| This dissertation investigates the effects of changing workplace practices and ideologies of labor on cultural production in 20th century America. Drawing on sociological and historical studies of women's entrance into the modern office, it identifies a structural relation between the gendered division of labor in the office and in cultural institutions, such as magazines, film studios, and universities. This new set of practices informed the emerging cultural hierarchy, in which modernism came to define "high" culture. In my reading of Edith Wharton and Sinclair Lewis's work, I suggest that the two authors fashioned their literary identities in response to the rise of the modernist ideal of authorship on the one hand, and the feminization and devaluation of clerical work on the other. An analysis of Anita Loos's screenwriting work from the 1930's and Sylvia Plath's writing from the 1950's and 1960's demonstrates the trenchancy and pervasiveness of these institutional and ideological structures.;Through a reading of Sinclair Lewis's and Winston Churchill's fiction, the first chapter argues that the feminization of clerical work was strongly affected by the Fordist managerial ideology. The female clerical worker was both an agent and object of this ideology, which intersected with the modern discourse of women's sexuality. Focusing on Edith Wharton's later fiction, the second chapter responds to Amy Kaplan's influential argument by distinguishing Wharton's early Jamesian professionalism from modernist professional authorship. It argues that Wharton's sense of exclusion from the latter model led to her deepening conservatism in the late 1920's and early 1930's. The third chapter examines Anita Loos's screenwriting career in 1930's Hollywood, suggesting that Loos's success was predicated on her ability to conform to the subordinate role of the screenwriter, a role that Eastern writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald could not abide. Unlike Loos, Sylvia Plath viewed herself as a professional author and sought to represent herself as such. In the fourth chapter, I discuss Plath's response to the incommensurability between femininity and professional work in the 1950's, and her struggle with institutions of cultural production (especially the New Yorker and the universities), revealing these institutions' class and gender biases. |
