DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c127-637243
title: Labors of love: reading queer female kinship in the melodramatic mode

description: In the context of nineteenth-century sentimental discourse, the expression “labors of love” devalued women’s contribution to the economic growth of the United States, while naturalizing women’s domestic labor as an expression of obedience, religious piety, and familial affection. Beginning with an examination of how the melodramatic mode frames scenes of caretaking in the nineteenth-century sentimental novel, my dissertation project, “Labors of Love: Reading Queer Female Kinship in the Melodramatic Mode,” investigates the relationship between the U.S. economy from the mid-nineteenth to early-twentieth century, focusing in particular on the discourses of work and family that emerged in popular melodramatic novels, plays, and films of the period, from Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1850) to King Vidor’s 1937 adaptation of Olive Higgins Prouty’s novel, Stella Dallas (1922). Building upon recent work on queer affect by scholars such as Heather Love, Lauren Berlant, and Sarah Ahmed, I argue that melodramatic mode destabilizes the moral imperatives of sentimental and realist representations of women’s labor, articulating instead, a feminist theory of labor value in which “labors of the love” (the immaterial, affective labors that women perform with and on behalf of one another) produce intimacies between women and, at the same time, register a sense of discomfort with both normative discourses of family and the circumspect performances of race and gender on which they depend. This discomfort is articulated within the melodramatic mode and circulated via the use of intertextual citation, allowing contemporary readers the opportunity to imagine a past and a future constituted outside the logic of heterosexual reproduction and rather, through a genealogy of female-centered kinship fantasies. ❧ This work intervenes in existing scholarship on nineteenth-century domestic discourse and women’s labor by feminist literary historians, such as Lora Romero, Amy Kaplan, and Jane Simonsen, by arguing that while domestic discourse linked the ostensible moral and racial superiority of the white middle-class household to the politics of national imperialism, the alternative kinship imaginaries that emerge in the context of women’s affective labor function as a critique of U.S. nationalism.  For example, in Chapter One, “The Sentimental Erotics of Queer Female Caretaking,” I argue that in Susan Warner’s sentimental novel, The Wide, Wide World (1850), Ellen Montgomery’s eroticized “sisterhood” with her spiritual mentor, Alice Humphreys, is constituted through the affectively-resonant melodramatic gestures of physical and emotional caretaking, and in doing so, undermines the Protestant ethical and moral imperatives of nineteenth-century sentimental culture. In this context, and contrary to prevailing criticism, the melodramatic mode calls attention to the relationship between normative discourses of work and family and their dependence on a hierarchical, racialized and gendered division of labor. ❧ I locate these discourses within melodramatic texts, in part, due to the increasing popularity and prevalence of the melodramatic mode in the forms of mass entertainment that were emergent in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. However, rather than approach melodrama as a simplistic generic category invested in moral binaries and atomized representations of social identities, I use the work of Peter Brooks, Tania Modleski, and Linda Williams, as a jumping-off point for redefining melodrama as a multi-generic mode, dependent on contradictions, fissures, and intertextual tension—particularly those between sentiment, music, drama, and realism—that create textual space for conflicts over meaning. Melodrama encapsulates debates over the meaning and significance of work and family at the turn-of-the-twentieth-century. For example, while Chapter Two, “The Affective Geography of Female-Centered Communities,” focuses primarily on women’s regionalist fiction—a genre not conventionally understood as “melodramatic”—I use Mary Wilkins Freeman’s short stories to demonstrate how regionalist fiction deployed melodrama in order to implicitly critique realism’s urge to manage social change by privileging objective forms of knowledge and rational sense-making over the emotional excesses of melodrama and sensationalism.  By articulating a metonymic relationship between women’s subsistence labor and the work of storytelling, women’s regionalist fiction also helped re-imagine both the physical and dialogic space of the nation, repositioning same-sex relationships between women at its center. ❧ Indeed, by focusing on melodrama’s characteristic use of non-verbal aesthetic features, including gesture, music, excessive affect, and intertextual citation women’s affective labor becomes readable as a social practice that participated in re-negotiating the meaning of “family” in a period of rapid social and technological change that continued through the Great Depression. In Chapter Three, “’’Home’ On-Stage in Sister Carrie (1901),” I argue that the series of multimedia domestic performances that Carrie engages in, not only “re-stage” the sentimental domestic scene that we explore in my first chapter, but articulate the degree to which familial roles were increasingly mediated by patterns of consumption that emerged conterminously with the rise of mass media at the beginning of the of the twentieth century. Indeed, after her arrival in Chicago, where she intends to work and live with her sister and brother-in-law, Carrie experiments with several domestic configurations both on-stage and off-, from the apartment she shares with the debonair masher, Charles Drouet, playing first as his sister and later, as his wife; to her on-stage role as the presumed orphan, Laura Courtland,  in Augustin Daly’s family melodrama, “Under the Gas Light” (1867); to her play as the wife of hotel-manger-turned-thief and kidnapper, George Hurstwood; and her eventual stardom and cohabitation with the chorus-girl, Lola Osborne. ❧ Furthermore, I show how Sister Carrie’s  fraught intertextual relationship with melodramatic texts—ranging from Augustin Daly’s stage-play “Under the Gas Light” (1867) to the melodramatic on- and off-stage performances of Sarah Bernhardt and Lillian Russell—is indicative of the way in which the melodramatic mode functioned as a vehicle for transmission of cultural affect circulating around the concept of “family.” Following from this claim,  “Labors of Love” concludes with Chapter Four, “The Reproduction of Knowledge,”  a look at the repeated adaptations of Olive Higgins Prouty’s Stella Dallas (1922), focusing specifically on King Vidor’s Oscar-nominated 1937 film, and suggests that in fact, the melodramatic representations of women’s domestic and affective labor that I include throughout the project constitute a “genealogy of entertainments” (to use Lauren Berlant’s phrase) in which stories of family life and their circulation within popular culture via mass market printing and film production, including multiple adaptations of nineteenth-century novels, such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1850), East Lynne (1861), and Little Women (1868), have resulted in a collective, national memory that has helped defined the meaning of “family.”  “Labors of Love” complicates Berlant’s argument, however, suggesting that in the genealogy of the melodramatic mode, we can also discern a cultural narrative of same-sex female kinship through which we can not only expand our contemporary understanding of  late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century debates over the meaning and significance of family, but also think about how queer female kinship functions as a horizon of possibility that has and continues to put pressure on normative discourses of family life in the U.S.