Gender as Performance

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses how both novels allow the authors to tell a compelling story, while simultaneously exploring the gender roles expected of both men and women in the last years of 19th-century American society. This paper examines how Dreiser and Wharton both examine and manipulate ideas about femininity and masculinity and the ways in which their characters perform their gender roles in these two tales.

From the Paper:

"Wharton's novel presents us with the downward social " and psychological " spiral of Lily Bart, our well-born but absolutely penniless hero, who begins the novel as the guest in various lush homes but ends " died of a sleeping draft overdose " in a poor boarding house. Lily, raised to be the ornament on a man's arm, never finds the man that society would have her be defined by, and her lack of ability to conceive of herself as a agent " combined with her gambling debts, which we might from our 21st-century vantage point " well take as a sort of crying out to be rescued by a man ensure her self destruction. She is not, in the end, capable of performing the role of a women alone a part that her society saw as quite unnecessary as a part of its ongoing story."

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