Disorderly conduct: The figure of the girl in three nineteenth-century American women's novels.
Item
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Title
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Disorderly conduct: The figure of the girl in three nineteenth-century American women's novels.
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Identifier
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AAI3063833
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identifier
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3063833
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Creator
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Green, Lisa Elaine.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Neal Tolchin
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Date
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2002
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, American | Women's Studies
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Abstract
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This study considers the ways in which three mid-nineteenth-century American women writers---Harriet E. Wilson (Our Nig, 1859), E. D. E. N. Southworth (The Hidden Hand, 1859), and Harriet Beecher Stowe (The Pearl of Orr's Island, 1862)---re-imagine the character of the undomesticated female child that was featured in many best-selling American novels of the period. In particular, the study argues that each author transforms this ubiquitous character---"the disorderly girl"---into a powerful figure of truth telling, boundary breaking, and desire. Speaking in ways that Wilson, Southworth, and Stowe cannot, the disorderly girl enables these authors to tell unsanctioned stories concerning racial abuse, social injustice, and gender inequality under the cover of a familiar and highly marketable popular genre.;The first chapter argues that in writing Our Nig Wilson exploits the white, middle-class genre of the sentimental novel as a strategy to safely represent a controversial story of racism and abuse---the true story of the author's own experience working as an indentured servant for a white family in the antebellum North. The second chapter argues that the girl-heroine of Southworth's The Hidden Hand, who may be read as a female version of the silver-tongued confidence man and archetypal trickster, exposes the inadequacy of both the masculine rule of law and the conventional women's novel as tools for revealing truth and effecting social change, while asserting instead the transformative power of moral language. The third chapter draws upon biography and current psychological theory to argue that Stowe constructs the young heroine of The Pearl of Orr's Island, her most overtly autobiographical novel, as a self-portrait of conforming femininity, while investing the "disorderly" side of her self in a male character---the heroine's willful, ambitious, and risk-taking younger brother.;The study concludes with an epilogue that argues that the figure of the disorderly girl as portrayed in these three novels, as well as certain contemporaneous works, may be read as a forerunner of the heroine as artist, a similar figure of boundary breaking and expression that came to dominate later writing by American women.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
