Lydia Sigourney Research Articles

Lydia Sigourney's Sailors and the Limits of Sentiment

Lydia Sigourney’s Sailors and the Limits of Sentiment Bryan Sinche [Erratum] Lydia Sigourney occupies a curious position in American literary history. Extraordinarily prolific and financially successful though she was, her canon is full of works that, as one reviewer argued in 1856, seem to have nothing in them that is either “intense, or odd, or paradoxical,” that have “no salient points whatsoever” (“Critical Notices” 576). Indeed, the fact that her work was widely thought to be lovely and affecting without being “intense” or “odd” is what made her so very popular throughout her lengthy career. At the same time, the utter conventionality of her work and her relentless focus on the hearth, heart, and home has led many critics (then and now) to describe her as a moralizing versifier, a second-rate poet whose inattention to antebellum political issues was typical of the worst sort of women’s writing.1 Since Ann Douglas excoriated Sigourney and her peers in The Feminization of American Culture, revisionary analyses by Jane Tompkins, Nina Baym, and Glenn Hendler, among others, have shown how sentimental writing enabled authors to respond to contemporaneous social and political issues. Alongside these far-reaching reevaluations of sentimentalism itself, a number of scholars have reconsidered Sigourney’s contributions to American literary history. While these nuanced and fair-minded reexaminations of “The Sweet Singer of Hartford” and her work have changed the way modern readers view the poet, few critics have argued—as I do in this essay—that we should reconsider her place in the pantheon of writers deeply committed to both a sentimental worldview and a sentimental poetics. Most recent work on Sigourney’s poetry implicitly directs readers to reconsider the power of her sentimental verse rather than to focus on her motivations or commitments.2 For example, Mary Louise Kete argues that many of the poems “[deploy] sentimentality as an agent of homogenization” that provides [End Page 62] a foundation for “the imaginative work of national definition” (119, 113). Read this way, Sigourney’s work reveals what Joanne Dobson calls a “desire for bonding . . . and . . . affiliation on the plane of emotion,” a desire for an affective union that would mirror the political union of the United States (267). Writing in a similar vein, Eliza Richards argues that the poetry serves a “republican project,” since the interiority that is the hallmark of her elegiac verse is purposely generic rather than particular and that such generic sentiments work to “[convert] private suffering into communal bonds” (67–68). Kerry C. Larson also highlights the community-building power of sentiment, claiming that Sigourney (much like Whitman) used poetry to reflect the feelings of the democratic mass. Larson insists that the poet’s elegies provide a “common literary idiom” that “cut[s] across lines of gender, class, race, and region” (85). That “literary idiom” idealizes certain identities (the mother), locales (the home), and attitudes (non-doctrinal Christianity) that might cement an affective union among readers. These astute critiques, which move this nineteenth-century author out of the realm of interiority and into a more public space, still take her sentimental outlook and aesthetic as more or less a given. In fact, only Paula Bernat Bennett departs from this critical consensus. In her reading of “The Lost Lily,” Bennett argues that the poem, which tells the story of a white woman who was captured by Native Americans but is unwilling to leave her adopted tribe and return to her biological family, shows the poet “turning her back on a good deal that she once believed and that, presumably, justified much of what she did and wrote” (60). While I think that Bennett’s conclusions are entirely correct, I argue that “The Lost Lily” is but one example of Sigourney’s reconsideration of sentiment as a remediative force, a reconsideration that was, in fact, inaugurated years before. In this essay I discuss this trend in Sigourney’s work as I evaluate changes to her well-known “literary idiom” manifest in her several collections of poetry for and about sailors. The sailor—as both audience for and subject of the poetry—serves as a provocative figure, since most antebellum sailors were detached from the faith...

