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Beyond Curiosity: Late-Nineteenth-Century American Women's Narratives of Obsession by Logan Scherer a Dissertation Submitted I

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Beyond Curiosity: Late-Nineteenth-Century American Women's Narratives of Obsession by Logan Scherer a Dissertation Submitted I Beyond Curiosity: Late-Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Narratives of Obsession by Logan Scherer A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Language and Literature) in The University of Michigan 2017 Doctoral Committee: Professor June M. Howard, Chair Professor Mary C. Kelley Professor Kerry Larson Professor Susan Scott Parrish Logan Scherer [email protected] ORCID iD: 0000-0002-7498-8774 © Logan Scherer 2017 for Kim Richards, with desperation, admiration, and obsession ii Table of Contents Dedication ii Abstract iv Introduction “To Me Everything Is A Discovery”: Harriet Mann Miller and the Making of Late-Nineteenth-Century Obsession 1 Chapter 1 Entomology, Fiction, Intoxication: Annie Trumbull Slosson and the Upsides of Obsession 26 Chapter 2 Between Sentiment and Science: Celia Thaxter’s Obsessions in the Garden 55 Chapter 3 Feeling Wrong: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s New England and Floridian Narratives of Obsession 87 Chapter 4 How the Stargazer Became A Starlet: Maria Mitchell and the Nineteenth-Century Celebration of Female Obsession 115 After Obsession: Kate Bolick, Julie Hecht, Jamaica Kincaid, and the Fruits of Sterility 148 Bibliography 158 iii Abstract In “Beyond Curiosity,” I identify a group of late-nineteenth-century American women writers whose all-consuming interests in observational sciences—from entomology to botany to ornithology to astronomy—guided their artistic creations. I call their short stories, novels, and personal and scientific essays “narratives of obsession,” a genre I reveal as a feminine reimagining of eighteenth-century natural histories and early- nineteenth-century literary sketches. I introduce “obsession” as a stylistic gesture, a narrative device characterized by plotlessness, heightened description, antisociality, idealized spinsterhood, and monomaniacal focus on specialized areas of personal study. I contextualize “obsession” against the postbellum shift in U.S. discourse when the sciences were becoming professionalized and institutionalized, less dependent on and welcoming of self-taught amateurs, and when women were facing new barriers against male-dominated universities and science organizations. I show how late-nineteenth- century upper-middle class white women crafted narratives of obsession as an alternative to the restrictive disciplinarity emerging around them. I chronicle the obsessions of four women: short story writer-turned-entomologist Annie Trumbull Slosson and her literary-descriptive tales and essays; poet-gardener Celia Thaxter and her garden book, An Island Garden (1894); Harriet Beecher Stowe and her book of Florida essays, Palmetto-Leaves (1873), and her novel, Oldtown Folks (1869); and astronomer Maria Mitchell and the newspaper and magazine articles and literary iv works that mythologized her (including Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun (1860), Herman Melville’s “After the Pleasure Party” (1891), and Augusta Jane Evans’ Macaria; or, Altars of Sacrifice (1864)). I extend the narrative of obsession to other white, upper- middle-class late-nineteenth-century women writers and naturalists, including Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Harriet Mann Miller, Mary Treat, Graceanna Lewis, and Katharine Dooris Sharp. While I locate women’s obsession in a New England culture that fostered feminine curiosity and spinsterhood, I also demonstrate how the obsessed woman became a figure of national fixation. By highlighting the antisociality and hermeticism in these narratives of obsession, I unsettle the standard critical account of community and empathy as the center of late- nineteenth-century women’s nature writing and regionalism. These narratives of widows, spinsters, and outcasts rejecting normative romantic and social bonds with others rework the modes of expression deemed acceptable for late-nineteenth-century women (sentimentality, domesticity, regionalism). I propose obsession as a different nineteenth- century women’s tradition that celebrates solitude and spinsterhood (not sympathy or connection). I end by tracing a spinster genealogy, a non-procreative legacy of late- nineteenth-century obsession. I examine texts by three late-twentieth- and early-twenty- first-century American women writers who imagine themselves as nineteenth-century spinsters in their narratives of obsession: Julie Hecht’s short stories, Kate Bolick’s memoir, Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own (2015), and Jamaica Kincaid’s My Garden (Book): (1999)—texts that expand the racial, social, and emotional possibilities of obsession