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The Influence of the Sentimental Novel and the Attendant Cult of True Womanhood on Four Novels by African American Women Beverly B

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The Influence of the Sentimental Novel and the Attendant Cult of True Womanhood on Four Novels by African American Women Beverly B Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2008 The Influence of the Sentimental Novel and the Attendant Cult of True Womanhood on Four Novels by African American Women Beverly B. Holmes Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES THE INFLUENCE OF THE SENTIMENTAL NOVEL AND THE ATTENDANT CULT OF TRUE WOMANHOOD ON FOUR NOVELS BY AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN BY BEVERLY B. HOLMES A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Degree Awarded: Fall Semester, 2008 Copyright © 2008 Beverly B. Holmes All rights reserved The members of the Committee approve the Dissertation of Beverly B. Holmes defended on October 22, 2008. ___________________________ John Fenstermaker Professor Directing Dissertation ___________________________ Lauren Weingarden Outside Committee Member ___________________________ Bruce Bickley Committee Member ___________________________ Maxine L. Montgomery Committee Member The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract iv INTRODUCTION 1 1. IOLA LEROY: THE MASK OF SENTIMENTALISM 9 2. PLUM BUN: A NOVEL WITHOUT A MORAL: REVISION OF THE FAIRY TALE 36 3. THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD: HEROINE IN TRANSITION 60 4. LINDEN HILLS: REVISION OF THE CAPTIVITY NARRATIVE 85 CONCLUSION 108 REFERENCES 113 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 121 iii ABSTRACT Sentimental novels were the juggernaut of the publishing industry in America in the nineteenth century. Also known as novels of domesticity and, more recently, as women’s fiction, these novels were written largely by and for women. The story was one of survival, of girls cast out to make their way in the world. However, they were to hold fast to the dictates of Victorian decorum and embrace the four tenets of the so-called “Cult of True Womanhood”: piety, sexual purity, submission, and domesticity. This study examines how the sentimental novel influenced four later novels by African American women writers. With harsh punishments against literacy, it was primarily only until after emancipation that African American women began writing novels. This study, then, explores how the authors of four novels both appropriated and reconfigured the template of precursory novels written by white women. Critics have more recently begun to re-evaluate the genre of the sentimental novel, a genre dismissed as unimportant for most of the twentieth century. What needs further study is the influence of these astoundingly popular texts on the novels of a previously repressed group of authors, black women. By examining this connection, this study contributes to an understanding of the intertextuality of women’s fiction, an intertextuality both deliberate and inadvertent as well as often consciously oppositional. iv INTRODUCTION The extent to which nineteenth-century sentimental novels captivated that first audience astounds today’s readers.1 Thought by many to be insipid tales of weak, weepy heroines, these novels, written by and for women, are being re-evaluated by a cadre of new scholars. My purpose here is two-fold: (1) to establish a broad-based and often revisionary reading of sentimental fiction; and (2) to connect this re-reading to four novels by African American women, novels which plot the trajectory of Black women’s space. In these four texts, the authors embraced, questioned, and reshaped images of nineteenth-century white womanhood and crafted a new emancipatory protocol. In the 1800s, the expansion of leisure time for women—both to read and to write—and the burgeoning publishing industry (made possible by more efficient transportation and better printing presses) created a receptive market for women’s fiction. According to Nina Baym, The Scarlet Letter (pub. 1850) sold fewer than 10,000 copies in Hawthorne’s lifetime (Introduction ix). In contrast, Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (also pub.1850), considered to be the first bestseller in America, “sold more than 40,000 copies in less than a year and went through thirteen editions in two years; Putnam’s son, George Haven Putnam, claimed that sales eventually exceeded a million copies.” Thirty years after its appearance, it was still selling (Kelley 18). Maria Cummins’s The Lamplighter (pub. 1854) sold 4,000 copies in its first month alone and 60,000 before it had been out for a year! (Baym, Introduction ix). Again, according to Mary Kelley, “[b]y 1871 nearly three–fourths of all the novels published that year came from the pens of women” (26). Clearly, these literary domestics had a public, national impact. No wonder Hawthorne grumbled about a nation “wholly given over to a d----d mob of scribbling women,” fearing he should have “no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash” (qtd. in Brown 179). A seminal text in the analysis of these nineteenth-century novels is Nina Baym’s Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels By and About Women in America 1820-1870. I 1 My subject here is the American sentimental novel. Sentimentality in nineteenth-century America has roots, of course, in eighteenth-century England and Europe. 