The Anti-Heroine in American Women's Modernisms
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City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 5-2019 The Woman We Don’t Want to Be: The Anti-Heroine in American Women’s Modernisms Madison Priest The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/3101 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] THE WOMAN WE DON’T WANT TO BE: THE ANTI-HEROINE IN AMERICAN WOMEN’S MODERNISMS by Madison Priest A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2019 © 2019 MADISON PRIEST All Rights Reserved ii The Woman We Don’t Want to Be: The Anti-Heroine in American Women’s Modernisms by Madison Priest This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in English in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ________________ __________________________________________ Date Hildegard Hoeller Chair of Examining Committee ________________ __________________________________________ Date Eric Lott Executive Officer Supervisory Committee: Hildegard Hoeller Nancy K. Miller Wayne Koestenbaum THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii ABSTRACT The Woman We Don’t Want to Be: The Anti-Heroine in American Women’s Modernisms by Madison Priest Advisor: Hildegard Hoeller Anita Loos’ Lorelei has a baby because “a kid that looks like any rich father is as good as money in the bank.” Edith Wharton’s Undine uses hers as a pawn in divorce negotiations with the child’s father. Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Angela abandons her sister so her boyfriend won’t guess she’s black, and Nella Larsen’s Helga frustrates and alienates everyone she loves. Yet these protagonists were subject not just to gleeful mockery and sanction, but to furtive pity, uncomfortable recognition, even envy. Each age calls for its own bogeys; and the anti-heroine was, I contend, the perfect instantiation of American modernity’s fears and foibles. She tells of modernity’s fragmented selfhood and a “lost generation” of sorts—what Dorothy Parker, speaking to the League of American Writers in 1939, called “a ladies auxiliary of the legion of the damned.” Of course, the “lost generation” of young men has long served as a standard-bearer for American modernist literature. Offering a deliberate rebuke to the mythology of the self-made man, the modernist anti-hero reports upon a rapidly contracting world and personifies the period’s existential dread and powerlessness. The story of U.S. modernisms that emerges as a result tells of a characteristic literary response to two brutal world wars and the devaluation of iv masculine labor, offering up a generalized masculine disenchantment. But what of feminine disenchantment? The anti-heroine, I suggest, bears witness not just to modernity’s contractions, but to its rapidly expanding possibilities: the new opportunities it offered for things like travel, communication, sex and sexuality, and even love. This dissertation tells of American literary modernisms by way of a theoretical and historical analysis the period’s anti-heroines. Femininity gone awry, this figure, whom I call “the Woman We Don’t Want to Be,” delimits the parameters of the systems that create her and into which she feeds. In recovering women’s writing from the period, feminist scholars have for obvious reasons tended to value feminist texts. Yet the anti-heroine is a bad feminist agent; she either fails to attain self-fulfillment, much less empowerment, or succeeds by buying into and profiting off of patriarchal, racist systems. And in reproducing her, her authors also reproduce, to varying degrees, the racist and sexist ideologies by which she is judged. As a result, these texts don’t fit into the existing feminist schema by which we have recovered and framed women’s writing. If this figure fits poorly into these rubrics, however, I argue that she perfectly reflects the period’s hesitancy towards feminist ideas. In this dissertation, I describe American modernisms’ relationship to what I call, following the lead of a 1925 Harper’s Monthly column, “feminism’s awkward age”—a marked ambivalence, on both sides of the color line, towards feminism as a collective project. If first- and second-wave feminism looked outwards in order to figure out what was wrong with women’s lives, modernity’s women looked within. In documenting this turn towards bad, uncomfortable or wrong feminine interiority, this dissertation reframes the fragmented self—long considered a hallmark of modernist writing—by exploring its stakes in modernity’s constructions of gender and race. In a period preoccupied v with self-making, in the sense of the self-made man, The Woman We Don’t Want to Be offers a fun-house image of her era, embodying the repulsive and fascinating possibilities of the un-made feminine self. vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would