Cult Of True Womanhood Research Articles

The Cult of True Womanhood in Harriet Jacobs’ Narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

The Cult of True Womanhood in Harriet Jacobs’ Narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

AMBIVALENCE IN GENDER PORTRAYALS IN GOOSEBUMPS (2015) AND GOOSEBUMPS: HAUNTED HALLOWEEN (2018)

The horror genre is notorious for sexist depictions of female heroines, which heavily imposes traditional gender stereotypes. This paper analyses Goosebumps (2015) and Goosebumps: Haunted Halloween (2018), which are the movie adaptations of R.L Stine’s horror book series. It aims to see the possibility of the female heroines and male heroes to defy conventional gender stereotypes and determine the female heroines’ agency as horror movies tend to objectify the female characters. This paper uses the Cult of True Womanhood (Welter, 1966), Male Gender Role Identity (Pleck, 1981) and representation theory (Hall, 1997) to analyse the dialogues and interaction of the characters, and the agencies of the female heroines in the two movies. This research shows the apparent ambivalence portrayals as the text often contradicts the characters’ depiction in the earlier part of the film and the ending. In the beginning of the movies, the female heroines are depicted as empowered and independent, but as the story progresses, they become characters that need male heroes’ help and support to overcome problems.

Reorienting “Lost” Time: Reading Godey’s Lady’s Book in the American Civil War

Reorienting “Lost” Time: Reading Godey’s Lady’s Book in the American Civil War Charlotte Hand (bio) Since Frank Luther Mott disparaged Godey’s Lady’s Book, the most influential women’s magazine of the American antebellum period, for being “absolutely untouched by the great conflict” that was the American Civil War, scholars have often claimed that the publication was apolitical during the sectional crisis.1 Susan Belasco, for one, argues that Sarah Hale, Godey’s editor from 1837 to 1877, “made no reference to the Civil War throughout the years of the conflict.”2 Scholars who have acknowledged the political impulse of Godey’s during the sectional tensions nonetheless suggest that the magazine only responded indirectly to them, never actually addressing partisan politics. Joseph Michael Sommers claims that in the years before the Civil War. Hale “appropriated seemingly innocuous sentimental modes and devices already present in the magazine” to rally her female readers against the secession of the southern states from the Republic.3 Despite recognizing Hale’s obvious call for national unity in her promotion of Thanksgiving in Godey’s, Patricia Okker writes off this effort for political peace as “idealistic and naïve.”4 It should be noted, too, that neither of these scholars examined Godey’s political effort during the Civil War. Yet the studies of Sommers and Okker demonstrate that Godey’s was very much concerned with the sectional tensions. It is high time, then, to re-examine Mott’s influential claim. These scholars’ dismissal of Godey’s participation in the partisan politics of the Civil War, whether as a refusal or as an oblique and thus politically ineffectual campaign, may be traced to two intersecting critical inclinations. First, an understanding of the Civil War as a battle between Union and Confederate forces over ideological differences and, eventually, slavery. Second, a rigid interpretation of the ideology of separate spheres as a spatial phenomenon. A predominant framework in criticism of nineteenth-century American literature during the mid-1960s, the ideology of separate spheres, [End Page 172] which determined that the proper roles of women and men were within the private and public domains respectively, has retained a spatial focus despite extensive revisions since. The metaphor of the separate spheres has also continued to occupy discussions on the ideology’s counterpart, the Cult of True Womanhood, an idealized image of the wife and mother as a domestic Madonna, and which set the social, aesthetic and political terms for the definition and performance of white middle-class womanhood. Indeed, modern scholars who have argued that the reality of white middle-class American women was vastly different from these ideologies that they themselves subscribed to—that the private sphere of white middle-class womanhood often converged with the public realm—relied on a spatial conception of these ideologies to demonstrate their claim.5 The spatial focus of their critique of these gender ideologies has led scholars to overlook Godey’s political attempt to ease sectional tensions. According to these strands of scholarship, Godey’s had refused to let its female readers venture into the male sphere of partisan politics and war—in other words, to keep the respective spheres of men and women separate, Godey’s had remained spatially removed from the Civil War. The current trajectory of nineteenth-century American studies does little to promote a re-examination of this assessment. Rightly recognizing that issues of race, sexuality, class, religion and other variables complicate the paradigm of the separate spheres, scholars of American studies have sought to move beyond a binary understanding of nineteenth-century America, rendering the ideology of separate spheres and True Womanhood obsolete concepts in the process. Consequently, publications like Godey’s that appear to promote the rigid gender demarcation of nineteenth-century American society that were aimed at white middle-class and elite women have garnered little critical interest from modern scholars. Yet Godey’s popularity demonstrates that the concept of separate spheres was influential in nineteenth-century middle-class society, even if it did not effectively condition gendered behaviors. It seems premature, then, to disregard these gender ideologies. As this essay will show, revisiting these ideologies sheds light on a critical battle that...

