In Search of a Moral Erotic Standard: Female Subjectivity and Eros in Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s Rough-Hewn and The Brimming Cup

Abstract

In this article I will discuss some of the ways in which erotic desire manifests itself in Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s literary universe. My study will focus on Rough-Hewn (1922) and T he Brimming Cup (1921). These novels are particularly interesting because of the tension they display regarding the morality of erotic life. While it seems as if the implied author/narrator tends to favor a devaluation of erotic desire, the ‘‘lived’’ world of the characters in these novels seems to challenge this devaluation. T he Brimming Cup was written and published before Rough-Hewn as the later novel is a prequel to the former. It is thus possible to read RoughHewn not only as an explanatory framework for the earlier novel, but also as an attempt to thematically appropriate T he Brimming Cup. By adding new information that precedes the first novel, it seems as if Canfield Fisher tried to settle some unresolved anxiety. Here, I am not interested in exploring Canfield Fisher’s intentions or anxieties. However, I will try to elucidate a tension between an overt thematic tendency to interpret sexual desire as meaning/non-meaning and a covert much less pervasive ‘‘tone’’ or ‘‘voice’’ in the texts in which erotic desire is expressed as something altogether disconnected from conceptualized meaning. In both novels, this covert tone appears in an unthematized way. Unlike some puritanical reservations against erotic desire that Canfield Fisher might have had, the distaste for sex that we find expressed in her fiction is not founded on the belief that sexuality should mainly be justified by its ultimate aim: to procreate. Marise, the female central character in both Rough-Hewn and T he Brimming Cup, is rather disgusted by the notion that sexual desire has no other meaning than that of procreation. Marise discards erotic life as non-spiritual and therefore as lacking in depth and meaning. In Rough-Hewn, we find that Marise’s and Neale’s relationship is built on the basis of a silent and implicit agreement that he will not express overt sexual desire for her. We learn that Marise is relieved that Neale silently promises to hold back ‘‘the flame of his passion’’ (RH, 492). To Neale, Marise seems so ‘‘weak’’ and ‘‘defenseless’’