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Angels Who Stepped Outside Their Houses: “American True Womanhood” and Nineteenth-Century (Trans)Nationalisms

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Angels Who Stepped Outside Their Houses: “American True Womanhood” and Nineteenth-Century (Trans)Nationalisms University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Doctoral Dissertations Dissertations and Theses March 2020 ANGELS WHO STEPPED OUTSIDE THEIR HOUSES: “AMERICAN TRUE WOMANHOOD” AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY (TRANS)NATIONALISMS Gayathri M. Hewagama University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2 Part of the Literature in English, North America Commons Recommended Citation Hewagama, Gayathri M., "ANGELS WHO STEPPED OUTSIDE THEIR HOUSES: “AMERICAN TRUE WOMANHOOD” AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY (TRANS)NATIONALISMS" (2020). Doctoral Dissertations. 1830. https://doi.org/10.7275/4akx-mw86 https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/1830 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Dissertations and Theses at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. ANGELS WHO STEPPED OUTSIDE THEIR HOUSES: “AMERICAN TRUE WOMANHOOD” AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY (TRANS)NATIONALISMS A Dissertation Presented By GAYATHRI MADHURANGI HEWAGAMA Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY February 2020 Department of English © Copyright by Gayathri Madhurangi Hewagama 2020 All Rights Reserved ANGELS WHO STEPPED OUTSIDE THEIR HOUSES: “AMERICAN TRUE WOMANHOOD” AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY (TRANS)NATIONALISMS A Dissertation Presented By GAYATHRI MADHURANGI HEWAGAMA Approved as to style and content by Nicholas K. Bromell, Chair Hoang G. Phan, Member Randall K. Knoper, Member Adam Dahl, Member Donna LeCourt, Acting Chair Department of English DEDICATION To my mother, who taught me my first word in English. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my advisor, Professor Nicholas K. Bromell for his thoughtful guidance and prompt feedback that greatly helped me see my project through to the end in four years; something that would have otherwise taken much longer to complete. Your contribution to my academic development will forever be appreciated. Thank you professors Randall Knoper, Hoang Phan, Adam Dahl and Laura Doyle for your valuable advice and guidance. Thanks are also due to Professor Joseph Black and Professor Asha Nadkarni who went out of their way to make sure I did not give up on my studies due to trying times. Thank you Professor Black for all the motivation and emotional support you have always given me, from the time of my application process to University of Massachusetts Amherst till the completion of my degree. Last but not least, I express my heartfelt gratitude to my parents who spared no expense for my education and love to Asanka, my soul-mate, a beautiful human being, who kept me alive through the most difficult time in my life. Thank you all! v ABSTRACT ANGELS WHO STEPPED OUTSIDE THEIR HOUSES: “AMERICAN TRUE WOMANHOOD” AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY (TRANS)NATIONALISMS FEBRUARY 2020 GAYATHRI MADHURANGI HEWAGAMA, B.A., UNIVERSITY OF PERADENIYA M.PHIL., UNIVERSITY OF PERADENIYA PH.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Nicholas K. Bromell “Angels who Stepped Outside their Houses” examines the fashioning of a gendered white American middle-class Protestant subject called the “American true woman” as a fitting representation of the emerging new American nation, as reflected in the writings of white American women authors from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Locating the formation of this identity on a transnational plane, this work argues that in their myriad texts, these women authors reveal the significant role that imperial Britain and the non-national/not-yet-national colonial Orient played in the (de/)construction/(de/)centering of American true womanhood. For, in the face of a particular Englishness and an Oriental otherness that these texts produce, American true women become interstitial and ambivalent subjects. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .......................................................................................... v ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................... vi CHAPTER INTRODUCTION: TO BE (TRANS)NATIONAL: AMBIVALENCES OF “AMERICAN TRUE WOMANHOOD” .............................................................. 1 1. “AMERICAN TRUE WOMEN” IN PROTEAN SHAPES: THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE DOMESTIC THEORIST AND HER WRITING ........................... 11 2. IN SEARCH OF A PRIVILEGED “ENGLISHNESS”: TRAVEL WRITING BY CATHARINE MARIA SEDGWICK, CAROLINE M. KIRKLAND AND HARRIET BEECHER STOWE ............................................................................... 