Style, Gender, and Fantasy in Nineteenth-Century American Women's Writing (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)

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S t y l e , Ge n de r , a n d Fa n ta s y i n N i n e t e e n t h- C e n t u ry A m e r ic a n Wom e n ’ s W r i t i ng

Dorri Beam presents an important contribution to nineteenthÂ�century fiction by examining how and why a florid and sensuous style came to be adopted by so many authors. Discussing a diverse range of authors, including Margaret Fuller and Pauline Hopkins, Beam traces this style through a variety of literary endeavors and reconstructs the political rationale behind the writers’ commitments to this form of prose. Beam provides both close readings of a number of familiar and unfamiliar works and an overarching account of the importance of this form of writing, suggesting new ways of looking at style as a medium through which gender can be signified and reshaped. Style, Gender, and Fantasy in Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Writing redefines our understanding of women’s relation to aesthetics and their contribution to both American literary romanticism and feminist reform. This illuminating account provides valuable new insights for scholars of American literature and women’s writing. d or r i be a m is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.



cambridge studies in american l i ter atu re and culture Editor Ross Posnock, Columbia University Founding Editor Albert Gelpi, Stanford University Advisory Board Alfred Bendixen, Texas A&M University Sacvan Bercovitch, Harvard University Ronald Bush, St. John’s College, University of Oxford Wai Chee Dimock, Yale University Albert Gelpi, Stanford University Gordon Hutner, University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign Walter Benn Michaels, University of Illinois, Chicago Kenneth Warren, University of Chicago

Recent books in this series 160. dorri beam Style, Gender, and Fantasy in Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Writing 159. yogita goyal Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature 158. michael clune American Literature and the Free Market, 1945–2000 157. kerry l arson Imagining Equality in Nineteenth-Century American Literature 156. l awrence rosenwald Multilingual America 155. anita pat terson Race, American Literature and Transnational Modernism 154. eliz abeth renker The Origins of American Literature Studies:€An Institutional History 153. theo davis Formalism, Experience, and the Making of American Literature in the Â�Nineteenth Century

S t y l e , Ge n de r , a n d Fa n ta s y i n N i n e t e e n t hCe n t u ry A m e r ic a n Wom e n ’s W r i t i ng D or r i Be a m University of California, Berkeley

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521769686 © Dorri Beam 2010 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2010 ISBN-13

978-0-511-90183-6

eBook (NetLibrary)

ISBN-13

978-0-521-76968-6

Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

Acknowledgements

page vii

Introduction. Highly wrought style

1

1â•…Florid fantasies:€Fuller, Stephens, and the “other” language of flowers

37

2╅Sensing the soul:€mesmerism, feminism, and highly wrought fiction

81

3â•…Harriet Prescott Spofford’s philosophy of composition

131

4â•… Pauline Hopkins’ baroque folds:€the styled form of Winona

164

Coda. The value of ornament:€Gilman and Wharton Notes Bibliography Index

189 196 235 254

v

Acknowledgements

This book was many years in the making and owes a great deal to the colleagues and friends who have offered their support along its winding path. It began as a dissertation, with a fine team of advisors. I thank Eric Lott for his unflagging faith in my work and for the freedom to pursue my interests, without which this book would be something different, and I thank Susan Fraiman for her critical support at crucial junctures. Other teachers shaped my vision and read incipient drafts, especially Deborah McDowell, Jessica Feldman, and Roger Stein. I thank former colleagues at Randolph-Macon College for their professional support during a very formative period, especially the English Department and my former chairs, Mark Parker and Ritchie Watson. Colleagues at Berkeley have guided this book with care and attention. One of my greatest debts is to Samuel Otter whose interest, patience, and intelligence guided every step. Dorothy Hale’s incisive critical acumen helped me find my way. I counted on Mitchell Breitwieser to provide both utterly clarifying insight into thorny issues and warm collegial support. Elizabeth Abel always asked the right questions about my writing and validated my endeavors. Katie Snyder’s comments on the manuscript at various junctures proved critical to the goals I hoped to achieve in this book. The friendship and insight of Kent Puckett and Bryan Wagner were invaluable. Marcial Gonzales, Joanna Picciotto, Gautam Premnath, Michael Rubenstein, Hertha Wong, Ashley Barnes, and Steve Goldsmith generously provided perceptive responses to my writing that shaped my approach and sustained my progress. Students at Berkeley have proved a source of inspiration and reminded me of what’s important about teaching and research. My research assistants, Trane Devore, Peter Goodwin, Emily Hilligoss, Paul Hurh, Karen Liebowitz, Katie Simon, and Arielle Simmons, contributed immeasurably to this book. Research for this project received support from an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation fellowship in residence at The Library Company of Philadelphia, vii

viii

Acknowledgements

a W. M. Keck Foundation fellowship in residence at The Huntington Library, a Doreen B. Townsend Fellowship in the Humanities, two UC Berkeley Humanities Research Fellowships, a Hellman Family Faculty Grant, and a University of California Regents’ Junior Faculty Fellowship. Portions of Chapter 4 were published in an earlier version as “The Flower of Black Female Sexuality in Pauline Hopkins’ Winona” in Recovering the Black Female Body: Self-Representations by African American Women, edited by Michael Bennett and Vanessa Dickerson, and published by Rutgers University Press in 2001. The insights of two anonymous reviewers at Cambridge University Press provided generative readings of the book that were a pleasure to engage in my final revisions. I thank Ross Posnock and Ray Ryan for their patience with those revisions and their support of my project. Joanna Garbutt and Sarah Price expertly guided this book through the final stages of production. Carrie Pickett proved copy-editor and indexer extraordinaire. I thank Ashley Barnes, Michael Bennett, Kim Chabot-Davis, Vanessa Dickerson, Jeffrey Steele, and Cindy Weinstein for reading and commenting on various stages of this book. Christopher Looby, Robyn Wiegman, and Ivy Wilson have also been important interlocutors along the way. Emily Todd has read much of the book, often at a moment’s notice, and helped me hone my prose. Kirsten Saxton has been an absolutely essential resource at pivotal junctures. I thank all of these friends for their generous advice and support. Without the support of family and friends, book writing would be a lonely endeavor. Jessica Reynolds and Mike Jacob, and Alex Petrakis and Bill White, have sustained my endeavors with their warm friendship and hospitality. Liz Lauck has been an important support line. Scottie and Richard Bowditch and Bob Beam have provided generous east coast warmth and hospitality to my family and me. Two special women, Dorothy Steger and Betsey King Beam, passed away before this book was completed, but the memory of their strength and grace has often heartened me. My sister, Megan Fulcher, and brother, Adam Rabung, and their wonderful families have been sources of wit, camaraderie, and loving support. The love and encouragement of my parents, John and Marybeth Rabung, has been a necessary foundation for all of my endeavors. My sons, Max and Jonah, were born during the period I wrote this book, and they have generously shared their mother with this distracting sibling. Without the immense patience and indulgence of my husband, David, who allowed me significant release time from parenting during crucial periods of writing, this book would not exist. This book is dedicated to David, Max, and Jonah, with my love.

Introduction. Highly wrought style

Before my second inmost sight it stood in the trance of a summer noon. The mountain summits burned in smouldering clouds of electric crimson. The cascade fell in sheets of crystallized sunshine€– trailed its glory over blistering rocks, dropping at last on the cool hearts of purple mosses which waited its coming in the humid gorges below. Again the fruits in the hands of Ceres flushed with mocking mellowness. More than ever the redolent flowers blushed above the mirrors of the fountains. Waters trickle in the throats of marble lilies€– tinkled, gurgled in myriads of murmurous jets.

(Mary Clemmer, Victoire)

October now. All the world swings at the top of its beauty; and those hills where we shall live, what robes of color fold them! Tawny filemot gilding the valleys, each seam and rut a scroll or arabesque, and all the year pouring out her heart’s blood to flush the maples, the great empurpled granites warm with the sunshine they have drunk all summer! So I am to be married to-day, at noon. I like it best so; it is my hour. (Harriet Prescott Spofford, The Amber Gods)

This book argues for the aesthetic pleasures and feminist politics of oÂ�rnament, profusion, and verbosity in nineteenth-century America by recovering a sensuous and extravagant style of writing by women that reviewers often termed “highly wrought.” The nexus of stylistic, aesthetic, and political commitments that link the diverse writers examined in this study has been obscured by critical preoccupation with sentimental domestic writing on the one hand and long-held aversions to elaborate or ornamental modes on the other. “Highly wrought” is not synonymous with “overwrought.” Technically, the term indicates a high degree of detail, finish, or craft rather than indexing the emotional outpourings or irrational excesses with which nineteenth-century women’s writing is often associated. In fact, reviewers of the period very frequently referenced the Â�apparent labor or craft of the texts that are the subject of this 1

2

Style, Gender, and Fantasy

study. Reviewers also labeled this style “fine” writing:€it is finely worked (wrought being the past Â�participle of work), thus troubling our expectation that reviewers insisted on finding women’s writing uniformly spontaneous rather than artful. Both “fine” and “highly,” however, incorporate an ambiguous judgment toggling between admiration for the surface finish and concern about excessive elaboration, labor that had become a luxury in its excess, or a surface that had become inappropriately labored.1 The authors in this study exploit this evaluative ambiguity:€they present the voluptuously turned language, the textured layering of sensual detail and image, and a syntax of endless accrual as the occasion for twinned aesthetic delight and (equally pleasing) aggression toward any aesthetic experience figured as transcendence of the feminine or material, as the artistic process is often figured in the romantic mythos they engage. The quotations above, from two key texts in this study, display the stylistic floridity that characterizes highly wrought style. Both passages invite a trance-like entrance into worlds intensified by a noonday sun:€fruits flush, waters brim and cascade, color pulses, and light saturates€ – even granite is “empurpled” in this wordscape of ripened prose; it is fully “done,” wrought to the nth degree. The place that words have made simmers and throbs€ – for these are visionary worlds instinct with possibility for the female narrators who articulate them; in fact, the above passages specifically present alternative tableaux to the marriages the respective speakers face. The personified elements of nature€– sun, rocks, and flowers€– take on lives of their own and speak to alternative sensual ways of being in the world that marriage will imperil. Such possibilities are rendered palpable for the reader by the rich massiness of the words that demand a pause, by the voluptuous play of alliteration and by the self-reflexive imagery that robes, gilds, and empurples the description. “Mellowness” is indeed “mock[ed]” by the energy and intensity brimming in this passage. Style, Gender, and Fantasy in Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Writing reconceives long-abjected and feminized modes€ – verbosity, ornament, redundancy€– as having a particular aesthetic and feminist rationale. This book demonstrates the ways in which the use of such style allowed women writers to generate alternative models of gendered self and desire. Rather than positioning these women writers as writing in a separate generic tradition, I seek to demonstrate the centrality of highly wrought writing to a variety of debates at the crux of romantic literary production. Nina Baym’s intriguing report in Novels, Readers, and Reviewers:€Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America that reviewers made a clear distinction between “highly wrought” and “domestic” fiction written by women

Introduction. Highly wrought style

3

inaugurated my interest in the category.2 Highly wrought fiction, Baym claims, was “a feverish, florid, improbable, melodramatic, exciting genre” in contrast to “quiet pictures of domestic life” that provided the reader with “a calm, soothing time” (208, 205). Yet Baym dismisses reviewers’ sense of distinction between the two classes of fiction to make room for both within the “overplot”€– “the story of female trials and triumph”€– of women’s fiction, as she defined it in her landmark Woman’s Fiction:€A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820–1870 (209). Though I am skeptical of Baym’s conflation of the domestic and highly wrought novel, my goal is not to survey and resuscitate a generic countertradition to domestic sentimentality, but rather to probe the distinctions Baym dismisses as merely stylistic. This study asks what is at stake in heightened style in fiction by women of the period and begins a conversation on how style operated within texts, in the literary field, and in constructions of gender.3 Like Baym, nineteenth-century reviewers often characterized the fictions I consider here as a separate class or genre€– as “passionate fiction” and of the “intense school,” for instance. But while style, plot, and reader are identically worked up in Baym’s description, reviewers carefully singled out style for distinct treatment. In his review of Spofford’s Azarian, Henry James opined that “the word intensity expresses better than any other various shortcomings, or rather excesses” of what he dubbed “the Azarian school€– for, alas! there is a school.” His concern was with stylistic extravagance, with describing “simply for the sake of describing,” with “chromatic epigrams” and a “thick impasto of words,” and with “bric-Â�aÂ�brac” in narrative. James’ own late (high) style was yet many years down the road; in this early paean to realist style, it was “the majority of female writers … [who] possess[ed] in excess the fatal gift of fluency.”4 While James’ complaints underlie the ambivalence of reviewers, they also reverse the final judgment of most preceding commentators on Spofford and the authors who came before her. Reviewers were frequently attracted to the “power” and “richness and brilliancy of imagination” of the prose while often deploring the more transgressive subject matter.5 Reviewers commended Ann Stephens’ “remarkable talent of description, which in a great degree compensates for what we deem the inherent defects of her plot.”6 The reviews consistently disarticulate the evaluation of content from the evaluation of style, indicating that the two components were perceived to bear some independence from each other. Spofford’s “style … is of itself a delight. In mere description she has no living rival,” asserted Harper’s. “No person, we think, ever painted in words such pictures”

4

Style, Gender, and Fantasy

but “she often wastes her wonderful word-embroidery upon a worthless fabric.”7 The regard for technique across reviews is notable and unexpected from our critical standpoint, which still attaches women to current and past histories of dismissive judgment. The reviews nonetheless point to tensions and ambivalences about how women should write and whether they could or should be judged by the same literary values as men. Thomas Wentworth Higginson captured reviewers’ ambivalence when he claimed of Spofford’s Azarian, “It is the style of the book, however, to which one must revert with admiration, not unmingled with criticism, and it may be, a trifle of just indignation.”8 In the same breath that reviewers find something arresting in the prose, they very frequently call on the author to chasten it. Publisher Charles Peterson claimed Stephens “has no rival … in the higher walks of passionate fiction,” though her style “is sometimes too gorgeous, and would, now and then, bear softening.”9 This brief digest of reviews already demonstrates the complex ways in which style was gendered. Language that was not transparent, that did not grant immediate access to the text or to the author, was inappropriate for a woman writer. Language that seemed to evidence labor worked against the limited purview of women’s expression as both spontaneous and generic, as without reflection or ambition, without art. Literary style, often regarded as the textual embodiment of personality, its display evidencing the “will” of the writer, would invalidate the generic femininity of the production by displaying the art and the individuality of the writer. The term wrought, used most frequently to describe work on material goods, crafted or manufactured, such as wrought iron, spun silk, or hammered metal, itself suggests the materiality and decorative nature that is assigned to women’s labor through the label “highly wrought.” Yet women staked a position in the literary field by breaking the codes that were to function as their point of departure€– by, for instance, transforming appropriate styles of description and ornament into an agencied and purposive mode. To exceed the convention of feminine form€ – to write with opacity or flourish, to body forth in writing any kind of recalcitrant textuality or uncongenial narrative manner was, as a woman writer, to have style, a Â�dubious accessory. We might turn, for instance, to the theatrical exasperation of Margaret Fuller’s critics upon encountering the difficult extravagance of her writing, registered primarily as material overabundance€– vaguely imposing as entrancing ornament or amassing substance. “Why [might not] the lady … keep on talking in the same strain until doomsday?” exclaimed Orestes Brownson.10 Her writing was “abounding with eloquent passages, and affluent in illustration,” Lydia

Introduction. Highly wrought style

5

Maria Child demurred, but such features led less sympathetic reviewers to suspect “she was too conscious of style,” that “her rich wares are … displayed to the admiring gaze of her astonished auditors.”11 Affirming while allaying such suspicions, Emerson assures readers of his Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli that, in conversation, Fuller was “very well able to dispose of all this pile of native and foreign ornaments.”12 Fuller’s fictional analogues also leap to mind:€Hawthorne’s Zenobia and Poe’s Ligeia€ – intellectual, writing women of (frighteningly) prepossessing personal style. It seems that when an affluence of creativity and knowledge take up residence in the female figure, a breaching of artistic form occurs, registered in these characters’ mesmerizing stories, extravagance of expression, and luxury of dress, all of which overwhelm the social bounds for decorous feminine speech, flesh, or manner. Their lush vitality of person and speech seems to challenge, in different ways, the storytelling of the narrator but ultimately yields to bring his story to fruition. Style itself is a figure and theme here, made charged and palpable by its proximity to the feminine; Hawthorne and Poe examine the relation of style and gender with an eye to the milieu they share with women writers. My aim has been to understand the style’s role in relation to the gendered desire with which it is insistently associated within the text and in reception. My readings link the plot’s presentation of the barriers to women’s desire with the style’s registering of that desire on another textual level, but find that it is frequently played out in tension with the formal drive of the text toward closure. It is as if the transgressive, adventurous content motivates the authors to capture its excesses stylistically. Through style they reformulate residual and unaccommodated feminine doubt, ambition, anger, longing, and pleasure as essential, substantial, and palpable. The quickening of style that seems to occur in highly wrought writing€– its quasi-embodiment of impersonal feminine will, its expressive agency, and its fecundating textures, sounds, and images€– is a surface event. But while florid writing is often considered as itself a cover for more authentic expression or as an impoverished substitute for something that cannot be said, among these experimental writers, florid writing emerges as the seat of expression, and it stages the central dramas of the text. Thus along with the striking stylistic patterns that emerge over the course of my selections, this book also gathers a fair proportion of works that feature first-person female narrators who are already authors of Â�transgression within the story. Marriage is often the antagonist rather than the goal€– a mistake the narrator seeks to escape or the crisis around

