BiblioVault - Books about Domestic fiction, American

AT HOME AT WAR

DOMESTICITY AND WORLD WAR I IN AMERICAN

JENNIFER HAYTOCK

The Ohio State University Press, 2003

Brides and Sinners in El Chuco

Christine Granados

University of Arizona Press, 2006

Brides have their dreams, sinners their secrets, but sometimes it’s not so easy to tell them apart.

In the border town of El Paso—better known to its Mexican American residents as El Chuco—dramas unfold in humdrum households every day as working-class men come home from their jobs and as their wives and children do their best to cope with life. Christine Granados now plumbs the heart of this community in fourteen startling stories, uncovering the dreams and secrets in which ordinary people sometimes lose themselves. Many fictional accounts of barrio life play up tradition and nostalgia; Brides and Sinners in El Chuco is a trip to the darker side. Here are memories of growing up in a place where innocence is always tempered by reality—true-to-life stories, told in authentic language, of young women, from preteens to twenty-somethings, learning to negotiate their way through troubled times and troubled families. In the award-winning story “The Bride,” a young girl recalls her sister as a perennial bride on Halloween, planning for her eventual big day in a pink notebook with lists of potential husbands, only to see her dream thwarted at the junior prom. In another, we meet Bobbi, the class slut, whose D-cup chest astounds the other girls and entices everyone—even those who shouldn’t be tempted.

Granados’ tales boldly portray women’s struggle for solidarity in the face of male abuse, and as these characters come to grips with self-discovery, sibling rivalry, and dysfunctional relationships, she shows what it means for Chicanas to grow up in protective families while learning to survive in the steamy border environment. Brides and Sinners in El Chuco is an uncompromising look at life with all its hard edges—told with enough softness to make readers come back for more.

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Building Domestic Liberty

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Architectural Feminism

Polly Wynn Allen

University of Massachusetts Press, 1988

Building Domestic Liberty offers a critical and admiring analysis of feminist philosopher Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935). Polly Allen examines Gilman's approach to architecture, landscape, and neighborhood design and discusses Gilman's case against prevailing household design and looks at her philosophy of world improvement.

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The End of Free Love

Susan Steinberg

University of Alabama Press, 2003

The End of Free Love evokes the schizophrenia of our times, a community of voices at the zero point. Like the voices that splinter from Marguerite Duras's work, these characters are neurotic, taking refuge in comics, food, music, sex, 'locking' and lies. Violence is everywhere: within, without, in every emotion, in every word. But often hidden emotions rise to the surface, where self-consciousness, shame, and rage, to name a few, are permitted, voiced, and, eventually, set free. Throughout The End of Free Love Steinberg creates a hybrid text, blending poetry and fiction in writing as much about its form as its content. This is fiction that offers itself up for our delight, while remaining as elusive and unpredictable as language itself.

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Family Matters in the British and American Novel

Andrea O’Reilly Herrera

University of Wisconsin Press, 1997

Contributors examine the literature that challenges widely held assumptions about the form of the family, familial authority patterns, and the function of courtship, marriage, and family life from the late eighteenth century to the present day. Topics include: the family as a microcosm of the larger political sphere in Charlotte Smith, Jane West, Elizabeth Fenwick, Mrs. Opie, and Mary Shelley, and alternatives to the nuclear patriarchal family in Charlotte Brontë, Harriet Jacobs, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Mary Louisa Molesworth.

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Home Fronts

Domesticity and Its Critics in the Antebellum United States

Lora Romero

Duke University Press, 1997

Unlike studies of nineteenth-century culture that perpetuate a dichotomy of a public, male world set against a private, female world, Lora Romero’s Home Fronts shows the many, nuanced, and sometimes contradictory cultural planes on which struggles for authority unfolded in antebellum America.
Romero remaps the literary landscape of the last century by looking at the operations of domesticity on the frontier as well as within the middle-class home and by reconsidering such crucial (if sometimes unexpected) sites for the workings of domesticity as social reform movements, African-American activism, and homosocial high culture. In the process, she indicts theories of the nineteenth century based on binarisms and rigidity while challenging models of power and resistance based on the idea that "culture" has the capacity to either free or enslave. Through readings of James Fenimore Cooper, Catherine Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Maria Stewart, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Romero shows how the politics of culture reside in local formulations rather than in essential and ineluctable political structures.

