Anne Boyd Rioux’s Meg Jo Beth Amy: why Little Women still matters …

Latest version of Little Women opens with  a deeply intimate-feeling scene of adolescent girls in their bedroom privacy trimming and curling the long hair of one of them (2017 BBC, scripted Heidi Thomas, directed Vanessa Caswell)

A version of this iconic scene, the four girls circled around the mother reading aloud the letter from the father away in the army Christmas time, is what usually opens the movie (this from the first 1931 George Cukor film)

Cut off from attention, marginalized or labeled as it has been into a “sentimental for-girls classic (in one of her chapters she shows how consistently teachers choose boys’ or apparently gender-neutral books for classroom texts), Little Women has still achieved remarkable longevity, respect, consistent readership (if most of the time not acknowledged by men) by mature women too …

Friends and readers,

It’s no wonder I feel as if I’ve been reading a good deal of Anne Boyd Rioux lately: I have! I did not mean to read her study of four 19th century American women novelists together with her study of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (by which throughout this blog I also mean Good Wives), but I ended doing so when TrollopeandHisContemporaries@groups.io decided to read this book. I didn’t mind; Meg Jo Beth Amy seemed an extension, a particular case in point of the lines of thought of Writing for Immortality.

This is the outside of the edition of the book with just these illustrations that I read and gazed upon for hours at age 10-11

While the book is presented as another of a recent favored genre, the biography-of-a-book as autobiography of this author (remember Michael Gorra’s masterpiece study of James and The Portrait of a Lady; think Rebecca Mead on Eliot and Middlemarch), it is more a defense of the book, something neither Gorra or Mead could possibly find necessary. Rioux argues for the depth, maturity of understanding conveyed, and original creativity in Alcott’s Little Women, and for including it in the curriculum of junior high school good books for both boys and girls, and in women’s studies in college. Beyond telling how the book emerged from Louisa May Alcott as an individual and in the context of her life and era, of its extensive and profound influence on countless people, about the stage, film and post-text legacy, and offering an array of interconnected readings, and of course retelling her own and her daughter’s experiences with this book, Rioux goes about to seek and finds very rare even today another or other books dramatizing and exploring problems experienced by adolescent girls and young women. If it were that a woman’s powerful book of genius could receive the kind of serious on-going attention and respect that such books by men regularly do, it would be recognized that Little Women changed the expectations we come to great children and young adult literature with.

Cut off from attention, marginalized or labeled as it has been into a “sentimental for-girls classic (in one of her chapters she shows how consistently teachers choose boys’ or apparently gender-neutral books for classroom texts), Little Women has still achieved remarkable longevity, respect, consistent readership (if most of the time not acknowledged by men). One of her chapters (longish, the fifth) is simply a recounting of many famous people’s (mostly women’s) praise and precious memories of reading (and nowadays), seeing, acting it out. I admit that by the time I got half-way through that I was relieved to be told Hilary Mantel “hated” it, Camilla Paglia saw it as “poison,” and Edith Wharton “avoided” it. I began to wonder how many people were just repeating cant. Surely there must be something wrong when there is such a uniform chorus of praise. But no she persuaded me her witnesses meant it.

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The “prologue” where Rioux claims this is a book women share with their daughters just invites an autobiographical response so I’ll oblige again: yes Little Women is a book I shared with my daughters, and both read it. Laura went on to further Alcott and it turned out preferred Little Men mightily, identified with Dan (ever getting into trouble), but it was not given me by my mother as a book she cherished. She never read it, but gave it to me as an appropriate gift-looking book for an 11 year old girl; I went on to read Little Men, Jo’s Boys, Eight Cousins, but began to balk at Rose in Bloom. Laura (at age 15) and I also shared Gone with the Wind, while Izzy took up Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion (before she was 13-14). I might as well get Rioux’s other assertion that comes up so quickly about Little Women (and she never quite leaves) over with: I never wanted to be tomboy or a boy; I was a reading girl. I also loved the romance of Prof Bhaer in New York City and when he comes to the March home to become Jo’s beloved partner, a tenderly loving older man seemed so perfect for her maturity. I did not want her to marry Laurie who seemed a boy in comparison, nor did I demand she remain unmarried since she did not seem happy up in her attic writing on alone.

The first part of the book (Chapter 1) offers a biography of Alcott in the context of portraits of her complex family members, their transcendental “high literary” milieu, and because of her father’s inability or refusal to conform to mainstream US norms to be able to make a living, hard poverty, strained physical existences, continuous work outside the home for all the daughters, but Lizzie (=Beth) who withdrew psychologically from what must have been an often silently traumatized scene and died young. As a group of readers, we hauled Bronson Alcott over the coals. Then Rioux recounts the extraordinary early and continual success (the “phenomenon”) of the book, the early editions, the re-printings, the way contemporaries talked of it, the two direct sequels (Little Men, Jo’s Boys), and the illustration history. This prompted several of us to describe the books we had read Little Women in and retell our favorite memories. Also what other children’s books we read: Elsie Dinsmore, What Katy Did. I talked of The Secret Garden and Nancy Drew.

Although of the elegant lady variety, Jessie Wilcox Smith’s pictures are felicitious

Prof Bhaer (Gabriel Byrne) and Jo (here Winona Ryder) have the iconic umbrella moment but I prefer this of them going over her story in the lodging house (1995 Miramax Little Women, directed by Gilliam Armstrong, scripted by Robin Swicord)

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June Allyson as Jo has some very real moments (1949 Mervyn LeRoy, directs — this one includes the girls putting on a play)

The second part of the book, “The Life of a Classic” offers a long chapter (4) on the stage plays and films made from the book from the very first up to the most recent, as well as an opera and Broadway musicals. As someone who has seen many of the films I found her analyses (the text is not soppy memories but genuine film study) enjoyable and accurate. It moved me to know the first stage production began with the words “Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,” and the performance had to stop to allow the “fervent applause” to finish itself out. She rightly goes on at length about the 1931 film, since it has been so influential and is still watchable; at the same time she’s right to say Katherine Hepburn (who is so paid attention to by critics) postures too much, jars as exaggerated, and we never forget the actress in the role. It was spoofed by Jack Benney as “Miniature Women” or “Small Dames.” The 1949 MGM film (June Allyson as Jo) and the 1995 again rightly take up much space (both genuinely thoughtful productions making of the characters evolving role models for adolescent and young women). I want to put in a good word for the old 1970 many episode BBC serial drama: for all its embarrassment at itself, it is the only film to give time to the later part of the story, Jo’s (Angela Downs) hard experience as the daughter left caring for two parents

Meg (JO Rowbottom) and John Brooke (Marvin Jarvis) were credible as young lovers in the 1970 BBC serial

The filmic artistry of all the films could have been paid more attention to; Rioux is rather interested to discuss whether the films convey the living power and emotions of the book, and both films are problematic: the MGM film is so lavish, the images highly magazine-commercialized, and women’s ambitions given short shrift; Armstrong and Co were so afraid to be seen as feminist, that the film is oddly bookish and stilted, too idealizing, no struggle, no anger, no gender ambiguities, to me recently it felt like a pretty Christmas card.

Of all I’ve seen (and not because it is the most contemporary) I find the BBC 2017 the closest to the spirit and themes of the book, and admire specifically how the women director and writer put Marmee on the scene re-experiencing her daughters raw emotions (as a kind of reflexive framing), and I’ve never seen Beth so empathized with as she tries repeatedly to get herself to come into the Laurence’s house and play on the piano as invited to.. Maya Hawke is not a celebrity so she has not been made a fetish of in the ads but she is pitch perfect as a sort of tomboy, as a girl who wishes she had been born a boy, as someone ambitious for a life outside being sexually a woman. At the movie’s end, we fast forward to see her running her school with Prof Bhaer (Mark Stanley) the one playing with their children.

She is Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman’s daughter — why and how she got the role — as well as good acting, here her face has a convincing hard edge of understanding as she grows older

But the meat or core of Meg Jo Beth Amy — why we should read this one by Rioux and Little Women by Alcott — is in the sixth chapter of this part and the seventh and eighth of the third. Most of the films end in a romantic arch that makes marriage the center of all three living daughters’ lives; when we look at the debates over its meaning and how it has functioned in American and English-speaking and European cultures, we find a very different story. Rioux covers in details how different critics across the 20th century and intelligent readers have discussed the book. It emerges as a deeply feminist (l’ecriture-femme) book which explains and defends young women’s natures, and goals in taking on those of life’s burdens suitable to them. One of the people in our group, Nancy Gluck, directed us to a blog she had written when reading Little Women with others as a feminist classic: A Feminist Book. There are conformist and feminist strands in the text, and Nancy distinguishes her terms carefully to emphasize what is liberating and valuable about this book:

“These are real girls, not models of perfection. Whatever your concept of feminism may be, for me it is the belief that women define their own natures; they are not defined for them by the male half of humanity. If women are entirely noble and good or entirely evil and dangerous, that is a patriarchal construct which separates females from the rest of the human race where everyone is a mixture of good and bad characteristics.

She also has ambition for herself, for her own sake.

“I want to do something splendid before I go into my castle, — something heroic or wonderful, that won’t be forgotten when I’m dead. I don’t know what, but I’m on the watch for it, and mean to astonish you all, some day. I think I shall write books, and get rich and famous: that would suit me, so that is my favorite dream.”

This is important because so often, in stories about girls or biographies of women, their accomplishments are portrayed as done entirely for the sake of others, to fulfill a helper role. Jo does not reject being a helper, but she also wants her own satisfactions and achievements. Within the realities of 19th-century life, Jo gets them. She rejects the suitor she does not love, she leaves home to support herself, she sells her stories, she writes a good book, and, finally, she does marry, but it is an unconventional union which enables her to become the manager of a school.

To me the absolute hallmark of masculinist and (one step further) misogynistic literature is this presentation of women as “noble and good” or “entirely” (or almost entirely) “evil and dangerous.” It so bothers me when I have to listen to exegeses (or just do read) of Poldark where the women lambast Elizabeth as almost entirely malign, ill-meaning, awful, with Demelza as an ideal close to that of Meg, Jo and Amy wrapped into one.

Another member of our group, Judith Cheney, wrote: “I am convinced that the Alcott’s aspirations for her Little Women are ones that young women today might still find helpful guideposts in their growing up out of girlhood years.” This is the chapter where Rioux goes over modern post-texts for Little Women.

Rioux looks at how far feminist and in what ways. She wants to defend the boo from the same modern thoughtful feminist point view that she uses in her Writing for Immortality and against the same wall of indifference by respected critics: a book can be sold widely, paid attention to by enormous numbers of people, made money off of and still not achieve the kind of recognition of (however temporary the earth) immortality (to use her words in the other book). By end she is discussing recent scholarly editions by Elaine Showalter the Library of America which printed the “Jo” trilogy (so to speak) and arguing for regarding all three together, even if the other two are not as central, as Alcott’s masterpieces. I found myself drawn to the sharper criticism: by Patricia Meyer Spaces: it’s a “glorification of altruism” – this would hit at the above as too soft, not telling the hardness of life and the people we must deal with and the money we must have to live. See Jill May’s “Feminism and Children’s Literature: Fitting Little Women into the American Canon,” CEA, 56 (1994):19-27.

This one has her novel, Work, about a young woman who during the civil war works as nurse, seamstress, governess, actress and companion
Alas it lacks Hospital Sketches and perhaps her short masterpiece, “The Brothers,” sometimes titled “Contraband,” which appears to be no longer available for free as a pdf on-line (it was for years, but greed never ceases).

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The first two chapters of Part 3 are rousing — one can get excited and even angry reading them. “A Private Book for Girls: Can Boys read Little Women?” is about the truth that Little Women will not be assigned in junior high to high schools, it is about how endlessly the books chosen in high school for all sexes is either by a man or focused on a boy, or, in the rare cases by a woman, she has a pseudonym, and they are mostly about boys — rare, Hunger Games, it’s about violent aggressive girl. Rioux mounts a convincing demonstration of at the core of this is an insistence on instilling macho male values (one parent catching a boy reading Little Women screamed, someone is making a “faggot” of his son), and refusing to acknowledge the interior life of women counts — and yes this all leads directly to rape culture. There is an attempt to keep LW private again, hidden — women belong in the home where nothing matters. She makes an attempt to show if permitted (not shamed or bullied of this) many boys will like and appreciate Little Women she describes individuals. They have to cope with seeing boys put in the marginal position in the book. A reasonable list of well known men loving Little Women follows — it includes Orwell, who I would not have expected to like LW. The opera composer, Adamo feels that LW is about “balancing our fear of vulnerability with our need for love.” That’s one theme but I doubt the central one.

“Being Someone (Chapter 8) treats Little Women as this educational “courtesy”‘ book (what they used to call these kind of book in the Renaissance). The situation and character types are made to do the work of situations and people analogous to girls’ situations as they are becoming mature. Not little girls, not fully grown (already married) women, but in-between, that time that books apparently still mostly avoid.

