For what we call the woman’s movement is a revolt from a pretense of being—it is at its best and worst a struggle for the liberation of personality.

—Glasgow, New York Times, 30 November 1913

Constitutional amendments, Jazz music, The Great Depression, The Great Migration, leftover Puritan ideals and industrialization sandwiched between World War I and World War II constitute the great age of Modernism—an age that revolutionized America’s culture. Writers seized opportunities afforded them through cultural upheaval to write about social, political and gender issues never before addressed in American literature. No longer could readers reassuringly cash in on authors' sentimental and romantic views of the world. William Faulkner cynically evoked happenings of the past to justify his gloomy outlook of the future. Henry Adams attacked widely-held Puritan views, labeling sexuality as the ticket to saving the future of art and literature. Somewhere between Faulkner's obsession with the past and Adams' expectations of the future, writers such as Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow and Katherine Anne Porter depict the present condition of life in the modern period through the use of women characters.

The modern period presented women with opportunities to explore new roles in and outside of the home. Newfound freedoms such as voting, drinking and dancing in public gave women opportunities to explore formerly repressed aspects of themselves. One may argue that increased self-awareness undoubtedly yielded increased happiness for women. However, through the women characters in their short stories, Wharton, Glasgow and Porter outline the painful costs of self-discovery.

In Edith Wharton's Prisoners of Consciousness, critic Evelyn E. Fracasso claims that Wharton's heroines are "either happy or disillusioned at the beginning of the narratives, but by the conclusion, they find themselves hopelessly entrapped in a situation that is, ironically, of their own making" (12). Indeed, Wharton creates characters who go through processes of enlightenment and self-awareness, but not without paying the painful prices of disillusionment and imprisonment.

In her short story, "The Lamp of Psyche," Wharton begins by situating protagonist Delia Corbett in a state of complete bliss—undeniably happy to "have been given the one portion denied all other women on earth, the immense, the unapproachable privilege of becoming Laurence Corbett's wife" (42). Then, showing how social shifts in modern America brought women closer together in their relationships with each other and, in turn, heightened their sense of awareness, Wharton juxtaposes Delia's delusional enchantment against Mrs. Hayne's realistic outlook during a visit together. Mrs. Hayne, having already discarded her illusions about love and marriage, holds up a mirror for Delia as she asks her to tell her more about her husband. Delia successfully supports her claim that her husband is "perfect" until Mrs. Hayne throws the question, "Then of course he was in the war?" (52). Delia stops coldly, unable to answer in the affirmative, realizing for the first time that she may have married a coward.

As Delia attempts to return to her daily affairs after having tasted reality in the company of Mrs. Hayne, she fails to regain the false sense of security and happiness she always had in her marriage with Laurence. "Formerly he had been to her like an unexplored country, full of bewitching surprises and recurrent revelations of wonder and

 beauty; now she had measured and mapped him, and knew beforehand the direction of every path she trod"(57). Such disillusionment leads her to the painful realization that she is imprisoned by her knowledge of herself and of her husband. Facing walls on all sides, Delia eventually trades "passionate worship" for "tolerant affection" in her marriage. No longer comforted by illusions, Delia indeed becomes a "prisoner of love and marriage" (Fracasso 11).

Unlike Wharton, who depicts women's process of self-discovery within the context of marriage, Ellen Glasgow shows the process happening solely outside of marriage. In "Ellen Glasgow as Feminist," Monique Parent Frazee claims Glasgow "audaciously" holds the position that women must claim the right to remain unattached from marriage and maternity to achieve intellectual, moral and emotional emancipation (175-180). However, Glasgow may "audaciously" fight for women's rights outside of marriage, but she is unable to rectify the romantic losses that she feels such professional success brings.

