A part—or the whole? War or harmony? Myth or reality? The needs and laws of nature? What would happen now?
Rebecca Harding, thirty-two, and Clarke Davis, twenty-eight, were married on March 5, 1863, in Wheeling. Only her family was present. No honeymoon. They went directly to Philadelphia, to the home of Clarke’s sister Carrie, where for the next fourteen months they were to live. It was a house crowded with children; meals and housekeeping had to be shared; Carrie was often ill, and always (it was her house) present.
Even more than Clarke, Rebecca came to marriage with strongly established patterns of living, including the practice of solitude. Now neither had even the physical space of a room of one’s own. The most intimate and tasking of relationships had to seek a tenable way to live in the midst of the clamor of everyday unavoidable relationship with others—necessitating (Rebecca, as a woman, would feel it most) constant consciousness and consideration for them.
In Wheeling, years of close living had bought the safety of unspoken understanding; knowledge of limits, one’s own and others’; what to accept, resist, avoid; what one spoke of, what was best kept silent. Here it was all to be learned.
Rebecca’s first venture out was to the Philadelphia public library—at last she lived somewhere where there was a circulating library, and a great one. She used her status as a leading Atlantic writer to secure reserved desk space, as well as a card.
Annie Fields came down for a flying one-day visit. Concealing any dismay she may have felt at the newlyweds’ circumstances, she set about arranging a series of visits and invitations from distinguished Philadelphians. She knew in Rebecca “the longing for music, art, the companionship of thinkers, scholars.” Lucretia Mott, the great, long-time abolitionist and women’s rights leader, came to call. Rebecca loved her: “a little, vivid, delicate creature, alive with magnetic power . . . no man had a more vigorous brain or ready eloquence.”* But she evaded further relationship with other Philadelphians, the “ponderous matrons whose turrets of white hair atop symbolize a sort of social Gibraltar.” Even those with whom Annie had hoped she and Clarke would find mutuality were dismissed by Rebecca (the shadow of Concord?) as “philanthropists, litterateurs, people with missions.”
The avoidance may have been partly self-protective. They had no home in which to entertain reciprocally; the position of husband to a famous wife was not easy for an as yet unestablished man; Clarke’s likings for people had to be considered; and there was the problem of Rebecca’s time and energies, seemingly less and less hers than ever.
Letters from Wheeling kept telling her how frail and lonesome her father was. Clarke, increasingly obsessed with the (mis)conduct of the war, seemed to speak of nothing else; passionately involved himself in organizing abolitionist meetings against Lincoln’s expediency. Rebecca reminded him that it was God who had the war in His hand, and not Clarke—to little effect. She wrote the story of “Ellen” who wandered freely, but it was not Atlantic quality. She had to send it to Peterson’s. Carrie was ill, recovered, was ill again. There were always children, and things that needed doing, and then redoing. Clarke and she never seemed to be alone when he was home—and the walls were so thin. “If any individual live too much in relations, so that [s]he becomes a stranger to the resources of his [her] own nature; [s]he falls, after a while, into a distraction, or imbecility which can only be cured by a time of isolation which gives the renovating fountains time to rise up.”* Carrie and the children were always about. The library hours and location were not really convenient. Clarke kept smoking all those cigars though she tried to help him cut down by offering him ice cream, and then had to eat half herself. Carrie was sick. It looked as if Clarke would enlist, or let himself be drafted. It was five months and she was not writing at all. Her father was worse. There were always children and a lot of things that needed doing and redoing.
Then, in late July, she did the only thing. She fell into a distraction or imbecility, an “undefined illness” (brain fever and nervous prostration are hinted at) that in our day we call a breakdown. Immediately she had freedom from household tasks, isolation, care, indulgence, removal; release to herself.
Although she probably did not know it yet, she was also pregnant.
