Writers reading the American press: Responsive connections between Djuna Barnes, Edith Wharton, and Gertrude Stein
Fletcher, Gabrielle
Fletcher, Gabrielle
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Identifiers
http://hdl.handle.net/10379/17541
https://doi.org/10.13025/16830
https://doi.org/10.13025/16830
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Publication Date
2022-11-22
Type
Thesis
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Abstract
Djuna Barnes, Edith Wharton, and Gertrude Stein are examined as responsive critics of gender narratives in the public sphere of American print. Navigating the evolving prominence of the New Woman, so-called White Slave, and Birth Control in newspapers and magazines, the research presents the contextually gritty and connecting strategies between these writers. In doing so, it deconstructs the stylistic and cultural separation of these prolific women. The first chapter considers the New Woman at the turn of the century, examining the little recognised comic icon 'Fluffy Ruffles' and the 'Gibson Girl.' It argues that Edith Wharton’s 'The Fruit of the Tree', Stein’s 'Three Lives', and Djuna Barnes’s articles 'How it feels to be forcible fed' and 'My sisters and I at a prize fight', employ structural and thematic repetitions deriving from the politics of New Woman iconography. The second chapter considers the commercialisation of the so-called White Slave during the teen years of the century, arguing that the public gaze and violence of this genre is a key facet of Barnes’s 'The Book of Repulsive Women' and Wharton’s 'Summer'. Finally, Margaret Sanger’s evolving publicity campaign and her radical periodicals 'The Woman Rebel' and 'Family Limitations', are newly examined for their influence to modernist aesthetics of the female body and the politics of censorship. The chapter presents how Barnes’s 'Ryder' and Wharton’s 'Twilight Sleep' reflect the changing institutional development of Sanger’s movement in the 1920s through their articulation of maternity and birthing. The thesis demonstrates a network of aesthetic responses in the fiction of Barnes, Wharton, and Stein that are invested in an exposure and reshaping of the politics of gender representation in the early twentieth century.
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Publisher
NUI Galway