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Although Jewett employs many local color conventions, she transcends the school in her subtle, controlled use of dialect, her blending of setting with story, and her skill in creating characters, especially women. She also maintains a sophisticated tension between local color polarities (city/country, individual/society, child/adult, land/sea, past/present, and insider/outsider), finding both sides necessary to a balanced portrayal of place and people.Through an internal analysis in of fifty-seven stories, this study classifies women according to marital or social groups. A chapter on courtship relationships finds that women usually have the upper hand, displaying a mixture of pragmatism and humor. Courtships often involve romance but never passion. Having made a choice, women accept the imperfections of men with understanding and tolerance.Women also form small groups of two or three which are often centered around rite-of-passage situations. These groups transcend but maintain social standing; they often function by a non-verbal code which is sometimes misunderstood. Or, the relationships may exist in the mind or heart, crossing geographic and temporal barriers. For women, isolation brings mental, spiritual, and even physical death.The group of younger women who have a special gift or calling for medicine, teaching, art, or business most clearly reveals Jewett's nascent feminism. These women must choose between the calling and the more traditional feminine role. Often they have a special affinity for their mothers.Sisters, externally alike, function according to a clearly defined hierarchy; the older is more controlling and motherly, the younger often prettier, more gentle, and less disciplined.Jewett's forte, the spinsters and widows who often live and function alone, are usually self-reliant and optimistic. They may create imaginary audiences or alter egos for companionship. Overcoming occasional temptations to selfishness, they maintain the family home with dignity and fortitude, even when the social and economic problems of a passing era become overwhelming. Jewett's women are strong and resourceful, optimistic and resilient. Her success in character portrayal lies in the ability to blend specific homey detail with universality of thought and feeling.

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Call number: LD2668 .T4 1938 H63

Situated at the crossroads of literary studies, ecocriticism and political theory, Active Enchantments explores a strain of thought within American literature that understands life in all of its forms to be generated not by self determined identities, but by interconnectedness and self abandonment. I argue that this interest led American writers across the nineteenth century to develop theories of subjectivity and of politics that not only emphasize the entanglement of the self with its environment, but also view this relationship as structured by self overcoming. Thus, when Emerson calls such interconnectedness "active enchantment," he means to signal life's inherent ability to constantly surpass itself, to never fully be identical with itself. My dissertation brings to the fore the political and ecological stakes of this paradox: if our selves and communities are molded by self abandonment, then the standard scholarly account of how nineteenth century American literature conceptualized politics must be revised. Far from understanding community as an organic production, founded on a teleological and harmonizing principle, the writers I study reconceive it around a sense of a commonality irreducible to fixed identity. The politics emerging out of such redefinition disposes with the primacy of individual or human agency, and becomes ecological in that it renders inoperative the difference between the social and the natural, the human and the non human, ourselves and what comprises us. It is the ecological dimension of what seems like a properly political question that brings together writers as diverse as Emerson and Sarah Orne Jewett, Margaret Fuller and Henry and William James. I argue, for example, that in Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs, racial minorities emerge from geological strata as a kind of natural archive that complicates the nation's understanding of its communal origin. When she sets her romances on Native American shell mounds in Maine, or makes the health of a New England community depend on colonial pharmacopoeia and herbalist healing practices of the West Indies, Jewett excavates from history its silent associations and attunes us not only to the violent foundation of every communal identity, but to this identity's entanglement in a number of unacknowledged relations. Her work thus ultimately challenges the procedures of democratic inclusiveness that, however non violent, are nevertheless always organized around a particular notion of identity. The question of the self's constitutive interconnectedness with the world is as central to Margaret Fuller's work. Active Enchantments documents how Fuller's harrowing migraines enabled her to generate a peculiar conception of the "earthly mind," according to which the mind is material and decomposable, rather than spiritual, incorruptible or ideal. This notion eventually led her to devise a theory of the self that absolves persons from self possession and challenges the distinctiveness of personal identity. My concluding chapter argues that Henry James's transnational aesthetics was progressively politicized in the 1880s, and that what scholarship celebrates as the peak of his novelistic method develops, in fact, out of a network of surprising and heretofore unexplored influences, William James's concurrent theories of corporeal emotion, Mikhail Bakunin's anarchism, and Henry James's friendship with Ivan Turgenev, which inflamed James's interest in British politics, the Russo Turkish War, and the Balkan revolutions.

Nineteenth-century women were a mainstay in the New England literary tradition, both as readers and authors. Indeed, women were a large part of a growing reading public, a public that distanced itself from Puritanism and developed an appetite for novels and magazine short stories. It was a culture that survived in spite of patriarchal domination of the female in social and literary status. This dissertation is a study of selected works from Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman that show their fiction as a protest against a patriarchal society. The premise of this study is based on analyzing these works from a protest (not necessarily a feminist) view, which leads to these conclusions: rejection of the male suitor and of marriage was a protest against patriarchal institutions that purposely restricted females from realizing their potential. Furthermore, it is often the case that industrialism and abuses of male authority in selected works by Jewett and Freeman are symbols of male-driven forces that oppose the autonomy of the female. Thus my argument is that protest fiction of the nineteenth century quietly promulgates an agenda of independence for the female. It is an agenda that encourages the woman to operate beyond standard stereotypes furthered by patriarchal attitudes. I assert that Jewett and Freeman are, in fact, inheritors of Hawthorne's literary tradition, which spawned the first fully-developed, independent American heroine: Hester Prynne.