Nineteenth-century Women Writers Research Articles

Laura Jane Curtis Bullard (1831-1912)

Like so many other once-prominent nineteenth-century women writers, Laura Jane Curtis Bullard seems to have fallen from history and memory. Curtis Bullard (1831-1912) was a novelist, editor, and activist who succeeded Susan B. Anthony as the editor of the suffrage newspaper, the Revolution, but she rarely exists even at the level of a footnote in books and articles about American social and literary history.1 One of the exceptions is Beneath the American Renaissance by David S. Reynolds, who declares, "Of all the oversights of literary and social historians of America, few are more heinous than the almost complete neglect of Laura Curtis Bullard" (393). Fifteen years have passed since Reynolds praised Curtis Bullard, but her work and her life remain for the most part neglected.2 Yet her texts and life offer us exciting new opportunities to explore questions of popular and elite literature, the role of women in the literary marketplace, political debates about marriage, divorce, and free love, and the cultural history of the woman's rights movement in the nineteenth century.3 Laura Jane Curtis was born, rather appropriately, in Freedom, Maine, on Nov. 21, 1831.4 She was the eldest of the five children of Lucy and Jeremiah Curtis (Mosher 17),5 who in the 1830s started a company in Bangor to sell Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup, a morphine-based tonic used to soothe aches and pains, such as teething in children. Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup later became one of the most popular patent medicines of the period, marketed through lush advertisements of mothers and children and an annual book of recipes. Indeed, the syrup became such a part of the popular culture that in 1879 Edward Elgar wrote a well-known adagio for wind quintet named "Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup," and A. E. Housman mentioned the medicine in his comic poem "The Shades of Night Were Falling Fast." While Jeremiah Curtis was building the family business, he was also politically active as an abolitionist, serving as vice president of the Liberty Party, also called the Abolitionist Party, in Maine ("The Movement"). In November 1847, when Laura was sixteen, Jeremiah Curtis ran—and lost quite soundly—as the Liberty Party candidate for a seat in Congress ("National Intelligencer"). In the early 1850s as his business continued to prosper, Jeremiah Curtis moved his company and family to New York City (Holcombe 116).6 Jeremiah Curtis's political activism must have helped to inspire his daughter's interest in [End Page 74] social responsibility and the rhetoric of rights and reform. By the time she was twenty-three, she had published her first novel, Now-a-days!, the story of a young woman, Esther Hastings, who rejects a marriage proposal and leaves Bangor after the death of her once-wealthy father to earn her living as a teacher in backwoods Maine.7 Although Esther cares for the people of Aroostock County, like so many antebellum social activists and workers, she also wants them to change to reflect her own middle-class education and values. Esther finds happiness in her work, but, at the very end of the novel, agrees to marry her former suitor, now a widower with children. Although Now-a-Days! has received very little critical attention, it deserves to be read within the framework of the female bildungsroman, pioneer stories, and the tradition of realism and regionalism, especially for Curtis Bullard's rich, historical detail of Maine backwoods life, the lumber industry, and representation of New England dialects.8 Two years later in 1856, Curtis Bullard published the radical woman's rights novel Christine: or, Woman's Trials and Triumphs with DeWitt and Davenport of New York. Christine is a sensational story about a young woman who speaks out against the sexual exploitation of women and rejects her suitor when she learns he has seduced a young girl. Christine, the heroine, leaves her rural home and shocks her family and friends by becoming a woman...

"I Like These Plants That You Call Weeds": Historicizing American Women's Nature Writing

In spite of the flowering of anthologies and criticism concerning American women's nature writing, ecocritics have concentratedon a small group of writings and on twentieth-century authors. The reasons for such omissions are numerous. Many nineteenth-century women's writings remain relatively inaccessible, in spite of the exponential growth in recent years of collections and reprint series. Moreover, in earlier writing the author's attitude toward nature is frequently ambiguous or complicated, making the literature resistant to recuperation, especially by critics seeking a relatively unproblematized, even idealistic, connection between women and nature. Much of this writing also evinces a high degree of genre hybridity, rendering it amenable to interpretation within a number of different literary traditions. Finally, critics of American women's nature writing have omitted consideration of nineteenth-century works because of the absence of satisfactory critical tools. Advocating the continued expansion of genres and modes in our understanding of American women's nature writing, this essay underscores the synthetic vision of nineteenth-century women writers, who are often more likely to regard nature in the context of gender politics or struggles for social amelioration than as a separate political or cultural concern. As a whole, the essay considers representations of women and nature; enlarges the tradition of American nature writing; and broadens its theoretical foundation.

