Resisting the overplot: Intertextual interventions and generic interplays in the writings of Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Stoddard, Lydia Maria Child, and Julia Ward Howe

Nicole C Livengood, Purdue University

Abstract

This project examines Margaret Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Elizabeth Stoddard's The Morgesons and Two Men, Lydia Maria Child's Philothea, and Julia Ward Howe's The Hermaphrodite. These texts that have troubled critical paradigms because they do not adhere to mainstream nineteenth-century models of women's writing that celebrate the trials and rewards resulting from a heroine's relegation to the domestic sphere and submission to patriarchal authority. Reading these texts together makes visible a shared literary strategy that remains hidden when these authors and texts are examined on their own or read through traditional critical lenses. I show that these authors share two richly-layered literary strategies: intertextual intervention, in which they respond to and re-envision each other's and dominant cultural texts to articulate the shape and purpose of women's writing and lives; and generic interplays, in which they meld and manipulate a number of literary genres and conventions to destabilize essentialized versions of womanhood and conventional understandings of social relationships. These techniques enable these authors to explore, challenge, and reformulate such topics as race, class, and gender in nineteenth-century America while questioning prevalent cultural norms that more traditional plot-driven women's writing often upheld. By reading these authors together and positing them as a literary cohort, this project begins to expand the terms of critical conversation as we assess the writing of women authors who remain outside of critical perspectives, and as we continue to interrogate women's texts that are recognized as forming the nineteenth-century women's literary canon.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Schneider, Purdue University.

Subject Area

American literature

COinS