first like to thank the members of my committee—Nancy K. Miller for demanding precision and boldness, Wayne Koestenbaum for keeping me attuned to the joys of writing, and most of all my chair, Hildegard Hoeller, without whose generosity and guidance this project would never have found its footing. This work would also not have been possible without the financial support of the Leon Levy Foundation for Biography, the Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean (IRADAC), the Advanced Research Collaborative and the Early Research Initiative. Further thanks are due to the wonderful librarians and archivists at the Graduate Center, the New York Public Library, Yale’s Beinecke Library, Columbia’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library and Princeton’s Firestone Library. My work has benefitted immeasurably from the encouragement, guidance and editing of mentors, colleagues and friends, who are too numerous and important to thank exhaustively or enough. Among them: Kaitlin Mondello, Alyssa Mackenzie and Rose O’Malley, who were there from the start; the members of Joan Richardson’s and Eric Lott’s dissertation workshops; the IRADAC dissertation workshop; Mary Ann Caws; Catherine Keyser; Talia Schaffer; and Amy Moorman Robbins. (My cats, Charlie and Lucy, were less helpful in their random deletions, but I thank them here nonetheless). I would like to especially thank the members of my writing group, Christina Katapodis, Alicia Andrzejewski and Erin Spampinato, who are the feminist heroes I’d been waiting for. Finally, I am deeply grateful to my friends and family. Chloe Estep’s friendship has enriched my life and work since we met almost fifteen years ago. My parents Marta Cervantes and Greg Priest have been delightful sources of wry, loving and unwavering support. Most of all, vii I’d like to thank my husband and partner Matt Davis for all the time he spent copy-editing, for encouraging me to take chances on myself, and for working with me to make our lives together. I couldn’t have done this without you, and I can’t wait for what comes next. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction. The Woman We Don’t Want to Be..……………………………………………. 1 Chapter 1. An Ethical Ambivalence: Gertrude Stein’s “Complex, Desiring” Melanctha……. 41 Chapter 2. “All Helga Ever Does Is Run Away”: Nella Larsen's Quicksand………………… 74 Chapter 3. Undine's “Flexible Soul”: Speculations in Identity in Edith Wharton's Custom of the Country………………………………………………………………………………………. 107 Chapter 4. Identity, Desire and the Double in Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral……………………………………………………………………………… 144 1963: An Afterword………………………………………………………………………….. 179 Bibliography.…………………………………………………………………………………. 193 ix THE WOMAN WE DON’T WANT TO BE “We were little black ewes that had gone astray; we were a sort of ladies auxiliary of the legion of the damned. And boy, were we proud of our shame! When Gertrude Stein spoke of a ‘lost generation,’ we took it to ourselves and considered it the prettiest compliment we had.” — Dorothy Parker, “Sophisticated Poetry—and the Hell with It,” (New Masses, 1939) American modernist literature is full of despicable women. Alternately hateful and pathetic, enviable and unsavory, these women tested the limits of acceptable femininity for their readers and writers. Anita Loos’ Lorelei, for instance, has a baby because “a kid that looks like any rich father is as good as money in the bank.” Edith Wharton’s Undine uses hers as a pawn in divorce negotiations with the child’s father. Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Angela abandons her sister so her boyfriend won’t guess she’s black, and Nella Larsen’s Helga frustrates and alienates everyone she loves. These women tell of modernity’s fragmented selfhood and a “lost generation” of sorts—what Dorothy Parker, speaking to the League of American Writers in 1939, called “a ladies auxiliary of the legion of the damned.” The “lost generation” of young men has long served as a standard-bearer for American modernist literature. Offering a deliberate rebuke to the mythology of the self-made man, the modernist anti-hero reports upon a rapidly contracting world and personifies the period’s existential dread. Hemingway’s Jake Barnes is literally impotent; Eliot’s Prufrock is metaphorically so, wondering, while “the women come and go,” if he even dares “to eat a peach,” much less to enjoy what the peach might represent. (“I grow old … I grow old …/ I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled”). They are victims, who cannot forge complete selves in the face of a fragmented existence. The story of U.S. modernisms that emerges as a result tells of a characteristic literary response to two brutal world wars, offering up a generalized masculine 1 disenchantment.