8
Nicole Tonkovich
Near the end of her long career as a well‐paid columnist for the New York Ledger, Fanny Fern noted a significant cultural shift. Her column “The Women of 1867” began with these words:
A woman who wrote used to be considered a sort of monster. At this day it is difficult to find one who does not write, or has not written. […] Nor do I qualify what I have said on account of social position, or age, or even education. […] [M]uch […] cries out for sympathy and expression, because life is such a maelstrom of business or folly. […] Let them write if they will. (Fern 1996: 342–343)
And write they did. Fern’s contemporary E.D.E.N. Southworth published more than 60 novels, many of them serialized in the Ledger. Sarah Josepha Hale edited The American Ladies Magazine and later Godey’s Lady’s Book, where she wrote a monthly “Editor’s Table” column for the next 40 years.
The great number of “wom[e]n who wrote” resulted from a general increase in people’s ability to read and write in many forms. These included print newspapers and books, handwritten letters, and, as David M. Henkin (2007) has observed, even the signs, posters, handbills, and strangers’ faces on crowded city streets. Although they lacked the franchise, “wom[e]n who wrote” directly engaged current affairs in novels, short stories, and sketches, as well as in essays, editorials, position statements, and non‐fiction appeals. Their fiction thus shares the “ideological, reportorial, and commentative function[s]” of news (Davis 1996: 213).
By the early twentieth century, however, books by these women were gathering dust on library shelves, while their more ephemeral writings were shrunk onto microfilm reels or tucked away into archives. When it was noted at all in literary scholarship, their writing was denigrated for being sentimentally engaged with domestic minutiae and outdated causes, judged unworthy to share canonical space with the timeless and aesthetically complex novels written primarily by white men.
Feminist recovery of the work of these women writers began in 1978 with Nina Baym’s encyclopedic Woman’s Fiction, which documented more than 100 novels written by 48 women. In 1984, Mary Kelley’s Private Woman, Public Stage traced the careers of 12 “literary domestics” (7). Two years later, in Sensational Designs, Jane Tompkins directly engaged the question of literary worth. Rather than measure women’s writing for aesthetic mastery and timeless appeal, she emphasized “the cultural work of American fiction” (the subtitle of her book) – the ways women’s writing engaged with what Fern called the “maelstrom of business [and] folly” (Fern 1996: 363). Such an emphasis turned scholars’ attention to the historical and political contexts of women’s writing, and has more recently spurred new investigations of the variety of print forms within which mid‐nineteenth‐century American women wrote.
Yet the number of their books in print today represents neither the number of women who wrote during the period nor the stupendous amount of writing most of them produced. As presses struggle to keep the printed book economically viable, the market forces driving twenty‐first‐century initiatives to recover women’s writing seem to depend upon synecdoche. With Harriet Beecher Stowe and Catharine Maria Sedgwick as notable exceptions, a woman writer, no matter how prolific, is today represented by a single book in print. Such a small sample of work overlooks the vibrant multivocality and intertextuality of the print culture within which they published. For example, reading Southworth’s The Hidden Hand as a paperback book designed for classroom use obscures the context in which readers first followed the novel – through 23 weekly issues of Robert Bonner’s New York Ledger. Nor does it, according to Christopher Looby, show how context “conditioned readerly response to Southworth’s ongoing tale,” nor how the author responded to other works in the Ledger as she wrote (2004: 186). As Deborah Gussman (2015) has noted, the limited number of women’s books now available neither shows a given writer “as having produced a body of work” nor “delineate[s] […] the continuities and discontinuities in style, theme, and political and social views” she may have espoused over her lifetime.
To highlight the plethora of women’s writings still awaiting serious study, in this chapter I will focus on the cross‐fertilization of the bound book with the periodical press in the mid‐nineteenth century and the relation of both to other cultural forms. The works I discuss here are currently in print as trade paperback books. Yet, as I will emphasize, at least half of them were first published in newspapers, magazines, literary monthlies or quarterlies, story papers, or other ephemeral forms. As Kelley established, most successful women novelists in the antebellum period first sold their writing to newspapers (1984: 19).
