On September 11, 1844, the Howes arrived in Boston and moved into the Doctor’s Wing of the Perkins Institution. Chev had not even unpacked before he wrote ecstatically to Sumner to describe his feelings: “I have at last brought home my noble & beloved bride & her beautiful suckling babe. We have been here but two hours, have taken but one meal, yet in that brief time I have enjoyed a feeling [of] satisfaction & of happiness unequalled by any I have experienced in all my journeying. When my heart is full of joy or sorrow, it turns to you & yearns for your sympathy; in fact as Julia often says, Sumner ought to have been a woman & you to have married her: but I should not agree to this in any monogamic land, for Julia is my love as a wife.”1It’s typical of Chev that he should have written to Sumner only two hours after getting home, emphasizing his new manly status, expressing his affection, but setting out the new terms of their friendship. Sumner was assured of Chev’s special affection but explicitly demoted to second place. He would have to adjust to his new position.
The noble and beloved bride did not share Chev’s joy at returning to the Institution. South Boston did not feel like home to her at all. Fifty years later, when she wrote her memoir, the shock of her arrival was still vivid: “The change had already been great, from my position as a family idol and ‘the superior young lady’ of an admiring circle to that of a wife overshadowed for the time by the splendor of her husband’s reputation. This I had accepted willingly. But the change from my life of easy circumstances and brilliant surroundings to the mistress of a suite of rooms in the Institution for the Blind at South Boston was much greater.”2
“A suite of rooms”—Julia had the gift of scornful understatement. At best, Perkins was still more like a hotel than a home, but in contrast to the luxurious hotels of Europe, it was grim. The walls were dark gray and green; the water closets stank. In contrast to the hotels on the humming streets of London, Paris, Rome, or New York, the building stood on a high hill, in a field overlooking the ocean. Getting to Boston meant a two-hour trip by omnibus through some rough parts of town. The Howes’ daughter Laura, who loved the Institution herself, imagined it through her mother’s eyes as a Gothic castle, a “bleak, lofty house set on a hill, four-square to all the winds that blew; with high-studded rooms, cold halls paved with white and gray marble, echoing galleries; where three fourths of the inmates were blind, and the remaining fourth were devoting their time and energies to the blind.”3 As her comic poem about the old lady of Plymouth had revealed, Julia was physically repelled by the disabled. She had to draw on all her spiritual strength to make herself live among them.
Chev could not have anticipated Julia’s feelings about the Institution. In his eyes, Perkins was a handsome building. Moreover, he saw Julia as a wife who lived only for her husband and child. Satisfied that her needs had been met, he plunged back into his usual hectic schedule, leaving Julia to run the household. Although Chev’s sister Jennette had stayed on to supervise the Doctor’s Wing, she was a “silent, inarticulate person,” decorous and judgmental; Julia did not want to seem incompetent before her.4 She set herself to learning the craft of housekeeping, dealing with the soap fat merchant and the rag man and all the prosaic details of everyday life. The transition from princess and bride to mother and housekeeper was abrupt and traumatic, as her daughters understood:
She had been a flower of the field, taking no thought for food or raiment; her sisters chose and bought her clothes, had her dresses made, and put them on her. Her studies, her music, her dreams, her compositions—and, it must be added, her suitors—made the world in which she lived. Now, life in its most concrete forms pressed upon her. The baby must be fed at regular intervals, and she must feed it; there must be three meals a day, and she must provide them; servants must be engaged, trained, directed, and all this she must do. Her thoughts soared heavenward; but now there was a string attached to them, and they must be pulled down to attend to the leg of mutton and the baby’s cloak.5
Cooking was a particular trial. The Ward family had teased her that she could describe every room at The Corner except the kitchen. Now she spent much of her time in the kitchen, struggling with the aid of Catharine Beecher’s Domestic Receipt Book. Chev also wanted to entertain his male friends for dinner every week, and Jennette, who did not like socializing, stayed away on party night. Moreover, Chev was a health advocate who would not eat fried food, pastry, ham, or coconut cakes. He was also becoming increasingly abstinent about wine, although he expected a fine spread for the Club members. Julia hired cook after cook, but Chev had a tendency to overrule her decisions and fire them, so there was a considerable turnover in the kitchen. Inevitably, she made many mistakes in her first efforts to act as hostess. She ordered ice cream delivered for a dinner party and was embarrassed when it was left in a snowdrift and not discovered until the next morning. She left the pass-through between the kitchen and the dining room open, and one night Annie reported that she could see the cook at work on the venison through the open window. These standard domestic catastrophes, which Louisa May Alcott would play for humor and sentiment in her account of Meg’s first year as a bride in Little Women, were humiliating failures for Julia.
