Creating Female Space: the Feminine Sublime in The

Southeastern University FireScholars Selected Honors Theses 12-2013 Creating Female Space: The eF minine Sublime in The wA akening and The ouH se of Mirth Emily F. Faison Southeastern University - Lakeland Follow this and additional works at: http://firescholars.seu.edu/honors Part of the Literature in English, North America Commons, and the Women's Studies Commons Recommended Citation Faison, Emily F., "Creating Female Space: The eF minine Sublime in The wA akening and The ousH e of Mirth" (2013). Selected Honors Theses. Paper 2. This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by FireScholars. It has been accepted for inclusion in Selected Honors Theses by an authorized administrator of FireScholars. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Creating Female Space: The Feminine Sublime in The Awakening and The House of Mirth by Emily Faye Faison Submitted to the Honors Program Council in partial fulfillment of the requirements for University Honors Scholars Southeastern University 2013 Copyright by Emily Faye Faison 2013 ii Creating Female Space: The Feminine Sublime in The Awakening and The House of Mirth Emily Faye Faison Southeastern University, 2013 This thesis examines the Edna Pontellier and Lily Bart, the respective protagonists of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth , integrating the theoretical concept of the sublime, particularly engaging Barbara Freemans’s idea of a feminine sublime, as discussed in her book, The Feminine Sublime: Gender and Excess in Women’s Fiction . In three chapters, the thesis provides an overview and brief history of the theory of the sublime, contextualizing Freeman’s argument, and measures the success of both Edna’s and Lily’s attempts to engage the sublime as they each struggle to find their place as women in early twentieth-century society. iii PREFACE I would like to thank my Thesis Advisor, Professor Alisa M. DeBorde. Not only did she help me to develop my thesis, but she truly nurtured and developed my research and writing skills. Thank for you for giving me space to explore, encouragement to write more, and for cooking some delicious meals along the way. Thank you also to Dr. Gordon Miller, Chair of the Honors Department (and Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences for the majority of my time at Southeastern). Dr. Miller’s cheerful encouragement and tough love pushed me to persevere in this project. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page PREFACE . iv INTRODUCTION . 1 I. SUBLIME’S PATRIARCHAL ORIGINS AND THE FEMININE RESPONSE . 6 II. A SUBLIME AWAKENING: EDNA’S FOURTH FEMININITY . … 15 III. SUBLIMITY AS SOCIAL ABJECTION: LILY’S EPHEMERAL VICTORY . 33 CONCLUSION . 48 WORKS CITED . 50 v INTRODUCTION “These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The woman’s place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep.” Audre Lorde, “Poetry is Not a Luxury” From a long and dark history of silence, women have emerged with voices, both loud and soft, strong and distinctive, mournful and exuberant. In art and literature, women are no longer invisible as they once were, but the wounds of caged silence do not heal quickly. Though traditionally marginalized because they have been understood on masculine terms, women have never been invisible, regardless of imposed silence, and now, emerging from history, women artists and writers are reclaiming histories: as Alice Walker searches for her mother’s garden among centuries of hushed-up foremothers, as Virginia Woolf writes Judith Shakespeare’s stories, these almost-lost voices make even more powerful the voices of Kate Chopin and Edith Wharton, the two writers whose novels I will be engaging in this essay. Chopin and Wharton, through their literature, are creating spaces for women in the past, present and future. Though Audre Lorde isn’t the focus of my paper’s subject, she beautifully captures the essence of the topic: the deepness of the reserve of woman’s creativity, hidden for so long, a place of power 1 that may be discovered within oneself – a discovery that is joyous and sublime… the deepness, the sublimity, the mystery, of femininity in art and literature. Author Kate Chopin is one of these women who dared tap into this “incredible reserve of creativity and power” (Lorde 223) and tapped so deeply that the creativity proved too powerful for her time (1900) – she was hushed. Edith Wharton, of the same time period, also tapped into her reserve of creativity, and though her art was not silenced like Chopin’s, her personal life and marriage suffered. The backlash against these women that took place as a result of their cultural context is precisely the reason they deserve thoughtful examination and analysis both critical and sympathetic. In this paper, I will explore the female