Natalie’s Blog

Natasha Trethewey’s book Native Guard (2007) is a collection of poems that very tightly document history.  Throughout my reading this book, I felt like I was interacting with a very dense skeleton.  A lot of her poems are easily seen as ghost-like because they talk about death, abuse, war, and other past events that prompt [...]

Romantic Friendships Between Women in Nineteenth-Century America
“Romantic friendship” is a term that usually refers to same-sex relationships in which the friendship is intense enough that it may surpass the platonic level.  The first well-known critical piece to discuss nineteenth-century romantic friendships was Caroll Smith-Rosenberg’s “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in [...]