Date of Award
5-2025
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
College/School
College of Humanities and Social Sciences
Department/Program
English
Thesis Sponsor/Dissertation Chair/Project Chair
Monika Elbert
Committee Member
Willard Gingerich
Committee Member
Laura Nicosia
Abstract
Early American poetess Annis Boudinot Stockton explores gender roles in her response poems “A Satire on the fashionable pompoons worn by the Ladies in the year 1753. by a Gentleman; Answered by a young Lady of sixteen” and “A Sarcasm against the ladies in a newspaper; An impromptu answer.” Despite being the first colonial woman to be published and having over twenty poems published during her lifetime, Stockton did not have a collection of poetry published until 1995, which was Only for the Eye of a Friend: The Poems of Annis Boudinot Stockton edited by Carla Mulford. Therefore, Stockton’s work has been largely underexplored in the area of critical literary analysis. Using the framework of Hélène Cixous’s essays “Sorties” and “The Laugh of the Medusa,” this essay examines phallogocentrism and identifies how Stockton reimagines these male-dominated word origins in her work, specifically in her poems that were written in response to sexist male poets. Other early American female poets, such as Phillis Wheatley, Judith Sargent Murray, Hannah Griffitts, and Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson, are discussed in conjunction with Stockton’s work in order to contextualize her ideas and to indicate that Stockton’s work should be included within the early American literary canon.
File Format
Recommended Citation
Merring, Lexi Norris, "Annis Boudinot Stockton's Deconstruction of Patriarchal Language" (2025). Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects. 1550.
https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/etd/1550