Late in September, she could write a note to Annie. Without specifying why she had needed treatment, she told her abruptly that allopathy and homeopathy had been useless, and now “finally desperately” she had “gone back to [her] old Western habit [her girlhood habit] of walking” walking walking to exhaustion. Philadelphia streets, not Wheeling’s. Now she was better: “I’m so glad, for I didn’t know how to be sick.”
The “better” was premature. Late in October, there is another letter:
My dear dear Annie: I wanted to write before only to say I love you. God knows how dear and tender all love has grown to me now, but at first I was not able and now the doctor forbids the least reading or writing for fear of bringing back the trouble in my head. Ma is with me. Clarke has been waiting every day to have some good news to send you, to write. Sometimes I wish the time would be longer. I don’t know—these days have been so like the valley of the shadow of death that I grow afraid of the end. . . . I wish you would pray for us.
I must tell you one happy thing. If I get well we are going directly to live by ourselves—it is all clear now. You know all that means to me.
Her mother brought her to Wheeling to convalesce. She wrote she was thinking of composing a Christmas story, forgetting that it was far too late for any publication. Sometime in November she went back to Philadelphia:
It was such a happy homecoming, but I was still weak enough to feel my heart beat and the tears come at a little petting, and they did pet me. . . . How dear you are to me, Annie. I never felt before how hard it was to justify my right to love as since I was sick. . . . Sometimes I have a horror, Annie, that it will all disappear like a dream, that I will become suddenly indifferent to you all—I am foolish to speak in this way, but I cannot help it.
She returned for Christmas to her family in Wheeling, sending Annie a mysterious note the night before going:
I have had much to think of and to feel—for others, not myself. I could tell you a story which I cannot write, sadder and stranger than any fiction, which has made the days and nights very feverish for a long time. Someday I will tell you but maybe now, I ought not to have even said this much.
There’s a happy ending coming at last, I hope.
The first hint to Annie of the coming baby.
“It was not a very merry Christmas. Father is not dangerously ill,” she wrote Annie, “but enough to make him nervous and even morbid in his desire to have me with him.” The good-bys were agonizing, the more so for the constraint.
After Rebecca came home, rearrangements in their living situation were made. She had some space and time. All January, February, March,* the six-seven-eight-month pregnant Rebecca wrote and rewrote a story which the July 1864 Atlantic featured as its lead piece. It deserved that honor, and perhaps a more permanent one.
“The Wife’s Story” is about a “terror and temptation which had beset” a married life from the beginning, and is now taking “a definite shape and hold.” The wife had married fifteen months before into a ready-made family (five children and a ward) whose habits and temperaments are alien to her. Economic disaster has come to them; they face “the coarse struggle . . . for bread and butter.”
The temptation is a life in art; the terror is in considering it, for it might mean having to give up human love, hurting and abandoning those who need her. She yields to the temptation—to discover that the talent is mediocre, self-delusion; the world in which it has to function, commercial and degrading; and the end result is shame; death to her loved husband; the fate of a social outcast for herself.
But wait: it is all in the fantasies of a brain-fever dream; she never yielded. The wife wakes from the nightmare illness “thirsty for love, and to love,” and safe: babe at her breast, husband at
her side, loved ones surrounding her. An example, furthermore, for the young ward:
. . . mother, here, will tell you a woman has no better work in life than the one she has taken up: to make herself a visible Providence to her husband and child.
Happy conclusion, and satisfyingly reassuring to the prevalent attitudes of her readers. But there is anguish in the story. It is there in the torment of Hetty’s situation, which Rebecca makes so actual. It is there in the extremity of Hetty’s punishment had she acted—self-deluded fool, death-causer, outcast. And it is implicit in the choice of endings: even 108 years ago, there were a handful of women with family who had demonstrated that in exceptional instances, for a few, a third ending might be possible.