The pervasive influence of serial publication is evident in the plots, characters, settings, and themes of mid‐nineteenth‐century women’s novels. Serial fictions usually consisted of short installments of two or three chapters culminating in an unresolved crisis to retain readers’ attention over weeks or months. Maria Susanna Cummins’s The Lamplighter (1854) “was [initially] composed to entertain Miss Cummins’s nieces, and was read to them in installments” (Williams 2006: 72). Like Susan Warner’s earlier bestseller, The Wide, Wide World (1850), The Lamplighter was not published serially, yet the episodic structure of both surely impelled readers through the approximately 500 pages of each novel. Serial fictions depended on memorable if sometimes exaggerated characters, such as Southworth’s Capitola and Black Donald. Rosabella and Floracita Royal, the protagonists of Lydia Maria Child’s A Romance of the Republic (1867), first published as a book, are similarly vivid. A panoply of stereotypical supporting characters – Pitapat, the black servant in The Hidden Hand; Dinah, the enslaved cook in Uncle Tom’s Cabin; and Biddy and Pat, the Irish servants in Fern’s Ruth Hall – lend coherence to serial fictions as well as to novels, short stories, newspaper sketches, and stage melodramas.
Serial novels mirrored in small the passage of time within the lives of their readers, and their temporal dimensions echo a more general cultural awareness of structured time, reinforced by the discipline of factory shifts and school bells. According to Henkin, “The cheap urban daily” newspaper “institutionalized the day as a significant unit of news” (2007: 334). Print publication generally responded to new temporal structures. Books were released at times of maximum importance: The Wide, Wide World, for example, was published in time for the 1850 Christmas season (Baym 1993: 140). In 1849 George P. Putnam reissued Sedgwick’s Clarence; or, A Tale of Our Own Times, first published in 1830, as part of a comprehensive edition of the author’s works, for over the intervening decades she had become a proven commodity. Putnam’s elegantly bound uniform editions attempted to arrest time by including Sedgwick and her oeuvre within the company of other recognized authors such as James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving, whose work Putnam had also collected. For her part, Sedgwick made Clarence new again by changing its subtitle to or, Twenty Years Since, adding a brief author’s preface, and commenting in footnotes about changes in New York City since 1830.
Even when it focused on the past, the work of nineteenth‐century women writers addressed present‐day issues, manifesting what Melissa Gniadek has called “multiple temporalities” (2014: 34). Their writing engages with topics of concern to journalist and novelist alike: settler colonial expansion, war, abolition and slavery, women’s rights, and urban violence. Timely in their focus, and as commodities that ensured the continuing success of their publishers, these texts were part of an extensive cultural conversation in print that included women and men alike as interlocutors.
The Past in the Present: Novels, Nostalgia, and Nationalism
Women writers of the period contributed to a larger literary effort to produce distinctively American works. Often they wrote of past events related to the nation’s birth. Child’s The First Settlers of New‐England (1829) and Elizabeth Ellet’s three‐volume history, The Women of the American Revolution (1848–1850), focused on women as patriots and mothers of birthright citizens. Other writers compiled biographical encyclopedias like Hale’s Woman’s Record; or Sketches of All Distinguished Women from the Creation to A. D. 1850 (1853) and Child’s The History of the Condition of Women, in Various Ages and Nations (1835). Women who wrote historical fictions delineated realistic settings, carefully transcribed dialect, and mixed historically real and fictional characters, techniques that anticipate late nineteenth‐century local color literature. Yet historical fictions that focus on the domestic can also expose settler colonial incursions. For example, Elizabeth Oakes Smith’s The Western Captive; or, the Times of Tecumseh, published in 1842 as a two‐part series in The New World, a weekly New York newspaper, invoked the Native–white conflict that culminated in the Battle of Tippecanoe three decades earlier. The novel’s protagonist, the fictional Margaret Durand, is a white captive who willingly remains with Tecumseh and his people. A romance that imagines an alternative to violent settler–Native relations, the book is also a nostalgic “[narrative] of belonging in spaces that others already call home.” Thus, although a history, The Western Captive invokes “contemporary moments of violence […] copresent with past moments” (Gniadek 2014: 35).
Ann Sophia Stephens’s Malaeska manifests multiple temporalities both in the details of its publication and in its content. The tale was first published in 1836 as “The Jockey Cap” in the Portland Magazine, which Stephens edited (Stephens 2008: 101). Set locally in 1725, the story features a skirmish between white settlers and Abenakis, an interracial romance, and a biracial child. Three years later Stephens expanded the tale, now titled Malaeska, into a three‐part serial for the Ladies Companion, which she also edited. The plot remained the same, but because the Stephenses had removed to New York, the author changed the story’s setting to the Catskills, the site of inspiration for the authors and landscape painters engaged in celebrating the American sublime. Two decades later, Stephens once again revised and expanded Malaeska, adding the subtitle The Indian Wife of the White Hunter (1860). It launched a series of Beadle’s dime novels.
