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The awakening: The female in business in the twentieth century American novel

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The awakening: The female in business in the twentieth century American novel

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Content THE AWAKENING:
THE FEMALE IN BUSINESS
IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AMERICAN NOVEL
by
Gerald Egidio Poggi
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(Comparative Literature)
December 1982
UMI Number: DP22547
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U N IV E R S ITY O F S O U T H E R N C A L IF O R N IA
T H E G R A D U A T E S C H O O L
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This dissertation, written by
GERALD EGIDIO POGGI
under the direction of his..... Dissertation Com
mittee, and approved by all its members, has
been presented to and accepted by The Graduate
School, in partial fulfillm ent of requirements of
the degree of
D O C T O R O F P H I L O S O P H Y
^ ........
Dean
D ate Pecerabe.r
ISSERTATT t t e :
Chairman
TABLE OF CONTENTS
»
Introduction.................................. 1
Chapter I The search for Identify.......................28
Chapter II Awareness and Self-Expression ............. 42
Chapter III success and Ambition................. 63
Chapter IV The Factory Girl.................................78
Chapter V The white Collar G i r l ......................... 94
Chapter VI The American Dream.............................108
Chapter VII The Female Executive.......................... 129
Conclusion.......................... 147
Bibliography.............. 153
INTRODUCTION
In 1915, the year before he was appointed a Justice of
the united states supreme Court, Louis d . Brandeis
delivered an Independence Day speech in Boston describing
the virtues of the American way of life. He noted that
American society was firmly rooted in the rights
guaranteed by the United states government — "the right
to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness":
Life in this connection, means living,
not existing; liberty, freedom in things
industrial as well as political; happiness
includes, among other things, that
satisfaction which can come only through
the full development and utilization of
one's faculties.!
These rights, he maintained, were the very foundation of
democracy because they extended to all citizens, including
American women who were about to vote for the first time
in the history of the country. For Brandeis a true
democracy could only function when life, liberty, and
happiness were exercised by the entire population:
America... has always declared herself
for equality of nationalities as well
as for equality of individuals.2
He saw no differences among the sexes and races when it
came to their prerogatives in using these rights. In
fact, he was adamant in the belief that citizens were
1
equal and entitled to the universal implementation of
life, liberty, and happiness in their daily lives.
Liberty became for him the epitome of "the right to
3
enjoy life, to acquire property, to pursue happiness"
for all Americans. And he affirmed the significance of
ethical as well as political implications in a citizen's
ability to exercise these rights.
Like many Americans during the early part of the
Twentieth Century, Brandeis took for granted the
relationship between the idealistic and the economic
dimensions of the American way of life. Liberty meant
freedom from economic as well as political, religious,
and social subordination and inferiority. It was
commonly understood that the accumulation of wealth
through work was the main vehicle for an industrious
citizen to acquire personal comfort, independence,
happiness, and leisure during a fulfilling lifetime.
For many, the business world was the logical place to
make the money which they considered necessary to
realize these benefits in their lives. But those
Americans who accepted Louis Brandeis' insights about
the applicability of the principles of American
democracy in their own personal and professional realms
did not seem to hear his remarks about "equal
2
opportunity" as the cornerstone "that will most advance
4
civilization," particularly with regard to working
women. And their attitude was typical of many other
Americans in later years who could not comprehend or
accept a female who was attempting to be successful in
the male-dominated business world of Twentieth Century
America.
Traditionally, women have been excluded from
participating in American business as equals with men.
Many males have failed to recognize or admit that women
have been struggling for centuries to achieve economic
parity with them. Through the years, the American
female has been taught to demonstrate that she is not an
economic achiever and does not hope ever to achieve,
particularly in competition with men: "her main task is
not to achieve in the feminine field, but to avoid
5
achieving in the masculine." If she dare achieve and
succeed in the male-dominated world of business, she
runs the risk of negating her very womanhood and of
sacrificing her emotional well-being. A man can only
enhance his masculinity by business success, but a woman
somehow diminishes her whole person by her active
involvement to acquire it:
Difficult as it is for anyone to succeed, women
carry the additional burden of a cultural and
3
social tradition in which they are not supposed
to compete against men, let alone win.^
She is not supposed to succeed economically and love
successfully at the same time.
Business success and achievement, then, are the
particular domain of the American male, and popular
culture has always made this assumption. The novels of
a Horatio Alger, the philosophy of a Dale Carnegie, and
the religion of a Norrnan Vincent Peale have become the
wide-spread vehicles of the American dream of success.
Its glorification of the masculine attributes of
competition, pride, individualism, achievement, and
power has been synonymous with the American way of life
since the Founding Fathers. The democratic ideals of
liberty, freedom, justice, and equality are supposed to
be the basic elements of the American success formula
for all citizens, but they are, in reality, slanted more
towards male than female success.
In any case, these ideals are subservient to the
strong desire for materialistic gain which is inherent
in the very core of the success ethic: "That we are
born free and equal is a glorious truth in one sense,
yet we are not all born equally rich, and we never shall
be."^ According to P. T. Barnum (1882), Americans
should accept the fact that "ambition, energy, industry,
4
perserverance are indispensable requisites for
success.... Fortune always favors the brave, and never
helps a man who does not help himself."^ Or, as Mr.
Witney, the successful business-man in Horatio Alger's
novel, Ragged Dick (1867), so aptly says: "I hope, my
lad,... you will prosper and rise in the world. You
know in this free country poverty is no bar to a man's
9
advancement." The language of Barnum and Alger is
limited to encouraging success for the male of the
species. At the same time it limits a broader
interpretation of what actually constitutes the American
dream of success:
Ideally the promise of the American dream
is aimed at the total personality of the
individual: The dream is defined not only
in moral terms -- freedom, equality,
justice and self-realization — but, also
in material and socioeconomic terms.
However, in practice, the moral ideals of
the dream are invariably subordinated to
material criteria and ambitions.10
And the American businessman is one of the chief
exponents of this materialistic philosophy of life.
Through the businessman the American dream, or
perhaps credo, of success assumes a moralistic and
religious stature and disseminates the commandments of
self-confidence, positive thinking, achievement, power,
5
and financial security to its adherents. Tranquility,
peace of mind, and contentment all revolve around the
gaining of riches. Money and its acquisition and
enhancement become his key to personal fulfillment in
the socio-economic framework of the American dream. The
"upward mobile, successful, upper-middle class American
businessman" values "accumulation and achievement,
self-initiation of action, individual autonomy,...and
never ceasing activity..."'*''*' as manifestations of his
business success.
What happens when a woman wants the same business
success as a man and attempts to achieve it
independently of the home? In the first place, her
actions are contrary to the common assumption that women
"should be selfless helpmates to husband and
children...be spiritual and...not corrupt themselves
with dealings in the marketplace":
In general, female independent selfhood
was and still is defined by the traditional
patriarchy as theologically evil,
biologically unnatural, psychologically
unhealthy, and socially in bad taste.12
Women's achievement, exclusive of sex, is
incomprehensible to the man who is accustomed to having
his women at home. For him a wife's role is to be
supportive of her husband's job and career and be
6
patient and understanding with him. Her devotion is to
her husband, and not herself or her needs, because he is
the one who looks after her and is responsible for her
self-esteem. she is merely auxiliary to his economic
activities. Through the years the male has been
conditioned by "the accumulation of property...aesthetic
development and his snobbish impulses acting in
harmony...to feel that it was more desirable to have an
idle than a working wife" or daughter, to his way of
thinking, women are comparable to "the ornamentally
wrought weapon and...the splendid offering to the gods
as a measure of the man's’power to waste, and therefore
13 ....
his superiority over other men." Any initiative or
drive women exert outside the home is anathema to the
social conventions to which they are traditionally
linked.
In addition, women are often perceived as not tough
or strong enough to cope with the rigors of the business
world. This masculine sentiment about feminine weakness
and helplessness in the face of business adversity is
described in a passage from Theodore Dreiser's novel,
The Financier (1912). Frank Cowperwood, the businessman
hero of the novel, watches a lobster and a squid in the
tank of a neighborhood fish market. He admits that he
7
14
is "fascinated by the drama" of life and death
between them and observes the lobster everyday with an
avid interest. He likes "to study the rough claw with
which the lobster did his deadly work. He liked to
stare at the squid and think how fateful was his doom."
(p.13) The lobster picks apart the squid piece by piece
until its destruction is complete. Cowperwood does not
actually witness the final act, but sees that the squid
has inevitably been maimed and killed by the lobster.
What he views in the tank confirms his feelings about
life, particularly with regard to dealings with other
people in a business setting:
That's the way it has to be, I guess,"
he commented to himself. "That squid
wasn't quick enough. He didn't have
anything to feed on." He figured it out.
The squid couldn't kill the lobster —
he had no weapon. The lobster could kill
the squid — he was heavily armed. There
was nothing for the squid to feed on; the
lobster had the squid as prey, what was
the result to be? What else could it be?
"He didn't have a chance," he said, finally,
tucking his books under his arm and trotting
on.
It made a great impression on him. It
answered in a rough way that riddle which
had been annoying him so much in the past:
"How is life organized?" Things lived on
each other — that was it....He wasn't so
sure about men living on men yet. (pp.13-14)
Cowperwood is a businessman whose goal is to "get what
you could and hold it fast." (p.103) To do this, he
8
has to "grow another claw," much "like the lobster."
(p.379) His "claw" or "right arm" is "wealth, the
position, and the force which means give." (p.378)
By using this type of animal imagery throughout the
novel, Dreiser emphasizes his points about the savagery
inherent to the business world, to the author,
businessmen "were all hawks.... they were all tigers
facing each other in a financial jungle...wolves at one
moment, smiling, friendly human beings at another."
(p.354) Stockbrokers are like gulls which hang "on the
lee of the wind, hungry and anxious to snap up any
unwary fish." (p.84) At one point in the novel,
Cowperwood abandons his first wife and children and
leaves them like dying fish "to those seafeeding
buzzards which sit on the shores of some coasts and wait
for such food." (p.483) They are easy prey in his
male-dominated business world precisely because they are
a woman and children bereft of the protection of a man.
Unlike Cowperwood and his predatory male business
associates who are characterized as "wolves and tigers
that run best in packs," (p.704) women and children are
helplessly alone and vulnerable to their onslaught.
Businessmen "may eat one another ultimately, but never
so long as there is anything else to eat." (p.704)
9
They will tend to stick together when they detect an
intrusion by an outsider into their "pack."
As an "outsider" in the masculine realm of business,
the "more acceptable way of earning recognition" for a
married woman "was through sharing in the achievement of
15
her husband# and few women went beyond this." A
single woman who also deviated from her stereotypical
norm by pursuing individual accomplishment through
business ran the same risks as her married counterpart.
And the story of Lily Bart is an illustration of this
predicament.
Lily Bart# the heroine of Edith Wharton's The House
of Mirth (1905)# asks a significant question about
herself early in the novel:
Why must a girl pay so dearly for her least
escape from routine? Why could one never
do a natural thing without having to screen
it behind a structure of a r t i f i c e ? ! ®
She realizes that as a woman in a world dominated by men
she has had to conceal her real self behind a mask. Any
other woman like her who may exhibit talent or wisdom is
forced to sublimate her strength of character to win the
love and status she wants from the men in her life.
Should she deviate from her accustomed inferior role to
men and attempt to define herself in relation to herself
and not to the men around her# she runs the risk of
10
becoming an unorthodox adversary to them. If she
pursues a career in the marketplace usually reserved for
men, she joins the ranks of those women who seem to have
forgotten about their proper station in a civilized
society. It is irrelevant that a woman may pursue a
career for self-sufficient and independent reasons, and
not to compete with or master the men she knows. Her
desire for economic and emotional freedom and personal
responsibility for her actions becomes a very real
challenge to the tacit assumption that "a woman's place
is in the home." Her continual assertion of herself
threatens the implicit belief many men nurture
about their women: they prefer to categorize them in
terms of dependency and frailty rather than of
achievement.
Lily Bart typifies the lovely, virtuous, and
charming female whom most men would eagerly have adorn
their homes as the ideal wife, she is "like some rare
flower grown for exhibition, a flower from which every
bud had been nipped except the crowning blossom of her
beauty." (p.329) As long as she is able to maintain
her decorative affiliation with the affluent circles of
New York society, she does not have to concern herself
with the prospect of earning a living. Her "bud" of
economic independence has been "nipped."
Idealistically, she envisions "her beauty as a power for
good, as giving her the opportunity to attain a position
where she should make her influence felt in a vague
diffusion of refinement and good taste." (p.38) Lily
dreams of marrying a rich European nobleman who will
shelter her from the "dinginess" of life and provide
"the bright pinnacle of success which presented such a
slippery surface to her clutch" (p.42) as a woman. Ever
reliant upon the generosity of others, she is "so
evidently the victim Of the civilization which had
produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like
manacles chaining her to her fate" (p.9) of rapidly
deteriorating economic conditions.
As her circumstances become bleaker, she tries to
find some kind of job to pay off her gambling debts and
wardrobe bills, but to no avail. After an unsuccessful
stint as a personal secretary, she becomes a seamstress
in a millinery shop but cannot hope to "learn to compete
with hands formed from childhood for their special
work." (p.305) so she fancies herself the proprietress
rather than a worker and imagines establishing her own
business where, "in command of her own work women, she
believed she had sufficient tact and ability to attract
12
a fashionable clientele...." (p.305) But she has never
possessed the background, training, or disposition to
sustain her expectations: "And as she looked back she
saw that there had never been a time when she had had
any relation to life." (p.331) Like her parents who
were "rootless, blown hither and thither on every w-ind
of fashion, without any personal existence to shelter
them from its shifting gusts," Lily succumbs to "the
feeling of being something rootless and ephemeral, mere
spindrift of the whirling surface of existence, without
anything to which the poor little tentacles of self
could cling before the awful flood submerged them."
(p.331) Alienated and alone, she takes her own life,
unable to make it like a previous acquaintance, Nellie
Struther, "the poor little working-girl who had found
strength to gather up the fragments of.her life and
build a shelter with them...." (p.332)
Lily confronts a society which values the
materialism, rather than the idealism, of the American
dream of individual success. In a culture which
elevates the acquisition, retention, and generation of
money to a religious cause, she simply has no money and,
even worse, has no immediate prospect of getting any.
Hence the society from which she so eagerly wants
13
acceptance renounces her and her poverty. she does not
accept a loan to finance her own dress shop, insists on
repaying, before she is able to, funds she had been
given, and refuses to marry for money. By this behavior
she sets herself apart from the ranks of the very people
she is desirous of joining. Her actions do not allow
her to extricate herself from the economic predicament.
Lily wants to combine the materialistic comforts of the
dream with the idealistic virtues of personal honor,
achievement, individuality, and expression. she fails
and takes an overdose of soporific.
As a woman who has been primed for the advantages of
beauty, wealth, and leisure, Lily is suddenly thrust
into the world of work where the "small pay she received
would not be a sufficient addition to her income to
compenste her for so much drudgery." (p.305) she no
longer can indulge herself in the same isolated
perspective she once had when she thought of wall street
in terms of its vastness, mystery, and "vagueness" which
"seemed to diminish its indelicacy." (p.87) Although
she is not seeking a job to gain freedom or self-
sufficiency for herself to exist independently in a
male-dominated environment, she nonetheless confronts
the real issues of personal awareness, identity, and
14
worth. Her motivation is not defined in terms of
career, but comes from economic necessity. And she has
to deal with the dimensions of love and marriage in her
life. She contemplates Nettie struther's "meagre enough
life, on the grim edge of poverty, with scant margin for
possibilities of sickness or mischance" and concludes:
But it had the frail audacious permanence
of a bird's nest built on the edge of a
cliff — a mere wisp of leaves and straw,
yet so put together that the lives entrusted
to it may hang safely over the abyss. (p.332)
Reminding herself that there are two elements required
"to build the nest: the man's faith as well as the
woman's courage," (p.332) she analyzes Nettie's
situation in relation to her own. Consequently, she
inadvertently stumbles on a key issue in the lives of
many women: the successful reconciliation of economics,
marriage, and happiness in the life of a woman who has
or wants to work in a job outside the traditional
restrictions of the home.
Edith Wharton depicts a sympathetic character in
Lily Bart. Although Lily manifests some of the same
materialism of the society which rejects her, she also
begins to exhibit "a growing aspiration to become
17
independent, unselfish, responsive, and responsible."
While she becomes gradually aware of herself and matures
15
as a sensitive and caring human being, society
ultimately destroys her. She is poor and unemployed and
therefore useless to that society "which lives by the
18
single standard of financial success." For a
society where the only thing that counts is money, a
person who is without it, regardless of good looks,
charm, or sensitivity, really has no place. in the
context of the novel, the union of business and society,
"the interdependence of success in wall street and
19
social recognition in Fifth Avenue," are really
responsible for Lily's death.
Like all women at the beginning of the Twentieth
Century Lily is living at a time of great sociological
change. She is unable to cope with her changing
circumstances and thus perishes. It is also a period of
rapid industrialization in the united states and,
consequently, the country's economy is shifting from a
rural and agricultural to an urban base. The cities, as
a result, experience an influx of people, particularly
of young women of a marriageable age looking for jobs in
the factories and offices of America. These women are
not really planning to satisfy long-term career goals as
much as they are intending to prepare themselves for
marriage and motherhood. For many American families of
16
this era it is burdensome to sustain a daughter at home
before marriage, so the daughter goes to work until she
finds the right man. And she may even meet him in the
office or at the factory:
The urban economy offered them [women] an
increasing variety of opportunities to earn
money.... For the most part, however, these
possibilities were confined to the few years
of late adolescence and early adulthood,
before the young woman married and began to
raise a f a m i l y . 20
Popular magazines of the time, such as the Womans Home
Companion and the Ladies Home Journal, reiterate the
theme of office and factory, work as a prelude to the
profession of wife, mother, and homemaker for women.
One magazine writer wrote:
As things now are, I am inclined to
think that the most effective training
that thousands of girls get for
housekeeping is from a period of
service in a modern, scientifically
managed factory, shop, or office.2^
Besides being encouraged to strive to become the perfect
wife, a female is exhorted to profess that motherhood is
her supreme career, in spite of any job she may have had
before marriage:
Women who are sincerely honest and one-
pointed in their desires to rear their
children into healthy, intelligent, high-
minded maturity come into agreement with
old truths. They admit that there is no
vocation demanding more mental agility,
more subtlety of discretion, more
17
painstaking devotion than the one job of
rearing children. They admit that it is
a woman-size job, demanding their hours
and their minutes....22
But marriage does not always come easily or quickly for
every young woman, so, until she can attain the
marriage that suits her, she is urged to be the model
employee who sets an good example in the workplace. For
however long she remains at work away from the home, she
has to contend with an environment which is basically
alien to her. The onus is on her as she copes with this
less than ideal setting:
...but we must remember that the employment
of women has not yet in popular estimation
ceased to be an experiment, and that the
mistakes made by a few are recorded against
us all.... Women have not, in popular
estimation, reached the heights where they
can be considered individuals, we have not
yet attained the dignity of having our work
estimated as that of Ellen, Sarah, or Jane.
We still belong to the inconglomerate mass
called "women" and must stand and fall
together.22
Hence, factory or office work was not considered as an
end in itself for her, but merely as an interim step
towards a woman's predetermined vocation in the home.
