Home of all nations: Race, place, and domesticity in American literature, 1877--1919.

Abstract

This dissertation argues that domesticity is a set of malleable tropes that must be historicized according to location. It focuses on representations of marriage, keeping house, the home ideal, and motherhood in San Francisco, New Orleans, New York, and Liberia at the turn of the twentieth century. Between 1877 and 1919, as the United Stated changed shape after Reconstruction, new kinds of social relationships emerged between women and men of Anglo, African, Spanish, French, Japanese, Irish, German, Chinese, and Jewish descent. As a result of the migrations that facilitated such encounters, the texture of American home life was in flux and distinctive versions of domesticity, which I designate bachelor, sexualized, homeless, and interracial domesticity, emerged in particular locations. The chapters of Home of All Nations are organized by place. In San Francisco, the multiethnic, homosocial legacy of the 1849 Gold Rush gave rise to bachelor domesticity, which is characterized by the bachelor's conflation of the figures of wife and prostitute. In New Orleans, the act of keeping house takes on new meaning in the brothel; the sexualized domesticity of this space challenges notions of privacy, racial purity, and womanly virtue. In New York, homeless domesticity is defined by a trajectory of urban experience that determines the ability of Eastern European immigrants and black southern migrants to be at home in the city, and, by association, the nation. Finally, in Liberia interracial domesticity emerges as white and black American missionary women take on similar roles as mothers and teachers to indigenous Africans. The project brings together a range of cultural texts about each location, including fiction by Sui Sin Far, Frank Norris, Kate Chopin, Abraham Cahan, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and James Weldon Johnson; the autobiographies of a madam and a missionary; as well as photographs, church records, guidebooks, newspaper articles, essays, and a scrapbook. In juxtaposition to---and in concert with---one another, these sources demonstrate that women and men reconfigured, represented, and understood the relationship between place and home in complex ways during this crucial era of the nation's history.