Introducing Malaeska in his anthology of dime‐novel westerns, Bill Brown declares, “not just the passing of the frontier but also the passing of Old Manhattan […] is the subject of Mrs. Stephens’s nostalgia” (1997: 54). Within the novel multiple pasts remain persistently present. The dates of the novel’s publication mark crisis points in the relations between the United States and various Indian nations. Three years before “The Jockey Cap” was published, Mary Jemison, a well‐known survivor of the Seneca Indian wars and mother of several mixed‐race children, had died. The Supreme Court debated Indian removal in the 1830s; the consequent displacements of Cherokee and other Native peoples followed in 1838 and 1839. The conflicts collectively known as the Seminole Wars raged in the Southeast from 1835 until 1842. John Augustus Stone’s immensely popular melodrama Metamora; or, the Last of the Wampanoags (1829), which nostalgically celebrated the so‐called vanishing Indian, played annually in New York during the 1830s and 1840s; and Pequot orator William Apess delivered impassioned pleas for Mashpee sovereignty and eulogized King Philip in 1836. As a dime novel published in 1860, Malaeska invoked still other instances of settler colonial violence that had sparked the ongoing Plains Indian wars.
Other women’s fictions, less apparently historical, likewise demonstrate multiple temporalities, especially to show how the violence of war affected women’s lives, whether the conflicts be ongoing Native–white skirmishes, the US–Mexico War, the filibusters’ involvement in Cuba, or the Civil War. The war with Mexico, for example, occurs in the novelistic present of The Hidden Hand, although the serial was first published in 1859, 11 years after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Southworth addresses the chronological gap, which widened with each of the novel’s three successive reprintings, with these words: “we might […] accompany our troops to Mexico and relate the feats of arms there performed. […] [but] We prefer to look after our little domestic heroine, our brave little Cap, who, when women have their rights, shall be a lieutenant‐colonel herself” (2007: 348). Earlier unnamed colonial aggressions (likely the Seminole wars, given the novel’s southern setting) manifest themselves in Major Ira Warfield’s and Colonel Gabriel Le Noir’s names and military titles. The domestic plot concerning Marah Rocke’s putative betrayal of Warfield begins near a battlefield. Traces of other violence remain buried at Hurricane Hall. Set into the floor of Capitola’s room is a trapdoor concealing a dark cellar designed as a “trap for Indians.” The house, according to Mrs. Condiment the housekeeper, had been “built as far back as the old French and Indian war; but [Cap’s] room belonged to the part that dates back to the first settlement of the country” (Southworth 2007: 73). The US–Mexico War (1846–1848) also figures in María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s Who Would Have Thought It? (1872), showing how early colonial incursions into the Mexican Southwest led to the war and then financed the Civil War, ongoing in the novel’s present. Its plot links the captivity of Doña Theresa Medina by “rascally Indians,” a million dollars in precious gems and gold she has bequeathed to her daughter Lola, and the rampant corruption associated with the North’s economic conquest of the postbellum South (1995: 34).
Lesser‐known works not currently in print illustrate the political valences of women’s domestic nationalism. Elizabeth Oakes Smith published many other works about Natives in eminent journals of her day and as dime novels, linking that history to women’s agitation for equal rights. Stephens wrote at least six other novels that reprised Malaeska’s themes of history, war, captivity, violent removal, interracial love, and ostensibly compassionate adoption. Cummins’s bestselling The Lamplighter, her only novel currently in print, is an urban melodrama set on the mean streets of 1854 Boston. Her novel Haunted Hearts, however, is a nostalgic historical fiction that exposes New England’s economic links to colonization in the West Indies. Emphasizing the circularity of history – the past in the present – the 1864 novel begins at Stein’s Tavern in rural New Jersey more than a half‐century earlier. George Rawle, the husband‐to‐be of protagonist Angie Cousin, is unjustly accused of murder and flees on a sea voyage. He is kidnapped by pirates, then becomes a privateer based in Surinam. He is acquitted in a court proceeding loosely based on several piracy trials that were current news as Cummins published the novel. The plot resolves as he returns home to purchase the tavern, renaming it Rawle’s Tavern.1
“Domestic Tale[s] of the Present Time”
In “The Women of 1867” Fern found the ubiquity of written text to be newsworthy. Her work, as that of other women writers of the era, attributes an immense importance to tangible manuscript artifacts. In her novel Ruth Hall (1855), a man who withholds letters from his wife commits a grave matrimonial infraction (1996: 200). Many chapters of the novel consist of letters received by “Floy” (Ruth’s nom de plume). These letters, which their authors did not intend to be published, are nonetheless shared publicly with the book’s readers. In other novels, letters lost, misdirected, or hoarded arrest the forward motion of a plot, such as those Aunt Fortune withholds from Ellen Montgomery in The Wide, Wide World. Letters arrive fortuitously to resolve tangled plotlines and reunite fragmented families. In Julia C. Collins’s The Curse of Caste; or, The Slave Bride (1865/2006), correspondence among family members and friends allows Richard Tracy, long presumed dead, to reclaim his daughter Claire. In Sedgwick’s Clarence and in Ruiz de Burton’s Who Would Have Thought It? letters secure family fortunes while personal memoirs revivify voices from the past. Nor should letters be understood to be a purely private genre, for in the era public letters published in newspapers kept readers apprised of the world’s news. Many newspaper correspondents were women. Margaret Fuller sent dispatches from Italy to Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, and Jane McManus Storm(s) Cazneau, using the pseudonym Montgomery, wrote from Vera Cruz to the New York Sun. In the mid‐1860s, Elizabeth Stoddard’s columns in the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin demonstrated that a woman could hold well‐informed opinions on war, slavery, and abolition.
