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<p><i>She Will Be: Literary Authorship and the Coming Woman in the Postbellum United States </i>argues that postbellum women writers deployed the figure of the Coming Woman, an archetype for the nation’s improved female future, to articulate expanded sociopolitical opportunities for women, interrogate prevailing standards of literary art, and validate their own literary pursuits. During the final decades of the nineteenth century, the American reading public became increasingly fascinated with identifying who the Coming Woman would be, what qualities she would possess, and how her arrival would alter the nation’s future. Such questions flooded US print culture in the decades between 1865 and 1900, demonstrating that the Coming Woman not only occupied a space between the antebellum True Woman and fin de siècle New Woman but also that she was a major feminine archetype in her own right.</p><p><br></p><p>Even so, existing scholarship on the Coming Woman tends either to identify the Coming Woman anachronistically as an early iteration of the New Woman or, when naming her directly, to overlook her complex function as both a harbinger and manifestation of manifold sociopolitical changes. These limited examinations elide the Coming Woman’s ubiquitous influence on postbellum literary culture, particularly in terms of the complex links Susan Coultrap-McQuin and Lawrence W. Levine have traced between middlebrow culture and postbellum national identity. <i>She Will Be</i> builds on recent scholarship by demonstrating how the American Coming Woman helped reshape notions of women’s literary authorship, modernity, and national identity in the late nineteenth century. By examining her literary life through four key middlebrow genres (<i>Bildungsroman</i>, sentimentality, utopianism, and regionalism), <i>She Will Be</i> reveals how female authors used the Coming Woman figure to imagine—and, indeed, write into being—an expanded vision for the US’s female future.</p>

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.

Scholars over the past two decades (Denning, Szalay, Edmunds, Robbins) have theorized the different ways literature of the Mid-Twentieth Century reflects the dawn of the liberal US welfare state. While these studies elaborate on the effect rapidly expanding public aid had on literary production of the period, many have tended to undervalue the lingering influence on midcentury storytelling of private charity and philanthropy, those traditional aid institutions fundamentally challenged by the Great Depression and historically championed by conservatives. If the welfare state had an indelible impact on US literatures, so did the moral complexity of the systems of charity and philanthropy it purportedly replaced. In my dissertation, I theorize modern charity as a cultural narrative that found expression in a number of different writers from the start of the Great Depression and into the early 1960s, including Harold Gray, Ralph Ellison, W.E.B. Du Bois, Flannery O'Connor, and Dorothy Day.

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