Julia’s first book did make a sensation. Titled Passion-Flowers (a name thought up by Emmanuel Scherb and approved by Longfellow), it was published by Ticknor, Reed and Fields on December 23, 1853. Julia quickly sent copies to her family and to prominent Boston poets. And true to her word, she finally showed the book to Chev.
It must have been a painful conversation and the start of a tense Christmas weekend. There were wounds aplenty for Chev in this revelation. Not only did he learn that his wife had secretly published a very personal book of poems, but also that his beloved old friend Longfellow had conspired with her to keep it from him. Moreover, the publisher who had rejected his book had accepted hers. Above all, while Chev had privately indulged his anger towards Julia, he could not have imagined that she would humiliate him publicly, or indicate that she did not love him. Passion-Flowers made that possibility achingly clear.
Julia admitted to Annie that he had taken the news “very hard.” His anger was a “bitter drop” in her overflowing happiness. Chev, however, did not say anything more about it in the days afterwards; he and Julia collaborated as usual to make a jolly holiday for the children, and she thought that the crisis had passed. He was consoled by the book’s success, she told Annie, and “behaves very well indeed.”1 With the ordeal of confronting Chev behind her, she allowed herself to feel excited about the book’s early reception and hopeful that it would establish her reputation as a serious American poet. She was pleased when Theodore Parker quoted from Passion-Flowers in his Christmas sermon. Chev did not go to church, even on Christmas, so he was not there to hear Parker or to watch the reaction of other parishioners. Julia hoped that the worst was over.
Passion-Flowers is a book of forty-four poems, arranged to tell the story of a poet-pilgrim’s spiritual and aesthetic quest during a time in Rome. Julia had been thinking of herself as a pilgrim for many years. While the title of the book might allude to the flower symbolic of the passion of Jesus, it is also tauntingly ambiguous. The passion-flower is never specifically mentioned in the poems, although many other flowers are named, especially roses. The word passion appears in the book in romantic and sexual contexts.
Julia would claim that the book was about the revolutionary political events of 1848, plus slavery and religion. These are not, however, the themes that stand out and shock most readers. The first-person voice of the poems is that of a woman poet or artist confessing her ambition and her unhappiness. In “Salutatory,” she addresses “brother and sister poets dear!” seeking admission to their “shining ranks,” and, like “a mournful Anne Boleyn” awaiting her death sentence, inviting severe criticism from “the headsman of our tribe.” In “Mother Mind,” she writes about an imperious male muse who fertilizes her imagination:
My Master calls at noon or night;
I know his whisper and his nod. . . .
I bear a thought within my breast
That greatens from my growth of soul. . . .
Its greatens till its hour has come;
Not without pain it sees the light.
Metaphors of childbirth came readily to Julia’s mind; the Master also sounds uncomfortably like Chev.
One of the longest poems, “Rome,” clearly alludes to her own experience in Rome away from her husband:
The winter, like a college boy’s vacation,
Seemed endless to anticipate, and lay
Stretched in a boundless glittering before me,
Unfathomable in its free delight.
Or if horizon-bounded like the sea,
I saw new seas beyond—the sweeping line
Limits the known, but not the possible.
Julia also defiantly included the poem George Putman had turned down as risqué, retitled “Thoughts, at the Grave of Eloisa and Abelard.” “Often at midnight, on the cold stone lying,” Eloisa laments, “My passionate sobs have rent the passive air.” Other poems about suffering women were just as fervent and disturbing.
For Julia’s contemporaries and her family, the poem that attracted the most gossip and attention was “Mind versus Mill-Stream,” a parable about a miller who wants “a mild, efficient brook” to help him grind his corn. Unfortunately for him, the Miller has “a brilliant taste” and “a love of flash and spray,” so he is attracted to a tempestuous stream with fierce depths beneath its deceptively quiet surface. He convinces himself that this wild, bright stream is actually the “beautiful and bland” companion that will serve him in a “snug and shady nook,” although other men have tried and failed to “bridle” her by “artifice and force.” When its “depths were stirred,” Julia warns, in the slangiest and most forceful line she ever published, “Wow! but it wrought its will.” (This may be the earliest use of “wow” in non-Scottish literature; it appears in Burns and in Scott, but the first English usage cited in the OED is 1892.)
Then after a brief “summer’s glow” of a honeymoon, the Miller settles down to tame and bridle his bride. He builds a waterwheel and orders her to turn it. She defies him:
“Your mill-wheel?” cried the naughty Nymph,
“That would indeed be fine!
You have your business, I suppose,
Learn too that I have mine.”
