Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Tramps in literature. Women tramps. American literature American literature United States United States'

Some Black women writers--Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Cade Bambara, Paule Marshall, Gloria Naylor, and Alice Walker--of American fiction have written characterizations of winning women. Their characterizations include women who are capable of taking risks, making choices, and taking responsiblity for their choices. These winning women are capable of accepting their own successes and failures by the conclusions of the novels. They are characterized as dealing with devastating and traumatic personal histories in a growth-enhancing manner. Characterizations of winning women by these authors are consistently revealed through five developmental stages: conditioning, awareness, interiorizing, reintegrating, and winning. These stages contain patterns that are consistent from author to author.While conditioning and awareness of the negative influcences of conditioning are predictable, this study introduces the concept of interiorizing and reintegrating as positive steps toward becoming a winning woman. Frequent descriptions of numbness and disorientation mark the most obvious stages of interiorizing. It is not until the Twentieth Century that we see women writers using this interiorizing process as a necessary step toward growth. Surviving interiorizing, as these winning women do, leads to the essential stage of reintegrating.Interiorizing is a complete separation from social interaction; reintegrating is a gradual reattachment to social process. First, elaborate descriptions of bathing rituals affirm the importance of a woman's body to herself. Second, reintegrating involves food rituals which signal social reconnection. Celebration banquets and family recipes offer an important reminder to the winning woman that the future is built on the past. Taking the best of what has been learned from the past into the future provides strength and stability.The characterization of a winning woman stops with potential rather than completion. A winning woman must still take risks, make choices, and bear the consequences of her choices. The winning woman does not accept a diminished life of harmful conformity. She is characterized as discovering how to use choice and power. Novels included in this study are: Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Are Watching God; Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters; Paule Marshall's Brownstone, Brown Girl; The Chosen Place, the Timeless People; and Praisesong for the Widow; Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place, Linden Hills; and Alice Walker's Meridian, and The Color Purple.
Department of English

This dissertation examines discourses surrounding religious dress in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly how various forms of religious dress were deployed by women. Analyzing the rhetoric used by women wearing distinctive religious garb as well as outsiders writing about religious dress, I show how religious dress not only held a variety of spiritual meanings for people of faith, but also served as a visual critique of a dominant Protestant paradigm that constructed religion as invisible, containable and private. I also show how discourses around religious dress were touchstones to negotiate larger cultural issues of the period between the end of the Civil War and the first two decades of the twentieth century, including consumerism and fashion, public education and secularism, and cultural imperialism. I position this project as an interdisciplinary cultural study in dialogue with scholars who engage with a wide variety of sources to trace developments in U.S. culture between the end of the Civil War and the first decades of the twentieth century. Yet, I intervene by drawing more attention to religion, and more specifically women’s religious dress, a category of analysis that has been virtually ignored by interdisciplinary U.S. cultural historians. Primarily using methods of literary and rhetorical analysis, I examine a variety of relevant primary sources, including novels, short stories, newspaper articles, denominational periodicals, promotional brochures, and legal documents such as court rulings and legislative proceedings. This project also intervenes in religious studies scholarship on dress. Most scholars who study religious dress focus on one religion. By examining discourses of religious dress across multiple groups, I illuminate how religious groups in the United States did not operate in vacuums, either apart from each other or from U.S. culture. Although religiously clothed persons may wear very distinct garb from each other, they share a commitment to wearing a visible marker of their faith. This opens up possibilities for a deeper understanding not only between groups, but also by outsiders. Thus, this project takes a more expansive approach than single-group studies, seeking to place multiple discourses in conversation with one another, especially within a context of hyper modernization, secularization, and imperialism at the turn of the century.

This study explores six utopias by female authors written at the turn of the twentieth century: Mary Bradley Lane's Mizora (1881), Alice Ilgenfritz Jones and Ella Merchant's Unveiling Parallel (1893), Eloise O. Richberg's Reinstern (1900), Lena J. Fry's Other Worlds (1905), Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915), and Martha Bensley Bruère's Mildred Carver, USA (1919). While the right to vote had become the central, most important point of the movement, women were concerned with many other issues affecting their lives. Positioned within the context of the late nineteenth century women's rights movement, this study examines these "sideline" concerns of the movement such as home and gender-determined spheres, motherhood, work, marriage, independence, and self-sufficiency and relates them to the transforming character of female identity at the time. The study focuses primarily on analyzing the expression of female historical desire through utopian genre and on explicating the contradictory nature of utopian production.

