European journal of American studies

14-3 | 2019 Special Issue: Harriet Prescott Spofford: The Home, the Nation, and the Wilderness

Electronic version URL: https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/14869 DOI: 10.4000/ejas.14869 ISSN: 1991-9336

Publisher European Association for American Studies

Electronic reference European journal of American studies, 14-3 | 2019, “Special Issue: Harriet Prescott Spofford: The Home, the Nation, and the Wilderness” [Online], Online since 29 October 2019, connection on 08 July 2021. URL: https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/14869; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.14869

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction. Harriet Prescott Spofford: The Home, the Nation, and the Wilderness Stéphanie Durrans

History, Her-Story

Harriet Prescott Spofford’s Development of a Protestant Aesthetic for a Diverse Nation Paula Kot

Feminizing a Colonial Epic: On Spofford’s “Priscilla” Daniela Daniele

Feminist (Re)Writings

“She Was the Mad Woman”: Misdiagnosed Madness in Harriet Prescott Spofford’s “Her Story” Sirpa Salenius

Of Women, Wine and Salt: Revisioning the Home in Harriet Prescott Spofford’s Detective Fiction Stéphanie Durrans

New Readings of “Circumstance”

Narrating Violation: Harriet Prescott Spofford’s “Circumstance” Rita Bode

Feline Alter Egos in Harriet Prescott Spofford’s “Circumstance” and the Poetry of Emily Dickinson Adeline Chevrier-Bosseau

Dissolving Boundaries: Fluidity, Metamorphoses, and Queer Undercurrents

Specular Metamorphoses: Harriet Prescott Spofford’s “The Ray of Displacement” Asunción López-Varela

Seductive Snakes and Asexual Angels: Queer Undercurrents in Harriet Prescott Spofford’s “Desert Sands” H.J.E. Champion

“Per si muove—it was a mass of moonstone”: Fluidity, Dynamic Relations, and the Commodification of Storytelling in Harriet Prescott Spofford’s Arctic Writings Verena Laschinger

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Introduction. Harriet Prescott Spofford: The Home, the Nation, and the Wilderness

Stéphanie Durrans

1 Throughout the nineteenth century, as underlined by Nancy Cott in The Bonds of Womanhood, “the central convention of domesticity was the contrast between the home and the world” (64). The tension between private and public no doubt informs most of Harriet Prescott Spofford’s work and will be addressed from many different angles by the contributors to this special issue.1 As a middle-class white woman who lived with her husband and extended family on the beautiful premises of Deer Island, Massachusetts, and had a reputation as a remarkable hostess,2 Spofford could be expected to define herself solely in relation to home and family. And yet for all that, while making domesticity a central concern in her work, she also explored its intricate connections with both national issues and the world of the wilderness in stories that often take on a disturbing edge. Elsden has shown how domesticity encapsulates a wide range of meanings “as a concept of state, as a thematics of the home, and as a tamed status in which wildness has been curtailed” (xi), all of which are perhaps given most prominence in Spofford’s widely anthologized short story, “Circumstance,” a haunting tale in which a woman who has been captured by a panther and carried away to the top branches of a tree manages to stop the beast from devouring her by singing through the night.

2 “Circumstance” plunges the reader into a world where “Distinctions between home and wilderness are blurred and uncertain” (Logan 121). It can hardly be denied that Spofford sets about destabilizing our most common assumptions. This is a story that features a woman on the move, a woman undertaking a journey to the heart of darkness while her husband is waiting for her at home, playing the violin and looking after their child; the home itself is subject to a renegotiation of its boundaries when the forest inspires a “sweet home feeling” (156) in her; the Indians are not where they would be expected to be in a traditional captivity narrative—not in the wilderness but on its edges where they lay waste to the small community of settlers; the spectral

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apparition that should have left the poor woman in a state of terror is dismissed by the pragmatic, no-nonsense protagonist as a mere product of “circumstance,” not even as a figment of her imagination (something she is utterly deprived of, says the narrator). The final twist clinches this series of reversals. Just as we expected order to be restored with the heroic husband saving his wife and the meek woman now following in her husband’s footsteps, the frame is once more destabilized by the destruction of the home to which a safe return could be expected after this rite of passage.

3 The young woman who wrote “Circumstance” (published in 1860) had only just risen to fame thanks to the publication of another story (“In a Cellar”) that she had sent to the Atlantic Monthly in 1859, a story that was deemed so good and that evinced such knowledge of Parisian life that the editor, James Russell Lowell, could hardly believe it came from the pen of a demure young lady who had never set foot in France. The late 1850s and early 1860s were years of intense struggle as Harriet Prescott found herself under pressure to write hundreds of stories to support her ailing parents as well as her younger siblings. In the process, she ventured into literary genres traditionally coded as “male” and questioned the stability that “home” was supposed to offer. Most of the stories she wrote in those days unfortunately remain uncollected and even unidentified, waiting for future scholars to sift through the dusty archives where they are lying. Her newly-found fame and her marriage with Boston lawyer Richard Spofford in 1865 marked the end of a period of dire financial circumstances, though she remained a highly prolific writer to the end of her life in 1921. Her work had by then largely fallen into oblivion, partly because of Spofford’s natural affinity for romanticism which made it difficult for her to negotiate the transition towards realism in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Most of this work thus remained unacknowledged until the early 1980s, when a handful of scholars including Thelma J. Shinn, Barton Levi St. Armand, Alfred Bendixen, and Anne Dalke initiated the pioneering work of literary recovery that has brought Spofford to the attention of modern readers. Since then, a number of critics have further contributed to establishing Spofford’s literary significance, though with a near exclusive focus on “Circumstance” whose intriguing implications are still being teased out by contemporary scholarship, as shown by the two essays featured in the third part of this collection. Our primary concern, however, was also to uncover less familiar facets of this amazing writer who tried her hand at so many different genres (detective fiction, sentimental fiction, local color fiction, science fiction, tales of adventure, ghost stories, etc.) and to show the relevance of her work to modern-day readers. Taken collectively, the essays that follow show how Spofford’s work grows out of a desire to position herself with respect to her literary predecessors (e.g. Poe and Longfellow), how it interacts with the work of her fellow contemporary writers (e.g. Dickinson and Gilman) and how it prefigures later developments and even strangely resonates in today’s society (how to express sexual trauma? how to integrate foreign elements in the American “home”?). Another major asset of this collection lies in its capacity to expand the traditional Spofford canon by including studies of her non-fiction and by drawing from some of her other writings (poetry, essays, non-fiction) to throw light on her creative process.

4 The opening section, entitled “History, Her-Story,” focuses on Spofford’s approach to historical material in two very different genres. In “Charlestown,” a historical sketch published in 1871, she looks back on a dramatic episode of US history (the invasion, pillaging, and burning of a Catholic convent by a Protestant mob in 1834) that she

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denounces as an attack on the principles of freedom upheld by the American nation. In the process, she undermines dominant views of the event by playing on perspectives, collapsing the boundaries between the domestic and the foreign, and eventually developing a participatory model of reading in which Kot sees the expression of a Protestant aesthetic. Spofford emerges from this finely nuanced appraisal as a “cultural theorist” (Kot) whose textual response to such outrageous acts reveals a high degree of political awareness. This is followed by an essay in which Daniela Daniele examines Spofford’s retelling of a colonial legend set against a historical background, one in which Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had also found poetical inspiration for his long narrative poem “The Courtship of Miles Standish” (1858). Spofford’s “Priscilla” is one of three tales (the other two written by Alice Brown and Louise Imogen Guiney) collected under the title Three Heroines of New England Romance; Their True Stories Herein Set Forth and published in 1894. While obviously participating in a wider project aiming to bolster a sense of national identity through the retrieval of historical foundations, “Priscilla” affords Spofford the opportunity to transform a domestic heroine into a proto-feminist by giving fuller development to the spirit of resistance and rebellion already intimated by Longfellow and adopting the perspective of the young woman herself. In doing so, Spofford gives an interesting twist to the book’s ambition to tell a “true” story since, as shown by Daniele, what Priscilla imposes instead is “the truth of her heart.” As was the case in “Charlestown,” historical material once more fuels her discursive efforts to envision a better state at home while developing a critique of patriarchal abuses.

5 This reformist agenda also transpires in the various texts examined in the second set of essays included here. Spofford once wrote to William Hayes Ward, the editor of The Independent that she had been “an ardent antislavery person, and woman suffragette from [her] fourteenth year” (unpublished letter, 31 Oct. 1896, U of FL, qtd in Bendixen xvii). Both my own essay on Spofford’s detective fiction and Sirpa Salenius’s on “Her Story” show how skilled she was at manipulating imagery and stereotype, transgressing domestic boundaries to further her feminist projects. There is no doubt that Spofford’s deft handling of complex female characters challenges the gender ideology of her times by undermining simplistic nineteenth-century constructions of womanhood and domesticity. While “Her Story” has been regarded by Bendixen as a rewriting of “The Amber Gods” “from the point of view of the virtuous woman victim” (xxxi), Salenius argues that Spofford goes beyond such binaries as “Angel in the House / Femme Fatale.” She portrays the nameless protagonist/narrator of “Her Story” as a frustrated mother and wife with artistic pursuits and sexual desires of her own who ends up suffering from exhaustion as she assumes more and more of her husband’s professional responsibilities beside her own. In many ways, the heroine prefigures the development of the New Woman at the turn of the century and “her story” could also be regarded as that of many modern-day women trying to balance work and family life in an endless quest for self-fulfilment. At the same time, argues Salenius, the story— that takes the form of an asylum confession—“contributes to the national discussion about mental illness and asylums that reached its peak around the 1850s” and suggests that depriving women of their rights and freedom amounted to treating them no better than lunatics. Significantly, another “madwoman” is given the last words in the story that completes what can be regarded as Spofford’s detective trilogy—“In a Cellar” (1859), “Mr. Furbush” (1865) and “In the Maguerriwock” (1868). My study of these three stories examines the successes and failures of Spofford’s serial detective, Mr. Furbush,

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and of his early prototype, the diplomat-cum-detective-cum narrator of “In a Cellar” who comes to realize the vital importance of establishing connections between the domestic and the public spheres. Following Delphine’s cue in that later story that “a truth is often more visible veiled than nude (22), this essay seeks to uncover Spofford’s contribution to the women’s cause through an analysis of patterns of indirection, of the power of silence and of linguistic wordplay.

6 These are also running concerns in Rita Bode’s re-reading of “Circumstance” in the next section of this collection. While this tale has given rise to an ever-growing body of allegorical interpretations over the last decades, using anti-allegory as a point of entry might yield interesting insights into Spofford’s achievements. Anti-allegory has been defined as a major romantic form that is based on “concentrically expanding and contracting connotations” instead of “analogical meanings” (Weisbuch 53). In his study of Dickinson’s poetry, Weisbuch notes that anti-allegories “force the reader to seek out causal implications. The reader looks to see where the language points, to which authoritative orders. In fact, he may find in the poem many gestures toward such orders, but finally he is forced back to a holistic description of the poem’s pattern in terms of nothing but itself” (48). “Nothing but itself” might indeed be the best way to apprehend such a fascinating, puzzling story. Bode’s cogent analysis invites us to look at the female protagonist’s horrendous experience as an actual rape—something which all critics have identified but which they have somehow glossed over to the benefit of more allegorical interpretations.3 Bode contends that Spofford’s oblique approach allowed her to circumvent editorial pressures that stopped women from explicitly engaging with sexual topics. At the same time, though, the enigmatic title can be interpreted as pointing to the “circumstantial evidence” that the reader has to put together to prove rape, “circumstantial evidence” that Bode herself carefully collects in an in-depth study that also leads her to explore the intertextual dialogue between Spofford and Dickinson. These connections are delved into more fully in the essay that follows, though from a different angle since Adeline Chevrier-Bosseau focuses on the monstrous feline as “an alter ego of the woman writer.” Chevrier-Bosseau argues that, in both writers’ works, “a specular inversion between the self and the feline brings the creator to reflect upon her status as a female writer in nineteenth-century America” and she shows how ambiguous and disturbing such dynamics of identification with the feline can be. These two essays offer new insights into Spofford’s eeriest tale and thus contribute to the critical debates surrounding it. “Circumstance” does indeed result from a strange combination of visionary and revisionary impulses. The spectral vision that marks the woman’s entrance into the wilderness can be related to the visionary politics that is inseparable from the Romantic aesthetic. It does foreshadow an impending apocalypse but the actual apocalypse that is under way is not the one we would expect: it has nothing to do with the destruction of the settlement when the husband and wife return to civilization; it is a veritable revolution in our ways of seeing and approaching women, nature, wild beasts and the place of women in a postlapsarian world, and in this respect the final lines open up new vistas onto a world of unlimited possibilities, a post-apocalyptic world in which men and women can “choose” to follow an entirely different path and establish different relationships with each other and their environment: “the world was all before them, where to choose” (Spofford, “Circumstance” 172).

7 The kind of revisionary strategy based on specular inversions that Chevrier-Bosseau identifies in Spofford’s and Dickinson’s works is also at play in the last three stories

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being examined here. These are stories in which woman’s voice might indeed appear to be speaking from “the centre of Dissolution” (Dickinson, L685 to Mrs. Holland, January 1881) or, to put it in Elaine Showalter’s terms, from a “wild zone” of female consciousness, some kind of Dark Continent inaccessible to men. Crucial to women’s attempts to claim their subject positions in a patriarchal culture are the questions of visibility and invisibility that Asun López-Varela investigates in her study of “The Ray of Displacement,” a science fiction tale published in 1903. Spofford’s work is set against a rich literary, philosophical and scientific background which López-Varela uses to throw light on the highly ambiguous figure of St. Angel and on the crisis of masculinity informing her depiction of the other two male characters. Processes of metamorphosis, displacement and hybridity are given pride of place as Spofford points up “the liberating blurring of gender differences” as well as “the disintegration and atomization of pathological social boundaries” (López-Varela). Although the woman’s voice is just as muted in “Desert Sands” (1863) and “The Moonstone Mass” (1868), the male narrators’ attempts to impose their control and authority eventually fail to hide the cracks that threaten to undermine the stability of their narratives. In a challenging new reading of “Desert Sands,” H.J.E. Champion probes beneath the surface of the text to uncover invisible layers of meaning that complicate conventional interpretations of the love triangle between the three main characters, i.e. a male artist torn between his angelic “pale phantom of a [wife]” (“Desert Sands” 191) and the alluring, predatory dark woman who appears to seduce him—or her. Champion uses queer theory to deconstruct binary readings of the story; she reinstates Eos as a full-fledged artist whose paintings express “underlying homosexual erotic desires” (Champion), emphasizes Sydney’s androgyny, and offers a radically new interpretation of the battle in the desert that stands out as a climax preceding Eos’s death and Sydney’s losing his sight. “The Moonstone Mass” takes us on a different type of adventure altogether, away from the Eastern deserts in search of a Northwest Passage that would facilitate trade across the Arctic. Unlike Eos, though, the narrator’s wife remains tied to the domestic arena and does not follow him into this “wilderness” where he hopes to make a fortune by inheriting his uncle’s money. Other critics have interpreted the story as “a rejection of the male quest for power … in favour of the world of feminine love and contentment” (Bendixen xxx), along the lines of “a binary opposition between masculine and feminine worlds” which leads Spofford to “[privilege] the latter, associated with home, family, and heterosexuality, over the former, correlated with capitalistic imperialism and conquest” (Weinstock 12). Verena Laschinger focuses instead on the dissolution of binaries as she examines “The Moonstone Mass” from the vantage point of a poem published almost thirty years later (“The Story of the Iceberg,” 1898). Her compelling analysis of the tale emphasizes the primacy of relational thinking, fluidity and dissolution as a way to counteract stasis in a story that testifies to Spofford’s fascination with alchemy and processes of metamorphosis a long time before she wrote “The Ray of Displacement.” Last but not least, she uses these considerations to illuminate the metatextual dimension of a story in which Spofford possibly reflects upon her own problematic positioning within contemporary print culture, more particularly upon the commodification of storytelling as she tries “to find and navigate a passageway transitioning from Romanticism to Realism” (Laschinger).

8 When the narrator of “In a Cellar” emphatically states that “we are nothing without our opposites, our fellows, our lights and shadows, colors, relations, combinations, our point d’appui, and our angle of sight. An isolated man is immensurable; he is also

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unpicturesque, unnatural, untrue” (2), he emphasizes what appears to be Spofford’s own perception of truth as hinging upon a play on perspectives. Truth is indeed to be found in the relationships we establish with our surroundings, with all the “circumstances” of our life. This modern approach likely to destabilize the certainties and principles that sustained Spofford’s Victorian society in the second half of the nineteenth century informs the critical inquiry carried out by all the contributors to this issue. Not only do these essays demand that we reassess Spofford’s place within the ranks of nineteenth-century American women writers, they also ask for a renewed appreciation of her interest in the political development of the young American nation through the study of fictional and non-fictional pieces that blur the boundaries between the home and the more public sphere of male experience and activism. From her quiet retreat on Deer Island, Spofford stands out as a major figure whose voice should definitely be heeded and whose contribution to the literary developments of the time is worth revaluing.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bendixen, Alfred. “Introduction” in Harriet Prescott Spofford, The Amber Gods and Other Stories. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1989. ix-xxxiv.

Cott, Nancy. The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780-1835. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1977.

Dalke, Anne. “‘Circumstance’ and the Creative Woman: Harriet Prescott Spofford.” Arizona Quarterly 41.1 (1985): 71-85.

Elsden, Annamaria F. Roman Fever: Domesticity and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Writing. Columbus: the Ohio State UP, 2004.

Halbeisen, Elizabeth K. Harriet Prescott Spofford: A Romantic Survival. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1935.

Logan, Lisa. “‘There is no home there’: Re(his)tor(iciz)ing Captivity and the Other in Spofford’s ‘Circumstance.’” Creating Safe Space: Violence and Women’s Writing. Eds. Tomoka Kuribayashi and Julie Tharp. Albany: State UP of NY, 1998. 117-29.

Shinn, Thelma J. “Harriet Prescott Spofford: A Reconsideration.” Turn-of-the-Century Women 1 (Summer 1984): 36-45.

Showalter, Elaine. “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness.” The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory. Ed. Elaine Showalter. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985. 243-270.

Spofford, Harriet Elizabeth (Prescott). “Circumstance.” The Amber Gods and Other Stories. Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1969 [1863]. 153-172.

St. Armand, Barton Levi. “‘I Must Have Died at Ten Minutes Past One’: Posthumous Reverie in Harriet Prescott Spofford’s ‘The Amber Gods.’” The Haunted Dusk: American Supernatural Fiction, 1820-1920. Eds. Howard Kerr, John W. Crowley, and Charles L. Crow. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1983. 101-119.

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Weinstock, Jeffrey. Scare Tactics: Supernatural Fiction by American Women. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008.

Weisbuch, Robert. Emily Dickinson’s Poetry. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1981.

NOTES

1. Most of the essays gathered in this special issue proceed from papers that were previously delivered on the occasion of the EAAS 2016 Conference in Constanta, Romania, and of the tenth international meeting of the EAAS Study Group of Nineteenth-Century American Literature that was held in Bordeaux (Université Bordeaux Montaigne) in October 2016. 2. See Bendixen’s introduction to The Amber Gods and Other Stories. For a more comprehensive overview of Spofford’s life, see Halbeisen’s biography of the author. 3. See, for instance, how Bendixen manages to deviate from any “suggestion” of an actual sexual violation: “the imagery shifts from the harsh, violent suggestion of sexual rape toward the expression of divine and natural love” (xxviii).

AUTHOR

STÉPHANIE DURRANS Stéphanie Durrans is Professor of American Literature at the Université Bordeaux Montaigne, France. She is the author of The Influence of French Culture on Willa Cather: Intertextual References and Resonances (2007) and of Willa Cather’s My Ántonia: A Winter’s Journey (2016). She has published widely on nineteenth- and twentieth-century women writers, with a special focus on questions of intertextuality and transatlantic literary relationships.

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History, Her-Story

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Harriet Prescott Spofford’s Development of a Protestant Aesthetic for a Diverse Nation

Paula Kot

1 In “Charlestown,” an historical sketch from her 1871 collection New-England Legends, Harriet Prescott Spofford examines the contest between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism that shaped Americans’ understanding of democracy as well as Spofford’s understanding of her role as an author in an increasingly heterogeneous nation.1 The sketch focuses on the 1834 burning of the Ursuline Convent and School of Mount Benedict in Charlestown, Massachusetts, by a Protestant mob, an assault that affords Spofford the opportunity to examine the nation’s ability to accommodate difference of all kinds. Born in 1835 and publishing the tales that first brought her to public notice in the 1860s, Spofford came of age as the nation underwent a series of crises that threatened its survival. This turbulent period was marked by territorial expansion, conflict with Native Americans, slavery, sectionalism, the Civil War and its aftermath, and the influx of immigrants, especially Roman Catholic immigrants, who represented to the predominately Protestant population an uncanny mix of foreign and familiar. Significantly, Spofford came of age in New England, where the seeming invasion of Roman Catholic immigrants was met with what Marie Anne Pagliarini calls an “unprecedentedly virulent” form of anti-Catholicism, fueled by the wide consumption of anti-Catholic convent tales and by the inflammatory rhetoric of influential Protestants, including the anti-Catholic sermons delivered by Lyman Beecher in Boston the day before the Charlestown attack (Pagliarini 97). In her sketch, Spofford notes the proximity of the violence against Catholics to the site of the Battle of Bunker Hill to embed it within the republic’s larger history and the challenge of accommodating difference within a shared social and political structure. As Sharon M. Harris explains of other nineteenth-century women writers who also wrote “at moments of cultural crisis,” Spofford sketches out the history of this important New England city as “a means of contextualizing a nation’s actions and building confidence in its survival” (Harris 292).

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2 On its most basic level, the sketch works to promote religious tolerance in Spofford’s contemporary audience by exposing the bigotry of antebellum New Englanders. On a deeper level, she suggests that the threat to American pluralism comes not from individual Roman Catholics or Protestants. Spofford detaches the principles traditionally associated with these religious institutions and relocates them in people’s mindsets.2 Against the backdrop of the nation’s territorial and population expansion, Spofford represents the continuing threat to American pluralism as a contest waged within the private spaces of the minds and hearts of Americans. She guides readers through a physical landscape that challenges them to contemplate the engrained bigotry that characterizes their own inner terrain. Her historical tour of Charlestown presents readers with a series of paradoxes associated with democracy that requires them to discard passive thinking and actively reflect on the paradoxical nature of a union that is founded on the notion of “from many, one” (8).3 Spofford promotes what has traditionally been seen as Protestant values—the focus on individual judgment and conscience—as what should drive American progress but recognizes that centuries of virulent anti-Catholicism have functioned to create a culture that has come to resemble its vilified Other—becoming in essence a tradition that colonizes minds and displaces individual opinion. She employs the permeability of the physical border of a nation that was expanding as a metaphor for the porousness of the conceptual border between the domestic and foreign, American and Other. In retelling the history of Charlestown, she creates a topsy-turvy realm of shifting and blurring categories that stretches identities and unexamined assumptions and turns readers’ anti-Catholic fears against them. The convent becomes an embodiment of the domestic realm—an image of both the home and the republic, as well as of the mind itself. All of these sites are threatened by the actions of a Protestant mob, whose invasion of women’s private space taps into Protestant fears of priests’ violation of women in the convent and confessional, and whose wanton violence reenacts British redcoats’ invasion of Charlestown in an early battle of the American Revolution.

3 Spofford thus involves her audience in the creation of a new, usable past to unify public opinion and counter the centrifugal tendencies of nineteenth-century America. Yet she does not replace bigoted narratives with other master narratives. Spofford resists developing a narrative that would implicate her in the suppression of views and voices associated with the repressive acts of bigoted Protestant mobs and what was viewed as Roman Catholicism’s undemocratic suppression of individual opinion, a suppression accomplished not only through papal control but through the invasion of the private spaces of the mind in the confessional. Instead, Spofford adopts a Protestant aesthetic in order to unify an increasingly heterogeneous nation: one that rejects a reliance upon the authority of the past yet engages readers in the process of deriving meaning from the artifacts of the past. As a writer whose work leads her into the private realm of the reader’s mind, Spofford develops a participatory model of creating consensus that replicates the dynamic of democracy in the public sphere. She attempts to recolonize her readers’ minds and hearts by creating room for the reader’s imagination in her sketch and involving them in the exploration of ambiguity that lies at the core of American identity—an attempt that requires that scholars reassess the critical reputation that Spofford has gained for bigotry and for unthinking support of imperialism.

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1. Promoting the March of Noble Thought

4 Spofford’s tour of the city of Charlestown begins in Boston, Massachusetts, as she positions her reader as a “traveler” departing by way of the Eastern Railway and passing through towns “all more or less historic” before arriving at his destination (“Charlestown” 8). Her descriptive tour of the city first takes the reader to the Navy Yard and State Prison, and then moves to “quite another” section of the city, one made famous by the Battle of Bunker Hill. The “suggestions of the scene” lead Spofford to bring back to life for readers the events of the battle, which in turn call up “another morning fifty years later” when the aging veterans who had “helped to lay the corner- stone of the Republic” by attempting to defend the city against the British then laid the “corner-stone” of a monument to celebrate the battle as one of the nation’s “first struggles for existence” (8). Working by association, Spofford’s story of the British soldiers’ burning of Charlestown leads to a reflection on the Protestant mobs’ burning of the convent thirty-five years earlier. Spofford recounts the founding of the convent and school in 1820 and its early success, expanding its campus and number of students and sisters despite the antagonism of a town that was “distrustful of Roman Catholic institutions” (10). She explains how the mob attack in 1834 was touched off by the decision of Sister Mary John, or Miss Elizabeth Harrison, the overworked music teacher, to temporarily leave the convent because of poor health—a seeming innocuous event but one that assumed significance because it aligned with the Protestant community’s suspicions about convents as they had been developed by the popularity of anti- Catholic convent tales. Spofford describes the town Selectmen’s visit to the convent and their demands to see Miss Harrison. She details the invasive nature of their fruitless search and their determination to publish a piece in the local newspaper to that effect to quell tensions. Spofford retells the night of the attack, as a working-class mob gathers, using “impertinent language” and demanding to see the “nun that had run away” (12). Spofford describes in detail the near escape of the students and sisters, and the seven-hour long pillaging and wanton destruction of the campus by the mob, and concludes her sketch by detailing the inability of the legislature to “address this assault and make reparation” (14).

5 In her tour of the city of Charlestown, Spofford retells the history of this city while imaginatively standing atop Bunker Hill and viewing the monument. This literally and conceptually elevated viewpoint offers readers the opportunity to reflect on what she believes is “peculiarly typical of our national [character]”: an exemplary devotion to the principle of freedom (“Charlestown” 9). Although Spofford reminds readers that the monument actually marks the site of a Revolutionary War defeat—the inability of local farmers to stop British soldiers from breaching their hastily constructed breastworks—for Spofford, the site memorializes the earnestness of the untrained and poorly equipped American rebels, whose resistance to the “invading” soldiers had the “moral effect in teaching the enemy” of the fledgling nation’s unifying principle (9). Spofford describes the farmers’ breastworks, a “rail fence stuffed with meadow-hay,” as “the first redoubt of freedom the wide world over,” a defensive structure that laid “the corner-stone of the Republic” (8-9). Suffused with the “emotion of patriotism” evoked by this site, she asserts that “from Bunker Hill began that march of noble thought and grand action across this continent which is destined to overthrow all tyrannies, both of intellect and of empire, in this hemisphere to-day, to-morrow in the other” (9).

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Spofford imagines the walls and borders of the republic continually expanding outward. She identifies her role as promoting the “march of noble thought” that will overthrow tyrannies of intellect and empire. She understands her own work as intertwined with the “march of … grand action,” the political work of men, in the process of imperialism, but her sense of this role is nuanced, representing both the emotional and patriotic ideal as well as combating its dark and violent incarnation. The benign rhetoric of the American republic’s march is set side-by-side with the brutal march of the invading British soldiers and eventually leads to the Protestant mob’s march on the Ursuline convent. Her rhetoric suggests that she sees women and men uniting to fulfill America’s destiny, but it also suggests that this destiny can only be achieved through the protection of human rights and freedom of thought for all within its borders.4

6 The Bunker Hill breastworks, as representative of the expanding borders of the nation and its values, typify the continuing challenge to the republic’s preservation and expansion. In reminding readers of its construction of sod and hay, Spofford emphasizes the permeability of this defensive boundary, a quality reinforced as she transforms the breastworks into the infinitely expanding borders of the republic. The expansion of the nation and its population—incorporating what Spofford calls elsewhere the “new ways, new faces, new customs” of immigrants into the nation— weakens and dissolves the boundary between domestic and foreign territory, American and Other, freedom and tyranny (The Servant 26). 5 As Amy Kaplan explains of the architectural metaphors used by nineteenth-century women writers who, like Spofford, viewed women’s role as having global influence, “the construction of an edifice ordinarily entails walling off the inside from the outside,” but the “distinction between inside and outside” is “obliterated by the expansion of the home/nation … to encompass the globe” (31). Spofford thus explores the paradox involved in nation building and the identity formation of Americans that Kaplan has identified in the works of other nineteenth-century American writers: the expansion of the nation and its population, the teleological fulfillment of its destiny, seemingly challenged national stability by incorporating foreign customs and views.

7 For Spofford’s contemporaries, one of the most serious challenges to the teleological view of the boundless expansion of the American republic and its values was the presence of Roman Catholic immigrants—what Susan Griffin calls the “familiar yet foreign presences making themselves at home in … America” (Anti-Catholicism 7). Griffin explains that the United States, like Britain, “had long traditions of anti-Catholicism,” but in the U.S., “the heavy Irish immigration … following the 1845 failure of the potato crop” magnified Protestants’ fears (3). Griffin describes how “the Roman Catholic population of the United Stated burgeoned, so much so that by 1850 Catholics comprised the single largest Christian denomination in the country” (3). Spofford’s sketch uncovers the nation’s correspondingly paradoxical response to this seeming Roman Catholic invasion: Protestants sought to preserve the union that had been founded on the principle of freedom by violently suppressing the views that they believed threatened unity. The sketch’s focus on the backlash against Catholics demonstrates that the threat of tyranny lies not only outside the nation’s borders, but within, and Spofford writes to promote the “march of noble thought” by, in effect, “teaching”—as the revolutionary rebels had taught British soldiers—and assimilating

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through her sketch those readers whose beliefs or actions threaten America’s unifying purpose.

8 Spofford guides her readers to Bunker Hill to renew their commitment to freedom— just as that commitment had been renewed when the Bunker Hill monument had been erected fifty years after the battle. She recognizes that this site provides the proper perspective for reflecting on an historical event associated with a form of tyranny that had challenged America throughout its history. Spofford redirects her reader’s gaze to the ruins of the Ursuline Convent and School of Mount Benedict. She explains how an “inherited dread of papacy and its influence” and “swarms of suspicions” concerning the “abominated” Roman Catholic Church led to the destruction of the convent by a Protestant mob in 1834 (10). Spofford most likely focuses her sketch on this instance of bigotry because of its far-reaching influence. Marie Anne Pagliarini explains that “within a week of the Ursuline burning, two new anti-Catholic newspapers began publication,” one in Philadelphia and one in New York (Pagliarini 119), and a wave of bigotry followed, including rioting and murder, the destruction of Roman Catholic homes and churches, the drafting of anti-Catholic legislation to inspect convents, and the rise to power of the nativist, anti-Catholic political party, the Know-Nothings (97).6 In her historical sketch, then, Spofford links two originary moments: the battle that represents the first steps of the fledgling republic and, as Pagliarini describes, a riot that touched off “the anti-Catholic sentiment that swept over antebellum America” (97). While commentators in the 1830s had noted the physical proximity of these two sites to justify the convent’s destruction as an effort to protect American freedom,7 Spofford notes their proximity to denounce the attack as nothing less than an “outrage on human rights and freedom of thought,” which, she adds, “it is to be hoped, neither this country nor this age shall behold again” (Spofford 9). Spofford focuses her sketch on uncovering the “steadily smoldering fires of hate” passed down and sustained through anti-Catholic literature that characterizes the history of New England.

2. The Colonizing Structures of Anti-Catholicism

9 Spofford’s initial architectural metaphor, imaging the republic as an expanding edifice, invites her readers to reflect on nation building, specifically on the entrenched ideological framework of anti-Catholicism that upholds and shapes the American imagination and its institutions. She develops this metaphor in her tour of Charlestown, a “city of walls and towers,” by focusing on a series of seemingly impenetrable defensive structures associated with the powerful “machines”—the military, civic, and religious institutions—responsible for the maintenance of order in the nation and for shaping public opinion (8): The rebels’ breastworks at Bunker Hill had been transformed fifty years later into an enclosure and gray shaft rising from the summit; the “massive granite wall” that encloses the Navy Yard; the State Prison, “entrenched behind its perpendicular fortifications and rows of spikes”; the “broken walls and chimneys” of the Ursuline Convent; and rising “far above them all,” as the streets of Charlestown “[lift] in tier over tier,” the “lofty spire of the hill-top church” (8-9). Save for the convent’s broken walls, Spofford describes at length the solidity and permanence of the built environment of Charlestown in order to suggest the resilience of the “cultural structures—colonizing structures—[that] take shape inside as well as outside minds and bodies.”8 She notes the upward trajectory of the city, with the

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Protestant church spire raised far above the other structures, in order to illustrate how these powerful ideological machines both support and are led by the teleological belief that linked the progress and perfection of the nation and world, “the global march of civilization,” to the “progressive religious development” of Protestantism away from Roman Catholicism (Griffin Anti 5). The relationship between the town’s many fortified walls and the convent’s broken walls suggests not only the failure of American institutions to protect freedom during the 1834 attack but that religious bigotry against Roman Catholicism is built into the teleological narrative that informs these institutions and American life.

10 In “Charlestown,” Spofford attempts to rehabilitate the hearts and minds of Protestant Americans, to free them from the tyranny of anti-Catholic bigotry, and thus facilitate the forward movement of the “wheels of progress.” She does so by exposing her readers to the intermeshed nature of domestic and foreign, freedom and tyranny, liberty and captivity. In the opening paragraphs of the sketch, Spofford directs her reader’s gaze to the State Prison, one of several heavily fortified structures of the town, and asks him to reflect on the seeming “inconsistenc[y] between theory and practice” in Massachusetts—the birthplace of American freedom—that the State Prison is “almost the only place within her borders, where a liberty-cap is displayed” (8). Spofford quickly adds that this is “not so glaring an inconsistency … as it at first sight appears, since the imprisonment of criminals means the freedom of all the rest of society” (8). As she does throughout the sketch, Spofford guides her reader past first impressions and unexamined assumptions and asks him to reflect on the paradoxical nature of American democracy, one that contains within its expanding borders heterogeneous views. Spofford focuses on the prison’s “perpendicular fortifications and rows of spikes” as a representation of the seemingly impenetrable nature of inherited ideological constructs that imprison the Protestant American imagination. Spofford also uses this particular site to point to nativist representations of convents as “‘priests’ prisons for women” in anti-Catholic literature9—which were, as Marie Anne Pagliarini writes, “a crucial factor in major incidents of convent violence” and certainly one that motivated the 1834 attack (Pagliarini 117). Furthermore, Spofford draws upon the nativist perception of Catholic dogma as itself imprisoning.10 Spofford calls this site “another lion” of Charlestown, or another of the powerful machines used to maintain order within the nation, in order to emphasize the failure of institutions to protect civil liberties (“Charlestown” 8). The sketch describes not only the institutionally approved destruction of the convent—the participation of Selectmen in the attack—but concludes with Spofford’s indignation that the men tried for this attack were acquitted and that the state in effect “has virtually repeated the outrage year by year” by refusing to acknowledge and make reparations for the convent’s losses (14). In other words, because of the institutionalization of bigotry against Catholics, those who betrayed America’s values were never placed within prison walls, but remain outside. Like her initial depiction of the porousness of the republic’s boundaries, Spofford problematizes the relation between internal and external. But Spofford asks her reader to note both the prison walls and the “number of officials necessary to carry on its operations and maintain order” within the prison and by extension, within the nation (8). Spofford projects herself within the walls—caught within even as she attempts to dismantle the ideological structures of anti-Catholicism.

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11 After all, Spofford was addressing an audience that was—like the 1834 mob—still “constantly fearful of Catholic supremacy” (10); moreover, these fears had been exaggerated by nativists throughout the antebellum period in order to unify an increasingly fragmented nation, to mark off and police the borders between American and Other, domestic and foreign.11 The influx of Roman Catholics into the Northeast had brought to power in Massachusetts—Spofford’s home state—the Know-Nothing party in the 1854 and 1855 elections (Griffin Anti 91). Nativists argued that the stability and prosperity of the nation depended on unanimity of thought and action, a unanimity that they asserted was threatened by Catholic immigrants (Griffin 4). In a nation increasingly fractured by immigration, Protestants could agree that the “common antagonist” was Roman Catholicism, as Henry Augustus Boardman expressed it in an 1840s lecture (17). Boardman’s anti-Catholic rhetoric urged Protestants to fortify themselves; he warned, “It ill becomes us, with the records of history open before us, to dismantle our fortresses, and disband the garrisons, and throw open the gates, while such an enemy as Popery is hovering around” (10). As Susan Griffin explains, “nativism offered ‘national homogeneity’ to a country threatened by sectionalism and facing growing religious diversity and disaffection” (Griffin 94). Spofford, then, faced a paradoxical challenge in writing “Charlestown”: in order to create consensus, she needed to dismantle the very fears that had been used by nativists to unify the nation. Furthermore, she needed to re-educate what she calls the “bigoted and narrow-minded of the untaught population” without engaging in a form of intellectual tyranny herself, without denying the right of individual opinion (“Charlestown” 12).

12 Yet Spofford’s attempt to defend the freedom of conscience of Roman Catholics—and thus, by extension, of America itself—is complicated by the fact that she herself was not immune to the nativist rhetoric that fanned the flames of bigotry throughout the antebellum period. Spofford demonstrates this influence in her sketch when she associates the Catholic Church with a form of intellectual tyranny at odds with American values, giving voice to the pervasive fear that “Catholic obedience to the Papacy was incompatible with either independent citizenship or loyal subjecthood” (Griffin 4). Although Spofford focuses a great deal of the sketch on ridiculing the anti- Catholic beliefs that flared into mob violence against individual Catholics in Charlestown, she legitimizes fears of Catholic “supremacy” that result from what she describes as a “largeness of view,” the ostensibly enlightened perspective that “as a Church of authority,” the Catholic Church “[denies] the right of individual opinion” (Spofford 10). Furthermore, Spofford’s motivation for writing this sketch and educating readers about the dangers of bigotry indicates that she had absorbed nativism’s argument about the vital importance of unity to the preservation of the union. In Paddy and the Republic, Dale T. Knobel explains that “Mid-century nativists extracted their certain kind of nationalism from a highly selective (and interpretive) reading of the republic’s founding fathers,” focusing specifically on the writings of Jefferson and Hamilton (Knobel 144). He writes, Jefferson had written that effective civil government ‘must be conducted by common consent’ growing out of popular subscription to common ‘principles,’ and Hamilton … observed that ‘the safety of a republic depends essentially on the habits of a common national sentiment; on a uniformity of principles and habits,’ … [and] recommended that ‘to render the people of this country as homogeneous as possible, must lead … to the permanency of their union and prosperity. (Knobel 144)

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13 Spofford exposes her absorption of nativism’s insistence on homogeneity in another sketch from her collection of New-England Legends, entitled “Dover,” when she writes of the “divided … opinion” that obstructed early settlers from “establish[ing] a government of mutual concessions” (“Dover” 29). What was “necessary” during this early time of crisis was what she calls “perfect unanimity of heart and mind” (29). For Spofford, unity of heart and mind had been and continued to be the key to preservation of the union. Nativists used the notion of homogeneity to justify their attack on Roman Catholicism and Roman Catholics as foreign to American institutions; Spofford endorses this notion to challenge anti-Catholic bigotry as foreign to American principles.

3. Dismantling Anti-Catholicism

14 Spofford organizes “Charlestown” and the other sketches in the collection as a series of sights viewed from a train “car window,” positioning her reader as a traveler inside the car; this structural device embodies the paradoxical nature of American expansion (“Charlestown” 8). On the one hand, Spofford’s imagery draws on the commonplace association of trains with America’s westward movement and thus links her reader’s experience to the teleological narrative that equated progress with the “westward march of empire” (Kaplan 18). She develops this metaphor further in her description of “the wheels of progress,” the spread of “noble thought,” that must accompany territorial expansion (“Charlestown” 10). On the other hand, the succession of seemingly unrelated views that “open on” the traveler as he journeys through Charlestown—the spire of the hill-top church, the Navy Yard, State Prison, Bunker Hill Monument, and ruins of the Ursuline convent—re-enacts the discontinuity of American experience brought about by the incorporation of new territory and diverse populations (8). While other nineteenth-century writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne used train travel to evoke the rapid changes associated with modernity, Spofford’s sketches present the unsettling perspective created by this mode of transportation as a constant feature of the American landscape. She collapses the past into the present, providing an uncanny counterweight to the teleological narrative, by focusing her sketch on the continuing conflicts created by the different ways, faces, and customs associated with the heterogeneous groups who represent America’s past and present.

15 In this way, Spofford acts as a guide not just to what her reader/traveler should see in visiting Charlestown, but how he should read, or re-read these sites. Spofford’s interest in retelling this New England “legend” is on how stories serve as carriers for colonizing ideological structures that—as implied in the sturdiness of the town’s built environment—seem permanent. She makes visible residents’ inflamed imaginations, the intertextual nature of the attack. Her relation of the events leading up to the destruction of the convent focuses on the familiar plots and characters of anti-Catholic literature that had been promoted by Protestant leaders, especially the convent tale, that, like Maria Monk’s bestselling Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery (1836), portrays the convent as the site of the sadistic torture of captive women (Pagliarini 112). Spofford describes the “swarms of suspicions” about Roman Catholicism—viewed as “little less than a branch of the Inquisition”—and carried by “such legends as that old one of the unfaithful nun, sealed up alive in a wall”—that motivated the mob to destroy the convent (“Charlestown” 10). She explains that this “old” tale as well as the

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“wood-cuts of ‘Fox’s Book of Martyrs’” [sic] caused citizens to misread the Ursuline convent, viewing “the quiet building on the hill not as a place of innocent merriment and girlish study, but” “as a den of wickedness and filth,” the site “of severe penance, of horrible punishment, of underground cells and passages through which all the mighty power of the Church walked abroad to crush any refractory spirit into death or submission” (10, 12, 10). Spofford quickly summarizes the thematic strand of convent tales—illicit sexuality, torture, captivity, and the victimization of women—because her own readers would have been as familiar with these tropes as the 1834 Protestant mob. She calls attention to the role of Foxe’s sixteenth-century Book of Martyrs in inciting violence to suggest that the Protestant church has become, like its vilified Other, a church of authority, oppressed by inherited and unexamined ideas. She subtly suggests that the centuries-old fear of Catholic tyranny has driven Protestants to do the same. The physical structures of the town make visible the bigoted ideological structures of the mob’s and her readers’ minds.

16 Spofford’s treatment of the events that set off the Ursuline convent attack sheds light on the role of print in shaping values and behavior and developing consensus and thus reveals the self-reflexive nature of her sketch. In Spofford’s sketch the first flare up of violence, the beating of the convent gardener, occurs when the town reads in the “neighboring newspapers” a single paragraph devoted to the rumors circulating about the disappearance of a woman, Miss Elizabeth Harrison (or Sister Mary John), from the convent, identified by the newspapers as “The Mysterious Lady” (12). Spofford explains that citizens’ “unfortunate feelings and fancies” about Catholics “glowed more and more hotly, [until] it needed but a single spark to kindle the flame of intolerance into open action among this population, watchful, and ready to give the worst possible construction to every simple circumstance” (10). The “spark” that kindled the violence was the brief disappearance of Miss Harrison, who, overworked and exhausted from her duties as a music teacher at the school, slipped away from the convent but soon returned and begged to be allowed to remain (11). When “magnified and exaggerated” by imaginations inflamed by convent tales and wood-cuts of martyrs, the townspeople interpreted news of her disappearance as evidence that she had been murdered or was being held captive and abused within the convent (12). Spofford explains that the appearance of this story in print represents the “visible and audible expression of what appears to have been in the minds of nearly all” (12) and led to united action, in this case, initiating the mob’s “march” on the convent. Spofford also suggests that print makes manifest the private, interior space that had been colonized by anti-Catholic literature, an interior space that Spofford attempts to recolonize through her sketches.

4. Creating Room for the Reader’s Imagination

17 The succession of scenes the reader travels through in Spofford’s sketch is intended to open in her reader’s imagination an expanded conception of what it means to be an American. If Catholics were constructed as the “common antagonist,” as Protestant leaders such as Boardman argued, then Spofford writes to enable readers to “throw open” their imaginative “gates,” to dissolve entrenched boundaries. At the same time, Spofford imagines her text as open to readers, as creating a realm in which the mutual engagement of text and reader can work to overcome divided opinion and create a new consensus and more stable nation. As writer and guide, she takes as her model

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Shakespeare and Emerson, who, she writes in her 1860 story “Desert Sands,” leave “room for [the reader’s] imagination” or require readers to “link” ideas “with chains of their own logic” (“Desert Sands” 189). Viewing the relationship between text and reader as a contemporary reader-oriented theorist would, Spofford imagines her sketch as a meeting place and participatory realm that promotes and mirrors the exchange of ideas in the public sphere. She presents her readers with the seemingly disparate legends of Charlestown’s past and challenges them to discover connections and create the significance of this past.

18 The first invasion of the convent occurs after Miss Harrison’s return, when five Selectmen and other citizens were guided through the convent, “assisted by The Mysterious Lady, Miss Harrison, herself” (“Charlestown” 12). Spofford clearly suggests the sexually invasive nature of this search of the convent. Ostensibly searching for other captive women, the men use the opportunity to probe and pry into the secret recesses of the convent, “searching every closet, opening every drawer,” though Spofford notes that these spaces are not large enough to conceal a captive (12). Satisfied, the men leave, intending to prepare a proclamation to that effect for the morning papers, but that night, a mob forms, demanding to “see the nun that had run away” (12). They assume she is held captive and want to search the convent to release her. Spofford describes how the mob poured into the convent, waving clubs, and purportedly searching for captive women: Before the last of the children had left the building the varlets had poured in …. In a moment afterward the house was filled with the mob, shouting, yelling, and blaspheming …. They ransacked every room, rifled every trunk, broke open every drawer, stole watches, thrust the costly jewelry of the Spanish children into their pockets, split up the piano-fortes, shattered the splendid harps, and even made way with the altar ornaments …. Having satisfied their curiosity and greed, they piled up the furniture, curtains, books, pictures, in the centre of the several rooms, and deliberately set fire to every heap, threw in the altar vestments, the Bible and the cross, and, the act of virtue consummated, left the building in flames. (13)

19 Spofford challenges nativist attempts to police the border between the domestic and foreign by depicting the Protestant mob attack as an invasion—the term used by Protestants to express anxiety toward the influx of Roman Catholic immigrants.12 Spofford’s retelling of Charlestown’s history asks readers to link the eighteenth- century invasion of the British soldiers at Bunker Hill and the mob’s invasion of the convent half a century later with contemporary Protestant anxiety about the Catholic invasion of America. She creates an unstable realm of shifting and blurring categories that turns inside out identities and assumptions, and effaces difference, until the male, Protestant mob manifests the terrifying qualities associated with redcoats and Roman Catholics.