even as they further narrow and make newly violent its monomaniacal focus. v Introduction “To Me Everything Is A Discovery”: Harriet Mann Miller and the Making of Late-Nineteenth-Century Obsession On the eve of her fiftieth birthday, Harriet Mann Miller took on a youthful glow. The author of hundreds of stories for children, Miller had become a kid again herself. “She is not a young woman, is the proud grandmother of seven children; but her bright face crowned with handsome white hair, has that young, alert, happy look that comes with having a satisfying hobby that goes at a lively pace,” a friend of Miller’s wrote, three years before her death (Sanborn 147). The “satisfying hobby” was birding—and it was much more than “satisfying” for Miller: it was transformative. Experiencing the joys of bird-watching for the first time, Miller underwent a rebirth. “I had never spent any time in the country and had been absorbed all my life in books,” Miller tells us of her pre- birding life. Her inaugural afternoon of birding at Brooklyn’s Prospect Park in the summer of 1880 changed everything: “My friend was an enthusiast and I found her enthusiasm contagious…indeed before she left me I became so interested in the Catbird and Thrush that I continued to visit the park to see them” (Bailey 166). Once she started, she didn’t want to ever stop. The discovery of this passion launched a kind of second life for Miller. What started as childlike wonder developed into a sustained investigation into her world: “after about two summers’ study the thought one day came to me that I had seen some things that other people might be interested in…All this time my love of birds and interest in 1 them had been growing, and soon I cared for no other study” (Bailey 166). Miller went on to publish eleven books about birds and help lead efforts to stop the killing of birds for hats. She was so keen on observing and understanding her beloved birds that she “turned one room of her house into a large aviary” (Anderson & Edwards 54). Her projects also took her far outside of the domestic space. The New Yorker went on birding expeditions throughout the West, the Midwest, and New England, almost always by herself. She returned to report her observations, under the pseudonym Olive Thorne Miller, to both juvenile audiences in educational texts for children and to adult audiences in nature books and articles in magazines like The Atlantic Monthly, Scribner’s Monthly, and Harper’s Bazaar. Miller courted readers of all ages and interests, becoming one of the most popular bird writers of her time, but there was one audience to whom she couldn’t imagine writing: professional ornithologists. Throughout her work, Miller presents her observations in opposition to scientific research, as an alternative to ornithological study. The ornithologist seeks to count, name, and categorize, Miller tells us, while she strives for something deeper—“to make a personal acquaintance with the birds, find out how they live, their manners and customs, their individual characters” (In Nesting Time 17). She dismisses Science’s “relentless substitution of fancy for facts” and even goes so far as to suggest that “many crimes are committed” “in the interest of science” (Upon the Tree-Tops 116, 131). In A Bird-Lover in the West (1894), Miller defends a blue jay’s stealing of eggs from other birds’ nests as a survival technique much more honorable than the thefts performed by scientists: “what is he but a ‘collector’? And though he does not claim to be working ‘in the interest of science,’ which bigger collectors invariably do, he 2 is working in the interest of life, and life is more than science” (148). The significance of so-called life over science is central to Miller’s approach. She claims that her methodology necessitates skills and qualities that “scientific knowledge” doesn’t have access to: “infinite patience, perseverance, untiring devotion, and more,—a quick eye and ear, and a sympathetic heart. If you do not love the birds you cannot understand them” (In Nesting Time 17). She writes of her approach here as something greater than science. Miller is proud of the “sympathetic” insights she brings to birding that ornithologists cannot, yet she also acknowledges the possible shortcomings of her narratives. In the introductory note of the same book where she extolls her “sympathetic heart,” Miller prefaces her work with a disclaimer: “The facts may not all be new to Science” (In Nesting Time iii). In another preface, to Little Folks in Feathers and Fur and Others in Neither (1875), Miller places herself below the scientist: “Far be it from me to intrude upon the field of the scientific naturalist. I merely take his discoveries, and translate them into the vulgar tongue, that every-one may enjoy the delightful results of his work” (3). What will be engaging to popular readers, she assumes, will not be of interest to professionals.
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