Women as Subject: Feminist Themes in Early 20th-Century American Lit
This essay examines the evolving representation of women in early twentieth-century American literature, focusing on three key texts: Hilda Doolittle's imagist poem "Helen," Jean Toomer's short story "Fern," and Edna St. Vincent Millay's sonnet "I, being born a woman and distressed." The paper argues that these works collectively trace a progression from the patriarchal objectification of women to a recognition of female agency and subjectivity. Drawing on themes of race, sexuality, and poetic form, the essay situates these literary developments within the broader sociopolitical context of women gaining suffrage and asserting new identities in the 1920s United States.
- Introduction: Patriarchy and the Female in Western History: Patriarchal history and emerging feminist literary voices
- H.D.'s 'Helen' and the Objectification of Woman as Symbol: Doolittle inverts Helen's mythic objectification through imagism
- Jean Toomer's 'Fern' and the Failure of Objectification: Toomer exposes the impossibility of objectifying women and race
- Edna St. Vincent Millay and the Assertion of Female Agency: Millay's sonnet form enacts female self-determination and agency
- Conclusion: The Decade of Redefinition: Post-WWI decade marks women's literary and political redefinition
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper builds a coherent argument across three distinct texts, using each work to mark a stage in the progressive redefinition of femininity — from symbol, to enigma, to autonomous agent.
- It connects formal literary analysis (imagist technique, sonnet structure, feminine endings) to thematic claims, showing how form and content reinforce each other in each text.
- Historical contextualization — particularly around women's suffrage and the post-WWI era — grounds the literary argument in concrete social reality without overwhelming the textual analysis.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates comparative literary analysis across genre: a lyric poem, a short story, and a sonnet are each examined on their own formal terms before being synthesized into a single overarching argument. The analysis of Millay's sonnet is particularly strong, showing how prosodic details (the stressed "I," feminine line endings, the Italian vs. Shakespearean structure) directly enact the poem's thematic content about female self-determination.
Structure breakdown
The essay opens with a broad historical claim about patriarchy and then narrows to American modernist literature. Each of the three middle sections addresses one author and text, arranged in a loose progression from objectification (H.D.) to failed objectification (Toomer) to agency (Millay). The brief conclusion ties the literary argument back to the historical turning point of women's suffrage, giving the essay a satisfying arc from civilization-level context to individual poetic line and back again.
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.
Works Cited
Dictionary.com. "zest." Accessed 22 May 2009.
Baym, Nina, ed. Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume D. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2003.
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