Negotiating Motherhood in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

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Author: Mary McCartin Wearn

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Studies in American Popular History and Culture

Edited by

Jerome Nadelhaft University of Maine

A Routledge Series

Studies in American Popular History and Culture Jerome Nadelhaft, General Editor Books and Libraries in American Society during World War II Weapons in the War of Ideas Patti Clayton Becker

Feminist Revolution in Literacy Women’s Bookstores in the United States Junko R. Onosaka

Mistresses of the Transient Hearth American Army Officers’ Wives and Material Culture, 1840–1880 Robin Dell Campbell

Great Depression and the Middle Class Experts, Collegiate Youth and Business Ideology, 1929–1941 Mary C. McComb

The Farm Press, Reform, and Rural Change, 1895–1920 John J. Fry State of ‘The Union’ Marriage and Free Love in the Late 1800s Sandra Ellen Schroer “My Pen and My Soul Have Ever Gone Together” Thomas Paine and the American Revolution Vikki J. Vickers Agents of Wrath, Sowers of Discord Authority and Dissent in Puritan Massachusetts, 1630–1655 Timothy L. Wood The Quiet Revolutionaries How the Grey Nuns Changed the Social Welfare Paradigm of Lewiston, Maine Susan P. Hudson Cleaning Up The Transformation of Domestic Service in Twentieth Century New York City Alana Erickson Coble

Labor and Laborers of the Loom Mechanization and Handloom Weavers, 1780–1840 Gail Fowler Mohanty “The First of Causes to Our Sex” The Female Moral Reform Movement in the Antebellum Northeast, 1834–1848 Daniel S. Wright US Textile Production in Historical Perspective A Case Study from Massachusetts Susan M. Ouellette Women Workers on Strike Narratives of Southern Women Unionists Roxanne Newton Hollywood and Anticommunism HUAC and the Evolution of the Red Menace, 1935–1950 John Joseph Gladchuk Negotiating Motherhood in Nineteenth-Century American Literature Mary McCartin Wearn

Negotiating Motherhood in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Mary McCartin Wearn

Routledge New York & London

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Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 2 Park Square Milton Park, Abingdon Oxon OX14 4RN

© 2008 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2007. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” ISBN 0-203-93983-2 Master e-book ISBN

International Standard Book Number-13: 978-0-415-98104-0 (Hardcover) No part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wearn, Mary McCartin. Negotiating motherhood in nineteenth-century American literature / by Mary McCartin Wearn. p. cm. -- (Studies in American popular history and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-98104-2 1. American literature--19th century--History and criticism. 2. Motherhood in literature. 3. Mothers in literature. 4. Women and literature--United States--History--19th century. I. Title. PS217.M65W43 2007 810.9’355--dc22

Visit the Taylor & Francis Web site at http://www.taylorandfrancis.com and the Routledge Web site at http://www.routledge.com

2007008399

To Jay: For All the Love and All the Laundry

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

1

Chapter One “Stronger Than All Was Maternal Love”: Maternal Idealism in Uncle Tom’s Cabin

15

Chapter Two No More “The Pillow of Affection”: Deconstructing the “Softening Influence” of Motherhood in The Scarlet Letter

43

Chapter Three “Links . . . Of Gold”: The Bonds of Motherhood in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl 73 Chapter Four “She Has Been Burning Palaces”: The Maternal Poetics of Sarah Piatt

105

Conclusion

135

Notes

139

Bibliography

149

Index

159

vii

Acknowledgments

I am grateful for permission to reprint work here that was originally published by University of Nebraska Press; parts of chapter four first appeared in Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 23.2 (2006). I deeply appreciate the institutional support provided by Macon State College in the form of a reduced teaching load. Particular thanks go to Dean Barbara Frizzell for her commitment to faculty development. I am indebted to Pat Borck and the amazing library staff at MSC. The efforts of interlibrary loan guru Anna Mancilla were essential to the creation of this book. Many members of the University of Georgia English Department fostered me while this work was in its earliest stages. James Nagel provided long and faithful support throughout my graduate studies. Tricia Looten’s enthusiasm and encouragement gave me the confidence to commit myself to the study of Sarah Piatt—a poet who was little-known when I first began research in 1998. Kristin Boudreau guided me through an intensive directed study of nineteenth-century American literature, during which the seeds of this manuscript took root. Kris’s enduring warmth and generosity have been invaluable over the years. I am deeply indebted to Douglas Anderson, whose wicked editing skills have taught me much. In addition, his ability to balance rigorous scholarship and professional service with a rich and rewarding family life will always serve as a model to me. I am thankful for friends and colleagues met along the way who have offered encouragement while I worked on this project. Lisa McNair and Peter McGuire provided critical support while I worked as a Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Jane Wilson gave invaluable editorial assistance, not to mention peace of mind. Lisa Rashley carried me on her coattails to my first conference of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers, opening my world to important new alliances that were critical to the creation of this book. Andrea O’Reilly and the Association ix

x

Acknowledgments

for Research on Mothering have provided fruitful avenues of interdisciplinary collaboration for which I am indebted. Paula Bennett has generously offered her wisdom and encouragement at several critical junctures along this journey. I am also deeply grateful for the friendship and support offered by my colleagues at Macon State College. The regulars of the MSC “Publish or Pasta” Writers Group—Nancy Bunker, Yunsuk Chae, David de Posada, Karmen Lenz, Gerald Lucas, David Sidore, and Monica Young-Zook—have offered pragmatic guidance and intellectual inspiration that greatly aided in the production of this book. I am indebted to my professional mentors at MSC; Amy Berke, Kevin Cantwell, and Debra Matthews have all generously guided me in my development as teacher, colleague, and scholar. My appreciation goes to my Chair, Robert Kelly. Bob serves for me as an exemplar of benevolent leadership, intellectual generosity, and basic human kindness. Finally, my thanks goes to the “other Mary”—my office mate, editor, sometimes-psychologist, and dear, dear friend—Mary Carney. My deepest gratitude goes, finally, to my family. I am grateful to my parents, Helen and Joe McCartin, and to my brother Joseph for their boundless if foolhardy faith in me. My beautiful and wondrous children, Jimmy, Jeremy, and Jackson, kept me sane and grounded during the writing process and provided living testimony to the things that matter most in this world. Finally, I offer thanks to my best friend, James Powell Wearn Jr., for his enduring patience, optimism, and fidelity. Without Jay this book would never have been.

Introduction

NINETEENTH-CENTURY SENTIMENTAL MATERNITY By the end of the eighteenth century, the shape and texture of the white, middle-class American family was in a state of radical and inexorable flux. The shift from an agrarian to an industrial economy in the North meant that while men got to business, women stayed at home. As enlightenment beliefs about the sanctity of childhood filtered into American consciousness, the domestic enclave was increasingly a child-centered space. The system of apprenticeship declined, children spent longer periods of time in the home, and the important job of morally, spiritually, and intellectually guiding the young fell almost exclusively to women. The civic role of the “Republican Mother,” to use Linda Kerber’s phrase, thus garnered a new social significance for middle class women in the first half of the nineteenth century.1 In The Mother at Home (1834), the Reverend John S. C. Abbott documents evolving cultural perceptions about women’s role in American society: The efforts which a mother makes, for the improvement of her child in knowledge and virtue, are necessarily retired and unobtrusive. The world knows not of them; and hence the world has been slow to perceive how powerful and extensive is this secret and silent influence. But circumstances are now directing the eyes of the community to the nursery; and the truth is daily coming more distinctly before the public, that the influence which is exerted upon the mind, during the first eight or ten years of existence, in a great degree guides the destinies of that mind for time and eternity. And as the mother is the

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Negotiating Motherhood in Nineteenth-Century American Literature guardian and guide of the early years of life, from her goes the most powerful influence in the formation of the character of man. (1–2)

In one of her popular advice books, Lydia Maria Child also acknowledges the public nature of maternal duty, dedicating her text to “AMERICAN MOTHERS, ON WHOSE INTELLIGENCE AND DISCRETION THE SAFETY AND PROSPERITY OF OUR REPUBLIC SO MUCH DEPEND” (The Mother’s Book). Imagining women’s new influence in traditionally masculine terms that joined religion and politics, Catherine Beecher and her famous sister Harriet would figure Woman as “the chief minister” ruling over the “family state” (The American Woman’s Home 19). The stakes and status of maternity, then, increased immensely in this era, and by mid-century, motherhood was no longer considered just one among many feminine duties, but became, for better or worse, the defining role of most women’s lives.2 The cultural tendency to conflate womanhood and motherhood would have profound and pervasive social ramifications in the nineteenth century and beyond. The morphing American family and the social ascent of the role of mother in the nineteenth century were inextricably linked to a burgeoning sentimental culture that, like the Transcendental and Romantic movements of the nineteenth century, was a reaction to the rationalism and dogmatism of an earlier age. Run on the fuel of sympathy, sentimentalism, to borrow John Stuart Mill’s phrase, is a “culture of the feelings,” in which the domestic unit is primary and familial bonds are the model of proper sentiment (104). Operating on the assumption of a universal emotional palette, literary sentimentalism coaxes the reader to sympathetically identify with the suffering other. Authors engaged in sentimental writing seek to construct affective pathways by which readers can imaginatively bond with those who might seem, on the surface, very unlike themselves. Through the mechanism of sympathy, sentimentalism suggests hidden connections between individuals and thus works towards creating social alliances where none previously existed. In nineteenth-century American culture, sentimentalism offered a particularly powerful discourse for imaginatively defusing the conflicting demands of the individual and uniting a diverse citizenry. The marriage of motherhood and sentimentality in America seems an inevitable union, for nineteenth-century perceptions of the maternal were often covalently connected to the culture of the feelings. Motherhood was perceived as a fundamentally affective role in the nineteenth century, and women’s moral authority and cultural prestige were immanent in their

Introduction

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selfless, sympathetic care of family. An 1852 Godey’s Lady’s Book article entitled “The Mother’s Love,” reveals the imagined emotional core of the maternal office: There is no scene throughout the whole range of our observation more strikingly illustrative of intellectual, moral, and even physical beauty than that presented by a domestic circle, where a mother holds her proper place, as the source of tenderness, the centre of affection, the bond of social union, the founder of each salutary plan, the umpire in all contention, and the general fountain of cheerfulness, hope, and consolation. (Ellis 163)

Figuring maternity as a bridge between contending forces, as the very source of “social union,” this portrait of motherhood is the perfect model of the sympathetic engagement on which the sentimental relies. Indeed, working with the American culture of the feelings, ideal maternity became an icon of natural morality and social harmony and served as a symbolic remedy for contentious factions. For example, through the reminiscences of her character Mr. Henderson in the novel My Wife and I (1871), Harriet Beecher Stowe imagines “mother” as the model practitioner of a natural and powerful familial diplomacy: In the midst of our large family, of different ages . . . of great individuality and forcefulness of expression, my mother’s was the administrative power. . . . She read the character of each, she mediated between opposing natures; she translated the dialect of different sorts of spirits, to each other. In a family of young children, there is a chance for every sort of variety of natures; and for natures whose modes of feeling are as foreign to each other, as those of the French and the English. It needs a common interpreter, who understands every dialect of the soul, thus to translate differences of individuality into a common language of love. (37)

The cultural vision of the mother as ideal mediator and translator that Stowe here articulates offered a powerful, imaginative solution to a young America struggling to form a cohesive nation from a diverse and unruly citizenry. While the “empire of the mother,” as one nineteenth-century cultural critic dubbed it, did not lead to women’s direct engagement in the political arena, it did authorize women’s limited participation in the public sphere.3

4


Coming to prominence in the midst of a publishing boom of literature written by, for, and about woman, sentimental maternity was particularly important to a new breed of women authors who relied on a proper domestic ethos to authorize their very public literary work. Women’s poetry and domestic fiction of the era were filled with emotionally evocative narratives of idealized mothers, both living and dead. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) is, perhaps, the quintessence of a culture that, in Ann Douglas’s words, “seemed bent on establishing a perpetual Mother’s Day” (6). Inhabited by an army of heroic women, Stowe’s novel offers Rachel Halliday as the epitome of maternal righteousness. Far removed from the world of masculine power, Stowe’s Quakeress exerts her quiet influence from the safe domain of her rocking chair. “[F]or twenty years or more,” Stowe writes, “nothing but loving words, and gentle moralities, and motherly loving kindness, had come from that chair;—difficulties spiritual and temporal solved there,—all by one good, loving woman, God bless her!” (117). While the sentimental mother played the most visible role in women’s writing of the nineteenth century, her essence was pervasive, haunting even traditionally male forums, including the works of authors who have been read for generations as essentially hostile to sentimental culture. In “The Grand Armada” chapter of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), the vision of a spiritually elevated domestic world of women and children lies coded in a description of sperm whale society.4 The defining “circles” of a whale herd reflect the gendered spheres of influence that form so prominent a part of sentimental culture. Finding themselves in the midst of a large group of whales, Queequeg, Starbuck, and Ishmael drift from the “circumference of commotion”—a male domain of violence and discord—and into the “enchanted calm” (422), the “innermost fold” of the “calves and cows” (423). Reflecting on the “creatures at the centre,” the “women and children” of the herd, Ishmael imagines the mother’s domain as an ideal retreat—a place, unlike the world of males, filled with spiritual calm and mutual affection: And thus, though surrounded by circle upon circle of consternations and affrights, did these inscrutable creatures at the centre freely and fearlessly indulge in all peaceful concernments; yea, serenely revelled in dalliance and delight. But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy. (424–425)

Introduction

5

Figuring the maternal province as an ever-accessible font of peace and bliss, Melville—whose most important novel is all but devoid of women—still actively participates in the project of sentimental maternity.

HAZARDS OF THE SENTIMENTAL While offering woman cultural prestige and a viable sphere of influence, the sentimental maternal ideology that took root in the nineteenth century held darker sway as well. The programmatic scripts of maternity that flourished in the era were often simplistic, rigid, and prescriptive—having little to do with the emotional complexities of most middle class women’s lives, let alone with the lives of slaves and the poor. Lydia Sigourney’s popular and floridly ideological Letters to Mothers (1838) provides a unique window into the reductive and overtly regulatory aspects of sentimental maternity.5 Firmly in the center of women’s culture and overtly didactic, Sigourney’s child-rearing manual is a template of maternal correctness that reflects the controlling essentialism of nineteenth-century culture. If motherhood was seen as an affective office, Sigourney feels free not only to offer pragmatic advice on how to tend baby but also programmatic guidance on how women should feel about their feminine role. In the opening lines of her work, Sigourney hails her audience in an interpellative gesture, creating the illusion of shared maternal experience: You are sitting with your child in your arms. So am I. And I have never been as happy before. Have you? How this new affection seems to spread a soft, fresh green over the soul. Does not the whole heart blossom thick with plants of hope, sparkling with perpetual dew drops? What a loss, had we passed through the world without tasting this purest, most exquisite fount of love. (vii)

Here Sigourney dissolves the boundaries between herself and the reader, imagining a mutual state of motherly feeling. Allowing no room for a spectrum of maternal emotions or a range of feminine aspirations, Sigourney reflects her culture’s maternal idealism, declaring motherhood the very “climax” of Woman’s “happiness” (9). Letters to Mothers also illustrates what Shirley Samuels calls the “power and powerlessness” of separate spheres, the paradox that Woman’s civic authority is ultimately underwritten by Her retreat from the public world into the private domain of the heart and home (4). Here, Sigourney speaks specifically about Woman’s role in national life, exposing the fundamentally conservative impulse of sentimental maternity:

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Negotiating Motherhood in Nineteenth-Century American Literature Secluded as she wisely is, from any share in the administration of government, how shall [Woman’s] patriotism find legitimate exercise? The admixture of the female mind in the ferment of political ambition, would be neither safe, if it were permitted, nor to be desired, if it were safe. . . . Still, patriotism is a virtue in our sex, and there is an office where it may be called into action, a privilege which the proudest peer might envy. It depends not on rank nor wealth, the canvassings of party, or the fluctuations of the will of the people. Its throne is in the heart, its revenue in Eternity. This office is that of maternal teacher. (13)

Describing motherhood as the proper form of womanly “patriotism,” Sigourney propagates the rigidly domestic boundaries of feminine power widely endorsed by dominant nineteenth-century culture. Sentimental maternity and its repressive idealism had dire consequences for the construction of female subjectivity. While Sigourney posits that motherhood offers women a “higher place in the scale of being,” for example, she also makes clear that the wages of such affective influence is sublimation of personal desire (9). Addressing an audience of new mothers, Sigourney instructs, “No longer will you now live for self” (9). Woman, she argues, is “incited to rise above the trifling amusements and selfish pleasures which once engrossed her, that she might be elevated to maternal dignity (16). The essentialism reflected in Letters to Mothers represents finding one’s selfless core as an easy, natural process, flowing directly from interaction with children. “Intercourse with infancy,” Sigourney writes, “subdues pride, and deepens piety. Obdurate natures are softened by its sweet smile, and the picture of sleeping innocence. Its entire helplessness, its perfect trust, dissolve the soul” (26). The natural range of experience and emotions found in woman who are mothers—female subjectivity itself—disappears in such a soul-dissolving maternity. The brand of maternal ideality Sigourney presents is a polarizing cultural force that leaves no room for difference. In prescriptive domains such as Sigourney’s, women who do not fit into the saintly mold of motherhood are often imagined as moral aberrations, as monstrous. While Sigourney’s domestic dogmatism is instructive, it is, perhaps, less interesting than the more politically complex representations of ideal motherhood found in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Although Stowe was acutely aware of the practical and emotional complications of motherhood in her personal life, she embraces maternal ideality in her antislavery novel, channeling it, as Elizabeth Ammons writes, “into an argument for widespread social change” (159).6 Stowe offers a vision of “the maternal paradise America might be” through the Quaker community to which the fleeing

Introduction

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slaves in Uncle Tom’s Cabin run (Ammons 168). Rachel Halliday, the community’s selfless matriarch, wields her feminine power for admirable purposes, offering succor to the fleeing slaves. Employing essentialist maternal constructions, Stowe imagines a world made peaceful through “feminine” values—a world in which slavery might be eliminated. Not surprisingly, Stowe’s novel of social protest is at the heart of the twentieth century’s most influential debate about sentimentalism. As Laura Wexler has noted, both Ann Douglas and Jane Tompkins open their arguments about sentimental literature with personal anecdotes about reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin. (Wexler 13–15). Douglas focuses on the hazards of the sentimental, critically wincing at the idealization of feminine “influence” that she finds in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and elsewhere. Jane Tompkins, on the other hand, lauds the “cultural work” of Stowe’s sentimentalism, declaring it “a monumental effort to reorganize culture from a woman’s point of view” (124). While Douglas sees Stowe’s maternal paradise as a capitulation to an inequitable power structure that excludes woman from real sources of influence, Tompkins views Stowe’s tale of selfless mothers as an attempted coup, an effort to establish a “new matriarchy” (Tompkins 142). In the wake of this critical debate, some scholars have focused on the constructive “Sentimental Power” that Tompkins identifies, attempting, in the process, to rescue nineteenth-century domestic writing from its long history of being ignored or critically disparaged.7 Philip Fisher, for example, argues that sentimentalism is “politically radical representation” (92) and “democratic,” noting that it offers “full and complete humanity” to beleaguered classes of people such as slaves (99). The more recent critical drift, however, has leaned toward the hazards of sentiment, emphasizing, among other things, what June Howard calls the “vicariousness” of sentimentality—its tendency to elide difference (225). In his critique of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for example, Glenn Hendler articulates how sentimentalism’s economy of sympathy operates on a “fantasy of experiential equivalence” that can obfuscate the very real differences between the observer and the suffering other for whom sympathy is garnered (7). Hendler cites Mrs. Bird’s sympathetic identification with Eliza Harris as a classic instance of such “fantasy”: the bondwoman is in danger of losing her son to the slave-trader, and Mrs. Bird, who has recently buried her own “little one,” sympathizes with her because she imagines she knows how Eliza feels (Stowe 97). The emotional logic of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, according to Hendler, thus assumes that losing a child to death is affectively—experientially—equivalent to losing a child at slave auction.8 Hendler summarizes the critical concern with the sympathetic mechanisms of

8


the sentimental: “To critics from a variety of perspectives—but especially those most concerned with questions of race and imperialism—the politics of sympathy is fatally flawed by its drive to turn all differences into equivalencies . . .” (7–8). Expanding on this premise, other critics have explored how sentimentalism and its mechanism of sympathy have been used as a public, regulatory instrument. Elizabeth Barnes, for example, writes that because sentimentalism “relies on likeness and thereby reinforces homogeneity,” it displaces “a democratic model that values diversity” (4). Kristin Boudreau notes that the “sympathetic exchange works to compress diverse individuals into a particular, highly regimented social framework” (6). Laura Wexler claims that sentimentalism is an “expansive, imperial project,” whose “energies” are “intended as a tool for the control of others . . .” (15). And speaking specifically about the sentimental ideology of motherhood, Eva Cherniavsky argues that the essentialized nineteenthcentury construction of maternity operates as “a regulative culture code” (xiii). These individual critics represent a broader contemporary consensus that elaborates literary sentimentalism as an essentially conservative ideological tool, deployed in nineteenth-century America in an attempt to normalize a markedly heterogeneous national community.

SENTIMENTAL NEGOTIATIONS One problem with the analysis of the sentimental, beginning with the Douglas-Tompkins debate and continuing today, is the tendency to take a complex and contentious culture of sympathy and treat it as a coherent entity—as a single “project,” in Wexler’s words. In recent years, some effort has been made to broaden the field of sentimentalism, tracing its roots back to the eighteenth-century moral philosophy of sympathy and expanding its limits beyond nineteenth-century women’s writing.9 These maneuvers, however, have generally served to establish the cultural continuity of sentiment, not to elaborate the logical, rhetorical, or ideological intricacies of an entire generation’s use of sympathy. Critics who narrowly define sentimentalism as literature that uses sympathy in one way or who theorize it as logically or ideologically of a piece risk depleting the visible richness of the nineteenth century’s culture of the feelings. This is a particularly treacherous issue for those who focus on the hazards of sentiment. For while one of the major complaints about sentimentalism has been that it “reinforces homogeneity,” the criticism itself—in an attempt to connect an entire genre to the forces of cultural conservatism—sometimes exhibits that very same tendency.

Introduction

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While many of the works of nineteenth-century sentimental culture indeed rely on a reductive emotional shorthand or a polarizing ideality, some authors who were concerned with the domestic world and who deployed the power of sympathy in their writing pushed the limits of “pure” sentimentalism, embracing the less tidy emotional complexities of human life. The domestic dogma and simplistic forms of evangelical Christianity with which nineteenth-century sentimentalism is so often identified never went unchallenged. And while all literature of this kind demands sympathetic engagement, not every writer who practiced sentimentalism was willing to so thoroughly dismantle the boundary between the spectator and the object of sympathy. The nineteenth century was an era swirling in debate over who was and was not fully human, over who could and could not be an enfranchised citizen. In the literature of the era, likewise, authors hotly debated who was worthy of their audiences’ compassion. Writers of the period, then, actively and aggressively challenged the standard terms of sentimentalism, negotiating the appropriate uses of sympathy through their writing. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s poem, “The Slave Auction” (1854), offers an elegant example of just such literary negotiations. The poem begins conventionally enough. In the first stanzas of the work, Harper relies completely on the standard sentimental rhetoric that was widely used in abolitionist discourse: The sale began—young girls were there, Defenceless in their wretchedness, Whose stifled sobs of deep despair Revealed their anguish and distress. And mothers stood with streaming eyes, And saw their dearest children sold; Unheeded rose their bitter cries, While tyrants bartered them for gold. (64)

The “streaming eyes,” the “stifled sobs of deep despair,” and the sundered family ties all place this poem squarely in the center of the nineteenth-century sentimental tradition. In the final two stanzas of the poem, however, Harper’s stance becomes more complex: Ye who have laid your love to rest, And wept above the lifeless clay, Know not the anguish of the breast

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Negotiating Motherhood in Nineteenth-Century American Literature Whose lov’d are rudely torn away. Ye may not know how desolate Are bosoms rudely forced to part, And how a dull and heavy weight Will press the life-drops from the heart. (64–65)

While the sympathetic mechanisms of sentimentalism generally rely on the reader’s identification with the suffering other, here Harper asserts fundamental difference. To put “love to rest” when a child dies, Harper suggests, is not affectively the same as having a little one “rudely torn away” at slave auction. Here, Harper implicitly challenges the standard sentimental methodologies of abolitionist discourse whereby child death and child sale were imagined as emotionally equivalent. The poem “The Slave Auction,” which is so richly enmeshed in the culture of the feelings, cannot, however, be ultimately read as a rejection of sentimentalism or its sympathetic mechanisms. For even in the final lines of the poem, Harper is demanding her audience’s sympathy and challenging them to feel for those who have experienced something even worse than child death. While Harper’s critical stance in “The Slave Auction” is, as Glenn Hendler suggests, an assertion of the “epistemological limits” of the mechanisms of sympathy, it is not, finally, a refutation of sentimentalism.10 Rather, through her poem, Harper critiques a sentimental culture in which she is actively participating. While she fully exploits the powers of the sentimental genre in “The Slave Auction,” she also challenges the terms by which sympathy can be deployed. Such literary negotiations are the subject of this study. More specifically, this text will look at the cultural negotiations that lie at the intersection of sentiment and motherhood—a cultural nexus that has been largely unexplored.11 To some extent the critical elision of motherhood in nineteenth-century American studies is part of the legacy of a Modern literary aesthetic that marginalized both the sentimental and the feminine. However, while feminist scholars ushered in a critical renaissance in the last half of the twentieth century, one which carved out a place in the canon for women authors, feminine subjects, and sentimental approaches, scholars have still largely resisted engagement with the maternal. Motherhood, I would argue, remains an especially anxiety-laden subject for feminist critics who are wary of grappling with an issue so susceptible to essentialist arguments. Conceding too much to the power of conservative, nineteenth-century maternal ideology and perhaps anxious about women’s complicity with its principles, contemporary critics have not looked beyond the superficial, sentimental surface of motherhood in nineteenth-century

Introduction

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literature to see the remarkably rich, complex, and culturally challenging representations of the maternal that lie beneath. This study seeks to move beyond a reflexive critical response to nineteenth-century literary representations of motherhood that, like much of the recent scholarship on sentimentalism, assumes a coherent, monolithic, and essentially conservative cultural product. The selfless, sanctified motherhood that I earlier articulated—the soul-dissolving maternity found in Sigourney or the heroic motherhood developed by Stowe—was by no means uncontested in the nineteenth century. Although such idealized visions of maternity have become an almost axiomatic shorthand for the sentimental, authors of the period negotiated not only the meaning and proper form of maternity but also the types of mothers who would be culturally worthy of sympathy. Beginning with an exploration of the ideal maternal figures of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, this study will proceed to analyze mothers of a different sort, female literary figures from a range of sources who muddy the waters of sentimental writing with maternal ambivalence and with contradictory and eccentric emotions; these mothers fall outside the range of “proper” nineteenth-century womanhood in their sexuality, power, or conditional love. This study will examine authors who, in negotiating the terms of motherhood in their writing, both engage and argue with their culture, authors who calculate the power of sentimental motherhood and weigh it against the cultural costs of invoking such ideality. By exploring how various nineteenth-century writers embrace, adapt, or challenge the sentimental in their creation of sympathetic maternal figures, I will demonstrate the fluid, evolving boundaries of the nineteenth-century literature of sympathy. More importantly, by moving beyond the sentimental surface of nineteenthcentury representations of the maternal, I will reveal how even at the very heart of America’s culture of the feeling, the empire of the mother never enjoyed a fixed or uncontested reign. In her novel My Wife and I, Harriet Beecher Stowe audaciously brings the feminine power of motherhood to what she saw as its natural, cultural terminus. Valorizing the domestic powers of his own mother and extrapolating from the home to public politics, Stowe’s character Mr. Henderson speculates about women’s future role in the new nation: “Shall MOTHERHOOD ever be felt in the public administration of the affairs of state? . . . The state at this very day needs an influence like what I remember my mother’s to have been” (37–38). The bold, utopian feminism articulated in this work finds a fuller, if more challenging, venue in Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a text central to any discussion of sentimental maternity and the subject of the first chapter of this study. As Douglas and Tompkins have collaboratively

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articulated, Stowe’s political deployment of motherhood in her abolitionist text demonstrates sentimentalism’s paradoxical aptitude for both empowering and entrapping women through their traditional, feminine roles. On the one hand, Stowe exploits the cultural authority of motherhood in Uncle Tom’s Cabin for politically radical ends and cannily uses maternal essentialism to sway her audience to accept her culture-challenging views. On the other hand, as I will show, Stowe leaves patriarchal social structures fully intact in her imaginative world, and the wages of her maternal idealism is, inevitably, female subjectivity itself. Chapter One, then, articulates the antithetical poles of cultural power and repression immanent in Stowe’s deployment of sentimental maternity, establishing how Uncle Tom’s Cabin sets the cultural stakes of the nineteenth-century motherhood game. Subsequent chapters explore how other authors of the era build on, resist, or revise the ideality of sentimental motherhood that Stowe’s text so elegantly illustrates. In the second chapter of this study, I examine Nathaniel Hawthorne’s complex connection to sentimental culture and its maternal constructions— an uneasy relationship played out on the pages of The Scarlet Letter. For many years, Hawthorne has been read outside of the sentimental tradition, as part of a Romantic movement whose literature, in Ann Douglas’s words, is “historically minded” (13) and operates as an “alternative” to “cultural norms” (5). More recent studies, however, have placed Hawthorne squarely in the center of his sentimental culture, positing the author’s firm commitment to the more conservative domestic ideologies of his day.12 In Chapter Two, I explore the middle ground—specifically examining how Hawthorne wrangles with sentimental maternity in The Scarlet Letter. Through his most rich and sympathetic representation of womanhood—Hester Prynne— Hawthorne powerfully expands the archetypes of motherhood, creating a character whose feminine essence is neither contained in nor controlled by her role as mother. Challenging the maternal essentialism of his culture, Hawthorne specifically interrogates the power and limits of the institution of motherhood as a means of cultural discipline. Philip Fisher provocatively identifies slavery as the “fated, primary subject” of sentimentalism (101). While one may argue with Fisher’s analysis, certainly any study of the nineteenth-century culture of the feelings must consider the often treacherous intersection of race and sentiment. In the third chapter of the work, I investigate Harriet Jacobs’s maternal constructions in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Written from the perspective of the suffering slave Linda Brent—Incidents, much like Harper’s poem “The Slave Auction,” is a divided literary work that both participates in and critiques sentimental culture. On one level, Jacobs endorses nineteenth-

Introduction

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century maternal idealism and strategically employs sentimental motherhood by creating Linda Brent as a heroic slave mother. At a deeper, covert level, however, Jacobs’s undermines white, middle class constructions of motherhood and, through Linda Brent, articulates a subversive, alternative African-American maternal subjectivity. As this study will show, Harriet Jacobs’s creative adaptation of her essentially domestic narrative form and her troubled construction of Linda Brent as a maternal hero elegantly illustrate both the flexibility and the limitations of nineteenth-century sentimentalism. The final chapter of this work explores the poetry of Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt, a successful nineteenth-century writer who, until recently, has been largely ignored by modern readers. Archived for most of the twentieth century as a genteel “poetess” of “womanly” subjects, the poet has been the subject of increasing interest since Paula Bennett published Palace-Burner, a new edition of the poet’s work, in 2001. A white, Southern woman of privilege, Sarah Piatt is deeply, but skeptically, engaged in her sentimental culture and its construction of motherhood. While Piatt embraces the domestic themes and characteristic form of sentimental poetry, she completely eschews the regulative emotional and moral palette of ideal maternity. Like Stowe, Piatt recognizes and exploits the political power of motherhood. Unlike Stowe, however, she uses her dark maternal poetics to explore and protest the repressive nature of nineteenth-century gender roles. Through a literary career that spans the entire second half of the nineteenth-century, Piatt, in fact, creates a body of poetry that participates in and documents the gradual dismantling of the maternal icon that Stowe’s work helped create. In this study, then, I explore the marriage of sentiment and motherhood in nineteenth-century American writing. All of the writers represented here are essentially concerned with the domestic world—with the life of the family in all its messy forms and, of course, with the role of women in that world. While negotiating motherhood in their writing, Stowe, Hawthorne, Jacobs, and Piatt make their cultural bargains, carefully weighing the relative benefits and costs of maternal idealism. By revealing the ways that these nineteenth-century writers embrace and engage—challenge and critique—their sentimental culture, I hope to complicate the way we think about the literature of sentiment and the way we imagine motherhood of the nineteenth century and beyond.

Chapter One

“Stronger Than All Was Maternal Love”: Maternal Idealism in Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Harriet Beecher Stowe was no “typical” nineteenth-century mother, even when measured exclusively against her white, Northern, middle-class peers. Having garnered the finest, most progressive education available to a young woman of her day, she spent the bulk of her married life—not simply as maternal guardian of her domestic enclave—but also as the primary breadwinner for her family in a very public literary arena. As the mother of seven children and arguably the most successful American woman writer of the nineteenth century, Stowe struggled valiantly but often in vain to strike a sustainable balance between her fertility and creativity, between her professional and domestic duties. Stowe’s strategies for cutting a thriving professional career from the fabric of her essentially domestic nineteenth-century existence included a demand that Virginia Woolf would echo more than eighty-five years later: “If I am to write,” Stowe reasoned in a letter to her husband Calvin, “I must have a room to myself, which shall be my room” (Charles Stowe, Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe 104). Stowe had a modern sensibility about motherhood that flew in the face of a conventional nineteenth-century wisdom that warned Northern women not to “trust” their “treasures too much to the charge of hirelings” (Sigourney, Letters to Mothers 31). Intuiting that buying time and space for herself would make her both a better writer and mother, Stowe refused, in her own words, to be a “mere domestic slave” and used her literary wages to employ a series of serving-women to act as wet-nurses, perform household labor, and care for her growing children (qtd. In Hedrick 119). In a letter to her friend Mary Dutton, Stowe claimed that her “house affairs & . . . children” were “in better keeping” when she herself was relieved by hired help and not “shut up in [the] nursery” (qtd. in Hedrick 119). Stowe also replenished her energies, and, no doubt, attempted to restrict family size by traveling widely as a young 15

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wife, spending extended periods of time away from husband and children while visiting her geographically dispersed extended family, attending to business in the literary capitals of the nineteenth century, and searching for health in the new-age spas of her day. During one prolonged visit to her brother Henry’s family in Indianapolis, she gleefully claimed in a letter to her husband Calvin, “I have forgotten almost the faces of my children—all the perplexing details of home, and almost that I am a married woman” (qtd. In Hedrick 161). While the unconventional family life that Stowe built upon her literary talents set her apart from many of her peers, she was not immune to the psychological and spiritual demands of the nineteenth-century institution of motherhood. Although she manipulated her domestic environment to control her writing life, she was often plagued by guilt for her failure to live up to her culture’s maternal ideals. In a letter to her husband, she fretted that her growing children needed “a mother’s whole attention” and pondered whether she could “lawfully divide” her energies between her family and her “literary efforts” (Charles Stowe, Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe 104). A notoriously poor domestic manager, Stowe found her inability to effectively orchestrate her family’s material life an eternal bone of contention between her husband and herself. However, she particularly bristled at the affective demands of nineteenth-century motherhood: “[It] drinks up all my strength to care for & provide for all this family,” she protested to Calvin, “to try to cure the faults of all—harmonize all—alas it is too much for me and my aching head and heart often show it” (qtd. in Hedrick 146). If Stowe measured her success as a mother by her children’s tendency to thrive and flourish, she likely suffered disappointment, guilt, and frustration. Only three of her children would outlive her; two of the seven struggled with addiction, and the most vulnerable—Fred—disappeared as a young adult, never to be heard from again. Plagued by moments of deep maternal ambivalence and despair, Stowe was, at times, remarkably unsentimental in assessing her own maternal experience. In a letter to Calvin she wrote, “Ah how little comfort had I in being a mother—how was all that I proposed met & crossed & my ways ever hedged up!” (qtd. in Hedrick 196–197). Given Stowe’s unconventional relationship to the domestic norms of her culture—her status as working mother, her acknowledged domestic failings, and her consciously articulated maternal ambivalence—she seems an unlikely candidate to become, as Joan Hedrick contends she does, one of the nineteenth century’s “chief propagandists for the Victorian ideology of the home” (127). Undeniably, however, no American novel more fully exploits or aggressively propagates sentimental maternity than Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Built on the backs of strong mother

“Stronger Than All Was Maternal Love”

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figures, Stowe’s novel deploys what Jane Tompkins identifies as American culture’s “favorite story about itself,” “the story of salvation through motherly love” (125). Indeed, the abolitionist argument in Uncle Tom’s Cabin runs on a uniquely maternal economy, fueled by the power of domestic propriety, selfless maternal love, and affective influence. And so, while Stowe found it impossible to “harmonize all” in her own family life, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, she figures mothers as the very arbiters of peace for a national family divided by race, regionalism, and slavery. Social change in Stowe’s fictional world is modeled on the power of maternal influence as imagined in nineteenth-century sentimental culture—as the power of moral affect. “But what can any individual do?” Stowe rhetorically asks her audience in the concluding remarks of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. “There is one thing every individual can do,” she answers, “they can see to it that they feel right” (385). When the abolitionist Stowe urges her readers to political action—to change the world by “see[ing]” to their “sympathies,” she is calling on citizens to feel with the heart of a mother (385). As the Douglas-Tompkins debate so aptly illustrates, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a critical lightening rod for widely diverse readings, precisely because of the text’s own compelling complexities and contradictions. Specifically, Uncle Tom’s Cabin articulates a utopian maternal feminism, inscribed within oppressive, patriarchal social structures. The good mother figures in Stowe’s novel, from Eliza Harris to Mrs. Shelby to Rachel Haliday, paradoxically underwrite feminine acts of civil disobedience from within the confines of domesticity and through a culturally endorsed discipline of self-denial. In Stowe’s imagined nation, as this study will show, mothers are model citizens whose a priori moral knowledge (some might call it “maternal instinct”) and disinterested care for the vulnerable other is ultimately privileged over the obligations of existing social contracts and even the law. While the repressive elements of sentimental motherhood remain in full force in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the good women in the novel successfully resist social and legal policy that violates their maternal sensibilities. Stowe’s maternal politics are thus reactionary and revolutionary at once. Following the destinies of mothers in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, one paradoxically finds feminine self-abnegation as a means of political power and disinterested motherhood as a colonizing force of social justice. Given Stowe’s exploitation of a maternal idealism that flew in the face of her lived experience, it is impossible to determine the precise mixture of ideology and efficacy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin—to quantify just how much of Stowe’s maternal discourse is zealous, utopic vision and how much is rhetorical pragmatism. Elizabeth Ammons argues for Stowe’s “deep intellectual commitment to nineteenth-century maternal ideology” (158), and

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claims that Stowe was prefiguring “the maternal paradise America might be” through Uncle Tom’s Cabin (168). However, Stowe’s deployment of sentimental maternity is undoubtedly a savvy invocation of ethos, too— one, as Marianne Noble suggests, that was “a tool of political agency” (127). Indeed, as an antebellum woman writer, Stowe’s only claim to authority and her only means of establishing cultural credibility is via the role of motherhood. Furthermore, as a Northern abolitionist attempting to gain political sway over an audience of white, female, middle class readers, Stowe shrewdly appeals to a shared maternal sensibility. Most importantly, though, Stowe’s canny exploitation of the disciplinary functions of the institution of motherhood in Uncle Tom’s Cabin suggests that Stowe consciously recognized, without critically judging, how women are regulated through the maternal role. In fact, as this study shows, Stowe not only dramatizes how women are socially hailed to proper motherhood, but she also rhetorically employs the mechanisms of maternal discipline to conjure a desired political response. Studying Stowe, then, is a necessary first step in any analysis of the nineteenth-century maternal, precisely because she so elegantly exposes both the power and the limits of sentimental motherhood. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in fact, represents a cultural baseline of sorts, a sentimental, maternal paradigm, against which other authors of the era can be measured. While many of her contemporaries would promulgate the particular brand of mother-power found in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, others, as we shall see, challenge Stowe’s essentialist, feminine sentimentalism. In figuring the selfless and self-sacrificing mother as a peace-broker between contending factions, as a force that naturally “mediated between opposing natures,” Stowe imagines a sentimental solution to the contentious and contrary needs of a diverse American culture (My Wife and I 37). While her solution places motherhood at the center of the national project, her maneuvers come at great cost in terms of imagining female subjectivity and individual agency. Through the fiction of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and her real-life role as an abolitionist activist and author, Stowe exposes the double-edged authority of the maternal: its paradoxical power to both liberate and entrap.

