Constance Fenimore Woolson

by Anne Boyd Rioux

  Jupiter Lights began its nine-month run in Harper’s in January 1889. It was, she told Sam, “different from my other stories, because shorter, & full of action, with almost no description.” She distanced herself from James in this novel, turning away from the analytical mode of East Angels and experimenting again with form, with the same focus on intense, troubling emotions. Instead of pausing and looking closely, as she had done in East Angels, she whisks the reader along on a wave of emotion, immersing the reader in the story, as if in real life. However, the absence of analysis by the narrator also left Woolson open to criticism. For she tackled, without comment, matters then only whispered about, such as alcoholism and domestic abuse. Jupiter Lights has been called a strange and melodramatic book, but it is also her bleakest and most impassioned one, a reflection of the desperate gloom enveloping her.24 It was as if Woolson had unleashed the emotions Margaret Harold had so tightly controlled in East Angels. The result is Woolson’s least Victorian novel as it points toward the eruptions of desire and rage that would become one of modernism’s hallmarks.

  The main character, Eve Bruce, is a version of Eva from “A Pink Villa.” She shares her initials with Elizabeth Boott and was, like her, brought up by her father, her mother having died when she was a baby. After her father’s death, Eve follows her brother, Jack, to England (as Alice James had followed Henry after their father’s death). When the Civil War erupts, Jack returns to America to fight and after the war marries a southern girl, Cicely, devastating Eve. Jack has little idea of “the exclusiveness, the jealousy of her affection” (an echo of Alice’s attachment to her brothers).25 Shortly after becoming a father, Jack dies of yellow fever. As the novel opens, Eve arrives on an island off Georgia, determined to retrieve the child, also named Jack, from Cicely, who has remarried. The new husband is off in South America.

  The little boy, now two years old, answers a deep maternal need in Eve, who asks for him “hungrily.” He seems to be a composite of Constance’s godson Francis Duveneck and Sam’s two boys, whom Woolson longed to see and shower with kisses. Eve is unsuccessful in getting Cicely to give her the baby. She had assumed that Cicely’s love for her new husband superseded her devotion to the child, but Cicely corrects her: “It’s the strangest thing in the world about a child. When it comes, you think you don’t care about it—little red thing!—that you love your husband a million times more, as of course in many ways you do.” (When Lizzie had her baby, James wrote to his aunt, while living under Woolson’s roof, that he looked like “a little red worm,” adding, “Lizzie will plainly be much more of a wife than a mother.”) Cicely continues, “But a new feeling comes too, a feeling that’s like no other; it takes possession of you whether you want it to or not; it’s stronger than anything else—than life or death. You would let yourself be cut to pieces, burned alive, for your child.”26

  The dominant subject of Jupiter Lights is not mother-love, however, but women’s love of men. With this novel Woolson ignored James’s criticism of her emphasis on the love story, writing her most unabashed romance, which is also, not by coincidence, her darkest book. When Eve, who has never loved anyone outside of her family, meets Paul, the half-brother of Cicely’s new husband, she falls deeply, abjectly in love. The resemblance between Paul Tennant and Frank Duveneck is striking: “broad-shouldered; not graceful like Ferdie [his half-brother], but powerful. His neck was rather short; the lower part of his face was strong and firm.” He has thick blond hair as well. Also from the nation’s interior (a Lake Superior mining town), Paul is described as speaking roughly, and, when he discovers that he loves Eve in return, his tenacity in pursuing her is reminiscent of Frank’s persistence toward Lizzie. His “masterful” way with women and “despotic” form of love render Eve powerless. She suddenly understands everything “she had always despised—pettiness, jealousy, impossible hopes, disgrace, shame.” Should he even grow to hate her, she realizes, she would be happy simply to be near him and fold his shirts.27 This is not the idealized romance of so much popular fiction of the day but a starkly realist portrayal of the degradation love can lead to.

