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Abstract
This interdisciplinary dissertation traces the development of a specific thread of American women's modernism that reflects late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century women authors' fascination with feminine liberatory roles in spiritual occult traditions and Classical mythology in order to weave a matrilineal literary tradition. Hence, this project centers on American women modernists and how their works comprehend conditions of societal exile and patriarchal oppression through an extra-traditional literary vantage point in Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs, Emma D. Kelley-Hawkins's Four Girls at Cottage City, Onoto Watanna's Miss Nume of Japan, Alice Dunbar-Nelson's A Modern Undine, Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth and The Custom of the Country, Gertrude Stein's Melanctha, and Nella Larsen's Passing, in light of a redefined notion of American Modernism. This investigation uses a comparative approach to draw out foundational cultural correspondences between women writers of color and white women writers within a literary tradition that developed in the United States after Reconstruction and culminated in the years before the Nazi occupation of Paris. The hypothesis for this project is that the writers experienced and apprehended a much different social and economic world compared to that of male modernists. Whereas the ideologies of male writers are often tied to cultural transformations related to the changing economic climate of the United States before the Great Depression or to their experiences of the first World War, American women modernists experienced a dramatically different cultural milieu, one which is represented in their fiction. The economic and social tumults of the American Civil War and the First World War led to conditions of crisis in the lives of the women writers examined in this dissertation who as a result responded to crises by turning to alternative spiritual ideologies and occult philosophies. Thus, this interdisciplinary project focuses on a literary and philosophical analysis of mythological and occult motifs in women's Modernist fiction.