MOTHER-POWER: AN AGENCY FOR OTHERS In Stowe’s antebellum culture, the institution of motherhood offered white, middle-class women increasing prestige and a legitimate, if limited, cultural voice. While the ideals of feminine virtue created a platform of moral authority and gave women “access,” in Gillian Brown’s words, “to critical, subversive stances,” those same ideals also defined the shape and scope of


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women’s political engagement (28). In fact, the acceptable limits of women’s politics were inscribed, in part, by cultural conceptions that figured the practice of motherhood as a discipline of self-denial. With a maternal love based in Sigourney’s words, on its object’s “utter helplessness,”—a love that could “subsist without aliment”—the ideal mother ineluctably subordinated her own needs to those of her child (Letters to Mothers 47). This ethos of maternal self-abnegation, likewise, underwrote and defined women’s politics before the Civil War. For while female public discourse on behalf of self or one’s own group might be deemed unseemly, the maternal moral code and the limits of domestic propriety warranted women’s public, political action on behalf of others. In fact, publicly advocating for the vulnerable and disenfranchised other, a phenomenon that Rosemarie Garland Thomson dubs “benevolent maternalism,” was viewed as a natural extension of women’s motherly impulse.1 Women’s charitable and political support of social reform movements that advocated for marginalized groups such as Native Americans and the working poor were, in this sense, part and parcel of a maternal ethics that granted women in the North a narrow but significant political agency and offered them an opportunity to help shape the burgeoning nation. For Stowe and her female contemporaries, the abolitionist movement provided a particularly powerful venue to test their political clout, since that “patriarchal institution” was figured by both North and South as an essentially moral and domestic issue, concerning both the individual and national family. By advocating for the slave, who was often depicted as a child, women like Stowe articulated a radical, progressive social agenda and, at the same time, fortified the self-denying, domestic construction of motherhood on which their tenuous cultural authority relied. According to historian Mary P. Ryan, furthermore, abolitionists early adopted a “sentimental anti-slavery formula,” which resonated with traditional feminine concerns by identifying the destruction of family life as the defining sin of the slave state (131). Increasingly reliant on a domestic discourse, abolitionists converted “mundane apprehensions” about family disruption into “sympathy for the slave” (131–132). Stowe, in fact, claimed that it was her own personal experience of maternal loss via the death of her young son Charlie that awakened her abolitionist consciousness and led to the production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin: “It was at [Charlie’s] dying bed and at his grave that I learnt what a poor slave mother may feel when her child is torn away from her’” (Charles Stowe, Harriet Beecher Stowe 154). If, then, as Philip Fisher has contended, slavery was the “fated, primary subject” of sentimentality (101), the sentimental mother seems the destined emotional fulcrum of abolitionist reform. Indeed, the beleaguered

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slave mother becomes, for Stowe, the central icon of the South’s ills and the central subject with which she hopes to garner her readers’ sympathy. Stowe specifically grounds her sentimental narrative and elaborates her maternal ethics through the character of Eliza Harris, echoing and amplifying the wages of mother-power that she would grapple with in her own role as abolitionist activist. Just as Stowe’s authority as a writer and citizen is built on an essentially Christian, maternal ethos, so too does she establish the African-American slave woman as an appropriate object of sympathy. Contradicting a vision of black womanhood that imagined female slaves merely as a means of production in the slave-holding south, Stowe endows Eliza with the natural instincts of motherhood, characteristics at the time deemed “white,” even in the North. Through Eliza’s motherhood, Stowe fulfills the sentimental mission that Philip Fisher has identified, extending “full and complete humanity” to the slave woman (99). A character whose iconographic status makes her the centerpiece of a chapter simply entitled “The Mother,” Eliza Harris, more than any white, female character in the novel, exemplifies ideal maternal ethics in its primary form—in the intimate relationship between mother and child. “[T]ranquilized and settled” by her motherhood (12), Eliza is taught “the duties of the family” and the responsibilities of a “Christian mother” by her mistress, and she lives quite contentedly in the domestic space allotted to her in the Shelby home as long as her family is intact (29). Stowe makes clear, however, that Eliza’s maternal sensibility is not just learned; it is an inherent part of the black woman’s character, a heavenly quality that transcends the maternal tutoring offered by her white mistress. So ideal, in fact, is Eliza’s motherhood that Stowe links her to the Virgin Mary, the embodiment of divine maternity. Echoing the words of the prophet Simeon to the Virgin (Luke 2: 35), Eliza’s husband George warns that “a sword will pierce through” her “soul” (15). Just as Stowe’s maternal posture authorizes her to breach the boundaries of the domestic sphere and enter into public, abolitionist dialogue, so too does Eliza Harris’s domestic propriety and maternal correctness authorize her unlawful escape from slavery. To highlight the specifically maternal ethics of Eliza’s flight, Stowe juxtaposes the slave woman with her husband George, who flees bondage in advance of his wife. George Harris is an Emersonian hero of sorts—a Frederick Douglass figure who privileges freedom over domestic ties and who demonstrates, in Richard Yarborough’s words, a “rational, violently male rejection of slavery” (“Strategies of Black Characterization” 56). While George is angered over his master’s attempts to separate him from his wife, he views the affront as just the last in a line of transgressions—not against his family—but against his manhood. Before


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George’s flight, Eliza urges her husband to “be patient,” and reminds him that the offending party is, after all, his “master.” George bitterly rejects the paternalistic relationship: “My master! and who made him my master? That’s what I think of—what right has he to me? I’m as much a man as he is. I’m a better man than he is” (13). While George hopes to be reunited with his wife after escaping to the free North, he has no qualms about severing his family bonds in order to attain freedom. After taking flight, he vows, “if any man tries to stop me, let him take care, for I am desperate. I’ll fight for my liberty to the last breath” (97). Willing to risk the permanent abandonment of his family, George will battle to the death before compromising his manhood and relinquishing his personal freedom again. The masculine motivation that Stowe offers for George’s escape serves to throw his wife’s drive to freedom into sharp relief. Eliza runs neither to assert her selfhood nor for the sake of personal freedom. Just as Stowe’s imaginatively formulates her subversive publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a motherly means of preserving national union, so too Eliza’s illegal escape is figured as a selfless, maternal effort to maintain the integrity of familial bonds. When the mother learns that she is to be separated from her child Harry, who is to be “sold down the river,” Eliza is compelled to politically radical action—to flee with her son from the safe, domestic world of the Shelby home. While she personally dreads “leaving the only home she had ever known, and cutting loose from the protection of a friend whom she loved and revered,” maternal instinct trumps both her loyalties to the Shelbys and her attachment to their domestic world (43). As Uncle Tom reports, it simply “—‘t an’t in natur” for the mother to sit idly by while her child is sold” (34). In the hastily scribbled note Eliza leaves for her mistress when departing, she expresses confidence that she will be exonerated for her crime because she is acting selflessly on behalf of her child: “[D]ear Misses! Don’t think me ungrateful . . . I am going to try to save my boy—you will not blame me!” (31). While maternal instinct, thus, radicalizes Eliza and authorizes her to transgress the bonds of that patriarchal institution of slavery, it also defines the limits of her aspirations; when she flees with her son across the icy Ohio, she does so not for the sake of personal freedom, but to save her child and maintain the integrity of her family. When the slave-Madonna eventually succeeds in achieving freedom for her son and for herself, the gain is no willful assertion of selfhood on Eliza’s part, but a reaffirmation of the inherent morality of maternal dictates and the primacy of the bonds of kin. In the end, the integrity of the Harris family is preserved through a stoic, motherly sacrifice, proving, in Stowe’s words, that “stronger than all was maternal love” (43).

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Requiring selflessness and sacrifice from women to maintain domestic union, is Stowe’s mother-power, then, merely a “continuation of male hegemony in different guises,” (as Ann Douglas contends 13)? Some contemporary critics have argued otherwise. Building on the work of early feminist critics, Gillian Brown and Rosemarie Garland Thomson suggest that Stowe consciously recognized the limits of a domesticity inscribed within patriarchy and attempted to circumvent those limits. Brown argues, for example, that Stowe conducts a “utopian rehabilitation” of the sentimental in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and actually reforms the “domestic values” that were complicit with a masculine, market economy (18). While Brown admits that “feminine self-abnegation” is the core of mother power in the novel, she concludes that in creating models of civil disobedience such as Eliza, Stowe imagines a world in which “domestic self-denial and feminist self-seeking can be complementary modes” (28). Rosemarie Garland Thomson likewise argues that Stowe specifically envisions “maternal devotion” as a type of “personal empowerment” (Thomson 86) that allows women to escape domestic limitations and to construct a uniquely “feminine” version of the Emersonian “liberal identity” (88). Stowe’s radical vision indeed offers a new agency to women. I would argue, however, that the particularly maternal shape of this feminine power neither allows individual women to transcend domestic roles nor imaginatively defines female subjects as agents of their own destiny. Indeed, to the extent that Stowe herself and her sympathetic slave Eliza derive their cultural authority from a nineteenth-century maternal idealism, their newfound agency can only be legitimately deployed in service to a vulnerable other, whether that “other” be one’s own child or disenfranchised citizens, such as slaves. “[D]omestic self-denial and feminist self-seeking” cannot be as easily reconciled as Brown contends, although self-abnegation can easily go hand-in-hand with an active service on behalf of others. By imagining mothers as ideal female citizens who, drained of all self-interest and desire, reflexively focus on the needs of others, Stowe participates in a cultural project by which the mother, in Eva Cherniavsky’s words, becomes a “mediator of democratic social and political forms”—an effective (and affective) vehicle of a cohesive society in the face of the competing demands of the individual (42). While Stowe imagines Eliza and the other good mothers of her text as central to maintaining familial and, by extension, national bonds of union, the self-denying political agency of motherhood thus employed is purchased at the price of women’s personal agency. Individual, female subjectivity is subordinated to the needs of the greater good. While Stowe, then, provides no cohesive vision of an autonomous, Emersonian liberal, feminine selfhood. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, nonetheless,


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represents a feminist demand for cultural power. The sentimental subject is often, as Louise Kete has noted “determined by its functional relationship to others” (82). To the extent that one can envision, as Kete does, a “collaborative self,” Stowe powerfully creates it (47). Figuring motherhood as a stable, unifying female ethos, Stowe, as we shall see, imagines the potential for a maternal-minded community made coherent by women who share a set of common values. In so doing, Stowe claims a vital role for herself and the community of mothers in defining national culture.

AN IMAGINED MATERNAL COMMUNITY While Stowe’s sentimental project does not effectively imagine an autonomous, female “self,” it goes quite far to establish a collaborative politics grounded in a specifically maternal epistemology. Through Eliza Harris’s escape narrative, Stowe moves beyond an elaboration of selfless, sanctified motherhood expressed at the primary level of mother and child and demonstrates how the maternal impulse can be directed outward and translated to the public sphere. The slave woman’s escape is facilitated by a chain of female alliances, and Eliza travels on an underground railroad fueled by maternal benevolence and motherly sympathy. What is most striking about Stowe’s network of benevolent mothers, which includes Mrs. Shelby, Aunt Chloe, Mary Bird, and Rachel Halliday, is that the women work in collaborative effort to aid Eliza, although they are, in most cases, completely unknown to each other. In spite of their varied positioning on the grid of race, class, and even geography, Stowe imaginatively connects the women by a shared moral vision, which is grounded in a distinctly female and specifically maternal ethos. Limited by the power structures of patriarchal culture, these women act out against the slave state and on behalf of family rights, a cause embodied by Eliza and her son. While they rely, when possible, on their sentimental powers of affective influence, they are also unafraid to resort to acts of civil disobedience to thwart the masculine, market-driven slave economy that so threatens family life. Like the character of Eliza Harris, this disparate community of likeminded women serves a didactic function for Stowe’s middle-class reader, dramatizing how “good” mothers should feel and act, regardless of economic or social status. Engaging the cultural mechanisms of nineteenthcentury maternal ideology, Stowe naturalizes a specific, motherly morality, imagining these women from diverse backgrounds as native defenders of the oppressed or, more specifically, the slave. Perhaps most importantly, Stowe authorizes the mothers’ public acts of civil disobedience—their break with existing social and legal codes—via the Christian/maternal ethics that they

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share. Each elaborating a slightly different component of Stowe’s matrifocal-abolitionist rhetoric, the women in Stowe’s underground railroad demonstrate how motherly benevolence can be publicly deployed in the name of family values and, ultimately, a broader social justice. Mrs. Shelby, mother to George Shelby and Eliza’s mistress, first advocates on behalf of the slave mother and her son Harry, expressly protesting the slave state’s privileging economic over domestic concerns. Having taught her slaves “the duties of family,” she sees their sale as a humiliating, “open acknowledgment” that her family actually cares for “no tie, no duty, no relation, however sacred, compared with money” (29). More specifically, she sees the sale of little Harry as a violation of Eliza’s motherhood and an unfortunate negation of the maternal education she herself has given Eliza, her “petted and indulged favorite” (9). Imploring her husband not to sell Eliza’s child, she argues: I have talked with Eliza about her boy—her duty to him as a Christian mother . . . and now what can I say, if you tear him away, and sell him, soul and body, to a profane, unprincipled man, just to save a little money? I have told her that one soul is worth more than all the money in the world; and how will she believe me when she sees us turn round and sell her child? (29)

Later, when chastised by Mr. Shelby for taking Eliza’s plight too much to heart—for allowing herself to “feel too much”—Mrs. Shelby exposes the feminine, affective, and specifically maternal foundation of her moral authority: “Feel too much!” she exclaims in outrage to her husband, “Am not I a woman,—a mother?” (62). When Eliza snatches up her boy and escapes from the slave trader, Mrs. Shelby rejoices, exclaiming, “The Lord be thanked!” (35). She then moves beyond the appropriate womanly force of affective influence and overtly sabotages the slave trader Haley’s legal efforts to reclaim his property. In the words of one of the slaves forced to aid in the search for Eliza, Mrs. Shelby makes clear that she “don’t want [Eliza] cotched” (38). More interesting still, Mrs. Shelby collaborates with a black mother, Tom’s wife Aunt Chloe, in creative acts of domestic disobedience to impede Eliza’s recapture. Having promised the slave trader a dinner that would be “hurried on table,” Mrs. Shelby teams with Chloe to derail the search for Eliza with a subversive, feminine hospitality (46). Aunt Chloe prepares the slave trader’s meal in an “unusually leisurely and circumstantial manner,” overlooking a series of culinary disasters that impede the meal and Haley’s departure to search for Eliza (47). For her part, Mrs. Shelby delays the slave trader “by


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every female artifice,” “graciously smil[ing], chatt[ing] familiarly . . . to make the time pass imperceptibly” (49). Using their sanctioned feminine roles, Mrs. Shelby and Aunt Chloe thus partner to thwart the technically legal justice of Eliza’s recapture. Although geographically and culturally separated from Mrs. Shelby and Aunt Chloe by the American Jordan of the Ohio River, Mrs. Bird, the wife of a Northern senator, nonetheless shares the same maternal sensibilities and joins the Kentucky women in facilitating Eliza’s escape to the free North. Through Mrs. Bird, Stowe specifically elaborates how women’s private, domestic, and essentially maternal values can and should be brought to bear in the traditionally masculine, public realm. The quintessential sentimental mother, Mrs. Bird feels her “husband and children” are “her entire world” (68). While she “wouldn’t give a fip for . . . politics” under normal circumstances, Mrs. Bird’s maternal passions are aroused, even before Eliza arrives at her door, when she learns that her husband has just signed off on fugitive slave legislation (68). Outraged at a law forbidding Northern families to shelter or feed the “poor colored folks,” she chides her husband for his moral weakness and vows to transgress the law he has helped put into place (68): “You ought to be ashamed, John! . . . It’s a shameful, wicked, abominable law, and I’ll break it, for one, the first time I get a chance; and I hope I shall have a chance, I do!” (69). While Senator Bird finds his wife’s feelings “quite right,” he cautions her that slavery is “not a matter of private feeling” (69). Noting that there are “great public interests involved,” he cautions his wife that they must “put aside . . . private feelings” (69). Stowe, however, quickly dismantles the imaginative walls between the private and political, and privileges the moral compass of the feminine heart over the manly head. Through affective persuasion, Mary Bird guides her husband to his own “right feelings.” Contradicting her husband’s claim that the Fugitive Slave Act is good policy, Mrs. Bird challenges him to move beyond masculine “reason” and embrace the true convictions of his own heart: I hate reasoning John,—especially reasoning on such subjects. There’s a way you political folks have of coming round and round a plain right thing; and you don’t believe in it yourselves, when it comes to practice. I know you well enough John. You don’t believe it’s right any more than I do. (70)

Stowe here suggests an alternative politics where a practical, affective (and essentially maternal) sympathy take precedent over any theoretical policy.

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Ultimately, as Mrs. Bird predicts, the Senator’s masculine abstractions do not hold up against the particular reality of a sympathetic human being. When Eliza arrives at the Senator’s door, he is compelled to break his own law and collaborates with his wife to secure safe passage for Eliza and her son. Reinforcing the moral lessons she has taught and affirming her husband’s “native” goodness, Mrs. Bird affectively rewards the Senator for properly acting on his feelings: “Your heart is better than your head, in this case. . . . Could I have loved you had I not known you better than you know yourself?” (75). As the moral tutor in the scene, Mrs. Bird has disciplined her husband to judge with his heart rather than his head, and has taught him, in David Leverenz’s words, to “feel what any mother feels” (190). In Eliza’s final stop on the maternal underground railroad, Stowe imagines a utopian community that, to borrow words from a later Stowe novel, anticipates an “ideal state” “pervaded by mother-influences” (My Wife and I 37). The Quaker village through which Eliza and her family pass is a millennial matriarchy, where domestic policies are quite literally that—made by women, in the kitchen. The motherly Rachel Halliday, whose very brow reads “peace on earth, good will to men,” sits at the head of her table and governs from the humble throne of her rocking chair (116). Ruling with “loving words,” “gentle moralities,” and “motherly loving kindness” (117), Rachel creates a kitchen and a community that runs “harmoniously” and establishes “an atmosphere of mutual confidence and good fellowship” (122). This ideal, maternal society is a place where entire families of runaway slaves are illegally nurtured and harbored; here Eliza finds rest for the first time and is reunited with her husband George. Stowe suggests, too, that in a world governed by maternal ethics, divisions of race will also disappear, for it is in Rachel Halliday’s Quaker community that George Harris first finds a place where he can sit down “on equal terms at [a] white man’s table” (122). Stowe ultimately reveals the limits of her Utopian vision, as the violent realities of a nation marred by slavery eventually infiltrate the Quaker Community and quickly send the Harris family back on the run. The imaginative trajectory of Stowe’s novel, however, places hope in an alternative national vision, articulated through the values of the culturally disparate group of women who constitute Stowe’s feminine underground railroad. To borrow Benedict Anderson’s construct, Stowe’s “imagined political community” is bound by a shared maternal sensibility, even though its “members . . . will never know most of their fellow-members” (6). In re-imagining the nation in antebellum America, Stowe posits a feminine counter-culture, whose members are connected by a maternal ethics that consistently places others before self and the needs of the national family above the material interests of individuals.


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Within the frame of Stowe’s sentimental novel, the morally-valenced community of like-minded mothers offers Stowe’s audience a model of an extralegal but nonetheless virtuous response to the problem of slavery. If, however, her dramatization of the maternal underground railroad is not enough to rouse the appropriate sympathies of her readers, Stowe jumps the boundaries of narrative, directly hailing the women in her audience. As Robyn R. Warhol has argued, Stowe requires her imagined audience of mothers “to draw upon memory and sympathetic imagination to fill in the emotional details of the story” and, in so doing, demands their proper sympathy for Eliza based on shared maternal affinities (39). For example, after describing Eliza’s flight with her son with the slave-traders at her back, Stowe interrogates her audience: If it were your Harry, mother, or your Willie, that were going to be torn from you by a brutal trader, to-morrow morning, . . . how fast could you walk? How many miles could you make in those few brief hours, with the darling at your bosom,—the little sleepy head on your shoulder,—the small, soft arms trustingly holding on to your neck? (43–44).

Stowe thus garners sympathy for Eliza Harris by appealing to her audience through the “natural” maternal instinct to protect children. Stowe goes even further with her direct address approach, requiring her audience, as Warhol argues, to “transfer their emotional response from the characters” in the novel to “actual slaves” (41). Demanding more than mere sympathy for fictional figures, Stowe hails her female audience into the imagined maternal community, exhorting the “mothers of America” to political, abolitionist action in the name of “the sacred love [they] bear” for their children (384). Challenging and channeling the maternal worthiness of the women she addresses in the concluding remarks of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, she provocatively asks “mothers of America” if slavery is “a thing to be defended, sympathized with, passed over in silence?” (384). While this exploitation of maternal essentialism may be questionable from a feminist perspective, it also represents Stowe’s particular rhetorical genius; she mimics the interpellative mechanisms of her patriarchal culture to evoke the desired sympathetic and ultimately political response from her largely female audience. In so doing, Stowe attempts to expand her imagined community of like-minded mothers beyond the borders of her book, colonizing her female readers for the cause of abolitionism. More importantly, perhaps, the logic of Stowe’s novel suggests that all citizens—male and female, young and old, single and married—can be trained, in Leverenz’s words “to feel with the heart of a mother” (190). Just as Mrs. Bird guides her husband to her matrifocal world view while cleverly praising

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him for following the dictates of his own heart, so too will Stowe attempt to spread her maternal ethics—to indoctrinate a broad, diverse body of readers.

DEATH AND DISCIPLINE: THE MODEL OF MATERNAL BEREAVEMENT As I have argued, in Stowe’s nineteenth-century culture, a proper maternal ethos was imagined as elemental in white women, an instinctual morality arising from women’s unique biological and spiritual natures. Stowe employs and extends maternal essentialism in Uncle Tom’s Cabin by reifying the slave Eliza Harris’s humanity through her maternal sensibilities, by imagining a racially and geographically diverse community of “good” mothers in her novel, and by demanding particular emotional and political responses from her largely female audience based on their expected citizenship in that imagined maternal community. Although Uncle Tom’s Cabin thus deploys maternal essentialism, Stowe does not preclude the possibility that non-mothers can employ maternal ethics. For example, many critics have noted that the gentle and ideally Christian Uncle Tom, for whom Stowe’s novel is named, demonstrates many motherly qualities, particularly in his loving relationship with his master Augustine St. Clare and with his young mistress, Little Eva.2 Furthermore, Senator Bird’s conversion to his wife’s maternal moral center suggests that, in Stowe’s world, non-mothers can learn motherhood’s selfless altruism if offered the proper cultural training. In fact, Stowe’s ambitions for extending her imagined maternal community go well beyond the audience of mothers whom she, at times, directly addresses in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Stowe’s abolitionist and national ambitions include expanding her imagined citizenry of “good mothers” well beyond the limits of biological maternity. Stowe’s novel demonstrates that individuals can be maternalized via the affective influence of a good woman. More specifically, as Leverenz argues, “The righteous energy of mothers,” in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, “can transform their men’s ‘hard Anglo-Saxon’ drive for dominance” (171). This is evident not only in the case of Senator Bird who is tutored by his wife and the mother of his children in “right” feeling, but also in other male characters such as Augustine St. Clare and George Shelby whose correct morality and actions are fundamentally underwritten by their rejection of paternal models and acceptance of maternal ones.3 Even the hyper-masculine George Harris is converted to motherly motivations by novel’s end. As he plans an exodus to Africa, he declares, “My sympathies are not for my father’s race, but for my mother’s” (374). However, maternal influence is neither the only nor the most effective means by which individuals are trained to feel like mothers in Uncle Tom’s


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Cabin; Stowe’s novel suggests an even more dramatic means of transformation. In her study of mourning in nineteenth-century America, Mary Louise Kete argues for the centrality of the grieving process in nineteenth-century American culture and contends that “Mourning . . . replaced conversion as the primary spiritual and social event of the American’s life” (59). Stowe imaginatively exploits this cultural phenomenon, converting several characters in Uncle Tom’s Cabin to a proper maternal ethos through the spiritual and specifically feminized discipline of death. Stowe dramatizes and deploys the disciplinary mechanisms associated with maternal bereavement to bring her characters (and, by extension, her audience) to the “right feelings” of motherhood that will facilitate her abolitionist ends. Considering the case of the angelic child Eva St. Clare’s premature passing in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Douglas and Tompkins early debated the efficacy of death as an agent of cultural change. Noting that Stowe presents the child’s “beautiful death . . . as part of a protest against slavery,” Douglas concludes that it “in no way hinders the working of the system” (12). Alternately, Tompkins finds that “dying is the supreme form of heroism” in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and suggests that it brings an “access of power” (127). Death stories in nineteenth-century culture, according to Tompkins, “enact a philosophy . . . in which the pure and powerless die to save the powerful and corrupt, and thereby show themselves more powerful than those they save” (127–128). In my reading, death is not simply a source or sink of power, but is, rather, an important vehicle of transformation—a cultural transducer that can convert the energies of mothers and non-mothers alike into a benevolent social force. According to her own accounts, Stowe’s grief after the death of her son Charlie sensitized her to the plight of the “poor slave mother” and transformed her private maternal sensibilities into a public and political abolitionist force (Charles Stowe, Harriet Beecher 154). “I felt that I could never be consoled for [Charlie’s death],” Stowe poignantly writes, “unless this crushing of my own heart might enable me to work out some great good to others” (Charles Stowe, Harriet Beecher 154–155). In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe imagines death as similarly affecting both the characters in her novel and her readers. The novel, then, does not defer death’s promises to some beautiful reunion in the afterlife, but reaps them through the conversion of those left mourning. Stowe’s novel, in fact, deploys the tempering fires of bereavement—those allied specifically in the nineteenth century with mothers and their children—on the general population. In many ways, child death was the ultimate gauntlet of womanly submissiveness in the nineteenth century, often being figured as a means of tempering faith and of testing a mother’s obedience to the will of a patriarchal

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God. Sigourney, the undisputed master of antebellum consolation literature, overtly describes the loss of a child as a vehicle for the mother’s spiritual education, as an opportunity for the mother to “benefit by the discipline of Heaven” (Letters to Mothers 262). Sigourney’s childhood elegiacs hinge not only on the necessity of submitting to God’s will but also on a requisite faith in resurrection. In poems such as “To a Dying Infant,” “Birth-Day of the First Born,” and “The Consenting Mother,” Sigourney figures childhood death as a chastening but ultimately rewarding maternal experience—a source of personal grace for the mourning mother. The penchant for valuing the single, dead child, furthermore, was imagined as a particularly feminine and specifically maternal characteristic, standing in antagonistic opposition to the contingencies of a masculine, market economy. Sigourney writes, “The scales in which a mother weighs her treasures, are not the same in which the man of the world weighs his silver and gold” (Letters to Mothers 262). Like other nineteenth-century sentimentalists, Sigourney figures maternal bereavement not simply as a tempering trial for women, but also as a humanistic force of spiritual and social change. Claiming that loss of a child would bring the mother to “eminence in those efforts of benevolence” (Letters to Mothers 269), Sigourney articulated the transformation of the bereaved woman: Is she not moved to deeper sympathy with all who mourn? Is she not better fitted to become a comforter? more strongly incited to every deed of mercy? When she sees a little coffin pass, no matter whether the mother who mourns be a stranger, or a mendicant, or burnt dark beneath an African sun, is she not to her, in the pitying thrill of that moment, as a sister? (Letters to Mothers 262).

The sentimental rhetoric of Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is built on just such a universalized sympathy. The successful escape of Eliza Harris relies, specifically, on the empathetic aid of the bereaved Mrs. Bird. In a famous and much explicated exchange, Eliza notes that Mrs. Bird is “dressed in deep mourning” (72), and lays claim to the white woman’s sympathy on the grounds of their shared maternal grief (12). Acknowledging Mary Bird’s loss of a child, Eliza concludes, “Then you will feel for me. I have lost two [children], one after another,—left ‘em buried there when I came away” (72). Noting that Harry is the only child she has left after the death of her infants, Eliza reveals that she became a fugitive upon learning of plans to “sell him down south” and confidently places herself and her child in the Bird family’s hands (73).


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Critics have pointed to this exchange between Eliza and Mrs. Bird as evidence of a sentimental tendency to elide difference. Glenn Hendler, as earlier mentioned, sees it as proof that Uncle Tom’s Cabin operates on the “fantasy of experiential equivalence” and argues that the emotional logic of Stowe’s scene suggests that Mrs. Bird’s loss of her child to death is affectively equivalent to Eliza’s (potential) loss of Harry at slave auction (7).4 This reading, however, disregards the women’s actual shared experience— their mutual suffering in the face of childhood death. More importantly, Hendler’s critique neglects the transformative property of maternal bereavement that is so central to Stowe’s ethos. Imagining mothers’ mourning as a reliable and efficacious process of spiritual discipline, one that converts grief into a practice of social benevolence, Stowe presents bereaved mothers as uniquely armed to advocate for the needs of the disenfranchised. Thus, when Stowe again resorts to direct address in her narration, aimed specifically at the bereaved mothers in her audience, she is not simply operating on a “fantasy of experiential equivalency”; rather, she is hailing women whose sympathy for those “burnt dark beneath an African sun” she can demand because they have learned compassion through the conversion process of child death. Summoning the social force of maternal bereavement on behalf of the slave, Stowe writes to the mothers in her audience: By the sick hour of your child; by those dying eyes, which you can never forget; by those last cries, that wrung your heart when you could neither help nor save; by the desolation of that empty cradle, that silent nursery,—I beseech you, pity those mothers that are constantly made childless by the American slave-trade! (384)

While Stowe thus calls on bereaved mothers to “eminence in those efforts of benevolence,” she will also bring the disciplinary mechanism of maternal bereavement to bear on an even broader constituency. In fact, through the brief life and tragic death of the angelic Little Eva, Stowe extends the forces of grief and loss beyond those who are actual mothers, hoping, through this maneuver, to unleash the forces of humanistic change imagined as inherent in maternal mourning. Privileged daughter of Augustine and Marie St. Clare, Little Eva sets herself apart from other antebellum Southerners by befriending the slaves who inhabit her parents’ New Orleans plantation and by advocating for their freedom. Spiritually precocious, Eva shares a special connection with the deeply Christian Uncle Tom and offers the orphaned slave Topsy the redemptive love necessary for her salvation. Noting Eva’s maternal nature, Ammons has argued that Little Eva is herself a central mother figure in

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Uncle Tom’s Cabin.5 While Eva’s pronounced spiritual and moral authority undeniably links her to nineteenth-century constructions of motherhood, I would argue that she is not best understood as a maternal figure. Rather, Eva is the epitome of the nineteenth century’s “special child,” a young person whose very angelic nature marks him or her for death and whose life serves as an exemplar to those mothers left behind. After the premature death of her beloved son Charlie, Stowe succinctly summarized the ethos of the special child: “Is there not something brighter & better around them than those who live—Why else in so many households is there a tradition of one brighter more beautiful more promising than all the rest, laid early low” (qtd. in Hedrick 191–192). Eva, who has “ the Lord’s mark on her forehead” and “something deep in her eyes,” (240) is among those children “whose office,” in Stowe’s words, is “to sojourn for a season” on earth “and endear to them the wayward human heart, that they might bear it upward with them in their homeward flight” (227–228). The nineteenth century’s “special child” held an elevated moral position and was figured as spiritual teacher for the mother. Offering an exemplar of good living while in this world, the child would become, after death, a celestial tutor of sorts. In Lydia Sigourney’s words, “The glorified spirit” of the dead child served as “a star to guide the mother to its own blissful clime” (Letters to Mothers 262). In critiquing Stowe’s representation of Eva’s elaborately detailed and ultimately salvific death, Gillian Brown argues that it represents a “detemporalization” of the problems “of slavery and femininity” and that it “seems to ignore or sentimentalize the problem of social injustice by opting for the rewards of the next world” (34). I would argue, however, that the positive effects of Little Eva’s death are not deferred to some afterlife, but immediately serve as a means of properly socializing living citizens, who in turn, work towards social justice, if only with partial success. Although Eva does not have the power to educate her own selfish and self-absorbed mother and only imperfectly reforms her well-intending but procrastinating father, she does become an agent of conversion for other characters in the novel and, ostensibly, for Stowe’s nineteenth-century audience as well. Specifically, through Eva’s relationship with the orphaned slave Topsy and Miss Ophelia, the spinster cousin of Augustine St. Clare, Stowe dramatizes and deploys bereavement as a form of cultural discipline that can maternalize non-mothers. Augustine St. Clare presents Topsy as a gift to his New England cousin Miss Ophelia in order to take a true measure of her anti-slavery sentiments and to put the liberal racial philosophies she claims to hold to a practical test. Charging Ophelia with the wayward slave child’s education,


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St. Clare challenges his cousin to “train” the child in “the way she should go” (207).6 According to Stowe’s Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the Northern spinster represents a class of people with “great logical and doctrinal correctness”; Ophelia lacks, however, the necessary “spirit of love,” to properly raise Topsy (Stowe 51). More specifically, Ophelia’s failure to provide the slave child with the proper maternalistic care inevitability leads to her failure in disciplining the larcenous, “goblin-like” Topsy. As Richard Brodhead argues, the very roots of Topsy’s mischievous, anti-social behavior lie in a “maternity-deficiency” (86). Having no biological connections in her memory, Topsy responds to Miss Ophelia’s inquiries about her mother, saying “Never had none” and “Never was born” (209). “[R]aised by a speculator,” Topsy’s deformed moral nature evolves from her status as a commodity rather than as a child (209). Her reformation, then, can only come from a mother-like love. While Miss Ophelia is quite ready to provide for the child’s physical well-being and welfare, she cannot open her heart wide enough to fill the emotional and moral void of Topsy’s missing mother. Here, Stowe’s “special child” must intervene. Through her life, Evangeline St. Clare provides Miss Ophelia with a proper model of caring for Topsy, and through her death, the little girl generates the transformative power that will render Ophelia’s heart motherly. Shortly before her death, Eva has a poignant encounter with the impish Topsy, a tableau instructively played out before the watching eyes of Miss Ophelia and Augustine St. Clare. Through “a blessed instinct” (Stowe, Key 51) Eva quickly diagnoses the slave girl’s moral illnesses, attributing them, as Brodhead states, to a “deficiency” of love (86), a deficiency Topsy herself blames on being a “nigger.” Assuring the girl that she is loveable, despite her blackness, Eva transgresses the racial divide by laying hands upon the slave girl and declaring, “O, Topsy, poor child, I love you!” (245). The watching Ophelia, whom Topsy contends would as “soon have a toad touch her!” (245), admits to St. Clare that she “never could bear to have” Topsy lay hands on her (246). Intellectually intuiting the propriety of Eva’s motherly model, Ophelia is nonetheless emotionally unmoved. While she wishes to be more like Eva and admits that the girl “might teach” her “a lesson,” she cannot yet extend the unconditional, maternalistic, love to a black-skinned child—a love that Eva reifies through her physical caress of the girl (246). Despairing, Ophelia admits, “I don’t know that I can help it . . . they are disagreeable to me,—[Topsy] in particular,—how can I help feeling so?” (246). It takes the disciplinary vehicle of Eva’s death to finally dissolve Miss Ophelia’s prejudices, converting her to a more beneficent, maternal world view. Just as the archetypal special child brings its own mother to

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“eminence in those efforts of benevolence,” so too will Eva’s death bear “fruit” in Ophelia’s “good and honest heart” (266). Deeply feeling the loss of Eva, “the more softened, more gentle” Ophelia finds her relations with Topsy utterly transformed (266). Approaching the bereft, orphaned slave shortly after Eva’s passing, Ophelia spontaneously declares, “I can love you; I do, and I’ll try to help you grow up to be a good Christian girl” (259). “No longer shrink[ing] from [Topsy’s] touch, or manifest[ing] any ill-repressed disgust,” Ophelia newly recognizes the slave girl as “an immortal creature,” sent to her by God, to “be led . . . to glory and virtue” (266–267). With a new sense of proprietorship, Ophelia asks Augustine St. Clare for ownership of Topsy, declaring, “I want her mine” (268). While she recognizes the fiction of slavery—that “Nobody but God” has a right to ownership of a child—she wants, nonetheless, the legal right to safely transport Topsy to the free states and to protect her from harm (269). Finally, though, Ophelia’s new relationship with Topsy is modeled on a brand of ownership quite different than slavery. Having “acquired an influence over the mind of the destitute” Topsy through her kindness and care, Ophelia wields her will over the child like a “natural” mother, via the bonds of love (259). Through Ophelia’s grief-induced conversion, Stowe transcends the limits of biological motherhood and demonstrates that an appropriate maternal sensibility can be garnered through proper forms of cultural discipline. Elaborately rendering Eva’s precocious death, Stowe also aims to extend Ophelia’s cathartic, maternalizing experience to her audience. As Kete argues, Stowe’s “presentation and re-presentation of dead children” ultimately aims to effect “the constitution not just of individuals but of the nation” (57). In propagating her abolitionist, maternal ethics through the discipline of death and grief, Stowe seeks, finally, to replicate Ophelia’s conversion en masse, and to transform the oppressive ownership of slavery into the protective possessiveness of motherhood.

MATERNAL DEVIANCE AND THE SUPPRESSION OF FEMALE SUBJECTIVITY In her early characterization of Mrs. Bird as a woman to be reckoned with, Stowe gives a brief but fascinating peek at another side of the Senator’s sweet wife. Normally the “most indulgent and easy to be entreated of all mothers,” Mary Bird is compelled, Stowe reports, to violent, “vehement chastisement” after discovering her children’s cruelty towards a “defenceless kitten” (68). “I tell you what,” recalls Bird’s son “Master Bill,” “I was scared that time. Mother came at me so that I thought she was crazy, and


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I was whipped and tumbled off to bed, without any supper” (68). Stowe reveals that “anything in the shape of cruelty would throw [Mrs. Bird] into a passion,” a fact that is all the more “alarming and inexplicable” when juxtaposed with the “general softness” of the mother’s “nature” (68). Through this brief but powerful vignette, Stowe offers her readers a fragmentary glimpse of what Stephanie Smith calls the “schizophrenia inherent . . . to that state named ‘maternity’” (99). Indeed, Stowe here presents an unruly, complex, and powerful maternal subjectivity, capable of aggression as well as submissiveness, violence as well as gentleness, passion as well as passivity (99). Through Mrs. Bird’s “inexplicable” psychic divide and her “crazy” maternal outburst, Stowe strategically engages the anxieties of a sentimental culture that cherished motherhood as symbol of unity and peace. Stowe’s threatening flirtation with maternal aggression is brief, however, for she is narratively constrained by her own rhetorical and political reliance on sentimental, maternal ideals. Mrs. Bird’s unseemly passion is, after all, predicated on a maternal instinct to protect the helpless, and her aggressive eruption is quickly contained, as she soon reassumes the proper stance of sentimental motherhood. Master Bill reports that before he could even “get over wondering” about his mother’s violent outburst, he heard her “crying outside [his] door” (68). The appropriately gentle supplication of Mrs. Bird’s sentimental, maternal tears makes him “feel worse than all the rest,” and he reports that he and his brothers “never stoned another kitten!” (68). Imagining the integrity of the union as dependent on a community of emotionally coherent and morally continent mothers, Stowe leaves only trace amounts of motherhood’s ominous “schizophrenia” in her maternal heroines. Stowe’s rhetorical strategies, then, leave her little room for developing complex feminine subjectivity, for the good mother-figures in her novel must be constrained by the limits of proper, sentimental maternity. Furthermore, in making her abolitionist argument, Stowe overtly pathologizes unruly women and deviant motherhood, figuring slavery’s capacity for denaturing maternal bonds as the most pernicious threat to American families and the nation. Specifically, the logic of Uncle Tom’s Cabin suggests that in denying maternal rights to black mothers, slavery frees them from culturally correct expressions of womanhood and threatens to unleash a dangerous, feminine power. The novel is replete with examples of black women whose violated motherhood leads them to destructive stances and aberrant behaviors. Despairing after she learns that her child is to be sold away from her, the slave mother Lucy resorts to suicide-infanticide, jumping off a Southward sailing ship, with her infant in her arms. Old Prue, who

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is forced by a cruel master to ignore the cries of her starving child, becomes a masochistic alcoholic, willfully provoking the beatings that will eventually take her life. The distorting force of slavery even casts its shadow on Eliza Harris’s maternal heroics. Her “desperate leap” across the American Jordon, “impossible to anything but madness and despair,” is symbolically haunted by the specter of a chosen death (52). 7 Stowe makes clear, too, that slavery distorts the maternal instincts of white women as well as black. Eva St. Clare’s self-absorbed, hypochondriac mother, Marie, is certainly no victim, but her malformed maternal character is specifically tied to the economic, social, and moral perversions of the slave-holding South.8 Marie’s selfish proclivities flourish because she is surrounded from childhood with servants “who lived only to study her caprices” (134). The arrival of her only child—an event which would be expected in nineteenth-century culture to be morally elevating—only makes matters worse for the pampered and indulged Marie. The “ordinary weakness” surrounding pregnancy and childbirth melds with the new mother’s “ennui and discontent,” leading to further distortions of character (135). As Jennifer Jenkins argues, Marie St. Clare “inverts Stowe’s traditional notion of maternal sacrifice,” for she subordinates the needs of all others, including those of her child, to her own (170). In her self-deluding solipsism, Marie considers herself a model of womanhood and a virtual maternal martyr. Juxtaposing the self-absorbed white woman with Eva’s selfless and nurturing black “Mammy,” Stowe underscores Marie’s gross maternal deficiencies and critiques the Southern child-rearing practices that distort the natural order by allowing black women to usurp a maternal role that should, in Stowe’s view, be claimed by white mothers. Stowe’s most challenging representation of a dangerous and uniquely multivalent maternity appears in the hellish, deep-South plantation of Simon Legree. Healer and harmer, lover and killer, victim and victimizer, Legree’s slave-mistress Cassy—more than any other character in Stowe’s book— richly evokes the contrary states of motherhood, the feminine schizophrenia, so threatening to nineteenth-century culture. Despite her slave status, Cassy, in her early life, projects the image of true womanhood: a beautiful, loving, and faithful companion to her white (extralegal) husband and the doting mother to their two children. Things quickly change, however, when the fortunes of slavery remove her from a once-happy home and place her in the lecherous hands of a man who manipulates her, making her as “submissive as . . . desired” through the power he exerts over her children’s destinies (316). Like other wayward slave mothers in the novel, Cassy’s maternal deviance is engendered by the slave-state’s violation of her maternal rights. Eventually Cassy’s children are sold away from her, and when


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she loses a mother’s proper control of her children she loses, too, the appropriate self-control of womanhood. The rich, conflicted motherhood thus created is unique in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for Cassy employs her complex maternal powers proactively and publicly, selflessly garnering a measure of social justice at the same time she exacts a brutal measure of revenge. Much critical attention has been given to Cassy’s act of infanticide. The murder-by-poisoning of her third child “proves,” as Gillian Brown rightly argues, “the destructive maternal capability that figures alongside maternal generativity” (35). While Stowe’s poignant rendering of the slave mother’s desperate act is compelling, it is neither the most interesting nor the most original manifestation of Cassy’s deviant motherhood. Stowe and other abolitionist authors routinely depicted slave mothers’ acts of suicide and infanticide as threatening expressions of power that were tempered for a white, middle class audience because the violence was perpetrated on black bodies. Cassy moves through and beyond such self-destructive rebellion, however, demonstrating as Gilbert and Gubar early noted, “the possibility of women enacting their rage without being consumed by it” (533). Cassy’s character also channels maternal aggression outwards towards her oppressors, twisting infanticidal impulse to strategic advantage. In an episode that leads to the creation of a maternal alter-ego of sorts, Cassy’s violent rage is aimed at her owner, the man responsible for her first son’s sale and suffering. Unable to protect her child when he is taken to the calaboose for punishment, she frantically seeks her master’s intervention, but he only laughs at her and refuses to intercede, claiming that the boy needed “to be broken in” (317). Cassy describes the ensuing scene of violence, almost as an instance of psychotic break: “It seemed to me something in my head snapped . . . I felt dizzy and furious. I remember seeing a great sharp bowie-knife on the table; I remember something about catching it, and flying upon him; and then all grew dark . . .” (317). In terms of her own immediate well-being, Cassy’s violent maternal rage pays off. Awakening from the episode days later, she learns that her abusive master has “gone away,” leaving her to be sold to the kind Captain Stuart (318). Cassy’s deviant maternity fully flowers in the gothic environs of Simon Legree’s remote Southern plantation. Having lived “five years, body and soul, under the . . . foot” of the reprehensible Legree (312), the mature Cassy seems, as Karen Halttunen suggests, the very “antitype of true womanhood”—a thoroughly defiled and degraded mother (122). On Legree’s plantation, the woman uses the fierce, feminine energies spawned by a lifetime of physical, psychological, and emotional abuse greatly to her advantage. Neither humble nor submissive, she is instead marked by “a fierce pride and defiance” (305). No angel in the house, Cassy is a “she-devil”

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(320) who threatens her abusive master with her witchy French incantations (308). Far from sexually pure, Cassy is, instead, powerful in her degradation. Her womanhood “hardened . . . within her” and the “fires of fiercer passions” awakened, Cassy becomes Legree’s mistress and keeps a “strange and singular kind” of influence over him (348). Stowe makes clear, however, that Cassy’s finer maternal instincts have not been extinguished. They coexist, if subliminally, with the deviant elements of her womanhood. Cassy’s harsh and even violent persona is juxtaposed with her knowledge of the “many healing arts” and “her long practice” of attending to the “victims of brutality” on Legree’s plantation (310). Bravely ministering to the abused and beaten Uncle Tom, her indecorous “wildness” is relieved by the “graceful and compassionate sweetness in her voice” (319). Cassy’s dormant maternal sensibilities eventually emerge through her burgeoning relationship with Emmeline, the beautiful, young slave whom Legree has purchased to become his new mistress. On one hand, Cassy is starkly unsentimental in her relations with Emmeline—even mocking the girl for following what “Mother told [her]!” in the amoral world of Simon Legree (36). However, when the disconsolate young girl begs for the older woman’s pity, Cassy responds maternally, “Pity you!—don’t I? Haven’t I a daughter?” (326). When Emmeline asks Cassy to help her escape from Legree’s plantation, to help her “get somewhere away,” the slave mother employs the contrary forces of maternal salvation and maternal damnation to complete the task (325). Intuiting that redeeming her surrogate daughter will require Legree’s death, Cassy first imagines achieving this end in conventional terms, and she solicits Uncle Tom’s aid to kill her master with an ax. Ultimately, though, Cassy’s weapon of choice takes a uniquely maternal shape. Exploiting her master’s guilty memory of his dead mother, Cassy will deploy a mother-fear so potent that it ultimately proves fatal to Legree. Imaginatively prone to the lingering powers of maternal influence, Simon Legree feels the moral pull of his dead mother—a force of feminine influence that, in Margaret Fuller’s evocative words, “burns unwearied” like a “Rosicrucian lamp” (28). While such post-mortem maternal influence was imagined as morally ennobling in nineteenth-century culture, Legree’s personal state of depravity and the corrupting power of slavery pervert the maternal relationship. The memory of his dead mother, whose good Christian values he has denied, becomes a source of terror and a symbol of damnation for Legree: “That pale, loving mother,—her dying prayers, her forgiving love,—wrought in that demoniac heart of sin only as a damning sentence, bringing with it a fearful looking for of judgment and fiery


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indignation” (323). Viewing Cassy as a demonic figure in her own right, Legree conflates his mother and his mistress in the montage of his dreams (327). Exploiting her master’s fear of maternal retribution, Cassy stages “an authentic ghost story” from the plantation’s garret, a site that is already terror-filled because it is the place where a slave woman (Legree’s likely murder-victim) has died. Feigning an escape with Emmeline, Cassy thwarts Legree’s search by retreating with the girl to the garret, a place too frightful for Legree to search. Donning a white sheet and slipping into Legree’s bedroom in the night, Cassy invokes Legree’s worst fears by posing as the spirit of motherly damnation. In response to Cassy’s terrifying maternal haunting, Legree “becomes a harder drinker than ever” (367). While Cassy and Emmeline are thus freed to make a legitimate escape, Legree is left to madness and death. Soon taking to his bed, he spends the final days of his life “Rav[ing] and scream[ing],” at an imagined “white . . . figure” who sinisterly calls on him to “Come! come! come!” (367). Eva Cherniavsky argues that in donning her white sheet and haunting Legree “Cassy . . . performs (white ) motherhood” and “recodes it as performative identity”(59). I would argue, however, that in playing the spirit of maternal retribution, Cassy inverts rather than imitates the sentimental motherhood of the nineteenth century. Her gothic incarnation of murderous, maternal power is, in fact, too terrible for Stowe to transparently locate within white womanhood. Revealing her own anxieties about a dangerous, aggressive motherhood, Stowe alloys the memory of Legree’s white mother with the degraded, living, black woman before unleashing the “dread, unhallowed necromancy of evil” that eventually kills the slave owner (323). Through her amalgamation of black and white—dead and living—Stowe creates a diabolical and quite effective inversion of ideal maternal affect; Cassy is the motherfigure who does not save by love, but rather kills with fear. Through her maternal damnation of Simon Legree, Cassy redeems her surrogate daughter Emmeline, ushering her to freedom. For a brief narrative space, Stowe thus harnesses the contrary energies of maternal protectiveness and aggression. At one level, Cassy’s actions are selflessly motivated; her primary goal is to protect and free the innocent Emmeline. In saving the young girl from Legree, however, Cassy also enacts a satisfying bit of revenge, the horrors of which are recorded in the screams that emanate from Legree’s deathbed. Stowe thus dramatizes, albeit briefly, a complex, independent, feminine subjectivity, not bound to the conventions of conservative maternal ideology, but powerful, proactive, and ultimately heroic, nonetheless.

