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Raping The Raced Body: Trauma In Asian North American Women's Literature, Amy Lillian Manning

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the representation of racial and sexual traumas in short fiction and novels by Asian American women writing post-WWII to the present. The central focus of this project is on Asian American literary representations of the lingering effects of physical, racial, and sexual traumas to Asian American women, specifically the nuances of narrating traumatic experiences. Each chapter explores various literary representations of post-traumatic psychological states of unrest, instability, and incoherence. Most importantly, this study examines the frequently simultaneous narrations of sexual trauma and racial awareness, of how personal narratives of trauma against the physical body become entangled with …

Competing Visions: Women Writers And Male Illustrators In The Golden Age Of Illustration, Jason Richard Williams

Doctoral Dissertations

In "Competing Visions," I examine the works of women writers and male illustrators during what has been termed the "Golden Age of Illustration" (1880--1920). Due to advances in printing technology and the proliferation of mass-market magazines just before the turn-of-the-last century, novels and short stories were often published with images by illustrators like Howard Pyle and N. C. Wyeth, who subsequently gained enormous popularity and developed wide followings. At the same time, women writers enjoyed an unprecedented period of widespread exposure and political influence. Looking closely at the intersection of images and texts from early twentieth century periodical publications reveals …

Excavating The Landscapes Of American Literature: Archaeology, Antiquarianism, And The Landscape In American Women's Writing, 1820--1890, Christina Healey

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the ways that women writers made use of the discourses of antiquarianism and archaeology between the years 1820 and 1890. Focusing especially upon the writings of Sarah Josepha Hale, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Susan Fenimore Cooper, Celia Thaxter, and Constance Fenimore Woolson, the project examines depictions of artifacts, ruins, relics, and other antiquities in literary landscapes. Each of these women presents a unique way of knowing the world that is manifested in the ways their texts join different ways of understanding the landscape, its occupants, the artifacts it contains, its strata and geological history, and its aesthetic value. …

Material Culture And Domestic Texts: Textiles In The Texts Of Warner, Adams, Wilson, Sadlier, Stoddard, And Phelps, Laura Smith

Doctoral Dissertations

In "Material Culture and Domestic Texts: Textiles in the Texts of Warner, Adams, Wilson, Sadlier, Stoddard, and Phelps," I draw from recently revised notions of the discourse of domesticity to argue that the imagery of textile production, consumption, and containment enables authors to configure experimental domestic forms. Mid-nineteenth-century authors used textiles---including their inherent "textility" and feminine associations---to play out new domestic configurations in response to exigencies of economy, race, intemperance, competitive desire, and labor. Their literature demystifies textiles' ability to invest social hierarchies of race, class, gender, and religion; it also enacts material changes of women's domestic spaces and roles …

Dirty Whites And Dark Secrets: Sex And Race In "Peyton Place", Sally Hirsh-Dickinson

Doctoral Dissertations

"Dirty Whites and Dark Secrets: Sex and Race in Peyton Place " suggests that Grace Metalious's 1956 potboiler Peyton Place contains a critique of race which may have been just as unsettling to a mid-century readership as the novel's famed critique of sexuality. Peyton Place is most often said to be "about" sex. In this study, I argue that it is also "about" race, and that it is the racing of the sex that may have provoked the scandalized outcry against the novel. My work posits that Peyton Place's controversial reputation resulted from Metalious's racialized representations of sexuality and the …

The Comradeship Of The "Happy Few": Henry James, Edith Wharton, And The Pederastic Tradition, Sharon Kehl Califano

Doctoral Dissertations

The recent scholarly reevaluation of Henry James in terms of queer theory has created a need to reexamine James' influence on Edith Wharton and her works. In this dissertation, I explore how James introduced Wharton to a circle of friends (the "Happy Few"), a group of queer men-of-letters who provided the author with both a literal and figurative space for discovering an interiorized, masculine queer self. Specifically addressing the years between 1905 and 1910, I show in this study how Wharton's initiation into queer culture and her introduction to the pederastic tradition, as reimagined through Walt Whitman's paradigmatic "comradeship," gave …

Choran Community: The Aesthetics Of Encounter In Literary And Photographic Modernism, Emily M. Hinnov

