The Feminization of American Culture

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LIBRAR/ HARIN COUNTY FREE

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How the Victorian aJliaiue Ik the clergy, aiid aJliaiue

gave

and the

wccn woiiu n ajid the popular literature to which that t

birth, fostered a sentimental society

Ix^ginnings of niodern

mass culture^

This

one of those rare

is

startling clarity

the ur

fluence through time of a brilliant

it,

at let

'

young

consumer culture

causes,

;

p:.

ji

,

us see with a fresh and

meaning, and

in-

ind cultural phenomenon. In

scholar traces the roots of our

modern

to the sentimental society of Victorian

America.

With

ico

originahty and sympathetic wit,

plores the alliance, beginning in 1820,

Ann Douglas

ex-

of two disenfranchised

of the middle class and the liberal Protestant clergy, both increasingly relegated to the edges of society (to the parlor, to the Sunday School, to the libraries) by the

groups: the

us the ladies and the ministers cultivat-

Ann Douglas shows

ing a realm of "influence," becoming the cultural custodians, taking control of the schools, preaching a reverence for the

imposed upon them: timidity,

qualities that society

piety, childish naivete, a disdain for the competitive forces in

the larger world. She gives us the missing social history of the Protestant minister in the Northeast, and the subtle decline of

She takes us through the magazines the women and the ministers edited {Ladies' Magazine, Godey's Lady's Book, The Ladies' Repository), through the his inherited theology.

etiquette books, into the saccharine biographies of ministers

and the books about

Woman

them.

women that

Suffrage:

which they tried orate on woman's

(among

the ministers wrote

The Reform Against Nature)

in

to fix the correct "feminine" role or elab-

"beautiful errand."

She gives us the contemporary novels and tracts— lachrynarcissistic, riotously

mose,

wildly popular {The

quirky, forgotten

Empty

Crib, Stepping

now

but then

Heavenward,

as

well as such scandalous books as Harriet Beecher Stowe's

Lady Byron Vindicated).

We see the authors, through their

works, colonizing, even domesticating, heaven (heaven has houses, streets, pianos, food, and clothing), projecting the

dead

as a

ment

kind of consecrated leisure

village,

class in a celestial retire-

conveying the impression that death widened

their appointed sphere: the church, faith, manners, morals.

We see the prayer manuals and the flood of almost necroWe see philiac pamphlets that the Victorians devoured.

.

.

.

.

the

women

ship in the

and the ministers competing for

community

as

.

.

spiritual leader-

they became more and more

self-

immersed.

We moral

see vapidity life

:o lO

women

prevailing entrepreneurial forces.

very

o ;o

masquerading

as a perpetual

progressively

more

anti

idealized not as a doer

I

the pretty objects that

'

'

as a sacred

innocence, the

ihood, the church becoming tual,

the middle-class

woman

lisplay case for the clothes v)uld lay at

her

and

feet, tragically

!C0

»rT '"' \ *

V2l

\Sra

'9^

Douglas, Ann Feminization of American 810.9 DOUGLAS

CENTRAL LIBRARY

DEC 2 7

f'^7

1977

ftN2 5;97B

DATE DUE

PB 2 7 J978

:M€^ "1~3~W4^ *H ^PR

8 1978 ,
ecial

urgency. Not

least

dilemma, was the problem of

and closely connected with

his political

intellectual leadership in his

community. In the period from 1820

his parishioners first

of these, his

to 1875,

found those sources of stimulation and opinion which

provide the average middle-class American today with his or her intellectual sustenance, such as

had

its

own

it is.

Unlike the southern Protestant congregation, which

reasons for skepticism

—

if

not dislike

—toward the fresh think-

ing and speaking brought by the burgeoning press and spreading lecture

system to

its

doors, the northern congregation was, within

open and responsive to Competition with libraries,

in the

intellectual

new forms of

the lyceum lecture

developments

in the

its

terms,

broader culture.

public address and persuasion

series,

own

—the lending

the periodicals, each relatively

unknown

eighteenth century but all-pervasive by the middle of the nineteenth

—complicated and accelerated the process of disestablishment for northern As many of them were well aware, their audiences were both better educated and more difficult to please than those men and women who had gathered twice on Sunday a few generations earlier to get their weekly,

ministers.

and only, contact with

literature, lectures, and, often,

each other.®^

Since the adherent of a revivalistic sect was likely to be and to remain less

educated and

less socially

terpart, his minister did not

prominent than

his non-revival-oriented

coun-

confront the same challenge. Methodism and

Baptism, both intensely evangelical sects, had hardly

made

their

tremendous

by converting Boston's Brahmins. Their success, as I have already suggested, was determined by the non-intellectual methods they evolved to gains

Clerical Disestablishment

meet the needs of lation.

The

decidedly non-intellectual immigrant and frontier popu-

a

violence of the revivals for which they were famous matched

the violence of the

At

37

life

of those

who were

converted under their influence.

mid-century, the Methodists found

least until

little

use for the arduous

training and intellectual achievement the Congregationalists their ministry.®^ Peter Cartwright (1785-1872), popularly

demanded of

known

as "the

Methodist bulldog" and one of the most powerful of the early itinerant Methodist preachers, had nothing but scorn for the complex requirements of the older denominations:

"illiterate

Methodist preachers

the world on

set

he boasted, "while they were lighting their matches!" In his Autobiography, Cartwright tells many anecdotes of ineffectual and efl^eminate eastern fire,"

West with no weapon but overextensive book-learning. One of "these little home-manufactured fellows" was unlucky enough to share a service with Cartwright. The newcomer tried to

ministers sent to evangelize out

read a sermon to the rather tough congregation, but, as Cartwright "the frame building

we were worshipping

blew hard," the candles

in

was not plastered

.

.

.

tells

it,

the wind

and he could barely see the pages before him. Cartwright of course took over and preached a vigorous, searching, and successful sermon without notes. When the "hot house reader" was sent flickered,

into the congregation to exhort the mourners, he did

fear of the violent emotion of an all-out

little better.

His timid

— conversion experience "Be com-

posed; be composed," he kept telling the struggling sinners, while Cart-

wright contramanded him: "pray on brothers; there's no compromise

—

in hell

him swimming feebly against the tide of salvation. Finally the "little preacher" was picked up bodily by a man in the throes of conviction and rushed around the congregation accompanied by deor damnation"

left

lighted hoots and

calls.

Once

released,

he disappeared ignominiously and

forever.^'*

Of

course well-bred non-evangelical easterners, secure on their

own

ground, could be as scornful of rivals as Cartwright was of competitors on his territory; ion,

they lavished uneasy disdain on revivalists who,

confused an insensitive

religious authority. in point.

a

A

moderate

Lyman

tasteless anti-intellectualism

in their opin-

with charismatic

Beecher's experience in Boston provides a case

Yale graduate, Beecher was a far cry from Cartwright; he was

who

disapproved of

many

of the

"New

Measures" introduced

by Charles Grandison Finney. Yet he was unmistakably rural in speech and manner, and frankly vehement in his emotions. Beecher arrived in 1826 in his usual intense and heated state of sincerity, ready to into revivalism

"kindle a

fire in all their [the Unitarians']

hoped that the liberal

churches around Boston."^^

He

own impassioned, electric style of ratiocination would attract intellectuals of the hub-city, men who patronized and dominated his

the select and genteel literary and social clubs

which were Boston's

pride.®®

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

38

Horace Mann, the great Massachusetts educator and cultured,

if

most

a Unitarian of the

reform-minded, variety, had heard Beecher preach

in Litchfield,

Mann could found the older man

Connecticut, in 1822 and had written his impressions to a friend. hardly deny Beecher's fabled eloquence, but he clearly bigoted, provincial, even primitive:

Dr. Beecher

.

.

.

published

dolorous

... a

condition of the people of the U. States

according to him,

sitting in the

had not hopkinsian creed. ...

I

.

.

.

.

.

.

[sic], six

upon

sevenths of

whom were,

shadow of death because

.

.

.

they

ministers to dispense the light of the Calvinist

never heard such a sermon

great an effect

about the heathenish

tale

my

tragedy well performed

feelings as

it

in

my

life. ... It

would have

as

to have heard a great

No more upon my

at a theatre!

produced

belief,

for belief

belongs to the understanding and should not be biased by hopes and fears.^^

Mann was not alone in his response; Boston as

one of them

later confessed

with

a

Unitarians went to hear Beecher,

touch of pride, "on the watch for the

amusing or the ludicrous."^® In 1832 Beecher

Brahmins to work out

their

own

salvation;

left

Boston and

its

"fastidious"

he was off to save the West from

Catholicism.

The

Unitarian or non-evangelical Congregational minister, however,

facing the same audience Beecher confronted in Boston, was not always

more comfortable. Their tastes and predilections were presumably his own, but this did not mean he automatically believed them adequate material for spiritual sustenance.

Both minister and congregation were

likely to

be

refined and highly literate. Cartwright stressed the foolish eastern novice's

over-devotion to the written page; Catharine,

Lyman

Beecher's daughter, in

made Boston's Unitarians so impervious to Beedescribed them as "literary" :^^ they oriented themselves

explaining to Finney what cher's brilliance,

through reading, through study, through conversation. Catharine Maria

Sedgwick (1789-1867), day, spent

a

popular and fervently Unitarian authoress of the

much time in Boston

communal

in the 1820s;

her diaries reveal an earnestness

makes the Unitarian circle of Boston intelligentsia the Channings, the Peabodys, and the Pollens, to name Miss Sedgwick's special friends sound like an extension of a Harvard of

talk

and

intellectual pursuit that

—

—

Divinity School seminar.^® Channing's parishioners, like Bushnell's in Hartford,^ ^

were people who expected

into religious awareness

—by

instances

susceptibilities

Even

from them

a

in

many

their self-consciously limited emotional

a literary dimension: they did not expect or

their pastor to elicit create.

be converted than to be socialized

—no matter how superficially or crudely

polite literature.

had

less to

perhaps want

response more vehement than a book could

— Clerical Disestablishment

39

Living as he did in a country whose whole history was, as one foreign visitor noted, "the history of revivals,"^^ the Hberal minister occasionally

had

trouble convincing himself that the relatively subdued interaction between himself and his congregation constituted genuine religious instruction; the

techniques of Cartwright or Beecher could be ridiculed, but they nonetherepresented the only religious experience which an overwhelming ma-

less

of Protestant Americans accepted as authentic. Non-evangelical

jority

Congregationalists like Bushnell frequently expressed an intense desire to witness

more

passion in their hearers.

divine of any prominence in the

There was hardly

a single Unitarian

half of the nineteenth century

first

not privately or publicly express the fear that the Unitarian

laity

who did were, as

opponents often claimed, "cold," over-intellectualized, bookish, lack-

their

ing in religious fervor.

Nor

did the liberal minister escape a similar charge.

William Ellery Channing was troubled by the problem of "languor and

were troubled by the The acknowledged leader of

insensibility" in his denomination;^^ other observers

coldness they perceived in Channing himself.

American Unitarianism, despite

his

immense and apparently

effortless pulpit

eloquence, was capable of taking notes during an informal conversation

on

his

own

words.^"*

Henry Ware, Jr. (1794-1843), bom of a Unitarian family and later to become a professor at Harvard's liberal Divinity School, as a young man found Channing more than sufficiently persuasive, but he worried about the attitude of his fellow Harvard candidates for the ministry. "Our Cambridge students 1812.

.

.

They

much

study religion too

.

"regard

to forget that

as a subject to

it

something to be

it is

he wrote his father

as a science,"

be reasoned upon felt."

.

.

.

in

and appear almost

Even while Ware found

revivals

of the Finneyite variety "outrageous and vulgar fanaticism," incredible displays of "indecorum,

.

.

profanity and blasphemy,"^^ he was troubled by

.

the fact that he as a Unitarian minister inevitably played on a smaller

emotional keyboard than the one on which a revivalist operated. achieve infinitely certain large

more

subtle variations, but he

and powerful

parishioners' "hopes

and

efl^ects.

He

might

was undeniably forgoing

In disavowing violent manipulation of his

he renounced the use of terror and the

fears,"

longing for grandiosity, profoundly rich religious resources.

Using trauma

as a basis for religious conviction

can produce every kind

of polarization.^^ Yet no one can dispute the efficacy of the nineteenth-

century revivalist preachers

catching the ear and opening the purse of

in

middle-class Protestant America. anxieties

and energies

is

a

way

To

say they were tapping non-religious

of saying that they were aggressively but

And whatever the case with their motives, Here is Lyman Beecher describing the start of his

surely in touch with their times. their first

energy was genuine. revival at East

Hampton, Long

Island, in 1807:

.

.

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

40

For some time there was no effect to anything I could do. I could not write any sermons that would take hold. Finally I resolved that I would preach the doctrine of Election. I knew what that doctrine was and what it would do. My object was to preach cut and thrust, hip and thigh, and not to ease off. I had been working a good part of a year with .

my

.

.

heart burning, and they feeling nothing.

mittens.

.

I

took hold without

.

[He preached last I

Now

his

sermon on Election on December

14, 1807.]

had found something that took hold. There was not an eye

At in

the whole church but what glistened like cold stars of a summer's night.

.

.

went home expecting; and word was sent up from the Springs that the Lord had come down the previous Sunday and that a meeting was appointed for Tuesday evening, and that I must not disappoint them. I went and preached. I saw one young man with his head down. I wanted to know if it was an arrow of the Almighty. I came along after sermon, and laid my hand upon his head. He lifted up his face, his eyes all full of tears; I saw it was God. Then I went to the Northwest and the Lord was there; then to Ammigansett, and the Lord was there; and the flood was rolling all around. Oh what a time that was!^^ I

Even

the non-evangelical clergyman was right in rejecting this kind

if

of energy as a perversion of genuine intellectual concern, the crucial question remained here as in the political sphere:

what did he have

to put in

its

by the new sophistication of his audience and the rapid development of highly specialized fields of knowledge, he was forced to abandon the claim to terrain which his predecessors had been wont to regard place?^® Driven

as their

backyard. His ministerial ancestors had seen themselves as

tual experts:

forebears

he had become the gifted amateur.

would have neglected or banned

sensitive brother, if

wrote

historical novels

conscientiously, tending his

New

his

when he was not somewhat

York City

flock,

men were

and Orville

ineptly,

Dewey

essentially outsiders

of art as Jonathan Edwards was decidedly not in the world of

secular philosophy. tellectually,

might enter areas

— William Ware, Henry Ware's

patronized painting and sculpture; but both in the field

He

intellec-

The

nineteenth-century liberal clergyman, checked

was simultaneously accepting, even courting,

on the emotional expenditure permissible

The equally

in his fiock

and

a

in-

kind of freeze

in himself.

non-evangelical Episcopalian rector, addressing an equally

educated, affluent, and reserved congregation, seemed to face a similar situation,

and face

it

with success.

It is

no accident

that the

first

church Unitari-

ans captured in Boston was the Episcopalian King's Chapel; the

two groups

kept up a complex process of rivalry and imitation throughout the nine-

41

Clerical Disestablishment

was

teenth century. ^^ But the rector's position

that of his Unitarian or Congregational peer. filled a special, discrete,

and separate

in

key respects different from

The EpiscopaHans had always

Their authoritarian

role.

ecclesiastical

structure and ritualized worship might be construed as a threat to the

American Way, but the denomination

to

which they adhered had not

origi-

nated historically in this country as a protest-sect.®® In contrast, the beliefs

which the

to

developed

By

in

liberal Congregationalist

or Unitarian minister subscribed had

the course of opposing and redefining the

had fewer traditions of their

definition, the Unitarian clergy

back on. Unitarianism was criticized by that

it

was primarily negative

for the creed

it

New England Creed.

in its

its

own

to

fall

enemies precisely on the grounds

animus, that

it

had nothing to substitute

defied except a half-hearted, literary piety and a

weak

imitation of Episcopalian ceremony.

The Personal

The

''Sphere''

dilemma of the non-evangelical clergymen was that of increasingly limited resources. The introduction of the voluntary system had compelled the ministers of the Protestant groups most aflPected to disavow in their different fashions any public pretension to tangible "power" in favor central

of the claim of invisible "influence."®^

former authority more

entirely,

None

of them had relinquished their

however, than the non-evangelical clergy-

man. Fearful of openly challenging the economic forces of compelled by unbeatable competition to abandon culture, both scornful

and afraid of the

his

under a sometimes claustrophobic pressure from

ways fervent congregation versatile,

former monopoly on

revivalistic reliance

agitation, attracted but cautious before the lure of

to be better trained,

his society,

Anglican

on fear and

ritual,

his fastidious

more

he was

and not

skillful,

al-

and more

while presenting a smaller number of topics and evoking a slighter

was asked to be more agile in an ever-shrinking space. One Maine clergyman, discussing "the magnitude of the ministerial work" in 1845, found the job's most painful demand to be on the sensibilities: it would be impossible, he wrote, to overestimate the tax exacted on the

intensity of feeling; he

minister's "sympathies." In fact, "his heart

and

falling

a

The

a perfect

barometer rising

according to the state of the atmosphere."®^ This metaphor

suggests an extreme subjectivity

dence.

must be

which

minister described here

fundamentally passive

role;

he

is

is

lacks even the merit of indepen-

doomed

to perpetual activity within

locked into an exhausting process of

no real sources of replenishment. Not surprisingly, it sometimes seemed to interested observers that the non-evangelical clergyman's subject matter was disappearing, thinning out into literary platitudes and trivialized piety. There were innumerable pleas instantaneous responsiveness with

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

42 in the

reviews and magazines of the

variety

from

their ministers.

complained that the

One

tions,

limited.

on

For the

was

monotony seemed

inevitable

when

options

was driven back on his own reactime when, through an obvious vicious circle,

liberal minister

himself, precisely at a

his self-confidence

writer in the Christian Examiner in 1840

weakness of the clergy was the "sameness" and

real

dullness of their sermons.®^ But

were so

and

liberal sects for greater force, vigor,

at

lowest.

its

He was

forced to professionalize

the personal simply because he had lost any solid impersonal basis for his authority.

The

liberal

clergy gave clear signs of the anxiety produced by their

Nervous that their society was deserting them, they noted uneasily the increasing abandonment of their profession by the "best" young men.®* Enrollment in Harvard's increasing sense of self-immersion and cultural isolation.

Unitarian-dominated and once-controversial Divinity School was low,

sometimes shockingly

so,

during the second half of the century; those

did go were often not of the social caste that had graced days.®^

Andover Seminary, once the school

under the innovative

liberal influences

its

who

halls in earlier

for Calvinists, at mid-century

of Austin Phelps (1820-90) and E. A.

Park, did a bit better; but half-jesting stories about a mythological student

dedicated to the ministry by an uncle

and so half-witted that he

listed

who found him

"fit

for nothing else"

Benedict Arnold as one of the great Protes-

Andover had its dunces and its doubts.®^ Suspicion that American society was not consecrating its most talented sons to the ministry was exceeded by a powerful if less rational fear that it was tant reformers revealed that

ignoring, perhaps persecuting, those ministers

mentalized yet clearly

felt

it

already possessed. Senti-

accounts of ministerial destitution abound

One

liberal religious press of the day.

in

the

clerical sob-brother painted a doleful

picture of a small-town pastor, ill-paid, unheeded, eating his soul out in

"agony," driven by necessity to teach school: "at

minded grave generation

in his

own

knows him

last

secluded churchyard, or he

not,

he occupies an unlives until

another

knows nothing of the once glowing preacher

in

the old and jaded schoolmaster."®^

This

is

soap opera, but

of living burial, which has

it

expresses a fear of cultural excision, a terror

its

own

very

real historical significance. It

is

hardly accidental that soap opera, an increasing specialty of nineteenth-

century

liberal Protestantism,

is

a

phenomenon which we

special needs of feminine subculture. line heritage,

was pushed

Who

whether economic,

Cut

political,

associate with the

off at every point

from

his

mascu-

or intellectual, the liberal minister

into a position increasingly resembling the evolving feminine

was barred with him from the larger world of masculine concerns, who else was confined with him to a claustrophobic private world of over- responsive sensibility, who else but the American lady? Foreign one.

else

Clerical Disestablishment

observers in America were quick to

draw

43

the comparison between the

clergymen and those of women. Harriet Martineau reported that the commercial classes treated the clergy disdainfully as pow-

situation

erless,

and

interests of

between men and women."®® Alexis de more optimistic view of the status of women and

ill-informed "people halfway

Tocqueville,

who

ministers in the

took

a

New World, noted

in

both

cases,

however, that they carried

authority only within their largely domestic and personal "spheres"; out of

were careful never to trespass.®^ so many non-evangelical clergymen between 1820 and

these "spheres," de Tocqueville noted, both Little

wonder

that

1875 expressed a terror of being constantly uprooted, then allowed to take

even slighter hold

Dewey's trauma in Washington, D.C., comes into clearer focus. The liberal minister was losing his role among his society's leaders; his place was increasingly in the Sunday School, the parlor, and the library, among women and those who flattered and resembled them.

in

ever-poorer

soil.

Orville

FEMININE DISESTABLISHMENT

Feminine Hopes and Fears

Throughout the ante-bellum and

Civil

War

period, liberal ministers

preoccupied with establishing and fixing the correct feminine important, they defined

it

in

role;

were

equally

terms which strongly suggested clerical aspira-

Horace Bushnell, writing to his young daughter in 1845, summed up the womanly ideal in one short statement: "a woman should be a Christian." A woman is by nature, he continued, amplifying on his theme, one "whose character can be finished only by assimilation to God."^ Another minister, writing on the same subject a decade earlier in a popular Congregationalist magazine, had put the matter even more bluntly to his feminine readers: "religion is far more necessary to you than self-sufficient men. In you it would be not only criminal, but impolitic to neglect it." Your tions

and

anxieties.

importance to society, the writer went on to warn, elevation.^ Like the

realm, the

women

clergymen newly segregated

lies

solely in

your moral

in a strictly ecclesiastical

addressed by Bushnell and his Congregational contempo-

rary are both flattered and threatened: stay within your proper confines, and

be worshiped, their self-appointed mentors assure them; step out-

you

will

side

and you

will cease to exist.

And

to be of a peculiarly unassertive

feminine

faith, like clerical piety,

and retiring kind. Bushnell instructed

his

woman,

she

daughter to have no needs, almost no character of her own: as should be "above

all

was

... unselfish."

"We

a

demand," he explained, with

a

euphemistic flourish, "that she shall seem to have alighted here for the

45

Feminine Disestablishment

world's comfort and blessing

... all

variance with her beautiful errand."^ of

it,

the part he sketches for the

claustrophobically cramped,

if

ways of selfishness are specially at Whether or not Bushnell was aware

the

woman

sacred.

is,

of the liberal clergyman,

like that

She should prompt others rather than

by personal example. The necessary, almost punitive connection between femininity and a certain kind of Christianity, while a favorite theme among liberal ministers, was a commonplace of the day, and one endorsed as heavily by women as by men. Sarah Hale (1788-1879), the editor of Godey's Lady's Book and the

assert herself; she

is

to persuade passively

most important arbiter of feminine opinion of her day, frequently reprinted

women with obvious approval. The willingness of women like Hale and her readers to court such self-evalua-

clerical injunctions to

literary-minded tion

and

identity

self-restriction suggests that

and esteem

as real

they were engaged

and complex

ministry in the same period.

as the

To document

in a struggle for

one which absorbed the

this

feminine

liberal

crisis in self-confi-

dence, one cannot turn to direct or indirect statements of professional anxiety such as abound

comparable

oflicial

spokeswomen

among

clerical writers, for

profession.

for the cautious

were intensely absorbed

in

Yet

many

women

of course had no

of them, the self-designated

among their discontented

middle-class

sisters,

trying to manufacture and defend a kind of

pseudo-profession through the enunciation of a theory of female "influence."

Not

the most admirable

among

the self-aware American

women

of

among the clergy, They were vastly more

the mid-nineteenth century, they, like the liberal ministers are in a real sense the most significant historically.

numerous than their overtly reformist feminine peers; Sarah Hale of Godey V Lady V Book always commanded more adherents than Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the suflFrage leader.

Moreover, the arguments Hale and others formu-

lated,

most notably the theory of "influence," were adopted not only by

those

who

avowed ries

thought

feminists."*

like

them, but, eventually, by the

sufl^ragists

and other

Theirs was to be a winning strategy, although

were hollow. This

is

I

victo-

not to suggest that Hale and her followers did not

advocate important reforms; they did, particularly

women's education.

its

am

in the critical area

of

admittedly downplaying such reform activities

here and elsewhere because they were contained within traditional, gically rephrased, notions of the feminine role.

if

strate-

Hale and her supporters

pursued partially feminist goals by largely anti-feminist means; genuine success

was hardly

possible.

Yet their caution was evidence not only of their

short-term shrewdness, but of their very justifiable anxiety. At mid-century, articulate northeastern

women,

like liberal ministers,

cerned about what viable place they might find

As

liberal ministers increasingly

marks and actual

were profoundly con-

in their society.

de-emphasized the traditional trade-

facts of their calling, the feminine promulgators of the

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

46

doctrine of "influence" habitually obscured women's biological and eco-

nomic function; they displaced and relocated themselves by defining femininity always in terms of

its effects,

never

in

terms of

for example, this ecstatic panegyric on the well-bred female

Magazine

Take,

causes.

its

from the

Ladies'

in 1830:

See, she

sits,

she walks, she speaks, she looks

ration springs

up

in

her very paths

—

—unutterable things!

follows her foot-steps.

it

is

awe,

and an

a reverence,

halo

For he approaches her with an

actually renovated. aff^ection

A

man not

of glory encircles her, and illumines her whole orbit. With her,

only feels safe but

Inspi-

which before he knew not he pos-

sessed.^

This apparent paean of self-love of invisibility

we saw

presented image. This ity itself

among

is

at is

work

model of self-evasion; the dread

actually a

in Orville

Dewey

hardly an assertion of a

painfully absent.

The

inflates

full

and mystifies the

feminine

ideal; physical-

constant reiteration of feminine "purity"

the proponents of influence was not only a denial of patriarchal

Reading

values, but of matriarchal ones. zine,

is

we have no

something to

this passage

Ladies' Maga-

from the

woman, or womanly ideal, is, except as be perceived and reacted to; she has no body and no personalidea of

what

this

The opening sentence reads today like an advertisement for a versatile doll. The first word, and the key to the whole statement, is "See": look at ity.

her, believe in her, the writer is

of value because she

is

unconsciously urging, so she can

is

able to

man; she represents nothing

work

finally

a

exist.

She

kind of religious transformation

in

but a state of susceptibility to very

imprecisely conceived spiritual values.

Dependent

as this

feminine creature

on masculine responses for her

is

very being, she can as easily be man's victim as his "inspiration."

Much

of

the contemporary writing on the stereotypic feminine figure suggests that, if

woman

precipitates

this precisely

by her

and indifferent

and represents

sensibility, she

sensitivity to pain.

The

relation

must inevitably prove

between

toiling pastor

flock, a frequent subject in the clerical fiction of the day,

echoed by the equally prevalent concern

in

was

feminine literature with the

necessary but tortuous bond between wife and husband, mother and child.

As one contributor

to the Ladies'

husband may cease to love silence,"

her,

Magazine explained

and she

will

in 1836, a

be called to bear

woman's

his neglect "in

only striving to win him back "by increased anxiety to please."

Again, a child

may

fall

ill,

and she

will, in

an abandon of irrational but

instinctive self-sacrifice, nearly kill herself in eflPorts to obviate

of discomfort: "if but a slight cloud passes over

its

its least

countenance,

if

pang but a

47

Feminine Disestablishment

disturbed motion gives evidence of suffering, she watches anxiously while others sleep, to soothe

if

Feminine suffering distinctly

about

its

more

violent

possible, its slightest pain."^

in the

popular writing of the period could take

and active forms, ones which raised painful questions

redemptive value. Indeed, paranoid terror that vulnerability would

among women writing about their position as among clergymen discussing theirs. The temperance cause in which clergymen and women worked side by side provides provide provocation only for brutality was as intense

a

good example;

was often promoted

it

the alcoholic but the

woman

at his

as a covert crusade to salvage not

mercy.

The

drunkard, usually a male,

destroys by his debauches himself and the saintly wife, mother, daughter,

or

sister

who

loves

him and would draw him from the saloon

His defiant drinking serves as he

is

willing to

kill

a

reminder of the

himself in order to attack

limits of its

to the fireside.

female "influence";

nearest representative.

Lydia Huntley Sigoumey (1791-1865), once famous as the "sweet singer of Hartford," author of countless popular and pious tales and in the pre-Civil

War era, published a collection of temperance stories in

fittingly entitled

brutality has

Her

poems

Water Drops. Their message

is

1

848

overwhelmingly that man's

Widow and When his devout

no function but the torture of woman. In "The

Son," the inebriate in question

mother pleads with him to mend laboriously enunciates

his

is

a fatherless boy.

ways, he "revolt[s]."

Sigoumey 's theme: "He despised

The

hurt mother

my woman's voice,

my motherly love." When the reprobate's pure sister touchingly admonishes him to reform, he spurns her advice as nothing but a veiled power play: "Always to be working under your orders, I suppose. No doubt that would be quite pleasing. All you women like to rule when you can."^ He takes his revenge by choosing the totally masculine career of a sailor. For the rebellious male, the whole world can function as a refuge from feminine authority. Sigoumey 's most famous temperance tale, "The Intemperate," makes the same point. It opens with a description of a family trudging on the weary road from a New England farm to a new home in Ohio. We know at once that all is not well, for the wife is staggering along under the burden of her two children while her spouse is reeling under a quite diflPerent load. The drunkard eventually murders his delicate son, his wife's special favorite. His motivation for this and other lesser enormities

he strove to distress "® sins.

his

wife and then

The happy ending

is

''visited

New

significant, if predictable:

her sensibilities upon her as

tellingly reserved for the real sufferer of the

story; the "intemperate's" wife, finally freed

to the

is

by her husband's death, returns

England homestead from which he has uprooted

her.

Even the determinedly moderate Sarah Hale, chief exponent of the doctrine of the feminine sphere, could occasionally describe the relation

between the sexes

in

terms whose fierce extremism

initially leaves a

modem

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

48

"Man

reader puzzled and disoriented:

mourner," "a fiend and an the

Roman

woman the mob destroyed

the murderer and

angel. "^ In 1834,

when

a

Boston

Catholic Ursuline convent, Hale found in their action not the

women:

excesses of bigotry but rather an extreme disrespect for

wrong

"it is

a

women," she exclaimed, "at which every female heart must revolt." ^° Hale was intensely sympathetic to all the overtlv oppressed members of her sex: Mormon women compelled by the iniquitous system of polygamy to lead lives of sensual indulgence, Asian women forced into demeaning servitude in a society which had no notion of feminine worth, American wives committed to insane asylums by husbands eager to escap>e the grim example of their sup>eriority.^^ Hale was usually supremely politic in her writings about male-female relations, but she was so precisely because cruelty, a

... to

she subscribed to a conspiracy view of history:

women must

engineer their

well-being in a world dominated by a sex essentially hostile to

Whether she was being like the

tactful or outspoken, hopeful or horrified, Hale,

authors of the temperance

nineteenth-century America

in

— rather

The

woman

as the register of

middle-class

like the minister's

ability of her

—

woman's depended

fate in in this

male peers, increasingly absorbed

which

the taks of settlement and competition, to recognize the values

their activities apparently denied.

or superannuated, narcissism at

work

disguise the fear

The

By

defined

tales,

man's capacity for personal experience.

view on the willingness and

it.

End of

a savior

in

The

well-bred

woman was either essential

or a creature destined to speedy extinction.

The

the very extremism of such alternatives could hardly

which gave

it

birth.

"'Mother Power''

woman

the mjddle of the nineteenth century the northeastern well-bred

was "disestablished" as surely as her clerical peers, although her disestablishment was hardly official. J. H. Allen, in discussing the efl^ects of voluntarism in 1868, lamented that the church, which had once been the "meeting house" of the town, the center for the vital community activities of worship, education, and business, was now merely a house of prayer, and place for words, not deeds. ^^

The

transformation occur

in

nal productive process

middle-class northern

children stayed before they began to

to clothe

and feed them;

had seen

her home: formerly an important part of a

under her direction,

after the strain of labor.

woman

Once

now

it

had become

a place

a similar

commu-

where her

work and where her husband

rested

her family had looked to her quite literally

they exp>ected

a

complex blend of nurture and

escape from her "voluntary" care.

The difficulties of discussing feminine disestablishment,

vital as

I

believe

Feminine Disestablishment it

49

to be to the understanding of nineteenth-century

enormous.

First of

all,

American

the disestablishment of middle-class

culture, are

women was

a

very haphazard and proximate process, compared to the end of state-sup-

No legislative acts banned home industries in early nineteenth-century New England, no feminine pressure groups lobbied for ported

religion.

and against the change. Furthermore, the

were not usually highly educated

down

writing

their opinions.

women affected, unlike the clergy,

societal leaders

Few even

of those

accustomed to voicing and

who must

have experienced

or witnessed in their lifetimes the shifting status of the matron of the house

from producer

consumer

to

left

detailed accounts of the transition. Unlike

their clerical contemporaries, they

ideas

were

history: they

had no awareness that their

were correspondingly

lives

or their

careless of preserving their

where women are concerned, sentiment was wanted, not facts. Literally hundreds of nostalgic memoirs were penned in the Civil War period abqut vanished rural ways, old New England farmsteads, and identities.

As

so often

once-abundant country Thanksgivings presided over by all-capable and generically hospitable housekeepers; such reminiscences, while valuable as a response to cultural

Even today there

change, hardly give us a trustworthy account of

is little

accumulated research to depend on;^^ accounts and

conclusions about the economic changes in the northeastern woman's the

first

it.

life in

half of the nineteenth century are inevitably tentative.

One must start by stressing that feminine "disestablishment" hardly affected all women in all parts of the United States. For the majority of American women living between 1800 and 1865, there was probably no economic dislocation and no concomitant "disestablishment" process comparable to that affecting the northern middle-class girls

who moved from a

life

for the feminine immigrants a ship to a

little

who came

women who

or no meaning.

cally in the

em

of labor on a farm to a

numbers

straight

from

The southern white woman, who belonged

techni-

same socio-economic category with her disestablished northeast-

this period.

"lady" was affairs

in increasing

of labor in a factory,

served King Cotton, disestablishment clearly

counterpart, found herself in

during

life

countless

northern sweatshop or a midwestem frontier, for the thousands

of enslaved black

had

woman. For the

still

many

respects in a quite different situation

Usually based on a farm or a plantation, the southern

performing an important function. Responsible for the

of a complex household often including a

nrmber

of slaves, she was

economically essential to the agrarian system of the South. Slavery gave her, as

it

gave the southern minister, an important role which, while limiting her

option and motivation for revolt, increased her opportunity for strategically

was not until after the Civil War that she had to deal with the problems arising from a modernizing urbanizing economy which had begun to beset her northern sister several generations before.^* placed support.

It

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

50

North

In 1800, by any reckoning, America,

Only

agricultural nation. in

six

percent of

was an

population of five million lived

New

York and Philadelphia could The common productive unit was the

towns of 2,500 or more; only

over 50,000 inhabitants.

its

as well as South,

boast rural

household; the processing and preserving of food, candlemaking, soapmak-

weaving, shoemaking, quilting, rugmaking, and

ing, spinning,

activities all

sale

less self-sufficient.

conducted on in the

other

took place on domestic premises. Although extra income might

be sought through the

more or

many

a barter

of produce and goods, such households were

Buying and

basis. ^^

selling,

The system

when

occurred, was often

it

of household industry prevalent

Northeast through the early decades of the nineteenth century meant

that the majority of

women

in

the area during that time were actively

productive activities of feeding, clothing, and equipping the

engaged

in the

nation. ^^

Nowhere was their importance

clearer than in the domestic

manu-

facture of woolen goods, most notably "homespun," a coarse all-wool and

undyed fabric from which most of the clothing worn in the Northeast was made.^^ The census of 1810 estimated that twenty-four of every twenty-five yards of wool produced in the United States was of domestic usually

origin;

during the Revolution and the

was hard individual

come

War

of 1812,

when imported

cloth

homespun was pushed on patriotic grounds and households were encouraged by bounties to prepare extra cloth

to

by,

for public sale.^® Within the household, adult certain difficult parts of the

men

traditionally handled

manufacture of cloth, but

pensable in spinning the wool and in

many

women were

other stages of

its

indis-

production.

Moreover, although from colonial days on professional workers had supple-

mented household procedures with

skilled techniques,

dependent on the domestic industry. like

When

the

first

they were entirely

labor-saving devices,

the carding machine and the spinning jenny, were patented at the turn

of the nineteenth century, they were intended for and absorbed by

household use.^®

By

1830, the picture in the

population was

still

farm products, the

North was very

diflPerent.

Although the

over five-sixths rural and exports consisted largely of

industrial revolution, as

modem economic historians tend

was under way.^^ Commercial farming replaced subsistence farming; self-sufficiency was giving way to specialization. The urban population was growing faster than the population of the country as a whole. The War of 1812 and the embargoes, blockades, and tariffs which accompanied and

to agree,

succeeded

gave support to America's manufactures.

it

the staunch defender of agrarian

taught

me

.

.

.

our comfort,"

manufactures are political

life,

now

When Jefl^erson, once

explained in 1816 that "experience has as necessary to

our independence

endorsement of the economic

shift

Between 1820 and 1840 the number of people engaged

as to

was complete.^ in

^

manufactures

Feminine Disestablishment

51

increased 127 percent, while those occupied in agriculture increased only 79 percent. Massachusetts and

New

committee of the Massachusetts pleasure, that

little

By

ing people."^^

inhabitants

its

1840, there

States, two-thirds of

them

in

York

still

were "becoming

were

as

much

essentially a

manufactur-

1,200 cotton factories in the United

New England. The wool industry, now subject

economic scene

accounted for

acknowledged, although with

legislature

changed dramatically. Although one ob-

to competition with cotton, had

server of the

industrialized soonest. In 1836, a

1839 estimated that domestic manufacture

in

cloth as factory production in

America

whole, the household was clearly losing out to the factory, especially Northeast. ^^

Homespun had owed

its

With

the

boom

opening of canals and

the

in

success to primitive technological

conditions and the absence of a real domestic market for material.

as a

in inventions, the

protection of the

railroads, the factories

more

finished

tariffs,

and the

had within reach

a

low-priced

woolen product and a market able and eager to buy it. By the time of the Civil War, homespun was common only in certain undeveloped parts of New England and in the western settlements. Middle-class women in the Northeast after 1830 were far more interested

in the

purchase of clothing

than the making of cloth. It is

a

interesting to note that this

decided alteration

number of

in

woman's

economic

shift

position in society.

among them

their legal privileges,

was concomitant with

Women lost a significant

the right to vote.^'* Despite

were barred from a newly deThey vanished more or less entirely

their long record as expert midwives, they

fined

and restricted medical profession.

from

a

number

of occupations; they appeared

less

frequently in public

records as printers, blacksmiths, arms-makers, or proprietors of small busi-

To

ness concerns.

woman

with

a

put

it

simply and perhaps simplistically, the independent

mind and

a life of

her

own

slowly ceased to be considered

Widows provide a good index of this change in opinion. Since by definition a woman suddenly deprived of male support, the

of high value. a

widow

is

opportunities her culture affords her, the attitude especially revealing of

New

England, a

"Widows"

its

widow

stance toward

it

adopts toward her, are

women more

generally. In colonial

could be a powerful force

in

her community.

constituted a special order in the Protestant Church; even the

tendency of the colonial mind to associate widowhood with witchcraft was a sign,

if

a negative one, of the

presumed power of widows.

A

recent study

of seventeenth-century Wethersfield, Connecticut, reveals that

its

widows

actually tended to remarry less often and after greater intervals than

widowers; they apparently did so because they had greater options for and busy single

lives

than did their male counterparts.^^

full

the early nine-

widows were conventionally viewed as pitiful Numerous organizations formed to relieve "widows and or-

teenth century, in contrast, charity cases.

By

its

— THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

52

phans"; stories turning on the pathos of the newly

were popular.^® There are no riage in the later period, but

same pattern of In

common

statistics available as

it

self-reliance

bride or mother

yet on the rate of remar-

seems highly unlikely they would reveal the

which the study of Wethersfield highlighted.

widow

nineteenth-century conception, the

new

widowed

—to help

waited for a

any show of

man

was valuable chiefly as evidence of her worthiness of such aid. She had no communal tasks deemed appropriate to her widowed state; she was obligated to undertake nothing but the heavily self-involved business of mourning. The process of adjustment was seen as a private and psychological one. The widow had become a source of sentimentality; a woman without a man a brother, a son, a

lover

her;

self-reliance

was an emblem of frailty and unproductivity. Contemporary observers sensed and articulated a connection between the economic shift and the change in middle-class feminine status taking place in their society. In 1851, when Horace Bushnell came to Litchfield, Connecticut, to deliver an address in honor of the county's centennial, he testified that a

major and complex upheaval had occurred since

his

own

boyhood days on a nearby farm a half century earlier. By 1851, industrialization was a fact in Connecticut; between 1800 and 1850, manufactures had replaced shipping and agriculture as the Bushnell's speech, however,

was

chief source of wealth.

less a tribute to

lament for the "Puritan Arcadia" of the vision of the vanished era,

state's

which he

past.

tellingly

spun," are the economically functional

^^

current progress than a

At the center of Bushnell's entitles "The Age of Home-

woman,

the "frugal, faithful, pious

housewife" spinning the clothes and linen of her family, and the organically productive household over which she presided: "[They were] harnessed, together, into the producing process,

the

boy

that rode the plough-horse to the

spectacles.

.

.

producer for nell's

young and

.

male and female, from

grandmother knitting under her

The house was a factory on the farm; the farm a grower and the house." The passing of the "Age of Homespun," in Bush-

mind, has resulted

manners": a

old,

all

loss

in a

"complete revolution of domestic

life

and

social

of self-reliance and social responsibility, the "severe" yet

"sublime" virtues of the earlier day. Bushnell

is

aware

that the "transition

from mother and daughter power to water and steam power" is both so momentous and so final that "the very terms 'domestic manufacture' have quite lost their meaning." Domesticity

women no longer marry

itself is

beyond recognition; living, but to help them

altered

to help their husbands get a

spend their income.^®

words on the transformation of the socio-economic role of the New England woman are implemented by his private testimony, which, while more limited in scope, is more illuminating in its detail. His mother belonged to the old school, his wife to the new; he loved them both, Bushnell's public

Feminine Disestablishment

53

but he loved and used them very differently. His mother, Dotha Bushnell, in

her son's words, "had no advantages of wealth or family connection above

Her

the level of industrious respectability. it

was

that she

won

field

was

in

her family and there

her best honors." She possessed tremendous "physical

endurance and tenacity" which enabled her to "bear severities of toil that would have reduced almost any other woman to the level of a drudge." To say that she

was economically functional would be an understatement. She

was, according to her son, economically indispensable:

She was providing and training her six children, clothing her whole family in linens and woolens, spun, every thread, and made up in the house also to

to administer, also

months

in a

by herself. She had a farm-and-dairy charge the farm workmen to board, and for five or six

a great extent

year the workers, besides, of a homespun cloth-dressing

shop. All this routine she kept

and clear such

as the

a stress

moving

astronomic year.

of burden!

And

.

.

.

in exact

order and time, steady

What mortal endurance could

bear

showed

dam-

yet she scarcely

a look of

age.^^

Mrs. Bushnell dedicated her son early to the ministry and was directly responsible for his final choice of a clerical career, but she never

much

showed

overt religiosity; she trusted to the example of Christian habit rather

than to devotional display to effect his conversion. She was reserved, even

was her prudence, her industry, and her "tact" which her son found "sublime." She was "tender," "motherly," and "self-sacrificing," Bush-

taciturn;

it

nell notes,

but her real greatness to his mind lay in her wisdom, her "wonder-

ful insight

and discretion."^® As her son

and

in secular

sees

them, her strengths

matters were unmistakably at root economic ones.

in spiritual

By

his

own

account, Bushnell paid her the tribute one ideally only pays to genuinely factual experience: he took her word,

more or

less

uncorrected and unal-

tered.

Mary A. Thorp of Hartford, a descendant

Bushnell's wife, ter

woman of charm and education, in contrast seems him where he should go so much as sustained him in

John Davenport and to have directed

less

of the minis-

chosen course. Her

a

any

was the nurturing one of affection, not the disciplinary one of authority. His mother was his leader, able to make him avoid error; his wife was to be his follower, instructing him as to his mistakes only by the pain they forced her to register. Insofar as she was to exert control over him, it was, as he once his

explained to her in a

not heard: "[hers] sive,

is

role, as

letter,

he

at

rate liked to conceive

to be as an "influence."

not an ambitious noisy power;

and often so deep

as to

have

its

it,

She would be

it is

silent,

felt,

but

calm, persua-

hold deeper than consciousness

itself.

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

54

.

.

.

He

when he

loves her

is

be conscious of his love.

.

.

too weary or too

much

bent on his objects to

She ministers and yet

.

seldom ministered

is

unto."^^

The and

his

causes for the difference in the roles played by Bushnell's mother

wife are varied.

more authority over

a

Of

man

course a

then

(as

now) expected

spouse than a mother. Yet

it

is

to exert

Dotha

clear that

Bushnell did not perform the same wifely duties for her husband that Bushnell did for Horace.

One remembers John Adams' remark on

pidity of an English general during the

would have put

Adams

Howe

in possession

from

clearly expected and got

wife, Abigail

American Revolution: his

own

Mary

in his

own

Bushnell, in other words, one itself

the subject of change

also pertinent to argue,

social mobility.

He

married up. Even

lived in Litchfield a quarter or a half

century

earlier,

been found spinning homespun; she would have lived

and educated daughter of Yet

mother. In discussing

between Dotha and Mary Bushnell was

shift in identity

Bushnell's

It is

Mary Thorp's

women

we have,

image of her

in

however, that the evidence of

in part

if

Mary Thorp had

she

would not have

town, the protected

of local importance.

self-definition as

biographical information to her husband's

man

a

"a smart wife

and independent

intelligent

must assume that the concept of wife has been rather than a cause of change.

the stu-

of Philadelphia a long time ago."^^

Adams, what Bushnell looked for

the different functions of Dotha and

Mary

it

woman

and

as

wife

—and from the

seems to have conformed

fairly closely

— was nonetheless dependent on the disappear-

Dotha Bushnell. The transformation in the feminine economic status did not mean that the same women turned from running the spinning wheel to playing the spinet; it involved, rather, a change in the concept of female labor which significantly altered the meaning of either occupation. When large numbers of respected and intelligent (if hardly upper-class) women like Dotha Bushnell were contributing by their work to their society's economic life, feminine labor, although unpaid, was neces-

ance of

sarily

judged

like

essential,

within limits to

and

women were

act, in essentially

inevitably defined, and allowed

productive ways.

proportion of the middle-class population engaged

farming families were involved

in

in

When

a

dwindling

farming and fewer

domestic production,

when women

in-

homes of their "productive" spouses or in relative discomfort working in newly established factories at low wages, female labor was devalued and the feminine identity was correspondently reconceived. There was an enormous difference becreasingly either lived in relative ease tending the

tween the eighteenth-century matron tending her wheel and the nineteenthcentury factory girl at her loom. The first was in a sense self-motivated, at the center of her productive unit; the second was the employee of others, a

mere cog

in a

system of which she had

little

understanding.

Feminine Disestablishment

SS

do not wish

to idealize the eighteenth-

important to be clear here.

It is

I

century middle-class woman's "productivity" or totally condemn the

more

nineteenth-century middle-class woman's emerging, er-oriented role;

gaged it,

is

women

in

both centuries and

essentially, if in different

perhaps

much

of

it,

ways,

oppressive,

that feminine labor and

its

in

in service

some of

it

leisured,

consum-

both capacities were en-

broadly defined

rewarding.

function in society were

The

—some of

essential point

visible in

the earlier

period, and this visibility assured a minimal recognition, and a minimal

degree of directness

in the assessment

mid-nineteenth-century middle-class "lady"

will be discussing

I

necessarily as idle as her various critics and admirers

She had many

responsibilities;

The

of the feminine contribution.

even servants,

was not

on occasion painted

her.

like the technological aid

which succeeded them, could create as much work as they performed. It is rather that the lady's leisure, whether hypothetical or actual, was increasingly treated as the most interesting and significant thing about her; her function was obscured and intended to be so, and evaluations of her worth consequently tended to become exercises in indirection. Eliza

Famham,

York, had occasion to spend time

New

and active-minded writer from

a self-educated

in the late 1830s

and early 1840s

in the

As was customary in those days, she took advantage of her sojourn to publish an account which she called Life in Prairie Land. Despite the fairy-tale quality of her title, Famham's book is actually the record of western

a

states.

confrontation between the

woman

new

disestablished middle-class northeastern

and the circumstances which had presumably shaped her grand-

mothers.

As economic

historians

have noted, ^^ the older methods of

household production of commodities, particularly homespun, prevailed

in

the cruder western communities long after they had been discontinued in the

more

western

industrially developed East.

woman enjoyed a

This hardly meant, however, that the

position in society better than the

one her eastern

counterpart occupied. Indeed, the evidence suggests that the transplanted

when feminine toil was equated with degradation, often had the worst of two worlds.^'* Eliza Famham, a publicist for the superiority of women, faced with her overworked frontier sisters, clearly felt like a missionary among the heathens; she was indignant, pitying, conde"pioneer" wife, forced to

toil

scending, didactic.

At one and

a

point,

farmer.

Famham

The man,

recounts a crucial conversation between herself

shrewd, tough, uncharitable, and unsentimental,

Famham's questions how he found his wife, and why her. She is a good worker, and this, to Famham's intense disgust, concems him. At the start of their exchange, she asks him if he

reveals in answers to

he values is all

is

that

building his

new house

supposed to realize that

to protect his "bird."

Famham

is

We the readers are of course

referring to the farmer's wife; her

little

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

56

metaphorical flourish literary

is

a calculated

good breeding and of

way both

he

is

woman. The

own

what elegantly

instructing the farmer with

euphemistic terms he ought to honor any insists that

of reminding us of her

westerner, however,

not sheltering a delicate creature weaker and more sensitive

than himself; indeed, he crassly compares his wife's physical strength to that of several of his beasts of burden. His clinching line "I don't

know what you Yankees call

a 'bird,'

but

I

is

call

the edged remark:

her

a

woman. "^^ The in which people

from a frontier situation were scarce and men far outnumbered women; whatever the value attached to it, woman's labor in the opening West was necessary. Famham was a product of the East, where the work of settlement was past and women already outnumbered men;^® women there might be indispensable but it was not their working powers which made them so. Such encounters could only make Farnham wonder whether the middle-class woman in the Northeast was in some sense superfluous. If she were, both the writer and her eastern reader were asking, might there not be a special worth potentially attached to superfluity in a utilitarian culture? What, they wondered, was to be the value of a euphemism? farmer's attitude sprang inevitably

Education for Exile

The confusion about cially

the role of the middle-class northeastern

woman,

espe-

during the crucial years of transition between 1820 and 1840, was

nowhere more apparent than

in

the

efl^orts

to train her,

whether through

advice books or actual schooling, for her part in national well, the counselor

must usually have

a definite goal in

life.

mind,

To

counsel

a clear sense

of what the purpose of the counseled should be; yet the advice and instruction profusely

showered on the northeastern

and 1830s had no such end

in sight.

girl

or matron during the 1820s

One might say

not only that her mentors

and teachers obfuscated her function, but that the function they urged on her was

itself

obfuscation of a culturally

vital kind.

To do

her part

in

the

sexual division, or redefinition, of labor in a modernizing society, the lady

was decidedly expected

to be a "bird"

and not

a

"woman."

In 1830, Sarah Josepha Hale reviewed The Frugal Housewife, a "how-to"

domestic manual written by the noted Abolitionist and reformer Lydia

Maria Child (1802-80). Hale's reactions were both ambivalent and

signifi-

economic transformation by rationalizing the middle-class woman's new domestic identity, was part of a growing effort Hale officially approved and aided. Catharine Maria cant. Child's book, designed to ease the tension of

Sedgwick,

whom

Hale consistently applauded, was

of popular stories which would

cover drama

in

make

a

just

beginning her series

heroine of the housewife and

dis-

her struggles with her servants, her children, and her hus-

Feminine Disestablishment

SI

band.^^ Catharine Esther Beecher (1800-78), another

woman who had

Hale's

continuing support, was inventing and popularizing what she called "domestic

economy,"

which be, a

called

it

a phrase ideally suited to disguise the

into being. ^® Child's

manual was,

very disfunctionalism

as all

its

successors

would

cautionary book. Beneath a veneer of modernity. Child was sanctioning

the genteel housewife's inevitably short-sighted economic struggles; she

was

urging her readers to cling to updated versions of their grandmothers'

domestic methods as their best refuge

in a sophisticated

beyond their control or comprehension. Hale was well aware that Child was at

least

attempting to combine the

virtues of the older feminine ideal with those of the practicality

market situation

newer model,

to unite

and elegance. Indeed, Hale showered praises on Child herself

combination of Mary and Dotha Bushnell: "a lady of the

a kind of

literary attainments,

as

first

[who] yet shows herself acquainted with housekeeping

in its

most minute and closely calculated

their

common

problems were not

details."

finally Hale's.

Yet Child's solutions to

Hale was palpably uneasy

with Child's celebration of economic wariness and practicality, the legacy

"Age of Homespun"; she was distressed, however, not because it offered a mere palliative to the modem housewife's profound confusion but

of the

because

money

might breed an over-concern and over-awareness of the value of

it

unsuited to

women. "Our men

explained. "Let us keep our

are sufliciently money-making," Hale

women and

as possible."^^ Hale's priorities are clear.

female decorum;

from the contagion as long Male dollars must be ignored by

children

women should forget or at The

laws of acquisition and accumulation. to her competitive-minded husband

is

least

appear to forget the sordid

lady's role as spiritual

clearly

more

exemplar

vital in Hale's

mind than

woman

should be

her function as his helpmate. Hale's sub rosa conclusion

was

that the middle-class

trained to play the part, not of a directly facilitating comrade, but of an indirectly beneficial laggard in the

march of

capitalistic progress.

Other

would-be educators of the northeastern lady agreed. Etiquette books of the

day make

it

amply

clear that

women were to cultivate domestic

closed doors while their male counterparts

were to

face,

piety behind

and

if

possible

conquer, the competitive world of commerce. Charles Butler, author of The

American Lady (1836), instructed

his

female readers on such subjects as

"Female Influence," "Emulation," "Motives to Exertion," "Dress," "Operas and Concerts," "Dancing," "Storing the Memory," "Female Conversation and Epistolary Correspondence," and "The Duties of Matrimonial Life."

The

lady's preoccupation

feelings,

is

to be with herself: her clothes, her manners, her

her family. Butler feels no need to

society of

which she

is

a part.'*®

When

tell

her anything about the larger

Butler speaks to the "American

Gentleman," however, he ignores domestic and religious concerns to focus

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

58

on such topics

"Supporting the Dignity of the Commercial Character"

as

and "Hints for Those

Who Are Designated for a

Reverend Daniel Eddy,

Mercantile Life."

Young Woman

Twenty

V Friend (1858)

and

The Young Man's Friend (1855), reiterated Butler's sexual bifurcation.

He

years

later,

grooms the "Young

and

solicitous mother,

Man"

Woman"

in The

appropriate to

in the virtues

a docile

tender wife, a

a

daughter, but he inculcates in the

"Young

Industry, Frugality, Temperance, and Honesty, the "Four Sources of

The "Young Man"

Success in Life."

is

warned

against the sins of the world,

Woman" against the lady here who is seldom

gambling, drinking, smoking, and so on; the "Young sins of the soul.

There

is

even cautioned about the not her strength, which

a certain flattery for the evils

is

of liquor, for example; yet

it is

her ignorance,

complimented. Hers are to be the cloistered and

untested virtues of the non-participant.

What

formal education there was for

girls in

the pre-Civil

enforced on them the same lesson of economic and cultural

Revolution most middle-class American

girls

home-workers: their early and brief years occasional attendance at the

summer

important than the years they passed cal

domestic

at a

more formal

receive longer and

Before the to be

"dame-school" and their

academy were

less

mother's side acquiring practi-

when they began

In the post-Revolution period,

skills.

exile.

period

were frankly educated

session of a local

at their

War

instruction, they did not, as

to

one might

logically predict, get even a modified version of the curriculum currently

offered their brothers.'*^ a special situation.

conversationalist,

They

received a special course, designed to meet

Margaret Fuller (1810-50), the famous transcendentalist,

and feminist, complained that

girls

"run over superficially

even more studies [than boys] without being really taught anything.'"*^ At the "Female Academies" which proliferated in the middle decades of the

nineteenth century, literature, history,

young

ladies studied

modem

languages, sewing, music,

and geography; they were seldom asked to tackle the

masculine subjects of mathematics, theology, Greek, and the natural sciences.

At

a

could define

when an apologist and defender for the feminine intellect woman as "the connecting link between man and the infetime

.

rior animals, possessing a central rank latter

.

.

between the mysterious

and the unattainable energies of the former,'"*^

that girls

Education

it is

were sedulously protected from the more in

instinct of the

hardly surprising

difficult disciplines.

general depended heavily on memorization, but

numerous

were asked to do even less independent reasoning than boys. Explanatory visual aids, maps, and charts were common in the young critics

noted that

girls

gentlemen's academies before they reached similar institutions for young ladies.'**

Apparently,

world by

rote;

to understand

it

was assumed

that girls only needed to

they were not going to change

it? If all

education

in

it,

so

why

know

the

should they need

mid-nineteenth-century America was by

Feminine Disestablishment

modem

definitions casual, education for

flippant.

The

and

academy had no entrance examinations; since stayed more than a semester or two, there were few

girls

curricular planning.

little

were often

social souls

families," caring little

about their love

who

am

enjoyed receiving students from the "best

bom

Sara Clarke (1823-1904), a popular writer

of feminine education as a means of

triviality

convinced," she stated in the half-jesting tone which was

her characteristic

style, that "there

is

an alarming conspiracy formed by

and guardians to patronize only such keep damsels

as are calculated to

from

establishments

lives.'*^

and reformer, analyzed the oppression: "I

The women heading such

about their pupils' advancement and rather more

"Grace Greenwood,"

fathers

young women might be termed

typical female

only a handful of tests

59

institutions of female learning

in subordination, in

fulfilling their natural, lofty destiny

order to prevent them

—from aspiring to equal power

Church and State."^^ Greenwood clearly had a point: in the superficiality was the specialty, for young ladies were being educated to be themes for thought, not thinkers; they were to be the muses not the practitioners of the arts, aesthetic or practical. Contemporary observers noted, some with distress, others with pleasure, the extraordinarily high cost of feminine education. Curiously, the price was its own justification. Girls' and influence

education

in

testified to a

widespread

if

contested conviction that middle-class

know more about spending than about learning. The "educated" lady was on her way to becoming what Thorstein

females needed to middle-class

Veblen would proclaim her

a half

century

later:

an emblem of conspicuous

consumption.

The educational

trend in the training of girls toward costly superficial-

was deplored with emotion and fought with energy. The ladies' magazines of the day united in denunciation of the meaningless gentility of ity

current feminine training.'*^

York, taught her foe

girls

who remarked

Emma

geometry

Willard (1787-1870) of Troy,

in the 1820s

bitterly, "They'll

even

in the face of

(

were

fully as sharp

and almost

as well trained as their

College. Catharine Esther Beecher founded

in

women,

modem

make

like

Sarah Hale

who

neighbors

at

Williams

more progressive female acadein operation.

Yet

vociferously supported them, were not

eyes altogether successful. Serious education for

significant gains until the

Mary

the 1830s and 1840s

mies between 1822 and 1870 than she could possibly keep these

one male

be educating the cows next."

Lyon 1797- 1849) knew her Mount Holy oke students in

New

women

did not

decade after the Civil War. In raising funds

for their educational enterprises, Willard, Beecher, and even

Lyon took

self-conscious care to gather male patrons, to appeal to male authorities, and to

couch

as

they presented

their

arguments it,

in

terms of male

was simply

interests.'*®

Feminine instruction,

a guarantee of masculine rights; the well-

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

60

was advertised largely as a better and more understanding wife and mother.'*^ The effort on the part of these women to camouflage their activities was understandable, and probably necessary, but it was nonetheless educated

girl

debilitating.

Behind

the efforts to train the

all

young

middle-class

woman

in the

Northeast, then, whether on the part of conscious conservatives or an-

nounced reformers, was

a

common

compete or even

serve her male counterpart, not significance

was

to

lie

in

at least oflicial

assumption: she was to

participate with him; her

advisors and teachers purposely defined her role vaguely;

whose

details

were

to be filled in

by

a masculine hand.

an outline which could not be altered. ors and educators wished to shape in

whose operations she had

on her

—

a saint

and

in

little

The

was

part,

ideal

it

was

a sketch

Yet the sketch had

woman whom the counsel-

to exert moral pressure

and to spend money

on

a society

—or have

an economy she could not comprehend. She was a

Her

her connotations rather than her actions.

in

it

spent

embryo both

consumer. Naturally the lady and her advisors underplayed her

consumer and overplayed her status as saint. They were largely ignorant of the developing economic situation of which they were a part; they were more aware of the sincerity of their conscious religious motiva-

status as

tions than of the reality of the

them. Middle-class women,

economic forces which

like those

who

partially

determined

counseled them, inevitably pre-

ferred to stress their moral and religious "influence" rather than their evolving importance as highly socialized and expert shoppers. In actual fact,

however, the two

roles, saint

and consumer, were interlocked and mutually

dependent; the lady's function

in a capitalist society

was

to appropriate

and

preserve both the values and the commodities which her competitive hus-

band, father, and son had

an antidote and

a

little

time to honor or enjoy; she was to provide

purpose for their labor.

The Economic Value of the Euphemism: Finery as Flattery Foreign travelers to the United States frequently remarked on the deference

which seemed

in their

eyes to be a trademark of the middle-class American

male's relations with the female. Isabelle Bird, a spirited English observer of

the American scene in the 1850s, found this courtesy exaggerated and even ludicrous.

Such

chivalry, she

commented, was not infrequently carried to

was seldom fully appreciated by its recipients: "The thousand acts of attention which gentlemen, by rigid usage, are compelled to tender to ladies, are received by them without the slightest acknowledgment, either by word or gesture."^® Most travelers also noted the elaborately fashionable, sometimes tasteful, and often impractical clothes American women wore; they agreed with Timothy Dwight, a well-known educator "absurdity," and

Feminine Disestablishment

and writer, that American

61

taught to regard dress as a momentous

"girls are

concern."^ ^ Their elegant garments were presumably but another manifestation of the veneration in

which they were

natural protectors. Yet Bird also observed that

shortage of servants as

by

much

as

men, who, "immersed

their

by their home by the

officially held

women, kept

at

by domestic devotion, were often neglected

in a

whirl of business, spent only short periods

with their families."^^

We

seem to

see a process of

politeness suggests

plained to his

atonement

German

as

compensatory etiquette here,

much

in

which

as recognition. Charles Follen ex-

relatives in 1826 that

"women and clergymen

while

are most honored" in America, lawyers and businessmen have "the greatest influence."^^ Harriet Martineau

women

tartly: "Indulgence,"

summed up

the situation of American

observed the English radical,

given as a

"is

substitute for justice."^'* Just as in certain matriarchal societies males are

treated with elaborate and ceremonious deference ors, in

their feminine superi-

Amermore as a

the patriarchal middle-class culture of mid-nineteenth-century

females were apparently being granted special status

ica the

substitute for

their finery

power than

own

accrue their

ings and

as

an acknowledgment of

it.

Yet such substitutes

prerogatives. Girls v/ere encouraged to exact deference;

symbolized the

cated, well-treated,

not

by

flattery

which was

their due. Expensively edu-

and well-dressed, they could both advertise male earn-

compensate themselves for their

make homespun; they

own

They

lost productivity.

displayed fine cottons and

back door through which middle-class northern

silks.

did

Fashion was the

women

re-entered the

American economy. Fashion was their form of reprisal, a contrapuntal commentary on economic productive processes; in its avowed disf unctionalism, it was capable of expressing, at its best, complex irony, at its worst, sheer pinched hostility. The self-involved style favored by the Victorian lady

—

waist, swelled bosom, and proliferating profusion of looped skirts and lacy

petticoats

—both obliterated and exaggerated the female body;

and enforced the feminine function

as

it

objectified

euphemism.

Yet the supreme product of feminine fashion, the chief emblem of the

emerging female consumer, was not found

odd

as

it

may

initially

sound, in her reading and writing.

proclivity for novels, the a standard its

theme for

serious side.

socialized to

A

in the lady's clothing,

young

jest in

miss's resort to the

but rather,

The

feminine

pen and the confidante,

eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction, had

Marxist might argue persuasively that American girls were

immerse themselves

in

novels and letters in order to

powerlessness in a masculine and anti-humanist society

more

make

their

certain and less

painful. In 1828, Sarah Hale, inaugurating Godey's predecessor, the Ladies'

Magazine, shrewdly exploited this unstated dynamic. She assured the hus-

bands and fathers of her prospective readers that her periodical would make

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

62

for

more

loving, because less bored, wives

and daughters. During the men's

women would

perhaps lengthy absences, the

be reading avidly and profita-

bly in Hale's pages.^^ Nathaniel Willis, the popular magazine writer, not

commented on

infrequently

the increasing tendency of the American male

to absorb himself in business and leave his wife to busy herself with practi-

dwindling

cally

if

psychologically inflated domestic duties and cultural

concerns too exclusively her own. Lydia Maria Child promoted

of

a love

reading as an unspeakable blessing for the American female. She explained

ominously, sion;

it

if

honestly: "[reading] cheers so

gives the

mind something

Sarah Edgarton

Mayo

many hours

to interest itself about.

wrote countless

New

stories

illness

and seclu-

"^^

(1819-49), the Universalist poet, provides a clear

example of the feminine reader and writer. Raised of brothers in rural

of

one

as

among

girl

a host

Hampshire, she read omnivorously. Later she

about young

and personal significance through

women who found

a well-designed

lovers, social status,

course of reading.

Mayo

continued to read constantly and feverishly herself, and corresponded de-

number of like-minded feminine

votedly with a

Mayo's

clerical friends noted,

seemed to ladies

live in the

"She had

As one of

Universalists.

a passionate love of letters,

correspondence of her friends."^^

wrote to each other about the joys of

The

and

Universalist

literary friendship

and about

books from feminine pens: they enthused over Corinne and Consuelo and Mrs. Hemans. Like her Universalist tined for the boarding-house lotte

Fillebrown (1820-45),

—the unhappy

Mrs. Case, des-

sisters

of a small-time divorced litterateur; Char-

life

a lower-class writer of real talent

who became

insane and died at twenty-five; Sarah Broughton, starved in girlhood for

stimulation in rural

Vermont and forced

feminine martyr in an

adulthood to glorify her role

marriage to an alcoholic^®

ill-starred

herself literally, utterly,

in

and unsuccessfully on

as

— Mayo staked

a life of letters.

Fine-minded,

genuinely devout, subject to depression, astutely aware of the limitations of her

own work,

she evinced

symptoms of

near-hysteria as she felt her

thinning out in her hands. She died in 1849 at thirty. first

of that large class of

women who,

phrase of several decades

later, lived

in

Henry

Mayo was one

James's

Middle-class

The

literary

market

women became

stories they read

mentality, exercises in

served as the rationale

if

maturation

women

for

women

America from the 1840s through the

in a

very

real sense

consumers of in

1880s.

literature.^^

the shopping

euphemism essential to the system of flattery which for the American woman's economic position. Mayo in the sentimental sagas

arrested femininity in a

somewhat worried

and wrote were themselves courses

and her successors found idealized

in

of the

"by the immediate aid of the novel."

Sentimental "domestic novels" written largely by

dominated the

life

which

world uninterested

of the day an icon of

forestalled the disappointments of

at best in their intellectual

and emotional

63

Feminine Disestablishment

adulthood. Indeed, this hterature seems today both ludicrous and painful in

enormous need of its authors and readers for confirmation of themselves and instantaneous satisfaction of their

the evidence uncritical

it

offers of the

appetites.

The

typical heroine of such stories was, of course, beautiful.

beauty was

Her

matter of looks, however, than a privilege of protection,

less a

which camouflaged her needs as other people's demands and endowed her with almost superhuman powers. The transcendent heroine of Bertha and Lily (1854) by Elizabeth Oakes Smith (1806-93) habitually emits a faint radiance from her fingertips. In Uncle Tom V Cabin, Harriet Stowe's Little Eva manages to give away on her deathbed innumerable locks of her hair to her family, friends, and slaves, and still go apparently a condition of invulnerability

unshorn to the grave. The sentimental heroine could afford to be modest; without any special assertion on her

a

to

fictive fate

compliment

her.

—

sorrow, her piety

Her

her universe conspired as by

Her image was inviolable; she did not candid camera. Whatever made her beautiful her looks, her

Newtonian law need to face

part,

—was the one thing she would never be asked to give up.

might be harsh, but the person on

whom she was ultimately

dependent, her reader, would never reject her. She was a narcissist freed of the obsession of self-involvement. Metaphorically speaking, she never had to shop. In the streamlined emotional

thing

was delivered

to her door.

economy

of the domestic novel, every-

She never had to pay; she operated on an

unlimited credit system. Special treatment was her destiny.

The Wide, Wide World, the

first

of the best-selling domestic novels for

women, was launched in 1850 on its way to long-lived popularity by Susan Warner (1819-85) of New York. The story apparently turns on the unwillingness of the old-fashioned little girl, Ellen Montgomery, to participate in which a cruel fate thrusts her. All Ellen's miseries begin when her father is clumsy enough to lose a vital lawsuit, and with it, his income. Mr. Montgomery's the "wide, wide world" of masculine competition and business into

surly incompetence and insecure aggressiveness threaten the idyll of femi-

nine sensibility shared by his wife and daughter. Ellen makes a rather unfilial point of evading her father, but she cannot long escape the forces which he represents.

When

mission to select humiliates,

her ailing mother sends her off alone on her

some

adult

material at a store, a rude and busy clerk cheats,

and dismisses her because she

commerce, because she

first

is

a child

and

a girl.

is

unused to the chicanery of

Although

a

benevolent elderly

gentleman indignantly intervenes and Ellen accomplishes her errand,

Warner Ellen

is

has

made her

point.

The

clothing-store setting seems important.

completely dislocated from her economic

past; those

the production of her apparel are utterly foreign to her. tion that she

It is

who

control

Ellen's distinc-

must be rescued from the world. She never requests or wishes

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

64

any way actually to function within her

in

Brewing consolatory

society.

cups of tea for her several beloved and diseased lady friends

Her undeclared

of her productive effort. tive forces

The

is

hostility to her culture's

too enormous to allow her to contribute to

Bible and those

who

love

it

Yet Ellen's otherworldliness

the full extent

is

its

competi-

economic

life.

are Ellen's only business.

not as straightforward as

is

it

The

seems.

actual buying under her mother's discreetly spiritualized supervision of an

elegant

little

Bible features as prominently in her story as her perusal of

it.

In the bookstore, Ellen feels the quintessential pleasure of the consumer, the

luxuriously difficult privilege of choice: "such beautiful Bibles she had never seen; she

pored

very evidently

in ecstasy in love

over their varieties of type and binding, and was

with them

indecision, she alights at last

on

all."^*'

a red

After a protracted period of happy

leather-bound volume.

of an ornamented writing table on the same excursion

is

an equally raptur-

ous experience. Ellen's obvious love of the act of possession

Shopping for the

necessities of

food and apparel

is

and somehow not shopping

at

all.

Ellen

is

is

here sanctified.

painful, even unnatural;

shopping to furbish the refined pursuits of religion and ful,

The purchase

literature

is

delight-

constantly being orphaned and

adopted, and the underlying question of her saga

who

is,

can prove the best

who

right to this jewel of a girl? Tellingly, the undeserving villains are those

force on her ugly objects; the deserving heroes those delicate tastes. a

A

mortally wounded. She the dainties she

is

later

would not stoop

that luxuries are

by

Age

of Homespun. Ellen

taken in by rich relatives

as her titular indifference to the is

her

cruel aunt at one point dyes Ellen's fine white stockings

coarse but durable brown: a reminder of the

all

who pamper

who

to acquire for herself. Ellen

goods of

this

definition her needs.

lavish is

world

will permit.

She

to be

is

is

on her

as grateful

The

truth

decked out and

would never say so, the tribute of extravagance. Heedless as she is of economic realities, she has her very real place in the economy, if only because she is a symbol of expenditure. At first glance, Ellen's extraordinarily single-minded ladylike proclivities appear to set her apart from other contemporary fictional heroines. These multifaceted ambidextrous maidens can usually run a household and

adored. She expects, although she

save lives with the same quiet feminine spirit they bring to

belles lettres

and

what Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-96), undoubtwoman writer of the period, called "faculty." As the

Bible-reading; they have

edly the most gifted

decades wore on, however,

this capability

rather than functional. Aristocratic

how

representative she

was

little

came

to be curiously ornamental

Ellen might have hated to

know

to be.

Stowe's female characters are emblematic of this trend, for they progressively lose their "faculty."®^ (1859)

is

Mary Scudder

in

The Minister's Wooing

pure, delicate, even ethereal, perpetually framed in flowers and

Feminine Disestablishment

65

make the lightest biscuits and chum the men in her world who are, econom-

singing along with birds, but she can

the creamiest butter in town.

It is

worst downright

ically, at best unreliable, at

shiftless.

Mary's extraordinarily

mother had supported her visionary and poetic father before his appropriately early death. When the story opens, Mary and her mother practical

board and look after the local minister. Dr. Hopkins,

on divinity but could not possibly get an economic critique here,

women

think while their ratiocination

and

feeling,

Stowe's sympathies

bestows

all

if

a

his

symbolic

work;

women

men

provide the community luxuries of

the necessities of food and clothing.

at this point are

women

can write treatises

own dinner. Mrs. Stowe is offering one. The male poets and preachers

with the laboring classes on

the rewards at her disposal.

Stowe's early

who

The enforced

characters with the real business of

And

whom

she

close contact of life

makes them

useful in every sense; in the long run they are not just the providers, but the

true ministers and seers.

It is

Mary who

brings the lost sheep of the book,

the agnostic James Mervyn, back into the fold, not Dr. Hopkins.

Mary Scudder had many

predecessors in Stowe's fiction and few suc-

Mara Lincoln in the later novel The Pearl ofOrr's bland (1862), like Ellen Montgomery, is absolutely addicted to pretty things. Her grandparents, with whom she lives, lavish money on fancy clothes for her to wear running around alone on the seashore. They incur community reproach for cessors.

it,

they feel guilty about

it,

but they persist

in

the extravagance, obscurely

sure that they are only performing an act of justice. Mara, an artist of real talent,

has no "faculty" of any kind, although she regards her lack as a

regrettable deficiency. Stowe's a

own

ambivalence

second heroine, merry Sally Kittredge,

is

clear in her creation of

who has mastered all the skills Mara

Stowe reluctantly weds the story's somewhat insensitive hero after Mara's death. Eva van Arsdel, the heroine of the New York novels. My Wife and I and We and Our Neighbors, which Stowe wrote in the early 1870s, like Mara has no practical ability, but unlike her has no

has missed.

It is

to Sally that

Her lovely clothes are her very essence. Henry, her husband, passes the honeymoon appropriately in literal worship of the mysteries of feminine regrets.

Eva and Henry, one might add, are hardly the last American couple to confuse female finery with female sexuality. Eva is proud to be a parasite. Her charming wardrobe, her success as the ideal wife and hostess she purports to be, indicate not how much she can do, but how much her charm

dress;

can coerce others to do for her. Although Eva

world of aesthetic

on her cook, the

taste

Irish

fixes

up her home with

and even practical ingenuity, she

Mary, to attend to

all

the real

relies

work of

She makes almost nothing; she buys almost everything. She

is

a

completely

domesticity. a

"manager"

because she stretches her presumably limited budget, not because she imple-

ments

it.

She creates nothing from scratch,

as the

women

gifted with "fac-

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

66

ulty" did. She

much

admiration as

We are we

shopper rather than

a

is

as their souls,

worker; she wants her friends'

a

and she tends to confuse the two.

watching here more than the evolution of the Stowe heroine:

are witnessing also Stowe's ongoing historical analysis of the changing

societal

and economic role of the middle-class northern

Mary Scudder

preceding century.

woman

over the

lives a relatively self-sufficient existence

{performing certain important, even indispensable, tasks in a small eight-

New

eenth-century

England

decorative part, not so

up the poetry"

much

village;

Eva van Arsdel plays

keeping a household

in a post-Civil

Eva

is

if

her words, "keeping

War urban metropolis. Stowe is explicit about

the almost vindictive affection she feels for

and her

as, in

dependent

a

Eva

in a

way

that Susan

Warner

could never be about their over-involvement with their heroines.

ilk

the apotheosis of

fiction of the day; she

van Arsdel

is

justified

is

all

the saints

even, as her

who

name

starred in the popular feminine

on the usual religious grounds

number of male conversions

—

to her credit; but she

Eva

Eva she has the customary

suggests. Little

is

revisited.

on

also vindicated

economic grounds. In the newly commercialized and urbanized America of the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the

demonstrates,

more important, more

is

woman

consumer, Stowe

indispensable, than the

ducer; luxury items can and must function as necessities.

woman

With her

prousual

acumen, Stowe had grasped the actual meaning of the sentimental heroine and her crucial role

Advertising and

in

the

of consumer culture.

rise

The Transformation of the Euphemism

''Influence''':

David Potter has argued persuasively that the most important "institution" in a

consumer

society, dedicated as

satisfaction of artificial wants,

and values

in those

it

is

it is

advertising; advertising instills

America began

economy

in the

its

momentous

as consumers.®^

shift

from

Sewing Machine for the use of a losing battle. Daniel

Hints

fts

down

Frohman, involved

to Advertisers

( 1

well-known

in

in advertising.®^ In

$18,000

oflf^ered

by

the

Howe

back cover, but the magazine was fighting in

869) that "a

advertising."®'* Available surfaces in cities

advertisements

historians agree

productive to a consumer

prodigious growth

first

early 1870s, Harper's Magazine could turn

in

a

Most

decades between 1860 and 1890. Certainly, this was the

period which witnessed the

argued

"new needs"

addresses, thus "hastening their adjustment to potential

abundance" and "training" them to act that

and

to the creation, multiplication,

both advertising and theater,

man

do business without were increasingly covered by can't

the 1860s; advertising agencies formed rapidly. \^arious

writers, including

Mark Twain, Artemus Ward, and

Harte, lent their talents to the budding industry.®^ as early as 1867 labeled advertising the

A reviewer for the

"monomania of the

times."®®

Bret

Galaxy

By

the

67

Feminine Disestablishment 1880s, the advertising business

1900

life

had tripled

pre-Civil

its

was spending $95 million a year.®^ Advertising was more than a business, however;

War expenditure; by

it

and

a

theory of

human

it

involved a

way

of

nature. Both, moreover, had crucial links to the

feminine subculture of which Eva van Arsdel was a representative. In 1871, the year in which the

George Powell,

of Stowe's

first

New

York novels was

published,

a pioneer in advertising, directed the advertiser to "ignore

every person, place or thing except yourself, your address, and your "the great point," he concluded,

article";

of course to attract attention."^® Despite

"is

the crudely theatrical aspect of the

stage of advertising,

first

its

theorists

were early convinced that theirs was the technique of suggestion, of anticipating and even forming consumer tastes and needs without activating the consciousness of the potential buyer. Theirs, in short, was the technique of "influence" carried to

nology or

its

Unhampered by

logical extreme.

could talk frankly about the economic

aspirations, advertisers

One

purpose of such "influence."

religious termi-

writer explained that "a lack of ability to

long concentrate the attention and disinclination to concentrated mental eflFort is a

American

distinctly

trait";

the "busy pace" of American

life

anyone wishing to hold the attention of the public must be

that

means alert,

flamboyant, and ready to take advantage of the slightest opportunity.^^ "Influence," whether exerted is

a technique

adopted

society too

ist

much

less

in a

by advertising or anything else,

other words,

to challenge than to seduce a competitive capital-

hurry to get

its

tastes

and values

on the run, on the sly, and unawares. Indeed, "influence" if

in

is

a

in

any way but

form of

flattery,

dangerously insidious and ambitious one, for the advertiser studies the

a

needs and wants of his potential market with extraordinary care and intensity.

One

could say that the

late

nineteenth-century advertiser was as ready

and explore the unconscious;

as Freud, if for diflferent reasons, to posit

forced to abandon the conscious

occupied

as

it

life

was by commercial

and mind of the American public,

cares,

he was proportionately eager to

know and manipulate all the unconscious impulses of his subject. Nor were the new advertising agencies unaware that their logical audience was feminine; they knew that, in some not altogether fanciful sense, women would operate as the subconscious of capitalist culture which they must

tap, that the

feminine occupation of shopping would constitute the

dream-life of the nation. Nathaniel Fowler, the most important figure in early

American

advertising, asserted that

should be oriented toward

all

ads,

women. "Although

even those for men's items, substantially

all

men

are

readers of advertisements," Fowler explained, "an advertisement has not one

twentieth the weight with a

gence and the same .

.

.

man

social status.

that .

.

.

it

has with a

Woman

everything from shoes to shingles."^®

woman

of equal

intelli-

buys, or directs the buying of

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

68

Harriet Beecher Stowe was aware as early as 1871 that the

woman was

particularly conditioned to be not only the most likely object

of advertising, but

its

ablest

amateur practitioner. Eva van Arsdel,

essentially advertising techniques, she skilled at their exercise.

She

is

adept

brilliantly

is

any tricky billboard

so basic to her that

become

religion, has

poster.

I

have

responsive to their pressure and

is

second-guessing the real

at

wants of her friends and acquaintances; addicted to attention, she as cute as

as

what are

suggested, represents the proto-consumer mentality; formed by

and

modem

The giving and

is

as

quick

getting of flattery

functions as her epistemology. Domesticity, like

it

for her an aspect not of

work or

effort but of leisure,

manufactured Utopia which advertising incessantly suggests. Eva's

that

tastefully decorated

home, into which she

admiring friends, stands

as a sociological

invites her special

and especially

phenomenon midway between

the

\ ictorian home, a place whose (male) occupants were allowed to relax as a

reward for working, and the

modem

home,

a place

whose resources

provide their (male) residents with a reason for living and the only tion for

working

to Little Eva.

at all.^^

It is

not

Eva van Arsdel

just that

is

in

every

Eva van Arsdel

her urban environment as Little Eva was

among

is

way as

justifica-

the fitting successor

pampered and

her slaves on

idle in

a plantation

Old South. Both are promulgators of "influence." And feminine "influence," no matter how genuine the religious convictions which inspired its formulation and exercise, represented the first appearance of what would be the most important means of forming and controlling opinion in fully developed capitalist culture: "influence" was ironically the mother of advertising, the only faith of a secularized consumer society.

in the

The Moral Value of the Euphemism: Influence as Subversion

Most of the women engaged an's role, the

was

Stowe

who

are of special interest to

stressed the moral, not the

Yet they encountered

difficulties in

wom-

economic, aspects of

doing

so,

for the plain fact

that they not infrequently unconsciously modified moral principle in

the light of a

the rationalization of the middle-class

exponents of female "influence"

this study, unlike

their suasion.

in

more

was ideally exerted in was most successful where its function,

pressing circumstances. "Influence"

world of gentlemen and

ladies;

it

both overt and covert, was already understood and accepted. Its^roponents, like the liberal clergy,

avoided testing their grandiloquent claims on occa-

where protest, not mediation, was unmistakably called for. At such moments, they tacitly confessed that they were, as Bushnell depicted his wife, followers, that their "influence" was most potent in persuading people to go in the direction they were already heading. This is hardly to suggest that their conformity was unmotivated or unmitigated. The situation at the

sions

69

Feminine Disestablishment

heart of the temperance stories little

— women with few

men who

physical force fearing and resenting

even brutalized them

— was potentially

a

legal rights

and relatively

ignored, exploited, or

very real one.

was

Inevitably the pressure the formulators of "influence" exerted

moral than psychological, claimed, without realizing advertisers

outspoken than

less

insidious.

what they were admitting,

— wished to address the unconscious

of their audience. Their ethics were closely ethics of the marketplace, the

if

as

much

less

They proudly

that they

—

like the

as the conscious life

unintentionally related to the

methods of acquisition and

infiltration

by

which buyer and seller measure and manipulate one another. Conservative as Sarah Hale and the other exponents of "influence" seemed, they were in some sense extremists, inevitably untrained in public responsibility and acChurchgoers

countability.

most attracted to

all,

they clung to Christianity; yet they were

potentially subversive uses in a secular culture.

its

Participation in radical causes

on the part of the practitioners of

"influ-

ence" was strikingly low. Ladies, Sarah Hale had once tactfully reminded

Lydia Maria Child, an early and courageous opponent of slavery, were not

encouraged to deliver rine

Beecher and

political views. Hale's closest allies,

Emma

Willard, took neutral or conservative stands on

crucial public issues. Beecher

the view that the

Grimke

women

was the self-designated feminine apologist for

had no business

sisters for their

later years, she

women like Catha-

in politics. In the 1830s, she

attacked

public lectures on behalf of Abolitionism; in

published several books to demonstrate that

women

need of the vote.^^ Willard's conservatism was equally pronounced, eccentric.

On

the eve of the Civil

War, she argued

had no

more

if

in print that conflict

Her extraordipowers of euphemism could not

could be avoided by making the slaves perpetual servants.^^

nary suggestion found few backers.

If

the

avert national struggle, they could ignore

it.

Hale discreetly piloted

Godey's through the perilous waters of the Civil

about slaves or

—and

battles; she has

royally.^'*

War

a

shaky

with nary a word

the distinction of having "cut" the Civil

War

Harriet Farley (1813-1907), also an educator and an editor,

was committed with Hale, Beecher, and Willard to the effort to extend women's dominion without running the risk of rewriting their charter. Farley, however, was forced to apply the politics of politeness directly to the relations of labor and capital.

Her career consequently oflFers a

case study

both of the painful limits of "influence" as an agent of genuine social change

and of

means of devious social control. In the 1820s, Francis Lowell designed the Lowell factories, to be located on the Merrimac River, on shrewdly semi-utopian and largely practical lines.^^

its

manifold

By

possibilities as a

the 1830s and 1840s, the factories were celebrated for their

by relatively high wages and good living condicame from farms all over New England and the central

mill-girls; originally lured

tions, these girls

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

70

Atlantic states. Bright, ambitious, literate, they were, as their best-known

Lucy Larcom (1824-93), later claimed, rather like the girls from the same area who would be going to Mount Holyoke and Vassar in the next generation. They were required to attend church at Lowell by their representative,

employers, as they had probably been required to do at families; a

number

of

them

joined the

"Improvement

home by

their

Circles" at the Univer-

and Congregational churches. From these two groups, two very ama-

salist

teur magazines appeared in the late 1830s.

Lowell Offering, edited in

its

They were soon merged

as the

most interesting phase by Harriet Farley and

Harriott Curtis.

According to her own account,^ ^ Farley was the daughter of

poor

a

and mobile Congregationalist clergyman and an eventually (and understand-

was one of ten children, most of whom died relatively young of consumption. She took the usual routes for an aspiring but impoverished New England girl of the period: although she picked up French and embroidery in a short stint in a nearby academy, she largely educated herself; she taught school; she wrote rather bad verse and fiction. Eventually she tended first a loom and then the Lowell Offering in the mills whose absentee owners boasted discreetly of their profits, and their periodicals. She does not tell us in the autobiographical revelations sprinkled a la Hale amid her editorials that by 1844 and for long after she was extra-

ably) insane mother. She

salaried

by Amos Lawrence, one of the most

influential shareholders in the

Lowell operation; she reveals only that she finds

must have, "to hear herself spoken of This was the charge being leveled Offering

mined amid

by operatives

in the

mid- 1840s against Farley and her

mill-girls,

like the labor

now almost

worsening conditions to win decent wages and hours.

steadily

Brownson

never high, was

organizer Sarah Bagley, deter-

Farley had risen to prominence in 1840 Orestes

rather hard, as indeed she

as a vile tool for aristocratic tyrants."^^

(whose circulation among the

non-existent)

it

for his attack

when

she publicly rebuked

on factory conditions. She had then

lished a kind of confusion engage as her specialty:

"Neither have

estabI

ever

discovered that any restraints were imposed upon us but those which were necessary for the peace and comfort of the whole and for the promotion

of the design for which of

it

and

as fast as

we

we

money, as much and approved "pic-

are collected, namely, to get

can."^® Farley

opposed

strikes

niques" as suitable protest demonstrations for ladies.^®

It

is

too easy to

assume, however, as Bagley sometimes did, that Farley was bought and sold.

As

she told

it,

her purpose had been to win respect for the class to which

known former mill-girls, she said, who spent their living down their former occupation. As though to substanti-

she belonged. She had lives

hiding or

ate Farley's defense,

one operative years

later

was

to reminisce in telling

terms about the boost the Offering's pieces once gave to factory morale:

Feminine Disestablishment

71

"they appeared to us as good as anybody's writings.

who had

written by people

was

literature

themselves

never worked

at all!"®®

How

precisely Farley's aim.

They sounded as if To palliate work by

could the operatives respect

they were acknowledgedly accepting skimpy pay for long

if

hours and poor accommodations? Farley's thinking here was of the liberal minister lauding the voluntary system. Offering

itself,

was

a traditionalized

had already been treated well (how

and would

like,

due from render

it

a

else the picnic little

The

spontaneously.

a notice that

or the periodical

one

at all?)

would announce one must now force one's

better; a strike

policy had not worked, that

group apparently

like that

"picnique," like the

form of euphemism,

perhaps, to be treated a

flatly that laissez-faire

A

much

insufliciently impressed or intimidated to

painful trap Farley

to her radical feminine descendants

if

found herself

in

is

obvious

not to her radical feminine contempo-

raries.

Farley had of course a rather different explicit political rationale for her conservatism. to them": to

own.

We

"To convince

do

we

this,

people," Farley explained,

"we must

gain access

cannot assault them with opinions contrary to their

cannot alarm them by revealing the deprivation which could

suggest our rage, and their danger. In an immensely telling,

must "do good by

if trite

stealth."®^

We

must sugarcoat the proverbial

summed up

phrase, Farley

On

her doctrine:

pill.

we

the one hand, in this phrase as everywhere

her editorials, Farley was elaborating on the Christian prescriptions to

in

which the proponents of female "influence" so often referred: turn the other cheek, return good for evil; reform by example not by protest. On the other hand she was, of course unconsciously, suggesting something faintly subver"do good by

sive in its connotations:

has implications other than

stealth''

was advocating the decorous deviousness which was Sarah Hale's Godey's Lady's Book, from which ladies well as obey their superiors, or in Catharine Beecher's

Biblical ones. Farley

presiding policy in

learned to cajole as

Hartford Female Seminary, where curves.

girls

were instructed always to "move

in

^^

The

novels and poetry published by

women between

1845 and 1875,

heyday of feminine authorship, continually manifest an apparent and sometimes actual confusion of moral standards. There are countless sentimental stories in which the heroine is accused of some fault or sin in the great

precisely because she

is

too naive or too pure to clear herself. Astrea Har-

mon, the heroine of Mrs. 3.

popular Civil

War

Bella Spencer's Tried

story published in 1866,

Confederacy when she has South to devote herself only because she as

it

is

in fact

and True or Love and Loyalty,

is

believed to be a spy for the

given up her family and fortune

as a nurse to the

Union

cause.

She arouses

in

the

distrust

attempting to shield her infamous husband, a rebel and,

evolves in the rather extraordinary denouement of the book, one of

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

72

With a reckless abandon not characteristic of her sister Spencer makes the fair Astrea guilty of bigamy and minor treason

Lincoln's assassins. novelists,

precisely to display the imperishable

innocence. Spencer's heroine

her heart Elsie

is

by

constantly assailed quality of her

no longer subject to the law: the impulse of

is

definition holy.

Dinsmore (1868) and

famous of the

if

"Elsie"

Elsie's

Holidays at Roselands (1869), the most

books turned out

Finley (1828-1909), a bedridden single

woman

frontation between feminine sanctions and

ower

father, the youthful

by Martha from Ohio, focus on a con-

in a nearly endless series

man-made

Horace Dinsmore

dictates. Elsie's

(usually mistaken

for Elsie's brother), adores his saintly and tearful

little girl,

wid-

by strangers but he also

demands absolute and unquestioning obedience from her on all occasions. Elsie is usually eager to comply with his demands, even to anticipate them, except when he requests her to do anything which conflicts with her interpretation of God's commands. Since Horace is not a real believer, he twice attempts to make her violate her conscience. Both incidents turn on the issue of the preservation of the Sabbath. On the first occasion, Mr. Dinsmore asks Elsie to play a secular air

determines to

with a

on the piano.

make her sit on the piano stool without food

his wishes.

She does not

most efficacious

relent; she falls

The second

faint.

angered father

Elsie refuses; her

until she

complies

the stool in what proves

oflF

confrontation occurs

when

Elsie will

not read aloud to her ailing father from a secular book on Sunday; her

punishment consists of months of

isolation,

poor food, and, most important,

the loss of her father's embarrassingly coveted kisses. Mr. Dinsmore claims

on

with some

his side

justification the sanction of

father and mother"; Elsie

is

Holy

treated like an abject criminal

writ:

by

all

"Honor thy the members

of the large household in which she resides.

The

fact remains that, even at age eight, the

little

girl

knows

best.

So

meek and mild, Elsie at bottom possesses a self-confidence as great as any of the Old Testament prophets she delights to read. She triumphs by a lengthy illness which terminates in her apparent death, the reading of her touching will,

and

a

miraculous and timely resurrection into a thoroughly repentant

and converted Papa's arms. Christianity with

its

messages of hope for the

— oppressed "the him become fool that he may be be wise" — has been pressed into the service of the beleaguered feminine ego. last shall

It

must have been

a

first," "let

winnow commandments

difficult for Finley's fans to

satisfaction at Elsie's

unconscious delight

adherence to the

at

out their conscious of

God from

their

her resultant defiance of the commands, paternal or

otherwise, of men.

Even when is

absorbed

in

a pious

female figure

in the sentimental literature

of the day

virtuous actions or self-sacrificing feelings which her whole

world unites to applaud, she

is

often

still

exploiting the paradoxical anti-

Feminine Disestablishment

morality of the

New

which appeared

in Godey's in 1852, a distraught

73

much about midnineteenth-century American culture as about Christianity. The feminine self-abnegation lauded in the temperance tales and in so much of the popular fiction of the time is in some real sense immoral. In a poem by one "M. W." ises

Testament

who

her criminal husband,

we

despairingly

ways

in

that reveal as

but determined wife prom-

has apparently asked (whether hopefully or

are not informed)

Forsake thee? Never!

she

if

going to leave him:

is

Though

the

mark

Of Cain were stamped upon thy brow, Though thy whole soul with guilt were dark, Fear not that

We

The

curious way, she

He has given

less

is

pledging to treat her sinful spouse equally unfairly.

than what she has earned, she will pay him with more than

somehow impervious

response

is

is

wife has been (one assumes) unfairly treated; but,

he deserves, but the principle is

now.®^

notice amid this extravaganza of self-immolation that morality

strangely irrelevant. in a

will leave thee

I

punitive in

the same. Each of

them

outward influences and

to its

is

mercy: he cannot shake

This strangely vengeful streak

is

is

self-involved, each

common

And

sense.

her

her.

not only in the feminine fiction

visible

of the day but also in innumerable "straight"

comments made by women on

public and private concerns. Sarah Hale, in one of the earliest issues of the Ladies' Magazine, explains with

diplomacy and insight

open to her feminine readers and what Authority over the

may,

if

they

men must

.

.

.

its

just

what power

gratifications are:

never be usurped; but

will, exert their talents,

is

still,

women

and [by] the opportunities nature

has furnished, obtain an influence in society that will be paramount to authority.

They may enjoy

the labors to acquire cares,

it;

the luxuries of wealth, without enduring

and the honors of

and the glory of victory, without

oflice,

without feeling

suflfering the

its

dangers of the

battle.^*

This

is

Hale

is

a crucial passage for the history oflFering

them and

of middle-class northern

rationalizing for

them the joys of

women,

for

vicarious livers,

of parasites. 1 hese are their pleasures, not just (of course) as readers of Hale's periodicals but as readers, period

admitted or understood

it,

—and

as

women. Hale would not have

but the role she outlines for the lady

is

that of

Eva van Arsdel, that of the consumer. Hale was transforming feminine exclusion into exemption. In her monumental Woman's Record (1853), a vast collection of biographies of every

— THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

74

distinguished

woman from Eve down

to

George Sand, Hale calmly

excul-

pated female criminals at the lenient bar of feminine understanding. She

evolved a highly original interpretation of the Fall according to which Genesis was a testament to female superiority: woman's servitude to

was her punishment for better stuff.

sin precisely

man

because she was made of finer and

A writer for the Congregationalist magazine, the New Englander,

indignantly protested Mrs. Hale's whitewash job on Nero's mother, Agrippina

II.

Hale had acknowledged

pleaded eloquently that she was it

a

a

few defects

"still,

above

and

all

stock villainess, but

in this

"Was

a motherV

in all

mother's heart that murdered Lollia Paulina?" the reviewer demanded,

with

a certain justifiable sense of outrage.®^

Yet Hale had hold of tives of maternity.

The

argument

a well-nigh invincible

cult of

motherhood was nearly

in the

preroga-

as sacred in

mid-

nineteenth-century America as the belief in some version of democracy.

Books on mothers of famous men, especially Mary Washington, mother of

George Washington, poured from the presses in the 1840s and 1850s;®® their message was that men achieved greatness because of the instruction and inspiration they received

from

The

their mothers.

divergent devotees of maternity were

many and

motives of the often-

moth-

substantial. Praise of

erhood could bolster and promote the middle-class woman's biological function as tantamount,

if

not supjerior, to her

imprison her within her body by glorifying her to outproduce her over, such tributes

were

prolific,

its

economic productivity;

unique capacities; encourage

uneducated immigrant competitors. More-

acknowledged some potent

power Dotha Bushnell had

losing the

lost

facts.

Mothers, while they

exercised,

were

in actuality

power of a different kind. In the mid-eighteenth century, Jonathan Edwards kept a stem fatherly eye on his flock and on his own offspring. Samuel Hopkins, who lived for several years with the Edwards family, described Edwards' close familial surveillance: "when they [the children] gaining

first

discovered any considerable degree of self-will and stubbornness, he

would attend to them til he had thoroughly subdued them and brought them to submit."®^ Edwards was a model of eighteenth-century paternal practice, although probably not representative of

ble that paternal authority

was

a

waning force

it.

home: before the for lunch; after

it

seems indisputa-

in the middle-class

family in the century following Edwards' death.

locked into tightening business patterns, was

Yet

less

American

The American and

father,

less likely to

be at

War, for example, he usually went back to his house he was more likely not to. The middle-class mother had

Civil

it,

an increasing monopoly on her children's time,

if

not on their respect.

In her widely popular Letters to Mothers (1838), Lydia

Huntley Sigour-

ney explicated the omnipotent quality of maternal influence:

Feminine Disestablishment

How

and perfect

entire

is

dominion over the unformed character

this

of your infant. Write what you will

wand

75

upon the

printless tablet

with your

of love. Hitherto your influence over your dearest friend, your

Now you

most submissive servant, has known bounds and obstructions. have over

mind

a

new-bom immortal

exercises over the body.

indeed pass away; but while

It is

this

it

almost that degree of power which the

The period of this influence must 88 lasts, make good use of it.

.

.

.

the lure of the total control found only in

illicit

authority planted within

apparent warning about the perils and pleasures of legitimate power

which makes Sigoumey's words

so fascinating.

A

kind of heresy

is

once

again the feminine subtext. Significantly, mothers increasingly took over the

formerly paternal task of conducting family prayers.®^

Emmons announced lived

Nathaniel

to his Franklin congregation that his son Erastus had

and probably died "stupid" with

sin,

he clearly

judgment lay with himself; yet he was laying door or that of Mrs. Emmons. Like

was

salvation of his oflFspring

He

When

little if

predecessor Edwards, he assumed the

his

finally a

some obligation of any guilt at his own

felt

matter between them and their Savior.

could and did instruct, discipline, and evaluate them; Mrs.

presumably aided him

in the process;

but they could do no more.

Emmons Emmons

never envisioned the Last Judgment scene which the theories of latter-day educators like Mrs. Sigoumey, not to speak of Freud or Dr. Spock, would suggest: a scene in his family,

which the accused Erastus would

and not so much to

his father as to his

pass the

mother!

mother of the mid-nineteenth century, encouraged to and educate her

child,

blame on to

The American

breast-feed, oversee,

was theoretically assuming, for

better and worse,

almost godlike prominence.

The cult of motherhood,

like the

Mother's

Day

it

eventually established

American calendar, was an essential precondition to the flattery American women were trained to demand in place of justice and equality. in the

It oflFered

them, of course,

a

very genuine basis for self-respect.

It

gave them,

moreover, an innate, unassailable, untestable claim to charismatic authority

and prestige, a sanction for subjectivity and

erhood promulgated by

grams of

women

like

child-raising, but they also

self-love.

The theories of moth-

Sigoumey generated important

pro-

found wide use

as justification for

women

over the course of

conventionally unmatemal pursuits. American

the nineteenth century were able to exonerate almost any action performed

name of motherhood. During the Civil War, countless northern women demanded on the grounds of their maternal nature the right to follow, nurse, and occasionally harass the Union army. It was no accident in the

sacred

that Clara Barton's "boys" liked to call their childless nurse "mother"; or that

the most famous maverick nurse of the war, a middle-aged

woman who

left

— THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

76

her

Illinois

hospitals,

the

last

army "Mother" Bickerdyke. Elizabeth Blackwell was not

family to "clean things up" on the battlefield and

was christened

woman doctor to argue for her sex's right

its

moral and

development, with the simple time-worn reminder of their

"God-given

.

.

.

call,

the

to full participation in the

medical profession, and even to guardianship over procreative capacities, what she liked to

in

scientific

at least potential

with ringing emphasis, their

maternal nature."®*^ Even the vote was claimed by many,

including that most courageous and prolific pioneer, Elizabeth

Cady

Stan-

ton, as a destined portion of the maternal inheritance.^^

Neither medicine nor politics was to prove the most productive area for feminine influence. Perhaps the distant

from the nursery

forum and the

hospital

still

seemed too

fully to substantiate the maternal rationale.

grade-school teaching appeared a mere step firm conviction displayed by

many

away from

cribside duty.

But

The

early nineteenth-century feminist pio-

women's education that classroom control of America's primaryschool system was as surely the divine prerogative of their sex as absolute sway over their children's unformed souls proved prophetic. Over the course of the nineteenth century, women gradually came to constitute the overwhelming majority of grade-school teachers in America's public and private schools, a feat they accomplished in no other country, and one which was to cause immense uneasiness in the men involved in American neers in

education by the turn of the twentieth century. ^^ Typically, however, they gained their supremacy by working for a mere half of the salary customarily ofl^ered to ity

men; despite their numbers they never achieved economic equal-

or leadership positions.

The

which characterized the feminine takeover of America's schools symbolized women's more general position pattern of defeat within victory

within their culture. public

life

If

they had been spared the contagious corruption of

—and the gains

this

exemption achieved for

they had also missed the benefits, the education manifest spoils and responsibilities of oflice, less

it

women

women were

oflFers.

real

Barred from the

understandably sought

legitimate rewards for their very real energies: psychological, emotional,

what they

called "moral" or "religious" control over the

minds of

their

actual or symbolic offspring. Naturally desirous of seeing others in a state

of ideal susceptibility to their "influence," they were inevitably conflicted about, sometimes hostile

to,

whatever diminished that receptivity: atheism,

"demon rum," or the kind of scientific, intellectual, and artisti^c achievement from which they had themselves been painfully isolated.

Feminine Disestablishment

11

The Feminine Advantage

Both

liberal ministers

and

women

literary

had

lost practical

function within

American society and were anxious to replace it with emotional indispensability; they turned of necessity from the exercise of power to the exertion of "influence." Both would in their

and knowledge, whether ity;

in the

they would substitute,

own ways exchange dogma

form of

for prayer

or of scholarship, for sensibil-

skills

in a sense, literature for life.

Yet there were

obvious and important differences between the position and reaction of the ministers and those of the

development of

I

1875, neither the literary

women

nor the

have been discussing had a room of their own.

She was reported capable of tending dictatir^g a

new

crucial to the

culture.

Harriet Beecher Stowe's creative efforts

and

which would be

differences

modem American

Between 1820 and clergymen

women,

is

a typical

one

in

The

liberal

saga of

feminine annals.

a child, giving instructions to the cook,

story simultaneously.

The

ministerial pattern

was

strik-

ingly similar. Sylvester Judd, an innovative eccentric Unitarian minister, did

romped around his study; Horace Bushnell liked to work in the same situation; Henry Ware, Jr., actually composed his sermons with a child in his arms. Virginia Woolf has written with extraordinary perception of a woman's constant and constantly frustrated need to have "a room of one's own." Perhaps she understood less well why women,

all his

writing while his children

and others

in a like situation, failed to

not even formulate

it

as a goal. If a

achieve that goal, indeed often could

person

sciously or otherwise, devalued, pushed aside,

foremost reassurance of her or

America,

women

no matter whether conshe or he craves first and

feels,

So

his existence.

in

and ministers were not simply denied private rooms: they

denied themselves. Given their cultural isolation, a their

on

own

life,

could seem

like further

little

demand

for a

room

The

professional

women who

studies they supposedly coveted, ladies like the popular

authors "Fanny Fern" (Sara Pay son Willis, 1812-72) or Lydia Huntley

goumey,

of

renunciation of an already slender claim

acceptance of solitary confinement.

got those

mid-nineteenth-century

Si-

obsessively reminded their readers of the incessant flow of inter-

ruptions which was their daily

lot: a just

reminder of the obstacles they

faced and overcame, yet also a hint of the multitudinous nature of their indispensability.

The ministers who designated their studies communal terri-

tory where the children played with toys, mother darned or read, and father

wrote sermons,

also feared the isolation of a

room of

their

own; they too

sought domestic importance as compensation for societal neglect.

Yet the ministers

in

sional prerogatives as the

forgoing their privacy were abandoning profes-

women were not.

Their Edwardsean predecessors

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

78

had made of their studies protected sanctuaries; Samuel Hopkins and Nathaniel

wives

Emmons were shielded from their often-numerous offspring by their in

ways

still

American

familiar to successful

They

males.

hardly

turned to their children for occupational inspiration or camouflage.

women

The

Sigoumey and Fern, in contrast, had never possessed any space for their own use. Hence, what was extraordinary about the vignette of Harriet Beecher Stowe could be that she was writing, not that she had a baby in her arms. What was notable about the mothers and grandmothers of

was hardly

picture of Sylvester Judd

other words, the

setting. In

be advertising her

was

new

like

woman

own

without a room of her

significance, but the minister in the

calling attention to his

new

same

women were freed

as

still

situation

as well as enfeebled

consumers than they had enjoyed

as

by

more quesproducers. More-

the shift in their economic status; they were to have greater,

powers

could

insignificance.

In certain ways, middle-class

tionable,

domestic

his literary activity but his

if

which they paid tribute represented no ethical they were women advocating the womanly, even

over, the domestic values to

transvestism on their part: if in

aggressive ways.

By

locating their careers en famille in several senses,

they were on one level making the best of a bad situation.

and large

in the

home;

And

but as unworthy? ally

undomestic

why the

not debunk the outside world not as indiflPerent

home could

activities. It

upward mobility on the

They were by

was

sanction rather than limit tradition-

a sign of the

new

self-conscious sense of

part of literary middle-class

women

that they

whose domain in so many ways seemed, if conspicuously more elevated than their own, yet tantalizingly contiguous to it. The liberal ministers were in a different position. Their economic loss did not necessitate any automatic compensatory economic gain. Certain of their traditional privileges had ceased to be efficacious or possible. As we shall see, they assimilated and catered to coveted the

elite

prerogatives of their ministers,

proto-consumer values; they coveted, even emulated, maternity and the illicit

sanctions and real satisfactions

it

off^ered.

Yet

in

modeling themselves

women parishioners, whose sources of strength seemed less vulnerable to the forces of debilitation sapping their own prestige, they were partially

on

their

patterning themselves on a group ally

less

publicly distinguished and profession-

accomplished than the members of their

been.

And

own

the feminine sources of strength were

calling

had traditionally

less substantial

than they

seemed.

The upward

mobility of the

sumers gave them an edge in status

improvement

in their lot it

power;

it

in is

or self-esteem. This

genuine gains

century, but that

in

women

and

question as natural proto-conuncertain that is

not to say that

in their self-image

was perhaps

it

them there was no

ofl^ered

over the mid-nineteenth

significantly less than they thought

it

was.

