Building American homes, constructing American identities: Performance of identity, domestic space, and modern American literature

In the twentieth century, the rapid social and cultural changes associated with modernity (immigration, migration, changes in gender and racial roles, and industrialism) challenged the historical constructions of American identity. As American society changed, the traditional conception of American identity as a cohesive whole was also challenged. While the literature of this period clearly reflects this growing ideological conflict, many modern authors focus on the development of new American identities in the context of historical constructions of America in order to foreground the complexity of American experience. These authors express an investment in the diversity of experience through their experimentation with the historical and cultural construction of place, which both inhibits and assists in the expression of the identity of the characters who inhabit them. They often use their characters' homes to investigate this conflict between diversity and historically homogeneous constructions of identity because home is a space associated with both individual identity and the traditions of history and family. This focus on the changing relationship between Americans and their homes challenges the idea of a coherent American identity.; My dissertation examines the changing nature of gender, sexual, and class identities in twentieth-century America by examining how domestic space mirrors and influences the construction of these identities in key works of American literature by Upton Sinclair, Dorothy Parker, William Faulkner, Djuna Barnes, Eudora Welty, James Baldwin, Edna Ferber, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. In studying the connection between domestic spaces and the characters who inhabit, construct, and decorate them. I reveal the struggle to redefine American identity in the twentieth century to be of the utmost importance in both experimental and popular texts of the period. The results of this investigation provide a new approach to looking at a specific cultural moment of twentieth-century America. My approach delves into the very conception of an "American" identity, seeking to multiply our notions of how it has been performed and conceived in our literature. In doing this, I find connections between canonical and non-canonical twentieth-century texts which suggest that the conception of form as transformable reaches beyond "Modernist" texts into the popular culture of the twentieth century.