There’s been a TV movie and there is even a 25th anniversary Audio reading — on CDS, MP3s, downloads and you can find the audiocassettes too

But there is a problem with using Little Women this way — and it comes down to sex. None of the March girls is attacked sexually, harassed, none of them sexually shamed — I would maintain these are central experiences for all girls — probably then once they were allowed away from chaperons. Fanny Burney and various French women writers of the 18th century show incidents of harassment, mortification and rape.. Madame Roland shows how the aftermath can be as bad as the experience: her mother harrowed her with guilt and put her in a convent for a while and her sex life with a man never recovered: it took her years to marry.  Jenny Diski was raped at 14 and the way she describes this is just so usual. That does not mean she got over it or forgot. The experience shaped the way she behaved thereafter. I was raped at age 12-13 and can vouch for the experience shaping the rest of my life.

Rioux admits that sex is left out and “For girls, maturation has … always been closely tied to sexuality or the loss of purity or innocence.” Girls were preyed upon by masters, bosses, and yes (she omits this) family members. So how can Little Women be a central text? it can’t as despite dealing with other issues admirably (if too upbeat I’d say) it omits sex.

Rioux then deals with a second text whose popularity in the 1990s and continued sales power surprises her: Mary Pipher’s Reviving Ophelia. I read it for the first time in the 1990s and I cried. Had this book been written in the 1960s, given me to read, what a difference in my life it might have made. It is the first book I ever read which tells the truth about girls’ sexual experience in their teens. Rioux dislikes it because it shows girls to be victims. I’ve got news for her: they are. Rioux admits that ours is rape, misogynistic, stereotyping culture but not that Pipher does all she can — by telling the truth so we shall not be alone — about what happens to girls who complain and how they cope. Has Rioux never had such an experience? how about her daughters? her students, have they never written of this? Jo’s time in NYC cannot be a version of college or modern girl working because there is no sexual threat anytime anywhere in any way.

A side issue: I object to the idea in Beth we have an anorexic, or party an anorexic. First off, anorexia is not just a response to sex, to sexual maturation, it’s not just an avoidance though it is that. It is a response to a high pressure culture and family life. Why shouldn’t girls “want out,” as Hilary Mantel has written. Rioux does not know anything for real or fully about anorexia and she treats it and Beth as fundamentally very strange. Well in the book she is – because she is presented as super-religious and since Alcott dare not question that, she can’t make sense of Beth Apparently Louisa did not understand what was going on with Lizzie – it was more than a wasting disease like TB.

I suggest it might have been a hysterical response to living with a man (Bronson Alcott) who insists you drink water and eat bread, wear inadequate clothes, worship God all the time, and a mother who obeyed this nonsense. She was punishing herself because she was taught punishing was good – she needs to read books about the centrality of the family and what goes on in schools to the development of anorexia. I recommend to her and anyone coming to this blog Mara Selvini Palazzoli, Self-Starvation: from Individual to Family Therapy in the treatment of Anorexia Nervosa.  Very bad are the way sports are conducted: coaches humiliate, girls are mocked who are the least bit chubby and not competitive. To ask that this be forbidden is like asking a group American cultural norms to reverse themselves right now. And perhaps Lizzie was autistic – I’ve a hunch Bronson Alcott was – and suffered badly from misunderstanding.

Marmee (Emily Watson) watching over the daughter Beth (Annes Elwy) who cannot bear to go to school

I’d say if you gave a girl Little Women as an adequate educational treatise, you had better back it up by Pipher’s Reviving Ophelia and tell for real what girls experience in adolescence. Rioux is not willing to do this. Is the fundamental conflict of a girls life “how to love and be loved without losing oneself? What ideal world did Rioux grow up in? Girls are pressured into making money, having a career and this presented as easy – Jo has no problem getting a flat, writing away – this is unreal. Add some Naomi Wolf on beauty and Promiscuities and don’t omit Anne Oakley on Subject Women (in colleges, offices). Rioux appears sheltered, an emotional conservative, and disingenuous: only once does she remark that Jo is a comfort to lesbian girls. And then she leaves the remark there. She’s not telling a crucial destructive truth that matters about adolescence and young womanhood for women today.

Her last chapter “Little Women and Girls’ Stories Today” (9) is weak again. We are in the area of popular wide readership and popular literature, and to me it’s no surprise (if a matter of regret) that the genre of serious domestic tale investigating real lives of girls has been replaced for most or many girls by fantasy tales, action adventure dystopias. Genre analysis of fantasy and science fiction as such shows that this is an optimistic genre where good people win out (however good is defined).  Hunger Games is so different from LW I cannot take seriously her allegoresis. Girls are also offered easy reading chick lit and mean girl books.

She then (in effect) forgets she has male readers (or has already forgotten) and moves to TV shows where she finds comparisons: I never saw The Gilmore Girls; after the second episode of Girls I tired of it– it was too much about how dismaying real sex is, and the startle and energy gotten by the expedient of suggesting fellatio and other practices dims quickly (for me at any rate). The girls needle each other towards the end of the series (HBO), and we see how (in Rioux’s own words at the opening of this last chapter) how maturation is seen as “walking the line between being sexy and being taken for a whore.” Until near the end the situations depend on ideas about how privileged girls are sheltered by parents.

Rioux seems to want books for girls growing up which teach companionate marriage and sisterhood as an ideal and “how to connect selflessly with another human being.” She wasn’t so keen on companionate marriage in Writing for Immortality. Maybe she is assuming most girls readers will not go on to be writers, but does that mean the self-sacrificing social life ideal that under-girds modern norms of motherhood are primary makers of a good life? Tertium non est?

Rioux also needs to read Rebecca Traistor’s All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation.. Traister argues mature women have always had long periods alone, not with a man, they just had no way to support themselves, no validation from the culture whatsoever (“redundant”! was the outcry when they came out of their closet in the mid-19th century) and thus live a life an individual person who happens to be a woman might want.

Ellen

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Anne Boyd Rioux’s eloquent story of four wonderful 19th century women novelists

Friends,

This eloquent and persuasive study of four women writers’ work: — Elizabeth Stoddard, Louisa May Alcott, Constance Fennimore Woolson, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps — is the fifth of several general books on women who spent long periods of time unmarried that I have been reading towards my project for a collection of essays in a book with the working title: Not an Anomaly. I recently produced an outline for myself, singling out the specific women I’d focus on over three chapters (widow, pariah, spinster). See At the Crossroads of this life (scroll down). One of my choices will be Constance Fennimore Woolson, (lesbian?) spinster about whom I’ve written here before: Hours of Good Reading: a 19th century woman of letters.

A drawing by Constance Fennimore Woolson

The unusual argument in the introduction (and throughout) is this: Just about all women who wrote about artists or women making money until the 20th century do not themselves say they are ambitious for power or fame (Stael is an exception), or they take their art seriously and want to be respected as artists: no, they are writing for money, they are writing because they have to, they have a family they must help support. Rioux argues that these four women by telling stories of women who aspired to make permanent remarkable works of art, genius, are breaking an important taboo and behaving in a radical way: affirming the value of a woman’s life for what she as an individual can create, for what she can experience as an individual and convey, for having gifts equal to or superior to men.

Rioux insists that it is important to understand this presentation of one’s book as primarily there as a great art, great vision and the real goal of the woman as creating great art (not for supporting herself) as radical and important in building esteem and validation for women as a group. We are so used to valuing things for the money, book history as turned into a branch of let’s study how capitalism, fame, and industry worked and the idea of writing as a vocation becomes something we scorn people for: what? they must be hypocrites and just say that because their books don’t sell. We are so corrupted to the folds of our minds — today unless a book wins a prize, becomes social capital for the writer, we doubt it can be any good. We see up a relationship between a book and money as the first and foremost measurement of value. So this is quite a radical book. Vocational behavior is what we find at the core of great writers and Rioux finds it among her subjects.

The book then divides into four long chapters: first, we learn how the four women when young discovered themselves to be artists, to have singular talents and conceived a desire to fulfill them in family contexts where it seemed this desire could be realized; we read how they expressed this. Aspiration towards high ideals and values is found in the works of these four women and those who encouraged them — Margaret Fuller comes in here. In the second chapter we see them experience adult and later mature life as what thwarts them, and presents obstacles they sometimes overcome but usually not wholly and sometimes not at all, and we read the stories of women artists they tell which narrate such experiences in particular ways. They are all to some extent crippled in their ambition or fame or even what they were able to achieve or write because of the demand they be conventional heterosexual and marry. One of them did: Stoddard and that stopped her producing any more than two good novels.

Elizabeth Stoddard — The Morgesons

Stoddard’s work combines the narrative style of the popular nineteenth-century male-centered bildungsroman with the conventions of women’s romantic fiction in this revolutionary exploration of the conflict between a woman’s instinct, passion, and will, and the social taboos, family allegiances, and traditional New England restraint that inhibit her. Her most studied work, The Morgesons is set in a small seaport town, and is the dramatic story of Cassandra Morgeson’s fight against social and religious norms in a quest for sexual, spiritual, and economic autonomy. An indomitable heroine, Cassandra not only achieves an equal and complete love with her husband and ownership of her family’s property, but also masters the skills and accomplishments expected of women. Counterpointed with the stultified lives of her aunt, mother, and sister, Cassandra’s success is a striking and radical affirmation of women’s power to shape their own destinies. Embodying the convergence of the melodrama and sexual undercurrents of gothic romance and Victorian social realism. But to read Rioux’s very inward account of Stoddard her writing shows intense doubts about herself and the value of what she wrote; Rioux says she stopped writing well before she had to, defeated as it were by her household duties -1866 when she died in 1902; a story she tells after she stopped writing, “Collected by a Valetudinarian” is about Alicia Raymond who keeps a diary, she is a woman of genius and finds herself isolated, lonely, finding no understanding; she refuses a suitor whom she says had the best of her, and slowly dies as her brother marries; her works are forgotten.

The others fought and produced and led a life they found satisfactory but to do so took tremendous energies which weakened them in other ways. I’d say this is even true of Alcott — fine as her achievement in children’s books is and here and there in adult fiction, it’s not what she could have done.

The second woman, Elizabeth Phelps (Ward) spent a good deal of her life unmarried but she finally did marry (a man 17 years younger than herself) and was prolific; in the wikipedia article we are told of 57 volumes, that she depicted women suceeding in non-traditional careers (physician, minister, artist) and like Frances Power Cobbe, wrote polemics against vivisection and on behalf of animal rights. But her novel, The Story of Avis (is about a woman whose talent is extinguished because she finds that supporting herself and her child and writing are by no means satisfying; she is said to have two inward natures, she feels it goes against women’s nature to become a great artist and her life leaves no room for it; she does have a daughter and the daughter it seems will have a career. In life Phelps had a mother Elizabeth Wooster Phelps, who wrote about the repressive lives of women; her career as a writer was cut short when she became a prominent minister’s wife; apparently the mother became ill, mentally and physically with this attempt to break out. The mother’s one short story, “The Angel Over the Right Shoulder”, illustrates the repressive burdens frustrating a wife’s creative ambitions and need to “cultivate her own mind and heart”. The story is notable as “one of the rare woman’s fictions of this time to recognize the phenomenon of domestic schizophrenia”, says literary critic Nina Baym. What her mothr is famous for is a book that sold widely, The Sunny Side; or, The Country Minister’s Wife. The novel sold 100,000 copies in its first year, eventually more than 500,000, and garnered international recognition. She died the next year and the daughter Phelps Ward said her mother died of this struggle.

The central enemies of promise are what allured women and did give them happiness: to marry and have children. So these are hard complex conflicts we read about.

In a third chapter Rioux goes over carefully stories they told as they imagined women artists creating art and their lives. In these stories we find women who do not married (and have children) are regarded as unfulfilled failures no matter what books they write. Her book is dismissed as irrelevant and besides the point of her existence – while it’s what the heroine wants to pour all her existence into. So the question becomes how can one combine the two sets of activities, two different roles. I thought of how Gaskell’s Life of Bronte is really an apology for the woman artist and that while Gaskell was determined to normalize Bronte and her family, and show Charlotte involving herself in what was considered suitable for women, she still presented Bronte’s father (and I think rightly) as domineering, her marriage as simply getting in the way, isolating her, and destroying Bronte in childbirth. Phelps by the way allowed herself “aspiration” but not ambition, saw deeper satisfaction in love relationships for women than writing. I also omitted how another escape route from the conflict of career and personal artistic fulfillment and what their life circumstances demanded and what everyone around them probably said was to choose a male narrator at the center. Emma Lazarus had male artist figures at the center of her fictions. Another ploy was to have a maternal narrator – a mother figure. I don’t mind the mother figure or stance but know I prefer the daughter one. I know I often find very frustrating (even angering) the choice of a male in the center. That’s why I’ve not read DuMaurier’s later novels. To me it seems a betrayal. Somehow using the disguise of a male in Wolf Hall made me accept Mantel’s use of the ploy — this earlier era (unless you have a time-traveling heroine, pro-active from the 20th century) precludes active heroines.