Learning to care for the baby was another trial. Julia Romana hardly ever napped during the day and wet the bed she shared with her mother every night. Although she felt “weakened by the long nursing,” Julia refused to wean her for fifteen months.6 At least the combination of a breast-feeding wife and a bed-wetting baby kept Chev out of the bedroom, a covert form of birth control that Julia would maintain. Socially, too, Julia found Boston unexpectedly difficult to negotiate. She had been popular as a lively visitor from New York; as a tired housewife in an unfashionable part of the city, however, she was kept at a chilly distance. Those first impressions of snobbery colored her attitudes towards the “frozen ocean of Boston life” for a long time; walking by the Charles Street Charitable Eye and Ear Infirmary, she quipped to a friend, “Oh, I did not know there was a charitable eye or ear in Boston!”7
One great comfort was attending Theodore Parker’s sermons at his new congregation. Challenging Unitarian orthodoxy to focus on social reform and abolitionism, he drew hundreds to his pulpit at the Melodeon Theater. “It was hard to go out from his presence, all aglow with the enthusiasm which he felt and inspired, and to hear him spoken of as a teacher of irreligion, a pest to the community.” Boston society was frigid, but she would rather “hear Theodore Parker preach than go to the theater.”8
Chev was very little help in her efforts to adjust to a new environment and a new set of responsibilities. He got up early and came back late, with “scarcely half an hour in twenty-four to give me.”9 He was opposed to her teaching at the Institution, so that outlet was closed to her. Meanwhile, Chev was brimming over with new causes and new crusades. He got involved in an acrimonious dispute about the education of deaf children, opposing those who argued that the children should be taught to sign, while he was staunchly in favor of teaching them to read lips and to speak. In league with Horace Mann, he criticized the Boston School Board for its old-fashioned curriculum and outmoded methods of memorization and rote learning. He was elected for a brief term on the Boston School Committee; then he threw himself into a campaign to set up a school for the mentally handicapped, and became the General Superintendent of the first Massachusetts School for Idiotic and Feeble-minded Youth in 1848. He stayed active in the role for the next twenty-five years. As Julia noted affectionately in her letters, he was “intoxicated with benevolence,” the very model of a “perfectabilian philanthropist.”10
Finally, he got into a ferocious argument with the Boston Prison Discipline Society about the abolition of solitary confinement. The argument about the efficacy and psychological costs of this system had been debated for years, but Chev’s views came from his feelings that his solitary confinement in Prussia would have been much worse if he had been made to mix with the ribald, sweaty mob of ordinary convicts. Although he was held in a solitary cell, his prudery was threatened by the obscene bantering of the male prisoners and the shameless solicitations of the female prisoners. It was better for the moral development of the convict, he insisted, to be isolated from the bad influence of other prisoners and exposed only to good jailers. How ordinary convicts might feel about being cut off from other prisoners was not his concern. In this shortsighted advocacy of solitary confinement, as in his rejection of signing, Chev was on the wrong side of history.
Nonetheless, he and Sumner, who had no real commitment to prison reform but went along out of friendship, aggressively argued their case for solitary confinement in seven debates before the Society in June 1847. They were soundly defeated, and even some of their friends and colleagues were dismayed by their harsh fanaticism. Among Howe’s biographers, Harold Schwartz regards their speeches as a low point for both men, “patronizing when agreed with, but wild with rage, contemptuous, and vituperative when opposed.”11
Julia loyally went to six of the seven debates and praised Sumner’s “masterly” final address: “he held the audience breathless for two hours and a half,” she unpersuasively insisted.12 But even she had to admit that Sumner was “recondite in language and elaborate in style” as a speaker, with an addiction to long quotations.13 Dinner guests at the Howes’, she warned a friend, had best avoid a long list of topics that could goad Chev and his friends into furious arguments and endless monologues, including “all insane hospitals, idiots, educated or otherwise, and madness of every description . . . All prisons, prison disciplines, prison societies, prison reforms, secretaries of prison reform societies, every form of legal imprisonment, . . . philanthropic enterprises, workhouses, relief and vigilance committees, interests of the African race.”14
While Julia was trying to find her place on the icy slopes of Boston society, her old friendships were shifting too. Mary Ward and her sister Martha paid a formal welcoming call soon after she arrived, but the visit was awkward, since Louisa had broken her engagement to their heartbroken brother John and was about to marry Thomas Crawford. “Martha was very constrained,” Julia wrote to her sisters, but “Mary was more like her old self than I expected—the interview was, however, a painful one. It was kind of them to call—I think Mary will love me again, as I will ever love her.”15 Indeed, Mary married the Bostonian Charles Dorr, and stood faithfully by Julia through the years ahead.
Laura Bridgman, now fifteen, was still living in her room in the Doctor’s Wing. While the Howes were away, she had written frantically to them both, but Chev rarely replied. Her teachers had told her about the birth of Julia Romana. “I love your baby very much & am your precious,” she wrote to Julia. “I should like to live with you and your husband & dear baby. While you were away one year I was in great misery, & had to miss you many times.”16 Laura had been so obsessed with Chev’s return that the teachers decided not to tell her the exact date of his arrival, because she would not be able to sleep. In August she dreamed that “his coat was made of velvet in Europe and he did not ask me how I did.”17
Chev was not wearing velvet when he returned to Perkins, but Laura had accurately sensed that he had been distancing himself from her for many months. Now that he had a real family, he had no more need of a surrogate one. He complained that Laura was much less gifted in language than he expected for the time elapsed, with “a constitutional disposition to irritability and violence of temper” he had not previously observed.18 Chev was also angry that in his absence, Laura had become a baptized Christian; he had given orders that she should not be taught about religion, so he could investigate her pure and “natural” religious ideas. He did not consider how his disappearance and silence might have contributed to her emotional volatility, or understand how she had been comforted by religious faith. An unacknowledged element in his feelings was that Laura’s physical appearance had altered as she entered puberty; when he came home she was an awkward disabled adolescent, rather than a pretty child, and her sexual maturity and developing body made him uncomfortable. He gave orders that she should not be allowed to share a bed with her teachers or any of the other pupils, probably to prevent sexual contact or stimulation; but that prohibition too cut Laura off from the pleasures of touch, her only remaining sense.
