Ruth Hall Research Articles

Ill Communication: Women, Writing, and Health in Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall

Ill Communication: Women, Writing, and Health in Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall

The Ideal Situation in Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall: A Feminist Viewpoint

this research provides an insight into American women's lives and the historical incidents in the nineteenth century. Within the nineteenth century, there was absence of equality between women and men. In nineteenth-century society, men were accepted to be stronger than ladies, both physically and mentally. This research strengthens the existing theory about women's writing. It can also be used as a starting point in further research to obtain more perfect women's writing research results. Via a context-oriented technique, our research plans to investigate the effective ways through which Ruth fought against patriarchal society to achieve her freedom and her dreams from feminist theoretical viewpoints. According to the analysis, Ruth Hall is the public expression of rage by a feminist and is used as a political-strategic instrument. She believes that God gave women the right to be intelligent and acquire talent so that, as Fanny Fern has, they should be able to use this ability by writing. The novel was willing to clarify how some females were able to resolve the injustice they were left with.

Resistance to Domesticity in Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall: A Feminist Viewpoint

The status of women in society is often overlooked and defined only through the presence of men. This situation tends to exclude women from socio-cultural, economic, and political contributions to society, which can be reproduced in literary texts. In particular, Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall (1855) reflects the miserable position of women in 19th century America and demonstrates that women must resist manhood’s power to achieve a certain ontological sense in life. Via a context-oriented technique, our analysis aims to explore the practical means through which Ruth, the protagonist of Fern’s Ruth Hall, resists domesticity to achieve self-realization and social freedom from feminist theoretical viewpoints. According to the analysis, Ruth resists domesticity through events, endurance, self-reliance, and in terms of language. Despite social standards, Fern’s representation of Ruth’s financial success highlights how women can surpass gender boundaries. Fern’s depiction of Ruth further demonstrates how the writings of female authors offer a distinct viewpoint on their place in history. It was envisaged that this analysis could advance our understanding of women’s lives in patriarchal societies from feminist theoretical viewpoints.

“A Nondescript Monster”: Fanny Fern in Transatlantic Print Culture

Fanny Fern (real name Sara Payson Willis Parton) was one of the most profitable American columnists and novelists of the mid-nineteenth century. Fern sustained her celebrity status largely through unauthorised reprints of her articles in American and British papers. Consequently, her public image was for the most part constructed through those reprinted articles, which were usually framed by speculations about her private life. This article examines the implications and limitations of Fern’s efforts to stabilise the dissemination of her public image in periodicals by using the relatively more stable form of the book. As a celebrity, she had limited control over the way she was publicly represented. As a woman in the public sphere, she was particularly vulnerable to slander and libel. The circulation of a spurious biography entitled The Life and Beauties of Fanny Fern (1855), alongside her sanctioned autobiographical novel Ruth Hall, profited from her literary brand while simultaneously undermining it. Examining how these competing narratives about Fern’s private life – one fictionalised, one unauthorised – shaped her literary reputation at home and in England, this paper argues that textual representations as well as material market choices, including book bindings and advertising techniques, shaped authorship in the increasingly commercialised transatlantic literary market of the mid-century in ways that both benefited and imperilled the female writer.

Literature Counts: The Feelings of Overwhelmed

Literature Counts: The Feelings of <i>Overwhelmed</i>

Fanny Fern’s "Ruth Hall": A Feminist Construction of Identity in the Nineteenth-Century American Novel

Fanny Fern’s "Ruth Hall": A Feminist Construction of Identity in the Nineteenth-Century American Novel

Refashioning the Domestic Novel: Literary Form and Fanny Fern’s Biopolitical Imagination in Ruth Hall

Refashioning the Domestic Novel: Literary Form and Fanny Fern’s Biopolitical Imagination in Ruth Hall

Separate and Unequal: A Comparison of African American and White Women in the 1850’s, as Seen through Ruth Hall and The Garies and Their Friends

Separate and Unequal: A Comparison of African American and White Women in the 1850’s, as Seen through Ruth Hall and The Garies and Their Friends

