Plots and Proposals: American Women's Fiction, 1850-90

Plots and Proposals: American Women's Fiction, 1850-90.

Plots and Proposals analyzes numerous nineteenth-century American appropriations of the originally British double-proposal marriage plot, arguing that in the hands of American women writers the "double-proposal novel" that appears to "offer no challenge to literary or cultural expectations" in fact "alter[s] the very conventions it appears to blandly reproduce" (8). Tracey claims that American versions of this plot provide readers with conventional narratives of courtship and marriage only to frustrate readers' expectations by including a failed first proposal that paves the way for heroines to resist and potentially renegotiate patriarchal expectations of women's domestic roles. By first invoking a traditional marriage plot and then distancing readers from that plot, the woman-authored American novel during the second half of the nineteenth century "creates dissonance within the reader that is not entirely resolved by apparently harmonious happy Exploring Lost Borders: Critical Essays on Mary Austin. endings" in which hero and heroine are reunited (8). The discordant...