As Fern emphasized, the ability to write was not exclusive to young educated (and, she might have added, white New England) women. Communities of immigrants, exiles, and colonized subjects maintained cultural ties within the pages of publications such as La Verdad, a bilingual newspaper read by Cuban exiles in New York. Other papers in French and Spanish published in Philadelphia and New Orleans apprised Caribbean refugees of ongoing revolutionary activities. Several Chinese‐language papers were published on both coasts. The black periodical press flourished in unexpected places such as the Midwest and West, as the title of Eric Gardner’s recent book suggests. In Black Print Unbound, Gardner focuses on the Christian Recorder, a paper that published the work of “Black men and women […] who worked busily to create communities, build coalitions, and strive for social and political change,” their ideas equally important as those of heroes of emancipation such as Lincoln. Collins, for example, had published at least six essays in the Recorder before 1865, when that paper began to serialize The Curse of Caste, a novel “in deep dialogue with the [paper’s] stories about the ‘great field’ opening to Black women that appeared in almost every issue of the Recorder in the mid‐1860s” (Gardner 2015: 9, 236).
Abolitionist writings, which appeared in multiple print genres, share the qualities of serial domestic fiction. Lydia Maria Child, who edited the National Anti‐Slavery Standard, published “The Quadroons” and “Slavery’s Pleasant Homes” in gift books in the early 1840s. These short fictional pieces anticipated A Romance of the Republic, published in 1867. This richly textured novel forcefully demonstrated that although the war was over and emancipation accomplished, enslavement still touched Black lives. All of Child’s work, and that of Stowe, Collins, and others, engages with other unbound forms of public print, including antebellum newspaper ads, placards, and handbills seeking the return of human property, and postbellum ads, handbills, pageants, and stage melodramas that document attempts by widely scattered individuals to (re)assemble families riven by slavery.
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin best exemplifies the mutual engagement of the periodical press and fiction. Often read as a novel of sentiment, the book’s serial context emphasizes its political urgency. It was first published in 41 installments in the National Era in 1851 and 1852, shortly after the Fugitive Slave Law was passed. The novel’s women who disobey that law demonstrate its horrific effects on homes and families. Eliza’s flight from a comfortable but dangerous prison/home inevitably elicits sentimental responses. Mrs. Bird’s challenge to her Senator husband, who supports the law until he sees its effects on the fugitive mother and her son, also proceeds from sentiment, as she shares with Eliza the clothes worn by her own dead baby. Both women are subject to the law, which constrained their rights and actions. They are, however, also subjects capable of action outside the law. And because their resistance occurs in the immediate present, when women were complicit in enforcing the law’s provisions, their decisions exemplify behaviors for readers to emulate.
Stowe was only one of many women who investigated the complexities of race, slavery, and abolition in her day. Ruiz de Burton’s Mrs. Norval, a self‐proclaimed abolitionist, is so repulsed by the darkened skin of her ward Lola Medina that she sends her to sleep with the Irish servants (that is, until Lola’s stained skin whitens and the extent of her fortune becomes apparent). Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859) offers an important antidote to Uncle Tom’s Cabin in its setting, “a two‐story white house, North” (emphases mine), and in its promise to “[show] that Slavery’s shadows fall even there.” Although Our Nig was not published as a serial, Wilson added gravitas to the journalistic character sketch. She limned the model slaveholders Mrs. Bellmont and her daughter Mary much as Fanny Fern sketched “model husbands” and “model wives.” Notably, the Bellmont “she‐Devils” are, like Simon Legree, northerners (Wilson 2009: 14). As well, the brief and loosely related sketches that comprise the book’s plot more aptly captured the discontinuities of the life of an enslaved woman than did a bildungsroman like The Wide, Wide World.2
Women’s fiction set in the present time frequently confronts the perils and opportunities of promiscuous urban life. Clarence (1830), subtitled A Tale of Our Times, opens with a detailed sketch of Broadway, “a scene as bustling, as varied, and as brilliant, as an oriental fair.” Sedgwick enumerates a “multifarious multitude” of
graceful belles […] accurately appareled Quakers […] dandies […] matrons […] blanketed Indian chiefs […] a bare headed Greek boy […] a party of jocund sailors from the “farthest Ind” – a family groupe of Alsace peasants – and […] the company of Irish orangemen stationed before St. Paul’s. (2012: 52)
As the Clarence family’s fortunes rise and fall with various economic crises, the physical setting of the city alters sympathetically – old buildings are torn down, elaborate suburban dwellings take their place and are then are sold at auction to satisfy creditors.
