The dissolution of the "Emotional center of life": women's friendships in American fiction (1873-1915)

"The Dissolution of the 'Emotional Center of Life': Women's Friendship in American Fiction (1873-1915)" examines the ways in which women's texts reflect the many social changes occurring after the American Civil War. During this time, traditional notions of womanhood were crumbling, giving way to new representations of women, as seen in fiction and other cultural documents. In particular, this study pays special attention to the move in women's fiction from "homosociality" in women's friendships to less hospitable relationships. The study begins with a discussion of Louisa May Alcott's Work and Mary Wilkins Freeman's A New England Nun, fiction which depicts the problems experienced by women when they leave the private sphere of home and family and enter the public world of work and competition. Both writers portray friendships between women as both a haven of bonding as well as a mire of contention. Next discussed are Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland; both works deconstruct the ways in which women's material conditions powerfully shape their relationships with other women. A brief Afterword reflects on the dissertation's main ideas. Gathering all of these texts together to discuss their portrayals of women's friendships shows how a study of female friendship, itself a construct in the American nineteenth century, reveals the way in which notions of gender and, particularly, femininity, were gradually changing in late nineteenth-century America.