79

Feminine Disestablishment

Nothing

is

more

distressing to the feminist historian than the

flushtide self-congratulation that pervades the

Hale;

it

is

work

of a

atmosphere of

woman

like

Sarah

understandable, but nonetheless painful that, to groups whose

potentialities are largely suppressed,

and probably

is,

any enlarged exercise of faculty seems,

at least in the short

whatever inner conflicts

it

creates,

range an almost unmitigated good,

whatever limitations or long-term conse-

condemn the anticipatory complacency of women like Hale as to condescend to members of ethnic or racial minority groups who "waste" their money today on big cars and fancy

quences

clothes.

it

carries. It

The

is

as pointless to

self-conscious

and others was natural, yet ministers and

women

if it

devious sense of social mobility

was

by Hale

delusive. Inevitably the uneasy alliance of

deepened their mutual entanglement

unperceived forms of dishonesty.

felt

in intricate

and

MINISTERS

AND MOTHERS Changmo and Exchanging

Roles

The Data of Biography: Devotees of the Press In discussing the ministerial and feminine impulse

change, zines,

we need

toward articulation and

not rely solely on impressions gleaned from novels, maga-

memoirs, and

By picking thirty liberal women who were among the leading liter-

tracts, invaluable as these are.

ministers and thirty middle-class

ary propagandists for a sentimentalized culture, and analyzing the relevant facts of career, geography, class, religious affiliation, family, in

the context of a broader sample,

it

and self-image

seems possible to obtain more precision

about the causes and workings of the feminization process under discussion. (See

Appendix

A.)^

should disclaim here, however, any attempt

I

quantitative methods.

questions of

my

discussed here;

between groups

I

use the information gleaned

from asking

at

hard

certain

control groups to detail and explore the self-images already I

am

ministerial

admittedly clarifying the similarities and differences

and feminine groups rather than comparing them to

in the larger culture.

To start

with generalized collective characteristics, one might note that

the sixty people in question were

all,

not

just

spokespersons, but self-con-

scious spokespersons; they formulated the problems and policies of the

groups from which they came and they placed inordinate, value

a

tremendous, perhaps an

on the process of formulation. They were dedicated

to the

active promulgation of liberal religious ends through literary means.

ministers of course

were

official

representatives of the liberal

The

wing of the

1

Ministers

Protestant Church.

A

Almost intent,

all

women came from

third of the

several married ministers,

and Mothers

many were

8

ministerial famihes,

regularly reviewed in religious organs.

of them were noted for their religious commitment, sermonizing

and the fervor with which they reinterpreted and softened Calvinism.

Ministers and

women alike saw themselves and the groups whose views they

Henry Bellows, a Unitarian minister and reformer, inquired rhetorically: "From what other body of men in proportion to their numbers, has this country drawn so expressed essentially as

largely

its

men

of

members of

a literary class. In 1869,

letters, its poets, its historians ... as

from the Unitarian

denomination and even the Unitarian pulpit?"^ Sarah Hale, collecting her Record of distinguished a

women

of

all

ages, found, especially in her

own

era,

preponderance of authors.

A few of the clergymen and ladies under consideration wrote primarily

—Joseph Tuckerman (1778-1841) and Catharine Beecher come to mind — but had some ambition for career reform- or religious-minded tracts

a

all

of

belles lettres.

The women

usually published primarily fiction and poetry;

the ministers sometimes turned their hands to fiction or poetry

— Andrews

Norton (1786-1853), the Ware brothers, Sylvester Judd, Henry Ward Beecher, James Hosmer, and John Abbot (1793-1879) did so but they were more likely to undertake less directly imaginative work. They might write

—

literary criticism for the

New

North American Review or the Christian Examiner

Peabody brothers did. Teaching literature was a possibility; Charles FoUen instructed Harvard students in German letters, Bela Edwards (1802-52) introduced Andover or the

Englander, as Austin Phelps and the

pupils to the English classics.

and studies with

Some

ministers published historical

memoirs

a strongly literary bent: the biographical sketches of

Em-

mons and Hopkins by E. A. Park (1808-1900) are justly famous, as the tributes of Henry Bacon (181 3-56) to Sarah Edgarton Mayo and "Charlotte" are justly forgotten. Clergymen might compose highly elegant and polished sermons very much designed for publication: Those penned by F. W. P. Greenwood (1797-1843) were snatched up by the "gemmy" ladies' annuals of the day. Ministers could edit a newspaper as Henry Beecher did in New York, or a denominational periodical as Horace Bushnell did in New Haven. Whatever aspect of literary activity these men and women practiced, they did so intensely, profusely, and more or less successfully. It is

important to realize that

advantage of a revolution with the process of

women

in the press

clerical

and ministers

alike

were taking

which had occurred concomitantly

and feminine "disestablishment."

No

"profile"

can be established for them without a discussion of the relatively

meaning of their

literary activity. Until the early nineteenth

ship had not been a profession in the a matter of finding a

new

century author-

modem sense of the word:

it

had been

paying patron rather than of pleasing a reading public.

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

82

In 1820, the books sold in the United States netted half a million dollars; in 1860, this figure

become

of a

risen to

and

a business,

it

twelve and

had

a half million.^ Publishing

operated increasingly under the laws of capitalist

was dependent on technological breakthrough, centralizaof resources, strict attention to profits, and the creation and exploitation dependable large market through advertising and quick transportation

development; tion

had

it

facilities.

The Harper

brothers offer a case study in the commercialization of

northeastern culture.

When the four young men, middle-class and ambitious

Methodists from Long Island, gradually expanded their prosperous printing business to a full-time publishing effort over the course of the 1820s, they

were making and heralding trends

new and quick methods of printing. They

they experimented shrewdly with

invested early in stereotypes, introduced in 1830s, they

had

installed

thousand copies of before.

The

a

During the same period,

in their field.

New

York around

1813;

by the

steam presses. By 1848, they could turn out twelve

page

in

an hour, a rate undreamt of a short two decades

Harpers, and those

who were

quickly to imitate them, had the

machinery to support mass production.'*

The so

brothers were of course in

were most of the

New York City, and, by

possibilities for

highly lucrative,

gious, publishing. Before the 1820s, an author

the local printer, often at his

own

was

War,

the Civil

not entirely presti-

if

likely to take his

book

to

expense.^ In the years between 1800 and

was published outside New York, Boston, and Philadelphia.^ Small-town firms were to find it harder and harder to survive in the 1840s and 1850s; in the years between 1840 and 1850, 1810, fifty percent of

American

fiction

only eight percent of American fiction was published outside Boston, and Philadelphia.^

And everyone knew which

New

York,

of these three cities

had the commercial edge. Even the cultivated, philanthropic Careys of

American publishers before the advent of the Harpers, did not achieve national circulation. Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Lydia Huntley Sigoumey, known for their pious and evangelical works, in mid-career switched from New England publishers to a New York firm Philadelphia, the most important

— Harper's, of course. At mid-century, Edward Everett, the great Brahmin orator,

and Henry

Ward

Beecher, the famous Brooklyn preacher,

when they published in Robert Bonner's spectacularly the New York Ledger; they ignored their critics, for the Bonner's paper, a pioneer

in the use

a

fire

successful weekly, plain fact

was

that

of advertising, was the most widely read,

best-paying weekly in the country. Bonner was an educated the Harper brothers were neither.

drew

The

eldest,

if

rakish man;

John, liked to say,

"I

am

only

humble maker of books," and, as his biographer adds, "he spoke the truth."® The brothers were kind to writers by the rather unkind standards of

their day, yet their

primary

interest,

not surprisingly, lay

in

the public and

.

Ministers

its

demands, not

these

new

and Mothers

authors and their needs.

in the

83

The pubHc was

available to

no public had ever been before. Reformers and lament the lag between America's rapidly increasing

publishers as

educators were wont to population and

its

educational

but nonetheless schools

facilities,

at all levels

—day schools, Sunday Schools, academies, high schools, and colleges— were and

proliferating in the 1830s, 1840s,

1850s.

A

nation of democrats,

its

by burgeoning newspaper coverage of current doings, was willing to read different fare purveyed by the same cheap press. For various

appetite whetted

reasons, the southern readers

pens, but this loss literary

sometimes eschewed the products of northern

was more than canceled by the opening of midwestem

markets to eastern publishers with the advent of the railroads

1850s.^ In 1826, Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, z popular

and

in the 1840s

laid

Fanny Fern's Fern Leaves From Fanny's Portfolio sold 80,000 copies and was read literally from coast to coast. ^° Not inappropriately, a Pullman car was eventually christened with book of the

time, sold 5,750 copies; in 1853,

the successful author's name.

Given such as just that

—

a

market, shrewd publishers naturally treated their business

The

a business.

circulation; they capitalized ies.

Harpers' motto was cheap prices and large

on

religious family series

and educational

Like their competitors, the brothers encouraged writers to

librar-

suit the

supply to the demand. ^^ In 1843, a reviewer for the North American Review, a prestigious periodical

which the

best

minds of Boston could not save from

dullness and poor circulation, complained bitterly:

Literature begins to assume the aspect and undergo the mutations of

The

trade.

printer and the bookseller, to the

becoming as mechanical as that of the being created by the same causes and subject

author's profession

same

laws.

.

.

.

The

is

for a particular kind of authorship just at a restaurant.

^^

Drawing on the ing business, the thors: to

principles of the

new

emerging and closely related

keep up demand, the public must be constantly reminded that

slow creative author,^^ It

Such

much

a policy less

was hardly helpful

helped prolific and careless souls like

if

truthfully, that

Sigoumey 's

writing great works, but by "merely

.

.

.

a

to a careful and

to a theologian, laboring for years

Lydia Sigoumey, as intent on acquisition unkindly,

advertis-

publishers encouraged high productivity in their au-

particular writer existed.

"system."

name of his customers calls as he would bespeak a dinner

publisher in the

on

a

Henry Ward Beecher and

Poe could point out enormous fame came not from as

on

art.

keeping continually

in

the eye,

.

.

by appealing continually with little things to the ear of the great, overgrown, and majestical gender, the critical and bibliographical rabble."^'*

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

84

Fanny Fern, was destined, as a contemporary put it, "to feed the multitudes on the plain rather than to pour nectar for the Olympians."^^ Henry Ward Beecher published his sermons in the weekly press almost as fast as he spoke them: then he collected them in volumes, like his "Lyceum" lectures, to gamer extra profits. One commentator, tartly noting Beecher's shrewd instincts for publicity and cash, extolled him sarcastically: "Oh! most noble Mr. Beecher! Money has no charms for thee, never dost thou debase thyself by exhibiting "^^ [thyself] like a showman. It was no accident, moreover, that Sigoumey, ^^ Fern, and Beecher were all primarily magazine and newspaper writers. Edgar Allan Poe, a brilliant analyst of a market he was never able fully to Lydia Sigoumey,

like the equally successful

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

exploit for himself, realized that the "energetic, busy spirit of the age [tends]

wholly to the magazine

saw

literature."^®

magazines proliferating

literary

enough, they were

The decades between in ever-greater

1800 and 1865

numbers; interestingly

content and orientation predominantly domestic and

in

religious.

meaning of these changes

In assessing the

activity of the ministerial is

not that

and feminine groups,

clergymen and

all

in literary

women who

I

should

— but rather that they turned to

stress that the point

entered the literary

1820 and 1875 were intent on making a financial killing

not

production for the

field

between

—many clearly were

literature precisely at a time

when

it

was

becoming a business, and that the majority of them made a success of it. These facts inevitably colored their literary activity and their attitude toward it. Literature, with its apparent lack of professional requirements, could be treated as

a

hobby; most of the

men and women

in

question

preferred to define themselves as primarily ministers and theologians,

women and

housewives: Christians

first,

and writers second. In any

whatever their actual predilections, current opinion forbade a

woman

to publish a

work concerned with thoroughly

informed by secular ambitions for

artistic excellence.

Peabody (1799-1847), praising Lydia Sigoumey view

in 1835,

in the

skill,

and

clerical

clergyman or

secular themes or

Reverend William North American Re-

demonstrated the conjunction of femininity,

ocre literary

a

case,

religiosity,

medi-

complicity in one loaded compliment.

Because her genius makes no claim to "the very highest attributes of poetry," he points out, spirit"

with

its

true feminine genius; for in contrast to man's "militant

is

it

"fierce energy," "feminine creativity will

always be found on

religion's side."^^

"Fierce energy" marked neither the practice nor the production of the

men and women revival rallies

if

in question.

only because

The women it

from the was considered undecorous for refrained

tactics of a

lady to

exhort anyone for anvthing, even salvation; the ministers, because such

methods were held

ro be equally inappropriate

by

their creed.

As groups

Ministers

and Mothers

working unobtrusively but

85

by "influence," they could hardly ignore the lure of what one clerical commentator called the "continual droppings of the press";^® the press was a very model of "influence."^^ Where a knock-down in-person plea would be out of place, a well-written "effusion" was by definition polite. A reader can regulate the effect of the printed page on him more easily than an auditor can control interested in

his responses to a speaker;

it is

ail-pervasively

always simpler to close a book than to walk

away from someone openly intent on retaining his audience. The sheer facts of the literary medium posit a dependence on the reader's tastes and announce reading

as a potentially

consumption-oriented activity.

women

offered liberal ministers and literary

distance preaching as a calculated display of

The

press

an opportunity for long-

good manners:

a kinder

God

presented in a kindlier fashion.

Yet the question

is

literary

and commercial success of the ministers and

significant because

it

women

underlines the fact that they pursued

in

less

vocations than careers; they were professionals masquerading as amateurs.

They evaded

or at

least

mitigated just those restrictions imposed by pastoral

and domestic duties which they celebrated

in print; in disseminating praises

of the private virtues, they gained access to the public realm. If they were

confined to the kitchen and the church, they could table or the desk

sit

and send out sermons, poems, and

down

at the

stories to

kitchen

compete, as

they themselves were forbidden to do, in the markets of the masculine world.

The

differences

between the two groups, both committed

as

they were

to literary self-definition, are as important, however, as the similarities.

majority of these ministers and

women engaged

The

in the feminization

of

American culture were prominent in the period between 1820 and 1875, but the clergymen were older than the women. Approximately two-thirds of the ministers were bom before 1810, while two-thirds of the women were bom after that date. There is a father-and-daughter grouping, so to speak.

The

ministers began the process of sentimentalization; the

women, some-

times quite literally the daughters, often the admirers and disciples, of the older ministerial group, carried on and drastically accelerated the process.

men were

In the 1820s, 1830s, and part of the 1840s, the later 1840s, 1850s,

and part of the 1860s, the

The

their shared cultural terrain.

of theology and

its

early period

implement reform,

if

The

increasingly dominated

saw the

recourse to literature; the

subordination of theology to literature. literature to

women

later,

first

in charge; in the

initial liberalization

the assimilation and

period marked the use of

hardly of a radical variety; the second, the

absorption of reform as literary inspiration. Both theology and reform were

subsumed

in the accelerating

self-justification, for

which

and complicated

literature

clerical

and feminine need of

provided the best vehicle.

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

86

This

emphasis

shift in

separate groups.

While the

is

apparent even within the confines of the two generation of

first

and

1810, devoted themselves to religious

generation,

bom

women, bom

social betterment, the

after that time, although hardly

more

defined themselves

usually before

second

without societal purpose,

entirely in literary terms.

Both feminine genera-

were adverse to theological speculation, but women like Catharine Esther Beecher and Lydia Maria Child were more likely to cast their very objections in the form and language appropriate to doctrinal debate;

tions

younger

women like Harriet Stowe or Elizabeth Oakes Smith used

basically

bom

a convic-

modes. Catharine Beecher,

literary

in 1800,

always harbored

tion that she could have been an inspired imaginative writer; her production,

however, consisted largely of tracts devoted to the causes of tantism, feminine education, and in 1811,

thought of herself with

home economics. Her

justification as a

liberal Protes-

sister Harriet,

moral crusader.

bom

The themes

works remained closely tied to Catharine's concerns, but the works themselves were almost exclusively novels and stories. Ministers bom after 1810 were also significantly more interested than of her

their clerical predecessors in avoiding theological

argumentation and

in

exploring the possibilities of the essay, the poem, even the novel as apt

conveyances for their views; there

were like

is

reason to think, however, that they

following the women's example. First-generation

in large part

women

Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1789-1867) or Lydia Huntley Sigoumey,

who began to conceived practice reflected

publish in the 1820s before book-writing could be realistically

in sheer business terms,

on male this

were

advisors, frequently

alliance;

Warner or Fanny

likely to

men

depend

in

theory and

of the cloth, and their writing

second-generation

feminine authors

like

Fern, in direct and profitable contact with a

literary scene largely consisting of

Susan

new mass

feminine readers and periodicals designed

to please them, could and did bypass clerical sanction even while they

usurped

clerical authority.

Andrews Norton might with some cause

think

of himself as a patron of female letters; Austin Phelps, thirty-four years his

observed the omnipresent feminine novel as

junior,

which he exercised no authority but Literary sentimentalism, as late

a

women bom

my

ture as a vehicle of first

its

its

extreme form

in

the

masculine backers and mim-

indiflPerent to assertive respon-

the secular or sacred realm. Significantly, the northeastern

after 1810

not included in

the

—despite

feminine concern, and one potentially

sibility in either

phenomenon over

considerable envy.^^

established itself in

1840s and 1850s, was definitely

—

ics

it

felt

a

who engaged

themselves primarily with reform are

sample precisely because they tended not to use expression. ^^

woman doctor,

litera-

Neither Elizabeth Blackwell (1821-1910),

nor Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902), the leader

of the suffrage movement, nerved as they undoubtedly were by the strategic

^

Ministers

and Mothers

87

narcissism of feminine literature, cast medical abuses or feminine

wrongs

in

fictional guise.^'*

The

liberal ministers

bom

after 1810

who were

active in social causes

or in the formulation and defense of dogma, in contrast, are included in sample.

As clergymen and simply

as

men, they had

my

broader

at their disposal a

range of sophisticated and demanding literary forms suited to the expression of essentially social and political opinions than did Blackwell or Stanton:

they did not need to disavow literary aspiration to espouse reform. Nonetheless, it is

striking that, even while those ministers

criticism of their society could write elegant ject

theology and reform to literary

ideals,

their overt preoccupation with belles

the social

commitment of

lettres.

a given liberal

committed to some genuine

and forceful prose, even sub-

they minimized, by and large,

Unpleasant as

it is

to observe,

clergyman often seems inversely

Horace Bushnell, who bookstores, would never have

related to his direct involvement in popular literature.

was rumored

to

browse through

fiction in

written a novel; and despite his liberal theology and his conservative, occasionally naive politics, his intellectual

Henry Ward

able.

Norwood at

and

social integrity

was and

is

unassail-

Beecher, whose sermons were as racy as stories, published

(1867), a best-selling novel of village

life.

Beecher's posturing, his

times indiscriminating interest in popularization, have rightly seemed

more

solid

and more interesting to posterity than

his principles.

Moreover,

the cultural irresponsibility of feminized sentimentalism was revealed by

its

eventual fate. After the Civil War, no longer backed by any significant

segment of the male

(or female) cultural elite, feminine literary sentimental-

ism became by definition lowbrow;

esteem to

its

it

had begun

its

downward trek

in public

present degraded position as the staple of the poorer religious

press, saccharine greeting-card poetry,

and the weakly soulful

lyrics of

certain popular singers.^

The majority

of the ministers and

been deeply disturbed even

political

initiate.

The

if

felt

under discussion would have

they had fully foreseen the religious,

literary,

and

consequences of the sentimentalizing process they helped to

ministers obfuscated their profession and

remembered enough of they

women

responsible

its

duties, but

they

their past to be at least nostalgic about clarity,

enough for the future to preserve

a

and

minimal commit-

more influential feminine collaborators, who intended to elaborate the clerical position and make it more fully consonant with feminine needs and ideals, in actuality transformed it. Examples are numerous. Edward Pay son (1783-1827), a Congregationalist ment

to actual possibilities. Their finally

preacher of Portland, Maine, magnified the religious importance of prayer,

which he likened to poetry; his daughter Elizabeth Prentiss (1818-78), a well-known novelist and religious writer, made this devotional and antidogmatic exercise the absolute center of Christian life. Austin Phelps of

THE FEMINIZATION OF

88

Andover Seminary developed, he

as

A

M

ERICA

which was

his

LT U R E

.

he wrote, "a concept of heaven

testified to a fervent belief in the reassuring

afterlife, a belief

N CU

promise of

refuge and solace

a

as a place";

concretized

very troubled

in a

His daughter, the popular writer Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844-191

1),

life.

enter-

tained a "concept of heaven as a place" in an extraordinarily literal sense. In

her novel The Gates Ajar, published in 1868 and dedicated to her father (to the horror of the collective theological world and probably to his dismay),

heaven was very

much

a "place,"

with houses,

clothing, just like earth, only better

sums

it

up.

What

in

overwrought and

— Kansas with

one character

hills, as

the father's strained but brilliant

borrowing the consoling

food, and

streets, pianos,

mind was

a

concept

indistinctness of fantasy, in the daughter's equally

sensitive consciousness

became fantasy usurping the

au-

thoritative outline of a concept. If the ministers gathered the firewood, the

women

applied the match.

Ministerial

The

and Feminine

Profiles

ministerial profession, as

we have

already seen, held an increasingly

conservative, even retrogressive status in

American

clergymen attempted to rob such criticism of intercepting

it.

They courted

its

autobiography with

a

a privileged oblivion; a peculiar ministerial

deceptive disavowal:

not been great. "^® Bushnell was ambitious peers,

however, were

to suggest that they

by anticipating or

sting

modesty became fashionable. Even Horace Bushnell his

society. Certain liberal

"My

figure in this

every sense;

in

compelled to begin

felt

many

only claimed to

as retiring as Bushnell

world has

of his clerical

be.

This

is

not

were unsuccessful: success and aggression are of course

by no means synonymous, and most of the ation did extremely well

liberal ministers

by the standards of

their profession

under considerand by broadly

conceived humanistic standards. But the majority of them, desiring to avoid the competition for which they were permanently out of practice, sought victories

which were by

definition theirs.

They were by and

large not

men

given to chances or changes.

With notable little

exceptions, the clergymen in question placed relatively

value on sheer bodily energy, and increasingly assumed a conjunction

between

their profession

and poor health. As early

writing for the Christian Examiner, reported that

it

was notorious

health of a large proportion of clergymen has failed or suffer

from dyspepsia, consumption, and

a

as 1826, "Clericus,"

is

failing

same periodical warned the

consumptive away from the ministry, admitting that "there our profession.

Many

of

have been compelled by

its ill

them"; they

"gradual wearing out of the

constitution."^^ In 1847, another writer for the

in

"that the

is

much

illness

brightest ornaments have died young. Others

health to seek diflPerent employments."^® In

and Mothers

Ministers

listing

89

current resignations of ministerial posts, the editors of the Examiner

frequently gave "insufficient health" as the reason. ^^ Carlos Wilcox (17981828), the poetic

preacher

who

preceded Bushnell

Congregational Church, knowing

full

at

Hartford's Second

well the hazards of a minister's

lot,

would bring early death to him. In 1839, Sylvester Judd, a student at the Harvard Divinity School, liked to wander in Mt. Auburn Cemetery and muse on "the clergy all sick and dying. What is the disease?"^** No clerical commentators attempted to check ministerial mortality felt

sure

it

against mortality rates in other masculine professions

clergymen

to argue that

in actuality died in greater

non-clerical peers. Several points do, however,

among prominent and

and

seem

am not equipped

I

numbers than

youthful members of the

relatively

The

clear.

liberal

their

death

toll

clergy in

was at least conspicuous, and highly Wilcox died shortly after assuming ministe-

the period between 1820 and 1860

publicized within clerical ranks.

Judd was dead a decade after his Mt. Auburn rummations. The Unitarian imagination was struck by a constellation of deaths in 184243: F. W. P. Greenwood, Henry Ware, Jr., and William Ellery Channing rial duties;

passed

all

away within months

tuberculosis,

were

liberal ministers

still

of one another; the

in their forties. Literally

found early graves during

first

two, struck by

dozens of promising young

this period:

Joseph Buckminster,

Levi Frisbie, John Abbot, William Peabody, Oliver Peabody, Charles Follen,

Samuel Thacher, William Thacher among the Unitarians; and Daniel Temple,

Mathew Poor among the

Chester Islam, Oliver Alden Taylor, William Bradford Hames,

Rice Dutton, James Richards, Levi Parsons, and Daniel Congregationalists

come to mind, almost all

victims of consumption.

A third

of the ministerial group under consideration suffered from a tubercular condition.

It is

new perils for the but it may have pos-

unlikely that the ministry had developed

potentially consumptive in the nineteenth century, sessed a stronger claim

on them;

associate the ministry with

ill

it

may have seemed more

health,

appropriate to

and to dramatize the connection.

We

must remember that religion was increasingly associated with feminine

in-

Boys with weak health or indoor tastes, likely to be introspective and sensitive, stayed at home. Of necessitv more closely drawn to their homebound, religious, and supposedly "weaker" mothers than to their more secular-minded, active fathers, they were naturally attracted to the clerical profession. In other words, a fluence and disassociated

from masculine

activity.

poor physical constitution could be linked in "feminine,"

of

ill

to,

domestic, and religious pursuits.

health with the clerical image

The social and

is

even confused with,

The

interest

conjunction of the idea

nonetheless significant.

vocational patterns of the clergymen under examination

confirm the lack of aggression which their health condition indicated and enforced. Most were middle-class; most were,

if

anything, socially mobile

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

90

but hardly dramatically of farmers, the in

New

jump from

England.

Few

Although

so.

was

a traditional

of them considered alternative callings or

homogeneous and

a

but solid minority were sons

agriculture to the ministry

seriously at other kinds of jobs.

were

a small

From

worked

religious point of view, they

a

Fourteen were Unitarian,

stable group.

one

five

ultra-Unitarian or transcendentalist, six liberal Congregationalist, one Congregationalist,

two

Universalist,

one

liberal Presbyterian,

and one Unitarian-

tumed-Episcopalian. All but two of them adhered to the faith

in

which they

women strikingly similar to themselves in social and cultural background, women raised, so to speak, to marry them. were

reared.

They tended

Channing wed

Ware

a cousin; the

devoted and like-minded

marry

to

sisters.

Henry and William, picked two time when America was on the move,

brothers,

At

a

which they were

these liberal clergymen were, in the main, apt to remain in the area in

Spokesmen for the disestablished clergy, able to protect themselves from the most obvious perils, and opportunities, of the voluntary system; they were both fortunate and anachronistic. Henry Ward Beecher, bom in Connecticut, settled in Brooklyn; James Freeman Clarke (1810-88), the son of an old New England family, spent several years

they had been

in

raised.

Kentucky; Edward Beecher (1803-95),

few examples, spent

just a

Furthermore,

many

Connecticut man, served for

a

Even such limited mobility, Channing, Ware, Jr., and Greenwood, to cite

while as president of the College of

however, was hardly typical.

a

Illinois.

the majority of their lives in the Boston area.

of the ministers under discussion promoted lack of

mobility as an ideal: they delivered panegyrics on the village-centered past; they took the lead, as

we shall

more

see, in

the

stable rural,

new

nostalgic

antiquarianism of mid-century.

The self-appointed

was the conservative one of cultural custodian.^ In the literary realms which they increasingly entered, they were more respected than popular. There were exceptions. Channing's sermons were destined to an extensive circulation that depressed Matthew Arnold, and Henry Beecher achieved a hit with Norwood even role of the liberal ministers

^

though, he liked to joke,

it

proved conclusively that he could not have

ghost-written Uncle Tom's Cabin as some critics had once thought. Such

was not only unusual, but perhaps unnecesquestion were in the main not dependent on the crass

literary success in clerical ranks sary.

The

ministers in

evidence of numbers and dollars to establish their claim to literary

very profession gave them status.

edit

its

They could head

at least

life.

Their

minimal educational background and

the nation's most prestigious schools and colleges,

most important magazines. They functioned

as

spokesmen for

their

country's cultural aspirations, although they were often unwilling or unable to

meet

its

actual literary needs.

Caretakers for their culture, dedicated to taste rather than creativity,

and Mothers

Ministers

91

apparently disdainful or incapable of the competitive mobility of contemporary

the ministers under examination approximated rather closely the

life,

conventional feminine

ideal.

As the century wore

were described

on, they

more and more frequently by themselves and by contemporaries

Buckminster Lee (1788-1864),

that stressed their softer susceptibilities. Eliza

the sister of the eloquent Unitarian prodigy Joseph Buckminster

had always seemed "an angel

1812), said her brother

commonly depicted

as feminine.^^

J.

terms

in

(178^

in disguise"; angels

were

H. Allen, speaking of Channing,

praised his "almost feminine" "native sensitiveness of organization" and his

"womanly temperament."^^ Henry Bellows found

Dewey

an "almost feminine

W.

sensibility."^'* F.

in his friend Orville

Greenwood remarked

P.

James Freeman, the founder of the King's Chapel, the first Episcopalian church in Boston, and later Greenwood's colleague there, an expression as in

"bland and gentle as a woman's."^^ William Thacher, a Unitarian minister

who

died young, was apparently characterized by a "winning and almost

feminine gentleness of demeanor."^^ Even

"womanly" were not used were employed suggested

when

the

to praise a given minister,

words "feminine" or the adjectives which

traditionally feminine virtues: "sweet," "meek,"

"gentle," "sensitive," "poetic," "delicate,"

come up

again and again. Carlos

Wilcox, for example, was remembered as "a most gentle, amiable, and loving spirit,

much

with

of the ethereal in his countenance"; he had "poetry in his

countenance and manners

mind and

as well as in his

heart.

"^^

In sum, the most literate and articulate of the Unitarian and nonevangelical Congregational clergy courted, with whatever ambivalence, a

feminized image which echoed and rationalized their conservative career

women who were both their supportMost of the women under consideration propagated and

and family patterns.^® What about the ers

and their

rivals?

which the liberal ministry was appropriating. Indeed, they espoused and swore by the passivity appropriate to their sex. Many may have been skeptical about its efficacy; only a few bold ones like "Fanny Fern," who enjoyed dressing up in men's clothes in private and baiting the male world in her public column for the New York Ledger, sanctified the feminine stereotype

attempted to make capital of their skepticism about the efficacy of feminine helplessness.

Even the

spirited

Grace Greenwood

fell

meekly into

line

when

she defined "true feminine genius" in 1850 as "timid, doubtful and clingingly

dependent; a perpetual childhood. "^^

and the clergymen

which underlay ministers,

were

it

lies less in

The

difference between the

the image they projected than in the reality

and the uses to which they put

in certain

ways, as

we have

reveal the aggressive characteristics of one.

not defend or analyze

Let

me

start

women

it.

The women,

seen, a rising group,

unlike the

and they

They sought power; they

did

it.

with the question of health.

The

literary

women

sampled

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

92

here

made no claim

was reputedly

to physical vitality. Feminine health

as

poor as clerical health. In Physiology and Calisthenics (1856) Catharine Beecher warned her readers that "there is a delicacy of constitution and an increase of disease, both among mature women and young girls, that is most alarming, and such as was never

known

in

any former period. ""^^ In

Letters

up her apocalyptic rumblings with statistics. She had asked all of the numerous women she knew in cities and towns across the United States to make a list to the

People on Health

of the ten

women

and Happiness, Beecher attempted

each

knew

best,

to back

and rate their health

as "perfectly

heahhy," "well," "delicate," "sick," "invalid," and so on. Her report, which covered hundreds of middle-class women, was as "alarming"

Beecher

as

could have desired. Milwaukee, Wisconsin, provides a typical example:

Milwaukee, Wise. Mrs. A. frequent sick headaches. Mrs. Mrs.

well, except chills. Mrs. L.

S.

B.

very feeble.

poor health constantly. Mrs. D.

subject to frequent headaches. Mrs. B. very poor health. Mrs. C. con-

sumption. Mrs. A. pelvic displacements and weakness. Mrs. H. pelvic disorders and a cough. Mrs. B. always sick.

woman Just as liarly

many

the health of

liberal

know one

clergymen were convinced that

its

which made Beecher was sure that

their profession

practitioners,

domestic duties of middle-class

reality

not

healthy

in the place."*^

demanding nature of

suffering.

Do

As

in

women

it

was the pecu-

so hazardous to

it

in the sexual

and

lay the secret of their physical

the case of the ministers' fears, there was an undoubted

behind Beecher's exaggerated statements.

A certain number of liberal

ministers did die young, usually of consumption; and the constant pressure to talk and preach,

endemic to

clerical

life,

could hardly have been helpful

to those with an incipient tubercular condition. In an age

knowledge was primitive even by

modem

standards,

whose medical

many women

undoubtedly suffer chronic infections attendant on menstruation, course, and childbirth. Moreover, "attention" to a

problem

in a

did

inter-

given period

which may be almost impossible to determine; American women and clergymen of the eighteenth century may have been in fact more sickly than their supposedly frail nineteenth-century is

as telling as its actual "incidence,"

successors, but they did not define or talk of themselves as sick,

descendants did.

The

and their

cultural uses of sickness for the nineteenth-century

was a way for both punitively to dramatize their anxiety that their culture found them useless and wished them no good; it supplied them, moreover, with a means of minister and lady are undeniable.

To stress their

ill

health

getting attention, of obtaining psychological and emotional

power even

while apparently acknowledging the biological correlatives of their social

and

political

unimportance. 42

Ministers

Yet there

between

a real difference

is

and Mothers

93

clerical

and feminine complaints

of sickness, at least as they are revealed in the sixty individuals under consid-

While almost

eration.

with the physical

women were

the ministers and

all

trials to

in actuality a

women

expressed their concern

which their profession or sex was subject, the somewhat healthier group than the clergymen.

Approximately one-half of the ministers experienced chronic and occasion-

women did. Ten of the clergymen died women. Twenty-three of the women lived past

ally disabling illness; one-third of the

before

of the

fifty; six

seventy; twenty of the ministers. longevity, logical

were

besieging those in their it is

their strength or

and sincere spokespersons for the very

as valid

real physio-

were the ministers for the trying difficulties profession. The issue is in no simple sense one of

problems of their sex

hypocrisy;

The women, whatever

as

a matter of unconscious, sociologically

determined strategy

based on a psychological conflict, even bifurcation, which was undoubtedly

and anxiety to the

a source of pain

perhaps talked about so,

ill

women who

health rather

experienced

it.

The women

more than they experienced

it;

in

doing

they were trying to palliate not only their failures in their society, but

their successes.

new

strength.

Feminine modesty, broadly conceived, was an apology for It

assured

its

public that

its

possessors,

if

they had

come

so

would come no farther; they would not presume. Ministerial humility at any level, whether physiological or professional, was a means of covering and conceivably bettering a newly weakened position. The majority of the women in the group under consideration lived out a display of competence while they talked and wrote of the beauties of far,

incompetence. Sarah Hale, an astute self-apologist, was given to dropping little

personal explanations in the midst of articles on varied subjects.

consideration of statement: "It sacrifice of

is

Anne Boleyn, only

in

for example, leads

somehow

to this dignified

emergencies, in cases where duty demands the

female sensitiveness, that a lady of sense and delicacy will

before the public, in a manner to

make

in

her pretensions.

may be considered

as allusions to

and

a pursuit "foreign to the usual character

work,

our

come

There is little These remarks

herself conspicuous.

danger that such an one will be arrogant editorial

A

own case." Hale engages in her literary and occupations

of her sex," only in order to "obtain the means of supporting and educating

her children in some measure as their father would have done." Clearly anxious that she has

somehow usurped

her husband's

her only real source of happiness in her fame

name

she stresses that

the sweet thought "that his

bears the celebrity." Hale's culturally imposed self-alienation

and

distressing; her

ing.

She

bit

is

role,

is

its

real

mimicry of industrial split-level consciousness, frightennot above using her declared maternal motivation for a shrewd

of advertising.

deserve

is

The

public

is

given the "surest pledge" that she will

patronage: "the guaranty of a mother's affection."*^ Hale was a

THE FEMIN'IZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

94

mother but she was

businesswoman. Femininity was too valuable an

also a

insurance policy to be openly abandoned.

The

similar life patterns of the

women

under consideration suggest the

aggressive nature of their underlying motivation. Like the ministers, they

came predominantly from a mobility

of

and

solid middle-class

backgrounds, yet they showed

a resourcefulness often absent in their clerical peers. Several

them eventually

rose in the

world from rather modest beginnings. Lydia

Sigoumey, for example, the daughter of a provincial gardener, married into a wealthy mercantile family. Sarah Hale came from a small New Hampshire farm to become the arbiter of American Godey V Lady

V Book. ^^ In

changed their religious the

women were

church than for

was

it

a lay

treated as highly significant Protestant. Furthermore,

almost half of the

lives,

women

eleven had been baptized in another

all

clearly

more momentous

for a minister to

person to leave his or hers, such a change was

by any devout nineteenth-century American

most of the women, including those

with their original denomination, experienced ions; this

editorial job at

only two of the ministers did. Eleven of

Episcopalians, and

denomination. Although leave his

the course of their

affiliation;

through her

taste

who

a shift in their religious opin-

represented a genuine change, although one

less

conspicuous and

culpable for anyone, lay or clerical, than switching churches.

clergymen fundamentally modified

remained

Fewer of the

their creeds.

Religious mobility of course does not necessarily imply intellectual

Two-thirds of the men, and only

activity.

a quarter of the

women, were

was the most attractive denomination to the women, and not to the men. Without impugning the sincerity of either group, several points can be made. Both Episcopalianism and Unitarianism were distinctly upper class, but Episcopalianism, due to its English associaUnitarians; Episcopalianism

tion

and

relative antiquity,

probably had the edge

in prestige.

Moreover,

Unitarianism could and often did require a complicated commitment to certain demanding, contrast, with

its

if

limited,

forms of

self-scrutiny. Episcopalianism, in

de-emphasis on preaching and

its

emphasis on ceremony,

could offer a haven to those more able to display than to examine themselves.'*^

made

The

bifurcation

I

have already noted

certain kinds of self-scrutiny painful,

anyone involved achievement

Emma

is

in

the process of

as essential as

Willard, and Lydia

if

in

not impossible. Moreover, for

upward

achievement

the feminine self-definition

mobility, advertisement of

itself.

Sigoumey converted

Women

in religious affluence a respite

Sarah Hale,

to Episcopalianism in part

to demonstrate that they had attained status and to insure

sought

like

from the very

its

possession; they

real if

unexamined

struggles they had fought, not a continuation of them.

Such women were perhaps reserving their combative energies for what they deemed more strategic arenas. The women were more assertive and

and Mothers

Ministers

more independent than the

95

Whatever

ministers in their careers.

they tended to adjust their personal

lives to the

their claims,

needs of their work, rather

than the reverse. In contrast to the ministers, only a bare majority (seventeen

women in the sample married,'*^ and half had children. Several of those who did marry, like Ann Stephens or Elizabeth Oakes Smith, married men engaged in literary work who were helpful in promoting their own efforts. Others, like Margaret Fuller, "Fanny Forrester" of thirty) of the

(Emily Chubbuck, 1817-53), Elizabeth Phelps, and Harriet Farley, took

husbands relatively

late in life, after

the bulk of their important

work was

A number, like Fanny Fern and Sarah Hale, did not begin their writing

done.

careers until they

were widowed. Most of those who were unmarried sup-

ported themselves financially, and the majority of those with husbands (nine

more

out of seventeen) were

successful than their spouses and,

by most

effectual tests, acted as the heads of their households.

The women made more major geographic Stowe had

England

as her

little

their husbands:

Har-

choice about her repeated moves in Ohio and

New

husband sought to improve

fortunes. Yet those

than did the ministers.

were simply following

In part, one could argue, they riet

shifts

who were

his

pedagogical and clerical

make their own choice, Gary, Fanny Fern, and Margaret free to

like

Sarah

Hale,

Fanny

tively

sought out the urban centers of culture where they could market their

Forrester, Alice

talents to best advantage.

Twenty-four of the

tions in addition to writing; six

had engaged

teaching and/or editorial work. Those

had

thirty

in

manual

who worked

Fuller, ac-

tried other

labor,

occupa-

twenty-one

in

with their hands did so

from necessity; and teaching was one of the few respectable forms of employment available to women. Their editorial activity perhaps possesses a deeper significance. One must remember here that editorship, a common and traditional prerogative

novelty for

among members

women. To be an

editor

is

of the ministerial group, was a

at least to try to get

hold of the reins

of power, to acquire the means to push one type of literature over another. It

is,

in a sense, a

benefit.

way

to control the actual literary

Sarah Hale, Lydia Huntley Sigoumey, and

had a hand periodicals

market for one's

Ann

Stephens (1810-86)

some of the most popular, if hardly the most prestigious, and annuals of the day and filled them with work by themselves in

and by other writers (usually female) pursuing similar

The simple selection of a literary for these

own

career meant something very different

women than did the choice of a

their ministerial counterparts.

Of

course

question whether or not outspoken

lines.

clerical it

and

literary profession for

was an open and often-debated

women

such as Margaret Fuller and

Lydia Maria Child were "unsexing" themselves by publishing their controversial

opinions on public

directly imaginative

work

affairs in

the newspapers of the day. Yet even the

slated for

magazine and book publication which

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

96

occupied the vast majority of the its

women in my sample was enough to brand

producers as both aggressive and competitive.

Louisa Little

May

was no accident

It

Alcott (1832-88), drawing the characters of the

Women, made

Jo, the rebellious

tomboy who

Women

slang, the writer of the family.

March

that

girls in

liked to whistle and talk

writers in the early and mid-

tomboys poaching on male preserves. Henry James, observing the dominance women writers exercised over the field of fiction in the 1880s, was well aware that a revolution had taken place; fifty years before, feminine authors had been few and frequently chal-

nineteenth century were in a sense

lenged. "^^

I

women

have already said that both

and ministers had special

reasons for being attracted to a literary career, yet

such a career gave the women, as the privileges that professional a

it

life

it is

nonetheless true that

did not the ministers, a

first

glimpse of

could bestow: an independent income,

group of friends outside the family

circle,

and

self-suflicient creative

beyond the procreation of children. Before the Civil War, authorship was the only profession open, no matter how grudgingly and fearfully, activity

to

women other than the infinitely world was the

literary If

less

conspicuous business of teaching; the

logical arena for the display of feminine ambition.

feminine motivation for a literary career was by definition more

same

assertive than clerical aspiration in the

mance.

The

irresistible;

minister's

work,

as

I

have

area, so

said,

was

was feminine perfor-

influential rather than

the woman's, while often treated with critical seriousness, was

some very real sense, commanded the audience they had marked as their own; Catharine Beecher's Domestic Economy was the classic in its rather new genre. Over half the women produced near best-sellers or best-sellers. It is worth remembering that the sales of all the works by Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, and Whitman in the 1850s did not equal the sales of one of the more popular domestic novels.'*® Stowe modestly hoped to get a new dress out of the proceeds of

decidedly popular. All of these

women,

in

Uncle Tom; despite a bad copyright situation and a disadvantageous publishing arrangement, she netted thousands of dollars, a mansion in the Northeast,

and an orange plantation literary

in Florida.

forms available to them:

says, sketches,

even poetry and

The

tracts, fiction.

Norton, Park, and Edward Beecher,'*^

all

ministers had a certain range of

"systems" of divinity, sermons,

With

es-

the exception of Bushnell,

the clergymen under consideration

avoided the most challenging genre at their disposal, the serious theological treatise.

The women had some variety

of choice too, although a rather

more

limited one: they could write tracts, sketches, poetry, and fiction. Their selections tended to be rine

more adventurous than the men's.

Beecher or Lydia Maria Child actually overstepped feminine bounda-

by writing reasonably sophisticated political and treatises.^® Beecher in particular was undoubtedly as ries

Women like Cathareligious polemical skillful a religious

Ministers

97

and Mothers

any of the ministers except Bushnell, Park, and her brother Edward. The majority of the women interested in fiction wrote primarily novels rather than short stories; and they were usually able to sustain their casuist as

level of

achievement, such as

number

was, through a

it

of exceedingly fat

The women, in sum, aimed at the biggest rewards possibly availthem; the men at the surest. The women took the more active, the

volumes.^ ^ able to

ministers the

more

passive part.

The Feminine Congregation

The

similarities

and

dissimilarities

between

ministerial

and feminine roles

were exposed and exaggerated by the potent fact that the two groups perforce kept company: the nineteenth-century minister moved in a world

women. He preached mainly to women; he administered what sacraments he performed largely for women; he worked not only for them but with them, in mission and charity work of all kinds. His dependency was, moreof

over, a relatively

new

one. Certain ecclesiastical changes had occurred in the

seventeenth century which foreshadowed later trends: the minister had gradually taken over the once-civil services of marrying and burying his parishioners; ^^ the old style of

women on a

another, gave

domestic iconography

way

church

men on one

seating,

to family pews.

in the minister's

set

of benches,

Both developments suggested

congregation, an involvement on

which anticipated his later custodianship over essentially feminine concerns. It was not, however, until the end of the eighteenth century, with the weakening of the establishment system and the development of the voluntary societies, that the liberal minister began fully to experience his deeper reliance on an audience which was his part

with private and familial

affairs

increasingly active, assertive, and feminine.

Female "influence," whether he liked

power was

it

or not, was the minister's chief

model of action with complex relevance to his own performance because it was his prime channel of communication. The Unitarian prodigy Joseph Buckminster reminded his feminine hearers "how little" the minister could do without their aid.^^ Reverend Daniel Wise

support; maternal

put the matter in a

a

way both

flattering to the

of ministerial fears: the pulpit alone

is

feminine ego and expressive

not sufficient to accomplish the

immense task of social conservatism he saw as its duty. "There is," he announced thunderously, a "POWER BEHIND THE SCHOOLROOM AND THE CHURCH which is capable of neutralizing the effects of both: maternal

influence."^'*

Harriet

dramatically but a good deal

Martineau stated the situation equally

more

baldly;

no one

listened to

American

ministers, she claimed in her celebrated study of

New World society, except

"women and

only

superstitious men."^^ After

all,

if

those

women who

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

98

appeared

at

Sunday

services

and weeknight prayer meetings, America's

chosen delegates to the Protestant Church, carried back the Christian message to their sons, brothers, husbands, and fathers,

would the

ministerial

voice reach the ear of the masculine forces which dominated American

American businessmen supported churches in large part because they thought they were protecting the social order in doing so, but social order is a complex concept. As everyone increasingly realized, feminine

society.

demands had much

The

to

church, like

do with the uses of masculine income. the faith it was meant to embody, was apparently

a

feminine preserve. There was a shared consensus

among

century clergymen, voiced most vehemently by the

liberal ministry, that the

Protestant congregations of America

mid-nineteenth-

were becoming increasingly and

pre-

ponderately feminine. In 1833, Sebastian Streeter, an early and fervent Universalist,

could say with every evidence of stating a commonplace that

composed of

"Christian churches are

much

so that in certain quarters

Frederic

Dan Huntington

post at Unitarian

many

it

a great

disproportion of females"

had become

Three decades

a joke.^®

Church congregation, composed vert to Episcopalianism,

wrote of Unitarianism

[or the

communicants]

chiefly of females

a lean

is

and aged men."^^ Another con-

Reverend William Gage,

in 1859, explained,

at this

in their churches.^^

that "in

minority of the

in the

semi-expose he

"The church was almost without

male members."^® Even the Episcopalians, as one of their historians evinced concern

later,

(1819-1904), shortly before deserting his pastoral

Harvard for an Episcopalian rectorship, admitted

cases, the

—so

tells us,

women draw women

time over the "alarming" preponderance of

Henry Ward Beecher, whose

ability to

was to become too widely known, seemed to find nothing depressing or unusual in the fact that his first church in Laurenceburg, Indiana, consisted of nineteen women and one man. Howard Allen Bridgeman, a liberal Congregationalist, writing for the

Andover Review

cal question of the

day succinctly: "Have

quipping that "the

women

men

Modem century saw

his gosp>el

a

posed the

ecclesiasti-

Religion for Men?" After

naturally gravitate to the prayer-meeting, and

as naturally to the penitentiary,"

dismay that

we

in 1890,

he expressed

in

more

serious vein his

appeared "limited by sex distinctions."®^

historians have often accepted the view®^ that the nineteenth a

numerical

shift

from

a

male-dominated to

a

female-dominated

Protestant Church, but the conclusive demographic and statistical

work

which would substantiate it has not yet been done. What evidence we have in contemporary evaluations by earlier clergymen as to the sexual composition of their church membership points in the opposite direction. Let me cite several typical examples. In the late seventeenth century. Cotton Mather noted as a truism that more women than men were church members, and that they

were more active members to boot.®^ In the mid-eighteenth cen-

Ministers

and Mothers

Samuel Hopkins had only one or two men

tury,

gation.^^

Ezra

Newport

at the

minister of the

Stiles,

rival

99 in his rather

scanty congre-

Congregational Church in

time and later president of Yale University, had more

communicants but not many more men, proportionately speaking: fifty-six of his seventy members were women, although only the men here as elsewhere were allowed to vote on ecclesiastical matters.®^ Samuel Mather, a Congregational divine of the same period, had 110

liberal

women

in his

Boston congregation.®^ In other words,

we have

ent evidence becomes available,

until

men and 246

more and

differ-

reason to assume that the nine-

teenth-century liberal ministers moaning over their largely feminine flocks

much about their own anxieties as about any actual statistical developments. What is clear is that they felt increasingly dominated by their women members who had in the proliferating "societies" new arenas of activity available to them in the church; the

as a signal

and new

disaster are telling us as

drawn to their feminine congregation, and an issue of power or of attraction which was decidedly present became confused with an issue of numerical change which may or may not ministers also perhaps felt increasingly

have been

valid.

The bonds parishioners

of nineteenth-century liberal clergymen with their female

were apt to be

important to remember

close ones

which formed

to the

New

lives.

Earlier generations of

same type of

suasion.

held. It

is

number of nonhomebound little boys.

Ministers often exalted the maternal impulse because

own

and

point that a significant

at this

evangelical ministers had been delicate, even sickly,

in their

early,

it

had been

a

key force

clergymen had surely been subject

John Smalley of Connecticut,

a pupil of the

Light divine Joseph Bellamy, recorded that the two most profound

religious experiences of his

and watching

his

youth were hearing George Whitfield preach

mother pray.®® The

fact remains,

however, that eight-

eenth-century preachers did not normally stress these experiences.

may have felt, and acknowledged, themselves in

its

maternal example, but they did not define

terms, as their successors

Horace Bushnell

They

were most decidedly

attributed his choice of the ministry,

to do.

which he

later

described eloquently as the decision that he "should finally be," to maternal

Henry Bacon and Henry Soule (1815-52), Universalist pastors who worked on The Universalist and Ladies' Repository in the 1840s, claimed

guidance.®^

that their ministerial vocations

dore Cuyler (1822-1909), literary stamp, told the

before he

made

a

more potent than

words apparently had

Theo-

in

York Presbyterian divine of a liberal and his autobiography that "God made mothers

"There

is

a ministry that

ours," he elaborated; "it

the crib and impresses the

influence.®®

New

world

ministers."

were dictated by maternal

first

is

is

older and deeper and

the ministry that presides over

gospel influence on the enfant soul." His

a personal application, for his

own mother had a great

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

100

impact on

his religious

He eventually

development.

put a memorial

window

Brooklyn church depicting Hannah and Samuel and dedicated to

in his

mother. According to Cuyler,

when he was

his

attending Princeton Seminary,

on one occasion asked those students who had praying mothers nearly all the hundred and fifty young men present leaped to their

a professor

to

rise;

feet.««

In innumerable cases contemporaries stressed that a given minister had

not only been influenced by his mother, but had inherited almost exclusively her temperament and her looks; they almost imply that his father had no

Ephraim Peabody,

share in his conception or formation.

man who in the

died of consumption at fifty in 1857, received from his mother,

words of

sensibility

a Unitarian clergy-

and

.

his friend .

.

Reverend Bartol,

his "exquisitely delicate

nervous

of spirit. "^° Dr. R. S. Storrs, eulogizing

inward composure

Edwards A. Park at his funeral in 1900, explained that although Park's father was also a minister, he did not really resemble him; Park drew his character, and his greatness, chiefly from his "gentle and dignified" mother, who was "not fond of theological debate [but] ... a lover of poetry."^ Such claims and descriptions are too often repeated in memoirs and commemorative ^

sermons on

liberal

clergymen to be ignored.

It

seems highly

likely that, in

when religion was more and more the province of women, many of the young men drawn to the church were seen to be deeply attached and even similar to the women they knew best, namely their mothers.

a period

Moreover, class

American

apt to count

as

an adult the

liberal minister, unlike the

average middle-

work was women. Some

professional man, through the very nature of his

among

his closest friends a significant

commentators on the

clerical scene

found

in

number

of

such enforced and perhaps

courted proximity to female parishioners the source of the proliferating ministerial sex scandals 1870s. In

which would

fill

the popular press in the 1860s and

1837 Harriet Martineau had been distressed by "the evil" she

witnessed in America "of

women

being driven back upon religion as a

resource against vacuity; and of there being a professional class to administer it."^^

The

English writer Frances Trollope, whose racy book on American

"domestic manners" insulted the young republic

1832, gave a highly

in

colored but probably not altogether inaccurate vignette of clerical-feminine relations:

from the clergy only that the women of America receive that sort of attention which is so dearly valued by every female heart throughout the world. With the priests of America the women hold that degree of influential importance which in the countries of Europe is allowed It is

them throughout this

all

orders and ranks of society

.

.

.

and

in return for

they seem to give their hearts and souls into their keeping.

I

never

— Ministers

and Mothers

101

saw or read of any country where religion had the women or a slighter hold upon the men.^^

so strong a hold

upon

A few decades later, Henry Ward Beecher, dropping in to read his novel-inprogress Norwood to the charming Libby Tilton in her husband's absence,

was planting the seeds for one of the biggest scandals of the 1870s, but he was only doing what many a less prominent and more innocent minister of the day must have done: he was, after all, a professional talker, inevitably seeking the most available

sors

not the best-trained ear.

if

one guesses that Beecher's

It is difficult

to be sure, but

found

male parishioners,

their

than those of Beecher and his

clerical predeces-

no more numerous, more accessible contemporaries; and perhaps the message of if

was more relevant to masculine concerns. Samuel Hopremembered for his friendships with the two other great American

the earlier pastors kins, best

Edwards and Joseph Bellamy, led a female Newport whose members were among his dearest parishion-

theologians of his day, Jonathan

prayer circle in ers.

He even wrote the biography

of great admiration.^'* Yet

women

of one of them, Susan Anthony, in a

much as he needed and

in the hostile situation

spirit

valued the support of such

he faced in Newport, he was not emotionally

dependent on them.

A

generation

larly interested in

woman

later,

Joseph Emerson, an orthodox clergyman particu-

female education, found the stimulation of an admiring

indispensable for his best thinking, writing, and conversing. His

self-pitying

and didactic

letters to his various sensitive

but short-lived wives

are unappealing examples of the parasitic interaction between ministerial

and feminine egos. Writing be his

first

that, after It

whom

a luxury to

enjoy alone.

I

her

most ardently wished

two sentimental females with

whom I might read,

might admire the pious, the melting effusions of an angelic His need to set himself up as a model of taste, piety, and sensibility I

before an appropriately enthralled female spectator his

tells

reading Mrs. Steele's hymns, he was in a "melancholy transport.

for the presence of one or

soul."

then his pupil, destined to

wife (and to die shortly thereafter of consumption), he

seemed almost too great

with

in 1802 to the girl,

pedagogy

insightful

is

so intense as to

suspect. Capable of inspiring the affection

women

like

make

and respect of

Mary Lyon and Zilpah Grant, he seems

nonetheless

correspondence to be perpetually posing before a mirror. After the death of his first wife in 1804, he wrote a (female) friend: "today I think my in his

happiness has exceeded everything that

The

bell

is

now

I

have ever before experienced.

tolling for the funeral of

before was a knell so pleasing."^^

my

It is difficult

departed Nancy.

— Never

not to find in Joseph Emer-

son's tenacious claim to constant feminine attention a vanity willing to

tyrannize a presumed inferior rather than compete with an equal.

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

102

Several decades

sympathy. As

later,

a divinity student at

awkward

female friends; his

womanly

Sylvester Judd felt the same craving for

Harvard, he wrote voluminous

posturing

missing in Emerson's effusions.

He

letters to

often touched by a real pathos

is

confides to one correspondent in 1839,

Mount Auburn

after rhapsodizing over the pleasures of a meditative stroll in

cemetery:

There

is

but

little

of the genuine emotion in our

[sex].

The habits of men

are too commercial and restrained, too bustling and noisy, too ambitious

and

repellent.

.

.

.

Women

are the bonds of society.

mountains, bold, icy, moveless, that

Judd is hinting and shouldered

powers

in

that he

criticizing.

is

.

Men

are like

the winds and worship the

not suited for male society; that he, insignificant

by men

aside

in the

female company.

when

thy": only

by the sex

.

but frown an eternal defiance at each other.^®

stars,

his

woo

.

He

He

marketplace, can only swell and expand is

very

much

asking for "tea and sympa-

removed will he be an object worth wants the warm fostering of home, the intimacy bestowed the fear of criticism

trained, as

one of

is

their self-styled

mentors urged, to admire, never

to envy.^^

Even Theodore Parker (1810-60), the militant reformer, drew steady sustenance from a close group of female admirers.^® William Ellery Channing found more than sustenance in the intense devotion of gifted women like Eliza

Cabot, Dorothea Dix, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, or Elizabeth

Peabody: some of

his best

sermons came from their conversation and

Peabody survived her mentor

to write the fascinating

if

Reminiscences of Reverend William Ellery Channing in 1877.

with

relish the story of

very senile old

ladies.

letters.

sentimentalized

There she

tells

Channing's relations with two slightly insane and

Possessed by a paranoid fear of poisoning, they

would

Peabody clearly intends her vignette as a parable: otherworldly and saintly, Channing automatically inspired trust in these women excluded from the larger world and hostile to it. But the story could work in reverse, for Channing was dependent for stimulation and support on the very same feminine forces so dependent on him. take food only at Channing's hands."^^

Significantly,

when Channing underwent

burned, as he later recalled

it,

"to

conversion

at

age fifteen and

do something worthy of

[his]

great

women; he knew that world, and that if they would

thoughts," he turned his mind to the conversion of

women "were

the powers that ruled the

bestow their favor on the right cause only and never be diverted

would be

One

.

.

.

triumph

sure."®°

could argue that the minister's "congregation" should be defined

more broadly than

I

am

doing here. Indeed,

I

have suggested that ministers,

Ministers

like

a

women, turned

and Mothers

103

to the press in part to reach a larger audience, to find

wider congregation. Yet the readers that both groups found awaiting their

productions were middle-class women.

no accident that the burgeoning libraries which catered to the new mass reading market began under clerical auspices, only to pass in certain real respects into feminine hands.® ^ One historian of American libraries lists It is

a

new

interest in history

among

causes for their development in the Jack-

sonian period. This in turn he attributes to the fact that landers

now

who would

have gone into the ministry a generation

many

turning to historical and literary pursuits.®^ Yet

New

Eng-

earlier

were

young

of the move-

ment's most active promoters were not clergymen manque, but liberal of the cloth.

The

select

Athenaeum

discreet coalition of business bot, a Unitarian minister,

New

borough, in

a

New

library of Boston

and ministerial investors.®^

by a In 1833 Abiel Abestablished

founded the pioneering public library

Hampshire; Abbot was prominent

England over the next two

much more modest

was

decades.®"*

in the library

Women,

men

in Peter-

movement

in contrast,

played

At the turn of the nineteenth Mary Sprague and Kezia Butler in Boston,®^ whose

role in initiating libraries.

century, milliners like

was almost exclusively feminine, sometimes rented out books. Later, women associated informally to buy and share popular fiction.®^ By the end of the nineteenth century, however, several women's organizations campaigned actively for the establishment of free libraries; library managers noted that a good percentage of their customers were female, as were many clientele

of their employees.®^

Women's omnipresence in the libraries was but one sign of their new cultural power. As early as mid-century, it was clear to a perceptive ob-

who it was that ruled the literary world: "It is the women who read. It is the women who are the tribunal of any question aside from politics or business. It is the women who give or withhold a literary reputation. It is the women who regulate the style of living. ... It is the women who exercise the ultimate control over the

server like the fashionable writer Nathaniel Willis

Press."®®

Joseph Emerson, wishing for a feminine companion to share with

him the sentimental pleasures of poetry, and Henry Ward Beecher, reading his novel aloud to his devoted young parishioner, Libby Tilton, were dramatizing the simple fact that the liberal minister wrote, as he

talked and acted, largely for

Imitation

The

clergy faced a difficult situation. Middle-class churchgoing and

women

ministers;

women.

and Rivalry: Pulpit Envy

liberal

reading

preached and

had genuine control, no matter

and some of them, moreover, were

how

limited,

at least partly

over their

aware of

their

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

104

power. Catharine Esther Beecher warned the ministry

woman

"designed that

by her

own

"it is

independent powers

all

that

is

common

As "the

revealed by God."

(Calvinist) "theological theories ... as

moral sense and

inevitably

is

seemingly opposing the

sense of mankind."®^ In effect, Beecher

is

caution-

ing the clergy to heed the wishes of their most important constituents. threatening, even possessive attitude ters figure

prominently

in

is

nineteenth-century novels by

women; moreover, accounted

is

feminine property. His housekeeping, his selection of

a wife, his

as surely as if

a

member

of their

own

and historians took an increasingly proprietary

Few

phy.

ladies in the eighteenth

The

choice of

The

was

minister

Women

families.^°

single,

writers

interest in ministerial biogra-

century presumed their capacities equal

to the task of narrating a clergyman's

century did.

clearly

concerns of the neighborhood women, married and

he were

Her

hardly atypical. Ministerial charac-

within the terms of a given story, the clerical figure

a cravat, are the

had

designed that she should be qualified

heaven-appointed educator of infancy and childhood," she

opposed to the

God

1857 that

should have the leading power as the educator of

mind," and, as a natural corollary, to gain

in

thousands

life;

their material.^

in

the nineteenth

^

authors of such memoirs explain their

own

temerity precisely by

the stress they place on the diminishing prestige surrounding the ministerial

Samuel Hopkins, an impressive though by no means

office.

preacher, used to

with

make one

a

skillful

of his youngest female hearers sob on a

Sunday

fear, because, as the little girl said, "I

the pulpit. "^^

Her

look up and think

I

see

God

in

was not unusual. Catharine

reverence, while extreme,

Maria Sedgwick, writing of her early reactions to Dr. Stephen West, the

orthodox minister records she had

clergyman then ized he

felt

her girlhood home, Stockbridge, Massachusetts, "the painful

inspired."

.

.

.

awe

But she outgrew

.

.

.

this,

which the

New

England

she adds, because she real-

had the "most tender and gentle heart" that ever beat beneath

exterior."^^ self.

in

He

This was

a

is

not, in other words, so very different

comparison which could function

in

"stem

a

from her feminine

two

directions:

if

the

was like a woman, why shouldn't the woman be like a minister? Sarah Edgarton Mayo, known to her friends as the "Angel of the Rose'' (the Universalist gift annual she edited), once wrote a friend: "I sometimes wish I were a man and a minister."^'* A similar desire was evident elsewhere in the feminine subculture of which Mayo was a minor representative. Most of the genteel periodicals for ladies which covered the coffee

minister

tables of the period espoused the cause of female education.

tors protested consistently, as

we have

seen, the current emphasis

"gilded cheat" of accomplishments and advocated a

riculum. ever,

The

Their contribu-

on the

more rigorous

elevated educational aspirations these writers evinced,

were perhaps

less interesting

cur-

how-

to their readers than the rationale they

Ministers

and Mothers

105

presented for such ambitions: American girls should be well educated because they were themselves to be the teachers of America. of pedagogue,

by

filled

a female, as

And

the office

one writer for the Ladies Repository '

explained, might well accomplish "the regeneration of mankind. "^^ Catha-

Beecher

rine Esther

training of

in

her lifelong crusade to get adequate funds for the

women teachers was wont

to address her appeals for

money and

support to the Protestant ministry. This was only reasonable to her mind since she

by

saw women teachers

"religious faith,"^^

engaged

young

and consequently as ministerial

ladies at Litchfield,

With the help of

allies if

not ministerial

Miss Sarah Pierce's famous

like

her early preceptor,®^ as

mathematics and moral philosophy.

in the 1820s.

She eventually

tried

at

without

Mary Lyon's

success to hire the evangelical but ladylike Zilpah Grant,

co-worker

inspired

paternal advice Beecher conducted several quite successful

Hartford Seminary

revivals at her

in

and was,

interested in saving souls as in teaching

work and

in "missionary"

Beecher herself had been educated

substitutes.

school for

as

Ipswich Seminary, specifically to quicken the religious

life

of

her school.^®

her

Mary Lyon's legendary famous Mount Holyoke

revivals, first at

Ipswich

in the 1820s,

then at

College in the 1830s, represent the extreme in

the feminine fusion of clerical and pedagogical roles. Lyon, a devout Baptist,

was convinced

that

all

the ministers in the land could do nothing without

the aid of "self-denying female teachers" (234).®^ Indifferent to financial profit for herself and intent

measured her success

from the

on salvation for her

first

students, she

in exclusively evangelical terms. In 1827,

reviewing a

school year in which a revival had begun only to leave the majority of her pupils untouched, she wrote: "I have a pleasant school, but one thing

wanting and when I

feel that the

vital,

think of that,

frown of God

for despondency.

uncouth,

I

The

rests

my

heart

on me"

is

Amidst all my blessings, She seldom had such cause

sad.

(53).

self-educated daughter of a

genuine, she yearned to rescue

is

New

England farmer,

young women from what she

"empty gentility" (245) of middle-class feminine life. If a student was unhappy, Lyon was wont to tell her that she was so only because she had failed that day to have "large desires for the conversion of the world" (89). Lyon's own desires were as large as her extraordinarily generous soul, and when she founded Mount Holyoke in 1836, she conducted it, in her called the

words, "on the principles of our missionary operations"

lyoke sent out and financed hundreds of presidency.

Lyon

women

(188).

Mount Ho-

missionaries during Lyon's

^°°

herself

became

a

beacon and an inspiration to

women

all

across

the United States. Sarah Hale of course championed her in polite editorials for the Lady

worker and

'j

Magazine and

writer,

later for

was to report

later

Godey X and Lucy Larcom, the mill-

on the admiration Lyon had evoked

.

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

106

among

the Lowell factory

a ministerial following.

told a student sagely

girls.

^®^

Not

inappropriately,

Lyon also

attracted

The famous Dr. Alexander of Princeton Seminary that "Mary Lyon had the right idea."^®^ Edward

Hitchcock, a distinguished geologist and the president of Williams College,

wrote

a

biography of Lyon whose tone was one of frank envy for her

evangelical achievements.

cock viewed

An

example of "moral sublimity"

her, she possessed a

power

a "practiced mesmerist" (446). Indeed,

Lyon, published

in 1852, as a

(471), as

Hitch-

preacher comparable to that of

as a

Hitchcock intended

his

Memoir of

guide and a prod to ministerial ambition:

"Why

should even ministers be ashamed," he inquires, "to learn wisdom on a

from a woman, especially from one so eminent for wisdom and piety and whose experience in revivals was so extensive?

subject so important

.

Who

does not

feel desirous,"

he adds, "of catching

at least a

.

portion of her

falling mantle?" (483-4).

Few were

destined, however, to

wear

that mantle.

She was one of the

power came precisely because she succeeded just where so many wished to shine. Thousands of nineteenth-century American women contributed what would amount to enormous sums to the missionary effort. ^°^ In such legendary figures as Mary Lyon or Ann Judson, a much-loved missionary to Burma, extraordinary personalities of her day, but her inspirational

the

women who

stayed at

sanctification of their

them. Educators

like

their occupation

was

hard

in the

home found

own domestic

a projection, amplification,

duties as well as a vicarious release

and

from

Catharine Beecher might promise housewives that to

"form immortal

minds,"^®'* but

multitudinous press of ordinary

life

it

must have been

to feel the vocation behind

the labor. Feminine missionaries actively, manifestly, and prominently en-

gaged

in

saving souls from terrible ignorance dramatized and vindicated the

housewives' importance.

Lyon and Judson

lived adventurously, but their

appeal was that they apparently did so by realizing, not rejecting, their

feminine

role.

Judson used her knowledge of Burmese to write

a

catechism

for children; Lyon, a skillful housekeep>er, regularly converted her help and invested domestic lore, required lure of religious discipline.

nine self-sacrifice. Such ters.

knowledge

at

Mount Holyoke, with

Both achieved masculine

women were

very

visibility

the

through femi-

much housewives become

minis-

^^^

Popular

fiction for

women depicted

and feminine functions implicit

in

the same assimilation of ministerial

women's educational and missionary

work. There were countless sentimental

tales

of maidens

efl^ortlessly

and

unsusp)ectingly performing ministerial feats in the natural course of their

domestic duties;

young

girl

just

doing what came naturally as

a

capable and devout

apparently involved saving souls as a kind of unintended

al-

though by no means unwished-for byproduct. Adeline D. T. Whitney

Ministers

and Mothers

107

(1824-1906), a friend of Harriet Beecher Stowe^s and an established author

of books for in

girls,

painted a classic vignette of the glories of girlish ministry

With an imploring glance and

The Gayworthys (1865).

request,

young Sarah Gair persuades an

noble-hearted

tally

sailor,

Once

ill-used,

sweetly spoken

a

embittered, but fundamen-

Ned Blackmere, to attend church for the first time

sermon preached on the doctrine of limited election by the ominously named Reverend Scarsley confusing and repellent. After the service, Sarah takes him outside the church to the more congenial churchyard where they wander among the ancient tombin

twenty

years.

there, he finds the

By

stones and she shyly but surely disagrees with her minister. that election really ular

means that "everybody"

and death, and

life,

"elected

—to

their

own

partic-

she converts Blackmere to a truly religious

all,"^®^

of mind in which Sarah's benign

state

is

explaining

God

and Sarah's innocent

self pleas-

antly contend as suitable objects of worship.

The

was not always

fantasized feminine assumption of clerical office

so

easy nor so unconscious. There was an entire sub-genre of historical fiction

which focused on

The

a conflict

between the Puritan fathers and

sympathy of her readers by

harsh seventeenth-century penalties for ^^^ liefs.

In

heroine

is

Naomi

a beautiful

Her American

careless Indians to

movingly on

fill

—

in

ered to test and

in colonial is

Massachuconstantly

doe slaughtered

a lovely

out her picture of feminine enslavement. Although "receptive" and lacks a "powerful imagina-

other words, she

outtalk a conclave of

be-

Eliza B. Lee, the

one where the feminine sex

is

we are told that Naomi is merely tion" (252)^°®

sister,

and persecuted young Quaker milieu

suflFering

humane nineteenth-century

by Joseph Buckminster's

(1848)

victimized: Lee even stops to focus

by

girl.

fathers attempt to stamp out opposition to their rigid creed; the inno-

cent and saintly heroine engrosses the

setts.

young

a

New

condemn

is

thoroughly feminine

—she manages to

England's most learned ministers specially gath-

her.

Her

real sin,

her dismissal of Calvinism, which she terms

Lee informs "little less

us,

is

not so

much

than blasphemies and

curses" (415), as her disavowal of pastoral guidance; she "dared to think for herself."

Her

church"

(413).

final

statement avows, "I must live by

She does

so, gets

away with her

life,

my

faith,

and her

not that of

my

lover, a convert

to her theology.

Outside the historical genre, other feminine novelists on occasion depicted a frank and even bitter contest between minister and heroine for spiritual leadership in a given Lily,

community. The

classic

example

is

Bertha and

published in 1854 by Elizabeth Oakes Smith. Smith, author of the

poem "The

Sinless Child" so

admired by Poe, had disavowed Puritan

theology with "a sense of horror"

was good." Her

religious heritage

Universalism, but the die was cast

at six

and claimed to be

sinless herself: "I

was mixed, including both Calvinism and when Smith chose the Unitarian Reverend

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

108

Edward Payson

over the fiery orthodox

his "ideal sweetness"

Nichols of Portland with

of the same city.

Her choice

of a liberal pastor was the

first

which was to remove her from clerical control altogether. In 1877, after an unhappy marriage and a distinguished career as a writer, feminist, and public speaker, she became the pastor of an Independent step in a career

congregation

own

clerical

Bertha

is

in Canastota,

New

anticipated her

eminence. a brilliant, beautiful,

woman who gradually town of Beach Glen. The

and radical young

takes over the role of religious leader in the

youthful

more than

York.^®^ Bertha

little

liberal minister officially established there,

appropriately

named

Earnest, initially resents her superior spiritual gifts. "Bertha should preach,"

he notes

in his journal (55),^^°

outdoors, drawing far larger

him

to envy: she talks to

when she does, crowds than he can command. He confesses

"as

but he

if I

is

a little disconcerted

were

a stupid

boy"

(66)

and makes him

by her untutored triumphs that "half the learning stowed away in my brain was so much useless lumber" (199). Professional training is no substitute for feminine instinct and sensitivity, both of which Bertha has in abundance. This incipient rivalry is nipped in the bud by Earnest's total capitulation: he marries Bertha, revolutionizes his church according to painfully aware

his wife's principles,

man" of

(325),

and grows,

while she becomes,

womanhood"

(332-3). Sarah

in Bertha's

words, "a lovely, inspired child-

in his eyes, like Christ in

her "new revelation

Hale once expressed her conviction that "to

bring about the true Christian civilization, which only can improve the

men must become more

women, and the women more like angels."^ In Smith's novel, the woman has indeed become more like an angel it is Bertha, remember, who gives off that faint glow from her fingertips and the man has become more like a woman. What Hale neglected to say but what Smith makes clear is that in the process the man will apparently lose power while the woman gains it. Bertha is the condition of our

sex,

the

like

^^

— —

minister. Earnest the parishioner.

The in its

fictional

form

as in

threat literary

its

takeover of clerical powers by content.

women

The

women was

sheer fact of the novel

offered to ministerial

itself

hegemony. In the

as significant

was one more 1680s, fiction

and romance constituted only about three percent of the reading matter of

were theological. ^^^ In 1793, Thaddeus M. Harris, a liberal minister and Harvard librarian, published a Selected Catalogue of Some of the Most Esteemed Publications in the English Language Proper to Form a Social Library and recommended only thirty-four Americans; half of the works

titles in

theology out of 227.

in circulation

He endorsed thirty

books of poetry and drama,

eleven of fiction, forty of history and biography. ^^^ Harris' modest claims for theology's circulation

dence Social Library

were probably

in 1753 reveals that

optimistic; a study of the Provi-

even then theology was among the

Ministers

Tyler

least-read subjects.^ ^* Royall

and Mothers

109

The Algerian Captive shows his hero

in

returning to Boston in 1795 after a long absence to discover that fiction and

"books of mere amusement" have captured the attention of all classes: his countrymen have forsaken "the sober sermons and practical pieties of their

gay

fathers for the

novelist."^ ^^ Educational

teenth-century library

way

and splendid impieties of the traveller and the

stories

and

clerical leaders

movement because

were drawn to the early nine-

the libraries apparently offered a

of replacing unsavory books in public favor with wholesome ones.^^®

Yet from their inception,

it

was clear that

libraries

tended to circulate a good

Harper Brothers firm between 1820 and 1830 suggest that theology formed the least signifi-

deal

more

fiction than theology. Tentative figures for the

cant category of their published books.^^^

Moreover, feminine religious

work

fiction

was competing with

in f righteningly direct

ways.

Many

strictly theological

of the ladies

who

and

p)enned

the best-sellers of the day saw themselves in quasi-clerical terms. Susan

Warner claimed

that she

wrote The Wide Wide World "on her knees"; Harriet

Beecher Stowfe told the world that

What

"God wrote"

Uncle Tom's Cabin.

minister could ask for better inspiration? Sarah Edgarton

^^^

Mayo was

by her writing "the same amount of good to one individual that I have received from a single sermon."^ ^® William EUery Channing, noting the advent and proliferation of female novel^^® He was ists, described them as "evangelist[s]," "teacher[s] of nations."

quite frank in her wish to accomplish

perfectly aware that their purpose

perhaps superior:

"Woman,

if

she

was

may

and their

similar to his,

not speak in the church,

from the printing room, and her touching expositions of

tactics

may

speak

religion, not

learned in theological institutions but in the schools of affection, of sorrow,

of experience, of domestic charge, sometimes

more

surely than the minister's homilies."^^^

make

A

way

their

to the heart

writer for the Christian

Examiner frankly labeled Catharine Maria Sedgwick's didactic novels

"ser-

James Freeman Clarke, considering Bushnell's Vicarious Sacrifice in the same periodical in 1866, warned his readers that enormously popular novels like those of Susan Warner which propagate "the crudest forms of mon[s]."^^^

the doctrine of the atonement" ^^^ must be taken seriously,

if

to the preservation of genuine religious doctrine. Elizabeth

only as menaces

Oakes Smith was

preaching through her heroine Bertha in a double sense.

Imitation

and Rivalry: Pulpit Paranoia

The clergymen's answer to gations

was not

resentment and facts of their

the complex challenge of their feminine congre-

so dissimilar to poor Earnest's. Ministers vacillated flattery, yet

between

both responses underscored the inescapable

dependency on feminine attention and

their

tendency to

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

110

assimilate feminine models.

feminine virtues crescendoed

clerical claims for

One clergyman,

heresy.

At the one extreme,

writing in 1854 on

content with asserting that the

woman

likened

at

"The

realm of fancy,

in the

times dangerously near

Woman

Question," not

"womanly element predominated"

in Christ,

very specifically to the Messiah: "She must open the long

disused page of the beatitudes

among

us,

for

manly energy

rots

among

its

husks, having dismissed reproving meekness and poverty of spirit. Let

woman offer them an asylum; Redeemer."^^'*

let

her

rise

Nor was the Deity safe from such

nell in the late 1860s

found

it

his breast

"even as

mother."^^^

Henry Ward Beecher, who,

mother the

rationale

that a mother's love

comparison. Horace Bush-

perfectly natural to speak of falling back "into

God's arms," to be pressed to

To

and take the beautiful shape of the

and center for

like all his siblings,

a feminized theology, told his hearers

"a revelation of the love of God."^^®

is

identify the female with

God

and the Savior made

for the touchy clerical ego to associate her in rash

with the minister

bosom of its made his dead

a child in the

as well. "If

man

is

the warrior,

moments

woman

is

possible even

it

of enthusiasm

the priestess," one

Edwards A. Park began his seminal and controversial sermon on "The Theology of the Intellect and the Theology of the Feelings" in 1850 by a tribute to the superiority of maternal to paternal instruction as a guide to pastoral ministrations. ^^^ By a natural analogy, the family, the special congregation of the woman, was viewed by Unitarian writer exclaimed in 1858.

clerical eulogizers as

comparable to the church. Daniel Wise,

clergyman and author,

tells a little

tious female readers of his

Christ,

He

Young Lady

likens the

find

me

Counsellor (1852).

embarrassment,

by

A minister visiting

in the

middle of her

his heartfelt ejaculation: "Let

so doing!" Wise, in elaborating his lesson,

"moral importance" of her "humble task" to that of "the missions

of Gabriel to the ancient prophets."

At the other extreme, cal

's

interrupts her apologies

when he comes,

Connecticut

parable for the benefit of the conscien-

a lady parishioner catches her, to her

housework.

a

in the

^^®

realm of

fact, ministers

blocked the practi-

implementation of those feminine virtues they lauded so energetically

print. Ministers

opposed the outright and by definition unholy demands for

political equality

bitterly feared

in

posed by the women's rights movement, ^^® but they also

and fought feminine assumption of conspicuously Christian

was a form of territorial imperative springing from too cramped common space. Ministers suspected and

tasks. Clerical hostility

an uneasy sense of rightly

a

—

—that women had more chance of capturing the church than the

Senate; and they reserved their fiercest possibility.

thorities

Of

course

women

were agreed on

that.

enjoins the Christian virtues so

resistance for such a

powers of

—

could not be ministers

all

ecclesiastical au-

Horace Bushnell, in the letter in which he vehemently on his daughter, reminds her that

1

and Mothers

Ministers

1 1

her very piety should forbid her to be either a soldier or a minister: a

conjunction of taboos flattering to their promulgator. For a long while

it

women could not even be missionaries, if ministers were to decide the issue. Women, who were eventually to be absolutely indispensable to the missionary eflPort, won the right to enter, then to organize, mission appeared that

work over repeated and widespread

clerical objection.

^^°

Other shared feminine-ministerial concerns give ample evidence of the ambivalence of the minister's reactions to the pressures toward feminization he increasingly experienced. Sunday had long been the minister's special day. Increasingly, as the century progressed,

and

his right to

did not remain undisputed.

it

seemed to be

it

it

only day,

The day when by custom and

sometimes by statute ministers were asked to perform and decreed to do nothing,

his

was the ordained time for

a

all

other adults

momentary and

perhaps token redressing of the balance between the competitive and contemplative forces of American culture. Various groups in the ministry

fought

at diflPerent times in the first sixty years

to keep this claim

on

They

their society's attention.

commerce, the interference of the

tions of

of the nineteenth century

mails.

protested the profana-

But they had another

competitor: the churchgoing American matron. Sunday also symbolized

her spot in the sun, her

moment

for possible magical transformation

neglected Cinderella to courted princess.

The Sabbath came

from

to be heralded

Sunday was the one day of the week the American male was supposed not only to go to church but to stay

as a sort of

weekly Mother's Day. After

all,

home. Sarah Hale described the Sabbath as the very cornerstone of the ble imperium of rest at

home

womanly

persuasion:

opportunities these days of

present to the wife and mother [she exults]

are then brought under the sweet

power of

"What

gravitation,

.

.

.

invisi-

!

The whole

family

feminine influence which, like the

works unseen but

irresistibly

over the hearts and

consciences of men."^^^ Catharine Maria Sedgwick, in her widely read fictionalized tracts

on the Christian family of the

1830s, chose

always to

emphasize the domestic rather than the ecclesiastical side of Sabbath worship. It

is

maternal

the instructive books perused by thoughtful children resting on laps,

the devout conversation and prayer with which parents and

oflPspring refresh

and edify each other, not the sermons delivered

which make Sunday

The opening and

a sacred

day

in

proliferation of

Sedgwick's

stories.

in

church,

^^^

Sunday Schools dramatized the minis-

and feminine struggle for possession of sacred territory. Sabbath Schools, begun in England in the later eighteenth century as a means of

terial

educating, and controlling, lower-class children, spread rapidly in America in the early nineteenth century. In

1817-18 the Sunday School Union had

forty-three schools and 5,970 pupils; a scant six years later,

it

could boast 723

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

112

From

Union was funded largely by businessmen, but the most active promoters and organizers were ministers and women. In 1804, a number of women from different denominations formed the Union Society in Philadelphia to educate poor girls; the Society, with twenty-six female members, incorporated in 1808. Isabella Graham, a devout Presbyterian, organized the Female Union for the Promotion of Sabbath Schools in New York in 1816; her daughter, Joanna Bethune, was to carry on her work. The feminine groups in New York and Philadelphia worked closely with ministers and other interested men, but their co-operaindeed it underscored their heightened tive effort in no way obviated

schools and 49,619 pupils.

its

inception, the

—

power.

The

experience of organizing and administering funds and people

intrinsic to the

running of any of the female voluntary societies was a heady

and educational novelty for the in

—

women

involved;

other people's eyes and in their own.

however, offered

it

raised their

importance

The Sunday School movement,

women special opportunities. Women constituted the bulk

of teachers; as the

Sunday School system gradually came

and upper-class children and assumed

its

modem

to include middle-

function as an indispens-

able institution of the Protestant Church, feminine pedagogical control had

genuine competitive thrust. ^^^ Children

no matter how

restlessly,

who had once

through the regular adult

receive their earliest religious instruction

from

a

been required to

might

now

rather than

from

service,

woman

sit,

Some clergymen

objected to the dilution of doctrine inevitable

in this catering to the childish

mind; none protested the deleterious conjunc-

the minister.

tion of feminine instruction with intellectual pabulum.

sented feminine encroachment on achusetts, the local minister

ing to establish a their

and

his

clerical

frankly re-

power. In Medway, Mass-

deacons fought

Sunday School: "These women

opponents claimed.

Many

a

women's group

agitat-

will be in the pulpit next,"

^^'^

Yet ministers by and large tolerated, even welcomed, the Sunday Schools.

The

schools did not of course confer on

to the pulpit; indeed, they

somewhat

aware, as

different

The

still

business of writing and publishing

be

was

and more serious matter. Liberal ministers were very

we have seen,

gations. Here, as

automatic entree

brought more people into what could

defined as ministerial territory. a

women

were angling for their congreeverywhere, women complimented and frightened ministhat feminine writers

by imitating them. The fluid situation of the press stood, however, in marked contrast to the still relatively hierarchical structure of the church. Few of the controls which blocked feminine mobility in the church existed ters

on the

literary scene: the minister

could prevent direct in-person feminine

access to his adult congregation, but his parishioners?

They might

feminine rivals the remaining

how

listen to six.

could he dictate the reading of

him one day

a

week, and read

his

.

Ministers

The

liberal minister

volvement

and Mothers

113

tended increasingly to depict his deepening

in literary activity as

in-

an effort to define and control resources

He

both necessary and potentially dangerous.

justified his course,

when he

did, in

terms of defensive maneuvers. In 1865, one Unitarian minister frankly

urged

his

brethren to

make

their

sermons

as wide-ranging, engaging,

polished as possible: otherwise "the most intelligent and earnest

women

will

go to

and culture." ^^^

literature instead of to

The

liberal

church for

and

men and

inspiration, guidance,

clergyman was hardly unaware that by engag-

ing on the enemy's territory, he inevitably ran the risk of contamination or

Hawes, an old-style Congregationalist, argued against literary preaching, and he couched his complaint in a telling image of transvestism: "The sword of the spirit [is] ... so muffled up capture. Bushnell's rival in Hartford, Joel

no longer to show what it is."^^® Such a blunt image was unlikely to turn up in a liberal minister's prose, but the idea behind it was hardly foreign to him. Henry Ware, Jr., warned

and decked out with flowers and ribbons

that a literary

which

in

effeminacy.

life

turn

could lead to "the

would

produce

as

careless indulgence

"self-indulgence

.

.

.

of the imagination'''' voluptuousness .

.

"^^^

Clerical critical response to feminine literary production

was

predict-

Andrew Peabody, a rank Mrs. Hemans over

ably mixed; poetry was one thing, fiction another.

Harvard Unitarian, could sincerely Homer because the latter neglected "heart sorrow" and seemed ignorant of

well-liked

"sublime tranquillity."^^®

Andrews Norton, an important Unitarian

critic

and polemicist, praising the same poet, complained that Milton lacked the "pure religious sentiment" and showed repel our

human sympathy."

It is

God

through "colossal forms that

precisely Milton's self-conscious greatness

which antagonizes Norton. He claims that Milton is in a sense disqualified from true eminence because he did not understand "domestic life, that life in which now almost all our joys or sorrows are centered," ^^^ that life which is Mrs. Hemans' chosen theme. Peabody's and Norton's absurd judgment that Hemans is greater than Homer and Milton is understandable; they were defending themselves. For they too, as ministers, were pledged in some sense to similar nurturing values; equally important, they too could write domestic

poetry. Norton's learned controversial tracts

than his saccharine verse, but the point

make

better reading today

that he considered both suitable

is

displays of his clerical and intellectual eminence.

The

rise

of the novel was roughly coincidental with the commercializa-

tion of the press; unlike poetry, the novel

form, and one which their use.

Yet the

many clergymen long

liberals

were

significantly

hardly more prolific in writing

minded

peers;

was

its possibilities

it)

a relatively

new and

secular

considered inappropriate for

more

tolerant of fiction (though

than their evangelical and dogmatically

came too

tantalizingly near providing an an-

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

114

swer to their

own

needs for

it

When

to be ignored or uncriticized.

Samuel

Miller of Princeton's Presbyterian Theological Seminary expressed his wish that he could ban novels,

Henry Ware,

defended the genre, even arguing that

it

of Harvard Divinity School

Sr.,

could be permissible and beneficial

for ministers to read fiction. Liberal clerical commentators were fully cogni-

women read and wrote,^"*® and they were equally aware that the fiction women preferred was the sentimental tale or romance. ^*^ They saw the significance of the new form precisely in its ability to interest, to attract easily. The novel was the key emblem of the advantages zant of

how much

fiction

and abuses inherent

reviewer praising Bushnell's

in "influence." In 1859, a

The Natural and the Supernatural called

time" and added tellingly:

"its

it

strong current, as though

surface of a novel, swept us through

it

could be reached best by

in 1845,

stories: "fiction

dreamed

of:

no

the

is

A

novel

in a

laudatory no-

recognized that the very young the

thing [the

first

learns to love."^'*^ Fiction creates a kind of birthright as the non-evangelicals

we were on

suggests a credo of leisure.

William Peabody, reviewing Fredericka Bremer's novels North American Review

the

the crooks in a day."^'*^

all

persuades without argument, without labor:

tice for the

work of

"the chief theological

struggle,

young mind]

church of

its

own such

no conversion experience

are necessary.

For the same fiction

was

were dangerous. If feminine for religious faith, what was to become

reasons, of course, novels

to induce or substitute

of the church, of dogma? Clerical critics incessantly compared the effect of fiction to that of alcohol

and tobacco. ^'*'* William Peabody warned

his

son

mind like drinking to the body: it intoxicates and destroys the power of the mind for any strong and useful exercise."^'*^ It was a standard complaint that fiction allowed the reader to be "passive"; as Peabody pointed out in his review of Fredericka

against excessive indulgence in novels: "It

is

to the

Bremer's

is

like a traveler

novels,^'*® the

asleep in a snowdrift.

entranced reader

gradually falling

An anonymous reviewer of "New Books of Piety"

for

the Christian Examiner in 1863 elaborates brilliantly on Peabody's thought.

"Novel-reading," he explains, involves "the cultivation of feelings"; "all the organs

again,

a single set

of

seem to be on the point of becoming rudimental

under the tyrannical development of

a single inner sense."

Novel-

reading thus produces "hypocrisy and shameful insensibility of the actual

world. "^'*^ In tones strikingly similar to those of present-day critics of television, these tic,

spokesmen are struggling to formulate and define the

regressive state of the

had put the "that so

clerical

few people

member

of the

modem

apprehension succinctly: think.

it is

rapt, autis-

mass audience. Peabody because of novel-reading

''^^^

We have already seen the stress placed on memory and the insignificant value attached to indep)endent observation in

girls'

education.

Emma

Wil-

Ministers

lard's talented sister,

lady on a ship

would

and Mothers

Almira Phelps, also

would

fall

try to find out

115

a teacher,

complained that

a

young

into a romantic revery while her male counterpart

how

was making an implicit one knows the world only by memory,

the boat worked. Phelps

critique of female instruction:

if

only by rote so to speak, the only possible imaginative exercise available fantasy, the excursion into the unreal.

A

^'^^

reviewer for the Christian Exam-

iner in 1839 castigated "female novelists" for

biography. "^^^

Another

critic in

is

overdoing "introspective auto-

few years earlier had "the adventure of some hero or the

the same journal a

referred offhandedly but significantly to

who naturally predominated by women for women, did not act

sentiment of some heroine."^^^ "Heroines,"

over "heroes"

in a fiction

written largely

in

1830 articulated his

Dewey

Kappa oration delivered claustrophobic conviction that American letters fos-

or observe: xhty felt. Orville

in a Phi

Beta

tered a hothouse rather than a schoolroom atmosphere. Novel-reading pursuit of idle ladies and of result.

American

literature

men who is

is

becoming "effeminate"

are fast

the as a

no longer "public" but "private": Dewey

sensed in feminine fiction the personalism of the liberal clergyman carried to

extreme

its

limits.

Novels are "luxuries"

—not "substantial food";^^^

—

times

literature

tion rather than of productivity.

Dewey

word Dewey repeats several has become a form of consumpa

understood that

the special property of Susan Warner's Ellen

The Clerical Dilemma: The Recourse

The

was

to be

Montgomery.

History

to

contradictions in the clerical response to the feminine presence and

challenge are as obvious as they are explicable. in a vicious

paradox.

concerns; refusing

it

hardly guaranteed

one hand, to praise feminine

upon

The

ministers

were caught

The women were their principal supporters. Accepting

feminine help meant in part prolonging their

look

fiction

new and

virtues, or books,

clerical prerogatives as their rights.

own

exile

from masculine

different adherents.

was

On

to encourage

On the

women

to

the other, since ministers

drawn ever more closely to feminine models, to exalt womanhood and its efforts was to enhance themselves and their own claims to were

in fact

authority.

For most of the clergymen involved there could be no

resolution to this profound difliculty, although a shall see,

attempted to find one.

The

number

real

of them, as

we

them to adopt obviated the problem of

simplest attitude for

about their feminized position, one which

in part

was what one might call historical. On the vexed issue of fiction, many non-evangelical clergymen acknowledged that novels were here to

evaluation,

stay,

with or without ministerial approval. Austin Phelps began reading

novels late in

life

one department

"as a sedative"; he soon [of literature], but

is

concluded that

fast

becoming

the

fiction "is not

only

department over-

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

116

shadowing

all

the rest."^^^

On

the closely related question of the essentially

feminine nature of Christianity larly historical

Examiner

in

overview.

One

itself,

the minister occasionally took a simi-

Unitarian clergyman writing for the Christian

1858 announced that while "the ancient world was emphatically

masculine," "Christianity [had] proclaimed the Gospel of the 'Ever Feminine' "

and showed "the utter nothingness of masculine

William Ware,

self-sufficiency."^^*

a distinguished historical novelist as well as a less distin-

guished Unitarian pastor, amplified and complicated this analysis in his

romance Zenobia, published

in

The Roman

1836 and destined for long popularity.

story recounts the conflict in the third century between the warlike

emperor Aurelian and the ambitious and proud mistress of the eastern king-

dom

More

of Palmyra.

important, the book represents Ware's carefully

researched, rather timid, yet deeply felt imaginative projection of a preChristian civilization. This sexuality sets the ideal.

of beauty; the finest

they do

lutes. In

is

world

a

in

which

a

capacious and unpolarized

The noblest men are fighters,

women

lead armies,

philosophers, and lovers

and handle weapons

one of the most fascinating scenes

in the

as skillfully as

book, Zenobia,

her daughter Julia, and her closest friend Fausta play at a sport which involves shooting a spear through a ring so that

beyond.

One woman

after another accomplishes this feat with nearly per-

fect success while the narrator

Freud to

Ware

realize that

is

Manlius applauds.

wings for

of the

new

its

faith to his

its

tone,

breathes toward

which

no knowledge of

takes

is

waiting like a character

cue. Manlius, soon to be a neophyte, interprets the nature

Roman

not "weak or eff^eminate." suavity of

It

exalting the powerful attractions of a pro-

foundly bisexual culture. Christianity, however, in the

ground

lands on the

it

all

.

.

of

.

It

friends. Christianity is

characterized by

the humanity of

human

kind,

.

.

.

its

to the aspiring spirit of

Palmyra

"feminine" although

"its gentleness,

doctrines,

the high rank

are particularly those of women. "^^^

is

it

.

.

.

.

.

.

the

the deep love

it

assigns to the virtues

Of necessity,

it

will be

as surely as to the militarism that

opposed is

Rome.

two successors to Zenobia Ware enough, more on the persecutions of the

Aurelian (1838) and Julian (1841), the

wrote, concentrate, interestingly

Christian converts than on their eventual triumph. Ware's hesitation about

the

modern feminized

society

is

which will succeed the heroic pagan the point at which he focuses and stages his

religious culture

apparent not only

in

form he chooses for it; the scholarly romance, first widely popularized by Sir Walter Scott, was the most "masculine" of the fictional forms, yet it was indisputably fiction. Ware wants it both ways, if he wants

story, but in the

it

at all.

Lurking behind Ware's books and the pronouncement of the Christian Examiner reviewer is an attempt to find in historical necessity an escape from the

dilemma of the

clerical profession.

The modem

historian,

with the easy

Ministers

advantage of hindsight, can see the

and Mothers line

117

of thought which contemporary

were barely beginning to enunciate. Beneath the conjuncof femininity and Christianity lies a probably unacknowledged assump-

clerical writers

tion

tion that the

modem

some sense would belong to the woman; and the minister who accommodates and imitates her. In-

hence, hopefully, to

age

in

deed, whether or not clerical observers fully an's

place

in

the

emerging

industrial

knew

order

it,

the middle-class

was

assured;

if

wom-

neither

autonomous nor respected, she would be, at the least, its most carefully watched, skillfully programmed, and rewarded victim. In espousing feminine values, the minister could become a middle-man of history, a participant, or a puppet with his feminine peers in the rather cowardly new world of consumer culture.

The

no matter what its validity, no matter how fully it exculpates the woman and the woman-bound minister and releases them from the impossible task of self- judgment, leaves two historical rationale,

where will the process of feminiAnd whose interests does it ultimately

absolutely critical questions unanswered: zation,

serve?

and

fictionalization, stop?

PART

TWO

v^.^^i'^O'^^.^;^

The

Sentimentalization

Creed and Culture

4

THE LOSS OF THEOLOGY From Dogma

to

Fiction

Atonement: The Descent of God Certainly the forces of sentimentalism liberal Protestants,

centered

itself

and

in

would

alter the doctrinal beliefs of

New

dramatic ways.

England Calvinism had long

on the concept of the Atonement. Let

me

outline briefly this

doctrine so crucial to the northern mind and imagination.

will use as

my

True Religion Delineated by Joseph Bellamy, a follower, in

locus classicus,

some sense

I

a popularizer, of

Jonathan Edwards. Bellamy published

logical masterpiece in 1750, with

guish true religion from false."^

Edwards'

The more

New

England Calvinists disapproved of

tially

Grotian theory represented the

explicit endorsement, to "distin"liberal" or "old light"

it

first

his theo-

from the

start;

branch of

Bellamy's essen-

skirmish in a long battle in which

the Calvinists were to try, not altogether successfully, to fight the increasingly powerful liberals with liberal weapons.^ Yet whatever

viewed from

a

mid-eighteenth-century

tract represented the last

strict Calvinist

its

concessions

viewpoint, Bellamy's

major formulation, or reformulation, of the older

Atonement to prove itself acceptable and eflfective for large numbers of American Protestants. If we can trust Harriet Beecher Stowe, and she is speaking here on matters she had every reason to know well, True Religion Delineated was one of the most popular non-fictional books in New idea of the

England

in the eighteenth

lamy's treatise even today rhetoric.

is

and early nineteenth centuries.^ to be caught

up in

its

To

read Bel-

trenchant logic and superb

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

122

Bellamy's

but that

man

is

premise

first

is

who

differently

There you have

Yet

it.

Man

Adam, he

or

is

full

of

is

he

the author of evil

an apparent contradiction

is

evil.

is

dealing with "plain fact."

God

could of course have

had he so chosen. Therefore, he did not so choose.

how

willed? Bellamy's answers ful.

There

feels confident

omnipotent, and the world

done things

God

quite simply, that

totally responsible for sin.

here, but not to Bellamy,

God

is,

man

can

grow

less

be punished for

God

sin that

has

though nonetheless power-

direct here,

God.

argues, had an "infinite obligation" to love

Therefore, the slightest deviation from obedience was deserving of "infinite"

punishment. In

ence would do sin."

As it

is,

Bellamy explains, "a whole eternity of perfect obedi-

fact, just

nothing towards making the

from being obedient, man

far

is

amends for the smallest

least

infinitely

depraved, with a heart

longing to destroy his creator: indeed he cannot will good. Nathaniel

Em-

would acknowledge what many of his colleagues evaded or worked out by complex theories of differing kinds of

mons with "ability":'*

merciless candor

God

not given him.^

man

requires something of

God

Red Sea

—but

God

asks the impossible. Bellamy pointed out that

capable of willing sin to bring about good heart so that the

obedience) that he has

(virtue,

Hebrews might

man can

leave

only will

—thus he hardened

Egypt while

ruler

its

sake of

evil for the

Pharaoh's

drowned

evil,

is

in

the

and hence

is

culpable.

In the main, however, Bellamy avoids such rationalizations of God's

behavior as in themselves impious.

man if

only because

it is

a plain

thence conclude that

though

we

every

at all:

stresses bluntly

man

is

cannot understand

willing to admit that

much

judge man, not to be judged

God

matter of fact that it

and repeatedly that

has deserved eternal damnation

God wants it that way. God is to

by him: "when

may

God

has no claims on

He

does such

a thing,

most certainly right for him to do

how

it is"

what "would be

(154). In fact,

infinitely

Bellamy

is

we

so, al-

perfectly

wicked for the highest angel

becoming to God" (19). God, in other words, is absolutely entitled to commit what humanity calls crimes and account them benevolence; mankind must abide by his values. "O, but for God to damn a whole world for one sin!" Bellamy imagines his reader exclaiming, and then reproves him: "But stay; does not this arise from mean in heaven,"

thoughts of It

God

less

man, to do,

is

"infinitely

and high thoughts of yourself?"

cannot be too

much

stressed

from the human perspective

that

how

(156).

supremely other Bellamy's

God

William Ellery Channing would espouse

so passionately in his seminal 1819 address at Jared Sparks's ordination, is

utterly lawless. His motive

is

his mirror.

a play

God

is

is

is;

indeed love, but

a narcissist, creating a

—so that he can have the starring

for a characterization that will run the

role.

it is

world

And

self-love.

as

The

God

universe

an actor might write

he wants a big part, calling

gamut of emotional

possibilities.

He

^

The Loss of Theology

1

has written the story of man's damnation and salvation because

and exercise

reveal

"He .

.

will excite

man

will be so

it

all?"

will fully

Bellamy inquires.

and so

his perfections to the life (44).

Regenerate

magnetized by the spectacle of God's glory that he will bit part in

the cosmic drama.

to explain, be willing to be

Emmons

rejoice, as

he get by

most perfect and exact image of himself"

happily consent to play any

Hopkins was

will

and display every one of

will exhibit a

.

"What

his gifts.

it

23

damned

if

God

He will, as Samuel so wills

it;

he will

liked to emphasize, in seeing once-cherished friends

by a justly incensed deity. What can be the meaning of Atonement, the part of mercy,

and

relatives tossed into hell-fire

of eternal exhibitionism? Bellamy makes

ritual

under no obligation to give

son to

his

he compelled to forgive man's sacrificed not to take

away

God's clemency, but to

on

onic, puts

sin,

sins

suflFer

it

crystal clear that

in

such

God was

for man's misdemeanors; nor

is

because Christ has died. Christ was

but to display God's dislike of

stress his punitiveness.

it:

show

not to

Bellamy's God, ever

histri-

temper tantrum controlled only by

a sort of spectacular

a

his

divine and innate didactic purpose: he reveals his hatred of his creatures, not his love of

out his

them

own

action, for,

man

if

He in no way

now

responds to man's needs; he

laws of self-expression. Yet there

by

The

is

is

following

another element

in this

God is making it possible for himself to forgive

Christ's death,

he should choose to do

(269-70).

can

(267).

so.

Christ in dying satisfied God's "honor"

Savior died, in other words, to pacify the Lord's pride.

feel justified in saving, if

he so chooses,

men from

God

the damnation

Atonement has changed neither man nor God nor the basic relations between them. On the one hand, it seems a mere facilitating maneuver, a face-saving operation; on

they

richly and infinitely deserve.^ Curiously, the

still

the other, order.

A

its

token quality

is

radical turnabout in

a

testimony to the eternal rightness of God's

God's attitude would have indicated

a

need

would have hinted at imperfections; for a being so tremendous, action must be merely symbolic, merely display. The Atonement represents only a different expression on the unchangeable divine countefor alteration,

nance;

God

is

God

and man

is

man

This doctrine of the Atonement it

as

clearly it

still,

is

in

despite Christ.

many ways

once possessed immense imaginative and

undoubtedly

is, it

a horrifying one.

intellectual appeal.

Yet

Unfair

operated as a model of majesty; crushing, humiliating

may appear and often was, it could be a source, almost uniquely so even among Western religions, of energy. It provided its adherent, no matter how as

it

it

belittled him,

with

cording to popular

a

supreme and commanding object of worship. Ac-

lore, a

black

man who had

long attended Bellamy's

church was asked after the retirement of that powerful and eloquent preacher

how

he liked his successor; the parishioner found the newer

satisfactory, but not so exciting or stimulating as

man

Bellamy had been. Bellamy

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

124

"made God

so great

—SO GREAT," he explained.® The terror and the

thrill

of obeying, partially identifying with, even being punished by such a

mighty being must have been enormous. Furthermore, Bellamy's claim that he was presenting the "plain facts" was a potent one: Calvinism, resting on

stem ideas of the Atonement, squarely faced the presence of evil, of sin, of injustice in life. In the Calvinist view, things are inevitably one way and not another. Consequences are to be respected. All men suffer from Adam's its

sin as surely as a child

The

"New

fire is

burned.

Atonement which gradually came

idea of the

wardsean or

singed by the

Divinity" theory

among

to replace the Ed-

liberal Protestant ministers

and

theologians in the early and mid-nineteenth century represented a shift from this basically paternal (or gubernatorial)

mentally maternal and affective one. sin in his sacrifice

and authoritarian view to

God

is

a

funda-

no longer expressing hatred of

of his son but love of man; he ceases to govern by the direct

sway by the influence of example. In ways, the change was, and is, obviously a welcome one. Yet the

imposition of his will and begins to certain

difliculty for

modem

thinkers in the newer, "softer" theory

is

not that

it

opposes the older, male-dominated concept of the Atonement, but rather that

its

opposition

incomplete and

is

finally unimaginative; patriarchy

is

denied, but truly matriarchal values are not espoused. Strength, as essential to genuinely feminine as to genuinely masculine social and intellectual structures,

is

absent; weakness

itself,

no matter how unintentionally,

is

finally

extolled.

This

doctrine of the Atonement was already under

shift in the

various forms in the eighteenth century within the liberal Calvinist clergy, but

it

way

in

wing of the

surfaced dramatically and decisively in the next

century with the Universalist attack on the Atonement

in

1807 by Hosea

Ballou (1771-1852), the Unitarian assault begun by Channing in 1819 and

consummated by Noah Worcester (1758-1837) tionalist redefinition

in 1830,

of the doctrine under the skillful

Bushnell in 1866. In a sense

all

and the Congrega-

command

of Horace

of these thinkers were playing variations on

the same theme. Ballou was well aware that Channing was echoing him; the Christian

Examiner welcomed Bushnell's work

as Unitarian in spirit,

and

queried whether the Hartford theologian had read (and failed to acknowl-

The

by these thinkers of an increasingly liberalized and sentimentalized Atonement was immensely significant if only because it symbolized the deeper and deeper penetration and accep-

edge) Worcester.

successive adoption

tance of formerly denounced heresy into the citadels of orthodoxy. Ballou's seminal and simply titled Treatise on the Atonement in a

was written

vigorous and trenchant style that Bellamy would have understood even

while he would have abhorred the doctrines the book contained. Ballou begins by saying that sin

is

only the result of "the imperfect knowledge

men

The Loss of Theology

have of moral good." Since words, If sin

must be

finite, sin itself

were

even by

Because

(18).

author of

sin,

Here Ballou

human

but he

is

it

would be by is its

punishment; there

"it is

much

God

sin.

own

no

God

final

the

is

intended for [man's] good"

(36).

The brothers' treach-

redemption, thus providing

final

used in Universalist annals, of the beneficent conse-

nowhere, according to Ballou, requires more of

creatures than they can perform, for his aim

modation to men, the working out of

mocks

ble to them. Ballou

is

as the fate of a large

race. Ballou, like Bellamy, argues that

so only because

(15).^

definition uncheckable,

gives the story of Joseph and his brothers.

an example, to be

incomplete, in other

Bellamy had argued

Bellamy envisioned

as

ery led to Joseph's elevation and their

quences of

itself

is

infinite as

so

finite,

it is

and complete damnation such portion of the

not

finite,

Ballou points out,

infinite,

God

knowledge

this

125

is

not self-assertion but accom-

their salvation in terms comprehensi-

God

the very idea that

preserve or to add to his glory, for such a wish

God would

already eternal and immutable.

his

could want either to

would imply

never punish

that

men

it is

not

eternally

because endless torment by definition cannot heal or reclaim them; and their

growth is his preoccupation. The Atonement had what meaning

spiritual

it

did in Bellamy's scheme precisely

because man, through his inability to appease God's honor or his wrath,

way

needed, although he in no

moved god

this rationale;

deserved, Christ's sacrifice. Ballou has re-

he even ridicules the self-involved nature of Bellamy's

whom he imagines as a creditor finally, and ludicrously, paying the debt

to himself

which he

insists

must be paid and which man the debtor cannot

pay. Ballou's translation of a divine

—which he then uses

as

privileged, absolutely

non-human

much

in

an unimpeachable

tribute a disposition to the (88).

He

any divine action: started

always

is it

the

from the premise

own

precisely

from

"It

is

is

test

into

gone; he

is

feels

way that

it

a fair

a parent it

is

human analogue

its

of truth

—

is

typical.

God's

to be judged very

profane," Ballou explains, "to at-

Almighty which we can

a father treats his son, Ballou It is

status

mortal and moral terms.

ourselves"

dilemma here

justly

condemn

in

and pertinent question to ask about

would

treat a child?

obvious that

God

While Bellamy

does not treat

man

as

assumes the reverse.

this implied familial affection that Ballou

draws

his

explanation of the Atonement, which he illustrates repeatedly and

by the parable of the prodigal son. God does not need to be reconciled to man, for his love because divine has been unchanging; it is

tellingly

rather it

man who

as part of

is

to be reconciled to his maker. Ballou

Adam's

sin that

him; he projected his

own

is

careful to explain

he (wrongly) thought the Lord was angry with evil passions

onto God.

The

undeniable fact

remains that God, far from feeling any need for appeasement,

man, winning him by

a display of affection

is

wooing

and conciliation. Furthermore,

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

126

God,

any good parent, loves

like

happiness of

all

his children equally (178);

all

of them; he will save them

lamy's notion that

man could

Ballou utterly rejects Bel-

all.