Reading Nineteenth-Century American Boys

Reading Nineteenth-Century American Boys Joe Sutliff Sanders (bio) Boys at Home: Discipline, Masculinity, and "The Boy Problem" in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, by Ken Parille. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 2009. Boys at Home is an important exploration of discipline and masculinity as they were understood in the northeastern United States between 1830 and 1885. Organized around "a series of arguments about five forms of pedagogy," it examines topics of clear importance to studies of both American culture and childhood: "play-adventure, corporal punishment, sympathy, shame, and reading" (xiii). In just under 130 pages, Ken Parille presents a dense, pointed argument that attempts "to reconstruct and reinterpret the pedagogical culture surrounding boys" (xviii). Using readings of work by historical and literary figures including Horace Mann, Jacob Abbot, Bronson Alcott, Louisa May Alcott, and Lydia Sigourney, Parille seeks to correct misconceptions that resonate across key theories of boys and their management. One of Parille's main concerns is avoiding—indeed, contradicting—the notion that boys can be explained as one great, undifferentiated mass. Here he speaks to a central fear in children's literature scholarship of contributing to cultural tendencies to theorize childhood through a disembodied subject known as "the child" rather than a heterogeneous subject known as "children." Parille's vigilance against broad assumptions about "the boy" is both obvious and necessary. His hope, as he says in his introduction, is that "Writings about boyhood discipline offer us an important way to complicate current critical narratives of gender, childhood, and literary history" (xiii). This goal is not always unequivocally achieved—the material Parille studies is frequently about boys in general, and it best positions his study to draw conclusions that are similarly about ideal rather than embodied children—but it is a hope to which Parille is consistently dedicated, and he uses a clever redundancy to add nuance to the clichés of his subject matter. By putting multiple, contemporaneous forms of pedagogy in dialogue with one another, Parille is able to point to contradictions between conceptions of "the boy," effectively forcing a more sophisticated image of boys than the writers of his subject material would themselves have recognized. As Parille puts it, "The picture of boyhood created by this [End Page 278] nexus of relationships offers us a detailed portrait of the pedagogical environment in which New England boyhood was constructed, and it gives us a multitude of perspectives ranging far beyond those of the few nineteenth-century literary figures who have monopolized critical discourses on 'the boy'" (xiv). His choice of material is therefore appropriate and even courageous, considering how very hot is the button he pushes when reading texts by writers who were invested in boyhood as a broad concept, not one full of contradictions. Similarly courageous is the book's dedication to speaking of topics central to Americanist discourse outside children's literature—such as nineteenth-century US social structures and the history of corporal punishment—in terms that emphasize rather than ignore gender. Such a strategy requires walking a narrow line. In such collections as Chapman and Hendler's Sentimental Men and Davidson and Hatcher's hyperbolically titled No More Separate Spheres!, Americanist editors and writers have criticized the tendency to consider sentimental and realist, domestic and public, feminine and masculine as completely discrete literary and social categories. The frequent result of such criticism is excellent scholarship that profitably reexamines the places where these categories blur, but other results have included poor scholarship that willfully ignores places where recognition of such categories might yield a more historically informed reading of literature. Parille, however, manages to tap into this current trend in Americanist scholarship without quite abdicating a reading that is aware of gender. He mentions on many occasions his interest in masculinity studies, and as a result his argument is not quite that gender should be ignored, but that insights gained through attention to one gender should be tested for usefulness when reading texts written for another. Thus he argues for a "threefold approach" in which he attempts to consider boys' fiction and girls' fiction by attending to "similarity, difference, or a combination of the two" (xxiii). He calls his study a "dual-gender...

"What Our Boys Are Reading": Lydia Sigourney, Francis Forrester, and Boyhood Literacy in Nineteenth-Century America

Reading has long been talked about in studies of nineteenth-century culture and of children's literature as a way to discipline adult and child readers in general or women and girls in particular, but it has received less attention as a source for ideas about disciplining boys. This article explores debates about boys and reading as theorized in novels, essay collections, children's periodicals, and conduct manuals, focusing on the work of Lydia Sigourney and Francis Forrester. While many writers favored an approach in which boys read narratives about historical figures and replay their typically masculine attitudes or actions, Sigourney, Forrester, and others were critical of this model.

Childhood, Power, and “Symbolic Plenitude”

Childhood, Power, and “Symbolic Plenitude” Richard Flynn The articles in this issue concern themselves with what Leslie Frost, in her article "Shadows of War," calls "children's symbolic plenitude." Frost's assertion that children and the concept of childhood may be employed in the service of ideologies ranging from the leftist to the fascist is not surprising. However, the nature of this symbolism and the ideological uses to which it is put are both slippery and subject to social and historical forces. The authors in this issue understand the intensity of our investment in childhood as a symbolic center and recognize childhood as a site for enacting both our idealism and disciplinary practices, often simultaneously—and usually uneasily. Ken Parille's "'What Our Boys Are Reading'" reveals the limitations of our received view of boys' reading as reinforcing "notions of male authority and privilege," in contrast to the disciplinary function of girls' reading. By examining Lydia Sigourney's writings about boyhood literacy alongside her biography of her son, Andrew, who died at the age of nineteen, Parille investigates Sigourney's critique of the "harmful norms" of "boyhood masculinity" perpetuated by the idea of "heroic imitation" in antebellum literary culture. Parille demonstrates that Sigourney's insistence that reading should cultivate boys' "domestic virtues" is echoed in later fiction for boys, such as Francis Forrester's Dick Duncan. Modern critics' tendency to divide nineteenth-century children's literature into "boys' books" (Twain) and "girls' books" (Alcott) obscures the complexity of both boys' reading and authors' attitudes toward the young. By questioning our reliance on "familiar classification of authors . . . by gender or perceived literary seriousness," Parille asks us to re-examine our "long-held beliefs" about boyhood. Daniel Greenstone presents a witty and cogent account of the ways in which Ian Falconer's Olivia books comment on the "unfulfilled promises of feminism." Greenstone reads Falconer as a satirist and social critic of contemporary gender relations, suggesting that the career of Gloria Steinem is emblematic of the ways in which feminism as a political movement has been subsumed (some might [End Page 1] say co-opted) by parenting styles that put the child at the center of a (largely upper-middle-class) world. In "The Sow in the House" Greenstone argues that the raising of a "fully actualized child" occurs mostly at the mother's expense, since it is usually she and not her husband who does most of the parenting, even in our more "enlightened" times. It is not surprising that Steinem praises Olivia's "self-esteem" in her jacket blurb for the book since the pop-psych Steinem—the "self-help feminist" author of the problematic Revolution from Within—has almost entirely supplanted the feminist who believed in political action. Making the child the center of the universe—a star like Olivia—often happens at the expense of the mother's autonomy. And as Greenstone notes, since Falconer has no plans to allow the six-year-old, "bratty and willful" Olivia to mature, we are not privy in the fiction to the results of such childrearing techniques, even as in real life the costs of "helicopter parenting" are becoming annoyingly clear. Perhaps the roots of Olivia's need to be center stage may become apparent when we turn to Joe Sutliff Sanders's examination of the changing role of sympathy in orphan girl novels. Sympathy, which Sanders describes as an "emotion . . . made up of a potent concoction of guilt, affection, and admiration," is depicted as "centrifugal" in novels such as What Katy Did and Uncle Tom's Cabin in which the weak characters use their position as the "heart of the house" to change the powerful. But while "radiat[ing] influence outward constitutes a kind of power, it does not alter the subservient status of the child." As the emphasis shifts from the centrifugal to the centripetal in Progressive Era novels like Pollyanna, the weaker character, rather than acting as a moral influence, becomes the recipient of adult attention. Having spread the glad game before her car accident, Pollyanna is now able to receive and "consum[e] the fruits of her labor: adult attention." In "'Saving the World Before Bedtime,'" Lisa Hager...

