The Margins of the Market: Women Writers and the US Publishing Industry in the Long 1950s
This dissertation examines the intersection between the literature of the long 1950s "1945 through 1963" and the industry changes in the publishing world that shaped the experiences of authors and impacted the works making it to market. I examine how women authors and the field of publishing responded to the increasingly conservative culture from the end of WWII through the early 1960s. In addition to looking at how women authors operated within a restrictive cultural climate to retain access to the public market for their works and their careers, I also unpack the ways publishers responded to women writers and how women writers are portrayed in the public market. Utilizing the methodologies of book history and literary scholarship, I scrutinize the complexities of textual creation and how this process "one often imagined as purely creative" is shaped by market and cultural conditions, and how authors' responses to these conditions can produce texts that have the potential to reshape the market and culture. Throughout this dissertation, I examine the undercurrents of raced-, classed-, and gendered-expectations affecting women's authorship and the market for women's work. Through archival research, I uncover how authors' interactions with their publishers, editors, and agents were shaped by gendered and raced market pressures. I also explore reviews, marketing materials, interviews, and book covers to see how authors were marketed to either fit with or challenge expectation and appeal to certain cultural values given the site of publication and generic conventions. And lastly, I evaluate how publicity and authorship are portrayed in women writers' fiction, how this was undergirded by the threat of violence, and how this violence was countered or subverted. The authors I consider here" Ann Petry, Dorothy B. Hughes, Laura Z. Hobson, Shirley Jackson, Carson McCullers, and Dorothy West" represent a spectrum of authors published in both trade and mass-market fiction. In Chapter One, I look at author-publisher relationships as evidenced through material in the Houghton Mifflin archive to determine how these relationships are shaped by gender, race, and notions of literary prestige. Through centering archival materials pertaining to three Houghton Mifflin authors" Carson McCullers, Ann Petry, and Dorothy West" this chapter finds that authors' perceived levels of cultural or literary prestige affect their interactions with Houghton Mifflin. I trace the publisher relationships of Petry, West, and McCullers through the archival materials, demonstrating that while the publisher desired them as authors because of the potential for profit or prestige, they often treated these authors with contempt because of their gender or race, working at odds with supporting successful authorship. Chapter Two focuses on Shirley Jackson's magazine work, primarily in Good Housekeeping and Woman's Home Companion , where she published numerous domestic fiction stories that emphasized her role as wife and mother rather than as author. By participating in the domestic fiction genre in these magazines, Jackson realigns the concerns she forefronts about womanhood and patriarchy in her longer fiction for distinctly different audience expectations. This chapter combines a study of the context of the women's magazine industry with Jackson's domestic fiction to investigate how Jackson both pushes against and functions within these gendered and raced confines, using humor to subvert expectation and examine the limited conventions of womanhood, and the consequences of these limitations. I find that this undervalued venue allowed Jackson to use humor to construct a site of identification for middle-class white women where personal dissatisfaction could be raised collectively and addressed as indicative of a social problem in need of public address. In Chapter Three, I look at how women authors functioned within the mass market by examining genre fiction. I focus on Laura Z. Hobson and Dorothy B. Hughes, both of whom wrote popular genre fiction embedded with cultural critique. I forefront the gendered expectations of genre to articulate how authorship was shaped by 1950s conventions of gender and how this surfaces in the literature. I find that mass-market publishing created an opening for women authors, but that this opening was shaped by expectations of gendered and classed readership. Through close readings of Hobson's Gentleman's Agreement (1947) and Hughes's In a Lonely Place (1947), along with examinations of promotional materials and interviews, I demonstrate how the gendering of genre shaped both the portrayal of authorship and the construction of texts. I argue that Hobson, working in a feminized genre, created an authorial persona and characters who conform more explicitly to gender roles, while Hughes, working in a masculinized genre, erased the importance of gender from both herself and her novels, in line with gendered generic expectations. Lastly, Chapter Four examines how the fictional portrayal of public space represents women's authorship in the postwar period as complicated by concerns of public violence and private invasion. While the first three chapters emphasize the context of publication, this chapter turns toward literary analysis to focus on Petry's The Street (1946) and Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962). Complimenting examinations of Petry's and Jackson's publishing experiences in previous chapters, I demonstrate how gendered pressures of mid-century publishing erupt in their texts through violence and spatial regulation. This chapter draws correlations between the experiences of being made public" being exposed for dissection during a period of intense pressure to conform to impossible standards" with the violence depicted in Petry's and Jackson's novels. I look at the double edge of publicity, using the notion of the public market as a site of struggle for power, the right of representation, and independence.
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