20 Spofford’s description of the assault does more than dissolve difference and embed this event within the contest between freedom and tyranny that frames the republic’s history; by emphasizing the sexually invasive nature of this attack, she exploits the multi-layered nature of her audience’s associations with the private and domestic. She portrays the convent as the embodiment of the domestic sphere, the domestic realm or republic, and the mind itself, all of which are under attack by the male, Protestant mob. Spofford’s description of the Ursuline convent as a “quiet building” and “place of innocent merriment” establishes that the Roman Catholic nuns and their convent/ home are associated with the domestic sphere. The Lady Superior, described as

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“thoroughly educated, dignified in her person, and elegant in her manners, pure in her morals, of generous and magnanimous feelings, and of high religious principles,” embodies the domestic ideal (12). Spofford also clarifies that the sisters perform women’s work—indeed participate in nation building—by domesticating and assimilating the girls who are drawn there “from all parts of the country” and the hemisphere, including “pupils from New England, the West Indies, Southern States and British provinces” (9-10). Yet these girls and women, like the revolutionary farmers at Bunker Hill, become victims to a foreign aggressor. The “group of men” disrupts and defiles this sphere by probing into and invading women’s private space—linking the mob’s actions to the pervasive fear of priests’ violation of the female body in the convent and the female mind in the confessional.13 Spofford thus turns readers’ anti- Catholic fears against them until the assault on the convent comes to embody an assault on the privacy of the mind, the realm of “freedom of thought.” In this attack, then, Protestants had committed the same error that they accused Roman Catholicism of: the invasion of the private spaces of the mind, the undemocratic suppression of individual opinion that they believed occurred through papal control and the confessional.

21 The Protestant mob’s perception of the threat posed by the convent is revealing; they view it not as a sanctuary from the power struggle between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism, but as an engine for that conflict—as an outpost of the foreign enemy intended to expand its influence into the domestic realm or nation.14 As Boardman’s lecture makes clear, Protestants feared Roman Catholicism’s contaminating expansion, what he calls the “tide of emigration” (Boardman 45). The Protestant mob fears that the convent has been erected for “proselyting purposes” (“Charlestown” 10)— converting Protestant American children into Roman Catholic foreigners. First, Spofford debunks the mobs’ fears. She explains that these fears were “oblivious of the truth” that “not a single pupil, in all the number educated in the convent, had ever become a nun, nor had one been converted to Catholicism” (10). But Spofford’s focus on the mob’s fears as well as her detailed description of the actual attack on the convent highlight the precarious role she herself plays as guide in this sketch and the dangers facing the artist who seeks to control and exploit the print medium. She projects onto the mob’s reading of the convent the anxiety-ridden role she herself plays—a participant in the process of imperialism, one who colonizes the private, interior realm of the hearts and minds of the “untaught.” Tyranny does indeed exist within the nation’s borders, and Spofford writes to facilitate American progress without implicating herself in the vices associated with Protestantism and Roman Catholicism.

5. Reassessing Spofford

22 An all-male mob that physically threatens women and searches and defiles their private space, a working-class mob whose violence is incited not only by bigotry but class prejudice against wealthy students, whose “costly jewelry” they steal—in Spofford’s retelling of the assault on the Ursuline convent and School of Mount Benedict, the attack on Roman Catholicism comes to represent an attack on difference. As Elizabeth Fenton has found in the writings of other nineteenth-century authors, Spofford uses Catholicism in this sketch as a site for “testing the limits of democracy’s capacity to accommodate difference” of all kinds (Fenton 4). On one level, then,

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Spofford writes to expose and dismantle the anti-Catholicism imprisoning the Protestant American imagination. The paradoxical rhetoric that Spofford uses to describe the assault, though, reveals that her concern runs much deeper and has personal significance for her as a writer who seeks to ensure freedom of thought even as she attempts to change entrenched thinking. On a deeper level, she believes that the survival of the nation requires a new perspective in her readers. In exploring the causes of the mob assault on the Ursuline convent, she reveals that from Foxe’s sixteenth-century Book of Martyrs to Lyman Beecher’s sermons, Protestant leaders have created a dogma that functions to strip individuals of independent judgment as effectively as they argued papal decree or the confessional had. Spofford negotiates this tension between freedom and tyranny by engaging her readers in the development of a national aesthetic. She creates room for the reader’s imagination in her sketch— expanding frontiers that allow readers to participate in broadening the definition of the domestic—while reining in and aligning the views that threaten unity.

23 The cultural politics of Spofford that emerges from this historical sketch differs greatly from the reputation she has gained from her most anthologized tale, “Circumstance” (1860). Judith Fetterley’s examination of this story led her to conclude that Spofford was incapable of freeing herself from “racist thinking,” unlike other women writers from this period who were able to make “a sincere and serious effort to combat racism in themselves and in their world” (Fetterley 267). Carol Holly’s reading of “Circumstance” led her to denounce Spofford for justifying the “American imperialistic ambitions” that led to genocide against Native Americans (Holly 163). As do other sketches from Spofford’s 1871 collection New-England Legends, an unexplored part of her oeuvre, “Charlestown” reveals that Spofford was more than just a “complicit carrier” of imperialist ideology. Rather, she was a self-reflecting “cultural theorist” who sought to expose and reshape the entrenched ideological framework that supported bigotry in its many forms.15 “Charlestown” demonstrates that Spofford did indeed see herself as a participant in the expansion of the values associated with the American republic but recognized the complex nature of this role. Her understanding of the role she plays in the process of imperialism as a woman writer, as well as her sincere efforts to combat bigotry in herself and in her world, require us to reassess her place within the ranks of nineteenth-century American women writers.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Boardman, Henry Augustus. Anti-Catholicism in America, 1841-1851: Three Sermons. Ed. Gerald N. Grob. New York: Arno Press, 1977.

Fenton, Elizabeth. Religious Liberties. Anti-Catholicism and Liberal Democracy in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011.

Fetterley, Judith. Introduction. Provisions: A Reader from 19th-Century American Women. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985. 1-40.

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Franchot, Jenny. Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994.

Griffin, Susan. Anti-Catholicism and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 2004.

---. “Women, Anti-Catholicism, and Narrative in Nineteenth-Century America.” The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Writing. Eds. Dale M. Bauer and Philip Gould. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 2001. 157-175.

Harris, Sharon M. “‘Across the Gulf’: Working in the ‘Post-Recovery’ Era.” Legacy 26.2 (2009): 284-98.

Holly, Carol. “Grand and Sweet Methodist Hymns: Spiritual Transformation and Imperialistic Vision in Harriet Prescott’s “Circumstance.” Legacy 18.2 (2001): 153-166.

Kaplan, Amy. The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002.

Knobel, Dale T. Paddy and the Republic. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1986.

Pagliarini, Marie Anne. “The Pure American Woman and the Wicked Catholic Priest: An Analysis of Anti-Catholic Literature.” Religion and American Culture 9.1 (Winter 1999): 97-128.

Pfister, Joel. “Hawthorne as Cultural Theorist.” The Cambridge Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne. Ed. Richard H. Millington. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. 35-59.

Spofford, Harriet Prescott. “Charlestown.” New-England Legends; with illustrations. Boston: James R. Osgood and Co., 1871. 8-14.

---. “Circumstance.” The Amber Gods and Other Stories. Ed. Alfred Bendixen. New Brunswick [N.J.]: Rutgers UP, 1989. 84-96.

---. “Desert Sands.” The Amber Gods and Other Stories. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1863. 173-217.

---. “Dover.” New-England Legends; with illustrations. Boston: James R. Osgood and Co., 1871. 29-35.

---. “Her Story.” The Amber Gods and Other Stories. Ed. Alfred Bendixen. Rutgers UP, 1989. 148-166.

---. “The Amber Gods.” The Amber Gods and Other Stories. Ed. Alfred Bendixen. New Brunswick [N.J.]: Rutgers UP, 1989. 37-83

---. The Servant Girl Question. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Co., 1881.

Sweet, Nancy F. “A Woman with a Cross: The Transgressive, Transnational Nun in Anti-Catholic Fiction.” Transnational Gothic: Literary and Social Exchanges in the Long Nineteenth Century. Eds. Monika Elbert and Bridget M. Marshall. London: Routledge, 2013. 97-112.

NOTES

1. My reading of Spofford’s exploration of the contest between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism is indebted to Elizabeth Fenton’s Religious Liberties: Anti-Catholicism and Liberal Democracy in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture. Fenton’s argument differs from that of Jenny Franchot, who views Catholicism as a “set of beliefs and practices” and anti-Catholicism as “the vehicle through which Anglo-Protestants produced a unified ‘Protestant’ identity.” Instead, Fenton traces anti-Catholicism back to the founding of the nation and views it as “a set of ‘imaginative contours and political functions’ circulating in U.S. culture” (4). Fenton explains that “the concept of individual freedom … hinged on an anti-Catholic discourse that presented Protestantism as the guarantor of religious liberty and respect for all kinds of difference—

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political, sexual, and racial as well as religious—in a plural nation” (6). My argument builds on the work of Fenton, Franchot, Susan Griffin, and Marie Anne Pagliarini, all of whom have contributed significantly to the study of Catholicism in the United States, yet none of whom have examined the significance of Roman Catholicism in the writings of Spofford. 2. The confrontation between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism is replayed in tales from this period. See for example Vaughan Rose’s antipathy toward the amber beads in Spofford’s 1860 “The Amber Gods” and the threat associated with the other woman’s convent education and familiarity with the sermons of the “Italian father[s] of the Church” in her 1872 “Her Story” (155). The amber beads, formerly rosary beads, leave the emphatically Protestant Vaughan Rose feeling as if he is “bound … in a thrall” (65). The convent education and discussion of Catholicism enable the other woman of “Her Story” to “rivet the chains” that entrap Sydney. Catholicism is associated with the loss of independent judgment and autonomy. 3. Citing the argument of scholar William C. Harris, Elizabeth Fenton notes that “the nation’s motto—‘E pluribus unum’ or ‘From many, one’—suggests … the ‘logical contradiction on which the nation was founded … the simultaneous execution of the principles of unity and equality” (3). 4. See Amy Kaplan’s cogent argument that the “gendered spheres were … complexly intermeshed” in the processes of American imperialism (25). 5. In The Servant Girl Question (1881), Spofford examines the changing nature of domestic service as Irish Roman Catholic servants “invaded” and colonized Protestant hearths and homes (29). Spofford viewed immigration as part and parcel of imperial expansion. In The Servant Girl Question, Spofford ties the influx of Irish immigrants to the annexation of Ireland when she writes that Ireland would become a new state— making light of this fact but reflecting popular fears. Spofford here too weakens and dissolves the boundary between domestic and foreign territory, American and Other, by representing the reciprocal influence between mistress and domestic (53). 6. In “Women, Anti-Catholicism, and Narrative in Nineteenth-Century America,” Susan Griffin explains that the Charlestown riot was considered a national scandal that drew a great deal of attention (162). Jenny Franchot points out that the attack on the convent was “arguably the most important political event in Massachusetts prior to the agitation surrounding the passage of the 1850 fugitive Slave Law” (136). 7. See Franchot 143. 8. Joel Pfister makes this point about the built environment of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Main- street” (37). 9. Susan Griffin makes this point in her examination of convent tales (“Women” 160). 10. For example, in an anti-Catholic sermon repeatedly delivered in the 1840s, Henry Augustus Boardman describes “Popery” and the confessional as “chaining” people and enslaving their consciences (17). 11. Nancy F. Sweet points out that most scholars who examine anti-Catholic literature in the U.S. link this discourse to nativism, but that it was actually a “transnational preoccupation” (99). She explains that it “literally traveled across the Atlantic during the second quarter of the nineteenth century” and can be traced back to “efforts to grant civil rights to Catholic Britons … in earnest in the 1820s” (99, 100). 12. Susan Griffin explains that “the spread of Roman Catholicism … was viewed by Protestants as ‘an outright invasion’” (Anti 16). 13. Marie Anne Pagliarini explains that the role of the priest as confessor to women was particularly troubling to Protestants, who linked this role to the priest’s sexual exploitation of women (105). 14. The mob recognizes that “woman’s true sphere,” as described by Amy Kaplan “was in fact a mobile and mobilizing outpost that transformed conquered foreign lands into the domestic

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sphere of the family and nation” (Kaplan 25). Spofford imagines her role as domesticating the minds of her readers. 15. Joel Pfister uses these terms to describe Nathaniel Hawthorne (35).

ABSTRACTS

In “Charlestown,” an historical sketch from her 1871 collection New-England Legends, Harriet Prescott Spofford examines the contest between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism that shaped Americans’ understanding of democracy as well as Spofford’s understanding of her role as an author in an increasingly heterogeneous nation. The sketch focuses on the 1834 burning of the Ursuline Convent and School of Mount Benedict in Charlestown, Massachusetts, by a Protestant mob, an assault that affords Spofford the opportunity to examine the nation’s ability to accommodate difference of all kinds. Spofford adopts a Protestant aesthetic in order to free readers from entrenched bigotry and unify an increasingly diverse nation. She develops a participatory model of creating consensus in an expanding nation that replicates the dynamic of democracy in the public sphere. Spofford’s understanding of the role she plays in the process of imperialism as a woman writer, as well as her sincere efforts to combat bigotry in herself and in her world, require us to reassess her place within the ranks of nineteenth-century American women writers.

INDEX

Keywords: Harriet Prescott Spofford, historical sketch, Protestantism, Roman Catholicism, Ursuline Convent and School of Mount Benedict, anti-Catholicism, convent tales, bigotry, pluralism, immigration, Charlestown, Massachusetts, Bunker Hill, imperialism, democracy, nativism

AUTHOR

PAULA KOT Paula Kot is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Niagara University. She teaches nineteenth-century American literature, including special topics courses on nineteenth- century American women writers. She has published on writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Lydia Maria Child, Lydia Huntley Sigourney, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Elizabeth Stoddard, and Willa Cather.

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Feminizing a Colonial Epic: On Spofford’s “Priscilla”

Daniela Daniele

1. Recovering a Romantic Realist

1 Harriet Elizabeth Prescott Spofford often responded to the requests of many editors to anonymously contribute stories to Boston “family” story-papers in the late fifties, well aware that it was not “her first inclination to write in a hasty, commercial manner” (Salmonson xviii). Few of those stories bore her name and, in producing them, she apparently seemed to follow Henry James’s patronizing advice to abandon “the ideal descriptive style” and “study the canon of the so-called realist school,” because “the public taste [had] changed” (James, “rev. of Harriet Prescott Spofford,” 269, 272). Later in the century, as an author of local color sketches, Spofford managed to preserve her penchant for the romantic while relying on the financial success of New England stories “realistically” inspired by historical architecture.1 Whenever pressed by necessity to write in the marketable regional style more attuned to the popular taste, she fictionalized colonial legends like “Priscilla”’s, doggedly working on celebrative sketches for hours until, as Salmonson recalls, her hands were cramped and got swollen for the effort, and she saw her “reputation faded among critics.”2

2 That “hurryscurry” production would slowly dissolve in the realism of the Reconstruction era and these texts were wrongly neglected though they were not mere pot-boilers devoid of literary value. Ranging from romance to Gothic thrillers, from fantastic tales to ghost stories, Spofford’s neglected production for a wider audience includes, in an increasingly less dramatic and sensational mode, the fictionalization of “Priscilla” as an old legend of the American wilderness which explicitly adapts the epic and lyrical poem, The Courtship of Miles Standish, written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in dactylic hexameters and published in 1858.3

3 Like other emergent popular writers, whose Romantic vein and keen interest in the uncanny and the ghostly were equally stigmatized by young James, Spofford tried to meet the readers’ tastes by creating regional tales which were very popular in the late

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nineteenth century. “Priscilla” is shaped as a romanticized chronicle of early American (hi)story and stands as a truly remarkable narrative retelling of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s classic which already continued Hawthorne’s transcendentalist process of turning American myths into an accessible prose naturally filled with lyricism. In her revision of Longfellow’s epic poem, Spofford managed to reconcile a Romantic subject matter with the public’s realistic preference for a simpler style. The growing domestic sensibility made of local color and of the diffuse sentimental culture a successful narrative formula likely to meet the tastes and expectations of a wide readership.4 While referring to her tales later collected in The Elder’s People (1920), Spofford clarified her positions in a letter addressed to Fred Lewis Pattee: “But although I like to write realistic stories like these last, yet I cannot say that I am entirely in sympathy with any realism that excludes the poetic and romantic” (unpublished letter dated 19 Oct. 1914, Penn State University). In such a style, Spofford proved to be a versatile professional writer not merely devoted to the Gothic style in which she naturally excelled but, as her times required, also able to meet her readers’ demand for “village tales” sustained by a very innovative use of dialect.5

4 No less than the coeval illustrated histories composed by Margaret Deland, Rose Terry Cooke and Mary Wilkins Freeman, Spofford’s rendition of the colonial past is based upon the long literary legacy of illustrated historical novels reinforced by the success of the American editions of Walter Scott’s Waverley novels and of Old Mortality (1816), and also of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Legends of the Province-House” (1838-39) which featured, as mementos, the engravings of old American dwellings and of architectural landmarks of the colonial and revolutionary past.6 In the intertextual cluster produced by Spofford’s fictionalised recollection of that heroic past, it is inevitable to allude to the generative role played by the popular genre of the American almanac adopted by Hawthorne himself to circulate in an abridged narrative significant elements of Western history and native myths which sustained the transcendentalist project to consolidate the indigenous cultural growth and an independent literary tradition in America.7 The New England heroines’ tales collected in the volume which includes “Priscilla” are indeed American emblems located at the same “corner-stone of a nation” (“Priscilla” 48).8 More specifically, Spofford’s homage to the hesitant and mild- mannered John Alden celebrates Longfellow’s noble, maternal genealogy of “Saxon complexion” and of “delicate lineaments” (“Priscilla” 32) which two American presidents would inherit.9 As Hawthorne did in the Peter Parley’s series, Spofford demonstrates the inventive power of folktales and the ability of a nineteenth-century writer to reshape the oral history of the first American colony into popular fiction. By developing their fabulistic potential in the popular style of Peter Parley’s, Spofford re- elaborated the symbols, icons and horrors related to the vessel named Mayflower which notably carried the first Puritan pilgrims to the most famous rock in the New World. By continuing in fiction what Longfellow had initiated in poetry, Spofford disseminated erudite traces of the Western literary classics in the abridged form which Hawthorne himself, as a former Peter Parley ghost-writer, mastered in similar narrative forms. Suspended between the celebration of Great Books from the Western tradition and the profane legacy of the early American folklore which played such an important role at the beginning of Hawthorne’s literary career, Spofford’s tale draws precious fragments from a classic of world literature such as Dante’s Commedia, placing them side by side with the distinctively New England focus of American pioneers celebrated by Longfellow’s generative poem. The aura of those pioneers was confirmed,

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in Spofford’s fictional adaptation, by a series of well-wrought engravings featuring homes and sites directly related to her exemplary colonial heroine. Such a verbal-visual arrangement, so carefully planned to arouse in her readers a historical and cultural awareness of their American roots, constitutes a significant interplay of word and image which testifies to the accurate strategy of graphic and sculptural design that sustained the transcendentalist project of the Anglo-Saxon cultural hegemony in America. No wonder that, in this illustrated edition of twice-told stories of pioneer womanhood that Spofford’s tale inaugurates, the very last word is left to E. H. Garrett who sketched “oldtime scenes” (“Priscilla” 139) and old houses which, without his drawings, “[would] soon have passed away” (“Priscilla” 139). His notes therefore conclude a triptych which, both textually and visually, recovers the genius loci and the lure of a time gone by. As I will demonstrate, Spofford’s domestic and humanized version of Miles Standish’s myth delineates a decided shift in taste from the Romantic sensibility of the American transcendentalists.

2. Old Buildings: Female Variations on a (Hi)story Repeated

5 Following the great success of the engraved editions of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels illustrated by Joseph Mallord William Turner, the picturesque style, which conventionally selected and sketched rural vistas and old properties representative of the past, was suitable to convey the growing nostalgia of nineteenth-century America for colonial art and architecture. It also served to exorcise, in a persisting national spirit, the menace of land-grabbing and wilderness-taming which had also been a concern of Romantic landscape painters (Rainey 1994). Such a resistance of the New England artists and writers to the destructive and commercial inclinations of Jacksonian America pervades the local color revived by Spofford’s tale, in its site- specific memorial commitment to the celebration of regional landmarks. Without sacrificing the subtle lyricism of Longfellow’s The Courtship of Miles Standish, her fictional version of “Priscilla” is far more than an abridged, narrative paraphrasis of that epic poem. It offers a distillation of Longfellow’s portraits of his colonial ancestors, in the lineage of the Hawthornian tales of the past which, in their educational purposes, adapted to the American contexts the successful formula of the illustrated historical fiction introduced by Walter Scott in England. In this intermedial frame, Longfellow’s edifying verse on his forerunners assumes a new, homely dimension with the emergence, in Spofford’s tale, of Priscilla—a domestic heroine who challenges the restrictions of her Puritan community and evokes proto-feminist attitudes of exemplary female figures who could “correct the turmoil of the present, or suggest the possibility of a new order” (Cagidemetrio 55).

6 In this re-writing of Longfellow’s epic poem, Spofford’s specific focus on the character of Priscilla served the double purpose of paying homage to New England’s colonial culture while offering a female model of domestic values that the growing number of Victorian women readers could easily identify with. Furthermore, her tale provides a feminist critique of the brutal practice of colonial marriages hastily arranged from the Old World to secure the social stability and the demographic growth of the British colonies in America. The marriage question widely debated by Victorian domestic feminists might have induced Spofford to turn the epic of the authoritarian courtship

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of Miles Standish (whose Latin name defines a soldier “not (of) deep affections,” “Priscilla” 20) into the story of a woman whose love is based on consent, foreshadowing a more tolerant time in which women stood against the disheartening realities of the mismatched couples schemed in colonial America to gratify the army leaders who had distinguished themselves in their military campaigns. By contrast, Spofford’s narrative replaced the myth of Miles Standish with the one of Priscilla and of her unassuming lover, whose half-suppressed emotions unexpectedly prove more seductive than the heroic deeds which boosted his more acclaimed rival. In illuminating this private subplot drawn from Longfellow’s epic, Spofford responds to the native legend of the British army hero with the domestic celebration of a heroine who dominates the scene as the “not so very gentle” (“Priscilla” 30-31) pioneer woman who dared challenge in love the unquestioned emblem of a colonial system that Longfellow could not help revere, despite the visible decline of his belligerent aura. While writing in reformed tones which suited her female contemporaries who opposed the rising Evangelical order to the Puritan restrictive codes, Spofford made of Priscilla a character who embodies the “feminized” era to come,10 bestowing upon her the honorary title which Longfellow had dutifully given to Standish. In this central position, Priscilla becomes the real protagonist of the legend and, in this place of honor, produces a decided shift in tone and gender in the generative colonial myth, democratizing the original source at the intersection of history, fiction and poetry and addressing a reassuring circulation of nineteenth-century female values likely to dispel the threatening legacy of Puritan violence and guilt.

7 While in Longfellow’s epic the legend of the colonial hero emphasized the Indians’ cruelty as the darkest menace in the Plymouth colony, Spofford’s more accessible prose stressed, instead, from Priscilla’s female perspective, the untenable enslavement of colonial marriages which were the tyrannical prerogative of army leaders like Miles Standish. According to a new private sense of self-determination which “could not endure grief, and must needs arm” itself “with forgetfulness and a new love” (“Priscilla” 23), Spofford enacts the decline of the colonial convention which led a brave captain like Standish to consider his sister-in-law an automatic substitute for his dead wife, in line with the stingy tradition of frugality and gloomy disaffection aimed to the mere survival and reproduction of the Puritan settlements. The slaughters of the colonial wars originated a knightly and male-centered sensibility “which made sentimental consideration of less value than practical ones” (“Priscilla” 23). In Spofford’s prose, however, the modernity of Priscilla’s private concerns undermines the epic deeds of the unsurpassed warrior.

8 Standish’s emotional indifference and his attention to the colony’s bare necessities can hardly match the psychological subtlety of Priscilla Mullins, backed up in her female claims by her sensitive suitor, John Alden, that is, by Longfellow’s colonial ancestor who, even in the poet’s lyrical celebration, silently resisted the private horrors of the colonial order, so indifferent to the feminized, private ethos which later emerged in the nineteenth-century culture of sentiment (Samuels). As part of this homely world, “Priscilla” programmatically shifts the focus of the American legend from the courtship of the glorious Miles to his object of desire, who finally turns him down to privilege the loyal but disempowered squire whom she had secretly fallen for. As Standish’s appointed go-between, John partakes, no less than Priscilla, of that domestic sphere of affections cherished by Victorians, as a human being “camped in the midst of demigods” (“Priscilla” 19), but destined to write the history of post-colonial America.

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And since “something of the blame is due to the condition of the colony” (“Priscilla” 23), Miles never achieves an affective reciprocity but, with little grief and a pragmatic, ineffable “swiftness,” he “had consoled himself after the death of Rose, his wife.” Spofford opposes an alternative system of relationships to the rough manners of the colony’s army leader “that failed to find incarnations among the captains and pirates of the great Elizabeth’s time, the Raleighs and Drakes and Frobishers, and who, coming along a hundred years too late, did his best to repair the mistake” (“Priscilla” 19). And even if “there were not a great many young girls in the little company” (“Priscilla” 24), and Priscilla Mullins was among the few pioneer women available to him, the new protagonist of the “twice-told tale” chose not to serve as his dead wife’s proxy, claiming a depth of feelings in private matters which firmly located her ahead of her primitive society and of the stern “condition of the colony” (“Priscilla” 23).

9 What truly matters to fully appreciate the intertextual density of Spofford’s tale and its reformed spirit is that Priscilla imposes the truth of her heart in the face of war and scarcity. Her poetic act was already enacted in Longfellow’s epic but it is more fully developed by his fellow woman writer, in her nineteenth-century awareness of affective comforts which turns an obscure ancestor of the American bard into a pioneer model of sentimental justice and a staunch advocate of the marriage question ahead of time.11 In doing so, the feminist ideas add an additional affective level to Longfellow’s documentary celebration of colonial America, from the vantage point of Victorian times which publicly embraced Christian and non utilitarian values, along with the reforming spirit of a feminine sensibility able to amend cruel colonial practices such as unwanted marriages. This feminized perspective made it natural for Spofford to revise the colonial legend popularized by Longfellow by expanding upon a woman’s theme which met the favor of a vast female audience, and challenging the restrictive Puritanism of her forerunners with the provocative and daring interrogations of an obscure pioneer woman.

3. Plymouth Revisited: Feminizing Colonial America

10 “Priscilla” tells how two colonial soldiers of British descent—the elder, “whose God was a man of war” (“Priscilla” 28), being Standish—prove their courage in the Indian wars and, within the Plymouth colony, vie for the affections of the beautiful Priscilla Mullins. Allied in war and rival in love, the gentle and lower-ranked John Alden hesitates to contrast Miles’s courtship and dutifully serves his Captain as a messenger boy on his behalf, like crossdressed Viola in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. However, his loyal submission to his master of “fire and spirit” (“Priscilla” 30) is subverted by the ineffable laws of desire and he is the one to conquer the independent-minded Priscilla, who ignores military hierarchies and, in her spontaneous and authentic love, eventually cherishes the respectful and self-conscious John (“There is a touching quality in the modest feeling of the soldier; he is still a young man, not at all grizzled, or old, or gray, as the poet paints him,—perhaps thirty-five or thirty-six years old,” 31). Therefore, Miles’s arrogance is gradually disarmed by a sentiment which can hardly be negotiated by social rules, even in a time in which pioneer women were required to submit to social necessities. Though listed among the few marriageable maids in the colony, Priscilla’s daring gesture makes of her the female protagonist of a legend previously dominated by the acclaimed Miles Standish, in an act of female independence already

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sketched by Longfellow himself when, as early as December 1857, he planned to name his epic project just “Priscilla.” However, while the poet’s tone is lofty and edifying, as his choice of the classical meter imposed, Spofford’s heroine came forward to provide a more grounded, female recollection of that part of colonial history, countering the prepossessing, patriarchal view which regulated the life of Puritan America in the wilderness, mostly aimed to secure the bare survival of that community. In privileging all the emotional aspects already present but not sufficiently highlighted in Longfellow’s epic poem, Spofford decided to expand “a scene within the scene” (“Priscilla” 31), that is, the subplot of the private act of rebellion of a woman who claimed authentic love in a war scene, with the support of a gentle, disempowered squire. After all, in the era of Reconstruction, the rising suffragism overtly advocated for desire and freedom in love relations, letting the importance of private affection prevail over the sovereignty of reproduction. Compared to the frugal and sacrificial conditions of early pioneers, Priscilla’s courage speaks for the new women who were to follow.

11 When she daringly shakes her secret suitor from his submissive obedience to his master (“Why don’t you speak for yourself, John Alden?” 35), the candor of that interrogation haunts the man’s conscience in a moment in which he is resigned to plead for his master’s request. In opposing his unnatural immolation, Priscilla foreshadows a new model of equality in relations. In manifesting her sentiments and claiming Alden as her choice together with her right to love “him equally” (32), Priscilla rejects the submission of the sexually enslaved females of her community, whose reproductive responsibilities were strictly related to the demographic growth of the colony.

12 Moreover, Spofford contributes to redefining the collective memory of the colonial Miles Gloriosus whose ridicule was also a feature of Longfellow’s epic.12. Priscilla’s compelling question, which was already present in Longfellow’s closing lines of the third chapter of his epic poem, brings to the fore the centrality of her subjective position within a fragile community constantly urged to acclaim its military defense over its strictly private concerns. Thus, in Spofford’s treatment, a legend of the colonial epic becomes a modern domestic narrative which significantly shifts its original focus from the pompous Captain to the intimacy and private affections of a delicate romance more likely to satisfy the expectations of the female Victorian readership. The “Priscilla” who proudly stands out in Spofford’s title reflects modern instances of female emancipation which go well beyond the entertaining purposes of a celebrative recollection of the Plymouth colony and a harmless amusement for genteel readers fond of local color.

13 Finally released from the sacrificial impositions bestowed by Puritan families upon their female components, Spofford’s fictional adaptation is “a disimprisoned epic” (Cumming) which goes well beyond a fictionalised presentation of the surviving properties from New England’s colonial past. By assuming the feminized attitude typical of a Victorian, domestic heroine, Spofford’s “Priscilla” claims no heroic deeds for herself but rather reclaims a cozy and solid affective shelter against the overwhelming menace coming from the untamed wilderness which apparently required a male-oriented military society.13 By taking seriously the original plans of Longfellow to rename his acclaimed epic poem “Priscilla,” Spofford demonstrates that even a popular genre like a colonial legend which she apparently fictionalised only to

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make some profit could actually enhance the narrative possibilities of an American myth meant to reverberate across the centuries.

4. Beyond the Male Colonial Epic: Homely Tunes in the Wilderness

14 Worthy of note is the fact that the title character of Spofford’s “Priscilla” had previously made a significant appearance in Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance (1852). Such a re-enactment of an old anecdote, initiated by Longfellow shortly after his mother’s death, demonstrates how a colonial legend could narratively develop through love triangles and the other emotional complications of modern times. In her long literary career, Spofford herself kept re-configuring the figure of Priscilla as a female icon of a generative, Puritan past reshaped according to the needs of her emancipated readers in a modernised revision which went far beyond the reverential praise of the colonial army, to further access the human implications of a private world history which Longfellow started hinting at but mostly left to his fellow women writers to explore. And since old legends, like oral myths and fairy tales, are meant to be endlessly retold and reactualized, Spofford kept re-elaborating Longfellow’s private epic in four later narratives—New England Legends (1871), Priscilla’s Love Story (1898), The Maid He Married (1899) and Old Washington (1906)—as if to emphasize the affective resonance of that exemplary colonial heroine even in the contexts of modern America. More explicitly, in the novel entitled Priscilla’s Love Story, the narrator keeps wondering about a new, Victorian incarnation of Mrs. Alden: “Why had she not waited to be wooed before she was won? Why, why?” (Spofford 1898, 5). Here, the protagonist’s explicit revelation of her female desire, although re-uttered in Victorian times, still threatens to dishonor both the woman and the man she is involved with. In this twice-told story which never stops repeating itself, Priscilla’s self-determination becomes even more perceptible. As the scene gets reset in the author’s writing present, she is portrayed as a music teacher unhappily married and “more restless than the wind” (125) who discusses her “premature love-affair” (16) with a penniless student who learns counterpoint from her. Transforming old stories and native histories into modern narratives of female emancipation certainly kept enhancing the respect for women’s desire and true romance in new, popular forms, according to the reforming intentions of the Transcendentalists.

15 All these modern incarnations of Longfellow’s foremother add a subtler psychological layer to the definition of the humble maid whose private resistance demonstrated the unstoppable decline of the Puritan system, founded on the doctrine of the depravity of man and on repressed desire. The material unveiling of Hawthorne’s Priscilla in The Blithedale Romance already foreshadowed a new society freed from those restrictive norms, in which veiled ladies with the oracular powers usually attributed to talented women feel increasingly ill at ease with colonial and Victorian plots of women’s imprisonment and dependence on tyrannical tutors and guardians.14 In this respect, Spofford’s feminized re-elaboration is very Hawthornean in spirit in seeking a way out of Puritan censorship and intolerance which she herself could not help reframing in nocturnal circumstances whose Gothic shadows she dispelled only later in her career.

16 As she turns the domineering courtship of Miles Standish into a female apologue on reciprocal love, Spofford operates a distinctive shift in genre and tone from

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Longfellow’s lofty epic to a more democratic prose which re-orients in a gendered direction the legend of the wilderness about the modest maid who refused to marry an army leader in mere tribute to his military authority. As she decides not to submit to that enslaving obligation, the colonial plot radically changes focus: Standish successfully leads his colonial army but not the story line, and the mythopoietic power of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow becomes the starting point of further stories of unrequited love which cast a subjective, female view on the Mayflower pilgrims who landed in Plymouth in 1620.

17 In the epic poem composed by Longfellow, after his wife’s death, Captain Miles Standish urges an instant replacement “out of hand” (“Priscilla” 22), but the maid who carries the sparkling name of Priscilla steps back and unexpectedly takes over a prominent role in that gloomy order, along with Mary Chilton—“the daring and spirited girl who must be the first to spring ashore when the boat touched land” (“Priscilla” 25)—and “the noble and serene Anne Hutchinson” (“Priscilla” 24), the dissident theologian of British descent charged with blasphemy and obscenity for preaching tolerance in the American colony in front of a mixed audience of women and men, demonstrating conversational skills which certainly inspired her eloquent descendant, Margaret Fuller.

18 Hutchinson’s slaughter by Mohicans—notably echoed by Spofford in “Circumstance” when her heroine attempts to endure a fierce attack thanks to her female piety—is an episode which magnetized Dickinson herself and also pervades The Courtship of Miles Standish through Longfellow’s emphasis on the dark Indian menace. In “Priscilla,” Spofford chose, instead, to undermine the impact of the Indian wars in order to stress the domestic enslavement of unwanted marriages forced upon pioneer women. Starting from this private perspective, the woman writer leaves the residual violence of the old legend to the belligerent Captain, who lingers with his heroic deeds in the background, until he appears diminished if not slightly ridiculed in his primitivism and brutality of manners.

19 As his object of desire becomes the new focus of the colonial legend, Priscilla starts her private defense of her true love for the sensitive John Alden, who eventually becomes her mate. She becomes an early advocate of the mid-nineteenth-century culture of sentiment, and of women’s free choice of their partners for life, independently from the imperatives of social hierarchies. In other words, Spofford’s concern for the private needs uttered by her literary foremothers, who sailed in great numbers to the New World, results in a decided step away from the heartless utilitarianism and pragmatism of the colonial system. That thrifty regime doggedly matched its women with perfect strangers selected by others for them for the sake of their community.15 Denouncing this abusive matrimonial policy, Spofford’s prose proved disimprisoning for her female readers, whose favorite fiction also questioned the gruesome circumstances produced by the disaffected, Puritan adjustment to the hardships of colonial America. In celebrating his maternal ancestors, Longfellow already included in his epic a private subplot of unrequited love, as a tribute to a new family system aimed to reform the rigid mores and manners of the Mayflower pilgrims. In this regard, Spofford’s narrative version of his poem might be received as a derivative contribution addressing a wider audience, in simpler and more prosaic forms. However, on closer inspection, Spofford achieved much more than this, since her times were mature enough to stress the domestic alienation of Plymouth’s belligerent past. Accordingly, her reactualization of

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the Priscilla figure more decidedly reverses the gender hierarchy of the colonial order by placing an obscure pioneer woman in a central position in her story. By gaining authority, Priscilla can refuse the emotionally obtuse “man of war” assigned to her, and her resolution anticipates a new reformed family which cherished the inner contentment of each individual member, whose feelings were considered superfluous and potentially corrupt by Puritans. Therefore, Spofford’s narrative adaptation “found some human beings camped in the midst of demigods” (“Priscilla” 16) and enormously benefits from the intertextual reverberations produced by the previous literary incarnations of her heroine, letting her sacrificial veil drop like in Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, until she is finally released from the grip of all her male patrons who tried to take advantage of her as a disposable commodity in the marriage marketplace. Spofford’s fictional embodiment of Priscilla refuses to be traded and, in her outspoken claim for sentimental freedom, distances herself from the frugal, colonial economy which Dickinson also depicted as a submissive system, ruled by a high respect of God and little respect for humanity (“God is a distant—stately Lover,” J357).

20 Stepping forward in this Victorian revision of the old legend, Priscilla Alden wisely learns to wait until news comes of the Captain’s sudden death, which instantly exempts her from sacrificing herself for the sake of her colony. As a matter of fact, there is no account of Standish’s death in the chronicles of colonial America, since, in real life, the glorious Captain simply “married elsewhere” (“Priscilla” 56). Longfellow’s decision to force the events is apparently only a fictional device to let Priscilla and her beloved John free to elope and fulfill their mutual desire. Writing from the vantage point of Priscilla’s state of mind, Spofford quotes Anne Whitney to embrace the alternative strategy of liberation of the two lovers, who might cautiously wait until Miles Standish found another companion before getting married.16 More importantly, “Priscilla”’s final scene foreshadows a more tolerant future compared to the purgatorial, “barren beaches” (“Priscilla” 36) which the Aldens restlessly tread, before achieving their sentimental freedom, the latter being a fragile and adamant value for these two non- aggressive characters, ready to wait lest they violate the rules of friendship which bind the respectful squire John to his Captain Standish. Even in the sternest conditions of the Plymouth colony, Spofford mimics Longfellow’s poetic license of the Captain’s fatal disappearance, which providentially allows her not to “impair the friendship of the lovers with the impetuous Captain Standish” (“Priscilla” 54). After all, their betrothal smoothly encountered the Victorian readers’ uncompromised appreciation of the Aldens’ private happiness, stressed by the Dantesque image of the two souls free to float with lifted spirits over the flames that the divine laws reserved for adulterers.

21 Once again, the well-read Spofford elegantly paraphrases another classic of World Literature by evoking the airy vision of the star-crossed lovers in the Fifth Canto of the Inferno, captured in “that period of bliss now dawned which makes most lovers feel themselves lifted into a region just above the earth and when they tread on air” (“Priscilla” 44). In this weighless representation of an authentic love miraculously sprung like a “may-flower” in the wilderness (“Priscilla” 48), we cannot miss another one of Spofford’s deliberate tributes to Longfellow. As a renowned translator of Dante, Longfellow did not hesitate to adopt for the Aldens’ passion the blissful image of Paolo and Francesca whose sentiments appear utterly immune to the acute sufferings and agonies of the Inferno just as Spofford’s characters are immune to the “horror and impending famine” (“Priscilla” 39) which periodically threaten their colony.

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22 Even the seraphic resistance to adversities of the Aldens’ delicate romance is representative of a paradigmatic shift in culture, as Spofford adamantly suggests: “for lovers will be lovers still, although the whole body of Calvinism be behind them” (“Priscilla” 50). The floating image of the couple testifies, in its aloofness and passion, to their indifference to the infernal punishment inflicted upon them. As the two secret lovers rejoice in flight in Dante’s Inferno, the squareness of the Puritan Captain is removed to a glorious but distant background, like an American embodiment of the Gianciotto in the Commedia, ready to intrude upon their enviable, intimate moments, but this time not to kill them.

23 It is John’s dilemma of choosing between his love for Priscilla and his loyalty to his master which acutely troubles the man, torn as he is between two sentiments of different quality but equal importance whose transgression risks alienating him from the favor of his beloved, on one side, and of his “impetuous” (“Priscilla” 54) master, on the other. However, such an occurrence is spared in both Longfellow’s and Spofford’s romantic treatment of the Aldens, by skilfully postponing the fulfillment of the Aldens’ desire, so that the image of the two absorbed lovers whose feet do not touch ground does not anticipate the tragic end of Paolo and Francesca.

24 Priscilla eventually overcomes the barriers erected by John Alden’s respect of military hierarchy and by his stoic effort to resist his feelings for her. The only limits of the brave soldier Alden are indeed his loyalty to Captain Standish. He is “torn between duty and passion, and doubtless pale with suffering” especially when he is sent to “suit before Mr. Mullins” (“Priscilla” 53) on the captain’s behalf, that is, before Priscilla’s father, “who replied favorably” to Miles Standish’s proposal. Such a dilemma triggers the final, provocative interrogation of Priscilla, which, in its liberating effects, marks the decline of the knightly values of loyalty typical of the colonial order, soon to be replaced with a feminized, home-centered ethos in which emotions mattered more than heroic deeds. Therefore, when John appears to Priscilla as Miles Standish’s messenger boy sent to her father to plead for her hand, the brave foremother of Longfellow—and also of the New Women to come—urges him to take a determined step forward for himself and unveil his true feelings instead of shying away for fear of thwarting his captain’s plans.

25 Spofford skilfully dramatizes his hesitation, as he “shrank from telling a girl that she had fired his inflamable heart” (“Priscilla” 31-32), and once again borrows Longfellow’s compelling formula: “Why dont you speak for yourself, John?” (“Priscilla” 35). With the enormous relief of the reserved soldier, in betraying her feelings while encouraging John to expose his own, Priscilla subverts the gender-based rules of courtship, running the risk of dishonoring “herself in his eyes” (“Priscilla” 39). The cathartic scene makes Priscilla overcome any constraints imposed by her times and circumstances and reproduces, in the American setting of the New England wilderness, the Shakespearean denouement of Twelfth Night, in which the cross-dressed, ancillary Viola finally reveals her feelings to her master whom she had secretly loved while serving him as a love messenger on behalf of a lady. Spofford foresees in Priscilla’s resolution a new way of conceiving love relationships in terms of reciprocity rather than subalternity, in a decided shift from the sacrificial rigor of the Puritan community to the comforts of a warmer, Victorian domesticity that Longfellow already inhabited.

26 In an era which staged more domestic trials than war scenes, Spofford rewrote the legendary history of a British soldier from the point of view of a woman whose natural

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destination was to serve as his well-deserved trophy and makes, instead, a timid squire dispel the public rituals of the colonial military saga. The edifying tones of Longfellow’s verse give way to more intimate ones in a Victorian domestic tale in which every character finds the right mate and Miles Standish does not have to die in battle to let the Aldens secure the private victory which they mutely cherished. As Priscilla’s legend shifts from the epic and lyrical mode to a prosaic form better equipped to investigate its potential for romance, the Plymouth myth is made more intriguing through the warm sensibility of a nineteenth-century woman writer who perused annals of the gentle Pilgrims and the sterner Puritans for any pages where one may find muffled for a moment the strain of high emprise which wins our awe and our praise, but not so surely our love, and gain access on their more human side to the men and women who lived the noblest romance in all history. (“Priscilla” 15-16)

27 In this respect, in all her many lyrical and narrative impersonations, Priscilla never stops seducing her modern admirers, drawing from the Pilgrims’ experience the reassuring germs of a more humane and secure world which Spofford’s generation consolidated in its praise of sentimental and private contentment.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cagidemetrio, Alide. Fictions of the Past: Hawthorne & Melville. Amherst: Massachusetts UP, 1992.

Calhoun, Charles C. Longfellow. A Rediscovered Life. Boston: Beacon Press, 2004.

Cumming, Mark. A Disimprisoned Epic. Form and Vision in Carlyle’s French Revolution. Philadelphia: Philadelphia UP, 1988.

Douglas, Ann. The Feminization of American Culture. New York: Knopf, 1977.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, et al. “Roger Malvin’s Burial” [1832]. The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, vol. XIII, no. LXII (August 1943): 186-196.

---. Peter Parley’s Universal History, on the Basis of Geography. New York: Ivison, Phinney, 1862.

---. Our Old Home: A Series of English Sketches. Boston: Ticknor, 1863.

---. “Legends of the Province-House.” Democratic Review 5, 6, 1838-39, vol. II, no. 12.

---. The Blithedale Romance [1852]. New York: Norton, 1958.

Hilen, Andrew (ed.). The Letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Vol. IV. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1972.

James, Henry Jr.“Rev. of Harriet Prescott Spofford’s Azarian.” North American Review (Jan. 1865): 268-277.

---. Hawthorne (1879). New York: Macmillan, 1967.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. The Courtship of Miles Standish and Other Poems [1858]. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1859.

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---. Letters of H. W. Longfellow, in 6 vols. 1837-43. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard U.P, 1982.

Rainey, Sue. Creating Picturesque America. Monument to the Natural and Cultural Landscape. Nashville- London: Vanderbilt UP, 1994.

Salmonson, Jessica Amanda. “Introduction” to The Moonstone Mass. Ashcroft, British Columbia: Ash-Tree Press, 2000.

Samuels, Shirley. The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in 19th-Century America. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992.

Scott, Walter. Old Mortality [1816]. London: Constable, 1895.

Spofford, Harriet Prescott. The Amber Gods and Other Stories [1863]. Ed. Alfred Bendixen, New Brunswick: Rutgers U.P., 1989.

---. New England Legends. Boston: Osgood, 1871.

---. “When Shall Our Women Marry? A Compilation of Opinions.” The Brooklyn Magazine 4.1 (April 1886): 61-63.

---. “Priscilla.” Three Heroines of New England Romance. Harriet Prescott Spofford, Louise Imogen Guiney, and Alice Brown. Illustrated by E. H. Garrett. Boston: Little Brown, 1894. 15-60.

---. Priscilla’s Love-Story. Chicago: Herbert S. Stone, 1898.

---. The Maid He Married. Chicago and New York: Herbert S. Stone, 1899.

---. Old Washington. Boston: Little Brown, 1906.

---. “Memories of Mrs. Spofford.” The Bookman, Nov. 1925. 315-17.

---. The Moonstone Mass. Ed. Jessica Amanda Salmonson. Ashcroft, British Columbia: Ash-Tree Press, 2000.

Watson, Kate. Women Writing Crime Fiction, 1860-1880: Fourteen American, British and Australian Authors. Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland, 2012.

