A STUDY OF WOMEN'S EMPOWERMENT. IN THE WORKS OF MANJU KAPUR AND ANITA NAIR

In general, however, these plots clearly speak to the changes in women's status between about 1870 and 1920. More and more women were joining the work force, often with lowpaying factory jobs, and considerable concern was being voiced about the effect of public employment on young women's virtue; in such a climate, the very figuring of the working girl as democratic heroine, her entry into a popular pantheon that included such nationalistically approved types as the hunter, the detective, and the honest mechanic, signaled some level of legitimacy. Fiction that heroized women outside the domestic sphere offered working-class women some kind of accommodation and justification, some means of negotiating the transition from private to public. The messages of all these dime narratives are complicated not only -298- by the relationship between formula and social agency but by the inscriptions of authorial voices in the texts. The Beadle and Adams authors forged a facsimile of a storyteller's relationship with their audience by talking to their readers about the commercial paraphernalia of the dime novel ...»