Woman in American Literature

by Helen Gray Cone

  Cone, Helen Gray. "Woman in American Literature." Century

  Magazine 40 (1890): 921-930.

  I am obnoxious to each carping tongue That says my hand a needle better fits. . . . . . . . Men can do best, and women know it well; Preeminence in each and all is yours, Yet grant some small acknowledgment of ours. -- Anne Bradstreet, 1640.

  Let us be wise, and not impede the soul. Let her work as she will. Let us have one creative energy, one incessant revelation. Let it take what form it will, and let us not bind it by the past to man or woman. -- Margaret Fuller, 1844.

  IT is difficult to disengage a single thread from the living web of a nation's literature. The interplay of influences is such that the product spun from the heart and brain of woman alone must, when thus disengaged, lose something of its significance. In criticism a classification based upon sex is necessarily misleading and inexact. As far as difference between the literary work of women and that of men is created by difference of environment and training it may be regarded as accidental; while the really essential difference, resulting from the general law that the work of woman shall somehow subtly express womanhood, not only varies widely in degree with the individual worker, but is, in certain lines of production, almost ungraspable by criticism. We cannot rear walls which shall separate literature into departments, upon a principle elusive as the air. "It is no more the order of nature that the especially feminine element should be incarnated pure in any form, than that the masculine energy should exist unmingled with it in any form." The experiment which, Lowell tells us, Nature tried in shaping the genius of Hawthorne, she repeats and reverses at will.

  In practice the evil effects which have followed the separate consideration of woman's work in literature are sufficiently plain. The debasement of the coin of criticism is a fatal measure. The dearest foe of the woman artist in the past has been the suave and chivalrous critic, who, judging all "female writers" by a special standard, has easily bestowed the unearned wreath.

  The present paper is grounded, it will be seen, upon no preference for the Shaker-meeting arrangement which prevailed so long in our American temple of the Muses. It has seemed desirable, in a historical review of the work of women in this country, to follow the course of their effort in the field of literature; to note the occasional impediments of the stream, its sudden accessions of force, its general tendency, and its gradual widening.

  The colonial period has, of course, little to give us. The professional literary woman was then unknown. The verses of Mrs. Anne Bradstreet, called in flattery "the tenth Muse," were "the fruit but of some few hours curtailed from her sleep and other refreshments." The negro girl Phillis Wheatley, whose poetical efforts had been published under aristocratic patronage in England, when robbed of her mistress by death "resorted to marriage" -- not to literature -- "as the only alternative of destitution." Mrs. Mercy Warren was never obliged to seek support from that sharp-pointed pen which copied so cleverly the satiric style of Pope, and which has left voluminous records of the Revolution. She too wrote her tragedies "for amusement, in the solitary hours when her friends were abroad."

  Miss Hannah Adams, born in Massachusetts in 1755, may be accepted as the first American woman who made literature her profession. Her appearance as a pioneer in this country corresponds closely in time with that of Mary Wollstonecraft in England. She wrote, at seventy-seven, the story of her life. Her account sets forth clearly the difficulties which in her youth had to be dealt with by a woman seriously undertaking authorship. Ill health, which forbade her attending school, was an individual disadvantage; but she remarks incidentally on the defectiveness of the country school, where girls learned only to write and cipher, and were in summer "instructed by females in reading, sewing, and other kinds of work. . . . I remember that my first idea of the happiness of heaven was of a place where we should find our thirst for knowledge fully gratified." How pathetically the old woman recalls the longing of the eager girl! All her life she labored against odds; learning, however, the rudiments of Latin, Greek, geography, and logic, "with indescribable pleasure and avidity," from some gentlemen boarding at her father's house. Becoming interested in religious controversy, she formed the plan of compiling a "View of Religions"; not at first hoping to derive what she calls "emolument" from the work. To win bread she relied at this time upon spinning, sewing, or knitting, and, during the Revolutionary war, on the weaving of bobbin lace; afterwards falling back on her scant classical resources to teach young gentlemen Latin and Greek. Meanwhile the compilation went on. "Reading much religious controversy," observes Miss Adams, "must be extremely trying to a female, whose mind, instead of being strengthened by those studies which exercise the judgment and give stability to the character, is debilitated by reading romances and novels." This sense of disadvantage, of the meekly accepted burden of sex, pervades the autobiography; it seems the story of a patient cripple. When the long task was done her inexperience made her the dupe of a dishonest printer; and, although the book sold well, her only compensation was fifty copies, for which she was obliged herself to find purchasers, having previously procured four hundred subscribers. Fortunately she had the copyright; and before the publication of a second edition she chanced to make the acquaintance of a clerical good Samaritan, who transacted the business for her. The "emolument" derived from this second edition at last enabled her to pay her debts, and to put out a small sum upon interest. Her "History of New England," in the preparation of which her eyesight was nearly sacrificed, met with a good sale; but an abridgment of it brought her nothing, on account of the failure of the printer. She sold the copyright of her "Evidences of Christianity" for one hundred dollars in books.

