Sirens' song: Literary representations of the musical female.

摘要

Eighteenth and nineteenth-century musical and social history has had a significant impact upon the ways that nonspecialists write about music. Among the effects is a tendency to "literalize" music, subordinating it to the linguistic or poetic image and effacing its technical properties. This movement often compared the emotions of art with a feminine sensibility, making music a "gendered" activity. The rise in amateur musical instruction and the standardized piano further conflated the female player with the musical instrument. This dissertation explores the struggle for subjectivity attendant to a musical experience recounted in words; that is, the interrelationship of the gendered body, musicality, and language in twentieth-century literature and film. Works discussed include Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark and Lucy Gayheart, Jane Campion's The Piano, Toni Morrison's Jazz, Jean Toomer's Cane, the poetry of Langston Hughes, Gayl Jones's Corregidora, Joseph Conrad's Victory and Doris Lessing's Love, Again.