Reconstruction Vol. 11, No. 3
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Everything But the Kitchen Sink: Popular Novels by Women in the Great Depression / Jan Goggans
The turbulent time of the 1930s encompassed, in literature, both the rise of the proletarian novel and the increased development of American modernism. Both played out against a backdrop of extreme cultural dislocation. As long standing assumptions about social and cultural positions dissolved in the wake of breadlines, unemployment, and political reform, the country found itself confronting the breakdown of barriers of class, race and gender. This essay joins a growing body of scholarship that seeks to understand how the Great Depression influenced, and was influenced by the literature it produced. In doing so, I hope to provide a greater understanding of how women writers responded to the era with a variety of transgressive strategies to confront and contain gender expectations of both society and literature. To do so, I turn to popular literature for and by women, one of the most highly consumed but currently overlooked genres of the era. Examining work by popular fiction writer Ruthe S.Wheeler and middlebrow and popular magazine writer Kathleen Thompson Norris, I argue that in popular fiction women wrote and read, the transgression of growing social boundaries that were the result of the era itself paralleled an equal attempt by women writers to transgress literary boundaries that had begun to form nearly a century earlier, and which high modernism reinforced and strengthened.
<1> During the Great Depression, the vast array of literature produced was as various as the poetry, drama, and fiction itself. Understanding that William Faulkner introduced the Compsons only slightly before the nation first met Nancy Drew speaks to the quick frustration that follows any attempt to understand the “average” writing of the era. In response to that frustration, scholars have tended to accept a shallow but easily digestible characterization of 1930s writing as “years of protest,” as American culture critic Jack Salzman titled his anthology. [1] For many writers of the era, it was the “red” decade, and they followed the formula of the proletarian novel, a conversion narrative that cast frustrated and economically dispossessed workers into a fall from which only a communist comrade could raise them. At the same time, as modernism entered its third decade, writers continued to build on tenets established in the late teens and twenties, featuring syntactical compression, ellipses, fragmentation, interiority, and submerged meaning and detail. For most literary critics, any other literary production was encoded into a wide but vague field termed “popular.” While many recent scholars have argued that none of these genres was in truth formulaic, they are rarely taken as “one literature,” despite the reality that one decade produced them. This essay joins a growing body of scholarship that seeks to understand how writing of the era was influenced by the Great Depression, and how those who strove to make sense of their lives within its rapid changes were influenced by the literature it produced. While finances often dominate our understanding of this era, shifts in raced, classed and gendered status were, for those who lived the Great Depression, as overwhelming as band closures and joblessness. Particularly, the era sought to reverse many of social freedoms, and nearly all of the professional gains, women had made in the previous decade. Thus, I turn to popular literature for and by women, one of the most highly consumed but currently overlooked genres of the era. Specifically, I look at the work of two of the era’s most popular writers of books for women and girls, Kathleen Thompson Norris and Ruthe S. Wheeter, to provide a greater understanding of how women writers responded to the era with a variety of transgressive strategies to confront and contain gender expectations of both society and literature.
<2> In exploring the Great Depression’s literary output as a literature, Lawrence Hanley’s recent essay, “Popular Culture and Crises: King Kong Meets Edmund Wilson,” analyzes literary production not as codified responses to the expectations of developing genres (such as modernism or proletarianism), but as evidence of a growing awareness of and discomfort with class alterations in the United States. “The collapse of a romance” Edmund Wilson described as the “romance of democracy” and John Dewey as “the romance known as business” underscored not simply the myth of Horatio Alger but the public’s inability or unwillingness to emotionally invest themselves in that myth. Hanley argues that this breakdown “is narrativized as a failure to contain and to manage agents of class difference who both provoke and, ultimately, subvert ‘official’ boundaries between inside and outside, self and other, and order and anarchy” (243). He locates this “generalized scene of disruption and difference” (244) in work as various as Faulkner’s Sanctuary and the movie King Kong.[2]
<3> As Hanley points out, the popular fictions of the Great Depression reveal significant and meaningful understandings of how people navigated their lives during a period of financial, social, and cultural disruption. As long standing assumptions about social and cultural positions dissolved in the wake of breadlines, unemployment, and political reform, the country found itself confronting the breakdown of barriers of class, race and gender. In popular fiction women wrote and read, the “disruption and difference” Hanley locates in both high modernist fiction and popular films occurs in two related ways: through the subversion of social boundaries that were the result of the era itself, and the infiltration of literary boundaries that had begun to form nearly a century earlier.
<4> The early 20th century formation of an operative “great divide” that Andreas Huyssen aptly described as the “insurmountable barrier separating high art from popular culture” (ix) led to increased difficulties for women writers, whose association with sentimental literature and mass culture made modernism openly hostile to their work. [3] Modernist women writers obviously existed, but many, most famously Virginia Woolf, aligned themselves with a masculinist modernism that disparaged feminine fiction forms (sentimental or popular) even when they were arguing for more female autonomy. Woolf retained and even revered the Victorian sensibility that viewed “art as a luxury reserved for the few, not a social necessity; artists were not ‘workers’ but creative geniuses” (Grieve 3). Such a perspective held that art addressing ordinary life had little place in the arts. Even when early modernism’s concentration on form and technique shifted, it did not move to everyday life, as artists and writers sought to explore and represent their own consciousness of their world. Rather than structurally modernist, works became modernizing, creating a new layer of distance from a society whose balance of mass consumerism and unchallenged capitalism became increasingly distasteful to artists, and the serious artist sought to produce literature that might transcend the times. Sinclair Lewis’ refusal of the Pulitzer Prize in 1926 stated the general ideology of serious writers: “Between the Pulitzer Prizes, the American Academy of Arts and Letters and its training school the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and the inquisition of earnest literary ladies, every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient and sterile. In protest . . . I must decline the Pulitzer Prize” (Casey 90).