  What makes Jupiter Lights remarkable among Woolson’s works is that she allowed her heroine not only to love deeply but also to express her feelings—verbally and physically. Eve tells an unsuspecting Paul, who doesn’t “understand riddles,” “I think you understand mine.” He takes her insinuation lightly at first, but to her it is a decisive moment: “She had said it. She had been seized with a sudden wild desire to make an end of it, to put it into words.” Later, when he takes her in his arms, she does not resist but resolves, “For one day, for one hour, let me have it, have it all!” This is the closest Woolson ever came to portraying the consummation of her characters’ passion.28

  Boott was rather shocked by Woolson’s portrayal of Eve—not because she gives herself to her lover, which he may have missed, but because she makes her feelings known to Paul. Woolson responded, “All you say of ‘Jupiter Lights,’ is extremely interesting to me. I dare say many people might maintain that Eve’s betrayal of her love was unusual and extraordinary. Because many people maintain that only the proper, or the guarded, exists; we are all banded together to say so.” However, she insisted, “In my fiction I never say anything which is not absolutely true (it is only in real life that I resort to fiction); so you may divine that I know more than one Eve.”29

  In tribute to Lizzie, Woolson also set the culminating scene of Eve’s romance in the Villa Castellani. Paul has pursued Eve to Italy, where she has taken refuge in a villa on an Italian hilltop. Its “blank yellow walls are long, pierced irregularly by large windows, which are covered with iron cages; massive doors open upon a square court-yard within,” a fair description of the villa in which Lizzie had grown up. Eve has run away from Paul, convinced that their marriage could never be happy because she was responsible for his beloved half-brother’s death. She had considered suicide but instead decided to seclude herself in a convent, preventing Paul from a life of misery but also herself from loving and serving someone who despised her. The final lines of the novel show Paul, who has discovered that his brother died of other causes, knocking over several men and women who try to keep him away from Eve with “the violence of a boor.”30 Finally he finds Eve and takes her in his arms, a true dictator in love.

  The physical force Paul employs mars the seemingly happy ending (at least for today’s readers), not least because violence against women has been a major theme of the book. Cicely’s new husband, Ferdinand, Paul’s half-brother, attacks her and Jack when he is drunk. He has left a long purple scar on Cicely’s breast and has broken the boy’s arm. Woolson’s portrayal of Ferdinand’s great remorse and Cicely’s continued love for him, including her conviction that he will not hurt them again, is so eerily accurate, in light of what we know today about abusive relationships, that it would seem Woolson had witnessed one up close. The most likely candidate is the marriage of her friend Jane Carter. In 1888, when Woolson was still in the early stages of her novel, Jane died, freeing her to portray more directly than ever before the trauma that had ended only with Lawson Carter’s suicide in 1869, the year in which Woolson set the novel. And just as Woolson has Eve return to Lizzie’s home, so does Cicely visit Cleveland, Jane’s former home, on her way to stay with Paul on the shores of Lake Superior in the wake of Ferdie’s latest, most violent assault.

  Ferdie’s attacks are not merely the result of drunkenness. He is described as afflicted by hereditary illness, a type of insanity. When he descends into madness, he is delusional. Cicely tells Eve, “When he gets that way he does not know us; he thinks we are enemies, and he thinks it is his duty to attack us.”31 During the breakdown that led up to Lawson Carter’s suicide at the offices of the Woolson stove factory, he was also described as delusional. Yet everyone was surprised by his violent act. He may have been a lot like Ferdie, who is similarly able to hide his affliction from most of those around him. Woolson allows her readers to see how intensely at
tractive and endearing a man could be yet also be a kind of monster who turns on those he loves. James’s friend Robert Louis Stevenson had published Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1886. Whether or not Woolson read the novel, hers shares some of its concerns. But Jupiter Lights is not an allegory. Her portrayal of madness is meant to be entirely realistic.