NOTES

1. One of her models in this attempt was Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Our Old Home: A Series of English Sketches (Boston: Ticknor, 1863). 2. As summoned in Spofford’s “Memories,” “When the financial crisis was over, and she had the leisure to write well, she found ‘something had escaped into the air. I could never get it back ... There have been times when it made me sick to my very soul’” (Harriet Prescott Spofford, “Memories of Mrs. Spofford,” in The Bookman, Nov. 1925, 317, cited in Salmonson’s “Introduction” to The Moonstone Mass, xix). 3. In a letter to Charles Sumner of June, 3, 1858, Longfellow announced: “I have just finished a Poem of some length, an Idyl of the Old Colony times—a bunch of May-flowers from the Plymouth woods. The title is ‘The Courtship of Miles Standish.’” (letter no. 1671 in The Letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Andrew Hilen, 82). 4. As Bendixen points out, “Spofford deserves some attention as an able practitioner of the realistic sketch—the literary mode that attracted the talents of many of the finest women writers in America during the second half of the nineteenth century. Her best realistic pieces show considerable interest and skill in the delineation of character. The

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strongest of these stories focus on the lives of elderly women in a New England village, and their handling is marked by both sympathy and humor” (“Introduction” to Harriet Prescott Spofford’s The Amber Gods, and Other Stories, xix-xx). 5. “[S]he did not have the same ear for Realism. New England writers were expected to write village tales, whether quaint and religious in the manner of Annie Trumbull Slosson, or tragic and confrontational in the manner of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. So Harriet wrote increasingly in the regional mode, and became an exceedingly popular writer by pandering in this way” (Salmonson xviii). Gianna Carroni examined the vernacular aspects of Spofford’s local tales in her translation thesis discussed at the University of Udine in the academic year 2015-16. 6. The Courtship of Miles Standish was also illustrated by the New York artist, John Whetten Ehninger, whose eight scenes contributed to the book’s success and became the main topic of Longfellow’s discussion with his correspondents. The drawings were photographed by Matthew Brady and, as the poet points out in his letter of Nov. 21, 1858, “published incessantly” by the firm Rudd & Carleton (letter no. 1694 to Charles Sumner, in Hilen’s The Letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 102). In a letter to the illustrator, Longfellow especially praised his rendition of the figure of Priscilla which he found “particularly charming.” To his eyes, however, the “lower part of Standish’s armour seems unnecessarily cumbersome” (letter no. 1697 to John Whetten Ehninger, 103-104). 7. By offering an acute and well-wrought compendium of history and myths, the almanac style introduced by Goodrich in the Peter Parley’s series with the complicity of a young Nathaniel Hawthorne who ghostwrote many of those volumes gave the classics of Western literature and the early American myths the form of a fable for the delight and educational support of the dispersed Anglo-Saxon colonies which the American writers contributed to making part of one and the same English-speaking nation. 8. Beside Priscilla Alden, the other legendary colonial heroines featured in the collective volume Three Heroines of New England Romance are the tavern maid Agnes Surriage, depicted in caricatural terms by Alice Brown, and Lady Martha Hilton, the former kitchen maid reconsidered by Louise I. Guiney, and previously represented in Longfellow’s Tales of the Wayside Inn (1863-73). In these two American versions of Richardson’s Pamela, Surriage becomes the wealthy wife of a baronet after bravely pulling him out of the wreckage during Lisbon’s earthquake, and Martha Hilton, the former cook who becomes Lady Wentworth of the Hall, also passes “from rags-to-riches” in another twice-told tale about social elevation based on the American folklore. 9. “[T]he greatness of nature that may have belonged to the ancestor of two of our Presidents” (“Priscilla” 32). Longfellow acknowledged his descendance from John Alden “by the mother’s side” in his letter of Nov. 21, 1862 to Georgia A. Alden, who was apparently pleased with his “Miles Standish” (letter no. 1974, 303). 10. My reference to a feminized culture is an homage to Ann Douglas’s classic, The Feminization of American Culture (1977) which skilfully detects the rise of a female-oriented, domestic culture which was crucial in Victorian America in marking the transition from the Puritan ethos which sustained colonial America to the Evangelical sensibility whose main ministers were popular women writers. 11. Spofford explicitly intervened on the “marriage question” in a debate which also involved Louisa May Alcott, Rebecca Harding Davis, Lucy Stone, Madeleine Vinton Dahlgren, Helen Campbell, Julia C. R. Dorr, Eunice White Beecher, Mary L. Booth, Elizabeth Peabody, and Adeline D. T. Whitney. In the article “The Marriage Question” also signed by Frances E. Willard, she refers to young women by arguing that “the father and the mother should have respect paid to their personal preference in the matter” (62). 12. As biographer Charles C. Calhoun points out: “The Courtship of Miles Standish, a romantic, in places even comic, ‘epic’ of life of the early Plymouth Colony […] was able

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to satirize the blustery and vainglorious ways of the Pilgrims’ military leader, Captain Standish, a miles gloriosus in the tradition of Renaissance comedy” (198). 13. Even in “Circumstance” (Spofford’s most anthologized tale, first published in The Atlantic Monthly in May 1860), the old hymn tunes sung by the pioneer woman to subdue the beastly creature who assaults her in the wilds of Maine is a lovely invocation of household happiness aimed to exorcise colonial terrors. A similar female confrontation with the wilderness—which constitutes, according to Kate Watson, “a feminine reworking of an episode in Brockden Brown’s pioneer Gothic novel, Edgar Huntly, where Huntly kills a panther in a cavern with a tomahawk and then eats its carcass and drinks its blood” (80)— was also dramatized by Nathaniel Hawthorne in “Roger Malvin’s Burial” (1832), an early colonial tale in which Dorcas equally sings aloud in the attempt to inhabit “the one little spot of homely comfort, in the desolate heart of Nature,” in the very instants in which her husband tragically shoots their son, mistaking him for a deer. 14. I refer to Priscilla’s legend but also to later fictions of female containment such as Henry James’s Watch and Ward (first published in The Atlantic Monthly, 1871) and Louisa May Alcott’s thrillers such as “A Whisper in the Dark” (published in The Flag of Our Union in 1863), which inspired him. 15. Kathryn Bigelow effectively portrays them in the opening scene of The Weight of Water (2000), in which ugly, old men on deck wait for the arrival of their young and often beautiful prospective wives, resigned to follow them out of duty. 16. In this densely intertextual tale which, in a typically Victorian fashion, keeps hinting at other narratives and poems, Spofford cites Anne Whitney’s poem “Bertha” about two lovers’ procrastinated desire, which, in many respects, reflects Princesse de Clèves’s and Duke Nemours’s enamoured abeyance in Madame de la Fayette’s 1678 masterpiece. Like many other Victorian writers of her times, Spofford closes her modern rendition of that particular episode of American colonial history with a long citation from Longfellow’s homage to the mythical Mayflower’s crew: “she … felt as if love and youth and joy and innocence had invented a flower for them alone,—the deeply rosy and ineffably fragrant mayflower that blooms only in the Plymouth woods in its pink perfection, and whose breath must have seemed like a breath blown out of the open doors of the new life awaiting them together” (“Priscilla” 46-47).

ABSTRACTS

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem, The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858) puts in dactylic hexameters a Romantic legend of the wilderness on unrequited love among the pilgrims set in Plymouth in 1620. In 1894, Harriet Prescott Spofford parodically replied to that colonial legend with a new love triangle written from the point of view of a pioneer woman who rejected the enslavement of a marriage arranged by others. By shifting her focus from the celebration of the army leader Miles to the disempowered Priscilla who stubbornly claims her freedom in love, Spofford points to the private horrors of colonization in an exemplary feminist apologue filled with domestic sentiments which partakes of what Alide Cagidemetrio defines as a “usable past.”

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INDEX

Keywords: Harriet Prescott Spofford, William Wadsworth Longfellow, The Courtship of Miles Standing, colonial legends, Priscilla Alden, Dante, Victorian parodies

AUTHOR

DANIELA DANIELE Daniela Daniele teaches American Language and Literature at the University of Udine. Her main focus in Victorian American studies is Louisa Alcott and her transcendentalist legacy. Her last publication on the theme is the Italian edition of “Enigmas” (Elliot, 2019).

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Feminist (Re)Writings

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“She Was the Mad Woman”: Misdiagnosed Madness in Harriet Prescott Spofford’s “Her Story”

Sirpa Salenius

1 Harriet Prescott—later Spofford—started her literary career as one of the Atlantic Monthly’s most celebrated writers; she was defined as a genius “destined for great things” (Boyd 11, 27). She published, as noted by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, “hundreds of stories, poems, essays, children’s books, travel books, and novels” (28). Immediately at the start of her career, she created a sensation with the publication of her story “In a Cellar,” which appeared in the Atlantic in February 1859. The story was hailed as a “new and brilliant contribution,” which dazzled the readers “with the splendors, the manners, the political intrigues, the sin-spiced witchery of Parisian life” (Bendixen ix). “The Amber Gods,” which followed in the January and February 1860 issues of the Atlantic Monthly, fully launched Prescott on her career: she was recognized as an innovative and unconventional author. Her unique female characters remained her trademark, so to speak, through the entire repertoire of her short fiction. Often her women protagonists can be seen to transgress the conventional social boundaries, as Alfred Bendixen notes, “of both language and morality” (x). Many of her fictional stories introduce women characters who are “‘ghosted’ by a culture that refuses to recognize women as active agents in control of their own destinies” (Weinstock 27). The ingenious, complex women figures Prescott-Spofford1 created range from self- centered dead narrators or political activists plotting with revolutionaries in wine cellars to oppressed women who sometimes find themselves trapped in mental asylums. Although nearly forgotten today, Spofford has been applauded for her proto- feminist texts, for their originality, poetic language, sensuous descriptions, and striking images. According to Bendixen, she was immediately recognized “as one of the most important, exciting, and promising young writers in the nation” (x). She was admired by such prominent authors as Henry James, Emily Dickinson, and William Dean Howells. In particular, they enthusiastically praised the “strength and brilliancy of her descriptions” (quoting James, Bendixen xi), recognizing her as a major talent. To be

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sure, her short stories remain brilliant testimonies of her capacity to address in impressively imaginative ways the many concerns that troubled the period’s women. At the same time, the stories still seem relevant to women in the twenty-first century.

2 One of Spofford’s stories with vivid images and a highly unique female protagonist is “Her Story,” which appeared in the Lippincott’s December 1872 issue. It has been identified as a forerunner for Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) because of the similarities in settings, characters, and circumstances of the narrators as well as the stories’ themes and ambiguities. Both stories present a woman protagonist who seems to have lost her sense of self because she has sacrificed her identity in a patriarchal society. In addition, both stories address the frustrations and submissive nature of nineteenth-century women. Lastly, in both stories the protagonists, also first-person narrators, are confined in mental asylums.

3 In this paper, I will argue that the protagonist of “Her Story” is an early representative of the modern New Woman who, however, not only follows the period’s gender-specific expectations by trying to accept her role as wife and mother but also ventures into the public sphere when assuming some of the professional responsibilities of her husband. Thus, she renounces her creative pursuits and becomes burdened with too many responsibilities. As a consequence, she suffers from anxiety not only over her family and marriage but also over work. She ends up feeling mentally and physically exhausted, which is evident in the symptomatic anxiety, insomnia, paranoia, hallucinations, feelings of worthlessness, anger, violent outbursts, and contemplation of suicide that subsequently are misdiagnosed as her “madness.” The woman’s inner conflict in trying to reconcile the two opposing sides of her identity—one entailing her sexuality, creativity, and independence; the other characterized by submissiveness, obedience, and sense of responsibility—reaches its climax with the arrival of another woman, the step-daughter of the narrator’s husband’s uncle, against whom she mirrors her own self.

4 The narrator of “Her Story” appears to be partially responsible for the loss of her selfhood because of her (seemingly) unquestioned renunciation of her agency after her marriage to Spencer, a priest with whom she fell in love after hearing his “deep, sweet voice” delivering a Sunday sermon (Spofford 150). Scholars have argued that this “female protagonist passively accepts her role as the ideal Victorian woman,” and the ward, who becomes part of her family, “can be seen as a phantom, a projection of the narrator’s inner self and an embodiment of the sexual passion that is frighteningly Other to her” (Murillo 763, 766). Others, for example Eva Gold and Thomas H. Fick, read the story as exploring “the way the oppositions common to male- and female-authored fictions (blond-passive-chaste; dark, aggressive, sexual) serve to divide women from each other” (512). Although I agree that the polarity between the narrator and ward is significant to the understanding of Spofford’s message, I argue that the oppositional traits represent the narrator’s identity. I take the cue from Spofford-scholar Rita Bode’s insightful interpretation of the story that places its focus “on the way in which motherhood and maternal responsibilities take control of women’s lives” (“Lost and Found” 142). In Bode’s reading, the protagonist suffers from postpartum depression (whereas in my reading she suffers from exhaustion), and the story explores the “dark side of motherhood” (“Lost and Found” 154). “Her Story,” which scholars have also seen as exploring women’s rivalry and jealousy (see, for instance, Murillo), follows the narrator’s journey from what she presents as her youthful innocence to her

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exploration of passion that lures her into what she perceives as a romantic triangle2 whose core is her husband, Spencer; the woman’s journey finally ends at a mental asylum, which becomes the starting point of the story she recounts.

5 The protagonist’s loss of identity, or a confused sense of self, is foregrounded by leaving her unnamed. The author’s choice to use a nameless narrator represents the annihilation of the individual woman, the negation of her goals, ambitions, desires, and passions. At the same time, she becomes a universal representative of women of her time. When she is locked up in an asylum that many scholars see as representing her marriage in a patriarchal society, she is stripped of any freedom and independence she might have had outside the walls of the “madhouse.” She narrates her own story as a flashback from the mental institution where she was confined after being diagnosed as “mad.”

1. Insanity Narratives

6 In the nineteenth century, the category of “insanity,” or “madness,” referred to a range of vague ideas and beliefs, although doctors tended to agree that it was an illness that affected the mind, reflected mental instability, and manifested more in actions than in speech (Glew n.p.). Commonly, people believed that madness could result from “a blow to the head, from the inhalation of poisonous vapors, from indigestion, from masturbation, from hereditary predisposition, or from another disease,” as Benjamin Reiss explains, “although asylums’ annual reports and other writings of asylum superintendents also include such causes as excessive study, religious enthusiasm, anxieties over work, and even ‘blowing Fife all night,’ ‘reading vile books,’ and ‘extatic [sic] admiration of works of art’” (4). In the case of women, their reproductive organs were often believed to be the source of hysteria and other mental illnesses. The wide range of causes that were believed to lead to “madness” demonstrates that neither doctors nor lay people knew what triggered mental instability. Spofford’s protagonist, for instance, seems to suffer not only from “anxieties over work,” caused by both tending to her family and taking care of many of her husband’s responsibilities, but also from anxieties over her marriage. Moreover, she struggles to reconcile her passion for music and desire for free-spirited companionship with her husband with the responsibilities of wife and mother. It is only recently that researchers have started paying attention to work-life balance, in particular in the lives of professional women, but Spofford already around the 1870s seems to have recognized the excessive demands nineteenth-century women had to face. Today the protagonist’s “madness” would most likely be diagnosed as physical and mental fatigue, exhaustion, or burn out. These medical conditions, however, were unknown in the nineteenth century.

7 Before the establishing of psychiatric institutions, those suffering from diseases of the mind were regularly incarcerated rather than hospitalized, or they found themselves in institutions that resembled prisons. Since the 1700s, patients had customarily been confined in isolated cells and it was common to use chains to regulate their movement. Cold and hot baths were considered proper treatments, while psychological and physical abuse was far from uncommon. In the late 1840s, Dorothea Dix started to advocate for the creation of state and federal insane asylums that would provide medical treatment for the mentally ill. She campaigned to find funding for the building of national institutions that would replace the hospitalization that too closely

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resembled incarceration. She envisioned these mental institutions with sunny bedrooms and spacious gardens where patients could take rejuvenating walks. As a result of her efforts, these utopian establishments became a reality. Soon, however, stories of patient abuse started to circulate again, this time receiving national attention. Consequently, it became rather common never to release the patients, thus guaranteeing their silence; they were not allowed to return to their homes to tell stories of their mistreatment. Instead, they remained locked up in the institutions under the vigilant supervision of figures of authority who controlled their every act (Reiss 1-21; Walter 17-24). As Benjamin Reiss points out: “Lunatics, like slaves, were deprived of the right to vote, to sign contracts, to make wills, and to hold property” (15). This, of course, was also the situation of nineteenth-century women in general.

8 Dorothea Dix’s campaigns to improve the condition of patients suffering from mental illnesses contributed to making the 1850s a crucial time in the national discussion about mental illness and asylums.3 Around the same time, the first autobiographical asylum memoirs appeared in print. In 1855, Phebe B. Davis published her story entitled Two Years and Three Months in the New York Lunatic Asylum at Utica. It was followed by asylum memoirs by such women as Elizabeth Parsons Ware Packard and Lydia A. Smith, who also raised awareness of the ill treatment of mental patients by telling their stories: they were forcibly confined in asylums by their husbands. Disagreement in opinions or women’s behavior that their husbands found inacceptable were reasons for the women to be diagnosed as insane. Elizabeth Packard, who established the Anti- Insane Asylum Society, wrote about her experience in The Prisoner’s Hidden Life, or, Insane Asylums Unveiled, which came out in 1868, four years prior to Spofford’s publication of “Her Story,” and in Modern Persecution, or Married Woman’s Liabilities, which was published in 1873. She ended up in the asylum merely because she disagreed with the conservative views of her pastor husband, the Reverend Theophilus Packard, on questions of slavery, religious beliefs, and the ways to raise their children. Lydia Smith, who was drugged and abducted six years after Packard’s forced institutionalization in 1860, contributed to the genre of insanity narratives or asylum memoirs with the publication of Behind the Scenes, or, Life in an Insane Asylum (1878). Other stories followed in the 1880s, the most famous of them perhaps being Ten Days in a Mad-House (1887) written by the journalist Nellie Bly (Elizabeth Cochran). Spofford’s “Her Story,” similarly to other multi-genre asylum memoirs and many nineteenth- century women’s narratives in general, resists any conventional categorization of the text as pertaining to one specific genre. Instead, it connects with confessional narratives but also ties in with the early examples of the asylum memoir genre. The story thus contributes to the national discussion about mental illness and asylums that reached its peak around the 1850s. At the same time, it affirms that women, just like “lunatics,” were deprived of many rights and liberties that pertained to (white) men; moreover, their bodies, minds, and behavior operated in accordance to social presumptions and expectations, and often were controlled by figures of authority.

2. A “Mad” Woman’s Version of “Her Story”

9 The frame narrative is set in one specific place, the mental hospital where the nameless protagonist is confined. Following the scholar William A. Gleason’s line of thinking according to which “[s]tories rooted in specific spaces and housed in particular

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structures can tell us a great deal not only about past practices but also about meanings and ideologies, both shared and contested” (2), it can be argued that the asylum reflects shared dominant ideologies concerning women in the period’s society. As space, the asylum serves to explore the ways in which human life fits into and responds to various social environments. This specific place with its confining walls is limiting, in action and expression, forming the opposite of freedom and self-reliance. It entails relentless control of its inhabitants by figures of authority, making it a space of powerlessness for the nameless narrator, who refers to the asylum in which she is entrapped as “this prison, this grave” (Spofford 148). In this closed space, isolated from her family, she is trying to recover her lost identity by exploring her psychological, emotional, and social circumstances. Although the narrator is eager to escape from her confinement, at the same time, though, Spofford presents the place in positive terms as one of repose, one in which the protagonist has time for herself. In this way, the physical space intertwines with her psychological, emotional, and moral search for self-knowledge.

10 The reader realizes quite early on that the narrator is manipulating her story, which she tells to a visitor, a friend, Elizabeth, whom she has known since her school days. Her story abounds in omissions, contradictions, and misinformation. As Bode notes, the “first-person narration … suggests more than its madhouse narrator consciously reveals” (“Narrative Revelations” 236). The frame narrative works as a confessional in which the narrator is in control over her story, thus drawing attention to the story’s unreliability. As Jo Gill observes: “To think about confession is, paradoxically given confession’s apparent proximity to truthful revelation, to enter into profound uncertainty” (8). The confessional becomes a retelling of events filtered by the confessor, consciously or unknowingly. As scholars point out, “women’s active manipulation of confessional conventions” involves “a process of selection and repetition” (Gammel 3, 5). The nameless woman’s narrative becomes one of distorted realities as it is filtered through her own selection and interpretation of the events that led to her confinement in the mental institution.

11 The frame narrative starts by making the reader question the veracity of the protagonist’s story, and, with the repetition of the word “true,” it draws attention to the subjective nature of “truth” in general: “If it were true,” the narrator ponders, “that accounts for my being here. If it were not true, then the best thing they could do with me was to bring me here. Then, too, if it were true, they would save themselves by hurrying me away; and if it were not true—” (Spofford 148). Although the phrasing seems to suggest that these are the thoughts of a person who is fundamentally confused, if not mad, the patient in the mental asylum is, in truth, considering the moral and ethical justifications as well as consequences of what occurred between her, another woman (the ward), and the protagonist’s husband. Such thought processes imply a rational, questioning mind with a propensity for analytical thinking, one that seeks to understand the motivation of others as well as find explanations or some logic she can accept, or refute, concerning her own circumstances. The narrator then assures her visitor, after pointing out the impossibility of knowing what is true and how “the worst of it all is the mystery,” that she would tell her story “all exactly as it was”; however, by now it is evident that she is incapable of telling her story truthfully since she herself seems confused about what exactly constituted the truth (148). The promise of an accurate narrative is further complicated by her reference to her insanity: “Mad! There was never a drop of crazy blood in the Ridgleys or the Bruces, or any of the

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generations behind them,” she insists and then continues, referring to the younger woman with whom, the narrator believed, her husband has become infatuated: “she was the mad woman, not I” (148). Thus, the question of reliability is foregrounded right at the beginning of the story. The narrator, clearly confused and questioning, is locked up in a mental institution, yet in denial of her own madness.

12 Such refutation is immediately contradicted, thus reinforcing the sense of her confusion and difficulty to accept the diagnosis of her insanity, when she reveals her muddled idea of her self: “I am as much myself, I tell you, as you are,” she says, then, realizing how absurd it sounds, adding: “To ask you not to be afraid of me because I am myself .… I am as much myself as you are myself!” (Spofford 149). With such statements, she again provides a glimpse into her confused mind, but she also seems to imply that neither she nor Elizabeth truly know who they are, and yet, they are the same, they are both women. She thus articulates the problem of the period’s women to understand their true identity when entrapped in a state of powerlessness under patriarchal control. It becomes clear as she narrates her story that her confusion stemmed from a struggle to reconcile societal expectations and her desire to express herself through art (music). In addition, being a woman and being sane, she clarifies, does not mean “that one is a saint” (150). Here the nameless woman, representative of women in general, offers another glimpse into her identity conflict: while, in some ways, she represents the modern New Woman with her passions and love of art as well as certain liberties, in others, she conforms to the period’s expectations of her as a devout True Woman, the domestic angel. Here, Spofford seems to invite her readers to find out more about the woman’s true identity.

13 In her youth, the woman explains, she was quite alone, an orphan, insecure and shy. Like others, she attended church on Sundays, but she, unlike others perhaps, went there “idly and dreamingly as usual,” not because of her religious calling (Spofford 150). She even confesses that she “had no faith” (152). The description of her as idle and profane distances her from the idealized true woman of her time. Instead, she was an emotional girl with a tendency to dream, one who was sensitive to music, to colors in nature, and to the scent of flowers (150). Encouraged by the priest, her future husband, the young woman would enjoy singing, either with him, her cousins or alone (151). This implies that the woman had artistic pursuits and music was the outlet for her creativity. She could express herself through singing, which, literally, enabled her to make her voice heard. Soon after meeting him, she became infatuated with the priest, and as she looks back to the time of her youth, she recalls herself as “that fresh young girl that loved so” (151). Such romantic love, Karen Lystra notes, “flourished in nineteenth-century America in response to many factors, not least among them the growing popularity of this romantic concept of self” (30). The idea of romantic love was offered as a prelude to marriage and motherhood that appeared as the ultimate goals set for young women. In “Her Story,” the emotional and spiritual love soon led to carnal desire.

14 Although the narrator claims to be shy, her actions reveal that she was bold and transgressive: she allowed the priest to kiss her on the mouth. The two became lovers and took their pleasure “as lovers do,” which may imply a premarital sexual relationship. Scholars, as Lystra argues, have challenged the idea that nineteenth- century Americans were passionless and prudish: “married or unmarried, American Victorians recognized and expressed sexual desire, interest, and passion” (59; emphasis

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mine).4 The idea that the couple engaged in a physical relationship does not seem too far-fetched when considering the young woman’s acceptance of the kiss on her mouth; perhaps she even desired and welcomed it. Moreover, for the young woman, their relationship was heaven (Spofford 152). She thus turns out to be a modern woman whose heaven was found in emotional and physical pleasure that was earthly, emotional, passionate, and perhaps even sexual.

15 The religious setting of their initial meeting underscores the confessional genre of the protagonist’s narrative in which the woman brings together the priest and herself. However, rather than “turning the confession of sin into a private act,” as is commonly done in confessionals, she denies her “sin” altogether (Gammel 3). Her self- presentation relies on an impression of her innocence and purity, despite her confession that the couple took their pleasure “as lovers do.” In confessional readings in general, Irene Gammel suggests, “women’s voices of sexuality are not so much silenced as they are appropriated, tamed, and recolonized to fit patriarchal frames of reference” (4). In telling her story, the nameless narrator distorts reality, in particular concerning her self-fashioning. The reader’s task is to tease out the significance of what the narrator either omits or merely mentions in passing.

16 To regain respectability, the narrator and the priest are married in the fall. The couple’s love found “its soul” in their marriage. This seems to correspond to Lystra’s findings of nineteenth-century views of “sex as the ultimate expression of love […] Imbued with romantic love, sex was seen as an act of self-disclosure, not so much in the sense of revealing one’s body as one’s essential identity” (59). In addition to romantic love, the passion for music, which the husband and wife shared, form the pillars of the young woman’s married life. Moreover, marriage not only recognized their union legally and formally but also condoned the couple’s sexuality.

17 “Luxury and beauty,” the narrator recalls, filled their “happy home” in which “a marble Eros held a light up, searching for his Psyche” (Spofford 153). Mentioning Eros as the center of the household indicates the importance sexuality had for the woman, whereas Psyche seems to foreground her abandonment, but also to evoke her own betrayal of Eros. Once again, it seems that the narrator may be withholding information in her attempt to create an image of herself that would correspond to gender-specific expectations. Her indirect reference to the centrality of her sexual desire contradicts the image of her as the idealized, domesticated wife and mother. And yet, following the period’s expectations, her sexuality seems geared at procreation. According to the narrator, the two children who were born as a result of their sexual relations made their union perfect; they all seemed happy in their domesticity. Nonetheless, the temple for Spencer and his wife was their music room, filled with instruments that included a pianoforte for her, one she had “never touched before.” Together the husband and wife would spend their time playing music and singing. When the first child was born, the narrator rejoiced because this daughter could join them in the music-room: she learned to sing when she started to walk. “Her sister sang earlier yet,” the narrator explained, which demonstrates the importance music and artistic skills had for the protagonist (153-54). Her domestic happiness, then, seems to reflect a highly idealized image of marriage and motherhood that were set as the main goals for nineteenth-century women. It seems that within this romanticized image of family life the narrator found happiness in being able to express her creativity: it was

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spending time together with her husband and children playing music and singing that made the family’s life one of bliss.

18 Things turned sour, however, with the arrival of the step-child of Spencer’s uncle. When the ward arrived to be part of the family, the narrator was already taking care of her husband’s responsibilities, in addition to tending to their children. She had her duties that she could not neglect. As she explained: “I was wanted in the parish, sent for here and waited for there: the dying liked to see me comfort their living, the living liked to see me touch their dead; some wanted help, and others wanted consolation; and where I felt myself too young and unlearned to give advice, I could at least give sympathy” (Spofford 158). Despite her feelings of inadequacy, she attended to the needs of the parishioners. Her husband, instead, would spend time with the ward talking, walking, and drawing, while his wife “was busied with servants and accounts or with the children” (156). She was not only burdened with work but also felt ignorant, which led to the resentment she felt toward the more educated, younger woman.

19 The narrator “did not like the things [she] heard about her” and was quite worried when the “delightful,” intelligent, and “charming” girl of “infinite variety” moved in with the couple (Spofford 154). The description she gives is full of contradictions because of the narrator’s resentment, envy, and jealousy of the girl who seems to have everything the narrator herself desired: she was educated, knew foreign languages; she had traveled to Spain and had visited Venice; she knew how to draw; she was even devout; she had time and the freedom to go horseback riding when she wished; she was fearless; she would “dash away” with her “veil streaming behind her” (155-156). In sum, she was “a wonderful and gifted being” (156). The image of the ward is one of a dynamic, independent, courageous girl who is used to doing what she wants. This is further underscored through her relationship with the children. She would dance with them when she pleased but would push them away when she preferred not to be with them (155). Again, this is something the mother could never do.

3. The Narrator’s Downward Spiral

20 The young ward, who had neither worked nor borne children, is physically beautiful, whereas the overworked wife and mother seemed “very thin and ghastly” (Spofford 161). In addition, the ward is gifted. The narrator, instead, devalues her own skills in playing musical instruments, singing, and taking care of the household. Her resentment toward her domestic duties is palpable and her envy turns into anger toward the girl, toward her religious devotion, education, talent for drawing, and beauty, while it seems that her rage, rather, stemmed from her own lack of educational opportunities and her self-sacrificing willingness to tend to her own domestic duties and her husband’s responsibilities. What is more, the woman, unlike the younger ward, had always been unable to praise her husband and make him feel his manhood (149); she had replaced her husband as the head of the family and had always taken care of everything. Because she had assumed the more masculine role of a caretaker, she envied the ward’s femininity, “the delicacy of her womanhood” (149). The narrator’s envy and jealousy of the young ward torments her, to the point that, foreshadowing her own doom, she prophesies in one of her heated outbursts: “she will die in a madhouse, depend upon it” (157).

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21 Although the narrator depicts herself as a devoted wife who was betrayed by her husband and a younger woman, her impatience with her children and propensity to subsequently plot a violent revenge indicate the contrary. She shows signs of domestic distress caused by a fear of losing her husband, but she also reveals her anxieties and repressed anger as well as ambiguity toward her traditional gendered role. Similarly to Gilman’s narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” she appears both to hate and love her husband and children (for Gilman, see Hume 6). The turning point occurs when Spencer informs her that “his marriage was a mistake” (Spofford 159). Her husband’s rejection, after she has sacrificed herself and assumed the identity of an obedient domestic angel, triggers the eruption of her oppressed emotions.

22 The strong negative emotions make the seemingly submissive narrator quite unique. Her envy and jealousy, so explicitly expressed, turn into boiling rage: the nameless protagonist turns “white and cold and [is] shaking” as she refuses to let her husband go. The violent outburst ends with the two of them crying together. They “had been one soul, and now [they] were two” (Spofford 159). Such impressions recall the period of their courtship and early phase of their marriage but contradict their everyday reality: they had lived quite separate lives, she assuming the responsibilities of the parish, which in reality were her husband’s duties, taking care of the living and the dead so as to leave him time to work on his sermons. In a way she had been simultaneously emancipated from and entrapped in her domestic life. Again, resembling Gilman’s narrator’s “grotesque domestic nightmare,” Spofford’s nameless woman also “embraces and participates in it from beginning to end – and this is what makes it difficult for readers to determine when or how this narrator’s madness surfaces” (Hume 10). Michel Foucault also offers an explanation for similar psychological states: “Madness occurs when the images, which are so close to the dream, receive the affirmation or negation that constitutes error” (91). In “Her Story,” the error becomes manifest when it is evident that the dream can no longer be affirmed in reality. In other words, nineteenth-century women’s dream, one which society insisted upon, was marriage and motherhood, but both were idealized to the extent of being unrecognizable in the much harsher realities of many wives and mothers.

23 The submissive wife gradually lost herself in the confining solitude of her home; subsequently, she nearly lost her own life in exhaustion when tending to her child who had fallen ill. The self-sacrificing mother “was worn to a shadow,” as she explains, “with the weight of my responsibility as to her life” (Spofford 160). Here she confesses what a burden her domestic responsibilities were,5 the weight of them causing her anxiety and insomnia; thus, these responsibilities had become a potential danger to her health. The condition of the burdened mother and betrayed wife degenerates even further because she is unable to sleep.

24 The medicine she had received from her doctor “nerved” her “wide awake,” and although her eyes, brain and body hurt, she could not sleep. “I counted the spots on the wall,” she remembers, here resembling Gilman’s protagonist, “the motes upon my eyes, the notes of all the sheets of music I could recall” (Spofford 160). She already clearly reveals the symptoms of what today would be diagnosed as mental and physical exhaustion, fatigue, or more commonly known burn out. She suffers from insomnia and is depressed. She blames herself for allowing her husband to be “exposed” to the ward’s power. She no longer finds time to sing or play the piano; her voice becomes “choked with tears” (160). The case of her exhaustion appears severe: self-accusations, crying,

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and feelings of not being valued already are symptomatic of the gravity of her illness, but she also contemplates suicide fancying that her husband might then realize he loved her: “when I was gone perhaps he would love me again” (161).6 Her rage and paranoia, also symptomatic of exhaustion, push her to contemplate murder: “I thought I had better put him [her husband] out of the world than let him, who was once so pure and good, stay in it to sin” (161). If the woman’s self-presentation can be seen as untruthful, so is the perception of her husband: he had never been so pure and good but had seduced her by brazenly kissing her on the mouth. Moreover, the narrator has no proof of her husband’s infidelity. Rather, he appears quite concerned for the condition of his wife. By now, however, it is rather evident that the woman is potentially dangerous not only to herself but also to others.

25 Indeed, the extent of her rage, which today is believed to be another side of depression, had become such that she was ready to murder her husband. Her confession appears tragicomic, colored with black humor as it vividly places the resourceful and revengeful woman in the corridors of her house, actually going as far as trying to open the door to their bedroom: I could have stolen back into our own room with the chloroform, and he would never have known. I turned the handle of the door one night, but the bolt was slipped. I never thought of killing her, you see: let her live and sin, if she would. She was the thing of slime and sin, a splendid tropical growth of the passionate heat and the slime: it was only her nature. But then we think it no harm to kill reptiles, however splendid. (Spofford 161)

26 The passage reminds the readers of what happened in real life to such women as Packard and Smith, whose husbands had them drugged with chloroform and then locked up in mental asylums. Here, however, the gender roles are reversed: it is the woman who contemplates harming her husband.

27 The reference to the younger woman implies that she may, indeed, be black or mixed- race, perhaps from some tropical place that in stereotypical imagery was governed by passion and heat. The idea of her as naturally inclined to “sin” seems to refer to the prevailing prejudiced idea of black women as sexually alluring and available. The passage indicates how the narrator’s anger, the sleepless nights, and resentment of her domesticity have pushed her toward mental instability. It is curious, though, that the victim in her murder plans should be her husband rather than the younger woman. This could imply that the target of her rage was, indeed, her husband, whose obligations she had so readily assumed.

28 In addition to contemplating suicide or killing her husband, the woman had started hearing voices. Hallucinations, just like paranoia, have been indicated as yet another symptom of fatigue. For the narrator, the boundaries between reality and imagination started to get blurred, and after she witnessed her husband kissing the young girl in their music-room, which had been her temple, she fainted, only to wake up in the mental hospital where she has now been, in the present moment of the narrative, for ten years.

29 Talking to her friend, the narrator claims to feel better; she affirms that her nerves feel cured. She confesses to feeling homesick and ready to forgive her husband. Although she has been in the asylum for a decade, she still feels anxious over her family, in particular her husband, doubting his capacity to take care of the duties that had been the narrator’s responsibility: “How could he do without me all this time?” (Spofford

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149). Since the narrator has always taken care of everything, she has been defeated by the repressive domestic culture that keeps her in chains; her willpower has been crushed, and her energy drained. Although her madness may give her a sense of “liberation from oppressive cultural constraints” (Rieger 5), her sense of responsibility is such that she wishes to return to her former life, not fully escape from it. Spofford’s narrator, like that of Gilman, “reveals that her ‘madness’ is paradoxically aligned with the same domestic sphere that oppresses her” (Hume 18). Her “insanity” reflects her failure to fully embrace motherhood, but demonstrates how she has internalized the patriarchal gender-biased dictate of being a mother and wife to the extent of wanting to return to her family. Her personal psychosocial conflict over her desires, roles, and responsibilities are the cause for her “madness.”

30 However, it is rather evident that because of her repressed anger, which suddenly surfaced when confronted with rejection and the dramatic experience of nearly losing her child, she had become a danger to herself and those around her. In her prison-like space, instead, she no longer is a threat, neither physically to herself or others nor by challenging her circumstances. What is more, in the mental institution, she has a chance to rest, to read books, sing, and take walks in the garden. Around Christmas, after thinking about her children and the time “when I [the narrator] had been used to take such pains for their pleasure,” she sleeps in the barn, alone, feeling “so free, so free and glad!” (Spofford 165). In the asylum, she is free of her burdens, she has her “amusement,” and the place itself is “fine; the halls are spacious and pleasant” (165). The “madhouse” in “Her Story” appears as an example of the institutions envisioned and promoted by Dorothea Dix, a positive, regenerating place with pleasant gardens. If the author wished to present it as an environment in which a woman could escape the demands of her children, husband, and work, it could then be understood to underscore the unsettling situation of women. Anticipating Virginia Woolf’s demand for “a room of her own,” Spofford would seem to imply that the only place where a nineteenth-century woman could find repose was a “madhouse.” It was there that the protagonist could come to terms with her desire for independence, passion, and artistic pursuits that she had tried to reconcile with the demands of traditional gender roles. In the asylum, the woman is gradually recovering her strength now that she has freedom, space, and time to read and sing, without having to worry about her family or the parish (165). And yet, the narrator longs to return home, which draws attention to the way women felt divided between extremes, being torn between desires and expectations concerning their lives and social roles. The narrator’s initial confusion about her identity is evoked in her conflicting desires for rest and freedom on the one hand, and husband and family on the other.

31 The only responsibility given to Spofford’s protagonist in the mental hospital is to look after another woman, whose hair is “whiter than leprosy” and who may be the protagonist herself as well as any woman. She succumbs to her fate, assumes once again the role of a caretaker, a responsibility corresponding to gendered expectations. Although the narrator thinks she saw “a gleam of intelligence” in the eyes of the white- haired woman who follows her around like a dog, according to the doctor, her case is hopeless: “Hopeless, poor thing! – that is an awful word: I could not wish it said for my worst enemy” (Spofford 166). Hopeless, Spofford seems to suggest, was the condition of most women of her time. They were unable to resolve the dilemma of their identity and

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self-fulfillment, to reconcile their own desires with the gender-specific societal assumptions concerning their destiny.

32 In unconventional, unusual ways Spofford’s women make readers question and protest against the repression of patriarchal society and the parameters used to conceptualize women’s value, identity, and experience. The protagonist in Spofford’s “Her Story” is in all senses a true human being with suppressed passion and sexual desire but also negative feelings especially toward her gender-defined roles, her motherhood, and limited lot in life. The story explores the psychological world of women, the variety of their feelings, and their tragic loss of identity. Since the protagonist conforms to, yet deviates from the period’s conceptualization of women as submissive, silent, and saintly, her emotional outbursts are diagnosed as “insanity.” She insists that she is not crazy, despite her acknowledgement that she would sit “mumbling and nodding” to herself, and would even wish the death of her children: “If only they never waked! they never waked!”7 (Spofford 164). Such statements indicate the woman’s rejection of the responsibilities and burdens that come with motherhood, which was a role imposed on the period’s women. Spofford’s feminist message comes across in the woman’s prescribed cure, which in addition to medicine and rest, was “books and work.” She wishes her husband would come and take her home: “take me to my girls, my fireside, my music,” so she could “rest in his arms” and “be blest again” (166; emphasis mine). She yearns for rest, for her artistic outlet, the moments she used to share with her husband and girls singing. As the narrator concludes: “if I had no memory, no desires … if I had never been happy before, I might be happy now” (165). Unfortunately for her, just like any woman, she did have desires—most of which remained unfulfilled or led to her destruction.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bendixen, Alfred. “Introduction.” “The Amber Gods” and Other Stories. Ed. Alfred Bendixen. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1989. ix-xxxvii.

Bode, Rita. “Lost and Found: Harriet Prescott Spofford’s Telling of Her Story.” Neglected American Women Writers of the Long Nineteenth Century. Eds. Verena Laschinger and Sirpa Salenius. New York: Routledge, 2019. 141-57.

---. “Narrative Revelations: Harriet Prescott Spofford’s ‘Amber Gods’ Revisited.” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 50.2 (2004): 233-67.

Boyd, Anne E. “‘What! Has She Got Into the ‘Atlantic’?’: Women Writers, the Atlantic Monthly, and the Formation of the American Canon.” American Studies 39.3 (1998): 5-36.

Ellis, R. J. “‘Latent Color’ and ‘Exaggerated Snow’: Whiteness and Race in Harriet Prescott Spofford’s ‘The Amber Gods.’” Journal of American Studies 40.2 (2006): 257-82.

Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Mentor Book, 1967.

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Gammel, Irene. “Introduction.” Confessional Politics: Women’s Sexual Self-Representations in Life Writing and Popular Media. Ed. Irene Gammel. Southern Illinois UP, 1999.

Gill, Jo. “Introduction.” Modern Confessional Writing: New Critical Essays. Ed. Jo Gill. London: Routledge, 2006. 8-13.

Gleason, William A. Sites Unseen: Architecture, Race, and American Literature. New York: New York UP, 2011.

Glew, Liana Kathleen. “On Intake and Insanity: Women’s Narratives of Institutionalization.” C19 Podcast S2ET. https://soundcloud.com/c19podcast/s2e7-on-intake-and-insanity-womens- narratives-of-institutionalization

Gold, Eva and Thomas H. Fick. “A ‘Masterpiece’ of ‘the Educated Eye’: Convention, Gaze, and Gender in Spofford’s ‘Her Story.” Studies in Short Fiction 30 (1993): 512–24.

Hume, Beverly A. “Managing Madness in Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper.’” Studies in American Fiction 30.1 (2002): 3-20.

Lystra, Karen. Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992.

Murillo, Cynthia. “The Spirit of Rebellion: The Transformative Power of the Ghostly Double in Gilman, Spofford, and Wharton.” Women’s Studies 42 (2013): 755-81.

Reiss, Benjamin. Theaters of Madness : Insane Asylums and Nineteenth-Century American Culture. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008.

Rieger, Branimir M. “Introduction.” Dionysus in Literature: Essays on Literary Madness. Ed. Branimir M. Rieger. Bowling Green (OH): Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1994. 1-15.

Spofford, Harriet Prescott. “Her Story.” “The Amber Gods” and Other Stories. Ed. Alfred Bendixen. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1989. 148-66.

Walter, Madaline Reeder. Insanity, Rhetoric, and Women: Nineteenth-Century Women’s Asylum Narratives. Ph.D. dissertation. Kansas City: University of Kansas, 2011.

Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew. Scare Tactics: Supernatural Fiction by American Women. New York: Fordham UP, 2008.

NOTES

1. Harriet Prescott married lawyer and poet Richard Smith Spofford in 1865. In this essay, I will refer to her as Spofford. 2. To complicate the relationship between the three even further, it has been suggested that it may be an inter-racial triangle, the younger woman being black (see Ellis 275). 3. These asylums appeared in nineteenth-century literature, for example in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851), Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall (1855), and E.D.E.N. Southworth’s The Hidden Hand (1859) (for more about asylums in nineteenth-century popular fiction, see Reiss 180-84). 4. For more information about premarital sex, see Lystra 276-77. 5. For more about the burden of motherhood, see Bode “Lost and Found.” 6. There are numerous online sources about twenty-first century mental and physical exhaustion (burn out), for example, https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/high-octane-women/ 201311/the-tell-tale-signs-burnout-do-you-have-them.

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7. I wish to thank Stephanie Durrans for pointing out that this could also be taken in a figurative sense as a spiritual awakening: she wishes her little girls would never wake since awakening, i.e. opening one’s eyes to the reality of one’s plight, necessarily implies pain and suffering.

ABSTRACTS

Harriet Prescott Spofford’s female protagonists are complex women who often aim to appear as good mothers and wives, sometimes at the cost of denying their sexuality and creativity as they tend to their families and become burdened with responsibilities. The persistent myth that women found fulfillment only in marriage and motherhood, Spofford seems to suggest, failed to reflect the reality of all nineteenth-century women. This essay will examine the female protagonist in “Her Story,” which is one of the brilliant short narratives in which Spofford questions gender roles and expectations in the period’s patriarchal society. At the same time, it contributes to the national discussion about mental illness and asylums, pointing out how women, just like “lunatics,” were deprived of many rights and liberties and how their bodies, minds, and behavior operated in accordance to social presumptions and were even often controlled by figures of authority. The protagonist’s desires and circumstances are viewed through her “madness,” which Spofford offers, to some extent, as a politics of survival. However, central to the story is the identity conflict experienced by the transgressive, music-loving woman who follows the period’s gender-specific expectations, trying to adjust into the role of wife and mother, while also assuming some of the professional responsibilities of her husband. As a consequence, she suffers from anxiety over work, family, and marriage, which leads to physical and mental exhaustion evident in the symptomatic paranoia and violent outbursts that are misdiagnosed as her “madness.” The story thus focuses on the problems faced by modern women.

INDEX

Keywords: Harriet Prescott Spofford, madness, confessionals, gender roles, insane asylums, women

AUTHOR

SIRPA SALENIUS Sirpa Salenius is Senior Lecturer in English-language literature and culture at the University of Eastern Finland. Her research interests include Transatlantic Studies, African American and Women's Studies. Her publications examine race, gender, and sexuality in the transatlantic context. Her most recent publications include Neglected American Women Writers of the Long Nineteenth Century (Routledge, 2019), co-edited with Verena Laschinger, and “‘Passionément was what I wanted’: Female Sexuality in Grace King and Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s Fiction,” published in Nineteenth-Century Southern Women Writers: Grace King and Modernism (Routledge, 2019).

