Constance Fenimore Woolson

by Anne Boyd Rioux

  The assessment of the nation’s literary authorities was that these stories deserved a lasting place in American literature. Her achievement, wrote a critic in Appletons’ Journal, was to “illustrate the possibilities of American life for artistic treatment with a fullness and success scarcely attained in our literature otherwise.” The Boston Literary World admired “the artist’s power—that virile force, that artistic completeness . . . which makes her place secure as one of the most vigorous woman writers of this country.” Meanwhile, Harper’s declared that Woolson had earned the name of “a conscientious and true artist” by not “sacrificing vigor or originality to mere finish.”4

  The one negative voice came from the Atlantic Monthly, where Howells oversaw the publication of a highly dismissive review by James’s old friend Thomas Sergeant Perry. It could only have deepened Woolson’s distrust of Howells. Perry accused her of imitating “poor novels” rather than illustrating “real life,” as well as making use of “melodramatic devices.”5 Her response has not survived, but she wrote to the reviewers at the New York Times and Scribner’s to defend her portraits of southerners and thank them for their praise of her stories’ realism. If she couldn’t have the full support of the Atlantic, she was glad to have it in other powerful quarters.

  A ROMAN WINTER AND SPRING

  After a fall spent in Geneva, where Constance took a break from writing and immersed herself in the eighteenth-century writers who had lived on Lake Leman—from Goethe to Madame de Staël—she began to plan her return to Italy. “I must have my three months in Rome,” she told Sam. Two difficulties presented themselves: the Roman fever (malaria) and the need for a travel companion, since Clara had taken Plum to Paris for schooling. Constance was still too new to Europe and too concerned about propriety to travel alone. Luckily, an old friend from St. Augustine, the older, wealthier Emily Vernon Clark, was on hand. Emily was “a cultivated, congenial, easy-going person [who] is fond of the things I am fond of,” Constance explained to Sam. For instance, she liked “to discuss a book threadbare” as much as Constance did.6

  In January 1881, when she finally arrived in Rome with Emily and three of Emily’s female relatives, the incessant rain could not dampen her excitement “to be really in the old walls at last!” Having dreamed about and longed for the Italian capital since she was a child, she could hardly sleep the first night. After the weather cleared, she began her explorations of the Vatican and St. Peter’s, the Borghese Gardens, the Forum, and the Capitoline Museum. She found the ancient statues the most moving, then the solemn ruins and the vast Campagna. Rome was enchanting; her situation as part of a group, however, was not. Constance resented not being able to do as she liked without comment or opposition. She felt her time tampered with and swore she would never travel with a party again, regardless of propriety.7

  Clara and Clare arrived in Rome for Carnival season in March. Amid the festivities the sisters had some serious conversations about the future. It was time for the Benedicts to return to Cleveland. Constance had no intention of joining them. She still longed for leisurely visits to England and Venice.

  By April Constance found herself, to her delight, alone in Rome. Her first act was to escape the crowded, high-priced hotels. She found a fifth-floor apartment with access to the roof where there was a garden of lemon trees and she could look over the rooftops and bell towers as far as the green Campagna. When she tired of writing in her parlor, she wrote up there, savoring the Roman sunlight.8

  Her first experience of independent living in Europe was a great success. She wrote sometimes for seven hours a day, made her own breakfast of coffee and boiled eggs and at five o’clock, religiously, a pot of tea. A cook made her a simple lunch and dinner, which she preferred to the abundant meals with endless courses served at hotels. When she wasn’t writing she was hunting down the city’s treasures. Very soon she had “ ‘gone over’ body and soul, to Rome!” She devoted herself to studying the ancient ruins, temples, and statues, filling the margins and blank pages of her Baedeker with quotes from Byron, Hawthorne, Dickens, and William Wetmore Story. She took long walks in search of ruins, lingering at the temples in the Forum and climbing the hills outside of town to the Raphael-designed Villa Madama full of frescoes on its crumbling ceilings and walls. She studied the pictures at the Doria Gallery and roamed through the streets, admiring the Italian soldiers on every corner and deciding that “the prettiest product of modern Italy, is a young Italian officer.” Stopping regularly at the Pantheon on her walks, she one day glimpsed Queen Margherita inside, kneeling in prayer.9

