In this compelling interdisciplinary study, Linda Grasso
demonstrates that using anger as a mode of analysis and the basis
of an aesthetic transforms our understanding of American women's
literary history. Exploring how black and white nineteenth-century
women writers defined, expressed, and dramatized anger, Grasso
reconceptualizes antebellum women's writing and illuminates an
unrecognized tradition of discontent in American literature. She
maintains that two equally powerful forces shaped this tradition:
women's anger at their exclusion from the democratic promise of
America, and the cultural prohibition against its public
articulation.
Grasso challenges the common notion that nineteenth-century women's
writing is confined to domestic themes and shows instead how women
channeled their anger into art that addresses complex political
issues such as slavery, nation-building, gender arrangements, and
race relations. Cutting across racial and genre boundaries, she
considers works by Lydia Maria Child, Maria W. Stewart, Fanny Fern,
and Harriet Wilson as superb examples of the artistry of angry
expression. Transforming their anger through literary imagination,
these writers bequeathed their vision of an alternative America
both to their contemporaries and to subsequent generations.