Lynda Williams
Dr. Craig White
Literature 5535
20 June 2002

Research Journal:  American Domestic Romances

“[. . .] I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors” (Abigail Adams in letter to John Adams, 31 March 1776).

            At the beginning of the semester when first considering a subject for this project, I immediately chose the broad topic of Romantic feminism because of my interest in that field.  As I explained in my proposal, I, like Dr. White, never encountered many professors in my undergraduate or early graduate studies who “remember[ed] the ladies.”  I, too, read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and many other such works, on my own.  Although I thought I had read extensively in this field, this class has uncovered an area that I feel extremely deficient in—American women’s domestic fiction in the nineteenth century.  In fact, I felt rather ignorant when Susan Warner, Susan Maria Cummins, and Fanny Fern, names I had never heard before, appeared on a handout as representatives of the “alternative” American Renaissance.  Thus, I plan to take advantage of this research opportunity to fill in that gap in my education. 

            Realizing the Herculean nature of the task ahead, I have tried to limit my research, for now, to several main topics.  First, I want to gain a better understanding of the time period, to see what factors during the Romantic era led to the rise and success of so many women writers.  Furthermore, I want to investigate why women’s novels gained such popularity at a time when society did not see novels as wholesome reading and did not approve of women operating in the public sphere.  Then, I also want to explore the reasons why those obviously successful and, in some cases, quite influential works have received such negative critiques and been excluded from the canon.  And finally, I plan to review some scholarly criticisms about several of the more popular of these works.

Reference Book:

            To begin my research, I consulted The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States to gather definitions and general information pertinent to my subject.  When I looked up “domestic fiction,” I found that this type of writing flourished from the 1830s to the 1870s although earlier works, such as Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple (1797) and Anne Bradstreet’s poetry (1650-1678) (works we have read in this class), anticipate this genre.  The Companion notes that domestic fiction, a “didactic and exemplary fiction centered in the ‘woman’s sphere’ and focusing on the concerns of women’s lives, was the best-selling literary genre of nineteenth-century America” (253).  Hoping to rectify the readers’ behavior, writers of this type of literature usually “structure their plots around a series of poignant, heart-wrenching episodes designed to enlist readers’ sympathies and thereby effect their reform” (253). 

The rise of this genre coincided with the growth of women’s magazines during this time period; however, interestingly enough, both Harper’s Monthly and The Atlantic Monthly, magazines that we today think of as primarily literary, printed many of the domestic fictions when those magazines first began publication in the 1850s.   In addition, those fictions appealed to both male and female audiences and also to different classes of readers. Toward the end of the century, as realism and naturalism replaced romanticism, this type of literature lost its popularity although some examples did still remain until the end of the century.  In the mid-1800s, three of the most important writers of this genre appeared on the scene almost at the same time:  Susan Warner with The Wide, Wide World in 1850, Harriet Beecher Stowe with Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1851, and E.D.E.N. Southworth with The Mother-in-Law in 1851.

I found this source extremely helpful for several reasons.  For one, it gave me a broad overview of my topic and answered some of my questions.  Furthermore, it cross-referenced me to the term “sentimental novel,” which gave additional background information on my topic and also listed other books and articles that I then went to for further research.  But, most important, it led me to the authors that I plan to focus on: Warner, Stowe, and Southworth.  Although I plan to use other sources for this journal to explore those three authors, The Companion does give an effective summary of each of those women—their lives, their works, and their influence.  However, I did discover that all three women wrote, not for their own fulfillment or because they had little else to do, but rather to support themselves and their families. 

Under ”sentimental novel,” I discovered that “virtually every nineteenth-century novel written by a woman has been routinely or even automatically described as sentimental, regardless of its actual content, tone, style, or themes, while virtually no novels written by men have been given this derogatory label” (786).  Fortunately, feminist literary critics would later question that automatic categorization and argue that nineteenth-century women wrote a variety of types of works, citing specifically Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which according to literary critic Jane Tompkins, “served as a powerful agent for social change and did not in and of itself warrant the pejorative label it received in the nineteenth century, nor the disapprobation under which it labored for most of the twentieth century” (qtd. in Oxford 787).  Another enlightening comment in this section conjectures that the men (Hawthorne, especially) who instigated and propagated this derogatory viewpoint may have, in fact, felt jealous and frustrated because of their own lack of success. 

