Woman in American Literature Read online

  We may trace from the early publications of Lydia Maria Francis and Catherine Sedgwick the special line along which women have worked most successfully. It is in fiction that they have wrought with the greatest vigor and freedom, and in that important class of fiction which reflects faithfully the national life, broadly or in sectional phases. In 1821 Miss Francis, a girl of nineteen, wrote "Hobomok," a rather crude novel of colonial Massachusetts, with an Indian hero. Those were the times of the pseudo-American school, the heyday of what Mr. Stedman has called "the supposititious Indian." To the sanguine "Hobomok" seemed to foreshadow a feminine Cooper, and its author put forth in the following year "The Rebels," a novel of Boston before the Revolution. A more effective worker on this line, however, was Miss Sedgwick, whose "New England Tale" -- a simple little story, originally intended as a tract -- was published in 1822, and at once drew attention, in spite of a certain thinness, by its recognizable home flavor. The plain presentation of New England life in "Redwood," her succeeding book, interests and convinces the reader of to-day. Some worthless elements of plot, now out of date, are introduced; but age cannot wither nor custom stale the fresh reality of the most memorable figure -- that manly soul Miss Deborah, a character as distinct as Scott himself could have made her. "Hope Leslie," "Clarence," and "The Linwoods" followed; then the briefer tales supplying "small moral hints," such as the "Poor Rich Man and Rich Poor Man." All are genuine, wholesome, deserving of the hearty welcome they received. "Wise, clear, and kindly," one must echo the verdict of Margaret Fuller on our gentle pioneer in native fiction; we may look back with pride on her "speech moderate and sane, but never palsied by fear or skeptical caution"; on herself, "a fine example of the independent and beneficent existence that intellect and character can give to women." The least studied among her pathetic scenes are admirable; and she displays some healthy humor, though not as much as her charming letters indicate that she possessed. A recent writer has ranked her work in one respect above that of Cooper, pronouncing it more truly calculated to effect "the emancipation of the American mind from foreign types."

  Miss Sedgwick, past threescore, was still in the literary harness when the woman who was destined to bring the novel of New England to a fuller development reached fame at a bound with "Uncle Tom's Cabin." At last the artist's instinct and the purpose of the reformer were fused, as far as they are capable of fusion, in a story that still holds its reader, whether passive or protesting, with the grip of the master-hand. The inborn powers of Mrs. Stowe were fortunately developed in a home atmosphere that supplied deficiencies in training. Fate was kind in providing occasional stimulants for the feminine mind, though an adequate and regular supply was customarily withheld. Miss Sedgwick attributes an especial quickening force to the valuable selections read aloud by her father to his family; Miss Francis, as we have seen, owed much to the conversation of her brother. To Harriet Beecher was granted, outside her inspiring home circle, an extra stimulus in the early influence of the enthusiastic teacher whose portrait she has given us in the Jonathan Rossiter of "Oldtown Folks." A close knowledge of Scott's novels from her girlhood had its effect in shaping her methods of narration. She knew her Bible -- perpetual fountain feeding the noblest streams of English literature -- as Ruskin knew his. Residence for years near the Ohio border had familiarized her with some of the darkest aspects of slavery; so that when the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law roused her to the task of exhibiting the system in operation, she was as fully prepared to execute that task as a woman of New England birth and traditions well could be. Since the war Southern writers, producing with the ease of intimacy works steeped in the spirit of the South, have taught us much concerning negro character and manners, and have accustomed us to an accurate reproduction of dialect. The sublimity of Uncle Tom has been tried by the reality of the not less lovable Uncle Remus. But whatever blemishes or extravagances may appear to a critical eye in the great antislavery novel, it still beats with that intense life which nearly forty years ago awoke a deep responsive thrill in the repressed heart of the North. We are at present chiefly concerned with its immense practical success. It was a "shot heard round the world." Ten thousand copies were sold in a few days; over three hundred thousand in a year; eight power presses were kept running day and night to supply the continual demand. The British Museum now contains thirty-five complete editions in English, and translations exist in at least twenty different languages. "Never did any American work have such success," exclaims Mrs. Child, in one of her enthusiastic letters. "It has done much to command respect for the faculties of woman." The influences are, indeed, broad and general which have since that day removed all restrictions tending to impress inferiority on the woman writer, so that the distinction of sex is lost in the distinction of schools. Yet a special influence may be attributed to this single marked manifestation of force, to this imposing popular triumph. In the face of the fact that the one American book which had stormed Europe was the work of a woman, the old tone of patronage became ridiculous, the old sense of ordained and inevitable weakness on the part of the "female writer" became obsolete. Women henceforth, whatever their personal feelings in regard to the much-discussed book, were enabled, consciously or unconsciously, to hold the pen more firmly, to move it more freely. In New England fiction what a leap from the work of Miss Sedgwick, worthy as it is, to that of Mrs. Stowe! The field whence a few hardy growths were peeping seems to have been overflowed by a fertilizing river, so rich is its new yield. It is "the soul of Down East" that we find in "The Minister's Wooing" and "Oldtown Folks." Things spiritual are grasped with the insight of kinship, externals are drawn with the certainty of lifelong acquaintance. If we glance at the humorous side of the picture, surely no hand that ever wrought could have bettered one smile-provoking line in the familiar figure of Sam Lawson, the village do-nothing. There is a free-handedness in the treatment of this character not often found in more recent conscientious studies of local types; it is as a painting beside photographs. A certain inequality, it may be admitted, appears in the range of Mrs. Stowe's productions. They form links, more or less shining, between a time of confused and groping effort on the part of women and a time of definitely directed aims, of a concentration that has, inevitably, its own drawbacks.

