New American Studies Journal: A Forum

Education, Experience, and Exchange: The Hull House Women, an International Network, and Chicago’s Immigrant Population

2023-08-10T16:55:04+00:00

This paper explores the creation and purpose of Chicago’s Hull House. It provides an overview of volunteer work by women in the US and addresses the European influence on Jane Addams’s idea for Hull House and the various educational aspects and approaches used by the Hull House educators.

Founded, funded, and administered by women, the Hull House settlement is shown as a prime example of the nascent spirit of American volunteerism that epitomized that era. Women were able to participate in the settlement because of the evolving perception of their role in society. It was possible to devote one’s life to charity and not to marriage and child-raising. The force of the Hull House residents was to combine their individual skills and strengths to work as a united group of very dynamic and talented women. Education, experience, and exchange were the three pillars of their very successful settlement home. In their efforts to reform and better the living conditions in the rundown Chicago neighborhood, the Hull House women became involved in politics and policymaking. Thereby, they began to have a voice which became louder and louder and could not be silenced.

A Response to “Experience, Exchange, and Education: The Hull House Women, an International Network, and Chicago’s Immigrant Population,” by Alice Bailey Cheylan

2023-08-11T08:37:01+00:00

A Response to “Experience, Exchange, and Education: The Hull House Women, an International Network, and Chicago’s Immigrant Population,” by Alice Bailey Cheylan

Serving in the Household and the Imagination: The Brontës, Alcott, and the Interconnected Roles of a Neglected “Transatlantic” Female Figure

2023-08-11T08:41:44+00:00

Tabitha Aykroyd, Martha Brown, Nancy and Sarah Garrs were just a few of the very many girls and women working as domestic servants in early Victorian Britain. The main purpose of this article is to analyze the precise context and conditions in which they were employed in Haworth Parsonage, where the Brontë sisters lived for most of their lives (1820–1855), and the influence that they had on the well-being of this famous family and on the imagination and literary activity of the sisters. Aspects connected with the following will be explored and problematized: the value and respect that the Brontës attributed to or showed these domestic laborers and their work, including sharing in their tasks and duties; brief but useful connections of these figures with the sisters’ own professional activities as middle-class women (namely, when serving as teachers and governesses themselves); and also comparison with some relevant literary representations of the figure and role of the “female servant” in the Brontës’ novels. A complementary purpose is of a more transatlantic nature: to compare their earlier British domestic context with Louisa May Alcott’s later American one, and their literary representations of the female servant with Alcott’s own extensive treatment of that neglected figure in some of her fictional works. The justification for this comparison does not lie so much in the known influence that the works written by the Brontës, in particular Charlotte’s, had on Alcott, but more in their sharing of very similar concerns as regards this topic, in spite of very specific (transatlantic) differences that can be revealing of their respective attitude towards servitude.

A Response to “Serving in the Household and the Imagination: The Brontës, Alcott and the Interconnected Roles of a Neglected ‘Transatlantic’ Female Figure,” by Paula Guimarães

2023-08-11T08:49:57+00:00

A Response to “Serving in the Household and the Imagination: The Brontës, Alcott and the Interconnected Roles of a Neglected ‘Transatlantic’ Female Figure,” by Paula Guimarães

Katrina Trask: The Gilded Age of Philanthropy

2023-08-15T07:44:43+00:00

Katrina Trask (1853-1922) is best known for founding—both financially and idealistically—Yaddo, the artist retreat located in Saratoga Springs, New York. Spencer and Katrina Trask’s sense of service and philanthropy was informed by her love for Arthurian legends and the medieval notion of patronage, wherein the wealthy fund and support artists and writers. Trask devoted her life to serving, so much so that her own literary career has become a footnote to her charity. She began her writing career after the loss of her four young children, and over the span of her lifetime wrote essays, plays, poetry, and novels—in addition to being a prolific chronicler of events. Historical and scholarly attention on Trask should be extended beyond references to her wealth to include her literary accomplishments, not as a mere footnote but rather as an independent aspect of her life worthy of its own critical attention. In this essay, I argue that the legends of King Arthur and Faust and the ethics associated therewith directly inform Katrina Trask’s literary works and the larger notion of service throughout her lifetime.

