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Creating The Self: Women Artists In Twentieth-Century Fiction, Bethany Dailey Tisdale

Theses and Dissertations

In novels of artistic development (or künstlerromane) by women in the early twentieth-century, becoming an artist is intimately tied to becoming recognized as an individual. It would appear that an era of rapid change and expanding opportunities for women would result in affirmative narratives of women’s artistry, but studying texts by Edith Wharton, Anzia Yezierska, Zelda Fitzgerald, and Dawn Powell shows that stringent gender roles can still keep women from realizing artist success.

In Wharton’s The House of Mirth, Lily Bart ruins her prospects on the marriage market by striving for freedom and aesthetic pleasure. Those desires cannot be reconciled …