Narratives of roots and wings: The American regionalist female Bildungsroman

Pamela D Sanders, Purdue University

Abstract

In the 1990s, Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse defined American women's regionalism as a late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century feminist tradition of women writers who worked within a singular narrative form---the regional sketch. But by limiting women's regionalism---according to historical chronology, literary period, genre, and the de-emphasis of region---they exclude many longer works by writers they themselves define as regionalist and works by women writers whom Mary Austin defined as regionalist sixty years earlier. Regionalist American fiction, redefined as a signifier of place, permeates and crosses genre boundaries and becomes a fluid and flexible narrative strategy. In doing so, it transcends definitions of regionalism bound by chronological historical periodization and becomes a transhistorical literature of place and community. As a result, regionalist literature expands to embrace the novel---in addition to the sketch, story, and nonfiction narrative---as a regionalist literary form. This project examines how regionalism---a transhistorical literature of place and community that illustrates rooted collective values---affects a novelistic genre of individualism and separation: the conventional bildungsroman. I explore the intersection of literary regionalism and the American female bildungsroman, and as a result, read novels of female development within a new theoretical framework. The regionalist female bildungsroman subverts and revises the traditional male bildungsroman, a gendered genre that privileges social integration and separation from regional community and landscape in order to achieve individual selfhood. It also transcends truncated early to mid-nineteenth-century American female bildungsromane ---the domestic female bildungsroman and the novel of inner development---that are centered on the societal "myth of romantic love" and conclude with the imprisonment or annihilation of female selfhood. In examining a regionalist variant of the novel of female development, this project broadens and expands regionalism to include formerly marginalized authors and/or texts: Sarah Orne Jewett's A Country Doctor (1884), Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers (1925), Myra Page's Daughter of the Hills: A Woman's Part in the Coal Miners' Struggle (1950), and Ellen Glasgow's Barren Ground (1925).

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Lamb, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Womens studies|American literature

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