The subtitle of Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall: A Domestic Tale of the Present Time (1855), echoes Sedgwick’s, as does its setting on city streets with their dangers and opportunities. The widowed Ruth, forced to work for a living, must leave her suburban cottage for a boarding house situated “at one block’s remove” from a bordello. Too ill to venture forth, she sends her young daughter Katy to fetch rent money from her grudging and miserly father‐in‐law. The stern old gentleman admonishes the child to “grow up quick, and earn something” (1996: 90, 87–88). Walking home, alone and weeping, Katy is stopped by a stranger who “lift[s] a handful of [her] shining curls from her face,” asks why she is crying, learns her name, gives her money, and then requests “a good‐bye kiss.” Although he proves to be a debtor to the deceased Harry Hall, Ruth’s shocked response, “How came you to take money from a gentleman?” suggests other, less savory prospects encoded in the encounter (1996: 88, 89, 91).
Yet the city is the incubator of print literacy. If its streets are dangerous to innocent children and women, they are the path to economic independence for well‐educated and literate Ruth, who confronts the “business streets, looking into office‐entries, reading signs, and trying to gather from their ‘know‐nothing’ hieroglyphics, some light to illumine her darkened pathway” (1996: 122). A perspicacious reader of signs and of people, Ruth personally presents her writing to gruff publishers and bargains for its publication. Reading these two episodes together suggests a homology between selling sex and selling writing on the streets, a pairing I will discuss in more detail below.
Because nineteenth‐century women’s novels have so frequently been classified as domestic literature, their visceral portrayals of urban violence have often been subsumed to a critical debate about the efficacy of the sympathetic responses they supposedly elicit. Tracing the contours of this discussion, Cindy Weinstein notes, “Critics have had much more to say about the tears than [about women’s] decision making” in these novels (2009: 303). Similarly, critics have had much more to say about sentimental affect than about these novels’ realistic portrayal of gritty urban conditions. Attending to those details can emphasize the immediate corrective actions (not tearful identification) these writers surely hoped to elicit. Many novels of this period feature encounters between prepubescent girls and grown men, strangers who fortuitously prove to be kindly. In the opening chapters of The Lamplighter, eight‐year‐old Gerty meets Trueman Flint, a lamplighter, at dusk on the streets. When her wicked guardian Nan Grant tires of Gerty’s spunky disobedience and thrusts the barefoot child into the cold November night, Flint plucks her off the street and takes her home to live with him.
The plot of The Hidden Hand (1859) was inspired by Southworth’s reading a newspaper account of a cross‐dressed newsboy. Thirteen‐year‐old Capitola, who works the streets as a newsboy and porter “at your’s and everybody’s service,” is apprehended for cross‐dressing. In the court session held to determine her fate, she is saved by Ira Warfield from being sent to “a Refuge for destitute children.” Although Warfield is a stranger to the court, he is promptly made her “proper legal guardian.” The “ill‐suppressed jibes of the crowd” in the courtroom suggest that this is a usual procedure: “‘There’s a hoary‐headed old sinner!’ said one. ‘She’s as like him as two peas,’ quoth another. ‘Wonder if there’s any more belonging to him of the same sort,’ inquired a third.” Should the reader not respond to those clues, the “[h]alf suspicious and half scandalized” reaction of the “elderly, kind‐looking” shopkeeper Warfield hires to dress Cap suggests he might have unsavory plans (Southworth 2007: 33, 48, 49, 50).
In the early pages of The Wide, Wide World (1850) Ellen encounters three men who could well be predators. The “old gentleman” who helps the unaccompanied girl purchase cloth warns her mother, “There are all sorts of people in this world, and a little one alone in a crowd is in danger of being trampled upon.” Aboard a boat en route to her Aunt Fortune, the distraught Ellen falls in with a strange man who comforts her and engages her in an extended conversation during which she sits on his knee; he then “gently put his arm round her and drew her head to a better resting place than it had chosen.” (The kindly man reenters the novel as the munificent George Marshman.) Left to fend for herself “at the door of the principal inn of the town,” Ellen accepts a ride to her aunt’s home from a Mr. Van Brunt who happens to be in town. He, too, proves to be a kindly mentor, despite his later propensity to beg kisses from Ellen (Warner 1987: 50, 51, 77, 88).
