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E.D.E.N. Southworth: Recovering a Nineteenth-Century Popular

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E.D.E.N. Southworth: Recovering a Nineteenth-Century Popular E. D. E. N. SOUTHWORTH E. D. E. N. SOUTHWORTH Recovering a Nineteenth-Century Popular Novelist Edited by Melissa J. Homestead Pamela T. Washington THE UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE PRESS / KNOXVILLE h Copyright © 2012 by The University of Tennessee Press / Knoxville. All Rights Reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America. First Edition. Frontispiece: A carte de visite of a daguerreotype of E. D. E. N. Southworth in her library at Prospect Cot- tage, date unknown. According to a note in Southworth’s hand in her papers at the Library of Congress, the daguerreotype “was taken on the spur of the moment. The artist was here to take the baby. While waiting for her to wake, he wanted to take me. I had no time to get myself up for a picture and so if he took me, he would have to take me, as I was, at my work. I was correcting the proofs. He fixed his camera in the porch door of the library. I told him I must work until he was quite ready; but if he would tell me when I would stop and sit still. I was directing the envelope, when he said ‘now.’ I sat back to rest and he took me.” Wm. B. Becker Collection/Photography Museum.com. Cindy Weinstein’s “‘What Did You Mean?’ The Language of Marriage in The Fatal Marriage and Family Doom” is a revision of her essay “‘What did you mean?’: Marriage in E. D. E. N. Southworth’s Nov- els,” published in Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, vol. 27 no. 1 (2011), and is included by permission of the author and the University of Nebraska Press. The chapter also excerpts material from “Sentimentalism” by Cindy Weinstein, published in The Cambridge History of the American Novel, edited by Leonard Cassuto © 2011 Cambridge University Press. Reprinted with permission. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data E. D. E. N. Southworth: recovering a nineteenth-century popular novelist / edited by Melissa J. Home- stead and Pamela T. Washington. — 1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-57233-925-5 — ISBN 1-57233-925-X 1. Southworth, Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte, 1819–1899—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Southworth, Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte, 1819–1899—Political and social views. 3. Women and literature—United States—History—19th century. 4. Social values in literature. 5. Literature and society—United States—History. I. Homestead, Melissa J., 1963– II. Washington, Pam. III. Title: Recovering a nineteenth-century popular novelist. PS2893.E34 2012 813ˇ.4—dc23 2012017296 Contents Acknowledgments ix Abbreviations xi Introduction xiii Melissa J. Homestead and Pamela T. Washington I. Serial Southworth E. D. E. N. Southworth’s Serial Novels Retribution and The Mother-in-Law as Vehicles for the Cause of Abolition in the National Era: Setting the Stage for Uncle Tom’s Cabin 1 Vicki L. Martin An Exclusive Engagement: The Personal and Professional Negotiations of Vivia 25 Kenneth Salzer The Hidden Agenda of The Hidden Hand: Periodical Publication and the Literary Marketplace in Late-Nineteenth-Century America 49 Alison M. Scott and Amy M. Thomas II. Southworth’s Genres Illustrating Southworth: Genre, Conventionality, and The Island Princess 77 Kathryn Conner Bennett Maniac Brides: Southworth’s Sensational and Gothic Transformations 107 Beth L. Lueck Change of a Dress: Britomarte, the Man-Hater and Other Transvestite Narratives of the Civil War 129 Annie Merrill Ingram III. Intertextual Southworth E. D. E. N. Southworth: An “American George Sand”? 155 Charlene Avallone Revising Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Sympathy, the State, and the Role of Women in E. D. E. N. Southworth’s The Lost Heiress 183 Paul Christian Jones E. D. E. N. Southworth’s Tragic Muse 205 Karen Tracey IV. Southworth, Marriage, and the Law Poe, Southworth, and the Antebellum Wife 221 Ellen Weinauer E. D. E. N. Southworth’s Reimagining of the Married Women’s Property Reforms 243 Elizabeth Stockton “What Did You Mean?” The Language of Marriage in The Fatal Marriage and Family Doom 265 Cindy Weinstein A Chronological Bibliography of E. D. E. N. Southworth’s Works Privileging Periodical Publication 285 Melissa J. Homestead and Vicki L. Martin Contributors 307 Index 311 Illustrations Prospect Cottage, c. 1863 xii Saturday Evening Post Prospectus, 1850 xxx “Lord Montressor’s Introduction to the Captain of the Petrel,” 1857 75 “Has a Mother a Right to Her Children?” 