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AUTHORING BODIES: WHITE SOUTHERN WOMEN'S WRITING, 1920-1940 By RHONDA ANN MORRIS A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 1997 For my mother, Lola Elizabeth Scott Morris, and in memory of my father, Raymond Alan Morris ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I have had the good fortune to have on my doctoral committee the English professors from whom I have learned the most: Marsha Bryant, Anne Goodwyn Jones, David Leverenz, and Stephanie Smith. I am indebted to them for their scholarship and instruction, their commitment to me and this project, their substantial and patient comments about my work, and their sage advice about things scholarly, professional, and personal. I want to thank my outside committee members Ofelia Schutte and Bertram Wyatt-Brown from the Philosophy and History departments for helping me place my project more solidly in the context of feminist thinking and southern history. My appreciation extends most deeply to Anne Jones, my chair, who inspired and challenged me, let me share her thoughts and books and office, and supplied me with the occasional Moon Pie. When I felt most discouraged, she cheered me up and cheered me on. University of Florida's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the Graduate School awarded generous fellowships that afforded me time away from teaching to research this project. My gratitude goes especially to Mrs. Frances Holmes, who sponsored my CLAS fellowship; I will never forget the lunch she treated me to, during which she iii shared her memories of course work and card-playing with "Red" Warren and her cottage-cheese and beer dinner with the Allen Tates. Over several years and in its several manifestations, the American literature dissertation group read countless drafts of my work, listened to my ideas and frustrations, and pointed me in productive directions and to undiscovered texts. I thank particularly Bill Beverly, Leslie Henson, Lisa Houston, Anne Jones, Gary MacDonald, Maria Martinez, Betsy Nies, David Russell, Dina Smith, Steve Spence, and Jim Watkins for their insightful comments on my work and for (nearly) weekly doses of encouragement, coffee, and beer. Gary MacDonald knows better than anyone about the costs and rewards of the past eight years; his friendship has sustained me. My love and appreciation also go to the other close friends and family who loved and supported me while I worked on this project: Charlie and Stan Lance, Lola Morris, Ramona Pelham, Sherry Morris, Reid Harris, June, Harriet, Bernard Bean, and my husband Kevin Cubinski, who kept assuring me that one day I would get the thing done. IV TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii ABSTRACT vi CHAPTERS 1 INTRODUCTION 1 2 WOMEN "HEDGED AND HEMMED IN": EVELYN SCOTT'S NARROW HOUSES 13 3 SHE'S ALL MADE UP: THE MASQUERADING FICTION OF FRANCES NEWMAN 46 4 DANCING AND DOMESTICITY: COMPETING STORIES OF THE SOUTHERN FLAPPER Ill The Flap over Flappers: "She's Not What Grandma Used to Be" 119 Domesticating the Flapper 128 Corra Harris's (Dis)Embodied Daughter 137 Zelda Fitzgerald: Fleshing Out Another Story 157 Coda 185 5 KATHERINE ANNE PORTER'S "MANGLED CREATURES": DISFIGURING THE FEMININE AND FLEEING THE DOMESTIC 193 CONCLUSION 244 WORKS CITED 248 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 260 V Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy AUTHORING BODIES: WHITE SOUTHERN WOMEN'S WRITING, 1920-1940 By Rhonda Ann Morris December 1997 Chair: Anne Goodwyn Jones Major Department: English In the American South, an image of the lady as selfless, morally and spiritually transcendent, and naturally fitted for a domestic life of service to the family dominated definitions of southern womanhood well into the 1930s. The ideal of the lady depended upon divorcing womanliness from corporeality. Subject to regulatory codes that repressed their bodies and desires, codes that ensured the white woman's body was effectively banished from the cultural imagination, privileged white southern women inherited an alienating and ultimately untenable identity. This dissertation examines the work of four authors who flesh out a white female body to critique a domestic economy that they characterized as furthering patriarchal interests at the cost of women. Unearthing the genteel corpses produced by southern restrictions of the female body, Evelyn VI . Scott's autobiography and fiction establish the need for a radical restructuring of the region's domestic order and female identity. By depicting the upper-class woman's body as a social text, Frances Newman's fiction and criticism open up the possibilities for women to rewrite their identities. Though she points to the same social regulation of female corporeality identified by Scott, Newman celebrates the woman's body's ability to parodically resist and overturn stifling domestic stories. The limits of Newman-style masquerade are evidenced by the flapper. Though the flapper's manifest corporeality disrupts definitions of