Womanhood in Anglophone Literary Culture : Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Perspectives [1 ed.] 9781443809191, 9781847183507

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Womanhood in Anglophone Literary Culture

Womanhood in Anglophone Literary Culture Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Perspectives

Edited by

Robin Hammerman

CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PUBLISHING

Womanhood in Anglophone Literary Culture: Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Perspectives, edited by Robin Hammerman This book first published 2007 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing 15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2007 by Robin Hammerman and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN 1-84718-350-6; ISBN 13: 9781847183507

This collection is dedicated to the loving memory of Helen Hill, daughter of Becky Wingard Lewis

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ..................................................................................... x Preface....................................................................................................... xii Robin Hammerman Part I: Foundations in the Nineteenth Century Chapter One................................................................................................. 2 Cabinets of the Curious: Readers in the Nineteenth Century American Archive and the Search for a Story-Like Life Zoe Trodd Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 32 Women’s History, Women’s Empowerment: Lydia Maria Child’s Ladies Family Library Series Susan Toth Lord Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 59 Cinderella Revisited: Women Writers and the Stepfamily Christine Poulson Chapter Four.............................................................................................. 78 The Hidden Harlot: Alternative Ideals of Womanhood in Nineteenth Century Women’s Fiction Susan Cruea Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 102 Victorian Women Poets and the Art of Collaboration Susan Soroka Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 123 “That Idyl of the June, that girls’ gospel”: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and Browning’s Aurora Leigh Becky Wingard Lewis

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Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 136 Cuban Femininity and National Unity in Louisa May Alcott’s Moods and Elizabeth Stoddard’s “Eros and Anteros” Nina Bannett Part II: Modernism and the Twentieth Century Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 164 Bad Girls of the VAD: World War I Fallen Women in the Forbidden Zone Jennifer Shaddock Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 184 Modernism, Maternity, and the Radical Women Poet Julia Lisella Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 210 Riders of the New Wave: The Feminist Science Fiction of Le Guin, Russ, and Tiptree Alayne Peterson Part III: Post-Modernism and Anglophone Narratives Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 246 Embodying the Muse, Opening Pandora’s Box: Post-Modern Counter Narratives of Female Creativity and Community Jennifer E. Dunn Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 269 Sacred Frontiers: Looking for Fissures to Construct an Alternate Feminist Subjectivity in Fatima Mernissi’s Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood Diya Abdo Chapter Thirteen...................................................................................... 309 Who I Be I Grow Up / Here?”: Literary Recuperations of Harlem’s Streets Alison Perry

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Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 343 Womb Fiction: Late Twentieth Century Challenges to the Woman as Womb Paradigm Natalie Wilson Contributors............................................................................................. 373

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We gratefully acknowledge the following: On behalf of Diya Abdo: Drew University Philip Lentz Peggy Samuels On behalf of Nina Bannett: The new faculty release time afforded by the City University of New York’s Professional Staff Congress Bradley Fox On behalf of Susan Cruea: Bowling Green State University BGSU Popular Culture Library Jeannie Ludlow On behalf of Robin Hammerman: Stevens Institute of Technology Adriana Stark, for editorial assistance Andrew Tilem David and Gail Hammerman On behalf of Julia Lisella: The Virginia Pyne Kaneb Faculty Scholars Grant awarded through Regis College Liz Ammons at Tufts University, where the piece began as a doctoral dissertation On behalf of Susan Toth Lord: The support of her husband, Edward, and her son, Timothy Larry Andrews and Lewis Fried, colleagues and friends

Womanhood in Anglophone Literary Culture

On behalf of Alayne Peterson: Her husband, Tony, for his support and encouragement On behalf or Christine Poulson: The British Academy Her stepchildren, Tim and Claire On behalf of Jennifer Shaddock: Her daughters, Addison Bushnell Her husband, Jack Bushnell The University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire The University of Wisconsin for sabbatical research support On behalf or Susan Soroka: Drew University Northeastern University George Soroka On behalf or Natalie Wilson: Naomi and Shane Clift Institutional support on behalf of: Jennifer E. Dunn, Balliol College, Oxford Alison Perry, University of Texas at Austin Becky Wingard Lewis, University of South Carolina

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PREFACE

Womanhood in Anglophone Literary Culture: Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Perspectives is a study well placed among a growing number of books on womanhood in literary tropes and themes. The essays in this collection investigate the historical continuity of culturally vibrant and deeply rooted conceptions of womanhood for Anglophone women writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The contributors examine specific ways in which women authors participated in discourses about social conditions for women. The essay topics were ignited by each contributor’s personal and professional interest in the relationship between women’s writing and the state or condition of being a woman. The scholars whose essays appear in this collection contribute to a great tradition of critical inquiry about intersections of literature and women’s culture, not to mention the expanding canon of nineteenth and twentieth century books written by women. This collection will be of special use to graduate students and faculty who navigate these intersections in their objects of study. Womanhood in Anglophone Literary Culture is divided into three parts: the first establishes foundations or basic contexts for understanding ideas about womanhood in the nineteenth century; the second investigates modernism and womanhood in twentieth century literature written by women; and the third explores conceptions of womanhood among female authors of the post-modern movement and in culturally expansive, late twentieth century Anglophone narratives. For part one, the first chapter by Zoe Trodd sets cartes-de-viste (CDV’s) in the context of America’s collecting culture. Trodd explains that contained within the world of parlor objects, and often imagined as collectible objects themselves, women seemed particularly easy to collect and categorize. Images of women as art objects reading novels were frequently featured in nineteenth century photographs, and Trodd reveals the tension in CDV’s between nineteenth century objects and subjects. In Trodd’s estimation, the images acknowledge women’s capabilities for living story-like lives and the CDV’s offered sites of resistance akin to those in nineteenth century fiction. In chapter two, Susan Toth Lord discusses the five volumes of women’s history that Lydia Maria Child compiled to educate and inspire American women about their potential as citizens of a nation that was

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grappling with moral issues such as slavery. Child, whom Lord identifies as a non canonical author, speaks to readers interested in nineteenth century -women’s education, activism, and the women’s rights movement. Lord examines the ways in which Child simultaneously validated and challenged the Cult of True Womanhood and its prevailing limitations of women to the roles of homemaker and mother. In Lord’s estimation, womanhood according to Child is ultimately characterized by self-sacrifice, intelligence, courage, and adaptability. Christine Poulson in chapter three examines nineteenth century novels and fiction written specifically for children which feature stepfamilies. Poulson explains how new attitudes towards children and towards maternity in the first half of the nineteenth century contributed to a new sense of the family, in which the maternal bond and the nature of childhood experience were considered especially significant. According to Poulson, a corollary was that the step-family was often seen as potentially problematic, unnatural, and deviant rather than a normative part of the social order and family life. In Poulson’s essay, the Cinderella story is heralded as the most famous of all step-family stories. Poulson examines how women writers, often writing initially for their own children, tended to rework and bowdlerize the story, omitting the stepmother and changing the step-sisters into sisters or half-sisters. For chapter four, Susan Cruea examines the obstacles which nineteenth century women writers faced with particular attention to their publishers. Cruea explains how women writers during this time faced careful scrutiny of their works by a publishing culture which strongly censured and deviation from hegemonic ideal s of True Womanhood. In Cruea’s estimation, women writers including Susan Warner, Maria Cummins, and E.D.E.N. Southworth, clearly endorse alternative ideal images of womanhood while appearing to perpetuate True Womanhood. Cruea traces the significance of their novels in the wake of Margaret Fuller’s writing and the feminist movement. In chapter five, Susan Soroka delineates the influx of poetry written by nineteenth century women who gained monetary support for their work and, at the same time, expanded some of the cultural roles assigned to them. Soroka explains how women poets reexamined the role of the poet and transformed contemporary understandings of poetic identity. In Soroka’s estimation, nineteenth century women poets worked in collaboration with each other as well as established historical and literary female figures to reexamine how poetry itself can and should be written. Soroka highlights the figure of Sappho and the story Long Ago, written by Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper under the pseudonym Michael Field.

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Becky Wingard Lewis in chapter six examines the art of collaboration in an inter-textual study. The essay emphasizes connections between The Story of Avis Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh. Lewis delineates the ways in which such literary women connected with each other across generations and oceans, defining and redefining their conceptions of True Womanhood in nineteenth century Anglophone society. In chapter seven, Nina Bannett compares the depictions of Cuban women in Louisa May Alcott’s novel Moods and Elizabeth Stoddard’s short story Eros and Anteros. Bannett explains how both writers configure a love triangle between an Anglo man and two women, one Anglo and one Cuban and how, in both texts, the Cuban woman is rejected as an unsuitable choice for the Anglo man. Bannett addresses the suggestion that Alcott’s and Stoddard’s decision to re-value the Anglo woman as the appropriate choice can be read as a rejection of the popular nineteenth century political doctrine of manifest destiny and, for Alcott, slavery in America. Bannett argues that both Alcott and Stoddard challenge notions of conquest abroad in a familiar domestic context. Cuban women are presented as more overtly sexual and dangerous than their Anglo counterparts, and they are expelled from the two stories because of these characteristics. Nevertheless, relationships between the Anglo couples falter. Both Moods and Eros and Anteros end with failure of the domestic relationships, suggesting in Bannett’s estimation that Alcott and Stoddard are as critical of domestic subjects as they are of Anglo political domination. For part two, chapter eight, Jennifer Shaddock argues that five literary chronicles published from 1930-33 provide a profound corrective to the idea that “war girls” on the front lines during World War I were empowered by the war. Shaddock explains that the writers of each narrative -- Mary Borden, Rebecca West, Evadne Price, Irene Rathbone, Vera Brittain – employs the Victorian trope of the fallen woman to describe their protagonists’ war experiences as Voluntary Aid Detachment nurses or ambulance drivers (VADs). The five writers transport the fallen woman iconography from a Victorian domestic landscape to the military terrain of the Great War. Shaddock reveals how the authors were thus able to express their inexpressible experience of disillusionment, debasement and alienation to a reading public otherwise unable to understand the full trauma of the VAD’s wartime story. In Shaddock’s estimation, the five narratives provide a more realistic account of the VAD’s sacrifice and trauma than had earlier published World War I narratives. The writers, to the extent that they revised the fallen woman

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metaphor, simultaneously revised the rigidly deterministic categories of this trope, which was still operational during the 1930s. Shaddock suggests that these women writers and war critics created a profound avenue of expression in modernism’s language of psychological despair and social critique. Julia Lisella in chapter nine examines the cultural expectations of women writers in both high modernist and leftist Anglo American circles. Lisella, drawing from poetry, manifestos, and historical documents of the 1930s, along with current ideas about maternity and modernism, argues for a holistic approach to the study of modernism and political poetry of the 1930s. In Lisella’s estimation, a fluid interpretation of those two movements and their relationships force us to reconsider American modernism’s lively debates, voices, and agendas. Lisella emphasizes the ways in which women’s political poetry of the 1930s often strove to articulate rather than obfuscate the particularities of female experiences, including birth, marriage, and domestic labor. Lisella argues that examining and embracing such traditional roles for women was a radical act for women in modernist and leftist circles. In chapter ten, Alayne Peterson examines three of the most influential twentieth century women writers of science fiction: Ursula K. LeGuin, Joanna Russ, and James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon). Peterson focuses on the ways in which these three writers approach ideas about gender and power. The representative texts were all written within a seven year period (1969-1976) that witnessed what Peterson characterizes as much consternation across the United States about the women’s liberation movement. The texts were written, Peterson argues, in part to challenge hegemonic assumptions about women and their social roles in contemporary society and in what Peterson identifies as the final frontier of late modern speculative fiction. For part three, chapter eleven, Jennifer Dunn examines reincarnations of the muse in fiction by postmodern women writers and its problematizations of female creativity. Dunn explains how the representative texts challenge patriarchal constructions of womanhood as well as the progressive reconstructions of feminism in the twentieth century. The study contains three sections. In the first section, Dunn considers the ways in which the muse figure in Angela Carter’s Black Venus functions to expose her disembodiment at the hands of the artist and to re-present her – black, foreign, diseased – as a return of the abjected body. In the second section, Dunn considers representations of the female artist and the male muse. The final section compares two novels featuring female artists haunted by female muses, Emma Tennant’s The Bad Sister

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and Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye. In Dunn’s estimation, both novels present a final, grim vision of blankness and absence that problematizes the speaking muse and suggests the impossibility of a positive narrative about womanhood. In chapter twelve, Diya Abdo examines Moroccan feminist and sociologist Fatima Mernissi’s Anglophone autobiography Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood. Abdo emphasizes the ways in which the women of the narrative construct for themselves an AraboIslamic feminist consciousness and subjectivity within spaces that are restricted physically, emotionally, socially, and narratologically. Throughout Mernissi’s narrative, Abdo observes a successful utilization and amalgamation of cultural or religious aspects that have been used to circumscribe women but might be used now to their advantage. Such a representation of Arab and Muslim women, especially for the target audience of this Anglophone autobiography, challenges representations of Arab and Muslim women as passive victims suffering from false consciousness; hence, the text in Abdo’s estimation delineates the existence of an alternate, viable feminism for English language readers. Alison Perry in chapter thirteen examines the acquisition of verbal and spatial literacy in Sapphire’s novel, Push. The novel chronicles the recovery from sexual and family violence of an illiterate, HIV positive, sixteen year old protagonist named Precious Jones who twice has become pregnant by her father. Perry explains how the body of the protagonist is characterized by her race, her class, her gender, and by the pregnancies that bear out her sexual abuse. The conception of womanhood in the novel, Perry argues, is young, black, and urban. The story, in Perry’s estimation, gives voice to marginalized women like Precious who simultaneously acquire literacy in English and develop autonomy. For the final chapter, Natalie Wilson explores how conceptions of womanhood from the 1980s became conflated with what she identifies as wombhood, or a woman’s capacity to reproduce and mother. Wilson contends that reproductive technology and trends beg critical assessment in relation to classifications of contemporary womanhood in Anglophone culture. The essay examines six novels published between 1983 and 1999 by contemporary female authors from Britain and the United States. Wilson explains how the six novels mock, resist, and subvert notions of motherhood as defining and necessary components of womanhood. In this study’s analysis of female subjectivity at the twentieth century’s fin de siècle, Wilson also draws from contemporary cultural phenomenon including images of pregnant celebrities and the rise of what Wilson identifies as chick lit.

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The collection suggests that womanhood in its multiple guises developed unevenly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries while it offers insight about the different ways in which women writers of the two centuries explore feminine identity. Books written by nineteenth century women, especially those who were once well -known and written about in periodicals, have become a vital part of literary studies in our time. Scholars, teachers, and researchers continue to resuscitate nineteenth century women’s writing in nearly all academic disciplines. The contributors to parts two and three demonstrate some of the ways in which twentieth century literature by women contribute to contemporary discourses about literature and material culture. Twentieth century woman writers, such as the ones examined here, have had to navigate the worlds between writer and publisher as well as writer and reader in unprecedented ways. Together, the essays in this book suggest that the examination and critique of womanhood in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries remain as boundless as feminine identity itself.

PART ONE: FOUNDATIONS IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

CHAPTER ONE CABINETS OF THE CURIOUS: WOMEN-READERS IN THE NINETEENTHCENTURY AMERICAN ARCHIVE, AND THE SEARCH FOR A STORY-LIKE LIFE ZOE TRODD

“[I]n the same cabinet, by the way, I had the pleasure of contemplating a picture of a different kind—that pretty American girl whom you pointed out to me last week” —Henry James, 1878. “[We can make] stories out of all these things; stories which will tell themselves to the untrained observer” —Frank Hamilton Cushing, 1894

On a gray Christmas morning, Jo March woke to discover a crimsoncovered book beneath her pillow. Her sisters rummaged and found books, too: Meg’s green, Beth’s dove-colored, and Amy’s blue. “I’m glad mine is blue,” said Amy. Jessie Willcox Smith’s illustrations for the 1915 edition of Little Women then showed Jo wearing crimson, Meg grey-green, Beth cream and Amy blue—connecting the girls’ clothes to their books’ covers, and by implication their interior lives to the books’ contents. The girls are their books and, sure enough, throughout Louisa May Alcott’s novel they come “to regard themselves as… capable of living story-like lives,” as Hayden White notes of whole classes in the nineteenth century.1 The Christmas books are copies of Pilgrim’s Progress. Jo reads her crimson volume as a “story of the… life… lived” and, emphasizing the possibility that Jo might then find her own story-like life, Alcott adapted 1

Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (1868, New York: Penguin, 1989), 13, 487; Hayden White, “Historical Pluralism,” Critical Inquiry 12.3, 1986, 487.

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part of John Bunyan’s work for her epigraph to Little Women (1868), so that Bunyan’s line “Go then my little Book, and shew to all... What thou shalt keep close, shut up from the rest,” now ends “shut up in thy breast.” This anthropomorphizes the book, connecting its hidden contents to the interior lives of the sisters (the same connection made by Smith’s illustrations), and suggests the possibility of narrating (shewing) one’s hidden story to others. This possibility is realized when the four little chests in the March garret, which contain the histories and “hidden stores” of the sisters (as Jo’s poem puts it toward the end of the novel) eventually open up to Jo’s “loving eyes.” The garret chests shew: telling stories, they make the archive speak—like the chest in William Merritt Chase’s studio of the 1880s, which one visitor imagined “could tell strange tales” and had “heard many a page whisper soft speeches in the ears of pretty, black-eyed tire-women.” Out of relics, trifles and records—what Alcott terms a “motley store”—Jo crafts the sisters’ individual stories and summons Mr. Bhaer to her side. Then, in responding to her revelation of the archives’ contents, he becomes her “knight”: dead treasures of the garret come to life, and Jo’s life becomes a story.2 The hidden, motley stores, where Jo finds disparate objects and storied relics of the sisters’ lives, are a model of unofficial history and an archive in the tradition of the old Cabinet of Curiosities. This was a tradition set apart from nineteenth-century America’s museum movement, and the era’s faith in the importance of classification and order within society and the archive. Throughout the nineteenth century, curiosity became knowledge and cabinets became museums, but the spirit of the Wunderkammer lived on: novels, cabinet cards and cartes-de-visite (CDVs) were shifting and dynamic archives, like the March family’s garret chest, and within this tradition of unofficial history, CDVs that show women reading novels explored the storying of women. Like Alcott’s novel, they acknowledged women’s stored but also story-like interior lives. These photographs offer the chance to read the archive from below, as instructed by Allan Sekula. Archives “maintain a hidden connection between knowledge and power,” notes Sekula, and should be “read from below, from a position of solidarity with those displaced, deformed, silenced, or made invisible by the machineries of profit and progress.” The photographs, “torn between narration and categorization, between chronology and inventory,” as Sekula says of the archive more generally, 2

Alcott, 12, 477-79; John Moran, “Studio-Life in New York,” Art Journal 5, 1879, 345.

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reveal a tension between nineteenth-century objects and subjects, archives and narratives. They show “hidden stores” becoming stories, and the “I” entering “stores” to make “stories.” Storied as subjects even as they were consumed as art objects, the collectible little women of CDVs narrated their individual “I.”3

Curious Cabinets and Classified Collections The eclectic Wunderkammer of sixteenth and seventeenth-century Europe was described Thomas Platter in 1599 after he visited Walter Cope’s cabinet: “a Madonna made of feathers, a chain made of monkey teeth… an appartment stuffed with queer foreign objects in every corner.” This became the Cabinet of Curiosities of eighteenth-century America; still a melange of “Any thing that Is strang,” as a 1625 letter by Tradescant the Elder described the Wunderkammer. The aesthetic of the Wunderkammer then reappeared in nineteenth-century trompe l’oeil paintings of well-worn objects and storied remnants, and as the nineteenth-century art studio, like Chase’s studio with its storied chest, and other studios of which visitors wondered “how constituents so multifarious and seemingly incongruous can make up such a delightful ensemble.” In particular, photographers’ studios seemed a remarkable “dumping ground of the dealers in unsaleable idols, tattered tapestry, and indigent crocodiles,” as one visitor to a New York studio remarked.4 Popular photography was in fact a major site for the rehabilitation of a Wunderkammer aesthetic of extravagance and wonder. For example, the introduction to Marvelous Scenes of the World (1902) noted that the photographer has gathered “from the ‘World’s Storehouse’ the choicest treasures, transports us through his images to the Old Curiosity Shop immortalized by Dickens.” The CDV composite-card, sometimes featuring up to a thousand tiny faces on one card, was advertised as a “photographic curiosity” in of itself, and CDVs of people with unusual physical features were popular by 1860. In addition, CDVs were produced to be album collectibles, referred to as “album portraits,” and collected within albums that were individuals’ own personal cabinets of 3

Allan Sekula, “Reading an Archive,” in Brian Wallis (ed.), Blasted Allegories (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1987), 119, 127, 118. 4 Thomas Platter, Thomas Platter's Travels in England 1599, trans. Clare Williams (London: Jonathan Cape, 1937), 171-73; Tradescant the Elder cited in Arthur MacGregor (ed.), Tradescant’s Rarities (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), 15; S.G.W. Benjamin, Our American Artists (Boston: Houghton, 1886), 72; Critic 43, 1903, 34.

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curiosities—with photographs of friends and relatives alongside images of Renaissance art-works, celebrities, and natural wonders.5 The CDV, which took the form of an individual bearer’s personal photographic portrait mounted on sturdy cardboard stock, was the first cheap, mass-produced photograph, and as such was the everyman’s portrait (often made in studios located on the premises of hairdressers, butchers and dentists). CDVs were so popular that in 1866 Edward L. Wilson observed in the Philadelphia Photographer: “Everyone is surfeited with [the CDV]… everybody has exchanged with everybody.” And when collectors compiled annotated albums that reflected their own histories and interests, the CDV became a form of folk-history. This was also an ever-shifting biodegradable history. “How long are card pictures to be the rage?” asked one critic in 1862. “In a few months or years at the most, our good patrons will have their albums full of dirty and yellow and faded pictures. Will they replace them with new ones, or pass us by with contempt and disgust?” Even the albums were shifting narratives, with invitations pasted on their first page inviting each viewer to add their own image after viewing it—to replenish and continue the collection.6 Part of a tradition of those “bards and story-tellers and minstrels, of soothsayers and priests” described by Carl Becker, the CDV invoked the opposite of “historians of the [nineteenth] century who found some special magic in the word ‘scientific.’” But, as Walter Benjamin explains, there was “in the life of a collector a dialectical tension between the poles of disorder and order.” Though the fluid miscellany of the original Wunderkammer persisted in some strains of the American archival imagination, a Cartesian world-view had spawned taxonomy, typology, and the archivist-curator who sought to classify and rationalize. Collecting seemed a way to systematize the self and the world, and so another nineteenth-century development of the Cabinet was the more specialized public collections of art, natural history, geology, and ethnography, where scientific inquiry and analysis replaced curiosity and wonder, and selection replaced the infinite. A visual syntax of evolution took hold of museums, and World Fairs exhibited cultures and curios with a metonymic logic of progress. The archive that was once a “bric-a-brac shop” now had “everything… in its place… [in] a savant harmony,” commented Thérèse Bentzon in 1893. CDV albums represented a kind of

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Anon., Marvelous Scenes of the World (Chicago: C.W. Slauson, 1902), 2. Edward L. Wilson, cited in George Gilbert, Photography: The Early Years (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), 96; Humphrey’s Journal, 13, 1861-62, 292.

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biodegradable history, but the nineteenth-century archival imagination sought a permanent totality.7 Commentators eventually looked back on earlier collections as what N. H. Witchell referred to in 1891 as “mere miscellaneous lots of objects brought together with no purpose.” Collectors like George Brown Goode believed their late Victorian museums to be “no longer a chance assemblage of curiosities, but rather a series of objects selected with reference to their value to investigators, or their possibilities for public enlightenment.” Material seemed worthless unless “properly classified and scientifically described,” said William Wilson, founder of the Philadelphia Commercial Museum, in 1894, and “classification, good labelling, isolation of each object from its neighbours” were “absolute requisites,” added Sir William Henry Flower in 1898. Michel Foucault explains this shift from “spectacle,” legend and fable to “rectangle… stripped of all commentary,” as the shift from an age of theatre to an age of catalogue.8 Extending this aesthetic into the home in the 1880s, advertisements for a series of real cabinets promised that the owner would realize “at once that he is ‘master of the situation.’” This advertisement in the Catalogue of the Wooten Patent Cabinet Office Secretaries and Rotary Desks added that “the man of method may here realize that pleasure and comfort which are only to be attained in the verification of the maxim, ‘a place for everything and everything in its place.’” And the Victorian interior was as compartmentalized as its method-making cabinets, the parlor a place “for company use”—a “sort of quarantine in which to put each plague of a visitor that calls,” as Calvert Vaux complained—and a site where women were “preserved, like a bottled fruit in syrup… in a plate-glass case,” as James puts it in one of his stories.9 7

Carl L. Becker, Everyman His Own Historian (New York: F.S. Crofts, 1935), 247, 249; Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” Illuminations (New York: Harcourt, 1968), 60; Thérèse Bentzon, Les Americaines chez elles (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1893), 113. 8 N. H. Witchell, “Museums and Their Purposes,” Science 18 (July 24, 1891), 43; George Brown Goode, “Museum-History and Museums of History,” in Annual Report of the United States National Museum (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian, 1897), 80; William Wilson cited in Steven Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876-1926 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 121; Sir William Henry Flower, Essays on Museums and Other Subjects connected with Natural History, (London: MacMillan, 1898), 250; Michel Foucault, The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. (London: Tavistock, 1970), 131. 9 Catalogue of the Wooten Patent Cabinet Office Secretaries and Rotary Desks (1883) cited in Katherine Martinez and Kenneth L. Ames (eds.), The Material Culture of Gender, the Gender of Material Culture (Hanover: University Press of

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The two different models of the Cabinet appear explicitly in Harry Leon Wilson’s The Spenders (1902), where a “what-not” contrasts the “Empire Cabinet.” The what-not shelters “the smaller household gods for which no other resting place could be found,” and contains “hair of the dead… two dried pine cones brightly varnished; an old daguerreotype in an ornamental case of hard rubber… three sea-shells; and the cup and saucer that belonged to grandma.” The new cabinet has “the mother-ofpearl fan… the tiny cup and saucer of Sevres… the Japanese wrestlers carved in ivory; the ballet-dancer in bisque.” The what-not is “obsolete,” and the Empire cabinet is “regnant,” adds Wilson; and they are “hostile and irreconcilable.” One offers an official narrative, the other a personal history: in the cabinet are the expected items, prefixed by “the,” and in the what-not are individual objects, prefixed by “an.” The what-not reveals what Benjamin explains as the collector’s attachment “not only to his object but also to its entire past”—an attachment wherein the commodity fetish for unstoried objects without paper-trails is instead a memorycollection through souvenirs and storied relics; an ephemeral collage that is stored and storied.10 The new kind of Cabinet was part of America’s search for a usable past and a visibly-ordered history amid the newly anonymous industrial marketplace—what Miles Orvell calls the nineteenth-century attempt to “enclose reality in manageable forms.” Communities had fragmented, and America was recollecting itself. Object-collecting offered America an immediate, accessible history, and Victorian rooms were increasingly full of objects. The desire to find a visible past and present, and to read and recognize strangers, also played out in physiognomy and phrenology, botany and zoology, anthropology and statistics. Josiah Nott and George Gliddon’s Types of Mankind was influential after 1854, and in 1874 Joseph Simms’ Nature’s Revelation of Character theorized dispositions through an observation of form and countenance. For in a way, the middle-class cult of collecting reflected the interests of a generation of physiognomist-collectors: as Benjamin notes, the true collector orders objects “according to a surprising… connection,” and late nineteenthcentury America exhibited instead what Benjamin terms “‘disinterested’

New England, 1997), 91-2; Calvert Vaux, Villas and Cottages (New York: Harpers, 1864), 95, 97; Henry James, “The Beldonald Holbein” (1901), in The Better Sort (New York: C. Scribner’s sons, 1903), 25, 26. 10 Harry Leon Wilson, The Spenders (Boston: Lothrop, 1902), 34-8; Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 207.

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contemplation… which we would do best to compare to the gaze of the great physiognomist.”11

Animate Art and Gilded-Edged Paper Contained within the world of parlor objects, women seemed particularly easy to collect and index—their characters like a “legible door-plate of… identity,” as Henry James put it in “The Liar” (1888). In 1868 Sara Hale insisted that “character is seen through small openings, and certainly is as clearly displayed in the arrangements and adornments of a house as in any other way,” and in 1875 Harriet Beecher Stowe noted that a woman’s home was “the new impersonation of herself.” Far from being deeply storied and associated with the turning pages of a book, like Alcott’s characters, nineteenth-century women often seemed frozen as objects and associated with decorative collectibles and works of art. The Goncourt brothers equated “woman” and “thing,” calling women “art objects,” and Bentzon described the American house with its art objects as an “exquisite frame for a charming woman.” Or, perhaps most famously, a sketch by George Du Maurier for the October 30, 1880 issue of Punch showed a women framed by art objects and a rectangular screen, her profile set against canvas. In a caption she expresses a desire to “live up to” the teapot that she holds, and as she looks at the object, her husband looks at her. She is collected as an art object within the middle-class cult of what Edmond de Goncourt called bricabracomania.12 Henry James praised Du Maurier’s satirical drawings, noting that they introduced America to the “mysterious body of people, devotees of the lovely and the precious, living in goodly houses and walking in gracious garments,” surrounded by “‘sincere’ sideboards and fragments of crockery.” He filled his own fiction with compulsive collectors and their cluttered rooms. For example, Miss Cutter’s house in the story “Mrs. Medwin” (1903) is “adorned indeed almost exclusively with objects that nobody buys… and would have been luxurious if luxury consisted mainly 11

Miles Orvell, The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 35; Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 207. 12 James, “The Liar” (1888), in Henry James: Complete Stories, 1884-1891 (New York: Library of America, 1999), 321; Sara Josepha Hale, Manners; or Happy Home and Good Society (Boston: JE Tilton, 1868), 81; Harriet Beecher Stowe, We and Our Neighbors (New York: JB Ford, 1875), 152; E and J de Goncourt, Journal, vol. 1, September 12, 1868 (Paris: Flammarionm, 1935), 177; Bentzon, 113.

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in photographic portraits slashed over with signatures.” Or Olive Chancellor’s room in The Bostonians (1886), has “many objects that spoke of habits and tastes,” books on “little shelves like brackets (as if a book were a statuette),” and photographs and water-colors covering the walls. A few other of James’ sinister or laughable collector-figures include Mr. Leavenworth with his memorials in Roderick Hudson (1876), Madame Merle with her teacups and damask, Osmond with his medallions, and Ned Rosier with his bibelots in The Portrait of a Lady (1881), Maria Gostrey with her brocades in The Ambassadors (1903) and Adam Verver with his tiles, enamels and museum in The Golden Bowl (1904).13 This theme encompassed James’ sub-theme of the collection of women as art objects and curiosities. He compared women to art on several occasions: upon seeing John Singer Sargent’s 1882 painting of four girls with vases, he remarked that “the splendid porcelain and the aprons of the children shine together,” so that girls echo vases. He admired another painting with “charming old objects… among which I include the human face and figure in dresses unfolded from the lavender of the past.” And within his fiction this theme is pervasive. For example, in “The Liar,” one woman has the appearance of “fresh varnish… so that one felt she ought to sit in a gilt frame,” and the character David Ashmore maintains that women might be painted many times and “hung up all over the place,” making “a pretty wall-pattern.” In his early story “A Landscape Painter” (1866), Miss Leary’s lover is “fond of comparing her to the Venus of Milo,” and the narrator explains: “if you can imagine the mutilated goddess with her full complement of limbs, dressed out by Madame de Crinoline and engaged in small-talk beneath the drawing-room chandelier, you may obtain a vague notion of Miss Josephine Leary.” Or in The American (1877), Newman wants “a beautiful woman perched on the pile, like a statue on a monument,” and observes: “I want to possess, in a word, the best article in the market.” The following year, in Daisy Miller (1878), Winterborne’s friend discusses “Innocent X by Valázquez, which hangs in one of the cabinets of the palace,” and then adds: “‘in the same cabinet, by the way, I had the pleasure of contemplating a picture of a different kind— that pretty American girl whom you pointed out to me last week.’”14 13

James, Partial Portraits (London: Macmillan and Co., 1888), 368; James, “Mrs. Medwin” (1903), in The Better Sort, 116-117; James, The Bostonians (1886, New York: Penguin, 1983), 15. 14 James, Picture and Text (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1893), 105, 12; James, “The Liar,” 323, 324; James, “A Landscape Painter” (1866), in A Landscape Painter and Other Tales (New York: Penguin, 1990), 64; James, The

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The theme continues throughout James’ entire body of work. In The Bostonians, Basil and Olive are like rival bidders at an auction of Verena, Verena seems a “moving statue” to Basil, and Mr. Burrage likes her for the same reason that he likes enamel and embroideries. In The Portrait of a Lady, Isabel’s inheritance makes her an object in the marketplace, a bibelot with value at auction. Osmond wants her “to figure in his collection of choice objects,” and compares her to a silver plate, just as Rosier thinks of Pansy as a “Dresden-china shepherdess” with “a hint of rococo.” In The Golden Bowl, Verver sees Maggie as “slim draped ‘antique’ of Vatican or Capitoline halls” and the Prince sees Charlotte as “a cluster of possessions of his own... items in a full list, items recognized, each of them, as if, for the long interval, they had been ‘stored’—wrapped up, numbered, put away in a cabinet.” In The High Bid (1909), Prodmore regards his daughter Cora as his “largest property,” puts her “on view,” and tries to exchange her for a house, and in The Outcry (1911), Lady Sandgate is pursued by a collector as though she is an expensive work of art, and Lord John explains that “every handsome woman” is “a work of art.” James was dramatizing the situation described by John Berger in Ways of Seeing (1972): “Men look at women,” and “[w]omen watch themselves being looked at” and turn themselves “into an object... a sight.”15 In James’ fiction this situation allows women to be inserted into the narratives of others. After being collected and archived, women are also read and written upon: Verena, Isabel, Pansy, Daisy, Catherine, and Milly are all plotted by other characters, and some are described as blank or uncut pages. In The Portrait of a Lady, Pansy is “a sheet of blank paper— the ideal jeune fille of foreign fiction,” and Isabel hopes that “so fair and smooth a page would be covered with an edifying text.” Isabel herself is plotted by Ralph, who acknowledges that most women “waited, in attitudes more or less gracefully passive, for a man to come that way and furnish them with a destiny,” and that “Isabel’s originality was that she gave one an impression of having intentions of her own.” Eventually he has to confess to Isabel: “I had treated myself to a charming vision of your American (1877, New York: Norton, 1978), 44; James, Daisy Miller (1878, New York: Penguin, 1983), 75. 15 James, The Bostonians, 63; James, The Portrait of a Lady (1881, New York: Penguin, 1986), 354, 409; The Golden Bowl (1904, New York: Scribner’s, 1909), 187, 46; James, The High Bid, unpublished typescript [1909], Houghton Rare Books Library, Harvard, Act 1, 23, 37; James, The Outcry (New York: New York Review Books, 2002, 1911), 14; John Berger, Ways of Seeing (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990, 1972), 46-47.

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future... I had amused myself with planning out a high destiny for you.” Or, in The Wings of the Dove (1902), Densher sees Kate as “a whole library of the unknown, the uncut,” and experiences “the thrill of turning the page,” and in The High Bid, Cora is a “large smooth sheet of blank, though gilded-edged paper.”16 James’ dynamic, whereby women are made into animate art and gilded-edged paper, played out across nineteenth-century photography as well. In spite of the presence of CDV albums as folk-histories and eclectic cabinets of curiosities, photography also helped to further catalogue and summarize culture. America sought national characteristics and the ideal type: Professor Plumbe’s National Daguerrian Gallery had 1000 portraits of public figures by 1845, Mathew Brady’s Daguerrian Miniature Gallery and semi-monthly Gallery of Illustrious Americans offered lithographic portraits and biography from 1847 onward, and Photographic Portraits of Living Celebrities (1856-1859) and Portraits of Men of Eminence (186367) gave accompanying mini-biographies each month. Central to typology, photography was also used in criminology and surveillance—most famously in Thomas Byrnes’ Professional Criminals of America (1886). Photography could index the nation’s faces, as Littel’s Living Age realized as early as June 1846, when a journalist claimed that photography offered “indices of human character,” and “exponential signs of disposition, desire, character,” with “as many subdivisions as the famous classification of plants.” Photography was the “grand climacteric of the science [of physiognomy],” concluded the writer. In 1869 another article confirmed photography was central to “the delineation of anatomical specimens and of all natural historical objects,” and added that it had “long been used for the purpose of identifying criminals.” The photographer seemed the physiognomist’s best hand-maiden, as one photographer acknowledged: “the face is an index to both the intellectual and moral character,” wrote Marcus Aurelius Root, adding that “we are all physiognomists in practice, if not in theory.”17 The use of photography in physiognomy and typology meant it seemed prone to making its subjects into objects—and to turning women, in particular, into collectible and consumable art-works. From P.T. Barnum’s American Gallery of Female Beauty (1854) to numerous post-bellum CDVs of women leaning elbows on empty pedestals where vases or 16

James, The Portrait of A Lady, 328, 116, 395; James, The Wings of the Dove (1902, New York: Norton, 2003), 309; James, The High Bid, 35. 17 Littel’s Living Age 9, June 1846, 552; “The Legal Relations of Photographs,” The American Law Register, January, 1869, 3; Marcus Aurelius Root, The Camera and the Pencil (Philadelphia: M.A. Root, 1864), 89.

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statues should be, women often featured in nineteenth-century photography as art objects. In CDVs where objects appear, these women are often associated with the objects, their costumes merging with painted backdrops of two-dimensional urns, their poses echoing the shapes of nearby sculptures. “[T]hey might as well be stone idols from Egypt,” complained one critic; “The entire number of positions… do not exceed four or five… No one could suppose that the artist thought they had souls, feelings, sentiments, dispositions.”18 As well, the design of CDV albums did tend to place the female subjects of CDVs deep within the culture of custom and typology. Partaking of the popular interest in botanical classification, many albums included printed surrounds of flowers and birds. And, positioned amid these specimens of natural history, the women in photographs sometimes wield botanic props that make them specimens of womanhood, as an article for the Journal of Photography made clear in August 1863: “In the portrait of a lady a variety of resources… may be found: she may be examining a bouquet, arranging a vase of flowers,” whereas in “the portraits of gentlemen, the same occupations would be less suitable.”19 While flowers were acceptable props for women, books were not. One photographer advised that while a woman might “hold a book or some other object, if the sitter so choose… a pretty hand is much the prettiest when empty.” Or, again advising against books as props, one early article in the June 1846 issue of Littel’s Living Age scorned the “literary weakness” that prompts “a young woman whose leisure hours are exclusively devoted to the restoration of dilapidated male habilments” to be photographed as “intensely absorbed in the perusal of a large octavo.” It seemed that women could be open books themselves, their characters readable, collectible and contained, but never readers within the CDV.20 Even when women do hold books in CDVs, the images often suggest merely the “desultory reading” that Abba Goold Woolson described in 1873 as being “without definite object or hope of temporal gain.” For example, in one 1880s image, two women have a toddler between them and hold on their laps open books at which they don’t look [fig.1]. White pages blend into their white aprons, for their stories are their domestic lives. The books balance precariously, and they hold them with one hand each while also supporting the child between them. They are connected visually by a fence-rail behind them—a rail with the same containing 18

“Expressing Character in Photographic Pictures,” The American Journal of Photography, November 1858, 180. 19 The American Journal of Photography, August 1863, 220. 20 Root, 106; Littel’s Living Age, June 1846, 552.

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function as the toddler, whose presence evokes the Victorian cult of domesticity.21

Figure 1. CDV, 1880s, by Dr. A. Lane, Pike, New York. [From the author’s collection.]

21 Abba Goold Woolson, Woman in American Society (Boston: Roberts Bros., 1873), 31;

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Equally, many images of reading groups feature one decentralized, closed book with women industriously sewing around it. The book here is merely decorative—as in The Bostonians, with Olive’s “little shelves like brackets (as if a book were a statuette).” Further containing the act of reading as a safely feminine leisure activity, several CDVs of boys dressed as girls indicate femininity via props like hat, parasol and book [fig.2]. Here is the “manly deeds/womanly words” dichotomy, as elliptically phrased on the back of one CDV of women-readers. Caught visually quite often between art objects at one side of the image, and piles of books at the other, the women in these photographs hover between objecthood and subjecthood [fig.3].

Figure 2. CDV tintype, 1860s. [From the author’s collection.]

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Figure 3. CDV, 1860s, Reading, Pennsylvania. [From the author’s collection.].

In addition, the popular interest in collecting CDVs meant that photographs eventually told the collector’s story rather than those of the female subjects. The album had replaced the card-basket in order to enable this collector’s narrative—for otherwise, as one journalist explained, “the card of Mrs. Brown of Peckham would well rise to the surface at times from the depths to which you had consigned it, and overlay that of your favourite countess.” Meaning was in the relation of the images to one another and to the collector, as explained by Jean Baudrillard, who

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suggests that collectors always combine their own pasts with those of their objects, so that “the last in the set is the person of the collector.”22 The women in CDVs thus became part of another person’s identity, “padding” the “vacant space” of that identity, as one writer warned in the May 1862 issue of Littel’s Living Age: “The claimant does not care about you… he or she has got a photograph book, and, as it must be filled, you are invited to act as padding to that volume and to fill a vacant space.” The arrangement of CDVs followed a pattern: usually public figures, grandparents, parents, siblings, other relatives, friends, places visited, European figures, works of art (in that order). Some albums even had musical boxes that played with the turning of pages—a fixed accompaniment. Locked within what Benjamin would later call the collector’s “the magic circle,” the individual image was seemingly part of a well-defined narrative. Like the woman in James’ “The Liar,” the little women of CDVs seem to sit “in a gilt frame,” and like James’ Cora, they seem little more than sheets of “blank, though gilded-edged paper.”23

Reading Women Reading Yet nineteenth-century women are also represented as subversively plotting themselves. For example, James dwelt on the question of plots for women in “The Story In It” (1902). “Women aren’t always vicious, even when… they’re unhappy. They can be unhappy and good,” asserts one character. But another wonders: “can they be ‘good’ and interesting?”, and scoffs, “The adventures of the honest lady? The honest lady hasn’t—can’t possibly have any adventures.” Of one woman he thinks: “Who but a duffer… would see the shadow of a ‘story’ in it?” Seeking her own “story in it” in The Portrait of a Lady, Isabel Archer resists the marriage plot, the tragic plot, the novel-of-education plot, and is “always planning out her development, desiring her perfection, observing her progress,” even while others plot her.24 One of James’ best explorations of plot versus archive, story versus collection, is his little-known story “In the Cage” (1898). Cissy works in a telegraph office, in “framed and wired confinement” but wants to “add something to the poor identity of her function.” Surrounded by the shop’s bric and brac, she reads novels until her “imaginative life was the life in 22 “The Carte de Visite,” The Photographic News, May 1862, 44; Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects (New York: Verso, 1996), 91. 23 Littel’s Living Age, May 1862, 448; Benjamin, Illuminations, 60. 24 James, The Portrait of A Lady, 107; James, “The Story In It” (1902), in The Better Sort, 179, 181, 188.

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which she spent most of her time.” She reads telegrams too, and pieces plots together from the cryptic messages. Soon she sees in one customer’s face “the very essence of the innumerable things,” guesses “all sorts of impossible things,” and feels about this other person that “she knew everything.” She lives “a double life… in the cage,” entering “more and more into the world of whiffs and glimpses,” finding a “panorama fed with facts and figures, flushed with a torrent of colour and accompanied with wondrous world-music.” She remembers people, fits them with others, interprets and rotates them, holds their secrets, and develops the power to plot their lives. She reads “into the immensity of their intercourse stories and meanings without end”; a “bottomless common.”25 Eventually Cissy has so much material that she can create scenes between people “better than many in her ha’penny novels.” One story, between Captain Everard and Lady Bradeen, beats “every novel in the shop.” Drawn into the plot of the lovers, she holds “the whole thing in her hand, held it as she held her pencil.” She recovers a telegram that exposes their affair, entering their story as a character. But at the end of the story she marries Mr. Mudge, accepts the end of her powerful imaginative life, and prepares to spend the rest of her life in a “damp, dusky, shabby little room.” It’s a fate reminiscent of Catherine Sloper’s, in Washington Square (1880), though Catherine could never plot herself at all: “From her own point of view, the great facts of her career were that Morris Townsend had trifled with her affections, and that her father had broken its spring. Nothing could ever alter these facts.” Catherine cannot create a usable past.26 Again, James was exploring a cultural phenomenon registered by nineteenth-century CDVs. This tension between story and archive, plot and collection, appears in CDVs of women reading, and undermines the otherwise objectifying tendency of the era’s photographs. Though photography journals and newspaper articles recommended that women not be photographed as readers, and though women were often visually equated with art objects within photographs, women are photographed holding and reading books nonetheless. In 1872 Woolson explained that if a woman could acknowledge her capability for living a story-like life, then she might be more than an “ornamental” young lady who just “carried out that theory which society told her was the only true and proper one to accept” without a story of her own. And the presence of books in 25

James, “In the Cage,” (1898) in Henry James: Complete Stories, 1892-1898, 835, 838, 841, 843, 846, 849. 26 James, “In the Cage,” 866, 867, 905, 917; James, Washington Square (1880, New York: Penguin, 1986), 203.

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Chapter One

collectible CDV images, within albums that were themselves books, reclaimed the secret histories of women and so acknowledged women’s capabilities for living story-like lives.27 As such, these images were a site of resistance akin to the nineteenthcentury novel—long feared by America’s cultural gatekeepers. A form of self-empowerment and people’s education, the novel subverted cultural hierarchy and unleashed dangerous imaginative powers: “We have long noted it as true… that what makes a large class of books… injurious, is not so much what is plainly expressed, as what is left to be imagined by the reader,” warned one writer for the New York Evangelist in 1846. “Indiscriminate novel reading [is] intoxicating and poisonous” for it “familiarizes the reader with characters, sentiments and events, that should be known only to the police,” said another writer in the same newspaper a year later. Novels accessed the exterior beyond the parlor and the interior lives of others, and were also “records of the inner life… of young women,” representing their “inner life,” as an article in the May 1861 issue of Littel’s Living Age insisted.The physiognomical and art-historical search for truth revealed by external forms, and the Victorian attempt to read and classify the body, pushed the interior life to the background. But the stories lost in the collecting impulse thrived in the novel.28 These thriving stories were represented in photographs of women holding books—books that symbolize the storied life and the narratable self. It may have been, as one Victorian museum director explained, that in a “busy, critical, and sceptical age, each man is seeking to know all things, and life is too short for many words,” so that the “eye is used more and more… and in the use of the eye, descriptive writing is set aside for pictures, and pictures in their turn are replaced by actual objects.” But the book endured within pictures, as an object that told stories. Sometimes the specific books these women hold restore their history beyond the parlor: African American women hold books about abolition, post-bellum women hold medical books to indicate their role as nurses during the Civil War, and women read suffragette volumes together. Sometimes the women’s postures suggest the unreadable nature of closed books in the images—the women resist readability when the books are unreadable too. Or some women, photographed with men, stare at their books while the men look at them, and so invert the “ways of seeing” described by Berger. In these CDVs, women make their faces unreadable, averting their gaze toward the pages of the books they read. Burying their faces in books, the women27

Woolson, 45. New York Evangelist, 17, April 9, 1846, 60; New York Evangelist, 18, January 28, 1847, 13; Littel’s Living Age, May 1861, 321.

28

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readers are curious in the other sense of the word. They perform a visual exchange: as we read them as curiosities, so they are curious readers.29 The little women of CDV images used the book lodged within the photograph to challenge the politics of collecting and surveillance, and of the nineteenth-century parlor and archive. The CDV expelled the inner-life through stereotyping: the daguerreotype had focused on the face, and the mass-produced CDV introduced the full-length portrait, making background, dress and pose more important, and yoking character even more firmly to appearance. Scene changes were limited (four seasons on a background cloth would be rolled across like a panorama) and poses were typical of professional and social roles. But the women-readers of CDVs restored the inner-life with the book. For example, if photographed with a man, often a woman holds a book at the same angle as his fob-watch, or places it against her body at the same place as the watch, suggesting her life in time—a narrative event. Or, again suggesting the presence of a living story, one image positions two girls with books either side of a seated girl in white surrounded by flowers [fig.4]: she is as pale as death, might be dead were it not that she is seated upright without obvious rigor mortis. Bookless, storyless, hers is a social death, while the standing girls hold their books at the same angle and wear the same dress: they’re connected readers and a community of two. These images challenge Maud’s distinction between reading and living, in James’ “The Story In It”: “I know you don’t read… but why should you? You live!” she tells Mrs. Dyott. The images also challenge Jean-Paul Sartre’s idea that “living” and “telling stories” are mutually exclusive: “Man… seeks to live his life as though he were telling it,” wrote Sartre. “But one has to choose: to live or to tell.” Confirming the possibility of living and telling, in some images the only blur is that of the pages as they turn: the viewer might seek to instantly read the sitter’s whole character, but here is an event in time—an ongoing story. The blur of moving pages even appears in images where the solitary woman is interrupted in her reading and looks up from the book: though interrupted, her story persists [fig.5]. The woman-reader in these CDVs is a “systematic story-seeker,” as James described himself.30

29

George Brown Goode, “The Museums of the Future,” in Annual Report of the United States National Museum (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian, 1897), 243. 30 James, “The Story In It,” 172; Jean-Paul Sartre, La Nausée (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), 62; James, The American Scene (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1907), 12.

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Figure 4. Cabinet card, 1870s. [From the author’s collection.]

Figure 5. Cabinet card, 1890s, Portland, Oregon. [From the author’s collection.]

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This motif of interrupted-reading appears in one of James’ descriptions of a painting: “Her arms are folded in her laps; she bends forward and looks up, smiling, from her book,” he wrote in 1873. The figure is an interrupted reader, and so the observer reads her face instead—she “melted many hearts, we conjecture, but she broke none… and on her path through life she stirred more hope than despair. All this we read in the full, ripe countenance she presents to us” Isabel Archer is another interrupted reader—interrupted by Mrs. Touchett, Warburton, Osmond, and twice by Goodwood. The theme extends from Gabriel Metsu’s painting Girl Receiving a Letter (1658), to Joel-Peter Witkin’s photograph Interrupted Reading (1999) where a woman-reader fragments into separate body-parts as her reading is interrupted. But Witkin’s figure keeps a finger between the pages of book, as do most of the nineteenth-century interrupted women-readers, as though in resistance to the interrupting, objectifying eye which fragments the self. In one image an interrupted reader even stands directly above a dog-statue, and the other, book-less woman in the image faces to the left, mirrored by the right-facing dog [fig.6]. This second woman is paralleled in her storyless state by the statue, while the interrupted reader resists object status with her book.31 In other images, women are posed next to small statue-heads that sit, disembodied, at the same angle as their own heads [fig.7]. But they have books to make them whole: the book stands for the whole story of the individual, as opposed to the story of holes and separated, cataloged parts. Surrounded by empty (holey) vessels (urns, teapots, vases, boxes), women in CDVs touch and hold books, for the book is the whole story—that story missing from James’ “The Beldonald Holbein” (1901), where Mrs. Munden is “a story in herself” but the narrator won’t go into it, or the story told by a painting in James’ “The Special Type” (1900), where the narrator paints a woman who feels: “It’s the whole story. It’s life.” In these CDVs, the book in is an open but full potentiality, like Woolson’s 1873 description of her grandmother’s house. Grandmother’s official history, in the form of a map of the United States, shows the country west of the Mississippi as a “blank, unexplored waste,” but her unofficial archive is a house of history full of “marvels and mysteries”; “hoarded contents” about which she has “fine stories,” though some she might “invent.” It is a “storehouse of relics” with an “unwritten history,” and

31 James, The Painter’s Eye (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956), 70.

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Chapter One

Grandmother knows that “everything unknown passes in time for the magnificent and the historical.”32

Figure 6. CDV tintype, 1860s. [From the author’s collection.]

32 James, “The Beldonald Holbein” and “The Special Type” (1900), in The Better Sort, 24, 114; Woolson, 242, 244, 249.

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Figure 7. CDV, 1870s, Rochester, New York. [From the author’s collection.]

Echoing Woolson, another critic imagined that the savage who visits America might be bemused by “the reader of fiction, looking upon what seems to him a vacant page, and yet seeming to see in its enchanted lines a world of spirits”: though collected to fill the vacant spaces of the collector’s album, the women-readers aligned themselves with the pages of books (unvacant, though unreadable to the viewer), and with the “hoarded contents” of Grandmother’s home. Some images further challenge the aesthetic of those collectors’ albums. Collected within albums that had botanically-themed surrounds, the women often hold their

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books beneath vases of flowers, or hanging vines, so that nature seems to explode from within the books’ covers, spilling out, like the loose pages of several books do in other images. They challenge—like imaginative fiction within Victorian culture—the confined spaces of parlor, national archive, legible female body, and natural history museum. Or, in one 1870s CDV, a woman holds a book and simultaneously looks through binoculars, connecting the book to the outside world; she is likely a birdwatcher and so is reader, gazer, and collector [fig.8]. Using a taxonomical text, she reverses the dynamic of woman as classifiable collectibles. The site of her gaze is beyond the frame, and the contents of her book are invisible to the viewer. Again, the book is a full but open potentiality of meaning, her mind a hidden store.33

Figure 8. CDV, 1870s, by C. M. French. Youngstown, Ohio. [From the author’s collection.]

This woman with binoculars is connected to the world via her reading, and in numerous other images women connect to one another physically through the book: groups of two or three women touch one another and a 33

Noah Porter, Books and Reading (New York: Scribner’s, 1871), 3.

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book at the center of the image, sometimes with eyes connecting on the book’s open pages. Even when tables are nearby for the book to rest upon, the women still reach out to touch them. If only one woman touches the book, she tends to put her other hand on her friend’s shoulder, so connecting her friend to the book via the intermediary body [fig.9], and if several women in one image have a book each, the books often touch each other, overlapping slightly on the table [fig.10]. The women’s physical contact with the books in the images inserts material traces of history into the archive.

Figure 9. Cabinet card, 1880s. [From the author’s collection.]

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Chapter One

Figure 10. CDV tintype, 1860s. [From the author’s collection.]

The connection between several women and a book also suggests that the book functioned in these images as a symbol of imagined community: the whole beyond the part and the space outside the frame. For example, in one CDV a group of twelve women face in different directions, entirely disconnected as they wind yarn, knit, and play instruments. But there is one connection in the image: two women in the back share a book, holding it between them and gazing together at its pages. This connection reminds

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the viewer that the book in nineteenth-century America was a portal to an interactive realm: female reading-clubs proliferated between 1860 and 1890, and a volume called List of Books for Girls and Women and Their Clubs noted in 1895 that, in a club the author becomes “a living voice.” In addition, many home study-courses assigned each woman-reader a correspondent who directed their study: even in images of solitary readers rather than groups of women, the book signifies community.34 In another CDV a woman-reader leans her open book toward a bright window that is divided down the middle like her open book [fig.11]. Here the book is aligned with the world beyond—again it is a portal to a universe beyond the parlor, perhaps a symbol like the key hanging on the blank wall in Nicolaes Maes’ painting An Old Woman Dozing over a Book (1655), where the woman-reader dreams herself into the universe of the imagination. Winslow Homer developed this idea in his painting Girl Reading on a Stone Porch (1872), which has a thin strip of open door and bright field beyond the dark background; a portal to the land where the reader’s mind roams. Photography itself created that universe beyond the parlor. One photographer insisted that “the sight of… [photographic] representations awakens the desire of learning the history of their originals”—the original story beyond that of the album collection. Photographs could tell whole stories, narrate “incidents and subjects” and express “a whole paragraph,” not just a label, he explained. In spite of its use in categorizing culture, which created spaces between people through hierarchy, it was also a “new form of communication… which now happily fills up the space between [people],” as Lady Elizabeth Eastlake observed in 1857. Echoing Eastlake, Siegfried Kracauer later claimed that “photography tends to suggest endlessness” and probe into “an inexhaustible universe.” The book within the photograph connects the women-readers to that universe. The little women of CDVs, who often stand or sit in front of cabinets, hold books that transcend the archive’s fixed boundaries, within photographs that further probed an inexhaustible universe.35

34

Augusta Leypoldt (ed.), List of Books for Girls and Women (Boston: Library Bureau, 1895), 298. 35 Root, 414, 130; Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, “Photography” (1857) and Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography” (1927), in Alan Trachtenberg (ed.), Classic Essays on Photography (New Haven: Leete’s Island Books, 1980), 65 (emphasis added), 264.

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Figure 11. CDV, 1860s. [From the author’s collection.]

Though the late nineteenth-century archival imagination sought a permanent totality, these books within CDVs are moving, shifting storiesin-time that countered a static, taxonomized and hierarchical archive with the model of narrative and story, and rewrote the nineteenth-century gendered politics of the archive. While Benjamin glimpses nineteenthcentury photographs emerging “from the darkness of our grandfathers’ days,” these CDVs of women-readers emerge from the unofficial darkness of our grandmothers’ days, and the women’s books remind us of the

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storied nature of that relatively undocumented darkness: they are symbols of the inner lives of women, and archives of used and fragments that revive the old Cabinet tradition. Emerging from the days when the American woman reached what Woolson called in 1873 “the transition period of her history… midway between the fixed limitations of the past and the revealed possibilities of the future,” the CDVs are storied stores and a cabinet of curious readers.36

Works Cited Alcott, Louisa May, Little Women. (1868) New York: Penguin, 1989. Baudrillard, Jean, The System of Objects. New York: Verso, 1996. Becker, Carl L., Everyman His Own Historian. New York: F.S. Crofts, 1935. Benjamin, S.G.W., Our American Artists. Boston: Houghton, 1886. —. Critic 43, 1903. Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. —. “Unpacking My Library.” In Illuminations. New York: Harcourt, 1968. Bentzon, Thérèse, Les Americaines chez elles. Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1893. Berger, John, Ways of Seeing. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990, 1972. Eastlake, Lady Elizabeth, “Photography.” (1857) In Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg, 65. New Haven: Leete’s Island Books, 1980. Flower, Sir William Henry, Essays on Museums and Other Subjects connected with Natural History. London: MacMillan, 1898. Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Tavistock, 1970. Goncourt, E and J de, Journal, vol. 1, September 12, 1868. Paris: Flammarionm, 1935. Goode, George Brown, “Museum-History and Museums of History.” In Annual Report of the United States National Museum. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian, 1897. Hale, Sara Josepha, Manners; or Happy Home and Good Society. Boston: JE Tilton, 1868. James, Henry, The American. 1877, New York: Norton, 1978. —. The American Scene. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1907. 36

Benjamin, Illuminations, 215; Woolson, v.

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—. The Bostonians. 1886, New York: Penguin, 1983. —. Daisy Miller. 1878, New York: Penguin, 1983. —. The Golden Bowl. 1904, New York: Scribner’s, 1909. —. The High Bid, unpublished typescript [1909], Houghton Rare Books Library, Harvard. —. The Outcry. New York: New York Review Books, 2002, 1911. —. The Painter’s Eye. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1956. —. Partial Portraits. London: Macmillan and Co., 1888. —. Picture and Text. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1893. —. The Portrait of a Lady. 1881, New York: Penguin, 1986. —. Washington Square. 1880, New York: Penguin, 1986. —. The Wings of the Dove. 1902, New York: Norton, 2003. —. “The Beldonald Holbein.” (1901) In The Better Sort. New York: C. Scribner’s sons, 1903. —. “In the Cage.” (1898) In Henry James: Complete Stories, 1892-1898. New York: Library of America, 1999. —. “A Landscape Painter.” (1866) In A Landscape Painter and Other Tales. New York: Penguin, 1990. —. “The Liar.” (1888) In Henry James: Complete Stories, 1884-1891. New York: Library of America, 1999. —. “Mrs. Medwin.” (1903) In The Better Sort. New York: C. Scribner’s sons, 1903. —. “The Story In It.” (1902) In The Better Sort. New York: C. Scribner’s sons, 1903. Kracauer, Siegfried, “Photography.” (1927) In Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg, 264. New Haven: Leete’s Island Books, 1980. Leypoldt, Augusta (ed.), List of Books for Girls and Women. Boston: Library Bureau, 1895. Moran, John, “Studio-Life in New York.” In Art Journal no. 5 (1879): 345. Orvell, Miles, The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880-1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989. Platter, Thomas. Thomas Platter's Travels in England 1599, trans. Clare Williams. London: Jonathan Cape, 1937. Porter, Noah, Books and Reading. New York: Scribner’s, 1871. Root, Marcus Aurelius, The Camera and the Pencil. Philadelphia: M.A. Root, 1864. Sartre, Jean-Paul, La Nausée. Paris: Gallimard, 1983.

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Sekula, Allan, “Reading an Archive.” In Brian Wallis (ed.), Blasted Allegories. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1987. Stowe, Harriet Beecher, We and Our Neighbors. New York: JB Ford, 1875. Vaux, Calvert, Villas and Cottages. New York: Harpers, 1864. White, Hayden, “Historical Pluralism.” In Critical Inquiry 12, no. 3 (1986): 487. Wilson, Edward L., cited in George Gilbert, Photography: The Early Years (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), 96. Wilson, Harry Leon, The Spenders. Boston: Lothrop, 1902. Wilson William, cited in Steven Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876-1926 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 121. Witchell, N. H., “Museums and Their Purposes,” Science 18, July 24, 1891. Woolson, Abba Goold, Woman in American Society. Boston: Roberts Bros., 1873. The American Journal of Photography, August 1863, 220. “The Carte de Visite,” The Photographic News, May 1862, 44. Catalogue of the Wooten Patent Cabinet Office Secretaries and Rotary Desks (1883) cited in Katherine Martinez and Kenneth L. Ames (eds.), The Material Culture of Gender, the Gender of Material Culture (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1997), 91-2. “Expressing Character in Photographic Pictures.” In The American Journal of Photography, November 1858, 180. Humphrey’s Journal, 13, 1861-62, 292. Littel’s Living Age 9, June 1846, 552; “The Legal Relations of Photographs,” The American Law Register, January, 1869. Anon., Marvelous Scenes of the World (Chicago: C.W. Slauson, 1902), 2. New York Evangelist, 17, April 9, 1846, 60 —. 18, January 28, 1847, 13 “Tradescant the Elder” cited in Arthur MacGregor (ed.), Tradescant’s Rarities (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), 15.

CHAPTER TWO WOMEN’S HISTORY, WOMEN’S EMPOWERMENT: LYDIA MARIA CHILD’S LADIES FAMILY LIBRARY SERIES SUSAN TOTH LORD

Despite her many and varied literary endeavors, and at a time when women’s professional writing in some genres was still considered controversial, Lydia Maria Child (1802-80) was in many ways a conventional nineteenth century American woman: she was married, she was both knowledgeable and skilled in the domestic arts, and much of her writing was designed to appeal to women or to children. Such qualities established her as an appropriate influence on and role model for women at a time when the prevailing view of women conceded that their capacity for nurturing and moral rectitude made them valuable citizens of the new republic but expected that their influence would be largely, if not entirely, restricted to the confines of the home. As critic Martha Cutter points out, “True Women [did] not desire public, political power but only the gentle influence they [could] exercise from within the domestic realm” 1. Historian Barbara Welter, author of Dimity Convictions2, delineates the four pillars of the social construct she called The Cult of True Womanhood: purity, piety, submissiveness, and domesticity. Although other historians have advanced other models of nineteenth-century American womanhood, all of them acknowledge that women’s restriction to and focus on the home was almost universally sanctioned by prevailing cultural norms. Many, if not most, nineteenth-century writers, including women, seemed to accept, or even to promote, a belief in the benefits of 1

Martha Cutter, Unruly Tongue: Identity and Voice in American Women’s Writing, 1850-1930, (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999) 10. 2 Welter, Barbara, Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976.

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such restrictions. Historian Mary P. Ryan quotes nineteenth-century author and educator Lydia Sigourney (1791-1865), who explained, “‘the woman’s partner toils for his stormy portion of power and glory from which it is her privilege to be sheltered’” 3. The home therefore came to be regarded and was often described in literature as a sheltered space, a refuge from the unwholesome, turbulent, and frequently corrupt outside world of commerce, politics, and other “male” concerns. Early in her career, Child appears to have endorsed this notion. Therefore, in accordance with her society’s expectations of women authors, Child’s early works were appropriate for and appealed to the domestic interests of her readers, most of them women. Following the publication of her popular first novel, Hobomok (1824) and her second novel, The Rebels (1825), Child quickly moved into the genre of children’s literature, serving as editor of the Juvenile Miscellany from 1826 to 1834. During that time, she wrote stories such as “Louisa Preston” (1828), which taught children traditional values such as the importance of hard work, perseverance, and education, especially to those who hoped to achieve middle-class status. Simultaneously, she encouraged the development of charitable attitudes and actions among the prosperous. In addition, Child wrote several popular domestic manuals, The American Frugal Housewife (1829) and The Mother’s Book (1831). The first addressed the particular needs of women who lacked the means to live extravagantly and offered specific hints on practical ways to save money while maintaining a clean home and providing simple, nutritious meals; the second stressed the importance of early training in developing children’s characters. At a time when, as Thomas Wentworth Higginson noted, “it seemed to be held necessary for American women to work their passage into literature by first compiling some kind of cookery book” 4, Child proved more than equal to the task: The American Frugal Housewife was a staple in many American households for more than half a century, reaching its fortieth edition in the 1880s, and The Mother’s Book had reached eight editions by 1845. However, even in her early work, Child sometimes included controversial elements that suggest that, despite her wholesome image as a defender and promoter of conventional values, she harbored some unconventional ideas. For example, the plot resolution of Hobomok includes a marriage between a white woman and a Native American man, 3

Mary P. Ryan, The Empire of the Mother: American Writing about Domesticity, 1830 to 1860. (New York: Haworth Press, 1982) 35. 4 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, Contemporaries (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, 1899) 117.

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the first, but not the only, time that Child would suggest interracial marriage as a solution to interracial conflict. This novel, set in Puritan New England, also establishes her dual interests in history, a traditionally masculine area of study, and human rights, which was only marginally closer to acceptable areas of feminine concern, especially when such concern moved into the public arena. As historian Megan Marshall points out, even in the early days of the new nation, some American women found that “authority in the home seemed a good deal less than the reward American men had given themselves for wartime service: the exclusive right to rule in public life” 5. Clearly, Child was evolving early in her career into one of those women who felt that the home offered too few opportunities to women who desired to use their moral views to influence public opinion. As Barbara Cutter indicates, historians disagree on whether the belief that women possessed superior moral qualities was used to justify their entrance into the public realm or to control them and keep them confined within the home .6 Historian Nancy Cott comments that the “cultural halo” that arose from the association of the domestic sphere with the religious and secular served to “reconnect . . . women’s ‘separate’ sphere with the well-being of society” 7. Although John Quincy Adams had argued that women’s selflessness and moral virtue justified their political activism as it related to abolition8 and abolitionist Angelina Grimké viewed women’s activism in this area as a moral duty9, other nineteenthcentury Americans remained unconvinced and were often hostile to women who left the private sphere, regardless of their motives. Child herself was somewhat conservative when public speaking was involved, refusing to give speeches, even when asked to do so, although she approved of the idea of women abolitionists, such as Angelina Grimké and her sister, Sarah, giving public speeches in support of the cause. However, while Child rejected the notion of herself as a public speaker, making her opinions, even political ones, public by means of the printed word was a task from which she never shrank. 5

Marshall, Megan, The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005) 15 6 Barbara Cutter, Domestic Devils, Battlefield Angels: The Radicalism of American Womanhood, 1830-1865. (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003) 101-102. 7 Cott, Nancy F. The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780-1835. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977) 199. 8 Barbara Cutter, 100 9 Barbara Cutter, 108

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As a result, in addition to domestic handbooks, novels, and children’s literature, she used her name and her talents to promote the aims of the abolition movement, and it is this work for which she is best remembered today. Having been raised by an abolitionist father, she had married a man with abolitionist sympathies, and so it seems only natural that she too would have strong opinions on this issue. An 1830 meeting with William Lloyd Garrison inspired her total commitment to that cause and determined the course of her literary career. As Child’s interest and involvement in the abolitionist movement grew, even her stories in the Juvenile Miscellany began to reflect her passionate belief that slavery was a corrupt and corrupting institution. She intended the sympathetic characters and tragic plot twists of “The St. Domingo Orphans” (1830), “Jumbo and Zairee” (1831), and “Mary French and Susan Easton” (1834) to evoke sympathy and consequent abolitionist sentiments in her young readers. Despite her early success, or perhaps because of it, and inspired by the idea of using her literary talents to influence readers in favor of abolition, Child determined to move further beyond the domestic realm. Therefore, fully cognizant that she could speak out most effectively on this issue in a woman’s voice, she published An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans10, which, as literary critic Jean Fagan Yellin comments, “combines a preface that is a woman’s plea to be heard with a text that is a well-researched argument for immediate abolition voiced in the clear strong tones of a free female citizen of the Republic”11. Child begs readers, “I beseech you not to throw down this volume as soon as you have glanced at the title” and demonstrates appropriate feminine humility by referring to herself in domestic terms, encouraging them to “Read it, from sheer curiosity to see what a woman (who had much better attend to her household concerns) will say upon such a subject”12. What follows is an extensive discussion of the historical, legal, political, and moral implications of the institution of slavery. Like Hobomok, An Appeal reflects Child’s fascination with history and with human rights and, as Child biographer Carolyn Karcher points out, “violates the prevailing norms of feminine discourse by its very engagement in political

10

Lydia Maria Child, An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans. Ed. Carolyn L. Karcher. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. 11 Jean Fagan Yellin, Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989) 54. 12 Child, An Appeal…, 5

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controversy”13. Consequently, Karcher continues, Child’s Appeal “outraged a public that had just canonized her as a paragon of feminine virtue”14. Her abolition work, not surprisingly, cost her her reputation among those who had regarded her as conventionally domestic. Many of her readers quickly came to regard her as unconventional and therefore as an unwholesome and even potentially harmful influence. However, just before becoming publicly involved in the abolition movement and while researching and writing her first book on abolition, Child also researched and wrote the five-volume Ladies Family Library series (1832-5), which both reflects her interests in history and human rights and demonstrates the dichotomy between her conventionality and her unconventionality. As historian Susan Phinney Conrad points out, “[w]riting and thinking about women’s history began to serve as a kind of mental compass that kept Child from losing her balance as she moved into the dangerous world of reform”15. At a time when published biographies and autobiographies of women who had lived before the nineteenth century were scarce, Child progressed from longer studies of specific historical figures to a more generalized account of women’s history that spans most of recorded history, meticulously documenting the lives and achievements of women unique in their abilities to combine intellectual attainments, intense spiritual experiences, or some kind of heroism with traditionally feminine virtues. In so doing, she demonstrated her ability to use to her advantage the convention of a woman writing about women for a female audience, even as she subverted it by describing the lives and celebrating the accomplishments of many women (some her readers’ contemporaries, but many not) who had stepped far beyond the confines of nineteenth-century models of womanhood, thus evoking admiration and, perhaps she hoped, even imitation in her readers. Thus, Child hinted, albeit subtly, that the many strong and capable women that she hoped to count among her readers might aspire to greater moral and cultural influence and more worldly achievements than they had previously. As she herself successfully combined conventional and unconventional feminine qualities, Child often portrays her subjects in terms of the same dichotomy, which is particularly evident in the first two volumes of her series, each of which contains two full-length biographies, and the third

13 Carolyn Karcher, The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994) 185. 14 Karcher, 191 15 Susan Phinney Conrad, Perish the Thought: Intellectual Women in Romantic America, 1830-1860. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976) 108.

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volume, Biographies of Good Wives.16 The first volume, Memoirs of Madame de Staël and of Madame Roland17, contains biographies of two French women, contemporaries, both unusual for their involvement in the politics of revolutionary and post-revolutionary France, and who were, Karcher reminds us, “women of formidable intellectual powers who had boldly challenged the political tyranny of male authorities” 18. Looking at the difficulties each faced as a result of her choice to step beyond the barriers erected by the eighteenth-century version of the Cult of True Womanhood afforded Child and her readers the opportunity to assess the potential costs to themselves should they move beyond the home and into the arena of public debate. Many, if not most, of Child’s readers would already have been familiar with Madame de Staël (1766-1817) as the author of the enormously popular novels Delphine (1802) and Corinne (1807), both of which Child herself admired, as well as the nonfiction De l’Allemagne, a study of German culture, religion, and literature. In addition, Child recognized the superiority of Staël’s early intellectual training: “as thorough an education as fell to the lot of any woman in Europe,” she notes.19 However, Child refers to Staël’s novels and nonfiction works only briefly, choosing to focus instead on her political role as “one of the most active and determined of [Napoleon’s] opposers”20. This opposition, in addition to rendering her unconventional in terms of nineteenth-century American society to a greater extent than her writings had, rendered her unconventional, even controversial in her own society, which led to her systematic victimization. Child points out that Staël’s much-heralded salon “was a resort for all the restless politicians of the day, and she was once denounced . . . as a person dangerous to the state”21. Critic Nina Baym notes that Child emphasizes Staël’s role as martyr.22 Indeed, Child regards Napoleon’s apparent persecution of her as the result of his jealousy of “a woman, who in his own capital was such a powerful

16 Child, Biographies of Good Wives. Fifth edition. New York: C. S. Francis and Company, 1850. 17 Child, Memoirs of Madame de Stael and of Madame Roland. Revised edition. New York: C. S. Francis and Company, 1854. 18 Karcher, 146 19 Child, Memoirs of Madame de Stael and of Madame Roland, 7 20 Child, Memoirs of Madame de Stael and of Madame Roland, 45 21 Child, Memoirs of Madame de Stael and of Madame Roland, 38 22 Nina Baym, American Women Writers and the Work of History. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995) 224.

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competitor for fame”23, a woman who “received a degree of homage never before paid to any woman who was not a queen”24. With obvious admiration, Child explains that Staël, whom Napoleon insulted, tormented, and eventually exiled, first from Paris and then from France, refused to yield to the French emperor’s demands that she cease to challenge his rule. Instead, “though her exile had cost her many hours of depression and anxiety, [she] was too noble thus to bow the knee to a tyrant, whom her heart disliked, and her conscience disapproved” 25. In addition to nobility of character, Staël also demonstrated “true greatness of soul” and a forgiving temperament”26, qualities of which Child approved. At the conclusion of this biography, she proclaims, “Madame de Staël . . . deserves our highest respect and admiration”27. Hounded from her native land and chased by Napoleon’s troops across much of Europe, the virtuous Staël emerges victorious and is able to demonstrate Christian charity toward her enemy, thus ensuring her rightful place in history and with it her continued political legacy and moral influence. However, Child was not content to focus exclusively on Staël’s political involvement and chose to discuss her personal life as well, particularly her friendships. Thus, while she recognized that Staël’s first marriage, “like most marriages of policy, was far from being a happy one”28, she pointed out that Staël proved a devoted and faithful friend whose “gratitude and friendship took the coloring of ardent love”29. In thus focusing on Staël’s non-romantic relationships, Child either ignored or was unaware of her subject’s many extramarital affairs, several of which produced children. Despite the fact that many of Staël’s contemporaries were well aware of her infidelities, Child belittles the “petty malice” of the small-minded and obviously jealous slanderers who had made such comments, pointing out that “[s]uch remarkable and obvious superiority could not be cheerfully tolerated by the narrowminded and the selfish”30. In order to argue against this apparent character assassination, Child maintains that Staël was, in spite of “the coolness of her feelings toward the Baron de Staël”31, a virtuous wife until his death; 23

Child, Memoirs of Madame de Stael and of Madame Roland, 45 Child, Memoirs of Madame de Stael and of Madame Roland, 95 25 Child, Memoirs of Madame de Stael and of Madame Roland, 69 26 Child, Memoirs of Madame de Stael and of Madame Roland, 106 27 Child, Memoirs of Madame de Stael and of Madame Roland, 106 28 Child, Memoirs of Madame de Stael and of Madame Roland, 28 29 Child, Memoirs of Madame de Stael and of Madame Roland, 29 30 Child, Memoirs of Madame de Stael and of Madame Roland, 25 31 Child, Memoirs of Madame de Stael and of Madame Roland, 40 24

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furthermore, “true to the kind impulses of her generous nature”32, she hoped to “make the evening of his days as cheerful as possible”33. Child portrays Staël as a wronged wife who generously forgives her husband’s misdeeds, thus elevating her to the status of domestic icon; her life was, Child insists, “one long sigh for domestic love”34, a phrase that seems calculated to elicit readers’ sympathy. Although Child’s likely biographical sources, such as La Biographie universelle (1825) similarly overlook the question of Staël’s faithfulness to her husband, Child’s choice to discuss this aspect of Staël’s life, rather than focusing merely on her political activities, indicates her desire to present as a role model a woman who had been successful in both her public and private lives. Likewise, Child represents Staël as a devoted mother who was “singularly beloved by her children”35, a mother who, despite her political involvement, supervised their education. Child quotes Staël’s daughter, the Duchesse de Broglie, who recalled, “‘nothing gave me such delight as half an hour’s intimate conversation with her. It elevated me at once, gave me new life, and inspired me with courage in all my studies. She herself heard my lessons every day; she would not procure a governess, even in the midst of her greatest troubles’”36. If Child’s original readers believed that they had nothing in common with Madame de Staël the political activist, many of them doubtless found that they had much in common with Madame de Staël the wife and mother. Child’s biography provided them with an example of a well-known woman who could balance successfully the demands of the public and private spheres. Child chose to emphasize this same dichotomy in writing the story of Madame Roland’s life. Although Roland’s role in the French politics of her time differed from Staël’s and her domestic situation was more conventional, it seems obvious that Child intended readers to pay attention to the similarities, not the differences, in the women’s situations. Therefore, she notes that Roland, like Staël, was well educated; having demonstrated “’a passion for learning’”37 as a child, she “’devoured every volume’”38 in her family’s small library. Furthermore, like Staël, Roland (1754-93) was victimized for her political activism, but whereas Stael survived, Roland was executed, a fact that serves to accentuate Roland’s 32

Child, Memoirs of Madame de Stael and of Madame Roland, 41 Child, Memoirs of Madame de Stael and of Madame Roland, 41 34 Child, Memoirs of Madame de Stael and of Madame Roland, 28 35 Child, Memoirs of Madame de Stael and of Madame Roland, 59 36 Child, Memoirs of Madame de Stael and of Madame Roland, 59 37 Child, Memoirs of Madame de Stael and of Madame Roland, 116 38 Child, Memoirs of Madame de Stael and of Madame Roland, 115 33

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dedication to the cause of liberty. Undoubtedly, Child’s American readers, many of them descendants of those who had fought in the Revolutionary War, admired Roland because of her martyrdom. When the French Revolution erupted in 1789, Roland, the daughter of a tradesman, departed from standards of appropriate female conduct by siding openly with the revolutionaries. The following year, Child recounts, she wrote in a letter, “‘the insolence of the rich and the misery of the people, excite my hatred against injustice and oppression; and I no longer ask for anything but the triumph of truth and the success of the Revolution’”39. Furthermore, Roland expressed her willingness to give her life for that cause, insisting, “‘[i]f we do not die for liberty, we shall soon have nothing left to do but weep for her’” 40. Child explains that during the Reign of Terror, Roland, “heart-sick at the wretched condition of her country . . . valued life less than she had done in the proud enthusiasm of her patriotic hopes”41. Although Roland’s courage and determination were tested during her imprisonment, she remained firm in her convictions, declaring, “’if I am destined for the scaffold, I shall walk to it with the same firmness and tranquility’”42. While awaiting her trial and her consequent sentencing, she wrote “[h]istoric Notices of the scenes she had witnessed”43 and composed letters to public officials in which she demanded to be told her crime and protested the injustice of her imprisonment. Eventually, the Jacobins sentenced her to the guillotine. Nevertheless, her defiant spirit remained intact; far from exhibiting remorse for her “crimes,” she demonstrated pride as she allied herself with the men who had preceded her. She proclaimed to her judges, “‘[y]ou have thought me worthy to partake the fate of the great and good men, whom you have murdered; I shall try to carry to the scaffold the same courage that they have shown’”44. Roland’s political engagement, as demonstrated in her actions and her writing, made her an unconventional woman in her own time as well as in nineteenth-century America. Child, standing on the threshold of her own radical political involvement, conveys her admiration for Roland’s strength of character and her unwavering belief in the importance of justice; declaring to her readers:

39

Child, Memoirs of Madame de Stael and of Madame Roland, 189-190 Child, Memoirs of Madame de Stael and of Madame Roland, 190 41 Child, Memoirs of Madame de Stael and of Madame Roland, 214 42 Child, Memoirs of Madame de Stael and of Madame Roland, 215 43 Child, Memoirs of Madame de Stael and of Madame Roland, 218 44 Child, Memoirs of Madame de Stael and of Madame Roland, 231 40

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I revere the strictness of her moral principles, the purity of her intentions, and the perfect rectitude of her conduct; I admire the vigorous activity of her mind, her unyielding fortitude, and her uniform regard for truth. I warmly sympathize with her enthusiasm for liberty, her hatred of oppression, and her contempt for the insolence of rank.45

Obviously, Child regarded Madame Roland as an effective model for nineteenth-century American women to follow. Refusing to be intimidated by threats of slander and violence, Roland, like Madame de Staël, had held firmly to her ideals during the French Revolution as Child and many other women would do in their battle against slavery. As she had done in the first half of this volume, Lydia Maria Child combined her praise of Roland’s unconventional actions with information on and obvious approval of her conventional private life. Roland’s mother had given her young daughter a variety of household tasks to perform, having been convinced by the predominant voices of eighteenth-century French society that “she should not contribute to her . . . happiness, or usefulness, by making her an artist”46. Therefore, the future Madame Roland was often summoned from her instruction in writing, geography, music, dancing, engraving, or drawing to “‘make an omelet, pick herbs, or skim the pot’”47, a combination of traditionally masculine and feminine skills that Child, educated novelist and domestic handbook author, no doubt found appealing. Roland’s marriage, unlike Staël’s, was a love-match, but Child is careful not to depict it as a partnership of equals; therefore, Roland’s married life was in some ways similar to those of Child’s readers. Roland seems to have had few illusions about the position within the household of married women in the eighteenth century; as a result, she insisted on the importance of “‘esteem and affection’” in a husband48, informing her parents, “‘[m]y husband must be my superior; since both nature and the laws give him the pre-eminence, I should be ashamed of him if he did not really deserve it’”49. Apparently, Roland’s parents chose wisely; she conveyed her admiration of him, characterizing him as “‘an enlightened man, of spotless reputation’”50 who shared his wife’s love of study and her ideas on the necessity for social and political change in France. Ambitious 45

Child, Memoirs of Madame de Stael and of Madame Roland, 239-140 Child, Memoirs of Madame de Stael and of Madame Roland, 117 47 Child, Memoirs of Madame de Stael and of Madame Roland, 120 48 Child, Memoirs of Madame de Stael and of Madame Roland, 144 49 Child, Memoirs of Madame de Stael and of Madame Roland, 147 50 Child, Memoirs of Madame de Stael and of Madame Roland, 167 46

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as well as idealistic, together they “fancied the time had arrived for the political regeneration of mankind”51. Like Child and her own husband, Roland and her husband had similar ideas about needed changes in their society. Child could make use of such agreement to show that Roland had no intention of deliberately stepping beyond her role as woman; she did so only because the circumstances demanded such action. Child, perhaps anticipating that her account of Roland’s political involvement, coupled with her literary accomplishment, would cause readers to discount her as an acceptable influence, demonstrated Roland’s adherence to societal convention in another way by focusing on her selfeffacement as an author. Despite being intelligent and well educated, Roland never wrote to earn fame for herself but only for the benefit of others. Child includes Roland’s statement on this subject: “‘I knew very well what part became a woman, and never stepped out of my proper sphere. I employed myself in working, or writing letters, without sharing in the debate’”52. Furthermore, she was careful to dissociate herself from professional authorship, declaring, “‘I would rather cut off my fingers, than become an author’”53. Therefore, rather than produce original texts, Roland served as secretary for her husband, infusing his writings, as Child notes, with “‘that mixture of spirit and gentleness, of authoritative reason and seducing sentiment, which is perhaps only to be found in the language of a woman, who has a clear head and a feeling heart’”54. As the editor of the first American edition (1798) of Roland’s An Appeal to Impartial Posterity, which Child quotes liberally, is quick to point out, Roland “was persuaded, that the celebrity of a woman ought to be confined to the esteem arising from the practice of the domestic virtues. On this account she would never consent to publish her writings, which might have procured her literary fame”55. Despite Roland’s desire to remain unacknowledged as an author, Child quotes extensively from her memoirs, thus allowing Roland to speak in her own voice and at the same time recognizing her ability as a writer. Child, who for many years placed more importance on promoting causes in which she believed than in promoting her own talents as an author, no doubt admired a gifted woman willing to sacrifice fame and its rewards for a more noble pursuit, and she 51

Child, Memoirs of Madame de Stael and of Madame Roland, 189 Child, Memoirs of Madame de Stael and of Madame Roland, 193 53 Child, Memoirs of Madame de Stael and of Madame Roland, 139 54 Child, Memoirs of Madame de Stael and of Madame Roland, 199 55 Louis Bosc, Introduction. An Appeal to Impartial Posterity. 1796. By Marie Jeanne Roland. 2 vols. (London: J. Johnson; New York: Robert Wilson, 1798. iii-ix.) iii. 52

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hoped to convey that admiration to others. Roland’s chief concern was social justice, and her work for that cause brought her great joy. Roland’s final letter to her daughter reminded her, “‘[y]ou have seen me happy in fulfilling my duties, and in giving assistance to those in distress. It is the only way of being happy’”56. Because Child understood well such happiness, she hoped to inspire readers to seek it for themselves by working for abolition, which she regarded as the most compelling social justice issue of her day. The second volume of Child’s Ladies Family Library series, The Biographies of Lady Russell and Madame Guyon57, presents the lives of two unconventional women in some ways like Madame de Staël and Madame Roland, all of whom Child considered potential role models for those of her readers who might, like herself, pursue some form of public activity. Much like the efforts of Madame Roland, the activism of Lady Russell (1636-1723) was closely connected to the role of her husband, and as Child had done with Roland, she quotes at length from Russell’s letters. Russell never intended to use her writing for her own benefit, instead using her influence as a virtuous woman and a member of the aristocracy to defend her husband against unjust accusations of treason and false claims that he had participated in a plot to assassinate England’s Charles II. As she fought to establish her husband’s innocence by writing letters to public officials, she wrote letters to him in which she attempted to comfort and reassure him. Thus, Russell’s letters establish both her public and private identities. As in the case of Madame Roland, only a threat to her husband served as impetus for Lady Russell to move from the domestic environment to the political one. When Lord Russell was arrested and charged in 1683 despite the fact that he was “a friend to liberty”58, his wife refused to remain at home awaiting the results of the trial; instead, she was “diligently employed in procuring information as to what was likely to be urged against him”59. She requested and was denied an audience with the king, but determined to speak to him, she entered his chamber to do so. Lady Russell also accompanied her husband when he went to court, managing to depart with “‘sweet and modest self-possession’” after the unfavorable verdict.60 After Lord Russell’s beheading, his widow devoted 56

Child, Memoirs of Madame de Stael and of Madame Roland, 227 Child, The Biographies of Lady Russell and Madame Guyon. Boston: Carter, Hendee, and Company, 1832. 58 Child, The Biographies of Lady Russell and Madame Guyon, 36 59 Child, The Biographies of Lady Russell and Madame Guyon, 43 60 Child, The Biographies of Lady Russell and Madame Guyon, 46 57

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herself to attempts to defend his reputation by clearing his name, attempts which required her repeated efforts to gain political influence. As Child points out, “although Lady Russell’s gentle heart was almost crushed under its weight of misery, she was ever a faithful guardian of her husband’s fame . . . using the utmost diligence to have all false charges publicly refuted”61. As a result, she took an active interest in politics, although, as Child carefully notes, “always with a reference to him whose memory she faithfully treasured in her heart”62. Russell never conducted her public life with a view to mere self-interest; she always focused on a loftier goal. As she had done with her earlier subjects, Child provided information on the private life of Lady Russell, emphasizing elements that she knew would appeal to her readers. Like Madame Roland, Russell believed in the importance of mutual respect and understanding between husbands and wives, explaining in a letter that “intellectual beings of different sexes were intended by their Creator to go through the world together;—thus united, not only in hand and heart, but in principles, in intellect, in views, and in dispositions;—each pursuing one common and noble end . . . mutually correcting, sustaining, and strengthening each other”63. In keeping with this philosophy, all of Lady Russell’s letters to her husband reflect her deep love and respect for him. Child also emphasizes Russell’s devotion to her children. After her husband’s execution, in addition to working to re-establish his reputation, she devoted herself to instructing her children, paying particular attention to molding their characters. Thus, Child assures readers that Lady Russell “watched over the education and character of her son with the most scrupulous attention” throughout his life64. Thus, as wife and mother, Lady Russell was a worthy role model for Child’s readers, her political activity being both a result of and an integral component of those roles. For Child, Russell’s willingness to leave the domestic sphere to right a wrong was an example that she herself planned to follow, and she hoped to inspire other women to do likewise. In contrast to Madame de Staël, Madame Roland, and Lady Russell, Madame Guyon (1648-1717) serves as a model of religious devotion rather than political action. However, she managed to balance the demands of her spirituality and her writing with her domestic duties, and her success in doing so probably accounts for Child’s decision to include her biography in this series. As a child, the future Madame Guyon was 61

Child, The Biographies of Lady Russell and Madame Guyon, 69 Child, The Biographies of Lady Russell and Madame Guyon, 90-91 63 Child, The Biographies of Lady Russell and Madame Guyon, 9 64 Child, The Biographies of Lady Russell and Madame Guyon, 97 62

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educated by nuns who “unquestionably inspired her with that devout and somewhat wild enthusiasm of character, which she retained to the end of her life”65. Probably because of this early training, she longed for martyrdom. Child points out that Guyon’s devotion to her faith resulted in several imprisonments for heresy. She also suffered several serious illnesses, and it was during one of these, which Guyon dubbed her “‘extraordinary illness,’” that she learned a new form of speech; she described it as “’a language which had before been unknown to me . . . . The language of angels’”66, a wordless communication with other devout souls. Child, herself steeped in the spiritual aspects of Romanticism, seems to have been impressed by Guyon’s claim that her writing was not the result of human effort but of divine revelation. Child tells readers that when Guyon was first inspired to write, although she “knew not what to say, and had not one idea to begin with, when she took her pen the matter flowed copiously, nay, impetuously,” and she was “urged onward by a sudden and overflowing inspiration”67. Appropriately, Guyon titled her first book The Torrents. In addition to this book, she wrote her autobiography, commentaries on the Old and New Testaments, and a tract on prayer. However, before becoming a mystic, Madame Guyon was a wife, and in sharp contrast to her accounts of Madame Roland’s, Lady Russell’s, and even Madame de Staël’s marriages, Child clearly labels Guyon’s marriage as abusive. Married at 15 to a man 23 years her senior, she quickly became the victim of both her husband’s and her mother-in-law’s peevish demands. In her autobiography, she speaks of the difficulty of living with “‘perpetual contrariety, without relaxation, of doing all one can to please, without ever succeeding therein, but even still offending by the very means designed to oblige’”68. Child attributes this marital discord to a fundamental difference in the characters of Guyon and her husband, explaining, “[t]he great difficulty was, there was no union between Madame Guyon and her husband. What she thought duties [charity to the poor, for example,] appeared to him like grievous faults”69. Child indicates that, in spite of the distress and frustration that Madame Guyon must have endured, her suffering had spiritual benefits. Forbidden by her husband to pray or to take communion, she gradually learned to display patience and gentleness in the face of insults and 65

Child, The Biographies of Lady Russell and Madame Guyon, 142 Child, The Biographies of Lady Russell and Madame Guyon, 221 67 Child, The Biographies of Lady Russell and Madame Guyon, 217 68 Child, The Biographies of Lady Russell and Madame Guyon, 158 69 Child, The Biographies of Lady Russell and Madame Guyon, 180 66

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complaints. She explains, “‘the greatness of my interior occupation, and what passed within, rendered me insensible to all the rest’”70. She came to regard endurance of pain and humiliation as essential to her religious devotion. Child reminds readers, few of whom at this time in the United States would have been Catholic, that Guyon “was educated in a church that deemed self-scourging a penance for crime. The path of salvation appeared to her to lead only through the regions of sorrow and mortification”71. The more Guyon suffered, the closer she felt to Christ. However, she refused to abandon her domestic life until the death of her husband, at which time she embraced the religious life. The example of Madame Guyon serves as inspiration to women to maintain their beliefs despite opposition. Strife, Child seems to say, far from weakening one’s commitment, serves only to strengthen it. Together, Child’s full-length biographies provide four models of education, courage, and determination as demonstrated in the public sphere, coupled with recognition and acceptance of domestic responsibilities. Her readers could emulate the spirit, if not the actions of, these somewhat unconventional women while remaining largely within the boundaries of True Womanhood and the private sphere. Defending the defenseless and working to improve the lives of the unfortunate were noble pursuits less risky than public actions likely to lead to perceptions of self-aggrandizement. Therefore, such pursuits were not unfeminine in nature. As the examples of these women must have served to reassure Child that her abolitionist tendencies were acceptable, so she hoped that they would have the same effects on others. Although Karcher indicates that Child included conventional images of women in an attempt to “counterbalance intellectuals and revolutionaries with pious Christians and exemplary helpmeets [because] she wanted to maximize sales”72, Child’s inclusion of 42 lesser known figures in her third volume, Biographies of Good Wives73, had the effect of bringing to readers’ attention women who had been overshadowed by their husbands and as a result were invisible to history. Thus, the book can be viewed as fairly unconventional because it objectifies female subjects not previously considered worthy of study. Most of Child’s subjects for this volume were British, German, French, or Swiss, and their common characteristics are their devotion to, support of, and influence on their better-known 70

Child, The Biographies of Lady Russell and Madame Guyon, 162 Child, The Biographies of Lady Russell and Madame Guyon, 189 72 Karcher, 147 73 Child, Biographies of Good Wives. Fifth edition. New York: C. S. Francis and Company, 1850. 71

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husbands. Due to the scarcity of published books about women’s lives, Child included only three women’s memoirs among her many sources for this volume. Most of her listed sources were written by men, many of whom were the husbands’ biographers. In focusing on their wives, Child highlighted the emotions and experiences of an important but largely unknown group. In doing so, she provided for her readers an array of examples, though not all of them were particularly intelligent, well educated, or privileged, since Child’s chief criterion for inclusion in this volume was strong moral character. Therefore, Biographies of Good Wives offers a broader, more democratic account of women’s influence than the previous two volumes. Despite its unconventional attention to women previously overlooked by history, the fact that the influence of these “good wives” was largely exercised only through men made this volume acceptable reading, perhaps more so than the previous two volumes, for those who adhered strictly to the tenets of the Cult of True Womanhood and as a result believed that women should avoid exposure to public life. Without exception, the women that Child featured in Good Wives are pure, pious, submissive, and domestic. They are devoted, loyal nurturers under all circumstances, morally steadfast in even the worst situations. In fact, these women exist as subjects in this volume only because they proved themselves model wives according to nineteenth-century standards. However, the subjects’ marital status proves to be a limiting factor in these biographies, many of which begin and end, not with the births and deaths of the women, but with the births and deaths of their husbands. Thus, it seems that not only their lives, but the very accounts of those lives, are completely framed by and limited by men. Probably because Child did not know their first names, she refers to nearly all of them as Mrs. or Madame, while referring to their husbands by full name and occupation. An example is Mrs. Blake, wife of William Blake, to whom Child devotes four and one half pages, the first two pages of which cover the poet’s early life. Furthermore, Mrs. Blake’s biography ends with her husband’s death. Therefore, it seems that, although his wife survived him, she had no life worth mentioning during the time of her widowhood. In reality, since it is unlikely that any material on Mrs. Blake’s individual life existed, Child’s research was probably hampered by the limitations of her sources. Similarly, Child’s twelve-page biography of Martin Luther’s wife does not mention its subject until the seventh page, and Child says little of Mrs. Luther’s widowhood, except to note that it lasted until her own death seven years later.

