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The Fictive Flapper: a Way of Reading Race and Female Desire in the Novels of Larsen, Hurst, Hurston, and Cather

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The Fictive Flapper: a Way of Reading Race and Female Desire in the Novels of Larsen, Hurst, Hurston, and Cather ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation / Thesis: THE FICTIVE FLAPPER: A WAY OF READING RACE AND FEMALE DESIRE IN THE NOVELS OF LARSEN, HURST, HURSTON, AND CATHER Traci B. Abbott, Doctor of Philosophy, 2004 Dissertation / Thesis Directed By: Profess or Marilee Lindemann, Department of English This study seeks to reevaluate the 1920s icon of assertive female sexuality, the flapper, as represented in the novels of four women writers. Although cultural images often designate, by their very construct ion, normal and alter it ous social categories, I argue that the flapper’s presence and popularity encourage rather than restrict this autonomy for even those female populations she appears to reject, notably lower -class women, non- white women, and homosexuals. Specifically, the flapper was predicated upon the cultural practices and beliefs of many of the very groups she was designed to exclude, and therefore her presence attests to the reality of these women’s experiences. Moreover, her emphasis on the lib erating potential of sexual autonomy could not be contained within her strictly defined parameters in part because of her success in outlining this potential. Each chapter then focuses upon images of black and white female sexuality in the novels, chosen for their attention to female sexual autonomy within and beyond the flapper’s boundaries as well as the author’s exclusion from the flapper’s parameters . Nella Larsen’s Passing suggests that the fluidity of female sexual desire cannot be contained within strict dichotomies of race, class, or sexual orientation, and women can manipulate and perhaps even transcend such boundaries. Fannie Hurst’s Imitation of Life offers a critique of the flapper’s excessive emphasis on sexual desirability as defined by conspicuous consumption, maintaining that lower -class white and black women can and should have access to sexual autonomy, while Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston similarly questions the denigration of working -class and non -white women in this model with her affirming view of Janie Woods, but also complicates the cultural presumption that any woman can find autonomy within a heterosexual relationship if such relationships are still defined by conventional notions of gender power. Finally, Will a Cather’s last novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl , contends modern black and white women have the right to control their own sexual needs within an unusual antebellum setting. Thus, all of these novel provide other models of sexual autonomy besides the white, middle -class, heterosexual flapper while harnessing the flapper’s affirming and popular imagery. THE FICTIVE FLAPPER: A WAY OF READING RACE AND FEMALE DESIRE IN THE NOVELS OF LARSEN, HURST, HURSTON, AND CATHER By Traci B. Abbott Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2004 Advisory Committee: Professor Marile e Lindemann, Chair Professor Zita Nunes Professor Peter Mallios Professor Martha Nell Smith Professor Deborah Rosenfelt © Copyright by Traci B. Abbott 2004 Dedication To John and Julia Gallo ii Acknowledge ments This project would not have been completed without the assistance and support of my chair, Marilee Lindemann, and my committee, Zita Nunes, Peter Mallios, Martha Nell Smith, and Deborah Rosenfelt. Others who have been instrumental in my academic car eer are Nancy Shevlin, Brian Richardson, Leigh Ryan, Sarah Simmons, John Auchard, Katherine Kearns, Bruce Herzberg, Mike Frank, Angelique Davi, and Jefferson Hunter. My family’s constant love and support were also invaluable. iii Table of Contents Dedica tion ii Acknowledgements iii Table of Contents iv Chapter 1: “A Bold and Brazen Defiance of Decency and Modesty”: The Flapper and Her Influence upon American Culture 1 Chapter 2: The Flapper as Icon and Practice 25 “The First Requirement”: Scie nce Deman ds the Female Orgasm 28 Careers, Cabarets, and Cloche Hates: The Influence of Women and Their Money 52 “This Flapper Age:” T he Flapper in Popular Culture 72 Chapter 3: “So daring, So lovely, and So ‘having’”: The Limitations of Female Desire in Nell a Larsen’s Passing 101 “Disguising to the “I” 105 Knowing (and Controlling) Love 111 Desire in Black and White 118 Condemnation, Reclamation, and Mutilation 138 Chapter 4: Every Woman’s Share: The Reclamation of Female Sexual Autonomy in Fannie Hurst ’s Imitation of Life 157 The Passive and the Beautiful 161 The Bad Fate of “Gooda Busts” 170 Every Woman’s Share 179 White Sk in, White Horses, White Lies 185 Chapter 5: “A Pain Remorseless Sweet”: The Reaffirmation of Black Female Desire in Their Eye s Were Watching God 210 Seeing Isn’t Believing 214 Spit Cups or Sh ivering Blossoms 216 Farmers and Dressed -Up Dudes 223 Still -Bait on a High Stool 231 Everything He Wants 251 Living in Peace or Dying in Denial? 