Narrating the Sartorial: Reading Fashionable Resistance in the Literary Archive

This dissertation argues that the novels and short stories of early twentieth century women writers relied upon and manipulated the aesthetics and temporality of the emerging fashion industry to re-think women's place in the public sphere, especially for lower class and raced individuals. Fashion provided these writers and their characters with the means to re-imagine feminine identification as women began to enter into the modern public sphere. It uses an intersecting methodology of material culture analysis, fashion studies, and close reading to explore how the novel and short story form archives women's relationship to the modern, transatlantic fashion industry. By focusing on form and content, it attends to both descriptions of characters' fashions and the formal dimensions of the fiction itself. In doing so, the dissertation uncovers a relationship between the modern novel and short story form and the modes of identification made possible to women via the emergence of ready-to-wear fashion in the early parts of the twentieth century. It holds that the development of the modern fashion industry not only provided women with new ways to imagine themselves in the public sphere, but also changed the way that women writers constructed and formulated their novels and short stories. Like their fashionable characters that use their attire to construct, although often fleeting, moments of feminine liberation, the authors that this dissertation studies manipulate the novel and short story form through fashion to rethink how to narrate and imagine feminine identity. Starting with Jean Rhys's high modernist novels, moving through the transatlantic black literature of Nella Larsen and Jessie Redmon Fauset, and ending on New York's Lower East Side with Anzia Yezierska's Yiddish fiction, this dissertation traces the emergence of a fashionable literary archive that takes into account the limiting and productive potentials of fashion as it narrates the lives of each author's characters. Character description and literary form come together in each of the works studied to produce an archive of fashion as it informed and created women's modern identification.