Southern crossroads: Science, religion and gender in southern women's literature between the World Wars (Ellen Glasgow, Frances Newman, Zora Neale Hurston, Katherine Anne Porter)

This dissertation argues that women writers in the post-World War I South redefined southern womanhood in their fiction by integrating the ostensibly opposed discourses of science and religion. Recent discussions of southern modernism emphasize the unique anxieties experienced by the region in response to cultural and industrial modernity, a tension manifested in the overt hostility between those who favored scientific progressivism and those who defended religious orthodoxy. Women in the South, however, brought a different perspective to this debate because of the region's distinct conceptions of femininity, which perpetuated Victorian notions of "true womanhood" while construing them within the framework of rigid racial binaries. Consequently, women writers more willingly embraced scientific thought in their literary themes and styles in order to challenge the religious structures used to uphold such restrictive definitions of gender. An analysis of Ellen Glasgow's Barren Ground, Frances Newman's Dead Lovers Are Faithful Lovers, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God , and Katherine Anne Porter's "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" highlights their textual engagement with the language and theory of Darwinism, Freudianism, anthropology, and medicine in ways that confront traditional religious doctrine. And yet these authors do not ultimately privilege science over religion, for their writings expose the complicity of scientific and religious narratives in their mutual efforts to define and control women's biological and social roles. These authors, then, use the narrative framework of fiction to rewrite both discourses in order to invest them with greater social, economic, sexual, and reproductive freedoms for women. In tracing the interplay of science and religion across these works of fiction, this project underscores the contribution that southern women writers made to the modernist enterprise by developing innovative literary techniques that overturned expectations of both narrative and gender.