Louisa May Alcott

Alcott as we all know strove to be a “dutiful daughter” and that is the phrase used here — it’s echoed in Beauvoir. Alcott wrote a novel she never finished Diana and Persis, which mirrors what happened to her and her sister May. May went to live in Europe, helped to get there by Louisa, and then lived a satisfying life (like Amy, except as an artist) but Louisa had to return home. In the novel Persis (May) at first has this satisfying life as both mother and artist, but soon she stops painting because she has had a child, and in an outburst (like Romney) it emerges despite her husband’s encouragement of her and saying if a woman will have courage and strength she can both, he berates her over her choice of her child when the child almost dies. It is a wish fulfillment book in that Diana (Louisa) becomes a sculptor, falls in love sort of with another (male) sculptor, Stafford, finds how wonderful it is to have this support, and then the novel breaks off. Rioux discusses her Hospital Sketches and Moods too. Rioux’s own Meg Jo Beth Amy, a kind of biography of a book is the one to read here.

Of the four Rioux concentrates on Woolson is the woman most pessimistic about this combination: Woolson’s register intense grief — as in “Miss Grief.” Woolson derided woman’s books which were “pretty and pleasant’ (idealized) romances, and writes about writing a story about a woman artist, Mrs B, that she never wrote out but the idea is she seeks to compete with men; Woolson has a male writer who realizes he cannot compete with the “power of a woman’s gifts of the heart” and a woman artist who feels she lacks the culture, learning, intellect of a man — this seems to mirror her idea of herself and Henry James. Alas she is best know for her relationship with James; late in life she went to live in Europe and didn’t return to the US, and apparently (I do think this is the truth) killed herself. Did she jump out a window or fall? Rioux stays on the fence but I feel thought she did kill herself. Woolson appears to have been bisexual.

Constance Fennimore Woolston

Grief is also central to these women artists; they grieve that they cannot come up to what men are granted as having achieved; they feel only unhappy women take to writing, they cannot sustain the achievement and eventually they die, killed by neglect, by exhaustion, live lives of quiet desperation. A less common theme (in both Woolson and Stoddard) is the need for women to have a belief in their own powers. She feels that their poses (however grating) could and maybe should be see as them finding authorial identities with which they are comfortable. Many of their heroines (or enough) really do aspire to be great artists, and they manage in different ways to circumvent the impasse they are confronted with by their culture, and how pessimistic they are, we see that in fact they had much success and real careers

Alcott seems single minded in her avoidance of courtship for herself, and intense grief in her novels. She was not unwilling to write uplifting girls’ stories. Phelps and Alcott openly advocate the single life — George Eliot could get away with the best of all worlds (she avoided time-wasting visitors is how I’d see it) because she had Lewes as her businessman. (Not mentioned by Rioux but Margaret Oliphant was envious and found that having to cope with the business end of her profession and support herself and family decreased her time and ability to produce the masterpieces she actually yearned to create. In Rioux’s re-telling, Stoddard emerges as the most poignant figure, for after her serious masterpiece, The Morgesons, still in print, the pressure of marriage and childre made her give up writing.

Mary Cassatt — Lydia at the Tapestry Loom (1881)

It’s not a story of what was not achieved though but of eloquent poems and life-writing, of great books, fascinating heroines and their stories, moving life achievements which at first gain an audience and respect or now and again gain these as if for the first time, but finally are placed in unknown and isolated limbos of neglect and disparagement, or just not valued for real. It’s a story of heroic struggle, of almost making it or making it for a while and then being stifled. I enjoyed reading the summaries and analyses of their books; Rioux makes these come alive with issues that women today who aspired to writing as a career (or any career) will face. I found myself indignant at the way particular editors and male writers and critics put these women down, refused to acknowledge their value, made fun of them, heaped withering scorn and resentment on them, would never give them equal respect — from Howells, Hawthorne and James to lesser known men (but powerful at the time) and the treatment the men and family members the women lived with did not sympathize, understand, and corroded their abilities. What differentiates American from English women was when in Europe they had the sense of being perpetually watched — paradoxically, the idea found in Henry James’s Daisy Miller, led to journalists and ordinary people in letters trying to watch and write about American women writers to see if they led moral as well as successful lives

Along the way Rioux brings in other women writers, especially those whose works did achieve longer lasting fame and recognition at least as first, as influential on our four. Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, a narrative poem about a woman trying to live the life of a woman writer. Phelps is quoted saying of Aurora Leigh: “I owe to her, distinctly, the first visible aspiration (ambition is too low a word) to do some honest, hard work of my own in the world beautiful, and for it.” Germane de Stael’s Corinne, or Italy, a tragic novel of a woman whose muse creates this beautiful poetic book, at the end of which she is rejected as a woman and artist. She also treats of Eliot’s Armgart, a poem about a singer I have read, a narrative novel where by the end the heroine loses her voice. This is so common in 19th century novels for women artists — it’s a punishment (like the scenes of confession and humiliation for heroines in many American movies still today). There is a typology of writing or artist heroines in the novels of this era: in the US a sentimental artist heroine who can and does marry and we see her troubles; in the UK and Europe, the woman of Romantic poetic genius, who most of the time comes to a tragic end. They also turned to real women they knew or knew of: Charlotte Bronte as presented in Elizabeth Gaskell’s life of her; George Eliot as the model they all yearned to be as novelists. There are explicit intersections Phelps’s novel, The Story of Avis by Phelps and both Corinne and Aurora Leigh – Avis, who becomes an artist is engulfed by her husband and her gifts lost. Phelps does not think that the conflict is a society-imposed one but inherent in women’s nature — she also refuses to give her heroine genuine ambition.

Emma Lazarus

Rioux also (or along the way) discusses Rebecca Harding Davies, Helen Hunt Jackson, Emma Lazarus, one black woman who was never enslaved and lived a middle class life, Charlotte Forten Grimke, as women who either wrote less, or what they wrote did not achieve the same level, or who did not deal openly with the issues of their own lives and those of women from a woman’s point of view, but whose work placed in the same context emerges as similarly unfairly marginalized. She excludes Sarah Orne Jewett and Emily Dickinson because they did not seek careers and in a sense validated the idea that women should stay in some private retreat.

The last chapter is a convincing demonstration that the male white academy of the 20th century excluded all but white males like themselves in a canon they invented and taught; that the four were similarly dissed in the marketplace, pushed into writing less aspirant books (children’s books for example) and how they never were able to reach the status and receive the recognition their work deserved. One must admit an oddity here: these four women did write prolifically, all were in print and had careers, one now still famous, Alcott, and one now still respected for her artistry, if not well known (Woolson) and one respected as achieving something beyond a historically important still readable book (Phelps). Still, this is the saddest chapter of the book. I found myself embarrassed as I read: Rioux is showing that these women chased after males; they wanted recognition so badly, that they kowtowed before them, behaved in deferrent and self-humiliating ways. I know I have done this and wish I could altogether stop. What really hurts is the situation described in the early and mid-20th century history of the Atlantic Monthly obtains today. Yes the women’s page and their normative heroines are different from mid-century but underlying it all is the same non-valuing of literature by and for women. Maybe it’s that I’ve experienced editors “losing” the attachment, never writing back. The part of the chapter about how critics treat women’s books rings loud still. It’s a masculinization of taste.

Rioux’s last topic is the canon. Brigid Brophy was a breath of fresh air, among the first of the 1970s feminist books on women writers. Brophy’s contribution was to agree these are “dreadful” books and because they are dreadful they are masterpieces. She turns the charge of sentimentalism on its head — the sentimentalism is what makes them great – they are morbid, complaining, sad, emotional, say things matter that in life “adults”‘ learn (so it’s implied) to get past, slide over, ignore. In short, they are powerful great grapplings with life in art. Rioux returns to her four women in the end and tells of their later years — betrayed by “new” women replacing them, so Edith Wharton never acknowledged their real influence on her work. Then a marvelous bibliographical essay, which takes the reader through the important cited books a history of feminist scholarship in the last quarter century.

An early important book, which meant a lot to me when I was young

Rioux’s book is so rich in details, in retellings of stories by so many American women writers, of the circumstances of their lives, in quotation (how shocked women were when they sought the vote and discovered males were violently hostile … ), I can’t begin to do justice to it. Read it yourself, and then do like me, turn to read at least some of the literature Rioux has digested for us. I’ve also got myself a good biography of Alcott as a reformist, written in an intriguing way: Kit Bakke, Miss Alcott’s Email: Yours for reforms of all Kinds.

Ellen

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A Summer Syllabus: The Enlightenment: At Risk?

Samuel Johnson reading (Joshua Reynolds)

A Syllabus

Where a great proportion of the people are suffered to languish in helpless misery, that country must be ill policed, and wretchedly governed: a decent provision for the poor, is the true test of civilization. — Samuel Johnson

For a course at the Oscher LifeLong Learning Institute at George University
Day: Six Wednesdays
June 26 to July 31
4215 Roberts Road, Tallwood, Fairfax, Va.
Dr Ellen Moody

Description of Course

The Enlightenment: At Risk

It’s been suggested the ideas associated with the European Enlightenment, a belief in people’s ability to act rationally, ideals of social justice, human rights, toleration, education for all, in scientific method, are more at risk than any time since the 1930s. In this course we’ll ask what was & is meant by the term, how & why did this movement spread, against what obstacles, what were the realities of the era and what were the new genres & forms of art that emerged. Our focus will be on select works by three major figures: Voltaire’s Letters on England, Diderot’s The Nun, Samuel Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands. We will also see Peter Watkins’s docudrama, Culloden (1965). It is asked that before class starts, people obtain and read Dorinda Outram’s The Enlightenment: New Approaches to European History.

Required Texts (in the order we’ll read them):

Voltaire, Letters on England, trans. Leonard Tancock. 1980; rpt. NY: Penguin, 2005.
Diderot, Denis. The Nun, trans., introd. Russell Goulbourne. 2005: rpt. NY: Oxford, 2008.
Johnson, Samuel. A Journey to the Western Islands in Scotland, together with Boswell’s The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, ed., introd. notes, Peter Levi. NY: Penguin, 1984.
(Alternative: Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, Journey to the Hebrides, ed., introd. Ian McGowan. 1996; rpt: Edinburgh: Canongate, 2001. ISBN 978-0-86241-4

Jean Huber, Voltaire Planting Trees, 1775 (click to enlarge).

Format: The class will be a mix of informal lecture and group discussion. Read for the first day on-line Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?”  http://www.columbia.edu/acis/ets/CCREAD/etscc/kant.html

June 26: What do we mean by this term? Voltaire: life & career. Values embodied: list of good and bad buzz words.  The 4 Revolutions. For next week read Letters on England.

July 3: Voltaire, Letters on England. Diderot: life, career, Encyclopedie, On Slavery, Art Criticism. Read for next time, “Eloge de Richardson” (“In Praise of Richardson”) online at Diderot site and Eloge de Richardson

July 9: Diderot’s The Nun. Introducing Scotland, Jacobites & Jacobins

July 17: Peter Watkins’s Culloden

July 24: London & Edinburgh: Johnson and English enlightenment (biographer, edition of Shakespeare, essays). Begin Journey to Western Islands in Scotland.

July 31: Finish Johnson; brief lecture on Madame Roland, Mary Wollstonecraft and the struggles of 1790s in France.

Johnson and Boswell’s route through Scotland (click to enlarge)

Bibliography: Supplementary reading:

Brewer, John. Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century. University of Chicago, 1897.
Buchan, James. Crowded with Genius: The Scottish Enlightenment: Edinburgh’s Moment of the Mind. London: Harper Collins 2003.
Cobb, Richard & Colin Jones, ed. Voices of the French Revolution. NY: HarperCollins, 1998.
Curran, Andrew. Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely. NY: Other Press, 2009.
Davidson, Ian. Voltaire in Exile. NY: Grove, 2004.
Diderot, Denis. Selected Writings on Art and French Literature, ed, trans. introd. Geoffrey Bremner. Penguin, 1994.
————–. Letters to Sophie Volland, a selection translated by Peter France. London: Oxford, 1972.
Greene, Donald. Samuel Johnson. Boston: Twayne, 1989
McLynn, Frank. The Jacobites. Law Book Co of Australasia, 1985.
Mitford, Nancy. Voltaire in Love, introd. Adam Gopnik. NY: New York Review of Books, 2012. A classic.
Outram, Dorinda. The Enlightenment. 3rd edition. London: Cambridge, 2013
Prebble, John. Culloden, The Highland Clearances. Both Plimico, new edition 2002.
Roland, Marie-Jeanne. Memoirs of Madame Roland, trans, ed. Evelyn Shuckburgh Paris: Mercure de France, 1990.
Trouille, Mary. Sexual Politics in the Enlightenment: Women Read Rousseau. State University Press of NY, 1997.
Wain, John. Samuel Johnson. NY: VIking Press, 1974.
Williams, Helen Maria. Letters Written in France, ed. Neil Fristat & Susan Lanser. Ontario: Broadview, 2001.
Yalom, Marilyn. Blood Sisters: The French Revolution in Women’s Memory. NY: Basic Books, 1994.

