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Rebecca Harding Davis’s “Second Life”; or “Her Hands Could Be Trained as Well as His”
Ruth Stoner Universidad de Málaga
No woman ever did better for her time than you and no shrieking suffragette will ever understand the influence you wielded, greater than hundreds of thousands of women’s votes. Letter from Richard Harding Davis to his mother (qtd. in Charles Belmont Davis, 293)
R ebecca Harding Davis was one of the most Magazine, it was the most widely read maga- popular writers in the nineteenth century, not zine in the United States and held that posi- because of “Life in the Iron-Mills,” as any con- tion for many years, over both Godey’s and temporary student of American literature might Graham’s (Tebbel and Zuckerman 36;Harris assume,but rather because for thirty-three years 72). Davis’s long-lasting association with she was a regular contributor to a “ladies” mag- Peterson’s, as well as with many other of the azine, Peterson’s.1 Her biographers argue that most widely read magazines and newspapers this was work she did to “pay the rent.” It is my of the day (Atlantic Monthly, Galaxy, Century, contention that this huge corpus of literature by Lippincott’s, Hearth and Home, Putnam’s, Scrib- Rebecca Harding Davis, often described by such ner’s, Youth’s Companion, St. Nicholas, Apple- epithets as “hackwork,”“potboilers,”and “gothic ton’s, Harper’s, Independent, New York Tribune, thrillers,” actually contains some of the most Saturday Evening Post, Ladies’ Home Journal, subversive literature written in the nineteenth Good Housekeeping, North American Review, century—radical declarations of women’s sta- etc.), dramatically illustrates her command of tus as chattel and portraits of women’s sexual the marketplace. That command, I argue, was repression, embedded within very conventional undeniably determined by Davis’s ability to imagery and formulaic sentimental plots. This fulfill the needs of the women who bought and body of literature joins a rapidly mounting col- read those magazines. And this satisfaction lection of women’s writing that, until recently, was reciprocal—such writing fulfilled Davis’s has been relegated to the subliterary classifica- own needs—financial and, in my opinion, tion of cultural artifacts, of some use to the emotional. social historian, of no use as works of art. It is my belief that Davis’s long and happy life At the time Davis commenced her enduring (she died at age 79) hinged decisively on the and endearing association with Peterson’s freedom of expression she exercised in what has now come to be seen as her “minor” literature.2 This is a prolific collection of short stories and legacy, vol. 19, no. 1, 2002, copyright © 2003 serial novels, nearly all “mysteries,” spanning the university of nebraska press, lincoln, ne fifty years. In one way or another, these works 03 legacy 19-1 part 3 1/30/03 2:02 PM Page 45
all overtly offer a symbolic display of Davis’s rian “mystery” of women’s bodies—bodies obsession with inheritance. Furthermore, these with “conflicting emotions” that, as Cynthia same works all subversively focus on female Griffin Wolff reasons, need a gothic heroine to sexuality and desire, often frustrated. Davis’s “embrace feminine sexuality” through her apparent opposition to the concept of survival union with a passionate man (215). and natural selection generated the pioneering Approximately six months after the publica- naturalism of “Life in the Iron-Mills,”her “elite” tion of “Iron-Mills” in the elite Atlantic work, submitted for judgment by “the select” Monthly, the popular Peterson’s Magazine pub- male readers such as her editor at the Atlantic lished “The Murder of the Glen Ross”—long Monthly, James T.Fields, or her reviewer, Henry before it is likely that Rebecca Harding, the then James. However, survival was ironically the thirty-year-old spinster, had become engaged chosen subject of much of her “other” fiction to marry. In most cases, a spinster daughter and the overriding force in her own life. Thus, would be expected to assume the domestic the woman who earliest and best condemned chores at home but not to contribute to the social Darwinism by “str[iking] the first blow finances of a southern household supported by for labor, in The Iron Mills [sic]” (C. B. Davis what biographers describe as a “successful busi- 293–94), was the very same one to illustrate, in nessman” father. Davis’s alliance with Peterson’s plot after plot, that a woman’s survival occurred at the same time that she, an “upstart” depended on obtaining and maintaining her from the mountains of western Virginia, had inheritance. come to