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"Well-Dispos'd Savages": Elite Masculinity in Eighteenth-Century British Literature
(2010) Veisz, Elizabeth Hayley; Rosenthal, Laura J; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
Writers in eighteenth-century Britain catered to, and helped create, public fascination with the brazen, sometimes illicit, often violent exploits of elite and aristocratic men. Literary critics have seen this elite male figure as part of an outmoded order superseded over the course of the century by the rising British middle class. Debauched aristocratic characters are often reformed over the course of eighteenth-century narratives, reflecting a larger societal shift in values towards polite restraint. As expressed in my dissertation's title phrase, however, many of the period's writers develop elite male characters whose behaviors and self-presentation blur those very boundaries between oppositional categories, like savagery and civilization, on which both Enlightenment theories of human progress and polite culture's prescriptions for decorum were presumed to rest. Through an examination of this paradoxical figure in novelistic, dramatic, and autobiographical literature, my dissertation demonstrates that the oft-repeated reform-of-the-rake narrative calls attention to obstacles and resistance to the ascendancy of a middle-class culture, not to the inevitability of its rise. Each chapter centers on a site that is accessible to a larger public only through literary or dramatic accounts, including the club, the elite school, the court, and the overseas estate. Chapter One, "`Our imperial reign': Addison, Steele, Gay and the London Mohocks," examines writings about a gang of rakish gentlemen rumored to prowl the streets of Augustan London. Chapter Two, "Schools for Scandal: Elite Education and Eighteenth-Century Narrative," uncovers a relationship between key mid-century novels and a longstanding debate about elite schooling. The final two chapters trace the influence of late-eighteenth-century discourses of liberty and sensibility on constructions of elite masculinity. Chapter Three, "Command Performance: Boswell's Libertine Diplomacy," focuses on the journals and travelogues of James Boswell, a self-professed libertine who strove, with mixed results, to restrain his appetite for power and pleasure. Chapter Four, "A `strong transition of place': Cultural Encounter and the reform plot in Sydney Owenson's The Wild Irish Girl," offers a new framework in which to read the genre of the national tale by shifting the critical lens from the novel's Anglo-Irish marriage plot to a parallel plot of intersecting and competing masculinities.
Girlhood in African American Literature 1827-1949
(2010) Wright, Nazera Sadiq; Washington, Mary Helen; Peterson, Carla L; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: GIRLHOOD IN AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE, 1827-1949 Nazera Sadiq Wright, Doctor of Philosophy, 2010 Dissertation directed by: Professor Carla L. Peterson Professor Mary Helen Washington Department of English This dissertation examines African American literature through the social construction and the allegorical function of girlhood. By exploring the figure of the black girl between 1827--when the nation's first black newspaper, Freedom's Journal, was published and slavery was abolished in New York--and 1949--the publication date of Annie Allen, Gwendolyn Brooks's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection poems, I argue that representations of the girl in African American literature are based on behavioral codes that acquired political meaning in print culture before and after Emancipation. In the canonical and rarely-read texts I examine, the varied images of the black girl as orphaned and unruly, educated and mothered, functioned as models for black citizenship. The Introduction argues that Lucy Terry and Phillis Wheatley become foundational models of intellectual achievement through their growth from slave girl to poet. Chapter One, "Antebellum Girlhood in African American Literature" argues that articles selected by black male editors of Freedom's Journal and Colored American, and works by black women writers, such as Maria Stewart's "The First Stage of Life" (1861), Harriet Wilson's Our Nig (1859) and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) adopted the black girl from the LucyTerry/ Phillis Wheatley paradigm and appropriated her image to represent their own, specific citizenship pursuits. In Chapter Two, "Black Girlhood Post-Emancipation," the racially-indeterminate girl figure in Christian Recorder stories, Mrs. N. F. Mossell's advice columns published in the New York Freeman, and Frances Harper's depiction of Annette in Trial and Triumph (1888-1889) represented the newly emancipated black girl figure and her grooming for racial uplift efforts. Chapter Three, "Race Girls in Floyd's Flowers," argues that in Silas X. Floyd's conduct book, Floyd's Flowers; or Duty and Beauty for Colored Children (1905), black girl figures return to the domestic sphere and defer to black male leadership due to an increase in violence at the turn of the century. Chapter Four, "Black Girlhood in Gwendolyn Brooks's Annie Allen (1949)," argues that Gwendolyn Brooks's modernist poems offer an alternative to the conduct manual by privileging the black girl's interiority and freeing her from an instructive role.
