Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0009-0003-7960-6653

Date Available

6-15-2025

Year of Publication

2025

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

College

Arts and Sciences

Department/School/Program

English

Faculty

Pearl James

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the political capacity of feeling in American women’s autobiographical and semi-autobiographical writing from and about their work during the First World War. Women produced emotionally complex accounts that resist easy categorization, and I argue that attending to feeling clarifies not only their emotional experiences with war work but their social and political projects. This dissertation closely examines portrayals and rhetorics of feeling, considering the intersections of gender, class, race, and labor in impacting how feelings are depicted, negotiated, and conveyed. While British women were more compelled to perform and convey feeling according to a rigid class system, white American women experienced more flexibility in expressing less desirable feelings. Black American women, however, had to conduct more complex negotiations of feeling so as to advocate for themselves as Black and as women. This dissertation builds upon work on affect by scholars such as Sara Ahmed, Sianne Ngai, bell hooks, and Lauren Berlant while considering gender and race interventions in war studies by scholars like Christine Hallett, Jennifer Keene, Mark Whalan, Santanu Das, and Claire Tylee, among others.

Considering texts in and around the canon by Ellen La Motte and Mary Borden as well as the more marginalized memoir of Addie Hunton and Kathryn Magnolia Johnson, this dissertation centers life writing, whether presented as autobiographical or loosely fictionalized. Chapter one interrogates the political capacity of disgust in La Motte’s The Backwash of War to illuminate and deconstruct war propaganda. Chapter two examines the temporal gap in Mary Borden’s The Forbidden Zone, as well as competing feelings of ease and unease, to locate Borden’s relationship to trauma within the text. Chapter three examines the efficacy of Hunton and Johnson’s rhetoric of love in Two Colored Women with the American Expeditionary Forces, arguing, identifying both the shortcomings and the social advantages of this love. I conclude by applying my argument to contemporary portrayals of war in new media to argue for affect as a means of understanding the experience of war, both past and present. The conclusion also proposes affective labor as an area of inquiry within war studies. This dissertation suggests that the study of war and feeling is not only relegated to the past but bears repeating in the present moment. More simply, examining feeling in women’s literature from the First World War informs how we read and interpret war texts (from the more traditional written book to the Instagram reel) in the present moment.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.13023/etd.2025.262

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