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Home Material

Ohio's Nineteenth-Century Regional Women's Fiction

Sandra Parker

University of Wisconsin Press, 1998

This chronologically selected anthology of fiction by eight Ohio women makes accessible a literary tradition that begins with lost aspects of frontier life in the 1830s depicted by contemporaries Julia L. Dumont and Pamilla W. Ball. It ends with Jessie Brown Pounds’s retrospective recreation of the Western Reserve’s frontier culture at the century’s close.

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Home Movies and Other Necessary Fictions

Michelle Citron

University of Minnesota Press, 1998

The Home Plot

Women, Writing, and Domestic Ritual

Ann Romines

University of Massachusetts Press, 1992

In this finely crafted study, Ann Romines builds on twenty years of feminist scholarship to show how domestic ritual--the practice and tradition of housekeeping--has helped shape the substance and tone of some of the best fiction by American women. Examining works by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Willa Cather, and Eudora Welty, Romines argues that one cannot fully appreciate this writing unless one understands the domestic codes in which it is inscribed.

By reading domestic ritual as a gendered language, Romines seeks to reclaim one of the oldest female traditions--housekeeping--from trivialization and devaluation. In the process, she brings fresh insight to the work of five important American novelists.

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Kitchen Economics

Women’s Regionalist Fiction and Political Economy

Thomas Strychacz

University of Alabama Press, 2020

An analysis of how nineteenth-century women regional writers represent political economic thought

WINNER OF THE ELIZABETH AGEE PRIZE IN AMERICAN LITERATURE

Readers of late nineteenth-century female American authors are familiar with plots, characters, and households that make a virtue of economizing. Scholars often interpret these scenarios in terms of a mythos of parsimony, frequently accompanied by a sort of elegiac republicanism whereby self-sufficiency and autonomy are put to the service of the greater good—a counterworld to the actual economic conditions of the period.

In Kitchen Economics: Women’s Regionalist Fiction and Political Economy, Thomas Strychacz takes a new approach to the question of how female regionalist fictions represent “the economic” by situating them within traditions of classical political economic thought. Offering case studies of key works by Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rose Terry Cooke, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson, this study focuses on three complex cultural fables—the island commonwealth, stadialism (or stage theory), and feeding the body politic—which found formal expression in political economic thought, made their way into endless public debates about the economic turmoil of the late nineteenth century, and informed female authors. These works represent counterparts, not counterworlds, to modernity; and their characteristic stance is captured in the complex trope of feminaeconomica.

This approach ultimately leads us to reconsider what we mean by the term “economic,” for the emphasis of contemporary neoclassical economics on economic agents given over to infinite wants and complete self-interest has caused the “sufficiency” and “common good” models of female regionalist authors to be misinterpreted and misvalued. These fictions are nowhere more pertinent to modernity than in their alliance with today’s important alternative economic discourses.

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Neodomestic American Fiction

Kristin J. Jacobson

The Ohio State University Press, 2010

In American literature, domestic fictions—that is, novels focused on the home and homemaking—are linked with white, middle-class women’s fiction and culture. Employing a spatial lens, Neodomestic American Fiction joins and extends other studies in redefining domestic fiction’s literary history and definition. Unlike previous redefinitions and reevaluations, Neodomestic American Fiction reads domestic novels alongside feminist geography and architectural history to map the links and disjunctions among a range of authors writing during the same period as well as across centuries and cultures. Kristin Jacobson’s attention to domestic geographies reveals a new space and subgenre emerge in the 1980s: neodomestic fiction.

In this innovative study, Kristin Jacobson identifies over thirty novels that renovate traditional forms, therefore challenging model domesticity’s conservative gender, racial, and sexual politics. Rather than produce stable single-family homes, neodomestic fictions advance a politics of instability characterized by mobility, renovation and redesign, and relational space. These “alternative” domesticities—when read in the context of neodomestic fiction—are not marginal but rather central to domesticity’s configurations. Such resistance, as Iris Marion Young argues, “is integral to modern political theory and is not an alternative to it.”

Thus, this spatial analysis of post-1980 domestic novels does not indicate a post-feminist or post-gender world. Rather, neodomestic fiction’s heterogeneous, unstable spaces offer opportunities to examine contemporary hierarchies and experiment with more egalitarian homemaking. These fictions include Toni Morrison’s Paradise, Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes, and Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life.

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Oceans at Home

Maritime and Domestic Fictions in Nineteenth-Century American Women's Writing

Melissa Gniadek

University of Massachusetts Press, 2021

The maritime world was central to nineteenth-century America, and ideas about the ocean, seafaring, and encounters with distant peoples and places suffused the cultural imagination. Women writers who were not mariners themselves incorporated oceanic representations and concerns into their work, often through genres that were generally not associated with the sea, such as children's fiction, diaries, and female coming-of-age stories.

