Challenging the belief that women did not respond publicly to the U.S.-Mexico War (1846-1848), this dissertation establishes a women's literature on the Mexican conflict. It examines a variety of textual materials--journalism, histories, novels, and pamphlet narratives--published in the years during and immediately following the war. What their writings reveal is a tenuous American identity struggling with a range of political and geographical instabilities during a period of contentious westward expansion. The U.S.-Mexico War offers an important public arena of women's political engagement for us to examine, and it asks us to reconsider the literary and cultural center of antebellum writings. This project not only recovers new voices and texts but also offers an alternative approach to more established writers, and it begins to build a critical framework for understanding the war's presence in American literature.
The first chapter examines the New York Sun war correspondence of Jane McManus Storm Cazneau, the only American journalist, male or female, to report from behind Mexican lines, and situates her work within the war writings of other journalists--Margaret Fuller, Jane Grey Swisshelm, Grace Greenwood, and Anne Royall. Chapter two turns to Emma Willard's conflicted history of the war, Last Leaves of American History. Eliza Allen's The Female Volunteer is the focus of chapter three, and her sensational cross-dressing narrative not only exposes the threats the war posed to gender, particularly the crisis in masculinity, but also reminds us of the troubled transnational identity of antebellum America. E.D.E.N. Southworth's The Hidden Hand responds to this masculinity crisis, and chapter four demonstrates how a focus on the war's presence in the novel opens up alternative interpretations, revealing in particular how Southworth complements her visions of domestic womanhood with a compatible manhood. The U.S.-Mexico War, as Jane Cazneau writes, placed "a deep and nervous responsibility on the American nation," and while there was little agreement as to the war's merits among these writers, they had little doubt as to the "nervous" distinction, whether for good or ill, the conflict had lain upon their nation.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TCU/oai:etd.tcu.edu:etd-04292010-144802 |
| Date | 29 April 2010 |
| Creators | Griffin, Megan Jenison |
| Contributors | Theresa S Gaul, NO SEARCH ENGINE ACCESS |
| Publisher | Texas Christian University |
| Source Sets | Texas Christian University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf, application/msword |
| Source | http://etd.tcu.edu/etdfiles/available/etd-04292010-144802/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to TCU or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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