A job, however, is not a prelude to marriage for all
women, work in the factories, department stores, and
offices of America is a permanent fact of life for them
because of economic necessity, and marriage, if and when
18
it comes, does not change their situation. The female
factory workers, who have labored in manufacturing
plants and textile mills since the early part of the
Nineteenth Century, saw their numbers swell by 1900.
The department stores and business offices experienced
an influx of female employees who regarded selling,
clerking, typing, and bookkeeping as possible avenues
for a financial and career growth which working at home
could not provide them. By the turn of the century five
million women were working, constituting about eighteen
percent of the American work force. Later in the
Twentieth Century, with the advent of the two world
wars, women became dominant in a labor force which loses
most of its men to the military effort, when the
soldiers return from the wars, many women are not
willing to give up their jobs for them, whether they
opt to work in an office or factory setting, women had
become a significant factor in American business and
industry. By the middle of the century their numbers
swelled to over twenty million workers, or thirty-seven
percent of the work force. Now one out of two adult
women was working outside the home.
This dissertation is an analysis of the progress of
women in American business literature since the
19
beginning of the Twentieth Century. It uses creative
literature, particularly the novel, as the basis for the
interpretation of the role of women in the traditionally
male-dominated business world. Those women who remain
apart from business within the usual confines of the
home and family life are not considered. There is no
single literary theme about women in Twentieth Century
American business, whereas American novelists, with
their usual "anti-business animus," typically depict the
American businessman in fiction as a "villanious
2 4
creature" whose value system is consistently
incompatible with the common good. Women, on the other
hand, who attempt work outside the home are often beset
by diverse and complex issues which do not affect men.
Within the framework of the novels these non-traditional
working women are "in conflict with society, with other
human beings, or within the self. Thus the quest for
identity is sharpened by two functions of literature, as
a reflection by what is and as a model for what may
2 5
be." unlike men women cannot simply make a decision
to step into the world of business without getting their
emotional bearings and liberating themselves from the
historical stereotypes which society has formulated
about them. Besides equating success with making money,
20
a female believes in the objective of working for
material gain as liberating, self-fulfilling, and
dignifying for the person involved, without an
appreciation of who she is and an understanding of what
she wants and why, a female is not only lacking material
riches, but also experiences a feeling of inner
impoverishment. Her effort to alleviate the poverty in
her soul is often far more meaningful to her than any
monetary success she may attain. Ideally, she will be
able to accomplish both emotional and economic self-
reliance by her personal mission in the marketplace.
This study undertakes to trace the evolution of the
Twentieth Century American female in business literature
from her early, growing awareness of herself as a person
to her need to define herself in independent terms,
especially in the masculine context of success as the
visible accumulation of wealth which has been achieved
through work. The novels themselves which are analyzed
reflect these sensitive and intricate questions which
occur in a woman's transition from the home to a job or
career.
Representative works from Twentieth Century American
fiction are used to illustrate the socioeconomic
differences between a man's and a woman's method for
21
realizing the dream of business success. Kate Chopin's
The Awakening (1899) heralds the change in a woman's
perception of herself and her role in society. Like the
woman in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper
(1896) Chopin's heroine, Edna Pontellier, is a female
who, although economically dependent upon her husband,
tries to free herself from her personal "experience of
2 6
nothingness" by engaging in activities not related
to the home. It takes a long time for a woman like
Isadora wing in Erica Jong's Fear of Flying (1973) to
put aside economic considerations and concentrate solely
upon herself and her quest to make it as a real,
functioning human being who is free of inhibiting
relationships with men. unlike the heroine in Doris
Lessing's Martha Quest (1952), Isadora does not drift
for years in her search for the truly economically and
emotionally liberated female role model who can fend for
herself and thrive on her own. She takes several giant
steps beyond Chopin's heroine and knows what she is
doing, and why, and, more significantly, how to do it in
the context of her own identity. Isadora is truly a
woman who has gone beyond the fragile, feminine beauty
characterized by a Lily Bart in Edith Wharton's The
House of Mirth (1905).
22
Once a woman has taken stock of herself she should
be closer to making a successful transition to the realm
beyond the home. Ideally, a career in business is a
primary vehicle for her realizing fulfillment and
self-sufficiency in her life. But she is still not
isolated from the expectations of society or the
historical and economic realities which affect her and
other Americans in the course of the century. After the
1890's the phenomenon of women working away from home
becomes commonplace. Women like Carrie Meeber in
Theodore Dreiser's sister Carrie (1900), Roberta Alden
in his The American Tragedy (1925), una Golden in
Sinclair Lewis' The Job (1917), Alice Adams in Booth
Tarkington's Alice Adams (1921), and Kitty Foyle in
Christopher Morley's Kitty Foyle (1939) are
representative of the new breed of working women who
symbolize the changing role of women in Twentieth
Century America. For the most part, they are single
women who seek work in the factories, mills, and offices
of the country out of economic necessity. Unlike
their Black counterparts, they have not always had to
work nor have they had to confront the dehumanizing and
desexualizing problems of a Lutie Johnson in Ann Petry's
The street (1946) and a Selina Boyce in Paule Marshall's
23
Brown Girls, Brown stones (1959). Some of the working
women like Emma McChesney in Edna Ferber's Emma
McChesney & Co. (1915), Fanny Brandeis in her Fanny
Herself (1917), and Selina Peake in her so Big (1924),
have not forgotten about the personally satisfying
aspects of a job in spite of its economic requirements.
In the spirit of Ferber's heroines, a Black woman like
Janie in zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were watching
God (1937) epitomizes the female who believes that work
can be reconciled with personal happiness.
It is not until the years during and after world War
II that the female really comes into her own in American
business. The war itself precipitates additional
changing cultural, economic, and social patterns which
solidify the woman's role in business and industry.
Career women like Beverly Thyson in Helen Van slyke's
Public smiles, private Tears (1982) and Mildred Pierce
in James m . Cain's Mildred Pierce (1945) never question
the fact of their business involvements or their
perogative to function as capable executives along with
their male peers. Having assumed their rightful place
in the business world, these women now try to complement
their professional success with emotional and personal
well-being, a consideration which permeates this entire
24
comparative study of women in Twentieth Century American
business literature.
25
FOOTNOTES
1 Louis d . Brandeis, "True Americanism" (1915) in.
American Thought: Civil War to world war I, ed. and intro.
Perry Miller (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1954),
p. 341.
2 Brandeis, p. 343.
3 Ibid., p . 344.
4 Ibid.
5 Margaret Mead, "Sex and Achievement," The Forum, 94
(November 1935), p. 302.
6 Michael Korda, success1 . How Every Man and Woman
Can Achieve It (New York: Random House, 1977), p. 167.
7 P. T. Barnum, "The Art of Money Getting," (1882) in
The American Gospel of success, ed. and intro. Moses
Rischin (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1965), p. 49.
8 Barnum, p. 57.
9 Horatio Alger, jr., Ragged Dick (New York: Collier,
1962 (1867)), p. 110.
10 Lloyd W. Brown, "Lorraine Hansberry as ironist: A
Reappraisal of A Raisin in the sun," Journal of Black
Studies, 4 (March 1974), p. 2 41.
11 W. Lloyd Warner, American Life: Dream and Reality
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1953), p. 225.
12 Carol Pearson and Katherine Pope, The Female Hero
in American and British Literature (New York and London:
R. R. Bowker Company, 19 81), p. 6.
13 Emily James Putnam, The Lady: studies of Certain
Significant Phases of Her History (Chicago: university of
Chicago Press, 1970 (1910)), xxxviii.
26
14 Theodore Dreiser, The Financier (New York: Harper &
Brothers, 1912), p. 13.
15 Vern Bullough, The subordinate sex: A History of
Attitudes Towards women (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1974),
p. 3 31.
16 Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (New York: The
New American Library, Inc'.' , 1964 (1905) ) , p. 18.
17 Margaret B. McDowell, Edith Wharton (Boston:
.Twayne Publishers, 1976), p. 45.
18 Michael Millgate, American social Fiction: James to
Cozzens (New York: Barness & Noble, Inc., 1967), p. 57.
19 Millgate, p. 57.
20 Robert W. smuts, Women and Work in America (New
York: Schocken Books, 1974), p. 38.
21 Ida Tarbell, "Give the Girl a chance," Woman's Home
Companion (April 1916), p. 14.
22 Harriett Abbott, "What the Newest New woman is,"
Ladies Home Journal (August 1920), p. 154.
23 Mary p. Seymour, "Homely Hints to Young Women in
Business," The Business woman's Journal 1, (March-April
1889) , p. 51.
24 John Chamberlin, "The Businessman in Fiction:
American Novelists Continue to Regard Him as a villainous
Creature," Fortune (November 1948), p. 134.
25 Nadean Bishop,-"women in Literature" in The
American woman: Her Past, Her present. Her Future, ed.
and intro. Marie Richmond-Abbot (New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, 1979), p. 48.
26 Carol P. Christ, Diving peep and surfacing: Women
Writers on a spiritual Quest (Boston: Beacon Press, 1980),
p. 119.
27
CHAPTER I
The Search for Identity
I believe all of us want the same things...
all the classes that have waited and taken
advice...we're tired of drudging and sleep
ing and dying...we're tired of hearing the
politicians and priests and cautious
reformers (and the husbands'.) coax us,
'Be calm! Be patient! wait!' For ten
thousand years they've said that. We want
our Utopia now — and we're going to try our
hand at it.1
These angry words of Carol Kennicott in Sinclair
Lewis' novel Main street (1920) are directd at much more
than a woman's life in Gopher prairie. They rant against
the romanticized depiction of Victorian women which, much
to Carol Kennicott's ire, has been propagated well into
the Twentieth Century. Coventry Patmore in "The Angel in
the House” (1876), articulates the traditional stereotype
of women which Carol Kennicott rejects:
To him she'll cleave, for him forsake
Father's and mother's fond command!
He is her lord, for he can take
Hold of her faint heart with his hand!2
Not only is a wife to be obedient to her husband and
dedicated to her children, but she is also idealized as
delicate in nature, exalted in beauty, and unsullied by
daily interchange in the world:
She was all mildness; yet 'twas writ
In all her grace, most legibly,
28
'He that's for heaven itself unfit,
Let him not hope to merit me. (p.81)
In Patmore's poem, the female is the pure and spotless
angel of man's salvation. should she aspire to those
things which do not smack of delicacy, grace, and nobility
in thought and deed, she somehow becomes less of a woman
in the eyes of the masculine beholder. Only the so-called
stronger sex can deal directly with and in the world. The
female's social milieu is defined by birth and marriage.
Hence she is relegated to the realm of the heart, and,
concomitantly, to the mundane existence of the hearth.
Her success in this limited environment is totally
dependent upon the dispensation of the men in her life.
Edna Pontellier, the heroine of Kate Chopin's The
Awakening (1899), feels inhibited by this traditional role
of woman, wife, and mother. In the context of the novel
she can hardly be categorized as the "perfect and
enthusiastic housekeeper" who "hopes for no better
3
profession." Her husband is not pleased with her lack
of interest or concern about their home life and lets her
know it:
He reproached his wife with her inattention,
her habitual neglect of the children. If it
was not a mother's place to look after her
children, whose on earth was it? He himself
had his hands full with his brokerage
29
business. He could not be in two places at
once; making a living for his family on the
street, and staying at home to see that no
harm befell them.^
She is very different from the type of woman Mr.
Pontellier has known through the years. The routine
married lives of her friends do not appeal to her. on the
contrary, she flees their stifling environment and seeks
her own alternatives. she can only feel compassion for
the other women on Grand Isle who know just one narrow
side of life:
It was easy to know them, fluttering with
extended wings when any harm, real or
imaginary, threatened their precious brood.
They were women who idolized their children,
worshipped their husbands, and esteemed it
a holy privilege to efface themselves as
individuals and grow wings as ministering
angels. (p.16)
One of Grand Isle's women, Edna's friend Adele
Ratignolle, stands out: "there are not words to describe
her save the old ones that have served so often to picture
the bygone heroine of romance and the fair lady of our
dreams." (p.17) unlike Edna who desires to change her
life, she does not seek "congenial work with excitement
and change" or ask for "less opposition and more society
5
and stimulus" m her rather languid existence. But, as
"the embodiment of every womanly grace and charm," (p.17)
Mrs. Ratignolle frets about having her fourth baby and the
30
state of her physical well-being:
Her 'condition' was in no way apparent,
and no one would have known a thing about
it but for her persistence in making it
the subject of conversation. (p.18)
As the antithesis to Edna, she personifies the domestic
virtues and ideals which Coventry Patmore extols in
married women. Her adeptness in fulfilling her wifely
duties is so proficient that her husband would be a
rogue if he did not appreciate her:
If her husband did not adore her, he was
a brute, deserving of death by slow
tortures. (p.17)
Mr. Ratignolle views "his wife as one looks at a
valuable piece of personal property." (p.19) Adele
accepts it; Edna rebels. she refuses to be categorized
as her husband's "personal property," even though she
realizes that "the house, the money that provides for
it, are not mine." (p.130)
It is Adele's docile and economically dependent
disposition which Virginia Woolf categorizes as her
"Angel in the House":
She was intensely sympathetic. She was
immensely charming. She was utterly
unselfish. she excelled in the difficult
arts of family life. She sacrificed her
self daily....in short she was so
constituted that she never had a mind or
wish of her own, but preferred to
sympathize always with the minds and
wishes of others.6
31
In spite of her outward beauty, grace, purity, and self-
sacrifice, there is a dark side to the Angel. She is
inimical to any notion a female may have about
transcending her defined role in the life. If she wants
to better herself by entering a profession, the Angel in
her tries to thwart her. Virginia Woolf confronts her
Angel with all her sinister ramifications and identifies
her as the inhibitor of her freedom as a person and
wr iter:
For, as I found, directly I put pen to
paper, you cannot review even a novel
without having a mind of your own, with
out expressing what you think to be the
truth about human relations, morality,
sex.... And all these questions,
according to the Angel in the House,
cannot be dealt with freely and openly
by women; they must charm, they must
conciliate, they must — to put it
bluntly — tell lies if they care to
succeed. (p.238)
As an artist, Virginia woolf makes the conscious
decision to destroy her Angel in the House; the
alternative is to be destroyed by her:
I took up the inkpot and flung it at her.
She died hard. Her fictitious nature was
of great assistance to her. It is far
harder to kill a phantom than a reality.
(p.238)
If she does not "kill" her, the "phantom" will become a
"reality" in her life. She must be dealt with abruptly:
Above all — I need not say it — she was
32
pure. Her purity was supposed to be her
chief beauty — her blushes, her great
grace. And when I came to write I
encountered her with the very first
words....I turned upon her and caught her
by the throat....I acted in self-defense.
Had I not killed her she would have killed
me. She would have plucked the heart out
of my writing, (pp.237-38)
The Angel is contained in Virginia Woolf's life, but
her vocation as a female writer who is honest about
herself is still a difficult task for her:
*
... telling the truth about my own
experiences as a body, I do not think I
solved. I doubt that any woman solved
it yet. The obstacles against her are
still immensely powerful -- and yet they
are difficult to define....she has still
many ghosts to fight, many prejudices to
overcome. (p.241)
Edna also encounters the same problems in dealing with
and expressing her innermost thoughts and emotions, so
she turns within herself to satisfy what she cannot
express in words, when Adele Ratignolle plays a piece
on the piano entitled "Solitude," it rouses the desire
for personal freedom and escape deep within Edna:
When she heard it, there came before her
imagination the figure of a man standing
beside a desolate rock on the seashore.
He was naked: his attitude was one of
hopeless resignation as he looked toward
a distant bird winging its flight away
from him.7
Ironically, only in death can Edna find the liberating
peace and solitude she so desires:
33
But when she was there beside the sea,
absolutely alone, she cast the unpleasant,
pinching garments from her, and for the
first time in her life she stood naked
in the open air.... She felt like some
new-born creature, opening its eyes in a
familiar world it had never known. (p.189)
She is departing from a world she never related to, a
world which is bereft of human love for her in which she
feels emotionally isolated:
There was a dull pang of regret because
it was not the kiss of love which had
inflamed her, because it was not love
which had held this cup of life to her
lips. (p.140)
She comes to an awareness of herself as a person without
true love, so she turns to solitude to compensate for
her loveless perception of reality. Suicide in this
context becomes the supreme act of solitude,
self-expression, and independence for her.
Edna Pontellier, then, does not share Virginia
Woolf's ability to sustain and nourish her rebellion
against the conventions of a society which are stifling
her. she attempts to change her life, but is destroyed
by the social and economic forces at work within and
outside of her. she is not successful in her attempt to
establish an independent existence. Her sense of
powerlessness at the hands of these forces ultimately
overwhelms her:
34
But as she sat there amid her guests,
she felt the old ennui overtaking her,
the hopelessness which came upon like
something extraneous, independent of
volition. It was something which
announced itself; a child beneath
that seemed to issue from some vast
cavern wherein discord wailed. There
came over her the acute longing which
always summoned into her spiritual
vision the presence of the beloved,
overpowering her at once with a sense
of the unattainable. (p.148)
Edna makes the conscious decision to commit suicide by
swimming out to sea and thereby affirms her individual
freedom and self-sufficiency as an emerging female on
the threshold of the Twentieth Century. She is a woman
alone who is striving for self-fulfillment above and
beyond her predetermined role in traditional family
life. Even though her death is symbolic of her personal
victory as a human being, it also represents her
capitulation to the social reality of her times which
forbids a female to attempt to sever her economic ties
from her husband. As a wife and a mother, she is
reliant upon her husband for financial support. He
earns the money which she spends for the house and the
children. Her active sexuality outside of marriage and
the neglect of her motherly duties underscore her quest
for fulfillment in her own right. By the end of the
novel, she has awakened to herself, but she cannot
35
reconcile her dependent status in life as a wife with
her new self-awareness as a person. Alienated and
despondent, she succumbs to her feeling of helplessness:
Exhaustion was pressing upon and over
powering her.... she looked into the
distance, and the old terror flamed
up for an instant, then sank again.
(p.190)
Her awakening is heightened by the emptiness of her
extra-marital affairs. in spite of her ostensibly happy
marriage and attentive lovers, the sterility of her life
remains. Love, in or out of marriage, is meaningless
for her. Life holds no regeneration or reconciliation
for her, only a more acute realization of the pain of
her existence on Grand Isle. There is no release for
her through or in other people, whether family, friends,
or lovers. since her quest for love has failed, she can
only achieve harmony, tranquility, and freedom in
death. By taking her own life, she asserts her
independence from a superimposed, rigid environment and
sinks into the glory of selffulfillment which eluded her
while she was alive:
There was the hum of bees, and the musky
odor of pinks filled the air. (p.190)
In an inhibiting domestic situation which parallels
Edna's, the woman in The Yellow wallpaper does not take
her own life — she goes mad instead. Suicide and
36
madness are the outcomes for both females who are
attempting to escape the socioeconomic limitations
imposed on them by an inflexible and often hostile
society, written in 1896, which is three years before
the publication of The Awakening, The Yellow Wallpaper
depicts the degrading plight of a woman who is
incarcerated by her husband in a shabby child's room
simply because she chooses the unorthodox vocation of a
writer along with being a wife and a mother. The
husbands of both women do not understand what motivates
their wives' actions, when Edna moves out of their
house, Mr. Pontellier worries about saving face with the
neighbors:
He hoped she had not acted upon her rank
impulse; and he. begged her to consider
first, foremost, and above all else, what
would people say. He was not dreaming of
scandal when he uttered this warning;
that was a thing which would never have
entered into his mind to consider in
connection with his wife's name or his
own.... It might do incalculable mischief
to his business prospects. (p.155)
He does not comprehend that her setting up her own place
of residence is the culmination of her need to make it
on her own:
Whatever was her own in the house, every
thing which she had acquired aside from
her husband’s bounty, she caused to be
transported to the other house, supplying
simple and meager deficiencies from her
37
own resources. (p.141)
He sees no relationship in her refusing his request to
come indoors at bedtime, in her failure to adhere to her
social responsibilities as the wife of a rich and
successful businessman, and in her insistence on
maintaining her own house. in The Yellow wallpaper, the
woman's husband, John, reacts with equal, though more
cynical, insensitivity:
John laughs at me, of course, but one
expects that in marriage. John is
practical in the extreme. He has no
patience with truth, an intense horror
of superstition and he scoffs openly
at any talk of things not to be felt
and seen and put down in figures.^
The woman's response to him is a pathetic cry: "You see
he does not believe I am sick! And what can one do?"