God's glory

as to

feeling, trifling in Bellamy's

pow-

so far forget himself in

rejoice in anyone's damnation, for

human

he wants the

erfully logical system, has

become the supreme value

Ballou "had rather," by his

own emphatic

in Ballou's

scheme.

confession, "be possessed of that

sympathy which causes [one man] to feel for another, than to enjoy an unsocial pleasure in

Man

2i

frosty heaven of misanthropy!" (182).

has displaced

God on

though relegated to the wings, sacrifices free will,

though

center stage in Ballou's vision, but God,

is still

God,

still

authoritative. Ballou gladly

were not always willof God's sovereignty. Man,

his Universalist followers

some vestige according to Ballou's plan, has no more choice about being saved than he did under the Calvinist dispensation about being damned. When we come ing to join him, in order to retain

Noah

to

Worcester's

Wrath, the changed has undergone since

tract,

title it

The Atoning

indicates the further

left

A

Sacrifice,

Display of Love Not of

metamorphosis the doctrine

Ballou's hands.

Worcester, unlike Bellamy or Ballou, was no controversialist. in

leader

the pacifist movement, an editor of the Christian Examiner and dedicated

from

to eradicating the spirit of sectarian strife

guished, in the

words of

a

contemporary, for

was

pages, he

its

his "dignity

distin-

and sweetness,"

"almost feminine gentleness," and his capacity for "gratitude"; he began

his

every blessing by placing his hand on

his heart

and invoking the Lord with

heartfelt emphasis as "Indulgent Parent!"^® In The ter,

Ballou, basically rests his

like

familial analogies: "to every Christir^n

Ballou, he views the

God"

(12).

But

Atonement

his interest

who knows by

as "the

is

experience the feelings

made," he explains

means of

no longer

is

Atoning Sacrifice Worces-

argument on anthropomorphic and

of a tender father, the following appeal

in

A

in a

(6).^^

Like

effecting changes in us not

sovereign God, or in

God

at

except as he manifests himself in a "submissive, meek and forgiving"

all

The Atonement has become for Worcester, the self-styled "Philo made from love to enemies and on the Pacificus," "a pacific measure

Christ.

.

.

.

good with

gospel principle of overcoming

evil"

(3).

Ballou had wanted to

minimize, even ignore, sufl^ering precisely because he saw for

sin,

God would

and he did not believe

punish

Worcester transforms the very nature of suffering this life,

This

is

in

.

.

punishment

with undue severity.

itself:

it is

often, even in

.

suffer for the guilty" (113-14).

the rationale for the suffering of the victim: the innocent civilian

Worcester's pacifist propaganda, massacred or mutilated

war for which he or she has no in

as

not "of the nature of punishment" but the result of "well-doing,"

for the "virtuous frequently

depicted

sin

it

in a

responsibility; the guiltless wife dramatized

the temperance literature of the day, chained to an alcoholic brute; and

127

The Loss of Theology

now Christ himself, winning both God and man by the patience and forbearance he exhibits

in his ordeal.

Bronson Alcott,

a brilliant

if

erratic transcen-

dental educator and philosopher, refused to discipline his pupils in the

The only use of the rod he condoned was in the hands of his students. The punishment he inflicted for an infraction of rules, in

accepted way. guilty

other words, was to force the off^ender to hit him, the teacher. According

produced deep, lasting remorse because the boys were forced to display and feel their own brutality; they saw the consequences of their misdemeanor in the pain it literally and to Alcott's daughter, Louisa, this treatment

and conceriied instructor. Alcott was giving

figuratively caused their loving his students a lesson in the

meaning of the Atonement

as

Worcester under-

was martyring himself to express and exorcise the sinfulness of his charges. ^^ God is no longer acting out his own drama, but man's. Bellamy's God was a commander and a logician; Worcester's Savior stood

is

it;

he, like Christ,

creature of feeling, passive rather than active, invoking not displaying.

a

Bushnell's contribution to this evolving reinterpretation of the Atone-

ment was

ous" for Worcester's "atoning" parasitic

is

and indirect quality he finds

heavily God's love of man;

A

.

.

.

God

"vicari-

highly indicative of the increasingly

the same as Worcester's but his stress

for him,

His substitute of the word

entitled The Vicarious Sacrifice.

in

God's

action. Bushnell's theory

different.

is

is

He emphasizes even more

"clings" to his creature, "feeling afflicted

encountering gladly any

loss

or suffering for his sake" (280).^^

reviewer for the Christian Examiner pinpointed the newest and most

radical

development Bushnell had

initiated.

"The purpose of the

incarnation

was not to meet man's need but God's," Bushnell's critic summarizes his argument. "God could not reach man; therefore he 'broke into the world' to get at his last offspring. He came to acquire with man a character, and thus to secure the influence of character," or what Bushnell calls "moral

God has ceased to be an "abstract He is not just consenting to act out

power." ^'^ With the incarnation, lence" and

become

a "person."

passions, as in Worcester's vision;

Bushnell's concept

is

is

as neither his predecessors

Eight years after the publication of The Vicarious

wrote Forgiveness and Law Grounded in

man's

expropriating them.

more complex than I am suggesting

and provided for God's glory did.

he

excel-

here.^^

nor

his followers

Sacrifice,

Principles Interpreted by

He felt

Bushnell

Human Analo-

was designed to correct what he had come to see as the over-liberal, too anthropomorphic bias of the first treatise. In the later treatise, Bushnell stressed that the Atonement was necessary not just to win man but to pacify God.^^ Yet Bushnell was not as influential in

gies

which, as

its title

suggests,

his revision as in his first presentation.

And

a real sense abdicated. Bushnell's deity, like his totally public existence, has

yearned

in his earlier

some

for,

work,

God

has in

celebrity dissatisfied with

and found,

a private life. It

is

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

128

the fantasy, often not without rationale or vaHdity, of the

weak

that the

up the pre-eminence which their inferiors would be forever incapable of wresting from them because they suddenly

strong will spontaneously give

feel its emptiness.

It

is

double compliment to the

a fantasy offering a

dreamer, honoring his enforced passivity, vindicating the validity of his

God has justified his creatures in Bushnell's scenario simply by envying them. He has found it lonely to be God up there with all that power and no love. He prefers earth to heaven, feeling to logic. portion even while bettering

it.

Bushnell repeatedly stresses Christ's "sensibility," his "sympathy"; he points

out that the Savior's suffering can be "nothing strange" to us because witness

God

it

daily in the responses of a

mother to her

child.

^^ It is

not

we

just that

wants to become man; he wants to become woman.

we are back with Sarah Hale who wished men to become more like women and women to become more like angels. Not surprisingly. Hale evolved a theological doctrine of the Fall in which woman was cast In a sense

in the role

of Bushnellian Savior. Hale presented her theory, an attempt to

translate the

drama of the Atonement

Woman's Record

crowning and

made

in

into sexual terms, as the preface to her

1852. Asserting that

human

created

best part of creation, she explains that

was not made

aflfections

woman last woman was

which the words

"for man," but not in the sense in

stood: "She

God

as the

indeed

are usually under-

to gratify his sensual desires but to refine his

and elevate

his

moral

Endowed with

feelings.

superior

beauty of person and a correspondent delicacy of mind, her soul was to

him where he was deficient, namely in his spiritual nature." To complete the parallel between Eve and Atoning Christ, the effect of original sin (for which Hale assigns Adam almost total responsibility) is inextricably to entangle woman with the fate of her inferior, man. She is to suffer vicari-

*help'

ously for his

proximity

sins,

and to try to work out through the "influence" her new

at least assures

her the "salvation [of]

.

.

.

the race."^®

Hale was not only anticipating Bushnell, but formulating the

essential

woman did

not need

drama of contemporary feminine to be tied to a drunkard to suffer

fiction. In its pages, a

a Christlike

martyrdom. Mara Lincoln of

Stowe's The Pearl ofOrr's Island acts out Bushnellian and Halean concepts of the Atonement. She converts the novel's black sheep, the rather brutish

though attractive Moses Fennell; but she accomplishes

him

as

this

not by marrying

he wants her to do, but by dying. Always ethereal

"delicate" in body, shortly after her

in

engagement Mara goes

mind and

first

into a

decline and eventually into a lengthy sequence of edifying deathbed scenes.

Like

all

the dying heroines in the popular fiction of the day,

a reproach

her demise.

Mara

offers

both

and an inspiration to the masculine mourners gathered to watch

Mara

when Moses is away on a long trip completely won his heart. As a boy, he had been brutally

sickens, symbolically,

and she has not yet

— The Loss of Theology indifferent to her feelings.

more

He

sensitivity.

As a young man

1

with her, he revealed

in love

regarded her religious

man:

in his

view, someone

this obsolete belief

woman) ought

(a

whose value

chance that the market

is

little

faith, utterly crucial to her,

woman

half-contemptuously, as a suitable possession for a a

but irrelevant to

to spend her time treasuring

currently next to nothing, on the

will alter. In a sense,

29

Moses prized Mara

because he could dismiss her. Mara worried even before her

off-

precisely

illness that

she

should not unite her purer nature with his coarser one, but her "sympathy," like Christ's,

way, her But she

made the link between heavenly and

illness

the result. Sinless herself, she

is

tacitly lures

strength;

last,

she

is

and devotion (and

is

suffering for his offenses.

even while she accuses him. In her weakness

indeed

role for the first time.

earthly beings; in a curious

She

Death has put her on center stage

first.

is

her

in a lead

finally able to reveal fully the beauties of faith

is

herself) in

what becomes

a tantalizing display; for like a

smart salesman, she

is

snapping shut her case and walking out the door

when her customer

is

ready to pull out his wallet. Moses, newly and power-

fully

convinced of Mara's value,

is

just

destined to a lifetime role as a faithful

and unsatisfied devotee. Yet Mara has done nothing spectacular, nothing dramatic. Her death, her

like

quiet, gradual, graceful. In The Vicarious Sacrifice, Bushnell

life, is

says of Christ's triumphs that they did not conne ter";

the Savior earned "no

title

from "the heat of encoun-

of honor such as the world's great

achieved." Indeed, Bushnell reminds us, until Christ ing

more than

to beautifully

and exactly

men have

was thirty, he did "noth-

fulfill his duties."^^

How

like the

Mara the Lord sounds! Both of them operate in whatever historical time is suggested by the atmosphere of home, not in a continuum of destiny determined by the events of the forum or the field. In Little Foxes (1866), Stowe encouraged the housewife to see herself as engaged gently conscientious

but crucial process of daily

in a small-time

domestic

trials as

rejoice in

them

.

.

.

[she]

is

her haircloth, her ashes, her scourges

—smile and be

quiet, silent, patient

a victorious saint."^° In "Living to

"look

self-sacrifice, to

God

—accept

at

her

them

and loving under them. in

Small Things" (1839),

Bushnell had urged his readers in similar fashion not to be misled by love of fame to overlook "influence," "at

but gradually all-pervasive.

"descends to an

He

first

directs

infinite detail." If

God

.

.

.

them

not

felt

because

.

.

to the example of

.

noiseless,"

God, who

merely attended to the thunder and

forgot the dew, "his works would be only crude and disjointed machines."^ ^

Again

in

an important sermon of 1846 called "Unconscious Influence," after

defining the nature of influence

—by

a

"law of social contagion

overrun the boundaries of our personality, its

all-important role in family

men

"dislike to be

swayed by

life

we flow together"

.

.

.

we

—and stressing

and child-rearing, Bushnell points out that

direct,

voluntary influence.

They

are jealous

"

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

130

of such control, and are therefore best approached by conduct and feeling,

and the authority of simple worth which seems to make no purposed onset." This, he adds,

The

was precisely

method. ^^

Christ's

special realm for ministers as for

overlooked but indispensable they were believers

women was

little,

by an obvious compensatory

detail;

adage that "a stitch

in the

that of the

time saves nine,"

in

They were

the tale about the finger in the dike.

the

process, tellers

of

pledged, professionally, to

on the unconscious. Sarah Edgarton Mayo, explaining her predilection for what her contemporaries called the

the insignificant and

its

crucial effect

"beautiful" rather than the "sublime," exclaimed: "I love

things the world

up of

all

parts.

little

butterfly, a bee

over.

A

There

scenes and

beauty

a sublimity in space but

is

made

is

of flowers, a singing brook, a bud, a

tree, a knoll

—are not these

little

a picture?

I

love things near/'^^ Sylvester

Judd was describing the same predilection when he remarked, "Nature, like art, seems to require a border in order to be finished." Judd preferred a view

woods

to the

too avoided the big. Both

Mayo

of a distant mountain framed and contained by neighboring

broad and open view from

a summit.^'*

He

and Judd promise and ask for protection, permanent residence amid objects that will neither threaten nor dwarf.

they

make

it

They anthropomorphize

their world,

own

accessible; they translate foreign texts into their

language;

they give and ask for the flattery of imitation. Their commitment to the the near,

little,

terian

is

one with their commitment to

Atonement by

a Bushnellian or

Worces-

"influence."

The new Bushnellian Christ, meeting men on mortal terrain, shaping himself to human needs, oflFering himself as a model not as a governor, is very much Mayo's and Judd's representative. He has become a being who tactoverwhelm those whose favor he courts; he wisely prefers power of infiltration than to test his capacity for onslaught.

fully refuses to

to prove his

Newly "little

sensitized

and feminized

ones," the liberal Jesus too

unconscious; he too

Like

in

is

adept

a character in a story,

Christ

is

at

very

is

image, defined as a lover of

abilities to

is

the world's

interested in discovering

and tapping the

which can

pass unnoticed.

the small gains

much

in fact like

connotative, even derivative; he must

precisely because he

all

dependent for

Stowe's Mara, Bushnell's

suflFer

his reality,

rather than

command

not on his "readers'

perceive objective truth, but on their capacities for subjective

impression and reaction.^^

Conversion and Church Membership:

The

From

Testing to Playing

personalized, feminized, literary Bushnellian view of the

was, as

posed

we

have seen,

a tranquil

a non-crisis-oriented one,

and

theory of religious development

in

it

Atonement

implied and presup-

man

as well as in

God.

1.

The Loss of Theology

3

1

some persons were saved, others were not, and momentous and hopefully visible one. God's ways were

In the older Calvinist scheme,

was a both unknowable and

exact;

was

why

the difference

although the

left,

momentously, one person was taken, another

of

might not be

it

clear.

There was an immense

incentive for thought-filled precision in this creed with

scientific, in

imperious and

as

it

was, Calvinism was empirical, even

the special objectivity

it

fostered and

Atonement. Repressive

legalistic

its

faithful believers. If

God

had few

man, the good minister owed

soft spots in his

demanded in its most heart, little sympathy for

to his flock to be equally harsh, equally

it

and equally determinate. The only antidote for divine wrath

factual,

at a

clergyman's disposal was ministerial wrath; the only immunity to punish-

ment was

in its anticipation.

a confidence,

were

which

at least fully

The

at times

armed,

Calvinism could give to those

believed

merged unpleasantly with arrogance,

it

that they

not invulnerable.

if

greatest figures of

who

New

England Calvinism showed an

ability to

which was to become legendary. Samuel Hopkins was noted for the kindly meant cruelty with which he discouraged

examine and judge religious

states

who

even dying parishioners

he believed to be entertaining

In 1755 called to the deathbed of a

woman

"full

ing she had saving discoveries of Christ," he

her

.

tion.

.

.

that she

was deceived;

She was confident, but

concludes:

by

it

of joy and comfort suppos-

was

satisfied

"upon examining

was only the workings of her imagina-

told her

I

hope."

my

fears."

With

resigned insight he

"How exposed to the delusions of the devil are ignorant p>ersons!

especially those lively

that

a "false

whose understanding

is

Emmons

a fever."^® Nathaniel

shattered and their imagination

brought the same

of investigation to the consideration of his son Erastus,

He had found

relentless spirit

who

died in 1820.

was promising there, and with the more than Roman rigor, the spare severity which ever characterized him, he told his congregation so in the funeral sermon he preached on the occasion:

He

little

that

lived stupid, thoughtless

the very sight of death.

.

.

.

and secure

in sin, until

he was brought to

But whether he did ever heartily renounce

God for his supreme portion cannot be known own view he had become reconciled to God.

the world and choose in this world. In his

more than possible that like others on hopes upon a sandy foundation. 27 But

the

it is

.

a sick-bed,

Emmons, like most of his persuasion, expected the human soul to be marked and momentous; no easy

he built

.

his

Lord's workings in assurances of inner

peace, whether given on a deathbed or elsewhere, could satisfy him.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the more theologically conservative and revivalistically oriented denominations kept the earlier Calvinist empha-

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

132

sis

on

a

pronounced, even

revivals themselves

Lyman His own

violent, often

sudden conversion experience;

were of course premised on the

reality of

such an experi-

ence.

Beecher's attitude toward conversion was typically evangel-

ical.

religious awakening, as he

remembered

it

in later years,

was

quick and powerful, possessing obvious and conscious parallels to Paul's

epiphany on the road to Damascus. At the age of twenty, Beecher was deeply struck by a remark of

his

mother's on a passing drunkard

once been "under conviction" but had since

who had

lost all religious inclinations.

from these words, only, after she left the room I felt a sudden impulse to pray. ... I was not in the habit of prayer. I rose to pray, and had not spoken five words before I was under as deep conviction as ever I was in my life. The sinking of the shaft was There was no perceptible

instantaneous.

or shall

in

revived,

I

effect

understood the law and

the day of judgment.

and

I

I

my

believe the

heart as well as

do now

commandment came,

died, quick as a flash of lightning.

Beecher remained faithful throughout

I

sin

28

his career to his

own

conversion

experience as a model. In 1829, he wrote a friend testifying to his belief in "instantaneous" as opposed to "gradual" conversion;^^ and he was always willing to analyze and defend the "conviction" he had thus received.

Beecher's awakening was implicitly a testimony to God's

own

as to Beecher's

importance, a tribute to divine ability to intervene

massively and decisively at a given instant in an individual's

most famous children belonged to and none of them were the

start,

power as well

able,

Beecher urged

a

life.

Beecher's

very different generation theologically,

or willing, to achieve a similar experience.

his sons

in at the strait gate; certainly

and daughters to "agonize,

agonize''' to

From enter

he himself agonized over them and regularly

subjected their hearts to a scrutiny almost as piercing as Emmons'. ^° Bee-

work was deeply alloyed by the realization that none of his own family were "safe." Edward stalled almost endlessly and never knew a full saving experience. Catharine was unable to undergo cher's happiness in his revival

conversion at

by her father

all

in

despite a barrage of letters written to her (and published)

the 1820s;^^ Harriet defied most of the rules of Edwardsean

theology by coming into her father's study

at a

very tender age

full

of happy

confidence that the Lord had simply taken her to be his own; she

no

boy was puzzled and pressured constantly by demands he could

anguish, only infinite calm and joy.

troubled by the whole process,

Henry Ward

felt

as a

neither meet nor dispute. Significantly, the Beecher children, with the possible exception of Catharine,^^ did not

want

their father as the engineer of their conversion or their

intercessor at the throne; they longed rather to see their mother,

Roxana

The Loss of Theology

Foote Beecher,

in that role.

perplexity,

wrote

longing for

God

Ward was

Henry Ward,

significantly: "I

barely three

when

his

3 3

explaining his childhood religious

wanted to be

lamb bleating longs for

as a

1

a Christian.

went about

I

mother's udder."^^

its

mother died of consumption

Henry but

in 1816,

even then, according to family legend, he made an effort to run away to

"Ma"

in

"heaven," and he talked of her his whole

her mother's role in family

had more influence ing to

Harriet, in explaining

wrote that "her memory and example

later

molding her family,

in

good than the

life,

life.

living presence of

in deterring

many

from

evil

and

excit-

mothers." She represented for

her children a "blessed" figure, a "saint in heaven." Harriet recalled vividly

waking from

praying thankfully to the scene, there life

hear her father

a virulent, nearly fatal fever as a child to

is

his

now

dear wife

with the Lord. As Harriet paints

Roxana Beecher has saved her daughter's she stood "as a sacred shield" between her

a clear sense that

by her holy mediation,

just as

sons "and the temptations of youth. "^'^

It is

worth remembering

bom, dedicated

Beecher, Roxana's youngest

Atonement, The Redeemer and

the

that Charles

work on the mother, whom, as he said,

his Bushnellian

Redeemed, to his

next to his Savior he most hoped to meet at the Resurrection.

Roxana Beecher has both

and representative significance. By

special

all

accounts an extraordinarily gifted and intelligent woman, reserved, quiet, evincing fine breeding and even elegant manners, with

keen interest marriage, first

or

Lyman,

fresh

Emmons,

Indeed, in the early days of their courtship and

faith.

from

ministerial assignment

a

came from an Episcopalian family and never

in science, she

changed her

essentially

and

artistic tastes

his theological training

on Long

and preparing for

Island, kept trying to test, a la

the soundness of his fiancee's religious hope.

his

Hopkins

He was essentially

anxious because she confessed to none of the negative aspects of the traditional conversion experience: she did not

horrid as even to curse

God

acknowledge

"a disposition so

to his face," such as Bellamy had posited; she

did not seem to love God's glory "disinterestedly" without reference to the

good he had done

her.

Roxana summarized her

to her future husband, in a letter written to

become

in

many ways

a

to serve as the basis of their

and her opposition

belief,

on September

own

.

.

can

I

help loving

feelings:

God

because

an object of God's mercy and goodness,

what would be

my

feelings.

He I

if I

do love Him, how can

is

good

to

me? Were

Imagination never yet placed

it

not

I

cannot have any conception

situation not to experience the goodness of

and

Drawing on non-human God

declaration of independence.

by the simple evidence of her own

.

which was

key document of her children's experience and

her Episcopalian and her feminine heritage, she dismisses a

How

1798,

1,

God

but be because

in

me

some way or

He

is

in a

other,

good, and to

me

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

134

Do

good? ... In

not God's children love

Him

my

mind, and, as

it

loved them?

first

mercy and goodness are were, swallow up his other at-

contemplating the character of God,

most present to

He

because his

tributes.

Almost

sixty years later, her

husband touchingly and characteristically en-

dorsed this letter "Roxana beloved

There

is little

still

this

Dec.

1854,

5,

Lyman

Beecher."^^

evidence to show that Roxana's epistle changed his thinking,

however, although

his children

sometimes liked to think

so.

Roxana Foote, anticipating Ballou and Bushnell in her stress on the primacy of God's love, on the Deity's intent to win her by giving her what she needs and wants,

is

obviating the necessity of a painful or sudden conver-

There is nothing disagreeable or difficult for her to contemplate, only God's love. There is nothing disagreeable or difficult, or new, for her to do; God has been continuously sustaining her by his affection and

sion experience.

The

gradually bringing her closer and closer to him.

Beecher advocated was

and immediate one

a violent

religious

awakening

essentially because

assumed the confrontation of two enemies, God's grace and man's nature, and the absolute conquest of the latter

by the former.

Man

it

sinful

being

is

assimilated into something not-Jike-him; violation as well as regeneration

is

at

work. Roxana's implied view of conversion, which was to be Bushnell's,

is

not that of a battle between

assimilation of all

two

similar

two

antagonists, but an evolving mutual

unequal beings. Edward, Henry, and Charles

if

concluded by adopting Roxana's view while

their father's

officially staying

church (despite repeated protests and

within

efforts at expulsion

on

the part of that often bewildered and antagonized church); Harriet and

Catharine espoused their mother's testimony and her denomination.

More and more religious thinkers and activists of the generation succeeding Lyman Beecher's sidestepped or redefined the traditional conversion experience. Even Edwards A. Park, who would show strong revivalist proclivities

become ing;

and

a

a minister

decided admiration for Finney,

decided to

at eighteen

although he had experienced no special religious awaken-

he tested himself, and

felt that

he not only believed but loved the Biblical

doctrines and that this was sufficient. ^^ Austin Phelps passed a sensitive

— boyhood

to say

morbid

rather

stem Congregational

tion to attend funerals

converted for

the grip of "religious despair." His father, a

in

minister, forced the

and look

at the corpses.

in the traditional Calvinist

boy for his moral edificaAt twelve he was almost

way: he "longed for

some sublime and revolutionary change of heart."

his earlier agonies pathetic lian belief in

religious

—not

and totally unnecessary.

''nurture''

domestic model: "The family

is

.

.

.

[and] waited

In later years he

He

adopted

a

found

Bushnel-

and "unconscious growth" based on

the nursery of

[faith],

and the Church

is

a

but

The Loss of Theology

1

3 5

the family on an extended scale." Phelps even speculated that he might have

been far happier had he been raised an Episcopalian.^^ Orville Dewey, also reared a Calvinist, repudiated his early training with equal vehemence: he

came

to feel that "Infidelity"

found

his

youthful conversion regrettable:

should be an event It is

their

was more defensible than Calvinism. Dewey

in

any human

"it is

lamentable that

life."^®

significant that both Phelps

and

Dewey

orthodox parents had treated them

intensely protested the

as children.

The

went to church with his or her family twice on Sunday to so constructed that few adults and certainly no children it

and to

ever

it

way

Calvinist child

sit

in a

pew

often

—

— could see out of

listen to long, detailed,

often highly abstract sermons written by

adults for adults. Perhaps he or she

was allowed

to play with the strings of

mother's purse, to look through the prayerbook, or at best to eat some treat specially

The

brought along to reward or pacify younger members of the family.

was an often uncomfortable hostage from another moral state, an impressed and ignorant recruit. In the eighteenth century most New England Calvinist churches had demanded of their full members baptism (and that often at a fairly advanced age when the subject would prechild as such

sumably be able to understand the meaning of the

act)

and

a

public

testimony of conversion. ^^ In the nineteenth century, an innovative evangelical like

Lyman Beecher might

sisted flatly:

"Baptism

repudiate infant damnation but he

still in-

infancy does not constitute adult membership in

in

the visible church." Beecher deplored the Unitarian "attempt ... to con-

found the scriptural distinction between the regenerate and the unregenerate."'^

Prerequisites for church participation

were squarely based on the con-

viction of innate depravity and an expectation of the significance of

maturity; Calvinists assumed that a struggle was to be fought by the Chris-

which would require a certain amount of time, awareness, and skill. God could pour his grace out on a mere child the legendary conversion of four-year-old Phoebe Bartlett under the ministration of Jonathan Edwards was evidence of the fact but he was unlikely to do so. The paradox of Calvinism was its absolute stress on God's sovereignty with its equally firm emphasis on human preparedness. The Lord app)eared to the ten virgins because he so desired, not because they were waiting (or not waiting) for him. But woe to them whose lamps were not ready to shed light on his coming!'*^ At its best, Calvinism represented a complex set of values which fostered both achievement and humility; it demanded that its adherents be

tian

—

—

both children and adults. If

one believed, however, with the

liberals that the soul

world already prepared, already converted, sion into a

came

into the

why delay or complicate admis-

church society which could only benefit by the presence of

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

136

young Christians? Channing liked to praise "the mild beauty of children": God would not, he believed, do anything so "repulsive and unamiable" as to damn them, as Calvinists had once held he did, or give them souls deserving of damnation.'*^ Horace Bushnell found no opinion "more essentially than that which regards the Holy Spirit as having no agency monstrous in the immature souls of children who are growing up helpless and unconscious into the perils of time."'*^ Bushnell did not deny the presence of evil .

in children,

.

.

but he denied

its

dominance, and

in

doing

God

repudiated the essential presupposition of Calvinism: that

mands something of man In Bushnell's view,

that

it is

it is

in

precisely

to and capable of conscious control is

when

the individual

—namely,

in

never to

never to disturb the infant soul, which,

like the

toward

is

childhood

is

points unerringly and instinctively

rightly de-

some way impossible for man

most assimilable to God. The great point

ity,

Channing,

so, he, like

jar

to do.

amenable

least

—that he or she

the child's sensibil-

needle of a compass,

maker. Children are to be

its

encouraged, even imitated, not broken. Bushnell wanted early baptism and, like Sylvester

Judd, he wished the baptized infants then to

grow up

Chris-

communion, the standard test of adult profession.'*'* Piety was to be the result of

tians in the church, free to partake in

membership, without any special "habit," not of effort.'*^ In this

way, ministers could gain adherents without

recourse to revivals, and very uncritical adherents at that. extension of the idea that

from

it,

adults

By

a logical

God would accommodate himself to man, and gain

were to please children for the

profit of their

churches and

Atonement acted on the unconscious, not the conscious, nature of men, ministers emulating him should logically address

their souls. If Christ in the

themselves to toddlers as well as grown-ups; they too should practice the techniques of maternal "influence" as formulated by

women

like

Sigoumey

and Hale.

The permeation Follen saw in a vision

Church by children, which Charles one Sunday afternoon, was a statement of fact as well

of the Protestant

as a fantasized ideal. Liberal ministers increasingly

dren under their pastoral care. Sylvester Judd,

wooed in his

the souls of chil-

"Account" of

his

conversion to Unitarianism, explained that his intellectual perplexities were solved, or rather obviated,

Sermon on the Mount: had

a

wicked

"

'I

by

a little girl's intuitive

Heaven with God if I He later wanted to make his

should not be happy

heart,' " the child told Judd.'*®

Augusta, Maine, parish into an extended family. ioners, especially the

younger ones,

were indeed part of

his hearthside circle,

understanding of the

in

He

as regularly

wrote to absent parish-

and familiarly

as if

they

always signing himself "Your

affectionate friend and pastor";'*^ he arranged special excursions and treats

Judd was sincere, but he was setting trend; love of children would become almost a profes-

for the children in his congregation.'*®

and anticipating

a

The Loss of Theology

requirement for the ministry.

sional

The

1

3

7

provision later in the century for

rooms and secular amusements within the church was part of an effort to assimilate the church to the home and the playground. The old Calvinist way of church induction presupposed a struggle for maturity that implied distancing from the mother and conflict with the father, and drew on an implicit and anticipatory analogy with Oedipal recreation

development.

assumed, and expected, pain: not the passive suffering of

It

deprivation and martyrdom, but the active distress of assault and achieve-

The most

ment.

obvious metaphor for the newly opened church as Bushnell

and Judd conceived and tried to implement it, however, was that of a mother with her offspring, obviating their faults, smoothing their path never let-

—

ting

them

go.

Domestic

novelists, like liberal ministers, reveled in depictions

of infantile piety gently and easily coasting from the nursery into the safe

harbor of the church. Susan Warner, in a fascinating Daisy Plains (1885), which documents her

shows two small

membership in

girls,

at the

one white, the other

precocious age of ten.

Warner, has been

own

late

novel entitled

theological liberalization,

church

a black servant, seeking

The father of the family, as always

every sense, but the mother has nurtured

a failure in

the children gently and incessantly in trust of Jesus as well as in reliance on the Bible. Symbolically, they go to examination at the hands of a

of initially skeptical and hostile clergymen straight

number

from mother's arms.

After their simple and heartfelt answers to the tricky questions of their increasingly impressed interlocutors have demonstrated that

understand that true theology embrace."*^

when he

is

Mother and church

little girls

best

but loving feeling, they return to her proud are one.

Judd summed up the

liberal ideal

described the conversion experience, ideally unconscious, as a

return, a "go[ing] home."^°

Liberal theology and literature increasingly

downplayed the impor-

tance of pain and effort in the conversion process. In the liberal view, self -torment

and

self-denial

were flawed not because they were bad

selves but because they could not really achieve their

Two

1

I and

own

in

them-

goals. In

Chapter

My

Wife and

talked about

Eva van Arsdel of Harriet Beecher Stowe's

We and Our

Neighbors as the representative of the

new

impractical

Ameran emblem

heroine increasingly popular in the fiction of mid-nineteenth-century ica.

Herself self-consciously childlike, not to say childish, Eva

is

of play, of leisure, of carefree gaiety, and a symbol of the increasing trust

Stowe,

ments

common with her culture, was putting on these qualities as instrufor the new Bushnellian kind of regeneration. Eva has nothing that in

she has to do; her time

is

essentially recreational,

making friends and saving

souls.

Among

and she passes her days by

her special flock

is

a colleague

of

her husband's, a sensitive and conscientious journalist called Bolton who,

because of a single bout of youthful intemperance, in adulthood

still

consid-

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

138

ers himself

an alcoholic. In true Calvinist fashion, he judges himself "lost"

marry the woman he loves although she is spending her life pining for him. Eva firmly counters his opinion as "morbid," and engineers his wedding to the girl of his dreams. A sense of sin and the stringent self-discipline it recommends represent false, if sincere, heroism: Bolton is not only happier, but more securely protected against his special failing, with a loving and beloved wife by his side. Again, the daughter of Eva's Irish cook Mary falls, through little fault of her own, into a life of prostitution. and

unfit to

While her mother's denunciation and reproaches only upset and anger Maggie, while the stark costume and silent piety of the sisters of an Episcopalian order with

whom

she stays for a while

sive finery, vivacious talkativeness,

Eva poses no of

all

who

awakens no

threats,

will play

Exponents of

with

this

and

awe but

distance her, Eva's inexpen-

afl^ectionate

fears, raises

ways

lure her to Christ.

no defenses; she makes children

her.

new

belief in play

and of

its

importance

in

the

conversion experience ranged from the religious hedonist to the theologian.

Henry Ward Beecher, who

asserted that to be a Christian

was "to be the

happiest person in the world," told Yale students in 1872 that he "studiously

refused to entertain anxieties." In the partial physicalization of respectable

Protestantism which was his most interesting achievement, Beecher, finding it

best to put Calvin aside, redefined the "elect" as the healthy; he said,

and

demonstrated, that such would have "an insatiable love of play."^^ Beecher loved to watch fine horses; he collected old books and rare gems. Like other

prophets of the mind-cure movement,^^ he sensed that mid- and

late-

nineteenth-century Protestant America wanted religion to provide an antidote to

work

liberation

and

well as for

as well as a

spur to

fulfillment, a

rhomme

toil.

He made religion an agent of personal

means of

spirituel:

self-expression for

rhomme

sensuel as

he revealed religion as a facilitator of

leisure.

Henry Ware, Jr., had already tried to grapple with the problem of "How to Spend Holy Time" and had toyed fascinatedly with the possibilities

of leisure implicit in the Unitarian emphasis on what Channing called

"self-culture";^^

it

took Beecher to say that spending time was

In Beecher's novel Norwood, Dr.

Wentworth,

a

itself

holy.

shrewd, humane, and

aes-

thetic-minded physician, acts as his spokesman. At one point Frank Edel, a

broken-hearted rejected lover, decides to turn from art to preaching to express his new-found conviction of

Dr. Wentworth, however, the older

Wentworth

life's

tragic nature;

when he

man advises him to stick

consults

to painting. Dr.

points out that the Christian artist preaches, and to a far larger

dodge "pain" hovering tantalizingly between the

congregation than the minister, but his

real

and

is

"self-denial."

Beecher

idea that suflFering

is

at this

the easy

point

way and

message for Edel

is:

the proposition that the easy

way

is

The Loss of Theology

Whatever

the best one.

1

however, he wants

his rationale,

his characters

comfortable with themselves, self-acceptant, self-loving, ample. Norwood unmistakably

book, composed of

a tedious

and discursive

talk.

Beecher claims

little

action and

at the start that the

tellingly calls his "leisurely narrative"

colored romance; he asks that they pursue

it

The

novel

words, a (Beecherian) religious experience, an exercise

ist

much

much rambling

pace of what he doesn't

meditatively, reflectively, over

a period of time, to taste, to relish, to savor.^'*

culture

is

want his they might some highly

readers to devour the novel feverishly in a sitting as

Horace Bushnell, who brought

He

intentional.

is

39

in

is

to be, in other

consumer

pleasure.

to the rationalization of a post-Calvinist

of the intellectual responsibility and massiveness of the Calvin-

theological tradition, published a study on

Work and Play

in

1

864.

He

begins by saying that his primary example and his motive for the investigation

was the

and kitten playing on the floor together."

sight of "his children

The unconscious and spontaneous ways tion,

although by no means

of children are his starting inspira-

stopping point.

his

He

considers their play

"muscular," and goes on to a consideration of the "hard struggle of [adult]

work" which can peak

into a realm of "inspired liberty

beauty." His conclusion

is

complete only is

it

"we are to conceive that

man, that which

state of

fulfills its

that

sublime instinct

is

his

and spontaneous

the highest and most

nature endeavors after and in which

the state of play.

To say that a man labors

to say that he fails."^^ Bushnell here anticipates Beecher

explain,

"Whoever

admired Beecher's barbaric,

and

his

thinks without thinking vitality

own

is

who would

in fact a genius."^®

Bushnell

but found him theologically primitive, not to say

thinking

preacher's.

Both are advocating

ment, both

call

is

a

much more complex

than the Brooklyn

post-romantic theory of organic develop-

for the "whole man." Both urge, in intelligent opposition to

the old Calvinist ethos, the resourcefulness of trust: to play

is

to offer

testimony to the possibility of safety. Yet Beecher wants to obviate the necessity of

work

altogether; Bushnell

mastery, harmony;

work

his

urging instead that

its final

end

losing consciousness of itself as eflPort passes

determination into delight.

ment for

is

He

is

in actuality

engaged

in a

complex

is

from

restate-

modernizing society of the ancient Calvinist dilemma over the

between the use of "means" and the passive awaiting of God's arbitrary grace. Bushnell hypothetically establishes a streamlined process by which neither is lost but one becomes the other; it is a message of renewal, relation

and

arrival,

which

in

no way ignores the necessity of the passage.

He

summed up his ideal of faith, and hinted at all his diflPerences with Beecher, when he said, "Abiding in Christ is to abide; it is not to bask. "^^ Nonetheless, his emphasis is on joy not pain, play not work, leisure not eflfort. The unkindest cut history gives to human achievement is that the effects of our

— THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

140

actions are often so as their

much

simpler than the intentions behind them; different

aims were, Bushnell and Beecher finally

moved Americans

in similar

directions.

Bushnell habitually delivered sermons whose length and argumentative density humiliated his

little

daughter, well aware of the predilections of his

Hartford congregation; he continued to publish even denser

though

his

sermons sold

better.

Nonetheless

successful attempt as a religious thinker as

an element into theological thought.

was

He

treatises, al-

most fascinating and most

his

his effort to

once

introduce leisure

said that "if

my

had

I

life

—

would not do I would not push,"^® and, like Beecher, although at an incomparably more profound level, he tried to teach theology the art of relaxation. Having undergone a prolonged period of religious anxiety and uncertainty in early manhood, he later used to lead over again, there

is

one thing

I

to advise others involved in a similar ordeal:

Never be time.

in a

Time

is

hurry to believe; never try to conquer doubts against

one of the grand elements

in

thought

you cannot open a doubt today, keep afraid to keep it whole years.^^ If

In his

A

most

bit like a

difficult theological

them

work, he urges

to-morrow; do not be

til

his readers to take

it

easy.

guide leading a group of amateurs on an arduous expedition, he

promises his readers there asks

it

motion.

as truly as in

is

"nothing too abstruse or difficult"

in

what he

open ranges of

to understand; they are proceeding "along

thought," rapidly bearing "a considerable continent already

.

.

.

behind us";®°

they can stretch, they can breathe. Territorial imagery occurs as naturally in Bushnell's

prose as physical metaphors appear in Beecher's

more heated

periods.

Bushnell believed that "forgiveness

is

man's deepest need and highest

achievement":®^ the forgiveness he has in mind

Eva van Arsdel urges on Bolton conversion experience

is

in

My

Wife and I

like that

which Stowe's

— self-forgiveness. Man's

no longer an acceptance of

acceptance of himself, and Bushnell understood ness,

is

God

so

much

as

an

this as a function of happi-

of nurture, and of process. Ministers of an older day like Johathan

Edwards, or even latter-day

Lyman

revivalists like Charles

Grandison Finney and

Beecher, stressed the inexorable press, the immediate need of conver-

was now, the decision was now, time was running out, which was to be your destination, heaven or hell? Tomorrow you may wake up, Edwards intoned in his correct precise voice, his eye fixed habitually and

sion: the crisis

calmly on the back of the room, is

arguing that time

is

on your

in hell. Bushnell, like

side.

Time

is

Henry Ward Beecher,

no longer God's, days and years

marshaled toward the relentless revelation of the divine

moments running

will,

but man's

freely into space, like a stream pooling into a lake.

Expan-

The Loss of Theology

flow

sion, cultivation, strain.

Nathaniel

141

the mortal task, not contraction, discipline, and

is

Emmons,

innovator despite (he claimed be-

a theological

cause of) the strictness of his creed, was under genuine pressure as he dryly

pursued truth: thinking for him was a matter of finding clues to planned by someone

ratiocination

else;

divine labyrinth. Thinking for the liant

was

much

a string leading in

less

a vast design

and out of the

scholarly although

more

bril-

Bushnell was to be inspiration, play, creativity. Austin Phelps, percep-

understood that for Bushnell "work was

tive as always,

discovery'';

"a seer, not a reasoner,"^^

and he could ignore predecessors with

disdain. Self-expression for

Henry Ward Beecher had become

ture; for

Horace Bushnell

it

was

a fine

posture, ges-

but both posited as

insight, vision;

he was

tfie

goal

of religious experience and development, assimilation, ease. In downplaying the Calvinist over-emphasis on effort with

its

reification of pain,

Beecher and

Bushnell tended also to downplay the inevitable role agony plays in experience. Trust

and define

objects.

its

rationale for

not a good in

is

itself; it

human

must take account of obstacles

Both Beecher and Bushnell helped to create the

Eva von Arsdel and her calculated

oblivion, anticipatory of the

consumer's amnesia.

and

Anti-Intellectualism

The new view

the Theology

of Feeling

of God's plan and man's part

in

it,

with

stress

its

on the

emotions, the unconscious, and the resources of leisure and literature, un-

doubtedly fostered

in

the clergy an anti-intellectualism

to have troubling effects

have seen that

many

which came

on the profession and on the broader

ministers, in the midst of their

in

time

culture.^^

most extravagant

We

state-

ments about the "feminine" nature of Christianity or the Christlike role of

women,

insisted

upon female

unfitness, indeed incapacity, for the trials

and

Woman Suffrage: The Reform Against Nature (1869), that men and women could not be more "unlike" if

duties of the ministry. In

Bushnell, after saying

they were two different species, explains that the male ing forcefully

from

ing "grace." Bushnell then goes

law it."

in

on to proclaim the superiority of woman,

terms of the Atonement: she "goes above the

it,

and overtops

it

in

giving by submission to

Clearly feeling that he has implicitly raised an obvious question, he

answers tion

in

doing everything for

the "law," thunder-

female the "gospel," subject to law but bring-

Sinai, the

couching her pre-eminence

is

is

it

by saying

that

women

are not to be ministers because "ministra-

one thing, and the question of administration

another."^'*

Women lack

the brains necessary for executive action. Feminine sentimentality, igno-

rance of the world, lack of scholarship, precisely those qualities which

women more Christian —and which were named ale of the liberal ministerial role

This apparent contradiction

is

made

increasingly in any ration-

— were, paradoxically, held against them.

eloquent.

Even while

liberal ministers sabo-

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

142

taged their intellectual heritage, they wished to hold on to that in

women

and

feminization lay

in

its

it,

and they feared

most formidable antagonist.

Women did not attempt to undermine clerical scholarship: made

housekeepers, they provided the labor which

as

wives and

church

possible; as

it

members, they constituted the audience which received

its

fruits in

prayers, and discourses; as intelligent and sensitive individuals,

sermons,

many

of them

exerted an important and constructive influence over the thinking of their

husbands and

ministerial

we

friends. Yet, as

have seen, disbelief

in

female

capacity for scholarship and real intellectual or artistic achievement was

American culture. The clergy, anxious to preserve their claim to distinction from those they imitated, fostered such skepticism; its effects on women and on their attitude toward religion were largely and predictably negative. The gravest irony of the ministers' position was precisely that in defending themselves they armed their enemy. widespread

The clerically

in

two most talented Beecher sisters to the pervasive, endorsed misogyny of their society were representative, if ex-

reactions of the

treme. Both

women were unusually

well versed and interested in Protestant

theology; both played a major role in vitiating

its

intellectual content.

My

Wife

sister Ida.

Eva,

options were painfully limited. In Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel

and as

I

/,

the frivolous Eva van Arsdel

have noted,

is

is

set against

a pretty little coquette.

her older

She reads

little

men who have

Their

besides magazines

more than she. Her "study" boasts few books and is decorated to give the illusion of what Eva calls "my Italy"; the room sports copies of works by Bushnell's favorite painter. Era Angelico.^^ At one point Eva explains her Anglican faith with a superficiality which fascinates and horrifies: " 'I long for the dear old prayers of my church, where my poor naughty little heart has learned the

and

likes to get

her "ideas" by talking to

way and can go on with Arsdel, in contrast, tan; she fixes

is

full

consent without stopping

room

Scholarly, bright, hard-working, Ida

'

"®^ Ida

van

in is

an old

New

England farmhouse.

determined to be

a

doctor and

a

more admirable of the two sisters, yet much drops her from consideration in We and Our Neighbors, My Wife and I. Stowe chooses to focus her attention, with

lifelong spinster.

the sequel to

to think.

doctrinally free-thinking, but temperamentally a Puri-

her study up like a

Stowe pretty

read

She

is

clearly the

whatever ambivalence, on the feminine opponent rather than on the feminist upholder of the

New

society had given her

England way. One can hardly

little

incentive or

hope

fault her; Stowe's

in plotting Ida's future. Ida

was

the rare exception, not the rule, and unlike her equally improbable, saintly

Stowe

fictional predecessors, Ida's appeal to readers

was

and a person was far too sociologically

— indeed, almost punitively so

alert

limited.

as a novelist

—to waste her time on sheer highmindedness. Harriet's

own

sister,

Catharine, at

first

glance seems closer to Ida than

The Loss of Theology

143

Eva. Easily the intellectual equal of her most brilliant brother, Edward,

Catharine Beecher was capable of producing theological tracts which published anonymously with no hint of the sex of their author)

won

(if

the

some of America's ablest divines. As a young woman, however, while her brothers went to Yale or Amherst, she stayed at home. Her adult life was spent in an ever-sanguine, ever-frustrated search to raise the funds necessary to endow a woman's college, staffed by women and designed to satisfy her biased yet high standards. Beecher was too restless ever to become truly bitter, but her heart burned at times when she contemplated the magnificent financial resources of Harvard and Yale and respect and response of

thought of her

own

multiple failed educational endeavors. Despite her tem-

peramental self-righteousness and excitability, her claim that she could have

more money seems a fair one: a good portion of her frantic over-activity was an effort to substitute human ingenuity for economic backing. Beecher suffered from hysteria and occasional paralytic afflictions. One hardly needs recourse to psychoanalysis to sense that she was suppressing a massive hatred of the male world which had denied her her succeeded

if

she had only had

colleges, denied her, in a very real sense, her

mind.

All Catharine Beecher's antagonism surfaced in an extraordinary

published in 1850 entitled Truth Stranger Than Fiction. This to be a defense of Delia

Bacon

Hartford Female Seminary,

a

At

(181 1-59), formerly Catharine's student at the

and writer somewhat

later a talented lecturer

Yale graduate, a minister, and a

herself. In 1847,

her.

work purported

of Margaret Fuller. Bacon had been engaged to Alexander Mac-

in the line

Whorter,

book

MacWhorter had

this time, Delia's

man

significantly

younger than

rather humiliatingly refused to

brother Leonard, a distinguished

preacher and a Yale professor of divinity, had brought

marry

New Haven

MacWhorter to

trial

for breach of faith before the local Connecticut convocation, and had lost

the case. Both

MacWhorter and Bacon

not sparked solely by Delia Bacon's plight.

between the older

ministers,

many

whose interest was The contest was in reality one

enlisted backers

of them colleagues or pupils of

Lyman

Beecher's closest friend, Nathaniel Taylor, and the younger clergymen, led

by Bacon; the former were professors and theologians, the chiefly less learned

men from

latter

were

the county parishes.®^

Catharine Beecher contributed

two lawyers and

then wrote her indignant account of

it.

She was

fully

herself to the

trial,

aware that the

and

conflict

was between what Edwards A. Park would call "the theologian" and "the pastor" (194, 235, 29 3 ),®® and her book was assertively dedicated to the "Parochial Clergy" of America. She knew that she was attacking not just, melodramatically emphasized, ''The grey hairs of my father's friend [Taylor]!" (294), but the Calvinist intellectual tradition and the elitist male as she

institution

most heavily endowed for

its

propagation

(12, 290-1).

Her

rally

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

144

MacWhorter had

cry was the sanctity of the domestic claims which

and which Yale University,

in

tive that the adverse decision

nant

CONSPIRACY!"

Bacon, to oppose such

exonerating him, had despised. She was posi-

could only have been the result of

2.

woman

with such

men is, and must be, the center of a

to her or to far as

one whose destiny

can be,

it

-malig-

a

but she was determined, as she told Leonard

(249),

''Such

it:

violated

is

calumny

a

affixed to her

perpetual warfare. There

now

united with hers,

till

is

no peace

wrong

this

by as

righted" (287). Unfortunately, to Delia Bacon's distress,

is

Beecher kept her word.

she did not alleviate Delia Bacon's situation, she

If

did express her rage and display her revengeful alliance with the forces of

The most

sentimental morality against those of theological scholarship. serious motive for her rage

is

one she omits from the book. Critics laughed

at the excesses

of Beecher's tirade, yet her anger was admirable.

she had

little

constructive advice to offer

passion.

She had been barred

all

her

life

The fact that

was the best justification of her from access to the training necessary

to fully solve the problems she exposed.

The

forces of anti-intellectualism Catharine Beecher invoked were des-

win the day

tined to

outburst, Bela Bates

intellect

elusive.

—and

By

.

.

.

after Beecher's

Edwards of Andover Seminary lamented

considered "an intellectual clergyman pious ministry

few years

in clerical ranks. In 1853, a

.

.

.

that people

deficient in piety and an eminently

deficient in intellect."®^ Clerical ability to unite piety with

thus to win wide respect

—came

to

seem more and more

1883 President Eliot of Harvard could say that the ministry had

declined greatly in the preceding forty years principally because educated

men no

longer found the "intellectual qualities" in the clergy which they

expected

in a guide.^°

increasingly

One

clear sign of the

youthful age of

dilemma of the ministry was the

men assuming

By

pastorates.

the

mid-

nineteenth century, especially in large towns, congregations tended to select

men

in their thirties,

of the church.^ In ^

1

often 859,

more youthful than the most

members of the Synod

influential

Reverend C. van Santvoord, president

Dutch Reformed Churches, complained: "churches of present times show so strong a proclivity toward calling young men in preference to teachers of riper experience and more solid attainments that a man

of the .

.

.

.

happening to be prematurely bald certain discomfiture"

...

a

.

may reckon on

almost

younger candidate.^^

In van

or gray,

when competing with

.

.

Santvoord's opinion, churches hoped thus to pay

.

.

little,

to get

men up with

the times, and to have "a fair countenance" to contemplate on Sunday

morning. Congregations were seeking

—namely

labor

in their ministers the ideal

of feminine

youth, good looks, and cheapness; they were insuring the

lack of lengthy training also characteristic of

women

employees.

Seminaries inevitably reflected congregational demands. Between 1850

and 1895 the number of Yale's graduates doubled, yet the proportion of

The Loss of Theology

145

who entered the ministry decreased by more than sixty percent. Of those who joined the clergy, fewer came from the best colleges; fewer came

those

from colleges at all.^^ Within the seminaries themselves, whether Harvard or Andover or Yale, there was a shift of emphasis in requirements for ministerial candidates which presupposed a change in theological outlook at least correspondent to the altered intellectual level of the young men applying to such schools. In 1726, the massively well-read Cotton Mather, writing his Manductio ad Ministerium (Directions for a Candidate of the Minissaid that

try),

he believed "learning" of a general kind the second most

important qualification for a clergyman after piety.

of

all this

should

erudition was clear to Mather; he stressed that

importance that

.

.

.

that

know Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Rhetoric, Logic, Mathematics, Astronomy, and Divinity. The purpose

a well-trained minister

Natural Philosophy,

He recommended

[the candidate] should be a

extolling the inquisitional

and controversial

good

skills

"it is

of the

last

"^"^

Mather was Hopkins and Emmons casuist.

possessed in such eminence: the ability to discriminate false

from

true,

and

defend the correct against the incorrect. Mather assumed that the truth was to be had,

with

if

Emmons and

difliculty, labor,

Hopkins,

and argumentation.

who trained hundreds of young ministers in the

days before seminaries opened, upheld Cotton Mather's standards.

They

themselves labored twelve hours daily at their desks; their impractical ab-

sent-mindedness about delight,

was

affairs

of this world, in which antiquarians would

cultivated, not innate.

Emmons

refused to

work

in his

garden

him from more urgent responsibilities. He believed that the duties God required of men were so many and so diverse that the true Christian would find no time for mere amusements; Emmons had no concept of leisure.^^ Little wonder if, according to popular lore, such men occasionally rode oflF on the wrong horse after service or even occasionally made themselves at home in the wrong house: they had more important things on their minds than such mundane distinctions. Reverends West, Whitridge, and Hopkins used to meet together regularly and talk theology for hours. On one occasion, just as night fell, Whitridge came out to see West to his horse. They fell again into theological debate and were absorbed until they thought they detected a fire in the east it was the rising sun.^^ Timothy Dwight, heir of Jonathan Edwards by lineal descent and by lest

it

distract

—

creed, as a tutor at Yale in the late eighteenth century pursued the ascetic

commitment

to learning

ited himself to

which had characterized

two mouthfuls of food

at

his predecessors.

He

lim-

dinner (usually potatoes), slept on

the floor, and studied heroically long hours. Probably partially as a result

of this regimen, he almost lost the use of his eyes. In later years, he was never able to

work

for prolonged periods of time.

He

professed to be thankful,

since he had been forced to the discovery that "real

knowledge" was only

— THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

146

to be

drawn from

ministers at Yale bears.^^ In the ical

a

life.

His style as a teacher and

was consequently very

words of

more popular and

that of his fore-

prevalent at that time in the pulpit, and introduced

instructive

Dwight's

partial loss of vision;

and New

York.

played to the

from

different

contemporary, Dwight "broke up the metaphys-

a

mode of discussion so

preacher training future

a

method of address."^® One can hardly it

led to the masterly Travels in

regret

New England

Dwight's shrewd practical powers of observation are

fullest in this lively narrative,

which

is

far superior

dis-

by almost

any criterion to his dull if solid four-volume treatise. Theology Explained and Defended. Dwight's changed course undeniably marks, however, an unwit-

New England Calvinist tradition. Increasingly after Dwight,

ting turn in the

ministers

The

were

pastors,

even writers, before they were theologians.

Andover Seminary illustrates the shift in American Protestantism away from dispute, doctrine, and scholarship. Founded in 1808 as a bastion against Harvard, which had recently capitulated to the theninsurgent Unitarian forces, Andover was intended to preserve and perpetuate the New Light Divinity of Edwards and Hopkins. All professors at the fate of

school swore opposition not only to Atheists and Infidels, but to Jews, Papists,

"Mohametans," Arians, Pelagians, Antinomians, Socinians,

ans, Unitarians,

and Universalists; they renewed

oath

this

Sabelli-

in public

once

every five years. Students, conducted through a supremely rigorous course

which heavily emphasized oping controversial

and faculty,

skills,

Biblical exegesis, indisputably essential to devel-

were examined once

also in public.^®

a

year by trustees,

The clear assumption was that

visitors,

theological truth

was indeed a fortress, but one in constant need of defense. Moses Stuart, who taught at Andover, delivered his learned broadsides against the Unitarians in the earlier part of the century; other, more liberal scholars like Edwards A. Park and Calvin Stowe were to succeed him at the task of ingenious debate. Calvin Stowe reiterated emphatically in 1852 that "the right interpretation of Scripture" was the cornerstone of religion, but students did not always agree.

By

the 1870s students, abetted by the younger

demanded, and a

got, less Biblical exegesis in their

members of the

faculty,

middle years. Park, after

long and unsuccessful struggle against their demands which his

own

liber-

alism had unwittingly fostered, resigned in 1881; unable to appoint the

Hopkinsian scholar he had wished to see spend the next twenty years working on

Jonathan Edwards. cial

because

it

The

he was destined to

in his place,®®

a

never-assembled biography of

students' revolt against Biblical criticism

was cru-

revealed their endorsement of Orville Dewey's observation

that "the main, the almost exclusive object of the religious impression."®^

Maine was reputed

The

.

great revivalist preacher

.

.

modem

pulpit

Edward Payson

to believe that "doctrines should be like sugar in tea

is

of

The Loss of Theology

only tasted

in

the cup"®^

—and who needed

147

a full

year of close Biblical study

provide "flavor"? Even the Biblical criticism which Park and others

just to

had gone to Germany to study scholar

failed to take

George Noyes published

hold

in

America;

a despairing article in the Christian

iner entitled "Causes of the Decline of Interest in Critical

concluded that seminaries might

in 1847, the

fail

Exam-

Theology"; Noyes

for lack of public support.®^ Andover,

Harvard and Yale, survived, but the preoccupation of later generations of divinity students was increasingly to be either with themselves and the cult of self-nurture, or with the changing, conflict-laden world and the creed like

of the Social Gospel

—not with learned explication of the Holy Scriptures.

In 1850 Park himself had instigated the second major nineteenth-cen-

among

tury controversy role.

The

first

the liberal Protestant clergy over their intellectual

had occurred

when the transcendentalist Unitarians by Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Ripley, 1839

in

of Boston and Cambridge, led

more orthodox Unitarian brethren ably marshaled by Andrews Norton of Harvard Divinity School. Norton was a parishioner of Henry Ware, Sr., a Brahmin intellectual possessed of

and Orestes Brownson,

genuine

if

split

from

their

conventional acumen. His dedication to scholarship and reason

was extreme,

for, as a fervent social conservative, in these alone

around him.

potentially civilizing forces for the democratic chaos characteristic of the

very

ill

at ten,

his spirit that his son, Charles Eliot

It

was

Norton,

worried only that he would die and not be able to "edit

Norton was

father's works."®'* tivity

man and

he found

bitterly

opposed to transcendental subjec-

and the incipiently democratic notion,

as

he put

it,

"that the

mind

possessed a faculty of intuitively discerning the truths of religion."®^ Utterly distrustful of the

to see "religion

.

common people or even the less common people, he wished .

.

taken out of the hands of divines

.

.

.

and

its

exposition

become the study of philosophers as being the highest philosophy."®^ These philosophers were to possess "extensive learning." Norton's response to the implicit attack on the clergy's elite status was, as his transcendental opponents fully recognized, to become more elite, to assert the challenged claims ever more assertively. The historian Richard Hildreth, one of Norton's ablest critics, realized that Norton was essentially and defence

.

.

.

arguing that "religion consists

in

knowledge."®^

To

be

a religious leader, in

other words, was to be a professional and safely out of the range, of earshot, of the untrained. If there was a choice to be

popular appeal and intellectual pre-eminence, Norton

if

also out

made between

at least

had no

hesita-

tions.

The

was very diflPerent for Park, who was twenty-two years younger, considerably more brilliant, and infinitely more imaginative, although every bit as scholarly as Norton and equally concerned about the clergy's dwindling intellectual stature. Norton was slated to be a partisan. case

.

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

148

a self-believer, able to

defend and see only one side of

a historical conflict;

Park was destined by temperament and talent to an attempt to bridge the fissures

of his culture.

When

culty.

He

tolerated intellectual mediocrity with great

a student, after delivering a peculiarly spiritless

difli-

and dull

ser-

mon, asked Park what hymn would best accompany it, Park snapped back, with the acerbic irony which Puritan discipline fostered and could not always check,

"Now

I

Lay

Me Down

to Sleep." Driven abroad

by the

nervous prostration and insatiable curiosity which would dog him

all

his

Germany; the advanced he found there made him

days, he experienced a profound depression in Biblical scholarship

and the extensive

libraries

ashamed and afraid for provincial Andover. Like Cotton Mather, he firmly believed that a minister creation

—ought

a colleague

who

to

—who

know

filled,

to his mind, the greatest place in

everything.

exemplified the

He

intensely admired

Moses

martyrdom and the glory of

God's

Stuart,

a learned

clergy:

A

Christian scholar, contending with the infirmities of an emaciated

body, leaving

his sleepless

couch

that he

studies of an anxious day, and closing his

gain

some

may

discipline himself for the

volume

at

may

evening that he

intermittent sleep for the relief of his wearied frame

men

keeping aloof from the haunts of motives for winning them to a

life

may

that he

.

.

new

search out

of godliness.®^

Stuart had indeed kept "aloof," and Park could not finally accept this as a valid alternative for the

modem

minister. In his

memoirs of Hopkins

and Emmons, whose scholarship Park helped to make legendary, he dwells fascinatedly

on the

inability of either

achieved their impact elite:

in a

manner

man

to attract a broad audience.

traditional for a

member of an

by educating students who were able to spread

Both

intellectual

their doctrines as they

themselves were incapable of doing. Park was impressed by their ability to

adhere to and believe

in truth,

without the confirmation supplied by

fol-

throw into bolder relief the fine quality of their intellectual integrity. They had no need, no conception of a public in the modem sense. Yet at the same time it is clear that Park lowers: he perhaps exaggerates their isolation to

finds

such pristine and tenacious virtue

popularity.

He

in itself a

keeps stressing that both

men

guarantee of very limited put their beliefs harshly,

boldly; he hovers between an apology for such tactless and impolitic over-

what he believes to be the truth and apf)eal. Everywhere he implies that no latter-day minister could fully follow their relentless course. Park himself was a powerful revivalist preacher who was able to awe and thrill even Emily Dickinson,

statedness and an admission that a minister cannot say

a

superb scholar whose biographies and studies

still

stand; he solved the

149

The Loss of Theology clerical

by

problem of

his generation in his

own

life.

Yet he was always pressed

which tormented and inspired Matthew Arnold, to make the culture prevaiV'\ he was always searching for a way to democratize

that urge

"best

what he hardly recognized as his own achievement, always anxious to rationalize and make accessible a clerical creed and lifestyle which would permit both learning and popularity, or, in his terms, "intellect" and "feeling." His religious and intellectual ideal was in the best sense a bisexual one, and he wished

to be not an isolated ideal, but part of Christian practice.

it

finally in this aim, in the history

occurring

in

but his failure

is

one of the most interesting {phenomena

of nineteenth-century American theology

such

a quarter,

it

He failed

if

only because,

demonstrates that success was hardly possible

anywhere. Park knew that to engage men's minds

—but

is

—he

to enlist their hearts

said

numerous writings about the clergy he repeatedly sets up, or recognizes, a split between the two faculties. As so many of the ministers of his time were to do,®^ Park envisioned and longed for a theology in which virile energy was to be united with "refined sensibility."®® In a crucial address entitled "The Theology of the Intellect and the

so,

and demonstrated so

in his

Theology of the Feelings" delivered in 1850, he described the former as precise logical doctrines developed and supported by the reason, and the latter as the

form of

belief "suggested

by and adapted

well-trained heart"; in a telling illustration, he linked the

the second with a "mother."

Of

course,

to the first

some version of

with a "father,"

this distinction

been familiar to Christian theology since the church fathers; tion

and respective value Park gives the terms which

two

to argue that the

Park's ostensible purpose

is

to the Christian minister,

who must

without becoming womanish, and

all

have

is

wants of the

it is

the defini-

striking.

Although

are both indispensable

the sensibility of a

"all

had

woman

the perspicacity of a logician without

being merely logical," his opening remark stresses that the appeal to the heart and the imagination can be successful

have been addressed

in vain;

when

and throughout,

the reason and judgment

his special plea

is

for the

feelings.®^

was at once recognized as epoch-making and controversial, and few were unaware which "theology" had emerged the victor. A reviewer for the Christian Examiner applauded Park; obviously thinking Park's discourse

that he expressed

agreement with the Andover leader, he wrote:

free to confess that

prefer a

much

hymnbook and

as

we honor

logic

a heart."^^ Charles

and the

Hodge,

intellect,

"We

are

we would

a brilliant Presbyterian

theologian at Princeton Seminary and the self-chosen defender of or-

thodoxy,

in the

lengthy and stunning debate which ensued between Park

and himself, showed himself not only disapproving of Park, but more aware of the implications of Park's argument than Park himself. Ironically sound-

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

150

ing a great deal like the deceased insisted that

no

one "theology" must be

Park so venerated,

true, the other false, or there

between them.

explicit or implicit contest

that Park, in

Emmons whom

He was

most un-Calvinist fashion, was refusing

Hodge

could be

doggedly conscious

to choose,

and

in

doing

what he does not believe." He was convinced that Park was finally, from no matter what motives, fostering sentimentality: allowing people to regret what they themselves have destroyed, to confuse fact with fiction. In his single most penetrating thrust, he accused Park of believing that the central tenets of the Protestant creed were "merely intense expressions" while Hodge knew them to be "true as docso,

"enabling a

man

to profess

—

trines."^^

Hodge argued

that Park

was not so much impressing

literature into the

service of religion as turning religion into literature: he believed that the

escape Park was trying to find for himself was that of language.

and Hopkins, by Park's

and interested

effects style; tor,

I

wrote

as

I

in

own

speaking of Emmons'

"^"^

men

capable of few linguistic

thought of

my

Jacob Ide, Emmons' nineteenth-century

edi-

fewer.

thought.

"perfectly naked. "^^

account, were

Emmons

Emmons

asserted: "I never

style, praised its "perspicacity"; his

Emmons was

a

man

thoughts were

absolutely sure that he had "ob-

upon all points which would admit of it,"^® and few, apparHe wanted his thoughts "naked" precisely because he knew

tained certainty ently, did not.

the thoughts were there and he wanted

them

in the spotlight.

attention to the words, in Hodge's opinion, because he

for the thoughts.

There

is

Park called

was substituting them

undeniable evidence for Hodge's interpretation.

Park said openly that the theology of the feelings provides "visible and tangible images" rather than "abstract thoughts," that

it

is

suited not to

controversy but to poetry;^^ and he continually implied that the Scriptures offer imaginative language not statements of fact, that the Bible text.

He came

perilously close to saying that religion

is

is

a literary

metaphor.

which perhaps shows the influence of Bushnell's Coleridgean treatment of language in God in Christ (1849), Park explains "that liberal doctrines of theology are too vast for complete expression by man, and our intensest words are but a distant approximation to that language which In a passage

forms the

new song

that the

redeemed

in

heaven sing."^® Park

is

acknowl-

edging the timeless truth that expression cannot match realization; he

is

also

more specific romantic notions of the inexactness and richness of language. Hodge charges that this is a credo more suitable for a poet than a minister. Hodge metaphorically pulls the rug out from under Park; he subscribing to

denies to Park the consolation of aesthetics, he asserts the ugliness and

primacy of dogma.

He accuses

Park, in several brilliant phrases, of "playing

with words," of performing "pirouettes" on words;^® Park leisured art of literature for laborious

commitment

is

substituting the

to truth.

It is

the same

1

The Loss of Theology issue

we have

God

does not assimilate to

easily or pleasantly or beautifully,

intense awareness that

Hodge insists:

comes with

genuine religious experience and

to

God

sobriety, struggle, pain, the

facts," are essential ingredients in the

calling.

indubitably had logic on his side; he was in the invincible posi-

meaning exactly what he

nent did not.

Hodge was

said

and being fully aware that

his

oppo-

incapable of seeing the sincerity and importance

of Park's effort to revitalize

Hodge

man nor man

and ratiocination not laced

realization

with emotion, the bareness of "plain

tion of

5

already seen in the changing concepts of the Atonement and

of the conversion process.

Hodge

1

dogma with

the creative forces of literature;

himself here and elsewhere seems to have issued a personal veto

against the imaginative

life.

Yet he saw correctly the drift of Park's thinking;

mind apprehended the potential over-personalism of Park's approach. The victory of exposure was Hodge's, but the Christian Examiner's allegiance to Park's more moving if less solid arguments was his essentially institutional

symbolic of the trend

Hodge

so tenaciously combated. Park had history

his side; the sentimental appeal,

integrity

own

and conviction

it

which he endowed with an

was seldom to display

again,

won

on

intellectual

the day. Park's

would de-emphasize the historical and scholarly work of Biblical exegesis in the Andover curriculum. In 1852, two years after Park's address on "The Theology of the Intellect

students

and of the Feelings," the

collect

and define

liberal Congregationalists, in a

form was formulated and

ratified.

effort to

was the first official Congre1646-48 at which the Cambridge Plat-

their forces, held a

gational gathering since the one in

new

Synod.

It

The concern

of the participants, unlike

was not with theology. They made plans to found the Congregational Library Association in Boston Bela Edwards and Park were particularly influential here and laid the groundwork for that of their long-ago predecessors,

—

—

the inception of the Congregational Quarterly.

A

National Council called in

1865 only further dramatized liberal discomfort with orthodox theology.

The

representatives vaguely endorsed "the faith and order of the apostolic

and primitive churches held by our fathers"; on

a special

and rather ironic

excursion to Plymouth Rock, however, they voted to delete the

word

"Cal-

vinism" from the traditional Congregational statement of self-definition.^®®

The

penultimate chapter in a book on the triumphs of Congregationalism

published in 1894 was entitled "Congregational Literature."^® ^ Hodge's cynical suspicion about Park's direction,

if

not his motivation, was more

than vindicated. Attention to the claims of the press and interest in a rather

were pre-empting commitment to the older New England theology for which Hodge claimed with justification to be a latter-day spokesman. Liberal Protestantism had moved one step nearer to the feminine subculture it both courted and feared.

nostalgic obf uscation of the past

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

152

and

Anti-Institutionalism: The Pastor

The

anti-intellectualism

the

which had begun

Sentimental Heroine

to pervade the non-evangeHcal

by mid-century inevitably affected his concept of the institution to which he belonged and of the role he was to play in it. J. H. Allen astutely remarked that the voluntary system had produced "spiritual-

minister's theology

ism [and] sentimentalism," but that

up an

building

institution.

""^^^

The

it

had

liberal

"and must always

failed

clergyman promoted,

He

ously, a personalized and de-professionalized church.

own

the special and established claims of his

The most

He

evaded

ambigu-

confidence in

denomination; he habitually

joined forces, or tried to, with Christians of recreational activities.

lost

if

fail in

all

worship and

beliefs in

ecclesiastical self-definition.

extraordinary and inspiring expounder of anti-institutional-

ism within the liberal ranks was Joseph

Tuckerman

(1778-1841).

Bom

of a

Boston patrician and mercantile family, from an early age Tuckerman was

known

for his blameless conduct, his intensely emotional nature, and his

"devotion to

.

.

literature." In

.

many ways Tuckerman, dominated,

as

he

himself said, by his "affections" rather than his "thoughts," was prototypical

of the

new

Channing explained: "His strength did not lie His heart was his great power."^®^ Tuckerman a concern for the urban poor shared by few of

liberal minister.

in abstract speculation

.

.

joined with his sensibility

.

his equally sensitive clerical a regular

contemporaries. Forced by

Unitarian pastorate in 1826, he founded the

ill

health to

much more

abandon

strenuous

"ministry at large," a small, interdenominational, and ad hoc band of "free" ministers, tackling

them

economic,

social,

and

spiritual

ills

wherever they found

whatever ways seemed most appropriate. Deeply troubled by the

in

fact that

by

his

count almost half of the

had no religious

affiliation at all,

1

3,320 Protestant families in Boston

Tuckerman lamented

the exclusiveness

which characterized the majority of urban Protestant churches. Pews could only be occupied by those who bought or rented them; the impoverished were consigned ignominiously to

special seats.

Churches were organized,

in

other words, to congratulate the rich rather than to save the poor.

Tuckerman became effort.

He

hated

official

increasingly suspicious of

nities voluntarily to care for their

state to play

own

was

workhouses and other necessary

wanted the

in penalizing facilities.

and he spoke to and for those

of a church, for those felt a

who had no

commu-

only part he would

towns

that failed to erect

The

who had no

local

The

deprived.

philanthropic style was personal service and care. party,"

organized religious

charity as fiercely as any proud pauper: a crusader

against centrally controlled state philanthropy, he

have allowed the

all

essence of Tuckerman's

He

claimed to be "of no

interest in being

members

who friend." He

interest in hearing a minister but

genuine need for what Tuckerman called

a "Christian

The Loss of Theology

1

53

wanted to enter the homes of the poor rather than to draw them into church. True reHgion for him was impossible without the "sympathy, interest, respect, love" which the poor so seldom received; the only church which mattered existed anyplace where these qualities were in operation. Tucker-

man underplayed

his clerical role;

the ministry, but he saw

he believed fervently

virtue precisely in

its

intrinsically unprofessional nature. "It

power to

office,"

he asserted.

^^'^

is

its

in

the sanctity of

self-disavowal, in

its

character only which gives any

In Tuckerman's eyes, the minister possessed

but one valid creed: that contained in his personal example.

even today to read Tuckerman's Ministry at Large with

It is difficult its stress

on

local control,

poverty, and intelligent,

writes.

its

its

relatively enlightened analysis of the causes of

eloquent language, and not feel

its

author's impassioned,

and crystalline concern and love for the people of

Tuckerman was some

however,

in

Beecher,

who

disinterest

his

clustered

showed the same

sort of saint,

more

in

if

a

whom

he

He was not alone, institutions. Henry Ward

minor one.

ecclesiastical

naturally with the sinners than with the saints,

anti-institutionalism

and anti-professionalism

later in the

century; but he substituted a manufactured intimacy for principled care.

Tuckerman disavowed

institutions

to

protect

the social

community,

broadly conceived; Beecher was an exemplar of the force of sheer personality,

and personality dedicated to the needs of an audience, not to the pur-

poses of a community.

Lyman

Beecher, every inch a "churchman," fought Atheists, Unitari-

Roman Catholics abandoning his own heresies) to

ans, Episcopalians,

(short of

and

to the death; he did everything

preserve the precarious unity of

the Congregational-Presbyterian "Evangelical Front"; his most famous son

appealed to Congregationalists and free-thinkers

alike.

Finding what close

among businessmen, journalists, and lawyers rather than among clergymen, Henry Ward Beecher advised candidates for the sacred friends he had

office to "avoid a professional

manner" and reminded them constantly

that

they were "men" before they were ministers. In the sometimes embarrassingly overt sexual language he habitually used to describe the successful minister's

hood" out over

more

like

—he was to "thrust," and "lunge" and "pour congregation — Beecher makes the clergyman

performance his

his

an exhibitionist than an ecclesiastical dignitary.

without a pulpit, standing almost within touch of

He

man-

sound

preached

his audience.

He

ad-

vocated that ministers not write out their sermons but speak extempore; he

was

after impression as

tirst

revival

under way

Henry Ward pulpit a

much in East

as truth.

Lyman

Hampton, had taken "hold without

characteristically

mittens";

wished metaphorically to extend from the

"warm and glowing palm bared

seduction, not compulsion.

Beecher, anxious to get his

to the touch."

He seldom talked

He was

intent

on

of the church; he almost never

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

154

spoke of doctrine except to debunk

To

it.

be a minister, to belong to a

church, was only to court definition and claustrophobia: preachers are

The

he warned; "a man's study should be everywhere."

partialists,"

"all

only

authority Beecher craved was that of omnivorousness; he wished to be as pervasive, and as intimate, as appetite.

Tuckerman and Beecher

^^^

two extremes of

represented the

anti-institutionalism developing in the liberal clergy

between 1820 and

and many of their colleagues ranged between them.

1875,

acquaintance said of Ezra

Stiles

new

the

An

admiring

Gannett, one of the most conscientious,

hard-working, earnest, and fervently Unitarian ministers of the early and mid-nineteenth century, that he was

among

the

sense of "ministerial brotherhood."^^® Gannett

ning

at

the Federal Street

Church

in

last

was

clergymen to have

a

associated with Chan-

Boston, and he was often troubled by

Channing's publicly stated dissatisfaction

at

being confined within one

creed, even the notoriously loose Unitarian one. "I belong to the Universal

Church," Channing proclaimed

The founder "from

in 1841;

"nothing

of American Unitarianism

hell."^^^

felt

shall separate

me from

it."

"the spirit of sectarianism" was

Charles Follen, a prophet of the ecumenical trend of the later

transcendental-Unitarian clergy, claimed with Channing to be a

member

of

the "universal church," sympathizing even with Jews and Catholics.^®® Ed-

win H. Chapin, one of the most popular preachers thought to be

a Universalist

only because

it

in

New

was impossible

York to

was what he

City,

tell

was.^°«

Such ministers

stressed the devotional

doctrinal or ecclesiastical, aspects of faith.

models and adherents.

Women

like

and

practical, rather than the

They were

not without feminine

Lydia Maria Child or Catharine Maria

Sedgwick repudiated sectarianism and partialism as fervently as Channing himself. Even as they proliferated their own associations, organizations, societies, and clubs, middle-class American women revealed a deep-seated and extreme distrust integral to their envy of the professions and institutions

which excluded them. Catharine Esther Beecher's crusade against Yale was only part of a larger campaign in which she had many sisterly assistants. ^^° Of these Dorothea Dix (1802-87) was perhaps the most talented and significant.

Dix was holic

and

bom

in

a fanatic

1802 to an ill-assorted couple; her father was an alco-

convert from Congregationalism to Methodism, her

mother an uneducated Dix spent

a

woman some eighteen

years older than her husband.

miserable childhood mainly with her grandmother,

likened to Medusa.^ ^^ She said in later years that she "never

whom

knew

she

child-

hood,"^ ^^ and her short career as a brilliant but excessively demanding and inflexible teacher

by

literary

proved her

right. Until

her late twenties, she was devoured

ambition of a conventional variety; she could write

a

confidante

The Loss of Theology

155

on one occasion about paying her "watery tribute to the genius of L. E. L.," a popular poetess.^ ^^ Dix turned out the usual volumes of Sunday School fiction

and sentimental poetry bearing predictable

Flora.

A

titles like

The Garland of

convert to Unitarianism, she took care of Channing's children in

the early 1830s and received

the benefits of his affection, discipline, and

all

With her consumptive tendency and her literary sensibility, she seemed in early womanhood, as a friend said, "an invalid, a very gentle and poetical and sentimental young lady."^^* In the mid- 18 30s she went abroad respect.

for her health, and returned in 1838, thirty-six years old, unmarried, un-

known, an unhappy, aimless, rather typical minor lady-litterateur. Then, by a near-accident, she saw the inside operations of a neighboring jail; the rage and conviction

this visit inspired in

prison, hospital,

her led to a highly motivated career of

and asylum reform which

lasted almost until the century's

close.

Dix was very much quell the

a "minister at large."

madmen, Dix was taking on

(at

the

Reading her Bible aloud to

least) a clerical role.

One

of her

biographers has noted perceptively that her Massachusetts memorial has

famous sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God."^^^ Lydia Maria Child christened her a "God-appointed miscertain similarities to Edwards'

sionary to the insane."^ ^® Dix rebuked strangers, and presidents, with absolute self-confidence,

beings

who pine in cells and stalls and

of wailing suffering creatures."^

worked on an

Hope of the poor crazed The Revelation of hundreds

and proclaimed herself "the ^^

cages.

.

.

.

Like Tuckerman, moreover, Dix always

essentially individualized, maverick,

controlled, plan.

Whether consciously or

female "influence" to the tive, politically tactful,

hilt.

ad

hoc,

although tightly

not, she exploited the doctrine of

Beautiful, well-educated, socially conserva-

welcome

in

both North and South before and after

the war, she besieged state legislatures and important personages with impas-

sioned appeals that he

still

had seen

well within the limits of decorum.

in chapels

One admirer remarked

of asylums Dix had founded or visited portraits

of her placed and adored as one might expect an icon of the Virgin to be.

Dix grasped the potential force of the veneration accorded the lady

in place

of power: she could be unique, autonomous, the arbiter not the subject of

moral judgment, the holy opponent rather than the inmate of

man-made

institutions. It

in later life

tongue

was symbolic

that

on Dix's crusading

all

trips

merely abroad

she was actually to boast of her inability to speak a foreign

—and of her

ability to

accomplish exactly what she wanted anyway.

Dix's charge against the prisons, hospitals, and insane asylums of her

day

had many motives, the most important of which was the criminally inadequate conditions which prevailed

in

them.^^® Like Tuckerman, Dix, for

her occasional (and self-sustaining) posturing, had a sense of a wider nity

which never

left her;

it

was her

all

commu-

distinction that she pledged herself

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

156

never to forget those her society was determined to ignore. In a very real

chosen

sense, Dix's

asked

foe,

an asylum to inspect the superintendents'

at

no! doctor, tion."^ ^^

I

Once replied, "Oh

Hke Tuckerman's, was organization per suites,

she

se.

have never found any suffering among officers of an

During the

Civil

institu-

War, an older and more paranoid Dix, appointed

superintendent of nurses and determined to help soldiers since she could not

be one, revealed als.

new extremes of distrust for professionalism and

profession-

She required no nursing experience for her volunteers (though she did

demand that they be thirty or over and homely), and she calmly instructed them to obey her rather than the doctors for whom they were actually working. A one-woman vigilante squad, she refused to take off a single day during the whole course of the war; she attempted to cut off the doctors' liquor supply and to oversee, and correct, every branch of wartime medical

As an observer remarked, she could not work within any system,

practice.

"for she belonged to the class of comets."

^^°

words of one exasperated official, in a perpetual state of "breathless excitement." George Templeton Strong, a sanitary commissioner, seized on the absurd and hysterical Dix

irritated military authorities

by being,

in the

aspects of her over-concern:

She

is

disgusted with us because

rush off the instant she last

time

ment

we were

in

tells

we do

not leave everything else and

us of something that needs attention.

Washington she came upon us

to say that a

cow

sunstroke, and she took

in

in breathless excite-

the Smithsonian grounds was dying of

very

it

The

ill

we

that

did not adjourn instantly to

look after the case.^^^

Strong was annoyed standably crippled anxiety rose that

all

at that inability to establish

many

of Dix's sex.

What he

from her horror, here focused on

proportions that under-

failed to note

a petty

these professionally trained, wage-earning

that her

but symbolic

men might

be incompetent. After Dix had opened the door of her

was

first

detail,

quite simply

state-run

jail

and

seen the enormities of neglect and maltreatment there, she doubted. In a sense, she

enjoyed the doubts, because they implied that

ently not helped,

were even

disabled,

running the world, the burden lack of qualifications

became

fell

on

by

her,

if

appar-

their training for the task of

and her apparent (and feminine)

a positive asset for the task.

distorted, but oppressive sense of

men were

Yet the intense,

unending obligation which resulted from

her frightening conclusion that she was the only wakeful passenger on a ship

headed for certain wreck was It

may

at first glance

real too.^^^

seem strange or unexpected that Dix should have

turned from youthful aspirations to be a literary lady to adult ambitions to

The Loss of Theology

1

57

be the unassisted savior of her nation, but her progression was in reality a

young man fervently loved literature; he too found his mature identity in a less hyperbolic but no less maverick missionary endeavor. Dix had liked to read sentimental fiction, and a number of her admirers described her in terms which suggest the heroines of such stories. From Washington Horace Mann wrote his wife, the former Mary Peabody, that he was happy to be Dix's "lackey" and to fight in her cause:

Tuckerman too

natural one.

as a

he "loved to picture her," he continued enthusiastically, "entering alone realms of darkness where man did not dare to set his foot ... or witl\a hymn

upon her

lips

quieting the fiercest raging of madness." ^^^ Like Florence

Nightingale, the English "Lady of the

Lamp" who would

so resemble her

temperament and achievement, Dix translated readily into automatically charged conventional pictures and ideas. Dix enabled or inspired Mann to in

draw on the stereotypes of found

it

The

ideal

feminine virtue prevalent

natural to fictionalize her.

And

it is

heroine of sentimental literature

he

easy to see why.

typically, as

is

in his society;

amateur minister handily outdoing her established

we have

seen,

an

clerical competitors.

Whether she is outside the church or spiritually at its helm, she cannot be a mere parishioner, a mere party-member, a mere cog. The reader seldom learns her exact religious afliliation. Like Dix and Tuckerman, she works alone, as a one- woman unit.

of sentimental novels

I

I

cannot think of a single heroine

have read whose basic identity

philanthropic group. These heroines are in charitable missions, dispensing

cold

all,

it

is

tied

hundreds

up with

a

of course, incessantly engaged

warm stockings, and prayers, women who belong to do-good

jellies,

but they are always alone. In such stories, associations are usually villains;

is

in the

as

if

to join a benevolent society

abandon one's femininity. Rose Clark, the

sufl^ering

is

to

heroine of a novel by

Fanny Fern, meets harsh treatment at the hands of Mrs. Markham, a cold, grasping matron who runs the orphanage where she lives; Mrs. Markham cuts off Rose's hair, locks her in dark closets, even whips her.^^'* In most sentimental novels, however, institutions of any kind are not so

tacked as ignored.

Not

much

at-

infrequently, the heroine will engage in activities

which the historian-reader knows were the object of powerful reformminded organizations, but she will never, apparently, think of joining or mentioning them.^^^ Eva van Arsdel in Stowe's New York novels, for example, rescues prostitutes, redeems drunkards, returns lost animals, and provides an ex

officio

neighborhood community center, but never involves

herself in a purity campaign, a

or a settlement house. in a school is

temperance

drive, an anti-vivisection league,

We seldom learn of a fictional heroine's activities even

or in a store: like Tuckerman's, her chosen philanthropic arena

the home, whether

someone

else's

or her own. Furthermore, she never

attacks poverty or intemperance or prostitution as social

phenomena: that

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

158

would

in itself

presuppose

a

degree of abstraction which she would find

abhorrent and irrelevant. Her attempt,

like

Tuckerman's,

is

always to "im-

prove conditions to the greatest possible extent by improving character."^^®

And

own example

she offers the sight of her

The

differences

between the sentimental heroine or those

and imitated her and figures

Tuckerman and Dix

like

Tuckerman and Dix had an

important.

vivid purpose to

to inspire her beneficiaries.

which

literature

was

created

are obvious and

intellectually defined

subservient.

who

and morally

Tuckerman, throughout

book on his ministry at large, addresses his reader personally and speaks always to him "as an individual." He refuses to allow his audience to escape into its collective irresponsibility. Every truth, he feels, is by nature ad hominem; he wants to convey the privacy of intense conviction. The domestic novelist also personalized her readership; but she was as interested in his

manufacturing

a privatized

experience for her readers as in awakening their

was concerned with the isolation created by fantasy rather than the solitude imposed by moral commitment. Tuckerman was using consciences. She

literature as

communal

Dix used her tracts and

petitions, to re-establish essentially

was plying her trade to convey an illusion of community through the shared consumer pleasures available in a mass society. Tuckerman grew up decades before the vogue of the sentimental heroine was full-blown; Dix's girlhood barely coincided with the heroine's rise. At most, one could say that Tuckerman anticipated certain of her qualities, and that Dix borrowed her invulnerability in order to engage

values; the domestic novelist

Yet the conjunction, and progressive degra-

in crucial societal tasks.

dation, of minister, lady-reformer,

and sentimental heroine

is

unmistakable;

and the process of assimilation imperiled the passionate precision which alone can edge and validate antipathy to institutional and professional

life.

We can elaborate on this process of deterioration by looking at another aspect of the minister's professional self-image. In Truth Stranger Than Fiction,

Catharine Beecher had espoused her "parochial clergy," the ministers

or pastors, as part of her attack on the clerical scholars and theologians, and

with good reason: the pastor, senses a sister.

as

he was increasingly defined, was

Tuckerman had never been

in several

a particularly forceful

or schol-

arly minister, and he tended always to see himself as a pastor rather than a

preacher or a theologian. crucial ties"

one

The distinction became an even more frequent and

in liberal ranks. In

an interesting series of sermons on the "Du-

Edwards A. Park pointed to a bifurcation between the who is to "cherish learning as a mark of status"^^^ and "discrimi-

of the ministry,

theologian,

nate between the authority of the mass of believers and the authority of a

few leading minds,"^^® and the

pastor,

who

is if

anything to conceal what

scholarship he has and to attend and speak to the "domestic griefs" and "private joys" of his congregation.

^^^

Interestingly enough. Park

saw the

.

The Loss of Theology

theologian as a masculine figure

example, was "manly"

steal

his

59

key words for Moses Stuart, for

—while he viewed the pastor

and well nigh domestic

view of some to

—one of

1

as feminine: "so gentle

the pastor's vocation," Park explains, "as in the

is

away

his

manly energy." ^^°

Stuart, as Park well

belonged to an older generation of ministers. Nathaniel Emmons, uel Hopkins, in his effort to

keep himself free from temporal

knew,

like

cares,

Sam-

courted

ignorance not only of his

own

he made no pastoral

except in cases of emergency. Channing's colleague

Ezra

calls

who

Gannett,

Stiles

personal affairs but of his parishioners as well:

his father, a liberal minister, inaccessible,

"arm of love," once

at least

who

always needed to lean on an

work was his most in their own homes

son wrote, was convinced his pastoral

as his

important duty.

mother and found

idolized his fervently devout

He

called

on

his

numerous parishioners

and sometimes more. In

a year,

his view, the pastor's task, like

the woman's, lay in the home, and like hers,

it

was composed of

telling

minutiae, of ''particularsy^^^

Henry Ware,

Jr.,

was the Unitarian beau

ideal of a pastor in the first

half of the nineteenth century. Like Gannett, he idolized his

found

relations with his kind, but very reserved

Ware

later

and scholar

"My

ment:

analyzed the repressive effect Ware, at

Jr.,

it

prominent preacher

his

emotional develop-

father's dislike of ostentation in religion has,

made me

difficult for

silent

of

fear, [been]

.

.

backward to introduce it; has with warmth, much as I love it." Ware,

on the

me to speak

I

it

subject,

did not, however, like "very ardent and fervent devotional exercises,"

which he

felt

made

as tyrannical

demands on the

capacities as his father's intellectualized

on

strict father difficult.

Sr., a

Harvard Divinity School, had had on

injurious. It has

made

and

mother and

his

much

mental

resources. ^^^

a religion

He wanted

and restrained

style of

worship did

affection, not passion: his

was very

of gentleness. Never effusive, never intimate with anyone

outside the circle of his family and a abstractions of his creed into a

Unlike

individual's emotional

his father

who was

few chosen

new

friends,

he personalized the

clerical lifestyle.

a skilled controversialist able to quell the

doughtiest anti-Unitarian opponents. Ware,

Jr.,

dent; of a literary bent, he always lacked the

was hardly

a brilliant stu-

"thorough discipline of an

accomplished theologian." His object was never to display great "audition" nor even striking "talents"

in the pulpit.

Ware thought both

of these finally

hindrances to the minister's true task, his "private duties," the pastoral

visits

which he exerts the "most real religious influence" on the ''characters of men" by promoting "personal religion." The ministerial role as Ware conceived it, in contrast to Hopkins' or Emmons' view, was that of a nurse rather than a doctor, a mother rather than a father. Henry Ware's biographer and brother, John, describes a fascinating scene in which Henry's wife urges him to take on some single great work and cease dissipatand ministrations

in

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

160

ing his talents in scattered poems, sketches, sermons, and pastoral

calls.

Ware

gently rebukes his wife for such masculine sentiments, answering with the

standard feminine rationale for inconspicuous achievement: "I

do the

little

good

In 1829, the

that

I

can

in

any way that presents

itself."

am

glad to

^^^

professorship of Pulpit Eloquence and Pastoral Care

first

was created at Harvard Divinity School. Significantly it was specially earmarked for Henry Ware, Jr. In 1816, Ware had ministered to the smallest Unitarian society in Boston, and, although he had done extremely well there, it

was with the assumption of the Harvard post

He had

own.

been chosen precisely for

on pastoral work and personal to be, as he well

knew,

religion,

his purity

came

fully into his

of character, his emphasis

and he was expected

a great "influence" for

He

that he

in his

good not only on

new

role

his students

on a hill very much so that his light might shine before the world; his example was to permeate the clerical ranks. His appointment signalized Harvard's skillful attempt to assimilate and ratify the anti-institutionalism increasingly characterizing the liberal faith Harvard represented. By all accounts. Ware was successful in just the terms he but on other ministers.

was meant to

be.

He

had been

set

invited his students to tea, got to

know many

of

them

As one student

well,

encouraged them to engage

later

wrote, "he raised the standard of ministerial character." ^^'^ In 1831, he

On

in

philanthropic activities.

Formation of the Christian Character, his most significant work and a fitting manifesto and rationale for his new position. published

the

Ware wrote

his

wife

1831 that he

in

strongly people feel" about the book: in their eyes."^^^ In his tract,

He steers entirely

radically. if

clear of

gracious speed.

at a suitably

underplayed;

Ware

in discussing the

The

was surprised

"They speak

to

me

to learn

of

takes the usual Unitarian

dogma; he heads

it

"how

with tears

line,

but more

straight for sensibility,

institutional aspects of religious life are

"Means of Religious Improvement," Ware

gives only a third of his allotted space to the activities of attendance at

preaching and partaking addressed very

much

ened by the fact to those

who

desirous of

in

communion. The book

is

a

how-to manual

to the private individual. Intimacy of tone

that, as

Ware makes

clear

from the

start,

is

he speaks only

already agree with him; he writes "only for those

knowing themselves and

are bent

height-

upon forming

who

a religious

character." Conversion and controversy are irrelevant here; the issue necessity,

and pleasure, of further assimilation among those

are

who

is

the

already

resemble one another. In a loaded metaphor, one could say Ware's book signalizes the transition is

from family

ties to incest; intellectual

by definition impossible. Ware explains that

religion

is

discrimination

"a matter of per-

sonal application and experience," "a sentiment or affection of the heart," an affair

of meditating in "habitual thoughtfulness of mind" and performing

"simple and blameless tasks." Faith

is

entirely consonant with

human

nature:

The Loss of Theology

communion with another

the devout Christian walks "in

harmony, unity, ... to

tranquillity for him: "His

him heaven

is

already begun."

to use Bushnell's phrase,

become the advocate of

Ware

161

^^^

duty and

Like Henry

Ward

Beecher, Ware,

basking rather than abiding; the pastor has

is

self-love.

advises keeping a diary and undertaking daily self-scrutiny and

was an

self-investigation

Of

course such

integral part of the Puritan tradition, but the

different here: this

is

is

his inclination are one.

examination for the best "formation of Christian character."

phasis

sphere." All

is

a leisurely

em-

counting over of one's emotional

resources rather than a strict balancing of one's quotidian account with one's

Ware

maker.

is

also especially

concerned with Christian conversation,

a

which he claims preoccupied the Savior and his disciples. Again Ware's interest is divided between the value of self-control and the lure of self-display: "let your example of cheerful, innocent, blameless words exhibit the uprightness and purity of a mind controlled by habitual principle, and be a recommendation of the religion you profess," he tells his readers. Under the guise of a justified self-approval. Ware subtly offers the pleasures topic

Ware urges his followers not to ignore "the books" among which "God has graciously ordered that your

of the mirror: self-communion.

abundance of lot shall

be

cast."

He suggests at least an hour of reading a day, and, although

recommends getting a list of other books from a minister; he states his belief that "no work of truth and science, or of elegance and taste, which does not tend to corrupt

the Bible

is

of course to his mind the primary text for study, he

the morals or create a disrelish for serious thought, need be prohibited to a religious man."^^^

Ware's

ideal Christian, metaphorically

and

literally

speaking, reads rather than acts.

The

assiduous friend of various notable

Edgeworth and Joanna terateur; he

Ware was

Baillie,

women

writers such as Maria

himself a minor poet and

wrote about the beauties of nature,

village funerals,

lit-

and other

matters of the heart as aids and corollaries to the "formation of Christian character." Interestingly enough, he had provided in his popular tract,

which forms the apotheosis of rationale literature.

A New creed,

mission, an exact theological

and description for the behavior of the heroine of sentimental Jane Elton, the heroine of Catharine Maria Sedgwick's

England Tale is

his pastoral

(1822), written to

pious, grave,

and

Edward Erskine

reflective. is

is

not a believer.

orphan, living with an

modest, quiet, intelligent, affectionate,

Her less

purity than by the realization "that if

An

She breaks one engagement because her fiance

with unbelievers," but she seems be solitary"

novel,

defend and advertise the Unitarian

an anticipation of Ware's thinking.

uncongenial Calvinist aunt, she

first

text

might well be "Be ye not yoked

motivated by adherence to doctrinal

my most sacred pleasures and hopes must

she marries him. She firmly believes in the central tenet of the

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

162

—that God has our bosoms" — and she

wisdom implanted the principle of selffinally weds a like-minded Quaker.^^® The love in pleasures of self-contemplation as well as of congeniality are insured by their liberal

creed

"in his

similarity.

Sedgwick was

of Ware's; he read, admired, and even

a close friend

directed her writing, and their shared preoccupation able to their

common

faith

may

be

in part attribut-

and their personal intimacy. Yet

later fictional

knew Ware or shared his creed, conform as closely as Jane Elton to the dictates of On the Formation of the Christian Character. Fleda, the successor to Ellen Montgomery and the star of Susan Warner's second best-seller, Queechy (1852), inhabits a world very much like whose

heroines,

creators never

the narcissistic one envisaged in Ware's tract:

it

only to discipline and create moral character; sentimental heroine

her

may become

a Christian

world "a vale of soul-making,"

little

orphan, she

it

not

in

or for

if

itself

but

there only so that the

is

and make others

so.

Fleda finds

in a rather limited

living at the start of the story

is

exists

way.

An

with her very elderly and

"womanly sweetness" Montgomery, sets ofl^ on

venerable grandfather, Mr. Ringgan, notable for his

and impracticality.^^^ her travels. Fleda

moral side of

is

He

dies

and

she, like Ellen

serious, well-read, constantly looking

thoughtful, devotional. She has a

life,

twenty years older than herself called Mr. Carleton, Dinsmore's famous some,

brilliant,

sire.

At the

on the

spiritual

and

young guardian some

who

story's start, Carleton

is

anticipates Elsie

well-to-do, hand-

charming, but proud, defiant, even Byronic; he has not found

religious certainty, or Fleda.

Fleda

Ware,

efl^ects

is less

Carleton's regeneration with relative ease; Warner, like

The

interested in conversion than in congratulation.

proceed along

a

heavy and uninterrupted course of

common

pair then

improvement.

Their conversations, conforming precisely to Ware's injunctions, inch for-

ward

in a step-by-step process

niscent

of observation, testing, and displaying remi-

of the absolute earnestness of conversation

Catharine Sedgwick and Eliza Follen reported in the 1820s Unitarian circle of which

catechism

One

in

Ware was

a part: their discourse

which both teacher and pupil are

in the is

critical faculties

in

"How was

arm along

with

a

a typical

trivial to

the

only sharpening the

rig-

a city street:

pretty the curl of blue

said

is

mutual and self-esteem. They are walk-

idly unscrutinized pleasure of total

arm

Boston

a liberalized

could say they take turns playing pastor to each other. Here

profound, their supposedly acute

like

instructed, fostered, buoyed.

example of Fleda and Carleton moving inexorably from the

ing

women

that

smoke

is

from

that chimney," he said.

tone so carelessly easy, that Fleda's heart jumped.

.

It .

.

.

The Loss of Theology "I

know

she said eagerly

it,"

—

163

have often thought of

"I

it

—espe-

cially here in the city."

"Why

What

is it?

Fleda's eye gave

spoke. "Isn't

is it?"

one of

contrast?

it

—or

"What do you make "Isn't it," said

its

exploratory looks

at least

I

at his

.

before she

think that helps the effect here."

the contrast?," he asked quietly.

Fleda with another glance, "the contrast of some-

thing pure and free and upward-tending with what

"To how many people do you suppose had

.

.

it

is

below

it."

.

.

ever occurred that smoke

a character?," said he, smiling.

"You are laughing at me, Mr. Carleton? Perhaps I deserve it." "You do not think that," said he, with a look that forbade her to think it. "But I see you are of Lavater's mind, that everything has a physiognomy?" "I think

he was perfectly right," said Fleda. "Don't you, Mr. Carle-

ton?"

"To some very nice

sensibilities,

Thus basking even in

people, yes!

in

—But the expression

is

so subtle that only

with fine training, can hope to catch

such tepid rays, ever ascending, they reach and revel

the ether of religious observation, until Carleton can exclaim, "

much

it."

religion heightens the

throbbed an answer."^'*®

enjoyment of

Elitists

life'

"

'How very

—to which "Fleda's heart

of spiritual sensibility, they find

world food for their calmly voracious

intelligences.

The

life

in the

the

of the mind,

of which Fleda and Carleton clearly consider themselves devotees,

evidence

all

is

not in

pages of Queechy.

Henry Ware,

Jr.,

died in 1843, almost a decade before the publication

of Queechy; he was spared seeing the fruits of his tract. Yet just before his

death he was at

work on

On

a sequel to

the

Formation of

the Christian

what there was of it appeared posthumously in 1847. As the title suggests. Ware's later tract was intended, like Bushnell's second work on the Atonement, to correct the excesses of his Character entitled Progress of the Christian Life;

first

He stresses repeatedly that "the life of contemplation" is only produces "the life of action." He particularly compares "religious

statement.

valid

if it

affections" to "sentimental reading"; both, misused, can

"consume and waste

the sympathies" by "awakening the impulse" to action without "gratifying" it.

Ware's solutions to the threatened bifurcation between "sensibility" and

realization, at his

however, only reveal the diminution of the

command. He

finds the

most persuasive argument for the necessity of

action finally to be that ''action religious growth') action, in

intellectual resources

is

an

essential

other words,

is

and all-important means of

important chiefly because

it

can

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

164

save religious sensibility

from

its

own

excesses;

it

is

subordinate to the

"formation of the Christian character." Despite Ware's acknowledgment of a "certain

vagueness" which clouds the idea of "Christian progress," he

cannot clear

it

and prefers to

away; he stress

offers almost

only that

it

no

specific

must be

a

matter of "habit. "^'*^ Ware,

determined to construct the framework of a recourse to theology

—the

obsessively, avoids doctrine

second

—

precision utterly eludes him. Christian Life; Susan

Queechy.

is

examples of pious "action"

full Christian life

without

tract, like the first, absolutely,

like a

Ware

almost

carpenter working without his tools: did not live to finish Progress of the

Warner went on

to

produce numerous sequels to

THE ESCAPE FROM HISTORY The

Static

Imagination

Teachers Without Texts

work was to go against the increasingly anti-intellectual temper of the times; few liberal Protestant clergymen had the training, inclination, or courage for such an attempt. With notable exceptions, they were apologists, not preachers. Temperance men indeed, they diluted their doctrines to suit the taste of their listeners. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the Protestant minister became the only professional other than the housewife who ceased overtly to command, much less monopolize, any special body of knowledge. His self-esteem depended more and more on the hope, even the genuine attempt, to be better, and less and less on the claim to have learned certain skills which would allow him to In truth, to publish serious theological

do better.

One

is

reminded of the housewife of today's

television ads.

She

is

presumably obsessed with putting the right detergent into the laundry; yet even kiss

if

her choice

is

effective, she expects

no more from her family than

or a compliment whose offhandedness stresses that

tion.

Her bold

sons and husbands and

less

sparkling clothes, are uninterested in the

Her family

is

it is

no act of recogni-

bold daughters, putting on their

why

of

it:

they simply

on the move, on the go, while "mom"

is

functions like scenery affecting the mind of the traveler.

with her family must appear accidental,

merged and dubious

expertise

is

if

a

fortuitous.

The

feel better.

stationary; she

Her

interaction

housewife's sub-

expressed only in the tip-off glance she

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN

166

C

L L

T

L

R E

exchanges with her equally weary and indispensable feminine audience. She is

"in the

know," but barred from the conceptualization of what she knows.

N4others and ministers with their undetected

.

.

Despite their secret supremacy, even despite the real service they

form and the

satisfaction they

openly to participate a

keeping their bustling

and congregations more decent than their bustling should permit

families .

skills

phenomenon. Whatever the

may

take in

causal relationship

between ideology and

clear that ideas play a crucial part in the

Dogma,

creates precision not because

but because

them

it

to take

can help

it.

We

and to think from

its

they have abandoned any right

process of change or fully to understand

in the

personal and social change.

it,

it

the

{per-

events,

it

as

it

is

comprehension and enactment of

commitment

to a certain set of ideas,

fosters the illusion of certainty

on

points,

all

subscribers to pick the right chance and nerve

induce people to alter partly by urging them to think,

a different persp>ective

than the one they normally adopt.

No one who wishes to effect change can cease to be an educator; no educator can do his work by starting exactly where assumptions. If he does so

his hearers are,

— and the majority of

nor with their

liberal Protestant ministers,

majority of American middle-class mothers and housewives, have

like the

increasingly done so in the

last

century

—

his

educative role has become part

of what the historian Daniel Boorstin terms a "pseudo-event":^ an event

designed and arranged so that people will notice

happening, though

it

will in fact

not take place:

which proves only the existence of in

other words, only that the

a j>erformer

embryo market

and believe

it

a trick

it

to be

of public relations

and an audience

— proves,

situation does indeed exist.

Such an educator provides, no matter how unwillingly, merely window-dressing for the forces which control his society. An ideology^ can represent a significant

mode

of resistance to economic determinism;

it

giving the vote, so to speak, to that part of oneself, no matter

which has withstood for whatever reasons the pressures

We

have already seen

theological thought

women

a

to conform.

an occasionally hostile lack of interest

inevitable

among educated and

in

literary Protestant

and what they had to gain from the demise of theology; unlike the

ministers, the

women

tion of Protestant

had never been involved

in the

formation or p>erpetua-

dogma. This does not mean, however, that they had

better substitute for

women

was

why

way of how small,

is

it

than did the ministers. Their effons to

a

make other

experts in "domestic science" u ere robbed of vitality by the intru-

sion of technology into the kitchen; mother-at-home hostess to male inventions. Their hopes to

was forced

make women

to play

into professional

mothers were diminished by the appvearance of (male) child psychologists and educational experts

who

guided rather than followed feminine practice.

Yet educated nineteenth-centurv American women,

like ministers,

wished

The Escape from History

to see themselves as missionaries

167

and teachers. The sincerity of the dismay

which they expressed as women and Christians when they contemplated a world irreligious and basically antagonistic to feminine concerns can hardly be questioned; who does not want in some way to change a society which denigrates her? Their choice to capitalize on the subversive, even subliminal aspects of their faith rather than to emphasize

strength as a sustaining

its

ideology for protest was logical and inescapable,^ but this of saying that they were in certain

ways doomed

is

another

to failure. If the

way

women

under discussion disavowed openly strident feminist methods, the goals they

worked for were feminist ones: better education, more opportunities, and more respect for their sex. The progress of women's rights in our culture, unlike other types of "progress," has always been strangely reversible, in part

because historical circumstances have always

made

impossible for signifi-

it

women to adopt an ideology appropriate to their position. As nineteenth-century women neglected Protestant dogma to point out the

cant numbers of

undeniable, yet often overlooked, nurturing values contained in their

gious heritage, so twentieth-century

reli-

women thus far have stressed emotional

"supportiveness" rather than the (usually Marxist) doctrines which else-

where tial

buttress

communal

thinking.*

Nurture and supportiveness are

values in any feminist-humanist vision, but they need

inform them

if

ing even to her

As

a

some structure to

they are to be achieved rather than espoused.

lady with her dislike of theorizing set an example

more overtly

essen-

The

Victorian

which has proved compell-

politicized descendants.

preacher of the gospel, the

liberal minister

was presumably com-

mitted to the hope of changing men; yet he renounced the right to educate his

congregation into his nominally chosen system of conceptualization.

Unlike

his predecessors,

he seldom delivered a

sermons on

series of

a selected

knotty theological problem such as the doctrine of election. His sermons

tended instead to be,

in

the broadest sense, occasional.

Henry Ware on "The Duty

random from his Works, of Improvement A New Year's Sermon" and "The Parallel Between the Jewish and Christian Passovers." Little wonder that the Protestant Church during this period magnified and proliferated religious "occasions" in ways that would have appalled its Puritan originators, who austerely disregarded preached, to take some examples at

—

even Christmas and Easter: the Victorian church, the intrusions of stasis into the realm of change,

extending the only valid license of Skills gain their authenticity

presumably entailed trist,

whose function

his client

is

knows what

its

multiplying holidays,

was simply honoring and

preachers.

from the recognition of unavoidable

in their acquisition. is

in

facts

A lawyer, a doctor, even a psychia-

closest to the minister's, asserts that his ability to help

largely independent of the

own psyche. The

worth of

passes for law, or medicine, or the

his

personality; he liberal minister

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

168

who abandoned

theology

as his predecessors

against him,

judges

fit

making

understood them: that

God

and

which they

the minister

"facts" of the Bible

God made

Men

are, in

in this

man, man sinned

older view live in a world not of their

momentous and

ultimate senses, not at home;

the only specialist in the knowledge they need to locate

is

Abandoning theology, the minister

themselves.

from the

had and has the right to assign any punishment he

for the offense.

in

lost his right to start

lost his expertise in

the realm

of what the psalmist called "God's thoughts"; he was inevitably forced to seek the lowest

common denominator

in the

minds of

his listeners:

some

loosely defined preoccupation with spiritual, social, and personal matters.

The sermons

of liberal Protestants inevitably became a bit like today's

— horoscopes "You want love month, but you may not of circumstances and lacking the your old friends" —designed to any will

find

this

it;

trust

set

fit

corrective bite provided by a sense of historicity.

