Jennifer Tuttle to discuss California and 'American nervousness' in western women's writing April 10th

 Jennifer S. Tuttle, Ph.D., University of New England Dorothy M. Healy Chair in Literature and Health, will speak on "Unsettling California:  'American Nervousness' in Western Women's Writing" on Friday, April 10, 2009 at noon in the St. Francis Room in UNE's Ketchum Library.

From the time it entered the Union in 1848, California has been a prime destination for tourism and settlement. 

In the late 19th century, when immigration, urbanization, and challenges to existing gender roles led many to bemoan the nation's supposed malaise, California was imagined as a locale for national renewal, a "natural health resort" for ailing bodies and an ailing body politic.

This language of health and illness informed the doctrine of Manifest Destiny that legitimized the conquest of the far West by Anglo Americans and spawned the genre of the literary Western.  But these narratives about California and the West, while familiar, were not the only stories being told.

In her 2007-2008 sabbatical project, Professor Tuttle considers several other stories: a white woman who claims for herself the healing power of the Western plot; a Mexican American woman, having lost her family ranch to Anglo settlement, who indicts California health seekers from the perspective of the conquered; a Eurasian writer who uses fiction and journalism to counter the anti-Chinese rhetoric of sickening "yellow peril"; and a Jewish American writer who transforms literary conventions of health and illness to argue for ethnic assimilation. 

All of these writers manipulated prevailing theories of "American Nervousness" - medical language that underwrote the conquest of California and the mythic West more generally - and unsettled their world in the process.

Jennifer Tuttle

In addition to holding the Dorothy M. Healy Chair in Literature and Health, Dr. Tuttle is also associate professor, Department of English and Language Studies.  She serves as faculty director of the Maine Women Writers Collection and codirects the Women's and Gender Studies Program. 

Her published work includes a scholarly edition of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 1911 novel The Crux and the forthcoming volume The Selected Letters of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (coedited with Denise D. Knight).  She is also coeditor of Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers.

The presentation is free. Lunch and chocolate will be provided at the presentation.