Sappho in the Shadows: Essays on the Work of German Women Poets of the Age of Goethe (1749-1832) (review)

Goethe Yearbook 431 Anthony Harper and Margaret Ives, eds., Sappho in the Shadows: Essays on the Work of German Women Poets of the Age of Goethe (1749-1832). Berne, Berlin, Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 2000. 280 pp. While women playwrights and novelists of the Age of Goethe have been the subject of extensive research over the past twenty years, female poets of the same period have received less scholarly attention. In part, this is because women's poetry, frequently scattered throughout various journals, is both more difficult to locate and harder to recognize as a literary work than are longer prose or dramatic texts. Few women poets of the age managed to collect and publish their work in book form; posthumous anthologies of women's poetry, like Gisela BrinkerGabler 's Deutsche Dichterinnen vom 16. fahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart or Susan Cocalis's The Defiant Muse: German Feminist Poems from the Middle Ages to the Present (both 1986) are rare and have usually not been kept in print. If women poets of the age are under-researched compared to female novelists, diarists, playwrights or epistolary authors, there is good reason to assume that they were also more numerous than female authors in other genres, that poetry, in fact, constituted one of the predominant literary genres for women writers. The time constraints and the constant interruptions by household tasks and childcare that characterized most of their writing lives must have resulted in working conditions more favorable to the creation of short genres like poetry or letters than longer works like dramas or novels. Sappho in the Shadows defines itself as an introductory study of seven eighteenth - and early nineteenth-century German women poets; its goal is to provide "contextual information about their lives and works accompanied by samples of their poetry in the original German, followed by translations into English" (Harper and Ives, "Introduction," 11). Aside from the essays on Friederike Bran (by Brian Keith-Smith) and Annette von Droste-Hülshoff (by Marion E. Gibbs), all chapters in the volume are authored by one of the co-editors (Margaret Ives on Anna Louisa Karsch, Gabriele Baumberg, and Karoline von Gündenode, Anthony Harper on Sophie Mereau and Luise Hensel). Appended to each essay is a short selection of the author's poetry in the original German and English translation. Bibliographies of manuscripts, archival materials, editions of poetry and primary texts, biographies, reference works, and secondary sources on each author are appended to the volume. Harper and Ives's introduction characterizes the undertaking as influenced by what researchers in German women's studies have referred to as the "feminist archaeology" of the 1970s and early 1980s, as part of the project of (re> discovering largely obscure women writers. It seems a strange principle to apply to this volume, since only two of the seven women discussed here, Gabriele Baumberg and Friederike Bran, are in need of such discovery and introductory assessment; the others—Karsch, Gündenode, Mereau, Hensel and certainly Droste -Hülshoff—have all been the subject of both descriptive and analytical research, research that to my thinking transcends the largely biographical treatment most of these authors receive here. As the introduction makes clear, the organizing principle of the volume is chronological and biographical rather than generic: poetry as a genre and the status of these writers as poets vis-à -vis contemporary 432 Book Reviews women writers in other genres is not thematized. That the volume's methodological orientation was inspired by feminist research of the 1970s and 1980s rather than more recent methodologies expresses itself not only in the stated necessity to rediscover or "introduce" these women writers, a necessity that could be argued with in five of the seven cases presented here, but also in the way in which many of these authors are contextualized in literary history, namely vis-à -vis or as opposed to contemporary male writers. In this volume, eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century women writers are placed much further into the "shadows" than research of the 1990s has made them out to be: The famous dramatic and epistolary author Luise Gottsched is viewed in the same way in which she appears in the "introductory" research of...

