The aunts of Anglo-American literature

Abstract

The Aunts of Anglo-American Literature theorizes how aunts complicate the so-called “cult of domesticity” within nineteenth-century domestic print culture. As part of the family but outside its nucleus, the aunt is a tangential but crucial nexus through which cultural anxieties about gender, class, and race are not only exposed, but also negotiated. Indeed, her liminality evokes the wider, often racially diverse kinship networks that concurrently shaped Anglo-American domesticity. Domestic labor has always depended on collective structures of support, whether from (enslaved) servants, extended relatives, close friends, or broader communities of care. The aunt’s presence cracks the façade that domestic work is a solitary pursuit performed by the idealized “angel of the house” who purportedly regulates the family and culture itself via her expert domestic management. As I argue, the term aunt becomes a rhetorical shorthand to account for women’s labor that falls outside the heteronormative ideal, and aunting emerges as a capacious literary mode that paradoxically enacts and bends the boundaries that the cult of domesticity imposes on “women’s work.” This project therefore contributes to ongoing feminist reappraisals of the angel in the house and the cult of domesticity as dominant critical frameworks within nineteenth-century studies. Moreover, it reclaims the aunt as a central, though curiously overlooked, agent in this deconstruction. By examining these tensions within the everyday media of periodicals, this dissertation illuminates not only the diversity of nineteenth-century kinship formations, but also their enduring legacies.