| dc.description.abstract | Abstract My dissertation focusses on American feminist tragic novels between 1890 and 1925, which deal with women’s tragic lives in a patriarchal society. I will show that the thematic and structural similarities among them are evident to the extent that they seem to build a particular literary tradition different from other similar genres, such as sentimental novels, naturalist novels, and classic tragedies. Based on the field of generic criticism, I define the new tradition as the genre of feminist tragic novels in which a feminist consciousness is manifested in terms of tragic vision and contentious structure. The specific generic approach to these novels leads to an analysis of their genre-unique aesthetic values, which justify their status as artistic works. For this purpose, I clarify the historical long-held aversion of critics to women writers’ realistic work through the variety of critical and aesthetics lenses. I explore how the male dominated process of American literary canonization, centering on Romance theory and masculine myths on one side and traditional aesthetics such as Genius theory and Disinterestedness on the other, have hindered women’s tragic novels from being interpreted aesthetically or rhetorically. These clarifications show how these feminist tragic novels, and their authors, create counter-discourse to previous genres by making gendered claims not only on the patriarchal society they live in, but also on the genre they write in. To show this, I begin with two novels that end with the suicide of the female protagonists: Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) and Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905). In the first chapter, I will show how women’s suicides serve as a vehicle to let readers experience the emancipation of ethics, rather than that of emotion. In the second chapter, I deal with the issues of women’s mental breakdown in feminist tragic fiction by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), and Gertrude Stein, “Melanctha” (1909), focusing on the way linguistic devices and narratology draw attention to the chasm between women’s desire and social oppression. In the third chapter, by closely reading Edith Summers Kelley’s Weeds (1923) and Ellen Glasgow’s Barren Ground (1925), I show how women’s adversities in the feminist tragic novels are depicted in a way that raises readers’ social consciousness, rather than allowing them to transcend or sublimate it, drawing on the aesthetic of dissensus. In each case, I define the feminist tragic novels as cultural products that represent their materiality, while simultaneously becoming a source from which new meaning is produced in both a dialectical and a revolutionary way. | |