46 3. HYBRID HEROINES: SUSAN WARNER AND THE MAKING OF ANGLO-AMERICAN FEMALE SUBJECTS ......................................................... 81 4. MARGINALIA: “AMERICAN TRUE WOMEN” AND AMBIVALENT ORIENTALISMS ................................................................................................... 109 5. ANTEBELLUM WHITE AMERICAN “MISSION WIVES”: OF FLAWED MIMICRY AND THE MISSION GENRE ........................................... 142 CONCLUSION ........................................ ............................................................... 174 NOTES..................................................................................................................... 176 BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................... 203 vii INTRODUCTION TO BE (TRANS)NATIONAL: AMBIVALENCES OF “AMERICAN TRUE WOMANHOOD” Nineteenth-century Britain-America-Orient1 is an intriguing trio: one, an imperial super power, the other a newly independent nation, and the last, a non-national/not-yet- national colonial space under the control of the British Empire. Although I do not want to downplay the fact that the representation of their power on a global plane was greatly disproportionate till the late nineteenth century when, for instance, the U.S. became an imperial power to be reckoned with, my study mainly concentrates on how all three of these materially produced metaphorical constructs were participants in a transnational exchange, albeit one characterized by different degrees of authority.2 In this large sociopolitical backdrop I will locate my study of the “American true woman,” considered as a fitting representation of the emerging American republic, and show her as an ambivalent (trans)national subjectivity, since other national or non-national/not-yet- national spaces were always already implicated in the making of this specifically gendered (female), racial (white), classed (middle class) and religious (Protestant) identity deemed uniquely American. National Selves and Transnational Visions ‘In the first place, do not copy foreign distinctions.’ ‘How? I do not know what you mean by ‘foreign distinctions.’’ ‘I mean the claiming certain airy rights and imaginary vantage ground, which however suited to the spirit of other lands, are out of place here. We have no privileged class; we have no American aristocracy! Heaven forbid we ever should, other than that truly Republican one, the aristocracy of mind and manners.’ 1 Susan Warner (1851) This is how Susan Warner’s essay, “How May an American Woman Best Show her Patriotism?”3 accounts for America’s national uniqueness, as perceived in the eyes of her nineteenth-century white American characters. Here, a husband explains to his wife that to be patriotic is to refrain from emulating the “foreign” (meaning, at least in this instance, the British,) assertively positing a distinctive difference between the new republic and the aristocratic Old World. The exchange is exemplary of the American ethos chiefly from around the end of the eighteenth century/the post-Revolutionary years toward the mid-nineteenth-century. This period of nation building and national aggrandizement was characterized and governed by concepts such as the westward movement of civilization, Manifest Destiny, Social Darwinism, and scientific theories of racism that generated a mainstream discourse of American Exceptionalism, producing an image of a distinctive New World country.4 Still, the manner in which George above places the “foreign”/Britain and the U.S in a binary ignores America’s sprouting desire at the time to be recognized as a nation among nations in the European world. His positioning of the old motherland and the newly independent colony as stark contrasts does not acknowledge the ties that existed between them well into the nineteenth century. The “American true woman” however, stands in the intersection of these national and transnational pulls and shows us how other nations contributed to the (de/)construction of this gendered subject. My objective in this dissertation is therefore, to mainly concentrate on the implications of transnational spaces in the (de/)construction/(de/)centering (contributing to both the formation and the dissolution) of a national subject, with special reference to 2 American relations with Britain and the Orient, from around the end of the eighteenth century toward the 1860’s.5 My principal argument here is that writings by white American women in the day participating in American true womanhood (by representing, promoting, and/or emulating this ideal) reveal an unambiguous Anglophilia that envisages a common Anglo-American unity, that is both complemented
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