"Cult of True Womanhood" and American Catholic Sisters: An Example of Creative Subversion

Barbara Welter concludes her pathbreaking article, “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820-1860,” by declaring that “[Various forces in their lives] … called forth responses from woman, which differed from those she was trained to believe were hers by nature and divine decree. The very perfection of True Womanhood, moreover, carried within itself the seeds of its own destruction. For if woman was so very little less than the angels, she should surely take a more active part in running the world, especially since men were making such a hash of things” [174]. Traditionally, in both Welter’s original work and the many efforts that have subsequently followed, the living out of “True Womanhood” and the creative subversion it unintentionally inspired have been understood almost exclusively in either secular or Protestant contexts. This article explores the role of Catholic education by sisters in both reinforcing and undermining Victorian gender roles, and specifically analyzes the contributions of Catholic women religious to the complex and subversive process that Welter suggested. It analyzes the cultural and religious tensions that characterized nineteenth-century Catholic women’s education, as well as the women’s agency that, however inadvertently, it came to empower.

Gender Ambiguity, Domesticity and The Public Space: The Case of Wilkie Collins’s <i>The Woman in White</i>

Starting from Linda Brannon’s “the Doctrine of Two Spheres” (Brannon 2004) and Barbara Welter’s “the Cult of True Womanhood” (Welter 2000), the contribution aims at analyzing how the “Doctrine of Two Spheres” is clearly visible in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859), where the main protagonists’ personalities and behaviors reveal both the preservation and subversion of the separate spheres ideology. The novel is shaped around the dichotomy between two half-sisters, that embody two contrasting forms of femininity. Laura epitomizes the Angel in the House, Marian, by contrast is a liminal figure, characterized by gender ambiguity. She is masculine in her physical appearance and in her behaviors. She constantly moves between gender roles and between the public and domestic space. Similarly, the two male protagonists of the novel, Walter and Count Fosco, are at the antipodes of each other. Walter, after a ‘bildung journey’ towards masculinity, acquires the typical masculine attributes of a Victorian man. Count Fosco, like Marian, is characterized by gender ambiguity. He moves between gender roles, disclosing feminine features and cherishing ladylike habits. In the end, Fosco and Marian’s gender ambiguity is punished with death: death by assassination for the villain, symbolic and social death for Marian the spinster, thus re-establishing Victorian gender roles.

"A Jewish Maestra and a Lady too": Reflections on Femininity in the Career of Ethel Stark

Ethel Stark (1910–2012) was one of the most important conductors and concert violinists in Canada in the Twentieth century. This article highlights how an Austro-Canadian Jewish woman who lived outside the constraints of conventional domesticity, both navigated through and defied the ideals of the “Cult of True Womanhood” and spearheads a movement of feminism in music. I argue that Stark’s exposure to Jewish cultural traditions of social justice and womanhood in her childhood formed a critical dimension of her feminist activism later in her life, and in particular in the founding of The Montreal Women’s Symphony Orchestra (1940).

