<p> By re-positioning the works of Elaine Showalter, Phyllis Chesler, Sandra Gilbert, and Susan Gubar alongside Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston, reading the literary texts through the feminist theories in order to expand them, this dissertation aims to contribute to an intersectional feminist practice that challenges claims of universality and continues to decolonize the female body and mind. Through an intersectional analysis of narratives written by women of color, applying and re-visioning theories of madness and transgression, this dissertation will present a counter-narrative to the &ldquo;essential womanness&rdquo; developed within and sustained by white feminist practices throughout the 1970s. Each chapter pairs white feminist theorists with an author whose work complicates notions of universal female experience: Dunbar-Nelson/ Showalter, Larsen/ Chesler, Hurston/Gilbert and Gubar. These pairings create tension between theories of universality and the realities of difference. The addition of three different narratives, each representing a broader range of intersectional female experience, enriches the heteroglossia surrounding feminist conceptions of mental illness. The result is a poly-vocal conversation that employs a scaffold of intersectional identity politics in order to (re)consider the relationship between the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness and the performativity of gender.</p><p>

Among the Dahomey of West Africa, the spirit Legba presides over all transitions, and African-American blues and jazz musicians can be considered his "children," or followers, since their music provides a link between the physical and spiritual worlds, the past and the present, and between cultures. Chapter one provides a cross-cultural perspective on the role of the musician in various societies, with the emphasis on Western Europe and West Africa, including a description of the special status of female musicians. Chapter two considers how the derogatory stereotypes of black musicians created by the nineteenth-century minstrel show allowed performers to cross the racial, sexual, and class boundaries of American society. Only if we recognize the paradox of freedom offered by this vestige of slavery will we be able to make sense of the fact that black performers adapted the minstrel roles after the Civil War. The third chapter describes the social role of the black musician of the jazz age, beginning with the controversy surrounding jazz in the early twenties, and tracing the survival of African musical practices and beliefs in jazz and the blues. The careers of many musicians are analyzed to demonstrate the range of opportunities open to black performers in the period. Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown wrote poetry inspired by the blues, adopting the persona of the musician in order to speak with an authentic folk voice. Chapter four considers how musicians are represented in their writing and compares their blues poems to the recordings of contemporary blues performers. The great jazz musicians of the twenties and thirties fired the imaginations of many modern African-American writers by providing a living link to African spiritual traditions and a new model of what history can be when it breaks free from the academy. Chapter five examines the representations of blues and jazz musicians in novels by Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker and Ishmael Reed, showing that all three writers assume the role of improvising historian by adapting the narrative techniques of the West African griot and the repetition with variation of the jazz musician.

Historian Warren Susman has proposed that the response to an experience is perhaps more important than the experience itself, and the American public responded to the Great Depression of the 1930s by documenting it in different forms and genres, and with different purposes and goals in mind. Given the complex nature of the crisis, the structure and function of the family served as central points of focus toward which many Americans directed their fears, concerns, anxieties, and hopes during the decade; consequently, the family was a frequent focus of the era's documentary texts. This dissertation examines documentary texts from the Depression-era which represent the American family, in an attempt to understand how documentary made sense of the Great Depression and its effects on families, and to determine what family "realities" documentary constructed and sanctioned as valid or depicted as undesirable. Its goal is not to determine how accurately or inaccurately documentary represented some objective "truth" or "reality" of family life, but to explore the complex interrelations between cultural ideals or myths of the family and constructions--representations--of actual families. The study considers works of fiction, nonfiction, and photography which are characterized by similar documentary methods and goals. It is organized according to three interconnected topics as they were presented by writers and photographers during the decade in question: the reactions of male heads of household to widespread unemployment and financial insecurity; the changing roles of wives and mothers both in and out of the home during a time of economic hardship; and the experiences of children and young adults in a society which provided limited opportunity and promise for the future. Issues of work and poverty are important subtexts of this analysis, given the Depression's effects on society in the way of unemployment, bank failures, homelessness, and destitution. The dissertation concludes with an examination of documentary constructions of "otherness" which are based on class and race, and illustrates how images of family were used to qualify or otherwise influence these concepts of otherness and difference.

The life and career of the remarkable Russian poet, Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) offers a paradigm for the modern woman writer. Despite the great number of women associated with Western Modernism, the Modernist canon is striking for the paucity of its women representatives. This thesis hopes to redress that situation, starting with a new reading of Tsvetaeva's epic poem of the Russian Civil War, Perekop (1928-1929). Perekop is the culmination of Tsvetaeva's verse experimentation with her culture's received constructs of gender and genre and it is the work in which she realizes the voice of an anonymous female bard. The failure of this poem to attract critical recognition parallels the experience of comparably innovative work among Tsvetaeva's female contemporaries. Tsvetaeva's work, in verse and prose, is a de facto manifesto of a female poetics. Deciphering the terms of this female modernist poetics provides a critical discourse in which to appreciate the comparably innovative and de-valued work of other modernist women writers. My thesis first outlines the cultural obstacles to Tsvetaeva's epic ambition, then explicates the strategies by which she accomplishes it. Through her re-writing of the gender-linked metaphors of Western poetics, Tsvetaeva creates the modern female bard. The trajectory of my analysis is determined by the unifying system of lyric tropes I extract from both prose and verse. This series of tropes is then located in Tsvetaeva's appropriation of western ideas, ranging from the practice of Homer, Herodotus, Hesiod and Heraclitus through the theories of the German Romantics and Nietzsche to the practice of the Russian poets Aleksandr Pushkin and Boris Pasternak. My analysis culminates in the exploration of the medieval Russian text Slovo o polku Igoreve as the unifying sub-text of Tsvetaeva's Perekop.