Even though this source proved extremely informative and I could spend much more time on it, I must now move on to the other sources I researched.  Next, I decided I needed to familiarize myself with the societal views and expectations of women during Warner, Stowe, and Southworth’s time period.

Article:

            To gain a clearer picture of the social conditions (restrictions) concerning women of this time period, I reread Barbara Welter’s well-known article, “The Culture of True Womanhood, 1820-1860.”  I said “reread” because, yes, I have read this article several times before but not with such a specific aim in mind: this time I searched for clues to give me some insights into Warner, Stowe, and Southworth and the success of their works.  And I did find some explanations for those women’s success, because even if they had stepped out of their “proper sphere,” they generally kept those “four cardinal virtues—piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity” intact in their characters, plots and themes (152).  According to Welter, “Religion or piety was the core of woman’s virtue, the source of her strength” during this time, and, therefore, “church work would not make her less domestic or submissive” (152-53).  It seems that those three authors took that rule and bent it a bit, because they could, in some sense, be seen as missionaries, preaching about the evils of the world.  Another point of interest to my research surfaced in the comment that “[t]he female was dangerously addicted to novels, according to the literature of the period”; nevertheless, “[i]f she simply couldn’t help herself and read them anyway, she should choose edifying ones from lists of morally acceptable authors” (165).  Therein lies another opening for the women writers, as they pen those “edifying ones.”  Finally, at the close of the article, Welter makes the observation that women at that time, just like women today, did not always live up to the ideals presented by their society.  In short, just because the “rules” existed did not mean the women always followed them exactly. 

Internet Sources:

            Next, I decided to try the Internet to see what I could find on my subject.  To begin, I went to www.google.com. and searched the broad topic of domestic fiction, which led me to many, many entries.  Choosing www.womenwriters.net/domesticgoddess, (the word “goddess” caught my attention), I found information on specific authors.  Although this site did not have any information on Southworth, I did find some on Warner and Stowe.  Before I begin my review of the two articles I chose here, I want to tell about some general information I found at this site.  When I went to www.womenwriters.net/19thc.htm, I found a brief, but extremely interesting preface to the links to specific authors.  To explain the increase in women writers during this time period, the preface states that more women were becoming readers.  “Prior to the 19^th Century, most women who could read were upper class nobles, and most of what they read was the Bible [. . .]” (Wells 1).  Now, however, because of the campaigns to teach reading so that everyone could have access to that book, literacy rates swelled.  Ironically, this brief paragraph addressed one of my major questions: What were some of the factors that led to the rise and success of so many women writers during this period?

            Having such a wealth of information at hand, I decided to pick an interesting article about each of my authors to review.  Under Susan Warner, I chose “Susan Warner’s Wide, Wide World: The Despair Way to Heaven” (1999) by Joel B. Henderson of Chattanooga State Technical Community College (www.womenwriters.net/domesticgoddess/pdf/Henderson1htm).  A Led Zeppelin fan, I felt drawn to this article and my instincts must have guided me correctly, as I found the article well written, well researched, interesting, and informative.  In addition, he uses several of the critics that Dr. White and The Oxford Companion listed.  Henderson looks at two major points in his paper: “how The Wide, Wide World perfectly embodies the primary characteristics of Sentimentalism” and “how this often overlooked novel becomes indispensable as a record of national history” (1).  Unexpectedly, this article follows quite appropriately after my discussion of “The Cult of True Womanhood” as Henderson uses it to explain his first point.  Furthermore, he corroborates my opinion that the women writers saw their work as evangelical contending that 

[. . .] the virtue of domesticity required that women be proficient in all areas dealing with their kingdom, the home.  Followers of the Cult believed that their mission was one of evangelism, a responsibility to bring the world back from its state of sin.  This could best be done from the home, where they reigned as defender of religious values and the instigators of widespread reform.  (2)

In essence, the women writers could accomplish their missionary tasks without leaving the confines of their homes. Furthermore, Henderson explains how Warner stays within the bounds of the Cult by giving a detailed description of how the qualities of piety, submission, and domesticity run through her novel. 

