Making girls into women: Reading, gender and sexuality in American women's writing, 1865-1940

Beginning with Michel Foucault, accounts of the consolidation of sexuality into identity have tended to focus solely on the role played by sexology and medicalization at the turn of the century in organizing into "sexual identities" a disparate group of acts and identifications. My dissertation explores how other late-nineteenth-century ideological shifts--in the discourses of sentimentality, of material production and reproduction in the context of industrialization, of gendered and racial embodiment--contribute to the rise of lesbian identity, and traces how these shifts are represented in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century U.S. women's writing. In my first chapter I elucidate how, after the Civil War, regionalist writing's stereotypes of the spinster opened up a space for imagining "queer" or "protolesbian" possibilities for female subjectivity within the bourgeois domestic sphere. Similarly, emerging literary forms such as the "girls" novel, as well as new counterpublic spheres such as boarding houses and women's colleges, began to offer pedagogic and erotic alternatives to the domestic sphere for the production of "little women"; my second chapter argues that Louisa May Alcott's novels dramatize the beginning of this shift, and in my third chapter I speculate on the effects that reading these enormously popular books had on the subjectivities of white, middle class girls. By comparing such texts as Djuna Barnes' Ladies Almanack and the Girl Scout Handbook, I demonstrate how both modernism and mass culture utilize the metaphors of mass production for their own attempts at reproducing specific forms of female subjectivity: while the Girl Scouts seek to make immigrants into middle class citizens, Barnes fantasizes that her writing will turn women into lesbians. My last two chapters investigate how postbellum representations of the spinster and of sentimentalized relationships between women are rewritten by Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop into models of (pro)creative, culturally central, "queer" and/or "lesbian" identities. Thus, in my attention to the status of gender and sexuality in realist, modernist and popular texts, I underscore the importance of women's writing in the formation of lesbian identity in America.