Sarah Wight was assigned to take over as Laura’s teacher and to help her make the transition to “self-controlled,” i.e., sexually disciplined, womanhood.19 As the Doctor withdrew to spend more time on his work and with his family, Sarah Wight began to take over his place in Laura’s life, although never to replace him in her heart. To his great credit, it must be said, Chev never abandoned Laura professionally. He continued to see her once a week at Perkins and made sure she would always be safe and supported. But after his marriage, she was never again his surrogate child, his muse, his partner in reform. While he was minutely observant of her intellectual development, he was thoroughly obtuse about her feelings. In their long relationship, Laura was not the only one who was deaf and blind.
On November 2, 1844, Julia went to New York for Louisa’s wedding to Thomas Crawford. The Howes and Wards had again demanded an antenuptial agreement, but unlike Chev, who had encouraged him to resist, Crawford made no fuss when he was presented with the dreaded document. Confident that he could support his family on his earnings as a sculptor, Crawford was happy to leave Louisa’s income in her name, with Uncle John Ward having the power of attorney. The Crawfords traveled in the South for almost a year. Then Louisa and Annie came to stay with the Howes for a brief, wonderful reunion in the summer of 1845, in the last months of Julia’s second pregnancy. At the end of July, Tom and Louisa moved to Rome, leaving Julia deep in her prepartum depression. “I do not think that I shall ever write poetry again,” she wrote to Louisa in August. “But you must not think sadly of me—it looks very dull and cloudy for me, just now, but God has given me a strong and hopeful nature—with patience, I may yet be happy.”20
On August 25, 1845, she gave birth to a second daughter, Florence Marion Howe. Chev chose the name in honor of Florence Nightingale. Julia wrote to Louisa, “I would much rather have called the child for you, but he was so sadly disappointed about it’s [sic] sex, that I thought it most politic to have his own way about the name in the hope that it would make him love the little creature.”21 By October, he was pestering her to wean Flossy. But she resisted, although she was nursing on demand every two hours, and Flossy was a restless sleeper, who kicked, scratched, pummeled, and rolled on top of her mother, and regularly drenched the bed. But these pummels and puddles were small prices to pay for keeping Chev out of the bedroom. They hardly saw each other during the days either. “My days and nights are pretty much divided between Julia and Florence,” she wrote to Louisa. “I sleep with the baby, nurse her all night, get up, hurry through my breakfast, take care of her while Emily [the maid] gets hers, then wash & dress her, put her to sleep, drag her out in the wagon, amuse Dudie, kiss, love and scold her, etc., etc.” Some days she didn’t get to brush her teeth until dinnertime. Dependable Louisa sent her a box of beautiful clothes from Paris; in May she wore the new green bonnet to church, and “frightened the sexton, made the minister squint, and the congregation stare. It looked rather like a green clam shell, some folks thought.” Her spirits were still high, although listening to Sumner and Chev pontificate about the sorrow of unmarried women was annoying. “Oh, my dear friends, thought I, if you could only have one baby, you would change your tune.”22
• • •
By the New Year, however, she had concluded that Chev’s coldness and indifference, rather than the babies’ insistent needs, were the cause of her depression and hopelessness; she was losing all confidence in herself as a poet. Metaphors of numbness and freezing appear in her letters. “My voice is still frozen to silence,” she wrote mournfully to Louisa in January 1846, “my poetry chained down by an icy band of indifference. I begin at last to believe that I am no poet and never was one, save in my imagination.”23 A month later, for the first time, she admitted to Louisa that her marriage was a failure and wondered whether marriage itself was an emotional trap for women, and maternity a draining of their animation and verve. “Dearest Wevie, what is this problem? Are we meant to change so utterly? Is it selfish, is it egotistical to wish that others may love us, take an interest in us, sympathize with us, in our maturer age, as in our youth? Are our hearts to fade and die out with our early bloom, and, in giving life to others, do we lose our own vitality, and sink into dimness, nothingness, and living death? I have tried this, and found it not good—so methinks, I will not hold it fast. But then again, what shall I do? Where shall I go to beg some scraps and remnants of affection to feed my hungry heart?”
She had tried giving in to Chev’s wishes and prejudices, but she could not appease him and could not solve the problems in their marriage by herself. Still, she could not stop blaming herself for the friction between them. “May God teach him to love me, and help me to make him happy,” she continued. “For our children’s sake, for our own, we must strive to come nearer together, and not live such a life of separation. . . . I have come to him, have left my poetry, my music, my religion, have walked with him in his cold world of actualities. There I have learned much, but there, I can do nothing—he must come to me, must have ears for my music, must have a soul for my faith—if my nature is to sing, to pray, to feel—his is to fight, to teach, to reason; but love and patience may bring us much nearer together than we are . . . We sleep apart and baby lies in my arms.”24
To Chev she wrote a piteous declaration of reproach and surrender. “I firmly resolved when I married you to admit to no thought, to cultivate no taste, in which you could not sympathize . . . It was long before I realized that you neither desired, nor appreciated this renunciation on my part . . . I will not expect too much from you. I will enjoy the moments of sunshine which we can enjoy together. I will treasure up every word, every look of yours that is kind and genial, to comfort me in those long, cold wintry days that I feel you do not love me.”25 There is no record of how Chev replied to this damning summary, or whether he felt any surprise, guilt, or remorse.