Turning to the historic significance of the work, Henderson maintains that The Wide, Wide World gives today’s readers a look at the “sweeping changes that took place in the early and middle 1800’s” (8).  Not only does he note the increase in literacy, he also cites the lower cost in publication as a factor in the growth of women writers. In brief, Henderson argues that Warner’s work “becomes a window through which we can develop a new understanding of American history” as it “provides the modern reader with an accurate snapshot of how America was in the 1850’s when women first began to develop a collective consciousness,” a snapshot certainly missing from my album (10).  

            From this site, I next chose an article on Harriet Beecher Stowe, “Between the Rhetoric of Abolition and Feminism:  Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (1998) by Tracey Thornton, an English instructor at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. Seeing the same traits of piety, submission, and domesticity in Stowe’s work that Henderson saw in Warner’s, Thornton does not place Stowe in the category with other women, such as Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, and Elizabeth Stanton, who were actively speaking and writing about women’s rights.  Familiar with those women’s writings and also with Uncle Tom’s Cabin, I found Thornton’s argument convincing.  To Thornton, and to me, Stowe seems much more concerned with the issue of abolition than with women’s rights.  In support of that thesis, Thornton gives many specific and general examples from Stowe’s novel.  For one, Thornton notes Stowe’s allusion to a woman’s power to influence in the closing passage of the novel:  “If the mothers of the free states had all felt as they should, in times past, the sons of the free states would not have been the holders, and proverbially, the hardest master of slaves [. . .]  (1).

However, although Stowe empowers her women characters, she still displays them in a role acceptable to the code of True Womanhood.  For example, “Miss Ophelia [who has no husband or children] is certainly not described as soft and feminine, as Rachel and Mrs. Bird [wives and mothers] are, but, instead, as rigid and brutish, evenly manly” (1).  Then, in the scene when Mrs. Bird argues the issue of the Fugitive Slave Act with her husband, Stowe carefully describes the difficulty of this task:  “Now it was a very unusual thing for gentle little Mrs. Bird ever to trouble her head with what was going on in the house of the state, very wisely considering that she had enough to do to mind her own” (qtd. in Thornton 2). Certainly Stowe’s portrayals of women connect more with the Cult of True Womanhood than with the women’s rights movement.  Although Thornton never says so in so many words, one can infer that Stowe’s technique may have made her work the success it was because she does not preach rebellion on all fronts. In modern day lingo, Stowe “picked her fight.”  Perhaps if Stowe had made her women characters more assertive, more active in the public sphere, she would have “turned off” her audience and her book would never have had the impact it did in the area of abolition.  Although I agree with Thornton’s assessment that “Uncle Tom’s Cabin, though certainly an abolitionist one, can not (sic) be considered a feminist novel,” I do not condemn Stowe (2).  Indeed, in many aspects, I admire her: she did get published, and, in the end, she did effect change in the public sphere. 