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Once Cassy escapes from Legree, however, Stowe quickly contains the unruly elements of the slave mother’s character, bringing her into rigid line with the conventions of sentimental maternity. Indeed, if Cassy “performs” white motherhood, as Cherniavsky suggests, it does not occur while she is wreaking havoc dressed in a white sheet, but, rather, in her complete return to the domestic order at the end of the novel. As Halttunen argues, Cassy is redeemed by her motherly care of Emmeline and is narratively rewarded by Stowe though her reunion with her two lost children, one of whom, it turns out, is Eliza Harris (123). Stowe’s edgy, evocative characterization of Cassy is, however, painfully diminished as the ex-slave takes her place in Eliza’s home. Indeed, Stowe is correct when she contends that her “readers” will “scarcely know” Cassy as the end of the novel when she appears in the form of a doting grandmother. (373). The slave-mother’s rich, multivalent nature dissolves into the domestic order as Cassy “sink[s] . . . into the bosom of the family” (373). The deviant mothers in Uncle Tom’s Cabin demonstrate Stowe’s difficulty in representing complex female subjectivity. As Stephanie Smith contends, Cassy’s ultimate “fate” demonstrates Stowe’s “inability to imagine” a positive feminine power “beyond the patriarchally defined realm of legitimate Christian motherhood” (99). Likewise, Marie St. Clare, the only woman in the text who exerts her will strictly on her own behalf, exposes Stowe’s failure to imagine a strong feminine subjectivity, grounded in a healthy self interest. Because Marie’s self absorption goes completely unrelieved by other redeeming qualities and because she is virtually the only “self-actualized” white woman in the text, Stowe comes dangerously close to conflating Marie’s destructive narcissism with female subjectivity itself. In fact, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, all maternal impulses that fall outside the narrow limits of the sentimental—be they infanticidal, murderous, or simply self-interested—are negatively inflected and ultimately presented as an undesirable symptom of the institution of slavery. The logic of Stowe’s novel suggests, finally, that a positive side-benefit of eradicating slavery would be the restraint and containment of unruly female subjectivities, such as Cassy’s and Marie’s. Restoration of the national union through abolition will also restore the national icon of ideal motherhood. A very complex vision of motherhood emerges from a reading of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Harriet Beecher Stowe, who refused to be a drudge of the nursery and proclaimed the absolute impossibility of harmonizing all through her own motherhood, builds Uncle Tom’s Cabin on a maternal ideal of absolute selflessness and posits her imagined matriarchal community as the instrument of national peace in a world divided by race and


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slavery. Most enigmatically, Stowe authorizes the radical political stances of the women in her novel via maternal prerogative, but her reliance on sentimental maternity binds her characters and her audience to a restrictive script of womanhood. Finally, while Stowe offers an expansive, inclusive view of the maternal that hails men and women, single and married to her imagined maternal community, her vision is also narrowly restrictive; all deviant motherhood in Uncle Tom’s Cabin must be eradicated or contained. Rhetorically brilliant and strategically effective as a work of abolitionism, Stowe’s novel, however, remains deeply problematic from a feminist perspective. In the final tally, the cost of Stowe’s mother-power is great, for it wreaks havoc with the integrity of the female subject. As Stephanie Smith has eloquently argued, “The Madonna solution . . . clearly deactivates any power of self determination” (105). In Stowe’s novel of maternal contraries, woman’s political power is ultimately purchased at the price of personal agency. Although Uncle Tom’s Cabin radically posits a communal maternal voice that wields great moral authority in the public sphere, female subjectivity all but disappears in this groundbreaking, abolitionist text. Stowe’s maternal paradigm—her perilous balancing act of motherly authority and feminine servitude—provides an excellent baseline by which to evaluate other authors of the era who variously employ, interrogate, challenge, and revise the nineteenth-century construct of sentimental maternity. Weighing the cultural power of ideal motherhood against its often repressive functions, Stowe’s literary peers will negotiate the terms of the maternal. In so doing, they will question feminine essentialism, measure the morality and efficacy of the disciplinary functions of the maternal role, challenge a political agency built on self abnegation, and, in some cases, actively work to revivify the female subject.

Chapter Two

No More “The Pillow of Affection”: Deconstructing the “Softening Influence” of Motherhood in The Scarlet Letter

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s relationship to the burgeoning sentimental culture that flourished at the height of his career has prompted much critical speculation. Seemingly unaware of his privileged cultural position as a male author and threatened by the monumental success of female domestic writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Hawthorne famously separated himself from the “d____d mob of scribbling women,” claiming that his own art could never succeed “while the public taste [was] occupied with their trash” (C 17: 304). Despite his protestations, Hawthorne was neither immune nor unresponsive to the pressures of popular taste, and the gloomy and provocative nature of much of his work is offset by forays into the purely sentimental. In compiling his first major signed work, Twicetold Tales, Hawthorne carefully gauged his audience, choosing to include highly sentimental sketches, while eschewing darker pieces such as “Roger Malvin’s Burial” and “Young Goodman Brown.” Proving himself an excellent barometer of public taste, Hawthorne was early rewarded with critical praise that cited his most conventionally sentimental tales—“Sights from a Steeple,” “A Rill from the Town Pump,” and “Little Annie’s Rambles”—as evidence of his artistic prowess. Several critical studies have focused on the relationship between Hawthorne’s personal conservatism and his art. In Dearest Beloved: The Hawthornes and the Making of Middle-Class Family, T. Walter Herbert specifically notes Hawthorne’s deep personal commitment to the ideals that underwrote the sentimental, identifying Nathaniel and his wife Sophia as “shamans of domesticity” (xvi).1 Herbert further claims that Hawthorne’s writing was deeply involved in the “cultural work” of “establishing and perpetuating” the domestic values that were the very bedrock of sentimental culture in the nineteenth century (xvi-xvii). While Hawthorne is undeniably concerned with the domestic world, I would argue that his commitment to 43

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his culture’s idealized conception of family is less obvious. Further, while one can easily point to individual pieces in his body of work that smack of a simplistic sentimentalism, Hawthorne is immensely wary of the sentimental’s potentially reductive and invasive exploitation of human feeling. In his personal life, Hawthorne demonstrated an almost obsessive emotional reticence, carefully guarding the depths of his inner life, even from those to whom he was closest. After his death, Sophia claimed that she “never dared gaze at him, unless his lids were down” because it “seemed an invasion into a holy place.” “To the last,” Sophia wrote, “he was in a measure to me a divine Mystery” (qtd. in Miller 9). Herman Melville, as well as some later critics, would interpret Hawthorne’s emotional reserve as the shadow of some deeply guarded and shameful secret.2 However, Hawthorne clearly was just as protective of others’ inner lives as he was his own. When he learned that his thenfiancé Sophia was dabbling in mesmerism, he anxiously wrote and warned her about what he saw as its inherent risks: “Supposing that this power arises from the transfusion of one spirit into another,” he wrote, “it seems to me that the sacredness of an individual is violated by it” (C 15: 588). Naturally, Hawthorne’s emotional reticence flowed into his art. In the preface to Mosses from an Old Manse, he rejected the confessional, the personally expressive, in his own writing: “I veil my face; nor am I, nor have ever been, one of those extremely hospitable people, who serve up their own hearts delicately fried, with brain-sauce, as a tidbit for their beloved public” (C 10: 33). In his critiques of woman writers of the era, Hawthorne pointed to their highly developed emotive faculties as their chief literary failing. Although he was a fan of Julia Ward Howe, for example, in a letter to William Ticknor, he complained of her need “to let out a whole history of domestic unhappiness” (C17: 177). “What a strange propensity it is in these scribbling women,” Hawthorne continues, “to make a show of their hearts, as well as their heads, upon your counter, for anybody to pry into that chooses!” (C 17: 177). Hawthorne was clearly uncomfortable with the emotional exhibitionism that he identified as the fuel of women’s writing. However, his skepticism about the efficacy and ethics of the sentimental would go much deeper. In story after story, Hawthorne challenges the very know-ability of the human heart, questioning the emotional transparency of human nature upon which the sentimental rhetorically relies. In works such as “Young Goodman Brown” and “The Minister’s Black Veil,” Hawthorne explores the mystery of the human heart, questioning the wisdom—even the morality—of attempting to reveal its secrets. Most significantly, through his greatest and most sympathetic incarnation of womanhood, Hester Prynne, Hawthorne questions the very communicability of inner, emotional truth and the reliability of its external manifestations. Specifically centering The Scarlet Letter on a mother-figure,

No More “The Pillow of Affection”

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Hawthorne challenges the essentialism that renders the maternal transparent by simplifying and universalizing the dense emotional complexities of motherhood. Through the iconography of his “Introductory,” Hawthorne begins his novel with a warning, cautioning his reader about the perils of taking a naively sentimental view. In describing the hazards of federal employment, Hawthorne elaborates on a symbol of the government, the carved eagle that sits atop the Custom House, and he rather eccentrically renders the militaristic bird as both female and a mother.3 Although this eagle warns the “inoffensive community” with “the fierceness of her beak and eye and the general truculency of her attitude,” the citizenry chooses to sentimentalize the maternal figure, “imagining that her bosom has all the softness and snugness of an eider-down pillow” and hoping to “shelter themselves” under her wing (C 1: 5).4 Revealing that the mother-eagle “has no great tenderness, even in the best of moods,” Hawthorne warns his readers of the potential for maternal aggression. “[S]ooner or later,” he writes, the eagle will “fling off her nestlings with a scratch of her claw, a dab of her beak, or a rankling wound from her barbed arrows” (5). One sentimentalizes, Hawthorne suggests, at one’s own risk. Despite Hawthorne’s early caveat, many critics have read The Scarlet Letter through narrowly sentimental eyes, seeing it as a powerful paean to motherhood. Edwin Haviland Miller, for example, identifies Hester as both “mother figure and symbol” (297) and identifies the “major theme” of The Scarlet Letter as the “assertion of the maternal principle and the redemption it promises personally and culturally” (298).5 Hester’s character is, indeed, fundamentally bound to her maternity from the moment she emerges from the prison door with a baby in her arms. Further, as Hester first stands upon the pillory, Hawthorne paints her with the redemptive features of the Madonna: Had there been a papist among the crowd of Puritans, he might have seen in this beautiful woman, so picturesque in her attire and mien, and with the infant at her bosom, an object to remind him of the image of Divine Maternity, which so many illustrious painters had vied with one another to present. (56)

As generations of critics have noted, however, Hawthorne paints his figures with unnervingly ambiguous strokes, often laying one image upon the canvas, only to obscure it with subsequent layers of meaning. In this instance, the author immediately revises his portrait, adding to his description that Hester would remind the viewer of the Madonna “only by contrast” (56). “Here,” Hawthorne writes, “there was the deepest taint of sin in the most sacred quality of human life, working such effect, that the world was only the darker for

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this woman’s beauty, and the more lost for the infant she had borne” (56). While in some sense, then, Hester may in fact be essentially “mother,” the nature and quality of that motherhood is obscured by the very imagery with which it is represented. Given Hester’s adulterous relationship with the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, whose identity she refuses to reveal, the reader may indeed speculate on whether Hester’s motherhood is redemptive, darkly aberrational, or something other still. As this study shows, Hawthorne’s fundamentally sympathetic development of Hester will radically challenge maternal essentialism and the very ideality on which sentimental motherhood is constructed.

JUDGING HESTER Deciphering Hawthorne’s verdict about Hester’s maternity is a complex task because of the rich, narrative ambiguities of The Scarlet Letter. However, the doubled historic context of the romance—seventeenth-century Puritan New England and Hawthorne’s own nineteenth-century sentimental culture—provides a unique perspective to the cultural forces with which Hester’s maternity is underwritten. The seventeenth-century setting offers an historical platform upon which the woman’s maternity becomes a community concern to be publicly judged. Indeed, Hester’s illicit motherhood is the source, subject, and means of her Puritan community’s disciplinary interventions into her life. While Hester is early punished for her adulterous sexual liaison, of which her child is the visible proof, as Pearl grows, Hester’s fitness to mother becomes the subject of public scrutiny, and a maternal interrogation of sorts is played out at the Governor’s Hall. Governor Bellingham and others of the community of “authority and influence” examine mother and child to determine whether Pearl’s “immortal soul” is safe with Hester—with “one who hath stumbled and fallen, amid the pitfalls of the world” (110). When Pearl incorrectly recites her catechism during an interview with the Governor, the lapse is seen as damning evidence against Hester—as proof, in fact, that she is an unfit mother. Although Pearl’s error stems from childhood “perversity,” rather than true ignorance, Hester finds herself in danger of having her maternal privileges peremptorily revoked. While the informal trial that ensues is played out on a Puritan stage, the scene elegantly elaborates key elements of sentimental ideology. Specifically, the interrogation and defense of the mother is deeply infused with nineteenth-century maternal essentialism and reflects the disciplinary functions imagined as inherent in the maternal role. Hester herself argues for what she believes to be the “indefeasible rights” endowed by her biological maternity: “God gave me this child!” she asserts, “I will not give her up!” (113). Because


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Pearl is “the scarlet letter endowed with life” (102), Hester contends that her daughter shares the letter’s disciplinary function and will serve as a vehicle of the Lord’s “retribution” (113). While Hester thus articulates a conservative nineteenth-century defense of her motherhood, Pearl’s father, Arthur Dimmesdale, most eloquently deploys the rhetoric of sentimental maternity. In so doing, he elaborates the cultural underpinnings of the nineteenth-century institution of motherhood. No stern Puritanical theologian, Dimmesdale is, in fact, the very embodiment of the feminized, sentimental clergy that, according to Ann Douglas, came into vogue in Hawthorne’s own day.6 Although living in secret sin himself, Dimmesdale is gifted with the Pentecostal “Tongue of Flame”—the ability to address “the whole human brotherhood in the heart’s native language” (142). Dimmesdale’s medium, the “native language” of the heart, is the very ether of sentimentalism. Coaxed by his secret lover to speak on her behalf, Dimmesdale ushers forth a pathos-filled argument for Hester’s maternal rights—an argument steeped in nineteenth-century maternal ideology. Positing the “quality of awful sacredness in the relation between this mother and this child,” the minister cites as evidence that unique, natural, and unduplicatable connection between mother and child, so pre-eminent a part of sentimental maternity (114). In Letters to Mothers, for example, Lydia Sigourney states that “Nature” gave a woman “the key to the infant soul,” endowing the mother with an “intuitive discernment of its desires and impulses” (14). The office of “maternal teacher” becomes, then, the “inalienable possession” of woman (Sigourney 14). Dimmesdale, in a parallel vein, argues for Hester’s maternal rights, claiming that God gave Hester “an instinctive knowledge of [Pearl’s] nature and requirements . . . which no other mortal being can possess” (114). Dimmesdale’s argument not only relies on the mother’s unique knowledge of her child but also builds on another fundamentally sentimental trope: on the premise that the child morally tutors the parent and that innocence redeems experience. While such a construction is dramatized through Stowe’s Little Eva, it serves as a type of feminine catechism for Lydia Sigourney. In Letters to Mothers, she argues that moral failings such as selfishness, indolence, vanity, and passion are wiped away through the “transforming power” of motherhood (22). The “feeble hand of the babe,” she tells her readers, has the power to lead the mother “through more profound depths of humility, to higher aspirations of faith” (25). Sigourney suggests, finally, that the moral influence of the child can lead to the mother’s salvation and guide the imperfect woman to “a higher seat among the ‘just made perfect’” (25). Dimmesdale likewise argues for the redemptive influence of motherhood:

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Negotiating Motherhood in Nineteenth-Century American Literature Therefore it is good for this poor, sinful woman that she hath an infant immortality, a being capable of eternal joy or sorrow, confided to her care,—to be trained up by her to righteousness,—to remind her, at every moment, of her fall,—but yet to teach her, as it were by the Creator’s sacred pledge, that, if she bring the child to heaven, the child will also bring its parent thither! (114–115)

In the eyes of the Puritan community, Hester has an even more critical need for salvation; she needs more than a guide to a “higher place” in heaven— she must be plucked from the very fires of hell. Dimmesdale suggests that Pearl may provide the grace needed for Hester to experience conversion, saving Hester from even “blacker depths of sin” and actually keeping “the mother’s soul alive” (114). Tinged with a proper amount of Calvinistic gloom, Dimmesdale’s pathos-filled arguments succeed; the community leaders authorize Hester’s continued care of Pearl based on the natural, “sacred,” and fundamentally regulatory bond between mother and child that the Reverend articulates. The essentially sentimental vision of maternity offered by Dimmesdale placates a community that can then rest assured Hester will be safely contained by her motherhood. The daughter Pearl will be the disciplinary agent of her mother’s social reform, “working in many ways upon her heart” (114). Hawthorne, however, steadily undermines the sentimental rationale by which Hester’s maternity is culturally underwritten. Through the federal eagle in “The Custom House,” Hawthorne warns his readers about naively sentimentalizing—about favorably reading exterior signs and extrapolating them to interior states. In the main text of The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne reissues his caveat by associating Hester with another infamous mother, “the sainted Anne Hutchinson,” whose Antinomian doctrine rocked Massachusetts Bay in the seventeenth century (48).7 Hutchinson challenged the Puritan doctrine of “visible sainthood,” which contended that redemption could be rendered publicly perceptible through good works. Instead, she believed that it was the individual spirit that was moved by grace, and that redemption (or the lack thereof) could be tried by no outward means. Hawthorne early connects Hester to the female heretic through the wild rose bush—fabled to have sprung up under Hutchinson’s feet—that sits outside Hester’s prison door and from which Pearl claims to have been “plucked” (112). Indeed, the impish Pearl herself most definitively ties the knot between Hester and the famous heretic. For in early accounts of Hutchinson’s life, her grotesque theology is translated into grotesque progeny—her malformed and miscarried fetus read as the incarnation of her “monstrous” heresies.8 As Amy Lang eloquently states,


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“just as the ‘misconceptions’ of Hutchinson’s brain come to fruition in the misconceptions of her womb, so Hester’s crime of passion quite literally begets her ungovernable offspring Pearl, symbol of a broken law . . .” (166). Indeed, Hester’s unruly daughter is described as an “imp of evil, emblem and product of sin,” who has “no right among christened infants” (93). Hawthorne thus links Hester and Hutchinson by their ill-conceived progeny. By connecting Hester to Hutchinson, Hawthorne not only associates his heroine with female rebellion but also posits the philosophical question of whether or not inward states can be safely read by outward signs. More specifically, Hawthorne will question the sentimental view of maternity that assumes inner womanhood is rendered transparent by the biological fact of motherhood. Through Hester Prynne, Hawthorne will complicate the reigning cultural notions of womanhood that flourished in his time; he will render the “natural” bonds of motherhood dangerously opaque; for whatever assumptions the Puritan community makes about Hester based on her maternity prove, in the end, to be dangerously in error. When Hester first stands on the pillory, looking like the image of “Divine Maternity,” all is not as it appears. Yet Hawthorne creates from Hester’s imperfect motherhood one of the most glorious and engaging figures of American literature. Indeed, it is a tribute to the sympathy with which Hawthorne creates his character that generations of critics have failed to note Hester’s deviant motherhood. Through his development of the wayward mother, Hawthorne exposes and deflates maternal essentialism and imaginatively disarms the disciplinary functions of motherhood, showing they are no match, at least, for the force of one woman’s rogue maternity.

MISSING THE “MASTER-WORD”: HESTER AS THE UNNATURAL MOTHER From the very opening of his tale, Hawthorne characterizes Hester as a woman who, while not as overtly hostile as the federal eagle, is every bit as uncomfortable, as “unnatural,” in her role as mother. Lacking “the key to the infant soul,” which Sigourney claims is inherent in all new mothers, Hester Prynne seems distinctly unknowing, perhaps even reluctant, in her motherhood. From Pearl’s infancy, Hester is a caretaker of dubious skill, seemingly devoid of any maternal “intuition.” When Hester arrives in the marketplace, for example, she seems to lack any protective instincts, using her infant daughter as a shield of sorts. Hawthorne writes. “ . . . it seemed to be her first impulse to clasp the infant

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closely to her bosom, not so much by an impulse of motherly affection, as that she might conceal a certain token, which was wrought or fastened into her dress” (52). Missing the natural “affection” of a mother for her newborn, Hester is indifferent, at times, to her child’s needs. In the early chapters of the book, we find Hester repeatedly clutching her baby “so fiercely” that she cries out in distress. (59, 61). At other times, the mother does not “even seem to hear” Pearl’s cries “of pain” (61). When Hester does respond to her infant’s “wailings and screams,” she only manages “to hush it, mechanically” and seems “scarcely to sympathize with its troubles” (69). The beleaguered mother is clearly no icon of sentimental maternity here. As Pearl grows from an infant to a young child, Hester Prynne’s unnatural maternity results not in the sanctifying bond for which the Puritan elders had hoped, but in a troubled, frustrated connection between mother and daughter. Pearl is an ill-adapted child whose passionate and perverse nature is a constant source of pain to her mother. The narrator states, “The child could not be made amenable to rules. In giving her existence, a great law had been broken; and the result was a being, whose elements were perhaps beautiful and brilliant, but all in disorder . . .” (91). Hester will “account for the child’s character,” in almost biological terms, recognizing in Pearl the same “wild, desperate, defiant mood” that she herself had suffered during her pregnancy (91). The narrator implicates Hester’s maternal body in the development of Pearl’s malformed nature, noting that “The mother’s impassioned state had been the medium through which were transmitted to the unborn infant the rays of its moral life . . .” (91).9 If Hester Prynne’s lack of maternal instinct was problematic for Hawthorne’s nineteenth-century audience, her inability to discipline her growing child would be judged even more harshly. As Hester’s early encounter with Governor Bellingham suggests, such a failure of discipline would be sternly frowned upon in Puritan New England. But even those in Hawthorne’s own nineteenth-century culture who most elaborately celebrated the mother-child bond believed that children must be bent to the will of the mother. Lydia Sigourney writes, “Watch for the time when your little one first exhibits decided preferences, and aversions. The next letter in the alphabet is obedience” (Letters to Mothers 33). Sigourney goes even further, telling mothers to “Establish your will as the law” (33). While instilling obedience was emphasized in both colonial and antebellum America, the methodology of controlling children in these two eras was quite different, as Hawthorne himself notes:


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The discipline of the family, in [Puritan] days, was of a far more rigid kind than now. The frown, the harsh rebuke, the frequent application of the rod, enjoined by scriptural authority, were used not merely in the way of punishment for actual offenses, but as a wholesome regimen for growth and promotion of all childish virtues. (91)

Many in Hawthorne’s contemporary culture, including his sister-in-law Mary Peabody Mann and his wife Sophia, rejected corporal punishment, advocating, instead, a method that Richard Brodhead has aptly termed “disciplinary intimacy” (70).10 Using this method, a mother morally molds her child, not through physical discipline, but through the powers of “feminine affection.” By “enmeshing the child in strong bonds of love,” the mother is able to enforce her own “imperatives and norms” (Brodhead 74). Whether one measures Hester Prynne through the standards of her seventeenth-century world or those of Hawthorne’s nineteenth-century one, however, she is notoriously inept at the art of discipline. While the narrator tells us that Hester “ran little risk of erring on the side of undue severity” (and one senses that Hawthorne is glad of this), she equally fails at mobilizing the power of disciplinary intimacy (91). For although Hester “early sought to impose a tender, but strict, control over the infant immortality that was committed to her charge,” ultimately “the task was beyond her skill” (91–92). Hawthorne describes Hester’s final retreat to a policy of laissez faire, whereby she allows the child, as Sigourney warns against, to succumb to her own “preferences, and aversions” (Letters to Mothers 33). Hawthorne writes, “After testing both smiles and frowns, and proving that neither mode of treatment possessed any calculable influence, Hester was ultimately compelled to stand aside, and permit the child to be swayed by her own impulses” (92). Hester’s failure to discipline her child would, no doubt, be viewed in a negative light by the Governor Bellinghams of her community. For those in the grasp of sentimental idealism, however, the failure would be on an even grander scale. While Lydia Sigourney, for example, promises motherly readers “intuitive discernment” of a child’s “desires and impulses” and a native skill to bend the child to their own “purposes,” she also sees such intuitive teaching skills as definitive “proofs” of the mother’s “prerogative, and of the Divine Source, whence it emanates” (13–14). But Hester only finds Pearl’s nature and her relationship to her daughter “bewildering and baffling” (92). Like Ophelia in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Hester lacks the necessary bonds of affection with her ward to properly discipline. From a nineteenth-century perspective, Hester’s sins would be deemed even more egregious than Ophelia’s, however, since it is her own biological child whom she cannot control, and she will not, like Ophelia, ever learn the art of proper mothering. In fact, to sentimentalists of

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Lydia Sigourney’s ilk, Hester’s inability to discipline would be viewed as an unnatural lack of sanctified maternal “prerogative,” as an unholy absence of “feminine affection,” as a failure, ultimately, to properly love. Indeed, Hester herself views her relationship not only as separated from a divine source but from a perspective which harkens back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: “Brooding over all these matters, the mother felt like one who has evoked a spirit, but, by some irregularity in the process of conjuration, has failed to win the master-word that should control this new and incomprehensible intelligence” (93). Despite Hester’s failure to live up to the rigid ideals of the seventeenth or nineteenth century, and despite the narrator’s sometimes harsh judgment of Hester’s maternal ineptitude, the overall effect of Hawthorne’s narration is sympathetic. Hester is a tormented mother who eventually arrives at the point where she feels not a “moment’s safety; not a moment’s calm enjoyment,” except when her child is sleeping (96). From a purely biographical perspective, it is not difficult to determine the root of Hawthorne’s compassionate treatment of Hester. Struggling in a difficult relationship with his daughter Una, Hawthorne writes of his first born in terms strikingly similar to those he uses to describe Pearl: . . . there is something that almost frightens me about the child—I know not whether elfish or angelic, but, at all events, supernatural. She steps so boldly into the midst of everything, shrinks from nothing, . . . seems at times to have but little delicacy, and anon shows that she possesses the finest essence of it; now so hard, now so tender; now so perfectly unreasonable, soon again so wise. In short, I now and then catch an aspect of her, in which I cannot believe her to be my own human child, but a spirit strangely mingled with good and evil, haunting the house where I dwell. (C 8: 430–431)

Such personal experiences helped, no doubt, in Hawthorne’s sympathetic creation of a woman for whom motherhood does not come naturally.

THE “SOFTENING INFLUENCES” OF MATERNITY? If Dimmesdale is wrong about Hester’s “intuitive knowledge” of her child and about her abilities to bring Pearl up “to righteousness,” what, then, becomes of Dimmesdale’s promise of maternal reformation (114)? Can Pearl’s perverse spirit be the instrument of Hester’s conversion? Can innocence tutor experience? Some critics, like Margaret Thickston Olson, contend that Hester’s maternity keeps her “in line socially,” at the very least (137). Others, such as


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Joel Pfister and Edwin Haviland Miller, see nothing less than “redemption” in Hester’s motherhood. I would argue, however, that while the “softening influences” of maternity lead to tangible changes in Hester’s public behavior, Hawthorne remains skeptical about motherhood’s ability to transform the inner self. Through The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne challenges the disciplinary functions imagined as an inherent component of the maternal role. Whatever Hester’s internal state may be, her motherhood undeniably puts clear, effective controls on her actions as a citizen. While she may be a spiritual sister of Anne Hutchinson, Hester’s political activities are effectively curtailed by the birth of Pearl. Hawthorne writes: . . . had little Pearl never come to [Hester] from the spiritual world, it might have been far otherwise. Then, she might have come down to us in history, hand in hand with Anne Hutchinson, as the foundress of a religious sect. She might, in one of her phases, have been a prophetess. She might, and not improbably would, have suffered death from the stern tribunals of the period, for attempting to undermine the foundations of the Puritan establishment. (165)

A woman of revolutionary zeal, she is, nonetheless, constrained by the fact of her motherhood, which keeps her sequestered in a role that creates the appearance, at least, of “blameless purity” (160). Indeed, Hester’s maternity even translates to the public sphere in positive ways, as she practices a form of benevolent maternalism, extending her mothering to the populace at large. Through feeding the poor, caring for the sick, and bringing comfort to the dying, Hester becomes, according to Monika M. Elbert, “the Great Mother” of the community (183). Hester’s good works and her apparent conversion to the public good are, in fact, so dramatic that many in the community choose to read the scarlet letter that adorns Hester’s breast with new and sympathetic eyes: She was self-ordained a Sister of Mercy; or, we may rather say, the world’s heavy hand had so ordained her. . . . The letter was the symbol of her calling. Such helpfulness was found in her,—so much power to do, and power to sympathize,—that many people refused to interpret the scarlet A by its original signification. They said that it meant Able; so strong was Hester Prynne, with a woman’s strength. (161)

Thus, for a time, at least, Hester’s maternity keeps her within socially acceptable boundaries, and her maternal nature expands into a productive public role from which the community benefits.

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Given the narrator’s continued connection of Hutchinson and Prynne, however, Hester’s social reformation must be approached with skepticism. Anne Hutchinson chastised her Puritan leaders for their doctrine of works and hypothesized an indeterminable breach between public action and inner states of grace. Hawthorne suggests, too, that Hester’s own community might be misguided in reading Hester’s good deeds as proof that she is redeemed by her maternal roles. Indeed, her Puritan community, as Hawthorne teasingly suggests, might itself be “inclined to show its former victim a more benign countenance than she cared to be favored with, or, perchance, than she deserved” (162). The narrator of The Scarlet Letter offers provocative clues, suggesting that Hester’s transformational maternal role may be little more than a public façade. For example, in describing Hester as a “Sister of Mercy,” the narrator echoes a key moment from earlier in the text, telling us that Hester’s “breast, with its badge of shame, was but the softer pillow for the head that needed one” (161). The reader recalls, here, that Hawthorne’s hostile federal eagle was also imagined by the public as having a “bosom” with “all the softness and snugness of an eider-down pillow” (5). The possibility of female duplicity—and the danger of sentimental misreading—is indeed palpable when, for example, the narrator tells us that Hester’s reticence to interact with the public might very well “be pride,” but is innocently read by the “public mind” as “Humility” (162). Outer appearances, Hawthorne suggests, rarely match inward states, and those who are most intellectually radical “conform with the most perfect quietude to the external regulations of society” (164).11 Many critics, including David Leverenz, see Hester’s maternity as fostering a socially circumscribed, “conventional” womanhood (265). But the narrator reveals quite the opposite; in her role as personal and communal mother, she has actually lost her feminine nature. Motherhood revokes rather than confers womanhood on Hester: All the light and graceful foliage of her character had been withered up by this red-hot brand, and had long fallen away, leaving a bare and harsh outline, which might have been repulsive, had she possessed friends or companions to be repelled by it. (163)

Although she evinces the appearance of “human tenderness” and a “warm and rich” nature for the community, the truth is revealed in Hester’s face, where there is “no longer any thing . . . for Love to dwell upon” (163). “Some attribute had departed from her,” the narrator continues, “the permanence of which had been essential to keep her a woman” (163).12 Finally, bringing home the image of the hostile federal eagle’s deceptive eider-down


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breast, Hawthorne writes that there was, in fact, “[N]othing in Hester’s bosom, to make it ever again the pillow of Affection” (163). Despite her public good works, Hester—like Hawthorne’s federal eagle—has a violent potential that goes unrecognized by the community. Her motherly role in society, in fact, masks a radicalism that Hawthorne suggests is dangerous even in its theoretical form. Hawthorne writes of Hester: The world’s law was no law for her mind. It was an age in which the human intellect, newly emancipated, had taken a more active and wider range than for many centuries before. Men of the sword had overthrown nobles and kings. Men bolder than these had overthrown and rearranged—not actually, but within the sphere of theory, which was the most real abode—the whole system of ancient prejudice, wherewith was linked much of ancient principle. Hester Prynne imbibed the spirit. She assumed a freedom of speculation, then common enough on the other side of the Atlantic, but which our forefathers, had they known of it, would have held deadlier crime than that stigmatized by the scarlet letter. In her lonesome cottage, by the sea-shore, thoughts visited her, such as dared to enter no other dwelling in New England; shadowy guests, that would have been as perilous as demons to their entertainer, could they have been seen so much as knocking at her door. (164)

With the violence of the European revolutions of 1848 still fresh in their minds, Hawthorne’s nineteenth-century audience would undoubtedly read Hester’s subterranean radicalism as an ominous sign. While her biological and social maternity keeps Hester from an actively radical stance, in the “most real abode” in Hawthorne’s view, in the “sphere of theory,” Hester is as potentially dangerous as the federal eagle (164). In her “circle of seclusion” with Pearl, Hester’s latent violence looms near at times, as she sublimates her radical energies into raising Pearl: “[I]n the education of her child,” Hawthorne writes, “the mother’s enthusiasm of thought had something to wreak itself upon” (165). Lost in the “dark labyrinth of mind,” Hester’s motherly ruminations turn, at times, violently against the child (166). “[I]n bitterness of heart,” she considers whether “it were for ill or good” that her child “had been born at all” (165). Hawthorne later adds, “At times a fearful doubt strove to possess her soul, whether it were not better to send Pearl at once to heaven, and go herself to such futurity as Eternal Justice should provide” (166). While Hester’s murderous thoughts again connect her to the federal eagle, Hawthorne mitigates harsh judgments of the mother. Hester is never portrayed as maliciously hostile;

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rather, she is a lost soul in an unsympathetic world, wandering “without a clew” (166).

THE “IRON LINK” Pearl, who is the scarlet letter incarnate, has given Hester the ostensibly redemptive role of motherhood. However, the narrator reports approximately three-quarters of the way through the main body of Hawthorne’s text, “The scarlet letter had not done its office” (166). Despite Hester’s “life of purity,” her maternity, her role as “Sister of Mercy,” she has not been reformed and has had no moment of grace or conversion. If Hester is not essentially “mother,” from where, then, does the rich and sympathetic fullness of Hester’s character come? In quiet but consistent ways that build throughout the narrative, Hawthorne portrays Hester as a woman whose animus is not derived through motherhood but from wholly different sources—from sources that actually compete for Hester’s maternal capital. Beginning with her loyal refusal to reveal the identity of Pearl’s father, Hawthorne points to the love of a man—not the love of a child—as the transformative agent in Hester’s life. Pitting Hester’s sexual and maternal natures against each other, Hawthorne clearly challenges a nineteenth-century sentimental ideology that narrowly defines female subjectivity through the role of motherhood. Throughout The Scarlet Letter, Hester’s decisions are driven by her romantic affections, not her maternal ones. When, for example, Hester decides to remain in New England despite the torment of her persecutors, she does so primarily to maintain proximity to Dimmesdale, “with whom she deemed herself connected in a union” (80). While in an attempt at penitence, Hester tries to “bar” the hope of reunion with the minister “in its dungeon,” the thought crawls, “like a serpent from its hole,” to her consciousness (80). David Leverenz argues, “While the narrator seeks to shift Hester’s ground from radical thought and sexual intimacy to more acceptable maternal love, Hester’s tenacious affirmation of her continuously punished union holds fast . . .” (265). Her emotional alliance with Dimmesdale is, however, more and less than “sexual intimacy”; in the time frame of the novel’s action, Hester and Dimmesdale are never lovers. While passion for the minister lies simmering in Hester’s breast, the “iron link” that connects her to Dimmesdale is also a product of their shared secrets, their shared guilt, and, of course, their shared relationship to the difficult and divisive daughter their union has produced. Hester, finally, cannot imagine a future without the minister, even if that future is in hell, where she is willing to “make their marriage-altar, for a joint futurity of endless retribution” (80).


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In her public state of penitence, Hester manages to maintain a selfenforced separation from Dimmesdale, languishing in her single-minded but unsuccessful motherhood. However, the narrator has promised that Hester, who has, in effect, “ceased to be a woman,” will “become a woman again,” if provided with “the magic touch to effect the transfiguration” (164). When, after seven years separation, Hester accidentally meets Dimmesdale on the very site of her earlier shame, the woman’s transfiguration is set in motion. On the scaffold, father, mother, and child are revealed as a family—as people “who belong to one another” (154). For Hester, though, it is her personal reunion with Dimmesdale that radically refigures her world. In her meeting with the minister, Hester’s “whole soul” is “moved” by the condition of the “poor, fallen man” (159). Enfeebled by his own guilt, the minister has also lucklessly fallen prey to the vengeful machinations of Hester’s husband Roger Chillingworth—Dimmesdale’s “instinctively discovered enemy” (159). Shocked at the physical and spiritual decay evidenced in her life partner, Hester’s sympathies are engaged in a way that they have not been in her role as a mother. All of the woman’s dormant instincts of love—the ability to sympathize, the desire to protect, the willingness to sacrifice—are reawakened by Dimmesdale on the pillory: She decided . . . that [Dimmesdale] had a right to her utmost aid. Little accustomed, in her long seclusion from society, to measure her ideas of right and wrong by any standard external to herself, Hester saw—or seemed to see—that there lay a responsibility upon her, in reference to the clergyman, which she owed to no other, nor to the whole world besides. The links that united her to the rest of human kind—links of flowers, or silk, or gold, or whatever the material—had all been broken. Here was the iron link of mutual crime, which neither he nor she could break. Like all other ties, it brought along with it an obligation. (159–160)

While she has not found satisfaction or redemption in her role as mother, the rescue of Dimmesdale is a job she can wholeheartedly embrace, as she finds in him “an object that appeared worthy of any exertion and sacrifice for its attainment (166). If mothering has been a fruitless trial, saving Dimmesdale seems to Hester worthy of great effort. The woman resolves to “do what might be in her power” to rescue Dimmesdale—body and soul (167). Hester’s extra-marital union is destined to come into conflict with the Puritan community. It must, too, clash with her motherhood. Whether one

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views Pearl, as Evan Carton does, as “a relentless agent of the Puritan order” or whether one views her, more simply, as a daughter who has enjoyed the sole attentions of her mother, she is bound to be a stumbling block to Hester’s illicit love (129). As the romance arcs to its close, Hawthorne pits mother love against love for a man, presenting a problem for those who would read Hester’s maternity in simplistic, sentimental terms. In a critical episode leading up to Hester’s reunion with Dimmesdale in the forest, Hawthorne’s heroine explicitly chooses her illegal union over the promise of redemption through her child. Through his characterization of Hester, then, Hawthorne challenges the cultural efficacy of disciplining women through the institution of motherhood and imagines an unruly female subjectivity unbound by the parameters of an essential, maternal nature.

