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Representations of Women and Aspects of Their Agency

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Representations of Women and Aspects of Their Agency REPRESENTATIONS OF WOMEN AND ASPECTS OF THEIR AGENCY IN MALE AUTHORED PROLETARIAN EXPERIMENTAL NOVELS FROM THIRTIES AMERICA By Anoud Ziad Abdel-Qader Al-Tarawneh A Thesis Submitted to The University of Birmingham For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of English, Drama, & American and Canadian Studies College of Arts and Law University of Birmingham October 2018 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. ABSTRACT This thesis investigates the layered representations of women, their agency, and their class awareness in four leftist experimental novels from 1930s America: Langston Hughes’ Not Without Laughter, Jack Conroy’s The Disinherited, John Dos Passos’ The Big Money, and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. It argues that the histories these novels engage, the forms they integrate, and the societal norms they explore enable their writers to offer a complex, distinct, sense of female representation and agency. All four novels present stereotyped or sentimentalised portrayals of women from the traces of early twentieth-century popular culture, a presentation which the novels’ stories explore through nuanced, mobilised, or literally as well as figuratively politicised images of women. In order to investigate these representations, I read each novel within its associated cultural context. I also employ feminist and cultural historians’ ideas about women’s complex roles in 1930s America and earlier decades; cultural historians’ arguments about the decade’s documentary culture and its popular modes of expression; and literary historians’ arguments about the blending of modernist form and leftist content in the decade’s proletarian writings. The study contends that in their various and always changing representations of women these novels explore a spectrum of female agency within the sphere of proletarian politics and challenge the gendered conventions predominant in early twentieth-century America. DEDICATION It satisfies the heart and soul of mine, to dedicate this work in a rhythmic line, to you Mom and Dad, for a key real sign: Your trust incites my success to shine! ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am indebted to my sponsor, Mutah University in Jordan, for funding my postgraduate study. The sponsorship enabled me to pursue both this research project at University of Birmingham and my Master degree in English literature at University of Akron. Due to the funding, I have enjoyed this amazing academic journey for five years (2013-2018), a journey which motivates my writing of this literary study in the discipline of American literature. I would like to especially thank my two dissertation supervisors, professors Andrzej Gasiorek and John Fagg, for their encouragement, insights, and constructive feedback throughout the three years of this project. Their efforts and dedication have been really appreciated. Their detailed comments on the project as well as their supervision meetings have ever been engaging, informing, and thought-provoking. And their invaluable guidance and support will always be remembered. Obviously, the dedication of this project as well as the first loads of thanks go to my parents. Thanks dad for allowing me to study abroad without anyone’s company. Your trust instigates my academic success. Mom, I always relate my success to your prayers, love, and the morals you have professionally instilled in me. Mom and dad, you have been great support to me. To my sisters, Nehad, Deema and Salam, I am deeply grateful. They have increased my ambitions during the ups and downs of my study. Their love, encouragement, and even text messages as well as phone calls have supported me throughout. Special thanks to them. Similar gratitude to my brothers Abdel-Qader (Abood) and Tareq for assuring me not to worry about traveling alone. I extend my thanks to Abood for excitedly picking me to and from the airport. I also thank my brothers-in-law, Fares and Atef, for having, like my siblings, a strong confidence I could do this. My professors at former universities deserve thanks from me as well. From University of Akron, I thank professors Hillary Nunn, Patrick Chura, and Mary Biddinger, for widening my scope regarding the literary field and its analysis. I would especially like to thank Chura for introducing me to the literature of 1930s America, and therefore making it a starting point to work on this project. From Mutah University, I thank professors Abdel-Qader Qattab, Rabab Kassasbeh, and Dafer Al-Sarayreh, for being the first who have introduced me to the field of English and its literary criticism. Special thanks go to Al-Sarayreh, for notifying me when he was the Dean of the College