When the miller tries to punish and control the “perverse” stream by building a strong dam to contain her, all hell breaks loose.
“What? Will you force me?” said the sprite;
“You shall not find it gain”,
So, with a flash, a dash, a crash,
She made her way amain.
Then, freeing all her pent-up soul,
She rushed, in frantic race
And fragments of the Miller’s work
Threw in the Miller’s face.
The Miller does not confront the stream but rebuilds the dam and diverts the water’s course. “Aha! I’ve conquered now!” he crows. But the stream, goaded to fury, rises up, floods the mill, and flings “to utterness of waste / The Miller and his mound.” In case any obtuse reader missed her point about domination and resistance in marriage, Julia appended an explicit and mischievous moral:
If you would marry happily
On the shady side of life
Choose out some quietly-disposed
And placid tempered wife,
To share the length of sober days,
And dimly slumberous nights,
But well beware those fitful souls
Fate wings for wilder flights!
For men will woo the tempest,
And wed it, to their cost,
Then swear they took it for summer dew,
And ah! their peace is lost!
The poem is a barely veiled summary of the courtship, honeymoon, and marriage, with Chev’s insistence on damming up Julia’s creativity and shutting her up in isolated houses. Calling the Miller “Reason” and the stream “Rhyme,” she emphasizes the difference between their kinds of work. To Chev, Louisa, and Annie, moreover, there were obvious allusions to Lawton’s Valley, where Chev had actually dammed up a brook and diverted the stream. Julia even made the brook a redhead, “coiffed with long wreaths of crimson weed.” The threat to Chev’s peace in the conclusion could not be more clear. Passion-Flowers was the stream’s revenge on the Miller. Julia’s conviction that Chev would not understand what she was saying shows how little she understood him. Or perhaps she knew he would understand and wanted to hurt him. In this she succeeded.
The finest poem in the book, in my judgment, is “The Heart’s Astronomy,” which deals with the confinement of maternity. Julia uses the metaphor of a comet, rather than a stream, to express the poetic nature and fiery drive that forces her out of a steady orbit. Since Wallace’s death she had been reading about astronomy, following up on Comte’s recommendations. Comets had been in the news in the 1840s. In 1847, Maria Mitchell, one of the first female astronomers in the United States, had discovered a comet, which won her acclaim and induction to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Named “Miss Mitchell’s Comet,” it lit up the New England press. Comets in general fascinated both scientists and the general public. As John Herschel, the British Astronomer Royal, explained in 1848: “The extraordinary aspect of comets, their rapid and seemingly irregular motions, the unexpected way in which they often burst upon us, . . . have in all ages rendered them objects of astonishment, not unmixed with superstitious dread to the uninitiated, and an enigma to those most conversant with the wonders of creation in the operations of natural causes.”2 Within the Howe family, “the comet” was a metaphor for the restless, explosive, and unpredictable Chev; the daughters would later attribute Julia’s disorientation in the early years of her marriage to being “caught up as it were in the wake of a comet, and whirled into new and strange orbits.” They acknowledged too that “life with a Comet-Apostle was not always easy.”3
If Chev was a “Comet-Apostle,” Julia was a comet-apostate, or comet-opposite; she was the one tied down to regular patterns and routines. In the poem, she begins with an image of captivity. The poet describes herself walking around the outside of her house, desperate to escape, if only for a little while, the confinement of domesticity. Her three children watch her from inside the front window. Using a metaphysical conceit, like Donne’s compass in “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” Howe compares her trudging to the fixed orbit of a star. From the children’s point of view, the mother revolves around them, and although she sometimes disappears from view behind the house, they are confident she will come around again.
Yet Howe suggests that she is not a steady maternal star, but a poetic comet, a creature with no fixed orbit, driven by inner compulsions, and capable of suddenly shooting off into space:
They watched me as Astronomers
Whose business lies in heaven afar,
Await, beside the slanting glass,
The reappearance of a star.
Not so, not so, my pretty ones,
Seek stars in yonder cloudless sky;
But mark no steadfast path for me,
A comet dire and strange am I.
But Comets too have holy laws,
Their fiery sinews to restrain,
And from their outmost wanderings
Are drawn to heaven’s dear heart again.
And ye, beloved ones, when ye know,
What wild, erratic natures are,
Pray that the laws of heavenly force,
Would hold and guide the Mother star.
In her conclusion, she raises the possibility that her wild, erratic poet’s nature might not be held back forever.
