Woman Redux

de Kooning, Mailer and American Abstract Expression

Authors

  • Linda Patterson Miller Penn State Abington Author

Keywords:

Abstract Expressionism, An American Dream, gender and representation, feminist criticism, modernism and postwar art, interdisciplinary aesthetics

Abstract

An examination of Norman Mailer’s appropriation of the painterly distortions of Willem de Kooning, a leading figure among the American Abstract Expressionists of the 1950s and 1960s in New York. Mailer’s portrait of Deborah Rojack’s murder in An American Dream bears uncanny parallels to de Kooning’s “Woman I,” a painting that Norman Mailer knew well by the time he was working on his novel. An examination of the two works in tandem illuminates how Mailer’s attempt, at least in this novel, was not to destroy women but to liberate them from within and to restore harmony for both men and women.

Author Biography

  • Linda Patterson Miller, Penn State Abington

    Linda Patterson Miller is Professor of English at Penn State Abington. She publishes in all areas of American literature, but her specialty is the cultural milieu of the American expatriate artists of the 1920s. Her books in this field include Letters from the Lost Generation and Reading Hemingway’s In Our Time (forthcoming). She is completing a group biography of the Lost Generation artists on the French Riviera. Dr. Miller is Head of the Editorial Board for the Hemingway Complete Letters Project (Cambridge University Press), and she continues to serve as a scholarly consultant for public broadcasting projects and museum exhibitions that focus on twentieth-century life and art.

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Published

2026-03-14

Issue

Vol. 3 No. 1 (2009): Beyond Fiction

Section

Articles