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However, in many cases, Child was able to include much detail that focused on the importance of these women to their husbands’ careers. For example, she notes that the wife of sculptor John Flaxman “arranged his drawings [and] managed now and then his correspondence”74, serving as his professional partner and “aiding him by her knowledge and directing him by her taste”75. Similarly, Child includes a short section on Mrs. Rieske, wife of a German philologist, who studied Latin and Greek in order to prepare her husband’s “‘confused copy’” for publication.76 Elizabeth Blackwell, the wife of Dr. Alexander Blackwell, “had a good knowledge of botany, and was well skilled in drawing”77. When her husband was imprisoned for his debts, she was able to capitalize on these abilities and take advantage of the public’s interest in medicinal plants by producing, with his help, an illustrated book, the proceeds of which allowed her to secure his release. The more traditional Madame Oberlin, whose husband was a pastor, “managed his household discreetly, educated their children judiciously, and entered into all his benevolent plans with earnestness and prudence”78, thus providing support that undoubtedly enabled him to meet his pastoral obligations with a minimum of distraction. Although these women worked only within the home, their efforts were invaluable to their husbands’ professional endeavors. Child indicates that in some cases, wives exerted strong moral influence on their misguided husbands. Mrs. Lavater, the wife of a Swiss pastor, chided her husband into giving money to a poor woman by whispering, “’She is an honest, pious woman, and has certainly been ill; do assist her, if you can’”79. When Lavater protested that he did not have sufficient money to meet her request, his wife responded by offering her ring, which she removed from her finger. She later complained, “’[y]ou have always been so benevolent. Why are you now so backward to assist this poor woman?’”80. Because of his wife’s generosity and persuasiveness, Lavater realized that she desired only his moral perfection, and in his shame, he “could hardly look” at her; finally, he folded her to [his] heart, and wept”81. The example of Mrs. Lavater’s unselfishness inspired her husband to become a better man. Much earlier in history, 74

Child, Biographies of Good Wives, 114 Child, Biographies of Good Wives, 117 76 Child, Biographies of Good Wives, 254 77 Child, Biographies of Good Wives, 162 78 Child, Biographies of Good Wives, 146 79 Child, Biographies of Good Wives, 19 80 Child, Biographies of Good Wives, 19 81 Child, Biographies of Good Wives, 20 75

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Chelonis, daughter of a king of Sparta, left her husband when he plotted a revolt against her father’s government. Rather than remain with the man who had betrayed his king, she chose to atone for his misdeed by following her father into exile. Child notes, “[a]s long as her father remained in sanctuary, she stayed with him”82. However, when her husband’s rule was overthrown, she shared his change of fortune: “she sat by her husband’s side, endeavoring to console him in the most affectionate manner”83 and pleading with her father to spare her husband’s life. When her husband was exiled for his crimes, she accompanied him. Chelonis’s father rewarded her with his love and respect, and readers can assume that her husband did likewise. Child makes clear to her readers that even in a society in which men have nearly unlimited power in the home, as they did in nineteenth-century America, when husbands are found to be morally deficient, their wives have a duty to serve as moral compasses. Child also included stories of women who, like Madame Roland and Lady Russell, risked personal danger for their husbands. During the English civil war, Lucy Hutchinson was imprisoned in the garrison with her husband, a victim of treachery in the castle, and when he was thrown into the Tower of London, she accompanied him. After his death, she wrote his memoirs. In the wake of Napoleon’s defeat, Madame Lavalette dressed in her husband’s clothes so that he, dressed in hers, could escape from prison. During the American Revolution, Lady Ackland ventured across enemy lines to nurse her wounded husband. All of these women behaved unconventionally but with high moral purpose, giving their husbands’ lives higher priority than their own personal safety. By including these women, none of whom were well-known figures, in her book, Child rescued them from obscurity. Too long overshadowed by their famous husbands, with her help they assumed greater importance. She made their biographies available to women searching for ways to influence their world despite the limitations of the domestic sphere. Furthermore, by extension, Child raised to greater significance the lives of married women in nineteenth-century America, who had been forced by social convention into a subordinate role. Throughout the Ladies Family Library series, Child emphasized the domestic lives of even her most unconventional subjects, perhaps attempting to demonstrate to readers that they could, like the women whose lives she highlighted, be involved in public life without abandoning altogether their duties at home. As Child

82 83

Child, Biographies of Good Wives, 176 Child, Biographies of Good Wives, 177

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wrote the final two volumes of her series, she continued to examine women’s lives in terms of their many facets. As its title implies, The History of the Condition of Women, in Various Ages and Nations84, presents a wide-ranging historical, geographic, and cultural perspective, which results in a two-volume virtual encyclopedia of facts on and anecdotes about women. Using a variety of sources that included early histories of women, classical Greek and Roman texts, reference books on biblical and classical scholarship, church histories, and encyclopedias, Child compiled a valuable educational resource as she recovered women’s history on a wider scale than those who had preceded her in the field or those who immediately followed her, and in much greater detail than she herself had in Biographies of Good Wives. As Karcher asserts, this work “stands at the crossroads of Child’s vocations as a purveyor of domestic advice and as a subversive political agitator;” in addition, these final volumes “met the need that abolitionist women were feeling for a broader definition of womanhood compatible with their new activities”85. Obviously anticipating the range of her readers’ interests, and tacitly inviting comparisons to American society in the 1830s, Child includes information on aspects of daily life with which women would have been familiar and in which they would have had the opportunity to exercise some degree of culturally sanctioned power. She examines the roles of women and includes facts on courtship rituals, wedding customs, women’s roles within marriage, child-rearing practices, the status given to mothers, and the influence of examples of feminine virtue within a number of early societies as well as more modern ones. In addition, Child discusses punishments for adultery, the availability of divorce, and cultural concepts of widowhood, all areas in which many women found themselves largely disempowered. More importantly, in attempting to expand readers’ imagined possibilities, Child highlights the achievements of women who undertook and excelled at tasks traditionally considered unfeminine. In compiling these final volumes, Child seems to have had two purposes in mind: to inspire women to excel, even in unorthodox ways, in order to obtain some form of power, and to increase their awareness of the pervasiveness of misogyny and its consequences. Child notes that in past civilizations, some women gained power through their association with religion. She points out that in primitive societies, for example, women were often credited with divine wisdom, 84

Child, The History of the Condition of Women, in Various Ages and Nations. Two Volumes. Boston: John Allen and Company, 1835. 85 Karcher, 220

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spiritual insight, or even supernatural abilities. Among the ancient Jews, she explains, there was “a strong tendency to believe that women were in more immediate connection with Heaven, than men”86. The Parsees, descendants of the Persians, boasted the presence of holy women who observed religious rites and were “held in the highest veneration”87. Likewise, the Javanese and the Egyptians were “great believers in old women endowed with supernatural powers”88. The Romans believed in the power of female soothsayers, “certain women, supernaturally inspired”89. However, Child reminds readers that this power did not always have a positive connotation; for example, in Siberia, women were often chosen to become shamans because of “their liability to nervous disorders”90. More recently, frightening outcomes of perceptions of women’s mystical powers had resulted in witch trials in Europe and in the American colonies. Thus, although Child’s readers would have recognized the connection between women’s involvement in religion and the True Woman ideal, she highlights the fact that when perceptions of that involvement are tainted by misogyny, reputations and even lives are at risk. In addition, Child discusses the contributions of women who adopted even more traditionally unfeminine roles in times of war. For example, she mentions the Hindu women who “frequently follow[ed] their husbands to battle, and perish[ed] by their side”91 and the Chinese women who fought alongside men “with a fiery courage amounting to desperation”92. During the Crusades, Child notes, “[w]hole squadrons of women sometimes took arms in defense of the holy cross”93, and Greek women “fought against the Turks with the resolute and persevering bravery of disciplined warriors, and sought death in its most horrid forms to save themselves from infamy”94. Even during the American Revolution, Child explains, “[t]he women of ’76 shared in the patriotism and bravery of men. They were ready to sacrifice themselves, or their children, for the good of 86

Child, The History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations, 1:10 Child, The History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations, 1:127 88 Child, The History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations, 1:194, 222 89 Child, The History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations, 2:55 90 Child, The History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations, 1:185 91 Child, The History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations, 1:189 92 Child, The History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations, 1:142 93 Child, The History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations, 2:117 94 Child, The History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations, 2:179 87

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the country. Several individuals carried their enthusiasm so far as to enter the army”95. Similarly, Native American women, trained like men to display only stoicism when tortured, endured pain bravely, calling on “their utmost powers of endurance”96. Because these societies tolerated and in some cases expected women to display courage in the face of danger, they did so willingly, much as American abolitionists, both women and men, were beginning to do. Furthermore, Child reports that as women obtained greater access to education, thus becoming better equipped to compete intellectually with men, they demonstrated that they had the necessary intelligence and creativity to make the same kinds of intellectual, scientific, and artistic contributions as their male counterparts. While Child condemns women’s learning “merely for display”97, she notes with satisfaction that “[o]ne of the striking characteristics of modern times is the tendency toward a universal dissemination of knowledge in all Protestant communities, which includes the instruction of women in the sciences and in foreign languages”98. Among historical examples of educated women that Child includes are Julia, a Roman, wife of Septimus Severus, who was “famous for her genius and her learning, and for the generous patronage she bestowed on literature”99 and Lady Jane Grey, who was renowned for her scholarship.100 The Greek Agnodice, disguised as a man, studied and practiced medicine, making several scientific advances101, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu introduced the smallpox vaccine to England102 and Hypatia was an Egyptian astronomer.103 Marguerite Clotilde de Surville wrote poetry “remarkable for its freshness and simplicity”104, as did Corinna, the prize-winning Theban poet (2:6), whose name would have been familiar to readers of Volume I, since she served as partial inspiration for Madame de Staël’s second novel. In addition, Child includes information on other women writers, such as Victoria Colonna, a

95

Child, The History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations, 2:258 Child, The History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations, 2:235 97 Child, The History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations, 2:66 98 Child, The History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations, 2:208 99 Child, The History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations, 2:66 100 Child, The History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations, 2:129 101 Child, The History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations, 2:21-22 102 Child, The History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations, 2:144 103 Child, The History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations, 2:127 104 Child, The History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations, 2:127128 96

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widow who was “passionately fond of poetry”105 and who wrote sonnets about her husband, in one of which she equated her creative efforts with motherhood, explaining, “‘Since I was not permitted to be the mother of sons, to inherit their father’s glory, I may at least, by uniting my name with his in verse, become the mother of his illustrious deeds and lofty fame’”106. In enumerating for readers the many and varied accomplishments of this panoply of educated women, Child sought to raise awareness of their own possibilities. She also refutes the claims of those who regarded women’s learning as harmful. During the Middle Ages, she explains, “[w]omen preached in public, supported controversies, published and defended theses, filled the chairs of philosophy and law, harangued the popes in Latin, wrote Greek, and read Hebrew”107. However, as Child notes, public opinion had lately vilified or ridiculed the educated woman. She comments, “[w]ithin the last century it has been gravely asserted that ‘chemistry enough to keep the pot boiling, and geography enough to know the location of the different rooms in her house, is learning sufficient for a woman’”108. Even Lord Byron, who was much admired by nineteenth-century American readers, “would limit a woman’s library to a Bible and a cookery book”109. Child dismisses such ideas as “poor philosophy and miserable wit”110, acknowledging, “[i]t is by no means easy to find a man so magnanimous, as to be perfectly willing that a woman should know more than himself, on any subject except dress and cookery”111; she reminds readers that men dislike pedantry in women, although they “ought to be ashamed” of such prejudice, since it is “certainly not the vice of modern times”112. Women who aspire to something more than domestic accomplishments will benefit from education, but even those who remain firmly entrenched within the home can use their knowledge to become more effective wives and mothers. Child, in keeping with the dual focus on women with conventional and unconventional qualities that she had established in the first volume of this series, included in the last two volumes numerous examples of women who neither renounced nor abandoned their domestic duties. Furthermore, 105

Child, The History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations, 2:128 Child, The History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations, 2:128 107 Child, The History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations, 2:127 108 Child, The History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations, 2:208 109 Child, The History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations, 2:208 110 Child, The History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations, 2:208 111 Child, The History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations, 2:209 112 Child, The History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations, 2:209 106

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continuing the theme of Biographies of Good Wives, Child highlighted the contributions of women who concentrated their efforts primarily on their marriages and homes. For example, Portia, wife of Brutus, was “remarkable for her prudence, philosophy, and domestic virtues”113; Arria, wife of Paetus, urged her husband to commit suicide in order to avoid torture and disgrace114, and Eponina, wife of Sabinus, live with her husband in a cave “rather than desert him at a time of disgrace and danger”115. Mherul-Nisa, a Hindu, gained “extraordinary influence” over her husband with her embroidered tapestries, painted silks, and ornaments, prompting him to place her name on his kingdom’s coins and to stage pageants for her amusement.116 Perhaps anticipating the objections of more conservative readers to some of her relatively radical examples, and recognizing the reality that many women’s lives, both in the past and in her own time, were circumscribed by marriage, Child included examples intended to interest and inspire them. In considering the various roles of women throughout history, Child could not refrain from including the impact of slavery on their lives. In keeping with her growing commitment to abolitionism, she implies a sharp contrast between the treatment of female slaves in ancient Greece and in nineteenth-century America, focusing particularly on the sexual exploitation of contemporary slave women by their white masters. She points out, “[t]he Athenian slaves were much protected by the laws”117, having the right to obtain new owners should they have “cause to complain of any want of respect to the laws of modesty”118. In contrast, Child refers to the American institution of slavery as a “polluting system” in which “female slaves are neither protected by laws, or [sic] restrained by public opinion. Their masters own them as property, and have despotic control over their actions”119. Furthermore, “their whole moral code consists in one maxim—obedience to the white men”120. Predictably, Child views the consequences for these slave women as destructive, primarily because of their vulnerability to sexual exploitation, which is in part a result of the common attitude that “female virtue is a thing not even 113

Child, The History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations, 2:62 Child, The History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations, 2:65 115 Child, The History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations, 2:65 116 Child, The History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations, 1:126127 117 Child, The History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations, 2:29 118 Child, The History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations, 2:29 119 Child, The History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations, 2:213 120 Child, The History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations, 2:213 114

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supposed to exist among slaves”121. Because of their helplessness in the face of such racism and misogyny, their instincts for self-preservation and their values are often convoluted and used against them; Child laments that for them “to be the mistress of a white man is an object of ambition rather than of shame”122. Furthermore, since slaves are not educated, they are “brutally ignorant,” having a “tendency to mental as well as physical indolence”123, despite the fact that “they are capable of the same moral and intellectual cultivation as other human beings”124. This disregard for slaves’ humanity, Child laments, “leads to great carelessness in sundering the ties of domestic affection”125; mothers and children are frequently separated by sale to the owners of different plantations. Furthermore, Child complains, “slave-owners make no scruple of selling their own mulatto children”126, a callousness that results from a combination of sexual exploitation of female slaves and a lack of respect for or understanding of those slaves as human beings. Furthermore, thirteen years before the Seneca Falls convention on women’s rights, Child reminds readers of the unfair treatment often accorded even Caucasian women. For example, she comments on the power of the male dominated church in the days of the Puritans, power that extended as far as the domestic sphere, when “[t]he selectmen deemed they had a right to ascertain whether every girl in their village did a proper amount of spinning and weaving; and if a mother staid away from meeting, to tend her babe, the deacon straightaway called to reprove her for neglect of the ordinances” 127. However, despite this apparent foray into the women’s rights debate, Child makes clear that this is not her purpose, as she responds to texts on this subject: Many silly things have been written, and are now written, concerning the equality of the sexes; but that true and perfect companionship, which gives both man and woman complete freedom in their places, without a restless desire to go out of them, is as yet imperfectly understood. The time will come, when it will be seen that the moral and intellectual condition of women must be, and ought to be, in exact correspondence with that of man, not only in its general aspect, but in its individual manifestations; and then it will be perceived that all this discussion about relative superiority, 121

Child, The History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations, 2:213 Child, The History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations, 2:213 123 Child, The History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations, 2:220 124 Child, The History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations, 2:213 125 Child, The History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations, 2:217 126 Child, The History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations, 2:218 127 Child, The History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations, 2:255 122

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While Child wants women to be proud of their womanhood and its accompanying strengths, she always expects that they will use those strengths, in addition to caring for their homes and their families, not to achieve independence for themselves, but to work toward the freedom of the enslaved, as she herself had determined to do. Child began to speak out favorably on women’s suffrage only after the Fifteenth Amendment granted voting rights to African American men, insisting in a letter written in 1867,“[t]he suffrage of woman can better afford to wait than that of the colored people”129. Clearly, during most of her career, ensuring the redress of wrongs that slaves had endured was her priority. Although, as literary historian Mary Kelley indicates, “[t]he abolitionist movement of the 1830s, particularly the Garrisonian wing, with its emphasis on the absolute moral equality of all human beings, had planted in the consciousness of a number of female abolitionists . . . the principle that women were essentially human and only secondarily female”130, Child severed her ties with those who used their abolitionist work to justify their fitness for suffrage, among them Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. At the beginning of her own involvement in the abolition movement, Lydia Maria Child provided inspiration for other reform-minded women who hoped to attain some level of public influence. However, she did not intend her Ladies Family Library series to influence women to leave their homes. Instead, she hoped that it would empower them to think of themselves as intelligent, strong, resourceful people capable of combining their domestic duties with work associated with their general moral responsibilities, which included a social component, in order to help bring into being an American nation that lived up to its original promise. Surely, she believed, women need not stand idly by while grievous wrongs were perpetuated in their midst. They had a right and an obligation to stand up in protest and to speak out for justice and freedom, and looking to women of the past as models might help provide them with the inspiration and the courage necessary to do so.

128

Child, The History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations, 2:211 Child, Selected Letters, 1817-1880. Ed. Milton Meltzer and Patricia Holland. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982) 469. 130 Mary Kelly, Private Women, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in NineteenthCentury America. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984) 317. 129

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Works Cited Baym, Nina, American Women Writers and the Work of History. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995. Bosc, Louis, Introduction. An Appeal to Impartial Posterity. 1796. By Marie Jeanne Roland. 2 vols. London: J. Johnson; New York: Robert Wilson, 1798. iii-ix. Child, Lydia Maria, An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans. Ed. Carolyn L. Karcher. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. —. Biographies of Good Wives. Fifth edition. New York: C. S. Francis and Company, 1850. —. Memoirs of Madame de Stael and of Madame Roland. Revised edition. New York: C. S. Francis and Company, 1854. —. Selected Letters, 1817-1880. Ed. Milton Meltzer and Patricia Holland. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982. —. The Biographies of Lady Russell and Madame Guyon. Boston: Carter, Hendee, and Company, 1832. —. The History of the Condition of Women, in Various Ages and Nations. Two Volumes. Boston: John Allen and Company, 1835. Conrad, Susan Phinney. Perish the Thought: Intellectual Women in Romantic America, 1830-1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. Cott, Nancy F. The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780-1835. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977. Cutter, Barbara. Domestic Devils, Battlefield Angels: The Radicalism of American Womanhood, 1830-1865. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003. Cutter, Martha, Unruly Tongue: Identity and Voice in American Women’s Writing, 1850-1930. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999. Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, Contemporaries. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, 1899. Karcher, Carolyn, The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child. Durham: Duke University Press, 1994. Kelly, Mary, Private Women, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984. Marshall, Megan, The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005.

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Ryan Mary P., The Empire of the Mother: American Writing about Domesticity, 1830 to 1860. New York: Haworth Press, 1982. Welter, Barbara, Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976. Yellin, Jean Fagan, Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.

CHAPTER THREE CINDERELLA REVISITED: WOMEN WRITERS AND THE STEPFAMILY CHRISTINE POULSON1

'You cannot deny that there are miserable second marriages, and that very, very few stepmothers make their husband's children happy, and generally end in making him wretched as well.'2

So complains the sixteen year old Janet to her friend, Mrs. Leicester, at the beginning of Mrs. Geldart's novel, The Second Mother: Her Trials and Joys. It was published posthumously in 1862, having been completed by Mrs. Geldart's sister, Emma Marshall. She wrote in the preface that Mrs. Geldart was ‘deeply interested’ in this subject and ‘would have rejoiced that some of her latest thoughts on this "vexed question" should thus be made known to Second Mothers, who have long had her earnest sympathy’(v). Mrs. Geldart was far from being the only mid-Victorian novelist to be deeply interested in this ‘vexed question.’ The narrator of The Second Wife, published anonymously in 1857, comments on special difficulties of the stepmother and stepchild relationship: 'Perhaps there is no position among the many anomalous ones of this world, where human beings . . . are placed respectively in a relation which does more violence to natural sympathies, than that which is afforded by 1

I am grateful to the British Academy for a research grant that allowed me to do much of the reading for this essay. I also want to thank Cassandra Johnson, Susan Robertson, and Jacqueline Toyne, for undertaking a literature search as part of their M. A. in Librarianship at the University of Sheffield. My interest in stepfamilies in nineteenth century fiction was first aroused by my own stepfamily and I would like to dedicate this essay to my stepchildren. 2 Mrs. Geldart, The Second Mother: Her Trials and Joys, completed and edited by her sister (London: Seeley, Jackson and Halliday, 1862), 14.

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There was of course nothing new about this situation. As the narrator of The Second Mother: Her Trials and Joys points out, the stepmother and stepchild relationship ‘is one which will exist as long as the world lasts.’4 So why did the 1850s and 1860s see a spate of novels dealing with the stepfamily? In the mid nineteenth century marital and parental relationships were under intense scrutiny and were seen by many as being under threat. The 1857 Divorce Act is the key example of this, but of no less importance was the Child Custody Bill of 1839, which for the first time allowed the Court of Chancery to award custody of children under seven to a separated or divorced woman provided that she was the innocent party. As Lawrence Stone suggests, it 'once and for all stripped traditional unlimited patriarchal authority from the father.'5 This legislation reflected a shift of attitudes towards children and towards maternity. A new sense of the family had emerged in which domestic life, the maternal bond, and the nature of childhood experience were considered important. The corollary was that the step-family was often seen as problematic, unnatural, and deviant rather than as a normal part of the social structure and of family life. Certainly there are plenty of wicked stepmothers – and some wicked stepfathers, too – in Victorian novels. The theme was often deployed to 3 The Second Wife, 3 vols (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1857), 58-59. The tendency of writers in this period to publish anonymously or pseudonymously presents a problem in an essay on women writers. Where there is no external evidence I have tended to assume female authorship; to do otherwise would be to exclude many interesting novels. 4 The Second Mother, 239. If anything the number of stepfamilies had declined. An estimated 30% of marriages in the mid sixteenth century were remarriages as against 11.72% in the mid nineteenth century. See E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England 1841-1871 (London: Edward Arnold, 1981), 259. 5 Lawrence Stone Road to Divorce: England 1530-1987 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 178.

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sensational ends. In Mrs. Henry Wood's novel, St. Martin's Eve (1864) the stepmother is a maniac whose jealousy on behalf of her own child results in her step-son being burned alive. In the anonymous Lady Olivia's Stepdaughters (1893) the stepmother plots the abduction and forced marriage of her stepdaughter. Yet such novels are matched if not outnumbered by those which show stepfamilies in a more positive, or at least, a more considered light. And it is with these novels that I am mainly concerned in this essay. How many stepfamilies were there in the nineteenth century? Lawrence Stone suggests that single parent families and consequently stepfamilies caused by the death of a parent were as common in the past as those created by divorce today. 6 Statistics bear this out. About nineteen percent of marriages contracted in the 1850s were ended by death of a spouse within ten years. 7 Just as most people today in the UK and the USA know a number of stepfamilies created by divorce and do not regard this as in any way unusual, the same was true in the nineteenth century of stepfamilies resulting from the death of a wife or husband. ‘To a far greater extent than today, family life was lived under the shadow of imminent death.’8 In the 1850s and 1860 the maternal mortality rate was 4.7 per 1000 live births in England and Wales and remained around this level for the rest of the century.9 It was not uncommon for women to make wills during pregnancy or even to write farewell letters for their husbands.’10 And in any death in childbirth was only one cause of death 6

Road to Divorce, 410. I am most grateful to Margaret Markwich for allowing to me to draw on a chapter in her forthcoming book, New Men in Trollope's Novels: Rewriting the Victorian Male, to be published by Ashgate, 2007. 7 Michael Anderson, ‘The Social Implications of Demographic Change’ in The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750-1950, 2 vols ed. F. M. L. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1990), ii, 29. 8 Roger Schofield, ‘Did Mothers Really Die? Three Centuries of Maternal Mortality,’ in The World We Have Gained: Histories of Population and Social Structure, ed. Lloyd Bonfield, Richard M. Smith and Keith Wrightson, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 232. In spite of this Schofield suggests that death in childbirth was not frequent enough to be a cause of dread for women (232). It did not seem that way to William Farr, the medical statistician, who referred to it in the 1870s as a ‘deep, dark and continuous stream of mortality (232). 9 Nicola Shelton and Robert Woods, An Atlas of Victorian Mortality (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997), 115. This includes ectopic pregnancy and septicemia following a miscarriage. 10 Judith Schneid Lewis, In the Family Way: Childbearing in the British Aristocracy 1760-1860 (Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1986), 74.

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among women of child-bearing age. In mid nineteenth century tuberculosis killed around 20 per 1000 women between the ages of twenty and thirty-five and must have swept away many young mothers.11 Many women writers were mothers – some were even stepmothers, notably Mrs. Braddon and Eliza Lynn Linton – others like Mrs. Gaskell and, again, Eliza Lynn Linton, had lost their own mother in childhood. The concluding words of The Second Mother: Her Trials and Joys point out that ‘We none of us know how, directly and indirectly, it may affect ourselves, or those dear to us.’(239). This point is brought chillingly home by the fact Mrs. Geldart did not live to complete her book. Elaine Showalter suggests, I think rightly, that female sensation novelists ‘made a powerful appeal to the female audience by subverting the traditions of feminine fiction to suit their own imaginative impulses, by expressing a wide range of suppressed emotions.’12 In Mrs. Henry Wood’s East Lynne, one of the suppressed emotions which infuses the narrative with such power and helped to make the novel a run-away success is surely a mother’s dread of what might befall her children after her death. East Lynne is not so much Cinderella revisited as Cinderella reversed. Isabel begins as the lovely aristocratic young wife and mother and is transformed into a drab and unregarded servant. Weak and feverish after the birth of her first child she overhears the servants speculating about who would be her successor should she die. She begs her husband not to marry Barbara Hare—‘She would ill-treat my child’ and tells him that she, Isabel, ‘could not rest in my grave.’13 The dead-but-not-dead plot of East Lynne allows Lady Isabel to return from the dead, much disfigured, after she is thought to have died in a train crash. She is employed as governess to her own children and witnesses the indifference of their stepmother, who is indeed the former Barbara Hare. Isabel watches her small son die of tuberculosis. The lines ‘dead, dead, dead, and he never knew me, never called me mother’ come from the stage play, not the novel, but the fact that they became so famous (and were later so much parodied) suggests that this cry of thwarted maternal love was perceived as the climax of the story. Similarly, in 'A True Ghost Story’ by Helen Mathers, the first wife, who has died in childbirth, comes every night to her children after her 11

Nicola Shelton and Robert Woods, An Atlas of Victorian Mortality (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997), 34-35. 12 Elaine Showalter, A Literature of their Own: From Charlotte Bronte to Doris Lessing, revised and expanded (Virago: London, 1999), 159 13 Ellen Wood, East Lynne, ed, Andrew Maunder (Broadview Press: Ontario, 2000), 229.

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detested rival marries the widowed husband. The terrified nursemaid hears ‘heart-breaking sighs . . . and loving murmurs in a voice that could be none other than a mother’s.’14 When the second wife dies, ‘worn out by her fierce, unhappy spirit’ (p.168), the husband devotes his life to his children, and the haunting ceases. The poignant short story, 'Lost,' by Lucy Clifford, is narrated by the spirit of a woman who has died giving birth to a baby that survives. She witnesses the sorrow of her widowed husband and his slow recovery that ends in a second marriage, happier even than the first. The grieving spirit visits the child and suffers the worst pain of all when the child, sensing her near, is afraid and calls out for its mother. The stepmother comes and takes the child in her arms and the child is comforted. The story ends with the dead mother’s devastating realization that she has been replaced in the affections of her husband and children and is not missed.15 Lucy Clifford’s husband had died of tuberculosis only two years before ‘Lost’ was published, leaving her to care for their two young daughters. The 1861 census shows that among the population under 65, there were over twice as many widows as widowers.16 This was partly because of a higher male death rate and partly because widowers were much more likely to remarry.17 This imbalance is reflected in Victorian and Edwardian fiction: there is an abundance of stepmothers but relatively few stepfathers. Elizabeth Gaskell wrote perceptively of the stepfather and stepchild relationship in her short stories, 'The Manchester Marriage,' 1858, and 'The Half-brothers,' 1859, while Mrs. Braddon exploited the dramatic potential of the wicked step-father in Birds of Prey (1867) and Charlotte's Inheritance (1868), but generally women writers focused more on stepmothers, particularly the stepmother and stepdaughter relationship. 14

‘A True Ghost Story’ in The New Lady Teazle and Other Stories (London: Digby, Long & Co., 1903), pp. 164-5. 15 Macmillan’s Magazine, Vol XLIV 1881, pp. 48-52. I am most grateful to Gowan Dawson for drawing my attention to this story and also to Marysa Demoor and Monty Chisholm (eds.), ‘Bravest of Women and Finest of Friends’: Henry James’s Letters to Lucy Clifford, (Victoria, B.C.: University of Victoria, 1999) 108, which cites a letter from William James to Lucy discussing her secret authorship of the story and a letter from William James to his wife commenting that Lucy was very anxious to remain anonymous because Leslie Stephens and his second wife were her intimate friends. 16 I am most grateful to Margaret Markwich for supplying me with this statistic. 17 One in 11.72 of marriages in the mid nineteenth century were remarriages and these were mostly widowers remarrying according to E. A. Wrigley and R. S Schofield, The Population History of England 1841-1871 (London: Edward Arnold, 1981), 259.

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Recent longitudinal research on the stepfamily provides evidence of how fraught this relationship can be.18 How much more must that have been the case in the nineteenth century, particularly in the middle classes. The new emphasis on domesticity and home life resulted in what Elizabeth Langland refers to as the professionalization of house-keeping.19 The middle-class mother was expected to supervise every aspect of her daughter’s life, to train her in womanly skills such as sewing and more generally for her future role as wife, mother and house-keeper. Stepmothers and stepdaughters would necessarily have been thrown into each other’s company a great deal, particularly once the girl was out of the nursery. The stepmother was expected to chaperone her stepdaughter, make sure she met the right people, and assist her to make a suitable marriage. Indeed in Mrs. Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters Mr. Gibson remarries principally to acquire a chaperone for his daughter housekeeper and a house-keeper. Such a marriage might be especially unpalatable for an adolescent daughter who had – like Molly Gibson – been the close companion of her widowed father and had some degree of independence. For all her faults of superficiality and self-deceiving hypocrisy, the new Mrs. Gibson takes her duties seriously: ‘as household and status manager she demonstrates fine discrimination and familial loyalty . . . and is a key player in the socially prestigious marriages of her daughter and step-daughter.’20 In The Twins and their Stepmother, published anonymously in 1861, Louisa Harley sees her new role in an exalted light—'A great work I have indeed undertaken, but a work of immense and never-failing interest.'21 In this novel as in others of the 1850s and 1860s this great work of rearing another woman’s children has a religious impulse. This sense of housekeeping and child-rearing as offering what might be described as a career for a woman was often combined with an evangelical sense of duty and moral fervor that placed formidable demands on the stepmother. Women writers were often sympathetic to the problems of the second wife, who might be little more than a girl herself, struggling to care for another woman's children and to meet exacting standards. The step-family 18

Gill Gorell Barnes et al, Growing Up in Stepfamilies, Paul Thompson, Gwyn Daniel and Natasha Burchardt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 80-87. 19 ‘Elizabeth Langland, ‘Women’s Writing and the Domestic Sphere,’ Women and Literature in Britain, 1800-1900, ed. Joanne Shattuck (Cambridge University Press, 2001), 126. 20 Langland, 132. 21 Anon, The Twins and their Stepmother: A Tale, Dedicated to the Children of the Present Day (London: Routledge,1861), 18.

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novel of the 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s is often in part an advice manual. In novels such as these the second wife tends to be inexperienced and inept, but well-meaning and a typical narrative charts her progress to becoming an accepted and successful stepmother. In Charlotte M. Yonge's The Young Stepmother, with its telling subtitle: A Chronicle of Mistakes,(1864) Albinia goes into the marriage with her eyes open, even relishes the challenge, which offers an outlet for her formidable energy. But there are problems she has not dreamt of and her over-confidence is tested to the limit. Her biggest challenge is to overcome her own impulsive nature and hasty temper. There is yet another hurdle to overcome in the selfish apathy of her husband who is inclined to leave the children entirely to Albinia's care. There is no trite happy ending for her or her three stepchildren. Albinia refers to three 'shipwrecked lives,' but her brother tells her 'Your visions may have vanished, but you did your work faithfully, and it has not been fruitless.’22 Her stepson Gilbert is dead, but it is an heroic soldier's death from wounds received in saving the life of Albinia's cousin during the charge of the Light Brigade. Lucy has carried on a clandestine courtship which has resulted in marriage to a man who is worldly, selfish and domineering. But through suffering she has become a perfect wife and mother, with 'every bit of personal vanity and levity . . . worn out of her'(427). Sophy has suffered the pain of an unrequited love, but she has got the better of her own tempestuous nature and has drawn close to Albinia as 'dear friend and sister and child in one’(430). Albinia's success is partial, but success it is nevertheless. If The Young Stepmother is the most accomplished novel in this subgenre, Mrs. Geldart's The Second Mother: Her Trials and Joys is the most openly didactic. Katherine, the second mother in question, is only twentysix when she marries Dr. Fielding; she 'was exactly one of those women who, in ordinary circumstances, might have passed for a good mother and mistress of a family, if all the care and perplexities of the relationship had come on her by degrees; but here she was, rushing unarmed into the battlefield of a stepmother's trials, and its countless hindrances’(59). There are seven children ranging from Janet who is sixteen to Bertha who is four. Janet particularly resents the authority of the new mother, feeling that she would soon have been old enough to run the household herself. When things start to go wrong, she turns to a family friend, Mrs. Leicester, who is herself a stepmother, who has long since earned the love of her stepchildren.

22

The Young Stepmother, (London and New York: Macmillan and Co, 1889), 429.

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What does Mrs. Leicester’s advice amount to? Some of it is similar to what might be offered today. Mrs. Leicester tells Dr Fielding to remember that he cannot force Janet to feel love and respect for her stepmother. 'You cannot demand a child's duty when the natural tie is wanting’(47). Time and patience will be needed. She tells him not to be too hard on Janet, who now has to share her much loved father with someone who is 'in her young eyes, something very like a usurper’ (48). As for Katherine, Mrs. Leicester tells her that she is expecting too much. She should be satisfied with outward conformity and let the love come later. Where The Second Mother parts company from the advice-manual of today is in Mrs. Leicester's insistence that all efforts will be unavailing unless they are underpinned by religious faith. This message is underlined when at a moment of crisis Katherine finds solace in a religious tract which has been left in a railway carriage. Mrs. Leicester’s stepdaughter, Emily tells Janet that her original feelings of bitterness towards Mrs. Leicester were exacerbated by the attitudes of relatives and servants: 'Naturally the thought arose in childish minds like ours, “Every one seems to pity us for having a stepmother: they must think it dreadful to have stepmothers”’(45). Janet too suffers from 'the infection of almost universal prejudice’(131) and is encouraged in her rebellion by her maternal aunts. The narrator urges the reader to show children ‘what blessings a stepmother may bring’(72) and asks the reader to consider whether they may be 'doing grievous wrong, by . . . meeting a second mother with prejudiced eyes from the outset . . let us rather, do everything in our power to show that the popular voice may err in its judgment’(238). The damage done by general prejudice against stepmothers is also the theme of The Second Wife. The misfortunes of Blanche and her family all stem from mistaken ideas about stepmothers. The novel is a rattling good read with a plot that involves a shipwreck, a forged will, a defrauded heiress, a Jesuit plot to retrieve monastic properties lost at Reformation and the abduction of a stepdaughter who is almost forced to take the veil. The second wife of the title is Edith Sidney, who marries Sir Reginald Estcourte of Charnwood Priory, a widower with two daughters. Relations and friends feed the elder daughter, Blanche, with false ideas about Edith and prejudices about stepmothers in general. ‘All seemed to take it for granted that her step-mother was to be selfish, hard-hearted, and unkind; her own position, oppressed and wretched’ (I, 83). Looking for a means of escape Blanche commits herself to a secret engagement to a man that she does not love.

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Edith turns out to be ideal second wife, not too young (she is fifteen years older than Blanche), loving and tactful, dignified and firm. But it is too late. Blanche has become ensnared in a Jesuit plot. She is rescued in the nick of time from the convent where she is imprisoned. The narrator points out that it could all have been avoided if Blanche's step-mother had been her confidante: but Blanche's first error had left her without the solace of confidential friendship; and in . . . her hour of weakness, the tempter was at hand’ (I, 292). Clearly The Second Wife is aimed more at actual and potential stepdaughters than stepmothers. This is true also of The Stepmother: or, Will She Be a Nun, published under the pseudonym of Florence in 1860, another novel concerned with the damage done by unthinking social prejudice against stepmothers and, like The Second Wife, violently antiCatholic. Mrs. Stapleton is the perfect stepmother, except for one thing: she has never told her stepmother that they are not her natural children. She had at first refused her husband 'merely because she had not the courage to become a stepmother’ and finally agreed on condition that she be allowed to ‘win the affection of [the] children before they knew her to be their stepmother.' 23 The prejudice against stepmothers that has lead to this situation also exacerbates it when Gertrude discovers the truth by accident and keeps the knowledge to herself, growing ever angrier and more estranged from her stepmother. Gertrude’s spiteful cousin plays on her feelings and encourages her to entertain a ludicrous suspicion that the kindly Mrs. Stapleton murdered her husband’s first wife. Gertrude is tricked into taking refuge in a convent and imprisoned there. She bitterly regrets her actions. 'if she could but write to her mother—yes, to that friend she had scorned—what would she not give to see her at that moment as she thought of her kind, loving ways’(240). Confined to a small cell with no books or employment, Gertrude goes into a decline and is near death, when her heroic stepmother infiltrates the convent disguised as a sister of mercy. They escape from the convent, but Gertrude pays a high price. She loses her looks and her lover and remain at home as the unmarried daughter. The narrator ends by ramming the moral home. 'We would only ask our youthful readers not to listen to the voice of slander, or to allow at any time that meanest of all error—prejudice—to influence their actions. There are many, like Gertrude, who have turned from one that would have guided and loved them merely because she was their stepmother’ (284). 23

Florence (pseud), The Stepmother: or, Will She Be a Nun (London: James Blackwood, 1860), 200.

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Prejudice within the family circle is highlighted again and again by writers as one of the main obstacles faced by the new stepmother, who finds that the children’s minds have been poisoned against her before they have even met her. Nurses or governesses were especially likely to be suspicious of the newcomer as they might lose their own privileged place in the family. In Mrs. Eiloart's His Second Wife (1877) the children’s nurse has encouraged them to expect the worst by telling them ‘stories in which the evil stepmother figured unfavorably’24(233). The new wife might also have to contend with hypercritical and meddling relatives, both her husband’s and those of the first wife. In The Young Stepmother, Albinia’s sister-in-law is afraid—and rightly—that Albinia 'will be spied and commented on by the first wife's relations’(2). In His Second Wife the long-suffering and devoted Lina is undermined at every turn. The first wife’s children spread slander about her and encourage the children to behave badly. Their impertinence takes almost Lina’s breath away. ‘What could she say to these women who presumed on their relationship with her husband and his children to interfere with his second wife in a manner they would never have ventured to do with his first’(III, 29). Even her own husband unjustly accuses her of favoring her own child over her stepchildren. The effect that prejudice against stepmothers might have upon the children also concerned women writing for younger children. The most famous of all stepfamily stories is Cinderella, which first appeared in English in 1729 as a translation from the French of Perrault's 1697 collection of fairy tales. It was the most frequently published fairy tale of the nineteenth century,25 but its popularity did not go unopposed. Sarah Trimmer, who made the first serious attempt to review children's literature in her publication, The Guardian of Education, 1805-1808 is the most famous opponent of fairy tales. She was in complete agreement with a correspondent who complained about Cinderella on the grounds that it ‘paints some of the worse passions that enter into the human breast, and of which little children . . . should be totally ignorant; such as envy, jealousy, dislike to mothers-in-law [stepmothers] and half-sisters . . .’26

24

Mrs Eiloart, His Second Wife, 3 vols (London: Samuel Tinsley, 1877), II, 233. The British Library catalogue and the catalogue of the National Art Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum between them list around a hundred works related to the theme of Cinderella, including chapbooks, illustrated children's books, pantomimes and, from the mid century onwards, entirely new versions of the story. 26 The Guardian of Education, ed. Mrs. Trimmer, 5 vols (London: J. Hatchard, 1802-1806) II, 448. 25

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The point was still being made in the 1870s when Mrs. Eiloart wrote His Second Wife: ‘Those poor stepmothers! From Cinderella downwards, how all the story-tellers have delighted to cast a stone at them’ (II, 233). Writers of children’s stories, who were often in the first instance writing for their own children, sometimes excised this disturbing element with bowdlerized versions of Cinderella in which the stepmother was omitted and the step-sisters were changed to sisters or half-sisters. In Lady Maria Theresa Lister’s The Story of Cinderella, dramatized for juvenile performers (London, 1844) there is no stepmother (no mother at all, in fact) and the stepsisters are simply sisters. The same is true of Louisa MacDonald's 'Cinderella' in Chamber Dramas for Children (1870), which, according to the title page, was 'intended for very young children only.' In Mrs. Cuthbert Orlebar's Cinderella, a fairy tale, in verse (1848), dedicated to her own children, for whom it was first written, there is again no stepmother and sisters are half-sisters.27 A novel written for an older readership reflects the same tendency. In Cinderella: A New Version of an Old Story, published anonymously in 1876, the stepmother and stepsisters become an aunt and cousins. 'Elinor Forester’ or ‘The Father's Wedding Day' by Mary Lamb was perhaps a response to the charges leveled by Mrs. Trimmer and others. It first published in 1809 in a collection of stories, Mrs. Leicester's School, by Mary and her brother, Charles, and was frequently reprinted throughout the nineteenth century. It is told from the point of view of a small child and brilliantly conveys the confusion in her mind when she told that she is to have a new mother. The father has chosen wisely in marrying a friend of his late wife whom Elinor already likes, but even so, ‘I foolishly imagined that Miss Saville was to be changed into something like my own mother, whose pale and delicate appearance in her last illness was all I retained of her remembrance.’28 Elinor bursts into tears when she realizes her mistake and refuses to accept the new mother. The stepmother wins her over by kindness, telling her that she was her mother's friend and encouraging her to talk about her mother. Mary Lamb was ahead of her time in her understanding of child psychology. It was more common to offer warnings of the fate that might await the disobedient stepchild. Margaret Roberts’ Liso's Stepmother of 1878 is a cautionary tale aimed at a child of perhaps seven or eight. It is 27

The brothers Grimm had done the reverse with Snow White; out of respect for the sanctity of the mother and child bond they had transformed the wicked mother into a stepmother. 28 [Charles and Mary Lamb] Mrs. Leicester’s School: Or, the History of Several Young Ladies, Related by Themselves (London: M. J. Godwin, 1809), 88.

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set in Estonia at a time which is never defined and draws on the idiom and conventions of the fairy tale. Liso resents her kindly new stepmother and her disobedience almost results in her young brother getting eaten by wolves. She repents of her bad behavior and is reconciled with her stepmother. Two stories of the 1890s aimed at the same age group offer a gentler take on the advent of a stepmother and were clearly written to counteract the idea that stepmothers were necessarily harsh and cruel. Esca Gray's story 'The Fairy Stepmother' conflates the characters of the stepmother and the fairy godmother. The three children of the story are frightened by their nurse’s prophesies about their new stepmother. One of them prays for a 'fairy stepmother' and when she arrives ‘instead of a stern and impossible she, a lady sat . . . comparatively young, dressed in dainty garments, her face wreathed in smiles.’29 She sweeps her little stepdaughter into her embrace ‘and Nurse, happening to come to the door at that moment, knew that her reign was over’(76). Similarly in Penelope Leslie’s Dorothy's Stepmother of 1896 Dorothy is cared for by a strict aunt until her father marries a young woman who becomes her 'fairy god-mother.’ So far I have been examining the ways in which women writers dealt with the stepmother and stepchild relationship, but the relationship between husband and wife was also a focus of concern. If attitudes towards children and parenting had changed in the early nineteenth century, so had attitudes towards marriage. Basing her evidence on a sample of fifty aristocratic families, Judith Schneider Lewis suggests that between ‘1760 and 1860 families seemed to have changed their perception of the emotions requisite for a successful marriage. A quiet mutual regard based on hearsay and a short acquaintance was thought sufficient, by 1860 one needed to be “perfectly in love.”’30 There is ample evidence of this idealization of romantic love lower down the social scale. It made the notion of second marriage problematic, just as the idealization of the mother/child relationship made the stepmother’s role problematic. Second wife might also mean second best.31 Yonge's The Young Stepmother opens

29

Esca Gray, 'The Fairy Stepmother' [A tale.] (London: Clarke & Co., 1897), 74. Judith Schneid Lewis, In the Family Way: Childbearing in the British Aristocracy 1760-1860 (Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1986), p. 31. This shift in sensibility is noted elsewhere, as in, for example, the work of Lawrence Stone. 31 Ch. I, 2. Of course some widowers were more eligible than others. Ideally he should be not much more than forty, rich, of good social standing, good-looking, or if not good-looking, at least interesting, perhaps in a melancholy sort of way, 30

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with Winifred lamenting the forthcoming marriage of her young sister-inlaw, Albinia, to a middle-aged widower: 'I grudge her giving her fresh whole young heart away to a man who has no return to make. His heart is in his first wife's grave’(2). Albinia is giving herself ‘to a man who cannot, if he would, return that full first love’(2). A similar suspicion occurs to Edith in The Second Wife when Sir Reginald turns away from her in his anguish over his missing daughter: ‘There stole over her, unconsciously and chillingly . . . a realization of the fact that she alone did not suffice to his happiness,—that she was his second wife!' (II, 228). ' Lina’s grandfather in Mrs. Eiloart’s His Second Wife puts it more bluntly: Lina is ‘not going to be nurse to another woman’s children, and take another woman’s leavings’ (II,157). The suspicion was that a man’s principal reason for marrying again must be pragmatic rather than romantic, that he was remarrying to provide a mother for his children and a housekeeper for himself. That is certainly the case in Mr. Gibson in Wives and Daughters and John Marchmont in John Marchmont’s Legacy pleads ‘not for a wife for himself, but a mother for his orphan child.’32Olivia is well aware of this. ‘You wish me to be your wife in order that you may have a guardian for your child? It is very much the same thing as engaging a governess; only the engagement is to be more binding’(84). The analogy was an apt one: both governesses and stepmothers were seen as an anomalies and their status within the family was uncertain. The question of how far a stepmother was justified in assuming the authority of a mother was one that exercised writers particularly around the middle of the century. Given that the authority of the birth mother had received legal sanction so very recently, it is not surprising that a stepmother, at one remove from the natural mother, should occupy an ambiguous position. This remains the case in the mid-twentieth century families studied by Gorell Barnes et al: a stepmother ‘was not recognized as a real mother – few were called mum by the child’s choice – but she was evaluated as a mother, in some cases in direct comparison.’33 This was a problem recognized by nineteenth century commentators. When Lina marries Hartley in Mrs. Eiloart’s His Second Wife, the narrator remarks that she is taking on ‘not only all the ordinary cares and obligations of matrimony, but also those involved in the doubtful and precarious position of a second like Mr. Rochester and or even Mr. Kendal. Ideally he should have no children, but one little girl is acceptable as that will allow the second wife to produce an heir. 32 Mary Elizabeth Braddon, John Marchmont’s Legacy, ed. Toru Sasaki and Norman Page (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 83. 33 Growing Up in Stepfamilies, 81.

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wife’(II, 218). In The Twins and their Stepmother (1861) Louisa Harley is horrified when her husband becomes a Roman Catholic convert and sends the twins to be educated in a French convent in. It is not until her own son is born that she feels able to assert her maternal authority. She refuses to have him christened as a Roman Catholic: 'You have made me wretched enough through your other children, Edward . . . but this one is my own. . .’ (265). The combination of step-families and anti-Catholicism seemed a natural pairing for a number of writers in the 1850s and 1860s. In the The Second Wife and The Stepmother:or, Will She Be a Nun prejudice against a stepmother drives an unfortunate step-daughter into the embrace of Roman Catholic church. The writers drew on the escaped nun narratives that were particularly prevalent in the US between 1830 and 1850 and often appeared in British editions.34 These typically purported to tell the true stories of young woman who had been lured into convents that turned out to be dens of idolatry and vice. In The Twins and their Stepmother it is the father who becomes a convert; the same is true of as Emma Jane Worboise's Overdale: or, the Story of a Pervert: A Tale for the Times (1869) in which a devoted stepmother dies of grief when her clergyman husband goes over to Rome and repudiates his family: second wife, children, stepchildren and all. In F. N. Dyer's novel The Step-Son: A Romance of the Present Day (1855) a degenerate step-son is the cat's paw of a priest who will stop at nothing, including murder. The atmosphere of these books is similar to the Cold War paranoia of thrillers of 1950s and 1960s. Catholic fifth columnists and disguised Jesuit priests are part of a vast Catholic conspiracy to establish Catholicism in Britain and even, as in The Second Wife, to take back monastic property confiscated at the time of the reformation. These novels can be set against a wider background of anti-Catholicism, fuelled by the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, the resulting rise in the numbers of British Catholics, and in 1850 a papal brief which reintroduced Roman Catholic Bishoprics for the first time since the Reformation. The fear that disaffected young women might be lured from their true vocation as wife and mother is related to a wider anxiety about what constitutes legitimate authority in both church and family. The same question is raised in a more subtle manner in Yonge’s High Church novel, The Young Stepmother; there it is necessary for the well-being of the family that both Albinia and her husband fully accept their parental responsibility. 34 Susan M. Griffin, Anti-Catholicism and Nineteenth Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 169.

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From the 1860s the sense of the stepfamily as something anomalous, unnatural even, allowed the exploration of another contemporary concern: a post-Darwinian preoccupation with inherited characteristics. In Mrs. Eiloart's His Second Wife (1877) Lina struggles with a stepdaughter who has inherited the first wife's degenerate and sensual character. ‘Isabel seemed to have inherited from her dead mother a jealous aversion to her successor; sometimes a look, that seemed as if the mother was living again in her child, flashed out from her dark eyes’ (III, 2-3). In Eliza Lynn Linton’s Lizzie Lorton of Greyrigg (1866) Lizzie is completely different in character and looks from her stepmother: dark and foreign-looking, with a ‘savageness about her beauty . . . that reminded one of a panther’35 and a passionate, undisciplined temperament. Her stepmother is ‘soft, fat and fair . . . the sleepiest and most indolent’ of women and the doting mother of a ‘ramping family’(I, 41) of spoilt children, which the unmaternal Lizzie is expected to care for. She cannot appeal to her father who is a scholar so bound up in his studies that he has little idea of what is going on and cares less. She ‘grew up as absolutely alone morally as if she had been on a desert island’(I, 44) and is stifled by the monotony of her life in a remote village in Cumbria. Her injudicious love for a man intent only on flirtation leads set off a train of events that leads in the end to her death. Eliza Lynn Linton was herself a stepmother, though a rather more successful one. In 1858 she married a widower largely, it seems, for the sake of his seven children: she had nursed their dying mother and had promised to take care of them. The marriage failed, but she remained on good terms with the children, especially her stepdaughters. Nevertheless she was clearly alive to the potential for conflict and it is all the more interesting that she returned to the theme in The Atonement of Leam Dundas (1877), a lurid tale of tainted heredity. Pepita is Spanish, a Papist and the daughter of an inn-keeper and is an ill-assorted mate for her English husband. She is ignorant, cruel, and sensual and her daughter is passionately attached to her. After her death her husband marries again. In an inversion of that other classic fairy tale, Snow White, Leam poisons her stepmother, who is discovered by her husband, dead in the marriage bed. Stepdaughters mostly stop short of murder, but the stepmother is often seen as the victim, rather than the oppressor. Moncrieffe's Second Wife by Lolo (1883) and L. T. Meade's The New Mrs. Lascelles (1901) show second marriages almost breaking down under the combined impact of deceitful, manipulative daughters and obtuse husbands. In His Second 35 Lizzie Lorton of Greyrigg: A Novel, 3 Vols (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1866), I. 45.

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Wife, the stepmother goes to masochistic lengths to accommodate her stepchildren and the novel ends in her premature death. Step-sons could be wicked, too. I have already mentioned the degenerate stepson in F. N. Dyer's novel. Similarly in John Cordy Jeaffreson's Isabel: The Young Wife and the Old Love (1856) a stepson who fears for his inheritance plots against a young and innocent stepmother. In other novels the stepmother is seen as the rescuer, even the redeemer. in The Stepmother: or, Will She Be a Nun? Mrs. Stapleton rescues her stepdaughter from the convent. In The Twins and their Stepmother the stepmother plays the protector or would-be protector of her stepchildren against their natural parent. After Mr. Harley succumbs to scarlet fever, Louisa and Uncle Fitz, the brother of Mr. Harley's first wife, are left as guardians to bring up the remaining five children along with Louisa's own little boy from the marriage. Heroic stepmothers who protect the stepchild against the wishes of the natural father feature also in two interesting novels of the 1890s. In Hesba Stretton's The Half Brothers (1892) a young man, Sidney Martin secretly marries a silly girl, Sophy, much beneath him in station, and abandons her abroad. Later he hears of her death, but not of the existence a child, Martino, who is brought up by peasants and treated like an animal. When his existence comes to light thirty years later, Sidney tries to conceal it, but his devout second wife won't allow this. The uneducated and emotionally deprived Martino is depicted realistically, as are the efforts made by the stepmother and her own son to care for him. The novel ends with Sidney making restitution by going out into storm to look for the lost Martino and dying in the attempt. In Mrs. Alexander's The Stepmother(1899) a woman finds meaning in a loveless and childless marriage by mothering her neglected and illtreated stepson. This accentuates the rift between her and her husband, who suspects – wrongly – that the child was fathered by his dead wife's lover. The novel ends with her bringing about a rapprochement between father and son. These novels of the 1890s offer a conservative view of woman’s role when set against the New Woman fiction of the time. They are a far cry from Ada Leverson’s cynical short story, 'Suggestion', published in The Yellow Book in April, 1895. The narrator, a young male aesthete, engineers the marriage of his father to very young woman whose adultery he then connives at. As with the 1850s this was a decade when traditional gender roles were seen as being under threat. Divorce, though still rare, was increasing and there were occasional novels which feature stepfamilies created by divorce rather than death. Henry James’s What

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Maisie Knew was published in 1897 and was followed for example in 1900 by Mrs. Arthur Kennard’s The Second Lady Delacombe, a frivolous story in which a hard-up divorced aristocrat with a son at Eton marries a rich young American for her money. But generally there was a decline of stepfamilies in fiction and this mirrored reality. The falling death rate and the stigma attached to divorce meant that by the mid-twentieth century there were fewer stepfamilies than there had ever been in recorded history. It was not until the 1970s that there was a steep rise in the divorce rate. By the 1990s the number of stepfamilies resulting from divorce was similar to that created by the death of a spouse in the nineteenth century. And just as in the nineteenth century concern and anxiety has coalesced around the contemporary stepfamily. The overwhelmingly negative stereotype of the wicked stepmother has by no means disappeared. 'Having a step-parent has turned out to be the most powerful epidemiological risk factor for severe child maltreatment yet discovered' state Martin Daly and Margo Wilson in The Truth about Cinderella: A Darwinian View of Parental Love (1998).36 In Abel Ferrara’s 1993 film, Bodysnatchers, the girl narrator already regards her stepmother as a counterfeit: ‘the woman who has taken the place of my mother.’ No surprise, then, when the stepmother is the first to be taken over by alien invaders and tries to destroy the rest of the family. More thoughtful and nuanced examinations of the stepfamily are offered by novels such as Joanna Trollope’s Other People’s Children (1998) and stories for children, such as Anne Fine’s Goggle-eyes (1990) and Step by Wicked Step (1995) and by Jaqueline Wilson’s 1995 Double Act (one twin likes the stepmother, the other doesn’t). My own stepdaughter in the mid 1990s was given an assignment by a perceptive teacher: to rewrite Cinderella from the point of view of one of the ugly sisters. Efforts such at these which encourage children to look at the stepfamily with fresh eyes would have been applauded by many of the women writers I have examined there.

Works Cited Anderson, Michael, ‘The Social Implications of Demographic Change.’ In The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750-1950, 2 vols ed. F. M. L. Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1990.

36

Martin Daly and Margo Wilson The Truth about Cinderella: A Darwinian View of Parental Love (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998). 7.

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Barnes, Gill Gorell, Paul Thompson, Gwyn Daniel, and Natasha Burchardt. Growing Up in Stepfamilies. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Braddon, Mary Elizabeth, John Marchmont’s Legacy, ed. Toru Sasaki and Norman Page. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Daly, Martin and Margo Wilson The Truth about Cinderella: A Darwinian View of Parental Love. London:Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998. Mrs. Eiloart, His Second Wife, 3 vols. London: Samuel Tinsley, 1877. Florence (pseud), The Stepmother: or, Will She Be a Nun. London: James Blackwood, 1860. Mrs. Geldart, The Second Mother: Her Trials and Joys, completed and edited by her sister. London: Seeley, Jackson and Halliday, 1862. Gray, Esca, 'The Fairy Stepmother' (A tale). London: Clarke & Co., 1897. Griffin, Susan M., Anti-Catholicism and Nineteenth Century Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Lamb, Charles and Mary, Mrs. Leicester’s School: Or, the History of Several Young Ladies, Related by Themselves. London: M. J. Godwin, 1809. Langland, Elizabeth, ‘Women’s Writing and the Domestic Sphere.’ In Women and Literature in Britain, 1800-1900, ed. Joanne Shattuck. Cambridge University Press, 2001. Lewis, Judith Schneid, In the Family Way: Childbearing in the British Aristocracy1760-1860. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1986. Schofield, Roger, ‘Did Mothers Really Die? Three Centuries of Maternal Mortality.’ In The World We Have Gained: Histories of Population and Social Structure, ed. Lloyd Bonfield, Richard M. Smith and Keith Wrightson. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986. Shelton, Nicola and Robert Woods, An Atlas of Victorian Mortality. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997. Showalter, Elaine, A Literature of their Own: From Charlotte Bronte to Doris Lessing, revised and expanded. London: Virago, 1999. Stone, Lawrence, Road to Divorce: England 1530-1987. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Wood, Ellen, East Lynne, ed. Andrew Maunder. Ontario: Broadview Press, 2000. Wrigley, E. A. and R. S Schofield, The Population History of England 1841-1871. London: Edward Arnold, 1981. The Guardian of Education, ed. Mrs. Trimmer, 5 vols. London: J. Hatchard, 1802 1806. Lizzie Lorton of Greyrigg: A Novel, 3 Vols. London: Tinsley Brothers, 1866.

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Macmillan’s Magazine, Vol XLIV 1881, pp. 48-52 The Second Wife, 3 vols. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1857. ‘A True Ghost Story.’ In The New Lady Teazle and Other Stories,164-165. London: Digby, Long & Co., 1903. Anon, The Twins and their Stepmother: A Tale, Dedicated to the Children of the Present Day. London: Routledge,1861. The Young Stepmother. London and New York: Macmillan and Co, 1889.

CHAPTER FOUR THE HIDDEN HARLOT: ALTERNATIVE IDEALS OF WOMANHOOD IN 19TH-CENTURY WOMEN’S FICTION SUSAN M. CRUEA

“But especially preserve the Chastity of your Soul from the Dangers you may incur, by Conversation with Muses that are no better than Harlots.” —Cotton Mather (1726)

The decade of the 1850s gave birth to what would eventually become known as the “bestseller,” and for the first time, popular novels were sold in such astounding numbers as to require several printings in order to fill the demand of the public readership. Women writers were responsible for most of these bestsellers, and for the first time, women authors became quite successful. According to Nina Baym, in Women’s Fiction, “This fiction was by far the most popular literature of its time, and on the strength of that popularity, authorship in America was established as a woman’s profession, and reading as a woman’s avocation.”1 At this time of women’s novels’ rising popularity, significant changes can be seen in women’s fiction regarding the ways female characters are represented. According to Susan Coultrap-McQuin in Doing Literary Business, 19thCentury literary critics praised female literary characters “who were True Women: pious, pure, domestic, and pleasing to others.”2 Writers of domestic fiction were expected to create characters who fit the ideal of True Womanhood. However, the female heroines in these popular novels deviate from the ideal of True Womanhood, offering alternatives for women to emulate, such as being energetic and self-sufficient. By examining The Wide, Wide World, The Lamplighter, and The Hidden 1

Nina Baym, Women’s Fiction (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 11. Susan Coultrap-McQuin, Doing Literary Business (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 11. 2

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Hand, three bestsellers that appeared in the literary marketplace between 1850 and 1859, we can see the ways in which authors challenged True Womanhood and how the heroine of “sentimental” novels rapidly evolved. These novels were well received by readers who responded favorably to female characters who modeled strength and independence. During a time when women’s fiction was expected to model acceptable behavior for women by strictly adhering to the gender norms dictated by True Womanhood, how in the world did these novels ever get published, much less become bestsellers? In order to answer that question, many feminist critics would argue the need to look at these texts within their cultural context. While Ann Douglas, in The Feminization of American Culture, claims that 19th-century women’s novels are little more than “artifacts” of that particular moment in time and that their “feminizing” of American culture encouraged “the continuation of male hegemony in different guises . . . and perhaps limited the possibilities for change in American society,”3 several critics would argue otherwise. For instance, Baym in Women’s Fiction, argues that while some critics have dismissed 19th-century women’s novels for their sentimental qualities that seem to perpetuate the ongoing patriarchal culture of the time, they actually “represent . . . [a] pragmatic feminism, which is not in the least covert but quite obvious, needing only to be assessed in mid-nineteenthcentury terms . . . to be recognized for what it is . . . feminism constrained by certain other types of beliefs that are less operative today.”4 In Sensational Designs, Jane Tompkins also defends 19th-century women’s fiction saying that these novels “offer powerful examples of the way a culture thinks about itself, articulating and proposing solutions for the problems that shape a particular historical moment.”5 She asserts that these works deserve greater inclusion in the literary canon due to the “cultural work” that the authors are doing, and that judging their value based on traditional notions of what constitutes a “masterpiece” needs to be rethought due to the fact that the aesthetic standards upon which we make these judgments is “contingent and variable,” determined by the values of the time in which they are conceived.6

3

Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Avon Books, 1977), 13. 4 Baym, 18. 5 Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), xi. 6 Ibid., 193.

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While attention to cultural context is important, some critics question whose perception serves as the basis for such interpretation. In “Toward a Feminist Poetics,” Elaine Showalter argues that most texts are examined from a patriarchal point of reference; therefore, she proposes an alternative method of reading which strives to “reconstruct the social, political, and cultural experience of women.”7 She believes that feminist literary criticism should be divided into two different categories: the “feminist critique” which focuses on “woman as reader” and the “gynocritic” which focuses on “woman as writer.”8 While the feminist critique is concerned with “the images and stereotypes of women in literature, the omissions of and misconceptions about women in criticism, and the fissures in maleconstructed literary history,” the gynocritic focuses on “woman as the producer of textual meaning, with the history, themes, genres, and structures of literature by women.”9 She continues with the claim that critics need to “construct a female framework for the analysis of women’s literature . . . [to] stop trying to fit women between the lines of male tradition, and focus instead on the newly visible world of female culture . . . the occupations, interactions, and consciousness of women.”10 In Gynesis , Alice Jardine agrees with Showalter that “feminists have perhaps tried for too long to adapt male critical systems to women’s texts.11 However, she goes a step farther by examining “women as speaking and writing subjects, their relationship to language, and how sexual difference operates linguistically in a literary text.”12 She coins the term “gynesis” as “the putting into discourse of 'woman' as that process … intrinsic to the condition of modernity; indeed, the valorization of the feminine, woman, and her obligatory, that is, historical connotations, as somehow intrinsic to new and necessary modes of thinking, writing, speaking.”13 Jardine sees Showalter’s approach as problematic in that the feminist critique and the gynocritic “assume that the two sexes and their imaginations can somehow be separated.”14 In Sister’s Choice, Showalter responds to those concerns by reminding critics that by not separating them, we risk losing the element of women’s experience in a specific 7

Elaine Showalter, “Toward a Feminist Poetics,” in The New Feminist Criticism, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 128. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., 131. 11 Alice A. Jardine, Gynesis (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1985), 40. 12 Ibid., 13. 13 Ibid., 25. 14 Ibid., 40.

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cultural context as authentic. She equates “the piecing together of racial, class, and even gender diversity” with the blocks of a quilt, held together by a common thread unifying the quilt.15 As such, a specific block can be examined individually and as a part of a larger work created over time by women. While these critics are to be commended for their recognition of the importance of cultural context and women’s experience, I would argue that greater attention needs to be paid to the uncommon relationship between the 19th-century American woman writer and her readers which comprise her cultural context. 19th-century American women’s fiction was unique in that it was written both by women, and for women; therefore, critics need to focus on women as being at the center of the reading of these texts, as both the writers and the readers. Granted, this set of women was limited primarily to literate, middle- and upper-class white women, but like the “blocks” in Showalter’s quilt, this particular subset of women’s conversation within these novels deserves to be examined not only because of the massive audience that they reached, but because this “first great wave” of American women’s novels followed directly behind Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) and the Seneca Falls Convention (1848), which began the Woman’s Movement, and reflects the changes that were being effected in 19th-century women’s values. By putting women at the center of the reading, we can begin to see the ways in which these novels “valorized women’s experience, encouraged readers to consider alternative possibilities, and ultimately altered the social framework within which women’s ambitions could be received.”16 Showalter called the period between 1840-1880, the “Feminine phase,” and describes women’s writing as “typically oblique, displaced, ironic, and subversive; [therefore,] one has to read . . . between the lines, in the missed possibilities of the text.”17 Such a phase necessitated a “feminine” reader who was able to read beneath the surface of the text. By utilizing various rhetorical strategies which middle- and upper-class women had come to expect in sentimental fiction, women writers were able to communicate radical ideas in ways which their “feminine” readership would recognize, but which would remain obscured to their readers approaching the text from a phallocentric point of view. At the same time, 15

Susan M. Griffin, “The ‘Common Threads’ of Gynocriticism,” American Literary History 5:2 (Summer, 1993): 372-376. 16 Susan K. Harris, 19th-Century American Women’s Novels, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 210. 17 Showalter, 137-138.

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we need to keep in mind the importance of the cultural climate surrounding this discourse. Women writers were closely scrutinized and subject to severe social censure for any violations of social norms. Therefore, before we can examine the novels in which women writers communicated with their female readers, we need to first look at the challenges that 19th-century American women writers faced. During the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s, the nonproductive matron had become a symbol of “bourgeois class hegemony” through an ideal now known as “True Womanhood,” which dictated the behavioral expectations placed upon middle- and upper-class women in American culture. This ideal, first described by Barbara Welter in her book Dimity Convictions (1976), “prescribed a female role bound by kitchen and nursery, overlaid with piety and purity, and crowned with subservience.”18 True Women were designated as the symbolic keepers of morality and decency within the home, being regarded as innately superior to men when it came to virtue. “[P]iety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity” were thought to be natural to women.”19 Because being a True Woman was such an important responsibility, the ideal of True Womanhood was early imprinted upon young girls, who were trained to be obedient and exhibit great self-control.20 As a result, 19th-century literary critics favored female literary characters who embodied the ideals of the True Woman. Such fictional women were greatly admired, and “literary reviewers, both male and female, encouraged female readers to pattern their lives after those heroines who best conformed to the role of True Woman.”21 Authors were encouraged to create heroines who conformed to True Womanhood as such models were seen as excellent standards for young women to emulate. In addition, “novels that kept women in their sphere, rather than legitimizing their discontent with it” were highly praised.22 Ultimately, women’s novels were intended to demonstrate acceptable female behavior and “to show their readers how to live.”23 18 Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct, (New York: Alfred A Knopf, Inc., 1985), 13. 19 Barbara Welter, Dimity Convictions, (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1976), 21. To read more about True Womanhood and 19th-century alternatives read my article, “Changing Ideals of Womanhood during the Nineteenth-Century Woman Movement,” in ATQ 19:3 (September, 2005). 20 Ibid., 4. 21 Coultrap-McQuin, 12. 22 Ibid. 23 Baym, 26.

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Ironically, while women writers were expected to promote True Womanhood, nineteenth century society itself was not “wholly restrictive to the aspirations of women who [chose] to be writers.”24 This created an interesting paradox as the women who wrote novels which were expected to train women as to how to behave, indeed, were themselves violators of those gender expectations. In fact, society not only allowed women to pursue literary careers, but writing was one of the few ways that women could earn a respectable living, some quite profitably. According to Coultrap-McQuin, the primary reason why society accepted women’s writing was the fact that it was an occupation that could be conducted in the home. “By 1860, only about 15 percent (up from 10 percent in the 1840s) of all women were wage earners outside the home, and those were predominately young, poor, black, immigrants, or widows. . . . [Women writers’] work made them more like the uncounted numbers of married women in the nineteenth century who were wage earners in their homes, selling surplus products, taking in boarders, or making garments. . . . Class, race, and gender biases against women working were mitigated somewhat by their doing the work at home.”25 Because writing could be done at home, society was far more willing to embrace it as a profession open to women, and as a result, “[w]omen authors were very popular and prominent. . . . [B]y the 1850s women were authors of almost half of the popular literary works.”26 But while women were not discouraged to write, they weren’t entirely encouraged either. Many women writers, if not most, were motivated by the need to provide an income to support themselves and often a family. As first noted by Helen Papshvily, in All the Happy Endings, many women writers were displaced women, often widows, who “under pressure of sudden poverty” were forced to support themselves and their children, due to an unexpected absence of support from fathers, brothers, and husbands, who “had proved unworthy of the trust and confidence . . . placed in [them].”27 However, as Ann Wood points out, it was “taboo for the lady writers to appear to be . . . shrewd competitors in the literary market.”28 For if they did, “[they were] clearly threatening, reminding an absent father, or men in general, of their failure to support [them] in the 24

Coultrap-Mcquin, xii. Ibid, 24. 26 Ibid, 2. 27 Helen Waite Papashvily, All the Happy Endings, (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1956), xvi. 28 Ann D. Wood, “The ‘Scribbling Women’ and Fanny Fern: Why Women Wrote,” American Quarterly 23:1 (Spring, 1971): 9. 25

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graceful domestic sphere for which [they were] presumably formed, and implying that [they] might now actively take from them what they refused to give.”29 Therefore, it was unacceptable for a woman to present herself as writing to earn her bread. Additionally, it was even worse for a woman to publish who wasn’t forced to do so by financial need. Such a woman risked abandoning her “womanliness” and “delicacy” by exposing herself to the public through her writing, potentially ruining her reputation. Furthermore, her “literary duties” dare not keep her from her “domestic” responsibilities – her true calling. A woman who sought writing as a personally satisfying “career” risked being labeled a “bluestocking,” a derogatory early term for feminists, and faced possible social censure. Therefore, women writers often masked themselves “behind a conventional ‘feminine’ façade” which “enabled hundreds of women to write without understanding all the frightening and unacceptable implications of their desire to do so, and it helped them to make a profit as well.”30 Some women, like Fanny Fern, chose to hide behind a pen-name. Others adopted a literary persona where they pretended to write for leisure, as a “genteel amateur,” simply “for the entertainment of others.”31 In order to be accepted as writer, a woman could not be seen as abandoning or rejecting her True Womanhood. In addition to maintaining the appearance of a True Woman, women writers were restricted by the subject matter about which they could write. As their works were intended primarily for women readers, women writers were expected to limit their subject material to that of a domestic nature, and the setting of most women’s fiction centers primarily around the “home and hearth.” These novels became known as “domestic” or “sentimental” fiction due to their domestic themes and focus on women and families. Such novels were expected to be “entertaining,” as they were intended for a large audience, usually of women readers; however, they were also expected to provide a moral lesson so that “readers [could] take away something from their reading that would help them live their lives.”32 In most cases, such novels were “the story of a young girl who is deprived of the supports she had rightly or wrongly depended on to sustain her throughout life and is faced with the necessity of winning her own way in the world.”33 The works typically convey the story of a heroine “who,

29

Ibid., 10. Ibid., 12. 31 Coultrap-McQuin, 14. 32 Baym, 16-17. 33 Ibid., 11. 30

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beset with hardships, finds within herself the qualities of intelligence, will, resourcefulness, and courage sufficient to overcome them.”34 Tompkins contends that it was through this formulaic plot that women writers strove to influence their readers. The purpose of most domestic fiction in the mid-19th-century, other than to gain the author an income, was to promote social change by appealing to a mass audience. Since women writers wrote in order to change public attitudes, domestic fiction was crafted as “sentimental” with the intent of influencing the widest possible audience and gaining public support for various social and political causes. The purpose of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Little Eva, for example, was to arouse reader emotion as a way of influencing public opinion on the issue of slavery. While the novel may seem to consist of “stereotyped character[s], … a sensational plot, and … trite expression[s],” Tompkins argues that Stowe was actually honoring a set of reader expectations that had been established for domestic fiction.35 Writes Tompkins, “[A] novel’s impact on the culture at large depend[ed] not on its escape from the formulaic and derivative, but on its tapping into a storehouse of commonly held assumptions, reproducing what [was] already there in a typical and familiar form.”36 Writers relied on readers’ existing expectations regarding domestic fiction in order to attract the largest audience possible and sway public opinion in their favor. As the popularity of women’s novels, as well as their female readership, increased, the role of “Gentleman Publishers” emerged in the publishing marketplace to serve as “moral guardians for their society,” thereby protecting readers from being exposed to violations of gender norms or any other sort of indecent material. The role of the Gentleman Publisher evolved during the nineteenth century into an inflated ideal where publishers were seen less as businessmen and more as “patrons of the arts.”37 As such, they considered it their duty to set the standard for quality literature that was appropriate for polite society to read. Publishers preferred to put themselves forth as providing a “public service,” instead of portraying themselves as savvy businessmen, out to make a profit from book sales. Eventually, “[t]he image of Gentleman Publisher, which flourished in the mid-nineteenth century, was as widespread a standard for publishers as True Womanhood was for women of the time.”38

34

Ibid., 22. Tompkins, xvi. 36 Ibid. 37 Coultrap-McQuin, 28. 38 Ibid., 32. 35

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As the importance of women authors became more pronounced, the Gentlemen Publishers’ function became a multifaceted one where “they sought to develop trusting, paternalistic, personal relationships with their authors; they claimed to have goals beyond commercial ones to advance culture and/or provide a public service; and they assumed the role of moral guardian for their society.”39 Publishers were expected not only to serve as literary critics and censors, but also as brotherly protectors of their female authorship. The relationship between an author and her publisher was often “long term, like marriage, close friendships, or intimate professional associations” and “loyalty and trust” played an important role. Publishers often handled their authors’ financial affairs, paying bills, advancing royalties, and offering advice on financial planning.40 According to Coultrap, “For women, the emphasis by publishers on personal relationships involving loyalty, trust, commitment, and paternalism was important. . . . After all, women had been socialized to value personal relations with family and friends, so associations with publishers modeled on that pattern were not particularly threatening to their womanhood.”41 Such protection and guidance were simply an extension of the protections that nineteenth century women had been taught to expect from “Christian Gentlemen.” As a result, the Gentleman Publisher enabled women writers to maintain the appearance of not dirtying their delicate hands in business affairs most appropriately handled by men. Thus, the relationship between an author and her publisher was hardly an equitable one; unfortunately, there was a potential of exploitation for women writers. According to Coultrap, several inequalities existed in the author-publisher relationship. For one, “publishers generally had more power and more autonomy than writers, no matter what their sex.”42 Which authors publishers chose to represent was mostly up to them, though of course an author could refuse to sign with a specific publishing house. However, unless an author had multiple publishers interested in her work, she might be at the mercy of an individual publisher, especially if she was in dire need of an income. Also, how much authors were “compensated for their work” was largely up to their publishers.43 Fortunately, it appears that most publishers lived up to their fame as “gentlemen” and that “most successful women writers did receive book

39

Ibid., 34. Ibid., 36-37. 41 Ibid., 38. 42 Ibid., 39. 43 Ibid. 40

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royalties at the same rate as their male peers.”44 Finally, as Gentleman Publishers were expected to serve as “moral guardians” for society, it was up to their discretion what materials were deemed as acceptable for the public readership. An author’s work could be severely altered before publication or even rejected altogether. On the other hand, one’s publisher could also work as “a powerful ally . . . who not only put [her] works into print but advertised them widely and enthusiastically.”45 A writer’s publisher held a great deal of power over her success. As a result, a publisher’s control over a writer caused potential obstacles for a woman who was attempting to perform “cultural work” through her fiction. If her publisher perceived her as a rebellious “bluestocking” or even suspected that her readership might perceive her as such, he was likely to refuse to publish her works. Therefore, women writers had to communicate their reformist ideas within the boundaries surrounding nineteenth century women’s fiction. In such a context, we can begin to understand why women writers were often “unspectacular” in trying to instigate social changes, for it is within these constraints that women authors first began experimenting with alternative ideals to True Womanhood. One of the first of these bestselling works was Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1851), “with sales that went far beyond 100,000 copies.”46 The Wide, Wide World is the story of a young girl named Ellen, who is separated from her mother so that her father can take the mother overseas to England in order to regain her health. Because the father has been the recent victim of a lawsuit, he is unable to afford to bring Ellen on the trip with them. Ellen’s impending separation from her mother is the cause of a great deal of distress as the bond between mother and child is prematurely severed. Ellen’s mother emphasizes, however, that it is God’s will that they be parted, and she offers Ellen her first lesson in self-control by teaching her to be submissive. Warner stresses the importance of a mother’s moral influence in raising an obedient and virtuous daughter. From the point that Ellen is separated from her mother, she encounters a variety of people who are either insensitively cruel or demonstrate Christian kindness, as she is conducted to her Aunt Fortune, her father’s sister, who is a healthy, hard working old maid, but is also lacking in Christian kindness and charity. Ellen and Aunt Fortune do not get along, and Ellen is extremely unhappy due to her sadness over the loss of her mother and her constant battles with her aunt. Faced with a difficult life 44

Ibid., 40. Baym, 23. 46 Coultrap-McQuin, 2. 45

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devoid of love and kindness, Ellen struggles to resign herself to her situation and finds guidance through her relationship with Alice Humphrey, a neighbor in the nearby mountains who takes responsibility for Ellen’s spiritual development and teaches not only school lessons, which Ellen’s aunt has denied her out of spite, but also lessons about Christian charity and obedience. Through her relationship with Miss Alice, Ellen learns the lessons that her mother desired for her: to become a good Christian and to humble herself and put her trust in God. She also meets Alice’s brother John, who continues Ellen’s school and Bible studies. During their time together, Ellen and John become very fond of one another. When Ellen learns that her mother has died, Alice and the rest of the Humphrey family help Ellen through her depression, again encouraging Ellen to accept God’s will. The novel ends with Ellen at John’s side, having been rewarded for perfect obedience, as she looks forward to their life together. On the surface, Ellen appears to be the perfect role model for True Womanhood. At the end of the novel, Ellen has learned obedience, dependence, and trust in God. Also, her final happiness is complete in her marriage to a Christian gentleman. However, Tompkins argues that Warner’s novel is not quite so simple and deserves a great deal of praise because of the cultural work which it was designed to do despite its cohering to 19th-century expectations. According to Tompkins, Warner was attempting to empower women within the confines of their domestic “sphere,” in other words, within the constructs of True Womanhood. Since True Women were expected to be obedient, Tompkins suggested that one way in which women could gain power was to select those to whom they were obedient. By choosing to be submissive to God, above all else, a woman exercised a degree of power over her self. As Tompkins points out, “The fact is that American women simply could not assume a stance of open rebellion against the conditions of their lives for they lacked the material means of escape or opposition. They had to stay put and submit. And so the domestic novelists made that necessity the basis on which to build a power structure of their own. Instead of rejecting the culture’s value system outright, they appropriated it for their own use, subjecting the beliefs and customs that had molded them to a series of transformations that allowed them both to fulfill and transcend their appointed roles.”47 Warner wanted to convince her readers that “the only

47

Tompkins, 161.

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way to overcome tyranny [was] through the practice of grueling and inexorable discipline.”48 Unfortunately, by Tompkins’ interpretation, Warner’s solutions don’t seem very useful in ending women’s victimization by men and would indeed seem to make her plan for social change weak at best. She tells women that they need to “appropriate” society’s expectations through choosing to obey God in order to gain some control over their lives.49 While this approach was empowering for many women, it doesn’t seem to be so for Ellen. She repeatedly endures personal losses that wear away at her spirit until she is broken and depressed. Warner’s brand of appropriation also requires constant sacrifice and selfless discipline, instead of using “the culture’s value system” to correct the wrongs that were being inflicted on women. For example, Warner is unconcerned with solving the problem of Ellen’s mother’s being forced by her husband to abandon her daughter against her will. Moreover, while Warner recognizes the cruelty of severing the natural tie of mother and daughter, she seems unconcerned with correcting the financial dependence that forces Ellen’s mother to suffer the loss of her child. Why doesn’t she appropriate True Womanhood’s notion of motherhood as woman’s highest calling as a means by which to force her husband into allowing her to remain with her daughter, for how could a True Woman allow herself to be separated from her child? In addition, Warner’s response to this victimization hardly seems adequate, for it does little to stop the continued victimization of women. Her message to her audience is to learn to be humble women, obedient to God (also characterized as a man), for eventually good Christians are rewarded in heaven by way of death, like Miss Alice, or on earth through a happy marriage to a kind man, like Ellen. By learning to be obedient, Ellen is being indoctrinated into the same obedience that allowed her mother to be victimized. What is to prevent Ellen from finding herself in the same situation as her mother? Warner also seems to cling to the notion of women’s delicacy, for Ellen’s role models are her mother and Miss Alice, both physically weak women, who eventually die due to their frailty. Warner never appears to approach their deaths as cautionary or preventable. Also, Aunt Fortune, a robust, strong woman, is depicted as mean-spirited. Warner fails to acknowledge that if Ellen’s mother had been healthy like Aunt Fortune, she could have taken better care of her daughter. Conservative in her thinking, Tompkins seems to feel that 48 49

Ibid., 175-176. Ibid., 161.

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Warner is incapable of creating a work which called for true changes for women. In contrast, I would argue that Warner is very aware of these discrepancies and is indeed calling for greater changes than Tompkins credits her. Warner recognized the innate problems with True Womanhood that hindered women’s ability to have any power at all. She clearly understood the depression brought on by constant self-sacrifice for women. She also saw the danger for mothers in a social system where motherhood is valued above all else, yet a woman has no legal right to her children. However, she was not in a position as a female author to be more direct in her attack as she risked rejection by her publisher as well as potential social retribution; consequently, she needed to be careful not to make her challenge of True Womanhood too apparent. As a result, Warner relies on her reader to read beneath the surface for her calls for reform. As Showalter suggests, Warner relies on “feminine values [to] penetrate and undermine the masculine systems that contain them.”50 While a reader approaching the text from a phallocentric point of view would see Ellen as becoming a True Woman through her obedience, a “feminine” reader would see Ellen’s strength and survival as a movement away from True Womanhood. For example, Ellen’s mother and Miss Alice, both weak women, die while Ellen, who has proven herself strong enough to endure all the trials heaped upon her, survives. Also, Aunt Fortune, despite her mean depiction, thrives in the novel as a strong independent woman. Indeed fortunate, as her name suggests, Aunt Fortune, as an unmarried woman, makes her own decisions, runs her own farm, and obeys no one. Despite her sternness with Ellen, Aunt Fortune helps to change Ellen from a weak young girl, who is destined to model her even weaker mother, into a stronger girl who can withstand the abuses and disappointments that life often involves. Warner knew, however, that a strong independent woman would never be accepted by critics; therefore, Aunt Fortune’s marriage at the end of the novel to the gentle Mr. Van Brunt serves a twofold purpose as it is first of all assumed to “soften” the disposition of Aunt Fortune. For example, during the courtship, Aunt Fortune “went round with an inward chuckle visible in her countenance.”51 Her marriage also prevents a strong woman from remaining an independent figure at the end of the novel and possibly offending supporters of True Womanhood. 50

Showalter, 131. Susan Warner, The Wide, Wide World, (New York: The Feminist Press, 1987), 418.

51

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Additionally, when Ellen is rewarded with marriage at the end of the novel for learning obedience and dependence, it is because that was what her readers, and more importantly, her publisher, expected. And though she marries, readers are led to believe that John Humphrey is a more caring man than her father and that her fate will be different than Ellen’s mother. To end the story any other way would have violated “sentimental” form. Warner can’t totally abandon the ideal of True Womanhood and the formulaic expectations that surrounded novels endorsing the ideal, but she can damage the ideal by revealing its weaknesses. Though she is unwilling or unable to offer an alternative to True Womanhood, she is using Ellen’s transformation prior to her marriage to demonstrate the problems inherent with the ideal. “The end of change, finally, is a new woman and, by extension, the reformation of the world immediately around her as this new person calls out different relations and responses from her environment.”52 As a result of her trials, Ellen’s character is strengthened by the “storms and winds that had visited it [which] did but cause the root to take deeper hold.”53 Warner’s readers would have recognized Ellen’s transformation as something much more than becoming a True Woman. While The Wide, Wide World reveals the dangers for women inherent in True Womanhood, Maria Cummins’ The Lamplighter encourages women to move even further past True Womanhood. Closely following The Wide, Wide World as a bestseller in the literary marketplace, The Lamplighter (1854), averaged sales of 5,000 copies a week during its first few months, selling 70,000 during its first year alone and making Cummins “the darling of every literate American household.”54 It is again, as the formula demands, the story of a young girl who is forced to make her own way in the world. However, the main character, Gerty Flint, is quite different than Ellen. As a young child, Gerty is raised by Nan Grant, a mean, poor woman who runs the boarding house where the mother died when Gerty was born. Though Gerty does her best to endure Nan Grant’s abuse and be obedient, she can’t help retaliating, due to her rebellious temper, and eventually gets thrown out of the house. Trueman Flint, the lamplighter who has befriended Gerty, takes her home with him and though a bachelor, with the help of friends — Mrs. Sullivan, her son, William, and Miss Graham — adopts and raises her. Gerty discovers happiness living under his care until he takes ill. She then repays his

52

Baym, 20. Warner, 569. 54 Donald A Koch, Introduction to Tempest and Sunshine and The Lamplighter. New York: The Odyssey Press, 1968, vi. 53

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kindness to her by tenderly caring for him during his illness until his death. After Trueman Flint’s death, Gerty goes to live with the Grahams where she is a companion for Miss Emily, who is blind. A close friendship is formed over several years, and Miss Emily becomes a mentor for Gerty in becoming a True Woman. As a result, Gertrude develops into a grown woman who has not only learned to master her feelings, particularly her temper, but has taken on the manner of a lady. While traveling with the Grahams, Gertrude moves among the socially elite and is introduced to many new people. She is courted by a wealthy and idle Mr. Bruce, whose attentions she rejects. Gertrude eventually meets an older gentleman who is introduced as Mr. Phillips. The gentleman takes a special interest in Gertrude and Emily and spends quite a bit of time in their company. During this time, Gertrude and William Sullivan have keep in touch through letters while he is overseas seeking his fortune. However, as Gertrude travels with the Grahams and Mr. Phillips, she loses contact with him for several years. Despite rumors of William’s engagement with another young woman, Gertrude discovers that she is in love with him. Gertrude also receives a letter from Mr. Phillips which reveals that he was the man who blinded Emily years ago, that his real name is Mr. Amory, and that he was forced to hide his identity after Emily’s accident. He also reveals that afterwards he went to sea, fell in love with the ship captains' daughter, and fathered a child — Gertrude. Emily tells Gertrude that she still loves Amory, Gertrude and William reveal their feelings for each other, and the novel ends with the happy couples engaged to be married. At first The Lamplighter seems to be another novel advocating True Womanhood. For instance, Gerty’s story is similar to Ellen’s in that she is cast out into the world to fend for herself, luckily being taken under the wing of a female mentor who teaches her the lessons necessary to be a True Woman. To the “feminine” reader, however, instead of promoting True Womanhood, Cummins is clearly offering an alternative to True Womanhood. In All American Girl, Frances Cogan explains that Real Womanhood differed from True Womanhood in its attitude toward health, education, marriage, and most importantly, employment. While, like True Womanhood, it claimed “a unique sphere of action and duty for women,” this sphere was “vastly extended …past the dimensions of anything meant by that term to devotees of the competing True Womanhood.”55 Real Womanhood encouraged healthy exercise and activity, permitted women a 55

Frances B. Cogan, All –American Girl, (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 4.

