Beyond Curiosity: Late-Nineteenth-Century American Women's Narratives of Obsession

nineteenth-century American literature;women"s literature;literature and science;regionalism;obsession;English Language and Literature;Humanities;English Language & Literature

Scherer, LoganParrish, Susan Scott ;

University of Michigan

关键词: nineteenth-century American literature;    women";    s literature;    literature and science;    regionalism;    obsession;    English Language and Literature;    Humanities;    English Language & Literature;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/137002/logansch_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

In ;;Beyond Curiosity,” I identify a group of late-nineteenth-century American women writers whose all-consuming interests in observational sciences—from entomology to botany to ornithology to astronomy—guided their artistic creations. I call their short stories, novels, and personal and scientific essays ;;narratives of obsession,” a genre I reveal as a feminine reimagining of eighteenth-century natural histories and early-nineteenth-century literary sketches. I introduce ;;obsession” as a stylistic gesture, a narrative device characterized by plotlessness, heightened description, antisociality, idealized spinsterhood, and monomaniacal focus on specialized areas of personal study. I contextualize ;;obsession” against the postbellum shift in U.S. discourse when the sciences were becoming professionalized and institutionalized, less dependent on and welcoming of self-taught amateurs, and when women were facing new barriers against male-dominated universities and science organizations. I show how late-nineteenth-century upper-middle class white women crafted narratives of obsession as an alternative to the restrictive disciplinarity emerging around them. I chronicle the obsessions of four women: short story writer-turned-entomologist Annie Trumbull Slosson and her literary-descriptive tales and essays; poet-gardener Celia Thaxter and her garden book, _An Island Garden_ (1894); Harriet Beecher Stowe and her book of Florida essays, _Palmetto-Leaves_ (1873), and her novel, _Oldtown Folks_ (1869); and astronomer Maria Mitchell and the newspaper and magazine articles and literary works that mythologized her (including Nathaniel Hawthorne’s _The Marble Faun_ (1860), Herman Melville’s ;;After the Pleasure Party” (1891), and Augusta Jane Evans’ _Macaria; or, Altars of Sacrifice_ (1864)). I extend the narrative of obsession to other white, upper-middle-class late-nineteenth-century women writers and naturalists, including Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Harriet Mann Miller, Mary Treat, Graceanna Lewis, and Katharine Dooris Sharp. While I locate women’s obsession in a New England culture that fostered feminine curiosity and spinsterhood, I also demonstrate how the obsessed woman became a figure of national fixation. By highlighting the antisociality and hermeticism in these narratives of obsession, I unsettle the standard critical account of community and empathy as the center of late-nineteenth-century women’s nature writing and regionalism. These narratives of widows, spinsters, and outcasts rejecting normative romantic and social bonds with others rework the modes of expression deemed acceptable for late-nineteenth-century women (sentimentality, domesticity, regionalism). I propose obsession as a different nineteenth-century women’s tradition that celebrates solitude and spinsterhood (not sympathy or connection). I end by tracing a spinster genealogy, a non-procreative legacy of late-nineteenth-century obsession. I examine texts by three late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century American women writers who imagine themselves as nineteenth-century spinsters in their narratives of obsession: Julie Hecht’s short stories, Kate Bolick’s memoir, _Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own_ (2015), and Jamaica Kincaid’s _My Garden (Book):_ (1999)—texts that expand the racial, social, and emotional possibilities of obsession even as they further narrow and make newly violent its monomaniacal focus.