Few modern economic historians dispute the notion that America's phenomenal economic growth over the last one hundred and fifty years was in large measure enabled by the development of the nation's antebellum Middle West—those states comprising the Northwest Territory and the Deep South that, generally, are located between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River. By far, the labor of 14.8 million people, who emigrated there between 1830 and 1860, was the most important factor propelling this growth.

Previously, in their search for the origins of this extraordinary development of America's heartland, most historians tended to overlook the voices of a variety of peoples—African Americans, Native Americans, Mexicans, and artisans—who did not appear to contribute to the historical view of the mythic agrarian espoused by Thomas Jefferson and J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur. Another marginalized voice from this era—one virtually forgotten by historians—is that of English women travel writers who visited and wrote about this America. Accordingly, it is the aim of this dissertation to recover their voices, especially regarding their collective observations of the economic development of America's antebellum Middle West.

After closely reading thirty-three travel narratives for microeconomic detail, I conclude that these travelers' observations, when conjoined, bring life in the Middle West's settler environment into sharper focus and further explain that era's migratory patterns, economic development, and social currents. I argue these travelers witnessed rabid entrepreneurialism—a finding that challenges the tyranny of the old agrarian myth that America was settled exclusively by white male farmers. Whether observing labor on the farm or in the cities, these English women travel writers labeled this American pursuit of economic opportunity—"a progress mentality," "Mammon worship," or "go-aheadism"—terms often used by these writers to describe Jacksonian-era Americans as a determined group of get-ahead, get-rich, rise-in-the-world individuals. Further, I suggest that these narratives enhanced migratory trends into America's antebellum Middle West simply because they were widely read in both England and America and amplified the rhetoric of numerous other boosters of the promised land in America's Middle West.

This thesis argues that twentieth-century American women playwrights spearhead the drama of transformation, and their plays become resistance discourses that protest, subvert, or change the representation of the female self in community. Many create antisocial, deviant, and self-reflexive characters who become misfits, criminals, or activists in order to lay bare women's moral-psychological crises in community. This thesis highlights how selected women playwrights engage with, and question various dominant, regional, racial, or ethnic female communities in order to redefine themselves. Sophie Treadwell's Machinal and Marsha Norman's 'night, Mother are representative texts that explore how the dominant culture can pose a barrier for radical women who long for self-fulfillment. To cultivate their personhood, working class Caucasian women are forced to go against their existing community so as to seek sexual freedom and reproductive rights, which are regarded as new forms of resistance or transgression. While they struggle hard to conform to the traditional, gendered notion of female altruism, self-sacrifice and care ethics, they cannot hide their discontent with the gendered division of labor. They are troubled doubly by the fact that they have to work in the public sphere, but conform to their gender roles in the private sphere. Different female protagonists resort to extreme homicidal or suicidal measures in order to assert their radical, contingent subjectivities, and become autonomous beings. By becoming antisocial or deviant characters, they reject their traditional conformity, and emphasize the arbitrariness and performativity of all gender roles. Treadwell and Norman both envision how the dominant Caucasian female community must experience radical changes in order to give rise to a new womanhood. Using Beth Henley's Crimes of the Heart and Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun as examples, this thesis demonstrates the difficulties women may face when living in disparate communities. The selected texts show that Southern women and African-American women desperately crave for their distinct identities, while they long to be accepted by others. Their subjectivity is a constant source of anxiety, but some women can form strong psychological bonds with women from the same community, empowering them to make new life choices. To these women, their re-fashioned self becomes a means to reexamine the dominant white culture and their racial identity. African-American women resist the discourse of assimilation, and re-identify with their African ancestry, or pan-Africanism. In the relatively traditional southern community, women can subvert the conventional southern belle stereotypes. They assert their selfhood by means of upward mobility, sexual freedom, or the rejection of woman's reproductive imperative. The present study shows these women succeed in establishing their personhood when they refuse to compromise with the dominant ways, as well as the regional, racial communal consciousness. Maria Irene Fornes' Fefu and Her Friends and Wendy Wasserstein's The Heidi Chronicles are analyzed to show how women struggle to claim their dialogic selfhood in minoritarian communities (New England Community and Jewish Community). Female protagonists maintain dialogues with other women in the same community, while they choose their own modes of existence, such as single parenthood or political activism. The process of transformation shows that women are often disturbed by their moral consciousness, a result of their acceptance of gender roles and their submission to patriarchal authority. Their transgressive behaviors enable them to claim their body and mind, and strive for a new source of personhood. Both playwrights also advocate women's ability to self-critique, to differentiate the self from the Other, to allow the rise of an emergent self in the dialectical flux of inter-personal and intra-personal relations. The present study reveals that twentieth-century American female dramatists emphasize relationality in their pursuit of self. However, the transformation of the self can only be completed by going beyond, while remaining in dialogue with the dominant, residual, or emergent communities. For American women playwrights, the emerging female selves come with a strong sense of "in-betweenness," for it foregrounds the individualistic and communal dimensions of women, celebrating the rise of inclusive, mutable, and dialogic subjectivities.