(p.10) She shares the same realization that Edna has in
her circumstances, namely a sense of emptiness and
powerlessness in a male-dominated society. This
actuality drives Edna to suicide and the woman to
madness.
The woman's cry to her doctor husband for help and
healing goes unheeded by him and his sister. In fact,
she maintains that his sister is convinced that her
writing is the cause of her illness: "I verily believe
she thinks it is the writing which made me sick."
38
(p.18) Trapped in the barred isolation of the nursery
room/ the woman succumbs to insanity:
But here I can creep smoothly on the
floor, and my shoulder just fits in
that long smooch around the wall so
I cannot lose my way. (p.35)
She joins "all those strangled heads and bulbous eyes and
wadding fungus growths of women who have capitulated and
effaced themselves" (p.34) in the void symbolized by the
hellish quality of the yellow wallpaper:
The color is repellent, almost revolting;
a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely
faded by the slow-turning sunlight.
It is a dull yet lurid orange in some
places, a sickly sulphur tint in others.
( P . 13)
By pulling off the shredded paper from the walls of her
nursery room, the woman releases her Angel in the House
totally into her life. The "phantom" becomes a real.
She becomes like "so many of those creeping women" who
"creep so fast":
But here I can creep smoothly on the floor,
and my shoulder just fits in that long
smooch around the wall so I cannot lose
my way. (p .35)
The woman's mad and frantic "creeping" reflects her
domination by her "creeping" Angel who, as Virginia
Woolf so aptly writes, is "always creeping back when I
9
thought I dispatched her." Virginia Woolf destroys
her Angel and defends "killing the Angel in the House"
39
as "part of the occupation of a woman writer." (p.238)
The woman does not and goes mad because she cannot
reconcile the dichotomy between what she wants to make
of her life and what society expects of her. Her only
vindication is to keep "creeping over him every
time"^ after her husband faints from seeing her
condition. But her grotesque, animal-like movements
over him are no recompense for her pathetic state of
mind and body.
The woman and Edna have capabilities which extend
beyond the usual confines of domestic life, but their
husbands neither appreciate nor encourage them.
Instead, the men try to keep their women in what they
perceive to be their proper place in the home as wives,
mothers, and homemakers. As a result, both women are
ruined by the restrictive environment which is forced
upon them. Whether their confinement is physical or
mental, or both, the consequences are the same for each
of the victims. Mental breakdown and suicide become the
alternatives to freedom of expression and creativity and
are no recompense for the loss of potential talent and
skill.
40
FOOTNOTES
1 Sinclair Lewis, Main street (New York: Harcourt
Brace & Howe, 1920), pp. 2 01-2.
2 Coventry Patmore, "The Angel in the House" in The
Poems of Coventry Patmore (New York: Dutton, 1876),
p. 149.
3 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper
(Old Westbury, New York: The Feminist press, 1973
(1896), p. 18.
4 Kate Chopin, The Awakening (New York: Avon
Books, 1972 (1899)), p. 16.
5 Gilman, p. 10.
6 Virginia woolf, "Professions for Women" in The
Death of the Moth and other Essays (New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1942), p. 237.
7 Chopin, p. 44.
8 Gilman, p. 9.
9 Woolf, p. 238.
10 Gilman, p. 36.
41
CHAPTER II
Awareness and Self-Expression
Both the woman in The Yellow wallpaper and Edna
Pontellier of The Awakening are attempting to expand the
narrow limits of their lives by activities which they
believe are essential for a true definition of -
themselves in their own terms. They are rebelling
against the assumption that, because they are women,
they can only find meaning and fulfillment in the home.
Turning away from their traditional roles as wives and
mothers and from the work usually associated with these
roles, they look to alternative experiences and
independent life styles as integral steps in their quest
for psychological and financial freedom as total human
beings. Their husbands, however, interpret their wives'
actions as basically incompatible with their usual
domestic functions and, more significantly, inimical to
their own perceived authority as heads of their
respective households. These men resent their wives'
movements beyond the conventions of marriage and
motherhood and react accordingly. They try to contain
their wives in different ways.
Hence the woman and Edna are confined within the
42
traditional role of the female who is emotionally and,
economically dependent upon men. In The Yellow
Wallpaper the confinement is physical as well as
mental. In The Awakening Edna perceives her inhibiting
situation and attempts to make something of her life,
but is unable to effect significant and lasting change.
She cannot translate her newly discovered perception of
herself into practical application in her life.
Mademoiselle Reisz, the pianist-friend of Edna, defines
Edna's problem in terms of her inability to attain a
clear picture of how to proceed with her life. To her,
Edna cannot complete what she has started and she finds
Edna's approach superficial:
You seem to act without a certain amount
of reflection which is necessary in this
life.1
In spite of her escape from her conventional life as a
wife and mother, Edna suffers from a lack of commitment
to art, work, or love. she cannot resolve her personal
and professional relationships in the context of her
independent thinking. Mademoiselle Reisz puts it
succinctly when she summarizes the risk involved in
making it on one's own,.particularly for a woman:
The kind that would soar above the level
plain of tradition and prejudice must have
strong wings. It is a sad spectacle to
see the weaklings bruised, exhausted,
43
fluttering back to earth. (p.138)
What Edna experiences as far as actualizing her
awakening into her daily life is not unique to her, but
common to other women who are trying to escape the
narrow domesticity which society has allotted to them.
Her failure to take the step beyond self-awareness is in
many ways due to her lack of a clear and definite role
model for a positive self image, women like Edna "do
not have images and models of self with which to shape
2
their identities, chart their experiences." The
other women in her life, particularly her friend Adele
Patignolle and the pianist Mademoiselle Reisz, are not
the right influences for Edna to emulate. To be limited
either to the busy family situation of the one or the
lonely artistic existence of the other is not the
solution for her. she wants a complete life where she
can fulfill both her emotional and creative needs with
meaningful activity within and outside of the home.
Edna never finds another female who can assist her in
dealing with her newly discovered awareness of herself
as a person. Instead, she is unable to validate her
experiences in her new context with any kind of
certainty and, consequently, struggles without any
"guidelines to tell her how to act." Edna, however,
44
does know the women to whom she does not relate and
moves away from them in her efforts to actualize what
she has learned about herself.
In Doris Lessing's Martha Quest (1952), the first
novel in her five volume series, The Children of
Violence, the heroine Martha articulates this very
condition which besets many Twentieth Century women. By
her mid-teens Martha already knows what she does not
Want — a life like her mother's or her mother's friend,
Mrs. Van Rensberg. But she does not have an alternative
to identify with. Early in the novel she verbalizes her
anxiety:
She would not like to be like
Mrs. Van Rensberg, a fat and earthy
housekeeping woman; she would not be
bitter and nagging and dissatisfied
like her mother. But then, who was
she to be like? Her mind turned
toward the heroines she had been
offered, and discarded them. There
seemed to be a gap between herself
and the past, so her thoughts swam
in a mazed and unfed way through her
mind....4
Although she is in the process of coming to the
realization that she is different from the other women
she knows, she cannot quite find her own particular
self-image. All she understands at this point is that
she is different:
For if she was often resentfully conscious
that she was expected to carry a burden
that young people of earlier times knew
nothing about, then she was not less
conscious that she was developing a weapon
which would enable her to carry it. She
was not only miserable, she could focus a
dispassionate eye on that misery. This
detached observer, felt perhaps as a clearly
lit space situated just behind the forehead,
was the gift of the Cohen boys at the station,
who had been lending her books for the last
two years. (p.8)
She eventually marries and bears children, but she still
cannot define her life in a meaningful way in the role
of only a wife and mother.
Although Martha does not find fulfillment as a wife
and mother, she still is able to have some kind of
objectivity about her unresolved situation. she is a
constant "detached observer" who can, at least,
momentarily answer some of her immediate questions and
concerns until she is able to resolve the meaning of her
whole life. In the last novel of the series, The Four
Gated City (1965), Martha attains an integrated
realization of herself, but only after a long and
painful process of social interaction and personal
introspection:
Still, she had learned that one thing,
that the most important thing, which was
that one simply had to go on, taking one
step after another; this process in
itself held the keys. And it was this
process which would, as it had in the
past, be bound to lead her around to
46
that point where — asking continuously,
softly, under one's breath, where, what
is it? How? what's next? where is the
man or woman who — she would find her
back with herself.5
The answer to her question about herself has always been
the same. she is the only resolution to her problems.
It is she who is the center of her universe, and not her
parents, husband, children, lover, or friends. She
awakens to the fact of how important she is to herself
and of how powerful this awakening is to her own life.
She discovers that she is solely responsible both to and
for herself. This personal responsiblity reinforces her
identity and gives meaning to her activities:
She thought, with the dove's voices of
her solitude: Where? But where. How?
Who? No, but where, where.... Then
silence and the birth of a repetition:
Where? Here. Here?
Here, where else, you fool, you poor
fool, where else has it been, ever....
(P.591)
Solitude for Martha, unlike Edna, is not an end in
itself or an escape from distasteful reality. It is a
process whereby she is able to answer fundamental
questions about herself, her role in life, her very
identity. Solitude becomes a means to self-discovery
and self-reliance as a whole human being. It is in the
same category as the sexual experiences that Edna and
47
Martha have outside of marriage. Edna is seeking the
same fulfillment and autonomous existence as Martha, but
she cannot sustain her independent course for very
long. Martha, on the other hand, has the power to see
the relationship between herself and her experiences,
and translate them into a meaningful explanation of her
life. she uses her extramarital affairs in her personal
journey for wholeness as a human being. she wants to
learn all she can about the world so she can be the
better for it. Never is she shackled to a
self-destructive dependence in her relations with men,
but transcends them for a more significant mission.
Virginia woolf makes the point, in A Room of one's
Own (1929), about the ideal of chastity for a woman and
its limiting effect upon her intellectual, emotional,
and physical well-being and knowledge. By being chaste,
a woman does a severe disservice to her perception of
and growth in the world. She is hampered from learning
all she can by the preconceived notion of how she should
behave socially and sexually. As Virginia Woolf says,
chastity assumes "a religious importance in a woman's
life, and has so wrapped itself round the nerves and the
instincts that to cut it free and bring it to the light
48
of day demands courage of the rarest." Edna and
Martha exhibit this "courage," but only Martha can
objectify it in terms of the relationship it has to her
quest of defining herself as a whole and integrated
human being.
Like Edna and Martha, Isadora wing, in Erica Jong's
Fear of Flying tries to reconcile the same differences
within herself about her role in life, her work, and her
loves. Rather than yearn for the limiting solitude of
Edna, she embarks upon a journey of active
self-discovery and intense interaction with the world
around her. as a female writer, she attempts to express
herself freely and independently and shirks her
affiliation with her Angel in the House. Fear of Flying
is filled with such boundless energy and spirit that the
reader is hardly surprised when Isadora's stomach
imagines itself a heart:
Was it a voice? Or was it a thump?
Something even more primitive than
speech, a kind of pounding in my
gut which I had nicknamed my 'hunger-
thump.' it was as if my stomach
thought of itself as a heart. And
no matter how I filled it — with
men, with- books, with food, with
gingerbread cookies shaped like men
and poems shaped like men and men
shaped like poems -- it refused to
be still. Unfillable — that's what
I was. Nymphomania of the brain.
Starvation of the heart.?
49
She wonders if she is not "doomed to
be hungry for life" with "this
pounding thing inside" of her. (p.166)
Erica Jong certainly instills a tremendous appetite
for living, a passionate hunger for wholeness in the
main character of the novel. Her "thump" or cry of
hunger also generates the extraordinary vitality which
characterizes much of her poetry, in Half-Lives, she
writes of "The woman who Loved to Cook":
Even her poems
were recipes.
'Hunger,' she would write, 'hunger.'
The magic word to make it go away.
But nothing filled her up
or stopped that thump.
Her stomach thought it was a heart.®
She goes one step further in "Chinese pood" when she
warns:
Your own mouth will eat you
if you don't watch out. (p.53)
Although she can be humorous and playful, her energy is
nonetheless voracious and pulls Isadora on a journey to
fulfillment as a woman, a wife, and an artist. In pear
of Flying, Isadora is attempting to resolve the
emptiness she feels within herself towards her family,
her husband and, most importantly, her career as a
writer. whether she ever does come to terms with
herself and achieve an integrated sense of identity is
50
not immediately obvious by a literal reading of the
ending of the novel. Isadora simply bathes in
Bennett's hotel bathtub. But what is obvious is her
aggressive, wholehearted, and powerful thrust to make
it intact while enjoying life and managing to keep a
lively record of it.
In a recent review of Sylvia Plath's Letters Home,
Erica Jong clarifies the relationship of the writer to
her persona in the context of an analysis of Plath's
personal and professional trials as a creative person:
We tend to confuse the artist who
mythologizes his or her own life
(among whom the major writers Colette,
Proust, Henry Miller and Anne sexton
must be counted) with the exhibitionist
who simply and inartistically spills
his guts. We do not understand that
even an artist who draws heavily on the
material of his or her own life is not
always telling the literal truth, that
there are many versions of the same
story and that a major artist will tell
the story over and over in different
ways throughout the course of his or her
life.9
Because of the remarkable similarities between her own
life and several incidents in Half-Lives and Fear of
Flying, it can be argued that Jong relies upon
autobiographical material for inspiration. Her
generalizations about the mother-daughter relationship
of an aspiring artist are as applicable to her and her
51
mother as they are to Sylvia Plath and her mother:
It is perfectly possible for a
versatile and gifted writer to write
about a hostile mother-daughter
relationship in one early novel and
yet love her own mother a great deal.
Human relations are complex. We love
and hate at the same time. Young
writers often rebel against their
families to establish their independ
ence. Young poets often rage first,
celebrate joy later. Anger is
cleansing -- but it is not all there
is to know.
And so, throughout Fear of Flying, Isadora is critical
of her family, especially of her mother; mother and
daughter have a real "love-hate" relationship:
Thirty-five years of changing fashions
and four grown daughters...thirty-five
years of buying and spending and
raising kids and screaming... and what
did my mother have to show for it?
Her sable, her mink, and her resentment?
(p.45)
Isadora’s mother supposedly gave up an artist's career
to become a mother and housewife, unfortunately, she
never let any of her children, particularly Isadora,
forget about her sacrifice. Jong releases her own
ambivalent feelings about her mother in a poem called
"Mother." In it she uses such forceful words as
"cursed," "envied," "hated," and "spat." she sums up
her mixed emotions towards her mother in one strong
line: We fought so gorgeously? (p.35) Yet the result
52
of the tension and bickering is not destructive for
Jong, but acts as a release of emotion, a "cleansing"
for her whereby she can bring about a stand-off between
"Jude" and herself:
I have made hot milk
& kissed you where you are.
I have cursed my curses.
I have cleared the air.
& now I sit here writing,
breathing you. (p.35)
By talking about her mother in verse and prose, and
about hfer family in general, Erica Jong affects a
catharsis or therapeutic purgation for herself of her
animosity towards them, as a New York born,
Barnard/Columbia educated, young Jewish writer, who is
married to an oriental psychologist and has had years of
analysis herself, Jong, or Isadora for that matter, can
be brutally honest. Her vividly descriptive,
rhetorical, and often comical style is hardly delicate,
and in her diary-like fashion she does not seem to care
for the niceties and subleties of tasteful concealment:
Times change, tastes change, and often
relatives and friends are profoundly
embarrassed by the presence of a genius
in their family tree, proud of the
association yes, but ashamed of the
work — particularly when it is truth-
telling in a not very flattering way.11
She revels in her conflicting feelings and is not afraid
to let the reader know it:
53
Ambivalence is a wonderful tune to dance
to. It has a rhythm all its own. (p.217)
She may be ironic here, but there is a lot of truth in
the statement when it is applied to her own dealings
with people, particularly with her mother.
When Isadora zelda white stollerman wing turns to
men, her disappointment far out-distances her
fulfillment. she is forever searching for the
"impossible man" of her high school fantasies, "the man
under the bed," the hero of her "zipless fuck." she and
her girl friend Pia find that men are useful for only
one thing:
We were attracted to men, but when it
came to understanding and good talk, we
needed each other. Gradually, the men
were reduced to sex objects. (p.100)
Isadora yearns for the perception and enjoyment of men
without the emotional involvement that so often drains
an affair, but is caught in a dilemma. On the other
hand, she finds it "heavy" to be without a man and, as a
teenager, "used to dream of a perfect man whose mind and
body were equally fuckable." (p.94) On the other hand,
after her picaresque adventures with Adrian in Europe,
she takes a hard look at herself and her strong needs:
What do lovers see in each other's eyes
anyway? Each other? I thought of my
crazy notion that Adrian was my mental
double and how wrong it had turned out
54
to be. That was what I had originally
wanted. A man to complete me. Papageno
to my Papagena. But perhaps that was the
most delusional of all my delusions.
People don't complete us. We complete
ourselves. If we haven't the power to
complete ourselves, the search for love
becomes a search for self-annihilation; -
and then we try to convince ourselves
that self-annihilation is love. (p.299-300)
She considers her plight as particularly female:
And the lesson is clear: being a woman
meant being harried, frustrated, and
always angry. It meant being split into
two irreconcilable halves. {p.157)
Nevertheless, she is slowly moving towards an awareness
of herself and where she is headed. Her "energy,
giggles, and wisecracks" (p.268), as well as her
penetrating introspection, blatant exaggeration, and
incessant talkativeness, become more significant for
this awareness than they appear on the surface. They,
as vital forms of therapy, lead to an integrated and
successful approach to life: "without articulation, the
12
self perishes." Her expressiveness reflects her
acceptance of the fact that she can validly define
herself in terms of her own experiences as a woman and
not have to rely solely upon the perspective of the men
in her life.
Erica Jong's last poem in Half-Lives, addressed "To
The Reader," ends:
55
I am trying to learn
to begin to begin to begin. (p.127)
Learning about the other half of life, that half
supposedly "irreconcilable" with the other, is a
painfully repetitious and exasperating process. But, by
experiencing everything that living entails and then
writing about it, she takes the essential first step on
her long journey as a female artist who keeps an
accurate journal of her travels. Her liberation means
more than the fact that she is not a secretary or a
housewife; her womanhood is not only posited in terms of
her being liberated or not being liberated in
relationship to her family or her lovers or her
husband. Her perception, acceptance, and pleasure of
herself as a complete human being who functions in a
meaningful way as a sensitive and creative female is
what matters to her now. This is the true definition of
self-fulfillment for herself and her Isadora.