  This, then, is our starting-point -- evident character and ability, at a disadvantage both in production and in the disposal of the product; imperfect educational equipment; and a hopeless consciousness of inferiority, amounting almost to an inability to stand upright mentally.

  Susanna Rowson, who wrote the popular "Charlotte Temple," may be classed as an American novelist, though not born in this country. She appears also as a writer of patriotic songs, an actress, a teacher, and the compiler of a dictionary and other school-books. "The Coquette; or, the History of Eliza Wharton," by Hannah Webster Foster, was another prime favorite among the formal novels of the day.

  Kind Miss Hannah Adams, in her old age, chanced to praise a certain metrical effort, unpromisingly labeled "Jephthah's Rash Vow," put forth by a girl of sixteen, Miss Caroline Howard. Here occurs an indicative touch. "When I learned," says the commended Miss Caroline, "that my verses had been surreptitiously printed in a newspaper, I wept bitterly, and was as alarmed as if I had been detected in man's apparel." Such was the feeling with which the singing-robes were donned by a maiden in 1810 -- a state of affairs soon to be replaced by a general fashion of feminine singing-robes of rather cheap material. During the second quarter of the present century conditions somewhat improved, and production greatly increased. "There was a wide manifestation of that which bears to pure ideality an inferior relationship," writes Mr. Stedman of the general body of our literature at this period. In 1848 Dr. Griswold reports that "women among us are taking a leading part"; that "the proportion of female writers at this moment in America far exceeds that which the present or any other age in England exhibits." Awful moment in America! one is led to exclaim by a survey of the poetic field. Alas, the verse of those "Tokens," and "Keepsakes," and "Forget-Me-Nots," and "Magnolias," and all the rest of the annuals, all glorious without in their red or white Turkey morocco and gilding! Alas, the flocks of quasi swan- singers! They have sailed away down the river of Time, chanting with a monotonous mournfulness. We need not speak of them at leng
th. One of them early wrote about the Genius of Oblivion; most of them wrote for it. It was not their fault that their toil increased the sum of the "Literature suited to Desolate Islands." The time was out of joint. Sentimentalism infected both continents. It was natural enough that the infection should seize most strongly upon those who were weakened by an intellectual best- parlor atmosphere, with small chance of free out-of-door currents. They had their reward. Their crude constituencies were proud of them; and not all wrought without "emolument," though it need hardly be said that verse-making was not and is not, as a rule, a remunerative occupation. Some names survive, held in the memory of the public by a few small, sweet songs on simple themes, probably undervalued by their authors, but floating now like flowers above the tide that has swallowed so many pretentious, sand-based structures.

  Mrs. Lydia H. Sigourney, the most prolific poetess of the period, was hailed as "the American Mrs. Hemans." A gentle and pious womanhood shone through her verse; but her books are undisturbed and dusty in the libraries now, and likely to remain so. Maria Gowen Brooks -- "Maria del Occidente" -- was, on the other hand, not popular at home; but put forth a far stronger claim than Mrs. Sigourney, and won indeed somewhat disproportionate praises abroad. "Southey says 'Zophiel; or, The Bride of Seven,' is by some Yankee woman," writes Charles Lamb; "as if there had ever been a woman capable of anything so great!" One is glad that we need not now consider as the acme of woman's poetic achievements this metrical narrative of the loves of the angels; nevertheless, it is on the whole a remarkably sustained work, with a gorgeousness of coloring which might perhaps be traced to its author's Celtic strain.