As I maintain throughout my study of the legacy of anxious antebellum white constructions of the ‘bad nigger’ trope, public sphere discourses too often deny African males access to the deliberations of civil society. Thus, I discuss the anxious public sphere discourses that created the antebellum ‘bad nigger,’ the ‘black beast’ rapist, and the violent ‘coon’ of Progressive Era popular song. However, my primary focus is the social, cultural, and historical circumstances that identify the assumption of negative identity as a form, however problematic, of masculinist African American oppositional discourse. Thus, I combine linguistic, cultural, and historical analyses to provide an ontological reading of the connection between African American appropriations of hate speech and the formation of counterpublics. I consider African American appropriation of the antebellum ‘bad nigger’ trope, construction of the ‘badman’ during the Progressive Era, construction of the ‘super bad’ masculinist African American hero during the 1970s, and the ascendancy of the ‘real nigga’ of hip-hop culture. To investigate some of the ways African American males and publics react to the imputation of negative masculine identities adequately, I pay particular attention to counterdiscourses embedded in African American folklore, literature, film, and popular music. The significance of these cultural forms to the shaping of some African American counterpublic discourses is great. On one hand, these forms allow specific African American concerns to be circulated within a larger public sphere in a fashion that exposes the ill effects of being denied access to civil society. The oppositional stance of these forms shapes and reflects African American counterpublic discourse. On the other hand, widespread public culture representations of figures similar to the antebellum ‘bad nigger’ call the usefulness of these figures to broad African American publics into question. This inquiry also shapes African American counterpublics. Thus, I come to question the efficacy of using this seemingly intractable and definitely problematic figure to shape and promote counterpublic discourses. Another question looms over this text, however. What circumstances must arise so these figures will becomes less culturally and rhetorically relevant? I hope I have provided details that will lead to potential answers.

This thesis examines societal representations of matriarchy in The Shore of Women by Pamela Sargent, The Gate to Women's Country by Sheri S. Tepper, and The Outlander: Captivity by B. J. Salterberg, and the ways in which these texts investigate the issue of male aggression and whether women and men can develop an egalitarian society. This thesis explores how these three 1980s dystopias question the methods by which the 1970s utopian texts' societies function through demonstrating how humans can easily pervert feminist utopian characteristics in order for one group to seize and maintain power and continue the exploitation and oppression of other people. This thesis will briefly discuss the chronological development of feminist utopian writing among American women, beginning with the late nineteenth century, and the subsequent evolution of 1970s utopian visions into the dystopian texts of the 1980s and locate these novels in their cultural milieu as feminist texts. Secondly, it will examine the traits of the feminist utopian genre and its application to the matriarchal societies depicted in the novels. Lastly, it will address how each of the texts employs the conventions of 1970s utopian writing to present a more complex questioning of power and equality.

“Normality” is an idea so deeply woven into U.S. culture that it seems always to have existed, yet this interdisciplinary American Studies dissertation reveals otherwise. Beginning by analyzing the appearance of Normality as a regular subject heading in the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature between 1945 and 1963, this project explores how the pressures of war and readjustment made “normality” (re)emerge as one of the most potent epistemological categories of the early post-World War II decades. Each chapter approaches the broader topic of “normality” through focused, in-depth analysis of one particularly revealing postwar text. The story of “Norm and Norma,” two anthropometric models created in 1943 as supposed statistical composites of the “average” American male and female bodies, shows how the impulse to measure and define the “normal” was taken to the level of the body itself. A postwar fashion remnant, the “gray flannel suit” served as a powerful signifier of middle-class identity, and also a target for sociologists anxious over the slippage between “normality” and conformity. James Jones' 1951 first novel From Here to Eternity, a critical and popular success quickly followed by an Oscar-winning film version, invokes then excises homosexuality in a prewar Army setting, in order to erect and normalize a certain brand of violent male heterosexuality in its place. Meanwhile, in the fictional small town of “Peyton Place,” citizens participate in a culture of “keeping up appearances” through the projection of façades and other-directed performances of identity. Such practices resonated with readers caught in the ambiguities of a postwar morality, making Grace Metalious's 1956 novel one of the first sweeping critiques of this culture of “normality.” These discrete examples, taken together, reveal much about this “homogenizing category” of culture: that a cultural preoccupation with the idea of normality did exist at this time; that normality was effectively produced and reproduced at the intersections of scientific/intellectual discourse and popular/material practices; and ironically, that normality would prove to be both powerfully coercive and impossible to achieve. Ultimately, this project reveals that “normality” has been both a subject of, and subject to, history.

