"Strong and brave": The culture of womanhood in the novels of Maria Susanna Cummins
Abstract
This dissertation is an interdisciplinary study of the evolution of one antebellum American woman writer's literary career, viewed within the larger context of national debates concerning ideal womanhood and the role of women authors in the public sphere. This work contributes to the ongoing recovery project of nineteenth-century American women writers by such scholars as Nina Baym, Susan K. Harris, and Judith Fetterley. Cummins' novel, The Lamplighter , is featured in today's criticism as a fairly conventional, if not typical, domestic text. It is and is not that. More important, she authored three other popular and thematically diverse novels, none of which has received serious scholarly attention. As important as she has become, her works are still unknown. Because each of her novels presents a distinct and different view of ideal womanhood, I contend that Cummins, like many of her peers, explored multiple fictive realities that could serve as inspiration and instruction to her readership, and even to herself. Drawing on historical and primary documents, I also show that her writing was not limited to the private sphere and “women's concerns.” Her fiction participates in vigorous debates of national importance on such issues as slavery, republicanism and the future of the republic, Manifest Destiny, industrial capitalism, Orientalism, American imperialism, and women's roles in the public life of the nation. In short, Cummins sought to expand the female realm well beyond the borders of the so-called domestic sphere. Her novels signal that women writers and women readers engaged issues of a serious, political nature. Thus Cummins' work is an important case study for recovering and reappraising nineteenth-century American women writers toward the end of rewriting a major part of our literary history.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Neufeldt, Purdue University.
Subject Area
American studies|American literature|American history|Womens studies|Biographies
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