Constance Fenimore Woolson: The Grief of Artistry (review)

Abstract

288 The Henry James Review the way changing times and social institutions elicited various aspects of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Brodhead underplays the psychological differences diat also influenced what successors took from Hawthorne. In addition to what the changing canon served up to MelviUe, James, or Faulkner as appropriate models, we want to know what level of their personalities responded to what level of Nathaniel Hawthorne's personality. Brodhead provides some very fine readings of Hawthorne's works, often extending critical commonplaces into new intensity and enlightening new applications. For example, while showing Hilda's moral and erotic prudery to be constructive of, and a reflection on, the separation of the literary arts from popular culture, Brodhead demonstrates that The Marble Faun was a victim of the same process, devitalized by this very partitioning off of the emotional from the cultural life. Although this study of Hawthorne's influence lingers on James for four chapters, it manages to reach the important discipleship of Faulkner. It briefly mentions Hawthorne's importance to Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welly, and Flannery O'Connor, but not to Edith Wharton, who was rather inclined to minimize her greatest American precursor. This monumental study of literary influence studiously avoids discussion of its own precursors, the work of Jane Tompkins and Harold Bloom, for example, whose names are nowhere to be seen. Their presence can be inferred, however, from references to canon reform and canon bashing, which, we are told, consigns "old pasts to the same oblivion it rescues new ones from." The School of Hawthorne steers clear of polemical positions lest Brodhead's own theory of tradition construction resemble the "standard products of cheap conspiracy tiieories (the past as self-serving tool of a little band of power-hungry men), or else of die facile form of modern ahistoricism (history is a fiction too—like everything else)." Instead, this lucid and superbly written book (except for die irritating stylistic tic of using üie verb "gets" to mean "is" or "becomes") accepts the fact of cultural mediation as inevitable in tradition formation and even, in üie long run, as instrumental in üie construction of usable pasts. Gloria C. Erlich Princeton, N. J. Cheryl B. Torsney. Constance Fenimore Woolson: The Grief of Artistry. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1989. 177 pp. $25.00. Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840-1894) was the only contemporary American writer, besides William Dean Howells, thai Henry James said he cared lo read in die mid1880s . Yet she, as Cheryl B. Torsney puts it, "appears in the literary histories like Mary Bartram, facing the fireplace wilh her back to us" (2). Indeed, supposed by many critics to be Üie Mary Bartram in James's life, Woolson is, Torsney observes, primarily remembered as the woman James could not love. Torsney notes that she is also represented as the lesser writer who supplied the master with germs for his fiction; James takes the title "The Figure in the Carpet," for example, from a phrase that appears in Woolson's notebooks that James read after her death. Constance Fenimore Woolson: The Grief of Artistry, the first full-length study devoted to her in more than twenty-five years, does a great deal to establish Woolson's literary importance. Torsney's perceptive exploration of how Woolson lived as well as wrote about die life of a nineteenth-century woman artist enables us to see why James would have been drawn to her not only as a friend, but also as an American writer preoccupied with similar themes. In the opening chapters, Torsney probes the reasons why the literary reputation of James's "excellent friend Fenimore," as he styled his well-known countrywoman, should have been eclipsed to the point that only Jamesian scholars are likely to recognize Book Reviews 289 her name, thanks to Leon Edel's monumental biography. Born too late for Üie pre-Civil War triumph of women's domestic fiction and too early for üie advent of the New Woman's fiction, Woolson, Torsney argues, belongs to a "lost generation" of women writers. According to Torsney, women of this transitional generation have been overlooked because they had lost confidence in domesticity but had not yet found die means...