HESTER’S CHOICE Little critical attention has been paid to the moral test at the heart of Hawthorne’s novel—a test in which Hester must accept or reject a crucial measure of redemptive intimacy proffered by her child Pearl. The mother’s trial begins during a walk by the seashore during which her young daughter adorns herself with a bit of green seaweed shaped to mirror Hester’s scarlet “A.” To Pearl, the symbol upon her mother’s chest is somehow an element of her nature, something, perhaps, that might be understood and accepted. Pearl’s own modeled letter—“freshly green instead of scarlet,”—suggests the girl’s potential to naturalize the symbol of her mother’s shame. Moved and intrigued by the sight of Pearl in her costume, Hester questions her daughter, asking, “ . . . dost though know, my child, what this letter means which thy mother is doomed to wear?” (178). Incapable of satisfactorily answering her mother, Pearl, in a gesture of probing honesty and confidence, asks her mother “in good earnest” the meaning of the letter (179). The moment of intimacy, in which Pearl takes “her mother’s hand in both her own, and gaze[s] into her eyes” leads Hester to contemplate her daughter’s character, allowing her to see beyond the limits of Pearl’s perverse and difficult nature: “The thought occurred to Hester, that the child might really be seeking to approach her with childlike confidence, and doing what she could, and as intelligently as she knew how, to establish a meeting-point of sympathy. It showed Pearl in an unwonted aspect” (179). For the first time, Hester sees the positive potential in her relationship with her daughter and speculates if Pearl might not now “be made a friend, and intrusted with . . . her mother’s sorrows” (179–180). Recognizing “sterling attributes” such as an “unflinching courage” and a “sturdy pride” in her daughter, Hester


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looks into the future and imagines a “noble woman” growing from the “elfish child” (180). The promise of relationship Hawthorne here articulates goes beyond a connection between mother and daughter and suggests the redemptive brand of intimacy that the Puritan community had hoped for when they authorized Hester’s maternal role. The mother herself now contemplates the possibility that Pearl, in addition to being God’s means of retribution, might also be a vehicle of salvation and grace. Hawthorne writes: Pearl’s inevitable tendency to hover about the enigma of the scarlet letter seemed an innate quality of her being. . . . Hester had often fancied that Providence had a design of justice and retribution, in endowing the child with this marked propensity; but never, until now, had she bethought herself to ask, whether, linked with that design, there might not likewise be a purpose of mercy and beneficence. If little Pearl were entertained with faith and trust, as a spirit-messenger no less than an earthly child, might it not be her errand to soothe away the sorrow that lay cold in her mother’s heart, and converted it into a tomb?—and to help her to overcome the passion, once so wild, and even yet neither dead nor asleep, but only imprisoned within the same tomb-like heart. (180)

Here, Hester seriously considers the possibility of true relationship between herself and her daughter and considers accepting the saving grace of motherhood that might turn her “A” from scarlet to a natural green. Arriving at a key moment of her moral life, Hester weighs the value of her relationship with her daughter against its costs. As the narrator indicates, Hester interprets her daughter’s proffered intimacy as an instrument to “help her . . . overcome the passion” she has for Arthur Dimmesdale (180). And in the end, Hester decides that the cost of a true mother-daughter bond is too high. As Pearl continues probing her mother about the meaning of the scarlet letter, Hester decisively rejects her daughter’s overtures of intimacy. Pondering silently on how to respond to Pearl’s inquiries, the woman abruptly and violently concludes, “No! if this be the price of the child’s sympathy, I cannot pay it!” (181). If entering into relationship with her daughter means soothing away the “passion” for Dimmesdale that is “imprisoned” within her heart, Hester wants no part of it (180). For the first time ever, the mother is “false to the symbol on her bosom,” and tells her child that she wears it “for the sake of its gold thread!” (181). Hester’s new resolve—her single-minded commitment to her passion—erupts in uncharacteristically violent ways. As Pearl intuits her

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mother’s disingenuousness, she relentlessly bombards Hester with questions about the letter and the minister—at times with a knowing “mischief” shining in her eyes (181). But the narrator reveals that “some new evil” has crept into Hester’s heart or “some old one” that “had never been expelled” (181). While the mother may not use her talons like the federal eagle, she makes a menacing display of her claws at the very least. With “an asperity that she had never permitted herself before,” the mother lashes out, warning, “Hold thy tongue, naughty child!” (181). Ominously threatening Pearl, Hester warns, “Do not tease me; else I shall shut thee into the dark closet” (181). The ever-judgmental narrator does not even deem it necessary to comment on Hester’s discipline. The chapter, which has begun with the promise of redemptive intimacy between mother and daughter, ends with the rancor of Hester’s cruel threat hanging in the air. Hester’s choice of an illicit love over a conventional and socially sanctioned motherhood is the defining moral moment of The Scarlet Letter, one that is textually analogous to Huck’s decision to support Jim in Huckleberry Finn. Indeed, both Hester and Huck will risk social exile and even the pain of Hell to remain faithful to a loved one.13 Hester’s restrictive society has tried to coerce her to sublimate her passions into acceptable, maternal forms, but she chooses to honor what is most sacred to her own soul—her relationship with a man to whom “she deemed her self connected in a union” (80). Hester’s meeting with Dimmesdale in the forest dramatizes the exceptional nature of her womanhood. While sentimentalists of Sigourney’s ilk typified a woman’s maternal love as an “element of nature,” Hawthorne portrays Hester’s strong and abiding love for a man as the elemental force in her life (Letters to Mothers 46). Rather than retreating to the sentimental conventions of benevolent maternalism with which Stowe imbues her female characters, Hawthorne offers a vision of a strong female subjectivity that transcends the role of motherhood. In fact, in her meeting with Dimmesdale in the forest, Hester will regain her womanhood—not through her maternal nature— but by asserting a distinctly Emersonian individualism. And whatever the narrator’s criticisms of Hester may be—and there are many—Hawthorne allows Nature itself to endorse Hester’s loving and passionate commitment to Arthur Dimmesdale and the counter-culture stance that it necessitates. 14

FINDING “THE VERY HEART OF WOMANHOOD” Hawthorne prepares the canvas for Hester’s radical reunion with Dimmesdale by establishing Nature’s view of Hester and Pearl, demonstrating


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quite literally that the sun does not shine on the mother-child relationship. Walking with her mother towards the forest, little Pearl taunts her mother with her exclusion from Nature’s grace, “Mother . . . the sunshine does not love you. It runs away and hides itself, because it is afraid of something on your bosom. . . .”(183). As Pearl plays in the dappled sun that shines through the forest, Hester tries to enter her daughter’s privileged space. She cannot, however, gain admittance into her own child’s “magic circle,” and when she attempts to do so, “the sunshine vanishe[s]” (184). Although Hester is excluded from her child’s Nature-blessed circle, when finally alone with Dimmesdale in the forest, she happily finds herself and her partner “inhabitant[s] of the same sphere” (190). Re-awakened and recommitted to the man whom the narrator now overtly reports that she “still so passionately loved,” Hester is set free from the bonds of her society (193). Like the Antinomian Anne Hutchinson, Hester rejects the authority of public judgments and stands as the lone arbiter of her soul’s state. Personally sanctifying what society has termed adultery and sin, Hester reminds Dimmesdale, “What we did had a consecration of its own. We felt it so! We said it so to each other” (195).15 While the narrator may judge Hester harshly for her failure to stay within acceptable boundaries, Nature, as we shall see, shines brightly on her true self. Just as Hester is able to slip the bonds of society’s sexual mores in the forest, so, too, will she slip her culture’s circumscribed gender boundaries. In playing the traditional role of masculine hero to the feminized Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, Hester transcends the narrow cultural limits of female subjectivity. Tormented by his own duplicitous life and by his persecution at the hands of Chillingworth, Dimmesdale looks to her for protection and guidance: “Think for me, Hester! Thou art strong, Resolve for me!” (196). Here, Hester reveals herself to be what Michael Davitt Bell calls an “Emersonian genius” (177), urging her lover to “leave it all behind” and to “Begin all anew!” (198). Hester’s solution takes a shape that, in the American literary tradition, has been identified as quintessentially masculine. Recommending a lighting “out for the Territory” (Clemens 229) of sorts, a re-invention of self, Hester says to Dimmesdale: Hast thou exhausted possibility in the future of this one trial? Not so! The future is yet to be full of trial and success. There is happiness to be enjoyed! There is good to be done! Exchange this false life of thine for a true one. Be, if thy spirit summon thee to such a mission, the teacher and apostle of the red man. Or,—as is more thy nature,—be a scholar and a sage among the wisest and the most renowned of

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Negotiating Motherhood in Nineteenth-Century American Literature the cultivated world. Preach! Write! Act! Do anything save lie down and die! Give up this name of Arthur Dimmesdale, and make thyself another, and a high one, such as thou canst wear without fear or shame. (198)

Hawthorne imagines this lighting “out for the Territory” with a difference, though. While Huck’s flight means running from the “sivilizing” world associated with the women in his life—Hester radically suggests that she will flee with Dimmesdale. “Thou shalt not go alone,” she tells her feeble and distraught lover (198). Hester imagines slipping the bonds of her society with her outlaw union intact. While Hester’s commitment to human connections might be typical of female, nineteenth-century literary figures—her willingness to throw off the yoke of society—her brave imaginings of some future, better life disconnected from the domestic world she knows sets her radically apart. Hester is not exactly transformed by her encounter with Dimmesdale; she has, in fact, come into her own nature—a nature that could not be fulfilled in her role as mother. Hawthorne writes, “the whole seven years of outlaw and ignominy had been little more than a preparation for this hour” (200). What is most dramatic about Hawthorne’s portrait is that he imagines Hester’s womanhood as immanent precisely in her revolutionary, counter-culture stance—in an Emersonian assertion of self, traditionally gendered male in nineteenth-century culture. While the path of motherhood might be the socially acceptable role for Hester, her renegade reunion with the man she loves restores her former feminine glory. Removing the scarlet letter and letting down her luxurious hair for Dimmesdale, Hester regains “the very heart of womanhood” that she had lost in her years as mother and sister of mercy: “Her sex, her youth, and the whole richness of her beauty, came back from what men call the irrevocable past, and clustered themselves, with her maiden hope, and a happiness before unknown, within the magic circle of this hour” (202). And while Hawthorne’s narrator may be reticent to sanction the lovers’ moment of joy, “that wild, heathen Nature” implicitly endorses Hester and Dimmesdale’s new covenant: And, as if the gloom of the earth and sky had been but the effluence of these two mortal hearts, it vanished with their sorrow. All at once, as with a sudden smile of heaven, forth burst the sunshine, pouring a very flood into the obscure forest. . . . The course of the little brook might be traced by its merry gleam afar into the wood’s heart of mystery, which had become a mystery of joy. (202–203)


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For one fragile moment, Hester and Dimmesdale find happiness and the blessing of Nature that had eluded Hester and Pearl. But the moment is only possible in the absence of their daughter. As Pearl—“the oneness of their being”—comes back into Hester’s consciousness, she hopes, at first, that the child will bless their union (207). Looking up at Dimmesdale with “the thrill of another joy,” Hester says to the minister, “Thou must know Pearl! . . . Our little Pearl!” (203). Despite Hester’s optimism that she can balance the competing demands of her child and the man she loves to create a family from her illegal union, it is not meant to be. As T. Walter Herbert suggests, the “spiritual communion” of Hester and Dimmesdale “is checked by the offspring that its enactment produces” (207). Hester cannot reclaim her daughter and her maternal role without giving up her Nature-blessed womanhood. As Hester calls for Pearl to return to her side, the essential conflict between her roles as lover and mother is revealed. Separated from her daughter by a brook, Hester senses herself “estranged from Pearl,” feeling as if the child “had strayed out of the sphere in which she and her mother dwelt together, and was now vainly seeking to return to it” (208). Hester’s feelings for Dimmesdale are a violation and a threat to Pearl—an impingement on her place and her rights as a daughter. Stating that the estrangement is “Hester’s fault, not Pearl’s,” the narrator continues, Since [Pearl] had rambled from [Hester’s] side, another inmate had been admitted within the circle of the mother’s feelings, and so modified the aspect of them all, that Pearl, the returning wanderer, could not find her wonted place, and hardly knew where she was. (208)

As Nina Baym points out, the brook-side scene dramatizes the fundamental “need of the child to possess the mother all to herself” (“Hawthorne and his Mother” 23). Refusing to accept that “the mother is no longer merely and entirely her mother” (Baym 23), Pearl throws a wild tantrum and refuses to come to Hester’s side until she has reapplied the letter of her shame, removed the minister from Pearl’s “wonted place,” and resumed—at least in form—the exclusive role of motherhood. Many critics read Hester’s final capitulation to Pearl—her returning of the scarlet letter to her breast—as a response to her daughter’s needs, as an acceptance, finally, of the limits of motherhood as the acceptable boundaries of her life.16 I would argue, however, that to the extent that Hester does capitulate to Pearl’s desires, she does so for the sake of a near-hysterical Dimmesdale, not for her child. The minister, in fact, is filled with angst as soon

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as he sees Pearl across the brook, and he imagines his daughter as an otherworldly presence. Inexperienced and inept in his own parenthood and desiring his anxiety to be assuaged, the minister calls Hester into maternal service: “Pray hasten her; for this delay has already imparted a tremor to my nerves” (208). Although the narrator reports that the mother, under ordinary circumstances, is “inured” to Pearl’s willful behavior, here, with Dimmesdale present, she is “anxious for a more seemly deportment” (209). Hester harshly calls to her daughter to “Hasten” and threatens her with the wages of maternal anger (209). As Pearl’s behavior moves from belligerence to an outright “fit of passion,” Hester intuits Dimmesdale’s meager resources as a parent and how his anxiety threatens to break their intimate connection (210). When Pearl’s tantrum reaches new heights, the minister begs Hester, “I know nothing that I would not sooner encounter than this passion in a child” (210). Resorting to hysterical ultimatum, he cries to Hester, “Pacify her, if thou lovest me!” (210). As David Leverenz has noted, Dimmesdale’s “if” “is both a bargain and a threat” (266). For the minister will judge the quality of Hester’s love for him based on her ability to discipline—on her willingness to be a “good” mother to Pearl. Hester’s final capitulation—her reapplication of the scarlet letter upon her breast—might fulfill her daughter’s psychological needs, but Hester acts primarily in response to Dimmesdale’s hysterical demands. Amy Lang writes that in calling her mother to re-apply the scarlet letter by the brook-side, Pearl “recalls Hester to her irrevocable femaleness, to motherhood, and thus to the social world” (184). I would argue, however, that the central innovation of Hawthorne’s ending is that when Hester does take up the mantle of her motherhood again, she loses all that has been glorious about her female nature. In a moment of relinquishing womanhood, Hester reapplies her scarlet letter and gathers “up the heavy tresses of her hair” (211). Nature itself frowns on the transaction. When Hester reapplies the scarlet “A,” the narrator reports, “As if there were a withering spell in the sad letter, her beauty, the warmth and richness of her womanhood, departed, like fading sunshine; and a gray shadow seemed to fall across her” (211). Revealing an almost cannibalistic hunger of child for mother, Pearl is calmed and placated by Hester’s diminished beauty and vitality. She joyously exclaims, “Now thou art my mother indeed!” And I am thy little Pearl” (211). Rejecting his culture’s maternal essentialism, Hawthorne here depicts the motherhood of Hester Prynne as a destructive force that threatens to rob the woman of her feminine nature. While Hester tries desperately to believe that her transformation is a necessary but temporary one—that she must “bear her torture . . . only a few days longer”—at a deeper level, “A sense of inevitable doom is upon her” (211). The promised reunion with Dimmesdale will never come to pass.


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“THAT FAR VISTA OF UNSYMPATHIZING . . . THOUGHTS” For those critics who read The Scarlet Letter as a paean to motherhood, the ending of the romance seems, finally, to validate that “Divine Image of Maternity” that Hawthorne introduces at the beginning of the book. Hester, who has ostensibly been restored to her maternal role at the brook-side, seems to grow even further into the stature of her motherhood. For in the final tableau on the pillory, as Dimmesdale lies dying after publicly claiming his family, Hester “supports his head against her bosom,” creating, in her embrace, a living image of the Pieta (225). But this final family portrait, like many of Hawthorne’s images, is deceptive, for Hester holds not a dying child in her arms, but the man she loves. Until the end, Hester’s primary commitment is not to her motherhood but to her union with the minister. And, as I will argue, if there is any “icon” of sentimental maternity at the end The Scarlet Letter, it is, oddly enough, the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale himself. While Hester remains true to the illegal covenant between herself and her spiritual partner, it is the minister who orchestrates a sentimentally satisfying ending, reestablishing the bonds of the traditional family unit. But Dimmesdale, whose moral hypocrisy is well documented throughout The Scarlet Letter, actually breaches his pledge to Hester in the very act of publicly claiming her as his own.17 In his narrative of Election Day, Hawthorne brings the hypocritical space between the minister’s public and private personas into its sharpest focus. Finding himself at the height of his public career, Dimmesdale emotes with the sentimental eloquence by which he first insured Hester’s maternal rights at the Governor’s hall. Describing the minister’s voice, the narrator says, “it breathed passion and pathos, and emotions high or tender, in a tongue native to the human heart, wherever educated” (243). Hester, however, standing apart in her “magic circle” of ignominy, is painfully separated from Dimmesdale, who is “so unattainable in his worldly position, and still more so in that far vista of his unsympathizing thoughts” (240). While he “sheds down a shower of golden truths” upon the crowd (249), Hester hears quite a different meaning in his sermon—a meaning specifically “for her” (243). While the narrator is silent on the secret message in the minister’s sermon, the reader clearly understands it through the final pillory scene; Dimmesdale has no intention of fleeing across the ocean with Hester as promised. Intuiting his disloyalty, Hester can “scarcely forgive him . . . for being able so completely to withdraw himself from their mutual world” (240). The cost of Dimmesdale’s sentimental success—his wildly popular, “universal” rhetoric of “golden truths”—is being distant and false to the most important person in his life.

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From “the very proudest eminence of superiority,” Dimmesdale will break his personal covenant with Hester, choosing instead the public confession and repentance that he believes will save his soul (249). Calling Hester and Pearl to his side, he compels the woman to again mount the pillory of public shame and to accept the socially-sanctioned domestic order: “Is not this better . . . than what we dreamed of in the forest?” (254). The Antinomian Hester, however, who believes in the sanctity of her illicit love and wants neither public confession nor forgiveness, remains unconvinced. “I know not! I know not!” she cries (254). In one sense, Dimmesdale makes Hester again claim her socially-sanctioned maternal role on the pillory. At another level, however, the feminized minister—who has now revealed “the red stigma” on his own breast—takes the role of sanctified maternity for his own. Jane Tompkins writes that American culture’s “favorite story about itself” is “the story of salvation through motherly love” (125). As Dimmesdale lies mortally ill on the scaffold, he will inhabit this traditionally female role by supplying the redemptive grace for his daughter Pearl that Hester’s own maternity has failed to provide. Hawthorne writes, Pearl kissed his lips. A spell was broken. The great scene of grief, in which the wild infant bore a part, had developed all her sympathies; and as her tears fell upon her father’s cheek, they were the pledge that she would grow up amid human joy and sorrow, nor for ever do battle with the world, but be a woman in it. (256)

In his publicly righteous dying, Dimmesdale not only provides for the calming conversion of his daughter’s spirit but also for her proper socialization as a woman—a proper socialization that Hester has resisted throughout the romance. But once again, Dimmesdale, in his sentimentally elevated stature, will leave his lover far behind. Hester, who remains painfully hopeful and consistently faithful, even on the pillory, will soon learn how distant she is from Dimmesdale in that “far vista of his unsympathizing thoughts.” Eschewing public judgments, focusing on what she sees as the sacred bond between herself and the man that she loves, she plots her reunion with Dimmesdale in the afterlife: “Shall we not meet again? . . . Shall we not spend our immortal life together? Surely, surely, we have ransomed one another, with all this woe!” (256). Dimmesdale silences Hester, though, imploring, “Hush Hester, hush!” (256). Here, Dimmesdale reverts to conventional prescriptions, telling Hester that only their sin and the broken law should be in her thoughts. While in the forest the minister claimed that in their love, they had never “violated the sanctity of a human


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heart,” here on the pillory, he recants: “I fear! I fear! It may be, that when we forgot our God,—when we violated our reverence for each others soul,—it was thenceforth vain to hope we could meet hereafter, in an everlasting and pure reunion” (256). Having thus repudiated their sacred union, Dimmesdale dies in “triumphant ignominy,” disavowing his sin and praising God’s name (257). Whatever Dimmesdale’s misdeeds may be, he—like the dead mothers in domestic novels of Hawthorne’s day—will attain a kind of sainthood through death. In Hester’s community, “highly respected witnesses” will vow that there was no “red stigma” on the minister’s breast and—more importantly—no admission of guilt on his part. These public witnesses will sentimentally read Dimmesdale’s death in the arms of a fallen woman, twisting it into a moral lesson of sorts: “After exhausting life in his efforts for mankind’s spiritual good, [Dimmesdale] had made the manner of his death a parable, in order to impress on his admirers the mighty and mournful lesson, that, in the view of Infinite Purity, we are sinners all alike” (259). Despite proofs “clear as the midday sunshine on the scarlet letter” that mark Dimmesdale as a “false and sin-stained creature,” for those swayed by Dimmesdale’s holy façade, the minister’s canonization prevails (259). Hawthorne suggests that to simplistically sentimentalize is to dangerously flirt with untruth.

“A MORE REAL LIFE” A danger exists in sentimentalizing Hester’s final outcome as well. After fleeing with Pearl to Europe where she establishes her daughter comfortably, Hester returns to New England, resumes wearing the scarlet letter, and assumes the role of a community counselor. Most critics have interpreted Hester’s terminal movement in the romance as acquiescence to Puritan values and a conformation to acceptable social roles. Sacvan Bercovitch broadly reads Hester’s return to New England as part of a process of political closure—an acquiescence to the will of her community—and a symbol of the possibility of pluralist consensus. In a more narrowly focused analysis, Monika Elbert sees Hester’s homecoming as a socially sanctioned return to benevolent maternalism. Elbert argues that Hester transfers her ministrations from Pearl to other needy women in her community, becoming a communal mother of sorts (182). However, a careful look at Hester’s endgame—her return to her homeland—actually reveals a continued rejection of social norms and a willful eschewing of the maternal role. In Europe, Hester’s daughter has married well. Although Pearl “would most joyfully have entertained that sad and lonely mother at her fireside,” Hester, true to her own spirit, refuses to continue in the role of mother (262). Even though Dimmesdale lies dead and buried, the

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narrator suggests that there is “a more real life for Hester Prynne . . . in New England” (262). And so to claim that life, she returns to the place of her “sin” and “sorrow,” willfully divested of her motherhood (263). Once again in New England, she begins to work in her community with those suffering from “sorrow and perplexity” (263). Hester’s role of counselor is most definitely not maternal in nature, however, for she does not feed the hungry or minister to the sick, or work as a social harmonizer in her community. Instead, she specifically ministers to those who have suffered for their sexual natures—for the passions in their lives. The narrator states: Women, more especially,—in the continually recurring trials of wounded, wasted, wronged, misplaced, or erring and sinful passion,—or with the dreary burden of a heart unyielded, because unvalued and unsought,— came to Hester’s cottage, demanding why they were so wretched, and what the remedy. (263)

Hester has not achieved the status of an Anne Hutchinson, but she remains a bold and powerful rebel nonetheless. She promises the women a better future—a future that she radically envisions forged on the bonds of man and woman, not woman and child: “She assured them, too, of her firm belief, that, at some brighter period, when the world should grow ripe for it, in Heaven’s own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness” (263). While Hester herself admits that she cannot be the “destined prophetess” of the coming revelation, it is not, as many critics have suggested, proof of either her penitence or her repudiation of her former life: The angel and apostle of the coming revelation must be a woman, indeed, but lofty, pure, and beautiful; and wise, moreover, not through dusky grief, but the ethereal medium of joy; and showing how sacred love should make us happy, by the truest test of a life successful to such an end! (263)

In this concession, Hester does not repudiate her own transgressive, “sacred” love. Here, she admits only that given the social constraints of her culture, she is unable to translate the passions of her heart into a happy life. Although Hester has wisdom enough to spare, she cannot stand as an example of a “successful” life of sacred love, for all of Hester’s lessons have been learned through grief, rather than joy. One final question then remains: why, on her return to the colonies, does Hester resume wearing her scarlet letter? Like many critics, Amy Lang sees Hester’s resumption of the letter as “a renunciation of her sinful past” (189).


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More elaborately, Sacvan Bercovitch claims that Hester’s return to New England and her reapplication of the letter represents “the need for law and the limits of free will” (14). These readings are compelling, but they are only valid if the meaning of Hester’s scarlet “A” has a constant value in Hawthorne’s romance—if the “A,” in fact, retains the shameful significance that the Puritan fathers had originally intended for it. However, as Hawthorne makes clear throughout the work, the symbol is subject to ever-changing interpretations. As the story draws to a close, we know that the letter is no longer associated with the retributive existence of Pearl whose “errand as a messenger of anguish was all fulfilled” (256). The scarlet letter is no longer “a stigma which attracted the world’s scorn and bitterness”; those members of the community who interpret the symbol on Hester’s bosom now see it as “a type of something to be sorrowed over, and looked upon with awe, yet with reverence too” (263). I would argue, though, that Hester does not reapply the letter for any meaning—punitive or otherwise—that the symbol holds for the community. Rather, the Antinomian Hester takes up the letter because of the inner, private meaning it holds for her. On Election Day, Dimmesdale publicly confessed his connection with Hester, and revealed the shared mark of their secret guilt on his breast. Hester thus resumes the scarlet letter—not as a sign of acquiescence or repudiation—but as a symbol of her history and of her continued connection to the man she has so faithfully loved. Finally, Hester is buried, not with her child, but with the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale. Although Hester may never achieve her longed-for reunion with the minister in the afterlife, as Gloria Erlich eloquently notes, “What life has sundered, symbolism and words have reunited” (32). For in death, Dimmesdale and Hester lie beneath a single memorial: a gravestone embellished with a scarlet “A.” Although a gap lies between the bodies of Hester and Dimmesdale—symbolizing, no doubt, the space created by their daughter Pearl—in the end, “one tombstone” serves for Hester and the man she loved. Finally, the scarlet “A” is a symbol of Hester’s and Dimmesdale’s tormented but lasting union. Judith Fryer has commented that the adulterous Hester is so gloriously wrought, so humanely and sympathetically rendered by her creator that “it is difficult to determine where Hawthorne’s sympathies lie” (107). Ultimately, though, while Hawthorne imbues Hester’s revolutionary spirit with a moving beauty, he refuses to take a naïve view of either the personal or societal costs of the woman’s transgressions. For Hester, like most other characters in Hawthorne’s work, is manipulated and diminished by cultural forces outside of her control. In the author’s world, one’s past can never be

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eluded; the needs and desires of the individual will always come into conflict with the requirements of society, and while one may place hope in true change—true reform—such things are always elusive, always in the realm of some distant future. In her personal, sorrow-filled life, Hester cannot escape the moral physics of Hawthorne’s universe. As a literary figure, however, Hester does, indeed, challenge and transcend the narrow essentialism of nineteenth-century domestic culture. Despite the expectations of the sentimental Dimmesdale and his Puritan admirers—despite the expectations of Hawthorne’s nineteenth-century audience—Hester can neither be defined nor contained by her motherhood. While The Scarlet Letter elaborates “cultural strategies of control,” as Sacvan Bercovitch argues, Hawthorne ultimately imagines maternal discipline as a failure (xvii). And although Hester Prynne chooses romantic love over maternal obligation, she is not vilified by Hawthorne. In her imperfect maternity, Hester never morally regresses to the stature of the cruel, matronly goodwives who brutally condemn her in the opening pages of the book; she never succumbs to the temptations of the witch, Mistress Hibbins; she never enacts the potential violence suggested by the federal eagle. Indeed, while Hawthorne’s narrator is as judgmental of Hester as he is of the iron-willed Puritans, Hawthorne allows Nature itself to endorse the woman’s iconoclastic spirit. Hester powerfully commands the reader’s sympathy, despite falling woefully short of the maternal ideals of Hawthorne’s sentimental culture. Ann Douglas argues that sentimentalism “always borders on dishonesty” (12). Through the duplicitous Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, Hawthorne expresses a more tempered wariness of that “native language of the heart.” In one sense, the minister plays foil to the Antinomian Hester. In his death, Dimmesdale succeeds where Hester fails—“saving” his daughter’s soul through maternalistic sacrifice and gaining sainthood in the eyes of many in his community. However, the minister—whose inner and outer moral states are so painfully disconnected—will, in the end, undermine the superficial ideality of the sentimental. Hawthorne insists, ultimately, that society’s highest values cannot be reduced to Dimmesdale’s simple, feelgood, “golden truths.” Hester’s nature as a woman, then, is no more defined by her motherhood than is the state of Dimmesdale’s soul determined by his role as minister. Outward forms, Hawthorne suggests, cannot simply reveal the inner states of individual lives. In resisting the premise of transparent, universal, emotional truth—especially for women who are mothers—Hawthorne rejects the reductive forces of sentimentalism and nineteenth-century maternal ideology. Through his deeply sympathetic portrayal of Hester’s


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powerful subjectivity, Hawthorne enriches and expands nineteenth-century sentimental culture, testifying to the mysterious, complex, and sacred nature of a woman’s heart. Finally, as a white male writing in the heart of the nineteenth-century, Hawthorne worked from a privileged space that afforded him a public, authorial freedom that a woman writing in the same period would find difficult to garner. While Hawthorne at times railed against the “scribbling women,” and at other times joined them in their writing conventions, ultimately he did not—like them—bear the cultural weight of sentimental expectations. Fully authorized as a man to work in the public sphere, Nathaniel Hawthorne was not obliged to underwrite his work with a proper domestic ethos as women like Stowe and Sigourney, no doubt, felt compelled to do. As I will argue in the next chapter, establishing cultural authority through overt and conventional feminine stances becomes an almost compulsory maneuver for an African-American women writer of the era. Harriet Jacobs, as the following study shows, was culturally compelled to take her criticisms of sentimental culture and maternal ideology narratively underground in a way that Hawthorne was not.

Chapter Three

“Links . . . Of Gold”: The Bonds of Motherhood in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

ABOLITIONIST ANTECEDENTS Harriet Jacobs’s autobiographical roman à clef, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself (1861), was published late in the Anti-Slavery Movement, coming to print in the final weeks before the Civil War. Richly influenced by its abolitionist predecessors, Jacobs’s autobiographical tale of enslaved womanhood is a complex amalgam that draws on sentimental, domestic traditions as well as the more masculine form of the classic slave narrative. Two foundational anti-slavery texts—Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: Written by Himself (1845)—cast particularly long shadows on Jacobs’s work. This influential dyad of abolitionist literature, whose poles reflect nineteenth-century distinctions of gender, race, and genre, presented Harriet Jacobs with compelling but conflicting modes of expression. As an African-American woman trapped between the cultural ideals of her womanhood and the social realities of her race, Jacobs would struggle to find narrative ground between Stowe and Douglass—a platform on which she could garner the necessary cultural authority while remaining true to the difficult experiences of her life. In fact, to articulate the defining gaps between Stowe’s maternal heroics and Douglass’s tale of masculine subjectivity is to discern the narrative and psychological tensions that lie at the heart of Harriet Jacobs’s work. Writing the tale of her own womanhood and slavehood, specifically on behalf of “the thousands—of . . . Slave Mothers . . . still in bondage” (qtd. in Yellin Incidents 242), Jacobs found a powerful precedent in Stowe’s Eliza Harris, the idealized African-American mother who is the fulcrum of the escape narrative imbedded in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. While Stowe nods to traditionally masculine slave narrative through the character 73

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George Harris, her novel sets precedent by establishing a specifically feminine abolitionist paradigm by legitimizing, even valorizing, Eliza Harris’s unlawful escape. Narratively sublimating the obvious political nature of the slave mother’s flight, Stowe constructs Eliza’s escape with her young son as a selfless expression of maternal instinct to defend the young and sustain domestic ties. As we have seen, Stowe’s conservative maternal ethics offered her text cultural credibility, and her powerful sentimental, domestic appeal made Uncle Tom’s Cabin an immensely successful abolitionist text, garnering political support by encouraging a nation to “feel right” about their African-American brothers and sisters (385). While sharing the political aims of Stowe’s maternal epic, Frederick Douglass provides a distinctly different abolitionist model that eschews the ideal, particularly in the arena of slave family life. In his preface to the autobiography, William Lloyd Garrison connects Douglass’s writing with sentimental abolitionist fare by underscoring the work’s “pathos and sublimity” (Preface 39). Anyone who can “peruse” the work “without a tearful eye, a heaving breast, an afflicted spirit . . .” Garrison emotes, “ . . . must have a flinty heart” (38). Douglass, however, resists the domestic anti-slavery formula used by Stowe, often choosing a rational rather than an emotional tone and reevaluating the meaning of family disruption for the slave. While The Narrative takes forays into the sentimental—evoking compassion, for example, for Douglass’s abandoned, elderly grandmother—in general, the author demonstrates a great emotional reticence and resists the temptations of appealing for sympathy on his own behalf. In stating the facts of his own case, Douglass speaks with the strong voice of masculine prerogative. While the tragedy of the broken family is acknowledged as a vicious instance of slavery in The Narrative, individual freedom, rather than family unity, is the telos of the hero’s journey. Writing from the perspective of a man deprived of freedom, Douglass asserts the rights of the individual over the requirements of family, community, and nation. Through his description of the meager relationship shared with his biological mother, Douglass specifically deviates from standard sentimental abolitionist writing and establishes a paradigm of slave family life decidedly different from that found in Stowe’s brand of maternal idealism. Refusing to tell the reader how he feels about being separated from his mother as an infant, Douglass shifts from subjective to objective in his narration, coolly conjecturing on the practice of parting slave mother from child: “For what this separation is done, I do not know, unless it be to hinder the development of the child’s affection toward its mother, and to blunt and destroy the natural affection of the mother for the child.

“Links . . . Of Gold”

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This is the inevitable result” (48). Backing up sociological speculation with personal evidence, Douglass documents the maternal void in his own young life: I do not recollect . . . ever seeing my mother by the light of day. She was with me in the night. . . . Very little communication . . . took place between us. Death soon ended what little we could have while she still lived. . . . She died when I was about seven years old. . . . I was not allowed to be present during her illness, at her death, or burial. She was gone long before I knew anything about it. Never having enjoyed, to any considerable extent, her soothing presence, her tender and watchful care, I received the tidings of her death with much the same emotions I should have probably felt at the death of a stranger. (49)

His mother is stripped of what Hester Prynne calls the “indefeasible rights” of motherhood (Hawthorne 113), and the young Douglass, for his part, is robbed of the “natural affection” a son should have for his mother. The dignified and dispassionate narrative voice of the autobiography both describes and documents the loss.1 Acknowledging the evils of the slave state’s separation of families, Douglass, nonetheless, radically deviates from the abolitionist formula by figuring the slave’s broken family ties as a source of personal empowerment. The affective void in Douglass’s life, as tragic as it may be, actually fuels his quest for personal freedom. While Eliza Harris’s flight is predicated on the preservation of family ties, Douglass’s escape is underwritten by his freedom from domestic bonds. The first critical step in his journey from slavery to freedom, his relocation from the confines of rural Maryland to the City of Baltimore, is facilitated by Douglass’s emotional liberty: The ties that ordinarily bind children to their homes were all suspended in my case. I found no severe trial in my departure. My home was charmless; it was not home to me; on parting from it, I could not feel that I was leaving any thing which I could have enjoyed by staying. My mother was dead, my grandmother lived far off, so that I seldom saw her. I had two sisters and one brother, that lived in the same house with me; but the early separation of us from our mother has well nigh blotted the fact of our relationship from our memories. I looked for home elsewhere, and was confident of finding none which I should relish less than the one I was leaving. (73)

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While this move from plantation to city is enforced by his master, the young Douglass, free from family obligations, greets it with opportunistic enthusiasm. And this relocation, as Douglass reports, “laid the foundation” and “opened the gateway” to future freedom (75). This is not to suggest that Douglass devalues human relationships, for he documents critical emotional alliances in The Narrative. Fondly thinking of his “dear fellow slaves,” on Mr. Freeland’s farm, for example, Douglass remembers teaching them to read as “the great days” of his “soul” (120). When an escape plan with these slaves fails, their resulting separation causes him “more pain than anything else in the whole transaction” (129). Ultimately, though, Douglass privileges his personal desire for freedom over the compelling force of human bonds. While the choice has a great emotional cost, he is clearly willing to pay. Douglass writes of his final, successful flight from Baltimore and slavery: I had a number of warm-hearted friends in Baltimore,—friends that I loved almost as I did my life,—and the thought of being separated from them forever was painful beyond expression. It is my opinion that thousands would escape from slavery, who now remain, but for the strong cords of affection that bind them to their friends. The thought of leaving my friends was decidedly the most painful thought with which I had to contend. The love of them was my tender point, and shook my decision more than all things else. (142)

Douglass concludes that cutting the cords of human affection is a necessary and justified evil, an essential part of the slave’s drive to liberty. By asserting individual autonomy over collective connections, Douglass claims the prerogative of self over the needs of family, friends, and ultimately society. Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe, then, present two very different approaches to the same abolitionist agenda. Stowe’s domestic novel appeals to the “right” feeling of her white, largely female, audience. Her heroine Eliza Harris is the quintessential “good mother” of the nineteenth century, who runs only for the sake of preserving family bonds. On the other hand, Douglass, as Kristin Boudreau asserts, is “careful to present himself as a man speaking to men” in telling his true tale (93). Structuring his life story as a transformative freedom journey in which a “slave” is “made a man,” Douglass figures human bonds to be powerful but, finally, dispensable (107). Stowe’s domestic imperatives and Douglass’s independent drive to freedom represent important poles of anti-slavery discourse between which Harriet Jacobs sought a narrative space to tell her own life story.


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HARRIET JACOBS AND THE SEARCH FOR “KINDLY SYMPATHIES” As a slave woman and mother writing in the wake of such gendered abolitionist antecedents, Harriet Jacobs faced unique, almost insurmountable difficulties. For neither Stowe’s domestic form nor Douglas’s more masculine structure could adequately contain the facts of her life. While cultural conventions of gender would naturally guide the slave woman towards Stowe’s sentimental strategy, as Valerie Smith argues, the “plot” of Jacob’s life was “more compatible with received notions of masculinity than femininity” (28). As a loving mother, Jacobs was likely attracted to the model of Eliza Harris’s heroic maternity, however, the circumstances of her life and the conventions of the domestic novel would deny her the kind of maternal moral authority that Stowe’s brand of sentimentalism required. Jacobs’s central narrative difficulty was the treatment of her sexual history. In traditional abolitionist literature, the light skin of the slave woman’s children is a genteel marker of rape, but Jacobs’s own fair children were the product of a consensual inter-racial union. Threatened by her sexually aggressive and psychologically abusive master, Dr. James Norcom (Dr. Flint in Incidents), Jacobs refused to play the stereotypical role of feminine victim. Preempting the licentious advances of her owner, Jacobs took her neighbor Samuel Tredwell Sawyer (Mr. Sands) as a lover. The moral implications of her sexual choices strained and impeded the narration of her life and threatened to render the slave woman unpresentable to her nineteenthcentury audience (85). Jacobs struggled with the taboos of her sexual past—negotiating between the impulse for honesty and the knowledge that the facts of her life might destroy her womanly credibility. Encouraged by her benefactress and confidant Amy Post to write her life story for the cause of abolition, Jacobs felt deeply ambivalent. In a letter to Post, Jacobs documents the tortured path by which she came to the decision to publicly tell her tale:2 your proposal to me has been thought over and over again but not with out some painful rememberances dear Amy if it was the life of a Heroine with no degradation associated with it. . . . your purity of heart and kindly sympathies won me at one time to speak of my children it is the only words that has passed my lips since I left my Mothers door I had determined to let others think as they pleased but my lips should be sealed and no one had a right to question me for this reason when I first came North I avoided the Antislavery people . . . because I could not be honest and tell the whole truth often have I gone to my

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Negotiating Motherhood in Nineteenth-Century American Literature poor brother with my . . . mortified spirits he would mingle his tears with mine while he would advise me to do what was right my conscience approved it but my stubborn pride would not yield I have tried for the past two years to conquer it and I feel that God has helped me or I never would consent to give my past life to any one for I would not do it without giving the whole truth if it could help save another from my fate it would be selfish and unchristian to hold it back (qtd. in Yellin Incidents 232)

Caught between a deep political commitment to the cause of abolition and a personal reticence to reveal the culturally compromising details of her reproductive life, Jacobs at first sought an intercessor to mediate between the mostly free, white audience and herself. Choosing to solicit Harriet Beecher Stowe to write a dictated narrative of her experience in slavery, the slave woman made a strategic decision to embrace the feminine, domestic form. Jacobs—whose motherhood was, in some ways, the central fact of her life—hoped to benefit from the skillful and compassionate deployment of sentimental maternity that Stowe so aptly used in her own anti-slavery tract. If Jacobs hoped to avoid personal embarrassment and public judgment by soliciting Stowe to write her narrative, however, she was soon to be disappointed. After receiving a synopsis of Jacobs’s life from Amy Post, Stowe was skeptical about its veracity, perhaps made suspicious by the striking similarities between Jacobs’s flight to a garret and the story of Cassy’s escape in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In order to satisfy her curiosity, Stowe sent Amy Post’s letter to Jacobs’s employer, Mrs. Nathaniel Willis, seeking verification of its authenticity. In so doing, the author revealed incriminating details of Jacobs’s sexual history that the slave had chosen to keep from her employer. Jacobs was mortified and indignant, as she documents in this letter to Amy Post: I had never opened my lips to Mrs Willis concerning my Children—in the Charitableness of her own heart she sympathised with me and never asked their origin my suffering she knew it embarrassed me at first but I told her the truth but we both thought it was wrong in Mrs. Stowe to have sent you letter (qtd. in Yellin Incidents 235)

In addition to being humiliated by Stowe’s indiscretion, Jacobs was also angered by the author’s proprietary treatment of her life story. For Stowe suggested that Jacobs’s narrative should be subsumed into her own Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, serving as documentary evidence for her novel


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rather than operating as a freestanding chronicle. According to a letter that Jacobs sent to Amy Post, Mrs. Willis wrote to Stowe, asserting her servant’s rights to her own story. Declaring that the tale “needed no romance,” Willis told Stowe that the runaway slave “wished” her narrative to be a “history” of her own life, “entirely by itself” (qtd. in Yellin Incidents 235). Learning that she could not exploit the facts of Jacobs’s life in her own work, Stowe precipitously cut off all correspondence, ignoring the next four letters written on Jacobs’s behalf.3 However personally painful Stowe’s rejection proved for Jacobs, it served positively to fuel the ex-slave’s willingness and desire to write her own story. In a sense, Jacobs’s struggle with Stowe represents a larger battle fought on the pages of Incidents. While she is clearly attracted to Stowe’s brand of abolitionism, Jacobs is wary of having her life story become a mere footnote—mere documentary evidence—to support a fictional, sentimental plot. Indeed, Jacobs realized that the messy fabric of her own life could never neatly conform to the genteel strictures of the domestic novel and that to rely strictly on the sentimental reflexes of her readers was to risk denigration and rejection again. To tell the truth of her life and earn the kindly sympathies of her audience would require unconventional tactics. With no simple model of success before her, Jacobs made some risky compromises. While she chose to write her own narrative, she sought the editorial assistance of Lydia Maria Child and, in so doing, accepted the weight of sentimental expectations that the author brought with her.4 Jacobs would not simply resort to the formulas of abolitionist sentiment, however. Instead, she would graft a tale of self-reliant resistance much like Douglass’s onto the domestic form of Stowe’s novel. The title of her work documents the conflation: while “Life of a Slave Girl” immediately suggests a feminine story, the secondary designation, “Written by Herself,” echoes Frederick Douglass’s subtitle and links Jacobs’s writing to a distinctly masculine tradition of autobiography.5 Jacobs’s fusion of male slave narrative and domestic novel produces some unusual fruit. As many critics have noted, Jacobs’s narrative voice splits, vacillating, for example, between revelation and concealment, between repentance for her perceived cultural crimes and defiance.6 This study explores Jacobs’s text by specifically examining Incidents as a maternal narrative with a clear political agenda. At one level, Jacobs’s narrative deploys white, middle-class constructions of womanhood and motherhood to underwrite her anti-slavery argument. However, just as Jacobs hides her true identity behind the pseudonym of Linda Brent in Incidents, so too does she hide a more radical maternal subjectivity—one which draws on

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Douglass’s uncompromising self-reliance—under the unthreatening veneer of sentimental motherhood. Thematically constructed upon her maternity and upon her relationship to the mother-figures in her life, Jacobs’s autobiographical narrative is, in one sense, a personal reflection of the author’s complex and contradictory experience as a “poor slave mother” (qtd. in Yellin Incidents 242). As a political text, however, Jacobs’s story, like Stowe’s, is rhetorically crafted for a specific audience, and the narrative cleft that Jacobs creates is at least partially strategic. Writing to arouse the sympathies of white “women of the North” (Jacobs 1), Jacobs, as Holly Blackford argues, “capitaliz[es] on Victorian culture’s sanctification of motherhood,” highlighting the maternal ideals she shares with her audience (314). Wrapping her quest for freedom in the cultural ideal of sacrificial mother-love, Linda Brent identifies securing her children’s freedom and well being as the primary impetus of her own escape. Jacobs’s political employment of culturally endorsed maternal values is, however, not unproblematic, and it is not the whole story. In her introduction to Incidents, Jean Fagan Yellin identifies the mission of Jacobs’s Linda Brent—a mission that reflects, in a way, the twin goals of Frederick Douglass and Stowe’s Eliza Harris. The “heroic slave mother,” Yellin writes, “struggle[s] for freedom and a home” (Introduction xxvi). Jacobs’s journey from slavery to freedom is steeped in a domestic desire, expressed by Linda Brent, who identifies the “dream of her life” as being able to “sit with [her] children in a home of [her] own” (201). As Krista Walter has noted, however, the domestic world will never be an “easy symbol of redeemable self” for Linda Brent (207). Much like Frederick Douglass, Linda will learn that the “strong cords of affection,”—the emotional ties of family, friends, and domestic life—most effectively bind African Americans in slavery (Douglass 142). Because they can be used as a tool of oppression in the slave state, traditional maternal bonds and the cultural values that underwrite them must, then, at a deeper level, be resisted. Jacobs’s nuanced, multi-layered depiction of her own motherhood and slavehood, then, both politically exploits and critically deconstructs nineteenth-century maternal ideals. On the flip side of Jacobs’s deployment of Victorian domestic ideology is a seditious motherhood and a subversive politics of self that places the needs of the family and community in a subordinate position. Through her juxtaposition of the men and women in Linda’s life, through legible gaps and elisions in the text, and through a discernable if more discreet alternative narrative voice, Jacobs articulates a more radical, more politically dangerous, maternal subjectivity. Finally, while Jacobs self-consciously speaks to a sentimental audience and seeks her readers’ sympathies, she cannot rely on the emotional and moral shorthand of sentimentalism. Unwilling and unable to imbue


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Linda Brent with the unimpeachable womanhood of Eliza Harris, Jacobs boldly demands sympathy for the slave mother nonetheless. Juxtaposing the competing attractions of family and freedom, Jacobs sympathetically documents the emotional and practical compromises that the slave mother must make in her negotiations between the two. In so doing, Jacobs challenges her sentimental audience to extend compassion beyond the likes of Eliza Harris—beyond literary reflections of themselves—to a woman and a mother who is not a “proper” object of sympathy in the terms of nineteenth-century sentimental culture.

