Abstract
The authors gathered together in this chapter constitute a quirky grouping. Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) has long been recognised by scholars as a major modernist, a radical innovator (even if her difficult oeuvre still fends off a wider readership). Edith Wharton (1862–1937) has always maintained canonical virtue, though for reasons that are the reverse of Stein’s case: as torchbearer of an older realist tradition — the Jamesian novel of manners and society. Mary Antin (1881–1949) is a newer arrival. The Promised Land (1912) is an early version of those migration and ‘self-making’ narratives later elaborated by Willa Cather and Zora Neale Hurston. The re-making of the canon over the past twenty years, and in particular the recovery of forgotten or neglected works of great worth, enable us to re-consitute literary groupings such as this one. But do these writers have anything in common beyond temporal coincidence? Are we not better off sticking with familiar and tested literary—historical periods and schools (local color, realism, regionalism)? A revisionist literary history sees continuities between writers and attempts to construct a nexus of cultural forces which shape literary production during a particular period; these early twentieth-century authors have more in common than first appears.
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Notes
Randolph Bourne, ‘Trans-National America’, Atlantic Monthly, 118 (1916), pp. 86–97
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 29.
Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899; New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1918), p. 179.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution, ed. Carl N. Degler (1898; New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1966), pp. 93–4.
H. L. Mencken, ‘Introduction’ to In Defence of Women (1918; London: Jonathan Cape, 1927), p. 16.
Jayne L. Walker, The Making of a Modernist: Gertrude Stein from ‘Three Lives’ to ‘Tender Buttons’ (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), p. xi.
Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900–1940 (London: Virago, 1987), p. 163.
Gertrude Stein, Three Lives (1909; reprinted Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), p. 3.
Gertrude Stein and Leon M. Solomons, Motor Automatism (1896; reprinted with an introduction by Robert A. Wilson, New York: Phoenix Book Shop, 1969), p. 21.
Gertrude Stein, Narration: Four Lectures, with an introduction by Thornton Wilder (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1935), p. 8.
Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein’s America, ed. Gilbert A. Harrison (Washington, DC: Robert B. Luce, 1965), p. 34.
Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933; London: Penguin, 1966), p. 39.
Willa Cather, interview with Flora Merrill for the New York World, 19 April 1925, reprinted in L. Brent Bohlke (ed.), Willa Cather in Person: Interviews, Speeches and Letters (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), p. 77.
Rachel Blau DuPlessis, ‘For the Etruscans’, The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 1–19
Edith Wharton, The Touchstone (1900) in Madame de Treymes and Others: Four Short Novels (London: Virago, 1984), p. 82.
Elaine Showalter, ‘The Death of the Lady (Novelist): Wharton’s House of Mirth’, Representations, 9 (1985), 133–49
Gloria C. Erlich, ‘The Female Conscience in Edith Wharton’s Shorter Fiction: Domestic Angel or Inner Demon?’, in Millicent Bell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 98–116.
Henry James’s 1912 comment on Wharton serves as the starting-point for Stuart Hutchinson’s essay ‘From Daniel Deronda to The House of Mirth’, Essays in Criticism, XLVII (1997), pp. 315–31.
Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country (1913; London: Everyman, 1993), p. 27.
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (1920; London: Everyman, 1993), pp. 46–9.
Harold E. Stearns, ‘The Intellectual Life’, in H. E. Stearns (ed.), Civilization in the United States: An Inquiry by Thirty Americans (1922; Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1971), p. 135.
Edith Wharton, Summer (1917; London: Penguin, 1993), p. 5.
A Backward Glance, cited and discussed by Dale M. Bauer, Edith Wharton’s Brave New Politics (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), p. 31.
Jonathan Raban discusses these books, and their projection of a dangerously idealised rural life, in Bad Land: An American Romance (London: Picador, 1996), pp. 34–40.
Dale M. Bauer, Edith Wharton’s Brave New Politics (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994)
Mary Antin, The Promised Land, edited and introduced by Werner Sollors (1912; New York and London: Penguin, 1997), p. 1.
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© 1999 Guy Reynolds
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Stein, G., Wharton, E., Antin, M. (1999). Re-making the Home, 1909–33. In: Twentieth-Century American Women’s Fiction. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27794-0_3
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