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minor degree of independence through education, urged caution in choosing marriage, and stressed economic self-sufficiency as a means of survival. If we look at The Lamplighter as Showalter suggests and examine the “female subculture including not only the ascribed status, and the internalized constructs of femininity, but also the occupations, interactions, and consciousness of women,”56 we begin to see Gerty as an example of Real Womanhood. One reason that Gerty can be considered a Real Woman is that she participates in strenuous exercise and activities. Unlike True Womanhood, Real Womanhood encouraged women to perform their own housekeeping tasks, such as pumping water, washing laundry, and sweeping floors since these provided brisk activity. Walking and gardening in the fresh air were encouraged for women as they stimulated “ruddy cheeks and vigorous health.”57 Gerty’s performance of these tasks, first in taking care of Trueman Flint’s home, and later by making herself useful while living with the Grahams, sets her apart from True Womanhood in way that “feminine” readers would have recognized, while others might have attributed it to her poor economic situation, failing to see the pride that she takes in her work. Gerty also takes frequent walks, thriving in the outdoors and fresh air. She is in no way sickly, frail, or dependent on others to care for her, as a True Woman was expected to be. This is clearly a movement away from True Womanhood. Gerty can also be considered a Real Woman in that she is educated. While True Womanhood advocated learning for women only as it enhanced the “arts of child rearing, domestic pursuits, and spiritual comfort,” Real Womanhood saw education as enabling a woman “to attract the right kind of man and … fulfill the duties of wife and companion.”58 A woman with an education was more likely to be a suitable partner for an educated husband, better able to participate in conversations on a more equal level of understanding. An education also made a woman better equipped “to manage a household and raise children satisfactorily,” and “to help transmit culture, gentleness, and morality to future generations, the immediate family.”59 On an individual level, Real Womanhood saw education as beneficial for a woman as a means “to combat neurosis, depression, and mental illness” and “to widen [her] horizons and enrich [herself] as a person.”60 As Gerty attends school, is an 56

Showalter, 131. Ibid., 7. 58 Ibid., 74. 59 Ibid., 74-75. 60 Ibid., 75. 57

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avid reader, and seeks to improve her mind, she embraces education in ways in which a True Woman would not. Again, a “feminine” reader would have recognized the difference, especially in the ways in which Gerty and William study together. William’s strong affection for Gerty begins when they are studying French together. “To his surprise . . . she kept pace with him, oftentimes translating more than during the week than he could find time to do. . . . [T]hey always had a fine study time together.”61 Their later romantic relationship is based on early intellectual discourse, not the romance that True Women sought. Gerty is also a Real Woman in that she approaches marriage as a very serious matter. The purpose of courtship for a Real Woman was to assess a potential husband’s character and help the woman avoid a disastrous match with a drunkard, gambler, or rake, for “one rarely managed to reform an alcoholic, a compulsive gambler, a chronic philanderer, or a wastrel; the behaviors usually continued, despite tears and promises to the contrary.”62 Therefore, instead of teaching a young woman “flirting techniques … guaranteed to bring her romance,” Real Womanhood offered careful strategies for gaining insight into the moral character of a prospective mate “for those girls wise enough to listen.”63 Real Womanhood encouraged a woman to marry “a man who was hardworking, compassionate, and moral rather than one who was merely wealthy or physically attractive.”64 Gerty clearly rejects the dictates of True Womanhood when she refuses the affections of Mr. Bruce, a wealthy, young man who could have raised her both socially and financially. Mr. Bruce recognizes this as well: “[I]f . . . you are so far forgetful of your own interests as deliberately to refuse such a fortune as mine, I think it a pity you haven’t got some friend to advise you. Such a chance doesn’t occur everyday, especially to poor school-mistresses; and if you are so foolish as to overlook it, I’ll venture to say you’ll never have another.”65 For a True Woman, especially in Gerty’s penniless situation, such a match would have been highly desirable for it enabled a woman to lead a privileged lifestyle. Gerty, however, is more concerned with the character of Mr. Bruce, whom she finds lazy and lacking morals. She refuses to entertain his advances despite the fact that he is wealthy, and by refusing him risks never marrying. And though at the end of the novel 61

Maria Susanna Cummins, The Tempest and Sunshine and The Lamplighter, (New York: Odyssey Press, 1968), 270. 62 Showalter, 103. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid., 75. 65 Cummins, 401.

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Gerty marries, as patriarchal culture expected and sentimental novels dictated, her marriage to William is based on careful assessment of his character, shared intellectual interests, confidence in his ability to care for a family, and mutual affection. Cummin’s readers would understand this as urging them to use greater care in choosing a spouse, and that risking spinsterhood, as Gerty did in rejecting Mr. Bruce, was better than being in a marriage with a poor husband. Because of the risks of marriage, Real Womanhood also permitted women to work for an income. While a career was not encouraged because it would distract from domestic responsibilities, work played a central role in Real Womanhood, which demanded that women be “employed” in charitable, domestic, or salaried work since it “taught the woman self-reliance.” Conversely, “idleness” was strongly discouraged as it promoted dependency and could lead to moral temptation.66 By being able to earn an income in order to support herself, a woman could also avoid finding herself in the position of having to marry an unsuitable man just to “acquire a home.”67 She could support herself until a desirable match could be found, or she could choose not to marry at all. Finally, too, a woman who was able to work could support herself and her family when illness, death, or financial disaster struck. Because Gerty worked for the Grahams and was thus able to provide for herself, she is in a position to reject Mr. Bruce’s advances. Also, when her employer Mr. Graham tries to order her to accompany him to Europe, rather then stay and care for an ill friend as her conscience tells her she should do, Gerty is able to find work elsewhere and support herself by teaching school due to her previous education. Her education enables her to assert her independence and follow her conscience as to the ethical choice she feels is right. Cummin’s readers would also have recognized this ability as being a movement away from True Womanhood and toward a better ideal for them to emulate if they also wanted such independence for themselves. E.D.E.N. Southworth’s The Hidden Hand (1859) is another novel written in the sentimental tradition that seems to also endorse True Womanhood for women. The Hidden Hand began its first serialization in the New York Ledger, eventually becoming one of the most successful novels of the mid-19th-century.68 Sales of the novel eventually reached over 2,000,000 copies.69 The story once again revolves around a young 66

Showalter, 200. Ibid., 107. 68 Joanne Dobson, Introduction to The Hidden Hand. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1992, xii. 69 Koch, vii. 67

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girl who has been cast out into the world, though she has done nothing to deserve such a fate. However, unlike Ellen and Gerty, Capitola is a young girl who is able to look out for herself right from the beginning. First introduced to the reader “disguised as a boy, selling newspapers and running odd jobs” to support herself, Capitola continues throughout the novel to lead a life of adventure where she “rescues damsels in distress, captures bandits, fights duels, all with insouciance and style.”70 She lives on the streets living by her wits to provide food and shelter for herself. She even goes so far as to cross dress as a boy in order to avoid being molested and be able to support herself as a newsboy. When Capitola is rescued from the streets by Old Hurricane, who was made aware of her presence by the old woman who delivered and then rescued and raised her, she is obstinate to his attempts to “civilize” her into a True Woman. Capitola goes out in search of adventure, riding out alone despite her guardian’s restrictions. She plots ways to capture Black Donald, a notorious bandit known for his disguises, who she admires not only for his dashing appearance but his freedom and recklessness. She also defends her own honor through dueling with pistols, though filled with peas instead of shot (unknown to her opponent). She completely refuses to conform in any way to behaving as a young lady was expected. At the same time, Old Hurricane is aware that even though he claims to be her uncle, legally he doesn’t have any right to Capitola. He knows that her father was Eugene Le Noir, who was murdered by his younger brother Gabriel in order to inherit his elder brother’s fortune and that Capitola’s mother disappeared after giving birth to twins, the male twin having died during delivery. Old Hurricane is trying to protect Capitola as he knows that she is really the rightful heir to the Le Noir estate. He is afraid to discipline Capitola as he fears that she might bring attention to her true identity before he has the proof necessary to reveal Gabriel Le Noir’s crime. Black Donald is eventually captured by Capitola and imprisoned, though she then proceeds to sneak into the prison and help him escape after convincing him to start living a more moral life. The novel ends with weddings for Capitola and Herbert, and Clara and Traverse, as well as a reunion for Marah and Old Hurricane. Unlike Ellen and Gerty, Capitola makes no pretences about being a True Woman. She clearly is an alternative ideal, but with her being so obvious, how did The Hidden Hand ever get published? One reason is that Capitola is such an exaggerated character that most readers would fail to consider her a viable alternative to True Womanhood. As Showalter points 70

Dobson, xiii.

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out, domestic fiction often adopted “ironic” and “subversive” tactics to communicate their radical feminist ideas.71 Capitola’s character comes off as delightfully entertaining in such far fetched way that hardly anyone at that time would ever have dreamed that emulating Capitola was a possibility for women. The notion of a pretty young girl chasing bandits and rescuing damsels in distress would have been ridiculously funny for most 19th-century readers. Southworth counted on that reaction to Capitola’s character. Only by exaggerating Capitola’s exploits to such a degree that they were almost unbelievable, such as her single-handedly capturing three bandits by tricking them and locking them in her bedroom, was Southworth able to make Capitola’s desire to behave as a man unthreatening to patriarchal readers. She also included Clara’s character to serve as a foil to Capitola and thus placate advocates of True Womanhood by providing a model. However, compared to Capitola, Clara’s character is boring. The notion of behaving like Capitola would have been far more enticing for Southworth’s readers. But what sort of alternative does Capitola represent for 19th-century women? Clearly she meets some of the criteria for Real Womanhood. She enjoys exercise and being outdoors, especially horseback riding. She also can provide for herself when need be, as she proved when living on the streets. However, Real Womanhood still clung to True Womanhood in that most activities were associated with the domestic realm. Real Women were allowed some independence; however, those freedoms were restricted to women’s sphere. Capitola, on the other hand, rejects everything that is associated with the domestic. Instead of advocating Real Woman as a model for women, Southworth is advocating New Womanhood. According to Cogan, the New Woman expressed a “distressing disinterest in the female domestic sphere – especially an overt disgust with housework . . . and a shocking desire for ‘fellowship’ with men.”72 She wanted to “exercise . . . her talents . . . even if that work existed in man’s sphere.”73 Capitola finds domestic chores boring and can barely sit still when trying to attempt needle work. She would much rather be chasing bandits, or some other sort of equally exciting male gendered activity, than darning Old Hurricane’s socks. Southworth’s “feminine” readers would easily have recognized Capitola’s desire to participate in men’s activities as deviant, for to take a young woman out of the “domestic setting” and 71

Showalter, 138. Cogan, 258. 73 Ibid., 259. 72

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allow “her to think and feel ‘as a man’ . . . violated virtually every lateVictorian norm.”74 Capitola also lacks an interest in marriage and raising a family. The New Woman didn’t look to a husband and children to fulfill her. In the same way, Capitola gives marriage little thought until the end of the novel when she marries Herbert Greyson, her childhood friend. She also refuses repeated marriage proposals from Craven Le Noir, who is infatuated with her daring and cleverness. At other times, it seems as though she is torn between her admiration for Black Donald and the life of freedom he enjoys as a bandit that is denied her as a woman, and her awareness that he is potentially dangerous as far as her being raped (which would have ruined her for marriage as she would no longer be considered a virgin) or murdered. Southworth’s feminine readers would have known that Capitola’s lack of interest in marriage and children violated the dictates of True Womanhood. The public feared the “loss of moral decency and grace” if women were no longer imparting their guidance within the home.75 Like the New Woman, Capitola also resents any restrictions placed upon her due to her being a woman. She feels that she should be allowed to do anything that a man can do and refuses to obey her guardian’s demands that she behave in a ladylike way. Old Hurricane experiences great frustration in trying to domesticate her: “I can’t manage her! She won’t obey me, except when she likes! She has never been taught obedience or been accustomed to subordination, and don’t understand neither! She rides and walks out alone in spite of all I can do or say! If she were a boy, I’d thrash her! But what can I do with a girl?”76 And when Old Hurricane is finally so exasperated with her that he does threaten to beat her, Capitola’s response borders on the criminal: CAPITOLA. Uncle, in all the sorrows, shames and sufferings of my destitute childhood, no one ever dishonored my person with a blow; and if ever you should have the misfortune to forget your manhood so far as to strike me — she paused, drew her breath hard between her set teeth, grew a shade whiter, while her dark eyes dilated until a white ring flamed around the iris. OLD HURRICANE. Oh you perilous witch, what then? cried old Hurricane, in dismay.

74

Smith-Rosenberg, 252. Cogan, 259. 76 Eden Southworth, The Hidden Hand, (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 174. 75

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CAPITOLA. Why then, said Capitola, speaking in a low, deep, and measured tone, and keeping her gaze fixed upon his astonished face, the — first — time — I — should — find — you — asleep — I — would — take — a — razor — and — OLD HURRICANE. Cut my throat! I feel you would you terrible termagnant! shuddered Old Hurricane. CAPITOLA. Shave your beard off smick, smack, smoove! said Cap, bounding off and laughing merrily as she ran out of the room.77

Though Capitola ends the threat as a joke, the tone and framing of her warning suggests the potential of violence in retaliation to any physical abuse Old Hurricane that might inflict upon her. While her final response is amusing that she would merely shave off his beard (which in itself would have been emasculating), Southworth’s readers would have noticed his recognition of the possibility of her actually murdering him in his sleep. In fact, what is to keep any woman from murdering any abusive husband, father, or guardian? Such thinking would have been an extreme movement away from True Womanhood. In the end though, Southworth has to reform Capitola. By the end of the novel, Capitola and Clara have greatly improved one another’s disposition as Clara has been inspired by Capitola’s wit, bravery, and independence, and Capitola has been tempered by Clara’s natural goodness, gentleness, and faithfulness. Although Capitola captures Black Donald, her heart turns womanly, and she helps him to escape on the condition that he change his way and begin leading a more moral life. Southworth couldn’t have Capitola happy about Black Donald’s capture and execution as it would have been unwomanly for her not to have more tender feelings. Also, as the sentimental form demands, Capitola has to marry at the end of the novel, and thus finally be domesticated. It wasn’t possible for Southworth to leave her single and happily chasing bandits all over the country or have her run away with Black Donald, who certainly seems a more equal match for Capitola than Herbert Greyson, for to do so would have gone too far. Critics could tolerate Capitola’s exploits, and perhaps even admire them, as long as she seems to be converted to True Womanhood by the end of the novel. By examining sentimental novels like Southworth’s The Hidden Hand, we can see, first of all, that “sentimental fiction” wasn’t attempting to perpetuate the ongoing patriarchal culture of the time as some critics would have us believe. As we have seen in The Wide, Wide World, The Lamplighter, and The Hidden Hand, 19th-century American women 77

Ibid.,188.

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writers used their novels to communicate alternative ideals of womanhood to their “feminine” readers by cloaking their works as supporting True Womanhood, while at the same time utilizing various rhetorical strategies that would have made their true intentions obvious to their intended readers. The unique relationship between 19th-century American woman writers and their middle- and upper-class women readers allowed writers to share radical ideas in ways which their “feminine” readership would recognize, but not their readers approaching the text from a phallocentric point of view. And while these women were primarily middle- and upperclass women who had access to education and the texts themselves, this “block” of women are worth studying, not only because of the massive audience that they reached, but because their communicating alternatives to True Womanhood for 19th-century middle- and upper-class women went a long way toward advancing the feminist movement.

Works Cited Baym, Nina. Women’s Fiction. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Cogan, Frances B. All –American Girl. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1989. Coultrap-McQuin, Susan. Doing Literary Business. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 1990. Cummins, Maria Susanna. The Tempest and Sunshine and The Lamplighter. (New York: Odyssey Press, 1968. Dobson, Joanne. Introduction to The Hidden Hand. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1992. Douglas, Ann. The Feminization of American Culture. New York: Avon Books, 1977. Griffin, Susan M. “The ‘Common Threads’ of Gynocriticism.” American Literary History 5:2 (Summer, 1993): 370-377. Harris, Susan K. 19th-Century American Women’s Novels. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Jardine, Alice A. Gynesis. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1985. Koch, Donald A. Introduction to Tempest and Sunshine and The Lamplighter. New York: The Odyssey Press, 1968. Papashvily, Helen Waite. All the Happy Endings. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1956.

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Showalter, Elaine. “Toward a Feminist Poetics.” in The New Feminist Criticism. Edited by Elaine Showalter. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985, 125-143. Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. Disorderly Conduct. New York: Alfred A Knopf, Inc., 1985. Southworth, E. D. E. N. The Hidden Hand. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1992. Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Warner, Susan. The Wide, Wide World. New York: The Feminist Press, 1987. Welter, Barbara. Dimity Convictions. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1976. Wood, Ann D. “The ‘Scribbling Women’ and Fanny Fern: Why Women Wrote.” American Quarterly 23, no. 1 (Spring, 1971): 3-24.

CHAPTER FIVE VICTORIAN WOMEN POETS AND THE ART OF COLLABORATION SUSAN SOROKA

During the nineteenth century, a quiet—and sometimes not-so-quiet— battle was raging over the “proper” role for women to occupy. Since the mid-eighteenth century, the doctrine of separate spheres—the public belonging to men, the private to women—had been growing stronger. Class distinctions were also becoming more obvious, and middle- and upper-class women were becoming more isolated in the home. Victorian culture did not encourage women to form or participate in female communities outside of the home, and they were given little or no education. What education there was to be had came in the form of governesses; going away to school for serious study was out of the question. Woman’s proper place was in the home, first as a daughter and then as a wife and mother, although not all women accepted this role quietly. During this time, British women were struggling to define their places in the world, in a variety of arenas. The world around them was changing—the boundaries of the British Empire were being stretched in more way than one. Social, political, and economic changes meant that definitions which had been previously considered set and stable were now being overturned or at least shaken. Even as Coventry Patmore was declaring the proper Victorian woman to be the “Angel in the House,” and social mores were relegating them the parlor as the home’s moral center, women themselves were pushing for more public roles, including the right to a better education and the right to vote; during the nineteenth century they began, among other accomplishments, to hold local public office and practice medicine. More women were becoming the primary breadwinners of their households, and they needed to find ways to earn a living without becoming social or cultural pariahs. Writing was one arena which allowed upper- and middle-class women to remain at least

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physically in the culturally proscribed domestic sphere. Novel-writing, a relatively new field, saw an influx of women writers. Poetry, however, was seen as a male pursuit; women who wrote poems were, at best, “poetesses.” During the nineteenth century, however, dozens of women successfully began to use poetry not only as a means of support, but also as a way of expanding the cultural roles allowed to women. In reexamining the role of the poet, and striving to transform contemporary understanding of poetic identity, nineteenth-century women poets began publicly raising questions of authority and authorship: who could write poetry? Who could not? Were certain genres more acceptable for women than others? Was poetry the domain of the upper class? Of men? One of the important questions that women poets asked, as they created their poetry and expanded the boundaries of what was a poem, and who was a poet, was the question of how poems were written. The image of the poet is often a solitary one—a towering intellect, locked in a room scribbling notes at his desk, or walking alone amid the beauties of nature. This image was also, in the nineteenth century, very definitely male. One of the methods that women used to overcome this image was through collaboration, both with one another, and, more often, with historical figures. In building on existing work, and collaborating with an accepted author, these poets increased their own chances of finding an audience and being accepted as a poet. In their quest to find a way of negotiating the difficulties of being accepted as women poets, and to authorize themselves to speak in a way that would be heard, these writers often stacked the deck, so to speak, by reviving and collaborating with a woman who was accepted not only as a poet, but as the tenth muse: Sappho. For the poets who come after her, Sappho is a complex and problematic figure, culturally acceptable and culturally transgressive at the same time; filled with both potential answers and potential traps. In collaborating with Sappho, women poets were able to re-write the ways in which they created their own identity, creating for themselves a new way of thinking about poetry, about women’s work, about the way identity is constructed, and find a new way of existing in both the public and the private worlds. During the nineteenth century, the women who collaborate with Sappho included Mary Robinson, Felicia Hemans, Letitia Landon, Christina Rossetti, and Michael Field. Here, however, I am focusing on one poet in particular: Michael Field. I do this in part because an exhaustive list is almost impossible, and—more importantly— because Michael Field is the collaborative pseudonym of two women, Katherine Bradley (1846-1914) and Edith Cooper (1862-1913). Not only

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do Bradley and Cooper collaborate seamlessly with one another, they extend their partnership to include Sappho. In general terms, the adoption of Sappho as a speaker is important because it provided nineteenth-century women with an immediately recognizable trope of the woman poet, one who had already claimed a place in literary history. Sappho offered them a voice with which to speak and to work on the question of how to be a poet. She also allows them to “at least partially objectify [their protagonists] . . . by using characters with an independent literary existence”1. The struggle Sappho undergoes to balance her love for Phaon with the fame she’s won, and the necessity for her to give up her fame since she cannot have love, provided a rich territory for early nineteenth-century women poets to grapple with their own difficulties. Susan Gubar suggests that Sappho “represents . . . all the lost women of genius in literary history”2, all the ancestresses that Victorian women are looking for but cannot find with ease. Sappho is an extremely difficult and complicated figure, because too many of her own words have been lost, too many gaps exist in the words that do survive, and her story has been too frequently mythisized and rewritten for the truth of her life and words to be easily found—if such a truth exists outside the minds of her literary descendants. She does not offer a clearcut of example, and thus is easily appropriated and recreated in the image the Victorian poet needed her to be Because [since] so many of her original Greek texts were destroyed, the modern woman poet could write “for” or “as” Sappho and thereby invent a classical inheritance of her own. In other words, such a writer is not infected by Sappho’s stature with a Bloomian “anxiety of influence,” because her ancient precursor is paradoxically in need of a contemporary collaborator.3

The collaboration with Sappho by women poets allowed them to find a place from which to speak with the same freedom they imagined Sappho to have had. Sappho also allowed them to remove the problems of establishing their own poetic identity from England and place them into a more exotic locale, one in which women were allowed to be poets: ancient Greece. Enacting the role of Sappho and speaking in her voice provided 1

Dorothy Mermin, “The Damsel, the Knight, and the Victorian Woman Poet.” Victorian Women Poets: A Critical Reader, Ed. Angela Leighton (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 207. 2 Susan Gubar, “Sapphistries.” Re-Reading Sappho: Reception and Transmission. Ed. Ellen Greene, (Los Angeles: U California P, 1996), 202. 3 Gubar, “Sapphistries,” 202.

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nineteenth-century women poets one way of working through the problems of transforming poetry into something they could do. The distancing of the emotional and personal problem makes that problem academic and theoretical rather than immediate, allowing these women to pick up Sappho’s laurel crown and place it upon their own heads and examine her subject-position—one close to their own—but because of the distance, to examine her position almost scientifically. The poems are very emotional, but the emotion present is not the writer’s emotion. And although the nineteenth-century women poets who adopted Sappho as a speaker would have been very aware of their contemporary audience, speaking in Sappho’s voice not only allowed them to utilize her authority and explore her emotions but also to utilize her audience. Sappho’s audience is either not present, as she prepares to leap from the cliff, or a large crowd—and in either case, her audience is long dead and cannot respond to or deny the collaborative efforts of such writers as Michael Field. Throughout the nineteenth century, multiple Sapphos were created, sometimes even by the same author. Early in the century, women poets coopted the image of Sappho at the cliff. Many of the poems portray the last words or last song of Sappho who, having been rejected by Phaon, chooses to die for love rather than live for poetry. The fall, the leap of the woman poet is the unavoidable ending for the Sapphos created by nineteenth-century women poets. In Victorian Sappho, her study of the use of Sapphic figures in Victorian literature, Yopie Prins argues that “women poets rise to authorship only by falling: they survive by repeating the death of Sappho”4. By using Sappho’s fall as a location for working on the problems of female poetic identity, nineteenth-century women poets could—particularly during the early part of the century—hope, in writing Sappho’s leap, to avoid the fall themselves. Even in the most liberating reinterpretations of Sappho, ones which focus on her life rather than her death, she ends her story and gives up her voice by leaping off the cliff into the sea; her suicide provides an occasion for last words which cannot be refuted. In this end, however, it is unclear whose last words are left hanging in the air: the words of Sappho or the words of the woman poet who is writing her. At the end of the nineteenth century Michael Field (Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper) returns once more to the location offered by Sappho. Field’s treatment of Sappho, however, is a far cry from the ones offered by Robinson, Hemans or Landon. In Sappho, Michael Field found the perfect image for looking at female poetic 4

Yopie Prins, Victorian Sappho, (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999), 183.

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identity as it pertained to their own personal situation. The Sappho of Michael Field’s Long Ago (1889), like the Sapphos of Robinson, Hemans and L.E.L., grapples once more with questions of love and fame, and, in the end, leaps off the cliff. Field’s Sappho does so, however, because she chooses to, and not because she cannot live without love. She has had love and fame, has sung both before an audience and alone at the top of the cliff. Unlike the Sapphos of the beginning of the nineteenth century, who offered models of how to die because of the impossibilities for women poets to find social and cultural acceptance, Michael Field’s Sappho is a model of how to live and how to make poetry womanly work. This Sappho re-imagines how to be a successful poet, living to old age and leaping at a moment of her choosing, as well as re-examining the very notion of love. By creating a Sappho who has both fame and love, and by focusing on her life rather than her death, Michael Field continues the work done by earlier poets, extending and reshaping cultural understandings of what poetry was, and what kinds of work were acceptable for woman in Victorian England. Because most of her actual body of work was lost in the seventh century AD, legends and fragments of her poetry were all that survived of Sappho—and those fragments were often deliberately translated inaccurately to reflect heterosexual love and longings. The stories that surrounded Sappho varied wildly, ranging from proper spinster bluestocking to amorous courtesan. Naming a woman as a “Sappho” could be interpreted as a great compliment—part of Sappho’s legend was as a poet and intellect unparalleled in her time—or as an implication of something unsavory, something improper and sexual. The most common version of her story was one in which Sappho, the famous poet and teacher, having been rejected by her beloved Phaon, a local boatsman, leaves the community of women she teaches and lives with, leaping to her death off of the cliffs of Leucadia. During the nineteenth century, both Sappho’s passion for art and her passion for Phaon must have seemed equally transgressive—neither is compatible with the peaceful domestic happiness exalted by cultural convention. The kill-or-cure remedy for hopeless passion must have been appealing to women who had no clearly defined pre-existing territories in which to explore the difficulties of transforming art into something womanly while still fulfilling their cultural obligations to be the “Angel of the House”—the home’s moral center, always modest and proper, domestic, never venturing into the public world which was the domain of men. The legends about Sappho are protean and adaptable, depending on the concerns of the historical moment. At particular times when the role of

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the artist was clichéd into the picture of a suffering, solitary life, punished for the aspirations of vision by the pains of loss or failure. Sappho conveniently fits this mould. At other times, for women especially, the conflict between the calls of art and the comforts of love became the particular tension, and here too Sappho fitted. . . . needing glorious role-models and finding so few—women artists everywhere invoked the name of Sappho.5

During the nineteenth century, changes in social, political, and domestic arenas meant that traditional understandings of gender roles were constantly in flux. As the century progressed, women began to gain more legal rights, access to better education, and more of a say in their own lives; the historical moment occupied by women in the nineteenth century was one of great social and cultural conflict. Part of that conflict came from the ways in which women’s roles as belonging entirely to the private sphere of the family were expanding outward into the public realm. No longer exclusively concerned with hearth and home, domesticity and family, women were beginning to pursue passions and vocations beyond the home. Art was among these passions, and the tension suggested by the story of Sappho’s leap allowed nineteenth-century women poets to begin, at least, to explore the question of why poetic art was not seen as womanly work, and why private domestic happiness and the passionate pursuit of that art were seemingly at such odds. The textual spaces left behind in the fragments of Sappho and in the myth of her leap provided ample room for nineteenth-century women poets to create their own images of her, which was perhaps even more important than finding a true historical reality of Sappho. Margaret Williamson, examining the poetry and times of Sappho in Sappho’s Immortal Daughters, finds the historical “facts” of Sappho’s life open to much interpretation and doubt, and asks the important question: “whose image has most often been inscribed on the blank page [of Sappho’s lost writings and life], hers or that of her readers?”6. Margaret Reynolds touches upon the same issue, claiming that “Sappho is always what we make of her. She may have performed once, but, ever since, others have performed her”7. Writers, both male and female, frequently inscribed their

5

Reynolds, The Sappho Companion, 7-8. Margaret Williamson, Sappho's Immortal Daughters (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995), 5. 7 Margaret Reynolds, The Sappho History (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 10. 6

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own ideas and images upon those of Sappho, which is evident in the ways Sappho changes over the course of the nineteenth century. In the early part of the nineteenth century, the figure of Sappho was frequently portrayed at the moment of her legendary death. This was in part because very few facts about her actual life remained; history merely recorded that there once was a woman named Sappho, and that she lived and wrote poetry on the Greek isle of Lesbos in the sixth century B.C. Since women in the nineteenth century, for the most part, had little or no Greek, it was not her poetry—which existed only as fragments, in any case—but instead the “legends that counted” for the women who adopted Sappho as a subject and, as a result, “a whole chorus of women poets singing ‘Sappho’s Last Song’, on her behalf, grew up in the nineteenth century”8. Sappho was, for many of these poets, a formative influence. Throughout the century she provided a locus for articulating a variety of explorations of female poetic identity. As nineteenth-century women poets wrote Sappho’s last words, they collaborated with the figure that Sappho’s legends provided to try on new ways of being a woman poet, even if they ultimately rejected the versions of poetic identity their poems suggest. At the end of the century, Sappho appears as the narrator of Michael Field’s (Katherine Bradley, 1846-1914, and Edith Cooper, 1862-1913) Long Ago. Michael Field collaborates on multiple levels—in their journals, Bradley and Cooper claimed that they were “closer married”9 than even that most famous of Victorian couples, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. They wrote and published together for decades, collaborating with one another even as they collaborated with Sappho. In Long Ago, Field not only expands culturally constructed ideas of womanly work, but they also reclaim Sappho as a woman who engaged in that work, and one for whom that work was central. The Sappho of Michael Field is at once the ancestress and descendant of all the nineteenth-century women before her. Standing at the cliff, at the cusp of a new century, she makes her own way as an artist and as a woman. For this Sappho, art is complex and important—and primary to the way she understands her position in the world. Art helps her to understand love, but love is in service to that art; when love is gone, art remains—a claim echoed by Michael Field's own description of themselves as "poets and lovers evermore." By the end of the century, Michael Field is able to use Sappho to define a female poetic identity which can have both passion (albeit, in 8 9

Margaret Reynolds, The Sappho Companion, (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 198. Emma Donahue, We Are Michael Field, (New York: Absolute Press, 1998), 43.

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her case, fleetingly) and fame. The Sappho of Michael Field constructs love in a far different way than the Sapphos of earlier poets, enabling her to leap because she has led a fulfilling life, full of poetry and joy, rather than out of a sense of desolation and fear that her life will always lack fulfillment. By the end of the century, however, collaboratively building on the work of the poets who came before them, Michael Field is able to conceive of a way of embracing both love and fame, completely redefining them both in the public world of poetry and the private world of their home. The return to Sappho is due in part to the new translations of her poetry which were being published toward the end of the century. As later editions of her poetry collected more fragments and translate them more accurately, Sappho herself changed; in 1885 H.T. Wharton’s volume became the first to correctly translate pronouns to reflect the homoerotic nature of her poetry. The shift in translation reflects part of a larger cultural shift, one which was allowing women more freedom and greater possibilities in both domestic and public spheres. Wharton’s volume was read and admired by Michael Field and was, in fact, the inspiration for Long Ago. Michael Field, two women who were lovers writing under a male pseudonym, returns to Sappho in part as a reflection of the nature of Bradley and Cooper’s relationship with one another. Katherine Bradley, the elder of the two, was born in 1846, the second daughter of a wealthy and successful tobacco merchant, Charles Bradley, who died of cancer two years after her birth. During her childhood, Katherine was given an excellent education by her Nonconformist mother, Emma, and formed a life-long love of knowledge, writing poetry and plays as a girl. In 1860, her older sister Lissie, then twenty-five, married James Cooper, a businessman who was seventeen years her senior. In 1862, when Katherine was sixteen years old, Lissie gave birth to a daughter, Edith Cooper. The birth of a second daughter three years later left Lissie weak and her mother and sister moved in with the Coopers to help with the children. When Katherine was twenty, her mother was diagnosed with what was becoming the family disease, cancer. After their mother’s death, Katherine continued to live with the Coopers for most of the year; she also traveled and visited friends. Wherever she was, she made certain that she had time for her writing, publishing her first collection of poems, The New Minnesinger, in 1875 under the pseudonym “Arran Leigh,” a nod to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s woman-poet. Katherine began attending university classes at Cambridge College, and corresponded with John Ruskin. His demands of obedience and her independent nature led to a break between the two in 1877, but by this time Katherine no longer

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needed to look outside her immediate circle for companionship and understanding; she had her “comrade,” Edith, to fill that place in her life. Like her aunt, Edith Cooper was an intellectual child, writing poetry by the age of ten. Katherine’s favorite companion from the time she was young, the two were kindred spirits during Edith’s childhood, and seem to have fallen quite naturally into couplehood by around 1878, when Edith was sixteen and Katherine thirty-two. Their relationship was accepted by one and all, and extended from their work—the two began publishing together in 1881—to romance. They kept their work a secret from most of their friends and relatives, publishing their first collaborative effort, a volume of poetry and a play, Bellerophon, under the names “Arran and Isla Leigh.” Their first verse drama was a harbinger of others to come; Bradley and Cooper favored historical subjects, often ancient, as the subjects of their work. Bellerophon was given little critical notice, and for their next volume in 1884, they changed their pseudonym to “Michael Field,” which allowed them to camouflage both their collaboration and, more importantly, their gender. Michael Field’s work was well received and earned good reviews from the critics, including the notice of an aging Robert Browning. Flattered, Bradley and Cooper took Browning into their confidence regarding their true identities. Their trust, however, was misplaced as Browning soon let slip the fact that Michael Field was, in fact, two women. Although the knowledge of their gender and collaboration was something they preferred to hide, Bradley and Cooper continued to publish under the name of Michael Field. Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper began their joint writing career by writing plays, publishing more than two dozen over the course of their collaboration, so it is little wonder that they created a dramatic persona of Sappho for one of their first efforts in poetry. In appropriating the voice of Sappho by translating her fragments and writing their own poems in the spaces between the silences, Michael Field was pushing further in the search for a place from which to speak than the women who had written earlier in the century. Michael Field’s Long Ago is a collection of shorter lyric poems based upon Bradley and Cooper’s own translations of Sappho’s fragments. Like the Sappho of Robinson, Hemans and L.E.L., Michael Field’s Sappho is rejected by Phaon. But unlike in earlier incarnations, this rejection does not signify the end of love, and correspondingly, the end of happiness. Michael Field’s Sappho constructs love in a different way than her predecessors; she is able to find a series of objects of affection, both hetero- and homo-sexual. . Although none of those loves seems to be lasting, rejection by one lover in this context means continuing to live life, and continuing to search for an enduring

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relationship, rather than a leap off the cliff. This new version of Sappho perhaps reflects the collaborative nature both of Michael Field's use of Sappho, and Bradley and Cooper's work together. Long Ago was inspired by H.T. Wharton’s 1885 volume of Sapphic fragments, Sappho: Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings, and a Literal Translation. Field’s volume, however, works in the spaces left open by Sappho’s fragments, building from short fragments in order to create a persona of Sappho, telling her story in a sequence of lyrics. In possession of excellent Greek, Bradley and Cooper could take both the translations provided in Wharton’s volume, and the Greek fragments themselves, and use the fragments to create a poetry based on Sappho the poet rather than Sappho the legend. The homoeroticism of Sappho’s poetry may have triggered their return to Sappho, for they were no longer trying to negotiate male-female relationships in their quest for both love and fame. The very nature of their authorship—two women, living together and claiming to be “closer married” than even such famous Victorian couples as Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, has lent itself to excellent readings of their poetry in a lesbian context and suggests that one of the attractions of creating a dramatic persona in the figure of Sappho was the ways in which she allowed Bradley and Cooper to echo and explore their own relationship. The homoeroticism of the volume is part of what allows Michael Field to consider what it might mean to find both love and artistic fulfillment—in this case in collaboration with the beloved, complicating the ways in which love is defined and understood. But homoerotic love is not the only, or even the primary, subject of Long Ago. Rather, Long Ago is the story of a woman who has loved, lost, lived, and sung, in all her variations. If the Sapphos of Robinson, Hemans and Landon saw love and fame as tragically and mutually exclusive and an end to poetry, the Sappho of Long Ago revels in the material a lover’s rejection provides for a poet. The Sappho who narrates this volume celebrates love, fulfilled and unfulfilled, personal and observed. The volume is full of poems about Sappho’s relationships, including her rejections by Phaon and Atthis, one of the women on Lesbos, and her own rejection of Alcoeus, a younger male poet who is in love with her. These rejections are bittersweet—Sappho celebrates the love felt while mourning its loss. She also sings of her maternal love, both for her daughter, Cleis, and for Erinna and Alcoeus, female poets who come after her. She does not stop with her own life and loves, however; Sappho sings to brides and bridegrooms, to her maidens, and to the world around her. She tells stories of romantic love and loss, of friendship, and maternal love: the

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stories of Adonis, Tithonus, Apollo and Leda, and Leto and Niobe— celebrating both love she has experienced and love she has observed. To read this volume as evidence of Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper’s romantic relationship is tempting, but to do so oversimplifies both the complexities of their relationship as well as the persona of Sappho created in this volume. If, in reading this sequence, we focus on the homoeroticism and exclude any other type of love, we miss the complexity of Field’s collaboration. This new more fluid and complex definition of love allows the poet rethink what is important and central to her. Glossing over any manifestation of love other than homoerotic glosses over the fact that heterosexual love—or any one specific idea of love—while important, is no longer central to the poet’s life. The poems in the volume celebrate certainly celebrate homosexual erotic love. They also celebrate heterosexual erotic love. And they celebrate maternal love, domestic love, and the love of two friends for one another. They celebrate love in the moments of its existence, and in its sometimes-bitter aftermath. The story told in Long Ago is a story not only of lesbian love, but the story of a woman who has had a variety of experiences, both good and bad. It is, above all, the celebration of a poet who can translate emotion into words. And it is a story told by two women who loved one another, who love others, who were family, and scholars, and travelers, and as well as many other things to the world and to one another. As a result, Long Ago offers an important shift in the way love is constructed—love, in this volume, is more fluid, erotic, and complex than it has been in any of the poems written by the women poets who precede Bradley and Cooper. In the preface of Long Ago, Michael Field says that “I have turned to the one woman who has dared to speak unfalteringly of the fearful mastery of love” (Field, Preface). The volume, in their own words, “involves the blissful apprehension of an ideal” (Field, Preface). The fragments they choose tended to be smaller fragments, or pieces of longer ones. Yopie Prins argues that they do so deliberately, because the brackets and ellipses within each fragment, the empty blanks around the fragment, the discontinuities from one fragment to the next, are all openings for Bradley and Cooper to write poetry that is implicitly if not explicitly lesbian. For this reason they prefer to imitate the shorter fragments, while avoiding the narrative context of Sappho’s longer texts . . . . the more fragmentary texts, riddled with gaps, enable Bradley and Cooper to locate their own lyrics in a figurative gap, an open space out of which the possibility of lesbian writing emerges. Literally and figuratively, their Sapphic lyrics are located in the spaces between the Sapphic fragments—the lacunae in Wharton’s text—in order to open a

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textual field that Bradley and Cooper may enter together as Michael Field.10

The blank page of Sappho becomes, once again, a place in which Victorian women poets can find space for their own poetic musings and puzzlings. The open spaces and gaps in Sappho’s original text allowed Michael Field the room in which to vocalize their own experiences as women poets. Field uses these spaces as a location for working on the question of poetic identity, both specifically their own as well as nineteenth-century cultural understandings female poetic identity more generally. This more general sense of what it means to be a woman and a poet is extremely important, and to read Long Ago exclusively, or even predominantly, as a volume of lesbian poetry pushes us into reading individual poems of sexuality, rather than reading the sequence as a whole. Reading the volume as a whole allows us to read Long Ago as the exploration of what it means to be a poet first (who happens to be a woman) and then a lover (who happens to have both hetro- and homosexual lovers) by authors who have declared the precedence that poet takes over lover in taking hands and swearing to be “poets and lovers evermore” (“It was deep April,” l. 6). The sequence of poems—seventy in all, including the invocation to the Muses at the beginning and the address to Apollo at the end (neither of which are numbered), narrate the life of Sappho. This Sappho, unlike the Sapphos created by poets such as Robinson, Hemans, L.E.L., and Rossetti, is a less problematic and more reliable ancestress. She is rejected by Phaon, and although unhappy because of that rejection, does not kill herself. In the choice between accepting or rejecting her gift, this Sappho accepts—and succeeds admirably. Throughout much of the volume, she is a woman speaking to women, and a poet speaking to poets. This is both a source of joy and sorrow, for even though her poetry is powerful, and she is highly praised, she is not always understood. In poem twenty, for example, Sappho addresses her women, and sings to them of the pain of love. The women do not understand her sorrow, however, and for Sappho—poet first and lover second—this is the worse pain: I sang to my women gathered round; Forth from my own heart-spring Welled out of passion; of the pain I sang if the beloved in vain I sighed for—when 10

Prins, Victorian Sappho, 102.

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Chapter Five They stood untouched, as at the sound Of unfamiliar things, Oh, then my heart turned cold, and then I dropt my wings. (ll. 1-9)

The poet’s function is to communicate emotion; failure to do so is more painful than the rejection of which she sings. The speaker pleads with Apollo for the power to “free / The senseless world of apathy” (ll. 1213), and tells him that when In poet’s strain no joy is found, His call no answer brings, Oh, then my heart turns cold, and then I drop my wings (ll. 14-18).

In the construction of poetic identity offered in Long Ago, the poet’s song is likened to flight. When a poem succeeds, the poet soars; she only “drops her wings” and leaps when her song fails. This Sappho’s leap off the cliff will indicate an end to her poetry, rather than an end determined by the rejection of a lover. Although the Sappho of Long Ago does leap at the end of the volume, she does so out of a sense that her time is done, and that she has said all she wants to say. Unlike the Sappho’s created by earlier poets, Michael Field’s Sappho leaps at the end of her life. She leaps, not because she has been rejected by Phaon, or because she is unable to continue without finding love; she leaps because she has lived her life, fulfilling her destiny. She leaps in a moment of her own choosing, and for her own reasons—not because she cannot find happiness in her life. Much of the volume consists of poems written by a woman looking back on her youth; less than a third of the way through the sequence, this Sappho is already old— in poem twenty-two, the narrator tells us: “I am growing old” (l. 2). Unlike the youthful Sapphos created by earlier poets, the Sappho of Long Ago is in a position to look back on her life, because she has chosen to live for poetry and art, rather than dying for love. The retrospective offered in Long Ago provides her authors, as well as to other women poets who read her, a model of how to be a successful woman poet. As the sequence draws to an end, Michael Field’s Sappho turns more and more to classical mythology, offering poems about Leto and Niobe; the muse Clio; the Graces; Selene, Leda; Aphrodite, asking for love; and to Apollo, asking for inspiration. In poem twenty-four, Sappho addresses Aphrodite, demanding “Why should I praise thee?” (l. 1) when Aphrodite has not granted her Phaon’s heart—or anyone else’s, for that matter.

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Sappho argues that she has fulfilled her part—using her poetry to “crown [Aphrodite] with my lays” (l. 8) even though Aphrodite has used her powers to deny Sappho the love she longs for. The theme of denied love—sometimes addressed to Aphrodite, sometimes addressed directly to Phaon, and sometimes addressed to a larger audience—is repeated throughout the sequence. At no point, however, does this Sappho suggest that death will provide her with an acceptable solution; instead, she suggests that the pains of love are a necessary part of any life, especially the life of the artist. Much of her poetry draws on this pain as a source of inspiration. In a poem addressed to the Dawn, Sappho tries to educate both the goddess of the Dawn, Aurora, and the goddess of Love, Aphrodite, on the joys of mortality: Sweet things of a mortal’s lot Are these: to win the rapture and to lose; To learn the morrow brings not back to-day; To bind the cup with roses while we may, To drink, or die athirst if we refuse (XXXVII, ll. 8-12)

Loss, according to Sappho, who has suffered much, is a part of the joy of being mortal—without loss, we do not know what we have, or what we have had. The Sappho who embraces loss as part of the “sweet things” of life is not the same woman who stood at the cliff in Felicia Hemans’ poetry. Field’s version is a revised version of Sappho, reclaiming her as a real example of how to make poetry into important and meaningful work. Later in the sequence, Sappho claims that “Death is an evil” (XLI, l. 1), for “had it been a boon, / Ah, then how soon / Would the Immortals die!” (XLI, ll. 1-3). This Sappho does not leap because she has been rejected; death is an easy way out but not a very profitable one. This way of thinking about death and the leap suggests that the earlier construction of Sappho created by Michael Field’s predecessors, which focused more on love than art, was an unsatisfactory one. Rather than singing of rejected love, and feeling it so deeply she cannot go on, the narrator of Long Ago uses her emotions—all of them, including the pain of rejection—as a source of poetic inspiration. Her poetic vocation, rather than her rejected love, is central to her way of constructing her identity. In fact, she tells us, at the end of her life she is finally loved the way she wanted to be when she was young. Her lover is younger than she, a seventh-century Greek lyric poet from Mytilene named Alcaeus. Alcaeus’ love is not returned by Sappho, which causes her some heartache, since she too has felt the pain of having her love rejected. She says to him:

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Chapter Five Thine elder that I am, thou must not cling To me, nor mournful for my love entreat: And yet, Alcaeus, as the sudden spring Is love, yea, and to veiled Demetia sweet. Sweeter than tone of harp, more gold than gold Is thy young voice to me; yet, ah the pain To learn I am beloved now I am old, Who, in my youth, loved, as thou must, in vain. (XXX, ll. 1-8)

Sappho rejects him as gently as she can, knowing that poets feel rejection deeply. Sappho is even pained to have to reject his love and that she cannot return it. Love is often her theme, and she feels the joy and sorrow of it as a poet. In the poem following her rejection of Alcaeus, Sappho says that Nay, I have no experience of ill; Within my heart there is no drop of gall; I joy and weep, and never of my will On boy or maiden let a shadow fall. No wrongs I nurse, no injury requite, Though unbeloved, lovers are all my theme (XXXI, ll. 1-6).

The narrator of this volume is content to have had and lost love, to be a poet, and to sing for her audience. In many of the poems, Michael Field’s Sappho specifically discusses her vocation as poet. In one of the most-often anthologized poems of the volume, numbered thirty-four, Sappho recounts her experience in singing before a crowd, a heady experience which makes her feel both her own and the crowd’s power. The poem, quoted in full below, offers insight into both the joy and the dangers of being a poet: “Sing to us, Sappho!” cried the crowd, And to my lyre I sprang; Apollo seized me, and aloud Tumultuous I sang. I did not think of who would hear; I knew not there were men who jeer; Nor dreamed I there were mortals born To make the poet’s heart forlorn. There is a gift the crowd can bring, A rapture, a content; Pierian roses scarcely fling

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So ravishing a scent As that with which the air is stirred When hearts of heavenly things have heard— Sigh and let forth the odour steal Of that which in themselves they feel. But now no subtle incense rose; I heard a hostile sound And looked—oh, scornfuller than those ‘Mong men I ne’er have found. I paused: the whistling air was stilled; Then through my chords the godhead thrilled, And the quelled creatures knew their kind Ephemeral through foolish mind. They saw their ghosts in Hades’ grove A dismal, flitting band; They felt they were shut out from love And honour in their land; For never in the Muses’ strain Of them memorial would remain; And spell-bound they received the curse Of a great King’s derided verse.

Although the crowd asks her to sing for them, their response to her song is hostile and scornful; the reasons for this hostility are unknown. Leaping to her feet and taking up her lyre, Sappho is seized by Apollo; poetry is once again construed as a gift from the gods. She sings, and as she sings she does “not think of who would hear,” because she is caught up in the moment and in the song. The response of the crowd is puzzling, giving Sappho pause, because she knows that when the crowd appreciates her song, they in turn give her a feeling of rapturous content. In contemplating the audience’s feelings, Sappho realizes that they do not understand her song: “they were shut out from love / And honour” and “never . . . / Of them memorial would remain” (XXXIV, ll. 27-28; 30-31). Perhaps the response of this crowd was similar to the response that many Victorian women poets, Michael Field among them, must have felt as they offered their own poetry up to be judged. Creating because they had to, the response of the crowd—which, in this case, is made up mostly of men—is hostile and derisive, out of both a lack of understanding and a lack of desire to understand. For Sappho, as for her modern counterparts, poetry is a vocation that cannot be denied. Content with being chosen by Apollo, the poet does not stop to consider the response to her poetry. When the response is negative, however, it makes “the poet’s heart

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forlorn” (l. 8). Here, as in many of the poems of Long Ago, the greatest pain the poet can suffer is the inability to share with her audience her emotions. In an effort to detail a poetic identity, the poems of Long Ago often return to the theme of what a poet does. In poem forty-six, Sappho addresses herself, saying she must “‘Faint not’—the poet must dare all; / Me no experience shall appal” (ll. 21-2). It is the poet’s responsibility to be strong of heart, daring and risking everything—leaping off the cliff because of a man’s, or a woman’s, rejection, would be a rejection of this vocation. As she has grown older, though, she has begun to step back, and, in the next poem, a bridal hymn, Sappho takes a solitary place beyond the crowd: “Sappho, with solitary eyes, afar / Will watch the rising of eve’s fairest star” (XLVII, ll. 35-6). In poem sixty-one, Sappho tells the story of Apollo’s seduction of a mortal, strengthening her claim that Apollo binds in fetters dire Those for whom he knows desire; Mortal loves or poets—all He must dominate, enthrall By the rapture of his sway (ll. 43-7)

Apollo, the god of poetry, dominates and enthralls his chosen; having been chosen, there is nothing Sappho can do to avoid her fate. Apollo’s sway is rapturous, she tells us, but binding nonetheless, and a poet, male or female, cannot reject Apollo’s gift. In poem sixty-two, “My daughter, when I come to die,” Sappho addresses her daughter and tells Cleis not to mourn her coming death but to celebrate the life that her mother has lived, knowing that as Sappho dies Apollo will be waiting for her, making her daughter’s “grief and wailing breath a sin” (l. 6). Sappho tells Cleis, her daughter, that it is joy that makes the heart Grow lyrical, and joy has part In each regret and pang Avowed in noble verse; Of love, the bitter-sweet, I sang Because I owned a glory in its curse. (ll. 13-18)

Poetry is bitter, but it is also sweet. The difficulties that Sappho faces as Apollo’s chosen are hard, but the results are glorious and she would not alter her path. Of her own death, Sappho says to Cleis

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My child, I give the grave small thought, For I have sung and loved, and nought Can make the years obscure In which I drew warm breath; My dark-leaved laurels will endure, And I shall walk in grandeur to my death. (ll. 37-42)

The poet finds joy in singing about the happiness of love, as well as about the pain and sorrow it can bring. Even as she faces her death, Sappho reaffirms her decision to give herself up to her vocation. In the poem immediately following the one addressed to her daughter, “Grow vocal to me, O my shell divine!,” Sappho asks Apollo, once more, for inspiration. She then turns back to thoughts of Phaon, and poems sixty-four, sixty-five, sixty-six, and sixty-eight name Phaon specifically. The last poem in the sequence, which is not numbered, is Michael Field’s version of Sappho’s “last words.” As Angela Leighton has argued, the Victorian woman poet’s interpretation of Sappho “reinforced the conclusions of the Sappho-Corinne myth: ‘the fruits of a successful literary career for a woman’ are, ultimately, death. . . . The problem of being a woman poet, rather than of just writing about her, is thus handed down, riddled with cautions and contradictions, to the poets of the future”11. Unlike the earliest nineteenth century revisions of the myth, particularly those constructed by Hemans and L.E.L., in the hands of Michael Field the Sappho myth no longer teaches women poets that “Woman’s creative success leads to moral and domestic disaster12. Instead, Field revises the existing Sappho, reclaiming her as an ancestress who offers a way of creating poetry, on her own terms. Although eventually she, like all Sapphos, must leap—some elements of this story are preordained—Field’s Sappho does so only after she has left a full body of work and a vibrant example for her literary daughters to follow. In Long Ago’s version of Sappho’s suicide note, quoted below in full, she addresses Apollo, saying O free me, for I take the leap, Apollo, from thy snowy steep! Song did’st though give me, and there fell O’er Hellas an enchanter’s spell; I heard young lovers catch the strain: For me there is the hoary main; 11

Angela Leighton, Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart, (Charlottesville: UP Virginia, 1992), 57. 12 Leighton, Victorian Women Poets, 57.

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This poem alludes to her rejection by Phaon and other beloveds—in a future life, if she must have one, she wants to be a “dumb sea-bird with breast love-free”—but does not dwell on the unhappiness she has felt in her own life. Instead, Michael Field’s Sappho focuses on her life as a poet and as Apollo’s own. In the end, she leaps not because Phaon or anyone else has rejected her, but because she chooses to do so. Tired and lacking the words to express that which “finds not in lyric cry release,” Sappho asks Apollo to free her not from Phaon’s words of rejection, but from her own words and her duty to those words. The leap, as everywhere else, is inevitable—none may forgo it—not because it is a way of escaping rejection, but because it is the best ending to Sappho’s story. Like the women poets who will come after her, Sappho’s story works to find a way to have both love and fame by transforming the way those categories are understood. Although she is unable to find a lasting love, Michael Field’s Sappho does find love and happiness, albeit fleeting. When love turns to pain, Sappho uses her emotions as a source for her poetry which is, in turn, a source of true and lasting happiness. The narrator of Long Ago chooses to be a poet above all else, and as such finds herself often in the position of observer rather than participant, and is faced with the hostility of the crowds who do not understand her as well as the praise and laurels of those who do. What she leaves us with, at the end of the volume, is the sense that, no matter how difficult her life has been, she would not have changed it. Although her ability to have both love and fame is not an entirely satisfactory one, it does nevertheless find a way to mediate between the two. At the cliff, Sappho claims to have fulfilled her

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destiny, and, as the volume she leaves us with shows, she has lived her life to the end. Unable to avoid the leap, she makes it on her terms, rather than an anyone else’s. The leap comes when Sappho is ready for it, and because she is ready for it, as a release from one life into another. If Apollo has granted her wish, and made her a “dumb sea-bird” in her next life, perhaps in the lives which followed she has been a poet again. Perhaps even in the nineteenth century. The questions that surrounded poetic identity, for women in the nineteenth century, were a constant presence in their art and in their lives. Existing cultural and social roles for women did not allow for the possibility that poetry could an avenue of self-fulfillment. In the poems examined above, these writers offer social, political, and cultural critiques that attempt to transform the aesthetic understandings of their time period, making poetry into important, womanly, and self-fulfilling work. Sappho, with all her cautions and contradictions, was the obvious place to begin their search for new ways of creating acceptable definition of female poetic identity. Because identity can be “something imaginatively, generously, and experimentally dispersed and diffuse, reachable through writing and reading” (Flint 158), in collaboration with one another, and with Sappho herself, Michael Field could use Sappho to her own ends, finding new ways of constructing love, fame, and the repose the leap offers while exploring an individual as well as collective idea of female poetic identity. The poems of Long Ago focus on a range of individual concerns, but taken as a collective, they mark an important part of a conversation which would result in a change in the way society understood aesthetics.

Works Cited Blain, Virginia. “Women Poets and the Challenge of Genre.” Women and Literature in Britain 1800-1900. Ed. Joanne Shattock. New York: Cambridge UP, 2001. 162-188. Field, Michael. Long Ago. London: George Bell and Company, 1889. —. Underneath the Bow. London: George Bell and Company, 1893. Gubar, Susan. “Sapphistries.” Re-Reading Sappho: Reception and Transmission. Ed. Ellen Greene. Los Angeles: U California P, 1996. 199-217. Mermin, Dorothy. “The Damsel, the Knight, and the Victorian Woman Poet.” Victorian Women Poets: A Critical Reader. Ed. Angela Leighton. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996.

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Leighton, Angela. Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart. Charlottesville: UP Virginia, 1992. Prins, Yopie. Victorian Sappho. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999. Reynolds, Margaret. The Sappho Companion. New York: Palgrave, 2000. —. The Sappho History. New York: Palgrave, 2003. Williamson, Margaret. Sappho's Immortal Daughters. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995.

CHAPTER SIX "THAT IDYL OF THE JUNE, THAT GIRLS' GOSPEL": ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS AND BROWNING'S AURORA LEIGH BECKY WINGARD LEWIS

American women writers in the nineteenth century were expected to champion the conservative "Cult of True Womanhood" philosophy in supporting women's responsibilities and duties to the domestic sphere in their writing. But an alternative route was suggested by the British writer Elizabeth Barrett Browning in her verse novel Aurora Leigh (1856). Browning's poem and hero provided a model in its double vision, in its celebration of female experience, and in its emphasis on the woman's search for creative work elsewhere than in the realm of domesticity. She created a woman's hero, a flesh and blood woman who fulfilled a vision of a woman's right to self-realization, vocational fulfillment, and achievement—a woman who could earn her own living by professional writing. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic (1984) assert that Aurora Leigh provided an important apostate text for Emily Dickinson in its depiction of a strong woman character who pursues her ambition outside the domestic sphere. Dickinson marked lines in her copy of Aurora Leigh, hung Browning’s portrait on her wall, and responded to Browning in her own poetry. 1 But Dickinson was not the only young woman to be awakened to a sense of existence and purpose in life by Aurora Leigh. Browning's poem also served as that important "girl gospel" for another American writer— Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. She records in her autobiography Chapters from a Life that she first read the poem in 1860 (Phelps was sixteen; Browning 1

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 669-561, 647.

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was 56) when the "June lilies, yellow and sweet, lighted their soft lamps."2 Phelps explains, There may be greater poems in our language than "Aurora Leigh," but it was many years before it was possible for me to suppose it; and none that ever saw the hospitality of fame could have done for that girl what that poem did at that time. I had never had a good memory—but I think I could have repeated a large portion of it; and know that I often stood the test of haphazard examinations on the poem from half-scoffing friends, sometimes of the masculine persuasion. Each to his own; and what Shakespeare or the Latin Fathers might have done for some other impressionable girl, Mrs. Browning—forever bless her strong and gentle name!—did for me. I owe to her, distinctly, the first visible aspiration (ambition is too low a word) to do some honest, hard work of my own in the World Beautiful, and for it. 3

But Phelps had inherited another "truth" about a woman's search for fulfillment in creative work from the example of her own mother whom she recognized as an "unusual woman [who] achieved the difficult reconciliation between genius and domestic life."4 Phelps's memories of her mother describe this dual role, Now she sits correcting proof-sheets, and now she is painting apostles for the baby's first Bible lesson. Now she is writing her new book, and now she is dyeing things canary-yellow in the white-oak dye—for the professor's salary is small.... Now she is a popular writer, incredulous of her first success, with her future flashing before her; and now she is a tired, tender mother, crooning to a sick child, while the MS. lies unprinted on the table, and the publishers are wishing their professor's wife were a free woman, childless and solitary, able to send copy as fast as it is wanted. The struggle killed her, but she fought till she fell.5

Thus, the idea that a dual career for a woman could be life threatening must have plagued Phelps. So much that she felt a natural distrust of marriage for a woman. A growing-up legend about Phelps pictures her with a friend holding a thimble in one hand and a paint brush in the other

2

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Chapters from a Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1896). 65. Phelps, Chapters, 65-66. 4 Phelps, Chapters, 12. 5 Phelps, Chapters, 14-15. 3

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and saying, "It is a choice between the two."6 Phelps may have felt the same distrust and sellout that modern feminists have felt when Aurora marries Romney and a "happily ever after" fairy tale ending is intimated. In 1877, Phelps wrote her own version of Aurora Leigh in The Story of Avis, using the novel form, employing American realism, and revising Browning's fairy tale ending by depicting the failure of a woman who tries to achieve both domestic and artistic success. In some ways, Phelps stays very close to Browning's text, but in other ways she departs drastically and refutes Browning's idea that a woman can have both career and marriage. One important difference is that Phelps's hero Avis Dobell marries Phillip Ostrander before she establishes herself as an artist. Aurora, however, never diverts from her career plans, standing up to Romney's proposals twice. She does not marry until she is an established writer. While Browning presents Aurora as a singular and single woman who becomes a creative artist first, and then marries, Phelps wants to illustrate realistically what can happen to prevent women from creative work. Phelps exploits and exposes the gaps in Aurora Leigh to demonstrate the unnurturing environment marriage holds for women. Threads of intertextuality run throughout the two works. Both set up a dichotomy between female/domestic work and masculine/artistic work; and both attack a traditional image of womanhood, female selfabnegation, or the "religion of domesticity."7 In the poem and the novel, aunts and sisters of the fathers of the two orphaned heroes, stand in for the mothers, fiercely presiding over and passing on the rituals, traditions, and responsibilities of the domestic sphere. The depictions of these women as they push their orphaned nieces into the limitations of domesticity are rich, showing ludicrous, emotionally crippled, and obsessive women. Aurora's aunt was so attached to her brother that she held a fierce hatred for Aurora's mother. Avis'\ aunt considered her own talent and love for botany only a "selfish pleasure."8 In Aurora Leigh, the confining domestic sphere is personified in Aurora's first image of her aunt, Her somewhat narrow forehead braided tight 6

Elizabeth T. Spring, “Elizabeth Stuart Phelps,” in Our Famous Women (Freeport: Books for Libraries, 1975), 566. 7 Jane P. Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 165-72. 8 Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Story of Avis, ed. Carol Farley Kessler (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 114. Page numbers cited parenthetically hereafter.

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The aunt's countenance reflects the limited options for women in the tightly constrained domestic world. It is as if the aunt's hairstyle has squeezed out all imagination and fruition. Aurora describes her aunt's life as "A sort of cage-bird life,/ Accounting that to leap from perch to perch/ Was act and joy enough for any bird" (I:304-05). Avis's Aunt Chloe also has that "sense of superior personal sacrifice" (15). She has been "summoned to that most difficult of human tasks, the training of another woman's child" (26). At one point, Avis asks her aunt if she ever wanted to be anything other than a wife, Is there nothing in all the world that you,—a woman of overflowing energy and individuality, and organizing power,—able to carry a Christian commission or a national commissary on your shoulders,—is there nothing that you ever wanted to be? (114)

Of course, those kind of desires constitute "strange thoughts and wishing impossible things," a heresy for Aunt Chloe (114). These Cerberus-like watchguards of the domestic sphere are superb engineers of curriculum. Aurora describes herself as a "meek and manageable child" (I.372) when at sixteen she came to her aunt's home. Changes began immediately. The aunt braided her curls "because she liked smooth-ordered hair" (I.372). The aunt believed that English women were "models to the universe"(I.444), so Aurora was forced to forsake Italian, her mother tongue, for English. The aunt liked piety in a woman so Aurora learned "the collects and the catechism,/ the Creeds...The Articles, the Tracts against the times" (I.392-94). The aunt liked "accomplishments in girls" so Aurora learned to spin glass, stuff birds, and model flowers in wax (I.425). The aunt liked "a woman to be womanly" so Aurora (I. 443), read a score of books on womanhood To prove, if women do not think at all, They may teach thinking (to a maiden-aunt Or else the author)—books that boldly assert Their right of comprehending husband’s talk When not too deep, and even of answering 9

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, ed. Margaret Reynolds (New York: Norton, 1996). Book I, Lines 272-76. Book and line numbers cited parenthetically hereafter.

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With pretty "may it please you," or "so it is"— (I. 427-433)

Aurora's education, primarily decorative, was masterminded for the purpose of getting her married. As an heiress, she would have servants who would take care of any heavy housework. But, Avis was not an heiress and Aunt Chloe, the consummate homemaker, offered a more practical New England education based on Aunt Chloe's own accomplishments. She had "high ideals in cupcakes" and made excellent Graham bread and lemon cream; she understood the varying nuances of the different materials suitable for towels and sheets; she appreciated the value of money and practiced the most frugal economies, such as finding her garden gown at a bankrupt sale in order to save pennies needed to buy a religious motto for the Soldier's Hospital; she was an expert in the question of wet or dry heat for an attack of pain; and she knew the appropriate color for doylies so they wouldn't fade or be easily stained by huckleberries (26). These lessons and other Mrs. Beeton homilies about housewifery spew forth from Aunt Chloe. And, like Aurora's aunt, she is aware that the "true woman" needed to be silent, like Avis's sphinx, and advises Avis against her art, "It is always a pity for a woman to become dependent upon any excitement outside of the sphere to which she must, of course, in the end, adjust herself"(96). Sewing imagery pervades both Aurora Leigh and The Story of Avis. Gilbert and Gubar have commented on the preponderance of sewing imagery in Victorian novels and suggest that sewing becomes symbolically connected with control and assertion similar to the power of the author as a "spinner of yarns" and "weaver of tales.”10 Phelps uses sewing images as ways for women to affirm and control the domestic sphere. Sewing chemises, cotton flannels, and sheets assumes great importance in the life of both Chloe and Coy, the women closest to Avis. Coy can tactfully avoid having to confront Avis's individuality and true feelings by switching a conversation to bias ruffles, more appropriate for the domestic domain (109). Of course, Avis has little interest in sewing. When Chloe complains to Mr. Dobell about this defect, Avis rails to her father, "I hate, hate, to sew chemises" (28). Avis recognizes and emphasizes that it isn't the work that she hates or is trying to avoid for she reminds him of other jobs, such as raking leaves, that she does quite willingly. Avis later attempts to explain her individuality to Phillip when 10

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 521.

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she explains that she "thrill[s] to paint a picture, and suffer[s] to sew a seam" (71). Helena Mitchie suggests that for feminine heroes sewing depicts "a way of repressing and controlling the self."11 Michie's thesis is represented in Avis's memory of her mother. Avis as a very young child probes her mother about her past life as an actress. The mother calmly sews and answers Avis until Avis questions her former career as an actress, "if you wanted to keep theatres, why didn't you?" (24). At this point, we realize the mother has been sewing while talking with Avis and now "with some signs of agitation, laid aside her sewing, and drew her little daughter upon her lap" (24). Then, the mother explains that she gave up the theater to get married. She puts Avis down, “then impulsively recalled, snatched, kissed, and cried over with a gush of incoherent words and scalding tears” (24). Phelps uses the sewing image to portray the mother's repression of what she gave up for marriage. When Avis confronts her directly, she can no longer conceal her desire for creative and fulfilling work. Likewise, Aurora connects women's labor with sewing, The works of women are symbolical, We sew, sew, prick our fingers, dull our sight, Producing what? A pair of slippers, sir, To put on when you're weary.... (I.455-58)

Sewing imagery becomes an indictment of women's work as trivial, wasteful, and fatal to creativity in both Aurora Leigh and The Story of Avis. Phelps and Browning deliberately oppose the work of sewing with masculine images of work, such as reading and walking, for their heroes. Both Aurora and Avis escape the clutches of their aunts' domestic education to read. Avis reads the blue and gold version of Aurora Leigh, "that idyl of the June, that girls' gospel" in the boughs of the apple tree (31). And, Aurora writes of her reading away from her aunt's eyes, Books, books, books! I had found the secret of a garret-room Piled high with cases in my father's name. (I.833-35) 11

Helena Michie, The Flesh Made Word: Female Figures and Women’s Bodies ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 41. Sewing becomes more complicated in Aurora Leigh in the subplot of Marian Earle. For her, sewing represents one of the few respectable ways in which a lower class woman can earn a living in the nineteenth century. However, sewing also carries the tainted linking of seamstress and prostitute.

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Both Aurora and Avis exhibit boylike behavior as girls. Avis climbs "unladylike" to the highest branch of the tallest appletree (30). Aurora also escapes her aunt's vigilant training to take vigorous early morning walks, It seemed, next, worth while To dodge the sharp sword set against my life; To slip down stairs through all the sleepy house, ...and escape As a soul from the body, out of doors, Glide through the shrubberies, drop into the lane, And wander on the hills an hour or two, Then back again before the house should stir. (I.690-97)

In Aurora's important epiphany scene when she announces her dream to be a poet, Romney links walking to her aspirations when he asserts that the walking will "defile/ The clean white morning dresses" just as "dreaming...Brings headaches" (II.93-96). Aurora counters, I would rather take my part With God's Dead, who afford to walk in white Yet spread His glory, than keep quiet here And gather up my feet from even a step For fear to soil my gown in so much dust. I choose to walk at all risks. (II.101-106)

Phelps's hero walks also. On a very capricious, snowy and windy day in April and without her father's approval, Avis walks along a reef in Harmouth Harbor. Phillip realizes that "there was but one lady in Harmouth who would have taken a walk to the light-house on such a day" (43). In fact, there was "not one woman in one hundred [who] could get across that reef in a blow like this" (43). In helping her cross the reef, Phillip becomes aware of her strength and suppleness, a physicality that belies her delicate appearance. Both heroes insist on women's primary moral and political responsibility to engage in serious work. Browning took to heart Thomas Carlyle's doctrine of work in her depiction of Aurora working and earning her own living. As Cora Kaplan argues, "the description of Aurora as an independent author living and working in London was possibly the most `revolutionary' assertion in the poem."12 Both Aurora and Avis reject the definitions of women's roles and creative limitations on women as artists 12

Cora Kaplan, “Introduction,” in Aurora Leigh and Other Poems (London: Women’s Press, 1978), 36.

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and choose vocations other than housewifery and ones that are in the masculine domain. Whereas in nineteenth-century Britain, versification was part of a woman’s education however it was verse as entertainment for the drawing room— lyrics, ballads, or songs about love and domesticity. More serious poetic forms, such as the sonnet, epic, elegy, which told stories about male heroes, were reserved for men’s domain. Aurora addresses contemporary poetry and asserts that the poet's "sole work is to represent the age" (202). Aurora's verse represents "this live, throbbing age" and is "living art" that "records true life" (203, 221-22). She then asks "What form is best for poems" (223). Her answer is to "Trust the spirit...to make the form...Inward evermore/ To outward" (22425). Aurora chooses to write epic poetry, long a man's province. Likewise, Avis desires to be an artist, not just to depict the domestic decorative paintings of flowers and birds, but as a career long denied women because of the formal training and study abroad that was required. Both heroes have epiphany scenes in which they realize their ambition. In Browning's poem, this very important epiphany takes place on a morning in June. Aurora remembers how she felt, I stood upon the brink of twenty years, And looked before and after, as I stood Woman and artist—either incomplete, Both credulous of completion (II.2-6)

She feels "so young, so strong" and decides to crown herself like Dante (II:12). She eschews the bay and the myrtle "which means chiefly love; and love/ Is something awful which one dare not touch/ So early o'mornings" (I.40-2). Instead she chooses the "headlong ivy," "bold to leap a height/ 'Twas strong to climb" (II.47, 49-50). She crowns herself and feels "like the caryatid, sole/ Of some abolished temple" (II.61-2). Romney appears, disturbs her reverie, and proposes marriage for the next 500 lines of the poem. At one point he indulgently explains that the world needs both the work of women, symbolized by the heart, and the work of men, symbolized by the head. He expands on this idea, Life means, be sure, Both heart and head—both active, both complete, And both in earnest. Men and women make The world, as head and heart make human life. Work man, work woman, since there's work to do In this beleaguered earth, for head and heart. (II.130-36)

And trivializes Aurora's aspirations,

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That book of yours, I have not read a page of; but I toss A rose up—it falls calyx down, you see! The chances are that, being a woman, young And pure, with such a pair of large, calm eyes, You write as well...and ill...upon the whole, As other women. (II.141-47)

He continues by asserting that women can only be doting mothers, and perfect wives, Sublime Madonnas, and enduring saints! We get no Christ from you—and verily We shall not get a poet, in my mind. (II.223-26)

Aurora wisely discerns how patronizing he is and that he does not love her. He, like Jane Eyre's suitor, St. John Rivers, only sees her as a helpmate in his socialistic ambitions to save this "beleaguered earth." She rejects his demeaning offer. Avis's epiphany of announcing her artistic vocation follows closely Aurora's similar moment. It is June; she is sixteen and in her father's apple tree reading Aurora Leigh to "find out what the woman really meant to say who wrote that book" (31).13 When Avis reads Aurora's birthday scene, the line, "The June was in her, with its nightingales" produces Avis's epiphany, her self-realization (32). She reveals her aspiration to be an artist to her father, who responds, "Nonsense, nonsense...I can't have you filling your head with any of these womanish apings of a man's affairs, like a monkey playing tunes on a hand-organ" (33). And, even if it was a "rude irritability not common with him" (33), he, like Romney, treats her aspiration as if it were something to outgrow, an abnormality, "a defect in the laws of nature" (244). When her father trivializes her art as "pretty little copies," Avis can retaliate with Aurora's answer to Romney, "I who love my art would never wish it lower to suit my stature" (34). Browning's powerful text works its magic for Avis. Her father sends her to Florence for her art education. After her training in Europe, she is pursued by Phillip, and like Aurora, she refuses to marry him. The scene contains imagery that evokes 13 Tricia Lootens in her dissertation points out that some critics saw a harm and threat in young women’s reading of Aurora Leigh and this may have played a part in the silencing of this text at the turn of the century. Elizabeth Barrett Browning: The Poet as Heroine of Literary Influence (Dissertation University of Indiana, 1988).

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Romney's proposal scene—it is June and the couple talk in front of the conventional courtship wall surrounded by spring flowers and buzzing bees, the "sacred space" for nineteenth-century romantic paintings.14 Phillip speaks with the same kind of authority about love and the world as Romney does. However, Avis does not assert the same confidence as Aurora. She has just completed a portrait of Phillip and is experiencing the let-down and "self-distrust" that comes with the "solitary struggle" of creation (57). Couture, her teacher and mentor, is not there to assure her. Also, Avis does not possess Aurora's powerful confidence in her voice. Avis's emblem is the Sphinx because the Sphinx is dumb and can't talk. Avis is described, when turning Phillip down, like "a great, dumb, protesting goddess" (64). Her "unspoken protest[s]" are interrupted as she struggles to explain the incompatibility of marriage for her (67). On the other hand, Phillip, in the "exquisitely-modulated tones" of a voice admired by all, reminds her that she "dare the loss of what nineteen centuries of womanhood has held as the life of its life, you dare the loss of home and love for—God forbid that I say an unproved but as yet untried power" (46,71-2). Avis does not feel the power and strength of an erect caryatid as Aurora did; rather Avis is worn and lies "prone as a fallen Caryatid" (72). It is Avis's sense of isolation and "solitary struggle" compounded with Phillip’s war injury that eventually causes her to put Phillip's desire for marriage above her own desire not to be married. Kessler contends that Phelps makes clear in The Story of Avis that "lack of emotional supports prevents creative work from emerging. Typically women provide rather than receive such nurture."15 The two people who support Avis's career as an artist, her teacher Couture and Stratford Goupil, who eventually buys her painting of the Sphinx, are not at hand when she needs them. Her aunt and Coy, her closest women supporters, believe in the “natural” domestic order of things; her father has too many everyday problems dealing with his students to be involved in any way with Avis's life also outside his domain; and her mother is dead. Cora Kaplan suggests that at the heart of Browning's poem is her "plea for women to attempt emotional and intellectual autonomy."16 Aurora is aware of the need for this emotional autonomy when she explains,

14 Susan Casteras, Images of Victorian Womanhood in English Art (London: Associated University Press), 36. 15 Carol Farley Kessler, “Introduction,” in Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ The Story of Avis (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992), xiii-xiv. 16 Kaplan, 34.

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This vile woman's way Of trailing garments shall not trip me up: I'll have no traffic with the personal thought In Art's pure temple. Must I work in vain Without the approbation of a man? It cannot be; it shall not. We'll keep our aims sublime, our eyes erect, Although our woman-hands should shake and fail;

And Aurora expresses the loneliness of the woman artist, How dreary 'tis for women to sit still On winter nights by solitary fires And hear the nations praising them far off, Too far! ay, praising our quick sense of love, Our very heart of passionate womanhood, Which could not beat so in the verse without Being present also in the unkissed lips And eyes undried because there's none to ask The reason they grew moist. (V.439-47)

Aurora like Avis, succumbs to her suitor’s proposal after Romney has lost his dream and become blind. A favorite nineteenth century theme, common in poems such as William Wordsworth's "Elegiac Stanzas"(1807) and Alfred Lord Tennyson's In Memoriam, is the idea that suffering humanizes. Nineteenth-century women novelists attempt to portray male characters overcoming sexist ideas or rigid thinking about women's roles by having romantic heroes suffer. Charlotte Bronte's Rochester in Jane Eyre provides an example. Romney's blindness and suffering bring about the humility that broadens his understanding of Aurora as his human equal. Aurora understands Romney's change and realizes that, Art is much, but love is more O Art, my art, thou'rt much, but Love is more! Art symbolizes heaven, but Love is God And makes heaven. I, Aurora, fell from mine I would not be a woman like the rest, A simple woman who believes in love, And owns the right of love because she loves, And, hearing she's beloved, is satisfied With what contents God. (IX. 656-64)

Browning's conventional ending of marriage embodies what Gilbert and Gubar have called the "most reasonable compromise between

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assertion and submission that a sane and worldly woman poet could achieve in the nineteenth century."17 Phillip's war injury brings about marriage for Avis and Phillip. However, for Avis, Phillip's injury does not enable him to see her as an equal. For Avis, the marriage is "like death" in that she loses her creativity.18 She is unable to bring anything to fruition. After Phillip's death, she feels herself to be a "withered thing, spent and rent, wasted by the autocracy of a love as imperious as her own nature, and as deathless as her own soul" (244). The one hope is Wait, "a sturdy lassie with straightforward eyes and a healthy temper of her own" (244). Avis realizes that "it would be easier for her daughter to be alive, and be a woman than it had been for her" (247). Thus, The Story of Avis ends on a hopeful note that Wait will be able to find the self-realization that was denied Avis. Both Aurora Leigh and The Story of Avis engage in a rich feminist discourse that goes on throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth about women who attempt to fulfill their creative potential. Browning wrote, “Elizabeth Barrett Browning writes about the lack of an established female poetic tradition in a letter to Henry Chorley, "I look everywhere for grandmothers and see none. It is not in the filial spirit I am deficient, I do assure you—witness my reverent love of the grandfathers." 19 However, she in Aurora Leigh is responding to texts such as Madame de Stael's Corinne (1807), George Sand's Consuelo (1842-43), Charlotte Bronte's Villette and Jane Eyre.20 Phelps is responding to Aurora Leigh, as well as Sara Payson Willis Parton's Ruth Hall (1855), George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871), Rebecca Harding Davis's Earthen Pitchers (1873-74), and Helen Hunt Jackson's Mercy Philbrick's Choice (1876).21 Both Browning's and Phelps's texts anticipate texts, such as Mary Austin's A Woman of Genius (1912) and Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark (1915). These texts give expression to the ferment over the role of women, a ferment often concealed and devalued because of the patriarchal imperative to support and preserve the dichotomy of the "heart and head," the domestic and political spheres. These bildungsromanes and kuntlesrromanes support even as they deconstruct and reconfigure their "grandmother" texts, build a dissident literary tradition that provides gospels and iconographic models for 17

Gilbert and Gubar, 575. Kessler, xxix. 19 Cited in Glennis Stephenson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Poetry of Love (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, 1989), 4. 20 Kerri McSweeney, “Introduction” in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), xvii-xix. 21 Kessler xviii-xix. 18

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women who refuse to give up creativity and self-realization for the domestic sphere.22 The intertextuality of these texts illustrates women writers influencing, interpreting, and providing authority for a splendid feminine literary tradition.

Works Cited Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, Aurora Leigh, ed. Margaret Reynolds. New York: Norton, 1996. Casteras, Susan, Images of Victorian Womanhood in English Art. London: Associated University Press. Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984. Kaplan, Cora, “Introduction,” in Aurora Leigh and Other Poems. London: Women’s Press, 1978. Kessler, Carol Farley, “Introduction.” In Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ The Story of Avis. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992. Lootens, Tricia, Elizabeth Barrett Browning: The Poet as Heroine of Literary Influence. Dissertation University of Indiana, 1988. McSweeney, Kerri, “Introduction.” In Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Michie, Helena, The Flesh Made Word: Female Figures and Women’s Bodies. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart, Chapters from a Life. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1896. —. The Story of Avis, ed. Carol Farley Kessler. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992. Spring, Elizabeth T., “Elizabeth Stuart Phelps.” In Our Famous Women. Freeport: Books for Libraries, 1975. Stephenson, Glennis, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Poetry of Love. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, 1989. Tompkins, Jane P., Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

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Elizabeth Barrett Browning writes about the lack of an established female poetic tradition in a letter to Henry Chorley, "I look everywhere for grandmothers and see none. It is not in the filial spirit I am deficient, I do assure you—witness my reverent love of the grandfathers."

CHAPTER SEVEN CUBAN FEMININITY AND NATIONAL UNITY IN LOUISA MAY ALCOTT'S MOODS AND ELIZABETH STODDARD'S "EROS AND ANTEROS" NINA BANNETT

Scholarly interest in the concept of the United States as empire has surged since the events of 9/11. In her October 2003 Presidential address to the American Studies Association, Amy Kaplan notes that Guantanamo Bay, currently utilized by the United States military as a prison, “is a location where many narratives about the Americas intersect, about shackeled slaves brought from Africa, the important role of Cuba in U.S. history, and U.S. intervention in the Caribbean and Latin America.”1 Kaplan’s address reminds us that the strained relationship the United States has with present-day communist Cuba stretches back over several centuries. Indeed, it can be argued that the United States’ appropriation of Cuban space today is rooted in the political philosophy of Manifest Destiny, once a centerpiece of nineteenth-century United States’ political rhetoric. In the nineteenth century, discussions of Manifest Destiny were made regularly by male public figures and elected officials whose rhetoric dominated U.S. political life. Jenine Abboushi Dallal defines Manifest Destiny as “a secular version of the chosen people in the promised land.”2 As Dallal’s article makes clear, nineteenth-century writers address Manifest Destiny in more implicit ways than politicians. In her analysis of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s views of aesthetic beauty and territorial 1

Amy Kaplan, “Violent Belonging and the Question of Empire Today: Presidential Address to the American Studies Association October 17, 2003.” American Quarterly 56.1 (2004): 12-13. 2 Jenine Abboushi Dallal, “American Imperialist UnManifest: Emerson’s ‘Inquest’ and Cultural Regeneration” American Literature 73.1 (March 2001): 48-49.

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expansion, she notes that “[a]lthough the interdependence of expansion and culture is a central theme for Emerson, passages in which he directly addresses U.S. expansionism or Manifest Destiny are rare.”3 More recently, Amy S. Greenberg, through her study Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire, has asserted that Manifest Destiny should be looked at as a gendered experience, with complicated, distinct meanings for men and women. Greenberg’s study traces the phenomenon of Manifest Destiny from the 1840s through the 1860s, arguing that “debates over Manifest Destiny also were debates over the meaning of American manhood and womanhood.”4 Nationalism and gender, according to Greenberg, must be examined in tandem when looking at the role of Manifest Destiny both at home and abroad. U.S. women fiction writers like Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) and Elizabeth Stoddard (1823-1902) were even less likely to make overt political statements concerning foreign policy than a male transcendentalist like Emerson. Instead, these women made their political commentary through fictional narratives.5 Through relationships between men and women in their fiction, they reveal the United States’ complicated view of itself in the larger world. Striking similarities abound in depictions of Cuban women in Louisa May Alcott's first adult novel Moods (1864) and Elizabeth Stoddard's short story "Eros and Anteros" (1862). Both of these narratives, written by New England women in the same narrow time frame of the early 1860s, feature love triangles, each consisting of one man and two women, one of whom is Anglo, one Cuban. It is no coincidence that in each case, one of the women is specifically identified as Cuban. In both Alcott’s and Stoddard’s narratives, Cuban women are depicted as overtly sexual and dangerous threats who must be expelled from these narratives as the Anglo women explore their choice of husbands and come to terms with their own womanhood. 3

Ibid, 55. Amy S. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (NY: Cambridge UP, 2005), 14. 5 For a thorough discussion of how criticism on the genre of the political novel has developed, see Sharon Harris’ introduction to the essay collection Redefining the Political Novel: American Women Writers, 1797-1901 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995). In describing the articles in this collection, Harris writes that “[t]hese works [the novels] bring to the forefront debates by women novelists on the nature of political orders (both macroscopically and in their microcosmic representations of family and social structures), the suppression of classes and races that are not part of the dominant culture in American society, and the means by which women’s art forms have been controlled and defined under patriarchy” (xxviii). 4

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Alcott and Stoddard both use the figure of the Cuban woman as an emblem of the contradictory impulses in the United States’ political psyche during the antebellum period. In the 1850s, Cuba was a hot topic, its potential annexation advocated by Presidents Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan. A takeover of Cuba would have tremendous implications for the United States’ increasingly urgent debate over the continuation of slavery within its borders. With approximately 500,000 slaves living in Cuba in the 1850s, Southern states would receive an influx of cheap human capital if annexation went through.6 For others, Northerners in particular, the idea of annexing Cuba was more problematic. In his influential work Walt Whitman’s America, David Reynolds notes that for some Northerners, “acquiring Cuba was widely seen as part of a Southern plot to extend slavery.”7 Annexing Cuba would be a strategic way for Southerners to fulfill the promise of Manifest Destiny. The raging debate over Cuban annexation, with its Southern supporters invoking the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, was one which Alcott and Stoddard, writers who each had a wide and overlapping circle of friends, were clearly cognizant. Both writers depict Cuban femininity as threatening to marital union, suggesting that both see Cuba as an entity which should not be legally joined to the United States of America; both writers use Cuban women as symbols of inappropriate marital choices. Further complicating a reading of Alcott’s and Stoddard’s fiction is the fact that in the early 1860s, when both texts were written, the United States was in the midst of civil war, and the Northern states focused on keeping the existing union intact. While the real danger of Cuban annexation had passed because of the war, the debate over national boundaries was still raging in altered form. With the nation split in two, Alcott’s and Stoddard’s fixation on Cuban women in these texts represents not just a political commentary on Cuban annexation, but, in Alcott’s case, a re-assertion of her own antislavery stance. Travel narratives of the 1850s provide evidence of the symbiotic relationship between the United States and Cuba. Under Spanish rule, Cuba became an important trading partner with the United States,

6 Tim DeForest, “Southern Attempts to Annex Cuba.” America’s Civil War 10.2 (May 1997): 38-45. Academic Search Premier 27 February 2004 . 7 David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography (NY: Knopf, 1995), 137.

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exporting sugar and other goods.8 As a result of the increase in trade, more United States citizens traveled to Cuba, and more of them wrote of their travels for an eager audience back home. Travel narratives about Cuba published in The United States began to peak at mid-century, with 14 published between 1850 and 1859, a number that would not be surpassed until the 1890s.9 These narratives, written by men and women alike, brought the daily aspects of Cuban life into U.S. homes. For example, readers could learn of Cuba’s beneficial health treatments from Nathaniel Parker Willis’s book Health Trip to the Tropics (New York, 1853).10 Readers could also learn of Cuban religious, educational, and social practices through Julia Ward Howe’s wry and witty narrative A Trip to Cuba, printed in serial form in The Atlantic Monthly in 1859, and published in book form the following year. Howe’s account of her stay in Cuba in 1859 helped keep Cuba in the consciousness of U.S. writers like Alcott and Stoddard at a time when the annexation of the island was still a possibility and the civil war within the United States’ geographical boundaries had not yet begun. Both Louisa May Alcott and Elizabeth Stoddard, readers of The Atlantic Monthly, would have been likely to encounter Howe’s serial.11 8

See Louis A Pérez’s fine introduction to Impressions of Cuba in the Nineteenth Century: The Travel Diary of Joseph J. Dimock (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Imprint,1998). Perez notes that “[b]etween 1841 and 1859 the value of Cuban imports from the United States increased from $27.8 million to $ 40. 3 million, while the value of exports to the North grew from $37.4 million to $68. million” (x). 9 See Harold F. Smith, “A Bibliography of American Travellers’ Books about Cuba Published Before 1900” The Americas 22.4 (April 1966): 404-412. A full listing of titles from the 1850s appears on pages 408-409. 10 In “Letter No. 29: Havana & Co.,” Willis addresses the issue of Cuban annexation. He writes: “We are to see, probably, whether it [Cuba] will stand the infusion of the blood which, of all on earth is most unlike it—the restless, hurried, scrambling, undignified-ly successful Yankee, and I hope Cuba will not be over— filibustered, but remain so far Spanish for the next fifty years, as to give a fair chance to the experiment” (280-emphasis original). His assumption that U.S. annexation is imminent also comes across in his remark that ‘[t]he Cuban ladies will be slow to give up the volante for any carriage that may be introduced by the invading Yankee” (284-emphasis original). Willis’ statements point to the presumption many Americans had that, whatever their own opinion was of Cuban annexation, it was an impending event. 11 In fact, both Alcott and Stoddard contributed to the Atlantic Monthly in the early 1860s, along with Julia Ward Howe. For an examination of the role of the Atlantic Monthly in shaping the careers of women writers, see Anne E. Boyd’s “ ‘What! Has she got into the Atlantic’?: Women Writers, the Atlantic Monthly, and the

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Howe’s book, laced with wry observations and humor as she observes the people and sights of Havana and other coastal cities, offers an Anglo woman’s perspective on a nation whose treatment of its women mixed condescension with worship, depending on their social class. In Chapter 4 of A Trip to Cuba, entitled “The Harbor of Havana,” Howe offers her readers her first reaction to seeing upper-class Cuban women. It is evening, after dinner, and Howe and her traveling party are relaxing on the piazza: The volantes dash by, with silver-studded harnesses, and postillions black and booted; within sit the pretty Señoritas, in twos and threes. They are attired mostly in muslins, with bare necks and arms; bonnets they know not, — their heads are dressed with flowers, or with jewelled pins. Their faces are whitened, we know, with powder, but in the distance the effect is pleasing. Their dark eyes are vigilant; they know a lover when they see him. But there is no twilight in these parts, and the curtain of the dark falls upon the scene as suddenly as the screen of the theatre upon the denouement of the tragedy. 12

Howe’s description of these women reveals the complexity of depicting Cuban femininity. Here representing women of the Spanish upper class, later describing black maids, Howe distinguishes between types of femininity. As Luis Mártinez-Fernández points out, nineteenthcentury Cuba was in fact a nation which “was neither fully capitalist nor fully slave-based; it was neither black nor white.”13 Mártinez-Fernández identifies several distinct types of women living in Cuba: the ruling Spanish (referred to as white), the Creole and the black slave. 14 Each group followed a distinct social code. The women of the Spanish ruling Formation of the American Canon” American Studies 39.3 (Fall 1998): 5-36. In addition, Alcott was personally acquainted with Julia Ward Howe, noting several of their meetings in November of 1856 and May 1857 in her journal. Of the latter, Alcott writes,” Father had three talks at W.F. Channing’s. Good company— Emerson, Mrs. Howe and the rest” (Journals, 84). 12 Julia Ward Howe, A Trip to Cuba 1860. (NY: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 38. 13 Luis Mártinez-Fernández, “The ‘Male City’ of Havana: The Coexisting Logics of Colonialism, Slavery, and Patriarchy in Nineteenth-Century Cuba.” Women and the Colonial Gaze. Eds. Tamara L. Hunt and Micheline R. Lessard. (NY: NYU Press, 2002), 104. 14 In A Trip to Cuba, Howe describes the appearance of Creoles in the following manner: “The prevailing color of the Creole is not the clear olive of the Spaniard, nor the white of the Saxon, — it is an indescribable, clouded hue, neither fair nor brown” (230).

