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Date of Award
5-2025
Document Type
Restricted Thesis: Campus only access
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
English
First Advisor
Dr. Keven Pelletier
Second Advisor
Dr. Monika Siebert
Abstract
Scholars of the American family have long taken the sibling bond for granted as a natural, immutable relationship. The tradition I examine in this thesis questions the assumption of an innate bond, and the literature of the sibling is constructed by the authors, and our modern understanding of the sibling is shown to be invented by the literary history as it grapples with the relationship. I consider three texts over a one hundred year period: Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (1868), Bunner Sisters by Edith Wharton (1916), and Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger (1961). In the nineteenth century, Alcott establishes religious devotion as the primary, lasting manifestation of the sibling relationship in order to stabilize it, though there are moments of instability that crack the novel's sentimental facade. At the turn of the century, Wharton finds those gaps in the devotional mandate Alcott leaves behind and explores how devotion taken to the extreme can destroy the relationship it was meant to hold together. Salinger then grounds the sibling relationship elegiacally, illustrating the futility of devotion as a method of conserving sibling relationships while showing that the bonds are rotted in the grief and loss inherent to the love shared between them. By the late twentieth century, the image of the ghost usurps Alcott's religious mandate, and ultimately, the literary history traces the sibling relationship from mid-century and from devotion to elegy.
Pleas note this thesis is permanently restricted and not available.
Recommended Citation
Couch, Olivia, "From Devotion to Elegy: Sibling Relationships in American Literature 1865–1965" (2025). Honors Theses. 1809.
https://scholarship.richmond.edu/honors-theses/1809