  Woolson also made a special visit to the graves of Keats and Shelley at the Protestant Cemetery, that serene spot about which Shelley had written, “It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.” She admired the violets blooming on Keats’s grave and the pyramid of Caius Cestius, built ca. 12 B.C., which “bring[s] the past very near us.”10

  Although she mostly avoided the expatriate society of Rome, Constance also made friends with two new families whom she would in future meet often on her travels: that of Richard Henry Dana, the author of Two Years Before the Mast, and that of U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander Caspar Goodrich, whose wife was a niece of her old St. Augustine friend Eleanor Washington. Constance avoided larger parties, where it was difficult for her to hear, but once made an exception for a reception at the home of the U.S. minister to Italy, George Perkins Marsh. Much more to her taste was a tête-à-tête with Henry James, whose two-week visit in Rome included at least one call to her “sky-parlor,” where they shared some gossip and a pot of tea. They had much to discuss, including his novel in progress, The Portrait of a Lady. He told her he was unsure about his characters Madame Merle and Gilbert Osmond, who had just been introduced in that month’s Atlantic Monthly. Woolson could only listen to his concerns. She didn’t have access to American magazines when she was traveling.11

  As April waned and the summer heat approached, Constance showed no inclination to leave the Eternal City. She paid little heed to warnings about the Roman fever that carried off many northern visitors. Once May arrived, and the tourists made their exodus, she was delighted to find that Rome was “no longer like a great fair for strangers.” Gone were the booths hawking souvenirs. She could linger in the Forum and the Coliseum and lean against the stones warmed by the sun. Her experience coincided perfectly with that of Isabel Archer, who happened to be visiting Rome for the first time in that month’s installment of The Portrait of a Lady and found May “the most precious month of all to the true Rome-lover.”12

  Woolson stubbornly stayed in Rome until the fourth of June, “reducing everybody at home to serious preparations for [her] funeral.” Her subsequent fear of Roman fever would, in fact, prevent her from ever returning to the Eternal City. However, she would always remember Rome as her “true home.”13 Had she been able to take up a permanent residence there, she might have been spared a good deal of the wandering that would characterize the rest of her life.

  THE RUIN OF WOMEN ARTISTS

  After Rome, Constance journeyed to a town in the Swiss Alps that was off the map for most American tourists—Engelberg, in a small, mountain-rimmed valley at 3,500 feet. She felt entirely hidden there. She took her meals in her room, avoided all acquaintance, and was content in her solitude. As mountaineers passed her window each morning on their way to the alpine passes, she settled in for a long day of work. It was likely there that she completed two long stories, almost novellas, portraying the demise of women artists. Both contain James-like characters who convince women to give up their art and marry them instead. While some of his biographers have seen in these stories indications of Woolson’s secret love for James, more probably they suggest—insofar as they may hint at her own feelings—that she viewed any possible relationship with him as destructive to her art. The women in these stories submit to marriages only after losing their financial independence and their faith in their creative power. Most distu
rbingly, the James-like critics have convinced them that women cannot be great artists. Despite the stories’ devastating themes, however, they also show Woolson at the top of her game. Wrestling with the crisis of confidence that followed her encounters with James, she nonetheless exhibited tremendous mastery over her art, suggesting a wealth of emotion boiling under the surface of finely wrought prose.