the attention of the Boston and Con- Inheritance was a theme preoccupying many cord literati as a promising star. She had already writers at the time, especially after the publica- agreed to provide a serial novel for the presti- tion of the Origin of the Species in 1859. Conse- gious Atlantic Monthly and pledged her undi- quently, women’s property inheritance was the vided loyalty to that magazine. What made her perfect motif to provide women with a practi- become a regular contributor of what she her- cal formula for physical survival in an unjust self described as “hackwork” for the popular world. But Davis also addressed emotional “ladies’”magazine (C. B. Davis 57)? The serious survival, which depended on alleviating the muckraker approach to literature Davis takes in sexual starvation Victorian mores imposed on “Iron-Mills” and her inner conflict with “hack- women. Although women dared not openly work” is in visible contrast to her friend, and in discuss sex, the subject did surreptitiously sur- many ways professional parallel, Louisa May face through a coded idiom. Paula Bennett has Alcott. Alcott appears to have thoroughly compellingly linked such nineteenth-century enjoyed churning out cliff-hangers—writing women poets as Emily Dickinson with clitoral with her “left hand,” as Elaine Showalter has imagery (238). It is therefore not so surprising expressed it (ix; also see Reynolds 407). What that women fiction writers, particularly Davis drove Davis to enter into this “bargain with the (whom we know Dickinson, an avid reader of devil” with Peterson’s that would forever cast a lowbrow literature, had read and enjoyed), taint on her? employed the same subversive technique, “The Murder of the Glen Ross”(1861) is a story “invisible” clitoral symbols, to celebrate a for- that the narrator/lawyer begins to tell on his way bidden subject (Reynolds 433; Harris 1). Thus, I to a wedding. On the eve of the wedding, the vir- find that the “mystery” in each of Davis’s plots, gin bride and heiress Sarah receives a gift,a “small the missing diamond, the life insurance, the box” that contains a marriage certificate belong- long journey, the asbestos box, the Etruscan ing to the groom-to-be, Geoffrey Hope. The cer- chain, etc., acted as a metaphor for the Victo- tificate is evidence of his previous marriage to a
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dark and sinful lady (allowing Davis to subtly was passing on the plots, probably “lifted” from broach the subject of divorce). The dark lady is the legal cases he was editing for the Law Reports found murdered the next day, in the glen, and and Legal Intelligencer, to Rebecca and allowing Geoffrey Hope is accused of the murder.The nar- her to elaborate them. The following passage, rator acts as Hope’s legal counsel until evidence spoken by the narrator, Page, in “Glen Ross” of his innocence is finally discovered and the could easily have passed directly from one of “good” marriage can take place. Clarke Davis’s letters to Harding: “My story . . . Sharon Harris recounts how Rebecca Hard- is but an outline; brief to brusqueness; ...which ing’s future husband, Lemuel Clarke Davis, I have no skill to unfold. My lawyer’s pen, then only an admirer of Harding’s writing, trained to the formal routine of briefs and invited and arranged for her to become a regu- deeds, has no delicate touch, no colors to paint lar contributor to Peterson’s, submitting the love, or jealousy, or fierce, gnawing pain” (353).4 kind of literature that she personally despised. In “Glen Ross” Davis clarifies her role from the Harris then interestingly points out that the start: “I am going to tell this story. Not its mere male narrator, John Page, of the early Peterson’s legal course, as it stands on the docket, but the stories shares an “amusing” similarity with soul of the matter” (346). Later, perhaps impu- Clarke Davis, leaving the writer to surmise that dently, she includes a gratuitously inserted com- Harding was writing about him (71–72). My ment by the narrator about a servant—“Davis own reading reveals that the bachelor L. Clarke took me aside, glad of a listener to the horrible Davis was a lawyer and writer (editor of law story”(439)—a practice similar to Alfred Hitch- journals), just as the narrator, John Page, was a cock’s fleeting appearance in his films, perhaps bachelor lawyer and a storyteller. Page is a very a private joke between the soon-to-be lovers. paternal figure, in the same way Rebecca may The technique of rewriting somebody else’s have perceived her relationship, at this point, plots developed into a regular feature of Davis’s with Clarke Davis, since he had arranged