No Hiding Place on Earth: the Female Self in Eight Modern American Women Authors. (Volumes I and II).

This study places the work of eight modern American women authors against their social and literary background. Selected works having a female protagonist written by Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, Willa Cather, Katherine Anne Porter, Carson McCullers, Mary McCarthy, and Joan Didion are discussed, tracing the individual authors' changing definition of the female self throughout their respective careers. The woman author addresses two literary lineages. Her female predecessors who wrote popular domestic fiction devised a woman's plot which addressed the cultural dem and s for both self-assertion and feminine gentility by removing the family as an available source of guidance and support. The writers of classic American literature created a parallel plot which portrayed the male's retreat, often with only a shadow companion, to a protected natural environment. These divergent literary precursors share the individual creation of an alternate emotionally expressive world. Speaking to both pasts, the woman author faces a narrowing set of social and literary dem and s. Women address the imaginative, intellectual issue of the society after their role in the communal institution of the home had eroded, yet their literature revolved around domesticity. As writers, they joined the art after the rational social leadership had devalued literature as a medium for unifying and educating the public. The woman artist answers a socially generated dem and for a close recreation of the physical environment even while she seeks to grant her heroine the absolute freedom of emotional escape. One misstep in walking this fine line, and the woman falls to disgrace, madness, or death. The modern woman writer searches to shelter her often self-identified characters from this tension. Each eventually renounces her vision of individual autonomy, the heroine retreating to a deadly spiritual communion or existing in hostile material world.Ph.D.American studiesUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/159220/1/8304532.pd