Aside from any light or dark that it casts on factors in Rebecca’s breakdown, “The Wife’s Story” is important (and fascinating) for the detailing of this anguish, the working of woman’s “conflict” in the insoluble situation of commitment to the real needs of other human beings and the real need to carry on one’s other serious work as well. The literature of this anguish is sparse.* “The Wife’s Story” is the first, and still among the most revealing:
I was so hungry for affection that night! I would have clung to a dog that had been kind to me. . . . The motherless boy, holding himself up by my knees, was more sturdy than I that night and self-reliant: never could have known, in his most helpless baby-days, the need with which I, an adult woman, craved a cheering word, and a little petting.
This immediately after she has acceded for the first time to the “temptation” of thinking of a life in art. Each succeeding concern with it is followed by a similar craving for love, for tenderness; an intensified sensitivity to her husband’s admirable qualities; or a rousing of physical desire at the touch or look of him. And this in turn is followed by resentment of what she makes herself scorn as “weak fever of the flesh”; or by a devaluation of her husband and their relationship; or by a redwelling on her work, and her circumstances that deny it.
In a long passage, Hetty tries to “judge” the years of her married life:
. . . other [previous] years of my life thrust them aside persistently, as foreign, alien to me. Those others were to me Home,—the thoughts that had held me nearest the divine life. . . . “The only object in life is to grow,” [it was] Margaret Fuller’s motto. . . . There had been a time when I had dreamed of attaining Margaret’s stature; and as I thought of that, some old subtile flame stirred in me with a keen delight. New to me, almost; for, since my baby was born, my soul as well as my body had been weak and nauseated. . . . I had intended my child should be reared in New England: what I had lacked in gifts and opportunities he should possess. . . . But the child was a girl,* a weazen-faced little mortal, crying night and day like any other animal. It was an animal wearing out in me the strength needed by-and-by for its mental training. I sent it to a nurse in the country. . . . For days after that he [the father] looked paler, and his face had a quiet, settled look, as if he had tested the world and was done with it. . . . I do not remember that after this he ever called me Hetty. But he was cheerful as ever with the boys.
“Some latent, unconscious jar of thought” brings her back to a time when she saw Rosa Bonheur’s famous painting, Horse Fair:
I remembered how some one had quoted her as saying, “Any woman can be a wife or mother, but this is my work alone.”
I, too, had my gift: but one . . . again the quick shiver of ecstasy ran through me;—it was my power, my wand with which to touch the world . . . was I to give it unused back to God? I could sing: not that only; I could compose music,—the highest soul-utterance. . . . I had been called, then,—set apart to a mission . . . and I had thrust it all aside—for what? A mess of weakest pottage,—a little love, silly rides behind Tinker, petting and paltering such as other women’s souls grew imbecile without. It was the consciousness of this that had grown slowly on me in the year just gone; I had put my husband from me day by day because of it. . . . I could look now at my husband, and see the naked truth about us both. Two middle-aged people with inharmonious intellects: tastes and habits jarring at every step, clenched together only by faith in a vague whim or fever of the blood called love. Better apart: we were too old for fevers. If I remained with Doctor Manning, my role was outlined plain to the end: years of cooking, stitching, scraping together of cents: it was the fate of thousands of married women without means. . . . Better apart.
As I thought that, he laid Teddy [the small boy] down, and came towards me,—the usual uncertain, anxious half-smile on his face with which he regarded me. . . .
. . . He . . . put his hard hand gently on my shoulder. It made me turn faint, with some weakness that must have come down to me from my infant days. . . . I caught the sleeve of his dressing-gown in my fingers, and began smoothing it. It was the first thing I had ever made for him. I remembered how proud I was the evening he put it on.
“I was sure the life meant so much more to you than food or raiment,” her husband says to her.
“What do you mean by the life? Have I found it here, Daniel?”
“No, Hester?”
“I want work fit for me,” I said, almost fiercely. “God made me for a good, high purpose.”
“I know,” cheerfully. “We’ll find it, dear: no man’s work is kept back from him. We’ll find it together.”