her elite work as soon as she moved to Philadelphia, job with the Philadelphia magazine. Both the received a reserved desk at the library there, and names Davis and Lemuel appear as those of started raiding the archives to which she had minor characters in Harding’s early stories for thus far lacked access. Stories like “Out of the Peterson’s.3 An obvious biographical parallel, Sea” (Atlantic 1865), “Ellen” (Atlantic 1865), and from a writer who wanted only to “tell other “A Faded Leaf of History” (Atlantic 1873) as well women’s stories” (Harris 103), can be drawn as scores of character sketches testify to this between the candidates for marriage in “Glen “borrowing”or “rewriting”technique (Pfaelzer).5 Ross” and Harding’s own parents. The heroine, When Davis’s narrators begin by stating, as they Sarah, is a child when she falls in love with the often do, that a particular story was “based on mature Geoffrey Hope, who goes away on facts,”it was not merely a narrative strategy, but “business” for many years and finally returns to the “truth.”6 reclaim his bride. The fourteen-year-old Rachel Davis’s use of direct address is a significant Wilson, Rebecca’s mother, waited nine years for and original ingredient of “Iron-Mills,” both in the twenty-four-year-old Richard Harding to its “distancing”quality,to reproach the highbrow return and marry her. reader, as well as its frequency (Warhol 812). In A closer look at Davis’s Peterson’s work fur- “Glen Ross” Davis employs direct address to ther substantiates Harris’s observation on introduce a discussion on the art of writing,reas- Clarke Davis’s role: certain passages from this suring the reader of the absence of sentimental first “popular” story, “The Murder of the Glen rhetoric. She had used the same technique— Ross,” reveal the likelihood that Clarke Davis establishing the relationship between the writer
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and her writing (Auerbach 18)—in the first women would enter into a contract—the same installment of“A Story of To-day,”7 published the contract Davis was initiating with her read- previous month in the Atlantic, when Margret ers—while the reader of “Iron-Mills,” in con- starts her new job: “I am sure the woman’s hand trast, can only feel offended by the narrator’s trembled a little when she took up the pen.... persistent taunting. Robyn Warhol claims that Then she climbed up on the high office-stool . . . many of the negative reviews Uncle Tom’s Cabin and went to work, opening the books, and copy- received were the response of “hostile readers” ing from one to the other as steadily, monoto- generated by Stowe’s direct address. The same nously, as if she had been used to it all her life” can be said of “Iron-Mills.” (9). This at once sounds like a commentary on That Davis was initially conscious of the dif- Davis’s work for Peterson’s. Hence, it is a written ference in the two types of writing is obvious: document,a deed,a marriage or birth certificate, “Life in the Iron Mills” and “The Murder of the but especially a will, which stands as the key and, Glen Ross” display little in common, superfi- invariably the obstacle, to a marriage, in every cially. The tone of “Iron-Mills” is derisive and single one of the “mysteries” Davis wrote for sarcastic, an example of what Moers termed Peterson’s over a period of thirty-three years. “writing in a rage”(24), and the style is “clumsy,” Howard Fulweiler has pointed out that “a cen- whereas “Glen Ross” initially offers the reader a tral concern of the Victorian novel comes smooth-flowing,cozy escape from the realities of together with the chief goal of Victorian science: life,albeit through erotic imagery:“I wish I could uncovering the secret of inheritance” (62). Writ- stop here, and plunge into the warm, spicy ing itself—the will—according to Davis, sheds memory of the life there, in that most heartsome light on the legality of the obstacle in the public of all country homesteads”(350).The narrator in sphere,while at the same time it expunges the sin, “Glen Ross,” as pointed out, serves to unite residing in the private sphere,uniting inheritance the writer and the reader in a comfortable and sex with writing in a unique manner. Davis father/daughter relationship, one of trust. Nev- exploits a utilitarian document, symbol of her ertheless, Davis’s reiterated call to the Atlantic popular “functional” writing, in much the same dilettante readers to roll up their sleeves and way as the transcendent korl statue in “Iron- come down with her into the inferno of the Mills” symbolizes her (intentionally) uncouth industrial workers is echoed in “Glen Ross”: art.8 She then connects this document to some “‘Were you ever in Ross Glen?’ . . . ‘No? Come kind of secret box or jewel, something small and down then a step or two. You can have an idea of valuable, which recalls Ellen Moers’s use of what it is deeper in’” (352; emphasis added). But Freudian symbolism to interpret The Mill on the where is she taking us? To the lower social strata Floss by George Eliot, coincidentally Davis’s of “Life in the Iron-Mills”? Both works portray favorite writer: “those things which in dreams dark, damp, and foul smelling places, “down symbolize the female genitals: boxes, chests, below,”to which Moers’s observations on the use pockets, ships, churches—and stop at the jewel- of topography to mask sexual allusions easily case, because of George Eliot” (Moers 253). apply: “[T]he complicated topography of the To cement a bond of intimacy and trust with female genital parts . . . makes one understand her readers, Davis ironically employed the how it is that they are often represented as land- paternal narrator, a conscious strategy that cre- scapes” (253–54). The plot of “Glen Ross” pro- ated the trust that she never achieved in her elite vides an overt site for licentiousness—where the fiction but that was essential for subversion.9 violation of a woman’s body has taken place, Page is portrayed as the kind of man most stimulating the Victorian/Puritan imagination— women could trust, the lawyer with whom while “Iron-Mills”only hints at Deborah’s sexual
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starvation. Sexual allusions, many of them neg- desire, a subject one of her biographers ative, abound in “Glen Ross”: the river in the recounts she shockingly brought up in her table “gorge” is “sluggish and black,”and the air is full conversation in Boston in 1862, while still of “a poisonous effluvia of nightshade and pur- unmarried (Langford 28). But this was a subject ple fungi” (352). Through Hope’s “titillating” more easily approached through the “private” prior involvement with a sexual woman that marriage plots of gothic or sentimental impedes his wedding to Sarah, a child bride, romances than through “public” social reform Davis, still unmarried, invokes the “Virgin/ novels. The famous “gloom” that James Fields Whore” syndrome identified by Cynthia Griffin objected to was not necessarily the social and Wolff (208). Thus Sarah’s rite of passage is sym- ecological gloom of industrialism or the un- bolized by forcing her to come to terms with the happy endings, but the implication, I argue, horror down in the glen: “It grows deeper, that the unhappy endings signified the sexual darker, more ghastly farther in....No wonder frustration of millions of women, married or that the damp, unnatural Glen warned him back not—and the fear that those women would as with a leprous cry of unclean! Unclean!”(352). eventually, through self-gratification, discover The theme of marriage, vaguely hinted at in the road to satisfaction—and therefore auton- “Iron-Mills,”is arguably the nucleus of the plot omy. Bennett claims that “absolute sexual in Margret Howth, Davis’s second contribution autonomy is a threat to individual men and to to the Atlantic, although she seemingly wished male rule generally”(239). Davis could carry on to expose the wrongs of industrialism begun in writing about female sexual desire, located in “Iron-Mills.” It is clear from her correspon- the genitals, as long as she disguised it, veiled dence with Fields that the novel originally did like the curtain over the korl woman, in the not end in marriage and that Margret’s mar- conventions already established: gothic riage was never meant to be the main attraction romances like “The Locked Chamber” in which (Harris 65; Pfaelzer 54)—love and marriage the fiancé of a fifteen-year betrothal cries, “I were not to be the foundation of Margret’s hap- have come” as soon as the virgin heiress opens piness nor was writing about them meant to her locked chamber; domestic romances like bolster Davis’s literary fame. But even so, Mar- “The Inlaid Harp,” a story of women as prop- gret and the mutilated Lois, copies of Deborah, erty in which a maiden decides not to sell her the symbol of the sexually, hence socially, frus- inheritance, her harp, to the man who demands trated woman, were an apparent projection of it, and she finally discovers the jewel encrusted Davis herself—women who are excluded from in it; stories that abound in the clitoral imagery personal fulfillment—marriage and mater- Bennett finds in Dickinson’s poetry:“peas, peb- nity—because their “creative and sexual pas- bles, beads, berries, nuts, buds, crumbs, pearls, sions are stymied by