<p> Over the last one hundred years, F. Scott Fitzgerald&rsquo;s <i> The Great Gatsby</i> has become one of the most popular American novels in the literary canon. Though thousands of critical articles have circulated concerning one of American&rsquo;s greatest tragic heroes, Jay Gatsby, it is the object of his desire that is often neglected. By applying the theories of feminist thinker Simone de Beauvoir, it can be shown that Daisy&rsquo;s status as mutable anti-heroine is representative of the patriarchal ideologies of the novel&rsquo;s time. Equally ripe for analysis is Daisy&rsquo;s film legacy, as four major motion pictures have been adapted for the big screen. In this project, I argue that Daisy represents the treacherous dichotomies often imposed on women, whether through idolatry, illusion, commodification, or slavery. I also seek to prove that Daisy is part and parcel of the American New Woman and how this further distorts America&rsquo;s identification with her. The ability to identify with characters is compulsory, which is perhaps why the story of Jay Gatsby has been adopted as a telling of the American Dream. As a contrast, however, the women in <i>The Great Gatsby</i> are difficult to identify with. If Daisy Buchanan is confined to a strict set of misshapen stereotypes, and we as Americans celebrate this novel as one of our Greats, how do we time and time again read women in the Great American Narrative?</p>

Critical reception of Karoline von Gunderrode has largely ignored her work and focused on her tragic life and death. Even earlier feminist scholarship overlooked her writing because of its presumed adherence to masculine literary traditions. As part of a shift towards more discursive analyses, this dissertation traces the contradictory representations of gender in Gunderrode's body of work. I maintain that gender is the central conflict for Gunderrode primarily because her appropriation of romantic idealism contradicts her desire for self-fulfillment. As a woman writer, she adopted a masculine persona at a time when romanticism privileged the feminine. Rather than an identity as muse or in self-negating love, Gunderrode developed her masculine self through intellectual engagement with philosophy and history. She also had ambitions of becoming a poet. What she considered feminine, however, is not absent in her writing: love, the sexualized body, and nature figure significantly as subject matter and metaphor. The contemporary discourse on nature and the extensive feminist criticism of that form the theoretical framework of my analysis. Gunderrode did not explicitly question the natural complementarity of the sexes, but through close readings of a wide range of her texts I establish some of the ways that she transgressed conventional expectations of women's and men's natures. Because love exists in a complicated relationship with women's creativity and historical agency, Gunderrode utilized various strategies--such as the maternal, homoeroticism, incest, and triangular relationships--to counter the romantic ideal. Love is never portrayed within a bourgeois context of marriage and family. Women's economic and emotional reliance on men is thematized. I also discuss how Gunderrode appropriated an orientalist discourse in her gender critique. Given the complexity of Gunderrode's work, I concentrate on three themes: the conflict between creativity and female sexuality; the conflict between heroism and love for women in history; and the construction of a poetic self. Through my reading of Gunderrode's encounter with an ideal of subjectivity and its negation of women, I suggest new categories with which to explore how gender codes formed the basis for late-eighteenth-century German notions of the individual.

This study argues the need to consider the impact of social class in women's narratives. Beginning with the turn of the century, a time of great social and economic change for women, I examine how women writers challenge and redefine traditional notions of middle-class womanhood in order to accommodate emerging feminist ideals, for example, the rejection of marriage for the pursuit of a career. Using the fiction of Wharton, Austin, Yezierska, and Hurston, I explore how the female characters of their novels negotiate between traditional roles ascribed to middle-class women and new definitions of womanhood symbolized by the appearance of the "New Woman." Interestingly, while some middle-class ideals are rejected, i.e. domesticity, two of these writers, Wharton and Austin, nonetheless remain committed to a middle-class ideology. For Yezierska and Hurston, middle-class acceptance means necessarily negotiating the uncertain terrain between a desire for middle-class stability and the reality of one's ethnic and racial background. By highlighting the importance of class in the construction of female subjectivity, my study of women's narratives makes a substantial contribution to the field of feminist literary theory.

