1920s Novels by NYC Women: Wharton, Larsen, Niles

This course will examine how a sampling of New York women writers of the 1920s represented the city, how their New York City can alternately seem utterly foreign and unnervingly familiar. We will focus on three novels, starting with Edith Wharton's acclaimed The Age of Innocence, moving on to Nella Larsen's Passing, a central text of the Harlem Renaissance, and ending with the little-known Strange Brother by Blair Niles, about gay culture in Harlem. We will discuss the New York setting in these works, and how they have shaped our image of 1920s NYC women. How did these writers respond to the post-World-War-I society that offered changing roles for women, along with other large cultural shifts? Sub-topics will include the intersecting concerns of gender, sexuality, ethnicity and race, anxieties over immigration, public space, and the culture of display. Biographical context will help us understand 1920s women authorship, and secondary readings drawn from cultural history and analysis will broaden our contextual framework, historical perspectives that will help us understand the underpinnings of our own society. Naturally, we will also stop to appreciate the tremendous achievements these brilliant texts represent.

Weeks one and two are devoted to The Age of Innocence, the 1921 Pulitzer-winning novel that purports to be about "old New York" and class structures of the late 1800s while it speaks volumes about the period when it was published, popular, and widely acclaimed. Through Wharton, we will discuss changing attitudes toward marriage and women's economic independence, and also the nativist movement in the early 1920s US, and fears of foreign "contamination" of the social body. In week three, we consider how these issues refract in Passing, a novel exploring the ethics and complications of racial divisions in NYC, through the topics of voyeurism, the Harlem Renaissance and New York's rising Black middle-class, and the homoeroticism of women's friendships. In our last week, we will discuss the triangulation of race, femininity, and a 1920s version of queer identity as seen in Strange Brother, about a gay white man making his home in Harlem.

Wednesdays, 6:30-8 PM (ET)
$175 (4 sessions, 90 minutes each)

Jonathan Goldman is a Professor of English at New York Institute of Technology. He is the author of Modernism is the Literature of Celebrity, and editor of Joyce and the Law, and co-editor of Modernist Star Maps: Celebrity, Modernity, Culture. He also directs New York 1920s: 100 Years Ago Today, a digital project which highlights archival materials related to the city 100 years ago. He is incoming president of the James Joyce Society.