The perils of white girls rescued from the streets only partially represent how women’s novels emphasize urban danger. Sentimental abolitionist works such as The Curse of Caste and The Romance of the Republic emphasize the centrally important factor of race. On city streets or elsewhere, women fleeing enslavement often lacked the protection of a male companion and faced continual fear of exposure and abduction. Within homes but lacking domestic privilege, they, like Gerty, are subjected to threats, strikings, scaldings, skinnings, whippings, kickings, mutings, and torture, as the experiences of Frado make clear in Our Nig. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 subjected all free persons of color to forcible apprehension on the street by self‐proclaimed bounty hunters, sent them before courts in which they were not allowed to represent themselves, and condemned them almost surely to (re)enslavement.
The violence in women’s novels’ encounters links sentimental novels and abolitionist stories to tales of urban sensation. Southworth, for example, was warned by publisher Henry Peterson to avoid the sensationalism that would link her work to George Lippard’s bestselling salacious fictions (Gniadek 2014: 57n13). Published as newspaper serials, all three modes were topical and ephemeral. Their episodic plots emphasize conflict and adventure, and their characters are motivated by strong feelings, whether of love, abjection, jealousy, a desire to be free, or vengeance. Violence permeates them all. Nan Grant drowns Gerty’s kitten, John Humphreys excels at beating horses into submission in The Wide, Wide World, and Simon Legree sadistically rapes, tortures, and personally flays his slaves in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Ellen Montgomery’s father takes her mother to Europe but leaves his daughter behind; Gerty and Capitola, both (apparently) orphans, grow up on the streets; Edmund Clarence abandons his Creole son Marcelline; Malaeska’s son is taken from her by his white grandparents who then retain her in their home as an “abject” “menial, and on condition that all natural affection lay crushed within her” (Stephens 1997: 95). Revenge is dished out not in duels with sword and pistol, but by means of journalistic exposé. Our Nig dispassionately narrates the cruelty and hypocrisy of named northern white abolitionists; Sarah Parton/Fanny Fern makes her family’s refusal to help her support her children the central issue in Ruth Hall.
Moments of vengeance are, however, comparatively rare in women’s novels. Although outspoken in naming the dangers that confront unprotected women and children, these fictions offer socially and economically conservative resolutions, especially when compared with sensational journalism. For example, multiple supposedly factual newspaper articles in the 1830s and 1840s gleefully reported the brutal murders of 23‐year‐old Helen Jewett, “a girl of the town,” and of Marie Rogers, “the beautiful cigar girl.”3 The story of Jewett, who was stabbed and incinerated by a client, is surely more sensational than Ruth Hall’s. Read together, the texts emphasize real urban dangers, yet their differential resolutions depend on social class. Whereas the women who populate sensation fictions often meet grisly ends, the feminine protagonists of sentimental fictions are rewarded – restored as rightful heirs to their once‐absent fathers, as in The Lamplighter (and possibly in The Curse of Caste, had Collins published its conclusion), or married to a wealthy older man, as in The Wide, Wide World. Ruth Hall does not remarry, but through her popular writings she becomes an independently wealthy stockholder. Such endings mark the alignment of women’s fictions with a conservative social probity that is deeply related to the economies of the mid‐nineteenth century.
Time Future: Print Culture and Commodity Speculation
Newspapers originally filled a mercantile role. For example, the New York Ledger, which by the mid‐nineteenth century had begun to resemble a magazine in its content, had “evolved” from the Merchant Ledger and Statistical Record. As Claire C. Pettengill has noted, Bonner nevertheless retained the newspaper format. The strategy linked the Ledger to “a range of progressive ideologies – it [became] a concrete link between economic […] progress and liberal social reform” by “fostering […] literacy,” disseminating useful information, and promoting “women’s interests” (1996: 75, 77).
The serial fictions that filled the pages of the Ledger and other story papers were de facto profit‐oriented and forward‐looking. Buoyed by trademark names such as E.D.E.N. Southworth and Fanny Fern, the New York Ledger flourished. Success bred success, as the works of well‐known writers subsidized publishers’ speculation on the work of less well‐known writers. In turn, authors could tailor their work to the paper’s audience and gain wide circulation for their other writings, sure of their editor’s implicit – and sometimes explicit – endorsement. Bonner boasted publicly about how well he paid his contributors and promoted their forthcoming work within his pages and in others’ papers. Two chapters of The Hidden Hand were printed in the National Era; readers who wanted to finish the story were directed to purchase the Ledger. Excerpts from the novel also appeared in papers in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Wisconsin (Gniadek 2014: 41).