The

which I write is perhaps more important is the

intellectual failure of

all

too apparent to need

what is failure of the majority of ministers and women involved to achieve genuine success, as opposed to popularity, in the forms with which they attempted to replace theology. Any contemporary chronicler of American historians acknowledges the numerical supremacy of clergymen and sometimes of women among the belaboring;

—

—

nineteenth-century authors of biographies and local histories, and then goes

on to dismiss their productions in a few pages. Any modem student of popular American fiction and belles lettres in the same period is forced to mention a host of names, usually those of women, occasionally those of

which are unfamiliar to the general reader. The clerical and feminine authors whose works are so largely forgotten today were caught in a double dilemma. A minister might initially reject a theological form (the treatise) as unpopular and uncongenial even though he felt guilty at his reluctance to undertake it. Unhappy and constricted within the secular or secularizing form he had chosen to alleviate his original anxiety, however, ministers,

he might well end by reminding his readers that religious

phy. lar

A

purpose that prompted him to embark

it

was only

his didactic

poetry or biogra-

at all into

female writer, putting suitably feminine piety into unsuitably popu-

and public modes, went through a similar cycle of

self-doubt

which

left her, f>erhaps

energy to the problems inherent

by

in

self-assertion

and

design, too preoccupied to devote her

her chosen vehicle and

all

too willing to

use her original religious intent largely as self-justification. Ministers and

women, unable

to

own up

fully to the

demands of

either their subject or

their form, subverted both.

The literature thus produced, whatever its actual merit, is important for the mass culture

it

helped to bring into being because of

complicated obsession with mediocrity. Authors feeling

its

a

fundamental and

confusion of pur-

The Escape from History

pose such as

I

have

described were by definition and by choice amateurs,

just

They could

not professionals.

to boast of achievement in a partially

hardly wish to

any usual

sense;

call attention to

they could hardly

genuine critique of the prominent and

the forgotten, and the

They were

169

common,

in

to

produce

a defense of the unskilled,

the mass-produced items of

of necessity interested

modem

life.

those multitudinous situations, events,

and persons which they could deceptively portray process of conspicuous historical change but

absorb and mute

fail

themselves,

as lying outside the

which served

in actuality to

it.

The Romantic Historians: History as Protestant Religion

Though

a nation of

theology. What,

swer

By

in

if

churchgoers, Americans were not concerned with

anything, did hold their intellectual attention?

varying forms until the eve of the Civil

1860 there were

1 1 1

War

seemed to be

The

an-

history.

active historical societies in the United States; 90 of

some "proceedings." And this in a country where there were only fifty-five towns with a population larger than fifteen thousand.^ Between 1800 and 1860, 90 of the 348 best-sellers in America, over onefourth, were either histories or books on historical topics; the seven most

these had published

influential periodicals of the

tents to historical subjects.

day devoted fully thirty percent of

By

1840, history

tary-school level; as early as 1790,

was widely taught

Noah Webster,

in his

their con-

at the

elemen-

popular textbook.

The Little Reader's Assistant, allotted half his space to historical material.

formal study of the past made

its

way

slowly but surely into high-school

and college curricula.^ Moreover, American fascination with history initially

stimulated and gained strength

The

at least

from the growing American absorp-

tion in fiction.

To

put

it

quite simply, history

itself

provided the most suitable subject

for literature in post-revolutionary America.

As English

fond of pointing out, there seemed to be a dearth of this

new

country.

Smith inquired

"Who

in 182

1.

critics

new

were

all

too

work in wit Sydney

literary

American book?" the British His query was snide but not jesting. Was there a lack reads an

of literary material, or motivation? Innumerable nationalist literary apologias

flowed from the pens of anxious defenders of American culture or protoculture in the early and mid-nineteenth century to quell such anxieties.

Their authors argued that American energy was necessarily

in large

measure

devoted to the development of a continent, not to the pursuit of the

arts.

Such arguments blossomed logically in the proclamation that America itself was the "greatest poem" and its exploitation hence an act of the imagination as of the body.^

America's material was clearly in

its

extraordinary and,

hopefully, providential history: "a city on a hill" had one obvious subject

.

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

170

—

and those

itself,

pared for

its

civilizations

which

paralleled,

threw into

or pre-

relief,

progress.

commonplace

how

American historians of the early and mid-nineteenth century were; the popular works of William Prescott on the Spanish conquest of the New World or the studies by Francis Parkman of the wilderness struggle between French and English were frankly formed on dramatic models and organized around carefully contrived flights of rhetorical eloquence. History was sometimes It

is

a

to

remark

"literary" the great

touted as a kind of antidote to fiction, exciting but not enervating.®

demand on

the historian, however, to write well, to be accessible, to provide

—

entertainment, to focus on character, to orchestrate events

remember

The

Sir

Walter Scott and the Waverly

in short, to

—never flagged. A

series

work of

writing for the Atlantic Monthly in 1859 urged frankly that a history should be as pleasurable for

critic

readers as the "airiest novel. "^ In his

its

young manhood, Prescott tried his hand at genteel light literature; Parkman, like John L. Motley, the historian of the Netherlands, produced a novel; even George Bancroft, the Jacksonian celebrator of Manifest Destiny, began by publishing a volume of poor Byronic verse. All four men saw themselves throughout their careers tor and rival of the

new

as practitioners of belles lettres. ^®

history

The quickened American major

was

less literature

The

real progeni-

than theology.

interest in history was, of course, part of a

which involved all of Western Europe, particularly simply, people began to believe that the most profound

intellectual shift

Germany. To put and meaningful uniquely

it

way

of viewing

in historical time;

German

thinkers with

historians studied clerical.

was not

as a series of events unfolding

man's growth, and his measurements of

other words, took on enormous seminal

was

life

new

whom

significance.^^

The

attitude of the

several of the best of the

American

necessarily or apparently anti-Christian or anti-

Indeed, their philosophy of history represented a complex transfor-

mation of Protestant dogma.

One

could almost say that the

German

romantic historian-philosophers were performing a complex intellectual eration

in

it,

by which they transplanted the heart of Protestant theology

body of secular G. W.

F.

into the

society.

Hegel, perhaps the most important philosopher of the nine-

teenth century, like

many

of his comp)etitors and followers, was as willing

to find in the dialectical historical patterns he elucidated

German

op>-

historian called "the loftiness

Ways of God"^^

what another great

and logic of the development

[of]

.

.

John Winthrop, the seventeenth-century governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, had been to see the design of God in the sufl^ering of a band of colonists on the Massachusetts coast. It seems

the

as ever

obvious that the great dialectic of Calvinism^^ in

Christ

—was

in part responsible

—God versus Man reconciled

for the concept of historical progression

1

The Escape from History as thesis, antithesis,

7

1

and synthesis worked out by German philosophers

like

Hegel. Moreover, the combination of a sense of tragedy with millennial hope, a combination frequently attendant on dialectical thought, was com-

mon

to Hegelians and to Calvinists.

Hegel

stressed continually the waste of

history; he eloquently referred to history itself as a "slaughter-bench."^'*

mass of men,

in

The

Hegel's theory, do not further the great historical design,

who do advance it count less for their motives and aspirations

and even those

than for the effects they produce, effects often contrary to their intentions.

Winthrop,

like his Calvinist brethren,

understood historical waste too; Win-

throp's Deity also elected his instruments with a fair degree of arbitrariness to serve his purposes.

—

John Winthrop or Jonathan Edwards did not that the dialectic operates only in time; as a result, in apprehending whatever reality means, it is more essential in the Hegelian view to perceive the Yet Hegel believed

—

as

differences than the similarities

phy, committed to this

between

relativistic

historical epochs.

assumption, concerned

Hegelian philosoitself less

with the

discovery and meaning of the immutable laws of God's universe and more

with the definition of the ways by which

how

and

men

perceive or project such laws,

The German

these perceptions alter over time.

thinkers most

directly responsible for the inception of the intellectual presuppositions

with which

Goethe,

all

we

live

still

— Herder,

partly available in English

work with an attempt

their

ophy

as "its

by 1850^^

—characteristically began

to formulate the distinctions

the Christian-medieval, and the

cal,

Hegel, Schlegel, Fichte, Schiller, and

age comprehended

in

between the

modem periods.

thought." ^^

Hegel described philosPhilosophy was now chained

to history, not to theology. St. Augustine, the greatest of the early fathers, his

had believed,

as others did after

home.

St.

church

him, that the Christian should direct

thoughts toward the eternal "City of

earthly

classi-

God" and

ignore the flux of his

Augustine's nineteenth-century

German

successors,

equally fascinated with constructing a historical-theological world view, disagreed.

They saw

the fundamental philosophical task as the comprehen-

sion of the significance of

remember, interested

By

a

paradox

St.

change

—

a

phenomenon which, we do

Augustine relatively

little.

essential to Calvinism, history for the Calvinist

sented not only God's immortal plan, but mortal

life

meant

as

much

had repre-

experience; the end,

God's glory, was foreordained, but the means, whether furthered individual's salvation or damnation,

well to

as that end.

in a

given

Although

it

was not, according to the older Protestant view, in man's power to determine whether or not he personally was saved, his spiritual state was nonetheless justifiably

and rightly

of history which, in a like

way

his

most momentous concern. Hegel's was

unthinkable to Winthrop and those

a

view

who thought

him, discounted the state of a man's soul. Hegel started and ended with

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

172

what actually happened, the "accomplished end, and

result as operative

its

upon the actual world,"^^ as Winthrop could not. Even as he tried to save himself from entrapment in matter, in what he called "the madness of what has happened," by amplifying a teleological view of events, a "final aim [for which] these monstrous

means

to ends.

in

have been made,"^® Hegel subordinated

Winthrop could never have used the word

to his mind, served.

life has,

change

sacrifices

human

life

every

Hegel's perception of the relentlessness of

produced

in

him

a fascination

from any awareness of God's

separable

"sacrifices";

with force potentially

design. His conception of history

was inevitably both intellectual and elitist; finally, the only consolation for the sheer magnitude and waste of historical motion lay in philosophic perception of the patterns

it

formed. ^^

The young American approach thinkers

home know

who went

to

Germany

Hegel or Goethe made sure to

like

that they

scholars

expressly to

their friends

let

were dutifully sorting out the wheat from the

back chaff.

George Ticknor, the future professor of Romance Languages at Harvard, acknowledged that the Germans "are a people who at this moment have more mental activity than any other existing," that among them are the handful of intellectuals who define the issues of the day; but he was also convinced that they frequently misdirect and even "pervert" their enormous talents.^^ Goethe might be a genius, but George Bancroft, future author of the most popular history of the United States ever written, found him "dirty" and "bestial."^ Such New Englanders hoped to gain intellectually while keeping their religious commitment intact. This was of course not ^

possible,

nor probably desirable.

Of

the seven most important figures in the

development of post-Revolution American history

—George Ticknor, Ed-

George Bancroft, William Prescott, John Lothrop Motley, and Francis Parkman none were untouched by the new ward

Everett, Jared Sparks,

—

German

historiography and the transformation of theology integral to

Parkman were all and these four made

Everett, Sparks, Bancroft, and ministers or ministers themselves, against the ministry

and for the

a Unitarian minister,

after

set

came back from

on defeating

either the sons of a

conscious choice

historical profession. Bancroft, the son of

sojourn

his

prolonged struggle, on the career of

unconsciously

it.

his

own

a

in

Europ)e determined,

clergyman; yet he seemed

decision.

He wore

outlandishly

foppish velvet clothing; he dropped affected phrases like "our dear Pelican Christ"

from Cambridge

pulpits, to the

dismay of

the ministry. After a stint as a teacher, he

He soon

left

a full-time politician

and

his listeners.^^

became

made his name through orations on the American past, on Adams, Jefferson, Washington, the "Fathers" and their deeds. He too gave up a clerical career, and one which began far more brilliantly than Bancroft's. Hard-working, elohistorian.

Edward

Everett was not officially an historian, but he

The Escape from History

quent, capable of everything, as his student

except of finding a mission

in life,^^

173

Emerson

astutely recognized,

Everett took over Joseph Buckminster's

Unitarian pulpit at the tender age of twenty.

A

few years

later,

without

breaking openly with the ministry, he made, like Bancroft, a step sideways

toward the academy; he joined the faculty of Harvard College as a professor of Greek.

By

the age of twenty-six, he could write his sister about the

many

"natural disdain" he felt for

of the concerns of the ministry and

express scorn for the much-celebrated sermons of the prodigious and sainted

Buckminster: "their puerility of style and ness

.

.

.

.

.

.

aflPectation of literary correct-

[were] calculated to do the least good to those

who most

need

it."^"*

Four years later, in 1824, Everett was elected to Congress, and, like Bancroft, he abandoned the ministry altogether for politics, diplomacy, and history. Jared Sparks, the editor of the multi-volume American Biography,

no such formal

shift.

He

made

gradually redirected his energies from the duties

of a Unitarian minister (which he had transformed largely into editorial

work It

in

any

case)

toward those of a talented eulogizer of the American

was Parkman, the youngest and perhaps the

most defiantly chose history effeminacy of the

Parkman, was in

liberal

temperament, he

aided groups like

men."

He

what he considered the clergyman also named Francis

Channing; witty, gentle, ineffectual, melancholy

insisted

on observing fading

"The Society

apparently aroused

younger Parkman

who

as a protest against

church. His father, a

a disciple of

greatest of the group,

past.

for the Relief of little

clerical proprieties

Aged and

and

Indigent Clergy-

respect in his son. In later years, the

liked to recount a childhood scene

tions he clearly cherished. His father

whose

was talking with

hostile implica-

a sentimental femi-

boy sat unobtrusively sketching nearby. When asked politely to show the grown-ups his picture, he revealed a tableau in which three devils were carrying away a minister! The sketch was clearly Parkman's translation of the feminine-clerical dialogue on which he was eavesdropping. Throughout his life, he referred to ministers as "ver-

nine parishioner while the

little

,^1^ "25

min.

Not one of the new American

historians,

however, altogether disdained

the clerical-theological profession. All of them, whether consciously or

otherwise, expropriated and rescued a

its

most

vital traditions

for

Even those historians who had never considered the ministry profession embraced the career of historian with what at times seemed

their as a

own

number of

use.

appropriated

zeal. Prescott,

the son of a lawyer, and Motley, the descendant

underwent what can only be called conversion experiences. Prescott, wealthy and charming, was known among his acquaintances as an idler almost up to the moment when Ferdinand and Isabella was published in 1838. George Ticknor, in his biography of Preson the paternal

side of merchants,

cott. takes care to

show

his readers Prescott's

stem

self-control, to share

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

174

with them the examining journals, the reiterated resolves which nerved Prescott in his struggles to produce.^^ Motley as a a

more desperate

lute.

case than Prescott; he

young man represented

was considered

less

gay than

disso-

Reputedly beautiful after the Byronic fashion, he possessed the elegant

insouciance of a Bulwer-Lytton dandy. Motley had been well educated by

Bancroft himself

at his

pursued was chiefly

fiction.

Hill

When

he answered with

cial tastes,

am

Round

all

a tutor

Harvard the reading he

at

reproached him for such superfi-

the nonchalance of a determined

reading historically, and have

Taken

academy, but

come

to the novels of the 19th century.

lump, they are very hard reading. "^^ Further study

in a

prepared for but did not precipitate

his destiny.

By

Hope,

is

made and

plasticity

my

with

tellingly to confess: fickleness.

Germany

discipline he

The hero of his first novel, Morton V

"The ground work of my character was

was mortified by

I

in

1839, at twenty-five, he

knew, however, that the study of history offered him the apparently despised but secretly craved.

trifler: "I

.

.

.

my

ignorance and disgusted

former course of reading [largely poetry].

now

I

set

myself vio-

lently to the study of history."^®

Motley's Rise of the Dutch Republic did not appear until 1856, but by the

mid- 1840s he had discovered the therapeutic value of the research involved

new

in the

history.

For

historiography prided

all its

itself

literary qualities, early nineteenth-century

chiefly

on

disavowal of impressionism,

its

obsession with the "facts," with the object, as the

von Ranke put in itself

it

Granada "Poetry

it

truly

in

is).^^

Prescott, reviewing

Leopold

extensive

Washington

Irving's Conquest

(as

of

happily of the factual impulse of recent history:

confined to her

Parkman did

historian

an immortal phrase, "wie es eigentlich gewesen war"

in 1829, writes [is]

German

its

own

work

in

sphere."^° Prescott, Motley, Bancroft, and

European and American

archives; like their

Calvinist predecessors, they solaced themselves with the belief that their

labor truth.

was putting them

in

touch with, and was even

Behind their commitment to research lay their

itself

equivalent

trust in

to,

work. "Be

occupied always," Prescott admonished himself;^ Sparks, whose career was ^

an exemplum of

efl^ort,

warned others

never purchase their devotees "a seat

Motley both spent

a

the resource of exhaustiveness.

ways to

treat

all

life plan.

France

in the

mental tasks

and dissipation"

will

temple of fame."^^ Prescott and first

major

studies.

what theology had offered

They tended

their fathers:

to conceive of their

Bancroft and Sparks meant

History

work

in

in their different

of American revolutionary history, Prescott to detail Span-

ish-American relations

Dutch impulse

in the

decade preparing their

offered these pioneering historians

terms of a massive

that "idleness

Motley to document the GermanicParkman to cover the struggle of England and

in their entirety,

to liberty,

New World from start to finish. They in the

same

spirit in

undertook their monu-

which Edwards and Hopkins dedicated

The Escape from History

175

their futures to the consolidation of their theological systems.

Research for the historian, as formerly for the theologian, could involve not

just labor

forest,

but martyrdom. Parkman's chosen subject, the American

and the fervency with which he pursued

one of the arduous missionary forays of

David Brainard. Parkman wrestled, Parkman's "enemy,"

as

he called

his experience of

earlier Calvinists like

it,

John

remind Eliot or

as did Prescott, against lifelong illness:

his disease,

was an incapacitating disorder

centered in the head; Prescott's was incipient blindness. But both

men battled

Hopkins or Emmons would have recognized and appreciated. Everett, Ticknor, Bancroft, Prescott, and Motley, during their student days and long after, habitually worked ten to fourteen hours daily, a regimen reminiscent of that which men like Hopkins and Edwards had imposed on themselves. Timothy Dwight and William Ellery Channing confessedly injured their health by their zealous over-commitment to the study of God's on

in a spirit

word; Parkman admitted that he had done "violence" to preparing for his career; Prescott

eye

if

knew he could

regain vision in at least one

he would stop the reading necessary to

seriously considered such an

The

abandonment of

his constitution in

his

work, but he never

his vocation.

transfer of energy formerly assigned to theological tasks into the

service of history

is

as

apparent

in the

most prominent nineteenth-century

work

as in the career patterns of the

historians.

With Hegel, they appropri-

from Protestant theology a notion of dialectical relationship and development which they used to understand the phenomenon of change; in every sense coming after Hegel, they became more interested in the fact of change than in the laws which tried to explain its purpose. At first glance, the underlying preoccupation of the romantic historians ated

appears to be not only a secular, but a political one:^^ the of liberty.

It is

rise

and spread

important to remember here that the beginning of

historical writing in the

modem

United States coincided with the winning of inde-

pendence and the consequent debate and controversy over the form of

new nation. The burst of historof the scramble among towns, states, sections, and

government appropriate for ical activity

was thus part

this

exemplary

parties for a controlling voice in

Judge Marshall's Federalist ence the election of 1810.

on

New

American

affairs.

Jefferson

Life of George Washington

A southern

was sure

was designed

that

to influ-

reviewer objected to Bancroft's stress

England; he was fully cognizant

that, if

northerners wrote the

would "become our masters."^'* American history was thus politicized and political from its inception; it naturally tended to stress the importance of politics, and of the special American brand of politics. George Bancroft, while always maintaining devoutly with Hegel that God nation's history, they

directs

human

progress, argued consistently that the religious "liberty" the

Pilgrims had sought was, intentionally or otherwise, the precursor for the

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

176 political

freedom of which

their nineteenth-century descendants boasted;

became

despite his lifelong love of Jonathan Edwards, he in

the ministers

among

his subjects

only

when

vividly interested

their aspirations

most

trans-

parently took on a directly political cast.^^ Motley, writing several decades after Bancroft

began to publish

his History,

found the meaning of the

struggle of Protestant Holland against Catholic Spain in the political

independence. Even Prescott, justifying the Conquistadors' con-

quest of Mexico, pointed the

Dutch quest for

moment the equally

up the despotic nature of Aztec

dictatorial

rule

—ignoring for

regime to be imposed by the Spaniards.^®

Yet the persistent theme of the romantic historians was not politics,

deep

as their

involvement was

in political affairs.

finally

They would each

have defined the term "freedom" differently to begin with: Bancroft was a Jacksonian democrat

who

considered himself "radical to the heart's core,"^^

while Parkman, Prescott, and Motley were

Parkman was

allegiance.

its

varying ways patrician

in their

clearly not as politically oriented as the others, yet

he was definitely of their school; focus, with

in

it is

as if in

Parkman's work the

rather spurious optimism, can be

dropped

political

as adventitious.

Whatever their very real flaws of attitude and judgment, romantic historians saw too deeply into the meaning of their country to concentrate on its democratic mission. Although they might not have been willing to say so, their common interest was less in liberty than in "the course of empire," the phenomena of discovery, expansion, struggle, conquest, and exploitation of which politics is but one reflection. Whether it was Cortez defeating the Aztec leader Montezuma, or La Salle planting the French flag in the American wilderness, the drama which fascinated them was that of imperialism. Their work is finally, in the broadest sense, not political but military history; they were profoundly if inconclusively involved in the study of violence. Jared Sparks, apparently the

determined to be

least

biased

member

of the group, the one most

compiling his popular twenty-five-volume Library

fair, in

of American Biography, which he intended as a kind of biographical history of America itself, notably stressed adventurers over saints. The vast prepon-

derance of

who

his Lives are

manifested above

devoted to explorers, all

soldiers,

and

politicians, those

energy.^®

Despite the fact that Sparks selected his biographers from every walk of (intellectual)

life

strikingly similar: son,

including the ministry, the portraits which emerge are

whether the subject

whether the writer

is

is

William Phipps or Alexander Wil-

the minister William Peabody or the scholar

on the problem of masculine ambition. Captain John Smith, whose "life and adventures" are given by the literary critic George Hillard in the second volume of the series, could serve as a prototype of those whose lives succeed his: he is one "among the adventurAlexander Everett, the focus

ous spirits

is

whom a restless love of enterprise called from the bosom of repose

The Escape from History in

England to new scenes and untried

perils in

177

our Western wilds"; he was

fortunate enough to "live in striving and eventful times" and to find in

America "an object attractive enough to keep his imagination perpetually kindled and vast enough to task all his powers."^^ Such words suggest that have such an object.

their author does not live in such times, does not

or Sparks, are warming their hands very self-consciously at

like Hillard,

they have not kindled. This

is

clearly the value of history to them:

their vicarious participation in the massive energies at it

work

it

Men fires

permits

in their society;

allows them imaginatively to invoke and to control the ungovernable

spirit

animating

Sparks used

which

enterprise

capitalist culture,

change

his role as historian to re-enact the

so fascinated him. Like his

research, he traveled thousands of miles

unseen manuscripts ... in

the

.

.

.

itself.

in

to friends in 1827

major peers a pioneer

fields

in archival

and examined innumerable hitherto-

the course of his work.

untrodden

drama of discovery and

He

himself "an explorer

felt

of American history.

"'^^

The

letters

he wrote

from Mt. Vernon, where he was going through the

Washington papers, read

a little like those of a general

engaged

in military

operations sending dispatches to his civilian contacts. Most of Sparks's stable

of writers for the American Biography series engaged in no such strenuous forays; yet they are consistently uninterested in those

resemble their

own

who

overtly most

scholarly selves; they dismiss "sedentary" pursuits with

They lust for the event, which they implicitly define as the moment of impact. The relatively short shrift given to clergymen in the American Biography is explained when Convers Francis, the biographer of consistent scorn.

John

Eliot, apostle to the Indians, passes rapidly

ministry in Roxbury: "There

clergyman

as such,

though

is

full

not of

much

toil,

concentrates rather on Eliot's missionary primarily interested in the fact that

it

is

over

Eliot's lengthy, settled

to be told; for the

not

of a

of events."'*^ Francis

full

work with

was

life

the Indians, and he

is

largely a failure. Christian piety

cannot integrate the natives into modernizing society.

To

convert the Indi-

ans as the Puritans originally intended to do, in Francis' narrative as later in

Parkman's, only hastens their demise; faith

all

by

itself is a

sign of passivity

and of approaching obsolescence.'*^ Sparks, Prescott, Motley, Bancroft, Parkman, and their followers were

writing what Nietzsche would

call

"monument"

history: the

tion and celebration of significant masculine achievement, pressive to these authors for

its

evanescence and

futility.

all

The

commemorathe more im-

vastness of the

topics and the periods they covered, as well as the organic theory of history as a process of conflicting

and resolving forces which they had appropriated

from the German school, made imperative an epic panorama and synthetic sweep from which by definition only the mightiest figures those, in

—

Hegelian terms, possessed of the

"spirit of the

age"

— could detach them-

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

178

selves

and emerge with

marked by

The works

clarity.

of the romantic historians are

unending motion which both

a sense of

and

parallels

finally

contains the aspiring will of the chief protagonists.

Motley clearly enjoyed writing the "Historical Introduction" to Dutch Republic,

in

which he compressed

millennium into

a

him an

cant details; the necessity of condensation makes ical

at

hunter stalking the ages for

its

most

his

signifi-

aggressor, an histor-

His excitement gradually mounts;

his prey.

the close of the introduction, he switches into the present tense.

As he

prepares to usher in his story proper, the narrative, released, can dilate

momentarily. This beginning

Dutch Republic,

ley's

of

movement and

is

like that of Prescott's Fall

collection, force

and

portrait of the hero or villain, arrest involved in these

honors

is

his hero,

of Mexico,

rhythm of Motis

counterpoint

a

by the

periodically broken

whether Philip

moments of

overall

resistance: the spectacle of the ever-

turbulent masses, the ever-moving ages,

scious: the historian

The

not deceptive.

portraiture

no matter

The

of Spain or Cortez.

II

is

how

set

deliberate and self-con-

he

may abhor his princi-

from the flow of his narrative, just as Cortez or Philip fought to impress his nature upon his times. The sea metaphors Motley uses again and again are appropriate and telling beyond their obviby exempting him

ples,

ous relevance his

briefly

in a history of

Holland. In Motley's narratives, as

drown

fellow historians, the heroes inevitably

but they are allowed vivid and

full

The ployed

attempts to

it

—

those of

in the flood of the

account,

flashbacks before they do drown.

logic of the narrative suggests that their

process

in

energy

less

is

The

only than that of the

alter.

American

style the best of the nineteenth-century a highly rhetorical, oratorical,

grand style

—

historians

em-

same law

illustrates the

which governs the narrative form: exhibitionism struggling heroarrest the attention of an utterly mobile universe. Bancroft was

of motion ically to

known, even powers;

criticized, for the profusion

in revising his early

volumes, he

called "slaughtering adjectives.'"*^

man who produced

Yet

it

furious river raging below;

by the

felt

bound

was the

his descriptive

to engage in

what he

later writer Francis Park-

the most highly crafted "purple" prose; he spoke of

Hennepin's discovery of Niagara thus: as yet

and extravagance of

pettiness of

til

"On

at length, in

his left

sank the

cliffs,

the

primeval solitudes, unprofaned

man, the imperial cataract burst upon

his sight.'"**

which places a high value on conspicuousness and waste. What is prominently displayed is in the same moment thrown away. The eflfect of restlessness in Parkman, Motley, or Prescott is heightened by a profusion of metaphors whose occasional confusion seems the result of the quickening pace. Motley describes Philip the Fair, the father of Charles the Fifth, as "the bridge over which the house of Hapsburg passes to almost universal monarThis

is

a style

chy, but, in himself, nothing."*^

The

reader's half-realized impression that

.

The Escape from History

one cannot be both

a "bridge"

and a "nothing"

179

is

lost in

the tide; Philip

both precisely because even before the close of the sentence the invincibly progressing, has necessarily shifted.

what could be

called a stable

metaphor

Hegelian

is

constant and complex

grammar of

lip service

Motley can refer almost

dialectic.

his lack of interest in

situation. Characters, places, scenes

are subjected to a kind of transformational

There

p>ersp)ective,

Motley has not revealed any

incompetence here, but he has demonstrated

literary

is

events.

paid in these works to the

clinically in passing to the rules

human history the vivifying becomes afterwards the dissolving principle."'*^ The invincible impression held by the of historical change: "even as in

all

reader that these narratives are not altogether "dialectical" comes a questioning

of their authors' sincerity in

from using such phrases than from an

unavoidable awareness of attention directed sophic concern with the dialectical process

momentum. The

is

just barely

elsewhere: philo-

lost in fascination

with

becomes self-consciously absorbed

dialectic

less

its

sheer

in its

own

pace. Parkman, Motley, and Prescott are masters of the art of flashback anticipation,

Edward

and the obvious but rich ironies to be garnered by

Everett in an 1853 oration on

future by

Columbus

method.

"The Discovery of America,"

by the Spanish throne that

ing of the 1492 proclamation

this

and

speak-

lands found in

all

belong to Spain, notes ominously: "Thus was

will

America conquered before

was

it

discovered.""*^ Everett's perception here

—that appetite can to presume digestion before the fact of consumption —

of the fundamental law of imperialism, as of capitalism

be so strong as

is

recurring and controlling one in the historical Dialectical fate

is

tells far

Everett's friends.

present; the oppressor will die, the oppressed will rise, only

to oppress in turn. But the

process

work of

a

motion which accompanies and accomplishes this

more than the outcome.

Look, for example,

at the

Conspiracy ofPontiac (1851).

magnificent closing paragraphs of Parkman's

Parkman has

just

described the assassination of

the Indian leader after the defeat of his attempt to expel the English

from

the lands of his tribe:

Thus

basely perished this

champion of

a

ruined race. But could his

shade have revisited the scene of murder, his savage exulted in the vengeance which

overwhelmed the

would have

[Indian] abettors of

Whole tribes were rooted out to expiate it. over the grave Pontiac more blood was poured out in atonement than flowed from

the crime.

of

spirit

.

.

.

the veins of the slaughtered heroes on the corpse of Patroclus.

Neither a

mound nor

mausoleum,

tablet

a city has risen

marked the

.

.

burial-place of Pontiac.

above the forest hero; and the race

For

whom

he hated with such burning rancor trample with unceasing foot-steps over

his forgotten grave.*®

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

180

The

point here

of course the irony; one should note

is

how

thoroughly

in

Parkman the dialectical process has been detached from its benign Hegelian end. Even more important, however, is the aimlessness, the omnivorousness of the irony: Pontiac's death ironically leads to more Indian revolts; the Indians, however, by a further irony, destroy principally themselves rather than their white conquerors; by a ans'

last

and most wrenching irony, the

beloved forests have been replaced by

cities

which Parkman, no sympa-

thizer with the Indian cause, clearly dislikes almost as himself.

Tied to the inexorability of history

Indi-

much

as Pontiac

Hegelian sense, commit-

in the

which yields a vivid tableau but little explanation or Parkman has been forced to resort to ambiguity as in itself

ted to the fait accompli

moral resolution, artistically

and philosophically conclusive;

and limited

possibilities

multitude of unsatisfactory

in a

simultaneously presented, Parkman has discovered

a suitable ending. In the Conspiracy

of Pontiac, there has

winner but the ever-alert principle of irony, the

been no

finally

of change

spirit

itself.

The Antiquarians: History as Sentimentalism

The sive bias

effort

why

collective output of the romantic historians even with

its

oppres-

toward masculinity and force, constituted an undisputedly serious

toward American

self-realization.

There were important reasons

ante-bellum America was vitally receptive and suited to the Hegelian

and post-Hegelian outlook. As

we

have seen, the

new

history represented

the use and transformation of the structures of America's oldest intellectual tradition, Protestant theology, in the service of a

modernizing time- and

change-conscious culture. Furthermore, the belief

in

in

America,

ment,

made

a belief

progress so

common

based on enormous industrial and technological develop-

palatable and even necessary the idea, central to the historicism

which Hegelian thinking inevitably created, that events occur uniquely and irredeemably ist

in time.

optimism such

as

To

put

it

another way, only a high degree of material-

America habitually suggested could permit men to

without benefit of the notions of compensation inherent

in

older non-

a

civilization

Hegelian and cyclical theories of history.*^ America was

whose rapid and apparently promising development necessitated the I

intellectual,

at least partial

have suggested that the romantic

economic, and social

adoption of historicism.

historians, like so

many

of those

have come closest actually to dealing with our culture, were sorbed by the phenomena they attempted to analyze.

They

and contained

Prescott, Motley,

ences; history

was

therein. Yet,

it

is

who

in part ab-

held the mirror

to the fundamental impulse of their society; inevitably they themselves also reflected

live

were

important to remember that

and Parkman immediately commanded European audilargely responsible for

what share of

intellectual respect

The Escape from History

America evoked abroad before of

Hawthorne and

the

1850.^®

work of

As was

181

later the case

with the novels

the southwestern humorists, foreigners

America were even quicker than United States citizens to hear and Hsten to an authentic voice; they were alert to note when the ratio between propaganda and information shifted the critically essential degree. If the work of Bancroft, Prescott, Motley, and Parkman is imperialist, at interested in

times repellently

so,

nonetheless represents a significant clue to a critique

it

of a society which was ans, as

we have

itself

absorbed

in conquest.

seen, intermittently sensed

And the romantic

histori-

and expressed the corrosive and

seeping ambiguity of American success, although they could present no alternative to the cult of progress.

Others did

try, if in vain, to find

can historians were widely admired their

work continued

to appear

an alternative. in their

own

significant

four major Ameri-

time and since. Although

and to be read throughout the

the nineteenth century, the historical writing of

most

The

outcome had passed

its

which

their

later half

work was

of

the

peak by 1850. Indeed, the propor-

among best-sellers, the percentage of of the more popular magazines and re-

tion of histories or historical novels historical material in the contents

views, began to diminish in the 1840s.^^ Just as critical exegesis,

models were

also largely

German,

failed to take firm hold in the ante-bellum

period, romantic history enjoyed a rise and a fall during the

important historical work, itself until

more

like

major

and

less

same time;

Biblical criticism, did not re-establish

several decades after the Civil

technical,

whose

War, and then

in

more

scientific,

synthesized form.^^ This does not mean, however,

was not written in the United States between 1850 and 1875. Although fiction swept the American market as never before, histories and biographies continued to pour from the press. The period witnessed the rise of lyceums and libraries, many of them interested in the preservation of local history and monuments; the collection and publication of genealogies; and the founding of magazines like the New England Historical and Genealogical Register and the New Englander. ^^ What had happened was not even the temporary demise of history, but the temporary defeat of one wing of the emerging historical profession by another: the triumph of sentimental, local, that history

antiquarian, "social," and, loosely speaking, religious history, written mainly

by clergymen and women, over-romantic, national, prophetic, "political," and secular history produced principally by well-to-do amateurs.^'* The earliest historical research in America had been done at the local level, if only because, as I have remarked, towns and states and sections were initially interested in history as a means of self-inflation and self-advertisement which could justify their claim to a bigger piece of the new national pie. In

ica

other words, the historical impulse in early nineteenth-century Amer-

was

as natural to those

who felt

unjustly neglected as to those necessarily

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

182

The men and women who

involved in the problem of conspicuousness.

wrote

local, antiquarian,

or biographical history at this time were fascinated

by the meaning of obscurity. The cliche they most frequently used to describe their motive was the phrase "to rescue from oblivion." They did not claim the

who

filled

title

of historian but referred modestly to themselves as those

"the humble office of a compiler."

They were

anxious to find

which have escaped the notice of historians" and "the smaller matters of individual experience" which more pretentious historical narrative "in its stately march could not step aside to notice."^^ These chroniclers discovered their mission in redeeming what was discounted as "those minor points

.

.

.

waste by imperialist Hegelian history, and

many ways

in

their effort

was

potentially admirable and farsighted.

The under ters

majority of what

clerical

and

will call the "antiquarian" efforts

and feminine auspices reveal

women

to their present.

Englander

I

that their society

was

a justified anxiety

among

urged

New

in

minisit

was

the

New

as indifferent to their past as

One writer, speaking on "Ministerial Biography"

in 1854,

England towns to discover and publish the

history of their former ministers and churches. ple of neglect:

which were

He

"There are large portions of the

anxiously cites an examstate [Conn.] in

which

nothing has been done to rescue from oblivion the memories of the early ministers."^^ Clerical cial it

commentators could be perfectly frank about the

spe-

importance of the past for them. Whatever the past actually might

can function

in

emblem

the present as an

be,

of changelessness and thus

provide a corrective to a society obsessed with change. As one rather florid

commentator wrote

We

in 1859:

idealize the past,

set oflF in

and

recall

it

in

the placid moonlight of romance,

the form of imagination, and seen through the haze of soften-

ing regrets and holy tears.

Its

domain, so sweetly peaceful, whence most

of the evil has been eliminated and where

all

the good has been touched

with consecration, contrasts with the turmoil and haste of the present. ^^ Ministers wanted to dwell on the past, but the past which concerned

them was hardly the one presented by contemporary romantic historians. They were often uninterested, occasionally hostile, before the supposedly heroic exploits of the colonial and revolutionary periods. Sylvester Judd lost his position as chaplain to the

Maine

when he felt compelled to Noah Worcester, despite his

legislature

preach against the American Revolution.^®

strong Federalist reverence for Washington, also found the Revolution mor-

Penn was the only one of America's early heroes he praised unstintingly. In 1815, Worcester straightforwardly, if heretically, disavowed those archetypal American models of masculine endeavor, the Puri-

ally disturbing;

The Escape from History

tan Fathers: he found .

.

.

brave

in battle,

them

but

.

Horace Bushnell took

.

.

"a class of

183

men assuming the most hostile attitude

[always] in a state of alarm, anxiety or hostility."^®

a similar

view of

his theological progenitors. In his

by Michelangelo. They are imposing and inhuman: "they took hold of the iron pillars that held up the theological heavens, and climbed and heaved in huge surges of might and kept their gross faculties in exercise. They looked upon the throne, they depiction, they resemble titanic figures in a fresco

.

heard the thunder

roll."

.

.

They provided

a

"grand massive character" for

which God now means to add the needed "softer shades of feeling."^® Edwards A. Park was never able to love Jonathan Edwards, although he devoted the last decades of his life to a memoir of his famous ancestor. Park venerated Edwards, but he wished Edwards had been able to be "something more of a brother and somewhat less of a champion."^ "Champion" suggests an overpowering figure, a combatant, and a winner. Devalued by his culture, the mid-nineteenth-century liberal clergyAmerican

religion, to

^

man evaded

rather than courted comparison with his weighty predecessors.

Equally important, he insisted that current historiography, in ignoring

conspicuous experience

like his

own, was perverting

its

less

task of record keep-

ing and record evaluation.

The

was aware of the slight place his profession was accorded by contemporary historians. Park noted that "the name of a pastor is seldom mentioned by an historian."^^ William Ellery Channing remarked that history "has not a place even in its margin for the minister and the schoolmistress."^^ We have seen what short shrift Jared Sparks gave clergy-

men

liberal minister

in his Library

which spurred his

his

of American Biography. It was perhaps Sparks's neglect friend Reverend William Sprague of Albany to compile

massive nine-volume Annals of the American Pulpit between 1857 and

The

1869.

titles

of the

two

series are significantly inappropriate; Sparks's

"Biographies" or "Lives" usually present studies of an entire place and pe-

while Sprague's Annals are actually a compilation of short biographical

riod,

sketches which supply the reader with

little

historical

background. Sprague

can omit the background because of the growing disassociation between the mission of the minister and conventional historical action or importance.

The

minister

was increasingly seen

as belonging to

what Horace Bushnell

eloquently called the "dead history" of "oblivion"; "dead history" consists of those deeds and people which live on in their unrecognized influence rather than in the articulated memories of their fellows.

"Do

the vegetable

growths repine or sicken," Bushnell asks, "because they cannot remember the growths of the previous centuries? Is it not enough that the very soil that

them is fertilized by the waste of so many generations moldering in it?"®'* Edwards A. Park explained, with some point, that "the real unwritten history of the race is not, in the main, made up of war and of diplomatic

feeds

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

184

manoeuvres, but of those domestic griefs which the pastor assuages and of those private joys which he hallows."®^

The

implicit assimilation of clerical

the rubric "domestic" and "private"

too

with

felt

dle-class

justice that their story

women were by

izing present or

One

striking

is

was both

and understandable. "real"

Women

and "unwritten." Mid-

definition less responsible for America's industrial-

They had had democratic work of

heroic past than their secular male peers.

more than

their share,

settlement.

its

and feminine "history" here under

their share

some

felt,

of the

feminist historian, writing for the radical reform periodical

The Lily in 1853, quipped angrily that she was tired of hearing of the hardships the Pilgrim Fathers had endured: the Pilgrim Mothers had suffered

all

the same

trials

— plus the Pilgrim Fathers!

than their share, however, in the

elitist

Women had

had

less

business of law-making and constitu-

work has always been

tion-comp>osing. Feminine

®®

ahistorical

by the

defini-

tion of male historians: raising children and keeping house have customarily

been viewed as timeless routines capable of only minor variations. In a

country

like

America whose

self-conscious crises, the exclusion of

culture

is

particularly acute.

irrecoverable past; hence

it

process which interweaves busts of

we even

all

our great

on

historical identity rests

women from

a short series

the historical

it

inexorably with social

leaders, original copies of all

women

of the

American history does not reach back into an nowhere takes on in retrospect the aspect of life.

We

have marble

our important documents;

have photographs which cover a third of our entire span.

public records;

life

of

seldom figure

in

them,

much

can history by any comparative basis afforded

keep

keep them. Ameri-

less

in the

Men

Western world

is

an

extraordinarily recorded affair and hence an extraordinarily masculine affair.

In America, history has functioned as a kind of literacy test

women

automatically

Women who with

Yorker and

fail.

undertook the writing of history

a revisionist aim,

which

whether acknowledged or

at

mid-century did so

not. Elizabeth Ellet, a

New

a poet, dedicated her considerable skills to the reinterpretation

of the American past. She was well aware that there existed an "abundance of materials for the [masculine] history of action" and

little

for the (feminine)

history of "feeling,"®^ yet she determined to redress the balance. In her most

important work. The Women of the American Revolution, published in three volumes between 1848 and 1850, Ellet tried to turn her readers from their

preoccupation with the Revolution's "leading to a concern with the founding mothers,

and shed

light

the founding fathers,

provided "the nurture

in

the

which afterwards kindled on the world."®® When women wrote historical

domestic sanctuary of that love of into a flame

who

spirits,"

civil liberty

novels, they did so to express discreetly veiled hostility to the very history

they were apparently extolling.

I

have already discussed works

like Eliza B.

The Escape from History

Lee's

Naomi

185

as protests against the ministry, but they were,

perhaps more

importantly, protests against a pecuHar definition of American history. mission of the heroine in these novels

him paradoxically from the

rescues

to a domestic tale.

Naomi and

is

The

from history: she novel, which she transmutes

to free the hero

historical

her loyal lover eventually desert the Puritan

and the Puritan community which persecutes those belonging to their

faith

Quaker

persuasion: they

marry and go

precisely and appropriately

when we

off into a sylvan idyll.

The book

pass out of the prison of male chroni-

domain of unrecorded feminine grace and family

cles into the

course, a convention of the novel that

ends

life. It is,

closes with a dismissal of

it

where they

its

of

charac-

no longer be subjected to the readers' scrutiny, but this convention has double force in a book like Naomi. The author does not so much drop the historical lifeline as cut it. Her characters have gone into a realm where history cannot follow them. ters into their private lives

Catharine Sedgwick's historical

from America's male

protests

will

work

critics,

is

who

equally ambivalent. Occasional

woman

felt a

could not deal

adequately with history or government, apparently found an echo

in

Sedg-

wick's understandably confused conscience.^^ In Hope Leslie (1827), a ro-

mance

set in

New

seventeenth-century

England, Sedgwick's high-spirited

heroine represents benign feminine anarchy wreaking charming havoc with official records.

As she

peers, frees witches,

history; she

is

past. In later

defies the

stem

edicts of

Governor Winthrop and

Hope

and defends Indians,

tion,

with an avowal that she has omitted any itself

woman."^® She

on the grounds that she

tastefully substitutes for

several rather dull love

nobility of character.

who

of the

is

his-

about the American Revolu-

She prefaces The Linwoods

patriot

solidities

books, Sedgwick evaded rather than subverted American

tory.

Revolution

Leslie suggests counter-

an ex post facto protest against the masculine (1835), a novel

his

real consideration of the

but a "weak and unskilled

such analysis the delineation of

few fervent panegyrics on Washington's Only the heroine, Isabella Linwood, an impetuous

aflPairs

and

a

continually regrets she

is

not a

man and

thus able to defend her

country, suggests Sedgwick's frustration at her sex-determined exile from her

own

material.

alized domestic

By

the later 1830s, Sedgwick had turned to thinly fiction-

manuals and religious

even from subversive history, was

Unable

as a

woman

treat the past, she

and

trials

tracts.

Her

apostasy from history,

little

noted but immensely significant.

to find a perspective

from which she could adequately

turned her very real talents to a depiction of the pleasures

involved in running the

modem household, and she took

her large

Works like Sedgwick's Home (1835) and Live represent in embryo form the romance of domestic

feminine following with her.

and Let Live (1837) management which would become the staple fare of the profoundly historical women's magazines of the twentieth century.

anti-

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

186

riet

women authors which succeeded Sedgwick's, the only major figure who could be said to

In the generation of

Har-

Beecher Stowe

have

devoted her

is

finest talents to the historical novel. It

seems hardly accidental

vogue and success of female authors in what Fred Lewis Pattee has called "the feminine fifties" coincided with the end of the dominance of historical fiction. The chosen noms de plume of several of the most important

that the great

of these authors suggest their anti-historical bias in guise:

tion

"Fanny

Forrester,"

its least

"Fanny Fern," "Grace Greenwood"

"Minnie Myrtle," "Lily Larkspur," and, somewhat

Such names,

flirting

femininity, they define

it

Even while they

as superfluous;

self-baptism, feminine authors

tory.

—not to men-

"Jenny June."

coyly with suggestions of vegetative process, are deco-

rative advertisements of luxury items.

effusions:

later,

constructive

flatter

they are purely

become characters

the authors'

fictional.

in their

own

By such

sentimental

hothouse products, they are self-announced refugees from

his-

"^^

Literary

women

and

liberal ministers joined in their

antipathy to the

which obsessed the romantic historians. Many of them and their commitment to peace was clearly motivated by

military subjects

were

pacifists,

their dislike of "masculine" history as well as

by

their hatred of violence.

Pacifism was most prominent and viable in the period between 1815 and 1850, after the partial national disillusion with the catastrophe of the

War

of 1812 and before the heated and belligerent sectionalism which preceded the Civil War. Pacifism, unlike temperance, never had the oflicial support

was launched in 1809 by a layman, David Low Dodge.^^ Yet from its inception, the American Peace Society numbered a very high percentage of clergymen among its members and many women among its supporters. One of the movement's historians estimates that a third of its initial supporters were in the ministry;^^ another scholar stresses that in 1828 the peace societies drew more adherents from the ministry, and especially the Unitarian clergy, than from any other profession.^'* By 1852, when the movement was in definite decline, it was a clerical concern limited to New England: of its 307 life members, 168 lived in Massachusetts and 93 were clergymen. ^^ Women were always active and eager in the pacifist cause. Where we have records for any given peace society, they reveal a significant feminine presence; at Portsmouth in 1826, the group included 18 men and 17 women. ^® Women were more likely, however, to evince their concern by less direct and conspicuous means. They could urge their minister to join the American Peace Society or to preach at least once a year on the subject of pacifism, and many did so. Most of the ladies' magazines of the day were avowedly and almost automatically in favor of non-belligerence. In the Ladies' Magazine of 1836, Sarah Hale had of the major Protestant churches;

it

The Escape from History

187

applauded the formation of the "Boston Ladies' Peace Society. "^^ The Ladies' Wreath:

A

Mrs.

T. Martyn, opened with

S.

Magazine Devoted

to Literature,

War'V^ The Ladies' Alhum on "The Evils of War."^^ of

a spirited attack against the

also editorialized indignantly

Protestant ministers, unlike Protestant

edged and respected role

Industry and Religion, edited by

in the

"Tendencies

and frequently

women, had taken an acknowl-

American Revolution.®® Thirty-six years

after the struggle for independence,

however,

Noah

Worcester, a Unitarian

become the peace movement, denounced mili-

minister, himself a veteran of the Revolution but destined to single

most important figure

in the early

tary glory in his one-man pacifist organ The Friend of Peace as absolutely un-Christian, not to say unclerical; he exclaimed that a fighting minister "at this

day would be regarded

as a

madmanP' Worcester was frank from the

of his anti-war career on his alignment with feminine principles.

start

He

outspokenly sought the support of women, promising any future feminine adherents:

"By

thirty years of faithful

and united exertion on the part of the

females of Christendom, war might lose

all its

fascinating charms, and be

regarded by the next generation with more abhorrence than the people of

today look on the gladitorial combats of Rome."®^

The view Worcester took and dramatized was the minute and

essentially

of

war

in his attacks

domestic one that television

represented the apotheosis of social history

on

it

— whose advent

—enables us to hold today; he

which besieged towns become groups of families and soldiers become men, husbands, and fathers. For him there was no such thing as military history; there was only the outrage of humanitarian values. Under the nom de plume of "Philo Pacificus," Worcester described "The Horrors of Napoleon's Campaign in Russia" in 1815. He felt that the reader is only "diverted" from the true issue by the customary "encomiums on the bravery of fighting men and the glories of victory." The point about war for Worcester lay in civilian consequences rather than in was

skillful at the close-up picture in

military actions.

He directs us characteristically

not to the battlefield but to

where the greatest and least deserved suffering is taking place: "On one side was an old man just expiring. On the other, an enfant whose feeble cries, the mother, worn down with grief, was endeavoring to hush."®^

the sidelines,

His concern

who

is

with the innocent victims, the women, children, and elderly

can only be martyrs

in the

masculine arenas of conflict and aggression.

In 1816, Worcester's friend and admirer William Ellery

Channing voiced

his

protest against the exaltation of the "hero," with his "love of excitement," his "passion for superiority, for

fectly conscious of

what

his

triumph, for power." Channing was per-

demand,

of Napoleon's Russian siege, implied

like

Worcester's ex post facto reporting

—

new

a

history. "Let the records of

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

188

past ages be explored,"

Channing urged, "to rescue from

wasteful conqueror

but

in

.

.

.

.

.

.

oblivion, not the

the benefactors to the human-race" engaged

philanthropy rather than destruction.®^

Those women who join shared

many

joined peace societies or urged their ministers to

of Worcester's preoccupations.

tary into social history; they too

were concerned

They

family and feminine

life.

An anonymous

with the actions than

less

with the effects of war, and particularly with those

too deflected mili-

which touched the Ladies' Album

efl^ects

lady pacifist in

explained that "the female portions of society are the greater sufferers in

war. Theirs

is

a

domestic

life.

.

.

.

War

breaks up the domestic

the husband, the father, the brother and the lover

home to the field of carnage."®'* One of the most popular novels Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, a novel

circle. It calls

from the endearments of

of the Civil War, The Gates Ajar by

which reached and touched thousands of

female readers, never recorded a battle scene or presented a soldier.

The

—

was with "the women the helpless, outnumbering, unconsulted women; they whom war trampled down, without a choice or protest."®^ Phelps's story focused on Mary Cabot, a young and insignificant girl in a small Massachusetts town who is overwhelmed by grief at the loss of an idolized brother in combat. Mary finally accepts the war author's concern, in her words,

and

all its

dreadful consequences only by denying

its reality.

Following an

obvious process of compensation, she ignores earthly existence to focus on a

heavenly land where family

peace, a world of

felicity

is

women and womanly

exaggerated into eternity. Domestic cares,

is

seen to be the abiding order,

not the aggressive and senseless militarism of men. For Phelps as for Worcester,

heaven, like history

their tastes

Clerical

The

itself, is a

civilian affair, a

matter of individuals and

and needs.

and Feminine Biography: From History

biographies

women

and ministers wrote

to

Biology

in increasing

numbers about

themselves and each other over the middle decades of the nineteenth century mark the consolidation of the clerical-feminine history, or flight from history. In 1839, Jared Sparks formulated a definition of the different types

of biography current

in his culture.

The

first

kind

is

the "historical biogra-

phy which admits of copious selections from letters and other original papers"; the second is the "memoir" whose method is "more rambling and relating more to aflfairs of a private nature."®^ Almost all of Sparks's American biographies are entitled "Lives" and belong to the vast majority of the clerical

first

category;®^ the

and feminine biographies under consideration

here are self-styled "Memoirs."

189

The Escape from History

The

antiquarians were attempting to create both a social and a re-

Christianized history; they certainly avoided the arrogance inherent in the

grand view of Hegelian intellectual history, and

this

is

much

very

to their

The pacifist impulse I just described here is a profoundly sympathetic one. From the antiquarian perspective as from the traditional Protestant viewpoint, every life serves. The number of books written on relatively credit.

obscure people, usually ministers or literary women, century

in the

enormous. Theoretically, they are valuable

is

mid-nineteenth

unused

just as

televi-

sion footage could be useful to our descendants: they offer a quotidian

record. Partial anticipators of the Braudelian and Eriksonian fnethods,®® the clerical

and feminine biographers sought to convey what could be called the

psychological topography of their era. Yet one cannot help feeling that this is

neither their main purpose nor their principal achievement.

manage

To

begin

convey no genuine information at all. It seems a general rule in the development of social history that the excision of conceptualization can go only so far before significant detail whose importance ironically is the raison d'etre of social history and the with, a

number of

these narratives

to

—

titular

reason for the exclusion of theory

over, there

is

little

clerical accounts.

confront

—

also begins to disappear.

development of any kind operating

The primary impulse

man with God

the feminine-

in

of the antiquarians

as the Calvinists did,

man's internal growth as more recent, what

More-

neither to

is

nor to explore the laws of

we might term

anti-patriarchal

psychologists and anthropologists have done; they wished rather to protect

from competition, whether emanating from men, God, or the movement of time itself. Bancroft, Prescott, Motley, and Parkman were always concerned with the individual, but they refused to sever him from their subjects

the context of historical change

The

oism.

panorama;

historical

subjects.

antiquarians, like it

which both created and overcame

Sprague

usually excluded the

in his Annals,

could only serve to dwarf their

They bestowed

a curious

his her-

less

enterprising

immunity from history on those they

commemorated. I

wish to be as precise as possible here. There

distinction

between an

interested, respectful

is

an enormous and

acceptance of the

full

condition and a glorification of the death of the critical instinct

acknowledging human limitations and celebrating them. This ence merely between good and bad social history. impulse, the second

is

finally a

The

is

vital

human

— between

not a differ-

first is a

religious

commercial one, and eventually involves the

preparation of the individual for the role of consumer. For the consumer is

by definition the man with no

interest in theorizing, the person possessed

of only the haziest powers of discernment. as a genre, first,

There are notable exceptions, but

one must say that the clerical-feminine biographies represent the

although hardly the

last,

use of the biographical

form

as calculatedly

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

190

therapeutic indulgence in the experience of ordinary

As such they marked

human

personaHty.®^

break in the tradition of ministerial

a significant

biography. In

1

796,

Samuel Hopkins wrote an account of one of

parishioners, a fervidly prayerful

hardly the

first

or the

and to himself.^® later,

women

last

most devout

Susanna Anthony.

called

He was

minister to memorialize feminine devotion to

was more

It

woman

his

however, when, almost

striking,

began to preserve

clerical lives for posterity.

a

God,

century

We have already

seen that Elizabeth Peabody published her Reminiscences of William Ellery

Channing in 1880. Sylvester Judd's confidence in feminine ability to appreciate was not ill-placed: one of his best correspondents, his cousin Arethusa Hall, gave his story to the world in a most sympathetic memoir published in 1853. Interchanged letters and intimate conversations were only a prelude to a more prominent exchange in which clerical and feminine sensibilities interacted for posterity.

Women

like

Hall or Peabody were indeed the

caretakers they had been chosen to be. Popular sermonizers loved to dwell

on the picture of the Three Marys at

Christ's

Tomb, and

the deceased liberal

minister usually had his feminine grave-watchers and believers also. "Let the

poor, the widows, and the orphan write [the minister's] epitaph," one clergy-

man exhorted

the

in

New

Englander

Beginning approximately

graphy underwent

a

decided

in 1845;®^

in the 1840s, the shift.

and sometimes they

did.

authorship of clerical bio-

The most prominent

ministers of the

eighteenth century were usually memorialized by their brethren, their

Hopkins wrote the life of Jonathan Edwards. Edwards A. Park did biographies of Hopkins and his intellectual peers,

whether contemporary or

ablest heir, Nathaniel cially if

later.

Emmons. The nineteenth-century clergyman,

he belonged to

a liberal

group, was apt to have

pher: not only Channing and Judd, but

Horace

a

feminine biogra-

Bushnell, Orville

Austin Phelps, Charles Follen, Joseph Buckminster, and Frederic

come

espe-

Dewey,

Dan Hunt-

mind as genuinely prominent clercical figures whose lives were written by feminine friends and relatives. Of my sample group of

ington

to

thirty ministers, twenty-one had at least

about them

in the

one

full-scale

biography written

generation after their death. Fifty percent of these were

by women. Not surprisingly the biographies of ministers from feminine hands were somewhat different in nature from their predecessors. In a novel appropriately entitled Papa's writer and Utopian thinker,

Own Girl (1874), Marie Howland, a feminist summed up the credo of the new feminine

biographers with more frankness than most of them would have relished:

Women are beginning to see the folly of allowing their "Lords" to write the biographies of great men, and are gradually taking the task themselves.

When

they do their

full

upon

share of this work, there will be

The Escape from History

found

in history

many

pigmies that would have swelled to colossi under

the pens of their

own

moral forces

be judged by the

will

191

sex; for their

claims to the honor of greatness as

way they

treat

women, specially and

generally.

A man may be great in a particular sense, if he is nothing but

a military

or political leader

man

a

if

.

.

.

but he can never be great integrally as

he lacks tenderness, justice or faith

in

Men who

humanity.

are

very tender as lovers, and deeply sensitive to the influence of women, usually have the reputation

—a word never found

among

in the

brutal

men

of being "hen-pecked"

vocabulary of refined people.®^

Domestic setting and domestic motivation dominate the memoirs writ-

by the daughters, wives, and friends of Unitarian and Congregational clergymen. These men are presented, naturally, as they are viewed from a feminine perspective: they appear primarily as fathers and husbands. Elizaten

—

beth Stuart Phelps emphasized her father's emotional and more particularly his

family

from

Orville

his family letters

Eliza, in

Dewey's daughter quotes much more extensively

than from his theological works. Charles Pollen's wife

an exceptionally fine memoir, pays ample tribute to her husband's

pioneering his

life.

education and theology, but she stresses above

eflPorts in

all else

kindness and consideration to family and friends. Earlier ministers, and their biographers,

mestic needs as predominant.

had not emphasized their do-

Thomas Shepard's moving

account, penned in

seventeenth-century Massachusetts, of the loss of his wife through childbed fever

was intended

tions,

not to display his

to instruct the reader

own

Jr.,

seemed in his

of earthly rela-

By

was noted

the turn of

(or created)

between

and private selves by their biographers. Jonathan Edwards,

who

for example,

the pulpit,

fallibility

capacities for familial feeling.

the eighteenth century, however, a split ministers' public

on the

could be "irresistibly impressive and even terrible" in

was "mild and

a herald "sent

affectionate" at home.^^ Stephen

West

down to denounce God's wrath upon a

in

church

guilty world";

family his manners were as "bland as those of a refined and lovely

woman."^'* There

is

a hint

West was,

sional one, that

somehow unable

here that the true self

is

the private non-profes-

Catharine Maria Sedgwick liked to imply,

as

to display his winning pastoral qualities once

delivering a sermon. Later ministers, according to their

own

on

his feet

testimony as

from their domestic aff^ections, which they counted all-important. Women were allowed, indeed encouraged, to confess that to love and be loved was their well as that of their biographers,

most important mission apparently

felt

in life,

even the

"it

professional inspiration

start of their religious faith.

equally eager to admit that

being, to love," and his daughter further:

drew

was

in

family

life

"it is

was ready

Bushnell

the strongest want of

my

to domesticate his statement

that he shone brightest."®^ Sylvester

Judd

.

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

192

never forget that

my

nature

"Though

the same hearthside creed:

testified to

is

I

am

I

a^man, a lover, a husband.

deep, strong, pervasive.

me

to

It is

am a minister ... I can The sentimental part of

almost religion."^®

Ministers were granted, and they courted, other traits which they else-

where recognized

as peculiarly

parasitic relationship

terms.

I

wrote

in

women and

between

commemorating

habit of

feminine and domestic. Nothing reveals the ministers better than their mutual

commemorators, and

their

in strikingly similar

an earlier chapter about the modesty, the ostensible lack

of ambition, clergymen and ladies increasingly claimed for themselves and those they admired. Eliza FoUen, Elizabeth Phelps, and

Cheney

all

stressed the humility, the self-effacement, of

Mary Bushnell the men whose

we remember, began his statement: "My figure in this

biographies they were writing. Bushnell himself,

autobiography with the modest

world has not been

great. ...

president of any society.

.

.

.

of the world's business and in

my

I

have almost never been

Take it is

inaccurate

if

the report of

naught.

separate and merely personal

.

.

I

have

or vice-

doings on the platform

filled

no place

at

But

all.

.

.

have had a greater'epic trans-

life, I

.

my

a president

acted than was ever written or could be."®^

Bushnell

is

here paying himself not simply the same compliment his

daughter gives him but the favorite tribute

clerical

biographers offered their

feminine subjects. Reverend Daniel D. Addison, a liberal clergyman, opened

memoir of Lucy Larcom with the standard obeisance to her apparent insignificance: "Her life was one of thought, not of action. In their outward movement, her days flowed on very smoothly. She had no remarkable adventures; but she had a constant succession of mental vicissitudes, which are often more dramatic and real than the outward events of even a varied life."^® Henry Bacon's biography of "Charlotte" follows a similar pattern. his

Bacon, a Universalist pastor and editor-in-chief of The Universalist and Ladies' Repository, first

recognized Charlotte's fictional and poetic gifts while

she was working at fifteen at a bindery in Boston.

undoubted force and five.

Bacon

Our

talent,

A

working-class

girl

of

Charlotte Fillebrown died in 1845 aged twenty-

begins:

record here

is

of a pure hearted and heroic

woman;

—not heroic

because of any wonderful exhibition of female intrepidity but because of a sustaining and persistent energy, that

came, not refusing to do could not be done. in history,

and to

little in

the

way

The truest heroism

made

the best of

life as it

of culture because a great deal

which seldom finds a place proclaim which the trumpet of fame is too brazen.

She had "no very striking

qualities

world"; she "lived to love."^^

.

.

.

is

[to]

that

command

the attention of the

The Escape from History

This

193

tribute, like Bushnell's evaluation of his place in the world,

not represent quite the Christian humility of Jonathan Edwards,

worm

who

does

could

low before God. It suggests rather the complex art of apology in which abasement and exaltation intertwine. The self is not being humiliated as it is in Edwards' journals: the account himself

public self

one

—

tion,

is

—

a

in the case of Bushnell,

phies

lie

infinitely

Larcom, and Jerauld

a very interesting

effaced in order to bring forth the private self for attention, celebra-

and caressing.

which

and wish to

is

It is

distressing.

lies

the over-emphasis, not the emphasis, on the personal

The

fascination of the ministerial and feminine biogra-

precisely in their intensely and consciously privatized

mood. One

might argue that their insistence on the obscurity of their subjects

is

a

necessary part of their calculated secretiveness: only in learning about those

who

no reason to believe their private lives will be a public concern can the reader respond most fully as a voyeur; only if the subject is someone ostensibly no better than herself can the reader's voyeurism function as an introduction to her own sensibility and as a narcissistic theoretically have

enmeshment

in herself.

The aim

of these memoirs

is

to establish an atmos-

phere of intimacy so strong as to replace historical awareness with what

seems almost biological consciousness; the biographer's obsessive subject's capacities for suffering

stress

on

his

and for sympathy with the world of process

draws the reader into the innermost sanctums of personality. Bushnell's

life,

as his

daughter described

it

and

as

he probably actually

was a Christian struggle with pain. He fought consumption for years before the end: lying awake during sleepless nights coughing, he would rise the next day and work at a book or some task; almost dying on a mountainclimbing expedition, he barely recovered, not to go home but to get up and lived

it,

reach the summit; existing finally with one lung, he began a theological

on "Inspiration" only months before

treatise

his

death

draw,

just to

as

he

from it." His own bodily weakness made him preoccupied with "forgiveness," which he described as "man's deepest need

wrote, "a

little

sense of being

and highest achievement. "^°® Austin Phelps, according to

dured

a lonely

his

daugher, en-

and miserable childhood. As an adult, he patiently suffered

from the neuralgia and insomnia which many of his colleagues and blamed on a weak will rather than a flawed constitution; he felt

tortures critics

forced to a great "sacrifice," as he described early in his career, while tending

it,

two wives

in

abandoning pastoral work;

in fatal illnesses,

he became a

compassionate and loving nurse. Naturally Phelps brooded increasingly on the meaning of the act of intercession, on the special abilities granted to the disabled. Charles Pollen, as his wife

world which she found child,

memorialized him to

a "crucifixion" for herself,

never "sympathetic with boys." Later

in

fulfill a

was

duty to the

a timid

and

frail

America, he spent himself for

Harvard students only to be defrauded and turned away by the university

194

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

authorities.

He

prepared

and delivered them conscien-

brilliant lectures

labored for an often-indifferent congregation whose

mands

He

and enthusiastically to an audience of two or three persons.

tiously

final

unreasonable de-

resulted in his untimely death in a shipwreck. Follen learned the

lessons of "disinterestedness," the value of "devotional feelings"

and "tender-

ness."^°^

Pollen's role, like Bushnell's or Phelps's,

the pious

Ames,

a

woman

contemporary

in

is

and biography. Mary Clemmer

fiction

memoir of her friend, the minor poet Alice Gary (1820-71), in 1874. A^ for Eliza of writing was painful for Ames: "Every line coming

noted journalist and writer, published

genuinely talented

if

Follen, the very task

the immolated one assigned

a

from memory has deepened the wound of irreparable

she begins.

loss,"

Describing Gary's deprived childhood, her early disappointment rich but secluded

with

life filled

illness,

and unachieved

self-doubt,

her intense but mournful love of her

tions,

own

in love,

her

aspira-

sex and her indignation at

what Gary "as a woman could be, and was, to another."^®^ Although Gary courted death by prolonged periods of toil in overheated rooms, when it came in 1871, she fought it. Gary

their

wrongs,

Ames

reveals, as she intended,

longed perhaps for a fuller

life

than she had ever had, for a fuller release of

her unmistakable though stunted creativity; but fierce reluctance a kind of feminine

summer

in a

Ames makes

Gethsemane. She

of her

dying

stresses that,

hot city, Gary missed the countryside where she had been

and bred. In her

last

hours,

Gary was happy, according

to

in his

memoir of

in

bom

Ames, only when

hearing those portions of the Gospel which recount Ghrist's love of

Henry Bacon,

final

Gharlotte, takes a similar

women.

line.

"Five

years have passed," he begins, "and on the anniversary of Gharlotte's death

we

begin this memorial.

August day sounds as

if

[is]

The heavy

of this

oppressive; but the sunlight penetrates the clouds."

Bacon

Gharlotte has become a saint:

signs. In telling

and the sultry

air

rains are falling,

God marks

her day with special

of Gharlotte's death. Bacon, like Ames, stresses her "longing

to get into the country, to smell the green trees

and the fresh

sorrow, and her extreme and significant attachment to a passage

by

F.

W.

P.

Greenwood

called "Ghrist

justification but the logic of the

Our Fellow

martyrdom he

is

air,"

in a

Sufferer."

her

sermon

With no

bestowing on Gharlotte,

Bacon hypothesizes her special fondness for passages like this: "loving him and comforted by his sympathy when I weep and fear, I am better prepared to follow and imitate him when he submits, endures and triumphs." Like Ghrist, Gharlotte did not "wrestle with her Maker, as though she was .

.

.

wronged by suffering"; she consented to her pain.^°^ These accounts vary greatly in style and value. The Bushnell and Follen biographies are broad and

phy does no

justice

still

even to

its

indispensable studies.

The

rather slight subject. Yet

Gharlotte biogra-

all

these narratives

The Escape from History

imply that their protagonists are performing ment; and that this

them

ritual assimilates

195

a ritual of (Bushnellian)

to a natural

Atone-

world whose law of

development and decay usurps the prerogatives of time. The preoccupation in all six

memoirs, the references to the country and the

in the narratives

about Charlotte and Gary, the intrusion of the pain

with suffering

weather

experienced by the authors in the Follen, Gary, and Gharlotte books, highlight a

common

tendency

to ministerial-feminine biographies of the period,

although hardly equally present

in all of

them: an avoidance of the promi-

nent use of dates and a replacement of these by what could be called the

—

organic markers

birth, conversion, marriage, aging,

and death. These markers are the lowest

all,

illness

denominators of human

weaker of these volumes, the average life cycle is treated here of greater historical importance than any extraordinary achievement; the In the

life.

as

common

and above

phenomena of biology age. Historicity

is

are applauded as comprising the history of the aver-

dissolved in atmosphere; a potentially cyclical pattern

dislodges a linear one. "Masculine" attempts at domination and demarcation give

way

and absorption. The active

to "feminine" abilities for assimilation

force of public example

is

lost in

the persuasive rites of protection and

dependency established by the nurturing power of memory. Biography merged with something close to a vegetation myth.

The clergyman by

literary

is

described in the reminiscences penned

women and liberal ministers, increasingly resembled a benign and

patriarchal god, at this

himself, as he

is

home and

at

one with

^^'^ a natural setting.

Nowhere

is

transformation clearer than in the treatment of the very old minister,

the survivor

from the grimmer days of

successors and his feminine admirers.

A

Galvinist theology, test case

for the

by

new

his

younger

sensibility, the

"patriarch," as he

was

we

today, was softened and subsumed into the organic rites

of

use the

word

called in a spirit almost antithetical to the

one

in

which

life.

Edwards A. Park in his memoirs of Emmons (1861) and Hopkins (1852) continuously makes both sound like very aged men. In a sense, this is understandable: Hopkins and Emmons lived to extremely advanced ages; both were in youth as in maturity sober and serious individuals; Park drew many of his impressions of Emmons from his meetings with him at the very end of his long life. There can be little doubt, however, that Park wants to picture his predecessors primarily in old age; that age is in his memoirs part of their very essence rather than a temporal condition. fragile, in Park's delineation, as old

mons, Park includes

Emmons

More Merciful after another

who

by another

his elderly congregation.

to Their

figures are as

manuscripts. In his biography of

a vignette, relayed

preaching to

The

Enemies Than

God

Is

Em-

minister, of the later

"Men Are saw one old man

His theme was

to His": "I

had grown gray under the patriarch's ministrations,

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

196

bending forward

gazing with eagerness to catch every teacher. ... an old it

man who

word

their seats

from the

that fell

lips

of their

is

a ministerial

dream:

a like-minded

(mascu-

congregation compelled by the sheer force of truth as presented by

line)

God's aged.

envoy. Yet the point here

clerical

They

are striking

mementos of

is

that the aged are addressing the

past virtue, but they are also fossilized,

weakened, sentimentalized. The emotions they arouse

in us are

more impor-

tant than the emotions they feel; they have been deflected precisely their

and

held his manuscript before his face, and read

low monotone."^®^ This

in a

from

in breathless silence, rising at length

through

gray hairs and silvered piety from subjects to objects.

Hosea

Ballou, the

most important figure

ism, also sufl^ered a mysterious

American Universal-

in early

change of character

in the

hands of

his

memorialists. Ballou, despite his conviction that "holiness and true happiness are inseparably connected," his love of nature, his sometimes maudlin

hymns,

his distrust of learning,

ministry,

was no

sentimentalist.

and

his faith in

He found

an essentially untrained

the ministry a "spiritual warfare,"

and conducted himself accordingly, attacking

Calvinists, Unitarians, and,

when provoked, fellow Universalists, with vigor and acumen. Like Hopkins and Emmons, he lived to a ripe old age, and long before his death he was being hailed as a "patriarch." He wore his white hair long, and, according to his son,

had

a

"remarkably venerable appearance";

tion," his feelings

his face

was a "benedic-

were "tender."^®^ Caroline M. Sawyer, the wife of

Universalist pastor, and herself a leading figure in the

little

a

literary coterie

which put out the genteel publications of her denomination. The Ladies' Repository and The Rose of Sharon, wrote a poem after hearing Ballou pray in 1843, a

decade before

"The Pleader

at the

his

death at the age of eighty-one. She entitled

Throne": Ballou

is

a mediator,

another occasion, Mrs. Sawyer described

on

in

not a commander.

prose Ballou's memorable

it

On

eflPect

his audience:

No-one who was present then and there can ever forget the impression made by the saintly white-haired old man as he arose in the pulpit, looked slowly around upon the vast congregation, most of whom saw him for the first and last time there, and then meekly but fervently breathed out the tenderest prayer that ever reached the ear of the good father.

There

^«^

is

something very unsubstantial about the figure of Ballou here:

he breathes rather than speaks, he ing into the realm of in

is

memory which

1852, his colleague

seen for the is

his

first

and

last

time

— vanish-

only kingdom. At Ballou's funeral

and successor. Reverend Alonzo A. Miner,

also a

contributor to The Ladies' Repository and The Rose of Sharon, extolled him

"

The Escape from History

197

again and again as "our venerable patriarch," "our venerable father," "our father in Israel." According to Miner, Ballou's great contribution to liberal

on the "paternal spirit" of God; he "effected a very general redemption from that state of orphanage to which so large a part of the world felt itself doomed."^®® There is little in Miner's eulogy to

theology had been

his stress

remind the hearers that Ballou was ever young, generous

spirit,

humane and

that, despite his

he was almost always aggressive. Ballou has been canonized

frozen in a benediction.

He dwindles

in the reader's

imagination

even as he accrues significance. Sawyer and Miner look on him

like depart-

in old age,

which gets smaller and smaller, and Hopkins and Emmons, is becoming a relic,

ing travelers gazing back on a figure

then

is

view. Ballou, like

lost to

precious, talismanic, culturally crucial

Let figure in

me

—but obsolete.

more about the connotations around the "patriarch" the contemporary subculture which was claiming these ministerial

figures for

say a

its

little

patron

The

saints.

patriarch appears again and again in the

sentimental literature of the ante-bellum period; he

always, in every re-

father. ^^^

spect, the opposite of the so-called Victorian

goumey did

is

Lydia Huntley

Si-

the classic sentimental studies of false and true male dominance,

one entitled "The Father," the other "The Patriarch," and both published in

"The Father" opens closes it. The last word is

The Young Lady's Offering in 1847. Symbolically

1862 collection of

tales,

"The Father" in character, will.

He

chaste,

is

but

"The Patriarch"

spends his

life

in disposition, rigid

and proud

classic

female hand on

male brow, she provides a needed antidote to

unspecified but highly successful activities in the world. Ostensibly, he

commanding one

in the relationship;

reading, he gloats over her like that

I

he

can create

wings.

his

is

the

he stays up whole nights planning her

Pygmalion over Galatea:

should gaze on the work of

he inquires.^ ^®

in

increasing his fortune and educating his delicate,

and adored daughter. Occasionally laying the

his classically fevered

his.

and driving businessman, Byronic

a brilliant, cultured,

tempestuous and excitable

the

my own

"

'Was

it

strange

hands with ineffable delight?'

It is

the male committing the ultimate heresy: he imagines

life.

Sigoumey has chastisement

The daughter

waiting, however, in the

dies unexpectedly; the father goes

through an agony

of grief, until, positively rigid with hysteria, unable to sleep or to weep, he

throws himself on her grave and even

tries,

apparently, to

exhume

her.

on her burial mound, he cries, and Sigoumey can forgive him. For he weeps that he has lost a woman, that he is not a woman able to create Finally,

life,

and, in weeping, he

is

mention of the "mother" the "father"

when he

like a

in the tale;

in place

her place

is

has

made no

empty, waiting to receive

resigns his rule.

Sigoumey's "patriarch" worship

woman. Curiously, Sigoumey

is

a

dummy

of the deposed father.

figure set

He

is

up

for compensating

the ancestor comfortably

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

198

Stowed away

in

the rocking chair, the male softened by the kindly touch

of time. His reign

not to his

is

a tribute to the sensitivity

own powers

connotative.

heads

is

The

what Sigoumey

civilization, its

by

rules

no force but

his

example and by

"influence," he

is

essen-

community which he "hermetically sealed." This spot is "swamp-

small self-suflicient rural calls

encircled'V^^ iconographically,

from

He

of direct exertion.

their regard for tradition; possessing tially

and receptivity of his subjects,

it

suggests very feminine territory. Cut off

occupants do nothing but hold primitively simple and

pious outdoor religious services and venerate their elders. At school, they learn only the three

and

totally self-involved

There

no story here; in this timeless world, there can be no dialectic, no progress of any

Rs and the

Bible.

is

kind, nothing but ceremonious repetition. Progress

masculinity; a feminine ripeness

is all

Appropriately, the narrator-observer chapel for the

little

smacks of excitement, of

Sigoumey, or the is

a minister,

who

patriarch, desires.

helps establish a

society and attends the patriarch's funeral at the sketch's

close.

Of course I

Mrs. Sigoumey

might point out that

her fictional work.^^^

is

not here writing history or biography, yet

it is

almost impossible to separate her historical from

It is

not unfair to see Mrs. Sigoumey's "father" and

"patriarch" as roughly analogous to the subjects of romantic "biography"

and the ministerial-feminine "memoir." Sigoumey's "father,"

like the

Pilgrim

Fathers, the founding fathers, and the heroes of Hegelian history, stands for

energy, enterprise, nature. father,

virility, direction, hybris; his sin is

to try to change

Taut with unreleased grief, tearing futilely at the closed earth, the until he acknowledges the as Sigoumey describes him, is sterile

—

limits of his authority.

Sigoumey's "patriarch,"

minister of the memoir.

He

is less

in contrast, suggests the

aged

the impregnator than the pregnant; he

suggests the precondition for futility. Absolutely not a leader, he belongs to his

community only because he embodies

and aspirations. he

eties,

is

Fit representative of clerical

the ultimate, almost parodic

consensus and conformist thought. sesses

is,

shared and

its

feelings

and feminine hopes and anxi-

emblem

The

common

of "influence," of totally

only authority he seeks and pos-

figuratively speaking, biological. His corpse goes into the earth

from which the community's sustenance

will

come.

We are back with Bushnell's rationale for the "history of oblivion": "Do the vegetable growths repine or sicken because they cannot

growths of previous centuries?

Is it

not enough that the very

remember the soil that

feeds

by the waste of so many generations moldering in it?" Bushnell's Hegelian interest in organic imagery does not conceal his un-

them

is

fertilized

Hegelian philosophic emphasis.

The "waste" so essential

to Hegelian notions

of historicity has not simply been redeemed; waste, as the reject of time and

change, has been elevated

in

importance above the forces which define and

The Escape from History

throw

it

off.

The

intimate atmosphere of the

private act of hoarding

which

is

their essential

199

memoirs

is

attendant upon the

dynamic. The genuine lessons

would teach cannot obfuscate the enormously tenacious importance they placed on personal possession, broadly of compassion the antiquarians

On

defined.

Worcester's

memoirs devoted

battlefields, in

Elizabeth Phelps's heaven, in the

to Austin Phelps, Alice Gary,

and

others, nothing can

happen, because there are no events, only objects and emotions increasingly

merge together

—on

display.

There can be

— which

violation or preser-

vation of order, but not genuine change. In their well-founded fear of historicity, the

feminine and clerical historians substituted space for time as

human experience. As is the case with modem attention to groupings rather than progressions. They

the fundamental dimension of telecasters,

they paid

were interested

in the relationship

owns, with what

in

family,

home,

severing,

job,

of the individual with what he or she

an almost biological sense belongs to her or him, whether or even the sense of

self.

In their vision, the forging,

and re-creating of such attachments substituted for the

the Hegelians.

dialectic of

6

THE DOMESTICATION OF DEATH The Posthumous Congregation

The Fascination with Death and Mourning

To

say that the memoirs of

death

is

women

and clergymen were concerned with

an understatement; to a degree that requires special consideration,

they were exercises

in necrophilia.

They

revealed as

much

of the art of the

mortician or the gravestone-cutter as of the craft of the biographer. Con-

temporaries on occasion described the memorialists' efforts in strikingly literal

funereal terms.

nals of the

The

Unitarian George

American Pulpit

in

1857, called

Ellis,

reviewing Sprague's An-

Sprague

was

particularly

who

contributed

two volumes had

died by the

carving the gravestone of his ministerial predecessors.

moved by

a "sepulchral artist" Ellis

the fact that at least eighty of the ministers

biographical information to Sprague's

time of publication;

six

first

of these contributors were between the ages of

ninety and one hundred. Ellis described the letters various clergymen wrote in tribute to

deceased colleagues as "the

dewy

flowers and the green grass

growing over graves where tears have been freshly shed."^ Nothing shows more clearly the underlying motive of the memoirs than the fact that a moving death rather than a stirring life provided the suitable qualification for treatment. Children, veritable infants,

conventional subject not

Agnes Adams and

"little

may

in this

word

just

became

a

of poetry but of full-scale biography. Tots like

Georgie" Cuyler, the respective protagonists

(if

one

connection) of Agnes and the Key of Her Little Coffin (1857) and The Empty Crib (1873), were notable, understandably, less for use the

The Domestication of Death

201

which were usually short, than for their deaths which were often protracted. Even in the memoirs devoted to adults, life gains its interest chiefly as a prelude to death. The reader is reminded from the outset that

their lives

the memorialized

A

is

going to die

— perhaps young, certainly

well.

comes to mind, but none is more striking than the biography of the Reverend William Peabody written shortly after his death in 1847 by his brother Oliver. Peabody was a fervent Christian, an opponent of "controversial divinity,"^ a defender of the Sabbath, and a pioneer in the host of examples

cemetery and Sunday School movements.

who

talent

view,

A

literary

man

of

real, if

minor,

contributed to the Christian Examiner, the North American Re-

and The Token, he published rather gentle pieces on autumn and death.

His best poem began with characteristic euphemistic melancholy: "Behold the western evening light!/

It

melts in deepening gloom;/ So calmly Chris-

away/ Descending to the tomb."^ From the start, Oliver Peabody depicts William as one too good to live, the kind of pale, serious, sickly, pious little child that wise old women were always clucking prophetically over tians sink

in the

domestic novels of the day. William survived childhood, however, to

marry an extremely devout woman whose resolve to give .

.

.

[her] soul to a private intercourse

her husband.^

When

she had been called

worthy of

power of

God" had an immense impact on

first

so that he might learn through

her. Cherishing his grief, life

he liked to

sorrow to be more

by moonlight near her

sit

were further attenuated when

suddenly only four months after

ter died

the

she died at an early age in 1843, he told himself that

grave. His links with this

At

with

"all

his eldest

daugh-

his wife.

Peabody biography an extraordinary thing happens. A new and anonymous writer explains, "the pen fell from the hands" of Oliver Peabody just as he approached his brother's moving deathbed scene. As William might have said, Oliver had "calmly sunk away." The consumptive Oliver had originally been a lawyer; he found himself unsuited, however, to enforced contact with a quarreling and litigious world and this point in the

.

turned to the ministry in middle

was apparently the only Oliver his

felt that, in

own

life;

logical

.

.

the step from the ministry to the grave

one

at this point in his spiritual history.

writing his brother's story, "he was carving the letters on

gravestone."^ Oliver's successor, the second biographer, luckily

survives his task, describes William's saintly and gentle death, and includes a

memoir of Oliver for good measure. A memoir like this is not only a biography;

called

contemporary consolation

literature.

it is

a part of

what can be

This enormously popular genre

included obituary poems and memoirs, mourners' manuals, prayer guidebooks, hymns, and books about heaven. Such writings inflated the importance of dying and the dead by every possible means; they sponsored elaborate

methods of

burial and

commemoration, communication with the

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

202

next world, and microscopic viewings of a sentimentalized afterlife. Their

authorship was typically, although not exclusively, clerical or feminine.

many and

causes for the widespread success of consolatory literature were

complex. At

this point,

what

demand

clear about the readers'

is

The

is

largely

negative: consolation literature probably does not reflect an actual increase in the

death rate of children or adults, although

it

may

point to changing

More can perhaps be ventured about

expectations about mortality.®

the

author's motivation. I

have already

women

said that

and glamorize their

and ministers,

were engaged

position,

an effort to rationalize

in

in

subordinating historical

progress to biological process. Barred by external taboos and internal anxieties

from elaboration on the overtly

birth,

the

they concentrated on

moments

celerated. efl^ort

failed than in those at

to anthropologize historical inquiry: as Mrs.

the sacred

which

it

in

ac-

glorification of death oflFered the final crucial strategy in the

suggests, forgotten lives are is

and death: they were more interested

which crude energy

at

The

illness

sexual acts of impregnation and child-

emblem

remembered by mother of the overlooked.

in the cult

that the ornate statuary

Sigoumey's "Patriarch" earth. It is

The tombstone

hardly accidental

which increasingly decorated Victorian graves has

some resemblance to enlarged victory trophies; symbolized and congratulated by stone angels, the dead were not losers but winners. Midnineteenth-century cemeteries were the paradoxical progenitors of a later generation's halls of fame. The clerical-feminine commitment to stress and exaggerate the value of those apparently wasted and insignificant "ordinary" lives

which

reached

patriotic history

and industrial development too often neglected

logical culmination in an imaginative reinterpretation of the

its

doctrine of the "resurrection" of the dead.

proved to be the could establish a tive

new

democracy

egalitarian

significant,

if

balance of

of

If

the dead could

power

American

the insignificant could be live,

ministers and

in the free-for-all, intensely

culture.

Like

politicians

women

competi-

engineering

triumphs by stumping fresh territory, drumming up

new

votes,

and even inventing voters, they multiplied the numbers and enhanced the resources of their supporters. the victory

was

theirs.

And

Some might

see the election as rigged, but

they were hardly the

drama of popular American culture

last

participants in the

partially to invent the public they

captured.

Lydia H. Sigoumey, countless obituary poems,

in

one of the more striking among her almost

"Twas But

a Babe," rhetorically

upbraided an

unspecified urban male passerby, apparently absort)ed in his commercial

profit-mongering and

indiflPerent to a sad funeral

procession wending

its

way behind a little coflin to the local graveyard. "Poise Ye, in the rigid scales/ Of Calculation, the fond bosom's wealth?" she inquired bitterly.

The Domestication of Death

Sigoumey's implicit point

203

mourning should the claims of home and

that the private rituals of

is

outweigh the public demands of business, that church should count for more than the imperatives of the marketplace. Her initial tone of indignation suggests her awareness that, in plain fact, most competitive middle-class American

men

did not share her priorities.

When

Mrs. Sigoumey turns, however, to detailing the imagined grief of the bereaved parents, she notes with particular approval and sympathy the "mute" father with his grief-worn and "pallid brow."

By

the poem's close, revital-

by imaginary contact with such domestic scenes and sentiments, Mrs. Sigoumey is preaching with full ministerial confidence to a more general audience, all "who mourn" a "vacant cradle."^ The pattern of Mrs. Sigoumey's little poem is characteristic of most of ized

the consolation literature of the period: an explicitly or implicitly hostile protest against the competitive, aggressive, non-familial society; a chastened

reminder that everyone will be forced sooner or

one (or by ations;

and

his or her

own

death) to turn

later

by the death of a loved

from public

to private consider-

where the needed comfort

a tactful hint as to

at

such hours can

modem undertaker. Her poem is and you will." "if you should need my services

be found. Mrs. Sigoumey anticipates the

way of leaving her card: The world of consolation

a

.

literature

is

a

.

.

domestic and personal one, a place

where the minister and the mother become

at last the

only genuine author-

ities.

who wrote

Elizabeth Prentiss,

the best-selling Stepping Heavenward

(1869), a classic of nineteenth-century consolation literature,

interesting

and revealing definition of the function of "a

position she herself occupied. nity, "to feel the right to at once,

and

join

them

There was an

pastor's wife," a

obligation, or rather an opportu-

sympathize with those

in their

once gave an

who mourn,

prayers and tears." She continued:

be pleasant to spend one's whole time

among sufl^erers, and

them would

to fly to "It

to keep testifying

them what Christ can and will become to them, if they will only let him."® Clearly such moments gave unusual power not only to Christ's word but to those who conveyed it the minister himself, or his wife. His literary efforts were often veiled reminders of the last hour and of his own crucial role in it. We have seen that Hopkins was never more the teacher than at the bedsides of dying parishioners; the liberal pastor, in contrast, was the comforter, winning entrance which at other times was denied to him. Intercessor between God and man, heaven and earth, he was the supplicant, the "pleader at the throne," as Caroline Sawyer described Ballou. His power came from to

—

the fact that at such a

—

moment

supplication

is

the only possible

mode

of

The clergyman's chance, like the woman's, was now coincidental weakest moment of his parishioners. No longer confident that he

expression.

with the

could meet his congregation

at their strongest

or impress

its

ablest represen-

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

204

—the men of courtrooms— the minister

tatives

intellect

women and his

and talent

increasingly

sensitized

mourner was

The

domestic drama.

counting-houses, and

back upon an inner parish of

fell

men who had been reduced

those

who were

congregation consisted of those

The

in their stores,

to playing the

woman's

role;

feeling rather than thinking.

clearly of vital

and new significance

in this

authors of mourning manuals directed their books

toward the actually and recently bereaved parent, husband, or wife seeking reassurance. Private, particular grief, in other words, starting point

and

raison d'etre.

Of

was

their declared

course the ordeal of the Christian survi-

vor forced to realize that he has "idolized" a loved one taken from him by a

God was

chastening

traditional in

New

England

The

religious writing.

seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, had no real cult of mourning literature.

The

Shepard,

a

prominent seventeenth-century divine, devoted only an eloquent

page and

a half to the loss of his

was seen

human. His condition was hardly considered one of particular fascination in the same way, for example, that the state of a sinner on the eve of "conviction" might be. Thomas griever

as culpable,

if

adored wife, and he concluded

his

account

"Thus god hath visited & scourged me for my sins & sought to weene me from this woorld, but I have ever found it a difficult thing to profit even but a little by the sorest & sharpest afflictions."^ Anne Bradstreet, writing in 1665 on the death of a grandchild, explained the irrelevance of what later generations would with

call

a characteristic stroke

mourning: "Blest babe,

of partial self-condemnation:

why

should

days so soon were terminate,/ Sith thou

I

once bewail thy

art settled in

fate,/

Or sigh thy

an everlasting

state."^^

In sharp contrast, the bereaved nineteenth-century authors of tributes like

The Empty Crib: The Memorial of Little Georgie and Agnes and the Key of

Her

Little Coffin quite

frankly assumed, and apparently got, the engrossed

attention of significant portions of their society for their emotional and

New

York clergyman who wrote The Empty Crib, received thousands of more than sympathetic letters from kindred mourners. Cuyler appended some of these epistles in The Empty Crib. I will quote from one to give the flavor of all: moral

state.

Reverend Theodore Cuyler, the prominent

—

My

dear

you

will see there "a flower"

Sadie,

Sir,

aged

5

If

it

ever

yrs; Lillie,

scarlet fever! [Cuyler's

times

may

heartfelt

on

aged

3

your way to

visit

Allegheny Cemetery,

three "little graves." ''Anna,

yrs;"

all

aged

died within six days, and

"Georgie" died of scarlet fever

also.] It

7 yrs; all

of

some-

own affliction to hear of one still greater reason why I, a perfect stranger, venture to

reconcile us to our

elsewhere; and this trespass

falls in

upon you

is

in

sympathy.

^^

the

your sore bereavement, and

to

tell

you of

my

The Domestication of Death

no escaping the

There

is

in the

way Shepard and

gence.

Mourning

The

and

nor

a

not being used here as discipHne,

Bradstreet used

but as therapeutic self-indul-

it,

seems to be doing the work formerly expected of

bereaved

positions, at least of

a minister

is

intended clearly to foster spiritual development, but

is still

a curious exhibitionism

self-scrutiny.

sense that grief

205

be the gainers

shall

concern. Even

its

mother, he

is

if

if

the

not of the world's goods

mourner

a possible stand-in for

an experience of powerlessness which unites them

mourner losses

is

by

so lavishly granted

his authors

figure

them: grieving all.

The

entails

attention the

compensates him for more

perhaps than he has consciously suffered.

In these annals of grief, the deceased, like the mourner, if

neither

is

unacknowledged

aflinities

with the author.

The dying

shows

striking

or dead child

is

most conspicuous exemplar of the new turn to the old prophecy, "the shall

be

ways

their maternal

and ministerial biographers, many of

was

like to

last

"Agnes" and "Georgie" were supposedly guides to their adult

first."

supervisors in

it

the

that

must have been both suggestive and

flattering to

whom knew

be treated, even to function, as children

in a

well what

world of unheed-

ing adults. Furthermore, these small household saints, according to their

biographers, usually chose their mother or their minister as their model. Little James,

an early deceased son of the Universalist minister Sylvester

Cobb, was memorialized by ing to her account, he

was

a

his

mother Eunice Hale Cobb

clergyman

he disliked "to mingle with the boys

and vulgar language."

He

in

embryo. As

[at school], so as

Accord-

in 1852.

a very

young

child,

to hear their profane

advised "respect of the aged" and once rebuked

man who referred to his father as "the old gentleman." He loved the Bible, took communion at age seven, and was wont to argue with fellow passengers

a

on boats and father,

trains against the use of tobacco. If

he adored

his

mother. During his

he emulated

last sickness,

his ministerial

he expressed

his

wish

"we could die with our arms around each other's neck."^^ The dying infant was made supremely to flatter his feminine and clerical biograto her that

phers: he shared their weakness while he dignified and extended their authority.

tics.

The process of extension often took on nearly supernatural characterisThe special quality of a biography like Oliver Peabody's memoir of his

brother

lies in

listening to a

seemed to

the rather sepulchral sense

posthumous

his loving

voice.

it

gives the readers that they are

During William Peabody's

last

months, he

congregation to be increasingly "standing on the

confines of the eternal world, as one ready to be offered; permitted just

before entering

its

gate to point out to those he loved, with the failing

accents of a dying voice, the

way

to reach

its

played daringly on the enticing boundaries between the

Peabody brothers apparently

Sigoumey and death where

blessedness."^^ Mrs. life

lingered. In her poetry she

was

apt, as

an

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

206

everyday matter, to overlook the apparently living

between the

and the dead female. She pictures one deceased maiden lying "In calm

Wounded

endurance, like the smitten lamb,/ girl

trivial distinction

dead, or merely stricken?

trays the

in

flowery

pastures."^'* Is the

Even Mrs. Sigoumey's narrative posture

same fascinated confusion. Her only attempt

Lucy

at a novel,

Howard's Journal, the story of a Christian housewife's progress

be-

in piety

and

woman presented to the world by her rather guiltily surviving spouse. Lucy Howard speaks from beyond the grave. As luck would have it, Mrs. Sigoumey's own autobiography.

family

life,

purports to be the diary of a dead

of Life, which she began in the early 1860s, was almost complete she died in 1865. The book, finished by other hands, has some of the

Letters

when

same otherworld posthumous authority which she granted Lucy Howard's infinitely less interesting account.

Mrs. Sigoumey's

last

recorded words were the benignly all-inclusive

ones, "I love everybody." ^^

A

few decades

before, Mrs.

Sigoumey had

published a sentimentalized biographical sketch entitled Margaret and Henrietta (1835).

phrase on her of such a

According to her account, Margaret had died with the same lips.^^

last line,

Could Mrs. Sigoumey have mentally noted the appeal

stored

it

up, and finally re-enacted a deathbed scene

she had in part invented?

Sigoumey was prone marriage

in

her

late

Long before

she uttered her

last

which

words, Mrs.

to usurp the authority of the dead. Prior to her

twenties she had been a distinguished schoolteacher in

Hartford. In later years, she liked to keep up with her former pupils through

annual spring picnic-processions in the

were

woods near Hartford. These

clearly extraordinarily important to Mrs.

rituals

Sigoumey's psyche: she

maintained them for decades, graciously including pupils' children as well as pupils.

She wrote

a regular

account of them

penned that she never published

—

entitled

—perhaps the only thing she

"A Record

of

My School. "^^ The

attraction of the reunions for their organizer seems obvious: here she could

play out the funereal fantasy she had developed in her poetry, her novel, and finally in

her memoir.

The

girls, later

to be middle-aged

women, marched

to the sylvan spot ceremoniously dressed in white, flanked

of handicapped children from Hartford's deaf and interest of Mrs. Sigoumey's).

Once

ate in picnic fashion (though Mrs.

such healthy and gross

activity),

by processions

dumb asylum

(a

special

arrived at the "glade," they presumably

Sigoumey and

characteristically

listened to their

downplays

former preceptor's

yearly talk. Mrs. Sigoumey's focus was always the same: she dwelt lovingly

on whomever of the

original

group had passed away during the preceding

That death at a young age from consumption or childbirth complications was frequent among Mrs. Sigoumey's pupils can hardly be denied by anyone who looks over the statistics which she, a sentimental Madame La Farge, accumulated in her "Record"; that Mrs. Sigoumey was doing more year.

The Domestication of Death

than recording obvious and tragic facts

is

101

equally clear to anyone reading

through the actual obituary sermons she delivered on the

lost

"floweret" of

the year.

Even more as

one

however,

is

Mrs. Sigoumey's penchant for talking

who has herself barely escaped the perils of death. At the first presumably

in 1822, less

striking,

in

her usual

plump and ruddy good

urges her listeners to go on meeting annually even

addresses

you should be

silent,

if

health, she nonethe-

"the voice that

now

the lip that has uttered prayers for your

welfare should be sealed in the dust of death." In 1823, she that since they last

reunion

met she has been

sick, has

been

tells

"(at least in

her hearers

thought) on

the confines of the abode of spirits," and has brought back solemn

wisdom. Mrs. Sigoumey has assumed

a clerical role;

words of

more important,

she has

become her own medium. The Fox sisters did not begin their table-rappings in upstate New York until 1848, but Mrs. Sigoumey had in several senses anticipated them.^® She was straining for the authority conferred on the Peabodys, the power granted by the privilege of extraterrestrial communication. Several of the little saints whose early deaths drew so many sympathetic tears showed extrasensory abilities similar to Mrs. Sigoumey's. It was not just a matter of the conventional lips,

the

last

little

upward, the smile on the once-rosy

finger pointing

gasped "Mother" or "Jesus."

A

enjoyed extended communications with the dancing of his

in anticipation of his

own

speedy

medium, and

spirit

like

saw various deceased members messages back to the living. He was

arrival,

family, and relayed their

quite literally a

James Cobb world: he watched angels

dying child

after his death he continued to appear to his

relatives.

Death, province of minister and mother, instead of marking the end of

power, had become specific senses

was

living to the dead,

its

source. Spiritualism in

a manifestation of a

most generalized and most

complex retransfer of force from the

from the apparently strong

on spiritualism and the

its

to the apparently weak.

afterlife like Elizabeth Ellet's

Books

Watching Spirits (1851),

Mrs. H. D. Williams' Voices from the Silent Land (1853), Daniel Eddy's Angel

Our Children in Heaven (1868), conveyed the clear impression that death widened rather than limited the ministerial and maternal sphere of influence. These sainted dead hovering around their old haunts, whether women, ministers, or pious children eternally firm in the virtues inculcated by their mothers and their pastors, were so many witnesses, even spies, for the church and the home. At work here Whispers (1855), and William Holcombe's

is

the compensation process

among exactly

I

spoke of

the living, declare them life,

earlier: if

among

you cannot make converts

the dead. Death must become, not

but a controlled extension of the feelings, and property rights,

of the living.

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

208

The Rural Cemetery Movement Before the early nineteenth century, Americans buried their deceased local

the

churchyard.

The

relative

abandonment of the

absence of ostentation

in these

distinctions of wealth or birth

when

ably interested those buried there

dead were no longer concerned with

the

simple graves,

which had presum-

suggested forcibly that the

alive,

this

in

world.

By

the 1830s, a

new and

very different method of treating the dead, what would prove to be the

modem

method, began to find acceptance.^®

The

intramural churchyard

was replaced by the landscaped "garden" or "rural" cemetery, located away from the church on the outskirts of town or village. Developing awareness of the laws of hygiene in part motivated the shift from the old crowded churchyard to the spacious lawn cemetery; this awareness in no way accounts, however, for the new conspicuous elaboration which characterized the layout and development of the that the

new

cemeteries.

same groups who produced the consolation

promoted and extolled the

It is

hardly surprising

literature of the period

cemetery and the innovative modes of

rural

which accompanied it. The rural cemetery movement officially began in America in 1831 with the opening of Mt. Auburn, the first garden cemetery in the Western world except for Paris' Pere Lachaise. New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Salem were among the many American cities quickly to follow Cambridge's lead. The pioneering Boston enterprise was burial

distinctly Unitarian,

Brahmin, sentimental, and

literary.

Among

the found-

were the Unitarian lawyer and writer Joseph Story, the antiquarian author and temperance reformer Lucius Sargent, the Unitarian ing fathers

clergyman and poet John Pierrepont, and the ex-Unitarian clergyman and prominent orator Edward Everett. At the consecration of the cemetery in

Henry Ware,

1831

The new,

Sr., led

the prayer and Judge Story gave the address.

planned, and picturesque rural cemeteries, unlike their

tramural predecessors, were dedicated to the idea that the dead,

"cared." Paths with pastoral names, gentle

still

newly popular graveside flowers

flattered the

and the

green slopes, and

presumed

docility of the

The severe tombstones of seventeenth-century New England with

deceased.

their stark reminders of the fact of death

—had

hourglass

thropomorphic

given

way

in

designs. Actual

—

a cross, a death's-head, or

the late eighteenth century to if

were

in

evidence by 1800.^°

graveyard guidebook ily plots in

produced

calls

new

an an-

crude portraits of the deceased appeared;

allegorical pictures of the Resurrection, tastefully trees,

rills,

living,

in-

By

adorned with willow

the 1840s, statues of what one popular

"weeping female figures"^ marked various fam^

Mt. Auburn: Mrs. Sigoumey had been immortalized and massin

Sigoumey decorated ornate her down/ A lovely jewel for his

marble. Lachrymose verse ^

gravestones. "In Jesus' arms

we

laid

la

The Domestication of Death

crown," were typical

lines inscribed

209

on the gravestone of

a

young

girl in

New Jersey; "asleep in Jesus" was a popular caption for children's tombs every where.^^ Reverend Cuyler, passing an afternoon at New York's Princeton,

Greenwood cemetery near the grave no means final adieu: "The air was

of his

"little

Georgie," bid his son a by

unnumbered

as silent as the

around me; and turning toward the sacred spot where

my

sleepers

precious dead was

bade him, as of old, 'Goodnight!' "

lying,

I

a vast

and exquisitely beautiful

Greenwood was to Cuyler "simply dormitory."^^ It is not so much that the dead

are alive as that they are altogether accessible to the living.

Developing funeral customs carefully fostered the same cemetery created. The dead person was reincarnated

euphemism for

made

ingly

a living one:

it

to resemble dolls.

as a

illusions the

kind of hideous

seems no accident that corpses were increas-

There was

a

growing de-emphasis on somber

mourning clothes and gloomy funerary practices. Sylvester Judd left directions for his own laying out: he was arranged for viewing "in apparent comfort upon

by

couch, as

According to

his side."

banished.^'*

his

The

if

in quiet natural

slumber.

A

winter rose lay

"gloominess and dread" were

his biographer,

deceased were to compliment and imitate their survivors

rather than threaten them. Elaborate and highly differentiated metal caskets

wooden ones in the early nineteenth century, although many protheir use. The metal casket, unlike its predecessor, insured that neither

replaced tested it

nor

The

contents would disintegrate or return to the earth for a long time.

its

new coffins were clearly intended to please the Nehemiah Adams began his account of Agnes and the Key

actual designs of the

taste of the living.

of Her

Little Coffin

in the

design of children's coffins.

angles.

.

nothing

.

.

They

by explaining that there had been

They no

a great

improvement

longer had "broken lines and

look like other things, and not like that which looks like

else, a coffin."

He added,

rather maladroitly,

"You would be

willing

any household article." There was nameplate inside the box, and a "lock and key"

to have such a shape for the depositing of

apparently a soft lining and a

had replaced the old "remorseless screws and screwdrivers."^®

While eighteenth-century American families generally prepared their deceased for burial at home in simple and straightforward ways, outside organizers began to proliferate in the early nineteenth century:

midwife or the undertaker.

livery-stable keeper or the sexton,

The

and

first

the

finally the professional

undertaker's art took a gigantic stride forward with the

practice of embalming, initiated during the Civil

spread until the twentieth century.

The new

War

though not wide-

funeral directors of the later

nineteenth century, with their double emphasis on business and sentimentality,

were the

heirs of the liberal ministers

to create the sensibility of mid-century.

and lady authors

By

who had

helped

the 1880s, there was a National

Funeral Directors' Association with a representative organ called Sunnyside

.

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

210

competed successfully with

(it

which

a rival periodical entitled Shadyside)

could issue touching and ludicrous statements to the press

like the fol-

lowing:

Funeral directors are members of an exalted, almost sacred calling.

The

Executive Committee believed that a cut

dal. ...

A

in prices

would be

Of

.

suici-

$1,000 prize was offered for the best appearing corpse after

A

was passed requesting the newspapers 26 porting the proceedings to refrain from flippancy. 60 days.

.

...

resolution

was the most

course, the "best appearing corpse"

in re-

lifelike one.

Nothing speaks more clearly to the transformation of death the rural cemeteries promulgated than their promotion as places of resort, well suited to holiday excursions.

They functioned

as a

Disney World for the mortuary

imagination of \'ictorian America. Sylvester Judd, in his days as a student at

Harvard Divinity School

Auburn was

tombstones. For him, Mt.

melancholy and a special

in the late 1830s,

delight. "^^ In 1859,

was fond of

a stroll

among

the

"that place of beauty and death, of

one young man from Connecticut made

pilgrimage to the spot. His reactions ranged from borrowed aes-

thetic piety to indigenous class-consciousness:

up

"What

a vast lot

of

money

Oh

what pleasure there is in walking among the dead. So say the people."^® By 1876, James Cabot Lowell could I

saw

piled

monuments.

in

.

.

.

write rather unkindly about his fellow Bostonians that their idea of proper hospitality automatically included a dinner with uncongenial

people and "a drive

man can do

in the

Hamlet went

in

and

ill-sorted

Mt. Auburn cemetery where you will see the worst

way

of disfiguring nature."^^

to the graveyard in a

mood

of alienation from his kind,

of philosophical despair; he resorted to the churchyard to confront some ultimate reality.

The

mid-nineteenth-century American went to the ceme-

tery rather in the spirit in

which

his

twentieth-century descendant goes to

upon the prospect of borrowed cemetery's camouflage of death was so entire that its

the movies: with the hopefulness attendant

emotions.

The

rural

purpose came paradoxically to seem the creation of the the vicarious edification and stimulation of the living.

tioned not like experience but like literature; sentimental reader's paradise. rine inscriptions oflicial

and

which

I

The Sunday

Visitor's

The cemetery

was

could peruse the saccha-

The

Picturesque Pocket

Guide Through Mt. Auburn was out by the less

than a decade old.

a detailed description

func-

in several senses a

unofficial literary guides to the various graveyards

cemetery was and

stroller

of death for

have already mentioned. Moreover, hundreds of

during the middle decades of the century.

and

it

illusion

It

appeared

Companion

late 1830s,

when

included Judge Story's address

of the most interesting

among

the

in toto

the monuments, and

The Domestication of Death

211

poem

closed with "Miscellanies," a collection of prose and

and graveyards; there were pieces by the sentimental

pieces

on death

litterateur Willis

G.

Hemans, and the gifted young Nathaniel Hawthorne. In 1844, Caroline F. Ome, a very minor talent, helpfully published a book of poems entitled Sweet Auburn and Mt. Auburn with Other Poems. Of the six stories Mrs. Sigoumey included in The Young Lady's

Clarke, the famous English poet Mrs.

Offering in 1847, five close with graveyard scenes

and funeral processions.

The visitor to Mt. Auburn and other cemeteries was clearly under an inviting willow, or pause near an

The

artificial

intended to stop

pond, and read aloud.

funerary literature and the rural cemeteries themselves did not

present death merely as provocation for the sensibility of the living, ever; they advertised

it

in

curious

ways

as

how-

matter for actual appropriation

and acquisition. The topography of the cemeteries,

like the

language used

to describe them, suggested a Utopian preservation, literalization, and even objectification of a conservatively conceived past.^°

and the

women

site

They were

I

discussed in the

chapter.

last

in

biography. According to a

critic

One commenta-

common man with for the New Englander in

tor explained that graveyards provide the

emblem

promoted by

for the biologically oriented, cyclical history

and ministers which

the

his

only lesson

1831, the rural

cemetery demonstrated to observers that "in the mighty system of the universe, not a single step of the destroyer, to

some

Time, but and the

ulterior purpose of reproduction,

eternal."^ ^

The

is

made

subservient

circle of creation

is

originators and supporters of the rural cemeteries had in-

tended them to serve as negotiable sanctuaries from the present. analyzed their appeal: "The retirement they

afl^ord to

An advocate

surviving friends in

their visits to the graves of loved ones; the quiet precincts of the sacred place,

made

beautiful

by the embellishments of

of natural scenery, combine to

They become places dance with their name and dead.

make

artistic tillage

attractive

and the inspiration

and sacred the city of the

of respectful and reverent resort. "^^ In accorin contrast to the

replaced, the rural cemeteries

intramural churchyards they

were located out of town, away from the

urban bustle and noise: they were to be uncrowded, pre-industrial, privatized.