(Un)Dress in Southworth & Hawes’ Daguerreotype Portraits: Clytie, Proserpine, and Antebellum Boston Women

Young America: The Daguerreotypes of Southworth & Hawes (2005) is a monumental exhibition catalogue showcasing the work of Albert Sands Southworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes. Together the partners established a renowned daguerreotype studio in mid-nineteenth-century Boston that catered to the city’s bourgeoisie. This paper seeks to unravel the mystery of dozens of daguerreotypes found in Young America, in which elite Boston women appear to be nearly nude. The unidentified women stand in stark contrast to the carefully concealed bodies of Southworth & Hawes’ other female subjects. Why would they expose themselves in such a manner before the camera’s lens? This paper attributes the women’s state of (un)dress to their deliberate emulation of two sculptures in the classical tradition: Clytie, a marble bust dating to antiquity, and Proserpine, a mid-nineteenth-century marble bust by American neoclassical sculptor Hiram Powers. This argument first reveals how a general “classical statue” aesthetic prevailed for women’s deportment in antebellum America, then demonstrates that the busts of Clytie and Proserpine had special significance as icons of white, elite female beauty in the period. Next, this paper makes the case that Southworth & Hawes devised a special style of photography deriving from their own daguerreotypes of the two statues, in which the women’s off-shoulder drapery was deliberately obscured allowing their female clientele to pose in the guise of these famous statues. The paper concludes by arguing that the women shown in these images could pose in this style without contravening societal norms, as these mythological figures were construed by women and men in the period to reflect the central precepts of the mid-nineteenth-century “Cult of True Womanhood.” Moreover, the busts offered sartorial models that reinforced standards of female dress as they related to class and privilege. By baring their flawless, white skin, however, the women positioned themselves at the crux of contentious beliefs about race in a deeply divided nation prior to the American Civil War.

Moral and Manners of Flappers (New Woman) in F. Scott Fitzgerald Works

Flapper's phenomenon appeared in the 1920s in line with the feminist achievement on women's suffrage. Industrialism opened the possibility for vistas of young American generations at that time to undergo a good member of changes both in moral and manners. The characteristics of flappers are reflected in literary works by Fitzgerald, an American famous novelist. In achieving the objective of this research, a qualitative method is applied by the way of library research - collecting data from both primary and secondary sources. The former, This Side of Paradise (1919), a novel telling about the young generation, The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender is The Night, both describing the maturity of the flappers. The outcome of the research proves that there is a similarity, in moral and manners, between the flappers in Fitzgerald's fictions and those in reality during the 1920s. The new values differed from the old ones which were maintained by the cult of true womanhood, especially in concern with those young generations performances, manners, and morals. The media encouraged the development of the new values. There is also a sense of paradox: on one hand Fitzgerald implicitly tended to spread out the moral and manners of flappers, but on the other hand, he criticizes them.

The Home and the Asylum. Antebellum Representations of True Womanhood in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables

This paper presents an analysis of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novels The Scarlet Letter and The House of Seven Gables regarding his depiction of the nineteenth-century ideals of femininity: the cult of true womanhood and domesticity. Drawing primarily on original material, it will be shown that emerging nineteenth-century psychiatry – asylum medicine – has strongly corroborated American ideals of femininity and their presumably restorative influence in cases of mental derangement. Hawthorne’s portrayals of women and madmen negotiate antebellum concepts of femininity and psychiatry, juxtapose the asylum against the home, and emphasize the author’s embeddedness in nineteenth-century medico-psychological theories.

Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women by Brittney C. Cooper

Reviewed by: Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women by Brittney C. Cooper Lilian Calles Barger (bio) Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women. By Brittney C. Cooper. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017. Pp. 208. $95.00 cloth; $19.95 paper; $14.95 ebook) Beyond Respectability by Brittney C. Cooper focuses on "race women" in the decades between 1890 and the 1970s, and challenges the view that these women built a straightjacket of respectability and a culture of dissemblance. Cooper considers the clubwomen of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), Mary Church Terrell and Fannie Barrier Williams, and identifies them as the first generation of self-consciously black women public intellectuals. Moving within the public sphere of racial uplift, they theorized the meaning and possibilities of the black woman's body and encouraged the production of race literature. They offered a challenging intersectional voice to the race men narrative expressed in the W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington ideological binary. While not denying the problems of respectability politics, Cooper reinterprets it as primarily an assertion of "undisputed dignity" challenging the long-standing white "cult of true womanhood" (p. 13). Considering the NACW as a "school of thought," providing the theoretical and political foundations for public race women, Cooper changes the focus from what black women did through the NACW to what they said (p. 16). In four lively written chapters, the author constructs an intellectual [End Page 554] genealogy and surveys the intellectual geography of race women from their speeches, essays, and memoirs. Beginning with the intellectual architects Williams and Terrell, she demonstrates how the NACW went beyond a social welfare organization to constructing ideas for addressing the "civic unknowability" of black women to claim their place as "citizen-women" (pp. 37, 43). Because they suffered social and political erasure through rape and violence, Williams sought to establish the legitimacy and public possibilities for African American women. In the club's "organized anxiety" of shared experience and consciousness of their subordinated position, these thinkers saw a deep link between discourse and embodiment in the black public sphere to which they contributed (p. 33). Through speaking, writing, and political protest Terrell, a protégé of Frederick Douglass, offered a conceptual bridge of "dignified agitation" from earlier uplift politics to the Civil Rights Movement (p. 58). Her memoir Colored Woman in a White World (1940) displays an early sustained reflection on race and gender, lived pain and pleasure, and the presence and absence of black women in the dominant narrative. By using her ability to pass as white, she confronted racial prejudice by drawing attention to her black identity and womanly body in an act of political protest. By making their historically denied bodies visible and exercising their voice Williams and Terrell asserted their public presence. The chapter that places activist and intellectual Pauli Murray within the genealogy of "race women," a concept which remains largely undefined, is less persuasive and appears discontinuous with the NACW school of thought in the previous chapters. Murray's politics were in line with a broad civil rights movement that went beyond race to gender and sex as fluid categories—a position unrecognizable to William and Terrell who asserted the dignity of black womanhood. As a multi-racial female experiencing life-long doubt about her gender identity, Murray was torn about identifying as black or as a woman. As a singular thinker who never resolved her basic identity conflict, she navigated the "disciplining forces of racial heteronormativity" to [End Page 555] engage in her distinct one-person activism of behalf of multiple social movements (p. 106). The designation "race woman" for Murray, a liberal individualist, is ill-fitting. Greater exploration of the thought of Anna Arnold Hedgeman, who along with the black feminist of the 1960s challenged the race man leadership model in the final chapter, would have enriched the text. Beyond Respectability remains an important contribution to growing field of black women's intellectual history and is sure to inspire further inquiry. Cooper has done a great service in bringing to light and identifying the unrecognized intellectual contributions of the NACW school in their theorizing about the political...

Because of the Places She Had to Go

This article uses archival evidence about the Women's Press Club of Pittsburgh, which is the second-oldest women's press club in the United States that has retained its single-gender status, to examine the ways that women's press clubs helped newswomen of the late nineteenth century bend gender roles while tweaking public perceptions of appropriate women's work. Archival evidence shows that nineteenth-century women journalists used the public image of womanhood espoused by the Cult of Domesticity or Cult of True Womanhood to reinforce their right to stand as representatives of women as a whole while their public work as journalists constantly challenged and, eventually, undermined that very same image of femininity.

Good manners and high heels: newspaper coverage of South Carolina’s first female governor

ABSTRACTThis study analyses newspaper articles from South Carolina’s largest newspaper – The State – in order to determine its portrayal of the state’s first female governor, Nikki Haley. Analysis of 138 articles, which were drawn from the first 100 days of the two terms that Haley has served as governor, reflected themes from the cult of true womanhood. Haley was first celebrated as the harbinger of moral change in the political landscape of South Carolina only to be positioned in a contentious space between manhood and femininity by her second term. Her husband’s new role as first gentleman of South Carolina was portrayed on a smaller scale but in a similar vein, one that demonstrated a publication’s attempts to negotiate changing gender roles.

