The other woman: Secondary heroines in the nineteenth-century British and *American novel

In a recurrent pattern in the nineteenth-century novel, authors introduce two female characters, only to focus on one and appear to forget the other. My dissertation examines this other woman: the “secondary heroine.” The protagonists of Romantic novels are written to embody stable national identities, suggesting a transatlantic history of the Romantic novel in which both British and American authors equate the primary heroine with a cultural ideal of femininity. Yet both traditions challenge that cultural ideal through the figure of the secondary heroine. My dissertation demonstrates how authors initially deployed the “other woman” to suppress alternative images of womanhood and nationhood, but eventually embraced the secondary heroine as the centerpiece of the Realist novel.;In the first three chapters, I pair British and American novels and examine the secondary heroine as a challenge to generic and nationalist constraints. I divide the Romantic novel into three separate subgenres: the epistolary novel, as exemplified by Samuel Richardson's Clarissa (1747–8) and Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette (1797); the Gothic and its inheritors in the cult of sensibility, represented by Ann Radcliffe's A Sicilian Romance (1790), Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility (1811), and James Fenimore Cooper's The Pioneers (1823); and the historical romance in Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe (1820) and Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie (1827). By pairing British and American texts of similar genres, I underscore the secondary heroine as a site of difference who reveals anxieties over unstable national identities.;The Realist novel reversed the roles of “primary” and “secondary” heroines, preferring dangerous women to conventional heroines. My fourth chapter traces the role of the secondary heroine in theories of Realism. I argue that the Realist novel works to contain dangerous women through two narrative strategies: acculturation and resistance. My final chapter turns to the heroines of Henry James's The Golden Bowl (1904). Situated at the cusp of Realism and Modernism, James's novel provides a fitting endpoint for my study: the construction of national identity via multiple marriage plots anticipates the fragmentation of identity and multiple narrators that characterize the modernist novel, erasing the distinction between primary and secondary heroines.