<5> While male writers produced popular and pulp fiction, often aimed at male readers, seemingly the only thing female writers produced was a brand of popular fiction that often included the developing definition of a field of literature disdained as middlebrow. Woolf mocked “the man, or woman, of middlebred intelligence who ambles and saunters now on this side of the hedge, now on that, in pursuit of no single object, neither art itself nor life itself, but both mixed indistinguishably, and rather nastily, with money, fame, power, or prestige” (Grieve 4). [4] Yet this wide-ranging form lacked neither purpose nor content, and deeply and genuinely examined female subjectivity. As Nicola Humble has argued, the middlebrow novel of the interwar years was “a powerful force in establishing and consolidating, but also in resisting, new class and gender identities [through its] paradoxical allegiance to both domesticity and a radical sophistication.” [5] As participants in and observers of culture, women artists and writers drew on and invented diverse strategies to contain and explore contemporary cultural modes, and their literary production often turned to transgressive strategies. The need for transgression, rather than open protest, emphasizes the complex strategies women writers had to take during that decade. Without a clear standing within either literary or academic communities, women writers seeking to explore feminist ideologies and alternatives turned less often to the radical Utopias Charlotte Perkins Gilman constructed, and more often to familiar scenarios. Yet far from acceding to social stereotypes set by first wave feminist novels such as Perkins Gilman’s Herland, novels set within familiar territories served as a site of interrogation of how things were at that time. Patricia Kamut’s study of feminist theory suggests that in seeking to understand women’s contributions to the academy, and the scholarship it produces, the “very ground” of what we are often taught can and must be eroded (54). In ways that predict Kamut’s argument, women writers of the 1930s, forced as they were by definitions of female subjectivity and canonical expectations that were beyond their control, worked to erode the very ground on which they were forced to stand. By introducing women in traditionally feminine social roles such as wife, mother, or daughter, and reinventing them in new roles, or familiar roles they articulated in new ways, writers were essentially going over the old canonical ground that opposed the popular female and serious male literary production; the slippages within their work eroded, elided, and perhaps even confused that opposition. Female protagonists whose work placed them precariously into male positions did not simply act like men, thereby perpetuating a masculinist world order; instead, they confused the difference between male and female work.
<6> Those strategies carried meaning not simply for writing women, but for many women of the era. After the heyday of first wave feminism had brought distinct employment benefits and more efficient homes, the modern woman found little social acceptance in the economy following the Crash. In the newly austere climate, men and woman found that what had looked like “vigorous independence and strong-mindedness in the flapper now seemed careless, selfish, and superficial” (Rehak 106). During the decade, “The number of women who never married, which had once been as high as 20 percent, dropped to 5 percent . . . and even education seemed to have very little effect” (Rehak 104). Not only did society revert to the marital security the 1920s had rejected, but “from 1930 to 1940, the number of women who worked outside the home would increase only a smidgen, from 24.4 percent to 25.4 percent, as all the progress that had been made in the early part of the 1920s seemed to wither away under the duress of the Depression” (Rehak 115). Domestic employment declined as well, for as Susan Ware writes, “when a salesperson (or a transient) asked at the door in the 1930s, ‘Is the lady of the house at home?’, she usually was” (4). Women moved aggressively to transform their homes into economically efficient bastions of frugality, as the saying “make it do, or do without” suggests. Eleanor Roosevelt referred to the “endless economies” that characterized women’s lives as they bought fewer items, re-used last year’s clothing and shoes, and learned new recipes to stretch lower quality meats. Economic and cultural concern over family stability and the hostility many women encountered in seeking employment outside the home (thereby “stealing” jobs from unemployed men) reinforced a back -to-the-home ideology. Laura Hapke charges that “working women, especially married ones, became the scapegoats of a movement to reassert the separate sphere thinking of past decades” (xv). They were denied equal pay for equal work under provisions of the National Recovery Administration and, if married, forbidden to work in government and other employment venues. As Hapke argues, “[t]hey were accused of emasculation, promiscuity, or both if they resisted these constraints but praised if they complied with the dictates of the back-to-the-home movement” (xvi).
<7> While working women found themselves attacked, writing women found themselves confined. Popular fiction discouraged experimentation, demanding adherence to formulas and openly shunning the “highbrow” literature of the time. In a 1906 letter to a prospective writer, Edward Stratemeyer, the entrepreneur behind Nancy Drew, The Bobbsey Twins and The Hardy Boys, wrote: “We do not ask for what is commonly called ‘fine writing,’ (usually another name for what is tedious and cumbersome” but want something full of ‘ginger’ and action.’” (Rehak 93) Unable to provide independent plot lines, women writers responded by fashioning independence in their heroines, placing them in male environments such as air transportation or news offices, and creating plots that not only showed young women rising to the challenge of entering the male domain, but questioning that domain’s gendered structure. Thus, while the stories reflected some of the realistic careers and attendant choices those careers asked women to make, they also mined a variety of social concerns, from the singular role of the female writer to the wider issue of modernity, and its increasing tensions for audiences already struggling to navigate a changed post-Crash political, economic, and cultural landscape. Deeply inscribed by the gendered antagonisms the 1930s formalized in both professional and personal terrains, the works of female popular fiction writers explain how women writers and their readers sought to interrogate a world increasingly hostile to women’s success and increasingly adept at disparaging textual articulations of that very world.
<8> In the landscape of popular stories and novels for girls, plots often revolved around school, friendships, and clothing, a standard approach that by the 1930s had begun to embrace work and, ultimately, the solving of mysteries. Ruthe S. Wheeler was one of the era’s popular writers, creating serial books around Janet Hardy’s glamorous adventures (Janet Hardy in Radio City, 1935 and Janet Hardy in Hollywood, 1935) as well as books devoted to single novel heroines. As her titles display, Wheeler sought to explore the current role and status of women, exploring their career options and commercial and creative desires in a time when both were limited. Thus, like the romance novels Janice Radway and Tania Modleski studied, Wheeler’s “books for girls” sought to acknowledge and deflect anxieties female readers and writers felt in facing their helplessness against patriarchal constraints. For example, in Jane, Stewardess of the Air Lines (1934), the impoverished new graduate from nursing school finds herself part of an experiment by Federated Airways to add nurses to its flying crews. She is barely out of training when she receives an assignment to travel with a millionaire dowager whose fare for the trip will keep the stewardess program alive. Bandits attack the airplane, and when the Air Force arrives like an aeronautical cavalry, the aerial battle leaves Jane neither airsick nor frightened. A news article makes her famous and pays her well, and she uses the money for flying lessons, which she puts to good use when she accepts the part of “stunt flyer” in a studio film and, later, rescues a child actor from kidnappers by flying him off the deserted island on which they are held hostage. Despite the fantastical plot, Jane, Stewardess of the Air Lines looks at the reality of the economy, and the struggle a single young woman faced. At graduation from the academy, Jane is “far too proud” to admit either to her friend or her family that “she was scared” (13). Jane has $4.23 in her pocket, her best friend has $2, and her only thought as both head to Chicago for their interviews is to wonder “just how she would subsist if she failed to get the job as stewardess” (22). Likely, the same thought was in the minds of many Americans, and Jane’s delirious embrace of her new job is as much about the steady pay she will receive as it is the “trim uniform.” Jane’s ability to present herself publically in an exciting and modern look, and her awareness that the look represented her fledging and highly modern career, were tied together in this moment for Wheeler’s heroine. Beyond the paycheck, Jane realizes that the job is “a great opportunity. It’s a real chance to get into a new field for girls” (19).