Legacy Profile: Fanny Fern (1811–1872)

Legacy Profile*Fanny Fern (1811–1872) Joyce W. Warren In 1851 a new and daring type of newspaper article captured the attention of American newspaper readers. Short, satirical pieces signed by an unknown writer, Fanny Fern, were published first in the Boston Olive Branch and then the True Flag and were immediately copied—pirated—by newspapers all over the country. The big question of the day was, "Who is Fanny Fern?" Was she a man (surely no woman could write so "indelicately"), or was she a woman (some of her articles spoke directly "to a woman's heart")? Was she young or old, married or unmarried? And, most important, was she a lady? Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Fanny Fern It was four years before the public learned that Fanny Fern was Sara Payson Willis, the daughter of Nathaniel Willis, editor and founder of two Boston newspapers, and sister of N. P. Willis, New York poet and journalist. Her meteoric rise to fame was accomplished without the help of—and in fact without the knowledge or encouragement of—her family. Like the heroine of her novel [End Page 210] Ruth Hall (1855) (and like the male heroes of countless "rags- to- riches" novels), Fanny Fern realized the American dream solely on her own. And for this, she won the disapproval of her family and was criticized by her contemporaries—men, and particularly other women—because to thus succeed independently was "unfeminine." As she wrote in the New York Ledger on June 8, 1861: There are few people who speak approbatively of a woman who has a smart business talent or capability. No matter how isolated or destitute her condition, the majority would consider it more "feminine" would she unobtrusively gather up her thimble, and, retiring into some out of-the-way place, gradually scoop out her coffin with it, than to develop that smart turn for business which would lift her at once out of her troubles; and which, in a man so situated, would be applauded as exceedingly praiseworthy. Fern was pained but not immobilized by the criticism of her contemporaries, and she was able to distance herself sufficiently to criticize and satirize the conventional attitude. In 1857, for example, she wrote a satirical review of her own book, Fresh Leaves, which summed up—and ridiculed—the kind of criticism that was directed at her, and which provides us today not only with a delightful example of Fanny Fern's satire, but also with a revealing look at some contemporary attitudes toward women writers. (The review is reprinted following this Profile.) Sara Payson Willis was born in Portland, Maine, on July 9, 1811, and her family moved to Boston when she was six months old. The fifth of nine children, she went to several schools, finishing her education at Catharine Beecher's Female Seminary in Hartford in 1829. There she made a name for herself as a "romp" and as a writer of spirited compositions. After living at home for eight years, in 1837 she married Charles Eldredge, a cashier at the Merchants' Bank in Boston. For several years Sara Eldredge was happy as wife and mother. But in 1844 began a series of tragedies which were to change her life forever: within two years her younger sister, Ellen, her mother, her seven-year-old daughter, and her husband died, leaving her emotionally reeling and, after her husband's death, penniless, with no way of supporting her two surviving children. Her father and father- in-law grudgingly gave her a small pension while urging remarriage as the best means of supporting herself. She finally capitulated, and in January 1849 entered into a marriage of convenience with Samuel P. Farrington, a widower with two little girls. The marriage proved to be a terrible mistake, and in January 1851 she took a step unprecedented in her family and shocking to her contemporaries: she left her husband. Her family was scandalized, and her father refused to resume support. [End Page 211] She tried to support herself by the few means open to women at the time: she did sewing, for seventy-five cents a week, and she took...

Portals of Desire in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall

Charlotte Brontë in Jane Eyre (1847) and Fanny Fern in Ruth Hall (1855) inscribe the possibility for personal agency through textual passages that describe border spaces and movement between margin and periphery, inside and outside, and departure and arrival. The authors employ architectural portals — windows, doorways, gates, stairs and hallways — to illuminate an array of physical, psychic and socio-cultural spaces and to convey a more fluid sense of truth as knowledge gained by experience. Truth is represented within a subjective lens, in the different positions their protagonists assume. By way of the insertion of autobiographic resonances in their fiction, Charlotte Brontë and Fanny Fern invert public and private spheres, thereby creating a strategy for personal agency. This emphasis on mobile independence for a woman did not sit well with many nineteenth-century critics, who responded adversely to the implied expansion of gender roles. Ultimately, Charlotte Brontë and Fern, through their method of encoding threshold images with subjective significance, create a conceptual space that affords possibilities of resistance to social oppression.

