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Of Selected American Women's Realist Novels, 1880-1917: Political and Psychological Issues of Gender and Canonicity Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 1995 A "Re-Vision" of Selected American Women's Realist Novels, 1880-1917: Political and Psychological Issues of Gender and Canonicity Luann Swartzlander-Kraus Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Swartzlander-Kraus, Luann, "A "Re-Vision" of Selected American Women's Realist Novels, 1880-1917: Political and Psychological Issues of Gender and Canonicity" (1995). Dissertations. 3600. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/3600 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 1995 Luann Swartzlander-Kraus LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO A "RE-VISION" OF SELECTED AMERICAN WOMEN'S REALIST NOVELS, 1880-1917: POLITICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL ISSUES OF GENDER AND CANONICITY VOLUME I: CHAPTERS 1-3 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH BY LUANN SWARTZLANDER-KRAUS CHICAGO, ILLINOIS JANUARY 1996 Copyright by LuAnn Swartzlander-Kraus, 1995 All rights reserved. ii PREFACE Blueprint for Reading The great age of American literary Realism that stretched from the 1880s through World War I supposedly ended with the rise of Modernist aesthetics, but many scholars still judge works of fiction by Realistic criteria. That is, readers still value or denigrate a book by answering the question "But how realistic is it?" If a story's events seem as though they could really happen, if its characters could be real people, and if its setting could (or better yet does) exist somewhere, critics praise its "Realism." Such praise rests upon assumptions that everyone knows what reality is, and of course we all do--at least we know what reality seems to be to us. The novelists of the Age of Realism--the original popularizers of today's Realist aesthetic--had distinctive, sometimes contradictory perceptions of reality, too, and their fiction embodies them. Because of the remaining traces of Realist aesthetic iii values in our culture today, it is important to periodically re-evaluate this period of American literary history. 1 Many perceptions of reality are affected by the way people are treated in our societies, and American society has traditionally treated women differently from men. Thus, the nature of American reality itself has differed for men and women. Like other writers, then, Realist authors' beliefs about reality must have been affected by their genders. This is admittedly a simple concept for today, yet theorists of Realism have repeatedly ignored, neutralized, or denigrated gender's importance to the practice of Realist writing--and simultaneously ignored most women-authored Realism. This ignorance persists in spite of the fact that the social rights and psychological roles of women and men were in a state of flux and were under intense public discussion at the turn of the century--nowhere are debates about women's rights so often thematized as in American Realist fiction. This dissertation aims to revise traditional definitions of Realism that have become established by reference to male-writers alone. Reading major texts of scholarship and criticism on this period gives one the 1Throughout this dissertation, I will follow turn-of­ the-century usage by capitalizing terms that are naming concepts or genres. The most notable example is my distinction between the specific genre and period of American Realism (to be defined at length below) and a more vague, abstract notion of "realism." iv impression that there were virtually no women writers involved in formulating the aesthetics of American Realism. This impression is inaccurate: from studying textbook and research indexes, card catalogs (e.g. at the Newberry Library), or feminist projects like the journal Legacy or Lina Maniero's American Women Writers, I have gathered information on more than forty women who produced substantial bodies of full-length Realist fiction between 1880 and 1917. These women's writings participated in examining, defining, and debating the aesthetics of Realism in myriad ways, both technically and thematically. Continuing to discuss American Realism without significant reference to more women writers .and issues of gender is inaccurate and even indicates a willed blindness. My work's re-investigation of the current canons and contexts of Realism aims to provoke long-overdue recognition of women's contributions in this field. In 1971, Adrienne Rich defined a critical practice she felt necessary for all women readers: Re-vision--the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction--is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. We need to know the writing of the past, v and know it differently than we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us. (2045-46) This now-classic feminist practice can and should be generalized to apply to everyone who reads and teaches literature these days, and it is especially important, I believe, for studying American Realist fiction at the turn of the century. Because "re-vision" includes but is not limited to "revision" and "reviewing," I will use Rich's hyphenated form throughout the following chapters. With the aid of constructs and terminology borrowed from important feminist thinkers like Rich, I intend to start re-visioning this period by re-reading and re­ interpreting selected women-authored Realist novels. In particular, I will argue that certain of these novels illustrate "feminine" perspectives on two key aspects of reality: politics--beliefs about people's places, rights, and duties in society, and psychology--the philosophy of human identity and behavior. That is, their political or psychological contents can be described as having qualities traditionally associated with the feminine gender. Subsequently, I call Realist fiction that presents such "feminized" political or psychological themes "Feminine Realism." The Contextual Introduction in Chapter One will lay the theoretical foundation upon which the rest of the vi dissertation relies. My goal is not just to make a bigger, female-centered canon, nor is it to try to destroy the idea of canonical value altogether; rather, I intend to complicate (and thus refine) the study of American Realism by foregrounding the necessarily historical and political processes of determining literary value that have been involved in defining the period and genre. This study assumes the value of what Paul Lauter has called "'canonical' criticism" : that is, that it is important to periodically re-investigate how we construct our syllabi and anthologies, . the roots of our systems of valuation, and . how we decide what is important for us to teach and for our students to learn. (Canons and Contexts, 134) Thus, the introduction also includes the elements of the historical and current discourse on canonization and Realism to which this dissertation responds. When I say "canon," I refer to a body of defining works which have been designated as Literary, specifically with a capital "L," and which then are repeatedly taught and written about, by various people in power in the academy. But Realism now should be re-configured using more conscious principles of value than those of critics who have had power in the past. In my discussions of the women's Realist texts, I will draw on theories of value from feminism, vii psychology, and politics, and literary theory. Key issues and terms from these fields will be defined in the Contextual Introduction. Chapters Two and Three use examples to demonstrate the political and psychological issues that surface in much Realist fiction and that affect the canonization process in American literary studies. The works of Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, and Willa Cather that I discuss help to demarcate the beginning, middle, and end of the turn of the century: 1880 to 1917, the year the United States entered World War One. Their works represent a range of styles in women's Realist writing, as well as a variety of political and psychological issues. Thus, I shall be using some of their novels as touchstones in explaining, illustrating, and refining the gender issues I consider so important to this re-vision of Realism. My readings of the novels in these two chapters are intended to concretize the two main areas of Realism that I argue are affected by gender: "Politics" and "Psychology." Chapter Two, "Politics," focuses on Jewett's A Country Doctor (1884), Freeman's The Portion of Labor (1901), and Cather's o Pioneers! (1913). These complementary novels are female bildungsromans which thematize political goals for women. Their political contents can be summarized as feminized leftist labor politics, the Exceptional Girl theory (my term), and variations on the so-called American viii Dream. Some of these works' generally anti-patriarchal "biases" show in their apparent goals of trying to open opportunities for women in society. As Barbara Bardes and Suzanne Gossett have explained, "fiction that addressed the gender struggle spoke to the central issue in many women's lives," because "in contrast to public political discourse, which tended to exclude the demands of women from discussion," novels "focused on the private sphere" (6), a sphere which may have had more interest for women readers who were themselves largely confined to that sphere. Addressing the issue of women and work is most effective when such issues are thematized in an appealing story of a young woman.
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