<9> Despite Amelia Earhart’s two broken records that year [6] (solo across the Atlantic and solo non-stop coast to coast), the “new field” Jane embraces is a hostile air space because of her success, as it was for successful female writers of sentimental fiction , Jane’s encounters with pilots are generally marked by patronizing comments and the studio director refuses to believe she can actually fly. When a new model of airplane is introduced, the pilot tells her she will be excited by the kitchen. Yet despite the old school patriarchy the men display, the industry itself is characterized by sleek lines and a decided thrust to the future. The kitchen Jane is directed to is done in modern lines and colors, with new devices for all she needs. And by the end of the book, Jane rises from stewardess to assistant manager. While the novel is not crafted as literary modernism, and employs none of modernism’s textual strategies Jane herself is aligned with modernity in crucial ways. She navigates the modern world of technological change by mastering not simply aeronautics, but the industry of commercial airline flight. Additionally Jane’s demonstration of turbulent gender roles, and even the economic displacements that permeate the novel suggest Wheeler’s awareness of the class shifts that recent scholarship has found within many modernist works. [7]
<10> Jane’s climb to success challenges post-Crash gender roles in multiple ways. The stewardess was simultaneously a traditional woman and a frighteningly independent new formulation of female subjectivity, cutting into new territory and often marking her own way. Because of their new introduction to society and social ideas of travel, airlines signaled a modernity that occurred rapidly, with passenger travel expanding from less than 9,000 in 1927 to more than 400,00 in 1930 (Barry 14). The decision to reject the model of the African American railroad porter and construct a new figure of a white “hostess” moved airline travel into a decidedly new era of service and travel. While the industry’s initial requirement of training as a nurse may have aligned the first stewardess with the traditionally female caring professions, her youth and unmarried status (both required) gave her an aura of glamour. One stewardess told the New York Times in 1936, “Oh, there’s a freedom—a mental stimulation to this work” (Barry 28) Dramatically transgressing the line between male dominated professions, such as aviation pilots, and the semi professional label of female dominated professions such as nursing, the stewardess was in and of herself an avatar of the modern, and Wheeler’s book, piling fantastic adventures and multiple awards on the adamantly professional and feminine Jane, offers a message to the female reader that although it may require persistence, the freedoms within such a transgression were worth the work.
<11> 1930s modernity found perhaps its best female representative not in the air, however, but behind the typewriter, putting copy to bed in a busy newsroom. Jean Marie Lutes argues that as a recently emerged “icon of American culture” in the early 20th century, the female news reporter was “a figure of modernity” (10). While women began writing for newspapers and magazines in the 19th century, women’s changing role in society made their place in journalism an indication of the early 20th century’s struggle with working women and working class women, both of whom threatened to disrupt a fragile social order. Like the female fiction writer, the “front page girl” was mistrusted by the male establishment. Like many women writers, female reporters created a hybrid genre, “synthesizing sentimental tropes of female authorship within a self-consciously professional version of the modern literary woman” (Lutes 7). Thus, in creating heroines in newsrooms, 1930s female writers created an entire popular genre of fictional female writers who paralleled their own experiences, drawing characters who struggled for respect yet remained determined to write. [8]
<12> For example, Ruthe S. Wheeler’s Helen in the Editor’s Chair (1932) opens with teenager Helen Blair anxiously awaiting the close of the school day; “She was glad that school was over for, to her, Thursday was the big day of the week. Press day!” (13). Helen is happy to push to the side high school activities such as the debate club, opting instead for delivering her father’s newspaper, The Herald, and when her father’s health fails, Helen volunteers to run the paper with her brother. Despite the diagnosis of the father’s illness as the result of “too many years bent over his desk in that dark cubbyhole of his” (30), Helen embraces the newspaper life with vigor and passion, striding beyond the Nelly Bly prototype of a reporter and into the male world of production, distribution, and near-complete control of the entire newspaper. She fends off a takeover attempt by the neighboring newspaper, including sabotage of the press, and in quick fashion secures a position as the Midwest A.P. correspondent. In that role, she receives admiring praise: “You’re a real newspaperwoman” (208). Adding to her success as a reporter, Helen learns to fashion a weather report of a local flooding into a human interest story. To do so she quickly creates an apparently marketable enough mix of clipped A.P. stories, local news, and advertisements to keep her newspaper in the red.
<13> In swift style, Wheeler’s novel parallels the reality of female writers and their writing of the popular, top-selling literature disdained by contemporary “high brow” literature. Helen’s awareness of what her readers want suggests Wheeler’s own understanding of the trajectory of successful female reporters, who had gone through several incarnations—sob sisters and agony writers, stunt reporters, and society writers, all of which were focused on producing reader friendly prose. That literary work led incrementally to establish women within the newsroom at the same time that they were held distant, apart physically and professionally from male reporters. Like Jane, Helen is awarded for her willingness to transgress social boundaries by a commendation from the Associated Press which wins her a byline and the title of Special Correspondent, as well as the town council’s designation of The Herald as the town’s official paper. In their alignment with female writers the novels speak to the frustration of many female writers with the literary community’s unwillingness to valorize women writers’ accolades such as the Pulitzer Prize and the lofty, if unnamed, high literary prize. The writing establishment did not take female reportage seriously, nor, more broadly, did it take seriously female authorship.
