UC San Diego

This dissertation examines how four U.S. women writers from disparate racial, ethnic, class, and regional backgrounds negotiated and reimagined discourses of gender, race, nation, and empire in the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. Using the U.S.-Mexican War (1846-48), the Civil War (1861-65), and the Spanish-American War (1898) as well as other moments of conflict such as Indian Removal and large-scale westward migration as major historical reference points, I explore how these women writers used seemingly "apolitical" domestic motifs and practices, such as love triangles, courtships, marriage, and family interactions, to support, critique, challenge, and/or subvert racist and imperialist policies of the nation, and, more importantly, to promote their own political agendas through narration. My analysis builds upon Amy Kaplan's thesis in "Manifest Domesticity," which argues that gendered metaphors of domesticity could be used as a "civilizing" force to justify imperial relationships between the conqueror and the conquered. Even though the texts under discussion vary in terms of genres, subject matter, and the year of publication, I contend that they all try to converse with dominant national ideologies through complicated textual engagements with wars, love, domesticity, and U.S. imperialism, and that by doing so they delineate alternative kinds of transregional and intercultural negotiations at their specific historical moments. Chapter one analyzes Louisa May Alcott's antislavery narratives (1860-64) and her sensational thrillers written during the same decade in relation to the sentimental disciplinary power of white womanhood. Chapter two discusses Dan, Alcott's unruly hero in the second and third books of the Little Women series (1871; 1886), in terms of U.S. westward imperial expansion. Chapters three and four look at how two California writers, the Mexican Mar\ía Amparo Ruiz de Burton and the Anglo Gertrude Atherton, mapped out their disparate literary visions of California and the West in the 1870s and 1880s and during the turn of the century and the early twentieth century respectively. Chapter five examines Pauline Hopkins' 1902 novel, Winona, in relation to African Americans' engagement in social practices and cultural imaginings concerning Indianness