'The sweet word,' sister: Nineteenth-century American literature, woman's rights, and the rhetoric of sisterhood (Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, Henry James)

Using nineteenth-century woman's rights texts and novels by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, and Henry James, I analyze the evolution of a political sororal metaphor within the nineteenth-century reform milieu and investigate cultural responses to the entrance of a language of intrafeminine intimacy into the public domain. In chapter one, my historicization of the sister metaphor centers on three main points: sisterhood was a more powerful and radical discourse than has yet been recognized; sisterhood was not a natural or necessary choice for woman's rights advocates formulating new public discourses; and sisterhood was a trope about which women reformers were surprisingly self-critical. Many woman's rights proponents were particularly concerned about sisterhood's acknowledgment and accommodation of class difference within its invocation of gender solidarity.; Together, the three chapters treating literary works refine and clarify the developmental narrative of the sisterhood metaphor scrutinized in chapter one. Chapter two analyzes Nathaniel Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance as a tale about the patriarchal containment of sisterhood's subversive potential, situating the discussion of the text within a framework that explores Hawthorne's anxieties about the relationship of his happily domesticated wife and her reformer sister, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. Chapter three begins with an examination of Louisa May Alcott's “Transcendental Wild Oats” as the foundation for Alcott's interest in developing social sisterhood ideals; I then discuss Little Women as a text seeking to correct idealizing discourses of the natal sister relation and An Old-Fashioned Girl as an attempt to reconfigure the social sister bond in a way that addresses the divisive imperatives of class difference. The final chapter juxtaposes Henry James's The Bostonians' ridicule of class paternalism within the postbellum woman's movement with Louisa May Alcott's more nuanced engagement with the negotiations of class division and feminine coalition in Work.