Gentlemen prefer modernism : 'middlebrow' culture and the transmutation of realism in the works of Louisa May Alcott, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and Fannie Hurst

This dissertation examines the emergence of a modernist aesthetic in early twentieth-century America and its effect on women writers, particularly those with allegiance to the nineteenth-century realist tradition fostered by William Dean Howellsand Henry James. A number of the anxieties about authorship and aesthetics expressed by early twentieth-century women writers have their roots in the nineteenth century, a period when more women began careers as writers; therefore, I analyze Louisa May Alcott as a nineteenth-century exemplar of the limitations imposed by Victorian gender constructions, particularly as they are informed by the ideology of women’s “influence.” Ialso consider the aesthetic limitations of the domestic and sentimental fiction genres on a woman's desire for personal fulfillment as an artist. I argue that the onset of the modernist era does not erase the tensions between the notions of woman’s “appropriate cultural influence and artistic ambition, but it instead shifts the emphasis of women writers' anxiety to aesthetic representation, especially as it concerns a move away from realism and into the mode of “transmutation,” an aesthetic propounded by Edith Whartonand continued in the work of Willa Gather and Fannie Hurst. Writers like Wharton,Gather, and Hurst are seldom classified as “modem”; they did write in a manner quite different from the most experimental narratives of their modernist contemporaries, andWharton and Gather in particular criticized modernist aesthetics. However, there are important parallels between the work of these women and the goals of the modernist movement that can offer insights into the complicated relationship between the emerging middlebrow” culture that consumed ever-growing numbers of popular and “literary texts and the literary critics who articulated “taste” for this culture in literary magazines,newspapers, and new formations like the “Book of the Month Club.