• • •
Julia wrote proudly to Annie that the book had been a hit in its first week of publication. “Its success became certain at once. Hundreds of copies have already been sold, and everyone likes it. Fields foretells a second edition—it is sure to pay for itself. It has done more for me, in point of consideration here, than a fortune of a hundred thousand dollars.”4 Despite its anonymity, everyone in Boston knew immediately that she had written it—the publishers themselves might have spread the word—and she hoped news of her authorship would help sales in other cities. “The authorship is, of course, no secret now, and you had best talk openly of it, all of you, as it may help the sale of the book in N.Y.”5
Longfellow, who had been such a friend to her and the book, did not respond right away. He may have been startled, when he saw it all in print, by its themes—sorrow, anger, and defiance. On Christmas Eve he confided to his journal that the book was “full of genius, full of beauty; but what a sad tone! Another cry of discontent added to the slogan of the femmes incomprises!”6 A few days later, he was still thinking about the troubling revelations of these “brilliant lamentations”; despite a “great deal of feeling, poetic and otherwise . . . here is revolt enough, between these blue covers.”7 (The first edition has brown covers, the second, blue.)
On a more enthusiastic note, the Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier, a warm supporter of women writers in general, wrote from the country with unmixed praise for the book, which he took as a passionate statement on the political issues of the day. “A thousand thanks for thy volume! I rec’d it some days ago, but was too ill to read it. I glanced at ‘Rome,’ ‘Newport and Rome,’ and they excited me like a war-trumpet. To-day, with the wild storm drifting without, my sister and I have been busy with thy book, and basking in the warm atmosphere of its flowers of passion. It is a great book—it has placed thee at the head of us all. I like its noble aims, its scorn and hate of priestcraft and Slavery. It speaks out bravely, beautifully all I have felt, but could not express, when contemplating the condition of Europe. God bless thee for it!”8 Whittier went on to write a positive notice of the book for the National Era.
The senior transcendentalists held back. Emerson wrote a thank-you note for the gift copy but managed to avoid saying anything about the poems, with the excuse that he was busy packing for a long absence. He had only had time to peek at the pages, he said, but looked forward to reading the “private lyrics, whose air and words [are] all your own.”9 Emerson could be a master of social as well as philosophical indirection.
Julia did not send a copy to Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was living in Liverpool as the American consul. The social relations of the Howes and the Hawthornes were not of the warmest; Hawthorne had a well-known dislike of women writers, although he might have been even more irritated by Chev. He was also uncomfortable with social events. The Howe daughters write that when their parents once went to call on the Hawthornes in Concord, they were welcomed to the parlor by Sophia Hawthorne and saw Nathaniel coming down the stairs. “Mrs. Hawthorne called out ‘Husband! Husband! Dr. Howe and Mrs. Howe are here!’ Hawthorne bolted across the hall and through the door without even looking into the parlor.”10 The Howe family excused him as “shy,” and he was; but he had made his feelings clear.
Nonetheless, William D. Ticknor was also Hawthorne’s friend and publisher, and passed the book on to him. “The devil must be in the woman to publish them,” Hawthorne replied; the poems “seemed to let out a whole history of domestic unhappiness.” He was impressed by the vigor of the writing but appalled by the book’s candor. “What a strange propensity it is in these scribbling women, to make a show of their hearts,” he wrote. “However, I, for one, am much obliged to the lady, and esteem her beyond all comparison the first of American poetesses. What does her husband think of it?”11 A few years later, in 1857, his opinion had hardened against her. “She has no genius or talent, making public what she ought to keep to herself—viz. her passions, emotions, and womanly weaknesses. Passion Flowers were delightful, but she ought to have been soundly whipt for publishing them.”12 His terminology makes the book sound like a slightly pornographic volume designed for male titillation.