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines novels, photographs, and phototexts by British and American artists published between the world wars in order to argue that these works re-envision community through a narrative aesthetic, which I term the choran moment, that communicates the possibility of genuinely empathetic understanding between self and other. My study of literary and photographic modernism is based upon these modern artists' awareness of an ever-present, organic community allied in common knowledge of the interconnection among humanity offered through convergence with and respect for difference. These choran moments of correlation are key to the aesthetics and therefore the politics of modernist …

Faith Positions: Re -Reading Gender, Race, And Christianity In Nineteenth -Century American Women's Writing, Mary L. Doyle

Doctoral Dissertations

Faith Positions is a study of the ways in which various modes of nineteenth-century religious belief are intertwined with the strained threads of an "American" national narrative. Specifically, I focus on the texts of four nineteenth-century American women---Jarena Lee, Rebecca Harding Davis, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Frances Harper---to consider the ways in which religious belief, and the narratives shaped by belief, respond to experiences defined by gender and race.

As Jenny Franchot and Carolyn Haynes (among others) have noted, contemporary American literary scholarship tends to evade concerns of religion and belief. "About those who 'had it' [religious belief] in the …

Motherwork, Artwork: The Mother/Artist In Fiction By Parton, Phelps, Chopin, Woolf, Drabble, And Walker, Nancy Hoyt Lecourt

Doctoral Dissertations

This study asks the question, What happens to a practicing (fictional) mother who also tries to be a practicing artist? How do literary texts represent such people? How do they represent the relationship between material and artistic work? The primary works studied are Sarah Parton's Ruth Hall, (1855), Elizabeth Stuart Phelps' The Story of Avis (1877), Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899), Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927), and Margaret Drabble's The Millstone (1965). The conclusion focuses on Alice Walker's short story, "Everyday Use."

Mother-artists finds themselves on the "wrong" side of the nature/culture binary, where ideologies about "true womanhood" and …

Domestic Visions And Shifting Identities: The Urban Novel And The Rise Of A Consumer Culture In America, 1852-1925, Nancy Helen Von Rosk

Doctoral Dissertations

Domestic Visions reexamines the tradition of the urban novel in America by reading the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, William Dean Howells, Theodore Dreiser, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Edith Wharton, Abraham Cahan and Anzia Yezierska within the historical and cultural contexts of an evolving urban consumer culture. Bringing together not only a wide range of canonical and non-canonical texts, but also an analysis of America's shifting domestic ideals over the last half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this study traces the impact of a new spectacular urban public culture on both the private realm and those who are …

Language's "Bliss Of Unfolding" In And Through History, Autobiography And Myth: The Poetry Of Rita Dove, Carol Keyes

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on the first five books of poetry published by the American poet Rita Dove: The Yellow House on the Corner (1980), Museum (1983), Thomas and Beulah (1986; awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1987), Grace Notes (1989), and Mother Love (1995). It situates her work within the whole field of American poetic discourse. Dove's relationship to myriad strands of American ars poetica traditions arises out of patterns of amplification and negotiation worked out in Dove's poetry in relation to a wide range of such traditions. Thus, the study's methodology proceeds from the poet T. S. Eliot's dictum that …

Transactional Bond In The Novels Of Charles Brockden Brown, Gretchen Elspeth Digeronimo

Doctoral Dissertations

The six novels and various other fiction pieces Charles Brockden Brown wrote between 1799 and 1801 coherently demonstrate the operation and effect of literary and artistic representation in early Republican America.

In original close readings of Arthur Mervyn, Edgar Huntly, Ormond, and several other works, this dissertation identifies transactional bond and describes how Brown charted the establishment of the public and private individual self through transactional bond in three specific arenas: relationships between the developing self and written, visual, or reported representation; relationships between master/mentors and apprentices; relationships among women.

Bonds that begin, operate, and dissolve between male characters are …

Turning To Earth: Paths To An Ecological Practice, Florence Marina Schauffler

Doctoral Dissertations

In highly developed countries like the United States, conventional approaches to environmental change emphasize systemic measures such as policies and regulations. Yet many intractable environmental problems appear to be rooted in the perspectives and practices of individual citizens. Efforts to restore 'outer ecology' may depend, therefore, on transforming 'inner ecology'--the constellation of spiritual and moral values that guide action. This dissertation examines the inner dimensions of ecological change, demonstrating how individuals redefine their relation to earth through a process of 'ecological conversion.'.