When Isadora dreams of the black Colette, she first
sees herself on her own terms as a woman, and not as men
have conditioned her to think of herself:
The final dream I remember is strangest
of all. I was walking up the library
steps again to reclaim my diploma. This
time it was not Mr. McIntosh at the
lectern, but Colette. Only she was a
black woman with frizzy reddish hair
glinting around her head like a halo.
56
'There is only one way to graduate' she
said, 'and it has nothing to do with the
number of husbands.'
'What do I have to do?' I asked desper
ately, feeling I’d do anything.
She handed me a book with my name on the
cover. 'That was only a very shaky
beginning,' she said, 'but at least you
made a beginning.'
I took this to mean I still had years to go.
'wait,' she said, undoing her blouse.
Suddenly I understood that making love to
her in public was the real graduation, and
at that moment it seemed like the most
natural thing in the world. Very aroused,
I moved toward her.- Then the dream faded.
(p.290)
She is truly on her way to making a "beginning"; for the
first time she realizes that it is important to care
about women and their work independently of men. By
appreciating and relating to other creative women and
their lives, she can ultimately come to terms with
herself and free herself from the forces which shackle
and confuse her. The learning process is fraught with
emotion and intellectual suffering, but it is worth it
in the long run. Towards the end of the novel, she can
admit, if only to herself and not in public, that she
has arrived at a personal philosophy of life:
What did I mean? I meant myself, of
course. I meant that genuine
permissiveness promotes independence.
57
I meant that I was determined to take
my fate in my own hands. I meant that
I was going to stop being a schoolgirl.
But I didn't say that. Instead I
nattered on about Education and
Democracy and all sorts of generalized
garbage. (p.304)
Erica Jong starts to move from the "half-life" of
physical consciousness of mind and body, while she
never negates the beauty of the body, but rather hymns
it, she sees it as an essential stepping-stone to a
fuller perception of reality. In "Going to School in
Bed," she affirms the open and inquisitive spirit which
reaps such positive results for her:
We learn so much psychology
from the dreaming of one body
of another.
• • • •
Is it any wonder we appear
like schoolchildren dreaming:
naked
& anxious to learn. (p.35)
In this atmosphere, it does not matter to Isadora
whether she will continue to live with Bennett or
divorce him. The reader is never really sure. But what
does matter is that she has learned that she can endure
and then still come back to her husband and, more
importantly, to her work which is the force that
integrates her fragmented life. She has control over
herself and her life:
It's for this, partly, that I write.
58
How can I know what I think unless
I see what I write? My writing is
the submarine or spaceship which
takes me to the unknown worlds
within my head. And the adventure
is endless and inexhaustible. if I
learn to build the right vehicle,
then I can discover even more
territories. And each new poem is a
new vehicle, designed to delve a
little deeper (or fly a little higher)
than that the one before. (p.210)
And now, despite her difficulties, both physical and
emotional, Isadora is getting where she wants and is
making it whole,.fulfilled, and very much alive as a
woman and as a writer.
Erica Jong and her female characters like Isadora
are not really concerned with the economic
considerations of a career in writing. Rather,
Isadora's work as a writer imparts a sense of
meaningfulness and personal necessity to her life. Her
status as an individual is enlarged by the zeal and
commitment she discovers through her work. Money is
secondary to Isadora because her talents and
capabilities are challenged by the value of the work
itself. In Jong's context Isadora's value as a human
being springs from the value of the work she engages
in. And her work as a writer is the anchor which gives
her the freedom to function as a complete and integrated
person with experiences as significant as those of any
59
man.
Isadora accomplishes what Edna of The Awakening
cannot. Edna may have the "desire to free herself from
biological determinants — a necessary prerequisite to
becoming a whole person rather than an extension of
13
nature," but is unable to effect lasting change in
her life. Although she does discover new facets about
living she never knew before, she cannot translate them
into a meaningful pattern of long-term activity. she
remains confused, or at least not totally conscious,
about her own role and relationships to others in her
life. The fact that she cannot sustain any action which
is independent of the home, such as her half-hearted
attempts at art or business, indicates that she is
barely on the threshold of emotional maturity and self
awareness. By the end of Fear of Flying Isadora,
however, is completely aware of herself, of her
particular demands, and of the personal direction in her
life. She has the right attitude which is required for
success, wherever and whenever she chooses, in art,
business, or emotional relationships. Her determination
to make it provides her with the motivation she needs to
evalute her life in pragmatic, self-centered terms and
then respond in a positive and active way. As a woman
60
of the early 197 0's she has been spared much of the
Victorian censure of an Edna's extra-marital sexuality
and self-inflicted death. Instead, Isadora is very much
in charge of the forces both within and without and
realizes it, thereby attaining that self-reliant and
independent fulfillment which so many woman have been
yearning for. And Isadora's attitude toward personal
success and the drive needed for her to achieve it in
her own life are part of that same incentive which
motivates the heroine of sister Carrie to embark upon
her journey from the countryside of her birth to the
city of her desired fame and fortune.
61
FOOTNOTES
1 Kate Chopin, The Awakening (New York: Avon Books,
1972 (1899) , p. 132.
2 Carol P. Christ, Diving peep and surfacing: women
Writers on a Spiritual Quest (Boston: Beacon Press, 1980),
pp. 55-6.
3 Christ, p. 31.
4 Doris Lessing, Martha Quest (New York: New American
Library, 1952), p. 10.
5 _______________, The Four-Gated City (New York: Bantam
Books, 1965), p. 588.
6 Virginia woolf, A Room of one's own (New York:
Harcourt, Brace & world, Inc., 1929), p. 51.
7 Erica Jong, Fear of Flying (New York: New American
Library, 1973), p. 165.
8 _______________, Half Lives (New York: Holt, Rhinehart
and Winston, 1971), p. 46.
9_________________, "Letters focus Exquisite Rage of
Sylvia Plath," Los Angeles Times Book Review, 23 November
1975, p. 10.
10 Ibid., p . 10.
11 Ibid.
12 Christ, p. 6.
13 Wendy Martin, "Seduced and Abandoned in the New
World: The Image of woman in American Fiction," in Woman
in sexist society: studies in Power and Powerlessness,
ed. and intro. Vivian Gornick and Barbara K. Moran (New
York: Basic Books, 1971), p. 340.
CHAPTER III
success and Ambition
In Theodore Dreiser's novel sister Carrie (1900),
Caroline "Carrie" Meeber takes a train to Chicago as "a
half-equipped little knight... venturing to reconnoitre
the mysterious city and dreaming wild dreams of some
vague, far-off supremacy, which should make it prey and
subject — the proper penitent, grovelling at a woman's
slipper.""*' Like countless other females at the turn
of the century in the United States she seeks the
opportunities she fancies to be available to her in the
metropolis of Chicago rather than in the familiar hamlet
of Columbia City, Wisconsin:
It has been argued that the movement of
population from the farms and the small
towns to the cities at the end of the
last century and the beginning of this
was largely a women's movement, part of
the whole effort at emancipation from
domestic drudgery into self-realization
and independence.2
Turning her back on her relatives and friends, along
with the values of family life and the principles they
represent, "either she falls into saving hands and
becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan
standard of virtue and becomes worse." (p.l) Dreiser
sees no reconciliation or "balance" between the two; the
63
3
"anomymity" and "moral indifference of the city"
overwhelm her. "Her conscience is putting up a losing
4
fight" because of the "cunning wiles" of the city
with its "gleam of a thousand lights... as effective as
the persuasive light in a wooing and fascinating eye."
(p.l) Carrie's outcome in this context is no surprise:
"Self-interest with her was high, but not strong. It
was, nevertheless, her guiding characteristic." (p.2)
She goes to Chicago to make an independent life for
herself and to find the financial success she knows
Columbia City cannot provide her.
Like Carrie with her hopeful vision of Chicago,
Lutie Johnson, the Black heroine in Ann petry's novel
The Street (1946), is also a female immigrant to the
city who sees New York as her means of bettering her
life through a good job. she is as success-oriented as
Carrie and believes what her white employers acknowledge
to be the benefits of constant industriousness:
After a year of listening to their talk,
she absorbed some of the same spirit.
The belief that anybody could be rich
if he wanted to and worked hard enough
and figured it out carefully enough....
She and Jim [her husband] could do the
same thing, and she thought she saw what
had been wrong with them before — they
hadn't tried hard enough, worked long
enough, saved enough. There hadn't been
any one thing they wanted above and
beyond everything else. These people had
64
wanted only one thing -- more and more
money — and so they got it.^
Both women hold money, by its acquisition and
manifestation in their lives, as the true and accurate
measure of their success. Carrie is attracted to those
who she thinks are rich and prosperous, namely Drouet
the salesman and Hurstwood the restauranteur. Lutie
approaches Boots, the Black manager for the white night
club owner Junto, for a loan to pay legal fees for her
son who has gotten into trouble. She knows who in the
ghetto has the money she so desperately needs, but
cannot get on her own.
a
For Carrie money is "something everybody else has
and I must get." (p.51) whether it be the twenty
dollars Drouet gives her to buy winter clothing or the
modern apartment in New York that Hurstwood gets for
Carrie and himself to begin their new life together,
money and what it can obtain
are what she wants:
Some of it she now held in her hand --
two soft, green ten-dollar bills -- and
she felt that she was immensely better
off for the having of them. It was
something that was power in itself. (p.51)
It can buy all the modern conveniences of a Manhattan
apartment:
Carrie picked out the new abode because
of its newness and bright wood-work. It
65
was one of the very new ones supplied
with steam heat, which was a great
advantage. The stationary range, hot and
cold water, dumb-waiter, speaking tubes,
and call-bell for the janitor pleased her
very much. (p.236)
Lutie's Harlem apartment, however, stands in stark contrast
to Carrie's Central Park west flat, with the little money
Lutie has, it is all she is able to afford:
Impatiently she [Lutie] forced herself
to inspect the kitchen; holding the
light on first one wall, then another.
.... The sink was battered; and the gas
stove was a little rusted. The faint
smell of gas that hovered about it
suggested a slow, incurable leak some
where in the connections.
Peering into the bathroom, she saw that
the fixtures were old-fashioned and deeply
chipped. she thought Methuselah himself
might well have taken baths in the tub.
(p.16)
Nonetheless, like Carrie, Lutie considers the apartment
for what it represents to her: "Now that she had this
apartment, she was just one step further up on the
ladder of success." (p.26)
Getting the apartment is part of her plan to make a
better life for herself and her son Bub. Not wanting to
go back to her job as a hand presser in a steam laundry,
Lutie struggles through a few years of business college
until she can master typing and other secretarial
skills: "For she had made up her mind that she wasn't
66
going to wash dishes or work in a laundry in order to
earn a living for herself or Bub." (p.55) she believes
what the white world preaches: "It's the richest damn
country in the world." (p.55) what she forgets is that
the wealth is reserved for whites, not for Blacks like
her. But she still wants to share in that affluence and
will struggle to get it. she attempts some civil
service examinations and finally passes one. The only
job she is qualified for is an appointment as a file
clerk. The pay is not enough to support her and Bub, so
she goes to work as a domestic for a rich family in
Connecticut. In spite of her present circumstances, she
refuses to give up because "she would fight back and
never stop fighting back" (p.57) for the promise of
luxury and happiness that she sees daily on subway
billboard advertisements:
For, the advertisements she was looking
at pictured a girl with incredible blonde
hair. The girl leaned close to a dark
haired, smiling man in a navy uniform.
They were standing in front of a kitchen
sink — a sink whose white porcelain
surface gleamed under the train lights.
The faucets looked like silver. The
linoleum floor of the kitchen was a
crisp black-and-white pattern that
pointed up the sparkle of the room.
Casement windows. Red geraniums in
yellow pots. (p.28)
She wants the brand new kitchen in an apartment just
67
like the one a white girl might enjoy.
But the white girl Carrie had not always had the
glamorous surroundings which affluence can afford, when
she first came to Chicago she lived with her sister
Minnie and her husband in a lower class working
people'sneighborhood.
Minnie's flat, like her life as the wife of a cleaner of
railroad refrigerator cars at the stockyards, is "lean
and narrow":
The walls of the rooms were discordantly
papered. The floors were covered with
matting and the hall laid with a thin rag
carpet. One could see that the furniture
was of that poor, hurriedly patched
together quality sold by the installment
houses. (pp.9-10)
Minnie's pathetic apartment and, more importantly, the
existence which it symbolizes have absolutely no appeal
for Carrie. Unlike Minnie and her husband, Carrie is
not "of a clean, saving disposition." (p.9) she cannot
build a house of her own from the meager savings of a
life of hard work. Her dreams are on a grander scale.
Perhaps a Lutie can relate to Minnie and her husband
Hanson's ambitious savings plan because she, like them,
is more future than present-oriented in her lifestyle.
She is even willing to give up regular visits home while
she works in Connecticut to save a little money. Her
68
V
son and her husband Jim would just have to see less of
her and sacrifice their relationship as a family for a •
promise of something better in the distant future:
...she began going home only once in
two months pointing out to Jim how she
could save the money she would have
spent for train fare. (p.44)
Carrie makes an attempt to adjust to the tedious
routine of living with her sister and trying to find and
keep a job at the same time, she has difficulty
accepting what Minnie and her husband expect her fate to
be:
A shop girl was the destiny prefigured
for the newcomer. she would get in one
of the great shops and do well enough
until -- Well, until something happened.
Neither of them knew exactly what. They
did not figure on promotion. They did
not exactly count on marriage. Things
would go on, though, in a dim kind of
way until the better thing would
eventuate, and Carrie would be rewarded
for coming and toiling in the city. (pp.11-12)
With such bleak prospects Carrie seeks factory work in
Chicago. After several unsuccessful attempts at
employment, she is finally hired in a shoe factory. It
is a dismal environment, and Dreiser’s description of
the poor working conditions is realistic, indicting the
capitalism of the day:
Under better material conditions, this
kind of work would not have been so bad,
but the new socialism which involves
69
pleasant working conditions for employees
had not then taken hold upon manufacturing
companies. (p.31)
Carrie cannot sustain the physical conditions of the
factory or the vulgarity of its workers, when the workday
ends, she can hardly wait to get out of the building:
She felt a slight relief, but it was only
at her escape. she felt ashamed in the
face of better dressed girls who went by.
She felt as though she should be better
served, and her heart revolted. (p.33)
Her sister's husband, Hanson, cannot understand nor
accept Carrie's rejection of the factory and its work
ethic. He can only translate his feelings about her
reaction in terms of "a full career of vanity and
wastefulness which a young girl might indulge in...."
(p.26) Carrie, however, with her "slight gift of
observation and that sense, so rich in every woman -
intuition" (p.9), realizes that she does not belong to
the tedious, dead-end world of factories and shops. The
grim, low-paying monotony of factory work cannot give
her what she wants:
The machine girls impressed her even less
favorably. They seemed satisfied with
their lot, and were in a sense "common".
Carrie had more imagination than they.
She was not used to their slang. Her
instinct in the matter of dress was naturally
better. (p.42)
So, the "little soldier of fortune" (p.48) Carrie
70
Meeber takes up with the slick drummer Charles H.
Drouet, becomes his mistress, and then leaves him for
the more sophisticated G. W. Hurstwood, manager of
Fitzgerald and Moy's restaurant, haven to "hundreds of
actors, merchants, politicians, and the general run of
successful characters about town." (p.35) she becomes
economically dependent upon both men until she can
sustain herself in her own right as a successful New
York actress, once she revels in the glory and success
of her dramatic power on the stage her two lovers are
meaningless to her. In one of her early performances
she recites her lines, "scarcely hearing the small,
scheduled reply of her lover," (p.152) who is portrayed
by an unknown actor. Rather, "putting herself even more
in harmony with the plaintive melody now issuing from
the orchestra," she continues, " 'love is all a woman
has to give,' and she laid a strange, sweet accent on
the all, 'but it is the only thing which God permits us
to carry beyond the grave.'" (pp.152-53) Love is
exactly what she does not and will not give, either to
Drouet or Hurstwood. Her desire for success will not
allow her to expend her talent and efforts on anyone
except herself and her career, as unmindful of her
stage lover as she is of her two real ones in the
71
audience, she is more responsive to the subdued refrain
emanating from the impersonal darkness of the orchestra
below than to the living human beings seated in front of
her. she is successful precisely because she is able to
g
"remain emotionally aloof from the men in her life."
By keeping her emotional distance from them she can
concentrate solely upon her theatrical career and the
money that comes to her from her work. she does not
have to share her time or effort with a man or become
distracted from her quest to be a successful and wealthy
actress by a romantic entanglement.
Lutie fails where Carrie succeeds. she does not
find a career; only the drudgery of housekeeping is
available to her as a Black female. Any economic
dependence she exerts upon a man as an attractive,
unmarried female means a life of prostitution to her.
And she is not willing to do this. In a way, she is
7
"handicapped by a sense of moral integrity" since she
will not take up living with any man unless he is her
husband. She is separated from her husband Jim and will
not go with any one else, other ghetto females live in
an unmarried state with men and are supported
accordingly. she prefers to set out on her own and does
not make it. Her husband has left her for another
72
woman, and her son does not understand what motivates
his mother. He takes up shining shoes to please her,
but she is horrified. He protests that he did it for
her:
You said we had to have money. You kept
' saying it. I was only trying to earn
some money by shining shoes," he gulped.
(p.69-70)
Then he is caught stealing from mailboxes, and Lutie
tries to borrow money to hire a lawyer. Her would-be
benefactor Boots wants to lock her in his apartment and
rape her and then turn her over to his boss Junto for
his pleasure. In a wild rage, she kills Boots and
thereby destroys everything which he and his kind
symbolize to her:
A lifetime of pent-up resentment went
into the blows.... First she was
venting her rage against the dirty
crowded street. Finally, and the blows
were heavier, faster now, she was
striking at the white world from which
there was not escape. (p.266)
Not only does Lutie have to confront the fact of her
sex when looking for a job, she also has to cope with
the reality of her race. The question never arises as
to whether she has to work or not. There is no choice
for her as a solitary Black female who is fighting for
survival in the bleak streets of Harlem. Beyond
sustaining herself and her son she even dares to hope
73
for a better-paying job by going to night school after
working all day. But her hope is dashed by the hostile
forces about her. The city, with its "dirt and dust and
grime on the sidewalk" (p.2), offers no salvation for
her. Unlike Carrie who believes that "the streets, the
lamps, the lighted chamber set for dining, are for me",
(p.6) Lutie sees the city and its streets in a
different context. She is on the brink of emotional and
economic disaster. Carrie, however, when she arrives in
Chicago, "is not starving; she is far from destitution;
she has two decent homes to go back to. what is at
O
stake is not Carrie's survival but her growth."
Lutie never reaches this point during the novel. At
the end she abandons her son and takes a train to
Chicago, ostensibly to start over. She has given up all
hope in the dream of personal success:
The trouble was with her. She had
built up a fantastic structure made
from the soft, nebulous, cloudy stuff
of dreams. There hadn't been a solid,
practical brick in it, not even a
foundation. She had built it up of air
and vapor and moved right in. so of
course it had collapsed. It had never
existed anywhere but in her own mind.
(pp.307-08)
Carrie does acquire all the money and material comforts
that Lutie dreamed about. But financial success is not
enough for her; she has "neither surfeit nor content"
74
(p.399) with it. she continues to dream, all by herself
sitting in her rocking chair and gazing out the window:
Though often disillusioned, she was
still waiting for that halycon day when
she should be led forth among dreams
become real. (p.398)
Her physical well-being has no relationship to what she
envisions real happiness to be. And Dreiser concludes
his story with a picture of Carrie's inner frustration
in spite of her outwardly successful life. Her own
standards and measurements for success are set too high
even for herself. Consequently, Carrie remains "much
alone, a lone figure in a tossing, thoughtless sea"
(p.8) right to the end of the novel.