Diderot

Madame Roland (probably drawn while she was in prison)

Films:

Culloden. Dir, Peter Watkins. Fictional documentary. Featuring: Tony Cosgrove, Olivier Espitalier-Noel, Don Fairservice. BBC, 1968.
La Nuit de Varennes. Dir. Ettore Scuola. Script. Sergeo Armidei. Featuring: Jean-Louis Barrault, Marcello Mastroianni, Hanna Schygulla, Harvey Keitel. Opera Film, 1982
The Nun. Dir., Script. Guillaume Nicoloux. Featuring: Pauline Etienne, Isabelle Huppert, Martha Gedeck, François Négret. Les films de Worso, 2013.

The whole of Culloden online:

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A Jane Austen Study Day, JASNA-DC: Life in Regency England (2)

Miniatures of Philadelphia and George Austen — Jane Austen’s aunt and father

Five Dancing Positions

Dear Friends,

The second half of the Jane Austen Study DC hosted by JASNA-DC at the American University Library, as “curated” by Mary Mintz. In the morning we listened to excellent papers on some realities and perceptions of religious groups and servants in Austen’s day; the afternoon was taken up with the equivalent of photographs, miniatures, and drawn portraits, and how dance was so enjoyed and a source of female power in the era.

After lunch, Moriah Webster spoke to us about miniatures in the era; her paper’s title “Ivory and Canvas: Naval Miniatures in Portraiture [in the era] and then Austen’s Persuasion.” Moriah began by quoting Austen’s pen portraits in her letters on a visit she paid with Henry Austen to an exhibition in the Spring Gardens in London, where she glimpsed

“a small portrait of Mrs Bingley, excessively like her. I went in hopes of seeing one of her Sister, but there was no Mrs Darcy; — perhaps I may find her in the great exhibition, which we shall go to if we have time. I have no chance of her in the collection of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s paintings, which is now showing in Pall Mall, and which we are also to visit. Mrs. Bingley’s is exactly herself -— size, shaped face, features, and sweetness; there never was a greater likeness. She is dressed in a white gown with green ornaments, which convinces me of what I had always supposed, that green was a favourite color with her. I dare say Mrs. D. will be in yellow… Letter 85, May 24, 1813, to Cassandra, from Sloane Street, Monday)

Samantha Bond as the faithful Mrs Western, next to her Mr Elton, to the back Mr Knightley (Mark Strong) and Emma and Mr Woodhouse (Bernard Hepton), trying to lead a discussion of picture looking to favor Emma’s depiction of Harriet (1996 BBC Emma)

The detail and visual acuity reminded me of many other verbal portraits in Austen’s letters and novels, which I wrote about in my paper on “ekphrastic patterns in Austen,” where I went over the attitudes of mind seen in the way she explained her own and others picturing process, both analysing and imitating the picturesque seriously, and parodying it. She asks how does the way we think about and describe, the language we use and forms we absorb enable and limit what we can see.

Moriah was not interested in the philosophical and linguistic issues (which were the subject of my paper)

“He talked of foregrounds, distances, and second distances — side-screens and perspectives — lights and shades; and Catherine was so hopeful a scholar that when they gained the top of Beechen Cliff, she voluntarily rejected the whole city of Bath as unworthy to make part of a landscape (Northanger Abbey, 1:14)

One of the many effective landscapes from Ang Lee and Emma Thompson’s Sense and Sensibility (director and screenplay-writer and Elinor n Miramax 1995 film)

Marianne argues passionately “that admiration of landscape scenery is become a mere jargon. Everybody pretends to feel and tries to describe with the taste and elegance of him who first defined what picturesque beauty was. I detest jargon of every kind, and sometimes I have kept my feelings to myself, because I could find no language to describe them in but what was worn and hackneyed out of all sense and meaning (S&S, 1:18)

but rather the real miniatures and drawings we know about in Austen’s life as well as how the way drawing is approached distinguishes a character’s traits of personality, and the way pictorial objects function in the plot-designs of her novels.

I offer a few examples of what interested her — though these were not delineated in her paper:

Irene Richards as Elinor Dashwood is a fairly serious artist (1981 BBC Sense and Sensibility) who can be hurt by people’s dismissal of her work

Sylvestre Le Tousel as Fanny Price dreams over her brother’s precious drawings of his ships (1983 BBC Mansfield Park)

For Kate Beckinsale as Emma drawing is a way of manipulating situations, defining her relatives, a vanity she does not work hard enough at (again the 1996 BBC Emma, with Susannah Morton as Harriet)

She did dwell on Persuasion. The novel opens with Anne cataloguing the pictures at Kellynch Hall; and has a comic moment of Admiral Croft critiquing a picture of a ship at sea in a shop window in the same literal spirit as Mr Woodhouse objects to Emma’s depiction of Harriet out of doors without a shawl.

Here I am, you see, staring at a picture. I can never get by this shop without stopping. But what a thing here is, by way of a boat! Do look at it. Did you ever see the like? What queer fellows your fine painters must be, to think that anybody would venture their lives in such a shapeless old cockleshell as that? And yet here are two gentlemen stuck up in it mightily at their ease, and looking about them at the rocks and mountains, as if they were not to be upset the next moment, which they certainly must be. I wonder where that boat was built!” (laughing heartily); “I would not venture over a horsepond in it.” (Persuasion 2:6 or 18)

John Woodvine as Crofts regaling Amanda Root as Anne and us with his reaction to a picture in a shop window (1995 BBC Persuasion)

More crucially we have a cancelled chapter and one about a miniature of someone who Captain Benwick was engaged to and died (Phoebe Harville), and is now prepared to discard and use the framing for a miniature of her substitute (Louisa Musgrove); this becomes the occasion of a melancholy and passionately argued debate over male versus female constancy and prompts Wentworth (listening) finally to write Anne Elliot a letter revealing the state of his loving mind.

What Moriah concentrated on was who had miniatures made of them, for what reasons and how much individual ones cost; how these were made, and who they functioned as social and cultural capital in these specific people’s lives. All the miniatures we have testify to the status of the person pictured, a status (I remark or add) that Austen (apparently) never achieved in the eyes of those around her.

Although she didn’t say this it’s obvious that Austen’s brothers had miniatures made of them because they rose to important positions in the navy; her father was a clergyman; her aunt became the mistress of Warren Hastings.

Francis who became an admiral and Charles in his captain’s uniform

She did imply the irony today of the plain unvarnished sketch of Austen by her sister, located in the National Gallery like a precious relic in a glass case in the National Gallery while all around her on the expensive walls are the richly and expensively painted literary males of her generation.

I regret that my stenography was not up to getting down the sums she cited accurately enough and the differing kinds of materials she said were used to transcribe them here so I have filled out the summary with lovely stills from the film adaptations — it’s easy to find many of these because pictures, landscapes and discussions of them are more frequent in the novels than readers suppose. Miniatures as a subject or topic are in fact rare.

Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth during her tour of Derbyshire with the Gardiners (1995 BBC P&P) is placed in a clearly delineated landscape (1995 A&E P&P scripted by Davies) and is reminiscent of

A William Gilpin depiction of Dovedale

There was some group discussion after this paper, and (as seems to be inevitable) someone brought up her longing for a picture of Austen. She was reminded that we have two, both by Cassandra. But undeterred she insisted these were somehow not good enough, not acceptable. Of course she wanted a picture that made Austen conventionally appealing. At this point others protested against this demand that Austen be made pretty, but she remained unimpressed by the idea that women should not be required to look attractive to be valuable.

It is such an attitude that lies behind the interest people take in Katherine Byrne’s claim a high-status miniature (the woman is very dressed up) that she found in an auction with the name “Jane Austen” written on the back is of Jane Austen. See my blog report and evaluation, “Is this the face I’ve seen seeking?”

**************************************

Dancing in the 2009 BBC Emma: at long last Jonny Lee Miller as Mr Knightley gets to express himself to Emma

The last talk was delightful: Amy Stallings on “Polite Society, Political Society: Dance and Female Power” dwelt on the dances themselves, how accessible they were, the social situations, how they are used in Austen’s books, and finally how in life they were used to project political behavior or views in assemblies and private parties and balls too. Her perspective was the political and social functioning of dancing (reminding me of Lucy Worseley), going well beyond the literary depiction of dance in Austen. She scrutinized ballroom behavior and dance to show that the ballroom floor was a kind of stage on which a woman could find paradoxical freedom to talk with a young man and older women might project political agendas and alliances (especially if she was the hostess).

If we look past the movie and see this scene as filming a group of famous admired actors and actresses we can see the same game of vanity and power played out (everyone will distinguish Colin Firth as Darcy in this still from the 1995 BBC P&P)

Her talk fell into three parts. First, she showed how dance was made accessible to everyone in the class milieu that learned and practiced such social behavior. This part of her talk was about the actual steps you learned, the longways patterning of couples, how it enabled couples to hold hands, made eye contact. Longways dancing is a social leveller, she claimed. I found it very interesting to look at the charts, and see how the couples are configured in the different squares. As today, it was common to see women dancing in the men’s line. People looked at what you were wearing and how well you danced. She quotes Edgeworth in her novel Patronage (which like Austen’s Mansfield Park has both dancing and amateur theatrics). There was pressure to perform in dancing (as well as home theater).

Dancing difficult maneuvers in the 1983 Mansfield Park: Fanny and Edmund

The second part dwelt on dancing in novels of the era. She quoted from Henry Tilney’s wit and power over Catherine in their sequences of dancing:

JJ Feilds as Tilney mesmerizing Felicity Jones as Catherine (2007 ITV Northanger Abbey)

Her partner now drew near, and said, “That gentleman would have put me out of patience, had he stayed with you half a minute longer. He has no business to withdraw the attention of my partner from me. We have entered into a contract of mutual agreeableness for the space of an evening, and all our agreeableness belongs solely to each other for that time. Nobody can fasten themselves on the notice of one, without injuring the rights of the other. I consider a country-dance as an emblem of marriage. Fidelity and complaisance are the principal duties of both; and those men who do not chuse to dance or marry themselves, have no business with the partners or wives of their neighbours.”
“But they are such very different things!–”
” –That you think they cannot be compared together.”
“To be sure not. People that marry can never part, but must go and keep house together. People that dance only stand opposite each other in a long room for half an hour.”
“And such is your definition of matrimony and dancing. Taken in that light certainly, their resemblance is not striking; but I think I could place them in such a view. — You will allow, that in both, man has the advantage of choice, woman only the power of refusal; that in both, it is an engagement between man and woman, formed for the advantage of each; and that when once entered into, they belong exclusively to each other till the moment of its dissolution; that it is their duty, each to endeavour to give the other no cause for wishing that he or she had bestowed themselves elsewhere, and their best interest to keep their own imaginations from wandering towards the perfections of their neighbours, or fancying that they should have been better off with any one else. You will allow all this?”
“Yes, to be sure, as you state it, all this sounds very well; but still they are so very different. — I cannot look upon them at all in the same light, nor think the same duties belong to them (Northanger Abbey, I:10.

and alluded to (by contrast) how Darcy will not permit Elizabeth to achieve any power over him through dance or talk; in his downright refusals and more evasive withdrawals he robs her of status and any hold on him. So she becomes grated upon, frustrated. Amy discussed Scott’s Redgauntlet as containing a particularly effective pointed description of a tête-à-tête; the disruption of walking away, walking out and its potential to humiliate is drawn out in this novel.

One of Jane Austen’s most memorable masterly depictions of social humiliation and kindness is in the scene where Mr Elton deliberately sets up Harriet to expect him to ask her to dance, and then when Mrs Weston takes the bait, and asks him to ask Harriet to dance, he can publicly refuse her. I thought of a similarly crestfallen hurt in the dancing scene in the unfinished Watsons where a young boy is carelessly emotionally pained and (as Mr Knightley does here), so Emma Watson there comes in to rescue him at the risk of herself losing social status by dancing in the lead position with a boy.

Mark Strong as Mr Knightley observing what the Eltons are doing

The expression on Samantha Morton’s face as she is drawn up to dance by the most eligible man in the room is invaluably poignant (once again the 1996 BBC Emma)

Amy’s third part was about the politics of the dance floor and particular assemblies in particular localities. First she did insist that Austen’s novels are explicitly political in various places (including Fanny Price’s question on slavery, Eleanor Tilney’s interpretation of Catherine Morland’s description of a gothic novel as about the Gordon riots &c). She then went on to particular periods where politics was especially heated and cared about, often because a war is going on, either nearby or involving the men in the neighborhood. She described assemblies and dances, how people dressed, what songs and dances were chosen, who was invited and who not and how they were alluded to or described in local papers in Scotland and England in the middle 17th century (the civil war, religious conflicts and Jacobitism as subjects), France in the 1790s (the guillotine could be used as an object in a not-so-funny “debate”), and in the American colonies in the 1770s.

Amy went on at length about particular balls given in 1768, December 1769, May 1775, where allusions were made to loyalist or American allegiances, to specific battles and generals. One anecdote was about a refrain “British go home!” While all this might seem petty, in fact loyalists were badly treated after the American colonists won their revolution, and many died or were maimed or lost all in the war. Her argument is that women have involved themselves in higher politics (than personal coterie interactions, which I suppose has been the case since people danced) through dance from the time such social interactions occurred in upper class circles and became formal enough “to be read.” We were way over time by her ending (nearly 4:30 pm) so no questions could be asked, but there was a hearty applause.