Margaret Bayard Smith’s 1809 Journey to Monticello and Montpelier: The Politics of Performance in the Early Republic

Historians have long valued Margaret Bayard Smith’s famed 1809 account of her trip to Monticello and Montpelier for its descriptions of the houses and of Thomas Jefferson and James and Dolley Madison. This essay argues that the descriptions function as what Cynthia A. Kierner calls “a domestic performance”—a performance by a woman or women that showcases private virtues for public uses. Such an analytic lens reveals the less-than-obvious political meanings of the travel account. In each setting, Margaret also encountered domestic performances to match her own. Understanding Margaret’s narrative as a domestic performance also highlights the use of a particularly feminine vernacular of domesticity and emotion, the development of which most historians place later in the century. Long before the advent of the “Cult of True Womanhood,” she and other Washington women used this vernacular for political reasons. With this language of domesticity, Margaret provided an evaluation of Jefferson’s political legacy that was a message of reassurance to an uncertain citizenry. Her subsequent portrait of Dolley Madison at home at Montpelier signaled that though a new family was ascending to power, the “house” of the government was safe.

Lot's Wife in the Novels of Mary Anne Sadlier

The biblical figure of Lot’s wife in the novels of Mary Anne Sadlier functions typologically, assigning the role of Lot’s wife to both men and women. This essay explores how such an interpretative move functioned to reverse the charges leveled against Catholic men by muscular Christianity and Catholic women by the Protestant Cult of True Womanhood. Sadlier’s audience was the burgeoning Irish American immigrant community, but the ethnically porous character of Sadlier’s sources of inspiration for that community might be attested by her family’s Catholic catechetical publishing company’s reprint of Cardinal Wiseman’s Fabiola in the United States a mere two years after its initial publication in Britain and by her numerous translations from the French. The choice of a typological figure with a widely acknowledged perceived historical basis helped Sadlier to navigate between progressive and conservative Catholic biblical interpretation contemporary to her writing. Typology also facilitated Sadlier’s participation in the Catholic polemics against anti-Catholic, nativist literature by assimilating a negative biblical exemplar to biblically devoted Protestants.

Homelands: How Women Made the West (review)

Reviewed by: Homelands: How Women Made the West Sue Armitage Homelands: How Women Made the West. By Virginia Scharff and Carolyn Brucken. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. 170 pages, $24.95. It seems that western women's history has been trapped by domesticity. Thanks to the images of Ma Ingalls and all those other fictional mothers, we have come to imagine western women always in the house, away from the "real" action—and much of women's history has seemed to confirm this image. The first widely used concept in western women's history, the Cult of True Womanhood, awkwardly transported the domestic ideal for middle-class urban and eastern women to the West. The influential work of Annette Kolodny extended the term, but only to the garden fence. Glenda Riley used domesticity so widely as the common denominator for western women that race, class, and region dwindled in significance. Later uses of domesticity, as in Brigitte Georgi-Findlay's The Frontiers of Women's Writing (1996) were again imported, this time from international feminist scholars trying to crack the masculine bias in the study of British imperialism. As this quick survey suggests, it is high time for western women to break the restraints, a task that Virginia Scharff and Carolyn Brucken undertake with gusto, literally redefining the word home to mean the entire process of occupying, claiming, and defending land. In one interpretation, this is simply [End Page 439] Patricia Limerick's contest for property and profit dressed up in gender terms. But in another sense, the redefinition moves women to the center of western history, for Scharff and Brucken are certainly right to say that, seen through this lens, the story of the West, is "a story of women creating and claiming home places" (1). Their insight feels absolutely true; the problem is what to do with it. Scharff and Brucken suggest a solution as radical as their redefinition: scrapping the framework of linear national history and envisaging a history of varied, often unconnected homeplaces stretching far back to before European conquest and extending forward into the present. To illustrate what this might mean, they offer three essays on the history of women's creation of homeplaces in three very different environments: northern New Mexico, Denver and the Rocky Mountain Front Range, and Puget Sound in the Pacific Northwest. The three histories are briskly undertaken, with a clear focus on women of many ethnicities adapting to new environments and shaping them—active, creative women, not the passive or trivial stereotypes of "old" western history. Each of the three sections has its own thematic emphasis: in northern New Mexico, the convergence of cultures; in Colorado, the interaction of women and transportation; in Puget Sound, women and water. This is an intriguing thesis, but Homelands does not explore it as fully as it deserves. This beautifully produced book is the companion volume to a woman-focused exhibit at the Autry National Museum in Los Angeles, so of necessity it is short and popular, and the exhibit, one assumes, can only offer a sketch of the larger argument. It left me interested, but asking, "What about culture? politics? economics?" and also, of course, "What does it mean to make the West, or for that matter, anywhere else?" Sue Armitage Washington State University, Pullman Copyright © 2011 The Western Literature Association

