'Fire and wings': Drinking women in interwar British and American literature

The interwar years were turbulent for Western society, and especially for women: traditional gender roles were fluctuating. Suffrage had been attained in Britain and the United States, but true equality had not been achieved: the sense of freedom many women felt in the 1920s was followed by a backlash of culturally-enforced domesticity in the 1930s. During these decades, drinking women were never fully accepted as part of the cultural norm. Alcoholic women were judged more harshly than were their male counterparts, and this is evident in the literature.; This dissertation is a study of depictions of drinking women in British and American literature in the years between World War I and World War II, with a focus on the perceived deviance of alcoholic women and how the gender of the author influences the portrayal of the characters. Works discussed include F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and Damned; Willa Cather's A Lost Lady; Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises; Dorothy Parker's "Big Blonde"; Sleeveless Errand by Norah C. James; and Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys.