Aesthetics and Politics of Feminist Tragic Narratives At the Turn of the Nineteenth Century into the Twentieth By © 2019 Meeyoung Kang DPhil, Sookmyung Women’s University, 2009 M.A., Sookmyung Women’s University, 2000 B.A., Sookmyung Women’s University, 1998 Submitted to the graduate degree program in English and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Chair: Laura Mielke Giselle Anatol Doreen Angela Fowler Randall James Fuller Dave Tell Date Defended: 7 May 2019 i The dissertation committee for Meeyoung Kang certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Aesthetics and Politics of Feminist Tragic Novels At the Turn of the Nineteenth Century into the Twentieth Chair: Laura Mielke Date Approved: 7 May 2019 ii Abstract My dissertation focusses on American feminist tragic novels between 1890 and 1925, which deal with women’s tragic lives in a patriarchal society. I will show that the thematic and structural similarities among them are evident to the extent that they seem to build a particular literary tradition different from other similar genres, such as sentimental novels, naturalist novels, and classic tragedies. Based on the field of generic criticism, I define the new tradition as the genre of feminist tragic novels in which a feminist consciousness is manifested in terms of tragic vision and contentious structure. The specific generic approach to these novels leads to an analysis of their genre-unique aesthetic values, which justify their status as artistic works. For this purpose, I clarify the historical long-held aversion of critics to women writers’ realistic work through the variety of critical and aesthetics lenses. I explore how the male dominated process of American literary canonization, centering on Romance theory and masculine myths on one side and traditional aesthetics such as Genius theory and Disinterestedness on the other, have hindered women’s tragic novels from being interpreted aesthetically or rhetorically. These clarifications show how these feminist tragic novels, and their authors, create counter-discourse to previous genres by making gendered claims not only on the patriarchal society they live in, but also on the genre they write in. To show this, I begin with two novels that end with the suicide of the female protagonists: Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) and Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905). In the first chapter, I will show how women’s suicides serve as a vehicle to let readers experience the emancipation of ethics, rather than that of emotion. In the second chapter, I deal with the issues of women’s mental breakdown in feminist iii tragic fiction by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), and Gertrude Stein, “Melanctha” (1909), focusing on the way linguistic devices and narratology draw attention to the chasm between women’s desire and social oppression. In the third chapter, by closely reading Edith Summers Kelley’s Weeds (1923) and Ellen Glasgow’s Barren Ground (1925), I show how women’s adversities in the feminist tragic novels are depicted in a way that raises readers’ social consciousness, rather than allowing them to transcend or sublimate it, drawing on the aesthetic of dissensus. In each case, I define the feminist tragic novels as cultural products that represent their materiality, while simultaneously becoming a source from which new meaning is produced in both a dialectical and a revolutionary way. iv Acknowledgement For my supervisor, Laura Mielke, without whose help this dissertation would not have been possible. For my husband, Chansam Moon, whose sails unweariedly took me on my dreamy navigation. For my sons, Kangeun and Kyungeun, who became the reasons that I want to live a beautiful life. For my mother, Choonhee Kim, who gave me my love for literature and whose prayer and encouragement were invaluable. And for God through whose love I could grow, contemplate, and find the real peace. v Table of Contents Introduction ................................................................................................................................... ２ Evolution of Tragedy into Feminist Tragic Novels .......................................................................................... ３ The Social Background of Emergence of Feminist Tragic Novels .................................................... １２ The Literary Environment ........................................................................................................................................... １４ Aesthetic Frameworks for Feminist Tragic Novels ..................................................................................... １７ Chapter One : ............................................................................................................................ ３０ Revealing the Discrepancy ......................................................................................................................................... ３７ Aesthetic Embodiment of Women’s Sensual Desire ................................................................................... ４３ Retrieving the Autonomous Self ............................................................................................................................. ４６ The Aesthetics of the Ugly ......................................................................................................................................... ５６ Chapter Two: ............................................................................................................................. ６０ Short Fiction as Women’s Genre ............................................................................................................................. ６１ The Aesthetic of Distraction ...................................................................................................................................... ６３ “The Yellow Wallpaper” and “Melanctha” as Tragic Fiction ................................................................ ６７ Extending the Boundaries ........................................................................................................................................... ７０ Chapter Three: .......................................................................................................................... ８９ The Tragic Responses to the Ideological Interpellation ............................................................................ ９４ The Feminist Resistance ......................................................................................................................................... １００ The Aesthetics of Dissensus ................................................................................................................................. １１０ The Aesthetic Appropriation of the Tradition of the Tragedy ........................................................... １１８ Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ １２４ Works Cited .......................................................................................................................... １２９ １ Introduction This study focuses on American feminist tragic novels between 1890 and 1925, proposing the feminist tragic novel as a new literary genre with aesthetically induced politics. When the feminist tragic novel is viewed through the prisms of aesthetics and politics, conflicting powers can be seen. It goes without saying that, in traditional male-centered tragedies, women were not featured as subjects, and the relationship between tragedy and the novel on one side, and between traditional aesthetics and feminist politics on the other, was hostile. Since the misogynist perspectives inherent in the tragic genre, realist novel, and aesthetics have hindered the feminist tragic novel from being interpreted aesthetically, this study aims to understand the internal dynamic of conflicting gender-related traditions, and to reveal the feminist aesthetics embodied in realist tragic novels as a counterbalance to other critical approaches. Critics such as Linda Kornasky and Donna Campbell argue that there are commonalities among the novels of Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Edith Summers Kelley, and Ellen Glasgow in that they all attempt to show how women’s tragic lives are susceptible to the deterministic power of the patriarchal society. According to these critics, the thematic and structural similarities among them are evident to the extent that they seem to build a particular literary tradition. Meanwhile, in The Female Imagination and the Modernist Aesthetic (1986), Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert argue that the women writers at the turn of the century such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Willa Cather, Chopin, Kelley, and Gertrude Stein disrupted the law of the father by speaking of their mother tongues in their literary texts. Specifically, regarding Kelley’ Weeds , they also argue that there are “the heroic images and tragic implications that endow a working- ２ class heroine with dignity” (10). In this respect, I will also draw on Barbara Lootens’s assertion that “a struggle for survival” itself provides a heroic moment to support my argument that they are tragic heroines with dignity. Although most critics focus on the determinism and naturalism in those texts, my analysis ultimately will show that these novels should belong to the genre of