A Purchase on Goodness: Fanny Fern, Ruth Hall , and Fraught Individualism

Abstract

Subjectivity, as the innermost core of the private, was always already oriented to an audience. --Jurgen Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere Scholarly assessment of Fanny Fern has in many ways paralleled the social reception of her most popular heroine, Hall. Both are portrayed as initially plagued by an oppressive, limiting, and condescending patriarchal community. They are then critically maligned and shunned when they attempt to throw off the shackles of patriarchy in order to write and earn money as independent women. In the end, they achieve a kind of miraculous triumph in that their writings--precisely for the way they eschew convention and voice the wrongs of the oppressed--become hugely successful, earning their authors riches, fame, and a delicious revenge over the corrupt society that had previously oppressed them. Fern's triumph (and the triumph of her heroine, Ruth) lies in her ability to defy and finally to transcend the stultifying codes for true that subjected women to the silence, oppression, and dependency of the patriarchal home. (1) Hall is, as critics have noted, a revolutionary novel precisely for the way it employs the conventions of sentimental literature only to reveal them as, at least in part, culturally bankrupt. In place of sentiment, Fern champions the free market as a legitimate source for women's serf-fulfillment, appropriating public labor and economic acquisitiveness as acceptable, even laudable, for American women. Fern was herself a remarkably efficient and successful exemplar for such an ethic. Seventy thousand copies of her first book, Fern Leaves from Fanny's Portfolio (1853), sold in America within a year of its publication, and another twenty nine thousand copies sold in England, making Fern Leaves one of America's first best-sellers. Hall (1855), Fern's second book, sold equally well. Her popularity continued to rise (she was compared to Stowe and Dickens), and by 1855 she was making the unheard-of sum of one hundred dollars per article for Robert Bonner's weekly newspaper, the New York Ledger, a paper that benefited tremendously from its affiliation with Fern. Hall gave rise to associated products like a Ruth Hall bonnet, in elegant black gauze, a musical score called The Hall Schottische, and a popular song called Little Daisy about Ruth's daughter who dies early in the novel. (2) Fern's divided identity--on the one hand she is portrayed as subversive, unconventional, and maligned by her contemporaries, on the other her overwhelming popularity opens up entire vistas of agency and representation for those on whose behalf she ostensibly writes--reveals much about both the reformist ideals that drive sentimental and the American marketplace in the mid-nineteenth century. (3) persona that drives Fern's (and, in Fern's novel, Ruth's) popularity in the market and her controversial status in the media continually fluctuates between a beleaguered, unfairly criticized sense of authenticity, and an overwhelming popularity that results from the discovery and acknowledgment of that same authenticity. This fantasy of being recognized for a previously unacknowledged or oppressed sense of personal value is consistent with the traditional plot line of what Nina Baym refers to as fiction in the mid-nineteenth century. (4) Hall, much like other popular woman's of the day, connects her heroine's true explicitly to her prowess as a consumer. (5) Fern's novel imbues this formula with particular resonance and urgency, for her heroine's goodness, authenticity, and essential womanhood are repeatedly threatened, and in order to stave off those threats she must continually improvise new fashions and innovative forms of self-expression in order to keep her essential self from becoming overwhelmed by the jealous masses. popularity of Fern's novel owes a great deal to the way it encourages readers to identify with and even emulate Ruth's productively fashionable energy. …