6

Style, Gender, and Fantasy

which the fiction revolves. Generally the plot turns on a division between a youthful period of naive presumption about one’s power to pursue sexual and social desires, and an ensuing disillusionment about the gendered and raced barriers to such a design. While that might describe a version of Baym’s overplot for women’s fiction, or indeed any narrative, these texts are not mistakable as domestic. They contain elements of what Susan K. Harris calls “overt thematic radicalism”€– adultery, free love, interracial marriage, female rule, and withdrawal from society are all entertained and indulged. Yet the fictions’ very failure to conform to domestic lines has made these texts illegible within recent frameworks; furthermore, they disappoint a feminist critical practice that seeks to chart a trajectory of characterological self-determination. This study thus continues in a direction first opened by Harris’ insistence on attention to the “formal level as well as thematic” in nineteenth-century women’s writing, but establishes nothing so concrete as a picture of “female independence, competence, emotional complexity, and intellectual acumen” that Harris finds in the “middles” and under the covers of contemporaneous domestic “exploratory” novels.13 Style offers something different from a glimpse of expanded arenas of action or transformed social roles. The women I present here used highly wrought style to make a series of overlapping gendered claims:€on the literary culture in which they participate, on the genres in which they write, and on the ideological presumptions of the reader. Across my chapters, these claims fall into three categories. First, the writers imitate and amplify presumptions about women’s writing and their access to style by embracing a “gorgeous” style of writing and enhancing the prosiness and mass of their writing. Second, they overproduce the features of the feminine within literary romantic modes to call such features into question and thus to locate a new position for such feminized discourse, one that frequently disturbs the reading experience. Third, they offer, through an aesthetic experience of sensual language, a sense of an alternative ontology€– a mode of pleasure and way of being that is not rooted in gendered anatomy. My archival reconstructions of the writers’ appropriations of flower language, mesmeric discourse, and theories of ornament contextualizes their stylistic choices, the particular experiences they imagine generating, and the feminist solutions they wish to impart. The textual experiments I portray help us to better understand, and perhaps differently place, other texts that I have not had space to treat at length. For example, though Elizabeth Stoddard’s style seems more condensed and taut than elaborately wrought, her concern in The Morgesons

Introduction. Highly wrought style

7

with undercutting the woman’s plot of self-cultivation and acculturation in favor of indulgences in a sensual style that renders the world opaque and strange rather than assimilable and interpretable, is another version of the experiments I describe here. Through different techniques, Stoddard achieves similar effects to those I depict, forcing the reader to pause and savor her language.14 That Stoddard, in Jessica Feldman’s construction of her aims, uses words that “announce themselves as words rather than as transparent windows through which realistically portrayed scenes are to be used” or that she (like Stephane Mallarmé, here quoted by Feldman) “aims to ‘describe not the object itself, but the effect it produces’” does not make her a lone modernist avant la lettre, but rather part of a significant formation of women writers testing the links between style, literary effect, and gender.15 We might also consider the pronounced aesthetic and affective investment in descriptive language in women’s later regionalist writing. Like the writers I study, Constance Fenimore Woolson uses an intensive descriptive mode to offset and even challenge the expressive primacy of plot and character.16 When, as Katherine Swett argues of Woolson’s “scenery fiction,” she attempts to “‘paint’ a place with words” and charges her endeavor with a sense of aesthetic and even sexual transgression (163), Woolson reveals her link to the predecessors I discuss, despite their clear generic differences. Sandra Zagarell, faced with the way The Morgesons troubles critical assumptions, including her own, about what women wrote, calls for us to address “‘nineteenth-century American women’s writing’ as a question or a set of questions, rather than taking it for granted as cultural terrain about which we already pretty much know what we need to.”17 Zagarell speaks for recent, general restlessness with our understanding of the forms that nineteenth-century literature took, and the inadequacy of our attention to their actual textual productions and contexts. Cindy Weinstein has returned to the archive of sentimental-domestic literature to redefine the terms, value, and form of its investment in family. Mary Louise Kete and Elizabeth Dillon have illuminated the formal workings of sentimentality, a mode long assumed to be without aesthetic rationale. Julia Stern calls for a “post-sentimental genealogy” to move beyond the sentimental novel’s exclusive claim on interpretive categories. Virginia Jackson, Mary Loeffelholz, and Eliza Richards, among others, abolish any sense of complacency we may once have harbored about the category of Victorian poetry and its production.18 My attention to highly wrought style in women’s writing is also motivated by a wish to intervene in gendered literary historical constructions

8

Style, Gender, and Fantasy

of nineteenth-century America and to engage the aesthetic dimension of texts while doing so. My work joins a recent trend in American studies toward “no more separate spheres,” but works on a different front by revealing women’s integral participation in and gendered recasting of Â�literary romanticism, rather than arguing for men’s investment in literary Â�sentimentalism as have many of these studies. I use the archive to rethink the position of women in the literary field through the historical and textual archaeology of an overlooked aesthetic mode and then bring that mode to bear on previously separate field formations. I return to the archives, not to recall forgotten authors for the sake of a rote representational politics, but to fundamentally reconstitute in deeply historical terms, the nature of literary endeavor, values, and forms for the nineteenth century. This book’s engagement with the highly wrought writing of Margaret Fuller, Ann Stephens, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Margaret Sweat, Mary Clemmer, Harriet Spofford, and Pauline Hopkins shifts the contours of the nineteenth-century literary field and allows us to rechart the imaginative life of both black and white women to show that aesthetic experiment, literary ambition, adventure, and fantasy were the province of women as well as men in nineteenth-century America. Women and men interact across a field in which women embraced the idealism of American romanticism and they responded creatively to the gendered binaries that underwrote it, while simultaneously shaping male approaches to shared dilemmas. The writers in this study were intellectual women at the center of nineteenth-century literary enclaves such as New York salon Â�culture, the young Atlantic Monthly, and The Colored American Magazine, where many acted as magazine editors and book reviewers, and their fiction reveals their investments in shaping the literary culture and values of their milieu.19 My revisionist history begins in the dynamic literary setting of antebellum New York, where writers featured in this study mixed with Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, as well as social reformers and intellectuals of all stripes, from the late 1830s to the early 1860s. I track shared stylistic interests across locations to the Boston of Harriet Spofford and Pauline Hopkins, and across periods as well, for Hopkins turns to highly wrought style at the turn of the twentieth century to innovate a form of African American romance. This group of women writers, some unread today, others better known but mistakenly considered anomalous, share with each other and with male writers romantic techniques of anti-mimeticism and self-reflexivity. I discuss, for instance, Fuller’s revisionist Transcendentalism vis-à-vis Emerson, Hawthorne’s anxious defense of the nature of the “romance,” and Spofford’s arch

Introduction. Highly wrought style

9

appropriation of Poe’s philosophy of composition. What has been missed is the depth and shaping force of the interaction€– by turns, contentious and appreciative, playful and transformative€– between women and men who share in a debate about the romantic project. I seek to restructure relations between women writers as well, by bringing the feminist theory and prose experiments of salon attendant and Transcendentalist luminary Margaret Fuller (long in her own separate sphere) into a central and formative relation with a contemporaneous body of fiction by women. As the following section suggests in more detail, placing Fuller in the context of fiction by women serves to dismantle an accompanying divide between fiction and nineteenth-century feminist politics as well. Recovery of highly wrought style reveals that literature itself was a primary site of feminist articulation€– that Fuller and her contemporaries needed literary language and figure, and modes of fiction and fantasy, to fully develop and embody their feminist political views. Exposing the points of mutual constitution in three conventionally unrelated fields€– fiction by women, feminism, and romanticism, I aim to demonstrate that women used highly wrought style to promote an equivalence between literary and social experiments, and to suggest the challenge from within romanticism presented by highly wrought style’s particular kind of literary world-making. Fuller’s existence across all of these often oppositionally configured spaces makes her an ideal exemplum for my study. F u l l e r, fa n ta s y, a n d “s e pa r at e s ph e r e s” George Foster’s New York in Slices (1849) is interesting, but not unusual, for its presentation of Fuller as only one of a number of iconoclastic intellectual women. Hypothetically scanning the room at Anne Lynch’s famed literary salon, Foster observes that the “ladies are scattered all about as thick as stars; yet we do not know how to approach them.” One is certainly struck by the redundancy of luminescent women in the room and by the quality of Foster’s response, so similar to the kind of mixed attraction and repulsion Fuller’s biographers record as the special burden of her particular public presence. He notes the “stately” Oakes Smith “talking in a bright, cold, steady stream, like an antique fountain by moonlight.” Farther on, “nestled under a light shawl of heraldic devices” is the “spiritual and dainty” Fanny Osgood. Next to her, the eyes of a “Mrs.€–€–” (perhaps Stephens) are “humid with the light of some brilliant fancy she has just been caging,” while Fuller’s eyes are likewise “lamping inspiration” and Grace Greenwood is casting “bright glances of lambent defiance

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Style, Gender, and Fantasy

around her”.20 This revealing vignette allows us to think of Â�reconnecting Fuller to New York’s bas bleu, often referred to as the “starry sisterhood.” The epithet itself recalls Fuller’s signature asterisk in the Tribune; its editor, Horace Greeley, was fond of calling her “the star” of the Tribune, and her biographer, Joan von Mehren, notes one reader criticized the “starry” literary editor for her abstract idealism.21 Foster’s description of a constellation of intellectual women, isolated and ridiculous in their radiant intensity, is echoed by Perry Miller when he claims, “one factor in our settling a public image of Margaret Fuller is that she cannot be dissociated from the hyperbolically female intellectualism of the period, the slightest invocation of which invites our laughter”.22 Apparently Fuller can be dissociated, however; certainly other New York intellectual women did not appear in Miller’s foundational The Raven and the Whale, a crucial exclusion still shaping our perception of the antebellum literary field.23 The terms under which Fuller’s segregation from women writers Â�transpired suggest much more than her own critical fate. Those terms Â�provide a key to the elisions in the inaugural recovery of American Â�women’s writing that help to account for the critical eclipse of highly wrought Â�writing by women. Ann Douglas’ The Feminization of American Culture in particular has determined our treatment of both Fuller and nineteenth-century women writers, which is to say that they are treated separately and dichotomously. In contrast to women fiction writers, Fuller’s Â�“characteristic crusade was against the myths so integral to status oppression:€ … that all women are incapable of intellectual effort and naturally seek domestic life”.24 Fuller faces down a whole mob, as it seems, of scribblers from the flanks of Douglas’ book. This is the same role Fuller performs in other 1970s’ studies such as Barbara Welter’s Dimity Convictions and Susan P. Conrad’s Perish the Thought:€Intellectual Women in Romantic America 1830–1860. Central to the framework of these books is the notion that popular novelists, espousing a feminine ethos, reinforced the problems faced by female intellectuals endeavoring in masculine realms of knowledge. It is thus that another, less remarked, configuration of the separate spheres rubric is mobilized. To modify Baym’s phrasing from her ironic description of masculinist literary history, women fiction writers are the villains in these 1970s’ melodramas of beset intellectual womanhood.25 Fuller has no role in subsequent studies of women fiction writers because 1980s’ and 1990s’ critics were concerned with either a transvaluative or deconstructive assessment of the feminized sphere from which Fuller had already been excluded.26 Revisionist critics who have since deconstructed the notion of separate spheres have failed

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to register the role Fuller was made to play in the critical construction of the separate-spheres rubric. Because the excision of Fuller from the field of popular women writers was a definitional moment that determined the shape and content of our current notion of separate spheres, Fuller’s role is key not only to the archive we turn to, but to the terms we bring to it. When Douglas writes that “Fuller’s life can be viewed as an effort to find what she called her ‘sovereign self’ by disavowing fiction for history, the realm of ‘feminine’ fantasy for the realm of ‘masculine’ reality” (262), she creates a hierarchical divide between fantasy and “reality” that privileges the “real.” This unfantastic Fuller had been the preferred Fuller ever since her brother Arthur amputated certain sections (about one-fifth) of the posthumous edition of her Summer on the Lakes in an attempt to circumvent speculation that the excised stories about passionate, magnetic women were semiautobiographical. Because these sections included her flirtations with a mystical feminine difference€– and admittedly because just such an identification with sibylline magnetism was also used to limit and belittle Fuller’s personal and political life, as well as her afterlife in history€– her enthrallment with mystical discourses has generally been anathema to the project of resurrecting Fuller as an intellect and activist.27 The recent work of Julie Ellison and Christina Zwarg does much to rebuild connections between feminist politics and romanticism within Fuller’s career and argues for a continuity between Fuller’s early writing (Dial essays and Woman in the Nineteenth Century) in Concord and her later Tribune journalism written in New York and then Europe. In doing so, they rightly seek to correct a division in Fuller’s career, a division that is marked as stylistic and critically invoked at the expense of the earlier writing. The earlier writing is frequently considered, most notably by Larry Reynolds, as florid and politically evasive in comparison to the greater social realism and perceived radicalism of the Tribune dispatches.28 Ironically, such a narrative of Fuller’s career internalizes the feminine fantasy and masculine reality bifurcation that her work had been used to project onto the literary field. What this critical history reveals is that it was not Fuller who disavowed fiction or “feminine” fantasy, but her critics, and their implicit aim was to isolate Fuller from women writers.29 The Fuller/fiction dichotomy had implications for the recovery of women fiction writers as well. Given the increasingly narrow archive I have described, a constellation of related terms have remained outside the sphere(s) of the debate over women’s fiction:€ these include radical reform, sexuality, feminism, fantasy, and, until recently, aesthetics. Critics

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reacting against Douglas sought to rescue fiction by women from just that of which Douglas accused it. Baym, in her important Woman’s Fiction worries that the term sentimental implies that “the author’s depiction of real life is heavily slanted toward the pretty and tender and hence is not a comment on reality but an evasion of it” (24). Douglas’ history/fiction and reality/fantasy hierarchies continue to haunt Baym’s binary configuration of “real life” versus “evasions” of it, only now Baym claims realism for “woman’s fiction.” In order to align the fiction she surveys with “real life,” Baym writes that its authors “had an oppressive sense of reality and its habit of disappointing expectations, and they believed that duty, discipline, self-control, and sacrifice (within limits) were not only moral but actually useful strategies for getting through a hard world” (18). Fantasy and nonrealist modes, it turns out, have been strenuously avoided as well by critics seeking to recover popular women’s writing, a development that has served to strengthen the presumed contrast between women writers and the male romantics, not to mention Fuller herself. As Mary Loeffelholz observes, Fuller’s isolation in our literary history has rendered “the romantic woman intellectual” either “invisible or impossible”, and such a pattern seems to hold despite recent work that seeks to dismantle the separate-spheres paradigm that Douglas, Baym, and Jane Tompkins had left in place by categorizing women’s writing as domestic and sentimental.30 The 1998 No More Separate Spheres! issue of American Literature and the edited volume that followed it were the highwater mark for the salutary distribution of domestic concerns and sentimental technique across gender and race categories, and the explosion of any sense that domesticity could be insulated from its constitutive exterior of the market or the foreign. But the same issue was simultaneously the low-Â�water mark of a sense of diversity or depth in writing by women, as the field had been winnowed to its purest domestic exemplars, losing sight of the sheer expanse and internal diversity of recovery work by Douglas, Baym, or Claudia Tate, who introduced a canon of African American women’s writing under a revised rubric of domesticity.31 Important as their work was, revisionist scholars like Amy Kaplan seemed also to reify the domestic paradigm and its link to women, even as they sought to trouble its exclusions.32 Excellent studies have recently revealed the diversity and depth of male writers’ shared investments in sentimental domesticity and many have yielded new and richer readings of masculinity in the Â�process.33 But the other half of the division, which holds women almost exclusively to domestic and sentimental investments, has yet to be adequately queried. What was the scope and nature of women writers’ investments in literary

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romanticism and what constructions of femininity might have hailed from beyond the precincts of the domestic model? But George Foster’s tableau, parodic as it is, presents a suggestive counterimage of a group of romantic intellectual women in New York. Literary historians have long known of the luminaries who frequented the salons of Anne Lynch and the Cary sisters, but only recently have critics, most notably Eliza Richards, considered the literary cultures they produced.34 Fuller’s dialogue with this group was more than a social and passing one.35 Fuller was a figure of lasting importance for many of the women featured in this study. Chapter 2 shows that Oakes Smith’s own feminist theory in Woman and Her Needs owes a great deal to Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century, and she shared, in a pronounced way, Fuller’s sense of a personal magnetism and clairvoyance.36 Ann Stephens was editor and reviewer for Peterson’s Ladies Magazine when reprints of Fuller’s writings received positive notice there in the early 1850s. While Stephens and Oakes Smith, as well as Osgood, Child, Fanny Fern, and Sarah Helen Whitman, were in frequent attendance at the salons during Fuller’s brief New York tenure, many other women writers would cycle through Lynch’s and, in the 1850s, the Cary sisters’ purportedly more political salon. Women like Caroline Chesebro’, Elizabeth Stoddard, Alice Cary, Mary Gove Nichols, and Mary Clemmer constitute a network of intellectual women of their day, one that interlaced and regrouped in dynamic ways both with the literary men of New York circles and radical reformers. Far from a temporary satellite to this New York constellation of female literati, Fuller’s memory was preserved as part of this community by fiction writer and political correspondent Mary Clemmer, herself a protégé of the Cary sisters, in a reverential portrait of Fuller for her 1873 collection Outlines of Men, Women, and Things.37 If we see the New York publication of Woman in the Nineteenth Century in 1845 as a New York event (rather than a Boston hangover) coincident with Fuller’s circulation in literary culture there, we can better register the kind of shaping force her work must have been. Fuller’s feminism, her emphasis on self-culture for women, and her intervention in the cultural symbolic of gender make her central for understanding women writers’ struggles with textual representation. I want to press Foster’s image of a group of extraordinary women absorbed in introspective imaginative reverie, and suggest that this group may be constituted textually as well as socially€– that antebellum America did have a group of romantic women writers, whose writing was related to but distinct from their male counterparts in New York and beyond. If embarrassment about a type of “hyperbolically female intellectualism” has