A Response to “Katrina Trask: The Gilded Age of Philanthropy,” by Khristeena Lute

2023-08-15T07:52:32+00:00

A Response to “Katrina Trask: The Gilded Age of Philanthropy,” by Khristeena Lute

“Grief became my friend, my work:” Mary Todd Lincoln’s Uneasy Union with Memory in LeAnne Howe’s SAVAGE CONVERSATIONS (2019)

2023-08-11T08:55:29+00:00

This essay examines the politics of service vested in the First Lady role and her affective labors by turning to a contemporary fictional representation of Mary Todd Lincoln. In Savage Conversations (2019), LeAnne Howe considers issues involving US national memory, White womanhood, and settler colonial violence. The play imagines Lincoln’s insanity episode in the Bellevue asylum in the 1870s, where, as Lincoln told her doctor, an “Indian” visited her every night, scalping her and wiring her eyelids open. By outlining Mary’s performance of caring widow and her petitioning for compensation for her public service, Howe reveals Mary’s complicity in the Lincoln presidency’s settler violence. The play recalibrates the gendered renditions of (public) service inherent to the narratives of mourning, motherhood, and insanity tied to Mary’s persona and shows the flip side of the care narrative, connecting the long 19^th century to the First Lady persona of the present.

A Response to “Grief became my friend, my work:” Mary Todd Lincoln’s Uneasy Union with Memory in LeAnne Howe’s SAVAGE CONVERSATIONS (2019), by Stefanie Schäfer

2023-08-11T08:59:27+00:00

A Response to “Grief became my friend, my work:” Mary Todd Lincoln’s Uneasy Union with Memory in LeAnne Howe’s Savage Conversations (2019), by Stefanie Schäfer

Contemplating Women’s Imperial Service: Mabel Bent as Photographer, Travel Writer, and Collector

2023-08-15T06:55:55+00:00

Despite a growing body of literature on women’s roles within the British Empire as settlers, teachers, nurses, missionaries, activists, and ‘adventuresses,’ their contribution to Victorian knowledge production remains underexamined. In particular, the labor of married women has often been subsumed under their husband’s work and, as a result, has largely gone unrecognized. Treating them as emblematic of a shadow archive of married women’s cultural production in the late 19^th century, I interrogate Mabel Bent’s diaries, photographs, and ethnographic collecting strategies to show that she exercised epistemic power through the imperial practices of representation and appropriation. I locate her productive and reproductive work within a complex web of service relationships between herself, the British Empire, and her husband, and show that while Bent related ambiguously to her service, she exploited it to defy gender conventions without risking her reputation.

A Woman’s Work is Never (Un-)Done: A Response to “Contemplating Women’s Imperial Service: Mabel Bent as Photographer, Travel Writer, and Collector,” by Esther Wetzel

2023-08-15T07:33:32+00:00

A Woman’s Work is Never (Un-)Done: A Response to “Contemplating Women’s Imperial Service: Mabel Bent as Photographer, Travel Writer, and Collector,” by Esther Wetzel

General Introduction to Issue 74

2023-08-29T07:36:55+00:00

The centerpiece of this issue is a set of exchanges on the topic of women’s service in the 19th century. In keeping with this journal’s aim to provide a forum for dialogue, the Intercontinental Cross-Currents Network, represented by Laura-Isabella Heitz, Khristeena Lute, Julia Nitz, Sandra H. Petrulionis, and Esther Wetzel, is pleased to share a collection of essays and responses reflecting long-distance academic conversations that took place during the pandemic. The service provided by many women during the pandemic inspired the theme.