The

quiet atmosphere of the cemeteries

responsible for the development of Mt.

down

was

Auburn

strictly enforced.

in 1831, for

careful regulations about the planning and use of

trustees of the spot

example,

laid

grounds: the

had the right to remove "offensive and improper" monu-

ments; no "vehicles" were allowed but those ers of plots);

its

Those

owned by

"proprietors" (own-

no one was allowed within the gates on Sundays and holidays

except proprietors.^^ As such restrictions suggest, the sentimental impulse ostensibly responsible for the creation and policing of the rural cemeteries

was

in part a disguise

for an impulse of ownership like the one motivating

.

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

212

the

new

and feminine history. Nostalgia, here

ministerial

as elsewhere, func-

tioned as a spiritualized form of acquisition. Until the 1880s, proprietors

by the erection of iron railings. Cemeteries bristling with such jealous markers gave evidence of squatters' rights rather than of mourners' grief.^'* Francis and Theresa Pubszky, a foreign couple visiting

disfigured their plots

America

in 1853,

little befits a

objected to the custom in frank language: "Exclusiveness

cemetery; the idea of private property carried even into the

realm of the dead

.

.

.

has something unnaturally strange."^^

Observers were particularly fond of describing the rural cemeteries terms which likened them to that emblem of the the middle-class home.

possibilities of

One commentator on "The Law

Sentiment of Death" for the Christian Examiner

in

in

ownership,

of Burial and the

1836 expressed his belief

and rever-

that the graveyards could foster "the sentiment of retrospection

ence" and draw their visitors from "the busy competition" and "hurried

.

ambitious spirit" of the day.^^ This of course was also the language used

.

in

American home, also by definition preindustrial. In the words of a popular domestic manual by a Reverend Phillips, the home was the "heart's moral oasis"; like the cemetery, it was a "refuge" for the "bereaved and disappointed."^^ Another writer for the Christian Examiner made the comparison explicit: thoughts provoked by the cemetery "give a new aspect to all our social relations and confer upon our

the period to describe the ideal

homes

particularly,

where these

relations are the

most intimate,

a peculiar

sacredness."^® It

was no accident

that the

same architectural thinking underlay the

new proto-suburban domestic architecture and the new rural graveyards. The idea of the "picturesque" as formulated by Andrew Jackson Downing dominated both. A landscape gardener and an architect. Downing was also a man of letters and a close friend of polite literary men like George Curtis and Nathaniel

Willis;

he edited a magazine entitled Horticulture and wrote

several books. Socially conservative, of the genteel school in every sphere,

he attempted to

civilize,

moderate, and control the taste and homes of

America's business-minded middle

Downing wished

class;

as

one contemporary put

it,

"to infuse a spirit and a grace in forms otherwise admirable

only for their usefulness."^^ Downing's architectural theories rested on what life"

which

proto-suburban styles were meant to emulate or approximate,

in his

he called the "theory of association." In the "cultivated country his

words, "everything lends nature.

bestow

.

.

.

The

aid to

awaken the

finer sensibilities of

heart has there, always within reach, something on

its aflPections.

planted."

its

Downing's

ceived, to foster "a

We

begat a partiality for every copse that

style

was meant,

"memory," not ambition.

which

to

we have

as his friend Nathaniel Willis per-

most careful culture of home '^^

our

associations,'' to

This "theory of association"

is

strengthen

the familiar doc-

The Domestication of Death

213

which we have already seen used to rationalize and recoup feminine and ministerial powers. Architecture, whether in cemetery landscaping or suburban homes, became one of the ways in which the less

trine of "influence"

aggressive purported to correct the sensibility of their competitive society.

gentleman should, Downing took

from England, but in doing so he avoided the grandiose as inappropriate to a democratic country. He classified domestic homes and grounds under two head-

As

a

his artistic principles

by a gentle and flowing style, and the more abrupt and irregular one. The pic-

ings: the "beautiful," characterized

"picturesque," dominated by a

turesque, generally preferred by Americans, sion of

what German writers and scholars

called the "sublime."

By

was

in actuality a

at the

debased ver-

turn of the century had

they designated the wild and almost

this term,

anarchic elements of the natural and mortal landscape perceived and

as-

by the human mind only at great peril to itself. The excitement and challenge of the sublime was precisely what Downing chose to ignore.

similated

Unlike the productions of the "sublime," the "picturesque" landscape or building

is

between

Change

not an illustration of the laws of motion.

a torrent

in the

and

a

a rushing waterfall

rill,

"picturesque" world

is

The

and

merely decorative.

a

difference

is

that

babbling brook.

One

of Downing's

supporters and helpers explained that he wished to counteract the "restlessness and disposition to change

The

which

"picturesque" cottage-style

is

home was to be modest

groomed by

the surrounding land was

characteristic of our people."'*^

but delightful;

judicious planting into a carefully

The new cemeteries looked as such domiciles. The Picturesque Pocket

controlled mimicry of natural abundance.'*^ if

they were extended grounds for

Companion and

Visitor's

"unusual variety" of

Guide Through Mt. Auburn rightly points to the

trees,

the "beautifully undulating" surface, the "flowers

and ornamental shrubs," the carefully measured paths of Mt. Auburn evidence of "picturesque plot, like the

.

.

.

landscape gardening."'*^

The

rural

cemetery

proto-suburban home, gains significance solely through

owner's fond appreciation.

The cemetery

as

its

plots, like their descendants, the

enough variety to pay tribute to the fact of distinct ownership and to perpetuate the romance of individual reduplication of an utterly standard theme. The dead and their places of rest have become very much the property of the living. suburban homes, manifest

just

Prayers and Hymns: Exploration of Another World

The

act of acquisition did not stop with the graveyard.

During the middle

decades of the nineteenth century, America was busy taking over territory

on

its

boundaries.

The

studies of past conquests

were paradigms for current aggression.

A

by the romantic

historians

number of Americans, however.

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

214

not apparently engaged or interested in these dramas of imperialism, were sighting and colonizing territory theoretically of infinitely greater impor-

tance than the Southwest: heaven

itself.

Consolation literature of

between 1820 and 1875 became preoccupied not

just

with the

all

forms

scenes and

last

earthly resting places of the dead but with their celestial destination and

Holcombe, the author of Our Children

doings. William

in

Heaven, expressed

the need of "some great spiritual telescope to bring [the dead] in all their beautiful reality," the

need of "a

authorized revelation of the

after death.'"*'*

than

at first

as Texas;

life

.

.

.

near to us

clear, consistent, philosophical

This was easier to provide

might be imagined. Heaven was apparently

as real, as concrete,

and heavenly prospects turned out to have many

affinities

with

domestic scenes. It is

possible and even appropriate to describe this spiritualist annexation

of heaven in the language of the

modem

tion literature dedicated to the definition

hymn-singing formed what other world.

The

we might

call

media.

The

sub-genre of consola-

and promulgation of praying and channels of communication to the

writers of consolation literature established contact with

modem

the next world through prayers and hymns; then, like reporters, they

television

purveyed news of the heavenly realm back to earthly audi-

The authors of such accounts had enormous authority, for who could question their reports? No matter how genuine the need and belief of its but propOiients, the new domestic heaven was unquestionably the earliest ences.

in

— some sense the most perfect "pseudo-event"

—

in

American

history: totally

fabricated, yet uncontestable.

Prayer manuals, which appeared

in ever-greater

numbers

at

mid-cen-

tury, taught thousands of Americans, in the phrase of a later mind-cure

expert, to "tune in with the infinite.'"*^

An

examination of the

motives of the authors of two of the most famous

Hour and Stepping Heavenward, may help this period.

gian, the

Typically, the earlier manual

second

As we saw

is

in

a

novel by

a

woman

lives

and

The

Still

among them.

to explain their proliferation in a treatise

is

and

a

by

a

man and

a theolo-

mother.

an earlier chapter, Austin Phelps had a close personal

acquaintance with sickness and death. According to Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, her father was possessed of a "divine instinct to relieve suffering," and he

tended

a succession of

dying wives

He founded town. In his own

as well as his frail daughter.

the "Improvement Association" for the graveyard of his

view, he was a victim, early consigned by a conspiracy of ill-health and neurosis to the role of disestablished

man, Phelps's in

frail

among

constitution forced

him

the disestablished.'*®

As

a

young

to relinquish active pastoral duty

Boston; in middle age, he was seldom well enough to achieve the perfect

fulfillment of his teaching

which

his

conscience

and writing obligations

insisted.

He

wrote

at

Andover Seminary on

a self-pitying yet

genuine piece

The Domestication of Death

215

"The Premature Closing of a Life's Work" which begins: "Look around: you find the world full of those arrested, rebuffed, disappointed though willing oh, how willing! workers."^^ A number of Phelps's con-

entitled

—

—

temporaries apparently believed Phelps courted an invalid there are questions to ask about a

man who,

Certainly

state.

one wife

after nursing

in a fatal

marked as tubercular, and nurse her through the remaining eighteen months of her life. What is clear is that in Phelps's mind his suffering conferred on him a special status, even a special occupation. He liked to hope that, while he was illness,

would within a few years marry her sister,

clearly

excluded from the work of "busier manhood," he gained

not surprising that over the years Phelps developed a stronger and

ity." It is

stronger belief in the reality of the heavenly

life,

He was open about the meaning of prayer in a

and

and therapy for

usefulness to

life like his, as

life's

.

is

.

as a

relieved

by

it."*®

In 1860, a

The

God, intended to help others learn

command

act.''"^^

Still

This

few years Hour:

or,

how to pray. He frankly

admitted that prayer was finally for the passive, that conception, a state rather than an

means of

finished.

.

after the death of his second wife, Phelps published

"prayer has

solace for the

lost, as

"The value of prayer [is] work like mine is mainly

oppressive sense of useless living

Communion with

an anticipation

life-prisoners:

men whose

of prayer.

in the reality

of powers not yet gained, a compensation for powers sick

in "spiritual vital-

it

But he was

was

also

"in

its

highest

convinced that

of an immense reserve of yet undeveloped

re-

sources."^® In a later work, Phelps recounts a significant story about a sick

and solitary

woman who made

Again, like so

many

a career of

semi-spiritualists,

ogy, Phelps explains: "Her daily

dence between

this

praying for everyone she knew.

drawing on

life ... is a line

a pseudo-scientific anal-

of telegraphic correspon-

world and heaven."^ ^ Her greatest triumph came when

she prayed incessantly for a

young man she had never met but whose

accidental presence in a railroad car with her had revealed to her his

gious

crisis.

She learned

later that

he had converted within

the ministry. Prayer allowed those excluded

a

reli-

year and joined

from the challenges of human

history to participate in the miracles of divine providence.

was peculiarly impressed by the work of Elizabeth Prentiss. Prentiss' father, Edward Payson, a famous preacher in Portland, Maine, in the early nineteenth century, was himself noted for his In his later years, Phelps

spontaneous and heartfelt praying, what he called "a kind of devout poetry."^^

He died when

later fiercely resented

ished the

memory

Elizabeth was

still

a little girl of eight.

Although she

comparisons between herself and her father, she cher-

of him

all

her

life as a

"hero and a

saint."

Admitting that

by his "devotional habits," she traced her own real spiritual development from the childhood moment when she had inadvertently rushed in on him "prostrate upon his face completely

she had been particularly influenced

—

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

216

was constantly subject to ill-health, insomnia, and intense emotional conflict; she too was a creature of real talent, perhaps of genius. Unlike him, she had the full-time job of mother of a large family and knew the frustration consequent upon repressing very genuine lost in

prayer." Like her father, Prentiss

and powerful

artistic

and ministerial impulses

until nearly the

end of her

life.

In the 1850s, Prentiss lost a daughter and a son, and she sought comfort in

books

The Folded Lamb, The Broken Bird, and

like Light on Little Graves,

Christian Consolation. Increasingly, Prentiss

and

like

Austin Phelps,

in prayer.

never stopping to think, as she

found her

outlet, like her father

She prayed incessantly on every subject,

said, "if

such and such

a

matter [was]

suffi-

words to her husband, which she would have her

ciently great for his [God's] notice." Prentiss' last

shortly before she left for the Bible-reading at

were

final collapse,

prayer for me.

'

is

as surely a

slow and emphasized injunction: " 'Vou pray

one-little-

"^^

most popular novel, the partly autobiographical Stepping

Prentiss'

Heavenward,

a

a

book which Phelps read repeatedly with great admiration,

prayer manual as The

Prentiss later explained,

"was

Still

word

Hour. "Every

a prayer."

A

of that book,"

admirer described

clerical

impact: "It was one of those books which sorrowing, Mary-like to each other,

and which lured many

of her care-cumbered

life

to

ponder the new lesson of

story concerns an over-burdened doctor's wife,

women read

Martha from the

a bustling

whose

fretting

rest in toil."^'*

piety

is

its

The

by her

tested

husband's insensitivity, her in-laws' selfishness, and the agonizing death of

genuine force comes from Prentiss' clear perception

one of her children.

Its

that the housewife's

work

satisfying

is

never finished, and hence never fully successful,

—or rewarded. Katy

one practical or

Elliott masters

lem only to have another crop up; the

moment

static

familial prob-

of achievement, the

by definition impossible. Prentiss depicts the middle-class mother's life as one of harassment whose rewards are genuine but obscured. The motto of Stepping Heavenward can be well-earned narcissistic pause for applause

summed up

in the

without ceasing.'

"

words of the

heroine's mother: "

Prayer provides

self-involvement no matter

is

how

at

minimum

lofty;

but

it

is

'Go on praying

— pray

a little leisure, time off for

more. Significantly, Katy

does not learn the true meaning of prayer and closeness to Christ until she is

cut off

from

all

household work by

a painful

seven-year

illness

which, the

reader assumes, terminates in her death. Needless to say, her family does not fully appreciate her until she

abandons her

status as semi-skilled wife

and

mother for the spiritual superiority of sainthood. Katy's last utterance, which closes the book, is, appropriately, a prayer expressing her thankfulGod's grace.^^

ness for It is

stanzaic

important that Katy's

form of the hymn. As

I

final

prayer

have already

is

also a

said,

poem couched

in

the

Elizabeth Prentiss' father,

The Domestication of Death

217

^

Edward Payson, had believed that prayer was "devout poetry." Prentiss loved hymns so much that at one time she felt herself in danger of preferring overcame this excessive predilection, but the passion for hymns remained. During Prentiss' lifetime, American churchgoers came increasingly to identify prayers, poetry, and hymns. There are several points to be noted about the hymns which proliferated and

them even

to the Bible. Discipline

were welcomed their relative

American homes and churches during this period: first, novelty as an important part of American Protestant worship; in

second, their largely non-evangelical and feminine authorship; and liberalized theology, poeticized form,

last,

their

and growing obsession with heavenly

life.^«

In Puritan days, congregations chanted closely

from the

psalms. Indeed, respect for the sacred

system of rhyme apparently necessitated prehensibility.

New

The Bay Psalm

England for nearly

Twenty-third Psalm is,/

Want

"hymns" which were drawn

Book,

first

a century,

word and

crude

a

a certain disrespect for easy

com-

published in 1640 and standard in

rendered the opening

lines

of the

"The Lord to me a shepheard Richard Mather, a member of one of New

in rather literal fashion:

therefore shall not

I."

England's most illustrious clerical families, in the Psalm Book's Preface:

"God's

altar

needs not our polishing." Another representative of the same

family. Cotton Mather,

his

own

translation of the psalms,

more of Art"^^ not inappropriate, and watched with interthe changes that took place in hymnology during the late seventeenth

thought "a est

who had done

little

and early eighteenth centuries.

The

great event for English

appearance of Isaac Watts's in 1715,

works destined

Watts used only the

hymnology during

Hymns

to dominate

in

1707 and his

was the Divine and Moral Songs this period

hymn-writing for nearly two centuries.

suitable portions of psalms for his

occasion loosely paraphrased those. His predecessors had

hymns and on

felt

committed to

every scrap of God's word; his successors were on occasion to desert Holy

Writ altogether for secular sources. Watts, an English Anglican who tended toward proto-Unitarianism, was perfectly aware of the transformation he

was encouraging: he admitted into the

God,

common

affairs

down the royal author men were to sing about

that he had "brought

of the Christian

life." If

must be in terms and tunes they understood, and enjoyed. Initial approval of Watts was cautious in the colonies. The first American edition it

appeared

in

Boston

in 1739;

Philadelphia issued one in 1742,

New

York

in

Cotton Mather was very enthusiastic about Watts's hymns, but thought them suitable for private rather than public services.^® Indeed, it is 1752.

crucial for understanding the role of

Protestant

Church

to

remember

hymns

that they

were

in the

changing American

originally conceived as best

adapted for domestic and familial rather than communal and ecclesiastical

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

218 uses. It

was only when the church

terms that

hymns could be

had been redefined

itself

central to their

forms of worship.

in

domestic

A conservative

Congregationalist like Joel Hawes, BushnelFs rival in Hartford,

bowed

to

new fashion with extreme and open reluctance. After a hymn had been sung, Hawes customarily announced with some acerbity that divine service would now recommence.^^ the

Watts became the standard authority, but successors and imitators.

He

had demonstrated,

his

very example inspired

as the

Wesley brothers

also

human

en-

did in the mid-eighteenth century, that hymn-writing was a

deavor, a

form of

necticut put out

literature, of authorship.

The

Congregationalists of Con-

The Hartford Selection in 1799;

Timothy Dwight,

the

Congregationalist "Pope" of Connecticut, published his very popular selec-

drawn from Watts and

tions in 1807, mainly

his school.

With the end of

church establishment and the spread of denominational rivalry can Protestant modus vivendi, every sect had Ballou's Universalist

fact remains,

tury, certain sects

hymns

in the

own hymnbook. Even Adin

and Songs

however, that from the

were

clearly

Northeast.

be conservative

Ameri-

and communal followers had their special collection,

entitled The Hopedale Collection of Hymns

The

its

as the

The

dominant

start

in the

(1845).

of the nineteenth cen-

writing and publishing of

Episcopalians, for obvious reasons, tended to

in their choices.

The

Presbyterians,

who

retained a clearer

many of their rival hymns. The Baptists devel-

emphasis on the sermon and the spoken word than Protestant sects, were not particularly fruitful in

oped

was in

a

compelling brand of emotional folk-song hymn, but

its

popularity

largely in the South and Southwest. All historians of the subject

agreement that the Unitarians, aided and abetted by

alists

liberal

seem

Congregation-

and what Theodore Cuyler called "godly women" writers,^^ produced

more popular hymns of high

quality than any other sect.®^

and 1865, the Unitarians published

Ware, editors

Jr.,

and authors;

in

1855

hymnbooks. Henry Greenwood were among the

fifteen separate

W. P. Henry Ward Beecher

William Peabody, and

F.

Between 1830

helped to put together

The Plymouth Collection, probably the most important

hymnbook

of the

mid-century period. More and more Protestants were singing more and

more hymns written by Unitarians, like-minded Congregationalists, and women. The special trademarks of these hymns were their literary quality and their tendency to stress the more cheerful asp>ects of Protestant theology. Changing funerary practices were intended to rob death of its proverbial sting; hymnology facilitated the process by ignoring hell and highlighting heaven.

Hymns were

increasingly viewed as performing a very different func-

sermon they might accompany. Austin Phelps, who helped to write the single most important treatise on hymnology in America

tion

from

that of the

The Domestication of Death

219

nineteenth century, explained to his readers that the subject of a

in the

sermon

is

not necessarily appropriate to a hymn.

express "the heart of the church."

As

Hymns,

in his opinion,

such, they should not have "an excess

of the analytic element," they should be well-written, tasteful, beautiful.

Their purpose

is

to inspire, uplift,

"tonic to the worshipper."^^ tual.

Hymns were not,

hymns

Phelps was using

and cheer: they are to act

to further

in

as a kind of

other words, to be intellec-

and define that

split

between the

"theology of the intellect" and the "theology of the feelings" which his

Edwards A. Park, had enunciated.

colleague at Andover, If

Phelps found

all

conceptualizing foreign to a proper and successful

hymn, he held one brand of speculation uniquely inappropriate: that which deals with hell or damnation. Reminding his readers that "the Scriptures inculcate a faith which worketh by love," he urged that "comminatory" or threatening

hymns should be very

rare.^^ Earlier

hymnologists had hardly

agreed. In 1758, Samuel Davies, the president of Princeton, had penned a

hymn

containing these grim lines on the fate of the damned: "In vain for

mercy now they cry;/ In lakes of liquid fire they lie."®'* Phelps was able to quote numerous lines from Watts which he pronounced unfit for a "Christian hymn": lines about "Eternal plagues and heavy chains,/ Tormenting racks and fiery coals," or lines entailing enforced confessions on the part of the singer that

Twas I

I

I

that shed the sacred blood;

nailed

him

to the tree;

God, the mockery!

crucified the Christ of I

joined

Calmly overriding the examples of Dante and Milton, Phelps explained that

do not belong to poetry"; no Christian could theme" or "clutch at details of modes and instru-

"actual and tangible horrors ''revel in

song on such

a

ments of torture."®^ Phelps wrote that "sacred song instinctively looks heavenward." Phelps also

noted that "hymns on heaven are innumerable,"^® and

a

study of dozens

hymnbooks of the period confirms his opinion. In 1818, Congregationalist William Tappan wrote a popular hymn called "Heaven, A Place of Rest" whose title might well have served for hundreds of the popular hymns which succeeded it. The kindest remark an admirer could apparently make about a hymn-composer was the one Dr. Charles S. Robinson made about Thomas Hastings: "His poems breathe the very air of of the most popular

heaven!" Reverend Cuyler praised William Muhlenberg, an Episcopalian rector

who wrote the

well-loved

"heavenlymindedness." In "Like

hymn

Would Not Live Always," for his Noah's Weary Dove," Muhlenberg exhorts "I

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

220 his soul (the

dove) to

fly

through "the open door" into "the ark of God."

Fanny Crosby, the bUnd poet who wrote hymns for Moody and Sankey later in the century, emoted joyously in 1858:

We

we

are going,

To

a

are going

home beyond

the skies,

Where the fields are robed in beauty. And the sunlight never dies. 67

The

subject of such

hymns

not simply heaven, but

is

its

accessibility.

The "home" of which Crosby writes was to be taken in a rather literal sense by many of her contemporaries. In The Still Hour, Austin Phelps explained that "an astronomer does not turn his telescope to the skies with a

reasonable hope of penetrating those distant heavens than the

mind of God by

lifting

up

my

analogy suggests again the pseudo-scientific

have of reaching

I

Throne of Grace. "^®

heart at the

Phelps's

of assurance which the

spirit

writers of consolation literature brought to the subject of heaven.

what

as

we might

follow on television the lunar expeditions of our

Americans mourning

astronauts, mid-nineteenth-century

encouraged to follow

what they

their journey to

ate for breakfast,

books of the

who

heaven

they met,

in

more

their

minutest

how they

Some-

modem

dead were

detail; to inquire

The

lived.

consolatory

promised them that such facts were part

afterlife increasingly

of available knowledge. In the 1880s, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, carrying her father's

analogy to

and Between styles,

its

logical extreme,

the Gates,

which

set

produced two novels. Beyond the Gates

forth the eating habits, occupations,

and methods of child care and courtship current

life-

heaven. She even

in

described with some care an oratorio Beethoven had just composed for a celestial audience.

The

only inquiry she could not answer was the natural

one "touching the means" by which her deceased narrator,

was "enabled which,

to give this record to the living earth."

as she says in the last line of

That

a

is

male physician,

the only "secret"

Between the Gates, she decides to

let

"remain such."^^

Heaven Our Home: The Colonization of the

The

Afterlife

debate over the afterlife to which the consolation literature made such

an interesting contribution had

a

complex history

in

American and Eu-

ropean thought. Medieval Christians had shown an intense

interest in the

next world, an interest which created a special, popular, and long-enduring literary genre, the

monastic vision. ^° Yet built into

notion that heaven

itself

was

finally

forbidden to

after the Reformation, Christian thinkers

was the During and

this tradition

human

eyes.

and believers showed an increasing

The Domestication of Death

111

preoccupation with the doctrine of the millennium, that period of

a

thou-

sand years before the Last Judgment in which Christ and his saints would rule

on earth/ Millennial speculation was particularly intense ^

many could

not help associating the birth of this

general and religious possibilities of regeneration.

new

in

America:

more Jonathan Edwards was

not alone in hoping that America might be the chosen

nation with

site

of the millennial

rule.

Before the Civil War, American Christians tended to be millenarians, although they

two deeply opposed camps: premillenarians, usually educated and more evangelical sects, who believed that

split into

members of the less Christ would come to

earth suddenly, even unexpectedly, at the start of the

millennium to supervise

would not appear

its

unfolding; postmillenarians

until the

who

held that Christ

end of the thousand-year period, leaving men to

more gradual and less dramatic fashion. ^^ convocation of clergymen from more traditional groups

guess and execute his wishes in a In 1878, a special

met

in

Chicago to uphold premillennial views. Strikingly, those responsible

and those attending were almost entirely of the evangelical ans,

sects: Presbyteri-

noted for their orthodoxy here as elsewhere, dominated. There were

few Episcopalians, few Congregationalists, and no Unitarians.^^ Unitarian thought on the subject is typified by F. W. P. Greenwood, who, several decades

earlier,

Judgment Day

had dismissed the millennium altogether and referred to the as "figurative,"

emblematic only of Christ's "coming

in

our

hearts."^^

The proponents of premillennianism could be very astute about analyzGeorge Duf!ield, 1842 treatise on the "Second

ing the thinking and motives of their postmillennial foes. a Presbyterian minister

and

hymn

writer, in his

Coming of Jesus Christ" notes that every postmillennial organizer of missionary work hopes "to see his church assume ascendant influence and lead the way to the millennium."^^ In 1840, Reverend J. W. Brooks, fighting those

who

disregard the millennium because they cannot see the "practical

use" of the doctrine, reminds

them

that utility

is

ultimately irrelevant:

do not recognize the chief and all-important feature of the ders—that it is not the word of man, but "THE

"Men

Bible," he thun-

WORD OF GODr^

Nathaniel West,

who

attended the Premillennial Conference, also lamented

"the mistaken system of spiritualizing and guage."^^

It is

dependent

lan-

Edwards A. Park once again: is man on God, or God on man? Is God's word dogma or litera-

Charles

finally

accommodating Bible

Hodge

versus

ture?

Yet the differences between pre- and postmillenarians were not as

as great

they seemed. Both groups had increasingly confused the millennial period

and

doing so had sacrificed the Augustinian

with the heavenly

afterlife,

and Puritan

on the importance of the Last Judgment and the com-

stress

in

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

222

manding

role an autocratic

and even alien Diety played

both groups increasingly shared transfigured,

in it.^®

Furthermore,

conviction that this earth, purified and

a

would be the locus of the millennium. Henry

F. Hill,

writing

on "the world to come," staunchly attacks the postmillenarians. He reminds his readers that the world is still full of evil and will require drain 1853

matic, and divine, aid to achieve millennial status; he warns that even ministers

may

believes,

be mistaken, and that "the Preaching of Peace

and claims most ministers

and beautified, but retaining

its

willing to admit that

it is

his

faculties of the

ble love of

mind

home

orthodox

enacted totally

in

stress

human

of our millennial

on God's

heart

.

.

.

around the homestead sacred and endearing

will,

in

he

is still

man's terms.

to promise his readers: "the

are not to perish with this mortal

planted in tae

site

man's sphere and

was careful

Hill, for all his premillennial zeal,

Yet he

beJieve, that the earth "purified indeed

materialism" will be the

and heavenly existences. Despite

a snare."

[is]

.

life

.

.

.

the indescriba-

rendering even .

.

trivial

things

will not only live but in-

crease in the resurrection state."^®

were not clearly separated, this world and the next were inevitably more and more closely, if unintentionally, assimilated to one another. The millennial debate became part of a larger discussion over the nature of heaven: kingdom or home? American ministers If millennial

and heavenly

lives

of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had given relatively

When they

little

atten-

was hardly in terms to attract the carnal heart. Nathaniel Emmons had remarked in one of his grimmer sermons: "The truth is there is nothing which God requires men tion to the subject.

to

do

in this life in

be willing to be

spoke of the next

order to go to heaven that

in heaven. "®°

Emmons

is

life, it

harder to be done, than to

attributed this aversion to

men

because he looked upon the next world as the Lord's possession, and as such a landscape inevitably foreign to mortal eyes.

There were men and women in the

to uphold at least a portion of this view

northeastern United States at mid-century, but they were in the clear

George Cheever, a popular and reformminded Congregationalist minister of New York City, in his book The Powers of the World to Come (1853) stressed the "glory" of the afterlife. Putting the Judgment in central place in his celestial picture, he visualizes

minority, and confused at best.

the regenerate souls passing eternity in the active worship and praise of in the

most traditional theocentric way. Yet, despite

God's omnipotence, Cheever

human domestic

needs.

He

still

tries to

all his

God

highlighting of

reconcile divine glory with very

promises his readers that heaven

incomprehensible universality of omnipresence merely, but

"is

not the dim

a place for

our

now, and with as intimate a home circle, as the dearest fireside on this earth can have, nay incomparably more intimate and personal and definitely local in our Father's House in Heaven."

abode, as determinate as place

is

for us

The Domestication of Death

Heaven

to reunite families;

is

it

223

who

even offers nurseries for children

die

before their parents.®^

Among non-evangelical tic

groups, the out-and-out supporters of a domes-

heaven were dominant. Andrew Peabody,

Wares, Charles Pollen, William E. a

few, believed that heavenly

constituted, that

it

offered

W.

Greenwood, the Channing, and Austin Phelps, to name just the

life satisfied

homes

F.

P.

human

restored, families regathered,

and friends

became common in 1850s a few daring

reunited.®^ Intimate speculation about heavenly scenes

the consolation literature of the period.®^ In the later souls

heart as presently

began to write novels about heaven.®* Given the tradition of the novel,

to write a novel about anything

was

in a sense to

domesticate

it,

to bring

from the church congregation to the family circle. No one was better aware of this than Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, who took heaven as her fictional specialty, to the delight of hundreds of thousands of Americans and the scorn of Mark Twain. ®^ Phelps's best-seller The Gates Ajar was published in 1868; two other books on the same subject followed it in the 1880s but she was able to claim, rightly, that her views were still what they had been in it

1868

when

she was only twenty-four.

Phelps was the descendant, not

just

of Austin Phelps and Moses Stuart,

but of ten generations of Congregational ministers and deacons.®^ She would

undoubtedly have been girlhood, while her

a minister

if

such

two brothers played

preaching. Self-consciously

literary

a

path had been open to her.®^ In

at

plain,

mock-sermons, she turned to reform-minded, over-earnest,

nearly an invalid from neuralgia and insomnia, she did not marry until forty-four, and the world laughed, for her husband Herbert

Ward was

more drawn to her literary success than her personal charms. The marriage was not happy. In The Gates Ajar, Phelps quotes from a Scottish divine who speculated that "Heaven may be a place for those who failed on earth."®® Though Phelps

seventeen years her junior, an aspiring writer clearly

was hardly

a failure

— her

books sold well throughout her

life

—she

had

missed not just love, but fulfillment. Seldom likable, always a sentimental

by her need of esteem. She came

writer, often a sloppy one, her formidable talents sapped self-justification, she received little real personal

increasingly

if

comprehensibly to see herself

she wrote in a clear in

any

real sense to

mood

or critical

as a vehicle of suffering. In

of self-revelation about the point

be profitable: "there comes a limit

best that Fate could offer could not atone for the

Believing that love[:]

.

.

.

trust

certain bitter If

earth

word.

is

God

.

.

.

when

beyond which the

has chosen to impose on his creatures "the

animus that he has pledged them

an orphanage, heaven surely must be

all

889

pain ceases

worst she had

under apparent desertion,"®^ Phelps

1

inflicted."

final test

also stressed

with

of a

the redress in his power.

home

in

every sense of the

—

.

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

224

No

one was more committed to the denial of death

as a separate state

than Phelps. In 1885 she published an extraordinary volume entitled Songs

of the Silent World,

filled

with reassuring poems supposedly written by dead

people to their living and grieving relatives. expresses Phelps's credo in the best

There

A One

imaginary trusting survivor

of the book:

no vacant chair. The loving meet group unbroken smitten, who knows how?

is

—

sitteth silent only, in his usual seat;

We Death

is

gave him once that freedom.

mood

a

By which Death

is life's

The Gates Ajar

is

of

life. It is

life's

Why

not now?

.

.

no whim

Giver mocks

a

broken

heart.

Him,

reticence. Still audible to

The hushed

it

poem

An

happy, speaketh on, apart. ^°

voice,

posited on this hopeful, literal-minded assurance, and

constitutes the apotheosis of the consolation literature of the day.

The

book appropriately focuses on the conflict among the would-be consolers of Mary, a New England girl who has lost her adored brother in the Civil War. On one side, there is Dr. Bland, the local Calvinist minister, who preaches of regenerate

a

cold and abstract heaven as " 'an eternal

" 'shall

study the character of God.'

"^^

On

state' "

where the

the other

is

Mary's

Aunt Winifred who believes in a thoroughly concrete and domestic heaven where dead soldiers will chat with President Lincoln and culturally starved young girls will have pianos to play. Heaven, in Winifred's view, is a consolation prize.

Mary aunt

in

herself

is

an easy convert to this view. After long talks with her

the local graveyard, she

is

reconciled to the loss of her brother

precisely because she realizes that she has not lost

him

confusion of heavenly and earthly spheres which

Winifred's credo,

comes to believe her brother a

is

watching

is

adopting the

Mary

her, waiting for her. It only takes

domestic tragedy to bring Dr. Bland, following the

Winifred's camp.

at all:

rest of the

town, into

When his wife bums to death, he craves comfort, and only

Winifred's belief can supply

it.

Winifred, like her author,

is

not

satisfied,

however, with the control of the souls of her townsmen; she wants the souls of her readers as well. All the logic of The Gates Ajar, as of the consolation literature of

which

going to end up,

if

it

is

you

the culmination, suggests to the reader:

you

are

are well-behaved and lucky, in a domestic realm of

women, and ministers (i.e., angels), so why not begin to believe in them now? Phelps has at her disposal a bid for power which, if ignored, could become a threat of revenge. children,

.

The Domestication of Death

Phelps's bid

225

formidable, however; the bribe she offers her readers

is

is

the enormous, intimate domestic detail of her heaven. Reading the

somewhat nue.

It is

like

window-shopping outside the

book is on Fifth Ave-

fanciest stores

the confidently precise information about the rewards of celestial

which makes this book and its successors such extraordinary documents of American religious and cultural history. Aunt Winifred predicts with assurance that her hair will no longer be gray "in heaven," that heaven will look (at least to her) like Kansas, the state she loves best. She teaches her little girl Faith to talk confidently to her dead father and to expect that God will life

give her everything she wants, even her favorite cookies, in heaven. Phelps's sequels to

The Gates Ajar prove Winifred's staggering assurances to be

modest understatements. The narrator of Beyond the Gates finds herself (after her death) in a lovely semi-rural graciously suburban landscape.

new

angel escorts her to her

We

which

house,

in

is

A

kindly

every sense a home:

stopped before a small and quiet house built of curiously inlaid

woods.

...

So exquisite was the carving and the coloring that on

scale the effect

might have interfered with the

a larger

solidity of the building,

but so modest were the proportions of this charming house that dignity was only enhanced by

—not

there were flowers

sunning himself up on the

and stood, uncertain,

met me

its

delicacy.

It

was shielded by

too many; birds, and steps.

.

I

.

.

.

at the threshold.

.

.

I

"much

as beautiful objects

strolled across the little lawn,

The dog

arose as

I

of the familiar furniture of a modest

which are strange to

bourgeois phrase, to have

Earlier in this chapter

ists

annexing

a totally

.

noticed a fine dog

came

up, and

home"

as well

her.

Her deceased

I

"

'somebody to come home

compared the authors of consolation

campaigning for new votes

new

who has He is glad,

father,

long been living there and waiting for her, comes to meet her.

to politicians

.

cordially.

Inside, she finds

in a tellingly

trees

its

in fresh territories

to.'

"^^

literature

and to imperial-

continents. But the sentimentalists, invading as they did

imaginary land, had

in

one sense an

politicians or imperialists usually do.

They

easier time of

it

than either

did not have to win over or

new supporters were just like themselves, their new country was home. They had no obstacles to overcome, and their subdue

a hostile populace; their

imaginary kingdom reflected that is its

fact:

law. Therein lay the source of

its

ownership, not acquisition or

effort,

widespread appeal to Victorian and

post-V^ictorian America. Phelps, like the other authors of consolation literature,

had an immense

interest in visualizing the afterlife as being scaled to

domestic and pastoral proportions, as a place where she would dominate

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

226

rather than be dominated. In doing so, she less

documented the enticingly

effort-

and inevitable pre-eminence of the average. She dilated heavenly time,

she blew

up

that anticipated

moment whose meaning

she could legislate; an

was fascinated by the inertia of the prolonged close-up. The anthropomorphizing instinct can go no further, for the next world is here known with an intimacy which only posses-

early practitioner of the art of soap opera, she

sion

can

bestow.

materialism. in

Beyond

Spiritualism

The unknown

the Gates

is

paradoxically

the

suggest no break with

its

earthly counterpart, but rather

which an imperma-

of Phelps's heaven

—en-

good works, keeping up with earthly news, redecorating

their

nent object becomes permanent. in

of

objects and possibilities of the "modest" house

the mysterious glorification inherent in the process by

gaged

fagade

logical

homes, falling

in love,

The occupants

and gratifying their various

—

tastes

live in a celestial

retirement village; they constitute a consecrated leisure society. fully contrived

world created

world of the dead

in

isolate,

competitive society,

in actuality

and protect what would become the most

ritual of that society: the

chaos of productivity

insure the pleasures of consumption.

care-

heaven, as in the rural cemetery, a

in protest against the larger

served to transfer,

The

is

essential

eliminated in order to

7 1—=.^'^_j'

THE PERIODICAL PRESS Arena for

Hostility

The Uses of Confusion I

have been describing

some malignity:

a cultural situation

influential

with their society,

of enormous tension and even

groups working apparently

in actuality at cross- purposes

at cross- purposes

with themselves, perpetuat-

Of course simply human experience.

ing a complicated series of deceptions and self-deceptions. to describe this pattern

is

to exaggerate

it

and to distort

Close-range biographical studies of figures like Sarah Hale, Lydia Sigour-

Henry Ware, Horace Bushnell, or Edwards A. Park not only great differences among them but a common mun-

ney, Catharine Beecher,

would dane

reveal

reality.

Yet

this

is

only to say that individuals of any class or group have

experiences whose meaning

group but

is

is

not exhausted by an analysis of their class or

rather determined

by broader human

possibilities

and

limita-

Whatever their individual motivation, the collective impulse of these people was toward self-flattery, self-aggrandizement, and an irritation occa-

tions.

sionally almost homicidal in intensity.

As

is

so frequently the case with the

ministers and

women

intense energies nents. Indeed, capitalist

it

order

in

members of

subcultures, the

question did not in actuality expend their most

combating those they officially designated as their oppois a measure of the strength of the emerging industrialistin the

Northeast that

its

clerical

and feminine

critics

were

systematically and half-willingly confused; they adjusted to a chronic state

of confusion and were rewarded for this adjustment. scious progenitors, as

I

have suggested, of

modem

They were

the uncon-

American mass

culture,

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

228

which comics routinely insult their audiences and themselves, jockeys toss out wisecracks whose casualness partly hides, partly en-

a culture in

disk

hances their sadistic tone, popular interviewers investigate their subjects

with a curiosity that intentionally borders on malice, advertisers downgrade their rivals in order to precipitate

popular patronage.

cratic interest in competition, in "sport,"

Our

so-called

culturally engaged

is

demo-

by the specta-

which serves the purpose of obfuscation rather than of challenge or criticism. For there is only one real issue between the cle of

submerged

hostilities

combatants, whether reviewer and reviewed or disk jockey and

hit singer:

which of them will engross more of the public's attention. The clergymen and ladies in question were engaged in just such mock-

When we

encounters with each other.

look at the imaginative writings,

which they wrote and admired,

especially the popular journalistic works,

we find in them a testament of sexual tension, of covertly stated hatred of women by men and the reverse. There was, and is, need of discussion and conflict on the subject of the relations of men and women in our society, but the clergymen and women were ofl^ering neither. Rivals for the new mass audience increasingly addicted to popular magazine

fare,

they were

expressing the diversionary anger of groups antagonized by competition for

which neither

gains

one another; even aged

its

as

fully respected.

They both

imitated and undermined

they consolidated their shared hegemony, they dam-

integrity and viability. In the end, they

conducted no exploration

of the genuine differences, whether imposed or innate, between masculinity

number of them genuinely wished to do so. They and played with stereotypic sex distinctions somewhat in the spirit

and femininity, although exploited in

which

a

modem advertisers attempt

to differentiate their products: to gain

the competitive edge. In their work, implicit sexual dislike provides provocation, innuendo, titillation, not analysis.

one really wants to win.

It

No

mood

of clerical-

distinctly incestuous; subject

and object,

seems no accident that the

feminine literary production

is

public and private, are indistinguishable. closed system of competition to incest as a topic or a

mood

two do not become

is

one wins, no one can win, no

that

one, they

Its

dynamic

is

generated by a

which no judges are allowed. The point of it

has a conspicuously disappearing subject:

become

less

than one; they emblematize

confusion, not union.

Ministers I

and Magazines: Divided Aims

discussed in Chapter

Three how threatened the

liberal minister felt

by the

competition feminine writers of domestic fiction posed to his religious

hegemony. Nowhere were in the

his fears

more formidable and more

justified

than

sphere of periodical publication. Nathaniel Willis shrewdly analyzed

.

229

The Periodical Press

the well-nigh dictatorial

power

middle-class

women

exerted over their cul-

ture as the result of their role as "the real constituency" of

Given the

literature.^

tastes of the

were compelled to promote or popular magazine form to respond,

periodical

and ministers

criticize the publication of

—

fiction in

women

female audience

shared, they

all

other words, to literature

in

most transparently mass-commercial incarnation. In the burgeoning if perilous world of popular magazines and month-

in its

lies,

women's

periodicals had taken an early and easy lead. Godey V

by

Book, seconded all

masculine

rivals.

its

imitators

As

Graham V and

Peterson 's

and supported by the Adamses, the Nortons, and other never drew more than

thies,

few thousand

a

many

of the same feminine readers

decades before the Civil War.^ Godey

in the

known and economic

New

England wor-

patrons. Equally distinguished

Family magazines, however, which

religious periodicals did not fare better.

attracted

long outdistanced

when Godey was in decline, it claimed 110,000. The North American Review, edited

late as 1860,

150,000 subscribers to Harper's

V,

Lady V

who

V,

liked Godey

Graham V, and

V,

proliferated

Peterson V

were

feared for a telling combination of lachrymose fare and hard

astuteness: they led the

way

of

in the signing

articles,

copyright, and the cultivation of advertising on a large scale

ments which were to underpin the financing of

later

Predictably, several of the prosperous periodicals

—

the use of

all

develop-

American magazines.^

managed by men

imitated,

with varying degrees of guilt and anxiety, the themes and style of their

At times they looked like rather small minnows swimming whale. Fashion plates a la Godey V in the wide wake of the matronly Godey appeared in surprising places. Even Harper's Monthly Magazine, which began in 1850, had a few fashion plates tucked at the back of each issue for feminine

rivals.

!f

good measure.

Many

clerical

deeply troubled alist

journal, the

commentators purported to

at this state

New

of

affairs.

The

be,

and probably were,

originators of the Congregation-

Englander, derided the male editors and co-editors of

such periodicals as Godey V and Graham

who

V,

"so far as they are men,

.

.

have given up their manly appetites and devoted themselves to the amuse-

ment of our

citizen ladies.'"*

Other

ministerial critics expressed discontent

with the very prevalence of periodical writing. In 1847, a reviewer for the Christian

Examiner panned Alderhook,

"Fanny Forrester." trusts

ever,

is

is

He

deplores her "flowery sentimental" style, which he

not "attractive to the sober-minded."

that

"Fanny

Forrester's" tales

typical contributions to the

Home

of magazine stories by

a collection

were

What

bothers him most, how-

originally

magazine publications,

coy light-hearted pages of Nathaniel

Journal; as such, they should hopefully have been,

literary

worth,

at least safely

ephemeral.

He bemoans the

if

Willis'

not of solid

countless readers

— he compares them to "locusts"— who support such periodicals; once again

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

230

he has recourse to the "sober-minded" periodical Hterature."

which

will take

perused

... is

its

who "mourn"

the "invention of

To collect feeble pieces like Chubbuck's into a volume on

substantial place

an additional

evil,"

library shelves,

"among books

to be

subjecting the public to "a double deluge."

We "must set up what dikes and breakwaters we can," he concludes grimly.^ The

dikes erected

by

liberal

clergymen against the flood

tides of femi-

The

nine sentimental periodical literature were often disturbingly flimsy.

Most liberal ministers were extremely hesitant to publish novels; and a volume of sermons, no matter how literary and sentimental,^ could not command the same market as a work of fiction. Appealing periodical fare, however, was theoretically within their sphere. From the start of the magazine business in America, religious journals and papers had numerically dominated the periodical market.^ By one historian's count, there were ten religious journals in 1800, eight hundred and fifty in 1840.® At mid-century, religious periodicals still outnumbered ladies' magazines, although none of them were as successful as the best of their feminine rivals.® reasons are obvious.

Their editors and contributors could vindicate themselves by the claim that they were providing a corrective to the secular feminine journals; like

modem they tion

preachers

felt all

who

skillfully

employ

television to spread their message,

compelled to make use of the powerful means of mass communica-

too available to their opponents. Yet the historian examining these

eral clerical publications discovers a

marked

conflicted progression

if

from and

intellectual, religious, belletristic material to popularized, sentimental,

fiction-oriented writing,

and

a tone of

mounting confusion and

lib-

hostility in

the face of a public which can apparently be neither entirely ignored nor won.

The

takeover of Harvard by the Unitarian forces

the nineteenth century

marked

a crucial

in

the early years of

and enduring coalition between

Cambridge belles lettres, scholarship, and liberal theology. This coalition gave both Harvard and Unitarianism their special character and produced several of the

most distinguished ante-bellum

{periodicals in

America. In

Buckminster and

1803, the fastidious Unitarian prodigy Joseph

a

group of

like-minded cohorts began to publish the Monthly Anthology, which theoretically

emanated from witty and elegant dinner-club conversation

approved English fashion. The club

founded

in 1803, consisted largely

were not

ministerial in

sense.

who frowned on

most

Anthology Society,

of liberal-minded ministers, but

any traditional

Congregational clergyman ter's

in question, the

in the

its

also

aims

Buckminster, the son of

novel-reading, was, by his

a

sis-

account, ever "fond of reading romances, but rarely indulged himself

in so pleasant a pastime."^®

His private journal

testifies,

however, that while

he was ignorant of Aristotle, Bacon, and Newton, he was devoted to the

works of the celebrated Mrs.

Radcliff^e.^^

The

periodical

which he founded

a

The Periodical Press

231

was unsuccessful financially, going through five publishers in its eight brief years of life and never attracting more than a few hundred subscribers failure which seems appropriate in light of the repeated professions of dislike for commercial America made by its contributors. Buckminster and his friends John S. J. Gardner and Samuel Cooper Thacher hoped to find in "the delight and charm of literature ... a refuge from the tumults and

—

contentions of active

life."

The

ignored theology, a subject,

much

in

journal, devoutly literary, for the

most part

Buckminster's urbane opinion, "upon which

of our genius and learning has been always employed, and not seldom

wasted."^^

The

was of course the Christian Examiner, which ran under Unitarian and Harvard auspices from 1813 to 1869. Originally a strongly sectarian organ, under the aegis of editors like Noah Worcester, Henry Ware, Jr., and William Ware, it gradually became more neutral theologically, and more oriented toward belles lettres. In the Anthology's most impressive successor

1850s, articles

on the decline of the

liberal

clergy jostle uneasily but

cantly with half-grudging reviews of popular

works of domestic

signifi-

fiction.

By

was decidedly literary and secular: volume seventy-three for 1862 includes seven articles on religious subjects, four on moral and political issues, twelve on literary matters. This balance, or imbalance, is typical. The Christian Examiner's demise came from many causes, not the least of which, one suspects, was the increasing competition of the Atlantic Monthly, begun in 1857 under the avowedly secular management of Boston's loosely Unitarian Brahmins Oliver Wendell Holmes and James Russell Lowell. That such was the Christian Examiner's successful rival speaks volumes for its changed and confused purpose. Unlike its predecessor, the Monthly Anthology, the Christian Examiner had to combat not simply the business forces of American society, but the commercialization of the culture itself. The Examiner's move to the more competitive atmosphere of New York in 1866 only hastened its demise. the 1860s,

From

its

closing decade, the journal

the earliest days of magazine publication ministers had con-

numbers to secular magazines and even to ladies' magazines;^^ on occasion, they edited them. Theodore Cuyler sent in pieces to Godey Lady Book while a student at Princeton Theological Seminary, with no apparent sense of contradiction.^'* The popular gift tokens of the period, themselves the lightest cream of sentimental magazine fare, oflFered a meeting ground for ministerial and feminine pens. Sarah Edgarton Mayo solicited poems and sketches for the Universalist token Rose of Sharon ^^ not only from sister scribblers like Broughton, Case, Scott, and Fillebrown but from

tributed in large

's

's

ministers of her denomination like pin,

Henry Bacon, Henry

and Thomas Whittemore. Sarah Hale began her

Soule, E.

H. Cha-

editorial career

when

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

232

Reverend John L. Blake, an Episcopalian clergyman of the Comhill High School for Young Ladies and

come

invited her to

Ladies'

who was the

principal

a Godey V contributor,

to Boston in 1827 and edit a ladies' magazine; ^^ the

Magazine began under

tion in feminine journals

clerical auspices.

was but

it

From

ministerial participa-

and control of

a step to the creation

religious journals clearly designed to tap,

and educate, the public which read

the magazines tailored for female and family consumption.

The New

Englander came out under Connecticut and Congregational

Horace Bushnell was among the notables involved in its founding. Like the Christian Examiner, it was to be a prestigious religious and critical journal, eschewing any creative contributions, but it from 1843

auspices

to 1892.

was a much more confident,

aggressive,

and militant organ than

its

Unitarian

Open war was soon declared on "the fashionable monthlies" and "our literature." One early reviewer was happy to name his enemies: Godey V,

model. lady

Graham

V,

The Lady V Companion, Miss

Leslie's

Magazine.

He

explained: they

contain no good literature, nothing to "provoke thought," no "rational information," only "foppery and nonsense" donated by "third rate" authors

adept

salesmanship rather than

at

suggests, intended to past.

One

of

its first

remind issues

its

making."^® 1850s.

a

The New

readers of their

Englander, as

more

substantial

its

and

title

virile

contained a eulogy of tough-minded Nathaniel

Emmons; apparently he was proper business as

art.^^

especially to be praised for "adhering to his

preacher and not turning aside to the business of book-

The campaign

against

cheap periodical

fiction

continued

in the

A lengthy article on "The Editorial Profession" demanded that maga-

zine editors receive rigorous and extensive scholarly training covering the

natural sciences, ature, "tact,"

modem

languages, philosophy, history, theology, and

and possess the virtues of and

a

"versatility," "alertness," "natural energy,"

"high tone of moral philosophy"; ^^ the

editor sounds

more

like the

liter-

New

Englander' s ideal

highly educated saintly minister of Cotton

Mather's Manductio Ministerium than a mere journalist.

Yet by the

mid-fifties, the

New Englander was devoting increasing space

from feminine pens: Vara, Ida May, and The Lamplighter, for example, were allotted, although clearly begrudged, attention. By the late 1850s, the New Englander' s principal contributors were more and more uncertain about the boundaries between its religious and literary inter-

to criticism of novels

ests; this

uncertainty erupted

in

an irate 1859 review of Holmes's Autocrat

of the Breakfast Table, then running in the new Atlantic Monthly. Holmes's critic of course disliked the "spirit of indifl^erence or levity" to religion

which

in

Congregationalist eyes marked Holmes's essays.

objected, however, to the Atlantic Monthly's printing any as

Holmes's decidedly did, with religious matters.

He

most strongly

work which

The New

dealt,

Englander

re-

viewer argued that once Holmes turned to religious material, he should have

233

The Periodical Press

published in a religious periodical

—

After this

like the Christian Examiner.

Unitarian journal, the critic explained that

sly slap at the lax standards of the

the Atlantic Monthly should deal with "Literature, Art, and Politics" but not

with

religion.^*' It is a

could assert

its

mark of

right to

its

failure of

comment on

purpose that the

New

Englander

secular literature while denying the

corresponding privilege of religious discussion to an avowedly secular magazine.

Other

liberal religious periodicals

realm of feminine completely.

The

made more

direct forays into the

only to compromise their original aims more

fiction,

began under the editorship of Reverend Sebas-

Universalist

volume displayed the usual run of pro-Univer-

tian Streeter in 1833. Its first

more general moralizing essays. By late 1833, the journal had changed hands. Streeter was succeeded by two other Universalist ministers, Daniel Smith of Boston and Matthew Smith, later to be theological articles and

salist

a vociferous

and despised

The periodical November 2, 1833,

traitor to the Universalist cause.

had also changed name and direction.

An

editorial of

announced that from henceforth the Universalist would be called the Universalist and Ladies' Repository and devoted to the causes of literature and of

women — a

telling conjunction.^^

women whose

make them

should of

all

were perfectly frank about broaden their power base, to reach

editors

made to

the fact that the switch had been the Protestant

The

kindly feminine natures (the editors claimed)

easy converts to the charitable doctrine of the salvation

way

men;^^ and the editors were well aware that the

was to

readers

offer stories.

The

to attract lady

Universalist indeed provides a telling case

study of the need of the various Protestant sects to supply their female adherents with suitable reading. But the matter was not a simple one. Thirty years after

by

inception the magazine was

its

a relatively

salists,

low number of

principally

women.

come more or

less

alive,

although supported

subscribers. Its contributors

Its editors,

contents almost purely fiction;

still

it

however, were

now

even sported fashion

indistinguishable

from the secular

were Univer-

also

women,

plates.^^ It

ladies'

its

had be-

magazines of

the day.

The Christian Parlor Magazine, which a group of Congregational clergymen began in 1844, provides an even more striking example of the attempt by the like

religious press to

compete with the women's magazines. Evangelicals

Lyman Beecher and

Sigoumey

So did Timothy Shay Arthur, destined for fame as temperance novels like Ten Nights in a Bar-Room and

lent her aid.

the author of lurid

Woman

the Abbott brothers donated their efforts; Mrs.

to the Rescue.

apparently of

its

own

Yet the periodical lasted only ten years,

ambiguousness of intention.

It set

a victim

out to be didactic:

moralizing travelogues, pious and non-sectarian accounts of eminent Christians,

popularizations of Biblical stories accompanied by illustrations,

all

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

234

underlined

mission of instruction. Various writers inveighed against

its

fiction, especially in the early

religious novels

numbers, although

a

few cautious reviews of

were included. The proprietors and contributors could not

bypass fiction altogether, but they limited themselves almost exclusively to tales

designed to precipitate the religious sensibility: these turned out to be

To

almost entirely stories of death and the graveyard.

take the issues of

1^46-7 as an example, one finds nine stories about dying maidens and their resting places, five sketches of pious females, five reminiscences of an ideal-

by negative example, and one temperance tale. Most of the poetry for the same years is devoted to death or heaven. There are articles on specific graveyards, Mt. Auburn and Greenwood among them, with maladroit titles like "Wonders of a Buried World." ized past, four cautionary pieces preaching

Several of the tales begin quite literally with a tombstone: descriptive pan of a cemetery ("our graveyard

is

the narrative voice spells out the inscription on

some

and

we

are

oflF

"Henry and

A

into the touching life of

first

we have

a lovely spot," etc.);

a

then

particular gravestone,

"Mary Wilson" or

the sad story of

Louise."^'*

monument apparently marks

sepulchral

of religion and

art.

Neither

restricted to allow either

is

the allowable meeting place

trespassing, but the

any creative mobility or

for those accustomed to the

common ground is too scope. The result, even

monotony of the average

gift

magazine, must have been stupefying.

The

tian Parlor Magazine's eflfort to use

feminine material

clerical interests

is

book or

ladies'

self-defeat involved in the Chrisin the service

of

which provided entitled "The Good

ludicrously apparent in the engraving

the frontispiece for the June 1846 issue.

The

picture

is

which presumably indicates that the subject is Christ, an identification the accompanying poem makes explicit; but the picture itself unmistakably shows a small girl with a crook, resembling nothing so much as Little Bo Peep. The Christian Parlor Magazine has achieved a kind of Shepherd," a

title

apotheosis of clerical-feminine confusion;

it

has objectified the feminine

heresy, and traveled farther into the realms of unreality than Godey V or

Graham

V ever

cared to go.

Masculine Sentimentalism and the Problems of Dependency

damned Herman Melville and R. W. Emerson, both of whom they associated with German romanticism, and praised Washington Irving, Henry W. Longfellow, Nathaniel Willis, the early Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Ik Marvel," and George Curtis, all It is

striking that reviews in clerical periodicals

some sense followers of the English authors Laurence Sterne and Charles Lamb. When ministers like Henry Ware, Jr., and Orville Dewey turned to

in

belles lettres,

they wrote whimsical,

light, epistolary

sketches a

la

Lamb and

235

The Periodical Press Irving, not

romances

Henry Ware, Jr.'s sketch "The Village Irving's "The Pride of the Village," although

a la Melville.

Funeral" owes everything to

Ware's heroine, unlike Orville

Dewey

carried

Irving's,

on

is

merely deceased, not sexually abused. ^^

a highly self-conscious literary

correspondence

with his good friend, the novelist and minister William Ware; he could

mimic Sterne ("Here's another new day, William; and I wish I were a new man") and jest pointedly, "I have none of the Lamb-ent light which plays around your pen."^^ Such members of the liberal clergy were acknowledging and fostering an important split in American letters, in some ways comparable to the one I have already noted in American theology and historiography. They were drawn as critics and writers not to the few serious non-commercial writers, romantics like Melville^^ dealing with religious issues in sophisticated narratives which commanded little public attention,

but rather to the essentially secular sentimental authors of the genteel

Irvingesque school,

who wrote

for the magazines and sold well with the

predominantly feminine American reading public. In

a sense, the "intellect"

was once more undervalued for the sake of the "feelings." Ministerial commentators of course had their reservations about the price their most cherished secular authors had paid for their popularity. A reviewer for the Christian Examiner in 1844 worried uneasily that Willis, despite his manifold gifts,

was lacking

of sentiment."^® Longfellow, press, a

was accused by one

"Goody two-shoes kind

in the style

who

"manliness of thought and dignity

in

usually received raves in the religious

critic in a religious

of literature

.

.

.

magazine

in 1848 of

producing

slipshod, sentimental stories told

of the nursery, beginning in nothing and ending in nothing. "^^

was perhaps the highly ambivalent preoccupation of the male sentimentalists with feminine taste, even their partial feminization, which made them so interesting to liberal ministerial observers. In many ways secular Yet

it

counterparts of the liberal ministers, the male sentimentalists played a crucial role in

social

making the

and sexual

periodical literary scene a testing

ground for covert

hostilities.

Washington Irving summed up the American author's dilemma: "Unqualified for business in a nation where everyone is busy; devoted to literature where literary leisure is confounded with idleness, the man of letters is

almost an insulated being, with few to understand,

less

to value, and

scarcely any to encourage his pursuits."^® Like the minister, the writer essentially "disestablished," but unlike him,

place in

American

society.

Rough

was

he had never had an "established"

political alliances like the

one between

poet-journalist Philip Freneau and the Jeffersonian party at the turn of the

nineteenth century were the only approximations early American letters

had to offer to the complex, evolved between

men

if

which had Europe since the

inadequate, system of patronage

of wealth and

men

of literature in

THE FEMINIZATION OF

236 early

M

A

E R

I

C A N. C U L T U R E

Middle Ages. Matters were not entirely improved by the commerciali-

which began

zation of literature

eighteenth century and was

in the late

full-blown by the middle of the nineteenth. Nathaniel Willis, running the

popular

Home Monthly

Payson

Willis, eventually

in the 1840s

in the

as

country for writers."

He

claimed that he had tried "to find

employment for dozens of starving writers in Monthly perforce paid

its

his sister Sara

"Fanny Fern" but then just beginning away from New York, the "most overstocked

famous

her literary career, to stay

market

and 1850s, cautioned

vain,"

and added that the Home

contributors nothing.^ ^ Willis himself, however,

made a financial success out of writing as few other males did in his day. The reason may be detected in his realistic description of himself and his peers, no matter how creative their enterprises, as journalists "trying to make a living by being foremost in riding on a coming turn of the tide." In his view, literary

men wrote

for the "middle class" and were middle class.^^

Unlike Nathaniel Hawthorne,

who complained

low

bitterly about the

tastes

of the feminine reading public, Willis and his popular sentimental brethren set

themselves to please the

ladies.

But to acknowledge, even to court, such

dependency was not always to find it palatable. The best-known sentimental male writers in ante-bellum America were the magazine writers Washington Irving, Nathaniel Willis, Donald Mitch-

—

ell

(known

as "Ik Marvel"),

and George Curtis. They revealed

a personal

and

exception of Curtis,

With the they had stem fathers of orthodox persuasion who made

them

and unproductive; they claimed to be following their

professional profile strikingly similar to that of the liberal clergy. ^^

feel belittled

mothers

in

showed an if

adopting

a

sunnier creed. ^"^ All four suffered from

indecisiveness about their careers

ill

health^^ and

which betrayed the

fact that,

they had in theory rejected their fathers' ways, in practice they found

difficult to

discover meaningful alternatives.

They

it

chronically postponed

adulthood. Irving tried law, the family business, travel abroad. Apparently destined to be an author, he

let

ten years elapse between the successful

publication of Knickerbocker's History of

New

York and the appearance of

The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon. Curtis experimented with utopianism, putting in a stint at Brook Farm, then traveled abroad, and gradually began to

produce sketches.^® Willis seemed

a pretentious

foppish idler to others as

he followed the footsteps and mimicked the ways of the beau monde

York and Europe. He had, however,

in

New

happy conviction, proved right in the gossipy pages of the fashionable papers he would edit, that his social advancement was synonymous with his literary career.^^ Mitchell found resolution on a life work acutely difficult. Like Irving, he tried law, without a

enthusiasm. His friends began to worry; he himself exclaimed in 1845 with self-pitying despair: "All the

alone without

it!

world intent upon their peculiar

When, when

will

it

be otherwise?"^®

business.

I

237

The Periodical Press

All four

became men of

letters

with

real

importance

in their society:

Irving was also an ambassador and an historian, Curtis an active reformer;

and Curtis edited several of the most

Willis, Mitchell,

New

in

York. Yet their writing displays everywhere their fear of paternal

condemnation. as his

influential periodicals

The male sentimentalist showed

much

as

guilt

feminine counterpart, perhaps because he believed

society believed

it,

about writing

knew

his

Women

au-

or

it,

to be increasingly a feminine occupation.

thors were anxious because their literary activity questioned the convention that only fast

men

should write; they nonetheless

becoming an

rivals.

knew

that the convention

which served merely to save face for

illusion

their

was

male

In an important story Irving included in his Tales ofa Traveller (1824),

the "hero," Buckthorn, confesses with a mixture of shame and bravado to poetic aspirations

—"that

is

to say

prone to play the vagabond." that poetry

true

is

I

have always been an

He is disinherited by

renounces "the

his father

sin of authorship."^^

Willis, Mitchell,

on

a

important

'^^

Ir-

This contiguity of travel and writing was

expressed the fact that these authors built their professions

form of evasion

occupation a

it

first

and Curtis were travel sketches modeled on

ving's ever-popular Sketchbook.

not accidental;

all

he fittingly repents and

later regains his legacy,

All four writers discovered their calling in travel: the

works of

on the grounds

employment, the bane of

"a cursed, sneaking housekeeping

manhood"; when he

fellow and

idle

itself.

—of

their country, of their

They made

own

identity,

and of their

of apparently aimless wandering a vocation,

vocation which perforce always retained amateur rank.

They emphasized

the casualness of their journeys, the haphazardness of their impressions, the

uncollated quality of their notes. take themselves seriously.

They

plicitly for a special status, that

only because he

is

They escaped

censure because they did not

confessed to indolence.

They

pleaded im-

of perpetual child, of the observer licensed

incapable of participation.

They dodged

and could be surprised and elusive

in the face of success:

considered amateurs, even

not

idlers,

achievement,

they wished to be

men working hard

to achieve their

literary goals. Willis early created a brilliant persona, the "Idle

epicure and a dandy

who

in the

summer

"eats

.

.

.

Man," an

with an amber handled

fork to keep his palm cool."*^ Mitchell's most long-lived contribution to

American

letters

Harper's. Curtis, lished his

ogues

own

was appropriately the Editor's "Easy Chair" column

who

took over

this

department

in 1855,

appropriate literary persona, the idler

like Lotus-Eating:

A Summer

Book (1852).

We

liberal clergy's

disavowal of their

est disclaimers

of professional status and motivation.

The

—the

oflicial roles,

of the

in

had already estab-

who

narrated travel-

are reminded of the

women

writers'

mod-

form these authors took from European and English sources and which was destined to become the magazine form par sketch

literary

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

238 excellence

few

—ideally expressed their anxieties about their

pretensions;

it is

humble, self-deprecatory.

Rag-Bag: these were some of the

The

era."

sketch

is

by

the assumption that

"ephem-

definition short; part of the convention behind

was produced

it

at a sitting,

has

The

Pencillings, Fun-Jottings,

Willis gave to his collected

titles

commercial periodical publication,

mately dispensable. is

The sketch

it is

even carelessly, that the

was everything, the writing nothing. Perfectly adapted

feeling or thinking to

status.

It

concerns

it

makes no claim

to

last; it is ulti-

with the small, the "picturesque."*^

itself

the literary analogue to the architectural style

promulgators would

its

choose for their semi-rural, semi-suburban homes.'*^ Irving acknowledged

was not

the start of the Sketchbook that he

mood, the sketch

is

entitled

unmistakably personal and subjective.

narrator

Its

much power.

man who

a portly

when

the narrator sees only the

none of the

posterior of the stout gentleman as he gets into a coach to leave; narrator's questions are answered.

The Lockean

the intellectual underpinning of the sketch as

eenth century in England

in

it

empiricism which formed

developed during the eight-

the hands of Sterne, Goldsmith, and

highlights the narrator's impotence in narration: he

The

trapped

in himself, a prisoner

Lamb

apparently as helpless

is

tone of apology so essential to the career and art of the male

women, was its

not,

adopted by ministers and

however, a simple one. Their form, the magazine sketch,

apparent timidity,

is

mood and shrewdly com-

self-indulgent in

mercial in purpose. Like any potentially mass-produced object, pretension as art makes

more appealing

it

be read casually, then forgotten.

from ers,

guilt.

Its

as

its

lack of

an article of consumption;

it

can

very insignificance frees the consumer

Again, the personae of the male sentimentalists are teases,

loiter-

given to disappearing around comers, gently dodging shadows of their

own

making,

a sign

men with

a vanishing act.

Their evaporation complex seems

—

partially

of self-effacement

as,

indeed,

it

is;

it

is

also a covert

self-congratulatory manifesto of irresponsibility. Their docility in

here

of his perceptions.

sentimentalists, like the attitude of humility

despite

In a piece

occupies an English inn with him.'**

sketch closes abruptly and comically

as a child,

is

"The Stout Gentleman," the narrator becomes more and

more curious about

The

at

interested in the "sublime." In

never omniscient; that would be to grant him too

by Irving

It

the midst of their humility

lies a

cant, as assimilable to feminine tastes as they

be suspected of carrying poison.

chance to be

all

seem on

as kindly, as insignififirst

glance.

dangerous weapons

They submit

at close range, intimate

book, Willis in Pencillings by the

deceptive;

hidden animus against the forces which

humble them. The gentlemanly narrators are not quite they publicly disarm themselves of

is

and

in

as if

order not to

partly in order to gain the

with the enemy. Irving

Way, Mitchell

It is

in Reveries

in

The Sketch-

of a Bachelor, and

239

The Periodical Press

Curtis in Prue and I

(all

works

originally serialized in the periodical press)

inherited and enhanced a male persona, overtly emasculated and covertly

whose ambiguities reflected their own aspirations and conflicts. Irving's GeoflFrey Crayon is a bachelor; his existence is built on explicit and implicit envy of the domestic state, yet he never seriously seeks to alter vengeful,

it.

Mitchell's "Bachelor" too

has

hostile run-ins

little

him away

as

he weaves

dreams of matrimony;

with

vigorous housekeeper,

his

his idle fancies

by the

who

is

a tactful

almost sweeps

fireplace. Curtis' narrator

is

Prue and I

is

happily married, and the ordering of characters in the symbolic. Prue

however, he

ironically,

and devoted wife, but

we

title

never forget that she

could have married an extraordinarily successful businessman by the side of

whom

the narrator seems in every

and thinks, and

loves,

way

She dams, and cooks,

insignificant.

while her spouse meanders. Yet the point

is

that Prue's

husband, like Mitchell's and Irving's bachelors, does meander: the book largely the record of his fantasies about other younger, richer,

women.

beautiful

No

matter that he and the Bachelors

oflicially

is

and more belong to

the domestic domain; in their secretive dreams they are wide rangers and

even furtive opponents of the regime of which they appear the most secure they are vampires of

and abject subjects. "Paul

Pry[s],"'*^

own and

especially

vitality of their

charming

girl in

lacking

equipped to tap that of others. At one

point, Mitchell's Bachelor pictures himself a

sensibility,

conducting an

Europe and writing of

idle flirtation

his inconclusive

with

amours to

his

The cousin, who worships him, is occupied in tending a dying parent and not far from the grave herself. He returns, having wooed but not wed the European girl, to discover the American one is dead. She lovely cousin at home.

has

packet of forgiving

left a

letters filled

foreign peccadilloes caused. Again,

with evidence of the

when he

suflPering his

imagines himself married,

it is

only to linger fondly over his fictional wife's demise from consumption:

now

"and it

the hand that touches yours," he inquires almost salaciously,

"is

no thinner, no whiter than yesterday?'"*®

The

maiden about tory.

He

between the sentimental narrator and the diseased

relationship

whom

he fantasizes

are his inspiration. still

caused

extremely complex and richly revela-

courts identification with her because her feminine resources are

precisely the ones he needs.

while

is

Her emotional

He comes as near as he

savoring the

titillation

susceptibility, her subjectivity

can to the

suflPering of the

female

involved in identifying with the male

who

Her weakness and isolation are in a sense his own and thus he both and rejects her. The sentimental author was dependent on female

it.

exploits

suflPering for his material just as

livelihood, but he resented

he was dependent on female readers for

and subtly

tried to reverse this subjugation.'*^

his

The

women in his pages exist only to give the narrator, otherwise idle and useless, something to do: they provide him with

a vocation.

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

240

Like that of Irving's Sketchbook, the world of Reveries and Prue and I is

virtually depopulated:

its

creatures are those of the narrator's fancy.

The

members of some family in which generations of inbreeding have weakened the stock almost unbearably; they have listened only to each other for too long. Their models were from the characters are pale and derivative like

they are faint with nostalgia for their predecessors

start literary ones;

pages of Addison, Steele, Sterne, and Goldsmith. Literature and

works

are never forced in these

into rivalry with

invisibility,

people.'"*®

am

any wife be

perse,

is

in fact. Mitchell's

The

a subtle

ized

power

in

fancy than

Bachelor inquires point-

prettier than an after dinner fancy, idle

and yet

vivid,

sentimental narrator's ever-present consciousness

reminder that he

is

any moment

at

dis-

the dictator as well as the servant of his

feminine readers' imaginative needs. thor's

Miss Amelia more

but dreaming, and dreaming dreams he can

is

no competi-

the guest who, for the small price of

He is sure that he enjoys a certain

can paint for you?'"*^ that he

is

creations

drinks only the best wines and talks only to the most agreeable

any of her actual male escorts do edly: "can

There

the

husband explains the peculiar ad-

tion to the narrator's imagination. Prue's

vantages of his position: "I

life.

its

in

He

never forgets that he has the au-

— which becomes all-important when

literature

is

commercial-

—of withholding; he can interfere with the reader's range and rate of

consumption.

The were to

who

clerical critics

enjoyed such magazine sketches

find in the 1870s an infinitely less

in

the 1850s

welcome and more spectacular

example of the same veiled masculine exploitation of genteel femininity

own

their

ranks. In 1869,

the crucial documents of at

once explain

Henry Ward Beecher published Norwood, one of its

period, although a perusal of

significance.^^ It

its

in

was

as

commercial

it

as

today might not

any of

Curtis' or

Mitchell's productions and designed for a similar audience. Beecher revealed little

of the anxiety which had troubled his clerical predecessors undertaking

fictional

work.

He

wrote Norwood for

a

huge sum of money paid him by

the enterprising editor Robert Bonner. Bonner serialized the novel in his

widely circulated weekly, the

work

New

York Ledger. Norwood was a magazine

replete with village scenes and a conventional love interest.

figure in the story

was not

a minister

but a doctor, one Dr. Wentworth,

confused Christianity with Darwinism and duty with spending oneself^ ^ very tale its

aroused

much

little

in

the style of his author.

controversy;

it

The main

The book

who

money on

sold well, but

its

was rather the circumstances surrounding

writing which produced high conflict. In characteristic fashion, Beecher

acted out the drama of ambivalence his secular and clerical colleagues preferred to confine to print; perhaps only Beecher

know

was shrewd enough

to

no amount of overtness could break the stranglehold commercial literary stereotypes held on experience. Perversely, that,

by the

late

1860s,

The Periodical Press

Beecher was as well protected from

was from

241

Mitchell's Bachelor; his scandal

life as

start to finish a literary affair.

Beecher had

a

very specific audience in mind for his rambling work,

namely Libby Tilton, wife of Theodore Tilton, Beecher's in his various

closest associate

reform-minded religious enterprises. Beecher had

difliculty in

getting started on the project; he had never written a novel, and he did not

was his would not

altogether share Robert Bonner's interesting conviction that fiction

As he himself said, he needed "somebody and that would praise it, to give me the courage

natural metier.

.

.

.

that

go on." Libby,

be

critical,

in

her husband's words, was "sympathetic to a very rich degree."^^ Tilton

to

and Libby were not altogether congenial. Tilton explained

which he accused Beecher of committing adultery with had gradually come to disbelieve

in

at the trial in

his wife^^ that

he

the divinity of Christ, while Libby was

"almost an enthusiast"^* for the opposing view.

He mocked

physical petiteness, her penchant for saccharine devotional

her for her art.

Tilton's

fictional work,^^ reveal

him

to be a strong, vigorous, not altogether astute, rather self-righteous,

and

words

and

at the trial, as well as his journalistic

combative man.

He

prided himself on his moral purpose, on his principled

frankness; Beecher's apparent bonhomie originally seemed a his

own

complement

to

temperament. Libby Tilton was inclined to tears and melancholy;

she was recovering from the death of a child and drawing on her pastor's helpful

powers of consolation when Beecher "seduced"

her.

Attractive, charming, not particularly bright, emotionally unstable and

immature, Libby Tilton was

a

devotee of

literature, a

follower of the

gious press. Susan Anthony, the leader of the suflFrage friend of

Libby 's, described her generously

as "a

reli-

movement and

a

woman of wide reading and

A

few decades earlier Libby would have been an admirer of Mrs. Sigoumey; she read the novels of Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth with avidity. Libby showed the squeamish fastidiousness inculcated

a fine literary taste."^^

by such ladylike mentors; despite

a serious flirtation

New

with the

York

women's movement, she was upset and disgusted by Victoria Woodhull, a flamboyant advocate of free love and a self-proclaimed candidate for the presidency. It should be noted that The Woodhull, as she was known, had her revenge on Libby and her lover; her public proclamation of the aflPair, made appropriately enough at a meeting of the American Association of Spiritualists,

forced Tilton, several years after the event, to bring

suit against

Beecher. Libby was of a different stamp; she emulated the exaggerated and

euphemistic rhetoric characteristic of Mrs. Sigoumey and her referred to Christ as instill in

"The Great Lover"

her

letters.

She

felt

and

She

tried to

her children a "reverence" for the clergy. She regretted greatly that

Tilton himself was not a minister "is

in

sisters.

the only virtue

I

possess."^^

— which, he commented characteristically,

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

242

According to her husband, Libby

initially felt

no

guilt

about her

affair

with Beecher. Her pastor had coyly called their relationship "nest hunting," a phrase

borrowed from

Libby 's peculiar

his novel-in-progress,

and an evasion to which only

could have lent any credibility. She

literary socialization

passed hours on her knees in prayer; she was, as

As

her up, "sentimental."^®

common

with Richardson's

whose

able notes

Clarissa.

Theodore aloud

admiration" for them.^® And,

view her

story, only

similar to hers.

let

in

She and her pastor exchanged innumer-

Henry Ward, who

to

me

She even read her rather

stress

it,

expressed "great

she was a reader. She began

relationship with Beecher differently, as Tilton tells the

illicit

when

had something

a prolific letter-writer she

indiscretion later haunted them.

histrionic letters to

to

Theodore Tilton summed

she read a novel

which presented

a character in a position

Libby was distressed and interested to discover that the

author clearly found such a situation to be cause for remorse, penitence, and final spiritual elevation.

Libby confessed to her husband

in part

because she

had found another role to play. This

is

not to

condemn

range the barrenness of her

her. It

only to scrutinize

is

at painfully close

Libby was reported to have com-

possibilities.

plained bitterly at one point during the protracted controversy around her private affairs: "I have always been treated as a nonentity

The

scandal hardly bettered her

lot.

—

a plaything.

"®°

Tilton forced accusations against

Beecher from her; Beecher demanded retractions; their various intermediaries

from her pen. Beecher had innocence depended on hers; initially, he re-

extracted other contradictory statements

begun by believing

that his

ferred to Libby tenderly as a pure "child." Later he realized he could clear

himself by

When,

damning

after the trial

truth of their love

and took to rebuking her "excessive

her,

was long

affair,

aflPection."®^

over, she published a plain statement of the

simply, as she said, with unconscious pathos, to

was too late. Her identity was already lost. Finally abandoned by both husband and lover, she died essentially of confusion, without a life, without a literary model to give her the illusion

satisfy

of

her "quickened conscience,"^^

it

life.

Beecher had an

easier time of

it.

He

had written

his

book, had read

chapter by chapter to an eager Libby in intimate tete-a-tHes held husband's absence,

just as

York City from Indiana

he had done everything since his arrival

in 1847: to

in

in

her

New

be seen, to be heard, to have an audience.

His success protected him. Plymouth Church, where Beecher served

was big

pew

it

as

There were men indifferent or disdainful toward Beecher personally who were eager to save such a profitable concern. As a writer, as a preacher, Beecher was indispensable; he was the central attraction at Plymouth Church. Libby was as fascinated as Beecher with the possibilities of exposure; with her pastor,

business;

rentals alone pulled in $60,000 a year.®^

243

The Periodical Press ill-placed confidences

he did, but she

knew

and

what

infinitely less well

to

do with

Don Juan

Machiavelli or probably a follower of hull's maliciously

courted attention as surely as

prolific letters, she

it.

Beecher was not

despite Victoria

Wood-

He

hopeful claims for his vast "physical amativeness."^'*

practiced a debased version of Whitman's trick of substituting love of

everyone for love of anyone. Unlike Libby, however, he could capitalize on his

confusion and maneuver through

it

with embarrassing

skill.

Beecher's occasional blubbering and frequent obfuscation at his

demonstrated

his ability to exploit his

own

amorphousness.

He

trial

claimed he

had not seduced Libby. Tilton accused him of "sexual intimacy"; he admitted to "improper advances."

What

was seduction anyway? But

in a sense

matter

how

you

close

If

Leslie

!f

who

The

trial itself

all,

Beecher's confusion was genuine, no

he seduced Libby, or was

your eyes, does anything

or act out a novel?

Americans

Had

manipulated.

kind of defense was that? What, after

really

it

just "nesting"?

happen? Did he read her

a novel,

supplied excitement for half a year to

read the papers or the magazines.

One commentator

all

for

Magazine noted enthusiastically that "we are reading the most mar-

vellous of

human

dramas; greater in plot, denouement and effect" than

Scarlet Letter or Eliot's Rotnola. ^^ Little

Hawthorne's

on

trial

by

a

he

justified his physical

He

increasingly talked in literary terms.

woman

friend as "a holy kiss as

wonder

spoke of

that Beecher

a kiss

sometimes have seen

given him

it

in poetry";^^

prowess (or what he confessed of

his physical

I

prowess) in terms reminiscent of the standard rationale of the polite lady-

"When you shall find a heart to rebuke you may rebuke me for misplaced confidence.

poets:

my

necessity.

the twining morning-glory, ... It

is

not

my

choice;

it is

*"

Here is the fascination of the fateful conjunction of Libby Tilton and Henry Ward Beecher avid over the pages of Norwood, duller drama by far than the one which unfolded during its reading. The minister-writer and 2i

the lady-reader have indeed found their

common

—

ground.

It is

their

mutual

which they must be utterly parasitic on each other and whose success depends on an entire exclusion of the forces of American society an exclusion brutally shattered by the protracted Beecher-Tilton trial. The trial called to the bar not so much Henry Ward Beecher and Libby Tilton as sentimental fiction itself. The characters of Mr. Beecher and Mrs. Tilton were on trial in a double sense; not just their lives but their roles were at issue. Although the jury was essentially unable to reach a verdict, Beecher's own church exonerated him. foray into fiction which

is

of such interest

a foray in

—

The

liberal minister

had shaped

his

female parishioners' tastes and fantasies,

then borrowed the powers they attributed to him. Beecher enacted the fantasy with

which the male

sentimentalists had flirted: exploiting the femi-

nine reader and then excluding her.

— THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

244

Feminine Sentimentalism: The Bitterness of Harriet Beecher Stowe

two could play as well as one. The women I have been considering were hardly unaware of the hostility emanating from their clerical and literary brethren, and they returned it with interest. Examples are plentiful, but none is more compelling than the one offered by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Among the most gifted women of her generation, Stowe fiercely defended her adored brother Henry Ward in his hour of need, but there can be no doubt that in a larger sense his cause was not altogether hers. During the years of Henry's affair, Stowe published two important novels My Wife and I (1871) and We and Our Neighbors (1874), to which I have referred in earlier chapters. Both appeared originally in the Christian Union, a weekly of which Henry Ward was editor, and they are Unmistakably,

this

was

game

a

that

very distinctly magazine writing as none of Stowe's earlier serialized novels were. Neither of them

is

up

to the level of her previous works, Uncle

Tom V

Town

Folks.

own

prob-

Cabin, The Minister's Wooing, The Pearl ofOrr's Island, and Old In their pages,

lems as a

woman,

commendable.

women

Stowe

at

If

is

coming

solving, or

a writer,

and

close to solving, her

a religious believer,

but her solutions are not

Henry Ward had unconsciously presented

the tableau of

men's mercy, Harriet triumphantly displayed the scene of

abject under feminine rule. She

managed

to analyze

and mock the

man

futilities

inherent in the position of the liberal minister and the male sentimentalist;

enormous scorn for masculinity itself. Harriet had more to lose than Henry did. Both brother and sister were in a real sense geniuses; while Henry's true calling, however, was commercial, Harriet's was ethical. To take her revenge on an unjust society, she abandoned a romantic, essentially historical style for a sentimental approach to which historical concerns were painfully peripheral. she recorded an

Harriet Beecher, like

all

on her

started her career riding

who made their mark, coat-tails. Lyman Beecher was

the Beecher children father's

always enthusiastic about "Hattie's"

gifts;

before she was ten, he pronounced

her a "genius" and only wished "she was a boy."®® Stowe repaid her father's

admiration by memorizing dozens of

hymns

as a small child

bona fide sermons at various points over her long

life.®^

We

and composing have seen

how

Stowe clung to her mother's memory, but it was, after all, a memory. She was five when her mother died. She was very much her father's daughter, if not his superior, and in ways for which one admires and likes her. Of Beecher's children, only she relished the vernacular as he did; she outdid her

comedy, and became the only major feminine humorist nineteenth-century America produced. She had Beecher's ear for dialect, his eye for realistic detail. ^^ With this relish for the actual Stowe father in her shrewd instinct for

combined,

like

her father,

a

genuine sense of the sublime.

Lyman and

Harriet

The Periodical Press

245

grasped the essential Calvinist truth which Melville understood so well: that sin itself

is

the sublime, and that only

its

enormity puts men on speaking

terms with God. In adolescence, Stowe emoted properly and passionately

over that archetype of the sublime, Niagara. In adulthood, on her

tour

first

of Europe, she promptly rejected the "effeminate" beauties of Raphael for the excesses of "all-powerful" Rubens.^ ^ In a spirit her father could have

understood, she exulted that Rubens' "triumphant, abounding

dragged her

"at his chariot wheels,"

and proceeded to articulate her rather

peculiar aesthetic demands: "Art has satisfied

quered and that

is

enough.

Stowe thought

had

life"

me

at last.

I

have been con-

"^^

Rubens caused her proved him "a She takes for granted here that great art is a form of onslaught. That was indeed the art of Calvinism, of Lyman Beecher and that "the very pain"

real living artist. "^^

—

Tom V Cabin. Stowe wrote her masterful anti-slavery novel in part to show up the faint-hearted American clergy of which Lyman Beecher was of Uncle

in this case a

conspicuous example, and she picked

to recognize. Uncle

novel, but because sion of

its

Tom V Cabin

it is

is

a

a great book, not because

a great revival

sermon, aimed directly

hearers. In subsequent years, in a series of

sometimes sentimental but always witty and ducted the most theology and

brilliant

a lifestyle ever

form they were sure

exploration of

less

its

at the

conver-

alert narratives

New

The

little

girl

as a

No one understood women; no one

decline; but Calvinism

the subject of Stowe's best work.

Stowe con-

England Calvinism

conceived by an American.

clearly the inevitability of

a great

sometimes rambling,

better Calvinism's repressive aspects, especially in relation to

saw more

is

it

was nonethe-

whose

father had

boy grew up to be a woman and an artist whose achievement was to beat daddy at his own game, and, more important, to realize far more fully than he the meaning of the religious vocabulary they both employed. Her tragedy was that, when she rejected this vocabulary, as, in the quest for self-expression incumbent on a temperament as creative as hers, she inevitably did, she found nothing fully adequate with which to replace it. Her failure is a revealing one. complimented her by wishing she were

a

Lord Byron's mistress, published her Recollections of Lord Byron; she whitewashed the English poet and damned his wife as censorious, cold, and vindictive. The Byrons had parted at Lady Byron's insistence a half century earlier; both of them were now dead; but interest in the old scandal still ran high and largely in Lord Byron's favor. Stowe, who had become Lady Byron's confidante in several revelatory sessions in England in the 1850s, rose at once to her friend's defense in Lady Byron Vindicated. She knew (from Lady Byron, she claimed) what later In 1869, the Countess Guiccioli, once

biographers have confirmed, that Byron never loved his wife and married to cover his love affair with his half-sister Augusta.

As Stowe saw

it.

Lady

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

246

Byron had had no choice but

to leave him,

and her subsequent silence had

been an act of compassionate nobility. In trying to destroy Lord Byron

Stowe was undermining a poet Byron had, moreover, long held immense

through her hysterical panegyric on

who had

fascinated her father;^'*

his wife,

personal significance for her.

Aaron Burr an apostate from

In her basically sympathetic portrayal of the very Byronic in

The Minister's Wooing (1859), Stowe had pictured him as

the Calvinist tradition of his famous ancestry, yet one

enmeshed ist

in essentially Calvinist

precisely because he

still

thought patterns. Her Burr

knows he

is

damned, and

is

paradoxically finally Calvin-

awareness

this

is

the source

of Stowe's concern. His self-disdain as well as his good breeding advertise

him

a gentleman,

narrative to

if

which he has been

erection of a simple

The

not a Christian.

story closes, at

some

cost to the

largely peripheral, with an account of the

monument on

Burr's neglected grave.

Stowe cannot

him out altogether from the circle of redemption. Her reading of the same character in Old Town Folks (1869), Ellery Davenport, is much harsher. This Byron-Burr figure is less a sinner than a cheater and a deceiver; he almost destroys the happiness of the gay and childlike heroine, Tina. At the end of this line of development, the Byron of Lady Byron Vindicated is a tormented voluptuary who commits incest because he "longed for the shut

new

stimulation of a is,

I

kind of vice."

He

do believe,' " he reportedly told

is still

a believer ("

*The worst of

Lady Byron)^^ but he no longer

it

en-

grosses Stowe's interest or compassion.

Stowe

is

identifying

less

with the Byronic hero than with the

woman

he inevitably wrongs; she has developed a sharper and more self-conscious sense of sisterhood. ^^ Yet the price a great deal

Stowe pays for

it is

about the sexual polarities of her culture.

fearful,

and reveals

To defame Byron was

not only to censure a traducer of her sex, but also to defame rebelliousness

and

its

—the "remorse" which Stowe rightly perceived

products

ration for Byron's obsessive creativity. His pain herself

had once

felt

was

as the inspi-

at least kin to that

she

before Rubens and defined as essential to Calvinism and

Byron was regarded by Lyman Beecher and by Stowe as the poet of the sublime. To praise Lady Byron, no matter how unfairly she was maligned, was to laud a denial of creativity and to extoll conformity. A reserved and dignified philanthropist. Lady Byron was an exemplar of Anglican benevolence, not of Puritan guilt. The writing of Lady Byron Vindicated was an important event for Stowe. The book antagonized thousands of readers; but more important, it advertised Stowe's new-felt freedom in the early and mid- 1870s. She was adopting the self-worship inculcated by sentimental feminine antinomianism which her extraordinary intelligence had prevented her from fully assuming all her insecure and chaotic life. She was beginning art.

to boast rather than analyze.

The Periodical Press Narcissistic rage

is

247

of Harriet Beecher Stowe's writings of

at the heart

My

the late 1860s and early 1870s. She wrote

We and Our

Wife and I and

Neighbors in part to regain the public she had alienated with Lady Byron Vindicated; yet these less

intense for

its

two novels

new

coyness. In neither of these

up her long-standing attempt rial

pulse with essentially the same hostility,

works has Stowe given

to supplant her father

authority; she has rather displaced

him

entirely

and obtain

by

his ministe-

tacitly redefining the

true sacerdotal office to exclude him. Stowe's earlier heroines had

— Mary Scudder

ministerial stand-ins

no

in The Minister's Wooing, for

all

been

example,

— but they had been recognizable ones. Like Mara, her successor The Pearl ofOrr's Mary palpa— bly wants— her fashion, Lyman Beecher "to save makes many more converts than Dr. Hopkins in

in

Island,

just like

and her whole

in his

souls,"

She

a church member, an assiduous and thoughtful reader of the Bible. Stowe's frivolous later heroines no longer need any resemblance to the usual ministerial pat-

tern to claim

life is a

They

sanctity.

its

They

secularized.

clear preparation for her mission.

are ministers

is

are completely unschooled and totally

who

are anti-ministers, prophets of the cul-

ture-bound family faith which was to dominate America's religious future. Harriet Beecher Stowe's

new credo

comes through the agency of the average "average" with a vengeance, for

woman

is

else

can Stowe demonstrate that any

man? Her creative impulse has narrowed perilscorn of any real accomplishment as, by definition, masculine,

better than any

ously near a

and rejection of the dant on

how

summed up thus: salvation woman. And her heroines are

could be

eflPort,

privatization,

and

sufi^ering she

knew were

atten-

it.

Stowe's disintegration as a writer

and her curious equally apparent.

is

evident in the

relish at the thinness, the

Not long

New

York

mediocrity of these stories

after publishing

My

Wife and

/,

it

was, lacked "jollitude."

is

Stowe, with

astonishing condescension, could remark to her great contemporary Eliot that Middlemarch, fine as

novels;

With

a

George note of

breezy reproach, Stowe informs the English author that she writes on "so high a plane!

self-abnegation.""^^ Stowe's failure of insight

It is all

almost deliberate; she could not be making

it

clearer that her

own

"self-abnegation," and great achievement, are triumphantly over. lar

and equally painful

in her career totally

characters.

The Key

logic, in the

abandoned to

Uncle

days of

By

a simi-

New York novels Stowe for the first time

historical

Tom

seems

's

and recognizable models for her

Cabin, a collection of historical docu-

ments that purported to substantiate the story of Uncle Tom, proved Stowe's not entirely conscious veracity in her

first

masterpiece;

Hopkins, Byron, Savonarola inspired several of her

Nat Turner, Samuel

finest later portraits.

Her

feminine characters, for obvious reasons, had seldom derived from prominent historical sources, but until 1871 they had always played, and often

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

248

drawn from "real-life." In My Wife Moreover, We and Our Neighbors is the first

forcibly, against masculine characters

and I,

all

characters are fictional.

Stowe ever wrote; like the male sentimentalists, including her she was newly fascinated with the possibilities of art lovingly

actual sequel

brother,

imitating art, with the excision not only of competition, of standards, but

of experience

itself.

Calvinism is

intent

itself is

predictably the

on demolishing.

It is

first

male achievement which Stowe

important to remember that these novels and

sketches are Episcopalian and, equally important to add. Episcopalian as

Stowe understood the term. She, with many other intelligent Americans, had turned to the Anglican Church in the mid- 1860s. It had much to oflFer her.

One should

in part

inely

not overlook the fact that Stowe's

move

to Episcopalianism

bore witness to her broadening religious and social

welcomed the

vision.

potential Catholicism of the Anglican

immigrant and urban culture; she was cognizant of the ways

and

its

orders allowed

which her

father's

it

work more

to

She genu-

Church

its

in

organization

effectively in the exploding cities in

denomination (Presbyterian-Congregationalist) was

ing to take real hold. Yet

it

an

seems undeniable that

in

fail-

her religious realign-

ment, Stowe was confirming and hastening her flight from self-criticism and

from the authority of

vital experience.

Despite sometimes bitter internal debate over the growing use of ritual

by the Oxford Movement, the Anglican Church was, comparatively speaking, a model of non-conflict in a very conflicted society. It was crucial to Stowe that the Episcopal sect, alone among Protestant denominations, claimed a history of organic evolution from the primitive church. Certainly in American life the Anglican Church put a premium on continuity and serenity. The Baptists, Presbyterians, and Methodists all split officially and deeply on the slavery issue prior to the Civil War, and the fissures initiated

were

in

some

cases well-nigh unbridgeable.

divided, because, as one of to recognize the issue.

its

The

The

Episcopalian Church never

historians has pointed out,^®

style of

Anglican

it

ecclesiastical

simply refused

ceremony con-

firmed the church's image in Stowe's eyes as a model of tasteful self-approbation.

Of

course the Episcopal Church, despite

revivals of 1857

its

participation in the urban

and 1858, was non-evangelical; the kind of

total self-exami-

nation which supposedly accompanied the conversion experience in other

was never demanded of its members. Moreover, the Episcopalian rector was wedded to his prayerbook and to a fixed service which de-emphasized the sermon; his language was the conservative one of public ceremony. It is important that Stowe joined the church just at the time when rituals were proliferating: despite "low church" protest, crosses, candles, saints' days, daily matins and vespers, choral services, weekly communion, even sacramental confession and absolution and elevation of the host were borsects

249

The Periodical Press

rowed from Catholic practice by Episcopalians.^^ Stowe's New York novels show that she heartily approved of most of these practices, and with sure instinct dismissed only those which posterity has also rejected. As we will see,

these rituals had significant narcissistic potential for her.

The

Protestant (non-Anglican) ministry

My

New

New

who

England clergyman

Absorbed

in theological

nanimous"

(35),®°

"God

has

much

in

common

with

Lyman

Beecher.

controversy, "naturally impetuous though mag-

Reverend Henderson has love but limited time for

When Henry

offspring.

not presented as a viable

York novels and sketches. Henry Henderson, the narraWife and I and We and Our Neighbors, is the son of a small-town

option in the tor of

is

is

bless him," said

bom, he

my

takes a short break

from

me and my

father, kissing

his

his

work:

mother, and then

he returned to an important treatise which was to reconcile the decrees of

God

with the free agency of men, and which the event of

entrance into this world had interrupted for some hours.

was a perfect success I am told and nobody moment's further trouble on the subject. (6)

that heard

my

The sermon it

ever had a

Henry naturally devotes himself to his loving mother and fantasizes about a day when his father will be old and unable to preach. After ReverLittle

end Henderson's death,

his closest friend explains that his greatness

was not

which he poured all his energies, but in his benevolent heart, which he in the main ignored. In other words, in so far as he was lucky enough to resemble his wife, he was successful: what he thought to be his achievement was largely a rather touching waste of time. Stowe displays even less sympathy for the more timid clerical souls in his theology, into

whom Lyman

Beecher had fought decades

earlier in Boston.

Reverend

Henderson may have been an anachronism, but at least he was a man. My Wife and I opens with a section entitled "The Author Defines His Position" which is in part a cruelly piercing attack on the often pathetic attempts of the contemporary liberal clergy to rationalize and popularize their predica-

ment.

A

The

few

lines will give the flavor:

"Christianity, a is,

in

Shadow will go on with his interesting romance of Dissolving View" designed to show how everything

Rev. Dr. Cool

many

respects, like everything else,

and everything tant that

—

will finally

and

all

things lead somewhere,

end somehow, and therefore that

it is

impor-

everybody should cultivate general sweetness, and have the

very best time possible

Faced with such options,

it is

in this

world.

(2)

Henry Henderson never profession. He knows he lacks

hardly surprising that

considers the ministry seriously as a possible

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

250

the faith necessary to meet

demands and

its

agonizing about his deficiency. Instead he chooses press that

is

no time

challenges, and he spends

popular

a career in the

competing so handily with the religious one, and becomes

New

reporter for a

The male

a

York newspaper.

come

no better than the ministers in Stowe's acerbic pages. The very title of My Wife and I reminds the reader of George Curtis' Prue and I. The episodic narrative and the male narrators of all the works Stowe turned out between 1868 and 1874, with the exception of Pink and White Tyranny, suggest the same source. Little Foxes (1866), The Chimney Corner (1866), and House and Home Papers (1865), the preparatory works for the New York novels, are collected sketches which origisentimentalists

appeared

nally

narrator,

is

in

reminiscent of Prue's husband.

ous, domesticated,

my

is

and

my

land where

and

literary

man, with

a sensitive stomach,"®^

heels luxuriously

love to

I

"A

he

a

somewhat

bald, fastidi-

is

Like Mitchell's Bachelor, he loves to

effete.

study chair with

"my cloud

Christopher Crowfield, their

the Atlantic Monthly.

delicate nervous organization

in

off

sail

away

lie

"back

propped on an ottoman";

in

this

dreamy quietude, forgetting

the war, the price of coal and flour"®^ until his strong-minded practical wife briskly reminds

him of approaching

deadlines. Crowfield embarrasses the

reader with the apologetic excesses of his self-dislike: palpably afraid of the

women

he propitiates by imitation, he deprecates himself

blind vulcan."®^ Since he

is

Stowe's puppet, he

sentiments about him, but Stowe

which was so crippling every sense.

in is

in terror

love of his

When

as a child

of the big boys life,

who

in part expressing

her

Curtis and Mitchell.

neither a minister nor an author, seems

he

own

also getting at the lack of self-respect

is

in writers like

Henry Henderson, though

is

"clumsy, old,

as a

first

leaves

home

to

threaten to bully him.

whom, with precocious

weak

go to day school, he

Then

Daisy, the

first

anticipation of the domestic state,

comes to his rescue: she has his place moved to the girls' side of the room. "I was a blessed little boy from that moment" (11), he tells us. He is completely dependent on little Daisy, as he will be on Eva van Arsdel, his legal wife. And no wonder. Males in these books are either he

calls his "child wife,"

awkward

transvestites. In either

are

amid feminine

brutes, stumbling

by nature

subtleties,

form, they are by nature

successes. It

is

quite clear that

or wistful would-be

failures, just as the

Henry Henderson

women

has no other

function than to provide an audience, a mirror, an adorer for his wife (or wives).

band,

is

The

crucial point

not apparent but

is

that his subjugation, unlike that of Prue's hus-

Henry, presumably spending

real.

time writing about Eva and

all

her

little

doings,

is

a

good

deal of

advertising his sexual

disadvantage.

And

Eva's doings are very

not to have doubts about her

little

new

indeed.

Stowe was much too

fashionable heroine,

whom

I

intelligent

have already

1

The Periodical Press

25

described as the proto-consumer. Pink and White Tyranny, which appeared in the

same year

as

My

Wife and

I,

the utter small-mindedness of Lillie

reveals the superficiality, the coldness,

eye might seem very similar to Eva van Arsdel. But

modem

who

society belle

Ellis, a

to the casual

if Lillie

represents

Eva suggests her hopes, and in My Wife and I and We and Our Neighbors, she indulges them to the uttermost. Before her marriage, Eva is a pretty society flirt with somewhat higher aspirations than the wealthy loveless match which seems clearly in the ofling. She is a regular churchgoer, but her theology, as we have seen, is a Stowe's fears about the modish

trivial

girl,

and subjective know-nothingism. She prefers the

Biblical explanation

of the creation to the Darwinian one because, as she says, "

'I

think

it

a

good

Garden of Eden story, especially as that's pretty the dear old Book that is so sweet and comfortable

deal easier to believe the

and

poetical,

to us' " (322).

and

A

is

in

quote

like this suggests

accurately not only the thinness of

her personality but the impoverishment of her language. She talks as James

was

to

make Daisy

few years later. Stowe, who could exult of Eva's lovely younger sister Angelique, was

Miller talk just a

over the "curlie-wurlies"

clearly past the point of being critical of her slight heroine.

charm for everyone, including her author and her husband, apparently lies in her tasteful wardrobe. Admiring her, Henry feels compensated for "those severe edicts" which decree that male dress should be dull. Like some kind of bird, the female of the species is apparently destined to Eva's great

brilliant

plumage, the male to drab. Henry's wits seem as dull

as his clothes

when he gapes over her finery; yet it is clear he is undergoing a religious experience, and more particularly, an Episcopalian one. Eva's clothes and the process by which she adorns herself are at

some

Stowe analogous to the rituals of her new-found church. In the two novels in which Eva figures, Stowe lingers fondly over scenes in which young couples adorn and re-adorn

little

chapels at appropriate seasons.

level for

Not too

surprisingly, the

young men always fall adoringly in love with the young ladies on such occasions. In We and Our Neighbors, St. John, a devout Episcopalian rector, has redecorated his church in blue and gold.

van Arsdel conducts her Sunday School outfit.

Of

He

is

class in a

stunned

matching blue and gold

course, although hitherto absorbed in his church, he

love with her. In Stowe's narcissistic imagination, the

become the church, and the man frank about her ambitions. In to "

abandon her vague

is all

girlish

is

a rapturous

We and Our

dreams of

a

woman

now

falls in

has herself

communicant. Eva

is

quite

Neighbors, counseling her sister

hero-husband, she explains sagely:

on pedestals and have you worship them. Now, for part, I'd rather have a good kind man that will worship me' " (403).®'* Her emphasis on the ''man " here, however, is somewhat misleading. She

'your heroes like to

my

when Angelique

sit

for marriage, eager to

make matches

for her sisters and friends at every

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

252

motive

turn, but her in life

is

not finally respect for the value of the male.

is

the essentially narcissistic one of multiplying her image by creating

domesticated replicas of her

little

Her aim

She holds her Thursday evening once in the domestic process; they

life.

get-togethers to implicate her friends at are to participate, admire, and

marriage

do

likewise,

and

own

of them do. Eva's

six

absolutely without content or meaning except as a model.

is

an advertisement, not

a

It is

product. After the honeymoon, her husband's adora-

is

assumed but not expressed. At one point,

we

them going to bed together in a classically sexless scene. He, exhausted from his day, is half asleep, while she is chatting on about subjects which don't interest him. The tion

see

vignette closes with her superior acceptance of his indifference and her

amusement

at his rather gross physical fatigue:

Well, never mind.

Good

night' " (85).

(There

is

"

no evidence

that the female of the species ever needs sleep.

sprightly alert.) Needless to say, the couple has

you sleepy-head!

'Oh,

no

She

is

in either

on

children.

novel

a perpetual, It is

apparent

Eva has no time for childbearing: she is too busy showing off. It is irrelevant to expect children from her as to expect a doll to talk. Henry that

as is

from home. He is like a character always off-stage, for Stowe increasingly omits any information about his job. When at home, he generally absent

is

factotum

a

alone in the

home

goes out, Eva to

we

Furthermore,

figure.

almost never find this model couple

they love so much: either guests arrive, or one of them "visit,"

Henry

to

work or

to his "club."

The

reader

thoroughly sympathetic with their apparently inconsistent dread of vacy:

it is all

is

pri-

too evident that, once alone without an audience, they would

cease to exist.

One must mimics,

much

is

say, to

do her

credit, that Eva, in chatting

with her potential

never base enough to insinuate that romance or even love has

do with marriage. There is a businesslike air lurking behind these matchmaking tete-a-tetes. She is always enticing her feminine friends by the to

possibility that

they can "make" some

nial investment.

The arguments

suitor Jim, a cheery

man by

taking him

up

as a

matrimo-

she uses on her sister Alice in favor of her

reporter, are typical. " 'Your influence might

young

help him' " in his career, she points out. Alice agrees. " 'Jim ought to be married, certainly,' " she says "in a reflective tone. 'Just the right kind of

marriage would be the making of him.'

"

keep

it

a nice thing for us all

if

an interesting version of the

would be

think

it

of

we

us;

and is

live

all

near

know him and us,

and

all

apparently that he

bit like a

is

"let's

like

him

.

.

.

But Eva's clinching argument in

the family" approach.

"

is

do one

'I

you could like Jim, for he's you might settle right down here,

go on together cosily'

" (403). Jim's

main

selling point

already familiar, already domesticated; he sounds a

prefab house, ready to be put up. In marrying Jim, Alice can

quickly dispose of him, and get to the real business of female

life;

setting

up

253

The Periodical Press

an "easy," "nice," "cosy"

home

for others to envy and imitate. Needless to

say, she accepts him.

Eva

exults over their prospective marriage

engineered in a

skillfully

letter

which punctuate the narratives curious

They seldom

affairs.

and two others she has

written to her mother-in-law. These

regular intervals, are in themselves rather

at

tell

letters,

us anything

through the direct narrative. Their purpose

is

we have

not already learned

not to inform but rather, by

which the book operates structurally as well as thematically, to re-reflect, to gloat. As Eva redescribes the trivia which comprise her life, she repossesses her kingdom, and replicates it once again the narcissistic process on

somewhat weary

for her

readers. Here, at her

peak

matrimonial entre-

as a

book she unabashedly demands her due 'Mother, doesn't it seem as if our bright, cosy, happy, pound of " free-and-easy home was throwing out as many side-shoots as a lilac bush?' (462). The natural, even floral, connotations of Eva's metaphor seem insidipreneur, in the key sentence of the praise: "

ously deceptive.

One has a vision of an unending assembly

ing thousands of these homes, essentially

empty

like Eva's

existing only because the others do. Incest has

line,

mass-produc-

and Henry's, each

been commercialized.

The Loss of Romanticism Stowe's

novels hint painfully at the tragic dead end of Victorian Ameri-

late

can culture. There

is

the viciousness between the sexes.

There

is

the trium-

phant drift toward a consumer and mass-media society: Eva the shopper,

Henry

the newspaper reporter,

Stowe

herself at least

momentarily the advo-

cate of the superficial, the replicable. Equally important in these books,

however,

is

what has been

lost:

theology, feminism, and romanticism

—to

all

of which Stowe, like others in her culture, was logically the heir. Stowe herself

is

not to blame for this profoundly disappointing end to a brilliant

She did what she did

career.®^

women

in the

them. But all

that

own

it

was

most

was

way

half-understood effort to vindicate

undervalued

in a society that she sensed

a costly vindication, for to

accomplish

best in her religious heritage, repress

creativity

A

effective

in a

—and then, boast of

all

that

it

she had to debase

was strongest

in

her

it.

period which produced Nathaniel Hawthorne,

Herman

Melville,

Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edwards A. Park, and Horace Bushnell, among others, produced no women, with the exceptions of Margaret Fuller and Stowe,

even

if

could match their claims

the standards used were appropriately rephrased and redefined.