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class were kept in a state of forced seclusion and had limited ability to walk freely about the streets, a practice Howe and many other female travelers to Cuba in the mid-nineteenth century found disconcerting and personally prohibitive. Howe’s characterization of these upper-class and Spanish women in their volantes is decidedly theatrical and overtly sexual. Later in A Trip to Cuba, Howe offers her readers a contrasting description when she describes her hotel chambermaid, Rosa, a woman of lower social status: Her voice and smile are particularly sweet, her person tall and well formed-, and her face comely and modest. She is not altogether black, — about mahogany color. I mention her modesty because, so far as I saw, the good-looking ones among the black women have an air of assumption, and almost of impudence, — probably the result of flattery.15

It is clear from this description that Howe categorizes the women in Cuba according to race, and that she makes corresponding assumptions about their beauty. As June E. Hahner has observed, “[f]emale foreign travelers’ observations of Latin American women tended to be based on models of femininity in their own countries.”16 Howe’s remarks bear this out. In a later chapter in A Trip to Cuba, she provides a portrait of black women in Cuba: The women are well-made, and particularly well-poised, standing perfectly straight from top to toe, with no hitch or swing in their gait. Beauty of feature is not so common among them; still, one meets with it here and there. There is a massive sweep in the bust and arms of the women which is very striking. Even in their faces, there is a certain weight of feature and of darkness, which makes its own impression.17

Howe makes it clear that, within each category of Cuban women she describes, she finds a different degree of femininity based on both race and class. An astute observer, Howe, like other visitors to Cuba in the late 1850s, is not only fascinated with the range of Cuban women, but with the political backdrop of the island’s possible annexation by the United States. 15

Howe, A Trip, 119. June Hahner, Introduction. Women Through Women’s Eyes: Latin American Women in Nineteenth-Century Travel Accounts. (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1998), xvii. See pages 169-173 for a list of nineteenth-century female travel accounts of Latin America. 17 Howe, A Trip, 122. 16

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Howe is against it, feeling that “[t]he enslaved population of Cuba and our own South must, under ordinary circumstances, attain in time a condition in which Slavery shall be impossible.” 18 Howe finds the Cuban slave system to be more benevolent, and thus she does not feel that annexing Cuba to the United States would benefit its slaves. “Still,” Howe proclaims, “Americans should feel a pang in acknowledging even in the dark article of slave laws they are surpassed by a nation which they con[d]emn.” In A Trip to Cuba, Julia Ward Howe discusses the linked issues of slavery and annexation, implicitly asserting that such issues had become fused for U. S. citizens who ruminated over the meaning of the acquisition of Cuba.19 Through narratives like Howe’s, Alcott and Stoddard were exposed to Cuban life and to the idea that the United States could define itself against the exotic otherness of Cuba and its women. Louisa May Alcott’s first adult novel Moods was published in late 1864 but was actually begun in August 1860, around the time Howe’s travel book about Cuba was receiving attention. Alcott herself, as Sarah Elbert writes in her introduction to Louisa May Alcott on Race, Sex, and Slavery, “called herself a ‘fanatic’ in the movement for abolition of slavery and racial integration [. . .].”20 In discussing Moods, Elbert connects chapter one of the novel, which is set in Cuba, to Alcott’s moral struggle against slavery, asserting that the novel “romantically racializ[es] 18

Ibid, 216, 224. It is worthwhile to compare Julia Ward Howe’s published narrative with Joseph Dimock’s unpublished diary Impressions of Cuba in the Nineteenth Century: The Travel Diary of Joseph J. Dimock. 1859. Ed. Louis A. Pérez. (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Sources Imprint 1998). Dimock, a mercantile agent whose diary was written the same year as Howe’s, also points to the strong pull Cuban annexation still had during this time: “Americans can and do talk here openly of buying Cuba, of annexation and of manifest destiny and are only answered by a shrug of incredulous shoulders”(19,mphasis original). Other passages speak to a rhapsodic belief in the inevitability of acquiring Cuba: “In the hands of an industrious, thrifty and go-ahead population, Cuba would blossom like the rose; now it is a garden growing wild, cultivated here and there in patches, but capable at least of supporting in ease a population of ten times its present number” (85-emphasis original). Dimock would go on to predict that “the whole surface of this garden of the world will burst from bud to a magnificent blossom which will astonish the civilized world” (104). Paradoxically, for Dimock it is the United States who can civilize a less-developed Cuba and also return it to an Edenic paradise. For both Howe and Dimock, Cuban annexation is presented as a political option that must be addressed. 20 Sarah Elbert. Introduction. Louisa May Alcott on Race, Sex, and Slavery. (Boston: Northeastern UP, 1997), ix. 19

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its heroes and heroines and dramatiz[es] the ancient kinship ties between populations, without ever mentioning the words race, amalgamation, or miscegenation.”21 In Moods, Alcott is not just concerned with the general immorality of slavery, but with using the locale of Cuba to enact a specific fantasy of (mis)union rooted in the folly of Cuban annexation, a folly justified by Manifest Destiny. Ostensibly, the doctrine of Manifest Destiny provided political and moral justification for the United States to expand its union in the nineteenth century. An outgrowth of the United States’ desire for territorial expansion, Manifest Destiny was at its peak in the 1840s and 1850s. In his landmark study Manifest Destiny: A Study of Nationalist Expansion in American History, Albert K. Weinberg traces the practical efforts to obtain Cuba and political and social motivations behind them. In doing so, he exposes the rhetoric of sexual conquest that both Alcott and Stoddard resist against in their texts. For example, it was starting in the 1840s, Weinberg argues, that “Americans not only felt the quickening of an expansionist impulse within themselves but observed evidence or promise of growth in all the elements and particularly the territorial phase of national life.”22 Here, Weinberg implicitly links the expansionist impulse with male sexuality. With the Gadsen Purchase of 1853, there seemed to be no limits to what territory the United States might gain. Manifest Destiny relied on “the pervasive currents of a popular Romanticism, and credibility from the dynamic political, social, and economic changes in American life that were spawned by a new spirit of optimism and self-confidence.”23 Or, to put it as Weinberg does, “[d]oing things meant above all to the American of the ‘fifties the exciting sport of extending the national boundaries.”24 The doctrine of Manifest Destiny sustained itself through collective belief as well as political action. There was, as Weinberg, points out, a “general sense of national growth in portraying America as a young giant on the threshold of a manhood which the Old World could not restrain.”25 In the system of metaphor that Weinberg describes, the United States is a young, virile man desirous of 21

Ibid, xxxvi. Albert K. Weinberg, Manifest Destiny: A Study of Nationalist Expansionism in American History (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1963), 193-194, emphasis added. 23 Robert W Johannsen, “The Meaning of Manifest Destiny.” Manifest Destiny and Empire: American Antebellum Expansionism. Eds. Sam W. Haynes and Christopher Morris. (Arlington, TX: Texas A and M UP, 1997), 13. 24 Weinberg, Manifest Destiny, 203. 25 Ibid, 194. 22

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significant conquests. In Weinberg’s dichotomy of conquest, Cuba becomes personified as the desirable, highly sexualized woman who will not be able to resist a male on the brink of possessing her. According to the principles of Manifest Destiny, Cuban acquisition would not be an unnatural or violent event, but rather a seamless development of biological dimensions. Acquiring Cuba would thus be an outgrowth of biological imperative and natural law. The use of a biological analogy for U.S. expansionism, according to Weinberg, was in full swing in the 1850s. Cuba had it all: close proximity, good trade relations with the United States, and a slave system already in place. While the 1850s saw the peak of U.S. interest in annexing Cuba, the inclination to acquire it actually began forty years earlier. In 1810, President James Madison tried to buy it; in 1819, President John Quincy Adams described the United States’ acquisition of Cuba as “indispensable to the continuance and integrity of Union itself.”26 Early in 1849, when President James Polk commented on the possibility of annexing Cuba, he pronounced himself “decidedly in favor.”27 The presidency of Zachary Taylor was even marred by the attempts of Cuban “filibusters,” such as the Cuban exile Narciso Lopez, to return to Cuba with a military force ready to liberate Cuba from her ruler Spain and turn her over to the United States. As Robert E. May explains, “[f]ilibusters were persons who, lacking either the explicit or implicit consent of their own governments, planned, abetted, or participated in private military invasions or intended invasions of foreign nations or dependencies with which their own countries were at peace” .28 Lopez’s filibustering missions (May 1850 and April 1851) ended in dismal failure with his public execution. The diplomatic coercion of the 1854 Ostend Manifesto, in which the United States tried to force Spain into selling Cuba to the United States, also went nowhere. The annexation of Cuba was more easily achieved as a cultural fantasy than as a political and economic actuality. For example, in his 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman draws upon the fantasy of Cuban annexation in several poems, among them “Our Old Feuillage/Chants Democratic,” in which he catalogues Cuba as a part of the United States: 26

President Adams as quoted in Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny, American Expansion and the Empire of Right (NY: Hill and Wang, 1995), 24. 27 President Polk as quoted in De Forest, “Southern Attempts.” 28 Robert May, “Manifest Destiny’s Filibusters.” Manifest Destiny and Empire: American Antebellum Expansionism Eds. Sam W. Hayes and Christopher Morris. (Arlington, TX: Texas A and M UP, 1997), 148-149.

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America always! Always me joined with you, whoever you are! Always our own feuillage! Always Florida’s green peninsula! Always the priceless delta of Louisiana! Always the cotton-fields of Alabama and Texas! Always California’s golden hills and hollows – and the silver mountains of New Mexico! Always soft-breath’d Cuba! 29

Whitman’s belief in Manifest Destiny comes across even more strongly in his poem “States!”, another poem which appears only in the 1860 edition. In it, Whitman seeks to explain what it is that ties The United States together. In the poem’s first stanza, he asks the states directly, “Were you looking to be held together by the lawyers? By an agreement on a paper? Or by arms?” Later in the poem, Whitman refers to Cuba directly: “To Michigan shall be wafted perfume from Florida,/To the Mannahatta from Cuba or Mexico/Not the perfume of flowers, but sweeter, and wafted beyond death.”30 David Reynolds notes the irony that Whitman’s belief in the annexation of Cuba went against his democratic philosophies.31 Whitman was like so many other writers during the late 1850s and early 1860s, weighing in on the possibility of Cuban annexation that tantalized parts of the nation. Aware of the ongoing debate over Cuban annexation during this time, Louisa May Alcott prominently features an upper-class Cuban woman in the first chapter of the 1864 edition of Moods, her first serious full-length fictional work. It is the Cuban temptress Ottila to whom Adam Warwick, Alcott’s Thoreau-like hero, is engaged. Adam’s promise to Ottila forms the subtext for his ill-fated romance with Sylvia Yule, later Sylvia Moor, wife of Adam’s friend Geoffrey. While Alcott was known to use exotic locales in some of her sensationalist fiction, Moods represented her decision to move beyond the tales that brought in money to feed the Alcott family, and towards legitimate art.32 Why then should Alcott depict a Cuban woman as part of such a project? 29 Leaves of Grass: Fascimile Edition of the 1860 Text. (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1961), 159, lines 1-5. 30 Ibid, 349, 350. 31 Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America, 135. 32 For instance, Alcott’s novel The Inheritance ( 1849) is set in England and her romantic thriller A Long Fatal Love Chase (1866) takes place in France, Italy and Germany. Alcott’s trip abroad in 1865 exposed her to many locales that made their way into her fiction; Part Two of Little Women, Good Wives (1868-1869) is set in Europe as well as in New England. However, Alcott’s own travels were limited before 1865, and Cuba was not among them.

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In fact, Alcott’s first chapter for the 1864 edition, “One Year,” is comprised almost entirely of polemic dialogue between Adam Warwick, Alcott’s Thoreau-inspired hero, and his Cuban fiancée, Ottila. The chapter begins melodramatically: “The room fronted the west, but a black cloud, barred with red, robbed the hour of twilight’s tranquil charm. Shadows haunted it, lurking in corridors like spies set there to watch the man who stood among them mute and motionless as if himself a shadow.” 33 Cuba itself is described as “nothing but a tropical luxuriance of foliage scarcely stirred by the sultry air heavy with odors that seemed to oppress not refresh.” It is against this stifling background that Alcott engages her leading characters in an equally stifling debate over the meaning of romantic promises. “Only a month betrothed and yet so cold and gloomy, Adam,” Ottila pronounces as she and Adam begin their prolonged discussion of the state of their potential union. Adam and Ottila’s conversation takes on a distinctly political tone almost from the beginning, and they sound less and less like lovers and more and more like moral philosophers or political debaters. Ottila’s “persuasive voice” comes up against Adam’s own glare of “accusing significance.” Ottila tries to fill up the void left by Adam’s silence by asking him if he has doubts about their betrothal and about whom else he is thinking. Adam’s rather polemic response of “self respect” makes it clear that the culprit is not another woman. Instead it is their engagement itself that is suspect, one between an Anglo man and a Cuban tempress. Adam characterizes it as “a weak, unwise, or wicked act.” His fiancée catches onto Adam’s intentions when he asks her: .

“How much would you do for love of me?” “Anything for you, Adam.” “Then give me back my liberty.” 34

Ottila’s silent response to this request reveals Alcott’s political subtext. Impassionedly, Ottila takes Adam’s “imploring hands in a grasp that turned them white with its passionate pressure [. . . ].”35 The force of her grip, while fervent, is ultimately presented as destructive. Her Cuban femininity, while attractive to Adam, is not advantageous for a permanent marital union.36 33

Louisa May Alcott, Moods 1864 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP), 1991, 5-6. Ibid, 6-7. 35 Ibid, 7-emphasis added. 36 Elizabeth Young takes up the motif of ethnic and national boundaries in her book Disarming the Nation: Women’s Writing and the American Civil War 34

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In Moods’ opening chapter, it is Adam, not just Ottila, who will be enslaved if their union becomes permanent. As Adam says, theirs would be “an unrighteous compact [. . .] because you have deceived me in yourself, appealed to the baser, not the nobler instincts in me, and on such a foundation there can be no abiding happiness.” He claims that their marriage would not be rooted in “confidence, respect, or love.” By trying to disentangle Adam from this Cuban woman, Alcott makes a moral judgment by telling us that he possesses the “courage of an upright soul, the fervor of a generous heart.” She makes it quite clear that Adam and Ottila do not belong together.37 Physical attraction is not enough to sustain their moral relationship, and by extension, geographical attraction is not enough to tie the United States politically to her Cuban neighbor. When Adam asks, “Would nothing but my subjection satisfy your unconquerable appetite for power?”, the image Alcott imagines is again that of a rapacious Cuban woman, one with “strength of wit and will to conceive and execute the design,” to be sure, but one who is trying to ensnare a man from the United States.38 Again, the imagery Adam summons to make his points to his fiancée is rooted not in romance, but in political fantasy: “Ottila, I have no faith in you, feel no respect for the passion you inspire, own no allegiance to the dominion you assert.”39 By adopting the rhetoric of U.S. political annexation, Adam envisions a marital dichotomy in which he can only be either “tyrant” or slave” to Ottila. Adam likens his desire for Ottila, whom he has known for only three months, to a form of “spiritual slavery.”40 Alcott’s choice of terms is anything but random. The daughter of Bronson Alcott, Transcendentalist thinker, educational reformer, and antislavery supporter, Louisa May Alcott was acutely aware of the political and racial overtones of the use of the word slavery. As the title of Sarah Elbert’s collection Louisa May Alcott on Race, Sex, and Slavery makes clear, Alcott wrote numerous (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1999) which examines the symbolic ways in which fiction written by American women writers is imbued with “fictions of nationhood and fantasies about gender” (17). Young points specifically to the roles race and gender play in this type of fiction: “As blackness and whiteness dynamically define each other, moreover, they also consistently take shape in relation to other national and ethnic designations. These works include characters who inhabit or assume forms of identity outside the dichotomy of black and white, particularly those of Irish and Cuban nationalities. Such designations blur distinctions between race and ethnicity and further unsettle the unstable boundaries of whiteness” (20). 37 Alcott, Moods (1864), 7, 8. 38 Ibid, 8-9. 39 Ibid, 9, emphasis added. 40 Ibid, 8.

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pieces of fiction that dealt with these social issues.41 Alcott’s own journals and letters also point to her commitment to abolition. In November of 1859, in a letter about the raid on Harper’s Ferry, Alcott exclaimed, “We are boiling over with excitement here for many of our people (Anti Slavery I mean) are concerned in it.”42 In a journal entry made that same month, Alcott writes, “Glad I have lived to see the Antislavery movement and this last heroic act in it. Wish I could do my part in it.” 43 In at least one instance which she recorded in her journal, Alcott attended an antislavery meeting in May of 1863, concurrent with her writing of Moods. Spanning from 1860 to 1864, Alcott’s initial composition of Moods paralleled the nation’s descent into civil war. It was also during this time that Alcott volunteered in a Washington field hospital, publishing a somewhat fictionalized version of her experiences as Hospital Sketches (1863). In Moods, the role of tyrant or slave applies not only to Adam, but to Ottila as well. They are exemplified in Ottila’s reaction to Adam’s harsh pronouncement that he must break off their engagement: She watched him as he spoke, and to herself confessed a slavery more absolute than any he had known, for with a pang she felt that she had indeed fallen into the snare she spread for him, and in this man, who dared to own his weakness and her power, she had found a master. 44

Through this description, Alcott suggests that Adam (the United States) and Ottila (Cuba) each feels enslaved by the other. Their relationship is not a romance, but a delicate political balancing act, with apprehensions on both sides. Thus, Adam’s decision to leave Ottila and Cuba in chapter one represents a an acknowledgment that he has been enslaved by both woman and nation. “This luxurious life enervates me; the pestilence of slavery lurks in the air and infects me; I must build myself up anew and find again the man I was.”45 A reader’s first impression, having finished chapter one is that Alcott is setting up the parameters of a love triangle, as Adam abandons Ottila and heads back to the United States, where he falls in love with Sylvia Yule, a woman who ultimately marries his best friend, 41

Louisa May Alcott on Race, Sex, and Slavery (Boston, MA: Northeastern UP, 1997). 42 The Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott. Eds. Joel Myerson, Daniel Shealy and Madeline Stern (Boston: Little, Brown, 1987), 49. 43 Ibid, 95. 44 Alcott, Moods (1864), 10. 45 Ibid, 12.

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Geoffrey Moor. However, the triangle of Ottila/Adam/Sylvia never really gets off the ground. Instead, the intertwining of the trio of Adam/Sylvia/Geoffrey is where Alcott applies her energies. In fact, readers see less and less of Ottila as the novel progresses. By chapter ten, she disappears altogether. Ottila appears in the flesh only once during the year’s trial period she and Adam have established to test their potential union. While Alcott’s readers might expect a dramatic scene between Adam and his fiancée, it is Sylvia who encounters the Cuban beauty and her cousin Gabriel André at a Christmas party. Gabriel reveals to Sylvia that Adam is engaged to his cousin: “ A month after Adam cries out that he loves too much for his own peace, that he has no freedom of his heart or mind, that he must go away and take his breath before he is made a happy slave forever.”46 Again, Alcott’s implication is that it is Adam, not Ottila, who will be enslaved in this arrangement, that his benevolence will be taken advantage of, that he is vulnerable due to his reliance on emotions rather than reason. Alcott devotes a fair amount of description to this recognition scene between the Anglo Sylvia and the Cuban Ottila, stressing differences in their levels of sexual maturity: Sylvia looked, saw the handsomest woman in Havana, and hated her immediately. It was but natural, for Sylvia was a very human girl, and Ottila one whom no woman would love, however much she might admire [. . . .] Sylvia possessed no knowledge that could analyze for her the sentiment which repelled, even while it attracted her toward Warwick’s betrothed. That he loved her she did not doubt, because she felt that even his pride would yield to the potent fascination of this woman. As Sylvia looked, her feminine eye took in every gift of face and figure, every grace of attitude or gesture, every daintiness of costume, and found no visible flaw in Ottila, from her haughty head to her handsome foot. Yet, when her scrutiny ended, the girl felt a sense of disappointment, and no envy mingled with her admiration. 47

Ottila looks at Sylvia and her gaze makes Sylvia aware of her own insignificance to Adam: “[. .. ] the lustrous eyes turned away with such supreme indifference, that Sylvia’s blood tingled as if she had received an insult.”48 Significantly, it is only after encountering Ottila’s powerful presence that Sylvia resigns herself to a romantic relationship with 46

Ibid, 96, emphasis added. Ibid, 99-100, emphasis added. 48 Ibid, 100. 47

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Geoffrey Moor. To what extent, Alcott seems to imply, can an Anglo girl compete with the seductive power of a Cuban woman? “[Ottila] is one those tameless natures which only God can govern; I dared not, even when I thought I loved her, for as much as I love power I love truth more.” 49 This is Adam’s pronouncement to Sylvia after breaking off his engagement with his Cuban fiancée. Ottila makes a more appropriate matrimonial choice in marrying her cousin Gabriel André. In so doing, the spectre of the United States and Cuba forging a permanent alliance ends. By chapter twenty, Ottila is no longer presented as a real woman even by her former lover Adam. Instead, she and Sylvia are now “ only fair illustrations of the two extremes of love,” ones Adam refers to from faroff Italy where he has been helping Garibaldi and the Italian nationalists. 50 As Adam points out to Geoffrey, “ I am glad to have known both [women]; each has helped me, and each will be remembered while I live.” Adam, however, does not live long. Several weeks later, he dies while sailing back to the United States, having saved friend Geoffrey’s life at the expense of his own. Neither Adam (nor Alcott herself as narrator) ever refers to Ottila again. Without her ties to Adam, Ottila’s presence in Moods is unnecessary. She is excluded from the rest of the 1864 narrative, which moves quickly to Sylvia Yule’s own death. By the 1882 edition of Moods, Ottila is gone from the novel altogether. Ottila’s removal from the 1882 text represents a conscious decision on Alcott’s part to rewrite her novel as a more conservative, domestic text. Alcott chooses to dismantle the political and philosophical framework she established in the 1864 edition as Moods underwent significant changes during the 1860s and 1870s. Finishing a quick draft of the manuscript in 1860, Alcott spent several years revising it and sending it to various publishers. It was finally published at the end of 1864, but Alcott expressed reservations about its critical reception, particularly once she became famous as the author of Little Women (1868-1869). In 1882, the Civil War having vanquished the national taste for expansion, Alcott published a quite different version in which the Cuban subtext is completely eliminated. National politics had changed radically, and Alcott’s revision of Moods reflects this. The fantasy of Cuban annexation was dead, and so the fantasy of Ottila fades into history. Fascinatingly, Elizabeth Stoddard’s story “Eros and Anteros,” like Alcott’s novel, relies on the framework of a love triangle between a man 49 50

Ibid, 127. Ibid, 202.

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and two women, one of whom is Cuban. In “Eros and Anteros” (1862), Sue Bartlett, a twenty-two year old woman, moves to New York City to live with one of her brothers, John Bartlett. The brother and sister form a domestic partnership. Their partnership, while an unsatisfying one for Sue in many respects, is further compromised by their involvements with other people: John with Alice King, whom he eventually marries, and Sue with Alice’s brother Ned, a man to whom she becomes engaged but does not wed. In Stoddard’s story, as in Alcott’s text, there are actually two love triangles: Sue/John/Alice, in which romantic love competes against brotherly love and sisterly friendship, and the erotic triangle of Sue/Ned/ Señora Garcia, Ned’s Cuban mistress. These overlapping triangles both take Sue as their center as she struggles to understand her role within each triangle. In “Eros and Anteros,” Stoddard creates an uneasy portrait of domestic satisfaction between brother and sister. Sue and John’s partnership has very clearly defined roles; he makes the money and she does the shopping and worshipping. Sue is able to secure good servants to further domestic happiness; in hiring their German servant Minna, Sue and John’s life improves: “[w]e began to live a merrier life, that is, he and his friends were merry—I merely ventured to be useful.” 51 Sue gives herself no credit in promoting her brother’s happiness, telling the reader that “[a]n elderly appendage could fulfill the same duties which fell to me now.”52 Even the structure of Stoddard’s paragraphs early in the story emphasizes the depiction of John and Sue as a single domestic unit. Paragraphs are long and unified, quite different from the choppy paragraph style critics have noted in her novels like The Morgesons.53 Sue’s autonomy is limited in her life with John; she is his subsidiary, her possessions and skills are incorporated into his domestic space. Literally, Sue lives within her brother’s boundaries. It is through Sue’s intervention that Señora Garcia, a skilled washerwoman, and Ned King’s lover, enters her life. In taking an active role in domestic affairs for her brother, Sue encounters Garcia on a nearby 51

Elizabeth Stoddard, “Eros and Anteros” 1862. Stories: Elizabeth Stoddard. Eds. Susanne Oppermann and Yvonne Roth (Boston: Northeastern UP, 2003), 90. 52 Ibid, 91. 53 In her introduction to The Morgesons (1862-NY: Penguin, 1997), Sandra Zagarell characterizes Stoddard’s style as “astringent, elliptical” and later remarks that “Stoddard is historically important also as an experimenter in narrative method. She anticipates modern fiction in using a severely limited mode, with minimal narrative clues (eliminating the “she said”’s as much as possible), minimal transitions, and dramatic, imagistic, and aphoristic impact” (ix ,xxi).

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street. As Sue catches sight of her for the first time, she describes the Cuban woman using distinctly erotic language: “I could not take my eyes away from her, and she well understood why I could not. She was the handsomest woman I had ever seen—a Cuban quadroon, about twenty years old.”54 Strikingly, Stoddard employs traditional romantic language through Sue’s first person narrative. This scene in “Eros and Anteros” is reminiscent of Alcott’s recognition scene between Sylvia and Ottila. In both texts, a less experienced Anglo woman encounters a Cuban woman who seems to possess not just feminine beauty, but indeed, a type of sexual power that has meaning in both the domestic and political arenas. Later, when Sue recounts her experience to John and Ned King, the exchange of dialogue the three share is fascinating: “It is for me to be flustered at the sight of a handsome woman, not you.” “She was a quadroon.” “And a devil, ” said [Ned]King composedly, lighting a cigar. 55

More is revealed here about the conversations’ participants than about the Señora’s actual appearance. Señora Garcia’s Cuban identity is defined differently by each of the three speakers: one describes her beauty, another her race, another her immorality. The three seem not to be participating in a love triangle but in a politically charged exchange about the significance of the Cuban woman. Their conversation defines Sue as well. In participating in a discussion about a beautiful woman, Sue is trapped within a male-centered space as she struggles herself to define Cuban femininity. Shortly thereafter, King begins to direct romantic attentions towards Sue: It was my fate to be astonished a second time that evening. When our eyes met, a belief, that I had never seen him before possessed me, and I grew abstracted in my study of his face, for the reason of my belief. It was a wish of his that compelled me to observe him, presenting him in a new light. The wish was, ‘I would I know you.’. 56

In a twist that is similar to Moods, in “Eros and Anteros,” the envy the Anglo woman feels for the Cuban is fleeting. During their next meeting, Sue’s perceptions of the Cuban woman have changed because Sue’s own self-image has changed. Thanks to her brother, she has secured new dresses and a bonnet and, with Ned King, a suitor of her own. With some 54

Stoddard, “Eros and Anteros”, 92. Ibid, 93. 56 Ibid, 93, emphasis original. 55

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idea of Ned’s interest in her, Sue does not depict her second meeting with Señora Garcia as a romantic fantasy the ways she did with her first meeting: “The next day Garcia came. I saw little in her behavior to interest me; she was dirty, vulgar and curious.”57 Sue’s revised characterization of Señora Garcia reflects the New England regional attitude towards the indigenous inhabitants of Cuba—uncultivated people of little use to Northerners who perceived themselves as less involved in the economics of slavery than the South.58 With a potential suitor in Ned King, the Cuban señora looks less attractive to Sue. In this second encounter, though Sue is less attracted to Señora Garcia’s beauty, she is fascinated by her use of Catholic ritual: She gave me a slight touch of the dramatic, however, before she went. The organ sounded in the church, and the chant of the priest came in through the open window, for it was a celebration day. She crossed herself, and all her dirt and vulgarity vanished. A gleam of remembrance shone in her colorless face; she clenched her right hand, and with the left slowly rubbed her arm, which was bare to the shoulder. 59

In describing Señora Garcia as a “dramatic” woman, Stoddard juxtaposes the Cuban woman with Sue’s own passivity, her inability to act on her own feelings towards Ned. In this lower-class Cuban washerwoman, Sue finds a woman who is not afraid to display her sexual or religious feelings, however uncultured she may be. For Ned King, Sue Bartlett embodies the role of passive angel, while his Cuban mistress is “an animal – a leopard, say; a creature of pure instincts, and no more answerable for what she is, and what she does, than an animal is.”60 Ned’s’s characterization of Señora Garcia reveals not just a man’s attempt to define a woman sexually, but hints at nineteenthcentury U.S. attitudes towards Cuba itself, just as Alcott does in Moods. In her chapter “American Men Abroad,” Amy S. Greenberg characterizes Anglo male attitudes towards Latinas as organized around the notion of 57

Ibid, 94. Differences in Northern and Southern perceptions of Cuba are neatly summed up by Matthew Pratt Guterl: “If British and American abolitionists saw Cuba as having the most grotesquely abusive slave system in the Atlantic world, many Southerners and their counterparts, venture capitalists from the eastern seaboard, believed that the island had a certain mystique about it, an intoxicating aroma of decadence, decay, and slavery. ” “After Slavery: Asian Labor, the American South, and the Age of Emancipation,” Journal of World History 24.2 (2003): 211. 59 Stoddard, “Eros and Anteros,” 94. 60 Ibid, 96. 58

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invasion: “The conquest of the Latin Anglo woman offered tangible evidence of the success of aggressive American manhood, and the success of Manifest Destiny as well.”61 Señora Garcia is object, not angel, for Ned King. Ned and Sue’s chaste engagement becomes significant as a political as well as a sexual statement: “I never went out except with him. With all this supervision, he never approached me, no caress passed between us; there were no moments of fond, foolish, human weakness.”62 A new annexation process has begun; Sue’s comments make it clear that Ned will be her protector, as he has already begun to rule over her. It is he who sets the rules and forfeits his opportunity for a more sexual relationship with his fiancé. Ned’s remark of “I would have you crystallized in me” again embodies the notion of a type of annexation, whereby Sue’s own mind will become enfolded into the structure of her future husband’s. Sue’s limited autonomy is sure to be diminished further, if not eradicated altogether upon her marriage. The “unspoken compact” Sue and Ned make assures that the boundaries of their relationship before marriage will continue after marriage; they will have a life of passive serenity.” 63 However, the “heaven of repose” Ned King longs for sounds less like happiness on earth and more like a state of sexual death for both man and woman. The political implications of the love triangle in “Eros and Anteros” are exposed through the story’s climactic scene, in which Sue, having performed an act of “instinctive rebellion,” steals her brother’s house key and dares to sneak out of the house and spy on her fiancé. In so doing, Sue promotes her own autonomy but discovers Ned’s sexual liaison with the Señora. The most powerful words in this scene are Sue’s as she asks her fiancé, “You never ventured to compare my soul with Garcia’s body?”64 The uneasy, asexual relationship between Sue and Ned’s is exposed; so too is the political nature of Ned’s’s relationships with both women, Anglo and Cuban. The Anglo woman possesses a soul but has no body; the Cuban woman is considered only a body. Once again, women serve as metaphorical sites for the political doctrine of Manifest Destiny;

61

Greenberg, Manifest Manhood, 134. Stoddard, “Eros and Anteros,” 99. 63 Ibid, 101. 64 Ibid, 102, 103. 62

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however, neither the Cuban woman nor the Anglo woman alone embody an ideal combination of physical and spiritual values. 65 Señora Garcia is perceived as a body not only by Ned’s, but by Sue as well. As “Eros and Anteros” progresses, the Señora’s body rapidly deteriorates. In the hotel room where Sue discovers their rendezvous, Señora Garcia seems barely alive at all, hardly a figure of vital sexual energy. Consumptive, her loud cough is the sound which gives her and Ned’s away. Inside the room, Sue, Ned, and the Señora enact a twisted version of a holy communion ceremony, a Catholic ceremony associated with the foreign Cuban. First, it is Sue who gives Señora Garcia wine to stop her cough: “I held it to her lips, and she slowly sipped it, till she revived.” Soon after, realizing the depth of Ned’s’s attraction to the sickly Cuban, Sue transgresses and imbibes some herself: “The act made all the receded blood rush back to King’s face; his brows were in a flame.”66 By drinking the wine, Sue has taken control over her own body, but it is an isolated and tenuous control. The story ends elliptically, in a way that is typical of Stoddard’s narrative style. Sue and Ned King act as legal witnesses to their siblings’ marriage but have no emotional connection. Two years pass in one sentence: “It is two years since they were married. I see King often. Our engagement was never annulled. I still live alone in Third street.”67 By not annulling their engagement, Sue is able to live alone, instead of with the married John and Alice. In keeping their “unspoken compact,” Sue gains a measure of personal freedom, but no emotional or physical happiness. Sue’s tone in delivering the story’s final lines is flat, declarative, emotionless. She has no protector left. The last paragraph of Stoddard’s story is choppy. For Sue Bartlett, the consequences of remaining unmarried are profound; she chooses to join herself to no man, but she is not happy. Ned King too is alone, saved from his unsavory relationship with his Cuban mistress. Stoddard chooses to erase Señora Garcia from the rest of “Eros and Anteros.” Presumably she dies of consumption shortly after her encounter with Sue and Ned King, but she is not even given a death scene of her own; she is dispatched without words. In rejecting Señora Garcia as part of an acceptable domestic relationship with an Anglo man, Stoddard borrows from the political climate of anti-annexation and fits it into an 65 As Greenberg states in Manifest Manhood, “[i]n the ‘annexationist’ fantasy of American man and Latin American woman,” it is not just the Cuban woman who is only half there, but “the American woman is necessarily absent” (221). 66 Stoddard, “Eros and Anteros, “104. 67 Ibid, 104.

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uneasy domestic space. Like Alcott, Stoddard blends a political viewpoint within what is superficially a romantic narrative. In “Eros and Anteros,” Stoddard makes the same decision as Alcott does in Moods when Adam Warwick rejects Ottila as his future wife. Both writers’ depictions of love triangles between an Anglo man, an Anglo woman, and a Cuban woman reflect their distaste with masculine perceptions of the social advantages of Manifest Destiny. The notion of political (and sexual) conquest, hailed by men, is undercut in both Alcott’s and Stoddard’s texts where the Anglo men wind up with nothing. Any chance at a satisfying romantic relationship with a U.S. citizen has been ruined due to the men’s association with a Cuban woman. The Anglo women also suffer the consequences of the love triangles with Cuban outsiders, losing confidence in their own womanhood. Within the last five years, as Stoddard’s work has been re-examined and republished, scholars have steadily acknowledged the political nature of Stoddard’s fiction. For example, through an examination of Stoddard’s novel Temple House, Weinauer makes a compelling argument for contextualizing Stoddard’s fiction within the political and social upheaval of the Civil War. In writing about Stoddard’s novel Two Men (1865), Jennifer Putzi reads Stoddard’s work as overtly political, exploring issues of race and class. Stoddard’s use of Philippa Luce, a character of mysterious national origins, echoes her earlier creation of Señora Garcia in “Eros and Anteros.” Putzi asserts that in Two Men, “Philippa’s ‘strange’ beauty is inexplicable and therefore supernatural, evil, even ‘diabolical’ in a New England setting.”68 Señora Garcia is similarly characterized as such by the Anglo characters in “Eros and Anteros.” In linking Philippa with Venezuela, Putzi recognizes Stoddard’s interest in fantasizing about racial and national boundaries. Putzi views Stoddard’s use of Venezuela as “a warning to her readers about the dangers inherent in uncontrolled passion, such that which led to the wars in South America as well as the United States’ Civil War, during which Stoddard was writing.”69 While Stoddard’s views on annexation and slavery are less transparent than Alcott’s, her writings for the Daily Alta California newspaper do provide some clues. Stoddard’s letters appeared in the paper twice a month from October 1854 through January 1858 as she wrote her column

68

Jennifer Putzi, “The ‘American Sphinx’ and the Riddle of National Identity in Elizabeth Stoddard’s Two Men” American Culture, Canons, and the Case of Elizabeth Stoddard. Eds. Robert McClure Smith and Ellen Weinauer. (Tuscaloosa, AL: Univerwsity of Alabama P, 2002), 191. 69 Ibid, 196.

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as a “Lady Correspondent” from her home in New York City.70 In one column from February 1856, Stoddard expressed her discomfort with the poltical rhetoric of annexation, of what she called “inflated Yankees [who] cry Excelsior to the American flag. It must wave in every land, and it is the specialty of every American to forward its journey, and to make it fly, in and out of season, over our own territory, and that of everybody else.”71 In another column from September 1855, she expressed no faith in President Pierce, a proponent of Cuban annexation, saying, “I guess any Administration would be an improvement on the present one.”72 Stoddard’s criticism of Franklin Pierce is significant: it was through a mutual friendship with novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, who wrote Pierce’s official campaign biography in 1852 that her husband Richard Stoddard obtained his job. 73 It was during Pierce’s presidency, in October 1854, that Cuban annexation fever became even stronger. The Ostend Manifesto represented the lengths to which the United States might go to acquire Cuba. In this document, written secretly by three U.S. diplomats, the United States government calls on Spain to sell Cuba to it. The tone of the Manifesto is unabashedly patriotic and jingoistic. As its rationale, the Manifesto cites that “[Cuba] belongs naturally to the great family of States of which the Union is the providential nursery.” 74 In addition, “[t]he intercourse which its proximity to our coasts begets and encourages between them and the citizens of the United States, has, in the progress of time, so united their interests and blended their fortunes that they now look upon each other as if they were one people and had but one destiny.” More frighteningly, the Ostend Manifesto hints that violence may be on the horizon: “[it is] upon the very same principle that would justify an 70

In his dissertation The Literary Career of Elizabeth Barstow Stoddard, (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1968) James H. Matalock asserts that “[t]he Alta column carried the fullest statement of Elizabeth’s views on a wide variety of subjects, views which changed very little throughout the rest of her life,,” 141. 71 Quoted in Matalock, Literary Career, 148. 72 Quoted in Matalock, Literary Career, 143. 73 In the book, Hawthorne ends with an account of Pierce’s acceptance of the Democratic party’s Presidential nomination. He quotes from Pierce’s acceptance speech in which he identifies America as “a Union wonderful in its formation, boundless in its hopes, amazing in its destiny” Life of Franklin Pierce. Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1852, 135. While Hawthorne does not go out of his way to emphasize Pierce’s territorial ambitions, neither could he ignore them in preparing his campaign biography. 74 “Ostend Manifesto” 18 October 1854. Rpt. in Documents of American History. 8th Edition. Ed. Henry Steele Commager. (NY: Appleton-Century Crofts, 1968), 333-335.

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individual in tearing down the burning house of his neighbor if there were no other means of preventing the flames from destroying his own home.” Again, just as with travel narratives of those who journeyed to Cuba in the 1850s, the Manifesto is a compelling glimpse into a version of the collective psyche of the United States. That President Pierce had to distance himself from its unsavory ideology even though he believed in its aims further shows the struggle both government and individuals had in realizing the unfulfilled dream of Cuban annexation.75 Stoddard’s willingness to criticize Pierce in a public forum suggests her views on his presidency were strong ones. Shortly after the Presidential election of 1856, Stoddard proclaimed to her newspaper readers that “[t]he bluster, dishonesty, and greed of slavery are the prominent American traits to the world.”76 She did not hesitate to point out the United States’ failings on the world stage, and felt strongly that any religious arguments in favor of slavery were dishonest. 77 In this context, Stoddard’s depiction of Señora Garcia in “Eros and Anteros” shows that her exploration of complicated issues of national and racial identity began even earlier in the Civil War period than scholars have previously addressed. A lower-class, unskilled immigrant, Señora Garcia’s relationship with the United States leads to her death: “the 75

Alcott and Stoddard’s friendships with Nathaniel Hawthorne provide an area of intersection between the two writers, who did not socialize with each other. For example, Hawthorne and Richard Stoddard’s fortuitous first meeting was secured through James T. Fields, head of the publishing firm of Ticknor and Fields, the same company that would later publish Julia Ward Howe’s account of her month in Cuba in 1860. Alcott grew up in the company of Hawthorne and his wife Sophia in Concord, Massachusetts in the 1840s. In 1852, the Hawthornes bought Hillside House from Louisa’s father Bronson, who had moved his family to Boston. In June 1860, the Alcotts and Hawthornes were reunited back in Concord and became next door neighbors. Hawthorne’s death in May 1864 brought his connection to the Alcott and Stoddard families full circle: he died in the company of his old friend Franklin Pierce, who brought Hawthorne’s body back to Concord from Philadelphia. In fact, Hawthorne himself had relatives who spent time in Cuba: Sophia Peabody Hawthorne and Mary Peabody,his wife and sister-in-law, went there in December 1833 to improve Sophia’s health. They stayed until the spring of 1835, and Sophia kept a diary of her time there. During the Hawthornes’ courtship, Sophia entertained him with stories of her life there. See Brenda Wineapple, Hawthorne: A Life ( NY: Knopf, 2003). 76 Column from 23 November 1856 as quoted in Matalock’s Literary Career, 148emphasis original. 77 See Daily Alta California column from 21 December 1856, quoted in Matalock, Literary Career, 151-152. Stoddard rails against a Southern clergyman’s assertion that Christian conversion justifies slavery in the United States.

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climate was killing her she said; snapping her fingers, she hoped she should find Cuba when she died.”78 While “Eros and Anteros” does not deal openly with abolition, it is a story in part about annexation and expulsion and the ways in which Anglo men and women view Cuban femininity as antithetical to marital harmony. In examining Alcott’s novel and Stoddard’s story as texts that embody political fantasies to examine the issue of spousal choice, I am mindful of Amy Kaplan’s important observation that “[t]he idea of foreign policy depends on the sense of the nation as a domestic space imbued with a sense of at-homeness, in contrast to an external world perceived as alien and threatening.”79 Kaplan reminds us that “[r]eciprocally, a sense of the foreign is necessary to erect the boundaries that enclose the nation as home.”80 This concept further illuminates the ways in which Alcott’s novel and Stoddard’s story embody political concerns. Thus Alcott’s and Stoddard’s use of a Cuban woman in these texts represents a complex reinscription of U.S. political desires in the mid-nineteenth century into a domestic context. Kaplan has noted the domestic rhetoric employed in debating the Mexican War of the 1840s. “In debates about the annexation of Texas and later Mexico, both sides represented the new territories as women to be married to the US..”81 Furthermore, in examining travel diaries written by men from this same period, Amy Greenberg finds that “[t]he conquest of the Latin American woman offered tangible success of the aggressive American manhood and the success of Manifest Destiny as well.”82 For Alcott and Stoddard, Cuban women are not appropriate wives for these men but the “pure” relationships between Anglo men and women also come out as failures, hinting that Alcott and Stoddard were as critical of domestic subjugation as they were about political conquest. I wish to stress the unlikelihood that Alcott or Stoddard wrote about Cuba without being conscious of its specific political importance in the early 1860s.83 The Cuban woman was not merely an abstract being for

78

“Eros and Anteros”, 100. Amy Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity” American Literature 70.3 (September 1998): 581-582. 80 Ibid, 582. 81 Ibid, 585. 82 Greenberg, Manifest Manhood, 134. 83 Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Pearl of Orr’s Island: A Story of the Coast of Maine (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1862), takes as its main focus the Cuban orphan Moses Pennel who washes up on the New England shore. Stowe’s abolitionist stance and her decision to write a novel with a Cuban protagonist is 79

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these women writers, but in fact, a living, breathing locus of national anxiety. The fear of using Cuba to perpetuate a cycle of human enslavement would certainly have been a concern to Alcott, and on the mind of Stoddard as well. Through Moods and “Eros and Anteros,” Alcott and Stoddard break down the boundary of “separate spheres” between the political and domestic. As Cathy N. Davidson reminds us, “the separate spheres metaphor can even make it seem as if women chose their world, as if white, middle-class American women preferred the female, domestic, sentimental, collective private space (basically the world of the home) to the male, individualistic, public sphere of commerce and politics.”84 Both Alcott’s 1864 edition of Moods and Stoddard’s 1862 story “Eros and Anteros” blend political and domestic space, writing fiction that inscribes both public and private worlds. For Alcott and Stoddard, American women excluded from public participation in public policy, writing fiction provided a vehicle through which they could fantasize. In rejecting Cuban women from their narratives, Alcott and Stoddard extend their moral reach and reject an annexation of territory whose main asset would be its human capital, its slaves. Cuba, for both writers, is an inappropriate choice. As Arthur Schlesinger Jr. reminds us, “the imperial dream had encountered consistent indifferent and recurrent resistance through American history”.85 Through these two works of fiction, Alcott and Stoddard register their resistance to Cuban women, and Cuba itself, being connected to men from the United States.

Works Cited Alcott, Louisa May. Moods. 1864. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1991. — . The Journals of Louisa May Alcott. Eds. Joel Myerson, Daniel Shealy and Madeline B. Stern. Boston: Little, Brown and Co. 1989. — . The Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott. Eds. Joel Myerson, Daniel Shealy and Madeline B. Stern. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1987.

further evidence that American women writers were conscious of Cuba’s unique value to the United States. 84 Cathy N. Davidson, “Preface: No More Separate Spheres!” American Literature 70.3 (September 1998): 444. 85 Arthur Schlesinger Jr. “The American Empire? Not So Fast.” World Policy Journal (Spring 2005): 44.

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Dallal, Jenine Abboushi. “American Imperialism UnManifest: Emerson’s ‘Inquest’ and Cultural Regeneration.” American Literature 73.1 (March 2001): 47-83. Davidson, Cathy N. “Preface: No More Separate Spheres!” American Literature 70.3 (September 1998): 443-463. DeForest, Tim. “Southern Attempts to Annex Cuba.” America’s Civil War 10.2 (May 1997): 38-45. Academic Search Premier . (accessed 27 February 2006). Elbert, Sarah. Introduction. Louisa May Alcott on Race, Sex, and Slavery. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1997. ix-lx. Greenberg, Amy S. Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire. NY: Cambridge UP, 2005. Hahner, June, E. Introduction. Women Through Women’s Eyes: Latin American Women in Nineteenth-Century Travel Accounts. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1998. xi-xxvi. Howe, Julia Ward. A Trip to Cuba. 1860. Rpt. NY: Negro Universities Press, 1969. Johannsen, Robert W. “The Meaning of Manifest Destiny.” Manifest Destiny and Empire: American Antebellum Expansionism. Eds. Sam W. Haynes and Christopher Morris. Arlington, TX: Texas A and M UP, 1997. 7-20. Kaplan, Amy. "Manifest Domesticity." American Literature 70.3 (September 1998): 581-606. —. “Violent Belonging and the Question of Empire Today: Presidential Address to the American Studies Association October 17, 2003.” American Quarterly 56.1 (2004): 1-18. Matlack, James. "Hawthorne and Elizabeth Barstow Stoddard." New England Quarterly. 50 (1977): 278-302. —. The Literary Career of Elizabeth Barstow Stoddard. Ph.D. diss. Yale University, 1968. Mártinez-Fernández, Luis. “The ‘Male City’ of Havana: The Coexisting Logics of Colonialism, Slavery, and Patriarchy in Nineteenth-Century Cuba.” Women and the Colonial Gaze. Eds. Tamara L. Hunt and Micheline R. Lessard. NY: NYU Press. 2002. 104-116. May, Robert E. “Manifest Destiny’s Filibusters.” Manifest Destiny and Empire: American Antebellum Expansionism. Eds. Sam W. Hayes and Christopher Morris. Arlington, TX: Texas A and M UP, 1997.146-179. Putzi, Jennifer. “The ‘American Sphinx’ and the Riddle of National Identity in Elizabeth Stoddard’s Two Men.” American Culture, Canons, and the Case of Elizabeth Stoddard. Eds. Robert McClure

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Smith and Ellen Weinauer. Tuscaloosa, AL: U. of Alabama P, 2002. 183-201. Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. NY: Knopf, 1995. Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr. “The American Empire? Not So Fast.” World Policy Journal Spring 2005: 43-46. Stephanson, Anders. Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right.NY: Hill and Wang, 1995. Stoddard, Elizabeth. “Eros and Anteros.” 1862. Stories: Elizabeth Stoddard. Eds. Susanne Oppermann and Yvonne Roth. Boston: Northeastern UP, 2003. 89-104. Weinauer, Ellen. “Reconstructing Temple House.” American Culture, Canons, and the Case of Elizabeth Stoddard. Eds. Robert McClure Smith and Ellen Weinauer. Tuscaloosa, AL: U. of Alabama P, 2002. 232-264. Weinberg, Albert K. Manifest Destiny: A Study of Nationalist Expansionism in American History. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1963. Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass: A Facsimile Edition of the 1860 Text. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1961.

PART TWO: MODERNISM AND THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

CHAPTER EIGHT BAD GIRLS OF THE VAD: WORLD WAR I FALLEN WOMEN IN THE FORBIDDEN ZONE JENNIFER SHADDOCK

In Sandra M. Gilbert’s influential 1983 essay “Soldier’s Heart: Literary Men, Literary Women, and the Great War,” she argues that women’s wartime potency derived from men’s wartime impotency.1 The essay, with its provocative thesis, still stands as pivotal in literary discussions of women’s experience of that horrific war. Gilbert describes women war workers’ “exhilaration” in reaction to a world turned topsyturvy since the war began, a war that allowed these women for the first time to feel an “invigorating sense of revolution, release, reunion and revision.”2 She notes that the Imperial War Museum photo archives repeatedly illustrate her point as, “Liberated from parlors and petticoats alike, trousered war girls beam as they shovel coal, shoe horses, fight fires, drive buses, chop down trees, make shells, dig graves.”3 But it seems likely that the kind of exultant, happy-go-lucky representations of women in war that Gilbert invokes may have been simply the scripted responses that war-torn England expected—and so received—from those dutiful daughters who experienced the war on the front lines. According to five women writers of World War I literary 1

Sandra M. Gilbert, “Soldier’s Heart: Literary Men, Literary Women, and the Great War,” Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, ed. Margaret Randolph Higonnet (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), pp. 197-226. Gilbert’s essay was originally printed in a slightly altered form but with the same title in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 8, no. 3 (1983): 422-50. The essay is also an abbreviated version of a chapter of the same title in Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s No Man’s Land: the Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 258-323. 2 Ibid., 201. 3 Ibid., 204.

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chronicles, anything like the truth about women in the forbidden zone (immediately behind the zone of fire) would have been scornfully dismissed as unpatriotic. The fact is, it took more than a decade after the Great War, when the “second wave” of war literature was written, for more realistic accounts of these women’s war experiences to emerge. In the short span between 1930 and 1933, Mary Borden’s The Forbidden Zone (1930),4 Rebecca West’s War Nurse: the True Story of a Woman Who Lived, Loved and Suffered on the Western Front (1930),5 Evadne Price’s Not So Quiet . . . Stepdaughters of War (1930),6 Irene Rathbone’s We That Were Young (1932),7 and Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth (1933)8 were all published. Borden, Brittain and Rathbone wrote from direct personal experience on the Western front, Smith and West from diaries of friends who had served in the war. Each of these texts focuses on the middle- and upper-class women who volunteered to assist the war effort as Red Cross Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) nurses or ambulance drivers. These five accounts provide a profound corrective to the idea that “war girls” on the front lines were primarily empowered by the war.9 In fact, a literary trope that all five authors employ to describe their protagonists’ war-torn condition—that of the Victorian “fallen woman”—suggests the almost fatal cost of this service to the VAD’s spirit and soul and her consequent alienation from her society.

4

Mary Borden, The Forbidden Zone (New York: Doubleday, 1929). Rebecca West. War Nurse: the True Story of a Woman Who Lived, Loved and Suffered on the Western Front. (New York: Cosmopolitan Book Corporation, 1930). 6 Evadne Price [Helen Zenna Smith]. Not So Quiet . . . Stepdaughters of War (New York: The Feminist Press, 1989). 7 Irene Rathbone. We That Were Young (New York: The Feminist Press, 1989). 8 Vera Brittain. Testament of Youth (New York: Penguin, 1994). 9 Gilbert’s thesis provoked critique by a range of subsequent writers on women and World War I. Most notably, see Jane Marcus’s extended rebuttal in “The Asylums of Antaeus: Women, War, and Madness—Is There a Feminist Fetishism?,” The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 132-151. See also Claire M. Tylee’s “Maleness Run Riot—The Great War and Women’s Resistance to Militarism,” Women’s Studies International Forum 11, no. 3 (1988): 199-210; Sharon Ouditt’s Fighting Forces, Writing Women: Identity and Ideology in the First World War (New York: Routledge, 2000); Margaret R. Higonnet and Patrice L.-R. Higonnet’s “The Double Helix,” Behind the Lines, pp. 31-47; and Angela K. Smith’s The Second Battlefield: Women, Modernism and the First World War, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988). 5

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While the ennobled male “fallen soldier” is a wartime cliché, the fallen status of the female VAD is fascinating and complex in its cultural ambiguity. On the one hand, the young women who served as VADs came from England’s finest families and had been raised within a strict late-Victorian ethos of domestic isolation and womanly decorum. Moreover, their sacrifices of time and energy for their country (a womanly gesture as defined by Victorian gender codes) represented their families’ commitment to England and the war effort—hence the wartime accolade “England’s Splendid Women.”10 On the other hand, as Evadne Price, writing under the pseudonym Helen Zenna Smith, notes in her novel Not So Quiet, these finely-bred women were thrown into wartime conditions where the class and gender codes of respectability were ludicrously irrelevant to survival and must, of necessity, be forsworn—hence, “mes petites harlots,” as Smith’s aristocratic heroine, Tosh, dubs her coterie of VAD friends.11 In the opening chapter of her best-selling memoir Testament of Youth, Vera Brittain describes a pre-war childhood bounded by Victorian ideals of gender and class. Poet Coventry Patmore, one of the most influential Victorian promoters of the domestic ideal of “the Angel in the House,” epitomizes the gender codes of the day when he describes woman’s elevated moral status as “Marr’d less than man by mortal fall.”12 This bynow-familiar Victorian ideology of woman as domestic angel, which represented the ideal woman as morally elevated—virtuous and selfsacrificing, patient and submissive, the protector of peace and the inspiration for faith—was still, in the first decade of the twentieth century, quite explicit in the daily social and intellectual education of a middleclass young girl. Brittain acknowledges that “it was the very completeness with which all doors and windows to the more adventurous and colorful world, the world of literature, of scholarship, of art, of politics, of travel, were closed to me, that kept my childhood so relatively

10

Price, 34. For an informative historical account of voluntary Aid Detachments, see Anne Summers’s Angels and Citizens: British Women as Military Nurses 1854-1915 (London: Routledge, 1988), and for a briefer treatment see Sharon Ouditt’s chapter “Nuns and Lovers: VAD Nurses in the First World War” in Fighting Forces, 7-46. 11 Price, 35. 12 Coventry Patmore. “The Angel in the House,” Victorian Women: A Documentary Account of Women’s Lives in Nineteenth-Century England, France, and the United States, ed. Erna Olafson Hellerstein (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1981), pp. 134-140.

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contented a time.13 Brittain speaks for an entire generation when she describes her pre-war childhood as socially and morally circumscribed within “solid provincial walls which enclosed the stuffiness of complacent bourgeoisdom . . . securely within themselves.”14 Brittain’s powerful metaphor of the immured, stifling garden of innocence is surprisingly expansive, including within its representation not only the social constraints impressed upon the “well-bred” woman but also the entrenched privilege of a complacent middle-class, and more ominously, the unsuspecting national consciousness of England as it moved naively toward the savageries of the Great War. Unlike post-WWI male writers who, according to Paul Fussell, represented pre-war England nostalgically as a lost Eden—“a permanent symbol for anything innocently but irrecoverably lost”—Vera Brittain found the cultivated innocence of the Edwardian girl galling.15 Such a view suggests an opening for Gilbert’s proposition in “Soldier’s Heart” that the war catalyzed women’s empowerment. Certainly, Brittain, like many women of the period, does recognize and appreciate the hard-fought independence that she and other women earned during their service in the war. However, she takes pains to describe the physical and psychological trauma that Gilbert neglects. It is easy to see within the context of World War I, a war that has been depicted as the great twentieth-century Western fall from innocence, how these five women writers could claim their own specifically gendered experience of this fall. The elevated ideal of the domestic angel of purity, chastity and innocence that these young women carried with them into war has, inherent within its definition, its correlative antithesis—the fallen woman. Art historian Lynda Nead writes in Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain that the term “fallen woman”—as opposed to the term “prostitute”—implies that the woman in question “had been respectable but had dropped out of respectable society. The term was therefore class-specific; unlike the working-class prostitute, the fallen woman came from the respectable classes.”16 While the 13

Brittain, 30-31. Ibid., 31. 15 Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford, 1975), p. 24 16 Nead, Lynda, Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 95. Admittedly there is some disagreement about the term “fallen woman.” In Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: the Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 2, Amanda Anderson sees more fluidity than Nead in the term, arguing that its designation “cuts across class lines and signifies a complex of tabooed behaviors and degraded conditions.” 14

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working-class prostitute was perceived within Victorian middle-class society as inherently lazy and immoral, a respectable middle-class woman’s fall from virtue, in contrast, was “attributed to seduction and betrayal which set the scene for her representation as victim.”17 Despite the fact that the fallen woman was perceived as a victim rather than an agent of her descent, she was nonetheless powerfully associated in the public mind with the same corrupting social conditions as workingclass prostitutes. The five VAD narratives that I am discussing here all depend upon and revise this cultural prototype of the fallen woman in order to describe an indescribable experience of debasement to a reading public otherwise unable to understand the full trauma of the VAD’s wartime story. However, to the extent that these women writers exploit the Victorian fallen woman iconography in the completely new context of the World War I VAD, exposing, manipulating, and transforming the basic Victorian assumptions about the metaphor, they simultaneously explode its deterministic categories. In this sense they enact as women writers and critics of the war the kind of transformative political power they could not realistically accord to their heroines. One practical reason for these writers to import the iconography of the fallen woman into the particular narrative of the VAD is its efficiency in communicating the strict demarcation and shocking distinction between the conditions of the VAD’s life before and after her fall, that is, before and after her enlistment in the war. Just as nineteenth-century narratives of the fallen woman conventionally portray her fall as an abrupt descent from the comforts of upper-class society to impoverishment, slumdwelling and ultimately death, so too the VAD portrayed in these narratives, immediately upon her “seduction” into the war, falls from innocent privilege (Vera Brittain did not know how to boil an egg and Nell Smith in Not So Quiet had never cleaned a room) to degradation, cynicism, and consequently, for many, to a spiritual and physical death. For early twentieth-century readers attuned to the conventions of the Victorian fallen woman saga, a notable signifier of the VAD’s fall is that the purity she carried with her into the war is sullied by the filth and infection that surround her in the daily trappings of war. Nead states that the Victorian prostitute was “represented as part of the refuse and dirt of the streets, the decomposing animal waste which produced atmospheric impurities and disease.”18 And Judith Walkowitz emphasizes the same point in City of Dreadful Delight, when she reminds us that prostitutes 17 18

Nead, p. 95. Ibid., p. 121.

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were considered “soiled doves.”19 When assigned to the front, the VAD heroines in these narratives were unprepared in any way for the filthy conditions of war. After being sent to the fighting lines, they immediately found themselves contaminated by wartime exigencies no “well-bred” woman could imagine enduring back home. Highly privileged women accustomed only to the most luxurious accommodations suddenly found themselves without bath water for weeks on end and so regularly slept in dirty, lice- and flea-ridden sleeping bags. In addition, as Jane Marcus notes, they were “marked out for the most polluted of war work”: cleaning the latrines, the bandages of wounds wet with pus and blood, and the fetid interiors of the ambulances they drove.20 Nell Smith from Not So Quiet, for example, describes with horrific images the work of “England’s Splendid Women”: Cleaning an ambulance is the foulest and most disgusting job it is possible to imagine. . . . The stench that comes out as we open the doors each morning nearly knocks us down. Pools of stale vomit from the poor wretches we have carried the night before, corners the sitters have turned into temporary lavatories for all purposes, blood and mud and vermin and the stale stench of stinking trench feet and gangrenous wounds.21

In similarly foul terms, Vera Brittain describes the mud from the front lines that caked not only the bodies of the dead and wounded combatants but also the VAD nurses and ambulance drivers who handled them: it was “not ordinary mud; it had not the usual clean pure smell of earth, but it was as though it were saturated with dead bodies—dead that had been dead a long, long time.”22 Rebecca West’s heroine, Corinne Andrews, describes treating men whose wounds “hung with little bunches of maggots,” and she recounts the multitudes of “gas cases” who developed untreatable infections and died of pneumonia or tuberculosis in her wards.23 Irene Rathbone’s Joan Seddon remembers that she would empty her pail of dirty dressings into “a great rubbish bin which stood in the corner, and which, in the course of the morning, became so full that you had to ram the stuff down with a stick to make room for more—keeping the nose averted—and then quickly clap on the lid again.”24 Mary Borden 19 Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992) p. 2. 20 Jane Marcus, “Afterword,” Not So Quiet, p. 243. 21 Price, pp. 59-60. 22 Brittain, p. 252. 23 West, p. 59. 24 Rathbone, p. 199.

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describes the clutter of the cramped hospitals on the front and pushing back piles of soiled bandages in order to stand around a table and drink a cup of cocoa.25 And Brittain similarly wonders how we were able to drink tea and eat cake in the [operating] theatre—as we did all day at frequent intervals—in that fetid stench, with the thermometer about 90 degrees in the shade, and the saturated dressings and yet more gruesome human remnants heaped on the floor.26

Here, the sororial sisterhood of the VAD takes tea amid the severed body parts of male soldiers. The scene suggests a twentieth-century wartime reprisal of the image of the nineteenth-century prostitute who culturally embodied “the corporeal smells and animal passions that the rational bourgeois male had repudiated and that the virtuous woman, the spiritualized `angel in the house,’ had suppressed.”27 Seen in this light, the VAD represents an explicit gender subversion and a societal threat. Through her experience in the war, she becomes directly associated with dirt, gore and disease, which by necessity subverts the pure gender role originally ascribed to her. Furthermore, this involuntary subversion of socially acceptable gender codes implicitly exposes the constructed nature and the performative aspects of the cult of the angel woman, and so the VAD becomes a double threat to conventional womanhood. The VAD’s subversion of the domestic ideal of womanhood portends her vulnerability to a moral fall. Specifically, the VAD is so mired in filth and disease that her physical degradation becomes metonymically conflated with her potential for moral degradation. Nead notes that in nineteenth-century social narratives, filth, contagion, disease and prostitution become so intricately connected that prostitution itself becomes the infection. “The prostitute is described as a ‘pestilence,’ a ‘sore,’ a cancerous growth, contaminating and destroying society.”28 Similarly in these war narratives the VAD must constantly be vigilant that she not transgress from the healer of contagion to its carrier. Joan Seddon in We That Were Young, while working as a nurse, contracts a lifethreatening case of septic poisoning from the exposure of a slight cut on her finger to a soldier’s wound. Her supervising Matron severely admonishes her, warning that “The slightest scratch on arm or finger is dangerous when you’re in contact with wounds.”29 Joan’s physical 25

Borden, p. 59. Brittain, p. 374. 27 Walkowitz, p. 21. 28 Nead, 122. 29 Rathbone, 237. 26

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carelessness endangers not only herself but also the soldiers she nurses, tacitly invoking the nineteenth-century fear of the spread of venereal disease through prostitution and suggesting a potentially fatal lapse of moral rectitude.30 Thus, the VAD’s constant exposure to physical infection and disease due to her close association with male soldiers becomes associated by the end of the war with her moral stain. Indeed, Vera Brittain complains that far from being honored for her war work as a nurse upon her return to Oxford after the war, she was socially rebuffed because of her apparently polluted status: I was the only woman returning, bringing with me, no doubt—terrifying thought!—the psychological fruit of my embarrassing experiences. During the War the tales of immorality among V.A.D.s, as among W.A.A.C.s, had been consumed with voracious horror by readers at home; who knew in what cesspools of iniquity I had wallowed? Who could calculate the awful extent to which I might corrupt the morals of my innocent juniors?31

Brittain’s tight conflation of infected “cesspools” to moral “iniquity” links the Edwardian VAD, like the Victorian prostitute, simultaneously to diseased squalor and to immorality. Her testimony of her cold reception back in England illustrates the endurance of the “fallen woman” myth and the inexorable alienation it implied for the soiled dove, be she nineteenthcentury victim or twentieth-century VAD. According to Helen Zenna Smith in Not So Quiet, it is the VAD’s very class privilege and cultured education that simultaneously qualify her for the philanthropic position of VAD and ironically allow for her fall. Her prior education as the angel-woman who would graciously make any sacrifice effectively prepares her for this job, and her learned passivity, her inability to assert herself to subvert cultural expectations, keeps her conveniently submissive to the most degrading demands of the military. Nell elaborates: 30 The VAD’s fall from innocence to experience and her consequent threat as a carrier of immorality and disease is highlighted in Lesley Smith’s novel, Four Years Out of Life (New York: Minton, Balch & Co., 1931), p. 17, when her heroine’s first rotation as a VAD nurse is in the Lock Isolation block in a British hospital where she treats syphilis cases. “A ghostly prickling of the skin made me feel that all the germs in the place were on the move. . . . Each sore and wound that had to be fomented seemed to be stricken with plague. . . I no longer needed to be told to scrub up. My hands became raw meat from constant soaking in perchloride.” 31 Brittain, pp. 476-477.

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It astounds me why the powers-that-be at the London headquarters stipulate that refined women of decent education are essential for this ambulance work. Why should they want this class to do the work of strong navvies on the cars, in addition to the work of scullery maids under conditions no professional scullery-maid would tolerate for a day? Possibly this is because this is the only class that suffers in silence, that scorns to carry tales. We are such cowards. We dare not face being called “cowards” and “slackers,” which we certainly shall be if we complain. What did we think we came out to France for? . . . A holiday? Don’t we realize there is a war on? . . . So we say nothing. Poor fools, we deserve all we get.32

Nell’s scorching critique is a rare diatribe on the middle-class domestic ideal of womanhood from within its own ranks and suggests that Nell’s brief war experience has already enabled her to see her own traditional social identity from an ironic perspective. The internalized degradation and shame in Nell’s complaint reflect the VAD’s inferior position within the military hierarchy. Not only was she given the most demeaning war work, but the VAD received no compensation for her work during the first five years of the organization’s existence and after 1915 only very poor remuneration. According to literary critic Sharon Ouditt, in 1915 she was paid less than some servants, suggesting in economic terms her paradoxical role as both bourgeois wartime philanthropist and debased laborer.33 As Jane Marcus notes in her Afterword to Not So Quiet, [VADs]were shunned by the society whose dirty work they did. They were neither the `ladies’ they had been brought up to be, nor were they paid professionals like working-class nurses in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (W.A.A.C.s) or Women’s Royal Naval Service (W.R.E.N.s), respected and rewarded for their labor. They were both terrorized and scorned by women in the regular armed services, precisely because they were volunteers but also because they were ladies exposed to the most acute physical horrors, suffering themselves under severe hardships, for which a comfortable life at home with servants had hardly prepared them. They made everyone except their patriotic parents at home feel ashamed.34

In this way, these young women, originally viewed as paragons of English virtue and purity, were defiled, appearing now in their own eyes 32

Price, pp. 50-51. Ouditt, p. 15. 34 Marcus, p. 243. 33

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as well as in those of their culture as the wartime equivalent of working harlots. Indeed, Nell herself, as previously mentioned, calls her VAD friends mes petites harlots. A common characteristic in these women’s war narratives is the belief expressed in Rebecca West’s War Nurse that war “swept us back to the primitive”—that both men and women descend to the brutish and carnal in war.35 Roland Leighton, Brittain’s fiancé, writes to her from the front before his death: “I feel like a barbarian, a wild man of the woods.”36 When VADs entered into this fraternity of soldiers, into a “forbidden zone” of militaristic “wild men,” they risked, by association, the moral corruption of the womanly ideal when judged by the pristine, “civilized” standards of the day. An interesting passage in Mary Borden’s The Forbidden Zone illustrates the Red Cross VAD’s morally ambivalent cultural position. Stepping out of a shining car in front of a regiment in France, the nurse is described as “a beautiful animal dressed as a nun and branded with a red cross.”37 In fact, when viewed in this context of her animalistic essence, the red cross that “burned on her forehead” suggests a striking allusion to the moral branding of the fallen woman, Hester Prynne, in The Scarlet Letter.38 The imagery foregrounds the carnal aspect of the VAD, implying that her performative role as a holy, selfsacrificing icon of nationalistic motherhood is belied by her undisguisable physicality: “Her shadowy eyes said to the regiment: `I came to the war to nurse you and comfort you’” and “her red mouth said to the officers: `I am here for you’.”39 The genteel VADs in these stories have moved abruptly from a pre-war segregation from men—when they were strictly chaperoned during meetings with the opposite sex in order to keep their reputations unsullied—to a socially uncharted freedom of association with male soldiers of all class backgrounds. Such newly emergent liberality easily lends itself to readings of the VAD as a symbol of the inevitable degeneration of civilized constraints experienced by women and men during war. Irene Rathbone suggests, in contrast to the four other writers considered here, that the VAD’s social intercourse with soldiers and doctors exerted not a degenerative but a refining pressure on men in the war. Rathbone’s central character, Joan Seddon, works in a London 35

West, p. 264. Brittain, p. 216. 37 Borden, p. 37. 38 Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (Boston: Bedford, 1991). 39 Borden, p. 37. For an interesting reading of this passage, see Sharon Ouditt’s Fighting Forces, pp. 19-20. 36

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hospital ward, tending wounded young soldiers. In all her long months of intimate contact with wounded men, Joan never saw one indelicate gesture, one suggestive look. At the time this didn’t strike her as remarkable—she never gave it a thought; but in after years she sometimes wondered how much to attribute it to the hospital atmosphere, how much to the decency of the men, and how much to a certain English directness and innocence in her young self.40

Later in the novel, after a visit from another English VAD, Betty, to the living quarters of soldiers on the front, the men announced that their tent was “henceforth `purified’ in consequence of the `ladies’ visit, and that they were not going to get drunk or use swear words for the rest of their stay in camp.”41 For Rathbone, Joan and Betty produce an ennobling, civilizing effect on the men at war, a moral victory indebted to Victorian notions of woman’s innately restraining influence on the bestial in men’s nature. But the dominant belief expressed in these texts is that the conditions of war force both women and men to renounce their pre-war morality and jettison any cultivation that did not serve their immediate needs. Nell in Not So Quiet anguishes, for example, over what she might reveal to her rabidly patriotic mother about the true conditions of her work, acknowledging how the “vulgar” contact with men has transformed her: That man strapped down? That raving, blaspheming creature screaming filthy words you don’t know the meaning of . . . words your daughter uses in everyday conversation, a habit she has contracted from vulgar contact of this kind.42

Nell goes on to damn her mother for her naiveté and blindness, mockingly asking her mother’s forgiveness since “that was not the kind of language a nicely-brought-up young lady from Wimbledon Common uses. I forget myself.”43 Such exposure to male obscenity is one overt example of the VAD’s border crossing from the rarified world of high-society woman to the more primitive freedoms of masculine community to which only prostitutes previously had access. Moreover, Nell’s admission that “I forgot myself” speaks not only to her trespass against language taboos but 40

Rathbone, p. 213. Ibid., p. 254. 42 Price, p. 91. 43 Ibid., p. 92. 41

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also, and much more profoundly, to her radical transformation of identity during the war. Even more subversive to their pre-war identities than their free association with a community of males was the VAD’s intimate relationship with the male body. Such relationships, in the VAD’s role as either nurse or lover, are regularly noted in these narratives. For instance, Corinne Andrews, the American VAD heroine in War Nurse, comments ironically that For three months I did general work in the wards. I cleaned up the place, I served the weak, I made the beds, I washed the men. I remember one day stopping with a sponge in my hand and bursting out laughing, because it had occurred to me that my whole upbringing had been designed to conceal from me what a naked man was like; and here I was washing naked men twenty at a time!44

Indeed, the cultural taboo against unmarried women coming into direct contact with the male body had been Florence Nightingale’s primary obstacle when she opened the profession of nursing to middle-class women some sixty years earlier. The VADs’ plain and modest uniforms were designed “to subdue expressions of individuality, and . . . of `femininity’ that might border on the sexual.”45 Joan, in Rathbone’s more conservative novel We That Were Young, claims that because “she was a nurse in uniform, and he was a wounded soldier,” the gulf between her and the soldiers she nursed was “fixed and rigid.” And yet, even for Joan, “across that gulf, unrecognised and certainly unheeded by either, stretched the faint sweet fingers of sex.”46 Indeed the nurses’ regulation uniform, even if as modest as a thick, starched and voluminous Edwardian schoolgirl dress, was nevertheless a weak defense against wartime passions and ethos. When Corinne Andrews, the VAD from War Nurse, decides to submit to the advances of her lover, the fighter pilot Waldron, she explains her decision to have sexual intercourse as part of the ethos of war: It is at least true that if I had found that resistance to Waldron had helped my work instead of hindering it, I should have tried harder to stand by my guns. I don’t mean that I am one of those women to whom work means more than love, for in peacetime work doesn’t mean anything to me at all. I mean that we were in the war, and I felt that anything which prevented 44

West, p. 57. Ouditt, p. 18. 46 Rathbone, p. 213. 45

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my serving the war was wrong, and anything which helped me to serve it was right.47

Sex, for Corinne, was a wartime duty, though her high-society parents back home would never have condoned this particular personal sacrifice. In fact, both Corinne and Waldron consciously reject traditional codes of behavior learned before the war: We kept on telling each other how much we loved each other. Yet at the back of my mind I was wishing we had never met, and I think Waldron was too. We were going straight to the supremest pleasure either of us could imagine the whole world affording us, yet we felt it was all too difficult. I was finding it hard to breathe, just as if I were climbing in high altitudes. His face was strained and contorted, like a soldier who had been brought into our hospital after he had collapsed under pack drill. Our 48 traditions had a hold on us all right.

For Corinne, the sexual act was pleasurable to a degree, but it was primarily practical: “It simply seemed an adjustment we had to make because of our circumstances: above all, because of the fear of death that pervaded our days.”49 And yet Corinne and Waldron’s decision to consummate their love before marriage was not a celebration of youth, freedom and power, as Gilbert might suggest. It is rather a clear-eyed, determined effort to grab at what is precious and fleeting. Conventionally, the nineteenth-century fallen woman broke the sexual taboos of her time for love and passion and then, as a consequence, faced the desperate situation of alienation, poverty and ultimately death. Conversely, in these modern war narratives the VAD is driven to break rigid sexual taboos in the desperate realization that death constantly threatens the annihilation of herself and those whom she loves. Nell Smith in Not So Quiet also exhibits this “seize the day” attitude toward sex. She yearns after months on the front for “the beauty of men who are whole and sane” and alive, and so sleeps with a young recruit fresh from England.50 She writes that We, who once blushed at the public mention of childbirth, now discuss such things as casually as once we discussed the latest play; whispered stories of immorality are of far less importance than a fresh cheese in the 47

West, p. 121. Ibid., pp. 123-4. 49 Ibid., p. 125. 50 Price, p. 164. 48

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canteen; chastity seems a mere waste of time in an area where youth is blotted out so quickly.51

Confirming her point, Nell’s sister, who also works on the front, becomes pregnant, doesn’t know who the father is, and gets a successful backstreet abortion only to be killed in an air-raid in France later that year. In each of these texts the VAD’s sudden exposure to young men, sex, and death has a profound impact on her thinking that rapidly radicalized her—a shift in perspective that ultimately alienates rather than empowers her. Originally protected by her family and a patriarchal order that demanded her quarantine from anything considered unseemly, vulgar or coarse, the provincial VAD found that in entering the public realm of male discourse and military might, she earned a rare and intimate view of the emperor and realized he had no clothes. Corinne in War Nurse, for example, begins to question her presumption that doctors are infallible and realizes after a time that they are completely inadequate to confront the atrocities of war that besieged the medical tents daily. In the following account, she reveals a sharp fall from innocence about the meaning of the war: At the beginning I’d taken it as natural that I didn’t know what the war was about. I was a woman, I wasn’t very bright, I’d never been considered to have a mind, I’ve never been mad on reading the papers. But I also took it for granted that somebody knew what it was about. That back of all of us, who were just helping out as soldiers and nurses and so on, there was someone who understood the situation and had it pretty well in hand. But all of a sudden we found that we had lost that feeling. We didn’t believe a soul knew anything about it. . . . The thing was just going right ahead, and no one could stop it.52

Corinne’s tone, largely representative of the general psychological transformation of the VAD in these narratives, has shifted from engaged and excited to cynical, worldly and disillusioned. Of course, men also were disillusioned by this recognition, but for women, this political fall from innocence had the added impact of a fatal blow to their participation in the social contract of patriarchy. In several instances, the women in these narratives return to England after the war refusing the pre-war social position of the bourgeois unmarried woman’s 51 52

Ibid., p. 165 West, p. 71.

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dependence on her father and taking up a feminist position of political activism and economic self-support. Vera Brittain, for example, writes: From the moment that the War ended I had always known . . . that after three years at Oxford and four of wartime adventure, my return to a position of subservient dependence at home would be tolerable neither for them nor for me. They understood now that freedom, however uncomfortable, and self-support, however hard to achieve, were the only conditions in which a feminist of the War generation . . . could do her work and maintain self-respect.53

While the VADs in these texts did not personally identify their sexual activity as a moral fall, their liberal wartime association with men did contribute to their rejection of mainstream societal gender expectations. And these five authors likened their protagonists’ subsequent alienation from conventional society because of their social trespasses to that suffered by the fallen woman. The social alienation of the VADs in these war chronicles may be physically most cogently embodied in their inability to have children after the war. At the heart of the Victorian image of the “good” woman, the angel/queen, is her capacity to mother, to give life to and nurture her babies. From this, she is to derive much pleasure and social esteem. Interestingly, Victorian social reformers found in the prostitute’s sexual deviancy an inherent physiological inability to conceive children.54 They believed that there was a link between her childless state and her choice of profession as a prostitute. Similarly, almost as though the protagonists in these war chronicles are being punished for their fallen status as VADs, they are left conspicuously bereft of their potential post-war role as mothers. Corinne Andrews in War Nurse, for example, “by repeated lifting of over-heavy weights, had gradually torn [her] uterus from [her] body.”55 She collapses in her own blood in an Army hospital in France and has to have a hysterectomy on the spot. According to writer Rebecca West, it happened to a good many overworked nurses in the war.56 More powerful than the physical trauma invoked in these texts, however, is the metaphor of psychological sterility, barrenness, and spiritual malaise that the war creates in this generation of women. Corinne Andrews explains,

53

Brittain, p. 536. Nead, p. 100. 55 West, p. 198. 56 Ibid., p. 56. 54

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You see, we thought that if we all backed up the armies by doing our best it would help to bring the war to an end. We had been brought up to believe that if you worked very hard and behaved very well, Heaven would reward you by making whatever you wanted happen. We also had a feeling that Heaven must be on the side of nice, quiet people, and undisturbed homes, and not killing each other. We had not yet been completely made over by the war. We had not yet been completely divorced from our childish beliefs and the faith of our fathers.57

Corinne Andrews returns to New York City, looking ahead to a childless marriage to a man she does not love, “awfully tired,” as she says, and wishing secretly for another war to give her life the meaning that it lacks in a post-war America where women are defined strictly in terms of family. Clearly, it is not that Corinne regrets her wartime experience and the knowledge she garners from it; rather she mourns the fact that the insights she gleaned are not shared by those who led civilian lives during the war. Similarly, the unmarried Joan Seddon, in We That Were Young, volunteers on behalf of the League of Nations but suffers from an intractable despair: In spite of her many activities, in spite of her genuine capacity for enjoyment, if Joan had been told, by someone who knew, that tomorrow she would have to leave all this and die, she would simply have said, “Oh!” At the roots of her being there lay a vast indifference.58

Like Joan, Nell from Not So Quiet returns to England psychologically wounded. She describes herself as “emotionless: “nothing will ever stir me again. I am dry. Worn out. Finished.”59 Yet out of loyalty to his military service and physical suffering, Nell insists upon marrying her fiancé, despite the ominous fact that she no longer feels the capacity to love. The third-person description of her in the final paragraph of the novel emphasizes the personal cost of her work as a VAD: Her soul died under a radiant silver moon in the spring of 1918 on the side of a blood-spattered trench. Around her lay the mangled dead and the dying. Her body was untouched, her heart beat calmly, the blood coursed as ever through her veins. But looking deep into those emotionless eyes one wondered if they had suffered much before the soul had left them. 57

Ibid., p. 67. Rathbone, p. 449. 59 Price, p. 213. 58

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Nell’s faded innocence, her hollow eyes, her intense suffering and her resignation mirror the iconography of the Victorian prostitute, who was often represented by print and visual artists in just this way to signal her inevitable downward spiral to misery and early death. Indeed, “Nello, as she is called in the later novels in the series, becomes downwardly mobile and ends up sleeping on the Embankment when what prostitutes now call `sex work’ is no longer available.”61 Vera Brittain, perhaps more than any other writer considered here, self-consciously and fully evokes the moral and spiritual malaise of the fallen woman to describe the VAD. At the end of the war, she writes in Testament of Youth: Once an ecstatic idealist who had tripped down the steep Buxton hill in a golden glow of self-dedication to my elementary duties at the Devonshire Hospital, I had now passed—like the rest of my contemporaries who had survived thus far—into a permanent state of numb disillusion. Whatever part of my brief adulthood I chose to look back upon—the restless pre-war months at home, the naïve activities of a college student, the tutelage to horror and death as a V.A.D. nurse, the ever-deepening night of fear and suspense and agony in a provincial town, in a university city, in London, in the Mediterranean, in France—it all seemed to have meant one thing, and one thing only, “a striving, and a striving, and an ending in nothing.”62

Brittain’s last line here quotes the epigraph to the second half of Olive Schreiner’s best-selling 1883 novel, The Story of an African Farm.63 The novel’s idealistic heroine, Lyndall, is reduced by the novel’s conclusion to the alienated status of fallen woman and the fate of death because of her subversive gender ideals. Like Lyndall and her VAD colleagues, Vera Brittain is never recognized for the heroism, sacrifice and trauma she endured (“a striving, and a striving, and an ending in nothing”). Instead, as we have seen, her war experience brands her as a tainted woman and marginalizes her from her culture. For many years after the war, Brittain suffers the “lethargy of post-war despair.”64 She describes herself as a “lost spirit,”—a term 60

Ibid., p. 239. Marcus, “Afterword,” p. 265. 62 Brittain, p. 458 63 Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm (New York: Penguin, 1995). 64 Brittain, p. 488. 61

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similar to “lost woman,” which was frequently invoked (along with “fallen woman” and “soiled dove”) to describe the nineteenth-century prostitute. When looking into the mirror, Brittain experiences nervous delusions, noting with horror a witch’s face looking back at her. She feels contaminated, too cynical, too steeped in the gritty realities of life to consider the romantic hopes of marriage and motherhood, regretfully rejecting these desires to instead give her energies fully to political activism and writing. She considers herself “nothing but a piece of wartime wreckage, living on ingloriously in a world that doesn’t want me!”65 She is alienated from the younger generation of post-war women scholars at Oxford who view her generation as simply foolish for allowing themselves to be seduced into the war. She is alienated from her family who sees her as a heroic patriot and can’t understand her despair and cynicism about the war. And she is alienated from her country, which wanted desperately not to dwell on the wounds of the war but to move on. Though Vera Brittain does, after some years, marry and have children, she does so within what she considers the context of a spiritual resurrection. “The fact that,” she says, “within ten years, I lost one world, and after a time rose again, as it were, from spiritual death to find another, seems to me one of the strongest arguments against suicide that life can provide.”66 The authors of the five texts considered here appropriate the fallen woman metaphor, invoking for their readers the familiar iconography of the nineteenth-century prostitute so that they can understand the radical alienation and dislocation of the VAD as the inevitable conclusion of her story of seduction and betrayal. Vera Brittain does eventually climb out of the bottom of her spiritual gulf, knowing that if she doesn’t, she will die.67 The protagonists in the four other texts discussed here are also spiritually wounded, sometimes fatally, by their fall. As victims of the war, they express regret at being seduced into the war by the patriotic idealism of their class, and they feel betrayed, not by the brutality of the war, but by those who refuse to acknowledge its wreckage. Though the VAD gained knowledge (and with it a freedom of sorts) absolutely inaccessible to other women in her class, these authors emphasize that it came at a terrible cost. In the best circumstances, the VAD heroines return to a post-war England that doesn’t recognize or respect their hard-gained experience; in the bitterest examples, they conclude their narratives describing themselves as fallen women, little more than walking dead—traumatized, alienated, hollow. These women 65

Ibid., p. 490. Ibid., p. 496. 67 Ibid., p. 519. 66

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much more closely resemble the psychologically impotent male soldiers Gilbert describes in “Soldier’s Heart” than her gleeful culture of liberated Amazons. In the act of transporting the Victorian fallen woman iconography from a Victorian landscape to the military terrain of World War I, the writers of these chronicles provide readers with a much more realistic account of the VAD’s sacrifice and trauma than earlier published narratives had provided of her role in the war. In addition and just as significantly, they explode the previously reified discursive categories of the fallen woman metaphor. Their simultaneous exploitation and revision of this powerful metaphor tacitly reveals an emerging understanding of the systemic hypocrisy at the heart of the Victorian separate spheres philosophy. By setting the Victorian separate spheres philosophy within the context of the patriotic, jingoist ideology of World War I, these writers are able simultaneously to critique both eras: the socio-political system at the heart of each relies upon the constructed innocence and altruism of the feminine domestic sphere to support and redeem the corruption at work within the broader masculine, public sphere. When these authors reveal their heroines as the sympathetic victims of this self-serving system, the authors enact a bold new literary expression that at once explodes the tyranny of the separate spheres philosophy and, at the same time, opens a pathway for women writers to modernism’s language of psychological despair and twentiethcentury social critique. In this way, it is not the VAD heroines of these war chronicles who represent models of women’s emancipation, as Gilbert would have it, but rather it is authors like Brittain, West, Smith, Rathbone and Borden who, with full agency, use the VAD’s story to expose the stultifying tyranny of the separate spheres philosophy and the trauma it induced in support of the Great War.

Works Cited Borden, Mary, The Forbidden Zone. New York: Doubleday, 1929. Brittain, Vera, Testament of Youth. New York: Penguin, 1994. Fussell, Paul, The Great War and Modern Memory. New York: Oxford, 1975. Gilbert, Sandra M., “Soldier’s Heart: Literary Men, Literary Women, and the Great War.” In Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, ed. Margaret Randolph Higonnet, 197-226. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, The Scarlet Letter. Boston: Bedford, 1991.

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Nead, Lynda, Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990. Patmore, Coventry, “The Angel in the House.” In Victorian Women: A Documentary Account of Women’s Lives in Nineteenth-Century England, France, and the United States, ed. Erna Olafson Hellerstein, 134-140. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1981. Price, Evadne [Helen Zenna Smith], Not So Quiet . . . Stepdaughters of War. New York: The Feminist Press, 1989 Rathbone, Irene, We That Were Young. New York: The Feminist Press, 1989. Schreiner, Olive, The Story of an African Farm, New York: Penguin, 1995. Smith, Lesley, Four Years Out of Life. New York: Minton, Balch & Co., 1931. Walkowitz, Judith, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992. West. Rebecca, War Nurse: the True Story of a Woman Who Lived, Loved and Suffered on the Western Front. New York: Cosmopolitan Book Corporation, 1930.

CHAPTER NINE MODERNISM, MATERNITY AND THE RADICAL WOMAN POET JULIA LISELLA

In a 1927 essay included in a special issue of the radical left American journal New Masses, poet Genevieve Taggard expressed the following sympathies for her fellow political artists: If I were in charge of a revolution, I’d get rid of every single artist immediately; and trust to luck that the fecundity of the earth would produce another crop when I had got some of the hard work done. Being an artist, I have the sense that a small child has when its mother is in the middle of house-work. I don’t intend to get in the way, and I hope that there’ll be an unmolested spot for me when things have quieted down.1

Taggard’s sense of bravado, her claim to authority over the “revolution” even as she relinquishes such authority, is evident from the phrase: “If I were in charge.” What is less obvious, 80 years later, is that Taggard, a poet who considered herself a modernist and a leftist, was inserting herself into a dialogue that was dominated by men, both within the New Masses editorial community and in wider leftist circles. All the more remarkable, then, is her effortless feminization of the “revolution.” On the turn of phrase, “Being an artist. . .” she manages to analogize the social movement to housework. Was the analogy an intentional, This essay is excerpted from the introductory chapter of a book in progress about the trope of maternity in the work of U.S. radical women writers of the 1930s. The essay here serves as an overview of the particular external and internal forces that shaped the poetry of radical women writers of the 1930s. Poets of central concern in the larger project include Mina Loy, Lucia Trent, Genevieve Taggard, Rosa Zagnoni Marinoni, Margaret Walker, and Muriel Rukeyser. 1 Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism, rev. ed. (1961; repr., New York: Columbia UP, 1992), 168.

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lighthearted dig at New Masses’ editor, Michael Gold, one of the Communist Party’s most famous literary critics and one of its leading proponents of proletarian literature? Gold and his male colleagues categorized the experimental literature of the modernists, which they described as “bourgeois art” based on “introspection and doubt,” as effete and inconsequential. They contrasted such art with proletarian writing, which they defined as strong and virile, in short, manly. In fact, Gold believed that literature influenced by “a world of revolutionary labor” produced an aesthetic for which John Reed had “poured out his rich manhood.” 2 By characterizing the pro-revolutionary artist as a wise child, and the revolution as a mother doing housework (work that is by its very nature relentless, repetitive, and necessary), could Taggard have been trying to send a message to her male readers that their shared enterprise need not be a contest in virility and that the categories of modernist and leftist need not be mutually exclusive? For Taggard, as for many of the radical women poets who also considered themselves modernists, political change and artistic experimentation could be simultaneously achieved. The road toward that collaboration between radical and modernist concerns was not a smooth one, however, especially for its women practitioners. In this essay I trace the internal and external struggles women faced to stake a claim on the leftist and modernist poetic project, within the Communist Party and wider leftist circles, within modernist circles, and out in the wider mainstream culture. Often, that claim was staked through the articulation of women’s specific experiences of sexuality, marriage, and motherhood. Though Taggard also seems to be playfully jibing artists she felt may have been developing too high a sense of their own self-importance, she, along with other politically radical women writers of the period, believed that women had a central role to play as artists in the “revolution.” Their “unmolested spot” was ensured as long as they kept their attention on the political work that needed to be done. Women wrote with authority about the social ills they witnessed and hoped to change. As Charlotte Nekola notes, “The aesthetics of revolutionary poetry in the 1930s called for works on a large and searching scale. [. . .] Cultural and political gains made by such movements as early-twentieth-century feminism and the Harlem renaissance joined with radical vision to open up possibilities of ‘big’ poems with ‘scope’ for women—the kind of poems called for in a

2

Constance Coiner, Better Red: The Writing and Resistance of Tillie Olsen and Meridel Le Sueur, (New York: Oxford UP, 1995), 20.

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decade of economic and political crisis.”3 Taggard’s poem, “Ode in a Time of Crisis” is one such “large” poem that addresses what Taggard felt was the United States’ misguided isolationism leading up to World War II. In it she writes with confidence, “It is a time of many errors now.”4 Although that radical spirit of the 20s and 30s liberated women poets’ sense of what could be included in a poem, the women’s poetry of the period also demonstrates a strong connection to traditional, feminized, nineteenth-century lyric forms and subject matter: love, gender relations, motherhood. Radical women writers often eschewed the label of “poetess” yet just as often used their culturally prescribed subject positions as mothers and daughters as an inroad into experiences that had not been given language. For example, although “Up State—Depression Summer,” from Genevieve Taggard’s 1936 collection, Calling Western Union, has now been widely anthologized5 as a prime example of Depression era poetry, the central relationships in the poem are domestic. The poem narrates the death of a young girl whose farming family can’t afford the medicine the doctor prescribes. By intertwining the pathos of a poor family with the politics of a middle class medical establishment and capitalistic system, Taggard makes clear that the illness at the center of the poem is an illness of poverty as well as of body: June was sinister sweet. Can you eat wild flowers? The world outside gilt-green, inside bone-bare. Evil, devil, pain in the belly hit them. Taxes, words with the grocer, rage . . . . The trouble veered And found a body small, for spring infection, White as the May, slim shoulders and naked ear Open for poison. Behind June-morning eyes The torpor spread. Suddenly the kid was sick.6

3

Charolotte Nekola and Paula Rabinowitz, eds., Writing Red: an Anthology of American Women Writers, 1930-1940, (New York: Feminist Press, 1987), 131. 4 Genevieve Taggard, Long View, (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1942), 5 See for example Cary Nelson’s Modern American Poetry, (New York: Oxford UP, 2000), 336, and the Heath Anthology of American Literature, 5th ed. (Ed. Paul Lauter; New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), in which the poem appears in a section called “ A Sheaf of Political Poetry.” 6 Genevieve Taggard, Calling Western Union, (New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1936).