By this time in their young marriage, the Howes had established the terms by which they would live for the next thirty years. Julia had hoped for a progressive partnership of loving equals; Chev for a traditional union of the dominant protective husband and the submissive protected wife. He wanted her attention, appreciation, and admiration, and expected her to share his political interests and support his philanthropic endeavors. She wanted his affection, sympathy, companionship, and cooperation with her literary aspirations. They had never had the opportunity to discuss their very different expectations of marriage, and indeed, Julia, as the much younger wife and less experienced spouse, had tacitly consented to sacrificing her dreams for his happiness. But she had expected that his adoration would be increased after the honeymoon, and even more once they had a baby. She had no idea that his working life would so overpower their private life, and she did not anticipate how little he would adapt to her. She felt betrayed by Chev’s inability to show his love, neglected by his workaholism, perplexed by his failure to understand her loneliness and her need to have a life as full as his own. With Annie and Louisa to write to, Julia voiced all her resentment, hurt pride, and fear of the future. Chev did not complain to his friends about his disappointments in the marriage, but he had his own resentments and feelings of betrayal, which he expressed in headaches, depression, and increased absence from home.
It is very tempting to see Chev as the heartless villain in the marriage and Julia as the helpless victim; some of Chev’s friends and biographers see it the other way around, with Chev much oppressed by his wife’s complaints. In a number of significant ways, however, the marriage resembled the British Victorian marriages provocatively analyzed by Phyllis Rose in her book Parallel Lives. In the nineteenth century, marriage followed a “patriarchal paradigm” of male power and female dependence. If husband and wife agreed with the paradigm, they could be happy and content. But as Rose persuasively argues, “every marriage was a narrative construct—or two narrative constructs. In unhappy marriages, for example, I see two versions of reality rather than two people in conflict. I see a struggle for imaginative dominance going on.” Indeed, for women, marriage was a “primary political experience,” an introduction to “power and powerlessness, . . . authority and obedience.” Rose is interested in the way men and women negotiated the unspoken terms of dominance and obedience in their marriage. “Whatever the balance,” she suggests, “every marriage is based upon some misunderstanding, articulated or not, about the relative importance, the priority of desires, between the two partners.”26 In the beginning, Julia’s desires had a lower priority than Chev’s. But she was not helpless, and she had sharp weapons of her own, which she would slowly learn how to deploy. As she often told her daughters, she first learned stealth: “If I told no one what I intended to do, I should be enabled to do it.”27
In May 1846, however, Julia and Chev started sleeping together again, and their sexual reconciliation may have augured other improvements in their relationship. Soon after, using part of the $10,000 agreed upon in the antenuptial, Chev bought an old farmhouse with six acres of land, six miles from the Institution, close enough that he could walk to work, but remote enough that Julia felt independent. They moved in June. Julia was elated. “We removed to this abode on a lovely summer day; and as I entered the grounds I involuntarily exclaimed, ‘This is green peace!’ ” Her friends teased her about her joy in the new home, and asked, “How are you getting on at Green Beans—is that the name?”28 Green Peace had its own multiple staircases, the cat-stairs and the dog-stairs, the top-stairs and the long-stairs, but they were charming and Dickensian—not the chilly marble stairs of Perkins. Without Jennette to spy on her, or Laura to make her feel uncomfortable and guilty, Julia happily unpacked her household goods and set to decorating her first real home with the primary colors she had loved as a child. She chose turkey-red cushions for the window seat, and put her old bookcase lined with crimson silk in the dining room. Their best furniture from Europe went into the parlor, along with a new Chickering piano (paid for by Uncle John Ward), and Lord Byron’s helmet hung atop a green iron hat tree in the hall. The helmet was surprisingly tiny. As their daughter Maud tactfully noted somewhat later, Byron “had a very small though beautiful head.” In the tradition of grasping Excalibur or wearing the glass slipper, many visitors to the Howe home would try unsuccessfully to put the helmet on. Eventually the third daughter, Laura, would be able to wear it. “My dear child,” Chev congratulated her, “if your head was a very little smaller, you would be an idiot!”29
Chev did some renovating and decorating of his own and even began to enjoy gardening. He built a new wing, a greenhouse, and a bowling alley, and set up a kitchen garden with peas, tomatoes, beans, squash, and potatoes. He also laid out strawberry beds, a rose garden, and fruit trees, especially the seven pear trees that “he watched as if they were deficient children,” wrapping the pears in cotton wool to ripen in drawers.30 Forbidding the children to touch a berry or a fallen peach, Chev hired an English gardener, Mr. Arrow, to care for the trees. The laburnums, the two pink hawthorns, and the Balm of Gilead tree, plus phlox, dahlias, jasmines, mignonettes, peonies, lilies, and lilacs made the outside of Green Peace colorful, fragrant, and lush.
In June 1846, Annie married Adolph Mailliard in New York, in a gown of white tulle and lace, which cost two hundred dollars; Julia attended her in a Parisian frock supplied by her personal shopper, Louisa.31 Adolph was a handsome, bearded Frenchman who had been secretary to Prince Joseph Bonaparte and then the executor of his estate. He was a serious horse breeder, and the Mailliards planned to live in Bordentown, New Jersey, on the Bonaparte estate, and look after their Thoroughbred stables. Annie would face some trials in her marriage, but on the whole she was much more content with Adolph than Julia was with Chev. When Julia visited her, she found Annie happy, “handsomer than ever before,” and enjoying her splendid home.32
In the middle of July, Chev took off for a vigorous two-week water cure in Brattleboro, Vermont. Longfellow had been there in the spring and recommended it. Chev always found hydrotherapy helpful for his headaches and constipation, and believed the daily regime of bathing, showering, wrapping up in cold sheets, and drinking the mineral water would “astonish your bowels.”33 Back in Boston, he kept up the spa routine, as he wrote to Horace Mann: “A part of each day I have to fight for life; if I do not take at least one cold bath I get sick; and if after each bath I do not take smart exercise for at least half an hour, I should turn into an icicle and die. I am up by half-past five, and chilled down and warmed up again by half-past six, for the first exercise at the Institution. I have to work there and to walk some six miles daily and see to my idiots, and worry the rest of the time.”34 Hydrotherapy gave him a manly excuse to be nurtured and cared for.
