The role of transgendering in three early twentieth-century American novels

In O Pioneers!, Barren Ground, and The Unvanquished , Willa Cather, Ellen Glasgow, and William Faulkner respond to contemporary gender discourses and critique the gender code itself. Because these novels were published over a period of twenty-five years, examining them together provides insight into the development of gender discourses in the early twentieth-century. While the focus of each novel varies, they all reflect the discourse that subverted the New Woman. Within their examinations of gender, these authors construct their female protagonists as transgendered---assigning them both masculine and feminine attributes so that their gender positions become ambiguous---and use this transgendering to emphasize the ways in which the gender code continues to restrict characters who not only violate prescribed gender roles but also challenge the very notion of dualistic gender.