Under Fire: Stowe, Jewett, Freeman, Cather And Welty

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1. Woman’s Fiction: Criticism

I find it rather difficult to engage the topic of domesticity without addressing theories of hegemony and resistance. Much of what has been said and written is directly related to power representations and consequently resistance to it. The figure of the domestic woman has been, by many, considered haunting for over two centuries, presumably because its positionings often destabilize male-created concepts of ideology and opposition.

Harriet Beecher Stowe cleverly commented once that the middle-class home is an alternative economic system and so it questions the whole structure of a society whose values are increasingly determined by an escalating industrial-commercial economy (Levy, 1992).

For these reasons, many works of fiction of the highest quality have been undervalued or underread  through time, especially when women’s traditional work is at their center. This is what we find when we look at important careers, such as those of Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Willa Cather and Eudora Welty. One quickly realizes that at that specific point when gender roles are openly discussed their work is neglected the most.

It is the case of Shadows on the Rock, possibly Cather’s least valued novel. Not surprisingly Freeman’s A Tardy Thanksgiving has seldom, if ever, been reprinted. Welty’s The Burning hasgarnered no importance by critics whatsoever, whom seem to have completely and purposefully ignored the presence of housekeeping in the story.

Since women’s housework has been consistently regarded as
either trivial or invisible, at least since the American Civil War, the literary traditions involving home plots have been similarly marginalized.

Historian Glenna Matthews has made a wonderful contribution to the understanding of this process of marginalization of American women’s domestic fiction post-1870′s on her work entitled Just a Housewife: The Rise and Fall of Domesticity in America. In it Matthews chronicles “the mainstream political efficacy and influence of the woman-centered domestic sphere in the antebellum United States” (In: Romero, 1997).

What seems to have happened in the years after the American Civil War was a collision between antagonistic male and female cultures. The home plot was generated in this period of oppressively separate spheres.

Not surprisingly, Women’s Fiction, as a genre, received all kinds of reception, from outstanding praise to rave criticism.

Myra Jehlen’s  claim, published in the feminist journal Signs, sustained that “by no means nineteenth-century women writers could compete artistically with Melville and the like because no woman can assume herself because she has yet to create herself, and this the sentimentalists, acceding to their society’s definition did not do.” (In: Romero, 1997)

Jane Tompkins, in 1985, in her groundbreaking book Sensational Designs, prophesized that the traditional “demonization” of domesticity was bound to lose its force. She argued that “the popular domestic novel of the nineteenth century represents a monu­mental effort to reorganize culture from the woman’s point of view” and that domestic fiction “in certain cases…offers a critique of American society far more devastating than any delivered by better-known critics such as Hawthorne and Melville.” (In: Romero, 1997)

 

2. The Nineteenth Century

 

I stack the dishes and I wring the dish-cloth, like mum says; I clean the sink with Rinso, not too much; I shake the mat before the door, I water the geranium — is this being good? mum says, “good girl”: I do this not for mum or anyone: I do it for myself;

H.D.
from “Sagesse”

 

In the language of nineteenth-century American housekeepers, to have “faculty” meant to be a housekeeper of exemplary competence. In the words of Harriet Beecher Stowe, faculty is “high art”, and she has been known to describe it wittily in “ponderous biblical cadences”, such as we see in the following excerpt from the Minister’s Wooing:

 

“To her who has faculty nothing shall be impossible. She shall scrub floors, wash, wring, bake, brew, and yet her hands shall be small and white; she shall have no perceptible income, yet always be handsomely dressed; she shall not have a servant in her house, — with a dairy to manage, hired men to feed, a boarder or two to care for, unheard-of pickling and preserving to do, — and yet you com­monly see her every afternoon sitting at her parlor-window behind the lilacs, cool and easy, hemming muslin cap-strings, or reading the last new book. She who hath faculty is never in a hurry, never behind-hand. She can always step over to distressed Mrs. Smith, whose jelly won’t come, — and stop to show Mrs. Jones how she makes her pickles so green, — and be ready to watch with poor old Mrs. Simpkins, who is down with the rheumatism.” (Stowe & Conger, 1999)

