Disorderly thinking, model conduct: Ethnic heroine construction in twentieth-century African and Asian American women's fiction

This dissertation challenges current models of ethnic-studies literary criticism analyses of “ethnic” narrative subjectivity that emphasize the cultural politics of ethnic literary traditions while promulgating essentialized concepts of subject-positions. In an examination of African and Asian American women's poetics, this project offers an alternative critical method that focuses on patterns of “transcultural” and transnational heroine construction occurring as canonical nineteenth-century “anglo” narratives of femininity inform and interact with twentieth-century American articulations of feminine identity. I consider these transcultural relationships as elements that prefigure the evolving narrative of the socially-displaced woman—across boundaries of race, nation, and class. Ethnicity, in this dissertation, is configured by narrative cross-cultural relationships as women's fiction mediates psychological forces like anxiety, ambivalence, desire, longing and the drive towards self-actualization, self-consequence, and identity-affirmation. In four chapters, I concentrate on the poetics of heroine construction in light of transcultural articulations of marriage plots, the language of heroine objectification, the search for place and position, and adolescent coming-of-age, in an effort to show that the self-assertive processes of ethnic female characterization have definite, if ambivalent, relationships with canonical anglo narratives of femininity.; Ideas of ethnicity, this project maintains, incorporate the narrative compounding of social exclusion and alienation existent in nineteenth and early twentieth-century novels like Biome's Jane Eyre (1847) and Wharton's The House of Mirth (1905), which critique class hierarchies. Onoto Watanna's autobiography Me (1915) and Jessie Fauset's Plum Bun (1928), are examples of ethnic women's fiction that centralize concerns of subjective development upon conventions of romance and culturally-dominant standards of femininity, in ways similar to the anglo texts listed above. These types of comparisons in this project work to disrupt the dichotomies between anglo and ethnic, as well as political and romantic. Also, the explication of the poetics of heroine construction in fiction by writers like Paule Marshall, Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Emma D. Kelley, Sui Sin Far, and Gish Jen demonstrates the fact that the seemingly divergent fields of African American and Asian American studies, configure similar strategies of ethnic feminist articulation.