Transatlantic Women at Work: Service in the Long 19th Century

2023-08-22T19:41:47+00:00

This special issue focuses on “Transatlantic Women at Work” in the 19^thcentury, with attention paid specifically to the labor women performed that was deemed by family, community, government, and often the women themselves as “service.” Our introduction briefly describes the six articles and responses included in this issue, and their origins in an online forum in 2021 and 2022, three poems, and one fictional work. The overview of contributions is followed by an attempt at theorizing the understanding and conception of the idea of “service” from a diachronic perspective. This exploration of varying notions and the accompanying politics of “service” is organized in sections as follows: “The Evolving Concept of ‘Service’ in the Long 19^th Century,” “Theorizing: What Is this Thing Called Service,” “The Tradition of ‘Service’ as a White, Middle-Class Notion,” “Women’s Service and Reform,” “Municipal Housekeeping as Service to the Community,” and “Women of Color and ‘Service to Their Race’.” Our examination of 19^th-century conduct books and reform texts by and for women illuminates how evolving notions of service as benevolence was primarily connected to a well-to-do class of White women and conceptualized against a notion of servitude as hard (enumerated) labor associated with poor women and Women of Color. We show how since the beginning of the century Black activists fought against such racial essentialism. However, White service notions lastingly influenced both 19^th-century (segregated) ideas of women’s social roles and 20^th/21^st century women’s historiography that continued to center White concepts of True Womanhood. We conclude by acknowledging that in our own 21^st century, women (especially Women of Color) too often continue in the vicious cycle of being relegated to lower paid and lower status service work, professions which remain lower paid because they are held by women. As we point out, the recent Covid pandemic shed renewed light on this transatlantic reality.

Trees

2023-08-11T09:39:43+00:00

This is a short story by Leanne Phillips inspired by the theme women and notions of service.

Rachlin and Bundschuh: Poems in Dialogue

2023-07-31T02:07:09+00:00

Jessica and Ellen are old friends, living continents apart who met up in Regensburg in May 2022. Upon exiting a circular stairwall of the Old Town Hall, they noticed a bronze nail bent, rusted and lying on the ground. Jessica held it in her open palm and suggested that they each write a poem about the nail. What may appear to contain shades of a Shelleyesque challenge was not a competition at all, but a mutual encouragement to write a poem.

Flirting Through Summer Jobs

2023-07-31T02:01:52+00:00

“Flirting through Summer Jobs,” traces the experiences of an American High School student seeking seasonal employment in Arizona and Alaska.

Writing Black Women’s Mythology: A Conversation with Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton

2023-08-22T06:51:30+00:00

In commemoration of the proclamation of the end of slavery in the United States on June 19, 1865, writer, activist, and performer Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton read from and discussed her memoir Black Chameleon at the 2023 Juneteenth Dialogue hosted by the Chair of American Studies at the University of Münster. The Juneteenth Dialogues are designed to enter into a discussion about systemic racism in the United States and to explore literary responses to the vulnerabilities of Black lives and strategies of (literary) resistance. With Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton, the focus of conversation was on the importance of mythology for Black women in the United States, the potentials of autobiographical writing, and the importance of literature today. Mythology, in Mouton’s work, builds on what Audre Lorde called “biomythography” to combine personal experience, popular culture, history, and received narratives that are part of ancient storytelling traditions. In Mouton’s hands, this becomes a technique for getting closer to some of the complex truths of a past grounded in enslavement. Mouton’s reading from Black Chameleon and the panel discussion that followed are the basis of this interview. It has been edited for clarity. We want to thank the audience of the 2023 Juneteenth Dialogues as well as Dr. Ortwin Lämke and Frederik Köpke from the Studiobühne for providing the space for this event.

Where Is Utopia in a Time of Disaster and Catastrophe?

2023-08-05T18:14:45+00:00

In search of new literary voices that might present an answer to Amitav Ghosh’s 2016 lament on the failure of contemporary literary fiction to find forms that adequately express the multiple challenges of the Anthropocene, I came across a review of Allegra Hyde’s debut novel in the Los Angeles Times. The novel’s title, Eleutheria, was suggestive enough to pique my interest: etymologically, it evokes the concepts of liberty and freedom; geographically, it calls to mind the small island of Eleuthera in the Bahamas that was colonized in the late 1640s by a group of English Puritans known as the Eleutheran Adventurers. Add to this that Willa Marks, the novel’s narrator-protagonist, is a twenty-two-year-old member of Generation Z, the same generation as the students we teach these days, and Eleutheria (2022) becomes a worthy candidate for an American Studies syllabus. What kind of narrative tapestry was the author able to weave out of the materials of history, climate change, and a young generation’s growing frustration with the ecological and political state of the world? I was ready to discuss these and similar questions with a group of students in a seminar on Anglophone Literature in the Anthropocene during the summer semester 2023. Serendipitously, the son of an American colleague and long-time friend studied with Allegra Hyde at Oberlin College, where she is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing. He suggested that she might be willing to discuss her novel with a group of German students. When I issued the invitation to join us digitally for one session, she accepted. I interviewed Hyde, who is also the author of two short story collections – Of This New World (2016) and The Last Catastrophe (2023)– a few days later. The following text is the transcript of that conversation. It has been edited for readability.

