Nineteenth-century Women Writers Research Articles

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>

Tombstone, Deadwood, and Dodge City: Re-creating the Frontier WestFictions of Western American Domesticity: Indian, Mexican, and Anglo Women in Print Culture, 1850–1950Failed Frontiersmen: White Men and Myth in the Post-Sixties American Historical Romance

Book Review| September 01 2021 Tombstone, Deadwood, and Dodge City: Re-creating the Frontier WestFictions of Western American Domesticity: Indian, Mexican, and Anglo Women in Print Culture, 1850–1950Failed Frontiersmen: White Men and Myth in the Post-Sixties American Historical Romance Tombstone, Deadwood, and Dodge City: Re-creating the Frontier West. By Britz, Kevin and Nichols, Roger L., Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press. 2018. xiii, 266 pp. Cloth, $32.95; e-book available.Fictions of Western American Domesticity: Indian, Mexican, and Anglo Women in Print Culture, 1850–1950. By Zink, Amanda J., Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press. 2018. xiii, 339 pp. Cloth, $75.00; e-book, $75.00.Failed Frontiersmen: White Men and Myth in the Post-Sixties American Historical Romance. By Donahue, James J., Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press. 2015. viii, 222 pp. Cloth, $59.50; paper, $27.50; e-book, $27.50. Janet Dean Janet Dean Janet Dean is professor and chair of English and cultural studies at Bryant University, where she writes and teaches about Native American literature, nineteenth-century women writers, and the cultures of political and social protest in the United States. She is the author of Unconventional Politics: Nineteenth-Century Women Writers and U.S. Indian Policy (2016), as well as essays, chapters, and reviews in a number of journals and collections. Her current work explores the significance of material culture in Native American literature. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2021) 93 (3): 533–536. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-9361349 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Janet Dean; Tombstone, Deadwood, and Dodge City: Re-creating the Frontier WestFictions of Western American Domesticity: Indian, Mexican, and Anglo Women in Print Culture, 1850–1950Failed Frontiersmen: White Men and Myth in the Post-Sixties American Historical Romance. American Literature 1 September 2021; 93 (3): 533–536. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-9361349 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Literature Search Advanced Search Frederick Jackson Turner famously declared the United States frontier closed in 1893, but of course he was wrong: you can’t close an idea. As many historians, literary scholars, and cultural critics since Turner have suggested, the frontier is not a place in time but a grand mythology, a story of national formation in which violent conflict gives way to white patriarchal authority and the domestication of “wild” spaces and people. Rehearsed in every form of art and popular culture, frontier mythology is also a broken promise, since the moral order, homogeneous social accord, and economic prosperity it ascribes to white settlement never arrived. As such, it prompts Americans’ continuous engagement; we return to it again and again, either to reinvest in its premises or, more productively, to reevaluate and challenge them. Though they differ in the depths of their investigations, the books under review join the ongoing project of tracking... Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

George Sand comique éd. par Olivier Bara et François Kerlouégan

Reviewed by: George Sand comique éd. par Olivier Bara et François Kerlouégan Maria G. Traub Bara, Olivier, et François Kerlouégan, éd. George Sand comique. UGA, 2020. ISBN 978-2-37747-182-9. Pp. 384. A longstanding notion that George Sand's writing is "spleenétique," and that the comic is generally absent from it, is challenged in this work, a study divided into four broad sections covering comedic form and register, those who laugh, getting laughs, and the political and ethical in comedy. Twenty-one essays spread beneath these rubrics focus upon diverse aspects of comedy, beginning with the intellectual and cultural formation of Sand. As a child she read the works of eighteenth-century philosophers, notably Diderot and Sterne, found in the library at Nohant. Sand, a nineteenth-century woman writer who loved life, never abandoned her quest for a joie de vivre. Specific examples are drawn from her correspondence in personal and business matters, from her autobiography and from theatrical works. The excerpts provided cover a spectrum of emotions from affectionate to seductive, jovial to satirical, polemical to inspirational. From her autobiography, one learns the influence of family. Anecdotes, such as one from a letter of Sand's father, describe his participation in a farcical theatrical entertainment among soldiers. For the most part, Sand gathered a genteel acculturation from her aristocratic father's side, while from her mother she received exposure to the spicy, spontaneous talk of common people. Such language was not lost on her. She used it to advantage when animating peasant characters in her writing. Sand's education—literary, artistic, and experiential—enabled her to create distance and objectivity in relationships. She learned not to take herself so seriously. In correspondence with close friends, she used generous doses of self-mockery. The comic in portraits of her contemporaries is expressed affectionately when describing Balzac, a writer who exuded enormous self-satisfaction, never tiring of discussing his work. As for Stendhal, whom she encountered while traveling, she was quite satirical. Stendhal offended her by seeking to uncover weaknesses in people, then mercilessly criticizing them. Her portraiture was not only verbal. Fanciful sketches appeared at the bottom of manuscripts, i.e., Spiridion, and letters to her editor Buloz. Sand shifted easily to the sublime when describing those friends whom she considered artistically gifted, such as Delacroix and Marie Dorval. The imagination and stimulus gleaned from association with musicians and singers motivated Sand to write in an entirely new genre, "opéra-comique littéraire," as found in Teverino. The commedia dell'arte and the works of Ruzante also exerted influence on Sand. From these she captured an innocent buffoonery, incorporating it into both plays and novels. Comedy was also used to support equality issues. In her novels, she put comedy to use in battles to favor women. Well-placed humor became a weapon of social combat. Within her novels, the characters who opposed values she defended were targeted for satire. While not exclusively a "comic" writer, the comic infiltrated myriad topics for Sand, whose expression conveyed reconciliation with self and others. This work provides a useful research tool. It offers insight into her use of laughter and invites us to share in it. [End Page 228] [End Page 229] Maria G. Traub Neumann University (PA) Copyright © 2021 American Association of Teachers of French

Gender and Genre in Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson's Periodical Writing

Abstract Despite scholarly recovery of many nineteenth-century women writers, especially those publishing mainly in periodicals, the fiction, travel writing and journalism of Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson (1840–1914) are still neglected. Situating Van de Grift Stevenson in the context of late nineteenth-century US periodical culture, this article considers how many of the author’s periodical writings cross not only geographical but also generic boundaries. Van de Grift Stevenson’s periodical publishing appears in a variety of modes and genres, at times with journalistic material entering her fiction, domestic life including recipes inserted in her journalism, and autobiography glimpsed in both fiction and journalism. The article examines this author’s transatlantic periodical writings in the context of gender and genre, noting the ways in which these categories intersect throughout her authorship. Focusing especially on the author’s regional writing as seen in her non-fiction ‘cookbook articles’ Ramblings of a Housewife and the short story ‘The Warlock’s Shadow’, the article argues that Van de Grift Stevenson’s blending of regional and domestic modes of writing presents a specific interrogation of cultural and geographical identities.

The Representation and Reappraisal of St. Monica of Hippo in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing

Abstract: Since she was commemorated as a saint in 387, Monica of Hippo has come to represent ideals of motherhood to successive generations. This article considers how three nineteenth-century women writers—Anna Jameson, Christina Rossetti, and Harriet Beecher Stowe—engage with this legacy to offer new ways of imagining the empowering social potential of faith. In my analysis, I indicate how they contribute to the Incarnation-inflected discourse of the second half of the nineteenth century and provide a helpful backdrop to understanding recent feminist appraisals of Augustine.

Unconventional Politics: Nineteenth-Century Women Writers and U.S. Indian PolicyArchives of Labor: Working-Class Women and Literary Culture in the Antebellum United States

Unconventional Politics: Nineteenth-Century Women Writers and U.S. Indian PolicyArchives of Labor: Working-Class Women and Literary Culture in the Antebellum United States

Sarah Wootton, Byronic Heroes in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing and Screen Adaptation

<scp>Sarah Wootton</scp>, <i>Byronic Heroes in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing and Screen Adaptation</i>

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

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

Byronic Heroes in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing and Screen Adaptation by Sarah Wootton

Byronic Heroes in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing and Screen Adaptation by Sarah Wootton

Mimicry, Originality, and Sarah Piatt’s Ekphrastic Failures

Mimicry, Originality, and Sarah Piatt’s Ekphrastic Failures Christa Holm Vogelius (bio) Sarah Piatt might seem a strange case study for originality and mimicry in nineteenth-century women’s verse, given her own strained relation to poetic convention. Her layered dialogue, distancing irony, and sharp, often cutting turns produce an effect askew of polished gentility. There are children here, but they are not innocent; there is romance, but it often ends badly; there are paintings and beautiful things, but the sense they leave us is more somber depth than reflective surface. Nonetheless, it is precisely Piatt’s engagement with and resistance to convention that make her poetry worth thinking about through these terms. This essay considers Piatt’s use of mirroring images and mimicry to test the boundaries between original and copy. This testing leads organically to Piatt’s ekphrastic verse, which as a detailed verbal description of a visual artwork is both in its basic function a literal copy and one that also deals very explicitly with the imitative function of images as behavioral models. If the nineteenth-century woman poet was on the one hand associated with a transparent, artless sentimentality and a seamless embodiment of her own verse, and on the other with imitation and a failure to truly originate, Piatt’s poems, particularly her ekphrases, [End Page 300] present an escape hatch from the traditional Poetess mode. These poems work within and unsettle a tradition in which, as Yopie Prins explains, the Poetess was a “detachable figure that exceeded the work of any actual woman poet,” “a repeatable trope, a personification performed by female poets.”1 Piatt’s poems engage sentimentality, but they do so through irony’s distancing lens, complicating the notion of poetic embodiment—by, in Karen Sánchez-Eppler’s terms, “mak[ing] evident the fragmented nature of lyric utterance … [and] lay[ing] bare the contradictory connection between embodiment and representation.”2 At the same time, the obvious attention to craft evident in Piatt’s poems denies the role of the Poetess as an astute mimic of form. What develops from this engagement and resistance are poems whose layering of voices elude a particular conceptual center and copies that perpetuate with no clear original, in a nineteenth century version of hyperreality that slips past the basic ethics of poetic embodiment. Piatt’s verse, in other words, may seem to us innovative in its anticipation of twentieth- and twenty-first-century modes of thought and writing, but it achieves this effect through its direct engagement with nineteenth-century Poetess tropes. The gift that Piatt gives us, then—and Paula Bernat Bennett through her—is the ability to see this mode as not (just) a harbinger of modernity or postmodernity, but as a state of mind that was already deeply embedded in nineteenth-century conventions, already a part of the way that writers and critics talked with and about this poetry. This essay begins by discussing the vocabulary of nineteenth-century editorial writing in relation to both feminist theory and our contemporary critical conversations. The second section frames Piatt’s verse of mirroring imagery in this context, while the final section, on Piatt’s ekphrases and ekphrastic theory, argues that this work is emblematic of her poetics as well as representative of the contradictory demands on the nineteenth-century woman writer. [End Page 301] i: the terms of criticism: origination, mirroring, and mimicry In the preface to the first edition of The Female Poets of America (1848), editor Rufus Griswold opens with an assertion that to his contemporary readers must have seemed a platitude: “It is less easy to be assured of the genuineness of literary ability in women than in men.”3 Women’s verse, particularly the genteel newspaper and periodical verse that Griswold strove to consolidate, had a lot to prove in these early years of nationalist literary collection. Anthologies like Griswold’s attempted to define, however unsystematically, what should count as American literature at a point when writers and editors were pushing back against European models. And “genuineness of literary ability” often hinged on tenuous and subjective terms like originality at a time when women’s writing was undeniably dominated by both...

Antislavery discourses in nineteenth-century German American women’s fiction

ABSTRACTThe essay discusses the transatlantic as well as the gendered perspectives on US American slavery in the works of two nineteenth-century German immigrant women writers, Therese Robinson (writing under the pseudonym Talvj, 1797–1870) and Mathilde Franziska Anneke (1817–1884). I will argue that German immigrant women were not only critical observers of the practice of slavery in the USA but they used antislavery discourses to negotiate German women’s efforts to assimilate to American culture. In nineteenth-century transatlantic culture, German immigrant women engaged in and commented upon intersecting discourses on antislavery, Americanization, and womanhood. With regard to discussions of gender, race, and slavery in nineteenth-century US American fiction, writings of German immigrant women or literary representations of German immigration to the USA have rarely been considered. This essay thus shows how fiction written by German immigrant women expands the scope of US American antislavery literature. Its discussion of two lesser known German immigrant women authors contributes to the research on German American literary culture and transatlantic women’s history.

From Quill to Mouse: Digitizing the ‘Woman of Letters’ 1861-1922

Abstract: This article describes a project in Italian Digital Women’s Studies, In-visiblewomen.org, which is currently being developed in collaboration with our two universities, and consists of an interpretive, thematic website on the material culture of Italian female intellectuals between 1861 and 1922. We envision In-visiblewomen.org as a tool that allows to investigate women’s agency in promoting social change and the interconnections between women writers’ material culture, their private space, their access to the public sphere and the impact of the new media revolution on women’s social status. Unlike the majority of existing digital projects on women writers, ours is not only a digitized text-bank or a mere collection of bio-bibliographical data. Rather, it will be a multi-layered, interpretive platform stemming from the expert contribution of scholars in the field. Our time boundaries comprise the period between Italian unification (1861) and the beginning of the fascist era (1922). Compared to other historical periods (the Renaissance and the fascist and post-fascist decades, for example) this highly transformative era for women’s cultural production and consumption has inexplicably generated less scholarly attention. Using a commissioned oil painting representing a late nineteenth century woman writer’s virtual study as interface, this project will be the first of its kind in the field of Italian Women Studies. Each object in this ideal study (pen, ink bottle, letters, magazines etc.) will be clickable and will lead to an encyclopedia-type entry. Through the painting, users will be able to access two searchable databases organized hierarchically and interconnected through tagging: a themes database, and an authors database.

La imaginación nacional en María de Montiel (1861) de Mercedes Rosas: historia patria y trama sentimental

In María de Montiel (1861), the first novel by a nineteenth-century Argentine woman writer, Mercedes Rosas, the destiny of heroes and heroines is always linked to national history. Following Doris Sommer's critical perspective, it can be said that national formation and passionate love are mutually implicated in this text. Thus, María de Montiel can be read not only as a political contribution to the national project, but also as a female and federal perspective during the so-called period of National Organization in Argentina.

‘Con el ropaje de la novela’

This article examines a text by the nineteenth-century Peruvian writer Margarita Praxedes Munoz to explore how she plays with the boundaries of the emerging form of the novel to bring together scientific knowledge and experiences that do not fit normative social models of womanhood. Through an analysis of the text as autobiographical fiction and its portrayal of the figure of the angel del hogar (angel of the house), this article argues that we need to find new ways of reading this type of text that consider how the conditions of production both create and limit the spaces that nineteenth-century women writers have for expressing their lived realities.

A Translemic Analysis of Maria Edgeworth’s "L’Absent ou La famille irlandaise à Londres" (1814)

After the publication of "Castle Rackrent" (1800), Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849) became one of the most famous nineteenth-century women writers in Great Britain, and her oeuvre was quickly translated on the Continent. This article analyzes the French translation of Edgeworth’s Irish tale "The Absentee" (1812) within the framework of Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS). For that purpose, both the source and the target text will be contextualized following Itamar Even-Zohar’s ideas on the literary system which is understood as a network of relations between elements depending on each other. As will be shown, the text prepared for the French-speaking readers greatly departs from the original text published in Great Britain, a fact which should be considered by any research on Edgeworth’s reception in Europe.

И анђео и лудакиња: женски лик и женско читање у роману „Вољена“ Тони Морисон

The paper is concerned with Toni Morrison’s contemporary novel Beloved , from the point of view of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s notions of the madwoman in the attic and the anxiety of authorship . The first term refers to the rebellious female hero from the nineteenth-century women’s literature, whereas the latter concerns the fear of writing as a male profession, felt by the nineteenth-century women writers. It is precisely this anxiety that influenced these writers to create the madwoman character, who opposes the patriarchal system in a latent manner. Starting from this critical perspective and asking the question whether contemporary women’s literature also contains such anxiety, the paper focuses on the main female character of the novel Beloved , initially published in 1987. The aim is to point out the difference which separates contemporary Toni Morrison from the nineteenth-century women writers, but is not solely temporal. This difference has to do with the character of the postmodern age, but is mainly related to a shift from the manner in which the nineteenth-century women writers created their female characters. The paper analyses this literary distinctiveness, but also attempts to find a broader meaning of this originality as seen from the point of view of contemporary women’s literature and reading. By focusing on Sethe – the main character of Beloved , the paper points out that Toni Morrison breaks with the tradition maintained by her literary ancestors in that she does not divide her female characters into obedient and recalcitrant ones in relation to the patriarchal system. Instead, she creates a character who is both a motherly angel and a madwoman committing infanticide, thus making it possible for her readers to interpret the novel from the perspective of a woman with ambivalent roles and specific experience. In this way, she also deconstructs the male writing and reading rules. By doing so, Morrison conveys a message that the anxiety of authorship of a contemporary woman novelist can be if not totally cured then certainly lessened by means of writing.

Hermann's Handmaidens? Male Archetypes and German Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing

Despite their lack of franchise, women participated actively in the discourse of unity in the emerging German nation with their pens—one of the few means of accessing the public arena open to them. This article examines how Johanna Franul von Weiβenthurn, Louise von François and Clara Viebig, writing in 1813, 1859 and 1913, respectively, invoked in their texts the figure of Hermann, the first-century warrior who led the Cheruscans against the occupying Roman force. It posits, firstly, that Hermann is an archetypal figure who served in successive eras of the long nineteenth century as a repository of collective hopes for unity and national strength in times of danger and uncertainty, and, secondly, that the literary transformations of this archetype—from historical figure to more contemporary re-imaginings in the form of a patriotic German student fighting against Napoleon and a Berlin blacksmith of the pre-unification era—reveal a variety of female concerns, which can be interpreted as gender-determined manifestations of the male archetype and which serve to nuance the conventional image of masculine heroism.

The Surrogate-Author Function in &lt;i&gt;The Portrait of a Lady:&lt;/i&gt; A Theory of Influence

Madame Merle of Henry James's The Portrait of Lady (1880-81) represents the paradox of authorship: she functions at once as the most prolific creator in the novel and the character most aggressively rendered invisible by the social relations she helps produce. When Madame Merlewas neither writing, nor painting, nor touching the piano, she was usually employed upon wonderful tasks of rich embroidery, cushions, curtains, decorations for the chimney-piece; an art in which her bold, free invention was as noted as the agility of her needle. She was never idle . . .1James devotes nearly the entire chapter 19 of The Portrait of Lady to elaborating her fecund artistry, the of her aesthetic interests, and her loquacious and confidential discourses with Isabel, the consummate object of her artfulness. The performativity, range, nature, and effect of Madame Merle's artistry - from her piano playing to her innumerable letters to her wildly effective orchestration of Isabel Archer's marriage to Gilbert Osmond - correspond to James's portrait of one of his favorite authors: French novelist George Sand. According to James, Madame Sand exhibits a greater fecundity, considering the quality of her work, than any writer of our day.2 What's more, her great quality from the first was the multiplicity of her interests.3 Imbedded in the richly metaphorical accretion of Madame Merle's character are signs of James's perspective on female authorship, the gender of artistic creation, and nearly everything he had to say about the controversial, crossdressing George Sand.How can we pursue connections such as these without reductively equating Madame Merle with George Sand? Reaching beyond the simple gesture of equivalence requires exploring the dynamics among James, his critical conception of Sand, and his characterization of Madame Merle. It means addressing how the elements of fiction emerge out of critical act. As James's implicit analysis of Sand's literature and lifestyle, Madame Merle becomes rhetorical proxy through which he works out his fascination with Sand and his evolving definition of literary mastery. Madame Merle functions as surrogate author. Through her characterization, James tries on the experience of nineteenth-century woman writer at the same time as he novelizes theory of mastery that circumscribes the female artist. The result is an implicit act of literary criticism that suggests new methods of studying both authorship and influence.For twenty-first-century critics, the term seems tarnished and outdated. Viewed as practice akin to biographical criticism, influence analysis connotes patriarchal traditionalism and the dusty obsolescence of topic in vogue over thirty years ago.4 And yet, new work in transnational literary studies demands theoretical vocabulary for analyzing precisely the kinds of cross-cultural exchanges that constitute influence. Studying, for example, transatlantic genres, immigrant fictions, or global cultural exchanges is form of influence analysis. Critics today do not embrace theories of influence or intertextuality largely, I think, because these warring terms are mired in debates that diminished the usevalue of both while failing to unite their different methodological benefits. This essay asks, how can we revitalize influence and intertextuality for twenty-first-century scholarship that so clearly treads the same interpretive ground? I propose concept called the surrogate -author function, which argues for the intrinsic function of literary criticism in fiction. Beginning with sketch of the antagonistic critical history of influence and intertextuality, I construct this model by engaging recent debates about critique and revising the hermeneutical strategies of Michel Foucault, Nancy K. Miller, and Harold Bloom. In the essay's final section, I offer reading of The Portrait of Lady that illustrates the possibilities of this theory for scholars today. …

Style, Gender, and Fantasy in Nineteenth-Century American Women's Writing (review)

Reviewed by: Style, Gender, and Fantasy in Nineteenth-Century American Women's Writing David Greven Beam, Dorri . 2010. Style, Gender, and Fantasy in Nineteenth-Century American Women's Writing. New York: Cambridge University Press. $89.00 hc. $71.00 e-book. 270 pp. Correction: The print version of this review contained a typographical error in the first sentence. At the request of the publisher, the online article and pdf have been corrected. Dorri Beam's Style, Gender, and Fantasy is a bracing study of écriture feminine in nineteenth-century American writing. What makes Beam's book valuable is her rigorous and passionate exploration of a specifically feminine poetics in the period. Disabusing the reader of any staid notions of what constitutes literary value, Beam makes a persuasive case for a legitimate female literary style that emphasizes what she calls "highly wrought" language and imagery. Often dismissed as flowery and frilly, this style, through Beam's insightful and tough-minded presentation, comes into its own as a highly self-conscious mode of literary art-making and self-expression. Beam's work significantly adds to our understanding of what was at stake for the nineteenth-century woman writer on multiple levels—and not least, her claim to aesthetic legitimacy to begin with. The standards of taste and decorum relegated even popular women writers (and women were by far the more popular writers of the era) to the sidelines. Beam restores the importance of female writing in the century to contemporary literary studies, but crucially he does this by taking women's writing seriously as an aesthetic project. In so doing, she also illuminates what was generally at stake for this century's literature in aesthetic terms. Regarding the latter, Beam's work expands the emergent scholarly interest in literary style in the period. Indeed, many prominent male writers of the period have often been accused of being prolix or florid—Edgar Allan Poe comes to mind. While the entire question of nineteenth-century literary style will now be reexamined in light of Beam's project, her focus will have its most salutary effect in our sustained reappraisal of significant figures such as Margaret Fuller and Harriet Prescott Spofford, among others, artists whose challenging work has often been simultaneously dismissed and misunderstood, especially in aesthetic terms. Writers such as Spofford have been ignored or undervalued until very recently because they offer no "proposal[s] for practical change, . . . no alternative to the cult of feminine beauty" they foreground (134). Yet Beam demonstrates persuasively that Spofford "mines [End Page 165] the possibilities of gorgeous or ornamental style for a woman writer, perversely developing its potential as a feminist aesthetic" (134). Personally, I find Beam's appreciation for Spofford's perversity as bracing as her elucidation of what Spofford—a languorously, sensually weird writer—does with the word. For Beam, nineteenth-century women's writing is characterized by a "stylistic floridity" that invites a "trance-like entrance" into a literary world in which "fruits flush, waters brim and cascade, color pulses, and light saturates"; the "personified elements of nature—sun, rocks, and flowers—take on lives of their own and speak to alternative sensual ways of being in the world that marriage will imperil" (2). Surprisingly, Beam makes no mention of the great French feminist Hélène Cixous's dynamic and controversial theory of l'écriture féminine, literally "women's writing." Regardless of how Beam might view Cixous's work, it would have been interesting and also helpful to see her engage with the theorist's ideas. In any event, Cixous's ideas take on a new force for me if I link them to the historical context Beam provides. "Language that was transparent, that did not grant immediate access to the text or to the author," Beam writes, "was inappropriate for a woman writer"; language that evinced "labor" disrupted limited notions of female propriety. Writing with a flourish, an accentuated personality, further disrupted these standards by flaunting style, a "dubious accessory" (4). The highly, almost disorientingly stylized language and imagery of writers like Spofford—so routinely dismissed or ignored for precisely these reasons—take on a new purposefulness here. What has seemed like...

New Girls and Bandit Brides: Female Narcissism and Lesbian Desire in Margaret Fuller's &lt;em&gt;Summer on the Lakes&lt;/em&gt;

New Girls and Bandit Brides: Female Narcissism and Lesbian Desire in Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes David Greven In July 1843, Margaret Fuller published her essay “The Great Lawsuit. Man versus Men. Woman versus Women” in the Dial, the major transcendentalist magazine, of which she was one of the editors; she later expanded it for publication in book form in 1845 with its title changed to Woman in the Nineteenth Century. During the period between publishing “The Great Lawsuit” and Woman, Fuller traveled to Niagara and the Great Lakes. The work that emerged from this trip, Summer on the Lakes, in 1843, published in 1844, has been regarded as one of this author’s most significant. In this essay, I argue that what makes the book particularly interesting to studies of gender and sexuality in the period is the light it sheds on her awareness of same-sex desire and its relationship to antebellum gender politics. In Summer’s Mariana narrative, Fuller links her critique of constrictive gender roles and their dynamics to the experience and implications of same-sex desire within a female homosocial environment; the play between collective gender identity and singular queerness provides the central drama of this narrative. From the prevailing critical perspective shaped by the theories of the French social historian Michel Foucault in his influential History of Sexuality, there has been a long-standing view, only recently challenged, that modern sexual identities such as lesbian and homosexual are a late-nineteenth-century invention, the result of the creation of new taxonomies of sexual identity that date from the 1860s and the subsequent rise of sexological and related legal discourses (43, 15–51). Writing in the wake of Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s early study of intensely passionate female friendships, “The Female World of Love and Ritual,” many scholars have disputed or at least deemphasized, as Smith-Rosenberg did, the erotic nature of these female friendships in early America, [End Page 37] arguing that what appears to contemporary readers as erotic passion was the conventional language of nineteenth-century friendship and other forms of platonic love. New waves of scholars, however, have been challenging such positions. Of specific relevance to this essay, several scholars have argued for the presence of eroticism between women and even for the legitimacy of using the term lesbian in texts prior to the late-nineteenth-century era.1 Within the growing field of Fuller scholarship, the question of same-sex desire has drawn increasing attention in the past two decades. Mary E. Wood writes persuasively about Fuller’s specifically lesbian themes: “By looking for lesbian positionality in the writings of Margaret Fuller in the light of the discourse on sexuality of a specific historical period and social context,” she argues, “we can begin to see that notions of lesbian ‘identity’ were already being constructed . . . well before sexologists named lesbianism as medically deviant in the 1880s” (4). Claudia Card discusses the lesbian significance of Fuller’s work as one that lies in its thematic and textual diversity (60–61), and Jeffrey Steele argues, as well, that Fuller explored homoerotic feelings in her work (66). In her essay “Essential, Portable, Mythical Margaret Fuller,” Mary Loeffelholz argues for the as yet unimagined possibilities that recognizing Fuller as a lesbian writer might mean for periodizing and anthologizing nineteenth-century women writers. Nicole Tonkovich also analyzes lesbian themes in the Mariana episode in Domesticity with a Difference (175–77, 185, 199–200). Given the important work from several critics on the subject of Fuller’s lesbian themes, then, it is surprising that Summer on the Lakes has not been reexamined in this light. As Meg McGavran Murray describes in her biography of the author, Fuller underwent a crisis of gender and sexual identity in 1839 and 1840, a period in which she was besieged by conflicting feelings toward other women (31). Summer is a crucial text for the question of same-sex desire in Fuller’s work, reflective of her personal struggles but also of her dynamic attempts to make sense of them. Because Summer is so resonant in these terms, it is also relevant to the contested issue of same-sex desire in...