Edward Beecher, gifted

who

and

the most impressive of Lyman's sons, was,

less intelligent

than either of his more famous

if

anything,

sisters.

less

His achieve-

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

254

ments cannot match Harriet's and are no greater than Catharine's. every

He

they were.

bit as eccentric as

which they lacked.

dignity, even a decency,

sound ridiculous by paraphrasing

had

still

He was

a balance, a restraint, a

could make Edward Beecher

I

his wildest notions

about reincarnation;

would only need to quote a few lines from the most excessive statements in his monumental Conflict of Ages to make my reader know that she would not laugh to his face, that Edward Beecher must be taken seriously. but

To

I

quote Catharine Esther Beecher, however, ludicrously grim with moral

rage in Truth Stranger Than Fiction, or to read from Little Eva's death scene in Uncle

Tom >

Cabin,

one ask for reflection and but his

sisters

were

of

first

is,

analysis.

inflated,

some

at

all,

level to

overdone, and the diflPerence

has nothing to do with propriety. Once,

thought that "anything which

all

He was not

is vital.

sense of proportion. This

when Horace

sets a

man

Bushnell was in

practically in his place,

precondition to intellectual

"room of

is

a

mental

was precisely —dignity honesty — sense of proper the true and own" — the middle-class northern woman,

good, a good of manners, of feeling

no matter how

can

neglected and unknown, but he consoled himself with the

felt

indispensable

later

Edward Beecher was perhaps misguided;

always balanced, but they occasionally lacked

London, he

amuse; only

place,

a

one's

this

itself."®® It

that

intelligent, lacked.

Both exalted and ignored, was the lady the savior of her nation, or

a

slave to an unappreciative master? Defined in unexplored extremes, she

inevitably often dealt in

them

and encouraged those segments of her

herself,

culture most committed to the avoidance of self-examination. Inevitably she

was profoundly barred from the

disaflfected

polls

from

and her

rights;

of placing, the awareness of class

genuine political consciousness she used

it

was not simply that she was she had little to gain from the sense interest, of societal structure, which

politics. It

t*iid

fosters.

When she obtained

the vote in 1920,

with indifference; she voted with her men, not because she was

sheeplike as various commentators claimed, but because, paradoxically, politics

were not

her politics. Sentimentalism had for too long served her needs

better; for sentimentalism

might be defined

as the political sense

obfuscated

modes of genuine

sensibility,

or gone rancid. Sentimentalism, unlike the

never

exists

except in tandem with failed political consciousness.

phenomenon whose appearance

recent

sentimentalism seeks and talism

is

oflPers

is

linked with capitalist development,

the distraction of sheer publicity. Sentimen-

a cluster of ostensibly private feelings

and conspicuous expression. Privacy functions ism only for the sake of as

it is

and

it

titillation, as a

which always

exist

without an audience.

It

attains public

in the rituals of sentimental-

convention to be violated. Involved

with the exhibition and commercialization of the

cannot

A relatively

self,

has no content but

its

sentimentalism

own

invests exposure with a kind of final significance. Little

exposure,

wonder

that

The Periodical Press

255

Harriet Beecher Stowe closed her career as a show-off.

And

she had plenty

of company.

— which covers the "feminiof zation" or sentimentaHzation of northeastern culture—ends with It is fitting, I

my

think, that

chosen period

a series

most notably,

scandals,

as

we have

seen, Harriet

Beecher Stowe's notorious

expose of Lord Byron's relations with his half-sister Augusta and Henry

Ward

Beecher's much-publicized affair with Libby Tilton. Incest underlay

both scandals: brother and in

bed as

sister,

in print their rather

minister and parishioner were advertising

unhealthy, and not altogether willing, need of

New

York novels and the writings of the male sentimentalists, these affairs suggested what could be called the mirrorphenomenon increasingly dominant in American life. Replication of the self, one another. Like Stowe's

absorption in the

self,

disguises confusion as to the purpose of the self;

politics yields to publicity.

Many newspapermen and

Beecher-Byron controversy and the

their trade during the years of the

Beecher-Tilton

some papers devoted

trial:

cartoonists rebaptized

as

many

as ten reporters to the

coverage of the Brooklyn imbroglio. In a self-immersed and self-congratulatory culture unable to generate the genuine tensions and purposefulness of criticism,

only scandal remains to provide the sense of

without which mass communal

life is

ritual excitation

intolerable.

The triumph of sentimentalism in nineteenth-century America is never clearer than when one realizes the relatively small number of romantic writers and theologians, male or female, this country produced.®^ For,

—and

ever one defines the romantic impulse

adequately here

—

I

do not pretend

to be doing that

clearly involves a genuinely political

it

and

sense, a spirit of critical protest alien to the sentimentalism so often

with

it.

Romantics such

even Byron never

lost

as

how-

historical

confused

Goethe, Schiller, Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, or

touch with ethical concerns as the mainspring of their

Greek liberty may seem self-glorifying, even diversionary, to some of us now; it is still today as it was to the Greeks then a profoundly different matter from staying at home, writing odes to Greece, and dying in bed. The unmistakable inspiration. Byron's once-celebrated death in the cause of

—

—

exaltation of the self

found

in the

works of the romantics was

a desperate

effort to find in private resources

an antidote and an alternative to the forces

was

not, like sentimentalist self-absorption, a

of modernizing society;

it

commercialization of the inner

The

test

which

life.

distinguishes romanticism

from sentimentalism

is

that

no matter how strained or foreign to modem ears, has not to use Hemingway's phrase "gone bad"; language, like that of the sentimentalists, which has utterly capitulated to the drift of its times invariably "goes bad." Perhaps we would not write today in the way Shelley, for its

language,

its

rhetoric,

—

example, did. Lines like

—

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

256

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! Bird thou never wert,

That from heaven, or near Pourest thy

it,

full heart

In profuse strains of unpremeditated art

may

ring a bit grandiose. But

language to

its

age

is

we

understand that the relationship of such

fundamentally healthy,

is

one

we might

wish

in

our

The language of Victorian religiosity, appears in the pages of Dickens or of Mrs. Sigoumey, we at once

very different fashion to approximate.

whether

it

reject, at least consciously, as a useful

model. Mrs. Sigoumey wrote about

birds too:

Beautiful boy, with the sunny hair.

What wouldst thou do with It

belongs to the sky

—

it

that birdling rare?

hath wings, you know,

Loosen your clasping, and

let

him

go.®®

We find so much of this rancid writing in our nineteenth-century literature. Mrs. Sigoumey 's present disrepute by no means obviates her enormous popularity

among

her contemporaries.

And where

our Goethe, our Schil-

our Hegel, our Byron, our Shelley, our Keats, our George Eliot?

ler,

could go on, but the point seems evident. conflicted,

ent from,

prone to compromises and if

figures.

And

mentalism the

in

more

Our

One

romantics were opposed and

failures of productivity in

not more intense than, anything

European contemporaries. Yet

all

is

known by

in literature as in

ways diflPer-

their English

and

theology, there were such

without some discussion of them, the story of Victorian

America would not be complete. They are valuable to us, precisely because their

more achievement was all

the

senti-

heroic,

so rare

and so threatened. Their romanticism was inevitably characterized and defined by their defiance of sentimentalism and of incipient mass culture.

They had

to try to

move

often became contortion

in straitjackets,

and motion, not unpredictably,

—stunted, incomplete. Yet

it

was motion, and

more significant because it took place under conditions and that would increasingly prevail in America and elsewhere. the

all

against odds

PART THREE ears; Ishmael, de-

spite his disapproval,

but only while

we

is

tells

us of his friendship with

at sea, Ishmael's voice exists in

at

times even supplanted by

it.

gives us, indeed embodies, the "story," and his voice represents the

extreme of public performance and greatest orator, the finest preacher in

had been

American

Ahab

literature; if

is

probably the

Margaret Fuller

would have appreciated his language; if Stowe she would have understood his style and his subject.

alive in 1851, she

had read Moby Dick,

revivalist art.

— Herman

Melville

and

the Revolt

In taking over the narrative voice,

the impersonal; Ahab's

mind may be

Against

Ahab moves

diseased, but

Reader

the.

307

from the personal

it

it is

a sickness

to

he caught

from God, not man. Nor can the movement from the particular

to the

abstract be reversed. After Ahab's death, the closing paragraphs before the

by Ishmael, are in a narrative mode which more mannered, more grandiose, than Ishmael's op)ening

"epilogue," presumably given us is

significantly

style.

Here

is

the start:

—

Some years ago never mind how long precisely having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest

me

Call

Ishmael.

me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.

(1)

Note the frightening connotations of a plethora of undistinguishable possibilities, Ishmael's hypothetical unwanted but insistent personal perspective. Here is the (penultimate) ending:

Now

white surf beat against

its

steep sides, then

shroud of the sea rolled on

The

tone

yawning

gulf; a sullen

collapsed,

and the great

small fowls flew screaming over the yet

is

no longer

as

it

all

rolled five thousand years ago. (565)

detached but magisterial, even orchestrated. Certain things are

happened. Ishmael

possible: history has

is

no more "important"

than he ever was, but his attitude toward his task of reportage has shifted. Ishmael survives, although he inhabits a universe which stands defined as the

wake of

the whale and the grave of Ahab. His return

no matter how randomly

represents the possibility,

responsibility for experience, even for experience

suggests

if

is

necessary, for he

available, of taking

beyond our

He

control.

not a commitment, a continuity on the part of the author, and

a lesson for the reader.

Ahab's implacability offers a clue to significance. this

His moral value

ambiguity

is

ambiguous, as

central to Melville's design

Lord Jim's courage reader close to

is

Ahab

is

I

have

said,

in

the sense that he

Ahab

self-consciousness here are

as a hero.

is

but

I

is

urging the reader as a

The

He

about

not drawing the

man

to

levels of Melville's literary

numerous and uncannily "modem,"

say in praise of writers of former ages.

do not think

say, the uncertainty

as,

essential to Conrad's. Melville

emulate or even evaluate

identifies

his literary as well as to his religious

as

we

like to

grasped the fact that a reader

with a fictional protagonist not only as he represents a "real"

person, but also purely as a fictional character. Melville brings the reader close to

Ahab because he

wishes the experience of

Ahab

as a hero in a book

to educate the reader not simply as a p)erson but as a reader. Ishmael

only an observer and an actor

in

the book, he

is

a

model for the

is

not

reader.

It

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

308

important that

is

Ahab

is

a deliberately old-fashioned,

even anachronistic,

character; his bombastic, self-consciously literary rhetoric

American drama of the

1830s; his very insanity

is

back; his intensely romantic view of the universe frees

him

to find

compact with meaning,

if

that of the

is

kind of cultural throw-

a

— which

a diabolic

his

one

"monomania"

—

is

not that of

Ishmael, our contemporary. Ishmael, with his utter lack of cultural roots and his terror of a potentially

with

—

Ahab

empty, meaningless universe, needs to identify

as well as to survive him. Ishmael

—but he

he cannot, although he

is

tempted to try

deny that he knew him. Melville

is

insisting that art

finally

consumed and thrown aside, which can and must alter the cannot regain is

is

view of

life

is

asked not to

not a product to be

as the "sketch" suggested, but

participant's

Ahab

not asked to become

is

an experience

and himself. Ishmael

pre-Ahab voice because Ahab has happened. The reader

his

denied the usual cycle of vicarious involvement, readjustment, and rejec-

tion.

Moby Dick

the most powerful attempt

is

on the eve of the commercialization of both to find

a

ble,

literature as a part of

wide audience and to restore the

mass culture

indispensability, the essen-

of the literary work.

tially religious dignity,

In an age

made by an American author

which expected

its

authors to be accessible and easily assimila-

When

Melville advertised the difficulty of his book.

Ishmael arrives at

whose

the Spouter Inn, he finds on the wall "a very large oil-painting" subject

it is

almost "impossible to decipher." There are "such unaccountable

masses of shades and shadows," such "portentous" masses, that

man

to drive a nervous

distracted."

The

it is

"enough

painting possesses an "unimaginable

sublimity" which freezes the viewer to the spot, until he "involuntarily" takes "an oath ... to find out

what

by "much and earnest contemplation, and ever, can Ishmael

make out an image:

—

three masts of a ship

and the Pequod

a picture

oft

that of a

very close to the

(10, 11). Melville

intricate sustained effort

Only repeated ponderings," how-

that marvellous painting meant."

is

whale impaling scene with

final

itself

on the

Moby

Dick

both acknowledging and justifying the

he demands of

his reader: as

Margaret Fuller asked

of her friends, he expects his readers to be productive.

The

reader

is

asked

move from the passivity of the "sub-sub," the Irvingesque persona who opens Moby Dick with his erudite but uncollated series of definitions, the

to

consumer of

the philosophy of

and

who is always more a reader than Ishmael, who is pre-eminently engaged

literature

finally to the passion of

a writer,

toward

with experience,

Ahab, whose imagination encompasses and

creates the enormities of adventure.

The

reader

is

urged to deal with the

ambiguities of Ahab's moral status precisely because to deal with ambiguity is,

in Melville's

mind, to deal with danger. Melville asks the reader meta-

phorically to risk his

life

invites the reader to help

to explore the necessities of the imagination; he

him write the book

—

if

he dares.

Herman

The

and

Melville

reader of Pierre

is

the Revolt

no

way

real

is

had liked

small taste for the sea"

would be

indeed,

is,

not educative here, for Melville allows

into the novel; the story

is

an

insult,

not a dare. In

Hawthorne in which Melville expressed his surMoby Dick "for as a general thing women have

the same letter to Sophia prise that she

309

exposed to endless "ambiguities"; that

the book's subtitle. But the danger his readers

Against the Reader

—

—he promised her that

work, presumably

his next

bowl of milk," a book for the ladies.^ Instead, in Pierre, Melville turned decisively and openly against the middle-class sentimental-minded feminized reading public he had essentially tried to evade or Pierre,

educate

become

it,

The

in

It is as if

their interference with his creative

must deal with

so troubling that he

it,

and he does so by

curious ways, the actual subject of his book.

which were excluded in the earlier works Moby Dick have overwhelmed the world of

forces of domesticity

and intricately contained

For the

Pierre.

^

previous work.

in his

effort has

making

a "rural

first

in

but not the

time, Melville limits himself to a claustro-

last

young Pierre Glendinning, the hero, There is nothing wild in the landscape;

phobically inland setting. Wealthy

grows up on it is all

a lush country estate.

blossoms and birds, a model of the picturesque.

feminine setting, and, Pierre's masterful

fittingly, its

is

dead; he

mother Mrs. Glendinning and

is

the

is,

his

women,

innocent young fiancee,

at least in theory, Pierre's. Pierre's

but again not the

first,

suggests the ideal

other principal inhabitants are

Lucy. Their polite Episcopalian faith father

It

last,

of Melville's heroes

who

does not have to struggle with a living paternal authority, actual or symbolic.

His

essential conflict

is

with

mother.

his

Imperious and beautiful Mrs. Glendinning

is

the daughter of a general,

and, beneath her calculated facade of dignified charm, she reveals the habit

of

command.

Discreetly wielding her sexual attractions to keep her son close

what Melville tellingly calls a "fictitious" relationship. The two evince a confusion between life and literature as deep as any that Henry Ward Beecher would display. They pretend coyly that to her, she envelops Pierre in

they are brother and

sister,

literary allusions. Mrs.

Glendinning wants Pierre to marry a timid, retiring

and their conversation

who

is

studded gaily with

girl,

such as she believes Lucy to be, one

Her

playful

son.

On one occasion, she reproves Pierre in the style of an etiquette manual:

"

decorum

hides a desire to repress

'Never rave, Pierre, and never

the

word Mrs. Glendinning

rant'

"

(14).

will pose all

(26).

woman"

all

of the family, and she uses

rance of the real world, her

it

in

her

In her musings about her son,

uses over and over again to describe

in possessing a

Mrs. Glendinning has

threat to herself.

genuine excitement

"docile." Indeed, she frankly admits to herself that she ble "a fine

no

him

is

hopes he will resem-

swelling chest, abundant hair, and docility

the authority usually associated with the

man

to keep Pierre in innocent and amiable igno-

rival.

Melville seems to be cynically suggesting

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

310

that the \^ictorian lady,

men, and her authors,

The

be.

and reader, will use

as "feminine,"

and

her "influence" to keep her

all

as restricted, as she

is

supposed to

distractions Mrs. Glendinning permits Pierre are precisely those

which perpetuate her power: dabblings, as we have seen, in trivial fashionable verse, and sentimental flirtation with his fiancee. Pierre is the only male heir in his

when

branch of the family.

line

disappearing, and dwindling;

is

Pierre tries on the clothes of his grandfather, a noted leader in the

much

Revolution, they are military ideal in

The

is

clear

from

too large. Pierre's distance from any heroic

Lady

of himself as "First

his jesting description

Waiting to the Dowager Duchess Glendinning"

(17).

Pierre has been raised to venerate his dead father as a perfect gentleman

— what When

else

would be an adequate compliment

to his mother's "influence"?

he learns of the existence of his illegitimate

crisis in his

thinking inevitably occurs.

It

an important

half-sister,

cannot be over-emphasized that

discovery does not disillusion Pierre primarily with his father;

come under

mother's falsifications which

this

is

it

his

most severe scrutiny. The

his

revelation of Mr. Glendinning's sexual transgressions provides Pierre, curi-

ously enough, with his

mannequin with

first real

opportunity to replace

a flesh-and-blood

his

man: to conceive of

mother's idealized virility.

We

never

hear anything really detrimental about Mr. Glendinning beyond the fact of his illicit liaison

and

its fruit.

Pierre recalls his father's deathbed remorse, his

"my daughter"; Isabel remembers his kindness and generosity with her. What Pierre has learned is not that his father was "bad" so much as that he was not altogether satisfied to live a prisoner in his wife's home calling for

and mind. Ironically, Mr. Glendinning becomes Glendinning claims he should be to Pierre's first reaction

at this point just

model.

his son: a

to test out in a covert

is

what Mrs.

manner

mother's

his

response to the possibility of Isabel's existence. In other words, he discussing Delly's case, to find out

describes as "a fine

(3), is

capable of encompassing

his father's experience.

tutes exactly the reality Mrs.

That experience

Glendinning wished to keep from

course, she treats Pierre's hypothetical case with fear and anger.

her no second chance; he clearly does not want

an alliance with Isabel which aflirms his father's far

is

he from wishing to attack

by

her mind, what Melville carefully

if

mind of medium culture"

and dealing adequately with

tries,

to. Instead,

affair

his father that his

He

is

Pierre; of

He

gives

he enters into

with her mother. So

only justification for

cruelty in refusing to explain matters to his mother desire to protect his father's reputation.

consti-

is

his

his repeatedly stated

shielding, even cherishing,

precisely his father's "sin," the masculine right of self-expression, against his

mother's censorious standards. Pierre fondly hopes that in running off to

he

is

performing an act of "heroism,"

a

New

York City with

word he and

Isabel,

Melville use often in

Herman the

first

half of the

Melville

book

her existence, Pierre can

the Revolt

Against the Reader

311

Yet he does

as a possible description of his course.

much

not become an adult,

and

less a

kill his

hero. Simply

by ceasing

mother; she dies of grief

acknowledge and rage, and he to

rightly takes responsibility, describing himself as her "murderer" (403). killing his

mother

is

not the same thing as finding the father his mother has

And

so totally obfuscated.

without

He

significance for his rebellion.

sophisticated protest against

knowledged

But

incentive,

was

a father, Pierre

can find no focus, no

real

can destroy, but not create. His father's

contemporary mores, which

real precisely

daughter, presumably Isabel. Pierre's in all its aspects, religious, literary

because

it

had

is

Pierre's unac-

consequence: a

a

much more extreme

and personal: there

is

revolt

is

a failure

no outcome, no

fruit.

which he was confirmed, yet he finds no way back to the Calvinist epistemology and structure which gave shape to Ahab's vengeance and his rhetoric. In New York Pierre lives Pierre abjures the liberal Episcopal faith in

in

an old church whose former members gradually deserted

neighborhood

moves

in,

which

in

the building

is

it

when

the

was located became declasse; at the time Pierre inhabited chiefly by poor artists and intellectuals.

it

Yet the symbolic transfer of activity

is

not substantiated in fact. Melville,

Matthew Arnold, found art no substitute for religion, because art without dogma is sensibility or rhapsody, incapable of form. The only religious authority Pierre encounters among the "Apostles" is the calm and dry Plinlimmon, more anticipatory of F. Scott Fitzgerald's T. J. Ecklesberg unlike

than reminiscent of Joseph Bellamy's Deity. Plinlimmon's theories are the opposite of any "dogma" Melville, and his characters, have found useful in the past: the philosopher hypothesizes an utter discrepancy between heav-

enly and earthly time, facts, and values. In other words, the system of

analogy which was essential to the dignity of Ahab's blasphemy has totally

broken down. Meaningful destroys the

fx)lite

art

is

impossible. Before he leaves

poetry he wrote

earlier;

home, Pierre

he no longer reads novels, finding

that they utterly falsify existence. In the city, steeping himself in

Shakespeare, he the publisher

toils

who

on

a

"blasphemous rhapsody" (497)

indignantly rejects

it)

as p>ersistently

(in

Dante and

the phrase of

and painfully

as

any

of the great Edwardsean ministers worked on their systems of divinity. Yet,

on the worthlessness of the "popular novels" the publisher and the public favor, he never tells us whether Pierre's work is of

although Melville

is

clear

genuine value or even coherent. In any

This pattern of

futility

is

case,

it

will never see the light.

reiterated in Pierre's personal revolt.

defied his mother's conventional ethics, he has run

makes no bones about

oflF

with

He

has

Isabel. Melville

their strong sexual attraction, but they apparently

do

not sleep together. His father chose sex without marriage; Pierre picks

marriage without

sex. It is

one of the greatest ironies of the novel that

Pierre,

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

312

while revolting

officially against

None

Virgin Absolute of the story.

boy Redbum, had been a virgin;

he

of Melville's earlier heroes, except the

obsessed and defined by his virginity.

is

himself the

is

particularly continent. Pierre, in contrast,

enough, unlike Melville's other his

Mrs. Glendinning's code,

sailor narrators,

Redbum,

is

just

interestingly

had no close friends among

fellow crew members; Pierre too has no intimate male friends.

his virginity

not

It is as if

a pledge of his allegiance to feminine values, a pledge

is

he

desperately wishes to break, but cannot. Lucy's decision to follow Pierre to

New

York, and

his decision to

welcome her

there, bring

down on him

the

hatred of her brother and of Pierre's cousin and former dear friend. Glen.

At the end of the book, Pierre welcomes a challenge from Glen and Lucy's brother; he kills them, then commits suicide. In the earlier works, as I have said, the "sons," usually crew members, banded together in fraternity against the "father," usually a captain. In Pierre, since there

is

no father whose

real

power must be opposed or supported, the sons in pointless rivalry merely for feminine attention turn on each other. In the essentially political world of Moby Dick, most of the characters die, but it is for a purpose which we

may

like

or

dislike. In

the domestic psychological world of Pierre, the main

characters die for no real reason. If

Ahab was

a

"monomaniac," Pierre

is

a

neurotic. Pierre

is

of course fictional as none of Melville's earlier works were.

we are getting straightforward description of a place or an experience. The grandiloquent rhetoric of Moby Dick has given way to a hothouse language of exaggeration. Pierre may actually

There

is

no moment when we

feel

be a parody of the legendary and tempestuous best-sellers cranked out by

women like Mrs.

E. D. E.

N. Southworth

in this period. ^^ Certainly, Melville

makes the sentimental domestic romance into a cage in which he deliberately confines his main character and himself both to define the limits of the

—

form and

to test the possibility of breaking out

of prisoner of fiction, Pierre

something

—

else.

is

and destroying

it.

trying to get out of his book or to

His struggle forces the reader to

know

the

form

A

kind

make as

it

one

knows a cell in which one has been frantically seeking an egress. But there is no exit, only a final and desperate exhaustion. There are so many straight lines, metaphorically speaking, in the narrative of Moby Dick Queequeg and Ishmael signing for the Pequod, the chase :

of the whale

itself,

cannot be reversed: Pierre are

all

the thrust of the harpoon. it is

circular,

themselves out:

if

historicist in the

ending dismally

Pierre leaves

in the city; if Isabel settles

Lucy

The

action proceeds and

Hegelian sense.

The

plot lines in

at their starting point,

in the

on one candidate

canceling

country, she comes after him as her actual father, she later

discovers another equally plausible one. Like Mrs. Sigoumey's tales and sketches, Pierre takes place in the mind, and so nothing can happen; there

3

Herman is

no

narrative,

and

Melville

and no history.

character in the book.

Against the Reader

the Revolt

Isabel

is

destroys Pierre's concept of his

history and of his father's, and she has nothing to put in

pure conjecture. Her amnesia

is

seems retarded, a

bit like

dissolves

ways

into

dim

dreams are

Everything

at times ludicrous; she

sensations.

" 'Al" into solidities'

She admits:

a manifestation of the insidious female sexuality of

which Mrs. Glendinning's drive for power was both act to conceal and distort the I

place.

Faulkner's Benjy in The Sound and the Fury, as she

what must have been events

(165). Isabel's

tive;

is

its

me, the solidest things melt into dreams, and dreams

in

1

symbolically the most important

Her very presence

Isabel tells Pierre

3

have tried to argue elsewhere

a

very different representa-

past.

in this

book

that the

American women

of Melville's generation were trying to replace the masculine vision of

economic

history as a series of political and

men with

a

masculine maturation hero;

it

and what

in his society. Pierre

it

his

meant for the

possibility of

cannot become an adult,

much

could almost be said that he cannot be bom. Narrative time

has been replaced by psychological time and

works on

and marshaled by

feminine view of social and biological process. Pierre represents

Melville's horror at this substitution

less a

facts enacted

by

biological time. Pierre

book in a cold room; Isabel wishes to keep the door between study and her bedroom open, "so the heat of her room might bodily go his

into his" (414). Pierre refuses.

It is

that he

is

is

world of

trying to escape; he reality. In vain.

Isabel reclaims him.

"

the ravishing, suffocating heat of her

literally

trying to enter the proverbially cold

He dies, symbolically

'Ye

knew him

Millthorpe, Pierre's only loyal,

not!' " she

enclosed in a prison

falls

and arboured him

on in

Pierre's

and

exclaims rather unkindly to

her point, however; Pierre has been separated from his

Dying, Isabel

cell,

simple-minded, male friend. She has

if

body

last

made

masculine

ally.

dead body, and "her long hair ran over him,

ebon vines"

(505). Pierre

has suffocated in the feminine

sensibility.

The Magazine Pierre

was

Pieces:

a critical

Going Underground

and popular

failure of an order that

made Mardi look

like a success. Melville's implicit hostility to his readers

sensed,

and returned

extant,"

one

is

critic

almost infinite

Another

critic

in spades.

went on

was

to say:

"The amount of utter trash

in the

volume

—trash of conception, execution, dialogue and sentiment."

fulminated against the "supersensuousness with which the

and son, brother and

sister are

"modem literati."^^

and warned the author: "Mother

sacred facts not to be distorted by sacrilegious

speculations." Significantly, Godey

of

critics

After labeling Pierre "the craziest fiction

early relations of the family are described,"

a satire

and

It is

's

picked up on the fact that the book was

hardly surprising that in the works which

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

314

succeeded

Pierre, Melville

went underground. After

he had written a friend "what a madness never

&

anguish

—under no conceivable circumstances— be Melville

ers."^'*

became

finishing White-Jacket,

it is

at all

that an author can

frank with his read-

increasingly adept at the art of withholding and innuendo. In Pierre there

is

grew

distinctly less "frank" later in his career; he

a frequently felt

Moby Dick and

Hamletlike "antic disposition," as Melville

dangles and twitches possible gratification before his audience; in the works

which succeed vitality

Pierre,

this process of

manic tantalization

is

missing.

The

of desperation has been replaced by the cunning of deceit. Melville

has dispossessed his readers without totally destroying his

own

rationale for

becomes his motivation. Reading the ship on a stormy sea; reading the later ones

writing: indeed, the dispossession itself earlier is

works

like sitting

is

like

rocking

becalmed

in

in a

ominously

waters.

still

In the period between 1853 and 1857 Melville produced

undoubted masterpieces:

Israel Potter,

some of

his

The Confidence Man, "Bartleby the

Scrivener," "Benito Cereno," as well as half a dozen tales of genuine interest

and power. Significantly, he intended them and Putnam's, and pages.

Of

all

but The Confidence

all

for

Man

two magazines.

Harper's

actually appeared in their

course Donald Mitchell, the "Ik Marvel"

who wrote

Reveries of

a Bachelor and founded the legendary "Easy Chair" in Harper's, and Curtis, author of the sentimental pastiches Potiphar Papers (1853)

and I it.

J.

that

George

and Prue

were the editors of Harper's during Melville's association with H. Dix was editing Putnam a newer periodical, but it was well known he followed Curtis' advice and lead in every possible instance.^^ As we (1856),

's,

have seen, both Curtis and Mitchell were

doubting "magazinish" writers working

skillful, trivial,

and wittily

in the graceful tradition

self-

of Lau-

rence Sterne and Washington Irving for a largely feminine audience.

That Melville designed his own magazine tales to pass muster with the same genteel handkerchief-reaching audience these men attracted seems very clear. The fact is that, without winning acclaim, they did pass muster. The Piazza

Tales, a collection

of a

number of

these pieces published in 1856,

received favorable reviews: one critic complimented Melville for having

"much of his former freshness and vivacity. "^^ Strikingly, the great American public chose precisely from among Melville's magazine works to

regained

perpetuate the once-immoral author's fame.

A

McGuffey's Reader of 1888

actually anthologized Melville's account of Benjamin Franklin's pro-temper-

ance comments delivered to the

a skeptical Israel Potter^^ for the edification of

American young. Melville was undoubtedly writing

McGuffey's didn't notice.

More

tellingly, the reserved but secretly

hearted clerk Titbottom in Curtis' Prue and

refugee in the bureaucratic ranks, actually leby's.^«

satirically,

I,

a

owns

but

warm-

shy but benevolent

little

himself a friend of Bart-

5

Herman

Ahab and

and

Melville

Pierre, vast as

expensive:

it

still

cost

Against the Reader

3 1

were the differences between them, had both

been rebels against their society.

which Melville

the Revolt

It is

an indication of the seriousness with

considered his culture that their revolt was open and

them

their lives.

The

lesson that Melville learned

from the

Hkes of Curtis and Mitchell, and one which by 1853 he was sufficiently alert

and

bitter to

a price.

absorb and elaborate, was that there was no need to pay such

His readers did not demand or understand

immolation, were like conflagrations kindled

Ahab's death, Pierre's

it.

in situations for

which

a

match

would have been sufficient: ludicrous. The excesses of their eflPorts at masculine stature were beside the point, outmoded, passe. Melville's newly lowered estimation of his audience was evident in the doll-house proportions of the

work he

oflFered

them; he deceived his readers, he veiled his

insults, partly

them how little worth the effort of attack they were. In the mid- 18 50s Melville, in whose writing speech was always to be key, turned for his models from the stage, where bombastic actors like Edwin Forrest paced and postured before mixed audiences in half-sincere struggles to idealize America's barbarity, to the "Easy Chair," where editors pontifi-

to demonstrate to

and equivocated for parlor consumption. In order to Melville always needed close contact with the nightmare central to

cated, jested, flattered, create,

the American psyche: in the mid- 18 50s, he found anguish, but affability;

its

subject

dynamic was not

its

was not the death-throes of masculinity

but the vicious coquetting of the feminine or effeminate.

The are

all,

them

in is

stories Melville

wrote for the magazines between 1853 and 1857

form, variations on the "sketch," and the central figure the "Ik Marvel" character, descended

from

Irving's

in

most of

Geoffrey

Crayon. In Moby Dick, Melville had quickly dismissed the Irvingesque "subsub"

who opens the book;

in the sketches, the indolent,

sentimental observer, toying with the tragedies of

disavowing them,

rules.^^

Let

me

start

smug, dreamy, timid,

life,

precipitating and

with the narrator of "Bartleby the

more important magazine tales. This prosperous complacent lawyer clearly owes much to Sterne, Irving, and

Scrivener," the earliest of Melville's

Marvel, and probably influenced Curtis' conception of his narrator

and I. The story he

pities,

is

but also because

him. In a sense, he

he

is

really his not

is

we

only because he

cannot get

at

is

between Bartleby 's meaningful

Bartleby 's story except through

what he

inaccessibility

liberal in religious belief.

Church, and he

is

is

fails

will print. It

to flatter him; is

the contrast

and the narrator's sometimes

meaningless garrulity which provides the heart of the Bartleby 's employer

Prue

as barren as the scrivener

the reader, screening out whatever

the editor choosing and rejecting

in

tale.'*®

clearly, like all the narrators of these sketches,

He

attends the fashionable Episcopalian Trinity

so ignorant of theology that he

is

capable of grouping

together the well-known free-thinker Joseph Priestley and the orthodox

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

316

Jonathan Edwards

(130).'*^

He

has no real equipment to understand Bart-

economic and spiritual dilemma; what he wants, and what he succeeds doing despite some genuine twinges of uneasiness, is to sentimentalize his

leby's in

clerk's story, to

make

it

resemble those he has read in magazines like the one

which "Bartleby" itself appeared. Melville is dramatizing here the process by which an essentially mass sensibility transforms and assimilates the alien to its own needs. The narrator is clearly a literary facilitator, a conveyor belt to his culture. At the start, he assures us that he could "relate divers histories at which good-natured gentlemen might smile and sentimental souls might in

weep"

A

would-be memorialist

feminine

he

is

regretful that he lacks the materials for a full "biography" of Bartleby:

it

is

(103).

in the clerical

style,

"an irreparable loss to literature" (103).

This lawyer has already had several rather eccentric

and apparently willingly accepts their

peculiarities.

clerical

employees

Although he unwit-

by small and futile oddities of behavior rebelling against the routinized and monotonous quality of their work, his own sympathy for them seems rather to come from their willingness to appeal to his emotions than from any real comprehension of their position. Turkey, who is wont to blot his afternoon copying under the influence of his lunchtime drinking, disarms his employer by an "appeal" to tingly allows us to understand that these copyists are

his "fellow feeling":

men

they both are getting old, he points out

are not really alike: one

in a position

is

relatively secure

of insecure dependency. But

it

is

(107).

The two

and prosperous, the other

this sentimental illusion of

brotherhood, this obfuscation of an essentially class situation, which the narrator

demands

as the price of his

sympathy, and

it is

precisely this

which

Bartleby denies him.

his

The narrator is constantly trying to use Bartleby 's plight to touch oflF own emotions. "His poverty is great," he ruminates, with the kind of

which Mitchell's Bachelor was a past master, "but his solitude how horrible! Think of it!" (120). He is lost in "fraternal melancholy," a perversion of the word "fraternal" to which Melville was as sensitive as Whitman could have been. He tries to extract Bartleby 's story from him

sadistic pity of

(122);

he attempts to force the scrivener to express gratitude for

benevolence

(123).

The

apparently morose clerk in Curtis' Prue and I

claims cousinship with Bartleby does finally

tell his

employer about

Bartleby does not. Faced with his only possible biographer, his

most important preference table

it

must be

his day;

he

Humanity!"

is

—

is

for oblivion. Bartleby 's revolt

easy,

tially so defiant in its

letter."

—and Melville knows

just is

how

The narrator,

how

ironic;

how

his past;

final

recessive

own who

if

and

inevi-

against the literature of

refusing, essentially, to be a character.

How

his

"Ah

Bartleby! ah

hard that Bartleby 's

life,

poten-

meagemess, should become indeed another "dead

having "placed" Bartleby 's story within the context of

7

Herman

Melville

the biographies of oblivion

and

the Revolt

Against the Reader

we have examined,

with onanistic indulgence he hastens to share the emotions which seized too. Melville

reminds

in the

how

Dead

(140)

on

a

his pity:

how

mangled,

rather than to distort

"hardly can

—he has almost, but not

I

express

quite, got us

final solution, his

"rumor" that Bartleby had worked

Letters Oflice at Washington; his silence,

massaged,

1

has finally got his "emotions";

however, that the narrator's

us,

interpretation, rests only

me"

3

as a clerk

no matter how coaxed,

Bartleby prefers to destroy history

persists.

it.

occupant of the "easy

Melville's distrust of the narrator figure, the chair," in the tales of this period

never flagged; he came, however, increas-

ingly to sense and exploit the hostility of this character to the very audience that he

had been formed and maimed to

in certain

ways most

interesting

"The Apple-Tree Table," possibilities

serve. In Melville's

magazine

and

stories, "I

My

two latest and Chimney" and

Melville puts himself behind the antagonistic

of his sentimental male narrator, even while he grimly predicts

the eventual success of those this personage both flatters and In the

first tale,

humorous" and, the

which Curtis praised particularly final

resists.

as "capital, genial,

compliment, "thoroughly magazinish,'"*^

we

find

the Melville narrator closest in character to the narrator in Curtis' Prue and /,

recently serialized in Harper's.

to "indolently

father of

lady

who

weaving

[his]

"A dozy

vapors"

old dreamer," given to a pipe and

(154),^*^

two daughters and husband

he

lives in a

world of women,

to a strong-minded positive-thinking

almost totally intimidates him. In describing his subjection, the

narrator slips in an astute analysis of the political possibilities of the current

notion of woman's "sphere" for those it:

"By

my

women

willing to pay lip service to

wife's ingenious application of the principle that certain things

belong of right to female jurisdiction,

find myself,

I

through

my

easy com-

by degrees of one m.asculine prerogative after another" (133-34). He has made his stand, however: his wife and daughters wish to tear down the tremendous central chimney, "a huge, corpulent old pliances, insensibly stripped

Henry VIII of a

chinfiney" (109) as he proudly describes

it,

which dominates

the architecture of the house, but he steadfastly refuses.

The

issues here are

many, and complex. The

women want

the house

redesigned along the recent convenient proto-suburban pattern, best suited to feminine needs and ideals:** timid himself, the narrator nonetheless de-

fends the chimney as a bastion of phallic, assertive, and aggressive mas-

takes a

The fate of most of Henry VIII's spouses is well known. The story new twist when the wife calls in an architect named "Hiram Scribe,"

who

paid by her to claim that the chimney has "a reserved space, hermeti-

culinity.

is

cally sealed" (148) possibly containing

be torn op>en. Scribe

is

—an inner space with

hidden treasure, and therefore must

suggesting in veiled fashion by this a "treasure,"

i.e.

a child, in

it

womb

imagery

—that the chimney

is

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

318

The narrator is able to more money to support

feminine.

dispose of this interpretation by offering

Scribe

his

architect

own

Among

case.

other things, the

possibly a "hired scribe," emblematic of the writers and

is

terateurs bribed

lit-

to invalidate and destroy the

by the feminine populace

masculine experience.

The that

story closes on a deceptively light note.

he leaves for

if

a day, his

womenfolk

I

have become

I

am

my

simply standing guard over

chimney

"mossy man," the great American writer he had be. It

is

Redbum

all

say

the time the fact

is,

and

my

come a long way from

the

mossy old chimney; for

will never surrender" (166). Melville has

and himself, to

down

moved from home: "Some

mossy old misanthrope while

a

narrator has learned

will call in laborers to tear

the chimney. So for seven years, he has not that

The

in

...

I

1850 hoped Hawthorne,

The

with his gun, but aged and weakened.

narrator can merely fend off his destructive audience, and perform a custodial role relic,

toward an

and one

in

achievement which he knows

artistic

is

whose making he could never have had

only

decaying

a

a share.

"The Apple-Tree Table," the struggle for appropriation, the conflict of interpretation which we have already seen in diflferent guises in "Bartleby" and "I and My Chimney" continues. The basic question remains: who will determine the content and form of American culture? Once again there In

is

antipathy to domesticity planted in the midst of a domestic the narrator of "I and

My

The

tale.

Chimney," although apparently

narrator

is

diff^erent

and smaller house, with the same bustling wife and the same genteel

daughters. This time the object quarreled over

with

a devilish hooflike leg

acting

which the narrator

is

in a

an old "apple-tree table"

finds in his attic.

Apparently

from the most benevolent and sentimental impulses, he determines

bring the table into the parlor. His tone to surround "this sad

hood with

all

hearts, little

little

is

positively missionary: he wishes

hermit, so long banished

from

warm arms, warm warm nursing would

the kindly influences of

dreaming what

this

all

to

genial neighborfires,

and

hatch"

warm

(15).

His

daughters fight his plan to "domesticate" the table, destined to become a source of terror to them.

The

table soon gives

a persistent ticking noise.

oflf

undoubtedly influenced by the recent wave of noise to ghostly presences; result of girls still

two

it

is

The

daughters,

Spiritualism,"*^ attribute the

actually, as they eventually discover, the

incarcerated bugs working their

way

The

out of the wood.

claim a sort of "spiritual" interpretation, rationalizing,

in

pious

fashion, that the insects symbolize Christ's

and man's resurrection. One

daughter closes her explanation with a

moral: "

exclaimed, with rapture, I

thought of them with

nine

—he speaks

at

'I

still

trite

believe in

them with

terror' " (51). Melville

'Spirits! spirits!'

delight,

assumes

one point to "whatever lady doubts

when

she

before

his readers are femithis story"

—and he

— Herman apparently it.

He

can

lets

Melville

modest successor ville's last

his

the

tale to

word "bug." "Humbug"

it

asso-

or not, however,

them, as Bartleby did not his history nor his

"chimney" to

their foes.

short magazine piece.

He was writing another book.

in reality a string of sketches

in

319

perhaps not unimportant that "The Apple-Tree Table" was Mel-

It is

and

Against the Reader

and the daughters' triumph; he has already

word "hum" with

he has relinquished the

Man,

the Revolt

them have the tale, for the daughter's speech pretty well ends

label the story,

ciated the

and

intended for serialization

he brought to a culmination

to say, in the shorter works.*^

up the

has in several senses given (April Fool's) in the

life

The

The Confidence 'j,

he had been trying to say, and not

all

struggle for possession

ship.

Putnam

in

The book

past: Melville

is

day

ostensibly details a

of a crook aboard a steamer called the Fidele; in his

numerous disguises, the con man tries to talk various other passengers out of their money. In actuality, the work shows American society ravaged by a sentimentality whose underlying viciousness Melville almost celebrates. He is no longer interested in the ambiguities of the genteel narrator but rather in his appetites. A book without a hero or even a narrator a book,

—

most

reveals the ity

about

significantly,

is

a ship

without a captain

triumph of "affection" over "authority"

seducing and fleecing the nation. Melville

of the market.

of "I and

Where

My

is

in

The Confidence

Man

America: sentimental-

here intent on the

realities

the narrator of "Bartleby" or the wife and daughters

Chimney" and "The Apple-Tree Table,"

absorbed by

all

questions of ownership, had at least been arguing over matters of interpretation, this

confidence

man

when he

has finally reached his goal only

someone else's pocket to his own. two of his most important incarnations, as "the

has

transferred the contents of Significantly, in

with the

Weed" and

"the Cosmopolitan," the confidence

kin to the sentimental observer.

and good

faith,

he

is

With

his

man

is

Man

clearly close

emphasis on sweetness and light

the apotheosis of the religious liberal: he can succeed

in distorting the Bible

message to

fit

precisely because, as he points out,

his

own

no one

exploitative creed of "trust" in

America reads the Bible

anymore. There are two clergymen aboard, one Episcopalian, the other Methodist, and Melville paints a favorable picture of both; yet both are

taken in by one or more of the confidence man's impersonations. As "the

Man

in

Gray," the confidence

man

easily

dupes

a sentimental lady

reading her Bible and gazing devoutly at the sunset.

confidence man's similarities to the editors for

As

whom

if

prone to

to underscore this

Melville

was writing,

he makes him explain that he has invented a "Protean easy-chair so bejointed, behinged and bepadded, every

way

all

over

so elastic, springy, and docile

some one of its endlessly changeable accommodations of back, seat, footboard, and arms, the most restless body, the most tormented conscience must, somehow and somewhere, find rest" (32).'*^ The to the airiest touch, that in

.

.

.

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

320

pun on the "Easy Chair" column of Harper's is obvious. Exposing the ethic which underlay the "dreamer's" pose, the ethic which exploited weakness as the basis for a power-play, Melville

pointing at the fundamental

is

and of the magazine

sponsibility of the feminized sentimental observer

which was

culture

his milieu.

defense of the press

poem .

.

The Cosmopolitan's

distributors and

'I

The

over duty.

press

still

I

because

it

and

tract

has neither opponents nor competiis

nothing to

acknowledges here that America has only one spokesman,

The

has only one culture, precisely that of "the press."

simply whether or not to believe or disbelieve

But

it.

this

is

issue

is

ished.

to be a fool; perpetually to distrust

Both

sides lose in so far as

The world

of The Confidence

To

Twain's Fudd'nhead Wilson,

atmosphere

in

which

ideas,

it is

or

is

arid.

can

art,

to be alone, crippled, unnour-

human development

genuine

Man

is

Nowhere flourish.

is

is

floats.

no people, there

are

horribly grounded. in

which had destroyed him

painted, imperishable in is

its

no water, no

The

appropriately the

which we hear next

kind of masquerade. Melville has anticipated that the

set, flat,

The

we

to nothing

boat

itself is a

will be the

no

is

Hollywood boat, there

are not just becalmed,

Man

is

dispossession of his readers.

man

there. " This it?"

But he

he does not

is

There

it

marks

his final

is

something vindictive

at

work

here: the

it

either.

I

is

tells his

readers:

also the only role

he has

"how do you left

is

like

to utilize, and

have said that Melville's Americanness consisted

awareness that he could not be significantly better than

culture; never before did he feel the constraints of this If his

the

has Melville's stage because Melville recognizes that he

realizes that "this"

in part in his

is

most elusive work:

Melville's

what you've chosen," he

like

are

itself.

The Confidence

confidence

we

absence of any genuine culture, Melville suggests

the slickest, driest nightmare penned by an American author,

absence of reality

first

and archetypical

final

very flimsiness. There life:

of

like that

there a possibility of the

This

about the water on which the craft presumably locale of the anti-culture

concerned.

is

one of handy-dandy;

story Melville has located on shipboard in

is

book of

a

vanishing conflicts, and even this one dissolves into a hopeless paradox. trust

it

speaks for Truth' " (197).

he does not meet even with custodian figures, for there

preserve. Melville

tellingly, his

is,

think interest never prevails with

The confidence man fundamentally tors;

sham

hold the press to be neither the people's

paid fool nor conceited drudge.

.

final

—of course several of the confidence men are readers: "

irre-

readers are dispossessed, so

is

theorem so

his

bitterly.

Melville.

The Late Prose: The Independent Vision After the publication of The Confidence

some

sort of

nervous collapse.

None

Man

in 1857, Melville

underwent

of his books were selling; he had no

Herman

Melville

and

321

He

compensate for popular neglect.

coterie of adoring disciples to

Hawthorne were no longer

Against the Reader

the Revolt

and

indeed they ever had been. His family

close, if

Lemuel Shaw,

did not understand or believe in his work.

Melville's brother-

in-law, could refer casually in a letter to "that horribly uninteresting class

of nonsensical books he passage in the

a

mood both

is

work of

given to writing." Melville at this time underlined

a

French author which aptly summed up

of profound discouragement: "the literary career seems to

and

in its essence

in the spirit

in the

rewards which one seeks from

My

of the narrator of "I and

a friend's report,

was wont

Chimney,"

to "pat great trees," as

if

it."'*®

a trip abroad,

by the

spending most of

heat, the

during his

on the advice of

flies,

his

his family

time

cemetery

saw

a

woman

it;

as

if

in Para,

over a

calling

speak to me?

it.

his doctor, Melville

in the pain

took

He was tortured

East.

throws out image after image of

he kept

isolation

and

they suggest. After

he notes:

new

grave

—no grass on

of misery! Called to the dead, put her head to

Somewhat

his relentless inability to sleep. In the journals

travels, Melville

unreal,

to remind himself that

Middle

in the

non-communication absolutely terrifying visiting a

and

me

Melville, according to

strength existed although he no longer felt he had access to In 1857, acting

own

his

down a hatchway

My God! — It

So much for consolation.

Ah,

is I!

or

cellar;

yet.

Such abandonment

down

as close as possible

it

"Why don't you

besought

—speak — but one word!"—

—This woman and her

cries

haunt

all

me

deaf.

horri-

bly.*^

Melville too has been unable to raise his dead.

His peculiar pilgrimage reached tion of stones .

.

He

its

apotheosis in Judea: "one accumula-

—stony mountains & stony

stony homes

&

stony tombs.

actually tasted the

.

.

.

plains;

stony torrents

Before you

Dead Sea and found

it

&

behind you are stones."

"bitter," adding, in the bleak

which marks the

repetitiousness, the more-coals-to-Newcastle principle style of these entries, "bitter

found an objective yet

is it

to be

correlative, the

what makes the journal

so

poor

& bitter to be reviled. "^*^ He has

geographic analogue to

wrenching to read

inability to find his suffering interesting.

comes from

& stony roads

The

is

his state

of mind;

precisely Melville's

extraordinary almost unique

combined intensity and flatness. Melville has come close to believing that no one but no one will ever read his pages. He has, at least momentarily, abandoned the secret cherished illusion which makes all of us, great novelists or unknown diarists and

quality of the writing

its

—

—

correspondents, write: the imaginary audience. His strength here

own

is

indeed

the strength of stones. Melville's pain creates of necessity

its

—

must convey, the

stiff,

jerky, stitched sentences sticking to the facts they

literature

— THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

322

bleached skeleton of rhetoric

everywhere

tion, Melville

When series

—but

baldly sidesteps inspiration. Inspira-

it

implies, has misled him;

he has no more use for

it.

he returned home, Melville embarked, without enthusiasm, on a

make money. Oliver Wendell Holmes regarded

of lectures to

lecturer as a "literary strumpet," and said so at a party in

which Melville

857

1

the

no prostitute ever minimized her charms more punitively than did Melville in his unpopular talks on "Statuary at Rome" and "The South attended;^

^

Sea Islands." If to lecture was to dramatize the dependence of the writer or

on the public, Melville made

intellectual like a lethal at

mass of

eloquence"

—

Hawthorne up

this

lead.

his

dependency

fall

on

his patrons

As one reviewer reported, "He makes no attempt

about the creator of Ahab,

half the night talking.

Islands" lecture.^^ Melville begins

by

We

this

have

telling his

about the

man who

a report of the

kept

"South Sea

audience that he will cover

nothing about which he has written in Typee or Otnoo, although those books

which drew

are presumably the incentives

The

lecture

makes

it

his

audience

strikingly clear that Melville

satirizing his public as

he did

to giving up. Melville

in

The Confidence

is

in

the

place.

first

no longer goading or

Man; he

has

wrote no more prose for thirty

come very

close

years.

Melville did experience, however, a brief period of renewed hop>efulness about his writing career, and reveals so clearly

it is

worth discussing

precisely because

what Melville considered the causes of

his defeat.

it

At the

outbreak of the Civil War, Melville began to write poetry, extraordinary

He published the resulting 1866. On every page Melville's

poetry, about the conflict between the states.

group of war poems as Battle-Pieces quickened faith in his nation is evident. realities

of

in

He apparently

believed that the stem

war would destroy the sentimental culture he detested: "Nothing

like a bullet

can undeceive," he writes. Hearing Sumter's cannon,

"how tame

trymen

will surely realize

before."

The war must prove The

his

coun-

the Nation/ In the age that went

a foe to domesticity:

appealings of the mother to brother and to brother

Not

in

And

the fissure in the hearth

hatred so to part

Growing momently more

The

"optimist" will

flee,

wide.

for the Calvinist Deity reasserts his supremacy and

"confirms his deep decree"; the "code" of battle corroborates "Calvin's Creed." Heroism has become possible once again, masculinity

"nothing can Melville's

lift

the heart of

war poems show

man/ Like manhood

little

values of nurture and healing

in a

is

an option:

fellow man."^^

of the concern for the wounded, for the

which characterize Whitman's response

in

— Herman

and

Melville

Drum-Taps; the older man

is

the Revolt

Against the Reader

323

not interested in finding an outlet for his

maternal feelings.^^ Melville dedicated Battle-Pieces appropriately to the

northern soldiers his

who

rough, irregular, and forceful poetry found

critics

who

Not surprisingly praise among American

died for "the flag of their fathers." little

considered Tennyson's verse the beau

ideal.

Melville continued

to write and publish poetry, fine poetry, after 1866; his later

poems never

summons

to a waiting

evinced, however, the felt spirit of expectancy, of

audience, which characterizes Battle-Pieces. It is

one of the good fortunes of American

letters that Melville's thirty-

year enforced silence in his chosen medium, prose, did not

stifle

him

al-

him for a statement for a kind of public balancing of accounts whose powers of condensation have seldom together, but rather prepared and disciplined

been equaled. In Billy Budd, Melville

not

is

a

combatant; he

is.

never

as

before, at a distance, having calmly assumed the authority he has not oflicially

been granted.

in the narrative

form,

We are back we

Potter and "Benito Cereno"

and

this narrative

itself as history.

above

all

is

world of men, we are back

are back with Calvinism, but with important

Probably written

diflPerences.

at sea in a

in the late 1880s, Billy

were among

is

is set,

as

only

Israel

Melville's earlier works, in the past;

uniquely conscious, as

Melville's tone

Budd

its

two predecessors were

not, of

dignified, balanced, formal, legalistic,

judicious. Despite Melville's frequently stated awareness in the tale

that his audience

is

unfamiliar and uncomfortable with the Bible and with

Calvin, theological discussion and definition are here as never before, their

own

terms: Melville

is

explicit

on the point that

on

oflicer Claggart's

hatred of the handsome sailor Budd, on which the plot turns, can be explained only

by the doctrine of depravity

(75-79).^^ Captain Vere's rationale

Budd for the unwitting murder of Claggart Angel of God, but the Angel must die!' " (101) draws

for his decision to punish " 'Struck

down by

meaning from

the

a text often used

by

Calvinist thinkers

and repeated by Lin-

coln in the spare theological cadences of the Second Inaugural Address: is

impossible but that oflPenses will come, but

they come" (Luke

17:1). In

"it

woe unto him through whom

the austere literary

form which Melville has

evolved here, he has apparently discovered an analogue, perhaps a substitute, for the theological discourse ily intellectual tradition.

which was the substance of America's primar-

In Billy Budd,

all

experience

is

ultimately to be

marshaled before the faculties of judgment and assessed by them.

This

is

a narrative not only of the

"phenomenal men," and

a

son and

mutual comprehension between two

a "father,"

—the "handsome

his abstract, intellectual, but fair-minded superior.

sailor" Billy

Budd

Captain Vere

—but

of the understanding between the son and the father (115).

It is

not simply

compared to Christ, and to Adam, and Vere is cast as his paternal superior, i.e. God. Whether or not he consciously intended it.

that

Budd

is

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

324

Budd something

Melville has given us in Billy

close to an allegory of the

older Calvinist gubernatorial theory of the Atonement. Just

God

as, in this

view,

sacrificed Christ, his innocent son, to dramatize his hatred of man's sin,

Vere suppresses the "fatherly" feeling he has for Billy and becomes the "stem disciplinarian" intent on demonstrating to the rest of the crew the quickness and fierceness with which he will put down any effort at rebellion. Captain Vere refuses to listen to sentiment. Vere's primary concern is not so

the happiness or even the just deserts of his things.

He urges the

men

as

they understand these

jury to rule out "the heart," the "feminine in man," and

even the "private conscience"

in

the interest of the "imperial" conscience of

There are no Bushnellian elements in this Atonement process; Vere sacrifices Budd to instruct his crew and to keep his distance from them, not to win their afl^ection by a display of his love

their public duties (110-113).

of them.

am

I

not suggesting that Melville wrote Billy Budd as a conscious

allegory of the older doctrine of the Atonement;

denouncing Vere's

in

belief in

injustice or in

God's malignity, are

Melville opposed

viewing

it

am suggesting that critics, evidence of Melville's

as

of just the liberal heresy which

in part guilty

—and opposed even

I

in its highest

form when

it is

closely

Such critics are like the readers Melville addresses whom he knows are no longer familiar with Calvinist doctrines (75), the chief of which is that God rules men according to his linked, as

it is

in Billy Budd, to "charity."

needs, in the interest of his honor, not in consideration of their desires. Again, it is

not that Melville believes

literally in these principles,

to the rigor of the structures they create. is is

Budd

a testament of loss. Billy

damaging

as well as sustaining to

and

we

haps easy. Captain Vere here.

"remorse," as Melville

As

a

The

Budd

Billy

re-established father-son relation

both participants. Budd

is

partially

than his

filial

the simplification of justice he finds congenial and per-

resist

mously important

No one could deny that

He feels his fraternal ties less forcibly

speechless, even childish.

ones,

dies.

but that he adheres

is

is

As

of course a man, and the a

human drama

is

enor-

from Budd's death: not from emphasize, but from grief and loss (129).

man, he

at pains to

suffers

man, Vere's motives cannot be altogether pure; although Melville

stresses his impartiality, his intellectuality, his extraordinary sensitivity,

also points out that sanity.

Yet Vere's

Vere

is

suflFering

he

perhaps ambitious, that others even question his

and

his

imperfections do not alter the fact that

condemning Budd is analogous to the Calvinist Deity's in Christ. Vere suffers in private for the fact that he has pulled off

his action in

sacrificing

a totally public gesture:

even those readers

feel that Melville suggests

Budd. Since he

is

\^ere can hardly

he was motivated by any personal animus against

human, he pays

on the impersonal, even

who condemn

a price for his

allegorical plane, but

it

determination to operate is

just this

determination

Herman

Melville

and

the Revolt

Against the Reader

325

which creates the large, although painfully measured, spaces of the tive. Psychology has given way to judiciousness; everything has its Injustice, as

we, and even Melville, understand

narrative

not,

is

however,

a protest against

it, is

place.

undeniably present.

Melville's imaginative

it.

narra-

The

energy

has unquestionably decreased; but his philosophical vision has gained precision.

Despite Billy Budd's lack of dialogue, sciousness of the characters, the reader

about the situation

interior views, yet this

of the narrative:

ness,

story

if

is

refusal to penetrate the con-

given almost complete information

is

which the story

in

its

grounded.

is

We

no

are allowed

part of the essential fairness, as well as the remote-

it is

as

if

Melville can only fathom and bear his ov/n

presented in an extreme long shot. Yet one should add that Mel

i

He

respects his characters' privacy as he could not respect Pierre's; Piti^e's

nightmare was that he had nothing but is

his privacy. In Billy Budd,

decorum

the word. Within these limitations, there are no missing pieces of informa-

tion

comparable to the unknown fate of

Toby

in

Typee,

or the actual

paternity of Isabel in Pierre, or the real identity of the confidence man; there are

no symbols

that precipitate

jacket or the white whale; there

and yet absorb events, such is

white

absolutely none of the sensuous detail

which over-runs and destroys the narrative of between narrative and story

as the

Pierre; the action

as in Mardi, Redburn,

or

is

Moby

not divided

The

Dick.

ization too strong,

become too important, the imperatives of rationalfor the case to rest on symbols or withheld information.

As

Melville's works, the tale simply proceeds, straightfor-

process of judgment has

in

no other of

wardly, chronologically; the reader

is

given whatever

it

is

necessary he

know.

The

some ways dry as a result, and its restraint is a testimony to its impulse toward edification. Because Melville so precisely acknowledges what can and what cannot be known, and because no one thing is less known or unknown than another we learn as much, or as little, narrative

is

in

—

about Claggart's depravity authority

mote, as

all

as

we do

about Budd's innocence or Vere's

— Melville presents an entire universe to the reader,

all

parts re-

parts equally accessible. Melville assumes an audience in Billy

he did not

in the

Dead Sea

journals; yet

particularly well. His very audience has

it is

not one he pretends to

become

Budd

know

generalized by the un-

known possibilities of history: we, the readers of the late twentieth century, are among Melville's rather indifferently hypothesized readers, yet Melville does not attempt to speak personally to us, as Whitman does in "Crossing Budd represents Melville's established distance from literature as an object to be consumed by a mass audience. The book is extraordinarily helpful to us precisely because Melville was not writing it Brooklyn Ferry."

for

us,

and

I

Billy

think Melville

knew

this.

We may

not possess the truth, the

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

326

conflicting but equally false oflicial and popular accounts of the incident

appended a sense

of

at the story's close

suggest

its

dimensions, of the space

its

it

inaccessibility.

We attain, however,

occupies. Melville had always been

imaginatively preoccupied with bigness, with

size;

now he is concerned

with

We the readers approximate to the "truth" simply because we are not deceived. We are kept to the actual facts and to those rather abstract measurement.

statements and generalized scenes in which complex emotions and personalities

can be presented with the solidity and impersonality of Despite

its

lack of dialogue, or perhaps because of

it,

facts.

Billy

Budd

is

about

communication, and the language and actions which can be trusted to accomplish

In Pierre,

it.

sant talking, singing,

where almost no

real interaction takes place, inces-

and attitudinizing occur among the characters. In

Budd genuine communication does occur although

—only

off-stage. \^ere

tion to the

young

—and

this

presumably explains Budd's fate and

sailor in

his

is

Billy

significant

own

motiva-

an interview whose "inviolable" privacy and

"holy oblivion" Melville honors (115).

We are told,

however, that "in view

of the character" of Vere and Budd, "each radically sharing in the rarer qualities of

our nature,"

we may

conjecture with the author that Vere

explained himself to Billy, that Billy fully understood, that Vere embraced Billy

with the passion Abraham

felt

obedience to the exacting behest"

There

is

no doubt

that in Billy

for Isaac before ofl^ering

(115).

Budd

Two men

him up

"in

have met and spoken.^®

Melville has taken his final leave of

abundance; he does not believe, as he once did, that he should try to have everything; he

is

no longer taking revenge on

a public

such an attempt impossible. Melville has muted the mastery blematic.

He

is

itself

which helped

his material to

to

master

make it,

but

"phenomenal." Melville's very control becomes em-

achieves what the sentimentalists with their unexamined fasci-

nation with process, with biology, failed to do; history, presented in

uncompromised

detail,

merges, no matter

ambiguously, with providence.

how

its

inscrutably and partially,

EPILOGUE

Melville last

worked on

decade of

his

Billy

life.

At

Budd

in the late 1880s

this time,

and early

1890s,

during the

many men, and women, were becoming

deeply concerned about the "feminization" of American culture and the closing of the frontier, actual and metaphorical,

which

suggested.

it

Muscu-

was popular even in elite clerical circles. In less fashionable Sunday was beginning the career which would culminate in

lar Christianity

quarters, Billy

the avowal that Jesus Christ Jesus

was the

was "no dough-faced,

greatest scrapper that ever lived."^^

lick-spittle proposition.

Movements were afoot

in

the field of education to control the still-proliferating and preponderant ratio of

women to men among grade-school teachers, even to reverse the tide

of co-education at the university level.^® Violent collegiate sports, outdoor

camping, hunting, and fishing grew rapidly its

exaltation of the right of the strong to

political practice

Darwinism with trample the weak dominated

in favor. Social

and sociological theory. Naturalism with

its

emphasis on

Teddy Roosevelt "Rough Riders" to

brute instinct and force influenced American novelists.

was launched San Juan

in the career that

would

him and

his

Hill.

Melville

was irrevocably apart from

culinity even while he understood

Sunday or even

a

its

this militant

deepest sources.

Teddy Roosevelt was

victory of the sentimental sabotage a defeat.

lead

—

crusade for mas-

The rhetoric of a

a signal, paradoxically, of the

a victory

which was

in a larger sense

For the point about the crusade for masculinity was the

which the majority of

its

Billy

proponents conducted their campaign.

level at It

was

a

— THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

328

no higher

level

maintained

in

in

an intellectual,

or political sense than Sarah Hale

spiritual,

the veiled propaganda of the pages of Godey V Lady V Book or

The

than Harriet Beecher Stowe descended to in Lady Byron Vindicated.

Teddy

Roosevelts had learned

ance movement, even the in

common

ladies'

the Purity Alliances, the temper-

magazines. T. R.'s "big stick" had something

with Carrie Nation's hatchet.

enough

significant

much from

The

forces of feminization were

—they had tapped the increasingly formidable processes

of industrialization, commercialization, and mass culture deeply enough so that

any opposition, even when waged by

Harvard graduate like T. R., terms. Certain forms of deprivation and

had to be conducted on their exclusion had

made

ers of the nation,

middle-class

American women, the readers and consum-

men who

and the

a

imitated, flattered,

logical heirs to the anti-intellectual tradition in

and exploited them,

American

culture;

and they

had conspired willy-nilly with changing historical circumstances to make anti-intellectualism the tradition in

American

culture.

hardly surprising that the long-overdue rediscovery of Melville

It is

took place

in the

when Neo-orthodox

1920s, at a time

were noting and attempting

historians

and religious endeavor.

intellectual

exhumed and published

in 1924, as

It is

theologians and

to rectify the vitiation of serious

Budd was and the Niebuhr

especially fitting that Billy

Karl Barth, Paul Tillich,

brothers were beginning their careers. Billy Budd's importance as a cultural

document

is

not only in

its

creation of a structured arena for (masculine)

discourse but also in the quality and

unnoticed leave of

his audience, Melville

has since called the "Life of the

This

which

make is it

as

a

is

Mind

figures like Sarah

that discourse. In taking his

reminds them of what Perry Miller

in

America."

not to say that nothing worthwhile

is

present in the mass culture

Hale or Teddy Roosevelt helped to create and

the principal carrier of our political, cultural, and sexual identity; nor

to imply that the formalism a

it is, is

work

like Billy

the only artistic good. Commercialism

minimal degree of

in

form of

consumer

is,

Budd after

partly suggests, fine all,

inseparable

from

some segment of lost productive energy resides even if it has hardly found there a safe home. Many

vitality;

appetite,

intellectuals mistakenly

if

inevitably over-value formalism of a kind

much

more extreme than Billy Budd displays as the only available antidote to mass culture. At its worst, however, formalism can function simply as the unexplored reversal of mass stereotyping. confined, even nullified, in formalist elitist. ^^

Our

A

radical

critique of society

works whose epistemology

is

is

punitively

current allegiance to the comforts of our televisions

is

not

altogether a matter for embarrassment or shame. Mass culture rests on an

enormous Utopian promise, what Stendhal even

if

in practice

Budd with

its

it is

largely

engaged

called "la promesse de bonheur,"

in the destruction of that hope. Billy

imaginative investment in the absolute poetry of conceptuali-

Epilogue

zation,

is

a great

work; yet

it is

inferior to

329

Moby

Dick.

Moby Dick

represents

most seriously hopeful engagement with his audience; it brings the sheer energy and fertility of the best of popular culture to the service of profound thought. In a country as diverse, as ideologically strained, as Melville's

unmistakably materialistic recorded but not

as

America, the "Life of the Mind" can be

finally defined. In Billy

Budd, Melville

is

as conscious of

the material he has lost as of that he has found abiding. In the most essential sense, Melville consistently

produced

a literature of inclusiveness.

would not allow him to conceive economic system, an honest culture he society

—

a

recognition of the price of their

loss.

—sexual equality, also included

a

What

his

non-oppressive

by making

his

work

APPENDIX A Alphabetical Listing of in

the

Women and

Control Groups Discussed

in

Ministers

Chapter ^

WOMEN May

17.

Mary Lyon

18.

Sarah Edgarton

Catharine Esther Beecher (1800-78)

19.

Elizabeth Peabody (1804-94)

4.

Alice Gary (1820-71)

20.

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

5.

Lydia Maria Child (1802-80)

21.

Elizabeth Prentiss (1818-78)

6.

Emily Chubbuck Judson ("Fanny

22.

Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1789-

1.

Louisa

2.

Delia

3.

Alcott (1832-88)

Bacon (1811-59)

Forrester") (1817-53)

Cummins

7.

Maria

8.

Dorothea Dix (1802-87)

(1827-66)

(1797-1849)

Mayo

(1819-49)

( 1

844- 1911)

1867) 23.

Lydia Huntley Sigourney (17911865)

Harriet Farley (1813-1907)

24.

Elizabeth Oakes Smith (1806-93)

Charlotte Fillebrown (Jerauld)

25.

Ann Stephens

(1820-45)

26.

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-96)

11.

Martha Finley (1828-1909)

27.

Susan Warner (1819-85)

12.

Margaret Fuller (1810-50)

28.

Adeline D. T. Whitney (1824-1906)

13.

Sarah Josepha Hale (1788-1879)

29.

Emma

14.

30.

Sara Payson Willis ("Fanny Fern")

15.

Mary J. Holmes (1825-1907) Lucy Larcom (1824-93)

16.

Sara Clarke Lippincott ("Grace

9.

10.

Greenwood") (1823-1904)

(1810-86)

Willard (1787-1870)

(1812-72)

331

MINISTERS

W^

Greenwood (1797-1843) James K. Hosmer (1834-1927) Frederic Dan Huntington (1819-

Joseph H. Allen (1820-98)

16. 17.

4.

Henry Bacon (1813-56) Edward Beecher (1803-95) Henry Ward Beecher (1813-87)

5.

Joseph Buckminster (1784-1812)

19.

Sylvester Judd (1813-53)

6.

Horace Bushnell (1802-76)

20.

7.

William ElleryChanning (1780-

21.

1843)

22.

8.

William Henry Channing (1810-84)

23.

Andrews Norton (1786-1853) Edwards A. Park (1808-1900) Theodore Parker (1810-60) Edward Payson (1783-1827)

9.

James Freeman Clarke (1810-88)

24.

William Peabody (1799-1847)

10.

Theodore Cuyler (1822-1909)

25.

Austin Phelps (1820-90)

11.

Orville

Dewey

26.

12.

Bela B.

Edwards (1802-52)

13.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82)

28.

Henry Soule (1815-52) Joseph Tuckerman (1778-1841) Henry Ware, Jr. (1794-1843)

14.

Charles Follen (1796-1842)

29.

William

15.

Ezra

1.

2. 3.

Stiles

(1794-1882)

Gannett (1801-71)

18.

F.

P.

1904)

27.

30.

Ware (1797-1852) Noah Worcester (1758-1837)

APPENDIX

B

Biographical information on the wotuen IS

and ministers

here listed in chronological order

FATHER'S

WOMEN 1.

Emma

Willard

(1787-1870)

OCCUPATION

SPOUSE

m. 1809 Dr. John WUlard,

Samuel Hart, Connecticut farmer

doctor

(d.

1825);

m. 1838 Christopher Yate doctor (divorced 1843) 1

2.

Sarah Josepha Hale

(1788-1879)

Gordon

m. 1813 David Hale, law^

Buell,

New Hampshire

farmer,

tavern-keeper

3.

Catharine Maria

Sedgwick

(1789-1867)

4.

Lydia Huntley Sigourney

(1791-1865) 5.

Mary Lyon (1797-1849)

Catharine Esther

Beecher

(1800-78)

chUd

Theodore Sedgwick,

(d.

1822)

5 children

single

Massachusetts lawyer, politician

Ezekiel Huntley,

Connecticut gardener, hired

man

Aaron Lyon,

m. 1819 Charles Sigourne merchant 2 children

single

Massachusetts farmer

Lyman

Beecher,

Connecticut preacher, theologian, reformer

single

333

MAIN PLACES OF RESIDENCE Berlin,

CT

housewife*

Middlebury,

VT

NY

Waterford,

Boston

RELIGIOUS AFFILIATION

OCCUPATION

teacher

(liberal) Congregationalist-^

Episcopalian

writer

administrator

NH

Newport,

teacher

Boston

housewife

Philadelphia

millinery-shop worker

Congregationalist-^

Episcopalian

editor

writer

Stockbridge,

New York

MA

City

housewife writer

Congregationalist-^

Unitarian

Boston Lenox,

MA

CT Hartford, CT

Norwich,

teacher writer

Congregationalist^ Episcopalian

housewife

MA

Buckland, E. Derry,

NH

housewife

Baptist

teacher

MA Hadley, MA

Ipswich,

revivalist

S.

administrator writer

CT CT

Litchfield,

housewife

Congregationalist^

Hartford,

teacher

Episcopalian

Cincinnati,

OH

and extensive

travels

administrator writer

throughout the U.S.

*I have listed "housewife" as an occupation for any woman, married or unmarried, voted significant time and energy to the management of a home.

who

de-

Appendix

334

B

FATHER'S

WOMEN 7.

OCCUPATION

Dorothea Dix

Joseph Dix,

SPOUSE single

Massachusetts farmer,

(1802-87)

Methodist preacher

8.

Lydia Maria Child

David Convers Francis,

m. 1828 David Lee

Massachusetts baker

(1802-80)

Chi]

lawyer, politician, reformer, farmer

no children

9.

Elizabeth Peabody

Nathaniel Peabody,

single

Massachuetts teacher,

(1804-94)

dentist

10.

Elizabeth Oakes Smith

David Smith,

m. 1823 Seba Smith,

Maine ship captain

(1806-93)

journalist,

humorist

5 children

11.

Timothy

Margaret Fuller

(1810-50)

Fuller,

Massachusetts lawyer, politician

12.

Ann Stephens

John Winterbotham, Connecticut

(1810-86)

wool manufacturer 13.

Harriet Beecher

(1811-96)

m. 1849 Angelo

Stowe

Lyman

Beecher,

Italian 1

nobleman

child

m. 1831 Edward Steph

customs house clerk 2 children

m. 1836 Calvin Stowe,

Connecticut preacher,

theologian, teacher,

theologian, reformer

author 5 children

14.

Delia Bacon

(1811-59)

Ossoli,

David Bacon, Connecticut minister

single

Appendix

MAIN PLACES OF RESIDENCE

OCCUPATION

ME

Hampden,

B

housewife

335

RELIGIOUS AFFILIATION Congregationalist/

Boston

teacher

Methodist^

Trenton, NJ

writer

Unitarian

and extensive

travels

nurse

throughout the U.S.

reformer

MA Watertown, MA

housewife teacher

Unitarian

Boston

writer

(transcendentalist)

Medford,

New York

Congregationalist-^

reformer

City

editor

Salem,

MA

Unitarian

teacher

Boston

writer

Concord,

MA

reformer

Portland,

ME

housewife

New York

City

(transcendentalist)

Congregationalist^ Unitarian

lecturer journalist

and writer

minister

MA

Cambridgeport, Groton,

MA

teacher

Providence, RI

Jamaica

Plains,

New York Rome,

lecturer

(transcendentalist)

journalist

MA

writer

revolutionary

City

Italy

Humphreysville, Portland,

CT

ME

New York

City

CT CT

housewife

writer

teacher

Hartford,

writer

OH Brunswick, ME

Cincinnati,

Andover,

Episcopalian

editor

Litchfield,

Congregationalist -^^

Episcopalian

housewife

MA

Talmadge,

OH

Boston

New

Unitarian

Haven,

teacher lecturer

CT

London, England Stratford, England

writer

Congregationalist-*"

Episcopalian

Appendix

336

B

FATHER'S

WOMEN 15. Sara

Payson

OCCUPATION

Willis

("Fanny Fern") (1812-72)

Nathaniel

SPOUSE

m. 1838 Charles Eldn

Willis,

Maine deacon,

banker

(d.

1847);

m. 1849 A. D. Earring

editor

merchant (divorced 1853);

m. 1856 James Partor historian, writer

3 children

16.

m. 1854 John

Stephen Farley,

Harriet Farley

New Hampshire

(1813-1907)

minister

17.

Emily Chubbuck

Qudson) ("Fanny Forrester")

New York

Dunl

engraver, inventor 1

Charles Chubbuck,

I.

chUd

m. 1846 Adoniram Ju

farmer

missionary 2 children

(1817-53)

18.

Elizabeth Prentiss

(1818-78)

Edward Payson, Maine teacher

m. 1845 George Preni minister

6 children

minister

19.

Henry Warner,

Susan Warner

New York

(1819-85) 20.

Sarah Edgarton

Mayo

(1819-49)

single

lawyer

m. 1847 A. D. Mayo,

Mr. Edgarton,

Massachusetts

minister

factory worker, manufacturer. First

1

child

name

unknown 21. Alice Cary

Robert Carey,

(1820-71)

Ohio farmer

22.

Charlotte Fillebrown (Jerauld)

(1820-45)

Richard FUlebrown,

single

m. 1843

worker

W.Jeraulc

occupation unknow

Massachusetts craft

L.

1

child

Appendix

B

337

MAIN PLACES OF

Portland,

ME

Boston

New York

seamstress

Congregationalist->

writer

(liberal)

NH NH

teacher

Atkinson,

mill operative

MA

New York

Congregationalist

housewife

City

Claremont,

Lowell,

RELIGIOUS AFFILIATION

OCCUPATION

RESIDENCE

Congregationalist

editor

City

writer

Eaton,

NY Utica, NY

factory operative

Burma

writer

Baptist

teacher

missionary

housewife

ME Richmond, VA

writer

New York

lay preacher

Portland,

Congregationalist

teacher

City

housewife Constitution Island,

NY Shirley,

Presbyterian

housewife

MA

Gloucester,

writer

MA

Hamilton County,

New York Boston

writer

Universalist

housewife

OH

writer

Universalist

book-binder

Universalist

City

writer

housewife

Appendix

338

B

FATHER'S

WOMEN 23.

OCCUPATION

Sara Clarke Lippincott

("Grace Greenwood")

Thaddeus Clarke, New York doctor

SPOUSE m. 1853 Leander K, Lippincott,

(1823-1904)

clerk 1

24.

Lucy Larcom

Benjamin Larcom,

child

single

Massachusetts

(1824-93)

merchant, sea captain

25. Adeline D. T.

Whitney

(1824-1906)

Enoch

m. 1843 SethD. Whitne

Train,

Massachusetts

merchant, ship owner 26.

Mary J. Holmes (1825-1907)

Preston Hawes, Massachusetts,

occupation uncertain (uncle: Joel

wool and leather

trade

4 children

m. 1848 Daniel Holmes, teacher, lawyer

no children

Hawes,

Congregational minister)

27. Maria

Cummins

Martha Finley

(1828-1909)

29. Louisa

May

single

Massachusetts lawyer

(1827-66)

28.

David Cummins,

Alcott

(1832-88)

James

B. Finley,

single

Indiana doctor

Bronson Alcott,

single

Massachusetts teacher,

reformer

30. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

(1844-1911)

Austin Phelps, Massachusetts minister, teacher, theologian,

writer

m. 1888 Herbert D. War writer

no children

Appendix

B

MAIN PLACES OF OCCUPATION

RESIDENCE Pompey,

New

NY

Brighton,

PA

339

RELIGIOUS AFFILIATION

writer

Congregationalist-*"

reformer

(liberal)

mill operative

Congregationalist-*'

Congregationalist

Washington, D.C. Philadelphia

New York

City

MA Lowell, MA Beverly,

Godfrey, IL

Norton,

Episcopalian

writer

MA

editor

Boston

housewife

Boston Milton,

teacher

writer

MA

housewife

Congregationalist-*"

Unitarian ->•

Episcopalian Brookfield,

MA

KY Brockport, NY

Versailles,

teacher writer

Congregationalist-^

Episcopalian

housewife

traveled widely

MA

writer

Unitarian

South Bend, IN

teacher

Presbyterian

New York

writer

Salem,

MA Dorchester, MA Springfield,

City

Philadelphia

Bedford, Elkton,

housewife

PA

MD

Concord,

MA

seamstress servant

Unitarian (transcendentalist)

teacher

nurse writer

housewife

Boston

writer

MA Gloucester, MA

reformer

Andover,

teacher

Congregationalist ->•

Episcopalian

340

B

Appendix

FATHER'S

MEN 1.

Noah Worcester (1758-1837)

OCCUPATION Noah

Worcester,

SPOUSE m. 1779 Hannah Brown

New Hampshire justice of the peace

(d.

1797);

m. 1798 Hannah

Huntington 8 children

2.

Joseph Tuckerman

(1778-1841)

Edward Tuckerman,

m. 1803 Abigail Parkman

Massachusetts

(d.

merchant

1807);

m. 1808 Sarah Gary 10 children

3.

William Ellery Channing

(1780-1843)

4.

Edward Payson (1783-1827)

William Channing,

Massachusetts minister

m. 1814 Ruth Gibbs 4 children

m. 1811

Seth Payson,

Maine

Ann Shipman

8 children

minister 5.

Joseph Buckminster

(1784-1812)

Joseph Buckminster,

single

New Hampshire minister

6.

Andrews Norton (1786-1853)

Samuel Norton,

m. 1821 Catharine Eliot

Massachusetts gentle-

man

active in

6 children

town

affairs

7.

Henry Ware, Jr. (1794-1843)

Massachusetts minister,

m. 1817 Elizabeth Waterhouse (d. 1824);

theologian, teacher

m. 1827 Mary Pickford

Henry Ware,

10 children 8.

Orville

Dewey

(1794-1882)

9.

Charles Follen

(1796-1842)

Silas

Dewey,

Massachusetts farmer

Christoph Follenius, Giessen,

Germany,

m. 1820 Louisa Farnham 3 (?) children

m. 1828 Eliza Lee Cabot 1

chUd

judge 10.

F.

W.

P.

Greenwood

(1797-1843)

William

P.

Greenwood,

Massachusetts dentist

m. 1824 Maria Goodwin 5 children

Appendix

MAIN PLACES OF RESIDENCE Mollis,

NH

Brighton,

OCCUPATION teacher

NH

Thornton,

MA

B

341

RELIGIOUS AFFILIATION Unitarian

minister editor

theologian

Boston

minister

Unitarian

reformer

Cambridge,

MA

Boston

minister writer

Congregationalist-

Unitarian

theologian

NH Portland, ME Rindge,

Portsmouth,

NH

minister

Congregationalist

minister

Congregationalist-

Boston

writer

MA Cambridge, MA

minister

Hingham,

Unitarian

Unitarian

teacher scholar

theologian

Hingham,

MA

Boston

minister

Unitarian

teacher

Cambridge,

Sheffield,

MA

MA

Boston

writer

teacher minister

New York

City

Congregationalist

Unitarian

writer lecturer

Giessen,

Germany

teacher

MA

minister

Cambridge,

Unitarian (transcendentalist)

reformer

Boston

minister writer

Unitarian

342

Appendix

B

FATHER'S

MEN 11.

William Ware

(1797-1852)

OCCUPATION Henry Ware,

SPOUSE m. 1823 Mary Waterh

Massachusetts minister,

7

children

theologian, teacher 12.

William Peabody

(1799-1847)

Oliver Peabody,

New Hampshire

m. 1824 Elizabeth lawyer,

Wh

5 children

politician

13.

Ezra Stiles Gannett

(1801-71)

14.

Horace Bushnell (1802-76)

15.

Bela B. Edwards

(1802-52)

Caleb Gannett, Massachusetts minister

Ensign Bushnell,

Connecticut farmer

Elosha Edwards, Massachusetts farmer,

m. 1835 Anna Tilden 3 (?) children

m. 1833 Mary Apthor] 3 children

m. 1831 Jerusha

Billin

3 children

deacon 16.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

(1803-82)

William Emerson,

m. 1829 Ellen Tucker

Massachusetts minister

(d.

1831);

m. 1835 Lydiajacksoi 4 children 17.

Edward Beecher (1803-95)

Lyman

Beecher,

Connecticut preacher,

m. 1829 1 1

Isabella

Jones

children

theologian, reformer

18.

Edwards A. Park (1808-1900)

19.

William Henry

Channing

Calvin Park,

Rhode

Francis

Island teacher

Dana Channing,

Massachusetts lawyer

m. 1836

Ann Edwards

3 children

m. 1836 Julia Allen 2 (?) children

(1810-84) 20.

James Freeman Clarke (1810-88)

Samuel Clarke, Massachusetts, no

m. 1839 AnnaHuidek 3 (?) children

settled occupation

21.

Theodore Parker (1810-60)

John

Parker,

Massachusetts farmer,

mechanic

m. 1837 Lydia Cabot

no children

Appendix

B

MAIN PLACES OF OCCUPATION

RESIDENCE Hingham, MA New York City

minister

343

RELIGIOUS AFFILIATION Unitarian

novelist

editor

Exeter,

NH

teacher

MA Springfield, MA

Cambridge,

Unitarian

minister critic

writer

MA

Cambridge,

Boston

teacher

Congregationalist

minister

reformer

New

Preston,

Hartford,

CT

CT

teacher

Congregationalist

minister writer

theologian

Southampton,

MA

Boston Andover,

Congregationalist

editor

MA

Boston Concord,

minister

minister

MA

writer

Unitarian-^ (transcendentalist)

lecturer

Litchfield,

CT

teacher

Boston

minister

Jacksonville, IL

editor

Galesburg, IL

writer

Congregationalist

administrator

Providence, RI Braintree,

Andover,

MA MA

teacher

Congregationalist

minister

theologian

Boston

minister

Liverpool, England

writer

Unitarian (transcendentalist)

reformer

Newton,

MA

minister

LouisvUle,

KY

writer

Meadville,

PA

reformer

Unitarian (transcendentalist^

Boston Lexington,

Boston

MA

minister writer

reformer

Unitarian (transcendentalist

344

Appendix

B

FATHER'S

MEN 22.

Henry Bacon (1813-56)

OCCUPATION Robert Bacon,

SPOUSE m. 183? Eliza Monroe

occupation uncertain

3 children

(probably a craftsman or laborer in Boston) 23.

Sylvester Judd

(1813-53)

m. 1840 Jane Williams

Sylvester Judd,

Massachusetts

anti-

3 children

quarian, editor

24.

Henry Ward Beecher (1813-87)

Lyman

Beecher,

Connecticut preacher,

m. 1837 Eunice Bullarc 2 children

theologian, reformer

25.

Henry Soule (1815-52)

26. Frederic

Dan Huntington

(1819-1904)

Clement Soule,

New York

farmer

Dan Huntington, Massachusetts minister

m. 1843 Caroline Whit< 5 children

m. 1843 Hannah Dana Sargent

4 children 27.

Joseph H. Allen (1820-98)

28. Austin Phelps

(1820-90)

Joseph Allen, Massachusetts minister

Eliakin Phelps,

Massachusetts minister

m. 1845 Anna Minot

\^

6 children

m. 1842 Elizabeth (d.

Stu;

1852);

m. 1854 Mary Stuart (d.

1856);

m. 1858 Mary Johnsor 3 children

29.

Theodore Cuyler (1822-1909)

Benjamin Cuyler,

New York

farmer

m. 1853 Annie Mathio children (number

unknown) 30.

James K. Hosmer (1834-1927)

George Washington

Hosmer, Massachusetts farmer

m. 1863 Eliza Butler (d.

1877);

m. 1878 Jenny Garlanc children (number

unknown)

Appendix

MAIN PLACES OF RESIDENCE Boston

OCCUPATION minister

MA

Cambridge,

B

345

RELIGIOUS AFFILIATION Universalist

writer

Providence, RI

editor

Philadelphia

MA Cambridge, MA Northampton,

ME

Augusta,

writer

minister

Lawrenceburg, IN

writer

Indianapolis, IN

lecturer

NY

Brooklyn, Utica,

minister

CT

MA

Northboro,

minister

MA

Plains,

MA

ME

Cambridge,

Unitarian^

writer

Episcopalian

scholar editor

MA minister

Philadelphia

teacher

Boston

writer

Andover,

Aurora,

Unitarian

teacher

MA

Pittsfield,

Congregationalist-^

editor

minister

Washington, D.C. Bangor,

Universalist

editor

Boston

Jamaica

Congregationalist

writer

Boston Hadley,

Unitarian

reformer

NY

Hartford.

Congregationalist^

reformer

CT

Litchfield,

minister

Congregationalist

MA

NY

minister

New York

City

writer

Brooklyn,

NY

lecturer

MA Cambridge, MA Antioch, OH St. Louis, MO Minneapolis, MN Northfield,

minister writer

teacher

(liberal)

Presbyterian

Unitarian^ Liberal

NOTES

INTRODUCTION: THE LEGACY OF AMERICAN VICTORIANISM 1.

On

American Victorian

Meade Minnegerode, The 1840-1850 (New York,

culture,

conservation,

is

a hunter

who

kills

more

ani-

mals and Indians than he saves. Whether he likes

or not, Natty

it

is

the vanguard as well

as the refugee of civilization,

see

ance

Fabulous Forties

mise.

any forest prophesies

in

The

and

of Melville's

protagonist

great

his appear-

eventual de-

its

and E. Douglas Branch, The Sentimental Years 1836-60 (New

quest,

York and London,

ing industry, and as such, a proto-technocrat;

1924),

1934).

For important

efforts to define "Victorianism" as

can phenomenon, see the essays issue of

an Ameri-

in the special

American Quarterly, 27 (1975) entitled

"Victorian Culture in America," particularly the lead article by Daniel

Walker Howe,

"American Victorianism as a Culture." 2. See Susan Sontag, "Notes on 'Camp' " in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New

Moby

if

Ahab, whatever

Dick,

a part of

is

his

Natty's most intimate friend

Ahab's

his

is

spiritual

America's aggressive whal-

harpoon.

The

is

his gun,

transcendental

jingoism of Whitman's early Manhattan per-

sona is

is

not designed to conceal the fact that he

celebrating the proliferating population,

self-propagating machinery, and randomly

abundant materialism of the most ruthlessly expanding and constricting city

am

in the

world.

Haw-

York, 1969), pp. 277-83. 3. See Exiwin Wilbur Rice, The Sunday School Movement 1780-1917 and the American

thorne's treatment of the pure maiden figure:

Sunday School Union 1817-1917 (Philadelphia,

Hilda

1917), pp. 42 4.

Thoreau

6.

carefully told his readers in

any conventional

is

hardly a

sense, the

mone-

I

Priscilla in

ff.

Walden, a rural narrative which pastoral in

5.

thinking here particularly of

in

I

The Blithedale Romance (1852) and

The Marble Faun (1860).

hope the reasons

I

have chosen

this

period (1820-75) as the crucial one for the development of Victorian sentimentalism in the Northeast will

become

clear in the course

tary cost of his experiment in self-reliant soli-

of this book. Recent historical opinion has

whose

minimized the importance of the Civil War as a crucial dividing line for American culture.

tude; and he never forgot the railroad

thundered near his retreat. Cooper's Natty Bumppo, the hero of the Leatherstocking Tales, despite his religious adherence to

cars

I

will

First,

make

few further points

here.

the period 1820-1875 includes the

initial

just a

.

Notes

to the

347

Introduction

of Denominationalism (New York, Perry Miller, who might

commercialization of culture, most notably

Sources

the revolution in printing and the rise of na-

1929). Scholars like

magazines. Second, the

circulated

tionally

most important work of the leading figures in the sentimentalization process (see Appendix

A) seems to apjjear and, more receive

valuation during

highest

its

significantly, to

these

be seen as the head of "Neo-orthodox" historiography, did not necessarily share the religious beliefs of those they studied, or of the

Neo-orthodox

theologians

Niebuhr

(the

brothers, Paul Tillich, and others)

who began

years. Elizabeth Stuart Phelf>s, for example,

to write in the 1920s. But they are

who was bom

orthodox"

late in the

period (1844), pro-

duces her most characteristic work. The Gates Ajar, in 1868; thereafter, she repeats herself

and receives

steadily less critical attention

and

praise until her death in 1911. Third, the pe-

Calvinist tradition

This

10.

Stowe

the

and regret

title

passing.

its

of a novel published by

in 1871.

My

1 1

is

"Neo-

they admire the

in the sense that

understanding of "influence" and

marks the time when the majority of Protestants in the Northeast changed from a strict to a "liberal" creed and when the Protestant Church forged its relationship with the newly commercialized culture: both changes are still in force today. In Chapter Three, I

how

that,

while Protestant ministers had been part

try to break the period into smaller, defined

of an

elite

riod

units. In

Chapter Seven,

I

discuss

its

tion in the early 1870s with the late

Henry Ward Beecher and In discussing

what

I

study on

I

its

am

focusing throughout this its

seven-

New

England exponents not because the former were greater than the lat-

teenth-century

Such subculture groups,

and present, evince certain inherent patterns. Most simply, one might say that society forces members of a subculture at any mopast

ment of

intersection with the larger culture

into a constant, simplified, and often

ing process of self-identification.

demean-

The minister

between 1820 and 1875 was beginning to the

perience

enforced

had long known. In 1820 the

on the nineteenth-century Protestant clergymen whose reformulation of Calvinist thought will be my chief concern. I

ment

am a

use the term "Calvinism," despite

what it does today: bound eff^orts at

directly influential

imprecision, because isterial

it

its

partial

was the word the min-

and feminine groups

I

most commonly employed to

am

studying

descrih)e the

older, sterner creed of their forebears. 8.

Martin Marty,

in

the "Foreword" to

Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in

America

(New

York, 1970), notes: "today

seven out of ten citizens identify themselves as Protestants"

(n.p.).

For an excellent introduction to Neoorthodoxy, see Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Reli9.

gious History of the American People

Haven and London, Martin E. Marty,

(New

932^8, and 233^3. For the

1972), pp.

op. cit.,

pp.

most astute Neo-orthodox analysis of the American religious tradition, see Francis Miller,

Wilhelm Pauck, and H. Richard Nie-

buhr. The Church Against the World (Chicago, 1935),

and H. Richard Niebuhr, The Social

"I

ex-

self-simplification

women

were inevitably more

ter but because they

join-

women and becoming part of

ing middle-class

calling Cal-

eighteenth- rather than

group, they were increasingly

a sp)ecial subculture.

of

vinism, the older Protestant tradition of the

Northeast,

work of Sigmund Freud and Heinz Kohut on narcissism as well as by the theories of a number of sociologists. I came to feel the

work

Harriet Beecher

am

nine groups under discussion was shaped by

culmina-

Stowe. 7.

functioned for the clerical and femi-

it

state-

minister" had a series of possible

precise connotations, theological and political.

By

meant roughly

1875, the statement it

connotes vague church"goodness."

"I

housewife," millions of American

am a women

have been explaining implicitly and explicitly for the last hundred and fifty years; yet, the term "housewife" is imprecise and obfuscating to an extreme. Surely there

much

was (and

is)

as

between tending a childless urban apartment and running a fully populated farm household as there was between diflPerence

practicing law and selling merchandise. Yet just at

the period

when women were

increas-

ingly adopting a punitively generalized

of self-description, selves in ever

more

men were

mode

labeling them-

specialized terms.

The allway

inclusive designation "lady" slowly gave

over the nineteenth century to the equally blank-check appellation "housewife." In contrast,

the polite term "gentleman" had no real

successor;

it

fragmented into

a

thousand

parts.

.

348

Notes

personal,

political,

men

have not equally

Why

and professional.

identified themselves

adequate,

or

inadequate,

to

by an

catchall

phrase such as "breadwinner"? Quite obviously, because society expresses

Chapter 1

in the past

gic elite";

Henry James, "Anthony Trol-

See

12.

Art of

ture.

1956), pp. 247-8.

lope," in The Future of the Novel: Essays on the

Naturally those h)elonging to a subculture

themselves be preoccupied with

who

they

are, often in equally simplistic

They

distorted terms.

will struggle obses-

and monotonously to

repetitiously,

sively,

and

deal with the burden of self-dislike implied

and imposed by their society's apparently low evaluation of them. In a sense, they will be

forced into some version of narcissism, by

which

mean

I

to suggest not only a psycho-

and even

logical process but a sociological political one. Narcissism

self

by

alien,

Fiction,

of

aspect

Works

Parker

(New

Roland Barthes, The Pleasures of the Text, Richard Miller (New York, 1975); and Raymond Williams, "Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory," New Left Review 82 (1973), especially 12-16. 14.

am

I

indebted for

maintenance of

in the

in early life

.

.

from the environment,

.

ways by

a

[he] turns

The

narcissist

must

.

Bronte

to

J. S.

Charlotte

Doris Lessing (Princeton, 1976). For

Mill reference, see The Autobiography

(New York,

n.d.),

pp. 103-

17. 15.

World

Herman Melville, White-Jacket, tn a Man-ofWar (New York,

or the 1967),

141.

p.

.

al-

definition be self-taught, because the

world's lessons are inevitably unacceptable to his ego.

From

Tradition in the English Novel:

[the nar-

to self-stimulation in order to retain [his]

precarious cohesion."

understanding of

perb study by Elaine Showalter, The Female

its

lacking in adequate confirming re.

my

objective means, a

ofJohn Stuart Mill

.

York, 1972), pp. 1-56;

trans.

causes for the development of narcissism:

.

think-

American Women on Womanhood 1820-1920, ed. Gail

the

sponses

my

ing are the "Introduction" in The Oven Birds:

customary role in the business of self-evaluaHeinz Kohut has explained lucidly the

cissist is]

phenomenon.

that particularly stimulated

the positive side of sentimentalism to the su-

tion.

cohesive self because

interesting studies of

reading

the

refusal to

a

willed inability to allow the world to play

"Being threatened

Leon Edel (New York,

ed.

There are many

13.

this

best defined not as

is

exaggerated self-esteem but as

judge the

a

Society

1963).

teem for masculine occupations by honoring them with a highly differentiated nomencla-

will

Modem

ing Elite: Strategic Elites in

(New York,

greater es-

its

what Suzanne Keller calls a "stratesee Suzanne Keller, Beyond the Rul-

He

is

CLERICAL DISESTABLISHMENT

committed not only to an un-

derestimation of the force of facts, but, in

Freud's words, to an "over-estimation of the

power of wishes and mental

1.

processes. ... a

2.

words and a method of dealing with the outer world the

God

belief in the magical virtue of

—

art of magic." Narcissism

can necessitate the

replacement of society by the literature.

self, reality

by

See Heinz Kohut, "Thoughts on

Quoted

in F.

W. Dupee, Henry James: (New York, 1956), p. 1.

His Life and Writings

1

H. Richard Niebuhr, The Kingdom of America

in

Winthrop

(New York,

1937), p. 193.

Hudson, American tantism (Chicago and London, 1961), 3.

Protes-

S.

p.

136.

Perry Miller, The Life of the Mind in America (New York, 1965), pp. 23, 25. For 4.

New

other studies from a version of the "Neoorthodox" view, see William A. Clebsch, From

York Psychoanalytic Society on November

Sacred to Profane America: The Role of Religion

Narcissism and Narcissistic Rage," a paper delivered as the A. A. Brill Lecture of the

30, 197 l;Sigmund Freud,

Introduction" in

A

"On

Narcissism:

An

General Selection from the

Works of Sigmund Freud, M.D. (New York, 1957),

John Rickman, p. 106. For a definition of minority groups, see Helen Mayer Hacker, "Women as a Minority Group," ed.

Bobbs-Merrill Reprint Series Sciences, 5-108.

in

the Social

The ministry had

constituted

in

American History

ert

Handy,

A

(New

Christian America: Protestant

Hopes and Historical 1971),

tian

York, 1968); Rob-

Realities

(New York,

and "The Protestant Quest for

America

1830-1930,"

a Chris-

Church History,

21-22 (1952-53), 8-20; Joseph Harountunian, Piety Versus Moralism: The Passing of the

England Theology (New York,

1932);

New Win-

.

349

Notes to Chapter 1

throp

Hudson,

S.

(New

Religion in America

York, 1965); Martin E. Marty, Righteous EmThe Protestant Experience in America

pire:

(New

York,

tory

Sydney

is

E. Ahlstrom's

A

his-

Religious His-

of the American People (New Haven and London, 1972), which notably ignores the tory

ministry

itself

and focuses on the richness of

America's pluralist religious culture. For the classic

and monumental study of the

vitiation

of nineteenth-century Protestantism, see Karl

E.

Dewey,

Autobiography and

ed..

of Orville Dewey, D.D. (Boston, 1884),

Letters

pp. 88, 230, 231, 224.

A notable exception to the

1970).

pervasive pessimism of current religious

Mary

15.

See Milton Powell,

16.

The Voluntary

ed..

Church: American Religious Life (1740-186S)

Through

Seen

Eyes of European

the

(New York and London, 17.

Visitors

1966), p. 90.

See Timothy Smith, Revivalism and So-

Reform: American Protestantism on the Eve

cial

War (New York,

of the Civil

Winthrop

1957), pp. 20, 21;

Hudson, American

S.

Protestantism,

pp. 97, 98.

Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth

18.

For discussion of disestablishment,

see

Century: Its Background and History (London,

Daniel Calhoun, Professional Lives in America:

1972).

Structure

am

I

5.

using "liberal" to descrih)e the non-

evangelical, non-revivalist

almost ists

all

wing of the north-

Church;

Protestant

eastern

many

Unitarians,

included

this

Congregational-

and Episcopalians, and some Presbyteri-

ans.

For reasons which

clear in this chapter,

I

hope

am

I

will

become

primarily con-

cerned with the Unitarians and Congrega-

and Aspiration 1750-1850 (Cam-

bridge, Mass., 1965); Evarts B. Greene, Reli-

gion and the State: The Making and Testing ofan

American Tradition (Ithaca, N.Y., 1941); Sid-

ney

Mead, The Lively Experiment: The Shap-

E.

(New

ing of Christianity in America

York,

H. Shelton Smith, Robert T. Handy,

1963);

and Lefferts A. Loetscher, American Chris-

An Historical Interpretation with Representative Documents (New York, 1960), I, pp. tianity:

tionalists,

and

to

a

degree,

lesser

the

Episcopalians. 6.

See Ahlstrom,

Steele 1947),

op.

cit.,

p.

400;

Henry

Commager, Theodore Parker (Boston, passim; Henry F. May, Protestant

Churches and Industrial America 1949), p. 30.

I

(New York,

have downplayed the reform

aspect of liberal Protestantism in the period. \'ital as

it

was,

does not seem to

it

Protestantism's central

rian

me

legacy;

\'icto-

but

it

should not be forgotten. The Works of Charles Pollen with a Memoir

7.

of His Life (Boston, 1842), I, pp. 514, 515. 8. James Elliot Gibot, A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston and New York, 1887), I,

James K. Hosmer, The Thinking Bayonet

(Boston, 1865), pp.

17, 15, 54.

10.

Joseph Henry Allen, Our Liberal Move-

ment

in Theology (Boston, 1882), pp. 190, 196.

William Henry Channing, Memoir of William Ellery Channing with Extractsfrom His Correspondence and Manuscripts (Boston, 1846), 1 1

II, p.

12.

cences

Palmer Peabody, Reminis-

Elizabeth

of Reverend William Ellery Channing, See

ibid.,

Stokes, Church

and State

(New York, 1950), 3 vols.; The New Heavens and New Religion in America (New

United States

Cushing Strout, Earth:

Political

is H. Richard Niebuhr and Daniel D. Williams, eds.. The Minis-

York, 1974). Also useful

try in Historical Perspective

(New York,

1956).

For consideration of the broader problem of which the loss of ministerial status was a j>art, see

Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism

American Life (New York, 1962). 19. See Clebsch, op. cit., Handy, tian America,

and Mead,

A

in

Chris-

op. cit.

The Autobiography ofLyman Beecher, ed. Barbara M. Cross (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), I, p. 192. p. 336.

21.

Ibid.,

22.

Philip SchafF, America:

Political,

Social,

p. 259.

23.

by

A

Sketch of Its

Religious Character,

Visit to the

Deputation from

American Churches the

Union of England and Wales 1835),

ed.

p. 80.

Andrew Reed and James Matheson, A

the

24.

p. 302.

and

Perry Miller (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), Narrative of the

266.

D.D. (Boston, 1880), 13.

Anson Phelps

ff.;

in the

20.

pp. 105, 167, 329. 9.

432

II,

Congregational

(New York,

pp. 98fr.

Elwyn A.

Smith, Religious Liberty and

The Works of William E. Channing, D.D. (Boston and New York, 1849), VI, pp. 190 ff.;

United States: The Development of ChurchState Thought Since the Revolutionary Era (Phil-

and see Peabody,

adelphia, 1972), p. 107.

14.

op. cit.,

pp. 203, 257.

the

1

350

Notes

Greene,

25.

op.

cit.,

97.

p.

to

See also M.

Chapter 1

lians,

1905).

1964); S.

Strout, op. cit, p. 343 znd passim;

26.

F.

Maclean,

Church and

"

James 'The True American Union' of

State," Cburcb History, 28 (1959),

41-54, partially reprinted in John F. Wilson, ed.,

Cburcb and State

in

American History (Bos-

ton, 1965), pp. 110-14. 27.

Quoted

28.

Ibid.

29.

Marty,

relatively

in

p. 114.

op. cit,

few good

p.

138.

There are

still

denomina-

histories of the

his-

of America, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1864); Leonard Trinterud, Tbe Forming of an AmeriStates

A

can Tradition:

Re-examination of Colonial

Presbyterianism (Philadelphia, 1949); William

Warren Sweet,

Religion on tbe American Fron-

1783-1840, Vol. IL Tbe Presbyterians:

A

of Source Materials (New York, William Trice Thompson, Presbyteri1936); ans in tbeSoutb, 2 vols. (Richmond, Va., 1963); Collection

A. Smith,

"The Forming of

a

Modem

American Denomination," Cburcb History, 3 (1962), 74-99; and Fred J. Hood, "Presbyterianism and the New American Nation, 17831826: A Case Study of ReHgion and National unpub.

Life,"

diss.,

Princeton

On

Methodism, see Early American Metbodism, 1968.

Emory

1949);

the Episcopa-

A

Albright,

tbe Protestant Episcopalian

History of

(New

Cburcb

York,

D. McConnell, History oftbe Ameri-

can Episcopal Cburcb 1600-1915 (Milwaukee, 1916);

A

William Wilson Manross,

1950).

History of

(New York,

American Episcopal Cburcb

tbe

For general studies of the CongreGaius Glenn Atkins and

see

gationalists,

Walker, Congregational Cburcbes op. cit,

History oftbe Presbyterian Cburcb in tbe United

Elwyn

Raymond W.

gregationalism (Boston, 1942), and Williston

tory of Presbyterianism, see E. H. Gillett,

tier,

see

Frederick L. Fagley, History ofAmerican Con-

Wilson,

under consideration here. For the

tions

On

Society (Philadelphia, 1955).

Louise Greene, The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut (Boston and New York,

Wade 2 vols.

Stevens Bucke,

ed.,

University, C. Barclay,

(New York, Tbe History

of American Metbodism, 3 vols. (Nashville, Tenn., 1964); William Warren Sweet, Religion

States 30.

(New For

in tbe

United

York, 1894).

distinctions

and relations between

Congregationalists and Old School and

New

School Presbyterians, see the excellent study

by George M. Marsden, Tbe Evangelical Mind and tbe New Scbool Presbyterian Experience: A Case Study of Tbougbt and Tbeology in Nineteentb-Century America (New Haven and London, 1970). 31.

A

See Earl Morse Wilbur,

History of

Unitarianism in Transylvania, England, and

America (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), and Conrad Wright, Tbe Beginnings of Unitarianism in

America (Boston,

1955).

32.

Evarts B. Greene,

33.

Ibid

34.

David D.

op. cit.,

pp. 90

Hall, Tbe Faitbful Sbepberd:

New England Ministry

History oftbe

if.

A

in tbe Sev-

enteentb Century (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1972), pp.

146

ff. I

am

deeply indebted as well to David

Hall's helpful

comments on

my

work.

pp. 190-3.

35.

Ibid.,

36.

Perry Miller, Jonathan Edwards

York, 1949),

(New

p. 197.

op

on tbe American Frontier, 1783-1840, Vol. IV,

37.

Hall,

Walter

38.

Calhoun,

39.

Arethusa Hall, Life and Character oftbe

Tbe

Metbodists

(Chicago,

1946);

Brownlaw Posey, Tbe Development of Metbodism in tbe Old Soutbwest, caloosa, Ala., 1933);

1783-1824 (Tus-

Wesley Gewehr, "Some

cit,

p.

186.

pp. 120, 121.

op. cit.,

Reverend Sylvester Judd (Boston, 1854),

William C. Gannett, Ezra

p. 231;

Gannett Uni-

Stiles

Factors in the Expansion of Frontier Method-

tarian Ministers in Boston 1824-1871 (Boston,

ism, \SO(^\S\l," Journal of Religion, 8 (Jan.

1875), p. 359.

On the Baptists, see Norman A. History oftbe Freewill Baptists: A Study

40.

Quoted

41.

Ibid, pp. 158-61.

New England Separatism (Rochester, N.Y., 1957); Albert Newman, A History oftbe Baptist Cburcbes in tbe United States (New York,

42.

William M. Thayer, Spots

1928), 98-120.

Baxter, in

1894); tists

Robert G. Torbet,

(Philadelphia, 1950),

A History oftbe BapA Social History of

in

Calhoun,

op. cit,

in

p.

174.

Our

Feasts

of Charity (Boston and Cleveland, 1854), pp. 231, 232. 43.

"The Shady and

the

Sunny Side of the

Ministry," Christian Examiner, 55 (1853), 338-

(Philadelphia, 1944), and Venture ofFaitb: Tbe

50. See also Rev. Amzi Benedict, "Ministerial Support," National Preacher, 29 (1855), 129-

Story of tbe American Baptist Foreign Mission

40,

tbe Pbiladelpbia Baptist Association:

1707-1940

and Rev. T.

S.

Clark,

"The

Pulpit

Worth

1

Notes

More than

Costs," National Preacher,

It

to

13

(1839), 161-76.

G. Goodrich, Recollections of a Lifeor Men and Things I Have Seen (New

44. S. time,

York, 1856), pp. 27, 99, 76. 45. J. H. Allen's astute observations on the state of the clergy

articles

Some

can be found

he pubhshed

in

two

in the late 1860s:

Modem

Conditions of the

"On

Ministry,"

Christian Examiner, 82 (1867), 51-63,

Some

crucial

and "On

Results of the Voluntary System, Espe-

Our Country

cially in

Parishes," Christian Ex-

aminer, 84 (1868), 207-29. 46.

See Roland H. Bainton, Yale and

the

(New York, 1957); Alice M. BaldNew England Clergy and the American Revolution (New York, 1958); Alan Heimert,

Chapter 1

351

Southern Clergy as a Strategic Elite: 17801870," a paper delivered before the American Historical Association in 1970.