“They Found and Left Her an Indian”: Gender, Race, and the Whitening of Young Bear

“They Found and Left Her an Indian”Gender, Race, and the Whitening of Young Bear Jim J. Buss (bio) . . . Mourning the lost. At length, a rumour came Of a white woman found in Indian tents, Far, far away. A father’s dying words Came o’er the husbandman, and up he rose, And took his sad-eyed sister by the hand, Blessing his household, as he bade farewell, For their uncertain pilgrimage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . At length they reach’d a lodge Deep in the wilderness, beside whose door A wrinkled woman with the Saxon brow Sate [sic] coarsely mantled in her blanket-robe, The Indian pipe between her shrivell’d lips. Yet in her blue eye dwelt a gleam of thought, A hidden memory, whose electric force Thrill’d to the fount of being and reveal’d The kindred drops that had so long wrought out A separate channel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A trembling nerve Thrill’d all unwonted at her bosom’s core, And her lip blanch’d. But two daughters gazed Reproachfully upon her, to their cheek Rushing the proud Miami chieftain’s blood, In haughty silence. So, she wept no tears; The moveless spirit of the race she loved Had come upon her, and her features show’d Slight touch of sympathy. . . . —Lydia Sigourney, “The Lost Lily” (1846) [End Page 1] On an autumn evening in 1835, the elderly, diminutive Miami woman Maconaquah (Young Bear) welcomed the weary white Indian trader George Ewing into her home at Deaf Man’s Village in northern Indiana.1 According to Ewing, the indigenous woman joined him near the cabin’s hearth after her family went to bed. He surmised that sick, tired, and perhaps wanting to confess before she died, Young Bear revealed a secret she had kept for nearly half-a-century; Indians had taken her from her white family as a child.2 His “discovery” launched a national search for Young Bear’s eastern relatives that eventually raised the woman from obscurity to national recognition. Ewing, informed by Young Bear that she had once lived among white people in Pennsylvania, wrote to Eastern newspaper editors, who subsequently published Ewing’s letters in their papers. “There is now living near this place,” he wrote the postmaster at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, “an aged woman, who a few days ago told me, whilst I lodged in the camp with her one night, that she was taken away from her father’s house.”3 Two years later, Ewing received a letter from Joseph Slocum, who was living at the time in Pennsylvania, inquiring about the woman. Slocum wondered; could she be his sister, Frances, the “Lost Sister of the Wyoming”? He packed his bags and set off for Indiana. White authors have recounted tales about Frances Slocum many times over the past century and a half. And, while these stories appear to mirror the many other captivity narratives that dominated eighteenth- and (to a limited extent) early nineteenth-century American literature, the narrative of Maconaquah’s capture, discovery, and later life differs in important ways. These differences reveal dynamics about gendered constructions of race in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that others do not. Moreover, Frances Slocum’s story continues to be written and rewritten as a captivity narrative, and that process illuminates the ongoing colonial project that has long typified the relationship between whites and Indians in America. Historically, captivity narratives have served as powerful fables that stress the undesirability of race mixing and place the events of colonization, settlement, and conquest into narratives of violent conflict.4 But modern scholarly treatments of the genre raise the possibility of seeing beyond typical nineteenth-century bifurcated categories of race that stress opposition. Historian June Namias believes that “the captivity drama presents us with an intersection of cultures” as intermarriages rest at the center of many of these stories.5 In the case of Frances Slocum, however, writers have historically underplayed the violence of her captivity and seldom focused on Slocum’s marriages to two separate indigenous husbands. In fact, they rarely discuss her half-century living among the Indians at all. Instead, writers have spilled much ink upon paper trying to explain how the elderly Frances Slocum [End...