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After the death of the girl, the mother, Emma, slowly deteriorates. Taggard makes the point that a poor farmer’s mental health is not a top national priority.7 Tom, the father of the girl, meanwhile, “found his cows, his second haying, found/The solid substance that he walked upon.” Childless, the mother can find no identity in her work on the farm; as a man, the father can find nothing but identity as a farmer. Despite Tom’s efforts, however, the farm falters, “They sold the calf. That fall the bank took over.” As Taggard’s poetry demonstrates, gender was a crucial category for radical women writers at the time. It’s important to Taggard that she highlight the varied response to the death of the daughter. For the mother, the daughter’s death is also a death of her own identity. One of the major ways in which radical women writers distinguished themselves from their political male colleagues as well as from their apolitical modernist counterparts was in their insistence on highlighting women subjects in their poems. Anecdotes about Marianne Moore or Elizabeth Bishop refusing to be included in anthologies of “women’s poetry” are more well known today8 than radical writer Josephine Herbst’s refusal in 1968 to be included in David Madden’s anthology, Proletarian Writers of the Thirties. Herbst, a reporter and novelist, and the only woman writer invited to address the American Writers Congress in 1935, responded to Madden’s request by saying that the definitions of proletarian literature were too narrow to encompass the work produced by her and many other radical women writers who were concerned with a “revolution in language, as in sex,” as much as with issues crucial to the working class and opposing fascism.9 Though women writers were encouraged to write about global issues, Herbst, Taggard, and others make clear in their literary productions and correspondence that they were not about to abandon their literary roots nor to allow their work to suggest that “women’s” issues were not of global and urgent concern. Gender identity, aesthetic identity, and political identity all acted their part in defining the 7

In a poem from the 1920s, “Evening Love-Of-Self,” in Collected Poems: 19181938 (New York & London: Harper, 1938), 132-145, Taggard makes a similar claim about the mental health of a less acceptable leftist subject, an aging middle class married woman with little to complain of except an unhappy marriage. What is important about reading these poems side by side is that Taggard seems to be making a claim for women across class lines—such claims made the left nervous. For a more extensive discussion of this poem, see my essay, “The Work of Lyric Discourse In a Long Poem By Genevieve Taggard,” at How2 (http://www.scc.rutgers.edu/however/v2_1_2003/current/readings/lisella2.shtm). 8 David Kalstone, Becoming a Poet, (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1989), 77. 9 Writing Red, 21

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work of the women poets in my study: Rosa Zagnoni Marinoni (18881970), Genevieve Taggard (1894-1948), Lucia Trent (1897-1977), Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980), and Margaret Walker (1915-1998). For the earlier generation, who I will focus on here (represented by Trent, Taggard, and Marinoni), the experience of maternity further differentiated and at times revolutionized their work. Though each of the women of this earlier generation came from vastly different economic and cultural backgrounds, they all had in common coming of age in the 1920s, an era of deep politicization and liberation for women artists. As Paula Rabinowitz points out, women writers of the 1930s benefited from the more sexually liberalizing effects of 1920s Greenwich Village culture and its surrounding social movements: For Herbst, as for many other women authors calling themselves literary radicals, the legacies of feminism, Freud, and modernist experimentation circulating within the culture of Greenwich Village during the 1920s supplemented their desire to write with the urgency that the issues of the 1930s demanded. These multiple influences sent women’s revolutionary writing on a different path from the one blazed out by Michael Gold and the other theorists.10

“Supplemented” is perhaps an odd word choice, as though women radicals picked their sources from a menu of options. Something much more organic seems to be at work in the radical poetry produced by women during the 1930s. Women poets from a variety of political and cultural backgrounds—some heavily influenced by the suffragist movement, others by Greenwich Village bohemian ideas on women’s sexuality, still others by their own working-class roots—all recognized the struggle of identifying women’s lives and work as part of their most radical literary project. Through lyric, they drew issues important to women into the realm of the urgent, at the same time that their male colleagues questioned the use of personal lyric, labeling it bourgeois and sentimental. Though Taggard identifies the artist as the child in the domestic scenario quoted earlier, women writers of the time probably had more in common with the mother portrayed by Taggard. They were doing the housework of the revolution—the daily labor of making their presence known as women and as artists, and of inserting “women’s” issues into a political culture that was at odds with and even often hostile to issues of gender, and a literary culture that was, at best, ambivalent about conventional forms of poetic expression. 10

Ibid, 21.

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Radical Women Poets and the Left The hostility on the left and in high modernist circles to issues of gender cannot be blamed simply, or at least not exclusively, on a knee-jerk gynophobia of male critics, artists, and political activists. Both men and women artists of the left played a part in suppressing or subsuming issues of gender to what seemed like more pressing material. At one time or another, Taggard and many others insisted that women’s issues must be tabled for more “global” concerns. Consider, for example, Taggard’s poem “Feed the Children.”11 In this poem, Taggard admonishes women that if they remain “conservative” and hold their husbands back from joining a strike for fear that the men will lose their jobs, they will certainly starve their children. Only a radical act, joining a strike, will prevent their families from starving. Similarly, Lucia Trent’s poem “Breed Women Breed” mockingly argues that women are reproducing only in the service of male capitalistic institutions and endeavors.12 In these poems, the poets rely on their essential “knowledge” as women to issue directives to women on behalf of the left. While this impulse toward the urgent and the global often produced some of the most polemical poetry I cover in this study, it also provided the tension through which women poets measured their debt to the lyric mode, to the radical left, and to a larger community of women writers. Each poem reignites the question for these women, “how can I” rather than “should I” speak as a woman. In a letter to Constance Coiner, Annette Rubinstein, longtime political activist and literary historian, cautions contemporary feminist critics against applying current feminist standards to the concerns of radical women of the 1930s: It is apparently very difficult for anyone who did not live through it to realize the emergency atmosphere of the early 30’s and to understand how irrelevant, almost impertinent, other issues seem when one is literally fighting hunger and homelessness for oneself and one’s family. When the lifeboat is swamped, the only relevant question about your partner is whether he or she can and will go on bailing. It is absurd to ask whether he promises to wash half the dishes when you get back to dry land.13

As Rubinstein notes, equality between the sexes was not always a radical woman writer’s, indeed any writer’s, top priority. At the same 11

Calling Western Union, 54-55. Lucia Trent, “Breed Women, Breed”, Children of Fire and Shadows, (Chicago: Packard, 1929). 13 Coiner, Better Red, 8. 12

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time, Elaine Hedges reminds us that the sense of economic and political emergency that guided the Communist Party (CP) and political activists and writers in general did not indicate an absence of discussion altogether on women’s issues. Particularly, Hedges notes that the CP supported strikes led by women, developed a women’s commission, published magazines geared to women readers of the party, and created CP “units” that were focused on particular constituencies of women, such as housewives. Despite these concessions to women members of the party, however, Hedges reminds her readers: The Party never recognized the special oppression of women: women’s roles and needs were not significantly distinguished from those of male workers; and Mary Inman’s feminist analysis, In Women’s Defense— which, in any case, did not appear until 1939—was not well received by the Party leadership. Inman argues that not just working-class women but all women were oppressed, and that housework was a major factor in capitalist oppression—an argument that conflicted with the Party position that wage labor was the key to oppression under capitalism.14

Consider Rosa Marinoni’s poem “Unemployed” in which she wryly notes that the Depression may have put men out of work, but women are, for better or worse, never unemployed: No machine can rob them of their work. No one wishes to take their places. Their hours cannot be shortened. Their wages cannot be lowered.15

Against the backdrop of park benches, breadlines, and closed factories Marinoni describes men as drowsing, muttering, or sulking, while women continue to work: washing, scrubbing, mending, cooking, rocking babies, nursing babies, soothing babies. It should not come as a surprise that a poem critical of unemployed men was written by one of the poets of this study who is least aligned with the left. A first-generation Italian immigrant who became the poet laureate of the Ozarks, Marinoni claimed no political affiliation. Instead, she published widely in radical left, as well as fascist-backed and mainstream journals, a fact that troubles her literary legacy.16 In fact, outside of 14

Elaine Hedges, Introduction, Ripening: Selected Work. Meridel Le Sueur, (New York: Feminist Press, 1982), 14. 15 Rosa Zagnoni Marinoni, Side Show (Philadelphia & New York: McKay, 1938), 101. 16 For a further discussion of this issue, see my essay on Rosa Marinoni, “Behind the Mask: Signs of Radicalism in the Work of Rosa Zagnoni Marinoni,” The Lost

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Genevieve Taggard, most of the women of this study did not claim close or at least consistent ties with CP-inspired radicalism. Lucia Trent inspired poets more generally to write socially committed poetry, urging them to write about “human needs and human suffering”17 Margaret Walker, who in the 1930s was a young new writer on the scene, never joined the CPUSA but her writing flourished under the tutelage of fellow writers and Communists Nelson Algren and Richard Wright. While working for Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal Federal Writers Project she felt awakened by the interstices of class and race, finding common ground between blacks and whites based on economics, but also gaining a clearer sense that the violent forces stacked against African Americans were both racial and economic.18 And though Muriel Rukeyser was dubbed the “Poster Girl” of proletariat literature in a 1943 Partisan Review article by William Phillips and Philip Rahv 19 (a title it isn’t clear she would have appreciated given its condescending tone), Rukeyser was eventually to distance herself from Communism, believing that party participation restricted her both politically and artistically, she remained a leftist all her life.20 Taggard was the most enthusiastic Party member; against growing international disclosures of Stalin’s violent regime in the Soviet Union, she never recanted her belief in the possibilities of a socialist revolution. Despite what appear to be inconsistent, if not tenuous signs of Communist allegiance among these writers, it is clear that Popular Front politics held currency in their work just as it did in the wider culture; these writers participated in a literary experiment that had everything to do with their World of Italian American Radicalism: Labor, Politics, and Culture, eds. Philip Cannistraro, Gerald Meyer (New York: Praeger Press, 2004). 17 Lucia Trent, “Aren’t Women Better Fitted Than Men to be Poets?” Trent, Lucia and Ralph Cheyney. More Power to Poets! (New York: Harrison, 1934). 18 Margaret Walker, “Growing Out of Shadows,” Common Ground. 4.1 (1943): 42-46. Rpt. in How I Wrote Jubilee and Other Essays on Life and Literature (New York: Feminist Press, 1990), 6. Years later, though Walker would concede that in the 1930s she was writing her “very best poetry,” she went on to describe her WPA days self-deprecatingly to fellow poet Nikki Giovanni: “I renounced all my academic background and my middle-class aspirations and I tagged along with a group that was both radical and bohemian.” A Poetic Equation: Conversations Between Margaret Walker and Nikki Giovanni, (Washington, D. C.: Howard UP, 1974), 48. 19 David Kadlec, “X-Ray Testimonials in Muriel Rukeyser.” Modernism/Modernity 5.1 (1998): 32, fn 33. 20 William L. Rukeyser, “Inventing a Life.” 299. In Ann F. Herzog and Janet E. Kaufman, eds., “How Shall We Tell Each Other Of the Poet?”: The Life and Writing of Muriel Rukeyser. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999).

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position as women and as radical political individuals. Each attempted to make her living as a writer and to make a place for herself in a literary and political culture that often defined itself, at least superficially, as “androcentric,” to borrow Constance Coiner’s description of Communist literary circles.21 That is, these women assumed their equality with men. At the same time, they struggled continually to remind the culture at large about women as a specific constituency. In such an atmosphere, their work about women’s domestic labor, psychic lives, and roles in the culture as mothers and daughters, by its very presence, often challenged the CPUSA’s purported goals of “human” liberty through socialism and communalism by pointing out the glaring discrepancies in the culture’s treatment of the sexes.

Radical Women Poets and Modernism How would our understanding of modernity change if instead of taking male experience as paradigmatic, we were to look instead at texts written primarily by or about women? And what if feminine phenomena, often seen as having a secondary or marginal status, were given a central importance in the analysis of the culture of modernity? What difference would such a procedure make? —Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity22

Up until more recent studies, literary historians cast modernism as a fait accompli by the 1930s, with The Wasteland its literary benchmark. Yet during the thirties, debates as to modernism’s cultural significance and usefulness were lively and loud, as I have begun to suggest. While leftist men objected to high modernism’s experimental nature as effeminate, the leftist women poets I discuss here seemed much more willing to claim the term modernist for their own—their objections to high modernism centered around what they saw as its nihilism, its aesthetic experiments that seemed divorced from real life struggles. Genevieve Taggard herself referred to the 1920s in Europe as “the dark ages”23 and in correspondence concerning the publication of T. S. Eliot’s “Prufrock” she wrote: “Eliot shows the first grown-up evidence of his hatred of humanity—his rejection of one half of the human race.” Of The Wasteland she said in the same letter: “Eliot comes out against everything that democracy in its 21

Better Red, 63 Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity, (Cambridge, MA, & London: Harvard UP, 1995). 23 Calling Western Union, xxx. 22

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growing expanding health stands for,” and she hopes that “he is . . . in our time, utterly defeated.”24 Taggard believed that Eliot’s brand of modernism was faulty on two counts: It was both sexist and cynical. Taggard is careful, though, to lodge her complaints as a “humanist” rather than a “feminist”—a move that suggests Taggard understood that to highlight women’s special oppression would not gain her points in either leftist or modernist circles. But Taggard also recognized Eliot’s potential to become the official voice of modernism, one that could win out over the humanistic thread of modernism Taggard felt she represented. Obviously, not all women writers of the period were publicly unified against T.S. Eliot, yet the writers of interest to us here each attempted to lessen the effects of modernism’s more nihilistic individuated tendencies by developing an aesthetic based on social witness, lyrical inventiveness, and feminist engagement. They sought to attend to modernist concerns for the new and challenging while grappling with real life issues. One can see this in Michael Gold’s global rejection of modernist experimentation as feminine and bourgeois, quoted earlier in the essay. Yet some women poets, too, rejected what they saw as modernism’s pretentiousness. Rosa Marinoni shared an impatience with modernism in an epigram, an acerbic form she had become well known for: “Yesterday I found the cook standing on her head in the kitchen. It reminded me of modernism. Just the old things turned about, and made less practical and a bit shocking.”25 Lucia Trent, along with her husband Ralph Cheyney, echoed Marinoni’s sentiments in a jointly written essay: “Increasing consideration has been given of late years to the so-called ‘cerebral poets,’ and other kindred spirits who retreat into their Ivory Towers and drop their effusions from its lofty but uninspiring eminence. [. . .] Assuredly, the Fugitive Group and the exponents of conceited cliques like Hart Crane, must be credited with the astounding achievement of piecing colorful and ingenious phrases into a wholly enigmatical ensemble. They have little to say of significance to anyone but themselves and those interested in deciphering their own introspective analyses.”26 Similarly, in his essay “The Literary Class War,” published in New Masses in August 1932, Philip Rahv defined modern formal experiments as “‘word-game[s]’ that provide ‘the ludicrous spectacle of grown-up people indulging in the most fatuous and infantile delusions.’” He compared these “word-dismembering experiments, which 24 Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century. Vol. 1. (New Haven & London: Yale UP, 1988), 216 25 Rosa Zagnoni Marinoni, Pine Needles, (New York: Parnassus, 1929), 25. 26 How To Profit From that Impulse, (New York: Dean, 1928), 54.

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the bourgeois illuminati take . . . quite seriously, (with) the well-known experiments of children with flies.”27 With the exception of Rosa Marinoni, the other women discussed in the study—Lucia Trent, Genevieve Taggard, Muriel Rukeyser, and Margaret Walker—willingly identified themselves as modernists or as having learned something from them and saw in modernism a linguistic protest that mirrored their social and political goals. Marxist journalist and poet Abe Magil expressed this when he argued against critic Philip Rahv’s characterization of modernism as so many “word-games,” saying that what Rahv “fails to understand is that some of these florid outbursts are the expression of a genuine protest (a confused, petty-bourgeois anarchist protest, it is true) against the existing order.” In a l980 interview with American left historian Paul Buhle, Magil noted that some of the people who shaped his early interest in poetry were modernists like T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, Thomas Hardy, H. D., and Robinson Jeffers.28 And even while suspicious of highly wrought erudite linguistic experimentation, Ralph Cheyney and Lucia Trent enthusiastically concluded in their essay “What is This Modernism?”: To modernists poetry is not a sugared sedative. Neither is it a tonic. It is more apt to be sap, blood. But chiefly it is poetry. It is not the choiring of simple souls. Rather is it the feeling aloud of a thinker whose mediations and meditations are burst in upon by a shouting army of workers tramping past belching mills lit by a rising sun.29

Writers like Magil, Trent, and Cheyney believed modernism and activism were branches of the same tree. Indeed, Trent and Cheyney’s vivid description portrays modernism as both individuated and happily “contaminated” (to borrow Andreas Huyssen’s term) by the masses, the “shouting army of workers.” Rukeyser directly responded to T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” with montage-like poems of her own, incorporating ancient and modern language, political and literary history, and Margaret Walker pointed to Langston Hughes as a clear influence on her work. So although some leftists felt the need to disassociate themselves entirely from modernism, many redefined its parameters to suit their needs. Whether leftist women writers declaimed modernism or embraced a particular branch of it, they were caught within an intensely gendered argument. Two unofficial mandates compelled them to produce an 27

Qtd. in Better Red, 21. Ibid, 22. 29 How To Profit From that Impulse, 36. 28

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alternative aesthetic: The first urged them to reveal that “other half of humanity”—women—in their writing; the second, which found its roots in the American Communist Party (CPUSA), compelled them to create a socially conscious art of the people. How would the American lyric fare under such a mandate? What did women bring to the question of making art during desperate times? While essentialist arguments that women valued one perspective over another because they were women are essentially dead-ends, it’s clear that conditions wrought both in political and literary circles forced women to engage differently with the political and literary questions of their times. Women’s political poetry of the period was a struggle for ascendancy, or at least for equal footing, for gender and genre as well as for political change. Women were a powerful force in literary and political circles in the 1930s, and they shared, with male artists, a faith in the capacity of literature to confront oppression and powerlessness in all its forms. That modernism was a reaction to an increasingly capitalist and technological world is now a well-established critical position.30 Men and women artists from both sides of the Atlantic, and both ends of the political spectrum, shared a desire to rework the nature of the lyric voice. But how each would reinvent the lyric often depended on his or her political inclinations. Many leftists agreed with Taggard, who challenged the Romantic ideal of “The Artist” and of the work of art. She believed Romanticism’s hyperindividualistic impulse needed to be transformed into something more representative of communities and group struggle: “For more than a century poets have been bred on the romantic notion that the individual is capable of godlike perfection. This is poison food, and those who eat it die a lingering and pallid death. [. . .] The future society will insist that the poet cease his childlike feud with society. The poet of the workingclass [sic] will not be cut off from the source of power: the lives of the people with whom he lives.”31 This belief that art must and would rise out of the masses enjoyed popularity. As Michael Tratner points out, the culture at

30

See for example texts by Rita Barnard, The Great Depression and the Culture of Abundance: Kenneth Fearing, Nathanael West, and Mass Culture in the 1930s. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995); Marianne DeKoven, Rich and Strange: Gender, History, Modernism, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1991); Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century, (New York: Verso, 1997) ; and Andreas Huyssen’s After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism, (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1986). 31 Calling Western Union, 31.

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large was involved in a great effort to turn away from a 19th century individualist sensibility and toward mass movements: Emerging together in the early twentieth century were modernist literary forms, collectivist political theories, new intellectual disciplines such as sociology and anthropology, mass movements such as socialism, feminism, and Fascism, and new collective or corporate structures of mass society such as unions, welfare systems, corporations, and modern political parties. The lines of influence went in all directions.32

Modernism itself, Tratner argues, articulated the meanings expressed by the masses. He asserts that both conservative and progressive modernists (he groups Eliot and Yeats as conservatives, Joyce and Woolf as progressives) believed their work was a part of this mass expression. Directly countering Tratner’s notion that modernism sprang out of mass culture and was part of it is the more widely embraced New Critical idea that maintained that modernism, or Modernism, proposed itself as the antidote to mass culture rather than as a gritty participant. According to Andreas Huyssen in After the Great Divide, this “fear of contamination” by the masses, which Huyssen asserts was often figured as female, was continuously and contemporaneously challenged by artists as well: Modernism’s “obsessive hostility to mass culture, its radical separation from the culture of everyday life, and its programmatic distance from political, economic, and social concerns” were tenets that met challenges as soon as they arose. Huyssen claims that such anxiety has served to keep this dichotomy between high art and mass culture “amazingly resilient” over the years. Yet Huyssen explains that concurrent responses to “high art” included the historical avant-garde: Berlin Dada; Russian constructivism; futurism and proletcult in the years following the Russian Revolution; and French surrealism. According to Huyssen, these politically motivated experimentalist movements were either “liquidated or driven into exile by fascism and Stalinism.” The avant-garde remnants were later “retrospectively absorbed by modernist high culture even to the extent that ‘modernism’ and ‘avant-garde’ became synonymous terms in the critical discourse.”33 Despite the many poststructural treatments of modernism available to critics and teachers today, we still tend to accept as the “official story” of modernism the New Critical, T. S. Eliot version in which political art and high art never meet. Huyssen’s revision of the modernist period reminds us of the fluidity that existed between 32 33

Michael Tratner, Modernism and Mass Politics, (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995), 6. Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide, x-xi

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modernism and mass culture and, for my purposes, between allegedly apolitical poetry and consciously political poetry. Women poets had an intense stake in reacting against modernism’s supposed distance from “the people” because of the ways in which “the people” were often figured as female. For women, modernist debates were not only about a crisis of form, but about artistic and political identity as well. As Suzanne Clark observes, Modernism inaugurated a reversal of values which emphasized erotic desire, not love; anarchic rupture and innovation rather than the conventional appeals of sentimental languages. Modernism reversed the increasing influence of women’s writing, discrediting the literary past and especially that sentimental history. Women themselves participated in this unwarranting. In the United States this reversal against the sentimental helped to establish beleaguered avant-garde intellectuals as a discourse community, defined by its adversarial relationship to domestic culture.34

This characterization of modernism may be totalizing. Modernism itself was not responsible for “discrediting the literary past” of women, but our critical treatment of modernism has managed to do that job quite efficiently. For example, while contemporary feminist critics eagerly claim some of the very women Clark has described as part of the intellectual culture hostile to domesticity such as Gertrude Stein and Djuna Barnes, they have ignored more accessible, emotionally driven writing by women like Trent, Marinoni and Taggard, and up until recently even the more formally complicated yet obviously political poetry of Muriel Rukeyser and Margaret Walker because of the status both women achieved as “popular” poets.35 Both New Critical treatments of modernism and leftist histories of the 1930s have gone a long way toward silencing these more traditional female voices, by which I mean, writers more willing to align poetry and female experience. But Clark’s argument is useful because it clearly focuses on the quandary of women artists of the time to define their poetics. In order to 34

Suzanne Clark, Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word, (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991), 1. 35 According to George Bradley, author of the introductory essay in The Yale Younger Poets Anthology, (New Haven & London: Yale UP, 1998), Stephen Vincent Benét, both Rukeyser’s and Walker’s editor at Yale University Press, had a penchant for choosing “popular” poets (liii), meaning their titles sold exceptionally well. Rukeyser’s first book sold more than 1,400 copies, and Walker’s sold more than 5,000 (Bradley xlviii), both numbers then unheard of for a book of poems and rarely surpassed today.

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be considered serious artists, women struggled to unyoke themselves from the term “poetess.” At the same time, while some women chose to assert their power by using experimental forms, the women writers who inspired this study chose a road that complicates their current critical treatment. They chose accessibility of language over difficulty, and they often chose the despised, old forms associated with bourgeois sentimentalism such as the short personal lyric. Moreover, even as radical women poets attempted to flee the category of “poetess,” their lyrics often defiantly focus on “women’s” issues of maternity, child care, domestic labor, the psychic bonds of marriage, the difficulties of relationships, and sexuality for the modern woman. Increasingly through the 30s, poems appeared by women about class conflicts specifically between women. By addressing these topics, women poets tested the claims of literary critics and artists of their own time that such attention to women’s issues would ghettoize their work and bind it to the sentimental. In addition, they produced work that at times transformed the personal American lyric into a new form or forms that could join the public, the political, and the personal together, often creating a hybrid, documentary lyric. Nevertheless, within progressive political circles women writers, though numerous, were suspect. Their concerns were seen as either too close to the earth, or not close enough. To what extent could a woman write out of the material lives of other women (much less out of her own subjective reality)—outlining the dangers and difficulties of pregnancy, labor, and child rearing, for example—without being accused of being so associated with nature that she could not grasp complex philosophical political arguments? If she was to participate in a truly revolutionary poetic project, need she avoid “the merely private”? Further, if a woman ignored or denied the lived experiences of other women in her work, could she be considered serious enough as a political artist, or was she merely “experimental” and therefore too bourgeois to be considered radical? For the politically radical writer, Poetry was a weapon of class struggle: this[sic] was the main message of literary radicalism. Its focus was to be social, public, and mass—not private. Bourgeois poetry, radical critics said, suffered from an excess of private despair and hid in language too highly wrought and too obscure for a mass audience. It led readers to mere escapism, wandering in a

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subjective wasteland. Revolutionary poetry should speak directly, address experience, and incite collective social action.36

Given these restrictions and specific goals, poets of the period struggled with both tradition and modernist developments. Creating a political lyric was a challenge because lyric, from Romanticism on, had spoken so specifically from an individuated consciousness. Women’s responses to the challenge were therefore highly fraught with contradictions: Just ten years after gaining the vote—surely a symbol of individuated voice amidst community—they were being asked to sublimate individuation in their poetry for the greater good, and the greater good continued to be defined in terms of male experience. This is not to suggest that women writers who remained outside political circles faired much better in terms of being considered equal participants in a modernist poetic project. Celeste Schenck aptly describes the difficult status of all women modernists as a “double bind” in which, “Women are always subjected to competing stereotypes: they are both ‘beneath’ culture—too mired in nature to master the codes or poetic forms—and (notably in and after the Victorian period) ‘upholders of’ culture—hence, rigid, conservative, form-bound, repressive of spontaneity and experimentation.”37 Schenck’s “double bind” may aptly characterize contemporary critical approaches to women modernists as well. Indeed, as I noted earlier, some of the women Suzanne Clark had in mind in Sentimental Modernism who shied away from any association with conventional domestic life have received, not accidentally, the most critical attention in recent recoveries of “lost” women’s voices. Feminist critics, for the most part, rarely choose to study the women who intended their poetry to be accessible, popular, and persuasive, thus ironically replicating the modernist preference for the difficult and the experimental. Cary Nelson puts it this way: “It is reasonable to claim, indeed, that our fixation on the story of experimentalist triumph—the hallmark of modernism as it has been marketed by academics for fifty years—has blinded us to other ways of configuring modern poetry.”38 Celeste Schenck goes as far as to suggest that as critics we have “fetishized” difficulty so that, “even a critical theorist like Julia Kristeva might co36

Writing Red 129 Celeste Schenck, “Exiled by Genre: Modernism, Canonicity, and the Politics of Exclusion” in Women’s Writing in Exile. Eds. Mary Lynn Broe and Angela Ingram, (Chapel Hill & London: U of North Carolina P., 1989), 228-229. 38 Cary Nelson, Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory 1910-1945, (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1989), 323. 37

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conspire in a Modernist hegemony that fetishizes formal experiment.39 Studying women’s radical poetry of the 1930s, inspired either directly by the CPUSA or more generally by progressive American movements such as American socialism, feminism, or trade unionism, provides another way for us to revise our literary history. A radical woman poet was radical on two counts, then, or bound on two counts. If she wrote in an experimental vein other leftist writers might consider her work bourgeois; if she wrote in traditional or conventional forms both apolitical and leftist writers might label her sentimental and therefore, un-modern. If she wrote about women’s lives her critics on the left might think she was neglecting the “real” struggle of workers, that is, male workers. If she ignored women’s lives, she was, as Suzanne Clark puts it, “participating in her own unwarranting.” Just as women were caught in a double bind, so they had a “double stake in refusing aesthetic detachment: they could speak outside of an inherited literary tradition, and they could speak for their own route to liberation as they spoke for others.”40 The most common element, then, about the women writers in this study is their fusion of the personal with social and global political issues, with political being defined by each poet within the complicated double bind I have just described. Their poems reveal a process, a type of linguistic and content-driven experimentation that has up until now remained unnamed or undervalued. Their poetry represents an engaged dialogue with the aesthetic and the moral criteria they encountered in both modernist and leftist circles.

Representations of Maternity in the 1930s I’ve never heard anything about how a woman feels who is going to have a child, or about how a pear tree feels bearing fruit. I would like to read these things many years from now . . . —Meridel Le Sueur, “Annunciation” The female ideal of motherhood was loudly praised during the Depression as the symbol of that most fundamental of traditional institutions, the family. —Wendy Kozol, “Madonnas of the Fields” The experience of maternity makes a woman reach out beyond self to the child. It leads her through the shadow of death to bring birth. . . . Her 39 40

Schenck, 230-231. Writing Red, 133.

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sacrifice for new life both in bearing and rearing children also helps her fill the poet’s role of giving voice to the inarticulate.” —Lucia Trent, “Aren’t Women Better Fitted than Men to be Poets?”

Women’s promised sexual liberation of the bohemian 1920s collided with and ultimately collapsed against Depression-era images of maternal goodness and strength. This widespread cultural shift in attitude about women’s sexual freedom from independence to the sanctity of family life was reflected within the CPUSA as much as it was felt in mainstream American culture. Constance Coiner explains that post-1936, as the CPUSA began working actively with more mainstream progressive and democratic groups against European fascism, the Party became careful about not wanting to antagonize these delicate coalitions. One issue that Coiner believes the left sacrificed was that of women’s reproductive rights. While leftists like Genevieve Taggard were joining with reproductive rights advocate Margaret Sanger, not a CP member herself, the official stance of the CPUSA was decidedly anti-abortion and profamily. The CPUSA’s shift away from the issue was mirrored in the Soviet Union, where Lenin was declaring such free-love advocates as Alexandra Kollantai, the only female member of the Bolshevik central committee and the Soviet Union’s first Commissar of Social Welfare, as “subversive” because she threatened the growth of more Soviet families to support the new system. Although Kollantai’s ideas of love among equal partners and the abolition of the bourgeois family clearly flowed directly from Marx and Engels’ notion in The Origin of the Family that love would develop into a higher form under communism, Lenin found such sexually liberating notions too dangerous to the growth of the new Soviet Union. According to Coiner, American Communism easily imported Lenin’s socially conservative views regarding women and family, as such notions coincided neatly with the more puritanical American view of maternity as an asexual state. Coiner recounts the many ways in which maternity was portrayed in official CPUSA publications as in the best interests of women. Any resistance to reproduction was portrayed as a male malady, attributable to their selfishness or their wayward sexuality.41 Only a few years earlier, in the early 1910s, women had explored maternity as an experience that could establish women’s sexual power and independence. Avant-garde modernists like Mina Loy and radical leftist women like Alexandra Kollantai advanced the notion of women as autonomous sexual beings whose claim on motherhood did not define them or their roles in society but added to their power as women. The “new woman” of the 41

Better Red, 54-58.

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1910s and 1920s was, by the 1930s, replaced by the mater dolorosa as women’s cultural importance as mothers took precedence over their sexuality. Why was it that one of the most politically radical periods in U.S. history was also one of the most repressive for women? Leftist women writers of the 1930s negotiated a number of ongoing binarisms: Gender issues clashed with pressing issues of class; individualism and the force of the lyric voice ran fiercely against an ideal of communal language; and the image of the long-suffering mother ran counter to and at times risked suffocating the voice of “real” women who mothered, worked, wrote, and marched for change. As the small sampling of radical women’s poetry I have offered here so far suggests, poems and commentary from a variety of women writers hint at the extent to which female experience during the 1930s was equated with experiences of maternity, domesticity, and family life. The particular reasons for this elision of femininity and maternity by women artists themselves as well as by the larger culture can be explained historically, but probably require a more in-depth discussion than is possible in this overview of lyricism, radicalism, and women’s writing.42 What I would like to interrogate here are the forms through which maternity was explored. As I have been arguing, critics often characterize modernism as being marked by linguistic experimentation. Having taken the critical position that we need to expand the definition of modernist writing to include politically radical contributions, I contend in this study that maternity itself could be defined as a modernist preoccupation. Radical women writers could be defined in part by their willingness to include stories of pregnancy, labor, miscarriage, infant death, as well as the death of grown children, domestic and more widespread abuse, and childcare in their literature. This phenomenon is most obvious in the work of Marinoni, Taggard, and Trent, but even in the work of Margaret Walker and Muriel Rukeyser, I will argue, who were not yet mothers themselves

42

Connections between femininity and maternity and its aesthetic and historical repercussions are well documented. See for example, E. Ann Kaplan’s Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama, (London & New York: Routledge, 1992), Brenda O. Daly and Maureen T. Reddy’s anthology of essays, Narrating Mothers: Theorizing Maternal Subjectivities, (Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1991), S. N. Garner, et. al.’s anthology of essays, The (M)other Tongue, (Cornell: Cornell UP, 1985), especially Susan Rubin Suleiman’s essay, “Writing and Motherhood,” 352-377.

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when they wrote their poems of the 1930s, 43 maternity and domesticity emerge as subthemes that allow these younger poets to develop a feminized radicalism defined as much in reaction against patriarchal institutions as in reaction to women’s participation in those institutions as mothers, lovers, artists, and citizens. Maternity as a female experience could both unite and differentiate women of various classes and races, as Marinoni’s depictions of farming women of the Ozarks demonstrates most clearly. While some of Marinoni’s mother figures fit the mater dolorosa stereotype, others are Amazonian in strength. Maternity could also express desire for connections among women, and between women and pressing global issues, such as war, fascism, and racism, as it does in Taggard’s work. Taggard continually questions whether maternity is a conservative or radicalizing force in her own life in her most introspective poems on the subject. For Lucia Trent, maternity engenders authority to speak both politically and emotionally. And finally, the maternal trope could represent the most primordial and ancient forces of the feminine, as it often does in the early poems of Rukeyser and Walker. The passages I provide above from 1930s writers Lucia Trent and Meridel Le Sueur, and the quote from Wendy Kozol, a current historian interested in representations of women in the 1930s, provide some models through which we can shape the debate about maternity and its uses in the 1930s. In these quotes a common vision emerges: each writer above problematizes the aesthetic value of maternity at the same time that she points out its explosive and radicalizing potential. The passage taken from Le Sueur’s story “Annunciation” comes out of a celebration of women’s power to procreate that would make an anti-essentialist feminist’s hair stand on end. Yet “Annunciation” does not only idealize but also validates her main character’s desire to reproduce in the middle of the Depression years, a desire the unemployed husband in the story finds not only puzzling but also politically repulsive. In addition, Le Sueur’s main character expresses a desire common among radical women writers of the 1930s to have revealed a “true” account about women’s physical and 43

I do not want to suggest here that a poet need be a mother first in order to address maternity in their work. I am simply pointing out that experientially and generationally, these groups of artists stand at a distance from each other. Rukeyser would eventually have a child and write a series of poems about the experience in the late 1940s. Walker’s most investigative treatment of maternity can be found in her novel Jubilee, which she conceived in the 1930s but wasn’t able to complete until the 1960s, due in large part to her actual role as an academic and the mother of four.

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psychic lives that might go beyond the political rhetoric of motherhood. In the story, a young pregnant woman staying in a boarding house without friends or relatives contemplates the wisdom of remaining pregnant (or more pointedly, assumes the wisdom of it) while her unemployed husband scours the town each day for work. The story is as much a meditation on childbearing as it is a meditation on writing about childbearing: “I would like to read these things many years from now, when I am barren and no longer trembling like this, when I get like the women in this house, or like the woman in the closed room, I can hear her breathing in the afternoon.”44 In the passage, the young narrator imagines herself as an older woman living among the women she’s met in the boarding house—solitary yet close enough to hear each other breathe. Le Sueur points to the dynamic relationship between two impulses: a desire to articulate what she has no language for—the experience of pregnancy—as well as the desire to build a common vocabulary of women’s experiences for an inner community of working-class women. For Le Sueur, the story of women as a community and the story of maternity cannot be easily separated, whether a woman chooses to become a mother or not. The “truth” about women’s experiences of childbirth, the potential for a woman writer to reveal that truth, and the truth about women’s lives all become inextricably linked, and therefore, for Le Sueur, politically important. The passage from Wendy Kozol is taken from the author’s sociohistorical and seemingly anti-essentialist analysis of the documentary photographs of women taken by the Resettlement Administration & Farm Security Administration (RA/FSA) and supported by President Roosevelt’s New Deal. Kozol explains that the New Deal documentary project encouraged its photographers to humanize the face of poverty by focusing on images of women and their children, preferably white women, in order to garner “proper” sympathy from a mainstream middle class.45 Kozol goes to great lengths to problematize the maternal images created by the project:

44

Ripening: Selected Work, (New York: Feminist Press, 1982), 130. This is not to say that leftists did not find these images of the working poor, especially women, compelling, making Kozol’s argument all the more problematic. Some of the most documentary-like poems of Marinoni, Taggard, Rukeyser, and Walker were shaped as much by first-hand witness as they were by the images that emerged from New Deal projects. See, for example, Walker’s essay “Growing Out of Shadow,” first published in Common Ground in 1943 and reprinted in How I Wrote Jubilee and Other Essays, enthusiastically supporting Roosevelt’s New Deal politics.

45

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Critics heralded the New Deal as an innovative plan which consolidated the social welfare state. Yet, in significant ways it was a conservative program which relied upon patriarchal values and nationalism as ideological tools to support a flagging political economy. While New Deal relief programs were aimed at impoverished Americans, appeals for funding and support by necessity focused on middle-class and congressional audiences.46

Through a policy based on what Kozol terms “a rhetoric of accidental poverty,” the RA/FSA documentary photography project “presented to the nation not drifters and loafers but proud Americans victimized by disasters beyond their control.”47 Inevitably, these images were of women as longsuffering and innocent mothers. The ideological intentions of the New Deal project seem less sinister than Kozol portrays them when seen through the wider cultural practice of portraying women as victims. As Sara Ruddick explains, “In many Western cultures women are portrayed as strong and brave victims of circumstances over which they have little control. Their sufferings and sacrifices are expected; they persevere in a violent world—but they bear no responsibility for it.”48 Indeed, Kozol’s critical stance toward the documentary project belies an underlying, even sympathetically essentialist argument that, despite the fact that a patriarchal New Deal ideology “birthed” the documentary photos of longsuffering mother-farmers, these sentimental visions of women as mothers nonetheless possessed some radical and radicalizing potential as images of women as human. In a telling moment in the essay, Kozol reverses her own assessment of the photos as hopeless products of a system uninterested in systemic change. She points to a portrait of a black woman tenant farmer who is shown full-length and who looks very powerful and dignified in the landscape. For Kozol, this is a photo that threatens to break out of that “passive victim” container of many of the FSA photos: “The power of the government to control events is replicated in the active power of the viewer’s look. The recipient of aid, rendered passive by the state, is also powerless against the gaze. Yet, these power relations are never fully contained. The focus on heroic individuals also encodes other resistant messages.”49 For Kozol, one of the most resistant messages these photos contained was that of the subjects’ “powerful humanity.” 46

Wendy Kozol, “Madonnas of the Fields: Photography, Gender, and 1930s Farm Relief.” Genders 2 (Summer 1988): 1-23, 1. 47 Ibid, 1. 48 Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace, (Boston: Beacon, 1989), 156. 49 Kozol, 7.

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Likewise, radical women writers at turns participated in the casting of women in the role of the mater dolorosa, the blameless and ever-suffering mother and the ultimate victim, but they also challenged those images with their own images of disquieting humanity. This tendency can be seen most clearly in Rosa Marinoni’s poems of social witness, but we can also trace such moments that hover between sentimentality/idealization and radicalism in the work of Trent, Taggard, Rukeyser, and Walker. Each of these poets approaches her subjects from a middle-class perspective. But their moments of witness, in the best circumstances, become more radical expressions of identification with the subjects. Lucia Trent’s question, “are women better fitted than men to be poets?” rallies women writers to face their identity, to write about it rather than mask it, to write from a “female” perspective. Trent subdivides the work of her contemporary women poets into three groups. The first write in imitation of men, “Many women who think themselves feminists prove to be very bad feminists indeed by trying to be unfeminine. They question men's superiority by their words but seem to try to prove it by their lives through the subtlest form of flattery: imitation. Thus, book after book by our women poets can only be recognized as a feminine product by the name on the title-page—and some women poets even take masculine names or hide their sex behind initials.” The second group write as “Victorian poetesses” and produce “the dainty, silvery tinkle of trivial verse. . . They are content in the role of minor melodists. Their loquacious stream purls its placid way, too shallow to bear any appreciable cargoes of thought. They are too legion for names. Though they may sing as women and write of feminine interests, it is as wholly conventional women absorbed with tea-table topics.” But finally, the women poets Trent argues for more women writers to emulate are those who write with “tenderness and the primal strength of a maternal outlook upon life.” Trent asserts that a woman poet need not have experienced motherhood “in order to deal more directly than most men with lives rather than things, with vital values rather than abstractions.” Again, as Celeste Schenck has pointed out in her work on traditional verse and women writers, even the women themselves set up a dichotomy between “the real” and female experience and the philosophical, abstract, and wide ranging and male acumen. Despite this tendency of some political women writers to mark themselves as of the earth and the heart rather than the world and the intellect, the poetry produced in the 1930s, and the literary cultures that grew around that poetry, seem to suggest that whether women dealt with maternity experientially or on the level of witness, or even on the level of “attentive daughters,” to borrow a

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phrase from Sara Ruddick,50 they did so at the risk of engaging and capitulating to 1930s social, cultural expectations of women’s domesticity and sentimentalism even as they saw themselves as challenging these categories through their work. Exploring motherhood as an inroad for either political or sexual or even aesthetic power as Trent tried to do was fraught with its own contradictions and the poetry of the period reveals those tensions— moments, for example, when the sentimental image could not be accommodated by or ameliorated by a radical social or political vision; moments when the mothering woman was foregrounded for polemically suspect purposes; or moments when lyric voice could not hold an essentializing moment together for the poet; and finally, in contrast to Trent’s claim and LeSueur’s desire, even moments of resistance when poets questioned the validity of the maternal experience as a representative experience for all women. In Writing Red, Charlotte Nekola characterizes women’s revolutionary writing, that is, writing committed to socialist and progressive politics, as a “refusal of modernism and aestheticism.”51 But as I have argued in this introductory chapter, women’s political writing of the 1930s was not a blanket refusal of either category. As Celeste Schenck and other critics have shown, questions of genre and approach were political questions, especially as these women tried to evoke a revolutionary vision in their writing. Radical women poets argued to varying degrees with leftist 50

Ruddick’s text is intended as a philosophical reflection on the capacity of “maternal thinking” to be learned by both men and women to develop an antiviolence philosophy. Ruddick’s ideas about attentive daughterhood and its radical potential are useful here. She adapts the idea of the “attentive daughter” from literary sources such as Ondine in Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby, who says “[If a girl] never learns how to be a daughter, she can’t never know how to be a woman,” as well as from the writing of literary critic Mary Helen Washington, who notes that “the educated daughters need to open the ‘sealed letter’ their mothers ‘could not plainly read.’” In turn, Ruddick explains attentive daughterhood as: “really listening when mothers speak. Obviously, listening respectfully to maternal thinking cannot mean accepting the conditions in which mothers have been disdained and their work devalued. Indeed, given the contempt that mothers suffer, listening could be considered an act of resistance. Nor does respectful listening mean accepting, let alone celebrating, maternal voices as they are. Daughters are not likely to give up a hard-won, hard-held critical stance.” Listening, like witnessing, becomes another moment of feminized resistance for some radical women poets. Maternal Thinking, 39-40. 51 Writing Red, 131.

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didacticism, traditional expectations of women, and a modernist attempt to decontaminate itself of mass culture and populist notions. Their lyrical moves toward public voice evidence these various struggles.

Works Cited Aaron, Daniel, Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism, rev. ed. 1961; repr., New York: Columbia UP, 1992. Bradley, George, The Yale Younger Poets Anthology, introduction. New Haven & London: Yale UP, 1998. Cannistraro, Philip, and Gerald Meyer eds. “Behind the Mask: Signs of Radicalism in the Work of Rosa Zagnoni Marinoni,” The Lost World of Italian American Radicalism: Labor, Politics, and Culture. New York: Praeger Press, 2004. Clark, Suzanne, Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991. Coiner, Constance, Better Red: The Writing and Resistance of Tillie Olsen and Meridel Le Sueur. New York: Oxford UP, 1995. Felski, Rita, The Gender of Modernity. Cambridge, MA, & London: Harvard UP, 1995. Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century. Vol. 1. New Haven & London: Yale UP, 1988. Kadlec, David, “X-Ray Testimonials in Muriel Rukeyser.” Modernism/Modernity 5.1 (1998): 32, fn 33. Kalstone, David, Becoming a Poet. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1989. Kozol, Wendy, “Madonnas of the Fields: Photography, Gender, and 1930s Farm Relief.” In Genders 2, 1-23. Summer 1988. Marinoni, Rosa Zagnoni, Pine Needles. New York: Parnassus, 1929. —. Side Show. Philadelphia & New York: McKay, 1938. Nekola, Charolotte and Paula Rabinowitz, eds., Writing Red: an Anthology of American Women Writers, 1930-1940. New York: Feminist Press, 1987. Nelson, Cary, Modern American Poetry. New York: Oxford UP, 2000. —. Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory 1910-1945. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1989. Ruddick, Sara, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace. Boston: Beacon, 1989. Rukeyser, William L., “Inventing a Life.” In “How Shall We Tell Each Other Of the Poet?”: The Life and Writing of Muriel Rukeyser, ed.

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Ann F. Herzog and Janet E. Kaufman, 299. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Schenck, Celeste, “Exiled by Genre: Modernism, Canonicity, and the Politics of Exclusion.” In Women’s Writing in Exile, eds. Mary Lynn Broe and Angela Ingram. Chapel Hill & London: U of North Carolina P., 1989. Taggard, Genevieve, Calling Western Union. New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1936. —. Long View. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1942. —. “ A Sheaf of Political Poetry.” In The Heath Anthology of American Literature, edited by Paul Lauter. 5th ed. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005. Tratner, Michael, Modernism and Mass Politics. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995. Trent, Lucia, “Breed Women, Breed.” In Children of Fire and Shadows. Chicago: Packard, 1929. —. “Aren’t Women Better Fitted Than Men to be Poets?” More Power to Poets! Lucia Trent and Ralph Cheyney. New York: Harrison, 1934. Walker, Margaret, “Growing Out of Shadows,” Common Ground. 4.1 (1943): 42-46. Rpt. in How I Wrote Jubilee and Other Essays on Life and Literature. New York: Feminist Press, 1990. How To Profit From that Impulse. New York: Dean, 1928. A Poetic Equation: Conversations Between Margaret Walker and Nikki Giovanni. Washington, D. C.: Howard UP, 1974. Ripening: Selected Work. New York: Feminist Press, 1982.

CHAPTER TEN RIDERS OF THE NEW WAVE: THE FEMINIST SCIENCE FICTION OF LE GUIN, RUSS, AND TIPTREE ALAYNE M. PETERSON

“What women do is survive. We live by ones and twos in the chinks of your world-machine.” —James Tiptree, Jr. “The Women Men Don’t See”

In the introduction to her collection of essays titled Alien Constructions: Science Fiction and Feminist Thought, Patricia Melzer argues that science fiction “is valuable to feminists because of its particular narrative mode. Two textual aspects that define science fiction are the structures and/or narrative devices that constitute its mode, on one hand, and themes and approaches on the other” [emphasis hers] and is concerned with …the element of estrangement, or the confrontation of normative systems/perspectives, and the implication of new sets of norms that result in the factual reporting of fiction…Science fiction stories can create “blueprints” of social theories. Only within genres of the fantastic is it possible to imagine completely new social orders and ways of being that differ radically from human existence as we know it.1

Speculative/science fiction as a genre seems to have been largely ignored by modern literary criticism until fairly recently. As James Gunn points out in the foreword to The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, in 1971 writers were coming to “the realization that science fiction was capable of greater sophistication and that it was worthy of 1 Patricia Melzer, Alien Constructions: Science Fiction and Feminist Thought (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 1-2.

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study, of scholarship, even of being taught to students.”2 Only within the past few decades has science fiction been recognized as drawing upon the classical tradition in much the same ways as other canonical genres as a viable medium for the expression of socio-political, religious, or philosophical ideas. SF is an important contribution to world literature that extrapolates many of its ideas from classical and eastern mythology, sixteenth-century Utopian ideals, and the writings of the Romantics, among others. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s best-known novel Frankenstein (1818) is considered by many to be one of the first SF novels, followed by her work The Last Man (1826), set in a twenty-first century world that has been devastated by plague to the extent that the human race is exterminated and only one man is left alive, to wander the world alone. As Pamela Annas points out, Though it has often been defined as an exploration of the social consequences of technology and scientific research — and certainly one of the questions SF asks is what the effect of science is on individuals and on society — it is not finally technology that is at the center of the genre. Rather, SF refers to the use in imaginative literature of the scientific method as an aesthetic concept. The SF writer, in creating a new or future world, isolates one or a few variables — biological, technological, psychological, social — and performs an experiment, builds an imaginative paradigm, peoples it, and works out the experiment within the confines of this artificially constructed laboratory of the text.3

To clarify, the term “speculative fiction” encompasses genres as diverse as “hard” science fiction, fantasy, horror, alternative history and magic realism; anyone who has read Borges’ Labyrinths or Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde can hardly argue with their inclusion in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database.4 In his 1948 essay “On Writing of Speculative Fiction” Robert Heinlein meant the term to be interchangeable with “science fiction” and did not include fantasy. In the collected letters Grumbles from the Grave, edited by his wife, Virginia Heinlein, Heinlein wrote that “Speculative fiction (I prefer the term to science fiction) is also concerned with sociology, psychology, 2

James Gunn, Foreword. The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction. Ed. Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn. (Cambridge: The Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge, 2003), xv. 3 Pamela J. Annas. “New Worlds, New Words: Androgyny in Science Fiction.” Science Fiction Studies 15 Vol. 5 Part 2 (1978) par. 1. http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/15/annas15art.htm. 4 Internet Speculative Fiction Database www.isfdb.com

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esoteric aspects of biology, impacts of terrestrial culture on the other cultures we may encounter when we conquer space, etc., without end.”5 The term has been used in multiple ways, and with the advent of New Wave SF in the early 1960s, it was meant to be distinct from so-called “hard” science fiction (with its fixation on technology and space travel) and fantasy (with its emphasis on magic and dragons); however, it fell into disuse in the 1970s, and has only been revived as of late in academic writing as a more inclusive term that covers a variety of genres. SF also seemed, at least until the late 1960s, mainly the province of male writers; a quick scan of any list of SF authors will illustrate the preponderance of men writing in the genre since Hugo Gernsback began publishing Amazing Stories in 1926. Because Western thought mostly consists of splitting the world into binaries, one of which often has dominance over the other, it becomes necessary to consider what women writers (specifically SF writers) have had to overcome in order to be heard. As Sarah Lefanu acknowledges in the introduction to In the Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism and Science Fiction, “The feminist intervention in science fiction has not been an easy one: writers have had to struggle not only against the weight of the male bias of the form but also against the weight of a cultural and political male hegemony that underpins the form itself.”6 Though there were a few female authors working openly in the field—notably Leigh Brackett, who published SF stories and novels in the 50s up through the late 1970s (though she is probably better known for writing the screenplays for films such as Rio Bravo and The Long Goodbye,7 as well as The Empire Strikes Back)—it remains that until Second Wave feminism in the 1960s (and the New Wave SF) broke over western society in the mid-to-late 1960’s, the genre was mostly a boy’s club. The audience for the pulp magazines was thought to be mainly male, so many female authors wrote under male pseudonyms or used only their first and middle initials to disguise their gender. Andre Norton (born Alice Mary Norton), author of the Witch World series also wrote under the pen names Andrew North and Allen Weston in part because since her audience was ostensibly young boys, a male name would increase her marketability.8 C. L. (Catherine Lucille) 5

Robert A. Heinlein, Grumbles from the Grave. Ed. Virginia Heinlein. (New York: DelRey, 1989), 49 6 Sarah Lefanu, In the Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism and Science Fiction. (London: The Women’s Press Limited, 1988), 4. 7 Pamela Sargent. Women of Wonder: Science Fiction Stories by Women about Women. Ed. Pamela Sargent. (New York: Vintage, 1975), xx. 8 Andre Norton, Biography page,

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Moore, whose short novel No Woman Born (1944)9 contains some of the first traces of what we now call cyberpunk, published her first story “Shambleau” in the November 1933 issue of Weird Tales.10 C.J. Cherryh, winner of multiple Hugo Awards, added the silent “h” to her last name because her first editor, Donald A. Wollheim, felt that “Cherry” sounded like a romance novelist.11 Alice B. Sheldon is perhaps the most notorious of these, having cultivated friendships with several of her contemporaries (Harlan Ellison, Philip K. Dick, Joanna Russ, and Ursula K. Le Guin, among others) under her pseudonym: James Tiptree, Jr. It was not until the late 1960s that female authors really began to make their presence known. As Lefanu points out, “One of the major theoretical projects of the second wave of feminism is the investigation of gender and sexuality as social constructs, thus posing a challenge to notions of a natural law regulating feminine behavior and an innate femaleness that describes and circumscribes ‘woman’.”12 Led by the ground-breaking work of Ursula Le Guin, who won both the Hugo and the Nebula awards in 1969 for her novel The Left Hand of Darkness, writers such as Joanna Russ and Alice B. Sheldon (writing as James Tiptree, Jr.) began to make their voices heard as they engaged with issues that were specifically related to feminist ideology, namely questions regarding gender, sociology, and the individual’s association with/ identification of the body and sexuality. These writers took as a primary task the examination of social and power relations that marginalize(d) women, and as such, their works remain important even into the 21st century as signposts on the way to a brighter (yet still distant) and more equal future for men and women.

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, published in 1969, is such a novel. It offers a reconstruction of reality on another world in order to give fresh perspective to the sociological constructs on our world. Le Guin draws upon the idea of androgyny, which is prevalent in ancient Greek, Chinese, and Hindu mythology, and the philosophy of Taoism as a representation of a holistic worldview to explore the idea of the Other that http://www.andre-norton.org/anorton/anbio.shtml. 9 Sargent, Women of Wonder, xix. 10 “C.L. Moore: Author of Judgment Night,” Red Jacket Press, http://www.redjacketpress.com/authors/cl_moore.html. 11 Evelyn Leeper, update of rec.arts.sf.written FAQ, June 18, 2001, http://www.faqs.org/faqs/sf/written-faq/ 12 Lefanu, In the Chinks, 4.

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gives insight into the wide-ranging sociological ramifications of human relationships. It is Le Guin’s “first contribution to feminism, which she has always taken seriously but without being particularly militant [about it].”13 The first of Le Guin’s novels to win both the Nebula and the Hugo Awards for science fiction, The Left Hand of Darkness is her first book that did not contain elements of fantasy (as with her successful 1968 work A Wizard of Earthsea), but was rather concerned with the mostly socioscientific ideas and anthropology first touched on in Rocannon’s World (1966), Planet of Exile (1966), and City of Illusions (1967)14. The Left Hand of Darkness is in Le Guin’s own words, a “thought-experimental”15 exercise in the examination of the impact of gender on human interactions. As Le Guin puts it in her 1976 essay “Is Gender Necessary?”: Because of our lifelong social conditioning, it is hard for us to see clearly what, besides purely physiological form and function, truly differentiates men and women. Are there real differences in temperament, capacity, talent, psychic processes, etc.? If so, what are they? …How to find out? Well, one can always put a cat in a box. One can send an imaginary, but conventional, indeed rather stuffy, young man from Earth into an imaginary culture which is totally free of sex-roles because there is no, absolutely no, physiological sex-distinction. I eliminated gender, to find out what was left.16

What was left was a complicated and consciousness-raising examination of the gulf between two human beings utterly dependent upon one another for survival, and as she points out in the introduction to A Fisherman of the Inland Sea, “…for decades writers have been using [science fiction] to explore character and human relationships."17 The relative freedom of science fiction as a genre offered Le Guin the chance to investigate what makes us human. In the universe of Le Guin’s Hainish empire (begun in her novel Rocannon’s World), a lone human ambassador—the Envoy Genly Ai— 13 Barbara J. Bucknall,. Ursula K. Le Guin. (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., Inc., 1981), 9. 14 Ursula Le Guin, Worlds of Exile and Illusion: Three Complete Novels of the Hainish Cycle. (New York: Orb Books, 1996). 15 Ursula Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness. (New York: Ace Books, 1969), ix. 16 Ursula Le Guin, “Is Gender Necessary?” Aurora: Beyond Equality Susan Janice Anderson and Vonda N. McIntyre, eds. (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Publications, Inc., 1976), 133. 17 Ursula Le Guin, A Fisherman of the Inland Sea.(New York: HarperPrism, 1994), 3.

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travels to the planet Gethen (nicknamed “Winter”) to work the diplomacy that will allow the newly rediscovered world to join the loose federation of known worlds called the Ekumen. The Envoy is a total anomaly on Winter, and he becomes a pawn between two neighboring countries, Karhide and Orgoreyn. Genly first approaches the Karhiders to propose joining the planet to the Ekumen. His lone ally, Therem Harth rem ir Estraven ends up being exiled and labeled a Traitor by the insane king of Karhide. In fear for his life, Genly travels to Orgoreyn (as does Estraven) and again becomes embroiled in a political struggle; the faction he trusts throws him into prison, and it is Estraven who risks his own life to save the Envoy. Genly is forced by a variety of experiences to reconsider his previous attitudes toward human relationships, not the least of which is coming to grips with Gethenian sexuality. The alienness of this new world is further exacerbated by the physiological ambisexual (androgynous) race that inhabits the planet. The humanoid inhabitants of Gethen are sexually androgynous for most of the month, in the phase they call somer. They have a cycle (not unlike the Terran estrus cycle) that brings them into kemmer every three weeks. In kemmer phase the Gethenians take on either male or female sexual characteristics and consequently, as the chapter on “The Question of Sex” points out, “the mother of several children may be the father of several more.”18 In direct contrast to this “abnormal” state stands the female human reproductive cycle whose phases—menstruation, pregnancy, and menopause—all have biological bases, but occur within a specific social context.19 The chapter on sex is written as an anthropological report by one of the Investigators, pre-contact observers whose main job is to blend in and take notes on the structure and customs of the alien society, who warns that “The First Mobile…must be warned that unless he is very selfassured, or senile, his pride will suffer. A man wants his virility regarded, a woman wants her femininity appreciated, however indirect and subtle the indications…On Winter they will not exist. One is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience.”20 When one considers that all Earth societies are almost entirely defined in terms of binary gender roles, it is not hard to understand why this would seem abnormal and upsetting, even if one is taught not to judge. There is also the possibility that here too, Le Guin may be twitting the reader; the First Investigator on Gethen was a woman. 18

Le Guin, Left Hand, 91. Alexandra G. Kaplan and Mary Anne Sedney, Psychology and Sex Roles: An Androgynous Perspective. (Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1980), 138. 20 Le Guin, Left Hand, 95. 19

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Despite his ethno/anthropological training, the Envoy is almost at a complete loss as to how to deal with or describe the Gethenians. His first description of a Karhider is as non-gender specific as he can make it, considering his position: The person on my left—a stocky dark Karhider with sleek and heavy dark hair, wearing a heavy overtunic of green leather worked with gold, and a heavy white shirt, and heavy breeches, and a neck-chain of heavy silver links a hand broad, sweating heavily…Wiping sweat from his dark forehead the man—man I must say, having said he and his…He is one of the most powerful men in the country…21

Note Genly’s continued repetition of the word “heavy,” meant to convey a sense of solidity not typical of women; Genly’s description gives a strong suggestion of masculinity. Also problematic is Genly’s use of the masculine noun man and the pronouns he and his: in his exasperation at his own futile, self-conscious attempts to use non-gender specific language, he gives up and refers to the Karhider, Therem Harth rem ir Estraven, as “he” for the remainder of his report. More than one critic has wondered why Le Guin did not attempt to create a gender-neutral pronoun, and Le Guin addresses the issue, in “Is Gender Necessary?” I call Gethenians “he,” because I utterly refuse to mangle English by inventing a pronoun for “he/she.” “He” is the generic pronoun, damn it, in English…But I do not consider this really very important. The pronouns wouldn’t matter at all if I had been cleverer at showing the “female” component of the Gethenian character in action…[F]or the reader, I left out too much.22

Unfortunately, the pronouns do matter; we make determinations about the world through language. Given that she invented the term shifgrethor to encompass the idea of “conflict without physical violence, involving one-upsmanship, the saving and losing of face—conflict ritualised, stylised, controlled,”23 her refusal to invent a gender-neutral pronoun seems groundless, and in subsequent essays and interviews, she has admitted as much. In spite of the androgyny she was shooting for, she instead succeeded in writing a novel in which there were no women. She wrote “Winter’s King” (1975) and “Coming of Age in Karhide” (1995) partly as a response to the criticism. Only a few years later after The Left Hand of Darkness was published, Marge Piercy would use the word “per” 21

Ibid., 4-5. Le Guin, “Is Gender Necessary?” 137-8. 23 Ibid., 134. 22

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(short for person) as her gender-neutral pronoun in her novel Woman on the Edge of Time. One of the fundamental problems that The Left Hand of Darkness focuses on is the agony involved when human beings try to overcome their alienation from one another, as well as their own self-alienation. The main drama in this novel is Genly Ai’s attempt to find within himself the courage, wisdom, and compassion to communicate honestly with his lone ally on the planet, Therem Harth rem ir Estraven. The problem is not so much how to know the odds or triumph over them, but how to be and let be. The Other mind is one of the most terrifying things that human beings can encounter; Genly’s situation is exacerbated not only because Genly is “a rather conventional young black man from Earth”24 but also due to the fact that the Other on Gethen is a total alien (by virtue of Gethenian ambisexuality), not just a symbolic one. As Bucknall points out, “If there were no real distinction between women and men, there could be no fear, no arrogance, no mistrust between the sexes. There could be no double standard because there would be no second sex…There would be neither sex roles nor stereotypes, so love could always be expressed physically in terms of the real nature of one’s emotions.”25 With the collapse of binary opposition comes the possibility for wholeness. In any case, the crux of Genly’s entire problem in dealing with the inhabitants of Gethen is his total inability to deal with their ambisexuality in relation to his own single sex-ness: “Though I had been nearly two years on Winter I was still far from being able to see the people of the planet through their own eyes. I tried to, but my efforts took the form of self-consciously seeing a Gethenian first as a man, then as a woman, forcing him into these categories so irrelevant to his nature and so essential to my own.”26 Language is the inescapable socializer; human gender stereotyping occurs through both verbal and non-verbal communication: “The process of developing gender identity involves acquiring information about cultural norms and roles for men and women (a social function), then adjusting one’s view of self, one’s role in society, and one’s behavior in response to those norms (a psychological function)…The primary vehicle for socialization is communication.”27 Pronoun usage (he/she, his/hers, etc.) perpetuates different personality traits; common linguistic practice defines women as immature, 24

Bucknall, Ursula K. Le Guin, 63-4. Ibid., 65. 26 Le Guin, Left Hand, 12. 27 Diana K. Ivy and Phil Backlund, GenderSpeak: Personal Effectiveness in Gender Communication, Third Edition. (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2004), 83. 25

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incompetent, and incapable, while males represent the reverse.28 So Genly sees Estraven at the beginning of the novel: …I thought that at table Estraven’s performance had been womanly, all charm and tact and lack of substance, specious and adroit. Was it in fact perhaps this soft supple femininity that I disliked and distrusted in him? For it was impossible to think of him as a woman, that dark, ironic, powerful presence near me in the firelit darkness, and yet whenever I thought of him as a man I felt a sense of falseness, of imposture: in him, or in my own attitude towards him?29

Interesting to note here is that Genly automatically assigns “charm and tact and lack of substance” as purely feminine (and undesirable) characteristics, but at least he has enough self-knowledge to question whether the sense of falsity rests with the Object of his gaze or within himself. Genly’s inability to cope with Estraven’s (feminized) non-gender continues throughout the entire novel, until nearly the end after they have relied on each other for survival in their desperate flight across the Gobrin Ice sheet. When the food makes Genly slightly ill, Estraven’s concern aggravates Genly’s prickly sense of his manhood: “I was galled by his patronizing. He was a head shorter than I, and built more like a woman than a man, more fat than muscle; when we hauled together I had to shorten my pace to his, hold in my strength so as not to outpull him: a stallion in harness with a mule…”30 The language in this entry is particularly puzzling as it comes late in the novel, after Estraven has used up most of his strength and food supply to save the Envoy’s life. As Sarah Lefanu points out, despite the fact that he is a trained professional anthropological observer, his twentieth century preconceptions of and prejudice towards women are prehistoric.31 In a later review, Lefanu points out that “[N]ow I see the envoy Genly Ai’s hesitations and confusions when confronted by men who seem to him unnervingly feminine as a prescient exploration of ideas about masculinity.”32 By today’s standards, Genly is woefully behind the times; there is no longer 28

Laurel Richardson Walum, The Dynamics of Sex and Gender: A Sociological Perspective. (Chicago : Rand McNally College Pub. Co., 1977). 16. 29 Le Guin, Left Hand, 12. 30 Ibid., 218. 31 Sarah Lefanu, Feminism and Science Fiction. (Indiana University Press. Bloomington, IN: 1989), 137. 32 Sarah Lefanu, “The King is Pregnant” The Guardian, January 3, 2004, par. 5, http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1115055,00.html.

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as much tolerance for “manly men” who view feminine qualities as a threat to their masculine pride. Genly has tremendous problems throughout the novel because he is alienated both from them and from himself; he cannot figure out how to relate to the inhabitants of Winter, despite the advice given by the Investigator: “When you meet a Gethenian, you cannot and must not do what a bisexual naturally does, which is to cast him in the role of Man or Woman, while adopting towards him a corresponding role dependent on your expectations of the patterned or possible interactions between persons of the same or the opposite sex. Our entire pattern of socio-sexual interaction is non-existent here.”33 Given his touchy masculinity, it is not hard to see how he can be unable to accept the Gethenians for who and what they are—human beings. He eventually learns that the limitation of his own alien (and decidedly male) perspective and his alienation from himself are keeping him from understanding this new world and its complicated society. For their part, the Gethenians have a great deal of trouble accepting Genly, as well as the idea that the human inhabitants of rest of the known universe are just like him (that is, single-sexed, with an “opposite” sex). When King Argaven questions Genly about the other worlds that are members of the Ekumen, he learns that Gethenian sexual physiology is an anomaly. Nevertheless, his reaction to this news is one of total disgust: “So all of them, out on these other planets, are in permanent kemmer? A society of perverts? So Lord Tibe put it; I thought he was joking. Well, it may be the fact, but it’s a disgusting idea, Mr. Ai, and I don’t see why human beings here on earth should want or tolerate any dealings with creatures so monstrously different.”34 So to the Gethenians, Genly himself is doubly alien—from another world, and “locked” into his male sex as if in prison. What Le Guin seems to be suggesting with her androgynous Gethenians is that perhaps what were originally thought of as “sex differences” may have more to do with psycho-social gender than with biological sex, although even this line of reasoning is problematic given that there are certain biochemical differences between men and women, which are in turn the differences that drive the Gethenian’s entrance into their kemmer state. Le Guin uses the concept of androgyny in redefining an entire society, as well as the ancient philosophy of Taoism to illustrate the difficulty of the recognition of the Other in human relationships. The androgyne is Le Guin’s example of a newly rediscovered, more whole human being that 33 34

Le Guin, Left Hand, 94. Ibid., 36.

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had originated in the ideology of Taoism. The unreality of this kind of human being in the Envoy’s eyes leads to one of the fundamental problems of the book: Genly Ai’s inability to accept the Gethenians as androgynes directly affects his inability to accept them as human beings, which consequently throws his own perceptions about the new world into confusion. The problem of whom Genly should trust on this alien world becomes a central theme of the book; he cannot trust Estraven because it is nearly impossible for him to trust someone (or something) he cannot understand, and when he does allow himself to trust his “rescuers” in Orgoreyn, the consequences are disastrous. Thrown into prison by those he had naively trusted, Genly has been drugged and abused to near-death, and when he wakes in the tent Estraven has set up for them, he discovers that he must take stock of their new relationship. Genly begins very slowly to understand Estraven’s essence: “I looked at Estraven, stretched out sound asleep on his sleeping-bag a couple of feet from me…The dark secret face was laid bare to the light, to my gaze. Estraven asleep looked a little stupid, like everyone asleep…I saw him now defenseless and half-naked in a colder light, and for the first time saw him as he was.”35 Genly’s gaze transforms Estraven into an Other, and from there, paradoxically, he is more able to relate to his new friend. Their journey across the treacherous Gobrin Ice sheet makes Genly stop and re-evaluate what it means to be a human being and a friend, and at the end, he is perhaps a good deal less egocentric than he had been at the outset of the novel. Yet even in the face of their peril, Genly still finds it difficult to overcome the barrier of their sex difference. He cannot yet call the other alien his friend: A friend. What is a friend, in a world where any friend may be a lover at a new phase of the moon? Not I, locked in my virility: no friend to Therem Harth, or any other of his race. Neither man nor woman, neither and both, cyclic, lunar, metamorphosing under the hand’s touch, changelings in the human cradle, they were no flesh of mine, no friends; no love between us.36

Obviously, Genly is a slow learner, as this speech comes after Estraven has rescued him, battered and badly abused, from the prison farm at the risk of his own life, for no other reason than that Estraven believed that it was his duty not to abandon the naïve scientist to his fate.

35 36

Ibid., 200. Ibid., 213.

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Day after day they haul the sledge carrying their supplies across the ice and set up camp, exhausted, at night. The evenings’ conversations allow them both insight into the Other’s mind, and this goes a long way to improving their connection. The only way Genly can really be present to himself is to accept Estraven’s presence, and all that it means. When Estraven goes into kemmer after they have traveled 254 miles on foot across the desolate glacial landscape, the tumblers of the universe click into place and their differences are finally moot. Estraven writes in his journal: “I was afraid he would laugh at me. After all he is no more an oddity, a sexual freak, than I am; up here on the Ice each of us is singular, isolate, I as cut off from those like me, from my society and its rules, as he from his. There is no world full of other Gethenians to explain and support my existence. We are equals at last, equal, alien, alone” (Le Guin Left Hand 233).37 Later, Genly describes his reaction to Estraven’s entrance into kemmer with a kind of wonderment; he finally sees and accepts Estraven as he truly is, with no excuses or compromises. He writes: And I saw then again, and for good, what I had always been afraid to see, and had pretended not to see in him: that he was a woman as well as a man. Any need to explain the sources of that fear vanished with the fear; what I was left with was, at last, acceptance of him as he was. Until then I had refused him, refused him his own reality. He had been quite right to say that he, the only person on Gethen who trusted me, was the only Gethenian I distrusted. For he was the only one who had entirely accepted me as a human being: who had liked me and who therefore had demanded of me an equal degree of recognition and acceptance. I had not been willing to give it. I had been afraid to give it. I had not wanted to give my trust, my friendship to a man who was a woman, a woman who was a man.38

The friendship they had both desperately needed during that bitter journey was transmuted into a profound kind of love that arose not from their likenesses, but from their differences. As philosophy professor Robert Williams writes in his book on Hegel, “The contradiction of love is that self and other are united without eliminating individuality or difference, without substituting a mystical unity, or a unity of substance, for interpersonal community”.39 Genly’s gaze can no longer strip Estraven 37

Ibid., 233. Ibid., 248. 39 Robert Williams, Recognition: Fichte and Hegel on the Other. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 184. 38

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of his possibilities or turn him into an object. Only in a personal encounter can one undergo the full experience of presence, and the genuine experience of the Thou is a relatively rare and privileged one. The only way to know another person in his particularity is to love him.40 Love is a free recognition of the Other: “Love renounces coercion and allows the other to be.”41 Love, hope, and fidelity are centered on the Thou in the fullness of his presence; these are but a few of the themes Le Guin brings into play in this novel.42 However, Genly and Estraven never touch during this phase, and so Le Guin loses the chance to really and fully explore Genly’s perceptions—what would happen if Estraven were to become sexually female in Genly’s presence, then revert back to his post-kemmer state? Perhaps nothing—perhaps the story would have then become another heterosexual love story rather than the exploration of gender roles Le Guin was attempting. Unfortunately for both of them, just as they are establishing a sustainable relationship, the darkness claims Estraven back into its fold. The two successfully negotiate the Gobrin Ice back into Karhide, where Genly will contact his starship and bring Gethen into the Ekumen whether King Argaven is ready or not. The faction in power discovers Estraven, and as he attempts to escape, shoots him down—except that it doesn’t appear that he is trying to escape; he skis directly into the border guards in what looks like a suicide attempt. Estraven’s last conscious utterance through mindspeech is to call out his dead Hearth-brother’s name, to whom Genly’s mind-voice bears an uncanny resemblance, and with whom he has a child. Estraven’s death means that Genly is once again alone— more completely alone than he was at the start of the novel. The final scenes of the book are wrenching. When Genly’s crewmates emerge from the ship, he is finally, utterly, completely alone—he is alien to them, and they are aliens to him: “But they all looked strange to me, men and women, well as I knew them. Their voices sounded strange: too deep, too shrill. They were like a troupe of great, strange animals, of two different species; great apes with intelligent eyes, all of them in rut, in kemmer…They took my hand, touched me, held me.”43 Le Guin uses this passage to illustrate how far Genly has come, how much of his old self he has let go of to create his 40

Herbert Feigl, “Other Minds and the Egocentric Predicament” Essays on Other Minds. Thomas O. Buford, ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970. p. 39091. 41 Williams, Recognition, 184. 42 Bucknall, Ursula K. Le Guin, 66. 43 Le Guin, Left Hand, 296.

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newer, more authentic self; it is a self capable of interacting with the inhabitants of Winter on equal footing, but unable to function with his former crewmates. As Beverly Friend points out, “He is not the destructive, irrational representative of masculine narrowness which destroys what it cannot understand and fears what defies its conventionality. Rather, like Gulliver among the Houyhnhnms, Genly Ai becomes so involved with the essential humanity of the Gethenians that when his eyes turn again on his own species, he can sense their essential incompleteness[.]”44 He manages to keep his cool long enough to give the others instructions, then retreats to his room at the palace, unable to fully communicate with them. In keeping with the tone of the novel as a whole, the ending is ambiguous; Genly travels to Estraven’s ancestral home and meets his son, in whom he sees Estraven’s life-spark and in whom, possibly, he may find another friend.

Joanna Russ, The Female Man (1975) A feminist literary critic and science fiction writer, Joanna Russ emerged on the SF scene in the early 1970s as the Sexual Revolution was at full steam ahead and the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment was in full swing. The previous decade had seen Title VII appended to the Civil Rights act of 1964, barring employment discrimination based on sex. The bombshell that was Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique served to shatter pre-conceived notions about women’s attitudes toward “women’s” work. The two developments that most likely shaped new attitudes regarding a woman’s place in the world were (1) more women were entering the workforce and were moving toward financial independence from men; and (2) the advent of the Pill, which gave women more control over their reproductive cycles and had a profound impact on sexual behavior. Both of these developments can be seen as inherently threatening to the status quo of male dominance in nearly every sphere of human enterprise. In 1983, Russ wrote the book How to Suppress Women’s Writing; in her essay “Anomalousness” Russ examines several literature anthologies to show how women’s writing has been ignored or passed over in favor of the male literary hegemony. The essay begins: She didn’t write it. 44

Beverly Friend, “Virgin Territory: The Bonds and Boundaries of Women in Science Fiction.” Many Futures Many Worlds: Theme and Form in Science Fiction, ed. Thomas D. Clareson (Kent: The Kent State University Press, 1977) 159-60.

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As noted by Jeanne Gomoll in her essay “An Open Letter to Joanna Russ: The ‘Me’ Decade and Feminist Science Fiction,” the book describes “in gory detail all the different ways that have been used to disallow, prevent, discourage, disbelieve, discredit, devalue, ignore, categorize, debase, forget, ridicule, malign, re-define, re-evaluate, and otherwise suppress women’s writing.”46 Gomoll asserts that “a growing number of people don’t remember that SF in the 70’s heralded the grand entrance of many new women writers.”47 Science fiction as a genre had long been a boys’ club, in part because the audience was thought to be primarily male, and the biggest awards (the Hugo and the Nebula) went almost exclusively to men until the late 1960s. As Gomoll points out, “[b]etween 1968 and 1984, there were 11 [women winners], and the increase of popular SF writers who were women was an exciting event of the 1970s.”48 Indeed, my first experience with feminist science fiction came in the form of a dog-eared anthology of stories I found in my public library: Aurora: Beyond Equality, published in 1976, featured a variety of stories (mostly by women, but with a few men—among them Tiptree) that examined the “man-woman problem.” As to the last point Russ makes in the opening of the essay, “‘it’ isn’t really serious, of the right genre,” this statement categorically applies to SF as it had long been perceived—pulp fiction for the masses, and as such, not deserving of recognition as literature. Russ’ Nebula award-winning short story “When It Changed” (1972), published in Again, Dangerous Visions, was the first glimpse in print of Whileaway, Russ’ all-female society of the future. Stranded on a planet nicknamed Whileaway, the expedition experiences a plague that wipes out all of the males. The women are able to reproduce through parthenogenesis (in this case, merging their ova) and their descendents have created a society where each can choose to do what she likes best without the imposed gender constrictions of a male-dominated society. 45

Joanna Russ, “Anomalousness.” Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism. Ed. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1993), 194. 46 Gomoll, Jeanne. “An Open Letter to Joanna Russ: The ‘Me’ Decade and Feminist Science Fiction.” Hot Wire: The Journal of Women’s Music and Culture 4, no. 3 (1988): 36, http://proquest.umi.com. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid.

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Over the course of six hundred years, the women live, love, and work in the complete (and utterly unlamented) absence of men; when men do arrive (as a “rescue mission”) they are viewed as utterly alien. The narration is elegiac in tone, as Janet speaks of realizing that everything they’ve worked for will come to an end once men begin arriving in larger numbers: …[M]en are coming to Whileaway. Lately I sit up nights and worry about the men who will come to this planet, about my two daughters and …what will happen to Katy, to me, to my life. Our ancestors’ journals are one long cry of pain and I suppose I ought to be glad now but one can’t throw away six centuries or even (as I have lately discovered) thirty-four years. Sometimes I laugh at the question those four men hedged about all evening and never quite dared to ask…Which of you plays the role of the man? As if we had to produce a carbon copy of their mistakes!49

Janet goes on to lament the knowledge that everything that makes Whileaway so wonderful for them will be reduced to mere historical curiosity, “the oddities you read in the back of the book, things to laugh at sometimes because they are so exotic, quaint but not impressive, charming but not useful. I find this more painful than I can say.”50 In the Afterword to her story, Russ says that “I have used assumptions that seem to me obviously true. One of them is the idea that almost all the characterological sex differences we take for granted are in fact learned and not innate…Also, the patriarchal society must have considerable survival value. I suspect that it is actually more stable (and more rigid) than the primeval matriarchal societies hypothesized by some anthropologists.”51 She goes on to say that the impetus for “When It Changed” arose from her reading of Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness and puzzling over Le Guin’s use of the male pronoun “he” when referring to what Russ calls “the hermaphrodite” in the novel: “And then I wondered why Miss Le Guin’s native ‘hero’ is male in every important sexual encounter of his life except that with the human man in the book. Weeks later, the Daemon suddenly whispered ‘Katy drives like a maniac,’ and I found myself on Whileaway, on a country road at night.”52 Russ writes that if the reader finds the story shocking (Janet and Katy live in an allfemale vision of the future), that this was not her intent. She merely 49 Joanna Russ, “When It Changed” Again, Dangerous Visions. Ed. Harlan Ellison. (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1972), 239. 50 Ibid. 51 Joanna Russ, Afterword 240-41. 52 Ibid, 241.

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wishes to show that the women are human with the full range of emotions (including rage and aggression) often denied women by our sex-polarized society. In Russ’ groundbreaking novel The Female Man, written in 1970 and published in 1975, she relates four parallel tales of Earth from the point of view of four different female characters: Joanna, who comes from “our” world of 1969 and is an angry, conflicted presence; Jeanine, a meek, quiet librarian is from a repressive, male-dominated society where the Great Depression is still in full swing because there has been no World War II, but parallel to Joanna’s 1969; Janet comes from Whileaway, where all of the men have died off; and Jael (who we do not meet until much later in the novel) is a physically enhanced assassin who owns a male sex slave and lives in a world where the sexes have been separated completely and are at war. The idea is to have four women who are in almost all ways identical, yet who have been shaped in four very different ways by the cultures in which they live. Russ’ use of constantly (and sometimes, disorientingly) shifting first-person narrative perspective encourages the reader to identify with all four women—regardless of whether or not the reader knows who the “I” is, she is immersed in that “I” and learns to adapt perceptions accordingly. In some ways, the book directly echoes the points raised by Le Guin in The Left Hand of Darkness, namely that language, socialization, and gender-stereotyping are often more delimiting than simple biology. We are first introduced to Janet Evason, born on a farm on Whileaway, which we are later told is a society made up solely of women, as all the men died off 900 years prior to Janet’s sudden appearance in Joanna’s version of New York City. As with the women in “When It Changed,” Janet is portrayed as intelligent, competent, and self-sufficient: My mother’s name was Eva, my other mother’s name Alicia. I am Janet Evason. When I was thirteen I stalked and killed a wolf, alone, on North Continent above the forty-eighth parallel, using only a rifle…I’ve worked in mines, on the radio network, on a milk farm, a vegetable farm, and for six weeks as a librarian after I broke my leg…My Stanford-Binet corrected score (in your terms) is 187, my wife’s 205 and my daughter’s 193…I love my daughter. I love my family (there are nineteen of us). I love my wife (Vittoria). I’ve fought four duels. I’ve killed four times.53

She is more than capable of taking care of herself, and when she appears out of nowhere on Broadway Avenue (“at two o’clock in the

53

Joanna Russ, The Female Man. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), 1.

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afternoon in her underwear”54) in Jeannine’s version of New York City, she is unflappable and curious—and just as quickly as she appears, she vanishes back to Whileaway—we discover later that the women of Whileaway, unimpeded by male notions of what women can and cannot do, have been experimenting with time-travel. Jeannine Dadier works in the library of a parallel New York City; the Great Depression is still on because World War II never took place, and Jeannine’s job is a WPA project. Jeannine is a sexually repressed “nice girl” who accepts her situation (ration books, old patched clothing, tiny apartment) as a burden she must bear; she finds refuge in daydreams. She sees the news articles about the strange woman appearing and vanishing, but elects not to think about it; instead, she must deal with the importuning of her boyfriend, Cal. “Oh, all right,” said Jeannine hopelessly, ‘all right.’ I’ll watch the ailanthus tree.”55 So sex with her boyfriend is also a burden to be borne silently, watching her tree; her displacement, first into Joanna’s continuum, then to Whileaway is borne similarly—hands to her ears, repeating to herself, “I’m not here. I’m not here.”56 Her meek and timid demeanor is a mask, though—Russ allows bits and pieces of Jeannine’s real thoughts to show through—“I want something else.”57 Something other than the drudgery of a loveless marriage with Cal, something other than an existence whose only purpose is to please another. Joanna is in the “real” world—the reader’s world—in 1969, and it is she who is the female man of the title. At a cocktail party (brilliantly lambasted later in the novel), she says, “I had just changed into a man, me, Joanna. I mean a female man, of course; my body and soul were exactly the same.”58 Joanna is the voice of contemporary feminism in the novel— a woman who plays the game (“dress for The Man/ smile for The Man/ talk wittily to The Man/ sympathize with The Man/ flatter The Man/ understand The Man/ defer to The Man/ entertain The Man/ keep The Man/ live for The Man”59) because it is what she has been brought up to do—wear makeup, worry about her hair and weight, and exert all of her energy towards catching (and keeping) a Man. She doesn’t quite understand why she is so unhappy—“moody and hard to be with”60—until 54

Ibid., 4. Ibid., 4. Emphasis in original. 56 Ibid., 18. Emphasis in original. 57 Ibid., 123. Emphasis in original. 58 Ibid., 5. 59 Ibid., 29. 60 Ibid., 29. 55

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she begins spending time with Janet, ushering her around New York as Janet explores the new continuum she’s been sent to. Later in the novel, after observing the workings of Jeannine’s and Janet’s continuums, Joanna observes “There’s no being out too late in Whileaway, or up too early, or in the wrong part of town, or unescorted. You cannot fall out of the kinship web and become sexual prey for strangers, for there is no prey and there are no strangers—the web is world-wide.”61 In other words, utopia. As Pamela Annas argues, This is the simplest and most thorough way of constructing a utopia without sex-role polarization. There is therefore no division of labor by sex. Instead there is physical work for young women, with time off for artistic work and child-birth and rearing, and intellectual work for older women. There are love bonds and partnerships between women, but no nuclear families. Instead there are extended families which include a range of age and among which a young woman may choose freely. There is a great deal of work to be done and everyone is expected to work. Whileaway, like many feminist utopias, is an anarchist society which emphasizes both individuality and social responsibility. The one crime punishable by death on Whileaway is solipsism, opting out, refusing to work, saying, in essence, none of you exist. There is no class structure on Whileaway; there are no differences of wealth and status. As a result, there are no property-based crimes; material goods belong to everyone. Most crucially, there is no constraint on movement and there is no fear[.]62

Whileaway, with its absence of binary opposition, is the utopia, a vision of a world without testosterone; Jael’s world is the dystopia, a parodic extrapolation of the “Battle of the Sexes.” Jael, the fourth of the “J’s” as she calls them, is from yet another time continuum—this one, like Janet’s, is in the future, though whose future (Jeannine’s or Joanna’s) is left in question. In Jael’s time, men and women have been at war for years (as a result of a plague and a previous war where biological weapons were used and half of the population was wiped out),63 and the sexes live separately in “Manland” and “Womanland.” Unlike Whileaway, whose lesbian society evolved because all the men have died, the separatist groupings remain heterosexual in Jael’s world. Though the men have more technology, they are nevertheless unable to have babies, so they must buy them from the Womanlanders. The babies they buy are brought up to be Men, and the ones who don’t quite make it 61

Ibid., 79. Emphasis in original. Pamela J. Annas, “New Worlds” par. 23. 63 Joanna Russ, The Female Man, 164. 62

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have sex-change surgery, the fate of two in seven male babies in Jael’s world. These are “the changed,” parodies of women, as opposed to “realmen.”64 As Susana Martins suggests, “The engineering of females in Jael’s world is a metaphor for the violence done to women and their interpellation as feminine objects in Joanna’s and Jeannine’s worlds.”65 Jael herself has Davy, a male sex-bot who is a part of her house; her home life is a parody of 1950’s heterosexual marriages (with Davy in the role of adoring—if programmed—homemaker and sex toy). Rather than attempt to find ways to live together as equals, each society in Jael’s continuum creates a distortion of (heterosexual) social norms. A technologically enhanced assassin—steel teeth covered by a veneer to make them look normal, retractable steel claws in her fingers—Jael (also called Alice Reasoner) moves between the two “camps” as part of her job in the Bureau of Comparative Ethnology and escorts the other three J’s (“the Young One, The Weak One, [and] The Strong One”)66 to her home. It is Jael who finally explains how they have all come together: she set out to find her other selves “out there in the great gray might-havebeen” and was able to find them: Genetic patterns sometimes repeat themselves from possible to present universe; this is also one of the elements that can vary between universes. There is repetition of genotypes in the far future too, sometimes. Here is Janet from the far future, but not my future or yours; here are the two of you from almost the same moment of time (but not as you see it), both of those moments only a little behind mine; yet I won’t happen in the world of either of you…What you see is essentially the same genotype, modified by age, by circumstances, by education, by diet, by learning, by God knows what…Yet we started the same…We ought to think alike and feel alike and act alike, but of course we don’t. So plastic is humankind!67

By the early 1970’s psychologists began to consider that perhaps masculinity and femininity were not opposite poles, but rather different dimensions of the same continuum. Sandra Bem’s “Gender Schema Theory” posits that “Once a child learns an appropriate cultural definition of gender, this definition becomes the key structure around which all other

64

Ibid., 167. Martins, Susana S. “Revising the Future in The Female Man” Science Fiction Studies 32, no. 3 (2005): 411. 66 Joanna Russ, The Female Man, 165. 67 Ibid., 161-62. 65

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information is organized.”68 Each of the J’s, then, is Russ’ exploration of what makes women who they are. Jael gives the three J’s a glimpse into her life. She takes them into Manland to discuss business with a Boss-man, whom she then murders with teeth and claws as he advances on her in a fog of lust: “You want me. It doesn’t matter what you say. You’re a woman, aren’t you? This is the crown of your life. This is what God made you for. I’m going to fuck you. I’m going to screw you until you can’t stand up. You want it. You want to be mastered.”69 As he chants this lustful litany with his eyes closed, he doesn’t see Jael’s claws come out until it’s too late. She kills him easily in front of the three J’s who look on, horrified—and explains succinctly that though it might not have been necessary to kill Boss-man, that she might have been able to placate him by Playing the Game, she tells them “I don’t give a damn whether it was necessary or not…I liked it.”70 Because the Boss-man refused to listen to her, and in fact becomes aggressive and completely disregards her status as a person, Jael feels justified in killing him; she also echoes Katy’s homicidal impulse in “When It Changed,” though Janet stops Katy before she is able to shoot the man who has just insulted Janet. As Susana Martins points out, “With the character of Jael, Russ counteracts the notion that women are naturally non-violent, more nurturing than men.”71 Jael’s attitude regarding both Boss-man and Davy represents the kind of control that “average” women can only dream of, a revenge fantasy not really much different from the sexist attitudes of the males in the three continuums Russ delineates. The interlacing of these narrative threads is somewhat disconcerting at first; often the only sign of a possible narrative shift is the inclusion of roman numerals, and these do not always indicate a change—the book is divided into nine parts through which the characters move in and out of each other’s continuums, learning the could-have-beens and the might-bes of each. As Susan Ayres writes in “The ‘Straight Mind’ in Russ’ The Female Man,” “These narrative shifts not only displace the reader, but on another level they raise the question of the identity of the subjective self.”72 At more than one point in the novel, it is difficult to tell who the speaking “I” is by context. As Russ was working on “When it Changed” 68

Ivy, Diana K. and Phil Backlund. GenderSpeak: Personal Effectiveness in Gender Communication, 3rd ed. (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2004), 77-78. 69 Ibid., 181. 70 Ibid., 184. 71 Martins, Susana S. “Revising the Future,” 411. 72 Susan Ayres, “The ‘Straight Mind’ in Russ’ The Female Man.” Science Fiction Studies 65, vol. 22 part 1 (1995): 23.

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and the question of gendered identity, there is no arguing with the idea that gender is intertwined with our concept of self. Because the male “Man” has until recently been the universal noun applied to humanity, it stands to reason that Joanna, in order to become fully human, must become a female Man: “To resolve contrarieties, unite them in your own person.”73 This goes directly to the heart of the feminist criticism of “human” nature—by making Man (understood as white and heterosexual) the universal or default standard, all other forms of humanity—female, non-white, nonhetero—become Other and as such, must try to define themselves in opposition to this standard, and however they may manage to do so, they are clearly not privileged in the way that white heterosexual men are. As with Genly Ai in The Left Hand of Darkness, by becoming a “female man” Joanna is attempting to transcend the sex polarization forced upon her by society (though for us there is no escaping the biological difference except through surgery—and even then one exchanges one sex for another, rather than literally being both sexes at once) and the behavior expected of her on the basis of her gender—women are soft, pliable, selfless. Joanna cannot accept that, and begins her transformation. What it all comes down to is that Jael (and by extension the Womanlanders) want to use Joanna’s world (and Jeannine’s) as a staging area for their war against the Manlanders. She tells them, “[T]his is what we want. We want bases on your worlds; we want raw materials if you’ve got them. We want places to recuperate and places to hide an army; we want places to store our machines. Above all, we want places to move from—bases that the other side doesn’t know about.”74 The section ends ambiguously, with no answer to Jael’s question; however, in the final section, Joanna throws out some clues that perhaps Jael will get her wish. The four J’s meet at Schrafft’s before going their separate ways, though it appears as if Jeannine will be Jael’s guide through the city. There is no resolution to the action, only a sense of moving, continually moving diagonally into the future, and as Martins argues, a “process of revising, revamping, re-thinking: working with what you’ve got now, and constantly stepping sideways to see what the alternatives are, to imagine different present moments, different futures.”75 The main point of the novel seems to be that we need to step out of our binary oppositions once in a while to see where we could go if we only took the time to consider it. The consideration devoutly to be wished, as it were, will take some time though; attempts to create woman-only societies (blogs and online forums, 73

Russ, The Female Man, 134. Russ, The Female Man, 200. 75 Martins, “Revising the Future,” 415. 74

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for instance) are often met with charges of male-bashing—and equality for women is perceived as bias towards women at the exclusion of what men want. One of the charges critics made against Russ was that the only way for her to have a utopia was to kill off all the men; as Tiptree also shows us, the idea is also a sad commentary on the seeming futility of mending relations between the sexes.