James Fields sent a copy to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who wrote to her friend Mary Russell Mitford that while some of the poems were good, “many of the thoughts striking, and all of a certain elevation,” overall she was unimpressed. “There’s a large proportion of conventional stuff in the volume. She must be a clever woman. Of the ordinary impotencies and prettinesses of female poets she does not partake, but she can’t take rank with poets in the good meaning of the word, I think, so as to stand without meaning. Also there is some bad taste affectation in the dressing of her personality.”13
Still more malicious speculation was heading across the Atlantic in the opposite direction. Francis J. Child, the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard, had become a close friend of Clough’s when he came to Boston, and dashed off a letter to London making fun of Julia’s talent as a poet, her self-regard, and her scandalous behavior. “The vanity of the woman is most amusing throughout her poems,” he sneered. “She sets up to be a good dancer, to be a famous musician, a dab at theology, cooking, languages, and all the accomplishments. She hints at a time when she was a leading belle, and gives you to understand that her beauty as well as her cleverness led her to that distinction . . . She does not pretend to be a model wife and there are several obscure pieces addressed to different men unknown which might reasonably give offense to her husband, who by the way never saw the book until it was printed.” He was dismissive of the poems themselves. They “showed a sympathy with poetical feeling without being poetical”; a “total want of ear,” and thoughts “crude in themselves and vaguely expressed.”14
In Boston, too, there was acid comment even among Julia’s circle of friends. Mary Jane Quincy wrote to Mary Peabody Mann, “Some of the flowers are doubtless too passionate. What a pity they were not cut off!”15 Louisa May Alcott did not say anything about the poems, and probably couldn’t afford to buy them; but when she was invited to meet Julia at a party in January, she declined. I “can’t bear her so I wouldn’t go.”16 Julia was mercifully unaware of this hostility; she fielded some barbed questions about the identity of the allegorized figures in the poems but generally thought the Boston reception was “tolerably civil.”17
Reviewers, however, were exceedingly civil. They were startled and impressed by the apparent autobiographical nature and intellectual range of the book. George Ripley, an ardent transcendentalist who had set up Brook Farm with his wife, Sophia, had become the literary critic of the New York Tribune after the community collapsed. Like other reviewers, he stressed the personal nature and unconventionality of the poems, especially coming from a woman, and praised Passion-Flowersas “a product wrung with tears and prayer from the deepest soul of the writer . . . We should not have suspected these poems to be the production of a woman. They form an entirely unique class in the whole range of female literature.” Moreover, he found the language of the poetry “marked by strength and vigor, which betokens an intellect of masculine self-concentration and force.”18
Edwin Whipple’s short review in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine could not have been more admiring. “The book is full of a remarkable power and an unusual experience, and is evidently the work of a woman,” he wrote. “It betrays more subtlety of emotional analysis than we had anticipated from the title. For, if we are not mistaken, the title was the result of consideration. But it does not describe the book. The poems indicate a shrewd intellectual sympathy with passion, but they are not passionate. They are the result of a searching glance upon the author’s shifting moods of experience, and a glance determined that these moods shall be variations of passionate emotion . . . They are so full of life, so audacious, so evidently the natural product of the author’s experience and self-knowledge …” And they are full “of generous human sympathy . . . an unblenching heroism and social independence.”19 The review would have been even more gratifying if Edwin Whipple had not been a good friend of Julia’s.
Ednah Dow Cheney was the only woman who reviewed Passion-Flowers, and she saw it as a breakthrough for American women’s poetry, a huge advance on the sentimental lyrics of the ladies’ annuals and the patriotic anthologies. “It really is a grave thing, and in this country, a rare thing, to publish such a book as this. Lively description and subtle sentiment have been the highest characteristics of the almost infinite . . . brood of female songsters which the Rev. Griswold has harbored under his wings; timidly yet earnestly, we have demanded something deeper than these, something truer to the idea of American womanhood. Shall we say that now, for the first time, we have been answered? We surely believe that this work stands for such a want in our Literature, and it is one that very many will not willingly let die.”20 Sales were good; Passion-Flowers did indeed sell out its first edition in a few weeks.
Chev had held his peace for a few weeks, but in secret he was writing to Nathaniel Parker Willis and Sumner to get their opinions of the book. Willis, the editor of the conservative Home Journal and the brother of the feminist writer Fanny Fern, replied on January 10, saying he hadn’t read the book itself, but he had looked at the reviews and opined that Julia had “volcanic resources, and may do what she pleases in the way of fame”—i.e., the book was a dangerous eruption by a woman eager for attention and celebrity.21 Sumner did not answer his request right away, and Chev wrote despondently to prod him, asserting in a transparent display of bravado that he needed to hear the truth and could take it. “You have not said a word about Julia’s book: I wish you would say to me what you think of it—though I know well it is a vain wish,—you would not wound me by saying all you think, I know.”22 Sumner wrote back a few days later that the book stood comparison with the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and was a work of genius. These words did not reassure Chev, however; and somewhere else he heard snide insinuations about the book and faced questions about his part in it.
