Democracy's broken promise in fin-desiècle British and American women's literature

Abstract

By analyzing fin-de-siècle literature, this essay will focus on a critical examination of The Awakening, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street,” and Passing. The emphasis will be on the impact of women’s suffrage on women’s voices, and the way these voices are perceived by a male-dominated democratic system. The early writings demonstrated the expectation that women’s suffrage would translate the ability to vote into a meaningful voice in this system. However, later texts revealed this expectation to be a false promise. This essay uses Virginia Woolf’s, A Room of One’s Own, as one critical lens through which to read these works.