English 465-001
Major Women Writers: Captivity, Seduction and Domesticity
Instr: Hamilton, Kristie
Office: CRT 478; 229-5959
e-mail: kgh2@uwm.edu
Office hours: TBA
Course Information: MW; 1:30-2:45pm; CRT 309
Course Description
Our primary focus will be the works of American women authors writing before 1900. As the course title suggests we will investigate captivity, seduction and domesticity as themes and narrative patterns that have informed the literary imagination and experiences of diverse American women.
We will begin with Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892), a late 19th-century short story about a woman seduced into confinement in her home and the drastic measures this woman must take to free herself. Having established the figurative uses to which the course's central themes may be put, we will read two autobiographical captivity narratives: Mary Rowlandson's 17th-century, Puritan narrative of her abduction and confinement and Zitkala Sa's "Impressions of an Indian Childhood" and "The School Days of an Indian Girl" (1900). We will also read an 18th-century seduction novel, Rowson's Charlotte Temple. When we turn to the 19th century, we will read novels, stories, sketches and essays by a variety of authors who embrace and/or resist the domestic ideal of womanhood, who debate the role of the woman author, who argue for social reform from within and outside the home, and who grapple with the dictates of a culture that confines women and men within narrow social roles. Among the authors included are Catharine Sedgwick, Maria Stewart, Lydia Maria Child, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Lydia Sigourney, Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Wilson, Fanny Fern, and, a late 20th-century novel by Alice Walker. We will conclude with Susan Glaspell's "A Jury of Her Peers," and a poem by Adrienne Rich, in order to think about 20th-century women writers' responses to the literary and social history they have inherited from their forebears.
Our interpretations of literary works will be contextualized by discussions of social history (nation-building and imperialism, the earliest women's rights movement, slavery and abolitionism, capital punishment, working-class protest and the invention of "family values"), of literary craftsmanship (in autobiography, the sentimental, melodrama, romance and romanticism, and realism), and of American literary history.
Required Texts:
- Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories (Dover Publications)
- Susanna Rowson, Charlotte Temple (Oxford UP)
- Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Hope Leslie (Rutgers UP)
- Judith Fetterley, ed., Provisions: A Reader from Nineteenth-Century American Women (Indiana UP)
- Harriet E. Wilson, Our Nig; Or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (Random)
- Fanny Fern, Ruth Hall and Other Writings (Rutgers UP)
- Alice Walker, The Color Purple
--Other materials will be placed on reserve in the Golda Meier Library, including:
Mary Rowlandson, "Narrative of Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson," Susan Glaspell, "A Jury of Her Peers," Zitkala Sa's "Impressions of an Indian Childhood" and "The School Days of an Indian Girl"