of Arts about the University’s scholarship, and thus foreseeing a doctor of me. Well-remembered persons deserve thanks from me as well: the relatives who repeatedly bade me farewells; the friends with whom I spent wonderful moments in Britain: Omama, Seyma, Ayse, Aseel, Yasmin, Fatima, and Bassant; my colleague Ali and friend Sahar for their well- remembered helps when I have been to America; the friends who have kept in touch from Jordan, particularly Esraa; my colleague Brittany Moster who helped with the editing; and, certainly, the readers of this project. TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER I: Langston Hughes’ Not Without Laughter: African American Women and Masks of their Social Consciousness 35 CHAPTER II: Limits and Possibilities of Female Agency in Jack Conroy’s The Disinherited 101 CHAPTER III: John Dos Passos’ The Big Money: Aspects of Women’s Autonomy and Social Agency 162 CHAPTER IV: John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath: Layers of Female Agency and Mobility in Dust Bowl Contexts 222 CONCLUSION 283 WORKS CITED 288 ABBREVIATIONS NWL Not Without Laughter HH Home to Harlem IM Invisible Man TD The Disinherited LD Love On the Dole 42nd The 42nd Parallel TBM The Big Money TGW The Grapes of Wrath NN Now in November TF The Foundry TG The Girl TGG The Great Gatsby INTRODUCTION How it grieves the heart of a mother, You every one must know, But we can’t buy for our children Our wages are too low. [...] But for us nor them, dear workers, The bosses do not care. But understand, all workers, Our union they do fear; Let’s stand together, workers, And have a union here.1 Grace Lumpkin’s novel To Make My Bread (1932) interpolates the above ballad, ‘The Mill 2 Mother’s Lament’ by strike organiser Ella May Wiggins, and describes in a third-person narrative the 1929 Gastonia textile mill strike, which propelled the political activity of working-class mothers. Bonnie McClare, this novel’s female protagonist, is her family’s breadwinner and the mother of five children. She works in the mill, helps organise a strike, writes the above ballad, and eventually is murdered during a strike. Comparable to Wiggins,3 Bonnie is a type of female character who displays agency in emotional, domestic, and political spheres, and this likely has to do with the fact that she was written by a female proletarian author. This thesis focuses not on the representation of women by women as in 1 Ella May Wiggins, ‘The Mill Mother’s Lament’, in American Folksongs of Protest, ed. by John Greenway (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953), pp. 251-2. 2 See Grace Lumpkin, To Make My Bread (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), pp. 345-6. 3 See Jennifer A. Williamson, Twentieth-Century Sentimentalism: Narrative Appropriation in American Literature (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2013), 23-58 (p. 30). 1 Lumpkin’s novel, but turns to male novelists of the period to consider ways in which four proletarian-experimental texts from the 1930s address layers of women’s autonomy, agency, sentimentalisation, and stereotypicality. In 1936, three years after the publication of Lumpkin’s novel, John Dos Passos, a centrist-leftist novelist and professional modernist writer, included a version of the ‘Mill Mother’s Lament’ in his novel The Big Money. It appears in one of the later Newsreels – the documentary pieces which display popular songs, news headlines, and advertisements – which occurs in the novel. Within the poem’s ultimate integration, in this last experimental volume of the popular proletarian trilogy U.S.A. (1930-1936), Dos Passos challenges gendered conventions and tries to emancipate working women from sexist paradigms and to affirm female proletarian agency in the prose of his novel. This thesis focuses on Langston Hughes’ Not Without Laughter (1930), Jack Conroy’s The Disinherited (1933), Dos Passos’ The Big Money, and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), investigating these novels’ representations of women and analysing how their portrayals of women’s autonomy and political agency are facilitated by the novels’ contents, forms, and associated historical contexts. Literary critical responses to proletarian literature have tended to characterise male proletarian novelists as one-dimensional or problematic in their representation of women.4 For example, Barbara Foley, in her study of proletarian literature, argues that ‘Even when they wished to project honorific portraits of class-conscious women, male-authored proletarian novels at times encoded denigrating assumptions about women’s roles and 4 These studies include Paula Rabinowitz, ‘Women and U.S. Literary Radicalism’, in Writing Red: An Anthology of American Women Writers, 1930-1940, eds. by Charlotte Nekola and Paula Rabinowitz (New York: The Feminist Press, 1987), pp.
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