Artists, celebrities, and reformers: American women literary autobiographers in the 1930s (Edith Wharton, Gertrude Atherton, Mary Austin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman)

In the 1930s, the American literary marketplace exhibited a striking trend: unprecedented numbers of women's literary autobiographies were published. This dissertation investigates both the market factors behind this trend and the response to it of a generation of women writers. Records of book sales, advancements in the methods of book and magazine production, changes in publicity and advertising, and demographic shifts in the American reading public reveal the factors behind the demand for women's literary autobiography. First, nostalgia and practicality' contributed to the popularity of nonfiction. Second, a new public interest in writing as a career for women generated a curiosity about women writers' lives. Third, the literary academy was developing, and women authors wrote autobiography to defend their literary reputations.; This study focuses primarily on the autobiographies of four well-known writers: Edith Wharton, Gertrude Atherton, Mary Austin, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Their memoirs were read by both popular and literary audiences, each of whom had differing expectations of them. Under the pressures of conflicting demands for feminine modesty, intimate revelation, and modern self-analysis, these women's texts are complexly designed, composed of careful rhetorical decisions about substance, style, and delivery. Each autobiographer in this study utilizes a unique rhetorical technique to either satisfy or subvert the expectations of her audiences. Wharton relies on renunciation, asserting identity through absence. Atherton chooses denunciation; she boldly rejects all constraints upon her life. Austin skillfully uses deflection through creating multiple personas and perspectives. And Gilman's self-portrait relies on transcendence to assert her views and defend her choices.; In essence, these women were engaged in a debate, with their culture and with each other, about the role of the new twentieth-century female writer. Through their autobiographies, each one seeks to define the woman writer as either an artist, a celebrity, or a reformer. Together, these texts reveal a continuum of issues and concerns about fame, female tradition, public curiosity, and literary status that women writers in the early twentieth century had to confront. Their experiments within the genre paved the way for the freedom and confidence of later women's literary autobiographers.