Decorations and renovations at Green Peace continued throughout the summer. At the end of July, Adolph Mailliard’s father had a big sale of the Joseph Bonaparte household furnishings, and Julia bought a blue Gobelin carpet with a central medallion of portraits of Napoleon and Josephine and a strawberry-colored border of fish, dolphins, birds, and flowers on a soft gold ground. Installed at Green Peace, the carpet became a favorite play space for the children.
Once the summer was over, however, the old problems of loneliness and isolation came back to plague Julia. Chev’s work routines started again, and as usual he was “a little grumpy, never fond of kissing.”35 He needed only four or five hours of sleep a night, got up at 5:00 a.m., went to work at 6:30, and “cared nothing for recreation in the ordinary sense of the word.”36 Green Peace was much more comfortable and attractive than the Doctor’s Wing, but it was still in remote South Boston. She tried to establish calling hours on Friday afternoons, but only Edward Everett and his wife ventured out, and Sumner was the only unmarried man who came to the house. She was desperate for company and stimulation. “I have nothing but myself to write about—for four months past I have heard only myself, talked with myself, eaten and drunk myself, made a solemn vow to myself every morning, and condoled with myself that I was about to be left to myself for another day.”37
To make things worse, the Howes were facing financial problems. Ever resentful of the Wards’ control of Julia’s money, Chev had nagged and strategized to gain control over her estate and managed to get enough to speculate in real estate. In 1845, he had started to buy land in South Boston, with her money but in his own name, expecting a boom that did not come for one hundred fifty years. Julia had no money of her own for clothes or household goods. Once again, her letters to her sisters were dominated by self-pity and impotent complaint. “I live in a place in which I have few social relations, and all too recent to be intimate . . . nobody takes the least interest in what I think, I am forced to make myself an imaginary public, and to tell it the secrets of my poor little ridiculous brain. While I am employed with fictions my husband is dealing with facts . . . At least I know all that is in his mind, if he does not occupy himself much with mine.”38 At some level, too, she confided to Louisa, she feared that bitterness and boredom were destroying her abilities to write: “My fingers are becoming less and less familiar with the pen, my thoughts grow daily more insignificant and commonplace.”39
Since the first few months of her marriage, she wrote mournfully, she had “lived in a state of somnambulism, occupied principally with digestion, sleep, and babies . . . Oh dearest Wevie, God only knows what I have suffered from this stupor—it has been like blindness, like death, like exile from all things beautiful and good.” For the first time, she began to formulate opinions about the sanctification of motherhood, and the expectation that all women should welcome and embrace it. “It is a blessed thing to be a mother,” she wrote Louisa, “but there are bounds to all things, and no woman is under any obligation to sacrifice the whole of her existence to the mere act of bringing children into the world. I cannot help considering the excess of this as . . . degrading to a woman whose spiritual nature has any strength. Men, on the contrary, think it glorification enough for a woman to be a wife and mother in any way, and upon any terms.”40
To her relief, Chev decided they should rent a house in Boston for the winter of 1846–47, and Julia saw friends, gave parties, and started writing again. “It has been strange to me,” she told Annie, “to return to life and to feel that I have any sympathy with human beings, after the long interval of quiet and indifference which succeeded my marriage. I have been singing and writing poetry, so you may know that I have been happy . . . God forgive me if I do wrong in following with ardor the strongest instincts of my nature.”41 By March she was writing to Louisa breathlessly describing “a devil of a winter, full of pleasure, of excitement, le tourbillon des passions!”42
And that spring Julia was reveling in a room of her own at Green Peace—a den off the library where she had “fitted up a lovely oratoire, hung with muslin draperies, and my religious engravings—in a recess, lined with red, is Crawford’s lovely bas-relief of Apollo—my little brackets are placed on the walls, with statuettes on them—my Prie-Dieu is there, with the crucifix elevated above it on a bracket supported by an angel’s head—my old chairs, and a little sofa complete the furniture of the room.”43 Chev bought her a season ticket to the opera, and a carriage with horses to convey her, and she went almost nightly. She was playing the new piano and singing, although she was thinking that her uncle John had been right when he had warned her not to marry. “Everyone else, instead of helping me on in my vocation tried to turn me aside from it, and I was fool enough to believe that the advice of others was better than the instinct of my own heart.”44
And at least she was not pregnant. In June, she rejoiced that Flossy was twenty-two months old, but there was still “as yet, thank heaven, no prospect of a successor.”45 At the end of June, she hosted a triumphant dinner for the Five of Clubs—from soup to salmon, sweetbreads, spinach, and strawberries. She had mastered the art of entertaining, although “for myself it is easy to find companions more congenial than the Club.” To that end, she initiated a club of intelligent women who did not take themselves too seriously, including herself as the “grand universal philosopher,” Jane Belknap as the “charitable censor,” Mary Ward as the “moderator,” and the editor Sarah Hale as the “optimist.” Chev even promised to take her abroad in five years to visit Louisa. And she published an anonymous article on Goethe and Schiller in a Boston newspaper, which was praised, albeit condescendingly, in the North American Review, as “a charming paper, said to be written by a lady.”46 She seemed to have made it through the trials of childbirth and nursing, mastered the arts of hostessing, found congenial women friends, and made some progress with her writing.
