CRAFTING RADICAL FICTIONS: LATE-NINETEENTH CENTURY AMERICAN LITERARY REGIONALISM AND ARTS AND CRAFTS IDEALS by ROSALIE ROBERTS A DISSERTATION Presented to the Department of English and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy September 2015 DISSERTATION APPROVAL PAGE Student: Rosalie Roberts Title: Crafting Radical Fictions: Late-Nineteenth Century American Literary Regionalism and Arts and Crafts Ideals This dissertation has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in the Department of English by: Paul Peppis Chairperson Mark Whalan Core Member William Rossi Core Member Gina Herrmann Institutional Representative and Scott L. Pratt Dean of the Graduate School Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Graduate School. Degree awarded September 2015 ii © 2015 Rosalie Roberts iii DISSERTATION ABSTRACT Rosalie Roberts Doctor of Philosophy Department of English September 2015 Title: Crafting Radical Fictions: Late-Nineteenth Century American Literary Regionalism and Arts and Crafts Ideals This dissertation demonstrates that Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), Mary Hunter Austin’s The Land of Little Rain (1906), Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899), and Mary Wilkins Freemans The Portion of Labor (1903) exemplify the radical politics and aesthetics that late nineteenth-century literary regionalism shares with the Arts and Crafts Movement. Despite considerable feminist critical accomplishments, scholarship on regionalism has yet to relate its rural folkways, feminine aesthetics, and anti-urban stance to similar ideals in the Arts and Crafts Movement. Jewett, Austin, Chopin, and Freeman all depict the challenges of the regional woman artist in order to oppose the uniformity and conventionality of urban modernity. They were not alone in engaging these concerns: they shared these interests with period feminists, sexual radicals, and advocates of the Arts and Crafts Movement like John Ruskin and William Morris, all of whom deeply questioned industrial capitalism and modernization. Jewett, Austin, Chopin, and Freeman envisioned women’s Arts and Crafts communities that appealed to readers through narratives that detailed the potential uniqueness of homemade decorative arts and other aspects of women’s material culture. For Arts and Crafts advocates and regionalists, handcrafted goods made using local folk iv methods and natural materials fulfilled what they saw as the aesthetic requirements for artistic self-definition: The Country of the Pointed Firs and The Land of Little Rain embrace the destabilizing effect queer and feminist characters have on a presumably heterosexual domestic environment, and they formally resist the narrative structures of industrial modernity, emphasizing the Arts and Crafts ideal union between woman artist, natural environment, and communal bonds. The Awakening and The Portion of Labor expose the suffocating impact of industrial capitalism and sexism on women artists who strive for connection with their local environments and communities and cannot achieve their creative goals. I prove that all four texts do more than simply interpret regionalism through the Arts and Crafts Movement as a means to launch their critiques of industrial modernity, they transform the meaning of regionalist Arts and Crafts aesthetics and politics in late nineteenth-century American literature. v CURRICULUM VITAE NAME OF AUTHOR: Rosalie Roberts GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED: University of Oregon, Eugene San Diego State University, San Diego, California Humboldt State University, Arcata, California Shasta Community College, Redding, California DEGREES AWARDED: Doctor of Philosophy, English, 2015, University of Oregon Master of Arts, Women’s Studies, 2006, San Diego State University Bachelor of Arts, English, 2002, Humboldt State University AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST: Nineteenth-Century American Literature Queer feminist theory PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE: Graduate Teaching Fellow, University of Oregon 2010-2015 vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to express sincere gratitude to Professors Peppis and Whalan for their support and insight during the preparation of this manuscript. I appreciate Professors Rossi and Herrmann for their insightful contributions to my committee. Special Thanks to Professors Ford and Dugaw for their support and mentorship throughout my graduate school experience. I could not have accomplished this dissertation without the support of my writing group friends, Susí Gomez and Mona Tougas. I am grateful everyday for Stephanie’s loving support. Many thanks to my family for their constant support of my lifelong interest in reading. vii Dedicated to Great-grandma Dores, who loved to read with me viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION: REITERATING FEMINIST HISTORICISM ................................. 