Sinking "Like a Corpse" or Living the "Soul's Full Desire": Shaker Women in Fiction and History

Th is article examines the disparity between fi ctional and historical accounts of Shaker women. Th e fi ction, infl uenced by pervading social beliefs like the cult of true womanhood, usually portrays a woman who becomes dissatisfi ed with her Shaker life, concluding that it is a sort of living death that isolates her from love, marriage, and motherhood. Historical records reveal independent and fulfi lled women who became Shakers for religious reasons but also for secular opportunities unknown in the outside world, including companionship, refuge from sexual predation, and a chance for professional or governmental fulfi llment . When well-read Americans in the 1850s heard the name Shakers, strange images arose in their minds: reclusive religious zealots, fanatical whirling dervishes, or cold and emotionless adherents to an outlandish faith. For the next one hundred fi fty years readers of fi ction about the Shakers would not have taken serious exception to these images, unless they had actually become acquainted with some real Shakers, who seldom resembled their fi ctional counterparts. By the 1790s the historical Shakers, some twenty years after arriving in America with their founder Ann Lee, had developed a system of communal living that enabled them to establish in the next half cen- tury nearly twenty fl ourishing communitarian villages from New England through Ohio to Kentucky. Novels and short stories about Shaker life seldom describe the success of these communities, focusing instead on members who felt trapped and frustrated. Th ese stories, examined in the fi rst third of this essay, particularly distorted the image of the Shaker woman by showing how Shakerism extinguishes her soul, if not her life, how its faith and customs restrict her to an isolated village life, and how it denies her the fulfi llment of love and motherhood. Historical documents, described in the last two-thirds of this study, contradict most of the published fi ction, specifi cally revealing that Shaker women seldom remained interned in an isolated village, that they

Sinking “Like a Corpse” or Living the “Soul’s Full Desire”: Shaker Women in Fiction and History

Abstract This article examines the disparity between fictional and historical accounts of Shaker women. Th e fiction, influenced by pervading social beliefs like the cult of true womanhood, usually portrays a woman who becomes dissatisfied with her Shaker life, concluding that it is a sort of living death that isolates her from love, marriage, and motherhood. Historical records reveal independent and fulfilled women who became Shakers for religious reasons but also for secular opportunities unknown in the outside world, including companionship, refuge from sexual predation, and a chance for professional or governmental fulfillment.

Comparing Sexual Harassment Subtypes Among Black and White Women by Military Rank: Double Jeopardy, the Jezebel, and the Cult of True Womanhood

Drawing upon feminist analyses of double jeopardy and the cult of true womanhood, we examine race, rank, sexual harassment frequency, and psychological distress for Black and White female military personnel ( N = 7,714). Results indicated that White women reported more overall sexual harassment, gender harassment, and crude behavior, whereas Black women reported more unwanted sexual attention and sexual coercion; enlisted women reported higher rates of each subtype than officers. Black enlistees reported more sexual coercion than White enlistees, and enlistees reported more than officers, but there were no racial differences across officers. Black women reported more psychological distress following gender harassment than White women, and enlisted women reported more distress following gender harassment, unwanted sexual attention, and sexual coercion than officers. Although Black officers were less distressed at low levels of sexual coercion, as coercion became more frequent, their distress increased significantly, and at high levels, all groups were similarly distressed.

