A study of narrative authority in the novels of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Augusta Jane Evans

Nineteenth-century American women's speech was severely restricted to the domestic sphere. Women who spoke in public spaces, reserved only for men, were deemed unnatural and even monstrous. Nineteenth-century women writers entered this restricted masculine space and, despite the cultural contradictions, they created public and authoritative narrative voices. The work of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Augusta Jane Evans demonstrates nineteenth-century women writers' struggle and success with the construction of authoritative narrative voice. Stowe and Evans's stress-filled contradictory lives are reflected in their novels yet both women create authoritative narrative voices despite oppositional cultural pressure. Stowe and Evans employ specific narrative techniques that allow them to cross gender codes and to construct authoritative, public narrators.