Again I wish I could’ve conveyed more particulars here but I don’t want to write down something actually incorrect. I refer the interested reader to Cheryl A Wilson’s Literature and Dance in 19th century Britain: Jane Austen to the New Woman. The early chapters tell of the many dances known at the time, the culture of dance, and what went on as far as we can tell from newspapers and letters at assemblies, with a long chapter on doings at Almack’s, where Jane Austen just about whistles over Henry her brother’s presence. Frances Burney’s Cecilia, George Eliot’s Adam Bede, and Thackeray’s Vanity Fair are among the novels mined for understanding. Wilson goes over the quadrille (squares) and how this configuration changed the experience of hierarchy and then wild pleasures of the waltz. Here Anthony Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her? and The Way We Live Now are brought in. Lady Glencora Palliser and Burgo Fitzgerald almost use an evening of reckless dancing as a prologue to elopement and adultery. I imagine it was fun to write this book.

At Lady Monk’s ball Susan Hampshire as Lady Glencora and Barry Justice as Burgo Fitzgerald dance their way into semi-escape

He begs her to go off with him as the true husband of her heart and body

It was certainly good fun to go to the Jane Austen Study Day and be entertained with such well thought out, informative and perceptive papers very well delivered. I wish more Austen events were like this one.

Ellen

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EC/ASECS at Staunton, Va; ASECS, Denver: Theater, Film, Landscape, Women artists

A 2017 production of Etheredge’s Man of Mode

A painting of an unknown young woman in the Berger Collection, Denver Art Museum

Friends and readers,

I held off writing about the rest of the autumn EC/ASECS conference separate sessions this past fall at the East Central, American 18th century society, a regional group (for a brief account and link to my paper on “Intertextuality: Charlotte Smith, Prior and Crabbe in Persuasion”), I held, I say, off for so long that I have lost my stenographer’s pad of what my now slow weak fingers and clumsier hands can capture. So I have determined not to wait so long for transcribing what was I able to take down, from the ASECS (American 18th century Society) conference I went to three weeks ago, March.

For the rest of the EC/ASECS I’ve described what the trip ordeal was like and what I saw of Denver in my Sylvia II blog Afterpiece (scroll down, not too far) and the two panels, Factual Fictions and Fictional Facts, one of which I chaired, and in one of which I gave my paper on the historical fiction of Winston Graham. Now I can offer a summary of the keynote lecture.

Matthew Kinservik on Etherege’s “Man of Mode and Its influence on 18th century comedy” has just been published in the March issue of the Intelligencer this year too. He asked why such an “oddly unfunny play” should have been such a hit and deemed representative of the finest intellect, controlled emotionalism, and satiric nature of comedy in the Restoration era. He explicated Steele’s adverse response and Dennis’s defense of the play. From close reading this debate Matt demonstrated that The Man of Mode survived as a period piece, highly artificial, a throw-back to an earlier era, historically acceptable, in which a central (no longer socially admired) aristocratic type, Dorimant, does whatever he wants and is made acceptable by the hypocritical codes of England “of the past.” It was therefore seen as safe, non threatening, and as a flattering view of the Restoration — all the while presenting sex-antagonism, on a bedrock of spite, as a serious exposure of earlier (still ambiguously attractive) norms. Etherege’s text emerges as even then (the early 18th century) the darker play it feels like and must be played for today. Perhaps I should have mentioned that of two of the plays performed in the Blackfriars theater next door to our conference while we were there, one was The Man of Mode — so after Matt’s paper we had quite a frank discussion and dispute over all sorts of aspects of the production, which used costumes that combined 21st century motifs with later 17th century ones.

Walking in the Wood (Davies’s 2007 NA)

Onto ASECS, Denver:  I link Matt’s lecture/paper to a Thursday afternoon session on “The Eighteenth Century on Film” (a NE/ASECS panel) where the topic was TV movies mostly, popular social art of our own time, using texts either from or based on 18th century history. Sarah Schaefer gave a paper (and did a power-point presentation of on the openings, framings (paratexts) of Black Sails, Outlander, Poldark and Westeros, Westworld and Games of Thrones were all brought together.

Poldark paratext (2015 — the oceans of the world gazed at)

Outlander paratext (2015 — linking 18th to 20th century world)

She argued the point of the images was to build a global world in which we see geopolitical tropes at play. Poldark is the most heritage-like of the costume drama films she covered; in Outlander the fantastical leads to a historical setting. In these liminal vast pictorial spaces we enter foregroundings of humanistic feelings and themes. Emily Sferra spoke on Andrew Davies’s 2007 adaptation of Austen’s Northanger Abbey: she criticized the film for making Henry as teacher of needed moral lessons to Catherine instead of allowing Catherine’s movement from a naive response to gothic to a mature understanding of how true terror, oppression, cruelty enters our lives. She felt Davies had lost Austen’s peculiar satirical tone. The movie also pleases the male gaze and desire (say) to look at other males as JJ Fields is sexy in an elegant artificial way. I add that in that this interest in the male body and beauty Andrew Davies’s NA then resembles the movies Sarah Schaefer was discussing. Zoe Eckmann made a case for regarding the depiction of female sexuality in The Favourite as liberating for the 21st century female gazer; she saw it as satire presenting women as aggressors. It overturns the way we expect women to behave submissively; audiences don’t care about historical accuracy.

Emma Stone as Abigail Masham

Rachel Weisz and Olivia Coleman and Lady Churchill and Queen Anne

The audience for these papers turned out to be people who had watched precisely these film adaptations with real care and investment of themselves. I presented an argument against Zoe’s view (made in my blog-review a couple of months ago: “Repulsive, obscene, gut-level anti-feminism”) and then the conversation became as lively as the one over Matt’s paper and the production of Man of Mode that audience saw. I wish I could remember all that was said, we went way over time ….

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On Friday early morning, I again found myself able to take down what was said about Gilpin and his relationship to other landscape gardeners and illustrators on “The Landscape Garden in the Eighteenth Century” panel. Elizabeth Mjelde talk on Gilpin’s work at Stowe began unexpectedly in Sri Lanka where she located evidence of the global impact of Gilpin’s work in an English officer’s private commonplace book about seeking new sciences for transforming the landscape, exploring it, testing it. In a place where harsh colonialist practices were the norm, here are dialogues and pictures about one’s duty to keep the desire for retirement, and another way of life “in its place.” Dana Gliseman’s paper was about the intersection of literary and artful imaginative terrains (descending from Gilpin) with concrete literal places. The ha-ha comes from a desire to make a trompe-d’oeil. I think she meant to suggest that the central concern with sexual reproduction (marriage, sexual transgression) found in characters in novels otherwise highly pictorial and picturesque show a linkage between landscape, the natural world and moral meaning.

Villa Medici, Fiesole

I assume others like me when we moved from these papers citing the usual English novels (Tristram Shandy, Sidney Biddulph, Mansfield Park), to Felix Martin’s remarkable talk on the development of landscape art (JW Turner), then schools of picturesque and classical architecture, parks which are genuinely global, rooted in documentable history, and finally considered philosophical aesthetics — were bowled over. Mr Martin was himself an architect who has studied in Italy, Dublin and the Warburg Institute and he brought a wealth of slides to enable us to journey through time and space and end on Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesen (his own country seat in Wisconsin), landscaped houses, and those of followers of his work. He went over different architectural schools as seen say in Blenheim and the Medici gardens in Fiesole, Castle Howard (familiar to some of us as Brideshead in the movie). He moved from the writing of Shaftesbury to Blake, to modern landscape design in Arizona. As Olmstead had come up in the panel I chaired where there was a paper on the later Gilpin-rooted influences on environmentalism, so Olmstead came up again as against false pomposity and for a cosmopolitanism that builds with local geography and flora in mind. The Denver park is an Olmstead creation.

Wright’s creations in Taliesen restore the landscape

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Prometheus Painting by Prince Hoare

I’ve two more papers to report, one from a Friday mid-morning panel called “Picturing the Stage,” the other the key note address of the conference by Melissa Hyde on women artist of the era, especially two almost unknown Frenchwomen, much of whose work seems to have disappeared. Mark Ledbury’s “Painter, Playwright, Entrepreneur: Prince Hoare in 1790s London told the remarkable story of a man whose father had been a painter, and who somehow went to good schools, learned several lagnauges, got himself to Rome where he was supported and befriended by radical talent and rich people (Fuseli, and the Cortellini family) who was continually re-inventing himself, and turned to acting, to writing plays (one farce out of a tragedy), left a book of fascinating essays about his own era from an artistic and theater man’s point of view called The Artist. He asked why is this man forgotten and the answer he came up with is “art history” is still plagued with and organized around (money given) the respectable known canon

Marianne Loir, Portrait of a Gentleman reading

The title of Melissa Hyde’s “Ambitions, Modest and Otherwise: Women and the Visual Arts in France,” emphasizes the perspective of her talk: the struggle of women artists to find time and space and materials to paint with, to find clients to paint for, to have them recognized, their name known and talked about. Women artists had the problem unreal depictions of the female body were used as a matter of course to embody “the glory and fame” denied most women whose bodies did not at all look so well-fed and fecund. She discussed French 18th century women artists and learned women whose names have come down to us, whose rare but nowadays sometimes re-printed books are known, findable, in print even. She contrasted the famous successful Vigee LeBrun (with brilliant memoirs to make her presence understood). The first woman is Marianne Loir, who died age 28. She painted Jean-Francois de Troy; produced a portrait of Madame de Chatelet. she never married and appears to have lived independently, alone for a while and also with a sister. Francois Hubert was her teacher; Prof Hyde showed us images Loir made of women as young girls, society ladies, ordinary unidealized people. Prof Hyde was forced to start her lecture late (an unnecessarily prolonged giving out of prizes ate the time up), and I had to rush away to my panel, so only heard of the beginning of Mme Lusuler’s career (I am not even sure I have her name correctly): she painted men, a “boy with a violin,” psychologically revealing portraits. She was well-connected, studied with academy teachers, received an “eloge” in two columns

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I had to leave on Saturday sometime mid-morning at the latest so missed a panel I would have loved to hear, “Marriage Rites and Marriage Wrongs: Feminist Thinking, especially a paper Condorcet: “One injustice can never become a legitimate reason to commit another (on women’s suffrage and marriage reform) by Guillaume Ansart; “Domestic Tyranny and Civil Slavery: Marriage in Catherine Macauley’s History of England” by Wendy Gunther-Canada;” Louise d’Epinay as a site to study the need to reform marriage and the state through education.” There was in the early morning a panel on health and disease in the 18th century chaired by Chris Mounsey (he chairs excellent panels on disability). But I did the wise thing in leaving at 9 am or so: given plane delays, airport troubles the trip took me 9 hours, and I needed to be home on Sunday to work towards my teaching, to drive Izzy to ice-skating, to say nothing of resting myself.

Unknown little girls in the Berger collection — each girl has a symbolic toy

I also did not attend a panel I could have: at 9:45 on Thursday morning, chaired by Benedicte Miyamoto, four papers on artists: three enjoyable sounding papers were Sarah Bakkali, “The Portfolio as Portable Museum: Disrupting French Collecting Practices,” Cristina S. Martinez’s “The Removal of Poussin’s Sacramento from Italy: smuggling, displacing cultural property and developing copyright,” and Louisiane Ferlier’s “Royal Society: Classifying the Collections then and now,” which Benedicte followed up with a visit for her panelist at the Denver Art Museum were they viewed the Denver Berger Collection. I know about this (noticed it) only because this Friday night I went to Eleanor Shevlin and Sabrina Baron’s Washington Area Print group’s talk by Benedicte (on her study of marginalia and reading practices in artistic manuals) and afterwards their dinner (or supper) at a local Thai restaurant. She and I got to talking of the conference we found we had both attended, and she told me of this panel (which I had missed) and showed me the above picture on her cell phone. Another graces the top of this blog.

I did not mention in my blog on my panels what a good time some people in the hotel appeared to be having on Friday evening. There was a concert on harpsichord and flute by two 18th century women musicians, Elisabetta de Gambarini and Anna Bon, both of whom seem to have had a hard life (one included beating by a husband): I attended this concert, quiet and unassuming and lovely. A film was shown in another part of the hotel. There was another concert in another venue further off (you needed to get a cab). People were drinking and began to play Dungeons and Dragons it was said — in 18th century costumes?

I did see some old friends (had coffee with them), and made some new acquaintances; got myself used to eating breakfast out of Starbucks (they have good coffee and yummy croissants) and hoarding snacks in my room. I took home a new edition of poetry by Charlotte Smith and bought on a discount when I got home two more biographies (of Catherine Clive and of Charlotte Lennox). I went to an enjoyable Burney dinner Friday evening, which dinner lasted until well after 10, and afterwards up to bed. I have still not tried to master putting on or changing the channels of any of the buttonless TVs in these fancy modern large hotels. It is still just that too much to ask. I worry the programs will be awful and I will not be able to turn the thing off.