My thesis analyses the oeuvre of the American writer Mary McCarthy (1912-1989), with the focus on the figure of the outsider looking in. McCarthy uses outsider figures in her texts as prisms through which distinctive historical moments as well as problems of gender, race and religion are studied against the backdrop of the changing climate of the American 'red' 1930s, the anxious '50s, and the late '60s torn by the Vietnam war. Examples of McCarthy's recurring protagonists are the New York Bohemian girl of the '30s in the predominantly male world marred by the Great Depression, the Jewish character stereotyped as the Other by the poorly hidden anti-Semitism of the American society of the early 1940s, and the orphan child exposed to adult cruelty, who finds her only solace in the Catholic religion. Their position of being outsiders who live in a society not their own by birthright, is shown to be crucial for their acquisition and knowledge of truth, and links insight to marginality, which is reinforced by McCarthy's technique of ironically detached observation, the 'cold eye' of her prose. McCarthy herself appears as an outsider character throughout her writing, both as the historical figure and as the protagonist of her autobiographies. Her self-image, shaped by her orphaned childhood and her youth as a Bohemian girl among leftist intellectuals, is subject to conflicting impulses of confession and concealment. McCarthy's wide use of autobiographical details in her fiction and elements of fiction in her autobiographies led most critics to study her work from a chiefly biographical point of view. My own approach to Mary McCarthy's writing takes their findings into consideration, and includes the analysis of the historical, political, and social contexts of McCarthy's texts, as well as the intertextual dialogue with a few select writings by McCarthy's contemporaries such as Philip Roth and Sylvia Plath.

The myth of the West is still very much alive in contemporary America. Lately, there has been a resurgence of new Western movies, TV series, and fiction. Until recently the West has been the exclusive domain of the quintessential masculine man. Women characters have featured only in the margins of the Western hero's tale. Contemporary Western fiction by women, however, offers new perspectives. Women's writing about the Old and New West introduces strong female protagonists and gives voice to characters that are muted or ignored by traditional Western literature and history. Western scholarship has largely been polarized by two approaches. First, the myth and symbol school of Turner, Smith, and followers celebrated American exceptionalism and rugged male individualism on the Western frontier. Second, the reaction against these theories draws attention to the West's legacy of racism, sexism and violence. The purpose of the present study is to collapse these theoretical fences and open a dialogue between conflicting theoretical positions and contemporay Western fiction. Molly Gloss's 1989 The Jump-Off Creek and Karen Joy Fowler's 1991 Sarah Canary selfcritically re-write the Old West. This study has attempted to explore the following questions: How can one re-write history in the context of a postmodern culture? How can "woman," the quintessential "Other" escape a modernist history (and thus avoid charges of essentialism) when she has not been in this history to begin with? In this study I analyze how these two contemporary feminist authors, Molly Gloss, and Karen Joy Fowler, face the dual challenge of writing themselves into a history that has traditionally excluded them, while at the same time deconstructing this very historical concept of the West. Fowler's and Gloss's use of diverse narrative strategies to upset a monolithic concept of history-- emphasizing the importance of multiple stories of the Old West-- is discussed in detail.

