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Special Relationships: Anglo-American Love Affairs, Courtships and Marriages in Fiction, 1821-1914

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Special Relationships: Anglo-American Love Affairs, Courtships and Marriages in Fiction, 1821-1914 SPECIAL RELATIONSHIPS: ANGLO-AMERICAN LOVE AFFAIRS, COURTSHIPS AND MARRIAGES IN FICTION, 1821-1914 by PAUL JONATHAN WOOLF A thesis submitted to The University of Birmingham for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of American and Canadian Studies School of Historical Studies The University of Birmingham September 2007 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. ABSTRACT Special Relationships examines depictions of love affairs, courtships and marriages between British and American characters in nineteenth-century and early twentieth- century American short stories and novels. I argue that these transatlantic love stories respond to shifting Anglo-American cultural, political, and economic exchanges during the period. In some cases, texts under consideration actually helped shape those interactions. I also suggest that many authors found such transnational encounters a useful way to define ideal versions of American national identity, and to endorse or challenge prevalent attitudes regarding class, race, and gender. Special Relationships begins with Cooper’s The Spy (1821), which I discuss in the Introduction. Part One examines works published by Cooper, Irving, Frances Trollope, Lippard, Warner, and Melville during the 1820s, 30s and 40s, and traces the emergence of the “fairytale” of the American woman who marries into English aristocracy. Part Two places works by Henry James, Burnett, and several other writers in the context of a real-life phenomenon: the plethora of American women who between 1870 and 1914 married into European nobility. I conclude by discussing the Anglo-American political rapprochement of the 1890s and the use by Jack London and Edgar Rice Burroughs of Anglo-American love stories to promote racial ‘Anglo-Saxonism.’ To Liz. In lots of ways, I couldn’t have written this without you. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Dr. Chris Gair has been an unending source of support and wisdom over the last four years, and I will be forever grateful for his advice, insight, and calm influence. My family – Mum, Dad, Phil, Liz, Levi, and Jude – have helped in too many ways, practical and emotional, to list. Thank you! I would also like to thank Ben and Catherine at Isis Media, and all at Maverick Television, especially Alex Fraser, for being generous employers and good friends. This thesis is funded by “The AHRC funds postgraduate training and research in the arts and humanities, from archaeology and English literature to design and dance. The quality and range of research not only provides social and cultural benefits but also contributes to the economic success of the UK. For further information on the AHRC, please see our website www.ahrc.ac.uk.” CONTENTS INTRODUCTION James Fenimore Cooper and the Anglo-American Relationship, 1820 p.1 Contexts p.5 James Fenimore Cooper, Continued p.29 PART ONE “A FAIRYLAND SORT OF PLACE”: THE AMERICAN LOVE AFFAIR WITH THE ENGLISH ARISTOCRACY, FROM WASHINGTON IRVING TO LITTLE WOMEN. Introduction p.39 The American Love / Hate Affair With The English Aristocracy Before 1850 p.42 International Nobility and International Mobility: James Fenimore Cooper’s Home As Found (1838) p.60 The “Coronet, For Which She Perilled Her Soul”: Aristocratic Marriage in George Lippard’s Quaker City (1844) p.79 From the Brink of War to Concord: The Reordering of Anglo-American Relations in the Late 1840s p.92 “A Fairyland Sort of Place”: Susan Warner’s Anglo-American Marriages p.106 Home and Homo-Eroticism as Found: Herman Melville’s Redburn (1849) p.137 From a Royal Visit in 1860 to Little Women (1866), and the Civil War In-Between p.152 CONTENTS (continued) PART TWO “DO YOU THINK IT IS UNPATRIOTIC?”: TRANSATLANTIC MARRIAGE, 1870-1914 Introduction p.160 Love or a Coronet: Heiresses, Marriage, and American Patriotism p.170 “A Woman’s Country is the Country Where Her Lover Lives”: Gendered Citizenship and Title-Heiress Marriages p.182 “ … Many a Yankee Maiden”: Henry James and International Marriage p.208 “For Then We Could Keep Them Both Together”: Frances Hodgson Burnett, Patriotic Womanhood, Race, and Anglo-American Rapprochement p.260 Conclusion: Anglo-American Imperialism and the Politics of Love Stories p.296 EPILOGUE Edith Wharton and International Marriage p.308 WORKS CITED p.318 INTRODUCTION James Fenimore Cooper and the Anglo-American Relationship, 1820 In November 1820, James Fenimore