University of Kentucky UKnowledge Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Gender and Sexuality Studies 1987 Gender and the Writer's Imagination: From Cooper to Wharton Mary Suzanne Schriber Northern Illinois University Click here to let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Thanks to the University of Kentucky Libraries and the University Press of Kentucky, this book is freely available to current faculty, students, and staff at the University of Kentucky. Find other University of Kentucky Books at uknowledge.uky.edu/upk. For more information, please contact UKnowledge at [email protected]. Recommended Citation Schriber, Mary Suzanne, "Gender and the Writer's Imagination: From Cooper to Wharton" (1987). Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. 3. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_gender_and_sexuality_studies/3 Gender and the Writer's Imagination This page intentionally left blank GENDER *~PWRITER'S IMAGINATION From Cooper to Wharton Mary Suzanne Schriber THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY Copyright © 1987 by the University Press of Kentucky Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine College, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Club, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University. Editorial and Sales Offices: Lexington, Kentucky 40506-0024 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schriber, Mary Suzanne, 1938- Gender and the writer's imagination. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. American fiction-19th century-History and criticism. 2. Women in literature. 3. Sex role in literature. 4. Feminism and literature-United States. 5. Women and literature-United States. I. Title. PS374.W6S37 1987 813'.009'352042 87-10919 ISBN: 978-0-8131-5422-0 This book is for A. MARIE jEANNOT ScHRIBER my mother, my teacher, my friend This page intentionally left blank CONTENTS Acknowledgments lX Prologue 1 CONSTRUCTION 1. JAMES FENIMORE COOPER The Point of Departure 16 2. NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE A Pilgrimage to a Dovecote 45 CONFIRMATION 3. WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS The Male Imagination at the Crossroads 86 4. HENRY JAMES The Summit of the Male Imagination 117 DECONSTRUCTION 5. EDITH WHARTON The Female Imagination & the Territory Within 157 Afterword 183 Notes 187 Index 209 This page intentionally left blank ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I owe particular thanks to Lynne M. Waldeland, my friend and colleague. She encouraged me in my work, boldly and courageously offering me the intellectual challenges from which this study has emerged. She persuaded me that this book could be written, and she then stood by me through revisions, disappointments, and stylistic trials and triumphs. I am indebted, as well, to James M. Mellard, who has given me his time and his expert advice on editorial matters. Karen Blaser and her staff at the Word Processing Center, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Northern Illinois University, have been unfailingly pleasant, patient, and helpful. Northern Illi­ nois University granted me a research sabbatical and a Gradu­ ate School Fund summer stipend to pursue this study. This page intentionally left blank PROLOGUE Every text can be seen as in some sense a political gesture and more specifically as a gesture determined by a complex of assumptions about male-female relations, assumptions we might call sexual poetics. -Sandra M. Gilbert Hans Robert Jauss observes that literary works operate through a modality of question and answer, problem and solution. To understand their significance and therefore their reception in the historical moment of their appearance, Jauss says, we must recognize that literary texts are aesthetic solu­ tions to problems that precede those texts and are rooted in the "horizon of expectations" of a culture, in the presupposi­ tions and values and attitudes of the writers who create them and the readers who receive them. If we are able to reconstruct the horizon of expectations on which a work in the past was created and received, we can "find the questions to which the text originally answered" and "discover how the reader of that day viewed and understood the work." 1 In the instance of nineteenth-century American culture, historians and literary scholars have gathered from popular publications, etiquette manuals, fiction, diaries, and the cur­ ricula of women's colleges a collection of ideas about woman that informed nineteenth-century thinking and contributed to an ideological framework that circumscribed the lives of actu­ al women and prescribed norms of conduct for them. The product of a dualistic habit of mind that assigned distinct natures and roles to women and men, these ideas offer a critical framework that brings to our attention, in novels where heroines play important roles, a subtext of questions 2 Gender & the Writer's Imagination about women to which cultural expectations gave rise and to which the novels seek aesthetic answers. This framework of ideas enables us to identify precisely those points in a text at which the culture's sociolect dictates the decisions and choices of the artist in the process of creating heroines and conceiving of situations for them that would seem plausible and meaningful to nineteenth-century readers. Using the concept of woman's nature and woman's sphere (one-half of the culture's dualistic thinking about gender) as a frame of reference for nineteenth-century American novels points us toward answers to questions that inevitably arise for twentieth-century readers confronting nineteenth-century novels. When situations clearly intended to be serious strike us as preposterous, the perspective provided by this frame­ work enables us to recover the meanings intended by the texts in their own century and to distinguish those meanings from the significance of the texts to us in our time. Since we view the world against a different horizon of expectations than did our ancestors,2 this framework doubles our reading experience, giving us insight into both our own world and, insofar as it is accessible to us, the nineteenth-century world. It allows us to credit rather than dismiss what seem to us, from our later twentieth-century point of view, to be problematic scenes, while at the same time we identify in their sexual poetics the sexual politics that have constricted both genders. Conversely, when fictional scenes surpass in power and resonance the sum of their parts, this framework gives us, for our amplification as we attempt to explain the ways in which texts achieve their effects, the backdrop from which such scenes take their force. It enables us to account more fully for both artistic failings and achievements that otherwise remain only partially ex­ plained in novels that include heroines in consequential roles. As the American Adam of R.W.B. Lewis and the frontier hypothesis of Frederick Jackson Turner enlarge our under­ standing of the novelistic construction of male experience, so the nineteenth century's ideology of woman usefully informs PROLOGUE 3 our comprehension of the novelistic construction of female experience, delivering to us a new vision of old writers and an expanded sense of their enterprise and their art. The novels of James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Haw­ thorne, William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Edith Wharton register the impact of received ideas about woman on the literary imagination from the relatively tranquil1830s, before feminism became a burning issue, through the stormy decades following the Civil War and beyond the turn of the century, when traditional understandings of woman were challenged mightily. In the novels of Cooper and Hawthorne, we see the pre-Civil War literary construction of the horizon against which heroines were projected. In the novels of Howells and James, the post-Civil War confirmation of the horizon takes place, as with varying degrees of success these writers wrestle with the problems and challenges that the culture's ideology of woman, now questioned, presents to the writer. The novels of Edith Wharton deconstruct the culture's horizon of expectations, asking previously unthinkable ques­ tions and exploring previously unimagined areas of "woman's nature" that were anathema or invisible to male novelists but were accessible to the imagination of a woman. While resolving questions about literary texts, dose analy­ sis of the novels of these five writers, who collectively span the nineteenth century, against the culture's horizon of expecta­ tions discloses as well the tenacity, the pervasiveness, and the insidiousness of the culture's ideology of woman. Try as they sometimes did to escape the confines of the culture's com­ monplaces in the interests of their art and to imagine heroines in other terms, the imaginations of these writers were locked finally into the culture's frame of reference. Dualistic thinking, with its concept of woman's nature, exercised a tyrannical power over the literary imagination throughout the century, permitting these writers to experiment in their fiction with woman's sphere but shackling them to the notion of a gener- 4 Gender & the Writer's Imagination alized "woman's nature" in which all women were presumed to share. Between the birth of Cooper and the coming to artistic maturity of Edith Wharton, Americans fought three wars, freed slaves, became industrialized and urbanized and secularized,