The Political Work of Northern Women Writers and the Civil War, 1850–1872 (review)

For more than two decades, literary critics and historians have recovered the work of nineteenth-century women writers. Rather than focus on aesthetic attributes, much of this scholarship emphasizes "cultural work": the ways authors helped construct or subvert the social, cultural, and ideological systems of their day. As her title suggests, Lyde Cullen Sizer belongs to this school. She argues that women of the Civil War era used publication to participate in a political system that excluded them from explicit representation. Moreover, their writings engaged central and emerging divisions within Northern society, even as Union fought Confederacy.

From 'Political' to 'Human' Economy: The Visions of Harriet Martineau and Frances Wright

The marginalization or exclusion of women from economic theory has a long and distinguished pedigree. Michele A. Pujol, in her groundbreaking study Feminism and Anti-Feminism in Early Economic Thought (1998), wryly observes that whilst Adam Smith devotes an entire page to the question of women's economic activity in his Wealth of Nations , women 'are nowhere mentioned in Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy and Taxation and in Malthus's Principles of Political Economy ' (Pujol 1992:17-23). In similar fashion Groenewegen, in Feminism and Political Economy in Victorian England (1994), notes that 'there have been few women contributors to … economic literature' (Groenewegen 1994:16). Indeed, as far as the first half of the nineteenth century is concerned, only two women - Jane Marcet and Harriet Martineau - seem to have written on political economy. Both wrote as expositors and popularizers of existing theoretical knowledge, content to repeat rather than challenge established orthodoxies, and as a result neither has commanded much more than a footnote in the history of economic thought. Martineau enjoys somewhat more of an enhanced reputation in the field of literary studies but even here attention tends to focus on A Manchester Strike at the expense of her other economic fictions. The present discussion, then, attempts to expand the field of vision with regard to Martineau by examining four of her economic tales: The Rioters (1827), The Turn-Out (1829), The Hill and the Valley (1832) and A Manchester Strike (1832). The first two of these were written prior to Martineau's 'conversion' to political economy, whilst the latter two appeared as part of Illustrations of Political Economy (a series of twenty-three tales published in twenty-five monthly parts between 1832 and 1843). As a way of exploring the disjuncture between economic theory and narrative events within these tales, the narratives themselves are read as implicit commentaries on (as well as 'illustrations'of) aspects of political economy, thereby allowing Martineau to emerge as a much more complex and problematic writer than is usually acknowledged. Also under examination here are the economic ideas of Frances Wright, another early nineteenth-century woman writer, particularly her critique of the existing economic order (which sharply differentiates her from Martineau) and her proposals for a new 'feminine' economy. The intention is to show that women writers on economics were not confined to the role of 'dutiful intellectual daughter, repeating … the words of her intellectual fathers' (David 1987:35)--to borrow Deirdre David's characterization of Martineau in Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy --but were capable of articulating a thoroughgoing critique of existing theoretical models.

"Pious Cant" and Blasphemy: Fanny Fern's Radicalized Sentiment

For contemporary readers who find nineteenth-century culture smotheringly conventional, Fanny Fern seems an enigmatically modern voice--funny, courageous, and disrespectful. She criticizes traditional Christian ministers, listless and blundering clerical expositors--many of whom offer us a Procrustean bed of theology, too short for any healthy creature of God to stretch himself upon (Fresh Leaves 90). By exposing materialism of pious, Fern demonstrates over and over that for many, contents of [the] pocket-book are most important, at expense of widows, orphans, immigrants, and poor (Fern Leaves, First Series 18). But unlike other nineteenth-century writers whose advanced feminism made them anathema to general public (for example, Lydia Maria Child), Fanny Fern was well-paid and popular. Her 1853 Fern Leaves From Fanny's Portfolio sold seventy thousand copies, and her success continued through a weekly column for New York Ledger (for more than fifteen years), two novels, five additional collections of articles, and three children's books. Fern's honored place in 1850s popular culture has prompted drastically different interpretive responses. Her literary success led Fred Pattee, in The Feminine Fifties, to describe her as the most tearful and convulsingly 'female' moralizer of whole modern blue-stocking school (110). The issue of sentimentalism has been central for U.S. feminist scholarship focusing on nineteenth century. Jane Tompkins's ground-breaking study Sensational Designs reclaimed culture as exemplary and formally skillful; in many ways, her work paved way for feminist re-evaluations of nineteenth-century women writers. Yet Tompkins's literary paradigm has often erroneously been applied to all women's writing of nineteenth century, and many scholars have moved away from Tompkins's celebration of sentimental power due to its gender essentialism and its often conservative politics. What is and how contemporary feminists can best understand and value are increasingly difficult questions to resolve. Fanny Fern is a prime example of this difficulty, for her writings both embody and challenge common understandings of culture. Her newspaper articles, even more than her fiction, combine funny and progressive critiques with pietistic fervor. It is this point that makes Fern so tantalizing and ultimately so frustrating, for alongside her subversiveness and her humor are anthems to God of nature and impassioned apologies for motherhood and religion--and irony is difficult to detect in many of these passages. Certain topics are off-limits for Fern; she approves of those who ha[ve] not learned to sniff at sacred things and never questions existence of God or truth of Christianity (Folly as it Flies 271). So is Fanny Fern or modern? Subversive or sincere? I would like to consider possibility that she is both. If Fern invoked irony to persuade her audience to a progressive Christian ethics and invoked pathos and religion for same purpose, what cultural implications might such a reading have for feminine fifties as well as for contemporary American culture? Examining Fern's critical legacy and her newspaper articles, this essay will consider following proposition: Fanny Fern's humor, her feminism, and her progressive politics came not in spite of or against her Christianity, but through it. CRITICAL ACCOUNTS OF FERN: SUBVERSIVE SENTIMENTALISM Before development of feminist literary and cultural criticism in seventies, Fanny Fern appeared in most critical accounts (when she appeared at all) as a prototype of weepy sentimentalism--a pious, insipid popular icon of a consumerized American culture. Feminist reclamations of Fanny Fern, by contrast, emphasize her nonsentimental qualities. To most feminist scholars, it seems incompatible for Fern simultaneously to lampoon hypocritically pious and to muse on joys of flowers, motherhood, and Christ. …

The Wilderness Within: American Women Writers and Spiritual Quest; Artist and Attic: A Study of Poetic Space in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing

Book Review| June 01 2000 The Wilderness Within: American Women Writers and Spiritual Quest; Artist and Attic: A Study of Poetic Space in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing By Kristina K. Groover. Fayetteville: Univ. of Arkansas Press. 1999. vi,134 pp. Cloth, $26.00; paper, $16.00.By Hsin Ying Chi. Lanham, Md.: Univ. Press of America. 1999. 169 pp. Cloth,$39.00; paper, $24.50. Mary Titus Mary Titus Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2000) 72 (2): 438–439. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-72-2-438 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Mary Titus; The Wilderness Within: American Women Writers and Spiritual Quest; Artist and Attic: A Study of Poetic Space in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing. American Literature 1 June 2000; 72 (2): 438–439. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-72-2-438 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. 2000 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Margaret Oliphant's autobiography as professional artist's life

Oliphant'sAutobiographyhas often been read as split between two traditions of life writing – a professional artist's account of her life and work and a family memoir of domestic incident and private recollection – and thus as displaying the tensions inevitable within the life of the nineteenth-century woman writer. In this article the author reconsiders theAutobiographyin literary historical terms and argues that Oliphant meant to write a literary life that resolved ideologically the tensions between motherhood and authorship. TheAutobiographytakes as its basis the Victorian domestic memoir and incorporates the professional artist's life story within it by making that story part of a family's professional achievement. Her account, intended for “my boys”, could thus be seen not just as a private or individual document but as a collaborative or communal history, one including her own literary achievement as well as her sons’ entry into the profession of letters.

