Representation and the Modern Female Subject: The New Woman Painter in American Literature

• Other Authors: Moffitt, Jennifer Leigh (authoraut)
• Format: Others
• Language: English; English
• Published: Florida State University
• Subjects: American literature
• Online Access: http://purl.flvc.org/fsu/fd/FSU_migr_etd-9219

"Representation and the Modern Female Subject" examines the socio-cultural work of the fictional woman painter in novels by women authors writing in or about the United States between the years 1870-1930. I focus on representations of women painters to explore the shift that occurs when women take control of their self-images. It is my contention that nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American women writers employ the self-reflexive figure of the painter heroine to promote an ideological and iconological awareness of the discursive and visual natures of gender construction. The second order act of gender- and self-making produced by the woman author writing the woman painter, who in turn produces ekphrastically rendered images, foregrounds the ways that gender is articulated in art, literature, and the popular media. These self-reflexive representations, therefore, anticipate questions raised by constructivists about how gender ideologies are produced, by whom, and to what effect. In this way, authors such as Lillie Devereux Blake, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Kate Chopin, Julia Magruder, Winnifred Eaton, and Jessie Fauset deconstruct hegemonic representations of womanhood or femininity, from the True Woman to the Gibson Girl, to enable a plurality of divergent, sometimes paradoxical, femininities. Implicitly, then, these authors suggest that gender is constructed and negotiated through language and image and, crucially, that women must take an active part in those processes if they are to obtain autonomy. === A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. === Fall Semester, 2014. === October 27, 2014. === Includes bibliographical references. === Leigh Edwards, Professor Co-Directing Dissertation; Paul Outka, Professor Co-Directing Dissertation; Karen Bearor, University Representative; Andrew Epstein, Committee Member; Dennis Moore, Committee Member.