The goddess in the landscape: A tradition of twentieth century American women's pastoral

The dissertation explores the ways in which twentieth-century American women novelists stay their personal anxieties of authorship and claim literary authority for women by appropriating the pastoral mode. The introductory chapter reviews previous studies in the field, examines the historical background of American pastoral, and provides a general paradigm for women's pastoral through an interpretation of Sarah Orne Jewett's "A White Heron." In the core chapters, close metatextual analyses are given for Willa Cather's O Pioneers!, Ellen Glasgow's Barren Ground, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Harriette Arnow's The Dollmaker. Chapter two shows that Cather depicts the American western frontier as a text that defies the writing of men while privileging that of women. Yet, paradoxically, in an attempt to protect against the disclosure of the lesbian subtext of the novel, the heroine's "writing" is silent. Chapter three explores Glasgow's effort to weed from the wasteland of the post-Civil War South the heterosexual romance plot which ensnares heroines. Her poetics of castration results in a compromised success for wresting a women's text; the inheritor of the heroine's farm is not a woman, but a crippled young man. Hurston is seen in the fourth chapter as exploiting the discourse of the romance plot to simultaneously protect herself, the heroine, and black men. Her "maiden language" of the flower subversively conceals her punishment of abusive black men and, ultimately, allows her heroine to tell her story to another woman. Examining the dilemmas of the mother-artist, chapter five finds that Arnow's post-World War Two novel portrays the failure of women's pastoral to protect women's linguistic authority against an all-encompassing patriarchy. Arnow's strategy of sacrificing the mother-heroine, her artistic daughter, and her sculpture works as both a critique of patriarchal domination and a way in which to gain readers' sympathies. The concluding chapter traces the contemporary revival of women's pastoral with readings of The Color Purple by Alice Walker and the ecofeminist theories proposed by Mary Daly and Susan Griffin. Contemporary women pastoralists no longer adopt the subversive poetics of their predecessors; instead, they claim women's linguistic power explicitly.