Domesticating the nation: American narratives of home culture

This study examines the relationship between domestication narratives in American literature and women's placement in the nation. I focus on literature's participation in the processes of domestication---a national campaign directing citizens to the gendered roles supported by dominant America's domestic ideology, asking how narratives of individual women's socialization for the home accommodate a changing national ideology for the sake of political bonds. While American domesticating ideology changed over time, it stayed central to national concerns as a defining element of a civilized and civilizing culture. In Chapter 1, Jefferson's political and scientific writings, Catherine Beecher's Treatise on Domestic Economy, medical texts, and agricultural magazines of the mid-nineteenth-century figure women as domesticated creatures, bred for their symbolic labor in or associated with the home. These texts imagine women as naturally domestic, and yet narrate the systematic process, much like breeding, that domesticates women. Chapter 2 reads Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance and Maria Cummins's The Lamplighter as narratives that interrogate the gendered socialization of Americans and the domesticating boundaries of the home. While they foreground domestication narratives, they also support the national mythology of natural femininity. In Chapter 3, Jane Addams's Twenty Years at Hull House and Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers express an expanding definition of modern American women's home duties supported by science in an era of urban chaos. Both writers utilize the female development formula of earlier sentimental domestic literature, illustrating a domestication process they simultaneously deny with their use of biological narratives. Chapter 3 explains how the white, middle-class, public New Woman constructed herself as a naturally/biologically empowered unifying force for a heterogeneous American population, and the effects of this modernization upon a diverse national population of women. Chapter 4 examines modern domestication narratives of loss. Henry James's The Bostonians, Kate Chopin's The Awakening, and Nella Larsen's Quicksand all use women's sexuality metaphorically, insisting upon what is stifled in the domesticating process that produces sanctioned New Womanhood. These texts link race, class, and sexuality, posing white, privileged, but necessarily desexualized women pining circumscribed public power by sacrificing other, more marginalized (and thus sexualized) women to domestic confinement.