Defining free America: Reading Black women's novels as counter, contending, and contested narratives (Frances Harper, Harriet Wilson, Pauline Hopkins, Jessie Fauset)

This dissertation contemplates the central question of how does one account for a Black female experience at odds with the language of identity espoused by the dominant narrative forms? Using the novels of four dissimilar Black women writers, Frances Harper, Harriet Wilson, Pauline Hopkins, and Jessie Fauset, this study challenges characterizations of America as a free nation. Despite their diversity, these writers set out to change dominant ideas of the nation so that the nation's narrative has to include an altered sense of domesticity, of gender, of race, of history and of America itself.; In order to argue that Black women's novels are useful in examining broader theoretical issues concerning American culture and society, I examine four time periods when nationalistic narratives of freedom are most pronounced: pre-Civil War, Reconstruction, turn of the century, and modern America. These novels challenge the practical availability of freedom and the possibility of freedom for Black Americans. As such, this dissertation suggests that these novels reveal the limits of American freedom—whether it is physical freedom, political freedom, or personal freedom. It concludes that these stories represent exclusions that disrupt the dominant narrative.