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Of Women, Wine and Salt: Revisioning the Home in Harriet Prescott Spofford’s Detective Fiction

Stéphanie Durrans

1 “In a Cellar,” published by the Atlantic Monthly in February 1859, was the story that turned an unknown 24-year-old woman into a celebrity overnight, thus establishing Spofford as a name to be reckoned with in the field of detective fiction. As underlined by Rita Bode, “[Spofford’s] detective stories emerge as early, ‘fully-fledged,’ and distinct contributions to the genre. Moreover, they may very well constitute the earliest stories of detective fiction authored by a woman” (2). These detective stories were all penned in the space of ten years, between 1858 and 1868, whereupon Spofford appears to have given up the genre to diversify her range even further through Gothic fiction, children’s literature, poetry, psychological studies, and local color fiction. I agree with Bode, however, that “many of Spofford’s stories demonstrate an abiding interest in detection, utilizing, for instance, the slow, timely revelation of significant events through an observant, analytic narrator and focusing on such related subjects as crime and madness” (1). We can thus wonder to what extent Spofford, far from abandoning the detective genre altogether, might have used it as the foundation for works in which suspense, sudden revelations and unexpected final twists serve her investigation of various social ills, especially those affecting the place and condition of women in the society of her times. In her brilliant analysis of gender and vision in Spofford’s fiction, Spengler examines how Spofford “conveys the instability of traditional gender roles as the instability of scopic relations between the sexes and shows the importance of the gaze in determining gender relations” (72). While Spengler focuses on Spofford’s interest in technological innovations and visual practices to explore her representation of female characters, I would argue that Spofford’s interest in questions of vision leads her also to play with language, signs and metaphors to suggest different ways of looking at reality and reaching the truth of the matter. Jeffrey Weinstock’s analysis of Spofford’s Gothic fiction also yields fascinating insights into her first novel, Sir Rohan’s Ghost (published in 1860, at the outset of her career), which can be viewed, he argues, as

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“a transition of sorts … from an emphasis on the terror of the unknown, associated with Gothic works by male writers, to the terror of the known, in which what frightens women the most is not the supernatural, but the dangers of everyday life attendant on being a woman in a male-dominated culture” (28). Building on these critics’ groundbreaking work on Spofford, I would like to reflect on this issue by focusing on what could be called the “detective trilogy” in Spofford’s career, i.e. the triptych formed by “In the Cellar” (The Atlantic Monthly, February 1859), “Mr. Furbush” (Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, July 1865), and “In the Maguerriwock” (Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, August 1868). The patterns of convergence that can be traced between these three tales will lead us to highlight Spofford’s vision of the home as a highly unstable ground whose shaky foundations are best reflected through the metaphor of the cellar.

1. Speaking in Metaphors: The Birth of the Detective in “In the Cellar”

2 “In the Cellar” caused quite a stir in literary circles at the time of its publication as publishers found it hard to believe that such a well-crafted, sophisticated intrigue had actually been elaborated by a demure young woman who had never set foot in France and had no knowledge of the Parisian aristocratic circles that formed the background of her plot. The story retraces the investigation of a self-styled detective after a diamond was stolen from the safe where it had been deposited. His quest for clues eventually leads him to hide in a cellar where he was hoping to find the stolen gem after overhearing a conversation between two suspects: Having been provided with keys, early on the following evening I entered the wine- cellar, and, concealed in an empty cask that would have held a dozen of me, waited for something to turn up. Really, when I think of myself, a diplomate [sic], a courtier, a man-about-town, curled in a dusty, musty wine-barrel, I am moved with vexation and laughter. (14, emphasis mine)

3 Evoking as it does the fetal position, the word “curled” might suggest that we are witnessing the actual birth of the detective in Spofford’s fiction, a detective-narrator whose benefit of hindsight leads him to reflect with self-mockery on the twists of fate that have put him into such a ridiculous posture. Instead of finding information about the coveted diamond, the narrator becomes the witness to a secret conclave gathering some of the most highly respected people in Paris: “men the loyalest in estimation, ministers and senators, millionnaires who had no reason for discontent, dandies whose reason was supposed to be devoted to their tailors, poets and artists of generous aspiration and suspected tendencies, and one woman,—Delphine de St. Cyr” (15). The wine-cellar then turns into a hotbed of rebellion threatening to disrupt the established social order. In one of her conversations with the narrator and the Baron Stahl, Delphine de St. Cyr unexpectedly brings up the topic of architecture as she states that: ‘We all build our own houses … and then complain that they cramp us here, and the wind blows in there, while the fault is not in the order, but in us, who increase here and shrink there without reason.’ ‘You speak in metaphors,’ said the Baron. ‘Precisely. A truth is often more visible veiled than nude.’ (22)

4 Like the oracle at Delphi that her name evokes, the young woman seems to be endowed with the power to deliver prophetic truths shrouded in mystery. Bainard Cowan has argued that Melville foreshadowed the development of Walter Benjamin’s thought

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when utilizing allegory “to express the historical experience of loss and decay,” especially so “at moments of crisis … when a text central to a people’s identity can neither command belief any longer nor be entirely abandoned” (7). In Spofford’s fiction, this “text central to people’s identity” is the home, and allegory becomes a natural vehicle to “speak differently”1 about it. Patterns of indirection proliferate in a text whose narrator confesses that he cannot “tell a straight story” (3), and finding out where the diamond is hidden takes us indeed on a circuitous route that is brought to an abrupt end around the dinner table, when the narrator suddenly realizes that the “cellar” where the diamond has been placed is none other than the saltcellar in front of him. The metaphorical value of the lost diamond is also made clear earlier in the story when the narrator emphatically declares: “One saw clearly that the Oriental superstition of the sex of stones was no fable; this was essentially the female of diamonds, the queen herself, the principle of life, the rejoicing receptive force” (9, emphasis mine).

5 We also learn right from the beginning that “the outline of her features had a keen regular precision, as if cut in a gem” (1, emphasis mine). The whole story eventually appears to be built on this double level of perception that takes us from the subterranean depths of the wine-cellar to the illuminated living-rooms of high society, from the vagaries of a stolen diamond to a beautiful young woman’s quest for liberty and power, from a mere detective story to a reflection upon women’s position and search for empowerment. This duplicity might account for the reactions of some of Spofford’s early critics who sensed the underlying presence of something disquieting in her work: “It has been said of Miss Prescott’s work by certain objecting critics that she does not write with a definite moral purpose; that the stern rectitude of the New England character is not exploited in her stories” (Cooke 533) wrote her friend and fellow writer Rose Terry Cooke in a book devoted to Our Famous Women. One would be hard pressed, indeed, to identify any such “moral purpose” in the underground connections that bring the narrator face to face with the reality of Delphine’s rebellious, imperious nature,2 only to provide an unexpected link with the “saltcellar” on the domestic table. In the end, the interest of the story lies not so much in the narrator’s attempts to locate the stolen gem as in his attempts to grasp the true nature of Delphine: does she belong to the old regime which her mother so perfectly incarnates or to a new, more subversive one? Does she belong in the home (together with the saltcellar) or in the darker, more disturbing depths of the wine-cellar? “She was, after all, like a draught of rich old wine,” states the narrator on the opening page. Spofford’s later detective figures would similarly have to draw connections between the domestic sphere associated with women and the public sphere of male dominance in order to uncover the dark secrets of criminals or mere suspects.

2. “Mr. Furbush”: Spofford’s Allegory of the Cave?

6 With “Mr. Furbush,” published six years later, Spofford takes her readers from the aristocratic salons of Parisian high society to the drawing-rooms of well-to-do Americans. The story tells how detective Furbush took an interest in the unsolved mystery of Agatha More’s murder after coincidentally finding himself in a photographer’s shop situated opposite the hotel where the young woman had been murdered a few months before. Jewels are once again given pride of place as the

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enlarged photograph that is the only silent witness to the crime ends up revealing the shape of a murderous left hand with a five-pointed ring on one of its fingers. The whole story hinges on a series of most improbable coincidences, such as when the photographer produces a picture that was taken by chance on the day of the murder or when Mr. Furbush later comes across a lady bearing the ring that he has spent so many months looking for in vain. As detective fiction, the story somehow frustrates the reader’s expectations and fails to rise to the levels of complexity that can be found in Poe’s Dupin stories, for instance. But its interest probably lies elsewhere, as one can sense at the end of the story when the detective who has just pointed an accusing finger at Mrs. Denbigh causes her to collapse from a heart attack caused by the shock: A long shudder shook her from head to foot. Iron nerve gave way, the white lips parted, she threw her head back and gasped; with one wild look toward her husband she turned from him as if she would have fled and fell dead upon the floor. ‘Hunt’s up,’ said Mr. Furbush to his subordinate, coming out an hour or two later …. Mr. Furbush made a night of it; but never soul longed for daylight as he did, he had a notion that he had scarcely less than murdered—himself; and good fellow as he must needs be abroad that night, indoors the next day he put his household in sackcloth and ashes.

7 The visual blank separating “murdered” and “himself” creates a certain ambiguity by suggesting two possible interpretations: should we take it to mean that Mr. Furbush feels that he has become a murderer himself or that what he has killed is himself, which suggests that the criminal also serves as a double for the detective, for the evil side of his own nature. Whichever way we interpret it, there is no doubt that, as underlined by Bode, “The crime has a disturbing indeterminacy, and for Spofford’s detective, identifying the criminal is not the whole story” (6). Spengler interprets the detective’s final qualms as the sign of “a profound ambivalence about the possibilities and consequences of new visual technology that lie at the heart of the story” (69) and she goes on to remark upon the inconsistencies of his behavior when he appears to have “sickened of the business” (Spofford, “Mr. Furbush”) and thus decides to quit his job while, at the same time, he still “yields to his fascination with the possibilities of photography by opening up a photo studio” (Spengler 70). It seems to me that Furbush’s qualms can be accounted for by his intuitive knowledge that Mrs. Denbigh is not the only culprit. However, her sudden, unexpected death now prevents him from investigating the case any further. Indeed, Mrs. Denbigh’s motives for killing the young woman who was her husband’s ward will henceforth remain shrouded in mystery, possibly allowing the true criminal to get away with it. Bode evokes a number of possibilities, like a “self-serving act of jealousy to eliminate the beautiful young woman who was her husband’s beloved ward,” unless Mrs. Denbigh was trying to protect someone? But who? Perhaps there is some truth in the accusation brought by Miss More’s rejected lover that Mr. Denbigh had “sinister intentions” of his own toward the beautiful young Agatha? Was Agatha on the verge of revealing them? Or was Mrs. Denbigh’s violent act a perverse means of protecting the young woman from her predatory guardian whom she nonetheless loves? (Bode 7-8)

8 Spofford leaves it up to her reader to tie up the loose ends, put the clues together and imagine possible scenarios: how can Mrs. Denbigh have strangled Agatha without her husband’s complicity since “the terrible action was thought to have been committed” while husband and wife were driving out of the city? How can we account for the fact that Agatha “had been a little out of health” since they had come back from a tour in

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Europe after Mr. and Mrs. Denbigh’s wedding, and for the fact that she appeared to suffer “from the great exhaustion and weakness of severe seasickness, [though Mr. Denbigh] had been unremitting in his endeavors to promote her comfort and happiness”? Is it possible that, like her illustrious namesake, the third-century martyr Agatha, she had to fend off the advances of a man of power (her own guardian) who engineered her murder either out of spite or to protect his own reputation if his ward happened to be with child?3

9 Coming as it does from a Greek word that means “good,” Agatha’s first name delineates a sharp contrast between the young woman and the evil embodied by her stepmother (and possibly her own guardian). Agatha’s qualities turn her into the perfect angel in the house—an angel who is quite fittingly already dead when the story opens and who already carried the germs of death in her family name (“More” as in the French “mort,” i.e. “dead” “or “death”). Although one might be tempted to trace out the influence of Snow White, it is worth noting that in Spofford’s rewriting, it is most likely the evil father figure who arranges to have the young woman murdered by the evil stepmother while the part of the hunter is ironically played by the detective who seems to derive satisfaction from the fact that “Hunt’s up,” as he asserts after Mrs. Denbigh’s death. Spofford skillfully reshuffles the cards as she exposes the weight of the patriarchal structures that led Mrs. Denbigh to commit the murder.

10 The story is also based on a contrast between the “broad daylight” in which the crime was committed and the dark room of both the photographer’s shop and the city mansion where the detective finally discloses the identity of the culprit (described as a “rather somber room”). In so doing, Spofford plays on effects of reversal as the truth of the matter can only be uncovered in the inner recesses of such dark chambers of the mind. Though Mr. Furbush’s final decision to withdraw from his profession in order to set up a photographer’s shop of his own has been interpreted as stemming from a desire to “embrac[e] the light” (Bode 8), one could also see it as a retreat into a cave of sorts—the dark room of his own mind where he now has to cope with a guilty conscience that could not bring itself to “compound [the] felony” of pursuing the other criminal in the case.4 American writer Joseph Wood Krutch famously said that “Poe invented the detective story in order that he might not go mad” (qtd. in Nickerson 6), which implies that the detective story “neutralizes terror and horror by demonstrating how the intellect can identify and control evil” (Nickerson 6). In Poe’s stories, indeed, the quest for truth is a highly intellectual pursuit. Spofford’s take on the issue is more disturbing: we can see that her detective’s soul is not fully at rest by the end of the story and that pangs of remorse are still tormenting him. Determined not to let her detective rest in peace, however, Spofford was going to drag him once more out of his comfort zone by taking him to the far reaches of civilization, all the way to a shabby farmhouse on the edge of the wilderness that was going to be the setting for her last detective story, “In the Maguerriwock.”

3. “In the Maguerriwock”: Reading and Decoding the Home

11 We learn at the story’s outset that Mr. Furbush has now settled into the routine of an easy life in a big city somewhere on the East coast. The opening lines make it clear that he has resumed his activities as a detective, though his investigative practices are

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circumscribed in “the pleasant purlieus of the city and [involve] no greater hardships than attendance at the opera-houses and in the drawing-rooms of fashionable ladies.” Money alone will bring the ageing detective to relinquish his creature comforts as he agrees to take up the case which his visitor urges him to elucidate. Spofford’s desire to direct her reader’s attention to the title figure of her detective in “Mr. Furbush” is confirmed by the space she now devotes to his introspective moods and self- examination of his mercenary motives. Smugness, complacency, and acquisitiveness characterize the man who plays hard to get to increase the amount of his fees while hiding from his client his intimate conviction that he has already pretty much solved the case in hand. Once more it will not take him long to identify the murderer of the unfortunate peddler who decided to cross the Maguerriwock; but the interest of the story lies elsewhere, both in the chain of circumstances that will allow Furbush to find the evidence he needs and in the criminal’s terrible treatment of his demented wife. After retracing the peddler’s itinerary and pinning down as a likely culprit the suspicious owner of a flourishing farm, Mr. Furbush corners the farmer into inviting him down in his cellar for a sip of home-brewed cider. His attention was previously drawn to the cellar by the senseless mutterings of the farmer’s wife, a poor creature sitting before the hearth in the company of her demented ten-year-old little girl, Semantha: “Three men went down cellar, and only two came up,” she keeps repeating. Mr. Furbush’s first exploration of the cellar gives him sufficient inkling into the location of the peddler’s body to allow him and the sheriff to fetch a search warrant and come back the following day, only to find out that the clever farmer, Mr. Craven, has lost no time in disposing of the body by moving it to another place during the night. Moved by a perverse impulse, the farmer insists on giving his helpless, unwelcome guests another sip of his cider before they take their leave, which alerts Mr. Furbush as to the possibility that the body might have been hidden in one of the casks: [Craven] drew the glass full and offered it to Mr. Furbush .… ‘Pungent!’ said Mr. Craven. ‘That’s the word. A drink fit for the gods!’ ‘Stay a minute,’ said Mr. Furbush, gently pushing back the proffered nectar. ‘Sheriff, I should be sorry to spill good spirit, but there’s some that’s better out than in. Break up that barrel.’ …. And there was only one hesitating moment before Mr. Craven was whirled away and held by as strong hands as those that were holding his raging and writhing son; the hoops had been knocked off the barrel, the staves had fallen apart from side to side with the fury of the outpouring liquor—and there lay the ghastly skull, the arms, the half-bleached skeleton of the murdered man they sought. They stood around the dreadful and disgusting sight in a horrified silence. The two men saw that there was no escape. ‘Well,’ said the elder, in the wolfish audacity of his confession, ‘I suppose you know what that sound upstairs means now?’ And listening they could hear the words of the woman on the dismal hearth above, as she rocked herself feebly to and fro, and made her moan: ‘Three men went down cellar, and only two came up!’ (“In the Maguerriwock”)

12 While Spofford’s very first detective was figuratively born in a cellar, his avatar Mr. Furbush finishes his literary career in another one. Her fascination with cellars can be studied from a phenomenological angle as stemming from a desire to explore “the dark entity of the house, the one that partakes of subterranean forces. When we dream there, we are in harmony with the irrationality of the depths” (Bachelard 18). As a consequence, states Bode, “Spofford’s cellars suggest that detecting involves the recognition, acknowledgment, and indeed even the embracing of the irrational.” She

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goes on to underline that “[the] association of cellars with burials and annihilation, as generally in the Gothic, and specifically in Poe’s tales of terror, forms part of Spofford’s stories, but she also turns her cellars into sites of discovery” (Bode 8). From a more practical point of view, Spofford was very much aware of the importance of cellars in directing the course of a family’s destiny and she advised housewives to take even better care of their cellars than of their parlors (“The condition of the cellar is far more important than that of the parlor,” Stepping-Stones to Happiness 218). She developed those ideas in Stepping-Stones to Happiness, a domestic help book designed to advise housewives about matters of health, hygiene and domestic care, and she maintained that a number of diseases and infections plaguing family life might well be the result of a neglected care of the cellar: “underlying as it does … the whole life of the house, [the cellar is] capable of sending, from its position in the substructure, bane or blessing, pure air or fetid, through every crevice of the dwelling” (219). Unlike the first two stories in which the narrator provided an epilogue of sorts and thus established some kind of narrative distance from the text, the end of this tale leaves the characters (and the reader) at a loss, stranded in the dark depths of the crime scene with only one possible exit towards the light of day—the steps leading up to the madwoman sitting by the fireplace.

13 This brings us back to the first story under consideration and to a strange detail related by the narrator in the last pages of his narrative: after he returns the diamond to its rightful owner, the latter allows the detective to keep the accompanying chain inset with tiny gems as a reward for his services. The narrator, in his turn, offers the chain to Delphine who, he later learns, only had to wear it to impose her will and get her husband, the Baron Stahl, to let her have her own ways. As in the other two stories, the male characters appear to be chained in the circumscribed world of their ignorance while looking up toward a mysterious female character who can only “speak in metaphors” (like Delphine, of whom the narrator says in the closing lines: “She has read me a riddle—Delphine is my Sphinx,” 23), take her secrets along with her in the hereafter (Agatha; Mrs. Denbigh) or deliver the truth in cryptic form (Mrs. Craven).

14 As underlined by Rita Bode, “Spofford’s own madwoman … is not to be found in an attic; Spofford firmly stations her by the home fires, turning the female figure on the hearth, the nineteenth-century’s idealistic symbol of domestic blessing, into a mockery. The woman on the hearth is ineffectual. She is dominated by the subterranean forces of the dark cellar” (12). Once more, Spofford’s double-voiced discourse allows her to drape her denunciation of the dominant patriarchal ideology in the folds of a mere detective story. This time, however, she uses the sheriff as a foil to her mercenary detective: as they are making their way back into town after their first visit to the farm, the sheriff expresses his qualms about arresting a man who is “doing so well,” seems “to have reformed” and is “doing so much to improve the country;” he even goes as far as to intimate that the crime is now under prescription and that he would rather let the criminal get off scot free. To Furbush’s protestation that crime must be duly punished, the law officer feebly retorts: “I don’t know …. I couldn’t say of myself that he abused anybody but his wife. And a judge in Illinois decided lately that that was nothing—the wife must adopt more conciliating conduct,” to which Furbush ironically replies: “Mrs Craven isn’t very conciliating, is she? …. I should be exasperated myself if she kept on informing me for ten years, since the day I made her and her child idiots with horror, that three men went down cellar, and only two came up!” As emphasized by her name,

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Semantha, the child forms part of the web of signs that point to another reading of the text.5 As a buffoon or jester type, she points to the truth that no one is willing to hear6 and brings the detective one step closer to this border zone between savagery and civilization that Spofford wanted him to confront far from the more sophisticated, plush atmosphere of his usual city haunts. She plays with the plates that her father has just laid on the table for his guests’ supper and spins them “like a top,” as if to ridicule her father’s efforts to keep up domestic appearances. The whole house itself turns into a space of resistance to patriarchal authority as the detective’s attention is drawn to the blatant discrepancy between its unkempt, shabby-looking appearance and the luxuriance of the fields that surround it.

15 Spofford’s revisionary stance on Plato’s allegory of the cave implies that one should set about exploring the dark depths of the cave instead of reaching for the upper world of ideas. The Chinese god holding a head in a sling might convey a similar message: the detective’s heart is more likely to guide him to the truth than mere intellectual ratiocinations.7 The crisis in seeing that characterized nineteenth-century artistic and cultural evolution is reflected in the works of all those writers who started taking an interest in the development of criminology and in the various ways of uncovering the truth. Spofford’s stories are predictably replete with references to visual perception that guide the detective in his quest for clues, but the modes of seeing that she foregrounds do suggest an attempt to move away from mere externals towards a more intimate or intuitive perception of the environment, i.e. through the heart, an organ that has traditionally been associated with women according to the gendered binaries that prevailed in Victorian culture.

4. Conclusion

16 Spofford’s detective fiction explores the idea that the home cannot be apprehended without taking into account the foundations on which it rests, the dark, subterranean reality that permeates its whole structure and influences the daily lives of its inhabitants. This is the sum of the investigations carried out by Mr. Furbush, a character who has been identified as the first serial detective in American women’s writing8 (Bode 2) and whose discoveries adequately throw light upon a whole range of female experiences that a lot of other writers, like the sheriff of “In the Maguerriwock,” would rather have kept cloaked in a shroud of silence.

17 The narrator of “In the Cellar” states at one point that “we are nothing without our opposites, our fellows, our lights and shadows, colors, relations, combinations, our point d’appui, and our angle of sight. An isolated man is immensurable; he is also unpicturesque, unnatural, untrue” (2). The cellar is one such “point d’appui” for the house lying above it. Spofford’s use of the cellar in these three stories might have been intended as a comment or revision of “The Cask of Amontillado,” in which Poe presents such an isolated man entombed in a cave that bears no connection to its upper structure.9 She thus gives a voice and a narrative presence to “opposites,” reinstating the oppressed female’s narrative by weaving it into the man’s tale. In the last story of the series, poor Mrs. Craven has the last word and Spofford’s play on perspectives turns her into a denizen of the higher spheres of knowledge while the horrified men downstairs appear to be stuck to the underground place on account of their inability to fathom the depths of Craven’s evil nature—a man who did not hesitate to hide the

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remains of his victim in the cask of home-brewed cider that he serves on his table. Ultimately, these three stories testify to Spofford’s skill in collapsing the boundaries between the wine-cellar and the salt-cellar, between the netherworld of human nature and the upper world of social appearances, and also between the supposedly male preserve of the detective story and the more feminine genre of the domestic or sentimental tale.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. 1958. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon, 1969.

Bode, Rita. “A Case for the Re-covered Writer: Harriet Prescott Spofford’s Early Contributions to Detective Fiction.” Clues 20.20 (Spring 2004): 1-13.

Cooke, Rose Terry. “Harriet Prescott Spofford.” Our Famous Women. Hartford, Conn.: Hartford Pub. Co., 1888.

Cowan, Bainard. Exiled Waters: Moby-Dick and the Crisis of Allegory. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982.

Nickerson, Catherine Ross. The Web of Iniquity: Early Detective Fiction by American Women. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998.

Spengler, Birgit. “Gendered Vision(s) in the Short Fiction of Harriet Prescott Spofford.” Legacy 21.1 (2004): 68-73.

Spofford, Harriet Prescott Spofford. “In the Cellar.” http://www.public-library.uk/ebooks/ 48/99.pdf

---. “In the Maguerriwock.” http://historicaltexts.org/Mystery/ Spofford%20(1868-08)%20In%20the%20Maguerriwock.pdf.

---. “Mr. Furbush.” http://historicaltexts.org/Mystery/ Spofford%20(1865-04)%20Mr%20Furbush.pdf.

---. Sir Rohan’s Ghost. Boston: J.E. Tilton and Company, 1860.

---. Stepping-Stones to Happiness. New York: The Christian Herald, Bible House, 1897.

Summerson, John. The Classical Language of Architecture. 1980 edition. Thames and Hudson World of Art series.

Sussex, Lucy. “The First American Woman to Write Detective Fiction? Harriet Prescott Spofford.” Mystery Scene 68 (2000): 44.

Weinstock, Jeffrey. Scare Tactics: Supernatural Fiction by American Women. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008.

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NOTES

1. From the Greek “allos” (other) and “agoreuein” (to speak differently). 2. In the rest of the discussion upon architecture, Delphine is clearly associated with the Doric (22), an order traditionally regarded as masculine since Antiquity (Summerson 14-15). While reinforcing her links with Greek culture, such a detail also contributes to destabilizing gender roles in the story. 3. Saint Agatha was a young woman born to wealthy parents in Sicily. She had vowed to remain chaste and pure but her beauty and wealth drew the attention of a Roman official who tortured and killed her when she persisted in spurning his advances. A similar fate awaits the young gypsy woman rejected by Sir Rohan in Spofford’s first novel, which testifies to Spofford’s interest in stories of joint crime and incest in the domestic realm. In Sir Rohan’s Ghost, however, the victimized woman is split into two characters, mother and daughter. After the mother has been murdered by Sir Rohan who refused to marry her, the child grows into a beautiful young lady, brought up by caring but ineffectual foster parents, and almost ends up marrying her own father who, ignorant of her true identity, fell under her charm. 4. In this regard, I would differ from Bode who delineates a sharp contrast between “Dupin’s inclination for his darkened rooms” (4) and Mr. Furbush who “both actively and metaphorically, seeks the light” (5). 5. This uncommon variation on the name “Samantha” draws attention to its Greek roots, “semantikos” (“significant”), deriving from the verb “semainein” meaning “to show by sign,” “to signify,” and from the noun “sema” (a sign, a mark, a token, but also an omen, a portent, or a grave). Like Yone, the narrator of “The Amber Gods” who actually delivers her story after death, these female figures appear to be speaking from beyond the grave. 6. Apart from God, if we consider that “God heard” is one of the most common interpretations of the name. 7. This Chinese God appears on a button of carved wood that Mr. Furbush finds on the floor of the cellar and to which his attention had already been drawn by the last person who saw the peddler alive before he left the town to cross the Maguerriwock. 8. See Lucy Sussex’s “The First American Woman to Write Detective Fiction?” and Bode’s “A Case for the Re-covered Writer,” for instance. 9. Poe’s influence on Spofford’s work has been repeatedly acknowledged by her critics. As noted by Bode, however, “her detective stories are not simple Poe imitations. Her detectives and their methods of detecting sometimes diverge from Poe’s assumptions, and these distinctions make Spofford’s detective stories remarkably forward looking” (Bode 4).

ABSTRACTS

Although Harriet Prescott Spofford appears to have given up the genre of detective fiction in the late 1860s, she actually used it as the foundation for works in which suspense, sudden revelations and unexpected final twists serve her investigation of various social ills, especially those affecting the place and condition of women in the society of her times. This paper examines three detective stories written by Spofford between 1859 and 1868 in an attempt to retrace the

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birth and development of her chief detective figure, from the wine cellar in which he is figuratively born to the dark depths of the cellar where he is left stranded at the end of the last tale. The patterns of convergence that can be traced between these three tales highlight Spofford’s vision of the home as a highly unstable ground whose shaky foundations are best reflected through the metaphor of the cellar.

INDEX

Keywords: Harriet Prescott Spofford, detective fiction, gender roles, home, cellars

AUTHOR

STÉPHANIE DURRANS Stéphanie Durrans is Professor of American Literature at the Université Bordeaux Montaigne, France. She is the author of The Influence of French Culture on Willa Cather: Intertextual References and Resonances (2007) and of Willa Cather’s My Ántonia: A Winter’s Journey (2016). She has published widely on nineteenth- and twentieth-century women writers, with a special focus on questions of intertextuality and transatlantic literary relationships.

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New Readings of “Circumstance”

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Narrating Violation: Harriet Prescott Spofford’s “Circumstance”

Rita Bode

1. Introduction: “Circumstance” as Rape Narrative and Methods of Representation

1 Harriet Prescott Spofford (1835-1921) authored some of the most enigmatic stories in nineteenth-century American literature. Her elusive story “Circumstance,” first published in the Atlantic in May 1860, startled even Emily Dickinson into declaring: “I read Miss Prescott’s ‘Circumstance,’ but it followed me in the Dark—so I avoided her—” (“To T. W. Higginson,” 25 April 1862, Selected 173). “Circumstance” is an unsettling story: a pioneer woman, “seized and borne aloft” into a tree by a particularly ferocious type of panther, commonly called the “Indian Devil” (Spofford 85), struggles to keep herself alive through one long night in the Maine woods by singing to her attacker. The range of critical interpretations of Spofford’s story suggests that it continues to resonate strongly with readers and critics alike in its engagement with female development, especially of the female artist; its deployment and re-envisioning of the captivity narrative pattern; its awareness of the environmental issues of human and non-human interactions; and its commentary on American culture and history, among other readings.1 Even after careful critical scrutiny, however, Spofford’s stories often retain their enigmatic edge. Part of the unresolved quality in “Circumstance” seems to stem from the critical attention itself. The narrative details, the language and imagery repeatedly point to a representation of rape, but even as critical commentaries acknowledge the story’s physical violence, the various contexts through which they complicate Spofford’s narrative tend to de-center the sexual violation, glossing over it or enlisting the nature and implications of rape to serve other ends. Theresa Strouth Gaul, for instance, directly addresses the story’s sexual violence but then diverts to arguing that the “scene of rape … function[s] simultaneously … as a scene of childbirth” (35) which she then positions as a statement on the pending civil war. Her reading accepts, with no direct questioning, the sexual assault on the story’s protagonist, but in

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her effort to uncover “the history of motherhood – and more particularly, childbirth,” which she rightly sees as having “been suppressed in the literature of preceding centuries” (35), Gaul suppresses the aspect of women’s history enacted in the violent encounter at the heart of the story. The displacement of the story’s physical assault in the critical responses to it exemplifies Sabine Sielke’s contention in Reading Rape that “transposed into discourse, rape turns into a rhetorical device, an insistent figure for other social, political and economic concerns and conflicts” (2).

2 In the second decade of the twenty-first century, revelations of sexual harassment, assault and violation are finding a place in public discourse with women speaking their experiences openly, but as Susan Brownmiller, in her influential study, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, reminded us more than four decades ago, sexual violation has a long history. Spofford’s story adds to the record of rape. In this paper, I argue that in “Circumstance,” Spofford presents a rape narrative. My approach positions Spofford’s story in the kind of recovery process that Lynn R. Higgins and Brenda R. Silver discuss in Rape and Representation, when they propose “that we recuperate what has too often been left out: the physical violation and the women who find ways to speak it” (3). By encoding the violation in the panther’s assault on her pioneer woman, Spofford finds a “way to speak” of physical rape; imply its trauma; and consider its social and personal implications in a time that demanded silence on sexual matters. Her story resists the elision of violence against women, and makes rape visible in a way acceptable to her time.

3 In their collection of essays, Feminism, Literature and Rape Narratives: Violence and Violation, Sorcha Gunn and Zoë Brigley Thompson attempt to consider “not just whether we speak about rape or not, but how we speak about rape and to what end” (3). The volume’s focus on “the subversive work being done by modern and contemporary writers on the subject of sexual violence” (4) and on the “radical readings” (3) that these rape narratives invite resists granting “narrative power to the rapists” (9), and, instead, aims to “establish new spaces for the subjectivity of the women who either have been raped or have been threatened with rape” (3). Neither “modern” nor “contemporary,” at least not chronologically, Spofford’s 1860 story is a fitting precursor, indeed, an exemplary paradigm, for a narrative of sexual violation that invites radical readings. Gunne and Thompson contend that their examples of rape narratives, while displaying considerable overlap, all fall into one of four categories, three of which readily accommodate “Circumstance” in straigthforward as well as more intricate ways. The first category, “subverting the story,” follows Carine Mardorossian’s call in “Toward a New Feminist Theory of Rape” to challenge and transcend “the conventional binaries between victim and perpetrator, passivity and agency that perpetuate women’s subjugation” (12):2 “Circumstance” is subversive, deliberately undermining gender hierarchies and, through the threatened female protagonist’s singing, granting her some agency. Gunne and Thompson’s second category focuses on “metaphors for resistance,” which, drawing on Elaine Scarry’s study on “the body in pain,” considers works in which the writers approach “the physical suffering and emotional pain of rape” obliquely translating the anguish into “complex symbologies” (13): Spofford relies on indirect representation and figurative language as she substitutes the panther for the male attacker, and extends her methods to her story’s form by enlisting the American captivity narrative with its ambivalence surrounding the occurrence of sexual assaults on female captives. Gunne and

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Thompson consider their third category, “the protest of silence,” to be “a particularly relevant topic to rape narratives” as they invoke Ernestine Schlant’s theories that “silence is a language like any other” (14):3 “Circumstance” seems initially silent about rape, since the word, “rape,” is never used directly either by the narrator or the protagonist—Susanne Opfermann first observed that there is “not one line of dialogue” in “Circumstance” (120)—but the language that reinforces the act is nonetheless present, for Spofford uses the silent background of language to convey her intents. Like Emily Dickinson, she draws on the etymology of words to suggest levels of meanings beyond the obvious. “Circumstance”’s “language of silence” conveys the presence and representation of the story’s rape.

4 As a nineteenth-century writer, Spofford remains aware of the restrictive social mores of her time concerning the representation of sexual violation. While the sexual vulnerability of female slaves forms a standard aspect of slave narratives, and, as David Reynolds shows, erotic literature was amply present in the century’s publications, explicit engagement with sexual subject matter, especially by women writers, was not acceptable for the fiction pages of the Atlantic and similar venues. Spofford’s oblique approach, moreover, provides the additional benefit of circumventing exploitation and voyeurism, moral issues that representations of rape often call into question. And her indirect methods of recounting rape also reflect the historical way of proving rape in the legal system, that is, through “circumstantial evidence.” The revised 1856 edition of Bouvier’s Law Dictionary, “adapted to the constitution and laws of the United States of America and of the several states of the American Union,” associates “circumstances” with “evidence,” defining them as “the particulars which accompany a fact” (“Circumstances”), and near the end of the century, the first edition of Henry Campbell Black’s A Dictionary of Law, published in 1891, has an entry for “circumstantial evidence:” “evidence which inferentially proves the principal fact by establishing a condition of surrounding and limiting circumstances.” Like the act of rape, Spofford’s telling of rape is “inferred from one or more circumstances” (“Circumstantial Evidence”), which her story carefully elaborates. In its suggestive language, its inferences and allusions, its ambiguous and ambivalent details, all of which speak to the story’s powerful literary achievement, “Circumstance” relentlessly conveys the sense of sexual violation. Whether deliberate or not, Spofford’s title points to her methodology. She tells her story of rape subversively and obliquely. Especially significant to her indirect method of representation is the ambiguous positioning of the Indian Devil between human and animal identities.

2. The Nineteenth Century’s “Indian Devil”

5 Judith Fetterley’s influential Introduction to “Circumstance” in Provisions, the important “reader from 19th-century American women,” acknowledges the story’s sexual violence. Her specific comments on the woman’s encounter with the panther foreground the “physical violation,” whose “overtones” Fetterley identifies as “clearly sexual;” but her conclusion “that the woman’s experience can be read, then, as an experience of ‘rape’” shows hesitancy in its phrasing, and she places the word rape in quotation marks, thus creating uncertainty about the actual physical enactment of the violation (266). While Fetterley does not allow metaphorical meanings to displace the transgression, she sees the rape itself as metaphoric rather than actual; the

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confrontation of the woman and the panther resembles the situation between a woman and a rapist, or, put slightly differently, what happens to the woman is like rape, but not necessarily rape itself. Spofford’s method of representation, however, is more metonymic than metaphoric. Through descriptions closely associating man and beast, and a focus on qualities easily transferable between them, she substitutes an animal for a human predator.

6 For many contemporary critics well-versed in intersectional theories of race and gender, the designation of the predatory beast as the “Indian Devil” is especially problematic in implying the story’s racist attitude towards Indigenous peoples. Fetterley comments that “‘Circumstance’ exemplifies the insidiousness and pervasiveness of the racist imagination in white American literature” (267), a view that has been taken up by other commentators. Carol Holly, for example, sees an “imperialistic ideology, deeply racist,” linked to manifest destiny at work in the story (160). But in admitting that “it would […] be a mistake to assume that, as a group, nineteenth-century white American women writers were free from racist thinking” (267), Fetterley implies that Spofford is neither more nor less racist than her contemporaries, including, to various degrees, the many male writers who for so long constituted nineteenth-century American literature’s canon. I follow Elaine Showalter’s observation in A Jury of Her Peers that while “some critics have read … [“Circumstance”] as racist … I think the meanings are much more complex” (522, n. 33).

7 Nineteenth-century references to the Indian Devil suggest a misguided approach to interpreting the term as racist, for both John S. Springer in his 1851 study on forest life in Maine and New Brunswick and Henry David Thoreau in The Maine Woods imply that the “Indian” designation for this vicious specimen of wild feline roaming the Maine woods originates with Indigenous peoples themselves rather than in the derogatory, racist attitudes of white settlers. According to Thoreau, the “Indians” consider this creature “the only animal in Maine which man need fear” (Thoreau 128); to the Indigenous people, the lunxus is demonic, and hence arises the term “Indian Devil” to reflect their perspective. Spofford seems aware of this origin, when she specifies, in her first reference to the creature, that the attacking “wild beast” is “known by hunters as the Indian Devil” (85, emphasis mine).4

8 Spofford does, however, make the problematic and pointed connection between the Indian Devil’s attack on the woman and the “Indian” raiders’ attack on the settlement at the end, which, as Matthew Wynn Sivils points out, seems to put the two “in league … to systematically terrorize the area” (24). The family’s salvation—by the first attack’s keeping them conveniently out of the way of the second—provides a certain narrative satisfaction which suggests that Spofford is employing the “Indian” term for her own aesthetic purposes that may include its racist connotations. A racially-charged interpretation of the designation “Indian Devil” demeans the human “Indian” to the level of beast, but the term then also carries the contrary implication that this beast may be human especially since Indigenous peoples were often characterized by white settlers as bestial and demonic. Spofford’s entire introduction to the panther is in language applied equally to Indigenous peoples in early accounts when she designates the “wild beast – the most savage and serpentine and subtle and fearless of our latitudes” (85).5 Not only are the descriptors for animal and human interchangeable, but, at times, they would seem more appropriate if applied inversely. Spofford speaks of “stealthy native or deadly panther tribe” but it is “stealthy … panther” and “deadly

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[native] tribe” that come to mind more readily and that the story, in fact, bears out (84). The story’s language allows for an easy slippage between an animal and human binary. Sivils observes that the narration “never once refers to the [Indian Devil] as a panther” (24). Spofford hesitates to identify the woman’s attacker as a specific animal species, referring to the panther instead in more vague, dehumanizing terms such as “creature” (86 and passim), “monster” (87 and passim), and, most often, as already noted, “beast” (85), the term that brings the panther closest to animal identity but is also a common description for brutish humans.

9 The indeterminacy surrounding the attacker’s species does not translate to the panther’s sex. The creature is never an “it” but always “he” (85 and passim). The Indian Devil functions as a camouflage for a violent male aggressor. Fetterley notes that “in the context of mid-nineteenth-century America,” Spofford’s descriptions of the panther constitute “a familiar code for referring to unrestrained male sexuality, that lower nature often let loose on the bodies of women” (266). The violence of the encounter makes reciprocity impossible, compelling the woman to position her violator as the deviant, alien other. Spofford engages species and race identifications, and the common prejudicial preconceptions around these, to subvert the ordered hierarchy of the male/female binary; she looks not only to human ascendance over animal life, but to degrees of human status, and in the nineteenth century’s racist context, an “Indian” readily fulfils the abject position. Spofford asserts her violated protagonist’s worth by devaluing the woman’s attacker. Spofford’s focus is not on racial stereotyping. The creature’s maleness trumps any other qualities and emerges as the only certainty. The dehumanizing of the attacker into wild animal and racializing into heathen savage are forms of resistance to a threatening male presence. Spofford’s handling of the encounter enables the expression of the woman’s perceptions in this violent incident. Spofford furthers, moreover, the understanding of female experiences of violation by drawing on the genre of the captivity narrative.

3. Captivity Narrative Frameworks and Family History

10 Within the social mores of mid-nineteenth-century America, the Indian captivity narrative, which Spofford invokes as a framework for her story through the Indian Devil’s capture of a pioneer woman, is a particularly suitable genre for a telling of rape: the captivity narrative rarely speaks of rape, but at the same time, in its very situation of capture and forced confinement, it foregrounds women’s vulnerability to physical violation. The extent of the sexual abuse of female captives by their Indian masters remains historically undetermined. Christopher Castiglia concludes that while documented instances of white women raped in Indian captivity are rare, they nonetheless do exist.6 In her introduction to Women’s Indian Captivity Narratives, Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola provides a brief summary of “whether or not Indians raped captured women:” she identifies “two dominant and differing responses: overt or covert appeals to white women’s vulnerability and Indian men’s alleged sexual prowess (often made by male writers or editors) and decisive claims that rape was virtually nonexistent in Native American culture (often made by women writers or captives).” Stodola affirms that sexual violation, whether as threat or act, hovers over the captivity narrative when, following Castiglia, she concludes that “both discursive strategies play into the ‘sexualization of the captive’s vulnerability’” (xvi). Condemning her Indian

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captors as “roaring Lyons and Salvage Bears, that feared neither God, nor Man, nor the Devil,” Mary Rowlandson nonetheless insists several times in her famous narrative that although in their midst, “by night and day, alone and in company: sleeping all sorts together, and yet not one of them ever offered me the least abuse of unchastity to me, in word or action” (57). In his edition of Rowlandson’s The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, Neal Salisbury comments on the rumors implying Rowlandson’s compromised sexual purity on her return from captivity (43). The stigma of sexual violation for women, which still endures, may very well have been one reason, stronger than others, that led Rowlandson to proclaim unequivocally her preserved chastity. Her assertions show a pro-active resistance to any possible positioning of her as a fallen woman. But her strong avowals of sexual preservation only serve to underline that captivity carries the fear and threat of sexual violation.7

11 If Spofford was drawing on a familiar literary genre in early American writing to tell a story of rape, she was also, as her biographer Elizabeth Halbeisen points out, invoking family history in “Circumstance.” Halbeisen recounts that “according to family tradition it was an experience of” Spofford’s maternal great grandmother, Mrs. Hitchings, “that gave her great granddaughter the inspiration for one of her finest stories, ‘Circumstance’ …. Mrs. Hitchings was said to have sung all night in the grasp of a panther, as does the heroine of ‘Circumstance’ in the grasp of the ‘Indian Devil’” (12). Halbeisen’s source was Louisa Hopkins, the daughter of Spofford’s good friend, Louisa Stone, later Hopkins, whom Spofford first met at the Putnam Free School and who became her dear and lifelong friend (Halbeisen 12, n. 21). That Louisa, the daughter, should know about this incident in the family of her mother’s friend suggests its importance in Prescott family lore. The story’s unique nature makes it compelling to pass from one generation to another, but the need to tell and re-tell the experience suggests also deep roots in trauma. In telling her grandmother’s story, Spofford is placing herself in a matrilineal context of storytelling and interpreting female experience. And, perhaps, too, her own method of expressing female violation was also her great grandmother’s. In her great grandmother’s time, as much as, if not more so than, in Spofford’s own, the violent captivity by the panther could provide an acceptable way to recount rape without the distress and exposure of speaking the experience directly; and at the same time, the telling of the violent experience would create a legacy of healing, in allowing family members to bear witness in this way to a female violation that even several generations later remained unspeakable.8

12 Rowlandson’s captivity narrative would have been accessible to both Spofford and her great grandmother, but other significant models of the captivity story circulated during their lifetimes. June Namias writes that “between 1787 and 1812, twenty-four different printings and several editions of a highly popular narrative were published in a collection of New England cities and towns … entitled A Surprising Account of the Discovery of a Lady Who Was Taken by the Indians in the Year 1777, and after making her escape, She retired to a lonely Cave, where she lived nine years.” By the eighth known printed edition of 1794, the ordinary “Indian” of the initial title had become “Savage Indians of the Wilderness” and the narrative was designated to be contained In a Letter from a Gentleman to his Friend. The “letter” bore the signature of “one Abraham Panther,” and the narrative, in its various editions, became widely known as “The Panther Captivity” narrative (94). To see a connection between this late eighteenth-century captivity tale and Spofford’s “Circumstance” because of the presence of two very different panthers

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is inviting but also too facile; nonetheless, a pattern of similarities suggestively links the two accounts: Panther’s “gigantic” Indian, like Spofford’s Indian Devil with his “giant’s vice,” is of abnormal proportion (Namias 94; Spofford 90). In both stories, the woman’s singing draws men to her rescue. In both, the men’s masculinity is reinforced by their carrying guns. And in both, when the men appear, the woman’s independence weakens: the Lady of the Panther captivity, who has, by the time her rescuers arrive, singlehandedly slain the giant, faints, and Spofford’s protagonist, when “her eyes trembled on her husband’s” (95), loses her saving voice. But the most suggestive association between the Panther captivity and Spofford’s story arises from a significant difference between the Rowlandson narrative and the Panther captivity story, for while both privilege female strength, Rowlandson, as already noted, downplays sexual violation and the Panther captivity foregrounds it. Central to the “Panther Captivity” is, as Namias puts it, “sexual explicitness, indeed erotica mixed with sadomasochism” (94). The “gigantic” aggressor who accosts the female protagonist and carries her off to his cave leaves no doubt about his intents. Namias quotes from “The Panther Captivity:” “He then motioned to me that I must either accept of his bed, or expect death for my obstinacy” (95). The expected violence ensues, but, surprisingly, it is directed at the violating male, who, while asleep, is dismembered by the potential female victim with his own hatchet, after which she calmly lives for the next nine years in his place until her gentleman callers find her in the wilderness. Spofford’s and her great grandmother’s familiarity with the Panther captivity has not been ascertained beyond its general popularity, but the blatantly sexual suggestions of the panther’s assault in “Circumstance” reflect the Panther rather than the Rowlandson captivity narrative model. The resemblances between Spofford’s story and the Panther narrative further reinforce the suggestion that Spofford’s primary focus in “Circumstance” is the representation of rape.

13 The Panther captivity narrative speaks directly to the sexual threat of female captives but places its narration at a distance. In contrast to Rowlandson’s personal account, it is generally considered a work of fiction. The female captive’s account occurs within the story of a hunting trip recounted in a letter, as already mentioned, by the pseudonymous Mr. Panther to a male friend. Derounian-Stodola and James Arthur Levernier offer an intriguing theory when they note that commentators assume Panther is male although “it is well-known that women who published in the eighteenth century often did so under a pseudonym.” “Given the feminist subtext,” they write, “it is tantalizing to speculate that the author could well have been a woman wishing to present a female viewpoint under the guise of the outrageously fake pen name Abraham Panther” (50). Spofford’s panther seems to serve a similar function of narrative distancing for addressing female violation, while at the same time, her story also insists on conveying the woman’s perspective.

4. The Language of Rape: Absence and Presence

14 The captivity narrative, as Castiglia notes, has a link to rape through the word “rape,” itself, and its origins (123). Such a link is particularly important for the study of Spofford, for words and their multiple meanings hold a special significance in her work. Spofford built her first literary success in the short story genre, “In a Cellar,” on the double meanings of a word: cellar, as a subterranean space, and cellar, as a

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container for salt. Her excesses in language, that have frequently been the source of the critical denigration of her work, also point, as Dorri Beam’s study suggests, to her intense engagement with words, which recalls Emily Dickinson’s devotion to her dictionary. The 1844 edition of Webster’s Dictionary locates “rape” in the Latin “rapio, raptus,” and defines its “general sense [as] a seizing by violence” and also “a seizing and carrying away by force, as females” (Def. 1). The word’s meaning enacts the defining event of the captivity narrative, the abduction itself, the Indian’s “seizing by violence … and carrying away by force” the white woman, just as the panther seizes and carries into the tree Spofford’s protagonist. Webster gives today’s more common definition as the second, specifically legal one. “In law,” according to Webster, rape means “the carnal knowledge of a woman forcibly and against her will” (Def. 2). In the captivity narrative, the word’s Latin origins link the male violence against women that the first instance implies with the possibility of the second definition. If the story omits the word rape, the captivity narrative form contains its meaning.