And then, towards the end of January, Chev erupted in a violent confrontation with Julia, which left them both shaken and exhausted. She was dazed by his anger and alarmed by his paranoia and instability. She had never seen him so out of control. Her intended visit to Annie had to be postponed; she was too frightened to leave him alone. In February, she confided to Annie:
I have been able to calm and soothe him, somewhat. . . . The Book, you see, was a blow to him, and some foolish and impertinent people have hinted to him that the Miller was meant for himself—this has made him almost crazy. He has fancied, moreover, that every one despised and neglected him, and indeed it is true that I have left him too much to himself. I will not expand upon the topic of our miseries—he has been in a very dangerous state, I think, very near insanity . . . we have had the devil’s own time of it, and as I tell you, I hardly know myself, after all that I have endured. You must not blame poor Chev, however, he could not help it.23
Behind his authoritative façade, Chev was thin-skinned and insecure; he feared ridicule and gossip. Competition from his wife was the last straw in the burden of resentment towards Julia he had been carrying during the ten years of their marriage. His belief that he was being persecuted and laughed at, that he was an outsider, came to the surface and made him frantic. Nevertheless, Boston appearances had to be kept up, if possible. In the face of his rage and pain, Julia felt remorse and tried instinctively to protect him. Her response to the crisis was to project the blame onto other people and to deny that she had indeed caricatured him as the Miller. But it was too late.
In exchange for agreeing to tolerate Julia’s perfidy, Chev demanded severe concessions. First of all, she had to make changes in the book. When the second edition of Passion-Flowers came out in February, “Mind versus Mill-Stream” had already been changed to “The Mill Stream,” and the last verses of the “Moral” had been cut.24 After the third edition appeared in March, Chev’s opposition escalated even more. Now he was offended by the sexual innuendo he detected in the book. During a trip to Washington that spring, he wrote to her about his concerns: “There are things in the book which made my cheeks tingle a little with a blush. They border on the erotic.” These interpretations were unlikely to have been the result of Chev’s newfound sensitivity to poetry, but probably reflected his conversations with other friends about the sensual language of Passion-Flowers and its images “such as a pure minded & sensitive lady should not write.” Topping these insults off, he suggested that their pure little daughters would be harmed by reading the book.25 Julia could not go back and rewrite the poems, but a possible fourth edition did not appear.
A far more devastating consequence of the confrontation in January was Chev’s insistence that they resume their sexual relationship, suspended for the previous eighteen months. If she refused, he threatened to divorce her and keep custody of Julia Romana and Harry. Divorce was legal in the United States and had become much more frequent by the 1850s, so this was a possibility. As Julia explained sorrowfully to Louisa, she had no choice but to accept his terms:
After three years of constantly increasing unkindness and estrangement, no alternative presented itself before me, but that of an attempt at a reconciliation or a final separation. The latter had been all along in Chev’s mind, and was so favorite a project with him that he would bring it up in our quietest hours, when there was nothing whatsoever to suggest it. His dream was to marry again—some young girl who would love him supremely. Before God, Louisa, I thought it my real duty to give up everything that was dear and sacred to me, rather than be forced to leave two of my children, and those two the dearest, Julia and Harry. In this view, I made the greatest sacrifice I can ever be called upon to make. God must accept it, and the bitter suffering of these subsequent months, as some expiation for the errors of my life …
Chev’s fantasy of the “young girl who would love him supremely,” and presumably, give up her identity to please him, as to a father, sums up his paternalist marital expectations. He could not cope with an adult woman, his equal in intelligence and spirit. But what could Julia do? Comparing herself to the actress Fanny Kemble, who had lost custody of her children in a notorious divorce case in 1849, she declared that she could “suffer and die with my children, but I cannot leave them.” The letter ended dramatically; “Burn this—I shall never speak of these things again.”26 Sex, which had never been enjoyable for her, became a kind of punishment, a sentence, a silent transaction of duty. By the middle of February, she was pregnant again. Chev wasted no time in extracting his fee.
She was then allowed to visit Annie. While she was in Bordentown, Chev informed her in a letter that he was moving the family out of Green Peace, putting it up for sale, and taking them all back to Perkins. Julia pleaded with him not to sell Green Peace, and he eventually gave in, but he had determined on the move. To Uncle John Ward he explained that he would both save $2,000 a year by living rent-free and please the Perkins trustees by moving back into the Doctor’s Wing. He also agreed on a plan to house the pupils of the Idiot School at Green Peace temporarily. “I am to go to the Institution for good. The idiots are to have our house,” Julia wrote scornfully.27 But she had lost the battle, and lost any semblance of control over where they lived. From then on, Chev moved them frequently from house to house.
