| Adapting Rene Girard's and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's theories about the triangles of desire underpinning narrative form in the Western-European tradition, this project explores women-dominated triangles as a subversive narrative element elaborated by American women writers between 1850 and 1930. Specifically, it examines women writers' revision of an American rhetorical tradition of structuring narrative around male-dominated triangles which highlight male alliance and female exchange. To capture the vast implications and scope of this tradition, the project historicizes the images of bodies and sexuality as they are embedded within erotic triangles emergent out of seventeenth-century Puritan conversion narratives and sermons, eighteenth-century seduction novels, nineteenth-century slave narratives and sentimental novels, and twentieth-century theories of psychology, modernist works, and Harlem Renaissance novels. My dissertation maps the history of the representation of normative heterosexuality in America, while showing how this discursive history utilizes male-dominated erotic triangles in an attempt to regulate women into traditional enactments of femininity and heterosexuality. Alongside this history, it reveals the ways in which American women writers envision the toppling of this tradition through the infusion into narrative of women-dominated triangles, configurations meant to allow for alternative imaginations of women's bodies and desires.;Reading E.D.E.N. Southworth's The Hidden Hand, Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig, Emily Dickinson's poetry and letters, Nella Larsen's Passing, and H.D.'s HER, "Desires Undammed/Bodies Unbridled" traces American women writers' origination of women-dominated triangles in an attempt to revolutionize narrative form in a way that liberates "woman," her body and desires. As used in the texts named above, women-dominated triangles make strange the usual heterosexual structural devices informing narrative. In turn, they subvert conventional images of sex/gender alignments and allow for lesbian or female bisexual desire. Finally, women-dominated triangles highlight one, or a fusion, of two key figures: a female trickster-rogue who claims masculine bodily capacities or a woman capable of being idealized who operates outside of conventional constitutive categories of identity. Through this "narrative queering," American women writers overhaul women's traditional relationship to plot, character, and theme, and rock the American discursive tradition. |
