Thesis (M.A.)--University of Virginia, 1998. / Description based on content as of June 1999; title from title screen.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin, 1935. / Vita. The above is an abridged version of the author's dissertation. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 437-442).

Throughout an adult life that witnessed drastic cultural upheaval between the Civil War and World War I, Bertha Honoré Palmer (1849-1918) was continually called on to deploy her Victorian values in response to modern events. Being a woman only complicated this negotiation. But being a child of the American frontier granted her a latitude and mobility that were rare for women of her class and era – allowing her to challenge gender boundaries and occupy more than one cultural space at a time. Most of what has been written about Bertha Palmer’s life has been exceptionalist in approach and tone, ascribing her outsized social and political successes to her physical beauty and perfection of temperament. I believe Bertha Palmer’s importance as a crucial transitional bridge between True Woman and New Woman has been underestimated in this discourse. Near the end of her life, a move to Florida offered her the potential to resolve the inside/outside, domestic/public, feminine/masculine dialectics that lay at the heart of her restless movements. These contradictions and dichotomies that Bertha Palmer embodied on a grand scale do more to make her knowable to us today than the record of her words and actions can accomplish. Both her Victorian reticence and her modernistic construction of a seamless public façade have a way of hindering our best efforts to understand her motivations – especially the choice to move to Florida – despite a wealth of biographical material, including her correspondence housed in Chicago and Sarasota history centers, and contemporary news accounts. In the end, the cultural history of the Gilded Age gives us the only reliable lens for penetrating the veneer of Bertha Palmer.

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In this dissertation, I wrestle with how literature has helped frame how modern cities have been understood, and how neighborhood change within them has been interpreted, since the dawn of the modern city in the early twentieth century U.S. Moving from Chicago at the time of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition to 1920s Harlem, to postwar Chicago, then back again to 1960s-era Harlem before focusing on the first “brownstoning” era in Brooklyn, I analyze how literature has shaped and contested the terms through which urban neighborhood change was and still is understood—terms like “community,” “integration,” “segregation,” and, on a more housing-specific note, “tenements” and “slums.” Its aim is to demonstrate the necessity of applying close reading to cities in order to understand and address urban problems appropriately in light of their context(s). It also seeks to illustrate how literature can be and has been used as a tool for imagining more equal and more just forms of cities, forms occasionally reached for but never fully attained.

The thesis Mounted on a Pedestal, chronicles the life of Bertha Honoré Palmer. The focus of her story are the years after 1910, when she traveled to Sarasota, Florida and heralded the flight to the southernmost state, leading the pack in the purchase and development of land in the Sarasota/ Tampa Bay area. The totality of her years prior to that time serve as a prelude to her accomplishments and the vicissitudes of her life in the sleepy little fishing village she found. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1849, she was provided with a privileged, comfortable childhood and a sheltered academic education at the most prestigious schools for young ladies of the day. She excelled academically and won high praise for her exemplary demeanor. She was beautiful, intelligent, musically gifted, a competent linguist and writer, an astute businesswoman, a paragon of graciousness, and politically savvy. She married business mogul, Potter Palmer, when she was twenty-one and he forty-four. Bertha Palmer was a pacesetter of haute couture; the society pages of the newspapers were filled with detailed descriptions of her gowns, her jewels and her lavish parties. Her Chicago homes were architectural masterpieces and she furnished them with treasures from renowned artisans. In 1900, she was appointed by President William McKinley as the only woman on the national commission to represent the United States at the Paris Exposition. Mrs. Palmer's most prominent position was as president of the Board of Lady Managers at the Chicago World's Fair of 1893. She had close personal relations with the elite of American Society and European royalty. Following the death of her husband Potter, in 1902, Mrs. Palmer combined her life of splendor, advocacy, and mobility while pursuing every opportunity to increase the value of her holdings, principally with real estate investments. She had been bequeathed an estate worth eight million dollars. Before her death, she would more than double her net worth. She would invest in thousands of acres of land, build more homes and amass a fortune in possessions.

Although the literary quality of women's poetry from the nineteenth century has long been criticized by literary scholars, recent work in reception studies has documented readers' aesthetic experiences with such poetry in order to appreciate its popularity and appeal (Stauffer). Extending this work in literary reception studies, I draw on scholarship in rhetorical studies, specifically rhetorical aesthetics (Clark), to demonstrate how conventional poetic forms and sentimental appeals can be used by marginalized communities to facilitate identification. I examine Songs and Flowers of the Wasatch, a collection of primarily Latter-day Saint women's poetry compiled by Emmaline B. Wells for the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, as a case study in rhetorical aesthetics. The collection was compiled with the intent to change popular opinion about Utah woman and foster community within women's movements of the time, including suffrage. By analyzing how these poems operated rhetorically--facilitating aesthetic experiences through familiar poetic forms and sentimental appeals--I conclude that the collection helped change negative public opinion of Latter-day Saint women. I argue that rhetorical aesthetics and reception studies offer an alternative way for literary and rhetorical scholars to reevaluate the value of women's nineteenth-century poetry. This project invites additional scholarly inquiry into how women and other historically marginalized groups have used art to create rhetorically powerful aesthetic experiences that prepare minds for change.

The Columbian Exposition of 1893 held in Chicago, Illinois has been the most influential World’s Fair held within the United States. It social, cultural, and architectural impact advanced America on a worldwide scale. There are only four buildings that still remain from this Exposition today: the Palace of Fine Arts, Dutch House, Norway Building, and Maine State Building. This thesis focuses on the Norway and Maine State Buildings since these are the only two that still remain with a majority of the original building materials still intact. An expanded history of both these buildings are explained, including their design, construction, impact at the Chicago World’s Fair, relocation(s), changes in ownership, what has happened to the buildings since the Fair, and what they are used for today. Further analysis includes why these buildings were saved and the importance of their historical inclusion in the 1893 Columbian Exposition / The Norway Building -- The Maine State Building -- Analysis & conclusion. / Department of Architecture