Carrie's internal s'tate is a result of decisions she
made in the course of her life to become successful in a
man's world. She has not had to contend with a preset
condition like Lutie has where Black "women had to work
to support the families because the men couldn't get
jobs and the men got bored and pulled out and the kids
were left without proper homes because there was nobody
9
around to put a heart into it." Lutie has very few
choices to make about her life, since her primary
concern is focused on survival for her family and
herself. Yet, she decides to retain her personal
integrity and refuses to compromise herself as Carrie
75
does to get ahead. It is not as if she does not have
the opportunity to do so, but she chooses what she
believes is honorable, thereby saving what Carrie
sacrifices for money, power, and prestige. Lutie's
success as a moral person who is striving for self-
sufficiency and economic independence for outdistances
her failure to make it in a material way. Although she
is victimized by a society which views her race, sex,
and poverty in the same oppressive context that the
characters of Brown Girl, Brownstones find themselves,
she tries to come away from the .hardships in her life as
a decent and free human being.
76
FOOTNOTES
1 Theodore Dreiser, sister Carrie (New York:
Doubleday, Page & Company, 1900), p. 2.
2 Mark schorer, Sinclair Lewis: An American Life
(New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1961), p.
242 .
3 Robert W. Smuts, Women and Work in America (New
York: Schoken Books, 1974), p. 123.
4 Smuts, p. 123.
5 Ann Petry, The street (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1946) , p. 43.
6 Gerald Willen, "Dreiser's Moral seriousness,"
University of Kansas city Review, 23 (March 1957), p.
_ _
7 Thelma J. shinn, "Women in the Novels of Ann
Petry,"
Critique, 16, no. 1 (1974), p. 111.
8 Ellen Moers, "The Finesse of Dreiser," The
American scholar, 33 (Winter 1963), p. 112.
9 Petry, p. 206.
CHAPTER IV
The Factory Girl
Paule Marshall, in her first novel Brown Girl,
Brownstones (1959), depicts the settlement of Barbadian
West Indians into a crumbling neighborhood in old
Brooklyn and traces their adjustment to an alien
American way of life through the eyes of her young
protagonist, Selina Boyce. The girl is on the threshold
of becoming a woman, and, just as her people struggle to
establish themselves in a white society, so does selina
mature and grow in this atmosphere. Through her
iron-willed mother, silla, and her dreamy father,
Deighton, selina sees the traditions of Barbados and the
United States confront each other and often clash. If
these traditions manage to avoid a head-on collision,
they are capable of making a truce, sometimes uneasily.
This truce leads to a new, but often painful, merger and
compromise of their cultural diferences.
The author deals with ethnic considerations, and
specifically with the racial implications for a group of
Black strangers transplanted in an unsympathetic and
hostile white world. Going beyond racial
considerations, Mrs. Marshall is heralding emerging
78
women/ in particular Black Barbadian women and their
efforts to succeed in their new land. These women are
somehow changing in their Brooklyn brownstones. They
have left the tropical landscape of a Caribbean island;
now they must labor to attain the physical comforts
which the new, complex, and impersonal civilization
imposes upon them. This civilization is characterized
by the rapid growth of industrialization and its
mechanized world of factories. To make it in this
environment, these females must strive to compete with
whites and with each other to forge a better life for
themselves. It is difficult for them to retain the past
sense of wholeness and freedom which they once shared in
Barbados when they have strong ambitions to succeed in
America. The motto of "The Association of Barbadian
Homeowners and Businessmen" perhaps best epitomizes
their new-found appetite for success:
IT IS NOT THE DEPTHS FROM WHICH WE
COME BUT THE HEIGHTS TO WHICH WE ASCEND.1
The forceful desire to succeed also engulfs Selina's
mother, Silla Boyce, with a tremendous passion; she
envies the Association and its good fortune:
The weight of their successes weakened
her and she fumbled blindly for the
overturned chair and sat down with her
head bowed and the lines of her face
downcurved in bitter design. 'It's not
79
that I's avaricious or money-mad,' she
whispered to herself.... 'But c'dear, if
you got a piece of man you want to see
him make out like the rest. You want to
see yourself improve. Isn't that why
people does come to this place?' (p.144)
One of the overriding concerns of the novel now becomes
evident, what Paule Marshall has done, through the
Association and silla, is bind her views on race and sex
to her "interest in the subject of power,...
particularly with groups — women and Blacks — where
2
roles have been defined by powerlessness." Power is
symbolized by the brute force and energy of industrial
machinery in Brown Girl Brownstones. it has its most
dynamic manifestation in the novel when selina sees her
mother working in a war factory. The noisy machines of
the factory dominate the workers:
The sound always recalled to her [selina]
the machines at the factory. Its theme
was the same one of impending ruin. The
machine-force pervaded them, it seemed —
was shaping them — and they could not
help but echo it. (p.151)
It is as if machine technology has become a real
dimension of far-reaching consequences for the people
who have to deal with it directly. selina herself is a
Twentieth Century female thrust into a strange country
while desperately trying to find her identity in the
complex environment symbolized by the machinery of the
80
century. The anonymity and the might of the machine
power is over-whelming to her. Yet, she learns that she
must either master the new force or be mastered by it.
She must bring the machine power into proper perspective
in her life and not be intimidated by its impersonal and
dehumanizing presence.
At this point in the novel selina is still learning
about her world which is rapidly changing. she is
frightened by the specter of the machines in the factory:
And just as the noise of each machine had
been welded into a single howl, so did
the machines themselves seem forged into
one sprawling, colossal machine. This
machine-mass, this machine-force was ugly,
yet it had grandeur. It was a new creative
force, the heart of another, larger, form
of life that had submerged all others, and
the roar was its heartbeat--not the ordered
systole and diastole of the human heart
but a frenetic lifebeat all its own. (p.99)
On her way to the factory, selina is surrounded by the
dark and inhuman atmosphere permeating it. It is
described as "another bleak building leaning black
against the black sky." (p.97) Only a cat reminds her
that she is still very much alive and a part of the
greater living family:
And then a cat, its belly sagging with
young, ambled over and brushed her leg
with its tail--the one warm gesture in
a cold country. (p.97)
She surveys the bowels of the factory and thereby
81
realizes the real threat of power:
The workers, white and colored, clustered
and scurried around the machine-mass,
trying, it seemed, to stave off the
destruction it threatened. They had built
it but, ironically, it had overreached
them, so that now they were only small
insignificant shapes against its over
whelming complexity. (p.99)
The workers' former world is gone, and now, "their
movements mimicked its [the machine's] mechanical
gestures .... And no one talked." (p.99) They have
become subservient to the machines they operate.
More overwhelming then the workers' robot-like
movements is Selina's mother's reaction to the factory.
She belongs here and fits into the mechanical scheme of
things:
Silla worked at an old-fashioned lathe
which resembled an oversized cookstove,
and her face held the same transient calm
which often touched it when she stood at
the stove at home. Like the others, her
movements were attuned to the mechanical
rhythms of the machine-mass. (p.59)
Somehow, reasons selina, Silla is stronger than the
machines:
Only the mother's own formidable force
could match that of machines; only
the mother could remain indifferent
to the brutal noise. (p.100)
For Silla's adjustment seems natural since she always
82
was comfortable with power. The mother also has a way
with words that few others share: "she [selina]
wondered at the mother's power with words." (p.71)
Certainly silla fits in well with her new environment of
machine power and articulates her identity within its
context.
Selina's father, Deighton, however, cannot
understand the stress and motion of his new existence.
He is nostalgic for his old Caribbean island and refuses
to conform to the machine power, as a result, he is
destroyed by it. His arm is crushed by a machine at the
factory, suggesting symbolically that its power resents
his weak presence, unlike his wife he makes no effort
to accommodate himself to his changing circumstances:
The sound became the machines roaring at
the factory, and she saw him, a slim
figure with an ascetic's face standing amid
that giant complex of pistons and power,
shuddering inside each time the steam
jettisioned up and the machine stamped
down. (p.155)
He is a broken man, unable to adjust to America and its
technological demands, when selina sees her father, she
observes a man whose spirit has been leveled by a
society he cannot and will not comprehend or embrace:
He lay down fully clothed, the newspapers
next to him and the bandaged arm across
his chest. His whole body seemed as limp
as that arm. All of him might have been
83
sucked into the machine and crushed. And
because he was so limp, he seemed quiet
inside, a kind of dead peace hovered about
him. (p.158)
Selina's apprehension about power centers around the
dehumanizing effect it has on people. she begins to
realize its impact when she considers the Association:
They were no longer individuals suddenly
but a single puissant force, sure of its
goal and driving hard toward it. Their
surety of purpose frightened her. It
was enviable. (p.222)
The "force" of the Association emulates the power of
American capitalism with its industrial machinery:
"It's a sign that we has a business mind!" (p.221)
When all the complexities of power dawn on selina, she
cannot allow herself to be near or to become a member of
the Association. she finally rails against it:
And why does it stink? Because it's the
result of living by the most shameful
code possible--dog eat dog, exploitation,
the strong over the weak, the end
justifies the means— the whole kit and
caboodle. (p.227)
Her rejection of the machine power of the factory
does not signify her psychological return to her
previous life in Barbados. she never negates
mechanization as a legitimate means for making it in the
relentless and aggressive technological American
society. Rather she is perceptive enough to comprehend
84
that the factories and their machines are "the
prerequisites for survival"^ in her newly acquired
culture. Her awareness of the lessons drawn from the
factory workers around her demonstrates that she can
understand how family and friends fit into the general
scheme of things:
Faces hung like portraits in her mind as
she walked down Fulton street: suggie
and her violated body, Miss Mary living
posthumously amid her soiled sheets, Miss
Thompson bearing the life-sore and
enduring, Clive and his benign despair,
her father beguiled by dreams even as he
drowned in them, the mother hacking a way
through life like a man lost in the bush.
(p.307)
Selina will hardly be "hacking a way through life like a
man lost in the bush;" she, unlike her mother, will not
compromise herself by assuming an insensitive and
dominant role in the power process. She can put the
Association in the right context and relate her own need
for purpose and meaning to it:
Thus, for the Association, there was,
surprisingly, a part of her that enjoyed
the sense of importance and power, that
could speak persuasively and subtly impose
her will, that could dissemble....(p .274)
She is beginning to recognize who she is and what she
wants to do with her life. The process of self-
awareness is a painful one for her, but necessary for
her growth as a sensitive and caring human being. By
85
adjusting to the stark reality of factory work and its
powerful machinery, she takes the first significant step
towards the integration of contradictory elements in
life as a Black female. she learns how imperfect it
is. Paule Marshall herself sees selina's process as an
essential journey for the Black female "to understand
that out of suffering have come a toughness of spirit,
an understanding of human life, a style and a poetry
4
which are precious and enduring." selina discovers
her identity in terms of race and sex:
Those eyes were a well-lighted mirror
in which, for the first time, selina
truly saw--with a sharp and shattering
clarity--the full meaning of her black
skin.
And knowing was like dying--like poised
on the rim of time when the heart's
simple rhythm is syncopated and then
silenced and the blood chills and
congeals, when a' pall passes in a dark
wind over the eyes. in that instant
of death, false and fleeting though it
was, she was beyond hurt. (p.289 )
Like silla Boyce, Roberta Alden in Theodore
Dreiser's novel An American Tragedy (1925), attempts to
make a better life for herself by seeking work in a
factory rather than remaining on the family farm. As
another ambitious female immigrant who moves from a
rural to an urban area, she is lured by the
opportunities she believes the new mechanism of industry
86
can provide her. Her father, like Selina's father
Deighton, is a failure:
Titus Alden was one of that vast company
of individuals who are born, pass through
and die out of the world without ever
quite getting any one thing straight.
They appear, blunder, and end in a fog.5
Titus is a poor man who lacks the imagination or courage
to try his hand at something other than farming to
improve his family's low standard of living. in spite
of their poverty, he rears all of his children to be
ethical in their dealings with others, and they, as a
result, are "excellent, as conventions, morals and
religions go — honest, upright, God-fearing and
respectable." (p.244) Roberta is no exception; she
shares the same decency and integrity that characterizes
the young Selina.
But, like Selina's mother silla, she wants more out
of life than just a poverty-stricken, rural existence:
"because of her innate imagination, she was always
thinking of something better.... A newer and greater
life." (p.245) She hopes she can make her dream for a
better life materialize if she can marry the right man.
Using "her beauty or charm" to "smite bewitchingly and
so irresistably the soul of a given man or men”
(p.245), she believes she has a chance. inevitably, she
87
meets Clyde Griffiths, the foreman in a shirt-collar
factory in Lycurgus, New York when she applies for a
job. She is impressed with him and can empathize with
his feelings about his own fate in life: "in relation
to his family and his life, she too considered her life
a great disappointment." (p.243) Clyde's desire for
money and success is so contagious that Roberta "was
seized with the very virus of ambition that afflicted
him." (p.243) Her association with him heightens what
she has always wanted out of life.
Even before Roberta met Clyde she tried to elevate
herself. First as a clerk in a dry goods store and then
as a worker in a hosiery mill, she used what little free
time she had "for some further form of practical
education — a course at a business college at Homer or
Lycurgus or somewhere which might fit her for something
better -- book-keeping or stenography." (p.246) She
was unable to complete her business education because
she kept giving what little money she saved for it to
her destitute family. Finally she decided she had to
leave them and find a factory job on her own in
Lycurgus. she hoped she could rekindle her dream for
emotional and financial success through her relocation
there:
88
This big city. This fine Central Avenue
with its stores and moving picture theaters.
These great mills. And again this
Mr. Griffiths, so young, attractive, smiling
and interested in her. (p.249)
Clyde's interest in: her, however, transcends "her social
and moral training and mood." (p.248) He epitomizes
"the Everyman of desire" who "goes doggedly after the
goals set in his path by his society...: pretty girls,
nice clothes, sweet foods, good times, and the money and
leisure to procure them."^ Roberta's background
demands something more permanent and substantial; Clyde
only sees sexual adventure in their relationship:
And if now Roberta was obviously willing
to sacrifice herself for him in this
fashion, must there not be others? (p.300)
He questions his willingness to marry her, even after
she becomes pregnant:
For after all, who was she? A factory girl'.
The daughter of parents who lived and worked
on a farm and one who was compelled to work
for her own living. (p.301)
He feels he deserves someone better, like the rich
society girl sondra Finchley, what he forgets is that
Roberta is different from the usual factory girls he
knows: "she was still, in part, at least, a reflection
of the religious and moral notions there and then
prevailing — the views of the local ministers and the
laity in general." (p.244)
89
Roberta agonizes over her illicit affair with
Clyde. Because of her background and upbringing, "she
is aware of her difficult position, and part of her
7
tragedy is implicit m this awareness." Through her
realization of what is happening to her, she is
apprehensive about the consequences of her actions:
Nevertheless, her underlying thought in
connection with all this, insofar as Clyde
and his great passion for her was concerned
-- and hers for him -- was that she was
indeed trifling with fire and perhaps social
disgrace in the bargain The course she
was pursuing was dangerous - that she knew.
And yet how, as she now so often asked
herself at moments when she was confronted
by some desire which ran counter to her
sense of practability and social morality,
was she to do?
But she persists in seeing Clyde and looks upon him as
the sole way of alleviating her past miseries and the
hope of a better life to come:
For here was true and poignant love, and in
youth true and poignant love is difficult to
withstand. Besides it was coupled with the
most stirring and grandiose illusions in
regard to Clyde's local material and social
condition.... And her own home, as well as
her personal situation, was so unfortunate
-- no promise of any kind save in his direction,
(p.293)
She gives herself to Clyde, and thereby confirms her
destruction, both emotionally and physically, at his
hands. Like silla, she believes wholeheartedly in the
dream of personal success and is consumed with it.
90
Clyde, like the powerful machinery in silla's factory,
symbolizes the means of actualizing all the desires and
aspirations in her life. But, also like that factory
machinery, he can be destructive to any individual he
may encounter, particularly to the trusting Roberta.
Unlike selina, Roberta cannot extricate herself from
the immediacy of emotion and evaluate the situation in
terms of herself and her relationship to it. She and
her hopes are dashed. Dreiser is sympathetic to her,
but the author's compassion does not soften the reality
of her plight in any way. Roberta fails where selina
succeeds. She succumbs to the dehumanizing force of her
newly discovered mechanical world of the factory.
After Roberta meets Clyde, she is unable to come to
terms with herself and her state in life as selina
does. She does not share the clear perception which
characterizes Selina's evaluation of the realities
around her. in Clyde Roberta sees the solution to her
problems. she gives up her quest for a better job and
becomes obsessed with the thought of marrying him,
particularly since she is pregnant. But her condition
does not evoke in Clyde any compassion or disturb his
conscience about her. He rejects her. she refuses to
accept it and tries to force marriage on him. Her
91
delusions destroy her, and she drowns in a lake while
Clyde looks on. swept up by emotions that she can no
longer control, she dies without realizing any of her
dreams of personal and financial success, unlike the
working women in The Job, Alice Adams, and Kitty Foyle,
Roberta sacrifices her self-reliance to pursue a bad
romance. These other women, rather than continue with
deteriorating personal relationships, direct their
energies to the cold comfort of their jobs.
FOOTNOTES
1 Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, Brownstones (New
York: Random House, 1959) , p . 220 .
2 Lloyd w. Brown, "The Rhythms of Power in Paule
Marshall's Fiction," Novel, 7 (Winter 1974), p. 159.
3 Brown, p. 16 2.
4 Paule Marshall, "Shadow and Act," Mademoiselle
(June 1974) , p. 83.
5 Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy (New York:
The New American Library, 1953 (1925)), p. 244.
6 Ellen Moers, Two Dreisers (New York: The viking
Press, 1969), pp. 228-29.
7 Charles Shapiro, Theordore Dreiser: Our Bitter
Patriot (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University
Press, 1962), p. 105.
CHAPTER V
The White Collar Girl
Women who know the joys and sorrows of
a pay envelope do not speak of girls who
work as working Girls. Neither do they
use the term Labouring Class, as one
would speak of a distinct and separate
race, like the Ethiopian.^
Many American women who drew "a pay envelope" in the
first third of this century earned their wages in an
office rather than a factory setting. They were the
secretaries, clerks, and stenographers who, if they did
not marry, hoped to join the ranks of the career girls
and other successful businesswomen. Called "white
2
collar girls" during the 1930's, they usually left a
small, rural town to make their fame and fortune in the
big cities like Chicago or New York. They possessed
modest backgrounds and were deeply rooted in Christian
and middle class values. some had a knowledge of
business subjects, either through classes in high school
or at a specialized business school. A number of them
were seeking work in the offices of America because they
really had no choice. They might have prefered to
attend college, marry, and raise a family. But their
fathers could have met an untimely death, and they were
94
compelled to become the support of the mothers who, by
disposition or lack of training, were incapable of
sustaining their families. Or, their fathers' business
ventures proved unsuccessful, and they decided to set
out on their own to earn a living in the world of
business. Novelists such as Sinclair Lewis in The Job
(1917), Booth Tarkington in Alice Adams (1921), and
Christopher Morley in Kitty Foyle (1939) depicted these
women's lives with pointed, and often painful, accuracy.
