Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory Edited by William E. Cain Professor of English Wellesley College A Routledge Series Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory William E. Cain, General Editor Postmodernism and Its Others Revisiting Vietnam The Fiction of Ishmael Reed, Kathy Acker, Memoirs, Memorials, Museums and Don DeLillo Julia Bleakney Jeffrey Ebbesen Equity in English Renaissance Different Dispatches Literature Journalism in American Modernist Prose Thomas More and Edmund Spenser David T. Humphries Andrew J. Majeske Divergent Visions, Contested Spaces “You Factory Folks Who Sing This The Early United States through the Rhyme Will Surely Understand” Lens of Travel Culture, Ideology, and Action in the Gastonia Jeffrey Hotz Novels of Myra Page, Grace Lumpkin, and Olive Dargan “Like Parchment in the Fire” Wes Mantooth Literature and Radicalism in the English Civil War “Visionary Dreariness” Prasanta Chakravarty Readings in Romanticism’s Quotidian Sublime Between the Angle and the Curve Markus Poetzsch Mapping Gender, Race, Space, and Identity in Willa Cather and Toni Morrison Fighting the Flames Danielle Russell The Spectacular Performance of Fire at Coney Island Rhizosphere Lynn Kathleen Sally Gilles Deleuze and the “Minor” American Writings of William James, W.E.B. Du Bois, Idioms of Self-Interest Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, and Credit, Identity, and Property in English William Faulkner Renaissance Literature Mary F. Zamberlin Jill Phillips Ingram The Spell Cast by Remains Machine and Metaphor The Myth of Wilderness in Modern The Ethics of Language in American Realism American Literature Jennifer Carol Cook Patricia A. Ross “Keeping Up Her Geography” Strange Cases Women’s Writing and Geocultural Space in The Medical Case History and the Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and British Novel Culture Jason Daniel Tougaw Tanya Ann Kennedy “Keeping Up Her Geography” Women’s Writing and Geocultural Space in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture Tanya Ann Kennedy I~ ~~o~;~;n~~;up LONDON AND NEW YORK “The Secret Properties of Southern Regionalism: Gender and Agrarianism in Glasgow’s Barren Ground, Tanya Ann Kennedy © 2006 by the Southern Literary Journal and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Department of English. Reprinted with permission. Excerpts from Vein of Iron, copyright 1935 by Ellen Glasgow and renewed 1963 by First and Merchants Bank of Richmond Virginia, reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Inc. Excerpts from Barren Ground, copyright 1925, 1933 by Ellen Glasgow and renewed 1953, 1961 by First and Mer- chants National Bank of Richmond, reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Inc. Excerpts throughout as submitted in the request from DUST TRACKS ON A ROAD by ZORA NEALE HUR- STON. Copyright 1942 by Zora Neale Hurston; renewed (c) 1970 by John C. Hurston. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. First published 2007 by Routledge Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2007 Taylor & Francis The Open Access version of this book, available at www.tandfebooks.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution­Non Commercial­No Derivatives 4.0 license. ISBN: 9780415979498 (hbk) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kennedy, Tanya Ann. “Keeping up her geography” : women’s writing and geocultural space in twentieth century U.S. literature and culture / by Tanya Ann Kennedy. p. cm. -- (Literary criticism and cultural theory) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-415-97949-8 (alk. paper) 1. American literature--Women authors--History and criticism. 2. American literature--20th century--History and criticism. 3. Women and literature--United States--History--20th century. 4. Feminism and literature--United States. 5. Feminist theory. 6. Space in literature. 7. Sex role in literature. 8. Women--United States--Social conditions. I. Title. II. Series. PS151.K46 2006 810.9’92870904--dc22 2006024257 Contents Acknowledgments vii Chapter One Feminism and the Public/Private Divide 1 Chapter Two Journeys into Urban Interiors 25 Chapter Three The Secret Properties of Southern Regionalism 71 Chapter Four Bitter Locations: Self-Representation, Gender, and Nation 111 Conclusion 157 Notes 161 Works Cited 171 Index 179 v Acknowledgments In ways large and small, many people have contributed to this project. First, this project could not have been finished without the patient guidance pro- vided by my dissertation advisor Susan Lurie who always made the time to read chapter after chapter, again and again. Helena Michie and Allison Sneider, as members of my dissertation committee, provided many help- ful suggestions for the manuscript. I would also like to thank Scott Derrick and Elizabeth Klett for reading and commenting on chapter two. Generally, many members of the Rice faculty were very helpful to me during my time there—Susan, Helena, and Lynne Huffer, particularly; my scholars’ group helped me keep deadlines and gave me a helpful forum for discussing the