Date of Award

Spring 2026

Degree Type

Thesis

Department

English Language and Literatures

Director of Thesis

Dr. Greg Forter

Second Reader

Dr. Jason Osborne

Abstract

This thesis examines how Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) and Anaïs Nin’s A Spy in the House of Love (1954) represent gendered subjectivity under the conditions of modernity. Drawing on Ben Singer’s account of modern experience and Rita Felski’s analysis of modernity as a masculine structure organized around autonomy and production, it argues that both texts stage encounters between masculinity and femininity as sites of interpretive conflict. In Miss Lonelyhearts, masculinity remains tied to coherence, authority, and the paradigm of Christ, and repeatedly attempts to impose order through perception, relationships, and religion. These efforts ultimately collapse, exposing the futility and limitations of inherited structures of meaning. In contrast, A Spy in the House of Love relocates the pursuit of freedom within a feminine subject, as Sabina’s shifting desires are reconfigured through music into a spiritual understanding of continuity and ephemerality. By placing these texts in conversation, this thesis demonstrates that modernity produces an asymmetry in gendered responses to the pressures it imposes on subjectivity, as masculinity remains bound to structures that cannot withstand modern conditions, while femininity becomes the site through which new forms of meaning emerge.

First Page

1

Last Page

33

Rights

© 2026, Rachel Loging

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