  The first of these stories, “The Street of the Hyacinth,” is set in Rome and was probably begun while she was still there. It is redolent of the awe and humility Woolson felt in the presence of so much ancient history and art. Interestingly, however, her main character, the naïve westerner Ettie Macks, at first feels no such humility. She arrives in Rome sure of her ability to realize her dreams of becoming an artist. Although she calls to mind the female artists in James’s Roderick Hudson and Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun, Ettie does not merely copy the great works, as they did, but has great ambitions of creating a masterpiece herself, believing in her peculiarly American way that “things that had once been done could . . . be done again.”14

  As in “ ‘Miss Grief,’ ” Ettie has sought out the opinion of a male authority, the art critic Raymond Noel. Having read all of his essays on art, she has come to Rome expressly to find him. Viewed as a prodigy in her hometown, Ettie attended four years of a western female seminary, where she took art lessons and was hailed as a genius. However, a teacher from New York has told her to read Noel’s essays, presumably to show her that she knows little of the Western tradition of art. As Noel seemed to think studying the old masters the only way to learn about art, she has come to Rome to study them with him. He tries to avoid her, especially after he judges her paintings very poor, but Ettie is determined and finally manages to corner him at the Doria Gallery. He shows her all the finest pictures, speaking to her as if “to an intelligent child,” and is amused by her opinions of the paintings, which she finds dull, ugly, and meaningless.15

  Meanwhile, an English art teacher has taken her up, believing that her crude work shows promise and that she would benefit from rigorous training. But he falls in love with her and does not press the importance of technique and execution, leaving her convinced that originality, her strength, is more important. When Noel realizes that she has not advanced in her art studies, he gives her a pile of books by authorities on Western art that are meant to show her how little she knows of the field in which she has hoped to excel. Eventually Ettie discovers her ignorance and mocks herself: “The Western girl, the girl from Tuscolee! The girl who thought she could paint, and could not!” She abandons her art, becoming a teacher and a dutiful daughter to her invalid mother. After Ettie suffers a series of misfortunes and rising debts, Noel comes to admire her and proposes. She refuses, admitting that she loves him but does not “respect . . . or admire” him. He humbles himself for the rest of the story and eventually convinces her to marry him when the street she lives in is scheduled to be demolished. For Ettie, marrying him “was a great downfall, of course,” Noel admits, but her aspirations had been too high.16

  “The Street of the Hyacinth” would appear the following year in The Century alongside Howells’s novel A Modern Instance, making it quite possible that James read the story. If so, he may have recognized aspects of himself in Raymond Noel, such as his polished amiability, popularity in society, and wide knowledge of art. Although Woolson warned her old friend Stedman not to look for actual people in her stories, least of all this one—“Real persons are seldom usable”—James is unmistakably portrayed, perhaps even caricatured.17 However, twenty-two-year-old Ettie Macks bears little resemblance to Constance beyond her interest in Noel’s (James’s) opinions of art and her devotion to her invalid mother. What has gone unnoticed by those who read this story and others as thinly veiled wish fulfillments is how Woolson gave her Jamesian characters love interests decidedly different from herself. They are all much younger and, she would have thought, prettier. They are marriageable, in short, a category from which she had long since excluded herself. James, however, was still considered a quite eligible bachelor, and he continued to fend off curiosity about his marriage prospects, including from Woolson. She would soon write to him about the “sweet young American wife I want you to have—whom you must have,—even if only (as you horribly write) as a ‘last resort.’ ” She had picked a woman out for him in New York and was disappointed when he told her he met there “no one in particular.” James was adamant, as he told his friend Grace Norton, that he “was unlikely ever to marry.”18

  The second woman-artist story Woolson completed that summer in Engelberg was “At the Château of Corinne.” It begins rather lightly with a group of Americans enjoying their leisure in a villa on Lake Leman near Geneva but turns serious when the heroine, Katharine Winthrop, reveals that she is a poet. While she looks back nostalgically on the eighteenth century when men and women seemed to be intellectual equals in the idyllic retreat of Lake Leman, the contrarian hero, John Ford, paints another picture: Madame de Staël, who had sought out the intellectual companionship of Goethe and Schiller, was an egotist who should have waited for them to approach her. As it was, “[t]hey confessed to each other . . . the deep relief they felt when that gifted woman departed.”19

  Constance’s fascination with Madame de Staël during the previous summer in Geneva had inspired her to write a story updating the themes of de Staël’s famous novel Corinne, a female Künstlerroman in which the heroine chooses art over the man she adores because love “absorb[s] every other interest and every other idea.” Corinne later explains, “Talent requires inner independence that true love never allows.” Yet she still yearns for love, so much so that when her beloved marries her docile, talentless half-sister, she wastes away and dies.20 Corinne, published in 1807, created the mystique of the female genius whose gifts marginalize her in life and in love. Generations of women—from Margaret Fuller, who was called the “American Corinne” in the 1840s, on down to Constance’s time—wrestled with Corinne’s myth. Woolson many times portrayed the idea that a woman could either pour her deepest feelings onto the page or invest them in marriage and domesticity, but not both.