their bodies—as female, pellets, dews, gems, jewels, drops, and bees” plain, or deformed” (Pfaelzer 103). Davis’s pro- (235). Observe Davis’s “The Missing Diamond,” fessional frustration may have been reflected in whose heroine, coming of age, cries out (to Hugh and the korl woman, but Davis’s feelings, Dick): not only about her condition as a woman but about parading those feelings before the public, There was the use of being a man! She had as are evident in the poignant, “You laugh at it?” good a fund of plain sense as Richard Nolt, and with which the narrator of “Iron-Mills” ob- as quick eyes; and her hands could be trained as serves Deb’s jealousy (23). well as his, she supposed; yet he, being a man, The subject Davis wanted to address from had his profession to fill up his days, to be of the start was unmistakably women’s sexual use to him as a money-making help, as well as
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an excitement and a pleasure. She had nothing of doned the valuable symbol, which soon took on all this, because—she was a woman.(344; a very positive, cherished nature—the “hidden emphasis added) treasure”—the “white herons”—that women possess and which is clearly (according to Davis) Davis was fond of berries: the heroines of two of their most effective power wedge within the Davis’s eight serial novels for Peterson’s (The Stolen established order, because it signifies indepen- Bond, 1866; The Long Journey, 1867) are named dence. Plot after “trite” plot presents the aware- “Berry”(short for Berenice), while “Berrytown”is ness of power by a woman who possesses the title of a novella she published in 1873 (Lippin- something that a man wants—her property, her cott’s), which was later retitled “Kitty’s Choice” estate, her body. Davis’s message to her women (emphasis added). Davis was also fond of pearls. readers is, “keep it.” An excellent short story is titled “The Pearl of It may be argued that many of the female Great Price” (Lippincott’s 1868–69)—which may heroines in Davis’s stories do not conform to give an insight to just what it was that Davis was this model of autonomy. Instead, they sacrifice attracted to in Hawthorne’s work and why their inheritances and their independence for Hawthorne was so attracted to Davis. Davis’s their men. For instance, the heroines Jane “Pearl” offers some of the most subversive sexual Derby and Audrey Swenson of the novella imagery intertwined with inheritance and women “Earthen Pitchers” (Scribner’s 1873) both relin- as property, as in the account of what a father has quish either their inherited property or their willed to his daughter: professional development to become doting “Müller knew better how to keep what he had wives. However, the satirical portraits Davis than to add to it. Folks in the valley used to say paints of their inept husbands and the drudgery that in the darkest nights he stood sentinel in of household duties can only be interpreted the door yonder, munching his bit of straw. subversively. Jane Derby is “happily married” Mounting guard. Over his treasure....There’s while her Casaubonesque husband spends his one story that it was rings he hid away about the time writing his “great treatise on Modern Art” mill; another that it was a sword-handle stud- and being chased around Europe by young ded with diamonds; but the most likely tale is women who provide him with “spiritual re- that it was an unset pearl that he had.” (607; freshment” through intimate “friendships” emphasis added) (284).Audrey sacrifices her music career to care for an invalid, a man who is literally “blind” to The daughter of this story forfeits marriage on her talent. Harris astutely recognizes that the eve of her wedding to keep guard over her “[m]arriage is no longer a solution, a happy legacy, her pearl. ending for Davis’s fiction; it is merely part of Davis soon abandoned the gothic horror she the commonplace tragedy” (182). Davis had had originally attached to the sexual images in previously deployed this strategy in the short her early fiction, either because of her own mar- story “Clement Moore’s Vocation” (Peterson’s riage and conventional sexual fulfillment or the 1870). The artist Clement Moore gives up an stock of historical documents she had access to opportunity to study art in Europe to marry a in the Philadelphia Public Library, or a combi- widower/judge with four unkempt boys and a nation of both. She concentrated her energy on filthy house “surrounded by a high broad character sketches of commonplace people, fence” (56). Though on one level Clement is especially women, whose voices as individuals described as the happy “true woman” who has were silenced—socially excluded by the intoler- learned that human relationships are superior ance of the Puritan heritage.But she never aban- to “art,” on a deeper reading we find that she is