  Eve (before she meets Paul) is horrified by the way Cicely welcomes Ferdie back without suspicion. “To love any man so submissively was weakness, but to love as Cicely loved, that was degradation!” Eve looks in the mirror and “revolt[s], dumbly, against the injustice of all the ages, past, present, and to come, toward women.”32 Of course, she then goes on to fall into the same trap, one that seems to be impossible for women to escape. There is the same compulsion and lack of free will that marked Zola’s novels and those of the American literary naturalists still to come.

  One night, when Ferdie attacks Cicely and Jack with a knife, believing they are trying to harm his real wife and child, Eve helps them escape and shoots him. He eventually dies, not from his wounds but from alcohol poisoning. Cicely is barely able to live without him, even when she learns of his infidelities. It wasn’t he who attacked her or was unfaithful to her, she reasons; it was the illness.

  In the end, the nightmarish side of Woolson’s romance overrides whatever pleasure the modern-day reader may be able to derive from Eve’s ultimate union with Paul. Contemporary readers may have felt differently. Ten years later, a reader gushed in the New York Times about the scene in which Paul forces his way into the convent, adding, “Miss Woolson was a woman who knew what kind of a man other women like.”33 Perhaps she did. But she wasn’t merely trying to satisfy her female readers’ appetite for domineering lovers. Jupiter Lights is a stark, proto-naturalist portrait of what she viewed as women’s greatest weakness: their susceptibility to self-abnegating love. She knew that dissecting it would make her less of an artist in the eyes of James and other male critics. But, as she told Boott, she never lied in her fiction. Her highest aim was to tell the truth of women’s lives, to look under the masks of acquiescent, idealized femininity that they wore. While other writers of the period portrayed the selfless love of women, they did not bother to examine the fierceness of a woman’s passion or the self-immolation it could lead to.

  LEAVING BELLOSGUARDO

  One night in January 1889, five months after Francis, Frank, and the baby had moved away, Constance laid aside the book revisions of Jupiter Lights to welcome Clara and Clare, who had come to live in the ground-floor apartment of the Villa Brichieri. They were greeted by Constance, Angelo, two maids, and a little dachshund named Pax who lived at the Villa Montauto and had become a frequent visitor. The three women stayed up long into the night, catching up in front of the fire.

  Constance introduced the “two Claras,” as she often called them, to her widening social circle, including Lady Hobart at Hawthorne’s Villa Montauto, Dr. Baldwin and his family, and Miss Horner. They went out every afternoon making calls. Woolson also threw a party with a buffet and dancing, with Clara serving as the primary hostess and financier. One hundred fifty people came, among them “Countesses & Counts & Marquises,” filling up five large rooms of the house. As Clara, Clare, and forty others danced downstairs until late into the evening, Constance received guests upstairs in her much quieter drawing room. All of the socializing during the Claras’ visit forced Woolson to hurriedly finish up the book version of Jupiter Lights, writing through the nights until she saw the sun rise, to the great detriment of her health and nerves.34

  Although Woolson had renewed her lease on the villa for a third year, she soon began to speak of giving it up. James wondered why, unless she was thinking of returning to Florida. Eleanor Washington’s widower wrote to her nearly every week to fill her in on the property he was overseeing for her there. His son Harry was in Florence and gave her an excellent report of the orange groves planted for her on the land she called “East Angels.” Worrisome accounts came to her, however, of how Standard Oil magnate Henry Flagler had built in St. Augustine two grand hotels with five hundred rooms, dozens of stained-glass windows from Louis Tiffany, and everything from spas and tennis courts to a casino and a bowling alley. Flagler was drawing wealthy northern socialites in droves to his “Newport of the South.” Woolson worried that her dream of a peaceful home there had been spoiled.35

  Nevertheless, Woolson still didn’t have the money to return to Florida. Nor, as it turned out, did she have enough to keep up with her household expenses in Italy, which she estimated as anywhere between a half and a quarter of what they would be in the United States. Her letters to Sam that year are full of queries about the American bonds whose interest she relied on. In her letters to Boott she gave other reasons for planning to leave Bellosguardo: “I might go into all the pros & cons. But I won’t; I will simply say ‘Why did you leave the scene?’ You surely can’t expect me to stay here without you!” Although she knew at least five hundred people in Florence, those who meant the most to her were gone. As the first anniversary of Lizzie’s death approached, she told Boott she would think of him with tender sympathy on that day. In reply to his query about whether she had felt Lizzie’s presence, she admitted that she often talked to her and sensed her listening.36

