The depiction of women in the works of John Dos Passos
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Description
The women characters in John Dos Passos' 'contemporary chronicles,' a term the writer coined to suggest the historical thrust of his fiction, constitute a significant, but neglected part of his achievement as a social historian and a novelist. Dos Passos' most successful works were written during a revolution in women's lives and work caused by suffrage activism, and by increased job opportunities made possible by technological innovations, World War I, and the post-war boom. Due to his consistent appetite for immersing himself in the events of his time, Dos Passos observed closely the major social and cultural changes which brought American women from rebellion to retreat in the first four decades of the Twentieth Century. A satirist like Thorstein Veblen, a major influence on his social analysis, Dos Passos recorded the transformation of women's roles by describing basic American female types through his women characters, each type reflecting an aspect of the age. Although these various feminine personalities are intimately related to the contemporary social scene, they also exemplify an increasing complexity in Dos Passos' treatment of women, as well as his thematic and formal maturation as a writer. In his earlier works, the female characters suggest his Victorian moral background as well as the absence of social awareness in his self-absorbed writings, whereas Dos Passos' more intricate portraits of American women in the mid-twenties reflect his improved stylistic skills as well as his increased exposure to politics. Finally, during Dos Passos' most radical and creative phase in the late twenties and early thirties, his women characters serve to demonstrate his belief in the bourgeois betrayal of original American ideals in capitalist society. Often central to his novels, Dos Passos' female figures contribute greatly to an understanding of the sexual and social outlook of a sensitive, intellectual rebel, whose aim was to expose the disease of materialism and mindlessness which, in his view, had infected Twentieth Century America