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averted scholarly eyes from portions of Fuller’s work and entire networks of women writers, it is time to take a critical look at the literary practices and philosophies this mocking category covers, by considering the continued life of romanticism in New York, and not just among male authors; by repositioning “feminine” stylistic excess, or what Douglas labeled Fuller’s “eloquence,” as a widespread modality engaged in particular aesthetic experiments and ideological work; and by revisiting introspective modes in women’s writing as something other than the “narcissism” that Douglas found in Fuller’s early writing and in popular women’s writing in general.38 Though he also regrets the language in which they tend to be couched, Larry Reynolds has observed that Fuller’s “intense inner life, her Â�mystical transports, her erotic fantasies, her prophetic visions, her moments of Â�rapture … await a study that elucidates Fuller’s heightened states without dismissing or normalizing them”.39 My book has less to do with Fuller’s personal experience of heightened states, but it does analyze such moments in her work and finds the heightened moment of fantasy or vision to be a shared trope of women writers that has complex political and formal implications. While she resituates Fuller’s feminism within the romanticism from which it had become detached in narrow readings that sought feminism in rights discourse and pragmatic reform, Julie Ellison nonetheless regards Fuller’s gendered critique of romanticism as emanating from a recourse to realism, noting that “from her childhood Fuller’s heroic figurations are framed by an ironic capacity for social realism which exposes the relativism of all romantic claims”.40 Such tension emerges for Ellison from Fuller’s struggle to make genius compatible with femininity, as when she “experiments with verbal style to find the proper balance of femininity and intellectuality” (232). Again realism and genius align against modes of femininity, and now Fuller’s heightened Â�verbal style is a symptom of the tension. Style, Gender, and Fantasy recognizes the gendered struggle for a form of expression but argues that Fuller and other women writers located such expression in the heightened rhetoric that critics would rather explain away. The maligned “eloquence” and hyperbole needs to be recognized not as a cover for some more authentic expression, not as compensation for the failure to achieve romantic heights of vision, and not as the failure of romantic modes to serve women’s needs. It is the form that women’s romantic vision took, one that might also critique romanticism€– not from the greater vantage point of the “real,” but from within its codes and assumptions. Rather than the “evasion of the real” that worried Baym, women’s literary fantasies, articulated in a heightened discursive register,

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entail productive recastings of the “real” and introduce new “spheres” of possibility for the study of women writers. T h e f ru i t a n d f l ow e r of t h e A m e r ic a n R e n a i s s a nc e : €r e a di ng or n a m e n t a n d r e f or m i n A m e r ic a n l i t e r a r y h i s t or y Fuller and the other women considered here reject a false division between eloquence and truth, as they do between fantasy and the political or real. Their hyperbole can be sincere in what it intends and simultaneously selfaware in the form it takes. It is neither artifice nor spontaneous effusion; it has expressive goals and an aesthetic rationale. Ornamentality is a value or quality of language, but in the hands of these writers it is also shown to be a way to value language€– the things that can happen in language and the things that language can do. Such a stance had wider resonance in American romanticism and was the subject of debate and commentary, but a heritage of modernist critical distaste for Victorian embellishment has endured to obscure its history. Contrary to such dismissals, the ornamentality of highly wrought style has a moral and political weight that deserves our sustained critical attention. As I have begun to suggest, making language ornamental is a primary way that the authors I treat render language palpable, just as my epigraph by Spofford metaphorically reflects the process when the “robes of color” and the “tawny filemot” of autumn leaves “gild” the October noon, enhancing the vibrancy of the scene’s sensuous aspect. Throughout Style, Gender, and Fantasy, I treat highly wrought writing as an aesthetico-Â�political code that demands close reading, with an equally close understanding of authorial, literary, and cultural contexts. While each author made important Â�non-fictional statements on literary-political values (of particular emphasis are Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Harriet Spofford’s and Pauline Hopkins’ book reviews, and Hopkins’ prefaces), I find their fullest aesthetic statements in their fiction. Spofford’s passage develops an even more specific reflection on the mode and effect of her writing when “each seam and rut” of the landscape is made out to be “a scroll or Â�arabesque.” The lines of the landscape are transformed by and into writing. While a scroll might be the paper and “arabesque” the typographic style, or font, of writing, both terms also pertain to decorative arts€– the scroll being a style of curve, and the “arabesque” a particular style of ornament. Used as a typeface, on building facades, or as a decoration on wallpaper, fabric, pottery, or other surfaces, arabesque ornament is a plant-based design that

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uses repeating flower, foliage, and scroll-work to produce an intricate pattern of interlaced lines. Its floral reference is usually stylized and abstracted because arabesque ornament derives from the Western fascination with Muslim arts, thought to avoid naturalistic depiction for religious reasons. A single sentence from another of Spofford’s stories, her 1864 novel Azarian, provides an example of arabesque ornament in Spofford’s writing and demonstrates the way she makes her language ornamental. Here is the “sentence”: Then came a book of tree-blossoms,€– those glad things that are in such haste to crowd into light and air before the leaves can get chance to burst their shining scales,€– where the faint green vapor of the elm, the callow cloud that floats about the oak, the red flame of the maple, the golden, dusty tassels of the willow,€– brimmed with being, whose very perfume seemed shaken about themselves on paper,€– hedged in with their wildness those caught and captived beauties but half tamed with all the years, the fair fruit-flowers, ever a sweeter surprise that their frail petals wreathe such rugged boughs,€– the pear rivalling the cornel, the cherry like a suspended snowstorm that has caught life among the branches, the apple veined finely as the blush on any cheek, with its twisted stem where the aged lichens have laid their shield, the peach, like some splendid orchid, in its fantastic shape, with lifted wings, yet clinging to the bough, and full of a deep rich rosiness that already holds the luscious juices and voluptuous savor of the perfected growth, not without a hint of the subtly sweet poison in its heart.41

Offered as a description of “a book,” this passage instead imitates the plant growth and blossom that the book, a creation of the artist-protagonist, can also barely contain. Its linked phrases mime the branches upon branches that it portrays and it becomes a kind of arabesque tracery, a scrolling pattern of images that lose their distinction in the rhythmic and repetitive sequence:€“€– where the faint green vapor of the elm, the callow cloud that floats about the oak, the red flame of the maple, the golden, dusty tassels of the willow, –.” The language is turned to emphasize effect over signification (even Spofford’s typographic comma-dash takes on a tendril-like decorative pattern and visual quality in this context). As Gabriele Rippl explains of arabesque ornament, “because the elements are abstract, they have no semantic value and only acquire meaning through ornamental syntax”.42 Spofford’s language has been toned down a bit for Azarian, a concession to critics of “The Amber Gods” and earlier stories, but her syntax, her attention to how words sound, look, and work together, is more emphatically stylized in this passage. There is another feature of Spofford’s sentence that is a hallmark of highly wrought style more generally:€it fails to end when it should, because the vining syntax scrolls on and on. Before we get to the final hint of “subtly

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sweet poison” that the deep color of the peach flower forecasts, the length of the sentence has become noticeably protracted, alerting us to the possibility that so much picturesqueness is no longer quite picturesque or even seemly. The floral syntax of the arabesque has become florid in Spofford’s hands. She has heightened the role of ornament in her composition. Just as the perfume, pollen, and “luscious juices” spill or spread in the primary depicted action of the passage, the linked phrases and clauses fill the page and claim their own space, eclipsing a view of the narrative trajectory or shape (and of the “book” being described). Baroque is a term to which I turn in Chapter 4, but it has general applicability for highly wrought style. In baroque art, as defined by Alejo Carpentier, “decorative elements” like the arabesque ornament “fill the space” with “motifs that claim their own expansive energy, that launch or project forms centrifugally. It is art in motion, a pulsating art, an art that moves outward and away from the center, that somehow breaks through its own borders,” obscuring the art’s “central axis” or structure.43 The protagonist’s flower art, detailed in a seven-page paragraph of sentences like the above, is described as holding “no dead pressed beauty, but the very spirit and springing life of the flower” (21), surely what Spofford’s stylistic profusion and imagery of perfumes, light, and color also intends to present. Spofford, and the kind of artists for whom she speaks in Azarian, used the baroque energy, the centrifugal movement, of their compositions to instantiate a “spirit” that might claim its own space in the flourish of language; her ornamentalism is not “dead pressed” but alive with significance. It is worth comparing Spofford’s style of floridity with a more familiar version partaking of domestic-sentimental values€– that of Fanny Fern in her novel Ruth Hall (1854).44 In a domestic-pastoral phase prior to her difficult assent to literary fame in New York, the semiautobiographical heroine, Ruth, gathers and arranges flowers and foliage to dress her home. More than once, Fern describes Ruth’s artistic sensibility with an arabesque flourish. For instance, the omniscient narrator directs: See how skillfully [the flowers] are arranged! with what an eye to the blending of colors! How dainty is that little tulip-shaped vase, with those half opened wildrose buds! see that little gilt saucer, containing only a few tiny green leaves; yet, mark their exquisite shape and finish. And there are some wood anemones; some white, with a faint blush of pink at the petals; and others blue as little Daisy’s eyes; and see that velvet moss, with its gold-star blossoms! (34)

Ruth’s feminine and decorative style is presented as a counter to the Calvinist austerity of her in-laws, and she can finally give it free reign in her own home. Yet Fern tempers Ruth’s expressive ornamentality by

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placing it in the service of domestic order, where all is moderated and things are in their place€– including women and children. The diminutive (“tiny,” “dainty,” “little”) is used five times in this passage, to designate an equivalence between Ruth’s maternal and artistic labors: “little Daisy” and tiny arrangements give us the scale of her endeavors. (Likewise, Fern’s sentences are neatly clipped, like the precise arrangements they describe, by the emphatic punctuation.) As a little child is subordinated to a parent, Ruth’s artistic expression is sublimated to the “bounteous Giver”; “she could not revel in all this loveliness,” nor “look upon this wealth of sea, sky, leaf, bud, and blossom … without a filling eye and brimming heart, to the bounteous Giver” (29). Floral ornamentality is instrumentalized, its “brimming” extravagance recaptured to express the beauty and divine order of the domestic sphere. But Fern’s narrator, on the other hand, is dubious of the ornamentation of even such a conventional theme€ – she steps in to apostrophize Ruth in warning against the arabesque flights that tempt Ruth to surrender to pastoral harmony, for it is easily shattered. Indeed in a few pages, Ruth loses little Daisy and then her husband. Fern uses a flourish of floral language to offset the perceived antisensualism of an older era’s sexual and gender codes and to designate an alternative feminine arena in keeping with sentimental modes, but she also recognizes the precarious dependence entailed in a full acceptance of that sphere and is by turns skeptical of its embellishment. For Spofford, ornamental language does not operate as a disguise, for it is not put to service in the same way; it scrolls away in a rhapsody that demonstrates the similarity between nature’s fecundity and the protagonist’s art. In Ruth Hall, style that exceeds the occasion is elsewhere castigated by Fern as a displacement of true feeling, as when Ruth’s mother-in-law meditates on the size of the decorative hem on her mourning dress rather than on the death of her son, Ruth’s husband (63). And nowhere is Fern’s distaste for ornamental spectacle more apparent than when she names Ruth’s detested brother (modeled on Fern’s actual brother, N. P. Willis), whom she caricatures as a shallow dandy, for the showiest of cultivars:€his name is Hyacinth. Fern prefers to find ways of breaking convention to get attention that are more in keeping with the plain style she seems to endorse. In the preface to the novel, she claims, “I have avoided long introductions and descriptions, and have entered unceremoniously and unannounced, into people’s houses, without stopping to ring the bell” (3). Though she was just as apt to take on a misty, sentimental persona, and her critics have debated the seeming bifurcation of her modes of address, Fern likely regarded such

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appeals to the heart as also forthright in not standing on exterior ceremony. Fern presented her writing as mannerless and free of mannerism; whatever strategy or form we may now understand her to have harnessed, she participates in a long American tradition professing the value of plain speech and simple style. At the end of the decade, the newly minted Vanity Fair magazine would run at least one literary satire each month leveled at the kind of literary rhetoric Fern seems to abjure. Spofford (then Miss Prescott) was a widely featured object of such satires, along with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Hawthorne. One such satire introduced its heroine, Gloriana, as follows:€“All through the heavy watches of the purple night, while the lilies lay, immobile as planets, on the sheeny bosom of the tidal waves, and the odor-fainting tom-tom sang joy exuberant to the sleepy, juice-laden cream-tufts of the white magnolia … But no; Miss Prescott has a copyright on all that sort of thing. All night, let me say, then, quite plainly …”.45 Oddly, the passage is then recast as “The Star Spangled Banner.” The satire suggests the grandiosity and sensuality of Spofford’s “purple” prose:€the scale is inflated (flowers play starring roles, lilies are planetlike vessels adorning tidal waves); the imagery is weighted with sensualism (and by adjectives like “heavy,” “laden,” “sleeping,” “immobile”); and words are compounded, adding to their own weight in the sentence and amplifying their beat (“odor-fainting tom-tom”). In a study on American humor that also makes foundational claims about an “American” style, Walter Blair rates this burlesque as one of the best of a rising nineteenth-century indigenous genre that aimed its satire at what one nineteenth-century critic called “rhetorical frilligigs”.46 Yet it is not clear that the Vanity Fair satires, even as they formulate a plain style as democratic idiom, do not also appreciate the more elaborate objects of their wit. They seem attracted to Spofford’s decadence, distinctiveness, and success in producing an effect; she becomes a national author when placed in company with Longfellow or Hawthorne, or compared to the national anthem for that matter. They archly call Spofford out at her own game when they bloat language that she has herself already worked over and augmented. The twentieth-century criticism that has validated the plain style at the expense of the ornate has lost the nuance of Vanity Fair’s fascination with styles like Spofford’s. F. O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance:€Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman extends a version of Blair’s endorsement of ungarnished expression when he establishes a standard of “organic form” for distinguishing the merits of the well formed from the

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faults of formlessness in American literary romanticism. Quoting Thoreau, Matthiessen argues that a work of literature should derive its form from the idea it wishes to express. A “perfect poem takes shape,” as organically formed as “natural fruit”; it is “one undivided, unimpeded expression fallen ripe into literature”.47 Matthiessen emphasizes Coleridge’s organic principle, his insistence on “growth according to a law; matter not dormant, not raw, but inspired, appropriated by spirit” (Matthiessen 154). Just as the universal mind generated the poet’s intuition, so the poet generated an artistic form perfectly suited to the spirit of the intuition. But, Matthiessen warns, the “emphasis on the inner urge rather than on the created shape can quickly run to formlessness, particularly when it insists on the same spontaneous growth for a poem as for a plant” (134). For Matthiessen, the degrees of formlessness in Whitman, Thoreau, and Emerson relate to how far they let an inner urge outstrip a fruitful structure. In the compact fruit lies a precise account of the critical abjection of highly wrought style€– of the spontaneity and autonomy of baroque elements, of the centrifugal trajectory of arabesque flourish, and of ripened, fully wrought expression as engorgement and distension rather than completion. Indeed, as Whitman intoned in the 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass, “The fluency and ornaments of the finest poems or music or orations or recitations are not independent but dependent … Who troubles himself about his ornaments or fluency is lost.”48 Ornament becomes the antagonist of organic form in Matthiessen’s account, and “reform” is linked to the opposition in a curious role. According to the nineteenth-century sculptor Horatio Greenough, on whom Matthiessen relies to construct his argument, “the normal deveÂ� lopment of beauty is through action to completeness. The invariable development of embellishment and decoration is more embellishment and more decoration”€ – ornament begets redundant rather than structured progression (qtd in Matthiessen, 136). For Greenough, and also for Whitman in Matthiessen’s account, “the symbolism of man’s body” provided the ultimate model of organic form. Greenough asked, “Where is the ornament of this frame? It is all beauty, its motion is grace, no combination of harmony ever equalled, for expression and variety, its poised and stately gait; its voice, its music” (qtd in Matthiessen, 151). Reform becomes a second antagonist to the organic principle when Matthiessen explains Greenough’s distrust of antebellum millennialism and reform in terms of the body metaphor:€unlike the body, reform movements and inquiries into the social structure “divide man’s wholeness and so … disperse and drain his vitality” (Matthiessen, 151). The bodily unity valued by

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Greenough required the subordination of the parts to the whole. Reform, one must surmise to the contrary, required an artificial rearrangement of parts (a re-form) or a special emphasis on a particular part or population in the social structure (one need only recall Charles Fourier’s grand scheme of phalanxes€– certainly baroque by any definition€– to better visualize Greenough’s concern that reform eroded organic structure). Thoreau’s better known excoriation of ornament in the “Economy” chapter of Walden makes similar claims:€“I have heard of one at least possessed with the idea of making architectural ornaments have a core of truth, a necessity, and hence a beauty, as if it were a revelation to him. All very well perhaps from his point of view, but only a little better than the common dilettantism. A sentimental reformer in architecture, he began at the cornice, not at the foundation” (31). (Thoreau is in fact speaking of Greenough, but Matthiessen chastises Thoreau’s distortion, arguing for the similarity of their ideas.) Thoreau links ornament and reform:€the remaking of some particular aspect or group of society elaborates one portion of the social structure until it is no longer a balanced or proportional element. Reform seems caricatured as a kind of special interest, and such lavish particularism leads to overly and unnecessarily developed and invested surfaces on the social foundation. Matthiessen’s discussion is descriptive of the terms of the nineteenthcentury debate about ornament, but the writers I present work to trouble the opposition between ornament and organic form that Matthiessen, following Emerson and Thoreau, posits. Fruits and flowers are featured prominently in the women’s texts of this study and are the cornerstone of their self-reflexive meditations on their aesthetic strategies, as my discussion of the floral patterns of the arabesque has already indicated. In their conception of their art, they release the “inner urge” that shapes their work from existing social laws and forms that constrain it, so that “formlessness” or overdevelopment takes the shape of possibilities€ – of resistance to the containment of women’s desire by narrative shape or social structure, of the invention of new linguistic and narrative modes articulating gendered interests, and even of new ways of imagining the body and its form. Theirs is a strategy of increase, on display in stylistic profusion, spreading words out over the page; in elaboration that elongates; and in fine writing, labored detail that, far from miniaturizing, adds weight and mass to the surface of the narrative. Thus my analysis also links ornament and reform but values them differently. Highly wrought writers use ornamentality to effect the disproportion necessary to alter models of gender as dual and complementary or of femininity as subordinate to masculinity.