In my dissertation, I argue that both white and black authors of the late-1850s and early-1860s used scenes of race-centered hospitality in their narratives to combat the pervasive stereotypes of black inferiority that flourished under the influence of chattel slavery. The wide-spread scenes of hospitality in antebellum literature—including shared meals, entertaining overnight guests, and business meetings in personal homes—are too inextricably bound to contemporary discussions of blackness and whiteness to be ignored. In arguing for the humanizing effects of playing host or guest as a black person, my project joins the work of literary scholars from William L. Andrews to Keith Michael Green who argue for broader and more complex approaches to writers’ strategies for recognizing the full personhood of African Americans in the mid-nineteenth century. In the last fifteen to twenty years, hospitality theory has reshaped social science research, particularly around issues of race, immigration, and citizenship. In literary studies, scholars are only now beginning to mine the ways that theorists from diverse backgrounds—including continental philosophers such as Derrida and Levinas, womanist philosopher and theologian N. Lynne Westerfield, and post-colonial writers and scholars such as Tahar Ben Jelloun—can expand the reading of nineteenth century literature by examining the discourse and practice of hospitality. When host and guest meet at the threshold they must acknowledge the full personhood of the other; the relationship of hospitality is dependent on beginning in a state of equilibrium grounded in mutual respect. In this project I argue that because of the acknowledgement of mutual humanness required in acts of hospitality, hospitality functions as a humanizing narrative across the spectrum of antebellum black experience: slave and free, male and female, uneducated and highly educated. In chapter one, “Unmasking Southern Hospitality: Discursive Passing in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred,” I examine Stowe’s use of a black fugitive slave host who behaves like a southern gentleman to undermine the ethos of southern honor culture and to disrupt the ideology that supports chattel slavery. In chapter two, “Transformative Hospitality and Interracial Education in Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends,” I examine how the race-centered scenes of hospitality in Frank J. Webb’s 1857 novel The Garies and Their Friends creates educational opportunities where northern racist ideology can be uncovered and rejected by white men and women living close to, but still outside, the free black community of Philadelphia. In the final chapter, “Slavery’s Subversion of Hospitality in Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” I examine how Linda Brent’s engagement in acts of hospitality (both as guest and host) bring to light the warping influence of chattel slavery on hospitality in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. In conclusion, my project reframes the practices of antebellum hospitality as yet another form of nonviolent everyday resistance to racist ideology rampant in both the North and the South. This project furthers the ways that American literature scholars understand active resistance to racial oppression in the nineteenth century, putting hospitality on an equal footing with other subversive practices, such as learning to read or racial passing.

In her bibliography, Incidents in the life of a Salve Girl, Harriet Ann Jacobs appropriates the autobiographical "I" in order to tell her own story of slavery and talk back to the dominant culture that enslaves her. Through analysis and explication of the text, this thesis examines Jacobs' rhetorical and psyshological evolution from slave to self as she struggles against patriarchal power that would rob her of her identity as well as her freedom. Included in the discussion is an analysis of the concept of self in western plilosophy, an overview of american autobiography prior to the publication of Jacobs' narrative, a discussion of the history of the slave narrative as a genre, and a discussion of the history of Jacobs' narrative.

