Visuality, perception, and the self in works by Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and Sarah Orne Jewett

This dissertation examines the depiction of female subjectivity in three turn-of-the-century novels by American women writers. Specifically, it considers how Wharton's The House of Mirth (1905), Cather's The Song of the Lark (1915), and Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) contextualize the formation of the gendered subject within turn-of-the-century America.;Reading these novels against the theory of Freud and Lacan provides the language and paradigms for a finely-tuned examination of individual perception and experience. This study uses psychoanalytic theory to read these narratives because it allows for a greater appreciation of the complexity, subtlety, and beauty of these fictional depictions. Freud's theory of the oedipal complex and Lacan's theory of the field of the gaze, for example, help uncover the way in which perception is organized in each novel, how characters see each other and the world, and how such perception contributes to the formation of the gendered and socialized subject.;Wharton, Cather, and Jewett problematize the idea of the coherent self in their novels, creating female subjects whose identity and subjectivity are dependent upon the social, cultural, and ideological context within which they exist. Locating an authentic self is a matter of struggle against outside elements which have a certain defining force but which also threaten to erase the self. Each novel works to reveal the structure and fictions supporting conventional beliefs which determine identity, as well as the division inherent in self-consciousness. The tactics the self relies upon to negotiate a self generates a kind of politics of desire and identification within this context.