ABSTRACT
Women’s lives, their values, friendship, nurture, and bonding took a distant second place to the rugged, individualistic, and adventurous world of men. Only within the past fifteen to twenty years has the situation changed. Interest in the women’s movement, minority literature, and multiculturalism has energized the call to reexamine and broaden the American literary canon. Women and children work in factories and mills as their income is needed to supplement the diminishing value of a once significant sea economy. In an unsettling era of change and economic instability, the villages in the fiction of the region are populated all too often with childless, middle-aged and older, widowed and single women. Elaine Showalter comments on how many of the stories in the period reflect the dominant ideology of women’s culture and “intense mother-daughter bonds, and intimate female relationships”.