Historically, women have not been "speaking subjects" but "spoken objects" in Western culture--the ground on which male-dominated constructions have been erected. In literature, women have been conventionally held as the silent and silenced other. Lyric poetry especially has idealized not only the entrenched figures of masculine subject/feminine object, but poetry itself as the site of prophecy, vision, Truth. Most dramatically in lyric poetry then, the issue of women as subjects has been collapsed into Woman as object, that figure who has been the sacrifice necessary for the production of lyric "song" and the consolidation of the unified masculine voice. It has thus been difficult for women poets to take up the position of speaking subject, most particularly because of women's problematic relationship to Woman. Recent feminist theorists have explored female subjectivity, how women put into hegemonic discourse "a possible operation of the feminine." This dissertation analyzes that possibility in poetry as exemplified in the works of Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, and H.D. I contend that these paradigmatic American poets constitute speaking subjects in their poetry that both figure Woman conventionally and reconfigure it, i.e. subvert the stability of those representations, thereby disturbing our view. I argue that this double identification produces, in effect, a divided or split subjectivity that is enabling for the female speaker. As an alternative to the traditionally specularized figure of Woman then, such a position opens up distinctly counter-hegemonic spaces in which to constitute the female subject, rendering problematic readerly consumption of the image of Woman as a totality. I explore the attempts to represent women's difference differently--the tenuous accession to, rejection of, or play with the lyric "I" in these poets' works. Dickinson, Moore, and H.D. reconfigure Woman and inscribe female speakers as grammatically and rhetorically, but not necessarily visually, present, thereby frustrating patriarchal economies of mastery and possession.

Advisor: Mary E. Wood. xii, 181 leaves : ill. ; 29 cm. Print copy also available for check out and consultation in the University of Oregon's library under the call number: PS374.S714 H37 2004.
The nineteenth-century American sentimental novel has only in the last twenty years received consideration from the academy as a legitimate literary tradition. During that time feminist scholars have argued that sentimental novels performed important cultural work and represent an important literary tradition. This dissertation contributes to the scholarship by placing the sentimental novel within a larger context of intellectual history as a tradition that draws upon theoretical sources and is a source itself for later cultural developments. In examining a variety of sentimental novels, I establish the moral sense philosophy as the theoretical basis of the sentimental novel's pathetic appeals and its theories of sociability and justice. The dissertation also addresses the aesthetic features of the sentimental novel and demonstrates again the tradition's connection to moral sense philosophy but within the context of the American elocution revolution. I look at natural language theory to render more legible the moments of emotional spectacle that are the signature of sentimental aesthetics. The second half of the dissertation demonstrates a connection between the sentimental novel and silent film. Both mediums rely on a common aesthetic storehouse for signifying emotions. The last two chapters of the dissertation compare silent film performance with emotional displays in the sentimental novel and in elocution and acting manuals. I also demonstrate that the films of D. W. Griffith, especially The Birth of a Nation, draw upon on the larger conventions of the sentimental novel.

Caliban, the ultimate figure of linguistic and racial indeterminacy in The Tempest, became for African-American writers a symbol of colonial fears of rebellion against oppression and southern fears of black male sexual aggression. My dissertation thus explores what I call the "Calibanic Quadrangle" in essays and novels by Anna Julia Cooper, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins. The figure of Caliban allows these authors to inflect the sentimental structure of the novel, to elevate Calibanic utterance to what Cooper calls "crude grandeur and exalted poesy," and to reveal the undercurrent of anxiety in nineteenth-century American attempts to draw rigid racial boundaries. The Calibanic Quadrangle enables this thorough critique because it allows the black woman writer to depict the oppression of the "Other," southern fears of black sexuality, the division between early black and white women's issues, and the enduring innocence of the progressive, educated, black female hero ~ all within the legitimized boundaries of the Shakespearean text, which provides literary authority to the minority writer. I call the resulting Shakespearean intertextuality a Quadrangle because in each of these African-American works a Caliban figure, a black man or "tragic mulatto" who was once "petted" and educated, struggles within a hostile environment of slavery and racism ruled by the Prospero figure, the wielder of "white magic," who controls reproduction, fears miscegenation, and enforces racial hierarchy. The Miranda figure, associated with the womb and threatened by the specter of miscegenation, advocates slavery and perpetuates the hostile structure. The Ariel figure, graceful and ephemeral, usually the "tragic mulatta" and a slave, desires her freedom and complements the Caliban figure. Each novel signals the presence of the paradigm by naming at least one character from The Tempest (Caliban in Cooper's A Voice from the South; "Mirandy" in Harper's Iola Leroy; Prospero in Hopkins's Contending Forces; and Ariel in Hopkins's Hagar's Daughter).