As they embarked upon their jobs in business, many
of the white collar girls got a rude awakening to the
bias of the times against working women. The drunken
salesman husband of Una Golden, the heroine of The Job,
voices this popular opinion to his wife in a tense scene
in the novel. Their marriage is on the rocks, and una
is about to return to work to support herself, since her
first husband, Julius schirtz, is too drunk most of the
time to hold down a permanent job. He rails at her:
You women that have been in business
simply ain't fit to be married. You
think you're too good to help a man.
Yes, even when you haven't been
anything but dumb stenographers. I
never noticed that you were such a
whale of a success.... Yes, sir, I
tell you business simply unfits a
skirt for marriage.3
Una leaves him and returns to the world of work she had
95
given up two years ago to devote her full attention to
their marriage.
When she first met Julius she was experiencing the
drudgery of office life and the loneliness of a single
woman in an impersonal and dull business environment.
The prospect of life at the office as a long-term
clerical worker frightens her, and she questions her
role in it:
But now and then one of them would start
to weep, cry for an hour together, with
her white head on a spotty desk-blotter,
till she forgot her homelessness and use
lessness. Epidemics of hysteria would
spring up sometimes, and women of thirty-
five or forty -- normally well content —
would join the old ladies in sobbing.
Una would wonder if she would be crying
like that at thirty-five — and at sixty-
five, with thirty barren, weeping years
between. Always she saw the girls of
twenty-two getting tired, the women of
twenty-eight getting dry and stringy, the
women of thirty-five in a solid maturity of
large-bosomed and widowed spinsterhood, the
old women purring and catty and tragic....
(pp. 233-34)
It is not surprising that una marries Julius schirtz.
The alternative seems more devastating. In the course
of the novel Lewis has Una redirect her life twice. She
"first takes marriage to escape 'the job'; later she
4
gladly takes ’the job* to escape marriage!" But her
second job is not in the same category as the monotonous
routine of her first. She joins a real estate company
96
and becomes its first female to sell property. Then she
is promoted to sales manager and put in charge of five
other women. Finally, she is a partner in a successful
hotel business.
By her second job the mature una Golden has come a
long way from the naive, aspiring young woman who left
Panama, Pennsylvania with her recently widowed mother to
become a "stenographer, a secretary to a corporation
president, a rich woman, free and responsible" (p.12) in
New York City. Unlike her mother who "was one of the
women who aspire just enough to be vaguely discontented;
not enough to make them toil at the acquisition of
understanding and knowledge," (p.14) una makes up her
mind to excel and studies at the public library to
compensate for her lack of a college education:
She wanted to learn, learn anything. But
the Goldens were too respectable to permit
her to have a job, and too poor to permit
her to go to college. (p.5)
After her father dies, she has to work. As a female,
her options are limited, but she is willing to try to
make a go of it:
She and her fellows are doomed, unless
they met by chance with marriage or death;
or unless they crawled to the top of the
heap. And this last she was determined to
do. Though she did not hope to get to the
top without unduly kicking the shrieking
mass of slaves beneath her, as the bright
97
young men learned to do. (p.236 )
By her desire to succeed at the office she is making a
genuine attempt "to define herself in terms of work...
5
and to find a meaningful way of living her life"
under less than desirable circumstances.
The author, however, is not satisfied with Una's
success only at the office. she has to become the
perfect and ideal wife and mother as well as the
outstanding business woman:
I will keep my job — if I've had this
world of offices wished on me, at least
I'll conquer it, and give my clerks a
decent time,' the business woman meditated.
But just the same — oh, I am a woman, and
I do need love. I want Walter, and I want
his child, my own baby and his. (p.327)
In a visionary way she hopes for a better business
environment for all women and yearns for the fruition of
her utopian dream:
She endeavored to picture a future in
which women, the ordinary,
philoprogenitive, unambitious women,
would have some way out besides being
married or killed off. She envisioned
a complete change in the fundamental
purpose of organized business from the
increased production of soap — or
books or munitions — to the increased
production of happiness. (p.235)
Una manages to achieve personal and professional
happiness in her own life at the end of the novel by
98
combining a successful career with a happy marriage. In
view of the arduously depicted business world throughout
the story, it seems implausible that such an idealistic
union can be effected. To this point, love and business
success are inimical. Then suddenly they are joined
together in the life and career of una Golden. The
ending of The Job is jarring to the unity of the novel
as a whole and negates the initial promise of realism
rather than fantasy in a tale about business. The
jacket of the first edition of the book sets the tone of
the novel to follow and claims that veracity will be
contained within:
For the woman who works: Her own
existence, not told as a pink
romance but as LIFE.
Somehow the novel's unrealistic conclusion is unable to
overpower the harsh realities of the office for both una
and the other women who have to work. Their happiness
is superfluous to the dehumanized, profit-motivated
business world whose overwhelming machinery symbolizes
the tight grip it has on the lives of its employees:
Machines are the Pemberton force, and
their greatest rivals were the machines
of steel and wood, at least one of which
each new efficiency expert left behind
him: machines for opening letters and
sealing them, automatic typewriters,
dictation phonographs, pneumatic chutes.
But none of the other machines was so
99
tyrannical as the time-clock. (p.234)
The ending of Kitty Foyle, however, is very
different from The Job. Kitty has loved unsuccessfully
once, just like Una. But the second time around she is
in control of her emotions. she has to make a choice
between marriage and a career and chooses a career. she
knows that she cannot continue in the cosmetic business
and satisfy a man who wants to marry her at the same
time, with her first lover, Wyn, she thought she
could. Then he left her to marry a non-working
socialite with a college education, but only after he
had gotten Kitty pregnant. since the abortion she knows
the difference, when Mark, her second lover, visits her
apartment at the end of the novel, she knows what he
wants and has all her lines rehearsed. she is ready for
him like the smart business woman she is with all her
clients:
Mark said he*d call, but if I got out
before the bell rings? He's always hurt
if I don't say darling. He says "You
don't greet me darling? Is it an argument?"
• • • •
Well I can say darling without committing
myself to nothing. Darling is only
politeness nowadays. Dearest is what I
couldn't say unless by accident? I bet
that's him now. Jesus god, what will I
tell him.
Hello darling.6
100
So the novel ends with Kitty's greeting.
Kitty Foyle is not the same person she was when she
and wyn were trying to get philly magazine off the
ground. The couple had rented a dusty suite of offices
in downtown Philadelphia, and Kitty was lovingly
cleaning it up so they could be ready for business:
I hurried over to Gimbel's and bought a
housewife apron and some dusters and
took the broom away from Wyn and got
busy. No woman can resist that combina
tion of office-work and housekeeping.
It's about the best feeling there is.
You know you're doing things men do,
just as well as they can, at the same
time you're doing women's kind of things
that men are so lousy at. (p.168)
is a career girl with a clear view of herself
role in business:
Jesus god, I read about the guts of the
pioneer woman and the woman of the
dust-bowl and the gingham goddess of the
covered wagon, what about the woman of
the covered typewriter? (p.261)
She feels that she and the countless others like her are
no better off than "sharecroppers" who "work like nigger
hands in a cottonfield" and give their employers "more
brainwork than they'd know what to do with." (p.261)
To graduate from the ranks of just being a "sharecropper"
Kitty throws herself completely into her career as a
demonstrator and sales representative for Delphine
Detaille inc., a cosmetic firm. Here she can "feel some
101
Now she
and her
of that ground you sweat on belongs to yourself."
(p.262) She begins to find her identity through and in
her work.
In favor of her career, Kitty pulls back from any
other serious romances, dismisses her abortion, and
forgets about ever going to college. She becomes a
full-fledged business woman like Minnie Hutzler in
another Christopher Morley novel, Human Being (1932),
and learns how to "be on your guard" so she will avoid
7
any "future embarrassment," particularly as it
affects her personal life. After all, Kitty muses,
"that's what life is anyway, pretty strong drink."
(p.232) She becomes like the nuns she sees "going
around in their robes." (p.146) she used to feel sorry
for them and hoped they did not forget they were still
females. But now she thinks the nuns feel sorry for
everybody else. Perhaps, she wonders, they want to hide
behind their habits and forget about what they
renounced: "They've quit thinking and started
believing. Maybe they've got something there."
(p.147) in many ways, her first boyfriend wyn is like
the nuns. He is "happy because he believes; he doesn't
think." (p.147) According to Kitty he "obeys the rules
of his order...of the Main Line or Rittenhouse square;
102
Philadelphia Proper. He doesn't question them; just
accepts." (p.147) So does she now that she has
accepted her career as a successful business woman who
is both economically and emotionally independent of men.
At first, like Booth Tarkington's heroine Alice
Adams, Kitty resisted the business world. she wanted
college, marriage, and a family. But her father had a
stroke and she dropped out of college to work in an
office. Alice's situation is- similar. Before her
father lost his business and her mother had to open a
boarding house to support the family,. Alice dreaded
business as "an obscurity as dreary and as permanent as
death":
And like dry leaves falling about her
she saw her wintry imaginings in the May
air: pretty girls turning into withered
creatures as they worked at typing
machines; old maids "taking dictation"
from men with double chins; Alice saw
old maids of a dozen different kinds
"taking dictation."8
Now that Alice's romance has failed and her family is
broke, she knows what she has to do. She is no longer
apprehensive about going up the steps to Frincke's
Business College in preparation for an office job. The
reality of her personal circumstances motivates her as
it does Kitty.
There is no happy resolution between career and marriage
103
for Kitty and Alice as there is for una. Career
replaces marriage, and there is little chance of one
complementing the other in their lives. Kitty and Alice
do not expect to. And so Alice ascends the wooden steps
to the business school and finds her journey not as grim
as she once imagined:
Half-way up the shadows were heaviest,
but after that the place began to seem
brighter. There was an open window
overhead somewhere, she found and the
steps at the top were gay with sunshine.
(P.434)
After graduation she will no longer be confined to her
inhibiting family. The world she finds beyond the
classroom will be her own.
Alice Adams is more of a story about her father's
unsuccessful business exploits in a glue factory than it
is about Alice's business career. But it does,
nonetheless, provide valuable insights into the dilemma
women experience about their identity and their role in
life. At one point in the novel, Alice is having a
conversation with her boyfriend Arthur Russell on the
front porch of the Adams' residence. Arthur asks her,
"what kind of girl are you?" She responds, "I don't
know. I've often wondered!" (p.198) The conversation
is playful at first, but becomes very serious in a short
time for Alice. She claims she really does not know
104
herself at all and has been wondering about her identity
for a long time. But she does know one thing: "I would
probably never dare to be just myself with you — not if
I cared to have you want to see me again." (p.199) she
cannot help herself with him, however, and admits, "and
yet here I am, just being myself after all'.” (p.199)
She is confused, and, in her confusion, "reveals the
terrible, chameleon aspect of a woman's life, the
necessity of adapting to others' needs, in constant,
cosmetic metamorphosis, rather than finding and
remaining true to the hard-core changeless being of the
9
inner self." she cannot be what he wants her to be.
Her honesty about herself is too much for him to take.
He leaves her.
Shortly thereafter, her father becomes bankrupt, and
Alice is forced to make a decision about her life. She
enrolls at Frincke's Business College. Her boyfriend
Arthur's initial impression of her and of what he wants
her to be are irrelevant now. It's her life. she makes
the choice, and discovers "the steps at the top were gay
with sunshine" (p.434) for her just as they are for
Kitty Foyle. But she has to make the first few steps on
her own.
In time, white collar girls like Alice Adams and
105
Kitty Foyle, or the young Una Golden, become resigned to
the loveless atmosphere of business. For these women
work is a substitute for romance in their lives.
Marriage ultimately takes a second place to their
successful careers. At one point una renounces her
first marriage for the impersonal life of the office.
Kitty would rather have an abortion than face the daily
prospect of taking care of a child, husband, and home.
Alice chooses business over love and makes the
commitment to devote herself totally to her studies for
her new career. By directing their efforts to jobs over
which they can exert some control, these three women are
spared the inconsistencies and frustrations of love. In
business they can use their talents to become more
effective employees for firms which will reward them
with raises and promotions. Marriage, therefore, fades
as a serious consideration for them, and a career in
business is the motivating force in their lives. The
likelihood of combining marriage with a job appears
remote to them. They are not in the tradition of Edna
Ferber's business heroines who are able to reconcile a
successful job with a meaningful relationship.
10 6
FOOTNOTES
1 Edna Ferber, Emma McChesney & Co. (New York:
Grosset and Dunlap, 1915), p. 173 .
2 C. Wright Mills, white Collar: The American Middle
Classes (New York: Oxford university press, 1956),
p. 19 8.
3 Sinclair Lewis, The Job: An American Novel (New
York & London: Harper and Brothers, 1917), p ~. 26 9.
4 Dorothy Yost Deegan, The Stereotype of the Single
Woman in American Novels: a social study with Implications
for the Education of women (New York: king s c r o wri'"' P r e s s,'
1951), p. 155.
5 Nan Bauer Maglin, "Women in Three Sinclair Lewis
Novels," The Massachusetts Review, 14 (1973), p.797.
6 Christopher Morley, Kitty Foyle (Philadelphia:
J. B. Lippincott Company, 1939), pp. 339-40.
7 , Human Being (New York: Random House,
1932) , p. 163.
8 Booth Tarkington, Alice Adams (New York: Grosset St
Dunlap, 1921), p. 140.
9 Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape: The
Treatment of women in the Movies (New York: Holt, Rinehart
and Winston, Inc. , 1974), pp. 182-83.
107
CHAPTER VI
The American Dream
Edna Ferber, early in her autobiography A peculiar
Treasure (1939), praises the American penchant for
work. she calls the united states "the Jew among
nations... .resourceful, adaptable, maligned, envied,
feared, imposed upon...its people are...moving,
shifting, restless...volatile.*1 while continuing to
define the country in terms of businesslike
industriousness, she goes on to extol the virtues of
work itself, particularly as it affects her life as a
writer:
With millions of others I have been a
work worshipper, work and more work.
Work was a sedative, a stimulant, an
escape, an exercise, a diversion, a
passion....1've worked daily for over
a quarter of a century, and loved it....
Nothing in the world was so satisfactory,
so lasting and sustaining as work. (p.11)
She marvels that "America has been a work hive since the
fifteenth century" (p.11) and revels in the dynamic
growth of her country and its people:
The workshop became a mill, the mill
became a factory, the factory became
a vast plant, the plant grew into a
solid town composed of works and
workers and owner of works. (p.11)
108
She is proud of the nation's rapid industrialization,
but also conscious that something very valuable may have
been lost in the process:
We were so busy being workers and merry
little grigs that we forgot all about a
region which was one of the first to be
cleared and settled in America. It had
grown into a jungle, weed-ridden, snake-
infested. It was called the soul and
Spirit of America and at one time was
thickly inhabited and very highly thought
of, though fallen into disrepute and even
ridicule now. (p.11)
The concern for the human side of enterprise never
leaves her, in spite of her admiration for the many
successful entrepreneurs the united States has
produced. It is her belief in the "soul and spirit"
that she incorporates into the characters of her
fictional businesswomen.
Her first female business character is a traveling
saleswoman by the name of Mrs. Emma McChesney who sells
underskirts for the T. A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat
Company. Mrs. McChesney is the heroine of a series of
short stories which were written between 1913 and 1915
for such popular magazines as the American Magazine and
Cosmopolitan. in 1915 Ferber published a collection of
some of the stories as she had done the two previous
years. The volume, Emma McChesney & Co., is a chronicle
109
of the saleslady's activities from a south American
selling trip to her marriage to and partnership with her
boss, t . A. Buck.
From the very beginning, the author makes it clear
to her readers that Mrs. Emma McChesney is no ordinary
woman. she is as adept at business as most other women
are at housework:
In the next forty-eight hours, Mrs.
McChesney performed a series of mental
and physical calisthenics that would
have landed an ordinary woman in a
sanatorium. she cleaned up with the
thoroughness and dispatch of a
housewife....she surveyed her territory,
behind and before...she foresaw factory
emergencies, dictated office policies,
made sure of staff organization like the
businesswoman she was.2
As she whirls around the office in preparation for her
South American business trip, she still finds time to
pack a trunk of smart clothes. Being the sucessful
business-woman that she is, Mrs. McChesney knows "the
value of a smartly tailored suit in a business
argument." (p.14) she proves her point when she lands
a lucrative department store account in Argentina. she
modestly explains to the owner of Argentina's largest
and most glamorous department store that she is just one
of several American women who indeed "do understand
110
business. Many — many charming women are in business."
(P.25)
Emma McChesney may be a woman who knows about
business, but her creator, in A Peculiar Treasure,
protests that she has no knowledge of it: "I knew
nothing about business, or selling goods on the road, or
the life of a female drummer....! never had seen a
traveling saleswoman." (p.173) Perber records these
remarks after she is approached by the editor of the
American Magazine to write McChesney stories. In a
letter from Bert Boyden of the magazine, she is asked to
keep writing about the unusual traveling saleslady:
In Emma McChesney, it [the letter] said,
I had created a new character in fiction.
The American businesswoman never had been
done. Emma was novel and refreshing. There
had been a special staff meeting to discuss
her. would I do a series of stories about
Mrs. Emma McChesney? And when could they
count on the second story? (p.172)
Her creation was a success, and Edna Ferber continued to
write about her. Even the Saturday Evening Post
attempted to purchase some of the stories.
Edna Ferber's remarks about her ignorance of
business matters are really not true in light of her
family's merchandising background. Her father ran a
small department store in Appleton, Wisconsin when she
was a girl. while he lay dying, his mother had to take
111
over the business. Ferber records the incident in her
autobiography:
My father's eyes were growing steadily
worse. My mother was in the store now
almost all day. she had developed a
rather surprising shrewd head for
business — surprising because her
direct heritage and background had
taught her nothing of this. Perhaps
one of the Berlin banking or business
Neumanns were cropping up in this, their
descendant. By now she realized that
she must take the helm or the business
would flounder altogether, (p.67)
Ferber does have to concede at one point that one of her
characters, the businesswoman Emma McChesney, may be
based on her childhood recollections. she really does
not forget about the family store, with its myriad of
salespeople and customers, when she writes of her other
business characters:
I never had seen a woman drummer, but
I once had heard my mother in Appleton
tell of a brisk woman who had come to
the store selling — it sounds fantastic
— mouse traps. I never heard about her
again. I knew nothing of the life of
traveling salesmen or of the wholesale
houses they represented except for such
talk as I had heard between my mother
and father in connection with the store.
I suppose that I actually had absorbed,
in those years of small-town life, a good
deal of information about buying and
selling and the lives of commercial travelers,
(p.172)
Ferber has a personal point of reference for her
business fiction in her parents and their family store.
112
The author uses her own mother as the model for Fanny
Brandeis' mother in the novel Fanny Herself (1917).
Like Ferber's mother Julia, Molly Brandeis is at once a
loving parent and a dedicated, hardworking
businesswoman. she is a combination of the best virtues
of motherhood and business savvy. The result is a
strong and realistically drawn character for the novel
who provides the author with the background for her
accurate depiction of the daily operation of a retail
business. Ferber acknowledges her reliance on her
mother for her portrayal of Molly: "Certainly my
mother, idealized, went to make up Molly Brandeis."
(p.223) Logically, then, it can be assumed that Fanny's
character is also somewhat autobiographical, and Ferber
confirms this fact with a similarly brief statement from
A Peculiar Treasure: "Bits and pieces of myself crept
into the character of Fanny Brandeis." (p.223) she
effectively uses her childhood in the atmosphere of the
family store to enhance the reality of the business
situations in her novels.