1857 84 “The ‘Starving’ Mother and Child,” 1857 85 “The ‘Last esort’R for the Settlement of the Difficulty between the Widow and Her Waiting-Woman,” 1857 88 “Willful Brande and Etoile on Their Way to Embark from the Island,” 1857 90 “Julius Luxmore’s First Glimpse of the Princess of the Isle,” 1857 91 “Interview between Estelle and Barbara Brande,” 1857 94 “Willful Brande and Old Timon Planning the Escape of Etoile,” 1857 96 “The Apparition of Old Neptune,” 1857 99 “T. B. Peterson & Brothers’ Book House,” 1875 153 “An Astounded Bridegroom,” 1867 219 Acknowledgments The symposium out of which this collection grew received financial support from the English Department and Nineteenth-Century Studies Program at the Uni- versity of Nebraska–Lincoln and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Central Oklahoma. Paul Erickson, Director of Scholarly Programs, arranged for the American Antiquarian Society to give us a meeting space and logistical sup- port. The American Antiquarian Society also provided images from its collec- tion, as did William Becker/PhotographyMuseum.com. Paul Christian Jones has been more than a contributor to this volume, generously sharing information and pointing us to resources, including the cover image of this volume. Andrew Jewell and J. David Macey provided feedback on the prospectus. The Office of the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Central Oklahoma supported the work of Jennifer Pruitt, who formatted the manuscript for submission. Abbreviations The following abbreviations are used in notes throughout this volume. DU Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth Papers, 1849–1901. Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke Uni- versity, Durham, NC. EDENS Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth Era National Era HP Henry Peterson NYL New York Ledger RB Robert Bonner SEP Saturday Evening Post TBP Theophilus B. etersonP Figure 1. A carte de visite of a daguerreotype of the exterior of E. D. E. N. Southworth’s home, Prospect Cottage, in Georgetown, Washington, D.C., c. 1863. Southworth acquired Prospect Cottage in 1853. Wm. B. Becker Collection/Photography Museum.com. Introduction Melissa J. Homestead and Pamela T. Washington In early 1901, Willa Cather visited Prospect Cottage in the Georgetown neigh- borhood of Washington, D.C., the longtime home of the recently deceased novel- ist Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte (E. D. E. N.) Southworth. Born in Washington, D.C., in 1819 to southern parents (her father from Virginia, her mother from Maryland), Southworth lived in Washington with her family until she married Frederick Hamilton Southworth and moved with him to Wisconsin in 1841. When he deserted her and their two children, she returned to Washington and taught school to support herself, turning to writing to supplement her income from teaching. Within a few years, Southworth became one of the most prolific and popular novelists of the nineteenth century, publishing scores of novels in a career that stretched from the late 1840s through the early 1890s. In 1853, she purchased Prospect Cottage with her literary earnings, and although she lived in England in the late 1850s and early 1860s and spent part of her later years in Yon- kers, New York, she returned to her cottage late in her life and died there in 1899. A mere two years after Southworth’s death, Cather made her visit and Southworth’s literary legacy the subject of a newspaper article for the State Journal of Lincoln, Nebraska, for which Cather had written reviews and cultural criticism as a student at the University of Nebraska and to which she occasionally contrib- uted even after leaving Nebraska in 1895. Cather concisely frames Southworth as a popular writer of melodramatic novels, a southerner, and a celebrity, and enacts in miniature the dynamic Andreas Huyssen describes in “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other.” At a moment in the evolution of American litera- ture when the “great divide” was opening between mass culture and “authentic” culture, female reader and male author, and the nineteenth and twentieth centu- ries, Cather sought to establish her own affiliation with the realm of pure art by positioning Southworth, her oeuvre, and her readers on the “wrong” side. Cather’s article provides a provocative jumping-off point for our twenty- first-century collection of essays on Southworth because it maps with precision Southworth’s location in this cultural struggle. Cather’s early-twentieth-century visit to Prospect Cottage came at a crucial moment in her career, when, as her ac- count of the visit demonstrates, she was struggling to find a way to become a “se- rious” novelist and contemplating the literary legacy of one nineteenth-century popular woman novelist with profound ambivalence.1 Writing throughout as “we,” Cather creates for herself and her readers a collective identity as modern subjects standing in judgment of a quaintly outmoded culture. However, she maintains this position of superior knowledge with difficulty, swinging between dismissive critique and defensive rationalization as she seeks to unlock the secret of Southworth’s popularity with an earlier generation of readers. Southworth’s “physical labor” is central,
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