Readers thus became involved in the economies of publication. Their speculation about the identities of pseudonymous or anonymous authors such as Susan Warner and Fanny Fern spurred sales of current and future books. While all fiction invites readers to speculate on plot outcomes, serial publication put fiction into even closer relations of exchange with readers who, because they invested time and money to follow a tale through months of its unfolding, felt entitled to exchange letters with the author, offer advice, evaluate her work, and demand particular outcomes. As Susan S. Williams has written of Susan and Anna Warner, “Their readers influenced the terms of their writing” (1990: 575). According to Susan Belasco Smith, Gamaliel Bailey, publisher of the National Era when Uncle Tom’s Cabin was serialized, “occasionally published letters from readers who were enthusiastic in their praise of the story. […] [One] subscriber wrote […] ‘we hope she will not be in a hurry to finish it,’ while another prayed ‘that she may keep it going all the winter’” (1995: 71). End it must, but a satisfactorily concluded fiction can also feed a demand for more of the same.
Both bound books and periodical publications existed within a context of commodity‐based literacy. As newspaper serials, The Hidden Hand and Uncle Tom’s Cabin became proven, if ephemeral, literary properties. Stabilized as books, they proclaimed the success of their authors and publishers and signified the literary taste of their owners. Because Uncle Tom’s Cabin engaged a matter of current controversy, it elicited other books – a revised version of Sarah Josepha Hale’s Northwood, or Life North and South (1827, 1852); anti‐Tom plantation novels such as Caroline Lee Hentz’s The Planter’s Northern Bride (1854) and Charles Jacobs Peterson’s The Cabin and Parlor; or, Slaves and Master (1852); and Martin R. Delany’s Blake; or the Huts of America (first serialized in the Anglo‐African Magazine, then in the Weekly Anglo‐African in 1859–1862), to name a few. Women’s fiction both incorporated and bred other forms of cultural literacy, as well: A Romance of the Republic features an opera‐singer protagonist and ends with an elaborate tableau vivant. The Lamplighter and The Hidden Hand, with their vividly drawn characters, were easily adapted to the stage. Devoted readers could dress in Capitola hats, sing and play sheet music from melodramatic stage adaptations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or ride in a railroad car named the “Fanny Fern.”
Economies of publication determined not only a novel’s outcome, but also the length at which it could be developed, whether published in calf‐bound volumes or subsidized at a given rate per word or per installment. Long fictions allowed authors to produce highly realistic scenes in which consumer commodities play an important part, as Lori Merish’s Sentimental Materialism (2000) establishes. A novel‐length narrative may linger over the accouterments of a tea table or the homely comforts of a Quaker kitchen. Ellen Montgomery’s white stockings and bonnet, her “neat little japanned dressing‐box,” and her mahogany writing desk with its pens, quills, paper and pencils, India rubber, sealing‐wax, and ivory leaf‐cutter signify her refinement. While such details surely elicit consumer desire in upwardly mobile readers, they also gesture toward larger economic speculations in wood, rubber, and ivory, in sugar, textiles, and human labor (Warner 1987: 32, 35–36).
Among the “women’s interests” engaged by progressive periodicals was the vulnerable financial and legal status of women. Their fictions often trace the acquisition, loss, and restitution of family fortunes. Gertrude Clarence’s inheritance is the result of her grandfather’s West Indies speculation. The Lamplighter’s Willie Sutton prospers in the India trade; Gerty’s estranged father has mysterious South American mercantile connections; George Rawle acquires his fortune in Surinam, a center of the early nineteenth‐century slave trade. Fathers and husbands, whose political privilege and access to economic opportunity should guarantee the security of their wives, children, servants, and enslaved dependents, often fall prey to disaster in the form of financial panics, unwise speculation, or gambling. They withhold the information from their families, then disappear, leaving behind their financial and moral bankruptcies for others to deal with. Harry Hall dies; his wife must pay his debts and raise their children. Edmund Clarence, bound for the West Indies to make his fortune, leaves his wife and son in England because they “could not be exposed to a tropical climate.” He then “form[s] one of those liaisons common in those islands,” eventually abandoning Eli, his creole mistress, and Marcelline, their biracial son (Sedgwick 2012: 83, 85).