The plot of Fanny Herself revolves around the life
of a small-town Midwestern Jewish girl who becomes an
executive in the infants' wear department for a huge
Chicago-based mail order house, the Haynes-Cooper
113
Company. In spite of her success and phenomenal rise in
the organization, she is ready to give up her thriving
career to marry a gentle and artistic friend from her
youth whom she once rescued from a group of bullies. At
the end of the novel she makes the decision to leave the
business world which once meant so much to her:
To justify one’s own existence. That
was all life held or meant. But that
included all the lives that touched on
yours. it had nothing to do with success
heretofore. It was service, really. It
was living as — well, as Molly Brandeis
had lived, helpfully, self-effacingly,
magnificently.'3
Her decision is confirmed by her stumbling across the
lone grave of a woman buried in the mountains. The
epitaph on the tombstone reads: "Here lies sarah
Cannon. Lay to rest, and died aione, April 26, 1893."
(p.317) Fanny knows of sarah as "a stern spinster who
had achieved the climb to the peak, and who had bet with
mishap on the down trail." (p.317) She relates her
long and arduous trek to the top of the Haynes-Cooper
Company and decides that she does not want to die
"alone" like the "stern" sarah Cannon. Unlike Emma
McChesney, she does not have the option to marry a
gentlemanly boss. In Fanny’s case, her boss Mr. Michael
Fenger is a married man who would like to have an affair
with her and makes his intentions very clear to her.
114
But Fanny is too honorable for an illicit affair and
renounces business in favor of a return to the purer
things of her youth which are represented by her
boyfriend Clarence Heyl and her attempts at character
drawing. in many ways Fenger epitomizes the sordid side
of business with his lack of concern for the workers and
his hypocrital display of fidelity to his wife. What
really motivates him is sex and power, and business is
his means to attain both.
Fanny's ambition to make it in business is clearly
outlined in the novel, but not in the same way as
Fenger. she knows that she does not want a life like
her mother's which is torn between the domestic and
business worlds. The hard job of maintaining a house
and rearing a family, coupled with running the store
after her husband's death, finally proves too much for
Molly Brandeis. One Christmas she dies of pneumonia
which is the direct result of her overworking herself at
home and at the store. Molly vows she will not be
subjected to the strain which killed her mother. In a
dramatic scene in the novel, she destroys her mother's
apron in the furnace. It is an act which symbolizes her
rejection of the enervating life of her dead
mother:
115
She flung open the furnace door....
Suddenly she flung the tightly-
rolled apron into the heart of the
gleaming mass. she shut her eyes
then. The fire seemed to hold its
breath for a moment. Then, with a
gasp, it-strangled upon its food.
The bundle stiffened, writhed,
crumpled, sank, lay in a blackened
heap, was dissolved. The fire bed
glowed red and purple as before,
except for a dark spot in its heart.
Fanny shivered a little. (p.Ill)
Fanny is determined to succeed; burning her mother's
apron is only the beginning for her;
Thus she successfully demonstrated the
first lesson in the cruel and rigid
course of mental training she had mapped
out for herself. (p.Ill)
She is willing to accept "all those years of work, and
suppression , and self-denial, and beauty hunger,"
{p.189) the necessary prerequisites for business success
in her life. Fanny also does not hesitate to reject her
artistic background, drop out of art school, and stop
her drawing to realize her ambition:
"It [drawing] isn't a gift," she said
lightly. "It's just a little knack
that amuses me. There's no money in
it. Besides, it's too late now. one's
got to do a'thing superlatively, nowadays,
to be recognized. I don't draw super
latively, but I do handle infants' wear
better than any woman I know. In two
more years I'll be getting ten thousand
a year at Haynes-Cooper. in five years
____________ " (p.188)
Her goal is "to see the great and beautiful things of
116
this world, and mingle with people who posses them."
(p.188) At this point in her life and career, she
believes that she will "have arrived" (p.188) when her
salary is at least five digits.
Throughout the novel the author reminds her reader
that Fanny never loses her humanity, in spite of her
overwhelming desire for business success:
"I'm not really a business woman....1 have
a knack of knowing what people are thinking
and wanting. But that isn't business....
it's only the human side of it that appealed
to me. I don't know why. I seem to have lost
interest in the actual mechanics of it."
(p.300 )
She is able to retain her perspective as a caring human
being in the face of the harsh and impersonal reality of
the Haynes-Cooper Company, "a firm that counts its
employees by the thousands, and its profits in tens of
millions." (p.219) For Fanny is a success both as a
person and as a businesswoman. But she is unique, and
her boyfriend Clarence realizes it:
Anything you might attempt would be
successful. You'd have made a successful
lawyer, or cook, or actress, or hydraulic
engineer, because you couldn't do a thing
badly. It isn't in you. You're a super
lative sort of person. (p.215)
It is inevitable that she would come to despise the
business world and what it does to its people.
Her boss Fenger epitomizes the driving and
117
self-centered executive who is equally unconcerned with
the welfare of his wife or his employees. All he cares
about are company profits and his own career and
financial growth. He has no concern for the people who
make up the business of Haynes-Cooper. They are just
one of the many raw materials necessary to make the
company successful, with no special privileges or
aspirations. And he is the manager to insure that these
employees produce to their optimum energy and efficiency
for the sole benefit of the company and his own personal
and professional ambitions. Through his calculating and
unfeeling actions he causes Fanny to loathe "Big
Business and all that it stood for." (p.255) By the
end of the novel she is ready to leave "the cold,
rarified atmosphere of business" (p.243) for a happy
marriage and life as an artist. She makes her move away
from the business world just in time. Her "whole face is
beginning to be stamped with a look that says shrewdness
and experience and success." (p.237) Her "eyes are
bright and hard, instead of tolerant" and her "mouth is
losing its graciousness." (p.237) she has to be
reminded by her boyfriend Clarence that there is more to
life than success in business. He cites people like
Jane Addams and Ida Tarbell as successful women in their
118
own right, possessing "a humanity sense, and a value
sense, and a something else that can't be acquired."
(p.237) And there is no reason, he maintains, that
Fanny cannot emulate them. she ultimately does by
renouncing her career for marriage and art.
All through her life Fanny had had a plan to be a
success in whatever she did. she is like Emma McChesney
in this respect as well as Selina Peake in So Big
(1924). When Selina tells her husband how to increase
his productivity for their truck farm, he does not
understand at first. After repeating her message
several times, he still seems not to comprehend. What
he calls "talk" she dubs "plans": "it isn't talk. It's
4
plans. You've got to plan." He does not plan, and
when he dies, selina has to run the farm to sustain her
son and herself. But she works with the same resolve as
Emma and Fanny.
All three women are thrust into the worlds of work
and business by necessity rather than choice. Emma
eventually marries the boss, but her business career has
not always been as pleasant as the last few years. Her
first husband was an alcoholic, and, after his death,
she becomes a traveling saleswoman to support her son
and herself. Her independence and confidence today are
119
the result of her need to enable her and her son to
survive without the traditional male provider. Fanny's
parents die, and she continues to nurture and encourage
her brother's career as a violinist as well as her own
as a businesswoman. selina's husband dies after a hard
life as an Illinois truck farmer. she takes over the
farm, sells its produce in Chicago, and rears her son
who eventually goes to college and becomes a banker.
The author's description of Emma in Emma McChesney & Co.
perhaps typifies all three:
During those fifteen years she had educated
her son, Jack McChesney, and made a man of
him; she had worked, fought, saved, triumphed,
smiled under hardship; and she had acquired a
broad and deep knowledge of those fascinating
and diversified subjects which we lump care
lessly under the heading of Human Nature.
(pp.178-9)
They all epitomize what Edna Ferber in her autobiography
referred to as the "soul and spirit of America": that
quality of humanity which enables her business heroines
never to lose a perspective of themselves and the people
around them, in spite of any monetary or career success
they may attain. They do not reject the men in their
lives. Rather, through men's influences as lovers,
sons, or even adversaries the women manage to heighten
their own self-consciousness and determination to make
it as human beings as well as workers. Their individual
120
situations may provide them the incentive to be
successful, but they all bring the qualities of
willpower and dedication to get them through whole and
alive.
Edna Ferber's female business heroines take the
idealism of the American dream of success literally in
their lives. They believe in the dreams, hopes,
possibilities, opportunities, and, most of all, in its
optimism. Material gain is only one part of the dream
for them; their perception and practice of it
incorporates a balance between its idealistic and
economic implications. They especially value the
dignity of the human person, whether it be their own or
that of other people who touch their lives personally
and professionally. Their idealism is the creative,
unifying 1 ife-principle that tempers them as adherents
to the success ethic with a sensitivity and compassion
which otherwise would be lacking. Material success,
without this idealistic dimension, is unsatisfactory for
Ferber's businesswomen. For them the dream of
individual business success must have an anchor in their
emotional success. If it does not, it is not worth
pursuing and, even less, sacrificing one's integrity and
humanity for.
121
Emma McChesney, Fanny Brandeis, and Selina Peake are
motivated to better themselves by working at jobs which
are inspired by their belief in the moral focus of the
American dream. Their perspective about material
success is much the same as Janie's in zora Neale
Hurston's novel Their Eyes were watching God (1937). as
a Black woman who has struggled to make it in an
agricultural environment dominated by wealthy, white
landowners and businessmen, Janie finds that her dream
of long-term financial success is not the key to her
ultimate emotional happiness. she has attained
security, prosperity, and money through her first two
husbands, Logan Killicks and Jody Starks. These first
two marriages give her what her Granny hoped for — life
like white people who believe in the success ethic and
own houses with porches, when she marries her second
husband, Jody, she gets a house with two porches, but
material achievement is not enough for her. Her inner
being hungers for fulfillment, the same fulfillment she
needed when Logan, her first husband, died and her
maturation as a total woman began:
The familiar people and things had failed
her so she hung over the gate and looked
up and the road towards way off. she knew
now that marriage did not make love. Janie's
first dream was dead, so she became a woman.^
12 2
It is only in the person of her third husband, Tea Cake,
that Janie is able to find herself as a total human
being. She can turn her back on the very success that
other people spent their lives striving for. Her needs
revplve around the love and personal freedom that the
. idealistic vision of the dream provides for her.
Material success alone is empty for her, but a loving
relationship coupled with it gives her what she yearns
for — a sense of possibility, meaning, and worth in her
working life:
He drifted off into sleep and Janie looked
down on him [Tea Cake] and felt a self
crushing love. so her soul crawled out
from its hiding place, (p.107)
Her dream is eventually burst by violence when she
has to shoot the raving Tea Cake who has gone mad and
threatens to kill her. The taste of real, living
freedom is destroyed by her act of self-preservation;
yet she has lived, if only for a few, brief years. She
does not negate her earlier experiences with Tea Cake
before the madness seized him:
"Now, dat's how everything wuz, pheoby,
jus1 lak ah told yah. Ah'm back home
agin and Ah'm satisfied tuh be heah. Ah
done been tuh de horison and back an now
Ah kin set head in mah house and live by
comparisons. Dis house ain't so absent
of things lak it used tuh be befo' Tea
Cake come along, It's full uh thoughts,
specially dat bedroom." (p.158)
123
While continuing to speak, Janie reveals the reasons for
her emotional success. she has known true love and
thereby knows herself:
"Ah know all dem sitters-and-talkers
gointuh worry they guts into fiddle
strings till dey find out whut we been
talkin' 'bout. Dat's all right, Pheoby,
tell'em. Dey gointuh mak 'miration 'cause
mah love didn't work lak they lov, if dey
ever had any. Then you must tell 'em dat
love ain't where and do de same thing tuh
everything, but still and all, it takes its
shape from de shore it meets, an'd it's
different with every shore." (p.158)
Her friend Pheoby answers her with a spontaneous
reaction of awe, wonder, and envy for what Janie has
managed to attain during her life:
"Ah done grown ten feet higher from jus'
listenin' tuh you, Janie. Ah ain't
satisfied wid mahself no mo'. Ah means
tuh make sam take me fishin' wid him
after this. Nobody better not criticize
yuh in mah hearin'." (p.159)
Through her remembrances of the dead husband, Janie,
like Ferber's selina Peake, finds what she has been
looking for all through life:
Of course he wasn't dead. He could never
be dead until she herself had finished
feeling and thinking. The kiss of his
memory made pictures of love and light
against the wall. Here was peace. she
pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net.
Pulled it from around the waist of the world
and draped it over her shoulder. so much of
life in its meshesl she called in her soul
to come and see. (p.159)
12 4
Of the novel the critic Robert Bone says that "if
mankind's highest dreams are ultimately unattainable, it
is still better to live on the far horizon than to grub
around on the shore.The "highest dreams" that Bone
mentions are not the dreams of material success, but the
dreams of love, opportunity, and fullfillment. These
dreams alone can give Janie meaning: "Janie does not
regret her life with Tea Cake, or her price which is
7
exacted in the end."
Janie's relationship with Tea Cake enables her to
put her job on the farm into a perspective she never
possessed before. In her first marriage she had to toil
in the kitchen and in the fields to satisfy a demanding
husband who attemptd to subjugate her to his wishes.
After she remarried, her second husband tried to stop
her from working at all. He wanted his wife to emulate
the leisurely life he believed well-born, white women
enjoyed. In both instances, Janie was prevented from
exercising any choices she may have had about her
circumstances. But with her third husband, Tea Cake,
she can combine her job on the farm with the love of a
man she wants to be with. unlike many Black women, she
does not have to work to support herself, a family, a
lover, or a husband. she works because she is happiest
125
when she accompanies her husband at all times. Tea Cake
does not expect his wife to toil at home and on the farm
like other Black working women or remain idle like many
rich, white southern ladies. The choice is Janie's, not
his. She opts to be with him as a wife and a worker and
enjoys her dual roles equally. in the spirit of Edna
Perber's business heroines, Janie decides to strive to
make it as a total person both on the job and at home
undaunted by the constraints of race and sex. She sees
the balance between work and love as the means to
achieving her dream of success. Work, in this context,
can only be a fulfilling and liberating force in her
well-adjusted emotional life.
Hurston's Janie and Ferber's heroines share a
similar perception about what work means to them. They
are pleased when they are able to share their efforts
with the men they love. It is irrelevant to them
whether they toil in the fields, sell underskirts, work
for a mail order house, or labor on a truck farm, what
matters to them is their ability to work for the benefit
of their loved ones. Janie is content when she exerts
herself by Tea Cake's side. Emma opts to maintain her
business association with her husband, even though she
is not obliged to. Fanny gives up the loveless
12 6
atmosphere of "Big Business" to combine a career in art
with marriage to the man she loves. Selina continues to
work after her husband's death to provide for her son's
education. In spite of the trials that they have to
endure on the job, these women work for love and for the
fulfillment that love brings to them. Some years later
Beverly Thyson, the heroine of Public smiles, private
Tears, tries to find the same blissful union between
personal emotion and work in her business career.
127
FOOTNOTES
1 Edna Ferber, A Peculiar Treasure (New York: The
Literary Guild of America, 1939) , p. TO".
2 _______________, Emma McChesney & Co. (New York:
Grosset & Dunlap Publishers, 1915), pp. T3-14.
3 _______________, Fanny Herself (New York: Frederick
A. Stokes Company, 1917) , p. 314 .
4 _______________, so Big (Garden City, New York:
Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1952 (1924)), p. 301.
5 Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were watching God
(Greenwhich, Conn: Fawcett^ 1^69 (1937) ), pT 25 .
6 Robert A. Bone, The Negro Novel in America (New
Haven: Yale university Press, 1968), pp. 131-32.
7 Bone, p. 13 2.
12 8
CHAPTER VII
The Female Executive
Beverly Thyson, co-buyer for the Import shop of
Welby's Department store in New York City, listens to
her boss Sylvia schlesinger explain the "facts of life"
about women in business in American industry. Sylvia
ultimately rises to head the store and, after she
retires, Beverly succeeds her. Both women started on
the floor as clerks in the early 1940's and then
ascended the career ladder to the top position. But
they are always aware of who they are and how men react
to them. Sylvia explains:
Listen Bev, let's not kid ourselves.
American businesses don't like women.
Not in top jobs. The guys get scared.
Oh, they claim they have a lot of
other reasons. That we're unreliable,
that five days every month we're going
to poop out on them, that we'll get
maimed or pregnant or burst into tears.1
She, however, knows "the real reason" for men's
apprehension and warns Beverly:
But the real reason out there is [men are]
frightened. They've been running the
world for centuries, and they and we both
know what a mess they've made of it. So
they're hanging on to their turf with all
the strength in their greedy little
fingers. ,.(p.l94)
12 9
Both women proceed with their careers until they reach
the pinnacle of success in Helen van slyke's novel about
the world of women's fashion, Public Smiles, private
Tears (1982). (The final chapters of the book were
completed by a longtime friend and fellow novelist,
James Elward, after Van slyke's death in 1979.) Beverly
and Sylvia strive to make it on their own and they do.
But the price they both pay in the context of the novel
is a frustrating emotional life, particularly when it
comes to their husbands and lovers.
Sylvia marries Herman Schlesinger, a man who is
willing to take second place to his wife's burgeoning
career:
Herman, early on, had analyzed and accepted
his role, a not uncommon one among the
husbands of dynamic businesswomen. He
was friend, lover, companion, willing escort,
and sensibly untroubled "kept man.".... it
was for her sake, more than his, that they
maintained the private and public charade
that Herman was "head of the house." (p.34)
After a few previously unsuccessful marriages to richer,
more ambitious males, Sylvia settles on Herman and
manages to find an agreeable partner in him. He is
content to have her pursue a career while he remains in
the background. Herman can accept the situation and
"couldn't have cared less about what 'society' thought
were the differing obligations of male and female in
13 0
monetary or prestigious contributions to a marriage."
(p.34) Sylvia, however, does not seem to have made a
similar adjustment: "It was only because Sylvia did not
want Herman to be hurt that they even petended to have a
more orthodox arrangement." (p.34) Her guilt about her
career at his expense finally surfaces after she is the
president of welby's. She is ready for early
retirement, and her reason is Herman:
"I don't know how many more years he'll
have -- how many more any of us have, for
that matter. He never complains, but I
know he hates the winters up here. He
gets this bad cough starting the first
of November and it doesn't seem to leave
until May." (p.195)
She says it all when she sighs, "I don't think I'm cut
out for retirement, exactly. But I owe Herman
something." (p.195)
Beverly is much like Sylvia; in fact, she is the
older woman’s protege. Sylvia sees a kindred spirit in
Beverly and takes a genuine interest in the younger
woman's career in the retail business. she understands
Beverly will be making some of the same decisions in her
life as she had done earlier in her career:
But she saw in Beverly something of
herself at that age — an almost
schizophrenic desire to be a docile
wife and a dominant executive. It
had taken Sylvia almost the span of
Bev's lifetime to realize that these
131
qualities were incompatible in most
women. she had to live through two
unsuccessful marriages and know the
agonies of self-reproach before
facing the fact that she was one of
those strong women who could exist
happily with a non-competitive man.
It was a hard realization to accept.
In the eyes of the world, Herman was
a failure. (p.7)
Perhaps, in her "eyes" he was too: "It had taken her
twenty years to stop fighting the engendered idea that a
husband must always be brighter, stronger and richer;
that there was something disgraceful about a marriage in
which the woman was the breadwinner." (p.7) Beverly
marries Ed Richmond, an unambitious world war II veteran
who "was never initially motivated towards success."