<14> One of the decade’s most popular middlebrow novelists, Kathleen Thompson Norris, sought to examine the female journalist’s world in Maiden Voyage (1934). Catherine Carter describes Norris as “the equivalent of Nora Roberts or Stephen King,” pointing out that between 1910 and 1950,many of the novels Norris wrote were bestsellers and were serialized in the period's most popular publications, (197) Norris’s rephrasing the popular reporter genre in a middlebrow vein suggests what young heroines like Helen might do once they matured. Norris’s choice of subject matter is not surprising, since through the first part of the 20th century, she often wrote for magazines. In plot and style, Norris freely mixes modernist, noir, and romantic styles to tell the story of a young San Franciscan who sets out to find work in the newspaper industry. Maiden Voyage opens with Antoinette Taft awaiting a job interview with Lawrence Bellamy, editor of the Journal of Commerce and Business. Antoinette’s plastering together of a split fingertip in her glove and her dream of “buying strong new gloves—brown gloves with one button,” suggest Antoinette’s frugal life. Norris’ opening comment that the young woman had been in many similar waiting rooms “in these last hard months” (2) introduces the dilemma of working class female subjectivity during the Great Depression. Unable to afford new clothing or even accessories that social custom demanded a woman wear when she was out in public (such as gloves), expressive culture, from Dorothea Lange's photograph of a woman's mended stockings to Ginger Rogers’ wish for “Sunday best” in Fifth Avenue Girl, reinforce Meridel Le Sueur’s argument in "Women on the Breadlines": there were no women on the breadlines because they could not afford to be seen in public (New Masses, January 1931). Le Sueur documented the darkest side of the back-to-the-home movement, the reality that women were often starving rather than leave the confines of the separate sphere into which they had been cast. Norris reflects these strictures, sending her heroine home after her failed interview and exposing her frustrations at being barred from the workforce and forced into the false ideal of the happy homemaker. “It isn’t the dishes,” her sister, Brenda, says, “it’s that effect of getting greasy and hot and smelly and tumbled, and yet having the evening nearly over—too near bedtime to clean up and change” (24). And while Antoinette insists she doesn’t mind dishes, her antipathy to married life is clear two pages later when her persistent suitor advises her on what kinds of women men like in their offices. “I loathe and despise you,” she silently fumes, “smoking there and feeling so sure of yourself, and if you had forty thousand a week I wouldn’t marry you under chloroform!” (29).
<15> Thus having set its heroine on the difficult road to becoming a working woman, the novel provides her with a position as treacherous as the road itself: reporting for a newspaper. Yet the “constant eccentric chatter of a telegraph machine from the wide littered desk marked ‘Associated Press’” (38) convinces her that she belongs there as soon as “her nostrils caught the first scent.” This San Francisco office, an urban version of Helen’s garage offices for The Herald, provide a similar determination and delight for Antoinette, but The Morning Call proves a different type of struggle than that which Helen faced. Assigning Antoinette, now Tony, to the society pages, her editor provides her with no parameters, guidelines, or help. She must teach herself, relying on her ability to steer through the resistance of her male coworkers, often by staying late and joining them for a comradely midnight meal, and occasionally by transgressing protocol to produce scoops by concealing her identity or hanging up on an unsuspecting man or woman after she has confirmed a story. She navigates the male world into which she has been thrown, producing marketable newspaper articles at the rapid pace that drove Helen In the Editor’s Chair. Patricia Bradley argues that following the 1929 crash, female newspaper writers reveled in a “two-ness” of identity as both independent workers and women responsible to home and family. A San Francisco Chronicle reporter claimed that after her wealthy family had lost all its money in the Crash, staying at the office and keeping up with the pace of the press was so exciting she would have done it “for nothing” (198). Another explained the “sensual excitement” of a writing a story, even one about a spelling bee contest:
I hurry back to the office. It is after eleven o’clock Saturday night. I begin to write my story in a state of excitement equal to that of a cheerleader whose team has won in the last minutes of play. The Saturday night editor looks over my shoulder as I write, but not even that dismays me. He takes the copy page by page as it comes from my typewriters and sends it to the city desk to have the headlines written. In half an hour it is all over. (198)
<16> The reporter’s description of her work presents fascinating transgressions and suggestions, not the least of which is the sexual rhythm and excitement of sending out page after page and then the sudden, swift, climax: “in half an hour it is all over.” The hybrid stance pairs a traditional, even girlish, subjectivity that offers a cheerleader whose team has won as the ideal metaphor of excitement with the masculine sexual rhythms and clipped, brusque opening and closing lines. Writing on deadline, in a male dominated office, provided a truly hybrid identity for a woman, offering her a measure of freedom and control while still demanding her traditional female subjectivity. In many ways, the front page girl travelled the same path as the stewardess, her life marked by collisions of traditional and modern, her occupation an arm of a technologically changing textual body. While the unexplained transformation from Antoinette to Tony suggests the character’s willingness to become one of the newspaper men with whom she works, Tony’s effort to support herself and her family inscribes within her work new ground for the female worker: a way to fulfill the demands of home and simultaneously experience pleasure and fulfillment on the job. Given the widespread rejection of women’s work during the era, Norris’ stance enacts the strategy of eroding old ground, for Tony moves between a traditional role and a radically new understanding of her social and personal identity.
<17> When the novel pushes Tony toward the predictable romance with Lawrence Bellamy, the editor who first ignored her, she has become a successful, well known reporter when she attends a large-scale soiree at the home of Bellamy and his wife. Despite her recent life of financial struggle, and Bellamy’s initial rejection of her, Tony revels in the luxury, making an easy transition into high society. Indeed, in a new gown, Cinderella nearly takes home the prince, taking Bellamy’s breath away when he sees her. But Norris complicates the potential romance by marrying Lawrence to a woman who is wealthier and older than he is (by 12 years), questioning his motives for marriage. And as if to highlight the interrogation into marital motive, the moment the novel is detailing the story of their courtship, she and Tony are in the midst of discussing an older man of wealth married to a younger woman. “‘That’s disgusting,’ Ruth says. ‘That isn’t marriage’” (96). Ignoring any potential similarities to Ruth and Lawrence’s marriage, Tony insists to Ruth her marriage “is” marriage. Soon after that, however, Tony finds herself distracted by memories of Lawrence’s face, and readers are likely unsurprised when a convenient road incident sends her into his arms while he murmurs, “my darling my darling” (151). Thus, all traditional attitudes towards marriage that the encounter presents are confronted and undermined. If marriage is based on love, then Tony and Lawrence’s growing passion is as “disgusting” as the May/December romance Ruth insists “isn’t marriage.” If Ruth and Lawrence’s relationship is marriage, then the novel’s obvious move toward Tony and Lawrence’s romance makes marriage incidental to love. With a heroine who is transgressing social boundaries of behavior by rejecting the importance of marriage in love, and vice versa, and a plot that is transgressing sentimental expectations by rejecting marriage as love’s outcome, the novel subverts the traditional romance novel’s goal of matrimony and maternity even as it treads the traditional feminine plot.