And so ended another conference for me, not just this past Friday night but also in the act of writing out, and remembering what happened and some of what was said that I was able to join in on.

Ellen

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History Today & Yesterday — at the Crossroads, Conflicted, and Cunning

Ford Madox Brown’s famous The Last of England (1864-65)

Friends and readers,

I’ve been working away on my paper for the coming ASECS conference in Denver, Colorado, on Winston Graham’s historical fiction; its now 19 minutes long and all ready, the title: “‘After the Jump:’ Winston Graham’s uses of documented fact and silences,” and I’ve been reading Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River, the second historical novel by this Afro-Carribean man brought up in Leeds, England, and listening to Diana Gabaldon’s fourth Outlander book, Drums of Autumn, which is about Jamie and Claire Fraser’s settlement of themselves, & family in North Carolina. I was riveted by Phillips’s equally immensely sad and political Cambridge before this and mean soon to read his European Tribe. I find Davina Porter’s reading aloud of Gabaldon irresistibly entertaining and at heart a woman’s romance. This and other reading, and contextualizing Graham’s achievement and tracing the changes over the course of six decades of writing, and how these mirror both the era he was writing in as well as the changes in historical fiction during each era — all prompted me to come up with a CFP for the next EC/ASECS:

Crossroads in Historical Fiction

The evolution of historical fiction as a capacious creative genre in the last half-century is astounding (especially when you consider how far it had sunk as a genre in the early part of the 20th). Prestigious prize-winning, breaking with all sorts of conventions of verisimilitude (time-traveling anyone?), its politicization encompasses post-colonialism, identity politics, overturning previous historical consensus from seemingly crucial central events and agents to analyses of peripheries; life-writing, gothic and spirituality trajectories, fictionalized biographies; post-texts (sequels, prequels, rewrites), while carrying on delivering the usual traditional art, fictional & learning history pleasures. Authors themselves nowadays stand at cross-roads so it’s no possible to call a book say Afro-Carribean if the author grew up in Leeds, and now lives in the US and writes for an international market (Caryl Phillips); or even pronounce its text as securely in one or another language different, say from English if it’s mostly known in English translation or originally written in English by someone from a non-English speaking culture. I invite papers on authors who stand at such crossroads in an 18th century imaginary in books or films

It has (to say nothing more) become increasingly difficult to know where to catalogue or place in a library recent transformations in historical fiction and romance. What do you do with fictionalized biography? Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy has influenced directly all biographies of Cromwell since Wolf Hall. What about post-texts which are historical novels in their own right: Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly out of R.L. Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

I had joined the Historical Novels Review site some weeks ago and have now received my first paper issue: it is fascinating, its theme theme Australian HF: indigenous origins, colonialism, and diaspora. The novels are organized by country or period set in – and within that the central world-historical figure. And I am now at long last receiving one a month paper copies of History Today. It was a difficult subscription to achieve because negotiating the online website was beyond me. I am just getting paper copies the way I just get paper copies of Times Literary Supplement. Well the new (it is much changed since I last got it) periodical is much improved with its reviews addressing modern concerns more. One of the columnists is still Mary Beard. Last month had Suzannah Lipscomb’s review of the movie Mary Queen of Scots where she compares what the movie showed to what is factually agreed upon. This month an intelligent an intelligent article by Lauren Johnson on the mental illnesses of Henry VI as the result of his traumatizing experiences.

Sam Heughan as James Fraser (he resembles both Aidan Turner and Kyle Soller as Ross and Francis Poldark – same posture)

Last I’ve been keeping up with historical films and adaptations of historical novels, and got myself (at a ridiculous price) an anthologies of essays on the way protagonists are recently presented in popular film TV serial dramas (BBC, Netflix, Amazon Prime): Conflicting Masculinities, edd Katherine Byrn James Leggott, Julie Anne Taddeo.

Among the central TV texts (films) they discuss are a group I’ve watched obsessively: The Crown, Victoria, Downton Abbey, Poldark, Outlander. Banished (except for this last where I had the stomach to watch but once). The interesting central thesis of the volume is that recent TV dramas mirroring the undermining of men’s roles in the neo-liberal order as men and placing a new emphasis on “self-making and self-management” for men and women has resulted in a very different portrayal of lead male characters. You could call this a feminization (they are soft emotionally), but that’s not true if you look at what they do: they are endlessly at work, they are themselves a work in progress; those who don’t behave this way are stigmatized as drone, inferior, useless. They are themselves violated (downright raped sometimes). At the same time in the new colonial order it’s their job to resist, not comply with, the economic and social order they find themselves in. What the females do is support, adapt and show resourcefulness in helping them

Physicality is intensely valued, so nakedness; an ability at warfare or being a good breaker of law and rescuing people; they are haunted by the demons of war, often scarred – nakedness is curious though because they are not completely naked (only the chest)) and the males whose penis is shown are those who are suspect, inferior, not masculine enough (like Francis Poldark). The worlds these men live in are uncivilized or inhospitable to women or they are centrally hostile to them in some fundamental way. They are partnered with an active, desiring and strong pro-active females. All round the different programs swirl issues of power, identity, territory – the man is seeking a place to be powerful from, whether criminally or not.

Online I found this essay on why academics supposedly are paying attention to nakedness in male icons of Poldark and Outlander:

There is a problem of complicity in enjoying the spectacle of the ruined, raped, frightening body — the colonialist power through some individual has left its mark on the person. I think of all the cruel marks through burning irons placed on enslaved black people. I saw backs in the African-American museum — of women – just as terrifying as Jamie Fraser’s back (a point of deep shame).

All these shows are associated with colonization but also specific landscapes we long to be in — I remember when in The Crown Philip (Matt Smith) went round the world and asserted his masculinity, it was always in colonized non-white places. When he and Elizabeth (Claire Foy) honeymoon it is in the very British Malta where the dominant culture has become white, Anglo. Philip goes to the Olympics which are taking place in Australia, and this becomes the raison d’etre for a long journey round the world with all males on deck and him in charge; we see a much freer and more comfortably and probably sexually promiscuous Philip. Elizabeth is confined to places like Malta, where her activity in hunting is more in the taking photos vein, including at least taking photos of an elephant. But we do not see evidence or memories of the centuries of harm that produced the control over the native peoples these royal British have in either case.

On Safari

I’ll end on this: my feeling is that Andrew Davies’ film adaptations (one of the best film-makers, script writers, adapters of our era) have not moved to this kind of conflicted masculinity at all — nor nostalgia over landscape.  The characters may be sad in a landscape and the landscape used symbolically.  And sure, Davies in say The Way We Live Now makes sure that the very ambiguous hero, Paul Montague, works and is seen to work hard, but it’s not central to what makes him a sufficiently exemplary male; he is not a rebel against the going regime necessarily. It is more he’s a man of integrity and truth — which all these other heroes are not necessarily. OTOH, he can be sexually unfaithful to the heroine, nay love another woman over a weekend at the seaside and still find himself accepted, covered-up for. This is not held against him as it is say Philip in The Crown.

Maxwell as Henry VII (“The Power in the Land”)

I will be putting my paper on Graham on line later this month and will be blogging a review of an astonishingly superb older BBC serial drama, The Shadow of the King, featuring James Maxwell as a man whose strength is in his intellect and wily amorality. It deserves to be much better known and watched again avidly for it speaks to us again today in an more adult complicated, dare I say Shakespearean way.

Philip Glenister as a subordinate male who rescues Mary Boleyn (2003 Other Boleyn Girl)

Claire Foy again, this time as Anne Boleyn, as aggressive as any male (Wolf Hall)

It is fair to say that emigration, colonialism, and refugees are not at all or only marginally the subject matter of Davies’s chosen books or this older BBC serial drama. The same holds true for the other brilliant and serious Tudor film adaptations, say Wolf Hall and both The Other Boleyn Girl films: masculinity is undermined but from a locally powerful corrupt point of view (all is for sale, including women, one’s head, whatever). See my Overturning Gender Stereotypes. This global political slant is new in its omnipresence, everywhere in the new historical fiction at the crossroads with male and female roles transforming themselves. Whence my opening image.

Ellen

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Lee Virginia Chambers -Schiller: Liberty: A better husband, Single Women in the US, 1780-1840

[The article I wrote] was about old maids. ‘Happy Women’ was the title, and I put in my list all the busy, useful, independent spinsters I know, for liberty is a better husband than love to many of us — Diary of Louisa May Alcott, February 14, 1868

Friends,

This summary and review is a companion blog-essay to my review of Martha Vicinus’s Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850-1920. It’s true that C-S’s book is about a previous generation of women, but C-S’s book is about the same topic from another angle. C-S examines the inward and private experience of women attempting to live independent useful fulfilled lives and where do they go for these? the institutions that Vicinus book argues was the only way single women in the UK could find the power and money and influence to enable future women and themselves also to choose a fulfilled life apart from their roles with men.

C-S’s is a much more upbeat book than Bridget Hill’s Women Alone: spinsters in England, 1660-1850 or Vicinus’s, not because of the tone so much but because C-S has found enabling norms and thought and behavior in the laws and customs of the US in the northeast after the revolutionary and before the Civil War. The average marital age creeping up, and more women were not marrying. S-C focuses on individual single women for whom liberty meant: economic independence, a room of their own, and the expansion of the mind in genial company. In her introduction, she looks to “the search for autonomy among women” and found that in her chosen era in the US this manifested itself in bourgeois individualism: women had “internalized” an “individualized ethic” that came from changes in structure and values of early modern families. Out of the Enlightenment came changing family relationships, and out of the first years of the US “republican motherhood” as an ideal emerged. I’d say the whole emphasis on how important mothers and motherhood is comes from Rousseau, that Janus-faced “feminist” for 18th century women. Under this aegis women asked for more respect, mutuality with men, authority for themselves. .

She asks why some women don’t marry: marriage market numbers get in the way, costs of supporting children, domestic arrangements in some cultures; opportunities for other kinds of self support. There are intangible reasons too: a daughter consigned to take care of the aged Pin some households (Verity in Poldark), the family or the girl deemed herself unmarriageable (this reminds me of Verity Poldark in the Poldark books too smart, too homely, thinking for herself) and didn’t seek a partner for her; some women shy away from sexual intercourse, because of the dangers of pregnancy, perpetual childbirth means she has too many children to do anything else.

But women began to voice more reasons: desire for greater intellectual life, more interesting one!, had a vocation marriage & motherhood inhibits. Ideas of self improvement, ambition, service, achievement, duty, independence shaped by different attitudes towards gender in the US. C=S is careful to distinguish vocation from career. A woman might still be embedded in family and not independent – vocation not bringing in money to live — this brings in Jane Austen to my mind. Teaching won’t hack it; low prestige, low pay, long hours, looked upon as temporary.

Statistics show rise in unmarried women in Massachusetts, and also west and less so south. Problem for women in a society based on enslaving large numbers of people to do the hard work of the and not themselves overtly enslaved, experience shows that they tolerate no rebellion or independence, hierarchy is presented as unquestionable. Sometimes white women could end up very isolated personally and socially if they couldn’t manage to marry or to obey. Southern slave-based culture ferocious towards white women who broke away in the least ways: makes them docile, a “lady” first. In the west there were pioneer settlers, and gradually women were permitted to homestead.

She names seven women and offers brief resumes; some were part of unacknowledged lesbian pairs — lesbianism was not acknowledged by most people at the time. Laura Clay (1949-19410, daughter of Cassius Clay of Kentucky, lived with divorced mother, ran successful farm, deplored any arrangement where someone is dependent on another for life’s necessities; Clare de Graffenried (1849-1921), labor bureau social investigator; Elizabeth Grimball, South Carolina teacher, refused to return home to live with parents; Eliza Frances Andrews (1840-1931) wrote and worked for women’s education; Olive Johnson White, moved out west 1866, a homesteader; so too Edith Kohl; and Clarissa Griswold; “bachelor” Bess Corey another. Laura Crews homesteaded in Kansas and Iowa.

The introduction to this book ends on Nancy Choderow’s ideas about women’s psychology in The Reproduction of Mothering with her ideas about motherhood, and Carole Gilligan, Lyn K. Brown and Kate Millett with their theories of female development, affiliation with mother and then one another (sisters, friends) and nurturing and caring for others, the community as the dominating ethic rather than competitive individualism.

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Edith Pijpers (1886-1963)

Chapter One: C-S makes the astonishing attempt to prove that there was a strain of thought that did not decry no marriage but looked at singleness as blessed. Just what Vicinus, Hill and others I’ve read on British women deny. C-S acknowledges customs against this idea: in the US communities actually required unmarried women not prostitutes to live in licensed families, headed by respectable property holding men. This reminded me of customs in Europe forcing a poor woman living alone to apprentice her sons and put her girls in service. No woman allowed to live unsupervised by a man. But she finds poetry and magazine columns saying that the question, why should a woman marry at all needs to be answered; these publications outline the misery and strife of being “fetter’d to a [man of a] different mold.” US literature acknowledges happy marriages are the exception, while marriage esteemed more highly, “old maids” were revalued. Religion helped: is the man corrupting her? she must ensure her own sanctity (this recalls Clarissa Harlowe refusing Lovelace after the rape). Women’s moral purity shows in lesser sex drive. God likes celibate people and grants them conversion experiences. “Fetter’d” was an adjective for marriage; religion’s powerful hostility to sex helped women in the US; women writers stories in the US of the happiness of a single life. She needed to be chaste and seen to be self-sacrificing, to be good because then she would be useful (defined as happy): the cause, US communities needed the services of single women.

