Term of Award

Spring 2022

Degree Name

Master of Arts in English (M.A.)

Document Type and Release Option

Thesis (open access)

Copyright Statement / License for Reuse

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Department

Department of Literature

Committee Chair

Olivia Carr Edenfield

Committee Member 1

Caren Town

Committee Member 2

Lindsey Chappell

Committee Member 3

Jared Yates Sexton

Abstract

The American Dream was first epitomized by Benjamin Franklin in his Autobiography (1791), in which he instructs his fellow citizens on how to procure the American promises of social mobility and economic prosperity. However, the moral and social performances reinforced by Franklin’s recipe-for-success promote an ideological system that prevents marginalized communities such as women, immigrants, and people of color, from procuring the Dream’s most foundational features. Inequitable access to the Dream is a theme revisited throughout American literature, wherein disenfranchised characters consume the aspirational narrative of American social mobility through art, media, and propaganda. This essay tracks the representation of the American Dream throughout American literature, placing particular attention on the ways it manifests in artistic forms and experience. While Rebecca Harding Davis’s “Life in the Iron Mills” (1861) anticipates a commodification of the Dream’s most essential features through a conflict between artistic experience and privileged aesthetic indifference, works like Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) and Ann Petry’s The Street (1946) reveal the disillusioning effects such indifference bears on the disenfranchised, who are unable to perform within the standards Franklin defines. Meanwhile, though Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt (1952) challenges traditional notions of the Dream through an unconventional artist’s attempt to reform her craft, it exposes a conflict between self-expression and social compromise.

OCLC Number

1344286858

Research Data and Supplementary Material

No

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