Women authors in mid to late nineteenth century American society were unafraid to shed the old domestic ideology and set new examples for women outside of racial and gender spheres. This essay focuses on the ways in which Elizabeth Stoddard's The Morgesons, Louisa May Alcott's Behind a Mask, and Elizabeth Keckley's Behind the Scenes, or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House represent the function of fashion and attire in literature. Each author encourages readers to examine dress in a way that defies the typical domestic ideology of nineteenth century America. I want my readers to understand the role of fashion in literature as I progress through each work and ultimately show how each female author and protagonist set a new example for womanhood through their fashion choices.

Nineteenth-century women were a mainstay in the New England literary tradition, both as readers and authors. Indeed, women were a large part of a growing reading public, a public that distanced itself from Puritanism and developed an appetite for novels and magazine short stories. It was a culture that survived in spite of patriarchal domination of the female in social and literary status. This dissertation is a study of selected works from Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman that show their fiction as a protest against a patriarchal society. The premise of this study is based on analyzing these works from a protest (not necessarily a feminist) view, which leads to these conclusions: rejection of the male suitor and of marriage was a protest against patriarchal institutions that purposely restricted females from realizing their potential. Furthermore, it is often the case that industrialism and abuses of male authority in selected works by Jewett and Freeman are symbols of male-driven forces that oppose the autonomy of the female. Thus my argument is that protest fiction of the nineteenth century quietly promulgates an agenda of independence for the female. It is an agenda that encourages the woman to operate beyond standard stereotypes furthered by patriarchal attitudes. I assert that Jewett and Freeman are, in fact, inheritors of Hawthorne's literary tradition, which spawned the first fully-developed, independent American heroine: Hester Prynne.

This dissertation discusses Gayl Jones’s and Toni Morrison’s characterisation of black women’s journeying towards empowered subjectivity and agency.

Through comparative analysis of eight fictional works, I explore the writers’ idea of female freedom and emancipation, the structures of power affecting the transition from oppressed towards liberated subject positions, and the literary techniques through which the authors facilitate these seminal trajectories.

My research addresses a corpus comprised of three novels and one book-long poem by Gayl Jones, as well as four novels by Toni Morrison. These two writers emerge in the US literary scene during the 1970s, one of the decades of the second black women’s renaissance (1970s, 1980s). This period witnessed unprecedented developments in US black literature and feminist theorising. In the domain of African American letters, it witnessed the emergence of a host of black women writers such as Gayl Jones and Toni Morrison. This period also marks a turning point in the reconfiguration of African American literature, as several unknown or misplaced literary works by pioneering black women writers were discovered, shifting the chronology of African American literature.

Moreover, the second black women's renaissance marks a paradigmatic development in black feminist theorising on womanhood and subjectivity. Many black feminist scholars and activists challenged what they perceived to be the homogenising female subject conceptualised by US white middle-class feminism and the androcentricity of the subject proclaimed by the Black Aesthetic Movement. They claimed that, in focusing solely on gender and patriarchal oppression, white feminism had overlooked the salience of the race/class nexus, while focus by the Black Aesthetic Movement on racism had overlooked the salience of gender and heterosexual discrimination.

In this dissertation, I discuss the works of Gayl Jones and Toni Morrison in the context of seminal debates on the nature of the female subject and the racial and gender politics affecting the construction of empowered subjectivities in black women's fiction.

Through the metaphor of journeying towards female empowerment, I show how Gayl Jones and Toni Morrison engage in imaginative returns to the past in an attempt to relocate black women as literary subjects of primary importance. I also show how, in the works selected for discussion, a complex idea of modern female subjectivities emerges from the writers' re-examination of the oppressive material and psychological circumstances under which pioneering black women lived, the common practice of sexual exploitation with which they had to contend, and the struggle to assert the dignity of their womanhood beyond the parameters of the white-defined “ideological discourse of true womanhood” (Carby, 1987: 25).

