Loving Empire: Intimacy and Expansion in U.S. Women’s Historical Writing, 1880-1900 by Amanda Healy A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English and Women’s Studies) in the University of Michigan 2018 Doctoral Committee: Professor Sandra Gunning, Chair Associate Professor Cari Carpenter, University of West Virginia Professor June Howard Assistant Professor Victor Mendoza Amanda K. Healy [email protected] ORCID iD: 0000-0003-2224-1801 © Amanda K. Healy 2018 Dedication For my family, of origin and of choice ii Acknowledgments All academic work is contingent to varying extents; mine is above all the product of the love, labor, tenderness, and patience of too many people to name here. I’ve given it my best shot. First and foremost I thank my incredible committee: June Howard has overseen my journey here from offer of admission to defense with generosity and patience, holding me to high standards and assuring me I was up to the task. Victor Mendoza was generous enough to take on the work of mentoring me while he was also newly arrived to the University of Michigan; as his research assistant I learned how to dig deep and think creatively, and also made my first foray into the archival work that would shape my dissertation so profoundly. Michelle McClellan served on my committee only briefly but had a deep impact, affirming my vision, of my project and my future, despite their unconventional natures. Finally, Sandra Gunning, advisor is far too small a word for the role she has played in my life over the past eight years. Sandra, you have been my champion – none of this is possible without you. In addition to my academic advisors, I was fortunate enough to have a host of generous mentors who helped me weather the long years of graduate study. I have profound gratitude to Omise’eke Tinsley, who oversaw my first graduate course and inspired me to pursue this work. I am iii indebted to Macalester College where I received the training and mentorship that inspired me to pursue an academic career - I thank Daylanne English, Michelle Wright, and Jen Caruso. Thank you to my teaching mentors, Lynn Verduzco-Baker, Jen Macfarlane Harris, and above all, Ruby Tapia. Aimee Germain, thank you for helping me navigate the red tape of graduate school and the even messier work of imagining a career. Hannah Rosen, thank you for being one of the first people to support my project. Louis Cicciarelli, whose writing help, energy, and patience were an invaluable catalyst. Danielle Lavaque-Manty – I have no idea how you put up with me, but I am very very grateful. Laura Schram – who believed in me when I didn’t believe in myself, who made me believe I was not just good enough but pretty damn good, and who told me in no uncertain terms that I had this whole dissertation thing in the bag. Endless gratitude and joyful, riotous love to Alison Cuddy and the Humanities Without Walls cohort of 2016 – thank you for making me bold enough to dream big. To Liz Wingrove and Kate Sechler who offered life- saving levels of support in my final stretch, right up to the very last second. To Dan DeSena – it’s been a long haul, man – thanks! To everyone who wrote alongside me: Lisa Jong my fellow longterm writer and cheerleader in my final hours (also minutes), and the rest of the MANKL writing group, Marie Stango, Nev Koker, and Katie Lennard; Jenny Kwak, my fellow DWI-street-parker; Beatrix McBride, the best wakeup call; the Community of Scholars cohort of 2013, and my RIW, Susan Hwang, Mei- Chen Pan, Cassie Miura, and Kate Schnur. To my housemates and neighbors past and present – especially my current roommates, Meredith and Ora, who have patiently endured my late night hours and endless stream of complaints, who ii brought me coffee and candy and let me cry to them, and Shane and Amber Davis, for being my friends and for fixing my disposal a bunch of times. To my landsmen: Emily Lloyd and Teresa Ballard who keep a lamp lit in my Minneapolis home; Liz Pattison who has been my constant couch companion, making me laugh in the darkest times; Mejdulene Shomali, whose banal minutiae I love terribly; Erin Ashmore who helped me make 1219 a home; Jessica Rosenberg who buoys me up and inspires me to be more radical even when we’re out of touch; Jina Kim who has been my Women’s Studies sister from day one; Angela who has a tender heart despite her cynicism; Jenny Kohn who found me again; Sharman Spieser for sharing her laughter and light; Michelle Winkfield who has held my very fractured heart with so much care and who is my very favorite person to spend Mother’s Day with; Alexa Milton, my vine; and Iris Bromberg– with whom I am always a native speaker. To Calvin the cat for his dignified oversight of the first half of my graduate career, and to Bravo the dog, for being my shadow as I stumbled to the finish line. To my parents, Dwight and Jill Healy, who demonstrated incredible love (and self-restraint) by only asking when I