Ghosts of Domesticities Past

Abstract

Ghosts of Domesticities Past Reviewed by Nicole Tonkovich Francesca Sawaya. Modern Women, Modern Work: Domesticity, Professionalism, and American Writing, 1890–1950. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. 191pp. ISBN 0-8122-3743-9 (cl). Beth Sutton-Ramspeck. Raising the Dust: The Literary Housekeeping of Mary Ward, Sarah Grand, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004. 261 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8214-1587-5 (pb). Judith E. Walsh. Domesticity in Colonial India: What Women Learned When Men Gave Them Advice. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004. 222 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-7425-2937-1 (pb). Signe O. Wegener. James Fenimore Cooper versus the Cult of Domesticity: Progressive Themes of Femininity and Family in the Novels. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2005. 191 pp. ISBN 0-7864-2128-2 (pb). Barbara A. White. The Beecher Sisters. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. xiii + 399 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-300-09927-4 (cl). When Barbara Welter published her essay "The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860" nearly forty years ago, she could not have realized the staying power of her formulaic mantra of "four cardinal virtues—piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity." 1 Two other paradigms, Jane Tompkins's notion of the "cultural work of American fiction," 2 and the trope of separate spheres, first concocted by Alexis de Tocqueville and later adopted by second-wave feminist historians, have exercised a similar power. This trio of scholarly methodologies has guided several decades of feminist work. Modifications, corrections, and direct challenges have usefully superseded, corrected, or modified these models: Laura McCall's careful content analysis of Godey's Lady's Book, one of Welter's sources, showed that "the women in Godey's fiction were not passive, purity did not connote asexuality, piety was understated, and home was not the only sphere to which women aspired." Additionally, McCall listed more than a dozen books that had challenged Welter's formulation. 3 Linda Kerber's "Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman's Place" showed how the paradigm of non-intersecting gendered worlds spoke more precisely of the concerns of [End Page 118] second-wave feminism than it described a nineteenth-century social formation. 4 Finally, an assertively titled issue of American Literature declared in 1998 "No More Separate Spheres!" 5 One might expect that these aging models would have been gracefully and respectfully interred, yet they seem even now to haunt much feminist work, especially when they are brought to bear on scholarly investigations of past practices of domesticity, where they are still used—at times overtly, but more frequently without citation and in combination with more recent paradigms of postcolonial, comparative, and global approaches. Five recent monographs of varying length and complexity seek to document the past effects of domesticity. Two of these books trace the importance of domestic discourse in literary history, focusing on how a text's perceived association with "the domestic" determines its place in literary history. Signe O. Wegener's James Fenimore Cooper versus the Cult of Domesticity surveys how one of America's first writers, commonly considered to be a paradigm of masculinity, engaged domestic discourse in his novels, and Francesca Sawaya's Modern Women, Modern Work presents a fascinating study of how domesticity served as a touchstone against which literary modernism constructed itself. A third book, Barbara A. White's The Beecher Sisters, turns from text to author, examining how biography and text interact in the domestic pronouncements written by members of the Beecher family, women who are, for contemporary scholars, nearly synonymous with nineteenth-century domestic theory and practice. Two other books—Beth Sutton-Ramspeck's Raising the Dust and Judith E. Walsh's Domesticity in Colonial India—use a comparative global approach to investigate prescriptive domesticity's designs upon the world of family and work. Each book is valuable in its own way to a segment of the scholarly population interested in domestic history and literature, yet each of these books wrestles, more or less successfully, with a problem that remains largely...