James Tiptree, Jr. [Alice B. Sheldon], Houston, Houston Do You Read? (1976) In the 1960’s, America’s reach had gone beyond the global, and out into space. NASA had been founded by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1958. Following the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s historic flight on April 12, 1961, the U.S. space program was already in full swing. Alan Shepard went up in Mercury 3 a month later on May 5th, and in February of the following year, John Glenn made three passes of the Earth in a nearly-five hour flight.76 America was in space, and it fired the imaginations of millions; the moon suddenly didn’t look quite so far away, hung there in the night sky. In a speech to Congress on May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy vowed that “Now it is time to take longer strides—time for a great new American enterprise—time for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key to our future on earth” and that we could and would “land a man on the Moon, and safely [bring] him back to Earth.”77. Suddenly, science fiction was turning into science fact, and many writers felt the pull of the new-old mode of exploring ideas: A generation of young writers—Harlan Ellison, J.G. Ballard, Thomas M. Disch, Joanna Russ, Samuel R. Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin—began to insist that SF be taken seriously as literature, or wrote as though it already were. SF acquired real characters, atmosphere, social criticism, style. And it joined these qualities to what it already had, a vocabulary uniquely suited to imagining change.78

Watching these first spaceflights and wishing she could go up to the stars too, Alice Bradley Hastings Sheldon was the only child of parents 76 Julie Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2006), 209 77 John F. Kennedy, “Special Message to the Congress on Urgent National Needs,” speech to Congress May 25, 1961, http://www.jfklibrary.org/ 78 Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr., 209.

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who were adventurous world travelers and explorers. Sheldon had worked as an analyst at the CIA during World War II and later earned a doctorate in experimental psychology. She began writing science fiction stories in the 1960’s under the pseudonym “James Tiptree, Jr.,” never really believing her work would see the light of day, and “[b]ecause of the precarious scholarly career she’d built, she decided again to submit her work under a pseudonym.” She and her husband Ting had been shopping when “she saw a jar of Tiptree jam. She said ‘James Tiptree.’ Ting said ‘Junior.’”79 So began one of the most famous disguises in literature. Tiptree’s first story, “Mama Come Home,” was published in If magazine in 1968, the beginning of an extraordinarily prolific career in which his training in experimental psychology would aid him. He struck up correspondences with the major SF writers of his day: Philip K. Dick, Ursula Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Vonda McIntyre, and Harlan Ellison; he turned out high-quality stories with speed (some thirteen in 1968 and 196980) and impressed a number of his contemporaries. Robert Silverberg, in his introduction to Warm Worlds and Otherwise, a collection of Tiptree’s stories in 1975, wrote that there was something “ineluctably masculine” in Tiptree’s writing, and that the notion that Tiptree was in fact a woman was absurd.81 When Harlan Ellison was putting together his second anthology of New Wave SF, Again, Dangerous Visions, he wrote to Tip and asked for a story. What came in (“The Milk of Paradise”) so impressed Ellison that he wrote in the introduction that “Tiptree is the man to beat this year.”82 “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” came about as a story for Vonda McIntyre and Susan Janice Anderson’s anthology, Aurora: Beyond Equality. The idea was to explore “what the world might look like after equality between the sexes had been achieved.”83 At the time, Tiptree had been corresponding with both Joanna Russ and Ursula Le Guin for some time, exploring feminist ideas through his male persona. As he explained to Russ, Tiptree was interested in feminism so that he could avoid stereotypes in his writing, and it is interesting to note that Alice Sheldon had begun a book project using her own name in 1973, titled The Human Male, which would do for Man what scientific studies on Woman had 79

Ibid., 210-11. Ibid., 225. 81 Lefanu, In the Chinks, 125. 82 Harlan Ellison. Introduction to “The Milk of Paradise” By James Tiptree, Jr. Again, Dangerous Visions. Ed. Harlan Ellison (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Co., 1972) 83 Ibid., 304. 80

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done for them: “It would review current research on gender differences while serving as a guide for young women to the male world and the male agenda.”84 So much has been made of “human nature” since the Enlightenment—women’s supposed weakness attributed to biology, men’s dominance the same—and Sheldon wanted to explore further ideas about biology that had been used to keep women “safe” in the home, where they belonged. Though she abandoned the project, Sheldon’s ideals about evolutionary biology influenced her thoughts on feminism and the SF writing that was to come. The crew of the spaceship Sunbird consists of three male astronauts launched on the very first circumsolar mission: Orren “Doc” Lorimer, the ship’s physicist, from whose point of view the story unfolds; Major Norman “Dave” Davis, a Bible-thumping Christian fundamentalist and the ship’s commanding officer; and Bernhard “Bud” Geirr, the ship’s pilot/engineer and all-around man’s man. Doc’s narration is somewhat unreliable, because as we learn in the first few pages of the story, he is under the influence of a drug given to him which causes shifts in perception, memory, and time. In fact, the novella begins with one of Lorimer’s more unpleasant memories: that of “running blindly—or was he pushed?—into the strange toilet at Evanston Junior High. His fly open, his dick in his hand, he can still see the grey zipper edge of his jeans around his pale exposed pecker. The hush. The sickening wrongness of shapes, faces turning. The first blaring giggle. Girls. He was in the girls’ can.”85 From the outset, we know that this is going to be a difficult trip for “Doc” and his “Right Stuff” shipmates, not the least because they are on an “alien” ship, rescued by the crew of the ship Gloria. Their mission had been routine, until they were caught by a solar flare that disrupts their trip and damages the ship, leaving them drifting through space with their location unknown. Repeated attempts to contact the NASA Space Center in Houston are met with static and silence across the intervening seventy-eight million miles, until a woman’s voice fills their tiny command capsule, calling for someone named “‘Judy?’ It is high and clear. A girl’s voice.”86 Thinking that somehow the Soviets have outflanked them or are playing a joke on them, the commander, in his stiff military tone, orders the speakers to identify themselves. The three are perplexed that the only voices they hear are women’s voices with distinct 84

Ibid., 291, 303. James Tiptree, Jr. “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” Aurora: Beyond Equality Susan Janice Anderson and Vonda N. McIntyre, eds. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Publications, Inc., 1976. p.36. Emphasis in original. 86 Tiptree, “Houston,” 42. 85

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Australian accents. As they listen in on the communications between the Earth-side station and the ship Gloria, they learn the first part of their fate: “We looked up history,” the Earth voice resumes. “There was a Major Norman Davis on the first Sunbird flight. Major was a military title. Did you hear them say ‘Doc’? There was a scientific doctor on board, Doctor Orren Lorimer. The third member was Captain—that’s another title— Bernhard Geirr. Just the three of them, all males of course…The point is, the first Sunbird mission was lost in space. They never came out from behind the sun.”87

As a result of the solar flare, the capsule has been thrown off course and catapulted three hundred years into the future; Houston is gone. If they do not accept help from the crew of the Gloria, they will gradually drift out of Earth’s orbit and die a slow death as their life support systems run out. In their presentation “Sexing Up the Spaceships or, How Science Fiction Engenders the Universe” at the 2007 International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, C. Jason Smith and Ximena Gallardo C. discuss the fetishization of space travel. Smith and Gallardo argue that with the creation of the starship, humans are “born again as a spacefaring race” and that space exploration is a sexual enterprise.88 As Gwyneth Jones points out in her essay “Kairos,” “It’s about reproductive success. The gadgets and the spaceships are all very fine and dandy, but what we’re always, really talking about is how Man gets out there to the edge of the known, grabs hold of a chunk of that alien dark, and pumps it full of his seed.”89 The rocket-phallus pushes the astronauts into the dark Otherness of space, and the astronaut is re-enwombed in the capsule—utterly dependent on the “mother”ship for survival, tethered by the umbilical apparatus for eating, excreting, and in some cases, even breathing. As Jones puts it, “in the real world space travel is a cramped, ramshackle, and smelly business, and nobody seems to get very far.”90 Not very romantic, at all—whatever our fantasies may be about going out among the stars. In this sense, then, 87

Ibid., 48. C. Jason Smith and Ximena Gallardo C. “Sexing Up the Spaceships or, How Science Fiction Engenders the Universe” Presentation at the 2007 ICFA in Ft. Lauderdale, FL 15 March 2007. 89 Gwyneth Jones, “Kairos: The Enchanted Loom.” Edging into the Future: Science Fiction and Contemporary Cultural Transformation. Ed. Veronica Hollinger and Joan Gordon. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 181. 90 Jones, “Kairos,” 178. 88

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astronauts are not the masters of their destinies—they are at the mercy of their tiny capsule for their survival; should any system fail, they will die. Though initially put off by the low number of male voices, Bud begins to fantasize about his new life on Earth: “A nice beach and about a zillion steaks and ale and all those sweet things. Hey, we’ll be living history, we can charge admission.”91 Gradually, though, the crew of the Sunbird begins to learn what has happened on Earth in the intervening three centuries, and the news is not good. The Earth’s population has been reduced from around eight billion down to two million after an epidemic induced almost universal sterility; only Australia and Northern Canada were left relatively unharmed: “Nobody lives in the rest of the world but we travel there sometimes.”92 Chilling, indeed, to think of whole cities and continents left unpopulated to molder and rot as the Earth continues in its orbit. Major Davis is disturbed most of all by the lack of information about their government and their economic structure: “We’re talking to a bunch of monkeys,”93 he says dismissively, and is further dismayed to learn that there seems to be no government, which other than his faith in God has been his central pillar for most of his life—the hierarchical command structure of his own time demands his faith in God and his government. Because there seems to be no government, the civilization with which the men have come into contact must be inferior. They can think of no other way of organizing a society. The women of Earth are not unaware of what the men are thinking. The voice at Luna Central warns the crew of the Gloria that “[w]e’re not sure you understand the risk…Judy, if you manage to pick them up you’ll have to spend nearly a year in the ship with these three male persons from a very different culture.”94 Faced with their own extinction if they do not accept Gloria’s offer of help, the men navigate their damaged capsule to within range of the ship, don their spacesuits and make the trip across the void to what Bud calls “a flying trailer park” and what Lorimer sees as “a disorderly cluster of bulbs and spokes around a big central cylinder. He can see pods and miscellaneous equipment stowed all over her. Not like science fiction”.95 Given that up through the 1960’s most “hard” SF was written by men, the rocket can be read as essentially an extended phallus. Bulbous shapes need not apply. Because the shape of the ship does not conform to the men’s sense of what a ship should look like (the rocket91

Tiptree, 57 Ibid, 58 93 Ibid., 60. 94 Ibid., 61-2. Emphasis in original. 95 Tiptree, Houston, 66-67. 92

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phallus), they are inclined to be dismissive of it; hence, the “flying trailer park” gibe. The men are, for the moment, safe, if not entirely comfortable in their new roles as rescuees saved by a bunch of women. “As they leave the control room Lorimer sees the withdrawn look in Dave’s eyes and knows he must be feeling the reality of being a passenger in an alien ship; not in command, not deciding the course, the communications going unheard. That is Lorimer’s last coherent observation.”96 Because the women of the Gloria are well aware, even before the men, of the danger the three males present, they automatically drug the food with a “laevonoramine compound, a disinhibitor” that doesn’t fuddle the senses the way that alcohol does.97 This compound is the reason behind Lorimer’s drifting backward in time, only to be snapped back to the present by what he refers to as a “dread unconnected to action” that recurs when the women’s talk penetrates his wandering consciousness.98 Echoing Genly Ai’s observations in The Left Hand of Darkness, Lorimer laments the fact that he is “Trapped…Irretrievably trapped for life in everything he does not enjoy. Structurelessness. Personal trivia, unmeaning intimacies.”99 Naturally, a man would see this type of behavior as meaningless, but in fact, it is the talk of the women that brings everything into crystal-clear focus for him, talk he has always found distasteful: “He has never really cared for talking to women. Ironic.” 100 Indeed, given that his continued survival (and that of his shipmates’) depends on the women’s willingness to let them live, to suffer them in all of their chest-puffing, misogynistic, patriarchal menace—it is a definite change of circumstance to which the men simply cannot adapt. After nearly a year on the Gloria, Bud’s training finally gives way before the disinhibition caused by the drug compound all three men have been ingesting, and he begins to try to have sex with one of the Judys. This is not out of character for Bud, whom Tiptree has been carefully preparing the reader to see as emblematic of the typical alpha male, the jock, the meathead who only thinks of himself and his own needs. Bud’s chauvinism has been evident from the outset of the story, where he refers to the women variously as “space bunnies,” “chicks,” “space chickies,” “sweet things,” and later, as he becomes more violent, “dumb bitch” and

96

Ibid., 70. Ibid., 71. 98 Ibid., 39. 99 Ibid., 36. 100 Ibid., 37. 97

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“dumb cunt.”101 Lorimer has envied Bud’s hyper-masculinity, and has also harbored some of the same violent rape fantasies: “They’re so vulnerable. They don’t know we can take them. Images rush up: a Judy spread-eagled on the gym rungs, pink pajamas gone, open to him. Flash sequence of the three of them taking over the ship, the women tied up, helpless, shrieking, raped and used.”102 The drug he and the others have been given calms them, but it also makes “the monsters in the deep” rise to the surface. At first, Bud seems harmless, singing and joking with Judy and Andy. He offers to show Judy some “primitive earth customs” and begins to fondle and caress her; she does not resist, and appears to be curiously enjoying the attention, which becomes steadily more brutal and unpleasant as the minutes tick by and Lorimer watches from a distance. Andy’s presence (with a camera, no less) enrages the distracted Bud to the point of violence; while Bud is still (to all appearances) inside Judy, he grabs Andy and begins to pummel her (yes, her—Andy is short for Androgyne, a woman who has taken extra hormones to bulk up in order to do the heavy lifting). This is the truth of human (male) nature: the intimate connection between sex and violence and death that is a theme in the large majority of Tiptree’s work. As Lillian Heldreth points out in “‘Love is the Plan, the Plan is Death’: The Feminism and Fatalism of James Tiptree, Jr.” a survey of twenty-seven of Tiptree’s stories “reveals scenes of physical violence or death in twelve, and a direct association of sex with death or violence (or both) occurs in eleven; six of them depict death as ultimately triumphant over the best human efforts.”103 Such an assessment does not necessarily mean that Tiptree’s work is completely fatalistic, but rather that he saw something of the Absurdity of existence reflected in relations between the sexes. After a distracted Bud masturbates himself to ejaculation, we are presented with the tragicomic image of Judy floating after the “small oyster [that] jets limply from him” with a plastic baggie.104 It is hard to imagine a more discomfiting scene than this, and yet Tiptree goes one step further. When Major Davis bursts upon the scene, which would be completely comedic if it didn’t involve attempted rape, he delivers a messianic message at gunpoint:

101

Ibid, 37, 39, 57, 86. Ibid 72 103 Lillian M. Heldreth, “‘Love is the Plan, the Plan is Death’: The Feminism and Fatalism of James Tiptree, Jr. Extrapolation, Vol. 23, No. 1 (1982), 22 104 Tiptree, “Houston,” 90. 102

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“We were sent here, Lorimer. This is God’s plan. I was sent here. Not you, you’re as bad as they are…Oh Father, send me strength…You have spared us from the void to bring Your light to this suffering world. I shall lead Thy erring daughters out of the darkness. I shall be a stern but merciful father to them in Thy name. Help me to teach the children Thy holy law and train them in the fear of Thy righteous wrath. Let the women learn in silence and all subjection; Timothy two eleven. They shall have sons to rule over them and glorify Thy name.”105

Lorimer recognizes the danger they are all in; Major Davis gives a demonstration of the gun’s power when he blows away one of the iguanas and the bullet ricochets, causing a leak. Here we have the other face of violence, in the name of God the Father and what is best for these “lost” women. The gun-as-phallas, the destructive “hole-maker” shall reign supreme, but for Lorimer’s interference. As he tries to warn the women about what the gun is, he knows that he is throwing his lot in with them— but at some level, in spite of his irritation with their talk, “[t]he bubbling irritant [that] pours through his memory,”106 Lorimer is closer to the women intellectually and emotionally than he is to his own crewmates. The supreme irony for Lorimer is that both Bud and Dave reject him; both have identified him as being sympathetic to the women on the Gloria, and as such, his suspect masculinity renders him useless as far as they are concerned. However, it is just this quality that may be his saving grace. Bud is subdued without Lorimer’s direct assistance, but Dave is another matter. Because Dave has a gun, he is considerably more dangerous, and Lorimer’s instinct is to protect the women—he launches himself at Dave and manages to get him in a chokehold so that Judy can inject him. As Dave goes under, he looks at Lorimer, calling him “Judas— ” thus completing Lorimer’s sense of isolation: “Judas…Lorimer feels the last shield break inside him, desolation flooding in.”107 After both Bud and Dave are subdued with a shot from a hypodermic needle (to which Dave cries, “Serpent!” when he sees Judy with the needle), Lorimer talks to Lady Blue about their future. He tries to defend the other men’s actions, blaming their behavior on the women and accusing the women of that most feminine form of murder, poisoning: “You did it to them, you broke them down…Everybody has aggressive fantasies. They didn’t act on them. Never. Until you poisoned them.”108 When Connie tells him that actually, nobody in their time has those kinds of fantasies, Lorimer gets 105

Ibid., 93. Ibid., 70. 107 Ibid., 95. 108 Ibid., 96. 106

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more and more upset, repeating that Bud and Dave were “‘good men,’ Lorimer repeats elegaically. He knows he is speaking for it all, for Dave’s Father, for Bud’s manhood, for himself, for Cro-Magnon, for the dinosaurs too, maybe.”109 He tells them that men built civilization, gave women their creature comforts, and protected them. “It was a fight, a bloody fight all the way. We’re tough. We had to be, can’t you understand?”110 The Judys are silent, and Lady Blue enlightens poor Lorimer: “We’re trying, Doctor Lorimer. Of course we enjoy your inventions and we do appreciate your evolutionary role. But you must see there’s a problem. As I understand it, what you protected people from was largely other males, wasn’t it? We’ve just had an extraordinary demonstration. You have brought history to life for us.” Her wrinkled brown eyes smile at him; a small, tea-colored matron holding an obsolete artefact [the gun].111

Ultimately, Lorimer’s fate is sealed. As Lady Blue points out, they “simply have no facilities for people with [his] emotional problems”112 back on Earth, and even the suggestion that they try cloning the men and bringing up a new generation is met with weary sadness. The end of the novella is ambiguous and unsettling. Lorimer’s suggestion that the women find deserted islands for the three men is met with a “look of preoccupied compassion. His mother and sister had looked just like that the time the diseased kitten came in the yard. They had comforted it and fed it and tenderly taken it to the vet to be gassed.”113 Julie Phillips, in her biography of Tiptree, says that “Tiptree later denied the charge of killing off the men. He told Jeff Smith their fate was not death but ‘polite, kind isolation, like a zoo. The point is, they and all their drives are now not bad or good but IRRELEVANT. The women don’t relate to them in any way. […] Much more chilly than hostility.’”114 However, given that one of the major themes in Tiptree’s (and her other alter ego, Raccoona Sheldon’s) writings—that sex and death are inextricably linked—it is hard to read the last lines, where Lorrimer takes the antidote to the calming drug he’s been given, as anything but a death sentence: “The drink tastes cool going down, something like peace and

109

Ibid. Ibid. 111 Ibid. 112 Ibid., 97. 113 Ibid. 114 Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr., 312. 110

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freedom, he thinks. Or death.”115 As Lewis Call points out in his essay “‘This Wondrous Death’: Erotic Power in the Science Fiction of James Tiptree, Jr., “Many of Tiptree’s stories emphasized the connection between sexuality and violence…the most striking of Tiptree’s stories went even further, to argue for a direct connection between sexuality and death itself.”116 “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” won the Hugo and the Nebula awards for science fiction in 1976. Shortly afterwards, when Sheldon’s mother died and the obituary appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Jeff Smith (one of Tiptree’s longest-running correspondents to whom Tiptree had let slip some biographical details) put two and two together and advised Tiptree in a letter that he had been discovered. The revelation that one of the most “ineluctably masculine” writers of the SF genre was in fact a woman hit with the force of a thunderclap. Far from wishing to deceive colleagues she had loved and admired, she asserted that “I was always just being me.”117 Much like Joanna’s assessment of herself in The Female Man, Sheldon had attempted to resolve her sense of bifurcation by appropriating the universal Man for herself. Through her creation and preservation of the Tiptree identity, she shattered closely held assumptions about what constitutes “women’s writing,” and gave the average SF fan an inadvertent tutorial in Foucauldian discourse analysis.

Into the Future Le Guin, Russ, and Tiptree have had an enormous impact on science fiction, paving the way for the next generation of women writers to explore and explode the genre. The societies each author depicts have opened up a new conversation on the concept of utopia and the possibilities and problems inherent within it. The past decade has seen a number of collections of women’s writing in a variety of genres, including science fiction. Though some critics saw a falling off in the publication of feminist SF (in 1996 Frances Bonner wrote an article which appeared in Hecate entitled “From the Female Man to the Virtual Girl: Whatever Happened to Feminist SF?”; see also Jeanne Gomoll’s essay), feminist SF and the study of gender in the genre continue to grow. WisCon, the world’s largest feminist science fiction convention, held in Madison, 115

Tiptree, “Houston,” 98. Lewis Call, “ ‘This Wondrous Death’: Erotic Power in the Science Fiction of James Tiptree, Jr.” Science Fiction Studies101 Vol. 34, Part 1 (2007), 59. 117 Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr., 358. 116

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Wisconsin every Memorial Day weekend, turns thirty-one this year; and the Tiptree Award, presented at WisCon to work(s) that explore gender in SF and fantasy writing, is now in its fifteenth year. In 2006, Justine Larbalastier published Daughters of Earth: Feminist Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century, a collection of eleven short stories by women writers, each accompanied by a scholarly essay which examines not only the story’s meanings and contexts, but their implications in the larger field of scholarly criticism of women’s writing. In her introduction, Larbalastier points out that “[t]he collection’s title comes from Judith Merril’s superb 1952 novella ‘Daughters of Earth,’ which serves as a reminder that women have written science fiction for as long as the genre has been around, and that science fiction is always about the here and now, about this place where humans live. We are all children of earth.”118 It is in this sense of pride and hope that women continue to contribute to and shape the future for all.

Works Cited Annas, Pamela J. “New Worlds, New Words: Androgyny in Feminist Science Fiction” Science Fiction Studies 15, vol. 5 part 2 (1978). http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/15/annas15art.htm. Ayres, Susan. “The ‘Straight Mind’ in Russ’ The Female Man.” Science Fiction Studies 65, vol. 22 part 1 (1995): 22-34. Bucknall, Barbara J. Ursula K. Le Guin. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., Inc., 1981. Ellison, Harlan. Introduction to “The Milk of Paradise” By James Tiptree, Jr. Again, Dangerous Visions. Ed. Harlan Ellison Feigl, Herbert. “Other Minds and the Egocentric Predicament.” Essays on Other Minds. Thomas O. Buford, ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970. Freedman, Carl. Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 2000. Gomoll, Jeanne. “An Open Letter to Joanna Russ: The ‘Me’ Decade and Feminist Science Fiction.” Hot Wire: The Journal of Women’s Music and Culture 4, no. 3 (1988): 36. Gunn, James. Foreword. The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction. Ed. Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn. Cambridge: The Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge, 2003. xv-xviii.

118

Larbalastier xviii

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Heinlein, Robert A. Grumbles from the Grave. Ed. Virginia Heinlein. DelRey. New York: 1989. Heldreth, Lillian M. “‘Love is the Plan, the Plan is Death’: The Feminism and Fatalism of James Tiptree, Jr. Extrapolation, Vol. 23, No. 1 (1982) Ivy, Diana K. and Phil Backlund. GenderSpeak: Personal Effectiveness in Gender Communication, 3rd ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2004. Jones, Gwyneth. “Kairos: The Enchanted Loom.” Edging into the Future: Science Fiction and Contemporary Cultural Transformation. Ed. Veronica Hollinger and Joan Gordon. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002, 178. Kaplan, Alexandra G. and Mary Anne Sedney. Psychology and Sex Roles: An Androgynous Perspective. Little, Brown and Company. Boston: 1980. Larbalastier, Justine. Daughters of Earth: Feminist Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2006 Le Guin, Ursula K. A Fisherman of the Inland Sea. New York: HarperPrism, 1994. —. “Is Gender Necessary?” Aurora: Beyond Equality. Ed. Susan Janice Anderson and Vonda N. McIntyre. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Publications, Inc., 1976. —. The Left Hand of Darkness. New York: Ace Books, 1969. Lefanu, Sarah. Feminism and Science Fiction. Indiana University Press. Bloomington, IN: 1989. —. In the Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism and Science Fiction. London: The Women’s Press Limited, 1988. —. “The King is Pregnant” The Guardian, January 3, 2004, http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1115055,00.html. Martins, Susana S. “Revising the Future in The Female Man” Science Fiction Studies 32, no. 3 (2005): 405-22. Melzer, Patricia. Alien Constructions: Science Fiction and Feminist Thought. Austin: The University of Texas Press, 2006. Phillips, Julie. James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice Sheldon. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2006. Russ, Joanna. “Anomalousness.” Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism. Ed. Robyn Warhol and Diane Price Herndl. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1993. 194-202. —. The Female Man. 1975. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986. —. “When It Changed.” Again, Dangerous Visions. Harlan Ellison, ed. New York: Doubleday, 1972. 233-241.

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Sargent, Pamela. Introduction. Women of Wonder: Science Fiction Stories by Women about Women. Ed. Pamela Sargent. New York: Vintage, 1975. xiii-lxiv. Tiptree, Jr., James. “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” Aurora: Beyond Equality. Susan Janice Anderson and Vonda N. McIntyre, eds. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Publications, Inc., 1976. —. “The Women Men Don’t See.” Her Smoke Rose Up Forever. Ed. Jeffrey D. Smith. San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2004. Walum, Laurel Richardson. The Dynamics of Sex and Gender: A Sociological Perspective. Chicago: Rand McNally College Pub. Co., 1977. Williams, Robert R. Recognition: Fichte and Hegel on the Other. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992.

PART THREE: POST-MODERNISM AND ANGLOPHONE NARRATIVES

CHAPTER ELEVEN EMBODYING THE MUSE, OPENING PANDORA’S BOX: POSTMODERN COUNTER-NARRATIVES OF FEMALE CREATIVITY AND COMMUNITY JENNIFER E. DUNN

The flames flickered along the spines inside a glass-fronted case that held books still crisp and new . . . I squinted at a title or two: The Initiation, The Key of Mysteries, The Secret of Pandora’s Box. Nothing, here, to detain a seventeen-year old girl waiting for her first embrace.1

In “The Bloody Chamber,” Angela Carter’s revision of the Bluebeard tale, the latest wife of the Sadeian “Marquis” is deposited in a castle. Left to her own devices, the nameless young bride discovers a library of sadistic pornography. Although she initially dismisses the volumes, idle curiosity wins, and she opens the door to the bookcase and begins to browse. What she discovers there is a perverse pun on “the secret of Pandora’s box”: When he showed me the Rops . . . had he not hinted that he was a connoisseur of such things? I had not bargained for this, the girl with tears hanging on her cheeks like stuck pearls, her cunt a split fig below the great globes of her buttocks on which the knotted tails of the cat were about to descend, while a man in a black mask fingered with his free hand his prick, that curved upwards like the scimitar he held. 2

Although she does not yet know it, the illustration is an image of herself, since it reflects the Marquis’s view of her as a trembling child he will violently deflower and decapitate. The caption, “Reproof of curiosity,” foreshadows the narrator’s punishment for opening another

1 2

A. Carter, 1979. The Bloody Chamber (London: Penguin 1981), 16. Carter, The Bloody Chamber, 16-17.

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door later on;3 as we already know, the “key of mysteries” is the key to Bluebeard’s bloody chamber. In Carter’s version of the tale, the Marquis not only kills his wives but also mutilates their bodies and displays them like artwork. The bloody chamber is a “little museum of his perversity” where dead women are “strung up” like paintings or carefully arranged like “statuary”.4 The narrator’s own execution by guillotine is similarly aestheticized, compared to the Marquis’s beloved opera Tristan. Following the pattern of the original tale, the narrator is saved from her fate by a last-minute intervention, though it is her tiger-fighting mother who comes to the rescue, not her brothers. Carter replaces passive fairytale brides with this strong female heroine, so that the plot climax foregrounds the bond between mother and daughter, rather than fairy tales’ usual romance between female victim and male savior. The intertwining of art, sex, and death is also foregrounded. Carter tropes the serial killer as an artist and each victim as his muse, invoking: a long tradition identifying the author as a male who is primary and the female as his passive creation—a secondary object lacking autonomy, endowed with often contradictory meaning but denied intentionality.5

Indeed, the Marquis’s marriage history suggests an artist seeking a muse for each new project: the opera diva is strangled, the artist’s model is strung up on wires, and the descendent of Dracula is impaled by the spikes of the Iron Maiden. The narrator is the Marquis’s first virgin bride, and it is the “silent music” of her “unknowingness” that inspires his latest project.6 Her beheading symbolizes her lost maidenhead, but also—and more significantly—her corruption. The Marquis’s pleasure comes from seducing the narrator with material gifts (in contrast to her mother, who “defiantly beggared herself for love”)7, and grooming her with pornographic pictures. By telling this story from the perspective of the narrator, Carter creates what DuPlessis calls a “displacement,” a shift to” the other side of the story”.8 This displacement problematizes the cautionary function of the original Bluebeard tale as well as the sadistic nature of the artist-muse 3

Carter, The Bloody Chamber, 17 Carter, The Bloody Chamber, 28-29 5 S. Gubar, “The Blank Page” and the issues of female creativity.” In The new feminist criticism. Edited by E. Showalter (London: Virago, 1986), 295. 6 Carter, The Bloody Chamber19 7 Carter, The Bloody Chamber, 8 8 R. B. DuPlessis, Writing beyond ending: Narrative strategies or twentiethcentury women writers, (Bloomington, IN: Indiana Univ. Press, 1985), 108. 4

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relationship. The muse lacks a body and voice of her own, since both are accessories to the male artist’s (creative) excitation and fecundity. We see Carter’s Marquis literally embodying his muses, reducing them to eroticized, mutilated, dead, and displayed flesh. Carter, in contrast, restores the muse’s body and voice in a more positive way. Supplying the personal histories of the earlier wives and inserting the first-person introspections of the narrator, she transforms abstractions into distinct flesh-and-blood subjects, in the same way she transforms the conventional passive heroine into a powerful female role model. The creation of a positive female predecessor and speaking, embodied muse seems particularly relevant to a text that rewrites a problematic patriarchal narrative. This shift to the other side of the story, however, is more complex than a simple reversal of gender roles. While the conflict of the bloody chamber resolves itself into a conventional happy ending (complete with heterosexual marriage), another Pandora’s box is opened, but not closed: the narrator’s own burgeoning sexuality, and her complicity in the Marquis’s desire. When she first wears her wedding gift, a ruby choker that simulates the cut of the guillotine, she sees herself through the Marquis’s eyes: And I saw myself, suddenly, as he saw me . . . I saw how much that cruel necklace became me. And, for the first time in my innocent and confined life, I sensed in myself a potentiality for corruption that took my breath away.9

The narrator’s gasp suggests both fear and sexual pleasure. She knows she is being inspected and purchased like “horseflesh”10, and yet enjoys how this transforms her into the object of everyone’s gaze: On his arm, all eyes were upon me. This whispering crowd [at the opera] . . . parted like the Red Sea to let us through. My skin crisped at his touch.11

Later, she finds she is both disgusted and aroused by her husband’s teasing or violent caresses.12 These hints of the narrator’s complicity play on the original tale, which implies that Bluebeard’s too-curious wives deserve their fate. But, as Atwood argues, they also serve to challenge the mutability of distinctions, especially between aggressor and victim: the

9

Carter, The Bloody Chamber, 11 Carter, The Bloody Chamber,11 11 Carter, The Bloody Chamber, 10 12 Carter, The Bloody Chamber, 15, 22 10

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text is a celebration of “relativity and metamorphosis”.13 It is unclear what power the narrator has in her situation, and this is further complicated by the retrospective narration, since we cannot differentiate between her seventeen-year old self and later impressions. The text closes, however, with her curious admission that the bloody mark on her forehead signifies her own “shame”14: not for entering the bloody chamber, we gather, but for her “potentiality for corruption.” The question of the narrator’s guilt or innocence has been circled by critics such as Atwood and Duncker15, who debate whether The Bloody Chamber is subversive or reactionary. The power of the story, however, resides in its refusal of easy answers. In embodying the muse, Carter opens a different Pandora’s box, unleashing textual contradiction at odds with the superficially neat plot resolution, and raising uncomfortable questions about the female artist’s relationship to the muse. What happens when the muse turns on her master? Given a body and a voice, is she implicated, as Carter’s narrator may be, in her master’s story? Further, what if that master is not male, but female? In her study of lyrical poetry, Maxwell rejects the notion that the muse is passive and powerless, and argues instead that she functions as an “aggressive female force which feminises the male in an act that simultaneously deprives and energises him”.16 She suggests that seeing the muse in this light could mean that “women, rather than feeling threatened by figures such as Philomena and Sappho, might feel instead a bond of sisterly sympathy”17—though Woolf, for one, inhabits a very different scenario in the battle with her own muse, the Angel in the House (1931). Below, I examine the relationship between the artist and the muse in postmodern women’s fiction, and how this affects representations of women’s art and community. Carter’s “Black Venus” (1985) tells the story of Baudelaire’s real-life mistress and muse Jeanne Duval, while Marianne Wiggins’s John Dollar (1989), a rewriting of Lord of the Flies (1954), repositions the artist as female and the muse as male. Emma Tennant’s The Bad Sister (1978) and Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye (1988) take up Woolf’s struggle with the Angel in the House and portray women artists struggling with female muses. While these texts 13

M. Atwood, “Running with the tigers,” in Flesh and the mirror: Essays on the art of Angela Carter, ed. L. Sage (London: Virago, 1994), 122. 14 Carter, The Bloody Chamber, 41 15 P. Duncker, “Re-imagining the fairy tales: Angela Carter’s bloody chambers,” in Literature and History 10, no. 1 (1984): 3-14. 16 C. Maxwell, The Female Sublime from Milton to Swinburne: Bearing Blindness (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 2001), 1. 17 Maxwell, 7

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recast the muse in different ways, all, like “The Bloody Chamber,” dispense with the notion of the passive muse. Yet, all represent the return of the muse’s body and voice as a kind of Pandora’s box, unleashing the abject, the grotesque, the marginal, and the ghostly in unexpected and horrifying ways.

I. Dis-easing Black Venus Like “The Bloody Chamber,” “Black Venus” shifts our perspective to the other side of official stories in order to restore subjectivity to a silenced female subject. In this case, Carter fills in the blanks for Jeanne Duval, who is famous for being Baudelaire’s mistress and sometime muse, but who lacks a history of her own: Nobody seems to know in what year Jeanne Duval was born, although the year in which she met Charles Baudelaire (1824) is precisely logged . . . Besides Duval, she also used the names Prosper and Lemer, as if her name was of no consequence. Where she came from is a problem; books suggest Mauritius, in the Indian ocean [sic], or Santo Domingo, in the Caribbean, take your pick of two different sides of the world. (Her pays d’origine of less importance than it would have been had she been a wine.)18

The story alternates between Carter’s analysis of the historical account and her fictional representation of Duval herself; the latter sections use free indirect discourse, so that the narrator’s voice is not always differentiated from Duval’s or Baudelaire’s. We are told Duval is a “forlorn Eve,” a “tabula rasa”: to the poet who makes her a kept woman, she is “baby,” an exotic “monkey,” “pussy-cat,” and “pet”.19 Baudelaire fantasizes about Duval’s imagined tropical homeland, and makes her dance “like a snake”.20 Her black skin marks her otherness, and is a screen for his fantasies of sensuality and exotic islands: neither has a native land, although he likes to pretend she has a fabulous home in the bosom of a blue ocean, he will force a home on her whether she’s got one or not, he cannot believe she is as dispossessed as he is. 21

When Duval dances for him, she is blanked/blacked out: “Although his regard made her luminous, his shadow made her blacker than she was, his 18

A. Carter, Saints and Strangers, 1985 (London: Penguin, 1987), 118 Carter, Saints and Strangers, 111-112 20 Carter, Saints and Strangers, 116 21 Carter, Saints and Strangers, 113 19

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shadow could eclipse her entirely”.22 Trapped in his gaze—and, Carter makes clear, drawn in by the relative security of being prostitute to one man rather than many—she inspires poetry of “black-thighed witches” and “weird goddesses”.23 As Matus shows, Carter exposes the problematic aesthetic, social, and scientific discourses that associate prostitutes with disease, and black skin with savage sexuality.24 The muse’s exploitation is bound up with the exploitation of sexual and racial others, and Carter connects Duval’s fate with the untold story of imperial conquest, rape, and the trade of human flesh: The splendid continent to which her skin allied her had been excised from her memory. She had been deprived of history, she was the pure child of the colony. The colony—white, imperious—had fathered her. Her mother went off with the sailors and her granny looked after her in one room with a rag-covered bed.25

Her sexual diseases are not a product of a “savage” sexual appetite, but acquired from her first “protector” in Paris: It was a bad joke, therefore, that, some centuries before Jeanne’s birth, the Aztec goddess, Nanahuatzin, had poured a cornucopia of wheelchairs, dark glasses, crutches and mercury pills on the ships of the conquistadores as they took their spoiled booty from the New World to the Old; the raped continent’s revenge, perpetuating itself in the beds of Europe.26

Part of Baudelaire’s fascination with Duval is that she disgusts him: he is aroused when he sees her urinating in the street and imagines her fluids are “a kind of bodily acid”.27 This is a variation of the disfiguring muse fantasy identified by Maxwell, in which Duval functions to shame and so inspire: she will hold him to her bosom and comfort him for betraying to her in his self-disgust those trace elements of common humanity he has left inside

22

Carter, Saints and Strangers, 114 Carter, Saints and Strangers, 117. Carter indicates she is translating from Les fleurs du mal (125-6). 24 J. Blonde Matus, “Black, and Hottentot Venus: Context and critique in Angela Carter’s “Black Venus,” in Studies in Short Fiction 28, no. 4 (1991): 467-77. 25 Carter, Saints and Strangers, 119 26 Carter, Saints and Strangers, 116 27 Carter, Saints and Strangers, 122 23

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Baudelaire’s desire to be comforted and held “to her bosom” is relevant, since his disgust/desire for Duval positions her as the abject m/other who threatens “narcissistic crisis,” in the same way her lack of home and history threatens his (affected) sense of dispossession .29 The poet sees Duval as “an ambulant fetish, savage, obscene, terrifying,” and experiences a fearful fascination with her “damaging” genital fluids.30 His pink kidskin gloves are “fitted as tenderly close as the rubber gloves that gynaecologists wear”31, suggesting both an objective scientific curiosity about her womb, and a desire/fear of climbing back into it. It is no coincidence that he “talks about his mother” after sex32, since his lust for Duval is bound up with her uncanniness: for Carter as for Baudelaire, Duval’s body signifies a discomforting return of the repressed and abjected. Carter attempts to turn all of these fantasies around by returning Duval’s “real” body (physical, abused, exploited) and “real” voice (brash, resistant, strong). Although Baudelaire’s eloquence “made her dumb,” and directs her “harsh clatter of ungrammatical recrimination and demands” at herself as a “great gawk of an ignorant black girl”33, Carter shows that Duval is neither mute nor stupid. Her first spoken word in the text is “No!” followed by: “Not the bloody parrot forest! Don’t take me on the slavers’ route back to the West Indies, for godsake! And let the bloody cat out, before it craps on your precious Bokhara!”34 This is a rough voice at odds with her languid dancing, and in keeping with the text’s ironic tone. When Baudelaire rhapsodizes over her snake-like movements, she retorts 28

Carter, Saints and Strangers, 123-124 J. Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay On Abjection. trans. L. S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1982), 14. Kristeva theorizes abjection in relation to the rejection of the mother’s body, and argues that objects which repulse us summon up abjection: “These bodily fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hard and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border” (3). She emphasizes, however: “It is . . . not lack of cleanliness of health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order” (4). 30 Carter, Saints and Strangers, 122 31 Carter, Saints and Strangers, 122 32 Carter, Saints and Strangers, 123 33 Carter, Saints and Strangers, 120 34 Carter, Saints and Strangers, 113 29

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that “snakes can’t dance: they’ve got no legs”.35 She knows he has never seen a snake, in the same ways the narrator knows his Tintorettos are fakes36: the effect is to ridicule the poet’s celebrated aesthetic sensibilities. It is Duval’s abject body, however, that allows her final triumph. Disfiguring muse she is, for she transmits her disease to the poet: he dies “deaf, dumb and paralyzed”37, while she travels to Martinique to “dispense, to the most privileged of the colonial administration . . . the veritable, the authentic, the true Baudelairean syphilis”.38 This is Duval’s revenge against men and empire, as well as the poet himself. It is apt that she pays for her journey with the sale of Baudelaire’s papers, which she had once used as cheroots: Europe’s greatest poetry is exposed as nothing more than smoke, founded on nothing less than blood, bodies, and money. Like Plath’s Lady Lazarus, who returns to “eat men like air”39, Carter’s reembodied muse avenges herself by destroying her master’s body. However, as Munford points out, Duval’s new story makes one wonder whether Carter invokes her “as a muse in her own revisionist writing project”40. She observes that Carter weaves allusions to and phrases from Les fleurs du mal throughout “Black Venus,” and suggests this “raises uncomfortable questions about her potential complicity with a malecentred aesthetic structures around the objectification of the female body”41. Like all muses, Duval’s position is a position of non-coherence, of the void or an empty space between signifiers precisely because she is constructed as the vanishing point and the condition of western culture’s fictions of itself; as the object and foundation of representation; as the telos and origin of man’s desire to represent his culture; as the object and sign of his creativity.42

This seems true in both Baudelaire’s and Carter’s representations. For Carter, Duval is the lost “bronze gateways of Benin,” the forgotten

35

Carter, Saints and Strangers, 117 Carter, Saints and Strangers, 113 37 Carter, Saints and Strangers, 124 38 Carter, Saints and Strangers, 125 39 S. Plath, Ariel, 1965 (London: Faber, 1968), 19 40 R. Munford, “Re-presenting Charles Baudelaire/re-presencing Jeanne Duval: Transformations of the muse in Angela Carter’s ‘Black Venus,’” in Forum for Modern Language Studies 40, no. 1 (2004): 10 41 Munford, 2 42 E. Bronfen, Over her dead body: Death, femininity and the aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1992), 403. 36

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“savannahs where men wrestle with leopards”43, just as for Baudelaire she is witch and goddess, abject mother and eroticized other. In exploring the relationship between male artist and female muse, the story also raises, but does not resolve, the problematic relationship between mother and daughter, and between female artist and female muse. We learn that Duval “can’t remember her mother,” and was sold by her grandmother “for a couple of bottles”44. Considering Duval’s final incarnation as a madam with her own “cortège of grieving girls”45, is she doomed to perpetuate this fate on her own surrogate daughters, to reinstall the very patterns “Black Venus” seeks to expose and subvert? As Johnson argues in her discussion of Mallarmé, the revaluation of the figure of the woman by a male author cannot substitute for the actual participation of women in the literary conversation. Mallarmé may be able to speak from the place of the silenced woman, but as long as he is occupying it, the silence that is broken in theory is maintained in reality.46

The question of appropriation still applies when the position of artist and muse is differently gendered, and is recomplicated here, since Carter, writing from a white, Euro-centric position, appropriates a black muse for her own “politically-interested image”47. The uncomfortable question of “speaking for” contradicts the text’s own insistence that Duval’s voice is “inimitable”48—although, since there is no other means of telling Duval’s tale, perhaps Carter’s point is to raise these questions, to shift our perspective from the old tale of the muse’s exploitation, to the new, complex story of her revival.

II. Monster eats Muse: John Dollar Centered on marooned schoolgirls, Wiggins’s text highlights the exclusion of females in Golding’s male-oriented, mythical construction of the primitive and civilized. Set in British colonial society in Burma during WWI, John Dollar alternates between different perspectives: that of Charlotte Lewes, an English schoolteacher sent to “foster and preserve the 43

Carter, Saints and Strangers, 119 Carter, Saints and Strangers, 123 45 Carter, Saints and Strangers, 125 46 B. Johnson, “Les fleurs du mal armé: Some reflections on intertextuality,” in A world of difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1987), 131. 47 Matus, 467 48 Carter, Saints and Strangers, 118 44

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standards of the Empire in English children”49; her lover, the wandering sailor John Dollar; Charlotte’s seven white pupils; and her single Asian student, Monkey.50 When the girls’ fathers arrange a sailing expedition for schoolboys to name an island in honor of the king, Charlotte, John, and her students join them. This festive redrawing of the Empire’s map culminates in three strange disasters: first, the schoolboys attack beaching turtles in an unexplained frenzy; second, these same boys go missing from their mysteriously bloodstained ship; and third, the unusually calm seas give way to a tsunami that shipwrecks the girls with a no-paralyzed John, and separates them from Charlotte. The wave that turns the world upsidedown also disrupts the narrative, as the focus switches from Charlotte— who now appears only in flashes until the end of the text—to the girls. This is also where Wiggins picks up Golding’s narrative, as the girls make a familiar descent into rivalry, ritual, and madness. Unlike Golding’s schoolboys, who direct their worst violence at their own outcasts—first murdering Piggy, then plotting to kill Ralph—Wiggins’s girls focus their attention on John. Having witnessed cannibals murder their own fathers, the two most powerful girls in the group, Amanda and Nolly, initiate their own form of mutilation and consumption. They build a daily ritual around feeding and medicating John, while secretly flaying and eating flesh from his unfeeling legs. Although Amanda and Nolly mimic the cannibals, their behavior is also reminiscent of the boys’ wanton destruction of the turtles, and their fathers’ equally careless map drawing. As Dohrmann notes, it is the English who are exposed as the real savages here.51 Wiggins reverses Golding’s representation of the barbaric as a natural state suppressed by civil order, instead reconstructing brutality as the dark heart of Britain’s “civilizing” projects. John is made to embody this “heart of darkness,” becoming the muse that inspires a confusion of rituals. His body is a text upon which Amanda and Nolly write a nexus of anxieties and inherited, jumbled discourses. They flay his legs out of hunger, desperation, and trauma, just as another of their number succumbs to anorexia in an act of hysterical selfcannibalization. As Nolly adds Christian prayer to the rites, John becomes the transubstantiated body of Christ: the embodiment of God and Logos, a means of staving off chaos. He is both the father who provides (food, order, hope in divinity), and the father(s) who have abandoned them. Just as the sea avenges the turtle massacre, Amanda and Nolly inscribe their 49

M. Wiggins, John Dollar (London: Penguin, 1989), 11 All references are to the 1989 Penguin edition. 51 G. V. Dohrmann, “John Dollar: Marianne Wiggins’ [sic] anti-utopian novel.” In English Journal 80, no. 4 (1991): 70-71. 50

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revenge against the father-as-patriarch and the father-as-imperialist by recasting their God as older, more primitive gods: like Dionysus, John is ripped apart and resurrected, day after day.52 This is also Wiggins’s revenge against her literary predecessor, the father-as-author: This novel . . . has eaten and defecated [Golding’s] earlier work, just as on the island the [cannibals] eat and defecate the girls' parents and the girls in turn eat and digest that defecation.53

As in Lord of the Flies, the rites that should restore order serve to perpetuate chaos and rivalry. As Amanda and Nolly become more obsessed with John’s “care,” the other girls are consumed: by anorexia and malaria, by the island’s quicksand, and, lastly, by the fire of Amanda and Nolly’s torches. Monkey alone survives, though it is to bring Charlotte back to John just as Amanda and Nolly have consumed him completely. This final embodiment of the muse brings more disaster: Monkey and Charlotte’s reunion does not heal the broken female community, but rather binds the two women together in ever-lasting horror. Charlotte has been isolated on the island, blind and trying to survive in the jungle. Her vision comes back too late. As we know from the beginning of the text, this story ends with an unspeakable murder and burial: “She and Charlotte had killed them, not Monkey so much, although Monkey had beaten their heads with a stone, after their hands had stopped moving”54. These events are too terrible to remember in detail, as they are too terrible to witness: Charlotte tells Monkey to bury John with his “head facing Hell,” “eyesdown in the earth”55. Years later, Monkey and Charlotte are still bound together in England, shipwrecked in blindness and silence: They lost their religion to silence, they lost their forbearance to fear. Year after year they refused to forget, to look forward, look inward, look anywhere, but to sea. The Indian loved the blind eyes of potatoes . . . She set them eyes-down in the rock-riddled earth. Each year she grew the same number. Nothing progressed. Nothing changed. Except Charlotte was dead and soon, the Indian knew, she herself would die, too.56

In rewriting Lord of the Flies, John Dollar also adds to Golding’s plot. Wiggins’s narrative begins with the coming-to-consciousness of English 52

Dohrmann, 71 S. Cokal, “Marianne Wiggins and the Eight Daughters of Chaos: Narrating the Body/(of)/the Text,” in Critique 40, no. 2 (1999): 112 54 Wiggins, 8-9 55 Wiggins, 9 56 Wiggins, 5 53

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schoolteacher Charlotte. Much of the first long section of the story has no direct relationship to Lord of the Flies at all, but is about Charlotte’s intense, transformative love affair with Burma’s landscape, which allows her to transcend language. As she travels further from England, Charlotte wakes as if from a fever, several times, although each time she seemed to surface from the loss of language, heat, the lassitude, she fell again into a deeper panic . . . Days went by wherein she couldn’t bring two thoughts together.57

She is unable to speak upon arriving in Burma: “Help me, she silently petitioned as they came in sight of the first rice mills, I’ve come halfway ‘round the world to spend my life inside a land of merchants”58. Charlotte’s silent despair, however, is her first step toward a new consciousness marked by the transcendence, not loss, of language. She comes to feel “she lived somewhere between known boundaries, extraterritorially”59. Standing in monsoon rains, she believes she is: amphibious, swimming through a double life. She was neither one thing nor the other, not a gill-fitted English woman who’s gone troppo nor an indigenous inhabitant of the native land. (25)

Her most joyful moment comes when she swims with dolphins and abandons the categories and order of English for another language, the rhythms and intuitions of the maternal natural landscape: As they swam it seemed they made a single body. The dolphin that she held to took its air in rhythm with her breathing. As they swam they rolled and Charlotte let her body press along the animal’s whole length . . . Then, as if the dolphins were a sleep a dream was threaded on, she lost all sense of time.60

Charlotte’s new perspective is that of artist and visionary, poignantly at odds with the mutilation arts practiced on the island: Charlotte's eyes-one blue, one green-are the first body part to be isolated and fetishized . . . Her ability to see what others do not and the uniqueness of her visual apparatus distinguish Charlotte in the first section; we follow her from England to Rangoon, watch the Burmese setting seduce and 57

Wiggins, 22 Wiggins, 23 59 Wiggins, 25 60 Wiggins, 39 58

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remake her. In the eyes of her cultural other, Charlotte's eyes make her super- or extrahuman, leading to a confusion of gender, spirituality, and bodily form . . . 61

Charlotte’s eyes are “eyes seeing with a mystic vision, knowing and transcending death: writer's eyes”62. She even makes a muse of John Dollar, molding him from dolphin, Dionysian myth, and desire: Through the light which lifted off the water she was sure she saw the dolphin running upright, taking off his shirt and running toward her on his legs, a vision of a man who ran toward her across a field of light, this man who rushed to her as if he lived for nothing else but running to her on the water.63

Theirs is an idealized relationship of equals: both are “extraterritorial,” since John has also renounced nationality. In love, they become lost together in a state without the boundaries and trappings of “civilization” the text works to problematize. But the experience of extraterritoriality does not mean transcendence for everyone. Charlotte’s other companion “between known boundaries” is her ostracized student, Monkey. The only non-European at the school, Monkey is objectified and excluded by the other girls: “It’s our slave-y”64; “Would you like to speak among us, Brother Monkey?”65. Alongside Charlotte’s journey, the narrative also charts Monkey’s coming-toconsciousness of racism and xenophobia, but her journey toward the selfcompletion Charlotte knows is interrupted by the tsunami. The events that follow it inscribe a scarred consciousness upon both women, marooning them for decades in the stasis of trauma and powerlessness. The beginning of the novel depicts Monkey and Charlotte sixty years later, living a sparse existence in Cornwall. Charlotte has died and Monkey, unable to communicate with the local authorities, cannot arrange her burial in the churchyard: “You won’t put her in this ground?” “It’s out of the question.” “The ‘question’?” “Forbidden.” “Forbidden?” 61

Cokal, 106-107 Cokal, 107 63 Wiggins, 40 64 Wiggins, 192 65 Wiggins, 137 62

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“Verboten. Defendu. Non licet, interdit. Vetitum est.” Was he mad? Was this hokus? The Indian took two steps backwards and put up her hand. She showed her palm to his eyes to signify she, too, could translate. The english makes laws.66

This moment overlaps, in Monkey’s memory, with the burial of John Dollar: The english makes laws . . . he eats cities, chews names. He eats people. Her name was something a long time ago that the english had chewed from its whole state of “Menaka” into a word they said “Monica” into the status of “Monkey,” for short. He translated her person, he chewed and he chewed.67

Just before the shipwreck that casts all into a world of horror, Charlotte and Dollar also fail to make the necessary translation. Though they oppose the turtle massacre, their silent consent marks their complicity in the Empire’s acts of naming and killing: “[Charlotte] stood and watched John watch it, Stop them, why aren’t you stopping them? she wondered”68. For all her special vision, Charlotte’s silence enables the daughters of imperialism to claim John as their own muse. She has not taught them anything but how to speak the king’s language: the language of claiming and naming, of consumption and death: A mutilation of a body, a mutilation of a text: either or both will inaugurate a certain impotence, shapelessness, the inability to see or speak (and thus, in some sense, to act) . . . But mutilation predicated on disaster also represents or heralds freedom, possibility—a time of lawlessness, a time of carnival . . . Death and disaster both defy narrative and enable it.69

Charlotte’s (and Wiggins’s) embodiment of the muse generates the story of a new postmodern world of fracture, silence, horror, and mutilation—a story at odds with Charlotte’s vision of a richly plural, borderless world of wanderers. By exploring the world beyond Golding’s island crisis of English masculinity and civilization, Wiggins fills in the margins of Lord of the Flies. Her story—its own margins notated throughout—is also about margins: their creation on British geographical and social maps; how the marginal penetrates speech, reality, and text; and 66

Wiggins, 7 Wiggins, 8-9 68 Wiggins, 96 69 Cokal, 101 67

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what forces—terrifying or illuminating—come from the margins. Wiggins’s multi-faceted troping of the marginal is a feminist and postcolonial reclaiming of marginalized experience, and a self-conscious signifier of the text’s own “marginal” status in relation to the canonized text it rewrites. But it also marks the text’s self-consciousness about vision, art, and language, and its re-presentation of the embodied muse as initiating both renewal and unending crisis.

III. Postmodernism’s Bad Sisters In both The Bad Sister and Cat’s Eye, the embodiment of the muse—in fact, of multiple female muses—also unleashes problematic narratives and fractures female communities. Tennant’s novel The Bad Sister is a femalecentered version of James Hogg’s gothic novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner70, and set in London and Scotland in the 1970s and 80s. Like Hogg’s text, it is composed of competing narratives, all focused on the murder of Scottish laird Michael Dalzell and his daughter Ishbel. The framing narrative is written by the “Editor,” who tries to make sense of the strange journal of Jane Wild, Dalzell’s illegitimate daughter and the prime murder suspect. This journal is the text’s central document, playing counterpart to Robert Wringhim’s paranoia-ridden “confession” of sibling rivalry and an evil doppelgänger named Gil-martin. Characterized by lyrical prose, vivid images, and multiple realities, it describes Jane’s paranoid rivalry with a series of real and imagined “bad sisters”—her half-sister Ishbel, her boyfriend Tony’s ex-girlfriend Miranda, and Tony’s mother Mrs. Marten. Her diary also details strange, supernatural visions sent by a radical feminist named Meg Gilmartin, who raised Jane in a commune of “Wild” sisters. Meg wants to destroy Dalzell because he is the “incarnation of capitalism”71, and orders Jane to kill her “bad sister.”72 In exchange, she promises to give Jane “Gilmartin,” Jane’s lost male half. While this strange transaction is in keeping with Meg’s feminist rhetoric about the divided female self, it also alludes to Wringhim’s doppelgänger. In Hogg’s text, Gil-martin manipulates Calvinist rhetoric to convince Wringhim he is one of the elect and to goad him into ever-greater acts of evil. But Tennant’s “Gilmartin” is an elusive figure who appears only in the visions Meg sends Jane; in contrast to Wringhim’s devil-like double, he radiates a positive male 70

E. Tennant, The Bad Sister (New York: Coward, 1824). Tennant, 40 72 All references are to the 1978 Coward edition. 71

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energy to which Jane is powerfully drawn. It is Meg who takes the place of Wringhim’s tormentor and leads Jane into a schizophrenic world of paranoia and murder. As in the texts discussed above, a narrative ostensibly about male-female relationships quickly becomes a narrative about women’s relationships with each other, and about what happens when the muse is re-embodied. In Jane’s case, Meg is one of many shadow selves who all blur together. Meg’s surname, Gilmartin, links her with the overbearing and menacing Mrs. Marten (and, of course, with the male Gilmartin). When Jane looks through Tony’s address book for Miranda’s contact information, multiple meanings and identities move under the sign of the same letter: M . . . why should she be in under her first name anyway? But I have a feeling she is. M for mother, for murder, for Meg. M for her. She made me a shadow, discarded by Tony before he had even met me. I am in Meg now, for Meg has my blood, and soon, M, you will be. We’ll both be there. Together again!73

Meg is blurred with Miranda, with “mother,” with Mrs. Marten—and Jane, too, is blurred with her enemy, since she also moves under M, being “in Meg’s blood.” This confusion between one doppëlganger and another points to many modes of identity division in the text. One of Jane’s recurring concerns is the difference between a genuine self and an artificially constructed one. Jane often sees herself as a false or empty image, or in terms of preconceived tropes: I am the double, now it’s me who’s become the shadow. Where I was haunted, now I will pursue. And the world will try to stamp me out, as I run like a grey replica of my vanished self—evil, unwanted, voracious in my needs. I will be outcast, dogging the steps of stronger women, fastening myself onto them at nights, trailing as their lying shadow in the day. Unless . . . bringing the world to rights . . . bringing Meg’s red altar the essential sacrifice . . . I am restored to life and greenness and in tearing out the simulacrum need no longer live as one myself.74

Like the advertisements she sees around her, Jane’s persona is constructed as a surface signifying nothing: a “replica” of a “vanished” self, an insubstantial “shadow,” a “simulacra.” She is a vampire who must feed off of others’ substance to sustain herself, a double lacking uniqueness. 73 74

Tennant, 149 Tennant, 148

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The borders, restrictions, and taboos imposed by patriarchal society go unheeded in the world Meg creates around Jane: incest, the supernatural, and extreme violence are allowed. But it is the transgression of such barriers that leads to the novel’s most violent atrocities: not only Jane’s dramatic self-division, but also the hate-fueled Dalzell murders, and the imaginary or remembered slaughter of the Aldridge family in Jane’s visions. Not least, of all, Jane’s incorporation into Meg’s world leads to her own death. Although her journal describes her reunion with Gilmartin in the Scottish hills, the Editor’s narrative relates the discovery of Jane’s corpse, which suggests her transformation into a vampire: the hair and nails show evidence of having grown in the grave, and there is a stake piercing the heart.75 These moments of metamorphosis into the supernatural, the inexplicable, and/or the grotesque promote a critique of the social circumstances driving women to desperate measures or madness, while also embodying an écriture féminine: erratic, hysterical, or “schizophrenic” narratives that counter the masculine-coded empiricism of the Editor’s account. But they are also used to “justify” terror, as Meg demonstrates: Mr Dalzell was a symbol of the father of all women . . . His assassination was symbolic . . . It was a ritual killing. The left hand performs the act figuratively, the right hand performs it literally. There is no difference between the two. He was the incarnation of capitalism. We have incarnated our disapproval of him.76

Tennant retropes Hogg’s Calvinist doctrine as a radical form of feminism. The slippage of morals, rather than Wringhim’s acts of violence per se, creates an indeterminacy in Hogg’s text that generates its gothic terror. As Sedgwick argues, the gothic’s terror always relates back to the conflict of identity.77 Gil-martin terrifies precisely because he is “too close” to Wringhim; his presence destabilizes the borders of the self. This is also true of The Bad Sister. In her journal, Jane describes a visit to Meg’s house, where Meg drinks Jane’s blood and Jane takes on the guilt of the crime she promises to execute. Vampirism is the code for this transformation: Meg’s hatred and evil is transmitted to Jane, as one vampire contaminates and makes another, so that the prey becomes the predator. This change occurs again, coded differently, in another room, during another coupling with another sister. In Jane’s visions, “Jeanne” 75

Tennant, 220-221 Tennant, 40 77 E. K. Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions, 1980 (New York: Methuen, 1986), 12-13. 76

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and “Marie” are abused by their employers, the Aldridges: “[Mrs. Aldridge] looked down at me in complete contempt. She was tired today, there would be no floggings. But she leaned down with the secateurs and nipped my ear. I let out a scream”78. As an escape from this abuse, the sisters take comfort in sex: Marie and I are in the one bed now, and our black dresses, which we never take off, even to sleep, are up around our waists. With our fingers we give each other comfort. We are kissing and biting. Her black hair is in my mouth. I will die, float, never let her out of my sight again.79

The sequence repeats the vampiric union with Meg, transforming it into a more explicitly sexual (and incestuous) scene. In both cases, the victim, Jane/Jeanne, is drawn into a problematic, too-close relationship with a predatory figure who appears, at first, to be another victim. Vampiric union with Meg, who poses as a fellow victim of patriarchy, leads to the violent murder of the Dalzells. Sexual union with her sister Marie, who would seem equally a victim of the Aldridges, precedes the vicious mutilation and murder of the family: under Marie’s direction, Jeanne tears out their eyes and “hack[s] them to pieces”80. In each relationship, Jane/Jeanne is “so close” to her “sister” that they become one: she perpetrates the crime her predatory sister desires, so that victim and victimizer are hardly distinguishable. In this way, the victim becomes a deformed version of herself, an unnatural vampire or incestuous lover, a “bad sister.” Atwood’s Cat’s Eye also focuses on the doppelgänger relationship between the female artist and her female muses. Elaine Risley, an artist whose paintings are acclaimed for their feminist themes, has returned to her native city of Toronto to attend a retrospective showing of her work. The trip initiates a process of recovering lost memories about three childhood bullies: Grace Smeath, Carol Campbell, and especially Cordelia, her childhood nemesis and sometime muse. Elaine is still haunted by Cordelia, whose childhood taunts continue to undermine her sense of cohesion and self-confidence: I’m supposed to have accumulated things by now: possessions, responsibilities, achievements, experience and wisdom. I’m supposed to be a person of substance.

78

Tennant, 104 Tennant, 105 80 Tennant, 190-193 79

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Chapter Eleven But since coming back here I don’t feel weightier. I feel lighter, as if I’m shedding matter, losing molecules . . .81

Yet, Cordelia herself is never a unified presence: I haven’t seen her for a long time. I wasn’t expecting to see her. But now that I’m back here I can hardly walk down a street without a glimpse of her, turning a corner, entering a door. It goes without saying that these fragments of her—a shoulder, beige, camel’s-hair, the side of a face, the back of a leg—belong to women who, seen whole, are not Cordelia.82

On the surface, Cordelia is Elaine’s opposite: bullying, rebellious, and lazy, where Elaine is trusting, hard working and smart. As is always the case with doppelgängers, Elaine and Cordelia are reflections of each other, two sides of the same person (even their names almost run together). As Elaine excavates her childhood and adolescence, she sees how frequently she and Cordelia change places. Cordelia reigned over Elaine’s childhood, but when they becomes teenagers Elaine is the one with a “mean mouth” and “an aura of potential verbal danger”: “The girls are afraid of me but they know where’s it safest: beside me, half a step behind.”83. At her retrospective, Elaine examines a portrait of Cordelia and thinks: I had trouble with this picture. It was hard for me to fix Cordelia in one time, at one age. I wanted her about thirteen . . . But the eyes sabotaged me. They aren’t strong eyes; the look they give the face is tentative, hesitant, reproachful. Frightened. Cordelia is afraid of me, in this picture. I am afraid of Cordelia. I’m not afraid of seeing Cordelia. I’m afraid of being Cordelia. Because in some way we changed places, and I’ve forgotten when.84

She has a similar reaction to her portraits of Grace’s mother, Mrs Smeath, who appears often in her paintings. Elaine’s relationship with Mrs Smeath is more hateful than her relationship with Cordelia: although she can accept Cordelia’s behavior (perhaps realizing all along that Cordelia, like her namesake in King Lear, is intimidated and ostracized by her father and older sisters), she cannot forgive Mrs Smeath for knowing about the bullying, and allowing it: 81

M. Atwood, Cat’s Eye, 1988 (London: Bloomsbury, 1989), 13. Atwood, Cat’s Eye, 6 83 Atwood, Cat’s Eye, 234 84 Atwood, Cat’s Eye, 227 82

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What I hate is not Grace or even Cordelia. I can’t go as far as that. I hate Mrs Smeath, because what I thought was a secret, something going on among girls, among children, is not one. It has been discussed before, and tolerated. Mrs Smeath has known and approved. She has done nothing to stop it. She thinks it serves me right.85

Mrs Smeath inspires Elaine’s need for revenge. Her “smug smile,” “bad heart,” and “evil eye” are recast again and again in her artwork86: we Mrs Smeath peeling potatoes “with half of her face peeling off” in “AN•EYE•FOR•AN•EYE,” and exposing her “reptilian, dark red, diseased” heart in “THE•KINGDOM•OF•GOD•IS•WITHIN•YOU”87. Ironically, the early Smeath paintings provoke controversy and bring Elaine her first taste of fame (or infamy) as a feminist artist. Yet, the retrospective allows Elaine to see Mrs Smeath in a new light. Although she “laboured” over Mrs Smeath with “considerable malice,” she now sees that her eyes are not only “piggy and smug,” but also “defeated”: The eyes of someone for whom God was a sadistic old man; the eyes of a small-town threadbare decency. Mrs Smeath was a transplant to the city . . . A displaced person; as I was.88

Power shifts back and forth between Elaine and her muses; as in “The Bloody Chamber” and The Bad Sister, the line between victim and aggressor, like self and muse, is constantly negotiated. Elaine’s retrospective—which is, after all, a tribute to her as an established artist—seems to provide a reconciliation of her troubled past: peace with bad memories as well as bad muses, a recognition that an “eye for an eye leads only to more blindness”89. The narrative has been a journey of self-recovery as well as self-discovery, as the careful arrangement of the art suggests (“Chronology won out after all,” Elaine notes.90 One of her most recent paintings, Cat’s Eye, which alludes to the cat’s eye marble she treasured as a child, seems to focalize her entire life. It portrays Elaine looking forward, while a mirror behind her reflects her younger self and three small girls: the childhood bullies she struggled to forget, and then struggled to remember. The final painting, Unified Field Theory, represents Elaine’s most terrifying and most inspiring memory: 85

Atwood, Cat’s Eye, 180 Atwood, Cat’s Eye, 180 87 Atwood, Cat’s Eye, 352 88 Atwood, Cat’s Eye, 405 89 Atwood, Cat’s Eye, 405 90 Atwood, Cat’s Eye, 404 86

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the day when Cordelia abandoned her in a ravine under a bridge, when she was rescued by a vision of the Virgin Mary. In the painting, Elaine’s savior becomes “the Virgin of Lost Things,” the site where past and present, light and darkness, and memory and art, come together: Underneath the bridge is the night sky, as seen through a telescope. Star upon star, red, blue, yellow, and white, swirling nebulae, galaxy upon galaxy: the universe, in its incandescence and darkness. Or so you think. But there are also stones down there, beetles and small roots, because this is the underside of the ground . . . The land of dead people.91

Sharpe argues that Elaine shares Kristeva’s “belief in the radical notion of space-time,” a belief that marks her as a dissident artist, and an artist disassociated from both other women and feminist politics (1993, 187).92 She reads the text’s final chapter, “Bridge,” as confirming Elaine’s longed-for connection with other women, and her sense of achievement as both artist and feminist: her imaginative vision at first provides her with a method of retreat from the world, and then she uses it seek revenge. But in the end, Elaine finds that the signifying space she creates from her own life communicates meaning to other women beyond the constraints of the language of linear time, the symbolizations of monumental time, or the rites of a dogmatic brand of feminism.93

But this ignores the text’s insistence on flux, cycles, and deferral, and especially its refusal of teleology. Elaine’s retrospective is “the time [she’s] made,” but this time is only a blur, the moving edge we live in; which is fluid, which turns back on itself, like a wave . . . Because I can no longer control these paintings, or tell them what to mean. Whatever energy they have came out of me. I’m what’s left over.94

The text does not end once, with a final bridging of distances, but several times over, restaging Cordelia’s deferral in present, past, and future. Although Elaine desires it, Cordelia does not come to the gallery: “I’ve been prepared for anything,” Elaine tells us, “except absence, except silence”95. She appears as her childhood self on the bridge above the 91

Atwood, Cat’s Eye, 408 Sharpe is referring to Kristeva’s essay “Women’s Time” (1981). 93 Atwood, Cat’s Eye, 188 94 Atwood, Cat’s Eye, 409 95 Atwood, Cat’s Eye, 413 92

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ravine, but this is a temporary illusion: as always, when Elaine turns around, “Cordelia is no longer there”96. Nor does she promise any future arrival. On the flight out of Toronto, Elaine watches two old ladies and thinks: “This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea”97. Thus, Cat’s Eye develops a typically postmodern form of intertextuality in which an engagement with Shakespearean commonplaces—Cordelia’s famous ‘nothing’—becomes the basis for an alternative epistemology, one built on uncertainty, relativity, and disjunction”98.

As in the other texts discussed above, the muse returns as a postmodern body, and inspires a postmodern text: both are consuming and consumable, ghostly and abject, persistent and elusive. (Cordelia, Atwood often reminds us, “has a tendency to exist.”) The “bridge” between artist and muse is not necessarily (not only) a sympathetic connection, a bond of sisterhood, but the middle ground between times, states, and selves: the dynamic of transition and flux that generates art, the trickiness of memory and muse.

Works Cited Atwood, M., Cat’s eye, 1988. London: Bloomsbury, 1989. —. “Running with the tigers.” In Flesh and the mirror: Essays on the art of Angela Carter, ed. L. Sage, 117-35. London: Virago, 1994. Bronfen, E., Over her dead body: Death, femininity and the aesthetic. Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1992. Carter, A. The Bloody Chamber, 1979. London: Penguin 1981. —. Saints and Strangers, 1985. London: Penguin, 1987. Cokal, S., “Marianne Wiggins and the Eight Daughters of Chaos: Narrating the Body/(of)/the Text.” In Critique 40, no. 2 (1999): 99118. Dohrmann, G. V., “John Dollar: Marianne Wiggins’ [sic] anti-utopian novel.” In English Journal 80, no. 4 (1991): 69-72.

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Atwood, Cat’s Eye, 419 Atwood Cat’s Eye,, 421 98 S. Raitt, “’Out of Shakespeare?’: Cordelia in Cat’s Eye,” in Transforming Shakespeare: Contemporary Women’s Re-visions in Literature and Performance, ed. M. Novy (Houndmills: Palgrave, 1999), 182-183 97

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Duncker, P. “Re-imagining the fairy tales: Angela Carter’s bloody chambers,” in Literature and History 10, no. 1 (1984): 3-14. DuPlessis. R. B., Writing beyond ending: Narrative strategies or twentieth-century women writers. Bloomington, IN: Indiana Univ. Press, 1985. Gubar, S. “‘The Blank Page’ and the Issues of Female Creativity.” In The New Feminist Criticism, edited by E. Showalter, 292-313. London: Virago, 1986. Johnson, B., “Les fleurs du mal armé: Some reflections on intertextuality.” In A world of difference, 116-133. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1987. Kristeva. J. Powers of horror: An essay on abjection. Trans. L. S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1982. —. “Women’s time.” In Feminisms. 1981, edited by R. R. Warhol and D. P. Herndl. Rev, 860-879. Houndsmills: Basingstoke, 1997. Matus, J. Blonde, “Black, and Hottentot Venus: Context and critique in Angela Carter’s ‘Black Venus.’” In Studies in Short Fiction 28, no. 4 (1991): 467-77. Maxwell, C., The Female Sublime from Milton to Swinburne: Bearing Blindness. Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 2001. Munford, R., “Re-presenting Charles Baudelaire/re-presencing Jeanne Duval: Transformations of the muse in Angela Carter’s ‘Black Venus,’” in Forum for Modern Language Studies 40, no. 1 (2004): 113. Plath, S. Ariel. 1965. London: Faber, 1968. Raitt, S., “’Out of Shakespeare?’: Cordelia in Cat’s Eye.” In Transforming Shakespeare: Contemporary Women’s Re-visions in Literature and Performance, edited by M. Novy, 181-197. Houndmills: Palgrave, 1999. Sedgwick, E. K. The Coherence of Gothic Conventions, 1980. New York: Methuen, 1986. Sharpe, “M. Margaret Atwood and Julia Kristeva: Space-time, the Dissident Woman Artist, and the Pursuit of Female Solidarity in Cat’s Eye.” In Essays on Canadian Writing 50 (1993): 174-189. Tennant, E. The Bad Sister. New York: Coward, 1824 Wiggins, M., John Dollar. London: Penguin, 1989. Woolf. V., “Professions for women.” In A room of one’s own/Three guineas, 1931, edited by M. Barrett, 356-361. London: Penguin, 1993.

CHAPTER TWELVE SACRED FRONTIERS: LOOKING FOR FISSURES TO CONSTRUCT AN ALTERNATE FEMINIST SUBJECTIVITY IN FATIMA MERNISSI’S DREAMS OF TRESPASS: TALES OF A HAREM GIRLHOOD DIYA M. ABDO

The reader of Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood,1 an “Arabic autobiography of childhood” as Tetz Rooke identifies the genre2, is immediately drawn in by the childish innocence of the young narrator’s voice. But Moroccan feminist and sociologist Fatima Mernssi’s lifenarrative is replete with examples of a subversively innocent style that, when examined, reveals the author’s attempt to construct an AraboIslamic feminist consciousness and subjectivity. After identifying her location, and that of the harem women, as raced, gendered, classed, and politicized individuals, Mernissi begins to work toward the construction of a feminist self. Because this construction necessarily takes place within spaces that are restricted physically, emotionally, socially, and narratalogically, fissures must first be located and accessed. These fissures, or avenues of escape, may be found in real, physical places, imaginary ones, or controlled and subverted personal “spaces,” such as the body itself. Using the theoretical work of Fatima Mernissi herself and other Muslim and Arab feminists as an authoritative gloss on the text at hand, this paper examines the status of Arab and Muslim women as

1

Fatima Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood. (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books, 1994) 2 Tetz Rooke, “The Arabic Autobiography of Childhood,” in Writing the Self: Autobiography in modern Arabic literature, edited by R. Ostle, E. de Moor and S. Wild. (London: Saqi Books, 1998)

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delineated in Mernissi’s literary work, and the various methods they might use to facilitate the creation of a feminist subjectivity. Commenting on Arab autobiography in general, Stefan Wild argues that the first sentence carries special psychological significance, “often considered to contain somehow [the writer’s] whole case” (Wild 1998, 84).3 To Fatima, the location of her family’s harem would seem to represent the defining factor of her life: “five thousand kilometers west of Mecca, and one thousand kilometers south of Madrid, one of the dangerous capitals of the Christians. The problems with the Christians start, said Father, as with women, when the hudud, or sacred frontier, is not respected” (Mernissi 1994, 1).4 Childish and unsophisticated, the description draws people and places with broad, crude strokes, implicitly polarizing them. However, Fatima is really locating herself as a woman geopolitically and geo-religiously. The harem, a socio-cultural institution, informs her life sexually as a woman, which is also informed by the center of Islamic religious narrative, Mecca. Her seemingly childlike precision in knowing how close she is to it is not only the remnant of strict memorization at Qur’anic school; rather it reflects the pervasiveness of this religious discourse and its effects on a Muslim woman’s identity. In a life informed by Islamic narrative, self-definition and subjecthood center on a relationship with the physical site of Mecca to such a degree that Fatima, a little girl, chooses to locate herself with reference to it before sharing even her age or number of siblings. In addition to locating herself religiously and sexually, Fatima does so racially and politically. Her reality as a colonized subject is expressed in her geographical distance from one of the political centers of colonial 3

Stephan Wild, “Searching for Beginnings in Modern Arabic Autobiography,” in Writing the Self: Autobiography in modern Arabic literature, edited by R. Ostle, E. de Moor and S. Wild., (London: Saqi Books, 1998) 84. 4 Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 1. Interestingly, in Doing Daily Battle Mernissi begins by stating that she was born exactly "five-hundred meters from Karaouin University," thus providing a different spatial location which references her identity in terms of knowledge and education and hints at a legitimacy more fitting to the scholarly endeavor of the book itself. The attempt to authorize her voice is strengthened by her contention that she was raised by “illiterate women who were not only physically confined but intellectually mutilated in the name of honor and a female ideal cherished by the male bourgeoisie” (Mernissi 1989, 1), signaling her difference as an educated woman. See Amireh’s “Writing the Difference” (1997) on how Arab women writers construct this “difference” between them and supposedly less “civilized” or “liberated” Arab women in order to empower and legitimize their own voices.

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power, Madrid. The imperial sphere represented by this place defines Fatima as female, Muslim and Arab through colonial or orientalist narratives. Additionally, Fatima’s mention of her father’s formulation of the “Christians’ problems” suggests the complexity of the national narrative that proscribes women’s lives. By setting up a parallel between all Christians and Muslim women, Father plays out the national patriarchal discourse which, in its response to colonialism, equates the nation’s women with the infidels religiously and the colonizers politically. Regarded as the point of a potential breach, violation and vulnerability whether in the Muslim umma (community) or the colonized nation, women, like the Christians (here denoting not only religious but politicoethnic identity), are a threat and an enemy. More dangerously, however, women are the enemy, the danger, the chaos within. As Mernissi and other Muslim and Arab feminists have argued (especially Leila Ahmed in Women and Gender in Islam [1992]), women, as a threat to patriarchal political and economic power, have acquired a stigma that finds its roots in religious and political history. As a result they continue to be cast in a certain light so that they may be treated and controlled in ways that appear sanctioned. Because of political and religious criminalization, women are subject to exclusion from the public sphere and confined instead to an inviolable, sanctified and neutralized private and domestic sphere. This privatization of women finds its causes in religious as well as political ideologies. As Mernissi tells us in The Veil and the Male Elite, though the Prophet Muhammad at the outset of his career emphasized the link between the sexual and the political, his insistence on “not setting up boundaries between his private life and his public life, which allowed his wives to be directly involved in the affairs of the Muslim state, little by little turned against him"5. The physical attacks against and harassment of the very public Prophet’s wives, and the verbal attacks on them in the form of rumors, were meant to weaken the political power of the Prophet. These actions resulted in a Qur’anic revelation that aimed to protect the Prophet’s status and reputation by ordering the publicly visible identification of his wives through veiling, but later became the basis for all women 's seclusion behind a literal as well as figurative hijab, the piece of cloth itself that women wear on their heads and a metaphoric as well as real curtain behind which women are guarded.6 Hence was women’s nature as a source of fitna,7 and indeed as 5 6

Mernissi, The Veil and the Male Elite, 172 Mernissi, The Veil and the Male Elite, 180

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fitna itself, cemented. Distracting and destructive, women’s sexuality is in mainstream Islam a bubbling cauldron that needs to be carefully monitored lest the umma or nation fall into disharmony. The seclusion of women was furthered under colonialism, wherein the ‘rule of the colonial difference’ (the difference and inferiority attributed to the colonized) shaped nationalist responses... where nationalists... divided the world into an inner and outer domain, a kind of private and public, in which men could safely emulate the ways of the West and appropriate its technologies in order to gain power as long as the home, with women its clearest representatives, could be preserved as a space of spirituality and cultural authenticity.8

Specifically within an Arab context, Yvonne Haddad contends, “the current slogan in the Arab world ‘borrowing technology but not ideology’ envisions the man as technocrat, building a modern industrialized nation, while the woman is the housewife safeguarding the Islamic nature of society by maintaining and transmitting its values”9. The enshrined presence of women in the private, supposedly apolitical sphere, is perhaps best represented in Dreams when Fatima claims that the women “certainly could not create magic when the men were talking politics”10. The rationale here mimics the stereotypical and dualistic narratives that identify women’s experiences and discourse as mysterious, magical, earthly and nature-bound, whilst men’s are cultural, political, rational and reasonable11. Thus, although perhaps the text seems to underscore this privatization as one that can be claimed and emphasized by women themselves in acts necessary for survival, it more importantly reveals that this seemingly de-politicized existence has been internalized in their very beings and behaviors since it is the only mode of existence offered them by the men who bar them from the world. Thus, in her very 7 Connoting a beautiful woman, fitna in Islamic terms refers to sexual and political “disorder or chaos” both caused by women’s sexual powers, powers which men cannot resist and therefore will result in their distraction from economic, social, and religious obligations (Mernissi 1987, 31-2). 8 Lila Abu-Lughod, Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998) 17. 9 Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, “Islam, women and revolution in Twentieth-century Arab thought.” In Muslim World, no. 74 (1984): 137 10 Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 84 11 Sherry B.Ortner, “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” in Feminist Theory: A Reader, edited by W. Kolmar and F. Bartkowski. (Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company, 2000)

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opening line Fatima (with the overlay of Mernissi’s already established theoretical work) manages to define the multiple narratives in and by which Arab Muslim women find themselves defined. When Fatima describes her home in Fez as a “fortress”12, it is so in ways that are not simply physical. An Arab Muslim woman’s place is not only sexually, religiously and culturally defined in a patriarchal system, but also (often more importantly) politically defined and marginalized. Although I generally concur with Mervat Hatem’s assessment that Mernissi offers a rather “narrow definition of the concept of patriarchy”13 that makes her scholarly work sometimes general and homogenizing14, here in this autobiography we see the ways in which patriarchy connects with other forms of oppression (colonialism, for example), thus widening its conceptual scope. These, then, are the “geometric line[s] organizing [women’s] powerlessness”15. But geometric lines, though organizationally powerful, can be transgressed, trespassed, and sometimes even warped. Mernissi’s text does not stop at defining the physical (and their associated social, sexual and political) boundaries these women inhabit; she goes on to demonstrate means by which these boundaries are manipulated. As Elizabeth Thompson reminds us, these boundaries that define what is “public” and what is “private” and their attendant narratives are never stable, and “Middle Eastern” women have historically attempted to break through these borders in multiple ways to infiltrate forbidden spaces.16 Indeed, the textual act itself represented by the writing of this autobiography is a forceful representation of the authorial and authoritative defiance of the Arab and Muslim insistence on the privatization of women and their lives; this self-indulgent and revealing narrative makes the private public, yanks the personal out of passivity and makes it political. Beyond the very important act of an Arab, Muslim, and “post-colonial” woman publicizing 12

Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 39 According to Hatem, this concept is “largely anthropological, stressing the important role that a patriarch plays in the family” and deals with the “gender relations within the family [that] are affected by Muslim laws and world views... [as] the cornerstones of Muslim patriarchy” (Hatem 1987, 815). 14 Mervat Hatem, “Class and Patriarchy as Competing Paradigms for the Study of Middle Eastern Women.” In Comparative Studies in Society and History 29, no. 4 (1987): 815-816 15 Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 3 16 Elizabeth Thompson, “Public and Private in Middle Eastern Women's History.” In Journal of Women's History, (2003) 2. 13

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her own life, the very essence of the private sphere, the text describes the ways in which, as Marjo Buitelaar argues of Moroccan women in general, these harem women “could exert considerable informal power within the ‘private’ sphere and... influence decisions taken in the ‘public’ sphere through their husbands and sons”17. Divisions of “private” and “public” within a Muslim context must thus remain necessarily problematic since they represent a Western ethnocentric representation of the Muslim world that does not take into account the various ways in which women have power and could infiltrate the public world.18 The women of Mernissi’s autobiography are no different. They strategize their trespasses so as to escape physically and discursively the multiple narratives that bind them. This is done primarily when the women of the harem create what I call fissures that render them more in control of their bodies and voices and provide them with limited and momentary access to the dominant, normative narratives, giving them an opportunity to revise these, at least temporarily. First, however, the women of the harem need to create a fissure in their own acceptance of their status so as to access other fissures. For example, in Dreams, the harem farm’s strongest representation of a fissure is found in the “high delicate wrought-iron grilles”19 which seem locked but which in fact spring open easily to let one out into the fields. The women of this harem are indeed capable of venturing out into the fields beyond and trespassing the hudud. What, then, if anything, is stopping them? Many feminists have argued that the oppressed, especially women, often internalize their own inferiority, objectification and “othering” to make them normalized and accepted parts of their identities.20 Fatima’s words tell us just how deeply she has internalized the normative narrative that circumscribes her life: “Often, I could not sleep the first few nights on Yasmina’s farm—the frontiers were not clear enough. There were no closed gates to be seen anywhere.... But how could I walk in an open field without being attacked?”21. The question’s apparent absurdity emphasizes how, with complete internalization of these dictates, women can be made 17

Marjo Buitelaar, ”Public Baths as Private Spaces.” In Women and Islamization: Contemporary Dimensions of Discourse on Gender Relations, edited by K. Ask and M. Tjomsland. (Oxford, England: Berg, 1998) 104. 18 El Solh, Camillia Fawzi, and Judy Mabro, eds., Muslim Women's Choices: Religious Belief and Social Reality, (Providence, RI: Berg, 1995) 14. 19 Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 50 20 For example, Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex (1974, xxiv). 21 Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 25

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the very agents of patriarchy, imposing its limits upon themselves. Lalla Radia, for example, in the memoir, “although a literate woman who read history books,” insists that, “‘harems were wonderful things. All respectable men provided for their womenfolk, so that they did not have to go out into dangerous, unsafe streets. They gave them lovely palaces with marble floors and fountains, good food, nice clothes, and jewelry. What more did a woman need to be happy?’”22. What such rhetoric signifies is some Arab and Muslim women’s erroneous belief that they are accorded enormous respect, which they further confuse with “rights.” But the two are not at all the same, as Nadia Hijab points out: women might “receive great respect in certain societies that give them few rights” and “receive equality of rights in societies in which they compete with men but have relatively low respect”23. Even out in the country, where there are fewer rules or locked gates, the women and men know the rules and live by them. This is the “Harem Within,” which is “‘inscribed under your forehead and under your skin’”24. Even if a woman is “unveiled,” a strange man “‘would cover his head with the hood of his own djellaba to show that he was not looking,’” knowing that “‘the women on the farm belonged to grandfather Tazi, and that he had no right to look at them’”25. Thus these women and men become locked in place by internalized barriers that need not any literal walls. Escape from these inner boundaries is possible, but as Aunt Habiba says, there are prerequisites: “the first is to feel encircled and the second is to believe that you can break the circle”26. One, and perhaps the most important, method that the text emphasizes to create fissures for escape is to de-internalize the architecture (and thus the narrative) surrounding one by seeing it in a new, more empowering light. Fatima does just this in her game of “the seated promenade”27 a pastime of her invention which the older Mernissi significantly finds still “quite useful today”28 as an activist and feminist. In this game, someone “stuck somewhere” can pass the time

22

Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 46 Nadia Hijab, “Islam, Social Change, and the Reality of Arab Women's Lives,” in Women's Voices, Feminist Visions: Clasic and Contemporary Readings, edited by S. M. Shaw and J. Lee (Mountain View: Mayfield, 2001) 504. 24 Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 61 25 Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 62 26 Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 64 27 Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 4 28 Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 4 23

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by “contemplating familiar grounds as if they were alien to [them]”29. Although at first one may well be overwhelmed by the austere Islamic architecture of the harem, “where symmetry ruled everything” and where even the nebulous water of the fountain “seemed controlled and tamed”30 and the sky “strictly square-shaped, like all the rest” hung frozen in the “geometric design”31, through this unfamiliar contemplation of a familiar narrative a trapped woman can begin to locate modes of escape. As she looks at them, the stars above Fatima seem to shift dizzyingly32, and so too does their symbolism shift from a reminder of tamed imprisonment to a violent and stubborn twinkling in escape from the chasing sun. The rigid, symmetrical courtyard contains other fissures, too. The stairs, for example, “lodged in the four corners of the courtyard... were important because even grownups could play a sort of gigantic hide-and-go-seek on them, running up and down their glazed green steps”.33 Thus a woman can find, if she looks unfamiliarly into the crevasses of the geometrical architecture, the portholes in the frontiers, the breaking point in the structure, the subconscious/unconscious spaces that represent the “repository of all the experiences and desires that cannot be identified with the symbolic realm and its laws of citationality, those calls to take up normative subject positions”34. This realm is a semiotic world of fissures through which a woman might fall through “dizzy,” “hypnotized” and “overwhelmed”35, dreaming of trespasses and wild adventures like Alice in Wonderland. Surrounded by walls physical and otherwise, the women of these different harems fashion different ways to access and manipulate those walls so as to create fissures for escape from the “spaces” that bind them, spaces whose restricting codes they have sometimes even internalized. In Fatima’s solitary game which “consists in contemplating familiar grounds as if they were alien to [her],” she “would sit on [her] threshold and look 29

Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 4 Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 4 31 Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 5 32 Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 5 33 Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 5. These stairs are even more important in that they lead off of the conservative courtyard space and into the “forbidden terrace” and the subversive “maze” of the women’s rooms upstairs. 34 Sidionie Smith, “Performativity, Autobiographical Practice, Resistance,” in Women, Autobiography, Theory : a Reader, edited by S. Smith and J. Watson, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998) 111. 35 Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 5 30

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at [her] house as if [she] had never seen it before”36. She is confined both literally and conventionally to a feminized space, as she is afraid to play the masculine war games with her cousins.37 In her description of how Fatima the child entertains herself within her frontiers, the adult writer Mernissi provides clues to how women might strategize so as to contend with and transgress the boundaries that surround them. Looking at a familiar world with wonderment, as if looking anew through the eyes of a child, is one way of exploring and discovering confining spaces imaginatively. However, Fatima’s description of her early childhood game, a textually self-reflexive strategy whereby the game reflects and mimics the very theoretical effort of this text as a whole and Mernissi’s scholarly feminist endeavors, provides Arabo-Islamic women with methods by which they can construct a feminist subjectivity within their architectural and discursive spaces. Here is a way to manipulate the architecture that surrounds one without appearing to interfere aggressively in its destruction. Still and almost invisible, women can slowly deconstruct and break down borders and frontiers. For it is dangerous to passively view and accept these spaces as they are; rather these walls should be always examined and re-viewed so as to reveal their gaps, holes, and fissures. The harem architecture around Fatima represents not only a physical space, but cultural, national, traditional and religious spaces as well. The “square and rigid courtyard, where symmetry ruled everything”38 echoes Islamic art and architecture. Here, these things stand in for the narratives that guide and discipline the women of the harem and Fatima the child. This narrative/architecture is so powerful that it domesticates even the presumably free water of the fountain, which becomes in the harem courtyard “controlled and tamed”39 when it should be unfettered and untamable—it can, after all, evaporate and disappear. Like the art and architecture which it inspires, this Islamic narrative is not only overpowering, but pervasive, webbed and intersecting within itself and the other narratives that surround it and which it bolsters and engenders. Everything is connected to everything else, from the colonnades to the

36

Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 4 Evelyne Accad sees war (here represented as games) as a mode of manifesting sexual power (1991, 245-6). Fatima does not possess this power and is therefore confined to a socially proscribed status. 38 Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 4 39 Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 4 37

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columns to the yard to the rooms, in a seemingly unbreakable unity of patterns that infinitely “mirror” each others’ design.40 The totality of the design is one in which Fatima and the rest of the women become more accustomed prisoners than willing parts: “Looking for the frontier has become my life’s occupation. Anxiety eats at me whenever I cannot situate the geometric lines organizing my powerlessness”41. Here, with Mernissi’s scholarly work helping us to interpret the novel, we can see how “Mernissi does not see Islamic gender segregation as an isolated social phenomenon of a religious nature, but as a political expression of a specific distribution of power and authority and an economic reflection of a specific division of labor, both forming a total and coherent social order”42. But is it really completely total and always coherent? Could there be a way to chip away at the seemingly insurmountable wall of social order? In her initial definition of herself and her childhood, Fatima identifies the web of narratives that ensnares her and informs her existence: the political, the cultural, the religious, and the orientalist. All are in fact embodied in the architecture and geography she describes. When Fatima first locates her distance from Mecca and Madrid; when she describes the austere and symmetrical house in which she lives and which controls even the sky and water; when she speaks of the opulence of the harem with its “drapes of heavy brocade, velvet, and lace” and “silver-plated, wroughtiron grilles, topped with wonderfully colored arches”43, the text mimics the various discursive visions and lived parameters of Arab and Muslim women. But Fatima’s self-location also functions as a lived example of the “politics of location” which as a “radical standpoint, perspective, position... calls those of us who would participate in the formation of counter-hegemonic cultural practice to identify the spaces where we begin the process of re-vision”44. In that vein, these various oppressive and distorting visions must be realigned and refocused for Muslim and Arab women to be liberated; the narratives need to be revealed, reclaimed and reinterpreted. This cannot be done when the architecture and narratives are simply accepted as facts the way most accept, at face value, the 40

Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 4 Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 3 42 Issa Boullata, Trends and Issues in Contemporary Arab Thought, (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990) 132. 43 Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 4 44 Bell Hooks, Yearning : race, gender, and cultural politics, (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1990) 145. 41

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normative narratives or the patriarchal interpretations of religious and national textualities, for, collectively, a people internalizes and accepts its indigenous stories because they become normalized as a part of the nation’s consciousness. Instead, as one can see the strangeness, absurdity and flaws of the cultural and religious narratives of others, so too with the perspective of an outsider must local narratives be viewed. Thus does Dreams’ Fatima seem to propose a theory in which Muslim women may look at the narratives that surround them with the passion and ethics of an insider but with the lens of an outsider—the investigative and questioning private eye/I. Mernissi practices what she preaches explicitly in her scholarly work and implicitly in this text. This theory is practiced in the form and nature of Dreams itself, where in order to more effectively explore her own highly personal and autobiographical narratives, Mernissi brings in an(“other”) eye through which these narratives can be seen and visited anew. In the text, this is quite literally the eye of Ruth V. Ward, the photographer. Through both of these “lenses,” photographic and narratological, in their tension and collaboration with each other in the text and paratext, Mernissi reexamines her life and explores new ways of unraveling these narratives without seeming like an enemy of the religion she critiques.45 The text’s message is that Arab and Muslim women need to be able to see clearly the barriers that sequester them so as to combat them. To do this they must be able to question these barriers’ sanctity, solidity and absoluteness, and for that, the third I, the cultural and sexual hybridity is required. Again, the memoir itself textually represents this attempt to navigate barriers, boundaries and frontiers. Image and word, text and paratext, “East” and “West,” Arabic and English languages, Arab and Western audiences, Islam and Christianity, adulthood and childhood, and the polyvocality of the various competing narratives, ages, and voices that inhabit this narrative world are melded, contrasted and juxtaposed, bleeding into one another and defying the inviolability of each. Thus, in a way, the text itself becomes a study in and manifestation of the tension between these binaries and an attempt to shift and transgress borders. As a result the text exemplifies what Caren Kaplan calls an “out-law” genre, 46 45

W. J. T. Mitchell explores the ways in which the photo essay “After the Last Sky” by Edward Said and its photographs by Jean Mohr also represent this double vision in which one lens makes up for whatever is broken or missing in the other (Mitchell 1999, 554-5). 46 Caren Kaplan, “Resisting Autobiography: Out-Law Genres and Transnational Feminist Subjects,” in Women, Autobiography, Theory: a Reader, edited by S. Smith and J. Watson, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998) 208.

