Seminar paper from the year 2017 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 3,0, University of Bonn, language: English, abstract: A woman's life in nineteenth-century American society was limited to the domestic sphere, or the household as well as church, and restricted with regard to current and future duties as mothers and wives. While young girls on the one hand need to learn how to fulfill their future duties as mothers and wives, their mothers and teachers on the other hand need to pass their knowledge regarding these duties on to their daughters. Certain gender roles served as the framework for women in society, mainly shaped by the Cult of True Womanhood. Other factors that influenced the role of women were the therewith connected virtues, which a woman was supposed to embody, as well as the common and well-known definition of a 'True Woman'. With regard to the protagonist in The Morgesons the author "simply disregards the 'cult of true womanhood'" (Weir 430). Autonomy with regard to women was rare, or even non-existing, and normally unwished-for, especially from the perspective of men, husbands or fathers, who expected every woman to simply take care of household and descendants.

Seminar paper from the year 2017 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 3,0, University of Bonn, language: English, abstract: A woman’s life in nineteenth-century American society was limited to the domestic sphere, or the household as well as church, and restricted with regard to current and future duties as mothers and wives. While young girls on the one hand need to learn how to fulfill their future duties as mothers and wives, their mothers and teachers on the other hand need to pass their knowledge regarding these duties on to their daughters. Certain gender roles served as the framework for women in society, mainly shaped by the Cult of True Womanhood. Other factors that influenced the role of women were the therewith connected virtues, which a woman was supposed to embody, as well as the common and well-known definition of a ‘True Woman’. With regard to the protagonist in The Morgesons the author “simply disregards the ‘cult of true womanhood’” (Weir 430). Autonomy with regard to women was rare, or even non-existing, and normally unwished-for, especially from the perspective of men, husbands or fathers, who expected every woman to simply take care of household and descendants.

This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.

The Morgesons is a novel written by Elizabeth Stoddard in 1862. A female bildungsroman, it traces the quest of a young woman in search of self-definition and autonomy. The novel comments upon the oppression of women in mid-nineteenth-century New England and challenges the religious and social norms of the time period.

"Stoddard was, next to Melville and Hawthorne, the most strikingly original voice in the mid-nineteenth-century American novel, a voice . . . that ought to gain a more sympathetic and perceptive hearing in our time than in her own."—from the Introduction The centerpiece of this volume is The Morgesons (1862), one of the few outstanding feminist bildungsromanae of that century. Additional selections include arresting short stories and provocative journalistic essays/reviews, plus a number of letters and manuscript journals that have never before been published. The texts are fully edited and documented.

Elizabeth Stoddard and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Culture traces Stoddard's emergence as a writer in the 1850s, her conflict-ridden relationships with the writers associated with the genteel tradition, and her efforts to negotiate the boundaries of Victorian culture in the United States. While in many ways a critic of nineteenth-century bourgeois culture, Stoddard remained in other ways an adherent; her work was not a rejection of bourgeois culture but a reworking of it, which suggests that bourgeois culture was not as monolithic as later critics believed. Recovering the richness and possibility that characterized early Victorian writing, this book examines the range of literary expression which had existed at mid-century, a period that boasts some of American literature's most iconoclastic voices.