1 II. AN ARTS AND CRAFTS PASTORAL IN SARAH ORNE JEWETT’S THE COUNTRY OF THE POINTED FIRS ....................................................................... 22 III. INTERWEAVING NATURE AND THE ARTIST IN MARY HUNTER AUSTIN’S THE LAND OF LITTLE RAIN ......................................... 57 IV. A PLACE OF ARTISTRY AND LOVE: ARTS AND CRAFTS ARCHITECTURE IN THE REGION OF KATE CHOPIN’S THE AWAKENING ............................................................................................................ 96 V. THE UNRAVELING OF REGIONALIST SELF-FASHIONING IN MARY WILKINS FREEMAN’S THE PORTION OF LABOR ................................ 131 V1. CONCLUSION: PATHWAYS TO AND FROM REGIONALISM ....................... 170 REFERENCES CITED ................................................................................................... 176 ix CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION: REITERATING FEMINIST HISTORICISM Since the 1970s, feminist scholars have recuperated American literary regionalist texts written by women as significant literature, elevating their aesthetics and politics. In Ann Douglas’s 1972 article “The Literature of Impoverishment: the Women Local Colorists in America 1865-1914,” she observes that pre-Civil War sentimental literature and later local color fiction written by women utilized a non-threatening feminine façade as “the armor under which the woman activist of the second half of the century was to battle for her rights” (9). While Douglas and Alice Hall Petry in their 1970s articles about local color fiction note the significance of the women writers’ veiled radicalism, they include all varieties of rural literature in the local color category, regardless of gender politics. The most important intervention into regionalism as a category in American literary studies was a recuperation of specifically feminist regionalist texts led by Marjorie Pryse and Judith Fetterly during the 1980s. At the time, regionalists faced sexist exclusion from the American literary canon because many regionalist works were written by women, focused on women characters, and often detailed feminine material activities in places that appeared geographically and politically distant from the concerns of masculine urban modernity. In her 1997 text Resisting Regionalism: Gender and Naturalism in American Fiction 1885-1915, Donna Campbell introduces her analysis of regionalist form, arguing that regionalism’s feminine formal qualities led to its dismissal by scholars primarily concerned with more masculine forms of realism and naturalism (5). Following two decades of feminist recuperation of regionalism, feminist scholars and 1 nineteenth-century American literature scholars continue debating how best to read regionalism through the lens of gender in order to discern its political contributions. After more than ten years of producing feminist scholarship about regionalism, Fetterly and Pryse’s 2003 book Writing Out of Place: Regionalism, Women, and American Literary Culture concludes that the rural, feminine, and queer aesthetics in women’s regionalism make it a literary movement marginal in comparison to naturalism and realism (37).1 But from their perspective, this is political because regionalism’s marginal status in comparison to realism and naturalism gives it critical distance from the gender and other social norms of “central” literary movements. Similarly, Sherrie Inness and Diana Royer describe this marginal position as a “decentered perspective of the dominant culture’s values” (2). Other scholars of regionalism, like Richard Brodhead, Stephanie Foote, and Amy Kaplan dispute the claims that regionalism is a politically radical literary movement, instead articulating regionalism’s role in assuaging American anxiety about the threat of immigration during a time of civil and economic unrest. Kaplan particularly emphasizes the politically reactionary aspects of regionalism’s utopian communities that are devoid of social conflicts (11). Brodhead challenges the assumption that since regionalism depicts quaint locales, it is provincial and limited in its politics. However his ultimate point is that regionalism functioned as a form of escapism for the urban bourgeoisie (136). Brodhead and Kaplan led the way for later scholars like Patrick Gleason, Cynthia Davis, and Francesca Sawaya to unravel regionalism’s implications in conservative nationalist agendas in spite of its depictions of seemingly 1 Fetterly and Pryse clarify that although some scholars use the terms local color and regionalism interchangeably, they find that local