Document Type
Article
Abstract
The turbulent time of the 1930s encompassed, in literature, both the rise of the proletarian novel and the increased development of American modernism. Both played out against a backdrop of extreme cultural dislocation. As long standing assumptions about social and cultural positions dissolved in the wake of breadlines, unemployment, and political reform, the country found itself confronting the breakdown of barriers of class, race and gender. This essay joins a growing body of scholarship that seeks to understand how the Great Depression influenced, and was influenced by the literature it produced. In doing so, I hope to provide a greater understanding of how women writers responded to the era with a variety of transgressive strategies to confront and contain gender expectations of both society and literature. To do so, I turn to popular literature for and by women, one of the most highly consumed but currently overlooked genres of the era. Examining work by popular fiction writer Ruthe S. Wheeler and middlebrow and popular magazine writer Kathleen Thompson Norris, I argue that in popular fiction women wrote and read, the transgression of growing social boundaries that were the result of the era itself paralleled an equal attempt by women writers to transgress literary boundaries that had begun to form nearly a century earlier, and which high modernism reinforced and strengthened.
Repository Citation
Goggans, Jan. "Everything But the Kitchen Sink: Popular Novels by Women in the Great Depression." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 11, no. 3, 2011, pp. 1–22. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol11/iss3/3