FEMALE GENDER ROLES IN AMERICAN MODERNIST FICTION
FEMALE GENDER ROLES IN AMERICAN MODERNIST FICTION

Summary/Abstract: While gender was once seen as innate and unchanging, recent perspectives have shifted, revealing that gender is continuously produced and reproduced through individual performances. Consequently, gender is something that we learn to do. Relying on the theories of Teresade Lauretis, Joan Rivière, Judith Butler, Candace West, and Don Zimmerman, the paper will analyze female gender roles in modernist fiction to explore how modernist fiction deals with gender roles and stereotypes and in what way modernist fiction functions as a technology of gender in comparison with realist fiction. Since literary modernism criticized the conventions and traditions of realism and brought change and freedom of thought and expression, the paper asserts that modernist literature, unlike realist literature, subverts female gender roles and stereotypes and thus reflects the growing changes in the notion of gender and gender roles that occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century. The paper showcases the stereotypes of the Southern belle, the mammy, the tomboy, the flapper, and the tragic mulatta as subverted in modernist fiction with the new gender ideas at the core of their subversion.

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