Women as Subject: Feminist Themes in Early 20th-Century American Lit

Introduction: Patriarchy and the Female in Western History

The history of Western civilization — and Eastern, for that matter — can be seen from one perspective as the history of patriarchal dominance and the subjugation and objectification of women. The vast majority of recognized historical figures, from governmental and military leaders to artists, scientists, and philosophers, are male, which to our modern sensibilities reveals a clear gender-based prejudice against women. The fact that women were not similarly recognized for their achievements with equal regularity cannot simply be attributed to male rejection of the significance of those achievements, however; the actual implications of Western history's patriarchal focus are much more profound and far-reaching. It is not only that women's achievements were less recognized than their male counterparts', but that women in fact accomplished less in these fields due to a persistent and pervasive belief that they were less capable in physical and intellectual pursuits than men.

It is this fundamental belief in feminine inferiority that lies at the heart of the patriarchal view of history, and it is the slow shift in this belief during the nineteenth and especially the twentieth century that has allowed for the emergence of new views of history and of human thought in general. This shift is especially noticeable in American literature of the early twentieth century, where the meaning of "female" and the ways in which women were affected by and interacted with the world came under close scrutiny and old views were often forcefully rejected. Yet to simplify the feminist perspective to an assertion of female equality is incredibly naive. Rather, authors like Jean Toomer, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Hilda Doolittle tracked the change of the female from object to individual and eventually to a full-fledged and active protagonist.

H.D.'s 'Helen' and the Objectification of Woman as Symbol

Doolittle's poem "Helen," first published in 1924, takes an ironic look at the traditional patriarchal view of the female as object. The poem, as the title implies, is concerned with the historic and mythic figure of Helen, whose beauty and questionable fidelity — depending on the version and perspective of the tale — lay at the heart of the Trojan War, one of the longest and bloodiest conflicts in the ancient world and a touchstone for later Greek writers across many, if not most, of the themes upon which they wrote. Military heroism, obedience and defiance to the gods, and epic familial struggles were all part of the Trojan War and its aftermath. But the cause of it all was Helen, a beautiful woman who was stolen from one man the way one might steal cattle or an expensive jewel. Helen, in short, is entirely objectified in the story of the Trojan War, possessing very little agency and being important only for what she symbolized.

Hilda Doolittle takes this symbolism and inverts it, using the techniques of imagist poetry to paint a verbal portrait of Helen that seems at once aligned with and diametrically opposed to the traditional mythic view. This is true not only of Helen herself, but also of Doolittle's use of other traditional Western symbols. The color white is generally associated with purity, innocence, and even explicitly with virginity. Doolittle uses it constantly throughout the poem to refer to Helen, whom "All Greece hates" and "reviles," which is not generally the way innocence and virginity are treated (Doolittle 1942, lines 1, 6). This reveals the paradox in the way Helen is viewed: she is a symbol of Woman, who is supposed to be pure and virginal, and yet Helen was also the object of great sexual desire. It is this aspect of womanhood — that which should arguably be most important to an ancient society insofar as it is procreative — that leads to her condemnation.

Jean Toomer's 'Fern' and the Failure of Objectification

An imagist poet such as Doolittle necessarily deals with objects, as that is perhaps the defining feature of such poetry. The short story "Fern" by Jean Toomer, on the other hand, deals with the woman-as-object scenario in a much different fashion. Though Doolittle hints at the impossibility of objectifying women through her use of symbolism and imagery, Toomer addresses the issue directly and explicitly through narrative and plot. As a writer of the Harlem Renaissance, race was also an essential theme of Toomer's writing, and the many parallels between the perspective toward and portrayal of African Americans and women are highly apparent in this work. Both groups were experiencing newfound freedoms and opportunities following the First World War, and the concept of objectification along both gender and racial lines began to crumble under the force of this recently regained agency.

Fern is representative of this failed objectification. No matter what part of her you looked at, the narrator says, you were immediately drawn to her eyes — her source of perception, and perhaps even of objectifying you in return. Toomer makes it even more clear that Fern, and women and African Americans in general, cannot truly be perceived and treated as objects when his narrator notes that "when she [Fern] was young, a few men took her, but got no joy from it" (Toomer 1637). The objectification attempted in the sexual act failed; though these men possessed her for those moments in the way they had intended, the outcome was not what they had learned to expect. Fern could not actually be possessed and was not even partially an object.

Conclusion: The Decade of Redefinition

The transition of the perception of the feminine from object to protagonist full of agency and self-determination is not something that can be clearly mapped along a line. Yet the decade immediately following World War I was an especially important period in the self-redefinition of women. Earning the right to vote marked a major advancement in the political progress of women in the United States, and the literature of the period also marks their transition from objects to full human beings with the full capacity to think and act independently.