The ambition revolution: gender and the pursuit of success in nineteenth-century American literature

Date
2023
DOI
Authors
Lacey, Kristin Anne
Version
OA Version
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Abstract
This dissertation investigates the changing relationship of gender and ambition in nineteenth-century American and British culture through analyses of literature by and about women. This project shows that, to avoid social censure, some women used the trappings of True Womanhood—propriety, domesticity, and submissiveness—to achieve the rewards of New Womanhood, including financial independence, education, and power. In a culture that expected women to eschew self-interest, women employed strategies of discretion and manipulation to pursue their individual ambitions. Counterintuitively, their paths to success (particularly those of middle-class white women) often deployed the very norms that sought to confine them to home and family. Their negotiations reveal a central tension in nineteenth-century views of gender: women were expected to understand the needs of those around them but were castigated for employing those same insights for self-interested purposes. Scholars have explored women’s increasing power within the domestic sphere and within collective reform movements. By contrast, this project demonstrates that women’s ambitions did not operate squarely in the home or marketplace, but rather can be found in liminal spaces marked by relational influence. Addressing canonical and understudied literary texts, as well as archival materials such as correspondence, etiquette guides, success manuals, and social commentaries, this dissertation is organized around four female types: authors, coquettes, governesses, and girls. Focusing on Fanny Fern and Constance Fenimore Woolson, Chapter One argues that strategically revising gendered behavior, particularly in relationships with male authors, was essential to female authors’ success. Through readings of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frank Norris, Chapter Two contends that coquettes and wives succeed if they meet society’s expectations for female consumption in the emerging market economy. Chapter Three shows that governesses used their intimate knowledge of employers to advance their individual interests in books by William Thackeray, Louisa May Alcott, and Harriet Jacobs. Chapter Four returns to Alcott to show how girlhood offers temporary latitude to pursue ambition more freely. Uneasiness over women’s ambition was central to the nineteenth century and persists today in ongoing debates about whether women can “have it all” and in the current backlash against women’s autonomy.
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