Dynes - Proposal

Justine Dynes

University of Central Florida

j.m.dynes@gmail.com

Creating Bonds Without Blood

Reflections of Female Homosociality in The Boarding School

A popular setting for early American novels concerning woman and their relations together has been the boarding school. These novels, such as The Boarding School by Hannah Webster Foster, explore the connection women receive when they are taken from the world and placed within their own separate society. While many scholars have explored the subject of female friendship in these novels, very few have gone further and explored the deeper connections these women create with one another. Even though the readers see their relationships on paper, the letters written between these women indicate a deeper, familial connection they share due to the close contact enforced upon them by a boarding school.

In this paper, I will pull the ideas from scholars on the friendship of women and push them further, exploring the idea of deeper bonds they may form while within their own society. The boarding school, or a society within a larger society, allows these women to find themselves and each other, making it easier to form bonds that will last them their entire lives. Most will claim that this is just friendship, but what I propose to argue is that these bonds are ones of sisterhood and family.

I will look extensively at the letters written in Foster’s The Boarding School and make deeper connections that are not just simple friendship using various definitions of family. These various definitions –whether defined by blood, relationship status, or bond-- will be shown through not only the words in the letters, but the situations happening around these letters as well. I hope to also explore the “what if” questions that arise from these particular cases. What if these women were facing the same issues, but without the support of the others? What if only one person was missing from this support circle?

Today, more and more people are finding families that are not their own. My paper aims to show how friends could become siblings, or how women in particular could form the bonds of sisterhood even if they are not related. I hope to bring forth the idea of family outside of one’s own biological one.