Lauren Batza - Family, Domesticity, and U.S. Social Structures
Lauren resides in New York City and works in the financial compliance field.
Area of Concentration Courses
American Studies H110 - The New Gilded Age
History 123 - Civil War and Reconstruction
Sociology 111AC - Sociology of the Family
Sociology 124 - Sociology of Poverty
EAPS-Sociology 110A - Youth and Society (Trinity College)
Thesis
Guilt Trope: Constructing the Epistolary Angel of the American Northeast from 1850 to 1899
The latter half of the American nineteenth century, wrought with contradiction and fluidity, operated on a disquieting fear of moral atrophy. In an urbanizing and industrializing American landscape, the individual became a central feature and necessary arbiter of the American fate. I center this rewriting of the individual as a part of a shifting emotional culture—one that saw a transition from exterior shame to interior guilt—and discern the epistolary practice of middle-class Northeastern-American women as a harbinger and catapult of these cultural changes. Drawing from contemporary scholars of literature and women’s rhetoric as well as emotional, cultural, and postal histories, I begin by identifying the character of this cultural practice, the epistolary Angel, as well as the newfound culture of guilt and moral surveillance that bewitched the American Northeast between 1850 and 1899. I then discern thesocial responsibility attributed to the epistolary Angel as a broader trend of the changing American society before discussing how that social responsibility was reflected on the relative
relationship between the epistolary Angel and her addressee. Recognizing secrecy, self-mastery, and fear as elemental to the epistolary personality of the Angel, I discern these features as products of this endemic nineteenth-century cultural guilt that helped construct a new American identity in a changing cultural landscape.
