Hagar in Nineteenth-Century Southern Women’s Novels

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.

Sex, Violence, and Religion in the Irish-American Domestic Novel

This chapter compares post-war Irish-American domestic novels by male and female authors, examining the influence of politics, assimilation, and ethnic identity on their plots and characters. Focusing on representative novels per decade from the 1940s to the present, the analysis finds that while both male and female writers agree that married life rarely equals domestic bliss, the authors’ gender identity determines their representation of the roles played by marriage, sexuality, and religion. The first part of the chapter examines the preponderance of adultery and gendered abuse; the second discusses attitudes towards women, sex, and sexual preference; and the third traces the movement from immigrant piety to an intellectual, independent view of the Church that acknowledges its ongoing gender hierarchy. The discussion not only reveals the progression of Irish Americans’ fictional lives since the 1940s but also examines the role of Irish-American women writers in expanding that view.

No, Really

This chapter examines Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892) and Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces (1900), representative black domestic novels, the genre that 1980s and 1990s black feminism used to usher black women’s literature into the canon. Refusing to treat black domestic fiction as a response to black women’s exclusion from the cult of true womanhood, this chapter highlights the trope of homemade citizenship, which has been overlooked because readers assume artistic works either protest injustice or ignore the reasons for protest. Both novels revolve around racial uplift, and because they define it as collective practices of making-oneself-at-home, they highlight the importance of the community conversation to help black women claim their right to every aspect of success, including romantic love. [121 of 125 words]

Changing Landscapes of Love and Passion in the Urdu Novel

This article illustrates the impact of generic differences and changes in the social and political context on the use of emotion concepts such as love and passion in selected Urdu novels from 1869 until 1945. While Nazir Ahmad (1830/31–1912) and Rashid-ul Khairi (1868–1936) in their domestic novels tend to stress the control of passions, particularly in familial relationships, Abdul Halim Sharar (1860–1926) in his Islamic novels/historical romances allows for romantic attraction and propagates religious fervor, bringing him closer to the emotion vocabulary used in contemporary Urdu journalism. This format was later expanded by Nasim Hijazi (1914–1996), who sought to strengthen the enthusiasm of fellow Muslims in their fight for Pakistan. In this highly popular genre strong feelings and passions serve to arouse intense feeling for the Muslim community.

BETWEEN TWO WORLDS: RACIAL IDENTITY IN ALICE PERRIN'S THE STRONGER CLAIM

Like many Anglo-Indian novelists of her generation, Alice Perrin (1867–1934) gained fame through the publication and popular reception of several domestic novels based in India and England. However, within the traditional Anglo-Indian romance plot, Perrin often incorporated subversive social messages highlighting racial and cultural problems prevalent in India during the British Raj. Instead of relying solely on one-dimensional, sentimental British heroes and heroines, Perrin frequently chose non-British protagonists who reminded her contemporary readers of very real Anglo-Indian racial inequalities they might wish to forget. In The Stronger Claim (1903), Perrin creates a main character who has a mixed-race background, but who, contrary to prevailing public opinion of the time, is a multi-dimensional, complex, and perhaps most importantly, sympathetic character positioned between two worlds. Even as Victorian India was coming to an end, many of the problems that had plagued the British Raj intensified in the early decades of the twentieth century. Perrin's novel is one of the earliest attempts to present a sympathetic and heroic mixed-race protagonist, one whose presence asked readers to question the lasting negative effects of race relations and racial identity in both India and England.