MATERNAL CHAINS In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Linda Brent’s maternal subjectivity is framed and articulated through her relationship with her grandmother, Aunt Marthy. As Jacobs structures her memories, she uses the figure of the grandmother to negotiate the cultural divide between herself and her largely white, Northern audience. The very embodiment of true womanhood and emblematic of the domestic, familial world that Linda longs for throughout the narrative, Aunt Marthy, as Krista Walter notes, is “steeped in the maternal values of the white ruling class” (202). Stepping in to care for Linda after the death of her mother, Aunt Marthy is the self-sacrificing matriarch of Brent’s entire clan and believes that a good woman “stand[s] by [her] children, and suffer[s] with them till death” (91). Jacobs engages her nineteenth-century sentimental audience through Linda’s filial devotion. Praising “the brave old woman” (26) and calling her a “great treasure” (5), Linda declares that she is “indebted” to her grandmother for “all comforts, spiritual or temporal” (11). Like Stowe’s Rachel Halliday, Jacobs’s Aunt Marthy is the motherly source of physical and spiritual nurturance for an extended body of children. While Jacobs forges bonds with her Victorian audience by valorization of the grandmother’s traditional maternal values, she also stealthily exposes the hazards of the maternal role for the slave woman. In the simplest sense, as Jacobs reveals, the role of motherhood makes slave women the means of production for the antebellum South because they serve to “increase their owner’s stock” (49). As the grandmother’s personal history reveals, however, the slave state exploits African American women’s maternity in even more insidious ways. Forced to serve as a wet nurse both to her master’s children and her own, the grandmother’s loyalties, as Linda reveals, are tangled through a genealogy—not of blood—but of mother’s milk: “My mother’s mistress [Mrs. Flint] was the daughter of my grandmother’s mistress. She was the foster sister of my mother, they were both

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nourished at my grandmother’s breast. In fact, my mother had been weaned at three months old, that the babe of the mistress might obtain sufficient food” (6–7). Much like the master’s rape of his female slaves, shared maternal milk makes siblings out of black and white children. More importantly, Aunt Marthy’s role as “foster mother” to her master’s offspring muddies her allegiances, putting her own children at risk. As Jacobs reveals, even after Aunt Marthy’s white nursling Mrs. Flint grows to be her granddaughter’s mistress and mortal enemy, the grandmother will find it impossible to “retain ill will” against the woman, “whom she had nourished with her milk as a babe” (89). Emblematically implicating the grandmother in the slave state through the maternal breast, Jacobs also shows that, even when directed towards her biological children, Aunt Marthy’s motherly motivations can, in effect, serve the cause of slavery. Imbued with the domestic values of her sentimental culture, Aunt Marthy consistently privileges family ties over personal freedom and, in so doing, supports the slave state’s status quo. While the grandmother is quite willing to pursue the legal avenues of liberty—“trusting in time to be able to purchase some of her children”— she is unwilling to have her family break their contracts with the slave state (6). The prospect of escape is anathema to her, not only because such ventures are inherently dangerous, but also because they often lead to separation of family. Aunt Marthy’s maternity, then, not only produces slaves but also serves to keep her children in chains. Avoiding any direct critique of the grandmother’s domestic ethos that might alienate her from her nineteenth-century audience, Jacobs casts oblique judgment by juxtaposing Aunt Marthy’s values with those of the freedom-loving males in Linda Brent’s early life. Linda’s father, brother, and Uncle Benjamin are characterized by the masculine, self-reliant individualism found in Narrative of the Life. Linda’s father is a “skilled” and “intelligent” carpenter (5) who some believe has “spoiled his children” by training them “to feel they were human beings” (10). Demonstrating the physical courage and the intellectual outrage of the young Frederick Douglass, Linda’s brother William is unafraid of the “smart of the whip” but rebels against “the idea of being whipped” (19). Likewise, Aunt Marthy’s beloved youngest son Benjamin possesses a “spirit too bold and daring for a slave” (17). Unlike Aunt Marthy, Benjamin values freedom over family, and will prove himself quite willing to “part with all . . . kindred” to secure his own liberty (26). As a girl unencumbered by children of her own, the young Linda Brent easily assimilates the traditionally male perspective. Particularly close to her Uncle Benjamin, Linda, as Stephanie Smith argues, “allies her


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own experiences with her uncle’s as thoroughly as they were twins” (135). Appraising her grandmother’s values in tandem with her Uncle Benjamin, Linda issues judgment from the first person plural, “we.” Articulating great respect for Aunt Marthy’s ideals, the young people nevertheless resist her domestic values to the extent that they serve the slave state. For example, while Linda claims that they “longed for a home” like Aunt Marthy’s, the “sweet balsam” found in the grandmother’s domestic world is not ultimately enough to assuage the bitterness of their captivity (17). Linda unsentimentally reports, “even the charms of [grandmother’s] old oven failed to reconcile us to our hard lot” (17). Likewise, while Linda and her Uncle Benjamin claim to admire Aunt Marthy’s great piety, they distrust her religion’s capacity to garner complacency. When the grandmother tries to placate Linda and her Uncle with religious consolation, telling them that their slavehood is the “will of God,” they are ill at ease (17). With a double-edged voice that at once sentimentalizes and undermines, Jacobs characterizes Aunt Marthy’s belief system, saying, “It was a beautiful faith, coming from a mother who could not call her children her own” (17). While admiration and denunciation co-mingle, here, Linda finally overtly admits that she and Benjamin “condemned” their grandmother’s faith (17). Intellectually aligning the young Linda Brent with masculine models, Jacobs, furthermore, presents the girl’s dormant emotional, domestic reflexes as a moral weakness to be transcended. Faced with the real prospect of losing her much-loved Uncle Benjamin when he decides to escape from captivity, Linda quickly reverts to their grandmother’s domestic imperatives. Like Aunt Marthy, Linda privileges security and family ties over freedom, begging Benjamin to stay: “I implored him not to go. . . . I reminded him of the poverty and hardship he must encounter among strangers. I told him he might be caught and brought back; and that was a terrible thing to think of” (20). While Linda admits that Benjamin’s motivation for escape is “right,” she, nonetheless, finds it “too hard to give him up” (21). Deploying the emotional tactics that Aunt Marthy uses throughout the narrative, Linda invokes filial obligation, cursing Benjamin with the warning, “Go . . . and break your mother’s heart” (21). Ultimately, though, Linda Brent judges her own feminine values harshly, implying that her domestic reflexes are tainted by selfish motives. Quickly regretting her self-interested efforts to keep Benjamin by her side, she “repent[s] of” her “words” almost immediately. In releasing Benjamin from familial obligation, Linda rejects Aunt Marthy’s Victorian maternal values and, instead, supports her Uncle’s individual quest for freedom.

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Although Benjamin’s flight will bring both danger and separation, Linda is willing to let her Uncle go. Benjamin’s subsequent recapture elegantly illustrates the antagonistic relationship between domestic ideals and freedom for the slave. In describing Benjamin’s return in chains to his hometown, Jacobs depicts Aunt Marthy’s maternal solicitude as an emasculating force that must be resisted for the sake of liberty. As Benjamin is led to jail, he sends word to his mother not to come and meet him, because “the sight of her distress would take from him all self-control” (21). Throughout his incarceration, Benjamin remains committed to flight, despite the risks. But his mother, who desires to keep him both safe and near, acts as a prohibiting force and pleads with her son to practice submissiveness. Imploring Benjamin to “Put . . . trust in God” and “Be humble” (22), she instructs her child to “beg” for pardon” from his master (23). As Donald Gibson argues, Incidents shows that the grandmother believes it “better to submit to the yoke of slavery than to sever family ties” (165). In contrast, the heroic Uncle Benjamin, who eventually escapes to the free North, articulates his willingness to “part with . . . all kindred” for the sake of personal freedom (26). In one sense, Jacobs’s critical juxtaposition of the domestic values of Aunt Marthy and the liberty-loving values of her son Benjamin is simply a reflection of those gendered poles of abolitionist discourse represented by Stowe and Douglass. Incidents stakes new territory, however, in positioning Linda Brent not on the feminine, domestic axis of her grandmother but with the liberty-loving men in her life. As Jennifer Fleischner argues, Jacobs’s own drive to freedom, “evolves primarily out of her identification and association with the men in her family and not the women” (63–64). While Benjamin’s escape is chronicled in a chapter entitled “The Slave Who Dared to Feel Like a Man,” and the character of Benjamin himself links freedom and manhood, Jacobs ungenders the hunger for personal liberty (17). Despite their grandmother’s protestations, Linda Brent and her brother William plot their own escape, even after Uncle Benjamin’s trying ordeal. Linda states, “To me, nothing seemed more dreadful than my present life. I said to myself, ‘William must be free. He shall go to the north, and I will follow him.’ Many a slave sister has formed the same plans” (42). In one sense, Linda’s sentiments are framed in a traditional, gendered configuration, with the freedom of her brother taking precedent over her own. However, Jacobs clearly departs from convention by showing that the autonomous desire to escape and the willingness to forgo domestic entanglements are not strictly elements of a masculine story, but are shared by “Many a slave sister” too.


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A PERILOUS PASSAGE IN JACOBS’S NARRATIVE While Benjamin’s escape teaches Linda Brent much, it is through her own coming of age—through her awakening into the world of sexuality and a reproductive life—that she will learn the difficult lessons unique to slave womanhood. While Jacobs admits that “Slavery is terrible for men,” she documents through Linda Brent’s life that “it is far more terrible for women” (77). In narrating Linda’s experiences with the Flint family, Jacobs further exposes the unique dangers of domesticity for the female slave. Confronting the hazards of the slave woman’s sexual nature directly, the author tackles a subject that lies coded in or on the periphery of most abolitionist literature. Just as Linda Brent’s encounters with the predatory Flint will prove a “Perilous Passage in the Slave Girl’s Life,” so too will the description of Linda’s sexual history prove the riskiest passage in Jacobs’s nineteenth–century narrative. In her preface to Incidents, Lydia Maria Child acknowledges the “indecorum” of Linda’s story, taking responsibility for presenting the facts of the slave girl’s sexual history “with the veil withdrawn” (3–4). However, the “monstrous features” of Linda’s sexual history, as Child calls them, are not the expected details of physical violence and rape (4). Flint sexually stalks Linda Brent, attempts to manipulate and coerce her, but never forces himself upon her in the frame of the story. And while Linda, like the real Jacobs, seems to have an honest commitment to the Victorian values of purity, promising to remain “virtuous . . . though a slave,” her desire for autonomy, freedom, and revenge will cause her to willfully forgo the womanly virtue of chastity (56).7 In attempting to reveal the details of Linda’s sexual life while maintaining the sympathy of her nineteenth-century audience, Jacobs navigates a treacherous narrative space. Just as Linda Brent refuses to be sexually coerced by Dr. Flint, so, too, will Jacobs refuse to be cornered by her audience’s sentimental expectations. Linda enters the Flint household grossly unprepared for the sexual and reproductive realities that she will encounter as a slave girl. Perversely considering her enslaved granddaughter’s chastity a “source of pride” (54), Aunt Marthy inadequately arms Linda, inculcating her with the “pure principles” of the Victorian middle-class (54). Linda herself harbors clearly romantic notions—a “love dream,” as she retrospectively calls it, of a monogamous marriage, a family, and a home with the “free born” “colored” man whom she loves (37). As the slave girl comes into her adolescence and becomes sexual prey for Flint, however, her Victorian values of chastity and her romantic dreams of love are replaced with an adult understanding of the “evil things” of

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the slave woman’s world (28). Jacobs describes Flint’s abuse of the young Linda as a violation of her innocent mind—not her body. Daily breaking “the most sacred commandments of nature,” Flint “people[s]” her “young mind with unclean images” (27). And when the doctor whispers his “foul words” in her ear, Jacobs reports that the young slave girl cannot “remain ignorant of their import” (27). Linda concludes, “The influences of slavery had had the same effect on me that they had on other young girls; they had made me prematurely knowing, concerning the evil ways of the world” (54). Linda, in fact, is forced into a kind of untimely knowledge—a sexual literacy—that will bring with it both pain and power. Just as learning to read awakens Frederick Douglass to the injustices of slavery, Linda’s sexual literacy teaches her sobering lessons about mores in the antebellum South, realities that her grandmother has rather cruelly kept from her. As Hazel Carby documents, Jacobs’s narrative uncovers the moral inversions of the slave state for her audience. “That which commands admiration in the white woman only hastens the degradation of the female slave,” Linda Brent reports, and “If God . . . bestow[s] beauty” on the slave woman, “it . . . prove[s] her greatest curse” (28). The conventional values of sexual purity are of little use to the slave woman, for “She is not allowed to have any pride of character. It is deemed a crime in her to wish to be virtuous” (31). Recognizing that her honorable dream of a monogamous relationship with the free black man she loves will never be sanctioned by her society, she proves herself willing, unlike Aunt Marthy, to sever the chords of affection to protect the dignity of the man she loves. “For his sake,” Linda reports, “I felt that I ought not link his fate with my own unhappy destiny” (42). Grieving the loss of the chaste, romantic vision her grandmother had offered her, she states, “The dream of my girlhood” was over (42). Disabused of her sexual naiveté and romantic expectations by Flint, Linda Brent puts away the things of her girlhood in many ways, but ultimately refuses the sentimental role of passive, feminine victimhood. Instead, she chooses more masculine forms of resistance, which Jacobs signifies with clearly militaristic terms. When Flint tells Linda that her “will must and should surrender to his,” the slave girl reports that “never before had my puny arm felt half so strong”(18). “The war of my life had begun,” Jacobs writes, “and though one of God’s most powerless creatures, I resolved never to be conquered” (19). While, at one level, Linda’s struggle with Flint is about the defense of her chastity, at another level, as Elizabeth Fox-Genovese has noted, it becomes simply a “conflict of two wills” (Fox-Genovese 77).


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Indeed, a strange dance of power occurs in Jacobs’s Incidents. For while Flint clearly can take Linda by force, Jacobs depicts him more like a frustrated lover than a master of a slave woman over whom he holds absolute power. Jacobs, in fact, constructs Flint’s sexual predation as a specifically domestic seduction, one in which the master thinly veils his sexual aggression in white, middle-class ideals of romance and family life. While Flint whispers “filth” into Linda’s ears, he also tries to entice her with offers of domestic respectability—promising, for example, to “cherish her” and “make a lady of her” (35). Later he vows that if Linda will submit to him alone—if she will be “faithful”—“he will make her as “virtuous as [a] wife” (75). Finally, Flint offers Linda a domestic haven, a “home of [her] own” over which she can preside (53). Tensions between master and slave reach a crisis when Flint actually begins work on the house that he has promised Linda. Reading Flint’s promises of home and domesticity as code for sexual violation, Linda vows to escape the fate Flint has planned for her: I was determined that my master, whom I so hated and loathed, who had blighted the prospects of my youth, and made my life a desert, should not, after my long struggle with him, succeed at last in trampling his victim under his feet. I would do any thing, every thing, for the sake of defeating him. (53)

While Linda’s defensive options are limited by her sex, Jacobs refuses to be confined to feminine, melodramatic plot lines. Much like Frederick Douglass, Linda chooses to fight a master who physically threatens her. Whereas Douglass uses the power of his fists to get his freedom, however, Linda employs her sexuality to thwart her adversary. If Flint has tried to engage Linda in domestic fantasy, she will prove herself no ideal, womanly partner in his enterprise. With “deliberate calculation,” she enters into a physical relationship with her white neighbor Mr. Sands, using her indiscretions as a vehicle of “revenge” (55). Jacobs thus imagines a new dynamic in which the slave woman’s sexual nature can be employed for her own ends rather than in service of the slave state. If the fact of Linda’s illicit sexuality places her on shaky ground with Jacobs’s sentimental audience, her reasons and rationale for the affair put her on shakier ground still. Linda makes clear that she harbors no love for Sands, claiming only that she does “not despise” the man as she does Flint (59). While she admits that “flattered vanity” and “gratitude for kindness” factor into her decision, her relationship with Sands is ultimately a vehicle of control, a means “to triumph over [her] tyrant” (55). Flint has tutored her in the

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power of her own sexual nature. Armed with the knowledge of Flint’s sexual obsessions and his proclivity for jealousy, she discerns that nothing “would enrage Dr. Flint so much” than to know she had “favored another” (55). Perhaps more radically still, in the detailed description of Linda’s “calculations of interest” before the affair, Jacobs suggests that the slave girl enters the relationship—at least in part—for the strategic purpose of becoming a mother (55). Indeed, as Eva Cherniavsky argues, Jacobs’s planned pregnancy is an “act of subaltern insurgency” (102). In allying herself with Sands, she chooses not only a lover, but also the father of her future children. And she sees her impending maternity as a source of power and possibly freedom. The thoughts that Linda tells us are “revolving in [her] mind” before the affair are preternaturally focused on the children that will likely be the product of her relationship (55). She reasons that while Flint’s progeny will follow “the condition of the mother,” Mr. Sand’s children would be “well supported” and “made free” (55). In choosing Sands as the father of her offspring, Linda is making a bold attempt to control the futures of children as yet unconceived. Furthermore, in a daring inversion of conventional constructions of motherhood, Linda imagines maternity via Sands—not as entrance into a role of selfless maternal servitude—but as a potential source of her own liberation. Speculating that if Flint becomes aware of her affair, ostensibly through a noticeable pregnancy, “he would revenge himself by selling [her],” Linda is “sure” that her lover would be willing to buy and free her (55). It is only after “deliberate calculations” on all of these facts that she embarks on the affair (54). Taking a radical leap of faith that will alter the course of her life, Linda chooses motherhood, gambling that it will offer her new control and might ultimately lead to liberty. Harboring “a feeling of satisfaction and triumph,” Linda finally uses her pregnancy as hidden ammunition in her battle with the doctor. When Flint comes to tell her that her new “home” is ready to occupy, she deploys her secret weapon, telling him, “I will never go there. In a few months I shall be a mother” (56). Like Douglass’s act of “bold defiance” in fighting the slave breaker Covey, Linda’s act of sexual rebellion is a “turning point in” her “career as a slave”; she, in fact, will never go to that house built by Flint (Douglass 113). Linda’s victory, however, will present narrative problems for Jacobs that Douglass did not encounter. While Douglass’s fight with Covey revives his “sense of . . . manhood” and establishes him as the hero of Narrative of the Life (Douglass 113), Linda’s act of sexual autonomy pushes her outside the limits of womanly respectability and, as Deborah Garfield notes, threatens her role as the sentimental “Heroine”—“the maternal icon”—of her own story (28). The narrative difficulties of presenting the facts of her life while operating within an essentially sentimental form wreak havoc on the unity of


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Jacobs’s text. In describing her sexual choices, Linda’s voice fractures and is divided into the overwrought idiom of sentimental, feminine victimhood and the clear, explicit, and guilt-free language of self-determination. At times, Jacobs uses the conventional nineteenth-century imagery of the sexual “fall,” describing Linda’s liaison as a “plunge into the abyss” (53) and a “reckless” act of “despair” (54). “I was struggling alone in the powerful grasp of the demon slavery,” Linda melodramatically reports, “and the monster proved too strong for me” (54). At other moments in the text, however, the author uses markedly stronger language of autonomy and control: “I knew what I did and I did it with deliberate calculation” (54). Linda coolly reports, “There is something akin to freedom in having a lover who has no control over you” (55). Here, Jacobs’s prose evokes the composed and dignified narration of Douglass’s Narrative of the Life. Ultimately, if Jacobs is to maintain her reader’s sympathy for Linda Brent, she must move her audience beyond the stock moral and emotional responses of sentimentalism. In a much-quoted invocation aimed directly at the reader, Linda melodramatically pleads for forgiveness and sympathy, but ends with a cool rejection of the reader’s right to judge her: Pity me, and pardon me, O virtuous reader! You never knew what it was like to be a slave; to be entirely unprotected by law or custom; to have the laws reduce you to the condition of a chattel, entirely subject to the will of another. . . . I know I did wrong. No one can feel it more sensibly than I do. The painful and humiliating memory will haunt me to my dying day. Still, in looking back, calmly, on the events of my life, I feel the slave woman ought not to be judged by the same standards as others. (55–56)

From the histrionic invocation in the opening of this passage to the dispassionate calm of the final line, Jacobs carries her readers away from the moral reflexes of conventional sentimentalism. Although Linda Brent’s speech, here, maintains a sentimental façade as she pleads for compassion, she does not appeal to the like-feeling of her audience. Instead she claims her independence, demanding sympathy based on the differences of her life experiences.8 Jacobs, finally, asks her audience to move away from the universals of sentimental culture—to compassionately consider the individual and to have sympathy for a slave woman who, unlike Eliza Harris, is not made in the image of proper Victorian womanhood. Another way Jacobs combats the moral stridency of her sentimental audience is by using Linda’s Aunt Marthy as a negative example of emotional moral response, much as Hawthorne uses Arthur Dimmesdale.

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Jacobs’s sentimental culture is allied with Aunt Marthy in her allegiance to womanly purity. The author’s narration, however, is constructed to render her audience uncomfortable with their identification with the grandmother by depicting the harsh consequences of Aunt Marthy’s rigid sexual mores. One of the most troubling components of Linda’s early struggles with Flint is that she is emotionally isolated and abandoned in her time of need. While Flint tries to coerce the girl to remain silent about his improprieties, it is Aunt Marthy’s strict adherence to white, middleclass codes of chastity that ultimately renders Linda painfully mute: I longed for some one to confide in. I would have given the world to have laid my head on grandmother’s faithful bosom, and told her all my troubles. But Dr. Flint swore he would kill me, if I was not silent as the grave. Then, although my grandmother was all in all to me, I feared her as well as loved her. I had been accustomed to look up to her with a respect bordering on awe. I was very young, and felt shamefaced about telling her such impure things, especially as I knew her to be very strict on such subjects. (28–29)

Aunt Marthy’s moral righteousness leaves her suffering granddaughter without succor; such vacuums of moral silence, Jacobs suggests, are dangerous indeed. When Linda becomes pregnant with Mr. Sand’s baby, Aunt Marthy fails Linda again, harshly judging the girl for her sexual impropriety. Without directly acknowledging Aunt Marthy’s sympathetic shortcomings, Jacobs covertly underscores them by documenting the grandmother’s moral alignment with the overtly villainized Mrs. Flint. When the Doctor’s wife arrives at Aunt Marthy’s house “like a madwoman” and reveals Linda’s impending pregnancy—falsely accusing the slave “concerning her husband”—Aunt Marthy sides with Mrs. Flint, her fair, foster child (56). Both grandmother and Flint express their outrage to Linda, appearing, as Deborah M. Garfield writes, as “a diptych of melodramatic indignation” (41). The grandmother’s harsh judgment, in fact, makes for the most emotionally brutal passage in Jacobs’s book. Reverting to the simplistic moral constructions that Jacobs rejects, Aunt Marthy declares, “I had rather see you dead than to see you as you now are. You are a disgrace to your dead mother” (56). Cutting her granddaughter off from her domestic domain and respectable matrilineal heritage, Aunt Marthy tears the mother’s wedding ring from Linda’s finger and says, “Go away . . . and never come to my house again” (57). Linda documents her pained response:


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Her reproaches fell so hot and heavy, that they left me no chance to answer. Bitter tears, such as the eyes never shed but once, were my only answer. . . . She had always been so kind to me! So kind! How I longed to throw myself at her feet, and tell her all the truth! But she had ordered me to go, and never to come there again. (56–57)

Linda later pleads for mercy from her grandmother, “for her dead mother’s sake,” and is granted pity, but never forgiveness (59). Although one would expect that ties of blood and bonds of enslaved womanhood would temper Aunt Marthy’s response to Linda’s sexual choices, the grandmother’s moral rigidity keeps her from acknowledging the extenuating circumstances of her granddaughter’s situation. Sympathy, Jacobs here suggests, needs to be applied at the individual, the personal level. In her description of Linda’s “perilous passage” she attempts to short-circuit the sometimes rigid emotional pathways of sentimentalism, asking her audience to engage, instead, in the sympathetic spontaneity which Linda’s unique circumstances demand.

LINKS AND TIES: BRENT’S MOTHERHOOD AND THE BONDS OF SLAVERY While mothering and freedom are inextricably linked in Jacobs’s narrative, the realities of Linda Brent’s life after giving birth fail painfully to conform to expectations. While Linda strategically enters motherhood to control her own destiny and the destiny of her progeny, maternity is not the route to freedom of which she dreamed. “Hope die[s] away” quickly, as she realizes her calculations have been improvident—that Flint will not sell her “In his rage,” as she anticipated (60). Thus, Linda’s sexual literacy does not, in the end, serve her nearly as well as Douglass’s ability to read serves him. Realizing that her children will “follow the condition of the mother” and become Flint’s slaves, the slave woman is deeply ambivalent about her motherhood. In describing Linda’s growing attachment to her new son Benny, Jacobs reveals the slave’s divided maternal consciousness, as she inflects sentimental domestic tropes with pain and violence, vacillating between expressions of maternal joy and desolation: The little vine was taking deep root in my existence, though its clinging fondness excited a mixture of love and pain. When I was most sorely oppressed I found a solace in his smiles. I loved to watch his infant slumbers, but always there was a dark cloud over my enjoyment. I could never forget that he was a slave. Sometimes I wished that he might die in infancy. (62)

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Greeting the birth of her daughter Ellen with even more strained emotions, Linda reports, “When they told me my new-born babe was a girl, my heart was heavier than it had been before. Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women” (77). Echoing the sentiments of Stowe’s infanticidal Cassy, Linda admits that she would “rather” see her children “killed” than live in slavery (80). Like other sentimental abolitionist writers before her, Jacobs thus explores slavery’s detrimental effects on family life and highlights the emotional ambivalence fostered by a system in which a woman is the vehicle of her own children’s bondage. Linda’s ambivalent maternity, however, reflects more than just anguish over her children’s slavehood or a sense of guilt about her own role in their captivity. For her children not only fail to be the vehicle of freedom that she had hoped for, but they actually serve as new impediments to the liberty for which she longs. Granted the right to care for her own children (a privilege not many slave women could boast), Linda finds herself further ensnared in slavery’s web by the responsibilities, the cultural expectations, and the emotional ties of motherhood. The divided nature of Jacobs’s maternal narrative again emerges as Linda plans to escape after the birth of Benny and Ellen. Carefully balancing her nineteenth-century audience’s expectations, her abolitionist agenda, and the realities of her own experience, Jacobs alternatively figures the children as both the motivation for and the obstacle to freedom. Writing for the culture Ann Douglas claimed “seemed bent on establishing a perpetual Mother’s Day,” Jacobs appeals to her audience by morally underwriting Linda’s quest for freedom with motherhood and by figuring Linda’s children as the impetus of her unlawful escape (6). Portraying Benny and Ellen as a source of inspiration, Linda explicitly links her desire to run with her burgeoning maternal love: “My drooping hopes came to life again [after the birth of the children] . . . I was dreaming of freedom again; more for my children’s sake than for my own. I planned and planned” (83). Following the model that Harriet Beecher Stowe created with Eliza Harris in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Jacobs narratively roots Linda Brent’s escape in the ethos of a self-denying, Victorian maternity: I could have made my escape alone; but it was more for my helpless children than for myself that I longed for freedom. Though the boon would have been precious to me, above all price, I would not have taken it at the expense of leaving them in slavery. (89)

In depicting Linda as a heroic slave mother, Jacobs, like Stowe before her, exploits that favorite American narrative—“the story of salvation through motherly love” (Tompkins 125).


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Because of Linda’s maternal motivation for escape and because her eventual flight leads not North but to the domestic domain of her grandmother’s attic, critics have argued that Jacobs presents a distinctly feminine abolitionist paradigm in Incidents that valorizes maternal self-sacrifice while implicitly critiquing the Emersonian self-reliance of male slave narratives, such as Douglass’s.9 I would argue, however, that the reader cannot be too credulous of Linda Brent’s declared motives, for in the shadow of Jacobs’s construction of Linda as a “heroic slave mother,” as Yellin terms it, lays a more subversive truth (Introduction xvi).The realities of Linda’s motherhood underscore the lessons she learned early on through Uncle Benjamin’s escape; the conventional maternal values that bind one to family can actually serve as a force of oppression. And Linda finds her own motherly responsibilities and attachments in antagonistic relation with her personal desire for freedom. Wary, no doubt, of her nineteenth-century audience’s response to her perception of children as an encumbrance, Jacobs sends the slave’s maternal ambivalence narratively underground. The florid titles of chapters announcing the birth of Linda’s children are instructive. Her son Benny is “The New Tie to Life” (58) and her daughter Ellen “Another Link to Life” (76). While these chapter names overtly acknowledge the life-affirming role of children, their diction is slippery; “ties” and “links,” no doubt, carry a shadow meaning for the slave. At the end of the chapter that documents her daughter’s birth and christening, the emotional freight of the word “links” is revealed. When a well-meaning white woman clasps a chain around the baby’s neck, Linda baulks at the gift: “I wanted no chain to be fastened on my daughter, not even if the links were of gold” (79). Motherhood, in its own way, holds Linda Brent captive with just such golden links. So, while Jacobs certainly does cast a light on the difference in experience between the male and female slave, she does not reject the models of escape presented in masculine slave narratives. Attracted to the uncompromising determination for freedom available to a Frederick Douglass, Jacobs explores the more complicated realities of a slave woman who yearns for freedom but is encumbered by the love and responsibility of children. Articulating how children are de facto accessories to the mother’s enslavement, Jacobs’s split narrative reveals how a slave’s maternal love conflicts with her desire for liberty. Although Jacobs overtly imbues her with the maternal heroics of Eliza Harris, Linda never musters the motherly single-mindedness of Stowe’s character. Nor, in the end, will she be able to garner the self-reliant will-to-freedom of the young Frederick Douglass. Despite Linda Brent’s emphatic claim that she seeks freedom only for her “children’s sake,” the tensions between Linda’s maternity and her personal desire for freedom are legible through faults in the narrative logic of the text,

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seen in contradictions between Linda’s spoken intentions and her actions. For example, the slave-mother maintains that she wants freedom for the sake of Benny and Ellen and claims to reject opportunities to escape without them. Fleeing with small children would be a high-risk proposition, however, and none of the actual escape plans Jacobs documents in Incidents actually include the slave’s children. Although Linda Brent hopes to secure their manumission after establishing her own freedom, when she actually takes flight, she leaves her children behind. As Stephanie Smith argues, Linda’s “voluntary desertion treads very shaky narrative ground” (146). In fact, the slave woman learned early from her Uncle Benjamin that pursuing freedom might mean parting with “all kindred” (26). Despite the Victorian motherly rhetoric of Incidents, it is a risk she is willing to take. Linda’s internal divide—her contradictory motivations as a woman who longs for freedom and a mother who loves her children—is symbolically represented as she visits her parents’ graves in preparation for escape. Memories of her mother’s chaste character are galling reminders of her own shame and degradation throughout the narrative and leave Linda “subdued in spirit” (78). As she bows before her parents’ graves, her mother’s memory highlights her own failings as a woman and a mother: I knelt by the graves of my parents, and thanked God. . . . that they had not lived to witness my trials, or to mourn over my sins. I had received my mother’s blessing when she died; and in many an hour of tribulation I had seemed to hear her voice, sometimes chiding me, sometimes whispering loving words into my wounded heart. I have shed many and bitter tears, to think that when I am gone from my children they cannot remember me with such entire satisfaction as I remembered my mother. (90)

In contrast, the memory of her father, who “had more of the feelings of a free man than is common among slaves,” evokes quite different emotions in Linda (9). As the girl kneels before the “sacred” spot of her father’s grave and kisses the fading letters on his tombstone, she “pour[s] forth a prayer to God for guidance and support in the perilous step” she is about to take (91). However, her father—not God—answers Linda. As she walks past the old meeting house that was used as a place of worship “before Nat Turner’s time,” she hears her father’s voice calling her, “bidding [her] not to tarry” until she reaches “freedom or the grave” (91). While the dead mother inspires shame and pulls the slave girl towards maternal obligation, the father calls her towards self-determination and freedom. This emotional and motivational split will haunt Linda through the remainder of the narrative.


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Linda’s internal, emotional struggle between the love of her children and her desire for freedom is dramatically developed through her external conflict with Aunt Marthy, who acts as the genteel, maternal consciousness of the narrative. While the slave woman cherishes her “dear old grandmother” for her motherly ways, she finds herself unwillingly barricaded in slavery by her Aunt Marthy’s value system (155). When the grandmother learns of Linda’s plans to escape, she invokes both filial and maternal obligation and willfully manipulates her granddaughter’s motherly emotions. Arguing for continued captivity, the grandmother interrogates Linda about her proposed escape: “Linda, do you want to kill your old grandmother? Do you mean to leave your little, helpless children?” (91). Taunting her granddaughter with her own superior motherly devotion, she pulls Linda’s children on her lap and says to them, “Poor little souls! what would you do without a mother? She don’t love you as I do” (91). Reproaching her granddaughter for a “want of affection,” the grandmother holds the younger woman up to her Victorian culture’s standards of maternity, arguing that “Nobody respects a mother who forsakes her children” (91). “If you leave them,” the grandmother threatens, “you will never have a happy moment” (91). Ultimately, motherhood means giving up all personal desires and all dreams of freedom for Aunt Marthy, and she instructs Linda to “Stand by [her] own children and suffer with them till death” (91). Cowed by her grandmother’s chastisement, Linda agrees not to attempt escape at that time. Jacobs writes, “My courage failed me, in view of the sorrow I should bring on that faithful, loving old heart” (91). To Linda Brent, submission to those cords of affection means the same thing it does to Frederick Douglass—a want of courage. Avoiding a direct indictment of the grandmother for the value system she wields, Jacobs implicitly casts judgment by revealing how the slave state similarly exploits maternal affections and deploys Victorian codes of motherhood to keep Linda in captivity. When Dr. Flint punishes Linda by exiling her to an outlying family plantation, away from her grandmother and children, Mrs. Flint fears that her slave will run. Hoping to prevent such a flight, Linda’s mistress recommends that the slave’s children be brought to the plantation, believing that their presence will “fetter [Linda] to the spot” (93). While reticent to rebel against her grandmother’s values, Linda proves quite willing to forgo conventional maternal morality to foil the Flint’s goals. Learning that Mrs. Flint is planning on using her children against her, Linda’s will to flee solidifies. “[N]ow that I was certain my children were to be put in their power, in order to give them a stronger hold on me,” Jacobs writes, “I resolved to leave them that night” (95). While, on one hand, Linda claims to make the move for the “freedom of [her] children,”

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on the other, she admits that her actions will put her children in danger: “I was about to risk every thing on the throw of the die; and if I failed, O what would become of me and my poor children? They would be made to suffer for my fault” (95). After Linda flees and retreats to a hiding place, the Flints continue to use her familial affections against her—throwing her children, her brother, and her aunt in jail to drive her out of hiding. The Flints operate on the premise that Cassy succinctly posits in Uncle Tom’s Cabin: “you can do anything to a woman, when you’ve got her children” (391). Linda, however, refuses to be a hostage to the needs of family, although the emotional costs are high: “When I heard that my little ones were in the loathsome jail, my first impulse was to go to them. I was encountering dangers for the sake of freeing them, and must I be the cause of their death? The thought was agonizing” (101). As Caroline Levander has noted, Linda must “strategically reject her motherhood” in order to gain her freedom (35). While Linda claims that her “first impulse” is to go to her children, she keeps to her hiding place, allowing her family members to remain in prison. As Aunt Marthy anticipates, the high stakes Linda wagers for freedom bring her further denigration as a woman. While she is granted neither the rights nor respectability of motherhood, the Flints judge her harshly for her lack of maternal instinct. Mrs. Flint dehumanizes Linda in criticism eerily evocative of Aunt Marthy’s own words: “She hasn’t so much feeling for her children as a cow has for her calf. If she had, she would have come back long ago, to get them out of jail, and save all this expense and trouble” (102). In rejecting the censure of her captors, Linda throws a critical light on Aunt Marthy’s domestic, maternal motivations. The mode of Linda’s eventual escape—the flight to her grandmother’s attic and her prolonged seven-year stay there—has been the subject of much critical comment. For unlike the escape of her Uncle Benjamin or of his predecessor Frederick Douglass, Linda’s “Loophole of Retreat” is a particularly feminine mode of withdrawal, a flight into the hidden, domestic spaces of the family. Many critics view Linda’s retreat as a proactive and creative way to honor her own maternal values, to stay connected to family, while at the same time, working for her escape. Stephanie Smith, for example, believes that through the attic Linda has found a positive way to “‘part with all her kin’ without actually departing” (156). Grandmother’s attic, she further argues, is a place of gestation—a womb of sorts—from which Linda emerges as a newly born freewoman. Others see Linda in her garret prison as a sort of empowered mad woman in the attic who, in Krista Walter’s words, participates in a type of “liberating writing,” creating the fiction of her escape in letters to Dr. Flint—a fiction that the


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slave will eventually make real(189).10 Critical lines of reasoning such as these see Linda’s feminine mode of escape as an inspired vehicle of freedom—an alternative to the plot of male slave narratives, which fail to honor the commitment to familial bonds. Smith finds a feminine power in Linda Brent’s retreat, arguing, “the act of choosing her own mode of confinement constitutes an exercise of will, an indirect assault against her master’s domination” (29). Such readings, however, grant Linda an agency that Jacobs does not afford her and romanticize a situation that Jacobs describes in unrelieved negative terms. At the simplest level, Linda does not choose “her own mode of confinement.” In fact, she takes no active part in the decision to flee to her grandmother’s attic but is brought there by friends without being informed of her destination. Later, she is grateful that they concealed “what a dismal hole was to be [her] home for a long, long time” (113). This feminine, domestic “retreat,” as Jacobs ironically figures it, is no sanctuary, but a prison—a dark, bug-infested crawlspace that exposes her to both unbearable heat and frigid cold. While Linda admits that the sight and sound of her children through her peephole are “consolations” (116), her hiding place is, ultimately, a “living grave”—a place of physical and emotional torture that is only slightly mitigated by her children’s presence (147). If Linda is slow to change her circumstance, it is clear from the outset that freedom lies not within the hidden spaces of Grandmother’s home, but to the North where her uncle fled. As Jacobs articulates throughout the narrative, domestic solutions are never real solutions for the slave woman. Linda’s limbo-like imprisonment is, in a more general sense, a meditation on the trap of domesticity and the untenable role of motherhood for slave women. Here, in fact, home is a prison and the maternal role that keeps Linda bound to the place proves to be a hollow office. While the escaped slave may be physically near her children, she is forced to relinquish their care to her grandmother and does not, in any way, act like a natural mother. As Karen Sanchez-Eppler astutely notes, Linda’s peephole does not even provide a view of her children’s domestic world but, instead, looks out on the street (87–88). While she catches glimpses of her children, such views only serve to highlight her maternal impotence. For example, after watching helplessly from the garret as her son is mauled by a dog, Linda reports, “Oh what torture to a mother’s heart, to listen to this and be unable to go to him” (123). Finally, in her domestic prison, the mother must stand by powerlessly as others decide her children’s futures. The children’s white father Mr. Sands—who purchases but does not free his son and daughter—makes plans to move his children from their grandmother’s home without the input or aid of Linda. Jacobs writes: “my grandmother

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came and asked what would I do. The question seemed a mockery. What could I do? They were Mr. Sands slaves, and their mother was a slave” (137). Linda’s helpless position in her hidden cell replicates the essential powerlessness of slave motherhood and exposes the trap of domestic solutions. Although pressured by Aunt Marthy to stay in hiding, Linda realizes she can do no good for herself or for her children while locked inside her domestic prison, futilely holding on to her sham-status as mother. “In order to protect my children,” Linda articulates late in Incidents, “it was necessary that I should own myself” (166). Jacobs’s narrative paradoxically reveals that, in order to claim her motherhood, the slave woman has to be an agent of her own liberty by freeing herself from slavery and from the ties that bind her to her family.

