Women, Compulsion, Modernity

The Moment of American Naturalism

Jennifer L. Fleissner

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780226805764
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The 1890s have long been thought one of the most male-oriented eras in American history. But in reading such writers as Frank Norris with Mary Wilkins Freeman and Charlotte Perkins Gilman with Stephen Crane, Jennifer L. Fleissner boldly argues that feminist claims in fact shaped the period's cultural mainstream. Women, Compulsion, Modernity reopens a moment when the young American woman embodied both the promise and threat of a modernizing world.Fleissner shows that this era's expanding opportunities for women were inseparable from the same modern developments—industrialization, consumerism—typically believed to constrain human freedom. With Women, Compulsion, and Modernity, Fleissner creates a new language for the strange way the writings of the time both broaden and question individual agency.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The "Feminization" of American Naturalism
• 1. The Compulsion to Describe: Naturalist Subjects, Naturalist History
• 2. The Great Indoors: Regionalism, Feminism, and Obsessional Domesticity
• 3. A Mania for the Moment: Fadmongering and Feminism in Henry James
• 4. The New Woman & the Old Man: Sentimentality and "Drift" in Dreiser and Wharton
• 5. Saving Herself: Gender, Preservation, and Futurity in 'McTeague'
• 6. Rhythm Method: Unmothering the Race in Chopin, Stein, and Grimke
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index