Melissa Gniadek explores the role of the ocean, with particular attention to the Pacific, in a diverse range of literary texts spanning the late 1820s through the mid-1860s from Lydia Maria Child, Caroline Kirkland, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Stoddard, and Harriet Prescott Spofford. Oceans at Home shows that authors employed maritime plots and stories from distant locations to probe contemporary concerns facing the continental United States, ranging from issues of gender restrictions in the domestic sphere to the racial prejudices against indigenous peoples that lay at the heart of settler colonialism.

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Personality Plus

Some Experiences of Emma McChesney and Her Son, Jock

Edna Ferber

University of Illinois Press, 2002

Edna Ferber, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Show Boat and Giant, achieved her first great success with a series of stories featuring Emma McChesney: a smart, stylish, divorced mother who in a mere twelve years rose from stenographer to traveling sales representative to business manager and partner of the T. A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company.

In this second of three volumes chronicling the travels and trials of Emma McChesney, the plucky heroine trades in her traveling bag and coach tickets for an office and a position a T. A. Buck Jr.'s business partner. Along with this well-earned promotion comes the home–-with a fireplace–-that she had longed for during her ten years on the road.

Her dashing son Jock, now twenty-one, has just entered the business world himself with the Berg, Shriner Advertising company. His colleagues believe that with his heritage he "ought to be able to sell ice to an eskimo." Indeed, Jock dazzles them with his keen business sense and exemplary work ethic, but goes overboard on the charm and ends up alienating clients, unnerving his boss, and even patronizing his business-savvy mother. When his company takes on the challenge of creating a zippy advertising campaign for T. A. Buck's no-frills petticoats, Jock comes through, but not without a reminder that mother always knows best.

In this bracingly modern novel, first published in 1914, Ferber contrasts the virtues of talent with those of experience to provide a fresh, readable, and smartly entertaining contest between a mother and her adult son.

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Publishing the Family

June Howard

Duke University Press, 2001

In Publishing the Family June Howard turns a study of the collaborative novel The Whole Family into a lens through which to examine American literature and culture at the beginning of the twentieth century. Striving to do equal justice to historical particulars and the broad horizons of social change, Howard reconsiders such categories of analysis as authorship, genre, and periodization. In the process, she offers a new method for cultural studies and American studies at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Publishing the Family describes the sources and controversial outcome of a fascinating literary experiment. Howard embeds the story of The Whole Family in the story of Harper & Brothers’ powerful and pervasive presence in American cultural life, treating the publisher, in effect, as an author.
Each chapter of Publishing the Family casts light on some aspect of life in the United States at a moment that arguably marked the beginning of our own era. Howard revises common views of the turn-of-the-century literary marketplace and discusses the perceived crisis in the family as well as the popular and expert discourses that emerged to remedy it. She also demonstrates how creative women like Bazar editor Elizabeth Jordan blended their own ideas about the “New Woman” with traditional values. Howard places these analyses in the framework of far-reaching historical changes, such as the transformation of the public meaning of emotion and “sentimentality.” Taken together, the chapters in Publishing the Family show how profoundly the modern mapping of social life relies on boundaries between family and business, culture and commerce, which The Whole Family and Publishing the Family constantly unsettle.
Publishing the Family will interest students and scholars of American history, literature, and culture, as well as those studying gender, sexuality, and the family.

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Raising the Dust

The Literary Housekeeping of Mary Ward, Sarah Grand, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Beth Sutton-Ramspeck

Ohio University Press, 2004

Raising the Dust identifies a heretofore-overlooked literary phenomenon that author Beth Sutton-Ramspeck calls “literary housekeeping.” The three writers she examines rejected turn-of-the-century aestheticism and modernism in favor of a literature that is practical, even ostensibly mundane, designed to “set the human household in order.”

To Mary Augusta Ward, Sarah Grand, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, housekeeping represented public responsibilities: making the food supply safe, reforming politics, and improving the human race itself. Raising the Dust places their writing in the context of the late-Victorian era, in particular the eugenics movement, the proliferation of household conveniences, the home economics movement, and decreased reliance on servants. These changes affected relationships between the domestic sphere and the public sphere, and hence shaped the portrayal of domesticity in the era's fiction and nonfiction.

