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AMERICAN ANTIGONE: WOMEN, EDUCATION, NATION, 1800-1870 by ROBERT E

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AMERICAN ANTIGONE: WOMEN, EDUCATION, NATION, 1800-1870 by ROBERT E AMERICAN ANTIGONE: WOMEN, EDUCATION, NATION, 1800-1870 by ROBERT E. NELSON A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in History written under the direction of James Livingston and approved by ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey October, 2008 ©2008 Robert E. Nelson ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION American Antigone: Women, Education, Nation, 1800-1870 by ROBERT E. NELSON Dissertation Director: James Livingston My dissertation explores women’s moral and educational labor—teaching, writing, and reforming—in the United States during the nineteenth century. Focusing on the social ideas and the lives of Emma Willard (b. 1787), Catharine Beecher (b. 1800), and Elizabeth Peabody (b. 1804), this study argues that an expansion of women's moral and educational labor played a significant role in political and social changes during this period. The Sophoclean heroine Antigone of the play named for her serves as a representative of womanhood in the emerging democratic culture of the United States. Antigone tells the story of a woman who tries to fulfill her family obligations by burying her brother, killed in a civil war. The conflict between a citizen’s duties to the state versus a sister’s duties to family, illustrates the concept of “separate spheres,” with its firm distinction between private and public. That these duties are not separate, that they come into conflict, is the moral dilemma of the play. Antigone challenges the state by publicly articulating her sense of family duty. Unlike her brothers, she does not claim the throne for herself. Like many American women in the nineteenth century, Antigone makes political arguments as a woman without claiming the same political rights as a man. ii American women of this generation did not all believe in sexual equality, and so their social ideas imagined reform within a different framework than political parties and elections. Willard, Beecher, and Peabody understand themselves and other middle-class women as participating in the democratic culture of the United States. This participation was through their moral and educational labor, not voting. Their ambivalence toward women’s suffrage was less a case of reactionary conservatism and more an attempt to assert the importance of civil society as the best ground for reform. Today, that position can seem alien in its conception of women as non-voters, but the social ideas of these women continue to speak to debates over the role that electoral politics can play in social change and to the way that the disenfranchised can speak to political authority. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Title Page i Abstract of the Dissertation ii Table of Contents iv Introduction: 1 Beyond Tragedy: Antigone in American History Chapter One: 15 Abandoning Spheres: Civil Society, Sexual Polarity, American Antigone Chapter Two: 64 The Moral Economy of Women’s Educational Labor, 1810-1835 Chapter Three: 116 A Woman’s Duties: Scenes of Educational Labor, 1835-1850 Chapter Four: 187 Black Antigone: Abolition and the Educational Labor of Women Chapter Five: 231 Antigone’s Politics: Subordination and ‘Something Better than the Ballot’ Curriculum Vitae 260 iv 1 Introduction Beyond Tragedy: Antigone in American History Antigone entered American culture as part of the celebration of ancient Greece that characterized the intellectual response to the rise of democracy. The first American edition of the play was published in 1835. It was first performed professionally in New York City during 1845. Caroline Winterer suggests that the arrival of Antigone in the United States “illuminates the moment at which Americans reimagined the function of classicism in women’s education, and in turn women’s preparation for citizenship.” The play was part of the cultural landscape in which women entered educational and political life in the United States and remains crucial to understanding how political culture is understood in relation to gender.1 Perhaps the most obvious lesson of Antigone is about the exclusion of women from politics. The play is centered on the conflict between Creon, who represents the justice of the state, and Antigone, who tries to fulfill her family obligations by burying her brother, killed in a civil war trying to overthrow Creon. The conflict between Creon and Antigone, duty to state versus duty to family, illustrates the concept of “separate spheres,” with its firm distinction between private and public. That these duties are not separate, that they come into conflict, is the moral dilemma of the play. Antigone challenges the state by publicly articulating her sense of family duty. Unlike her brothers, she does not claim the throne for herself. Like many American women in the nineteenth century, Antigone makes political arguments