the lady and belle, the figure is ultimately absorbed into the dominant culture and erased as an important regional image of privileged white womanhood. Zelda Fitzgerald, however, uses the flapper's dancing body to model corporeal resistance to deadening domesticity in her autobiographical novel Save Me the Waltz Katherine Anne Porter's Miranda . stories critique the social order by exposing the mangled bodies that Porter sees at the heart of every domestic story. But Porter's depictions of Miranda Gay's continual flight suggest that women can avoid re-enacting the deforming stories of their mothers. Southern women writers testified to the difficulty of wresting a body from the social stories that envelop it, yet their portrayals of contentious corporealities advanced feminist social transformation Vll — . . CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Luce Irigaray once pointed out that "the female body has always figured into the male corpus" but has rarely "become the object of a female subjectivity experiencing and identifying itself." Irigaray suggests that to enact "social and cultural transformation," we need to develop a female-originated representation of body--a "morpho-logic" in the stories that we tell.^ This dissertation will argue that the fiction of Evelyn Scott, Frances Newman, Zelda — Sayre Fitzgerald, and Katherine Anne Porter southern white women writing in the 1920s and 1930s--constitutes such a pro ect j That their work does so is perhaps all the more surprising given the context in which they wrote. While, historically, materiality has been framed as feminine and has freighted women with often socially negative meanings,^ in southern ideology, the body of the privileged white woman ^Luce Irigaray, "Writing as a Woman," interview with Alice Jardine, Je. Tu. Nous: Toward a Culture of Difference (New York: Routledge, 1993) 59. ^See Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism. Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley: U of California P, 1993) 1 2 has been denied and suppressed. As Allen Tate writes in The Fathers adult southern white women "were only neck and head . set above a mysterious region that did not exist. Womanliness and embodiment were at odds in the South. Dominant southern thought relegated corporeality to African-American and working-class women, stereotyping them as highly sexual, animalistic, and earthy. Within southern society's persistent ideology of ladyhood--arguably, a regionalized version of "the cult of true womanhood"--the African-American woman was not perceived as enacting "natural" or "pure" femininity.^ Literary historian Diane Roberts verifies this, noting that southern black women were assigned Bakhtinian "grotesque bodies" connected with "eating, drinking, defecation and other elimination (sweating, blowing of the nose, sneezing) as well as , ^Allen Tate, The Fathers (1938; Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1977) 43. This novel, like southern culture, rests upon the body of the "bodiless" woman; the narrative chronicling the story of "the fathers" opens with family clustering around the coffin containing the corpse of the mother. In fact, the fifteen-year old narrator asserts that "the death of [his] mother is a suitable beginning for [his] story," a story which repeatedly moves away from and returns to the woman's originary body (4). This lady's body--or at least Lacy Buchan's invocation of it--is thus central to the telling of the (male) story but is pointedly absent from that story. ^See Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford UP, 1987), chapter 2. ® 3 copulation, [and] pregnancy."^ Such bodies contrast with the "classical bodies" associated with the privileged southern women who enacted their world's conceptions of femininity. Roberts explains: Tcohled:clas"sTihcealverbboadly nisormeslevofateodffi.ci.al. nanodnselxiutaelr,ary language, determined by the canon, prohibit all that is linked with fecundation, pregnancy, childbirth ..." [Bakhtin 320]. The classical body tidily represents the white upper-class southern woman, estranged from her own pfhryosmicsapleiatkyi.ng.a.ve.rnTaheculwahriteoflbaodydiliys pfruonhcitibointsed from sex to birth to menstruation to defecation because she is constructed to be "innocent" of such things, chaste, orifices closed, a silent endorsement of the patriarchal representation of her as the designated work of art of southern culture. Sidonie Smith notes that this process of "ideological enshrinement" leads to an "objectification of the body [that] encourages the process whereby others whose bodies are identified as culturally 'grotesque' become more fully body."^ "The pregnant black woman's body is present in a ^Roberts is quoting Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984) 317; see Diane Roberts, Faulkner and Southern Womanhood (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1994) xiv. ^Roberts xiv. ^Sidonie Smith, Subjectivity. Identity, and the Body: Women's Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993) 6.