Thesis advisor: Cynthia Lyerly / My dissertation examines the social, cultural, and political lives of women in the early Republic through an analysis of the first women's literary circle formed in the United States after the Revolution, the Boston Gleaning Circle. The Gleaners, as the women referred to themselves, instead of engaging primarily in charitable and religious work, which was the focus of other women's groups, concentrated on their own intellectual improvement. The early Republican era witnessed the first sustained interest in women's education in North America and the Gleaners saw women as uniquely blessed by the Revolution and therefore duty-bound to improve their minds and influence their society. My study builds on, and challenges, the historiography of women in the early Republic by looking at writings from a group of unmarried women whose lives did not fit the ideal of "republican motherhood," but who still considered themselves patriotic Americans. The Gleaners believed that the legacy of the American Revolution left them, as young women, a crucial role in American public life. Five of the Gleaners had a father who was a Son of Liberty and participated in the Boston Tea Party. Their inherited legacy of patriotism and politics permeated the lives of these young women. Many historians argue that the Revolution brought few gains for women, but the Gleaners demonstrate that for these young Bostonians, the ideas of the Revolution impacted them. Making intellectual contributions was not easy, however, and the young women were constantly anxious about their Circle's place in society. By the 1820s, the opportunities that the Revolution brought women had been closed. Prescriptive literature now touted a cult of True Womanhood told women that they were to be selfless, pious, and submissive. These ideas influenced the Gleaners and by the 1820s they no longer met for their literary pursuits, but for charitable purposes. No place in society remained for women in a self-improvement society. Instead, women had to work to improve others, demonstrating the limited opportunities for women in the antebellum period. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.

This dissertation examines Mark Twain’s literary-critical reputation from the years 1865 to 1882, as he transformed from the regional “wild humorist of the Pacific Slope” to a national and international celebrity who William Dean Howells called “the most popular humorist who ever lived.” This dissertation considers “Mark Twain” not as the name of a literary author, but as a fictional creation who was narrator and implied author of both fictional and non-fiction texts, a performer who played his role on lecture platforms and other public venues, and a celebrity whose fame spread from the American west through America and the world. The key question of this dissertation is the historical position of the “humorist,” a hierarchical cultural category that included high culture literary figures, such as James Russell Lowell and Bret Harte; literary comedians, such as Artemus Ward and Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby; and clowns and minstrels, who were placed at the bottom of the hierarchy. I argue that Mark Twain muddied the hierarchical distinctions between class-appropriate leisure and burgeoning forms of mass entertainment, between uplifting humor and debased laughter, and between the canonical literature of high culture and the passing whim of the merely popular. Through the success of The Innocents Abroad (1869) and the promotion of William Dean Howells, Mark Twain was elevated into critical discussions of literary value, and in the 1870s he entered into venues of higher prestige: so-called “quality” magazines such as the Galaxy and the Atlantic Monthly, lecture stages on the lyceum circuit and in England, and the personal realm of friendship with other authors. While Twain was accepted into some literary cultures, other critics attempted to consign him to literary oblivion, or simply ignored him, while Twain himself betrayed keen anxiety about his role as “stripèd humorist” in respectable literary realms. This dissertation thus focuses on written works, critical interpretations, and performative instances in which “Mark Twain,” as both agent and subject, brought debates over “American Humor,” “American Literature,” and “American Culture” to the fore. / text

This thesis examines the important role of female same-sex relationships in nineteenth-century literature and culture. Whilst drawing directly upon Sharon Marcus's recent book, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England, a revisionary queer reading of inter-dependent same-sex female intimacy and mainstream middle-class heteronormative ideals, my own study extends the parameters of Marcus's work by focussing on alternative contexts and previously overlooked same-sex female relationships. This thesis argues that the culturally endorsed model of Victorian female homosociality identified by Marcus was subject to disruption and transformation both within and beyond the institutions of marriage and the family. It concludes that various forms (rather than one definitive model) of homosocial desire shaped nineteenth-century female bonding. In the first chapter I explore the unstable social status of working middle-class women, and identify instances of employer/employee female intimacy organised upon a disturbance or reversal of social hierarchy. In the second chapter I demonstrate how the ideal of female amity was inevitably undermined in the literary marketplace, and that whilst women writers were engaged in constructing and disseminating this ideal in their novels, they were also embroiled in a series of professional jealousies with one another which served to undo the very ideal they were promoting. In the second part of this chapter I highlight the pluralism of mainstream homoerotic femininity by examining Dinah Mulock Craik's fictional representation of homoerotic surveillance manifest in a culturally endorsed adolescent female gaze. In the third chapter I challenge Marcus's claim that well-known independent nineteenth-century lesbians were fully accommodated into mainstream 'respectable' society by demonstrating that some of these women informed Eliza Lynn Linton's homophobic portrait of radical feminist separatism. I also explore in this chapter Linton's fictional representation of sororal eroticism, and argue that (notwithstanding mother/daughter bonds) Linton, like many of her contemporaries, regarded sisterhood as the primary bond between women. I also evidence in this chapter that Linton's portrait of 'sororophobia' is comparable with cultural ideals regarding the important function that female friends had in facilitating one another's marriage.