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This project examines the representation of architectural and metaphoric spaces in the works of four nineteenth-century American women writers: Harriet Wilson, Harriet Jacobs, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Edith Wharton. I focus on what I call interstitial spaces: spaces that are neither wholly public nor private but that exist somewhere in between the public and private realms. Interstitial spaces are locations that women writers claim to resist the predominantly private restrictions of the family or the predominantly public conventions of society. Interstitiality becomes a border space that enables women writers?both for themselves and for their fictional characters?to redefine, rearrange, and challenge the expectations of public and private spaces in the nineteenth century. This dissertation investigates how nineteenth-century American women writers create interstitial spaces. Further, it demonstrates how they use such spaces to express their views, manipulate the divisions between the public and private realms, and defy societal and familial conventions. Since the mid-1970s, critics have been analyzing public and private under the assumption that the boundaries between the spheres were more porous than originally thought. This project adds to the critical dialogue concerning the separation of public and private realms as the conceptual framework of criticism shifts from an increased awareness of gender, race, and class. My project responds to the growing trend of analyzing literary works through architectural and spatial theories. While applying such theories, I focus on how race and class affect a writer's ability to create interstitial spaces. I further respond to this trend by considering authors who have not yet been included in this way, namely Wilson and Phelps. By analyzing the physical and rhetorical ways these authors manipulate space, I offer an account of gender, race, and class along with architectural and spatial concepts that juxtaposes authors who have not yet been considered together. My dissertation offers a new critical vocabulary to consider writers' representations of spaces by employing the word interstitial, which no other critic uses. I specifically use interstitial to describe spaces that exist between the public and private realms and describe the transformation in space that occurs through spatial and rhetorical manipulation.

This thesis explores the ways selected American women writers utilize spatial imagery to convey their female characters' internal and external situation. In the introductory, theoretical chapter, attention is at first paid to the representation of space in literature. Drawing upon Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space and Marilyn R. Chandler's Dwelling in the Text: Houses in American Fiction, space is presented as playing a role equal to that of characters and plot since it is perceived as both a production shaped by its inhabitants and a force that is, in turn, shaping them. Furthermore, the difference between female and male spatial awareness as depicted in American fiction written both by men and women is scrutinized with the result that, arguably, male characters have a tendency to regard their houses as mere tokens of their social status, whereas female characters tend to have a more intimate and emotional relationship to their living space. This passage is inspired by Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. Finally, it is argued that women characters tend to develop their personalities in respect to the space they inhabit, and that domestic space can be for them either a space of confinement (the section dealing with this phenomenon is based on Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in...

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Growing Cold: Postwar American Women Writers and the Novel of Development, 1945-1960, examines how women writers developed, negotiated, and struggled with representing adolescent girl selfhood in the novel of development – also termed the Bildungsroman – during the early postwar era. By examining four women’s Bildungsromans written between 1946-1960 – Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding (1946), Jean Stafford’s The Mountain Lion (1947), Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman (1951), and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) – I show that postwar women writers were actively shaping the genre in a way that would fundamentally shift how adolescent girlhood would be represented in second wave feminist and contemporary female Bildungsromans. By 1960, adolescent girls in women’s literature were far different from where they began in 1945: they were younger, more sexual, and more psychologically complex than the adolescent girl characters earlier in the 20th century. Yet these novels are also racially and sexually problematic, advancing white heteronormative identity at the expense of queer and racially othered characters. In this way, these writers suggest that postwar adolescent development is a process of "growing cold"; it is a process of loss, emptiness, and violence, leading to emotional and social isolation. This project therefore intervenes in postwar American literary studies and women's studies by raising awareness of the importance that postwar women writing played in the development of the contemporary Bildungsroman. / English