From her perspective, the move was insensitive, if not spiteful. Soon she was back at chilly Perkins, coping with “loneliness, desolation, much fault finding, a cold house, no carriage, weary walks in and out of town, these things go far to counterbalance any pleasure that my Book has given me.” She felt such “horrible depression” that she broke down, and had “one fit of raving hysterics, I was perfectly mad, and rushed from room to room like a wild creature.”28
Chev witnessed the attack, and was sufficiently alarmed to ease up on his grouchiness and fault finding.
By June the pregnancy was visible, and her social life was even more curtailed. On Perkins Institution notepaper, she confided to Annie that she was bursting out of her clothes. “I have grown dreadfully out of shape since you saw me, darling . . . I still adhere to corsets, but with difficulty, and am going to have some with elastic and without a bone in front. I keep out of sight as much as possible and make myself as genteel as possible when I do go out.” She could just “squeeze into my green dress—the Paris one.”29 The growing shabbiness of the lovely green Paris dress became one of the metaphors of Julia’s life for the next few years.
Despite Julia’s sexual concessions, Chev remained emotionally distant and physically absent, and she began to suspect him of having found the docile young girl he dreamed of. Writing to Annie in June 1854, she said that Chev was “as cold and indifferent to me as a man could be. I sometimes suspect him of having relations with other women, and regret more bitterly than ever the sacrifice which entails upon me these moments of fatigue and suffering. God will help me through, I hope. But it all looks very dark before me.”30 In a few months’ time, she had lost her home, her sexual autonomy, her literary control, and any pretense at a companionate marriage.
When summer came, they moved back to Lawton’s Valley, where Julia spent the two hundred dollars she had made on Passion-Flowers to buy furniture. We have no letters from Chev giving his point of view about the pregnancy. His anger and alienation expressed itself, however, in his tacit encouragement to Theodore Parker, who wanted to adopt the prospective baby. Parker and his wife, Lydia Cabot, were childless, and that was a source of misery for the preacher. He complained in his journal and his letters that “a Parker or a Cabot that has no children is something unheard of in the history of our families.”31 According to Parker’s letters, Howe did not refuse.32 Years later, the Howe daughters recalled different versions of the incident. Laura said the plan had never been taken seriously and wondered lightheartedly how her rambunctious sister would have turned out if she had been brought up by the Parkers.33 Maud, the subject of the transaction, told a more dramatic story; according to her memoir, Parker rode to the Institution as soon as he heard of the baby’s birth. There, like a fairy-tale gnome, he said to Chev: “A fourth daughter, a fifth child! You and Julia have your hands full already. Give the baby to my wife and me; we will bring her up as our own, call her Theodora, and make her our heir!” According to Maud, Chev dismissed the idea at once and told it to Julia, who exclaimed, “Parker can certainly have no idea what it means to have a child!”34
Julia never liked being pregnant, but this pregnancy was the worst of all. November 4, approaching her confinement, she wrote to Louisa:
You ask whether I am glad or sorry. I can scarcely trust myself to speak of it, so bitter and horrible a distress has it been to me. You recommend ether—my dear Wevie, my mental suffering during these nine months nearly past has been so great that I cannot be afraid of bodily torture, however great. Neither does the future show a single gleam of light. I shall not drag this weary weight about me, it is true, but I cannot feel that my heart will be any lighter. I dread to see the face of my child, for I know I cannot love it. I must not write further in this strain—it brings tears, and I never give way to these, lest I should lose the little eyesight I have left.35
On November 8, she instructed Annie to give her manuscripts to George Ripley if she died in childbirth.36
The next day, Julia, alone in the main room reading a French poem, endured her labor pains until Donald insisted that she go to bed. The “great, stout baby” was born immediately.37 Chev wanted to call her “Thyrza,” but Julia must have prevailed; they named their daughter Maud.
• • •
How good a poet was Julia Ward Howe, and how important is Passion-Flowers? Most specialists in nineteenth-century women’s poetry would dismiss this question as irrelevant. They argue that the primary task of literary historians is recovery of the lives and texts of the scores of women who wrote, and that raising aesthetic questions means applying elite male standards to a group of writers whose intentions were different and for whom sentimentality was a technique like any other poetic mode.
Nonetheless, poetry is an artifact of language. We can judge its range and versatility, the originality of its images, its use of words and meter. By these standards, only a few of the hundreds of men and women composing and publishing their poetry in nineteenth-century America are among the great. The male poets Howe knew personally, Longfellow and Whittier, belonged to the genteel school called the “Fireside” or “Schoolroom” poets; no one reads them now. Dickinson and Whitman are the great exceptions, but they were iconoclasts who challenged tradition and found strategies to allow them to stay on their own paths. Dickinson never married and never published her poems; she did not have to ask permission to write, and she did not need critical approval to keep writing. Among nineteenth-century American women poets, only Emily Dickinson continues to be read and studied.
