The Queer Possibilities of Aromantic Reading

This thesis considers the queer possibilities of aromanticism in a variety of late nineteenth and early twentieth century American works, articulating the features and affordances of an aromantic lens. In the first chapter, I dive into what it means to read aromantically by analyzing how Sarah Orne Jewett makes aromanticism legible in her famous “spinster” novel A Country Doctor through the creation of an “aromantic type.” In the second chapter, I turn to Jewett’s A Marsh Island and Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle” to explore the “failure” of the aromantic type within conventional narratives where romantic love is what is expected to give structure and meaning to life, time, and character growth. In the third chapter, I investigate the political possibilities of aromantic refusals in Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour,” Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s “A Moral Exigency,” and Jewett’s most famous work The Country of the Pointed Firs, considering the question of what aromanticism might be orienting toward in orienting away from romance—what Jewett refers to in A Country Doctor as a yearning for “The Great Something Else.”