| My work examines four seminal pieces of modernist European literature: Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Gide's The Immoralist, and Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. I show two aspects of gender representation within the characters of these novels. First, these novels follow the trend in much of canonical modernism of representing modernist traits through their male characters and pre-modern, 19th-century traits to their female characters. Second, despite this gendered representation of modernism, and at times because of it, the hegemonic gender norms for both sexes are defied. |