Sentiment and Satire: The Language of Flowers in Fanny Fern's RUTH HALL

An unflinching, no-holds-barred American newspaper columnist and novelist of the nineteenth century, Fanny Fern was an anomaly who told “what she felt to be the truth about her society, without cov...

The American Dream and American Greed in Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall: Sentimental and Satirical Christian Discourse in the Popular Domestic Tale

Although Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall: A Domestic Tale of the Present Time originally was a widely popular book in the nineteenth century, Fern and Ruth Hall were criticized after readers learned about the similarities among Fern’s life and book. Contemporary critics have recovered Ruth Hall from the literary margins and situated Ruth’s story in the context of the popular American dream story while emphasizing the book’s satirical elements. Reexamining the novel’s originally popular sentimental elements alongside the novel’s more recently popular satirical elements expands the literary critical focus from Ruth’s sentimental struggles and Fern’s satirical accomplishments to Ruth Hall’s equally important critique of American greed, especially among wealthy and socially-conscious Christians.

The Cult of Artistry in Zelda Fitzgerald's Save Me the Waltz

The Cult of Artistry in Zelda Fitzgerald's <i>Save Me the Waltz</i>

The Cult of Artistry in Zelda Fitzgerald's Save Me the Waltz

The Cult of Artistry in Zelda Fitzgerald's <i>Save Me the Waltz</i>

ANOTHER COUNTRYSIDE? POLICY OPTIONS FOR LAND AND AGRARIAN REFORM IN SOUTH AFRICA/Ruth Hall (ed.)

This study titled Another countryside? Policy options for land and agrarian reform in South Africa, edited by Ruth Hall, is significant given the challenges around diminishing global resources, including those affecting food security. Land reform does not only affect food security but also the maintenance of food production levels, development of small businesses, residential settlement and social cohesion. The focus on South Africa’s land and agrarian policies is relevant at a time when land issues have taken centre stage in public and private debates in South Africa. There are wide-ranging security implications for South Africa if the process of land reform is mismanaged. This study is a timeous one. Hall, as editor, contributes to some of the eleven chapters. The author is well versed in land issues in South Africa and her work focuses on the interests, actors and discourses which have shaped land reform processes in South Africa. As a background to this book, it would help to the read the 2010 study undertaken by Hall under the title The politics of land reform in post-apartheid South Africa, 1990–2004: A shifting terrain of power, actors and discourses.

An Expenditure Saved Is an Expenditure Earned: Fanny Fern's Humoring of the Capitalist Ethos

