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| author | Taylor Tracy |
| title | Ladies in Log Cabins: Female-Authored Responses to "Reckless" Individualism |
| abstract | Tracy explores how novels by Hannah Farnham Sawyer, Caroline Matilda Kirkland and Harriet Beecher Stowe use the multifaceted
motif of the log cabin in order to amend the ideology of individualism and promote domesticity as a stabilizing force at a time of national social, political and
economic turbulence. Tracy argues that these works represent a thread of individualism that prioritizes the experiences of women and the home over a more "rugged"
or "reckless" individualism representing the selfish, exploitative domination of the American frontier in the early- to mid-nineteenth century. In doing so, these
works expand the scope of American Individualism to include the experiences of women and critique the selfish motivations behind the burgeoning market economy and
the rampant land speculation that sparked a cycle of economic panics. Tracy follows several threads in these novels to examine how they amend and expand the national
and cultural narrative of their time: acting as the "fine print" of individualism, upholding and challenging separate spheres ideology, prioritizing and destabilizing
idealized domesticity, exposing tensions between public and private space and employing a blend of sentimental and realist rhetoric. Tracy ultimately uncovers the
limitations of the turn towards domesticity as a stabilizing force and the circumscribed agency this move allows women. |
| school | The College of Liberal Arts, Drew University |
| degree | B.A. (2017) |
| advisor | Hannah Wells, English Department
|
| committee | Neil Levi, English Department
Wyatt Evans, History Department |
| full text | TTracy.pdf |
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