MIAMI UNIVERSITY The Graduate School Certificate for Approving the Dissertation We hereby approve the Dissertation of Angela Weaver Candidate for the Degree: Doctor of Philosophy ____________________________________________ Director Dr. Timothy Melley _____________________________________________ Reader Dr. Madelyn Detloff ____________________________________________ Reader Dr. Martha Schoolman ___________________________________________ Reader Dr. Andrew Hebard ____________________________________________ Dr. Marguerite Shaffer Graduate School Representative ABSTRACT PUBLIC NEGOTIATION: MAGAZINE CULTURE AND FEMALE AUTHORSHIP, 1900-1930 by Angela Weaver Public Negotiation: Magazine Culture and Female Authorship, 1900-1930 analyzes the convergence of modernism, print culture, feminism, True Womanhood, and the early careers of four female writers. At this crucial moment, Gertrude Stein, Dorothy Parker, Edna Ferber, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson each publicly negotiated with the dominant rhetorical and ideological registers of the emerging magazine market, infusing the available means of representation with new, sometimes transformative meanings. In the 1910s and 1920s, magazines served to spread a conservative ideology of womanhood more widely and rapidly than at any previous historical moment. This study asks how a writer secures a paycheck from an organ whose purpose was to promote the very politics she resists in her own writing. How did female writers construct their identities early in their careers while also challenging popular constructions of female identity from within a rapidly expanding print culture? To understand early twentieth century American literature, we must understand the strategies women used to ensure that a variety of experiences of modernity—female, working woman, Jewish, lesbian, African-American—found expression in print culture. There is no single pattern of negotiation; each woman responds in her own way. Stein retained control, persistently making it difficult for venues with a certain claim to modernism to refuse her critique. Parker developed an aesthetic of ironic wit, using humor to challenge conservative ideologies and to draw readers into a critique of themselves. Dunbar-Nelson conflated the passing narrative with the more popular romance narrative to develop a powerful critique of racism and sexism in magazine culture, while Ferber used business rhetoric to create the nation‘s most popular and controversial female protagonist. Each author posed important challenges to the ideological positions of their magazines and reading audiences. Each of these writer‘s responses provides a powerful example of how periodical culture required that female writers both perform and subvert popular constructions of womanhood to achieve success. PUBLIC NEGOTIATION: MAGAZINE CULTURE AND FEMALE AUTHORSHIP, 1900-1930 A DISSERTATION Submitted to the Faculty of Miami University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctorate of Philosophy Department of English by Angela Weaver Miami University Oxford, Ohio 2009 Dissertation Director: Dr. Timothy Melley © Angela L. Weaver 2009 Table of Contents Introduction ....................................................................................................1 Chapter One: Business and Domesticity in Edna Ferber‘s Emma McChesney Stories .............................................................................21 Chapter Two: Representations of Women in Dorothy Parker‘s Early Magazine Work ....................................................................................51 Chapter Three: Gertrude Stein as Debutante in Vanity Fair and the Little Review ...................................................................................... 80 Chapter Four: Alice-Dunbar and Female Authorship in Turn-of-the-Century Popular and African-American Magazines ..................118 Bibliography ..................................................................................................160 iii Acknowledgments Miami University‘s English graduate program played a significant role in the creation of this manuscript. The Sinclair Dissertation Fellowship, as well as Department of English Teaching Assistantships, allowed me the time to work on this project. I want to thank my committee: Dr. Timothy Melley, Dr. Peggy Shaffer, Dr. Madelyn Detloff, and Dr. Martha Schoolman. I am grateful to Madelyn Detloff for helping shape the initial concept for the dissertation. Your thoughtful, intelligent feedback initially on my prospectus and then throughout the process was invaluable. I want to thank Peggy Shaffer for opening my eyes to new avenues for interdisciplinary work in history, American Studies, gender studies, and literature. My views of teaching and scholarship have broadened each time I have worked with you. To Martha Schoolman, I am grateful for your support and feedback. Finally, Tim Melley, my dissertation director, could not have been more supportive over the last several years. Throughout the process, you helped me sharpen my ideas and focus my argument. I am indebted to you for your careful readings of each stage of the manuscript and the consistent engagement you offered me as a teacher and a scholar. I truly owe a debt of gratitude for the supportive environment my committee fostered throughout the process. Fellow graduate students at Miami University were integral to my development as well. Shawna, what can I say? You‘ve been there through all of it and I can‘t thank you enough. You always believed in this project, and your habit of asking questions helped me learn to talk about my ideas. I‘ll always be grateful to Lisa Suter for her generous spirit and sense of humor. We were conspirators in a plot to finish, and we pulled it off. Jamie Calhoun and Erin Douglas, you are both good friends and good teachers, and I‘ll always value our time together at Miami. To Lisa Riddle and Stephanie Corbin, can I just say, thanks for never giving up on me, no matter how many years I‘ve been in school. I could not have made it through graduate school without the support of my amazing family. Michelle, you‘ve inspired me with your drive to accomplish your life‘s goals. Maria, I‘m so proud of you for finishing your dissertation, and it only makes my accomplishment all the iv sweeter. I couldn‘t have two better sisters or friends. You have shaped the person I am and taught me to be proud of that person as well. Mom and Dad—thank you for never questioning my ambitions. Dad, without your gentle support and inspiring work ethic, I never would have made it this far. Mom, I started reading because I wanted to be like you. Your love of the written word helped shape my path in life, and I‘m eternally grateful. And finally, thank you, John. Thank you for your relentless belief in my ability to accomplish anything. Your enthusiasm, curiosity, sense of adventure, and generosity have shaped me as a writer, scholar, and teacher. Your support and love guided me through the highs and lows of dissertating. You be bold; I‘ll be daring. v Introduction It‘s a bargain. For three months I shall do nothing more militant than to pick imaginary threads off your coat lapel and pout when you mention business. At the end of those three months we‘ll go into private session, compare notes, and determine whether the plan shall cease or become permanent. Shake hands on it. (Edna Ferber, Emma McChesney & Co., 1914) Without the wild success of the American magazine industry, Calvin Coolidge would not have claimed ―the chief business of the American people is business‖ in 1925. Magazines encouraged the growth of a national advertising industry, which changed the way Americans did business and also changed the way people understood work, family, and gender. At the center of these changes were dozens and dozens of female writers vying for publication opportunities in one of the only venues open to them—popular magazines. In 1911, for example, the young writer Edna Ferber was mailing short stories to any magazine whose address she could find while also working in her mother‘s dry goods store. In her life, as in the lives of more and more American women, business, literature, and gender roles were becoming inextricably linked. Ferber‘s 1911 short story ―Roast Beef Medium‖ propelled her career. In this story and the series of stories following, Ferber actively uses the rhetoric of business to negotiate the tensions between feminism and the domesticity promoted by magazines and their advertisers. Therefore, a marriage proposal becomes a contract sealed with a handshake, not a kiss. Ferber‘s work is just one example of the ways female magazine writers in the early twentieth century invented narrative strategies that challenged restrictive ideologies in the very venues that legitimated those ideologies for profit. These negotiations reveal an American culture in flux, its men and women struggling for answers amid a rapidly growing and increasingly contradictory popular culture. As an archive, early twentieth century magazines offer significant insights into how women shaped their identities within this culture. The magazine presented a new discursive space, where shared meanings were contested, created, and reinforced. A hybrid publication, it included multiple print genres alongside advertising. The heterogeneity of the form allowed it to embody contradictory meanings, and those meanings shifted with time. Artists such as Nell Brinkley reinvested popular iconography with feminist overtones on one page