NEW MODELS OF JUDGMENT AND SYMPATHY Despite Linda’s untenable living arrangements, Aunt Marthy remains the champion of domestic solutions until the end, using her emotional ammunition and Victorian values to keep Linda sequestered in her garret. Aunt Marthy informs Linda that “it will break [her] old grandmother’s heart” when the slave leaves her attic prison (131). Jacobs, however, offers her audience alternate feminine models of judgment and sympathy, creating several female characters who embrace the notion of freedom, despite the risks it poses to the domestic order. Not surprisingly, Jacobs imagines two such characters— Betty and Aunt Nancy—as childless, free from the emotional entanglements of motherhood. In the early days of her escape, Linda is harbored in a white woman’s home and protected by that woman’s servant Betty. Providing comfort and counsel, Betty attempts to keep Linda single-minded in her search for freedom, trying to relieve her of the fear-inducing distraction of her children. When Linda frets over the precarious position of Benjamin and Ellen from her hiding place, Betty tenderly rebukes her: “Lors, chile! whats you crying ‘bout? Dem young uns vil kill you dead. Don’t be so chick’n hearted! If you does, you vil nebber git thro’dis world” (101). Betty’s dialect suggests she is not constrained by the class-based values of Aunt Marthy, but Linda attributes the servant’s bold outlook to her childlessness: [Betty] had never had little ones to clasp their arms around her neck; she had never seen their soft eyes looking into hers; no sweet little voices had called her mother, she had never pressed her own infants to her heart, with the feeling that even in fetters there was something to live for. How could she realize my feelings? (101–102)


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Linda’s Aunt Nancy is another source of womanly inspiration. Based on Jacobs’s own Aunt Betty, this character deviates in an important way from her living predecessor; while the real Aunt Betty actually had a child at the same time as the author, the fictional Aunt Nancy is rendered childless through stillbirths and crib deaths in the narrative.11 Jacobs underwrites Aunt Nancy’s brave advocacy of Linda’s escape by her own freedom from the bonds of maternity. While Aunt Nancy is willing to act the part of a mother to Linda, she, unlike Aunt Marthy, will not constrict the girl with maternal fears or obligations. Brent reports: When my friends tried to discourage me from running away, [Aunt Nancy] always encouraged me. When they thought I had better return and ask my master’s pardon, she sent me word never to yield. She said if I persevered I might, perhaps, gain the freedom of my children; and even if I perished in doing it, that was better than to leave them to groan under the same persecutions that had blighted my own life. (144)

After Aunt Nancy’s death, the opportunity finally arrives for Linda to escape North. Besieged by Aunt Marthy’s pleas to stay, Linda painfully grieves that she “had no good old aunt Nancy now to encourage” her (149). The slave woman Aggie provides the most powerful alternative to Aunt Marthy’s domestic ethos, serving, as Daneen Wardrop argues, as a doppelganger of sorts for Linda’s grandmother. Illiterate and poor, this bereaved slave mother is the only character specifically to challenge Aunt Marthy’s maternal values and present an alternative model of motherly devotion. When Linda’s brother William escapes to the free North, Aunt Marthy is sorely grieved and reports her distress to her friend, “O Aggie . . . it seems as if I shouldn’t have any of my children or grandchildren left to hand me a drink when I’m dying, and lay my old body in the ground” (135). Aggie gently but firmly rebukes Aunt Marthy for her response, providing quite a different model of pious womanhood for Jacobs’s readers: Is dat what you’s crying fur? . . . Git down on your knees and bress de Lord! I don’t know whar my poor chillern is, and I nebber ‘spect to know. You don’t know whar poor Linda’s gone to; but you do know whar her brudder is. He’s in free parts; and dat’s de right place. Don’t murmur at de Lord’s doings, but git down on your knees and tank him for his goodness. (135)

Jacobs uses dialect sparingly in Incidents, and Aggie’s language clearly separates her from Aunt Marthy and from Jacobs’s middle class audience.

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It is a separation, Jacobs stealthily suggests, that is all to Aggie’s moral advantage. Jacobs’s juxtaposition of Aggie and Aunt Marthy cuts even deeper. Although Aggie claims, at first, not to know the whereabouts of her children, the reader soon learns that she, just like Aunt Marthy, is secretly harboring a fugitive daughter in her home. Jacobs morally delineates between the two old mothers, however, in depicting their dramatically different reaction to the prospect of their children’s escape. When Linda’s chance to flee North finally comes, Aunt Marthy reacts with “sob[s], and groan[s],” and she “entreat[s],” her granddaughter not to go (151). Linda responds, “Her excessive fear was somewhat contagious, and my heart was not proof against her extreme agony. I was grievously disappointed, but I promised to relinquish my project” (151). In contrast, when Aggie learns that her daughter Fanny is to take Linda’s place on an escape vessel she “rejoice[s] to hear of such a chance” (151). Aggie, whose social class allows her to escape the narrowness of the culture’s sentimental, domestic mores, proves the more selfless mother in the end. She provides an alternative model of maternal care for Jacobs’s audience—one in which offering freedom and cutting domestic ties are their own means of nurturance. Finally, Jacobs boldly rewrites the script of sentimental response through Linda’s relationship with her daughter Ellen, offering her audience a new paradigm of sympathy. Having been reunited with her daughter after her successful escape North, Linda attempts to foster a relationship of honest communication by eschewing the shamed silence that often existed between herself and her grandmother. When her daughter prepares to leave for boarding school, Linda decides that she must reveal the sexual details of her own young life and identify the girl’s father. In a sense, the difficulty Linda Brent faces in revealing her tainted history to her daughter is precisely the same difficulty that Jacobs faces in approaching her sentimental audience: Linda attempts to tell the truth while retaining the “kindly sympathies” of her child. She describes the dilemma she faces with her daughter: “Now that she was going from me, I thought if I should die before she returned, she might hear my story from some one who did not understand the palliating circumstances; and that if she were entirely ignorant on the subject, her sensitive nature might receive a rude shock” (188). Like Jacobs, Linda chooses to tell her own story because she can and will emphasize the “palliating circumstances” that explain, if not exonerate, and that cast a different light on her imperfect Victorian womanhood. In important ways, Ellen’s daughterly response to her mother’s confession offers a new model of “right feeling”—a model that Jacobs undoubtedly hopes her audience will take to heart.


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Because Jacobs’s nineteenth-century sentimental culture had such faith in and so cherished the innate goodness and natural wisdom of the child, Ellen’s reaction to her mother would have carried a weighty moral authority with the audience. It is significant, then, that Ellen refuses to judge her mother with the stock values of genteel society. Instead, she judges her mother from a more intimate, personal perspective. As Linda begins to detail her sexual history, Ellen embraces her mother and says, “O, don’t mother! Please don’t tell me any more” (188). Revealing that she knows all about her own father, she rejects the need for such a confession and affirms Linda Brent in her motherhood. Ellen tells Linda, “I am nothing to my father, and he is nothing to me. All my love is for you” (189). This moment between mother and daughter provides great emotional balm for Linda, and heals, in a way, the painful silence and shame of Linda’s life. Jacobs writes: She hugged me closer as she spoke, and I thanked God that the knowledge I had so much dreaded to impart had not diminished the affection of my child. I had not the slightest idea she knew that portion of my history. If I had, I should have spoken to her long before; for my pentup feelings had often longed to pour themselves out to someone I could trust. But I loved the dear girl better for the delicacy she had manifested toward her unfortunate mother. (189)

The success of Jacobs’s abolitionist narrative rests on her audience showing just such “delicacy” of sentiment; in offering Ellen as model, the author guides her readers to accept the slave mother in her imperfection without “diminished . . . affection.” The freedom narratives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Eliza Harris both arc to a point of harmonious conclusion, with both slaves attaining and superseding their original goals. In the end, Douglass and Eliza Harris achieve both freedom and domestic contentment. While Douglass goes on a single-minded quest for liberty and proves himself willing to cut the cords of affection to run North, at the end of The Narrative, he is re-united with a fiancé—a woman who is curiously absent from the rest of the work. As Douglass writes his story “seated by [his] own table,” he works in both “the enjoyment of freedom and the happiness of home” (75). The saintly mother Eliza Harris, who gives up the domestic comforts of the Shelby house to stand by her child, is likewise rewarded. At the end of the novel, we find the free woman, in “a small, neat tenement” with “a cheerful fire blaz[ing] on the hearth,” surrounded by her family—her “air” even “more matronly than of yore” (456). While Douglass claims the cultural ideal of self-reliant manhood,

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in the end, he earns a comfortable domesticity as well. While Eliza Harris is the nineteenth-century epitome of selfless womanhood, she reaps her own freedom through her maternal single-mindedness. In the worlds of Douglass and Stowe’s Eliza Harris, freedom and domesticity are imaginatively reconciled. Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, however, does not and cannot aspire to the holistically satisfying conclusions of Douglass or Stowe. The end of Linda Brent’s story is as replete with moral compromise as the rest of her life. When Linda finally affects her escape, she is disappointed to find the North a place that merely “ape[s] the customs of slavery” (163). Her ambivalence about freedom, motherhood, and the domestic world continues unabated. While she is overjoyed to wake to the sight of free land on her first day in Philadelphia, she is painfully aware of the cost: “We had escaped from slavery. . . . But we were alone in the world, and we had left dear ties behind us” (158). While she is happy to find herself eventually reunited with her children and gainfully employed in the home of the caring Mrs. Bruce, Linda admits that “Sweet and bitter were mixed in the cup” of her life (170). Constantly hounded by fears of being recaptured, forced to put the needs of her employers’ children over her own, Linda still finds herself longing “to be entirely free to act a mother’s part” (160). While she is fortunate, in the end, to have her safety purchased—to be bought out of slavery—it galls her beyond measure that payment has been made to her old master’s family for “what never rightfully belonged” to them (200). On the final page of the narrative, Jacobs defines the narrow limits of her peaceful ending with Linda Brent’s penultimate words: Reader, my story ends with freedom; not in the usual way, with marriage. I and my children are now free! We are as free from the power of slaveholders as are the white people of the north; and though that, according to my ideas, is not saying a great deal, it is a vast improvement in my condition. The dream of my life is not yet realized. I do not sit with my children in a home of my own. (201).

In the end, neither Linda Brent’s claims to freedom nor her claims to motherhood can say a “great deal.” Throughout the narrative, Linda’s sexual, domestic, and maternal ideals have been painfully attenuated and altered by the “palliating circumstances” of her slavehood (188). As a woman and mother, Linda accepts and acknowledges what Aunt Marthy cannot or will not admit: that the freedom to choose chastity is a luxury that the slave woman will never know; that the power and respectability of white southern motherhood is unavailable for the slave woman; that domestic


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dreams—as lovely as they are for the tortured slave—can offer no real avenue of escape and may actually tighten the chains of slavery. Perhaps most painfully of all, through the course of the narrative, Linda Brent learns the agonizing moral compromise that is the inevitable cost for the slave woman who loves her children but loves freedom, too. In Jacobs’s imagination, as in Hawthorne’s, individualistic pursuits can never be successfully or completely reconciled with the requirements of home, family, and society. Through her innovative adaptation of the domestic form in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs eschews the ideality of sentimentalism and attempts to circumvent its domestic dogma as well. In presenting Linda Brent’s imperfect womanhood and motherhood, Jacobs challenges her readers to creatively and generously extend sympathy to a character whose life circumstances and moral realities are radically different than their own.

Chapter Four

“She Has Been Burning Palaces”: The Maternal Poetics of Sarah Piatt

For a remarkable fifty-seven years (1854–1911), Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt successfully worked as a poet, publishing in many of the elite periodicals and presses of nineteenth-century America. In the eleven years that she spent in Ireland (1882–1893), Piatt gained an international reputation as well, often being favorably compared in the Irish and British press to the Brownings and Christina Rossetti. Built primarily upon the domestic experiences of marriage and motherhood and written with a distinctly genteel vocabulary, Piatt’s poetry was most often admired by nineteenth-century critics for its perceived fidelity to gender norms. For example, in a review of her earliest and only unsigned volume, A Woman’s Poems, William Dean Howells commended Piatt for having so aptly titled her work, finding her poetry praiseworthy for being so “thoroughly feminine in thought and expression, in subject and treatment” (“Recent Literature” 773). And George D. Prentice, the influential editor of the Louisville Journal, speculated that if Piatt remained “entirely true” to herself, she would become the “first poet of [her] sex in the United States” (qtd. in Willard and Livermore 569). Not surprisingly, as America moved beyond its Victorian sensibilities, the perception of Piatt as a genteel, “womanly” artist rapidly transformed from an asset into a liability. One late nineteenth-century review criticized the poet for her “feminine tendency to glorify the trivial” and suggested that Piatt’s “maternal instinct” was sometimes “at odds with her artistic faculty” (“Poetry and Verse” 257). Moving into the modern era, Piatt’s poetry could not bear the often reductive scrutiny of a twentieth-century critical aesthetic. After her death in 1919, the poet was summarily archived with other sentimental women writers, reduced in one 1934 biographical dictionary to the role of an “Essentially feminine” poet whose work reflected the “joys, griefs, and aspirations of the ordinary woman’s life” (Johnson and Malone 557–558). Until the end of the twentieth century, 105

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then, Piatt was relegated to the ranks of minor poets—penalized, like many of her female peers, for supposedly operating within the narrow confines of a specifically sentimental, feminine discourse. However, Piatt’s focus on womanly subjects and her “feminine sensibility” were not the simple reflection of sentimental culture and conservative gender ideology that either her nineteenth-century enthusiasts or her twentieth-century detractors believed. Alice Meynell, one of Piatt’s contemporaries, recognized the complexity beneath the genteel façade of Piatt’s “womanly” poetry. Noting that the term “feminine” was often a masked pejorative, Meynell reclaimed and redefined the term on Piatt’s behalf: . . . [A] woman is best praised . . . without the word feminine, and she has cause to be glad if she deserves not to hear it. Nevertheless, it is reserved for one woman [Sarah Piatt] to show this very quality in a new manner—not as a grace, but as a force; not as a negative of something else, but as a positive thing, and therefore an energy standing sufficiently alone. (32)

Some of Piatt’s other early critics puzzled over the seeming paradox of her work: while her poetry seemed at first conventionally sentimental, the feelings revealed or the emotions evoked by her verse were somehow lacking or askew. In an 1874 review of A Voyage to the Fortunate Isles, one critic complained that the poet lacked “sentiment, tenderness, feeling.” This review particularly criticized one of Piatt’s poems on death whose subject was “pathetic” but whose treatment “lacked pathos” (“Art vs. Heart” 502). While another critic noted that Piatt’s method was “a profound one,” he also felt it a “faulty one” in that it “implies more sympathy than she is likely to obtain” (“Recent Poetry by Women” 635). In perhaps what is one of the most astute nineteenth-century reviews of Piatt’s work, the critic highlights the poet’s ability to manipulate a sentimental medium to her own purposes. The reviewer writes, “she has so happy a knack” of keeping “her readers sympathizing with her even while she is saying what in itself is outside their sympathy” (“Recent Verse” 14). Piatt, like other genteel women poets of her day, did indeed treat “feminine” subjects and often exploited stock sentimental imagery, but through her poetry, she pushed the limits of her nineteenth-century readers’ sympathies, challenging them with a vision of womanhood that did not conform to cultural ideals. Poetically inhabiting a distinctly sentimental space, Piatt interrogated and critiqued her culture from within. Paula Bennett’s ground-breaking scholarship has offered modern readers a powerful new way of approaching Sarah Piatt’s “feminine”

“She Has Been Burning Palaces”

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aesthetic. While Bennett concedes that Piatt wrote some genteel poetry that was aligned with conservative, nineteenth-century sensibilities, she argues that Piatt’s mature, irony-laden work was different. According to Bennett, Piatt’s poetry does not underwrite the nineteenth-century vision of Woman as the domestic, pious, and pure “Angel in the House”; instead, her poetry concerns “the formation of middle-class women’s subjectivity” and actually works towards the “deconstruction of the Angel” (Poets in the Public Sphere 139). Identifying “‘woman’s place’ in the modern world” as Piatt’s primary subject, Bennett argues that the poet explores the social, political, and literary implications of gender issues for women (Poets in the Public Sphere 139). Reversing the reading of Piatt as insular in her focus on womanly issues, Bennett establishes Piatt’s “deep commitment to her poetry’s political role in the public sphere” (Poets in the Public Sphere 139). Agreeing with Bennett that gender represents the poet’s principle subject, I would contend, however, that Piatt’s cultural argument is made specifically on the platform of motherhood. Unfortunately, contemporary scholarship on Piatt has tended to conceal the poet’s central preoccupation with the maternal. In fact, the story of the recovery of Sarah Piatt’s work exposes a continued tendency, especially among feminist critics, to eschew the maternal in nineteenth-century studies, based, in part, on its connection to a sentimental culture that is read as homogenously conservative. In reclaiming Sarah Piatt through her publication of Palace-Burner, for example, Paula Bennett positions Piatt as a proto-modernist. Highlighting poems that she reads as overtly political, Bennett deemphasizes those which focus on conventionally sentimental subjects—those at risk of being critiqued as essentialist or pejoratively labeled “domestic.” Through these maneuvers, Bennett was undoubtedly attempting to free the poetry from a critical heritage that had buried it under claims of its “feminine” nature. Unfortunately, Bennett’s recovery strategy has offered contemporary readers a skewed picture of Sarah Piatt—one that does not address her enormous poetic and political investment in the maternal. In her preface to Palace-Burner, Bennett provocatively claims that Piatt wrote what is “probably the largest single body of poetry about motherhood and children in the English language” (Preface xviv). Nonetheless, Bennett’s influential introduction and poetry selection in Palace-Burner obscure the decidedly maternal focus of Piatt’s cultural critique.1 Piatt’s extensive body of work on motherhood, in fact, proves every bit as challenging—and every bit as political—as, for example, her poems on the Civil War. And while Piatt’s literary career, which spans the second half of the nineteenth-century, undoubtedly arcs towards Modernism, the mother-poems that form the core of her oeuvre attest, first and

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foremost, to the complex negotiations on gender that were waged within the sentimental era in which Piatt came to maturity. Piatt’s maternal poetics both originate in and challenge the tradition of sentimental motherhood. Like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Piatt recognized the political and cultural currency of the maternal, finding in motherhood the critical intersection of women’s private and public lives. Keenly aware of motherhood’s de facto political nature, Piatt, like Stowe, uses maternity as the fulcrum of her cultural critique. However, while Piatt places her poetry in the conventional arena of women’s domestic lives, she is also deeply skeptical of utopian visions. Ultimately, her poetry undermines rather than endorses nineteenth-century idealizations of motherhood. In fact, the central action of Piatt’s “deconstruction of the Angel,” as Bennett terms it, is the dismantling of the selfless, sanctified maternal icon that so powerfully inhabited the imagination of nineteenth-century America. The flawed and ambivalent women in Piatt’s poems do not come “naturally” to their roles as mothers, and they will demonstrate a distinctly troubled and conditional brand of love. Piatt’s poems about motherhood, then, explore the uncomfortable realities of women’s confining gender roles and expose and thus render vulnerable the regulatory mechanisms embedded in sentimental maternal ideology. In resisting her society’s narrow, conservative constructions, Piatt, like Hawthorne and Jacobs, participates in the alternative discourse of motherhood, and she explores the maternal role as a potential site of both subjection and subversion. Piatt’s biography offers interesting context for the poet’s proclivity for turning a sharply critical eye on the sentimental, middle-class culture in which she also comfortably participated. In her preface to Palace-Burner, Bennett describes the author as having a “border-state mentality”—a result not only of the Northern transplantation of this Kentucky-born poet, but also of her literary exile in Ireland for eleven years, while her husband served as U.S consul at Cork (Preface xix). Daughter of a prominent Southern family and direct descendent of Daniel Boone, Piatt’s adult life was marred by social descent. Her marriage to the poet J. J. Piatt was plagued by a financial and social instability that undoubtedly contributed to her border-state mentality by threatening her comfortable position within the middle class.2 Furthermore, as a Southerner who witnessed the ravages of the Civil War from a Northern perspective, Piatt was in an untenable emotional position, unable, as Bennett writes, to “take sides without betraying something or someone” (Introduction Palace-Burner xvv). Piatt’s childhood provides specific context for the poet’s unique view of the maternal. Having lost her own mother when she was eight years old, Sarah and her sister Ellen were handed off to a series of relatives


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and lived only briefly again with their father after his remarriage. In a letter to James Russell Lowell, her husband J. J. would attribute the melancholy of Piatt’s poetics to “the death of a tender mother . . . the loss of a beautiful and happy home, [and] her father’s second marriage” (J. J. Piatt to James Russell Lowell September 1, 1865, qtd. in PalaceBurner 180). 3 Sarah’s antebellum origins further complicated her view of motherhood. Living in the slave-holding South, including a stay on her maternal grandmother’s plantation, Piatt lived within a social system that placed the care of white children in the hands of slave women. According to Bennett, the one person in Sarah’s life after her mother’s death who provided the girl with the deeply-felt feminine affections that might be termed “maternal” was an elderly black slave woman, who first served as the caregiver for Piatt’s own mother. Bennett writes that this black woman was “Piatt’s only constant” in the years of upheaval and change that followed her mother’s death (Introduction Nineteenth-Century American Women Poets: An Anthology 22). In two of the few poems in which Piatt directly approaches the subject of her own childhood, “The Black Princess: A True Fable of My Old Kentucky Nurse” (1872) and “A Child’s Party” (1883),4 Piatt deemphasizes biological maternity while privileging the emotional relationship between Southern children and their slave caretakers. In so doing, Piatt interrogates what Sigourney calls the “entire and perfect” “dominion” that a birth mother has over her child. (Letters to Mothers 10). Piatt reached her maturity, then, with in a unique vision of the maternal—one dissociated from the essentialist constructions of sentimental motherhood. While sentimentalists such as Sigourney imagine the bond between biological mother and child as a force of nature—as sacrosanct, Piatt’s world-view leaves little room for such constructs. Through her maternal poetics, Piatt peels away the façade of conservative, sentimental maternity, exposing the emotional and political truths lying beneath.

DISMANTLING THE MATERNAL ICON Providing an alternative to the devoted, selfless, middle-class Madonna, Piatt’s poetry sympathetically treats women who fail to live up to essentialized visions of the maternal. In the poem “Questions of the Hour” (1869), for example, Piatt denaturalizes the bond between mother and child. After a bedtime reading of Cinderella, the young daughter in the poem naively asks her flawed, harried mother, “Mamma, are you—my stepmother?” The narrator guiltily admits, “The innocent reproof crept to my heart” (35). Piatt here challenges the cultural ideal of maternal love as an “element of

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nature,” suggesting a more complex motherhood in which women can, at times, play the evil stepmother to her own children. Often, the women who inhabit Piatt’s poetry suffer a divided maternal consciousness, which is expressed through dreams of oppression and fantasies of escape. Keenly aware of cultural expectations but decidedly unable to live up to them, Piatt’s mothers are wracked by a guilt-ridden ambivalence. The poem “A Dream’s Awakening” (1864), for example, expresses a deeply conflicted motherhood: SHUT in a close and dreary sleep, Lonely and frightened and oppressed I felt a dreadful serpent creep, Writhing and crushing, o’er my breast. I woke and knew my child’s sweet arm, As soft and pure as flakes of snow, Beneath my dream’s dark, hateful charm, Had been the thing that tortured so. (1–8)

The dark, nocturnal vision is transcended “in the morning’s dew and light,” and the mother-narrator is consoled (9). But while maternal ambivalence is safely housed in a nightmare that disappears in “higher day,” the reader cannot so easily dismiss the powerful imagery, which figures the responsibilities of motherhood as crushing and oppressive (12). This poem juxtaposes a troubled, private maternal experience with the culturally-sanctioned, “day-light” vision of motherhood. The poem “Offers for the Child” (1871) similarly reflects the guilty conscience of a woman who feels oppressed by her maternity. The mother-narrator in the poem meets “a stranger with the whitest hair” (4) in “the dim spaces of a dream” (1). The stranger is the mythological figure Atlas, and the mother provocatively equates her own burden with his: “His name was Atlas, and he held the world; / I held a child—and both of us were tired” (8–9). As Atlas expresses admiration for the child, the mother complains of maternal fatigue: “A handsome boy,” he courteously said; “He pleases my old fancy. What fine eyes!” “Yes, father, but he wearies me. My head Is aching, too, and—listen how he cries!” (10–13)

With a seductive pageant that evokes Satan’s temptation of Christ in the desert, Atlas makes “Offers for the Child,” promising the mother—quite


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literally—the world if she will relinquish the son she has declared such a heavy burden: “If you would let me take him”—and he spread All his fair laces and deep velvets wide; Then hid them from my smile, and, in their stead, Sweet jewels and vague sums of gold he tried. Then ships, all heavy with the scents and sounds Of many seas, the stains of many a sun; Then palaces, with empires for their grounds, Were slowly offered to me, one by one. Then take the world! It will amuse you. So Watch while I move its wires.” An instant, then He laughed. “Look, child, at this quick puppet show:” I saw a rich land dusk with marching men. (14–26)

The mother must choose between the world of wealth, luxury, and power and her child—a child who has made her tired, who has made her head ache with his crying. The deep maternal ambivalence, the resentment of burden and sacrifice, the longing to be free from parental responsibilities, the desire for material rewards—all emerge in the anxieties of this dream. A broader political message is at work here, too—communicated most effectively in the line of “marching men” paraded before the mother. Atlas represents the worldly, masculine, and militaristic existence that threatens to claim the son. Through the anxieties of the dream, the mother-narrator, fatigued and unfulfilled, expresses a guilty sense of complicity in creating and supporting such a world as she contemplates sacrificing her troublesome child to Atlas to relieve her own burdens. As the poem draws to a close, the “old Peddler” roughly makes his final demand (37): . . .”Take the world and move them as you will!— Give me the boy.” (32–34)

Like the mother in “A Dream’s Awakening,” the narrator of “Offers for the Child” seems to return to the sentimental ideals of nineteenthcentury motherhood when she returns to consciousness. As the narrator awakens, she says farewell to Atlas, ostensibly recommitting herself to the burdens of maternal duty:

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Negotiating Motherhood in Nineteenth-Century American Literature ——Then shivering with affright, I held the close cheek’s dimple closer still, And bade the old Peddler—for I woke—good-night! (35–37)

While the ending of Piatt’s poem seems to nod to the ideals of sentimental maternity, the deep ambivalence of the mother, represented in the temptations of the dream, goes essentially unresolved. For the mother never volitionally turns down the “Old Peddler’s” offer; she only bids Atlas “goodnight” by coming to consciousness.5 When the mother awakens “shivering with affright,” she is not only fearful of the sinister Atlas but also of her own dark capacity to barter her innocent child for the worldly treasures with which he tempts her. Piatt’s poetry also addresses the specific ambivalence of the woman artist and mother. In the poem “Her Talk with a Redbird” (1871), the narrator imagines escaping the toils and cares of motherhood and fleeing into the world of flight and music represented by a redbird. In the hours before dawn, the wearied mother dreams of changing places with the bird, even if it means loss of her eternal soul: “Oh, Bird, flush’d Bird, you can sing and fly. For the song I hear and the wings I see, I would give you—my soul and its share in the sky; And I would be you and you should be me. (9–12)

Piatt’s poem is closely akin to the “free-bird” pattern that Cheryl Walker identifies as an important topos of nineteenth-century women’s poetry. Within this traditional motif, the woman poet aspires to the freedom of a bird but quickly realizes that to follow into flight and song means leaving loved ones behind. Walker writes that the free-bird poem suggests “that a woman must choose between love and poetry, that a commitment to both is somehow impossible” (47). In the final stanza of “Her Talk with a Redbird,” Piatt similarly posits that women must escape the responsibilities of motherhood to enter the world of song. Unlike the typical free-bird poem, however, Piatt’s verse does not end with the poet’s renunciation of the bird as a model. As the poem concludes, the narrator imagines a painless and productive retreat from maternal duty: “They would tell my children their mother was dead. ‘Never mind, she was tired and pale,’ they would say, ‘But here is a Bird, so pretty and red, ‘In your trees—to cry might scare it away!’” (13–16)


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While the speaker dreams of leaving the ineffectual and unfulfilling role of mother behind, she does not envision completely abandoning her children. Instead, she imagines bringing delight and joy to them as an element of nature, perhaps in the creation of art. In rejecting both the essentialism and idealization of motherhood—in disclaiming the conventional moral authority of the mother—Sarah Piatt also exposes and disarms maternal ideology as a disciplinary tool. This is particularly evident in the maternal poems written in her signature form, the dramatic or dialogue poem. These works, which focus on intimate moments between mothers and their children, allow readers to eavesdrop on mother-child conversations. Piatt’s dramatic poetry inhabits some of sentimental culture’s most cherished space, not only exploring the mother’s role as her child’s first teacher but also examining what Sigourney calls the “transforming power” that the child exerts on the mother (Letters to Mothers 22). This intimate space is imagined as a site of cultural discipline in nineteenth-century writing, but Piatt revises it by identifying a politically radicalizing potential lurking within the mother-child bond. Nowhere is this more evident than in “The Palace-Burner” (1872). In this poem, the mother-narrator’s private interaction with her young child initiates a process of self-scrutiny, leading the woman to recognize and claim her own subversive inclinations. While “The Palace-Burner” documents an intimate, domestic moment between mother and child, the subject matter of the poem elegantly articulates the intersection of the private and the public, the personal and the political, in women’s lives. In this poem, a mother and son are perusing old newspapers, and despite the mother’s objection, the son’s attention turns repeatedly to the illustration of a desperate woman about to be executed by a French firing squad. The woman in the illustration is one of the legendary “pétroleuses”—women incendiaries who purportedly used burning petroleum cans to start fires for the Communard forces in the French uprising of 1871.6 While these female fire-starters were frightening symbols of revolutionary violence to many, they were sometimes sympathetically portrayed in the American press as brave but misguided women who were driven by desperation and despair.7 In the opening lines of Piatt’s “The Palace-Burner,” the mother-narrator answers her child’s questions about the female revolutionary pictured in the newspaper: She has been burning palaces. “To see the sparks look pretty in the wind?” Well yes— And something more. But women brave as she Leave much for cowards such as I to guess.

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Negotiating Motherhood in Nineteenth-Century American Literature [. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .] You wish that you had lived in Paris then? You would have loved to burn a palace, too? But they had guns in France, and Christian men Shot wicked little Communists, like you. You would have burned the palace? Just because You did not live in it yourself! Oh! why? Have I not taught you to respect the laws? You would have burned the palace. Would not I? (1–4, 9–16)

This private conversation between mother and child is precisely the venue in which sentimental maternity is imagined to wield its power, where a mother can claim her role as “maternal tutor” and indoctrinate her child in proper, bourgeois social values. Paula Bennett reads “The Palace-Burner” as a critique of this process and claims that Piatt exposes how the mother’s “inactivity and moral indifference” “instill non critical obedience to authority, muddying the child’s innate sense of justice” (Poets in the Public Sphere 138). I would argue, however, that the tone of the mother’s rebuke in the opening lines of the poem must be carefully weighed. There is an intimate, playful tenor, as the mother labels her son a “wicked little communist” and scolds, “Have I not taught you to respect the laws?” Indeed, the fact that the mother has first labeled the pétroleuse brave and herself cowardly is not lost on her son. The knowing young boy innocently calls the mother’s bluff, candidly asking (as the dramatic monologue suggests), “Wouldn’t you burn palaces too?” Ultimately, the critical message of the poem concerns not what the mother teaches the boy, but what the boy teaches his mother. For the intimacy between mother and child here is not the vehicle of the mother’s proper socialization as nineteenth-century sentimentalists imagined it might be. The child challenges his mother to embrace her more revolutionary allegiances. As Bennett has noted, the mother is the one “on trial” here, and the child’s interrogation leads the woman to examine her own conscience—to examine if she, indeed, would not burn a palace (Poets in the Public Sphere 138).“Would I?” she asks. Dismissing the child, the mother continues to ruminate on the child’s provocative insights: Would I? Go to your play. Would I, indeed? I? Does the boy not know my soul to be Languid and worldly, with a dainty need


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For light and music? Yet he questions me. Can he have seen my soul more near than I? (17–21)

The boy has served as a mirror for the woman, and she wonders in amazement if he might not know her conscience better than she knows it herself. Although she has put on the trappings of domesticity—lived in the “Languid and worldly” realm of bourgeois womanhood—her son somehow sees past the performance. Gazing at the picture of the pétroleuse, looking through her child’s eyes, the narrator sees not only the vision of another woman’s radical life choices but contemplates, too, the revolutionary stirrings in her own soul. The poem continues: Ah! in the dusk and distance sweet she seems, With lips to kiss away a baby’s cry, Hands fit for flowers, and eyes for tears and dreams. Can he have seen my soul? And could she wear Such utter life upon a dying face, Such unappealing, beautiful despair, Such garments—soon to be a shroud—with grace? (22–28).

Through the agency of the child’s eyes, the figures of the bourgeois mothernarrator and the doomed communard are momentarily melded; with lovely imagery, Piatt superimposes the doomed bravery of the revolutionary on the tender heart of motherhood. In her imagination, the speaker makes the pétroleuse maternal; then she explores the woman’s violent potential: Has she a charm so calm that it could breathe In damp, low places till some frightened hour; Then start, like a fair subtle snake, and wreathe A stinging poison with a shadowy power? Would I burn palaces? [ . . . ] (29–33)

The poem concludes with a disclaimer of sorts as the speaker regretfully admits that she is no palace-burner. However, the woman’s moral allegiances, which are defined and elaborated by her son’s probing questions, are crystal clear at the end of the poem. For in the final line, the mother acknowledges that the pétroleuse is a “finer” being than she. Piatt’s “PalaceBurner,” then, suggests a potential for political subversiveness immanent in the maternal role. This is evident not only in Piatt’s communard, who the

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narrator provocatively imagines as a mother, but in the bourgeois mothernarrator herself. For it is inside the intimate maternal space—through interactions with her questioning child—that the mother-narrator in “The Palace-Burner” first acknowledges and owns her own radical political allegiances. And although his mother currently lives a “languid and worldly” existence, the son at least suspects that she might strike like a snake if provoked, like the pétroleuse, by injustice. Here, the mother-child bond challenges rather than reinforces the domestic and political status quo.

THE POETICS OF MATERNAL BEREAVEMENT In Ramah is heard the sound of moaning, of bitter weeping! Rachel mourns her children, she refuses to be consoled, because her children are no more. (Jeremiah 31:15)

Perhaps Piatt’s most dramatic dispute with her culture’s maternal ideology evolves in her poetics of motherly bereavement. Like Sigourney and Stowe, Piatt recognized child death as the ultimate test of womanly submissiveness, and she generously contributed to her culture’s production of child elegies. Unlike conservative sentimentalists, however, Piatt actually critiques this nineteenth-century “Domestication of Death,” much as Ann Douglas would do one hundred years later (200). While the bereaved mother-narrators in Piatt’s poems certainly claim no moral authority, they do speak under the cover of grief. Exploiting this cultural cover, Piatt produces some of her most pointed social criticism. Indeed, while Piatt freely draws on conservative sentimentalists’ elegiac vocabulary and emotional strategy, her poetry will resist the sentimental tendency to “sanitize grief” (Petrino 93). Contesting the ethos of Christian consolation, Piatt also challenges the wisdom of the sentimental tradition, elaborated through the works of both Sigourney and Stowe, that imagines the loss of a child as a spiritually empowering event for women. And just as Piatt undermines the intimate space between the mother and her living child as an effective site of interpellation, so too does she challenge the efficacy of child death as a vehicle of maternal discipline. Piatt knew firsthand what it was to lose a mother at an early age, and as an adult she suffered the deaths of three of her children. In August of


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1873, Piatt’s four-day-old infant died of unknown causes. Although such deaths were commonplace in the nineteenth century, Piatt was not philosophical about the loss; her infant’s death left her inconsolable (PalaceBurner 168). According to an early biographer, less than a year after the passing of her infant son, Piatt’s eldest son Victor (1864–1874) was killed in a fireworks accident on the eve of Independence Day: Just at dusk, as his father came home from the city, [Victor] was playing with some powder which he had stored in a bottle, when it exploded— and the same instant the little fellow ran toward them crying assuredly, “Mamma, I am not much hurt! I am not hurt mamma!” But the next moment he was no longer with them. (Farman 69)

Ten years later, Piatt’s sons Cecil and Louis were seen leaving the family home in Ireland “with their arms prettily about each other”—venturing off to sail two “tiny yachts . . . of pine” on the Lee River (J.J. Piatt in a letter to William Henry Venable, September 12, 1884 qtd. in Palace-Burner 178). While Cecil survived the adventure, Louis, the sixth of Piatt’s children, drowned in Cork Harbor at the age of nine. These tragic experiences coalesced in a life-long sorrow for Piatt. Her writing is also suffused with a sense of loss, and in her poetry, as Howells notes, “melancholy . . . tinges all” (“Some Recent Volumes of Verse” 41). An astute contemporary critic praises Piatt for her powerful evocation of “the Rachel-sorrow,” an allusion to the biblical figure of bereaved motherhood (Farman 68). Piatt was certainly not alone in her evocation. Much of the consolation literature of the period—Sigourney’s included— acknowledged the Rachel-sorrow, but focused primarily on God’s disciplinary call for Rachel to “Cease” her “cries of mourning” and to have faith in His promise of spiritual reunion (Jeremiah 31:16). Sigourney writes to bereaved mothers: You will not, then, become a prey to despondence, though loneliness broods over your dwelling, when you realize that its once cherished inmates have but gone a little in advance to those mansions which the Savior hath prepared . . . (Letters to Mothers 267)

In contrast, Piatt’s elegies focus on the sorrowing mother herself—the Rachel figure—who, rebuffing God’s call, “refuses to be consoled” (Jeremiah 31:15). Rejecting all solace, religious and otherwise, Piatt’s bereaved mothers will demonstrate what Howells called a “heart-broken scorn of comfort” (“Some New Books of Poetry” 39). All written from the grieving

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mother’s perspective, Piatt’s Rachel poems portray rebellious mothers who refuse the moral discipline of child death, and who are, at times, narcissistic, heretical, even nihilistic in their grief.8 The Rachel poems differ from other nineteenth-century elegies because they often begin and end at the grave; there is no moving deathbed scene and no post-mortem spiritual reconnection with the deceased to render death meaningful. Perhaps the most anti-sentimental of all Piatt’s writing, her childhood elegies reject the rhetoric of sentiment, which, according to Mary Louise Kete, is used as a vehicle “through which individuals can join together in solving the seemingly local problem of grief in the face of death” (3). In poems such as “No Help” (1877) and “Comfort—By a Coffin” (1876), the bereaved mothers stand spiritually graveside, bitterly rejecting the religious consolation of their friends. These poems not only critique sentimental constructions of child death but also expose and subvert the regulatory mechanisms that sentimental culture attempted to infuse in women’s experience of maternal loss. Piatt deconstructs the very discipline of death that Stowe exploits in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. “No Help” is a particularly instructive poem because it systematically critiques the sentimental traditions of consolation while offering a new paradigm of maternity and loss. The bereaved mother in this poem refuses, in fact, to submit to the discipline of heaven. As the implied comforter in the poem offers religious solace, the mother verbally spars with her consoler. For example, when the friend suggests that the dead child is now safely reunited with the deity to whom he belongs, the bereaved mother challenges the patriarchal God’s claim to her young son: “Is he not with his Father? So I trust. / Is he not His? Was he not also mine?” (84). The mother narrator further rejects the sentimental construction whereby an early death is imagined as a boon for the child, a fortunate escape from what Sigourney calls “the hazards of this changeful life” (Letters to Mothers 263). The speaker harshly responds to her consoler’s claim that her child is now “safe” in heaven, lamenting the human costs of such divine “security”: Safe? But out of this world, out of my sight! My way to him through utter darkness lies. I am gone blind with weeping, and the light— If there be light—is shut inside the skies. (19–22)

Here, Piatt radically departs from cultural traditions that promised a continued connection between mother and dead child and that often figured the deceased as a celestial, moral tutor. Sigourney, for example, imagines


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“The glorified spirit of the [dead] infant” as “a star to guide the mother to its own blissful clime” (Letters to Mothers 262). Writing after the death of her beloved nephew Gilbert, Emily Dickinson would similarly envision the deceased child: “I see him in the Star.” “Now,” she would conclude, “my ascended Playmate must instruct me” (Johnson, Thomas H. L868).9 In contrast, Piatt’s bereaved mother is totally cut off from her child; her way to him “through utter darkness lies.” The dead child is powerless to offer moral instruction to the mother. Furthermore, the tears this mother sheds are neither the vehicles of communication nor the sign of redemption that they often are in sentimental literature; instead, tears lead to spiritual isolation and blindness.10 The light of heaven—if there be any—has been “shut inside the skies.” As “No Help” closes, the grieving mother reveals that she would willingly snatch her child from his eternal reward in an act of spiritual rebellion: Think you, to give my bosom back his breath, I would not kiss him from the peace called Death? And do I want a little Angel? No, I want my baby—. . . (23–26)

Protesting the deferment of maternal privileges until after death, Piatt’s mother-narrator is willing to lure her child from spiritual eternity for the sake of a material present. She bitterly acknowledges, however, that no such exchanges can be made. With a moving lament, the mother cries out against a God who is not only unaffected by her sorrow, but who seems Himself to be dumbly bound to his own legalistic necessities. Piatt writes: “God cannot help me, for God cannot break / His own dark Law—for my poor sorrow’s sake” (29–30). Here, Piatt’s deity seems to have more in common with Melville’s harsh Calvinist God than with the sentimentalists’ benevolent lamb.11 Indeed, while sentimental culture touted child death as a tempering vehicle of faith, Piatt explores how such losses could actually sow doubt, disbelief, or even overt rebellion against God. In a poem shrewdly entitled, “Her Blindness in Grief” (1873), Piatt explores the costs of child-death, particularly as they pertain to the mother’s faith. Futilely looking for religious consolation after her child’s death, the bereaved mother-narrator is devoid of faith and imagines God only as a “silence,” “a dream, a hope, a fear, / A vision” (9, 11–12). Moving beyond religious skepticism to something more radical still, the mother speculates whether heavenly interventions, if even possible, could quell her sorrows or allay her hunger for her lost child:

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Negotiating Motherhood in Nineteenth-Century American Literature “Woman, why weepest thou?” One said, To His own mother, from the dead. If He should come to mock me now, Here in my utter loneliness, And say to me, “Why weepest thou?” I wonder would I weep the less. Or, could I, through these endless tears, Look high into the lovely spheres And see him there—my little child— Nursed tenderly at Mary’s breast, Would not my sorrow be as wild? (13–23)

Piatt’s inaccurate rendering of John’s Resurrection story (John 20: 11–17)— whether a simple mistake or willful revision—is provocative. The bereaved Mary whom the resurrected Jesus interrogates at the empty tomb is not, in fact, his mother, but Mary Magdalene. In her re-writing of the gospel, Piatt makes Jesus a dubious comforter of mothers—perhaps even a taunting provocateur—one who would “mock” a woman in her grief with affectively meaningless promises of resurrection. Such fleshless encounters are an intolerable substitution for this mother, who will be comforted neither by God’s consolation nor by her child’s safe harbor in heaven. Even if her baby be “Nursed tenderly at Mary’s breast,” the mother will not cease her mourning. While at its core the poem “Her Blindness in Grief” is an expression of religious doubt in the face of loss, in the final stanza of the work, the mother’s anguish erupts into a bitter and rebellious faith in a God whom she sees as antagonistic and adversarial: The grief is bitter. Let me be. He lies beneath that lonesome tree. I’ve heard the fierce rain beating there. Night covers it with cold moonshine. Despair can only be despair. God has his will. I have not mine. (49–54)

Working against the Christian tradition that tutors followers to make God’s will their own, Piatt here articulates an un-traversable chasm between the desires of the bereaved woman and the will of a seemingly uncaring, patriarchal God. Far from being a disciplinary vehicle that


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garners faithful submission, the experience of child death radicalizes the mother, leading to a rebellious subjectivity that protests rather than embraces God’s will. Like the writing of Sigourney and Stowe, Piatt’s Rachel poetry rhetorically operates on the emotional universality of mothers’ grief. In a poem entitled “Rachael at the Lodge” (1885), Piatt identifies a peasant mother’s keening for her dead child as “the world-old wail” (1). And poems such as “The Thought of Astyanax beside Iülus” (1880) and “The Prince Imperial” (1879) suggest an emotional connection between bereaved mothers across both time and class lines. However, unlike other prominent nineteenth-century women writers, Piatt will overtly reject what Kete calls the “utopian aspects of sentimentality” in her elegies (xviii). Unlike Lydia Sigourney, who imagines the experience of child death as a force leading mothers to “eminence in those efforts of benevolence” (Letters to Mothers 269), and unlike Stowe who rallies her female readers to action “ . . . by the desolation” of their “empty cradle,” Piatt’s poetry eschews constructions of maternal bereavement that figure it as a humanistic force of social change (384). While her graveside poems figure child death as a catalyst of a subversive maternal subjectivity, her Rachel poems also critique a sentimental ideology that imagines the devastating realities of maternal grief as leading to socially constructive ends. Piatt’s poetry of mourning portrays mothers whose own grief stands stonily invulnerable to human sympathy; in “Rachael at the Lodge” the “unreasoning woman,” continues her grieving in the face of human comfort, and the poem ends with the woman’s eternal inconsolability (30). Piatt’s haunting last line reads: “And—still that cry, that cry!” (36). Spiritually isolated in their bereavement, Piatt’s mothers, unlike Sigourney’s or Stowe’s, prove incapable, at times, of responding to or even registering the needs of others—let alone acting as a force of social change. In this way, Piatt undermines the imagined power of maternal loss and challenges the sentimental cult of mourning. In the poem “Counting the Graves” (1875), for example, Piatt will explore the deep narcissism of maternal bereavement. The poem begins with a questioning child asking his mother, “How many graves are in this world?” (1). Much to the child’s amazement, the mother replies that there are only two. While she acknowledges that there are countless places that the “dead may rest,” in the reality of the mother’s life and in the spaces of her own heart, there is only grieving room for her own dead children (7). Depleted by loss, she does not have the emotional resources to register the pain of others. Piatt’s “A Child in the Park” (1891) similarly explores the diminishing effects of maternal bereavement. The

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mother-narrator of the poem loses herself when she is visited by the spirit of her dead child. By the final stanza of the work, the mother-narrator declares herself among the dead too, ghosted by her “tryst” with the beloved deceased (28). Unlike the deeply sympathizing and engaged mothers in Stowe and Sigourney, the women in Piatt’s poetry are lost to the world of the living because of their obsession with the dead. The mothers’ grief not only prevents them from sympathizing with the suffering of others but, even more significantly, impinges on the feelings they have for their surviving children. Taxed beyond their affective capacity, these mothers are left drained and ambivalent—lacking in affections for their living children. In “Sad Wisdom—Four Years Old” (1876) Piatt exposes the costs of unconstrained maternal grief, demonstrating how mother-love can be unnaturally usurped from the living. The poem opens with the painfully poignant interjection of a child, “‘Well, but some time I will be dead; / Then you will love me, too!’” (1–2).The child intuits that the mother’s affections are monopolized by the deceased and that it is only through his own parting that he can compete. The mother, for her part, guiltily acknowledges the naïve wisdom of her living child: Ah! mouth so wise for mouth so red, I wonder how you knew. (Closer, closer, little brown head— Not long can I keep you!) Here, take this one poor bud to hold, Take this long kiss and last; Love can not loosen one fixed fold Of the shroud that holds you fast— Never, never, oh, cold, so cold! All that was sweet is past. (3–12)

Piatt’s verse is riddled with subtlety and ambiguity. The “little brown head,” which at first seems to refer to the living child, is actually a specter from the dead. The mother has escaped into a reverie of sorts with a child who the reader ultimately learns is held “fast” by a “shroud.” Rousing herself from her compulsive mourning, the mother-narrator attempts to focus on her living child, apparently with little success. Fixated on the dead, this mother has little maternal affection left for her living child. The poem ends with the sorrowful question: “Tell me, tell me, when will we love / The thing the sun shines on” (23–24). Through this poem,


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Piatt reveals the destructive underside of prolonged and elaborate grieving—the cult of mourning, so cherished by sentimental culture. Piatt’s poetry also turns a critical eye to the trope of the “special child”—the spiritually precocious child marked for death—most elegantly elaborated through Stowe’s martyr-savior Evangeline. After the death of her own son Victor, Piatt marked the status of the dead child as her most beloved in an elegiac poem expressively entitled “The Favorite of Five” (1884). However, although Piatt engaged in her culture’s hagiographic obsession with the dead, she challenged it as well. In the poem “The Little Boy I Dreamed About” (1876), Piatt exposes the specter of the “special child” as a delusory and destructive myth that serves to alienate the bereaved mother from her living children. In this poem, a mother rather brutally compares her sainted dead child to the troublesome living one. Speaking to her surviving son, the mother first figures the deceased as “The Little Boy I dreamed about.” Riddled with the mother’s longing interjections—“Where can the darling ever be?” (10) “If I could only find him out” (4)—the poem documents the woman’s futile search for her dream-child. Although the dead child is merely an elusive specter that the mother wishes she could “believe in,” she holds him up to her living child as a model to be emulated (38). Unlike the boy she is speaking to, the dream-child does not “tease and storm and pout” (11), “pull the pigeon’s feathers out” (13), “cry / To throw the kitten down the stair” (17–18), or “[wake] too late to know / a bird is singing near his bed” (21–22). At the poem’s end, the narrator makes explicit to her son and to the reader that she is comparing her living child to the memory of a dead one. Responding to the implied inquiries of her boy, the mother reluctantly reveals that her dream-child is not some inhabitant of “Fairy-land” (36), but is the beloved lost. Admitting that the fabled child is “Dead” (41) and pondering why and how it happened, the grieving mother concludes, “The sweetest children die” (42). With an ironic tone that challenges the powers of religious consolation, the mother tells her son that “Good Christians” would explain the child’s death as “God’s will” (45). By placing the dead boy among the “sweetest children,” Piatt clearly evokes the sentimental’s special child. However, having already figured the deceased as a child that the mother merely “dreamed about,” Piatt suggests that such sanctified visions of perfect children are, indeed, just fantasies— and destructive ones at that. The mother’s dark religious skepticism about “God’s will” further proves the inefficacy of the discipline of death. In the last stanza of the poem, the mother claims she would sacrifice the “goldenest star” to find the beloved deceased (48). Indeed, she has sacrificed much in her relationship with her living child in her compulsive and futile search

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for the sainted dead. The beatification of her deceased child not only exacerbates her own grief but also robs her of an appreciation of her flawed but of-the-flesh child. In the short, simple poem “Of Two and Two” (1878), Piatt carries her reader to the dark endpoint of compulsive maternal grief. Packaged as children’s poetry—first among the pages of Youth’s Companion and finally in the collection Child’s World Ballads—this poem of almost murderous despair reads deceptively like a nursery rhyme:12 A BROWN head and a golden head Above the violets keep in sight; Dark eyes and blue (with tears to shed) Look laughing toward me in the light. A red-bird flashes from the tree: ‘The world is glad, is glad!’ sings he. A golden head, a head of brown, Below the violets, miss the sun; Dark eyes and blue—their lids shut down— With tears (and theirs were brief) have done, A dove hides in another tree: ‘The world is sad, is sad!’ grieves she. Through song and moan, I hardly know Between the red-bird and the dove, If most I’d wish that two below The violets were with two above; Or two above the violets lay With two below them deep, to-day. (1–18)

In her utter desolation, this mother is brutally torn between “song and moan,”—between “the red-bird and the dove”—between the allure of the living and the allure of the dead. The mother-narrator ponders whether she most wishes that her dead children might live or that her living children might die. The horror of child mortality and the disciplinary rigors of maternal bereavement, then, do not lead Piatt’s mother to “eminence in those efforts of benevolence,” do not lead her to “deeper sympathy” or to “deed[s] of mercy”; instead, she is carried to a place of near-infanticidal anguish (Letters to Mothers 269). Through her Rachel poems, Piatt thus exposes and undermines an ideology that figures the discipline of maternal grief as a spiritually empowering, socially constructive tool.


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MOTHERHOOD AS LOSS Some of Piatt’s nineteenth-century critics took issue with the deep pessimism and religious skepticism of the Rachel poems. However, because these works, with their vibrant pathos, seem to trace transient psychological states rather than fixed philosophies, Piatt was able to escape any fatal censure from her contemporaries. In a review of That New World and Other Poems, Howells, for example, found not morbidity in the author’s poetics of maternal bereavement but an expression of “the universal anguish of mortality” (“Some New Books of Poetry” 89). Howells argues that the sorrow in Piatt’s poems “does not assume to be any sort of philosophy or system; it is simply the bitter truth to a phase of human experience through which all men must pass” (“Some New Books of Poetry” 89). The emotional immediacy of Piatt’s individual poems, however, masks a more entrenched darkness in the author’s oeuvre and a broader argument with her culture’s maternal ideology that even some of her nineteenth-century reviewers recognized. In fact, the Rachel-sorrow is not an evanescent sentiment for Piatt but an enduring worldview, tied to her unique vision of motherhood. The mournful Rachel does not just haunt Piatt’s child elegies; she informs the poems about mothers of living children as well. While nineteenth-century sentimental culture imagined motherhood as woman’s ultimate fulfillment— as her proper and complete role as productive citizen—Piatt would see things quite differently. Unlike Sigourney who figures motherhood as the very “climax” of a woman’s “happiness,” Piatt sees the confines of maternal experience in her nineteenth-century American culture as a site of irrevocable loss. Explaining the psychology of her friend’s poetry, Katherine Tynan wrote, “When she kissed her children at night it was with a poignant feeling that the minutes and the hours were taking from her the child she had kissed” (Memories 179). Indeed, for Piatt, the child’s mortal journey from babyhood to adulthood would itself be a most grievous process to witness—a process that not only imbued maternity with a primal sense of loss but which also filled the mother with a mounting ambivalence for her growing children. Piatt’s vision of motherhood as an essentially elegiac experience inhabits her poetry in startling ways. In a series of poems, including “Last Words” (1870), “The Sad Story of a Little Girl” (1875), and “My Babes in the Woods” (1870), Piatt imagines the beloved and innocent infant “disappearing” and being replaced by the clearly less attractive, less loveable older child. For example, in the poem entitled “Last Words,” a mother says an elegiac farewell to her sleeping children:

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Negotiating Motherhood in Nineteenth-Century American Literature GOOD-NIGHT, pretty sleepers of mine— I never shall see you again: Ah, never in shadow or shine; Ah, never in dew or in rain! In your small dreaming-dresses of white, With the wild-bloom you gathered to-day In your quiet shut hands, from the light And the dark you will wander away. Though no graves in the bee-haunted grass, And no love in the beautiful sky, Shall take you as yet, you will pass,— With this kiss, through these teardrops. Goodbye! With less gold and more gloom in their hair, When the buds near have faded to flowers, Three faces may wake here as fair— But older than yours are, by hours! (1–17)

The flowers that the children hold evoke a funeral scene, but the reader quickly discovers that it is not death but the passing of time that takes the children from their mother’s love. Clearly despondent over the loss of her babies, the mother is distressed by the specter of the older children who will take her darlings’ place. In one of Piatt’s most popular poems “My Babes in the Woods” (1870) the narrator actually imagines her young children as dead—“birdburied darlings” who are replaced by the less desirable older children (32). This poem of deep maternal ambivalence, perhaps not surprisingly, has been quite often misread. In an 1885 review of A Voyage to the Fortunate Isles, one critic would write of the poem, “Nothing could be more delicate in fancy or ligh[t]er in touch” [sic] (J. M. Gray 269). In a 1984 study of the Twilight period in American poetry, Dorothea Steiner places the poem in a female tradition “in which a mother, by talking to her dead child, tries to cope with death” (179). The mother in “My Babes in the Woods,” however, is not talking to deceased children; she is talking to her living children whose younger selves are “gone from sight!” (12). The mother in the poem speculates about the mystery of her “gradual parting” from the beloved lost: Poor slightly golden heads! I think I missed them First in some dreary, piteous, doubtful way;


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But when and where with lingering lips I kissed them, My gradual parting, I can never say. (17–20)

Pained by the vagueness of such temporal loss, the mother chooses to imagine her beloved children as having actually perished, as having been left in the woods to be “softly covered / By robins, out of apple flowers they knew” (25–26). In the final stanza of the poem, however, the mother reveals the mystery of the lost, young children to their older, living counterparts. Piatt writes: Their names were—what yours are! At this you wonder. Their pictures are—your own, as you have seen; And my bird-buried darlings, hidden under Lost leaves—why it is your dead selves I mean! (29–33)

And so, while sentimentalists such as Sigourney would tout an unconditional love that was the “dictate” of a mother’s “nature” (Letters to Mothers 45) and which brings women to the very “climax of happiness” (Letters to Mothers 9), Piatt instead uses her child-replacement poems, such as “Last Words,” to depict a mutable maternal love that is sabotaged by the passing of time. Maternity, in Piatt’s world, is a fundamental experience of loss: to be a mother is to be bereaved. While Piatt’s vision is, in one sense, a realistic expression of the complex emotional lives of women who are mothers, at another level, her representation of motherhood offers a broader political message about the stifling limitations of women’s gender roles in the nineteenth-century. Motherhood might bring women cultural or personal power, but in Piatt’s view, this power is elusive, fleeting, and emotionally depleting. To have a subjectivity and citizenship defined exclusively by one’s maternal nature—to have a cultural identity bounded by a child-care function that must eventually disappear—is a no-win game of inexorable loss.

CULTURAL TRANSLATIONS In 1882, J. J. Piatt was appointed as U. S. consul at Cork, Ireland. The Piatt family set up home at “The Priory,” the official United States residence in Queenstown. Here they lived for the next ten years, followed by a brief stay in Dublin and a yearlong residence in London. Thus immersed for over a decade in the foreign culture of the British Isles, Sarah Piatt would experience a radical sea change, and her poetic vision would take a distinct turn

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outwards. Bennett reports that approximately half of the poems Piatt wrote in this period are “related one way or another to Ireland or to her family’s travels on the continent” (Introduction Palace-Burner xivii). In addition, Piatt’s familiar first-person narrations now slipped more often into the third, and the intimate focus on motherhood and domestic life gave way to a more expansive vision. Living life on truly foreign soil for the first time, this older mother of a maturing family distanced herself from the maternal poetics that are the primary subject of this study. However, while Piatt seemed to eschew the poetic spaces of motherhood more often in her years in Ireland, she did not abandon the maternal subject entirely. Moving beyond a direct dialogue with a sentimental culture that was now on the wane, Piatt observed maternity from a new vantage point in her poetry. No longer speaking from an overtly maternal perspective, Piatt’s later narrators explore motherhood with a marked objectivity and affective reticence. This is nowhere more evident than in her elegiac poems such as “In the Round Tower at Cloyne” (1893) and “A Bid for the Crown Jewels” (1891). The cool third-person narrations of these Irish child elegies are a world away from the intimacy and raw sentiment of Piatt’s Rachel poems. Written specifically to commemorate the death of her son Louis, “In the Round Tower at Cloyne” most aptly illustrates Piatt’s new affective reserve. Such emotional sublimation begins with geographic displacement for the poet; while her son Louis drowned in the Lee River, the child of the poem is lost in a Round Tower—a historic site no doubt visited by the Piatt family.13 In this beautiful poem, called “perfect after its kind” by W. B. Yeats, the bereaved mother—whom any student of Piatt knows lies at the heart of the verse—loses her individual identity and is melded into the anonymous “they” who suffer the loss of the child and mourn his death (82): 14 They shivered lest the child should fall; He did not heed a whit They knew it were as well to call To those who builded it. “I want to climb it any way, And find out what is there! There may be many things—you know there may— Lost, in the dark somewhere.” He made a ladder of their fears


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For his light, eager feet; It never, in its thousand years, Held anything so sweet. The blue eyes peeped through dust and doubt, The small hands shook the Past; “He’ll find the Round Tower’s secret out,” They, laughing said at last. The enchanted ivy, that had grown, As usual, in a night Out of a legend, round the stone, He parted left and right. And what the little climber heard And saw there, say who will, Where time sits brooding like a bird In that grey nest and still. . . . About the Round Tower tears may fall; He does not heed a whit. They know it were as well to call To those who builded it. (1–28)

As the poem draws to a close, the child disappears, becoming as inaccessible to the bereaved as are the ancient ghosts of those who built the Round Tower. The maternal rage at an uncaring God, so central to Piatt’s Rachel poems, is noticeably absent here. In fact, God is not present in the poem at all; the narrator need not argue with Him. As for the dead child—he has not migrated into some spiritual realm, but is trapped in time—ghosted in an historical moment, oblivious to the tears of those he has left behind. With an elegant reserve Piatt takes the experience of maternal bereavement and turns it into what Karen Kilcup has aptly assessed as a “powerful romantic vision” (xliv). The mystery of the Round Tower that the child sought is hauntingly melded with the mystery and misery of child death. Transposing her poetry for a new place and time, Piatt no longer focused her maternal poetics solely on the politics of gender that had been so central to her dialogue with American sentimental culture. Instead, Piatt’s challenging maternal sensibilities are interestingly displaced onto poetry that addresses the politics of poverty, suffering, and violence she

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found ravaging the Irish Isle.15 Although narrated from a new emotional distance that views culture from the outside in, these poems reflect the themes of loss, grief, and suffering that are evident in Piatt’s earlier maternal writing. The poem “On the Pier at Queenstown” (1883), for example, documents the sorrow of the Irish diaspora by describing a son’s anguished departure from his mother, as he seeks a better life in the New World (30). The young man’s “Heart shake[s] at his mother’s cries,” as the bereaved woman wails her tortured goodbye (18). Beautifully melding the loss of mother with the loss of country, the final lines of the poem describes the young man’s “farewell chant of pain / For [the] green isle of ruin and rain” (35–36). In “Rachael at the Lodge,” an “unreasoning woman” (30) grieves inconsolably for her dead child, expressing her grief with “the world-old wail” (1). The poem, which highlights the utter failure of religious consolation, stands specifically as an indictment of a national religion that fails to adequately address the suffering of its people: The Wise-men’s star, out of the East Is shining on her baby’s bed. (Comfort her, Crucifix and priest!) Madonna-face and thorn-stabbed head Watch from her wall. And yonder lie The heavens. And—still that cry, that cry! (31–36)

In “A Night-Scene from the Rock of Cashel, Ireland” (1889), Piatt paints the Irish landscape of poverty and hunger with an impressionistic rendering of a suffering mother and child: From darkness, such as hides the happier dead, On the wet earth-floor grows a ghastly flame; A woman’s wasted arm, a child’s gold head, Shrink back into the wind-stirred straw for shame. (5–8)

Finally, through the two poems—“An Irish Wildflower” and “A Reproach”—the author’s maternal vision finds its most elegant and powerful cultural translation. Piatt, whose poetic vision of maternal love and loss, maternal guilt and grief, was rooted in her own motherlessness, would unleash her tortured knowledge in her artistic and political responses to Ireland. For example, in the same year that Stephen Crane’s Maggie “blossomed in a mud puddle” (24), Piatt would figure a poor child of Erin as “An Irish Wildflower,” one who, motherless, has sprung-up from the historical ruins of her country:


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She felt, I think, but as a wild-flower can, Through her bright, fluttering rags, the dark, the cold; Some farthest star, remembering what man Forgets, had warmed her little head with gold. Above her, hollow-eyed, long blind to tears, Leaf-cloaked, a skeleton of stone arose . . . Oh, castle-shadow of a thousand years! Where you have fallen, is this the thing that grows? (1–8)

The head of gold—a sign of fragile and evanescent childhood—is a recurring trope in the author’s poetry. Even Piatt’s most conflicted mothers treasure the golden head and grieve its passing. In this poem, however, it documents humanity’s uncaring neglect. A distant star, “remembering” (4) the treasure of childhood, warms the “little head with gold,” but uncaring “man” “Forgets.” Piatt here figures the face of Irish suffering as that of an unmothered child. In “A Reproach,” Piatt will take an alternate approach, painting Ireland—not as an absent mother—but as a negligent one: Beautiful, cruel Mother, you who sit Singing with voice of linnet, lark, and thrush, Among the sorrows born of you! Is it Nothing to you, your children’s crying? Hush. Can rose-leaves cure the heart-ache, think-you, Sweet Are starving mouths with dews and perfumes fed, That thus, with your wild brood about your feet, You give them blossoms when they want for bread? (1–8)

In a later generation, James Joyce would harshly figure Ireland as “the old sow that eats her farrow” (220). Where Joyce’s brutal animal imagery is an uncomplicated, unrelieved vision of unnatural maternity, however, Piatt’s portrait—like her best poetry of mothers and children—is messy, complex. Mother Ireland is both “cruel” and “beautiful.” This poem provocatively recalls Piatt’s “Her Talk with a Redbird,” in which the mother fantasizes about abandoning her maternal duties and escaping into the bird’s world of song—a song that she imagines sharing with her children from a distance. Similarly, the mother of “A Reproach” fails to provide her children with sufficient bread but gives them other extravagant gifts—gifts of song and blossom. Ultimately, of course, the mother’s beautiful gifts are not

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nourishing, and as the title of Piatt’s work makes clear, her poem is meant as reproof. However, the complexity of the image should not be ignored. In her study of the Irish poems, Pamela Kincheloe forgives Piatt for what she sees as forays into the “ideal”—pointing, for example, to the beautiful bright rags and golden hair that adorn “An Irish Wildflower” (117). Finally, though, Piatt’s willful juxtaposition of beauty and cruelty, pleasure and pain, is not a “slip” in vision, nor a slide into idealization. Indeed, such seeming inconsistencies simply reflect the intricacies of Piatt’s world-view. As a poet who spent much of her writing career immersed in the messy, impure complexities of the mother-child bond, Piatt was unwilling, in the end, to simplify her life experiences in poetry. While Piatt continually argues with the essentializing, reductive elements of sentimental maternity, she deepens her culture’s understanding of womanhood through her provocative and moving treatment of women who are mothers. The recovery of Sarah Piatt is important to the study of nineteenth-century literature—not just because a powerful woman’s voice has been reclaimed—but also because Piatt studies afford us an excellent opportunity to revisit our current conceptions of nineteenth-century culture. Living and writing in the heart of the American culture of the feelings, Piatt opted out of the conservative sentimentalist project, producing an alternative discourse that challenged rather than participated in reigning notions of womanhood. While it might be easiest to identify Piatt as a proto-modernist—an exceptional woman in a small nineteenth-century vanguard—it is more fruitful to examine Piatt’s case as further evidence that American sentimental culture and nineteenth-century women’s culture were not as monolithic as previously imagined. Piatt studies are also productive in that they can help trace critical mechanisms that have served to mute or distort alternative nineteenth-century voices. Piatt’s maternal poetics is a key to such a root cause analysis. While the process of reclaiming Piatt has been largely successful, the poet’s central preoccupation with motherhood, as I have argued, has been masked through the recovery process. The brief history of Piatt’s studies in the twenty-first century suggest that persistent denigration of the sentimental and feminist anxieties about essentialism continue to lead some scholars to avoid critical engagement with the maternal. Indeed, because motherhood remains relegated strictly to the domain of the domestic and the private, it tends, at times, to be either simplistically represented or effaced in the critical dialogue entirely. Reflexively reading the subject of motherhood as part of a conservative, sentimental project, modern critics have often


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overlooked the possibility that motherhood could be written in the nineteenth-century with a counter-culture stance. Piatt’s maternal poetics powerfully reveal that motherhood—both as literary subject and lived experience—can also be a site of the public and political. To be sure, Piatt recognized that the role of motherhood could be used as a cultural tool of subjection. Her poetry, which figures maternity as an experience of loss and bereavement, protests the deleterious effects of lives too narrowly defined through motherhood. Piatt, however, was not confined by the limits of nineteenth-century maternal ideology, and her vision is not wholly pessimistic. Featuring maternal figures who successfully escape the interpellative mechanisms of their culture, Piatt’s poetry also explores motherhood as a potentially powerful instrument of female subjectivity. In her graveside poems and in works such as “Palace-Burner,” Piatt exposes the subversive forces of maternity, demonstrating how the role of motherhood can actually serve as a vehicle of radical enlightenment. For nearly a century, Piatt’s vibrant and challenging poetry was lost to the reading public, having been critically reduced in the early twentieth century to its ostensibly “feminine” essence. Contemporary scholars must not, like earlier critics, remain tone-deaf to the socially and politically complex chords that may be imbedded in nineteenth-century representations of the maternal and domestic. The reclaimed Sarah Piatt, who speaks with a counter-culture voice from the heart of Victorian society, challenges us to reexamine the work of nineteenth-century writers, listening carefully for alternative discourses that may be, as yet, unheard.

Conclusion

This, then, is the patriotism of woman, not to thunder in senates, or to usurp dominion, or to seek the clarion-blast of fame; but faithfully to teach by precept and example, that wisdom, integrity, and peace, which are the glory of a nation. Thus, in the wisdom of Providence, has she been prepared by the charm of life’s fairest season, for the happiness of love; incited to rise above the trifling amusement and selfish pleasures which once engrossed her, that she might be elevated to maternal dignity; cheered under its sleepless cares by a new affection; girded for its labours by the example of past ages; and adjured to fidelity in its most sacred duties, by the voice of God. (Lydia Sigourney Letters to Mothers 16)

The first half of the nineteenth century was a foundational moment in the history of the American family and a critical juncture in the development of a national identity for a still young and amorphous United States. Ascending in the wake of America’s industrializing, antebellum culture, the office of Republican motherhood came to a unique prominence both as a practical form of female citizenship for white, middle-class women and as part of an iconography that figured the selfless mother as a symbolic guardian of national unity. Deeply enmeshed in a burgeoning sentimental culture, the “perpetual Mother’s day” of the nineteenth century was guided by a maternal idealism that offered women cultural clout while, at the same time, rigidly limiting their actual role in the public sphere (Douglas 6). As Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin demonstrates, the political potential of traditional sentimental motherhood was great, but in terms of female subjectivity, the costs were enormous too. The powerful and ultimately conservative empire of the mother, while fostering a sense of feminine purpose and agency, was at its core an essentializing ideological tool that served to regulate not only women who were mothers but also the children those mothers raised. 135

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As I have articulated in this study, however, the restrictive maternal ideology that permeated the American imagination in the nineteenth century faced critical cultural challenges, as evidenced by the literature here explored. Confronting the icon of the American Madonna and the maternal idealism on which she stood, authors such as Hawthorne, Jacobs, and Piatt engaged their sentimental culture, questioning the dominant, white, middle-class “family values” of their era. In exploring how these writers employed, adapted, and challenged the sentimental in their creation of sympathetic maternal figures, I have attempted to complicate cultural notions of motherhood that originated in antebellum society and to reveal the malleable boundaries of literary sentimentality. The stronghold of conservative sentimentalism and the symbolic power of the American Madonna with which nineteenth-century culture grappled waned gradually and imperfectly at century’s end. Documenting the decline of the empire of the mother, Stephanie Smith argues for historical interventions, noting that the “ideal of homogenous maternal love” “began to lose its symbolic force” during the Civil War (26). Indeed, a broken national family, ravaged by a conflict that pitted brother against brother, was less likely to store faith in the power of motherhood as an imagined vehicle of peace and union. As I hope this study proves, however, America’s dampened faith in maternal salvation at the turn of the century was no cataclysmic break with the past. The cultural negotiations that occurred in the very heart of sentimental culture—the re-visioning of maternity in the works of authors such as Hawthorne, Jacobs, and Piatt—played a key role in a cultural evolution that would lead to new definitions of family, womanhood, and motherhood. The innovations of maternal representation that I have here discussed prepared American culture for more direct repudiations of conservative maternal ideology and blazed a trail that would bridge the gap between the sentimental True Woman and the turn-of-the-century New Woman in American literature and culture. Indeed, the oeuvre of Sarah Piatt, whose career spanned the entire second half of the nineteenth century, articulates an imaginative dismantling of the maternal icon. Following in this path, other late-nineteenth-century authors radically departed from conservative ideology. In Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), for example, Stephen Crane overtly lampoons sentimental maternity through his characterization of Mary Johnson. Writing motherhood as performative, Crane shatters maternal essentialism, showing that the vicious and violent Mary Johnson plays the role of the bourgeois, sentimental mother for her own benefit and at her child’s expense. Edna Pontellier, the heroine of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899), is another radical turn-of the-century mother-figure. Following in the footsteps of Hester Prynne, Edna privileges her

Conclusion

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sexual nature over her maternal one. Unlike The Scarlet Letter, however, The Awakening lacks a critical narrator and thus presents a subversive sexuality and motherhood without any moral judgment. At times viewing her children as “antagonists” (999), Edna Pontellier, furthermore, challenges the ideology of natural motherhood, refusing to relinquish her subjectivity to her maternal role: “I would give up the unessential; I would give up money, I would give up my life for my children,” Edna proclaims, “ but I wouldn’t give myself” (929). These and other complex visions of motherhood created in the postsentimental era continued and extended the cultural debate about motherhood that was waged in the heart of the nineteenth century. Through this study, I have challenged contemporary constructions that view the sentimental era and its representations of motherhood as a coherent, conservative cultural project. From an historical vantage point, I would argue that the critical elision of the complexities of nineteenth-century motherhood has its specific origins in the heated anti-sentimentalism of the Modernist era. Blurring the lines between gender and genre, critics at the beginning of the twentieth century often pejoratively marked sentimentalism as a specifically feminine discourse. Reflexively marrying the feminine subject of maternity with the conservative forces of sentimentalism, early twentieth-century critics read representations of motherhood—especially those written by women—as a uniform product and generally failed to give proper critical consideration to the work. The Modern reception of Sarah Piatt elegantly illustrates my point, as early twentieth-century critics read completely past Piatt’s culturally challenging maternal poetics, seeing, instead, the work of a genteel poetess who wrote transparently about the “joys, griefs, and aspirations of the ordinary woman’s life” (Johnson and Malone 557–558). While today’s critics are no longer likely to simplistically conflate gender and genre, they have largely failed, nonetheless, to successfully reconstruct the contentious nineteenth-century negotiations that occurred at the intersection of motherhood and sentiment. Recovering the complexities of nineteenth-century formations of motherhood is a vital endeavor not only because it enriches our understanding of the period but because the critical debate about motherhood’s practical and symbolic meanings has enduring social relevance. In Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1844), Margaret Fuller sentimentally extolled the power of motherhood, contending that even the dead mother wields her influence, like a “Rosicrucian lamp” that “burns unwearied, though condemned to the solitude of the tombs” (28). While the “perpetual Mother’s day” that reigned in America might have ended with the nineteenth century, the lamp of ideal maternity has continued to burn in the American consciousness.

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In her influential manifesto, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976),1 Adrienne Rich reports herself “haunted by the stereotype of the mother whose love is ‘unconditional’” and troubled by a literary and visual iconography that represents motherhood as a “single-minded entity” (3). Rich poignantly inquires, “If I knew parts of myself existed that could never cohere to those images, weren’t those parts then abnormal, monstrous?” (3). Maternal idealism continues to permeate American society as evidenced in everything from the mundane cultural trappings of television sitcoms and Mother’s Day greeting cards to overtly ideological parenting literature that is still firmly grounded in the dictates of intensive mothering. In her introduction to a collection of essays published in honor of Adrienne Rich’s legacy, Andrea O’Reilly reports, in fact, that conservative, maternal ideology is still a “normative discourse” that continues to be “deeply oppressive to women” in the twenty-first century (From Motherhood to Mothering: The Legacy of Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born 7). In a contemporary culture, dubbed by some as “post-feminist,” open dialogue about the multiple meanings of motherhood apparently remains a vital necessity. And so, this study returns to the heart of the culture of the feelings to expose the rich ambivalence that has always lived in the maternal subject. Revisiting a foundational moment in the history of the American family and exposing gaps in the early mythology of ideal mothering, this study demonstrates that the American Madonna—an icon that still haunts America’s imagination—has always been a figure of contention.

Notes

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION 1. In Women of the Republic, Linda K. Kerber describes the rise of what she has aptly calls Republican Motherhood. Kerber argues that in the days after the American Revolution “a consensus developed around the idea that a mother committed to the service of her family and to the state, might serve a political purpose” (283). 2. The changing role of white, middle class women at the turn of the nineteenth century has been well documented by cultural historians. Carl Degler explores the changing shape of the American family at the turn of the century in his book At Odds. Barbara Welter’s Dimity Convictions and Nancy Cott’s The Bonds of Womanhood describe the Cult of Domesticity as it developed in the first half of the nineteenth century. Catherine M. Scholten’s Childbearing in American Society: 1650–1850 and Mary P. Ryan’s Empire of the Mother: American Writing about Domesticity 1830–1860 document the social ascent of motherhood through mid-century. Some critics have challenged the usefulness of the model of gendered, binary spheres that these cultural historians use to describe family life in nineteenth-century America. Cathy Davidson, for example, claims that “it has never been clear if [the] spheres actually existed,” and she emphasizes their “metaphoric” nature (445). While I acknowledge that issues of race and class must necessarily complicate our notions of family life in the nineteenth-century as Davidson suggests, I do not agree that the vision of an early America divided along gender lines is a mere “retrospective construct” (Davidson 443). 3. Mary P. Ryan, author of The Empire of the Mother, identifies nineteenth-century abolitionist and cultural critic Henry C. Wright as the originator of the provocative phrase with which she titles her text (Ryan 97). 4. For a more extensive analysis of Herman Melville’s use of tropes generally associated with the culture of the feelings, see Elizabeth Schultz’s “The Sentimental Subtext of Moby-Dick.” 5. Sigourney’s extensive, multifaceted body of prose and poetry engages a host of cultural positions. While much of her work is complicit with repressive

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6.

7. 8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

nineteenth-century gender ideology, Sigourney plays social critic as well— most notably in challenging American policy in dealing with Native Americans. While I use Sigourney’s Letters to Mothers, here as representative of the conservative maternal ideology of the day, I do not contend that the mothers’ manual is representative of Sigourney’s work as a whole. Published in six editions between 1838 and 1853, Letters to Mothers is important to this study because it was the “Dr. Spock” of another generation and thus reflects broadly held views about motherhood and parenting. I will discuss the striking contrast between Stowe’s maternal rhetoric and the realities of her own unconventional motherhood in the first chapter of this study. The Tompkins chapter on Stowe is entitled “Sentimental Power” (Sensational Designs 122–146). I will more critically explore Hendler’s characterization of the dynamic between Eliza Harris and Mrs. Bird in the next chapter. June Howard, Elizabeth Barnes, Glenn Hendler, and Kristin Boudreau all trace the roots of nineteenth-century American sentimentalism to eighteenthcentury moral philosophy. See, for example, Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). Through his anthology of essays, Sentimental Men (co-edited with Mary Chapman), and continuing in Public Sentiments, Hendler expands the study of sentimentalism beyond the feminine domain. Barnes and Boudreau see sympathy and sentimentalism as part of a larger American project and expand their studies to include earlier American writing. Glenn Hendler’s reading of “The Slave Auction” highlights how my approach differs from those who more narrowly define sentimentalism either in terms of its cultural conservatism, its imperialist tendencies, or its reliance on a particular mechanism of sympathy. Hendler uses Harper as an example of those “readers” of literature who are uncomfortable with “Sentimentalism’s reliance on the fantasy of experiential equivalence” (7). Citing only the penultimate stanza of “The Slave Auction,” Hendler argues that Harper “asserts epistemological limits to the sentimentalists’ insistence on affective translatability” (7). While I agree with Hendler’s assessment of Harper’s critical stance, I find his essential reduction of Harper to a reader of sentimental literature—to a critic of “the sentimentalists’” strategies—troublesome. While Harper undoubtedly practices a different brand of sentimentalism than Stowe, she is nonetheless, an important contributor to the culture of sympathy. Definitions of sentimentalism that are too narrow diminish the richness of the field. While much has been written about representations of motherhood in twentieth-century and contemporary literature, the trope of motherhood in nineteenth-century American writing has been largely neglected, and few sustained explorations of the subject are available. Two important exceptions are Stephanie Smith’s Conceived by Liberty and Eva Cherniavsky’s That Pale Mother Rising. See, for example, T. Walter Herbert’s Dearest Beloved or Kristin Boudreau’s chapter “Hawthorne’s Model of Christian Charity” (Sympathy in American Literature 49–82).

Notes to Chapter Two

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NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE 1. Rosemarie Garland Thomson argues that benevolent maternalism grew “out of women’s traditional caretaking and affective duties” and “gained virtue and legitimacy by focusing on the needs and suffering of others and publicly advocating on their behalf” (88). 2. Elizabeth Ammons’s “Stowe’s Dream of Mother-Savior: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Woman Writers before the 1920’s,” Stephanie Smith’s Conceived by Liberty (106–110), and John Gatta’s American Madonna (89–110) all posit that Uncle Tom is the central, symbolic mother figure in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. While I agree that Tom is a feminized character who has developed an ethics clearly allied with sentimental maternity, he is no ideal mother. Early in the novel, Stowe differentiates Tom from the “natural” mother Eliza, who refuses to part with her child. Tom, in contrast, willingly accepts separation from his family, feeling his parting will serve the greater good of the community. In addition, as David Leverenz argues, as the novel progresses, “Tom seems much more interested in saving his various masters and going to heaven than in being reunited with his wife and children” (192). 3. While Augustine St. Clare’s twin brother takes after their aristocratic father, Augustine himself is emotionally and spiritually allied with his mother. Upon becoming a man, George Shelby follows his mother’s moral model by choosing to free his slaves. 4. See also Noble (129). 5. Ammons, who sees Eva as “pure symbol,” notes that the child is named for the “mother of the race” (164). 6. “Train up a child in the way he should go; and when he is old, he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6). 7. The suicidal-infanticidal subtext of Eliza Harris’s dash across the Ohio River was evident to Stowe’s contemporary, Frances Harper. In her two deeply intertextual poems “Eliza Harris” and “The Slave Mother: A Tale of the Ohio,” Harper effectively conflates Eliza Harris with Margaret Garner, the infamous slave-mother who killed her own daughter and attempted suicide during a failed escape. 8. In her chapter on Marie St. Clare in Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe writes, “Human nature is no worse at the South than at the North; but law at the South distinctly provides for and protects the worst abuses to which that nature is liable” (58).

NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO 1. For an account of Hawthorne’s conservatism from a more overtly political perspective, see The Office of The Scarlet Letter by Sacvan Bercovitch or “The Politics of The Scarlet Letter” by Jonathan Arac. 2. Julian Hawthorne writes that Melville “was convinced that there was some secret in my father’s life which had never been revealed, and which accounted for the gloomy passages in his books” (Hawthorne and His Circle 33).