This dissertation examines Elfriede Jelinek's investigation of Austria's and Western Europe's "obscene fantasies" through her "perversion" of generic forms in three of her best-known texts (Die Liebhaberinnen, Lust, and Die Klavierspielerin). It also investigates how these texts, at first glance less overtly political than Jelinek's later work, can be seen as laying the groundwork for her later, more political, analysis of Austrian fascism and racism. The dissertation is composed of three chapters; each investigates a central psychoanalytic concept (alienation, jouissance, perversion and sublimation) and reads a Jelinek text in relation to the genre that it is perverting, exposing the "obscene fantasies" that lie at its heart. Chapter One examines how Jelinek depicts alienation (in the Marxist, socialist feminist, and Lacanian senses) in her 1975 novel Die Liebhaberinnen, and explores how Jelinek's depiction of alienation functions to make Die Liebhaberinnen an anti-romance. Chapter Two addresses whether Jelinek's novel Lust (1989) is a pornographic or anti-pornographic text. I investigate the complex relationship between aesthetics and pornography, arguing that many other Jelinek scholars collapse the distinction between mass-cultural forms of pornography and the high-cultural pornography of Bataille and Sade, and thus fail to understand how her text is simultaneously pornographic and anti-pornographic. Chapter Three focuses on Jelinek's novel Die Klavierspielerin (1983), examining the development of its protagonist as a (perverse) sexual subject, and her ultimate failure to achieve a stable sexual position and how Jelinek's text perverts the genre of the Künstlerroman. It also discusses Erika's training as a pianist as a possible causal factor of her perversions and lack of sexual identity, concluding that her inability to sublimate demonstrates the similarities (and differences) between the artist and the pervert, illustrating how Jelinek's novel deviates from the traditional Künstlerroman. The dissertation argues that the disruption of genres is one of Jelinek's most significant literary contributions, her works functioning to create a "negative aesthetics" as opposed to a positive reworking of generic forms. Jelinek rejects an identificatory mode of writing and refuses to create "positive" subjects, preferring instead to produce art that is a "critique of praxis as the rule of brutal self-preservation at the heart of the status quo" (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 12).

This dissertation explores the communal uneasiness and hermeneutic impasse created by suicide in twentieth-century US American literature by women. By considering how history is negotiated through suicidal acts and how literary texts are structured by self-inflicted death, I suggest that this intentional turn is most fundamentally readable through public spaces—the Middle Passage, Hiroshima, Harlem, San Francisco's Chinatown. My first chapter focuses on Ludwig Binswanger's The Case of Ellen West: An Anthropological-Clinical Study (1944), an existential analysis of a Jewish woman who killed herself in Switzerland when she was thirty-three. Along with Anne Sexton's poetry, West's writing acts as a prelude to my subsequent chapters because it makes the body inextricable from the imagination, and both inextricable from history, community, and politics. In Chapter Two, I trace the conflation of white femininity and suicide in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature before turning to modern novels in which women ambiguously fall to their deaths: Nella Larsen's Passing (1929), Mary McCarthy's The Group (1963), and Fae Myenne Ng's Bone (1993). These texts disperse intention over a field of inquiry, connecting the private act of suicide to culture less through consciousness than through public space—the fictional space of falling in public and the imagined space of a reading public. In Chapter Three, I examine revolutionary suicide in Toni Morrison's Beloved (1988), Sula (1973), and Song of Solomon (1977), integrating theories from Emmanuel Levinas and Huey Newton. Self-destruction operates on two revolutionary levels: within the story, as a political form of resistance and within the narrative structure, as a discursive strategy, an axis around which meanings revolve. Finally, in Chapter Four, I sketch the political terrain covered by female suicide in Adrienne Kennedy's Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964), Velina Hasu Houston's Tea (1983), and Suzan-Lori Parks's Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom (1990). Each play extends the logic that I have traced in previous chapters, deploying the act of suicide to register the effects of colonialism, war, and white supremacy on contemporary American women's lives.

