Elizabeth Gaskell and Louisa May Alcott

Domestic Narratives in the Transatlantic Community: Elizabeth Gaskell and Louisa May Alcott Louisa Jayne Charlotte Hodgson Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of PhD University of Leeds School of English September 2010 The candidate confirms that the work submitted is her own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. © 2010 The University of Leeds and Louisa Jayne Charlotte Hodgson Acknowledgements With thanks to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for supporting this PhD, and to my supervisors, Professor Bridget Bennett and Dr. Matthew Rubery. I would also like to thank the following people for their help and support: Owen Clayton, Dr. Alice Crossley, Dr. Richard de Ritter, Dr. Tara Deshpande, Irene Addison-Child, Dr. Emma Smith, Dr. Lucy Evans and Dr. Robert Jones. Abstract My thesis investigates the processes of reciprocal, transatlantic literary exchange between Britain and the United States in the nineteenth century. While these specific transnational relations have received much critical attention in recent years, I extend current theoretical frameworks by focusing on how women‘s domestic fiction operates as a currency for literal and ideological interchanges between Britain and the United States. Concentrating primarily upon Elizabeth Gaskell‘s and Louisa May Alcott‘s fictions, I trace how they operate as ‗transatlantic domestic narratives‘. I use this term to refer to the mobility of their material texts as they circulate within a transatlantic community, and also to articulate the generic narrative tropes on which their domestic fictions rely. I explore, therefore, how the rhetoric of domesticity – as transmitted through the transatlantic domestic narrative – becomes a shared medium through which specific localised concerns can be articulated and circulated within a transatlantic arena. Focusing on four domestic tropes which were common on both sides of the Atlantic – home, the worker, the nurse, and the witch – I illustrate how both Gaskell and Alcott mobilise these four narrative structures in order to contribute to local and transnational debates in which national, literary and gendered identities are created and contested. Both authors‘ fictions, I demonstrate, exemplify, and have a significant impact upon, a transatlantic literary marketplace. Table of Contents Introduction: Transatlantic Domestic Narratives 1 Transatlantic (Dis)Satisfactions 1 The Transatlantic Literary Marketplace 8 Exchange in a Transatlantic Community 12 The Critical Domestic Tradition in Britain and the United States 18 Chapter One: Spaces of Home and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford 24 ‗The Last Generation in England‘ 24 Spaces of Home 27 ‗Elegant Economy‘ 30 Trivia, Trains and Charles Dickens 34 Letters, Butchers, and Samuel Johnson‘s The History of Rasselas: Prince of Abissinia 41 Balls, Ballrooms, and the Transformative Effect of the Conjurer 48 Regionalism, Sarah Orne Jewett‘s Deephaven and Lethargic Clowns 53 Returning to Cranford 63 Chapter Two: Louisa May Alcott’s Literary Experiments: Little Women and Transatlantic Tradition 65 Little Women: the ‗American‘, Domestic ‗Myth‘? 65 Gender and Genre in the Transnational Literary Marketplace 69 John Bunyan and Self-Reliance 77 Charles Dickens and the Pickwick Portfolio 88 Becoming a ‗C.B.‘ 92 Sensational Literature 10 Re-imagining the U.S. ‗Moral Story-Book‘ 106 Chapter Three: ‘I did a woman’s work’: Nursing and Female Labour 113 The Nurse with ‗a Face for Every Occasion‘ 113 The Nurse-at-Home and the Nurse-at-War: Her Literary and Cultural Legacy 118 The Nurse-at-War: Florence Nightingale and Transatlantic Reform 122 Gaskell and Nightingale: ‗settl[ing] that most difficult problem for women‘ 127 The Life and Demise of Nurse Periwinkle: Constructing a Hospital Sketch 133 Work: A Story of Nursing 146 ‗She is no common woman‘: (De)Constructing the Nurse in Ruth 156 The Nurse at Work (in the Narrative) 169 Chapter Four: The Monstrous Witchcraft Narrative 172 The Witch: the ‗Perfect Figure for Negative Identity 172 Transatlantic Readings of Seventeenth-century Histories in Nineteenth-century Narratives 176 Lois the Witch and Gothic Storytelling 184 ‗New‘ and ‗Old‘ England 186 A Witch, By Law 191 The Witch as Storyteller 197 Telling Tales About Witches 200 Seeing an Invisible World: A Pair of Eyes: or, Modern Magic 204 ‗I am a witch […] Beware of me in time‘ 211 A ‗Secret Slavery‘ 214 ‗It‘s a dreadful picture, isn‘t it? But I can‘t help looking at it‘ 217 Conclusion: Making Connections 221 Bibliography 227 Introduction Transatlantic Domestic Narratives Transatlantic (Dis)Satisfactions In 1857, literary agent Sampson Low approached British novelist Elizabeth Gaskell proposing that she edit a British version of Maria Cummins‘s American bestseller Mabel Vaughan, published that year. Gaskell willingly complied with the proposal.1 Acting as the London agents for U.S. publishers Harper Bros., and conversely as the U.S. contacts for authors such as