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a “cultural autobiography” to be specific, wherein just as in Fayad’s description of Assia Djebar’s Fantasia, Mernissi uses “a combination of personal and collective narratives... problematizing the nature of autobiography as a genre with a traditional focus on the individual to the exclusion of communal identity”47. Thus the revision of borders is not only a revision of the Moroccan or Arabo-Islamic narratives but also of the Western, as here in Mernissi’s revision of the Western genre of autobiography. A quiet but powerful examination of walls and narratives as a potentially successful feminist strategy is emphasized frequently within the text, especially through the person of Yasmina, Fatima’s maternal grandmother, who is Mernissi’s prototype of successful feminism and, I believe, Mernissi’s feminist alter-ego and representation in the text. In one incident, when little Fatima interrogates Yasmina about walls, boundaries and the meaning of freedom, Yasmina advises the little girl not to spend her time “looking for walls to bang” her head on.48 To prove her point, and not simply to make little Fatima laugh as the latter seems to believe, Yasmina runs up to the wall and mimics banging her head against it, shouting: “The wall hurts! The wall is my enemy.” Yasmina then looks at Fatima and asks, “You understand what I mean?”49. Yes—and so should the reader. The text celebrates a breed of feminism in which a woman can find the time for “fun, laughter and happiness”50 even when the wall is right there in front of her. It is also a philosophy that celebrates femininity as well as feminism: “I was going to grow up in a wonderful kingdom where women had rights, including the freedom to snuggle up with their own husbands every night”51. But such a reading is too simplistic. In something else Yasmina says, we find another clue about those damnable walls: “You will be a modern, educated lady. You will realize the nationalists’ dream. You will learn foreign languages, have a passport, devour books, and speak like a religious authority”52. “Don’t bang your head against the walls,” Yasmina 47

Mona Fayad, “Cartographies of Identity: Writing Mahgrebi Women as Postcolonial Subjects,” In Beyond Colonialism and Nationalism in the Maghrib: History, Culture, and Politics, edited by A. A. Ahmida. (New York: Palgrave, 2000) 97. 48 Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 64 49 Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 64 50 Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 64 51 Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 37 52 Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 64

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seems to tell Fatima; rather, “get educated, acquire religious authority, and maybe you can figure out what put those walls up to begin with, and thus destroy them without sacrificing yourself.” Writing now as the woman who has fulfilled her grandmother’s dreams, Mernissi passes the lesson on to others. If the harem and its walls are codified spaces and narratives, the best way to overcome those walls is to gently study them, discover how they have been constructed, examine their history and if possible rewrite and reinterpret them. Radically tearing down the walls or simply ignoring them as narratives with which one cannot argue, as Nasr Hamid Abouzeid contends53 is not a viable option. In cultures in which identity itself is dependent on such narratives, such actions are not only ineffective but could amount to social or literal suicide for those who attempt them. The example of Nawal El-Saadawi (against whom religious authorities in Egypt issued a fatwa declaring her murder permissible and whose marriage they attempted to forcibly dissolve) and the incident to which Mernissi refers in a footnote in Dreams (“a Moroccan women’s association... that had collected one million signatures against polygamy and divorce became the target of the fundamentalist press, which issued a fatwa, or religious decree, calling for the women’s execution as heretics54 clearly show that any attempted secularization or rejection of religious “revelation” is potentially lethal and perhaps impossible.55 More effective, then, is to smoothly rearrange the bricks and reshape the wall, or to locate its crevices so that one might chisel through to hidden doors. One must accept the existence of the wall, the narrative, and then work within its confines to reconfigure its limitations. Various Islamic feminisms, by which I mean feminisms that take Islam and its important texts as a point of departure and as a base, are in fact based on just such a premise, and Mernissi’s later scholarly work and this literary text speak in concert with the tenets of those Islamic feminisms. Though considered by As’ad AbuKhalil as members of an “Islamic apologetic school” since it absolves Islam proper from sexism and misogyny and places the blame on patriarchal appropriation and readings of Islam, Islamic feminists are in fact effective because they work within 53 Abouzeid, Nasr Hamid, “Al-Mar'a: Al-Bu'd al-Mafqood Fi al-Khitab al-Dini alMu'aser (Woman: The Missing Dimension in Contemporary Religious Discourse),” in Hajar: Kitab Al-Mar'a (Hajar: Woman's Book), edited by S. Bakr and H. ElSadda. (Cairo: Sina, 1993) 58. 54 Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 37 55 Anouar Majid, “The Politics of Feminism in Islam,” in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 23, no. 2 (1998): 340

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the confines of Islamic texts and reinterpret them from a “female, feminist point of view” without “being dismissed as anti-Islamic,” therefore securing “a position in society which they would otherwise be denied”56. Islamic feminism then solves the dilemma which burdens Muslim (and in this case also Arab) women—how to reconcile “feminist longings” with “postcolonial conditions” and how to “become modern”—liberated— “when one was not, could not be, or did not want to be Western”57 at a time when women were finding it difficult if not impossible to “serve their cause as women and at the same time belong to the nation for whose very existence they have struggled”58. Dreams of Trespass solves this dilemma because it provides strategies with which to “modernize” the status of Muslim and Arab women while making that liberation and modernization appear indigenous, as for example in the case of the Muslim Sisters, who “command respect in their communities because they demonstrate that self-empowerment is possible while still adhering to Islam”59. This perhaps also explains the shift in the scholarship of Mernissi, whose earlier works were explicit in their anti-Islamic spirit60—especially The Veil and the Male Elite 61, which was banned in Morocco, 62and in which Mernissi “takes a stance that is similar to many Western feminists” and “provides a devastating and totalizing critique of Islam as a Patriarchal religion”63. The shift in Mernissi’s works then could be the result of a honing of her feminist skills and the knowledge of strategies that will be

56

Asad AbuKhalil, “Toward the Study of Women and Politics in the Arab World,” in Feminist Issues. (1993) 5. 57 Abu-Lughod, Remaking Women, 14 58 Marie-Aimee Helie-Lucas, “Women's Struggles and Strategies in the Rise of Fundamentalism in the Muslim World: From Entryism to Internationalism,” in Women in the Middle East: Perceptions, Realities, and Struggles for Liberation, edited by H. Afshar (London: Macmillan, 1993) 211. 59 Susan Muaddi Darraj, “Understanding the Other Sister: the Case of Arab Feminism,” in Monthly Review 53, no. 10 (2002): 81 60 AbuKhalil, 14 61 Fatime Mernissi, The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women's Rights in Islam, translated by L. Mary Jo (Reading, MA: AddisonWesley, 1991). 62 Kramer, Martin, “Politics and the Prophet.” In New Republic, 1 March, 1993: 39 63 Mona Fayad, “Cartographies of Identity: Writing Mahgrebi Women as Postcolonial Subjects,” in Beyond Colonialism and Nationalism in the Maghrib: History, Culture, and Politics, edited by A. A. Ahmida. (New York: Palgrave, 2000) 107.

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locally effective—educating without alienating.64 Mernissi’s strategy is linguistic. Ultimately, if the spatial walls represent also salient discursive, ideological, religious, psychological, and emotional narratives, then the bricks and crevices are the words and concepts of those narratives. And so the Islamic feminist game of reexamination begins. “What exactly is a harem?”65 Fatima asks, thus acting out Mernissi’s scholarly feminism, which identifies both physical location and verbal and written word as sites of power. Physical location in a space or in the body must be accessed and manipulated if power itself is to be accessed. But it is just as important to manipulate the words that encircle women as tightly as their physical spaces, their clothing, and their bodies. Thus the question does not only mean, “Of what does a harem consist?” or “Where is it located?” Equally importantly, it asks one to examine the word “harem” itself, its etymological history, its origin, mutations and associations so as to locate women’s oppression linguistically, discursively, and therefore ideologically and culturally. Knowing the origins of a word can help reveal where along the way it has acquired incorrect meanings, meanings that have come to proscribe women’s lives, and thus revealing that “[t]he Arabic literary heritage was produced over the centuries primarily by men: mainly middle class men who lived in deeply misogynist societies”66 reflecting an “Islam erected by that minority of men who have created and passed on this particular textual heritage over the centuries"67. In the memoir, Fatima’s quest to define “harem,” both in discussion with her cousins on the forbidden terrace and through the voice of Yasmina, allows Mernissi, as an adult scholar, to explore the multiplicity and the ramifications of this word and thus accurately locate and define Muslim women’s oppression in a narrative which casts them as both forbidden and sacred, virgins and whores, angels and devils, irresponsible social liabilities and highly burdened cultural symbols: “Harem,” Yasmina explains, “was a slight variation of the word haram, the forbidden, the proscribed... the opposite of halal, the permissible,” but it also means the place “where a man 64

Despite these efforts, Anne Roald contends that Mernissi’s (and Nawal ElSaadawi’s) reputation in “Muslim society is that of the ‘Western Feminists’” and dismisses their contribution as effectively negligible since “very few Muslims outside the ranks of Muslim feminists would find their writings relevant” (Roald 1998, 25). 65 Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 39 66 Leila Ahmed, The Women of Islam. Transition 9, no. 3 (2000) 88. 67 Ahmed, “The Women or Islam”, 94

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sheltered his family” as well as the inhabitants of that place. Additionally, “harem” was a “strictly codified” space as well as a sacred one, such as Mecca 68, which was also referred to as “haram” (pronounced with a shorter second vowel). Zuleikha Abu Risha reminds us of the colloquial word “hurma,” derived from harem and haram, for woman/wife, a word that also implies the woman is the property of the husband and forbidden to all others.69 In very much the same way, Mernissi attempts to define the word in her scholarly work The Veil and the Male Elite to arrive at the more devastating conclusion that the entire seclusion of women as embodied in the hijab seems to have resulted from specific Qur’anic revelations aimed at the Prophet’s wives only.70 The word itself is one whose very overdetermined meaning is still argued today, nearly always to the disadvantage of women (Mernissi 1991, 85-102 and 180-8). 71 Beyond religious narrative, Nasr Hamid Abouzeid also identifies a tendency to polarize the value of women in the various discourses engendered by colonialism, whether traditionalist, fundamentalist, or modern nationalist. All together, these produce a contradictory representation of women. In the Islamic narrative “woman is a ‘awra [shame] to be covered” whilst in the modern nationalist discourse she is a “precious jewel to be hidden from the thieving eyes and hands” of the colonist.72 In the traditionalist narrative, she represents the cultural authenticity of the nation which must be kept intact.73 Muslim women internalize this concept and sometimes voluntarily take on the veil as a political gesture to more fully present a strong Muslim national identity in the face of Western hegemony.74 Ultimately, because of the colonial defeat, modernist and nationalist discourses were subsumed by religious discourse in the shared view that 68

Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 61 Zuleikha Abu Risha, “Language and Gender (Al-Lugha wa Al-Gandar).” (Paper read at The Specificity of Feminist Creativity (Khososiat Al-Ibda' Al-Nasawi), at Amman, Jordan, 1997) 68. 70 Mernissi, The Veil and the Male Elite, 172-173 71 Mernissi, The Veil and the Male Elite,85-102, 180-188 72 Nasr Hamid Abouzeid, “Al-Mar'a: Al-Bu'd al-Mafqood Fi al-Khitab al-Dini alMu'aser (Woman: The Missing Dimension in Contemporary Religious Discourse),” in Hajar: Kitab Al-Mar'a (Hajar: Woman's Book), edited by S. Bakr and H. ElSadda. (Cairo: Sina, 1993) 97. All translations from Arabic are my own. 73 Nasr Hamid Abouzeid, Circles of Fear: Readings in Women's Discourse (Dawa'er al-Khawf, Qira'a fi Khitab al-Mar'a). 1 ed. (Casablanca (al-Dar alBaida'): Arabic Cultural Center (Al-Markiz al-Thaqafi al-'Arabi), 1999) 186. AbuLughod, Remaking Women, 3 74 Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 4 69

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traditional religious customs were sacred.75 The result is the same for all discourses: women need to be effectively sequestered in the private domestic sphere and guarded as either precious or dangerous (politically as a breach in the fight against colonialism, and religiously and socially as fitna) objects. But if these various master narratives need to be questioned, these life and scholarly quest(ion)ings are rarely welcomed, not least by the budding patriarchs. For example, when Fatima takes her questioning of the harem one step further than her male cousin Samir, suggesting that an understanding of the harem “depended” on the situation, and therefore was not absolute, he rejects the contribution.76 When Malika suggests that it is perhaps the size of a man’s penis, and that he “needs a big thing under his djellaba to create a harem,” Samir puts “an end to that line of inquiry immediately and threatens her with the normative narrative which has always threatened women’s transgressions: haram, hell, and God’s severe punishment for invoking such shameful and taboo subjects.77 Both Fatima’s and Malika’s questioning of the harem’s absolute authority, their attempts to delineate its intricacies run up against the wall of the religious narrative, which will not permit such questions. But what Fatima and Malika are doing is simply investigating their surroundings and “asking questions” as Aunt Habiba encourages. The counter-narrative which these budding feminists begin to build is led by the example of the older women in the house who take into consideration all factors around them, including “time and space”78 the better to see something as it is spatially, temporally and therefore specifically located and thus bring it down to its human, temporary size. The encouragement is then to historicize culture and to see how it changes as it is revised in different epochs and lands. In such a way, the object of examination can be seen as both specific and alien, better to be known, unpacked, and countered. Mernissi bolsters this feminist endeavor of constant questioning and questing by intelligently using the Islamic narrative itself in a way that rewrites and changes it to support and justify her own argument. Men don’t want women to think (witness Samir’s rejection of their ideas above) but Aunt Habiba says that there was no reason “‘for a human being to stop using the most precious

75

Abu-Ludhod, Remaking Women, 193-194 Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 150 77 Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 151 78 Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 154 76

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gift that Allah had bestowed upon us—‘aql, or reason’”79. Hence does the text, like Mernissi the scholar, cleverly use the discourse against itself; God himself, Habiba seems to tell her conservative detractors, has ordered her to do the very thing she is chided for doing. By extension, author Mernissi’s “tajdeed”80 is in fact encouraged by God. This, in itself, is a crevice in the religious contract (which is again the modus operandi of Islamic feminisms), which if exploited and chiseled away carefully can justify the inquiry into the very narrative that condones it. Thus, in both her literary and scholarly work Mernissi unravels the history of the harem and the meaning of the word so as to understand, unpack, and ultimately neutralize and reclaim the menacing narrative built into this single and yet far-reaching concept. Representing an indigenous feminist spirit and the dire necessity for this kind of local activism, the women of Mernissi’s text register very strongly the significance of words and their meanings. Yasmina describes narratives and words as onions that need to be peeled so as to uncover multiplicity and ambiguity of meaning.81 But narrative manipulation must be handled with care. Fatima warns us, for example: “if words in general were dangerous, then ‘harem’ in particular was explosive”82. Here Mernissi identifies the ambiguous power of words, for she knows that these can be, and have been predominantly, used against women and manipulated to control their lives. Words, and perhaps especially this one, constitute discursive violence against women by men. Just the mere mention of that word could throw the women of the city harem in which Fatima was born and lives into a fit of rage.83 This rage is engendered by the oppression or the cultural investment so centrally located in this word.

79

Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 154 This is a form of contextualized reading of the religious scripture which builds on traditional jurisprudence and modernist readings of Islam as begun by Imam Mohammed Abdo at the turn of the 20th century. This mode of re-interpretation focuses on contextual reasons for the revelation of the Qur’an or hadith as well as on the language of the text and linguistic development (Abouzeid 1999, 202). Others refer to Mernissi’s interpretive methods as “ijtihad” (free interpretation) and a religious activity “long denied women” (Lang 1996, 2). One of these latter is George Lang, who makes the interesting etymological connection between that word and jihad (holy war) to describe Mernissi’s religiously-based feminist efforts as a holy war against misogyny and injustice (Lang 1996, 2). 81 Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 61 82 Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 40 83 Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 40 80

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The women’s anger reflects their knowledge of the role of this word, the fact that it is not only a collection of letters but an entity that has been made sacred. It is because of the associations of this word and its very opaqueness that women had to be veiled (see above discussion of The Veil and the Male Elite [1991]). As such powerful things, words must be artfully manipulated in a manner that rewrites and educates without alienating the speaker, the creator of the narrative, its subjects, or the speaker’s intended audience (in this case the women who are also the object of narrative). The most obvious of these dangers lies in offending the narrative’s subjects; these are the ones in power who, if sensing direct threat, may do as Samir does and merely put an abrupt end to discussion. Less apparent, however, is the latent and subversive power of the listener, something also evident in Dreams: “‘But even the seemingly subservient, silent listener has an extremely strategic role, that of the audience. What if the powerful speaker loses his audience?’”84. The power of the listener and the audience of an autobiography, a self-confessional, is particularly emphasized by Michel Foucault who argues that “the site of confession or self-exposure dramatically reverses power’s conventional dynamics: the one who remains silent and who listens exerts power over the one who speaks”85. We see in Dreams, for example, how when Chama, one of the women of the Mernissi household, puts on a homemade theatrical show her female audience begins to overtake her performance, storming the stage and participating in the story; here, the audience can literally rise up and remove power from a speaker by becoming active participants rather than listeners. More figuratively, we might interpret the action of Aunt Habiba and the other women, in refusing to listen to the word “harem,” to be a brave one. Rather than plain refusal to think, this can be seen as an outright rebellion wherein women refuse to hear the words that circumscribe them. Part of the power of the narrative is the adherence to that narrative by women who accept and internalize it. Perhaps more radically than seeing narratives in a different light, women can reject the narrative utterly and refuse to accept, listen, and adhere to it. But are women ever even afforded the power to simply reject and ignore? This strategy of rejection seems, in Dreams of Trespass, to be effective when women, the objects of the harem and the narrative, are the speakers, and 84

Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 41 Magda Al-Nowaihi, “Resisting Silence in Arab Women's Autobiographies.” In International Journal of Middle East Studies 33, no. 4 (2001): 478-479 85

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not men, its subjects. For no matter how slight a modicum of power the women achieve by removing themselves as audience and thus denying power to other women, such rejectionists still remain stuck in that harem. Hence, the text suggests multiple and more effective strategies for female empowerment through various manipulations of the word, a manipulation much like the empowering and subversive, but unofficially accepted, magical spells which the powerless perform to assert some authority in their lives. In this light, the poetic adult narrative of the author proper, which intrudes on Fatima the child’s voice in a different font, establishes the importance of the magical nature of word control: “I will be a magician” who “crosses past this strictly codified life” through the “Words, I will cherish./ I will cultivate them to illuminate the nights,/ Demolish walls and dwarf gates” and “will chisel words to share the dream and render the frontiers useless”.86 Again, words and narrative and the examination of these is represented as an act both scholarly and magical, feminist and feminine, that has the power to alter and manipulate the lives of women by adjusting the narratives that erect frontiers around them. This, in brief, is Islamic feminism. It is an indigenous feminism, for it casts itself as simply a honing of the yet undeveloped and unstrengthened powers of women who came before Mernissi and who lived in harems. In the country harem, one way of re-seeing space so as to identify its spatial fissures is the reclaiming of that space, in this case nature. Thus, throughout much of the text the focus is on nature as a major spatial outlet via which women can escape. For example, Fatima’s childlike description of the difference between the men’s and women’s (co-wives’) quarters at the country harem conceals a dense theoretical outlook and understanding of the ways in which men and women live their lives and how nature can function as an escape: The men’s garden had a few trees and a lot of neatly kept flowering shrubs, but the women’s garden... was overrun with strange trees and bizarre plants and animals of all kinds... [T]he animals would follow you around, even under the arches of the paved colonnades, making a terrible

86

Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 114. This intermingling of prose and poetry is a feature of Moroccan women’s literature and autobiography (Bin Jum’a 2001, 255) as well as Moroccan literary tradition in general (Wolf 1992, 36).

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racket which contrasted sharply with the monastery-like silence of the men’s garden.87

The description reveals a simplistic understanding of men and women as polar opposites. The men’s space and architecture, and by extension men themselves, are organized, scientific, logical, reasonable, while women are earth- and nature-bound, hysterical, noisy, disorganized, emotional, mysterious, exotic, strange, and confusing. This image of strange and exotic flora and fauna further confirms an orientalist image of women as “exotic birds”88. This polarization seems rather anti-feminist in its dichotomizing and essentializing (men control nature, women are nature), and indeed feminism has historically sought to erase these kinds of false and socialized binaries. But looking closely at the text’s vision reveals a different kind of feminist ideal that embraces nature as a woman’s ally and a potential avenue of escape from the harem within or without. As Inge Boer reminds us, feminisms spring from a location and, [l]ocation, of course, implies that various feminisms are situated differently in relations of power and have different stakes in opposing hierarchies that are based on class, ethnicity or nationality. Feminism might want to strive for achieving the status of master narrative in one context, whereas in others a plural, limited and contextualized notion of feminism is more suitable.89

In the case of Muslim women specifically, Deniz Kandiyoti asserts that “feminism is not autonomous, but bound to the signifying network of the national context which produces it”90. Sometimes, in other words, women can claim and emphasize their difference to survive, and women’s difference from men, particularly in this instance, is not something the text wishes to erase. Rather the text expresses this difference, however socially constructed, as something which can now be used subversively and reclaimed so that these women might claim a place for themselves, a separate territory all their own. In the country harem of Dreams, we see 87

Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 50 Ruth Bernard Yeazell, “Ructions in the Seraglio,” in London Review of Books 16, no. 23 (1994):16 89 Inge Boer. “Remastering the Master Narrative or Feminism as a Travelling Theory,” in Changing Stories: Postmodernism and the Arab-Islamic World, edited by I. Boer and A. Moors (Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi, 1995) 108. 90 Deniz Kandiyoti, “Islam and Patriarchy: A Comparative Perspective,” in Women in Middle Eastern History: Shifting Boundaries in Sex and Gender, edited by N. R. Keddie and B. Baron (New Haven: Yale UP, 1991) 433. 88

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that this physical claimed space approaches the status of owned property: “each co-wife claimed her own little plot of land which she declared to be her garden, where she raised vegetables, hens, ducks and peacocks. You could not even walk in the women’s garden without trespassing on someone’s territory”91. This description is highly significant. While women are prohibited from trespassing outside their boundaries, those same boundaries are not always so easily held. To claim a space that could be trespassed upon makes one a subject, rather than an object, with property. And since women figure prominently in spatial arrangements but are only ever symbolically significant in their narratives in the sense that they never control them, the women here combat that exclusion by using their recognized affiliation with nature to claim a space, a boundary, an area for themselves. This connection to nature is not so much innate as it is a socialization by which women are trained to take advantage of whatever domain is given. We see this in the almost universal way in which women, particularly housewives, tend to view kitchens (spaces that restrict them to a specific role) as the domain in which they are most powerful. It becomes a legitimate haven into which few dare to intrude. Thus, again, it is within the larger architecture of the harem that women find spaces to claim for themselves, chipping away the powerful unity of the larger framework. The co-wives’ gardens represent physical, emotional, political, and psychological spaces and are the archetypal representation of unconscious/subconscious gaps within the conscious architecture of the farm and the normative narratives. One normative narrative accessed by this reclamation of nature is the national narrative that identifies woman as the nation and the nation as woman.92 In this ideology, the nation’s natural and physical landscape must be powerfully claimed, owned and protected by patriarchy in the face of colonial aggression. This trope is recast here, where women do not evade the trope but rather by claiming nature reclaim the trope, themselves and their bodies and refuse to be “repositories” for a transcultural and ahistorical national identity that “legitmates” control over these women of the nation.93 In another sense, this claim over nature also combats the orientalist narratives that are seemingly and deceptively confirmed by the initial description of the gardens. As Malika Mehdid remarks, the “Oriental” woman was seen in colonial eyes as “relocated within the natural world,” and one who could easily, as a primitive, animalistic 91

Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 50 Helie-Lucas, 207 93 Helie-Lucas, 207 92

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being, “‘relapse into the state of nature’”94. In Dreams, in the women’s active appropriation of the natural world, women are rewritten out of the orientalist representation of them as the stupid, animalistic, natural beings. Taking charge of the gardens as property which none, especially men, are allowed to enter, is for these women a reclamation of the very thing that enshrines them as objects or mindless animals within these doubly marginalizing narratives. Perhaps more importantly, this repossession of the “garden” combats the most insidiously damaging narrative of all—the religious one—for in this act, the representation of “woman” as the cause of the destruction of and dismissal from the primeval garden is undercut. Since it is specifically men who are barred from these Eden-like spaces, the metaphoric effect in this text resembles those found in texts by other women writers: “The myth of Eve is inverted,” writes Elizabeth Ordonez, “the patriarch alone—not woman—is displaced from the garden. Thus, the garden becomes wholly woman’s space, its reappropriation signifying a displacement of Biblical [and Islamic] myth with a plot shaped and defined by woman herself”95. By taking charge and re-signifying these spaces, the women create their own rules, and within their own gardens are able to create a kind of experience and relationship with nature that is less orderly, wilder, and opposite of the men's. By claiming these spaces and (dis)ordering them, they are defining their own mode of existence within a space that has always been defined for them. We see a similar use of nature as an escape, cure, and feminist aid in other Arab women’s autobiographies, most notably Huda Sha’rawi’s Muddhakiratti96, Fadwa Tuqan’s Rihla97 and Leila Ahmed’s A Border Passage 98. More generally, as Nadja Odeh points out, “retreat into nature has been referred to as an image of freedom and independence so often by women novelists that Annis Pratt... has worked it out as an archetype, which in Jung’s definition

94 Malika Mehdid, “A Western Invention of Arab Womanhood: The 'Oriental' Female,” in Women in the Middle East: Perceptions, Realities, and Struggles for Liberation, edited by H. Afshar (London: Macmillan, 1993) 34. 95 Ordonez, Elizabeth. “Narrative Texts by Ethnic Women: Rereading the Past, Reshaping the Future.” In Melus 9, no. 3 (1982): 23 96 Leila Ahmed, “Between Two Worlds: The Formation of a Turn-of-the-Century Egyptian Feminist,” In Life/Lines: Theorizing Women's Autobiography, edited by B. Brodzki and C. Schenck. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988) 163-166 97 Magda Al-Nowaihi, “Resisting Silence in Arab Women's Autobiographies,” in International Journal of Middle East Studies 33, no. 4 (2001): 477-502. 98 Leila Ahmed, A Border Passage: From Cairo to America—A Woman's Journey. (New York: Penguin Books, 1999)

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is a literary symbol that derives from the preverbal realm of the unconscious”.99 Storytelling is another important means by which the women of the harem fashion for themselves a feminist subjectivity and construct their womanhood. It is especially so because it is an enactment of the power and primacy of the spoken word and reclaiming of an oral tradition Leila Ahmed cites as “intrinsic to Islam itself”100. Ahmed points out the importance of the fact that the Qur’an was delivered orally until the death of the Prophet and that the Arabic language finds fixed meaning only when spoken rather than written, since writing does not indicate the voweling necessary to determine words’ meanings.101 Additionally, this emphasis on orality in talking, narrating and telling stories bursts, with a vengeance, yet another myth in orientalist narrative represented in Flaubert’s image of the Egyptian/Turkish courtesan Kuchuk Hanem. To Flaubert, Edward Said argues, Kuchuk Hanem “produced a widely influential model of the Oriental woman; she never spoke of herself, she never represented her emotions, presence, or history. He spoke for her and represented her”102. In Mernissi’s harem, the “Oriental” women were more than capable of representing and speaking their emotions and histories. The act of storytelling is also empowering because it signals the use of the voice, which in Islamic and Arabic cultures, much like the body, is sexualized and considered ‘awra, a shame, to be equated with the female sexual organs and thus a cause of fitna—sexual and political chaos. The “I” of the woman speaker and the eye of sex are brought together as one of power, seduction and chaos in need of being covered and silenced.103 99

Nadja Odeh, “Coded Emotions: The Description of Nature in Arab Women's Autobiographies,” in Writing the Self: Autobiography in modern Arabic literature, edited by R. Ostle, E. de Moor and S. Wild. London: Saqi Books, 1998) 267. Odeh’s essay also discusses how nature functions as a code in Arab women’s autobiography signaling “spiritual and erotic rebellion” (Odehh 1998, 265) in texts otherwise controlled by the woman author’s superego which is “preoccupied with proper conduct for women, constantly repress[ing] subversive desires for selfexpression” (Odeh 1998, 265). 100 Ahmed, “The Women of Islam”, 95 101 Ahmed, “The Women of Islam”, 95 102 Edward W. Said, Orientalism, (New York: Vintage Books, 1979) 6. 103 In an interesting connection, considering this text’s use of Scheherazade and The Nights (in particular the Burton translation), Isabel Burton’s version of her husband’s Nights changes the story of the “Box Woman” and has her sin be that of speaking to 570 men rather than sleeping with them. The djinni is unable to control her powers of speech, her tongue, which Schahriar and his brother

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It is no coincidence that this fissure, this subversive strategy for creating an alternate feminist subjectivity and narrative itself occurs inside a spatial fissure within the rigid geometric architecture of the Fez harem, the maze of rooms in the upper quarters. Here the women would listen to their aunt’s “voice opening up magic glass doors, leading to moonlit meadows. And when we awoke in the morning, the whole city lay at our feet. Aunt Habiba had a small room, but a large window with a view that reached as far as the Northern mountains”104. This maze of rooms becomes symbolically and metaphorically significant because they initially represent the way in which, untapped, modes of oppression intersect and strengthen each other; the rigid Islamic architecture of the house intersects with and embodies the rigid architecture of traditional cultural and social narratives. In its most marginalized spaces dwell “divorced and widowed aunts, relatives, and their children”105. People’s lives and the places in which they are made to reside embody and reflect the distribution of power. Their lives are organized geometrically, spatially and architecturally within the strict larger scheme. They are marginalized physically from the central courtyard and also marginalized in terms of power and importance. In an Arabo-Islamic culture such as Morocco, women primarily achieve power through men; thus women without a son or a husband or who are divorced or widowed are the least powerful among women.106 Bringing sons into the world places women in a greater bargaining position with patriarchy and provides them with more power107. Because Aunt Habiba was “divorced,” “she could not contradict Lalla Mani openly, but had to mumble her objections softly”108. And unlike Mother, “the widowed and divorced women, with no husbands to protect them, could not claim the right to wear djellabas. To have done so would have meant immediate and irreversible condemnation as loose women”109. Being effectively owned by one man means that a woman acknowledge as a problem “greater than that of marital infidelity” (Sallis 1999, 92). 104 Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 19 105 Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 16 106 Vanessa Maher, “Women and Social Change in Morocco,” in Women in the Muslim World, edited by L. Beck and N. R. Keddie, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1978) 121. 107 Donna Lee Bowen, “Women and Public Health in Morocco: One Family's Experience,” in Women and Family in the Middle East: New Voices of Change, (Austin: U of Texas Press, 1985) 136. 108 Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 42 109 Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 120

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cannot be accused of tempting other men; not having a man to claim her, conversely, means that her behavior is always sexualized and always observed in relation to other men. If she has no single phallus to claim ownership of her, she invites ownership by others. Her every action is sexualized and viewed as a manifestation of fitna. Women who have had a man but lost him have an ambiguous political and social position somewhere above spinsters and beneath wives. A woman’s current or past relations to the holders of power, the men, determines her standing, which in turn is reflected in her physical placement within the house and therefore within the cultural and traditional narrative. But we have seen thus far how crevasses, margins, and cracks within the physical and discursive architecture of the harem become fissures and loopholes through which the women escape the walls around them, and these marginalized upstairs rooms are no different. “Very simple”110 in design, in contrast with the ornate and opulent courtyard, which symbolically represents the very heart of the physical and cultural architecture and narrative that enshrines women’s lives and informs their existence, and located upstairs far off from the center of the structure and narrative, these spaces are less clear (because they are maze-like), less structured, and more imaginative. And because they are marginalized, away from the center of power, they are a place of more freedom and less rigidity.111 The women might be less powerful and marginalized, decentralized and removed from the heart of power, but precisely because of that marginalization they are able to escape and rebel; these women inhabit marginal spaces that unsettle “the calculation of power and knowledge, producing other spaces of subaltern signification”112. It is from the margins and the “homeplace” that the center of power can be subtly and slowly attacked and can be used as sites for resistance and struggle.113 In the margins, and so forgotten, ignored, or considered unimportant and thus unworthy of protective effort, women find the space to perform subversive activities. In effect, a second-class status can come with access to escape routes. The paradoxical freedom enjoyed by those of low position is manifested in the hadra (possession dance) that allows women to subvert the system and dance beyond their borders. “The women from the richest families... did not want to be seen dancing”114 110

Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 17 Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 17 112 Homi K Bhaba, “Dissemination: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,”iIn Nation and Narration, (New York: Routledge, 1990) 163. 113 Hooks, 145 114 Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 160 111

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because their reputations are much more fragile and more significant to their families; therefore, they are more protected. While the poorer women sit in the courtyard (a central place of power within the harem) during these hadras115 wealthier women remain in the less central salons. The poor women in the courtyard are the ones overtaken by the dance and afforded its powerful release. One of the more fascinating strategies of which these harem women take advantage is to approach the walls of the normative narratives and geometric lines that “organize their powerlessness” by entering through the door of the restricting narratives’ subconscious levels. Much like inhabiting the marginalized spaces of the harem, the descent into sanctioned madness is another effective course of rebellion, escape, and creation of an alternate subjectivity, identity and discourse where women can perform their inner desires and express rage without fear of reprisal or condemnation. This is the kind of madness that is sought and exercised in the hadra, or djinni possession dances and the magic rituals. These are rituals of the “mystical Sufi tradition” representing “[t]he aspect of Islam on which women have the greatest impact in Morocco”116. As a practice in Morocco, Sufism, a “popular mystical tradition that has always been marginalized”117, allows women to organize their own religious festivities, “distribute super-natural power” and create and venerate “female saints,” and elevate “a host of female functionaries” who “hold religious positions that may be legitimized through election, through the ritual transmission of power or through birth.” Women’s Sufism possesses an “organizational complexity” which almost formalizes it religiously.118 In Dreams of Trespass, being possessed by a djinni meant that the person in question “lost all sense of the hudud, or the frontier between good and bad, between haram [forbidden] and halal [allowed]”119. Possessed women “‘would leap high in the air when they hear their rhythm playing... and shake their bodies shamelessly”120. In this way the women use a loophole, the subconscious, provided them by the conscious discourse of 115

Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 160 Daisy Hilse Dwyer,, “Women, Sufism, and Decision-Making in Moroccan Islam.” In Women in the Muslim World, edited by L. Beck and N. R. Keddie, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1978) 585. 117 Samia Mehrez, “Subversive Poetics of Radical Bilingualism: Postcolonial Francophone North African Literature,” in The Bounds of Race: Perspectives on Hegemony and Resistance, edited by D. LaCapra, (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991) 276. 118 Dwyer, 587 119 Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 158 120 Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 158 116

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Islam itself, which acknowledges the existence of these djinnis, and the traditional discourse, which acknowledges their possession powers. The person possessed is no longer herself and therefore cannot be reprimanded. Thus, in order to trespass, to dissolve the barriers of halal and haram, women must locate a fissure in that very same discourse; the loophole is the legitimate but disrespected, subconscious, subterranean spaces of that narrative. In these underground spaces, women experience their bodies in ways they are not otherwise allowed. As Assia Djebar writes of the women of Algeria, their language, regardless of status, “remains that of the body [which] in trances, dances or vociferations, in fits of hope or despair, rebels, and unable to read or write, seeks some unknown shore as destination for its message of love”121. Thus the body functions “outside the reach of any symbolic discourse, and... by virtue of this, can communicate the unsayable” (Elia 2002, 188). The written official narratives and symbolic language and law are temporarily disarmed, the women dance transcending it with their bodies. Hence, women’s use of the Kristevan “semiotic systems” (Moi 1985, 161), such as body language, is incorporated into the symbolic order so that the arena of female agency and desire may be expanded to challenge the cultural constraints usually deployed against it. Because both djinnis and magic are mentioned in the Qur’an and Hadith, women can claim to be innocent, possessed victims or users of magic that is sanctioned and performed by “Sheiks.” Many real-world women commit horrendous acts of murder and aggression or breach sexual or other taboos while claiming to have been possessed, and are thus forgiven, pitied and afforded sympathy. Both magic and djinnis represent the dark untamed underbelly and threatening, though still legitimate and recognizable, part of Islam. To the powerless, these dark subconscious aspects of a master narrative represent an opportunity to gain some power and escape the narrative itself. It is the subconscious subtext of the text, and thus, metaphorically, architecturally, and spatially similar to other subconscious modes of escape the women use. As the women’s use of the djinnis is an unofficial use of the approved master text, their subconscious, coded, ritualized, and therefore semilegitimized activities stand in stark contrast to the mainstream religious rituals, the conscious presentable facet of the text. The Mouloud festival in Morocco, one of the most important in Islam because it celebrates the anniversary of the birth of the Prophet Mohammed, is a prime 121

Assia Djebar, Fantasia, an Algerian cavalcade, (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1993) 180.

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manifestation of the master Islamic narrative. During this festival, Fatima tells us, there are various kinds of celebrations: the “most official... allmale religious choruses” (the conscious), and the “ambiguous hadra, or possession dances,”122 which represent the subconscious undercurrent of the master narrative. Women are part of the subconscious of Islam123, and the subcultures and the subconscious of Islamic narrative in their various forms, such as the Sufi or Qarmatian movements, are always considered a challenge to the orthodox mainstream, which has sought to wipe them out.124 Not coincidentally, the leader of the early Sufis, Rabea AlAdawwiya is stated to be one of the religious figures that the harem women of Dreams love to enact on their terrace stage.125 The hadra, along with visits to the saints’ tombs (mentioned below) are dual-natured activities, part rebellion and part concession to the system. The use of magic, too, falls into this category. By using magic, women commit a “legitimate haram” as it is found in the subconscious of the Islamic texts, and thus use the master narrative to subvert and rebel against it. The representation of magic as a subconscious but valid aspect of the normative discourse is suggested by the fact that the associated “charm books”126 are presumably written by famous religious authorities.127 These texts then are legitimate and yet frowned upon; they are written by religious authorities but not really so. Framing these narratives as legitimate religious philosophies grants the subscriber more power and currency, and thus the weak flock to them. The harem women access this dormant, subconscious element of the master narrative, the dark part inhabited by djinnis, because it is the only place of power in the narrative available to them. In Morocco (as well as elsewhere in the Arab and Muslim world) women use amulets which have written in them specific verses of the Qur’an; they are used by these women as a means of conniving with the spirits (djinnis and others) to effect change in their lives, as prophylactics to protect themselves against harm, envy, or the evil eye, or to heal emotional and physical ailments—all ways of either maintaining or achieving power in society. Typically paper, these amulets can be worn on the body, dissolved in water and drunk, or even eaten if an 122

Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 159 Ghoussoub, Mai, “Feminism—or the Eternal Masculine—in the Arab World.” In New Left Review, no. 161 (1987): 3-19. 124 Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1992) 95-96 125 Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 128 126 Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 191 127 Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 192 123

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edible medium is used for the inscription.128 In this way, the Islamic written master narrative is dissolved, appropriated by these women and literally inscribed on and within the female body, its power reformed, ingested and embodied in these subversive pseudo-Islamic practices. Interestingly, in other magic rituals practiced by the women of the Mernissi harem, the women utter and attempt to manipulate foreign and alien, yet familiar words, words whose sounds and spirit are Arabic, but which are completely meaningless in a linguistic sense. This double estrangement and familiarization of language is something not very different from what Mernissi does in her scholarship to culturally and politically loaded Arabo-Islamic words. She unpacks words by estranging, alienating, de-familiarizing and thus demystifying them for the Muslim and the Arab so as to reveal their inner workings. Also, the fact that the recitations and incantations of the magic, which were the “fragments of languages of the supernatural djinnis” were “not Arabic”129 highlights the simultaneously local and alien nature of that language, which in turn mimics the existence of the women themselves within the Arabo-Islamic discourse. Women are strange, different, alien, chaosinducing, and thus things to be feared and hidden. Like the hadra dances, magic is halal and haram, accepted and denied, understandable and incomprehensible, local and foreign—as are the women themselves. It is also symbolic that these magical activities by which women both tap into and subvert the master narrative are very much connected with the moon and its stages. The intimate connection between magic and the moon not only signifies women’s empowerment through nature and their bodies, for the moon is linked to women’s menstrual cycles, but is also a connection to the Qur’an. Reclaiming and reusing the time and symbol of the revelation of the Qur’an (as well as the symbol for Islam itself—the crescent) to create a subconscious, subversive narrative is symbolic of the very subversion of that normative narrative. The text’s treatment of these supernatural elements (hadra and magic) in these harem women’s lives, as well as Mernissi’s allusion to the women’s visits to the tombs of “saints” for healing purposes bursts an orientalist myth about the backwardness of Arab and Muslim women whose “excursions outside the protected quarters are only social visits [hence of no real cultural or political value], 128

Marjo Buitelaar. “Between Oral Tradition and Literacy: Women's Use of the Holy Scriptures in Morocco,” in Proceedings of the Colloquium on Popular Customs and Monotheistic Religions in the Middle East and North Africa, Budapest, 19-25th September, 1993, edited by A. Fodor, (Csoma de Koros Soc, 1994) 126. 129 Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 195

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including visits to cemeteries and old sorcerers”130. Mernissi exposes these acts, as she does others, for the political strategies of survival and empowerment that in fact they are.131 But Mernissi implicitly warns the reader not to romanticize any of these modes of escape. For, although the subconscious narrative of the magic is not crushed outright, the patriarchal discourse does frown upon it, as it does upon the possession dances or any other avenue of escape. All outlets are controlled by the gatekeeper, the watchdog of patriarchy. Even the women’s rare movements into escape are controlled. Despite this undercurrent of ambivalence about the women’s acquired power, we can read throughout Mernissi’s narrative a larger plan for a workable Arabo-Islamic feminism, one that is dependent on several factors elucidated by the above discussed fissures. Firstly, the significance of women’s community presents itself as a dominant and recurring thread running through all the women’s modes of escape and rebellion. Studying women in Morocco, Amal Rassam finds that the “inevitable competition for domestic power which takes place among women in the patriarchal extended household prevents the potential formation of any alliances among these women and weakens their position vis-à-vis the men”132. This conclusion is belied by Dreams of Trespass, wherein a women’s community provides its members with the ability to “bargain with patriarchy,” another strategy Mernissi the scholar explores and upon which other political theory feminists, notably Deniz Kandiyoti (1988), have expounded. This is the “existence of a set of rules and scripts regulating gender relations to which both genders accommodate and acquiesce, yet which may nevertheless be contested, redefined and negotiated”133. Having the option, however drastic, of taking the children away and going to the shelter of a harem places a woman in a “stronger bargaining position” with her husband. This brings into the forefront the importance of the harem as a social institution, something that Fatima’s mother totally rejects but toward which both Fatima the child and Mernissi the adult seem ambivalent. Throughout Mernissi’s scholarship, it is the 130

Malika Mehdid, “A Western Invention of Arab Womanhood: The 'Oriental' Female,” in Women in the Middle East: Perceptions, Realities, and Struggles for Liberation, edited by H. Afshar, (London: Macmillan, 1993) 24. 131 Nikki R. Keddie and Beth Baron, eds. Women in Middle Eastern History: Shifting Boundaries in Sex and Gender. (New Haven: Yale UP, 1991) 20. 132 Amal Rassam. “Women and Domestic Power in Morocco,” in International Journal of Middle East Studies 12, no. 2 (1980):172 133 Deniz Kandiyoti, “Identity and its Discontents: Women and the Nation,” in Millenium: Journal of International Studies 203 (1991): 440

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harem as a spatial concept and political code that creates women’s weakness (Beyond the Veil and The Veil and the Male Elite, most notably); quite paradoxically, though, the harem places them within stronger women’s communities and support systems. This view of the harem exemplifies a method through which Arabo-Islamic feminism can and does sometimes celebrate the very institution that seemingly imprisons women. Leila Ahmed conceives of ways in which the harem can be positive for women. Women, here, “can be, and often are, freely together, freely exchanging information and ideas, including about men,” and although segregated Muslim societies might give “individual men control over individual women,” the “shape” of those societies in their segregation “allows men considerably less control over how women think, how they see and discuss themselves, and how they see and discuss men”134. The Yemeni model of the harem contains women’s gatherings in which they mock and ridicule men and “ideals of the male world”135. Ahmed goes so far as to say that the harem could be seen as an embodiment of radical feminism in its joining of women together as a class, 136 thus acting as a solution to what feminists, such as Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex137 and Shulamith Firestone in The Dialectic of Sex138 see as a major obstacle to women’s rebellion against their lot in life: the fact that they are separated from each other and are members of other groups which lay stronger claim to their loyalties. The focus of this workable Arabo-Islamic feminism is not simply an overthrow of all things traditional and “normative,” but a successful amalgamation of those cultural aspects that might be used to women’s advantage, such as the institution of the harem. Thus, although it seems sometimes that Mernissi the author advocates, through the voice of her mother, a potentially dangerous “westernized” feminism that manifests itself as “individualistic” versus a more “communal” Eastern feminism, I believe she avoids this. Witness, for example, young Fatima’s preference for the freeing texture and structure of the harem pants that are so symbolic of the harem institution itself. The adult Mernissi’s scholarly 134

Leila Ahmed. “Western Ethnocentrism and Perceptions of the Harem,” in Feminist Studies 8, no. 3 (1982): 528 135 Ahmen, “Western Ethnocentrism and Perceptions of the Harem”, 529 136 Ahmed, “Western Ethnocentrism and Perceptions of the Harem”, 531 137 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex. Vintage Books. New York: Vintage Books, 1974. 138 Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex. In Feminist Theory: A Reader, eds. W. Kolmar and F. Bartkowski. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company, 2000.

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views are more accurately conveyed by the voice of Yasmina than that of Mother. That an indirect defense of the harem is offered, one that is not entirely dismissed, through the voice of Father and others139 suggests to us the author’s understanding of the necessity, and possibly even feminist qualities, of the harem and its ability to present women with empowerment strategies not available within nuclear families. Thus Mernissi’s text is not, as Abu-Lughod sees it, a disappointing call for a shallow “westernized” feminism.140 In fact, this autobiography fulfills another call by Abu Lughod for successful scholars of Arab and Muslim women to do exactly what Mernissi’s text seems to do—“escape binary thinking” that “posits a rigidly distinct West and East and assumes therefore the crude dynamics that correspond to this division, slavish imitation or cultural loss versus nationalist resistance and cultural preservation”141. Rather than a focus on “Western individualism,” the text in fact focuses on a hybrid/third “I” as well as on a construction of identity and community formation “rooted in a woman’s community that creates her identity” and “articulate[s] herself”142. In this sense, Mernissi’s self-construction actually fits in with the female (including Western) autobiographical tradition in which, unlike the Western male autobiographer’s “unfolding self-discovery where characters and events are little more than aspects of the author’s evolving consciousness,” women “seem to acknowledge the real presence and recognition of another consciousness [or multiple ones], and the disclosure of female self is linked to the identification of some ‘other’”143. Thus, in this text, the trap of the binary—individual vs. group, East vs. West—is avoided. In fact, the interplay in the text reveals, in addition to its drawbacks, the importance of harem life for some women despite Mother’s romanticization of Western-style nuclear family life. For instance, Lalla Mani’s sons who have left the harem rarely ever visit their 139

Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 76 Leila Ahmed, “The Women of Islam.” In Transition 9, no. 3 (2000). 141 Lila Abu-Lughod, “The Marriage of Islamism and Feminism in Egypt: Selective Repudiation as a Dynamic of Postcolonial Cultural Politics.” In Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, edited by L. AbuLughod, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1998) 21. 142 Mona Fayad, “Cartographies of Identity: Writing Mahgrebi Women as Postcolonial Subjects,” in Beyond Colonialism and Nationalism in the Maghrib: History, Culture, and Politics, edited by A. A. Ahmida, (New York: Palgrave, 2000) 92. 143 Mary G. Mason, “The Other Voice: Autobiographies of Women Writers,” in Life/Lines: Theorizing Women's Autobiography, edited by B. Brodzki and C. Schenck. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988) 22. 140

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mother144; if not for the harem, she would be all but abandoned. Thus, in its complexity, the text reveals that this institution can be useful for some women, even if it is not for others. A Western mode of life can strip away one woman’s power (a mother) while granting it to another (a wife). Indeed, westernization in the form of “modernization” and “capitalism” are sometimes negative developments for women, especially among the lower or working class.145 Leila Abu-Lughod, for example, discusses the ways in which the modern nationalist discourse in Egypt, as exemplified by Qasim Amin, wanted to undermine women’s solidarity by separating and dividing them into nuclear households.146 The third and most important factor of Dreams’ brand of feminism is perhaps exemplified in the ways in which the harem women’s modes of escape, their spatial, social, and emotional fissures, are located and created when these women look at metaphoric “walls” in an innovative, recreative, and deconstructing manner as a metaphor for the way in which women can find solutions in Islamic feminism, a new look at and reinterpretation of previously male-interpreted and male-codified religious texts: the hadith and Qur’an. This method is more effective than becoming enraged and simply “banging one’s head” on the wall.147 For Arabo-Islamic feminism148 to be effective, it needs to deconstruct rather than destroy, to be seductive and educating rather than aggressive and alienating. An example of this understated rebellion is the naming of the country harem peacock in Dreams of Trespass after King Farouk, a known misogynist. Naming the peacock after him is the women’s rather simple but personally effective manner of insulting male ego and selfaggrandizement as something that happens at the expense of the less powerful, women.149 Ultimately, through communal action, the inhabiting of a third I/space beyond the binaries, and quiet maneuvering, these women can learn to personally and privately re-see the narratives around them. More important, though, than finding the fissures and seeing the writing on the wall is a further step: the accessing of that writing, of the 144

Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 76-77 Ahmed, “Western Ethnocentrism and Perceptions of the Harem”, 132-133; Abu-Lughod, Remaking Women, 9. 146 Abu-Lughod, Remaking Women, 259 147 Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 64 148 For a thorough discussion of Islamic feminism, see Badran (1999, 2001, and 2002). For Islamic Feminism in political, judicial and social action see Mai Yamani (1996). On the problematics of Islamic feminism see Majid (1998), Mayer (1998), Moghadam (2001), and Winter (2000). 149 Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 32 145

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space beyond the wall, so that religious and national narratives may be rewritten.

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—. Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books, 1994. Mitchell, W. J. T., “The Photographic Essay: Four Case Studies.” In Ways of Reading: An Anthology for Writers, edited by D. Bartholomae and A. Petrosky. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1999. Moghadam, Valentine M., “Feminism and Islamic Fundamentalism: A Secularist Interpretation.” In Journal of Women's History 13, no. 1 (2001): 42-46. Moi, Toril, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. New York: Methuen and Company, 1985. Muaddi Darraj, Susan, “Understanding the Other Sister: the Case of Arab Feminism.”In Monthly Review 53, no. 10 (2002): 15-25. Odeh, Nadja, “Coded Emotions: The Description of Nature in Arab Women's Autobiographies.” In Writing the Self: Autobiography in modern Arabic literature, edited by R. Ostle, E. de Moor and S. Wild. London: Saqi Books, 1998. Ordonez, Elizabeth. “Narrative Texts by Ethnic Women: Rereading the Past, Reshaping the Future.” In Melus 9, no. 3 (1982):19-28. Ortner, Sherry B., “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” In Feminist Theory: A Reader, edited by W. Kolmar and F. Bartkowski. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company, 2000. Rassam, Amal. “Women and Domestic Power in Morocco.” In International Journal of Middle East Studies 12, no. 2 (1980):171-179. Roald, Anne Sofie, “Feminist Reinterpretation of Islamic Sources: Muslim Feminist Theology in the Light of the Christian Tradition Feminist Thought.” In Women and Islamization: Contemporary Dimensions of Discourse on Gender Relations, edited by K. Ask and M. Tjomsland. Oxford, England: Berg, 1998. Rooke, Tetz, “The Arabic Autobiography of Childhood.” In Writing the Self: Autobiography in modern Arabic literature, edited by R. Ostle, E. de Moor and S. Wild. London: Saqi Books, 1998. Said, Edward W, Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. Sallis, E., Sheherezade Through the Looking Glass: The Metamorphosis of the Thousand and One Nights. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 1999. Smith, Sidionie, “Performativity, Autobiographical Practice, Resistance.” In Women, Autobiography, Theory : a Reader, edited by S. Smith and J. Watson. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998. Thompson, Elizabeth, “Public and Private in Middle Eastern Women's History.” In Journal of Women's History, 2003. Wild, Stephan, “Searching for Beginnings in Modern Arabic Autobiography.” In Writing the Self: Autobiography in modern Arabic

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literature, edited by R. Ostle, E. de Moor and S. Wild. London: Saqi Books, 1998. Winter, Bronwyn, “Theoretical Issues, Fundamental Misunderstandings: Issues in Feminist Approaches to Islamism.”In Journal of Women's History 13, no. 1 (2000):9-41. Wolf, Mary Ellen, “Textual Politics in Contemporary Moroccan Francophone Literature.” In The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 25, no. 1 (1992):32-40. Yamani, Mai, ed., Feminism and Islam: Legal and Literary Perspectives. New York: New York University Press, 1996. Yeazell, Ruth Bernard, “Ructions in the Seraglio.” In London Review of Books 16, no. 23 (1994):16-17.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN “WHO I BE I GROW UP HERE?”: RECUPERATING HARLEM’S STREETS ALISON M. PERRY

every 3 minutes a woman is beaten every five minutes a woman is raped/every ten minutes a lil girl is molested yet I rode on the subway today

In 1978 when Ntozake Shange wrote the poem “With No Immediate Cause,”1 from which I excerpted the above lines, statistics indicated that sexual violence toward adult women occurred once every five minutes. In 1992, the last time a survey of its kind was conducted, the National Women’s Study estimated that figure to be closer to every 1.3 minutes.2 Regardless of its frequency—both studies are clearly outdated and likely under-calculated—Shange’s assertion that “[she] rode on the subway today” despite the prevalence of violence against women seems like an apposite tactic of resistance against such violence. Throughout the poem, Shange echoes this same defiant refrain, emboldening her own, public movement through the city to function as a mode of protest against the pervasiveness of a violence that could have easily and understandably kept her at home. Ntozake Shange is not the only contemporary woman writer to employ the trope of her own geographic mobility to illustrate the efficacy by which public, urban spaces—in Shange’s case, the subway—can serve 1

Ntozake Shange, “With No Immediate Cause,” in Nature’s Ban: Women’s Incest Literature, 317-320, (Boston: Northeastern UP, 1996), 317. 2 New York City Alliance Against Sexual Assault, “Research Fact Sheet,” National Center for Victims of Crime and Crime Victims Research and Treatment Center, http://www.nycagainstrape.org/research_factsheet_6.html (accessed 21 March 2007).

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resistant, and perhaps emancipatory, functions for women in the city. Between the years 1946 and 1996 a cadre of African American women writers flourished, all of whose novels work to recuperate disparaging representations of the inner-city. Moreover, a number of these women writers set their novels in Harlem, which was perceived largely as the epicenter of urban decay during these years. This article investigates one of these novels in particular, Sapphire’s Push (1996), but also aims to place it in conversation with others that were authored during the same fifty year stretch and perform similar cultural work.

Stories of the Streets Between Harlem’s Renaissance and the relative present, written narratives, as well as orally-transmitted urban legends, have circulated about this neighborhood; largely, these stories revolve around Harlem’s status as a dangerous “space of fear.” It is a truism of public policy and opinion, for example, that Harlem (and by extension all urban “ghettos”) are places of violence and danger for women and children. Documents like the infamous Moynihan Report and public policies, such as 1980s welfare reform, underline common assumptions about the quality of life and the character of people in neighborhoods like Harlem. Conversely, but concomitant with this trend in ideology and with the discourse this ideology produces, institutions such as the media, the church, the American school system, and the psychological establishment scripted the American, suburban home as being a space of safety from the corruptive forces of public life. This reductive, bifurcating model presents a false dichotomy wherein the American home is exalted as a stronghold of social and national security—the “building block of the nation”—and the inner city is lambasted as a volatile space of danger and fear. Sapphire’s Push, along with other novels like Ann Petry’s The Street (1946) and Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place (1980) rehabilitate pervasive negative perceptions and representations of Harlem from this period. This cluster of novels set in Harlem and authored by African American women complicates and challenges the pervasive American belief that safety is found in domestic space and that public (particularly urban; specifically Harlem) spaces are spaces of danger. Each of the narratives I examine in this article contains at least one episode of sexual violence perpetrated upon women residents of Harlem. Twelve year-old Francie, the protagonist of Louise Meriwether’s Daddy Was a Number Runner (1970), for example, is repeatedly molested by the white shopkeepers in her neighborhood. In order for the butcher to

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include an extra soup bone for Francie’s hungry family, she has to endure Mr. Morristein, “in his scroungy white smock, patt[ing her] shoulder, [slipping his hand down] and squeeze[ing her] breast.”3 She stands “there patiently while his hands fumbled all over [her] body,” which she explains as the “nonsense” she has to “stand still” for anytime she is the only customer in the butcher shop. Francie also reports that she gets extra rolls from Max the Baker “whenever he [gets] the chance to feel [her].”4 As if all this inappropriate touching at the hands of neighborhood merchants is not enough, Francie is also stalked by a white man who follows her to the movies and sits next to her, getting up and moving with her when she changes seats to escape his groping hands. Francie finally accepts a dime from him and lets “his hands fumble under [her] skirt” until he gets to “the elastic in [her] bloomers.”5 This same man waits for her on the stairwell in her building; he exposes himself to her and again tries to pay her for sexual favors6. Later, Francie and her best friend Sukie expose themselves at the bidding of an old, white man in the park, who pays them a nickel each for a brief glimpse of their bloomers. Audre Lorde’s “biomythography,” Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982), contains a scene strikingly similar to Francie’s experiences with the baker and the butcher. In young Audre’s case, it is the proprietor of the comic-book store, “a fat white man with watery eyes and a stomach that hung over his belt like badly made jello.”7 As he lifts Audre and her sisters up, ostensibly so that they can better see the comics that he houses high on his shelves, “his nasty fingers moved furtively up and down [her] body, now trapped between his pressing bulges and the rim of the bin. By the time he loosened his grip and allowed [her] to slide down to the blessed floor, [she] felt dirtied and afraid, as if [she] had just taken part in some filthy rite.”8 Later, when she is about ten, Lorde too is assaulted on the roof of her Harlem building by a “boy from school much bigger than [her]” who “threatened to break [her] glasses” if she did not let him “stick his ‘thing’ between [her] legs.”9 3

Louise Meriwether, Daddy Was a Number Runner, 2nd ed, (New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2002), 43. 4 Meriwether, Daddy Was a Number Runner, 43. 5 Meriwether, Daddy Was a Number Runner, 15. 6 Meriwether, Daddy Was a Number Runner, 15. 7 Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, (Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1982), 49. 8 Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, 49. 9 Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, 75.

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Although both of Lorde’s and Meriwether’s books contain episodes of sexual violence against young, black girls that occur in the semi-private spaces of stairwells, roofs, and stores, they function somewhat differently from the other novels that constitute the constellation of women-authored, Harlem-centered texts I will examine in greater detail in this piece. The crucial difference lies in the fact that, in the two texts mentioned above, the perpetrators are white men (the boy who rapes Lorde notwithstanding: his physical description is not discussed, and my assumption is that he is black based on book’s setting in the highly segregated space of 1940s Harlem). The Street (1946), The Women of Brewster Place (1980), and Push (1996), however, all contend with intra-racial sexual violence. In Ann Petry’s novel, The Street, for example, protagonist Lutie Johnson is subject to constant, menacing sexual advances of her Harlem apartment building’s Super. Jones, the Super, ferociously desires Lutie and fantasizes repeatedly about attacking her. From the moment he first shows Lutie the space she and her son will rent, he envisions raping her on the empty apartment floor: “[…]he knew if he followed her in there, he would force her down on the floor, down against the worn floor boards. He had tried to imagine what it would be like to feel her body under his— soft and warm and moving with him. And he made a chocking, strangled noise in his throat.”10 The Super’s frustrated desire plagues him, and he becomes obsessed with the idea of “having” Lutie. In one scene, after Lutie and her eightyear old son, Bub, have occupied the apartment long enough for Jones’s fixation with Lutie to reach the boiling point, she comes home late, brimming with excitement over the success of her rehearsal with a band that plays at the Junto, the club owned by the man with the same name. Seeing her “standing in the doorway, her long skirt blowing around her [… Jones’s] hand left the door in a slow, wide gesture and he started toward her, thinking that he would have her now, tonight, and trembling with the thought.”11 After Jones blocks Lutie’s passage as she tries to get past him and up the stairs to her apartment, she strategizes her escape, thinking that “if she moved fast enough, she could get out into the street.”12 Here, for the first and perhaps the only time in the entirety of the narrative, Lutie understands that the public space of her Harlem neighborhood, the very street she condemns, offers her sanctuary from the sexual violence endemic to her apartment building. For a split second, Lutie understands what the secondary female characters in the novel, Min 10

Ann Petry, The Street, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1946), 99. Ann Petry, The Street, 234. 12 Ann Petry, The Street, 235. 11

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and Mrs. Hedges—both of whom fare far better than Lutie—have known all along: that the public space of the city protects its residents better than their private, ostensibly secure, domestic spaces. Moreover, when Jones does apprehend Lutie, his goal is to drag her down into the cellar, which Jones considers his domain. In fact, other characters in the novel attribute Jones’s sociopathic tendencies to the amount of time he has spent in cellars and basements; Min, for example, notes “maybe if he’d had more sun on him he would have been different,”13 and Mrs. Hedges labels him as “cellar crazy.”14 Here, Min and Mrs. Hedges indict the interior spaces of run-down apartment buildings as the real cause of the Supe’s corruption, which contrasts Lutie’s notions of the street as the force that hardens and changes people. Regardless, the cumulative effect of domestic and subterranean spaces on Jones engenders his criminal consciousness such that he does not consider his attacking Lutie to be sexual assault; Jones even believes that her attempts to fight him off are because “she hadn’t understood that he wasn’t going to hurt her, that he wouldn’t hurt her for anything.”15 As Jones attempts to abscond to the cellar with Lutie in tow, his terribly abused dog charges into the hallway and jumps on Lutie’s back. Although Jones later speculates that it is his life-in girlfriend Min who releases the dog16 , Petry provides no other evidence for this conjecture. It does, however, seem curious that the dog would have escaped from Jones’s closed door without Min opening it for him, but perhaps this moment in the text serves as an instance wherein the building’s porosity, which Lutie claims to disdain, actually serves to help her in a way that runs counter to her ideas about the importance of self-reliance and insularity. No matter how the dog gets into the hallway, however, his presence there sends Lutie into full-blown panic, and her consequent screams alert her neighbor, the ever-vigilant Mrs. Hedges, that something is amiss. While Lutie’s screams “rushed back down the stair well until the whole building echoed and reechoed with the frantic, desperate sound[…] a pair of powerful hands gripped her by the shoulders, wrenched her violently out of the Super’s arms, flung her back against the wall.”17 The sound of Mrs. Hedges’s voice in the hallway causes “the dog to slink

13

Ann Petry, Ann Petry, 15 Ann Petry, 16 Ann Petry, 17 Ann Petry, 14

The Street, 370. The Street, 240. The Street, 280. The Street, 278. The Street, 236.

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away, his tail between his legs.”18 Mrs. Hedges confronts Jones, telling him that if he “ever even look[s] at that girl again, [she’ll] have [him] locked up.”19 Yet even with Mrs. Hedges’s initial intervention and continued observation of Jones throughout the time Lutie occupies the apartment building in 116th st, Lutie is nevertheless understandably traumatized by his attempted assault. It colors her perception in such a way that she begins to generalize her blame for all the negative occurrences in her life to the mercenary influence of her tenement building as well as to the corrupting forces of the street on which it lies. For example, Lutie aspires to sing with Boots Smith and his band at the Junto, the club down the street, which she believes will enable her to earn enough money to move herself and her son away from 116th st. Because, Junto, the proprietor of the eponymous club wants Lutie as a girlfriend (or as a courtesan, depending upon one’s point of view), he declines to pay her for her performances and decides instead to give her gifts as tokens of his affection, which he speculates will eventually sway her feelings positively towards him. Lutie is devastated by Junto’s choice not to financially compensate her for her talent because she realizes that, without the supplemental income from singing at his club, she will never be able to relocate. After Lutie returns from trying to negotiate a non-existent salary with Boots Smith, the bandleader and one of Junto’s minions, Petry writes: She had to go on living on the street, in that house. And she could feel the Super pulling her steadily toward the stairway, could feel herself swaying and twisting and turning to get away from him, away from the cellar door. Once again she was aware of the steps stretching down into the darkness of the basement below […]20

Here, it seems as if the figure of Jones, the Super, stands in for all the male oppressors in Lutie’s life—particularly Boots Smith and Junto. All three of these male figures desire to dominate Lutie sexually, and because she does not make herself readily available to them as a sexual object, they instead try to coerce or, in the case of Jones, force her to comply. When Lutie imagines herself being pulled down the stairwell once again as a response to Junto’s decision not to pay her, she equates actual, physical rape with the kind of “soul assault” perpetrated by Junto and Boots. Here 18

Ann Petry, The Street, 237. Ann Petry, The Street, 238. 20 Ann Petry, The Street, 305. 19

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again, she makes sense of her interaction with Jones and Boots via architectural analogy: “She hadn’t been buried under brick and rubble, falling plaster and caved-in sidewalks. Yet that was how she had felt listening to Boots.”21 As the above quotation suggests, it seems as if Lutie’s experience with the Super exacerbates an already-existing claustrophobia on her part, which Petry describes as that “trapped feeling she got when there wasn’t a lot of unfilled space around her.”22 And indeed, Petry reinforces this characteristic by stocking The Street with references to the expansion and contraction of spaces Lutie occupies. More often than not, when Lutie feels sad or afraid, she notes that the walls are closing in on her. For example, the first time Lutie walks up the stairs to her new apartment on 116th st, Jones follows closely behind her, making her nervous. She observes that “When they reached the fourth floor, instead of her reaching out to the walls, the walls were reaching out for her—bending and swaying in an effort to envelop her.”23 Later, after Lutie and Bub had been living in their apartment for a while, Lutie feels that “after she had been in them just a few minutes, the walls seemed to come in toward her, to push against her.”24 In contrast, as she fantasizes about an alternative living situation for her and Bub, Lutie thinks, “It would be a place where there was a lot of room and the walls didn’t continually walk at you— crowding you.”25 In another passage, when Lutie first meets Boots Smith, whom she initially perceives to be the vehicle by which she and Bub might move into a place where the walls don’t walk at her, and he tells her that she has a good enough voice to sing with his band, she admits that she had never thought of trying to be a professional singer and acknowledges to herself that “the walls had beaten her or she had beaten the walls. Whichever way she cared to look at it.”26 Clearly, Lutie’s claustrophobia stems from her deeper fear of being trapped in her circumstances, of being denied both geographic and social mobility because of her subject position as a young, black, poor woman in 1940s Harlem. Likewise, throughout each of the seven women’s narratives that make up Gloria Naylor’s 1980 novel, The Women of Brewster Place, the author frequently (but not exclusively) scripts exterior, urban spaces as bastions of refuge and support in the lives of the women who live on Brewster 21

Ann Petry, Ann Petry, 23 Ann Petry, 24 Ann Petry, 25 Ann Petry, 26 Ann Petry, 22

The Street, 307. The Street, 160. The Street, 12. The Street, 79. The Street, 83. The Street, 150.

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Place. Conversely, many of the interior, household spaces within the novel are the places where negative things happen—most notably abuse and assault perpetrated by men. Throughout Mattie Michael’s story, for example, domestic spaces appear particularly vexed; she endures many the acts of violence, both physical and psychic, within homes and apartment complexes. Even the conditions that propel Mattie north from her childhood home in Tennessee transpire as a result of family violence. When Mattie tells her father about her pregnancy, for example, he beats her badly enough to break the broom with which he hits her.27 Unable to remain living in her abusive father’s house, Mattie heads north and moves in with her friend Etta, who leaves shortly thereafter in search of better opportunities in a different northern city. Mattie remains in the shabby, “cramped boardinghouse room with its cheap furniture and dingy walls”28 because she is unable to save enough money to move elsewhere and still pay the babysitter’s and doctor’s bills for her son. While living in this boardinghouse, Mattie awakens one night to the sound of her son’s screams after he is bitten by a rat in his sleep. For Mattie, the danger of making a home in a place so run-down and infested with vermin overwhelms her, and she knows she must take her son and flee this household space of danger in order to create a better, safer life for him. In a scene incredibly reminiscent of Lutie Johnson’s apartment-hunting trek in The Street (1946), Mattie packs their things, picks up Basil, and walks the streets of the city all day, trying to find someplace they can afford to live.29 Her status, like Lutie’s, as a single, young, African-American woman prohibits her from easily finding something, but after a day of walking, Mattie (again, much like Lutie does with Mrs. Hedges) encounters a woman on the street who presents her with options she did not have before. The woman, Miss Eva, invites Mattie and Basil to live with her and her granddaughter Lucielia (Ciel), and Mattie finds herself “settling like fine dust on her surroundings and accepting the unexplained kindness of the woman with a hunger of which she had been unaware.”30 Here, as throughout Mattie’s narrative, she garners the support necessary to recover from the negative occurrences in her past—all of which take place in interior, household spaces—via positive experiences in public, urban space. 27 Gloria Naylor, The Women of Brewster Place: A Novel in Seven Stories, (NY: Penguin Books, 1980), 23. 28 Gloria Naylor, The Women of Brewster Place, 27. 29 Gloria Naylor, The Women of Brewster Place, 29. 30 Gloria Naylor, The Women of Brewster Place, 34.

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Miss Eva’s happy home, however, which provides Mattie and Basil with thirty-years of safe, rat-free nights, again becomes a source of fear for Mattie long after Miss Eva has passed away and Ciel and Basil have grown up. Basil becomes a spoiled, child-like man, who cannot bear to sleep in a jail cell after he gets arrested for killing a man in a bar brawl. Mattie, an ever-indulgent mother, borrows against the home Miss Eva lovingly left to her, so she can bail him out and pay a lawyer’s retaining fee. Again, in a narrative twist evocative of Ann Petry’s The Street, Mattie does not actually need to pay a lawyer to defend her son; a public defender would have sufficed. But, like Lutie, Mattie does not know this, and the lawyer neglects to disabuse her of this notion; he thinks instead, “Thank God for ignorance of the law and frantic mothers.”31 In this way, Mattie loses her house, a one-time space of hope that is transformed into a symbol of betrayal and loss. As a result, she winds up in the dingy, anemic Brewster Place apartment. Mattie’s is not the only Brewster Place domicile represented as a space of danger for its inhabitants. Luciela’s and Cora Lee’s chapters reinforce this idea as well. Cora Lee is the mother of seven children, who is too concerned about the events unfolding on her favorite soap operas to keep her house tidy and her children safe. The representation of Cora Lee’s apartment in the miniseries reinforces Naylor’s description of it as a place with “broken furniture” and “piles of litter in [the] living room.”32 In both versions, while Kiswana visits Cora Lee, trying to convince her to bring her children to an all-black production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the park, Cora Lee’s son falls from the draperies on which he is swinging and hits his head.33 Whereas Dorian’s fall worries Kiswana, this type of thing is de rigueur in Cora Lee’s household, which is a constant scene of domestic chaos. Kiswana does, however, manage to convince Cora Lee to bring her children to the Shakespeare play, and it is in the public, recreational space of the park that the lives of Cora Lee’s children are transformed. On the way home from the performance, for example, her son asks her if Shakespeare is black, to which she replies, “’Not yet,’ remembering she had beaten him for writing rhymes on her bathroom walls.” 34

31

Gloria Naylor, Gloria Naylor, 33 Gloria Naylor, 34 Gloria Naylor, 32

The Women of Brewster Place, 48. The Women of Brewster Place, 121. The Women of Brewster Place, 116. The Women of Brewster Place, 127.

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Significantly, as Jill Matus notes in her article “Dream, Deferral, and Closure in The Women of Brewster Place,”35 Naylor opens the chapter with a quotation from A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “True, I talk of dreams,/Which are the children of an idle brain/Begot of nothing but vain fancy.”36 Cora Lee forever dreams of infants, but when the tiny babies she adores begin to grow up, Cora Lee neglects them and shows that they were themselves “begot of nothing by vain fancy.” Regardless, I follow Jill Matus in arguing that Cora Lee’s newfound respect for and nurturance of her children evidences changes in her attitude toward life, no matter how small. After the family returns from Shakespeare in the park, for the first time ever, Cora Lee bathes her children and cleans her house before she goes to bed. Here, the experience she had in the public sphere helps transform her apartment from a site of domestic chaos into a more suitable home for her children. Sadly, Luciela’s chapter does not present such a happy ending. While her parents argue in another room, Ciel’s daughter Serena (whose age is never disclosed, but who looks about eighteen months old in the adaptation) becomes fascinated with a cockroach crawling across the floor, and she chases it until it retreats into a crack in the wall right next to a light socket. In her attempt to wrench her new playmate from his hiding place, Serena instead electrocutes herself.37 Here, like the rat that bites Basil, pests associated with tenement-living contribute to the danger of domestic spaces. Moreover, it is the apartment itself—or rather its wiring—that is responsible for Serena’s death. In The Women of Brewster Place, and within an entire cluster of texts set in Harlem and written by African American women between the years 1949 and 1999, interior, household spaces are consistently coded as far more dangerous for women and children than the urban “ghettos” that lay outside their front doors. Next, I turn to the main text I examine in this article, Sapphire’s Push, which provides an even greater vindication of Harlem’s streets during the 1980s, an incredibly tumultuous period in the neighborhood’s history.

35

Jill Matus, “Dream, Deferral, and Closure in The Women of Brewster Place,” Black American Literature Forum 24.1 (Spring 1990): 49-65. 36 Gloria Naylor, The Women of Brewster Place, 107. 37 Gloria Naylor, The Women of Brewster Place, 99.

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“Lifes of trash” At the commencement of Sapphire’s 1996 novel, Push, Precious Jones is an illiterate, HIV positive, sixteen year old, who is pregnant by her father for the second time. After having been suspended from her public school and told she must attend an alternative educational program called Each One/Teach One because of her pregnancy, Precious begins to learn to read with the help of the other students in the class and their adult literacy coach, Ms. Rain. One of Precious’s favorite exercises is to walk around her Harlem neighborhood with her journal in hand, describing the scenes she witnesses there. In one entry, Precious writes about a “vaykent lot” on 124th street, the very heart of Harlem, as being a space of abject urban decay: i stop. Gon rite bout vaykent lot uuuuuuugh dog shit dog shit crummel up briks steel fence lifes of trash cancer yr eye multiply ugliness greazee shit garbage cans, rottin cloze PAMPER filthee dope addicks pile up flow over uglee I HATE HATE UGLY38

Sapphire sets her novel in the years 1987-1989, a time when poverty and disrepair deeply marred inner-city areas such as Harlem. Precious keenly observes the product of such impoverishment, the filth and squalor surrounding her, and records her emotional reaction to it. She communicates in no uncertain terms that she “HATE[S] UGLY” and the “dog shit,” “crummel up bricks,” “garbage cans, rottin,” and “cloze PAMPERS filthee” that constitute it. Precious’s description of her neglected, environmentally and emotionally toxic, late-1980s 38

Sapphire, Push (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 104-105.

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neighborhood depicts Harlem at what is arguably its most destitute moment in history. Not unlike other socially and politically underrepresented areas in New York, the standard of living within this historically black neighborhood in upper Manhattan had been on the decline since the early days of the Great Depression. Whereas other areas in the city rallied during and after WWII due to a national industry boom that, in turn, promoted growth in the service and entertainment sectors, Harlem never returned to the exalted place it occupied in the national imagination during its Renaissance in the 1910s and 1920s. Precious was born in 1970, and although she is only seventeen years old when she writes the above poem, she seems to communicate a sense of loss for the Harlem of the past when residents were more invested in the upkeep and safety of this neighborhood’s public spaces, such as the vacant lot about which she writes. In her incisive sociological study “After Drugs and the ‘War on Drugs”: Reclaiming the Power to Make History in Harlem, New York,” Leith Mullings argues that during the 1980s and 1990s, Harlem was so “whipsawed by both a drug ‘epidemic’ and the socalled ‘war on drugs,’” that it lost its potential for what she labels “historymaking,” referring to the place Harlem occupied—and perhaps still occupies—as the “symbolic capital of black America.”39 Mullings begins her article by noting the “widespread nostalgia” of her informants for a lost Harlem “characterized by a sense of community.” She attributes this nostalgia to “a loss of history, and hence of agency”40 that she blames largely on the globalization of capitalism and New York City’s expanding role as a hub of worldwide enterprise during the second part of the twentieth-century. She notes that “a global city requires world class order”41 and explains how, during the 1960s and 1970s, “the city became an important testing ground for enforcing a global order,” largely, she argues, through institutions and ideological constructions, such as the welfare state and the prison industrial complex, that served to strip individual citizens of their potential for agency within a participatory democracy. The Harlem that Precious observes is one in which the political and social volition of its citizens has flagged in the face of hegemonic institutional forces as well as the scourge of heroin and crack.

39

Leith Mullings, “After Drugs and the ‘War on Drugs’: Reclaiming the Power to Make History in Harlem, New York,” Wounded Cities: Destruction and Reconstruction in a Globalized World, ed. Jane Schneider and Ida Susser. (New York: Berg, 2003), 173. 40 Leith Mullings, “After Drugs,” 174. 41 Leith Mullings, “After Drugs,” 176.

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Precious notes the effects of both types of narcotics in her neighborhood when she observes the occupants of the vacant lot: “Dese not crack addicts like on one-two-six. Dese people on 1-2-4 is HAIRRUN shuters. There eyez is like far away space ships. they don see you, only smell pepul go buy for money. They money dogs. If they sniff money they will try to take it.”42 The matter-of-fact quality of this statement suggests that, in the seventeen years she has inhabited this neighborhood, Precious has become inured to the danger of living in space so heavily populated by addicts and marked by the sub-standard living conditions that both create and sustain them. Indeed, over the course of Precious’s lifetime, economic changes within the country as a whole created a ripple effect in Harlem, but one inversely proportionate to the “trickle down” promise of Reganomics. Throughout the 1980s, the economic situation in New York City as a whole markedly improved; the gap, however, between the wealthy and the impoverished simultaneously widened, which localized and magnified urban blight in places like Harlem. Mullings notes that, particularly during the later half of the 1970s, “public investment in housing collapsed, city-owned buildings and parks were abandoned, and fires, often attributable to private landlords, broke out.”43 As a result, Harlem’s population fell dramatically: “numbering around 160,000 people in 1970, Central Harlem had barely 97,000 people in 1989.”44 Making matters even worse was an unemployment rate twice that of other areas in the City. Because of the degree of destitution and desperation experienced by the people in her neighborhood, it is no wonder that spaces like the vacant lot Precious describes proliferate in Harlem. Ironically, despite the fear public spaces should ostensibly cull in this neighborhood during this particular moment in history, Precious instead experiences the exterior spaces of Harlem as significantly safer than her own apartment. When Precious experiences a dissociative incest flashback while standing on a bus stop, for example, solicitous strangers gather around her, extending their concern and offering their help. This moment in the novel sharply contrasts the way that Precious is treated at home, where she is sexually, physically, and emotionally abused by both her parents. Whereas home, a

42

Sapphire, Push, 105. Leith Mullings, “After Drugs,” 178. 44 Leith Mullings, “After Drugs,” 178. 43

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location commonly considered “safe,” becomes a “landscape of fear”45 for Precious, places that exist in the public sphere, especially those that people typically assume to be dangerous, actually provide her with refuge and support. Throughout the duration of the novel, Precious not only garners compassion and aid from people in the public sphere, but she also experiences alternative spaces in the city that allow for her to imagine other, emancipatory possibilities for herself and her life.

“Who I be I grow up/here?” Early on in the novel, Precious describes a busy afternoon in her Harlem neighborhood as she walks home from school. She observes the homeless and the addicted who loiter on the street and contrasts these people’s potential for violence with the danger inherent in her own apartment: “I’m walking slow slow now[…] I’m safe. Yeah, safe from dese fools on the street but am I safe from Carl Kenwood Jones?”46 Precious malingers in the street in an attempt to avoid going home where she is always, “busy getting beat, cooking, cleaning, pussy and asshole either hurting or popping.”47 Because her parents exploit her labor and violate her body within the private space of their Harlem apartment, Precious feels far more secure in public spaces than she feels in her own terrifying, domestic world. Nevertheless, it comes as a surprise to Precious when people she does not know worry about her wellbeing during her dissociative episode. “’You OK?’ guy in a uniform for like working in a garage ax me.” Precious responds, “‘I’m OK, I’m OK,’” and notes that “People done started to gather ‘round me.”48 In this scene, Precious garners concern from absolute strangers in a way that she never has from immediate family members, teachers, social workers, or other people who ought to be as or more invested in her wellbeing than the people on the streets with whom she has no formal ties. On this same walk through Harlem, Precious notes the presence of “men, women and kids waiting at bus stop to go to school and downtown to work.”49 She asks herself, “Wonder where they go to work? Where I 45 Rachel Pain, "Space, sexual violence and social control: Integrating Geographical and Feminist Analyses of Women's Fear of Crime,” Progress in Human Geography 15.2 (1991): 415. 46 Sapphire, Push, 23. 47 Sapphire, Push, 62. 48 Sapphire, Push, 25. 49 Sapphire, Push, 23.

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gonna go to work, how I’m gonna get out HER house?” Here, as through the duration of the narrative, Precious observes people in the public sphere whose lives she speculates rotate around an axis of normalcy in a way that hers does not. These people, Precious notes, these “men, women and kids waiting at bus stop,” go to work or school everyday, whereas the adults in Precious’s immediate sphere, most notably her mother, live dysfunctional everyday lives. Precious mentions how her mother “have not left home since Little Mongo was born.”50 Precious calls her daughter Little Mongo because a nurse at Harlem Hospital categorized her as a Mongoloid, a term for someone with Down’s Syndrome; she was born when Precious was twelve, and at this point in the narrative, Precious is sixteen, so her mother has effectively been house-bound for four years. Tellingly, throughout these four years of self-imposed domestic confinement, not only has Precious’s mother collected welfare, but she has also successfully exploited the welfare system. Little Mongo, in fact, lives with Precious’s maternal grandmother, but Precious’s mother declares both Precious and Little Mongo as her dependents in order to collect a greater welfare stipend. When Precious notices the people on the bus stop and ponders the details of their everyday lives, she contrasts what she imagines are their experiences with those of the socially maladapted people around her; as a result, she envisions a life for herself that includes self-sustaining tasks like work and school rather than a life of institutional dependency like her mother’s. Children and teenagers’ exposure to diverse groups of people in the public sphere aids in their social development by allowing them to forge networks of identification, which enable them to imagine various possibilities for their futures. The livelier the city streets, the more they teem with different kinds of people who have varying pursuits, the better example the streets provide. Precious has spent the better part of her childhood exposed to one particular version of urban life, namely, her mother’s agoraphobia and state-dependency. Consequently, when Precious wonders about the everyday lives of people she sees on the streets, it empowers her to define herself against her mother, which, in turn, enables her to think differently about her own life and her own future. She admits, “I know I will choke to death I don’t find myself.”51 For Precious, part of the process of finding herself is disidentifying from her mother and forging her own concept of herself as an agent in the 50 51

Sapphire, Push, 32. Sapphire, Push, 59.

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world, a task that her growing exposure to the urban public facilitates as the novel progresses. While the public, urban space of her Harlem neighborhood serves as an important locus of education for Precious, a second, semi-public site reinforces and expands the life lessons she learns on the street. Each One/Teach One is located on the nineteenth floor of the Hotel Theresa, which seems significant for a number of reasons. During the 1950s and 1960s, the Hotel became famous for renting rooms to people who were denied accommodation elsewhere. More often than not, these people were African-Americans—although evidently Fidel Castro and his entire entourage were invited to stay at there free of charge after their party was turned away at an upscale, downtown hotel.52 When Malcolm X used it as a meeting place for his Organization of Afro-American Unity, the Hotel Theresa became even more widely recognized.53 Although it closed its doors to guests in the late 1960s and was converted into office spaces a few years later,54 well before Precious began to attend classes there, most residents of Harlem continued (and still continue) to refer to it by its original name—the sign “Hotel Theresa” continues to hang even as I write this. The Hotel’s lasting historical significance coupled with its current, business-oriented occupation creates a space that spans the breach between Harlem past and Harlem present. When Sapphire writes the Hotel Theresa as the site of Precious’s adult literacy classes, she geographically and metaphorically positions Precious alongside pivotal figures in (African) American history. Moreover, all hotels blur the line between public and private spaces. Patrons rent a room for an agreed-upon period of time, thus making it “theirs” for those days they occupy that space; yet hotels are also inherently transitional spaces— never really belonging to their occupants, even those who stay there longterm, first as guests and later as permanent residents. Regardless of the duration of their guests’ inhabitation, all hotels are essentially public buildings that provide people with private accommodations. Because of its second incarnation as office space, the Hotel Theresa further highlights the public potential of semi-private spaces like this one. Simply put, Each One/Teach One’s location within this particular building squares nicely with other positive experiences Precious has in the pubic sphere. The people Precious encounters in her class at the Hotel Theresa also shape her perceptions of the world around her and offer her instruction not 52

Sondra Kathryn Wilson, Meet Me at the Theresa: The Story of Harlem’s Most Famous Hotel, (NY: Atria Books, 2004), 204. 53 Sondra Kathryn Wilson, Meet Me at the Theresa, 229. 54 Sondra Kathryn Wilson, Meet Me at the Theresa, 45.

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only in literacy but also in life. Precious’s teacher, Ms. Rain, proves instrumental because of her dedication to both types of education. Before she meets Ms. Rain, Precious is socially observant but not necessarily socially aware; in other words, she notices the economic and social conditions of her neighborhood, although she does not yet understand why she sees what she sees when she walks around Harlem. Precious keeps a poster of Louis Farrakhan hanging in her bedroom. She “loves” Farrakhan because “he is against crack addicts and crackers,” and, as she learns from listening to his radical, separatist rhetoric, “Crackers is the cause of everything bad.”55 At this point in the development of Precious’s social consciousness, pithy, reductive statements like the one above resonate with her, in part perhaps, because she doesn’t have the vocabulary or experience to articulate the racism she encounters in her life and in the lives of the people she sees in her neighborhood. When Ms. Rain “put[s] the chalk in [Precious’s] hand, make[s her] the queen of the ABCs,”56 she not only teaches Precious the building blocks of language, but she also begins to raise Precious’s awareness of the history of black oppression in America. As her reading skills improve, Ms. Rain gives her books to read about the Civil Rights movement, about which Precious comments, “I ain’ know black people in this country went through shit like that.”57 Before meeting Ms. Rain, Precious understands that there is race and class oppression—she bears witness to it every time she leaves her apartment—but Ms. Rain instills in Precious both the skills and the information she requires to understand why this oppression exists in the first place. Precious’s exposure to Ms. Rain and to the other students in the class does create for her a certain amount of pedagogically-useful cognitive dissonance that forces her to think about her world differently. Through observing Ms. Rain’s acceptance of all different kinds of people, Precious begins to stop making sense of her world through the blunted tools of generalization and totalization and starts to think about people as individuals. She writes, “But what I confuse about is this. Itz so uglee dope addicks—dey teef, dey underwater walkin, steelin. Spred AIDS and heptietis. But Rita was one of dese pepul an she is GOOD. I luv her.”58 Through her friendship with Rita, Precious garners greater empathy for addicts. She begins to comprehend how events that occurred in Rita’s early life, which engendered her drug use in the first place, do not differ 55

Sapphire, Push, Sapphire, Push, 57 Sapphire, Push, 58 Sapphire, Push, 56

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all that dramatically from Precious’s own history of abuse. Precious concludes that she could have easily made the same choices as Rita did had the circumstances in her life been even slightly different. Precious harbors other prejudices as well, which also surface during Ms. Rain’s class. Very likely because of her fondness for Farrakhan, Precious is extremely homophobic when she begins her time at Each One/Teach One. When she meets her classmate Jermaine Hicks, a butch lesbian, on her first day in her alternative school, for example, Precious thinks, “Uh oh! Some kind of freak,” and notes that Jermaine “is a boy’s name.”59 Later, Precious sits next to Jermaine, who comments that she is glad there are no boys in the class. Precious thinks, “Uh oh! Freaky deaky here. I move a little way from her. I don’t want no one getting the wrong idea about me.”60 Ms. Rain works hard, however, to shift Precious’s perceptions about homosexuality. After the women in the class have improved their reading skills significantly, Ms. Rain assigns The Color Purple. Precious relates so much to the narrative that she “cry cry cry you hear me, it sound in a way so much like myself except I ain’ no butch like Celie.”61 When Precious expresses this sentiment to her class, Ms. Rain uses it as a pedagogical moment: Ms. Rain tell me I don’t like homosexuals she guess I don’t like her ‘cause she one. I was shocked as shit. Then I jus’ shut up. Too bad about Farrakhan. I still believe allah and stuff. I guess I still believe everything. Ms. Rain say homos not who rape me, not homos who let me sit up not learn for sixteen years, not homos who sell crack fuck Harlem. It’s true.62

Precious loves Ms. Rain enough that her devotion to Farrakhan’s teachings—at least those about homosexuality—wanes and is replaced by a greater acceptance of vagaries in gender identity and sexual orientation. The education Precious receives at Each One/Teach One, then, extends well beyond literacy coaching; it helps raise Precious’s awareness of both letters and life.

59

Sapphire, Push, Sapphire, Push, 61 Sapphire, Push, 62 Sapphire, Push, 60

45. 49. 81. 81.

