| In "Beyond Curiosity", I identify a group of late-nineteenth-century American women writers whose all-consuming interests in observational sciences---from entomology to botany to ornithology to astronomy---guided their artistic creations. I call their short stories, novels, and personal and scientific essays "narratives of obsession", a genre I reveal as a feminine reimagining of eighteenth-century natural histories and early-nineteenth-century literary sketches. I introduce "obsession" as a stylistic gesture, a narrative device characterized by plotlessness, heightened description, antisociality, idealized spinsterhood, and monomaniacal focus on specialized areas of personal study. I contextualize "obsession" against the postbellum shift in U.S. discourse when the sciences were becoming professionalized and institutionalized, less dependent on and welcoming of self-taught amateurs, and when women were facing new barriers against male-dominated universities and science organizations. I show how late-nineteenth-century upper-middle class white women crafted narratives of obsession as an alternative to the restrictive disciplinarity emerging around them.;I chronicle the obsessions of four women: short story writer-turned-entomologist Annie Trumbull Slosson and her literary-descriptive tales and essays; poet-gardener Celia Thaxter and her garden book, An Island Garden (1894); Harriet Beecher Stowe and her book of Florida essays, Palmetto-Leaves (1873), and her novel, Oldtown Folks (1869); and astronomer Maria Mitchell and the newspaper and magazine articles and literary works that mythologized her (including Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun (1860), Herman Melville's "After the Pleasure Party" (1891), and Augusta Jane Evans' Macaria; or, Altars of Sacrifice (1864)). I extend the narrative of obsession to other white, upper-middle-class late-nineteenth-century women writers and naturalists, including Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Harriet Mann Miller, Mary Treat, Graceanna Lewis, and Katharine Dooris Sharp. While I locate women's obsession in a New England culture that fostered feminine curiosity and spinsterhood, I also demonstrate how the obsessed woman became a figure of national fixation.;By highlighting the antisociality and hermeticism in these narratives of obsession, I unsettle the standard critical account of community and empathy as the center of late-nineteenth-century women's nature writing and regionalism. These narratives of widows, spinsters, and outcasts rejecting normative romantic and social bonds with others rework the modes of expression deemed acceptable for late-nineteenth-century women (sentimentality, domesticity, regionalism). I propose obsession as a different nineteenth-century women's tradition that celebrates solitude and spinsterhood (not sympathy or connection). I end by tracing a spinster genealogy, a non-procreative legacy of late-nineteenth-century obsession. I examine texts by three late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century American women writers who imagine themselves as nineteenth-century spinsters in their narratives of obsession: Julie Hecht's short stories, Kate Bolick's memoir, Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own (2015), and Jamaica Kincaid's My Garden (Book): (1999)---texts that expand the racial, social, and emotional possibilities of obsession even as they further narrow and make newly violent its monomaniacal focus. |
