Women’s Studies, 39:747–764, 2010 Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0049-7878 print / 1547-7045 online DOI: 10.1080/00497878.2010.505151 THE TAWDRY FRONTIERS AND NOMADOGRAPHIES OF JANE BOWLES’S TWO SERIOUS LADIES PAVLINA RADIA University of Toronto The long staircase seemed short to her, like a dream that is remembered long after it has been dreamed. —Jane Bowles, Two Serious Ladies Jane Bowles, the second-generation American modernist who spent most of her life moving restlessly between the United States, Central America, Africa, and Europe, is perhaps best known for her first and only published novel, Two Serious Ladies (1943). Framing the novel are the much celebrated yet contentious jour- neys of two American women of upper-middle-class background whose desire to extricate themselves from their conventional lifestyle propels their desire for a nomadic idyll. Miss Goering sells her family house in order to live on an island while embarking on nightly excursions to the mainland. Mrs. Copperfield, on the other hand, opts for another frontier, Panama, where she hopes to find what she desires most: happiness. Read primarily as a cel- ebration of women’s empowerment, the novel continues to be lauded for its positive deployment of the characters’ journeys as an “ideological project of social change for women” (Lakritz 227), or similarly, as an attempt to find a “new space beyond accepted norms” (Tinkler 67). While the focus remains on the charac- ters’ resistance and individual idiosyncrasies, the socio-cultural context of their nomadic, yet not necessarily liberating, geopol- itics remains largely unexamined. In what follows, I argue that Bowles’s novel sheds light on the utopian mythographies and often complicated nomadographies of American modernity. Written in the 1940s, a period of many political upheavals in and outside of the U.S., Two Serious Ladies comments on the Address correspondence to Pavlina Radia, 272 Broadway Avenue, Toronto, Ontario M4P 1V9, Canada. E-mail: pavlinar@nipissingu.ca 747