Housekeeping become history: New England women's regionalisms

Lorie A Damon, Purdue University

Abstract

My study reconsiders New England women's regionalism, moving beyond Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and reexamining current formulations of regionalism. When New England women's regionalism was first recovered, critics like Donovan and Pryse argued that practicitioners present a rural women's world where the rituals of housekeeping root women in their landscapes and bind them to one another in nurturing communities; these texts thus counter urban, industrial, patriarchal cultures. Recently, however, critics like Kaplan and Brodhead have argued that regionalism actually colluded in the process of federalization by enacting a kind of tourism: regionalist writers present rural roots as a common ancestry, consolidate the emerging middle class, and help to minimize social difference. These rather opposited formulations of regionalism, however, treat both the relationship between the region and the nation and the work of regionalism too simply. In order to enrich our readings of this tradition, I examine Rose Terry Cooke and Alice Brown as well as Jewett and Freeman, and I focus specifically on their depicitions of urban and rural and their representations of rootedness. I also investigate their differing conceptions of regionalism's cultural work. I begin by reconsidering Jewett's representation of rootedness in three stories which depict women's displacements from home. Chapter 2 focuses on Cooke and examines three stories that present urban tourists in rural spaces. Though Cooke acknowledges the dangers of urban presence, she suggests the rural community is, in fact, eroding and corroding from within. Chapter 3 reconsiders Freeman's regionalism by examining three stories in which she depicts rural folk as tourists in urban locations. In Chapter 4, I examine Brown's reconfiguration of regionalism as a means of enriching the present through recoveries of the past. In the final chapter I examine one example in current adaptations of New England women's regionalism to illustrate the continuing importance of this legacy in contemporary American women's writing. In its meditations on the virtues and drawbacks of rootedness, Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping recalls and reinvents New England women's regionalisms of the earlier century.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Oreovicz, Purdue University.

Subject Area

American literature

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