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Fuller’s feminist theory, in fact, stresses gender as a proportion or preponderance rather than a pure and essential opposition. Not surprisingly, “man’s body”€– Greenough’s candidate for perfect form€– is an unsatisfactory aspirant for a model of women’s expression, and ornament is enabled as a site that can challenge its universality. They use forms of proliferation, intensification, and embellishment as modes for producing an enlarged and enhanced sense of the presence of a kind of expression that is inarticulable without the kind of reforms they effect in literary language. These aims fall within a romantic purview:€ women’s highly wrought writing is a distinctive, and deliberately gendered, textual project, but it is not a separate one. One need not look farther than Melville’s Pierre (1852) for a coalescing concern with formlessness, florid language, and reform that reveals the nature of the shared project with women’s highly wrought writing. For much of the history of Melville scholarship in the Â�twentieth century, however, Melville’s extravagant style in Pierre has been tolerated by attributing it to the tastes of the “the feminine audience” that was both the new market share he wished to address (with this, his first nonseafaring book) and the prime satiric target of his stylistic excesses. This caricature of female readers and writers does not of course hold up.49 Ironically, the women writers of my study can be documented responding to Melville’s purportedly more masculine texts€ – Fuller reviewed Typee for the Tribune, Stephens reviewed The Confidence Man for her own Ann Stephens’ Monthly, and Spofford took aim at Melville’s and Poe’s gendering of quest narrative in a lengthy review essay for the Atlantic Monthly and in her story “The Moonstone Mass.”50 Moreover, such a claim tends to deny Melville’s investment in his purple prose. Melville’s language is a partner (if perhaps in the vexed sense of that term for this novel of incest) to his expressive goals. As did these women, Melville wrestles with the limits of language, enticed by its potential as a transformative medium, and he engages in a like examination of gender, desire, and social and literary form. Like Spofford’s books, Pierre was also subject to reviewers’ indignation (less mixed with admiration) and to parodies of its style like this from Godey’s:€ “Mysteriously breathing an inane melody, it has been beautifying the innermost recesses of our visual organs with the luscious purpleness and superb goldness of its exterior adornment. We have Â�listened to its outbreathing of sweet-swarming sounds, and their melodious, mournful, wonderful, and unintelligible melodiousness …”.51 The sentence Â�parodies (and then enacts) the presumption that Melville can instantiate hisÂ�Â�impalpable melody with exterior adornment, by ornamenting it with “purple” prose or “gold”-en words. In the logic satirized here,

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ornament triggers a kind of second sight by which Melville’s melody is rendered visible. This is an accurate description of highly wrought poetics, but it is not a process that Melville ridicules. Melville’s language flaunts the narrative contract, abuses cliché, and calls out readers’ defenses with the same kind of deliberation as that of women’s highly wrought writing. Reviews of Pierre, like this from the New York Herald, called on Melville to “brood over plain, honest, Saxon style” (Higgins and Parker, 53). In figures of accrual that anticipate Spofford’s arabesque style and her reviewers’ discomfort with it, the Boston Post labeled Pierre a “string of nonsense,” and the Whig Review complained of “word piled upon word, and syllable heaped upon syllable, until the tongue grows as bewildered as the mind” (Higgins and Parker, 33, 56). Even Fitz-James O’Brien, widely noted as Melville’s one sympathetic critic, suggested, “Let him diet” [on Addison] to winnow his bloated form (he then shifts to floral metaphor:€“[A]nd … he will make a notch on the American Pine” where growth is carefully measured [Higgins and Parker, 76]). As Richard Brodhead has noted, Melville’s novels “strive to create orders of significance independent of the dramatic one of the characters’ lived experience”€– precisely the romantic project in which highly wrought writing shares.52 But in Pierre, Brodhead maintains, the project fails due to its “debased fictional means” (190). Sacvan Bercovitch likewise finds that the florid rhetoric Melville employs (“purple prose” he hopes will “sell,” in Bercovitch’s construction) turns and traps Melville. When language fails to symbolize, Bercovitch suggests, it defeats expression.53 A Graham’s review knew differently:€“None of Melville’s novels equals the present in force and subtlety of thinking and unity of purpose. Many of the scenes are wrought out with great splendor and vigor, and a capacity is evinced of holding with a firm grasp, and describing with masterly distinctness, some of the most evanescent phenomena of morbid emotions” (Higgins and Parker, 55). As the parody of Melville’s style also deduced, the “wrought out … splendor” of Melville’s language renders evanescent phenomena distinct and capable of being grasped. In Pierre, such evanescent phenomena constitute Pierre’s desire:€arising from a confrontation with gendered, sexual, and social norms, that desire emerges unwieldy, balked and balking, refusing to assume its place. As Samuel Otter has argued, Melville’s language frustrates but also shapes Pierre’s desire€– its allusions, digressions, rhymes, and sounds provide “a more material account” of Pierre’s experience.54 Melville’s writing, like the Memnon Stone, a massive rock in the woods near Pierre’s pastoral Saddle Meadow, is “an immense mass,” and it shares

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with the hulking rock “its ponderous inscrutableness” and “giddy height,” by which it balks the reader’s narrative expectations and philosophical sureties, particularly those of the romance.55 For instance, in the title of Book IX, “More Light, and the Gloom of That Light • More Gloom, and the Light of That Gloom,” the double chiasmus of “Light” and “Gloom” alerts us to the way Melville’s style repeatedly caricatures and then confounds the oppositions of the romantic mode. As Cindy Weinstein has cogently noted, throughout the novel, Melville’s language cannot sustain or recognize difference, repeating the incestuous relations of the plot in the very relations of words.56 Isabel’s section in the book brings this mode to the fore, both because she is the object of Pierre’s incestuous desire and because a dreamlike, hazy mode is narratively associated with her (as the sentimental is associated with fiancée Lucy and the male romantic with the heroic alienation of Pierre).57 Isabel has difficulty distinguishing herself from lightning, cats, snakes, her guitar, and, of course, her brother Pierre. Critics have accurately described her as outside of the law, where desire is not regulated and where language is indistinguishable from the rhythms of bodily experience. Stylistically, Isabel’s vagueness is featured in the excessive and fruitless nominalizations of terms that defy concretion, such as “the unfathomableness of fullness” (Melville, 153). Isabel’s style has many provenances:€her inchoate utterances resemble those of female trance speakers, such as Cora Hatch, and even those of women experiencing trance in private settings, whom I feature in Chapter 2. As Otter has observed, Isabel’s incantatory tones also have a Poeian echo. Isabel is surely a contender for Foster’s “starry sisterhood” in his sketch of the visionary, intellectual women of New York literary circles, circles that Melville also visited. Isabel’s eeriness is not quite like anyone else’s, but her sense of the fluidity between extremes, her sense that “always in me, the solidest things melt into dreams, and dreams into solidities” (Melville, 117), is also a shaping force of the works I will present (as are trance states and Poe’s experiments in alternately vaporizing and corporealizing women). Indeed, what interests me is that Melville has gendered this mode of potentially revisionist romanticism by associating it with Isabel. Moreover, Melville can be said to engage the revisionist idealism of the writers in this study when he entertains possibilities of refusing polarities, residing in a place between. In the “More Light, and the Gloom of That Light” chapter in the Isabel section of Pierre, Melville refers to such chiasmic reasoning as “introversions” (165). By definition, then, this kind of language folds in on itself and creates a new space in doing so. For some, such insight is delusional, and, Ahab-like, leads them to the “Arctic regions,”

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the “Pole” of the mind (165). But “even the less distant regions of thought are not without their singular introversions” (165), and Melville suggests they are necessities. In the chapter, he creates another such introversion that provides a defense of Pierre and his “enthusiasm”: [O]nly by being guilty of Folly does mortal man in many cases arrive at the perception of Sense. A thought which should forever free us from hasty imprecations upon our ever-recurring intervals of Folly; since though Folly be our teacher, Sense is the lesson she teaches; since if Folly wholly depart from us, Further Sense will be her companion in the flight, and we will be left standing midway in wisdom. (166–7)

Though the sentence uses a structure of chiasmus, it is clear that the sentence is also highly wrought in its own way. The sentence is less symmetrical than involuted, as well as exasperatingly long and complicated; Melville seems also to humorously demonstrate the runaway repetition with the final, dangling, placement of “Further Sense” outside of a chiasmus. Like a thread we might pull, to take Sense without Folly would unravel the dense fabric they weave. The narrator goes on to assert “the reciprocity and partnership of Folly and Sense” (167). The relation established between the seemingly exclusive terms does not yet telegraph the ending’s collapse of unconventional relations, nor does it reconcile or balance oppositions; rather, they create a new and vital, if precarious, space together. Through a grammar of introversion and through the folds of Melville’s compounded language, the terms hold open a space that acknowledges Pierre’s unconventional desire. In such rhetorical ornament, then, as in Melville’s many other rhetorical follies and flourishes, Melville locates the sense and spirit of his meaning. Given the novel’s gestures toward midcentury utopian communities, we might also recognize in “reciprocity” and “partnership” the terms of social experiments that attempted to open up new spaces in the social structure by reconceiving marriage and family. Through the in-folds of language, Melville too suggests a revision of the grammar of relation€– both social and philosophical. Melville offers through the introverted discourse of Isabel’s section an acknowledgement, and even a homage, to the enthusiasm that generates reform and to all of its challenging excesses of expression. In this way, we might think of Isabel’s discourse functioning in the novel something like the breath of Memnon’s bereaved mother, Aurora, when it encounters the great Memnon monument. Aurora’s wind makes music with the statue and in doing so commemorates Memnon; likewise, Isabel’s discourse facilitates the expression of Pierre’s monumental, tragic desire. Even though Melville’s book anatomizes the follies of enthusiasm,

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of asserting desire against the forms and conventions of social and literary realms, it sees the necessity of and the sense in such folly, and Melville’s language furiously enacts the madness in all its baroque formlessness. But Aurora’s song is also a dirge for Memnon, and by the end of the novel Pierre is excruciatingly sandwiched between dark and light lady (as a breezy sailor observes to him at the novel’s fraught denouement); he is no longer relishing the middle space, seeing the sense in his folly, or enjoying previously uncharted reciprocities€– between sisters and fiancées, between words, or between idealist poles. Language’s potential insidiously flattens as well. The glorious purple haze bedecking another massive rock, Mt. Greylock, in the dedication becomes “cunning purpleness” by novel’s end, and words create deceiving veils and covers rather than intricately layered possibilities (314). Melville’s formlessness in Pierre, its particularly labored and ornate variety, constitutes an investment in both the techniques and philosophy of highly wrought modes, though he ultimately turns away from them. Perhaps Melville’s own enthusiasm is introverted:€to espouse is to reproach and to reproach is to espouse. Melville seems to withdraw from the possibilities his language has created, but it is with an anguished sense of loss rather than derision, and the furious mass of words he leaves behind as Pierre commemorates the folly and sense in the effort.58 In Walter Spengemann’s elegant construction, Pierre begins in an Emersonian mode, where “words serve as temporal, material emblems of eternal spiritual ideas, pointing upward from the sublunary world of confusion and change to the transcendent realm of harmony and permanence”.59 By midway, instead of standing for the fixed meanings from which they arose, words “endlessly” take on new meanings with each successive unfolding of events, “accumulating semantic complexity” on the way (xv). The writers featured in this study are attracted to dynamics of spirit, matter, and language, but they refuse any instrumentalizing of language or a working through matter toward a notion of transcendent spirit. As with Melville, a rejection of such ultimates keeps them suspended in language, finding the spirit of matters in the processes of language. T h e s e ns e a n d spi r i t of h ig h ly w roug h t s t y l e “Style” has been a largely neglected term in American literary study of the nineteenth century€– one we have taken for granted. Scholarship has been quick to pass over heightened verbal play in women’s texts for fear that is evidence of the apolitical idealization, expressive strain, or artistic limitation of women writers. My goal is to invigorate the term “style” by

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passing it through close readings of specific verbal experiments, through writers’ self-reflexive sense of their language, through figures of style and gender in reception and intertextual dialogue, and finally through a context of wider debate about spirit and the nature of aesthetic experience that gives highly wrought style its force and cogency. Mine is not a strictly formalist reading of verbal surface; rather, verbal textures are embedded in image repertoires, thematic logics, and narrative structures that support verbal effects, or verbal textures may create generative tension with such contexts. Style is not a textual feature that can be detached from its layers of context, and it is more than the sum of its techniques. Nor can literary style be understood by reference to extratextual context alone. In my close readings, I attend to how the authors construct an aesthetic experience of language while I also situate those effects in relation to literary historical contexts that must be reconstructed by close attention to shared codes, to literary relations, and to aesthetic values and problems that are specific to their historical time and place. My study exists in relation to a classic formulation of style and American literature, Richard Poirier’s A World Elsewhere:€The Place of Style in American Literature, whose interest in style and the “scenes” it fashions into a “world elsewhere” are interests I assume but recalibrate.60 Whereas Poirier argues for style in American literature as escape into the purity and solace of a private world, I understand style to allow for a step into a space from which dominant assumptions can be brought into view and reformulated. The world the writers of this study create is one where clarity is gained in the pursuit of a reengagement. By shifting language from its referential purpose and intensifying its aesthetic qualities in the specific ways I delineate in my close readings throughout the book, the reader experiences what Gerard Genette describes as “a turn” into the “inner space” of language, in which language appears newly substantive.61 That “turn” reorients us to the space the writer has ascribed to her desire and we meet with the world style she has refashioned. In our experience of style, we are made to sense the possibilities it creates, of both gendered resistance and feminist alternatives. Richard Poirier argues that writers create an “environment” through style, using literary language to struggle against the constraints of social environments as well as literary convention. James, Hawthorne, Melville, and Twain “evolved a style meant to liberate [their] heroes from those … who would ‘fix,’ imprison, or ‘know’ others” (27). Through their style, Poirier’s authors effect “extraordinary dislocations of our fixed ideas of reality” and the “suspension and then the redirection of our way of seeing things and of

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feeling them through language” (84). Poirier claims such a gesture as the essence of literature itself€– literature exists “to appropriate space to one’s desires,” and style is the medium through which to create that space and convey its consequences (17). Through style, the authors “refer us not to anything with a settled existence but rather to something of which the style itself is the synecdoche” (84). In Poirier’s study, literary style has a kind of purity€– of expression that frees itself from literary convention and social ties. Poirier’s readings value the break or rupture in the texts he examines as evidence of the heroic struggle with social and literary convention. For Poirier, the “relinquishment” of literary and social ties is the precondition to becoming “a poet” who, uncontrolled by either physical necessity or social condition, can find the proper “style” (62). The resolutions of the books he examines return the heroes, dispossessed of their freedom, to the “prison” of the social environment, where they are subjected to “questions of a social and sexual nature which it has been their and their creator’s intention to avoid” (29). The highly wrought styles I examine seek such freedom of expression, but with a linked motivation to enter and transform literary and social fields. I see these styles, and indeed those of many of the authors Poirier examines, as socially concerned with their effects on readers, whether they implicitly argue for or against material social changes. They ask the most interesting social and sexual questions when they experiment with built literary environments. Poirier is most interested in “‘scenes,’ passages of writing that cling to the imagination … tenaciously,” as am I (91). Poirier’s project involves distinguishing American literature from British on this point, in an attempt to recoup as something more valuable the “incoherence,” “excessive ambition,” and what Yvor Winters dubbed the “pseudo-reference” (his less heroic term for the struggle to create a world) by which American literature was characterized in Poirier’s mid-twentieth century moment (qtd. in Poirier, 91). I retain Winters’ and the other sentiments here, for the way they capture something of the performance of highly wrought style, a performance that the authors I study relish, as did, I would argue, their “classic” counterparts, Melville, Poe, and Hawthorne. (Poirier remains suspicious of too much relishing, finding that Thoreau borders on the stylist “as fop” in some of his wordplay.) They engage and provoke with style, inviting us to savor its inventions or recoil from them, to appreciate or repudiate the way such style vexes its own reception contexts or confronts the social worlds of its audience. Yet as my treatment of Poe and Spofford will reveal, even styles with notable investments in decadent self-display or

