UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones 5-1-2012 From Martyrs to Mothers to Chick in Choos: The Medieval Female Body and American Women's Popular Literature Gina M. Sully University of Nevada, Las Vegas Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/thesesdissertations Part of the American Literature Commons, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, and the Gender and Sexuality Commons Repository Citation Sully, Gina M., "From Martyrs to Mothers to Chick in Choos: The Medieval Female Body and American Women's Popular Literature" (2012). UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones. 2830. http://dx.doi.org/10.34917/9419970 This Dissertation is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been brought to you by Digital Scholarship@UNLV with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this Dissertation in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/or on the work itself. This Dissertation has been accepted for inclusion in UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones by an authorized administrator of Digital Scholarship@UNLV. For more information, please contact [email protected]. FROM MARTYRS TO MOTHERS TO CHICK IN CHOOS: THE MEDIEVAL FEMALE BODY AND AMERICAN WOMEN’S POPULAR LITERATURE By Gina M. Sully Bachelor of Arts in English University of Nevada, Las Vegas 2005 Master of Arts in English University of Nevada, Las Vegas 2009 Graduate Certificate in Women’s Studies University of Nevada, Las Vegas 2012 A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy in English Department of English School of Liberal Arts The Graduate College University of Nevada, Las Vegas August 2012 Copyright by Gina M. Sully 2012 All Rights Reserved THE GRADUATE COLLEGE We recommend the dissertation prepared under our supervision by Gina Sully entitled From Martyrs to Mothers to Chick in Choos: The Medieval Female Body and American Women’s Popular Literature be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Department of English Joseph McCullough, Ph.D., Committee Chair Felicia Campbell, Ph.D., Committee Member Evelyn Gajowski, Ph.D., Committee Member Joanne Goodwin, Ph.D., Graduate College Representative Thomas Piechota, Ph. D., Interim Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies and Dean of the Graduate College August 2012 ii ABSTRACT From Martyrs to Mothers to Chicks in Choos: The Medieval Female Body and American Women’s Popular Literature by Gina M. Sully Dr. Joseph McCullough, Dissertation Committee Chair Distinguished Professor of English University of Nevada, Las Vegas Placing the generic conventions of medieval hagiography, Nina Baym’s insights about nineteenth-century American sentimental fiction’s overplot, and contemporary American women’s popular literature into tension illuminates some important commonalities. First, biographers of the medieval virgin saints and authors of contemporary American women’s popular literature deploy the same overplot that Baym identifies as characteristic of American women’s nineteenth-century popular fiction. Second, in order to define feminine virtue and establish the virtue of their protagonists, nineteenth-century and post-millennial American women writers rework the contrastive tropes by which hagiographers establish their heroines’ virtue. Third, struggles for ascendance in the domestic realm gesture toward its inherently political functions. Fourth, contemporary American women’s popular literature presupposes and reproduces a medieval configuration of the female body as a site for narrative and political conflict and locates women’s work in a hybrid domestic-work space. Finally, the literary reconfiguration of the workspace undoes the public-private distinction on which theories of democratic liberalism rely to construct male citizenship. iii For my parents, Jacqueline and Ron Whose patient love lit my way back from the dark places Thank you for letting me dance my own dances For Otie Mae, Dorothy, Jane, and Sonia, Whose courage and strength inspire me still Thank you for giving me safe places to dance. For my friends, teachers, colleagues, and students, Who have taught me more than any of us know Thank you for dancing with me. For Joel, Without you, the world would not feel like home to me. Thank you for giving me so many reasons to dance. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………….…….iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS…………………………………………………………..….iv CHAPTER ONE: CRITICAL FRAMES AND THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES................................................1 CHAPTER TWO: MARTYRS: MEDIEVAL BODIES AND LITERARY LEGACIES................31 CHAPTER THREE MOTHERS: DOMESTIC ANGELS AND HARRIED HOMEMAKERS........56 CHAPTER FOUR CHICK IN CHOOS: THE SIGNIFYING BREAST.......................................................99 CHAPTER FIVE CONCLUSIONS: READING THE PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE................136 REFERENCES…………………………………………………………………..…….147 CURRICULUM VITAE……………………………….…………………....................173 v CHAPTER ONE CRITICAL FRAMES AND THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES Situating Myself When I was a child, my grandmother bought me a little book made of envelopes. Labeled chronologically to indicate the school grade it was intended for, each six-by- eight-inch envelope could hold memorabilia and ephemera from that school year. Although my mother continued for a time to put my report cards and ribbons from corsages in the envelopes, after my kindergarten year at All Saints Catholic School, I myself filled in the spaces designated on the outside of the envelopes for the names of special or new friends, teachers, favorite subjects, and desired life path. In kindergarten, I wanted to be a mommy. In first and second grades, I wanted to be a nun, like my teachers. In third grade, I wanted to be a teacher and spent much of my play time reading to dolls and teaching them the alphabet and the basics of mathematics. In fourth grade, though, Sister Alexia read saints’ biographies aloud to us. That year, in the blank labeled “When I Grow Up,” I wrote Virgin Martyr . I’m not sure that I knew what virgin meant back then, but I understood what martyr meant, and I knew what virgin martyrs did: They refused to marry the men who found them beautiful and irresistible, the men in whom their beauty aroused a disgusting (but disturbingly fascinating to me) lust. They stood up to their fathers and the pagan men who abused them, and they retained their purity (whatever that was) in the face of tortures so vile that Sister Alexia skipped those parts. Like the Sisters of Mercy who taught me, the virgin martyrs married Christ and remained faithful to him. That summer, having earned an adult library card by reading one hundred books in four months, I 1 devoured English translations of saints’ biographies. I read biographies of Polish and Russian saints, French and Italian saints, Irish and German saints, English and American 1 saints. I read accounts of the lives of male and female saints, transvestite saints, and reformed-prostitute saints. But the biographies of the medieval virgin saints captured me as none of the others did. Thrilling to the idea of retaining my faith in the face of tortures so depraved they had to be elided by my biographer, I longed for the same kinds of tests Saints Agnes, Lucy, and Bridget had transcended. I longed to be as worthy of Jesus’ love as they had been. By the next school year, of course, my interests and my goals had changed, but those texts were my introduction to the kind of unruly, ambiguously defiant heroines I continue to find myself most attracted to as a reader, heroines who cannot “just go shopping or get [their] hair done like a normal girl” (Springer, Killer 202). When I re-encountered the virgin saints’ biographies during my undergraduate education, I grumbled, disappointed that we wouldn’t be reading other English-language literature from the period. However, those hagiographical texts haunted my scholarly writing in graduate school and inspired papers and articles about literary forms and genres as seemingly unconnected as formulaic contemporary romance and the literature of the American Renaissance. Nonetheless continuing to focus primary research on American domestic humor, I planned to use my dissertation to explore the ways male and female authors constructed narrative personae in American domestic humor written between the World Wars. 2 Then, during my final class as a PhD student, I read Nina Baym’s Women’s Fiction . I was thunderstruck. The “overplot” Baym identified in U.S. women’s domestic fiction written between 1820 and 1870 was virtually identical to one I’d identified virgin saints’ biographies and Samuel Richardson’s Pamela as sharing: A 2 “young girl” is separated from the social supports on which she had “rightly or wrongly” depended to sustain her throughout life and is faced with the necessity of winning her own way in the world. The happy marriages with which most—though not all—of this fiction concludes are symbols of the successful accomplishment of the required task and successful resolution of the basic problems raised in the story, which is in most primitive terms the story of the formation and assertion of a feminine ego. (Baym, Women’s