Was Sigourney a Poetess? The aesthetics of Victorian plenitude in Lydia Sigourney's poetry

This article addresses aspects of Anglo-American Poetess Studies today, focusing on the resuscitation of the Poetess soubriquet itself, found to be questionable when applied to 19th-century US women poets generally, and deeply problematic when applied to Sigourney herself. Like their British peers, US women poets wrote Poetess poems of the sort recent theorizations of the Poetess describe, as did US men. But US women poets wrote many other kinds of poems also, whose parameters fall well outside those of the Poetess poem and whose diversity or, as it is called here, 'plenitude', speaks to a far more inclusive aesthetic than that warranted by Poetess poetics alone. What this aesthetic was, what empirical forces led to its emergence, and why it was vital to the flourishing of US women's lyric production in particular are questions that this article explores through my examination of Sigourney's poetry.

"I have not told half we suffered": Overland Trail Women's Narratives and the Genre of Suppressed Textual Mourning

Many literary critics have noted a distinct genre of ritualized texts about mourning in Victorian America. Authors such as Lydia Sigourney, Fanny Longfellow, and Frances Osgood, for example, inscribe an image of mourning that is excessive, sentimentalized, and embedded within an aspiration toward middle-class, genteel society. Yet, as this essay will show, this excessive, textualized, ritualized grief was but one of a number of strategies that women used to write about loss. Nineteenth-century diaries and letters written by women bound for West on Overland Trail represent grief in an equally ritualized fashion. These writers repeatedly suppress and minimize grief over deaths of husbands, children, and friends in order to construct an image of westering women as tough, durable, and forever moving forward. However, this alternative, but equally ritualized, pattern of textual mourning becomes apparent only when we read gaps and silences of these women's narratives. GENERIC DIFFERENCES: WOMEN WRITERS AND THE DETAILS OF TEXTUAL PRODUCTION What might account for these different textual representations of bereavement? The specific details of textual production--when and how a text is produced and for whom--impact way genres evolve. So circumstances of slowly composing a poem at home, as time and leisure allow, versus quickly inscribing day's events in a diary or letter along Overland Trail may produce significant differences in category and type of text that results. (1) Women in settled communities would have different outlets for grief than women who penned narratives in environments where they often lacked time, materials, and rituals that mark--and mitigate--grief in more settled communities. Questions of audience play an important role in any text's production. For example, as Sandra Zagarell notes, Lydia Howard Huntley Sigourney wrote for a large audience and for consumption (2681). Her writings, as did those of many other writers in antebellum period, helped contribute to popular phenomenon of sentimental cult of mourning--or, as Ann Douglas calls it, the domestication of (200). Their texts, like Victorian practices of keeping locks of hair, daguerreotypes of deceased infants, death masks, and other mementos, arguably helped preserve, even immortalize, departed. As Gary Laderman points out, these mourning rituals also were part of bourgeois ideologies of grieving families (39-41). Likewise, Elizabeth A. Petrino maintains that sentimental writers tailored their poems of motherhood, death, and Heaven (often portrayed as a domestic, actual place) to readers with middle-class to [gentility]; thus texts, for both writers and readers, reaffirmed social position and [reflected] coalescence of Victorian sentimentalism with bourgeois aspirations (320). In settled, class-based, well-to-do communities, deceased often served as a permanent centerpiece of sorts, whether as subject of a text or as focus of photographs, a death mask, or similar mementos. The presence of text or material artifact encouraged readers, family, and friends to gather around and to grieve openly and sometimes excessively. Thus, grieving ritual ultimately reinforced identity and community. In addition to contributing to culture of sentiment and its class-based underpinnings, New England writers also created ideologically appropriate models of maternal and textual grieving for a national audience. According to Cathy Davidson, technological advancements in printing press after Revolution, coupled with an increasing public demand for written material, meant that by 1830 texts--especially novels--often were produced in press runs of as many as thirty thousand copies (17). Authors within this burgeoning print culture reached a much larger readership than did women on Overland Trail. …

Managing literacy, mothering America: women's narratives on reading and writing in the nineteenth century

Sarah Robbins's new book accomplishes two monumental tasks. It identifies and defines a previously unstudied genre, the domestic literacy narrative, and provides a pioneering cultural history of this genre from the early days of the United States through the turn of the twentieth century. Domestic literacy narratives often feature scenes that depict women - mostly middle-class mothers - teaching those in their care to read, write, and discuss literature, with the goal of promoting civic participation. These narratives characterize literature as a source of shared knowledge and social improvement. Authors of these works, which were circulated in a broad range of publication venues, imagined their readers as contributing to the ongoing formation of an idealized American community. At the center of the genre's history are authors such as Lydia Sigourney, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, and Frances Harper, who viewed their writing as a form of teaching for the public good. But in her wide-ranging and interdisciplinary investigation, Robbins demonstrates that a long line of women writers created domestic literacy narratives, which proved to be highly responsive to shifts in educational agendas and political issues throughout the nineteenth century and beyond. Robbins offers close readings of texts ranging from the 1790s to the 1920s. These include influential British precursors to the genre and early twentieth-century narratives by women missionaries that have been previously undervalued by cultural historians. She examines texts by prominent authors that have received little critical attention to date - such as Lydio Maria Child's Good Wives - and provides fresh context when discussing the well-known works of the period. For example, she reads Uncle Tom's Cabin in relation to Harriet Beecher Stowe's education and experience as a teacher. Managing Literacy, Mothering America is a groundbreaking exploration of nineteenth-century U.S. culture, viewed through the lens of a literary practice that promoted women's public influence on social issues and agendas.

