Bawdy talk: The politics of women's public speech in nineteenth-century American literature and culture

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dc.contributor.advisorMinter, David L.en_US
dc.creatorLevander, Caroline Fielden_US
dc.date.accessioned2009-06-04T00:23:17Zen_US
dc.date.available2009-06-04T00:23:17Zen_US
dc.date.issued1995en_US
dc.description.abstractThroughout the pages of nineteenth-century American fiction men remain fascinated by the sound of women's speech. Literary depictions of men's intense interest in women's pleasing and distinct utterance occur with a frequency that suggest not so much that there "are" unalterable differences between American men's and women's speech, but that the imagining of that difference is central to the nation's understanding of itself as a distinct entity or to the creation of what Lauren Berlant calls a "national symbolic." These lengthy depictions of women's speech thus participate in cultural work of a profound, enduring, and to date unspecified nature. It is the project of this dissertation to describe the cultural burden placed on women's language in mainstream nineteenth-century American literature and, then, to carve out new ways of thinking about the public significance of women's speech and its impact on the nineteenth-century political arena. In chapter one, I analyze the writings of, among others, Henry James, Sarah Hale, and Noah Webster in order to show that the separation of women's speech from the public arena was a process that depended for its success on the attention that men paid to the sound of women's talk and to the desire that sound produced. In short, I establish a clear relation between the creation and reinforcement of the public sphere and the depictions of women's speech that occur repeatedly in American fiction. In my second chapter, however, I show that by mid-century a minority of American writers, including Herman Melville and E. D. E. N. Southworth had begun arguing that the sexually explicit subject matter, rather than eroticized sound, of women's language recenters their speech in the public sphere. Using their figuration as a departure point, I show, in chapters three through six, how Maria Monk, Caroline Lee Hentz, Harriet Jacobs, Lillie Devereux Blake, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps employed and foregrounded this alternative paradigm of women's speech in their political fictions in order to influence, respectively, the nativist, pro-slavery, abolitionist, women's suffrage, and labor reform movements. My analysis thus revises the critical consensus that nineteenth-century women's speech failed to impact America's political life.en_US
dc.format.extent210 p.en_US
dc.format.mimetypeapplication/pdfen_US
dc.identifier.callnoTHESIS ENGL. 1995 LEVANDERen_US
dc.identifier.citationLevander, Caroline Field. "Bawdy talk: The politics of women's public speech in nineteenth-century American literature and culture." (1995) Diss., Rice University. <a href="https://hdl.handle.net/1911/16845">https://hdl.handle.net/1911/16845</a>.en_US
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/1911/16845en_US
dc.language.isoengen_US
dc.rightsCopyright is held by the author, unless otherwise indicated. Permission to reuse, publish, or reproduce the work beyond the bounds of fair use or other exemptions to copyright law must be obtained from the copyright holder.en_US
dc.subjectAmerican literatureen_US
dc.subjectWomen's studiesen_US
dc.subjectSpeech communicationen_US
dc.subjectAmerican historyen_US
dc.subjectPolitical scienceen_US
dc.titleBawdy talk: The politics of women's public speech in nineteenth-century American literature and cultureen_US
dc.typeThesisen_US
dc.type.materialTexten_US
thesis.degree.departmentEnglishen_US
thesis.degree.disciplineHumanitiesen_US
thesis.degree.grantorRice Universityen_US
thesis.degree.levelDoctoralen_US
thesis.degree.nameDoctor of Philosophyen_US
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