In "The Professional Instinct," Glasgow proves Frazee's claim by creating character Judith Campbell—the epitome of a woman who has reaped the rewards of intellectual discovery outside of marriage. She makes a professional name for herself as a professor of philosophy and is eventually offered a position as the president of Hartwell College. However strong Judith's instinct to accept the prestigious position may be, she faces an equally arousing instinct to be with her lover, Doctor John Estbridge. Haunted with having to make the terrible choice between a love life and a professional life, Judith cries to John, "I wish I had no ambition." John replies, "Judith, would you give it up if I asked you?" Unable to blend her professional life with her romantic life, Judith eventually gives in, saying, "I haven't any ambition—any future—except yours" (1006). Here Glasgow introduces the idea of inevitable betrayal that ensues self-discovery. No matter how liberating personal exploration and discovery may have been for women in the modern era, Glasgow claims that a choice eventually had to be made between a professional and romantic life, leading ultimately to an ironic betrayal of instincts discovered during the process of self-liberation.

Although Wharton and Glasgow succeed in revealing the costs inherent in self-discovery, Katherine Anne Porter uniquely depicts the inner-life of a woman during self-discovery with a magnification beyond that of her contemporaries. In her short story, "Theft," she uses the nameless protagonist to show the ultimate price women pay for self-discovery: isolation.

The onset of "Theft" reveals an already self-aware woman so caught up in her independence that she no longer holds interest in love or in relationships with others. In his essay "By Self Possessed," critic John Edward Hardy agrees that the central figures of Porter's stories are "people whose desperate preoccupation with themselves cuts them off from effective communication with all other human beings" (62). In "Theft," Porter skillfully alludes to the central character's aloofness by conveying most of the action through a series of recollections all taking place in the woman's mind while she is alone in either her room or bathroom. The only action that takes place in the

 present is when the janitress steals and returns the woman's purse to her. At the moment the janitress returns the purse, the woman realizes that the uncomfortableness of the incident has nothing to do with the stolen purse, but rather the other things she has lost in her life:

She felt that she had been robbed of an enormous number of valuable things, whether material or intangible: things lost or broken by her own fault . . . words she had wished to hear spoken to her and had not heard, and the words she had meant to answer with; bitter alternatives and intolerable substitutes worse than nothing, and yet inescapable: the long patient suffering of dying friendships and the dark inexplicable death of love—all that she had had, and all that she had missed, were lost together, and were twice lost in this landslide of remembered losses. (64)

Eventually, the woman realizes that her quest for independence and self-awareness has led her to complete isolation. She has become her own worst enemy as she realizes she has robbed herself of a balance between the love and friendships of her former life and her current state of self-awareness. She admits, "I was right not to be afraid of any thief but myself, who will end by leaving me nothing" (65).

Again, in describing the protagonist in "Theft," Hardy summarizes the theme of self-discovery with a price relevant not only to Porter's works, but also to Glasgow's and Wharton's as he says, "She discovers by the end of the story that to love oneself, to the exclusion of all other things and person, is ultimately to despise onself—indeed to lose oneself. We are to understand that once she has glimpsed the hell of her self-imposed loneliness, the protagonist can never again escape it" (68).

Disillusionment, imprisonment, betrayal, aloofness and isolation in the name of self-discovery represent the results of advancements made in women's issues during the modern era. Perhaps Wharton's, Glasgow's and Porter's commentary make the fight for independence and self-actualization look dreary. Perhaps they are only warning against extremity in thought and action. Perhaps they were ahead of their time, knowing that in eighty years American women would still be paying painful costs while moving forward in love, marriage, careers, child rearing, social expectations and political rights.

Works Cited

Fracasso, Evelyn E. Edith Wharton's Prisoners of

Consciousness. Westport: Greenwood, 1994.

Frazee, Monique Parent. "Ellen Glasgow
     as Feminist." Ellen Glasgow:
     Centennial Essays. Ed. Thomas M.
     Inge. Charlottesville: University Press of
     Virginia, 1976. 175-190.

Glasgow, Ellen.  "The Professional
     Instinct." The American Heath
     Anthology of Literature. Ed. Paul
     Lauter.  Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002.
     1000-1010.

Hardy, John Edward. Katherine Anne
     Porter. New York: Ungar, 1973.

Lewis, R.W.B., ed. The Collected Stories
     of Edith Wharton.  New York: Scribner,
     1968.

Porter, Katherine Anne. Collected Stories.
     New York: Harcourt Brace, 1965.

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