Reviving Lydia Huntley Sigourney

Lydia Sigourney’s (mis)identification as “The American Hemans” serves as a kind of parallel or allegory for the double-bind faced by nineteenth-century woman writers: to become famous, one must be like Hemans, but to be like Hemans is to lose sight of oneself; to signify oneself as a “proper” woman writer, one must utter the sobs of the sentimental woman, but such a voice has been valued by critics at about the level of “anonymous.” Sentimentalism, what is expected of the woman writer if she is to achieve fame, has been seen as manipulation, not an art. In a feminist prose essay on women’s education, Sigourney reveals her desire for fulfillment in roles other than the strictly domestic: she longs for the day when women can be “professors.” A canny poet-engineer taking up the tools of the new sensationist epistemology to become a professor of sentimental rhetoric, Sigourney deploys several poetic voices or personae to communicate her decidedly feminist ethos. The subject positions adopted in her poems are various, ranging from male seminary professor to an edgy, angry, male prophet, from woman rhetor to woman preacher. InLucy Howard’s Journal, Sigourney prophesies and in some sense prepares her own reception history as a female writing subject whose textual voice can outlive the stultifying critique of feminine sentimentalism.

Gendering the Debate over African Americans' Education in the 1880s: Frances Harper's Reconfiguration of Atticus Haygood's Philanthropic Model

In years after civil War, white Americans north and south debated capacity of former slaves to be educated for citizenship, while leading African American authors (and some white supporters) used fiction, speeches, and other forms to demonstrate capabilities of race for full civic participation. As evident in teaching texts like Lydia Maria child's The Freedmen's Book and novels like Albion Tourgee's Bricks Without Straw, this discourse about democratic participation was often closely bound up with arguments about whether or not freedmen of south should or even could be educated. By 1880s, when Radical Reconstruction had been displaced by calls for national reconciliation, this contest frequently shifted focus to kind and degree of education most suitable for African Americans. Some New South leaders began to suggest to their constituencies that making some allowances for education of blacks could bring long-term benefits to region that clearly needed to become indu strialized. Meanwhile, northern foundations such as Peabody and Slater funds became increasingly powerful arbiters of African American education experiences, exercising much more decisive control over curriculum of institutions aimed at teaching blacks than loose confederation of Freedmen's Bureau and missionary societies had in 1860s. In particular, small group of white male foundation agents who ran Slater Fund--Rutherford B. Hayes, Daniel Gilman and Atticus Haygood--consistently set African American educational programs within race-specific industrial model. Along those lines, Haygood's 1885 report to Fund's Board of Trustees, purportedly benign discussion of The Case of Negro, as to Education in Southern States, is representative of policy that was institutionalized at sites such as Tuskegee and Hampton institutes. Haygood's 1885 report depicted the negro as a good citizen:' but one whose status would remain inferior, constrained by very work habits of manual lab or Slater Fund's educational model would allow--a model denying access both to liberal arts study and to moral, ethical, and social leadership more appropriate to superior white race (5off). When we see how writing like Haygood's set such firm limits on African American education and citizenship, we have heightened appreciation of negotiation Frances E. W. Harper carried out in her 1880s serialized novel, Trial and Triumph, which addressed issues about blacks' education through experiences of characters being taught at home, in church, on job, and in school--that is, within nurturing community education model. And if we position Harper's portrayal of education alongside white middle-class tradition of home-guided teaching that assigned moral training to motherly mentors, we can understand how she used affiliation based on gender to counter Haygood's argument based on race. Overall, during post-Reconstruction, Harper's education-oriented literature faced what could have been debilitating dilemma evident in texts like Haygood's. Yet, in speeches like A Factor in Human Progress and in her Trial and Triumph serial, Harper encouraged members of her race to adapt domesticated learning practices and educational goals that had been touted, earlier in nineteenth century by white, middle-class women writers like Catharine Maria Sedgwick (e.g., in her Ella narrative in Stories for Young Persons) and Lydia Sigourney (e.g., in Letters to Mothers). Consistent with ideal of Republican motherhood, these antebellum narratives had argued for white women's increased access to learning so that they could prepare their children for civic responsibilities. Portraying women's home-based teaching as vital force uplifting nation, these domestic literacy management stories had later been adapted by writers like Sarah Josepha Hale to portray women schoolteachers as naturally extending middle-class women s rightful teaching role into larger community. …

