Embodying gender: The politics of form in American literature, 1850-1900

This dissertation contends that major forms of American literature, including the romance and the realist novel, derive their strategies of representation from an attempt to contain the disruptive presence of a female spectacle. In a range of nineteenth-century literature, male and female writers figure their relation to the world through the female spectacle. This visual dynamic stands as an analogy for the author's relation to his or her material, and the politics of form emerge as authors attempt to control, suppress, or represent faithfully the problem of a gendered and racialized female body.;In attending to the dynamics of spectatorship, I invert the usual field of feminist inquiry by focusing on the male or female spectator rather than the female spectacle. I dissociate the meaning of the female spectacle from any universal notion of "woman" by demonstrating how specific fears and desires inform the gaze. Methodologically, I employ psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity and spectatorship, especially as these are inflected by feminist theory, in order to demonstrate how gender, race, and history revise Lacanian paradigms, like the "gaze" and the "mirror stage.".;Chapter One argues that Nathaniel Hawthorne's romances employ textual and generic strategies of voyeurism and veiling in order to protect men from the disruptions associated with bodies represented and troped as female. Chapter Two contends that Henry James's realist experiment in The Bostonians fails because the narrative struggle with gender becomes a struggle with genre. While characters fetishize the spectacle of the heroine, James's narrative fetishizes the modern, feminist world that repeatedly evades the author's control. Chapters Three theorizes a poetics of the veil" in Emily Dickinson's verse which allows her to project her poetic voice. Such poetics radically reconceptualizes theories of spectatorship and desire and grants the female poet a privileged relation to language. Chapter Four argues that realist and romantic forms figure contending modes of "seeing" racial identity in Pauline Hopkins's Contendinq Forces. Chapters Three and Four link generic innovation to the writer's attempt to re-envision categories of gender and race and to find new ways to represent female desires, experiences, and bodies.