Writing at the Crossroads: Sophia Hawthorne's Civil War Letters to Annie Fields

Abstract

If civil war was, as Shelby Foote suggested ..., crossroads of our being, how did imagine crossroads? (6) Lyde Cullen Sizer, The political Work of Northern Women Writers and War, 1850-1872. Sophia Peabody Hawthorne met Annie Adams Fields for first time in London in June of 1859. Fields was young, beautiful new bride of powerful editor and publisher James T. Fields. The acquitance between two was renewed one year later as Hawthornes and Fieldses traveled together across Atlantic their homeland. According Rita K. Gollin, Annie later remembered Sophia on this trip as 'second Scheherezade,' a 'romancer in conversation [who] filled evening hours by weaving of her fancies' (92). Those magic webs took epistolary form once two arrived in America, settling into their lives--Sophia in Concord, Annie in Boston--and into intimate friendship spanned decade. (1) The friendship, and correspondence, dissolved in late 1860s amid financial disputes between then-widowed Sophia and Annie's husband, James, concerning royalties from Nathaniel's books. Until time, though, Fields was for Hawthorne that ... sacred sort of nature which provokes my entire confidence. (2) She wrote Annie of matters large and small, of those strinkingly at center of her life, such as illness and death of her husband, and of those more exterior her but perhaps equally as formative, such as her nation's War. For this extraordinary epistolary friendship took place during equally extraordinary time--the US War period--and this historical backdrop provides a rich context within which examine Hawthorne's correspondence with Fields, specifically her treatment of gender. Housed in Boston Public Library, Hawthorne's unpublished letters Fields have been studied by scholars in past, most often for what they could reveal about their author's famous husband, last years of his life, and his wife's editing of his journals after his death. (3) More recently, Gollin surveyed letters in her 2002 biography of Annie Fields. And, in a 2006 essay, I explored Hawthone's writing of war in letters, arguing she thereby contributes and participates in what Lyde Cullen Sizer calls an alternative history and narrative of [Civil W]ar--a story told by about women's experience of great conflict (n). (4) In present essay, I push this analysis further, focusing not solely on Hawthorne's representation of war, but also on her writing of gender within wartime, when rebellion and revolution against state and its sociopolitical constructs were enacted daily. For, as scholars have noted, war in general, and perhaps civil war in particular, tends destabilize and disorder gender roles and identities. Christa Hammerle notes gender inversions in her fascinating examination of World War I correspondence, while Margaret R. Higonnet, in Civil Wars and Sexual Territories, argues for specific power of civil wars to transform women's expectations (80). In their studies of writers and US War, Elizabeth Young and Lyde Cullen Sizer concur. As Young notes, this concentrated moment of social flux ... catalyzed and authorized multiple modes of civil disobedience for women (14); fuller account of conflict sees it not only as a war fought by as well as men, but also and more fundamentally as a war over meaning of gender itself (2). Sizer writes cogently the war was ... a cultural as well as a military battleground [, as w] omen fought over limits their sphere, a sphere already within war's reach (84). Sophia Hawthorne entered into this cultural warfare in her letters Fields, where instances of civil disobedience and rebellion abound. Sometimes gendering herself male, at other times writing herself into male roles, and, at still others conducting open warfare with male authority, Hawthorne simultaneously conceives and creates in correspondence alternative written selves and a world of extended influence, possibility, and power for women. …