Deconstructing the domestic sphere : the American sentimental novel as feminist metafiction.

Abstract

Since the late twentieth century, sentimental literature has seen a resurgence in literary study, with many nineteenth-century American women writers receiving critical attention for the first time. However, this attention is often focused on how these sentimental texts can be read through a modern theoretical lens, denying these texts the opportunity to be read for their own literary or sentimental value. To address this absence, I use a feminist metafictional lens to study these works within their own genre construction as cultural artifacts. In feminist metafiction, critics often question the social construction of reality and fiction to show the conflict that occurs when women are expected to fill specific gender roles, such as those established within the woman's sphere. Through analyzing Harriet Beecher Stowe's The Minister's Wooing (1859), Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig (1859), Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), and Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868), I argue that these feminist metafiction and sentimental novels aim to expose socially constructed genders roles for what they really are--fiction in real life--to effect change.