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“Writing Could Be the Boat” Although Precious’s expanding awareness of both her internal and external landscape constitutes an early leg of her personal odyssey of selfdiscovery and redefinition, Precious embarks on her journey in earnest as she begins to acquire literacy. By coupling her growing literacy with her expanding self-knowledge, Sapphire situates Precious within a pervasive, abiding tradition in black, American literature. From the first publication of early slave narratives, such as those by Olaudah Equiano and Frederick Douglass, through to the relative present, the importance of reading has played a central role in many African-American narratives. As Madhu Dubey notes in her book, Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism (2003), “If the slave narrative equated the ‘rights of man with the ability to write,’ much of the subsequent African-American literary tradition was galvanized by the belief that print literature could effectively press the case for full black participation in public life.”63 In other words, what has held true on a macro-level for the African-American community—that literacy, specifically print literacy, portends greater community potential—also holds true on a micro-level for those individual members of this community. Indeed, as the novel progresses, Precious’s increased literacy emboldens her to participate more actively in public life. Subsequently, Dubey asserts that, “In this tradition, the political potential of print literacy has been intimately tied to the progressive possibilities of urbanity.”64 Historically, both increased literacy and northward migration of black people from America’s rural south to its urban north worked to (slowly and imperfectly) create different possibilities for social and economic mobility. Dubey argues that the novels she investigates in her book (Push, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, and John Edgar Wideman’s Philadelphia Fire, among others), “by forcing the question of how to read urban texts and how to grasp them as interpretive wholes, take on a much-debated problem—of the semiotic legibility of postmodern cities.”65 For Dubey, textual literacy and a subject’s ability to read urban space as its own system of signification are intimately linked. Likewise, as Push progresses and Precious learns basic reading and writing skills at Each One/Teach One, her confidence in her ability to read the text that is New York and, consequently, to travel through it—both as 63

Madhu Dubey, Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism, (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 2003), 4. 64 Madhu Dubey, Signs and Cities, 4. 65 Madhu Dubey, Signs and Cities, 57.

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a pedestrian and via public transportation—increases as well. In other words, the trajectory of Precious’s verbal literacy parallels the trajectory of Precious’s geographic mobility. The moment in the text when Precious dissociates on the bus stop, for example, occurs the first time that she attempts to travel to her new, alternative school, Each One/Teach One. She recovers from her incest flashback thinking, “I’m leaning against glass panel of bus stop. I stare at 101 bus disappearing down 125th street. What am I doing at one-two-five at this time of morning? I look down at my feet, my eyes catch on my leggings, NEON YELLOW, of course! Alternative! I was on my way, was on my way, walking down Lenox when bad thoughts hit me ‘n I space out.”66 Here, at this early stage in the narrative, Precious’s post-traumatic stress reaction circumscribes her ability to move in and through her urban environment. In providing her own back story, Precious references times in the past in which “everything get swimming for me, floating for days sometimes.”67 Significantly however, the next time in the narrative that Precious experiences a flashback in real time occurs that same, initial day of Each One/Teach One. This time, Precious endures these same invasive, traumatic memories when she is asked to read a passage out loud to her new instructor, Ms. Rain. She describes her reaction to Ms. Rain’s request, explaining, “All the air go out my body. I grab my stomach. Miz Rain look scared. ‘Precious!’ My head water. I see bad things. I see my daddy. I see TVs I hear rap music I want something to eat I want fuck feeling from Daddy I want die I want die.”68 Although it is common for people who suffer from post-traumatic stress to experience frequent intrusive memories and thoughts,69 it seems significant here that Precious has these incest flashbacks both when attempting to utilize her spatial literacy by traveling through the city and when attempting to demonstrate her (lack of) verbal literacy. For Precious, systems of enunciation— whether spatial or semantic—are intimately bound up with traumatic memory, such that in both these scenes the impact of Precious’s history of sexual violence severely limits her ability in the present to “read’ the topographic and linguistic signifiers surrounding her. As Precious begins to make sense of her past, however, both her spatial and verbal literacy expand. One month into her Each One/Teach

66

Sapphire, Push, 25. Sapphire, Push, 35. 68 Sapphire, Push, 53. 69 Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, (NY: Basic Books, 1992), 37. 67

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One program, just before her second child is born, Precious writes in the dialogic notebook that she uses to correspond with her teacher: A is fr Afrc (for Africa) B is for u bae (you baby) C is cl w bk (colored we black) D is dog E is el l/m (evil like mama) F is fuck […]. 70

In this journal entry, Precious uses the alphabet, the very building blocks of literacy, to make meaning from and impose order onto her chaotic, violent past. Through a kind of semantic proximity, she links her child (“B is for u bae”) up with his ancestral heritage (“A is fr Afrc”) and racial identity (“C is cl w bk”), which enables her to situate herself and her child in time and space. For survivors of traumatic events—especially those who experience sustained, protracted abuse—“there is […] an imperative need to tell and thus come to know one’s story, unimpeded by ghosts from the past against which one has to protect oneself. One has to know one’s buried truth in order to be able to live one’s life.”71 Moreover, this truth needs to be integrated into the survivor’s personal history via narrative. In other words, the survivor must tell her story in order to situate the traumatic event(s) within the context of her overall life history. In her written dialogue with Ms. Rain, Precious references her ancestry and race as antecedents to her childhood sexual abuse (that is, she was African American prior to the onset of the incest), but also notes that “E is e ‘l/m, ” or “E is evil like Mama” and that “F is fuck,” re-locating herself in the present where she continues to weather the consequences of her abuse. As Precious gains mastery over language, she becomes progressively better equipped to engage with the realities of her history of sexual abuse. Throughout her time at Each One/Teach One, Precious develops friendships with the other women in the class, many of whom are survivors of family violence as well. Together, they author a “class book” that they fill with their life stories, particularly those that detail their 70

Sapphire, Push, 65. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. (NY: Routledge, 1992), 78. 71

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traumatic pasts, in order to bear written testimony to the reality of their experiences. The class book, or Life Stories, as Ms. Rain’s literacy students title it, appears at the end of Sapphire’s novel and stands out both structurally and aesthetically from the rest of Push. Life Stories is presented as its own entity: the type-set is different from the body of the text, as if it had been written on a typewriter; it is not paginated like the rest of the novel (nor does it have its own page numbers); it does, however, contain a cover that very much resembles the title page of a book report, replete with Instructor’s name, class meeting time and days, and title of the course. It is as if Sapphire, instead of claiming authorship for this portion of Push, allows her characters to be the authors of their own stories, attributing the production of the class book not to herself, but instead to Ms. Rain’s literacy students. Notably, its title, Life Stories, is underlined, a privilege reserved for those works of literature that have already been published. If nothing else, that Life Stories is underlined clearly demarcates it is a separate entity from the rest of Push, even though it is, according to the logic of the narrative, authored by the novel’s protagonists. In this way, the class book strongly adheres to a pervasive literary trope in twentieth-century fiction, “the book-within-the-book.” Madhu Dubey explains that “Since the 1970s—the period widely referred to as postmodern—African-American fiction has teemed with tropes of the book-within-the-book, and with scenes of reading and writing, which probe the twinned inheritance of print literacy and urban modernity.”72 Because of the rise of technological mediation throughout this period of postmodernity, Dubey fears that print culture teeters on the brink of annihilation, which for her relates directly to the dissolution of urban communities in postwar America. She believes that frequently, “the artifact of the book is taken to be the very emblem of the modern city, with its uniform visual blocks of print seeming to mirror the grids of rationalized urban space. More substantively, print technology supports a unique model of mediated yet knowable community befitting modern urban conditions.”73 The 1980s, decade in which Push is set, as well as the decades that preceded (and to some extent succeeded) this period, were largely defined by the dissolution and decay of urban communities. In addition, the way that information was presented and distributed shifted away from print and toward digital media. According to Dubey’s calculus, modernity gets equated with print literacy and urbanism, whereas postmodernity is associated with technology and the 72 73

Madhu Dubey, Signs and Cities, 2. Madhu Dubey, Signs and Cities, 2.

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destruction of America’s urban centers as well as the communities they foster. For Dubey, it is no wonder that novels highlighting this trope of the book-within-the-book have appeared frequently throughout the past thirtyfive years, wherein there has lain an incredible amount of anxiety about the future of cohesive urban communities in the wake of postmodern cultural shifts. Accordingly, novels like Push, which take as their primary subjects issues of literacy and urbanity, attempt to mitigate this anxiety by representing fictional communities of writers and readers like the Each One/Teach One group. Dubey writes, “PUSH is able to affirm a literate community that is urban in the sense that it achieves intimacy by means of difficult acts of mediation among strangers.”74 Significantly, Dubey also notes that “the circulation of the manuscript is restricted to the students and teacher of the literacy class”75 who are not, by the time the manuscript is authored, “strangers” at all; Ms. Rain and the literacy group have spent at least two years in class together, and the mere presence of the class book evidences the students’ acquisition of both verbal and interpersonal, emotional literacy over the course of their time at the Alternative School. I take issue with Dubey’s overall categorization of Life Stories as a “typed manuscript with a clearly defined readership rather than a print commodity whose distribution escapes authorial control.”76 To be sure, within the hermeneutic of Sapphire’s novel itself, Life Stories is indeed a singular entity—it is written by the members of Each One/Teach One for the members of Each One/Teach One, and, as I note above, very much stands out from the body of the text. But Life Stories lives only within the world of Push, a novel of Sapphire’s creation intended to itself be a published, print commodity with a broad distribution. So although Dubey is correct that Life Stories does work to quell postmodern anxiety by creating a print text with a narrowly-defined community of readers, she neglects to account for the fact that the distribution of the class book depends wholly on the publication and distribution of Push itself. Nowhere is this more evident than in the organization of Life Stories. The class book both begins and ends with poems by Precious, which bookend the prose-style autobiographies of the other women in the class. Because Push—the novel taken as a whole—treats Precious as its true protagonist and her teacher and classmates as significant, yet secondary, characters, it seems logical that the class book highlights Precious’s literacy skills by sequencing her work both first and last in the order the 74

Madhu Dubey, Signs and Cities, 78, (emphasis mine). Madhu Dubey, Signs and Cities, 77-78. 76 Madhu Dubey, Signs and Cities, 77. 75

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women’s narratives appear. Moreover, in the last poem found in the class book, “Untitled,” Precious writes, “nobody can see now/but I might be a poet, a rapper.” The inclusion of Precious’s poetry in the class book, as opposed to a prose-style narrative about her life (which, arguably, the body of Push already constitutes), underscores Precious’s achievements in literacy acquisition over her classmates’ because, again, her work appears first and last, because she employs the “Über-literate” genre of poetry to relay her life story, and because writing her life narrative in free verse allows Precious to practice telling her story in her chosen medium. In other words, the very structure of Life Stories highlights Precious as its focus even though the class book is ostensibly a community-wide project written for and by all the members of Ms. Rain’s literacy class. The content of the women’s autobiographies found in the class book parallels Precious’s story in devastating and uncanny ways. Although the life stories of the other women included in the class book—Rita Romero, Rhonda Johnson, and Jermaine Hicks—represent these women’s unique experiences, their individual histories of family and sexual violence nonetheless read remarkably like Precious’s own narrative. Rita Romero’s story appears after the two initial poems by Precious and details the incident in her childhood that spawned her life of “foster care, rape, drugs, prostitution, HIV, jail, [and] rehab,” all of which occurred before she joined the Each One/Teach One community. Rita begins her autobiography, titled “My Life,” by literally situating herself within the domestic space she occupied as a child. For Rita, the material objects found in her childhood home signify an Edenic time of wholeness and union with her mother. Rita describes the interior space of the apartment she shared with her dark-skinned, Puerto Rican mother and her white father, noting that the “apartment was full of beautiful stuff—velvet couch, lace curtain, virgin statues, candles, chandeliers.” Whereas Rita recalls these material objects with great clarity, she also notes that “My father honestly I don’t remember him so much even though I know he was there everyday. I know he is white because he tells me this, tells me I am white.” Although she has few distinct memories of her father, Rita nonetheless retains the impression of him as racist and abusive. She relays how “[…]he grab me, hold out my arm next to his, see SEE. Look he says you are WHITE. You are not no nigger morena puta WHORE.” Here, Rita’s father’s equates her mother’s darkness with sexual excess and deviance. Rita, conversely, adores her mother and associates darkness in general with comfort and safety. Rita writes,

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I am six years old. The walls of the room are maroon. The velvet couch with the white, lace doilies is the same color as the wall. It’s so pretty. It’s my favorite. In the middle is the dark wood table with the crystal ball. Lace curtains is on the window. The shades is drawn.

Later on in the same paragraph, Rita again describes her mother, saying, “her hair is black down her back, her lips like red movie star lips, eyes black like oil.” In this description, Rita’s mother’s darkness mirrors the darkness of the room where Rita feels secure and happy. Significantly, Rita’s mother address her, Rita, as “Negra,” the Spanish word for Black, and later “Negrita,” little black one, claiming Rita as her own and aligning Rita’s (supposed lack of) blackness with her own darkness, as well as with that of the room (womb) surrounding her. At this point in Rita’s narrative, it appears as if her own story of domestic happiness and comfort runs counter to Sapphire’s overall scripting of Push’s household spaces as spaces of danger. Indeed, the initial part of Rita’s story reads like a model of early childhood, prelapsarian wholeness. Rita’s father, however, intrudes upon this scene of primal household bliss between Rita and her mother one very significant afternoon, when he accuses her mother of prostitution and shoots her in the head, killing her in front of Rita. Sadly, in Rita Romero’s story too, the seeming security of interior, domestic spaces shatters in the devastating presence of family violence. This theme holds true for Rhonda Johnson as well, whose story follows Rita’s. Rhonda’s story differs structurally from the other women’s in that she bifurcates her narrative into two distinct parts, which she titles “My Younger Years,” and “My Grown Up Years,” respectively. Rhonda’s story also begins with her early childhood, although hers is spent in Jamaica; “things was good there,” Rhonda writes, “until Pop die then we didn’t have money so we move to the U.S. For me that is when the problem start. What the problem is is hard to say but it was with my brother.” When Rhonda, her mother, and her brother Kimberton arrive in the United States, Rhonda is only twelve, yet she must work alongside her mother serving West Indian takeout on 7th Ave instead of going to school. Not only does Rhonda’s job isolate her from her peer group, but her brother becomes progressively more sexually abusive, alienating Rhonda from others even further. She explains, “We sleep in same room. He wait until I am asleep. I awake Kimberton standing over me naked as the day he born. Thing like a donkey’s. I don’t want it.” Twice Rhonda tries to solicit help from her mother. The first time Rhonda tells her mother what is happening to her, she’s fourteen, and her mother clearly does not understand what Rhonda is saying to her—the mother’s response is to

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leave her brother’s computers alone, and he will leave Rhonda alone. Ronda tells her mother again, however, when she is sixteen. She explains that, “Kimberton is…is molesting with me at night.” Not really understanding, her mother asks for clarification, which Rhonda provides by saying, “He come over to my side of the room at night and intercourse me,” at which point Rhonda’s mother kicks her out of the house, calling her names like “filthy haint” and “night devil walker.” Part two of Rhonda’s narrative, “My Grown Up Years,” tells of her life on the street, where she would “go with men to bars, drink, go home with them, hope I get to stay the night—that they don’t tell me go after they come. After I do this with, oh, is it five or fifty or a hundred guys, I start dissolve.” But, in truth, Rhonda does not dissolve; she attempts to figure out the welfare system, then lands a few different jobs as a home health worker until one of her clients dies, which catapults her back to a life of homelessness. Rhonda again lives on the streets, where she procures food by rummaging through garbage cans. It is while Rhonda is engaged in her search for other people’s discarded dinners that she encounters her brother for the first time since their mother excommunicated her. Again, as throughout the rest of Push, Rhonda’s moment of vindication occurs in public, urban space when Rhonda sees her brother for the first time since they are children and asserts, “I am not ashamed.” As Kimberton pursues Rhonda, trying to get her to take money from him, she empowers herself by simply walking away. Here, as through the rest of the novel, women’s mobility through urban space works to help re-script past traumas that played out in the “safe” space of the home. Although Jermaine Hicks is not sexually or physically abused by her parents, she is subject to rampant, violent homophobia in response to her style of dress. Indeed, Jermaine titles her autobiography “Harlem Butch,” wherein she details a lifetime of violently inappropriate responses to her gender and sexual identity. She notes how, when she is only 7, “A boy hold me down/under the stairwell/that smells like urine (pee I woulda said at seven)/tries to push his dick into me.” Here, Jermaine is subject to abuse in domestic, interior spaces in the same way as many of the other women found in Push. Jermaine, however, “undoes” this abuse, at least semantically, by stating next that “I am 8:/when I put my tongue/in MaryMae’s mouth/for the first time/(under the same steps).” In fact, there appears to be some amount of promise at this point in Jermaine’s narrative that she will successfully navigate the pitfalls of her childhood relatively unscathed; this changes, though, by the time Jermaine is thirteen and Mary-Mae’s father catches them having sex. Mary-Mae’s father rapes Jermaine, as she explains it, “to show me what a MAN is, what a woman

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is/when I get up from my new knowledge/one of my front teeth is gone.” Later, Jermaine and Mary-Mae get “caught” by Jermaine’s very Christian mother, whose “words float over [their] naked bodies like clouds of poison gas.” Jermaine notes that after this incident, “I keep going until I hit the street.” Whereas sexual and verbal abuse occur in domestic spaces for Jermaine, she too is able to liberate herself from the confines of her past via public, urban space. Because many of the women in the group share common histories of abuse and assault, as they grow closer, they begin to take responsibility for each other’s healing and help encourage one another to forge networks of support. Rita, for instance, persuades Precious to attend an incest survivors group meeting with her. In order to go to these meetings, however, Precious and Rita must take the bus from Harlem down to 14th Street, where the meetings are held. Not only does Precious assert and implement her spatial literacy by taking the bus through Manhattan, but the survivor’s group is also where Precious first publicly names her violation as rape. In doing so, Precious employs her new-found geographic literacy to arrive at a location where she implements her burgeoning verbal proficiency in order to speak out for the first time about her history of abuse. Precious also comes to a pivotal conclusion while drinking hot chocolate in the Village with Rita and some of the other women from the survivors’ meeting: “How Mama and Daddy know me sixteen years and hate me, how a stranger meet me and love me. Must be what they already had in they pocket”77 In connecting with a community of compassionate women, Precious is able to shift some of the blame for her abuse away from herself and onto her parents, much more appropriate objects. Under the guidance and encouragement of her teacher and fellow classmates, and in the service of authoring their class book, Precious begins to write poetry about her experience as both a resident of Harlem and as an incest survivor. She writes about how she loves to take her son, Abdul, (who, incidentally, is healthy at birth, not developmentally disabled or HIV positive) to daycare early so that she can “wallk throo Harlem in/ mornin to school.”78 She observes that “this/a Harlem done/took/a beating/but mornin/if you/like/me/you see/ILANTHA tree rape/concrete/n birf/spiky green/trunk/life.”79 Although this is an especially redemptive image—a sidewalk “raped” by a tree that gives birth to new life and new growth—this moment is certainly not the first time in 77

Sapphire, Push, 131. Sapphire, Push, 102. 79 Sapphire, Push, 103. 78

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the narrative that Precious understands her history of sexual violence through her observations of her surrounding urban landscape. Indeed, Precious understands her own history of sexual violation largely through a racialized and spatialized framework. Even before she audibly names her experience as rape to her incest survivors group, Precious admits to herself, I think what my fahver do is what Farrakhan said the white man did to the black woman. Oh it was terrible and he dood it in front of the black man; that’s really terrible. Yeah, on the video, Farrakhan say during slavery times the white man just walk out to the slavery Harlem part where the niggers live separate from the mansions where the white people live and he take any black woman he want and if he feel like it he jus’ gone and do the do on top of her even if her man there.80

In coming to terms with her own history, Precious relies on past rape narratives. Tellingly, in the above example, Precious references an historical moment in which black women living in the racially-marked area of Harlem were subject to assault at the hands of white men. For Precious, a black woman living in an area where the collective historical memory of sexual violence informs her understanding of her own traumatic past, merely walking through Harlem serves as an act of defiant enunciation. Because of the frequent deployment of rape as a method of intimidation and control during slavery, this act carries with it a particularly devastating cultural resonance for the female descendents of slaves, as well as for black women in general. Sharon Holland writes, “Ultimately, a system such as slavery might be abruptly halted, but its dream lives in the peoples’ imagination and becomes fodder for both romantic fictions and horrific realities.”81 Similarly, in her book, Scenes of Subjection, Saidiya Hartman writes about both slavery itself and its aftermath. She focuses especially on the way in which the institution of slavery constituted the African American as (non)citizen. In her section on female slaves and rape, Hartman explains how, “By […]examining female subject-formation at the site of sexual violence, I am not positing that forced sex constitutes the meaning of gender but that the erasure or disavowal of sexual violence engendered black femaleness as a condition

80

Sapphire, Push, 68. Sharon Holland, Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity, (Durham: Duke UP, 2000), 15.

81

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of unredressed injury.”82 This condition of “unredressed injury” has never been fully assuaged, or even satisfactorily acknowledged, in American culture and politics throughout the century and a half following Abolition. Rather, the transgenerational memory of grief emerges repeatedly, veritably defining American cultural and political life. Ours is what Avery Gordon describes as a “haunted society”83—one that is marked by pain that “might best be described as the history that hurts—the still unfolding narrative of captivity, dispossession, and domination that engenders the black subject in America.”84 And, as Anne Cheng writes, “the traumatic effects [of this history] can be transmitted even if (or precisely because) the traumatic event itself has not.”85 In other words, the legacy of slavery serves as the ghost limb of the American body politic; although the institution itself has been severed off from the American political system, enduring, repetitive reminders of its presence pain us even today. Although this transgenerational legacy of slavery makes itself known across American cultural and political life, this dissertation focuses on its contemporary manifestations in the form of sexual violence against African-American women. As a result of this history, I am interested in the ways through which women—both in life and in literature—tactically employ geographic mobility in the service of re-scripting both their own traumatic pasts and those of generations of women who proceeded them. Consequently, for many young women like Precious, the very act of moving through space itself is asserted as a pedestrian act of resistance. Newly able to negotiate the New York public transportation system, Precious notes with pride how she takes the bus and the subway from Harlem to various destinations around the city. Linking geographic mobility with increasing verbal proficiency, Precious writes in her journal abut how excited she is that, “Toosday Rita take me VILLAG/Sat we go museum/sun day church/MONDY we gonna read Harriet T. book.”86 It hardly seems coincidental that reading and mobility are connected for

82

Saidiya Hartman. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. (NY: Oxford UP, 1997), 101. 83 Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP: 1996), 98. 84 Saidiya Hartman. Scenes of Subjection, 51. 85 Cheng, Ann. The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief. (NY: Oxford UP, 2002), 84. 86 Sapphire, Push, 103.

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Precious, both of which work to construct geographic and discursive “liberated spaces.”87 The reference to “Harriet T.” above proves significant as well. Early in her Each One/Teach One program, Ms. Rain gives Precious a poster of Harriet Tubman that she hangs in her room next to her poster of Louis Farrakhan.88 Later, Precious lists all the books she has read and acquired, one of which is authored by Ann Petry and titled Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad.89 For Precious, the Underground Railroad serves as an apt metaphor for her own journey from her oppressive, domestic life to her newfound life of freedom, as she and Abdul move from her mother’s house into a half-way house. While living in the half-way house, Precious’s mother visits, leaving her own home for the first time in years, to inform Precious that her father has died of AIDS. Precious writes in her journal: I was fine til HIV thing/she say i still fine/but prblm not jus HIV it mama Dady/BUT I was gon dem/I escap dem like Harriet/Ms Ran say we can nt escap the pass./the way free is hard/look Harriet H-A-R-R-I-E-T/i practice her name.90

In practicing writing the name “Harriet,” Precious further underscores the connection she forges for herself between writing and liberation, realizing that literacy can serve as her passage to both emotional freedom as well as freedom from dependencies on public assistance. The act of “practis[ing] her name” seems significant here as well. By rehearsing, in writing, Harriet Tubman’s name, Precious aligns herself with a long, important tradition of African American writing and self-naming as deliberate acts of resistance. Perhaps for Precious, repeating the act of writing the letters “H-A-R-R-I-E-T” reinforces that she herself is “P-R-EC-I-O-U-S” or, as she discovers in thinking about what to name her son, “My name mean somethin’ valuable.”91 Learning to write—not only her name but her life-story—enables Precious to give form and structure to her experience in a way that allows her to transcend what seem like impossible dilemmas. When Precious first learns of her positive HIV status and tells the Each One/Teach One 87

De Certeau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life, Trans. Steven Randall (Berkeley: University of CA Press, 2002), 105. 88 Sapphire, Push, 63. 89 Sapphire, Push, 80. 90 Sapphire, Push, 101. 91 Sapphire, Push, 67.

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class about it, for example, Ms. Rain asks them write about it in their journals. Precious explains her reluctance to do so to Ms. Rain: I say I drownin’ in river. She don’t look at me like I’m crazy but say, If you just sit there the river gonna rise up drown you! Writing could be the boat carry you to the other side. One time in your journal you told me you never really told your story. I think telling your story git you over that river Precious.92

Shortly thereafter, Precious begins her journaling in earnest, even to the point of walking around everywhere with the journal. She reports, “You know I go walk with Abdul, etc., take journal, write stuff in journal.”93 From this moment forward, Precious uses her journal both to practice writing itself—to increase her literacy skills—and also to engage with her traumatic past and further her healing. She continues to read literature and seems particularly fond of writers who are themselves from Harlem. She quotes Langston Hughes (“Harlmen Poet Laureeyet!”) to her class, saying, “Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair […] But all the time/Ise been a climbin’ on.” 94 By referencing the spatial metaphor found in the Hughes poem, Preciouis confirms her commitment to mobility, to her passage from a place of fear, confinement, and ignorance to another, transcendent place of verbal and spatial competence. Moreover, by writing Hughes’s words in her own journal, Precious includes herself as a member of a distinguished literary history. Throughout the novel, Sapphire also references texts by Ann Petry, Alice Walker, Langston Hughes, and Lucille Clifton, all of whom are well established, well respected African-American authors. All of these authors that Sapphire cites, and indeed many of the historical figures as well, serve as talismans on Precious’s journey into the world of both literacy and literature. Many of the individuals whom Precious reads or learns about—such as Harriet Tubman—are associated with the struggle for Abolition. Still others are strongly affiliated with the Civil Rights movement. Precious also reads books titled, in her words, “Ain Nobodi Gon’ Turn Me ‘Round ‘bout civil rights.” After reading it, Precious explains, “I ain’ know black people in this country went through shit like that.”95

92

Sapphire, Push, Sapphire, Push, 94 Sapphire, Push, 95 Sapphire, Push, 93

97. 98. 113. 82.

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By invoking these important activist figures and pivotal historical moments, Sapphire aligns Precious’s fight to overcome her personal battles with poverty, racism, incest, and the educational system alongside collective social movements aimed at transforming the role of blacks in America. Interestingly, even the white, British, nineteenth-century poet William Wordsworth, whom Precious reads and whose poem serves as an epigraph to the novel as a whole, functions as a literary and activist rolemodel for Precious, as Wordsworth held strong anti-slavery sentiments. Throughout the novel as a whole, Precious’s literary progenitors function as guides who educate and inspire her as she becomes more verbally, emotionally, and spatially literate. In her room at the half-way house, Precious hangs a map of the New York subway system that “show all the places the subway go. Subway go Queens, Brooklyn—I look at it sometimes and wonder where I be if I get on train and go to end of the line or get off at say, ummm, let’s see, how about Lefferts Blvd in Queens or Middletown Road in the Bronx. What kinda town or part of New York will it be.”96 At this point in the narrative, Precious is eighteen years old and has been participating in Each One/Teach One for two years. Over the course of her second year in the program, Precious’s “TABE reading test” score increased from a 2.8 to a 7.8, meaning that, as an eighteen year old, she reads at nearly an eighthgrade level.97 Clearly, as the subway map hanging on her wall demonstrates, Precious is now much better equipped to read both spatial texts (the text that is the subway system) and their cartographic representations (the map of the subway that hangs on her wall). In doing so, Precious is also better able to author herself into her experience in these spaces, wondering what it is like on “Lefferts Blvd in Queens or Middletown Road in the Bronx,” and imagining alternative, emancipatory possibilities for herself. Within these “liberated spaces”—both discursive and geographic— Precious is able to envision imagined lives that differ dramatically from her earlier, violent domestic existence. She writes in her journal: […] I am homer on a voyage/but from our red bricks in piles/of usta be buildings/and windows of black/broke glass eyes./we come to buildings bad/but not so bad/street cleaner/then we come to a place/of/everything is

96 97

Sapphire, Push, 126. Sapphire, Push, 139.

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fine/big glass windows/stores/white people/fur/blue jeans/it’s a different city/I’m in a different city/Who I be I grow up/here?98

In moving from Harlem, an area of urban decay—particularly in the early 1980s when this novel is set—to downtown, where she observes cosmetic differences in both buildings and people, Precious, likening herself to Homer’s Odysseus, imagines an alternative life for herself infused with possibility. Later in the same journal entry, Precious again constructs a substitute version of herself through her identification with literary figures and cityscapes, in this case with the poetry of William Blake, himself an ardent abolitionist. She writes, “TYGER TYGER/BURNING BRIGHT/That’s what in Precious/Jones heart—a tiger./bookstores/café/BLoomydales!/Bus keep on rolling.”99 In this way, by attaining both geographic and semantic literacy, in learning to navigate her way through the city and positioning herself as a reader and a writer within the tradition of her literary progenitors, Precious successfully resists the pervasive sexual violence that had previously constrained her and, consequently, fashions—for herself and women like her—both spatial and discursive spaces of hope out of ostensible spaces of fear.

Works Cited Cheng, Ann. The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. De Certeau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life, Trans. Steven Randall. Berkeley: University of CA Press, 2002. Dubey, Madhu, Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 2003. Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York: Routledge, 1992. Hartman, Saidiya, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Herman, Judith, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. NY: Basic Books, 1992. Holland, Sharon, Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. Lorde, Audre, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1982. 98 99

Sapphire, Push, 127. Sapphire, Push, 128.

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Matus, Jill, “Dream, Deferral, and Closure in The Women of Brewster Place.” Black American Literature Forum 24, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 4965. Meriwether, Louise, Daddy Was a Number Runner, 2nd ed. New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2002. Mullings, Leith, “After Drugs and the ‘War on Drugs’: Reclaiming the Power to Make History in Harlem, New York.” In Wounded Cities: Destruction and Reconstruction in a Globalized World, ed. Jane Schneider and Ida Susser. New York: Berg, 2003. Naylor, Gloria, The Women of Brewster Place: A Novel in Seven Stories. NY: Penguin Books, 1980. New York City Alliance Against Sexual Assault, “Research Fact Sheet,” National Center for Victims of Crime and Crime Victims Research and Treatment Center. http://www.nycagainstrape.org/research_factsheet_6.html Pain, Rachel, "Space, sexual violence and social control: Integrating Geographical and Feminist Analyses of Women's Fear of Crime.” Progress in Human Geography 15, no. 2 (1991): 415. Petry, Ann, The Street. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1946. Sapphire, Push. New York: Vintage Books, 1996. Shange, Ntozake, “With No Immediate Cause.” In Nature’s Ban: Women’s Incest Literature, 317-320. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1996. Wilson, Sondra Kathryn, Meet Me at the Theresa: The Story of Harlem’s Most Famous Hotel. NY: Atria Books, 2004.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN WOMB FICTION: LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERARY CHALLENGES TO THE WOMAN AS WOMB PARADIGM NATALIE WILSON

Motherhood has been reified into a compulsory component of ‘normal’ womanhood to such an all encompassing extent that the category ‘woman’ is largely ‘womb dependent.’ While feminism has undoubtedly made inroads into this delimiting conflation, we are now, at the beginning of the 21st century, seemingly moving backwards rather than forwards in regards to women’s rights, especially in relation to reproductive freedom. In fact, we seem to be making a decided U-turn. From the “New Momism” ideology so brilliantly elucidated by Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels in which women’s ‘worth’ is tied to their capacity to be ‘perfect mothers,’ to the increasingly restrictive legislation regarding a woman’s right to choose, it seems the triumphs of feminism and women’s rights in relation to reproductive issues and maternal subjecthood are eroding at an alarming rate.1 In response to this erosion, a unique corpus of women’s fiction has emerged over the past two and a half decades that draws on elements of satire and the grotesque in order to challenge the conception of woman as womb. This humorous, incisive body of texts serves as a critical roadblock on the increasingly neo-conservative, fundamentalist anti-feminist fast track that is currently permeating the globe. In the following paper, I will focus on this body of texts and the literary challenges these narratives pose to the ‘woman as womb’ paradigm that continues to beset female subjecthood and circumvent women’s full equality. In particular, I will focus on the various ways 1

See “The New Momism” in Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels, The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How it Has Undermined Women (New York: The Free Press, 2004).

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female writers mock, resist, and subvert the notions of motherhood as the defining (and necessary) component of womanhood. Positing the increasing erasure of the maternal body within contemporary reproductive politics and the simultaneous championing of the ‘fetal body’ is tied to a conservative agenda that aims to both disenfranchise women on the one hand and turn reproduction into a profitable venture on the other, I will suggest that while in theory reproductive technologies offer positive options for reconfiguring the maternal body and reproduction, in practice, the reality of these technologies serves to disavow female embodiment while simultaneously triumphing the fetus as a utopic, ultimate body. While the second wave feminist focus on the need to redefine and rework the institution of motherhood was invaluable in its examination of parental roles and its expansion of the definition of motherhood, the revolution in parenting roles and reproductive matters authors such as Adrienne Rich and Shulamith Firestone hoped for never came to fruition. In The Dialectic of Sex, Firestone famously argued for the need to free women from their biological destiny. This freedom, she posited, would be wrought by a technological revolution in which reproductive technologies would release women from the tyranny of their oppressive maternal role.2 While some of the advancements in technology that Firestone envisioned have undoubtedly come to pass, the revolutionizing of gender and parental roles that she hoped for have not. On the contrary, reproductive technologies have not radicalised the social milieu but have rather coincided with a rebirth of a conservative right-wing agenda. In fact, the reproductive technologies that emerged in the early 1980’s and have been burgeoning ever since helped to consolidate a narrow vision of ‘family values’ in which the right, the white, and the wealthy are designated as ‘true’ families. The class inequalities that shape access to reproductive technologies, let alone to education and contraceptive choices, have become further entrenched in conjunction with the rise of reproduction as a technology. In effect, on a global scale, the wealthy reap the benefits of reproductive technologies, advancements in contraception, and prenatal care, while the global ‘underclass’ all too often are left with little to no choice in reproductive matters let alone any technology to support those choices. Moreover, as third wave theorist Celeste Newbrough points out, there is ““an almost invisible new class of women brought about by the application of new reproductive technologies” who sell their eggs, genetic material, and 2

See Shulamith. Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex. (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1970).

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bodily parts to feed the growing research machines.3 As Newbrough notes, “anyone who cares to look can see an emerging caste engaged in reproductive prostitution.”4 As egg donation and other such practices procure an often hefty paycheck, this prostitution is globally practiced by single mothers, welfare recipients, and low-wage earners. Further, the continuing technologization of reproduction paradoxically disembodies and dehumanises maternal bodies while relegating women to the body, to the maternal function. On the one hand, reproductive technologies discount the materiality of the body in favour of a notion of body as machine, on the other, they serve to shift reproduction in such a way that women are once again tied to the body and to their capacity to reproduce. In regards to the notion of maternal body as machine, reproductive technologies transform the body into a genetic warehouse mined for eggs, ovaries, fetal cells, and DNA strands. In this way, embodied female subjectivity is displaced by technological intervention. This slow death of the maternal subject brought about by the excavation of the female body and the eradication of a feminist reproductive politics has given birth to a monstrous offspring: the fetal body. While the earlier deification of the pregnant body which glorified women while ironically subsuming them to second class citizenship was certainly faulty, the current deification of the fetal body is just as ominous. For, as theorist Anne Balsamo notes, “the material integrity of the maternal body is technologically deconstructed, only to be reconstructed as a visual medium to look through to see the developing fetus who is now, according to some media campaigns, ‘the most important obstetrics patient.’”5 Similarly, Susan Bordo argues that “as the personhood of the pregnant woman has been drained from her and her function as fetal incubator activated, the subjectivity of the fetus has been elevated”.6 This personification of the fetus is particularly ominous when viewed in 3

Celeste Newbrough,“Bah, Bah Black Sheep: Cloning, Reproductive Rights and the Gender Revolution,” International Archives of the Second Wave of Feminism, Feb. 29, 1997, http://home.att.net/~celesten/clone.html (12 December 2006), no pagination. 4 Celeste Newbrough,“Bah, Bah Black Sheep: Cloning, Reproductive Rights and the Gender Revolution,” International Archives of the Second Wave of Feminism, Feb. 29, 1997, http://home.att.net/~celesten/clone.html (12 December 2006), no pagination. 5 Anne Balsamo, “Forms of Technological Embodiment: Reading the Body in Contemporary Culture.”Cyberspace, Cyberbodies, Cyberpunk, Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows, eds, (London: Sage, 1995) 227. 6 85

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relation to the machination and fragmentation of the maternal body. For this reason, Rosi Braidotti insists that “No area of contemporary technological development is more crucial to the construction of gender than the new reproductive technologies”.7 Like Bordo and Balsamo, Braidotti confirms that the new biotechnologies serve to displace women’s status as embodied subjects and construe them instead as ‘fetal production’ houses. Thus, while fetal rights grow, women’s rights shrink. The protection of the fetus’s health and the monitoring of its living environment within the womb become tantamount, while once the fetus is a child, no such monitoring is in place. This super-personification of the fetus needs to be read in relation to current cultural notions of the body and embodiment. Why, we must ask, has the fetus become a sign of ultimate embodiment – a subject to be protected, invested in, monitored? The work of Lauren Berlant provides particular insight into these issues. Berlant, in her study of contemporary citizenship, claims that “a nation made for adult citizens has been replaced by one imagined for fetuses and children.”8 Discussing what she refers to as ‘fetal citizenship’, Berlant argues that current US culture in particular fosters “the image of fetal personhood as the icon of ideal citizenship” through which “the fetus becomes a mass-media form itself, providing a tissue of logics through which notions of social connectedness and the national future are transmitted.”9 Here, not only does the fetus represent a future baby, a baby to be, but a future citizen. Placing more emphasis on this possible, future body than on the already existing bodies of the mother and others shifts the emphasis away from the present everyday political, social, bodily issues and moves them instead to some envisioned future. The fetus becomes a symbol of hope, a utopian body for tomorrow. Exploring these issues, Berlant contends that: the nation’s value is figured not on behalf of an actually existing and laboring adult, but of a future American, both incipient and pre-historical: especially invested with this hope are the American fetus and the American child. What constitutes their national supericonicity is an image of an American...not yet bruised by history: not yet caught up in the processes of secularization and sexualization; not yet caught in the confusing and exciting identity exchanges made possible by mass 7

Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 79. 8 Laurn Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). 1. 9 Belant, 22.

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consumption and ethnic, racial, and sexual mixing; not yet tainted by money or war. This national icon is still tacitly white, and it still contains the blueprint for the reproductive form that assures the family and the nation its future history. This national icon is still innocent of knowledge, agency, and accountability...10

Hence, this fetal icon is untainted by culture and history, it symbolizes the ultimate blank slate, the body as mere matter to be imbued with the hopes of a future nation. Further, as Berlant points out, the fetus has no voice. With no voice and no agency, the fetus is thus also the perfect docile body, far easier to contend with than actual bodies who can use their political agency to express dissatisfaction with the statues quo.11 In keeping with this uber-personhood of the fetus, the women that ‘house’ these fetuses metaphorically are constructed as fetal incubators, as ‘womb only.’ While the fetus becomes a ‘superbody’ to be protected at all costs, the maternal body within which the fetus lives is simultaneously viewed as dangerous, deceitful, and generally dubious. On the one hand, the fetus is represented as a victim, trapped within the prisonhouse of the mother’s body – a body which if the popular media is too believed, drinks too much, eats unhealthily, and might very well be taking illicit drugs or partaking in dangerous sexual activities. Within this framework, the maternal body is stripped of embodied subjectivity, reason, and will. Like a naughty child, the pregnant woman cannot be trusted. Berlant refers to this contemporary cultural climate as suffering from a “national and masscultural fixation on turning women into children and babies into persons”, arguing that within this cultural logic “the pregnant woman becomes the child to the fetus, becoming more minor and less politically represented than the fetus, which is in turn made more national, more central to securing the privileges of law.”12 A growth in various cultural discourses and practices that serves to uphold certain notions of normative maternal embodiment accompanies this superpersonhood of the fetus and the shrinkage of women into mere wombs. In fact, the various forms of biopower surrounding the maternal body reify and reinscribe the maternal body as a body to be controlled and attest to “the power of normativity over the living organism.”13 And, as Jana Sawicki contends in Disciplining Foucault, “As these medical 10

Berlant, 6. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. (New York: Vintage, 1979). 12 Berlant, 84-5. 13 Briadotti, 58. 11

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disciplines isolate specific types of abnormality or deviancy, they construct new norms of healthy and responsible motherhood.”14 Lauren Berlant, along the same lines, argues we are “witnessing the politics of woman’s discipline to norms of proper motherhood.”15 This ‘proper motherhood’ all too often seems to relegate women to their reproductive capacity alone and to ignore their rights and desires as fully functioning subjects – to allocate them to ‘womb only.’ However, as the literary texts I discuss below contend, constructing motherhood and the maternal body in a less reified, more open and variable way is a crucial, feminist move. In particular, as the novels indicate, if we re-evaluate current notions surrounding the maternal body, what is revealed is a pernicious ideology in which women are relegated to their reproductive and maternal functions on the one hand, and, on the other, reproduction becomes a commodified affair. Within these various cultural constructions of normative maternal embodiment one thing remains constant –a construction of female gender that is inextricably tied to maternal matters. As Braidotti notes, ”No area of contemporary technological development is more crucial to the construction of gender than the new reproductive technologies.”16 Along the same lines, Sawicki posits that these technologies are “producing new norm of motherhood” and “attaching women to their identities as mothers.”17 Reproductive technologies and the discourses that surround them in contemporary culture place having a child as a premium importance and reify the construction of the female body as a maternal body. Moreover, the evergrowing technologization of reproduction serves to replace female subjectivity with a maternal body as blank slate for medical intervention. Female embodied subjectivity is reinscribed in relation to a technologized maternal body, a body as an assemblage of reproductive parts which function as a mere engine to fuel the fetus. Moreover, reproductive technologies currently involve the reproduction of certain types of subjects. No longer do we have the Darwinian survival of the fittest, but now more so the survival of the richest, for it is they who can afford the exorbitant price bracket of most biotechnological advances. As Balsamo notes, “Not surprisingly, these services are usually marketed to upper-middle-class (infertile) couples

14 Jana Sawicki, Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power, and the Body (New York: Routledge, 1991), 84. 15 Berlant, 98. 16 Braidotti, 79. 17 Sawicki, 85.

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who can afford to spend more than $35,000 trying to conceive a child.”18 This complex interconnection of reproductive technology and monetary issues points to the growing commodification of reproduction wherein commodity capitalism has made everything – including reproduction – a consumer affair. Various theorists have noted the move towards “birth as an industry in itself” wherein, as with any lucrative industry, profit issues become a defining force.19 Seen in this light, reproductive technologies lose the benign and altruistic image of advancements whose purpose is to help infertile couples desperate for children and become instead profit making enterprises. As Sawicki asserts, reproductive technologies “link up with the logic of consumerism and commodification by inciting the desire for ‘better babies’ and by creating a market in reproductive body parts, namely, eggs, wombs, and embryos.”20 Similarly, Braidotti compares the “manufacturing of babies” to “industrial output”, noting the interconnections between capitalist global expansion and “the commerce of living bodies.”21 This commodification has led to increasing fragmentation of the female body – the womb becomes a site for colonization, an empty vessel awaiting technological and capitalist intervention. Accordingly, it also becomes a site for media interest – a zone to be watched, surveyed, and interpreted. Attesting to this phenomenon, many pregnancies become the object of intense media scrutiny – as, most recently, with Katie Holmes pregnancy. As I will exemplify below, various fictional texts provide a useful interpretative framework with which to explore these issues in relation to the current cultural climate. In particular, Ex Utero and Twin ship, by Laurie Foos, Ark Baby and Egg Dancing, by Liz Jensen, Geek Love, by Katherine Dunn and Omnivores, by Lydia Millet, serve as useful fictional frameworks with which to critique contemporary preoccupations with reproductive technology and the maternal body. However, before I turn to more recent texts, I would like to emphasize that literary resistance to the ‘woman as womb’ ideology is by no means new. Along with feminist theory and activism, women’s literature has often attempted to redefine and expand female subjectivity particularly as it pertains to reproduction and maternity. From Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, from Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in 18 Anne Balsamo,Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 91. 19 Balsamo, Technologies, 91. 20 Sawicki, 84. 21 Braidotti, 51-2.

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the Sun to Doris Lessing’s “To Room Nineteen,’ from Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born. to the work of Sylvia Plath, Alice Walker, Amy Tan, Marge Piercy, Michelle Cliff, Sandra Cisneros, Edwidge Danticat and many other far too numerous to be named, women writers have wrestled with notions of motherhood, the maternal, and the tendency to reduce and/or idealize women into ‘womb only.’ While many such texts have variously assessed the effects of what Rich terms the ‘institution of motherhood,’ and the ‘second-class citizenship’ of mothers and their children, a more recent trend in women’s literature allies with the explosive growth in reproductive technologies over the past several decades. As I will elucidate in what follows, a number of women’s novels from the 1980’s to the present critique the growing field of reproductive technology and the accompanying reduction of women to ‘womb only’ status. In fact, many acclaimed novelists writing in the latter part of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st have focussed on motherhood and the maternal body. Of particular note are writers such as Michelle Roberts, Toni Morrison, Amy Tan, Buchi Emechita, and Margaret Atwood. However, for the purposes of this paper, I will focus exclusively on novels that draw on elements of satire and the grotesque in order to attack the shrinkage of full female embodiment and subjecthood into a ‘womb only’ identity, that highlight the fact the ‘fetal body’ has come to be viewed as more important and valuable than the maternal body which houses it, and that critique the various ways in which advanced patriarchal capitalism has turned reproduction into a profit making industry. As I will reveal in what follows, these texts employ grotesque humor in order to satirize the more pernicious aspects of reproductive technologies. In so doing, they do not merely reflect on or reveal cultural trends, but offer politicized critiques that forcefully jar readers into a recognition of what is at stake if we succumb to the ‘woman as womb’ paradigm.

‘My Womb is Everything I Am’: Woman as Womb in Ex Utero Laurie Foos novel, Ex Utero, published in 1996, satirizes reproduction as the defining trait of female existence in relation to contemporary American cultural trends such as talk shows, consumer mania, and ‘mommy wars.’ At the outset of the novel, Rita, who isn’t sure she wants to have children, accidentally loses her womb at a shopping mall. Rita immediately worries that “Her ambivalent feelings about having children…may have caused the womb to shrink away and fall out of her

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like a kind of discharge, an escape from lack of use”.22 When Rita berates herself for not using her uterus for its intended purpose of baby-housing and instead misplacing it during her “quest to achieve a versatile wardrobe” the novel ridicules two ‘norms’ of femininity in one blow – shopping and motherhood.23 (2). Within this framework of ‘lost womanhood’ and shopping obsession, Ex Utero represents Rita’s ‘abnormal’ wombless body in order to interrogate entrenched notions the female body as first and foremost a maternal body. The fact that being a body capable of reproducing defines womanhood is satirized when Rita goes to the mall in a frantic search for her uterus. As she desperately searches for her missing body part, women only “whisper to each other and hold their hands proudly over their own stomachs.”24 Here, in a comic depiction of what Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels call ‘mommy wars,’ women are represented as in competition with each other over the status of their wombs.25 Rita is set against these ‘normal’ wombed women as an aberrant woman, a wombless freak. Desperate to have a womb even though she has “misgivings about childbearing”, Rita posts notices all over town with pictures of her womb and the caption “If found, please call…Owner desperate.”26 In hopes of spreading the word about her lost womb, Rita appears on a syndicated talk show and is confronted by a pregnant woman in the audience who stands and proudly proclaims “My womb…is everything I am.”27 Here, the novel humorously derides the fact that wombs have become the signifier for womanhood. This novelistic exploration of woman as womb coincides with theorist Anne Balsamo’s insistence that there is a current trend to deconstruct the female body “into its culturally significant parts and pieces” so that“the womb serves as a metonym for the entire...body.”28 Moreover, through mockery and satire, the novel encourages readers to see this conflation as ridiculous via the inclusion of a fictional television talk show of the Jerry Springer variety. The text further challenges the trope of woman as womb when Rita’s lost uterus serves as a catalyst for the formation of the “FruitlessWombs,” 22

Laurie Foos, Ex Utero (London: Review, 1997) 1. Foos, Ex Utero, 2. 24 Foos, Ex Utero, 8. 25 See “The New Momism” in Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels, The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How it Has Undermined Women (New York: The Free Press, 2004). 26 Foos, Ex Utero, 137, 9. 27 Foos, Ex Utero, 30. 28 (Technologies 81). 23

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a group of women dedicated to deifying the womb. ‘Womanhood,’ the novel suggests, might as well be aptly renamed as ‘Wombhood’. Womb fever captures the nation and, at a rally held in Rita’s honor at the mall, a group of women with baby strollers participate in a relay race “to show their belief in the importance of their wombs.”29 Rita’s appearance on the aforementioned talk show generates large amounts of fan mail from “sympathetic women who have spent years in fertility treatments, prepubescent girls who are at once terrified and exuberant about their ability to procreate, menopausal women who live in mourning for their dying wombs.”30 Here, the novel mocks the conflation of women with wombs and prompts readers to see the damaging effects such a conflation has on females of all ages. Within the novel, Rita’s husband also subscribes to this belief that the womb is the definitive component of femaleness. He becomes impotent due to the loss of what he sees as Rita’s ‘womanhood’ and begins to address Rita as “your barren self.”31 This loss of male virility as a product of Rita’s womblessness further satirizes the ways in which femininity and female sexuality are construed as ‘womb dependent’. Playing on the correlation between the abject and the female body, the novel also links Rita’s lost womb to bodily rot.32 For example, after she loses her womb, Rita feels “an empty feeling of fruitlessness, a dry rot inside her.”33 Then, while sitting on the television talk show panel among the “sense of ripeness” all the wombs in the audience convey, Rita “smells her own rot.”34 In the closing shot before the commercial, the talk show host sits on the stage at her feet, sniffing the air, and asks “Do you smell something rotting.”35 Here, the novel mocks the tendency to idealize women’s reproductive capacity on the one hand and, on the other, to disparage the female body as disgusting. Moreover, by setting this exploration of the female body on the set of a syndicated talk show, the novel emphasizes how popular culture shapes conceptions of the female body. As in real life, the talk show explores abject femininity, implicitly claiming the female body is out of control and needs to be disciplined into

29

Foos, Ex Utero, 47. Foos, Ex Utero, 51. 31 Foos, Ex Utero, 12. 32 See Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia UP, 1982). 33 Foos, Ex Utero, 1. 34 Foos, Ex Utero, 1, 28. 35 Foos, Ex Utero, 30. 30

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normativity.36 Humorously mocking abject fears related to feminine ‘rot’, the first sighting of Rita’s womb in fact turns out to be “a rotted sponge belonging to a housewife in a local suburb.”37 Thus, the novel critiques the fact that the female body is coded as grotesque and reveals how such a coding is maintained and perpetuated via cultural institutions such as the daytime talk show. Other telling outcomes of womb fever in the text involve an additional protagonist in the novel –Lucy. As womb fever spreads throughout the nation, Lucy begins to question her relationship to her body and feels she has lost the control she once had over it. While on a dreaded visit to the gynecologist she comes to the realization that “Even having pap smears faithfully …cannot guarantee our safety anymore. We may as well throw caution to the wind, let our bodies rot.”38 Noting that her body is “beginning to resist strenuous aerobics” she recognizes that “No longer does she feel the same joy at having the sweat run down her spandex tights or the same elation at downing a handful of Motrin after a hard day at the gym.”39 Here, Lucy is presented as a woman obsessed with attaining a ‘normal’ (i.e. extremely thin) body with which to continue to attract men so she can eventually do her ‘duty’ and procreate. However, akin to Rita losing her womb, Lucy feels she is losing control over her once malleable flesh. Analogous to these fears of losing control over her body are the signs Lucy reads on the walls of the gynecological office which tell her “about how to keep your womb in place, how to keep your vagina open and healthy.”40 These indictments satirize the constant control and vigil a woman is supposed to hold over her body, a body that is deemed as valuable only in relation to its reproductive and ‘man catching’ capacities. Moreover, this narrative thread reveals the virtual impossibility of having a body that is ‘maternal’ on the one hand and ‘man-catching’ on the other. For, as Lucy’s exercise obsession reveals, society instructs women to be thin and toned. In contrast, reproduction requires a fleshy body that expands. Hence, the hard, thin body idealized in contemporary culture is in flagrant contradiction to the vagaries of pregnancy and swelling bellies, leaking breasts, and ‘child-bearing hips.’

36 Talk shows topics often explicitly and/or implicitly explore the female body as out of control and monstrous, especially via discussions of diet and beauty wherein the female body is meant to be kept under control. 37 Foos, Ex Utero, 43-4. 38 Foos, Ex Utero, 80. 39 Foos, Ex Utero, 82. 40 Foos, Ex Utero, 84.

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Ex Utero, in keeping with the critique of female bodily norms, also mocks cultural indictments to conceal menstruation. Exploring the hypocritical valuation of female’s reproductive capacities and the simultaneous abhorrence of the real nitty gritty of the body that allows for reproduction, the novel attacks cultural bodily paradigms as preposterous. For example, the narrative arc that recounts Lucy’s sudden and torrential menstrual ‘crisis’ is employed in order to emphasize that part of being a ‘wombed’ body involves menstruating. In the text, Lucy, while watching talk show coverage of Rita’s missing womb as she waits to see her gynecologist, suddenly “feels a gushing between her legs.”41 She leaves a trail of blood as she retreats from the doctors. When she gets home, she shoves rolls of toilet paper between her legs and eventually the bathroom rug, none of which can contain the flow of blood. Here, Lucy serves as a comic portrayal of the grotesque female body that oozes and excretes, that is open to transformation and transgression of cultural boundaries and refuses to play by ‘the rules’ of bodily docility. In fact, by bleeding onto the streets as she walks home, Lucy symbolically makes her mark on culture via her body – a body which, in effect, rejects the ‘exercise mania’ that worked to ‘de-feminize’ it. Thus, the novel not only mocks the notion of a grotesque female body as a cultural threat, but also symbolically gestures towards the fact that women are ironically supposed to function in the main as wombs but to conceal the very bodily processes that allow for such a functioning. Through such themes , the novel insists on the importance of cultural and societal beliefs surrounding female bodily specificity. Unlike the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, whose theory of the grotesque depersonalises the womb, using it as an abstract symbol rather than in relation to specific female embodiment, the novel asserts the importance of the specificity of the female body in relation to gender politics.42 The novel presents the womb as a contested signifier of womanhood, as a crucial component of how female subjectivity comes to be defined. By generally ridiculing the conflation of the womb with women, the novel emphasizes the importance of re-evaluating the tropes of normative female embodiment, insisting that the womb must not be inscribed as the ultimate signifier for the female body. By representing Rita’s feelings of lost womanhood as ludicrous, 41

Foos, Ex Utero, 87. For a discussion of the womb in relation to Bakhtin’s theory of the grotesque, see Ruth Ginsburg’s“The Pregnant Text: Bakhtin’s Ur-Chronotope: The Womb.” In Bakhtin: Carnival and Other Subjects: Selected Papers from the Fifth International Bakhtin Conference, University of Manchester, July 1991. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1991. 165-176. 42

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the novel makes a serious point about the ways in which our society allies ‘proper femininity’ with procreation and derides current cultural obsessions with reproduction. When Rita runs a commercial on television advertising her lost womb with the words “Never been pregnant” this phrase continually haunts her, symbolizing the fact that it is not just the loss of the womb that bothers her, but also the fact that she is riddled with guilt because the womb is unused.43 Here, the novel ridicules a society that purports to be ‘post-feminist’ but nevertheless still induces guilt and shame in women who do not have children at the ripe old age of thirty (Rita is thirty one).44 Within the texts, these incidents serve to humorously undercut the importance placed on having a ‘proper’ functioning female body – a body which in order to be normal, culturally viable, and sexually attractive must have a functioning womb. Ex Utero thus satirizes 1990’s American society where supposedly free and liberated women are still reduced to their reproductive parts – parts which come to define and circumscribe their status as subjects. Moreover, the recurring emphasis on shopping malls and television talk shows in the novel serves to symbolize how conceptions of normal femininity are imprecated in and through the spaces of popular culture. As mentioned earlier, Rita is berated by other ‘normal’ women in the shopping mall for losing her womb. Here, the mall is represented as a disciplinary setting utilized to normalize Rita into a ‘proper’ womb holding and child desiring woman. Further, In addition to exploring the normative criteria surrounding the female body and notions of the woman as unruly womb, the novel also explores the commodification of female bodies. For example, when Lucy is at the gynecologist’s office and her “blood spews forth in a rush”, the male doctor is overcome with enthusiasm at the prospect of having an exclusive story to sell to a talk show.45 The fact the doctor is elated with this exclusive story rather than concerned with Lucy’s excessive bleeding symbolizes the marketability of the female body. Like Rita’s womb, which the talk show host Rod Nodderman uses to improve his talk show ratings, reporters, cameraman, and talk show hosts vie for the exclusive on Lucy’s menstrual story. This marketability of female bodies serves as a recurring theme throughout the novel. For example, when Rita loses her womb at the mall, she is offered a gift certificate as compensation – representing that her womb has a monetary value (and also, of course, that any woe of a woman’s can be relieved through shopping!). Further, the rising sales of red high heel 43

Foos, Ex Utero, 17. See Bordo 71-97. 45 Foos, Ex Utero, 87. 44

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shoes after Rita loses her womb serves as a humorous derision of a consumer fetishism that constructs the body as a mere prop to enable commodity consumption. The selling of Rita’s and Lucy’s stories are tellingly linked to the rise in sales of red high heels, showing, in myriad ways, the premise of a recent feminist publication that “So material are women’s bodies to the reproduction of capitalism that they can be sold— or used to sell other commodities or products”.46 Yet, by the end of the novel, the heroine Rita has overcome these notions of femininity – she symbolically gives up wearing shoes altogether and avoids television, telephones, talk shows, and shopping malls. Significantly, once Rita finds her womb she does not reinsert it into her boy but places it on the passenger’s seat of her car as she takes a road trip across the country. Here, Rita is finally living the life she wants and does not have to have “her feet squeezed into a pair of red heels and her hair tied back in a bun.”47 Rather, ironically, she is a whole woman now due to the loss of what tied her identity to a limiting norm – her womb.

Medicine, the Media, and Profit Motives – Dehumanizing the Maternal in Twinship Twinship, Laurie Foos third novel, published in 1999, also critiques the ways reproduction is constructed as a definitive component of female existence. The novel charts the story of Maxi (whose name of course brings to mind ‘maxi-pads’ and is thus in keeping with the authors focus on women as menstruating, womb defined bodies). Maxi, at the behest of her mother, Mini, impregnates her self and subsequently gives birth to a clone, Middle. Mini, Maxi, and Middle - mother, daughter, and granddaughter - the likeness of their names symbolizing the ‘cloning’ of women – serve to represent reproducible femininity wherein women’s only ‘value’ is that of her womb and its fetal output. Mini, the grandmother so desperate to have another child that she pressures her daughter into having one for her, serves to represent the notion that women’s lives are defined by their children, that reproduction is what gives female life purpose. Furthermore, Mini’s control over Maxi serves to illustrate the transference of cultural indictments that posit women as defined in and through motherhood alone. Via the continued implication 46

Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury, eds. ”Introduction”, Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory (New York: Colombia UP) 8. 47 Foos, Ex Utero, 185.

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that Maxi’s life is not complete without a child, Mini indoctrinates her own daughter into the cultural belief system that purports women must have children to give their life meaning. Then, once Maxi is pregnant, Mini writes a script for her labor scene and “even taped Xs on the floor to block the birth scene.”48 These excessive measures exemplify Mini’s attempt to control Maxi’s pregnancy and birth and serve as a metaphor for cultural attempts to control both the female body and its reproductive capacities. Norton, the doctor who delivers the clone Middle, recounts the birth of the clone at a media press conference, noting, “Both specimens are being monitored for vital signs and have undergone extensive testing.”49 Falsely claiming the birth of the clone was his doing, Norton ceaselessly works at his own self-promotion in order to vie for the Nobel Prize in genetics. Vassey, his public relations sidekick, who was the “mastermind behind the selling of Desert Storm,” knows that this clone could mean “more research money than you can shake a stick at” and coaches Norton on the importance of media promotion.50 Here, the novel underscores news media as propaganda that is able to just as readily turn war into a glorified event as it is to commodity female bodies and their fetal output. By representing the medical world and the media as both vying for money, fame, and power, the novel implicitly critiques these trends in contemporary culture in which female bodies are dehumanized into mere baby-making machines for the sake of medical fame and profit. This theme is further explored in relation to Maxi and the control both the medical world and the media have over her body. Once she gives birth to the clone, Maxi is not only sequestered as a prisoner of the hospital, but is hooked up to various machines and cameras. As she notes “My eggs have been captured in freeze-frames at various stages, a videotape playing the inner working of my fallopian tubes day and night.”51 Here, Maxi is related to as if she were a mere egg producing factory, and the consensus is that her eggs should become public property, that production of more clones should override her individual wishes. These facets of the novel explore how reproductive technologies sometimes lead to situations wherein women are no longer treated as subjects but as objectified wombs. Akin to Ex Utero, the novel also represents the ‘messiness’ of the female body and emphasizes the inanity of trying to ‘sanitize’ the

48

Laurie Foos, Twinship (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1999) 3. Foos, Twinship, 40. 50 Foos, Twinship, 38. 51 Foos, Twinship, 63. 49

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processes of reproduction. This is particularly evident in the birth scene, where Maxi narrates the following: ...there was no sense of closure. I tried to press my thighs together to hold myself in, to keep the other parts of me from falling away; and I cried...trying to use my hand to close up the gap between my legs. I cried heavy, thick tears while Mother clapped and the doctor reached in to pull more of me out, as if my body had opened too wide and would never close 52 up again.

Maxi repeatedly refers to the birth as the splitting of her body and makes desperate attempts to make herself feel whole again. Referring to “the emptiness inside” Maxi requests that the doctors put the baby back in, and, failing this, makes a “frantic search for wholeness” by “trying to shove things up between my legs: a pillow, a pair of socks, event the plastic container that held my daily Jell-O.”53 Here, Maxi succumbs to the cultural doctrine of the ‘classic body’ that purports the body is meant to be a closed and complete finished unit, separated off from others and the world.54 But, as the novel contends, the maternal body is in flagrant contradiction to this classic body. Depicting the maternal body as one which ‘opens too wide,’ the novel questions our limiting bodily dictates that idealize ‘disembodied bodies,’ and, rather than idealizing the perfect, plasticized bodies admired in the contemporary world, the novel emphasizes the messy reality of embodiment in ways similar to Ex Utero. Also similar to Ex Utero, the novel questions the turn to technologized reproduction, specifically grappling with issues of cloning and genetic engineering in relation to Maxi’s career of Persian cat breeding. While in her role as cat breeder Maxi was initially trying to produce a ‘cat of the year’ through various inbreeding techniques, her own birth experience leads her to reject her attempts to produce the ‘perfect’ cat. In the text, cat breeding is linked to genetic engineering and, as Dr. Norton does with human genes, Maxi makes a chart with “recessive and dominant genes carefully mapped out, a series of piebald genes crossed to form what would become the perfect bicolor.”55 However, after her experience of giving birth to a clone and witnessing her cat’s deformed litter of kittens, Maxi turns against such practices. The deformed kittens, all born without eyes or noses, serve as symbols of the dangers of a genetic technology 52

Foos, Twinship, 4. Foos, Twinship, 12-13. 54 See Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World. Translated by Helene Iswolsky. (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1984), 29. 55 Foos, Twinship, 239. 53

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aimed at controlling and manipulating natural reproductive processes for fame and profit – a technology that the ‘good’ Dr. Norton is trying to promote. Further, when Dr. Norton tries to persuade Maxi of the benefits of cloning with the argument that it creates wonderful possibilities for women’s liberation, he comically draws attention to the fact that cloning in Maxi’s life has meant just the opposite. For her, giving birth to the clone does not bring liberation but hospital imprisonment, constant media intrusion, and invasive medical procedures. Maxi thus turns soundly against cloning and genetic engineering and voices her approval of a government moratorium on cloning procedures. At the close of the novel, she has given up cat breeding and takes to the open road with her two favorite cats. Like Rita, who at the end of Ex Utero is seen traveling along the highway with her womb lying in the passenger’s seat, Maxi has symbolically separated herself from the cultural norm of ‘woman as womb;’ exemplifying that female identity is not womb dependent and that the body, (be it human or feline) should not be valued for its reproductive capacities alone.

Unwanted Pregnancies, Fetal Parasites, and Shrinking Maternal Rights: The Importance of Reproductive Choice in Geek Love Novelist Katherine Dunn, in her novel Geek Love, published in 1983, also presents us with a female heroine who takes control of her reproductive capacities and uses them as she, not society or her family, sees fit. Saturated with reproduction from start to finish, the novel begins with the story of Al and Lil Binewski’s experimentation with drugs, insecticides, and radioisotopes which Lil ingests in order to reproduce freakish children to performe at the Binewski carnival. These ‘freakish’ children will serve to generate income for the failing family carnival and the novel thus posits reproductive engineering as an ominous activity, an activity linked to generating wealth. In addition, the trajectory of the text also serves to emphasize reproductive issues in relation to domination of the female body. For example, the sub-plot that revolves around the conjoined twins, Iphy and Elly, and their desire to abort their pregnancy, reveals that lack of reproductive choices disavows female subjectivity. Moreover, the fact that the twins’ pregnancy is a result of rape gestures towards the fact that women, in our patriarchal, misogynistic world, are often subject to sexual violence and abuse which results in unplanned pregnancies – pregnancies that, as the novel attests, can literally destroy

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the lives of women. Using this narrative of unwanted pregnancy to explore reproductive issues, the novel emphasizes that women need to control and define their own reproductive lives if gender equality is to become a reality. In the text, the twins desperately want to have an abortion but their brother Arty forcefully prevents them from doing so as he assumes their pregnancy and eventual motherhood will prevent them from continuing with full time carnival work. Defining himself by the big crowds he draws and the money his performances generate at the carnival, Arty is jealous of the twins and sees in their pregnancy a chance to end their popular piano act. He orders that their performance tent be broken down and, tellingly, uses the material from their tent to enlarge his own. Hence, by controlling the body(ies) of his sisters, he takes control of the carnival. This narrative thread of the novel can be read as a scathing metaphor for the ways in which male bodies (represented by Arty) control female bodies (represented by Iphy and Elly). Moreover, via linking Arty’s control of the twin’s reproductive choices to their ability to earn a living, the novel gestures towards the various ‘costs’ of being defined as controllable womb. Furthermore, the fact that Arty does not stop at preventing the twins from having an abortion but also has the carnival surgeon lobotomize Elly represents the varying ways in which women are literally and figuratively forced into a position of being ‘mindless wombs’ rather than thinking, acting subjects. By forcibly lobotomizing Elly, her co-joined twin’s life is also circumscribed; Iphy’s time and energy must be spent caring for and carrying around the helpless, lifeless Elly. More specifically, Elly becomes a bodily parasite as evidenced by the scene in which we witness “the pale Iphy in her painful progress down the row toward the Chute with her swollen belly pulling her forward while she struggles to balance the flabby monster that sprouts from her waist.”56 Critic Rachel Adams suggests that lobotomized Elly and the growing fetus both serve to parasitically disavow Iphy’s subjecthood and call attention to the negation of identity involved in an unwanted pregnancy. She argues that Iphy’s “pathetic attempts to support the senseless torso of her sister call attention tot he parasitic nature of unwanted pregnancy: like the passive and drooling Elly, the fetus is another alien ‘monster’ dependent upon the body of the mother.”57 This suggestion of the unwanted fetus as parasite is 56

Katherine Dunn,. Geek Love (New York: Warner Books, 1990), 305. Rachel Adams, “An American Tail: Freaks, Gender, and the Incorporation of History in Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love,”in Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the 57

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further confirmed in the novel once the baby, Mumpo (tellingly a male), is born. In the text, Mumpo metaphorically represents the shrinkage of mothers’ rights as well as of their bodies. As Olympia observes: Mumpo was eating the twins....They grew frail and bony except for the four breasts that ballooned every three hours in time for Mumpo to wake. He bellowed before he even opened his eyes, roaring until the gap was crammed with raw tit. Then he vacuumed the bag until it draped flat over the protruding ribs of his mothers, and bellowed the next tit until all four milk bags were drained limp. He would sleep for three more hours before beginning again.58

Olympia further notes that, while the twins shrink, “Mumpo grew, spreading around himself in looping, creased pools of pinkness that pulsated with his breathing.”59 Here, the twins bodily subjectivity is metaphorically erased as they become mere milk machines, while the subjecthood of Mumpo grows concurrently with his ever expanding body. This subplot within the novel thus serves to indicate the implications of removing maternal rights. As Adams emphasizes, ‘Elly’s lobotomy and unwanted pregnancy vividly illustrate the ways in which legal intervention in questions of reproduction, motherhood, and fetal rights can deny the subjectivity and bodily integrity of pregnant women.”60 Thus, this thematic exploration of the fetus as dangerous virus or parasite that threatens the mother's health and bodily integrity echoes the trend in contemporary culture in which the growth of fetal rights is accompanied by the simultaneous shrinkage of maternal rights. Additionally, by contrasting the negative experience of Iphy and Elly with the more positive maternal experience of Olympia, the novel emphasizes the importance of maternal choice. Olympia, who consciously chooses to get pregnant via artificial inseminatation her, is in control of her pregnancy from start to finish.61 On the one hand, Elly and Iphy experience a horrific pregnancy which entails loss of bodily integrity and leads to their metaphorical death. On the other, Olympia, who exercises reproductive freedom, revels in and enjoys her pregnancy, seeing it as a wonderful bodily experience rather than as a parasitic annoyance. These Extraordinary Body, edited by Rosemarie Garland Thomson (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 284. 58 Dunn, 346. 59 Dunn, 346. 60 Dunn, 284-5. 61 See Dunn, 331-4.

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parallel pregnancy plots illustrate that maternity is neither inherently enabling or delimiting but is highly contextual and ultimately dependent on the woman’s right to choose. In so doing, the novel does not condemn reproductive technologies but emphasizes the importance of not disavowing the context of the maternal body and maternal choice through the deployment of medical, legal, or scientific intervention

Cannibal Babies and Commodified Female Bodies in Omnivores Omnivores, by Lydia Millet, published in 1996, similarly explores the links between the trope of woman as womb and reproduction as an industry. Like Foos and Dunn, Millet employs a jarring, satiric style that wrenches readers into recognition of the delimiting aspects of conflating the female with the maternal. For example, the first chapter introduces readers to the bizarre capitalist magnet and torture obsessed Frank Kraft, the mannequin like, masturbating obsessed mother Betty, and the naïve, tormented daughter, Estee – all of whom will be focussed on in order to reveal the way in which female identity is circumscribed via gender norms and maternal imperatives. As the narrative progresses, we learn Estee is a prisoner in her own home, forced by her father to carry out human and animal experimentations while also caring for her bed-ridden mother. Here, akin to Foos Twinship, the text emphasizes sinister links between scientific experimentation and the control of female reproductive capacities. Eventually, when Estee escapes into the outside world of modern day Los Angeles, she fares no better. She is forced to marry Pete Magnus, an unethical venture capitalist, and then gives birth to the world’s first cannibal baby. The Los Angeles setting of the novel caustically reflects the horrors of late capitalism, linking reproduction to the more ominous aspects of consumer culture. Los Angeles, “is not a mere city” as theorist Mike Davis contends, but, “on the contrary, it is, and has been since 1888, a commodity; something to be advertised and sold to the people of the United States like automobiles, cigarettes and mouth wash.”62 This notion of Los Angeles as a crystallisation of commodity culture fits in well with the text’s overall insistence that the city, in numerous ways, reflects immoral profit motives, materialism run rampant, and inhabitants which are no longer flesh and blood humans but elasticised, commodified objects 62 Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (London: Verso, 1990) 17.

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forced to (re)produce and consume ad nauseaum. Hence, in this raucous, blackly comic portrayal of American culture, Millet lays bare the connections between profit motives and the control of the female body and its reproductive capacities. In keeping with this theme, Estee, whose name was tellingly inspired by a jar of Estee Lauder cellulite cream, serves as a usable commodity bartered away by her father to a new ‘owner’, a future husband, with thirty million dollars worth of Coca Cola shares. Her intended spouse, Pete, like her father, represents capitalist excess and wastefulness. His condominium is decorated with contraband African Art. The piece de resistance, a shrunken head from a cannibal tribe, symbolises Pete’s own small mindedness as well as his greedy cannibalistic business practices. Estee, like the shrunken head, functions as yet another commodity to benefit Pete, acting as maid, prostitute, and surrogate mother. The fact that consumption is a defining trait of modern existence, one of the novel’s key themes, is duly noted by Estee when she observes: “There is a tariff for being alive.”63 Estee further notes that: Even the air had become commodified, every segment of the earth apportioned off to an entrepreneur. There was no plot of land anywhere not laid claim to by a number, not described by other numbers, kidnapped and held for ransom to anyone whose hapless body, with dimensions and wants far beyond its control, chanced to rest on its surface. The earth was a grid, subdivided by owner.64

Later, the ownership and control of land is linked to Estee’s pregnant body which is similarly represented as a grid for capitalist culture to commodify. Once she is pregnant, doctors survey her body, poking and prodding her like a piece of meat. She feels: “NO ENTRY signs should be posted on her front and back, all over her so that everyone saw them. They were all invasive. They put their hands and faces everywhere. They were prospectors and she was public land.”65 This quote represents her body as a zone to be colonized and controlled by various outsiders. In the text, her body is firstly controlled by her father, then by Pete, then by her son William. This excessive and unending control of Estee’s body is particularly linked to the notion that, as a woman, she is ‘womb only.’ When Estee earlier tried to help Pete understand the ramification of being forced to carry out an unwanted pregnancy, he blithely compared 63

Lydia Millet, Omnivores( London: Virago, 1996.Millet), 103. Millet, 105. 65 Millet, 149. 64

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her pregnancy to his broken arm, to which Estee replied “an arm, it’s external, it’s an appendage….a uterus, it’s internal, it’s what you are.”66 Pete responds that the pregnancy is “just in your head” and a violent attack ensues in which Pete hisses “You want me to get rid of it…I’ll do it right here, and then you can shut up about it.”67 When Estee awakes, she is in the hospital with Pete hovering over her insisting “I need you to forgive me” with a “wall of licensed professionals” at the foot of her bed.68 This continuing emphasis on Estee’s body as terrain to be colonized and controlled by male parents, partners, and doctors is further represented via the representation of her male child as cannibalistic – baby William, like the other men that control Estee’s life and body, metaphorically eats away at her subjectivity. Brought into existence via Pete’s prize possession, the shrunken head, William is a symbolic encapsulation of colonisation, patriarchy, and cannibalism. Just as Pete’s purchase of contraband tribal art is fully commensurate with colonising power in which those bodies deemed as ‘lesser’ are taken over and controlled - are metaphorically shrunk while those in powers feed off of their land and their bodies- so too does William’s body represent the bloated power of patriarchal capitalism. William literally consumes anything and everything: at three days old he eats a toenail off his foot followed by an assortment of flies, cockroaches, slugs, worms, and birds. This grotesque child, seemingly part animal, part monster, serves as a sarcastic embodiment of an overfed, gluttonous culture. William, instead of a beautiful baby born of middle class consumerism, “looked like tenderized beef and smelled like raw sewage.”69 He is used to satirize the rot of 1990’s consumer culture and the stench of middle class ‘values,’ particularly in relation to women’s circumscribed status Thus, the ridicule the novel directs at cultural mores surrounding reproduction does not only focus on unwanted pregnancies and disempowered female subjects, it also ridicules a conservative agenda that touts ‘family values’ while simultaneously curtailing women’s rights and turning reproduction into a politicized, profit driven industry. For example, when Estee enrols in prenatal classes and observes other pregnant women, she is exposed to these so called ‘values’ pushed by real life conservative politicians such as Newt Gingrich and political commentators such as Rush Limbaugh. At class, Pammi, a fellow classmate, glows about the prospect of having five children with her 66

Millet, 146. Millet, 147. 68 Millet, 148-9. 69 Millet, 165. 67

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husband, mentioning that she knows about “Zero Population Growth” but that “it’s mostly for welfare mothers on crack and that.”70 Pammi, in her infinite wisdom, also feels “there should be a test or something, like a minimum annual income for people who want to have kids, or like an IQ test.”71 Here, we see that ‘family values’ are really only concerned with middle class values, and that society wants reproduction of a certain types of people – not of welfare kids who will supposedly ‘leech the system,’ but of middle class kids who will become avid consumers of capitalist culture. These ‘normal’ middle class kids, the novel reveals, are meant to be properly socialized and molded into docile consuming bodies. Pete, representing the normalizing force of society, councils Estee that the wayward William has “gotta learn to be like a normal kid” and suggests “Get ‘im in front of the TV Esty, teach him what’s what.”72 Subsequently referring to the Ninja Turtles and Barney the Dinosaur, characters who have been mass marketed to the point of saturation, Pete is, in effect, telling Estee to teach William to be a consumer. Estee argues that William doesn’t need to be normal but Pete, an avid cultural consumer himself, wins out and William is sent to ‘Debbie Does Day Care’ to be normalized. ‘Debbie Does Day Care’, as the porno-redolant name hints, is not your typical daycare. Rather, the children are treated as robots to be farmed in and out of the prison-like establishment. The assembly line caregivers spout parenting mantras, telling the parents “Remember the three S’s for productive parenting: support, straight talk, and swift punishment. It is the only way they learn.”73 William does not take to normalization easily though, and his bad behaviour causes the caregivers to keep soliciting checks from Estee – a symbol that she can buy normalcy for her child. Attired in goalie masks, combat boots, and shin guards, the caregivers attempt to indoctrinate troubled toddlers into societal normality. The tots have vegan lunches and play “interactive psychological support games”, the favorite being “I’m Normal, You’re Normal: A Game of Discovery.”74 Here, the novel satirizes the cultural saturation of pop-psychology and other such doctrines which define normality in very limited ways. However, normalization doesn’t work for little William and he escapes the daycare, taking all the other children with him and leaving the Caregivers behind in a zombie state. As a symbol of consumer culture spinning out of control, William cannot be fenced in by societal mores but, like a 70

Millet, 137. Millet, 137. 72 Millet, 174. 73 Millet, 182. 74 Millet, 181. 71

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capitalist monster, consumes and destroys everything in his path. At the end of the novel, Estee locks Pete and William in a room together with Will staring at Pete “poised to spring” and notes that “William knew his enemy. He had always known.”75 Estee feels that William will win the battle to come, that he will “waddle toward his father with hunger glinting in his eyes.”76 Thus, the monstrous offspring of consumer and commodity (of Pete and the shrunken head) will devour his creator – symbolizing the ceaseless chain between consumer culture and bodies as products to be consumed. In contrast to these representations of consuming male bodies, female bodies are represented as consumable -- Estee’s body is metaphorically devoured by her father, her husband, and eventually her son. While Estee never wanted to marry Pete let alone have children with him, she is represented as having no choice or control over her own body. Significantly, this lack of choice is presented as part of the patriarchal, capitalist world she inhabits. While she noted at the start of her marriage her desire to find a job and support herself, Pete scoffed, convincing her that her lack of experience doomrd her to wait on him and rely on his “generous allowance.”77 Once she is pregnant, the parenting classes she takes, tellingly entitled “Prenatal Lessons in Happy Childrearing,” further educate her about her prescribed role. As the message of these classes reveal, women’s ‘duty’ is to produce children and rear them to emulate the norms of consumer capitalist culture. Moreover, during the anonymous question time, Estee is trained to think that her children are always to come first. When the question “Your child and the president of the United States are trapped in a burning building. Which one do you save” arises, Estee learns that in such a situations, mothers should think of their children first, that “your child should always be your first concern.”78 Thus, over the course of the novel, Estee is always at the beck and call of her male controllers. Yet, at the end of the narrative, she drives away from Pete and William knowing that William will find her because, like any good capitalist, “He was a survivalist and a hunter.” 79 Until then, Estee muses, she will bask in “the commonplace illusion that she was free.”80 This realisation – that she is, in fact, not free – is the same realisation the readers of Omnivores are encouraged to confront. In this surreal fable, 75

Millet, 200-1. Millet, 201. 77 Millet, 135. 78 Millet, 138. 79 Millet, 202. 80 Millet, 202. 76

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Millet thus holds up a satirical mirror on the contemporary world and women’s circumscribed place within it – an image which is particularly critical of the trope of woman as womb and the accompanying control of female bodies.

‘No Babies, No Future’: Reproducing Empire in Ark Baby Ark Baby, by Liz Jensen, also explores the commodification of the maternal body. The novel, published in 1998 and set in the future 2005, presents us with a national fertility crisis in Britain. Since the apopylyptic deluge of rain on New Year’s Eve 1999, there has been no natural conception. After five years of sterility, the nation is suffering from “post-fin-de-siecle malaise” and a mournful acknowledgement of impending extinction that is captured via the slogan “No babies, no future.”81 As the narrator notes, “The tourist industry collapsed completely, and overnight, we became a third-world leper colony. Europe poured millions of Euros into fertility research, but was desperate to get shot of us.”82 Here, the production of babies is linked to economic growth and national stability. Without fertility, the novel contends, there is no commercial future for Britain. This leads Internet news pages to advertise: “Five million Euros for the first British pregnancy.”83 This, in turn, creates an inundation of falsely reported pregnancies from women anxious to cash in on the reward. The news coverage visually presents these pregnancies on a map of Britain with “Concentric circles... emanating from Glasgow, where the first pregnancy had been reported.”84 Here, the map of Britain becomes a virtual pregnant body, swelling with fetal citizens. Excited onlookers of this ‘pregnancy map’ interpret it as a sign of Britain’s future while, at a local pub, the customers begin to “feel quite patriotic” and start to sing “Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the waves.”85 Here, future fetal output is thematically linked to Britain’s colonial past and the mindset that equated reproduction to empire producing. Like theorist Lauren Berlant, who argues that the fetus has become the new symbol of perfect citizenship, this aspect of the novel explores how fertility and pregnancy is conflated with both the commercial output of a country and with ongoing nationalism/patriotism. Thus, the ultimate patriotic act within Ark Baby is to conceive and (pro)create a future Britain. 81

Liz Jensen, Ark Baby, (London: Bloomsbury, 1998), 8. Jensen, Ark Baby, 43. 83 Jensen, Ark Baby, 110. 84 Jensen, Ark Baby, 230. 85 Jensen, Ark Baby, 231. 82

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Significantly, the novel attributes the national fertility crisis to women as male sperm is tellingly not affected, only female eggs. Britain is described as “an egg-killing zone. A nation of ovarian doom. There was nothing wrong with British sperm” and thus men leave the country in droves in search of healthy wombs, causing a “Sperm Drain.”86 Through this humorous exploration of “ovarian doom,” the novel examines the current cultural logic that places women as the reproductive sex. Problems with fertility, conception, and with fetal abnormality are invariably linked with the female body while the role men play in reproductive issues is ignored. As critic Anne Balsamo notes, while women are increasingly surveyed and held culpable for unhealthy babies in the contemporary world, the same is not true for men.87 Referring to the increasing surveillance of maternal bodies and the tendency to lay blame on pregnant women, she points out that men’s drug use, alcohol intake and/or work in chemical factories or with toxic substances is not considered detrimental to male reproduction. Similarly, Susan Bordo contends that while women are supposed to undertake “extraordinary levels of vigilance” to protect the ‘fetal environment’, the activities of husband’s and father’s is put under erasure. But, as Bordo insists, “Fathers’ drug habits, smoking, alcoholism, reckless driving and psychological and physical treatment of pregnant wives are part of the fetus’s ‘environment’, too.”88 Within the novel, this placement of women as the sex ultimately responsible for healthy reproduction receives uproarious treatment. In a jesting manner, Jensen literally places the future of a healthy Britain within the female womb and, in so doing, mocks the cultural tendencies to do just this – to ignore the potential for undoubtedly detrimental male contributions (or lack thereof) and place all blame on the female body.

Women as Reproducing Machines in Egg Dancing In similar ways, Jensen’s earlier novel, Egg Dancing, published in 1995, also explores the tendency to define the female body as inadequate. The novel charts the story of Hazel, whose husband, Dr. Gregory Stevenson, is experimenting with the drug “Genetic Choice” in hopes of being able to reproduce perfect babies. However, unbeknownst to Hazel, Gregory has been using her body as a ‘test womb’ for his experiments. Here, the novel explores reproductive technology in relation to women as 86

Jensen, Ark Baby, 43. For a further discussion of this issue, see Balsamo, Technologies, 110. 88 Jensen, Ark Baby, 83. 87

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womb, contending that the medicalization of the maternal body leads to a dehumanization of women into mere fetus receptacles. When Hazel discovers that her husband has been using her as a test case for his drug Genetic Choice, she also figures out that her son Billy, as well as her three miscarriages, were a result of Gregory’s unauthorized experimentation on her body. While observing that Gregory’s notes are “written in the impersonal, ponderous language of science”, she comes across the following text: “The mother was administered the drug – without her knowledge – over a period of thirty-nine months. During this time she experienced three mid-term miscarriages and an unknown number of early ‘spontaneous’ abortions (all, presumably, of low-grade fetuses)”89 As it dawns on her that she is ‘the mother,’ Hazel is astonished by the fact that her husband’s medical notes contain no indication of emotion, that her various miscarriages are referred to as “natural fallout” and “wastage statistics.”90 This dehumanization of her body is paralleled by the story she narrates about Gregory fixing her sewing machine. Recalling when the machine broke and Gregory took it to pieces, fixed it, and put it back together and “had a look of joy more profound than on our wedding day,” Hazel assumes the delight Gregory takes in fixing machines must be similar to the joy he feels as he “fixes” her body to be able to produce “a high grade fetus.”91 Referring to the scientific desire to “know how things work” and the “need to master a thing, to get at its insides and see how it works and then modify it so that maybe it works better. Maybe perfectly. A sewing machine, a body, a mind,” Hazel equates her own body to the sewing machine. Further, the language Gregory uses in his ‘experimentation’ associates her body with a utilitarian machine and her reproductive capacities with industrial output: “Vagaries of quality evaluation”, “gene selection processes” and “clone perfecting indexes” serve as telling euphemisms wherein science and medicine are allied with the machination of bodies while reproductive technologies are allied with manufacturing and industry.92 This manufacturing theme is further explored in the novel through the presentation of Hazel as a mere fetal incubator who will serve as a quasiproduction line for Gregory’s envisioned perfect babies. Gregory’s work with genetic choice involves monitoring Hazel’s body and, like a machine being tested for quality control, she must record all her bodily inputs and outputs: 89

Jensen, Egg Dancing, (London: Bloomsbury, 1995), 66. Jensen, Egg Dancing, 67. 91 Jensen, Egg Dancing, 66. 92 Jensen, Egg Dancing, 63. 90

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Here, Hazel quite literally becomes a walking womb. The illustration on the front cover of the novel aptly demonstrates this status– it shows a picture of an egg with legs – like the women in Ark Baby or the handmaids in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Hazel is valued for ovarian output alone.94 Egg Dancing thus serves as a satirical indictment of the more ominous aims of reproductive technology. It explores contemporary motherhood as denying female subjectivity through, on the one hand, the disavowal of maternal bodily rights, and on the other, the contention that mother’s do not matter. The negation of female subjectivity that occurs when the female subject becomes a mother is aptly portrayed through Hazel’s character, who refers to “that subspecies of womanhood known as the mum, an underclass that forms the great marshmallow cushion on which other lives, more interesting and worthy than ours, are sustained and serviced.”95 As such, the novel serves as a valuable framework with which to read the contemporary application and growth of reproductive technology and how this technology affects embodied female subjectivity. In conclusion, as this burgeoning fictional genre, perhaps best named ‘womb fiction,’ reveals, reproductive technology and various other reproductive trends beg critical assessment. By rallying against the conflation of the female with the maternal, by positing that female rights must not be subsumed by fetal rights, and by interrogating the commodification of reproduction, this body of fiction prompts readers to assess the delimiting ramifications of current reproductive practices and ideologies. Through a utilization of the comic, the horrific, and the corporeal, these texts question the commodification of reproduction and the objectification of women into mere wombs. Informed by advanced capitalism and the trends towards global corporatization, these texts draw parallels between the dangers of global capitalism and the dangers of 93

Jensen, Egg Dancing, 17. For an excellent analysis of The Handmaid’s Tale in relation to reproductive technology and maternal embodiment see Balsamo, Technologies, 83-89. 95 Jensen, Egg Dancing, 125. 94

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capitalizing the body, particularly the reproductive body. Further, these texts exemplify that reproduction is a crucial component in the construction of gender. While reproductive technologies would seem to offer the possibility of a more fluid concept of gender and parenting, in actuality, as these novels attests, reproductive technologies tend to be reinscribe women as womb and limit the female body to its maternal functioning. In so doing, they form an important body of contemporary women’s literature that prompts readers to re-examine maternity, reproductive rights, and the trope of woman as womb. This literary resistance to woman as womb proffers positive possibilities for revamped notions of the maternal, the feminine, and the corporeal. While Ex Utero explores the ‘womb fever’ that grips our contemporary moment, texts such as Omnivores and Egg Dancing critique the construction of the fetus as a ‘super-person’ with more rights and embodied subjectivity than already existing bodies. As this corpus of fiction contends, reproductive technologies are a crucial component of contemporary culture that profoundly shape ideas and practices related to gender, race, class, embodiment, and subjectivity. As the texts warn, if we ignore reproductive policies and practices we may end up (re)producing an extremely unjust world.

Bibliography Adams, Rachel. “An American Tail: Freaks, Gender, and the Incorporation of History in Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love.” In Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, edited by Rosemarie Garland Thomson. New York: New York University Press, 1996. 277-90. Balsamo, Anne. “Forms of Technological Embodiment: Reading the Body in Contemporary Culture.” In Cyberspace, Cyberbodies, Cyberpunk, edited by Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows. London: Sage, 1995. —. Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1984. Berlant, Lauren. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Wieght: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkely: University of California Press, 1993.

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Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Conboy, Katie,Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury, eds. ”Introduction.” In Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. New York: Colombia University Press, 1997. Davis, Mike. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. London: Verso, 1990. Douglas, Susan and Meredith Michaels. The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How it Has Undermined Women. New York: The Free Press, 2004. Dunn, Katherine. Geek Love. New York: Warner Books, 1990. Firestone, Shulamith. The Dialectic of Sex. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1970. Foos, Laurie. Ex Utero. London: Review, 1997. —. Twinship. New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1999. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1979. Ginsburg, Ruth. “The Pregnant Text: Bakhtin’s Ur-Chronotope: The Womb.” In Bakhtin: Carnival and Other Subjects: Selected Papers from the Fifth International Bakhtin Conference, University of Manchester, July 1991. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1991. 165-176. Jensen, Liz. Egg Dancing London: Bloomsbury, 1995. —. Ark Baby. London: Bloomsbury, 1998. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. Millet, Lydia. Omnivores. London: Virago, 1996.Millet, 103. Newbrough, Celeste. “Bah, Bah Black Sheep: Cloning, Reproductive Rights and the Gender Revolution.” International Archives of the Second Wave of Feminism, Feb. 29, 1997, http://home.att.net/~celesten/clone.html (12 December 2006).

CONTRIBUTORS

Diya Abdo: Amman, Jordan Nina Bannett: City University of New York, New York City College of Technology Susan Cruea: Bowling Green State University Jennifer Dunn: Balliol College, Oxford University Robin Hammerman: Stevens Institute of Technology Becky Wingard Lewis: University of South Carolina Julia Lisella: Regis College Susan Toth Lord: Kent State University Alison Perry: University of Texas at Austin Alayne Peterson: University of Wisconsin Fond du Lac Christine Poulson: University of Sheffield Jennifer Shaddock: University of Wisconsin Eau-Claire Susan Soroka: Drew University Zoe Trodd: Harvard University Natalie Wilson: California State University