Loving Empire: Intimacy and Expansion in U.S. Women's Historical Writing, 1880-1900

Abstract

“Loving Empire: Intimacy and Expansion in U.S. Women’s Historical Fiction, 1880 - 1900,” works to expand our understanding of nineteenth-century U.S. historiography by analyzing texts authored by women from and about sites of colonial violence. This project endeavors to repopulate the archive of U.S. historiography using a much less restrictive set of criteria to determine what constitutes “history.” I draw from novels, memoirs, didactic literature, journalism, and second-hand accounts of performances and lecture tours to reveal crucial discourses and counter-discourses that sought to explain, criticize, and justify continental expansion during a period when the national memory of these events had not yet crystallized. In each chapter, I aggregate literary texts about different sites of U.S. imperial conquest. I starting with the writing of Paiute advocate, Sarah Winnemucca, her autobiographical history Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883) and the popular response to her advocacy. I then turn my focus to the ways in which manifest domesticity operated in conjunction with the material project of colonial violence, looking at the work of Elizabeth Custer, writings by other army wives, and adaptations of these works leading to broader pop cultural dissemination. Collectively, these texts produced, and failed to produce, historical truth effects (regimes of truth), whose existence, let alone lasting influence, has not yet been accounted for by either historical or literary studies. The function and impact of these texts can best be understood by approaching them not as single books but as constellations, dense collections of memoir, book reviews, interviews, and mass circulated excerpts that in turn fueled the production of popular representations of the west, like David Belasco and Franklin Fyles’ The Girl I Left Behind Me, a frontier melodrama that toured internationally at the end of the century. Ultimately I argue that these narratives, and the popular response to them, constitute multiple, fractious histories that competed for authority as the era of continental expansion drew to a close. These texts offer critical insight into the means by which white Americans wrote themselves, and others out of, the emerging United States. Each of the works under study narrates differently the interweaving of “domestic” issues - love, marriage, family - with “world historical” markers of progress - advances in technology ranging from the telegraph to the train. These narratives tell contending “strictly true” stories about the process by which Native land was transformed into American soil, and relate the grandiose narratives of imperial expansion as well as the unspeakable violences upon which they rested. They describe the advance of armies not only by reference to battles but through the proliferation of “objective” units – dates, increasingly specific and uniform time measurement, and the mapping and measuring of space and land. By demonstrating the common historical impulse at the heart of generically and stylistically diverse texts, I aim to reveal a broader and more capacious archive of historical fiction in the nineteenth century, and examine the methodological principles that condition literary histories, and their place in a rapidly developing nineteenth-century historical imaginary.