Moreover, Ward, Grand, and Gilman articulated a domestic aesthetic that swept away boundaries. Sutton-Ramspeck uncovers a new paradigm here: literature as engaging the public realm through the devices and perspectives of the domestic. Her innovative and ambitious book also connects fixations on cleaning with the discovery of germs (the first bacterium discovered was anthrax, and knowledge of its properties increased fears of dust); analyzes advertising cards for soap; and links the mental illness in Gilman's “The Yellow Wall-Paper” to fears during the period of arsenic poisoning from wallpaper.

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The Roads of My Relations

Devon A. Mihesuah

University of Arizona Press, 2001

"I've traveled a lot of roads, but never alone. My relations are with me," says Billie McKenney, one of the matriarchs of the complex family of Choctaws searching for peace as the white world rapidly encroaches on their tribal land, politics, and values. In her first collection of stories, Native American writer Devon A. Mihesuah chronicles the lives of several generations of a close-knit Choctaw family as they are forced from their traditional homeland in nineteenth-century Mississippi and endure unspeakable sorrows during their journey before settling in southeastern Oklahoma.

Blending family lore, stark realism, and vivid imagination, The Roads of My Relations relays a strong sense of Choctaw culture and world view in absorbing tales of history and legend. Unfolding through the voices and actions of family members, confused half-bloods, and unlikely heroes—not all of them living or even human—the stories tell of the horrors of forced removal, the turbulence of post Civil War Indian Territory, the terrifying violence suffered at the hands of immortal Crow witches, and the family's ultimate survival against forces of evil. Time-traveling ghosts, mysterious medicine men, and eerie shape-shifters share the pages with proud matriarchs, mischievous schoolgirls, and loving siblings.

Together, these interwoven stories express the strength and persistence of a tribe whose identity and pride have survived the disruptions of colonialism. With The Roads of My Relations, Devon A. Mihesuah has created a universal and timeless exploration of heritage, spirituality, and the importance of preserving and passing on tradition.

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Victorian Domesticity

Families in the Life and Art of Louisa May Alcott

Charles Strickland

University of Alabama Press, 1985

The subject of Victorian Domesticity is family life in America. The life and works of Louisa May Alcott served as the vehicle for exploring and analyzing this subject. Although Alcott was deeply influenced by popular currents of sentimentality, her own experience exposed her to the confusions and contradictions generated when sentiment confronted the reality of life in 19th-century America.

In the first chapter Strickland outlines the ways in which sentimentality colored the perception of 19th-century Americans about such issues as courtship, marriage, the relationship between the sexes, generational relationships, and the relationship between the nuclear family and the community outside the family. Chapters two and three trace Alcott’s childhood and adolescent experiences, exploring the tensions that developed between Louisa and her father, and detailing the ways in which she carried the double burden of being both poor and female as she sought her identity as a writer.

The following six chapters treat the varieties of family life that appear in Alcott’s stories, the impact of feminism on her life, and her emphasis on the importance of child nurture. In the final two chapters the author treats the relationships that Alcott perceived between the family and the world around it and assesses the legacy of the Victorian family idea.

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The Wilderness Within

American Women Writers and Spiritual Quest

Kristina K. Groover

University of Arkansas Press, 1999

America’s literature is notably marked by a preoccupation with the spiritual quest. Questing heroes from Huck Finn to Nick Adams have undertaken solitary journeys that pull them away from family and society and into a transformative wilderness that brings them to a new understanding of the spiritual world. Women, however, have not often been portrayed as questing heroes. Bound to home and community, they have been more frequently cast as representatives of that stifling world from which the hero is compelled to flee. Are women in American literary texts thus excluded from spiritual experience?

Kristina K. Groover, in examining this question, finds that books by American women writers offer alternative patterns for seeking revelation—patterns which emphasize not solitary journeys, but the sacredness of everyday life. Drawing on the work of feminist theorists and theologians, including Carol Gilligan, Naomi Goldenberg, and Rosemary Ruether, Groover explores the spiritual nature and force of domesticity, community, storytelling, and the garden in the works of such writers as Toni Morrison, Katherine Anne Porter, Kaye Gibbons, and Alice Walker. Ordinary, personal experience in these works becomes a source for spiritual revelation. Wisdom is gained, lessons are learned, and lives are healed not in spite of home and communal ties, but because of them.

Thus, American women writers, Groover argues, make alternative literary and spiritual paradigms possible. Similarly, Kristina K. Groover, in this lucid and groundbreaking work, opens up new fields of exploration for any reader interested in women’s spirituality or in the rich, diverse field of American literature.

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