Then she tells of stories Catherine Sedgwick a novelist told, of stories and columns in Godey’s Lady’s Book, which sanctify the celibate, a maiden sisterhood; Sedgwick emplies the less you bother yourself over love or sex the more you know peace of mind. Discipline is good for soul. Better to be single than suffer the miseries of a bad marriage or compromise one’s integrity to gain husband or competency: this idea found widespread currency In US newspapers, periodicals, fictions, advice books

Chapter Two, “Hymen’s Recruiting Sergeant” is supposedly about “factors influencing the rate of marriage,” except it’s not. The chapter does list all the factors pressuring women to marry but far more space is given up to speculating on why statistics and commentary shows us that in the northeast of the US and some areas of the west, considerably less women chose marriage than in the south, south east. There were opportunities for paying jobs, teaching among them, factories.

Women were made to be the daughter staying home and in this role could find much satisfaction in the US given the state of fluctuating social life. There was a shift from traditional family economies in the widening of capitalism and so much more land available so parental control over their children started to give way in the US far more than say the UK. In the US far less gov’t agencies or social network so unmarried women had a real function in a family and small community.

The discourse in the US was far more about the gravity of your choice and how once you chose to marry you give up your identity. You have to obey the husband, live for him, for your children and women were endlessly pregnant. I do think here out of Austen’s letters you can find out why she chose not to marry, not to lean on the few flirtations that did happen and fled the one proposal. Renaming yourself is loss of identity. Stories of male abuse, women deserted. She suggests that articulation of the importance of women’s friendships and that women find far more satisfaction in confiding in other close women friends than any husband or family member (who would be biased against many complaints). They open sought emotional and spiritual (back to how religious the US is at base) support from other women.

Yes spinsters dreaded old age, poverty, had a limited right for family support. What if you become invalided? Cult of domesticity was very strong. This line of thought takes us to

Chapter Three: “To what thraldom is her noble spirit subjected?” is about the meaning of antebellum marriage

C-S looking at women who chose not to marry. We get examples of women who just turned down good proposals. And stories and novels of women made miserable in all sorts of ways by marriage. Again Catherine Sedgwick, an important novelist, dwells on this terrain. The loss of individual goals, pursuits, one’s will — these stories remind me of Clarissa Harlowe’s meditations and reasoning for her refusal to marry not just Lovelace and Solmes but really anyone. “At stake was female autonomy.” And the one happy dream of Clary’s is she gets control of the small farm her grandfather left her and goes to live on it.

Yet US culture which supposedly prized individualism and autonomy did not value female autonomy and it was as hard here to get institutions to acknowledge women’s individual existences as anywhere else. So how did women come to value their private wishes. C-S says the US constitution influenced by philosophes whose thinking implies or states principles and laws and judicial decisions which value privacy, limiting states’ coercion of individuals; treatises and essays on the importance of protecting privacy and how the state should ensure this. Is not this the core of Rowe V Wade? Scaglia mocked the idea of individual privacy. The philosophes here are Marquis de Condorcet, Wm Godwin, and John Stuart Mill. S-C finds instances of spinsters resisting submitting themselves to state control. They would say they had things they wanted to do and to accomplish — children got in the way

S-C turns to American stories about misery and danger of endless pregnancies — filled with revulsion of feeling (reminding me again of Jane Austen, this time in her letters). S-C cites names familiar to me — e.g., Fanny Kemble’s diary of her time on her husband’s plantation. Kemble writes about the exploited, raped, women whose bodies were directly (by violence and marking and indirectly literally destroyed, their minds shattered, no identity allowed but that of cattle. S-C cites and describes Alcott’s Diana and Persis where the heroine is urged not to live alone with a group of like-minded women. Alcott proposes singlehood as a prerequisite for artistic development.

S-C feels the idea of a vocation grew in antebellum US — presented as for men, but women could of course think why not me? Individuals write about desire for high attainments. (I know when I try to say Austen had vocation not a career most Austen scholars and Janeites are not pleased with that: they want to hear she wanted to make money, have a public career — this is not what some of the US women presented here wrote about — this makes me think of Constance Fennimore Woolson’s heroine, Anne. Lucy Larcom’s life story is often used by S-C – she is one of those who pretended she was forced into publication, didn’t want reviews, was not ambitious but her stories show her true yearnings to use “the values of US culture” in support of individual courses of action — for women. Reading this helps develop a perspective for the “anomaly” that is new and inspiriting. You were not to be personally ambitious; that remained a no-no.

The chapter ends on the essential compromise S-C finds American women making: they actively pursued self-development and personal growth. You might say that’ll end them up in their room, a dependent daughter, and in fact there is where Emily Dickinson’s pattern fits in. The startling thing about the fourth chapter of this book is Emily Dickinson’s choices suddenly make sense as a kind of exaggerated version of what other spinster daughters/sisters/aunts chose when they could not find a vocation outside the house.

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Chapters Four to Five: “When I get my freedom” & “I have reached the age for action”

What was avoided was ambitiousness and selfishness: if you were seen to be working for others as part of your vocation, you could get away with it. The problem then was how to support yourself. And in curious ways what emerges in chapters 4 and 5 is a kind of reverse picture of Vicinus. Each of the women start out with a burning vocation, one which evades masculine sovereignty (sounds like Austen, no”) and the way they end up doing this is they become part of religious institutions, institutions doing philanthropic work (which Vicinus talked of in settlement houses associations) and nursing groups (during war). American women asserted their independence first, undertook a calling in a quest for autonomy and self-actualization in something she believed in and ended up as a part of a group that in the UK formed itself from the upper classes first.

What then were the images that came to represent a woman’s freedom: wearing men’s dress or dress that looked very man-like, “throwing away shackles” (fetter’d was a synonym for marriage in the UK too) and one finds three themes: how can she achieve “economic security,” that “room of one’s own” (how this does resonate with all these US women) and “the opportunity to expand intellectual horizons.” I’m struck with this last as in the UK material anti-intellectualism and disdain for bluestockings kept this kind of desire silent; not in the US at the time.

She tells stories of individual women and quotes famous voices, speeches, attitudes. Susan B Anthony was firm on the need for “the higher dignity of the paid occupation.” Autonomy rests on someone’s ability to support oneself. Well women tried to re-define economic independence so as to make this more minimal.

Emily Howland’s story is moving; it’s not well known because she was not a writer. Basically she fought to have the right to spend her life working to better the lives of black Americans; and could not have done it (been allowed to leave home) without the support of a quaker community and aunt. It took until she was 31 to free herself.

Rachel Stearns attended a female academy in Wilbraham, Mass, wanted to prepare herself for teaching; an uncle would not give her a dime whose own wealth was the result of her mother making sacrifices for him when she was a child. It’s not clear if she managed to teach anyway. She wrote of what she had been deprived (basically an allowance form a male) what she wanted and of the bleakness of a life “friendless, pennyless,” of the utter loneliness” of a womans economic dependence. It was she who enabled her niece Emily to leave home and find herself. Now S-C doesn’t take this further as Vicinus would so we don’t know what sacrifices and difficulties Howland knew as she worked her way to success in NYC. Howland’s life as told by S-C is an idealistic one; she identified what she wanted to do and lived up to her own vision.

Alice Carey (not in Wikipedia) spent 14 years working very hard for very little for the poor in NYC: her health was never better, she was never more gratified or in a better frame of mind, though she inveighed on how little women and poets were paid for anything

Mary Reed’s is the story of a woman who could not afford to continue in the Philadelphia Female Medical College. S-C tells of women teaching themselves by borrowing every book in the library (reminding me of Ferrante’s Lila). So for some self-education becomes a life-long pursuit. It did therefore help that (according to S-C) intellectual development was respected (pp 78-79)

Cornelia Hancock was luckier but her luck will seem strange. She found herself and came alive and loved the life of a nurse in the civil war. As told by S-C conditions were horrific, medicine didn’t begin to have enough, or enough people, but Hancock would work 20 hours a day, sleep in terrible conditions, continually soaked, hardly getting enough to eat. When the war was over, she moved to South Carolina where she taught ex-slaves under the auspices of the freedman’s bureau – it’s a story of achieving personal autonomy, working for the socially marginalized despised and needy and becoming a “self-directed, self-actualized independent woman’ (pp. 97-99).

What is striking about these women and makes them so different from European ones and hard for me to enter into is a large portion of their strength came from a conversion experience. It is in S-C’s book almost an assumption that just about all US people were religious, or least these sorts of middling women who were the first to have respect and autonomy made it based on a dependence on their relationship with God. What emerges is a religious country – to me all the more striking in that S-C appears utterly unself-conscious about this (as Vicinus was about the intensely cloying semi- and full blown lesbian relationships she describes as important for networking for women I colleges and boarding schools).

Without telling the specifics, Helen Hunt who wrote of how she looked forward to a time when women would not be socialized in schools and elsewhere just to be wives (exchange sex and domestic labor for material support was the way she put it in 19th century American English), Mary Lyon, Mary Moody Emerson. Some women found a room of her own was not enough: she needed a separate establishment to get free time – Helen Hunt to practice medicine.

Catherine Beecher was a public intellectual (part of the upper classes and got into print) training women to be independent, how to run a business, that they should live together. Underlying was a desire for privacy and power in feminine guise – it was “disguised as a woman’s natural love for a home,” she just didn’t need to have a man or children in it. Anthony wrote a speech that resonates with me: “The Homes of Single Women.” I loved the lines where she talks about making rooms for yourself that reflect you, your doing, desires – women alone market (shop for food), house-keep, garden and cook for themselves and are a “true woman” after all. There is psychological truth to this according to Durkheim: men don’t make homes for themselves as “naturally.” (p 77)

Unexpectedly, almost weirdly I find that Claire Fraser in Drums of Autumn, without the religion takes up some of these roles as she asserts herself. She was a nurse in WW2 and in 18th century America she is a surgeon, helps with a school, goes out like Lady Bountiful to teach and help others, write letters and keeps a journal about her medical activities. The diaries are not filled with romance but religion. They keep diaries “to have a ventilator from the interior” to talk to (p 80). They seek self-knowledge.

I have a feeling Vicinus would say this is hopelessly idealized: I suggest the difference between the books is Vicinus is looking to explain how women can build power and why didn’t they in the early to mid-20th century. S-C is not looking to see how women can have power to alter their society

“The age for action” concentrates on that moment women finish school – we saw with Barbara Pym, I saw in Claire Tomalin and also Katherine Mansfield, once the girl is finished school, she is given no place or job in society she can be fulfilled by. Tomalin’s early years are marriage and 4 babies. Mansfield destructive free sex and a bohemian existence without enough money. Pym write novels no one wants.

So here S-C writes of individual women’s struggles form this point of view. They suffer badly from depression because they don’t want to marry and are given nothing else. Some do “make it” by turning to God – this reminds me of Renassance learned ladies in their closets. Other first submit to God and then somehow escape (Howland, Hancock, &cc but Stearns not)

The section on Emily Dickinson comes here and it’s among the best things I’ve read – she just is another more extreme and S-C quotes some poems by ED I had not read before.

I’m ceded, I’ve stopped being theirs;
The name they dropped upon my face
With water, in the country church,
Is finished using now,
And they can put it with my dolls,
My childhood, and the string of spools
I ’ve finished threading too.

Baptized before without the choice,
But this time consciously, of grace
Unto supremest name,
Called to my full, the crescent dropped,
Existence’s whole arc filled up
With one small diadem.

My second rank, too small the first,
Crowned, crowing on my father’s breast,
A half unconscious queen;
But this time, adequate, erect,
With will to choose or to reject,
And I choose—just a throne

Louisa may Alcott’s novel for women, Diana and Persis is about the process of artistic development as experienced by antebellum women. Persis goes to Paris, does study, take up her sculpture but in the end marries. Diana stays in Boston, works away at writing (who is this?), dedicates herself to this. If she never reaches what she aimed at, she has much satisfaction. Alcott (apparently) has in this novel a woman “extending control over her medium” and “expanding her vision.” But outside the studio, things are not so good. Compare this to Jewsbury’s Two Sisters, one goes on stage and self-destructs, the other marries someone who will not let her fulfill herself. Neither is allowed by the to practice self-fulfilling art. So there is an American paradigm quite different from the English.

S-C end this section with the comment that women could escape being a wife, widow, mother but not a daughter. The pose of the submissive daughter was “high emotional price to pay.” Dickinson ended up “the madwoman” of Amherst.

This book is about making the self, a private individual task which in some lucky cases the woman did branch out into public work – they are trying to find and test out new roles primarily from the home and through accepted roles. She comes back to how these single women had to deal with a “primary identity as a daughter.”

