The Woman Question: Early Feminism and 19th Century Transatlantic Literature

Catalog description

This course will examine the issue properly known as the Woman Question through some of the major works of 19th-century literature. Because the philosophical and political debates concerning Woman's role preoccupied not only 19th-century America but also Victorian Britain, we will consider American and British discussions as part of a transatlantic conversation. The course begins with early Victorian literature, moving across the Atlantic to the 1840s and 50s, when a group of "domestic feminists" became the most popular writers in the U.S. The course closes at the fin de siècle, when the conventions of sentimental fiction and "True Womanhood" were being superseded by realism and naturalism, and when an explicitly anti-domestic image of womanhood began to be formulated around the figure of the "New Woman." Authors may include Brontë, Fuller, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Stowe, Fern, Jacobs, Christina Rossetti, Taylor, Mill, Patmore, Linton, Dickinson, Alcott, James, Ibsen, Harper, Gilman, Chopin, Freeman, and Wharton.