In recent years, historians studying the United States in the mid-nineteenth century have made increasing use of popular writings to identify attitudes and beliefs. One genre of writing which has been largely overlooked by scholars of history is the convent narrative. These texts criticized convents and claimed that American nuns suffered imprisonment and abuse. Numerous examples of this genre, including both avowedly fictional novels and purported real-life autobiographies, were published in the United States between 1850 and 1870. Detailed study of these works uncovers a rich seam of evidence of popular attitudes to a range of political, religious and social forces, including republicanism, Catholicism, immigration, urbanization, industrialization, slavery and the role of women. This study analyzes and compares the themes, ideologies and techniques found in these texts. It will relate these to their wider context, and will examine the role the texts played in transmitting and reinforcing the beliefs and opinions of their authors. Close study of the narratives reveals that their authors were primarily concerned, not with the religious implications of convents and Catholicism (although these did alarm these authors), but, first and foremost, with the safety and stability of the American republic. The creators of convent narratives believed that the republic was under siege from anti-republican forces working to undermine the American way of life on a number of different fronts. These concerns are manifested repeatedly in the convent narratives. Where previously this genre has been overlooked by historians, except as a straightforward manifestation of lurid and sensationalistic anti-Catholic nativism, this study analyzes the deeper ideals and ideologies which these documents reveal, and establishes a basis for further exploration,

Convents and conspiracies : a study of convent narratives in the United States, 1850-1870

Gillian Brown's book probes the key relationship between domestic ideology and formulations of the self in nineteenth-century America. Arguing that domesticity institutes gender, class, and racial distinctions that govern masculine as well as feminine identity, Brown brilliantly alters, for literary critics, feminists, and cultural historians, the critical perspective from which nineteenth-century American literature and culture have been viewed. In this study of the domestic constitution of individualism, Brown traces how the values of interiority, order, privacy, and enclosure associated with the American home come to define selfhood in general. By analyzing writings by Stowe, Hawthorne, Melville, Fern, and Gilman, and by examining other contemporary cultural modes--abolitionism, consumerism, architecture, interior decorating, motherhood, mesmerism, hysteria, and agoraphobia--she reconfigures the parameters of both domesticity and the patterns of self it fashions. Unfolding a representational history of the domestic, Brown's work offers striking new readings of the literary texts as well as of the cultural contexts that they embody.

Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America

By the middle of the nineteenth century, domesticity had gained a position of prominence, if not dominance, in American culture; this discourse of home, family, and private life influenced everything from home design to social reform movements (1) A primary feature of this ideology concerned the mother's role as child nurturer and educator, a role for which women were supposed to be divinely intended and biologically designed As historian Mary Ryan has observed, "the feminization of child-rearing, in literature and in practice, dovetailed neatly with the gender system enshrined in the cult of domesticity The true woman was the perfect candidate for the role of child nurturer She was loving, giving, moral, pure, and consigned to the hearth" (2) Much mid-nineteenth-century domestic literature, in the form of advice manuals, articles in ladies' magazines, and published sermons, reiterated and reinforced this message through reverent portrayals of the mother as "tutelary seraph," a home-bound figure who instills virtue and religion in her children through the medium of her matchless love (3) In his popular guide for parents, Fireside Education (1838), Samuel Goodrich describes the infant's early impressions of its mother, a "ministering spirit" who supplies all its inchoate needs: "If cold, [she] brings it warmth; if hungry, she feeds it; if in pain, she relieves it; if happy, she caresses it  The mother is the DEITY OF INFANCY!" (4) AS the child matures, though, it begins to require more than food, warmth, and affection Now, according to Goodrich, the father steps in: Hitherto, [the child] has been a creature of feeling; it now becomes a being of thought The intellectual eye opens upon the world Curiosity is alive, and questions come thick and fast to the lisping lips  At this period, the child usually becomes fond of the society of his father He can answer his questions He can unfold the mysteries which excite the wonder of the childish intellect (15) This description typifies the view taken by many didactic writers who focus on the mother's role as child educator In these texts, maternal instruction appears as an instinctive, spontaneous reaction rather than a reasoned, deliberate choice (a competency reserved for fathers) Indeed, as a writer for The Mother's Magazine phrased it in 1841, a mother was supposed not "to teach virtue but to inspire it" (5) Taken together, these writings suggest that the ideal mother accomplished her work simply by loving her children; no more rigorous methods were necessary At its core, the antebellum cult of the mother rested on the fundamentally emotional, irrational character of the mother's attitude towards her children To underscore this point, I will use the term "sentimental maternalism" to refer to this cluster of beliefs (6) Most critics of nineteenth-century American literature conclude that the popular women's novels of mid-century bear the imprint of domesticity, including its emphasis on sentimental maternalism, although they debate the extent to which these texts advance or impede progressive political transformation (7) Stephanie Smith, for example, deems it a "commonplace" to say that "representations of a sanctified motherhood formed the primary cornerstone for commercially successful writing in the United States of the nineteenth century" (8) But to suggest that domestic fictions uniformly or unequivocally promote sentimental maternalism misreads this genre Detailed portraits of competent, capable motherhood (let alone the sanctified variety) rarely appear in most domestic fictions (9) Far from promoting the mother's educative primacy, some of the nineteenth century's best-selling domestic novels demonstrate nothing so much as her superfluity This article shows how two popular domestic novels--Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World (1850) and Maria Cummins' The Lamplighter (1854)--point out the limits of sentimental maternalism as an instrument for educating young women …

