The novel of awakening in American women's fiction, 1860--1940

This dissertation examines the growing field of late nineteenth/early twentieth century American women's fiction by exploring what I call the novel of awakening in seven novels published between 1860 and 1940. I relocate these texts (Stowe's The Pearl of Orr's Island, Alcott's Moods, Stoddard's The Morgesons, Chopin's The Awakening, Wharton's Summer, Larsen's Quicksand and Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God), within a critical tradition that extends from the sentimental or domestic novel popular in mid-nineteenth century America. Reworking sentimental motifs, often in covert ways, these novelists move towards a more subversive and, ultimately, anti-romantic approach to the themes of female identity, sexuality, and autonomy. These writers often use transactional imagery of promises and gifts in ways that expand the dimensions of the sentimental genre itself.; I define an awakening as a transitional state which allows a female character a means of acknowledging desires which fall out of the range of the marriage plot. An awakening is connected to an excited state of desire, be it a desire to understand or sympathize with another woman (as I discuss in Chapter 1, with Stowe and Alcott's texts) or a desire for space (as in Chapter 2, with Stoddard and Chopin's novels). This desire for emotional and psychic affiliation is not always realized in these novels; as I argue in Chapters 3 and 4, where interpersonal exchanges are not possible, emotions become conflated with inanimate objects or even external landscapes. The final chapter of this dissertation focuses on the limits of contract law exposed by Hurston's novel, particularly for African-American women. My examination of contract law, along with psychoanalytic feminist theory, provides a theoretical framework for this project, as I assert the importance of promising and gift-giving as specific alternatives to the marriage contract, prominent in each of these novels.