This cultural history uses the glaring spatial divides within Germany in the 1970s, the Berlin Wall and the German-German border, to analyze discourses of crisis that manifest themselves around issues of space, divisions, walls, and borders. The perspective of a "transnational feminist psychogeographer" borrows from German and cultural studies, transnational feminist theory, and postcolonial critiques to allow for a reading of cultural contradictions without reducing them to either/or positions. Discussing changes in Cold War politics that characterize the 1970s in terms of a shift to postmodernity, post-Fordism, or a new stage in capitalist globalization, chapter one develops a theoretical framework for examining how 'globalized' borders appear as both permeable and permanent, fostering contradictory discourses of security and confinement. Rather than suggesting that the specific fears produced around global issues like the oil crisis and the Vietnam War vanished by the end of the 1970s, chapter two argues that the production of fear is part of a permanent, racialized, gendered, as well as specifically Western, state of emergency. Chapter three and four reread discourses of national crisis around immigration and terrorism. The mechanisms and strategies of Othering implied in these texts promote a contradictory sense of global alliances and national identity while simultaneously fostering the militarization of the borders of the nation state. Chapters five and six examine the politics of discourses of gender crises in texts and films of the New Subjectivity and in feminist texts in the 1970s. The perspective of a "transnational psychogeographer" allows me to contextualize feminisms and the crisis of the male subject within changing interpretations of gender, nation, and the West. The conclusion contends that we should rethink our understating of the 1970s as a decade between the social change of the 1960s and the conservative backlash of the 1980s to accommodate contradictory political discourses defining a divided Germany in a global context by means of creating a 'permanent state of emergency.'

This dissertation explores the ideas about fashion and luxury in literary texts from the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. The first chapter reviews the concept of “fashion,” its meaning and implications, and provides an overview of the most important theories that have attempted to explain why fashion exists and how it is originated. The second chapter is devoted to the study of the controversy about fashion and luxury during the Enlightenment, with an emphasis on the national and patriotic implications of that discussion, and on the generic aspects of a controversy in which both male and female are subjected to scrutiny and criticism for their fashionable, effeminate and unpatriotic behavior. The primary sources used for this chapter are the eighteenth century periodical El censor , the Cartas marruecas by José de Cadalso and El libro del agrado by Luis de Eijoecente. The third chapter explores the ideas and rhetoric about fashion in nineteenth century novels by Benito Pérez Galdós—especially La de Bringas—and in some writings by Emilia Pardo Bazán. The most important issues addressed are the feminization of fashion in that period, when fashion starts to be considered a feminine affair and this belief—held by novelists and theorists—is analyzed and deconstructed. The second issue is the traditional explanation of fashion as imitation of the behavior and manners of the upper classes, which explains the Victorian anxieties about fashion in the light of class competition and the worries about the confusion of classes. The fourth chapter explores the ideas about fashion and fashionability in the works of the most important writers about female education (such as Fenelon, Rousseau, Wollstonecraft and Taylor-Mill), and examines the ideas about fashion in two female Spanish writers who took part in the polemic about the female education and emancipation: Concepción Arenal and Rosario Acuña. The chapter concludes with a close analysis of the work done in the 1920 by Carmen de Burgos, a writer, feminist and journalist who celebrated fashion as art and feminine expression. One of the main conclusions of this dissertation is that the late nineteenth century marks a change from a culture of luxury to a culture of fashion in a capitalist world where being fashionable no longer means being able to purchase the most expensive fabrics and embroideries.

This dispensation explores Rose Auslander's poetics through her revision of traditional myths. In many of her short poems, the 20th-century Austrian-Jewish poet is concerned with the creative process. Turning to female predecessors, she revises the role of Eve in the Biblical creation myth and uses images of an archetypal cosmic mother figure and of the Shekhina, a feminine emanation of the divine in the Kabbalah. Out of these revisions of mythology arises a new role for the woman poet, and the maternal imagery leads to an understanding of poetics which I call relational poetics. In close readings, I trace the development from the revision of Eve to the cosmic mother and to a maternal language. Eve is seen as a co-creative female power next to the divine forces of creation. Her transgression makes her a role model for the woman poet, rather than marking her as the archetypal seductive woman. She turns the knowledge acquired from the forbidden tree into the source of poetry which she shares with the world. Thus, she becomes a point of departure for Auslander and provides a bridge to the mother figure. In the mother poems, verbal creation is replaced by water and milk as the medium of creation, and Auslander shifts from the creative competition between God and Eve to the struggle between the cosmic mother and her human daughter. Finally, language takes on the mother role. Maternal voices become part of Auslander's search for a new language as images of the symbiotic relationship between the mother and the child in her womb provide access to these voices. Through the image of giving birth, female reproduction becomes a metaphor for poetic productivity. Auslander's relational poetics thus derives from the close relationship between mother and daughter. The boundaries between self and other are fluid, and in a constant process of exchange, poet and poem create each other anew with every word.

