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Veranstaltung

3.02.120 S 19th-Century American Women Writers and the Ideology of Separate Spheres -  


Veranstaltungstermin | Raum

Beschreibung

In nineteenth-century America, women stayed at home and took care of the children and the household, whereas men ventured out into the world of business to make money—or so the idea of the “separate spheres” seems to suggest. Yet as a discourse and a metaphor, the notion of the “separate spheres” has been subject to changing interpretations and evaluations. Women’s “proper place” in the domestic sphere, we have learned (and continue to learn), can be understood in manifold, often contradictory ways that understands the home as an oppressive regime that confines women; a relational, affective network among women that provides important nurture; a place set apart from the corruption of the capitalist world; an architectural, material space that is in itself a product and tool of capitalism, even a wellspring of empire. It is these diverse, inconsistent ideas regarding women’s “proper place” that this class investigates in American women’s writing, an activity that the nineteenth century in particular associated with the genre of the domestic or sentimental novel. How and with whom do the protagonists authored by women themselves move in and out of their homes? What roles do their social positions, different class, racial, and marital status play? What different readings emerge when we conceive of women’s “separate sphere,” i.e. the home, as either patriarchal prison; same-sex affective network; or architectural, material site? And, lastly, in what ways does women’s “separate sphere” still haunt female authors of the 20th century? These are some of the questions that this class will seek to answer.

Please purchase the following novels, which are listed in the chronological order of discussion: Louisa May Alcott’s Work: A Story of Experience (1859); Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig, or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859; preferably the version edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.); and, for our twentieth-century “coda,” Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping (1980).

lecturer

Studienbereiche

  • Anglistik
  • Studium generale / Gasthörstudium

SWS
--

Lehrsprache
englisch

Für Gasthörende / Studium generale geöffnet:
Ja

(Stand: 10.02.2026)  |  Kurz-URL:Shortlink: https://uol.de/p28463
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