Doctorat en philosophie et lettres, Orientation langue et littérature
info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

This dissertation explores the communal uneasiness and hermeneutic impasse created by suicide in twentieth-century US American literature by women. By considering how history is negotiated through suicidal acts and how literary texts are structured by self-inflicted death, I suggest that this intentional turn is most fundamentally readable through public spaces—the Middle Passage, Hiroshima, Harlem, San Francisco's Chinatown. My first chapter focuses on Ludwig Binswanger's The Case of Ellen West: An Anthropological-Clinical Study (1944), an existential analysis of a Jewish woman who killed herself in Switzerland when she was thirty-three. Along with Anne Sexton's poetry, West's writing acts as a prelude to my subsequent chapters because it makes the body inextricable from the imagination, and both inextricable from history, community, and politics. In Chapter Two, I trace the conflation of white femininity and suicide in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature before turning to modern novels in which women ambiguously fall to their deaths: Nella Larsen's Passing (1929), Mary McCarthy's The Group (1963), and Fae Myenne Ng's Bone (1993). These texts disperse intention over a field of inquiry, connecting the private act of suicide to culture less through consciousness than through public space—the fictional space of falling in public and the imagined space of a reading public. In Chapter Three, I examine revolutionary suicide in Toni Morrison's Beloved (1988), Sula (1973), and Song of Solomon (1977), integrating theories from Emmanuel Levinas and Huey Newton. Self-destruction operates on two revolutionary levels: within the story, as a political form of resistance and within the narrative structure, as a discursive strategy, an axis around which meanings revolve. Finally, in Chapter Four, I sketch the political terrain covered by female suicide in Adrienne Kennedy's Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964), Velina Hasu Houston's Tea (1983), and Suzan-Lori Parks's Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom (1990). Each play extends the logic that I have traced in previous chapters, deploying the act of suicide to register the effects of colonialism, war, and white supremacy on contemporary American women's lives.

This dissertation, “Wayward Reading: Women’s Crime and Incarceration in the United States, 1890-1935” illuminates the literary stakes of a crucial, yet overlooked, moment in the history of American incarceration: the development of the women’s prison and the unique body of literature that materialized alongside that development. In the late 19th and early 20th century, the women’s prison became a testing ground for the study of women’s sexuality: social scientists sought to assimilate their “patients” into gendered and racialized citizenship by observing the minutiae of women’s everyday lives and policing their sexual and social associations. Ultimately, this experimental study of women’s sexuality served to reinforce racial stratification: sociologists figured white women’s waywardness as necessitating rescue and rehabilitation into domesticity, and depicted black women’s waywardness as confirming their essential criminality, justifying their harsher punishment and consignment to contingent labor. I argue that women’s imprisonment also sparked another kind of experimentation, however, one based in literary form. A wide range of writers produced a body of literature that also focused on the “wayward girl’s” life trajectory. I contend that these authors drew on social science’s classificatory system and cultural authority to offer alternate scales of value and to bring into focus new forms of relationship that had the potential to unsettle the color line. In Jennie Gerhardt, for instance, Theodore Dreiser invokes legitimate kinship outside the racialized boundaries of marriage, while women incarcerated in the New York State Reformatory for Women exchanged love poetry and epistles that imagine forms of romance exceeding the racial and sexual divides that the prison sought to enforce. Wayward Reading thus draws together an unexpected array of sociological, legal and literary texts that theorize women’s crime and punishment to imagine alternate directions that modern social experience might take: popular periodicals such as the Delineator magazine, criminological studies by Frances Kellor and Katharine Bement Davis, the poetry and letters of women incarcerated at the New York State Reformatory for Women, and novels by W.E.B Du Bois and Theodore Dreiser. To understand how both social difference and social intimacy were reimagined through the space of the women’s prison, I model what I call “wayward” reading, tracing the interchange between social scientific and literary discourses. I draw attention to archives and texts that are frequently sidelined as either purely historical repositories (such as institutional case files from the New York State Reformatory) or as didactic and one-dimensional (such as Frances Kellor’s sociological exploration of women’s crime), as well as to literary texts not traditionally associated with women’s imprisonment (such as W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Quest of the Silver Fleece). Reading “waywardly” thus allows me to recover a diverse set of aesthetic experiments that developed alongside women’s imprisonment, and also to reconsider critical assumptions about the status of “prison writing” in literary studies. A number of critics have outlined the prison as a space of totalizing dehumanization that in turn reflects a broader logic of racialized domination structuring American culture. As such, scholars have read literary texts that describe incarceration as either enforcing or critiquing carceral violence. However, by turning our attention to the less-explored formation of the women’s prison, I argue that authors mobilized social science not only to critique the prison’s violence and expose how it produced social difference, but also to re-envision the relationships that comprised modern social life altogether.

