Opening acts: Narrative beginnings in 20th century United States fiction by women

Few studies of narrative beginnings exist, and not one takes a feminist perspective. My dissertation seeks to fill this gap. Drawing on feminist narratologists who assert that gender is integral to the study of narrative, I argue that social identity (e.g., gender, race, and ethnicity) is particularly essential to the study of how narrative fictions begin. Although several critics have established the importance of beginnings, with the exception of Edward Said, they offer almost exclusively formalist readings of canonical male-authored texts. Moreover, these critics consistently overlook the implications of beginnings in relation to gender, race, and cultural identity formations. Using a wide range of twentieth-century women's narratives as points of entry, my project pays close attention to the strategic use of formal and conceptual beginnings by writers contesting patriarchal and racist cultural ideologies. Through this project, I argue that acknowledging the formal complexity of narratives by historically marginalized writers is central to a comprehension of the cultural work they perform. Furthermore, I suggest that the insights gained by feminist and minority discourse scholars about identity formation must be more fully extended to the theoretical study of narrative, especially concerning the connection between social subjectivity and beginnings in narrative fiction.