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Notes to Chapter Two 3. Hawthorne will not maintain his maternal metaphor throughout “The Custom House.” By the end of his introduction, he figures the federal government as a demoralizing and emasculating “Uncle Sam.” Hawthorne’s gender-morphing metaphors highlight the eccentricity of his original maternal figure, suggesting that the mother-eagle resonates beyond his discussion of the federal government. 4. All future citations of The Scarlet Letter (C 1) will give a page number only. 5. To varying degrees, many critics have identified motherhood as the defining and/or redeeming quality of Hester’s character. Nina Baym contends that Hester’s relationship to Dimmesdale is insignificant when compared to her relationship with Pearl, contending that maternal love supersedes erotic love (“Thwarted Nature” 73). Similarly, Monika M. Elbert claims that Hester’s identity “resides not in her initial temptress sexuality. . . . but in her maternity” (181). David Leverenz sees Hester’s life as one of “motherly survival” (270). Joel Pfister asserts that “Hawthorne constructs ‘motherhood’ as Hester’s redemption” (132). Lois A. Cuddy sees the relation between Hester and Pearl as central to The Scarlet Letter because it illustrates “mother-daughter symbiosis” (101). 6. In The Feminization of American Culture, Ann Douglas argues that, in the nineteenth century, the clergy moved from the rigorous theology of Calvinism to a sentimentalized religiosity. The Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, who is preternaturally gifted with the “power of experiencing and communicating emotion,” certainly fits this mold (141). While, for example, others among his fellow clergymen are “endowed with a far greater share of shrewd, hard, iron, or granite, understanding” (141), this minister speaks the “heart’s native language” (142). Dimmesdale’s liberal, emotive approach to his ministry leads to a “brilliant popularity” (141); the community deems him a “miracle of holiness,” and while “virgins of his church” grow “pale around him” (142) the elderly invoke their children to bury “their old bones . . . close to their young pastor’s holy grave” (143). The “paleness of the young pastor’s cheek”—the apparent sign of an early and imminent death—only increases the community’s esteem and marks Dimmesdale as a sentimental hero of Hawthorne’s romance (120). 7. I do not follow most critics in reading Hawthorne’s “sainting” of Anne Hutchinson as strictly ironic. It is true that Hawthorne used his own historical sketch of Hutchinson and her infamous “feminine ambition” to chastise those “public women” of his own day who made their living in literature, but the piece is by no-means single-mindedly critical (C 12: 217). The “uncompromising narrowness of the Puritans” is also lampooned in Hawthorne’s sketch. Further, while the ending of the work finds our “stern ancestors” feeling sanctimoniously vindicated by the ill fate of Hutchinson and her last remaining child, the author imagines mother and daughter reuniting in heaven (C 12: 226). 8. Michael J. Colacurcio notes that Hawthorne was highly influenced by the “bastardly” metaphor by which Cotton Mather described Antinomian theology. Mather figured Antinomian doctrines as “brats” and went further to

Notes to Chapter Two

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

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describe the grotesque “prodigies” both spiritual and literal that Hutchinson and her followers brought forth. In Magnalia Christi Americana, Mather writes, “The erroneous gentlewoman her self, convicted of holding about thirty monstrous opinions, growing big with child, and at length coming to her time of travail, was delivered of about thirty monstrous births” (519). Franny Nudelman connects The Scarlet Letter with domestic advice literature that describes the process by which a mother can morally “poison” her child through the medium of her body. Such “poisoning,” Nudeleman writes, is at once “the means of a troubling maternal violence and the means by which that violence is brought to light” (“‘Emblem and Product of Sin’” 205). Thus, according to Nudelman, Pearl’s deformed moral character is the vehicle whereby Hester’s spiritual deviance is publicly revealed. Sophia Hawthorne’s sister Mary Peabody Mann co-authored The Moral Culture of Infancy (1863), a book that extols the virtues of disciplinary intimacy. Sophia—ostensibly with Nathaniel’s support—employed the methods of “feminine affection” in the raising of the Hawthorne children. For a description of the disciplinary techniques which Sophia Hawthorne subscribed to see T. Walter Herbert’s Dearest Beloved (172). Michael Colacurcio argues that Hester’s supposed social reformation is actually a willful manipulation of the Puritan’s belief in outward signs. In her apparent conformity, Hester “play[s] the game of ‘sanctification’—the single rule of which is that the true Self is the sum of all its outward works” (228–229). In his sketch of Anne Hutchinson, Hawthorne criticizes the public woman because she takes a role outside of her “natural destiny,” and, in doing so, she “relinquish[es] part of the loveliness of her sex” (C 12: 219). In The Scarlet Letter, it is through the conventional role of motherhood that Hester’s womanly beauty fades. Given Hawthorne’s rationale, it would appear that for Hester, motherhood is as “unnatural” a role as is the public one for Hutchinson. For the contemporary reader, of course, Hester’s choice is infused with a moral ambiguity that Huck’s is not. Nevertheless, both Twain and Hawthorne present characters who follow their own passions in spite of cultural expectations. As David Leverenz reminds us, we must trust the tale and not the teller. I agree with Leverenz’s assessment of Hawthorne’s narrative voice as a “safety valve” that “release[es] and contain[s] feeling in socially acceptable ways.” Leverenz writes that the narrative voice “abets, displaces, and conceals [the] story’s unresolved tensions” (260). Many recent critics have staked their evaluation of Hawthorne on the author’s personal and political conservatism. I take issue with those who have de-radicalized Hester’s union with Dimmesdale. T. Walter Herbert, for example, claims that the Hawthorne’s own marriage “bears a striking analogy to the adultery portrayed in The Scarlet Letter” (115). Like Hester and Dimmesdale’s union, Herbert argues, Sophia and Nathaniel’s relationship “had a consecration of its own” (115). Herbert goes on to claim that

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Notes to Chapter Three

Hester’s adulterous union actually underwrites nineteenth-century ideals because her union is of the heart—and not based on impious worldly interests (186). Whatever one believes about Hawthorne’s judgments of adultery, the claim that the author is proselytizing bourgeois values through a sympathetic presentation of adultery seems too great a leap of faith. 16. Adrianne Kalfopoulou, for example, argues that Hester’s “creative, sexual potential, absorbed by her more conventional calling, is no longer the heart of impassioned feeling, but the domesticated heart of sentimental fiction” (31). David Leverenz contends that after Hester’s capitulation to Pearl, “her capacity to love diminishes to a tender mothering, the defeated residue of a passionate equality” (269). Ultimately he sees Hester’s existence as reduced to a “motherly survival” (270). 17. Dimmesdale’s moral weakness is established in the opening of the romance, when he allows Hester to assume all the guilt and punishment for their crime, while he maintains his highly-respected position in the community. Furthermore, when he does break from the bonds of society in the forest, he cannot contain any of his anti-social impulses. Hawthorne writes: . . . the infectious poison of that sin had been thus rapidly diffused throughout his moral system. It had stupefied all blessed impulses, and awakened into vivid life the whole brotherhood of bad ones. Scorn, bitterness, unprovoked malignity, gratuitous desire of ill, ridicule of whatever was good and holy, all awoke, to tempt, even while they frightened him. (222) Dimmesdale finally stays within the boundaries of society’s laws—not necessarily because they are an expression of his own values—but because he is morally incapable of charting his own course.

NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE 1. In Douglass’s subsequent biographies, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881), his mother plays an ever-increasing role in his life story and is more sentimentally treated. Sarah Meer posits that Douglass’s later texts reflect the influence of Stowe, particularly the sentimental re-creation of Douglass’s mother in Stowe’s Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But the fact that Douglass’s later biographies emphasize Harriet Bailey’s literacy suggests a different interpretation. By affiliating his own exceptional talents with his black mother instead of his white father in later biographies, Douglass privileges the African-American heritage his mother represents. His feelings, one imagines, are much like George Harris’s at the end of Uncle Tom’s Cabin when he states, “My sympathies are not for my father’s race, but for my mother’s” (459). 2. Jacobs’s letters are here quoted in their original form, without spelling or grammar corrections. 3. Joan D. Hedrick speculates that Stowe’s insensitivities were a result of “her sense of literary ‘ownership’ of the tale of the fugitive slave” (249).

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4. In the introduction to her 1987 edition of Incidents, Jean Fagan Yellin documents the scope of Lydia Maria Child’s editorial input. Child was responsible for two significant changes in the work. First, she encouraged Jacobs to significantly expand her narration of the violent aftermath of Nat Turner’s rebellion—material that resulted in Chapter twelve of the narrative. Child also convinced Jacobs to remove material on John Brown, which the author had added after the attack on Harper’s ferry. Because of this change, Jacobs’s work ends with the personal and sentimental description of her grandmother rather than political invective. Aside from these changes, Child worked to regularize and reorganize Jacobs’s material. Characterizing the scope of her input Child claimed, “I abridged, and struck out superfluous words sometimes, but I don’t think I altered fifty words in the whole volume” (qtd. in Yellin Introduction xxii). 5. James Olney documents the use of the subtitle “Written by Himself” in his essay “The Founding Fathers—Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington.” In addition to being a convention of male slave narratives going all the way back to Olaudah Equiano, the designation also echoes the original title of Franklin’s autobiography, Mémoires de la vie privée de Benjamin Franklin, Écrits par Lui-Même. Subsequent English versions of Franklin’s work also contained the term “Written by Himself” in the title (Olney 4). 6. Jean Fagan Yellin identifies Jacobs’s “contrasting literary styles” in her introduction to the 1987 edition of Incidents (Introduction xiv). Elizabeth Fox–Genovese sees the duality in Jacobs’s narrative as typical of Black women’s autobiographies, which “seem torn between exhibitionism and secrecy, between self-display and concealment” (“My Statue, My Self: Autobiographical Writings of Afro-American Women.” 70–71). Yvonne Johnson connects Jacobs’s narrative split to the double-consciousness of the African-American subject as described by W. E. B. Dubois (The Voices of African American Women 23–24). 7. Jacobs expressed deep shame over what she considered her sexual degradation, citing it as the chief obstacle in the telling of her own story in print. In her correspondence with Amy Post, Jacobs reported, “Woman can whisper—her cruel wrongs into the ear of a dear friend—much easier than she could record them for the world to read” (qtd. In Yellin Incidents 242) 8. In “Harriet Jacobs and the Sentimental Politics of Female Suffering,” Franny Nudelman more elaborately develops the argument that Incidents “abandons” the standard “sentimental rhetoric of identification” for “a rhetoric of contrast” (957). Nudelman writes, “Jacobs uses her inability to communicate her suffering to demand sympathy and attention on the basis of her exceptionality rather than universality—she employs difference itself as a means of conveying marginal experience” (957). 9. Beth Maclay Doriani writes that Incidents reveals “the limitations of the Emersonian self-reliant man,” and that Jacobs demonstrates “that resourcefulness, will, courage, and self-reliance need not be opposed to interdependence and sacrificial love” (212). Stephanie Smith argues that unlike male slave narratives that document “the triumph of the individual

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will,” Incidents is, instead, “a story of triumphant self-in-relation” (33). Harryette Mullen directly juxtaposes Incidents and Narrative of the Life, arguing that Jacobs calls “into question Frederick Douglass’s paradigmatic equation of literacy, freedom and manhood . . .” (245). 10. Jean Fagan Yellin and Joanne Braxton also read Linda Brent as an empowered madwoman in the attic. See Yellin’s introduction to her edition of Incidents (xxxiv) and Braxton’s Black Women Writing Autobiography: A Tradition Within a Tradition (26). 11. In the notes to her 1987 edition of Incidents, Jean Fagan Yellin reports that Jacobs’s construction of Aunt Nancy deviates from the “generally striking accuracy in Incidents about Jacobs’s family” (Yellin Incidents 281). Yellin elsewhere documents that Jacobs’s Aunt Betty had a child at the same time as the author and that the two actually shared the experiences of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood (“Incidents in the Life of Harriet Jacobs” 142).

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR 1. In her classification of Piatt’s poetry into four major thematic groups in the introduction to Palace-Burner, Bennett omits the category of “Motherhood” entirely, instead dividing Piatt’s work into the following four categories: “Civil War Poems” (xli), “Poetry on Gender Issues” (xliii), “Poetry about Children” (xlv), and “The Irish Poetry” (xlvii). Bennett does gloss some of Piatt’s maternal poetry in her introduction, but she lumps the work under the category “Poetry about Children.” Most problematically, Bennett completely excludes the maternal poetics from her discussion of Piatt’s “Poetry on Gender Issues.” Finally, from my perspective, Piatt’s poems on motherhood are critically underrepresented in Palace-Burner. 2. Paula Bennett places much of the weight of Sarah Piatt’s unhappy adult life on the shoulders of her husband, emphasizing J. J.’s “absolute incompetence as a husband, provider, and poet” (Introduction xxvi). While J. J. undoubtedly demonstrated lapses in both professional responsibility and creative ambition, I would argue that his devotion to his wife’s writing career—particularly in light of his own slim success as a poet—indicates that he was an unusually supportive husband. It was J. J. who copied and prepared all of Sarah’s work for publication and who handled all of her business dealings. In her memoirs, Katherine Tynan paints a poignant portrait of the Piatt marriage: “There was between them the extraordinary tender, marital affection, which so often exists in perfection in happy American marriages. They seemed to suffice for each other” (Memories 181). 3. Piatt’s resentment of her stepmother is indirectly documented in some of her adult writing. In a letter to Louise Chandler Moulton in which Piatt comments on In the Garden of Dreams, she praises Moulton’s verses wherein “His Second Wife Speaks.” Piatt finds these pieces “heartbreaking” but wishes Moulton “hadn’t written them,” for she hates “a man’s second wife” (qtd. in Hanalwalt 246). In Piatt’s own poem, “A Woman’s Last Words” (1895), a dying wife reflects on the inevitability of her husband’s remarriage,

Notes to Chapter Four

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

147

bitterly commenting on what she sees as men’s disloyalty and faithlessness to their deceased wives. All dates specified represent the earliest known publication date of the given poem; they do not necessarily represent the date of publication for the particular text cited in this study. In a closely related poem by Piatt, “Prevented Choice” (1872), the narrator is similarly tested; she is offered the world for her homage to a Satan-like figure. “Prevented Choice” makes explicit what is implicit in “Offers for the Child”—that the woman never makes a decision—that and her choice is “prevented” as the dream-picture dims and she awakens. Sensational rumors of “les pétroleuses” are reported to have led to the executions of many innocent women. See Stewart Edwards’s The Communards of Paris, 1871. An 1871 Harper’s Weekly article entitled “Lá Pétroleuse,” is one such sympathetic account and places responsibility for the violence of 1871 in the hands of irresponsible and ineffectual French men. While the article stops short of condoning the actions of les petroleuses, the author suggests that these women were driven to action by desperation as they watched their children die of starvation while their men sat idly by. The author, who figures French women as “worker bees” and French men as “drones,” goes so far as to suggest that the revolt of 1871 might have had a good outcome if women had been offered political agency within the commune. The author concludes, “A Woman of capacity would have obtained honorable terms from the hesitating government of Versailles, and Paris would have been spared the horrors to which she has been subjected” (628). Creative writing in the popular press also portrayed the women and children who fought in behalf of the commune as brave but misguided—as unwitting victims of political circumstance. See, for example, “A Woman’s Execution, Paris May, ‘71” (Preston) or “The Hero of the Commune” (King). Paula Bennett identifies the engraving of a doomed pétroleuse that accompanies the1871 Harper’s article as the inspiration of Piatt’s poem, and a reproduction of the illustration graces the cover of Palace-Burner (Poet’s in the Public Sphere 135). I distinguish between Piatt’s first-person child elegies (which I here term the “Rachel” poems) and the handful of pieces in which Piatt laments childdeath from the third-person subject position. See, for example, “Bid for the Crown Jewels” (1891) and “In the Round Tower at Cloyne” (1893). These poems focus more on the dead and less on the bereaved. In the poem, “Singing to a Star (His Mother’s Song)” (1891), Piatt deploys the same celestial trope as Sigourney and Dickinson. However, the dead child at the center of Piatt’s poem is no spiritual guide for the mother left behind. Instead, the mother imagines her “wistful” and “lonely” “Little Star,” (1) longingly looking down on the earth, wishing it “were not so far” (8). The poem does not offer the hope of heavenly reunion but, instead, nostalgia for the lost, worldly relationship: Little Star, good-night. . . . . Dream of the olden Time that was the sweetest and the best,

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10.

11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

When you were a baby’s precious golden Head, asleep upon your mother’s breast. (21–24) Karen Sánchez-Eppler argues that “in sentimental fiction bodily signs are adamantly and repeatedly presented as the preferred and most potent mechanisms for . . . communicating meaning . . .” (27). And tears are the most common of these bodily signs. In her study of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Jane Tompkins argues that tears are to be read in this particular work of fiction as “signs of redemption” (131). The tears of Piatt’s mothers, to the contrary, are often portrayed as meaningless compulsion—as isolating and futile. Piatt’s juxtaposition of the emotionally overwrought mother and the distant, unfeeling, and legalistic God evokes for me a moment in Moby-Dick. Melville’s protagonist states, “ . . . but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels; that’s tingling enough for mortal man! to think’s audacity. God only has that right and privilege” (613). Melville would more explicitly make his point in a letter to Hawthorne, writing, “The reason the mass of men fear God, and at bottom dislike Him, is because they rather distrust His heart, and fancy Him all brain like a watch” (The Writings of Herman Melville 14: 192). Here, Piatt’s mother not only evokes a similarly distant God but also reflects Ahab’s sense of being entrapped in emotion. As Emily Watts notes, the seemingly non-threatening genre of children’s poetry offered nineteenth-century women writers “cover,” allowing them to make “observations . . . that they would not possibly have made in their poems for adults” (Watts 94). Pointing to Piatt’s work as an example, Watts concludes “some of the most startling and original poetry written in the second half of the nineteenth century was written by women purportedly for their children” (94). The Round Towers that haunt the Irish countryside are believed to have been built as defense against Viking raiders sometime between the eight and tenth century CE. Jean Allen Hanawalt identifies Yeats as author of the unsigned review of Piatt’s work entitled “Bundle of Poets” (253). After devastating famine in mid-century, Ireland in the 1880s would further suffer from the brutal consequences of an unjust landholding system. Tenant farmers, faced with reduced resources, unfair rents, and evictions would be lead to a desperation that resulted in the “Land Wars.”

NOTES TO THE CONLCUSION 1. The title of Rich’s work echoes Margaret Fuller’s famous claim: “Man is of woman born, and her face bends over him in infancy with an expression he can never quite forget” (Women in the Nineteenth Century 27).

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Index

A Abbott, John S. C., 1; see also Mother at Home, The Abolitionism and Harriet Beecher Stowe, 19, 29, 73–74, 84 and Harriet Jacobs, 77–81 and motherhood, 19–20, 37, 40 in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 74–76 in “The Slave Auction,” 9–10 in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 19–20, 27, 37, 40, 73–74, 76 and women, 19 American Madonna (Gatta), 141n. 2, Chapter 1 American Woman’s Home, The (Catherine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe), 2 Ammons, Elizabeth, 6, 17, 31, 141nn. 2, 5, Chapter 1 Anderson, Benedict, 26 Angel in the House, 37, 107 Antinomianism, 48, 142–143n. 8 Arac, Jonathan, 141 n. 1, Chapter 2; see also “Politics of the Scarlet Letter, The” At Odds (Degler), 139n. 2 Awakening, The (Chopin), 136–137

B Barnes, Elizabeth, 8, 140n. 9 Baym, Nina, 63, 142n. 5 Beecher, Catherine, 2; see also American Woman’s Home, The Beecher, Henry Ward, 16 Bell, Michael Davitt, 61

Benevolent Maternalism (maternal benevolence) 19, 23, 24,141n. 1, Chapter 1 in The Scarlet Letter, 53, 60, 67 in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 23–28 Bennett, Paula Bernat, 13, 108, 109, 114, 128, 146nn.1, 2, 147n. 7; see also Palace-Burner and recovery of Sarah Piatt, 106–107 on Sarah Piatt, thematics of, 107, 146n. 1 Bercovitch, Sacvan, 67, 69, 70, 141n. 1, Chapter 2 Blackford, Holly, 80 Black Women Writing Autobiography: A Tradition Within a Tradition (Braxton), 146n. 10 Bonds of Womanhood, The (Cott), 139n. 2 Boone, Daniel, 108 Boudreau, Kristin, 8, 76, 140nn 9, 12 Braxton, Joanne, 146n. 10; see also Black Women Writing Autobiography: A Tradition Within a Tradition Brodhead, Richard, 33, 51 Brown, Gillian, 18, 22, 32, 37 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 105 Browning, Robert, 105 Brown, John, 145n. 4 “Bundle of Poets” (Yeats), 148n. 14

C Calvinism, 119, 142n. 6 Carby, Hazel, 86 Carton, Evan, 58 Cherniavsky, Eva, 8, 22, 140n. 11; see also That Pale Mother Rising

159

160

Index

on Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 88 on Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 39, 40 Childbearing in American Society: 1650– 1850 (Scholten), 139n. 2 Child death, 10, 29–30 Lydia Sigourney on, 30 Sarah Piatt on, 116–124, 128–129, 147–148nn. 8, 9 in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 29–34, 118 Child discipline, 50–51; see also Disciplinary intimacy in The Scarlet Letter, 50–52 in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 32–33 Child elegy, 30, 116–124, 128–129 147– 148nn.8, 9 Child, Lydia Maria, 2, 79, 85, 145n. 4 Chopin, Kate, 136; see also The Awakening Christian consolation, see religious consolation Civil disobedience, and mothers, 17, 22, 23; see also Domestic disobedience Clemens, Samuel Longhorn, see Mark Twain Clergy, nineteenth-century, 47, 142n. 6 Colacurcio, Michael, J., 142––143nn. 8 142, 11 Communards, 113, 147n. 6 Communards of Paris, The, 1871 (Edwards), 147n. 6 Conceived by Liberty (Stephanie Smith), 140n. 11, 141n. 2, Chapter 1 Consolation literature, 30, 117 Cords of affection; see also domestic bonds in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 80, 95 in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 76, 80, 101 Cott, Nancy, 139n. 2; see also Bonds of Womanhood, The Crane, Stephen, 130, 136; see also Maggie: A Girl of the Street Cuddy, Lois A., 142n. 5 Cultural work, 7, 43 Culture of the feelings, 2, 3 Custom House Eagle, see Federal Eagle

43, 140n. 12, 143n. 10 Degler, Carl, 139n. 2 139; see also At Odds Dickinson, Emily, 119, 147n. 9 Dickinson, Gilbert, 119 Dimity Convictions (Welter), 139n. 2 Disciplinary intimacy, 51, 143n. 10; see also Child Discipline Discipline of death, 28–34, 118, 123; see also Maternal bereavement Domestication of death, 116 Domestic bonds, 75; see also Cords of affection Domestic disobedience, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 24 Domesticity and slave women, 85, 87, 97–98 values of, 43, 82, 81–83 Domestic novel, 67, 76, 77, 79 Doriani, Beth Maclay, 145n. 9 Douglas, Ann, 11, 12, 22, 92; see also Douglas––Tompkins debate on domestication of death, 116 on nineteenth–century clergy, 47, 142n. 6 on nineteenth–century motherhood, 4 sentimental literature, on, 7, 70 Douglass, Frederick, 20, 80, 82, 84, 86, 87, 88, 95, 96, 102; see also Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass abolitionist model of, 73–76, 79, 146n. 9 and literacy, 86, 91, 144n, 1, 146n. 9 mother, relationship with, 74–75, 144n. 1 self-reliance of, 80, 93, 101 works: Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, 144n. 1 My Bondage and My Freedom, 144n. 1 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 73–76, 79, 82, 88, 89, 146 n. 9 Douglas-Tompkins debate, 7, 8, 17, 29 DuBois, W. E. B, 145n. 6 Dutton, Mary, 15

D

E

Davidson, Cathy, 139n. 2 Dead mother, power of, 38, 67, 137 Dearest Beloved: The Hawthornes and the Making of a Middle-Class Family (Herbert),

Eagle, see Federal Eagle Edwards, Stewart, 147n. 6; see also Communards of Paris, The, 1871, Elbert, Monika M., 53, 67, 142n. 5 Elegy, see Child elegy

Index Ellis, Mrs., 3; see also “Mother’s Love, The” Emersonian liberal self, 20, 93, 145–146n. 9; see also self-reliance feminine, 22, 60 and motherhood, 22 in The Scarlet Letter, 60, 61–62 Empire of the mother, 3, 11, 135, 136, 139n. 2, 3; see also Wright Empire of the Mother: American Writing about Domesticity 1830–1860 (Ryan), 139nn. 2, 3 Equiano, Olaudah, 145n. 5 Erlich, Gloria, 69 Essentialism, 132, 136 in Letters to Mothers, 5–6 in Maggie: A Girl of the Street, 136 maternal, 5–6, 12, 27, 28, 46, 49, 64, 113, 136 in poetry of Sarah Piatt, 113 in The Scarlet Letter, 12, 45, 46–49, 64, 70 in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 12, 27, 28, 41 Experiential Equivalence, 7, 31, 140n. 10

F Family and abolitionism, 19, 23, 92 changing role of, 1–2, 135, 138 Hawthorne’s conception of, 44–45 in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 80–81, 82, 84, 91–98 in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 74–76, 101 national, 7, 17, 19, 26, 136, in The Scarlet Letter, 57, 63, 65 slave, 19, 23, 74 in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 21, 23–24,76, 101 Federal Eagle, 48 and Hester Prynne, 49, 54, 55, 56, 60, 70 as maternal figure, 45, 142n. 3 Female subjectivity, see subjectivity Feminist critics, 10, 22, 107 Fisher, Philip, 7, 12, 19, 20 Fleischner, Jennifer, 84 Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, 86, 145n. 6 Frankenstein, 52 Franklin, Benjamin, 145n. 5; see also Mémoires de la Vie Privée de Benjamin Franklin, Écrits par Lui-Même.

161 Free-bird topos, 112 Fryer, Judith, 69 Fugitive slave law, 25 Fuller, Margaret, 38, 137, 148n. 1; see also Woman in the Nineteenth-Century

G Garfield, Deborah, 88, 90 Garner, Margaret, 141n. 7 Garrison, William Lloyd, 74 Gatta, John, 141n. 2, Chapter 1; see also American Madonna Gendered spheres, see Separate spheres Gender roles, 13, 61, 84, 107, 108, 127 Gilbert, Sandra, 37 Gibson, Donald, 84 God, 117; see also Jesus Christ as benevolent lamb, 119 Calvinist, 119 in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 83 in Moby-Dick, 148n.1 patriarchal, 29–30, 118 in poetry of Sarah Piatt, 117, 118, 119– 121, 123, 129, 148n. 11 in The Scarlet Letter, 47, 59, 67 will of, 29–30, 83, 123 Gubar, Susan, 37

H Halttunen, Karen, 37, 40 Hanawalt, Jean Allen, 148n. 14 Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins, 12, 141n. 7 and sentimentalism, 9–10, 140n. 10, works: “Eliza Harris,” 141n. 7 “The Slave Auction,” 9–10, 12, 140n. 10 “The Slave Mother: A Tale of the Ohio,” 141n. 7 Harper’s Ferry, 145n. 4 Harper’s Weekly, 147n. 7 “Harriet Jacobs and the Sentimental Politics of Female Suffering” (Nudelman), 145n. 8 Hawthorne, Julian, 141 n. 2, Chapter 2 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 103, 108, 136; see also Scarlet Letter, The Anne Hutchinson, depiction of, 142– 143 n. 7, 8, 12 emotional reticence, 44–45 maternal essentialism, challenge to, 12

162 personal conservatism 43, 143–144n. 15 secret of, 141n. 2, Chapter 2 and sentimental culture, 12, 43–44, and women writers, 43, 44 works: “Little Annie’s Rambles,” 43 “The Minister’s Black Veil,” 44 Mosses from an Old Manse, 44 “A Rill from the Town Pump,” 43 “Roger Malvin’s Burial,” 43 The Scarlet Letter, 12, 43–71, 137 “Sights from a Steeple,” 43 Twice-Told Tales, 43 “Young Goodman Brown,” 43, 44 Hawthorne, Sophia, 43, 44, 51, 143nn. 10, 15 Hawthorne, Una, 52 Hedrick, Joan, 16, 144n. 3 Hendler,Glenn, 7–8, 10, 31,140nn. 9,10; see also Public Sentiments; Sentimental Men Herbert, T. Walter, 43, 63 140n 12, 143– 144nn. 10, 15; see also Dearest Beloved “Hero of the Commune, The” (King), 147n. 7. Howard, June, 7, 140n. 9 Howe, Julia Ward, 44 Howells, William Dean, 105, 117, 125 Huckleberry Finn (Twain), 60, 61–62; 143n. 13 Hutchinson, Anne, 48 Hawthorne on, 142–143 nn.7, 8, 12 and Hester Prynne, 48–49, 53, 54, 61, 68, 143n. 12 in Magnalia Christi Americana, 143n. 8

I Imagined maternal community, 23–28, 40, 41 Imagined political community, 26 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl 12–13, 73–103 alternative female models in, 99–101 cords of affection in, 80, 95 dialect in 98, 99 domesticity in, 85, 87, 93, 96, 97–98, 101–103 family in, 80–81, 82, 84, 91–98 heroic slave mother in, 13, 80, 92–93 influence of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass on, 73, 74–76

Index 0on Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 26, 27, 28, 141n.2, Chapter 1 Literacy and Frederick Douglass, 86, 91, 144n. 1, 146n. 9 and Harriet Jacobs 86, 91 sexual, 86, 91 Lowell, James Russell, 109

M Madonna figure, 41, 45, 130; see also Mary, mother of Jesus; Maternal icon American, 136, 138 middle-class, 109 in The Scarlet Letter, 45–46, 49, 65 slave, 21 Madwoman in the attic, 146n. 10 Maggie: A Girl of the Street (Crane), 130, 136 Magnalia Christi Americana (Mather), 142–143n. 8 Male (masculine) subjectivity, see subjectivity Mann, Mary Peabody, 51, 143n. 10; see also The Moral Culture of Infancy Mary Magdalene, 120 Mary, mother of Jesus, 20, 120 Massachusetts Bay Colony, 48 Maternal bereavement discipline of, 29, 31, 116, 118, 120, 123, 124 as force of social change, 30, 31, 121 and God’s will, 121,123 Lydia Sigourney, on, 30, 116, 117, 118– 119, 121, 122 narcissism of, 121–122 in poetry of Sarah Piatt, 116–124, 125, 129, 147n. 9 and religious consolation, 116, 118–121, 123, 130 in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 28–34 Maternal body, 50 Maternal community, see Imagined maternal community Maternal discipline, 18, 18, 19, 46, 49, 53, 58, 70, 113, 116 Maternal discourse, 17, 108 Maternal heroics, 35, 36, 73, 77, 93 Maternal icon, 13, 65, 88; see also Madonna after the Civil War, 136 dismantling of, 13, 108, 109–116 Maternal idealism (maternal ideality), 13, 135, 136

Index in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 13 in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 4, 6–7, 12, 15–41, 74 in works of Lydia Sigourney, 5, 6 Maternal ideology, 5–7, 10, 136–138 and Harriet Beecher Stowe, 17–18, 23 in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 71 in Letters to Mothers, 5–6 in Piatt, poetry of, 108, 113, 116, 125, 133 in The Scarlet Letter, 47–48, 70 in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 23, 39 Maternal instinct(s), 17, 21, 35, 36, 38, 50, 74, 105 Maternal subjectivity, see subjectivity Mather, Cotton, 142–143n 8; see also Magnalia Christi Americana Matriarchy, 7, 26, 40 Melville, Herman, 119, 139n.4, 148n. 11 see also Moby-Dick and Hawthorne, 44, 141n. 2, Chapter 2 and sentimental maternity, 4–5 Mémoires de la Vie Privée de Benjamin Franklin, Écrits Par Lui-Même (Franklin), 145n. 5 Meynell, Alice, 106 Milk, mothers, 81–82 Mill, John Stuart, 2 Miller, Edwin Haviland, 45, 53 Moby-Dick, 4–5, 139n. 4, 148n. 11 Modernism, 137 aesthetic of, 10 and Sarah Piatt, 107, 132 Moral Culture of Infancy (Mann), 143n. 10 Mother at Home, The (Abbott), 1 Motherhood; see also Sentimental Maternity affective influence of, 2–3, 5, 6, 16, 17, 22, 23, 24, 25, 28 aggression in, 35, 37, 39, 45 ambivalence of , 11, 16, 91–92, 93, 102, 110–113, 125, 126, 138 biological, 28, 34, 46–47, 49, 50, 55, 74, 82, 109 bonds of, 35, 49, 80, 91–98 changing role of, 1–2 and death, 38, 67, 137 deviant 34–41, 49–52 discipline of (regulatory aspects of), 5, 18, 18, 19, 46, 48, 49, 53 , 58, 70, 108, 113, 116, 118 ethics of, 19, 20, 23, 26, 28, 34, 74 institution of, 12, 16, 18, 47, 58

163 and literature, 3–5 and patriotism, 6, 135 and public sphere, 3–4, 23, 135 redemptive, 45, 48, 56 Republican, 1, 135, 139n.1 rights of (privileges of), 35, 36, 46, 47, 65, 119 sanctified (divine), 11, 20, 23, 45, 49, 52, 65, 66, 108 and sentimentalism, 2–3, 10–13 and slavery, 35–40, 74–76, 81–84, 91–98 values (ideals), 16, 25, 35, 70, 80, 81, 83, 93, 96, 99, 102 white, 39, 40 Mother- power, 18–23, 41 “Mother’s Love, The” (Ellis), 3 Moulton, Louise Chandler, 146–147n. 3; see also In the Garden of Dreams Mullen, Harryette, 146n. 9

N Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Douglass), 73–76, 79, 82, 88, 89, 101, 146 n.9 as an abolitionist model, 74–76 cords of affection in, 76, 80,101 family in, 74–76, 101 mother figure in, 74–75 slave family life in, 74–76 Nat Turner, 94, 145n. 4 New Woman, 136 Noble, Marianne, 18, 141n.4 Norcom, Dr. James, 77 Nudelman, Franny, 143n. 9, 145n. 8; see also “Harriet Jacobs and the Sentimental Politics of Female Suffering”

O Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (Rich), 138, 148n.1 Olney, James, 145 n.5 Olson, Margaret Thickston, 53 O’Reilly, Andrea, 138

P Palace-Burner (Bennett), 13, 107, 108, 146n. 1, 147n. 7 introduction, 107, 146n.1 preface, 107, 108 Patriotism, of mothers, 6, 135

164 Pétroleuse(s), 113–116, 147nn. 6, 7; see also “The Palace-Burner” Pfister, Joel, 53, 142n. 5 Piatt, Cecil, 117 Piatt, John James (J. J.), 108, 109, 127, 146n. 2 Piatt, Louis, 117, 128 Piatt, Sarah Morgan Bryan, 13, 105–133, 136, 137 “border-state” mentality, 108 Children, death of, 116–117, 123,128 Civil War, response to, 18 critical reception of, 105–106, 125, 128, 137 contemporary scholarship on, 107–108, 132–133, marriage of, 146n. 2 mother, death of, 108–109 poetics: child elegy, 117–124,128–129 dramatic (dialogue) poems, 113 genteel vocabulary, 105 poetry for children, 148n. 12 sentimental maternity, response to, 108, 109 stepmother of, 146n. 3 thematics: Angel in the House, deconstruction of, 107 child death, 116–124,128–129, 147– 148nn. 8, 9 Civil War, 107 domestic experience, 105 domestication of death, critique of, 116 gender, 106–107 Ireland, 127–132 maternal ambivalence, 109–113 maternal bereavement, 116–124, 125, 129 maternal icon, dismantling of, 109– 116, 136 motherhood as elegiac experience 125–127 Rachel poems, 117–125 religious consolation, rejection of, 118–121 special child, 123–124 works: “Bid for the Crown Jewels,” 128, 147n.8 “A Child in the Park,” 121–122

Index Child’s World Ballads, 124 “Comfort—By a Coffin,” 118 “Counting the Graves,” 121 “A Dream’s Awakening,” 110, 111 “The Favorite of Five,” 123 “An Irish Wildflower,” 130–131, 132 “Her Blindness in Grief,” 119–121 “Her Talk with a Redbird,” 112–113, 131 “In the Round Tower at Cloyne,”128–129, 147n. 8 “Last Words,” 125–126 “The Little Boy I Dreamed About,” 123–124 “My Babes in the Woods,” 125, 126–127 “A Night-Scene from the Rock of Cashel, Ireland,” 130 “No Help,” 118–120 “Offers for the Child,” 110–112, 147n. 5 “Of Two and Two,” 124 “On the Pier at Queenstown,” 130 “The Palace-Burner,” 113–116 “Prevented Choice,” 147n. 5 “The Prince Imperial,” 121 “Questions of the Hour,” 109–110 “Rachael at the Lodge,” 121, 130 “A Reproach,” 130, 131–132 “The Sad Story of a Little Girl,” 125 “Sad Wisdom—Four Years Old,” 122–123 “Singing to a Star,” 147–148n. 9 That New World and Other Poems, 125 “The Thought of Astyanax beside Iülus,” 121 A Voyage to the Fortunate Isles, 106, 126 “A Woman’s Last Words,” 146–147n. 3 A Woman’s Poems, 105 years in Ireland, 127–128 Piatt, Victor, 117, 123 Pieta, 65 “Politics of the Scarlet Letter, The” (Arac), 141 n. 1, Chapter 2 Post, Amy, 77, 78, 145n. 7 Prentice, George D., 105 Priory, 127 Public Sentiments (Hendler), 140n. 9 Public sphere

Index and mothers, 3–4, 23, 135 and Nathaniel Hawthorne, 71 and Sarah Piatt, 107 in The Scarlet Letter, 53–54 in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 23, 41 Puritan Community doctrine, 48, 54, 143n. 11 and Nathaniel Hawthorne, 142n. 7 in The Scarlet Letter, 46, 47–49, 50–51, 54, 58, 59, 67, 143n. 11

Q Quaker community in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 6–7, 26

R Rachel (biblical figure), 116, 117, 125 Rachel Poems (Piatt), 116–124, 125, 128, 129, 147n. 8 Redemptive intimacy, 58–59 Religious consolation and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 83 and the poetry of Sarah Piatt, 116, 118– 121, 123, 130 Republican motherhood, see Motherhood Resurrection, 30, 120 Rich, Adrienne, 138, 148n. 1; see also Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution Rosicrucian lamp, 38, 137 Rossetti, Christina, 105 Round towers, 148n. 13 Ryan, Mary P., 19, 139nn. 2, 3; see also Empire of the Mother: American Writing about Domesticity 1830–1860

S Samuels, Shirley, 5 Sánchez-Eppler, Karen, 97, 148n. 10 Satan, 110, 147n. 5 Sawyer, Samuel Tredwell, 77 Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne), 12, 43–71 Anne Hutchinson in, 48–49, 53, 54, 61, 68, 142–143 nn.7, 8, 12 benevolent maternalism in, 53, 60, 67 child discipline in, 50–52 disciplinary intimacy in, 51 Emersonian liberal selfhood in, 60, 61–62

165 Federal eagle in, 45, 48, 49, 55, 56, 60, 142n. 3 female subjectivity in, 61 Madonna figure in, 45–46, 49, 65 maternal discipline in, 46–48, 58, 70, Nature in, 60, 61–64, 70 Pieta in, 65 public sphere in, 53–54 Puritan community in, 46, 47–49, 50–51, 54, 58, 59, 67, 143n. 11 redemptive intimacy in, 58–59 sanctified maternity in, 66–67 scarlet letter in, 47, 53–54, 56, 58–60, 62, 63–64, 67, 68–69 sentimental maternity in, 46–48 unnatural maternity in, 49–52 Scholten, Catherine M., 139n. 2; see also Childbearing in American Society: 1650–1850 Schultz, Elizabeth, 143n. 4 Scribbling women, 43, 44, 71 Self-reliance; see also Emersonian liberal self and Frederick Douglass, 80, 82, 93, 101 in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 7, 80, 82, 93, 145n. 9 Sentimentalism (sentimentality), 2, 7–11; see also Douglass-Tompkins debate; sentimental maternity and abolitionism, 9–10, 19, 74, 79 and cultural conservatism, 8, 11 ideology of, 8, 46, 56, 121 and motherhood, 2–3, 5–7, 10–13 and sympathy, 2, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 140n. 10 Sentimental maternity, 1–13, 135–136 and Harriet Jacobs, 78 hazards of, 5–8 in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 80, 92 in Letters to Mothers, 5–6 in Maggie: A Girl of the Street, 136 in poetry of Sarah Piatt, 108, 112, 114, 132, in The Scarlet Letter, 46–48, 50, 65–66 in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 4, 6–8, 11–12, 16–18, 15–41, 135 Sentimental Men (Chapman and Hendler), 140n. 9 Separate spheres, 4, 5–6, 139n. 1 Sexual literacy, see Literacy Shelley, Mary, 52; see also Frankenstein Sigourney, Lydia, 11

166 on child death, 30 on child discipline, 50, 51 consolation literature of, 30 conservatism of, 139–140. n5 domestic ethos of, 71 on maternal bereavement, 30, 116, 117, 118–119, 121, 122, 147n. 9 on maternal bond, 109, on maternal experience, 5, 125 on maternal intuition, 47, 49, 51, 52 on maternal love, 19, 60, 127 on maternal rights, 109 on moral influence of children, 6, 47–48, 113, on patriotism of women, 6, 135 and sentimental maternity, 5–6, 47 social criticism of, 139–140. n5 on special child, 32 works: “Birth-Day of the First Born,” 30 “The Consenting Mother,” 30 Letters to Mothers, 5–6, 47, 139– 140n. 5 “To a Dying Infant,” 30 Smith, Adam, 140n. 9; see also The Theory of Moral Sentiments Smith, Stephanie, 35, 136, 140n. 11; see also Conceived by Liberty on Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl 82, 94, 96, 145–146n. 9 on Uncle Tom’s Cabin 40, 41, 141n.2, Chapter 1 Smith, Valerie, 77 Special child, 32–34, 123–124 Steiner, Dorothea, 126 Stowe, Calvin, 15, 16 Stowe, Charlie, 19, 29, 32 Stowe, Frederick ,16 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 3, 4, 6–7, 11–12, 13, 15–41, 47, 60, 71, 76, 92, 102, 108, 116, 118, 121,122; see also Uncle Tom’s Cabin and abolitionism, 19, 29, 73–74, 84 and Douglas-Tompkins debate, 7 feminism of, 11–12 and Harriet Jacobs, 78–79, 144n. 3 maternal discourse of, 17–18 and maternal idealism, 6, 12, 17 maternal politics of, 17 motherhood of, 6, 15–16 professional life, 15–16 works:

Index American Woman’s Home, The, 2 Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 33, 78, 141n.8, 144n. 1 My Wife and I, 3, 11 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 4, 6–7, 11–12, 15–41, 51, 73–74, 78, 92, 96, 118, 135 Subjectivity; see also Emersonian liberal selfhood female (feminine), 6, 12, 18, 22, 35, 38, 39, 40, 41, 56, 58, 60, 61, 107, 127, 133, 135 male (masculine), 73 maternal, 13, 35, 79, 80, 81, 121, 138 in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 22, 34–41

T That Pale Mother Rising (Cherniavsky), 140n. 11 Theory of Moral Sentiments, The (Adam Smith), 140n. 9 Thomson, Rosemarie Garland, 19, 22, 141n. 1, Chapter 1 Ticknor, William, 44 Tompkins, Jane 8, 66; see also DouglasTompkins debate on sentimental power on Uncle Tom’s Cabin 7, 12–13, 17, 29, 140n. 7, 148n. 10 True womanhood, 36, 37, 81, 136 Turner, Nat, see Nat Turner’s rebellion Twain, Mark, 143n. 13 Tynan, Katherine, 125, 146n. 2

U Uncle Sam, 142n. 3 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 15–41, 92, 96, 118, 141n. 2, Chapter 1, 144n. 1, 148n. 10 abolitionism in, 19–20, 27, 37, 40, 73–74, 76 benevolent maternalism in, 23–28 child death in, 29–34, 118 child discipline in, 32–34 dead mother in, 38–39 and Douglas-Tompkins debate, 7, 17 essentialism in, 12, 27, 28, 41 experiential equivalence in, 7–8 family in, 21, 23–24,76, 101 female agency in, 18–23 female subjectivity in, 22, 34–41 feminism in, 11,17

Index imagined maternal community in, 23–28, 40, 41 infanticide in, 35, 37 influence on Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 73–74, 76 maternal bereavement in, 28–34 maternal deviance in, 34–40 maternal discourse in, 17–18 maternal idealism in, 4, 6–7, 12, 15–41, 74 public sphere in, 23, 41 Quaker community in, 6–7, 26 sentimental maternity in, 6–8, 11–12, 16–18, 15–41, 135

V Virg in Mary, see Mary, the Mother of Jesus

W Walker, Cheryl, 112

167 Walter, Krista, 80, 81, 96 Watts, Emily, 148n. 12 Welter, Barbara, 139n. 2; see also Dimity Convictions Wexler, Laura, 7, 8 Woman in the Nineteenth-Century (Fuller), 137 “Woman’s Execution, A” (Preston), 147n. 7 Women of the Republic (Kerber), 139 n.1 Woolf, Virginia, 15 Wright, Henry C., 139n. 3; see also Empire of the mother

Y Yarborough, Richard, 20 Yeats, W.B. 128, 148n. 14; see also “Bundle of Poets” Yellin, Jean Fagan, 80, 93, 145nn. 4, 6, 146nn. 10, 11 Youth’s Companion, 124

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