Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Humphreys, Debra

Titel

Authority, authenticity, and ambition: American women writers performing femininity in public

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

Erscheinungsjahr

2001

Link zum Volltext

• ProQuest

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This dissertation analyzes how four American women writers—Louisa May Alcott, Zitkala-Sa, Ida M. Tarbell, and Anzia Yezierska—became public celebrities and contributed to shifting understandings of American identity and of the relations between public and private spheres in American life. Through their stories—both biographical and fictional—I analyze the public construction of femininity, the practice of writing within an emerging marketplace of commercial entertainment, and the role of gender, class, and ethnicity in a new configuration of public and private identities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I compare how each of these writers confronted shifting expectations about women's roles within both public and private spheres. In addition, I suggest how they each responded to and shaped the cultural marketplace of ideas, images, and commodities that defined these roles. They each contributed to shifting public understandings of femininity—sometimes enforcing and sometimes undermining dominant images and ideas. As public celebrities themselves and through the images of femininity they created in their writings, they contributed to a horizon of expectations and available images through which American women could construct their own relations to public and private spheres. Finally, I reveal how these women writers' public performances of femininity suggest the persistence in American life of tensions and contradictions engendered by both sentimentalism and consumer culture.