The Life and Work of Adelaide Procter: Poetry, Feminism, and Fathers (review)

Poet, child of a poet, and dead at the age of just thirty-eight, Adelaide Procter was fabulously popular in the mid-nineteenth century. She was a canny self-marketer, building up a dedicated readership through regular contributions to Household Words and All the Year Round, beginning in 1853, and then collecting her poems into two volumes entitled Legends and Lyrics, which were published in 1858 and 1861. By 1881, the first volume was into its nineteenth edition and the second was in its fourteenth edition. (A further volume, A Chaplet of Verses, appeared in 1862.) Victorian audiences thrilled to Sir Arthur Sullivan's musical setting of Procter's "A Lost Chord," still her most recognizable and frequently anthologized poem, and Procter's death in 1864 was described in the press as "a national calamity" (qtd. in Listener 73 [1965] 636). However, her sentimentality, her ornamental and often trite versification, and what Hoxie Neale Fairchild has described as her poems' overdependence on "small angels with ringlets" pose serious problems for twentieth-century critics seeking to recover nineteenth-century women writers (Religious Trends in English Poetry [1957] 265). The few critical treatments of Procter's work published this century have tended to isolate for discussion those lyrics in which she addresses woman's role in society, as well as her longer narrative poems, such as "A Legend of Provence." The range and formal inventiveness of this illuminatingly representative Victorian poet have remained largely unexplored.

Lesbian Panic: Homoeroticism in Modern British Women's Fiction (review)

Reviewed by: Lesbian Panic: Homoeroticism in Modern British Women’s Marilyn R. Farwell Patricia Juliana Smith. Lesbian Panic: Homoeroticism in Modern British Women’s Fiction. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. xvii + 236 pp. Patricia Juliana Smith’s book on women’s fiction of the twentieth century is an exciting and welcome addition to the study of women’s writing and especially to the study of lesbianism in fiction. Although at the outset, Smith distances her study from recent theories of lesbian fiction, her book must be considered part of the growing work on lesbianism in fiction because it not only explores thematic instances of lesbian panic in straight women’s and, for the most part, closeted lesbian fiction but also develops and describes lesbian panic as a structural element in narrative. Lesbian panic becomes, in Smith’s text, a narrative device that creates plot movement in the traditional heterosexual, romantic story. As a technique of narrative structuring, lesbian panic occurs as an unacknowledged trope in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women writers, indicating an author’s rather than a character’s fears of lesbianism, and later as acknowledged lesbian characters who disrupt the courtship plot in twentieth-century women’s fiction. Smith covers a range of women writers, from Virginia Woolf to Jeanette Winterson, arguing that the use of this device shifts even in the twentieth century from innuendo to an open acknowledgment of lesbian existence. In the process of this examination, Smith offers insightful readings of texts by twentieth-century women writers such as Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Doris Lessing, Brigid Brophy, and Fay Weldon. The definition of lesbian panic is in one way quite simple; it is, as [End Page 436] Smith says, “the disruptive action or reaction that occurs when a character—or, conceivably, an author—is unable or unwilling to confront or reveal her own lesbianism or lesbian desire.” Smith develops but also distinguishes lesbian panic from Eve Sedgwick’s definition of gay male panic. Gay male panic occurs when men experience the potential loss of subjectivity through identification with women’s position as the Other; women, however, fear the loss of value in a heterosexual system of exchange in which their economic security is at stake. In the romance or courtship plot, lesbian panic provides for narratability, forcing a crisis in the heterosexual plot system but also providing for movement that propels the plot to its accepted, heterosexual closure. This narrative situation, then, is not ideal for the representation of lesbianism in fiction but has been prominent in the historical context of the repression of homosexuality. Smith’s ideals for the narratability of lesbianism without such a negative trope are “narrative strategies that carve out a space in fiction for lesbianism as a thing in and of itself.” The ideal narratives Smith envisions are nonmimetic and experimental, placing her on the side of current postmodern critics who believe that only postmodern experimental fiction can narrate lesbianism given the imperatives of the heterosexual plot system. Thus, although Smith eschews philosophical quarrels, postmodern assumptions of the inadequacy of the romance narrative and the nondefinition of lesbian as a “free-floating signifier” are important to her arguments. Her careful readings, particularly of Virginia Woolf’s texts, are excellent examples of the quality both of her prose and of her analytic skills. Long, insightful analyses of The Voyage Out, Mrs. Dalloway, and To the Lighthouse occupy the second chapter and set the tone for the attention to narrative detail that marks the rest of the book. In The Voyage Out, lesbian panic is barely implied, but it is Mrs. Dalloway herself who narrates her lesbian panic in that eponymous novel, which provides insightful comments on both male and female homosexual panic. Woolf, who was clearly bisexual, gradually moves out of the narrative dilemma of lesbian panic with Lily in To the Lighthouse. Here, Smith’s postmodern views again emerge without much argument when she describes Lily as negotiating the “traps of gender,” allowing her the potential to love a woman and complete herself artistically. With Miss La Trobe in Between the Acts, Woolf presents the fullest development of an open lesbian, but since the trope of lesbian panic is not...

New England Gothic by the Light of Common Day: Lizzie Borden and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's "The Long Arm"

W HEN Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's 1895 prize-winning detective story, The Long Arm, first appeared in newspapers across the country, she had begun to make decisions about her professional writing that complicated both her career and her later critical reception. After firmly establishing her reputation as a leading regional realist with the periodical short fiction collected in A Humble Romance (1887) and A New England Nun (1891), she began to experiment with a range of genres in the mid-nineties that ultimately led her to produce over forty volumes of poetry, drama, and fiction. Most of this work remains relatively unexplored even though Freeman has benefited from the recent reappraisal of nineteenth-century women writers.' Of that work-and Freeman tried her hand at most of

Mastering Slavery: Memory, Family and Identity in Women's Slave Narratives (review)

REVIEWS Fleischner, Jennifer. Mastering Slavery: Memory, Family and Identity in Women 's Slave Narratives. New York: New York Univ. Press, 1996. 240 pp. Paper: $15.16. Since the publication of Sander Gilman's Freud, Race & Gender (1993), critical attention toward psychoanalysis and race has gained increasing visibility . Psychoanalysis has been regarded as the domain of Europeans and Euroamericans, presumed to have little significance to or influence over the lives of minorities. However, Jennifer Fleischner's Mastering Slavery begins unveiling the "psychologically coded strategies of remembering and representing in slave narratives by ex-slave women, from the Civil War through post-Reconstruction" (p. 3). Fleischner's study examines the slave narratives of Harriet Jacobs and her brother John Jacobs, Elizabeth Keckley, Kate Drumgoold, and Julia A. J. Foote. In her efforts to explore the dynamics of interracial sisterhood in the texts of antislavery white women writers, Fleischner offers poignant readings of Lydia Maria Child's "The Quadroons" (from Child's Fact and Fiction : A Collection ofStories, 1846) and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). Fleischner's psychoanalytic readings of these seven works remind us of how the legacies of slavery reverberated throughout the lives of both black and white nineteenth-century women writers, and how these legacies manifested themselves in these women's texts in complicated ways tangential to identity. In her readings of Child and Stowe, Fleischner demonstrates how each one's perception of interracial sexuality and nineteenth-century racial ideologies regarding identity varied from imaginary race and gender liaisons to white domination. Where Child sought a romanticized and idealized vision of interracial sisterhood by casting slavery's wrongs within the domains of white men and demanding "feminine virtue" and equality for all women (p. 39), Fleischner argues, Stowe's analogue for slavery is a romantic, racialized vision of black docility, moral superiority, and colonization that is dependent on "white maternal domination" (p. 58). In reading Harriet Jacobs' slave narrative Incidents in the Life ofa Slave Girl: Written by Herself(1861) against her brother John S. Jacobs' narrative "A True Tale of Slavery" (1861), Fleischner reveals how neglecting or ignoring the connections between these two narratives limits our understanding of Jacobs as a mother, daughter, granddaughter, sister, and sexually traumatized "other." Fleischner contends that Jacobs' decision to escape slavery is as dependent on her relationship to, and respect and internalization of, her father's and brother's resistance to slavery as it is on her identification with her mother, grandmother, and aunt. We must thus read her and her brother's 126Reviews narratives as complements of each other, paying close attention to the information that each narrative represses and reveals. Elizabeth Keckley's Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (1868), Kate Drumgoold's A Slave Girl's Story (1898) and Julia A. J. Foote's A Brand Plucked from the Fire: An Autobiographical Sketch (1 879, 1886) disclose individual and familial memories of slavery; displaced and repressed anger; the construction of good and bad, black and white maternal imagoes; and mourning. Fleischner contends that Keckley's preoccupation with materialism is her attempt to distance herself from the legacies of slavery as well as from mourning the loss of her mother. Her title "behind the scenes" not only indicates her relationship as seamstress and confidante to Mary Todd Lincoln, but also represents the repressed scenes of slavery which Keckley fervently attempts to ignore, or whose significance she attempts to downplay. Fleischner contends that mourning is as endemic to Drumgoold's narrative as it is to Keckley's. Drumgoold's early loss of her mother and placement in her mistress' home manifests itself in Drumgoold's conception of herself as a "sickly slave." Foote, too, must contend with the loss of mother when she is hired out as an indentured servant to a white family, and she realizes that her mother fails, or is unwilling, to protect her from being beat by the white woman for whom she works. The legacies of slavery and the complicated relations of white surrogate mother to the black child/woman are thus highlighted in both Drumgoold's and Foote's narratives. Where Drumgoold seeks...

Designing an Epistolary Corpus of Victorian Women Writers' Letters: Challenges and Opportunities

This article describes a database corpus of approximately 2,000 letters written by or to nineteenth-century women writers in the period from 1820 to 1870. Almost all the letters are unpublished and have been transcribed from manuscripts in archives across Great Britain, the United States and Canada. Around twenty-five women writers are represented including well-known figures such as Harriet Martineau, Anna Jameson, Mary Russell Mitford, Fanny Kemble, Florence Nightingale, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. We discuss in particular the question of a design for the corpus that would render it suitable for both literary and linguistic research. Linguists and literary scholars, generally speaking, come at language from opposite directions: linguists from the word and phrase level up to text or discourse level, literary scholars from the text level down to the word and phrase level. They meet each other somewhere in the fluid regions of discourse analysis, literary stylistics, and genre typology and taxonomy. The corpus is described here from a linguistic perspective and from a literary point of view.

The (Other) American traditions: nineteenth-century women writers

The American literary canon has been the subject of debate and change for at least three decades. As women writers and writers of color are being rediscovered and acclaimed, the question of whether they are worthy of inclusion remains open. The (Other) American Traditions brings together for the first time in one place essays on individual writers and traditions that began to ask the harder questions. How do we talk about these writers once we get beyond the historical issues? How is their work related to their male counterparts'? Are differences related to gender or race or class? How has the selection of books in the literary canon (Melville, Hawthorne, Emerson, and James) led to a definition of the American tradition that was calculated to exclude women? Do we need a new critical vocabulary to discuss these works? Should we stop talking about a tradition and begin to talk about many traditions? How did black American women writers develop strategies for speaking out when they were doubly in jeopardy of being ignored--as blacks and as women? The volume offers irrefutable proof that the writers, the critics who work on their texts, all these questions, and the expansion of the canon matter very much indeed. The contributors are Nina Baym, Deborah Carlin, Joanne Dobson, Josephine Donovan, Judith Fetterley, Frances Smith Foster, Susan K. Harris, Karla F. C. Holloway, Paul Lauter, Diane Lichtenstein, Carla L. Peterson, Carol J. Singley, Jane Tompkins, Joyce W. Warren, and Sandra A. Zagarell.

Writing their nations: the tradition of nineteenth-century American Jewish women writers

Writing their nations: the tradition of nineteenth-century American Jewish women writers

Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing

Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing

Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing

Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing

Gender and the Writer's Imagination from Cooper to Wharton by Mary Suzanne Schriber (review)

