Uncovering the Widow Figure in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Fritz, Meaghan M.

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-smy0-2c19

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Uncovering the Widow Figure in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

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This dissertation examines the legal, economic, and social transformations experienced by American widowed women from the Salem Witchcraft Trials to the Civil War to expand how scholars of literature, the law, and American history define women’s citizenship prior to suffrage. Emphasizing literature’s importance to nineteenth-century nation-building during the era of forced Indian removal, institutional slavery, and the emerging Women’s Rights Movement, my dissertation demonstrates how authors repeatedly relied on the figure of the widow in fiction and poetry to imagine a more feminized and inclusive Republic. Although scholars theorize the affective registers of grief and mourning in nineteenth-century American literature, the political potential of the widow figure remains largely ignored. My project widens the critical conversation by concentrating less on the widow’s bereavement than on what she gains from such loss: independent legal recognition, absolute sovereignty in the home, and autonomous access to the marketplace. Joining scholars of women’s history and literature such as Mary Beth Norton, Linda Kerber, and Sandra Gustafson, I challenge privileging suffrage as the foundational moment of American women’s citizenship. My project offers the extralegal autonomy of the widow and her adaptations in literature as profound iterations of independent women’s citizenship in early- and nineteenth-century America.

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