For discussion of

56.

Hobbs

Barnes, The Anti-Slavery Impulse 1830-

(New York;

1844

this issue, see Gilbert

Chicago; and Burlingame,

David Brion Davis, ed., (New York, 1967); Louis Filler, The Crusade Against Slavery 1830-1860 (New York, 1960); Daniel Walker Howe, The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy 1805-1861 (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), pp. 270-305; Aileen S. Kraditor, Means and Ends California;

1933);

Ante-Bellum Reform

in

American Abolitionism: Garrison and His

Ministry

Critics

on

win, The

(New

York,

pp. 133

ff.;

and

Strategy

Tactics

Stokes,

1967);

1834-1850 cit,

op.

II,

Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Lewis Tap-

War

and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1966); J. Eari Thompson, Jr., "An 'Unnecessary, Unjust and Inexpedient' War:

pan and

Congregational Clergy Dissent Against the

slavery groups in the various denominations.

Religion

War

Andover Newton Quarterly, 1 33^7. Republicans at political ban-

of 1812,"

(1970),

the Evangelical

(Cleveland, 1969).

See Stokes,

57.

op. cit.,

My

58.

(1950), 19-30.

their

constitution,

"The

Pulpit for the Priest not for the Politi-

their

cian." See Stokes, op.

politics

cit.,

I,

religion,"

pp. 409, 410.

James Banner, To the Federalist Convention: The Federalists and the Origins of Party Politics in Massachusetts, 1789-1815 (New 47.

59. cit.,

On

is based on "Horace Bushnell and the

Jr.,

Slavery Question,"

—the Bible

for a discussion

discussion of Bushnell

Charles C. Cole,

century made

"The Clergy of all Denominations

II,

of conflicts and breaks between anti- and pro-

quets in (Donnecticut in the early nineteenth telling toasts like the following:

Against Slavery

New England Quarterly,

Finney and slavery see Barnes,

pp. 161

and Wyatt-Brown,

ff".,

op.

23

op. cit.,

passim. 60.

The

Clerical

Appeal of 1837, directed

very specifically against Garrison and his

fol-

was the place "into which we flee from a troubled world for lowers, asserted that the church

The

York, 1970), pp. 150-65.

peace [not for]

Quoted in Vernon Stauffer, New England and the Bavarian Illuminati (New York

minister's task

is

religion." See

William Lloyd Garrison 1805-

48.

and London, 49.

1928), p. 94.

50.

Marty,

51.

See David Hall,

52.

Stokes, op. cit,

53.

Charles Forrester

op. cit,

op. cit., II,

pp. 136, 144.

pp. 15-17.

.

doubtful disputation."

"the promotion of personal

pp. 13^5.

Andrew Peabody,

Atti-

missions, prison reform, better conditions for

South

the seamen, temperance

the

1942), p. 53.

leading op|X)nent of slavery and

—

all of them causes whose immediate dimensions were private

and

fjersonal.

See

lukewarm protest was of course William Lloyd Garrison. See William Lloyd Garrison 1805-1879: The Story of His Life Told By His

mary and secondary sources

and John

L.

York, 1885), 4

Thomas, The

vols.,

passim,

Liberator: William

Lloyd Garrison (Boston and Toronto, 1963). 55.

For

gyman's

this

role,

view of the southern see

cler-

Donald Mathews, "The

61.

I

Examiner,

Christian

(1845), 369-70.

(New

Uni-

Toward

the most severe critic of the northern clergy's

Children

a

from Harvard, writing a decade later in answer to another attack on clerical indiff^erence, defensively listed all the good causes the American ministry did support:

Dunham, The

1860-1865 (Toledo, Ohio,

The

II,

.

tarian divine

2.

p. 69.

tude of the Northern Clergy

54.

1879,

Christian Examiner, 2 (1825),

.

base this remark on

am

38

numerous priwhich I have

to

already referred, but

I

what emerged

reform (or several clerically domi-

chiefly referring to

as the semi-official

anti-reform) line in

nated periodicals over the 1850s and 1860s.

See most notably the Unitarian Christian Examiner, the liberal (x)ngregationalist

NewEng-

Notes

352

to

and the more evangelical National

lander,

Preacher.

Contemporary

62.

awareness of

clerical

the diminishing cultural jX)wer of church and

was

pulpit

pervasive, but see especially

"Liberalism

Allen,

in

Church and

Christian Examiner, 85 (1868), 82-98;

Bellows,

"On

28-38; Alvan Lamson,

"A

"The

the

William G. McLoughlin,

Jr.,

to Billy

Graham (New York,

Plea for

if

1959), p. 61.

Sedgwick's voluminous and revealing,

70.

occasionally

illegible, diaries

are at the Mas-

sachusetts Historical Society.

7L For an

39 (1849),

excellent study of Bushnell and

his congregation, see

Barbara M. Cross, Ho-

Changing America

race Bushnell: Minister to a

(Chicago, 1958). fifty

ordained between 1640 and

of these had also followed a post-gradu-

William Ellery Channing,

home. Of the eight hundred Congregationalist ministers ordained between 1740 and 1810, fewer than twenty lacked a

Mary

74.

ate course of divinity study in a qualified

minister's

E.

Dewey,

Letters ofOrville

II, p.

I,

Dewey,

p. 373.

Autobiography and

ed..

p. 36.

Lewis Tappan

the Unitarians because of their lack of

left

Wyatt-Brown, op. cit., pp. 34 ff. John Ware, M.D., Memoir of the Life of

fervor; see 75.

this p)eriod ministerial

candidates had several recognized divinity

op. cit.,

and also SchafT, op. cit., pp. 94, 95. 73. William Henry Charming, Memoir of

11,

but twenty-five held a college B. A.;

many

See Reed and Matheson,

72.

Congrega-

all

and by the end of

in

W.

H.

1740,

B.A.,

Quoted

69.

Revivalism: Charles Grandison Finney

Pulpit," Christian

two hundred

tionalist ministers

79 (1865), 177.

iner,

Modem

Examiner, 29 (1840), 19-50.

Of

Mann and

Horace

Victory:

State,"

289-314; "True Work," Christian Examiner, 78 (1865), 165-84, and

Tharp, Until

Mary Peabody (Boston, 1953), p. 47. 68. See "Lyman Beecher," Christian Exam-

the Alleged Unattractiveness of

Theology," Christian Examiner,

63.

also

H.

J.

the Christian Pulpit," Christian Examiner, 87 (1869),

Chapter 1

Henry Ware, Jr (Boston,

1846), pp. 53, 178,

179.

schools at which to pursue their clerical education.

The Methodist

non, see

well into the nineteenth century asked only a

conversion experience of

its

clergy,

and grad-

ually accelerating educational requirements

were long fought by many of

its

most promi-

Training

New England (New Williams,

eds., op.

in

York, 1937); Niebuhr and

cit.,

pp. 237-48.

Autobiography of Peter Cartwrigbt the Backwoods Preacher, ed. W. P. Strickland

(New 65.

York, 1856), pp. 79, 360, 371. The Autobiography of Lyman Beecher,

I,

p. 47.

66.

On

the literary social scene in early

nineteenth-century Boston, see Daniel op.

cit.,

passim;

Howe,

M. A. Dewolfe Howe,

view (Boston, 1910); Lewis

P.

Simpson, The

Mind:

Selections from the Boston Review 1803and Monthly Anthology 1811 (Baton Rouge, La., 1962); and Ronald

Federalist Literary

Story, "Class and Culture in Boston:

Athenaeum, 1807-1870," American

The

Quarterly,

11 (1975), 178-99. 67.

body

Quoted Sisters

in

p. 46.

See

1954); Charles

The Evangelical

1960); Clifford S. Griffin, Their Brothers' Kee-

Moral Stewardship

in

the

United States

(New

Brunswick, N.J., 1960). For and in my view, more insympathetic, more telligent accounts, see Lois Barmer, "Religious

1800-1 865

Benevolence

as Social Control:

A

Critique of

an Interpretation," Journal of American History, 60 (1973), 23-41; John A. Krout, The Origins of Prohibition 77.

(New York,

1925).

The Autobiography of Lyman Beecher,

I,

pp. 113-16. 78.

See William R. Hutchison, The Tran-

scendental Ministers: American Reform in the

New England Renaissance (New Haven,

1959),

pp. 1-3. 79.

Many

Unitarians crossed into the Epis-

copalian fold in this period or adopted a

num-

ber of Episcopalian practices. See particularly F.

Louise Hall Tharp, The Pea-

of Salem (Boston, 1950),

An Errand of Mercy:

United Front, 1790-1837 (Chapel Hill, N.C.,

ed..

Journal of the Proceedings of the Society Which Conducts the Monthly Anthology and Boston Re-

A

1820-1860 (New York,

Foster,

pers:

64.

phenome-

C. Cole, The Social Ideas of the Northern Evangelicals

Eighteenth-Century

this

Allen Billington, The Protestant

Study of the Origins of American Nativism (New York, 1938); Charles

I.

Ministerial

Ray

Crusade 1800-1860:

Mary Latimer Gambrell,

nent members. See

For negative readings of

76. sect, in contrast, until

W.

lies

P.

Greenwood,

and Sunday

Hymns for

Social Services for

Schools

Fami-

With a Collection of 1855), and

Private Use (Boston,

.

Notes

to

Chapter 2

353

Huntington, Memoir and Letters of Frederic Dan Huntington (Boston and New

ence" was so widespread and so accepted that

York, 1906). Huntington was a notable con-

its

Arria

S.

to Episcopalianism and

vert

his

defection

from Unitarian ranks caused consternation;

New Discussions of the

see his The

ton, 1860). See also "Unitarian

New

Affinities,"

lian

Trinity (Bos-

and Episcopa-

Englander,

3

(1845),

For

good account of early Episcopa-

a

Joseph

lianism, see

Mind in cut,

terms.

J. Ellis,

The

New England

Samuelfobnson of Connecti1696-1772 (New Haven and London,

source

Sarah

"An

Transition:

at

most valuable

Ladies' Magazine, 1828-36, edited

Hale.

And

see

by

Norman Mezvinsky,

Glenda Gates Riley, "The Subtle Subversion: Changes in the Traditionalist Image of the American Woman," The Historian, 32 (196970), 210-27. 1 am indebted most heavily, how-

And

(1845), 202.

see Rev.

"The Murder of

Henry R. Weed,

a Faithful Minister,"

Ameri-

can Preacher, 8 (1834), 253-61.

"The

Pulpit," Christian Examiner,

29

Nancy

to

Samuel Cutting, "The Inefficiency of the Church," National Preacher, 11 (1849), 14. 82. E. Thurston, "The Magnitude of the 19 Ministerial Work," National Preacher, 81.

Frederick

Henry Hedge, "The

Desti-

nies of Ecclesiastical Religion," Christian Ex-

aminer, 82 (1867),

3.

85.

See Niebuhr and Williams,

86.

"An Andover Student," New Englander

eds., op. cit

"The

Pulpit," Christian Examiner,

29

(1840), 30, 31. 88. Powell,

op

cit.,

p. 85.

Ibid, p. 90.

A

Study in the Nineteenth-Ontury America," submitted to Harvard College in 1971. This thesis has been seminal for my work.

Women

History of

in

5.

Ladies' Magazine,

6.

Ladies' Magazine, 9 (1836), 383-86.

7.

Mrs.

L.

3

(1830), 83, 84.

H. Sigoumey,

Water Drops

For other temperance literature, see Herbert Ross Brown, The Sentimental Novel in America 1789-1860 (Durham, N.C., 1940). Of special interest are the following works by Timothy Shay Arthur: Strong Drink: The Curse and the Cure 1848), pp. 49, 51.

(Philadelphia,

(1855), 236.

undergraduate

Osterud's

"Sarah Josepha Hale:

(New York,

(1840), 30, 31.

89.

is

J.

thesis,

87.

and reform

Idea of Female Superiority," Midconti-

ever,

84.

women

trine of "influence," the single

1973).

83.

will discuss

I

greater length in Chapter Three. For the doc-

nent American Studies Journal, 2 (1961), 17-26;

556-61. 80.

the radicals were gradually forced to talk in

1877);

Ten Nights In a Bar-

Room, and What I Saw

Donald A. Koch (Cambridge, Mass., 1964); Woman's Trials or Tales and Sketches From the Life Around There, ed.

Us (Philadelphia, 1869). See also The Old Brewand the New Mission House By Ladies of the Mission (New York, 1834); Mary L. Fox, The Ruined Deacon: A True Story (Boston, 1851); Dr. H. A. Reynolds, Minnie Hermon: or. The Curse of Rum (New York and Cincinnati, ery

FEMININE DISESTABLISHMENT 1

Mary

Bushnell Cheney, Life and Letters

of Horace Bushnell

(New

York, 1880),

p. 142.

2.

Ladies' Magazine,

3.

Cheney, Life and Letters of Horace Bushp. 142. For the comments on women of

nell,

5 (1832),

308-15.

1878): Mrs. S. A.

Hut:

or.

ton, 1854); ace; or

Southworth, The

Inebriate's

The First Fruits of the Maine Law (Bos-

Emma

Wellmont, Uncle Sam's Pal-

The Reigning King (Boston, 1853). For

Bushnell's clerical predecessors, see Laurel

secondary sources, see Henry William

Thatcher Ulrich, "Vertuous Women Found: New England Ministirial Literature, 1668-

The Temperance Movement: or The Conflict Be-

1735," American Quarterly, 28 (1976), 20-40. 4.

Aileen

Woman

Kraditor

in

Suffrage Movement,

The Ideas

of

1890-1920

(New

the

York and London, 1965) documents the shift in the argument of the suffrage party over the course of the nineteenth century from a demand for women's "rights" to a plea for the wider exercise of their feminine influence;

in

other words, the conservative ploy of "influ-

Blair,

tween Man and Alcohol (Boston, 1888); Mrs. Annie Wittenmyer, History of the Woman Temperance Crusade (Boston, 1882); Brian Harrison, Drink and the Victorians: The Temperance Question in England 1815-1872 (Pittsburgh,

's

1971); tion

John A. Krout, The Origins of Prohibi-

(New

York,

1925).

I

wish to thank Chris-

tine Stansell for access to her unpublished

paper, "(Darrie Nation and the

Movement."

Temperance

354

Notes

to

Lydia Huntley Sigoumey, The Young

8.

Lady

Gems of

Offering, or

'j

Prose

and Poetry

(Boston, 1862), p. 222.

For

evi-

dence that Hale's paranoia was not altogether unfounded, see the case of the seduced and

murdered Mahon Heberton The

New

10.

Englander,

1

reported in

as

(1842), 442-551.

Ladies' Magazine, 7 (1834), 419.

excellent

women

on

paper

implications

the

for

of anti-Catholic literature, see David

Movements and the Victimized Woman," delivered

Bennett, "Anti-Catholic

Vision of the

1970);

The Old South and American National Char-

(New York and Evanston, 1957). I am basing my discussion here on the following works: Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Era of Expansion 1800-1848 (New York, acter

15.

1969);

For an

1830-1930 (Chicago and London, William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yan-

Politics

kee:

Ladies' Magazine, 8 (1835), 186.

9.

Chapter 2

of

the

1966);

Douglas C. North, The Economic Growth United States 1790-1860 (New York,

Anhur M.

Schlesinger,

The Age of

Jr.,

Jackson (Boston, 1945).

See Lemer,

16.

op.

cit.;

Smith,

op.

cit.,

pp. 49-78.

before the American Historical Association

17.

Cole,

op. cit.,

on Dec. 28, 1975. 11. Such articles by Hale are scattered throughout her first periodical. Ladies' Magazine, which she edited from 1828 until 1836. 12. See J. H. Allen, "On Some Results of the Voluntary System, Especially in Our Country Parishes," Christian Examiner, 84

18.

Ihid.,

pp. 192, 193.

19.

Ihid.,

pp. 97-110.

20.

See Jeffrey Williamson, "Urbanization

in Atlanta, Ga.,

(1868), 207-29. 13.

For help

understanding the process

in

of "disestablishment," see

Mary

R. Beard, ed.,

America Through Woman's Eyes (New York, 1933); Arthur W. Calhoun, A Social History of Vol. 11 (Cleveland, the American Family, 1918); Alice Clark, The Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth

Century

(New York,

1920);

in the

American Northeast, 1820-1870,"

in

The Reinterpretation ofAmerican Economic History (New York, 1971), pp. 426-36. 22.

Quoted Quoted

23.

Cole, op

24.

See Richard B. Morris, Studies

21.

in Schlesinger, op. in ibid., cit.,

Chap.

p.

18.

190.

Law (New

"Women's Rights

Ill,

cit.,

148.

p.

p.

History of American

in

in the

York, 1930), Early Ameri-

can Law."

My

25.

comments here

are based

say by Johnny Faragher, "Old

Arthur Harrison Cole, The American Wool

Women

Manufacture (Cambridge, Mass., 1926), Vol.

field,"

I,

181.

p.

Seventeenth-Century

in

forthcoming

Women

in

See the widows

's

on an

es-

Men and Old Wethers-

Studies.

Anthony Dexter, Colonial Women of Affairs (Boston, 1911); Gerda Lemer, "The Lady and the Mill Girl: Changes in the Status of Women in the Age

Widow and Her Family (Hudson, N.Y., 1837), and Bella Z. Spencer, Tned and

of Jackson," Mid-continent American Studies

1866).

passim; Elizabeth

26.

in

True; or Love

and Loyalty

Mary Ryan, "Ameri-

27.

can Society and the Cult of Domesticity,

sition

1830-1860"; Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine

don, 1918), pp. 117-30.

Journal, 10 (1969),

Beecher:

7, 8;

A Study in American Domesticity (New

Haven and

Lx)ndon,

1973);

Smith,

Paige

Daughters of the Promised Land: Women in American History (Boston, 1970). An imporis Nancy F. Cott, "In Womanhood: Perspectives on

tant unpublished study

the Bonds of

Female Experience and Consciousness England,

1780-1830,"

Ph.D.

in

New

dissertation,

On

the southern

women,

(Springfield, Mass.,

Richard J. Purcell, Connecticut in Tran1775-1818 (Washington, D.C., and Lon-

Horace

28.

spun"

Bushnell,

in Litchfield

"The Age of Home-

County Centennial Celebra-

tion (Hartford, 1851), pp. 114, 112, 124. 29. nell,

Cheney, Life and Letters of Horace Bushp. 27.

30.

Ibid.,

pp. 29, 27.

31.

Ibid.,

p.

women, Against

Brandeis University, 1974.

Mrs. Julia H. Scott,

The Blind

111.

For Bushnell's views on

Woman Suffrage: The Reform Nature (New York, 1869). see also

see Lisabeth

32.

Beard,

Cohen, "Beneath Cotton and Lace: The Plan-

33.

Cole,

34.

See Johnny Faragher and Christine

14.

tation

Legacy of the Southern Woman," an

op. cit.,

op. cit.,

"Women

p. 80.

pp. 186-9.

and Their Families on the

important essay submitted as an undergradu-

Stansell,

ate thesis at Princeton University in

Overland Trail. 1842-1867," Feminist Studies,

Anne Scott,

1973;

The Southern Lady from Pedestal

to

2 (1975),

150-66.

355

Notes to Chapter 2

35. Nancy Cott, ed., Root of Bitterness: Documents of the Social History ofAmerican Women (New York, 1972), p. 235. 36. Thomas Woody, A History of Women's Education in tbe United States (New York and

Lancaster, Pa., 1929),

II, p.

3.

Home

See Catharine Maria Sedgwick,

37.

(Boston, 1854); Live and Let Live, or Domestic Service Illustrated

(New

or Single?

(New

York, 1856); Married

York, 1858); Means and Ends:

or Self-Training (Boston, 1840).

A

Catharine E. Beecher,

38.

mestic 39.

1841).

Ladies' Magazine,

3

man

On

(1830), 42, 43.

front to dignify feminine enterprise, see Lutz, op.

call .

.

50.

in

Woman

see

Barbara

in

America:

Mabel Newcomer,

A

Women Wolf Thompson,

1959); Eleanor

Education for Ladies 1830 -I860 1947); in

(New

op. cit

Godey's Lady's Book, 20 (1840), 273.

in Cross, op. cit, p. 117.

Exlucation," American Journal of Education,

45.

Mary

E.

Hartford Female Seminary

Dewey,

Sedgwick

and

Life

Letters

(New York,

of

1871),

Grace Greenwood, Greenwood Leaves: Collection of Sketches and Letters (Boston, For the attitude of the

48.

On

neers, see

of His Life (Boston, 1842),

Mem-

p. 108.

I,

54.

Smith,

55.

Ladies' Magazine,

56.

Lydia Maria Child, Tbe Mother's Book

op. cit,

p. 78. 1

(1828),

2.

of Sharon

Rose

Tbe

(Boston,

1849),

p. 287.

58.

For the

lives

Hanson,

ed..

of these

women,

see Mrs.

Our Women Workers:

Bio-

Church for Literary, Philanthropic and

Christian

Werk (Chicago,

1882).

Their writ-

in the Universalist Gift-

book, The Rose of Sharon, and the monthly Universalist

and Ladies'

Repository.

For

a fas-

cinating study of the dependency of the am-

on novels, see Mrs. A. D. T.

Whitney's Hitherto: A Story of Yesterdays (Boston, 1 869). This novel by one of the era's most

Thompson,

op. cit.,

the educational

Alma

Lutz,

ladies'

work of

Emma

maga-

passim.

these pio-

Willard: Daughter

of Democracy (Boston and New York, 1929); Beth Bradford Gilchrist, The Life of Mary

Lyon (Boston and New York, 1910); Edward Hitchcock, Tbe Power of Christian Benevolence Illustrated in the Life and Labors of Mary Lyon

(Northampton,

extensive analysis. 59.

On

the increase in reading, see (Darl

Bode, Antebellum Culture (Carbondale and

1853), p. 29. 47.

p. 365.

cit.,

popular writers for young ladies would repay

46.

zines, see

Tbe Works of Charles Follen with a

bitious rural girl

pp. 56, 57.

A

Bird, op.

II

and Suggestions Respect-

(Hartford, 1829).

Catharine M.

1966), pp. 152, 338.

pp. 236, 237.

cit.,

ings appeared chiefly

ing Improvements in Education Presented to tbe tbe

Hill Clark (Madison,

53.

versalist

See Catharine Elsther Beecher, "Female

of

Andrew

graphical Sketches of Women Eminent in the Uni-

43.

Trustees

Plan

Englishwoman

52.

E. R.

Quoted

(1827), 219-23, 264^9,

Bird, The

(Dalhoun, op.

57.

42.

44.

A

Willard,

(Boston, 1831), p. 86.

Higher Exiucation," University Magazine,

Woody,

Lucy

Isabelle

York,

Ann Douglas Wood, "Women's Future

52 (1972), 6-13;

Emma

See especially

51.

Cen-

tury of Higher Education for American

(New York,

to

upon the province of men."

America, ed.

oir

of Background and Problems

1923);

we mean

will not create a jealousy that

.

49.

1965); Willistyne Goodsell, The Education

(New York,

27,

p.

Milwaukee, and London,

women's education,

Its Social

where Willard determines to her new school a seminary: "That word

cit.,

Vt., 1818).

of Catharine Beecher, Margaret and M. Carey Thomas (New York,

Women:

cit.

For clear evidence that they were often selfconsciously aware of the need for a masculine

Selected Writings Fuller,

Lyon Eliza-

neer Educator (Phihdelphh, 1932);Sklar, op.

Lady

and The American Gentle-

Cross, ed., Tbe Educated

Mae

beth Harveson, Catharine Esther Beecher: Pio-

Do-

(Philadelphia, 1836).

41.

Mary

ed.,

for Improving Female Education (Middlebury,

40. Charies Butler, Esq., The American

(Philadelphia, 1842)

Lansing,

Through Her Letters (Boston, 1937);

intrude

Treatise on

Economy (Boston,

Marion

1852);

Mass.,

and

Philadelphia,

Edwardsville,

III.,

1959), pp. 109

ff.;

Norman

Werthman, eds., Tbe History of Popular Culture (New York and London, 1968), pp. 84-94.

F.

Cantor and Michael

60. Elizabeth

S.

Wetherell,

World (Philadelphia,

The Wide,

Wide

1888), p. 34. "Elizabeth

Wetherell" was Susan Warner's nom de plume. 61.

I

am

deeply indebted

in

my

discussion

of Stowe here and elsewhere to Elizabeth Kendall,

"Secret

Springs of

Violence:

A

356

Notes

Study of Margaret

to

Beecher

Fuller, Harriet

Stowe, and Kate Chopin," an unpublished

Chapter 2

issues of the Lowell Offering,

(1845).

5

es-

77.

Lowell Offering

say submitted as an undergraduate thesis at

78.

Quoted

Harvard University in 1969. 62. David Potter, People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character

79.

Lowell Offering

80.

Quoted

81.

Lowell Offering

(Chicago, 1954), pp. 173-5.

82.

Harveson,

83.

Godey's Lady's Book, 45 (1852), 283.

63.

on

have consulted the following sources

I

advertising: Daniel Boorstin, The Image:

Guide

A

(New York,

Pseudo-Events in America

to

1972); J. A. C. Brown, Techniques ofPersuasion: From Propaganda to Brainwashing (London,

Revel Denney, The Astonished Muse:

1963);

Popular Culture in America (New York, 1957); Frank Presbrey, The History and Development

of Advertising (New York, 1929); Walter Dill "The Psychology of Advertising," At-

Scott,

Turner,

lantic Monthly, 93 (1904), 29-36; E. S.

The Shocking History of Advertising (London, 1952); James Pleysted Wood, The Story ofAdvertising

(New

York, 1958).

64. Presbrey, op.

See

65.

A

ing in

Ann

cit.,

pp. 255, 256.

Douglas, "Art and Advertis-

Connecticut

The Robber

Yankee:

Baron Revisited," Canadian Review of American Studies, 6 (1975), 182-95. Presbrey,

66.

op. cit.,

Quoted

69.

Ibid.,

70.

Ibid, p. 318.

71.

See Margaret Mead, "The Pattern of

in Presbrey, op.

cit.,

pp. 276-8.

ff.

Larrabee and Rolf Meyersohn,

72.

eds..

Catharine E^her Beecher,

and Abolitionism with

Slavery

Mass Lei-

1958), p. 14.

111.,

p. 188.

cit.,

p. 231.

op. cit.,

1

(1828), 422, 423.

Englander, 11 (1953), 152.

For examples, see Rev. John S. C. AbMother at Home; or the Principles of Maternal Duty Familiarly Illustrated (New York, 1833); Jabez Bums, D.D., Mothers of the Wise and Good (Boston, 1830); Margaret Conkling. Memoirs of the Mother and Wife of Washington (Auburn, Me., 1851); Marion Harland, The Story of Mary Washington (Boston and New York, 1892); Our Mother: A Memorial of Mrs. S. C Farley Maxwell (Boston, 1860). Elizabeth Prentiss wrote a novel which is an extreme illustration of the motherhood cult, The 86.

bot, The

Home at Greylock (New York,

1876).

The clas-

example of medical support of the cult is Dr. Exlward H. Clark, Sex in Education: or a Fair Chance for Girls (Boston and Cambridge,

sic

On

the medical background, see

Fashionable Dis-

eases:

Women's Complaints and Their

ment

in

Treat-

Nineteenth-Century America," Jour-

of Interdisciplinary History, 4 (1973), 25-53, and Clio's Consciousness, ed. Louis Bannal

Leisure in Contemjwrary Culture," in Eric

sure (Glencoe,

p. 193.

5 (1845), 264.

Ann Douglas Wood, "The

68.

cit.,

5 (1845), 56.

in Josephson, op.

New

Mass., 1878).

p. 259.

67. Potter, op. cit, p. 169.

pp. 370

The

in Josephson, op.

Magazine,

84. Ladies' 85.

(1845), 190.

5

An

Essay on

Reference to the

ner

(New

York, 1974).

John Hawksley, ed., Memoir of the Rev. Jonathan Edwards Compiled Originally by Sam il.

Hopkins (London, 1815), p. 89. 88. Mrs. L. H. Sigoumey, Letters

to

Mothers

Duty ofAmerican Females (Philadelphia, 1837) and The True Remedy for the Wrongs of Women

ney's account of her relationship with her

(Boston, 1851).

own

73.

Emma

Willard, Via Media:

A

Peaceful

and Permanent Settlement of the Slavery Question

(Washington, D.C., 1862).

74.

For an

Taylor, 75.

New son, nity:

pp. 115^1.

See Hannah Josephson, Golden Threads:

I

am

The

(New

indebted also to John Kas-

"The Factory

as

E^rly

Andrew,

89.

Bernard

Republican

History

Commu-

of

Lowell,

The

Child

p. 30.

ley gives her account in the July

fF.

Far-

and August

For a good L. Kuhn,

Anne

New (New Haven,

90.

See

Ann Douglas Wood, "The Fashion"The War Within a

able Diseases," p. 49, and

Women

pp. 191

the

1947).

War

San Fran-

and

The Mother's Role in Childhood Education:

England Concepts 1830-1860

Civil

in

(New

of Modem American Child

Nurture (Philadelphia, 1968),

War:

op. cit,

The Faded Hope

Wishy,

Dawn

American Studies Association cisco on Oct. 19, 1973. See Josephson,

in

See also Mrs. Sigour-

York, 1853).

Massachusetts," a paper delivered before the

76.

p. 10.

discussion of motherhood, see

England's Millgirls and Magnates

York, 1949).

son,

Republic: The

analysis of Hale's politics, see

op. cit.,

(Hartford, 1838),

Nurses

History,

in the

Union Army,"

18 (1972), 197-212.

91. For Stanton's views and experiences of motherhood, see her autobiography. Eighty Years and More (1815-1897): Reminiscences of

Notes

to

Elizabeth Cody Stanton (Lx)ndon, 1898), pp. 108-25.

For the

92.

reaction, see Goodsell, op.

cit.,

Chapter 3

357

the invaluable source nals

which

1837-69),

have studied

I

Also useful have been

passim.

whose

New

The

Englander, North American '

Godey

zine,

ROLES should stress that

I

I

Lady

'j

The

Magazine.

have tried to

re-

's

sixty individuals

works by and on them. I have consulted manuscript sources on the following: Catharine Esther Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe in the Beecher-Stowe

will

available

all

Collection at the Schlesinger Library at RadchflFe

College, Cambridge, Mass.; the Marga-

ret Fuller papers at the Boston Public Library and Houghton Library, Harvard University;

the letters of Sarah Zdgarton L. B.

J.

Case

Mayo and

Mrs.

at the Schlesinger Library; the

Catharine Maria Sedgwick papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society; the

Sigoumey

papers at the Connecticut Historical Society in

Hartford, Conn.; the Fanny Fern (Parton)

Book, The Universalist

impKjrtant autobiographies,

under

in the

be cited

sf>ecial

by the

consideration

course of discussion.

Christian Examiner, 87 (1869), 29. Evan-

2.

gelicals of course also

the

and

and the Christian Parlor

biographies, and literary productions

search these sixty individuals carefully, reading

of magazines

Review, The National Preacher, Ladies Maga-

Ladies' Repository,

1.

in its entirety.

number

a

read through: The Christian Ex-

files I

aminer,

AND MOTHERS: CHANGING AND EXCHANGING MINISTERS

William Sprague, An9 vols. (New York,

is

of the American Pulpit,

press;

urged or

justified

made

extensive use of

non-evangelicals

indeed,

often

publishing in terms of

catching up with the productivity of evangelical rivals.

The

difference

one

is

in prestige

and influence.

Lawrence C. Wroth and RoUo G. Silver, "Book Production and Distribution from the American Revolution to the War Between the States," in Hellmut Lehman-Haupt, ed., 3.

in America (New York, 1951), p. 71. am drawing my information about the

The Book 4.

I

papers at the Sophia Smith Collection in

Harpers, unless otherwise stated, from Eu-

Northampton,

gene Exman, The Brothers Harper

Mass.; and the Joseph

Buck-

minster papers at the Boston Athenaeum. Al-

though

I

am

using these sixty persons as a

"control group" in Chapter Three, here and

elsewhere

have tried to check

I

my

conclu-

by a wider if thorough survey. For useful biographical information on the women of the period, see Exiward T. James, Janet Wilson James, Paul S. Bryer, eds.. Notable American Women 1607-

sions against the data gathered less

1950,

3

(Cambridge, Mass., 1971), and

vols.

Frances E. Willard and

Mary A. Livermore,

American Women: Fifteen Hundred Biographies, 2 vols. (New York, Chicago, and Springfield, Ohio, 1897). Also useful are Eminent Women of the Age (Hartford, 1869) and Our Famous

Women

(Hartford, 1885). Nina

Baym

in a

manuscript to be published by Cornell University Press,

"Women's

Fiction in

America

many Where I am

1820-1870," provides a helpful study of of the

women

I

am

considering.

interested only in certain aspects of their pro-

duction and

in the

underlying unity of their

work, she treats their careers more broadly and examines the distinctive quality of each woman's effort. Baym furthermore sees their collective contribution in

terms than

I

am

much more positive

able to do.

On

the ministers,

(New York,

1965). 5.

Charles A. Madison, Book Publishing

America

(New York,

in

1966), p. 6.

William Charvat, Literary Publishing in America 1790-1830 (Philadelphia, 1959), p. 26. 6.

7.

Ibid

8.

Exman,

9.

Charvat,

op. cit., op. cit.,

p. 45. p. 307.

10.

Ibid, p. 56.

11.

Madison,

12.

North American Review, 56 (1843), 110. Nathaniel Hawthorne suffered; see

13.

Charvat, 14.

op. cit.,

op. cit.,

Quoted

in

p. 45.

pp. 57-9.

Gordon

S.

Haight,

Mrs

Si-

goumey: The Sweet Singer of Hartford (New Haven, 1930), p. 80. 15. Eminent Women of the Age, p. 87. 16. Quoted in Carl Bode, The American Lyceum:

Town Meeting of the Mind (New York,

1956). 17. Sigoumey wrote prolifically for a number of the magazines, most notably Godey \ Graham and Peterson Y Henry Ward Beecher's work appeared in a newspap)er he 's

largely

controlled.

The

Independent.

wrote almost exclusively for the Ledger.

New

Fern York

358

Notes

Quoted

Matthew

to

Chapter 3

Bruccoli, ed.,

35.

Sprague, Annals, VIII,

The Profession of Authorship in America 18001870: The Papers of William Charvat (n.p.,

36.

Christian Examiner, 28 (1840), 33.

37.

Sprague, Annals,

38.

I

18.

in

J.

1968), p. 92. 19.

American

North

41

Review,

(1835),

441-3. 20.

Examiner,

Christian

(1826),

3

"The Poetry of Mrs. Hemans," aminer, 3d series,

(New York, Earlier

Memoir

41.

p.

A

Grecian Romance

which is concerned with the problem of slavery and women's place. 24. For the importance of feminine novels

(Boston, 1845),

women

reformers, see Gail Parker,

Women

The Oven Birds: American

hood 1820-1920

(New York,

a severe

on

Woman-

1972), pp. 1-56.

but accurate critique of

Martin E. Marty, John G. Deedy, Jr., David Wolf Silverman, and Robert Latachman, The

(New York,

Religious Press in America

1963).

Bushnell Cheney, Life and Letters

of Horace Bushnell

(New York,

27.

Christian Examiner,

28.

Ibid.,

29.

Ibid, 38 (1845), 299.

3

1880), p.

The

Unitarian

Daniel Walker

is

Conscience:

1805-1861

Harvard

(Cambridge,

Eliza Buckminster Lee, Memoirs of Rev.

Stevens

Buckminster

(Boston,

1S5I),

33.

J.

H. Allen, Our Liberal Movement

34.

Mary

E.

Dewey,

p. 358.

in

p. 45.

ed..

Letters ofOrville Dewey,

Poisoned,"

Harper's

New

(1866), 771.

This paragraph

is

a

summary

of

Ann in

Nineteenth-Century America," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 4 (1973). 4 (1831), 3-4, and

Ladies' Magazine,

43.

Woman's Record, p. 682. 44. For Sigoumey's life, see Haight, op. cit., and her own autobiography. Letters of Life (New York, 1866). For Hale's life, see Isabelle Webb Entrikin, Sarah Josepha Hale and 'GoBook' (privately printed, 1946),

dey's Lady's

and Ruth

E. Finley, The

Lady ofGodey

's:

Sarah

Josepha Hale (Philadelphia and London, 1931). I

will

46. In

come back

to the uses of Episco-

of

an earlier study of

women

Stowe

in

my

Chap-

Impoverishment:

Autobiography and

D.D. (Boston, 1844),

a smaller

number

"The

Literature of

The Women

Local Colo-

sentimentalists,

America 1865-1914," Women's Studies, 1 (1972), 3-46, 1 found a higher percentage of marriages and assumed wrongly that this would hold true for a bigger sample. Much of my research and discussion here, however, rists in

confirms the research for the earlier study. 47.

Henry James,

don, 1905),

p. 116.

Theology (Boston, 1882),

See

164.

ter Seven.

Joseph Buckminster, D.D. and of His Son Rev. Joseph

1856), p.

"The American Peo-

discussion of Harriet Beecher

Mass., 1970). 32.

for Schools

palianism for the feminine subculture in

(1826), 97.

best study of the Boston Unitari-

Philosophy

Calisthenics

See Beecher, Letters to the People on and Happiness (New York, 1855),

45.

43 (1847), 189.

ans from this point of view

Moral

pp.

Women's Complaints and Their Treatment

2.

Arethusa Hall, Life and Character of the Reverend Sylvester Judd (Boston, 1854), p. 138.

Howe,

Leaves,

Douglas Wood, "The Fashionable Diseases:

30.

The

Congrega-

124.

42.

ed..

the present state of the religious press, see

31.

Starved and

Monthly Magazine, 32

reform pur|x>ses. See L.

Philothea:

and

ple

See Eliza-

women did use literature at least

Maria Child,

Greenwood

and Families (New York,

1891), p. 224.

for

Mary

Physiology

40.

Health

occasionally

For

Greenwood,

39.

Christian Ex-

A

reference to the

in

non-evangelical

also Catharine Beecher,

(1836), 328-62.

1

and

Unitarian

a in

by

covered

period

403-18, and

beth Stuart Phelps, Austin Phelps:

26.

toward

tional ministry.

attitude, see the follow-

"The Poetry of Mrs. Hemans,"

ing reviews:

25.

shift

310-12.

Christian Examiner, 29 (1840), 40-6.

For Norton's

War

pre-Civil

Sprague, most notably

but see particularly "The Pulpit,"

lander,

to the

statement on the basis of a

study of Sprague's Annals; the the

Christian Examiner, 28(1840), 119.

Awareness of the potential power of the press is evident everywhere in the articles in the Christian Examiner and the New Eng-

23.

this

pp. 656, 657.

II,

feminized descriptive vocabulary occurred

21.

22.

make

p. 174.

Partial Portraits (Lon-

p. 177.

James Hart, The Popular Book: A Hisof America's Literary Taste (New York,

48.

tory

1950), pp. 91-2. 49.

tracts

Among these

the

more important of the see Edward

men produced,

..

Notes

to

Beecher, The Conflict of Ages: or The Great Debate on the Moral Relations of God and Man

Horace Bushnell, God in Christ (Hartford, 1849) and Nature and the Super(Boston, 1853);

natural

(New

York, 1858); Andrews Norton,

Evidences of the Genuineness of the Gospels (Boston, 1877); Exi wards A. Park, The

Atonement

For examples,

50.

Common

see

Catharine

Elsther

Sense Applied to Religion; or

The Bible and the People

(New York,

1857);

An Appeal on Behalf of That Class of Americans Called Africans (Boston, 1833) and The Progress of Religious Ideas Lydia Maria Child,

Through Successive Ages

(New

York, 1835),

3

vols.

59.

the

359

William Wilson Manross,

American Episcopal Church

Sedgwick, Sigoumey, Smith, Stephens,

Stowe, Warner, Whitney, and Willis ("Fern")

History of

60.

Howard Allen Bridgeman, "Have We a

Religion for Men?" Andover Review, 13(1 890), 388-96. 61.

Aaron

Ignatius Abell, The Urban Impact

bridge, Mass., 1943), p. 214. 62. Paige Smith, Daughters

Land:

Women

in

of the Promised American History (Boston,

1970), p. 49. 63. William Henry Channing, Memoir of William Ellery Channing, With Extracts from

His Correspondence and Manuscripts (Boston, 64.

I,

p.

140.

Edmund S. Morgan,

A Life of Ezra Stiles and London, 1962), p.

prolific.

Best-selling

65.

Sprague, Annals,

interest

by these au-

66.

Ibid, p. 559.

thors are: Alcott, Little

Women

(1868); Finley,

Dinsmore (1867); Holmes, Lena Rivers

(1856); Phelps, The Gates Ajar (1868); Prentiss,

Stepping Heavenward (1869); Sedgwick, Hope

The Gentle Puritan:

1727-1795

were exceptionally works of considerable Elsie

A

(New York,

1950), p. 246.

1846),

Alcott, Finley, Holmes, Phelps, Pren-

51. tiss,

Chapter 3

on American Protestantism 1865-1900 (Cam-

(Boston, 1839).

Beecher,

.

(New Haven

188. p. 372.

I,

and Letters ofHorace Bushnell, p. 3 3 68. See Mrs. E. A. Bacon, Memoir of Reverend Henry Bacon (Boston, 1857), passim; and Caroline A. Soule, Memoir of Reverend H. B. 67

Life

Sigoumey, The Young Lady's Offering (1847); Smith, The Newsboy (1854);

Soule (Boston,

Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852); Stephens, Fashion and Famine (1854); Warner, The Wide

LL.D., Recollections of a Long Life: An Autobiography (New York, 1902), pp. 4, 120-1, 1 19.

Leslie

(1827);

Wide World

(1850);

Whitney, Faith Cartney's

a 863); Willis ["Fanny Fern"], Fern

Girlhood

Leaves from Fanny's Portfolio (1853) and Ruth Hall:

A

Domestic Tale of the Present Time

(1854).

enteenth Century (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1972), pp.

271-2.

See "The Influence of the Gospel on

the Character and Condition of the Female Sex," in Sermons by the Late Joseph Buckminster

(Boston, 1841), pp. 383-410. 54.

lor

York, 1892),

Quoted

in

Milton Powell,

ed.,

The Vol-

73. 74.

York and London,

1966), pp.

56.

The Universalist,

57.

F.

125-6

2 (1833), 326.

D. Huntington, Sermons for the People

(Boston, 1856),

p. 350.

Christian Examiner, 62 (1857), 264.

Quoted in Powell, op. cit., p. 127. Quoted in ibid., pp. 68-9. Samuel Hopkins, The Life and Character

76.

Arethusa Hall, Life and Character of the

Reverend Sylvester Judd,

p. 148.

Charles Butler, E^., The American Lady

(Philadelphia, 1842), p. 36.

See

Henry

Steele

Commager,

Theodore

Parker (Boston, 1947), passim. 79.

Visitors

D.D.,

erson (Boston, 1834), pp. 74, 127.

cences

of European

Cuyler,

ofMiss Susanna Anthony (Portland, Me., 1810). 75. Ralph Emerson, Life of Rev. Joseph Em-

(New

the Eyes

Ledyard

p. 28.

untary Church: American Religious Life Seen

Through

Theodore

Quoted in Frank Hugh Foster, The Life of Edwards Amasa Park (New York, 1936),

78.

p. v.

860), passim.

71.

77.

Daniel Wise, The Young Lady > Counsel-

(New

55.

70.

72.

David D. Hall, The Faithful Shepherd: A History of the New England Ministry in the Sev52.

53.

69.

1

Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Reminisof Rev. William Ellery Channing, D.D.

(Boston, 1880), pp. 41, 42. 80.

William Henry Channing, Memoir of

William Ellery Channing, 81

58. Rev. William L. Gage, Trinitarian Sermons Preached to a Unitarian Congregation

Jesse

(Boston, 1859), pp. v-xxi.

ment

I,

p. 67.

On the development of the libraries, see H. Shera, Foundations of

the Public Li-

brary: The Origins of the Public Library in

New England 1629-1855

Move-

(Chicago,

360

1949),

Notes

to

and Sidney Ditzion, Arsenals of a DemoA Social History of the American

cratic Culture:

Public Library the

Movement

(Northampton,

1900 (Chicago,

to

82. Shera, op.

cit.,

p. 209.

tory of Mt. Holyoke Seminary, South Hadley,

terly,

cit.,

p. 166.

York,

Ibid.,

87.

Ditzion,

88.

Parker Willis, Tbe Rag Bag:

to Religion,

A

Collection

90. See

Housekeeping"

Minister's

Oldtown 91.

I

women

and

p. xii,

Letters on the

of Religion (Hartford, 1857). Harriet Beecher Stowe, "The

Difficulties

in

Sam Lawson's

will discuss ministerial biographies

by

Chapter Five.

92. Edwards A. Park, ed., The Works of Samuel Hopkins, D.D., With a Memoir of His Life,

Vol.

93.

(Boston, 1854),

I

Sprague, Annals,

94. Selections from the Writings

C

Mayo

Edgarton

band (Boston,

with a Memoir

and

Universalist

Hartford Female Seminary

the

of

(Hartford, 1829),

p. 7.

For examples of p>opular biographies

105.

of popular

women

missionaries, see Daniel C.

(New York,

sion

Woman's MisEmily C. Judson,

(Boston, 1847).

A

Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney, The Gaywor-

107.

and Thrums (Boston

Story of Threads

and London,

and

of Female Education,"

1855);

Memoir of Sarah B. Judson (New York, 1849); James D. Knowles, Memoir of Ann H. Judson

By Her Hus-

1865), p. 287.

See Michael Davitt

Romance of New England

the Historical

108.

All page references are to Eliza Buck-

Two Hundred

minster Lee, Naomi; or Boston

96. Catharine E. Beecher, The True

for the Wrongs of Enterprise

Women

Remedy

Years

with a History of an

Having That for

Its Object

(Boston,

Hawthorne

Bell,

(Princeton, 1971).

8 (1840),

15.

Ago

109.

(Boston, 1848).

Mary

Wyman,

Alice

ed..

The Auto-

biography of Elizabeth Oakes Smith (Lewiston,

Me., 1924), pp. 22, 85, 216.

1851), p. 49. 97.

the Trustees

106.

ofMrs. Sarah

Ladies' Repository,

13^8.

Catharine E. Beecher, Suggestions Re-

104.

thys:

1849), p. 88.

95. "Illustrations

World Mission

in

1968), pp.

specting Improvements in Education Presented to

p. 28.

p. 551.

I,

(Grand Rapids, Mich.,

Exidy, Daughters of the Cross or

Fireside Tales (Boston, 1871).

in

R. Pierce Beaver, All Loves Excelling:

American Protestant Women

p. 83.

of Ephemera (New York, 1859), p. 262. 89. Catharine E. Beecher, Common Sense Applied

n.d.), p. 348.

103.

p. 94.

86.

op. cit.,

1961), p. 223.

102. L.

Ibid, p. 140.

85.

(New York,

Girl-

T. Guilford, The Use of a Life: Memorials of Mrs. Z. P. Grant Bannister (New

27 (1975), 178-99.

84. Shera, op.

hood

(Spring-

Lucy Larcom, A New England

101.

83.

Half Century

Mass., 1887).

field,

Ronald Story, "Class and Culture in Boston: The Athenaeum," American Quar-

Philadelphia,

See Mrs. Sarah D. (Locke) Stowe, His-

100.

Mass. During Its First

1947).

and

Mass.,

1852).

New England and

in

Middle States from 1850

Chapter 3

See Emily Noyes Vanderpoel and Eliz-

abeth C. Barney Buel,

eds.. Chronicles

of a Pio-

110. All

page references are to Elizabeth

Oakes Smith, Bertha and Lily; or The Parsonage

Miss Sarah Pierce and Her Litchfield School

of Beech Glen: A Romance (New York, 1855). 111. Sarah Josepha Hale, Woman's Record:

(Cambridge, Mass., 1903); Vanderpoel,

or Sketches ofAll Distinguished

neer Schoolfrom 1792-1833, Being the History of

ed.,

More

Chronicles of a Pioneer School from 1792 to 1833 Being Added History on the Litchfield

Female Academy (Cambridge, Mass., 1927). 98.

Mae

E.

Harveson,

in

Catharine Esther

Beecher: Pioneer Educator (Philadelphia, 1932),

correspondence with

includes

her

Grant

Appendix A,

in

99. All

Zilpah

pp. 257-9.

page references to Lyon's career

here, unless otherwise stated, are to

Edward

Hitchcock, The Power of Christian Benevolence Illustrated in the Life and Labors of Mary Lyon

Creation p.

to

Women From the A.D. 18H (New York, 1855),

328. 112.

Hart,

op. cit.,

113. Shera, op.

15.

p.

cit.,

113.

p.

114.

Ibid.,

pp. 117-18.

115.

Ibid.,

p.

116.

Ditzion,

117.

Ibid.,

118.

Quoted

Feminine pp. 55-6.

120. op. cit.,

p.

and Shera,

Fifties

in

132.

op. cit.,

pp. 146

Fred Lewis Pattee,

(New

York,

1940), op.

ff.

The cit.,

Notes

1

The Writings of Mrs Sarah

19.

Mayo,

C.

to

Edgarton

D.D.

The Works of William E. Charming, (Boston and New York, 1849), \'I,

121. Ibid.,

II, p.

Dewey, "On

Human

Life" in Discourses on

and

Life

141.

280.

122.

Christian Examiner, 21 (1836-7), 399.

123.

Ibid, 80 (1866), 360.

124.

Ibid, 56(1854), 33-4.

125.

Horace

Things

Novels," North American Review,

the

32 (1831),

the Religion of

Human (New York,

Nature,

Nature of Religion,

I

1847), 292-3.

162.

p.

361

386-421; Orville

p. 32.

120.

Chapter 4

(New

York, 1868),

See "Jane Bouverie," Christian Exam-

50(1831), 178-89.

Fumess and Dr.

142. "Dr.

Question of

Moral Uses of Dark

Bushnell,

iner,

Words and Names,"

Christian Ex-

aminer, 66 (1859), 115. 143.

p. 27.

"Miss Bremer's Novels," North Ameri-

W.

Quoted in William G. McLoughlin, The Meaning of Henry Ward Beecber: An Essay

Peabody, "Paul de Kock's Novels,"

on the Shifting Values of Mid-Victorian America

(1843), 276-300.

126.

1840-1870

(New York,

128. Wise, op. 129.

cit.,

For several

144.

p. 87.

classic statements

"The

Up From

A

Memoir by His Brother

(Boston,

Bushnell,

Reform Against Nature

Woman Suff(New York,

p.

135.

of Piety," Christian Ex-

aminer, 74 (1863), 428. 148.

ed.,

Sermons by

the

Late William B. 0. Pea-

body, p. 133. 149. Almira H. Lincoln Phelps, Lectures to Young Ladies Comprising Outlines and Applications

of the Different Branches of Female Educa-

tion (Boston, 1833), pp. 171, 172.

See Beaver,

131.

Sarah Hale, Manners or Happy Homes

and Good

op. cit,

passim.

Society All the Year

150.

See

Sedgwick, Home (Boston, I

base

Lynn and

ibid.,

ist,"

my

Elliott

Maria

Catharine

particularly

"Novels and Tales," Christian Exam-

66 (1859), 297. 151. H. T. T., "Mr. Thackeray As a Novel-

iner,

Round (Boston,

1868), p. 53.

152.

60 (1856), 103.

Dewey,

Discourses, pp. 261-4.

153. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Austin Phelps:

1854).

remarks here on Robert

W.

Wright, The Big Little School:

Sunday Child of American Protestantism (New York, 1971); Edwin Wilbur Rice, The Sunday School Movement 1780-1917 and the American Sunday School Union 1817-1917 (Philadelphia, 1917);

36

William B. 0. Pea-

"New Books

130.

133.

body With

the Late

"Miss Bremer's Novels,"

1869).

132.

Sermons by

147.

included in Aileen Kraditor,

Horace

145.

146.

History ofAmerican Feminism (Chicago, 1968), rage: The

ibid.,

Regard to Reading," New

in

Pasto-

the Pedestal: Selected Writings in the

pp. 50-2, and

O.

Englander, 10 (1852), 188-97.

of the

Letter" of 1837 provoked by early femi-

nist activity

"Duty

B.

1849), p. cviii.

anti-feminist clerical pK)sition, see ral

can Review, 37 (1845), 128. See also

1970), p. 88.

Edwards A. Park, The Theology of the Intellect and of the Feelings (Andover, Mass., 1850), pp. 3^. 127.

A

Bushnell:

Joanna Bethune, The Power of Faith Ex-

134.

and Writings of the Late Graham (New York, 1843). Lynn and Wright op. cit., p. 128.

135.

Christian Examiner, 78 (1862), 178.

136.

National Preacher, 3d

A

Memoir, 1

54.

p. 224.

"Dante's Beatrice as a

Type

of

Wom-

anhood," Christian Examiner, 64 (1858), 49. And see J. W., "The Woman Question," Christian Examiner, 56 (1854), 1-34.

William Ware, Zenobia; or

155.

Palmyra (New York,

1854),

the Fall

of

p. 196.

I,

emplified in the Life

Mrs

109.

Isabella

See Calhoun,

137.

Ware,

1

(1862),

1.

The Miscellaneous Writings of Henry Jr.,

IV

(Boston, 1846), p. 338.

138.

Christian Examiner,

139.

"The Poetry of Mrs.

tian Examiner, 3d series, 140.

series,

p. 109.

op. cit.,

See Daniel

204. See

W.

B.

1

Howe,

34 (1845), 136-7. W^mzTis,''' Chris-

(1836), 335, 341. op.

cit.,

THE LOSS OF THEOLOGY: FROM DOGMA TO FICTION

pp. 189-

O. Peabody, "The Waverly

All page references are to Joseph Bel-

lamy, True Religion Delineated in The Works of Joseph Bellamy With a Memoir of His Life and Character, 1853), 2.

tory

ed.

Tyron

Edwards

(Boston,

I.

Hugh New England

A

See Frank

Foster,

of

Theology

1963), pp.

200

ff.;

Genetic His-

(New York,

Joseph Harountunian, Piety

362

Notes

New

Versus Moralism: The Passing of the

land Theology

See

3.

York, 1932), pp. 164^79. Grandmother's Blue Book" in

"My

May

F.

(Cambridge,

Mass.,

Chapter 4

Eng-

(New

The

4.

problem

the "Introductory Essay" in Disvii-

are

the Exiwardsean position on the Atonement.

ing Conceptions of Original Sin:

American Theology Since 1750

which sheds

light

on

A

Study

(New

in

York,

a closely related

problem. See

5.

Grounded

gation

(New York,

(New York,

of Universal Obli-

1877), p. 37.

Christian Examiner, 80 (1866), 278-9. 15.

See the excellent discussion

ton Smith,

ed.,

Horace Bushnell

16.

Excerpts from

this

Bushnell, pp. 277-359. ness

The

and Law was published

Emmons,

Nathaniel

particularly

God

Horace

original Forgivein

New

York

in

Emmons

Smith,

pp. 281,

Woman Record; or Women From the AD. 1854 (New York, 1855), pp.

Sarah Josepha Hale,

Sketches

(Boston,

's

of All Distinguished

Creation to

ibid.; Hopkins apparently got this from Jonathan Edwards' wife, Sarah Pierpont. See "Sin Through Divine Interposition, An Advantage to the Universe and Yet This No Encouragement for Sin" and "An Inquiry Into the Nature of True Holiness," in

Horace Bushnell,

ed.,

xxxvii, xxxix.

See

6.

19.

Smith,

Horace Bushnell,

ed.,

The Works of Samuel Hopkins, D.D. (Boston, II, pp. 493-545, and III, pp. 5-66.

Under pressure by

7.

the Universalists, Bel-

lamy, like other prominent Edwardseans, was

move toward

ment.

In

Christ has

the idea of a general Atone-

other words, God's sacrifice of

made

saved, although

it

all

possible for

men

men

all

will not

to be

20.

Haroutunian,

Quoted

8.

op. cit.,

21.

I,

p. lix.

Treatise on the

Quoted

Hosea Ballou,

Atonement (Boston,

1860).

William Sprague, Annals of American Pulpit (New York, 1837-69),

10.

in

Henry Ware, Jr., Memoirs of Reverend Noah Worcester (Boston, 1 844), p.

is

in

National Preacher,

22.

This essay

is

in ibid.,

20 (1846), 169-79.

sive Virtues," Sermons for the

York, 1858),

p. 339,

and "The

New

23.

C

Selections from the Writings

Edgarton

Mayo

24.

Hall,

op

with a Memoir

1849), p. 57. cit.,

pp. 459-60.

25. For a brilliant critique of the newly humanized Christ, see Charles Hodge, reviewing Bushnell's God in Christ in Essays and Re-

views

(New York,

1879), pp. 436-43.

a strict Calvinist, points

out that

to the

Memory of the

Rev.

Noah

Worcester,

"a

sion

D.D.

Atonement

work of art [which] produces an impresmore powerful than a formula" (p. 437).

26. I,

Hodge,

in Bushnell's

the

(Boston, 1837).

in

of Mrs. Sarah By Her Hus-

is

Tribute

(New

Coat"

Arethusa Hall, Life and Character of the Reverend Sylvester Judd (Boston, 1854), pp. 274-6.

interpretation, Christ's act in the

A

Life

Little

VTII, p. 197, and

See also William E. Charming,

13

See also Bushnell, "The Efficiency of the Pas-

band (Boston,

pp. 164, 165.

All page references are to

9.

This essay

p. 36.

(1839), 65-80.

Exiwards, ed., The Works of

in

Joseph Bellamy,

See

Christopher Crowfield [Harriet Bee-

cher Stowe], Little Foxes (Boston, 1866),

be able to

themselves of this opportunity.

avail

302,

pp.

307.

1852),

127.

Vicar-

280, 282. 18.

to Punish Sinners," in Jacob Ide,

The Works of Nathaniel

the

York,

work and The

ious Sacrifice are included in Smith, ed.,

idea

A

H. Shel-

in

(New

1965), passim.

1842), VI, pp. 111-22, 181, 152-7.

to

And see

1866), pp. 279-83.

See "Review of Current Literature,"

14.

17.

ed..

in Principles

1874.

"God's Hatred of Sinners," "The Heavenly Hosts Praise God for His Justice," and "Saints Desire

Display of

Horace Bushnell, "Loving God is But Letting God Love Us" in Sermons on Living Subjects

Essay on

Moral Agency (Salem, Mass., 1 794). For an excellent recent study on the idea of sin and human agency, see H. Shelton Smith, Chang-

1955),

rifice,

an understanding of the range of

An

Noah

to

A

See Horace Bushnell, The Vicarious Sac-

13.

See also Stephen West, D.D.,

are

Sacrifice:

Life of Bronson Alcott (Boston, 1937), p. 169.

Edwards A. Park, ed.. The Atonement: courses and Treatises (Boston, 1859), pp. Ixxx. The documents included here essential to

references

ed.

best discussion of this theological is still

page

1966),

391^12.

pp.

All

11.

Worcester, The Atoning

Love Not of Wrath (Cambridge, Mass., 1830). 12. Odell Shepard, Pedlar's Progress: The

Harriet Beecher Stowe, Oldtown Folks,

Henry

to

434.

Park, ed.. The Works of Samuel Hopkins,

.

Notes

Exiwards A. Park,

27.

Emmons

thaniel

ed.,

to

Memoir of Na-

(Boston, 1861),

I,

p.

Chapter 4

"Judd's Discourses on the Church," Christian

Examiner, 56 (1854), 428-45.

434.

28. The Autobiography ofLyman Beecher, ed. Barbara M. Cross (Cambridge, Mass., 1961),

45.

Ibid.,

II, p.

133.

For examples of Lyman Beecher's exhortations to his eldest sons William and Exi30.

ward, see

ibid.,

For

31.

I,

ibid.,

cher:

Study in American Domesticity

(New

Haven and London, 1973), passim. 33. Quoted in William G. McLoughlin, The Meaning of Henry Ward Beecher: An Essay on the Shifting Values of Mid-Victorian America

1840-1870 (New York, 34.

Autobiography

1970), p. 15.

of Lyman

Beecher,

I,

Ibid.,

pp. 55-7. Harriet Beecher

theology

York,

Wooing

The Minister's

in

(New

Memoir (New York, 1891), pp. 23-5. 38. Mary E. Dewey, ed.. Autobiography and

Letters p. 33.

52.

of

Orville Dewey, D.D. (Boston, 1884),

A

See Sylvester Judd,

Young

Man

'j

Churches in 1894), pp. 40.

the

216

53.

Spend Holy Time" can be

to

The Works of Henry Ware, Jr. (Boston, 1846), I, pp. 87-106. in

Henry Ward Beecher, Norwood

lage Life in

New England (New

or Vil-

York, 1868),

pp. 301-2, v-vi.

Horace

55.

Work and Play Q^tv/

Bushnell,

York, 1883), pp. 10-16. 56.

Henry Ward Beecher,

Yale Lectures,

p. 186.

57.

Mary

Bushnell Cheney, Life and Letters

of Horace Bushnell

(New York,

1880), p. 537.

Ibid, p. 517. p. 60.

59.

Ibid.,

(New York,

60.

Quoted

ff.

in

Smith,

ed.,

61.

Cheney,

Works by Lyman Beecher

62.

Ibid, p. 532.

63.

Richard Hofstadter

in

II,

pp. 221-2.

See the seventeenth-century treatise by

New

England minister Thomas Shepard, The Parable of the Ten Virgins (London, 1660), a work very influential on the Exiwardseans. 42. William Henry Channing, Memoir of

the

1973).

Horace Bushnell,

p. 281.

(Boston and Cleveland, 1852), 41.

"How

found

See "The Design, Rights and Duties of

Local Churches"

Donald Meyer,

World W^^r / (Hanover, N.H.,

Congregational

United States

1971);

A

(New York, 1965); and Gail Thain Parker, Mind Cure in New England: From the Civil War

58.

Walker,

Williston

(New York,

Study of the American Quest for Health, Wealth and Personal Power

ton, 1838). 39.

(1854), 437.

Vale Lectures on

See Richard Huber, The American Idea

The Positive Thinkers:

Ac-

count of His Conversion from Calvinism (Bos-

"Judd's Discourses on the

in

Henry Ward Beecher,

of Success

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Austin Phelps:

37.

A

1

54.

Frank Hugh Foster, The Life ofEdwards Amasa Park (New York, 1936), pp. 52-3.

Quoted

1874), pp. 181-6.

1859).

36.

(New

Warner], Daisy Plains

Preaching (Boston and Chicago, 1872, 1873,

Stowe

used this letter as the basis of her heroine's

p. 21.

p. 223.

cit.,

Church," Christian Examiner, 56

to

pp. 224-6. 35.

Ibid, p. 187.

5

See Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Bee-

A

48.

49. [Susan

pp. 355-86. 32.

Voung Man's Account,

Hall,

50.

see

A op

47.

York, 1885), pp. 102-22.

pp. 278-80, 288-9.

correspondence,

this

See Bushnell, Christian Nurture, passim.

46. Judd,

p. 28.

29.

363

op. cit.,

Anti-Intellectualism

in

p. 518.

in his classic study,

(New

American Life

York, 1962), speculates that the root of the

American disrespect or lies in

distrust of the

the sentimentalization of

faith: "to the extent that

it

its

mind

religious

becomes accepted

William Ellery Channing, with Extracts from

in

His Correspondence and Manuscripts (Boston,

largely an affair of the heart or of the intuitive

1846), 43.

I,

pp. 375-6.

Horace

qualities of the

Views of Christian

Bushnell,

Nurture (Hartford, 1847), 44.

For Judd's views,

any culture," he

of Discourses (Boston, 1854). For a favorable review of Judd's book which links it with Series

see E. E.

is

mind and

is

that the rational

irrelevant or worse, so far

it

will be

believed that the rational faculties are barren

p. 11.

see The Church in a

Bushnell's Christian Nurture,

mind

writes, "that religion

H.,

or perhaps dangerous" 64.

Horace

Bushnell,

(p. 47).

Woman

Suffrage: The

Reform Against Nature (New York, 1869), pp. 65, 66, 24. For a study of the problem of

364

Notes

and

anti-intellectualism

women,

to

nineteenth-century

Chapter 4

erals:

A

Study

(New

American Theology

in

Mid-America, 48 (1966), 258-70. Also of im-

York, 1941), pp. 6-13. 80. Foster, Edwards Amasa Park, pp. 233-5. 81. See "Subjects for the Pulpit," Christian

portance for this problem

Examiner, 41 (1846), 381-92.

see Barbara Welter, "Anti-Intellectu-

American Woman: 1800-1860,"

alism and the

is

Barbara Welter,

"The Feminization of American Religion 1800-1860"

Hartman and

S.

Mary

in Clio's Consciousness, eds.

Banner

Lx>is

(New York,

Harriet Beecher Stowe, My Wife and I Henry Henderson's History (New York,

1872), pp. 189-91. 66.

Neighbors Street 67.

tan:

We and Our

Harriet Beecher Stowe,

of an Unfashionable

the Records

or,

(New York,

1875), p. 39. Italics mine.

Conn., 1969). For American scholars

in

many,

Histori-

Quoted

Than Fiction

'j

Magazine, 8

torical Penpective

( 1

85

1 ),

29-

133-4.

1 (1850),

H. Richard Niebuhr and

in

Daniel D. Williams,

The Ministry

eds..

(New

in His-

York, 1956),

p. 244.

70.

Quoted

71.

Daniel (Dalhoun, Professional Lives

in ibid,

p. 279.

in

America: Structure and Aspiration 1750-1850

(Gimbridge, Mass., 1965), National Preacher,

p.

152.

new

no.

2

eds.,

op.

cit.,

p. 45;

Mary Latimer Gambrell,

Training

Ministerial

New England (New 75. Emmons said,

in

Eighteenth-Century

York, 1937),

They

See

Memoir of Nathaniel

ed..

Sprague, Annals, VIII,

77.

Charles

Dwtght (New York, P.

Timothy

Andrews Norton,

1942), pp. 44-7.

Fisher,

A

Discourse

Com-

(New Haven, 1858), p. 26. Day Williams, The Andover Lib-

Daniel

A

Statement of Rea-

Not Believing the Doctrines of Trinitarians Concerning the Nature of God and the Person of Christ (Boston, 1867), p. 37. 87. Quoted in Perry Miller, The Transcen-

An

dentalists:

Anthology (Ciambridge, Mass.,

1967), p. 221.

Exiwards A. Park,

A

Discourse Delivered

at the Funeral of Professor Moses Stuart (Boston, 5.

89. See particularly Edward Beecher, "The Nature, Importance and Means of Eminent Holiness Throughout the Church," Na-

10 (1835), 193-223.

tional Preacher,

Beecher

the true Christian must possess both the

military and pacific virtues. See also

(1861), 223-31,

Religion That

and Is

F.

Henry A.

Energy of

new

series

4

D. Huntington, "The

Natural," in Sermons for the

gian:

Edwards A.

An

Park, Duties of a Theolo-

Anniversary Address

(New

York,

1839), p. 25.

memorative of the History of the Church of Christ in Vale College During the First Century of Its 79.

86.

sons for

90.

p. 45.

Cunningham,

E.

1852),

People (Boston, 1856), pp. 362-99.

76.

Existence

Mass.,

Christianity," National Preacher,

pp. 106-7.

George

(Cambridge,

Christianity

293.

are the offsprings of a cor-

Park, I,

ing p.

Nelson, "The Gentleness and

rupted heart and nourished by vicious exam-

Emmons,

p. 7.

Andrews Norton, "A Discourse on the Latest Form of Infidelity" in Tracts Concern-

reason or

in

in

85.

insists

"Diversions, properly so

have no foundation either

religion.

p. 27.

Study

Kermit Vanderbilt, Charles

in

(Cambridge, Mass., 1959),

1852), p.

Niebuhr and Williams,

p. 279.

78.

A

Ger-

Eliot Norton: Apostle of Culture in a Democracy

88.

series

(1859), 186.

Ibid.,

Quoted

84.

All page references are to (Datharine

and The Literary World,

ple."

German

of Culture (Ithaca, N.Y., 1965).

Beecher's hostility, see The Knickerbocker, 36

called,

see Jurgen Herbst, The

American Scholarship:

(1850), 464^5, Holden

74.

Wayne Brown,

The Rise of Biblical Criticism in America 18001870: The New England Scholars (Middletown,

the Transfer

book, responses which sensed the source of

73.

a discussion of the failure of Biblical

criticism at this time, see Jerry

cal School in

(Boston, 1850). For negative responses to the

72.

York,

Life of Delia Bacon ((Cambridge, Mass.,

Elsther Beecher, Truth Stranger

69.

For

44.

1959), p. 100.

30,

(New

See Vivian C. Hopkins, Prodigal Puri-

A

68.

Memoir of the

See Christian Examiner, 43 (1847), 324-

83.

65.

A

n.d.), p. 311.

1974), pp. 137-57.

or,

Rev. Asa Cummings,

82.

Reverend Edward Payson, D.D.

91.

Exiwards A. Park, The Theology of the and of the Feelings (Andover, Mass.,

Intellect

1850), pp. 92.

5, 3, 34.

"The Andover and Princeton Theolo-

gies," Christian

Examiner, SI (1852),

31.

Notes

to

Chapter 4

365

Hodge, "The Theology of the Intellect," Essays, pp. 543, 572. For Hodge's life, see A. A. Hodge, The Life of Charles Hodge

gotten Samaritan

(New

Dix (Boston and

93. Charles

York, 1880).

Ihid, p. 272.

95.

115. Marshall,

Em-

p. Ixiii.

I,

96. Park, ed.,

Memoir of Nathaniel Emmons,

p. 76.

97. Park, The Theology

of the

Intellect

and of

98. Ibid., pp. 21-2.

Hodge,

99. Charles

Walker, op

100.

op. cit,

ctt,

p.

625.

gationalists in America:

A

Popular History of

and Work

their Origin, Belief, Polity, Growth,

(New

York, 1894), pp. 467-88. 102. J. H. Allen, "On Some Effects of the

Voluntary System, Especially

Our Coun-

in

try Parishes," Christian Examiner, 84 (1868),

Ihid.,

117.

Marshall,

T. McColgan, Joseph Tucker-

103. Daniel

man: Pioneer

in

DC,

ington,

discussion of

American Social Work (Wash-

1940),

pp. 9,

Tuckerman's

10,

19,

32.

My

based on this

life is

biography.

Results of the Ministry at Large in Boston (Bos-

ton, 1838), pp. 135, 139, 37.

nett,

3,

Yale Lectures, 173.

William C. Gannett, Ezra

Gan-

Stiles

Unitarian Minister in Boston 1824-1871

(Boston, 1875),

p. 387.

D.D. (Boston and

New

Channing,

York, 1848), VI, pp.

209-10.

The

108.

V,

Works of Charles Follen with a Life (Boston and New York,

p. 254.

Sumner

The Life of Edwin H. Chapin (Boston, 1882), pp. 87-103. 110.

Ellis,

For anti-professionalism,

anti-intellec-

tualism,

and anti-institutionalism among early

women

nurses and doctors, see

Wood, "The War Within

Ann Douglas

A War"

and "The

Fashionable Diseases." See also Lydia Maria Child, The Progress of Religious Ideas Through Successive Ages vols.,

111.

115.

L.

War (New York,

Dannett,

1959), p. 60; Sylvia

Women of

Noble

ed..

(New York and London, 119. Tiffany,

op

cit.,

1959), pp. 88-104.

p. 358.

120.

Marshall, op

121.

Quoted in Young, See Young, op. cit.,

122. op. cit,

p.

G.

North

the

cit,

pp. 206, 210. op. cit,

p.

104.

pp. 308-9; Tiffany,

141.

123.

Marshall,

124.

Fanny Fern, Rose Clark (New York,

op. cit.,

p. 57.

1856), pp. 15-21. 125.

The popular

novelist Elizabeth Stuart

was passionately

Phelps, for example,

inter-

ested in anti-vivisection. Yet she never lets the

ti-vivisection societies or

even be aware of

their existence. See Though Life

Do Us

Part

126.

Tuckerman,

127.

Calhoun,

op. cit.,

op. cit,

p. 324.

p. 183.

128. Park, Duties 129.

of a Theologian, p. 5. Exiwards A. Park, The Indebtedness of

130. IHd., p. 22. 131.

Gannett, Ezra

Stiles

Gannett, pp. 30,

76, 500.

Memoir of His 109.

p.

the State to the Clergy (Boston, 1851), p. 11.

The Works of William E.

107.

1887),

op. cit,

(Boston, 1908), and Trixy (Boston, 1904).

Henry Ward Beecher,

pp. 187, 189, 192, 193, 215, 106.

101.

heroines of her anti-vivisection fiction join an-

Joseph Tuckerman, The Principles and

105.

p.

ff.; David the Discovery Asylum: Social The Rothman, of J. Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston and Toronto, 1971); Agatha Young, The Women and the Crisis: Women of the North in the

222.

104.

op. cit,

11.

p.

p. 104.

116.

Civil

pp. 597-9.

Rev. Albert E. Dunning, D.D., Congre-

101.

York, 1891),

118. See Tiffany, op. cit, pp. 53

the Feelings, p. 8.

3

New

114.

Memoir of Nathaniel Emmons, The Works of Nathaniel

1937),

Francis Tiffany, Life of Dorothea Lynde

p. 296.

mons,

I,

112.

Ihid, p. 19.

Ide, ed..

N.C.,

Hill,

p. 54.

113.

94. Park, ed.. I,

(Chapel

(New York and London,

1855),

for a veiled attack on theology.

Helen

E. Marshall, Dorothea Dix: For-

132. John Ware, M.D., Memoir of the Life of Henry Ware, Jr (Boston, 1846), pp. 99, 46. 133.

Ibid, pp. 46,466, 87,469.

134.

Ibid.,

pp. 321-3,474.

135.

Ibid.,

p. 331.

136.

Henry Ware,

Jr.,

On

the

Formation of and

the Christian Character ((Cambridge, Mass.,

Boston, 1831), pp. 288, 318, 390, 293, 391. 137. Ibid., pp. 165, 53, 67-8. 138. [Catharine

England Tale

Maria Sedgwick],

(New

A New

York, 1822), pp. 214, 252. 139. Elizabeth Wetherell [Susan Warner],

Queechy (Philadelphia, 1892), 140.

Ibtd,

II,

pp. 213-14.

I,

p. 69.

366

Notes

Henry Ware,

141.

to

Progress of the Chris-

Jr.,

Chapter 5

The Rise and Fall of Feminism

5.

George H.

THE ESCAPE FROM HISTORY: THE STATIC IMAGINATION Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A

Guide

to

(New York,

1972).

A

Pseudo-Events in America

"pseudo-event," in Boorstin's definition,

event which

is

made

happen, because indeed

so that

it

it

to happen, or

mass

an

seem to

covered by the media,

is

can be covered by the media.

many of the "events" of

Boorstin suggests that

modem

is

life

cations; that attention-getting substitutes for

have found

I

helpful for

my own

2.

I

this analysis greatly

thinking.

am not using the term "ideology" in the

Marxist sense of that cluster of concepts by

which a ruling class perpetuates and solidifies its hegemony. I rather mean to suggest by the term a coherent body of doctrine to which groups and individuals give their allegiance

and which opposes apparent

as well as supports their

self-interest.

Both

Marxism and

Christianity have at different points func-

tioned as an ideology in this sense. For

two

crucial discussions relating to this issue, see

Georg Lukacs,

History and Class Consciousness:

Studies in Marxist Dialectics,

trans.

Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass.,

Rodney and

1968),

Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia:

An

In-

troduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, trans.

Louis Wirth and

Edward

Shils

(New York,

n.d.). 3. There were exceptions, of course, although they lie largely outside this study. See

the

openly feminist

Christianity the Equality

revisionist

studies

of

by Sarah M. Grimke', Letters on of the Sexes and the Condition of

Its Practice

timore and London, 1970),

and Purpose

(Bal-

p. 35.

pp. 57-9.

6.

Ibid.,

7.

Whitman

of course argues this in his

"Preface to 1855 Exiition of Leaves of Grass" in

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass and Prose, ed.

Sculley Bradley

Selected

(New York,

1960),

arguments from the turn of the nineteenth century, see The Ameripp. 453-72.

For

similar

can Literary Revolution, 1783-1837, ed. Robert E. Spiller

are not actualities but fabri-

experience.

Callcott, History in the United

1800-1860:

States

1.

America

in

(Chicago, 1969).

tian Life (Boston, 1847), pp. 67, 69, 68, 85.

8.

(New York,

Callcott, op.

cit.,

1967).

p. 195.

Quoted in ibid., p. 139. 10. For the biographies and studies on which my discussion of the lives of these four 9.

men

Van Wyck Brooks, The (New York, 1936);

are drawn, see

Flowering of New England

David Levin, History as Romantic Art: Bancroft, Prescott, Motley and Parkman (Stanford, 1959);

A

Harvey Wish, The American

Social-Intellectual History

of

the

Historian:

Writing of

(New York, 1960); Marcus Cunliffe and Robin W. Winks, eds., Pastmasters: Some Essays on American Historians (New the

American Past

York, 1969); Russell

B.

Nye, George Bancroft:

Brahmin Rebel (New York,

Oliver

1943);

Wendell Holmes, John Lathrop Motley: A Memoir (Boston, 1879); Howard Doughty, Francis Parkman (New York, 1962), and "Park man's Dark Years:

Dwight

Mary

Letters to

Parkman," Harvard Library Bulletin,

4 (1950), 53-85; George Ticknor, Life of William Hickley Prescott (Philadelphia, 1863).

On

11.

the birth and meaning of the "his-

toricist" viewpoint, see Callcott, op.

cit.;

R. G.

Collingwood, The Idea of History (New York, 1956); Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal

Cady

Return: Or, Cosmos and History, trans. Willard

Stanton, The Woman's Bible (Seattle, Wash.,

R. Trask (Princeton, 1954); G. P. Gooch, His-

Women 1974).

(Boston, 1838), and Elizabeth

Both documents were disavowed, not

simply by the sentimentalists with

whom I am

tory

and Historians

(New

in the Nineteenth

Century

York, 1913); Paige Smith, The Historian

(New York,

Hayden

concerned, but by most of the suffragists

and History

themselves.

On Sarah Grimke's life, see Gerda Lemer, The Grimke Sistersfrom South Carolina:

White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination

Rebels Against Slavery (Boston, 1967).

London,

4. For an interesting although not fully comprehensive study of the feminist move-

quoted

ment from its inception until the present, from the {perspective of this ideological failure, see William O'Neill, Everyone Was Brave:

1964);

of Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore and 12.

13.

my

1973).

The I

in

historian

Gooch,

is

Leopold von Ranke,

op. cit.,

p. 87.

speak of Calvinism here, but of course

remark

is

equally

applicable

to

the

Pauline or Augustinian tradition in Catholi-

Notes

to

cism on which the Protestant reformers drew so heavily.

Georg Wilhelm

14.

Philosophy of History, York, 1956), p. 21. 15.

Callcott, op.

16.

Quoted

18.

Quoted Quoted

19.

I

am

trans.

(New

Sibree

J.

(New York,

1965), p.

in

White,

in

Kaufmann,

op. cit.,

my

indebted in

op.

A

1.

cit.,

George

discussion of

He-

p.

in

Nye,

op. cit.,

New

York, 1925), pp. 272-3.

op. cit.,

25. 26.

Ticknor,

27.

Quoted

op. cit,

in

Quoted

28.

in

(New York,

pp. 5-6.

passim.

John Lothrop Motley, The

Holmes,

op. cit.,

p. 26.

Critical Miscellanies (Philadelphia, 1890), p. 77.

Quoted in Ticknor, op. cit., p. 135. 32. Quoted in Herbert Baxter Adams, The Life and Writings of fared Sparks (Boston,

Past: An Interpretation of the Development of Historical Studies in America 16071884 (Chicago, 1960), pp. 115-17. Van Tassel 's

on the

political

motivation of

34.

Quoted

35.

Bancroft's analysis of the witchcraft

44. Francis

George Bancroft, The His-

in

Parkman, La

Salle

and

Nye

the Dis-

125.

III, p.

45. Motley, op.

cit.,

I,

p. 59.

46. Ibid., p. 35.

Exiward Everett, Orations and Speeches

47.

on Various Occasions (Boston, 1870),

Parkman,

48.

III, p.

200.

The Conspiracy of Pontiac,

pp. 312-13. 49.

I

am

indebted in this discussion to

cit.

On

50.

the continuing high reputation at

home and abroad of the romantic historians, John Higham with Leonard Krieger and

see

Felix Gilbert, History (Princeton, 1965), especially pp. 3-72.

in ibid.

late

II.

See also Callcott,

op. cit.,

pp.

21-3.

early nationalist history.

controversy of the

Francis Parkman,

covery of the Great West in Parkman's Works,

Eliade, op.

p. 32.

excellent

is

tory of the United States, ed. Russell B. (Chicago and London, 1966), p. xviii.

See David D. van Tassel, Recording

America

Quoted

43.

31.

I,

The classic example among

pp. 158-9.

The Conspiracy of Pontiac and the Indian War After the Conquest of Canada in Parkman

von Ranke, see Smith, op. cit., pp. 50-6, and Gooch, op. cit., pp. 76-100. 30. William H. Prescott, Biographical and

33.

1860), p. 12.

the treatment of Indians, see Levin,

the historians themselves

On

1893),

p. 385.

I,

Francis, Life ofJohn Eliot: The

Works (Boston, 1891-7),

Rise of the Dutch Republic: A History (London, Toronto, and New York, 1920), I, p. 5.

is

Adams,

York, 1856), pp. 177, 391.

!r

Quoted in ibid., p. 66. Doughty, Francis Parkman,

29.

(New

Con vers

On

S.

ofAlexander Wilson and Captain

41.

op. cit.,

Orator and Statesman (Boston and

24.

[William B. O. Peabody and George

40.

42.

p. 41.

Paul Revere Frothingham, Edward Ev-

23.

39.

Hillard], Lives

I,

22. Ibid., p. 63.

erett:

See The Library of American Biography, IS volumes, ed. Jared Sparks (New York,

Apostle to the Indians

Quoted

pp. 200-^. 108.

38.

Tick-

120. 21.

See Prescott, The Conquest of Mexico, The Conquest of Peru and Other Selections, ed.

John Smith Hillard (Boston, 1877),

S.

the 74.

36.

p. 251.

and Journals of George

Life, Letters,

20.

States of America from the Discovery of American Continent (Boston, 1844), III, p.

1835-48).

p. 91.

gel to Larry Gross.

nor, ed.

161

Roger Howell (New York, 1966), 37. Quoted in Nye, op. cit, p.

pp. 9-11.

cit.,

Walter Kaufmann, Hegel:

in

Reinterpretation 17.

Friedrich Hegel, The

Chapter 5

seventeenth century as

outcome of the attempt by

33^.

51.

Callcott, op.

52.

See Higham,

53.

See Daniel Clalhoun, Professional Lives

cit.,

pp.

op. cit.,

pp. 3-72.

America: Structure and Aspiration 1750-1850

certain groups England clergy to regain their rapidly waning power in community affairs is

(Cambridge, Mass., 1965), p. 195. For the more general climate of nostalgia in the ante-bellum

both keen and unfair. Bancroft's

period, see

the

of the

ism

is

isters,

New

apparent

in

such statements as "the min-

desirous of unjust

build their

anti-clerical-

hope of

it

influence,

only on error"

could

—hardly

an adequate summation even of the complex role of the

Mathers

in

the witchcraft

crisis.

See George Bancroft, The History of the United

in

the

Arthur

P.

Dudden, "Nostalgia and

Amenczn," Journal of the History of Ideas,

22 (1961), 515-30; Neil Harris, The Artist in

American

1860

Society:

(New York,

The Formative Years 17901966);

Michael

B. Katz, The

Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation

in

Mid-Nineteenth-Century Massachu-

368

setts

Notes

to

(Boston, 1968); Marvin Meyers, Tbejack-

sonian Persuasion: Politics and Belief {Stanford,

Fred Somkin, Unquiet Eagle: Memory

1957);

and Desire in the Idea of American Freedom 1815-1860 (Ithaca, N.Y, 1967); Bernard Wishy, The Child and the Republic: The Dawn of Modem American Child Nurture (Philadelphia, 1968).

See Callcott,

54.

pp. 69-70, for a

op. cit.,

sociological profile of the

more distinguished

and pp. 111-15 for

historians of the period,

of the antiquarian impulse.

discussion

a

He

makes no mention of the conflict between romantic and antiquarian history I am discussing. 55. Callcott, op.

New

57.

"The Religion of

Englander, 12 (1854),

p. 194.

the Present," Chris-

See Arethusa Hall, Life and Character of

193, 211,

290-3 for his views on war.

Edwards A. Park,

Duties of a Theolo-

(New York,

Anniversary Address

Exiwards A. Park, The Indebtedness of the

64.

Catharine Maria Sedgwick,

York, 1835),

1860

The Lin-

(New

p. xii.

I,

Ann

D. Wood, "The 'Scribbling Women' and Fanny Fern: Why Women 71.

See

On

Christian Attitudes Towards

and

(New York and Radical

(1971), 3-24.

Roland H. Bainton,

pacifism, see

War and

Peace:

Bushnell,

Moral Uses of Dark

York, 1868),

America

Antebellum

in

Eugene

The

Curti,

ment: Phases ofAmerican Social History from the Colonial Period to the Outbreak of the Civil

(New York, 73.

Curti, op.

cit.,

74.

Henry

May,

op. cit.,

of the State

to the

War

1944), pp. 396-423.

F.

p. 22.

Protestant Churches

(New

York,

op. cit., p. 399,

1949),

cit.,

pp. 201-2.

76. Ibid, pp. 23-4.

Ladies' Magazine, 9(1836), 215-19.

His-

78.

Ladies' Wreath,

tory ofAmerican Magazines Vol. II, 1850-1865 (Cambridge, Mass., 1938), p. 51.

79.

Ladies' Album,

80.

See Alice M. Baldwin, The

67.

Quoted

in

Frank Luther Mott,

A

EUet here strikingly anticipated the

French historian Lucien Febvre. See his essay "Sensibility and History: How to Reconstitute the Emotional Life of the Past," in Lucien

Febvre,

A New

Kind of History and Other Es-

K.

trans.

says,

Folca

(New York,

68.

an

'j

Quoted

in

Sarah Josepha Hale,

the Creation to

A.D. 1854

and

the

(1847-8), 50-3.

10(1848), 109-13.

New England (New

American Revolution

York, 1958). (1815), 24-5.

81.

Friend of Peace,

82.

Ibid,

83.

"War: Discourses Before the Congre-

1

5.

gational Ministers of Massachusetts" in

Wom-

and

Record; or Sketches of All Distinguished

Women From

Clergy

1

1973),

pp. 12-26.

(New

York, 1855), pp. 645-6. 69. For examples of typical reviews of

pp.

and Curti,

77.

Clergy, p. 11.

and

p. 48.

75. Curti, op.

p. 76.

65. Park, The Indebtedness

66.

A

Critical Re-evaluation

Nashville, 1960); Peter Brock,

Pacifists

26-7. See also Tyler,

in ibid., p. 11.

(New

Things

70.

to

woods; or Sixty Years Since in America

Industrial America

State to the Clergy (Boston, 1851), p. 11.

Quoted Horace

in the Literary Thought of Her Time Up (Washington, D.C., 1937).

(Princeton, 1968); Merle

1839), p. 29.

63.

A Study of the Works of Catharine Maria Sedgwick (Columbus, Ohio, 1958), and Sister Mary Michael Welsh, Catharine Maria Sedgwick: Her Position

N.C., 1929); Alice Felt Tyler, Freedom's Fer-

Horace

62.

inadequate, eval-

Bushnell, "Barbarism the First

60.

1

Danger," National Preacher, 21 (1847), 218.

An

later, also

American Peace Crusade 1815-1860 (Durham,

Friend of Peace,

61.

For

uations, see Richard B. Gidez,

(1815), 39.

59.

gian:

(1828), 403-20.

Historical Survey

the Rev. Sylvester Judd (Boston, 1854), pp. 121,

I

(1827-28), 289-95; [F. W. P. Greenwood], ''Hope Leslie, " North American Review, 26

72.

tian Examiner, 67 (1859), 55. 58.

""Hope Leslie, " Western Monthly Magazine,

Wrote," American Quarterly, 23

pp. 112-15.

cit.,

56.

Chapter 5

The

Works of William E. Channing, D.D (Boston New York, 1848), III, pp. 40-1, 50. For a

more ambivalent response to pacifism, see Ralph Waldo Emerson, "War," in Emerson's

New

Works (Boston and

York, 1878), XI,

pp. 177-201.

Sedgwick's historical novels which single out

84.

Ladies' Album,

for praise their ahistorical qualities, see [Wil-

85.

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Chapters From

liam

CuUen

Bryant], ''Redwood,

can Review, 20 (1825), 245-69;

''

North Ameri-

Timothy

Flint,

a Life (Boston and 86.

Adams,

10(1848), 109.

New

op. cit.,

II,

York, 1897), p. 191.

p. 98.

Notes

87. The Memoir of

to

Chapter S

"A

96.

Lucretia Davidson" by Catharine

97.

exception, appropriately,

is

369

Hall, op Cheney,

Life,

Lucretia Davidson was a young, consump-

York, 1895),

tive,

pious

in

from the

p>oet, entirely different

p. 510.

and Diary (Boston and

Letters

New

p. v.

Henry Bacon,

99.

p. 2.

Addison, Lucy Larcom:

98. Rev. Daniel D.

The Library of American Biography, VII (New York, 1860), pp. 219-98.

Maria Sedgwick,

cit.,

op. cit.,

and Prose by Mrs.

Poetry

usual subjects of the Sparks biographies, and

Charlotte A. Jerauld (Boston, 1850), pp. 17-19.

Sedgwick's account of her

See also Selections from

in the tradition

is

of the clerical-feminine memoirs as describing 88.

I

work

I

will be

it.

am

contemporary

referring to the

of the historian

Femand Braudel and

of

the psychologist-historian Erik Erikson. See particularly Braudel, Capitalism

and Material

Miriam Kochan (New York, 1967), and Erikson, Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (New Life 1400-1800, trans.

York, 1958). Dramatically different as Braudel

and Erikson of course are, they are among the most distinguished representatives of the modem school which has questioned and overcome the abstract and political quality of traditional history Braudel by stressing the material and environmental aspects of the human experience, Erikson by exploring the psychological and spiritual development and influence of prominent historical figures. One should also mention in this context the recent work of the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, whose expressed antagonism to the historicist view would have won some allegiance among the ministers and women I am

—

See

discussing.

"The Kyong,"

particularly

Levi-Strauss,

Tristes Tropiques,

trans.

and Doreen Weightman (New York,

John 1974),

pp. 405-15.

For an excellent essay on a more recent example of this phenomenon, see Leo Lowen89.

thal,

"The Triumph of Mass

ture,

Popular Culture, and Society (Palo Alto,

Calif., 1961), pp.

90.

acter

Idols" in Litera-

109-^.

C

Edgarton

Mayo

of Mrs.

The Works of Charles Pollen with a Life (Boston and New York,

101.

Memoir of His 1887),

I,

pp.

7,

325, 414, 534.

A

102.

Mary Clemmer Ames,

104.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, describing

Memorial of Alice and Phoebe Cary With Some of Their Later Poems (New York, 1874), pp. vi, 97. 103. Bacon, op. cit., pp. 9, 74, 76-7. his

uneasy relations as a child with

his rather

stem and harsh minister

compared

himself to

Adam

father,

hiding in the garden at the

sound of the Lord's voice. See James Elliot Cabot, A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston and New York, 1887), I, p. 35. In a sense, the liberal minister of Emerson's generation did indeed wish to hide from the father and the command to historical responsibility he suggested and take refuge in the garden, a place rich in Biblical, sexual, and feminine

connotations. Another Unitarian, a convert

from Episcopalianism, explaining

his

new

sense of freedom, wrote in 1852: "Nature has

recovered the bloom of her

lost

Eden; and

Lord God walks again in his garden in the cool of the day; and I no longer tremble

the

sound of his voice, but listen to it, as to the melodious whisperings of the wind amid at the

fragrant arbors." See

How

I Became a Uni-

tarian Explained in a Series ofLetters to a Friend

By

a Clergyman of the Protestant Episcopal

Church (Boston, 1852),

of Miss Susanna Anthony

son, this

(Portland,

the Writings

with a Memoir by Her

Husband (Boston, 1849), pp. 9-10. 100. Cheney, op. cit., pp. 549, 510.

See Samuel Hopkins, The Life and Char-

man

p. 192.

UnHke Emer-

has achieved a reconciliation

with God: he has found a milder and kindlier

1810). 91.

New

92.

Marie Howland, Papa V

Englander, 24 (1845), 387.

Own

Girl

Deity

(New

York, 1874), pp. 64-5. 93. William Sprague, Annals of the American Pulpit (New York, 1837-39), I, pp. 659, 655. 94.

Ibid, p. 556.

95.

Mary

(New York,

who

is

now

a part of the soft scenery

of the Garden rather than an admonishing

The Garden,

God, become the primary reality; the Fall, which marked the beginning not just of mortal alienation but of human history, ha^ been intruder in

it.

rather than

has

obviated. Guilt and the threatening paternal

Bushnell Cheney, Life and Letters

of Horace Bushnell 468.

Sarah

1880), pp. 465,

presence have disappeared together.

The garden was

the chosen and conse-

crated terrain of the feminine sensibility in

.

370

Notes

American

mid-nineteenth-century

to

Chapter 5

culture.

Lady-litterateurs like Sarah Hale and

Flora

titles:

Interpreter and Fortuna Flora

's

(Boston, 1848) or Drops from Flora Poetry of Flowers (Boston, 1852).

umes were often extremely

Cup or the These vol-

!f

who

loved the

"little."

usually consisted

1930],

Mrs. Sigoumey was the perfect confidante

book

this case. In 1856, she published a

tled Past Meridian

(New York and

on the "beauty of

1854),

They

The Sweet

[New Haven,

p. 5.)

petite in size; their

femininity seemed to dictate their smallness, and one remembers Sarah Exlgarton Mayo,

Sigoumey:

Mrs.

Singer of Hartford

Griffin respectively turned out books with

coy

Haight,

S.

Mary

in

enti-

Boston,

age"; in later life she

exulted, "the overmastering force of the passions to

broken." In a long passage in Letters

[is]

Mothers, she elaborated further:

of poeticized, moralistic, and sentimental de-

probably the highest

whose pretty appearance and sweet scent were

Entire resignation

clearly to symbolize and suggest a kind of

debility gives leisure for meditation.

transfigured female "influence." Ladies' maga-

If

of

scriptions

the

various

flowers,

zines and gift annuals of the day,

women

edited by

from

their titles

ning

if

...

.

Protracted

.

.

.

it is

cun-

its

because those weary laborers

tence has come.

The Amaranth,

.

the right hand forgets

have need of repose.

favorite flowers: The Ladies' Violet,

faith.

the deafened ear no longer excites the

mind,

commonly

or by ministers, often drew

The Lily, The

Wreath,

is

attainment of our

It

The Sabbath

brings with

it

of exis-

a season

The Rose of Sharon, The Lily of the Valley were among such popular floral offerings. Girls

of silence, in which to meditate, to release

were frequently named after flowers: Bushnell called one of his daughters "Lily." As we

past

have seen, many women authors selecting noms de plume took floral or at least vernal

let.

names. Fictional heroines,

Stowe's

A

framed

in a

105.

thaniel ix.

For

Wooing

Minister's

bower of apple

Exlwards A. Park,

Emmons

first

ed.,

a similar fascination

Edwin Pond

men were

I

pp. clxxiii-

Memory

are

of debility, pensioners of

flow

should add here that

Harmah Gould,

a

in a

own

if

a

in

108.

School

the most exu-

talking with a companion,

man

trembling, white-haired aged

passes before me,

hot and rolling

upon

my

change

lips,

in

my

I

feel the tears

call

it

gushing

down to quench the smile before I am aware of the emotions. But

mourning nor sorrow only

in

it

is

that does this.

melting. (Quoted in

moved by

the

el-

I

not

can

Gordon

embody the virtues memory unfit for

the tribute which in part

is

her

Thomas J. Sawyer and of Caroline M. Sawyer (Boston and Chicago, 1900), p. 336. A. A. Miner, St.

A

Discourse, Delivered in

Church, Boston at the Funeral of the

Rev. Hosea Ballou (Boston, 1852), pp. 16, 17, 21, 33,40.

109.

and

reverses her tab-

kind of excess of self-love; she pays

man

Indeed, the sentimental literature of

early religious liberalism streets,

cur-

106. Maturin M. Ballou, Biography of Rev. Hosea Ballou (Boston, 1852), pp. 212-13. 107. Quoted in Richard Elddy, The Life of

ney:

spirits,

far-off"

due.

New

ence for the elderly, wrote to Mrs. Sigour-

berant

The

competition with the world. Gould's tears the old

poet, trying to explain her rever-

Walking the

.

moving

Mothers [Hartford, 1838],

Gould and Sigoumey

with the aged

they were fragile but because they were

some Hampshire

{Letters to

.

pp. 224-8.)

Parker, ed., The

precious not simply because

sense feminized.

rent of things.

of the Sabbath destined to

man's rugged militant Calvinism by focusing his gentle old age.

.

to the feminine ideal: they are pious creatures

a literal follower of Bushnell, softens the older

aged

ties.

vivid than the

appears

Autobiography of the Rev. Enoch Pond (Boston, 1883). Parker, Pond's grandson, a minister and

on

more

derly because the aged are by definition close

Memoir of NaI,

is

in

blossoms.

(Boston, 1861),

minister, see Rev.

had

possible,

if

Mary Scudder

flowers in their hands;

the soul from earthly

makes stock

out of the "father" and the to

villains

(Dalvinist minister

whom he is symbolically allied.

The Univer-

and Ladies' Repository was launched in 1833 under the editorship of the Streeter

salist

brothers simply as The Universalist.

was

filled

As such

with sermonizing non-fictional

it

arti-

on the advantages of the Universalist faith. Within the year, it changed editors and became a magazine for Universalist ladies. cles

Notes

dedicated to the proposition that true

kindness of their nature and [their]

29 [1833], 230).

(II,

win

azine tried to

estingly enough,

.

.

.

The new mag-

religious fiction

with scathing attacks on Calvinist clergymen.

Such men have "passed

bounds of de-

all

cency," one contributor warns

luridly, to se-

more significantly, the first piece to appear by a woman (who calls herself "Fidelia") was entitled "Letter from a Young Lady to Her Fafeminine

cure

ther"

243-4).

i,ibid.,

Even

converts.

The daughter

firmly

announces her new allegiance to Universalism and defies her tyrannical and orthodox parent.

From

1833 on, the Ladies' Repository regu-

about cruel Calvinist fathers

larly ran stories

and pure Universalist daughters.

"The Vampyre: or Calvinism"

A

title like

the Legitimate Fruits of

(4 [1836], 17-23)

speaks for

itself.

daughters, but

all in vain.

Jr.,"

wayward

Whether he

resorts

to seduction or violence, the father-figure finally exerts his authority

only as a gesture of

impotence: the daughter-figure remains true

body, p. xlvii.

pastor and

her

own

p. xc.

Ibid.,

5.

The

some mourning in America between 1820 and 1875 are complex and elusive. The historian's first instinct is to turn to demography and to consider the possi6.

causes of this literary, and in

part actual, magnification of

of an unusually high death rate in this

bility

There was of course the

period.

which

struction [Boston, 1961], p. 531). Massive,

national,

about the destination of the departed during

and after the war seems

trusting

Lydia Huntley Sigoumey, The Young Offering, or

(Boston, 1862),

Gems of

Prose

and Poetry

p. 10.

111.

Ibid, pp. 253, 247.

112.

Compare Lydia Huntley Sigoumey,

Letters

(New York,

of Life

Connecticut,

Forty

1824), or The Lovely Sisters rietta

1866), or Sketch

Years

Since

of

(Hartford,

Margaret and Hen-

(Hartford, 1846), with Lucy Howard's

Journal

(New

inevitable. Elizabeth

Stuart Phelps claimed that she wrote her bestselling novel The Gates Ajar (1868), a fictional-

mourning manual, because she was

ized

touched by the grief of the thousands

had

lost

New

who

beloved sons and husbands in the war.

York, 1897),

p. 97.

Yet the shock im-

War

merely dramatized

parted by the Civil

and accelerated

way. Phelps's

a trend already well

own

under

father had felt for years

that only his "conception of heaven as a place .

.

not unlike this world," an idea which

is

the

key to the appeal of The Gates Ajar, made living

Lady V

even

need for consolation and curiosity

tolerable

him.

to

heart. 110.

War,

Civil

took a million lives (James G. Randall

and David Donald, The Civil War and Recon-

.

to the precepts and examples of her gentle

Universalist

Late William B. 0. Pea-

the

See Phelps, Chapters From a Life (Boston and

Fathers with names like "John Calvin,

oppress and even murder their

371

Sermons by

4.

amiable

a female readership, inter-

by mingling

Chapter 6

women

repugnant "to the

instinctively find Calvinism

sympathies"

to

Phelps, Austin Phelps:

A

(Elizabeth

Stuart

Memoir [New York,

1891], p. 18.) Writers in both England and America had anticipated Elizabeth Phelps's preoccupation with death and the afterlife; Heaven Our Home (Boston, 1864) and Life in Heaven (Boston, 1865) by the Englishman Peter Branks went through dozens of editions in England. And The Gates Ajar was even more successful in England, which had had no civil

war, than in America.

York, 1858).

Many

cultural historians have

assumed

or implied that nineteenth-century American children died of

THE DOMESTICATION OF DEATH: THE POSTHUMOUS CONGREGATION 1.

Christian Examiner, 62 (1857), 114.

2.

Sermons by

the

Late William B. 0. Peabody

with a Memoir by His Brother (Boston, p.

1

849),

XXV.

more or

less

natural causes in

staggering numbers. In this view, the copious consolation literature, so largely concerned

with deceased children, was

way

a sentimental

but

cope with a widespread and valid sense of loss and deprivation. Recently, however, scholars, most notably Maris

viable

to

Vinovskis of the University of Wisconsin,

have begun to demonstrate that the mortality

3. Rufus Wilmot Griswold, ed.. The Poets and Poetry of America (New York, 1874),

rate of the period

p. 266.

is

was not so high

supposed. Although no at least

final results

as

are

once in,

it

uncertain that the death rate for

372

Notes

infants increased

from the eighteenth

to

to the

nineteenth century in the northern United States;

it

may have

The outpour-

decreased.

ing of mourners' manuals needs further explanation.

The answer may

well

lie

con-

in

temporary perceptions or misperceptions of demographic data, perceptions shaped by economic and social factors. Northern middle-class families by mid-century were beginning to "plan" their families;

women hoped

to

have three or four children, rather than keep

Chapter 6

and "Spiritualism and Science: Decade of the Spirit Rappings," American Quarterly, 29 (1972),

(1975), 200-21,

Reflections on the First

474^500. 19.

For accounts of the "Rural Cemetery"

movement, see Thomas Bender, "The 'Rural' Cemetery Movement: Urban Travail and the

New England

Apf>eal of Nature,"

Quarterly,

47 (1974), 196-211; John Brinckenhofl^ Jackson, American Space: The Centennial Years

perity and incipient scientific investigation,

(New York, 1972), p. 70; Stanley French, "The Ometery as Cultural Institution: The E^ablishment of Mt. Aubum and

expectations were perhaps raised beyond the

the 'Rural Cemetery'

three or four. In a period of increasing pros-

level of available

medical competence.

Mrs. Sigoumey's

7.

poem

has been

re-

American Women on Womanhood 1820-

(New

1920

York, 1972), pp. 59, 60. George C. Prentiss, The Life and Letters

8.

(New York, 1882), p. 295. Perry Miller and Thomas H. Johnson, The Puritans (New York, Evanston, and

of Elizabeth Prentiss 9.

eds..

London,

1963),

II, p.

Movement"

Death

in

in

America, ed. David E. Stannard (Philadelphia,

printed in Gail Parker's anthology The Oven Birds:

1865-1876

475.

1975), pp. 69-91; Neil Harris,

American

The Artist

in

The Formative Years 1790-

1860 (New York, 1970), pp. 200-8; Barbara Rotundo, "The Rural Ometery Movement," Essex Institute Historical Collections,

231^0; Peter

Schmitt, Back

J.

Arcadian Myth

in

to

1

09

( 1

97 3 ),

Nature: The

Urban America (New York,

1969), pp. 67-8. 20.

See The Works of Anne Bradstreet, ed.

Society:

Merrifield

Harriette

Forbes,

Grave-

Jeannine Hensley (Cambridge, Mass., 1967),

of Early New England and the Men Who Made Them 1653-1800 (Boston, 1927), pp.

p. 235.

63-7.

10.

Theodore Cuyler,

11.

The

Empty Crib

(New York,

1873), pp. 81-2. Cuyler also produced two other very popular mourning

manuals, Beulab Land: or Words of Cheer for Christian Pilgrims (New York, 1896), and God's Light on

Dark Clouds (New York,

1882).

Eunice Hale Cobb, Memoir ofJames Arthur Cobb (Boston, 1852), pp. 24, 30, 111. 13. Sermons by the Late William B. 0. Pea12.

body, pp. xlvii, xc, Ixxiv. 14. Lydia Huntley Sigoumey, Zinzendorff and Other Poems (New York and Boston,

1835), p. 111. 15.

Life

16.

Sisters

York, 1866),

Letters

of

at the 18.

My School," MS in The Sigoumey Collection

Sigoumey, "A Record of

am

21.

1972).

Moses

King,

Aubum

Mt.

Cemetery

(Cambridge, Mass., 1839), pp. 46-8.

Theodore Cuyler explained that no phrase was as popular for tombstone inscrip22.

tions as "asleep in Jesus"; see God's Light on

Dark

Clouds, p. 164.

Cuyler, The Empty Crib, pp. 158, 173. 24. Arethusa Hall, Life and Character of the

On

basing

my

interpretation

of

on the brilliant work in progress by R. Lawrence Moore of Comell University. See his articles, "The Spiritualist Medium: A Study of Female Professionalism in spiritualism

Victorian America," American Quarterly, 11

p. 523.

flowers, see Jessica Mitford, The American

Way of Death (New York,

1963), pp. 198-9.

Nehemiah D. D. Adams, Agnes and the Coffin By Her Father (Boston,

Key of Her Little 1857), p. 15. 26.

Connecticut Historical Society. I

(New York,

25.

1846), p. 238. 17.

Experimental and Willow Trees: Archaeology in Colonial Ometeries," American Antiquities 31 (1966), 502-10; and Edmund Gillon, Jr., Victorian Cemetery Art ubs,

Reverend Sylvester Judd (Boston, 1854),

p. 408.

Lydia Huntley Sigoumey, The Lovely Margaret and Henrietta (Hartford,

unpublished

On cemetery art, see also Edwin Dethel-

son and James Feete, "Death's Heads, Cher-

23.

Lydia Huntley Sigoumey,

(New

stones

also

Quoted

in

Mitford,

op. cit.,

p. 222.

See

Robert Haberstein and William Lamers,

The History of American Funeral Directing

(Milwaukee,

1955).

op

27.

Hall,

28.

Quoted Quoted

29.

cit.,

in

p.

131.

Rotundo,

in ibid.,

op. cit.,

p. 237.

p. 238.

Notes

on

excellent

to

Chapter 6

373

p. 281.

this

54.

Ibid.,

aspect of the cemetery movement. For the

55.

Elizabeth

Harris,

30.

cemetery

op.

is

cit.,

as Utopia, see Sylvester Judd's ex-

A

traordinary romance, Margaret:

Tale of the

Real and Ideal: Blight and Bloom

(Boston,

which the hero and heroine set up an ideal liberal religious community called Mons Christi which is laid out exactly like the new 1845), in

cemeteries, with floral names, marble statuary, etc.

32.

Quoted Quoted

33.

See The Picturesque Pocket Companion

31.

and

French,

in

op. cit.,

p. 87.

in ibid., p. 79.

Guide Through Mt. Auburn (Bos-

Visitor's

ton, 1839), pp.

3

Toward

From

Death:

don, 1974),

to

the Present,

M. Ranum (Baltimore and LonFrench,

in

op. cit.,

(Richmond, Wilder Foote, Three CentuVa., 1927); Henry Hymnology (Cambridge, ries of American Mass., 1940); Edward S. Ninde, The Story of the American Hymn (New York and Cincinnati,

Christian Examiner, 26 (1836), 338-9.

37.

Rev.

Samuel

H. W. Stephenson, Unitarian Hymn Writers (London, 1931). For the most impor-

The

Phillips,

Christian

Hymns and Choirs (Andover,

L. Furber,

57.

Foote,

58.

Ibid.,

59.

See

Theodore Cuyler,

An

Long

39.

Quoted

1902), p. 37.

B.

Tatum, "The

Quarterly,

3

N. Parker

40. tion

(1951), 36-51.

(New

Life:

Rag-Bag: A

York, 1855).

Collec-

p. 124.

cit.,

op. cit.,

Park,

63.

Ibid, pp. 81-2.

64.

Quoted

in

mestic architecture, see Carl Bode, Antebellum

65.

Phelps,

Park,

For

42.

cit.,

p. 209.

Culture (Carbondale and Edwardsville,

111.,

Picturesque Pocket Companion, pp. 22-3.

