Spinster Regionalism: Asexuality, Genre, and Type in the Shadow of Consumer Desire

At the fin de siècle, a period in American letters remembered for the rise of naturalism, romance, and a new orientation to readerly pleasure, regionalism moved in the opposite direction, becoming obsessed with the austere and sexless spinster. This article revisits this spinster regionalist corpus to recover the asexual cultural politics of both the spinster and this corpus’s spinster aesthetic. The corpus’s spinster disavows appetites, a figure of underconsumption striking in the context of these stories’ publication in Harper’s Bazar and other early print mediators of consumer desire. Spinster regionalism’s distinctive formal (nonpropulsive, minimally plotted sketches) and stylistic (narratorial reticence, antipsychologism) qualities invert the sensuous and seductive quality of the texts that surrounded them, turning away, rather than soliciting, readerly desire for more (plot, affect, connection, etc.). By centering the asexual qualities of both the spinster archetype and the narratives that contain her, this article opens up space to think more complexly about the radical conservatism long identified with turn-of-the-century regionalism: moving contrariwise to prevailing literary currents, in ways that often alienated early readers, this corpus critically resisted the shaping of American literary culture and readerly habits in the image of consumer desire.