Current Research

• Primary Areas of Interest: Long Nineteenth-century American Literature; Multiethnic American Literature; American Gothic Literature; Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

• Other Areas of Interest: Literary Memory and Trauma Studies; Digital Humanities

Dissertation Abstract

My dissertation, Spaces of Assimilation: Multiethnic American Women’s Writing and the Gothic, analyzes how multiethnic women writers employ gothic tropes to narrate the pressures of assimilation into white Protestant American culture throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A multifaceted feminist literary recovery project, this dissertation uses tools and techniques from literary studies, gothic studies, feminist studies, and American cultural studies to highlight the gothic tropes in underrepresented women’s writings. In doing so, Spaces of Assimilation re-presents these texts as key records of multiethnic women’s experiences as marginalized Americans.

Revisiting periodicals from the Progressive Era (such as the Atlantic Monthly, Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, and the Birth Control Review) reveals that minority and immigrant women’s otherwise realist and modernist writings contain recurring gothic tropes, including the uncanny double, hauntings, and monsters. This dissertation examines gothicized, assimilative spaces throughout Yankton Dakota Sioux author Zitkala-Ša’s autobiographical American Indian Stories (chapter 1); Black writer Angelina Weld Grimké’s stories “The Closing Door” and “Goldie” (chapter 2); Eastern European immigrants Yente Serdatsky’s “Unchanged” and Anzia Yezierska’s Hungry Hearts (chapter 3), and Asian American writer Sui Sin Far’s collection Mrs. Spring Fragrance (chapter 4). I argue that analyzing these spaces, from the Midwest’s Native American residential schools to New York’s Lower East Side tenement housing, through gothic conventions reveals these writers’ anxieties about the instruments of assimilation, such as education, discourses of racial purity, labor practices, and material culture. By tracing these gothic tropes, the chapters emphasize the systemic—and often horrific—nature of American cultural imperialism and its insistence on linguistic, religious, and ethnocultural hegemony. The coda explores echoes of these Progressive-Era women writers’ works in contemporary minority and immigrant women writers’ gothic and horror fiction by Erika T. Wurth, Tananarive Due, Ania Ahlborn, and Monika Kim, among others. The nuanced gothic tropes that characterize these works reflect their authors’ troubling experiences within spaces of assimilation and acculturation over one hundred years. As a result, these stories narrate historically marginalized women writers’ profound skepticism about what it means to be or become “American” in the nineteenth and in the twenty-first centuries.

Spaces of Assimilation reinvigorates criticism about the American Female Gothic literary tradition and advances contemporary literary criticism on the long nineteenth century. Since the late twentieth century, scholarship on American Gothic literature has broadened to include woman-authored texts. However, these studies often center works by white (specifically Anglo-Norman) women born in the United States, disregarding the works of minority and immigrant women writers. Spaces of Assimilation addresses this gap by focusing on texts written by historically marginalized authors, emphasizing the distinct stylistic bridge among the gothic, realism, and modernism their works offer. Most importantly, this dissertation centers these underrepresented women’s gothicized writings to propose a new cultural history of the Progressive Era in the United States. This bold retelling is defined and narrated by the very voices the period’s assimilative forces attempted to stifle.