A Study On Structures Of Feeling In Rebecca Harding Davis's Works

This is a study of Rebecca Harding Davis' s works.Rebecca Harding Davis(1831-1910)is an important transitional figure in American literature from romanticism to realism in the nineteenth century.She is widely known as a pioneer realist for her realism aesthetics on commonplace and realistic writing of American industrialization.This dissertation analyzes and interprets Davis' s works in the vision of Raymond Williams' s structure of feeling,which is defined as �social experiences in solution�.Living in the whirlpool of America's transition from agricultural civilization to industrial civilization,and as a middle class intellectual woman and sensitive writer,Davis always perceived signs of changes and crisis of her time timely and recorded new structures of feeling created when people responded to those changes in her works.In order to articulate people's various new experiences brought by industrialism and their distinctive response,Davis explored and experimented with new literary forms and convention such as realism and naturalism.The dissertation consists of three parts.The first part is an introduction,the focus of which is how Williams defined �structure of feeling�,and why it is appropriate to use �structure of feeling� as an analytic tool for interpreting Davis' s works.The second part is the main body of this dissertation and is made of four chapters.This part mainly discusses what new structures of feeling Davis articulated with her realistic and naturalistic writing.Chapter One and Chapter Two focus on new�common experiences�.In Chapter One the author examines the narrative strategies and �naturalism� in �Life in the Iron Mills�,and analyzes Davis' s commonplace aesthetics and the structure of feeling elements in her first novel Margret Howth: A Story of To-Day.Through new subjects,personalized characterization,detailed presentation of the environment,as well as a language which imitates the real world,Davis expressed and communicated her own exact impression and comprehension of the new era.The focus of Chapter Two is Davis' s realistic writing of the Civil War.As a witness,Davis demystified the war and revealed its devastating nature.She also pointed out that the Civil War was more than a binary opposition between right andwrong.Davis reported the catastrophe which happened to take place on her doorstep through her first-hand experience.The main structures of feeling of the nineteenth century America manifested as the contrast between the artist's actual experiences and the middle-class ideology.What Davis expressed and recorded were people's true feelings and emotions in daily life.Chapter Three and Chapter Four stress on�individual experience�.In Chapter Three,analysis is made according to the time clue.From Davis' s stories and novels written respectively in 60 s,70s,and in the last two decades of the nineteenth century,we see clearly the diachronical changes of women's feelings and emotions which were both subtle and complex in the transition period.The key word for the discussion of Chapter Four is �work�.This chapter analyzes how Davis revealed the historic features and social conflicts of the transition period through social experiences and feelings of various male characters with different jobs and occupations.Through details in people's life and their mentality,Davis clearly showed the main structures of feeling in the transition period of the nineteenth century.Part Three is a summary of the whole dissertation.As a sensitive writer,Davis always made timely response to the changing structures of feeling by continuously exploring new literary forms and ways of presentation to record them in her works.