Elliott, Mary. 「The Closet of the Heart: Legancies of Domesticity in Tomboy Narratives and Lesbian Pulp Fiction, 1850-1965.」 P.h.D diss., the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 1999.

Abstract:
This study provides a missing piece in the history of American women's writing, demonstrating the powerful connections that link the popular fiction of the nineteenth century with that of Cold War America. These connections may be seen in several modes of cultural practice and influence: production and reception of popular nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction in America, theories of childhood and adolescence, the evolution of domestic ideologies, and theories of gender and sexuality as they influence notions of the 「individual,」 in particular for women. Tomboy narratives of the nineteenth century challenge, even as they reflect, prevailing notions of childhood, gender, individuality, work, and sexual identity, all components of ideals and practices that we loosely term 「domestic.」 They, like lesbian pulp romances a century later, struggle to find language for ideals of gender and sexual identity—a language that the larger dominant culture did not imagine for them. Poised a century apart, tomboy and pulp texts complete each other』s unfinished sentences: tomboy narratives ask what life would be possible for girls and young women outside of heterosexual family relationships and gendered social limitations; lesbian fiction provides a complex answer to those questions from within the Cold War』s culture of redomestication.

Chapter 1 examines the intransigence of spirited girls within the context of domestic theories and practices that seem designed to contain them. Control of these bodies controls class intransigence, as well. Chapter 2 explores how tomboys become disciplined through last-minute capitulations to Christianity and marriage that are markedly unnatural within the terms of their narratives. Chapter 3 compares tomboys with sissies, a literary dyad that reflects and critiques sex/gender binarisms.

Chapter 4 situates lesbian pulp fiction within the broader history of popular fiction and moral guardianship in America. Then, the chapter compares the cover art and rhetoric to the text』s contents, pointing out the dissonances between the marketing devices and the text itself. The final chapter draws from interviews with pulp authors and audiences to examine the cultural work these texts performed. Pulp romances created a community of readers who found in this fiction the first representations of their identities and lives.