Fabricating identities: Dress in American realist novels, 1880-192

The vital connection between self and the clothed body forms the basis for this study of representative American realist novels set during the decades spanning the years 1875 to 1925. American social history of these decades is marked both by the swelling of a middle class define through respectability and by the emergence of a consumer culture that promised through its proliferation of images and commodities that the "good life" was within the reach of all. This history sets the scene for these literary works. In examining female characters' attempts to construct selves outfitted for this new social order, I argue that in these characters' quests to move beyond the domestic sphere, a model for social change emerges.;Through focusing on novelists' descriptions of clothing and through mapping out the cultural grid that brings symbolic meaning to these description, this study aims toward recreating what Mikhail Bakhtin called "the social atmosphere of the word." A complex weave of cultural meanings is illuminated through attention to dress and to the social backdrop against which it etches its fashion statement. Unravelling the "living dialogic threads" weaving themselves around images of draped and bustled skirts, gigot sleeves, or serpentine teagowns, a reader can begin to expose the warp of social class and gender expectations integral to selfhood and examine the emerging constructions of the female self.;In the novels selected for this study--Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady, Kate Chopin's The Awakening, Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie, Willa Cather's My Antonia, and Ellen Glasgow's Barren Ground--various female characters accept, challenge, contradict, or oppose the social forces impinging upon self. As each takes from a closet of possibilities the womanly practices and womanly images that suit her, some select in a willy-nilly fashion a hybrid ensemble that pulls from opposite ends of cultural poles. This new ensemble--partaking in dominant forms but rearranging and thus amending them--works to outfit at least some of these fictional characters for change. Informed by Bakhtin's socio-linguistic theory of the novel, reception theories that examine triadic models for meaning-making, and work of material historians and cultural critics, this study provides a model for using images of dress as a tool for interpreting literary texts.