In my dissertation, I argue that both white and black authors of the late-1850s and early-1860s used scenes of race-centered hospitality in their narratives to combat the pervasive stereotypes of black inferiority that flourished under the influence of chattel slavery. The wide-spread scenes of hospitality in antebellum literature—including shared meals, entertaining overnight guests, and business meetings in personal homes—are too inextricably bound to contemporary discussions of blackness and whiteness to be ignored. In arguing for the humanizing effects of playing host or guest as a black person, my project joins the work of literary scholars from William L. Andrews to Keith Michael Green who argue for broader and more complex approaches to writers’ strategies for recognizing the full personhood of African Americans in the mid-nineteenth century. In the last fifteen to twenty years, hospitality theory has reshaped social science research, particularly around issues of race, immigration, and citizenship. In literary studies, scholars are only now beginning to mine the ways that theorists from diverse backgrounds—including continental philosophers such as Derrida and Levinas, womanist philosopher and theologian N. Lynne Westerfield, and post-colonial writers and scholars such as Tahar Ben Jelloun—can expand the reading of nineteenth century literature by examining the discourse and practice of hospitality. When host and guest meet at the threshold they must acknowledge the full personhood of the other; the relationship of hospitality is dependent on beginning in a state of equilibrium grounded in mutual respect. In this project I argue that because of the acknowledgement of mutual humanness required in acts of hospitality, hospitality functions as a humanizing narrative across the spectrum of antebellum black experience: slave and free, male and female, uneducated and highly educated. In chapter one, “Unmasking Southern Hospitality: Discursive Passing in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred,” I examine Stowe’s use of a black fugitive slave host who behaves like a southern gentleman to undermine the ethos of southern honor culture and to disrupt the ideology that supports chattel slavery. In chapter two, “Transformative Hospitality and Interracial Education in Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends,” I examine how the race-centered scenes of hospitality in Frank J. Webb’s 1857 novel The Garies and Their Friends creates educational opportunities where northern racist ideology can be uncovered and rejected by white men and women living close to, but still outside, the free black community of Philadelphia. In the final chapter, “Slavery’s Subversion of Hospitality in Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” I examine how Linda Brent’s engagement in acts of hospitality (both as guest and host) bring to light the warping influence of chattel slavery on hospitality in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. In conclusion, my project reframes the practices of antebellum hospitality as yet another form of nonviolent everyday resistance to racist ideology rampant in both the North and the South. This project furthers the ways that American literature scholars understand active resistance to racial oppression in the nineteenth century, putting hospitality on an equal footing with other subversive practices, such as learning to read or racial passing.

Cette thèse étudie des œuvres littéraires arabo-américaines contemporaines écrites par des femmes, plus spécifiquement les écrits d’Evelyn Shakir tels que Bint Arab, ainsi que plusieurs autres romans dont Arabian Jazz et Crescent de Diana Abu Jaber, The Inheritance of Exile de Susan Muaddi Darraj, The Night Counter d’Alia Yunis, et Once in a Promised Land de Laila Halaby. Elle montre comment ces œuvres construisent des univers où peuvent être interrogées les notions d’identité, de culture, d’ethnicité, et de genre. Les conflits quotidiens autour de l’identité sont traités en se fondant à la fois sur les œuvres critiques des femmes arabo-américaines et sur les études psycho-sociales du biculturalisme. De plus, ce travail met l’accent sur la formation de solidarités entre les femmes de couleur, en élargissant le concept de « conscience des zones frontalières » d’Anzaldua pour inclure les œuvres des écrivaines arabo-américaines. Les théories développées après la colonisation, particulièrement les études sur l’orientalisme à la suite d’Edward Said, sont également invoquées pour remettre en question le modèle oriental de la féminité. Enfin, cette thèse analyse la narration et son rôle dans la création d’un point d’ancrage pour les identités « exilées », insistant plus particulièrement sur la figure de Shéhérazade. Ce travail montre ainsi la façon dont les productions littéraires peuvent créer de nouveaux espaces pour comprendre les problèmes sociaux, politiques, culturels, ou ethniques. / This dissertation analyses contemporary Arab-American literary productions by female writers, specifically, Shakir’s collection of memoirs Bint Arab and her two short stories “Oh Lebanon” and “Name Calling,” as well as a selection of novels, Abu Jaber’s Arabian Jazz and Crescent, Darraj’s The Inheritance of Exile, Alia Yunis’s The Night Counter, and Laila Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land. It shows how these works construct a space which enables them to investigate questions of identity, culture, ethnicity and gender. Identity conflicts around everyday matters like physical appearance, color, dress codes, veiling, chastity, and marriage are addressed by drawing upon critical works by Arab-American female writers and psycho-social studies on biculturalism. Moreover, this work emphasizes coalition-building with women of color by extending Anzaldua’s concept of the “consciousness of the borderlands” to encompass works by Arab-American female writers. Theories by post-colonial thinkers, particularly Said’s studies on Orientalism, also contribute to the dissertation’s questioning of the Oriental model of womanhood. Finally, this dissertation envisages critical works that study storytelling and its role in creating a surrogate home for “exilic” identities, with special emphasis on the Scheherazadian narrative. This project views literary productions as an appropriate way to investigate social, political, cultural and ethnic issues. It shows how writings by Arab-American women contribute to exploring inner identity conflicts, how they connect with other minority groups, and how they create a new sense of home.