The Limits of the Mother at Home in The Wide, Wide World and The Lamplighter

Uncle Sam Needs a Wife : Citizenship and Denegation

This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by TopSCHOLAR®. It has been accepted for inclusion in Masters Theses & Specialist Projects by an authorized administrator of TopSCHOLAR®. For more information, please contact connie.foster@wku.edu. Recommended Citation Bergman, Cassie N., "Clockwork Heroines: Female Characters in Steampunk Literature" (2013). Masters Theses & Specialist Projects. Paper 1266. http://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/1266 brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk

Clockwork Heroines: Female Characters in Steampunk Literature

In the 1970s, when feminist scholars started searching for published writing by early U.S. women, we expected to find almost nothing. Most of us also supposed that what we found would be almost exclusively fiction and that this fiction would express a modestly counter-hegemonic, gender-specific ethos we might accurately label "sentimental." A minority of us rejected in advance the term sentimental as prejudicial to the reception of our project, given the longstanding invidious association of sentimentalism with foolish femininity; a few of us preferred to conceptualize the counter-hegemonic discourse of sentimentality as truly subversive rather than mildly dissenting. In any case, we have all learned that well before 1900 numerous women in the U.S.-mainly white and Anglo, virtually all Protestant-had published a substantial body of diverse material, the majority of it probably nonfiction. As early as 1830, in the story "Cacoethes Scribendi" (translation: The Itch to Write), Catharine Maria Sedgwick could already satirize a mania for publishing among New England women involving not only fiction, but also historical memoir ("anecdotes of the revolution and the French war"), religious meditation (a "Saturday night book" called Solemn Hours), and textbooks including one "popular treatise" on education and another called Familiar Dialogues on Botany (54).1 In sum, along with much fiction, U.S. women published substantial quantities of other kinds of work including religious tracts; children's books; local-color sketches; village chronicles; plays; poetry in lyric, dramatic, and narrative form; translations; reviews; biographies; family memoirs; histories; travel books; textbooks in subjects from ancient history to botany, chemistry, geography, and astronomy; cookbooks and other works on domestic economy; advice books for girls, boys, young women, brides, and mothers; occasional essays; editorials; manifestoes. Women kept family journals, wrote family letters, edited newspapers and magazines, organized literary salons and won literary prizes.2 The fiction women wrote was perhaps as often polemical as it was domestic (and, as in the case of Uncle Tom's Cabin, often both at once); novels and stories took a range of positions on social, religious, and political issues including abolitionism,

Nina Baym

Papers

Women's Novels and Women's Minds: An Unsentimental View of Nineteenth- Century American Women's Fiction

A New Perspective on Cooper@@@A World by Itself: The Pastoral Moment in Cooper's Fiction