Nineteenth-Century American Women's Novels: Interpretative Strategies. Susan K. Harris

The appropriation by U.S.-American blacks of the Egyptian enslaved woman, Hagar, as she appears in the book of Genesis, is epitomized in black art, literature, and cinema. Yet less familiar is the appropriation of Hagar by nineteenth-century, middle-class, white women novelists, who mostly lived during the antebellum Southern era. Their novels feature a dark, wild, female protagonist named Hagar who appears as a racially ambiguous woman. She is usually orphaned or abandoned, and she overcomes many obstacles and adversaries to fulfill her life’s purpose in the domestic sphere. Sometimes she is openly compared with the biblical Hagar, depicted as having African ancestry, and characterized as an untamed woman who is free of society’s gender constraints. Nineteenth-century domestic novels thus present stories about Hagar as a temporary escape for middle-class white women’s perceived enslavement to traditional gender expectations, as they experienced them in their individual lives. At the same time, the domestic novels disregard the experiences of nineteenth-century enslaved black women.

Download Full-text

In Memory of Cassie: Child Death and Religious Vision in American Women's Novels

Religion and American Culture A Journal of Interpretation ◽

10.1525/rac.1996.6.1.03a00050 ◽

1996 ◽

Vol 6 (1) ◽

pp. 87-104 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Ann-Janine Morey

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Twentieth Century ◽

Women Writers ◽

Toni Morrison ◽

Child Death ◽

American Women ◽

Social Perspectives ◽

Religious Vision ◽

Women's Novels ◽

Religious Problems

This article investigates the contribution of several twentieth-century women writers to the legacy of women's writing about child death and scriptural consolation. The suffering and death of children constitutes the most intractable of religious problems, and recent studies of parental grieving support women's literary treatment of child death. Thus, just as child death creates a unique religious space, it may also demand its own literary category and aesthetic. By considering the unique dimensions of parental grieving, and by looking at how Perri Klass, Toni Morrison, and Harriette Arnow handle this subject, it is possible to gain fresh literary perspective on the fiction of nineteenth-century American women, many of whom also addressed the problem of child death and scriptural consolation. Women writers create children who are more than literary or symbolic commodities, and, in so doing, these writers challenge us to reevaluate scriptural and social perspectives on child death.

Download Full-text