Sickly Sentimentalism: Sympathy and Pathology in American Women's Literature, 1866-1900

City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 5-2018 Sickly Sentimentalism: Sympathy and Pathology in American Women's Literature, 1866-1900 Nicole Zeftel The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/2613 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] SICKLY SENTIMENTALISM: SYMPATHY AND PATHOLOGY IN AMERICAN WOMEN’S LITERATURE, 1866-1900 by NICOLE ZEFTEL A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Comparative Literature in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2018 © 2018 NICOLE ZEFTEL All Rights Reserved ! ii! Sickly Sentimentalism: Sympathy and Pathology in American Women’s Literature, 1866-1900 by Nicole Zeftel This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Comparative Literature in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date ! Hildegard Hoeller Chair of Examining Committee Date ! Giancarlo Lombardi Executive Officer Supervisory Committee: Eric Lott Bettina Lerner THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK ! iii! ABSTRACT Sickly Sentimentalism: Sympathy and Pathology in American Women’s Literature, 1866-1900 by Nicole Zeftel Advisors: Hildegard Hoeller and Eric Lott Sickly Sentimentalism: Pathology and Sympathy in American Women’s Literature, 1866-1900 examines the work of four American women novelists writing between 1866 and 1900 as responses to a dominant medical discourse that pathologized women’s emotions. The popular fiction of Metta Fuller Victor, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Sarah Orne Jewett, and E.D.E.N. Southworth mobilized sentimental style and sympathetic affect to challenge the medical trend of treating female sentiment as a sickness. At the level of narrative, this challenge took the form of deviating from the domestic and marriage plots prevalent in women’s popular fiction of their period. Through forms of sentimental writing my selected authors imagined new possibilities for female subjectivity outside the limitations of pathology and domesticity. This dissertation joins the critical work of scholars of American studies seeking to attend to the writings of overlooked women writers. I argue that a broader consideration of nineteenth-century women’s literature that more thoroughly encompasses popular fiction can expand our understanding of sentimentalism as both a genre and cultural discourse. My study is in large part a recovery project, aiming to shed new light on popular female authors whose work is still overlooked and remains out of print despite critics’ best efforts to expand the nineteenth-century canon. ! iv! Acknowledgements I am truly grateful to the professors at the University of Toronto’s Literary Studies program, in particular Julian Patrick, who taught me how to read analytically and led me to pursue a PhD. I want to thank Giancarlo Lombardi, Andre Aciman, and the rest of the faculty at CUNY’s Comparative Literature department for their support throughout the years and for fostering such an intellectually rich program. Thank you to Bettina Lerner for her generosity in joining my committee late in the process, and providing intellectual guidance and attention. I am indebted to Hildegard Hoeller for her incisive editing and clarifying commentary that led me to my central ideas even when I could not yet see them, and to Eric Lott who helped me conceptualize this dissertation at its most crucial junctures. I am forever grateful for the support of the friends who sustained me during this degree and the difficult writing process. I’ve been very lucky to have Krysia Michael by my side from our time as undergrads in Toronto to graduate students at CUNY; her humor helped me survive the more difficult parts of life in New York City, and her generous editing and critical insights informed my work. I relied on Valentin Gurfinkel for his wit and wisdom about all things academic, psychoanalytic, and otherwise. And thank you to Allison Siehnel who always encouraged me to finish this project. Without the support of my parents, Barbara and Bruce, I would never have been able to pursue this career. Thank you for teaching me the value of hard work and the meaning of an intellectual life. Thank you to Jon and Jenni who made my life in New York so much richer. And thank you to Ramiro, who came into my life halfway through this project at a moment when I was not sure I could finish it; he guided me to its end with enthusiasm and care. ! v! Contents Introduction 1 Follow the Money: Circulation and Sentiment in Metta Fuller Victor’s The Dead Letter 21 A Medium for Reform: Feminist Possession in Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism 53 Heart Histories and Pathological Sentiment: Sarah Orne Jewett and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps 107 Hysterical Sentimentalism: E.D.E.N. Southworth and the Excesses of Marriage Law 158 Bibliography 205 ! vi! Introduction American Physician E.H. Clarke’s Sex in Education (1874) presents a biological justification for the long-held belief in women’s mental inferiority, arguing that women are ill-fit for education because they menstruate. In an essay included in Julia Ward Howe’s Sex and Education: A Reply to Dr. E.H. Clarke’s “Sex in Education” (1874), activist and author Elizabeth Stuart Phelps rejects Clarke’s theories: The woman who is physically and intellectually a living denial of every premise and of every conclusion which Dr. Clarke has advanced, has yet right to an audience…. No clinical opinion, it will be remembered, bearing against the physical vigor of any class of people, is or can be a complete one. The physician knows sick women almost only…. Thousands of women will read that they are prevented by Nature’s eternal and irresistible laws from all sustained activity of brain or body…. Thousands of women will not believe what the author of “Sex in Education” tells them, simply because they know better. (129) The activity of women’s “brains and bodies” was of predominant concern in the American nineteenth century. Despite what Phelps writes, as the century went on there was an increasingly prominent belief that a “clinical opinion” (assessments of women established through supposedly empirical evidence) could indeed lead to a complete understanding of the female subject. The development of neuroscience and the establishment of a codified medical system away from the pseudo-sciences of the first half of the century led to a growing conviction that the body tells truths; that physiology can be accurately read for information about the internal self. Previous to this, medicine had been more speculative and less committed to empirical assessments of gender. Thus, for example, what began in the first half of the century as an unsubstantiated belief that 1 women simply could not receive the same advanced education that men could, had by the end of the century transformed into Clarke’s physiological theory. “Sick women,” in Phelps’ terms, are everywhere in the treatises and studies on the dangers of education and reading for the female population. Clarke proposes the readability of women’s bodies, treating them like texts that reveal sickness—a theory that reverberates through conceptualizations of women’s writing and reading. Often referred to as “sickly sentimental,” women’s novels were positioned by medical discourse as both expressing and provoking emotional pathologies. Too much reading could be a symptom of hysteria, while regulating it could be part of the cure. Literature also contained hysteria in its overwrought style and unrealistic plots, telling what physician Charles Withington called “ill-balanced” stories that created similarly ill-balanced readers. For Withington, “sentiment is not a sign of hysteria; sentimentality is. The former is, as it should be, controlled by reason and common sense; the latter is devoid of any such control” (195). In his essay warning of literature’s power to spread an apparently contagious form of hysteria, Withington specifically implicates popular sentimental literature. Physician F.M. Turnbull, like Withington, finds “sickly sentimentalism” to reside in “such magazines one can buy in every news stall” (294). Phelps seizes their language to rebuke their position, arguing that “sickly sentimentality” lies in the system that regulates women’s lives and confines them to domesticity (Unhappy Girls 149). So too does radical feminist Victoria Woodhull diagnose sickly sentimentalism as a symptom of hegemonic power, asserting that the cure is found not in regulating women but rather in loosening excessively rigid social mores. After famously revealing esteemed preacher Henry Ward Beecher’s affair with his congregant Elizabeth Tilton, Woodhull accuses Tilton’s husband of sentimentality when he refuses to join her feminist cause: his “bogus sentimentality, pumped in his imagination, because our sickly 2 religious literature, and Sunday school morality, and pulpit phariseeism had humbugged him all his life into the belief that he ought to feel and act in this harlequin and absurd way on such an occasion” (qtd. in Spectral Sexualities 12, emphasis my own). In her speech The Elixir of Life (1873), Woodhull entreats her audience to “throw off the sickly sentimentalism about sexual love—your sham morality and mock modesty about the most common and harmless, as well as the innocent and beautiful of things” (173, emphasis my own). Both outspoken feminists, Phelps and Woodhull argue that rigid moralism and the irrationality of conservative ideals generate society’s sickness, and not women’s unmediated contact with sentimental literature. As I argue, in the hands of the novelists considered here, sentimentalism is the salve for patriarchal values through its refiguring of female embodiment and emotion.

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