Then on September 20, 1847, Julia learned she was pregnant again, with the baby due in March. She reacted with horror and despair. “At first I cried & raved about it, but now I am more reconciled to the idea. It will be a girl and is already christened Dolores.”47 At the end of the month, they heard that her brother Francis Marion had died in New Orleans of yellow fever. Finally, Sam Ward had lost a lot of money in speculation. Prime, Ward, and Company went bankrupt, his wife left him, and he resigned as the trustee of Julia’s estate. Chev was quick to take advantage of the moment. He sold all of her New York real estate—great tracts of land in midtown and downtown—and invested the money in buying land in South Boston. Chev was not the only Ward son-in-law, however, to make a foolish real estate decision. Adolph Mailliard sold Annie’s property on Thirty-Fourth Street for $1,500 and they took a belated honeymoon in Europe.
Julia kept active during her pregnancy, if only to spite Chev, who was unsympathetic to her complaints, talking about a fourth child to keep “Dolores” company, or giving her the silent treatment. “I have been alone all day with my husband, who, being out of sorts, has hardly spoken one word to me in twelve hours,” she wrote to Auntie Francis.48 Her pregnancy coincided with a time of major medical debate about the pain of childbirth. In London, in January 1847, the distinguished obstetrician Dr. James Simpson had successfully given ether to a woman in labor. Longfellow read some of the flood of articles in the Edinburgh Review and other periodicals about the experiment and decided ether must be used when his second wife, Fanny, delivered their third child. (His adored first wife, Mary Potter, had died slowly after a miscarriage, and he was determined to spare Fanny any pains and risks.) But he had to scramble to find a Boston physician willing to administer the drug. Finally he located a dentist, Nathan Cooley Keep (who later became dean of the Harvard dental school), and on April 7, Fanny “heroically inhaled . . . the great nepenthe,” becoming the first American woman to use ether in childbirth. She wrote to her friends praising the drug: “I feel proud to be the pioneer to less suffering for poor weak womankind. This is certainly the greatest blessing of this age and I am glad to have lived in the time of its coming.”49 By 1850, English husbands, from Darwin and Dickens to Prince Albert, were demanding ether for their wives as well. Chev was not among their number, but Julia was determined to have it for her upcoming delivery.
On March 2, 1848, she went into labor while she was having tea with Sumner in the parlor, and delivered a son. Julia and Chev both wrote to Louisa giving accounts of the birth of their first son. Chev described it as a quick and easy delivery, lasting about twenty minutes, and both “pleasant” and “enjoyable.” In his account, he was in charge of the whole procedure: “I went down and dispatched the man servant for the Doctor, sent Sumner for the midwife & the girl for . . . ‘chloroform.’ ” Neither doctor nor midwife nor chloroform was required, however; Chev delivered the infant himself, and could not refrain from lecturing Louisa on the morality of natural childbirth and the evils of ether: “A woman of good constitution, good training, good habits, & good courage need not anticipate & will not have a formidable delivery. Depend upon it, it is all wrong & wicked for women to make such delicate things of themselves & the pains of child birth are meant by a beneficent creator to be the means of leading them back to lives of temperance, exercise, and reason.”50 What Louisa, who had been in labor for fifty-two hours with her first child, Annie, thought of Chev’s sermonizing and rhapsodizing, we do not know. He was certainly thrilled with his first son, who he predicted would be another classical military hero, the equal of Julius Caesar, Pericles, and Brutus.51
Julia’s version was earthier, and contradicted Chev in several respects; “pleasant” and “enjoyable” were not the terms she chose to describe the birth. As she told the story, she was the one who sent Sumner for the doctor and nurse, and sent the maid to the pharmacy for chloroform, while Chev just hung around. He was no use for the delivery either. “The child was born after half an hour’s labour, without any assistance. I suffered very little for the head, but as Chev did not know how to assist me, I had to make a tremendous effort for the shoulders, & gave one horrid scream, the only one of which I was guilty. Chev soon gave one himself: ‘Oh, Dudie! It’s a boy!’ I couldn’t believe it—we both cried & laughed . . . I had very severe afterpains.”52They named their first son Henry Marion, although one friend suggested “Sumner Longfellow Parker Wilmot Howe.” Harry was a good baby who rarely cried and slept almost all night from the beginning. At seven weeks, Julia thought of him as “the little saint” and hoped he would not feel “the melancholy which oppressed me during the period of his creation.”53
Within a month, she had recovered and was expressing her aesthetic and spiritual frustrations to a bewildered Fanny Longfellow. “Julia Howe was here a cheval yesterday afternoon wishing for the intense in life. What more can she desire than the extremes of joy and suffering in domestic life?”54 There was not much joy for Julia in domestic life. Chev’s sexuality was limited to procreation, while Julia wanted more general intimacy, kisses, and cuddling. Having tried to change his ways without success, she became convinced that he found her repulsive. In October, she wrote to her sister Annie, with comic exaggeration, but with a note of desperation: “I only feel as if my death were the one thing desirable for his comfort, but live I must, and I can unhappily be nothing but my poor half crazy self. Don’t let this make you sad; it does not me. I am quite jolly as usual, but I should like to know how it feels to be something better than an object of disgust to one’s husband.”55 In an effort to reassure herself about her attractiveness to Chev, she weaned Henry after only nine months and then worried about another pregnancy. She was relieved to get her period—“a certain course of nature”—in November.56
Some of her poems were published that month in the popular anthologies of American women’s writing. The anthologist Rufus Griswold included seven of her poems in his Female Poets of America. Among them was a tribute called “Wordsworth,” eight stanzas of the weakest poetry Howe ever committed to a page. Considering her cynical view of Wordsworth when they met in England, it is surprising that she wrote such an overwrought address to a poet “to whom we listen / As never to bard before,” imploring him to “speak, for our hearts are thirsting / For the light of righteousness.” As usual, she employed archaic terms, rather than the language of men speaking to men, or women to women: hark, thee, thy, thou, bard, sitteth. She depended heavily on feminine end-rhymes: winging/bringing/singing, clearer/dearer/nearer, deepest/weepest. Julia was not very proud of the poems, but she was pleased that Chev had to take notice of them; “I find that my name has been advertised in relation to Griswold’s book—people come to ask Chev if that Mrs. Howe is his wife.”57 They should not have been in doubt, since Griswold’s introduction to her contributions identified her by all her male relations: daughter of the “late eminent banker” Samuel Ward, sister of Mr. Samuel Ward Jr., “one of our most accomplished scholars,” and wife of Dr. S. G. Howe, “one of the most active and wise of living philanthropists.” In the best of the Griswold poems, “Woman,” she began with a description of the ideal woman poet as “a vestal priestess,” meek, calm, self-sacrificing, and indifferent to fame; but concluded with her witty admission that she was not that kind of woman at all.