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self-referentiality cannot be reduced to those investments without losing sight of the moral or political valences they also entail:€their aestheticism is not late-century aestheticism. In the stylistic performances, and especially in the self-display and the pseudo-reference, of women’s highly wrought style, I discern the gendered politics of a specific literary and social project. They create a new world in language with the political urge to provoke social change outside of the text as well. Of what, then, might highly wrought style be the synecdoche, to return to Poirier’s term? Poirier argues that his writers engage repeatedly in stylistic acts of relinquishment and possession€– relinquishment of an artificial environment for the visionary possession of a “true” and free world. The artificial environment my writers relinquish is in an important way anatomy itself and the gender relations that devolve from it. Through highly wrought style, these writers seek to embody a way of being that is not bound to the gendered morphology of the physical body. Deriving conceptions from mesmerism’s interest in palpable spirit, they seek to possess and explore a way of being that is reoriented toward spirit but yet reclaims all of the pleasures of the senses through it. The “second inmost sight” through which the speaker of my second epigraph enters the “trance of a summer noon” of sensual delight is more than a figure of speech and entails a full set of cultural meanings (Clemmer, 99). Mine is neither an argument about the renunciation of matter nor the renunciation of spirit, but rather about the reformulation of the body€– of sensory ways of feeling alive€– through an idea of spirit. My readings will thus challenge a concept of spirit as politically anemic and sexually repressive, the argument of a predominant vein of Americanist scholarship running from Douglas’ The Feminization of American Culture to Russ Castronovo’s Necro Citizenship. Highly wrought writers signal their aim to intervene in literary and social conventions of femininity through their engagement with cultural and literary discourses of ornament, spirit, and matter that index, often in contradictory fashion, the status of women’s writing, the social role of women, or the literary tropology of the female body. When their language exceeds its original site of feminine ornamentality, spiritual refinement, or passive matter to create something else altogether, such effects likewise become the primary evidence for the concentration and intensity of the author’s work. Thus the style embodies an account of gendered power relations in the literary field and is itself an instance of women taking a position as writers of the florid and the gorgeous. The wit of their intertextual addresses to the literary field and the deployment of a style that seeks its effects in the calculated effrontery of copious and intensified verbiage

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are ample evidence for D. A. Miller’s insistence that “style presupposes a deliberately embraced project … [that] one must choose, pursue, perform,” one that here modulates into a culturally material stance of women authors.62 The deliberately embraced project of highly wrought fiction emerges in the literary field as what Margaret Cohen, in her literary archeology of nineteenth-century French fiction by women, has called a literary “position.”63 “Position-taking” occurs when an author “solicits the reader against rather than with an established practice imbued with symbolic prestige and/or market appeal” by “violating the codes that are [a text’s] point of departure,” in this case codes for the proper style of women’s writing (18). Position-takings can cohere into a position when they are recognizable by their contemporaries, when their use becomes “symbolically and/or economically freighted” (18). Highly wrought style is a synecdoche, then, for the visionary possession of new feminist modes of presence or being. These modes appear in the literary register as a hyper-production of the feminine within romantic and literary codes of the period and they also manifest in a social register as a challenging conceptual reformulation of gendered embodiment. Highly wrought writers use style to enhance what they take to be an ontological fact about language itself:€its borderline status as material and expression, embodiment and sign. In the most vivid instances (scenes, to use Poirier’s term) of their performance of style on language, they generate what I would call “types” of quasi-materiality in a determinedly semiopaque representation of feminist politics. Across my chapters, these types are:€ flower language, the sensuous soul, living ornament, and visionary form. These types embody, to quote Cohen, “a set of poetic strategies that offer a persuasive fictional solution to urgent contemporary social contradiction even as they resolve a problematic specific to the literary field” (19). These authors exploited a metaphorics of matter and spirit, found in both flower language and mesmerism, the subjects of my first two chapters, in order to mediate the contradictory binaries of mid-century romantic idealism in which women’s bodies figured as matter even as middle-class women were ideologically detached from their bodies by theories of feminine spirituality. They used style to create forms that were perceptible but not categorizable, substantial but not reducible, forms that could be a kind of synecdoche of the visionary possession of alternative ways of being, presenting, and imagining woman. Poirier’s term, synecdoche, is wonderfully evocative of the way that an author’s use of style can conceptually concretize and embody something otherwise quite abstract, something even within the realm of the

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“visionary”€– the not-yet-in existence. As I have already begun to make clear, however, I want to move away from Poirier’s notion of the purity of the vision that takes shape through style, that it is something that categorically does not exist, has not been touched by and will not touch the environment it resists. If they embody a conceptual resolution to historical contradictions, these types are not just the most vivid instances of women using highly wrought style to imagine quasi-material states of being, they are themselves historically material. As such, they work like what Frederic Jameson has called an “ideologeme,” in that they are a concretion, a formal embodiment, of a complex symbolic resolution to the social and literary contradictions women experienced.64 In this framework, “types” like the sensuous soul or living ornament are an essence or mode made into a historically determinate conceptual or semic complex. They are not just a reflection of historical conditions but an active response to them. In my reading, such forms are not symptomatic of the depredations of capitalism, but are expressly political resolutions developed by women writers. The solutions of individual works attend to different political priorities, variously foregrounding the development of an alternative ontology for woman, the recovery of aesthetic ground for the woman writer, or simply the effort to register the presence of desire belonging to women, yet because the authors use style to work through layers of both literary and social contradiction, these goals are interlocking and present with more or less emphasis in each work. I thus want to move away from the notion that an author’s style might produce a linguistically bound substitute that can only exist in contradistinction to and outside of history or the material world, that the world elsewhere has no traffic with the world here. Rosi Braidotti’s recent attempts to articulate a “materialist” feminism are also germane here.65 Drawing on a very different lineage of materialism, one that reaches into Continental feminism rather than into Marxism, Braidotti proposes the uses of “feminist figurations,” for example, such figurations of alternative feminist subjectivity as “the womanist, the lesbian, the cyborg” (after Alice Walker’s, Monique Wittig’s, and Donna Haraway’s concepts), that are politically significant in that they “differ from classical ‘metaphors’ … precisely in calling into play a sense of accountability for one’s locations. They express materially embedded cartographies and as such are self-reflexive and not parasitic upon a process of metaphorization of ‘others’” (13). I take Braidotti to mean that such figurations arise from and encompass the material relations of women even as they embody possible new forms of that social location€– they compare a social location across time rather

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than through an objectifying comparison to another person, location, or thing. Braidotti goes on to say that “by extension, new figurations of the subject (nomadic, cyborg, Black, etc.) function like conceptual personae. As such, they are no metaphor, but rather on the critical level, materially embedded, embodying accounts of one’s power-relations. On the creative level they express the rate of change, transformation, or affirmative deconstruction of the power one inhabits” (13). Figurations, Braidotti concludes, “materially embody stages of metamorphosis of a subject position towards all that the phallogocentric system does not want it to become” (13). While they embed material relations and a new axis of comparison across time rather than locations, Braidotti’s feminist figurations still seem to function representationally, as models€ – they are “expressions” and embodiments. This is an essential aspect of my own work in this book, where such models are infinitely rich in accounts of women’s interactions with literary and social environments. The figurations I explore are attempts to consolidate a sense of other ways of being present or alive, gendered by virtue of being made on behalf of women and on literary ground that has already been gendered. They differ, however, from Braidotti’s urge to recall and retain the specificity of the female body€– “the specificity of feminine morphology, sensibility, sexuality, and creativity” (35). Highly wrought figurations are replete with flowers and fluids, and some even project the female body onto the landscape, but in my estimation these figurations never fully cohere as a return or reclamation of the physical female body, and that is part of the point. In my own analysis, I have been eager to protect the strangeness of some of these conceptions from a reductive materialism of the body, as were, I believe, their authors. The authors work on, rearrange, elaborate, sculpt the materials of the feminine that they find in the literary discourses to produce new and strange forms that bear an uneasy relation to social femininity or the body. Thus to the extent that Braidotti’s figurations are material because the female body is foundational to their articulation, highly wrought figurations do not partake of her materialist feminism, while to the extent that they embody social relation and express the potential for change, they do. But I also want to think about an additional location of material relation that Braidotti’s definition can suggest€– in the very encounter with “materially embodied” alternative subjectivities and with figures-turned-conceptual personae. Again, only Spofford, by making her narrator into a voice that speaks for and as highly wrought style, really produces anything resembling a “a subject” or a “person” through style; rather, the authors generate the quasi-material types I have mentioned and that we encounter as manifestations of the

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gendered desires the author cannot (and therefore will not) accommodate in representational ways. The idea that these types not only embed, but also might begin to form, by interaction with the reader, a change in social relations is one I want to entertain. It is Poirier, after all, who might best explain how the style shows us something that is, to use Braidotti’s words, “no metaphor,” or something more than synecdoche:€we must return to his emphasis on the reader’s experience of an author’s style. The authors I examine seem to wish to generate a sense, both an understanding and a perception, of their solutions. On the one hand, we have the desire to evoke in language’s sounds, looks, and syntactical arrangement, an effect of sensual existence that is not encased in anatomy. And on the other hand, we have the literary ambition to amplify the purported verbosity and the formlessness of women’s literary production as a manner of artful expression. These solutions may seem antithetical€– to move out of the physical body, and to overproduce the textual body, the mass and prose, of women’s writing€– but both are forms of making present, indeed allowing the reader to feel, the existence of and the effect of something that has leapt its bounds and become uncontained and perhaps uncategorized. This form of presence does not manifest as an appearance in a visual or representational economy, but as an experience of the textures of language€– the sound, graphics, diction, syntax, pattern, repetition, and imagery of the style. The effect of such texture is experienced in some form of relation, frequently antagonistic, to its narrative context and the narrative contract it promised. The reader reads and things are done to him or her. The literary object exerts its resistance, or it surprises the reader into a new experience of reading, a new position in relation to the literary object. Writers use highly wrought style to interpose language between the reader and the narrative, language that invites the reader to pause and savor its sounds, look, rhythms, and the logic of its arrangements and patterns and that, on the other hand, can disturb the reader with its convolutions and involutions, dislocate with its endlessness, or confront the reader with its interposing mass. These texts seek to construct and relocate a reader in relation to their gendered effects, and thereby move the reader to new forms of social relation. As Poirier reminds, these efforts refer “not to anything with a settled existence” (84). Rather, highly wrought style refers to something that has yet to take shape but nonetheless exerts its spirit as a felt possibility. The trajectory of this study is as follows. In Chapter 1, “Florid fantasies:€Fuller, Stephens, and the ‘other’ language of flowers,” I contextualize

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Style, Gender, and Fantasy

the style’s floridity in relation to the conventions of the popular language of flowers. Flower dictionaries purported to offer the code needed to conduct a love affair, but I argue that women writers were attracted to the idea that flower language was a language system, a “woman’s language,” as many prefaces proclaimed. Fuller’s mystical flower sketches, “The Magnolia of Lake Ponchartrain” (1841) and “Yuca [sic] Filamentosa” (1842), pose the typically emblematic status of flowers as a variety of feminine servitude to masculine meaning. Fuller’s strange talking flowers emphasize the flower’s own language rather than a language in or through flowers, and open the potential of floridity as the site of feminine alterity. Ann Stephens’ popular novel Mary Derwent (1838), oft cited and reprinted in the magazine culture of the 1840s and 1850s, offers a full menu of feminine transgression from adultery to polyandry to political power, but it is in the “flowery superstructure” (the novel’s term), both the represented and rhetorical jewelry of the text, that an antieconomy of unreformed female desire glimmers. In the final section I analyze the Orientalist motifs of indulgence, material accrual, and ornament as modes calculated to confront Western constructions of femininity through an imagined “style” of alterity. Chapter 2, “Sensing the soul:€ mesmerism, feminism, and highly wrought fiction,” considers the nature of the space that highly wrought writers sought to create and the alternative embodiment and ontology it posited. By reading the daydreams, clairvoyant visions, and out-of-body trysts in Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), Elizabeth Oakes Smith’s feminist writing, and Mary Clemmer’s ambivalent anti-free-love novel, Victoire (1864), next to mesmerists’ descriptions of the expansion of sensibility experienced in trance, I argue that these writers found new ways to materialize autonomous femininity. Furthermore, an intensifying style works to alter the nature of vision and fantasy, substantiating its presence and swelling narrative form to accommodate its unplotted demands. I trace an intertextual dialogue on the status and style of vision and fantasy in Donald Mitchell’s Reveries of a Bachelor (1850), Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance (1852), and Clemmer’s Victoire to reveal politicized gender investments in embodying alternative worlds. Blithedale’s possessive reaction to feminist claims on the realm of romance and dream, I argue, further demonstrates the formative presence of highly wrought writing in the period. The fiction I examine places pressure on a possible meeting of reform and romance through the medium of feminist-mesmeric vision, which finds “worlds elsewhere” in the here and now. This chapter proposes that literary language is the terrain of a long-overlooked feminist utopian

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conception, embodying new styles of femininity and requiring new forms of gender relation. While Chapter 2 tracks the feminist social aims of the literary environments created by women’s use of highly wrought style, Chapter 3, “Harriet Prescott Spofford’s philosophy of composition,” reveals the intensely literary stakes of the style. It takes Spofford’s signature story, “The Amber Gods” (1860), as an aesthetic manifesto in which the female narrator gives voice to highly wrought style, staging its philosophy of composition in aggressive dialogue with its readers and making clear its gendered positiontaking in the literary field. I take up one feminist critic’s lament that the narrator can only occupy the position of “death or decoration,” to counter that the narrator actually speaks from both unlikely places, and to consider Spofford’s engagement with Poe, that other connoisseur of the dead and the ornamental.66 Using reviews that lavish praise on Spofford’s luxurious prose on the one hand while disparaging her “morbid” themes and “fatal gift of fluency” (this from Henry James) on the other, I show that Spofford, in her own review essays and in her fiction, wittily engaged her peers and sought to embody in her fiction the significant challenge that her style presented.67 In her story, amber€– a gorgeous amorphous residue and natural embalmer€– is the complicated figure for highly wrought style itself, in which some fantastic version of nondomestic woman might abide, or bide her time. Spofford’s defense of highly wrought style rests on a detailed theory of ornament that she would propound in her Art Decoration Applied to Furniture (1877), an inaugural installment of American aestheticism and a key to the forgotten linkage of ornament, gender, and spirit generating highly wrought aesthetics. Chapter 4, “Pauline Hopkins’ baroque folds:€the styled form of Winona,” looks at a late development of highly wrought writing. Hopkins shifts stylistic attention to generic form, reworking content and rethinking generic divides, to create a form that embodies black female desire in the design of her text rather than in her heroine. Hopkins’ self-proclaimed interest in making fictional and political use of “all the fire and romance of our history” leads her to turn to the predominantly white-authored tradition of highly wrought fiction to innovate a politically charged form of African American romance.68 Reorienting currents in contemporaneous African American literary traditions as well, her use of romance lends itself more readily to an exploration of sexuality than to “uplift,” the primary goal of Hopkins’ contemporaries. Hopkins’ Winona (1902) imagines not a social role for its heroine, but a romantic “interior.” Using a Deleuzean metaphorics of matter as folded rather than divided, I argue that such spaces

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are opened up by Hopkins’ way of working in the interstices of the western and romance genres she employs. Hopkins implicates one in the other, making each genre comment on and revise the thematic€– revenge and marriage€– in the other, generating in the process modalities of pleasure and anger forbidden in the “race literature” of late century. Hopkins thus finds “fire and romance,” not in the heroine’s psychic interior, but in new ways of styling western and romance as connected and mutually informing, itself productive of a fecund inner space that is an analogue for interiority rather than a mimetic representation of its workings. A brief coda considers the continued entwinement of ornament with issues of gendered expression in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s and Edith Wharton’s writing and reveals their involvement with the writers that preceded them.

