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A Grievous Necessity: The Subject of Marriage in Transatlantic Modern Women’s Novels—Woolf, Rhys, Fauset, Larsen, and Hurston

Czarnecki, Kristin Kommers

Abstract Details

2004, PhD, University of Cincinnati, Arts and Sciences : English and Comparative Literature.
My dissertation analyzes modern women’s novels that interrogate the role of marriage in the construction of female identity. Mapping the character of Clarissa in The Voyage Out (1915), “Mrs. Dalloway’s Party” (1923), and primarily Mrs. Dalloway (1925), I highlight Woolf’s conviction that negotiating modernity requires an exploratory yet protected consciousness for married women. Rhys’s early novels, Quartet (1929), After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1931), Voyage in the Dark (1934), and Good Morning, Midnight (1939), portray women excluded from the rite of marriage in British society. Unable to counter oppressive Victorian mores, her heroines invert the modernist impulse to “make it new” and face immutability instead, contrasting with the enforced multiplicity of identity endured by women of color in Fauset’s Plum Bun (1929) and Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929). Hurston’s last novel, Seraph on the Suwanee (1948), indicts American race and gender relations in the story of a white woman’s modification of her identity within an abusive marriage. In each novel, marital crises reflect the experience of becoming “modern,” of attaining female selfhood in sexually, socially, and racially complicated milieus.
Amy Elder (Advisor)
243 p.

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Czarnecki, K. K. (2004). A Grievous Necessity: The Subject of Marriage in Transatlantic Modern Women’s Novels—Woolf, Rhys, Fauset, Larsen, and Hurston [Doctoral dissertation, University of Cincinnati]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1090786882

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Czarnecki, Kristin. A Grievous Necessity: The Subject of Marriage in Transatlantic Modern Women’s Novels—Woolf, Rhys, Fauset, Larsen, and Hurston. 2004. University of Cincinnati, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1090786882.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Czarnecki, Kristin. "A Grievous Necessity: The Subject of Marriage in Transatlantic Modern Women’s Novels—Woolf, Rhys, Fauset, Larsen, and Hurston." Doctoral dissertation, University of Cincinnati, 2004. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1090786882

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)