Sentimental Collaborations: Mourning and Middle-Class Identity in Nineteenth-Century America

Sentimental Collaborations: Mourning and Middle-Class Identity in Nineteenth-Century America. By Mary Louise Kete. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. Pp. xx, 280. Appendices. Cloth, $49.95; paper, $17.95.) American literature specialist Mary Louise Kete presents an intriguing reevaluation of function of poetry and fiction in nineteenth-century American culture. Her book, which examines literary creations produced from War of 1812 end of Reconstruction, attempts connect and literary romanticism with consumerism by illustrating how fiction and verse (published or not) served as a gift-giving ritual. The sentimental collaborations exchanged by nineteenth-century Americans reflected a gift economy that established symbolic ties among separate persons (52). Kete thereby refutes Alexis de Tocqueville's well-known observation that each man is forever thrown back upon himself alone, and there is danger that he may be shut up in solitude of his own heart and instead argues that Americans were deeply social and very concerned about vulnerability of family and community cohesiveness. They expressed their anxieties through language of mourning and loss. Kete begins her discussion with private, unpublished of Vermont rural folk whom she discovered in Harriet Gould's keepsake album (included in appendix one), and then expands her thesis illustrate how their concerns were articulated by poets Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Lydia Sigourney as well as novelists Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Mark Twain. Harriet Gould's book contained poetry and remembrances written by Gould's family and friends between late 1830s and early 1860s. Kete utilizes this source illustrate how ordinary people made sense of their lives and concludes that their writings complicate, in important ways, many of our common understandings about nineteenth-century American literary (16). Kete believes contents of Harriet Gould's album reflected a collaborative individualism (56-57) that was strongly influenced by sentiment and a romantic sensibility that more accurately explains emotional locus of pre-Civil War Americans. She questions previous assessments by Gordon Haight, who argued nineteenth century's culture of sentiment reflected country's bad taste, as well as Ann Douglas, whose Feminization of American Culture (1977) suggests sentimentality represented feminization of national character. She also questions assessments of culture of isolated that was supposedly taking shape in early nineteenth century and found its fullest articulation in Tocqueville's Democracy in America. Rather than collapsing into isolated egotism, or the degeneration of individual into an unstable and unsustainable unit of one, she asserts promise of sentiment enforce or coerce a joining of interests was one way of negotiating this threat (49, 54). Sentiment represented a form of mourning that broke down borders of death as well as physical separations caused by westward migration and thereby enabled its participants to establish connections through which one could understand and identify oneself' (32). The poems in Harriet Gould's keepsake book are not concerned with expressing or constituting an isolated, freestanding ego but a situated, dependent individual. …

Elizabeth Fries Lummis Ellet (1818-1877)

More than a century-and-a-half ago, Elizabeth F. Ellet began the process that scholars continue today of recovering and recording the lives and contributions of women. One of the best-known writers of her day, Ellet published prolifically in a wide variety of genres. In part because she refused to follow expected roles for women, she became embroiled in public battles with prominent literary men, such as Edgar Allan Poe and Rufus W. Griswold. Consequently, despite her pioneering work as a precursor of feminist scholarship, Ellet has been cited by twentieth-century literary critics primarily in negative terms. However, Ellet was a major participant in the nineteenth-century literary scene and continues to be acknowledged by historians for her valuable early methodology in recovering women's history. Elizabeth Fries Lummis was born in Sodus Point, New York, in October 1818 to a well-to-do physician, William Nixon Lummis, and Sarah Maxwell Lummis. [1] Educated at a female seminary at Aurora, New York, Ellet began writing poetry in her early teens. Her first book, published when she was sixteen and entitled Poems, Translated and Original (1835), collected her own poems, many previously published, with some she had translated from French, Italian, German, and Spanish. The volume also included Ellet's tragedy in five acts, Teresa Contarini, which had a successful run in New York and some smaller cities. At the age of seventeen, Ellet married and moved to South Carolina where her husband, William H. Ellet, accepted academic appointments at Columbia College and South Carolina College. Even before her marriage, Ellet had contributed to a number of periodicals, includeing Knickerbocker, Ontario Repository, Lady's Book, and American Monthly. After moving to the South, she began publishing in regional publications such as Southern Literary Journal and Monthly Magazine and Southern Literary Messenger, but she continued her work for established national periodicals and contributed to prestigious new magazines and newspapers, most notably Democratic Review, New Yorker, Harper's, and Union Magazine. [2] Early contributions were primarily poetry and translations and criticism of Italian and German writers, making use of her early interest and fluency in languages. In the late twentieth century, as scholars recovered and revalued the contributions of earlier women, one great irony was that most references to Elizabeth Ellet were based primarily on the words of her male rivals, Edgar Allan Poe and Rufus Wilmot Griswold. Nearly all attention given Ellet depicts her as a villain in battles with these celebrated men, calling her a trouble maker, maligner, and scandal maker (Bayless); she was assumed to have taken action based on either jealousy or a taste for scandal-mongering (Moss). [3] The readiness with which these men's accounts have been accepted is surprising because Ellet had such highly respected companions in these conflicts-Margaret Fuller, Ann S. Stephens, and Anne C. Lynch (Botta). In addition, she had many longtime, highly esteemed friends, including Lydia Sigourney, Sarah Josepha Hale, and Jared Sparks, a noted historian whose advice she sought in writing The Women of the American Revolution. Ellet's battle with Poe began amidst gossip about the Poe-Osgood liaison. Edgar Allan Poe and Frances Osgood, both married to others, began an extended literary flirtation in the pages of the Broadway Journal, which Poe was editing at the time. [4] The couple also regularly attended events and social gatherings together. Ellet, professing concern for Osgood, claimed to have been shown incriminating letters from Osgood to Poe by Poe's wife Virginia. Her account was corroborated by the actions of Anne Lynch (Botta), author and hostess of New York's best known literary salon, and by Margaret Fuller, who, with Osgood's permission, visited the Poe household to retrieve the letters that might harm Osgood's reputation. …

Robert Frost and feminine literary tradition

In spite of Robert Frost's continuing popularity with the public, the poet remains an outsider in the academy, where more difficult and innovative poets like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound are presented as the great American modernists. Robert Frost and Feminine Literary Tradition considers the reason for this disparity, exploring the relationship among notions of popularity, masculinity, and greatness. Karen Kilcup reveals Frost's subtle links with earlier feminine traditions like sentimental poetry and New England regionalist fiction, traditions fostered by such well-known women precursors and contemporaries as Lydia Sigourney, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. She argues that Frost altered and finally obscured these feminine voices and values that informed his earlier published work and that to appreciate his achievement fully, we need to recover and acknowledge the power of his affective, emotional voice in counterpoint and collaboration with his more familiar ironic and humorous tones.

Mobilizing Women, Anticipating Abolition: The Struggle against Indian Removal in the 1830s

Andrew Jackson's request Congress in December 1829 for federal monies remove Southeast Indians beyond the Mississippi River generated the most intense public opposition that the United States had witnessed. In six short months, removal opponents launched massive petition drives that called on Congress defeat removal and uphold Indian rights property. To block removal, Catharine Beecher and Lydia Sigourney organized the first national women's petition campaign and flooded Congress with antiremoval petitions, making bold claim for women's place in national political discourse. The experience of opposing removal prompted some reformers rethink their position on abolition and reject African colonization in favor of immediatism. The strength of antiremoval forces stunned Martin Van Buren who, writing of the events over twenty years later, portrayed the government's side as besieged from all quarters and stated flatly that a more persevering opposition public measure had scarcely ever been made. Though Jackson's former vice president consistently defended removal, he believed that the issue of Indian removal unlike histories of many great questions which agitate the public mind in their day will in all probability endure ... as long as the government itself, and will in time occupy the minds and feelings of our people. It was an issue, Van Buren concluded, in which the nation was responsible to the opinion of the great family of nations, as it involves the course we have pursued and shall pursue towards people comparatively weak. 1

Emily Dickinson and Her Contemporaries: Women's Verse in America 1820-1885

Reviewed by: Emily Dickinson and Her Contemporaries: Women’s Verse in America 1820–1885 Shira Wolosky (bio) Emily Dickinson and Her Contemporaries: Women’s Verse in America 1820–1885. By Elizabeth A. Petrino, University Press of New England, 1998 240 pp. Elizabeth Petrino’s Emily Dickinson and Her Contemporaries: Women’s Verse in America 1820–1885 carries forward the investigation of women’s verse-writing as context for Dickinson’s own unique achievements. After an overview of feminist discussions of Dickinson, Petrino examines Dickinson’s efforts in a sequence of contexts: publishing practices for women; the child-elegy, a popular genre for nineteenth-century women poets; epitaphs; floral dictionaries and conventions; and questions of female authorship. The women verse-writers most extensively brought for comparison and context are Lydia Sigourney, Frances Sargent Osgood, and Helen Hunt Jackson. The book is most valuable when it reaches past the already established round of references to venture into, for example, children’s portraiture, graveyard inscription, and floral handbooks. Here, new materials are brought forward with very suggestive implications for Dickinson’s handling of some of her characteristic representations: her child’s voice, her voices of death, her flower imagery. Specific texts gain new illumination as references to widespread female discourses are uncovered in poems, including references to particular works that Dickinson knew. Petrino also shows how certain female conventions, such as flower images, offer more complex representation than has been generally acknowledged, both in Dickinson’s writing and beyond it. Petrino’s project of reading Dickinson in terms of her women contemporaries is, of course, no longer new. Rather, she uses a method that has become widely accepted in Dickinson’s studies, in salutary counterweight against the older Dickinson-in-her-room school of criticism. There is certainly much to gain in the recognition that Dickinson wrote in the languages available to her and which she shared with other women contemporary to her. Yet, Petrino’s work also shows some of the weaknesses of this method. The cultural-historical contexts into which Petrino ventures remain rather limited: mainly to literary and almost exclusively to female relationships. This has, first, the problematic result of treating women’s history as though it were some separable, self-bounded set of issues, rather than as part of ongoing historical [End Page 110] events and developments in which women’s history also takes its place. It draws a circle around the lives of women in a way that diminishes a sense of the full impact of women’s lives on general culture. Second, even within the boundaries of women’s history, the book tends to rely on the historical work of other, mainly literary critics and to be descriptive rather than analytical of the hi torical materials it brings. Its presentation of the lives of nineteenth-century is weighted heavily toward the negative, as a story of oppression. Yet the record of achievements by nineteenth-century women in redefining the boundaries and terms of their lives seems to me nothing short of breathtaking. Finally, the balance in this study between social-historical interests and literary analysis remains uneasy. I think it is undeniable that contemporary women’s verse is a useful context for studying, and appreciating, Emily Dickinson. But there is a danger of absorbing Dickinson into a general discourse in ways that obscure her unique achievement. Conversely, I wonder whether Dickinson is the best standard for judging the work of contemporary women’s verse. Against Dickinson’s accomplishment, the stature of other women tends to shrink, and their generic commitments, such as the child-elegy, to flatten. While Petrino’s analysis of Helen Hunt Jackson explores the complexities of her work, Lydia Sigourney risks being reduced to an untalented, predictable writer. She becomes mere foil, instead of courageous innovator writing a poetry of (some) complexity, irony, and self consciousness. I do not think this does her full justice. Petrino’s study joins an important body of work exploring women’s verse, a subject long neglected and even repressed from American literary history. While she does not break new ground, she does cultivate paths worth cultivating, bringing to view a denser network of relationships, a closer scrutiny of...