Constructions of Violent Jamaican Masculinity in Film and Literature
(2008-07-28) Harewood, Gia; Collins, Merle; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
Greg Dimitriadis and Cameron McCarthy sketch out what they see as an emergent postcolonial aesthetic percolating in the postcolonial artist's imagination. According to their analysis, postcolonial artists make meaning in their work through three critical motifs that help shape this aesthetic: "counterhegemonic representation, double or triple coding, and emancipatory or utopic visions" (19, italics in original). Counterhegemonic representation "rework[s] the center-versus-periphery distinction . . . to look beyond its strictures to new histories, new discourses, new ways of being" (24). Double coding combines "two or more fields of reference or idiom in any given work" pulling images from places such as "the East and the West, the first world and the Third, the colonial master and the slave" (26). And utopic visions are about "imagining possibility even when faced with impossible barriers" (30). My project is fundamentally interested in constructing healthy (masculine) identities and its arguments are ultimately guided by their first and third motifs. Using feminist theory, masculinity studies, cultural studies and postcolonial theory, I focus on the representation of black Jamaican men as violent criminal beings in three films (The Harder They Come, Third World Cop and Shottas), two novels (The Harder They Come and For Nothing at All) and one ethnographic travelogue (Born Fi' Dead). I argue that "real/reel" Jamaican masculinity is ultimately connected to gun violence and the most popular films out of Jamaica over the past thirty years only perpetuate this image. While not the only source for role models, visual images play a significant role in the lives of young men (and women) who are trying to live up to social standards of masculinity. With limited access to social mobility, they often emulate the shotta (gangster) glory that they see sparkling on the screen. Through close readings of these texts, I show how hegemonic masculinity is reinforced and reveal that non-violent models of masculinity do exist, despite being overshadowed by violent "heroes." I call for that "utopic vision," to excavate the vulnerable and intervene on behalf of peace to help young men and boys find alternative models of masculinity and ultimately create sustainable communities.
Man Enough: Fraternal Intimacy, White Homoeroticism, and Imagined Homogeneity in Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Literature
(2006-04-27) Schramm, Geoffrey Saunders; Lindemann, Marilee; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
"Man Enough" construes mid-nineteenth-century literary representations of sameness as corollaries of the struggle during this volatile era to realize unity among white men. I argue that three canonical authors envision homoerotic or same-sex erotic desire as a mechanism through which men can honor and defend sameness. These authors advert the connotative power of sameness by envisioning or assaying erotic desire between men as democratic. This fraternally conjugal (or conjugally fraternal) union serves as a consequence of the cultural directive to preserve the nation's homogeneity. In chapter one I reflect upon the circulation of sameness in mid-nineteenth-century America. I provide an overview of the logic of sameness in conceptions of race and then discuss how it textured sexual difference. As historians have recorded, new homosocial spheres led to fraternal intimacy at a time when white men competed in the free market economy. These new forms of friendship were erotically--though not necessarily sexually--charged. In the second chapter I argue that in The Blithedale Romance Hawthorne represents homoeroticism as effecting strong, yet tender erotic bonds between men that circumvent women and feminizing domesticity. He ultimately registers that same-sex erotic desire imperils male individualism and autonomy since it demands submission. Chapter three begins with an observation that critics fail to consider how dominant attitudes about race and gender shaped Whitman's representations. Another aspect of his Leaves of Grass that has eluded attention is the prevalence of California in his work. As I argue, Whitman's references to California in his own "Blue Book" copy of the 1860 edition suggest his desire for a racially and sexually homogeneous gay nation. Herman Melville's Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War is the focus of my final chapter. In this poetry he underscores that the homosocial martial life of war provided American men with an opportunity to forge fraternal intimacy with one another. Seeking to memorialize the sacrifices of Union soldiers, Melville sentimentalizes their losses so much that his poetry comes across as a homoerotic epic. Melville in Battle-Pieces offers a model of fraternity in which men eroticize racial and gender sameness.

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