  “At the Château of Corinne” is not about the struggle to become an artist, as “ ‘Miss Grief’ ” and “Street” were. Katharine Winthrop is already an accomplished poet who has published a long poem that received high praise, although it was published anonymously. Katharine seems to be on the verge of crowning her literary success with the love of a man, Lorimer Percival, also a poet, who honors the legacy of de Staël and presumably admires Katharine’s work. However, she discovers he was primarily attracted to her fortune and, predictably, has married a simple, beautiful young girl who knows nothing of poetry.

  The climax of the story takes place earlier, however, at de Staël’s home, Coppet, where Katharine reveals to Ford that she is the author of the widely admired poem, which he has read, and demands to know his opinion of it. Having already scorned the very idea of a woman of genius, he proceeds to tell her what other men won’t, because they are too polite: “[I]ts rhythm was crude and unmelodious; its coloring was exaggerated,” and its logic was weak. All of this was foreseeable, however, because “[w]e do not expect great poems from women any more than we expect great pictures; we do not expect strong logic any more than we expect brawny muscle. A woman’s poetry is subjective.” Most unforgivable, however, was

  a certain sort of daring. . . . For a woman should not dare in that way. Thinking to soar, she inevitably descends. Her mental realm is not the same as that of man; lower, on the same level, or far above, it is at least different. And to see her leave it, and come in all her white purity, which must inevitably be soiled, to the garish arena where men are contending, . . . this indeed is a painful sight. Every honest man feels like going to her, poor mistaken sibyl that she is, closing her lips with gentle hand, and leading her away to some far spot among the quiet fields, where she can learn her error, and begin her life anew.

  Such opinions appear
to be what Woolson sensed lurking behind James’s courteous demeanor. For Ford is another of Woolson’s Jamesian characters. Although he is neither writer nor critic, the description of him is remarkably like James: Ford also has gray eyes “without much expression” and closely cut brown hair. His manner is “quiet, and quite without pretension,” and he is shy, somewhat cynical, and opinionated.21

  What exactly James said or did to indicate that he held views such as Ford’s is unknown. None of his letters to Woolson have survived. But his fundamental disregard for women writers is clear enough in his early reviews. As in Stedman’s essay on Elizabeth Barrett Browning, his disbelief in woman’s genius was apparent. In one review he wrote, George Eliot possessed “the exquisitely good taste on a small scale, the absence of taste on a large, . . . the unbroken current of feeling, and, we may add, of expression, which distinguish the feminine mind.” In another, he wondered why George Sand’s novels were less worth rereading than those of other highly accomplished writers. “Is this because after all she was a woman,” he asked, “and the laxity of the feminine intellect could not fail to claim its part in her?”22 Woolson may have already been aware of such views before she met him, but “Street” and “Château” suggest that as she came to know him better, she detected a generally patronizing attitude toward all women writers that more or less crushed her hopes of eliciting from him the respect Aaronna receives from the Jamesian narrator in “ ‘Miss Grief.’ ”

  However much she may have resisted the common perception of a fundamental difference between the male and the female mind, she couldn’t help believing it herself. Not long after finishing “Château” she wrote to James, “A woman, after all, can never be a complete artist.”23 She was referring to George Eliot’s choice to kill off the odious Grandcourt in Daniel Deronda, while James had let the equally loathsome Osmond live, as he would have in real life. She suggests that women cannot but be ruled by their emotions when they write. They lack the cool detachment that art requires. She may not have been referring to herself, however, for she was adamant that realism must trump moral concerns in her own art.