The Artist as a Young woman in Edna Ferber’s Fanny Herself

Abstract

Edna Ferber wrote the semi‐autobiographical Fanny Herself in 1917. It is the first novel in which she highlights the conflict inherent in the American Dream: the struggle among professional success, personal fulfillment and the need for artistic expression. The setting is yet another Midwestern town, Winnebago, Wisconsin. Fanny, a young girl, watches as her widowed mother takes control of the family store and runs it, like a man would, in order to support herself and her two children. It was a time when there were “plenty of women wage earners in Winnebago, as elsewhere; clerks, stenographers, school teachers, bookkeepers.”  However, Fanny’s mother is different.: