Nineteenth-century American Women Research Articles

Early American Women, the Novel, and God

Early American Women, the Novel, and God

An Idle Heroine in Industrious Times: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ The Story of Avis

An Idle Heroine in Industrious Times: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ <i>The Story of Avis</i>

Oceans at Home: Maritime and Domestic Fictions in Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Writing by Melissa Gniadek

Oceans at Home: Maritime and Domestic Fictions in Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Writing by Melissa Gniadek

Redwood: A Tale by Catharine Maria Sedgwick

Reviewed by: Redwood: A Tale by Catharine Maria Sedgwick Rachel B. Griffis Redwood: A Tale. By Catharine Maria Sedgwick. Edited by Jenifer B. Elmore. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021. vii + 320 pp. $120 hardback/$120 e-book. Originally published in 1824, Redwood: A Tale is the last of Catharine Maria Sedgwick's major novels to be reprinted in a modern scholarly edition. Since Mary Kelley edited Hope Leslie; or, Early Times in the Massachusetts (1827) for publication by Rutgers University Press in 1987, new editions of Sedgwick's novels have been released steadily, with the most recent being Married or Single? (1857), edited by Deborah Gussman and published by University of Nebraska Press in 2015. Jenifer B. Elmore's new edition of Redwood is therefore a milestone for scholars of Sedgwick and nineteenth-century American women writers, who now have all six of Sedgwick's major novels available in a format conducive to teaching and research. Redwood follows the orphan Ellen Bruce as she grapples with her identity, navigates both sincere and disingenuous friendships, meets and falls in love with Charles Westall, helps save her friend Emily Allen from the Shakers, and eventually discovers the mystery of her parentage. The titular character, Henry Redwood, is Ellen's long-lost father, a Virginia planter who abandoned his first wife, Ellen's mother, a virtuous woman who died shortly after giving birth. Henry does not learn that he fathered a child with his first wife until the end of the novel, after he has become acquainted with Ellen and developed a parental fondness for her. Both Henry and Ellen are delighted to learn that they are father and daughter, and Ellen facilitates Henry's repentance and religious conversion before he dies. Though Sedgwick does not specify the date of the novel's events, Elmore speculates that Redwood's historical setting could be as early as the years following the American Revolution or as late as the 1820s. Most of the events of the novel take place in Vermont and Massachusetts, though characters travel from Virginia, South Carolina, Boston, Philadelphia, and England. Through the [End Page 115] geographical diversity of her characters, Sedgwick explores regional differences and tensions, particularly between the North and South and between England and the United States. Redwood is a work of sentimentalism deeply engaged with political, social, moral, and religious questions, especially as these topics pertain to the lives of American women. Sedgwick challenges the institution of slavery through her portrayal of Lilly, an enslaved woman who works as a maid for Ellen's manipulative half sister Caroline. Lilly self-liberates and elopes with a West Indian man when the Redwood family visits New York, a plot twist that highlights political tensions between North and South. The subplot featuring Ellen's rescue of her friend Emily from the exploitative Shaker leader Reuben Harrington invites readers' reflection on the meaning of freedom and how harmful ideologies limit and confine individuals and communities in multiple aspects of life—morally, intellectually, and physically. Sedgwick also complicates the ideal of feminine domestic fulfillment through Ellen's mentor Debby Lenox, who defies conventional performances of gender and affirms the benefits of singlehood amid a flurry of marriages at the novel's conclusion. Elmore's edition of Redwood contains a substantive introduction, a bibliography of recent scholarly work on Sedgwick, a chronology of Sedgwick's life and literary output, a character list, appendices, and the prefaces Sedgwick wrote for the book in 1824 and 1850. This scholarly edition of Redwood reproduces the original 1824 version, while incorporating the changes in spellings and punctuation Sedgwick made for the 1850 edition. The 1824 preface, located at the beginning of the book, contains Sedgwick's reflections on the role of the novel in her time and her own aspirations for Redwood, which she hopes will convey "the great truths of our common religion" (7). In the 1850 preface (Appendix A), Sedgwick expresses remorse for offending the Shakers through her negative portrayal of them, and in the 1850 edition she significantly revised many of her descriptions of this religious community, which, Elmore asserts, "soften[s] her criticism of the doctrines and practices of the Shakers" (317). In Appendix...

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

Reviewed by: Nineteenth-Century American Women's Serial Novels by Dale M. Bauer Rachel Ihara BAUER, DALE M. Nineteenth-Century American Women's Serial Novels. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 172 pp. $99.99 hardcover; $80.00 e-book. An ambitious study of four popular American women writers, Dale M. Bauer's Nineteenth-Century American Women's Serial Novels proceeds from the premise that understanding a serial author requires reading beyond a few texts in order to grasp "the entirety of an author's production" (2). This is no small task given the prodigious output of the authors under consideration: E.D.E.N. Southworth (approximately fiftytwo novels), Ann Stephens (twenty-six), Laura Jean Libbey (possibly seventy novels), and Mary Jane Holmes (thirty-nine). Such numbers boggle the mind, and the time and devotion involved in tackling all of these novels, with their convoluted plots and beset heroines, is impressive indeed. The study that results aims to make sense of this abundance of plots, in order to chart the particular themes and preoccupations of each author while also making an argument for their shared interest in narratives of female suffering (as a result of sham marriages, bad men, mistaken identities, and bouts of insanity), suffering that is provisionally resolved in abrupt conclusions (through sound marriages, restored senses, and transformed identities), before being taken up again in the next serial. Building on, yet diverging from, early studies of popular women's fiction, like Helen Papashvily's All the Happy Endings (1956), which dismissed serial plots as "simple" (xiv), and Nina Baym's Woman's Fiction (1978), which saw in these novels "'a single tale' with 'one overplot'" (xv), Bauer seeks to do justice to the rich and varied issues taken up by these authors. For instance, while critical attention to Southworth's best-known novel, The Hidden Hand (1859), might lead to an assumption that cross-dressing represents her primary challenge [End Page 308] to gender norms, Bauer sees mental breakdowns in Southworth's characters as more typical of Southworth's strategy for highlighting and confronting various societal ills. One challenge in adopting this all-encompassing approach is that it requires a command of a substantial number of novels, most of which will be unfamiliar to all but a few scholars of American literature. This means that Bauer's claims about texts and their significance rest, to a large degree, upon plot summaries. While these glosses are intended to illuminate the points being advanced, often they seem to exceed the critical purpose accorded to them, pointing to alternative interpretations and avenues of exploration. For example, Bauer frames a discussion of Southworth's novel The Fortune Seeker, or The Bridal Day (1866) as an instance of Southworth's return to the idea that "moral equilibrium between the sexes ends monomanias of all sorts, which caused the cultural and personal irresponsibility that she wanted her novels to redress" (22–23). Yet what follows, ostensibly to illustrate this point, is a summary of the adventures of the novel's heroine, Astrea, who is captured on her wedding night, is disguised as a "quadroon" and sold, is compelled to rebuff the sexual advances of her purchaser, and temporarily loses her reason, before regaining her senses when she is reunited with her husband. This plot outline, while it provides evidence of repeated themes in Southworth's oeuvre (villains preying on young women, racial disguise, mistaken identities, brain inflammation, and spouses separated and reunited), does not clearly support a reading of Southworth's fiction as primarily concerned with women's suffering and temporary insanity as social critique. This may be an issue of method as much as material. The sheer abundance of "data," along with the need to convey to the reader, in broad strokes, the outlines of the many novels under discussion, constantly threatens to overwhelm any unifying argument that seeks to bring these texts together. Bauer's aim, to do justice to the messiness and variability that characterizes these novels, individually and as a whole, is to be commended. However, in reading Nineteenth-Century American Women's Serial Novels, I couldn't help but wonder if there might be another way to capture the...

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

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...

Curating History in the COVID19 Era: Philadelphia Epidemics and Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Medical Education

Physician and educator Henry Hartshorne’s manuscript medical school lecture notes serve as a remarkable record of the response by faculty and women students in Philadelphia to transitions from post-bellum education to scientific, laboratory-based curriculum. These archives document the tensions felt throughout the medical system due to extended classroom hours and competition for limited clinical rotation assignments experienced by those treating patients in urban Philadelphia during the 1870s. Hartshorne was not the only physician who trained female attendees at area institutions including Women’s Medical College during this point of transition in both the education and practice of medicine.

Review: In Plain Sight: Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Poetry and the Problem of Literary History, by Alexandra Socarides

Review: <i>In Plain Sight: Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Poetry and the Problem of Literary History</i>, by Alexandra Socarides

"Will You Ignore My Sex?": Emily Dickinson's 1862 Letters to T. W. Higginson Revisited

Drawing insights from critical studies of gender and nineteenth-century American women's poetry, this essay examines the letters sent from Dickinson to Higginson in 1862 in order to alert readers to hear the implicit plea in these often abrupt, imperative, elliptical, and cryptic documents: "Will you ignore my sex?". At the same time, Wang shows that Dickinson's enclosure of her name in a smaller envelope might be read as a miniature drama directed by the poet that manipulates the mode of reading and the affective experience and critical reception of her poems. Wang suggests that Dickinson mimics in miniature the historical situation of the woman writer's publishing in anonymity, in which sexual identity was first hidden, evaded, and deferred in its presentation. No matter how naïve and shy, or deliberate and pretentious, such a plea might seem to her recipient or to later readers, she argues that the request should probably be read as a sincere statement: "Please regard me as a poet instead of a lady poet." Dickinson's playful indirection reveals the anxiety of the female poet, which should not be ignored by readers of any period. Dickinson's dramatizing devices and metaphorical use of male muses to propel her own volcanic power, combined with pervasive unsexing practices in Dickinson's poetry more generally, make her legacy ambiguous for later female writers; it also complicates critical attempts to construct a female literary tradition.

Narrating Violation: Harriet Prescott Spofford’s “Circumstance”

The several critical interpretations of Harriet Prescott Spofford’s short story, “Circumstance,” generally acknowledge the presence of sexual violation, but they also tend to de-center it, either glossing over it, or enlisting the nature and implications of the assault to serve other ends. In contrast, “Narrating Violation” sees the story’s sexual assault as its main subject; it explores the methods that Spofford employs to present the sexual violation and the implications for reading “Circumstance” as a rape narrative. Spofford’s multiple ways of speaking the violation at the heart of “Circumstance” align with Emily Dickinson’s treatment of rape. The possibility that Dickinson recognized in “Circumstance” a story of rape and wrote her own poetic version of it begins to identify a literary stream in nineteenth-century American women’s writing that resists the elision of violence against women and tells of rape in a way acceptable for its time.

Harriet Prescott Spofford’s Development of a Protestant Aesthetic for a Diverse Nation

In “Charlestown,” an historical sketch from her 1871 collection New-England Legends, Harriet Prescott Spofford examines the contest between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism that shaped Americans’ understanding of democracy as well as Spofford’s understanding of her role as an author in an increasingly heterogeneous nation. The sketch focuses on the 1834 burning of the Ursuline Convent and School of Mount Benedict in Charlestown, Massachusetts, by a Protestant mob, an assault that affords Spofford the opportunity to examine the nation’s ability to accommodate difference of all kinds. Spofford adopts a Protestant aesthetic in order to free readers from entrenched bigotry and unify an increasingly diverse nation. She develops a participatory model of creating consensus in an expanding nation that replicates the dynamic of democracy in the public sphere. Spofford’s understanding of the role she plays in the process of imperialism as a woman writer, as well as her sincere efforts to combat bigotry in herself and in her world, require us to reassess her place within the ranks of nineteenth-century American women writers.

“Hope, and Keep Busy”: &lt;em&gt;Little Women&lt;/em&gt; and Critical Pedagogy in the Era of Trump

"Hope, and Keep Busy":Little Women and Critical Pedagogy in the Era of Trump Randi Lynn Tanglen In chapter 16 of Little Women, Marmee must leave Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy to go to the Union army hospital in Washington to care for Mr. March, who is dangerously ill. When the girls first hear of the peril facing their father's life, "strangely the day darkened outside! and . . . suddenly the whole world seemed to change" (130). When the girls wake up the next morning, "[e]verything seemed very strange" (135). Jo hides her tears in the kitchen towel, and Beth and Amy "wore a grave, troubled expression, as if sorrow was a new experience to them" (135). Before their mother leaves, the four sisters gather around Marmee, who tells them to "[g]o on with your work as usual, for work is a blessed solace. Hope, and keep busy; and, whatever happens, remember that you can never be fatherless" (135). Marmee provides her daughters with the reassurance they need when their world becomes newly threatening and uncertain: you can make a difference, you are not alone, you are safe. In the early hours of November 9, 2016, after the election of Donald J. Trump as United States president, I was on the brink of despair. Yet I woke up with Marmee's words, "hope, and keep busy," running through my mind. A few hours later, I met with my nineteenth-century American literature class. The students were looking for guidance and comfort on that dark morning, when "everything seemed very strange." Many of us were in tears, and the students expressed worries about the loss of LGBTQ rights, women's rights, immigrant rights, and civil rights in general in the face of a Trump presidency. In the spirit of Alcott and Marmee, I told them to be strong and brave, to "hope, and keep busy." Before that November morning I had taught Marmee's words—and, to be honest, the novel as a whole—as a platitude to satisfy nineteenth-century women and children with little political power. But over the past two years my cynicism has faded, and I have come to see Marmee's instructions as wisdom for those of us who felt everything change on that day. While I am committed to a critical pedagogy that asks students to question the role of literature in perpetuating social and political inequalities, when my students and I were politically bereft I realized that we needed something to work toward. I can't give [End Page 109] my students the tools to critically dismantle patriarchy, power, and privilege without empowering them with agency, voice, and security. These days I tell students that we can be inspired by Alcott's dedication to social reform and look for its legacies in Little Women. Heeding Marmee's maxim, I've been heartened by throwing myself into my work, developing new courses on nineteenth-century American women writers, reform, and resistance. My once despondent students say that learning about the perseverance of women writers like Alcott makes them feel more secure and confident in their activism and brings structure to the chaos of today's unpredictable political news cycle. Little Women reminds me that those who "hope, and keep busy" engage in a profound act of resistance in our dark political times. Like the moon that shone on Marmee before she left for Washington, Little Women encourages me and my students: "Be comforted, dear soul! There is always light behind the clouds" (134). [End Page 110] Randi Lynn Tanglen Austin College Copyright © 2019 University of Nebraska Press

Her Voice Will Be on the Side of Right: Gender and Power in Women’s Antebellum Antislavery Fiction by Holly M. Kent

Reviewed by: Her Voice Will Be on the Side of Right: Gender and Power in Women’s Antebellum Antislavery Fiction by Holly M. Kent Kara B. Clevinger HER VOICE WILL BE ON THE SIDE OF RIGHT: GENDER AND POWER IN WOMEN’S ANTEBELLUM ANTISLAVERY FICTION, by Holly M. Kent. American Abolitionism and Antislavery. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2017. 216 pp. $55.00 cloth; $46.99 ebook. Was the nineteenth-century woman empowered by the ideologies of true womanhood and separate spheres, or was she confined within the home? This question has defined a persistent debate for scholars of nineteenth-century American women’s literature since it was proposed by Ann Douglas and Jane Tompkins in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Douglas’s critique of the anti-intellectualism of much of women’s literature, clustered under the broad term “sentimentalism,” and Tompkins’s reclamation of that literature and the cultural work it performs, as well as the opening up of the canon of American literature, have inspired countless critical studies of women’s writing that have spanned the range of women’s empowerment. At this point, scholars of the nineteenth century agree: it is complicated. Holly M. Kent’s Her Voice Will Be on the Side of Right: Gender and Power in Women’s Antebellum Antislavery Fiction makes a significant contribution to this debate and the field of antebellum literary scholarship, as Kent explores how women writers intellectually and imaginatively considered the position of women as abolitionist activists and agitators in the United States between 1821 and 1861, arguing that white women writers conceived of gender, not race, as the most significant barrier to social justice and equality. Beginning with early antislavery fiction in the 1820s and the optimism of women writers’ belief that morally superior women could abolish slavery and de-corrupt men, Kent traces a decline in the hope for white women’s ability to effect change in a patriarchal society during each decade leading up to the Civil War. Much of the antislavery fiction Kent analyzes has received little attention from literary scholars, and thus her book is as much a recovery project as it is a compelling assessment of the productions of female antislavery fiction writers. Kent reads short and long-form fiction from well-known authors like Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Elizabeth Margaret Chandler, Lydia Maria Child, E. D. E. N. Southworth, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. She also introduces readers to a valuable sampling of lesser-known and [End Page 453] anonymous authors, such as African American writer Sarah Mapps Douglass, who contributed fiction for young readers to The Liberator, including a piece in August 1832 in which she does not reveal that the virtuous young female protagonist is African American until the end, hoping her young audience will learn a moral lesson in shame for their racist assumptions. Kent places Douglass’s short story within a fascinating comparison of African American and white women writers of antislavery fiction to demonstrate how African American authors took up debates about what society might look like after emancipation, while white authors focused on the liberation plot and held back from writing what came after emancipation. One of the more intriguing conclusions Kent comes to is that white women authors became increasingly uncomfortable with relinquishing conventional ideals of white middle-class femininity and could only imagine African American female characters embodying or desiring these traits rather than portraying new and diverse models of womanhood. The triumph of Kent’s book is the valuable contributions it makes to a number of scholarly conversations about the nineteenth century: antislavery fiction and abolitionist activism, domestic literature and separate spheres ideology, theories of public and private spheres, and the historiography of women and authorship. Kent intervenes in each of these conversations, placing her magnifying glass over fiction and examining how women imagined antislavery action rather than speculating on women’s lived experiences at the time. The result is an insightful and pure literary studies monograph, which is thoroughly researched with expert attention to secondary sources and a rich array of primary sources that made use of wonderful collections at the Boston Library, Smith College, and the Historical Societies of Massachusetts and...

THE AWAKENING (1899): BREAKING WITH THE PARADIGM

Kate Chopin is a important writer whose novel The Awakening (1899) written in the end of Victorian Era in the United States broke away from women's writings of that time. The Novel deals with the condition of nineteenth-century women, a theme totally unpeculiar for that time. For this reason, when Kate Chopin's novel was published, it provoked reactions in its reviews. Critics censured in the national press and taken from circulation. One of the reasons The Awakening was dropped out of sign was that, for the first time, a female main protagonist, Edna Pontellier, explicitly violates “the modes and codes of nineteenth-century American women`s behavior” KEYWORDS : Kate Chopin; Women's writing; Solitary novel; Defy values

Nina Baym: June 14, 1936&#x97;June 15, 2018

Nina Baym: June 14, 1936&#x97;June 15, 2018

Bennett’s Archive I: Lydia Sigourney

Bennett’s Archive I: Lydia Sigourney Elizabeth Petrino Nineteenth-century American women’s poetry has recently come of age. With the arrival of new anthologies and critical volumes, critics have built on Paula Bennett’s pioneering archival work.1 In fact, her landmark Nineteenth-Century American Women Poets: An Anthology (1998) both predates the newly-reconstructed standard American literature anthologies and underscores the aesthetic achievement of many once popular writers, among them a key nineteenth-century woman poet: Lydia Sigourney. Responding to the views of early critics, such as Fred Lewis Pattee in The Feminine Fifties (1940), who disparaged women writers as hack sentimentalists, Bennett’s scholarship also establishes a new way of reading their poetry that emphasizes their legacy within a broad cultural framework. This essay will explore the many ways that Bennett’s anthology and her monograph Poets in the Public Sphere: The Emancipatory Project of American Women’s Poetry, 1800–1900 (2003) advanced the critical conversation. Based on her extensive archival research, Bennett’s essays on Sigourney’s poetic achievement and generic experimentation have inaugurated a full reassessment of her influence. [End Page 234] Countering an earlier essay by Yopie Prins and Virginia Jackson, Bennett’s 2007 article, “Was Sigourney a Poetess? The Aesthetics of Victorian Plenitude in Lydia Sigourney’s Poetry,” takes issue with the newly recovered term Poetess and asks whether it should be applied so widely to American women’s poetry.2 Prins and Jackson’s “Lyrical Studies” responded to various projects recuperating and interpreting transatlantic Victorian women writers, Bennett’s among them.3 They claim that the Poetess occupied a role constructed around well-understood aesthetic conventions. By resurrecting the term, Prins and Jackson seek to dislodge the feminist orthodoxy that the lyrical self embodied in the speaking subject or “I” might be read wholly as the poet’s personal self. Rather, they question the degree to which female authors might be able to identify with the emotion traditionally expressed by speakers within the lyric and argue that the Poetess instead comprises “not a speaker, not an ‘I,’ not a consciousness, not a subjectivity, not a voice, not a persona, not a self.” Unlike Bennett, Prins and Jackson define the theory of women’s writing as “lyrical,” rather than focusing on the “lyric” genre, in order to question the limits to which the Poetess must subscribe but which also doom her to obscurity.4 They claim that British women poets, such as Christina Rossetti, L. E. L., Caroline Norton, George Eliot, Michael Field, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning invoke Sappho, both as harbinger of a female literary tradition rooted in a classical past and as a figure of disappointed love and spendthrift emotion. In doing so, British women poets initiated a Poetess tradition of what Bennett terms “succinctly, self-enclosed poems aestheticizing woman’s pain” that proved both highly popular among readers and effective at reducing the poets themselves to empty ciphers.5 In contrast, Bennett claims that American female poets not only resisted the term Poetess, but that they wrote other types of socially relevant poems.6 In America, editors and publishers, rather than aesthetes and literary historians, [End Page 235] shaped publication history by responding to the literary market, thus creating a more competitive environment for poetry than existed in Britain. Perhaps women in America wrote Poetess poetry, Bennett insists, but so did American men, and their poetic production far exceeded this one type.7 Indeed, while in Britain female poets referred to themselves more often as poetesses, in America, female poets eschewed this term—as they largely also eschewed the Sappho figure—in favor of viewing themselves as working professionals without pretensions to literary aestheticism—as Sigourney describes herself, “a schoolmistress and a literary woman.”8 Unlike in Britain, where women poets responded to aesthetic views, in America the reigning model emphasized literary production and the marketplace forces that made poets, among them Sigourney, household names.9 Given Sigourney’s widespread notoriety and public renown, for instance, the publisher of Godey’s Lady’s Book paid the poet $500 per year simply to list her name on the masthead, capitalizing on her reputation.10 And if male editors and critics in...

Life Writing in the Long Run by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson

Reviewed by: Life Writing in the Long Run by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson Thomas R. Smith (bio) Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. Life Writing in the Long Run. Maize Books, 2016, 730 pp. ISBN 978-1607854098, $39.99. When and if the story of Anglophone studies of life writing from the 1950s to the early 2000s is written, Sidonie Smith (no relation) and Julia Watson's Life Writing in the Long Run will be an invaluable source document, not only because Smith and Watson have been important theorists in the field since the late 1980s, but also because they have been important influences on the development of its criticism and pedagogy. While a major focus of their scholarship has been women's autobiography, this selection of their work, spanning 1991 through 2016, amply demonstrates that they see "the autobiographical"—in many incarnations, in various media, in any part of the world—as their objects of study. Reflecting this broad scope, Life Writing in the Long Run selects a wide range of their coauthored work and single-author essays—from synoptic discussions of women's autobiography, its theory and criticism, to nineteenth-century American women's autobiography, to contemporary uses of personal narratives as witness and testimonio in human rights campaigns, to online and visual self-representations, to narratives of ethnicity and exile. More than any other scholar of autobiographical writing I know of, they have tried to make sense of seemingly all the manifestations of the autobiographical as practiced in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. They have been a powerful force in broadening our understanding of the autobiographical by showing its pervasiveness across media, cultures, and continents. In the introduction, Smith and Watson describe the collection's connecting thread as a tracing of the shift in the early 2000s from the scholarly topic of "autobiography" to the more inclusive field of "life writing" in their own work and that of others. Their book documents this shift well. In the 1990s [End Page 455] they use various forms of the word "autobiography" and, prefiguring the shift, "autobiographical practices." In 2006, they use "life narration," and by 2014, "life writing" is firmly in place. In my view, this shift came about for at least two reasons: 1) the awareness by many students of the autobiographical mode that the classificatory work of parsing genre distinctions among letters, diaries, journals, memoirs, and "autobiography proper" was garnering diminishing returns, suggesting that the genre problem it was trying to solve needed reconceptualization. That problem was that, while the canonical autobiographies most usually studied up to the 1980s were book-length, retrospective, chronological narratives of usually Anglophone males' self-formation and rise to successful adulthood on the model of the bildungsroman, other kinds of self-referential writing, often by women or other marginalized people, did not conform to that model and suffered thereby from second-class status. But since there was no umbrella term but "autobiography" for this non-conforming writing, the word had to serve to name many disparate kinds of writing, some so different from each other as to call into question the ability of the term to specify anything concretely. This semantic confusion bothered everyone in the field, since it led to endless terminological debates that seemed to go nowhere. The other reason for this shift, I believe, was that online writing and visual media offered new forms of self-representation so far removed from traditional retrospective prose narrative autobiography as described by Philippe Lejeune's pacte that "autobiography" became a misnomer. If autobiography was what Lejeune said it was, how could it apply to such rapidly expanding and changing kinds of self-expression and self-representation? While "life writing" cannot adequately describe many visual autobiographical forms, it does create a large tent for verbal self-representations and obviates endless and often unrewarding discussions of the formal differences among the various kinds of autobiographical writing. Using James Olney's constitutive terms for autobiography, "life writing" preserves bios (life) and graphe (writing) but discards autos (self). That may not be a great loss since the "self" component of "autobiography" only establishes a heuristic distinction between biography and autobiography, a distinction first...

"What an Insect Teacheth Thee": Space, Gender, and Species in Lydia Sigourney's Animal Poetry

Along with a handful of other nineteenth-century American women writers, Lydia Sigourney figured prominently in the advocacy of kindness to animals, writing about animals in prose works like Letters to Mothers (1838) and poems published in multiple print venues. Following John Locke, these writers argued that the proper treatment of and engagement with animals was not only evidence of moral and spiritual superiority, but also preparation for adult life. While Sigourney played an important role in the promotion of such rhetoric, she clearly also recognized its limitations. In this article, I look at Sigourney's poems about nuisance creatures—mice and flies, in particular—to argue that her positioning of the nonhuman absolute other in contact with the middle-class domestic woman highlights the unreasonable and often impossible demands placed upon women by the rhetoric of kindness to animals. Sigourney's centering and decentering of the human in these poems prompts a rethinking of how and why animals figure into nineteenth-century American culture.

Theorizing Democratic Feelings, Disagreement, and the Temporal Child in Catharine Maria Sedgwick's &lt;em&gt;The Linwoods&lt;/em&gt;

Theorizing Democratic Feelings, Disagreement, and the Temporal Child in Catharine Maria Sedgwick's The Linwoods Marissa Carrere Written in the wake of the Nullification Crisis over tariffs on manufactured goods in which South Carolina threatened to leave the Union, Catharine Maria Sedgwick's 1835 novel The Linwoods stages the anxieties that condense around the desire to believe that democracy follows timeless certainties and the knowledge that its process necessarily entails negotiating contingent and ephemeral opinions. The Linwoods suggests that such irresolvable tension is vital to democratic thought, and Sedgwick uses the figure of the child to represent that tension. Because of nineteenth-century constructions of children as both malleable and transcendent, the figure of the child permits Sedgwick to dramatize the conflict between the self-evident truth and radical revisability of the Constitution and the patriotic feelings of American citizens. As the novel investigates the nature of both national and political commitments, Sedgwick uses the figural child to assert normative claims in response to her particular politico-historical moment while troubling the theoretical integrity of those claims. In limning Sedgwick's move toward the theoretical realm, my project aims to expand our understanding of how the child operates in the political literary imagination and to recognize Sedgwick's contributions to the archives of democracy. Contextualizing these aims demands that we read nineteenth-century American women's writing through the lens of political theory. Without question, the feminist recovery of nineteenth-century female-authored fiction introduced women writers to the political clime and canon; indeed, the inclusion of women involved disrupting the fantasy of an apolitical or ahistorical [End Page 33] aesthetic canon and recognizing literary texts as politically, socially, and historically contingent. However, literary historians have not fully examined how these texts theorize democratic governance and participation. While we read women's texts for their political valences and explicit political critiques and as political acts themselves, we might also ask how these texts variously theorize democracy not only in the ideological terms of gendered relationships to the political center but also at the level of philosophical principle. Admittedly, in seeking the conceptual nature of political critique I may be trying to tease a distinction that will ever elude us: What is the difference between reading a literary text for its political engagements and as a mode of political theory? How do we discern which aspects of a literary text count as articulations of political critique? Even without resolving these questions, we can acknowledge the need to rethink and revise the disproportionately (white-and) male-authored literary archive of democracy.1 This essay begins to offer a response by reading through the historical in order to reach the conceptual in Sedgwick's writing. the nullification crisis and the temporal child In the opening chapter of The Linwoods, a group of boys on a playground confound their adult audience with the un-childlikeness of their politically charged play. Mr. Linwood turns to his son and asks: "Herbert, can you tell me what these boys are about? They seem rather to be at work than play" (17). Herbert replies that the boys are "throwing up a redoubt to protect [their] fort" and to "keep off the British" (17–18), and Mr. Linwood is appalled by "the seeds of rebellion springing up in their young hot bloods": A loud huzzaing was heard from the fort—"What does that mean?" asked Mr. Linwood. "The whigs are hanging a tory, sir." "The little rebel rascals!—Herbert!—you throwing up your hat and huzzaing too!" (18) With this scene, Sedgwick establishes the intergenerational conflict between loyalist Mr. Linwood and his revolutionary children that the novel will work to resolve. Critical readings of The Linwoods generally characterize this conflict as a domestic political allegory responding to the nationalist concerns of its contemporary moment, in particular the passing of the Revolutionary generation and the threat of disunion raised by the Nullification Crisis of 1832–33.2 By casting these concerns about the current generation's national identity into the moment of its discordant origins, Sedgwick imagines the possibility of a reconciled and [End Page 34] healthy national future through proper models of republican virtue. In keeping with other domestic...

Transatlantic Women: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Great Britain

Transatlantic Women: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Great Britain