  The encouragement of the great magazines, from the first friendly to women writers, is an important factor in their development. "Harper's" dates from 1850; "The Atlantic Monthly," in 1857, opened a new outlet for literary work of a high grade. Here appeared many of the short stories of Rose Terry, depicting the life of New England; unsurpassable in their fidelity to nature, their spontaneous flow, their grim humor, pathos, tragedy. In the pages of "The Atlantic," too, suddenly flashed into sight the brilliant exotics of Harriet Prescott, who holds among American women a position as singular as that of Poe among men. Her characters have their being in some remote, gorgeous sunset-land; we feel that the Boston Common of "Azarian" is based upon a cloud rather than solid Yankee earth, and the author can scarce pluck a May flower but it turns at her touch to something rich and strange. Native flavor there is in some of her shorter stories, such as "The South Breaker" and "Knitting Sale-Socks"; but a sudden waft of foreign spices is sure to mingle with the sea-wind or the inland lilac-scents. "The Amber Gods" and "The Thief in the Night" skillfully involve the reader in a dazzling web of deceptive strength.

  In "Temple House," "Two Men," and "The Morgesons," the peculiarly powerful works of Mrs. Stoddard, the central figures do not seem necessarily of any particular time or country. Their local habitation, however, is impressively painted; with a few swift, vigorous strokes the old coast towns spring up before us; the very savor of the air is imparted. Minor characters strongly smack of the soil; old Cuth, in "Two Men," dying "silently and firmly, like a wolf"; Else, in the same book. There are scenes of a superb fierce power -- that of the wreck in "Temple House," for instance. The curt and repressed style, the ironic humor of Mrs. Stoddard, serve to grapple her work to the memory as with hoo
ks of steel; it is as remote as possible from the conventional notion of woman's writing.

  The old conflict between the reformer's passion and the art instinct is renewed in the novels and stories of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, who possesses the artist's responsiveness in a high degree, with but little of the artist's restraint. Exquisitely sensitive to the significant beauty of the world, she is no less sensitive to the appeal of human pain. In "Hedged In" and "The Silent Partner," in her stories of the squalid tenement and the storm-beaten coast, her literary work reflects, point for point, her personal work for the fallen, the toiling, and the tempted. Her passionate sympathy gives her a power of thrilling, of commanding the tribute of tears, which is all her own. An enthusiast for womanhood, she has given us in "The Story of Avis" and "Dr. Zay" striking studies of complementary themes; "Avis," despite certain flaws of style to which objection is trite, remaining the greater, as it is the sadder, book. All Miss Phelps's stories strike root into New England, though it is not precisely Mrs. Cooke's New England of iron farmers and stony farms; and none strikes deeper root than "Avis," a natural product of the intellectual region whence "Woman in the Nineteenth Century" sprang thirty years before. No other woman, among writers who have arisen since the war, has received in such fullness the spiritual inheritance of New England's past.

  The changes brought about by the influx of foreigners into the factory towns of the East are reflected in the pages of Miss Phelps, particularly in "The Silent Partner." A recent worker of the same vein is Lillie Chace Wyman, whose short stories, collected under the symbolic title "Poverty Grass," are marked by sincerity and simple power. Sarah Orne Jewett roams the old pastures, gathering many pungent handfuls of the familiar flowers and herbs that retain for us their homely preciousness. She is attracted also by the life of the coast. Without vigorous movement, her sketches and stories have always an individual, delicate picturesqueness, the quality of a small, clear water- color. "A Country Doctor" is to be noted for its very quiet and true presentation of a symmetrical womanhood, naturally drawn towards the large helpfulness of professional life.

  A novel which has lately aroused much discussion, the "John Ward, Preacher," of Margaret Deland, is, although its scene is laid in Pennsylvania, a legitimate growth of New England in its problem and its central character. The orthodox idea of eternal future punishment receives a treatment somewhat similar to that applied by Miss Phelps in "The Gates Ajar" to the conventional heaven. The hero seems a revisitant Thomas Shepard, or other stern yet tender Puritan of the past, miraculously set down in a modern environment. The incisiveness of portions of "John Ward," as well as the grace of its side scenes, gives promise of still more valuable coming contributions to American fiction by the poet of the charming "Old Garden." A yet later New England production is the book of stories by Mary E. Wilkins, "A Humble Romance," a work brimful of vigor and human nature.

  We need not now enter into the circumstances tending to the misdirection of intellectual effort which so affected the work of Southern women in literature that for some time they produced little of enduring value. These causes have been of late fully set forth by a writer of the new South, Thomas Nelson Page, who in naming the women of Southern birth or residence most prominent as novelists before the civil war places Mrs. Terhune in a class by herself. "Like the others, she has used the Southern life as material, but has exhibited a literary sense of far higher order, and an artistic touch." Mrs. Rebecca Harding Davis, a native of West Virginia, has chosen a Pennsylvanian background for some of her best work; producing, perhaps, nothing stronger than "Life in the Iron Mills," published long since in "The Atlantic" -- a story distantly akin to those of Miss Phelps and the author of "Poverty Grass." The hopeless heart-hunger of the poor has seldom been so passionately pictured. A distinguishing characteristic of the work of Mrs. Davis is her Browning-like insistence on the rare test- moments of life. If, as in the complicated war-time novel "Waiting for the Verdict," -- a work of high intention, -- the characters come out startlingly well in the sudden lights flashed upon them, the writer's idealism is tonic and uplifting.

  It was a woman of the North who pictured, in a series of brief tales and sketches full of insight, the desolate South at the close of the civil war -- Constance Fenimore Woolson, the most broadly national of our women novelists. Her feeling for local color is quick and true; and though she has especially identified herself with the Lake country and with Florida, one is left with the impression that her assimilative powers would enable her to reproduce as successfully the traits of any other quarter of the Union. Few American writers of fiction have given evidence of such breadth, so full a sense of the possibilities of the varied and complex life of our wide land. Robust, capable, mature -- these seem fitting words to apply to the author of "Anne," of "East Angels," of the excellent short stories in "Rodman the Keeper." Women have reason for pride in a representative novelist whose genius is trained and controlled, without being tamed or dispirited.

