Publication:
The Transparent Mask: American Women's Satire 1900-1933

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dc.contributor.advisorDeborah Carlin
dc.contributor.advisorNicholas Bromell
dc.contributor.advisorSteven C. Tracy
dc.contributor.authorHans, Julia Boissoneau
dc.contributor.departmentUniversity of Massachusetts Amherst
dc.date2023-09-23T04:34:58.000
dc.date.accessioned2024-04-26T19:49:01Z
dc.date.available2024-04-26T19:49:01Z
dc.date.issued2011-05-13
dc.description.abstractAn interdisciplinary study of women satirists of the Progressive and Jazz eras, the dissertation investigates the ways in which early modernist writers use the satiric mode either as an elitist mask or as a site of resistance, confronts the theoretical limitations that have marginalized women satirists in the academic arena, and points to the destabilizing, democratic potential inherent in satiric discourse. In the first chapter, I introduce the concept of signifying caricature, an exaggerated characterization that carries with it broad social, political, and cultural critique. Edith Wharton uses a signifying caricature in The Custom of the Country where the popular press, middlebrow literature, and the democratization of language is under attack. Several of Wharton’s satiric stories also ridicule the New Woman, revealing Wharton’s anxiety over women functioning in the public arena. The second chapter features recovery work of May Isabel Fisk, an internationally known comic monologist whose work has been lost to scholars. This chapter examines Fisk’s monologues, paying particular attention to her use of the eiron and alazon comic figures. The dissertation then moves on to Dorothy Parker’s biting satires of Jazz era decadence, the sexual double standard, and the oppressive norms of feminine beauty promoted in mass culture. The study concludes with an analysis of Jessie Fauset’s Comedy: American Style, a novel using a signifying caricature to chastise America’s failed racial policies and an essentialist theory of race. Comedy: American Style is an overlooked Depression era satire that challenges notions of a fixed American cultural nationalism even as it presages the idea of race as a floating signifier.
dc.description.degreeDoctor of Philosophy (PhD)
dc.description.departmentEnglish
dc.identifier.doihttps://doi.org/10.7275/2176377
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14394/38831
dc.relation.urlhttps://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1394&context=open_access_dissertations&unstamped=1
dc.source.statuspublished
dc.subjectCaricature
dc.subjectHumor
dc.subjectMask
dc.subjectParody
dc.subjectSatire
dc.subjectEnglish Language and Literature
dc.subjectLiterature in English, North America
dc.titleThe Transparent Mask: American Women's Satire 1900-1933
dc.typedissertation
dc.typearticle
dc.typedissertation
digcom.contributor.authorisAuthorOfPublication|email:jbhans@english.umass.edu|institution:University of Massachusetts Amherst|Hans, Julia Boissoneau
digcom.identifieropen_access_dissertations/390
digcom.identifier.contextkey2176377
digcom.identifier.submissionpathopen_access_dissertations/390
dspace.entity.typePublication
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