In assessing the dynamics of conversion, this work relies primarily on the testimony of six 20th-century American writers: …

"Wherein Lies Personal Identity": The Reception Of Locke And Richardson And The Language Of Self In The Letters And Journals Of Exceptional Eighteenth Century American Women, Carolann O'Malley Davis

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation adds a new chapter to the history of the social revolution that accompanied the American Revolution, specifically the revolt against patriarchalism. It is my contention that exceptional women initiated a private revolution to gain recognition of a new personal identity. This private revolution led to the rejection of the system of private government of man over woman, patriarchalism.

I identified seven women, Eliza Lucas Pinckney, Abigail Adams, Esther Edwards Burr, Mercy Otis Warren, Eliza Southgate Bowne, Anne Willing Bingham and Anne Home Shippen, who were especially representative of a network of women who developed a self-consciousness. For these …

Emerging From The Chrysalis: Isolation And Publication In Nineteenth-Century Literacy Narratives, Lisa Ann Sisco

Doctoral Dissertations

"Emerging From the Chrysalis" begins with the words of Frederick Douglass, who explains in his 1845 slave narrative that learning to read was a conflicted experience, simultaneously enabling and painful. Douglass writes, "I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing." These powerful words reveal a paradoxical "double-consciousness" inherent in nineteenth-century narratives about literacy: literacy's capacity to simultaneously imprison and empower. Douglass's relationship to literacy, both as a character within his narrative and as an author in a historical context, exemplifies the focus of this dissertation.

I borrow my central metaphor from …

A Thorn In The Text: Shakerism And The Marriage Narrative, Robert Michael Pugh

Doctoral Dissertations

Since 1824, fiction writers have attempted to treat the celibate communalist life of the American Shakers within narrative plot patterns that privilege marriage. The resulting stories and novels show Shakerism continually resisting this appropriation. Nevertheless, unable or unwilling to accept Shakerism's subversion of the necessary centrality of marriage, most of these writers have struggled to contain Shakerism's counter-structures of family and of narrative by reducing Shakerism's complexity. Shakerism, however, remains irreducible--a thorn in the text.

This study focuses on fifteen fictions in which well-known and lesser-known writers try to bring Shakerism and marriage together.

The Preface summarizes the Shakers' history …

Red Plush And Brass: Prostitution As A Mirror Of Self In The Fiction Of Ernest Hemingway, Claude Caswell

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the iconography and psychology of prostitution as a motif in the fiction of Ernest Hemingway. After identifying the prostitutional dynamics that form a recurring pattern throughout Hemingway's work and personal life, the discussion focuses primarily on exploring the implications of those dynamics in Hemingway's three major novels: The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929), and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940).

What this study contends is that the literal and figurative presence of prostitution as a theme in Hemingway's narratives operates on two basic levels. On one level, the prostitution elements represent the pathology …

On Her Mouth You Kiss Your Own: Lesbian Conversations In Exile, 1924-1936, Luita Deane Spangler

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the work of four American lesbian expatriate novelists living and writing in Paris in the years between the two World Wars. Altogether six novels are discussed: The Uncertain Feast (1924), The Happy Failure (1925), and This Way Up (1927) by Solita Solano; The Cubical City (1925) by Janet Flanner; The One Who Is Legion (1930) by Natalie Clifford Barney; and Nightwood (1936) by Djuna Barnes.

Guided by recent conjectures on the significance of sexuality and gender development proposed by such feminist theorists as Luce Irigaray and Monique Wittig, this dissertation explores these six novels for evidence of …

The Hair Wreath: Mary Wilkins Freeman's Artist Fiction, Norma Johnsen

Doctoral Dissertations

Mary Wilkins Freeman uses an artist protagonist to explore conflicts and issues she herself faced as a woman writing in male-defined culture. Her artists make art in the content of a highly developed, expressive, sometime subversive, and always deeply personal women's art tradition. Their singing, their poems and stories, and their decorative "household arts" speak a complex poetic language.

The Mary Wilkins artist defines self through her art. In "A New England Nun" the artist preserves her artistic identity by retreating to her solitary pleasures of household arranging, sewing, and distilling. Other household artists or architects assert their identity by …