“A woman — white — to be”

The essay explores the issue of Emily Dickinson’s participation in the ongoing social debate on subjectivity and gender in nineteenth-century America. This was a pivotal time for middle-class women who, as subjects and agents of the Cult of True Womanhood, a gender-related ideology dominating the era, had to meet contradictory expectations to maintain their social status. Dickinson, despite her habitual withdrawal from public life, appears to be well-informed about these and other issues of social reform. Although she has been charged as elitist and insensitive to disadvantaged social groups, I will argue that Dickinson displays a keen understanding of the problematics of (dis)advantage, and power. While the poet may have been less concerned with the plight of slaves or immigrants, she nevertheless closely scrutinizes the seemingly privileged class of white middle-class American women. I hope to show through the analysis of some of her poems, most importantly “A Charm invests a face” (Fr 430), how Dickinson critiques the image of the True Woman through the rhetorical means of her unique language and how she ultimately reveals the vulnerability and illusory nature of the privileges enjoyed by this class of women.

Identity Politics of the Captivity Narrative after 1848 by Andrea Tinnemeyer

3 0 8 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e F a l l 2 0 0 7 cusses ethnic identities in the context of Mormonism and the shifts in this focus as the church’s proselytizing brought its earlier philosophy into conflict with changing populations. Mary Jane O’Donnell recounts a more recent development— the changing demographics and culture of the Islamic Center of Southern California and the Center’s role in establishing an “American Islamic identity.” While all of these essays are engaging, the volume as a whole does not add much to our knowledge of the broader conflicts of race and religion in the American West. In fact, although both race and religion are addressed in the introduction, the editors do not offer any definition of their West. None of the essayists address the powerful influence of Protestantism on the concept of Manifest Destiny that influenced so profoundly the shaping of the West— including the role of race (white Euro-American capitalists) and religion (white Protestant conservatives) in the region. Nor does the volume address the role of American Protestantism in the attempts to eliminate and/or assimilate America’s Indians, surely a key element in the history of race and religion in the broader American West. Still, the student of the literary West who is particularly interested in the development of the urban West or the history of race and/or religion in the (far) Southwest will find useful background information in these accounts of encounters, racial and religious, in the West. Identity Politics of the Captivity Narrative after 1848. By Andrea Tinnemeyer. Lin coln : U n iversity o f N eb rask a Press, 2006. 157 pages, $39.95. Reviewed by Marissa López U niversity of C alifornia, Los A ngeles Andrea Tmnemeyer’s The Identity Politics of the Captivity Narrative after 1848 explores the US-Mexican War’s restructuring of class, race, and gender in the United States. This book is not so much about the captivity narrative as a genre as about the identity politics it reflects. Tinnemeyer argues for the significance of the war to the national imaginary by establishing a connection between it and the American Revolution of 1776. Both, she argues, work through national growing pains via narratives of captivity. Tinnemeyer positions her project as an evolution of the captivity narrative but ultimately falls short of her mark. Though she makes several key insights about race, class, and gender in post-1848 U S culture, she has little to add to the generic discussion. The book’s great strengths are its close readings of understudied materials pertaining to an understudied topic. The US-Mexican War radically altered the United States’ self-perception, as its size more than doubled and its citi­ zenry rapidly changed. In contrast to its historical significance, there is a dearth B o o k R e v ie w s 3 0 9 of literary scholarship about the war. Tinnemeyer makes a valuable contribution to the field with perceptive analyses and creative archival work. Her first chapter revitalizes María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s Who Would Have Thought It1 (1872), reading it against newspaper and novelistic accounts of the real-life captivity of Olive Oatman. Ruiz de Burton, Tinnemeyer argues, revises the captivity genre from one that preserves East Coast whiteness to one that calls whiteness into question via geographical and transnational shifts. Tinnemeyer next treats interracial marriage as a romance of Manifest Destiny with readings of Timothy Flint’s Francis Berrian (1826) and Jovita González and Eve Raleigh’s Caballero (193 7). Captivity here is the Cult of True Womanhood, and the chapter contends that racialized citizenship, homoeroticism, and pulp fiction redefined the gender of the national symbolic. The body as national symbol is the topic of chapter 3, which deals with war songs and how anxi­ ety about the changing face of the United States is enacted through lyrical disfigurations of the Mexican male body. In chapter 4, the body as symbol is destabilized. Tinnemeyer argues that cross-dressing female soldiers in Ned Buntline’s...