1 won’t recapitulate her excellent study, but she posits that literary critics consciously promote as the best literature of an era its quirky and unread works rather than the works everyone was wild about at the time. Critics assume popularity and poor quality are synonymous. This is not to say that in studying these nineteenth-century novels (most which are largely unread today), I discovered a hidden classic like Moby Dick or Walden, but I did find works written in defiance of an established social and literary tradition for readers previously thought unimportant and only minor participants in public dialogue. Women in the nineteenth century read not just for information about the world but also for instruction about their lives, finding in imaginative literature, models for their own conduct. These novels were at their core about empowerment, and the lack of it, and survival. A nineteenth-century rhetoric of “true womanhood” or the “cult of domesticity” prescribed an ideal for white Victorian women. The cult of true womanhood was a set of behaviors for middle-class white women of the nineteenth century. This vague descriptor was used in the popular magazines and advice books of the time; it became a favorite term, and authors assumed readers knew its definition. Barbara Welter in her foundational text Dimity Convictions describes four attributes of True Womanhood: piety, sexual purity, submission, and domesticity. According to Welter, the ideal woman was to be passive and retiring with her main focus the home and rearing of children. Women’s magazines subscribing to the True Womanhood ideal encouraged their readers to embrace the role God assigned them, a role of service and virtue. Education was encouraged, not for the sake of a salaried career or for her own enrichment, but so she could be a more satisfying conversational partner for her husband and could supervise the education of their children. Marriage and motherhood were the highlights of her life. It would be a mistake, however, to believe only one monolithic prescription existed for women’s behavior. The cult of true womanhood was an ideal espoused by many, as evidenced by etiquette books, magazines, advice tracts, and novels of the period—but not by all. Instead, the tenor of directives was obviously a continuum. Still advocating a separate “women’s sphere,” a second popular ideal (largely between 1840- 1880) was that of what author Frances B. Cogan terms Real Womanhood, an ideal which advocated “intelligence, physical fitness, health, self-sufficiency, economic self-reliance, 2 and careful marriage” (4). However, while real womanhood was more elastic in its set behaviors for women, the core principles were the same: men and women inhabit their separate spheres under God’s laws, and society is stratified with correct behavior “geared both to one’s social level and one’s divinely appointed sexual obligations” (Cogan 75). The issue is further blurred by the Southern ideal of the more passive, decorative “Southern belle” as compared to the more active and practical Northern lady. A woman’s prime responsibility, whether of the true womanhood or the real womanhood camp, was to be a wife and mother. But by the end of the nineteenth century, a new role for women was emerging: that of the so-called “New Woman.” Breaking from both True Womanhood and Real Womanhood, the New Woman rejected separate spheres, insisted on her right to a career, irrespective of the needs of her family, and strove for independence in all areas. Ironically, the extreme stance of these New Women threatened members of both sexes and created a surge back to the True Womanhood ideals. Even in the late twentieth century, this view of a woman’s role found new life in the 1980s “Total Woman” program of Maribel Morgan and in the speeches of conservative political activist Phyllis Schlafly. A confusing array of terms surfaces in a discussion of the sentimental novel. Largely viewed as a pejorative descriptor, “sentimental” connotes an unmerited emotional response. Thus, many critics now prefer the terms “women’s fiction” or “domestic novel.” The claim that these novels deal primarily with emotional experiences is misleading. Even a cursory reading of the most popular “sentimental” novels reveals the subject matter to be exploitation, powerlessness, coarseness, pettiness, illness, poverty, exhaustion, degradation, and suffering. Michelle Burnham declares that “[s]entimental novels reproduced the dilemma of agency and responsibility, not only in their heroines’ trials of virtue but in their readers’ responses of sympathy” (79). The term “domestic” in describing this fiction means that the content centers on the home and social relations within that home.
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