            To get an article on E.D.E.N. Southworth, I went to www.yahoo.com and searched by her name.  Again, I found an extensive list, so I chose “E.D.E.N. Southworth’s The Hidden Hand” by Nina Baym for two reasons.  First, I have encountered Baym’s name in several places; therefore, I assume she must be a respected critic, and second, several sources have listed The Hidden Hand as Southworth’s most popular book. According to Baym, “no woman (and, for that matter, no man) approached [Southworth’s] cumulative record of best-selling productivity” (1).  Because Southworth’s novels were serialized in the New York Ledger, “the most widely read weekly paper of its time,” they reached a large audience (1).  In fact, in Baym’s words, “to know the Ledger was to know Southworth” (1).  To illustrate the magnitude of Southworth’s popularity, the newspaper printed her works for thirty years, and, as soon as one novel ended, another began.  Baym, as do my other sources, attributes Southworth’s fade from view to the “critical discussion [. . .] in later decades [that] has tried to explain away the Southworth phenomenon by belittling both her and her audience” (1).  Not having read this novel yet, I felt somewhat overwhelmed by the material presented; however, I did gain several interesting insights.  Unlike Stowe, Southworth creates her lead female character, Capitola, as a woman who “reject[s] most rules of female decorum as humbug at best, perniciously hypocritical at worst”(2).  Moreover, “[Southworth] regularly attributes Capitola’s attractiveness as a character, as well as her success within the plot [. . .] to her recognition of the dangers of false ideologies of true womanhood” (2-3).  According to Baym, Southworth was able to get away with this irreverent picture of womanhood because “[e]ven now it is hard to resist this high-spirited cheer.  Southworth’s readers saw no reason even to try.  The author was doing what rhetoricians from classical times onward had urged as the work of literature:  instructing and delighting” (6).  And I see “instructing” as the operative word here; Southworth evidently did not veer too far from the straight and narrow. 

Books:

            Finally, in my research, I looked at two books, Women’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and About Women in America, 1820-1870 by Nina Baym and Sensational Designs:  The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 by Jane Tompkins.  After perusing those two books, I believe they would prove invaluable for doing scholarly investigations of the women’s literature of this time period or for doing research into a specific author or work.  For my more general investigation, I chose to report on the chapters that address the concerns I listed at the beginning of my project.

            In Baym’s book, I chose to look at Chapter 2:  “The Form and Ideology of Woman’s Fiction,” a chapter that confirmed many of my previous findings and shed even more light on my subject.  According to Baym, the authority figures (males) of the day did find those women writers threatening:  “Their distress showed itself in expressions of manly contempt for the genre, its authors and its readers” (23).  Nevertheless, the women received much support, both in financial compensation and in advertising from their publishers, information that indicates how women were able to get their works into print and into the hands of so many readers.  In short, the publishers wanted to make money and they knew the domestic fictions sold newspapers and magazines.  As to the argument that these works did not portray the realities of the world, which thereby gained them the derogatory term of sentimentalism, Baym maintains that the women writers tried to rise above the harshness and drabness of their own lives:  the women “assumed a rhetoric that was intended to transcend the pain and crudeness of the things they had to represent” (25). 

In addition, Baym points out that the Cult of True Womanhood, although it did suppress women in some areas, assured the woman that “she was a far more intelligent, resolute, and able person than was traditionally supposed, [. . .] supported her inclinations toward self-fulfillment, and justified a search for means of exerting influence that were compatible with her woman’s nature” (29).  In America, most of the women writers came from the middle class as they had the education needed to do so; however, “only those who needed money attempted it” (30).  Like teaching, another profession beginning to open for women at this time, writing enabled the women to exert their influence and to gain some control over their own financial situations.  Unfortunately, the women themselves may have caused their writing not to be taken seriously as they often “deliberately and even proudly disavowed membership in an artistic fraternity” (32).  But in retrospect, one wonders if that was the only way to get their work published because in so doing, they reassured the dominant culture that they posed no competition (an example of passive resistance?).   One can only imagine the men’s rhetoric if the women had announced their equality in the field.  Furthermore, Baym believes that those works, “that their visible success helped change attitudes towards women more than the creation of literary masterpieces might have” (33).  Although Baym laments that the women’s dismissal of their own works undoubtedly “foreclosed certain possibilities for themselves and for others” (33), I think W.E.B. Du Bois explains this reaction when he describes the stance of the black man in the following excerpt from The Souls of Black Folk:

            His [Her] real thoughts, his [her] real aspirations, must be guarded in whispers; he [she] must not criticize, he [she] must not complain.  Patience, humility, and adroitness must in these growing black men [white women] replace impulse, manliness [assertiveness], and courage.  With this sacrifice there is an economic opening, and perhaps peace and some prosperity.  (166-67)

