| This dissertation, "Self-Culturing America, 1838-1917," explores how the discourse of self-culture--a rhetoric of amelioration or self-betterment that negotiates such domains as work, education, success, and religious/spiritual enrichment--functions in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature. From its first articulation in the Rev. William Ellery Channing's 1838 "'Self-Culture" address to the Gilded Age obsession with success, self-culture is an inspirational discourse that goads the individual to desire and to achieve. While self-culture discourse is universalizing, available to anyone with enough desire to better him- or herself, gender and class distinctions nevertheless pose nearly insurmountable barriers to the promised achievement. Self-culture thus gives with one hand and takes with the other, as utopian dreams and ideological constraints wage an endless battle for the selfhood of the individual and the stability of the nation. As the discourse of self-culture, originally grounded in a religious framework, confronts the dilemmas of modernization, the everyday life practice of self-culture is transformed, and our texts show the ruptures of these transformations. In this dissertation I examine how writers such as Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott, Horatio Alger, Jr., Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, and David Graham Phillips negotiate the contradictions and ambiguities inherent in self-culture discourse. In doing so, I show both the endurance and the limitations of this ideal, which continues to shape our lives even today. |