15 Through its etymology, the word “rape” and its origins seem to hover over “Circumstance” as a rape narrative in other ways as well. In her discussion of representations of rape in Chaucer, Christine M. Rose points out that “the comparable word to the Latin ‘raptus’ in Old French, ‘ravir,’ spawned ‘ravissement’ and the English ‘ravish,’ and became used as a synonym for rape or for the spiritual action of a soul’s being carried to heaven, transported by enthusiasm or bliss” (28, emphasis mine). Through her hymn-singing response in her adversity, Spofford’s protagonist experiences a “divine rapture” (Spofford 93) of spiritual transcendence. In her night long vigil, she undergoes spiritual ravishment: “Her vision climbed to that higher picture where the angel shows the dazzling thing,” Spofford writes. Her description suggests that her protagonist is “carried” away in multiple ways as she describes the woman’s vision of “the holy Jerusalem descending out of heaven from God,” climbing to a crescendo, “with its splendid battlements, and gates of pearls, … with its great white throne, and the rainbow round about it, in sight like unto an emerald” (93). Her experience of spiritual ecstasy through her hymn-singing corresponds to Mary Rowlandson’s influential paradigm that sees the hardships of captivity as an opportunity for spiritual transformation and the renewal of faith in God, but her “divine rapture” also suggests that in attempting to endure one kind of ravishment, she turns to another. Ann Wolbert Burgess and Lynda Lytle Holmstrom, whose pioneering work on coping with rape and rape trauma syndrome continues to inform the understanding of rape, point out that “victims of rape often cope by mentally focusing and directing their attention to some specific thought to keep their minds off the reality of the events and focus on their survival” (415). The terrifying “fabulous flying- dragon” (Spofford 85) who captures the protagonist seems not so distant from “the Lord descended from above” who in the protagonist’s hymn-singing “on the wings of all the winds / came flying all abroad” (92). Like the Indian Devil’s human and animal coextension, the simultaneous presence of anguish and ecstasy disrupts any straightforward understanding of the woman’s rapture as exclusively spiritual and transcendent. The ostensible meanings in Spofford’s diction of rapture hint at or indeed collapse into their more hidden ones opening up to the multiplicity of the woman’s experience. As suggested above, Spofford’s awareness of these verbal connections to situate her story as a rape narrative is more likely deliberate than not. Alfred Bendixen sums up Spofford’s intense language in this way: “Spofford’s daring experiments with sound and image represented nothing less than an attempt to

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revitalize language itself, an attempt to transform the literary word into a force capable of challenging and enlarging the reader’s perception of reality” (xii). In “Circumstance,” Spofford’s silenced words emerge with intensified meanings. Throughout the story, Spofford’s language continues suggestively to imply rape providing a vivid representation of both the assailant’s aggressions and the woman’s reactions to them. Spofford presents the panther moving immediately to attack the woman’s clothes “worr[ying] them sagaciously a little,” but finding his claws caught in the clothing, he initiates fleshly contact by “licking her bare arm with his rasping tongue” (86). These descriptions of the creature’s aggressive and violent behaviors insist on a human rather than animal presence. They suggest a human physicality—the panther “held her in his clutches … in his great lithe embrace” (85-6)—as well as human consciousness. The male predator acts immediately upon becoming aware of the woman’s movements toward escape: “as if he scanned her thoughts, the creature bounded forward with a yell and caught her again in his dreadful hold … clasping her with invincible pressure to his rough, ravenous breast” (88-9). Spofford makes the woman’s experience palpable. The beast holds, embraces, yells, creating an image of human assault. His exertion of complete bodily control over the woman as he encompasses her fully in his physical presence speaks powerfully to an enactment of rape; she feels “pouring over her the wide streams of his hot, foetid breath” (86), a sensation to which Spofford persistently returns to suggest the woman’s entrapment in a forced intimacy. “Only the breath like the vapor from some hell-pit still swathed her” (87), Spofford writes; her danger is vividly imminent in “the torrent of his breath [that] prepared her for his feast as the anaconda slimes his prey” (88). Spofford continually emphasizes their close, physical proximity. The beast’s “diabolical face fronted hers” (88); the woman sees “his white tusks whetting and gnashing, his eyes glaring through all the darkness like balls of red fire” (86); she watches the “lifting of the red lip from the glittering teeth” (88). To the woman, the beast is a “living lump of appetites” (89). The intensity, intimacy and sensuality of the encounter all imply forced sex.

16 Spofford positions the beast over the woman in the stance of a rapist, as he drips on her from “foaming chaps” and “slaver[s] above [her] with vitality” (89). When the husband finds his wife in the forest, he beholds “the monster covering his wife with shaggy form and flaming gaze” and sees her looking “so ghastly white, so rigid, so stained with blood, her eyes so fixedly bent above” (94, emphasis mine). He seems to come upon— perhaps interrupt—a scene of rape; significantly, as Webster’s states, one of the meanings of “cover” throughout the nineteenth century was “to copulate with a female” (Webster’s 1844; 1913). Spofford’s phallic language supports this understanding. In her descriptions, the panther’s “long sharp claws,” “rasping tongue” (86), and “daggered tooth” (88) are “weapons” (86) that “plunge” (86), “pierce” and “penetrat[e]” (88) the woman’s flesh and body. “The long red tongue thrust forth again” (87), Spofford writes, and the woman feels its “rough, sharp and multiplied stings” (86). His “savage caresses … hurt like wounds” (90). The woman reacts like a victim of sexual assault. She feels “agony” and “quivering disgust” (86), and, as Burgess and Holmstrom state about the rape victim’s focus on survival, fears for her life (415).

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5. Spofford and Dickinson: Rape Narratives in Different Genres

17 Spofford’s panther provides the kind of narrative distancing that Dickinson, too, employed. Dickinson’s declaration to Higginson that she wished to avoid Spofford is only partially true, for to her sister-in-law, Susan Dickinson, who had sent her the May, 1860 issue of The Atlantic Monthly with “Circumstance” “marked in the table of contents by a heavily inked ‘X’” (St. Armand, Emily Dickinson 173), she wrote something quite different: “Dear S.: That is the only thing I ever saw in my life I did not think I could have written myself. You stand nearer the world than I do. Send me everything she writes” (Dickinson, Susan). This is a powerful declaration. Perhaps the initial need for avoidance comes from Dickinson’s recognition of her own startling imagination flashing back at her from Spofford’s work. Sue’s account of her sister-in-law’s reaction in her own 1903 letter to the editor of the Springfield Republican praising “Harriet Prescott’s Early Work” led the way to modern criticism’s recognitions of the affinity between the two writers. “From Spofford, Dickinson learned a vocabulary of passion associated with tropical flowers, rich stuffs, fabulous jewels, and fantastic colors,” Barton Levi St. Armand concludes (Emily Dickinson 186).

18 Several critics link “Circumstance” to Dickinson’s “’Twas like a Maelstrom, with a notch” (Poems #425), the poem that Maryanne Garbowsky interprets as having “more than coincidental” relationship to Spofford’s story (17).9 In the close resemblances of diction, “content and structure,” Garbowsky perceives a “causal relationship” between “Circumstance” and Dickinson’s poem and identifies Spofford as a “maternal muse” for the poet (17). She sees Dickinson translating Spofford’s description of “a literal attack by an animal, … into a figurative one,” but nonetheless finds that the subject matter of the poem and the story correspond. In “’Twas like a Maelstrom,” according to Garbowsky, Dickinson “relates an equally horrifying experience [to “Circumstance”] which also threatens to overwhelm its female victim” (14). Garbowsky finds in Dickinson’s language expressions of pain—the capitalized “Agony” of the fourth line— and extreme, incomprehensible fright, like the “Goblin with a Gauge—” (l. 10); she comments that “the sense of helplessness that both victims experience is also dramatically alike” (15), with the imagery describing both women as benumbed. Garbowsky’s interpretations of the women’s reactions and responses in both story and poem are in keeping with the experience of sexual violation. Burgess and Holmstrom cite paralysis, both physical and psychological, as a significant state in the experience of rape (413-15).10 While acknowledging the poem’s engagement with female victimhood, Garbowsky observes that “Dickinson never specifically identifies the central incident of the poem.” Perhaps this is because at the poem’s center lies the unspeakable act of rape.

19 Garbowsky’s interpretation of “’Twas Like a Maelstrom” points to the possibility that the poem is Dickinson’s creative response to reading “Circumstance” as a rape narrative. Daneen Wardrop’s study on “Dickinson’s gothic” identifies a number of Dickinson poems that treat rape as their subject matter. In the context of Dickinson’s well-known fondness for punning as a poetic technique as well as of the sexual explicitness of some of her poetry, as, we see, for instance, in “Wild Nights” (Poems # 269), the idea of “’Twas like a Maelstrom” presenting a rape narrative does not seem so far-fetched. The homophonic “Mael” of the first syllable of “Maelstrom” specifies the

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sex of the overbearing, assaulting force that “maelstrom’s” ordinary meanings suggest; 11 the definition from Webster’s, moreover, of the “notch” in the line’s completion, “’Twas like a maelstrom with a notch,” is “1. A hollow cut in any thing … 2. an opening or narrow passage through a mountain or hill” (def. 1 and 2). The definitions describe female genitals, and brought together with “maelstrom,” describe a vivid and indeed graphic depiction of violent, forced sex. The speaker’s opening “’twas like” suggests that the poem is a reminiscence of a violent act, as she goes on to re-tell painfully the aggressor’s assault on her person, stripping her clothes, “Toyed coolly with the final inch / Of your delirious Hem—” (l. 5-6), and commanding her body, “helpless, in his Paws” (l. 13). The debilitating psychological and physical effects of the assault intensify with a relentless focus on the speaker’s suffering and victimization, much like the terror endured by Spofford’s woman: “As if your Sentence stood – pronounced –,” reads the second last stanza, “And you were frozen led / From Dungeon’s luxury of Doubt – / To Gibbets, and the Dead –” (l. 18-21). “’Twas like a Maelstrom,” Dickinson’s own rape narrative in poetic form, emerges as highly reminiscent of Spofford’s tale.

20 The affinity between Dickinson and Spofford reflected in their formidable imaginations is also evident in their literary methods. “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant” (Poems #1263), Dickinson writes, a thought that seems to express Spofford’s intent and method as much as her own. Literary history’s elision, as suggested earlier, of the representations of rape may be in part also because the act itself resists representation. Mieke Bal points out “that rape makes the victim invisible” on several counts: “literally – the perpetrator … covers her … figuratively, the rape destroys her self-image, her subjectivity … [and] finally, … because the experience is physically as well as psychologically, inner. Rape takes place inside” (230). Both Spofford and Dickinson struggle to find ways to speak the anguished experience that seems inexpressible in its simultaneous and intense violation of both body and mind. The visibility of rape through representation, moreover, presents its own problems. The public exposure that representation entails must answer to the ethical dilemma that Tanya Horeck probes in Public Rape: Representing Violation in Fiction and Film when she questions “the ethics of reading and watching representations of rape” and asks, “are we bearing witness to a terrible crime or are we participating in a shameful voyeuristic activity?” (vi).12 Representation, with its propensity toward exploitation and voyeurism, carries the threat of repeating the initial violation. Attempts to represent extreme violation result at times in extreme expressions which mid-nineteenth-century America, in both sentimental and sensational forms, found particularly compelling. Both Spofford and Dickinson venture into Gothic spaces where the spectacular slides into spectacle, with its too ready embracement of the subject of violated womanhood. But the “slant” (l.1) ensures that they “dazzle gradually” (l. 7) permitting the slow adjustment of sight rather than the blindness that often accompanies public outrage or backlash following controversial exposure. Like Dickinson in more minimalist fashion, Spofford readily pressures emotional and psychological limits. The panther and the maelstrom provide a means of controlling expression and thereby disallow the double victimization of the assaulted woman.

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6. Endings and Conclusions

21 Neither story nor poem ends with violation. Like many of Dickinson’s poems, “’Twas like a Maelstrom” closes oddly couching what should be a triumphant declaration of “Reprieve” in ambivalence: “And when the Film had stitched your eyes / A Creature gasped ‘Reprieve!’ / Which Anguish was the utterest – then – / To perish, or to live?” (l. 23-5). Once again, Dickinson seems to be interpreting some crucial moments in “Circumstance.” Hearing “a remote crash of brushwood,” Spofford’s singing woman mistakes her approaching husband for “some other beast on his depredations” (93). Her confusion is momentary, but nonetheless again associates the male presence with threat and fear. As critics, like Dalke and Fetterley, have noted, moreover, in the presence of her husband and child, the woman’s voice fails, and in the context of women’s struggles to find and project their own voices, this failure is open to disturbing implications for the female artist, as Dalke argues, but also for independent womanhood.13 “The fervent vision of God’s peace,” which the woman’s inner strength has figured forth, fades as “her eyes trembled on her husband’s, and she could only think of him, and of the child, and of happiness that yet might be.” The “earthly hope” (95) that replaces the divine vision deserves her full commitment, but it also endangers her, weakening her focus on self-preservation. In her fiction, Spofford repeatedly shows her awareness of the complex nature of women’s lives. Her handling of the husband’s arrival is a more muted version of Dickinson’s ambiguous “Reprieve” (l. 23), creating a small drama in which the difficulty of balancing individual selfhood with the demands, however ultimately rewarding, of the self in relation momentarily emerge.

22 The world of the story is clearly a dangerous place. Neither forest nor home, wilderness nor settlement, offers safety. Copse and woods temper the stark demarcation of the “great forests that stretch far away into the North” (84). The settlers’ habitats and lives occupy the “fringe” of this wilderness with their only “half-cleared demesnes” (84) still participating in it. This is not a knowable space. At both the story’s beginning and end, Spofford introduces inexplicable details concerning the woman’s experience. Practical and sensible, the woman nonetheless has what the story presents as a vision: Walking rapidly now, and with her eyes wide-open, she distinctly saw in the air before her what was not there a moment ago, a winding-sheet,—cold, white, and ghastly, waved by the likeness of four wan hands,—that rose with a long inflation, and fell in rigid folds, while a voice, shaping itself from the hollowness above, spectral and melancholy, sighed,—‘The Lord have mercy on the people! The Lord have mercy on the people!’ Three times the sheet with its corpse-covering outline waved beneath the pale hands, and the voice, awful in its solemn and mysterious depth, sighed, ‘The Lord have mercy on the people!’ Then all was gone, the place was clear again, the gray sky was obstructed by no deathly blot. (85)

23 Both apparition and panther come, suddenly and unexpectedly, out of nowhere. The threatening tone of the vision gives way to the possibility of an unknown assailant stalking the woman. The apparition is meant to intimidate, the “winding-sheet” suggesting pending death and making its appearance in the fading light of dusk that reminds human selves of their susceptibility to the dangers of the dark. Its “ghastly” quality speaks to making the prospective victim feel vulnerable and therefore more defenseless in the coming attack. Despite the incident’s spectral quality, the “four wan hands” waving the sheet point to an embodied presence, and the “solemn and mysterious” voice speaks familiar words from the woman’s own culture and religion.

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There is no hint of a native presence, or indeed of an animal one, in this odd and threatening image in which the human menace that precedes the violent attack is evident. Beyond the apparition’s illustrating the woman’s mental sturdiness in her ability to shrug off its hints of danger, its presence is never explained. It ties in with another detail coming at the story’s end which is problematic because, although equally inexplicable, it is too readily explained, that is, the woman’s discovery of the “singular foot-print in the snow” (96). The woman lingers over the footprint but then connects it through a “hurried word” (96) to the presence of raiding Indians which her husband momentarily confirms. The attribution is very quick, and seems too facile. There is no sense of the kind of terror that literature’s most famous single footprint inspires in Robinson Crusoe because there is no questioning of it—either of its origin or its oddity. The woman and her family, after the night of anguish, clearly need a ready answer. The footprint’s singularity invites explanation yet the need for an explanation is not even acknowledged. It remains unknown, suggesting perhaps, without beleaguering this detail more than it deserves, that the source of evil is not so easy to discern. Is it Indian, animal, savage, male? The “wan hands” of the spectral image waving the winding sheet suggests a pale, white presence. Was the attacker from the settlement? And does the settlement’s burning, then, offer a kind of poetic justice, the instrument of which is the Indian raid, giving it then an entirely different role than the evil enemy? Spofford is a subtle artist. A distinct lack of certainty informs much of her work. Her aesthetics involve destabilization at every turn.

24 The end of “Circumstance” is not completely mired in ambiguity, however. The story of Spofford’s singing woman recalls other literary figures and patterns that bring clarity to her situation. She is like Sheherazade and Orpheus at once, as Opfermann points out, singing one song after another to keep death at bay, and using her music to tame the wild animal. But song also connects her to another violated woman, the ravaged Philomel, who, defying all odds to proclaim the wrongs done her, eventually transforms into a nightingale. Like the transformed Philomel, Spofford’s woman does not speak, but only sings, and her songs demand listeners bear witness to her past life. The encounter between the woman and the “serpentine and subtle” (85) enemy inevitably recalls Eve’s temptation, and the story’s last line, from Paradise Lost, “the world was all before them, where to choose,” confirms Spofford’s awareness of Milton’s epic poem on humankind’s history (Book 12, l. 181; Spofford 96). Spofford’s resolution to the panther’s assault pointedly ends in the woman’s literal fall. Catching “a sidelong hint of the man standing below with the raised gun,” the beast, “sprung round furiously,” writes Spofford, and seizing his prey, was about to leap into some unknown airy den of the topmost branches …. The woman, suspended in mid-air an instant, cast only one agonized glance beneath,—but across and through it, ere the lids could fall, shot a withering sheet of flame,—a rifle-crack, half-heard, was lost in the terrible yell of desperation that bounded after it and filled her ears with savage echoes, and in the wide arc of some eternal descent she was falling;—but the beast fell under her. (95)

25 In her ending, Spofford re-writes the nineteenth century’s vision of the fallen woman. This falling woman lands softly, on her tormentor. The physical inversion of the woman and beast’s fall retains the female ascendancy over her male attacker discussed earlier in this essay. Throughout her ordeal, moreover, the woman inverses the relationship between womankind and serpent as well, for in a sense, her singing seduces the beast, not the other way around. The central motif is the woman’s songs

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echoing in the beast’s ears rather than the devil whispering in hers as he did with Eve. Spofford’s musical protagonist is no culpable Eve, nor any kind of tainted woman. The woman and her family move beyond the violation. Spofford describes the woman’s sense of herself as “someone newly made … the present stamped upon her in deep satisfaction” (96); the woman gives herself over to the moment disallowing the past and its burdens to intrude on her happiness. Spofford emphasizes their normalcy as they walk toward home after the ordeal while also invoking Romantic nature’s healing power, with the woman stopping to “gather a spray of the red-rose berries … or a handful of brown cones for the child’s play” (96). The effects of the traumatic experience seem to fade too quickly, but Spofford’s emphasis on new beginnings in the context of a rape narrative is particularly important for it resists the prejudice and stigma associated with sexual violation. There is no hint of recoil or rejection. Spofford offers another response. She empowers her female protagonist, and the image of the united family, the woman, man and child continuing on, provides a model of resilience that insists on resistance to the evil that both man and beast do.

26 In rejecting the image of the attacked woman as passive victim and, in the aftermath of rape, as tainted subject, Spofford offers a revisionist interpretation of nineteenth- century attitudes towards women who experienced sexual assault. Many of Spofford’s stories reflect her keen interest in women’s experiences, whether these be fulfilling, challenging or threatening. In “Circumstance,” the literariness of Spofford’s story- telling powers leads readers to witness an aspect of women’s lives that has frequently been silenced and often ignored. In entering into dialogue with Dickinson’s poetry, Spofford’s story points to a literary history of nineteenth-century rape narratives, a tradition that calls for further recuperation. Spofford’s willingness to broach the difficult topic of rape in a time that was particularly wary of addressing sexual subjects is daring, and her method of presentation both compelling and astute. Like Dickinson, she presents obvious details but then mutes them to reveal her subject obliquely but powerfully. Spofford finds ways to express an unspeakable female experience that demands the understanding of her readers. Spofford’s and Dickinson’s indirect methods point also to the possibility that other hidden sustained stories of sexual violations which speak to female experience and women’s history lie unrecognized in the rich output of nineteenth-century women’s writing.

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NOTES

1. Fetterley’s commentary in Provisions, and Alfred Bendixen’s introduction to his 1989 edition of Spofford’s The Amber Gods and Other Stories raise many of the critical issues addressed by other commentators: like Anne Dalke’s reading of the story as a bildungsroman “in miniature” in which the female protagonist discovers her “creative power” (74), Fetterley sees in the story “an extraordinary, compelling, and harsh vision of the circumstances of the woman artist” (264), and Bendixen finds “a female counterpart to the more familiar stories of male initiation in which the protagonist journeys into a psychic wilderness” (xxvii); both Fetterley and Bendixen recognize the protagonist’s religious experience (266; xxviii) which Carol Holly develops in her focus on “the heroine’s consciousness as she moves … [toward] evangelical Christian renewal” through her singing of Methodist hymns (Fetterley 153); Colleen Donnelly, on the other hand, offers a compelling counter-argument to interpreting the protagonist’s experience as a spiritual and religious awakening locating in her singing and choice of songs an empowering female voice that speaks to the strength of her earthly bonds with husband and child; Ian Marshall’s eco-feminist reading situates the protagonist’s development in her relationship to nature as she rejects views of nature as sentimental and then indifferent “in favor of an incipiently ecological perspective” (49) through which “the spiritual values represented by the woman’s singing grow out of and make possible communion with nature” (55); Fetterley’s suggestion that Spofford challenges “the idea of home as safe” (265) is explored by Lisa Logan through Spofford’s use of the captivity narrative pattern and its engagement with a racialized discourse determining national identity; continuing the story’s ability to address American culture and history, Susanne Opfermann focuses on the “construction of gendered subjectivities” (121) to comment on “the relation of corporeality and femininity as the nineteenth century saw it” (122) and to suggest that Spofford is staging a “psychic drama: the attempt of woman to control and transcend her sexual nature” (123). Michael Grimwood argues for the story’s “full engagement with contemporary discourse” (450) which includes the “yearning for a Republican victory over the Slave Power” of the South (481). He writes: “For most readers of ‘Circumstance’ in 1860, the story would have signified not the victimization of one race or gender by another but the threat to one group of white people by other white people” (469). 2. For Mardorossian’s ideas, see also her book, Framing the Rape Victim. 3. Gunne and Thompson’s final category, the representations of rape in visual and physical media, the stage, art, and television, is not applicable. 4. Jeffrey S. Cramer, the editor of the annotated The Maine Woods, glosses Thoreau’s account of his conversations with an Indigenous person about the “lunxus or Indian Devil” with a passage from Springer as follows: “There is an animal in the deep recesses of the forests of Maine, evidently belonging to the feline race, which, on account of its ferocity, is significantly called ‘Indian Devil’— in the Indian language, ‘the Lunk Soos’; a terror to the Indians, and the only animal in New England of which they stand in dread. You may speak of the moose, the bear, and the wolf even,

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and the red man is ready for the chase and the encounter. But name the object of his dread, and he will significantly shake his head, while he exclaims, ‘He all one debil!’” (The Annotated Maine Woods 128, n. 171). Attributing the origins of the term “Indian Devil” to white settlers may be erroneous and thus mitigate readings of it as racist. See also Robert Coleman who, like Showalter, finds “something more than the metaphysics of Indian-hating” at work in the story’s Indian presence (22). Calling “Circumstance” “a captivity narrative with a twist” (15), he sees Spofford displacing the tradition of “savage eloquence,” found, for instance, in Cooper (19), with the protagonist’s singing, “a style or rhetoric appropriate and pleasing not only for the beast [but] for herself” and one that masks Spofford’s romantic “rhetorical penchant … in a marketplace attuned to realism” (20). Coleman’s reading makes Spofford’s presentation of Indigenous peoples a part of her literary strategies in both story-telling and marketing. As Fetterley concedes, the presence of “racist assumptions” in nineteenth-century literary texts comes about often because “they are so readily available and so easy to invoke” (267). Opfermann, moreover, notes that Spofford perhaps “critiques a racist practice since she explicitly links the term “Indian Devil” to a male tradition of naming when she writes, ‘known by hunters as the Indian Devil’ … and later has her protagonist wonder ‘lest his name of Indian Devil were not his true name’” (127). In a seminar session that she chaired and organized at the 2013 Northeast Modern Language Association Convention in Boston, MA, Paula Kot presented her work in progress on Spofford’s non-fiction publication of 1871, New England Sketches, arguing that in this work, Spofford takes a strong stand against bigotry, a position that, Kot suggests, might lead to new readings of her work, including “Circumstance,” and to a reassessement of her racist designation among white nineteenth-century American women writers. 5. Joe R. Feagin writes: “In war settings Indians who fought back were asserted to be less than human and depraved murderers, a part of the anti-Indian subframe of the white racial frame. Like their predecessors, eighteenth-century colonists periodically framed Indians as animals —‘beasts of prey,’ as Colonel John Reid put it in 1764 or as ‘animals vulgarly called Indians’ and a ‘race’ who had no right to land, as Hugh Brackenbridge put it in the 1780s” (61). The captivity narratives provide many examples of this kind of negative terminology applied to native peoples. 6. I found Castigilia’s discussion particularly helpful (especially 122-23). See also Glenda Riley. June Namias further notes that “in several pieces of early republican writing, erotic motifs occur within the captivity literature, extending the possibilities of sexual encounters across racial, ethnic, and cultural lines. Titillation and eroticism are apparent, ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ are blurred, for white women, Indian brutality is reported as being more explicitly against them, and what is claimed as retaliatory violence against Indians (in the Dustan mode) is sanctioned” (97). 7. See also Steven Neuwirth and Pauline Turner Strong for further discussions of rape and Rowlandson’s assertions of her chastity. Susan Jeffords also makes a similar point about Rowlandson’s protestation: “since most of the early narratives of those who survived such capture were written by women, the question of physical abuse, particularly rape, played some part in reinforcing both the fear of capture and the threat of the captors. (Mary Rowlandson, whose The Narrative and Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson in 1762 was the first of this genre, expressed wonder at the fact that her captors did not rape her, establishing that the fear of rape was already an elemental part of tales of capture.)” (206). Susan Brownmiller notes that references to “rape shrouded in … polite language … began to make an appearance in the later narratives of white female captives, and male captives who lived to tell the tale offered succinct commentary on the treatment of the female captives that they saw” (143). By “later,” Brownmiller means mid-nineteenth century, beginning just prior to the time of the publication of “Circumstance” in 1860. The association of the captivity narrative with the eighteenth-century

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seduction novels of Samuel Richardson also recognizes the presence of the rape threat in the captivity narrative. See Armstrong and Tennenhouse. 8. This possibility that “Circumstance” is a camouflage story for rape, growing out of an actual event in Prescott family history, gains further credence in the context of animal biology. Kevin Hansen points out: “It is now believed that prey-capture behavior is very similar in all species of wild cats. After locating a rabbit or a rodent, the bobcat fixes his gaze on the animal, lowers itself to the ground in a crouch, and begins to maneuver closer, taking care to remain hidden. […] Once [the prey] is seized and pinned with the bobcat’s forearms and paws, it is usually killed with a bite to the nape of the neck or head” (42-43). See also McDonald and Loveridge for a description of the force of the felid bite and its effectiveness in killing (94-95). As residents of Maine, both Spofford and her great grandmother would likely have been familiar with the behavior of wild cats for whom attack and kill are synonymous activities; wild cats drag only dead carcasses, not living bodies, into trees or other areas for their feasting. The fictional panther’s actions of carrying off a live human body breach usual animal behavior, but are consistent with a potential human rapist’s seeking a secluded and isolated spot to facilitate his aggression. 9. See St. Armand and David Cody. Like Garbowsky, they offer suggestive thoughts on the relationship between Spofford’s story and Dickinson’s poem that support but do not offer the rape narrative interpretation. Discussing Dickinson’s spiritual outlook, St. Armand suggests that she found in Spofford’s panther a “model of feline perversity” (Emily Dickinson 173) corresponding to her own conceptions of the “Calvinist cat-god,” “capricious … predatory” and powerful who haunted her imagination (Emily Dickinson 176, 174). David Cody’s more recent study situates Spofford’s connections with Dickinson through the “Azarian” school of emotional and linguistic intensity, so called after Spofford’s 1864 novel, Azarian: An Episode. He finds a similar stylistic intensity characterizing the conversion experience in “Circumstance” and several Dickinson poems, including “’Twas like a Maelstrom.” 10. Rape crisis centers emphasize in their information that the experience of rape affects women differently, and they provide a broad range of possible responses. These possible responses, however, show consistency, and align with Holmstrom and Burgess’ early work. Dissociation, fear of death, and paralysis, both physical and psychologcal, are consistenly cited. See, for example, Rape Crisis Scotland and its “I Just Froze” campaign (2017): https://www.rapecrisisscotland.org.uk/i-just-froze/. 11. See also Jay Ladin’s account of the various responses to this poem put forth by his students in the Homestead seminars at the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, especially one student’s reading of the poem as a “rape allegory, whose subject … was the psychological effect of male-dominated language and literary institutions on the female poet.” Ladin’s student locates the rape once again figuratively, but his reasoning also speaks suggestively of its enactment. Drawing on Dickinson’s knowledge of German, the student reads the opening line’s “Maelstrom” as her pun on “male stream” (33), that is, semen. 12. See also Wendy Hesford. 13. See also Opfermann for a very different interpretation of the woman’s silence. She queries if Spofford’s descriptions leading up to the woman falling silent—“‘She shuddered now …. One gasp, a convulsive effort, and there was silence,—she had lost her voice—’” (95) suggest “a climactic moment of terror or of another climax, a sexual one?” (119).

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ABSTRACTS

The several critical interpretations of Harriet Prescott Spofford’s short story, “Circumstance,” generally acknowledge the presence of sexual violation, but they also tend to de-center it, either glossing over it, or enlisting the nature and implications of the assault to serve other ends. In contrast, “Narrating Violation” sees the story’s sexual assault as its main subject; it explores the methods that Spofford employs to present the sexual violation and the implications for reading “Circumstance” as a rape narrative. Spofford’s multiple ways of speaking the violation at the heart of “Circumstance” align with Emily Dickinson’s treatment of rape. The possibility that Dickinson recognized in “Circumstance” a story of rape and wrote her own poetic version of it begins to identify a literary stream in nineteenth-century American women’s writing that resists the elision of violence against women and tells of rape in a way acceptable for its time.

INDEX

Keywords: captivity narrative, Emily Dickinson, Harriet Prescott Spofford, nineteenth-century American women writers, rape, rape and representation, rape narrative, sexual assault

AUTHOR

RITA BODE Rita Bode is professor of English Literature at Trent University, Canada. She has published on Spofford’s “Amber Gods,” “Her Story,” detective stories, and children’s stories. She has a special interest in transatlantic relationships and influences among women writers as shown in her work on George Eliot and Harriet Beecher Stowe, and George Eliot and Edith Wharton. Other publications include articles and book chapters on Cather, Hawthorne, Melville and the Canadian writer L.M. Montgomery, among others.

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Feline Alter Egos in Harriet Prescott Spofford’s “Circumstance” and the Poetry of Emily Dickinson

Adeline Chevrier-Bosseau

1 When she read it in the copy of The Atlantic Monthly her sister-in-law and lifelong friend Susan had lent her, Emily Dickinson was much impressed by Harriet Prescott Spofford’s “Circumstance,” as Sue recalls in her own review of Spofford’s work entitled “Harriet Prescott’s Early Work,” in which she explains that upon reading the short story, Emily Dickinson asked her to “send [her] everything she writes.”1 Both women were involved in an intense literary dialogue which went on until Dickinson’s death. Through both letters and personal conversations, they discussed contemporary literary production, including Dickinson’s own ongoing writing. Susan’s reminiscence allows us to think that both women must have read Spofford’s works extensively, and that they respected her as a writer. Adopting the characteristic—and ironic—pupil persona that she maintained throughout her correspondence with him, Dickinson’s amusing reference to Spofford’s short story in a letter written to Thomas Wentworth Higginson two years after its publication would mislead us to believe she did not follow Spofford’s works so closely: “I read Mrs Spofford’s ‘Circumstance,’ but it followed me, in the Dark—so I avoided her—” (L261 to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, April 25, 1862). Reading beyond the frightened little girl persona’s discourse, what is extremely noticeable in this comment is that Dickinson clearly dissociates the writer, designated by the female pronoun “her,” from her “creature,” the Indian Devil or the story, designated by “it”2; the creature, the woman’s creation, appears as the scariest element of all. Dickinson thus alludes here to the trope of the monstrous creation by the female writer, and to the combination of fear and awe that this creation elicits—a theme that is quite recurrent in her work, if we think for example about her reference to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poetry in poem F627 “I think I was enchanted”: I think I was enchanted When first a somber Girl – I read that Foreign Lady – The Dark – felt beautiful –

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2 Despite her claim that she “avoided” Spofford, her discussion with Susan attests to the allure of the “Dark” for the poetess, and to a sense of awareness—or self-awareness—of the monstrosity of female creation, be it incarnated by the monstrous creature (in Spofford’s story, the Indian Devil is part-puma, part-dragon, part-snake3 and every bit as monstrous as Mary Shelley’s creature) or the woman writer’s monstrous creation (a fantastic tale dealing with hidden desires and fears). Analyzing the complex relationship of female writers to authorship, the authors of The Madwoman in the Attic choose Lilith as the figure who best associates female authorship and this anxiety of monstrosity, of abnormality: “both the first woman and the first monster [Lilith] specifically connects poetic presumption with madness, freakishness, monstrosity” (Gilbert and Gubar 35). Dickinson’s contradictory allusions to Spofford illustrate how difficult it was for women writers to come to terms with this anxiety of authorship, and to comply with society’s injunctions: Dickinson could admire Spofford in the private sphere of her correspondence with Sue, but she had to appear as a frightened little girl to Higginson if she wanted to have a chance at publication.4

3 Drawing on the initial ambiguity of the combination of admiration and fear that is apparent in Dickinson’s references to “Circumstance,” the contrast between the allure of the dark and the proclaimed fear of the dark, between a woman writer’s artistic ambition and her society’s injunctions, this paper will focus on felines in Spofford’s “Circumstance” and a cluster of Dickinson’s poems in which the feline, a creature of horror, appears as an alter ego of the woman writer. As in the examples of monstrous females gathered together by Gilbert and Gubar, the “feline” becomes a composite image, conflating the characteristics of the domestic cat, wild felines like pumas or tigers, and the snake or the dragon—therefore making the feline a nodal figure articulating discourses on female authorship, the anxiety of feeling “other,” and a discourse of resistance to a stifling patriarchal culture. In Spofford’s short story and Dickinson’s feline poems, a specular inversion between the self and the feline brings the creator to reflect upon her status as a female writer in nineteenth-century America, between the mainstream and unthreatening image of the strange poetess or the gentle —albeit “half-cracked”—artist inscribed in nineteenth-century sentimental culture and her deep-rooted feeling of precariousness as well as her protean capacity for identification in a literary culture in which women had to comply with certain prescribed standards to be published.5 The feline, at once me and not-me, becomes for both women a figure onto which they project anxieties about female desire, female power and aggressiveness, about the association of femininity with animality, as well as about racial otherness. After replacing the identification with the feline within nineteenth-century scientific discourses and sentimental culture, this paper will explore the racial and political dimension of the animal identification in both women’s works.

1. “A Dying Tiger – moaned for Drink / I hunted all the Sand”: Women and Animals in Nineteenth-century Sentimental Culture

4 As Keith Thomas’ study Man and the Natural World has shown, the shift in the perception of animals—initiated with the publication of biological taxonomies such as those of

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Buffon highlighting similarities between human and animal anatomy—widened in the nineteenth century. As pet keeping became more and more popular, the awareness of physical and psychological likenesses between humans and animals increased; animals were still considered as “other,” but it was acknowledged that they could have feelings of pain or joy, for instance, as humans did and therefore deserved compassion. Compassion for animals was highly valued during the Victorian era.6 A series of Acts of Parliament were adopted against cruelty for animals (Thomas 149) and movements promoting animal rights, including vegetarianism, began to spread in America (Thomas 295-296). In Humans and Other Animals: Beyond the Boundaries of Anthropology, Barbara Noske highlights a crucial difference in the perception of animality according to gender: “In as far as humanness is equated with the shaping of culture and history, men are made to appear more human than women. Women are commonly thought of as more biological than cultural, and are taken to be closer to animals than men” (Noske 40).

5 Noske further remarks that the qualities of “empathy, intersubjectivity and relatedness” (40) exhibited by women were the qualities that brought them closer to the animal realm than men. In an 1887 article published in Harper’s Monthly Magazine, Thomas Wentworth Higginson explores this particular affinity between women and animals and compares “the care given by the young girl” to her pet to the “tenderness of a mother to her child.” In Higginson’s representation, pet-keeping and pet care is practice for motherhood, and similar in terms of the care and affection bestowed on the smaller being by the woman. Such a representation, as Colleen Gleeney Boggs notes, “anthropomorphizes animals and animalizes children” (205). Children, women and animals thus form a group united by their weaker intellect, their heightened capacity to feel rather than think, and their subjection to man.7 This natural connection between women and animals is perceptible in Spofford’s “Circumstance” and Dickinson’s “tiger” poems, in which the female character or speaker displays a capacity for immediate understanding of the animal’s behavior. As Brigitte Nicole Fielder reminds us, nineteenth-century taxonomies also established a hierarchy between races, not only between species: “for nineteenth-century American readers, popular understandings of race were informed by theories of scientific racism, which rendered race and species never fully extricable from each other” (Fielder 490-491). A combination of the cat, the tiger, the snake and even the dragon, the feline is also racially other. The “Indian Devil,” as it is called, stands out as a racially composite image, conflating the figure of the black slave, the “Indian,” and an Orientalist self.

6 As we will see, both texts also integrate anxieties about animal assimilation—which have a particular resonance for women in many respects. In his chapter entitled “Maintaining the Boundaries,” Keith Thomas explores the anxieties about “any form of behavior which threaten[s] to transgress the fragile boundaries between man and the animal creation” (Thomas 38); according to Thomas, notions like “bestiality” or “animality,” pointing to the animal’s lack of restraint, ferocity and savage impulses, are in fact man’s projections of his own dark impulses on the animal: Men attributed to animals the natural impulses they most feared in themselves— ferocity, gluttony, sexuality—even though it was men, not beasts, who made war on their own species, ate more than was good for them and were sexually active all the year round. It was as a comment on human nature that the concept of ‘animality’ was devised. (Thomas 40-41)

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7 As pure “Angels in the House” in Victorian sentimental culture, women supposedly rose above the bestiality of men, and elevated their male counterparts to higher levels of virtue. Judith Fetterley suggests that Like Lydia Sigourney’s ‘The Father’ and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Pearl of Orr’s Island, ‘Circumstance’ dramatizes the nineteenth-century conviction that men, despite their lower nature, have a spiritual component that responds to women and by means of which women can tame their beast and raise them to a higher level. (Fetterley 266)

8 In “Circumstance” as in the poems by Emily Dickinson, the female character or speaker is able to work with and even tone down the animal’s “bestiality” and make the feline less harmful, less savage, if not harmless. The association made by Higginson between caring for children and caring for pets is apparent in Spofford’s short story, in which the “Indian Devil” is soothed, like a baby, by the woman’s song: “she had heard that music charmed wild beasts … and when she opened her lips the third time, it was not for shrieking, but for singing. A little thread of melody stole out, a rill of tremulous motion; it was the cradle-song with which she rocked her baby” (158).

9 Despite the terror he generates, the “Indian Devil” behaves overall like an overgrown kitten: a wild feline would go directly for the kill and then consume its prey, but the well-fed domesticated cat usually plays with the mice it catches before eating them— like the “Indian Devil” does in the short story. The fact that the beast does not immediately tear her flesh to shreds but toys with her points to its perversity— emphasized by the use of the adverb “sagaciously” to refer to the movement of its claws—but also to its kinship with domestic cats. Like the pet cat, the puma kneads its paws (“he worried them sagaciously a little,” “fretted the imprisoned claws,” 159)—a movement that is usually accompanied by purring, and that reveals the animal’s comfort and satisfaction before finding a suitable spot and position to rest in—which the puma finally does, “lay[ing] the disengaged paw across her with heavy satisfaction” (160). Like the domestic cat, the “Indian Devil” sharpens its claws on the bark of a tree: “the creature who grasped her uncurled his paw and scratched the bark from the bough” (160). The cat’s rough licking of the woman’s arm and face can also recall the actions of a mother cat with her kitten, and the movement of its head and facial expression at times are extremely reminiscent of a cat (“he fawned his fearful head upon her,” 163, “he half closed his eyes, and sleepily reopened and shut them again,” 162) or a dog (“the beast made a sluggish movement,—stretched and fawned like one awakening,—then, as if he would have yet more of the enchantment, stirred her slightly with his muzzle,” 171) with its mistress. The understanding and anticipation of the puma’s behavior displayed by the female character is enabled by the beast’s comparison to a pet: since women are naturally sympathetic to animals and affectionate to their pets, the female character in “Circumstance” seems to understand naturally, despite her terror and disgust, how the beast’s mind works, and how to offer it something it will like (the song) to get what she wants from the puma. Her survival is due to her ethological skills, her understanding of the beast, and her capacity to tame it: the woman’s natural capacity to understand how to interact with the animal and the construction of the puma’s behavior modeled on the behavior of domesticated pets echo the relations to animals in nineteenth-century sentimental culture and the representations of women as naturally connected—emotionally and instinctively—to the animal world. If women were naturally sympathetic to “innocent” animals, they were also more likely to naturally empathize with the suffering slave—as Fielder has

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shown in her study of animal comparisons in the abolitionist discourse. Indeed, as Fielder reminds us in her analysis of Mrs. Bird’s defense of the kitten and Eliza in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, antislavery and animal welfare movements were connected in nineteenth- century America (Fielder 494).

10 In Dickinson’s poem “A Dying tiger – moaned for drink”, the speaker is less in danger in front of the feline, because the tiger is dying, and therefore relatively innocuous: A Dying Tiger – moaned for Drink – I hunted all the Sand – I caught the Dripping of a Rock And bore it in my Hand –

His mighty Balls – in death were thick – But searching – I could see A Vision on the Retina Of Water – and of me –

‘Twas not my blame – who sped too slow – ‘Twas not his blame – who died While I was reaching him – But ‘twas – the fact that He was dead – (F529)

11 Like Spofford in “Circumstance,” Dickinson uses the pronoun “he” while referring to the tiger, not “it,” another sign of the humanization of the animal. Here the female speaker shows Christian mercy to the tiger by attempting to bring him water in his final moments (“I hunted all the Sand – / I caught the Dripping of a Rock / And bore it in my Hand”); the speaker “hunt[s]” not the tiger, but the water that can save him. We get a fleeting glimpse of a possible tragic outcome for the female speaker, the hunter- turned-prey, in the “Vision on the Retina / Of Water – and of me” of the tiger, when the two edible objects, the woman and the water, are reflected in his death-glazed eyes. The affinity between the female speaker and the wild feline is here emphasized by the specular inversion: in this respect, the use of the terms “A vision on the retina” is extremely accurate scientifically, and operates a shift in the perspective, where the animal and the woman are no longer two, but one and the same. Dickinson was very interested in science and, having herself suffered from a debilitating eye condition (Sewall xxiv ), probably knew a lot about eye pathologies and how the human eye works. Here Dickinson correctly locates the site of vision in the retina, which is the rear part of the eye, the one which is connected to neurons and which transmits the received information to the brain. The fact that the image is received by the retina is interesting in this sense, because the cornea and lens send an inverted image to the retina, which then processes the information. Here the vision of herself in the tiger’s retina therefore enacts this specular inversion. The speaker does not merely see herself through the tiger’s eyes but sees herself in the tiger, within the beast. We can therefore wonder if what the speaker “searches” (“searching – I could see,” l. 6) in the depths of the tiger’s eyes is not ultimately herself. Imbued by nineteenth-century discourses on the natural affinity between women and the animal world, the woman writer questions her legitimacy to claim an identification with culture rather than nature, to challenge the patriarchal dichotomy (man-culture / woman-nature), in her complex identification with and dissociation from the animal. As Anne Dalke has shown in her article “‘Circumstance’ and the Creative Woman: Harriet Prescott Spofford,” the

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woman acknowledges her kinship to the beast, and “rises above” this base condition through the act of artistic creation: Walking on the edge of the woods, at the edge of evening, this young woman slips over the margin and encounters her own worst self in the forest. She fights in the dark woods not something other, but her own lower nature .… The protagonist of Spofford’s story succeeds in subduing that lower self, by rising above it. Much is made of the fetid smell of the breath of the beast, but this young woman makes more of her own exhalations. She puts down the base self by developing, suddenly, on penalty of death, the higher one: she becomes imaginative, creative. (Dalke 76-77)

12 In Spofford’s and Dickinson’s writings, the feline is an alter ego of the woman writer as well as the image of an abject “other” the woman writer acknowledges is like her but wishes he was not so much like her, in an ambiguous dynamics of identification which reflects the patriarchal injunctions that the woman writer had to grapple with, as well as the complexity of the protean dimension of the figure of the female creator—part- monster, part-creator.

