The Gendered Subject of Turn-of-the-Century American Fiction.

The Gendered Subject of Turn-of-the-Century American Fiction. Public Deposited

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Pruttipurk, Jittima
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of English and Comparative Literature

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Focusing on late nineteenth-century American narrative fiction from 1892-1915, “The Gendered Subject of Turn-of-the Century American Fiction” examines the significance of female protagonists as a literary tool and experimental subject to imagine an American national identity. This dissertation argues that narrative fiction by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edith Wharton and Henry James continue the tradition of exploring women’s interiority, first established in the captivity narrative of Mary Rowlandson’s The Sovereignty and Goodness of God: Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682). Each writer presents a model of the subject that updates that posited by Rowlandson. I argue that they share a skepticism of the notion of the subject based on exclusionary difference as a viable paradigm of American national identity and suggest a model of the subject that enables not only the ability to circulate, but one that privileges and guarantees its members political freedom.

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