It is a sly confession. In fact, between 1846 and 1848, Julia had begun in secret to write an extraordinary novel about her feelings of loneliness, rejection, and uncertainty as a woman and an artist. Unfinished, unpublished, and unread for over a century, the manuscript tells the tragic experience of Laurence, born with both male and female sexual organs but raised as a boy by his parents. Both a metaphor for her own feelings of androgyny and a meditation on her husband’s emotional and sexual absence, the story reveals a wildly unconventional side of her imagination, with hidden depths of sexual fantasy, anger, and protest.
The discovery of the novel is among the great sagas of scholarly adventure. In 1951, Julia’s granddaughter Rosalind Richards gave the manuscript to the Houghton Library at Harvard along with a huge collection of Howe family papers. Piled among what the curators labeled “10 boxes of unsorted prose manuscripts and speeches,” without a title page, beginning on page 2 in the middle of a sentence, and ending midsentence in the final fragment, the narrative escaped notice until 1977, when it was discovered by Mary H. Grant, a historian researching her dissertation on Howe. She was baffled by the fragmentary text, by pages that seemed out of numerical order, and characters who appeared and disappeared as if Julia had forgotten them. “All this,” she recalls, “gave the writing a slightly dreamlike quality, vague and inexplicable.” She mentioned it in her biography of Howe published in 1982. In 1993, another biographer, Valarie Ziegler, looked at the manuscripts and discussed them briefly in her 2003 study Diva Julia. Two years later Gary Williams came upon the manuscript while researching a study of Howe as a poet. In his book Hungry Heart, Williams suggested a number of interpretations and lines of inquiry about the text. Finally, in 2004, he completed the huge task of organizing the fragments and published his edition of the manuscripts under the title The Hermaphrodite. The marketing division of the publisher, the University of Nebraska Press, had come up with the title.
The Hermaphrodite stunned Americanist scholars with its sophistication and daring.58 No one would have guessed that the nineteenth-century female author of the conventional and pious verses printed in Griswold’s anthology could be capable of producing such a sensational story and creating such lurid images of androgyny, bisexuality, homosexuality, and monstrosity. Influenced partly by her reading of French novels about androgynous creatures, and inspired by a copy of the famous Greek statue The Sleeping Hermaphrodite, which she had seen in the Villa Borghese in Rome, Julia foreshadowed the mid-twentieth-century female Gothic in its obsession with freaks, monsters, and especially hermaphrodites, and suggested that the woman artist is not only a divided soul but also a monster doomed to solitude and sorrow.
Laurence narrates the first part of the novel, describing his lonely childhood, baptized by “a masculine name, destined to a masculine profession, and sent to a boarding school for boys, that I might become robust and manly, and haply learn to seem that which I could never be.”59 When his younger brother is born, his father coldly sends him off to college, highly advanced intellectually, and thus presumably masculine; but physically delicate and “endowed with rare beauty” (4), thus presumably feminine. Attractive to women, but indifferent to their charms, Laurence is pursued by Emma, a beautiful widow in her late twenties. He overhears two students commenting on his physical beauty and peculiar effeminate gestures, and comparing him to the “lovely hermaphrodite in the villa Borghese.” He is alarmed that his secret may be coming out. Then Emma comes to his room and begs him to make love to her. He pulls away, and she looks directly at him for the first time. “She saw the bearded lip and earnest brow, but she saw also the falling shoulders, slender neck, and rounded bosom—then with a look like that of the Medusa, . . . she murmured ‘Monster!’ ‘I am as God made me, Emma’ ” Laurence replies (19).
Emma has convulsions and dies, and Laurence, rejected also by his father, flees to a hermitage in the woods, with “an apartment of moderate size, but of beautiful proportions, fitted up as a study. The pointed windows, curiously carved woodwork, and ancient furniture of the room were all in perfect keeping with each other. The walls were adorned with well-filled bookshelves, a massive writing table occupied the centre . . . Beyond it lay a small bedchamber, almost meanly furnished.” In an adjoining chapel there is an altar decorated by a “strange monumental conceit,” the sculptured bust of a beautiful woman, “with a marble veil covering the face” (37–38). There he stays for years, writing poetry, studying, his hair growing long, until he is discovered and rescued by Ronald, a beautiful lad of sixteen. Ronald too falls instantly in love with him, believing him to be a woman, and after many romantic vicissitudes, they meet in Heidelberg, where Ronald is befriended by fellow students. Laurence is persuaded to play Juliet in a student production, and with his hair falling in loose locks around his neck and a garland around his brow his performance is greeted with rapturous applause. Overcome by passion Ronald breaks into his chamber and attempts to rape him. Laurence drugs his wine and escapes.
