Off-campus UMass Amherst users: To download dissertations, please use the following link to log into our proxy server with your UMass Amherst user name and password.
Non-UMass Amherst users, please click the view more button below to purchase a copy of this dissertation from Proquest.
(Some titles may also be available free of charge in our Open Access Dissertation Collection, so please check there first.)
Giving testimony: Social reform and the politics of voice in four nineteenth-century American texts
Abstract
In this study I provide a close textual analysis of Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall: A Domestic Tale of the Present Time (1855), Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Silent Partner (1871) and Louisa May Alcott's Work: A Story of Experience (1873). I place those texts within the social and political contexts of the mid-to-late nineteenth century--especially, the woman question and women's rights movement, slavery and abolition, workers' rights and industrialism, opportunities for employment and discussion of marriage reform. Particularly, I focus upon the way these four writers place their own narratives within the social and political debates of the time, the way they appropriate the rhetoric of social reformers, and especially with the ways they depict social problems and the possibilities of reform within their narratives. These writers, for whom the social issues of the day were intertwined with the debate about women's roles, test the separation of spheres and notions of domesticity by presenting protagonists who gain personal and political power only when they make private experience a matter of public record. Also at issue in these texts is the way in which the author's voice is mediated by audience concerns. Harriet Jacobs, for example, works with and against the expectations of her white, middle-class female readers as she describes her own life under slavery by both appealing to and criticizing the Christian morality of her feminist-abolitionist audience. At times, ambivalences of authorial voice in these texts replicate the ambivalent cultural expectations of the "true" versus "new" woman. I argue that access to public voice was a central concern of many social reformers of the mid-to-late nineteenth century, and in this study I examine the ways these authors imagine the possibilities of social reform by depicting that concern against private and public discourse.
Subject Area
American literature|American studies|Womens studies
Recommended Citation
Connolly, Paula T, "Giving testimony: Social reform and the politics of voice in four nineteenth-century American texts" (1991). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9132833.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9132833