Studies in American Fiction121 Windows, and Peeping Toms: Women as the Object of Voyeuristic Scrutiny" in A New Life and Dubin's Lives and finds that "they share a common shallowness and common values" (p. 185). Finally, Sidney Richman's "Malamud's Quarrel with God" explores the author's God's Grace and concludes that it is "at once the most elaborate of his attempts at the fable and unquestionably his most ambiguous," although the message of piety and redemption is passed down without scar or break (pp. 203, 219). There are, undeniably, at least two Bernard Malamuds. The most recognizable is the one who has expressed his identification with those who suffer, whose "humane sensibility," as Salzburg puts it (p. 1), is anchored in his use of the metaphorical and moral dimensions ofJewish experience. Malamud for more than three decades tried to wring from life a meaning in suffering; character transformations, symbolic redemptions, and moral victories were characteristic of most of his work. On the other hand, as Salzburg carefully points out in his "Introduction," there was the Malamud who was angry at divine indifference in the face of human suffering, who quarreled with God time and time again. Of course, this is a Jewish tradition, but it is significant that in a telephone conversation a few months before his death on March 18, 1986, Malamud, responding to a question about his quarrel with God, suggested that it was not an unlikely reaction of a writer living in the times that we do (p. 2). One of the most enduring aspects of Malamud's work has been his ability to frame ambiguous yet relevant questions. How a man can create for himself a new life was central to his quest. That there was an antagonism between materialism, the sexual ethic, and the Jewish ethic was not surprising. Yet it is his sensibility, incorporated into a laconic prose, free of sentimentality, that brought him to national attention as an accomplished and sophisticated writer who somehow withstood the corrosive influences of modern life. Joel Salzburg's Critical Essays on Bernard Malamud is an exceptionally well-put-together collection with the most comprehensive, incisive, retrospective, overview of Malamud's career and spectrum of criticism available. If you can buy only one book in this field, this is the one. If you have everything up-to-date, get this one. It is highly, enthusiastically recommended. Pennsylvania State UniversityDaniel Waiden Schriber, Mary Suzanne. Gender and the Writer's Imaginationfrom Cooper to Wharton. Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1987. 214 pp. Cloth: $22.00. Irving's Rip Van Winkle, Cooper's Natty Bumppo, Melville's Ishmael and Billy Budd, Twain's Huck Finn, James' Christopher Newman, until the advent of feminist criticism, it was primarily these male avatars of Adam who defined the American character in the nineteenth century. Granted, critics also discussed at length female characters such as Hawthorne's fascinating adulteress, Hester Prynne, andJames' vivacious, victimized heiresses, Daisy Miller and Isabel Archer. Nevertheless, American fiction, as defined by literary critics, was concerned primarily with the exploits of male heroes and anti-heroes. In recent years, however, the configurations of the literary map have been altered considerably . Thanks to the efforts of Nina Baym, Mary Kelley, Judith Fetterley, Elizabeth Ammons, and others, the forgotten works of many important nineteenth-century women writers have been recovered; Harriet Beecher Stowe and Kate Chopin have been added to the literary canon; and justice has at last been done to the works of Edith Wharton, who no longer is dismissed as being a pale imitator of Henry James. Moreover, the women characters in the works of male and female writers alike have become the subjects of critical inquiry 122Reviews in such studies as Paul John Eakin, The New England Girl: Cultural Ideals in Hawthorne, Stowe, Howells andJames (1976); Judith Fryer, The Faces ofEve: Woman in the Nineteenth Century Novel (1976); Kristin Herzog, Women, Ethnics, and Exotics (1983); and Joyce W. Warren, The American Narcissus (1984). The most recent critical study to focus on female characters and the issue of gender in nineteenth and early twentieth century American fiction is Mary Suzanne Schriber's Gender and the Writer's...

The Flesh Made Word: Female Figures and Women's Bodies , and: Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing (review)

The Flesh Made Word: Female Figures and Women's Bodies , and: Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing (review)

Shaming the Self in "The Angel over the Right Shoulder"

44AMERICAN women writers early concentrated on describing Z-k the social context that shapes the individual self, writes Judith Fetterley in her anthology of nineteenth-century women writers, Provisions.1 And few nineteenth-century women's texts illustrate this observation with as much insight and economy as one of the stories Fetterley includes in this anthology. First published in I852, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Angel Over the Right Shoulder concerns a married woman who, frustrated with the unstinting demands her household makes on her, attempts to set aside two hours each day for solitude and study.2 Instigated by her husband, Mrs. James's system is constantly undermined not only by the children and servants of the household but also by the husband himself (p. 209). Weighed down by despondency at the failure of this plan, Mrs. James goes to bed on New Year's Eve only to dream a dream that seemingly resolves her problems and dispels her unrest. Now she could see, plainly enough, that, though it was right and important for her to cultivate her own mind and heart, it was equally right and equally important, to meet and perform faithfully all those little household cares and duties on which the