The pioneering group of Julia Ward Howe’s biographers were dismissive of her poetry. Deborah Clifford thought that “except for a few intense poems which touch on then-forbidden subjects, there is little true poetry in Passion-Flowers.” In her view, the book’s popularity came mainly from its notoriety.38 Mary Grant too found all Howe’s writing except The Hermaphrodite “derivative in form and content.”39 Valarie Ziegler thinks it does not matter whether the book was good or bad; Howe had published a book, one that got attention and good reviews, she had won a literary reputation, and that was a major achievement.40 That was certainly how Julia herself treated Passion-Flowers in later years. She had earned acceptance by the literary community: “The great performers in the literary orchestra of writers answered to its appeal, which won me a seat in their ranks.”41
More recently, however, Howe scholars who have worked extensively with the archives and know the broad historical and theoretical literature on nineteenth-century American women’s poetry have given Passion-Flowers higher praise. Gary Williams calls it a benchmark of “antebellum literary achievement . . . that represents a claiming and settling of territory that permanently alters the map of the world.”42 Cheryl Walker sees in Howe’s poetry “a dark and thrilling mystery . . . which refuses to unveil itself.”43
To understand the plusses and minuses of the book, I think we need first to understand the horizon of expectation for women poets in the 1850s. On the positive side, American women were encouraged to write and publish their poems, and there was a steady market for their work. Annuals and newspapers were packed with women’s verse, usually anonymous, but clearly feminine in terms of subject, imagery, and tone. On the negative side, female poets’ standard themes were disavowals of poetic ambition or desire for fame; women poets bragged mainly about their modesty and self-abnegation. They insisted that they sang as artlessly as birds, or that divine inspiration spoke through them, not that they practiced a craft that required study, effort, revision, and originality. Technically they were not experimental, depending on quatrains, usually based on hymn meter; and when they sat down to write poetry, they abandoned conversational naturalness for an archaic, artificial language that signaled “This is a poem! Stop smiling and sit up straight!”
Julia’s technical and verbal style in Passion-Flowers is generally conventional. With a few variations, she casts her thoughts in blank verse, heroic couplets, and hymnlike quatrains; uses feminine rhymes as line endings; and, as in the Griswold anthology, depends on a stilted vocabulary of poetic effusions, such as raiment, boon, olden, gladsome, spake, forsook, or methinks. She could use the vernacular freely and forcefully in her correspondence with her sisters (tittie and pipi come up with relation to babies); and she was a skillful satirist who continued to produce clever comic poems throughout her life. But Chev had been angry when she showed him the verses on the old woman of Portsmouth, and while she carefully kept copies of serious poems, she was careless with her humorous verse. Comic verse was not “poetry”; the comic Muse got no respect, and the wordplay Julia enjoyed when she was writing for friends or family had to be set aside when she auditioned for the literary orchestra.
Yet there are places in Passion-Flowers where she does defy verbal and thematic convention, as in the “wow!” of “Mind Versus Millstream.” When the poet confronts a scornful audience in “From Newport to Rome,” she declares her independence after long submission, in language that is vigorous and direct:
I’ve sat among you long enough,
Or followed where your music led,
I’ve never marred your pleasure yet,
“But you shall listen now!” I said.
No affected medievalisms—amongst or ye or thy—show up in this claim to an irrepressible poetic voice.
Whitman’s case is very instructive in terms of highlighting the profound disadvantages of women poets. Julia Ward and Walt Whitman were born in the same year. They both grew up in New York. But in the 1830s, while Julia was confined to her home, unable to move without a chaperone, hemmed in by restrictions of her reading and theatregoing, he was already working in Brooklyn and freely exploring the city. As he remembered, “I spent much of my time in the theatres . . . going everywhere, seeing everything, high, low, middling—absorbing theatres at every pore.”44 He avidly absorbed the slang and dialect of the streets, while Julia was restricted to a decorous and ladylike vocabulary.
By the early 1850s, both were ambitious young poets hoping to make their mark on American literature, yet the options open to a male poet and a female poet could not have been more different. Whitman was determined to take full advantage of all the resources of self-promotion and self-advancement available to a writer. In 1854, he was unmarried, unemployed, and living with his family in Brooklyn. He typeset ten pages of the first edition of Leaves of Grass himself, at the printing shop of some Brooklyn friends, and had two hundred copies bound in green cloth at his own expense. Whitman’s initial efforts to find a bookstore to sell the book failed, but he convinced the firm of Fowler and Wells, which sold phrenological and health-fad books, to take it on. It appeared on July 4, 1855.