44.

William Holcombe, Our Children

Heaven (Philadelphia, 1868), p. 24. 45. Ralph Waldo Trine, In Tune With Infinite or Fullness

(New

of Peace, Power, and Plenty

(New

My

A

Portfolio:

York, 1882),

Austin Phelps, The

Still

munion With God (Boston, 50.

Austin Phelps,

51.

Ibid, p. 240.

52.

Rev.

A Mem-

My

Payson, D.D.

Hour:

or.

Com-

George

op. cit.,

and

p. 66.

Furber,

op.

cit.,

Ninde,

in

op. cit.,

pp. 165, 168,

Austin Phelps, The see

George

Still

C. Prentiss, Life

Hour,

p.

45.

and Letters of

Elizabeth Prentiss, p. 60, for a similar expres-

69. Elizabeth

Portfolio,

70.

Stuart Phelps,

For

a

Between the

p. 223.

study of these monastic visions,

development and themes, see Ann Douglas Wood, "Piers Plowman and the Monastic Vision Tradition," Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1970. I

The common

pattern

discovered in these visions was one in which

the dreamer, after a tour of

p. 23.

hell, is

given a

glimpse of heaven; ravished with delight, he

A

Memoir of the

(New

York,

n.d.),

p. 246.

53.

cit.,

their

1860), p. 96.

Rev. Asa Cummings,

Edward

Ibid, p. 82.

Quoted

And

Collec-

p. 263.

p. 227.

49.

op.

173, 347.

A Mem-

48. Elizabeth Phelps, Austin Phelps: oir,

66.

Gates (Boston, 1887),

Austin Phelps,

of Essays

Furber,

sion of confidence.

pp. 127, 100.

47. tion

the

pp. 181-2, and Ben-

and

Ninde,

67.

68.

York, 1897).

46. Elizabeth Phelps, Austin Phelps: oir,

in

of a York,

pp. 84, 64-5, 85.

1959), pp. 38-50. 43.

(New

pp. 82, 52, 123, 79.

a discussion of "picturesque" do-

41. Harris, op.

Chris-

pp. 46ff.

Phelps,

62.

Recollections

Autobiography

See Foote,

61.

son, op.

Willis, The

of Ephemera

pp. 42, 44, 48.

"Hymns and Hymnbooks,"

Christian Examiner, 31 (1841), 151.

George

op. cit.,

p. 61.

tian Examiner, 8 (1832), 163-81.

38.

and the Picturesque," American

Mass.,

1860).

60.

Beautiful

hymns, see

Austin Phelps, Edwards A. Park, and Daniel

(Springfield, Mass., 1860), p. 15.

in

Christian Church

1921);

p. 83.

36.

Home

Use in Worship (Philadelphia, 1915), and The

Hymnology of the

p. 72.

Quoted

35.

Middle Ages

the

trans. Patricia

Heaven-

Stepping

tant nineteenth-century study of

flF.

Philip Aries, Western Attitudes

34.

Prentiss,

ward (New York, 1880), pp. 23, 425-6. 56. For the development of American hymnology and its context, see Louis F. Benson, The English Hymn: Its Development and

wishes to stay but

and

Letters

Elizabeth Prentiss, pp. 11-12, 142, 60, 510.

of

forced by his guide to

return instead to a better performance of his earthly duties.

C. Prentiss, Life

is

It

should be stressed that this

vision tradition persisted in various guises until

modem times.

For American examples, see

.

Notes to Chapter 6

374

Some Remarkable Passages in the Life of Dr. George De Benneville (Germantown, Pa., 1890); David Lx)rd, Visions ofParadise: An Epic (New York, 1867). In the monastic

dreams heralded

and

persisted in life

link

among

visions,

such

a conversion experience; this literary

William Sprague, Annals

gelical groups. See

of the American Pulpit

VI and VII on

(New

York, 1837-69),

the Baptists and Methodists,

see

The Perpetuity of the Earth; a Discourse Preached Before the Premillennial Advent Lillie,

(New

Association

York, 1842), and Anna

man. The World's Jubilee

tradition

nineteenth-century American evan-

For other examples,

135, 50, 15, 253, 10.

John

Jacob

80.

Emmons

(New York,

Ide, ed.. The

(Boston, 1842).

I,

Sili-

1836).

Works of Nathaniel p. 187.

George B. Cheever, The Powers of the World to Come (New York, 1853), pp. 108, 221, 81

250.

For other examples of

this

ambivalent

passim.

attempt to enforce the older theocentric

For general discussion of the develop>ing ideas of heaven and the millennium, see James P. Martin, The Last Judgment in Protestant Theology from Orthodoxy to Ritschl (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1963); Ulrich Simon, Heaven in

heaven, see Rufus

71.

the Christian Tradition

(New

York, 1958); Er-

Lee Tuveson, Millennium and Utopia:

nest

Study

in the

A

Background of the Idea of Progress

(Berkeley, Cahf., 1949).

Second Gaming: The Millenarian Tradition

Light on the Grave

A.

J.

De

Jong, As the

Waters Cover the Sea: Millennial Expectations in the Rise

of Anglo-American Missions 1640-1810 and Ernest Lee Tuveson, Redeemer

Thomas

movements

America; see Arthur Beston,

in

Backwoods Utopias: The Sectarian Origins and the in

Owenite Phase of Communitarian Socialism America 1663-1829 (Philadelphia, 1970),

and

6-8;

pp.

Oneida: Utopian ration 73.

Maren Lockwood Garden, Community to Modem Corpo-

(New York,

ed., Premillennial Es-

says of the Prophetic Conference (Chicago, 1879), p. 7.

74.

1844), 75.

Sermons by I,

F.

W.

Greenwood (Boston,

P.

Duffield,

Dissertations on

Prophecies Relative to the Second Christ 76.

the

Coming ofJesus

(New York, 1842), p. 381. Rev. J. W. Brooks, Essays on

the

Advent

and Kingdom of Christ and the Events Connected Therewith (Philadelphia, 1840), 77. 78.

West,

ed.,

p.

op. cit,

pp.

xiii,

17-70; H.

Richard Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God America (New York, 1937), passim; and

mon, 79. the

op. cit.,

in Si-

pp. 20-37.

Henry F. Hill, The Saint V Inheritance; or to Come (New York, 1853), pp. 178,

World

F.

Doc-

Living,"

National

and Augustus C. Believer's

Home (Boston, 1854). See William Henry Charming, Memoir

Journey and Future

of William Ellery Cbanning with Extracts from His Correspondence and Manuscripts (Boston, 1846),

II, p. 18;

Men"

Charles Follen, in

"On the Future

The Works of Charles Follen

with a Memoir of His Life (Boston and New York, 1887), V, pp. 12-96; F. W. P. Green-

wood, "Recognition of Friends," "Voices from Heaven," "The Good Revealed," "Peaceful Sleep," and "Seeing the Departed" in

Sermons of Consolation (Boston, 1842) pp.

216-62, 312-21, and "Heaven a Place of Rest" in

Sermons

pp. 109-21;

II,

and "A Door

Andrew Peabody,

Heaven"

in

in Christian Belief

and Life (Boston, 1875), pp. 160-8; Henry Ware, An Inquiry Into the Foundation, Evidences and Truths of Religion (Cambridge, II,

pp. 263-70.

83. Of course the big influence here was Emanuel Swedenborg, Concerning Heaven and Its Wonders and Concerning Hell: From Things Heard and Seen (New York, 1863). For an example of heavenly scenes from consolation

literature, see

17.

Premillennial Essays, p. 17.

See Martin,

the

to

Thomp)Son, The Better Land; or The

Mass., 1842),

pp. 41, 35.

George

to the

"Identity of the Eirthly and Heavenly Life"

1969), p. 12.

Nathaniel West,

York, 1869); C.

"No (Dommunications

Shipman,

L.

from the Dead

State of

impulse was very fundamental to the Utopian

Its

ofa Future Life (Boston, 1858); John WilHeaven liams Kimball, (Boston, 1857);

(n.p., 1970);

Nation: The Idea of America's Millennial Role (Chicago and London, 1968). The millennial

and

trine

82.

view, 39 (1952), 44^58;

(New

Hudson, Debt and Grace As Related

America," Mississippi Valley Historical Re-

in

Clark, Heaven

Preacher, 30 (1856), 246-54;

See Ira V. Brown, "Watchers for the

72.

W.

Spiritual Emblems (Boston, 1857); Peter Grant,

Thomas Baldwin Thayer, Over Walks Into

the River, or. Pleasant

Shadows and Beyond: the Sick, the Dying,

1862).

For

a

more

A

the Valleys of Book of Consolation for

and

the

Bereaved (Boston,

learned version, see Rev. H.

Harbaugh, Heaven; or An Earnest and Scriptural Inquiry Into the Abode of the Sainted Dead (Philadelphia, 1853),

3

vols.

Notes to Chapter 7

interesting is George Wood's which he published to Httle effect then, capitalizing on Elizabeth Stuart

The most

84.

Future

Life,

in 1858;

Phelps's best-selling The Gates Ajar, he repub-

Wide Open: or

lished the novel as The Gates

Scenes in Another

World (Boston,

Heaven,"

Visit to

in

The Complete Works of

Mark Twain (New York,

1922), vol.

\'III,

See

Mary Angela

Bennett, Elizabeth

Stuart Phelps (Philadelphia, 1939),

more recent

interpretation

p. 2.

For

of Phelps,

in

a

see

Christine Stansell, "Elizabeth Stuart Phelps:

Study

and

Unitarian

Congrega-

non-evangelical

A

Female Rebellion," The Massachusetts

who found it impossible to who has ever known

Grandison Finney,

believe that "a person

the love of

(quoted

pp. 223-78. 86.

Dulany Addison, The Clergy in American Life and Letters (London, 1900). This was a period which saw a marked refinement and secularization of sermon style, especially among the tional groups. Revivalist leaders like Charles

1869).

See "Extract from Captain Stormfield's

85.

375

em

in

God

relish a secular

William G. McLoughlin,

Revivalism

nounced

can

[New York,

1959], p.

was

which

preaching

novel"

Mod-

Jr., 1

de-

18),

but

the

"reading of elegant literary essays" (Finney, Lectures on Revivals of Religion, ed. William

McLoughlin [Cambridge,

Mass.,

1960],

G. pp.

"A Wom-

176-8). Joseph Buckminster, in contrast, had demonstrated that the pulpit could and

an's Pulpit," Atlantic Monthly, 26 (1870), 11-

should induce "gratification of the taste as

22.

well as

Review, 13 (1972), 239-56. 87. See Elizabeth Stuart Phelps,

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Gates Ajar,

88.

Helen Sootin Smith (Cambridge, Mass.,

ed.

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Strugglefor

New

Immortality (Boston and

York, 1889),

.

improvement of the character"

(El-

1851], p.

and most non-evangelicals followed

When

356),

his lead.

Austin Phelps inquired, a half century

"why should not a work of intellectual

after Buckminster's death,

pp. 55, 61. 90. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Songs lent

.

Stevens Buckminster [Boston,

1964), p. 108. 89.

.

Buckminster Lee, Memoirs of Rev. Joseph Buckminster, D.D. and of His Son Rev. Joseph iza

New

World (Boston and

of the Si-

York, 1885),

Christian sermon be a

art?" (Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Austin Phelps:

Memoir [New York,

pp. 11-12. 91. Elizabeth Phelps, Gates Ajar, pp. 48-9.

92. Elizabeth

Stuart

Beyond

Phelps,

the

1891],

p.

A

he was That serwas amply

69),

clearly posing a rhetorical question.

mons could be art, and popular art,

demonstrated by the constant appearance of

Gates (Boston, 1883), pp. 125-6, 128.

the flowery efi^usions of

men

like F.

W.

P.

Greenwood and

THE PERIODICAL

PRESS:

ARENA

FOR HOSTILITY 1.

tion 2.

can

N. Parker

Willis, The

of Ephemera

Frank Luther Mott, Magazines,

Vol.

II,

A

Collec-

1855), p. 70.

A

History of Ameri1850-186S (Cam-

bridge, Mass., 1938), pp. 141, 10-11, 60. 3.

Gannett lamented that the opinion that is not entitled to rank as one of the highest forms in which genius may give expression to its thought" {Christian Examiner, 45 [1848], 429) had gained wide currency. The sermon, no matter how literary and sentimentalized, had limited intellectual and commercial value. The contrast between Emerson's Stiles

"the sermon

Rag-Bag:

(New York,

E. H. Chapin in the ladies' albums and magazines of the day. Yet, during the same period, the Unitarian minister Ezra

Frank Luther Mott, A History of AmeriI, 1741-1850 (New York

pulpit performances and his lectures reveal

can Magazines, Vol.

the strictures even a very liberal clergyman

and London,

felt

1930), pp. 303-12.

4.

New

5.

Christian Examiner, 42 (1847), 395, 397,

Englander, 2 (1844), 96.

See Lawrence L. Buell, "Unitarian Aes-

thetics

and Emerson's Poet-Priest," American

Quarterly, tarian

viewer for the

9).

New

Moreover, while a

Englander could boast

re-

in

1868 that the publication of sermons, as of

393, 394. 6.

the sermon form imposed (Buell, "Uni-

tarian Aesthetics,"

20 (1968), 3-21, and

Movement and

Nineteenth-Century

"The Uni-

the Art of Preaching in

America,"

American

Quarterly, 24 (1972), 166-90. See also Daniel

hymns, had greatly increased, proving that such works were "popular reading" (27 [1868], 190), other clerical commentators were aware that both sermons and hymns, at least

tury,

those written in the mid-nineteenth cen-

were perilously

close to the

domain of

376

Notes

to

Chapter 7

journalism: their very effort to be topical, apn

Mrs. N. T. Munroe, the corresponding editor

and attractive doomed them to be ephemeral in a way even a novel was not

Mrs. C. A. Soule.

propriate,

Hymn

("New

Books," Christian Examiner, 40

Furthermore, Henry Ware,

[1846], 29-47).

Jr.,

Christian Parlor Magazine,

24.

3

(1846-7),

Frank Luther Mott says, "The Christian Parlor Magazine was a part of 155, 13, 16, 113-15.

movement by which

reviewing a collection of Greenwood's

ser-

the

mons

was no

attempted to compete with the lady's books

for the Christian Examiner in 1843,

forced to admit that the sermon was

how

matter

still,

polished, basically an oral form,

unlike the novel: as a result.

Ware

only a "small

sermon can be

.

.

.

part of the

and popular family magazines of the times" {op

laments,

brought before us by the printed page" (34 Mott,

8.

William Warren Sweet, Religion

op. cit.,

I,

in the

Development of American Culture 1765-1840 York, 1952), pp. 184-5.

p. 745). is

included in The Miscella-

neous Writings of Henry Ware,

ton and London, 1846),

Mary

E.

Dewey,

D.D. (Bos-

Jr.,

pp. 139-46.

I,

ed..

Autobiography and

of Orville Dewey, D.D. (Boston,

Letters

pp. 42, 131, 198.

I,

This sketch

26.

(New

1884),

p. 176.

MelChapter Nine. A clerical reviewer could complain of Richard H. Dana's Two 27.

will treat the critical response to

I

in

ville

Mott,

op. cit.,

II, p.

10.

Lee,

op. cit.,

pp. 152, 84.

11.

Buckminster's journals and papers are

admire greatly, that

Athenaeum in Boston. The entry

hue"; E)ana does not "extract a kindly lesson

9.

in the

62.

Years Before the Mast, a

I

refer

Aug. 18, 1804. 12. Lewis P. Simpson, The Federalist Literary Mind: Selections from the Monthly Anthology 1803-1811 (Baton Rouge, La., 1962), pp. 88, 174. See also Lewis P. Simpson, "A Literary Adventure of the Elarly Republic: The Anthology Society and the Monthly Anthology," New England Quarterly, 11 (1957),

to

cit,

25.

[1843], 85). 7.

the religious press

is

168-90.

See Mott,

14.

Theodore Cuyler,

An

Life:

op. cit.,

I,

all

men."

{New

He shows no

Englander, 9 [1851],

Christian Examiner, 36 (1844), 284.

29.

New Englander,

6 (1848), 556.

An anon-

ymous reviewer for the United States Magazine in 1856 summed up the dire influence of the American female writer on her male

Recollections

(New

The magnetism produced by her outgiven heart-throbs has warmed into vitality a vast number of womanly men, who,

of a York,

without manly force or manly vigor of The Rose of Sharon includes sermons,

have given way to unmanly mawkishness and morbid complainings prettiness and sentimentalisms, quite to the shame of manhood. Our literature is growing rather fine than forceful. We are tired of the whole school of mosaic workers like Longfellow, and imintellect,

which sketches, or essays by Universalist ministers Thayer, Bacon, Chapin, Skinner, Adams, Grosh, and Thomas. This degree of clerical

(Boston,

1841)

participation

16.

spirit' "

28.

p. 56.

Autobiography

See, for example.

demise

things and

33).

1902), p. 93. 15.

all

'motherly

book Melville was to showed a "sombre

peers:

13.

Long

from "

it

is

typical of the annual until

.

Webb

.

.

its

in the late 1850s.

Isabelle

.

Entrikin, Sarah Josepha

.

.

Bayard Taylor and Curtis

itators like

Hale and Godey's Lady's Book (Philadelphia,

(III

[1856], 242). 1846), p. 14. 17.

New Ibid,

1

19.

Ibid,

11 (1853),

21.

the feminine sentimental vogue succeeded,

(1843), 112.

18.

20. Ibid,

Those who accommodated themselves to

Englander, 2 (1844), 96-101.

but often

210-22.

Universalist

and Ladies'

Repository,

2

(1833), 184.

23.

See The Ladies' Repository, 25 (1857), for

editor

is

of genuine

the changed

title.

The

Mrs. E. A. Bacon, the assistant editor

at

artistic

the cost of

presumably spent

lit-

time lamenting his current reputation as a

"namby-pamby

Ibid, 291-2.

first,

the cost

their self-respect. Willis tle

22.

example. Note,

at

achievement and sometimes

17 (1859), 277, 275.

writer in twaddling albums,"

but Longfellow, that ajwgee of Victorian poetic piety, felt

mands of

frequently trapped by the de-

his public for

innocuous, cheerful,

.

Notes

to

The work he prided poems like "Michael

morally uplifting verse. himself on

— vigorous

Angelo," abstract narratives

met with

little

approval.

The

like

is

—

aphorism Kavanagh

bitter

that appears in his early novel

"This country

Cbristus

—

not priest-ridden but press-

ridden" {Longfellow's Prose Works [London

New

and

York,

n.d.], p.

— was

238)

in a sense

Chapter 7

377

however, and here lay her second distinctly of stronger

stuflf.

p>oint,

was

When the couple's

only son died, and the poet-father was weeping over his grave, the

of fate pointing to

mother saw "the

me

finger

as the only deliverer"

Then and there was conceived the North American Magazine^ an enterprise which her (96).

husband's

made distinguished but Jane's acumen could have

talent

prophetic of the difficulties of Lx)ngfellow's

which

own

brought into being. She was writing an exemplary moral tale of how to succeed in American letters, casting herself in the virtuous

For the

career.

best discussion of this

aspect of Longfellow, see

Matthew

J.

Bruc-

The Profession of Authorship in Amer1800-1870: The Papers of William Charvat

coli, ed..

ica

pp. 106-67.

(n.p., 1968),

Quoted

30.

ington Irving:

apprentice's role. In contrast to her husband,

she demonstrated well-calculated aggressive-

combed

in

William L. Hedges, Wash-

ness as she

An

American Study 1802-1812

patrons, and subscribers.

(Baltimore, 1965), p.

14.

known under

to be

only

Donald Mitchell,

the

later

pseudonym of "Ik

Marvel," long hesitated to go into a literary

men

career because, in his words, "the literary

of our country have impoverished themselves

the country for money,

by their labors" (Waldo H. Dunn, The Life of Donald G. Mitchell [New York, 1922], p. 1 16).

self-reliant sex.

The

career of the poet

bitter narrative), but she

field

(1801^44)

may

Sumner Lincoln

Fair-

be used as an illustration

of Mitchell's observation. In The Autobiogra-

phy ofJane

whose love for the "sentimental" (18) had impelled her from a girlhood of suburban

dreariness in a poet

ing

life,

told his genuinely touch-

tale.

domestic life. She concluded that "a creative and poetical mind was a fatal gift" (53). She did not add "in America," but she probably should have. Fairfield was a literature a miserable

man who "found

dependence, and he was

utterly without business faculties, or a profes-

any kind"

(35).

His

futile

attempt

acting career (his wife helped laugh

an

at

him

ofl^

accounts a

Perhaps she lacked genius

(so

the better! she implies throughout her

knew how

to find

was genius worth anyway? 3

Unpublished undated

1

latter in the Par-

ton Q)llection in the Sophia Smith Collection in

Northampton, Mass. Quoted in Gjrtland

32.

P.

(New

Willis 33.

two major points to make. Her husband, whose talents even she in her most critical moments (and they were legion) was astute enough not to doubt, was in her opinion "a genius." As such, he was hopelessly unstable, unsuited to In her biography, Jane Fairfield has

all

readers for genius, and without these, what

New Jersey into a marriage with

and a city

sion of

much

Fairfield (Boston, 1860), his wife

Jane,

By

handsome woman, she used her feminine charms for masculine purposes: the long-suffering wife with her two helpless little girls and her helpless husband could open purses closed to pleaders from the supposedly strikingly

I

P.

York, 1969),

Auser, Nathaniel p. 59.

have also examined the

works of

a

and

lives

number of other members of

the

genteel or Irvingesque school (broadly conceived), practitioners of a kind of witty yet

sentimental

journalism;

most

particularly

Lewis G. Clark (1803-73), Willis G. Clark (1808-41), Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-94), H. W. Longfellow (1807-82), James Russell Lowell (1819-91), Henry Tuckerman (181371), and Charles Dudley Warner (1829-1900).

The

personal and professional patterns

line for Curtis, Irving, Mitchell,

not hold true for

all

I

out-

and Willis do

these men,

are strong affinities of literary

though there style and sub-

ject.

Edgar Poe on drugs and alcohol to help him endure miseries he had no real resources to

34. Washington Irving's sire was a New York businessman and a Presbyterian deacon who demanded daily family worship at home and church attendance three times on Sun-

alleviate, are painfully detailed in

days.

the stage), his tragic period as a teacher, his increasing insanity, his growing reliance a

field's

la

Jane Fair-

account, a narrative more painful for

the evident lack of

sympathy displayed by

the author for her subject. Jane Fairfield,

Mr.

Irving

distrusted

emotional nature; Washington

Washington's in

turn

dis-

and always preferred his more kindly tempered mother. (See Stanley T. Wil-

liked his father

378

Notes

[New

The Life of Washington Irving

Hams,

York, 1935],

ists.

evangelical ministers, as part of a sociological

East Argus

Portland,

in

Boston Recorder and

the

later

paper

Willis,

Companion, and served as a deacon

in

"Brimstone Comer," the Park Street Church

which was the stronghold of evangelical vor

One

in Boston.

phers,

summing up contemporary

wooden

fer-

of Willis' earliest biograimpres-

him

sions of the older Willis, described

rather

as "a

person," subscribing to "the

formal and narrow piety of the gelicals of that

.

.

.

evan-

day, revolting against the

of the

latitudinarianism

Boston churches"

(Henry A. Beers, Nathaniel Parker Willis [Boston and New York, 1885], p. 11). Willis never got on with his father, although he, like his sister "Fanny Fern," adored his devout, affectionate, and playful mother. He liked to believe he inherited from her the "quick-silver spirit" which was his distinguishing characteristic. Willis was sent to Congregationalist Andover Academy and Yale. Although he later joined Exlward Beecher's church in Boston, he became increasingly convinced that he had never experienced gelical protestations

the

elite

a saving change.

were

also a

Evan-

hindrance

Unitarian circles to which Willis

In

pired.

he was

1829,

officially

in as-

excom-

municated from the Park Street Church for "absence from

.

.

communion

.

.

.

.

and

atten-

dance at the theatre" {ibid., p. 95). Donald Mitchell was the son of an Andover-trained Congregationalist minister very

much

oriented toward revivals; despite a love

for the beautiful. Reverend Mitchell was, in his son's

words, "a very severe disciplinarian,

too severe to kindle a child's best love" (Dunn, op.

cit.,

many

p.

Mitchell, like Willis and so

24).

liberal ministers,

scent only

from

his

claimed emotional de-

charming, consumptive

pick a

life

of writing and talking than their

stronger peers. 36.

For

Curtis'

Not one

of them was genuinely heal-

good

portions of their lives struggling with con-

sumption.

Willis

in

his

later

years wrote

frankly and profusely about various remedies for tuberculosis; he received

many

letters of

inquiry from his readers, especially from cler-

gymen, "the

class oftenest stricken

by con-

Edward Cary,

see

New York,

1894).

Willis

37.

as a kind of

Even

as

was proud to announce lapdog

his status

feminine

in chic

an undergraduate

much

flattered in

vacation by the attentions of literary

women,

more

the latter

seemed to consider

circles.

he could

at Yale,

write his mother: "I was

men and who

particularly

quite the thing to find

it

who was not a bear and who could much from the excelsia of his profes-

a poet

stoop so

sion as to dress fashionably and

ments" (Beers, 38. 39.

op. cit.,

pay compli-

p. 57).

Dunn, op. cit., p. 161. Life and Works of Washington

(New

Richard Henry Stoddard

Irving, ed.

York, 1880),

pp. 372, 379, 391. 40.

See

George William

Curtis,

Lotus-

A Summer Book (New York, 1852); "Ik Marvel," Fresh Gleanings or A New Sheaffrom Eattng:

the Old Fields of Continental Europe (New York, 1907); N. Parker Willis, Pencillings by

the

Way (New York,

41.

Quoted

in

1852).

Auser,

op.

cit.,

23-4.

pp.

Moreover, Willis had been something of

a

lit-

erary prodigy in his youth, and he always

disavowed hard

who had

critics,

labor. In 1855,

answering

his

been warning him for twenty

years that his "light and flippant"

work could

not outlive him, he explained that he had no

posthumous fame. He wished only LIVE, as variedly, as amply, and as worth-

desire for 'Vo ily

as possible

ture

—

off^ered

";

least

ety, the

— periodical

"literature

him the

of Horace Bushnell

thy: Irving, Willis, and Mitchell spent

life,

George William Curtis (Boston and

freest access to

p. 55).

perforce

kept closer to mother were more likely to

—the

{ibid.,

who were

pattern: the frail boys

Episcopalian mother; he was to be an admirer

35.

functions

ill-health

ministers as well as several journal-

the

!$•

Chronic

459).

p.

with the male sentimentalists, as with the non-

Maine, and Youth

[New York,

sumption" {Outdoors at Idlewild

a

His father, also called Nathaniel

edited

Chapter 7

1855],

I.)

Nathaniel Willis' ancestors included

number of

to

confining

readiest

mode

litera-

means for

this

of subsistence, the

contemporary mind and

soci-

most influence and power" {Outdoors

at Idlewild, pp. v-vii).

For other important examples of the Gaylord Clark, KnickKnacks (New York, 1852) and The Literary Remains of the Late Willis Gaylord Clark (New York, 1843); H. T. Tuckerman, Leaves from the Diary of a Dreamer (London, 1853), The 42.

"sketch," see Louis

Notes

to

(New York, 1850), and Rambles and (New York, 1841). The four writers in discussion ended

Optimist Reveries 43.

their days presiding over carefully planned

and dearly cherished semi-country Irving's

Sunnyside

Willis'

Idlewild

Exigewood

Mitchell's tis'

New near New

retreat

Ashfield,

in

on her breeds anMaria off^ers to dry his handkerchief in her bosom, he leers tenderly at her, " 'And is your heart still so warm, Maria?' " Thus reminded of her sorYet

his parasitic reliance

not

New York;

rows, she

question in a "service to the virgin."

City;

Haven; Cur-

Massachusetts.

style,

line

All

woman, that could the traces be ever worn out of her brain, and those of Eliza

but to duck out of the arena of mascu-

surrounded by

New

[London and

an exalted ideal of family

life

cherished

which

their be-

48.

moved by

they were

their occupation into feminine society

ward feminine

to-

values.

and Works of Washington

44. Life

and

Irving,

Pry"

45. "Paul

is

the

title

of the

first

Donald Mitchell,

46. or,

A

Book of

York, 1888),

The

47.

50. William G. McLoughlin makes Norwood central to his recent re-evaluation. The Meaning of Henry Ward Beecher: An Essay on

the Shifting Values

Heart by Ik Marvel

the

(New

p. 33.

encounter

locus classicus for this

Laurence Sterne's description

in

51.

See

Village

Reveries of a Bachelor:

is

A Sentimental

Prue and I

Curtis,

49. Mitchell, Reveries of a Bachelor, p. 9.

chap-

ter in Mitchell, Fresh Gleanings.

122,

1893), p. 48.

of Mid-Victorian America

1840-1870 (New York,

pp. 447-50.

my

Eliza

to

York, 1960], pp.

George William

(New York,

havior mainly supported. Like their liberal clerical counterparts,

in

daughter {A

124).

bevy of

a

men

be

...

as a

Sentimental Journey; The Journal

domesticity. Irving, a bachelor until his later life

me

bosom, and be unto

ambition into the safe shelter of feminine

adoring nieces; the other three

that

all

the heart wishes or the eye looks for in

English

in the

he

Still,

So much was there about her of

out of mine, she should

be landed gentry

days, ended his

response to his unspxjken

pip>es a

us coyly:

tells

they represented their owners' desire

just to

When

other conflicting impulse.

these homes were "picturesque" in Andrew Jackson Downing's best style (both Willis and Mitchell were avowed followers of the architect);

379

York

Tarrytown,

in

outside

retreats:

Chapter 7

1970).

Henry Ward Beecher, Norwood, in

Life

New England (New

or

York,

1868), pp. 211-16. 52. Quoted in Robert Shaplen, Free Love and Heavenly Sinners: The Story of the Great Henry Ward Beecher Scandal (New York,

1954), pp. 53, 33.

Journey of the meeting between Yorick and

53

.

The

scandal was one of a series involv-

the abandoned insane Maria, a scene

ing the ministry. For contemporary attacks

was to

on the

which England

inspire a host of imitations in

W.

subject, see

and America. Yorick has heard of Maria and

A

seeks her out as a kind of sentimental side-

(Boston, 1874); and

When

show.

he finds her, she

is

dressed in

F. Jamieson, The Clergy,

Source of Danger to the American Republic

The

Satire in Verse on The Rev.

Drama of Deceit: A Henry Ward Beecher

white, with hair hanging loosely about her

(Worcester and Clinton, Mass., and Roches-

shoulders; she

ter,

dog not

is

tearfully imploring her

little

to desert her. Yorick immediately, in

a symbolic gesture, attempts to appropriate

her

wounded I

sat

sensibilities for his

down

close

wipe them [her

by

her;

tears]

in

mine, and then I

did

it, I

within

felt

me

as

I

and Maria

away

my handkerchief. my own, and then in

with

own:

I

as

they

me

fell,

then steeped

hers,

and then

in

sure could not be ac-

counted for from any combinations of matter and motion. I

am

jxjsitive

I

have a

soul.

A

Complete 1874),

184.

55. See most notably Tilton's extraordinary romance, Tempest-Tossed (New York,

1874),

wip'd hers again, and as

am

The Beecber-Tilton Scandal:

54.

author.

and

his tract. The True

Church (Philadel-

it

such indescribable emotions I

anonymous

History of the Case (Brooklyn, N.Y., p.

let

N.Y., 1875) by an

phia, 1867). 56.

Quoted

Beecher:

An

in

Paxton Hibben, Henry Ward

American Portrait

(New

York,

1927), p. 183. 57.

The Beecher- Tilton Scandal, pp.

58.

Ibid, p. 92.

59.

Quoted

in

Hibben,

op. cit.,

p.

54, 91.

195.

380

Notes

61.

Quoted Quoted

62.

Ibid.,

60.

in Shaplen, op.

cit.,

in

p. 99.

cit.,

Emanie Sachs,

''The Terrible

Siren": Victorian Woodhull (1838-1927)

York, 1920), 66. 67. 68.

and

in ibid., p. 262. in

and

(Indianapolis,

Beecbers

Annie

Runaway

Stowe

I

The Story of Harriet

(New York,

Trumpets of

1963);

Constance

ed.

Jubilee,

Kenneth

Lynn (New York and Burlingame, 1963), pp. Edward Stowe, Life of HarBeecher Stowe Compiledfrom

Journals (Boston and

mund

New

Her Letters and

York, 1889); Ed-

Wilson, Patriotic Gore: Studies

erature of the American Civil

in the Lit-

War (New York,

1966), pp. 3-98; Forrest Wilson, Crusader in

Crinoline:

Lady Byron

The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe

London, and New York, 1941). critical works are Alice Crozier, The

woman's

because

moral

God

is

ever-loving, ever-forgiving,

has given him no high range of

faculties,

no sense of

which the

Justice

laws, literature

induce

in

women

Charles

77.

Edward Stowe,

My

The Rungless Ladder:

derson's History

(New York,

pers

p. 85.

op. cit.,

ries

Oldtown Fireside

Stories (Boston, 1871).

Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sunny

of Foreign Lands (Boston, 1854),

72.

Ibid.,

p. 388.

73.

Ibid,

I,

Memo-

II, p.

166.

p. 281.

The Autobiography of Lyman Beecher, ed. Barbara M. Cross (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), I, 74.

393^. When Byron died in 1824, Lyman young Harriet, " Tm sorry that Byron is dead. I did hope he would live to do something for Christ. What a harp he might have swept!' " He preached a sermon on Bypp.

told the

or,

Henry Hen-

1872).

Little Foxes (Boston, 1866), p. 69.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, Household Pa-

82.

New York,

and Stories (Boston and

1896),

83. Crowfield, Little Foxes, p. 238.

to Harriet Beecher Stowe,

p. 232.

For notable examples, see Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Mayflower and Miscellaneous Writings (Boston, 1855), and Sam Law71.

cher Stowe],

84. All references here

Wilson,

70.

son's

Wife and I:

Christopher Crowfield [Harriet Bee-

81.

lished paper delivered before the Association

69. Forrest

471.

page references are to Harriet

Beecher Stowe,

28, 1975.

op. cit., p.

York, 1951), pp. 192-8.

tanism (Durham, N.C., 1954). See also Carol V. R. George, "Harriet Beecher: Suffering and the Feminization of Jesus," an unpub-

Dec.

vir-

James Thayer Addison, The Episcopal Church in the United States 1789-1931 (New

(New York,

of American Historians in Atlanta, Ga., on

and

78.

Ibid, p. 207.

Puri-

and misun-

as a sp>ecial grace

All

New England

bit-

tue."

79.

Harriet Beecher Stowe and

She

derstood religion of England have sought to

80.

1969); Charles Foster,

justice."

terly protests "that utter deadness to the sense of

The

Novels of Harriet Beecher Stowe

pas-

affection should not

be expected to resemble that of a devoted

(Philadelphia, best

friends

Stowe exclaims

to evince,

dog: "The dog

Heaven:

Byron's

fidelity

thought appropriate for the much-abused

of Harriet Beecher Stowe (BosYork, 1897); Johanna Johnston,

to

pp. 118-19. In protesting the

silent

sionately that a

are:

67-112; Charles riet

ibid.,

dumb and

Field, ed.. The

Beecher Stowe

Rourke,

See

76.

Lyman Beecher Stowe,

Letters

New

History of the Byron Controversy

(Boston, 1870), p. 395.

have found useful Life

A

Vindicated:

in ibid., p. 236.

1934), p. 154. Biographical studies of

ton and

saw Byron as tormented by a dark religious faith and wished he might have talked with him and helped him. 75. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lady Byron

in ibid., p. 193.

Sinners,

Saints,

(New

p. 174.

Quoted Quoted Quoted Quoted

65.

in Harriet's words, "with a most eloquent lamentation over the wasted life and misused powers of the great poet." He

p. 193.

p. 266.

Quoted

Chapter 7

ron and closed,

in ibid., p. 269.

63. Shaplen, op. 64.

to

bors: or,

The Records of an Unfashionable Street

(New York, ous,

1875).

Stowe was

85. if

producing more

also

not original work, in

town Fireside Loves and Lives

Sam Lawson

Poganuc People:

Stories,

(New York,

A

in Sacred History:

York, 1874), as well as Idea

and elsewhere are We and Our Neigh-

(New York,

Series

1878),

and

Old-

Their

and Women

of Sketches

trivia like Betty

1876),

seri-

'j

'/

(New Bright

Little Pussy Wil-

low (Boston, 1870). 86.

Mary

Bushnell Cheney, Life and Letters

of Horace Bushnell (New York, 1880), p. 168. 87. See R. A. Yoder, "The Equilibrist Perspective:

Toward

a

Theory of American

Romanticism," Studies

in

Romanticism,

12

.

Notes

to

705-40, on the special problem of

(1973),

Chapter 8

ed.

ham, The Triumph of Romanticism (Q)lumbia, S.C., 1970), and Quentin Anderson, "Practical

xxvi.

and Visionary Americans," American

127-8.

Mrs.

L.

H. Sigoumey,

Poems

Select

York, 1963), pp. xxv-

Wetmore

William

James,

The Letters of James Freeman Clarke

p. 234.

1952), pp. 78-9.

Memoirs,

MARGARET FULLER AND THE

13.

For recent biographies,

39.

see

Wayne An-

drews, Germaine: A Portrait ofMadame de Stael

DISAVOWAL OF FICTION

(New

Journals ofRalph Waldo Emerson, ed. Exi-

ward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson York, 1912), VIII,

II, p.

to

John Wesley Thomas

ed.

Fuller,

12.

New

pp.

11.

I,

(Hamburg, Germany,

(Boston and

I,

Memoirs,

8

1.

Story,

10.

Margaret

(Philadelphia, 1854), p. 13.

(New

Perry Miller

9.

45 (1976), 405-18. 88.

Her Writings and Correspondence,

Selection from

American romanticism. See also Morse Peck-

Scholar,

381

York, 1963), and Andre Maurois,

A Life of George Sand, (New York,

p. 116.

Hereafter referred to as Journals

trans.

Lelia:

Gerrod Hopkins

1953).

14.

Memoirs,

15.

She

I,

p. 229.

left Italy

for America in 1850, for

The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. Frederic G. Kenyon (New York, 1897), I,

example, because she could not earn the

p. 460.

side the

2

money

she needed to supf>ort her family out-

none of which are fully adequate, are as follows: W. H. Channing, J. F. Clarke, and R. W. Emerson, Memoirs of Margaret Fuller

United States. There were a number young men with whom Fuller was in love as a young woman, most notably Samuel Ward, who married Fuller's closest friend, Anna Barker. Faith Chippenfield stresses (in-

(Boston, 1852), 2 vols, (hereafter re-

deed, over-stresses) Fuller's love-life in her

3.

The

standard biographies of Margaret

Fuller,

Ossoli

Thomas Wentworth

ferred to as Memoirs);

Higginson, Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Boston, 1884);

Julia

Ward Howe,

Margaret Fuller

(Boston, 1883); Katharine Anthony, Margaret Fuller:

A

1920);

Arthur M. Brown, Margaret Fuller

(New

York, 1967); Faith Chippenfield, In

Psychological Biography

(New York,

Quest of Love: The Life and Death of Margaret Fuller

The

(New York,

Roman

1957);

Joseph Jay Deiss,

Years of Margaret Fuller

(New

York, 1969); Mason Wade, Margaret Fuller: Whetstone of Genius ler's

papers are in

(New York,

(New York,

Story

gallantry with tion.

At times

Life

and

1956), p. 97.

Fiction" and

"The Future of

of the Novel, ed. Leon Edel

the

(New

York, 1956).

James, in idealizing the mid-nineteenth-

century Italy of Story and his friends, seems to have been vindicating his

oirs,

II,

felt

isola-

her loneliness to be

pp. 167-8). Yet she held herself to a

from

a spirit of

own courage

in

tate affection

manded

breathing

Fuller,

American Romantic:

also clear that she de-

She strug-

is

difficult.

Repeatedly, she faced

ruthlessly the waste of her emotions.

She

strove for "humility" {Memoirs,

she

could be

he

is

gled ruthlessly to live in altitudes where

is

evasion.

it

a basic precondition of self-respect.

a half

later: expatriation,

—

generosity of thought from herself as

implies,

century

II, p.

While it is clear that this high tone served a compensatory function she would be admired if she could not be loved, she would predict destinies if she could not dic-

Europe

no longer an

martyrdom {Memoirs,

167).

prayed,

Margaret

she

unbearable, that she had "no real hold on life, no real f>ermanent connection with any soul," and recorded with horror: "This thought envelops me as a cold atmosphere. I do not see how I shall go through this destiny. I can, if it is mine; but I do not feel that I can" {Mem-

confronting a vastly changed and modernized

8.

which she handled her

—

127.

Novel," collected in Henry James: The Future

7.

mod-

scrupulous enough to distinguish rigorously

James's standard defenses of fiction are

"The Art of

strikes a

Houghton Library of Har-

and His Friends (Boston, 1903), I, p. 5. F. W. Dupee, Henry James: His 6.

What

em reader of Fuller's letters and journals is the

high tone of magnanimity which she was

Henry James, William Wetmore

Writings

sentimental biography.

1940). Ful-

vard University and Boston Public Library. 4.

of

"Would its

own

I,

that love like

p. 166);

knowledge

reward" (Higginson,

op. cit.,

p. 180).

A

16.

Fuller once wrote that those

who

live

.

382

Notes

to

without love and support "are thrown upon themselves," and

and incessant "there

is

they do not find "peace

if

life," at least

none to

flatter

them

New

W.

Caroline

the

in

York, 1835],

p. 97.

Healey, Margaret and Her

W. Higginson

T.

in his

biography of

had turned "from the weak side of

American

intellect,

to the strong side, {op. cit.,

which then was literature, which was statesmanship"

Memoirs,

20.

Quoted

in Chippenfield, op.

21.

Higginson,

22.

Memoirs,

23.

Ibid.

24.

Ibid.,

p. 82.

cit.,

See Alexander E. Jones, "Margaret Ful-

Attempt

ler's

Woman,

Fuller,

26.

Memoirs,

referred to as Literature.

It is

interesting that

as a critic writing for the

New

York Tribune in

the mid- 1840s, Fuller had utter scorn for the

I,

p. 303.

I,

p. 20.

liere,

Woman,

I,

p. 387.

Thomas

Carlyle, to pick one example

undeniable utterances

work

.

"the

of a truly heroic

...

mind; altogether unique

.

.

among

the writ-

women of this generation, rare enough the writing

men" (quoted

in

Howe,

.

186).

(Boston, 1949),

p. 28.

See the early correspondence in James

Freeman Clarke

to

This poem

Works ofJames

Margaret is

Fuller.

included

Russell Lowell

in

The Poetical

(London,

n.d.),

was mocking a real attitude of Fuller's. In 1839, she wrote a friend: "I was proud that I was to test myself in the sternest way, that I was always to return to child,

my own

priest, pupil, parent,

husband and wife" {Memoirs,

What Lowell Fuller had

Woman,

specially tailored

and

which speak of "great a girl, she

realities" (p.

had read for pleasure Mo-

Clervantes, Shakespeare,

all

of

whom

Not what

{Memoirs,

is"

I,

failed to

I,

p. 99).

understand was that

no other option.

35.

Memoirs,

36.

Quoted

I,

in

Margaret Fuller

op. cit.,

Ossoli,

flp.

At Home and

Europe (Boston and London, 1836), pp. 171-2. Home and Abroad.

Hereafter referred to as

Quoted

in

44. Memoirs, 45.

Quoted

46.

Memoirs,

47.

Woman,

48.

Memoirs,

Andrews,

op. cit.,

p. 97.

p. 55.

I,

in

Maurois,

II,

p.

op. cit.,

p.

113.

195.

p. 94. I,

pp. 248-9.

which was an imporon Fuller, is described in Elizabeth Peabody, Record of Mr. Alcott's School (Boston, 1874). See also Dorothy McCuskey, 49.

Alcott's school,

Bronson Alcott, Teacher

Hereafter referred to as 51.

Healey,

York, 1940).

52.

See

op.

ibid.,

cit.,

pp. 67

Letters.

pp. 139^K). ff".,

where Fuller

delib-

erately enjoys an anecdote of cruelty (Apollo's

pp. 280-2.

(New

The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ralph Rusk (New York, 1939), II, p. 202. 50.

flaying of Marsyas) in most unfeminine

fashion, to the

p. 231.

Wade,

Woman, pp. 130

tant influence

pp. 140-80. Lowell

myself, to be

(

Abroad, or Things and Thoughts in America and

43. op.

John Wesley Thomas, James Freeman Clarke: Apostle of German Culture to America

34.

root"

p. 30).

.

32.

33.

its

for children, she be-

he should be, but what he

42.

p.

find

fit

p. 297.

toute epreuve" and thought her

cit.,

must

were not such

41. Fuller,

ing

it

"loved the natural history of man.

of many, praised her "chivalrous nobleness a

among

which put "instruction"

The works

As

312).

Memoirs,

Ihid.,

run of children's books coming into

style of narrative

classics

Memoirs,

30.

pp. 130-1. Hereafter

65.

II, p.

28.

Fuller,

II,

and Art

Literature

Fuller,

1832),

truncated "thin and baseless fictions" but the

p. 41.

27.

29.

Write Fiction," Boston Public

Margaret

40.

(New York,

lieved,

154.

p.

to

nature in which

18.

p.

cit.,

for Fuller's relations with other

women.

39.

p. 311).

25.

31.

fF.,

over "development," "the moral" over "the

p. 22.

op. cit.,

I,

(Bos-

popularity. She disliked the "Peter Parley"

pp. 31-2.

I,

pp. 35

common

pp. 132-3).

19.

's

on

Library Quarterly, 6 (1954), 67-73.

Fuller noted that Fuller, influenced by her father,

She hoped

ton, 1836), pp. 327, 323. See Higginson, op.

older

Fuller (Boston, 1895), p. 156. 18.

closer to her mother.

that they are not

Ten Conversations with Margaret

Friends, or,

After the birth of her child. Fuller

her return to America in 1850. The Young Lady Friend By a Lady 38

Hereafter referred to as Woman). 17.

37.

drew much

to bring her family to live with Mrs. Fuller

Nineteenth Century and Kindred Papers [Bos-

and

Chapter 8

they are honest;

very poor and very mean" {Woman ton, Cleveland,

.

dismay of one of her more

conservative students.

Notes to Chapter 8

53.

Memoirs,

54.

Quoted

55.

Memoirs,

56.

Howe,

57. See,

cluded

in

77. Letters,

p. 329.

I,

Higginson,

in

II, p.

op. cit.,

p. 117.

op. cit.,

creativity: "But,

"The Magnolia,"

in-

and Life Within, or Reviews, Narratives, and Poems (Boston, 1960), pp. 333-5. 59.

Quoted

60.

See

Essays,

in Chippenfield, op.

Madame

de

windows when p. 197.

cit.,

Stael, Corinne; or Italy,

Emily Baldwin and Paulina Driver (London, 1890), passim. 61. See F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (London, Toronto, and New York, 1941), p. 17, and pp. 3-75 passim. 62. For contemporary views, see William Wirt, The Letters of the British Spy, ed. Richard trans.

Beale Davis (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1970), especially

pp.

132^7, and The

Henry (Hartford, ple,

remarked: "If

[Fuller] justice,

what she has

I

I

Life

I,

19).

I,

79.

.

tive

Memoirs,

p. 32.

I,

See Ann Wood, "Emerson's RepresentaMen, " New Republic, Jan. 1-8, 1972, p. 29.

84.

p. 295.

Wetmore Story,

I,

p. 171.

and see Wade,

op. cit, II, p.

322.

pp. 166, 167.

op. cit., II,

pp. 2-3.

Letters, III, pp. 19-20, 29.

85. Her fascination with Goethe had stemmed largely from the fact that this emphasis on the outward world was his central message. See Frederick Augustus Brown,

Margaret Fuller and Goethe

24.

II, p.

II, p.

83. Literature,

p. 59).

(New York,

1910).

86. Letters, III, p. 180.

op. cit., p.

Edgar Poe was aware of Fuller's confusion between life and literature at this time. He wrote perceptively: "her personal character and her printed book are merely one and the same thing. Her acts are bookish, and her books are less thoughts than acts" (quoted in Wade, op. cit., p. 155). Healey,

Letters,

'Never read

I,

have

"overwhelming question" to him with such force. And no one did.

Letters,

.

his journal, "I

her death no one would again address the

87.

130.

71.

he wrote in

audience" {Journals, VIII, pp. 115What he meant probably was that after

Higginson,

p. 294,

70.

later,

my

82.

67. James, William

Memoirs,

years

lost

written' " (Letters of Elizabeth

66. Memoirs,

New

81.

64. Letters, IV, p. 222.

69. Ibid.,

six

to

80.

65. Journals, VIII, p. 250.

68.

on her York, saw herself as Emerson's vanishing Muse. When he heard of her death

way

wished anyone to do her .

III, p. 284).

to realize that Fuller, then (July 1844)

of Patrick

Browning, for exam-

should say

Barrett Browning,

she can get a chance, for they

Emerson, notoriously cold-blooded, liked a fire even in summer. It takes little imagination

1848), passim.

63. Elizabeth Barrett

to

have seen her several times, especially near night. Sometimes she looks in at your study are almost always shut" {Letters,

p. 238.

I,

Muse

the

was capa-

Emerson with his failures of Waldo, how can you expect come to you} She hovers near, I

ble of taunting

p. 85.

for example,

Memoirs,

p. 32.

I,

Ibid, pp. 351, 245, 239. Fuller

78.

160.

Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Life Without

58.

383

much

I

am

of

indebted for this point and for

my

thinking on the Fuller-Emerson

relationship to Michael Davitt Bell of Wil-

liams College. 88. 89.

Quoted Quoted

dentalists:

An

in

Higginson,

in

Perry Miller, The Transcen-

op. cit.,

p.

165.

Anthology (Cambridge, Mass.,

1950), pp. 307-8.

p. 137.

90. Memoirs, II, p. 58.

11.

For two fine articles on the Emerson relationship to which I 72.

91.

Fuller-

am

in-

debted, see Girl Strauch, "Hatred's Swift

Odell Shepard, Peddlar's Progress: The

Life of Bronson Alcott

(Boston,

1937),

pp.

155-6.

Memoirs,

Repulsions: Emerson, Margaret Fuller and

92.

Others," Studies in Romanticism, 7 (1968), 63-

93. Memoirs,

II, p. II,

29.

pp. 151

ff.

See also Horace

103; and Harry R. Warfel, "Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson," Publications of the Modem Language Association, 30 (1935),

Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life (New York, 1868), pp. 169-91. For Greeley's career,

376-94.

in

73.

Higginson,

74.

Memoirs,

75.

Quoted Quoted

76.

op. cit.,

II, p.

see

Frank

W. Scott, "Newspapers

p. 85.

Luther Stoddard, Horace

75.

in

Higginson,

in

Warfel,

op. cit.,

op. cit.,

1775-1860"

The Cambridge History of American Literature, II (New York, 1918), pp. 177-95; Henry

p. 62.

p. 382.

tor,

Crusader

Greeley, Printer, Edi-

(New York,

1946);

Garlock Van Deusen, Horace

Glyndon

Greeley: Nine-

384

Notes

Crusader

teentb-Century

(Philadelphia,

to

Pa.,

1953). 94. Fuller,

Woman,

MetnoirSy

95.

11, p.

p. 103.

Chapter 8

moment, she could refer to Ossoli's love as "all fondness, but no help" {Memoirs, II,

In a dark

p. 233).

She had reservations about the

tion of marriage

156.

{ibid.,

institu-

and gave

p. 278),

a

great deal of thought to the freedom the

97.

Woman, pp. 119, 172. Quoted in Wade, op. cit., p. 143.

98.

Memoirs,

(Deiss, op.

96. Fuller,

11, p.

much younger

151. Fuller's friendship

with Greeley was not the only sign of the

change taking place in her, however. She had an unpromising relationship with a German

107. Fuller, 108.

Ossoli might one day need p. 295).

cit.,

Home and Abroad,

pp. 162, 166.

See Paul P. Baker, The Fortunate

Pil-

grims: Americans in Italy 1800-1860 (Cam-

Jew called James Nathan, an evasive and weak man whose presence in Fuller's life at first glance tells more about her hunger for

Otto Wittman,

affection than about her ability to read char-

Natalie Wright, American Novelists in Italy

acter.

After a few months he

fled to

Europe,

and another woman. Yet she was attracted to Nathan at least in part because he worshiped

Margaret the "Muse" only intermittently,

if

at

While she wrote him that she was one of "the few in whose lot the meaning of the age

all.

is

concentrated," she also confessed that she

On

lacked "humility."

from

coiled

one occasion she

he had hurled

insults

she liked his telling her, fool" (quoted in

Wade,

op. cit.,

responding positively to

this

you are

pp. 164-5). In

it

often by defi-

for self-demythification. (See also Julia ed..

1844-1845

Ward

The Love Letters of Margaret Fuller [New York, 1903], for Fuller's let-

Quoted

Wade,

in

American

Travellers in Arcadia:

1951);

111.,

109.

Quoted

110.

A. William Salomone, "The 19th-cen-

in Baker, op.

tury Discovery of Italy:

An

p. 42.

cit.,

Essay

Ameri-

in

can Cultural History," American Historical Review, 173 (1968), 1360-2. See also

Howard

R. Marraro, American Opinion on the Unifica-

(New York,

of Italy 1846-1861

111. Fuller,

Home and Abroad,

112.

Ibid, pp. 331,

113.

Ibid, p. 367.

1932).

p. 218.

334

114. Deiss, op.

p. 222. Fuller's

cit.,

p. 153. It is

op. cit.,

important to note, moreover, that the newspa-

estimate

of the gap between reportage and fact was

not exaggerated.

The

dramatically changing

opinions of Louis Cass, the American attache

who

Rome

arrived in

testify

to the

in the spring

of 1849,

same phenomenon. Pleading

with his government to empower him fully to recognize the young republic, he

ters to Nathan.)

99.

Richardson and

apparently de-

nition did, but also her half-conscious instinct

Howe,

P.

1830-1895 (Detroit,

a

woman even when

that involved belittlement, as

Edgar

(Philadelphia, Pa., 1965).

tion

grading remark, she was recording not simply her desire to be treated as a

Artists in Italy

re-

at her, yet

"little girl,

bridge, Mass., 1964);

the issue at stake: this

is

summed up

"not, as the

press has so constantly insinuated,

European

[a conflict]

per was a natural offspring of the American

between anarchy and order, [but one] be-

Even

tween constitutional, representative government and the most benumbing despotism"

oratorical tradition.

its

greater informal-

was a logical modification of a tradition which maintained that the most "sublime" eloquence was s{>ontaneous and even untuity

101. Fuller,

Home and Abroad,

man

p. 62.

Home and Abroad,

relationship cit.,

best account of the FuUer-Ossoli is

in I>eiss, op.

pp. 154-70,

106.

is

She wrote

ers only a part of

ceive that

it

cit.

Anthony,

op.

also useful.

a friend,

my

journal, see

Diary," Journal of

115. Fuller,

p. 214.

104. Ibid, p. 243.

The

Roman

p. 71).

Leona Rus-

Modem

History,

12

(1940), 209-70.

Ibid, p. 232.

103. Fuller,

Fuller's

[Madison, Wis., 1954],

tenberg, "Documents: Margaret Fuller's Ro-

100. Letters, III, p. 183.

105.

zini's Writings

For

tored.

102.

(Joseph Rossi, The Image of America in Maz-

life,

"Our but

relation cov-

I

do not

interferes with anything

to have or be" (quoted in Deiss, op.

cit.,

I

per-

ought

p. 295).

Home and Abroad,

116.

Ibid, p. 327.

117.

Ibid, pp. 305-6.

118.

Ibid, p. 420.

119.

Memoirs,

120.

Ibid, p. 209.

121.

See James Freeman Clarke

Fuller,

p. 102,

goumey.

II, p.

p. 248.

310.

where Clarke

to

Margaret

praises Mrs. Si-

Notes to Chapter 9

122.

James Freeman Clarke, Autobiography,

Diary and Correspondence,

New

Hale (Boston and

ed.

Edward

Everett

York, 1891), pp. 171,

123.

Memoirs,

235.

II, p.

Ibid.,

p.

12.

Ibid.,

p. 92.

13.

Melville quickly

became

bitter at the

two successful travelogues, Typee and Omoo. His dislike of such stereotyping led

his first

Leopold Wellisz, The Friendship of Margaret Fuller Ossoli and Adam Mickiewicz (New York, 1947), p. 34. 125. Fuller, Woman, p. 177. 126. Quoted in Anthony, op. cit., pp. 82-3. 124.

him to refer to himself in cruel parody as the "Author of Peedee, Hullabaloo and Fog Dog'' (quoted

HERMAN MELVILLE AND THE Margaret

Selection from

American Romantic:

Fuller:

(New York,

1965), pp. 222-3.

Quoted in Jay Ley da, The Melville Log: Documentary Life of Herman Melville 18191891 (New York, 1951), I, p. 390, II, p. 651. 2.

Perry Miller makes the point that the

New

York

He

could

nursery tale" (quoted in

Herman

14.

Adventure

Ibid.,

16.

Herman

pp. 118, 164.

and Other

5.

Wits in the Era ofFoe and

519.

II, p.

On

Melville's Reading:

A

M. M.

Sealts,

Check List of Books

Owned and Borrowed (Cambridge,

Mass.,

1950). 7.

of War

For another author who became

increas-

mode and Mark Twain, most notably Pudd'nhead Wilson and Tom Sawyer, Detective in The Writings of Mark Twain (New York and London, n.d.). Vols. XIV, XX. 8. The feminine members of Melville's

"Tartarus,"

Marvin

The

Man,

Confidence

women as prominent as

I,

p. 676.

New

York church of

Henry

Bellows, a close

friend of Orville Dewey's. See William Bras-

Interpretation 9.

'j

Religious Thought:

(New York,

1959), p.

Essay in 8.

All page references here and elsewhere

Herman Melville, (New York, 1957).

to Pierre are to

Ambiguities 10.

An

Pierre, or, the

Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gil-

man, The Letters of Herman Melville ven, 1960), p. 93.

(New Ha-

of

"Melville's

New

Certain of Melville's works, most nota-

20.

it

Fisher,

EngAmerican Quarterly, 23 (1971), 79-100.

land,"

bly

see

The Deflowering

do not include

characters; yet

I

classify

"Freudian" and feminine because, as

show

try to

later,

male protagonists

is

feminized culture whose off-stage presof.

Herman Melville, Redburn: His Voyage (New York, 1957), p. 12. see

will

determined by an essen-

21.

22.

I

the consciousness of the

tially

op. cit.,

The Apple-

in

pp. 167-210. For an interesting article on the social and sexual implications of

ence Melville keeps us aware

well, Melville

and London,

and the Tartarus of Maids"

aloud

the liberal Unitarian

the

1959),

Melville, The Apple-Tree Table

family read Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney's works

His wife attended the

or,

Tree Table,

ingly fascinated with the detective

for similar reasons, see

See Leyda,

York,

(New York,

Sketches (Princeton

'Tartarus':

in the 1850s.

(New

Typee

See particularly "The Paradise of Bach-

19.

elors

Melville's reading, see

Narrative of

Melville, White-Jacket,

Man

Herman

18.

Margaret

Fuller (Boston, 1883), p. 186. 6.

A

1922), p. 107.

Ward Howe,

Julia

Melville,

Herman

17.

War of Words and Melville (New York, cit,

Omoo:

South Seas (Chicago, 1968),

1961), p. 175.

for a "genius." See The Raven and the Whale:

Ley da, op. Quoted in

"a

p. 108.

15.

World on a

4.

& ale" and

p. 237).

ibid.,

p. xiii.

literary circle Melville joined in

1956), passim.

Melville,

in the

the later 1840s was self-consciously looking

The

which

later refer to Redburn,

of Mardi, as "nothing but cakes

A

A

3.

The

return to his original material after the failure

Her Writings and Correspondence,

Perry Miller

Bruccoli,

J.

of Authorship in America 1800-1870: The Papers of William Charvat [n.p., 1968], p.

he wrote to answer popular demand that he

REVOLT AGAINST THE READER 1.

Matthew

in

Profession

227).

Jr.,

138.

11.

public's insistence that he simply reduplicate

179.

ed.

385

For an example of the

Thomas

cult of

First

boyhood,

Bailey Aldrich, The Story of a

Boy (Boston and

New

23.

Melville, Omoo, p. 184.

24.

Melville, White-Jacket, pp. 49, 289.

25.

Ibid.,

26.

Interestingly enough,

Redburn style of

is

Bad

York, 1869).

p. 270.

when

Melville in

being genuinely informative in the

Omoo

—about

life at sea,

or conditions

386

in

Notes

Liverpool

— he

to

clearly talking to an imag-

is

Chapter 9

Redbum

"survives," although not happily.

Redbum

5tands, painful in the revealed, self-

inary audience

which

is

male

When

he condescends by ex-

mocking

"microcosm, or

ened

interests.

terms

plaining

world"

words

shows

(102),

little

by using archaic

off

interest.

mocking Redbum's

naive adher-

27.

ence to the causes of temperance or purity, he is

apparently addressing genteel readers.

important to keep

form

a hybrid.

in

mind

that

in

is

Two types of narratives about

were common

life at sea

Redbum

It is

in Melville's day.

There was the straight adventure chronicle, whether fact or fiction, such as Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast (1840) and Melville's first two books, which were clearly designated as reading for boys and men. There was also the sentimental sohh story of the sailor's trials at sea propagated by societies for the relief of

seamen and tailored

to the tastes of a religious and feminine audi-

ence.

and

Sigoumey belonged to such a society, "The Widow and Her Son"

in tales like

[New

{Water-Drops

York,

73) she depicted the unrepentant life at sea as

tle

nursery it is

tale.

a

44wild

an unjust protest against female

Redbum

authority. Melville dismissed

say

pp.

sailor's

1848],

tale";

as a "lit-

more accurately one might

confused parody of a

In Redbum, Melville

nursery

little

writing in deliber-

is

and

intention

unsatisfied

Newton

Arvin,

Herman

Melville (n.p.,

1950), p. 265.

William Charvat,

28.

in one of the finest on Melville and one which has

essays to date

my own

guided

''Moby Dick

was

.

.

remarks that

approach,

[is]

.

the

work of

a writer

in a state of creative tension

whose

ing public

defined" (Bruccoli, 29.

are to

op. cit.,

a read-

had

at last

p. 240).

All page references here and elsewhere

Herman

York, 1948).

Melville,

On

Moby Dick (New

the connections between

Melville and Gilvinism, see particularly Bras-

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and Morton White, Paths of American Thought (Boston, 1963), p. 84, where the authors state in connection with Melville and Hawthorne well, op.

cit.;

that "the emotions of Calvinism thus persisted in literature after the

stmcture of theology

had begun to fall to pieces"; Randall Stewart, American Literature and Christian Doctrine (Baton Rouge, La., 1958); Lawrance son, Melville's Quarrel with 1952).

On

Melville's reception in the religious

Mentor

L. Williams,

"Some Notices

press, see

and Reviews of Melville's Novels

mal

is

clear, his for-

what part he is to play, is not. an odd cross between the conven-

identity,

Redbum

is

Thomp-

God (Princeton,

While the character Redbum's meaning vehicle of class-consciousness)

who

with

limitations he

ate consciousness of the sentimental sea tracts. (as a

his

conventional reader's aroused but unfulfilled

satirizes his

(104),

So

tension between Melville's awak-

but

and

"wight"

like

readers by

like

either male or shares

in American Religious Periodicals 1846-1849," Ameri-

can Literature, 22 (1950), 119-27. 30.

Melville

is

of course enormously aware

tional virtuous lad of pious sea literature, ex-

of the economic realities and significance of

posed but resistant to maritime temptation,

the whaling industry, however. See

and the tough

Berthoff, The Example of Melville

tives.

sailor of the

adventure narra-

To further complicate the confusion

the book, like Mardi (although

ously tive,

less

of

conspicu-

Redbum is divided between a narraabout young Redbum's adventures at so),

and a rather improbable "story," which peaks with Redbum's mysterious, perhaps

sea,

Ideal in America (London, Oxford,

and

study of Melville

we

have, not only for a

numh)er of particular points, but for eral

is

not

in

control of the dichotomy between the book's

two formal modes,

narrative and "story."

He

—

nominally finishes off the "story" Melville always rounds out his stories, as he never does his narratives by telling the reader what he or she presumably wants to know, most par-

—

ticularly the sad fate of can't

end the

narrative;

Harry Bolton.

we

He

only learn that

New

York, 1964), pp. 277-319. I should add that I am indebted to Berthoffs book, the finest

Harry Bolton

London. Melville

York,

1962), pp. 78-84, and Leo Marx, The Machine and the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral

decadent, escapades with the English boy in

Warner

(New

my

gen-

understanding of Melville's supreme im-

portance and value. 31.

For further information on

Melville's

intention with Pierre, see William Braswell,

Opinion of

American LitFor an interesting interpretation of the artistic and sexual diflficulties revealed in Pierre, see Lewis Mumford, Herman Melville: A Study ofHis Life and Vision

"Melville's

Pierre,"

erature, 23 (1951), 246-50.

.

Notes

(New York,

1956), pp. 151

interpretation

Herman

ff.

Another helpful

William Ellery Sedgwick,

is

of Mind (Cam-

Melville: The Tragedy

bridge, Mass., 1945), pp. 127 32. Bruccoli, op. 33.

to

see Hershel Parker,

The Recognition of Herman Melville: Selected Criticisms Since 1846 (Ann Arbor, Mich.,

ed.,

Hugh W.

1967), pp. 49-60;

Reviewers

Melville's

1846-1891 (Chapel

"A

Melville's

the

Re-examination

of

Literature,

Melville's

42 (1970),

35.

(Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1951),

221.

p.

Mitchell Curtis, and Melville shared the same ,

Merton M.

see 'I

and

My

Sealts,

Chimney,'

ruff,

Modem

Language

his

own

atheistic, materialistic,

and the writing

sensual, chaotic productions

WoodIS

See Vicki Halper Litman, "The Cot-

tage and the Temple: Melville's Symbolic Use Architecture,"

of

American

Quarterly,

21

(1969), 630-8. 45.

Carolyn

See

Tree Table,' 46.

"

'The Apple-

American Quarterly, 23 (1971),

See Charles N. Watson,

and the

"The

Karcher,

L.

101-9.

draw between

American

Association,

Melville's relations with Harper's, see

ibid.,

"

(1960), 283-92.

'Spiritual Lesson' of Melville's

pp. 282-302. Melville perhaps saw the comparisons critics in the early 1850s liked to

My

"Herman

"Melville and His Chimney," Publications the

of

Eugene Exman, The Brothers Harper (New York, 1965), p. 245. For

publisher. Harper's. See

p. 224.

op. cit,

Literature, 13 (1941), 142-54; Stuart C.

44.

Quoted in Bruccoli, op. cit., p. 239. See Leon Howard, Herman Melville

Howard,

Other Sketches For useful studies of "I and

and American

On

in

will be to

Other Tales

43. Page references to "I and My Chimney" and "The Apple-Tree Table" will be to Herman Melville, The Apple-Tree Table and

226-32. 34.

Quoted

Chimney,"

Hill, N.C., 1961).

American

Reviewers,''

Page references to "Bartleby"

41

Hetherington,

of Hetherington, see Hershel

unreliability

Parker,

British

387

Herman Melville, Billy Budd and (New York and Toronto, 1961). 42.

fF.

p. 276.

cit.,

For these views,

Chapter 9

Theme

of Timonism:

The Confidence Man,

Jr.,

"Melville

From

Pierre to " American Literature, 44

(1972), 398-^13.

heart," or the tasteful, "moderate, judicious,

page references are to Herman Melville, The Confidence Man: His Masquerade

and experienced" work of

(New York,

of Mitchell, praised for writing "from the Curtis. See Parker,

48.

ed., Recognition, pp. 63, 93.

36.

see

For

this

Howard,

37.

and other favorable reactions,

op. cit,

47. All

pp. 211

the

can Mind: Social and Moral Ideas

op. cit.,

II, p.

574.

49. Ibid, p. 542.

Ibid, p. 547.

50.

ff.

Richard D. Mosier, Making

1949).

Leyda,

Ameri-

51.

Ibid, p. 579.

the

52.

See "The South Seas"

in

Melville, ed.

(New

Lecturer (Folcroft, Pa., 1970).

York, 1892),

p. 111.

The Portable

(New York,

McGuffey Readers (New York, 1947), p. 130. 38. See George William Curtis, Prue and I

Jay Leyda

in

575-83. See also Merton

M.

1952), pp.

Sealts, Melville as

For modem was working in the Steme-Irving-MitchellCurtis tradition in his magazine tales, see

of Herman Melville, Hennig Cohen (New York, 1964), pp. 7,

Richard Harter Fogle,

Charles Eliot Norton, see Leyda, Melville Log,

recognition that Melville

39.

Melville's Shorter Tales

32.

For

Edward H. Ro-

II, p.

senberry, Melville and the Comic Spirit (Cam-

54.

(Norman, Okla.

1960), p. 46;

bridge, Mass., 1955), pp. 146 cit, p. 193;

Judith Slater,

if.;

Sedgwick,

op.

"The Domestic Ad-

venturer in Melville's Tales," American Literature,

which

For I

''Bartleby:

interpretations

found Art

of

"Bartleby"

John Gardner, Social Commitment,"

helpful, see

and

a negative response to Battle-Pieces

ed. 24,

by

683.

For an

interesting contrast of these

works, see John

P.

McWilliams,

Taps and Battle-Pieces:

Jr.,

The Blossom

two

''Drum-

of War,"

American Quarterly, 23 (1971), 181-201. 55. All

37 (1965), 267-79.

40.

Selected Poetry

53.

Sailor:

page references are to Billy Budd ed. Harrison Hay-

An Inside Narrative,

ford and Merton M. 56.

I

Sealts, Jr.

(Chicago, 1962).

am indebted for the spirit of my inter-

Philological Quarterly, 43 (1964), 87-98; Liane

pretation to the superb discussion of Billy

Norman, "Bartleby and the Reader," New Eng-

Budd

land Quarterly, 44 (1971), 21-39.

in Berthoff, op. cit, pp. 183-203.

differing

and penetrating

analysis, see

For

a

Edgar

Notes to Chapter 9

388

A.

Dry den,

of Form: The

Melville's Tbematics

twentieth century. See

Thomas Woody, A

Great Art of Telling the Truth (Baltimore,

History of Women's Education in the United

1968).

States

57.

Quoted

in

Intellectualism in

Richard Hofstadter, Anti-

(New York,

American Life

58.

The

versity policies

ail

University of Wisconsin, the Uni-

and Wesleyan Uni-

tried to reverse or

on co-education

(New York and

Lancaster, Pa., 1929),

pp. 268-98. 59.

I

am

referring

to

the

which Georg Lukacs descrih)ed

1962), p. 116.

versity of Chicago, Tufts,

II,

modify

at the

their

turn of the

phenomenon "Grand

as the

Hotel Abyss," the "coupling of with

'left'

ethics

epistemology"; see The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, 'right'

Mass., 1971), p. 22.

INDEX

American Revolution,

Abbot, Abiel, 103 Abbot, John,

81,

Ames, Mary Clemmer, 194 Andover Review, 98 Andover Seminary, 42, 145, 146-7,

Abbott, Jacob and John, 233 Abolitionists, 33-4, 35, 69

Adams, Abigail, 54 Adams, Henry, 229 Adams, John, 54 Adams, Nehemiah, 209

Anglican Church, 248; church, 23,

advertising, 66-8, 82, 83, 229 afterlife, 88, 202, 207, 220, 221, 57,

222^

64

Little Coffin

(Adams), 200, 204-5, 209

(Roman

empress), 74

Alcott, Bronson, 127, 269, 278-9 Alcott, Louisa

26. See also

Episcopalianism

Anthology Society, 230 Anthony, Susanna, 101, 190 anti-institutionalism, 152-8, 160

anti-intellectualism, rise of, 141-5, 146-51, 152, 158-61, 165, 168, 230, 328

antinomianism, feminine, 246, 294

agrarianism, 50 II

as established

Annals of the American Pulpit (Sprague), 183, 189, 200

Addison, Joseph, 240

"Age of Homespun," 52, Agnes and the Key of Her

148, 151

Angel Whispers (Eddy), 207

Addison, Daniel D., 192

Agrippina

23, 182, 187, 265,

272, 282, 285

89

May,

127; biographical data

on, 338-9; Little Women, 96

Alderbrook (Forrester), 229

"Apple-Tree Table, The" 317, 318-19

(Melville), 299,

architecture, 212-13

Arminians, 23, 27-8

Arnold, Matthew, 90, 149, 311

Alexander, Dr. A., 106

Arthur, Timothy Shay, 233

Algerian Captive, The (Tyler), 109

association, theory of, 212-13

Allen, Joseph H., 20-1, 22, 31, 48, 91, 152;

Astrea

biographical data on, 344-5

American Biography. See Library of American (Butler), 57

American Peace Society, 186

(fictional character),

71-2

atheism, 76 Atlantic Monthly, 170, 231, 232-3, 250

Atonement,

Biography

American Lady, The

Harmon

109, 121-30, 151; Bushnell's

redefinition of, 124, 127-8, 129, 130;

Calvinist doctrine (Bellamy) of,

121^,

2

390

Index

Atonement

132-3, 134, 218, 309; anti-institutionalism

{cont'd)

153^,

125-6, 131, 324; Congregationalist

of,

by "influence," 126-30; Unitarian view of, led by

344-5; comparisons of, with Bushnell,

Worcester, 124, 126-7; Universalist view by Ballou, 124-6

on mother's

redefinition of, 124;

134-41; definition of a Christian by, 138;

of, led

Atoning

The,

Sacrifice,

A

161; biographical data on,

Display of Love Not

of Wrath (Worcester), 126

love, 110;

101, 138-9, 240-2, 243;

women

Norwood, 87, 90,

sermons

of, 153-4;

and, 98, 101, 103, 241-3, 244, 255

Beecher, Lyman,

24-5, 26-7, 29, 35, 39,

18,

Aurelian (Ware), 116

132^,

Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (Holmes), 232

daughter Harriet and, 244-5, 247, 249;

305; conversion experience of, 132;

Bacon, Delia, 143-4, 334-5

30,

Religion Delineated,

concerning

on the Atonement, 124; view of,

concerning doctrine of Atonement, 124-6 Bancroft, George, 170, 172-3, 174-6, 177,

as

121;

view

of,

and damnation, 122^, 125

sin

Bellows, Henry, 81, 91

"Benito Cereno" (Melville), 298, 314, 323 Bertha and Lily (Smith), 63, 107-8, 109

Bethune, Joanna,

178, 181, 189

1 1

Between the Gates (Phelps), 220

baptism, 135-6

advocacy of segregation of

Baptists, 22, 23;

state by, 33;

evangelism

membership

of, 218;

predominance

of, in

Beyond

the Gates (Phelps), 220, 225,

of,

figure

Bickerdyke, "Mother," 76 Billy

South, 23; slavery

Budd

(Melville), 298, 323-6, 327,

by Sparks, 188

of, defined

Bird, Isabelle, 60-1

Barth, Karl, 328

Blackwell, Elizabeth, 76, 86-7

"Bartleby the Scrivener" (Melville), 293,

black

298, 314, 315-17, 319

Blake,

Phoebe, 135

women, 49 John

L.,

Bonner, Robert,

Barton, Clara, 75

232

240-1

82,

Battle-Pieces (Melville), 322-3

Boorstin, Daniel, 166

Bay Psalm Book, 1\1

Boston, 29; church membership of

Beecher, Catharine Elsther,

38, 57, 69, 81,

253^; biographical data younger

on, 332-3; comparison of, with sister Harriet, 86, 142;

Yale,

142^,

crusade of, against

154; Domestic Economy, 96;

Episcopalian faith People on Health

of,

1

34; Letters to the

and Happiness,

and

themes

96-7, 104, 143; Truth Stranger

Calisthenics, 92; religious

than Fiction, 143, 158, 254;

education and,

Protestants, 152; library 151;

Lyman Beecher

publishing center, 82; Unitarians of, 37-8,

Boston Ladies' Peace Society, 187 Bradstreet, Anne, 204, 205

Bremer, Fredericka, 114

Bridgeman, Brooks,

women's

J.

Howard

Broughton, Sarah,

59, 71, 105, 106, 143

62, 231

Beecher, Edward, 90, 96-7, 132, 134, 143,

Brownson, Orestes,

of Ages, 254 30, 81, 82,

83^,

Barrett, 259

70, 147

Buckminster, Joseph, 89, 91, 97, 107, 173, 190, 230-1; biographical data on, 340-1

253-4; biographical data on, 346-7;

Henry Ward,

Allen, 98

W., 221

Browning, Elizabeth

Conflict

103,

37-8; as

40, 147, 160, 162

Beecher, Charles, 133, 134

Beecher,

movement,

in,

Brainard, David, 175

92;

Physiology of,

328-9

biography, 168, 176-8, 181-2, 183, 188-99; types

issue and, 34, 248

132, 142, 227,

226

Biblical criticism, 146-7, 148, 151, 181

of, 23; non-intellectualism of, 36-7;

Bartlett,

99, 101, 133, 306,

Atonement

reformulated by, 121-4, 125-6, 127; True

Ballou, Hosea, 124, 134, 196-7, 203; Treatise

hymns

Boston, 37-8; quoted, on

6, 29,

311; doctrine of

Ballou, Adin, 218

36-7;

39^0

Bellamy, Joseph,

143-4

Joanna, 161

church and

of, in

revivalism,

Belknap, Jeremy, 32

Bagley, Sarah, 70 Baillie,

experience

Beecher, Roxana Foote, 132-4

Bacon, Henry, 81, 99, 192, 194, 231; biographical data on, 344-5 Bacon, Leonard,

135, 140, 143, 153, 233, 246, 253,

90,

Burr, Aaron, 246

Index

391

Bushnell, Dotha, 53-4, 74

biographical data on, 340-1; health of,

Bushnell, Horace, 34^5, 38, 39, 52-4, 68, 77,

injured by overwork, 175; marriage of,

81, 87, 88-9, 96-7, 99, 113, 134, 136-7,

161, 227, 232, 253-4, 265;

autobiography

of, 88, 192, 193; biographical data on,

342-3; comparisons of, with

Beecher, 139-41; daughter's

Henry Ward memoir of,

Peabody's memoir

90;

of, 102, 190;

quoted, on historiography, 183, 187-8; quoted, on Tuckerman, 152; "self-culture"

sermons

term coined by, views

of, 90;

of,

138;

God women

concerning

193^; early baptism advocated by, 136; Forgiveness and Law Grounded in Principles Interpreted by Human Analogies, 127; God in Christ, 150;

Channing, William Henry, 271, 274; biographical data on, 342-3

"history of oblivion" defined by, 183,

Chapin, Edwin H., 154, 231

190, 191, 192,

198;

Natural and

the Supernatural,

The,

Atonement, 124, theological thought and

and Atonement,

122, 124, 136;

and, 102

charity, voluntarism

in,

152

114; redefinition of

"Charlotte" (Bacon), 81, 192, 194-5

127-8, 129, 130;

Cheever, George, 222

writing, 139-41; Vicarious Sacrifice, The, 109, 127, 129;

view of conversion,

134,

136, 137, 140;

Woman

Reform

Suffrage: The

Against Nature, 141; on women's role, 44^5, 110-11, 129-30, 141; Work and Play,

139 Bushnell,

Mary Thorp,

Cheney, Mary Bushnell, 192 Child, Lydia Maria, 56-7, 62, 69, 86, 154, 155; biographical data on, 334-5;

controversial themes of, 95, 96 child-raising, 74-5, 264

Chimney Comer (Stowe), 250 Christ: Calvinist view of meaning of death

53-4, 68

Butler, Charles, 57-8 of, 123, 125, 324;

Butler, Kezia, 103

"feminine" nature

of,

108, 110, 116-17, 126-30, 141, 305, 327;

Byron, Lady Anne, 245-6 Byron, George Gordon, 245-6, 247, 255, 256, 284

liberal

views of meaning of death

of, 124,

127-9

125,

Christian Examiner, The (periodical), 29, 31, 32, 42, 81, 88-9, 109, 114, 115, 116, 147,

149, 151, 201, 212, 229, 231-2, 235;

Cabot, Eliza, 102

shift in doctrine

Calhoun, Daniel, 29 Calvinism, 12-13,

18, 20, 81, 131,

139, 146, 274; at

134-6,

Andover Seminary,

42,

146-7; Catharine Beecher's opposition to, 104;

conception of history found

in,

170-2; conversion and, 131-2, 134-5;

decline of, 6-8, 13, 17-19, 151; doctrine

of Atonement as formulated by, 121-4, 125-6, 131, 324; Eliza Lee's opposition to, 107; liberal

wing

of, 124; in Melville, 297,

305-6, 323-4; Stowe's 248;

view of

work

on, 245, 246,

sin in, 122-4, 125,

245

capitalism, 6, 12; sentimentalism linked to,

127 Christian Parlor Magazine, 2}}-4 Christian Union (weekly), 244

Chubbuck, Emily, 336-7. See also Forrester, Fanny church membership and attendance, 97-8; female predominance in, 97-9; New England Calvinist churches and, 135; rise of, from eighteenth to nineteenth centuries, 22-3

church cities,

Civil

254 careers,

women's, 51

Carlyle,

Thomas, 292

Cart Wright, Peter,

37,

and

of Atonement, 124, 126,

tax, 23, 28

population, 50

War,

20, 35-6, 69, 75-6, 156, 208, 322

Clarke, James Freeman, 90, 109, 266, 286;

biographical data on, 342-3; Fuller and, 271, 274

38-9

Greenwood, Grace

Gary, Alice, 95, 194, 195, 336-7

Clarke, Sara. See

Case, Mrs., 62, 231

Clarke, Sarah, 270

Catholics, 22, 23

Clarke, Willis G., 211

cemetery movement, 201, 208-13

class

Channing, EUery, 271 Channing, William EUery,

and oppression:

Fuller's journalism on,

281-2; in Melville's writing, 21, 38, 39, 89, 91,

11,

298-300

clergy: crisis of self-confidence of, 17-22;

109, 154, 155, 159, 173, 223; address of,

decline of scholarship of, 141-2, 144-51,

on the nature of the Church,

152, 158-61, 165, 168, 230-1, 328;

21;

7

Index

392

consumerism,

clergy {cont'd)

5,

64—6, 117, 141, 253, 328; in

disestablishment of, 22-8, 274; economic

literature, 9-10, 64-6, 68, 251; role

consequences of disestablishment

advertising in creating, 66-8

of,

conversion experience, 131-2, 134-8, 140,

28-32; education of, 144-9, 151;

151, 248; "instantaneous" vs. "gradual,"

evangelical, 28, 35, 36^7, 39^K), 113;

exclusion of, from frail

132, 134

political office, 33;

health of, observed, 88-9, 92-3, 175,

215-16; income

Corinne

intellect vs. piety of, 141-4; mobility of,

29-30; theological

Crosby, Fanny, 220

vs.

pastoral role of, 144-51, 158-60. See also

"Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" (Whitman), 325

Cummins, Maria, 338-9

ministry as a profession

Curtis,

Cobb, Eunice Hale, 205

George, 212, 234, 236-9, 314-15,

317; Prue

Cobb, Sylvester, 205 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 255

and

/,

239, 240, 250, 314, 315,

316, 317

colleges: coeducational, 327; proliferation of, in

(fictional character), 62, 261, 271,

276 Cotton, John, 275

28-30, 31, 90; poHtical role of, 32-6; of, 28,

Coop)er, James Fenimore, 5-6, 83, 283

copyright, 229

of, 28-9, 30-1;

intellectualism of, 9, 36-41, 145-8;

tenure

of

1830s to 1850s, 83; women's

Curtis, Harriott, 70

Cuyler, Theodore, 99-100, 204, 209, 218,

vs.

219, 231; biographical data on, 344-5

men's, 143

commercialization, 236, 238, 240, 308, 328 Confidence

Man, The

(Melville), 293, 299,

Daisy Plains (Warner), 137

301-2, 314, 319-20

damnation: Ballou's Universalist view

of Ages (Beecher), 254 Congregationalism, 17, 18, 23, 151; Conflict

Arminian wing

125-6; Calvinist view (Bellamy) of, 122-3, 125-6, 171; Channing's view of, 136; as

of, 23; as established

church, 23, 27; clergy

subject for hymns, 219

of, 28-9, 30, 34-5,

37-9, 41, 89-91; disestablishment of, 23, 24-5, 27; failure of, in

cities,

geographical distribution

248;

of, 26;

hymns

of, 218; installed vs. uninstalled ministers of, 30; intellectualism

151;

membership

of clergy of, 37-9,

of, 27-8;

membership

figure of, 23; millennialism and, 221;

National Council "Plan of Union" of, in

of,

of, in 1865, 151;

Dana, Richard Henry, 295, 297

Dante Alighieri, 219 Darwinism, 251; social, 327 Davies, Samuel, 219

Davenp)ort, John, 53

death and mourning, 200-7 democratization, 24

denomination, church: change

and

of, 27; relative decline

nineteenth century, 23, 26, 27;

ministers, 90, 94;

change

of,

by

of,

women

by

writers, 94; terminology, 32

Dewey,

Orville, 21-2, 40, 43, 46, 91, 115,

slavery and, 34-5; statement of

135, 146, 234-5; biographical data on,

self-definition of, including deletion of

340-1; daughter's

word

Synod of 1646-48

"Calvinism," 151;

of, 151;

Synod of 1852

of, 151;

view

of,

toward Atonement, 124

memoir

of, 190, 191

Dial, The (periodical), 259, 276-7, 278-9,

281 dialectic: of Calvinism, 170-1; Hegelian,

Congregational Library Association, Boston, 151

171, 175, 179-80,

Dickens, Charles,

5,

198-9

256

Congregational Quarterly, 151

Dickinson, Emily, 148

Connecticut: Anglicans as dissenters, 23, 26;

discrimination, 141-3; in education, 143,

Congregationalism as established church,

266; in

employment and pay, 76

23, 27; disestablishment, 24-5;

disestablishment of churches, 22-8

industrialization, 52

dissenters, 23, 24,

Conquest of Granada (Irving),

1

74

Conrad, Joseph, 307 consolation literature, 201-7, 208, 214, 220, 223-6, 234 Conspiracy of Pontiac (Parkman), 179-80

26-7

Divine and Moral Songs (Watts),

2

1

Dix, Dorothea, 102, 154-7, 158; biographical

data on, 334-5 Dix,

J.

H., 314

Dodge, David Low, 186

Index

272; Margaret Fuller and, 259, 260, 267,

Domestic Economy (Beecher), 96

domestic manufacture,

disappearance

50, 52;

393

West, 55

of, 49, 51, 52; lingering of, in

"domestic science," 166

269, 270-3, 274-9, 281, 284-5, 287;

ministry quit by, 20, 21, 275; quoted, on Italy,

Douglas, Stephen, 33

Downing, Andrew Jackson, 212-13 Drum-Taps (Whitman), 323

283-4

Emmons, Emmons,

Erastus, 75, 131

Nathaniel,

6, 8, 31, 75, 78, 122,

123, 131, 133, 141, 150, 159, 196-7, 232;

memoir

Duffield, George, 221

Park's

Dutch Reformed Churches, 144

scholarship of, 145, 148; view of next

Dutton,

Mathew

of, 81, 150, 190, 195-6;

world by, 222

Rice, 89

Duyckinck, Evert, 289 Dwight, Timothy, 60, 145-6,

Empty 175,

218

Crib, The: The

Memorial of Little

Georgie (Cuyler), 200, 204-5

England: Victorian culture Victorian literature

"Easy Chair" column,

in Harper's, lil, 314,

315, 317, 320

economic

women,

shift in,

48-55,

78, 117

5-6;

in,

9

Episcopalianism, 23, 40-1, 94, 248-9; attraction for

role of

in, 5,

women

of, 94;

clergy

practicing, 40-1; as established church, 23, 26;

geographical distribution

hymns

of, 218; millennialism and, 221;

of, 26;

Eddy, Daniel, 58, 207 Edgeworth, Maria, 161, 268 editorial careers, 232; women's, 95

"established" churches, 23

education: of clergy, 144-9, 151;

evangelism, 28, 35, 36-7, 39-40; attitude of,

women's takeover

grade-school,

slavery issue and, 248

of, 76,

327; popularization of, 1830s to 1850s, 83

education of women, 45, 56-9,

76, 104—6,

265, 270; discrimination in higher, 143,

toward conversions,

132; at

Eva van Arsdel

(fictional character), 65-6,

67, 68, 137-8, 140-1, 142, 157,

266; female academies for, 58-9; higher,

Everett, Alexander, 176

co-educational and, 327

Everett,

Edwards, Bela Bates,

female

seminaries, 105-6

Edward,

250-3

82, 172-3, 175, 179,

208

81, 144, 151;

biographical data on, 342-3

Edwards, Jonathan,

4, 6, 29, 32, 40, 101,

121, 135, 140, 145, 146, 171, 174-5, 176, 190, 316; as a father, 74; humility of, 193;

and millennial doctrine

of, 221; Park's

memoir to, 183; "Sinners an Angry God," 155

in the

Hands of

Fall of Mexico (Prescott), 178

Farley, Harriet, 69, 70-1, 336-7; marriage of,

95

farming, shift from subsistence to

commercial, 50 Eliza, 55-6

Famham,

Edwards, Jonathan,

Jr.,

Edwardsean school,

6-7, 77, 121-4, 274

Farrar, Mrs. John, 267

191

fashion, 60-1

"The Father" (Sigoumey), 197-8

"elect," the, 138

change

Eliot,

Charles William, 144

father's role,

Eliot,

George,

Faulkner, William, 313

5,

243, 247, 256

63^,65,

253, 259, 290, 294; twentieth-century, 11.

6

Montgomery

Ellen

(fictional character),

Fern,

George, 200 Dinsmore (Finley),

Elsie's

women's

Fanny

rights

Isabella (Prescott), 173

(worn de

plume of Sara Pay son

Willis), 78, 83, 84, 86, 91, 157, 186;

"eloquence," 271^, 282 Elsie

See also

Ferdinand and

115, 162

EUet, Elizabeth, 184, 207 Ellis,

74-5

feminism, nineteenth-century, 45, 167, 246,

Eliot, John, 175, 177 elite culture,

in,

biographical data on, 340-1; career of, 95,

236

72, 162

Holidays at Roselands (Finley), 72

embalming, 209 Emerson, Joseph, 101-2, 103 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 19-20,

Fern Leaves From Fanny 's Portfolio (Fern), 83 Fichte,

147, 173,

fiction,

Johann Gottlieb, 171 168, 260; Melville's approach

to,

234, 253, 275-6, 292; biographical data

301-2; periodical, 229-30, 232; as

on, 342-3; "eloquence" as sought for by.

replacement for theology as reading

5

1

1

394

Index in the Nineteenth Century,

fiction {cont'd)

matter, 85, 108-9, 160; rise of, 108-9,

women

113-16;

writers'

dominance

work

282, 287;

in,

96,

279-80, 281,

Herald Tribune,

of, for the

279-82, 283, 284, 285; as a writer, 272-3,

279-80, 281, 285-6, 290-1

260. See also novels

Fillebrown, Charlotte, 62, 192-3, 194, 231;

Fuller,

Timothy, 263-6,

269, 272, 274, 282

funeral customs, 209-10

biographical data on, 336-7 Finley, Martha, 72, 338-9

Finney, Charles Grandison,

18, 35, 37, 38,

134, 140

Fitzgerald, F. Scott,

3

1

Gannett, Ezra

Follen, Charles, 19-20, 21, 35, 38, 61, 81, 89, 136, 154, 223; biographical data on,

340-1; wife's

memoir

195

Interpreted by

Human

Analogies (Bushnell),

Genesis, as testament to female superiority,

74

Germany:

formalism, 328

E^win,

3

the

Godey's Lady's Book (periodical), 45, 61, 69, 71, 73, 94, 105, 229, 231-2, 234, 267, 273,

297, 313, 328

1

Fanny {nom

Chubbuck

Biblical scholarship in, 147, 148;

historian-philosophers of, 170-2, 174, 177

Formation of the Christian Character, On (Ware), 160, 162, 163 Forrest,

231

Gay worthys, The (Whitney), 107 in Principles

127

Forrester,

S. J.,

Garland of Flora, The (Dix), 155 Garrison, William Lloyd, 35 Gates Ajar, The (Phelps), 88, 188, 223, 224-5

forgiveness, 123, 125-6, 140

and Law Grounded

Stiles, 29, 154, 159;

biographical data on, 342-3

Gardner, John

of, 190, 191, 193-4,

Follen, Eliza, 162, 191, 192, 193, 194

Forgiveness

Gage, William, 98 Galaxy (magazine), 66

de plume of

Emily

Judson), 95, 186, 229-30;

biographical data on, 340-1

God

in Christ (Bushnell), 150

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 255, 256, 265-6, 269-70, 284

Fowler, Nathaniel, 67

Goldsmith, Oliver, 238, 240

Fox, Katie and Maggie, 207

Goodrich, Samuel,

Francis, Convers, 177

Graham,

171, 172,

3

Isabella, 112

Freeman, James, 91

Graham's (magazine), 229, 232, 234

free will, 126

Grant, Ziipah, 101, 105

Freneau, Philip, 235

Greeley, Horace, 277-8, 279-80, 289

Freud, Sigmund, 67, 75

Greenwood,

Friend of Peace, The (Worcester), 187 Frisbie, Levi,

81, 89, 90, 91, 194,

Greenwood, Grace {nom

89

Clarke Lippincott),

Frohman, Daniel, 66 frontier

W. P,

F.

218, 221, 223; biographical data, 340-1

de

plume of Sara

59, 91, 186;

biographical data on, 340-1

women, 55-6

Grimke, Angelina Emily and Sarah Moore,

Frugal Housewife, The (Child), 56-7 Fuller, Margaret, 13, 58, 95, 143, 253,

259-88, 290-1, 294; biographical data on,

69 Guiccioli, Countess Teresa, 245

334-5; "Conversations," 259, 262, 270, 273, 274; death of, 259, 287; as editor of Dial, 259, 276-7, 278-9, 281; education of,

263-6; "eloquence" displayed by, 260,

271^,

276, 277, 282, 285-6;

Emerson and,

Hale, Sarah

J.,

47-8, 56-7, 59, 61-2, 71,

78-9, 105, 227, 328;

background

of, 94;

biographical data on, 332-3; career of, 95, 231-2, 337; conversion of, to

259, 260, 267, 269, 270-3, 274-9, 281,

Episcopalianism, 94; doctrine of female

284-5, 287, 291; in Italy, 259-60, 282-7;

"influence" developed by, 45, 47, 57, 69,

marriage, 95, 283; and Melville, 289-92,

73, 136, 261;

294, 301, 306, 308;

and oppression, 281-2;

theory

of,

feminine nature of Christ, 108, 128; as

sense of history and action p>ossessed by,

pacifist, 186-7;

262, 265-6, 268, 277, 278-9, 281, 284-6,

self-alienation of, 93-4;

289; socialism of, 285;

Summer

on the

Lakes, 278, 281, 282; transcendental

period

of,

269-79, 281, 286, 291;

Women

concerning

73^,

on the Sabbath, 111; Woman's Record,

81, 128

Hall, Arethusa, 190 Hall, David, 29

Index

395

Harper Brothers, 82-3, 109

Home (Sedgwick), 185 Home Journal, 229 Home Monthly, 236

Harper's Magazine, 66, 229, 237, 320

Homer,

Harper's Monthly Magazine, 229, 314, 317

Hopedale Collection of Hymns and Songs, The,

Hames, William Bradford, 89 Harper, John, 82

Harris,

113

218

Thaddeus M., 108

Harte, Bret, 66

Hope

Hartford Female Seminary, 71, 105

Hopkins, Samuel,

Hartford

Selection,

146, 230;

The (hymnal), 218

women

5, 6,

Friedrich, 170-2,

Ward, 271

Julia

Huntington, Frederick Dan, 98, biographical data on, 344-5

190;

Hutchinson, Anne, 275 198-9

Hegelian

dialectic, 171, 175, 179-80,

Hemans,

Felicia Dorothea, 62, 113, 211

Hemingway, Ernest, 255, 297 Henry Henderson (fictional character),

hymns, 214, 217-20

Hymns "I

65,

249-52

(Watts), 217

My

and

Chimney"

(Melville), 299,

317-18, 319 Ide, Jacob, 150

Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 171 Hildreth, Richard, 147

to Advertisers

immigrant women, 49 immigration,

222

7,

"Improvement

Hillard, George, 176-7

Hints

of, 49,

West, 55

Howland, Marie, 190 Hudson, Winthrop, 18

Place of Rest" (hymn), 219

Georg Wilhelm

demise

50, 52;

Howells, William Dean, 20

women, 91-3

Henry F,

House and Home Papers (Stowe), 250 household industry,

Howe,

295, 309

175, 179, 198, 256

Hill,

K., 20, 21, 22, 81;

51, 52; lingering of, in

Hedges, Frederick, 264 Hegel,

of, 81,

biographical data on, 344-5

20, 96, 181,

health, frail: of clergy, 88-9, 92-3, 175,

A

memoir

274

and, 291, 292, 305, 318, 321, 322; quoted,

215-16; of

101, 190; Park's

150, 190, 195; scholarship of, 145, 148,

Hosmer, James

211, 234, 236, 243, 253, 283, 297; Melville

"Heaven,

Anthony,

excluded from, 143, 266

on Fuller, 266 Hawthorne, Sophia,

101,

196-7, 203, 247; biography of Susanna

Thomas, 219

Hawes, Joel, 113, 218 Hawthorne, Nathaniel,

6, 31, 32, 74, 78, 99,

104, 123, 131, 133, 146, 150, 159, 174-5,

Harvard University: Divinity School, 145, 147, 160; dominated by Unitarians, 42, Hastings,

(Sedgwick), 185

Leslie

incest, 228,

(Frohman), 66

historical novel, 107, 116, 181,

184^

Circles," 70

255

industrialization,

7,

12, 24,

50-1, 52, 328

"influence," 9, 77, 85, 114, 198, 213, 261,

historocal societies, 169

Atonement by,

273; of advertising, 66-7;

historiography, 174, 183, 284; American, political nature of, 175-8;

23

126-30; of the clergy, 77, 85, 136, 207;

German, 170-2,

feminine, doctrine of,

174, 177

9,

45-8, 53, 57,

68-9, 71-6, 77, 97, 103-4, 128-30, 155,

history, 169-72, 180-2, 260; biographical,

310; maternal, 74-6, 99-100, 207; of the

168, 176-8, 181-2, 183, 188; Fuller's sense

press, 85

of, 262, 265-6, 268, 277, 278-9, 281,

Ipswich Seminary, 105

284-6, 289; as literary subject, 169-70,

Irving,

Washington,

174, 234-5, 236-9, 314;

180-2; local histories, 168, 181-2;

Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, 236, 237,

Melville's sense of, 289; social, 188, 189

238-9, 240, 315

History (Bancroft), 176

Islam, Chester, 89

Hitchcock, Exiward, 106

Israel Potter (Melville), 293, 298, 314, 323

Hodge, Charles, 149-51, 221 Holcombe, William, 207, 214

"I

Italy,

283-7

Would Not

Live Always" (hymn), 219

holidays, proliferation of, 167

Holidays Abroad (Kirkland), 290

Jackson, Andrew, 263

Holmes, Mary

James, Henry,

J.,

338-9

Holmes, Ohver Wendell, 231, 232, 322

284

9, 20, 62, 96,

251, 260-1, 283,

Index

396 James, Henry, Sr, 17-18, 19

liberal theology, 124-30, 132-4, 135-51, 197

Jane Elton (fictional character), 161-2

libraries, public, 36, 83, 103, 109, 181;

Jefferson,

Thomas,

23, 50, 175,

Jerauld, Charlotte F. See Fillebrown,

from theological

shift

"Jimmy Rose"

(Melville),

299

Library of American Biography (Sparks,

job discrimination, 76

Judd, Sylvester,

Land (Famham),

Life in Prairie

29, 77-8, 81, 89, 102, 130,

136-7, 182, 210; biographical data on,

"Like Noah's Lily,

of, 190;

quoted, on his

love, 191-2

55

Life of George Washington (Marshall), 175

344-5; conversion of, to Unitarianism,

memoir

ed.),

173, 176-7, 183, 188

Johnson, Richard, 33

136; Hall's

texts to fiction,

108-9

Charlotte

need to

of

Congregational Library Association, 151;

265

Weary Dove" (hymn), 219

The (periodical), 184

Lincoln, Abraham, 323

Linwoods, The (Sedgwick), 185

Judson, Ann, 106

Lippincott, Sara Clarke, 338-9. See also

Judson, Emily Chubbuck. See Forrester,

Greenwood, Grace

Fanny

literary career,

Julian (Ware), 116

literature:

women

in,

95-6, 109

commercialization

of, 236, 238,

June, Jenny (nom de plume), 186

240, 308; in competition with sermons,

Kansas-Nebraska Act, 33

220, 223-6, 234; fiction's rise to

113, 230; consolatory, 201-7, 208, 214,

p)Osition in, 108-9, 113-16; history as

Keats, John, 255, 256

Key

to

Uncle

Tom

Kingdom of God

'j

dominant

subject for, 169-70, 180-2; as mass

Cabin (Stowe), 247

in America,

The (Niebuhr),

medium,

81^,

9,

103, 168, 229, 238, 253,

308; theology subordinated

18

to, 85,

108-9,

Kirkland, Caroline, 290

137-9, 141, 150-1, 168, 253; as biography

Knickerbocker's History of New York (Irving),

defined with types defined, 188;

236

labor: female, 49, 54, 69-70; sexual division of, 56-8; strikes,

Victorian, in America, 5-6,

9,

Victorian, in England,

women's,

5, 9;

61-6, 68, 71-6, 81, 84, 86, 96, 109, 114-15, 168-9, 267-8. See also biography; fiction;

70-1

magazines; novels; poetry

Ladies' Album, The (magazine), 187, 188 Ladies' Magazine, 46, 61, 73, 105, 186-7, 232

Little

Eva

(fictional character), 3-5, 8, 12,

63, 66, 68,

Ladies' Repository, The, 99, 105, 192, 196,

254 250

Little Foxes (Stowe), 129,

233 Ladies Wreath, The:

A

225, 253;

Magazine Devoted

to

Literature, Industry and Religion, 187 Lady Byron Vindicated (Stowe), 245-7, 255,

Little Reader's Assistant, Little

Women

The (Webster), 169

96

Live and Let Live (Sedgwick), 185

London

296, 328

(Alcott),

Times, 285

Lady's Companion, The (magazine), 232

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 234, 235

Lamb, Charles, 234-5, 238 Larcom, Lucy, 70, 105, 192-3; biographical

love, God's: Bellamy's Calvinist self-love

Lotus-Eating:

view

data on, 338-9

Larkspur, Lily (nom de plume), 186

A Summer Book

of, 122-3; liberal

(Curtis),

views

of,

Lowell, Frances, 69

Last of the Mohicans, The (Cooper), 83

Lowell, James C)abot, 210

Lawrence, Amos, 70

Lowell, James Russell, 231, 266

Lee, Eliza Buckminster, 91, 107, 184-5

Lowell

leisure time, 138-9

Lowell Offering (magazine), 70-1

of Life (Sigoumey), 206

Letters to Mothers

(Sigoumey), 74-5

Letters to the People on Health

and Happiness

(Beecher), 92 liberal reformers, 21, 22, 35-6, 155-7, 269,

281-2

of man,

124-8, 133-4

Last Judgment, 221, 222

Letters

237

factories,

69-70

Lucy Howard's Journal (Sigoumey), 206 Lutherans, 25

lyceum

lectures, 36; of Beecher, 84

lyceums, 181

Lyon, Mary,

101, 105-6; biographical data

on, 332-3; and female education, 59, 105

Index

397

MacWorther, Alexander, 143^

293, 299, 301-2, 314, 319-20; disjuncture

magazines,

between form and theme

229-40, 267, 314, 320; family,

36,

186-7, 229, 231-2, 233;

ladies', 59, 61, 104,

in

works by,

302-4; female characters of, 297, 299-300;

229, 232; historical subjects of, 181;

"I

and

My

Chimney,"

299, 317-18, 319;

literary, 84, 230-1; Melville's pieces in,

Israel Potter,

313-20; religious, 230-4; "sketch" form of

Rose," 299; lectures of, 322; magazine

pieces for, 237-40, 315; women's,

pieces of, 313-20; Mardi, 299, 301, 302,

twentieth-century, 185

293, 298, 314, 323;

"Jimmy

313, 325; "Marxist" vs. "Freudian"

Manductio ad Ministerium (Mather), 145,

of, 298-9, 303;

232

themes

masculinity as theme

of,

Moby

294-^, 310, 313, 315, 317-18, 328;

Mann, Horace, 38, 157 Mann, Mary Peabody, 157

Dick, 295-6, 298, 301, 302, 303, 304-9,

manufacturing, 50-1, 52

302, 303;

Mara Lincoln

11, 298; personal

312, 314, 315, 325, 329; Omoo, 296-7, 298,

(fictional character), 65,

128-9, 130, 247

Mardi

and oppression dealt with by,

Tbe Piazza

(Melville), 299, 301, 302, 313, 325

women

291-2, 320-2;

314; Pierre, 294-5, 299,

Tales,

300, 301-2, 304, 309-14, 315, 325, 326;

Margaret and Henrietta (Sigoumey), 206 marriage: of ministers, 90, 95; of

life of,

in

sample, 95

poetry of, 322-3; "Poor Man's Pudding and Rich Man's Crumbs," 300; Redbum, 293, 296-7, 298, 300, 302,

303^,

312, 318,

Marshall, John, 175

325; rediscovery of, 328-9; romanticism

Martineau, Harriet, 43, 61, 97, 100

of, 13, 289, sense

Martyn, Mrs. Marvel,

S.

T,

South Sea narratives

187

Ik. See Mitchell,

Mary Scudder

of history

Donald

of, 289;

of, 293, 295, 302;

Typee, 289-90, 296-7, 298, 302, 325;

(fictional character), 64-5,

66, 247

295-6, 297-8, 301, 302, 303-4, 314

masculinity, 228; of

American

history,

176-7, 184; late nineteenth-century

memoirs, as biographical genre, 188-99, 200-1, 205

crusade for, 327-8; as Melville's theme,

Mercersberg Theology, 25

294-6, 310, 313, 315, 317-18, 328

mercy, concept

Massachusetts: Congregationalism as

of, 123

Methodists, 22, 23; evangelism of, 28, 36-7;

established church, 27; disestablishment,

itinerant preacher tradition of, 30;

23; industrialization, 51; Unitarians, 27

membership

mass culture,

view

of sin presented by, 245; Wbite-Jacket,

13, 103, 168, 228, 256, 308,

of, 28;

320, 328; vs. elite culture, 6, 328;

predominance

Victorian culture and,

issue, 34,

mass production,

5,

253

145, 148, 217,

in

South, 26; and slavery

248

232

Middlemarcb

247

(Eliot),

Mather, Richard, 217

Mill,

Mather, Samuel, 99

millennium, doctrine

Mayo, Sarah Edgarton,

62, 81, 104, 109,

130, 231; biographical data,

336-7

John

Stuart, 11 of,

Miller, Samuel,

1

14

Milton, John, 113, 219

McGuffey's Reader, 314

Miner, Alonzo A., 196-7

mechanization, 50

221-2

Miller, Perry, 18, 260, 328

Mazzini, Giuseppe, 266, 285

medical profession,

figure of,

Mickiewicz, Adam, 266, 287

in printing, 82

Mather, Cotton, 98,

membership

23; non-intellectualism of, 36-7;

Minister's Wooing, Tbe (Stowe), 64-5, 244, 51,

76

246, 247

Herman, 5-6, 8, 10, 96, 234-5, 253, 289-326, 327; "The Apple-Tree Table,"

Melville,

ministry as a profession: change

in,

1820-75, 7-8, 9-10, 19-20, 24, 32-43;

299, 317, 318-19; "Bartleby the

eighteenth-century, 6-7,

Scrivener," 293, 298, 314, 315-17, 319;

clergy

9,

32-3. See also

"Benito Oreno," 298, 314, 323; Billy

Ministry at Large (Tuckerman), 153, 158

Budd, 298, 323-6, 327, 328-9; Calvinism

misogyny, 142

in,

297, 305-6, 323-4; class conflicts

treated by, 298-300;

compared to

Fuller,

289-92, 294, 301, 308; Tbe Confidence Man,

missionary work,

35, 105-6, 111; in

Pacific, Melville's

and

condemnation

289-90, 305

of,

Fuller's

the

Index

398 Miss

New

Magazine^ 232, 243

Leslie's

Mitchell, Donald, 236-7, 238-9, 314-15;

mm

de plume "Ik Marvel," 234, 236, 303, 314,

York

City, 50, 277-8, 281; as

publishing center, 82; Sunday School

movement in, 112 York Herald, 281 York Herald Tribune,

New New

315; Reveries of a Bachelor, 238-9, 240,

250, 314, 316

277-8, 279

mobility: of clergy, 28-30, 31, 90; of

New

York Ledger (weekly), 82, 91, 240

women, geographical, 95; of women, upward social, 78-9, 94 Moby Dick (Melville), 295-