2. “I knew a Bird that would sing as firm in the center of Dissolution, as in its Father’s nest – ”8: The Woman Writer Singing from the “center of Dissolution”

13 As Anne Dalke delineates, comparing “Circumstance” to Kate Chopin’s “Désirée’s Baby,” Spofford’s short story is “a tale about the uncertain margins of existence” (Dalke 74), and the liminal setting—the forest—is, just like in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream or As You Like It, a world on the edge of rational, patriarchal society where all the inversions and subversions become possible for the female protagonist. Dalke adds that time is liminal as well in “Circumstance” (“it is set, as well, at a marginal time,” Dalke 75), in the late hours of the day, between daylight and sunset, “on the edge of the evening” (Spofford 156). In Emily Dickinson’s poem “A Dying Tiger – moaned for Drink”, the space where the speaker evolves is also a limbic space, some sort of desert—which could be in Africa, Asia, or the deserts and wilderness of the American Frontier—as we can picture from the reference to the “sand” (l. 2) and the “rock” (l. 3). The following poem featuring a tiger also unfolds in a limbic, imaginary space, between the sea (l. 1), the “lonely Valleys” (l. 3) and some exotic, foreign place (“Dates and Cocoa,” l. 11, “Domingo,” l. 15): As the Starved Maelstrom laps the Navies As the Vulture teased Forces the Broods in lonely Valleys As the Tiger eased

By but a Crumb of Blood, fasts Scarlet Till he meet a Man Dainty adorned with Veins and Tissues And partakes – his Tongue

Cooled by the Morsel for a moment Grows a fiercer thing Till he esteem his Dates and Cocoa A Nutrition mean

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I of a finer Famine Deem my Supper dry For but a Berry of Domingo And a Torrid Eye. (F1064)

14 The reference to these exotic, limbic spaces “exoticizes” the feline and emphasizes the racial conflation, by associating the beast with Africa, the Caribbean and Asia. “As the Starved Maelstrom laps the Navies” associates the figure of the feline with the themes of want and starvation, with the delayed satisfaction of appetite, and with the violence of the frustration experienced by both the speaker and the feline. The speaker’s appetite and the feline’s are closely connected throughout the poem (via the use of “as” repeated three times in the first stanza and the comparative “finer” in the last one), but although the speaker claims that, as in Spofford’s short story, she rises above the low impulses of the beast, the satisfaction of her hunger will be as violent as the tiger’s. The reference to a “Crumb of Blood,” conveying the image of coagulated, solidified blood, associates blood with bread, the tiger’s nourishment with the human speaker’s. Just as we can anticipate the bloodbath that will ensue when the tiger digs his teeth into the “dainty” assemblage of delicate “veins and tissues” of the skinned body of the “man”, we can picture the red juice on the speaker’s lips when she bites into the “Berry of Domingo.” The image of the “Torrid Eye” animalizes the speaker, the “torrid I,” whose lustful eyes burn with unsatisfied desire, like the tiger’s. The tiger’s—and the speaker’s—vision undresses and skins the human prey, since the poem offers us the vision of a skinned body, “Dainty adorned with veins and tissues.” In Spofford’s “Circumstance,” the “Indian Devil”—like the tiger in this poem9—exercises a certain degree of restraint, since he does not devour his prey right away, like any predator would. In fact, he does not seem that interested in eating the woman, and seems to derive from the encounter an affective and almost artistic satisfaction rather than the satisfaction of pure hunger: It might be that he was not greatly famished; for, as she suddenly flung up her voice again, he settled himself composedly on the bough, still clasping her with invincible pressure to his rough, ravenous breast, and listening in a fascination to the sad, strange U-la-lu that now moaned forth in loud, hollow tones above him. He half closed his eyes, and sleepily reopened and shut them again. (161-162)

15 The feline seems “ravenous” for the song rather than for the woman’s flesh. In fact, the flesh eating occurs only in the woman’s imagination: What rending pains were close at hand! Death! and what a death! worse than any other that is to be named! …. No gnawing disease can bring such hideous end as this; for that is a fiend bred of your own flesh, and this—is it a fiend, this living lump of appetites? What dread comes with the thought of perishing in flames! but fire, let it leap and hiss never so hotly, is something too remote, too alien, to inspire us with such loathly horror as a wild beast; if it have a life, that life is too utterly beyond our comprehension. Fire is not half ourselves; as it devours, arouses neither hatred nor disgust; is not to be known by the strength of our lower natures let loose; does not drip our blood into our faces from foaming chaps, nor mouth nor slaver above us with vitality. Let us be ended by fire, and we are ashes, for the winds to bear, the leaves to cover; let us be ended by wild beasts, and the base, cursed thing howls with us forever through the forest. (162)

16 In Dickinson’s poem, the act of tearing the human flesh apart is also imagined through the speaker’s consciousness, and not actually done by the animal. This capacity for empathy with the beast and the importance given to the sensual pleasure experienced by the animal overshadows the pain of the human body which will be torn apart and

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eaten. The desire of the feline and that of the female speaker are superposed. In Spofford’s text, the narrator insists on the beast’s sensual enjoyment of the songs, and the sensual pleasure he would derive from eating her—conveyed through the insistence on the beast’s salivating mouth, or salivating gaze: “the beast threw back his head so that the diabolical face fronted hers, and the torrent of his breath prepared her for his feast as the anaconda slimes his prey” (160). There is a form of consummation by proxy, of delayed satisfaction, of longing whetted by restraint and self-inflicted frustration in this projection of the beast’s sensuality, which seems to me quite similar to the shared experience of frustration in Dickinson’s “tiger” poems. In Dickinson’s poem, the “finer famine” of the lyric self is appeased by a poetic feast rather than by actual food contrary to the tiger, but both experience a common “torrid” longing. The wilderness’s liminality and transformative powers enable the woman to revert to a form of limbic psychological topography. She recognizes her animal instincts, the base animality she has evolved from but which she acknowledges all the same as her point of origin. In that sense, the woman writer’s representation of the racialized feline echoes the discourse of nineteenth-century taxonomies, and establishes a filiation which asserts both an evolution from and a kinship with other races and species.

17 In the opening stanzas of this poem, the dialectic of starvation and consumption is again articulated through the comparison with the feline: It would have starved a Gnat – To live so small as I – And yet I was a living Child – With Food’s necessity

Upon me – like a Claw – I could no more remove Than I could coax a Leech away – Or make a Dragon – move – (F444)

18 Here the feline is represented metonymically through the “claw” restricting the speaker. The association of the feline with a blood-sucking leech or a dragon is reminiscent of Spofford’s “fabulous flying-dragon,” as is the position of the claw “upon” the self, preventing her from moving, which reminds us of the positioning of the Indian Devil’s paw “across” the woman (160). The composite figure of the feline (cat, tiger, dragon, serpent) functions as a metaphor for the basest impulses of any living being (eating, drinking), which restricts the speaker and prevents her from achieving a state of complete liberation from the body’s necessities. The speaker, just like in the previous poem, proclaims an ascetic refusal of greed (or even the simple satisfaction of hunger) and longs for a life free from “food’s necessity,” for spiritual or literary nourishment perhaps, and in any case for metaphorical nourishment that would remove her from her “lower self,” from base animal instincts; but she still has to eat … The speaker is powerless in front of her own animal instincts: no “coaxing” will stop the “leech,” “dragon,” or feline of hunger from sinking its fangs into her being and thoroughly possessing her.

19 The image of the “Maelstrom” used in the first poem also appears in “Twas like a Maelstrom, with a notch” (F425), which Maryanne Garbowsky compellingly connects with Harriet Prescott Spofford’s “Circumstance”: in this poem such as in “As the Starved Maelstrom laps the Navies,” the “Maelstrom” is a vortex, a whirlpool that threatens to absorb the female figure, which we can read as the threat of the animal

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regression which will reassimilate the woman into nature and cut her off completely from culture and civilization. A “Maelstrom” also signifies a jumble, a confusion of feelings. In Spofford’s text as in Dickinson’s poems, the female voices are definitely entangled in contradictions, between complying with a sentimental culture in which women are more naturally sympathetic to the weakest (animals, children, and, since they were often animalized in nineteenth-century discourse, people of color) and the reluctance to be assimilated to beings they deem inferior, which threatens to sever their ties to culture and might lead them to be reintegrated into nature. In this literary maelstrom, issues like gender, anxieties about authorship and assimilation with nature, as well as racial anxieties are intricately entangled. In both women writers’ works, the feline is associated with racial otherness. This is very obvious in the use of the name “Indian Devil” in Spofford’s “Circumstance” to designate what is most likely a puma, and in Dickinson’s “As the Starved Maelstrom laps the Navies,” the representation of the tiger and the image of the “Berry of Domingo” in the last stanza are clearly laden with racial meaning. As Cristanne Miller has argued in Reading in Time, Emily Dickinson in the Nineteenth Century, Dickinson frequently uses the term “berry” to refer to African- Americans (see Miller 13-17). In her reading of this poem, Eliza Richards points out the ambiguity of the image of the suffering tiger, which elicits both sympathy and a desire to differentiate herself from him on the part of the speaker. If, according to Richards, the tiger symbolizes “African-American rage” (Richards 171-174) as well as the suffering of slaves, the ambiguity of the white speaker is evident: as in the case of the poems featuring felines or Spofford’s “Circumstance,” the racialized feline is both an object of compassion and of fear. In Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium- Eater, the famous “Malay” that unexpectedly shows up at the protagonist’s house is compared to a “tiger-cat,” in another conflation of the feline species (De Quincey 56). In this poem by Emily Dickinson, the figure of the “Malay” and the dynamics of reversibility at work in the poem are very reminiscent of Dickinson’s “tiger” poems: The Malay – took the Pearl – Not – I – the Earl – I – feared the Sea – too much Unsanctified – to touch –

Praying that I might be Worthy – the Destiny – The Swarthy fellow swam – And bore my Jewel – Home –

Home to the Hut! What lot Had I – the Jewel – got – Borne on a Dusky Breast – I had not deemed a Vest Of Amber – fit –

The Negro never knew I – wooed it – too – To gain, or be undone – Alike to Him – One – (F451)

20 Like the Indian Devil in Spofford’s short story, the Malay’s behavior in Dickinson’s poem is predatory: the Malay “takes” the “Pearl” away to its den (“The Swarthy fellow swam – And bore my Jewel – Home”), while the white speaker, identified as an “Earl” in the second line, watches, unable to intervene. The object of desire is the same for the

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white speaker and the dark other, who both want to possess the “Pearl,” the white woman. This common desire is comparable to the community of desire in the “tiger” poems, as is the ambiguity in the identification with the “other”—be it animal or human. Indeed, the white speaker opposes his nobility and restraint (l. 2-4) to the dark other’s brutal actions: while the Malay is deemed “[un]fit” (l. 12-13) to possess the precious “Jewel” and is feared by the speaker, the latter also seems to long for his capacity for action and fearlessness. For the reader, this association between animals and dark others in Spofford and Dickinson’s works is disturbing, since it echoes contemporary racist discourses equating African-Americans to animals and presenting them as beasts incapable of intellect or restraint—especially when white women are involved. This animal association is also to be read in the light of nineteenth-century sentimental discourse, in which African-American slaves, who are treated like animals and denied any humanity by the white masters who torture them, are the object of Christian sympathy in Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the abolitionist literary production issued in the wake of Stowe’s famous novel. In this configuration, white women are both the victims of choice of the beastly dark other as well as those who can best empathize with them because of their natural propensity to sympathize and care for the weakest (children, oppressed people and animals), being part of “the weaker sex” themselves.

21 What is striking in both women’s works is the way these authors negotiate these contemporary discourses while managing somehow to challenge the domination of white masculinity. In Emily Dickinson’s “The Malay – took the Pearl,” white masculinity literally pales in comparison to the dark other’s capacity for action and fearlessness. Another way that white masculinity is undermined in this poem is through what Páraic Finnerty characterizes as “cross-dressing.” In his analysis of this poem, Finnerty states that “Dickinson’s Earl is a gender-blurring speaker rather than a silent authoritative male” (Finnerty 81), and he adds that such cross-dressing “reflect[s] Dickinson’s need as a woman who conformed to her culture’s ideals of femininity and was almost ‘parodically female10’ to unsettle and obscure, in her poems, nineteenth-century gender arrangements” (Finnerty 66). As Judith Fetterley notes, traditional gender roles are also unsettled in Spofford’s “Circumstance”: much of the strength of ‘Circumstance’ derives from Spofford’s success in finding a mechanism for presenting a woman outside the home. As if to emphasize her strategy, Spofford presents in detail her protagonist’s visions of her husband, safe at home, tending the hearth, soothing the child. He, not she, is domestic, and she, not he, is out in the world, exposed to the hard fact of real danger. (Fetterley 265)

22 Both women writers therefore create subversive female figures, grappling not only with wild felines but with multiple patriarchal snares. Spofford’s and Dickinson’s construction of the wild feline is enmeshed in nineteenth-century discourses of white male domination, in which women, children, people of color and animals are all subjected to white masculinity. In this context, the racialized feline is, for the female self struggling to find her voice amidst the maelstrom, both a figure of abjection and an indissociable alter ego—a construction that echoes what Toni Morrison delineates in her seminal essay Playing in the Dark, Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. According to Morrison, For the settlers and for American writers generally, this Africanist other became the means of thinking about body, mind, chaos, kindness, and love; provided the occasion for exercises in the absence of restraint, the presence of restraint, the

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contemplation of freedom and of aggression; permitted opportunities for the exploration of ethics and morality, for meeting the obligations of the social contract, for bearing the cross of religion and following out the ramifications of power. (47-48)

23 “Malay,” “Negro,” “Indian Devil,” the racialized feline functions like Morrison’s Africanist other, as a projection of the woman writer’s darkest instincts and fears— sexuality, freedom from the considerable restraints weighing on women, sexual and racial anxieties, etc. It is particularly obvious in both women’s works that the feline provides, in Morrison’s words, “the occasion for exercises in the absence of restraint, the presence of restraint.” A reading of both texts as echoing the abolitionist debate— as Michael Grimwood has done in his article on “Circumstance”11—is of course perfectly germane, but when focusing on the role and symbolism of the feline alter ego in both women’s texts, the way these two female writers grapple with structures of domination appears infinitely more complex. As well-to-do white women, Dickinson and Spofford were themselves part of the dominant caste. In Dickinson’s “tiger” poems as well as in Spofford’s “Circumstance,” the figure of the feline crystallizes the ambiguity of the women’s position in struggles challenging white male domination, between a natural affinity with the dominated, suffering ones, and deep anxieties about being reassimilated into nature and losing the privilege of the affiliation to culture. In a letter written to Mrs. Holland in 1881, Dickinson refers to “a Bird that would sing as firm in the center of Dissolution, as in its Father’s nest – Phenix, or the Robin”; it appears that both Spofford’s and Dickinson’s female voices sing from this nest of patriarchal snares, from the maelstrom, from the “center of dissolution,” thus showcasing the complexity, elusiveness and protean capacity of identification of female voices in the nineteenth- century American literary landscape.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Bennett, Paula. “‘Pomegranate-Flowers’: The Phantasmic Productions of Late-Nineteenth- Century Anglo-American Women Poets.” Solitary Pleasures: The Historical, Literary, and Artistic Discourses of Autoeroticism. Eds. Paula Bennett and Vernon A. Rosario. New York: Routledge, 1995. 189-213.

Berger, John. Why Look at Animals? London: Penguin, 2009.

Birke, Lynda. “Supporting the Underdog: Feminism, Animal Rights and Citizenship in the Work of Alice Morgan Wright and Edith Goode.” Women’s History Review 9.4 (2000): 693-719.

Boyd, Anne E. “What! Has she got into the Atlantic? Women Writers, the Atlantic Monthly, and the Formation of the American Canon.” American Studies 39.3 (1998): 5-36.

Dalke, Anne. “‘Circumstance’ and the Creative Woman: Harriet Prescott Spofford.” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 41.1 (1985): 71-85.

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De Quincey, Thomas. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 1998.

Dickinson, Emily. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. Ralph W. Franklin. Variorum Edition. 3 volumes. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1998.

---. The Letters of Emily Dickinson. Eds. Thomas H. Johnson and Theodora Ward. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1958.

Ellis, R. J. “‘Latent Color’ and ‘Exaggerated Snow’: Whiteness and Race in Harriet Prescott Spofford’s ‘The Amber Gods’.” Journal of American Studies 40.2 (2006): 257-82.

Fetterley, Judith. “Harriet Prescott Spofford, Circumstance.” Provisions, A Reader from 19th- Century American Women. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985. 261-278.

Fielder, Brigitte Nicole. “Animal Humanism: Race, Species, and Affective Kinship in Nineteenth- Century Abolitionism.” American Quarterly 65.3 (2013): 487-514.

Finnerty, Páraic. ““No Matter – now – Sweet – But when I’m Earl”: Dickinson’s Shakespearean Cross-Dressing.” The Emily Dickinson Journal 7.2 (1998): 65-94.

Folsom, Ed, and Kenneth M. Price. “Emily Dickinson, Slavery, and the San Domingo Moment.” University of Nebraska-Lincoln. http://www.unl.edu/Price/dickinson/

Garbowsky, Maryanne M. “A Maternal Muse for Emily Dickinson.” Dickinson Studies: Emily Dickinson (1830-86), U.S. Poet 41 (1981): 12-17.

Gaul, Theresa Strouth. “Captivity, Childbirth, and the Civil War in Harriet Prescott Spofford’s ‘Circumstance.’” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 19.1 (2002): 35-43.

Gilbert, Sandra M., and Gubar, Susan. The Madwoman in the Attic, The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2000 [1979].

Glenney-Boggs, Colleen. “Animals and the Formation of Liberal Subjectivity in Nineteenth- Century American Literature.” The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Ed. Ruth Castronovo. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012: 197-216.

Grimwood, Michael. “‘Circumstance’ in 1860.” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 58.4 (2012): 447-492.

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth. “Women and Men: Children and Animals.” Harper’s New Monthly, July 1887.

Holly, Carol. “‘Grand and Sweet Methodist Hymns’: Spiritual Transformation and Imperialistic Vision in Harriet Prescott Spofford’s ‘Circumstance.’” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 18.2 (2001): 153-166.

Ingold, Tim. What Is An Animal? London: Unwin Hyman, 1988.

Kenyon-Jones, Christine. Kindred Brutes: Animals in Romantic-Period Writing. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001.

Marshall, Ian. “Literal and Metaphoric Harmony with Nature: Ecofeminism and Harriet Prescott Spofford’s ‘Circumstance.’” Modern Language Studies 23.2 (1993): 48-58.

McAbee, Leslie. “Through the Tiger’s Eye: Constructing Animal Exoticism in Emily Dickinson’s ‘Big Cat’ Poems.” The Emily Dickinson Journal 26.1 (2017): 1-26.

Miller, Cristanne. Reading in Time, Emily Dickinson in the Nineteenth Century. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2012.

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Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark, Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.

Noske, Barbara. Humans and Other Animals: Beyond the Boundaries of Anthropology. London: Pluto Press, 1989.

Richards, Eliza. “‘How News Must feel When Travelling’: Dickinson and Civil War Media.” Companion to Emily Dickinson’s Poetry. Eds. M. N. Smith & M. Loeffelholz. London: Blackwell, 2007. 157-79.

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Sewall, Richard. The Life of Emily Dickinson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1974.

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Spengler, Birgit. “Gendered Vision(s) in the Short Fiction of Harriet Prescott Spofford.” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 21.1 (2004): 68-73.

Spofford, Harriet Elizabeth (Prescott). “Circumstance.” The Amber Gods and Other Stories. Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1969 [1863]. 153-172.

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NOTES

1. Susan Dickinson’s “Harriet Prescott’s Early Work” was addressed to the editor of The Republican in January 1903 and is available on the Dickinson electronic archives: http:// archive.emilydickinson.org/susan/tshdcpb31.html 2. Marianne Garbowsky also makes this distinction when she specifies “it was the spectre of the Indian Devil which took hold of Dickinson’s imagination and ‘followed’ her ‘in the Dark’” and that “the beast must have terrorized Emily Dickinson, lingering in her psyche for months, roaming freely through her imagination” (Garbowsky 13). 3. As we can see in the series of examples of female monstrosity compiled by Gilbert and Gubar, the female monster—from Thackeray to Spenser—often combines the characteristics of snakes, felines and dragons, thus becoming a slithering, ferocious and treacherous creature endowed with fangs and claws (Gilbert and Gubar 29-36). 4. Dickinson’s performance of the bashful, timid and “half-cracked poetess,” as Higginson used to call her, was not enough however to make him forget the unpublishability of her “spasmodic gait” (L265). 5. In this respect, T. W. Higginson is an important figure: as both women’s “mentor,” he gave them advice and was influential in the publication of their work, often shaping them to what he perceived was appropriately publishable—especially in the case of Dickinson. 6. Keith Thomas notes that “in her Jubilee address of 1887 Queen Victoria would comment that ‘among other marks of the spread of enlightenment amongst my subjects’ she had noticed in particular, ‘with real pleasure, the growth of more humane feelings towards the lower animals’” (Thomas 149-150). 7. As Lynda Birke delineates in her article “Supporting the Underdog: Feminism, Animal Rights and Citizenship in the Work of Alice Morgan Wright and Edith Goode,” women were particularly active in the defense of animal rights in the nineteenth century, since “women and non-human

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animals [were] seen as similarly subject to interconnected systems of domination, which posit both women and animals as inferior” (Birke 693). 8. L685 to Mrs. Holland, January 1881. 9. In her study of this poem in her article “Through the Tiger’s Eye: Constructing Animal Exoticism in Emily Dickinson’s ‘Big Cat’ Poems,” Leslie McAbee highlights the “gentlemanly” behavior of the tiger in Dickinson’s poem: “this anthropomorphized Tiger is also a gentleman of refined etiquette who recognizes the aesthetic beauty of his supper so ‘Dainty adorned.’ He savors and contemplates his meal when he ‘partakes – his Tongue’ with protracted satisfaction and ‘esteems’ his food choices with thoughtful deliberation in spite of his fevered addiction” (McAbee 13). 10. The quote is from Sandra M. Gilbert, “The American Sexual Poetics of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson,” Reconstructing American Literary History (ed. Sacvan Bercovitch, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1986), 123-154. 11. In this article, Grimwood explains that when Spofford wrote her short story, slavery was perceived as a dragon, as a serpent ensnaring the south (Grimwood 472), which accounts for the dynamics of entrapment, of ensnaring in the two women’s texts. He adds that when reading the short story, Emily Dickinson would certainly have recognized the racial dimension in Spofford’s discourse (479-481).

ABSTRACTS

This paper focuses on the role of the feline in Harriet Prescott Spofford’s short story “Circumstance” and three poems by Emily Dickinson (F529, F444, and F1064). In these texts, the feline becomes an alter ego for the woman writer, leading her to reflect upon her status as a female artist in the nineteenth century in connection to the sentimental culture of the time and to issues such as race, violence and power. At once me and not-me, the feline is racialized in the two writers’ works, and its function is akin to that of the “Africanist other” as defined by Toni Morrison in Playing in the Dark, Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. When the female self is in the claws of the feline, or compared to the feline, she grapples with multiple snares as her voice is entangled within the contradictory impulses she strives to negotiate. Singing from this nest of snares, the female voice that we hear in these texts showcases the complexity, elusiveness and protean capacity of identification of female writers in the nineteenth-century American literary landscape.

INDEX

Keywords: Emily Dickinson, Harriet Prescott Spofford, felines, race, violence, power, American nineteenth-century sentimental culture

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AUTHOR

ADELINE CHEVRIER-BOSSEAU Adeline Chevrier-Bosseau is Associate Professor of American literature and Dance studies at the University of Clermont-Auvergne. She has published several articles examining the influence of Shakespearean theatricality on Emily Dickinson’s poetry in French journals such as Transatlantica or Représentations, and in collective works such as Thy Truth Then Be Thy Dowry, Questions of Inheritance in American Women’s Literature (ed. Stéphanie Durrans, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014). Her book, Emily Dickinson du côté de Shakespeare: modalités théâtrales du lyrisme, is forthcoming at the Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal (2020). Her current research focuses on the dialogue between American literature and dance, and she has recently published several papers on the place of dance in the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman.

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Dissolving Boundaries: Fluidity, Metamorphoses, and Queer Undercurrents

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Specular Metamorphoses: Harriet Prescott Spofford’s “The Ray of Displacement”

Asunción López-Varela

For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. And now stays faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity. (1 Corinthians 13: 12-13, emphasis added)

1 Starting in the eighteenth century, the impact of empiricism in the Western world caused scientific pursuits to be directed towards rational and mechanist analyses of nature, disregarding organicist approaches to the natural world. Somewhat paradoxically, emerging studies such as phrenology and animal magnetism (mesmerism) received an impulse which was at odds with this empiricist orientation, and the nineteenth century saw a resurgence of esotericism, mysticism, alternative religions, as well as a belief in magic, themes that continued to enter twentieth-century modernity (see Winter). Electricity inspired stories such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus (1818) in the first half of the century; in the second half, electromagnetic discoveries advanced the atomization of reality and the materialization of non-visible phenomena, stirring both great desires and profound anxieties regarding the paranormal. In the 1880s and 90s, the development of photography and cinematography, based on lenses and other optical instruments incorporated new inquiries.

2 The complicated relationship between technology and the supernatural is evident in the works of Harriet Prescott Spofford (1835-1921), one of the United States’ most widely-published authors who deserves to be rescued as one of the pioneers of science fiction. I shall concentrate on her 1903 short story “The Ray of Displacement” which features two important symbolic tools: the optic (crystal) element, a diamond which belongs to the protagonist’s acquaintance Judge Brant, and a depolarizing ray gun, with which the scientist-protagonist accidentally transforms the diamond into carbon. Hoping to restore it to its original form, the unnamed scientist sends Brant in search of the police and, in the meantime, succeeds in reversing the process. The protagonist

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prefers to go to prison rather than reveal his secret experiments, but before being taken away by the police he has a quick chance to polarize himself partially so that he can, at times, become semi-transparent, which allows him to traverse walls. He goes to Brant’s house in order to put the diamond in his pocket, hoping that when he finds it, he will clear him out of prison. But when Judge Brant realizes the possibilities of the secret weapon, ambition blinds him and he maintains his claim that the diamond has disappeared, keeping the scientist in prison in an attempt to blackmail him to secure further riches for himself.

3 This essay begins with a reflection on the impact of technological developments, particularly the role of optic instruments such as lenses and mirror, and their importance in enhancing human perceptual modes and instrumental power. One of the first stories in this regard is that of Archimedes who, using the sun’s reflection, was able to destroy the Roman fleet that was invading Syracuse, thus creating one of the first heat-ray prototypes, similar to the lightning bolts used by the gods of Greek mythology, like Zeus, or the Norse god Thor. The inquiry into the impact of technology and optics which occupies the first part of this paper highlights the importance of speculative science parallel to the advancement of empirical science itself. This will be followed by a section on the relationship between the supernatural and its socio- cultural implications. In particular, it focuses on gender issues through the third protagonist of Spofford’s story. St. Angel is an androgynous, sometimes child-like figure who appears to the protagonist in his prison-cell and opens up the possibility of boundary crossings between the male homosocial world and the ghost-like invisibility of women. But the story does not only invert the angelic rhetoric present in the conception of the “Angel in the house.”1 It also problematizes the role of the angel as a mystic inspirational body, introducing theosophical concerns that focus on the power of sympathy as a fundamental reformist ethos that, as in the case of other fraternities, revolutionized the “public sphere,” to put it in the terms of Jürgen Habermas.2

1. Technological Advance, New Forms of Perception and the Supernatural

4 The rise of science fiction fantasy, a hybrid genre that fuses scientific fact and fiction, has been intimately connected with the emergence of new technologies and information transmitted through multiple coding systems (López-Varela and Sussman). In ancient mythological stories, technologies are both tools and activities that transform social and natural environments, affecting human as well as other species, and thus involving issues of power, communication, ethics, and so on. Very frequently, these technologies and weapons with secret and magic powers are reserved to divinities and a few chosen people.

5 Although literary critics such as Matthew Arnold in The Study of Poetry (1880), or later Northrop Frye in his monumental study on William Blake, enhanced the connection of literary fiction to spiritual and ethical underpinnings, attempts to unveil the complex role of the occult and hermetic forms of knowledge in social change have remained controversial, inevitably situated beyond rational scientific academic research and orthodox methodologies. Indeed, the secret patterns and unifying frameworks that would explain the connections between human life and the cosmos would seem to hide behind the expansion of the Gothic and the fantastic.

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Now when something is revealed to us we see it, and the response to this revelation is not faith in the unseen or hope in Divine promises but vision, seeing face to face after we have been seeing through a glass darkly. Vision is the end of religion, and the destruction of the physical universe is the clearing of our own eyesight. Art, because it affords a systematic training in this kind of vision, is the medium through which religion is revealed. (Frye 51)

6 As seen in the quotation above, the boundaries between the visible and the invisible, the transparent and the opaque, have unveiled the limits between the known and the unknown. Timothy Reiss has demonstrated the impact of discoveries such as the telescope and other optic elements upon the shift from theocentric to anthropocentric views during the Renaissance. However, the connections between magic and the occult, embedded in the perspective of art and fiction as forms of revelation and mediation, and their formulation in terms of optical perspective and Euclidean physics was only brought to public attention with the publication of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking- Glass (1871). Crossing the mirror threshold symbolized a radical alteration for the viewing subject, who became involved in “othering” effects by entering a sort of secret gateway that enabled the transcendence of limits and categories such as youth and adulthood, or life and death, as it happens in Alice’s case (López-Varela). Traversing the looking glass or the magic crystal ball opened the way to alternative spatiotemporal dimensions.

7 With the emergence of psychoanalysis and the development of psychology, there was also much interest in the exploration of psychic states that defied rational positivism, with hidden or repressed stories restoring to public memory aspects of individual and communal beliefs (i.e. Carl Jung’s archetypes) that may have been effaced by too much emphasis on empirical evidence. Thus, to a certain extent, it can be argued that occult movements and secret societies, such as the Theosophical Society, may have played a role in the fin-de-siècle crisis of culture and conscience (Kerr & Crow). In many cases, they enabled the comparative study of religions across a wide spectrum of cultures, providing cross-cultural arguments for connections among world regions (Eliade), reflecting the ideas of a growing secular society as well as challenging scientific materialism. This difficult coexistence of empirical and speculative science has not ceased. From Isaac Newton the alchemist to contemporary Nobel Laureate, Russian Viscount Ilya Romanovich Prigogine, noted for his work on thermodynamics and complex unstable systems as applied to socio-cultural aspects, the connection between the visible and the non-visible remains in the field of speculation.

8 In the 1870s, the expansion of electromagnetic theories and their technological application (i.e. James Clerk Maxwell) provided new explanations for phenomena such as perspective and colour. The idea that a whole spectrum of invisible waves could pass through solid substances and carry information, as it occurred in technologies such as telegraphy, photography, radio or film, drove spiritualists to toy with the idea that the human body was a kind of psycho-electromagnetic receiver and transmitter. Thus, two years before the publication of Spofford’s “The Ray of Displacement,” theosophist Annie Besant and Mahatma C.W. Leadbeater published Thought Forms, which explored colours in connection to emotions and thoughts, defined in Neoplatonic terms as mental projections reflected on the physical world as a ray traversing a mirror.3 The interest in optic instruments such as prisms, mirrors, lenses and conventional glass dates back to Ptolemy’s work. In his Optics, he describes light properties such as reflection, refraction, colour, etc. Lenses and mirrors occupy a prominent place in

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mythologies and superstitions in almost all cultures. Sometimes the reflected image was identified with the spirit/soul of the person (note that vampires do not project reflection on mirrors). In the Golden Bough, Sir James Frazer saw mirrors as both shadows and reflections of the other side, laden with divination powers (the term “divinari” addresses the inquiry into the divine). Mirrors have a prominent position in the Egyptian myth of Osiris, whose pieces are gathered by his sister Isis with the help of a mirror which reflects Horus’ eye—a symbol of clairvoyance and spirituality. Other mythological figures, often female transgressors like the Mesopotamian goddess Lamashtu, or the Greek Lamias, were associated with mirrors as gateways to worlds beyond. Besides the story of Narcissus, in Greek and Roman cultures there are innumerable examples of narratives including mirrors and other reflective surfaces such as lakes. Just to give an example, Plotinus’ Enneads mention how human souls are reflected in Bacchus’ mirror (Dionysus acted as a divine communicant between the living and the dead, a passage facilitated by the unconscious state brought about by wine drinking). Mirrors are frequent in Gothic stories such as those by E.T.A Hoffmann’s The Story of the Lost Reflection (1815), and in the tales of H. P. Lovecraft and of Henry St. Clair Whitehead, both contemporaries of Spofford. In the twenty-first century, Netflix series Black Mirror is also receiving much attention in relation to the use of digital screen technologies to supplant the real in their virtual mirror-images.4 Visual perspective was first discovered by Florentine architect Filippo Brunelleschi by painting directly on a mirror. Leon Battista Alberti expanded the use of these technologies to architecture, sculpture and painting. Curved lenses were also used in the development of the telescope by Galileo Galilei. One of the most important statements on the mirror as an instrument that contributes to visualizing the world occurs in Leonardo Da Vinci’s Trattato della pittura, a collection of articles put together by his disciples around 1542 and published in 1651: “You see upon a flat mirror the representation of things which appear real; Painting is the same …. Both give the idea of something beyond” (216-217, emphasis added).

9 Optical instruments like lenses and mirrors have undoubtedly been at the heart of many technological and artistic advances. Spofford’s contemporaries used them in the construction of machines, such as Nikola Tesla’s particle beam weapon or William Roentgen’s X-rays (see Tesla). The electromagnetic radiation used in these devices allowed light to be bent and reflected in new ways, interacting with matter to obtain several effects (among them its destruction or vaporization) and, through the manipulation of the electromagnetic spectrum, direct the flow of light around objects, like water flowing past a rock in a stream, so that without reflection, the object would become invisible.

10 Indeed, with regard to the topic of invisibility, one of the first allusions can be traced back to Ovid’s Metamorphoses and to Plato’s story about the invisibility ring of King Gyges of Lydia (modern Turkey), who reigned from 716 to 678 BC and is mentioned in Book 2 of the Republic (2.359a–2.360d). The intertext allows Plato to consider whether an intelligent person would have natural ethical inclinations if he did not fear being caught and punished for committing a crime or injustice. This theme is also present in Spofford’s tale. The ring, often magical, symbolizes both the community (as well as marriage) and the emotional agreement that holds its members together, thus providing an image that integrates ethical principles in other spheres of life through the sharing of sympathy and understanding (Ketterer). Ultimately, by depicting the

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Sun and the Moon, the King and the Queen, the Husband and the Wife, the sphere-ring used in alchemy and hermetic creeds represents the blending of masculine intellect and autonomy with feminine sympathy and emotion, providing a radical criticism of the social division between the masculine and the feminine realms, “somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other” (Hawthorne 35-36).5 Such boundary crossings are also present in other secret societies (i.e. Theosophy) and occult philosophies. In spiritualism, for instance, it is believed that the living and the dead have access to one another across the boundary of death.

11 Although rings have often been held to have magical powers that enable invisibility or shape-shifting, as in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, crystals, mirrors and other optical instruments are also used. Before the publication of Spofford’s “The Ray of displacement,” H. G. Wells had serialized The Invisible Man in Pearson’s Magazine between April and December 1897. “The Crystal Egg” was published the same year. Related to the topic of invisibility, other stories inquired into the existence of transparent beings, as in Fitz-James O’Brien’s story “What Was It?” (1857) or Edward Page Mitchell’s “The Crystal Man” (1881). In “The Damned Thing (1893), Ambrose Bierce explored invisibility in relation to the spectrum of human chromatic scale and Besant’s ideas about colours beyond human visual spectrum. H.P. Lovecraft also paid attention to this topic in “The Colour out of Space” (1927).

12 Communication issues between the dimension of the real and other dimensions or worlds can be inferred from the allusions to diverse language machines (telegrams, typewriters, telephones and even a phonographic diary) appearing in these novels (Bell’s telephone and Edison’s phonograph were patented in 1876 and 1877). Marconi’s wireless telegraphy experiments can also be discerned in the desire to connect the voices and spectres that came from the machines, as in Jules Verne’s Le Château des Carpathes (1892). Owen Oliver’s “The Black Shadow” (1903) went beyond invisibility into sub-atomic life forms to fuse electromagnetism with demonic bodysnatching themes, drawing on Tesla’s belief that he was receiving alien messages (Grove). Jack London’s “The Shadow and the Flash” (1906) is yet another example. In many of these works, invisibility is linked to the idea of the existence of alternative dimensions and spatiotemporal folds, as Einstein’s relativity theory also speculated.

13 More interesting for the purpose of this paper are stories of transparent women like Stella (1895), written by mathematician and spiritualist Charles Howard Hinton. Here the protagonists regains her self-image only after achieving financial and social equality, literally becoming a “New Woman” (Grove 141-173). In Wells’ The Invisible Man, invisibility leads to masculine egomania and desires of excessive control. Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published the same year, also explores masculine fears of the “New Woman” and the materialization of the undead, leading to allegorical issues of social control.

2. Engendering the Supernatural

14 There have been important contributions to the re-emergence of supernaturalism in the nineteenth century which trace connections between the Gothic genre and the development of modern psychological fiction. For instance, the work of Rosemary Jackson (1981) explored the fantastic as an interrogation of the real, which she traced

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back to the Enlightenment. Nina Auerbach (1984) concentrated on dichotomies such as the angel/demon, the old maid, and the fallen woman in order to show that fear of these types contributed to the ideal of the dutiful family-bound woman, the “Angel in the House.” In the case of the United States, authors such as Paula Bennett and Vernon A. Rosario explored the “Phantasmic” in American fiction in the nineteenth century, while Lynette Carpenter and Wendy K. Kolmar focused on feminist approaches to ghost stories alongside Dana de George, Marina Warner, and Andrew Weinstock. In spite of this large body of texts, the social function of these stories needs further exploration.

15 One early study on sociocultural aspects of the supernatural is that of Kate Ferguson Ellis who contended that male UK science fiction writers may have been struggling to redefine masculinity in the face of emerging forms of strong femininity. Back in the United States, Melanie Butler Holladay proposed the existence of supernatural marriage plots that peak between 1820 and 1870, the decades between the emergence of the “Angel in the House” and the rise of the “New Woman,” the era during which the genre of domestic fiction also materialized. These domestic angels have often been described figuratively as disembodied spirits, suffering a sort of civil death upon marriage and a subsequent loss of rights and power in favour of their husbands’. Such depictions reinforced moral lessons of submission and self-sacrifice for female readers.

16 However, the emergence of other supernatural figures to depict female characters as rebellious, describing them as devilish and malignant elves or witches, had the purpose of fighting the angel myth. In many fictions written by female authors, particularly after the 1870s, ghostliness serves “as a way station between individualism (the realm of men) and angeldom (the realm of women), suggesting that traversing the boundary between the spheres involves a traumatic crossing over into a different state of being” (Holladay xxi). Both the angel and her devilish counterpart have to make sacrifices. The angel sacrifices her individuality at the cost of her social acceptance, becoming more human. The fallibility (notice the etymology of the word) of the witch, fairy or elf helps retain some humanity and individuality but, like the Satan of Milton’s Paradise Lost, these figures are marginalized and isolated as outcasts.

17 The intense anxiety surrounding discussions on the “Woman Question” and the emergence of a “New Woman,” associated with traditional malevolent supernatural types (i.e. the myths of Isis, Lilith, vampire women and so on) indicated the continued existence of ancient fears concerning woman’s satanic alliances and, at least in the Western world, her responsibility in causing the Biblical Fall. However, the new alliance between hermetic secret societies and scientific knowledge visible in many supernatural plots may have also contributed to the re-evaluation of women’s nature, role and status.

18 In “A Composite Wife,” published in 1894 as part of the collection A Scarlet Poppy and Other Stories, Spofford had already touched upon the theme of women’s invisibility by describing the dead wives of widower Mr. Chipperley as “pallid women” (228), “three ghosts” (229) who “must have lost all identity by this time” (229, 220). Chipperley is interested in the opinionated Honor Humphreys who, defying her parents’ desires, tries to get rid of his unwelcome attentions and pair him with her cousin Marian Marcy, “pale and drab, just like all the women he naturally prefers” (235). Honor, who bears all the attributes of a malicious supernatural being, dressed with a “bewitching knot,” holding “a diamond6 stick-pin” in each hand (223-224), and with “Four great Persian cats [who] haunted her every footstep in the house” (230) is presented as “a

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satanic black fiery thing with fiery eyes” (230). Marian, on the other hand, seems to be the perfect “angel” partner, even if “she knew next to nothing of politics, or theosophy, or music” (230). As Holladay has noted, the supernatural figure of the ghost or the semi-visible figure may represent a desire to metaphorically reclaim the female body and its agency, thus becoming a sort of political discourse.

3. “The Ray of Displacement” and the Blurring of Gender Differences through the Power of Sympathy

19 “The Ray of Displacement” represents another step in the unsettling association of women with the occult and the growth of secret societies, such as the Theosophical Society, which may have had a fundamental impact on the “public sphere.” Spofford offers a hybrid narrative which fuses scientific forms of perceiving transcendence dominated by male consciousness with philanthropy and ethical concerns, typically attributed to the female gender (but also very important in the civil societies and brotherhoods that stood for what today would be called social networking). Spofford’s technological account of invisibility has a very clear purpose: the re-establishment of moral goodness through the substitution of the negative character of Judge Brant by the obscure androgynous figure of St. Angel, who shows itself secretly to the scientist- protagonist while he is unjustly held in prison.

20 Spofford had already written a poem entitled “Two Angels” published in August 1898 in The Temple Journal, a monthly magazine devoted “to the fuller unfoldment of the divinity of humanity.” The poem also shows traces of her theosophical inclinations. Two angels out of darkness born, All unaware of bloom or scathe, Hung on the outer edge of morn,— And one was Doubt, and one was Faith. Doubt spread his gray and mighty plume Beyond the bounds of space and night, And round him depths and gulfs of glooms Swept with an ever-circling flight. But Faith, with eyes that only knew Immeasurable light above, Sprang upward through the quivering blue And rested in the heart of Love. (The Temple Journal 1898: 49)

21 “The Ray of Displacement” uses the figure of the angel, a multifaceted disembodied being described in the story in ambiguous terms. Although angels have no bodies and therefore no biological gender, in Christian belief they are depicted as both masculine and feminine. In Judaism, however, they are often androgynous, blending masculine and feminine traits. In Spofford’s story, the dual alchemic nature of the diamond, which is both bright and carbon-dark and becomes invisible by the manipulation of the protagonist’s technology, parallels the description of the two angels in her poem, also echoing the hermetic tradition present in Milton’s Paradise Lost as well as William Blake’s poem “I Heard an Angel Singing.” The figure of St. Angel is described in ambiguous terms as a male, sometimes with female attributes, and almost human: It was here, practically, he came into my life—alas! that I came into his. In the long nights of darkness and failing faintness, when horror had me by the throat, he was beside me, and his warm, human touch was all that held me while I hung over the abyss. When I swooned off again his hand, his voice, his bending face

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recalled me. ‘Why not let me go, and then an end?’ I sighed. ‘To save you from a great sin,’ he replied. And I clung to his hand with the animal instinct of living.

22 In States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel, Elizabeth Barnes shows how the post-Revolutionary rhetoric of sympathy attempted to “reconcile conservative republican values of duty to others with a liberal agenda of self- possession” (Barnes 12). My argument is that this rhetoric had also a decisive influence on the “public sphere,” propelled, in many cases, by the role of societies, associations and brotherhoods. Holladay has also explored the impact of sympathy on US literature in the second half of the nineteenth century, particularly in the case of supernatural fiction. The power of sympathy contributed “to a sentimental vision of union that eventually becomes the ideal for both men and women” (Barnes 13). I would like to point out that this empowering of society through the virtues of sympathy takes place in the context of emerging civil societies, often secret because of their revolutionary inclinations, that sought to give scientific explanations to transcendent phenomena previously viewed through the prism of religion. As a result, the importance of sympathy became so widespread that it was believed that men should “learn to be more like women” (Barnes xi). This translated into a greater emphasis on male sympathy towards women’s disadvantages, a trend still in force today in the most recent wave of feminism.

23 In Spofford’s text, St. Angel is the catalyst for the power of sympathy in securing the protagonist’s ethical transformation. The unnamed scientist learns to empathize because his guardian angel is described as having suffered himself a similar situation of imprisonment: I learned afterwards that St. Angel had given up the sweetness of life for the sake of his enemy. He had gone to prison, and himself worn the stripes, rather than the woman he loved should know her husband was the criminal. Perhaps he did not reconcile this with his love of inviolate truth. But St. Angel had never felt so much regard for his own soul as for the service of others. Self-forgetfulness was the dominant of all his nature.

24 In the paragraph above, it seems clear that St. Angel had lived a human life before becoming an angel, a “watcher” over humanity. As in the account of Noah’s grandfather, the Book of Enoch, one of the earliest accounts of supernatural phenomena, various angels, sons of the divinity, would have fallen for human women while on earth. Indeed, St. Angel describes himself as unable to reconcile his human love for a woman with “his love of inviolate truth.” However, feminine traits such as his “self-forgetfulness” which “was the dominant of all his nature” create an ambiguity in his description which becomes extended to the plot by means of several events and incidents.

25 As in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the protagonist and St. Angel are enthusiastic about the medical and ethical possibilities behind a discovery that could help to improve the world. The following paragraph brings the protagonist close to Christian imagery with its final allusion: What wonders of energy would follow this ray of displacement. What withdrawal of malignant growth and deteriorating tissue was to come. ‘To what heights of succor for humanity the surgeon can rise with it!’ said St. Angel, as, full of my enthusiasm, I dilated on the marvel. ‘He can work miracles!’ I exclaimed. ‘He can heal the sick, walk on the deep, perhaps—who knows—raise the dead!’

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26 Seeking to perform such miracles, St. Angel convinces the scientist to perfect his discovery. He suggests the exchange of clothes so that the scientist can abandon the cell at night to go to his laboratory. As we mentioned at the beginning of this paper, the scientist had already polarized himself before entering the prison and was able to traverse walls in a semi-transparent state: “You are my size …. We will exchange clothes. I will remain here,” insists the angel.

27 This episode of cross-dressing parallels the shape-shifting and invisibility that takes place under the impact of the Y-ray: I had now found that molecular displacement can be had in various directions. Going further, I saw that gravity acts on bodies whose molecules are on the same plane, and one of the possible results of the application of the Y-ray was the suspension of the laws of gravity. This possibly accounted for an almost inappreciable buoyancy and the power of directing one’s course. My last studies showed that a substance thus treated has the degenerative power of attracting the molecules of any norm into its new orbit—a disastrous possibility. A chair might disappear into a table previously treated by a Y-ray. (emphasis mine)

28 The apparent casual reference to the chair plays an important role at the end of the story when, in the final metamorphosis, St. Angel becomes Brant: “Brant fell back into his chair exhausted, the purple color fading till his face shone fair as a girl’s, sweet and smiling as a child’s, white as the face of a risen spirit” (emphasis mine). Thus, the ghostly lack of materiality that affects anything having been touched by the Y-ray parallels the obscure ambiguous descriptions of St. Angel, and his final transformation into Brant, a description where his face takes the tints of a “girl’s” face. But the story hides other references to clothes and their importance for identity and embodiment. For example, St. Angel convinces the protagonist to speak to Brant once more and explain the situation: “‘At any rate,’ he continued, ‘come out with me now and see the Governor, and see the world and the daylight outdoors, and be a man among men a while!’ With the stipulation that I should return, I put on a man’s clothes again and went out the gates” (emphasis mine).

29 First, the protagonist wants to show St. Angel just how despicable Brant is. “Seeing is believing,” he tells St. Angel, “Sometimes not seeing is the naked truth,” and he goes on to add that “there is no one on earth with eyes to see you but myself.” The strong sympathetic connection between the two, to the point of cross-dressing as shown above, helps protect their self-esteem. Their invisibility serves as a metaphor of their individualism and isolation: “‘Have no fear. You hear me now,’ I said. ‘I am in perhaps the Fourth Dimension. I am invisible to any one not there—to all the world, except, presently, yourself. For now you, you also, pass into the unseen. Tell me what you feel’.” This invisible realm is a magic zone in which the two outcasts can find comfort in one another’s sympathy.

4. Hauntologies: Gender Inquiries beyond the Visible

30 From the above discussion, it might be possible to conclude that the supernatural metaphors that appear in “The Ray of Displacement” are associated with seemingly opposing components: on the one hand, isolation, imprisonment (recalling domesticity) and secrecy, all of which might be a positive aspect for recovering self-possession; on the other hand sympathy which allows others to accept one’s individual self. Both the

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ghost and the protagonist in Spofford’s “The Ray of Displacement” are no longer trapped in a netherworld limbo, alone in their suffering and haunting sense of injustice. Their capacity to sympathize allows them to reach out to the other.