Although the book was anonymous, Whitman used a steel engraving of himself, bearded, casual, one hand in his pocket, the other on his hip, in an open-necked shirt and a black slouch hat, as the frontispiece. It was taken from a daguerreotype he had commissioned from the Brooklyn photographer Gabriel Harrison and was meant to reinforce the image of individualism and immediacy in the poems. His gaze, as biographer David S. Reynolds observes, radiated egalitarianism; the expression of his face is “full of emotional shadings, insolence, arrogance, calmness, compassion, even a touch of sadness.”45 Even the beard was a bardic symbol.46
The first edition of Leaves of Grass did not make the splash Whitman had hoped for. The copies piled up; as Whitman recalled, “none of them were sold—practically none—perhaps one or two, perhaps not even that many.”47 There were only a few reviews; they were hostile and stressed the reader’s outrage at the book’s “indecency.” Whitman, however, was not discouraged or dispirited. He wrote several rave reviews of the book himself and published them anonymously. In the United States Review, for example, he began: “An American bard at last! . . . Self-reliant, with haughty eyes, assuming to himself all the attributes of his country, steps Walt Whitman into literature.”
Still nothing happened. Fortunately, he had sent a copy of the book to Emerson, who soon responded with a glowing letter of thanks, congratulating Whitman on “the beginning of a great career,” and praising his “free and brave thought” and “courage of treatment.” Emerson’s cultural power was immense, and his eloquent assessment was a priceless publicity asset. How could Whitman make use of a personal letter? After holding on to it for a few months, Whitman passed it on to the editor of the New York Daily Tribune, who printed it, without Emerson’s permission, in October. It also played a prominent role in the “publicity apparatus” of the second edition in 1856, although Emerson himself began to rethink his appraisal; in May 1856, he wrote to Carlyle, Leaves of Grass was “a nondescript monster, which yet had terrible eyes and buffalo strength, and was indisputably American.”48 Overall, Whitman got his work published through confident initiative and tireless self-promotion, and if some reviewers found it scandalous, their views had no impact on his life. Certainly no woman threatened him with divorce for publishing his work, however intimate or revealing. When Whitman wrote “I celebrate myself,” this was no poetic exaggeration.
Julia Ward Howe also wanted to be an American bard. No woman poet, however, could ever have attempted the same confident methods of self-branding and self-advertisement available to Whitman. Women did not include photographs of themselves in their books. To judge by the pictures of Julia at this period—demure, genteel, bonneted, beshawled, buttoned-up, eyes downcast—her image is more of concealment than engagement. She would not have dared to write a preface that was in fact a manifesto for a particular vision of American poetry, or to assume the attributes of her country. Had she dared, she would have been denounced for it. Male experience could be seen as symbolic of the nation, but certainly not female experience. Julia could not have written a “song of myself” and could not have claimed the verbal range open to Whitman. She could not have imagined writing an anonymous review of her own book. Worst of all, she did not have the freedom, as Whitman did, to revise and expand her work, and to argue for it. Howe was a poet with the irresistible force of her talent, the subversive intellect of an Emily Dickinson, the political and philosophical interests of an Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and the passionate emotions of a Sylvia Plath. Passion-Flowers was her best collection of poems, an impressive and promising debut. But Chev was an immovable object in her path, a powerful censor, her worst critic; and mid-nineteenth-century America did not allow her to grow.
By Christmas 1854, Julia had recovered enough from her depression to preside graciously over the annual party at Perkins. A Christmas tree had been set up in the large drawing room, and she sat at the piano and struck up a march, while the blind pupils and all their teachers and attendants entered. “At the end of the procession came Laura Bridgman, dressed as the Fairy Queen of the Festival, in fluttering gauze and tinsel, seated in the Howe children’s donkey carriage, which was filled with gifts, waving a gilded scepter over the merry throng. Her face was radiant, her slender figure trembling with joy. A smile hovered on her lips but was not allowed to break out. With royal dignity she presided over the distribution of gifts by her maids of honor.”49
For Julia this celebration was a charade, the final performance of a painful year. Like the Duke in Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” Chev had given orders, and all passion ceased. Behind her accustomed mask as the smiling matron, she was in despair. In a Christmas letter to Annie, she anticipated the bleak decades ahead: “Why should I add a chapter to the complaining of Job? . . . But oh! the weary, tasteless life, without a single point of interest in it! This life, which is a waste, without hope, love, or courage to help me to the future.”50