The “Thingness” of the American Middlebrow:

2023-05-25T09:10:35+00:00

In this paper, I examine the ways in which Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby both critique and engage with materialism and consumerism as middlebrow texts. Bill Brown’s discussion of the power and meaning of “things” of literature (2003; 16-17) serves as a framework through which I analyze the double “thingness” of the middlebrow as depicted in these novels—that is, the simultaneous investment in and critique of consumer objects. To that end, I analyze both the print culture histories and content of Blondes (which is widely considered a middlebrow text in academic scholarship) in conversation with Gatsby (which is not always thought of as a middlebrow text). I argue that, rather than view middlebrow within a high/low brow paradigm, we should instead consider the ways in which the middlebrow operates with and within mass consumer culture as well as provides a critique of that culture. Because the American middlebrow has a distinct socioeconomic history, I demonstrate how these novels also grapple with the “thingness” of American identity and the Americanness of “things” by centering the protagonists’ engagement with material objects in the construction of their identities. Gatsby and Blondes demonstrate the middlebrow American quality of things through their narrative content, and the novels’ histories as print objects reflect their circulation as commercial things themselves.

This article challenges understandings of the “middlebrow” as a genre unto itself by examining the historical situatedness of the term and its evolving definitions. This article also invites renewed conversation around the middlebrow by proposing a new perspective and an alternative approach to the understanding of middlebrow literature. I argue that these novels present an ideal re-entry into discussion of the middlebrow because of their disparate print culture histories and the cultural capital (or lack thereof) they signify in the present day. This article thus traces the print histories of these two novels alongside analyses of their reception histories and critiques the concept of a middlebrow literature, turning again to contradictory definitions of the term to suggest a more fluid understanding of the middlebrow in scholarship should be able to account both for the continuing appeal of early twentieth-century middlebrow literature and the ways in which the middlebrow itself as an aspirational aesthetic and consumerist ethic has evolved and is ubiquitous in the twenty-first century.

Mary McCarthy and the Genealogy of Progressive Liberalism

2023-07-31T00:23:47+00:00

Three decades after graduating from Vassar, in 1963, McCarthy published her bestselling novel The Group – a phenomenal commercial success that brought her fame, wealth, and plenty of scorn from her fellow New York intellectuals. In The Group, she revisits the site of her political and aesthetic awakening, Vassar College, by focusing on the lives of eight – or, at closer counting, nine – Vassar girls, a group of friends from the class of ‘33, who have just graduated, and now are off to put their Vassar-bred ambitions into practice, or not. At first sight, the novel is not concerned with politics. Yet indirectly, it reinterprets and reevaluates the liberalism of the 1930s. And it does so, curiously, by hanging on, in some crucial ways, to the model function of Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy, though what it appropriates from Dos Passos no longer corresponds to the young McCarthy’s enthusiasm of the year 1933.

My Life in American Studies – Memories and Expectations

2023-07-31T00:03:20+00:00

I am now in that phase of life when old people like me tend to reminisce and give account. Since my long academic life was committed to American Studies, I wondered how this came about, and although I am aware of the inevitable mix between coincidence and symbolic self-construction, I believe that my career was rooted in certain moments of experience: a seminar on Melville, the physical exposure to “America,” and the significance America had for me from childhood on. I also believe that a temperamental affinity to an idea of democracy built on communication led me to embrace the democratic belief that is at the core of American Studies. At the same time, my own process of disillusionment ran parallel to the critical redefinition of American Studies that has characterized the development of the field during the last forty years or so. In what follows, I have tried to reflect on my original enthusiasm, and on where I stand now, in an effort to be realistic and optimistic at the same time.