From Martyrs to Mothers to Chick in Choos: The Medieval Female Body and American Women\u27s Popular Literature

Placing the generic conventions of medieval hagiography, Nina Baym\u27s insights about nineteenth-century American sentimental fiction\u27s overplot, and contemporary American women\u27s popular literature into tension illuminates some important commonalities. First, biographers of the medieval virgin saints and authors of contemporary American women\u27s popular literature deploy the same overplot that Baym identifies as characteristic of American women\u27s nineteenth-century popular fiction. Second, in order to define feminine virtue and establish the virtue of their protagonists, nineteenth-century and post-millennial American women writers rework the contrastive tropes by which hagiographers establish their heroines\u27 virtue. Third, struggles for ascendance in the domestic realm gesture toward its inherently political functions. Fourth, contemporary American women\u27s popular literature presupposes and reproduces a medieval configuration of the female body as a site for narrative and political conflict and locates women\u27s work in a hybrid domestic-work space. Finally, the literary reconfiguration of the workspace undoes the public-private distinction on which theories of democratic liberalism rely to construct male citizenship