<18> Moreover, in the space between these first words of passion and the novel’s culmination of the romance that readers expect, rather than the romantic’s forlorn life of aching for impossible love, Tony embraces her professional life zealously.
It was all quite simple, when one knew how; and Tony did know how, now . . . during the week she would make a selection from [her file of prints] and write the sentences that gave them their reason for appearing in her columns . . . . It was hack work now. Tony enjoyed it because of the fierce swiftness of it; the city room had all the tenseness and heat and agitation of a surgery, night after night. (193-4).
Her newspaper colleagues call her “a swell girl,” and her now married sister gasps, “ ‘You’re so sure of yourself! You’re different! I hardly know you, Tony’ ” (195). Tellingly, Tony feels “her life moved in wider channels than the peaceful ones that Brenda knew now,” such as collecting soap scraps and delighting in similar “small economies” that were at the heart of the country’s message to women of the era to occupy themselves in the home. Tony’s observation thus destabilizes the era’s masculine attitudes toward women’s roles and its modernist attitudes about women’s writing. Domestic economies reduce Brenda, and writing unashamedly increases Tony’s sense of self and her depiction to readers. She is more confident, more appealing, and more vivid.
<19> Love increases her, too, but only in conflicted ways. To emphasize the boundaries Tony is crossing in both her professional and personal lives, Norris’ narrative moves from realist prose into a new style and mood that draw on modernist elements of stream of consciousness and a free ranging point of view devoid of omniscient guidance. In doing so, Norris highlights the ease of crossing boundaries by creating contradictory messages and the use of mixed and transgressive genres. “Mysterious movement,” a chapter opens,
mysterious colors pulsed in it as they all looked down. Ribbons of seaweed in every shade of purple, metallic blue, scarlet, cream color, shell pink . . . slow-surging tides brimmed over the pool; receded in a dragging foam of white; the roar of the breakers, the piping of gulls, the singing of the summer wind above the grassy cliffs came to them through the cooling afternoon air. (261)
This opening section, swirling in impressionistic visuals, is but one of a handful of quasi-modernist stylistics that range from abrupt interior moments of reflection to stream of consciousness impressions of events. But Norris is only trying her hand at such techniques, and as Lawrence and Tony set off alone, ostensibly on the way back to San Francisco, the narrative is pure realism, including details of the inn at which they stop for dinner and the careful dialogue between them that suggests the building romance. Back on the road, they get a flat tire and hike to the nearest farmhouse; after they knock, a man opens the door clutching his temples and sobbing, “My wife’s just been murdered! I don’t know what to do!” (274). The novel’s sudden and unforeseen plunge into noir disrupts neither the narrative nor the plot; indeed, Norris weaves the scene into the story seamlessly, building the front page headlines the murder makes into the now published news that Tony and Lawrence were out together. As a result of the headlines, Ruth and Lawrence escape to Paris; but before they settle into their move, Ruth dies. Yet Norris is not writing a romance, and will not link her couple now that Lawrence is free. Tony swiftly finds Lawrence has now married Ruth’s best friend, effectively betraying both women. While he insists to Tony that emotionally, she was “his wife” he feels no compunction in riding easily over both spoken vows. The entire romance formula comes under interrogation, with a handily modernist vengeance against the unreliability of words and a nearly proletarian championing of the working girl. And, when Lawrence returns and confesses his misery in the new marriage, Norris’s frustration with a male world that provides for a woman “excitement, curiosity” but nothing that “lasts” (313) is confronted by her rejection of women who say “I’d rather have him mean to me in that magnificent way of his, keep me waiting, despise me, throw me down, than not have him at all” (313). Thus, while the novel ultimately provides a satisfying marriage for Tony, it vanquishes a number of romance and realist devices as it approaches its conclusion. Contradicting the formulaic romance plot of many popular novels, Norris both undercuts and retains the happy ending. As Tony moves into both a new marriage and a new sense of her professional self, the novel stresses the future outlook yet adamantly and insistently turns back, to what has been. In the novel’s final line, Norris insists on the narrative device of plot as a chronological medium yet at that same time, given her heroine’s adamant breaking of social codes and her own insistent generic transgressions, Norris questions the value of either: “What of the way to the end?” Tony asks on the last line of the book. “The end crowns all” (334).
<20> Tony’s closing question suggests the instability of text and textual production in a decade marked by literary and social instabilities. Norris’s The Angel in the House, which she published in the same year as Maiden Voyage, places textual instability and the contested place of the woman writer at the heart of the seemingly middlebrow plot of romance and familial formations. The novel opens with a languid group gathering for a summer tennis game at Pebble Beach. When Lee Fargo enters, her low, thrilling voice and dark blue eyes enrapture the young Judson Calhoun before she heads home to a Carmel “canon, filled with trees that faced downhill to the sea, and in the center of it a small group of buildings that might indeed have been the old Castilian ranch houses they simulated” (13). The novel is quick to contextualize Lee’s home life as one that has been acquired, pointing out that while relaxing in this environment, “She could look back upon years of grinding poverty and anxiety, this woman lying thoughtful and relaxed in warm moonlight. She could remember other summer nights in a hot city, and herself sick and weary under a close-pressed roof that seemed to hold the day’s heat all through the short night hours, and until morning broke burning and merciless again” (15)
<21> The novel provides background details that seem drawn from a standard romance: not “taken care of” at her husband’s death early in their marriage, she had gone to work teaching until three years prior to the start of the novel, when “some patent that Alec Fargo had bought an interest in . . . was sold for an immense sum. Her share was a hundred thousand or so . . .” (22). The financial endowment does more, however, than buy a nice home and clothes; Lee and her daughter, Angela, experience their change in status by feeling even more fiercely how their earlier poverty set them apart from others in their society and bound them together in ways those others do not understand. “Angela simply can’t see anything but her mother, and she’s . . . a distinctly queer child!” an acquaintance tells Judson (25). As the novel advances, the “queer” factor that marks Angela is both praised and contested by the plot. The mother and daughter’s firm but gentle placement outside of a society into which they have every financial right to enter is aligned with both the subversion of ‘official’ boundaries Hanley notes in the era’s class struggle and the female writer’s desire to subvert the masculine boundaries modernism established. Even though Lee has the right to enter this society, has paid her dues, and has worked her way through hard times, she is not “like” them, a reality that speaks to the era’s fear that hard work does not pay off after all. Norris’s treatment of Lee’s position acknowledges the unfairness of this fact while, at the same time, it suggests that Lee has, somehow, not come through her difficulties with appropriate fortitude. Her weakness is evidenced by the highly conflicted relationship she has with her daughter. Norris creates two narratives within the novel, the maternal and the romance plot, which confirm and contest each other. In neither does Lee easily or clearly define a woman’s role, and while the novel’s insistence on a happy ending narratively suggests the romance plot as the preferred of the two, Angel’s extraordinary talent, and the relentless power that talent holds over her mother’s life, insist that maternity is more profoundly complicated than the domestic ideology of the day suggests. In real and metaphorical ways, Angel is in her mother’s house.