as a woman without claiming the same 2 political rights as a man. The difference between the Greek and the American Antigone is the difference between mythic and historical narrative. As a story centered on the doomed fate of Oedipus’s family, the Greek Antigone ends in death and madness. Denied her public role and prevented from fulfilling her family duty, Antigone dies by her own hand after being buried in a cave. Creon is driven mad by the consequences of her death. His wife and son, who was betrothed to Antigone, commit suicide. Translated to the American nineteenth century, there is reason to see a similarity in the exclusion of women from politics and the denial of their civil rights. The lives of some American women were tragic, their voices silenced, their public lives denied. And like Antigone, many experienced the contradictions and frustrations of making women’s concerns public. Yet, the stark clarity of Antigone’s death does not reflect the complex history of women’s civil and political life in the United States. Another crucial difference, one that was repeated in nineteenth century reviews and commentary on the play, is between the “heathen” Greek play and the predominantly Christian society of the United States. The consensus among scholars and philosophers writing in national magazines was that Greek drama needed Christianity to complete its moral framework. As a reviewer of the first American editions of Antigone and the Alcestis of Euripides put it, “In point of morality they [ancient Greeks] reach the highest point of heathen purity.”2 As pre-Christian art, Greek drama was limited in its ability to reflect true morality, which was only available after Jesus had appeared. Thus, in an article titled “The Influence of Christianity on the Family,” one writer suggested that 3 Antigone “reaches out prophetically beyond the domain of Heathenism. Antigone is an ideal creation of poetic fancy, realized only in Christian nations.” And realized, we can assume, not only in nations, but within the gendered framework of morality as well. The writer concluded, “Christianity alone raises woman to her true dignity.”3 Like many writers of his day, the author of “The Influence of Christianity on the Family,” understood women’s social roles through the family roles of wife and mother. His discussion of women’s dignity focused entirely on Paul’s description of the relation between husband and wife as being like the relation between Christ and church. The directive in Ephesians 5:22 "Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord" is followed by the analogy in Ephesians 5:23 that "the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church" and the complex view of marriage reflected in the rest of Ephesians 24-33. Like the author, American men and women of the nineteenth century interpreted these passages as meaning that wives were subordinate to husbands. Yet, it is worth noting that Antigone, unlike her sister Ismene, is not married. Whatever the meaning of Paul’s description of marriage, it does not directly address women who, like Antigone, have live outside the marriage relation. How then was Antigone “realized in Christian nations?” If the role of wife defines women as subordinate, what does the story of an unmarried woman who resists state authority mean? Christianity was not the only moral framework for making sense of Greek drama. The transatlantic intellectual culture that began flourishing outside church structures during this period also struggled to make sense of Antigone’s meaning. George Eliot argued that rather than see Antigone’s moral in terms of an “antagonism between valid 4 claims” specific to the polytheism of ancient Greece, we should see that “the struggle between Antigone and Creon represents that struggle between elemental tendencies and established laws by which the outer life of man is gradually and painfully being brought into harmony with his inward needs.”4 Eliot suggested that the conflict between Antigone’s claim and Creon’s authority reflects something universal about the necessary dangers of a belief too strong or a political authority too unyielding. In the passage that serves as the epigraph to this study, Eliot beautifully described the unintended consequences of following individual conscience. Perhaps this modern sensibility informs more recent engagement with the figure of Antigone. Antigone seems to have re-entered American cultural consciousness in a major way. In 2005, Starbucks chose to feature the debut CD by an all-women’s band named Antigone Rising in all its stores. That same year, New Antigone, a journal focused “on postgraduate women writing and arts, without being exclusively for and about 'women' and 'postgraduates'” began publication. In 2004, “The Antigone Project,” a collaborative project by five women writers and five women directors ran at the Julia Miles Theater, New York.5 In August 2005, Cindy Sheehan, bereaved mother turned anti-war activist, captured the imagination of the nation.
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