Suffragettes of the Harem”: the Evolution of Sympathy and the Afterlives of Sentimentality in American Feminist Orientalism, 1865-1920
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“Suffragettes of the Harem”: The Evolution of Sympathy and the Afterlives of Sentimentality in American Feminist Orientalism, 1865-1920 by William Radler Hunt Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Priscilla Wald, Supervisor ___________________________ Thomas Ferraro ___________________________ Timothy Marr ___________________________ Annabel Wharton Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2016 ABSTRACT “Suffragettes of the Harem”: The Evolution of Sympathy and the Afterlives of Sentimentality in American Feminist Orientalism, 1865-1920 by William Radler Hunt Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Priscilla Wald, Supervisor ___________________________ Thomas Ferraro ___________________________ Timothy Marr ___________________________ Annabel Wharton An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2016 Copyright by William R. Hunt 2016 Abstract This project examines narrative encounters in space identified as “harem,” produced by authors with biographical ties to the vanguard of the American Suffrage Movement. I regard these feminists’ circulations East, to the domestic space of the Other, as a hitherto unstudied, yet critical component of transnationalism in the history of U.S. Suffrage. This literary record also crucially reveals the extent to which sentimentality was plotted as a potential force for the reform of other cultures. An urge to sympathize denied in the space of the harem illustrates the colonial anxieties that subtended sentimentality’s prospective deployment beyond national borders. In five chapters on the work of Anna Leonowens, Susan Elston Wallace, Demetra Vaka Brown, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Edith Wharton, I examine how Suffrage-minded authors writing the harem strategically abandon an activist praxis of fellow feeling. Such a reluctance to transform sentimental literature into a colonial literature consequently informs that genre’s postbellum decline. The sentiments that run dry for American feminists in the harem additionally foreground the costly failures of Wilsonian Idealism, a doctrine that appropriated a discourse of sentimentality in order to script the United States’ expanded involvement in global affairs. iv Dedication For my copy editor, Toni, and my accountant, Big Jim. v Table of Contents Abstract .................................................................................................................... iv Dedication ................................................................................................................. v List of Illustrations .................................................................................................. vii Acknowledgements ................................................................................................ viii Introduction: “What’s de harem?” Suffragists Define the Harem and its Sentiments in the Postbellum ................................................................................. 1 Chapter 1: “An architectural Sabbath”: Anna Leonowens, Fourierism, and Sentimental Assimilations in the City of Women ........................................ 45 Chapter 2: “Mrs. Lew Wallace Opens the Doors of Forbidden Rooms”: Sentimental Simulations and Utilitarian Orientalisms in Susan Elston Wallace’s The Storied Sea ................................................................................... 101 Chapter 3: “Suffragettes of the Harem”: Internationalism, Impressionism, and Strategies of Sympathy in Demetra Vaka Brown’s 150 .................................................................................................... حرملك/Haremlik Chapter 4: “Kindling a Streak of Fire”: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Sentimental Utopias, Sympathetic Evolution, and the Death of Suffragist Sentimentality ...................................................................................................... 205 Coda: Edith Wharton in Morocco, Woodrow Wilson at Versailles, and the Suffragettes at Occoquan ............................................................................. 259 Works Cited........................................................................................................... 273 Biography .............................................................................................................. 301 vi List of Illustrations Figure 1: Fourierist Victor Considérant’s concept for the phalanstère, 1836 ....................99 Figure 2: “The Beautiful Gate of the Temple" .................................................................100 Figure 3: Lew Wallace, portrait of Sultan Abdul Hamid II .............................................148 Figure 4: "The Turkish Princess/The Arabian Princess". .................................................149 Figure 5: “Female Head from New Zealand, in the Museum, Chester" ..........................258 vii Acknowledgements I would like to thank the members of my dissertation committee for their sizeable investment of time, patience, kindness, and invaluable feedback as this product wound its way toward completion (after only a few stints in the wilderness). viii Introduction: “What’s de harem?” Suffragists Define the Harem and its Sentiments in the Postbellum It is not surprising that much ignorance should prevail in the Occident concerning the true character of the women of the Orient, and, inasmuch as the sole knowledge of the individuality and of their intellectual capacity is derived from the stories of women tourists, usually frivolous and only able to converse with the inmates of the harems through interpreters, and from the rare and derogatory remarks of the male natives, who affect a profound contempt for the fair sex, it has been taken for granted in this country and likewise in Europe that the mental caliber of the inmates of the seraglios is exceedingly low and even degraded. — “Influence of the Harem: Crimes Perpetrated with Impunity within Its Doors,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, December 18, 1898 Miss Adams and Miss Sadie Adams were aunt and niece, the former a little, energetic, hard-featured Bostonian old-maid, with a huge surplus of unused love behind her stern and swarthy features. She had never been from home before, and she was now busy upon the self-imposed task of bringing the East up to the standard of Massachusetts. She had hardly landed in Egypt before she realized that the country needed putting to rights, and since the conviction struck her she had been very fully occupied. The saddle-galled donkeys, the starved pariah dogs, the flies round the eyes of the babies, the naked children, the importunate begging, the ragged, untidy women, – they were all challenges to her conscience, and she plunged in bravely at her work of reformation. As she could not speak a word of the language, however, and was unable to make any of the delinquents understand what it was that she wanted, her passage up the Nile left the immemorial East very much as she had found it, but afforded a good deal of sympathetic amusement to her fellow-travellers. — Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Desert Drama: Being the Tragedy of the Korosko (1898) Let’s start with the problem of establishing a definition. Let’s start on a raft, a few days upriver from Cairo, Missouri, at a moment when the work of attributing meaning becomes mired in the hermeneutics of suspicion. “‘What’s de harem?’” Jim asks Huck, in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), during discussion on the life and times of King Solomon (111). Not to neglect subsequent events in the same fictional universe, this conversation takes place well before Huck and Jim’s sojourn 1 across North Africa in a hot-air-balloon – before Jim becomes stranded atop the head of the Great Sphinx of Giza and besieged by belligerent Cairenes.1 According to Huck, Solomon’s harem is “‘the place where he keeps his wives’” (111). Jim’s ignorance of patently obvious common knowledge prompts some juvenile chiding: “‘don’t you know about the harem?’” (111). In a flash of awareness, Jim recollects the term but defines it against some of its most common associations in the West: “‘A harem is a bo’d’n-house [boarding house], I reck’n. Mos’ likely dey has rackety time in de nussery. En I reck’n de wives quarrels considerable…Bekase why would a wise man want to live in de mids er sich a blim- blammin all de time?’” (111). Solomon’s appropriation of a harem is, to Jim, a marker of poor judgment: “‘dey say Sollermun de wises’ man dat ever live. I doan take no stock in dat”’ (111). Not so much denoting sexual domination or polygyny, the harem is here a tableau of domestic chaos in extremis. Solomon’s private life administering an overcrowded harem has also impacted his career as a jurist: “‘You take a man dat’s got ‘bout five million chillen runnin’ roun’ de house, en it’s diffunt. He as soon chop a chile in two as a cat. Dey’s plenty mo’. A chile er two, mo’er less, warn’t no consekens to Sollermun, dad fetch him’” (113). Jim’s inversion of the Judgment of Solomon, which Huck tries mightily to correct, recasts the king’s verdict to cut a child in half not so much as a ruse designed to flush out an impostor, but as an illustration of how an aberrant domesticity can