Book 2 leaps to Rome, where Laurence is once again a student, but dressing as a woman, giving Howe an opportunity to denounce the confinement of women’s roles, in a passionate manifesto:
Women, the adored of all, but trusted of none; women, the golden treasures too easily lost or stolen, and therefore to be kept under lock and key; women, who cannot stay at home without surveillance, who cannot walk abroad without being interrogated at every turn by the sentinel of public opinion; women, I say, are very naturally glad now and then to throw off their chains with their petticoats, and to assume for a time the right to go where they please, and the power of doing as they please.
What a new world does this open to a woman! What a delightful, dangerous abyss of novelty! It is a world of reality in exchange for a world of dreams—it is dealing with facts instead of forms, with flesh and blood, instead of satins and laces. She can hear the conversations of the camp, the cabinet, the café, the gaming table. She can learn how men talk and act when they are drunk, and angry, and sincere. She will marvel to find so much or so little in them. If she be so minded, she may learn to drink, game, and swear the best of them . . . And this masculine mania may last long, and go far, but it will not last forever. However strong, or depraved, or metaphysical the emancipated woman may be, she will in the end feel the want of someone to bully and protect her, the necessity of being cherished and admired, or kicked and cuffed. And so someday she will ignominiously strike her flag of defiance, and creep back to her woman’s trappings, and to her woman’s life as best she may, happy . . . [if she can find] someone who though he may outrage her best feelings, laugh at her convictions, and offend her taste, will yet praise her eyebrows, and pay her bills (131).
Howe was unable to organize these powerful fragments into a narrative whole. The manuscript peters out into fragments of poetic dialogue; Laurence never confronts or resolves his sexual ambiguity, or finds a role for himself in the world. He has another tragic parting from Ronald, succumbs to a fever, has visions and hallucinations, and is examined by a physician who is unable to pronounce him “either man or woman” but gravely declares “that he is rather both than neither” (195). In the final paragraph Laurence is in a deathlike trance and about to be buried alive; he hears the step of Ronald, who falls to his knees beside the coffin. But then? Is he rescued? The manuscript ends “he knelt for”—. The rest of the page is blank.
Critics have suggested numerous interpretations of this extraordinary work.60 What stands out for me are the rewritings and projections of Julia’s own experiences and feelings. Laurence is the poet and adventurer she might have been if she had been a boy. He competes in the university poetry competition and wins. He spends some years in an idyllic and perfectly furnished study, the apotheosis of her den at Green Peace. He enjoys the bohemian life of Heidelberg, where Sam had been a student. He speaks for her longing to move freely in the streets, unencumbered, unobserved. Julia was trying to express a sexuality and consciousness forbidden to women, but she also had to invent a fictional form to contain it. The task was formidable; unable to discuss her work with anyone, lacking narrative models and unaware of contemporary women’s fiction including Jane Eyre, Julia abandoned the book. She was aware that it was too scandalous to be shared. Yet it must have been a comfort to her to have such a document hidden away, and to lose herself in it when the marriage was too turbulent and hurtful. Her writing was starting to come more directly from her own real life and to express her genuine feelings. But she needed a literary community to support her.61
In the summer of 1849, Julia sadly realized that she was pregnant again. Louisa and her family came to visit her at Green Peace, but Chev was rude and hostile to the Crawfords and critical of their noisy little girls. He created an awkward situation for Julia, broadcasting the strain in their marriage. “Louisa has had but a humdrum time of it, I fear—you know how gloomy the house is,” she confided to Annie. “Chev sits in the library—Crawford and Louisa in the dining room—I flit from one to the other, quite uneasily, having nothing to bestow anywhere but my tediousness. We are all heartily glad when bedtime arrives.” She admitted to Annie that she was afraid of Chev, although she insisted that she was also “tenderly attached to him.” Annie would have recognized the mixed emotions; they had felt those tensions with their father. Still, Julia clung to the hope that she would feel better after the baby was born. “When the unwelcome little unborn shall have seen the light, my brain will be lightened, and I shall have a clearer mind.”62
The unwelcome little unborn saw the light on February 27, 1850. Julia told Annie that the delivery had been her easiest, and Chev was more than usually nonchalant about the occasion. When she began to have labor pains at 9:30 p.m., he went to his study to write a letter to Horace Mann, saying he did not see the need to come up to the bedroom until he heard her screaming. Of course Julia resolved not to give him the satisfaction, and she was silent until Laura was born in half an hour, with Chev arriving at the last minute to cut the cord. Julia was cynical in her letter about the birth; the baby, she wrote, “looked like an insect . . . her arms and legs looked as if they had been parboiled.”63 The insect-like baby was first called Anna-Louisa, after Julia’s sisters, but a few days later, Chev insisted that she must be named Laura Elizabeth. Laura Bridgman’s position as his honorary daughter was supplanted by real daughters, and none of them would ever be named for the Ward family.
Six years had passed since Julia came home to Boston from her honeymoon; and her youthful fantasies about marriage had been shattered. She had her children, her studies, and her secret writing, but her marriage had turned out to be another imprisonment with her husband as the jailer.