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Abstract
This dissertation examines antebellum women writers' appropriations of philosophies of individualism. Spanning a range of writings including slave narratives, novels, short stories and essays, the dissertation analyzes how women writers imagined a feminine selfhood. The chapters discuss Catharine Sedgwick, Gail Hamilton, Harriet Jacobs, Fanny Fern, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. Each author and her work thus provide a differing interpretation, or refraction, of what it means to create a philosophy of individuality for women. The introduction situates these writers within nineteenth-century women's literature as a whole and within contemporary scholarship. Chapter One, "Woman and Author," juxtaposes Catharine Sedgwick's short story "Cacoethes Scribendi" (1830) and Gail Hamilton's essay "My Book" (1865). Two works vitally concerned with the role of the woman author in the antebellum period, Sedgwick's and Hamilton's writings each elaborate a feminine and authorial individualism against the background of nineteenth-century debates about "high" and "low" cultural production. The second chapter, "Harriet Jacobs's Reforms," reads Jacobs's 1861 autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl within the context of antebellum moral reform, linking her individualist representational strategies to a narrative tradition of recuperation spanning two centuries and disparate literary forms. Chapter Three, "Re-Possessing Individualism," looks at Fanny Fern's 1854 novel Ruth Hall to examine how the author combines individualism and sentimentalism as a means of class differentiation. Often read as an example of the allure of possessive individualism, I argue that Fern's deliberate fashioning of a natural, origin-less class (reminiscent of Bourdieu) places her firmly within the province of an anti-market, isolated and even melancholic ideology of self-possession. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's short story "The Angel Over the Right Shoulder" (1852) provides the focus for the final chapter, "For Girls Only," which argues that contrary to ideas concerning the decline or Calvinism and the "feminization of American culture," a rigorous and Puritanical view of self continued to pervade nineteenth-century ideologies of motherhood, to the extent that a maternal individualism of any stripe became incompatible with religious sentimentalism. As such, I read Phelps as one of the few women writers to consider seriously, and then reject, the possibility and the attraction of a feminine individualism that chooses women, and not girls, as its subject.