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“judged” by her husband and “punished” with rials, and a large corpus of juvenile fiction, published hard labor in his veritable prison. Like Audrey mainly in the extremely popular Youth’s Companion. of “Earthen Pitchers,” she can only hope that 2. The distinction between elite and popular litera- her talent will transcend through her daughter. ture is a controversial one; and so also is the grouping The title of this article refers to “The Second of Davis’s works, since it is impossible to separate them Life,”the first pulp novel that the already “distin- based solely on quality or subject. Place of publication guished” Rebecca Harding wrote,10 apparently has been the general criteria for evaluation, although for no better reason than, in her own words, Sharon Harris first alluded to the uncertainty of such “mammon.” The title is ironic in many ways: it a division (72), and Jean Pfaelzer made a strident plea publicly contrasts with her first “Life”—in the for the inclusion of these neglected works (23). “Iron Mills”—and denotes the inferiority of the 3. In fact, the name Clarke (with the same less- one to the other; it heralds the second phase in common spelling) appears in “Iron-Mills,”as that of the private life of a thirty-two-year-old spinster the overseer, which leads one to suspect that the rela- about to become a wife and mother; and it tionship had begun before Rebecca Harding’s publi- acknowledges the acquiescence of a double pro- cation in the Atlantic Monthly. Mr. Davis might have fession, the first as a public advocate of social known Rebecca before “Life in the Iron-Mills,”based reform, in opposition to what would later be on her Wheeling newspaper work or some other termed social Darwinism, and the second as a more “popular” publication, one of those that she private woman, intimate with her readers, a sur- did not wish to recognize as her own (Pfaelzer 10). vivor. Davis’s “potboilers,” free from critical 4. This warning also serves to explain to the reader highbrow scrutiny, provided Davis with a forum that she will need to use her imagination to fill in the to denounce women’s status as chattel and details and come to her own conclusions concerning women’s sexual repression, the mysteries of their the obscured meaning. Unfortunately, Davis either own inherited bodies and their own inherited destroyed or had someone destroy her personal cor- estates.This denouncement was not aimed at the respondence and journals before or upon her death. largely male readership of the Atlantic Monthly, The pieces of her life, like Emily Dickinson’s, have where it would be mocked or rejected as Debo- been largely put together from the letters she wrote rah was by the men at the iron-mill. On the con- to other famous people, particularly, her son Richard trary, it was sent out to the same magazines that and Annie Fields. carried patterns for sewing and recipes for cook- 5. In fact, it was this “borrowing” technique that ing, to empower women directly, showing them got Davis into trouble over “Ellen” and may have the way to autonomy and allowing Davis to have been largely responsible for her being “dropped” as a the last laugh. It is time to question whether or regular contributor to the Atlantic Monthly (see Har- not Davis wrote for Peterson’s, for thirty-three ris 126–27). years, for money alone. It is, perhaps, ironic that 6. The narrator of “The Glen Ross” states in the scholars have so far chosen to search for clues to first paragraph,“All the facts, therefore, came within Davis’s interior in her elite corpus, the logically my own personal knowledge” (346). ascetic candidate. Social reform was one release 7. This serial novel was immediately published in for women’s rage and frustration. Subversion of book form with the title Margret Howth (1862). sentimental texts was another. 8. I consider her writing for Peterson’s functional since it provided Davis’s financial security, but also because of the ludic role, as Janice Radway, based on NOTES the theories of Barthes and Piaget, points out. Davis’s 1. This was in addition to her prolific output in awareness of the utility of her popular writing— other popular ladies’magazines, her newspaper edito- writing for instruction as much as for entertain-