thought I might finish this thing every once in a while. Thank you for schools and summer camps and vacations I didn’t appreciate at the time, for supporting me and for helping to make me who I am. To my sister and brother and brother-in-law, Elizabeth and Tim and Joe for loving me and making me laugh and not giving up on me. Also for helping me move. To my nephews, who I will totally spend more time with once this is submitted. And finally, deeply, to Jesse Carr, my love and my family. iii Table of Contents Dedication ii Acknowledgments iii Abstract v Introduction 1 Chapter 1: “I have never forgotten their first coming”: Sarah Winnemucca and the Second Draft of History 13 Chapter 2: “Making history with our men”: Elizabeth Custer and Martial Love 48 Conclusion 104 Chapter 3: Union Forever?: The Western Army on the National Stage 109 Conclusion 143 Bibliography 147 iv Abstract “Loving Empire: Intimacy and Expansion in U.S. Women’s Historical Fiction, 1880 - 1900,” works to expand our understanding of nineteenth-century U.S. historiography by analyzing texts authored by women from and about sites of colonial violence. This project endeavors to repopulate the archive of U.S. historiography using a much less restrictive set of criteria to determine what constitutes “history.” I draw from novels, memoirs, didactic literature, journalism, and second-hand accounts of performances and lecture tours to reveal crucial discourses and counter-discourses that sought to explain, criticize, and justify continental expansion during a period when the national memory of these events had not yet crystallized. In each chapter, I aggregate literary texts about different sites of U.S. imperial conquest. I starting with the writing of Paiute advocate, Sarah Winnemucca, her autobiographical history Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883) and the popular response to her advocacy. I then turn my focus to the ways in which manifest domesticity operated in conjunction with the material project of colonial violence, looking at the work of Elizabeth Custer, writings by other army wives, and adaptations of these works leading to broader pop cultural dissemination. Collectively, these texts produced, and failed to produce, historical truth effects (regimes of truth), whose existence, let alone lasting influence, has not yet been accounted for by either historical or literary studies. The function and impact of these texts can best be understood by approaching them not as single books but as constellations, dense collections of memoir, book reviews, interviews, and mass circulated excerpts that in turn fueled the production of popular representations of the west, like David Belasco and Franklin Fyles’ The Girl I Left Behind Me, a frontier melodrama that toured internationally at the end of the century. Ultimately I argue that these narratives, and the popular response to them, constitute v multiple, fractious histories that competed for authority as the era of continental expansion drew to a close. These texts offer critical insight into the means by which white Americans wrote themselves, and others out of, the emerging United States. Each of the works under study narrates differently the interweaving of “domestic” issues - love, marriage, family - with “world historical” markers of progress - advances in technology ranging from the telegraph to the train. These narratives tell contending “strictly true” stories about the process by which Native land was transformed into American soil, and relate the grandiose narratives of imperial expansion as well as the unspeakable violences upon which they rested. They describe the advance of armies not only by reference to battles but through the proliferation of “objective” units – dates, increasingly specific and uniform time measurement, and the mapping and measuring of space and land. By demonstrating the common historical impulse at the heart of generically and stylistically diverse texts, I aim to reveal a broader and more capacious archive of historical fiction in the nineteenth century, and examine the methodological principles that condition literary histories, and their place in a rapidly developing nineteenth-century historical imaginary. vi Introduction This dissertation expands the framework of manifest domesticity to look at women’s representations of warfare and the violences of settler colonialism. These representations blur the line between history and literature, showing how both grapple with “contact zones.” In these “spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism [and] slavery” (Pratt Arts 34), how do women’s narratives constitute homes and families? I address these questions partly though Amy Kaplan’s formulation of manifest domesticity, wherein antebellum discourses of domesticity that distinguished private from public were also delineating the boundary between domestic and foreign critical to the doctrine of manifest destiny.