Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2016 Idling Women: The omesD tic Bildungsroman and the American City, 1830-1900 Jordan L. Von Cannon Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Von Cannon, Jordan L., "Idling Women: The omeD stic Bildungsroman and the American City, 1830-1900" (2016). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 1677. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/1677 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. IDLING WOMEN: THE DOMESTIC BILDUNGSROMAN AND THE AMERICAN CITY, 1830-1900 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English by Jordan L. Von Cannon B.A., Palm Beach Atlantic University, 2008 M.A., University of Kansas, 2011 August 2016 “When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse.” “She gazed and gazed, wondering, delighting, longing, and all the while the siren voice of the unrestful was whispering in her ear.” - Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Throughout this dissertation, I have found myself to be an idling woman at various points. Unlike some of the female characters I discuss, my idle time did not result in unproductiveness, thanks in no small measure to my committee. I offer my deepest thanks and gratitude to Michelle Massé, my committee chair, who shepherded this project from its earliest stages and continues to guide me both personally and professionally as I navigate the academic world as a female scholar. Also if it had not been for William Boelhower’s seminar on the Chicago novel, his unyielding support, and formative readings this project would never have come to fruition. My other committee members Lauren Coats and Michael Bibler read various drafts and iterations of these chapters, offering invaluable feedback that informed this project in some of the most significant ways. I am also thankful for Michael Bibler’s “post”-seminar course, in which I and my fellow dissertators (Stacey Amo, Christie Cognevich, Megan Feifer, Cristina Rosell, and Logan Wiedenfeld) worked to support each other through the various stages of our projects. I will be forever grateful for the Catharine Maria Sedgwick Society and its members who welcome new scholars into their fold without reservations, especially Jill K. Anderson, Lucinda Damon-Bach, Jenifer Elmore, Ellen Foster, Deborah Gussman, Susan K. Harris, Melissa Homestead, Patricia Kalayjian, and Ashley Reed. Similarly, my first chapter would not have been possible without the work of Melissa Homestead and Ellen Foster who brought Clarence into our own time with their new edition and generously shared their research materials with me. Louisiana State University’s Graduate School, English Department, and Women’s and Gender Studies Department supported this project with dissertation fellowships and travel awards for research. I am deeply thankful for all the attention my parents, James and Lorena Kidd, and my grandparents, Leo and the late Kay Rivera, paid to my own development. iii And finally, without the love and joy of the two most important men in my life, Michael and Wally, I’m not sure where I would be. This project is dedicated to the memories of Melanie and Sandy, two women whose narratives ended far too soon. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS………………………………………………………………..............iii ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………….……………………..vi CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………...1 2. THE IDLE HEIRESS: DOMESTIC ECONOMY IN CATHARINE SEDGWICK’S CLARENCE; OR, A TALE OF OUR OWN TIMES………………….…24 3. BETWEEN PLOTS: THE PASSIVITY OF PSEUDONYMITY IN FANNY FERN’S RUTH HALL……………………………………………………………………………..62 4. HENRY JAMES’S BARTLEBY: FEMALE STASIS AND URBAN PROGRESS IN WASHINGTON SQUARE…………………………………………………………..…..103 5. THE IDLE NARRATOR: DESIRE AND THE LIMITS OF THE CAUTIONARY TALE IN THEODORE DREISER’S SISTER CARRIE……….……………………………....138 CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………..……………………..179 BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………..………………………………………..185 VITA…………………………………………………………………..………………………..196 v ABSTRACT In Idling Women: The Domestic Bildungsroman and the American City, 1830-1900, I explore urban narratives of female non-development. In city novels featuring female protagonists, there are two normative arcs of development: either women find new opportunities for marriage, work, and, in some cases, independence in the city, or they fall prey to threats of seduction, poverty, and even death. However, these two plotlines fail to accommodate stories of women who wait to develop, fail at it, or otherwise resist what might be considered character growth. By problematizing distinctions between idleness and the American “work ethic” often tied to the industrialized city, I challenge existing feminist scholarship, which often equates non- normativity with active rebellion, focusing instead on rather negative character qualities such as dullness, vapidness, and procrastination. Depicted in texts ranging from Catharine Sedgwick’s Clarence (1830) and Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall (1854) to Henry James’s Washington Square (1880) and Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900), female characters show upward mobility until their promising plots stall out; others passively wait in the aftermath of failed domestic plots; some refuse to engage in any development whatsoever; and still others navigate common urban pitfalls (including seduction and death plots) by remaining staunchly vapid, self-interested characters. Sometimes dull, often disappointing, these protagonists beckon us to reexamine women in the urban Bildungsroman in order to counter the “marry-or-die” narratives of urban progress and, at the same time, resist more redemptive feminist celebrations of these protagonists’ active resistance. vi INTRODUCTION In Idling Women: The Domestic Bildungsroman and the American City, 1830-1900, I begin by asking a seemingly basic question: How do we read female characters who frustrate narrative expectations of progress and development? These might be individuals who procrastinate or wait to develop, those who bore the narrator and perhaps even their readers, or those whose plots of urban development are co-opted by others. How do we read these characters and their strange lack of urgency? When examining representations of female experience in the city, scholars often observe two broad narratives arcs. Women who go to the city either find success—through marriage or financial stability—or they meet their downfall. By focusing on these two plots, I maintain that scholars often overlook idleness or recast female inactivity as a proto-feminist act of resistance (which it not always is). Reading authors including Catharine Sedgwick, Fanny Fern, Henry James, and Theodore Dreiser, I work at the intersection of genre, feminist, and place/space theories in order to argue that idle female characters—and their quieter affects—embody a crisis of progress in the mid-to-late 19th-century U.S. More often than not, definitions of the Bildungsroman center on the life-phases of a protagonist who develops through early education, travels, ordeals, and experiences in society. Often about young men, these narratives have frequently been mistaken as fictive accounts of all “human” development. In Season of Youth, Jerome Buckley contends that the Bildungsroman normally revolves around two or three basic elements that include a child raised in the country who will eventually leave home to make his own way in the world. For Buckley, the hero’s transformation occurs through his “search for a vocation and a working philosophy” (18). Attaining a position in society through an occupation completes the protagonist’s transition from adolescence to adulthood. Likewise, Franco Moretti, in The Way of the World, maps the genre 1 according to recurring milestones in the plot in order to construct a network surrounding the male protagonist’s development. Less interested in the appearance of specific character or hero types, Moretti outlines thematic elements (the hero’s early education, first rebellions, reluctant socialization, and ultimate acceptance) in order to highlight the defining features of the genre. Additionally, he goes on to make the astounding point that the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman managed the effects of modernization by coupling youth with maturity; by representing the beginning and, most importantly, the end of development; by making a form of progress. Using Moretti’s emphasis on youth as a jumping off point, Jed Esty has recently focused on the way modernist writers depicted perpetual youth, or arrested development, as a way to critique colonialism and imperialist modes of development. He contends that while novels of development permeate across cultural, national, and literary traditions, the twentieth century brings with it a “subset of youth novels, the stories of failed maturity”