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Remedio Varo

Chapter Six: A Daughter, an Immortal Being (a line from Dickinson I believe)

Cecilia Hancock’s reply: “If I had been unfortunate enough to marry some forlorn person and been obliged to stay in some disagreeable part of the country, you would not feel you could control me in coming home at your discretion. Now in that case it might be very humane to send for me. But I am pleasantly located with congenial friends and congenial employment and an independent home but am not allowed to stay in it in peace (p 108)

This chapter charts the struggles many women had freeing themselves from their parents: unless you were married you were not recognized as a fully self-governing adult. How hard it was to break away, not only disobeying the norm but girls were brought up to love the parents, especially to care for the mother. Women were seduced by the compliments to their gifts; they were told domestic life was crucial to their health as women; they loved those to whom they rendered service. (I guess I escaped more easily because the last was not true of me.) Sacrifice, acquiescence, duty, and the idea someone else owned you just about. Parents were conservative – most of these daughters wanted to do radical reform work. They came close to wishing themselves dead when they stayed. How the structure of home life made a vocational identity impossible or frustratingly difficult. Think of Austen with her desk by a creaking door; were it not for Cassandra would she have had any time.

Chapter Seven: “My earthy all:” Sisterhood and the search for autonomy

Now she again crosses the terrain of Vicinus when she talks of how sisters bonded, and went to female academies and the role of academies, associations, institutions in both freeing but also binding women. Women needed we see again and again female support, females with you, female encouragement – you could get this from a sister, but the relationship could also be fraught, and one odd central norm was that sisters were interchangeable. Remember how it was pretended Cassandra and Jane were interchangeable. Actually the Austens discovered this was not so; thus Cassandra far more often sent for than Jane.

Families were large, and siblings counted. The death or marriage of a sister was a turning point in others sister’s lives – brothers too.
Some did find you were better off with friends but it was more likely the sister would be loyal. Money came form families to sisters; they opened schools together, studied, She goes over the complicated relationship of Emily and Elizabeth Blackenwell, the first women physicians and how Elizabeth became the known one, how Emily was controlled by Elizabeth, differences in temperament. This is a very interesting story because they opened an infirmary in NYC, went back and forth to the UK, Emily was in the provinces; Elizabeth just gave them their titles. In the end Emily retired with another woman, Dr Elizabeth Cushnier because there she also had “Love and mutuality” to give meaning to her independence and autonomy”
Some sisters had a hard time when autonomy was thrust upon them. S-C does not despise this understandable result of such upbringings. The story here is of Harriot and Sarah Hunt

Remember too – S-C does not enough emphasize how this autonomy was presented as failure, despicable and the little sympathy for radical reform causes. So it was important for such a woman to have female friends, an association to belong to, a sister. You did want to belong to someone, to help and be helped and achieve and be recognized for this achievement by someone. I know myself how hard it is to do without the recognition.
Some of these pairs anticipate Elena Ferrante’s Lila and Lenu (My Brilliant Friend) — were Lila to have been given an equal education and not married off for money (by parents) for foolish version of prestige (by herself).

Some of the relationships remind me of the women in The Secret Sisterhood in their misunderstanding, vexations, the kinds of interpretation S-C gives whats happening to triangular conflicts.

I also was reminded the groups of sisters/nieces in Deborah Cherry’s book about women painters in the 19th century – there were famous quartets, female painting families – so this is the inner life of those presented by Cherry. I don’t have time to record the individuals – none of them are well known literati; some a little known like Alice and Phoebe Carey. Louisa May Alcott did not have sisters following her vocation and professionalism.

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Isabel Bishop (1902-88): Reading and Art

Chapter Eight: conflicts in the single life: heavy heart and heavy head. Now this chapter becomes harder: now we talk of the problem of earning a living.

It’s at this point the book turns dark – at heart what C-S suddenly admits is that the inner life of women of this era – in the US (and I think by extension Vicinus without her attention to private life as her focus shows this) the UK – women were made to feel their desire for independence was a social disease.

Read carefully with attention Trollope’s CYFH? Suggests Alice is erotically sexually deeply in love with John Grey (the TV series is a travesty of this and reverses it) and would have been very happy with him but that she was given foolish ideas by her lesbian cousin and evil male cousin, and rejected the deeply peaceful good life he was offering. He made it worse by his self-control and drive to dominance, But she has a disease it’s said more than once.

Meanwhile in the US the outward world was giving women for the first time through the industrial economy, need for schools, training, changes in family life to delay marriage to pursue self-development, accomplishments in careers outside the family
This chapter through story after story shows they were not paid anywhere near enough to earn a living when they followed these outward vocations. They could not be free, they could not afford space in dignity. Death or marriage of a sister or friend (who clubbed with them) could be devastating. Greater strain as they were also expected to do home tasks.

The chapter shows women breaking down under theses pressures: Sarah Pugh, Emily Parsons working in hospitals needed self respect from validation from others – and got it only from those they were literally working for. Women at home bored, frustrated. Women not married feared menopause as that put paid to any further marriage and yet they had not means of support – and they would be too old to work even for minimum pay.

So heroines earlier in the book are driven: Cecilia Hancock who say she hated organizational and institutional is driven to accept and conform
The problem with teaching was not enough money, no respect really and little adult companionship in the way it was organized. Women can’t relax; and they find satisfaction and peace only in hard work – Clara Barton became sick when not permitted to nurse; allowed to work ferociously for the Red Cross, which she built, she throve. Again and again women are rejected for professional positions they are as capable of the men at doing. – I am not naming the individual stories again – very bad psychic stress which they then were blamed for – as hysterical women. Had they married you see all would have been well busy with their babies and then family later on – all this hopelessly idealized.

Chapter Nine: “The Mind Will Give Way” assertion and limits of social tolerance

This chapter is unusual for telling one woman’s story at length Mary S. Gilpin: her four brothers and father lived good productive lives in professions and did well financially; she had the same assertive competitive, ambitious personality they did, but each time she opens a school or starts an institution, either not enough people bring children, or it’s underfunded or her assertive personality is complained of and either she is thrown out or her venture fails. At the end she actually spends years in an asylum (imprisoned by a brother in effect) and late in life retreats to near a Naïve American village spending her years reading and writing down her own thoughts –

This is where her book transects Vicinus: institutions of church, university, medicine, law, science so the extension of female autonomy that was going on as a threat and worked to keep women in low places – -and the rhetoric is conscious. Social tolerance very rigid – don’t act out your independent mindedness or disobey (sexual) propriety or you will be cast out, punished, ostracized, ignore

Chapter Ten: The great social disease – on women and independence. In this chapter we see society closing ranks at the same time as there is gradual growth of liberty, independence for women – in the US the land-grant colleges let women enter and several colleges (sister schools) are opened just for women: Vassar, Wellesley

This social disease – could end in insanity; women weren’t using their organs and so would sicken. Companionate marriage offered but that does not allow for equality – John Grey offers Alice Vavasour a companionate marriage where what he says goes. And women who did go out to work did not experience independence or expansion of autonomy because they did for a short while and only as filler or to bring in “extra money” (usually very low status jobs).

Three important women writers about this topic: Ida Tarbell, Alice Repplier,Anna Garlin Spencer. They tried to reshape these arguments – they defended spinsterhood, showed women were marrying later in the 19th century, argued for the period of work before marriage and during.
What happened in the 1890s with the coming of Freudian ideas and studies in sex is that spinsterhood is sexualized: such women are miserable because not having sex, twisted, torment others. Celibacy a social disease (not I realize why Frances Power Cobbe wants to show “celibacy’ such a good way to be in life because you are free to do good, to actuate things that need to be done. Doctors dominating women in childbirth, against abstinence (they won’t give you contraceptive either so you are compelled into pregnancy).

So we see each time a new form of thought or change in social or economic structure comes, the patriarchal norms twist them to the subjection of women

So for a book that began with such hope and filled me with a sense of inspiration and goals for women that could be meant, C-S ends with a demonstration that women lost ground badly in the early part of the 20th century. There was a tremendous push-back against them not because so many more were independent and seeking not to marry but that they were for the first time ever _visibly_ so and more women than ever were self-supporting – because jobs had changed, because of WW1, after the suffragette movement. And the tragedy is that we can see that ceaseless propanganda and punitive norms worked, for as the decades from 1890 went on fewer women were marrying later, many marrying younger, despite the spread of contraception still having what we today would consider relatively large families.

All the vile talk and behavior in short worked: The sexualization of spinsterhood and the way Freud was used was an important factor. I’ll bring in last night I watched half-way through the Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala film adaptation of The Bostonians and was horrified to see how this movie reinforced the sinister misogyny of the book so that Vanessa Redgrave playing Olive Chancellor is presented as a sick woman, her desire for independence a plot to dominate Varenna. Varenna herself is presented as a simpleton who is used by her unscrupulous father for his spiritual seances and they are presented as just as useless and corrupt in the sense of taking money for their cause. The more I watch some of these older Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala films the more disillusioned with them I become.

Especially striking is where S-C crosses the same terrain as Vicinus. I was shocked or startled at the positive representation of women’s friendships in boarding school when they crossed a line not only into homoeroticism and lesbianism but also creating dependencies and manipulative. Vicinus was for this because she argued (in effect) it is from such woman’s friendships and mentors and networks that power can be built

From the 1890s on and especially after Freud’s theories became popular women’s friendship were intensely stigmatized as deeply sick, as sexually perverted – all of them were now suspect.

S-C says that what had been a sense of “womanhood’ and pride in your sexuality as feminine and your network of women’s friendships was attacked and women had another bad loss of self-esteem. This was a bad blow

Women who nourished and supported other women were presented as deviant – So say in Trollope’s CYFH? Kate Vavasour’s love for Alice is not presented as lesbian but it’s hinted and she is presented as deviant and destructive, she betrays Alice – not to make her independent but to get her to break with John Grey and offer herself and her money body and soul to George.

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Dame Laura Knight (1931): Good Night

In the Conclusion to the book S-C goes over what to me begins to become a bit suspicious – because I’ve seen these patterns of how women were once in charge (matriarchies – never was; in some cultures the fathers and brothers were in charge instead of the fathers and sons) or could go out in public (this never was) or public not separated off from private (never was) so now S-C would have us believe a period between 1780 and 1830 or so showed real progress for women partly based on new protestant beliefs, the loosening structure of society in the US, it’s lack of a tight social network so that an independent woman could find a praised niche. This is now described as destroyed by the new norms reinforcing subjection of women at the beginning of the 20th century.

Whether S-C is right or not, she also described the mechanisms by which most women were kept subject to their families throughout the 19th century, and she describes some of the ways of thinking and feeling that did help towards some liberation

That frontier and opening of educational institutions who needed teachers – pay was abysmal

What helps confirm women in singlehood or independence and not repeat the patters of a life of self-sacrifice to men and men’s children and family:

1) being ambitious, taught to want to offer service to a wider community.

2) Very important the desire to expand your intellect. This Vicinus talks about in two of her chapters: on boarding school and all women’s colleges. We can see why the persistence mockery and derision of learning as making a woman (horrors) a bluestocking so she obviously doesn’t want men or babies

3) a desire to explore, revere, cultivate the self

4) simply a desire to be free and independent – Alice Vavasour has this but no opportunity because the money left her is handled by her father and she is given nothing worthwhile to use it for – only George’s intensely selfish ruthless politicking

She quotes the religious language by which American women justified their pursuit of writing and communing or doing good work in a community – this kind of language was mostly not available in the UK – or elsewhere it seems – it gave courage because of the notion God was on your side. You are not going it alone

I’ve never much taken Hilary Clinton’s supposed piety seriously and when she includes this kind of thinking in her book I have felt she was hypocritical but it may be her tin ear and turgid style, and inability to sound sincere – and upper class identifications that grate on me

5) a family context which valued you as an individual and education, and sisters, mothers who supported you (rare) friendships with like minded women

S-C talks of some women who tried to set up utopian communities and the settlement movement. So again we are with Vicinus.

She thinks present feminism’s roots owe a lot to these early spinsters writing and women who did write in feminist ways for independence or revealing the deprivation and nightmares of their existences (like Fanny Kemble about enslaved black women on her husband’s rice plantations).

It’s a moving book which ends in the same place Vicinus does: a kind of bleak despair.

A few more to go before finally choosing individuals: Onto Anne Boyd Rioux’s Writing for Immortality is very good: a history and analysis of the culture of 18th century American and struggles of 4 to write and publish successfully in it: Alcott, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Elizabeth Stoddard and Constance Fennimore Woolson her choices. Showalter in her Jury of Her Peers, a rare history of American women writers from the eighteenth to the later 20th century, has sections on Stoddar, Phelps, and Woolson. Rebecca Traister: All the Single Ladies, which begins with how living independently has become a norm for women well into their thirties and yet if you want to cast suspicion on someone (Anita Hill) you ask her why she never married (frigid or a lesbian?), or if she did, why she never had children (selfish and lazy). Virginia Nicholson, Singled Out: a book on how millions of women lived out their lives after WW1 without getting married (a whole generation of young men wiped out), her other writings are on novels of the era about single women.

Ellen

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