Women Writing the American Artist in Novels of Development From 1850-1932

Rickie-Ann Legleitner

doi:10.5771/9781793610355

Summary

In nineteenth- and early twentieth-century artist novels, American women writers challenge cultural, social, and legal systems that attempt to limit or diminish women’s embodied capabilities outside of the domestic. Women writers such as E.D.E.N. Southworth, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Kate Chopin, Willa Cather, Jessie Fauset, and Zelda Fitzgerald use the artist novel to highlight the structural and material limitations that women artists face when attempting to achieve critical success while navigating inequitable marriages and social codes that restrict women’s mobility, education, and pursuit of vocation. These artist-rebel protagonists find that their very bodies demand an outlet to articulate desires that defy patriarchal rhetoric, and this demand becomes an artistic drive to express an embodied knowledge through artistic invention. Ultimately, these women writers empower their heroines to move beyond prescribed patriarchal identities in order to achieve autonomous subjectivity through their artistic development, challenging stereotypes surrounding gender, race, and ability and beginning to reshape cultural notions of marriage, motherhood, and artistry at the turn of the twentieth century.

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Bibliographic data

Copyright year: 2021
ISBN-Print: 978-1-7936-1034-8
ISBN-Online: 978-1-7936-1035-5
Publisher: Lexington, Lanham
Language: English
Pages: 234
Product type: Book Titles

1. Contents No access
2. Acknowledgments No access
3. Statement on Language and Identity No access
1. The Novel, the Literary Marketplace, and the Urban Milieu No access
2. The Female Body and Communal Corporeality No access
3. The Bildungsroman and the Künstlerroman Genres No access
4. Chapter Descriptions No access
5. Notes No access
1. The Importance of Free Movement, Health, and Maturity in Marriage No access
2. Racial Tropes and Redeeming Individualism No access
3. Bodily Admonishment and the Dangers of Male Domination No access
4. Vocation, Artistry, and Autonomy Restore Health and Home No access
5. Domesticity Renewed through Public Success No access
6. Notes No access
1. A Legacy of “Abnormal” Desires and Burgeoning Artistry No access
2. A Collective Voice: Avis’s Masterpiece No access
3. Detrimental Marriage and Embodied Patriarchy No access
4. Notes No access
1. The Pleasure and Disillusionment of Delayed Maturation No access
2. Property, Ownership, and Appearances: A Man’s World No access
3. A Woman’s Place No access
4. From Dabbling to Work: Becoming an Artist No access
5. Avoiding Spectacle and Embracing Fate No access
6. Notes No access
1. A Troubling Reception No access
2. Breaking the Marriage Plot No access
3. Ethnic Identity and Privileged Upward Mobility No access
4. Of Men and Money No access
5. A Room of Thea’s Own No access
6. The Price of Success No access
7. Notes No access
1. Revising Genre, Disability Rhetoric, and Embodied Identity No access
2. Notes No access
1. High Modernism, Experimentation, and Feminism No access
2. Late Modernism, Sentimentality, and Communal Female Artistry No access
3. Notes No access
Epilogue No access Pages 211 - 214
Works Cited No access Pages 215 - 228
Index No access Pages 229 - 232
About the Author No access Pages 233 - 234