The American slavery debate, raging from the early nineteenth century up until the Civil War, almost destroyed the Union through its increasing political, economical and social anxiety. Southerners...Show moreThe American slavery debate, raging from the early nineteenth century up until the Civil War, almost destroyed the Union through its increasing political, economical and social anxiety. Southerners argued against any federal interference of their institution of slavery and abolitionists, especially those who were more radical, vehemently opposed any continuation of the institution. In this tumult, several writers took up the pen to argue against or specifically in favor of slavery, which they did in sentimental novels intended to sway their readers. I argue that each of the authors of the works discussed in this thesis reframe the African American plight in order to portray what the authors feel is the idealized version of African Americans, regardless of whether it had any bearing on reality. In this way, white superiority remained intact. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, while advocating for the abolition of slavery, treats her enslaved characters as childlike and simplistic. Eastman’s Aunt Phillis’s Cabin portrays her enslaved characters as utterly devotional to the white families they work for, going even as far as to argue for removing their own autonomy so to better serve their masters. And Page’s In Ole Virginia, written during the post-Reconstruction period, portrays free African Americans as witnesses to the better times experienced while in servitude.Show less
The political, social and ecclesiastical anxiety and fragility of colonial New England was manipulated by two opposing groups‒the Radicals and the Conservatives‒both of whom helped cause, and...Show moreThe political, social and ecclesiastical anxiety and fragility of colonial New England was manipulated by two opposing groups‒the Radicals and the Conservatives‒both of whom helped cause, and exploited, the 1692 witchcraft crisis in Salem, Massachusetts. I identify the “Radicals” as a group of mostly young, female and poor individuals both instigating and reveling in the breakdown of an oppressive community. They were experimenting with a world turned upside-down, a grand social experiment both echoing and inverting the Puritan experiment Salem was built upon. The very society that oppressed them, Puritan New England, had set a precedent for dissent and the formation of a new, radical, society. I will argue the opposing group, the “Conservatives,” consisted of older, mostly male figures trying desperately to maintain the establishment. I will argue that their interpretation of the actions of the possessed was proposed with specific intent and was formative in the continuation of the crisis. The crisis was, therefore, not an inadvertent consequence of their fractured society, but a fulfilment of the desires of each group.Show less
This thesis re-views Jack Kerouac's "On The Road" through the cultural-anthropological lens of "liminality" in order to understand the novel's endurance as well as its contemporary reflection of a...Show moreThis thesis re-views Jack Kerouac's "On The Road" through the cultural-anthropological lens of "liminality" in order to understand the novel's endurance as well as its contemporary reflection of a generation in limbo. This thesis contends that the liminal characteristics and rituals studied by Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner in small-scale African communities can be modernized and applied to such ritualistic phenomena as road travel in Kerouac's novel, which utilizes the anonymity of the American highway as a liminal space that allows freedom of self-definition. Such a reading returns "On the Road" to its contemporary socio-political landscape and makes it clear that the novel depicts not a subversive countercultural movement, but that it is actually part of a private ritual of passage that eschews the mainstream culture only on a temporary and minimal basis. By way of the liminal phase, the narrator appropriates characteristics of the socially and ethnically marginal while reproducing and reinforcing the values of the mainstream (white) culture against these marginal people.Show less
The avoidance of procreation is a recurrent theme in John Dos Passos’s novels, playing an especially significant role in Manhattan Transfer (1925) and The Big Money (1936). However, few scholars...Show moreThe avoidance of procreation is a recurrent theme in John Dos Passos’s novels, playing an especially significant role in Manhattan Transfer (1925) and The Big Money (1936). However, few scholars publishing on gender in relation to Dos Passos have addressed the theme of procreation, or more precisely, his denial of procreation from his female characters. To fill this hiatus in the scholarship on Dos Passos, this thesis will address and explore several aspects of procreation as a theme in Manhattan Transfer and The Big Money, placing these novels in the wider social-historical context of contemporary debates about birth control and abortion, and especially the literary-historical context of modernism in general and Dos Passos’s work in particular.Show less