31 When following Judge Brant, the two friends witness the judge’s dubious lifestyle and the negative perception people have about him: “‘The Judge has gone to the races, and he’s left word that Tuesday morning your goods’ll be put out of the house if you don’t pay up!’ The woman went her way weeping.” In particular, the text compares Brant’s dark side to St. Angel’s luminous personality, providing more examples of his compassionate behaviour, as when he slips a dime into the driver’s pocket on their way to the races: “he felt that even the invisible … carried a right.” More eloquent is the following description as the two follow Brant to his club: With more cunning than ability, he had achieved some success in his profession, and he secured admission to a good club, recently crowning his efforts, when most of the influential members were absent, by getting himself made one of its governors. It would be impossible to find a greater contrast to this wretch than in St. Angel — a man of delicate imagination and pure fancy, tender to the child on the street, the fly on the wall; all his atmosphere that of kindness. Gently born, but too finely bred, his physical resistance was so slight that his immunity lay in not being attacked. His clean, fair skin, his brilliant eyes, spoke of health, but the fragility of frame did not speak of strength. Yet St. Angel’s life was the active principle of good; his neighborhood was purification.

32 Structured around the stories of lonely men and their obsessions (science in the case of the protagonist, money, sports and the club in the case of Brant, and a married woman in the case of St. Angel), Spofford’s text reveals how homosocial networks may constitute a barrier to gender integration, a boundary that the author surpasses by introducing the supernatural as a civil realm of almost alchemic completion. The doubling of material and spiritual that takes place in the fusion of the protagonist and the ghost, and eventually in his atomization with Brant himself, may call attention to the liberating blurring of gender differences (all the men in the story are imprisoned in their own ways) and to the disintegration and atomization of pathological social boundaries through Spofford’s hybrid rhetoric.

33 Spofford’s experiment in sympathy turns upon itself when Judge Brant, who stands for the legal system, gradually becomes invisible and is allowed to see what others secretly think about him, which shows that he is also imprisoned in his world. The situation is very similar to Scrooge’s experience in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Brant’s outrage and anger at the expressions of people’s unconscious disapproval increases the effects of the Y-ray on his body, and his shape grows vaguer and vaguer. At the club, he “falls” on an apparently empty seat, where St. Angel is also sitting: He had closed his eyes, and perhaps fallen into a light doze when he must have been waked by the impact of Brant’s powerful frame, as the latter took what seemed to him the empty seat. I expected to see Brant at once flung across the rug by St. Angel’s natural effort in rising. Instead, Brant sank into the chair as into down pillows. I rushed, as quickly as I could, to seize and throw him off, ‘Through him! Pass through him! Come out! Come to me!’ I cried. And people to-day remember that voice out of the air, in the Kings County Club. (emphasis mine)

34 The description of Brant’s “fall” and his subsequent metamorphosis is described as a struggle in which the two bodies become one:

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It seemed to me that I heard a sound, a sob, a whisper, as if one cried with a struggling sigh, ‘Impossible!’ And with that a strange trembling convulsed Judge Brant’s great frame, he lifted his hands, he thrust out his feet, his head fell forward, he groaned gurglingly, shudder after shudder shook him as if every muscle quivered with agony or effort, the big veins started out as if every pulse were a red- hot iron. He was wrestling with something, he knew not what, something as antipathetic to him as white is to black; every nerve was concentrated in rebellion, every fiber struggled to break the spell.

35 Thus, St. Angel takes Brant’s bodily shape and Brant acquires the ghost’s ethical characteristics, imbued with feminine traits. The story ends with St. Angel’s possession of Brant’s masculine body, and with the Judge embodying the ghost’s feminine and sympathetic personality as he engages in a number of philanthropic pursuits in order to improve his lifestyle. The scientist returns to his laboratory and after depolarizing himself, he destroys all vestiges of his work. Then he goes back to his purgatory in the prison where he later receives Brant’s visit who, in “a singular sweet overtone” explains that he has come for reparation. ‘If I did not know who and what you are,’ I said, ‘I should think the soul of St. Angel had possession of you!’ The man looked at me dreamily. ‘Strange!’ he murmured. ‘I seem to have heard something like that before. However,’ as if he shook off a perplexing train of thought, ‘all that is of no consequence. It is not who you are, but what you do’…. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘We will go together. We will carry light into dark places—there are many waiting—’ ‘St. Angel!’ I cried, with a loud voice, ‘are you here?’ And again the smile of infinite sweetness illuminated the face even as the sun shines up from the depths of a stagnant pool. (emphasis mine)

5. Conclusion

36 One could argue that in “The Ray of Displacement” female protagonists are invisible. The women in the story only exist in the minds of their male counterparts. St. Angel’s hauntings are caused by the obsessive memory of a married woman through whom he learns the power of sympathy. And in his solitary confinement, the protagonist’s scientific and ethical concerns are also transformed through the ghost’s sympathetic powers, adding to the myth of the scientist who, by means of technology, wishes to show not only potential for material metamorphosis but also an expression of social, political and ethical change. Ultimately, Judge Brant, who represents the legal establishment, is possessed by the feminized phantom.

37 The emphasis on sympathy suggests the idea of regeneration through a sort of feminized other, but the radical forms of gender alterity and heterodox conceptions that appear in the story go even further. In “The Ray of Displacement,” all three male protagonists seem to coalesce in novel expressions of hermaphrodite manhood, crossing the boundaries between the male homosocial world and the domestic realm of invisible women. Such forms of metamorphoses embody the limitations of gender politics ascribed to the body and dramatize the crisis of masculinity that haunts the text by portraying the masculine desire to possess (someone else’s wife, scientific recognition, money and power, in the case of each of the protagonists), and also be possessed by ideal feminine forms embodied in sweet St. Angel and the invisible unnamed wives.

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38 In her famous correspondence with Thomas Wentworth Higginson, her mentor as well as Spofford’s admirer, Emily Dickinson wrote about “Circumstance,” one of Spofford’s most successful and strange short stories, and mentioned that she read it and that it followed her in the dark [L261]. Spofford’s stories have indeed been described as dark and florid. In 1865 Henry James wrote a famous critique of her novel Azarian in terms of its queer florid poetics, a trend that James contemplated as a dangerous form of writing perhaps voicing a longstanding cultural anxiety about social feminization (Douglas). Indeed, in her chapter on Spofford, Dorri Beam demonstrates how her florid style functions as both figure and theme to create a textual space of transgression and alternative ontologies of gender, emerging “as the seat of expression” (Beam 5, emphasis mine).

39 In “The Ray of Displacement,” florid poetics blends with scientific rhetoric in a hybrid alchemic hermaphrodite narrative that presents an organic scenario of process where the visible becomes invisible and vice versa. The story not only questions gender categories; it also interrogates possible connections between the human realm and non-human dimensions. In endless surreal shape-shifting the diamond is carbon, the table a chair (the seat of expression and possession), the embodied individual a ghost, and the feminine is masculine. The story transforms and deforms, displacing physical space and metaphysical time in a scenario of specular metamorphosis, where the mimetic looking glass becomes a distorted black mirror. In Spofford’s words: “Sometimes not seeing is the naked truth.”

40

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Auerbach, Nina. Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1982.

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Bennett, Paula. “‘Pomegranate Flowers’: The Phantasmic Productions of Late-Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Women Poets.” Solitary Pleasures: The Historical Literary and Artistic Discourses of Autoeroticism. Eds. Paula Bennett and Vernon A. Rosario. New York: Routledge, 1995. 189-213.

Bierce, Ambrose. “The Damned Thing.” Complete Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce. Ed. Ernest Jerome Hopkins. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1970. 97-105.

Braude, Ann. Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989.

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Carpenter, Lynette and Wendy K. Kolmar (Eds.). Haunting the House of Fiction: Feminist Perspectives on Ghost Stories by American Women. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1991.

Da Vinci, Leonardo. Trattato della pittura. Translated by John Francis Rigaud for the Royal Academy of Painting. London, 1835. https://archive.org/details/davincionpainting00leon

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Dickinson, Emily. Letters from Dickinson to Higginson. 25 April 1862. http:// archive.emilydickinson.org/correspondence/higginson/l261.html

Douglas, Ann. The Feminization of American Culture. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977.

Eliade, Mircea. Patterns in Comparative Religion. New York: Sheed & Ward, 1958.

Ellis, Kate Ferguson. The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1989.

Enoch, Jay M. “History of Mirrors Dating Back 8000 Years.” School of Optometry: University of California at Berkeley, 2006. http://journals.lww.com/optvissci/Fulltext/2006/10000/ History_of_Mirrors_Dating_Back_8000_Years.17.aspx

Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1947.

Grove, Allen W. “Röntgen’s Ghosts: Photography, X-Rays and the Victorian Imagination.” Literature and Medicine 16 (1997): 141-173.

Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Trans. Thomas Burger. 1962. Cambridge: MIT, 1989.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. Vol. 1 of The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Eds. William Charvat, Roy Harvey Pearce, and Claude M. Simpson. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1962.

Hinton, C. H. Stella. Scientific Romances. Second Series. London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1895.

Holladay, Melanie Butler. Individualism Possessed: The Supernatural Marriage Plot 1820-1870. Nashville, Tennessee. PhD dissertation. 2006.

Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. New York: Methuen & Co., 1981.

Jacob, Margaret C. Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe. New York: Oxford UP, 1991.

Kerr, Howard, Crowley, John W., and Crow, Charles L. (Eds.). The Haunted Dusk: American Supernatural Fiction, 1820-1920. Athens: The U of Georgia P, 1983.

Kerr, Howard, and Crow, Charles L. (Eds.). The Occult in America: New Historical Perspectives. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1983.

Ketterer, David. “‘Circle of Acquaintance’: Mistress Hibbins and the Hermetic Design of The Scarlet Letter. English Studies in Canada 9.3 (1983): 294-311.

López-Varela Azcárate, Asunción. “El futuro de las narratologías híbridas en Alicia en el país de las maravillas.” 1616: Anuario de la Sociedad Española de Literatura General y Comparada. Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2015. 137-162. http://revistas.usal.es/ index.php/1616_Anuario_Literatura_Comp

López-Varela Azcárate, Asunción and Sussman, Henry (Eds.) Technopoïesis: Transmedia Mythologisation and the Unity of Knowledge. Icono 14 Revista Científica de Comunicación y

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Tecnologías Emergentes 15.1, 2017. https://icono14.net/ojs/index.php/icono14/issue/view/ 15-1-17

Melchior-Bonnet, Sabine. Histoire de miroir. Paris: Imago, 1994.

Mitchell, Edward Page. The Crystal Man. Ed. Sam Moskowitz. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1973.

Prigogine, Ilya and Stengers, Isabelle. La Nouvelle alliance. Métamorphose de la science. Paris: Gallimard, 1979.

---. Order out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature. London: Flamingo, 1984.

Reiss Timothy. Knowledge, Discovery and Imagination in Early Modern Europe: The Rise of Aesthetic Rationalism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997.

Spofford, Harriet Prescott. “A Composite Wife.” A Scarlet Poppy and Other Stories. New York: Garrett Press. The American Short Story Series, Vol. 76, 1894. Reprint 1969.

---. “The Ray of Displacement.” The Ray of Displacement and Other Stories. Project Gutenberg Australia. n.p. http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0606581h.html.

Tesla, Nikola. “Tesla’s Latest Results: He Now Produces Radiographs at a Distance of More than Forty Feet.” The Electrical Review (March 18th, 1896). https://teslaresearch.jimdo.com/articles-interviews/tesla-s-latest-results-he-now-produces- radiographs-at-a-distance-of-more-than-forty-feet-electrical-review-march-18th-1896/

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Warner, Marina. Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: The Clarendon Lectures in English 2001. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002.

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Winter, Alison. Mesmerized: The Power of Mind in Victorian Britain. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998.

NOTES

1. The term is taken from a narrative poem by Coventry Patmore which was first published in 1854 and which became very popular in the United States. 2. In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas sees the public sphere arising from the growing role of the bourgeoisie in critical debate, first in the extended family realm through the gatherings they celebrated in their salons and, later, in the form of communities and societies where discussions on art, education, economics and politics began to articulate the interests of civil society in the form of pamphlets, journals and other publications that served to shape the concept of public opinion and eventually shift social conditions. Many fraternities lodged themselves within the social structure of civil society, and a growing number of liberal top army officers, politicians and influential people became freemasons. This community model, which had expanded during the Middle Ages to religious orders and cavalier warriors, grew among guilds of tradesmen, particularly builders and engineers who, in the absence of welfare measures and trade unions, gathered as professional equals for mutually beneficial purpose and networking. Masonic lodges appeared in several European countries as early as the eleventh century, coinciding with the huge workload of cathedral construction all over Europe. The

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adjective “free” came to be added to the term “mason” in order to emphasize that these workers were not feudally bound. Under the Enlightenment, the principles of Freemasonry entered academic institutions such as the Royal Society as well as the army (Napoleon gave it semi- official status in 1802). Margaret Jacob has also explained that these fraternities, which declared themselves open to all religious beliefs and political views, may have had a very important role in developing the public sphere, which functioned independently from state institutions, becoming a platform for revolution and reform. 3. For a collection of papers that show how the interest in the occult forms a distinctive pattern in the history of the United States, see Howard Kerr and Charles L. Crow. In the same volume, see Mary Farrell Bednarowski’s “Women in Occult America” (177-195). See also Braude. 4. In Histoire de miroir, Sabine Melchior-Bonnet gives a comprehensive account on the history of the mirror. See also Jay Enoch. 5. The “Mystic marriage” metaphor was first elaborated by ascetic scholar Origen of Alexandria, and later by the Franciscan Bernard de Clairvaux. The soul was compared to a bride and the groom of the divine logos, an interpretation that tends to effeminate man’s soul through the power of sympathy. 6. Although the space of this paper does not allow me to explore the importance of jewels, particularly “stones” in Spofford’s stories, I would like to draw attention to their symbolic presence in “In the Cellar” and “The Amber Gods,” among many others.

ABSTRACTS

This paper focuses on Harriet Prescott Spofford’s short story “The Ray of Displacement” which appeared in The Metropolitan Magazine in October 1903. The story deals with a crystal structure and the adventures of an unnamed scientist falsely accused of stealing it. The scientist’s invention of a Y-ray, capable of separating atoms and molecules so that solid bodies can penetrate one another, leads him to the discovery of disembodiment and invisibility. The story indirectly refers to St. Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians where Revelation is shown as a riddle or enigma reflected on a looking glass. Spofford offers a hybrid narrative which fuses philanthropy, ethical concerns, and the power of sympathy, typically attributed to the female gender, with scientific forms of perceiving transcendence dominated by male consciousness. Inverting the angelic rhetoric present in the conception of the “Angel in the house,” Spofford displays a complex story that engenders the supernatural.

INDEX

Keywords: Harriet Prescott Spofford, theosophy, science fiction, the Angel in the House, gender hybridity, the power of sympathy

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AUTHOR

ASUNCIÓN LÓPEZ-VARELA Asunción López-Varela is Associate Professor at the Department of English Studies, Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Her research interests are Comparative Literature, Cultural Studies, as well as Cognitive and Intermedial Semiotics. She coordinates the research program Studies on Intermediality and Intercultural Mediation (SIIM). López-Varela is currently Deputy Head of the Department of English Studies at UCM and member of the Executive Committee of the Association of Alumni of the Real Colegio Complutense at Harvard University and of the Marie Curie Alumni Association MCAA. Between 2017 and 2019, López-Varela was President of the European Society of Comparative Literature. In order to strengthen relations between Europe and Asia, López-Varela coordinates an annual Seminar Series on Cross-cultural dialogue funded by the One Asia Foundation. She is honorary member of the Poetry Award Committee of Beijing Literature and ArtNetwork and editor and a member of the scientific committee of various academic journals.

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Seductive Snakes and Asexual Angels: Queer Undercurrents in Harriet Prescott Spofford’s “Desert Sands”

H.J.E. Champion

1 First published in The Amber Gods and Other Stories in 1863, Harriet Prescott Spofford’s short story “Desert Sands” is narrated by the self-righteous Sydney, an artist in constant search of “greatness.”1 In anticipation of his inevitable great masterpiece, and in confident expectation of its resulting “pompous parade, its triumphal march from town to town, … its throng of lovers, … its world-wide fame” (214), Sydney draws Romantic inspiration from nature, poetry, and women. His search for an ideal muse begins with “Eos,” a young girl he plucks from her family to follow him on his travels as his wife. Sydney “names” Eos as if he had brought her into being himself in a deific act of creation (“Eos, I called her,” 176) and the reader is only ever aware of the name given to her as Sydney’s muse, a role that he implies she perfectly embodies: “I needed her, she must be about me, she must, in fact, give all and receive nothing” (179).

2 Pious, conventional and quiet, Eos is described as a “pale phantom of a woman” (191) who follows her husband faithfully. Dutiful in her marital roles, she embodies traditional femininity. Yet when Sydney is seemingly seduced by the exotic Vespasia, a rich art collector, he positions his two muses against each other, relishing what he understands as an ongoing competition for his affections between both women, a fight that comes to a dramatic finale as Vespasia jealously attacks Eos in the desert, losing her own life instead. She is defeated by Alain, Eos’s cousin and a French soldier in an Algerian regiment, who provides Eos with unwavering protection throughout the story but who cannot protect her from her own sharp decline after Vespasia dies. Even as Sydney laments melodramatically at how his weak wife is ailing he concurrently does not attempt to care for her. His greatest love is his own painting, a depiction of the desert sands. Yet the story finishes with a dramatic slap of irony when Sydney is struck blind.

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3 It seems that Sydney’s narration acts almost as a painting itself. Infused with colorful descriptions and artistic terminology, his words are carefully composed to create a text that does not go deeper than surface brushstrokes. Characterization is established only through Sydney’s narration, and Eos and Vespasia are mere objects of focalization, nothing but muses described for their aesthetic qualities only. The substantial references to vision, light and sight throughout the text suggest the dangers of gazing, of seeing too much, or indeed, of not seeing at all. One could evoke Birgit Spengler’s “cultural regimes of seeing” when exploring the scopic relations between Spofford’s characters and how each individual “positions him- or herself in relation to the world and in social relations, a process that involves negotiations of knowledge, power, and desire” (6). One could then go on to ask whether the blindness of Sydney’s first-person narration results in an unreliability that ultimately undermines it.2 An analysis of Spofford’s visual language could uncover subtle clues that Spofford has strewn for the reader throughout the short story—whether consciously or unconsciously—and that allow for an alternative interpretation of events. Indeed, a careful application of turpentine to Sydney’s overlying painted narrative uncovers the instability of his narration and the possibility of a more versatile approach. This paper evokes the possibility of a “queered” palimpsestic reading of the alternative story that can be found between and behind Sydney’s initial canvas of words.3 A deconstruction of Sydney’s binary understanding of both women—and thus their position as mere muses in Sydney’s artistic gaze—allows the reader to explore Eos’s burgeoning sexual desires, perhaps provoked by Vespasia’s consistent deviations from essentialist and traditional gendered roles. Similarly, underlining the confusion of gender roles in the story could in turn suggest a complication of Sydney’s own desires and the many overlapping love triangles in the story. Following an analysis of these implications, this paper will go on to propose an alternative reading of the battle scene and the ultimate death of Eos.

1. The Angel and the Ghoul

4 One must look first at the surface level of the text, identifying how Sydney contrasts both women along binaries of angel/monster, asexual/sexual, light/dark, pious/ heathen and domestic/exotic. Eos is positioned as the ideal feminine wife using nineteenth-century notions of the “Angel in the House,” while Vespasia is positioned as monstrously unangelic through an Orientalization of her body. The strictures of nineteenth-century feminine normative identity for white upper-class women are well established. These women were traditionally represented as pure, chaste and nurturing “Angels in the House,” described by Barbara Welter as having “four cardinal virtues— piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity” (21). Eos is “bright,” “delicate” and “lovely” (176), appearing to be typically angelic as she selflessly gives up any shred of autonomy in order to satisfy her husband’s demands. For Sydney she is a “bright and morning star,” with the purity of “the lilies of eternal peace” (176).4 She never bears Sydney a child, her virginal chasteness again typical of Puritan expectations for white upper-class women, expectations which spurned sexual desire and agency for the notion of a pure ideal. Indeed, for Sydney, Eos is not there to be loved, rather to be admired: “I did not know if I loved her, if, certainly, I ever loved her” (176).

5 Welter describes the “Angel in the House” as a “hostage in the home” (21), and certainly Sydney revels in his ability to control and manipulate his wife both physically

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and emotionally. When he tells her to follow him, she does; he tells her to marry him, so she does; he tells her to stop painting for pleasure, so again she does, instead completing her “little household chores” (185) while her husband fulfils his artistic destiny. When Sydney wants her, he has her: “She was singing in some upper room, but came down at my demand, and sang to me” (176); “You must go with me Eos. So Eos went with me” (177); “She was always there, she never swerved from following me” (179).5 Sydney seems to have established himself as a central point, the axis of Eos’s movements. As “pale and patient as a satellite” (197), she “always … came circling back to [Sydney], like the moth to its flame” (178).

6 Eos’s weakness is predestined: “it became necessary to regard her as a confirmed invalid. That is the case with all American women, I said” (213), as opposed to Vespasia, who is frankly un-American, “East Indian by birth,” and positioned by Sydney as an exotically racialized other (187). While Eos is as a “moth to its flame,” Vespasia is described as the flame itself: an “Oriental creature of fire and strength” (190). Her opulent eroticism would not go amiss in a painting by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, and, like Ingres, Sydney identifies her with the mysteries of the Orient and the romanticism of the desert landscape, the “old Eastern dream of [his] youth” (191). In this way, he extends his power over Vespasia, constructing her “otherliness” from a position of hegemony.6 Vespasia is consistently described as monstrous. With her “sinister” eyes (186, 205, 211), she is an “enchantress,” a “beautiful ghoul … genie and great fairy” (199). She is inhuman, associated with snakes, with “serpentine grace,” “ophidian extremities” (199) and “hissing” silks (190). Yet while this animalistic vision of Vespasia aims to undermine her threatening authority over Sydney, it simultaneously underlines her power to the reader. She is considered predatory: a “savage thing panting with restraint” (199) and a “desert-creature” with “feline instincts” (199). She is a disturbing “vision of Lamia” (190), the mythological Queen who devoured children, her “flash of white teeth” (189) symbolizing her voracious appetite. This voraciousness is vampiric (“all your gold is coined from her heart’s blood,” 195), Vespasia’s predatory lust a threat to Sydney. The words “rapture” and “ravished” evoke Vespasia’s sexual power that plays with images of rape: “I recognized her will, her magic, … I submitted to her ordination, to the influx of foreign force” (192). Perhaps most relevant to the visual nature of the text is her “envenomed gaze” (212) and “eyes like broken bottle-glass” (198), a clear intertextual reference to Medusa.7

7 In a sharp contrast to faithful Eos who is, at first glance, both literally and figuratively confined within interior space, Vespasia’s foreignness reverses and destabilizes traditional American femininities. When she leaves America for “the East” (198), her savagery is again noted: “[i]t is better … to have every object fulfil its destiny; hers was not in civilization” (199). It is clear that Vespasia resists containment and relegation to the angelic domestic sphere. As well as taking up space bodily—being “imposing” in her “proportion” (187)—Vespasia moves freely, “careering” (211) through exterior space. This gendered autonomy reaches a climax with a moment of cross-dressing in the desert, a defining point in “Desert Sands” for Vespasia’s clear shedding of feminine signifiers. Her ability and confidence as a soldier is evident: “our enemy [Vespasia] exceeded us thrice; I can only imagine that their certainty of victory already dashed us with defeat” (210). Vespasia is an “adventuress” (211), a female warrior, and an

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Amazon,8 her name possibly inspired by the Roman Emperor Vespasianus, a man known for his military prowess.9

8 This bodily gender transgression is extended further by her appearance. In comparison with the femininity of the “white and radiant” Eos (193), Vespasia’s skin evokes masculinity in its “soft and smooth gold-brown of the beurré” (186). R.J. Ellis points out the gendered signification of skin color in the nineteenth century, when white skin was considered an implication of the suitable domestic sphere for the feminine gendered body—a result of being indoors, or under a carefully arranged parasol—while masculine skin was marked from being outside, under the sun (Ellis 265). Indeed, as Eos is carried through the desert “pillowed and canopied aloft on her mattress” (204), Vespasia is a “lithe figure … leaning on one stirrup from the saddle” (211), wearing a turban and burnous, the uniform of the Maghreb. Such gender transgression cannot go unpunished, and it certainly seems that Vespasia has been punished for her own transgression of traditionally pure and angelic roles, and by no less than God Himself: “Their defeat is no less than a miracle of God, a blow for charging in mad noon at command of a woman! Dogs, and sons of dogs! God willed it; she lies there dead!” (211). 10

9 If one takes into consideration the etymology of “monster” (from the latin “monere” meaning “to warn,” or an “evil omen,” and later meaning “to show something”) one can wonder what this “something” is that Vespasia is intended to show. Vespasia’s very monstrosity could indeed function as a clue to her potential signifying role in the text. Emma Donoghue describes monstrosity as a “cultural shadow” that “overlaps” with the queer (108), while Terry Castle sees the ghoul in particular as metaphorically useful: The spectral figure is a perfect vehicle for conveying what must be called—though without a doubt paradoxically—that ‘recognition through negation’ which has taken place with regard to female homosexuality in Western culture since the Enlightenment. Over the past three hundred years … the metaphor has functioned as the necessary psychological and rhetorical means for objectifying—and ultimately embracing—that which otherwise could not be acknowledged. (60)

10 It could thus be argued that Vespasia’s “ghoulishness” (199) implicitly points the reader towards a hidden subtext to the story. What can one make of the (also spectral) figure of Eos (a “pale phantom,” 191), and the ambiguous connection between the two women? The fact that Vespasia is first introduced to Eos through one of the latter’s paintings gives the reader a starting point for an analysis of their relationship. Unlike Sydney, who sees what he expects (or desires) to see, Vespasia is not only able to see Eos’s hidden feelings, but to point them out to the reader. It certainly seems that before meeting Vespasia Eos, like Sydney, can only imagine such desires within the context of the canvas, although she is only able to paint when Sydney is not at home. As an artist, she reverses her role as traditional muse, enabling the reader to comprehend not just how Sydney sees Eos, but how she sees herself.

2. Yonic Landscapes and Seducing Graces

11 Sydney’s strict control over Eos extends to her creative pursuits, so it is perhaps unsurprising that she waits for him to leave before indulging in a moment of artistic expression. This move from “muse” to “artist” or indeed “creator” is also foreshadowed by her first moment of autonomy in the narrative. She refuses Sydney’s demand to travel, preferring to stay at home with her cousin Alain. In a bid to establish

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his authority, Sydney states: “‘Eos at home away from me? But you are my wife, you know, and to-morrow we will go’ ‘No,’ she said, lifting her head, ‘to-morrow I shall not go. I wish to stay a day longer’” (180). Sydney pretends to find this dissent amusing, waving it off as a quirk: “Eos with a will of her own? … I have half the mind to indulge it, and see where the caprice ends” (181). Yet while Sydney scoffs, he overlooks, or ignores, what is a telling assertion of autonomy on Eos’s behalf. While Sydney is gone Eos paints a landscape of her own, in which a cliff, yet blue in heavy night shadows, was rent apart, and in the rift a brook—a thread of limpid water—crept down and curled from reach to reach to lose itself in dimness; a tuft of long bearded grass, half-guessed, bent forward and shook its awns in a wind; a young birch shivered with the tremors of its perpetual joy. (182)

12 This lush image depicting a river gushing through a cliff crevice may be identified as inherently yonic,11 a sumptuous rendering of female sexual pleasure, which could indicate underlying homosexual erotic desires within Eos. Her personified trees shake in orgasmic “tremors” of joy, the grass suggestive of loosened hair. The landscape is very similar to Sappho’s fragment 2: And here cold water murmurs through the branches / Of apples, and with roses all the place / Is shadowed, and from the rustling leaves / Deep sleep descends / And here the meadow where horses graze blooms / With spring flowers, and breezes / Breathe sweetly [.] (Prins 96-97)

13 Yopie Prins suggests that this fragment invites its reader into a homoerotic topography (99), in which the “multiple pleasures of woman’s jouissance” are celebrated (98). In painting such an overtly sexual image Eos has created a representation of forbidden thoughts, the feminine jouissance she is denied through her role as Sydney’s muse. As an artist, she reverses her role as traditional muse, enabling the reader to comprehend not just how Sydney sees Eos, but how she sees herself. Perhaps aware of its transgressive potential as representative of female desire, Sydney forbids the painting to be shown in public, hiding it behind a curtain in his studio. Eos is humiliated by his reaction, hiding her blushing face and pleading her husband for forgiveness, a guilt reminiscent of Butler’s implication that normalization is socially imposed: “‘coherent identification’ has to be cultivated, policed, and enforced; and … the violation of that has to be punished, usually through shame” (Kotz 88). This painting could also enable the reader to delve into alternative desires that are firmly embedded into the story. Sydney’s disgusted reaction could in fact be a result of his own hidden shame. What does he have to hide? Certainly, his relationship with Alain, Eos’s cousin, is highly ambiguous: As I looked at his now, I acknowledged that his was the most faultless face I had ever seen; had I been a figure painter, I could have asked no greater book than perpetual companionship with such beauty; as it was, to have seen him once was to have seen him too often …; this man, with his seducing graces, could win a saint from heaven …. Then I became aware that I was possessed of jealousy. I had hoped that such a possibility was over, and could scarcely remember the time in which I had been so utterly displeased with myself .… I strangled it with a death-grip. (181)

14 Sydney seems clearly attracted to the soldier’s “faultless face” and “seducing graces,” his jealousy bringing him feelings of shame (that, interestingly, he seems to have had to fight before). Sydney seems uneasily aware of his own underlying forbidden desires as he confesses to the reader “I am one of those who have no right to marriage vows” (177). Similarly, Alain’s militaristic masculinity serves to underline Sydney’s androgyny, particularly in the desert where he enjoys wearing the burnous, “in all gay

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shades, effeminate and light as wrappings of air” (203). Finally, Alain’s presence introduces another of many overlapping love triangles in the text. Indeed, one must not only consider the relationship between Sydney, Eos and Vespasia but also that between Sydney, Eos and Alain. The relationship between the three characters is notably strained. Sydney notes that Alain, who seems to despise him, has a “brother’s freedom” with Eos (180). One could question who he is actually jealous of. In Between Men, Sedgwick writes that the “love triangle” acts as a “sensitive register precisely for delineating relationships of power and meaning, and for making graphically intelligible the play of desire and identification by which individuals negotiate with their societies for empowerment” (27). Much like Vespasia’s significance for Eos, Alain could also serve to point out Sydney’s own gender ambiguity and sexual desires. Eos’s painting therefore acts as the first clue to Eos’s destabilized angelic identity within Sydney’s narrative, as well as pointing out Sydney’s own ambiguous identity. Yet it has another role to play, that of foreshadowing Vespasia.

15 In his description of the painting, Sydney describes a sky “of dark and tender twilight” in which “the morning star hung” (182). Anna Clark uses the image of twilight in her analysis of same-sex behavior in nineteenth-century literature: “Just as one can see only vague shapes in the dim light of the dusk, twilight words conveyed sexual desires and practices that were only half-understood” (140).12 Eos, the Greek goddess of the dawn, is represented by the morning star, and as she “hangs” in the twilight she is perhaps united with Vespasia (from “vespers”?) in a “dark and tender” embrace. The two women are coupled from the moment Vespasia appears. As the art collector sweeps into Sydney’s studio to buy a painting she instead finds his wife’s canvas tucked out of sight behind a gold sheet. The “eager and tremulous” purple flowers reflect her own “violet draperies” (188, 186)13 and she cries “my heart is set upon it” (188). When Sydney refuses to sell the painting Vespasia coquettishly replies: “I shall see that wife, Mr. Sydney, never fear, and arrange her good services on my behalf. In what seclusion she is cloistered .… Do you keep a seraglio?” (189).14 Her casual reference to an Ottoman harem could be understood in two ways, either as an implication that Eos is a prisoner of heterosexual pleasure, merely an object of male consumption, or indeed as a nod towards the emergence of transgressive bonds between women within a female space, an exotic erotic that does not correspond to Puritan values of monogamy. This sentence also allows Vespasia to clearly state her objective—to “see” Eos, and thus free her from her confinement—and in doing so she places Eos in the role of imprisoned maiden, undertaking to rescue her. Robin Riley Fast argues that Vespasia wants to rescue Eos from her role as “Angel in the House”: Virginia Woolf writes of the woman writer’s need to kill the angel in the house. Spofford, I believe, anticipates Woolf’s argument and broadens it: the woman who would live as a powerful, sexual, independent being must kill the image of femininity designed and imposed by man to minister to his needs. Vespasia attacks the angel in the house and she attacks the female muse whose only relation to art is as a passive intermediary. Her attack, however, is not only on Eos; it is also on the man who so oppressively depends on her services as angel and muse. (44)

16 Yet perhaps not only does Vespasia want to rescue Eos; she also aims to ride off into the horizon with her on the back of her steed.

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3. Eos and Vespasia

17 When Vespasia is unable to buy Eos’s painting and declares that she shall “do [herself] the honor of calling upon Mrs. Sydney, shortly” (189) and Sydney responds in turn that Eos does not receive calls, Vespasia merely laughs at his reply. The text continues without further mention of this meeting, yet such an unexplained gap in the narrative does not necessarily imply that it did not take place, rather Sydney’s lack of knowledge about whether or not this event ever occurs. It is indeed curious that later that day— after Sydney returns from an evening walk in which he moons over Vespasia’s charm— he finds Eos asleep in front of the fire. Not only does the fire evoke Vespasia, an “Oriental creature of fire” (190), but a copy of Arabian Nights has slipped from Eos’s hand—a striking image that begs the question of what has happened in his absence.

18 It is also possible that Sydney continues to misinterpret Eos in the days to come. He states: “she made me feel her sweetness more,” yet this use of “made me” is again suspicious. Could it possibly indicate Eos’s persistent effort to continue her ongoing performance of “wife” in order to conceal her burgeoning relationship with Vespasia (191)? Eos’s behavior certainly seems to be that of one in the first stages of romance. She sings “constantly,” surrounding herself with freshly picked flowers that remind Sydney of Vespasia (191). Sydney concludes that she does so to capture his attention, declaring “It was all in vain” (191) and assuming that Eos and Vespasia are “antagonists” (192), jealously fighting for his affection. Yet a subtle connection between the two women is apparent in their shared gaze. When both women are seated opposite each other at the opera, Vespasia “furtive[ly] glance[s]” towards Eos (193), whose “glittering eyes” reflect her own (189, 193). Eos’s rare appearance in public is abruptly ended when she is firmly escorted back by her husband, who holds her closely in his arms, “cheek to cheek” (195). This reaction is ambiguous. Who is jealous of who? Is Eos jealous of Sydney and Vespasia, or indeed, is Sydney jealous of the fact that he is unable to retain Vespasia’s attention as she looks “furtively” at his wife? Why does Sydney feel the necessity to firmly remove his wife from the scene? Much like Sydney is jealous of Eos’s relationship with Alain, Eos may also be jealous at Sydney’s ability to appear in public with Vespasia.

19 This ambiguous mesh of jealousies can be found again after Sydney escorts Eos home, when she reappears later that evening outside Vespasia’s house, watching the party from the street outside: “There was a woman with her shawl wrapped closely about her, leaning against the lamp-post, her white face bent upward and covering the window with such a gaze as that with which a tigress protects her young; she had no significance for me” (194). Sydney’s surprising statement “she had no significance for me” could be interpreted in various ways. Is he incapable of recognizing her, or indeed, does Eos consider him insignificant? Is Eos standing outside Vespasia’s house as a betrayed wife, or as a jealous lover? There certainly seems to be a clear connection between both women. Eos as “tigress” (194) reflects the “feline” Vespasia (199), and her protective gaze marks the first time there is any hint of any real feeling on the part of any character. The focus on Eos’s eyes, described earlier by Sydney as “bluer than the violet planet” (176), again mirror Vespasia and her own violet garments. Inside, Vespasia does not seem to be interested in Sydney, asking him: “‘Do you remember … how the Fay Vivien bound Merlin?” (194). The fact that Vespasia is reminding Sydney of the Lady of the Lake who, tired of Merlin’s advances, decides to trap him under a

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rock, seems a subtle indication of her overall weariness of him. Sydney meanwhile “too involved in the enjoyment of delicious fancy” (194) decides to ignore her completely.

20 When Eos becomes seriously ill after her bitter evening outside, Sydney assumes that she is suffering from a “broken heart” (195) caused by his own affection for Vespasia. Yet if one uses this love triangle framework to shift the focus toward Vespasia, it becomes clear that Eos’s decline also parallels Vespasia’s departure for the Orient, while her recovery seems reliant on her successful manipulation of Sydney to take her there. It seems that Eos, determined to persuade her husband to travel to the Orient, uses every method of manipulation in her power to plant the idea in Sydney’s mind. Sydney notes how Eos sings him a “Song of Sand” and reads Oriental texts to him such as Eothen and Vathek15 (196). When Sydney expresses his desire to journey East, Eos simply utters: “I thought you would” (201). When she asks Sydney firmly “can I go?” (201) and he replies frankly “you were thinking of Vespasia” (202) the subtext seems to play with the reader, and it could be argued that Eos’s plan to “elope” has fallen into place.

21 Even though Eos is not suited for the heat (“I nearly dissolved in Florida,” she says, 202), she is stoic in the desert, happiest when night falls, when she “[becomes] refreshed and enlivened, and [appears], once more, airy and light-hearted as when in youth” (204). The desert landscape at night—with “stars that hung great and glowing from their vaults of crystalline darkness, in the gloom, the coolness, the shelter of tamarisk-thicket and breath of rose-laurel”—evokes the lushness of her painting (204). The desert, a landscape in constant flux with its “restless sand” and “hot exhalations” (204), becomes a metaphor for Eos’s fervent emotions, as she is waiting for Vespasia to appear.

4. A Desert Battle

22 When Vespasia eventually appears, her flashing “emerald eyes” temporarily blind Sydney: “I can scarcely see, I am dazzled .… [I]t would not be very pleasant to be left in the dark, you know” (206).16 Sydney is both literally and metaphorically “left in the dark” when Eos wraps his head with a wet cloth and he sleeps. This results in another gap in the narrative, in which the reader is unaware of Eos’s actions. What does she do while he sleeps? Is the implication that Eos has once again gone to meet Vespasia and, as a result, has she been informed of the impending attack?

23 The night before, Eos is suspiciously excited about something: “she slipped, at length, from my grasp and walked beside me and grew gay; now she ran a few paces in advance, now came back … twittering and chirping … like a bird at dawn” (207).17 The comparison with a bird is telling, and, with her liberation in sight, Eos cannot control herself when Sydney mentions their upcoming departure from the desert. She bursts into tears, crying “Don’t speak of home! .… Don’t speak of home! …; where you are is my home always. I am sorry I have been so naughty—a hindering little thing. A weak and silly little wife!” (208) In this association of home with negativity and of Sydney with home, one can recognize the moment of Eos’s valediction, as she proceeds in her act to leave her husband and, consequently, her traditional role as his wife and muse, one which she now considers to be “weak and silly.” Finally, in a gesture that recalls her painting, Eos then goes on to point out the omen in the sky that portends the following day of bloodshed: “Eos pointed with her white finger at one star, just above the

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horizon, red as a drop of blood ready to fall” (208). Her identification of the star not only points out her potential knowledge of the upcoming battle for her (sexual) freedom but also her own autonomous path towards Vespasia, with this image referencing their “tender embrace” in her painting. The pre-planned attempt is later confirmed by the leader of Sydney’s group, the Sheik Ibrahim, who “had suspected it for two or three days” (209).

24 And so it goes that the next day, wandering dreamily behind the caravan, Sydney is unwittingly led into battle by his wife. As the attackers are approaching, Eos remains undaunted, seeming rather to enter into a state of sexual ecstasy: “Far from terror, I found Eos exhilarated and trembling with excitement; her hand lay in mine like ice, and her eyes were fixed on a distant and increasing point. My glance followed hers.”18 Tellingly, Sydney is attacked first and Vespasia appears as a “lithe figure that flashe[s] to and fro, mercurial and savage, among the swords.” The closer Vespasia is, the more excited Eos becomes, until she is “replete with spirit” and “[grasps] a rusty old yataghan” (210), her upheld dagger reflecting Vespasia’s “uplifted sword blade” (211). She stands behind Sydney, with one hand clutching a dagger and the other on his shoulder, an ambiguous gesture that seems more menacing than protective. Indeed Sydney is a continuous target in the battle, with Eos only under attack when she is standing near him: “I had but time to fling Eos behind me when the blow descended and sheared a portion of her dress” (211). Vespasia’s violent gesture is not only a symbolic move that could be interpreted as a rejection of the phallus and heterosexual codes of lovemaking or indeed an attempt at castration; it simultaneously serves to literally undress Eos. Vespasia’s command of a “tribe” (211) further references queer desire between women if we consider the similarity between the word “tribe” and “tribadism,” meaning “lesbian” from 1600 onwards and implying “lesbian sexual activity” from the 1800s onwards. The connection between Eos and Vespasia, and the fact that the brunt of the attack is firmly directed towards Sydney, suggests that this attack in the desert is, rather, a rescue attempt. Yet it is a rescue attempt that comes to no avail.

25 As the French soldiers—led by her cousin Alain (coincidentally?)—arrive to protect the caravan, Eos screams out in what could be a cry of joy at being rescued or indeed a screech of terror at the inevitability of defeat (210). Vespasia’s tribe is no match for these soldiers and she is killed in battle. With Vespasia’s dead body lying before him, and in an attempt to restore some semblance of (heteronormative) order, Alain tells Eos to put her heel on Vespasia’s head. Her distress is evident, and she “[flings] him a glance like the blue light shed from the swallow’s wing” (211)—just as Vespasia flung her spear at Sydney—in a last act of autonomous liberation, a liberation that now soars like a swallow beyond her grasp.

26 The aftermath of the attack results in Eos’s mental and physical collapse. Without Vespasia, Eos reverts back into an infant, “motionless” (213) and unable to move autonomously: “I took her in my arms,—she was lighter than any child,—laid her head on my shoulder” (215). Sydney once more manipulates Eos’s body, yet it seems that it is no longer possible for her to return to her earlier angelic role, performing her “unfailing services” (213) as Sydney’s “weak and silly wife.” Every night she dreams of Vespasia and “the sight of those jewel-eyes … —frequently she seemed fascinated and forced to seek for them” (212). Eventually she is unable to sleep at all. One day she declares: “You know the wick flashes up when the flame is extinguished” (214), but she

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is unable to “flash up,” the extinguishing of the flame that was Vespasia resulting in Eos’s emotional and physical decline that inevitably ends in her death. She dies, forgotten, symbolically hidden behind a screen just as Sydney finishes his masterpiece. As he lays down his brush after daubing the final details of a perfect depiction of the desert, he feels a pain in his eyes: “a spear … leapt across my vision, then murk darkness” (215). The artist has become a victim of his own hubris; he has painted the desert—a symbol in the story of female otherness and a queer space of gender liberation—without being able to truly see it, and it has thus symbolically destroyed his own ability to see. In a stroke of irony, the last thing he will ever perceive is the desert “forever and forever stretched before [his] eyes” (215).

27 It is unlikely to be coincidental that his blindness comes in the form of a spear. It seems that Vespasia’s attempt to destroy Sydney has finally succeeded and, in a reminder of Medusa’s gaze that destroys her male adversaries, the artist has been castrated by his muse, undermining hegemonic discourses in the process. But Vespasia is not the only muse who has her retribution. When Sydney realizes his loss of sight he calls out to Eos, who does not answer: “Night had fallen at noon. I was blind, and Eos was dead” (216). Sydney’s blindness and Eos’s “death” are thus implicitly interconnected. It is not only the woman who is dead, but the muse that Sydney has named Eos. The “heavy night shadows” (182) that evoke Eos’s painted sexual desires have enveloped him and Eos is free from his possessive gaze. Death is often used symbolically in Spofford’s writing. After Yone dies in “The Amber Gods” she exclaims: “How clear the space is! .… How free I am! .… So I passed out of the room” (65). Death equals freedom and a release from traditional domestic categorization, with death in “Desert Sands” a similar act of liberation, Sydney’s wife shedding her identity as the muse “Eos” as a snake would shed its skin.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bode, Rita. “Narrative Revelations: Harriet Prescott Spofford’s ‘Amber Gods’ Revisited.” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 50.4 (2004): 233-267.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Castle, Terry. The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture. New York: Columbia UP, 1993.

Clark, Anna. “Twilight Moments.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 14.1/2 (January 2005/ April 2005): 139-160.

Donoghue, Emma. Inseparable: Desire Between Women in Literature. New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2010.

Ellis, R.J. “‘Latent Color’ and ‘Exaggerated Snow’: Whiteness and Race in Harriet Prescott Spofford’s ‘The Amber Gods.’” Journal of American Studies 40.2 (August 2006): 257-282.

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Faderman, Lillian. Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Columbia UP, 1991.

Fast, Robin Riley. “Killing the Angel in Spofford’s ‘Desert Sands’ and ‘The South Breaker.’” Legacy 11.1 (1994): 37-54.

Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.

Halperin, David. Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997.

Kotz, Liz. “The Body You Want: Liz Kotz interviews Judith Butler.” Artforum 31.3 (November 1992): 82-89.

Prins, Yopie. Victorian Sappho. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1999.

Spengler, Birgit. “Introduction: Appropriating Vision(s): Visual Practices in American Women’s Writing.” Amerikastudien / American Studies 54.1 (2009): 5–11. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/ 41158409.

Spofford, Harriet Elizabeth Prescott. “The Amber Gods.” The Amber Gods and Other Stories. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1863. 3-66.

---. “Desert Sands.” The Amber Gods and Other Stories. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1863. 175-216.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men. New York: Columbia UP, 1985.

Weiss, Andrea. Vampires and Violets: Lesbians in Film. New York: Penguin, 1992.

Welter, Barbara. “Female Complaints: Medical Views of American Women.” Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Athens: Ohio UP, 1976, 57-70.