This dissertation investigates the influence of GDR writer Gabriele (Kachold) Stötzer's visual and performance art on the texts published in her 1992 volume of experimental prose, grenzen los fremd gehen. Born in 1954, Stötzer is loosely associated with the experimental writers of the Prenzlauer Berg “Szene.” In the 1980s in Erfurt, she established the Künstlerinnengruppe, a performance group that focused on self-expression in the private spaces of apartments and self-made studios—painting, posing for photographs, creating amateur films, weaving, making pottery, and sewing clothes. I maintain that this coalition of women fashioned an indirect defiance to the GDR State by operating in arenas the Stasi did not conceive as political. As well, I argue that the techniques of bricolage—the spontaneous use of materials at hand—she devised to express that defiance that are employed in the group's visual art performances, are also central to Stötzer's textual production. Stötzer tosses together sentences built upon consonant and vowel sounds that play on meanings; she rejects the steps of revising and editing; and she uses “materials at hand”—especially the body. She uses those techniques to represent her wrenching experience of incarceration at the age of twenty-four and her ongoing discontent with the GDR. Stötzer eschews any optimistic view of the intact individual within socialism and reveals instead in her writing an exasperated figure that lacks crucial freedoms. In Chapter One I outline the prescribed tenets of socialist realism and their implementation in GDR practice and how Stötzer's texts resist them. In Chapters Two and Three I trace Stötzer's biography and her artistic production—especially with the Künstlerinnengruppe, showing how her art has always been informed by elements of bricolage. In Chapter Four I provide analyses of eight texts from grenzen los fremd gehen, particularly emphasizing their relationship to her visual and performance art. I conclude my dissertation by arguing that Stötzer's creative potential was catalyzed in very particular ways by the circumstances that reigned in the waning days of the GDR, so that her more recent post-Wende texts no longer display the experimental qualities that brought her acclaim before 1989.

Detective fiction, thematically and structurally, contains the potentially rich ability to stand at multiple places simultaneously. Consequently, it provides an appropriate mediating structure for the discussion of potentially disruptive ideas, particularly ideas on identity. Beginning with an examination of the nineteenth-century literary and cultural contexts, I consider the geography of gender and the literary strands that provided fertile ground for the emergence of detective fiction. Through close readings of detective narratives by the three earliest women writers of the genre, Seeley Regester (1831-1865), Anna Katharine Green (1846-1935), and Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876-1958), I examine how these writers thematize the need for informed choice for their female characters, who either as detectives or suspects learn to achieve expansive readings of the confusing signs surrounding them, and seem to request expansive readings by their readers. Paralleling the discourse that moves toward answering the question "who did it?" is the double text of many of the novels that suggests a series of seemingly contradictory realities: women's entrapment by socially sanctioned roles and the clever ways they achieve freedom; women's victimization by male texts and their creation of a new story; women's invisibility to those unable to hear, see, or understand them and their vivid presence obvious in the emancipatory strategies employed for their survival. The ands suggest the wholeness of the vision of these novels and the possibility of their being read both ways--that is, read for their reinforcement of traditional ideologies and read for the future discourse they evoke. Central to my exploration are the disruptive pauses that begin a renegotiation of gender boundaries in Regester's texts, the significance given to gendered language in Green's novels, and the discourse of humor that demarcates a newly created space for women in Rinehart's narratives. Drawing connections between these early women writers and the presently emerging feminist detective novel, I argue that Regester, Green and Rinehart provide multiple mysteries in their narratives--mysteries that emphasize the desire of these women to understand the boundaries that define them and the ways in which they can change these contours.