Gaskell, Sampson Low had established themselves as one of the literary agents of the period, boasting a catalogue of authors that included Wilkie Collins, Harriet Beecher Stowe, as well as Louisa May Alcott.2 Recognising the significance of a transatlantic publishing network facilitated by agents such as Low, Gaskell prefaces her edition of Mabel Vaughan with a discussion of the ‗pleasant intercourse‘ established through the ‗interchange of novels which seems to be going on pretty constantly‘ between Britain and the United States.3 This exchange, she implies, is facilitated through the exchange of domestic fiction and the ideology of domesticity: Our cousinly connection with the Americans dates from our common ancestors of whom we are both proud […] When we are stirred to our utmost depths by some passage or other in ―Uncle Tom‖, we say from our full hearts, ―And I am also of the same race as this woman‖ […] It is our Anglo-Saxon descent which makes us both so undemonstrative; or perhaps I should say, so ready to express our little dissatisfactions with each other, while the deeper feelings (such as our love and confidence in each other,) are unspoken [...] Through the means of works of fiction, we obtain glimpses into American home-life; of their modes of thought, their traditional observances, and their social 1 She received £50 for her work. 2 Gaskell did, however, have a difficult relationship with Low. In a letter to her friend Charles Eliot Norton (1857) she describes the agent as a ‗tricky man‘ who she would ‗like to out-dodge‘, believing he had deliberately not paid her for her story ‗Doom of the Griffiths‘. The Letters of Mrs Gaskell, ed. by J.A.V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1966), p. 488. The story was, however, published in Harper‟s Monthly Magazine in January 1858. 3 Elizabeth Gaskell, ‗Introduction‘ , to Maria Cummins, Mabel Vaughan (London: Sampson Low, 1857), p. vi. 1 temptations, quite beyond and apart from the observations of travellers, who, after all, only see the family in the street, or on the festival-days, not in the quiet domestic circle, into which the stranger is rarely admitted. 4 Gaskell constructs an extended familial metaphor to emphasise the shared linguistic and ancestral heritage that connect the two nations. The ‗cousinly‘ relations, predicated upon a common ‗Anglo-Saxon‘ descent, enable texts such as Harriet Beecher Stowe‘s Uncle Tom‟s Cabin (1852) to enter into British reading circles and provoke empathetic responses. Gaskell‘s use of the term ‗race‘ here as a conjoining metaphor is significant; it is a reference to an explicitly white Anglo-Saxon heritage that structures British-U.S. familial relations, forming an exclusive forum in which transnational issues such as abolitionism could be debated.5 Gaskell, therefore, positions the ‗little dissatisfactions‘ which sometimes characterise transatlantic relations as merely superficial familial squabbles that hide a deep-rooted mutual respect. However, while texts such as Mabel Vaughan and Uncle Tom‟s Cabin both facilitate and affirm these connections, they are also the vehicles through which difference is asserted. The ‗little dissatisfactions‘ between the nations are underplayed, yet they register in Gaskell‘s unconscious slippage between the prepositions ‗we‘ and ‗our‘ used to describe American ‗home-life‘. While the latter denotes shared ties of transnational affection, ‗we‘ is used as a national-specific pronoun – a British reading public that gazes upon and consumes ‗the quiet domestic circle‘ in which U.S. difference is performed. The brief ‗glimpses‘ of ‗home-life‘ presented to the ‗stranger‘ are depicted as both instantly recognisable and essentially foreign as national difference is respectively bridged and affirmed. Domestic texts like Mabel Vaughan, therefore, have a dual identity. They operate both as depictions of localised or national concerns, 4 Ibid, p. vi. 5 Important new work on the relationship between Anglo-Saxonism, British and American relations and ethnicity has been done by Elisa Tamarkin in Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion and Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), pp. 239-40. 2 and also manifest themselves as mobile cultural products that are consumed by audiences on the other side of the Atlantic. These domestic fictions, Gaskell implies, speak to both a specific and an expansive transatlantic community of readers. Sampson Low‘s edition and Gaskell‘s ‗Preface‘, I contend, neatly articulate the dynamics of the transatlantic literary relationship between Britain and the United States in the nineteenth century.6 The British edition of Mabel Vaughan exemplifies the processes of reciprocal exchange that enabled both Cummins‘s text to cross the Atlantic, and Gaskell‘s work to reach U.S. audiences.7 This anecdote encapsulates many of the preoccupations that inform my work. In this thesis I explore how women‘s domestic fiction operated as a currency for transatlantic exchanges.

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