Ch a p t e r 1

Florid fantasies:€Fuller, Stephens, and the “other” language of flowers

In a semiautobiographical sketch in her travel memoir, Summer on the Lakes, Margaret Fuller compared the words of her fictional heroine, Mariana, to a “fire of cinnamon.”1 As such, Mariana’s expression is too intense to bear:€“What she wanted to tell they did not wish to hear; a little had pleased, so much overpowered, and they preferred the free air of the street, even, to the cinnamon perfume of her palace” (61). Forced to quell her intensity, Mariana languishes and dies. One familiar with the recovered canon of nineteenth-century American women writers might wonder at the linguistic threat of Fuller’s heroine and the erotic cadence€– the cinnamon perfume€– of Fuller’s own words. The cloistered decadence evoked is not that of Fuller’s earnest political voice, nor is Mariana’s lonely demise quite like the sentimental deaths of the period that bind and affirm social values. Yet Fuller’s is not the only perfumed palace of the nineteenth century. It was not uncommon for nineteenth-century women to assign a fragrance to their feelings as Fuller did, and in fact this was the business of flower language, popular throughout the nineteenth century. This chapter explores the intensity of expression, and floridity of language, in Fuller’s and other women’s writing of the mid-nineteenth century by returning to the popular discourse on flower language which their writing signals, reinterprets, and extends into alternative expressive forms. From Victorian flower dictionaries to George Bataille, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Derrida, flowers have facilitated queries about the nature of language, its capacities for expression, and its relation to materiality.2 Fuller and her contemporaries shared such investigations, which led them to confront the deeply gendered nature of the analogies between language and flowers€– an inevitably feminized and sexualized medium in Western culture. Paula Bennett, Christopher Looby, and Elizabeth Petrino have argued convincingly that flower language often functioned in nineteenthcentury literature as a popular “code” for the semicovert expression 37

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of transgressive sexualities.3 I will complicate this view by arguing that Fuller, Ann Stephens, and writers in subsequent chapters in fact resist the grammar of metonymic substitution under which flowers operate as either emblems or codes in dominant constructions of flower language and in the representational strategies it promotes. Indeed, many women writers saw the potential of flower language as an alternative language€– with grammar, rhetorical conventions, and linguistic strategies€– and not only a vocabulary. They implicitly worked to unfold the “woman’s language” that many flower dictionaries claimed to compile and that Fuller’s mystical “flower sketches,” written for the Transcendentalist Dial, proposed to fully reclaim. Fuller and Stephens also join their canonical romantic counterparts, who likewise engaged intensively with flower language, in working out a grammar of nature, language, and self. Fuller in particular takes the floral analogies through which these relations were frequently addressed as an invitation to critique and revise the gendered underpinnings of romanticist models of the ideal and the material. This project does not lead Fuller to abandon flower language as hopelessly wed to a conventional version of the feminine. Instead, she reenters its discursive terrain to elicit an alternative language of the flower, one the flower speaks rather than one that is spoken through it. Fuller’s anatomy of the transition from an emblematic language of flowers to a language that is of or like the flower allows us to better understand the gendered and aesthetic dimensions of floridity in women’s popular fiction like Stephens’ Mary Derwent, where a “flowery superstructure,” to use Stephens’ term, of intensively wrought fantasy€ – both florid and relentlessly floral€– counters the containment of women’s passion and pleasure by the social reality the novel depicts. A final section examines the Orientalist valences of flower language to illuminate the unexpected models of feminine space and voice on which Fuller’s and Stephen’s texts turn. T h e l a nguag e of f l o w e r s So popular were flower dictionaries that John Ingram’s 1869 Flora Symbolica was able to claim that “in the United States, the language of flowers is said to have more votaries than in any other part of the world; and said with justice, if we may judge by the number and splendor of the works on the subject which have appeared there during the last few years, and the intimate acquaintance which American writers display with floral symbols.”4. According to flower dictionaries, each flower is a unit of

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39

meaning, expressing a sentiment to those who understand the language of flowers. Flower dictionaries usually consist of a brief but thorough glossary of botanical terms, followed by the main floral dictionary, and perhaps ending with poetry about flower lore or intricate devices for arranging personalized flower bouquet messages. Each entry assigns a feeling, or sentiment, to the flower and consists of at least one verse expressive of that sentiment, often compiling additional literary passages that mention the flower by name. Following their French predecessors, American flower dictionary editors and compilers drew heavily on English poets, especially Shakespeare and the British romantics, though the editors themselves often made generous anonymous contributions of their own verse.5 A significant number of these editors were already well-known women writers, including Sarah Hale, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Frances Osgood, Emma Embury, and Louisa May Alcott. Although the sentiment assigned to flowers followed certain familiar conventions, the sentiment of a particular flower would frequently vary between dictionaries, evidencing the editor’s role in determining flower meaning. One of the earliest and most influential of American flower dictionaries was Elizabeth Wirt’s 1829 Flora’s Dictionary, which remained in print through the 1850s.6 A truly exquisite example of the genre, Wirt’s dictionary contained multiple hand-colored plates, and the margins of each page were filled with ornately sketched garlands of flowers. Displaying her now legendary acumen for nineteenth-century popular markets, Sarah J. Hale soon followed Wirt by publishing her own flower dictionary. Her Flora’s Interpreter:€or, The American Book of Flowers and Sentiments was in print for nearly four decades, beginning in 1832. Eschewing the ornamentation of Wirt’s book, a single color plate constituted the only illustration in Hale’s stolidly pared-down version. Emphasizing “American” in her title and domesticating the Eastern mystical flair that crops up in Wirt, she used poems by American writers (including Lydia Sigourney, Miss H. F. Gould, selections from Ladies’ Magazine, and herself) to illuminate the sentiment of each flower. Hale’s stated intention in editing such a volume was to raise interest in both “botanical research” and the “beauties of our own literature.”7 Her goals for her dictionary were dual and gendered:€“May it inspire our Young Ladies to cultivate those virtues which can be truly represented by the fairest flowers, and our Young Men to cultivate their minds, till our land shall become beautified by the spirit of Taste, and our literature brilliant by the creations of Genius” (v). Twenty years later in 1853, women are still to endeavor to be like flowers, but Hale’s revised introduction

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Style, Gender, and Fantasy

indicates that men are no longer expected to enrich their minds with Flora’s Interpreter, but to “strive to be worthy of the love that these fairest flowers can so eloquently reveal.”8 At this point, Hale’s didactic goals are conceded to the more romantic ones that Wirt had always endorsed, giving credence to historian Beverly Seaton’s observation that the language of flowers was dominated by “the vocabulary needed to conduct a love affair.”9 Wirt’s preface stated plainly the dictionary’s usefulness in helping men to select bouquets conveying the appropriate (and often elaborate) message. In these examples, flower language functions ostensibly as a woman’s language for men to read and compose. But Hale’s conception of flower semantics as operating under simple and manifest rules where flowers are taken “as symbols of the affections” (Flora’s Interpreter, 1833, iii) is reconsidered when her revised edition purports to present “the mystical language of flowers” with the intention of “stimulat[ing] the young to the observance of the hidden meanings which may lie concealed in the flower volumes of nature” (1853, iv). Hale’s language invites a heuristic project with rather remarkable possibilities for her nineteenth-century readers. Women were asked to cultivate flower-like qualities€– essentially to be a flower, as sumptuous illustrations of flower-women in J. J. Grandville’s The Flowers Personified indicate.10 In fact, women were urged to study botany because, as one late-century handbook for girls put it, “in learning to know Nature, you are learning to know yourselves” (qtd. in Seaton, 22). Among other “hidden meanings” concealed in flowers was the floral reproductive system, a recent botanical discovery explained in detailed scientific language in many flower dictionaries including Wirt’s. Compounded with the already romantic overtones of most flower “sentiment,” the “hidden meanings” to which Hale referred might well have been of the very type her earlier editions attempted to assuage:€ mystical, decadent, even erotic. Hale’s mixed message gets at the double valences of flower language. While dictionaries proposed to offer a code in which flowers function as manifest emblems, they seem implicitly to recognize the ways that flowers were always somehow in excess of their emblematic status. Perhaps anticipating her later explicit endorsement of the project of locating hidden meanings, Hale’s third edition in 1834 contained a new arrangement with only one flower entry per page to “leave blank spaces for quotations, or those original remarks, which it is often convenient to permit in a book of this kind”.11 As well as allowing room for personal reverie, such blank spaces invited each reader to become an editor of flower language and launch independent interpretations. This is precisely what Sarah Mapps Douglass, a black Philadelphian and educator, did when offered a

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blank page in the keepsake album of her pupil Mary Anne Dickerson. There she painted a full-page watercolor of a sprig of fuchsia and paired it with a description of the flower, perhaps quoted from another source, and her own definition: ‘All the species of fuchsia droop their heads toward the ground in such a manner that their inner beauties can only be discerned when they are somewhat above the eye of the spectator. In a meaner flower this might not attract attention, but most of the fuchsias are eminently beautiful, both in form and color; and this modest bending of the head is the more remarked from the singular and peculiar beauty of the parts involved in the calyxe which they would thus seem anxious to conceal.’ Beautifully and significantly typifying modesty.12

Douglass’ flower editing is most interesting for its departure from the standard vocabularies of flower dictionaries. An intrinsic color vocabulary, often made explicit through a color glossary in an appendix (or even called attention to in the very title, for example, Anna Burke’s The Coloured Language of Flowers), dictated that white, not red, flowers typified purity and modesty.13 A flower as showy as the fuchsia was more likely to be assigned the type of biography that The Flowers Personified granted it:€“I selected Paris for my place of abode. I frequented balls, and shows and concerts. I had splendid apartments … I danced the polka to perfection. I smoked cigarettes, rode on horseback, played at lansquenet, and drank champagne” (Grandville, 290). That Douglass chooses to epitomize the “exotic” and colored fuchsia as “modest” is testimony to the editorial license that made flower language a particularly pliable language of femininity, of use to black women writers as well as white.14 Douglass’ fuchsia is also a calculated refutation of those color vocabularies applied both to flowers and to female sexuality€– the lurking, but not fully determinate referent of flower language. Certainly such lurking meaning was not lost on Douglass, the first well-known black sex educator, however “anxious to conceal” the fuchsia’s “inner beauties” she might be. But also, Douglass’ delicate painting of the fuchsia seems to be somewhat in excess of the “modesty” and “concealment” by which she has defined the flower, for it is a detailed meditation on the beauty of the flower that reveals the lavish attention required to render the painting. Her artistic appreciation of the fuchsia might then entail a kind of pride in and loving display of its colored beauty as a homage to the young African American woman whose album it graces. Like visual elements in other examples of floral definition, especially the detailed arabesque garlands that frame Wirt’s pages, or even the labor-intensive hand-coloring of plates in the more expensive

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Style, Gender, and Fantasy

of dictionaries, Douglass’ painting presents an aesthetic excess that is not folded in to the ordered regime that dictionaries impose. This is not to say that any nineteenth-century meditation on the “inner beauties” and hidden meanings of flowers is synonymous with a Â�twentieth-century O’Keeffean reverie on the hidden beauties of female anatomy, though certainly the wittiest of Victorian flower language shares a certain understanding of anatomical parallels, as Douglass well illustrates. In flower dictionaries, very few flowers are used to describe physical characteristics; it was a language interested primarily in “inward states” (Seaton, 126), especially of women. The use of flower language did not necessarily affirm the bond between women and the biological world of cycles and reproduction€– a tie that science and psychology would increasingly press throughout the century. In fact, flower language also laid special emphasis on the “soul” of the flower. While Linnaeus was out classifying flowers by various physical features (making his own kind of dictionary), for example, Fuller tells us that his daughter saw “the soul” of a red lily “exhaling from the flower”.15 Like the aesthetic qualities of the flower’s visual and material nature, the flower’s ineffable Â�qualities exceed a lexical economy of signs and their definition, especially when the language of flowers stressed the connection between fragrance and feeling. A female self could be located in the fragrance of flowers, thereby circumventing the visual economy of representation without relinquishing the sensuality of that self. Thus, women writers put flower symbolism bound to its sexual “hidden meanings” into play. The possibility of this “other language” offered in flower dictionaries yields not just a vocabulary, but a whole mode of expression for “hidden meanings” that attempts to push beyond the semiotics of floral appearance, linking color and form to skin and genitals, to express the ever-elusive, seemingly ineffable soul of the flower. Elaine Scarry, in speaking to the universality of flower imagery in our imaginative expressions (whether painting, philosophy, or poetry), argues that flowers provide “an arc between the material and the immaterial”.16 Their material substance, combined with what Aristotle called their “rarity” (their quick, almost ephemeral existence and their growth, or ascension, toward the heavens) and with what Scarry characterizes as their very willingness to become the stuff of our imaginations, contributes to the idea that flowers are “always already in a state of passage from the material to the dematerialized” (104). This arc between the material and immaterial was formulated in nineteenth-century flower language in a gender-specific way as the arc between the flower’s corporeality (miming

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not only faces, or the curve of the eye as in Scarry’s formulation, but also the female body) and the flower’s soul. Moreover, this arc functions in my examples as a space between:€a tensioned suspense of, rather than a trajectory between, the dichotomies it brings into relation€– soul and body, the symbolic and the material. Flower language could therefore lend dimensionality to expressions of a female self, allowing women to hold together body and soul by enfolding both sexuality and spirituality within the petals of the flower. Thomas Miller claimed, in his 1847 The Poetical Language of Flowers (the American edition edited by feminist and highly wrought novelist Elizabeth Oakes Smith), that flower language originated as “a language which the sweet tongue of woman had made music of before the beauty of the early world was submerged beneath the waters”.17 Flower dictionaries repeatedly refer to the presence of a lost language, a language of particular use€– or pleasure, as this quotation suggests€– to women. This quote vaguely Westernizes what was popularly imagined to be the origin of flower language, mentioned in most dictionaries:€the Turkish harem. The above edition traded Orientalist secrecy for a kind of pantheist mysticism by substituting Eden for an Eastern “paradise”€– the enclosed gardens of Islam (and of the Canticles). But both origins suggest that flower language posits oblique access to a mystical, sensuous, remote, and even repressed femininity. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu first brought word of the Turkish “selam” in 1718, describing it as a bouquet arranged to send a message through the specific flowers that composed it, a “secret” mode of communication between harem women and their lovers on the outside.18 Austrian Orientalist J. Hammer refuted Montagu’s claim in 1809, asserting that the selam was a language known only to women, who “invented it in the leisure of their lonely life, and who employ it as an amusement, or as a code for lesbian attachments.”19 Whatever the validity of Hammer’s research, belief in the female-centered nature of the language of flowers and its erotically charged “origins” in the alternative sexual structures of the pre-Lapsarian garden or the polygamous harem, with its imagined female adultery (Montagu) or homoerotic space (Hammer), gave the discourse its mystical and erotic aura, often in tension with the heteronormativity and traditional gender prescription that supported the ostensible exchange of flowers in courtship. It is this gap between how femininity has been constructed and what nonetheless lurks that Fuller and Stephens developed using flowery style€– its profusion limning the sensuality and the formlessness of scent€– to assert a palpable yet unreified presence.

44

Style, Gender, and Fantasy S e ns ua l a n d s t r a ng e : €F u l l e r’s “l i v i ng h i e ro g ly ph ic”

Fuller’s “The Magnolia of Lake Pontchartrain” (1841) is one of two short mystical sketches on flowers she published at the outset of her writing career. The sketch begins with a traveler’s detour to locate the source of a scent, a “full and penetrating sweetness” that overwhelms him during the course of his journey.20 Following the scent, he finds a magnolia “singing to herself in her lonely bower” (45), where the spirit of the flower agrees to “tell the tale of [her] being” (49). Indeed, the reader realizes that, like the traveler, she is being led away from everyday reality when the magnolia’s “song” appears in the text as actual and extensive dialogue with the traveler. Fuller takes up the metaphorical equation of women and flowers in popular flower language in order to imagine what it is like to be a flower€– and what such an imaginative leap might have to offer to Fuller’s project of rethinking “woman” in the nineteenth century. In Fuller’s sketch, the flower speaks, has a point of view, and a history. The history she recounts to the traveler reveals the process of the unmaking of an emblem. The magnolia tells the traveler that she began life as a different kind of flower, an orange blossom, before she was transformed by a mystical power. Most flower dictionaries define the orange blossom as a symbol of generosity since it offers fruit and flower simultaneously. In Fuller’s tale, the orange blossom, as an exalted ornament and commodity, resembles the nineteenth-century true woman:€“On me the merchant counted, the bride looked to me for her garland, the nobleman for the chief ornament of his princely hall, and the poor man for his wealth. All sang my praises, all extolled my beauty, all blessed my beneficence,” the magnolia recalls of her life as an orange blossom (47). But eventually the orange blossom wearies of her extravagant self-sacrifice:€“I had no mine or thine,” she protests, “I belonged to all, I could never rest, I was never at one” (47). As a flower, she is the perfect emblem€– always tropic, never without an exchange value. Like the ideal true woman, the orange blossom leads a selfless existence. Fuller’s orange blossom complains of “a fullness of speech” (“I was never silent. I was never alone,” she claims [47]), but she can never express her own needs. In a striking image, the orange blossom claims, “Painfully I felt this want, and from every blossom I sighed entreaties for some being to come and satisfy it,” but “each bud only produced€– an orange” (47). Here the feminine is indeed shackled to the cycle of reproduction through floral imagery€ – but only under protest. In fact, the orange blossom’s plight might be said to replicate that of the nineteenth-century woman’s

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sex life:€without birth control, anytime she reached out in desire she ran the risk of producing€– a baby. Rather than creating a sexual self, she might re-create yet another being who would demand further sacrifice from her. The orange which almost violently jams the end of her sentence (“from every blossom [she] sighed entreaties … but each bud only produced€– an orange”) seems to cork up her speech, rendering her matter rather than mind, a body never heard from. Her desire is channeled into the service of the sexual economy in which she circulates; it binds her to her bodily and social functions of providing pleasure and (re)producing fruit. Yet the orange blossom does not turn to a strategy of passionlessness, the nineteenth-century belief that women had no inherent sexual desire, an ideology that historian Nancy Cott proposes many women strategically endorsed as a method for avoiding excessive pregnancy. Though the orange blossom knows that those who “despoil” her “could not know what was hid beneath the perpetual veil of glowing life”, she does not choose to deny, as passionlessness required, that which is “hid beneath” the “veil” (48). Instead, Fuller’s language momentarily links into the moral reform discourse on male sexuality. This discourse was equally concerned with finding “scientific” reasons for limiting sexual activity, but differed from passionlessness in its recognition of male sexual drives. Using language that echoes this scientific crusade against male masturbation and nonreproductive sex for fear of the enervating loss of semen, the orange blossom considers “hoard[ing] from the daily expenditure of [her] juices” (48) in an effort to grow tall enough to outdistance her tormentors.21 But the orange blossom is able to reject such an economy of scarcity because she is given the opportunity to explore “beneath the veil” when her outer form is killed by frost, allowing her spirit to turn pleasurably inward with a “mystic shudder of pale joy” (48).22 During her withdrawal from her earthly form, she has a mystical encounter with the “queen and guardian of the flowers,” a being whom the flower cannot describe to the traveler “in any language now possible betwixt us” (48). The flower queen facilitates the flower’s turn from satisfying the needs of others to satisfying her own needs, by dictating that the orange blossom “take a step inward” and reincarnating her as a magnolia (49). Flora’s Dictionary defines the magnolia as high-souled, emphasizing the flower’s withdrawal from worldly demands. Fuller’s magnolia sketch treats the two versions of flower language I have discussed:€the orange blossom moves from her status as a circulating emblem serving a highly gender-schematized economy to another version of flower language that enfolds a surfeit of meanings in excess of a system of feminine complementarity and nondesire.