  As Mrs. Samuel Gilman, Caroline Howard, of whom we have already spoken, carried the New England spirit into a Southern home, and there wrote not only verses, but sketches and tales, much in the manner of her sisters who never left the Puritan nest, though dealing at times with material strange to them, as in her "Recollections of a Southern Matron." With the women of New England lies our chief concern, until a date comparatively recent. A strong, thinking, working race -- all know the type; granite rock, out of its crevices the unexpected harebells trembling here and there. As writers they have a general resemblance; in one case a little more mica and glitter, in another more harebells than usual. Mrs. Sigourney, for instance, presents an azure predominance of the flowery, on a basis of the practical. Think of her fifty-seven volumes -- copious verse, religious and sentimental; sketches of travel; didactic "Letters to Mothers," "Letters to Young Ladies"; the charmingly garrulous "Letters of Life," published after her death. Quantity, dilution, diffusiveness, the dispersion of energy in a variety of aims -- these were the order of the day. Lydia Maria Child wrote more than thirty-five books and pamphlets, beginning with the apotheosis of the aboriginal American in romance, ending in the good fight with slavery, and taking in by the way domestic economy, the progress of religious ideas, and the Athens of Pericles, somewhat romanticized. Firm granite here, not without ferns of tenderest grace. It is very curious and impressive, the self-reliant dignity with which these noble matrons circumambulate the whole field of literature with errant feet, but with a character central and composed. They are "something better than their verse," and also than their prose. Why was it that the dispersive tendency of the time showed itself especially in the literary effort of women? Perhaps the scattering, haphazard kind of education then commonly bestowed upon girls helped to bring about such a condition of things. Efficient work, in literature as in other professions, is dependent in a degree upon preparation; not indeed upon the actual amount of knowledge possessed, but upon the training of the mind to sure action, and the vitality of the spark of intellectual life communicated in early days. To the desultory and aimless education of girls at this period, and their continual servitude to the sampler, all will testify. "My education," says Mrs. Gilman, "was exceedingly irregular, a perpetual passing from school to school. I drew a very little and worked 'The Babes in the Wood' on white satin, with floss silk." By and by, however, she "was initiated into Latin," studied Watts's "Logic" by herself, and joined a private class in French. Lydia Huntley (Mrs. Sigourney) fared somewhat better, pursuing mathematics, though she admits that too little time was accorded to the subject, and being instructed in "the belles-lettres studies" by competent teachers. Her school education ceased at thirteen; she afterwards worked alone over history and mental philosophy, had tutors in Latin and French, and even dipped into Hebrew, under clerical guidance. This has a deceptively advanced sound; we are to learn presently that she was sent away to boarding-school, where she applied herself to "embroidery of historical scenes, filigree, and other finger-works." (May we not find a connection between this kind of training and the production of dramatic characters as lifelike as those figures in floss silk? Was it not a natural result, that corresponding "embroidery of historical scenes" performed by the feminine pen?) Lydia Maria Francis (Mrs. Child), "apart from her brother's companionship, had, as usual, a very unequal share of educational opportunities; attending only the public schools," -- the public schools of the century in its teens, -- "with one year at a private seminary." Catherine Sedgwick, "reared in an atmosphere of high intelligence," still confesses, "I have all my life felt the want of more systematic training."

  Another cause of the scattering, unmethodical supply may have been the vagueness of the demand. America was not quite sure what it was proper to expect of the "female Writer"; and perhaps that lady herself had a lingering feudal idea that she could hold literary territory only on condition of stout pen service in the cause of the domestic virtues and pudding. "In those days," says Thomas Wentworth Higginson, "it seemed to be held necessary for American women to work their passage into literature by first compiling a cookery book." Thus we have Mrs. Child's "Frugal Housewife"; and we find clever Eliza Leslie, of Philadelphia, putting forth "Seventy-five Receipts" before she ventures upon her humorous and satirical "Pencil Sketches." The culinary tradition was carried on, somewhat later, by Catherine Beecher, with her "Domestic Receipt Book"; and we have indeed most modern instances in the excellent "Common-sense Series" of the novelist "Marion Harland," and in Mrs. Whitney's "Just How." Perhaps, however, it is not fancy that these wear the kitchen apron with a difference.

  In addition to lack of training, and to the vague nature of the public demand, a third cause operated against symmetrical artistic development among the women of those electric days preceding the civil war. That struggle between the art instinct and the desire for reform, which is not likely to cease entirely until the coming of the golden year, was then at its height. Both men and women were drawn into the maelstrom of the antislavery conflict; yet to a few men the artist's single aim seemed still possible -- to Longfellow, to Hawthorne. Similar examples are lacking among contemporary women. Essential womanhood, "das Ewigweibliche," seems at this point unusually clear in the work of women; the passion for conduct, the enthusiasm for abstract justice, not less than the potential motherhood that yearns over all suffering. The strong Hebraic element in the spiritual life of New England women in particular tended to withdraw them from the service of pure art at this period. "My natural inclinations," wrote Lydia Maria Child, "drew me much more strongly towards literature and the arts than towards reform, and the weight of conscience was needed to turn the scale."

  Mrs. Child and Miss Sedgwick, chosen favorites of the public, stand forth as typical figures. Both have the art instinct, both the desire for reform: in Mrs. Child the latter decidedly triumphs, in spite of her romances; in Miss Sedgwick the former, though less decidedly, in spite of her incidental preachments. She wrote "without any purpose or hope to slay giants," aiming merely "to supply mediocre readers with small moral hints on various subjects that come up in daily life." It is interesting to note just what public favor meant materially to the most popular women writers of those days. Miss Sedgwick, at a time when she had reached high- water mark, wrote in reply to one who expected her to acquire a fortune, that she found it impossible to mak
e much out of novel- writing while cheap editions of English novels filled the market. "I may go on," she says "earning a few hundred dollars a year, and precious few too." One could not even earn the "precious few" without observing certain laws of silence. The "Appeal in Behalf of that Class of Americans called Africans" seriously lessened the income of Mrs. Child. That dubious America of 1833 was decided on one point -- this was not what she expected of the "female writer." She was willing to be instructed by a woman -- about the polishing of furniture and the education of daughters.

  And now there arises before us another figure, of striking singularity and power. Margaret Fuller never appeared as a candidate for popular favor. On the polishing of furniture she was absolutely silent; nor, though she professed "high respect for those who 'cook something good,' and create and preserve fair order in houses," did she ever fulfil the understood duty of woman by publishing a cookery book. On the education of daughters she had, however, a vital word to say; demanding for them "a far wider and more generous culture." Her own education had been of an exceptional character; she was fortunate in its depth and solidity, though unfortunate in the forcing process that had made her a hard student at six years old. Her equipment was superior to that of any American woman who had previously entered the field of literature; and hers was a powerful genius, but, by the irony of fate, a genius not prompt to clothe itself in the written word. As to the inspiration of her speech all seem to agree; but one who knew her well has spoken of the "singular embarrassment and hesitation induced by the attempt to commit her thoughts to paper." The reader of the sibylline leaves she scattered about her in her strange career receives the constant impression of hampered power, of force that has never found its proper outlet. In "Woman in the Nineteenth Century" there is certainly something of that "shoreless Asiatic dreaminess" complained of by Carlyle; but there are also to be found rich words, fit, like those of Emerson, for "gold nails in temples to hang trophies on." The critical Scotchman himself subsequently owned that "some of her Papers are the undeniable utterances of a true heroic mind; altogether unique, so far as I know, among the Writing Women of this generation; rare enough, too, God knows, among the Writing Men." She accomplished comparatively little that can be shown or reckoned. Her mission was "to free, arouse, dilate." Those who immediately responded were few; and as the circle of her influence has widened through their lives the source of the original impulse has been unnamed and forgotten. But if we are disposed to rank a fragmentary greatness above a narrow perfection, to value loftiness of aim more than the complete attainment of an inferior object, we must set Margaret Fuller, despite all errors of judgment, all faults of style, very high among the "Writing Women" of America. It is time that, ceasing to discuss her personal traits, we dwell only upon the permanent and essential in her whose mind was fixed upon the permanent, the essential. Her place in our literature is her own; it has not been filled, nor does it seem likely to be. The particular kind of force which she exhibited -- in so far as it was not individual -- stands a chance in our own day of being drawn into the educational field, now that the "wider and more generous culture" which she claimed has been accorded to women.