Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Serial Novels by Dale M. Bauer

Abstract

Reviewed by: Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Serial Novels by Dale M. Bauer Melissa Gniadek Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Serial Novels. By Dale M. Bauer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. xviii + 172 pp. $99.99 hardcover/$80.00 e-book. Scholars of nineteenth-century literature are accustomed to thinking about seriality as an important aspect of print culture and publishing. We recognize that individual titles often appeared in installments and that this had an impact on the pace and narrative structure of texts. In Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Serial Novels, Dale M. Bauer sets out to focus on the careers of serial novelists rather than individual texts. Reading across the work of authors who [End Page 167] were popular and prolific, writing twenty-six, thirty-nine, fifty, or more novels over their long careers, Bauer compellingly recuperates the very repetition that has marked this body of work as simple or predictable. The serial novelists that Bauer reads often used the same plot points, character types, and even some of the same language across their work, but, Bauer argues, this is not an indication of simplicity or something to be discounted. Repetition across an author’s career is not an aesthetic flaw but rather how these authors secured a reader-ship and grappled with concerns facing the nation, and women in particular, by urging a sense of shared feeling. Repetition “enables serial novelists to recur to the ongoing vulnerabilities of women in their expansive narratives,” Bauer writes (1). And it creates a sense of urgency as it repeatedly depicts female pain and suffering in US culture. Serial novels, Bauer writes, “help readers interpret American experiences of pain and recovery” through their constant return to particular dramatic plots (94). E. D. E. N. Southworth exemplifies the type of author subjected to the reading practices that Bauer identifies and revises, and she is the subject of the first chapter. Many read, teach, and write about Southworth’s novel The Hidden Hand, focusing on its entertaining and subversive cross-dressing plot without considering Southworth’s other work. Reading across Southworth’s serialized novels and acknowledging the serial nature of her career, Bauer traces patterns of “moral insanity” through her plots. Southworth “returns, again and again, to the joys of responsibilities, the temporary pain of mania and insanity, and the necessary juggling of identity to fix the gap between private desire and public duty,” Bauer writes (31). She “favored repetitions of various moral insanities because they enabled her to experiment with the narrative means for overcoming them” (31). Recognizing the patterns that characterize an author’s career as Bauer does can provide new frameworks for reading the entire body of work of an author like Southworth, but it can also lead us to revisit a now-well-known novel like The Hidden Hand and to approach it in new ways with these patterns in mind. In chapters devoted to the less-well-known serial authors Ann Stephens, Mary Jane Holmes, and Laura Jean Libbey, Bauer similarly reveals how recurrent plots of family dramas, secret marriages and adoptions, brain fevers and brain surgeries, prisons, and work register what US culture, and women in particular, “feared and felt” across the decades when these authors were active (133). According to Bauer, “The accumulation of novels within these writers’ careers . . . produces a broader encounter with US culture than any single serial novel reveals, though each serial novel contributes its version to the whole of a writer’s array of novels” (133). Bauer goes even further than acknowledging the collective cultural work of these texts as they constantly return to traumas [End Page 168] even as they envision new possibilities, however. She also considers how the recursive serial structures of these authors’ careers keep readers coming back for more in a way that is about financial success for the authors (as Bauer notes, “repetition paid”), as well as the promise of transformation and change for readers (1). Individual serial installments or individual novels offer the pleasures of narrative closure as tensions are resolved, identities are revealed, families are reunited, or women are absorbed back into domestic certainty. But these resolutions are only temporary. An installment or novel concludes...