46

Style, Gender, and Fantasy

As the orange blossom, the flower’s circulation as an emblem or commodity (as a bridal flower it was both) is related both to an economy of gender in which the feminine is the complement to the masculine and to an economy of sexuality where woman has no pleasure of her own; her sexuality is for others. The orange blossom’s dilemma arises out of the same reproductive burdens that passionlessness was meant to relieve, but the flower is able to opt out of the either–or bind, the choice between sexuality and spirituality, that passionlessness poses. Her “step inward,” a flight into flower fantasy, enables a recognition of nonreproductive pleasures and releases the orange blossom from the gendered economy she endured. The movement of the narrative, then, enacts Fuller’s dictum in Woman in the Nineteenth Century that women should “retire within themselves, and explore the groundwork of life till they find their peculiar secret,” a project to which flower language with its mystical feminine aura easily lends itself (313). Like flower language, Fuller’s piece is finally more interested in the inward states (and private pleasures) of women than in any traditional relationship with men. The language of flowers facilitates a love affair, but it is an affair with the self. As Paula Bennett has argued, flowers were particularly useful for negotiating such terrain in writing. A flower has “self-contained sexuality,” its “power like its pleasure is located finally within itself.”23 Thus flowers were a vehicle through which women could imagine an alternative sexual economy through which they might “function and flourish outside [feminine] complementarity” (“Critical,” 247). Bennett furthers her reading by turning to an “organic or symbolic base” for such noncomplementary sexuality in the pervasiveness of clitoral imagery of nineteenth-century women poets from Emily Dickinson to Lydia Sigourney. Bees, buds, seeds, and even jewels:€ these “small but precious objects” are part of a woman-centered symbol system that does not define female sexuality as lack, as complement to the male. To the extent that the clitoris might be taken, as both Barbara Johnson and Gayatri Spivak have also noted, as “a synecdoche for the possibility that the world could be articulated differently,” Bennett’s argument has great force, but to the extent that clitoral imagery grounds an alternative symbolic in the female body, it is less persuasive as a key to nineteenth-century flower language.24 What then happens to the soul of the lily as seen by Linneaus’ daughter? If zooming in for genital close-ups seems somewhat anachronistic, we should also look beyond the emphasis on identifying body parts, the rush to isolate genital from other pleasures.

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In fact, the very nature of representation, particularly of a female self, seems to be part of the problem in Fuller’s sketch. The flower queen, the feminine being at the center of the narrative journey, refuses embodiment. The magnolia describes, or rather refuses to describe, the flower queen: Suffice it to say, that it is not such a being as men love to paint, a fairy,€– like them, only lesser and more exquisite than they, a goddess, larger and of statelier proportion, an angel,€– like still, only with an added power. Man never creates, he only recombines the lines and colors of his own existence; only a deific fancy could evolve from the elements the form that took me home. (48)

The limitation of symbol systems, of representation, this passage suggests, is the reliance on resemblance, similitude, and thus dependence on malecentered modes of thought. The logic that the magnolia critiques cannot imagine difference, a difference that would enable construction of female desire independent of male desire, rather than as the complement to male sexual and social status. Such talk, the magnolia suggests, is not the type to “take her home.” Thus, part of the magnolia’s voyage of self-discovery is a quest for a new language and a new logic€– not merely a new anatomical symbol system€– to articulate what she finds in order to ensure that it remains her own. Like Bennett, I consider the use of flower language to be a linguistic strategy enacted by women to express autonomous desire, not in gaps and silences, but in words. But rather than making recourse to the biological “constants” of women’s anatomy, we might examine strategies like flower language as historically embedded formations of women’s sexuality. My point is not to deny that Fuller’s flowers do signal sexual pleasure; it is rather to recognize how that experience is being created in the language in a way does not map precisely onto bodily acts. The flower queen cannot be described “in any language now betwixt us” because she is “secret, radiant, profound” (48). The flower with its genital significance is figured as a secret entity in the story, while the figuration itself is simultaneously inlayed, enmeshed, and secreted in lush language. We might say that Fuller’s flower language employs a sentence, not just a vocabulary.25 As Fuller’s magnolia sketch suggests, such language protects female sexuality from commodification, and yet, this language is not primarily compensatory. The cloaking nature of Fuller’s language is a function of both protection and pleasure. Sexual expression is not silent or absent in these works, but it is not laid bare either; it is clothed, even covered, in lush language. The suggestion of a female body shimmers in the satin cup of the magnolia or the secret radiance of the flower queen, but it remains veiled€– Â�ethereal, yet sensual, like the fragrance of flowers, or the soul of the lily.

48

Style, Gender, and Fantasy

It is the scent and not the sight of the magnolia that leads the traveler to her. Her scent, also referred to as “her song,” is the expression of her “peculiar secret” or “hidden meaning”; it tells the story of her journey of self-realization (the traveler even notes that the magnolia has an unusual scent, one that still bears a trace of orange blossom). But the scent is elusive, leading the traveler in a circuitous path; it evades even as it beckons. Scent can even be “thrown” from the flower so that it is not encountered at its origin, but at some other place entirely, just as this flower’s soul is literally detached from her original embodiment as an orange blossom. As if to prepare the reader for such dislocations, the narrator observes in the beginning of the magnolia sketch that certain words “charm us like a spell long before we know their meaning” (44). But succumbing to the spell is the first step toward knowledge; had the narrator not “learned to prize the monitions of my nature as they deserve, and learn sometimes what is not for sale in the market-place”€– in other words, to apprehend something that does not translate or circulate€– he never would have abandoned his route to seek the magnolia (44–45). This sort of unmapping, the willingness to relinquish a known destination in order to succumb to the experience of the journey and the flower itself, occurs as Fuller’s ornate, mystical prose sidetracks the reader and attenuates and even impedes signification. Fuller’s sketch suggests that the pleasure lies as much in the experience of this euphemistic language, its convolutions and coverings, its long way around the issue, as in any peek at metaphorical body parts. But “euphemistic” quickly becomes an inadequate descriptor since it suggests a simple substitution for a more graphic phrase, though flowers are most often read as part of just such a system. In fact, the notion of a language of flowers has continued to have a long and surprising career in contemporary theory, where it illuminates the structure of language in its interaction with our imagination through basic associative links that, based on the notion of flowers as emblems or signs, bear a substitutive relation to one another, what Christopher Looby has called a “metonymic series”.26 Looby suggests that T. W. Higginson in his Army Life in a Black Regiment (1870) uses flowers as elements in a “metonymic series” that leads through a chain of erotic displacements that allow him to “avow his love for the race he lived with and fought for, and to disavow the erotic investment that informed that love” (111). Looby builds on Georges Bataille’s essay “The Language of Flowers,” where Bataille (like many flower dictionary editors before) proposes a key to the “secret” of the language of flowers. Bataille argues that our investment in flowers as a symbol of love is based on a substitution€– that of the beautiful corolla of the flower for its

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hairy sex organs. That substitution duplicates our own habitual structures of erotic displacement that begin with our love for a person rather than his or her sex organs. Bataille, like Scarry, observes in the human perception of flowers “the inevitable seductiveness produced by the general thrust from low to high,” but Bataille seeks to get to the bottom of the idealizing function of such psycholinguistic daisy chains by drawing our attention to the flower’s roots, “swarming under the surface of the soil, nauseating and naked like vermin”.27 Bataille explicitly equates flowers and “beautiful women” as representations of the human ideal, but, by plucking the petals of a red rose to reveal a “rather sordid tuft,” he reminds us of the failure of (floral and feminine) ideals€– of “the filth of [the rose’s] organs,” and “garish withering” of the corolla (12). Bataille’s can be read as a modernist reaction to the kind of correspondential chain that popular Transcendentalist thought often made of flower language as, for instance, when Lydia Maria Child reflects, while pausing amid what she calls a “mystical” outburst in her September 1842 “Letter from New York” on flower language:€“I began to write about flowers with the utmost simplicity; not meaning to twine of them a spiral ladder of garlands from earth to heaven”.28 (She had been discoursing on “the ascending series” of progressive and orderly “planes of existence” which “touch palms” when plants, like the Crab Cactus, resemble animals [180, 181].) But Fuller, as I have shown, wishes to go neither up, like Child, nor down, like Bataille, in a chain of associations or dissociations, but rather nowhere, like the traveler the magnolia delayed. (And even though Child gives her garland organization and direction, speaking of flowers seems also to carry her off her path.) Thus, though it is most common to observe that flowers are always tropic, that they are made to be detached and turned into ornaments, or placed in symbolic circulation, Fuller’s magnolia sketch thematizes this version of flower language as its problematic€– it is the orange blossom’s very dilemma. Bataille’s ravishing of the flower to discover its hidden (sordid) materiality is only the reverse of their deflowering circulation as signs, as always already flowers of rhetoric. Fuller’s historical moment was rife with readings of flowers akin to Bataille’s. Nineteenth-century luminist painter Martin Johnson Heade plucks magnolias and positions them sans vase “like odalisques on a couch” (according to one nineteenthcentury commentator quoted by Looby) for his famed magnolia series (Looby, “Flowers,” 126).29 J. J. Grandville’s decadent French giftbook of the midcentury, The Flowers Personified, in which flowers are a species of women, delights in lascivious vignettes of “the traffic in flowers” or their torture by lady botanists who anatomize them “to penetrate the secrets of

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nature” (317, 320). We might also see in Heade or Grandville the desire to reduce or denude the idealism of flower language€– its “mystical” surplus of femininity, which is read by them as a gilded cover for the female sexuality they each claim to unmask. Similarly, for Bataille the female body is the threatening material excess that language can never idealize or transcend. If, however, instead of employing a striptease hermeneutics that seeks the body part in the textual flower (and here Bataille’s anti-Â�idealism would keep company with feminist impulses to uncover the body), we understand the flower€– and by extension, the flower of language€ – in women’s highly wrought writing as a dressing, a poetics, that is in many ways an end in itself, we better understand the erotics of highly wrought writing. Fuller is after a different form from the metonymic chain€– what she calls a “living hieroglyphic” in her second flower sketch, “Yuca [sic] Filamentosa.”30 If “The Magnolia of Lake Ponchartrain” was Fuller’s allegory of the unmaking of an emblem, “Yuca Filamentosa” is her allegory of the making of a more accommodating floral form, “the living hieroglyphic,” a form she hopes is like a flower, or, better, like a flower’s language. The speaker wonders, “In the world of gems, the pearl and opal answered to the moonbeam, but where was the Diana-flower?€– Long I looked for it in vain” (51), and the sketch is devoted to the search for and discovery of the flower€– a pair of yucca€– that answers her query. Fuller, like Child, seems to be relying on the “doctrine of correspondences,” a belief in a relation of analogy between the spiritual and material world where, as Emerson famously proposed in Nature, “Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact. Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind … flowers express to us the delicate affections”.31 John T. Irwin, in his study of the centrality of the hieroglyph to the American Renaissance, describes how the major canonical writers conceive of their own writing processes as that of hieroglyphic translation. Irwin argues that hieroglyphics were considered a language of material forms evoking an “original,” closer relation between words and things, between sign and referent, before a “fall” into a conventional language of arbitrary words.32 Through the doctrine of correspondences, Irwin argues, the writer “penetrates the emblem to reveal its inner simplicity, to show the hidden relation between outer shape and inner meaning” (11). Recovering the hidden essential structure or meaning within the outer complexity of objects or emblems and revealing its relation to a universal metaphysical system was the linchpin of Transcendental correspondence and romantic symbolism more generally. Fuller, however, signals her intention to condition the terms “correspondence” and “hieroglyphic”

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when she uses both in the first two paragraphs of her sketch, and in doing so she addresses the significant traffic between popular notions of flower language and high romantic interest in flowers as keys to the nature of language.33 Fuller troubles the universality of such a system, in which the diversity of nature yields to an underlying unity, when she notes that the earth corresponds differentially, and seemingly unequally, to sun and moon:€“Could it be that she [Earth] … never returns one word to the flood of gentleness poured upon her by the sovereign of the night?” (“Yuca,” 50).34 When her speaker claims, “The correspondences between the various parts of this universe are so perfect, that the ear, once accustomed to detect them, is always on the watch for an echo,” the notion of “correspondence” slides from philosophical to figurative as her language evokes a kind of conversation, a reciprocal exchange between entities that stresses the function of answering, of call and response, more than of analogy (50).35 In the “Yuca” sketch, Fuller seeks the language of the conversation between the feminine moon and (also feminine) earth, which is fundamentally different from that between the sun and moon. Mary E. Wood has Â�provocatively addressed Fuller’s disruption of heteronormative narrative patterns in Woman in the Nineteenth Century by citing, among other techniques, Fuller’s creation of a narrative “web of desire” that “follows a model of conversation,” for example, when “one woman, the narrator, opens the space for the subjectivity of another woman, Browning, who evokes the presence of yet another woman, Sand, by addressing her as ‘you’”.36 This is much the kind of simultaneous and multilateral, rather than serial, circuit Fuller’s speaker joins when finally she discovers the yucca “at sunset … as … the slender crescent of the young moon greeted me, rising above a throne of clouds, clouds of pearl and opal” (“Yuca,” 51). Formerly silent and “dull,” even failing to bud, the yuccas enter into a dynamic of expression with the moon and each other: At last came the night of the full moon, and they burst into flower together. That was indeed a night of long-sought melody … But now each little bell had erected its crest to meet the full stream of moonlight, and the dull green displayed a reverse of silvery white. The filaments seemed a robe, also of silver, but soft and light as gossamer. Each feature of the plant was now lustrous and expressive in proportion to its former dimness, and the air of triumph, with which it raised its head towards the moon, as if by worship to thank her for its all, spoke of a love, bestowed a loveliness beyond all which I had heretofore known of beauty. (51)

The yucca alone is not the “living hieroglyphic to indicate that class of emotions which the moon calls up” (50); it must be apprehended in

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conjunction with the other entities that seem to foster its livingness. By rendering the living hieroglyphic as a composite figure, Fuller transforms the Â�correspondential use of gems and flowers into a more complex practice (50). The yucca is not quite a substitute for the moon, for Diana, or for a pearl or an opal, any more than it is exclusively a euphemism for female anatomy. Rather, in searching for a form that will “correspond” with Diana, the moon, or a type of emotion, Fuller arranges and constellates her images, keeping all of these associations in play, or alive€– “living.” In constellating earthly bodies (gems, flowers) and heavenly bodies (the moon, a goddess), rather than forming a correspondent series like Child’s, the living hieroglyphic creates a space for Fuller to keep in play both body and spirit, both the material and the ideal. Fuller’s speaker wishes to experience the feminine, to know the “class of emotions which the moon calls up,” and Fuller recreates the dynamic arrangement in the living hieroglyphic that embodies that complex of feeling (50). Fuller underscores “the hour of rapture” in the “night of the full moon” when the yuccas burst into bloom together with the moon, which itself has dilated from crescent to full (52, 51). Like the floral “calendar” appended to many flower dictionaries that noted the month and even hour of each species’ time of bloom, Fuller emphasizes the event of blooming, while her form approximates it through its opening, or dilation, of vital “living” interaction between formerly static emblematic nodes, proposing a new structure of “correspondence” that emphasizes relationality as experience rather than an abstracted form. Through a pun on “spheres” as both realms and spherical bodies that seems to run throughout Fuller’s sketch, Fuller converts the abstracting language of correspondence, of “spheres” that link, into a system of sensual bodies€– connecting planetary “orbs,” flower “bells,” and “globular world[s]” of nectar “in the flower’s midst” (50). These bodies connect through sensualized modes of address, by “pour[ing]” and “flood[ing]” light and “erect[ing]” crests (50, 51). When Fuller connects the world of flowers to a world of other feminine entities, she maintains the sensuality of relation between feminine bodies€– moon and earth, moon and flowers, flowers and women, perhaps women and women. With the other bodies with which it seems to both correlate and commune, the yucca generates, rather than merely emblematizing, a “class of emotions” and a riot of sensations. In what might be an extreme version of twenty-first-century feminist Rosi Braidotti’s concept of “feminist figurations,” figurations that are “not parasitic upon a process of metaphorization of ‘others,’” Fuller subjectifies the objects she brings into relation or correspondence.37 In keeping all of its components in play, her figuration becomes expansive and even

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florid€– like a flower in its structure and literally incorporating the relations of flowers within it. Fuller rejects a logic of substitution, of emblems, but rather keeps a sense of the flower’s sensual immediacy and of its life, and understands these as generative of the Â�“feeling” she seeks. This dynamic of relation clothes the flowers in a new opulence; the flowers display a “reverse of silvery white” and their filaments seem a “robe, also of silver,” with a luster that echoes the moonlight and the clouds of pearl and opal. Fuller’s vocabulary of gems, thrones, and queens marks the conversion of the language to an opulent fabric in which luster and expression go hand in hand. Refusing the enthusiasm for hieroglyphic translation, the surface of Fuller’s hieroglyphic seems to get richer rather than yielding to an essential meaning. This is not language to be worked through; what for Bataille is a penetrating discovery to be made in the deep structures of (flower) language is for Fuller a deliberate and pleasurable embedding and ciphering. The flower neither leaps to the brain, as in Scarry’s formulation, nor withers into dirt, as in Bataille’s. Fuller offers instead a flower that will not be plucked. Rather than a reduction of one end to the other€– of ideality to materiality or vice versa, Fuller proposes an opening or expansion in the space of metaphor€– a blossoming of one end in another, creating a figure that is symbolic and material at once, rather than sequentially. Fuller reconditions our sense of what it means to think of flowers as a hieroglyphics, a language, suited to articulate woman or the feminine. Fuller reclaims the term “hieroglyphic” to recapture a sense of the flower’s alterity and of its outer complexity that embodies an untranslatable excess that is both sensual and suprasensual. In her version of hieroglyphics as a language, she maintains the fullness of untranslatability and the fascination of a complex elaborate design. We are to read the flower and Fuller’s figuration of it as we would such a hieroglyphic. Language that is intricate, elaborate, and opaque, that is arranged according to the sensual events and feelings it produces, and that generates excesses that it does not translate, can embody the feminine€– here, Diana and her pleasures. Fuller’s form exploits conventions latent in flower dictionaries, for the dictionaries also connect flowers with a web of associated sensory material€ – sentiment or mood, several verses of poetry, and an illustration, relating the emotional, aural, and visual. When the magnolia refused to represent the flower queen to the traveler, she claims it is because it is a “presence thou mayest feel, nay, approach step by step, but which cannot be known till thou art it, nor seen nor spoken of till thou hast passed through it” (“Magnolia,” 48). To “feel” the sense of the flower queen might mean to approach her essence through the emotions, or perhaps through intuition;