But under the cheerfulness there was a sad quiet, as of one who has lost something forever, and tries to hide the loss from himself.
In her intensified sensitivity, his pain overwhelms her. She caresses him:
“Why, why, child!”
“Call me Hetty, Daniel, I’d like to think that name belonged to me yet.”
She gets up, brings him his slippers, kneels to put them on:
Another of the old foolish tricks gone long ago. There was a look on his face which had not been there this many a day. He had such a credulous heart, so easy to waken into happiness. I took his wrist in my bony hands, to raise myself; the muscles were like steel, the cording veins throbbing with health; there was an indescribable rest in the touch.
“Daniel,” I said, looking him full in the face, “I’d like to have no mission in God’s world. I’d like to give up my soul, and forget everything but you.”
“Yes,” she says later. “It’s a fever . . . In the blood.”
Each hardening of determination comes out of situations of drudgery (“Was [it] for this in reality God had made me?”) or out of reinvolvement with her music,
the work of my life. . . . I got it [the score of an opera] out now by stealth, at night, putting my pen to it here and there, with the controlled fever with which a man might lay his hand on a dear dead face, if he knew the touch would bring it back to life. Was there any waking that dead life of mine?
Her final decision—to accept an offer for her opera to be produced, and to sing in it herself—is made as she sits mending the weekly heap of the boys’ half-washed, leather-stained socks after a long exhausting day of making-do:
The actual dignity and beauty of [this family] life, God’s truth itself, may have grown dim to me, behind a faint body and tired fingers; but let the hard-worked woman who is without that sin throw the first stone at me.
Each hardening is followed by acts of love; renewal of responsibility; magnified sensitivity to others’ feelings; and terrible longing not to have the conflict:
To nestle down into this man’s heart and life. To make his last years that warm Indian-summer day! I could do it! I! What utter rest there were in that!
Yet was this power within me to rot and waste?
The movement of the story is that of David Gaunt: the back and forth embracing of the chimera with her brain, and the thrusting it aside with her heart—until the resolution.
The happy ending is what Rebecca, big with child, must have believed those last few months, sitting beside a bleak stove thinking of “the great talking fires at home.” She wrote to Annie:
The air is
warmer and the sunshine clearer. We read and walk and I sew a little. . . . The time has been full of a deep breath of content and waiting.
All good things lie in the future.
Richard Harding Davis was born on April 18, 1864. He was named after Rebecca’s father, whose death three weeks before had been kept secret from her until her mother could come and tell her. The telling coincided with the onset of labor. For a month she was very ill, kept to her bed. When Annie wanted to come and visit, Rebecca asked her not to until she was stronger and the baby had had “a chance to grow fat and better pleased with the new world he has found. Just now he is the smallest tiredest little thing, and homely too, only with big dark eyes.”
Clarke found a cheap rooming house in Point Pleasant near the sea for the summer, and in fall they moved at last from Carrie’s into a place by themselves—a rented yardless Philadelphia row house, “not a scrap of growing green anywhere in sight,” one of several hundred others exactly like it for streets around. They christened it “Centre of the Universe,” a name to be attached to wherever they lived.
In December she took her baby to Wheeling, where Clarke—building a law practice, immersed in political activities, editing, and working at the post office part time—wrote her: “Dearest Pet, will you help your old Boy a little” with some writing?
Dearest Pet helped her “old Boy” and herself a lot in those next months. Five Atlantic stories and Haunted Manor House, a book-length mystery for Peterson’s: writing very fast and from the surface, nothing she really cared about, not stopping to rewrite or revise. She wanted help in the house and a yard and vista and to live by the sea that in the one summer she had come so dearly to love.
She got help with the baby and another summer by the sea. She was pregnant again, and after a while the writing raveled off. It was just as well; in that seaside time she was dreaming up a new book. It would be a major work. She would write it carefully, take her time, not as with those potboilers she had spun off.
Silences Page 14