(p.44) Unlike Beverly and her circle he does not care
about "fame or power or the other yardsticks of success
adopted by those of his friends who were already bucking
for heart attacks." (p.44) He is not obsessed with
money, career growth, or status. The price he would
have to pay — "locked in an office with his name on the
door, ass-kissing the boss and shuffling a lot of
ridiculous paper" (p.44) — is too much for Ed. For a
man who does not care "about living by the rules" (p.44)
he is strangely attracted to a female who is, namely
Beverly Thyson. And she will try to make him over into
the image of herself and of what she thinks society
132
expects. She fails, and then divorces him.
From the very beginning Beverly is determined to
make it. Unlike the friends she went to high school
with, she does not go on to college, but goes to work
instead. She rejects their socially acceptable path of
college, marriage, and family for a career at welby's:
"If I have a brain and ambition, am I supposed to forget
it?" (p.5) Her role model is Sylvia: "There's an
example for you, by the way. she has a nifty husband
and a terrific job." (p.5) But Beverly cannot reconcile
her career with marriage. she still wants Ed to be as
successful in business as she is and continue to love
her as much as he does. Ed tries, but cannot become
someone he is not: "He did suspect that he had been
forced to try for a role that was more for Bev's
satisfaction than for his own, but he refused to believe
that a lack of business success was the cancer that was
destroying his marriage." (p.60) Beverly turns from
him to the powerful, independent businessman Arthur
Powers and takes him for a lover. But, their
relationship does not last because he and Beverly are
too much alike. They are both driven to success by the
same motivation which also engulfs Sylvia. Sylvia
pinpoints how she and Beverly are similar:
13 3
Mirror image again. You're very like me.
Or like what I used to be. Ambition-driven
and hating my ambition. Aggressive without
really wanting to be. Domineering and
loathing the role. We're not bad people,
Bev. silly, maybe, and certainly selfish.
Only a basically, solid, non-competitive man
can put up with our kind of ego We're
afraid all the time. Afraid not to feel
needed and in charge. (p.96)
Arthur, too, is unable to sustain a relationship with a
wife or a lover. His last wife walks out on him, and he
turns to Beverly for companionship and understanding.
But they are too competitive for each other and
ultimately go their separate ways. They cannot combine
business success and mutual love in their brief affair
with each other.
Beverly is used to evaluating her life in terms of
successfully combining marriage and career until she
meets Arthur. Now, after leaving Ed and breaking up
with Arthur, she realizes the naivete of her assumption
the compatibility of marriage and career. she recalls
how a high school girlfriend Ruth told her that marriage
and career cannot coexist:
She looked at her life as it stretched
behind her. She had been so young, so
ignorant when she had argued with Ruth
that a woman could have everything in
life, a career and a marriage, both of
them working together like the wheels
meshing in a watch. Ruth had known
better, although her choices had not made
her happy, what with the death of Geoff
134
and now this oddly cold marriage she
seemed to be having with Amory. (p.190)
Now she is determined to renounce any hope she has for a
successful romance and to devote herself full time to
her career. she willingly gives the management of the
department store "all her skill, her knowledge, and,
with the emptiness of her personal life, as much of her
time as they wanted." (p.225) She eventually assumes
the presidency of the New York store and dedicates her
life to her job. After a large, midwestern conglomerate
buys out the New York store from the original owners and
decides to close it and sell the property, Beverly still
has a job with the new owners. But she toys with the
idea that she may go back to the husband she divorced.
She is tiring of her lonely climb to the top of the
retail business world and contemplates a reconciliation
with Ed in St. Louis. Arthur is dead, and her immediate
business world of welby's has crumbled around her. she
recalls the love she once had in her life, "and she
found herself smiling, her steps growing brisk and
energetic as she walked toward the future." (p.250) At
this point she knows she still is employed, will be
traveling in the course of business, and may just go as
far as St. Louis, since she has "been hearing it's very
pretty out there." (p.235) Given her past track record
135
as a successful business executive, it is highly
doubtful that she will effect any type of reunion with
Ed. But she can still dream of the possibility, and the
author makes her the more human and believable for it.
Her career spans thirty years in the retail
department store business. As a young woman in the
1940's she certainly watched screen heroines like
Rosalind Russell, Katherine Hepburn, Barbara Stanwyck,
and Joan Crawford play "strong, sure-of-themselves women
who lit up movie screens with a sophisticated assurance
that cloaked a normal weaker-sex need to be dominated by
Cary Grant or spencer Tracy." (pp.3-4) Many of her
female counterparts who sat in movie theaters throughout
the country during this period related to these
actresses and took their own career ambitions "straight
off the surface of movie screens and ran to the kind of
jobs portrayed as glamorous and exciting":
For though they fantasized about achievement
and public recognition, most of these well-
brought-up middle class girls did not honestly
believe that any career, no matter how
dazzling, was woman's ultimate achievement.
Marriage to a strong, handsome provider who
would find their ambitions laudable but
transient was, in their minds, the only
enduring vehicle for true female fulfillment,
(pp.3-4)
The young Beverly believed that she was different
because she could combine a successful career with a
136
happy marriage. She, unlike the other young women of
her generation or the actresses on the screen who
"tacitly wanted to be 'kept in their place' by dominant
men - having, of course, first sampled the sweet fruits
of accomplishment," (p.4) had "her job, which she had no
intention of leaving, and her tall handsome husband, who
was inordinately proud of her success." (p.7)
Beverly's strong desire to become a retailing
executive is not dissimilar to Mildred Pierce's
obsessive ambition in the restaurant business. Both are
career women who function very well in their respective
business environments, but not in their emotional
relationships. The main difference between the two
women, however, lies in their motivation to be
successful as businesswomen. The older Beverly, after
conceding that she is unable to love at home and achieve
in business simultaneously, immerses herself completely
in her career. Mildred goes from waitress to
restauranteur solely for the sake of her children,
especially for Veda, her daughter. In the 1945 film
version of James m . Cain's 1941 novel, Joan Crawford
plays the title role of a woman who "sacrifices herself
2
totally...on the way to success." However, her
"competence in the business world, radical enough,
13 7
perhaps, for its time, is not a sign of independence
sought for its own sake, but of initiative in the
service of family (or of self-love pervertedly
disguised). Mildred's ambitions are for some 'higher
3
purpose' than self-fulfillment." ostensibly, she
seeks business success for the sake of her daughter, and
not for herself. But her daughter is merely an
extension of herself, and Mildred used her as the
vehicle to satisfy her own desires and needs to make
it. She is a tough businesswoman with an uncanny
ability to survive and then thrive in a male-dominated
environment, with a clearly realistic outlook on life,
Joan Crawford plays a calculating Mildred Pierce with no
romantic illusions about the result of her actions. she
may dream about the future, but she is efficiently
practical in her approach to actualize her vision, as a
strong woman with a weak husband she is forced to make
it when he fails because of his inadequancies as a
person and as a breadwinner. After her spoiled daughter
Veda, convincingly played by Ann Blyth, complains to
Mildred about what she does not have and what she wants,
her mother answers:
I know, darling. I know. I want you
to have nice things. And you will.
Wait and see. I'll get you everything.
Anything you want. I promise. Now
138
to to sleep.4
Mildred's answer becomes her overriding personal
objective in everything she does to ensure that her
restaurants are financially successful for the sake of
her daughter's selfish needs.
As a housewife who has been thrust into the
unexpected situation of providing for her family,
Mildred does not know what to do at first. So she
becomes a waitress and eventually winds up owning
several restaurants through her own efforts and
persistence. She has divorced her first husband and
marries again. The cunning Monte, her second husband,
is played by Zachary Scott. He is a contemptible
individual who not only misuses Mildred's money, but
also becomes sexually involved with her daughter Veda.
Eventually Veda murders Monte, and Mildred is willing to
take the blame for it. After all, says Mildred, "I'm
still her mother." (p.236) At the end of the movie,
Veda is arrested, Monte is dead and Mildred is bankrupt
because she has squandered her money on her ruthless and
ungrateful daughter. There is nothing left for her.
She returns, implausibly, to the forgiving embrace of
Bruce Bennett in the role of her first husband Bert with
the simple words: "Take me home, Bert." (p.235) She
139
can pick up where she has left off. Her attraction as a
woman is too much for Bert to resist.
Unlike her confidant, the mannish Ida, played by Eve
Arden, Mildred,never renounces her sexuality as a woman
to immerse herself totally in her business endeavors.
She is not the sterotype of the typically asexual career
woman who is seen as acting more like a man than a woman
in the male-dominated world of business. Ida is an
excellent judge of men because she has not been and is
still not involved emotionally with them. She is an
unmarried "big sister type. You know - good old
Ida...you can talk with her man to man." (p.204) she
is objective enough to warn Mildred about the perils of
the business world for a woman:
That's the way it is Mildred. It's a man's
world. If you succeed, if you show signs of
getting up in the world...then the knives
come out. I never yet met a man who didn't
have the instincts of a heel. (p.203)
Yet, Ida regrets her ability to remain aloof from any
personal relationship or affair with a man. She is
smart enough to figure out masculine ulterior motives,
but she is really not happy with her gift of insight.
She laments: "I'm getting very tired of men talking man
to man with me." (p.204) unlike Beverly and Mildred her
life has not been touched by the dimension of an
140
emotional involvement, and she feels a sense of
frustration because of it.
At the same time both Beverly and Mildred live their .
lives to the fullest in their pursuit of business
success. Both women do not hesitate to get involved
emotionally with a husband, lover, or both. They have
mastered the ability to make it in a man's world where
many men, and often those with whom they are involved,
have failed, unlike Ida, they do not rationalize their
need for emotional relationships in terms of the freedom
they may lose as women. The lack of love for the sake
of perspective in Ida's life is not satisfactory for
Beverly or Mildred. Mildred, in one brief sentence in
the movie, negates all of Ida's clinical perceptions
about men: "You've never been married, have you, Ida?"
(p.204) somehow, Mildred perceives that Ida is missing
something that she has. There is a risk involved in any
relationship, but for Mildred it is a risk worth taking.
In spite of Mildred's reunion with her first husband
at the end of the film, she has asserted herself as an
independent and self-contributing person during her
career. She makes the conscious decision to return to
Bert just as Beverly imagines, if only fleetingly, a
reconciliation with Ed. Their actions at this point
141
really have no affect on their careers. Mildred is
bankrupt, and her business is ruined. What does she
have to lose by returning to Bert? Beverly talks about
a possiblity of something in St. Louis, but it is
vague. Given her long, successful career there is an
element of uncertainty as to whether the independent
Beverly will ever affect a return to her former
husband. It is also doubtful that she will be able to
make the same tenuous accommodation between marriage and
career as Sylvia did. Nevertheless, both Beverly and
Mildred do come to terms with themselves, first as women
and then as executives. Each makes the choice about how
she will live her life, regardless of the imperfection
of their circumstances. As Ida says, "I sometimes wish
I could get along without 'em." (p.204) But Beverly
and Mildred would rather not and thereby prove that
"often times self-awareness, professional elan, and
romance can exist side by side with the female as the
5
healthy protagonist, the male as the needy one."
As two career women who came of age during the
1940's they manage to achieve successfully in their
professional lives what their ambition and talent cannot
affect for them personally. They have long rejected the
passive and socially conventional lives of their
142
mothers, although they are not as liberated and
proactive as the generation of women who follow them.
In control of their own lifestyles and careers during
the years of world war II, they represent the beginnings
of the truly self-sufficient female who does not
hesitate to make it in a world formerly reserved for men:
Neither thoroughly emancipated nor
totally enslaved, conditioned by
convention and conscience, her
[Beverly's] ingrained timidity was
strangely at odds with her determination
to be independent and free.^
Through her active role in business Beverly solidifies
her assertion of herself as a real person, what Charley
Johnson, the advertising manager in Lady in the park
(1941), moss Hart's musical play about Liza Elliott, the
successful fashion magazine editor, says about Liza
herself also applies to Beverly:
You married that desk years ago.
Boss Lady, and you're never going
to get a divorce. I know your
kind....Yep. You have magazines
instead of babies. Maybe you're
right. There's a lot like you.7
Whether the Charley Johnsons approve or not, or even
accept them, women like Beverly Thyson have made it
professionally. The issue for these women does not lie
in their emotional well-adjustment or happiness.
Rather, it is one of career accomplishment during the
14 3
changing sociological and economic times which the
1940's herald for women in American business.
And a career woman like Beverly could only relate to
the life of Joan Crawford, both on and off the screen.
For her the actress typified the movie queen of the
1940 's who portrayed "the ordinary woman who becomes
extraordinary, the woman who begins as a victim of
discriminatory circumstances and rises, through pain,
obsession, or defiance to become mistress of her
Q
fate." The unique aspect of Joan Crawford's life for
Beverly was that she was able to combine marriage and
career successfully. Not only was she a top star in her
own right, but also had a prosperous marriage and second
career as a businesswoman. as an actress, she could
adeptly play the head of a trucking firm in They All
Kissed The Bride (1942) and a restaurant owner in
Mildred Pierce (1945). At the same time, she was the
wife and business associate of Alfred Steele, then
Chairman of Pepsi-Cola Company, and sat beside him on
the firm'z executive board. she was the embodiment of
the successful career woman whom many like Beverly hoped
to emulate in their own personal and professional
lives. Both she in her roles on and off the set and
Beverly in her capacity as a top retailing executive are
144
a far cry from the
Edna Pontellier of
woman of The Yellow wallpaper and
The Awakening.
145
FOOTNOTES
1 Helen Van slyke with James Elward, Public smiles,
Private Tears (New York: Harper & r o w, 1982), p. 194
2 Marjorie Rosen, Popcorn Venus (New York: Avon
Books, 1973), p. 208.
3 Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape: The
Treatment of women in the Movies (New York: Holt,
Rhinehart and Winston, Inc., 1^74), pp. 179-80.
4 Albert J. LaValley, ed., Mildred Pierce
(Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1980
(1945)), p. 117.
5 Rosen, p. 207.
6 Van slyke, p. 2.
7 moss Hart, Lady in the park (New York: Random
House, 1941), p. 105.
8 Haskell, p. 161.
146
CONCLUSION
Beverly Thyson reminisces about her long, prosperous
career with welby's Department store and thinks about
all the female shoppers she has dealt with through the
years. she gets "philosophical" about them and relates
their buying habits to a condition which she believes to
be indicative of American women in general:
But this store, and all the stores all over
the world, had perhaps been the only place
millions of women had ever been able to
exert one of the most basic of human needs,
a need men exercised every day of their life
as a natural right. The need for some kind
of power. Perhaps power was the wrong word.
Choice. That was closer, she thought. Men
for centuries had been allowed to make
decisions that affected millions of lives,
the fortunes of whole countries, only in a
place like welby's could a woman satisfy that
need. It would have seemed trivial to any
man, Bev knew.-*-
She is a woman who has been able to make choices in her
life: "She, at least, had chosen her own road, walked
it to success, and been fulfilled." (p.249) Not all of
them have been correct, but they were self-initiated and
self- directed to make her own activities both
meaningful and purposeful. Her career has shown her the
beauty of being herself first and then of actualizing
the potential she discovered within. she has decided to
147
include work in her life and to make it as significant a
factor in her plans as love and marriage. In spite of
any personal or professional relationships she may have
developed in the course of her career, she has not
become "an appendage to their [other people's] reality,
2
their vocation," but has remained true to herself as
a person with her psyche intact.
Beverly's choice to pursue a career in "the business
jungle" rather than embrace the domesticity of "a vine-
covered cottage" sets her apart as a woman who goes
3
against "the laws of nature" that are based on
assumptions about traditional male-female roles. By her
business success she proves that a woman can be
economically independent of a man and thrive in an
environment that is supposedly foreign to her
disposition. Her emotional life is by no means ideal,
and she seems unable to resolve her career and marital
aspirations to a mutual compatibility, unlike una
Golden or Emma McChesney who find equal satisfaction in
their jobs and marriages, Beverly is not as lucky and
thereby remains a more believable and human character.
Without sinking into the inert alienation of Edna
Pontellier who peceives husband, children, and lovers as
basically inimical to her personal discovery of self,
148
she comes through her emotional disappointments whole
and channels all of her energies into her career. Nor
is she a woman like Lily Bart who has been reduced to
economically dependent decorativeness in a man's world.
By the end of the novel, Beverly is the president of the
store and still contemplates the possibility of uniting
a happy marriage with a successful career. Although she
hopes for a better future, she does not share the
4
anxiety of Carrie Meeber's "ambivalent success." The
tension between her personal and professional happiness
is not insoluble in her eyes. At the height of her
career, she is optimistic, whereas Carrie remains
frustrated. Beverly hopes for the love which has eluded
her and has "a feeling it was going to be a lovely
5
autumn."
Her optimism about combining work and marriage
springs from her conviction that she is responsible for
her own life. The fact that she has not been able to
complement her career with marriage to this point does
not exclude the possibility for her in the future. Her
situation is similar to many successful businessmen who
have not achieved a full career and a happy marriage
simultaneously. Yet, when it comes to a female like
149
Beverly, society has a double standard. In the course
of an interview for photoplay in the early 1940's Bette
Davis verbalizes the popular belief that "women never
have, never will, never can be independent of the men
they love — and be happy!"^ However, her own career
and activities contradict what she says. Any man who
tried to dominate her did not last very long in her
private or professional life. At least Beverly is more
honest with herself and considers some type of
accommodation between love and career.
Beverly understands how painful a transition it is
for a woman to make it in the business world. She
shares the same acute realization of her choice to go
beyond what society expects of a woman as do selina and
Lutie. Her motivation ultimately becomes self-oriented
and is not focused on what is external to her, like
Mildred Pierce's feelings for her daughter Veda.
Beverly, in many ways, is the epitome of the successful
businesswoman. she is not as emotionally callous as
Kitty Foyle or as uncertain of herself as Alice Adams or
Martha Quest. She is a strong woman in the tradition of
the confident Fanny Brandeis who has no qualms about
competing with men on their own terms. But, unlike
Fanny, she is not willing to give up her career for
150
marriage. She is as sure of herself as Isadora Wing is
at the end of her journey.
The key to Beverly Thyson's success both as a woman
and as a business person lies in the fact that she
exercises her prerogative to make decisions, seek
alternatives, and take risks in her own life. she
firmly believes that "any road you choose yourself is
7
the one that is right for you in the end." she makes
her choices and succeeds, not as the typically sinister
or unethical caricature of a villainous male business
figure, but as a female who has resolved her identity.
Her thrust into business is the means for her to assert
herself as an independent, self-reliant, and
well-adjusted human being. Through her search for
financial and career success she manages to fulfill her
real mission as a woman, the one intimately connected
with the recognition, acceptance, and integration of the
self.
151
FOOTNOTES
1 Helen Van slyke with James Elward, Public Smiles,
Private Tears (New York: Harper & r o w, 1982), p. 248.
2 Carol Pearson and Katherine Pope, The Female Hero
in American and British Literature (New York: R. R.
Bowker Company, 19 81), p . 237 .
3 Van Slyke, p. 5.
4 Charles Shapiro, Theodore Dreiser: pur Bitter
Patriot (Carbondale, southern Illinois university press,
1962) , p. 12.
5 Van Slyke, p. 210.
6 Charles Higham, Bette: The Life of Bette pavis
(New York: MacMillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1981), p.
128.
7 Van slyke, p. 249.
15 2
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157

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Creator Poggi, Gerald Egidio (author)

Core Title The awakening: The female in business in the twentieth century American novel

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Comparative Literature

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag literature, American,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

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Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c17-736979

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