 

Stowe’s description both valorizes faculty and gently mocks the ideal of domestic competence. The very idea of one woman who can effortlessly manage, without any servants, the chores of cooking, cleaning, sewing, “pickling and preserving,” and other self-perpetuating tasks seems rather unreal, for even though she inflicts harsh labor on her hands they are always white, even though she mercilessly exercises herself to exhaustion her countenance is always of coolness and freshness. Most interestingly, this woman, despite her endless labor, keeps up to date with literary productions – mind the sentence “reading the last new book”.

            According to Stowe, one sign of an accomplished housekeeper is that she is never caught in the act (Stowe & Conger, 1999).

The ideal of such a capacious female life, centered in housekeeping, was
an insistent presence in nineteenth-century American culture. Thus all
of Stowe’s New England novels contain portraits of women who have achieved
“faculty”.

One example is The Pearl of Orr’s Island, in which the memorable seamstress, Aunt Roxy Toothacre, is an example of achieved faculty. She is “brisk, capable, with superior powers of foreknowledge” (Stowe, 2008). She is the first to diagnose the tuberculosis of the novel’s young heroine.

Aunt Roxy’s profile fits the description of having a way of life which is described as “housework as ritual enactment”, as explained by theologian Kathryn Allen Rabuzzi (Stowe, 2008). According to her, the time this woman spends at her household tasks is “typically characterized by amorphousness or circularity or both, and a content frequently imperceptible within the structures of dominant male culture” (Stowe, 2008).  What these women do is essential yet invisible; notwithstanding, this neverending ritual assures the continuation of belief and knowledge from one generation to the next.

Judith Fetterley (In: Campbell, 2009) writes of fiction as written and consumed by nineteenth-century American women claiming that “much of the pleasure that the contemporary reader takes in this literature stems from its ratification of women as significant subjects”.

These significant subjects materialized in literature in the figure of the heroine are often at odds with the rituals of the household in which they find themselves. Contradictorily, these heroines are domestic outsiders by definition. Sentimental novels typically culminate with their female protagonists’ marriages but interestingly leave undepicted their subsequent incorporation into the realm of housekeeping.

According to Baym, these climactic marriages are “symbols of successful accomplishment of the re­quired task and resolution of the basic problems raised in the story, which is in most primitive terms the story of the formation and assertion of a female ego” (In: Campbell, 2009).

Until recently, a woman writing fiction about housekeeping was likely to find her choice of subject matter considered as politico-economic strategy, as referred to by Annis Pratt, in the New Feminist Criticism (1971). Or she might find that the domestic aspects approached in her work are liable to be labeled as relatively trivial, as Joyce Carol Oates, in 1969, described Eudora Welty’s fiction, i.e., as a “bizarre combination of a seemingly boundless admiration for feminine nonsense — family life, food, relatives, conversations, eccentric old people (In: Romines, 1992).

REFERENCES

Campbell, Donna M. “Domestic or Sentimental Fiction, 1830-1860.” Literary Movements. Available at: <http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/domestic.htm>. Accessed on: 17 Aug 2009. 

Levy, Helen Fiddyment. Fiction of the Home Place: Jewett, Cather, Glasgow, Porter, Welty, and Naylor. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1992.

Pratt, Annis. “The New Feminist Criticism.” College English 32 (1971): 872-8. Available at: <http://www.eduref.org/plweb-cgi/fastweb?getdoc+ericdb2+ericdb+443781+76+wAAA+(decency)>. Accessed on: 16 Aug 2009.

Romero, Lora. Home Fronts: Domesticity and Its Critics in the Antebellum United States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997.

Romines, Ann. The Home Plot: Women, Writing & Domestic Ritual. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992.

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. The Pearl of Orr’s Island. Charleston, SC: Bibliobazaar, 2008.

Stowe, Harriet Beecher and Conger, Danielle. The Minister’s Wooing. London: Penguin Classics Series,1999.

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