Among the many ridiculous characters in Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall: A Domestic Tale of the Present Time, the heroine's mother-in-law, Mrs. Hall, stands out as the most comical with her supply of unhelpful cliches and suggestions. One of her sayings in particular, Waste want not, taken from Benjamin Franklin, sums up her role as one of the many spokespeople for economy in Ruth Hall (31). In this role, she complains that her new daughter-in-law's frilly underwear and silk stockings reveal a profound disregard for economy, and even suggests that Ruth apply something to straighten her curls because one should avoid everything that looks frivolous (30-31). Her husband, Dr. Hall, counts the pieces of firewood the servant uses each night and spends his dinner hour [narrating] the market prices he paid for each article of food upon the table (36, 38). Dr. and Mrs. Hall betray a trait common in the novel's abundant stereotypical characters: Although they stand in the privileged position to spend, they compulsively save at the cost of everyone around them. During the brief phase in the novel when the heroine, Ruth, is married and financially supported, these characters serve as comical nuisances that cause familial tension; however, when Ruth's husband dies and leaves her penniless, these characters threaten to deprive the widow and her children of their basic necessities. The satirized stereotypes of Ruth Hall are powerful figures who blame Ruth's financial hardships and their refusal to help her on her lack of economy. Old Mrs. Hall's Waste want not becomes a motto through which the empowered attribute poverty to sufferers' thriftlessness and thereby absolve themselves of responsibility (87). In contradistinction to these cliched characters with their secure cultural positions, Ruth Hall must make her own way through nineteenth-century industrial capitalism. The novel's title pays tribute to her singularity amid the generic masses. As ambassadors of acquisition and conservation, old Mrs. Hall and her fellow economizers are finally laughed off once Ruth learns how to negotiate the financial world herself. Ruth Hall's heroine-turned-capitalist negotiates a comfortable position for herself and her daughters. Even as the novel resolves economic injustices thematically, its techniques of humor express the cultural pressures that these now-marginalized characters represent--namely, the pressure to save time and energy. (1) Drawing on Sigmund Freud's The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, trace how Ruth Hall's comical stereotypes and wordplay enable readers to save the exertion required to understand new characters or ideas, to pursue a chain of reasoning, or to feel a certain way. However, rather than helping the reader accrue and conserve capital--the motivation for saving that the elder Halls and the novel's plot resolution ultimately endorse--the savings of the comical are expended in laughter. Through this process, Fern renders the comic a space of resistance by way of its overt, nonproductive consumption of energy. This technique aligns the novel's comical episodes with its sentimental passages: Both modes of writing solicit audience expenditures, one in the form of laughter and the other in the form of affect. Paving the way for the techniques of the comic, Ruth Hall's preface justifies formal choices through a socioeconomic concern for efficiency. Fern writes: I have compressed into one volume what might have expanded into two or three. have avoided long introductions and descriptions, and have entered unceremoniously and unannounced, into people's houses, without stopping to ring the bell (iii). Thus, even before introducing characters who enforce thriftiness, Fern reveals that saving time and space motivates the narrative. With chapters that are often the length of newspaper sketches--the form through which the heroine will build her own capital--the narrative frequently lets the information exchanged in conversation drive the plot forward without reiteration or explanation. …

PROTOCOL: The Impact of Land Property Rights Interventions on Agricultural Productivity in Developing Countries: A Systematic Review

PROTOCOL: The Impact of Land Property Rights Interventions on Agricultural Productivity in Developing Countries: A Systematic Review

Overcoming Historical Injustices: Land Reconciliation in South Africa, James L. Gibson. * Land, Memory, Reconstruction, and Justice: Perspectives on Land Claims in South Africa, ed. Cherryl Walker, Anna Bohlin, Ruth Hall and Thembela Kepe.

Overcoming Historical Injustices: Land Reconciliation in South Africa, James L. Gibson. * Land, Memory, Reconstruction, and Justice: Perspectives on Land Claims in South Africa, ed. Cherryl Walker, Anna Bohlin, Ruth Hall and Thembela Kepe.

The Land Question in South Africa. The Challenge of Transformation and Redistribution - Edited by Lungisile Ntsebeza and Ruth Hall

Journal of Agrarian ChangeVolume 11, Issue 1 p. 132-135 The Land Question in South Africa. The Challenge of Transformation and Redistribution – Edited by Lungisile Ntsebeza and Ruth Hall COLIN MURRAY, Corresponding Author COLIN MURRAY Derbyshire, UKColin Murray, Derbyshire, UK. E-mail: colin.murray@manchester.ac.ukSearch for more papers by this author COLIN MURRAY, Corresponding Author COLIN MURRAY Derbyshire, UKColin Murray, Derbyshire, UK. E-mail: colin.murray@manchester.ac.ukSearch for more papers by this author First published: 12 January 2011 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-0366.2010.00288.xCitations: 1Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume11, Issue1January 2011Pages 132-135 RelatedInformation

Renovating Domesticity in Ruth Hall, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Our Nig

Renovating Domesticity in Ruth Hall, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Our Nig