Within these fictions women circulate as commodities, whether redeemed captives, household or field labor, or mistresses, daughters, and mothers whose bodies display their male relatives’ wealth. As Eve Sedgwick has established in Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985), women are objects of exchange facilitating homosocial bonds between father and husband, debtor and creditor. In A Romance of the Republic (1867), Señor Gonsalez, the grandfather of Rosa and Flora, “formed an alliance with a beautiful slave, whom he had bought in the French West Indies.” He then sells their “half French, half Spanish” daughter Eulalia to Alfred Royal to pay a debt. Royal, like the other men in this novel, defaults on his public and private obligations. “[B]eing immersed in business […] [he] never seemed to find the time” to manumit Eulalia (Child 1997: 19, 13, 21). His home is a thinly disguised bordello, wherein Rosa and Flora are offered to young men of fortune as down payments on his debts. Their beautiful clothing and their elaborate domestic surroundings only enhance their exchange value. Royal dies bankrupt, leaving his biracial daughters ignorant of their legal status and in danger of being sold to meet his obligations.
When failed commodity speculation by fathers or husbands deprives women of their status as consumers and vehicles of display, the disturbance must be redressed, often through marriage. The irony of this solution is not lost on Cindy Weinstein, who asks why “sentimentalism demands that its novels conclude in marriage” (2011: 212). A partial answer is that, within fictions (which themselves are commodities subject to market forces), marriage is the best (although surely not infallible) way to ensure a happy ending. Marriage restores financial well‐being, rewards middle‐class virtues of patience, perseverance, suffering, and self‐discipline, and, most important, retains fortunes within heteronormative families.
Such a claim might seem to be disproven by the example of Ruth Hall, one of the most radical fictions of this era. Although the novel does not end in marriage, its resolution is nevertheless economic: Ruth is rewarded with her children, a home, and a certificate of bank stock. The novel’s earlier linking of prostitution to other kinds of public women’s labor – notably, Ruth’s selling her writing by walking the streets – highlights exactly how this success is earned. The economic importance of writing, for women, is frequently invoked in their fictions that linger over details of writing implements. Over three and a half pages of The Wide, Wide World, Ellen and her mother obsess over her writing desk. At the end of Our Nig, Frado inventories her “portable inkstand, pens, and paper” among the “memento[s] of affection” given her by friends and mentors (Wilson 2009: 74). These desks and inkwells are both possessions signifying social class and tools by which their owners earn their living.
According to Karen A. Weyler, Ruth Hall presents the economies of publishing as a “utopian fantasy” in which “cordial familial relationships replace the competitive, sexualized tension between women and men, whether prostitutes and johns, or female writers and their editors and publishers” (2005: 99, 100). In “My Old Ink‐Stand and I; Or, The First Article in the New House,” a column Fanny Fern published the year following Ruth Hall, she made clear the costs and benefits of her labor. Her apostrophe to the tools of her trade details the straitened circumstances in which she, as a widow, was denigrated “because my bonnet‐ribbon was undeniably guilty of two distinct washings,” but gloats over the “bran‐new pretty house that you have helped me into” (1996: 278). The connection is clear: if a prostitute sells her body for money, a widow, lacking the economic protection of her husband, sells her writing, the fruits of her intellectual labor. What goes without saying should not, however, be overlooked: her future success or failure is intimately tied to the economic success of the business concern who buys, promotes, and publishes her work.
The Future Is Now
Economies of production and preservation have, until relatively recently, impeded scholarly investigations into the connections of novels, periodicals, and other cultural forms related to print literacy. Reading a large‐format newspaper to establish a full context for a given serial novel, or to locate the works of a given author who may have published pseudonymously or anonymously, was a nearly overwhelming challenge. Relatively few libraries could afford to shelve and preserve collections of this size. Digital recovery, however, has begun to bring the past into the present, making available the infrastructure for deeply contextual investigations of the dimensions of nineteenth‐century women’s writing. In 2015 Eric Gardner and Joycelyn Moody edited a special issue of American Periodicals devoted to black periodical studies. Similar work could be done within the hundreds of other newspapers and magazines published in English or other languages within the United States.
Digital recovery is not merely a matter of making Internet editions into the virtual counterpart of their codex originals. Internet publication can – and should – explore the connections among various print, visual, and performative genres and their related commodities, exposing relations that have until now been invisible to all but the most intrepid researcher. It asks for speculation, as well, for investments of time, painstaking historical research, and permanent digital platforms. But it could effect a long‐due revolution, amplifying or correcting dominant interpretative modes – domesticity, cultural work, sentiment, affect, context, and economy – through which women’s writing has been understood. In a digital future, the present canon of supposedly timeless bound books would not be supplemented with, but replaced by a vibrant, even raucous, multigeneric conversation among a much larger and more diverse group, regardless of social position, age, education – or even of gender – who wrote in the mid‐nineteenth century.
References
Further Reading
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 1 (THE TRANSFORMATION OF LITERARY PRODUCTION, 1820–1865); CHAPTER 11 (EMILY DICKINSON AND THE TRADITION OF WOMEN POETS).
Notes