<22> The daughter who will so affect the plot is in school in France when the novel opens, and through snippets from letters Lee has carefully saved, Angel is revealed to be a poet savant. “The mere words ‘dimity’ and ‘crinoline and ‘ringlet’ enchanted Angela; she had had for years a favorite topic of conversation that involved her somehow growing small enough to have a tiny house not a foot high, with every microscopic warming pan and silver spoon in scale, and herself and her house lost in the biggest forest that was anywhere in the world” (48). Her letters reveal originality and conjure dream-like phrases: “ ‘If life was,’ and ‘explanation feel’—this was her own vocabulary; she coined these phrases and used them as calmly as if they were legal tender . . . When Angela was uncommunicative it was indicated by ‘I sphinxed’ or ‘I catacombed’; unimportant persons were ‘chairs’: ‘six nice chairs at Aunt Yvonne’s lunch’ and to ‘show how the moocow went’ meant ostentatiousness’ ” (49). There is a modernist bent to her untamed writing life, and the book presents it through Lee’s eyes with admiration, even awe: the wild phraseologies and the self invented vocabulary based on a compressed use of simile inspire fervent delight in her daughter’s talents. Yet, just as modernist female poets before and during the Great Depression found themselves in shaky terrain, Angel’s poetry and the dilemma she creates for Lee challenge the novel’s romance plot decidedly enough that readers are forced to question exactly how delightful Angel is, and wonder exactly how blind Lee might be to her daughter.
<23> Through its early development of Lee’s romance with Judson, the novel seems to put Angel’s writing life on the margins. Jud and Lee defy the conventions of age by falling in love. Then, on the night before they plan to depart for marriage and honeymoon, Angel arrives unannounced, full of clinging neediness for Lee. When Lee breaks the news of her marriage, Angel goes rigid: “Marriage is always a surrender for a woman, isn’t it, Mum?” she observes, and promptly gets sick. The novel’s conflict over marriage is complicated. In Paris, Angel was set to marry a count, but ran away, and her mother was relieved. Now back in California, she becomes a liability in the house, obstructing Lee’s own marriage. [9] As Lee repeatedly postpones the marriage, trying to negotiate between daughter and fiancée, Angel’s writing turns in a new direction: her obsession with Jud, the young man about to become her stepfather. In an ambiguous scene, Angel urges Jud to consummate a feeling she assumes is mutual, and may be. “When did you first suspect?” Angel asks him, and he “answered briefly, ‘I don’t know’ ” (204). When she continues to insist she will “always feel this way,” he tells her only that he is “so sorry!” but Norris has him say it “irresolutely, inconsequentially” (215).
<24> Ultimately, Jud breaks off the marriage, telling Lee he will always love her and does not explain any more. Despite the bewildering but seemingly sincere departure of the man who showered her with love, Lee is even more shaken when she discovers Angel’s love poems to him, a discovery and realization that “struck with the swiftness of a rattlesnake” (234). Writing, it seems, is neither a marginal endeavor nor inconsequential to the “plot” of life, for it disrupts Lee’s life in all ways. The poems are, like the vocabulary described in the novel’s earlier segments, whirls of compression and metaphor:
From childhood, girlhood, swift have you me whirled,
To the inner garden, to the journey’s end
begins one, in a reversal of syntax leading to a metaphorical interiority. A second, imitating or evoking the fascicle writing of Dickinson, reads
I’ve skipped all that,
Anteroom of life,
--Girl, sweetheart;
I’m wife.
Even in horror, Lee can only gasp, “How easily you say it all, Angel!” (233) Soon, Angel disappears, and the maid delivers the glum news to a friend who finds Lee hollow eyed and seemingly near death: “Miss Angel run off wid Mist’ Calhoun, dat’s what happen” (238). Word of their marriage follows and in the novel’s next few pages, Norris embarks on a fascinating dialogue among the modern and modernist writing that Angel’s work has suggested, the classics, and popular journalism. Through an “odd, quiet autumn,” Lee heals herself through reading:
Shakespeare, and Ousspenky’s Tertium Organum, and the essayists: Max Beerbohm and Ellis and Santayana; and the newest murder thrillers. She turned the pages of the new magazines: girls were being presented to society; Pekes were winning prizes; rooms were being furnished in millefleurs glass and petit-point embroidered bell-pulls. (245)
<25> It is unclear if Norris is simply praising writing in general, focusing on its power both to hurt and to heal, or if she draws a clear line between the traditional great works and Lee’s frightening, half formed, thoughtless words. Norris herself did not hold such distinctions, and wrote steadily across genres. Maiden Voyage and The Angel in the House are two of twenty eight novels Norris published between 1930 and 1940; additionally, she wrote two guidebooks to both California and San Francisco, modeled in many ways on the WPA guidebooks. Norris wrote freely and fluently, respecting writing for its possibilities. She used whatever genre seemed most fitting for the story, even crossing generic lines in the space of a single chapter. Thus, rather than a critique of the type of writing Angel produces, or a simply commentary on the power inherent to all writing, Angel’s complicated presence in the novel suggests difficulties within maternity and work; in essence, Lee has sacrificed for her daughter, willingly, and yet, she has had little control over the outcome of that sacrifice. Angel’s poetry, beautiful and wild, is distinctively untamed; more than a madwoman in the attic, it suggests an unharnessed voice, a female unsocialized, unrepressed and restricted, and because of that, unthinking. In a complicated exploration, Norris simultaneously challenges the repressive nature of society, and confirms its necessity.