This dissertation argues that girls' series fiction played a key role in the cultural discourse about girlhood from the late nineteenth century through the early twentieth century. Over the course of sixty-five years, the desirability of piety and community activism for girls slowly shifted to an emphasis on the empowering possibilities of responsible consumption. Chapter One (the introduction) discusses the difficulty of defining adolescence in the postbellum period and its slow evolution into a distinct life phase and consumer category. Chapter Two examines the ways in which reading and religion were intertwined for girls and how the depictions of postbellum benevolence and reform organizations offered girls a path to personal agency that still fell within "acceptable" social behavior. Chapter Three examines the Little Women, Elsie Dinsmore, and Chautauqua Girls series and argues that postbellum series modeled a proto-New Womanhood that was based first on individual acts of charity, next on overlapping networks of benevolence and reform societies, and finally on political and social reform organizations that aimed to create national change. Series heroines take advantage of ix their social status as pious individuals to assist the poor in their communities and to extend their moral reach. Chapter Four begins to detail the shift from postbellum activism to consumerism as the prevalent ideology for girls by examining Edward Stratemeyer‘s innovations in the series book market. Stratemeyer combined the traditional series format with production techniques borrowed from story paper and dime novel publishers. He was also one of the first to recognize adolescents as a distinct market group with money to spend. Finally, Chapter Five examines the Patty Fairfield, Grace Harlowe, and Outdoor Girls series for the ways in which they communicate both excitement and anxiety about the new culture of consumption. Girl heroines exercise agency as consumers and develop individuality through their purchases, gaining a considerable amount of individual autonomy while they lose some of their status as spiritual leaders. Girl heroines learn to be responsible consumers and enjoy the pleasures of individual consumption, but series authors also warn against desiring money and material goods simply for their own sake.

An interdisciplinary study of women satirists of the Progressive and Jazz eras, the dissertation investigates the ways in which early modernist writers use the satiric mode either as an elitist mask or as a site of resistance, confronts the theoretical limitations that have marginalized women satirists in the academic arena, and points to the destabilizing, democratic potential inherent in satiric discourse. In the first chapter, I introduce the concept of signifying caricature, an exaggerated characterization that carries with it broad social, political, and cultural critique. Edith Wharton uses a signifying caricature in The Custom of the Country where the popular press, middlebrow literature, and the democratization of language is under attack. Several of Wharton's satiric stories also ridicule the New Woman, revealing Wharton's anxiety over women functioning in the public arena. The second chapter features recovery work of May Isabel Fisk, an internationally known comic monologist whose work has been lost to scholars. This chapter examines Fisk's monologues, paying particular attention to her use of the eiron and alazon comic figures. The dissertation then moves on to Dorothy Parker's biting satires of Jazz era decadence, the sexual double standard, and the oppressive norms of feminine beauty promoted in mass culture. The study concludes with an analysis of Jessie Fauset's Comedy: American Style, a novel using a signifying caricature to chastise America's failed racial policies and an essentialist theory of race. Comedy: American Style is an overlooked Depression era satire that challenges notions of a fixed American cultural nationalism even as it presages the idea of race as a floating signifier.

Built on original archival research, this dissertation elucidates how the Federal Theatre Project's (FTP) dramas of Depression-era poverty functioned as proselytism for class-conscious social reform. Through a combination of unique narrative structures and mimetic depictions of class struggle, these "poverty dramas" questioned the viability of the American Dream and its related concepts of upward mobility, limitless possibility, and the idea that America functions as a meritocracy. Chapter one discusses the Federal Theatre's relation to the American workers' theatre of the early twentieth century, particularly the ways in which the transactional re-lationship between artist, worker, and artistic production evolved from the theatre of the Progressive era to the emergence of the poverty dramas in the late 1930s. Chapter two discusses two of the New York Federal Theatre's plays. Triple-A Plowed Under critiques class disparity and calls for a more class-conscious American ideology. Class of '29 is read through the work of Pierre Bourdieu to show how the play makes visible the performative aspects of economic class. Chapter three examines the Philadelphia Federal Theatre's rewrite of the famous New York production of One-Third of a Nation. This chapter shows how the Philadelphia production encouraged a more racially pluralistic view of "the people" and a more nu-anced understanding of lived poverty in America. Chapter four shows how the Los Angeles Federal Theatre's The Sun Rises in the West simultaneously represented the conservative American ideology of the nation's dust bowl farmers while allowing for the expression of the play's left-leaning playwrights. The chapter argues that the play's multiple ideological threads, which at first appear in conflict, are in fact compatibly bound through the play's engagement with and re-working of a persevering American myth structured by a Frontier Archetype. The epilogue broaches the topic of what it means to undertake archival research so as to speak directly to the complex if occasionally problematic relation a researcher has with archives. The epilogue also briefly addresses one aspect of the Federal Theatre's legacy: its redefining of the theatre as a "people's art" rather than a cultural event reserved for the cultural and economic elite.