            Although I do not have the time to elaborate here, I found Baym’s approach in this chapter quite effective.   Taking each of the characteristics of True Womanhood, characteristics that do indeed pervade those novels, Baym shows how the writers used them to their advantage as they create through their heroines “self-made wom[e]n” who effect social change by projecting the characteristics of the home sphere onto the public one.  In conclusion, Baym maintains that those women authors “imagined that if each woman rose to the opportunity that history putting in her hands, [. . .] then women collectively would make a peaceful revolution” (49). 

In Jane Tompkins’s Sensational Designs:  The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860, I looked specifically at Chapter 6, “The Other American Renaissance.”  Again, the title called to me, as I was not even familiar with that term until this class.   In this chapter, Tompkins investigates why so little attention has been paid to female writers of this time period and so much to male writers.  Specifically, Tompkins focuses on Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World, which emerged on the publication scene at the same time as Melville’s Moby Dick.  Again, Tompkins puts forth the argument that the men felt intimidated by the success of the women’s works and “hated [them] for their popular and critical success” (148). (I know the pronouns are vague in the previous sentence, but the vagueness is intentional, as I believe the men probably hated both the women and the works.)  Tompkins argues that modern researchers need to pay more attention to that body of successful writing as it could not help but have had a profound influence on American literature and society, simply because of its pervasiveness in the culture of the time.

According to Tompkins, “The publication of Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World in December of 1850, caused an explosion in the literary marketplace that was absolutely unprecedented—nothing like it, in terms of sales, had ever been seen before” (148).  To explain what made that work and others like it so successful, Tompkins looks at the culture of the time, asserting that we must set aside our modern attitudes (prejudices?) and understand that “antebellum critics and readers did not distinguish sharply between fiction and what we would now call religious propaganda” (149).  Next, Tompkins proceeds to explore the publications of the American Tract Society, one of the organizations that was a “mobilization of wealth, energy, and missionary fervor designed to convert the entire nation and eventually the entire world to the truths of Protestant Christianity” (149).  Through a detailed account of the precepts of those religious organizations’ intentions, Tompkins shows how the women writers worked within what the time period considered appropriate.  Tompkins also contends that modern critics must discard their own sense of reality as reality is “as it appears to people at a given time” (152). In other words, what we today would view as simple and naïve represents what the people of the time considered realistic; evidently, those works remained faithful to their view of the world. 

Furthermore, using Warner’s work and its characters specifically, Tompkins shows how the women used their writings to gain power.  Since those women were working in a society that granted them little or no power, they built “a power structure of their own” (161).  In The Wide, Wide World, Warner imbues her female characters with traits that enable them to “become the agents of their own subjection” (a phrase that reminds me of the Harriet Jacobs’s slave narrative), and, ironically, in so doing, effect a positive result, as evidenced in the novel’s “happy” ending (162).  Ironically, the women writers turn what most would consider liabilities into assets.  To explain, in reference to Mrs. Vawse, a character in the novel, Tompkins observes, “Autonomy and freedom are the defining features of Mrs. Vawse’s existence” (167).  Through Vawse, women readers would see that “piety and industry, both activities over which a woman has control, [could] set [them] free” (168).  In essence, Warner’s novel showed women how to deal with their powerlessness in a world from which no escape routes existed.  Using the example of Huckleberry Finn, Tompkins maintains that since women could not run away as Huck (men) could, they must find a way to survive in their confinement (175).

