Degree Name
MA (Master of Arts)
Program
English
Date of Award
8-2005
Committee Chair or Co-Chairs
Mark Holland
Committee Members
Ronald K. Giles, Robert Sawyer
Abstract
Often overlooked in the study of nineteenth-century American literature, the New England writer Rose Terry Cooke elicited great popular appeal during the peak of her career. The admiration Cooke received from her readers and fellow writers compels one to question Cooke’s present-day obscurity. Cooke’s fiction and poetry seem inconsistent with the attitudes she express in her non-fiction, particularly concerning religion and women’s suffrage. She portrays women in miserable marriages, desperately looking for an escape. These “brides of Bluebeard” find different ways to cope with their predicament. While most never truly escape, many use (1) religious devotion, (2) masochism, and (3) homosocial relations as “coping mechanisms” in their plight. I identify each of these reactions to Bluebeard figures in Cooke’s writing in order to understand the contradictions in her works, for, like Cooke, these brides were products of their culture, torn between duty to self and duty to others.
Document Type
Thesis - unrestricted
Recommended Citation
Garland, Bridget Renee, "Trapped in Bluebeard's Chamber: Rose Terry Cooke and Nineteenth-Century "Desperate Housewives."" (2005). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Paper 1039. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/1039
Copyright
Copyright by the authors.