<26> Lee decides to sell the house and move away, and is packed and ready to leave when Angel returns. As they struggle to converse, Lee, unable to fault Angel for anything more than “bad manners,” finally explains: “We have to shape ourselves to circumstances; they won’t yield to us. I’m ten—I’m more than ten years older than Jud; it was only a dream. You and he have found each other now, and you must make him a good wife. You must be a woman, Angel, and help us to solve the whole thing” (264). In Lee’s quiet words to her daughter, the ideology of social restrictions surfaces, as her characterization of love as a “dream” echoes Jud’s own parting words to her that having to leave her is “like a horrible dream” (219). In their willingness to relegate their love to dreams, Norris’s couple reinforces the novel’s troubling of the social conception of maternity as a role of willing sacrifice. If marital happiness is a dream, then Lee’s advice to her daughter can be at best problematic. Admitting her failed fantasy of transgressing the social boundary against an older woman and a younger man, she literally calls on Angel to grow up, to “be a woman” and “make him a good wife.” Should Angel be able to do so, Lee would have done her socially sanctioned job as a mother, transforming her daughter from child to woman and wife.
<27> And yet there is no suggestion in the novel that a transformation of that sort is the goal. Indeed, Norris refuses the course its protagonist sets forth, suggesting perhaps more than anything that Lee still is not a “good” mother, and is incapable of appropriate mothering. At the same time, while refusing to establish Angel and Jud within a socially respectable marriage, it also refuses to resolutely condemn either Angel’s savant ways or Lee’s maternal inabilities; instead, it turns weirdly and wildly noir. Increasingly deranged, Angel attempts to jump off the edge of a cliff but is saved by a family friend as she clings to the ledge. Jud, eyebrows raised at the news of his “marriage,” assures all that no marriage occurred, that Angel stowed away on his liner, and he has simply brought her home. A doctor tells Lee that Angel is “most certainly a psychopathic case, perhaps with a touch of paranoia” (294). In the bizarre dénouement, the doctor convinces Angel it was all a dream, Lee receives news that Angel will steadily regress and become the mental and emotional equivalent of a five year old, and Jud and Lee happily contemplate married life with their “new baby.” Norris’s choice of dream language here is resolutely undetermined. The dreams that Lee and Jud invoke are socially conflicted, but Angel’s “dream” is an escape hatch, no more believable in the novel than it would have been in life. Angel’s willful pursuit of her mother’s lover, her determined, insightful, and undeniably original writing—all have determined for readers that she is both a dangerous femme fatale and a brilliant and talented young writer.
<28> In choosing to focus on the reestablishment of the romance plot, Norris provides a quiet comment on modernist female writers and their work. Her literal turn away from Angel’s writing and into her characterization as insane suggests that the “plot” of the female writer is unsolvable. The plot mechanism Norris utilizes to bring her lovers back together could not have occurred without Norris’s awareness of canonical forces seeking to circumscribe the female writer by emphasizing her difference as a means to belittle her literary production. As Huyssen writes, we simply cannot ignore the masculinist and misogynist trajectory of the time. [10] To do so would be to miss half the novel, the surreptitious angles of structure and development that reflect how female novelists dealt with the reality of their time. The salient urges of Norris’s novel reflect both the era’s popular fictions of heroic and ground breaking modern women such as Jane and Helen, but also, in Norris’s own numerous shifts to literary modernism’s established technique, they suggest how firmly planted she was within the ideology of middlebrow culture, a space she used to freely move within and beyond established boundaries within both society and literature.
<29> The main danger women writing popular fiction in the 1930s faced was in their belittled place in the literary hierarchy and its willingness to consider their writing as simply a job, not an art. The main danger for the heroines those women created for their novels was, similarly, not on the job, but in the job. Jane’s and Helen’s success is mitigated by the onus on sacrifice placed on women within their professional careers. Lee’s lifelong sentence as Angel’s caretaker reminds readers that when Jane ages out of the airline industry’s youth requirement, her wings will be clipped by maternity; just as Tony’s macabre romance cum murder scene assures readers that the budding Helen will not spend her golden years passionately writing articles that fill her with a sensual pleasure when she produces them. Wheeler’s and Norris’s work demonstrate how women writers of popular fiction in the era could seek to push beneath the surface of the decade’s nearly glib commentary on women’s work, domesticity, and maternity, insisting that while each might indeed be “women’s work” none was essentially female. From Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind (1937) to Fannie Hurst’s Imitation of Life (1932), popular novels agreed, perhaps to their detriment. At the heart of these novels is the demand for respect the work put in by working women in all forms of labor, and the insistence on the pleasure female heroines encounter when facing and conquering the dangers inherent to transgressing the boundaries established to keep them from the male world. Entering the growing airline industry, rising up in the business world, breaking into the newspaper force—all were transgressive acts that the novels posited as dangerous, challenging, and ultimately within a woman’s range of choices and to which she was entitled. In their creation of popular heroines willing to face and even pay the price for their transgressions, female writers of the era often confronted the misogynist world of modernist literature, demanding that their writing, like their lives, be included.
Endnotes
[1] While it would be a different exploration to make, the influence of the 1960s may have been responsible for the characterization. After Walter Ridout’s 1956 The Radical Novel in the United States: 1900- 1954: Some Interrelations of Literature and Society (Harvard University Press) set the tone, three collections followed, all of them emphasizing the “red” and radical tenor of the era’s literary production: Years of Protest, ed. Jack Salzman (New York: Pegasus, 1967); Proletarian Writers of the Thirties, ed. David Madden (Carbondale and Edwarsville: Souther Illinois University Press, 1968); The American Writer and the Great Depression, ed. Harvey Swados (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1966).
