'Self-made' women: Envisioning feminine upward mobility in American literature, 1900--1930 (Theodore Dreiser, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edna Ferber, Willa Cather, Anzia Yezierska).

摘要

"Self-Made Women: Envisioning Feminine Upward Mobility in American Literature, 1900--1930" focuses on five literary works written in the first three decades of the twentieth century: Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie; Charlotte Perkins Gilman's What Diantha Did ; Edna Ferber's "Emma McChesney" short-story series; Willa Cather's My Antonia; and Anzia Yezierska's Salome of the Tenements. The study examines ways each text, all of which feature heroines that rise from positions of economic dependence to economic power, attempts to intervene in contemporary representations of an increasingly visible population of working women. The study takes a "literary" and historical approach.; Throughout the study, I rely on a vast body of cultural, literary, and feminist work that addresses the history of working women. I also examine a wide range of cultural documents: contemporary economic theories, social science treatises, advice literature, domestic science tracts, popular magazine articles, and investigative reportage. Using this context, I argue that narratives of the "self-made" woman became a means to imagine social change, to justify the entry of middle-class women into the labor force, and to construct visions of harmonious societies. Simultaneously, the narratives became a means for imaging either the management of or the escape from a changing workforce.; The first three chapters explore the manner in which writers created heroines who responded to cultural anxieties about the changing nature of work in a consumer society. Examining the pull between "disciplinary" and "personality" based labor, I argue that writers altered discourses of "errant womanhood," "scientific management," and "Bullmoose Americanism" in order to examine how the use of a specific form of labor by the "new" woman worker could create social change. The last two chapters examine how writers used the "self-made" heroine to envision a labor force outside the "disciplinary" versus "personality" dichotomy presented in previous chapters. Throughout the study, I argue that a text's success or failure resides, in part, on its ability to imagine nonhierarchical alliances between middle- and working-class women workers and/or to present a variety of such alliances that encourages selective and generative readings.