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Women Artists in Twentieth-Century Fiction

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Women Artists in Twentieth-Century Fiction University of South Carolina Scholar Commons Theses and Dissertations 2015 Creating The elS f: Women Artists In Twentieth- Century Fiction Bethany Dailey Tisdale University of South Carolina Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Tisdale, B. D.(2015). Creating The Self: Women Artists In Twentieth-Century Fiction. (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/3698 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you by Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. CREATING THE SELF: WOMEN ARTISTS IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY FICTION by Bethany Dailey Tisdale Bachelor of Arts University of Southern Mississippi, 2006 Master of Arts University of South Carolina, 2009 Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English College of Arts and Sciences University of South Carolina 2015 Accepted by: Catherine Keyser, Major Professor Brian Glavey, Committee Member Greg Forter, Committee Member Yvonne Ivory, Committee Member Lacy Ford, Senior Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies © Copyright by Bethany Dailey Tisdale, 2015 All Rights Reserved ii DEDICATION To my favorites, Errol and Will. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Writing a dissertation seems like a very solitary process, but I couldn’t have completed it without the aid of friends, family, and mentors. This dissertation is as much a product of my labor as it is a product of their love and encouragement. I am thankful for my committee of brilliant, generous faculty: Greg Forter, Brian Glavey, and Yvonne Ivory. I am forever indebted to Catherine Keyser, whose indefatigable spirit gave me hope that not only could I indeed finish and graduate but that I actually had something worth saying. I admire her ability to provide incisive but kind feedback on even the roughest of drafts, and I am grateful for all the time she spent with me over the course of this project. My menagerie of friends motivated me and propped me up with love: Ali Arant, Barbara Bolt, Jamie Boyle, Emily Rendek, Graham Stowe, and Katherine Upton. These friends have enriched my scholarship and my life. Finally, I am grateful to my patient family. My parents have always been proud of me and wholeheartedly embraced my goals. My brother Blake provided goodwill and levity when I needed it the most. My in-laws have also been stalwart supporters, and I’m proud to join the ranks of the other Drs. Tisdale. To Errol: you’ve cooked (or picked up Egg Roll Chen), proofread, parented solo, and paid the bills. You have watched me struggle, rage, and cry. You are my personal assistant, my tech support, my friend, and my partner in all crazy things in life, and I love you. And to my little helper and hindrance, my sweet baby William, I got this done in spite of you, and I couldn’t love you more for it. iv ABSTRACT In novels of artistic development (or künstlerromane) by women in the early twentieth-century, becoming an artist is intimately tied to becoming recognized as an individual. It would appear that an era of rapid change and expanding opportunities for women would result in affirmative narratives of women’s artistry, but studying texts by Edith Wharton, Anzia Yezierska, Zelda Fitzgerald, and Dawn Powell shows that stringent gender roles can still keep women from realizing artist success. In Wharton’s The House of Mirth, Lily Bart ruins her prospects on the marriage market by striving for freedom and aesthetic pleasure. Those desires cannot be reconciled with the very real necessity of marriage for financial and social stability, so she finds that her artistic desires are incompatible with her station. Yezierska’s Hungry Hearts and Bread Givers promote the importance of self-making for becoming a scholar or artist. Her heroines all yearn to be legible as American, and Yezierska’s unique take on the künstlerroman requires community engagement in order for inspiration to strike. In Fitzgerald’s Save Me the Waltz, Alabama Beggs presents a proto-feminist slant on artistic development. In the fact of stringent opposition by her peers and her artist husband, Alabama decides to fail spectacularly both as a dancer and as a wife and mother, thus asserting her agency and defying social strictures that would attempt to determine her behavior. Powell’s Ebie Vane swings between high and low culture in Angels on Toast, ultimately finding that modernity’s promises to woman are a lie: Ebie v can choose neither love nor career without making distasteful sacrifices, and she certainly can’t have both. Key to all of these artist-heroines’ journeys is failure. These modern künstlerromane dramatize the difficulty of women attempting to enter the public sphere as artists when they are not recognized as autonomous individuals or are instead consumed as art objects. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION ....................................................................................................................... iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................................ iv ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................................v CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................1 CHAPTER 2: LILY BART THE ARTIST AND ART DEALER IN THE HOUSE OF MIRTH ..............15 CHAPTER 3: “THE MIRACLE OF AMERICA COME TRUE!”: SENTIMENTAL ATTACHMENTS IN ANZIA YEZIERSKA’S HUNGRY HEARTS AND BREAD GIVERS .....................................39 CHAPTER 4: UNBECOMING AN ARTIST: ZELDA FITZGERALD’S SAVE ME THE WALTZ AND PASSIVE RESISTANCE ..............................................................................................74 CHAPTER 5: MOBILITY AND THE HOME: REDEFINING DOMESTIC SPACES IN DAWN POWELL’S ANGELS ON TOAST ............................................................106 BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................................................................................................136 vii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION The figure of the artist in fiction is lonely, and a typical künstlerroman (artist’s novel) traces a journey away from society toward artistic enlightenment (Lewes x). The künstlerroman is an overwhelmingly male-dominated genre, though, and men artist- heroes aren’t perfect analogues for women artists. In künstlerromane by modern American women writers, marital prospects, domestic duties, and sentimental attachments complicate the drive for independence. In spite of their access to the public sphere, and sometimes in spite of their commercial success, the protagonists of novels by Edith Wharton, Anzia Yezierska, Zelda Fitzgerald, and Dawn Powell struggle to view themselves as autonomous individuals, let alone as artists. Their modern künstlerromane dramatize the conflicts facing modern women who would like to enter public life. In contemporaneous künstlerromane by modernist men, such as James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as Young Man and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise, solitary artistic genius prevails against all odds. But these texts by and about women show that women do not get to laud their own achievements. They flirt with failure—whether in the marriage market or the aesthetic sphere—and they find that they have to compromise rather than renounce domestic attachments. Edith Wharton’s Lily Bart dies; Anzia Yezierska’s Sara Smolinsky is drawn back into service for her tyrannical father; Zelda Fitzgerald’s Alabama Beggs abandons the ballet; Dawn Powell’s Ebie Vane tries to keep house instead of pursuing commercial art. These protagonists show that the process of 1 becoming an artist as a woman requires an amount of sacrifice. Artistic development costs them relationships, social standing, career opportunities, and even bodily control. I argue that in the form of these failures and compromises, we can see these texts’ feminist commentary on the cultural pressures that restrict women to the roles of art object or domestic helpmeet. These women writers demonstrate that women cannot retreat from community and domestic attachments and thus provide us with a new, less isolated version of the künstlerroman. The künstlerroman traces its origins to German Romanticism. Darby Lewes pinpoints the birth of the genre at the publication of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre in 1795. Lewes argues that from this point onward, artist-protagonists were characterized as lonely outcasts, skirting society in an effort to develop a rich interior life that would lead to great art (x). Maurice Beebe’s Ivory Towers and Sacred Founts pursues the idea of the Divided Self, suggesting that “the artist is pulled in both directions simultaneously because his needs as a human being are not those of his creative self” (308). Perhaps being an artist always entails a tug-of-war between these two impulses, but for early twentieth-century women, the pull is intensified by the domestic expectations associated with gender norms and the promise of modernity. To become an artist, the (masculine) hero must “test and reject the claims of love and life, of God, home, and country, until nothing is left but his true self and his consecration as artist” (Beebe 6). The women artist-heroines I discuss find that they do not have the luxury of
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