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Rebecca Harding Davis's 03 legacy 19-1 part 3 1/30/03 2:02 PM Page 44 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 Ruth Stoner 45 03 legacy 19-1 part 3 1/30/03 2:02 PM Page 46 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.
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