[2] Hanley’s work joins that of others who have insisted in recent years that the Great Depression’s literary output was encoded with a variety of social and cultural markers, many of which were founded in the decade’s tumultuous understanding of class position, status, and the increasingly fragile boundaries between marking the two. This work insists that despite the general attitude toward popular fiction and film of the 1930s as an escape from hard times, little was being escaped in the silver screen romances and the affordable fictions of hard boiled detectives working under the radar of the law and wondrous girl sleuths untouched by political turmoil and financial distress. For example, in analyzing the transgressive nature of cinematic fashions for women of the era, Sarah Berry argues that “one way to look at Hollywood films of the 1930s is as a mythology of ‘bluff,’ a celebration of symbolic over ‘real’ status. Hollywood cinema was from its inception deeply concerned with issues of social mobility, acculturation, and fantasies of self-transformation” (xvi). Ina Rae Hark suggests that the seemingly quintessential tale of escape, the few magical hours young Dorothy Gale spends as the heroine of Oz, is far more symptomatic of the decade’s years of “considerable fear and uncertainty, which Hollywood displaced but did not ignore.” Hark identifies “an equal measure of transgressive desire and normative pressure, sympathy for the marginalized and respect for hegemonic authority, all of which affected film narratives, characterization, and genre construction” (2). Lawrence Levine has argued, almost summarily, that the “imprecise and unhelpful” term “escapism” explains little about why people turned to what they did indeed turn to during the era. He insists “we would be committing a serious error if we did not attempt to understand the extent to which Americans were attracted to those cultural expressions which helped them, or at least appeared to help them, comprehend their own world” (218).
[3] Huyssen argues that the “repudiation of Trivialliteratur,” [2] was one of the hallmarks of a modernist literature “intent on distancing itself and its products from the trivialities and banalities of everyday life” (47). Feminine fiction’s concern with just those “trivialities and banalities” inscribed the 19th century notion of serious and authentic culture as male into high modernist art itself and essentially gendered the mass culture/modernism dichotomy as female/male. The separation was hostile enough that Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar describe it as “warfare,” and argue that the split was in actuality “the central, energizing conflict of modernism” (156). Suzanne Clark argues that high modernism’s “gendering of intellectuality” (3), sought to exclude women from high modernism by feminizing popular or sentimental fictions and by identifying woman with “the mass and regarding its productions as ‘kitsch,’ as ‘camp,’ and, like advertising, as objects of critical disdain” (Clark 4). Examples masculinist system of modernist standards of publication and critical reception that women faced are in no short supply. As one, Gubar and Gilbertcite Joyce’s example: “Perhaps the best example of the highbrow male modernists’ disgust with the lowbrow scribbler is Joyce’s parody of Maria Cummin’s The Lamplighter (1854) in the ‘Nausicaa’ chapter of Ulysses (1922). Unlike the relatively brief and often adulatory stylistic tributes to his literary patrilineage that Joyce incorporated into the ‘Oxen of the sun’ chapter, this parody indicts the banality and bathos inculcated in young girls by the pulpy fiction of literary women’ (146). Of course, Joyce was amply preceded by Gustave Flaubert, whose Madame Bovary indicted Emma similarly. When the farm girl who will turn into an adulterous demi monde is but fifteen, her heart turns to romance novels, stories of “love affairs, lovers, mistresses and harassed ladies swooning” and, above all, handsome and noble men, “incredibly virtuous, always beautifully dressed” (Flaubert 41). With a pursing of his lips, Flaubert rumbles ominously, “for six months, when she was fifteen, Emma begrimed her hands with this dust . . . .”(Flaubert 40).
[4] Woolf’s disdainful description of the Babbitt of US literature remained unpublished, but it articulates an overall approach to modernist writing, the need to stay away from the “common man” to whom FDR would turn for help in his campaign for human rights and political reform.
[5] For more on female reading and writing habits within the realm of popular and middlebrow culture, see Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Caroline Press, 1984) and A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill: University of North Caroline Press, 1999) and Joan Shelly Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Caroline Press, 1992). For more on reading the Great Depression beyond genre and formula, see, among others, Patrick Quinn, ed., Recharting the Thirties (Sellgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 1996), Phillip Hanson, How Movies and American Life Intersected during the Great Depression (Madison, Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2008), Ted Atkinson, Faulkner and the Great Depression: Aesthetics, Ideology and Cultural Politics (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 2006).
[6] The year before had launched a 5 volume aviation series by Edith Lavell featuring Linda Carlton, an Ameila Earheart-type heroine.
[7] Wheeler’s novel is far more concerned with the issue of modernity, that is, a rejection of a Puritan past and a confidence in modernity’s superiority to that past, than literary modernism. Still, it does not follow the traditional romance plot that modernism rejected, and indeed, Wheeler’s novel insists on a rather open ended plot; the ‘who knows what’s next’ last line, while obviously set to encourage a follow up novel about Jane, also insists that no conclusion resolves Jane’s life. Indeed, the text does not engage in romance tropes beyond Jane’s love of flying. In contrast, Vita Hurst’s Air Stewardess, which comes out the same year, places its protagonist Irene into repeated romances, from the fiancé who spurns her for a famous surgeon’s daughter and promise of partnership, to a series of pilots who increasingly convince her that not men, but “sailing in the sky” is the thrill “she never failed to respond.” But despite the determinedly modern stance of this working air hostess, the novel moves in a predictably romantic trajectory and ultimately, Irene will describe her love for the Irish pilot Barney O’Sullivan in decidedly aeronautical terms, when she realizes she “had to feel the swift thrill of being swept towards the stars, the heady intoxication of loving mixed with danger. And for this she was willing to pay whatever price her own individual fate demanded. For to some, love walks securely, eye open, feet on the ground, but to others, it flies, blindly, with a whir of wings.” Thus does the novel neatly swap Irene’s love of flying for her love of Barney.
[8] The trope of the female writer appears in popular fiction as early as 1906, in Betty the Scribe, by Lillian Turner. In 1932, Barbara Benton, Editor (Helen Diehl Olds) featured the protagonist’s column, “Breezy Bits by Babs, and in 1936, Peggy Covers the News (Emma Bugbee) sent Peggy around the world to report the news.
[9] While Norris relegates it to a near side note, Maiden Voyage addresses the same fraught territory of the mother child dynamic as The Angel in the House. Ruth cannot put behind her the death of she and Lawrence’s only son, and the novel intimates that Ruth’s obsession with her child, dead or not, if what drives Lawrence into the arms of the more available Tony and, following Tony, Ruth’s best friend. Ruth’s punishment for putting her child before her husband: death.
[10] Huyssen argues that we simply cannot ignore the “powerful masculinist and misogynist current within the trajectory of modernism, a current which time and again openly states its contempt for women and for the masses . . .” (Huyssen, 49).
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