perils of writing and teaching; and Marc Tipton offered much appreciated emotional support and a good time always. Finally, I would like to thank my family, especially my mother, for being understanding and supportive throughout my education. vii Chapter One Feminism and the Public/Private Divide In her essay, “Feminist Critiques of the Public/Private Dichotomy,” Carol Pateman argues that “[t]he dichotomy between the private and the public is central to almost two centuries of feminist writing and political struggle; it is, ultimately, what the feminist movement is about” (118). Most political theorists see the origins of the public/private divide in the modern nation- state and industrial capitalism; men became citizens and workers in the pub- lic sphere and assumed authority over women and children in the private realm of the family. Thus, feminist theorists have traditionally understood the binary as key to women’s exclusion from citizenship and their subordi- nation in the home. As Pateman argues, feminist theorists have challenged this gendered divide, as well as critiquing Marxist and liberal political theo- ries of the modern nation-state that ignore gender. These feminist critiques have demonstrated that the public and private are mutually constitutive, that gender is a key organizing principle of the binary, and that the “personal is political.” More recently, feminist scholars have debated the usefulness of the public/private divide as a framework for analysis.1 However, both this debate and traditional feminist critiques of the divide have been mostly neglected in feminist U.S. literary studies, because these feminist critics tend to focus more on the nineteenth-century ideology of separate spheres. But just as feminist theorists in other disciplines debate whether or not to use the public/private as a framework for analysis, some critics in U.S. studies have called for an end to the use of separate spheres as a model for analyzing gender relations. Cathy N. Davidson and Jessamyn Hatcher’s No More Separate Spheres! is an extended argument against using separate spheres as a framework for analyzing gender relations in nineteenth-century U.S. culture. The authors also want to rid American Studies of separate spheres criticism, feminist criti- cism devoted to the study of women as a separate category of analysis. When 1 2 Keeping Up Her Geography Davidson and Hatcher trace separate spheres theory through literary and his- torical models, they tend to focus on a generalized view of separate spheres criticism as essentialist and to conflate this view with the public/private binary.2 This leads to the neglect of significant feminist work challenging the binary and a repetition of arguments that have been theorized in feminist work not situated squarely within the field of U.S. literature. As Davidson and Hatcher note, they are not alone in calling for an end to a use of the separate spheres model in feminist analysis. Many of these critics seem to see the doctrine of separate spheres not as a specific historical and cultural manifestation of the public/private divide, but as merely another dualism in a long list of dualisms. Davidson and Hatcher argue that [w]ithin the rigid logic of separate spheres, the originary organizing binary of male/female on which the concept is grounded aligns and affiliates with any number of other dualities: woman/male, femininity/ masculinity, emotion/reason, sentiment/logic, domesticity/politics, private/public and so on. (20) Here, it seems to be the use of the separate spheres model—feminists’ liter- ary and historical analysis of women—that generates the binary of public/ private. The assumption is that any use of a binary model must necessarily adhere to the binary logic of the model itself. Moreover, the authors make no specific distinction between separate spheres—a binary that uses gender as its specific organizing principle—and the public-private binary—a Western cultural model that tends to make the politics of gender invisible. Therefore, they cannot provide a complex historical account of how these two binaries operate in relation to one another. This dismissal of the gendered ideologies of the public/private binary may be the result of the authors’ inattention to the complexity of feminist critics’ analysis of how the public/private binary reproduces women’s inequal- ity in the United States. For example, Davidson and Hatcher footnote, rather than discuss, the numerous scholars who, throughout the 80s and 90s, cri- tiqued the use of the separate spheres model, but they also neglect work by feminist scholars who analyze the ideology of public/private in the United States and its effects. In the following analysis, I focus on two examples of this scholarship that complicate Davidson and Hatcher’s notion that femi- nist criticism can easily move beyond the gendered binaries that structure U.S. dominant culture. These examples suggest that there may be problems with feminists arguing that they are done with a dominant ideology, such as the public/private binary, when it is not done with women.