Independent women: Black women as consumers in literature written from slavery to the Harlem Renaissance.

摘要

This dissertation explores the role of consumerism in literature written by African-American women between 1861 and 1928. It consists of three chapters. Chapter One examines the birth of consumer culture in America and Benjamin Franklin's emergence as an exemplary American as it relates to the same. In this chapter I posit that Franklin was a model not only for European-Americans but also for African-Americans, as seen in the slave narratives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs. I argue that as an enslaved black woman, Harriet Jacobs reflected and revised the Franklin model and her revision of this model influenced the black female writers who followed her. Chapter Two is concerned with the emergence of Booker T. Washington as the prime mediator between American consumer culture and newly freed African-Americans. This chapter looks at how two black female writers, Ida B. Wells and Pauline Hopkins, responded to Washington, even as they reconfigured the Jacobs template. The final chapter places Nella Larsen's Quicksand within the context of America's blossoming consumer culture in the twentieth century and I argue that her rewriting of the Jacobs paradigm represents a breakthrough in depictions of black women's financial and relational autonomy.