protagonists of two novels: Edna Pontellier in The Awakening , by Kate Chopin, and Lily Bart in The House of Mirth , by Edith Wharton. Edna and Lily each sought to create spaces for themselves despite rigid cultural constructs that determined the boundaries of their femininities and social statuses. In her search for a feminine space, Edna attempts to forge her own femininity, outside of those allowed for women in her cultural context. Lily seeks a feminine space by attempting social mobility, desiring to rise above her current social standing. While both women are othered in their societies, Edna seeks to understand her otherness and transcend societal constraints, while Lily seeks to dissolve her otherness and simply rise to a new level in the social hierarchy. Art and the aesthetic of the sublime are woven into each of these women’s stories as they encounter and engage the sublime in their respective attempts to create a uniquely feminine space. Part of my project is measuring Edna’s and Lily’s success in engaging the sublime as a means to or byproduct of achieving their goals of creating space. Both women use art as a component of their respective interactions with the sublime, a concept I will explore at length in chapter 1 of this essay. 2 An understanding of the theoretical concept of the sublime is crucial because it provides a foundation for my discourse. Longinus, the first to write a treatise on the sublime in the first century A.D., provides a foundational look at the concept of the sublime. Edmund Burke later wrote A Philosophical Inquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), which is crucial for its distinction between the aesthetic categories of sublime and beautiful, a distinction that Emmanuel Kant also focuses on in his Critique of Judgment (1790). Kant also introduces the idea of excess as a critical element of the sublime, an idea later discussed by Luce Irigaray, one of the few females to enter the discussion of the sublime with Speculum of the Other Woman (1985). Julia Kristeva, in Powers of Horror (1982), discusses the transcendence of sublimity in relation to the abject. Most notably, I introduce Barbara Freeman and her Feminine Sublime (1997) as a new exploration of and response to this primarily patriarchal concept. Freeman’s groundbreaking book in the arena of the sublime theory is just one part of a growing discourse of feminine inclusiveness. As a part of this trend, Freeman forges a path for women in theory and criticism, where women are severely underrepresented. Though representation of women in art has increased substantially throughout the past few decades, theory has continues to lack a representation of women or feminine. Particularly in the area of the sublime, which has primarily been discussed from a patriarchal perspective, theory needs women’s voices. In the same way that Chopin and Wharton created spaces for themselves as female writers in the literary world, Freeman is creating a space for women in theory with her book, and creating a space within the theory of the sublime for a feminine perspective. The feminine perspective, as a rather broad ideology, encompasses quite a lot of history and social background. Margaret Ferguson’s concept of non-linear feminism provides a 3 foundational understanding of feminism and feminist history that shaped my understanding of the importance of Chopin’s, Wharton’s, and even Freeman’s work. “Feminism in Time” provides a brief overview of the history of feminism, including a list of important feminists and their works, affirming the idea that feminism is not merely a historical fact or political topic, but encompasses who women are and where women have been, without confining feminism to a linear and therefore restrictive, progression. “The Woman Question” headnote in The Norton Anthology of English Literature is primarily focused on the role of women in multiple levels of Victorian Era culture, effectively illustrating feminine ideals and the oppression of women leading up to the nineteenth century from a literary point of view, providing a stable background of women’s roles that contextualize Chopin’s and Wharton’s views of women that were still relatively revolutionary for late- nineteenth to early twentieth century. The essay also includes a catalogue of literature that pushed back from that social tradition. As a rebuff towards the Victorian era of “The Woman Question,” the trend of the “New Woman” rose in popularity in the 1890’s, a concept clearly explained in A. R. Cunningham’s “The ‘New Woman Fiction’ of the 1890’s” as a heroine who rejects major features of the feminine role as defined in Victorian England, especially the socially accepted structure of marriage, which New Woman novelists of the time agreed was discriminant towards women.

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