My dissertation argues that domestic service alters a culture’s relationship to the laboring body. I theorize this relationship via popular literary and cultural antebellum texts to explore the effects of servitude as a trope. Methodologically, each chapter reads a literary text in context with social and legal paradigms to 1) demonstrate that servitude undergirds myriad articulations of antebellum power and difference; 2) show how servitude inflects the construction of these paradigms; and 3) trace Americans’ changing relationship to the concept of servitude from the Early Republic through the Civil War. I begin with James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers (1823), exploring the famous Leather-stocking character – not (as has canonically been the case) as an icon of American independence, but as an icon of American servitude. I historicize this reading with the legal history of master/servant statutes in the early nineteenth century. While public opinion quarantined servitude to an oppressed racial minority, the apparatuses of the law were dramatically expanding servitude’s purview, rendering the master/servant relation the touchstone from which to understand all employment relations. Following, my second chapter examines Caroline Kirkland’s A New Home, Who’ll Follow? (1833). I show that Kirkland’s text dramatizes the narrativity of identity-formation and its potential class consequences. Throughout, Kirkland suggests that this is particularly a women’s problem, whose narratives of self are charged with maintaining the narratives of the family and, synecdochically, the nation. Maria Susanna Cummins’s The Lamplighter (1854) is a revolutionary intervention into the narratives of laborless-ness. I read the adoptions within the novel alongside the legalization of bounded servitude for children, since antebellum minors could be adopted or sign indentures if doing so was determined to be in their “best interest.” In my fourth and final chapter, I examine Civil War draft resistance. In her House and Home Papers columns for The Atlantic (1863-4), Harriet Beecher Stowe turned to the tropes of servitude to make sense of these violent eruptions. Yet this strategy laid bare servitude’s place as the basis for many other forms of state power (including military service) and servitude’s incompatibility with principles of individual sovereignty.

The purpose of my thesis seeks to uncover the constructed nature of the Anglo-Saxon ethnicity within two works of fiction. My thesis utilizes London’s The Valley of the Moon (1913) and Norris’s McTeague (1899) because they were published in a similar era. Both authors lived and wrote in the Bay Area during the Progressive Era of American politics. Therefore, there is political, stylistic, and regional proximity. Although Anglo-Saxonism has always been present in the United States, the construction of race was changing in the 1900s. The Valley of the Moon and McTeague both contain intriguing (and antiquated) notions of whiteness that further exacerbate the class struggle in California. This thesis describes the convergence of Progressive politics, eugenics, and Marxism within a unique chapter of American history. Through an exploration of Anglo-Saxonism, this examination of racial classifications is an attempt to reveal the inner workings of oppression in America.

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The House of Mirth's main character, Lily Bart, is charaterized a fated character, incapable of exerting free will. With the help of Lawrence Selden and Gerty Farish, she realizes that, for the most part, she has lived and acted according to what others expect of her.

In this subjective hero concept lies an intriguing aspect of Bakhtin's paradigm: A hero is not necessarily a living entity; a hero can be ideas, objects and locations. When viewed through the lens of traditional western rhetorical theory, Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea appears as a monologue wherein Santiago seemingly speaks for the author about the subject of doom and man's relationship to the world.

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Speculative fiction allows an expanded view of literature and so allows scholars to explore new boundaries in the way words and ideas work. In the titular character of The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle, the reader sees an expansion of self through liminality while A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick explores its collapse. In order to portray each of these the character examined must move though one seems to move upward and the other downward. This idea of movement is only part of what expands the idea of liminality past the traditional idea of a doorway to create a hallway that the character might traverse on the way from place to place. This is not a redefinition of the term but a revision, a change in the way that we look at the concept as we accept and explore newer genres.

Accusations and persecution of witchcraft have been embedded in global culture for centuries. For as long as these persecutions have occurred, women have found themselves accused most frequently. Older women with herbal knowledge were often called on to assist with childbirth or termination of pregnancies and this “secret knowledge” often led them to be suspected of supernatural abilities, often of a satanic nature. Intrigued by these wise women who appeared to have mysterious powers and a penchant for arousing the ire of men in the legal, medical, and religious communities, I began to notice their frequent appearance in novels. Does the presence of actual or perceived magic serve to improve the women’s status in their community? I reviewed several examples of YA literature, two picture books, and four Toni Morrison novels to determine if magic, conjuring, and witchcraft were more powerful threats than sexism and racism.

The time of modernity, defined here as 1850-1940, contributed to massive changes in the representation of the feminine in literature. Societal paradigm shifts due to industrialism, advances in science, psychology, and a newfound push for gender equality brought transformation to the Western World. As a result of this, male frustrations revived the ancient trope of the femme fatale, but the modern woman—already hungry for agency, tired of maligned representation in heinous portrayals of skeletons, sirens, and beasts—saw a symbol begging for redemption rather than the intended insult. Women of the nineteenth century infused texture to a two-dimensional accusation that argued the only good female sexuality was one that could be contained. The redemption of the femme fatale is traced in this thesis through Charles Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil (1857), Gabrielle D’Annunzio’s The Triumph of Death (1901), and Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936).