Cooper, youngest son of an illustrious American family, made his literary debut with Precaution.1 By that year, at least one hundred novels had been produced in the new republic since independence.2 The nation’s book market, though, was still dominated by English titles and English tastes, and American literary critics were calling evermore urgently for native poetry, drama and fiction that made use of local stories, characters and language rather than merely following English models.3 Their ire had been piqued earlier in 1820 by the English critic Sydney Smith’s notorious jibe. “In all four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?” Smith had asked, derisively.4 Beset by financial problems, Cooper had taken up literature specifically as a means of making money and he aimed Precaution, an Austen-esque tale of a baronet’s daughters picking their way through the matrimonial minefield of English high 1 James Fenimore Cooper, Precaution, a Novel (1820; London: George Routledge & Sons, 1889). 2 Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America, Expanded Edition (1986; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 3. 3 For relevant discussions, see: James D. Wallace, “Cultivating an Audience from Precaution to The Spy,” in James Fenimore Cooper: New Critical Essays, ed. Robert Clark (London: Vision and Barnes & Noble, 1985), 38-54; Robert Weisbuch, Atlantic Double-Cross: American Literature and British Influence in the Age of Emerson (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986), ix- 8; David Timms, “Literary Distances,” in The End of Anglo-America: Historical Essays in the Study of Cultural Divergence (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991) ed., R.A. Burchell, 160-169; Malcolm Bradbury, Dangerous Pilgrimages. Trans-Atlantic Mythologies and the Novel (London: Martin Secker and Warburg, 1995; reprint, London: Penguin, 1996), 53-58; Leonard Tennenhouse, “A Language for the Nation: A Transatlantic Problem,” in Revolutionary Histories: Transatlantic Cultural Nationalism, 1775-1815, ed. W.M. Verhoeven (Basginstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 62-84. 4 Sydney Smith, “Who Reads an American Book?,” in The Edinburgh Review (Edinburgh: January 1820), reprinted on: http://www.usgennet.org/usa/topic/preservation/epochs/vol5/pg144.htm Accessed: 16 June 2005. - 1 - society, squarely at America’s Anglophile reading public.5 However, even Cooper’s own friends criticised Precaution for its Englishness and, by the author’s own admission, the novel’s critical and commercial success was only “moderate.”6 So, for his second book Cooper set himself the task of writing “an American novel professedly.”7 He produced The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground (1821), the story of an upper-class, New York-state family’s divided political loyalties during the War of Independence and a Patriot secret agent’s heroic efforts to protect them.8 Whether shrewd or lucky, Cooper’s timing was perfect. A combination of factors made the early 1820s a ripe moment to introduce such an avowedly patriotic novel 9 into the American marketplace. Nationalist feeling generated by the war against the 5 Biographical details from: Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization 1800-1890 (New York: Atheneum, 1985; reprint, New York: HarperPerennial, 1994), 82-84; Warren Motley, The American Abraham: James Fenimore Cooper and the Frontier Patriarch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 1-59; Robert Emmet Long, James Fenimore Cooper (New York: Continuum, 1990), 13-29; Wayne Franklin, “Introduction,” in James Fenimore Cooper, The Spy, xii-xviii; Wayne Franklin, “Fathering the Son: The Cultural Origins of James Fenimore Cooper,” in Resources for American Literary Study 27:2 (2001): 155-158. 6 James Fenimore Cooper, from “unpublished autobiographical notes which Cooper wrote down in the 1840s,” printed in Susan Fenimore Cooper, Pages and Pictures from the Writings of James Fenimore Cooper (New York: W.A. Townsend, 1861), Appendix 1; reprinted in Marcel Clavel, Fenimore Cooper and his Critics: American, British and French Criticisms of the Novelist’s Early Work (Aix-en-Provence: Imprimerie Universitaire de Provence, 1938), 54. 7 James Fenimore Cooper, The Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper Volume One, ed. James Franklin Beard (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960), 4-5. 8 James Fenimore Cooper, The Spy; a Tale of the Neutral Ground (1821), with an Introduction by Wayne Franklin (London: Penguin Books, 1997). 9 See: Michael Kammen, A Season of Youth: The American Revolution and the Historical Imagination
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