William Dean Howells y Elizabeth Stuart Phelps: masculinidad, feminidad y representaciones literarias del matrimonio. Estados Unidos, 1870-1880

Objetivo: el objetivo de este artículo es analizar la dimensión simbólica de las tensiones de género que se desarrollaron en Estados Unidos en el periodo de 1870 a 1880, cuando las esferas de lo público y lo privado habían comenzado a desdibujarse. Metodología: se comparan las representaciones literarias del matrimonio en las novelas Their Wedding Journey (1872) de William Dean Howells y The Story of Avis (1877) de Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, relacionando los personajes femeninos y masculinos y sus preocupaciones en torno al matrimonio con el contexto histórico de las obras. Originalidad: estas novelas no han sido estudiadas en años recientes, aun cuando su contenido resulta valioso para examinar tanto la estructura de sentimiento de la época respecto al género, como las luchas simbólicas de los autores en un contexto de crisis de la feminidad y la masculinidad. Conclusiones: esta investigación revela que la pertenencia sexual de los autores determinó su relación con el género como estructura de distribución del poder y fungió como principio de separación cultural, por lo que cada uno trató de incidir en el ordenamiento de la estructura social desde su forma propia de ser en el mundo: Dean Howells abordó la identidad femenina como complemento de una noción específica de masculinidad, mientras que Stuart Phelps participó en el proceso de creación de la conciencia feminista.

Disaffected

In Disaffected Xine Yao explores the racial and sexual politics of unfeeling—affects that are not recognized as feeling—as a means of survival and refusal in nineteenth-century America. She positions unfeeling beyond sentimentalism's paradigm of universal feeling. Yao traces how works by Herman Melville, Martin R. Delany, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Sui Sin Far engaged major sociopolitical issues in ways that resisted the weaponization of white sentimentalism against the lives of people of color. Exploring variously pathologized, racialized, queer, and gendered affective modes like unsympathetic Blackness, queer female frigidity, and Oriental inscrutability, these authors departed from the values that undergird the politics of recognition and the liberal project of inclusion. By theorizing feeling otherwise as an antisocial affect, form of dissent, and mode of care, Yao suggests that unfeeling can serve as a contemporary political strategy for people of color to survive in the face of continuing racism and white fragility. Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient

American Realism and Gender

Critical to the development of realism was the issue of gender, not only in terms of realism’s rejection of the mode of sentimentalism and the genre of women’s fiction but also regarding the women who wrote realism throughout the decades when realism was a dominant literary form. Early realists such as Rebecca Harding Davis, Rose Terry Cooke, Elizabeth Stoddard, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps protested the abuses of industrialism and the unequal gender dynamics encoded in marriage laws while promoting alternative visions of women as independent agents. Second-generation realists Constance Fenimore Woolson, Frances E. W. Harper, and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman questioned the dogma of realism as preached by William Dean Howells and Henry James, ranging beyond the limits of decorum regarding race and sexuality to do so. Early twentieth-century writers stretched the limits of realism further by incorporating elements of other forms, including New Woman, utopian, and travel narratives; immigrant and tourist fiction; Native American legends and popular westerns; and novels of region. The resulting reconsideration of women writers yields a realism that remains faithful to Howells’s ideal of the “truthful treatment of material” while ranging beyond realism’s limits by including a wide range of experiences conditioned by gender and race.

The Feminine Origins of American Literary Realism

This chapter describes American literary realism as emerging from the efforts of a group of early postbellum women writers—Elizabeth Stoddard, Rebecca Harding Davis, Louisa May Alcott, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps—to access the newly minted American high literary culture exemplified by the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne. The origins of realism, these writers’ texts show, lie in intertextuality. They not only revise their own and one another’s work to excise the vestiges of the popular feminine tradition of domestic sentimentalism, but they also rework Hawthorne’s canonical gothic plots and imagery in the context of a shift in literary tastes away from the romance and toward an aesthetic that values the contemporary and the everyday. Their adaptation of the Hawthornean gothic to address the patriarchal and capitalist foundations of social life yields the earliest version of American literary realism as a mode of structural social critique.