Visions of Union from Professional Women Writers of the American North, 1859-1877
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Carolina Digital Repository THE HOME FRONT REVISITED: VISIONS OF UNION FROM PROFESSIONAL WOMEN WRITERS OF THE AMERICAN NORTH, 1859-1877 Vera R. Foley A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. Chapel Hill 2016 Approved by: Philip F. Gura Joy S. Kasson Timothy Marr Eliza Richards Jane F. Thrailkill © 2016 Vera R. Foley ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Vera R. Foley: The Home Front Revisited: Visions of Union From Professional Women Writers of the American North, 1859-1877 (Under the direction of Philip F. Gura) This project reintroduces a series of recently recovered women authors of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. These women, I argue, form a print community whose fiction uses tropes of domestic disorder in order to reimagine the home not as rigidly hierarchical but as malleable to the needs of the women who inhabit it. Significantly, the Civil War seems to be a creative asset rather than an impediment to such revisionist fiction. While wives and daughters remained, often sans patriarch, on the home front, their perception of the shape of the American family and the institutions that undergirded it transformed. This print community of women authors narrated versions of that changed perception through its novels and short stories. Exploring this alternative vision of the American family at home reveals a literary reimagining of the terms of feminine domesticity, the depth and scope of which have not yet been fully acknowledged by scholars of literature or history. “The Home Front Revisited” presents for the first time a network of literary and ideological connections between Lillie Devereux Blake, Elizabeth Stoddard, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Louisa May Alcott, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. Historically, their works have been read as responses to more famous male voices, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne or Edgar Allan Poe. I, however, reintroduce them not as faded counterparts to canonical men but as members of a vibrant intellectual community of their own. To demonstrate the complexity of their developing visions of the American gender hierarchy, I posit a new series of thematic categories that iii highlight these women authors’ shared concerns and responses to one another: (1) courtship conventions on the marriage market, (2) hierarchies of influence within the household, (3) gendered lines of inheritance, (4) the rhetoric of domestic slavery, and (5) women’s potential to act as wage-earners in the public sphere. Such critical contexts reveal the limitations of relying exclusively upon political suffragist rhetoric to represent nineteenth-century women’s visions of how the family structure might be productively transformed. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to take this opportunity to thank my director, Philip Gura, for his support and guidance as I developed this project, and most particularly for introducing me to Elizabeth Stoddard and Lillie Devereux Blake. Many thanks also go to my readers, Joy Kasson, Tim Marr, Eliza Richards, and Jane Thrailkill, for giving generously of their time and expertise. The institutional support I received from the University was integral to this project. In particular, I would like to thank the Department of English and Comparative Literature for awarding me a Dissertation Completion Fellowship that expedited the completion of my work. I would also like to thank the staff at the University of North Carolina libraries for their assistance with my searches for increasingly specific research materials, especially Tommy Nixon and Stewart Varner. Any acknowledgements I make would not be complete without recognizing my extraordinary colleagues, who offered valuable insights into my project when it was still in draft form: Emma Calabrese, Josh Doty, Rachael Isom, Leslie McAbee, and Kym Weed. I received valuable feedback on the sections of this work that I presented at conferences in 2015. I owe thanks to the audiences and organizers of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers (Philadelphia, November 2015) and the South Atlantic Modern Language Association (Durham, NC, November 2015) for their support of my presentations on Elizabeth Stoddard’s Two Men and Harriet Prescott Spofford’s The Amber Gods, respectively. v Finally, I know it would not have been possible for me to attend this program, much less complete this project, without the education and inspiration I received as an undergraduate from my professors at Mount Holyoke College, in particular Nigel Alderman, Christopher Benfey, and Donald Weber. I would also like to extend my thanks to Elizabeth Young, also of Mount Holyoke, for the guidance she provided regarding my research after I graduated. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: THE REWRITTEN FAMILY: AMERICAN WOMEN’S LITERATURE AND THE NEW DOMESTIC IMAGINATION…………….........9 Law Before Literature: Women’s Rights in the Political Arena…………………………..9 The Turn to Literature: Redefining Family on the Page…………………………………17 The Sites of Change: Using Literature to Map History.…………………………………44 CHAPTER 1: A SACRED UNION: AMERICAN WOMEN AND THE MARRIAGE MARKET REMADE……………………………………………………..............51 The Cage That Is Courtship: Southwold (1859)………………………..………………..56 A Marriage Beyond Bars: The Morgesons (1862)……………………….………………70 CHAPTER 2: A MASQUE OF FALSE MATRIARCHS: WIVES AND BRIDES IN THE “HOUSE DIVIDED”..……………………………………………………………………..86 Blood Relations and Revelations: Rockford, or Sunshine and Storm (1863)…………....90 A Family Under Siege: Behind a Mask, or A Woman’s Power (1866)…...……………111 CHAPTER 3: AMERICA’S CINDERELLAS AND THEIR WICKED STEPFAMILIES: INHERITANCE DURING AND AFTER THE CIVIL WAR……………..132 The Burning of Cinderella: “The Strathsays” (1863)…………………………………..138 Two Men, a Girl, and Her Wicked Stepmother: Two Men (1865)……………………..153 Cinderella’s Wicked Stepdaughter: “Her Story” (1872)……………………………….168 CHAPTER 4: CLEOPATRA AND THE SPHINX: THE FACES OF SLAVERY IN THE SHADOW OF CIVIL WAR……………………………………………..182 The Slave Trader’s Legacy: The Amber Gods (1860)………………………………….186 Chaining the Postbellum Sphinx: The Story of Avis (1877)……………………………208 vii CHAPTER 5: HELPING HANDS: WOMEN’S WORK AND THE RISE OF THE POSTBELLUM FEMININE UTOPIA…………………………………………………...231 The Hands That Bind: The Silent Partner (1871)………………………………………236 Becoming a Sterling Woman: Work: A Story of Experience (1873)………………...…258 AFTERWORD: AFTERLIVES….……………………………………………………………..281 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………………290 viii THE REWRITTEN FAMILY: AMERICAN WOMEN’S LITERATURE AND THE NEW DOMESTIC IMAGINATION Law Before Literature: Women’s Rights in the Political Arena “I do not ask society to require less of woman, but more of man,” declared women’s rights activist Caroline Healey Dall in 1861. In a series of lectures that she presented in January of that year, Dall enumerated the many failures of supposedly benevolent heads of household to fulfill their duties as patriarchs and agents in the public realm on behalf of their female dependents. Husbands and fathers, she asserts, routinely “deprive” their families of their right “to find man in his proper place, as counsellor [sic] and friend.” Unlike more “radical” members of the suffrage movement, Dall is willing to imagine an ideal household in which the husband remains “at the head of the family”—but she asserts that the American husband rarely fulfills the obligations that make this hierarchical domestic structure feasible. As his family’s only representative outside the home, a husband or father, she reasons, has a responsibility to use his greater power and “experience” to act as a guide and helpmeet to his wife and as a “spiritual custod[ian]” of his children. It is only when a patriarch commits himself to these domestic duties, Dall implies, that he can be trusted to wield absolute financial, legal, and moral power over his dependents. In essence, instead of demanding that women be released from their “separate 9 sphere” of the home, she implies that the sanctity of the American family may be preserved by the return of the husband to the domestic fold.1 Dall’s solution to the increasingly prominent problem of women’s dissatisfaction with their place within the American home is in fact more “radical” than its relatively conservative language suggests. Historically, as Nancy F. Cott succinctly demonstrates, Americans had “seen marital governance and political governance as linked along the same continuum”; the same republican ideology that gave (white) men the right to vote for their political representatives vindicated the right of the husband to act as a representative to his wife in the public realm, to which women had only limited access.2 But, despite the patriotic allure of benevolent paternalism, concerns about these strategic limitations to the public agency of wives, and the potential it created for abuse and neglect on the part of husbands and fathers, proliferated in the American North, with its vibrant women’s right movement, following the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848. Dall’s contention that “[s]ociety sets men free from every conceivable family duty, without a word,” while simultaneously “bind[ing] women down” as they attempt to compensate for their husbands’ apathy reflects more than a decade of similar arguments made by celebrated proto-feminist activists such as