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ment—became even more apparent as she turned ———.“Ellen.”Peterson’s Magazine 44 (1863): 38–48. many of her later domestic plots, often in the form ———. “Ellen.” Atlantic Monthly 16 (1865): 22–34. of monologues or diaries, into advice for demoral- ———. “A Faded Leaf of History.” 1873. A Rebecca ized wives, advocating companionship marriages. Harding Davis Reader. 362–73. Although they remain imaginative fiction,“How We ———. “How We Spent the Summer.” Peterson’s Spent the Summer” (1871), “Sun or Shade?” (1873), Magazine 60 (1871): 118–28. and “Between Man and Woman” (1874) are excellent ———. “The Inlaid Harp.” Peterson’s Magazine 54 examples of “lessons” on partnership marriages. It (1868): 447–55. was the early negative response to the realism of ———. Life in the Iron Mills and Other Stories.Old Davis’s elite “Iron-Mills” and Margret Howth, then, Westbury: Feminist, 1985. that promptly led her to modify her strategies,adapt- ———.“The Locked Chamber.” Peterson’s Magazine ing her radical themes to plots and language that 41 (1862): 42–54. were acceptable to the majority of readers. ———. The Long Journey. Peterson’s Magazine 51 9. Davis also used the setting to reinforce the (1867): 31–42, 109–20, 187–200, 269–83, 342–52, identification: in “Life in the Iron-Mills,” the narra- 417–24. tor is inside a cozy, middle-class house, looking out ———. Margret Howth. 1862. Upper Saddle River: at the squalor which surrounds her; in “Glen Ross,” Gregg, 1970. as in all popular stories, the protagonists are gener- ———. The Missing Diamond. Peterson’s Magazine ally outside, in the cold, looking in, contemplating 47 (1865): 337–47, 408–15; 48 (1865): 25–32, 111–18, the warm glow from which they are barred. 169–77. 10. Although “Life in the Iron-Mills” was pub- ———. “The Murder of the Glen Ross.” Peterson’s lished anonymously, Rebecca Harding had won the Magazine 40 (1861): 347–55, 438–48. attention and praise of Nathaniel Hawthorne, James ———. “Out of the Sea.” A Rebecca Harding Davis and Annie Fields, and others. Reader. 139–65. ———.“The Pearl of Great Price.” Lippincott’s Mag- azine 2 (1868): 606–17; 3 (1869): 74–88. WORKS CITED ———. A Rebecca Harding Davis Reader: “Life in the Auerbach, Jonathan. The Romance of Failure: First- Iron-Mills,” Selected Fiction, and Essays. Ed. Jean Person Fictions of Poe, Hawthorne, and James.New Pfaelzer. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1995. York: Oxford UP, 1989. ———. The Second Life. Peterson’s Magazine 43 Bennett, Paula. “Critical Clitoridectomy: Female (1863): 33–39, 121–30, 204–11, 293–300, 348–53, Sexual Imagery and Feminist Psychoanalytic The- 420–30. ory.” Signs 18 (1993): 235–59. ———. The Stolen Bond. Peterson’s Magazine 49 Davis, Charles Belmont, ed. The Adventures and Let- (1866): 37–46, 113–22, 194–200, 261–68, 352–32. ters of Richard Harding Davis. New York: Scrib- ———. “Sun or Shade?” Peterson’s Magazine 63 ner’s, 1917. (1873): 132–38. Davis, Rebecca Harding. Berrytown. Lippincott’s Fulweiler, Howard W. “‘A Dismal Swamp’: Darwin, Magazine 11 (1873): 400–11, 579–87, 697–707; 12 Design, and Evolution in Our Mutual Friend.” (1873): 35–48. Nineteenth-Century Literature 49.1 (1994): 50–74. ———. “Between Man and Woman.” Peterson’s Harris, Sharon M. Rebecca Harding Davis and Amer- Magazine 65 (1874): 190–98. ican Realism. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, ———. “Clement Moore’s Vocation.” Peterson’s 1991. Magazine 57 (1870): 54–59. Langford, Gerald. The Richard Harding Davis Years: ———.“Earthen Pitchers.”1873–74. A Rebecca Hard- A Biography of a Mother and Son. New York: Holt, ing Davis Reader. 215–86. Rinehart & Winston, 1961.
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Moers, Ellen. Literary Women. New York: Doubleday, Showalter, Elaine, ed. Alternative Alcott. 1988.New 1976. Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1997. Pfaelzer, Jean. Parlor Radical: Rebecca Harding Davis Tebbel,John,and Mary Ellen Zuckerman.The Magazine and the Origins of American Social Realism. Pitts- in America: 1741–1990. New York: Oxford UP, 1991. burgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1996. Warhol, Robyn R.“Toward a Theory of the Engaging Radway, Janice A. “A Phenomenological Theory of Narrator: Earnest Interventions in Gaskell, Stowe, Popular and Elite Literature.”Diss. Michigan State and Eliot.” PMLA 101 (1986): 811–18. University, 1977. Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. “The Radcliffean Gothic Reynolds, David S. Beneath the American Renais- Model: A Form for Feminine Sexuality.” The sance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Female Gothic. Ed. Juliann E. Fleenor. Montreal: Emerson-Melville. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988. Eden, 1983.
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