Thesis (M.A.)--University of Detroit,1946. / "June 1946." Includes bibliographical references (p. 75-78).

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Narrative, Gender, and Masquerade tracks the way the American novel of manners structures itself on representations of a pair of purportedly opposite and opposing women, the fair, innocent girl and the dark, tempting seductress. This opposition increasingly merges into sameness even as the novel in which it appears labors to keep the two characters separate in order to stabilize its textual architecture of thematic and formal binaries. Presenting itself as a text closely related to a social reality, the American novel of manners is structured as a masquerade: purporting to reveal as it conceals, conjuring readerly doubt as to the nature of both mask and reality. There are two main theoretical traditions in the study of masquerade. The first, the anthropologically-inflected cultural and literary historical approach to masks and masquerade, typically is applied to literary texts to explain religious and political historical exigencies as reflected in a given work of literature. The second, the psychoanalically-based theory of femininity as a masquerade, is most often deployed to use the text as a means of explaining the male gaze, desire, and gender performance. My reading of the American novel as gendered rests on dissolving the disciplinary borders between the two, thereby focusing reading on the form of the novel as well as its relation to its cultural, historical, and literary context. The novels I analyze situate women into stereotypical binary roles of the virgin and the seductress. These narratives register a duality between reality and representation that is analogous to the gender masking the novels take as their theme.

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In "American Callings" I argue that late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century American literature dealing with cross-cultural humanitarianism contains a strand that sought to rectify the potentially oppressive shortcomings of humanitarian practice. The authors whose work I examine--novelists William Dean Howells and Albion Tourgeé, reformer Jane Addams, humorist George Ade, and memoirists Mary Fee and George Freer--grappled in their writing with two reciprocal questions. First, they meditated on how humanitarianism shapes, changes, and constitutes the self. Second, they theorized how increased self-awareness and self-criticism might help the humanitarian actor avoid the pitfalls of humanitarian practice that critics, in their time and ours, have seized upon. "American Callings" thus challenges three critiques that have been instrumental to American literary studies for decades: critiques of sentimental humanitarianism's complicity in projects of cultural domination, realism's investment in the status quo, and reform's role in maintaining social discipline through surveillance. The dissertation disputes the prevalent assertion that literature dealing with cross-cultural humanitarianism constitutes a sentimental, imperialistic, and ultimately violent discourse. I accomplish this by looking to instances of what Gregory Eiselein (1996) has called "eccentric" reform, efforts articulated from within a culture but in opposition to certain aspects of it. Drawing on narratives of what I call "humanitarian selfhood" in three historical contexts--industrializing urban centers in the North, the South during Reconstruction, and the Philippines during the U.S. occupation--"American Callings" traces an "eccentric" literary genealogy, one that offers up the humanitarian dynamic as a heuristic wherein the humanitarian agent arrives at a new kind of self-understanding by way of wrestling with the questions raised by service to others. The literature written by and about these humanitarians, I suggest, then provides an opportunity for readers to be transformed, as well. / text