268 Chapter 6: “Within Her Rights”: The Redemption of Female Desire in Willa Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl 284 “Those Unknown Persons” 286 Pure in Heart or Purely Pathetic? 297 The Family Inheritance 305 Absolutely (Un)Available 315 Chapter 7: Conclusion 336 Works Cited 341 iv Chapter 1: “A Bold and Brazen Defiance of Decency and Modesty”: The Flapper and Her Influence upon American Culture “and he could see her other things too, nainsook knickers, the fabric that caresses the skin, . and she let him and she saw that he saw and . he had a full view high up above her knee no-one ever not even on the swing or wading and she wasn’t ashamed . She would fain have cried to him chokingly, held out her snowy slender arms to him to come, to feel his lips laid on her white brow th e cry of a young girl’s love.” James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)1 “Her panting body heaved against his as they lay full length on the ground locked in furious embrace. Judith buried her nails in the flesh over his breast, beat her knees in his loins, set her teeth in the more tender skin over the veins at his wrists. ‘Kiss me – now,’ she said in a breath.” Martha Ostenso, Wild Geese (1925) 2 “After hundreds of years of mild complaisance to wifely duties, modern women have awakened to the knowledge that they are sexual beings.” Phyllis Blanchard and Carlyn Manasses, New Girls for Old (1930)3 In the 1920s female sexual desire entered the forefront of America’s cultural imagination. Granted, the female libido was never fully absent from public discourse even when passionless ideology had denied its existence, surfacing in free love treatises and anti -prostitution diatribes. But the twenties were the first time in American history when popular culture taught women that expressing their sexual desire and, more often, their sexual desirability provided them with power and opportunities. Psychoanalytic theory revitalized the relevance of female sexual desire at the same time popular culture 1 was flooded with images of vivacious female sexuality. While social historians have rightly worked to problematize the flapper’s impact on social norms, documenting in detail how this sexual power was, for many women, ambiguous and limited, this study seeks to reassert the central significance of this cultural change: Ame rican culture propagated female sexual power, a liberating sense of sexual autonomy – the right to have, express and fulfill sexual desire – which transformed the lives of thousands, if not millions, of women.4 Not enough acknowledgement has been made about the door of possibility which opened for women in these decades. Women were not merely given license by popular culture to express their sexuality nor simply validated by science as sexual beings; for the first time in centuries, women were provided wi th the means to conceptualize of themselves as sexual beings with many of the same rights to sexual pleasure that their male counterparts already possessed. As a result, even those women excluded in various degrees from the cultural icons of female sexual freedom – primarily non-white, non-heterosexual, or lower -class women – still benefited from the sexual revolution of the 1920s and 1930s. Moreover, the flapper, as the predominant cultural icon of womanhood, integrated a variety of existing beliefs and practices about female sexuality which in turn validated opposing models of sexuality even as it tried to exclude or modify them. Assuming that the effects of any cultural shift are tangible, how can the gains in female sexual autonomy from this period be measured? Literature is one such discourse since texts, particularly fictional narratives, inherently focus on subjectivity and individual experience. A study of female sexuality first must acknowledge its psychological complexity for it incorporates a woman’s ability to have, express, and satisfy her erotic desire as well as her erotic desirability, the ability to arouse desire in others. At the same time, a 2 number of modern theorists, including Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, and Monique Wittig, have argued that gender and sexuality are always imbued with historical and cultural markers and founded upon mutually exclusive categories that affect individual and social perceptions of deviance and normalcy. Hence, the cultural impetus to restrict and regu late sexual behavior is not only exposed by the means of regulation, legal and otherwise, but also the discourse that attempts to disguise its regulatory function as, for example, scientific “fact” or moral “truth.” With these perspectives in mind, this study analyzes the novels of four women writers – Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), Fannie Hurst’s Imitation of Life (1933), Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and Willa Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940) – as explorations of th is new promise of female sexual agency and subjectivity in the years immediately following the flapper’s 1920s revolution.
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