  Similar surefootedness and mastery of means are displayed by Mary Hallock Foote in her picturesque Western stories, such as "The Led-Horse Claim: a Romance of a Mining Camp," and "John Bodewin's Testimony" -- in which a certain gracefulness takes the place of the fuller warmth of Miss Woolson. One is apt to name the two writers together, since they represent the most supple and practiced talent just now exercised by women in the department of fiction.

  Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett, English by birth and education, and influenced by the Dickens tradition, though reflecting the tone of her environment wherever fate may lead her, touches American literature chiefly on the Southern side, through "Louisiana" and "Esmeralda." Despite the ambitious character of her novel of Washington society, "Through One Administration," her most durable work is either thoroughly English or belongs to the international school. This particular branch of fiction we cannot now pause to note, though conscious that such books as the beautiful "Guenn" of Blanche Willis Howard have their own distinct value.

  A truly native flower, though gathered in a field so unfamiliar as to wear a seemingly foreign charm, is Mrs. Jackson's poetic "Ramona." A book instinct with passionate purpose, intensely alive and involving the reader in its movement, it yet contains an idyl of singular loveliness, the perfection of which lends the force of contrast to the pathetic close. A novel of reform, into which a great and generous soul poured its gathered strength, it none the less possesses artistic distinction. Something is, of course, due to the charm of atmosphere, the beauty of the background against which the plot naturally placed itself; more, to the trained hand, the pen pliant with long and free exercise; most, to the poet-heart. "Ramona" stands as the most finished, though not the most striking, example that what American women have done notably in literature they have done nobly.

  The magazine-reading world has hardly recovered yet from its shock of surprise on discovering the author of "In the Tennessee Mountains," a book of short stories projecting the lines on which the writer has since advanced in "The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains" and "The Despot of Broomsedge Cove." Why did Miss Murfree prefer to begin her literary career under the masculine name of "Charles Egbert Craddock"? Probably for the same reason as George Sand, George Eliot, Currer Bell; a reason stated by a stanch advocate of women, in words that form a convenient answer to the common sneer, "Not because they wished to be men, but because they wished for an unbiased judgment as artists." The world has grown so much more enlightened on this point that the biased critic is now the exception, and the biased editor is a myth. The precaution of disguise cannot much longer remain a necessity, if, indeed, it was necessary in the case of Miss Murfree.

  From whatever cause adopted, the mask was a completely deceptive one. Mr. Craddock's vivid portrayal of life among the Tennessee mountains was fairly discussed and welcomed as a valuable and characteristic contribution from the South; and nobody hinted then that the subtle poetic element and the tendency to subordinate human interest to scenery were indications of the writer's sex. Th
e few cherishers of the fading superstition that women are without humor laughed heartily and unsuspiciously over the droll situations, the quaint sayings of the mountaineers. Once more the reductio ad absurdum has been applied to the notion of ordained, invariable, and discernible difference between the literary work of men and that of women. The method certainly defers to dullness; but it also affords food for amusement to the ironically inclined.

  This review, cursory and incomplete as it is, of the chief accomplishment of American women in native fiction, serves to bring out the fact that they have during the last forty years supplied to our literature an element of great and genuine value; and that while their productions have of course varied in power and richness, they have steadily gained in art. How wide the gap between "Hobomok" and "Ramona"! During the latter half of the period the product gives no general evidence of limitation; and the writers would certainly be placed, except for the purposes of this article, among their brother authors, in classes determined by method, local background, or any other basis of arrangement which is artistic rather than personal. In exceptional cases a reviewer perhaps exclaims upon certain faults as "womanish"; but the cry is too hasty; the faults are those of individuals, in either sex. It is possible to match them from the work of men, and to adduce examples of women's work entirely free from them. Colonel Higginson has pointed out that the ivory miniature method in favor with some of our masculine artists is that of Jane Austen. Wherein do Miss Sprague's "Earnest Trifler" or "The Daughter of Henry Sage Rittenhouse" display more salient indications of sex than works of similar scope by Mr. Henry James?