NOTES

1. Sydney is preoccupied with this idea of greatness, repeating the word “great” no less than twenty-one times throughout the story. 2. Indeed, as he repeatedly boasts of Eos’s unwavering loyalty, Spofford’s choice of words simultaneously casts this loyalty into doubt. Sydney declares that his acts of affection “thrilled [Eos] with a timid joy” (180), yet the fact that this is followed with the hesitant “I think” exposes Sydney’s uncertainty and insecurity to the reader. 3. David Halperin positions “queerness” in “oppositional relation to the norm” as “by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant” (62). Queerness can thus be used as a theoretical tool to expose the discourse of oppositional binaries such as hetero/homosexuality and masculinity/femininity to be in a state of flux, this fluidity destabilizing them and creating space for new meanings and possibilities. 4. Does Spofford’s unexpected inclusion of the conjunction “and” here highlight the contradiction between “bright” and “morning/mourning”? This association of a beautiful woman with death turns Sydney into a Poesque narrator and foreshadows the ending of the story. The image of death is furthered with Eos’ connection to “lilies of eternal peace” (176). 5. The word “swerved” is analyzed by Gilbert and Gubar in their description of women writers from the nineteenth century: “Such writers … both participated in and—to use one of Harold Bloom’s key terms—‘swerved’ from the central sequences of male literary history, enacting a uniquely female process of revision and redefinition that necessarily caused them to seem ‘odd’”

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(Gilbert and Gubar 73). Under Sydney’s gaze Eos certainly seems to be personifying an image of the ideal wife; yet when we look in-between the lines of this narrative we can begin to detect an undercurrent of queered “swerving” or resistance, as discussed in the second section of this paper. 6. Here one must consider Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), in which he examines how Western scholars have exoticised the East as wild and superstitious through an artificial opposition with the rational, dominant West. This Orientalist discourse of power positions the East as inferior, thus legitimizing colonization and imperialism, and Sydney himself seems to place his own relationship to Vespasia with such a narrative, as something to be “taken,” just as Alain, a French soldier, would “take the Arabia” (196). 7. Vespasia’s constant association with snakes evokes her intertextual connection to Medusa, whose gaze petrifies her enemies. 8. The word “amazon” has been used throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to indicate female transgression. The most famous example is perhaps Natalie Clifford Barney, who was named “l’Amazone” by French poet Rémy de Gourmont. Her adoption of the legend in her literary salon and writings further imbued this title with queer meaning. 9. Sydney proposes that Vespasia has Roman origins as “some creature of the old Latin reign” (190), later musing “I fancied there had been Roman women like her” (199). 10. Butler is clear on the punishment accorded to bodies that do not perform their gender or social position correctly: “As a strategy of survival within compulsory systems, gender is a performance with clearly punitive consequences” (178). 11. The word “yonic” brings to mind Spofford’s highly ambiguous protagonist Yone in “The Amber Gods.” Rita Bode’s article “Amber Gods Revisited” illustrates how Spofford’s stories hide further levels of meaning that unsettle traditional representations of Victorian women. 12. Similarly, Lillian Faderman describes relationships between women as “twilight lovers” in Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers–A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth–Century America. 13. Violets have a long history as symbols of desire between women. They were used by Sappho in her poem “I have not had one word from her” to represent her (female) lost lover who had worn garlands of the flower. English women in the sixteenth century pinned the violet to their lapel to indicate their proud unmarried status (Weiss 2) and women in the early 1900s would give violets to their female lovers. Violets were also a symbol of Natalie Barney’s salon, with her lover the poet Renée Vivien known as the “Muse of the Violets.” 14. Her role as a knight in shining armor foreshadows her later actions in the desert. 15. In Vathek, An Arabian Tale written by William Beckford in 1782, the protagonist has a fatal look and is addicted to sexual pleasure. Alexander William Kinglake’s Eothen; or Traces of Travel Brought Home from the East was published in 1844. 16. The story contains several moments in which Sydney seems to be preempting his later blindness. 17. Both women are referred to as “gay” within the story (192, 207) and even though the term did not have its full contemporary meaning in Spofford’s time, according to the OED it was already being used to mean “lewd” or “lascivious,” or as revealing an “overt and often offensive sexual desire.” 18. Sydney follows Eos’s gaze, a detail that could underline her upcoming autonomy from his.

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ABSTRACTS

Harriet Prescott Spofford’s 1863 short story “Desert Sands” recounts, at first glance, the jealous rivalry between an artist’s two muses. Yet when one applies a thin layer of turpentine to the top layer of the canvas that makes up the narrative of “Desert Sands,” it becomes clear that there is another, much more unusual, image underneath. This article proposes a palimpsestic reading of the short story, one which attempts to underline the queer nature of the relationship between the muses Eos and Vespasia and goes on to pose questions about gender roles, deviant sexuality and transgression as related to women in the nineteenth century.

INDEX

Keywords: Harriet Prescott Spofford, Queer theory, homosexuality, gender, Orientalism, Angel in the House, the gaze

AUTHOR

H.J.E. CHAMPION H.J.E. Champion is a doctoral student at both Université Bordeaux Montaigne and the University of Eastern Finland. Her PhD dissertation is concerned with “queering” nineteenth-century short stories by American women writers. She has written on Mary Wilkins Freeman, Madeline Yale Wynne and Ada Trevanion.

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“Per si muove—it was a mass of moonstone”: Fluidity, Dynamic Relations, and the Commodification of Storytelling in Harriet Prescott Spofford’s Arctic Writings

Verena Laschinger

In “The Story of the Iceberg,” a poem from the collection In Titian’s Garden and Other Poems (1897), American author Harriet Prescott Spofford employs a covert speaker to tell the story of an iceberg’s long journey “down to equatorial seas” in eighteen quatrains (60). The poem’s protagonist is the eponymous iceberg. Personified and endowed with affects, he initially appears “weary” of the “dark months of winter night” and full of longing “for other worlds and flight” (58). As “he” yearns for someone to admire “his mighty mould” and bring out what he thinks is best in him, his “light and color” (58), the iceberg’s restlessness appears motivated by vanity and ambition. When in early spring “a band of sunbeams” warms the Arctic regions, the iceberg eventually breaks loose from “the mother glacier” and launches to get ever further south (58). Craving the spectral effects that make his “moonstone gleam” (58), the floating iceberg crashes “his way through sinking ships” like “some vast fleet in majesty” (59). Running rampant he is, however, unaware of how the sun unleashes its destructive power onto him, precisely by making him shine. Too late the iceberg realizes that all this sparkling in “jewelled splendor” comes at a cost (59), and only when he is “dissolving in a fervent heat” (60) is he full of remorse and does he long to see his “dim, dark home once more” (61). The poem ends, however, laconically stating the iceberg’s obliteration: And, but a hulk of crumbling ice, Within the deep he found his grave, Stranded upon a hidden key, And washed to nothing by a wave. (61)

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As the iceberg’s southbound drift is not explained by natural laws but attributed to the “ghost of glory” that lures the vain protagonist into a death trap, the poem assumes the function of a morality tale (60). Given how the adventurous icecalf and his mother glacier are gendered, “The Story of the Iceberg” could rightly be read as a “feminist critique of the gendered hubris of the conventional exploration narrative,” to borrow a claim that literary scholar Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock makes about another Arctic text that Spofford published in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in October 1868. In his compelling first analysis of “The Moonstone Mass,” Weinstock finds that the exploration tale “sets up a binary opposition between masculine and feminine worlds and privileges the latter, associated with home, family, and heterosexuality, over the former, correlated with capitalistic imperialism and conquest” (12). Clearly, “The Story of the Iceberg” riffs on Spofford’s earlier, “unjustly neglected short story” (Weinstock 4).1 Yet it does so in ways that exceed a commonality of theme. The narrative poem not only resonates with the short story, which it intertextually references and complements, but by switching genre and focalization, “The Story of the Iceberg” also retroactively shifts the reader’s perception of “The Moonstone Mass.” The poem, I claim, introduces fluidity as a topic as well as a promising mode of analysis for the short story. As a consequence the rigidity of presumed binaries (e.g. gender) is dissolved in favor of a “form of relational thinking,” a conceptual framework introduced by Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory (Felski 748). Seen through the lens of fluidity foregrounded by Spofford’s Arctic poem, her story renders a network of actors (human and other), who are connected and continuously influence one another. Hence, “The Moonstone Mass” demands an analysis that acknowledges this relationality as facilitating the protagonist’s discovery of the Northwest Passage alongside the metaphorical pathways, which the geographical trope symbolizes in the text. Ultimately, it is my claim that “The Moonstone Mass” fictionally renders an (imaginary) geographical journey to describe the complexities and challenges of personal, generational and societal transfers from the culturally conspicuous perspective of the nineteenth-century American storyteller transitioning from the era of Romanticism to Realism.

1. Forging a Fluid Voice

Exclusively set in an aquatic environment, “The Story of the Iceberg” assumes the diegetic world as a “fluid space,” which according to Annemarie Mol and John Law contains “no well-defined objects or entities” (qtd. in Ingold 153). Instead, it speaks of “substances which flow, mix and mutate, sometimes congealing into more or less ephemeral forms that can nevertheless dissolve or re-form without breach of continuity (153). In such a fluid space dynamic relations (e.g. between sun and iceberg, or iceberg and ship) occur, as a result of which the actors—as I want to call all entities in the text with a nod to Latour—interact, e.g. by feeling, moving, melting, or sinking. Their relating and interacting is potentially endless and open in all directions. Any form that any actor assumes at any point in the process is temporary. Consequently, neither the iceberg’s initial form as a gigantic mass of frozen water nor its fluid form at the end of the poem are permanent. Even if it is “washed to nothing” as the poem states, with “the wave,” “the grave,” and the “crumbling ice” all being identical in their chemical essence, the iceberg is in fact not gone. Once it is dissolved, it will eventually

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assume other forms as vapor, rain, or again ice. Despite the suggestion of finality and stasis at the poem’s end, mobility and fluidity prevail. The larger discourse of Arctic exploration entangled with the diegesis of “The Story of the Iceberg” is similarly fluid. As sociologist Michel de Certeau explains in “Writing the Sea,” the conspicuous fluidity of Jules Verne’s writings, for instance, results from a process of constant cross-insemination between science and fiction. From there “earlier texts relating yet earlier voyages” emerge, some of which are “now appearing in the form of documents that are traversed, now appearing in the form of lands and seas that are navigated” (139-40). “The Story of the Iceberg” relates to “fictions inscribed upon fictions of travel” such as “The Moonstone Mass,” which is itself a spin- off from the accumulated histories of early travelers and Arctic explorers. Consequently, both of Spofford’s Arctic travel texts are products of “library navigation” (138), and themselves productive of a fluid discursive environment. They emerge from “a path of flow,” as Tim Ingold calls it with recourse to Mol and Law (153), and constitute such “a path of flow,” connecting and influencing other texts and discourses. Published in the heyday of Arctic exploration in the United States, a period that extends “from 1850 to 1910” (Robinson 2), “The Moonstone Mass” takes its thematic cue from historical expeditions by Martin Frobisher (1576-78), James Cook, (1776), James Clark Ross (1800-1862), who was the first to reach the North Magnetic Pole in 1831, or Robert McClure (1807-1873) who is lauded as the first to partly traverse the Northwest Passage in 1851 and was saved after a journey over the ice by sledge.2 Spofford borrows this feature when she sends her protagonist across the ice to find an escape route. While the author draws inspiration from actual expeditions, she also culls from Romantic tales that typically replay escapist fantasies and panoramic visions in heroic quest narratives that are set in vast, expansive layouts. “The Moonstone Mass” echoes Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), Jules Verne’s The Adventures of Captain Hatteras (1864)—whose eponymous hero resembles John Franklin, the leading figure of “the heroic age of Arctic exploration,” which made the Northwest Passage “the Holy Grail of exploration” (Craciun 1-2)—and, as is obvious from the title, it also owes to Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone whose publication in 1868 preceded it by three months. Like Spofford’s Arctic poem, “The Moonstone Mass” relays a plot in which the protagonist’s journey culminates in transformation. While “The Story of the Iceberg” takes note of the cost and loss that result from dynamic change, “The Moonstone Mass” explores its productive, profitable faculties. Fittingly, the autodiegetic narrator is the heir to a wealthy New England merchant family who, displaying some versatility in professional identity, embraces the role of the romancer to tell the lore of his adventure in the Arctic sea. In an extended monologue he narrates the following story: driven less by his “adventurous streak” than his irrational “fear of dying in poverty,” he left his fiancée Eleanor, along with the comforts of his “old family estate” (90), to join an Arctic expedition in the hope to claim the reward promised by his uncle for the discovery of the Northwest Passage. Yet, after the first winter aboard the “Albatross” (92), his objective changed and he fully invested in the exploration: “curiosity and research absorbed every other faculty,” he relays, to the point even that “Uncle Paul’s donation … was nothing to me. I had but one thought, one ambition, one desire in those days—the discovery of the clear seas and open passage” (93). When the ship gets “wedged in the ice” (95), he is ordered to “take a sledge with Glipnu and his

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dogs, and see if there were any path to the westward” (95). However, the wind and the current carry the ice on which the search party travels to the North. Shortly after, all but one dog and the protagonist drown in the tumultuous sea. Latched on to a careening iceshelf, he is driven further off course way beyond the magnetic north pole where he discovers a mass of moonstone in a cavern of ice, but is carried away by the current before he gets a chance to snatch the gem. Later—and the time progression he reports is not really consistent with other facts he mentions such as the amount of supplies he still carries—whalers find him unconscious, afloat on an iceshelf in the North Pacific Sea. They hand him over to the crew of an armed Russian ship to take him home. Upon his return, he marries his fiancée and fashions an Arctic adventure tale in which he claims to have been traversing the Northwest Passage. Because his uncle does not believe his account, the narrator forfeits the prize money, which leaves him with Eleanor as “the treasure that I have” (101). From the outset, the narrative operation in “The Moonstone Mass” features fluidity. For one the narrator’s rhetorical procedure wavers between befuddling ornamental opulence and informative directness. As a “symbolic romance,” Bendixen states, “The Moonstone Mass” is characterized by a “love of poetic language, of richly sensuous description, of striking phrases and extravagant images” (xi). When the narrating I, for example, exposes the narrated I’s proclivity for financial “inconsistencies”—one of the “undesireable traits” he inherited from his forebears along with “a goodly share of pelf stored in stocks, and lands, and copper-bottomed clippers” (90), that came with other “gold and silver heir-looms” (91)—the euphemism “inconsistencies” is elaborated with so much verbal finesse it almost washes over the narrator’s admission to having been “a niggard” (90).3 For only a brief moment, and likely to be missed by the inattentive reader, the admission intercepts his otherwise convoluted rhetoric and exposes his younger self’s proclivity to retain his “amassed wealth” instead of spending it on a prospective wife and child (91). Clippers, a contemporary reader of the story would know, had been produced by American shipbuilders since the 1840s specifically for the trade of tea between China and New York: “The maritime culmination of a Yankee obsession with speed, they were the fastest, most beautiful wooden sailing vessels the world had ever seen—long and lean, with sharp bows, raked masts and a great cumulus of sail” (Whipple 6). Furthermore, the use of copper on the hulls of merchant vessels was uncommon, which indicates to the reader the enormous wealth of the narrator’s sea-trading family. Like many merchants on the East coast the narrator’s family probably made its fortune with the Gold Rush of 1848, having realized “that there was a great deal of money to be made by shipping freight as well as people to California” (49). Clearly, the inconsistent personality of Spofford’s narrator is confirmed precisely as the narrating I indulges in a rhetorical excess of verbose self-characterization. The procedure oscillates between obscuration and sudden revelations which occur “like a lance of piercing light shot up at the zenith” from an iceberg (97), alerting the reader that not all meaning is obvious at all times in this story and that the most substantial part floats underneath the surface. Like in many other stories by Spofford, a gem serves as a metaphor for the narrator’s “idiosyncratic voice and rhetorical procedure” in “The Moonstone Mass” (Beam 132).4 The eponymous moonstone which is also known as the “Traveler’s stone” for the protection it affords (“Moonstone Meanings” n.p.), fits the narrator who is an unlikely survivor, protected, it seems, by mysterious forces. According to his own words, the

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discovery of a mass of moonstone, which allegedly “holds the power of mystery” (“Moonstone Meanings” n.p.), revitalizes him in the liminal moment when he is about to die in the Arctic’s dire straits. Propelled by greed, a powerful trait running in his family, he is able to tap into his physical and mental resources and finds both the strength that is needed to survive and his voice as a storyteller: “I should have a jewel in that mass of moonstone the size of which the world never saw,” he says and decides right away: “I must have this thing” (99). The voice by way of which he is able to talk of his near-death experience in the Arctic— which typically “had come to represent the limit of both empire and human experience” in romantic American sea fiction and exploration narratives (Hill 3)—is as massive and abundant as the mass of moonstone whose sight, he claims, has saved his life. The rhetorical procedure mimicks the gemstone’s adularescence, an optical phenomenon in which light is scattered in many directions and which gives the moonstone its idiosyncratic “glowing appearance” (Gia n.p.), as it billows across the surface of the gem. I will continue to elaborate in the following how and to which effect both the narrative process and the plot of “The Moonstone Mass” reflect the symbolic fluidity of the adularescent moonstone whose “most captivating aspect” is “its appearance of motion” as the misty light seems to roll across the gem’s surface as you change the viewing angle” (Gia n.p.). “The Moonstone Mass” announces the streamlining of storytelling into creative capital under the influence of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism.5 Both the narrator’s voice and rhetorical procedure function as harbingers of the age of Realism, in which yarn will be spun on a spinning jenny to make revenue from the commodity product. On the level of plot “The Moonstone Mass” portrays “the evolution of the ‘short story’,” which, to phrase it with Walter Benjamin, will have “removed itself from oral tradition” (93), as a tumultuous process that upsets the conventional order of things, a dangerous journey that upends time and space. On the level of discourse the transition is elaborated in terms of a contradictory simultaneity of the narrator’s claim on orality on the one hand and the written text’s stylized literariness on the other. On the one hand, the tale is fashioned as the oral report of the sole survivor of an exploration trip. As a “seaman,” the narrator thus aligns with a “tribe of storytellers,” whom Benjamin deems “archaic representatives” of an “art” that was “coming to an end” (84-85). Even in written form, Benjamin states in “The Storyteller” of 1936, it lets the reader feel he/she shared “the company of the storyteller” as if he/she was “listening to a story” (100, emphasis mine). In “The Moonstone Mass,” the narrator intimates such communality and invites indulgence in his storytelling by way of the confessional tone with which he relates the story to the reader. He forges an immediate bond, likely to make a deal with his audience, in which the latter are to accept the story’s fair degree of inconsistency in exchange for relishing its amplitude. On the other hand, the written version of his report entitled “The Moonstone Mass” foregrounds its literary quality, which I suggest connects with the narrator’s outright self-identification as merchant. Watering down his identity as a storyteller in Benjamin’s sense, “The Moonstone Mass” drafts instead the modern storyteller as a dealer of written marvels who profits from textual production in an economic sense. In Spofford’s text, such profit takes the form of the moonstone. While the massive gem remains out of reach for the autodiegetic narrator, who still adheres to the stylistic conventions of the romance, he nevertheless realizes “the pure essence of the thing”

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(Benjamin 100). While aiming at such “essence” is anathema to the storyteller in Benjamin’s sense, it is paramount to an up-coming generation of narrators, writers of novels and short stories. When Spofford lets her narrator take to the pen—assuming that the implied author is identical with the storyteller—in a gesture that is typical for actual naval explorers who made it home, “The Moonstone Mass” explicates fictionally what Craciun calls the “seismic shift in the relationship of exploration to publication located at the turn of the nineteenth century” (6). Because nineteenth-century Arctic explorers were commonly also “published authors of books” (8), Craciun contends, “the modern figure of the explorer” became “conspicuous across cultural spheres” (7). Stories that celebrated their accomplishments transcended geographical borders and made their authors famous across the Atlantic, where readers were hardly bothered by the fact that “much of heroic imagining rests upon falsehood and part truths, a web of idealized narratives and romanticisms” (Huw n.p./position 373). Yet, Spofford’s fictional explorer is granted no such generous, gullible audience neither intra- nor extradiegetically. Unlike his historical models, he fails to achieve the status of maritime hero. No one believes his claim to have traveled the famed Northwest Passage. The whalers who rescue him in the Pacific, he states, “would never believe a word of my story” (101). Instead, “they considered me a mere idle maniac” (101). The officers aboard the “Russian man-of-war,” he continues, “afforded me more polite but quite as decided skepticism” (101). Of his immediate family his Uncle Paul outright mocks him and his wife Eleanor who allegedly “never doubted a word of my narration,” is, in fact, not “willing to hear another word about it” (101). Clearly, his story fails as testimony of the discovery of the Northwest Passage. Yet, while it deems the narrator unreliable and thus situates him on the storyteller end of the narratological spectrum, it nevertheless evidences his entrepreneurial instincts. His tale is as much the written testimony of the great discovery that narrating can be a business, that the mass of moonstone exists, as of the desire to make it one. All he needs to do is sit and wait for the trailblazing news to sink in, while all he can do is sit and wait for a more effectual narrator to accomplish the task. Consequently, addressing the reader directly at the end of his extended monologue, he relinquishes control over his story: “You can take it for what it is worth” (101). Having put the word out to the public and fixed the message in print is what matters: “if I had not told the thing to you it might come to pass that I should forget altogether the existence of my mass of moonstone” (101). To himself the enormity of his discovery is indisputable, and his determination to see it come to fruition solid as a rock as his final declamation attests: “—it was a mass of moonstone! With these eyes I saw it, with these hands I touched it, with this heart I longed for it, with this will I mean to have it yet!” (101). As he vows to bring the massive market potential of stories to fruition, the nameless narrator of “The Moonstone Mass” represents the generic American writer invested in making her craft a lucrative business in the future.

2. Literary Alchemy

Diffracted by the iceberg’s sparkle in Spofford’s poem, I have argued so far, “The Moonstone Mass” appears as a text about fluidity whose narrative charge is simultaneously oral and literary. As a story about transformation it can be conceptually

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framed by Latour’s actor-network theory (ANT). In this context the protagonist’s shifting priorities from prize-winning to exploring are not just another symptom of his inconsistent personality, but symptomatic of the performative, processual dynamism of the actor-network in which he exists roughly one year into the exploration trip. At this point in the narrative the actor-network consists of him, the sea, ship, crew members, homosociality, etc. Granted activity by the others, each of these actors temporarily assumes a specific character (“Clarifications” 373). Later the strong Arctic currents, the floating iceshelf, and most importantly the glowing moonstone are similarly employed as actors to produce his transformation from haplessly passive protagonist to productive narrator. While it lends itself to an ANT reading today, “The Moonstone Mass” certainly uses conceptual registers and vocabulary that were popular with readers at the time of the text’s publication. The narrative echoes a fascination with alchemy that is typical of other American Romantic writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller. Like Fuller who, according to literary scholar Jeffrey Steele, frequently “resort[s] to the language of alchemy … to construct a heterodox vocabulary of spiritual change” (62), Spofford links the “image vision of emotional and spiritual rebirth to a quest for a precious gem, a glowing ruby or ‘carbuncle’” (62). And like Fuller, whose womb-images are meant to evoke feminine aspects of spiritual transformation (63), Spofford sets her character’s transformative experience in a “cavern” (99), in which he appears helplessly subjected to the forces of nature. This scene is succeeded by another that is rendered in stereotypically heroic terms: “now indeed I was battling with those elemental agencies in the dreadful fight I had desired— one man against the might of matter” (100). Significantly, the dramatic and highly dynamic episode in which the narrated I discovers the moonstone, and which clearly is the high point of Spofford’s exploration narrative, is fluid also in its attribution of gendered descriptions. The longer episode that describes the explorer’s psychological transformation into storyteller is structured into four stages. Nineteenth-century readers of Fuller, Hawthorne, and Emerson would most likely have understood that they corresponded with the four phases of the chemical transformation described by alchemists as “Melanosis,” “Leukosis,” “Xanthosis,” and “Iosis.” Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung later decoded their symbolical meaning as stages in the process of individuation” (Alchemie 316). Jung, who “found that alchemy mirrored the complexities of the process of creation of the self” (Encountering 2), describes the initial alchemical stage as “Chaos” which unconditionally leads to death (Alchemie 318). In the corresponding scene in Spofford’s text, the protagonist is already in a state of crisis as he becomes aware that the Arctic is a dynamic, fluid, chaotic environment: “the ice traveled, too; the whole field, carried by some northward-bearing current, was afloat” (96). From the experience of mobility follows the experience of the ice as actor working its dynamic force on the protagonist who responds with physiological chaos and emotional turmoil: At this moment my blood seemed to sing and bubble in my veins; I grew giddy with a sort of delirious and inexplicable ecstasy; with another moment unutterable horror seized me; I was plunged and weighed down with a black and suffocating load, while evil things seemed to flap their wings in my face, to breathe in my mouth, to draw my soul out of my body and carry it careering through the frozen realm of that murky heaven, to restore it with a shock of agony. (96-97)

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The episode effects the protagonist’s disintegration, a cataclysmic collapse, the dissolution of the narrator’s former self who concedes: “I was no longer myself” (96). Of the second stage, “Leukosis,” also refered to as “sublimatio” (Edinger 120), “alchemical texts speak of the soul now becoming conscious of itself by becoming aware of its own light nature—the reflected light, symbolised by the moon” (Hamilton n.p.). Spofford renders this stage as a luminous spectacle. Transfixed by the “magnetic quality” of the iceblock on which the narrated I floats and with which he effectively merges, he observes how “a lance of piercing light shot up the zenith” eventually “dissolving in a thousand colors that spread every where over the low field, flashing, flickering, creeping, reflecting, gathering again in one long serpentine line of glory” (97). As sensually excessive as the experience is (it is lethal for the dogs that accompany him), the protagonist now seems to have an inkling of “the light that is pure, creative intelligence” (Hamilton n.p) in him. Aware of this light, the narrated I is alchemically whitened and purified. The third stage, “Xanthosis,” which is only intermediary according to Jung (318), is exemplified by Spofford in such a way that her protagonist tries to gain more control over the situation perforce of reason. He brings to mind vernacular knowledge about the “magnetic quality” of the ice “which,” he says, “held me so that I changed my position upon it with difficulty” (97). He frantically tries to explain what is happening to him. But his attempt to come up with a scientific explanation for the phenomena he experiences (likely the effects of a geomagnetic storm) fails as does his “watch” which “had long since ceased to beat” and “his pocket-compass” which “had become entirely useless” (97).6 The scene exemplifies that “inner knowing is not arrived at by study, reflection, or deep thought; it is to be experienced as a direct revelation” (Hamilton n.p.). The revelation is about to happen in the next stage, “Iosis,” the fourth and final stage of the alchemical transformation process. Pinned down to the iceblock on which he cowers while being swirled around in circles, the protagonist makes the central, astonishing discovery: a mass of moonstone sitting on top of “a bare jag of rocks rising in the center of this solid whirlpool, and carrying on its summit something which held a light” (98). Shaking off the fright of his earlier nightmarish hallucinations, of what he perceived were “two great eyes like glowing coals” (97), “the stare of those dead and icy eyes” (98), “a figure” (98), he experiences a “direct revelation” (Hamilton n.p.): “It was no figure at all,” “nothing deceptive” but “a thing so real, so genuine, my breath became suspended; my heart ceased to beat; my brain, that had been a lump of ice, seemed to move in its skull” (98). With his head cleared the protagonist realizes that what he had witnessed earlier was not a phantasmagoria, hellish fantasy, no supernatural experience, no mystery but the optical phenomenon of adularescence, the schiller of a mass of moonstone: There it rested, limpid with its milky pearl, casting out flakes of flame and azure, of red and leafgreen light, and holding yet a sparkle of silver in the reflections and refractions of its inner axis—the splendid Turk’s-eye of the lapidaries, the cousin of the water-opal and the girasole, the precious essence of the feldspar. Could I break it, I would find clusters of great hemitrope crystals. (99) In terms of the alchemical symbolism that is employed in the story, the schiller represents the sparkling of the protagonist’s pure spirit. Exhilarated by finding “this treasure of a kingdom” (99) in the Arctic cavern, his survival instincts kick in, and he is certain about his future: “I would return! I would take this treasure with me! I would not be defrauded!” (99). The alchemic “transmutation of pain into insight” (99) is

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completed. The protagonist does indeed survive his Arctic adventure trip and returns to New England as a new man, clearsighted and awakened to the full capacities of storytelling as a business, even though he fails to get hold of the moonstone. The climactic scene closes with the currents getting ever stronger and carrying him away from the moonstone through a passageway to the Northwest: “Slowly it receded— slowly, and less slowly” (99). His spiralling first around a magnetic rock and then away from the moonstone mass in a vortex of whirling water, reminds us of rupes nigra (the black rock), one of several myths that Spofford manufactures into “The Moonstone Mass.”7 The rupes nigra, mentioned in “Gerardus Mercator’s map of the northern polar regions, published posthumously in 1595,” is “a mountain as tall as the clouds, surrounded by an enormous ocean whirlpool” located at the Magnetic North Pole or at the North Pole itself (Tallack n.p.). In a 1577 letter Mercator describes the magnetic stone as follows: In the midst of the four countries is a Whirl-pool, into which there empty these four indrawing Seas which divide the North. And the water rushes round and descends into the Earth just as if one were pouring it through a filter funnel. It is four degrees wide on every side of the Pole, that is to say eight degrees altogether. Except that right under the Pole there lies a bare Rock in the midst of the Sea. Its circumference is almost 33 French miles, and it is all of magnetic Stone. (Mercator qtd. in Taylor 57) More significantly, though, the whirls by which Spofford crafts her protagonist’s experience of the moonstone’s schiller as terrifying, surreal and brimming with psychedelic imagery strongly resemble the opium-induced imagery of Collins’s The Moonstone, one of the intertexts of the story: Rose late, after a dreadful night; the vengeance of yesterday’s opium, pursuing me through a series of frightful dreams. At one time, I was whirling through empty space with the phantoms of the dead, friends and enemies together. At another, the one beloved face which I shall never see again, rose at my bedside, hideously phosphorescent in the black darkness, and glared and grinned at me. (Collins 397) The scene quoted above in which Ezra Jennings describes “his terrible opium dreams” in The Moonstone “derived from Collins’s own experiences” (Kemp x). Spofford references Collins’s “novel about an experiment with opium written under the influence of opium” (x) already in the title of her story, but the question is: to which effect? How is the ending of the transformation scene in “The Moonstone Mass” to be interpreted? As conclusive to the drug-induced reverie of an insane narrator who barely made it home from a failed exploration trip? Or as indicative of an incomplete transformation which would therefore make “The Moonstone Mass” a story about failure? I argue much to the contrary. As the reintegration of new consciousness is a process that is never fully completed, the prizeless gem cannot be seized, just as historically the alchemical process never fully reached its intended goal (Jung, Alchemie 316). Despite failing to materially take hold of the moonstone the protagonist as a narrator remains, paradoxically enough, both enlightened by its schiller and drawn to its magnetic pull. Being the alpha and omega of his new life, the moonstone is both the source of his enthralling, captivating, schillering voice and the lucrative target of a new narrative genre and convention. Consequently, the voice of the individuated narrator assumes a literary quality that corresponds with the moonstone’s schiller. It is as simultaneously solid and evanescent as his narrative is inconsistent yet cogent. To phrase it in Latour’s terms, the moonstone’s schiller functions as an actor that gives the protagonist the character of

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the storyteller who himself reciprocates as actor by affording value to the mass of moonstone. Pitching scientific facts against mystery and occultism in his account, the narrator wavers between competing epistemologies. He promotes a realistic perspective, takes a hardcash view on the matter at hand, yet in an old-fashioned mode of speech. As a natural resource waiting to be mined, the moonstone mass is symbolic of the massive exploits that are to be made from storytelling—when the time comes and people realize that a “jewel that could not be prized” has been discovered (99). The narrator is clearly better attuned than his old-fashioned uncle to recognizing the potential gains that are to be made. In the future—that much is indicated by the narrator’s generational dispute with “old Paul”—storytelling will develop into a profitable business, a new frontier so to speak. While he has no material proof to attest the existence of the moonstone, the veracity of his account, and the solidity of his business instinct, the narrator relies on the passing of time, on progress really, to work in his favor. In the meantime he records his memories as “The Moonstone Mass” and patiently, stubbornly awaits future recognition. Convinced of his groundbreaking discovery, the narrator even likens himself to Galileo Galilei: “My mass of moonshine, old Paul calls it. I let him have his say; he can not have that nor any thing else much longer; but when all is done I recall Galileo and I mutter to myself, ‘Per si muove—it was a mass of moonstone!’” (101). Considering himself a new Galileo may be prophetic or megalomaniac of the narrator. Either way, his discovery certifies a new paradigm: “I was to learn,” the narrator states, “that death and stillness have no kingdom on this globe, and that even in the extremest bitterness of cold and ice perpetual interchange and motion is taking place” (92). Initially, he believed that the Arctic was static. Under the roving eye of the inexperienced Arctic traveler “extended the sheets of unbroken ice; sometimes a huge glacier hung pendulous from the precipice; once we saw, by the starlight, a white, foaming, rushing river arrested and transformed to ice in its flight down that steep” (95). In this scene, the icy fluids momentarily appear arrested as they are aestheticized into a landscape image by the narrator’s gaze, before they break up and rearrange themselves in resumed motion. Of the rescue party, Glipnu, two of his dogs, “and the sledge went under,” the narrator tells us. He is now deserted in “the living terrors of this icy hell” (96). Championing an understanding of “the Arctic as a dynamic space, not an empty landscape or flat surface awaiting the entrance of history’s actors” (Craciun 12), Spofford lets the protagonist engage in dynamic relations. At the end of his exploration, the protagonist is molded and changed by the ice, the cold, the ship, the crew, Glipnu, the dogs, the moonstone, and every other actor in the network in which he is entangled. At the end of the story which, corresponding with “The Story of the Iceberg,” does not state the end of transformation, the protagonist is another man with an unremitting belief in his knack for storytelling. In a narrative procedure that masterfully employs gothic elements to build and release tension, to create the impression of utmost danger and terror and mystery, the narrator’s idiosyncratic voice and narrating describe the exploration voyage as a symbolical journey, as the narrated I’s rite of passage that facilitates his re-birth as a narrator. Evoking at times an arctic sublime typical of much nineteenth-century literature and art, “The Moonstone Mass” coheres to the conventions of the time which often imbued the ice with metaphoric, spiritual meaning. “Ice and icescapes,” Adriana Craciun states in Writing Arctic Disaster, “not only disoriented and intrigued mariners, they dazzled writers, painters, and spectators. Their curious atmospheric, optical, and acoustic

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effects inspired generations to imagine new natures” (9). Accordingly, Spofford’s narrator recalls that “the air seemed full of a new power, a strange and invisible influence, as if a king of unknown terrors here held his awful state” (96). From this fluid environment emerges the narrating I whose retrospective self-narration allows him to assure himself, his family, and his readers that not all was lost in the failed endeavor to find the Northwest Passage. Using meiosis to fashion himself as an anti-hero, he wrests personal, psychological profit from the tale about his metamorphosis from “hard-cash descendant to romancer” (101).8 At the very least his story allows him to save face. Yet, the narrator’s experience in the Arctic further effects his emancipation both as a man and a businessman, which closes the narrative cycle. From the outset, capitalism appears as a chief actor in the story, propelling the plot and the main character into action in the person of “old Uncle Paul” (91). He is “intensely interested” in the subject of the Northwest passage “both scientificaly [sic] and from a commercial point of view” (91), as he seeks to expand his trade business and reduce the time and cost of transportation. While the narrated I is frank about the appeal that money has for him, he is initially less daring than his uncle. Yet, once he is lured into the great wide open, he realizes storytelling could be turned into an entrepreneurial exploit, a moonstone mass he means to “break” and “to obtain” (99), not as material trophy token but a new business idea. This makes the narrating I the harbinger of a new generation and it is only a matter of time until the age of “old Uncle Paul” will be over (91).

3. Everywhere Icebergs Intervene

The mass of moonstone points to storytelling as a marketable commodity (a mass market product) as Spofford, trimming down the expanse of the Romantic adventure novel, channels the Arctic exploration narrative into the generic pathways of the short story. Given that Spofford herself had been churning out stories to support her family and herself for decades (Murillo n.p.), the author would certainly be the first to hope that the genre which was popular with American writers, publishers, and readers precisely for its benefits as quickly and easily commodifiable literary product, would generate great gains. Still, like her protagonist, Spofford wavered and struggled. The author “had difficulty joining the realistic movement” (Murillo n.p.), trying to find and navigate a passageway transitioning from Romanticism to Realism. This effected a series of generic spills in her oeuvre. In her analysis of Spofford’s gothic tale “Her Story” literary scholar Rita Bode concedes that “the romantic and realistic exist simultaneously in the same story baffling the rigid categories for critical assessments” (143). Bode echoes Spofford’s biographer Elizabeth K. Halbeisen who writes that “the struggle between the romanticists and the realists being fought on a battle ground of the seventies and eighties, and Harriet Prescott Spofford having already given evidence of the pull in both directions, her stories bear excellent witness to the war” (124). “The Moonstone Mass,” Halbeisen continues, is “a romantic adventure into unknown land made real by verisimilitude of detail” (127). While it “owes a debt to Poe’s tales of symbolic journeys and some of the masterpieces of British romantic poetry” (Bendixen xxix), the text caters to the readers’ increasing appetite for realistic stories as it embraces capitalism as a literary subject, literally promoting the commodification of storytelling as ingenious idea, “a thing so real” (Spofford, “The Moonstone Mass” 98).

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Yet, Spofford’s elaborating fluidity as a topic and compositional feature in her Arctic texts has not only biographical reasons. Aesthetically it attests to the transformation of American society after the Civil War, to the cultural and economic changes that were about to reshape American life and to the instabilities that these changes effected in terms of gender and class identities and relations, in short to a newly reassembling actor-network that allowed for new practices and identities. As the old order gets upset, a sense of the world going topsy-turvy plays out in terms of a conceptualization of dynamism not just in the symbolic episode that forms the climax of the text, but also in terms of the narrator’s change in marital status and profession, his wavering between Romanticism and Realism. As we know today, Spofford’s story turned out to be prophetic and the narrator’s vision became reality before long. A few decades later, during the Gilded Age, storytelling was established as a “recognized trade,” which prompted William Dean Howells to voice his indignation in “The Man of Letters as a Man of Business.” In this 1902 essay, the great American realist criticizes the business that was made of “the sort of fiction which corresponds in literature to the circus and the variety theatre” (qtd. in Trachtenberg 194). Expanding on Howells’ contempt for popular literature, cultural historian Alan Trachtenberg explains that it was, in fact, “story-paper fiction” that “represented one of the most ephemeral commodities of the era […] hundreds of authors working anonymously in factory-like quarters in New York” (197). There, a writer of dime novels and other formulaic literary mass products “turns into a veritable machine,” Edward Bok of the Ladies’ Home Journal complained in 1892 (qtd. in Trachtenberg 197). To conclude, in “The Moonstone Mass,” which in the typical fashion of the short story is open-ended, all sorts of matters are unstable and in motion like in Spofford’s poem “The Story of the Iceberg.” Dynamism is foregrounded both on the level of form and style as well as content. By assembling tropes of both Romantic and Realistic writing, the short story actively forges dynamic relations between literary styles and eras. In terms of plot, dynamic relations are at work between man and himself, between the generations, genders, human and non-human actors as well as between material matter and text. Despite the fact that the ice is not yet personified as it will be in the later poem, “The Moonstone Mass”—and here I play on Latour’s phrase in The Pasteurization of France—assumes and activates relations, for everywhere icebergs intervene (35).9 In “The Moonstone Mass” icebergs act and uncannily so. Compelled by invisible currents, the ice flows, careens, breaks, and reconfigures. The ice, like all other actors in the text, is in constant motion, assumes ever-surprising new forms, and is inseparable from the characters in the text, to whom it continually relates in complicated, interactive ways. The Arctic in Spofford‘s writings is not conceptualized as a natural environment that is separate from humans who use it as a frozen, mute and static setting on which to act and enact the plot. Rather, it is an actor that factors in. Both in “The Story of an Iceberg” and “The Moonstone Mass,” icebergs are enmeshed in a network of connections with objects, people, animals, from which the narrative poem and autofictional story emerge as effects of collective activity. Contesting the image of stasis connoted by the idea of a ship locked in ice, the narrator of “The Moonstone Mass” comes to appreciate that the polar region is instead defined by constant movement, which not only saves his life, but also generates his storytelling. And he is right to assume that as time progresses major changes are about to happen to writers, texts and discourses in post Civil War industrial America.

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NOTES

1. Unlike Spofford’s better-known stories, “Circumstance” (1860) and “The Amber Gods” (1863), “The Moonstone Mass” has not often been anthologized; nor has it received much scholarly attention. Alfred Bendixen was first to include it in his 1989 collection of stories by Spofford. Next Jessica Amanda Salmonson reprinted it in The Moonstone Mass, and Others (2000). More recently “The Moonstone Mass” appeared in Peter Straub’s thematic American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps (2009), and Mike Ashley’s The Dreaming Sex: Early Tales of Scientific Imagination by Women (2011) (see Murillo for a comprehensive survey). 2. The Northwest Passage (earlier known as the Strait of Anian) connects the Atlantic with the Pacific Ocean. According to Adriana Craciun it “appears on maps only after 1530 (inspired by John Cabot’s 1508 voyage)” (14). Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen first successfully completed it in 1904 several decades after Spofford’s protagonist claims discovery. 3. Spofford’s use of the term “copper-bottomed,” which also means reliable, as innuendo on the narrator’s self-declared inconsistent character and mode of storytelling, is, of course, tongue-in-cheek. 4. In Style, Gender, and Fantasy in Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Writing, Dorri Beam highlights the importance of voice in Spofford’s writings as “it moves, accrues, and takes substance to form some new entity” (132). In “Circumstance,” the woman protagonist succeeds in keeping at bay a ferocious panther in a New England forest by singing to him for hours on end. Over the course of the long, frightening night in which she must—much like Scheherazade—keep the beast enthralled, or die, the protagonist’s voice “has taken form and substance in music” (131). Ultimately, it is “the embodiment of a new self released by her break with social structures and her intimacy with the wilderness” (131). Investigating Spofford’s employment of voice in “The Amber Gods,” Beam ties in with Lisa Logan who argues that the short story “critiques the imperialist agenda of romanticism” (qtd. in Beam 139). According to Beam “The Amber Gods” “performs its resistance through voice and style” (139). The author engages an extended conceit to relay the narrator protagonist’s rhetorical procedure who tells the story after she died—from her grave: “When she breaks the frame to include us, when she talks forever, when she describes her beauty in bewildering and hyperbolic terms, Yone’s voice enacts the threats of highly wrought style. Like amber, her voice flows out of its containers, it captures us in its liquid embrace” (153). Breaking “the frame of conventional narrative by allowing the dead to speak” in “The Amber Gods,” Spofford allegedly inspired Emily “Dickinson’s experiments with ‘dead’ poetic voice” (140).

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5. Other poems in the collection In Titian’s Garden similarly connect the theme of transformation with the logic of productivity and profit. “The Making of the Pearl,” for example, which immediately follows “The Story of the Iceberg,” tells the story of a “little creature” (61), some shelled mollusk, whose carefree existence in tropical waters is made miserable when an irritating grain of sand gets trapped in its folds. In the attempt to alleviate the pain, we learn, the oyster eventually manages to metamorphosize the invasive element into a pearl that is harvested shortly after. Despite the fact that he gets “snatched […] into death and doom,” the mollusk’s hard existence and heedless death are redeemed by the pearl’s splendor: “On some queen’s breast it heaves, it falls” (64), the speaker states. Since it contains the world in a grain of sand, “Sunshine and sea and moon are there, / The sorrow of a lifetime, too!” (64), the pearl’s aesthetic surplus value trumps that of the mollusk’s bare existence which gets exploited as a breeding ground. In “The Violin,” too, the reader gets attuned to the feelings of a natural resource, a tree in this case, who as autodiegetic narrator relays his transformation into musical instrument. Like with the mollusk, the violence to which the tree gets subjected as raw material is traded off with his cultural value after he has been cut and crafted into an instrument: “I had never sung had I not died!” the violin/former tree states as speaker (16). Yet in the hands of a skillful musician, he rejoices in ecstasy: “I was singing—I who once was mute!” Having lamented his inability to speak throughout the first half of the poem, the violin is jubilant not only because he considers music an aesthetic uplift but because his being put to use as a means of musical production affords him a way of self-expression via cooperation. In contrast, “The Story of the Iceberg” refrains from any such sublimation, which also sets it apart from “The Moonstone Mass,” where the narrator’s failure as explorer is redeemed by his successful fashioning of a story that elevates his pains to the higher level of cultural work. 6. The solar storm of 1859 was widely covered in American newspapers at the time (for a list see http://www.solarstorms.org/SS1859.html). Chances are that Spofford found in some of these the inspiration to describe the auroral and magnetic phenomena in “The Moonstone Mass.” 7. The narrator reiterates the Gulf Stream theory about “currents of water heated in the tropics and carried by the rotary motion of the planet to the Pole” (94), and “the existence of an immense space of clear water” (93). Here “The Moonstone Mass” quotes August Petermann’s renegade idea of a navigable sea (“eisfreies und schiffbares Meer”) which the German mapmaker had announced at the first German Geographer’s Convention in Gotha in 1865 (7). He promoted it much in opposition to the widespread notion that the Arctic was covered by perennial ice and believed in “a green central Greenland fuelled by observations of floating timber in the waters near the big island” (Sverker 329). 8. Changes of profession, another instance of fluidity, abound in Spofford’s work. In her detective story “Mr. Furbush” (1865), the protagonist is also surprisingly flexible in terms of occupation. The eponymous character resigns, “sickened of the business” as a detective, to open “one of the largest and most elegant photographing establishments in the city” (6). Going from police-employed detective to self-employed shop-owner, Furbush’s professional trajectory continues in the sequel “In the Maguerriwock” (1868). Here Furbush resigns from his resignation to work more profitably as a self- employed private detective with “a case” that, “a client” assures him, “‘will really be worth [his] while’” (97). Like “The Moonstone Mass,” which tells the story of a

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businessman turning explorer turning romancer, Spofford’s detective stories explore the dynamism of the new capitalist system, concluding that it offers not only possibilities of individual transformation, professional change and promotion, and hence greater permeability between the social classes, but that it also demands a recalibration of social standards and relations which are rendered as inherently unstable. 9. “There are not only ‘social’ relations, relations between man and man. Society is not made up just of men, for everywhere microbes intervene and act” (Latour, The Pasteurization of France 35).

ABSTRACTS

The essay examines Harriet Prescott Spofford’s short story “The Moonstone Mass” (1868) through the lens of fluidity foregrounded by her Arctic poem “The Story of the Iceberg” (1897). Rendering a network of actors (human and other), who are connected and continuously influence one another, “The Moonstone Mass” demands an analysis that acknowledges relationality as facilitating the protagonist’s discovery of the Northwest Passage alongside other metaphorical pathways, which the geographical trope symbolizes in the text. I argue that “The Moonstone Mass” fictionally renders an (imaginary) geographical journey to describe the complexities and challenges of personal, generational and societal transfers from the culturally conspicuous perspective of the nineteenth-century American storyteller transitioning from the era of Romanticism to Realism.

INDEX

Keywords: Harriet Prescott Spofford, Arctic, iceberg, moonstone, fluidity, Bruno Latour, actor- network theory, storytelling, Romanticism to Realism, poem, short story

AUTHOR

VERENA LASCHINGER Verena Laschinger teaches American Literature at the University of Erfurt, Germany. From 2005 to 2010 she was employed as an Assistant Professor of American Literature and Culture at Fatih University Istanbul, Turkey. She holds a Ph.D. from Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Germany. In 2006 she co-founded the European Study Group of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and has co-edited two of the group’s essay collections, most recently with Sirpa Salenius Neglected American Women Writers of the Long Nineteenth Century (Routledge 2019). In her writings she has also examined photo-text relations and Turkish-American issues in American literature since the nineteenth century.

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