In conclusion, I must say this research project has certainly proven interesting and enlightening: I now no longer feel quite so ignorant (at least in this area) as I have found answers to all my initial questions.  To summarize my findings, I found several factors during the Romantic time period that encouraged the proliferation of women’s domestic fiction.  For one, more women were literate and, therefore, had the capabilities to become writers, and those that did not write could read those novels.  In addition, cheaper printing and publication costs made those writings accessible to more people, and the publishers supported these women with good salaries.  Next, I found out how these women broke into a world usually occupied by men; they used society’s own restrictive “rules” about women to their advantage.  To explain, if the society thought it fit and proper for women to engage in church work, then how could it object to their doing missionary work by the pen?  One can just imagine the woman’s arguments: she would not have to leave her home, and, furthermore, she could save many more souls through the press than through individual meetings.  Moreover, although some of those women writers gave their women characters power, they did so in an entertaining and well-disguised manner.

As to my other main point of inquiry about the women’s lack of literary reputation, I view Hawthorne’s comment, “America is now wholly given over to a d——d mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while public taste is occupied with their trash—and should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed” (qtd in Oxford 784), as the most damning factor during the nineteenth century.  If the men honestly did not consider those women writers as serious, why did they not merely ignore them?  Personally, I think Christine de Pizan, a Medieval writer, gives the answer in The Book of the City of Ladies:  “Do you not know that the best things are the most debated and the most discussed?” (1767). 

Then, in the twentieth century, because worldviews had changed so dramatically, critics (men and women) dismissed that entire body of fiction as frivolous, as sentimental, and, therefore, unworthy of serious consideration.  However, I agree with Tompkins’s opinion that we must set aside our own views to understand the value of those writings to our present day:  American women in the twentieth century did not emerge from a vacuum, but rather from a long heritage of women’s protests that have deep roots in Western culture.  To name a few who reacted to the restrictions of their patriarchal society, Eve, Sappho, Marie de France, and Christine de Pizan immediately spring to mind.   In short, to understand today’s women (and for them to understand themselves), we must look to the past for clues.

In closing, although I did not always get the full benefit from the critical analyses of the three novels I researched as I had not read Warner or Southworth’s novels, my research did pique my interest, and, as a result, I have put The Wide, Wide World and The Hidden Hand at the top of my summer reading list.  In addition, I would like to thank Dr. White and other professors who do “remember the ladies [. . .] and [are] more generous and favorable to them than [their] ancestors.”  Abigail (and I suspect Harriet, too) would be proud of you.

Works Cited

Adams, Abigail.  “Familiar Letters of John Adams and His Wife, Abigail Adams, During the Revolution.” Feminism:  The Essential Historical Writings. Ed. Miriam Schneir.  New York:  Vintage Books, 1994.  2-4.

Baym, Nina.  “E.D.E.N. Southworth’s The Hidden Hand.”  English.  Online.  Internet.  June 2002.  <http://www.englishuiuc.edu/baym/essays/southworth.htm>.

- - -.  Woman’s Fiction:  A Guide to Novels by and About Women in America, 1820-1870.  Ithaca:  Cornell UP, 1978.

Christine de Pizan.  from The Book of the City of Ladies.  Trans. Earl Jeffrey Richards.  Literature of the Western World:  The Ancient World Through the Renaissance. Ed. Brian Wilke and James Hurt.  Vol. 1. 5^th ed. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2001. 1765-83. 2 vols.   

Du Bois, W.E.B.  The Souls of Black Folk.  New York: Penguin Books, 1989.

Henderson, Joel B.  “Susan Warner’s Wide, Wide World: The Despair Way to Heaven.”  1999.  Online.  Internet.  June 2002.  <http://www.womenwriters.net/domesticgoddess/pdf/Henderson1htm>.

The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States.  Ed.  Cathy N. Davidson and Linda Wagner-Martin.  New York:  Oxford UP, 1995. 

Thornton, Tracey.  “Between the Rhetoric of Abolition and Feminism:  Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”  1998.  Online.  Internet.  June 2002.  <http://www.womenwriters.net/domesticgoddess/thornton.htm>.

Tompkins, Jane.  Sensational Designs:  The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860.  New York:  Oxford UP, 1985.

Wells, Kim.  Women Writers.  February 2002.  Online.  Internet.  June 2002.  <http://www.womenwriters.net/>.

Welter, Barbara.  “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860.”  American Quarterly  18 (1966):  151-74.