Emily Dickinson and Her Contemporaries: Women's Verse in America, 1820-1885

Elizabeth A. Petrino places the Belle of Amherst within the context of other nineteenth-century women poets and examines the feminist implications of their work. Dickinson and contemporaries like Lydia Sigourney, Louisa May Alcott, and Helen Hunt Jackson developed in their writing a rhetoric of duplicity that enabled them to question conventional values but still maintain the propriety necessary to achieve publication. To demonstrate these strategies, Petrino examines both Dickinson's poetry and a range of women's genres, from the child elegy to the discourse of flowers. She also enlists contemporary magazines, unpublished professional correspondence, even gravestone inscriptions and posthumous paintings of children to explain what Petrino calls the most significant fact of Dickinson's literary biography, her decision not to publish.

Angels and absences: child deaths in the nineteenth century

What is the difference between public and private feeling, and how far can we deduce past feelings from the words that have been left us? Why do child deaths figure so often and so prominently in the literature of the nineteenth century, and how was the theme of the death of a child used to elicit such poignant responses in the readers of that era? In this fascinating new book, Laurence Lerner vividly contrasts the contempt with which twentieth-century criticism so often dismisses such works as mere sentimentality with the enthusiasm and tears of nineteenth-century contemporaries. Drawing examples from both real and literary deaths, Lerner delves into the writings of well-known authors such as Dickens, Coleridge, Shelley, Flaubert, Mann, Huxley, and Hesse, as well as lesser known writers like Felicia Hemans and Lydia Sigourney. In the process, he synthesizes fresh ideas about the thorny subjects of sentimentality, aesthetic judgment, and the function of religion in literature. Lerner's forthright and evocative prose style is enjoyable reading, and he excels in teasing out the moral implications and the psychosocial entanglements of his chosen narrative and lyrical texts. This is a book that will illuminate an important aspect of the history of private life. It should have wide application for those interested in the history, sociology, and literature of the nineteenth century.

Reinventing Lydia Sigourney

IFLydia Howard Huntley Sigourney had not existed, it would have been necessary to invent her. In fact, she was invented. As American women writers began to publish in numbers before the Civil War, one of their number would inevitably be construed as an epitome of the phenomenon of female authorship in its range of allowed achievements and required inadequacies. Now, here was a poor, virtuous, essentially self-educated woman whose writing was sponsored by one of the leading families in Hartford, Connecticut, with additional patronage from many other New England aristocrats.1 She published pious poetry on domestic subjects in the major magazines and wrote for the Sunday School League. Having made a good marriage (from the social point of view), she faithfully performed her duties as wife, mother, and hostess; and she began to write for money only after financial reverses put the family under economic duress. Here, in short, was a woman whose example could instruct all would-be literary women as to what they could do, what they should do, and also what they had better not do. Here also was a life in which a modern success story of upward mobility through hard work and self-sacrifice led to an affirmation of traditional class structure. The social construction of Lydia Sigourney began, then, in her own lifetime. And, with Sigourney's canny participation, it continued throughout her lifetime as well. For example, the prefatory advertisement to the I815 Moral Pieces in Prose and Verse, which was written by Daniel Wads-

Expanding "America": Lydia Sigourney's Sketch of Connecticut, Catharine Sedgwick's Hope Leslie

Expanding "America": Lydia Sigourney's Sketch of Connecticut, Catharine Sedgwick's Hope Leslie