The Significance of Anya Seton's Historical Fiction
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University of Louisville ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository Electronic Theses and Dissertations 5-2017 Breaking the cycle of silence : the significance of Anya Seton's historical fiction. Lindsey Marie Okoroafo (Jesnek) University of Louisville Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.library.louisville.edu/etd Part of the American Literature Commons, American Popular Culture Commons, European History Commons, European Languages and Societies Commons, Gender and Sexuality Commons, Higher Education Commons, History of Gender Commons, Inequality and Stratification Commons, Language and Literacy Education Commons, Liberal Studies Commons, Literature in English, North America Commons, Modern Languages Commons, Modern Literature Commons, Other Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Political History Commons, Politics and Social Change Commons, Public History Commons, Quantitative, Qualitative, Comparative, and Historical Methodologies Commons, Reading and Language Commons, Secondary Education Commons, Social History Commons, Sociology of Culture Commons, United States History Commons, Women's History Commons, and the Women's Studies Commons Recommended Citation Okoroafo (Jesnek), Lindsey Marie, "Breaking the cycle of silence : the significance of Anya Seton's historical fiction." (2017). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Paper 2676. https://doi.org/10.18297/etd/2676 This Doctoral Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository. This title appears here courtesy of the author, who has retained all other copyrights. For more information, please contact [email protected]. BREAKING THE CYCLE OF SILENCE: THE SIGNIFICANCE OF ANYA SETON’S HISTORICAL FICTION By Lindsey Marie Okoroafo (Jesnek) B.A., Tiffin University, 2008 M.A., Indiana State University, 2010 A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of the University of Louisville in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Humanities Department of Comparative Humanities University of Louisville Louisville, Kentucky May 2017 Copyright 2017 by Lindsey Marie Okoroafo (Jesnek) All rights reserved BREAKING THE CYCLE OF SILENCE: THE SIGNIFICANCE OF ANYA SETON’S HISTORICAL FICTION By Lindsey Marie Okoroafo (Jesnek) B.A., Tiffin University, 2008 M.A., Indiana State University, 2010 A Dissertation Approved on April 20, 2017 by the following Dissertation Committee: _______________________________________________ Dissertation Director Dr. Annette Allen _______________________________________________ Second Committee Member Dr. Ann Elizabeth Willey _______________________________________________ Third Committee Member Dr. Ann C. Hall _______________________________________________ Fourth Committee Member (Outside Reader) Dr. Jo Ann Griffin ii DEDICATION This dissertation is dedicated to my mother Cathie A. Daane who has supported, encouraged, and loved me through all of my endeavors. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my mother, Cathie A. Daane, for loving me unconditionally and for doing everything in her power to help me reach my goals. I would like to thank my wife, Katrina Uchem Okoroafo, for her waiting so long for me to finish this degree. I would like to thank my best friend, Charters Harrison, for her encouragement and for helping me believe in myself again. I would like to thank my precious dog, Pearl, for (literally) being by my side during all of those difficult late nights and exasperated moments. I would also like to thank all of my committee members. Thank you to Dr. Allen, my beloved director, for always being my advocate and for her tremendous efforts in helping me through this project. Thank you to Dr. Beth Willey and Dr. Ann C. Hall for devoting their time and expertise to make this project as successful as possible. Thank you to Dr. Jo Ann Griffin for her helpful feedback and for her willingness to teach the independent study course that ultimately introduced me to the topic of my dissertation: Anya Seton. Finally, I would like to thank Anya Seton for her determination and resilience in resurrecting the stories of three forgotten women in history: Theodosia Burr, Katherine Swynford, and Elizabeth Fones. Ms. Seton, I sincerely hope that this projects helps to break the cycle of silence that has so unjustly kept your work from receiving the scholarly attention it deserves. iv ABSTRACT BREAKING THE CYCLE OF SILENCE: THE SIGNIFICANCE OF ANYA SETON’S HISTORICAL FICTION Lindsey M. Okoroafo (Jesnek) May 12, 2017 This dissertation examines the feminist significance of Anya Seton’s historical novels, My Theodosia (1941), Katherine (1954), and The Winthrop Woman (1958). The two main goals of this project are to 1.) identify and explain the reasons why Seton’s historical novels have not received the scholarly attention they are due, and 2.) to call attention to the ways in which My Theodosia, Katherine, and The Winthrop Woman offer important feminist interventions to patriarchal social order. Ultimately, I argue that My Theodosia, Katherine, and The Winthrop Woman deserve more scholarly attention because they are significant contributions to women’s literature and to women’s history. In the introduction, I provide a brief biography of Anya Seton and provide an outline of what will be addressed in the subsequent four chapters. In Chapter One, I call attention to the dissonance between Seton’s sustained popularity with readers and her relative absence in scholarship. Then, I provide short summaries of each historical novel to prepare my reader for the analyses I perform and the conclusions I come to in the succeeding chapters. Finally, I put forth the argument that a complex set of socio-cultural factors have contributed to the scholarly dismissal of Seton’s work. In Chapter Two, I perform an analysis of the historical events and literary trends that were occurring prior to v and during the time Seton was writing My Theodosia, Katherine, and The Winthrop Woman in the 1940s and 1950s. Throughout my analysis, I articulate how dominant ideologies about history, literature, genre, and gender have collectively rendered Seton’s historical novels unworthy of serious scholarly attention. In Chapter Three, I identify the ways in which My Theodosia, Katherine, and The Winthrop Woman effectively interrupt the master narrative of the invulnerable male hero that has traditionally dominated the pages of most mainstream historical texts. In Chapter Four, I argue that Seton disrupts the widespread and disproportionate absence of women in mainstream historical texts by placing at the center of her novels three real-life historical female figures who are rarely given any attention in accounts of the past. I also argue that Seton’s novels challenge the masculinist ideology of mainstream historical texts by portraying ways that the female protagonists in My Theodosia, Katherine, and The Winthrop Woman either resist or reject traditional codes of feminine behavior. Finally, in the conclusion, I reiterate the main points of my chapters and emphasize the importance of breaking the cycle of silencing women’s voices throughout history. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE DEDICATION ……………………………………………………………………… iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS…………………………………………………………… iv ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………………….. v INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………….... 1 CHAPTER ONE……………………………………………………………………... 12 CHAPTER TWO……………………………………………………………………. 40 CHAPTER THREE………………………………………………………………….. 76 CHAPTER FOUR………………………………………………………………….... 114 CONCLUSION……………………………………………………………………… 165 REFERENCES....……………………………………………………………………. 176 CURRICULUM VITAE……………………………………………………………... 187 vii INTRODUCTION My first exposure to the work of Anya Seton was purely coincidental. While putting the finishing touches on a reading list for a doctoral independent study course on twentieth-century Gothic fiction, I thought it prudent to confirm that I had indeed included an appropriate array of the most widely read Gothic novels. Before consulting the university library databases, sheer curiosity prompted me to see what a simple Google search would reveal, and I stumbled across a book retailer’s advertisement for Dragonwyck, a best-selling Gothic novel published in 1944 by an author whose name I had never heard mentioned—not once during my twelve years as a student of American literature. I quickly learned that while Dragonwyck was Anya Seton’s only truly Gothic novel, she wrote nine other novels1 that all involved extensive historical research. It also became clear that Seton’s novels were not only popular at the time of their publication but have also remained popular with twenty-first century readers. Her name appeared so frequently on internet book club blogs, online recommended reading lists, and unpublished reader reviews that I was gripped with a sudden fear: had my tenure in higher education on literature somehow been inept? Shuddering at the thought, I immediately consulted university library holdings where I expected to find hundreds of scholarly journal articles about Anya Seton’s oeuvre. However, a series of feverish 1 Not including Seton’s two young adult novels, The Mistletoe and the Sword (1955) and Smoldering Fires (1975), or Seton’s short biography book for children entitled Washington