  As spring approached, Woolson began to get restless. She fantasized about running off to Venice without telling anyone. “I should like a month of quiet; & no visiting list; no ‘calls’ to make,” she reported to Boott. Frank Duveneck was back in Europe and urged her to come to Paris for the Exposition, or World’s Fair, promising “to do everything” for her and take her to see the pictures. Eleanor Poynter wanted her to go with her to Tours, France, “and see all the old Châteaux.” But Constance’s eyes began to turn farther afield, to Algiers and Egypt. Her interest had been piqued by the Egyptian treasures of Daniel Willard Fiske. “If I could but go!” she wrote to him. For now she would have to content herself with the Egyptian coffee cups he had given her, which she used every day, imagining she was in Cairo.37

  In June, Constance fled to Venice with her niece Kate. She hired two gondoliers to take her far out into the lagoons, where she visited shrines, church ruins, and monasteries on the distant islands, returning by moonlight, never tiring “of the exquisite dreamy beauty, & silence, of the fairy water streets.” She knew so many of the local residents already that she wasn’t lonely. She had previously met Ariana Curtis in Florence and soon became a frequent guest at her magnificent Palazzo Barbaro. She decided that Ariana and Daniel Curtis, also close friends of James, were among the most enjoyable people she had ever known. She began to dream of renting an apartment in Venice. “To have put a few years of Venice into one’s life,” she wrote her old friend Stedman, “will be to have wrestled so much from darkness.”38

  That last word is one of the few tangible signs of her depression. As later letters reveal, she was by then unable to eat, sleep, read, or enjoy anything. Most distressingly, she found her money problems spiraling out of control. She was working as hard as she could, but it wasn’t enough to sustain her financially. She started drawing on her capital, selling two of her bonds for $2,000, making her question how long she could continue to support herself.39

  One day late in July, shortly after her return to Bellosguardo, she received a letter from Sam announcing that he was sending her enough money to stabilize her finances—an astounding $15,000. Sam could afford it. He had become quite rich in his father’s coal mining company. As she explained to him days later, after she had composed herself enough to write, “I could not believe that I had read aright, and went over the words again. And then, when I realized what you meant, tears came, and the happiest feeling that I have known for years. . . . I am afraid I had become almost discouraged, Sam. I had got behind. . . . The feeling was rapidly taking possession of me—‘It’s of no use!’ A feeling of hopelessness for the future.”40

  The tone of her letter to Sam and other clues suggest that Woolson had grown sui
cidal. During the time of her troubles at Bellosguardo, she read The Teaching of Epictetus, the Greek Stoic philosopher. Many of the pages discussing his views on suicide have been torn out of her copy, perhaps to conceal marginalia revealing her state of mind. But evidence remains, such as the following passage, which she marked with double wavy lines in both margins, indicating its great significance: “And when it may be, that the necessary things are no longer supplied, that is the signal for retreat: the door is opened, and God saith to thee, Depart.” In the notes section, she also marked the following with darker lines: “This phrase of the ‘open door’ occurs frequently in Epictetus, usually when, as here, he is telling the average nonphilosophic man that it is unmanly to complain of a life which he can at any time relinquish. The philosopher has no need of such exhortation, for he does not complain, and as for death, is content to wait God’s time. But the Stoics taught that the arrival of this time might be indicated by some disaster or affliction which rendered a natural and wholesome life impossible.” Then Woolson marked the final sentence with two lines in the margin: “Self-destruction was in such cases permissible, and is recorded to have been adopted by several leaders of the Stoics, generally when old age had begun to render them a burden to their friends.”41