She Will Be: Literary Authorship and the Coming Woman in the Postbellum United States argues that postbellum women writers deployed the figure of the Coming Woman, an archetype for the nation’s improved female future, to articulate expanded sociopolitical opportunities for women, interrogate prevailing standards of literary art, and validate their own literary pursuits. During the final decades of the nineteenth century, the American reading public became increasingly fascinated with identifying who the Coming Woman would be, what qualities she would possess, and how her arrival would alter the nation’s future. Such questions flooded US print culture in the decades between 1865 and 1900, demonstrating that the Coming Woman not only occupied a space between the antebellum True Woman and fin de siècle New Woman but also that she was a major feminine archetype in her own right.

Even so, existing scholarship on the Coming Woman tends either to identify the Coming Woman anachronistically as an early iteration of the New Woman or, when naming her directly, to overlook her complex function as both a harbinger and manifestation of manifold sociopolitical changes. These limited examinations elide the Coming Woman’s ubiquitous influence on postbellum literary culture, particularly in terms of the complex links Susan Coultrap-McQuin and Lawrence W. Levine have traced between middlebrow culture and postbellum national identity. She Will Be builds on recent scholarship by demonstrating how the American Coming Woman helped reshape notions of women’s literary authorship, modernity, and national identity in the late nineteenth century. By examining her literary life through four key middlebrow genres (Bildungsroman, sentimentality, utopianism, and regionalism), She Will Be reveals how female authors used the Coming Woman figure to imagine—and, indeed, write into being—an expanded vision for the US’s female future.

This dissertation engages in a critical analysis of the poetry of Emily Dickinson which, to me, suggests that the poet suffered from a type of manic-depression known specifically in psychiatric parlance as bipolar disorder. I argue that although Dickinson experienced much pain and suffering she learnt, through time, to address, understand and contain adversity - that ultimately, she transformed these experiences into the raw materials for poetic creation. Dickinson's poetic achievements are often obscured by a misunderstanding of her mental and emotional constitution. This thesis provides an alternative to the views of those commentators who maintain that Emily Dickinson was insane, neurotic or delusional. I intend, ultimately, to offer the reader a fresh insight into Emily Dickinson's poetry by reading it from the assumption that she suffered from bipolar disorder.
Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2007.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)
Although many of Lola Ridge's poems champion the causes of minorities and the disenfranchised, it is too easy to state that politics were the sole reason for her neglect. A simple look at well-known female poets who often wrote about social or political issues during Ridge's lifetime, such as Edna St. Vincent Millay and Muriel Rukeyser, weakens such a claim. Furthermore, Ridge's five books of poetry illustrate that many of her poems focused on themes beyond the political or social. The decisions by critics to focus on selections of Ridge's poems that do not display her ability to employ multiple aesthetics in her poetry have caused them to present her work one-dimensionally. Likewise, politically motivated critics often overlook aesthetic experiments that poets like Ridge employ in their poetry. Few poets during Ridge's time made use of such drastically varied styles, and because her work resists easy categorization (as either traditional or avant-garde), her poetry has largely gone unnoticed by modern scholars. Chapter two of my thesis focuses on a selection Ridge's social and political poems and highlights how Ridge's social poetry coupled with the multiple aesthetics she employed has played a part in her critical neglect. My findings will open up the discussion of Ridge's poetry and situate her work both politically and aesthetically, something no critic has yet attempted. Chapter three examines Ridge’s role as editor of Modern School, Others and Broom. Ridge's work for these magazines, particularly Others and Broom, places her at the center of American modernism. My examination of Ridge's social poetry and her role as editor for two leading literary magazines, in conjunction with her use of multiple aesthetics, will build a strong case for why her work deserves to be recovered.