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the use of touch is even suggested if one is to “feel” a meaning. What is clear is that the flower queen’s meaning cannot be garnered through the usual avenues of sight or speech, which would attempt to fix or determine that which Fuller wishes only to approximate or suggest. For to “know” the flower queen would signify a type of possession of her€– of an erotic self€– that the magnolia wants to safeguard. The traveler himself has had to “feel” or sense his way to the magnolia. It is her striking fragrance, “a fragrance,” he claims, “beyond anything that I had known,” that leads him to seek “the poet of the lake that could utter such a voice” (44). This odd collapse of fragrance and voice, a literalizing of flower language€– it is an attempt at the flower’s language rather than a language in flowers€– attests to the complex of strategies required to attend to (hear? smell?) such a voice, to make sense of scents. Some type of intuitive “feeling” is required to make the leap from scent to sentiment, a feeling that is itself a complex of imagination, emotion, and sensory perception. The attempt to convey such feelings without losing the pleasurable play between the sensual and the imagined leads Fuller to the living hieroglyphic, a nonhierarchized space where fragrance might signify as much as specularity, and songs can be smelled. Looby has speculated on the readerly effects of “olfactory texts,” texts like Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” redolent with allusions, frequently floral, to the smell of the poet’s body in the “sniff of green leaves” or, in the Calamus poems, of the eponymous rushlike plant said to smell like semen.38 Looby suggests that such “a fantasmatic encounter (subjectively experienced as real) with a material exudation of the poet’s body” potentially triggers “sensory hallucinations” that are physiologically indistinguishable from actual olfactory events and may form a textual/sensation interface that goes some way toward Whitman’s desire for contact between poet and reader.39 Fuller would no doubt demur from Whitman’s desire for virtual contact in which whoever touches the poem touches the body of the poet, but she does share the urge to body forth a sense of erotic yet Â�inassimilable presence in language. In conceiving, through flower Â�language, a relation between scent and “song” as both a poetics and amalgamated Â�sensory-expressive communication with a reader, both Whitman, as Looby argues, and Fuller experiment with the less emblematic aspects of flower language to in some way break through what Michael Moon has called “the frustrating but ultimately incontrovertible conditions of writing and embodiment that actually render it impossible for [Whitman] to produce in his writing more than metonymic substitutes” for Whitman’s body.40 But while Whitman’s drive

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may be to make language a more permeable medium between bodies, one that can be reached through, or experienced as a vehicle to virtual experience of another’s body, Fuller lingers in the less resolved dimensions of textual materiality to locate new forms of sensual presence€– the self as scent rather than the self’s scent. The magnolia’s scent invites and challenges the traveler by turns. It beckons and evades; it can only suggest a flower essence because the traveler’s perception is limited. As such, Fuller’s flower language might be said to partially align with Baudelaire’s “Correspondances,” in Les Fleurs du Mal, where “Nature is a temple in which living columns / Sometimes give voice to perplexing words. Man passes there as through a forest of symbols / Which observe him with familiar regard”.41 Nature’s meaning is only partially articulated and received; symbols seem to keep their secrets, presenting thickets that are both forbidding and beautiful. The forms of nature announce their familiarity€ – part insolent, part sympathetic€– with man, even as he cannot fully fathom in response his relation to them. He Â�journeys but nature sees. The poem goes on to evoke not nature’s words, but its untranslatable voice:€“Like the long echoes mingling in the distance / In a deep and tenebrous unity, / Vast like the night and the clarity of light, / Perfumes, sounds, and colors correspond” (193; my translation). Baudelaire’s correspondences, I would argue, work on a horizontal plane to open unexpected avenues between the senses as in synethesia, but perfume, sound, and color also acquire integrity, as themselves having things to express that are not fully translatable. Fuller’s striking position is to correlate a feminine voice with the strange and seductive language of nature that Baudelaire depicts, rather than with “Man”€– a generic label in the poem, yet gendered in his separation from nature’s symbols, particularly the floral. Fuller stresses her perceivers’ inadequacies:€the magnolia ultimately recedes from the traveler, and Alcmeon, the companion of the speaker in “Yuca,” exasperates as one whose eye seems to look past the material world. Fuller’s speaker remarks that Alcmeon is “one who could travel amid the magnificent displays of the tropical climates, nor even look at a flower, nor do I believe he ever drew a thought from the palm tree more than the poplar” (“Yuca,” 52). Fuller’s talking flowers counter the location of experience and knowledge in the person who finds “the face of the world covered with blazons to be read” rather than listened to (Irwin, 36). The efflorescence of her language, miming the talk, perfume, or blossom of flowers, is an attempt to locate an “other” language that will not so easily yield to the eye of the perceiver.

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Fuller’s strange talking flowers emphasize the flower’s own language rather than a language in or through flowers, and open the potential of floridity as the site of gendered alterity. Fuller’s flower sketches may also be a more pointed response to her friend Emerson. In an experience that was formative to his composition of Nature, Emerson visited the Jardin des Plantes in Paris in 1833, and discovered there, particularly in the arrangement of plant specimens into compendiums of species (as the displays were laid out in a demonstration of the new natural history), the conceptual tools he needed to conceive his philosophy in Nature. When he envisions in the botanical garden’s rows a “dictionary” and a “grammar of botany,” Emerson participates in the popular interest in a language of flowers.42 As Lee Rust Brown has argued, Emerson found in the botanical rows of specimens the unity underlying the chaos and beauty of nature. Walking through the allées of the garden, he discovered the conceptual movement through a series of forms that, as Theo Davis argues, constitutes his experience of transcendence and that becomes the most important conceptual and stylistic pattern in his writing.43 As Brown writes of the cabinets in the museum attached to the Jardin, “All nature, in the Museum, yielded itself to the conceptual graphics of outline, series, and hierarchy … its entire structure demonstrated the way that ‘visible things,’ once converted into ideational currency, became ingredients of ever larger forms”.44 The point for Emerson is in the transparency of all forms, their giving way to the experience of transcendence. At the Jardin, Emerson felt like “a bridegroom,” later remarking that the naturalist “cannot see a star, but instantly this marriage begins of object and subject” (qtd. in Brown, 60). In Nature conjugation is the very basis for man’s relation to the world:€“man is an analogist, and studies relations in all objects. He is placed in the centre of beings, and a ray of relation passes from every other being to him … All the facts in natural history taken by themselves … are barren, like a single sex. But marry it to human history, and it is full of life” (36). As many critics have remarked, these roles are clearly and conventionally gendered; the masculine perceiver “takes up the world into himself,” as Emerson put it in Nature, and it revolves around him. Fuller’s mission in the flower sketches is ever to refuse this role for the feminine and for the nature with which it is imbricated (33). If language formed the medium for this marriage, then Fuller seeks through language a different kind of relation to the feminine and nature. In her “Yuca” sketch, Fuller’s speaker makes her friend Alcmeon feel his exclusion from the scene instead. Even though it is the flower’s “nuptial hour” Alcmeon is not the bridegroom:€“the piercing sweetness of this flower’s look in its nuptial hour

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conquered even his obtuseness. He stood before it a long time, sad, soft, and silent. I believe he realized the wants of his nature more than ever he had done before” (52). In “Yuca Filamentosa,” the elements of nature seem to forge their own relations (relations that are strikingly independent of masculine entities) rather than being composed by the seeing eye. The flower’s look “pierces” the observer, not the other way around. Nor in “The Magnolia of Lake Ponchartrain” does “the poet conform things to his thoughts” so that “all objects shrink and expand to serve the passion of the poet” (Emerson, Nature, 45). By contrast, the magnolia sets the terms under which it will be known. The magnolia protests her social and symbolic “beneficence” (a term Fuller may have used pointedly as it was Emerson’s for the role of nature toward man), and she requires the perceiver to learn the flower’s language, rather than utilizing her as language (47). The flower conditions perception rather than yielding to it. For Emerson, the world’s surface of diverse forms gives way, beneath the vision of man, to a common spiritual depth and unity of meaning. Fuller’s apprehension of nature is primarily through an aesthetic and sensual sense of its arrangement rather than the abstracting verve that structured Emerson’s encounter with the displays at the Jardin des Plantes. But although Fuller’s flowers have their own voices, experiences, and particularities, the feminism of Fuller’s flower sketches does not pivot on a claim about the personal or particular in the face of Emerson’s abstraction. Fuller is like Emerson in her desire to enliven a principle she locates in nature, one that articulates the grammar of nature, self, and spirit. Fuller wished to animate, however, a principle of difference rather than unity. Fuller calls this principle, which I treat more fully in the next chapter, “the feminine principle,” and it is a force she imagined unleashing from its artificial containment, to be expressed and experienced. Even as she seeks to release it from conventional forms, she seeks a language as a medium or body that will hold and make present this force. Her flower sketches work out a model for this language, based on values of opacity rather than transparence, accruing rather than Â�dissolving complexity, convolution and constellation rather than serial progression, and a commitment to an enunciative position of difference, which she locates in nature. To preserve the hieroglyphic essence of the flower was to preserve the complexity, interest, and fullness of nature’s alterity. For Fuller, there was no moving through this language, through its opaque, living, spirited surface, just as there was no moving through the diverse forms of nature’s surface. The spirit, the gendered principle or force, she wished to elicit and develop is also sensuous, and the role of her poet is to embody it in language and provoke its apprehension in the experience of style.

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Style, Gender, and Fantasy Or n a m e n t a n d de s i r e :€S t e ph e ns’ “f l ow e r y s u pe r s t ruc t u r e”

At virtually the same moment, but in a very different genre, Ann Stephens was also working out what flowers might have to say. Despite Fuller’s lamentations about the quality of popular magazine fiction in her essay on American literature, she explicitly exempts two writers from her indictment:€Lydia Maria Child and Ann Stephens.45 Stephens’ Mary Derwent (1838) shows how a commitment to floridity as feminine alterity opens up registers of the text that deeply complicate the text’s consent to the social regulation of female desire enacted by the plot of female Bildung. In Stephens’ text, the dialogic confrontation between two frames of reference that Fuller staged between her flowers and an interlocutor is shifted so that a similar confrontation begins to occur across the narrative framework, between reader and florid scenes. Stephens’ writing allows us to see how the values Fuller delineates in her living hieroglyphic are more widespread. Stephens’ popular fictions were considered to be of “the passionate school” and though her interest in treating the transgressive desires of women in fiction was sometimes more lurid than feminist, she seems committed to making space for them in her fiction. Few writers better demonstrate how highly wrought style could grant hieroglyphic presence to the unspeakable desires and pleasures of women, rendering such feelings both present and unavailable and their expression both sensual and strange. Stephens is best known today as the writer of the first dime novel, Malaeska, and as a sensation writer. Shelley Streeby’s study of nineteenthcentury American sensation fiction of the period reveals the logics behind the genre’s drive to physically and politically arouse and startle its readers.46 Sensation fiction, Streeby argues, is designed to make the reader feel the social fragmentation and corruption of the class system in the tortured, cadaverous bodies it features; to recall the reader to the life of the body and its fleshly particularity; and thereby to resist the decorporealizing abstractions of republican rhetoric that effaced the pain and suffering of unequal, working-class bodies. Streeby usefully acknowledges that sensationalism was not simply a “male discourse,” and her survey notably addresses women’s writing, including Stephens’ dime novels (32). But women’s relation to the sensation genre was complicated, Streeby cautions, by the separate spheres ideologies “that still exerted pressures on definitions of popular body genres in this period” (32) and furthermore by writers like George Lippard who implicitly pit the culture of working-class sensation against a culture of “feminized” genteel values, epitomized for him by the genteel press and

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the (often male) author who was the “penner of paragraphs so daintily perfumed with quaint phrases and stilted nonsense” (qtd. in Streeby, 33). Here, a floral style signifies for Lippard the moral bankruptcy of Â�middle-class values. Streeby notes that, given these constraints, in women’s sensation fiction “sensational aspects of the text, which focus on violence, shocking scenes, bodies, and the grotesque are often framed by sentimental devices that reassert genteel values and middle-class respectability” (36). Women authors, she claims, valorized a middle position opposed to the perceived excesses of both the upper and lower classes. I would argue, however, that rather than automatically consign women to the “genteel values” that the sensation genre seems designed to confront and thus perhaps take the equation of women (or flowers) and gentility at face value, we may need to redefine where we look for the “sensational aspects of the text” in fiction by women. Of Stephens’ 1854 mega-hit Fashion and Famine, a city mysteries novel, the British Athenaeum protested that the sensationalism emanated from no specific depiction of bodily states or sensational situations but was nonetheless undeniable:€“the sensual materialism that oozes out of every page is something wonderful, and indicates, not so much any specific immorality as a state of general moral decomposition”.47 Stephens’ sensationalism is not, or not only, in the livid visage of cadaverous bodies but in the florid registers of sensual language and mise en scène, and this is excess worth our attention. As we have seen with Fuller’s rearticulations of flower language and the value of floridity, such linguistic excess cannot be taken for granted as a sublimation of sensuality. We must consider that it may be the thing itself:€in Fuller a renovated flower language embodied the ideal, the feminine principle, and in Stephens it embodies the anti-ideal, a political counter to genteel femininity. (Stephens’ sensational critique of genteel values, it should be said, is one that is based on gender, not class.) The effect is different, but the essence, the manifestation of resistant gendered presence, is the same. The story of Catharine Montour, the heroine of Mary Derwent, is much like the orange blossom’s:€it is both a quest for fulfillment in a culture that denies it and a fantasy of subverting self-sacrificing womanly roles by privileging desire. Mary Derwent was widely touted as the “$200 Prize Article” of an 1838 competition held by The Ladies’ Companion, an American literary magazine featuring well-known authors including Hawthorne and Poe. Stephens’ serialized novella enjoyed frequent reprinting in the years that followed, and she eventually revised the work several times through her long career.48 Notwithstanding the title of the book, it is Catharine’s

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story that drives the narrative and in the shorter original, holds the Â�center. Readers seem to remain unconvinced by Stephens’ attempt to contain Catharine’s story:€ most summaries, both contemporary and modern, never mention Mary, a “hunchbacked” daughter in a pioneer family in pre-Revolutionary Pennsylvania’s Wyoming Valley.49 Mary’s liminality as a quasi-outcast who must often retreat to nature provides the narrative opening to introduce a host of characters that meet and mingle with the local Iroquois Indians on the fringes of colonial settlement and within earshot of Mary’s retreat. In this way we are soon introduced to Catharine as “The White Queen” of the Mohawk Valley, based very loosely on the historical Catharine Montour, of mixed French and Indian descent, who was a Seneca chief and matriarch in the late eighteenth century (Stephens’ Catharine is a Seneca matriarch, but is fully British, not of mixed race).50 Mary witnesses a clandestine dispute between Catharine and a young Tory captain for the honor of Catharine’s half-Indian daughter, Tahmeroo, who has fallen for the false engagement he has offered. At this point, the narrative seizes the opportunity to follow a gorgeously bedecked Catharine to the hut of the local Moravian missionary, where she goes to secure a legitimate wedding ceremony for Tahmeroo. But the missionary longs to hear the infamous woman’s story, and Catharine takes over the narration for the equivalent of about half of the story, placed at its center. Catharine’s story begins in England with a misguided platonic marriage to her tutor and guardian, Varnham. She soon realizes that “the deep, sisterly affection which I had ever felt for him … was not love, at least, not the love of a soul like mine,” when she falls in love with Varnham’s best friend, Grenville Murray.51 After what seems, through some narrative haze, to be a consummation of their adulterous love, and after watching Murray go on to marry another woman, Catharine goes mad. In a remarkable chapter that I will treat at length, in later editions titled “Dreams and Fantasies,” Catharine relates her dreamscape in detail. When she returns to sound mind, she determines to fake her suicide and escape to America to save her husband and Murray any further torment because she cannot relinquish her illicit desire. She becomes a leader of the Iroquois, using her grand inheritance (fortuitously liquidated in cash and jewels before her departure) to mete out justice and maintain peace between the Indians and settlers. Some time after, she must marry a chief (with whom she will conceive Tahmeroo) in exchange for the life of none other than Murray, his wife, and child, recently arrived in the New World and captured by Catharine’s tribe.52 When the frame story resumes, it ushers in the denouement, in which Catharine and Tahmeroo, betraying their Indian ties as

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the narrative hurtles toward a restoration of order, work to save the settlers from Indian attack. During the fiery battle scene that functions Â�narratively as Catharine’s atonement for gender and race transgression (a bullet significantly shattering the bejeweled serpent crowning her head), we are confirmed in our suspicion that the missionary is actually Varnham, her (other) husband, and Murray, her lover, also makes his reappearance. In fact, Catharine dies from her Indian husband’s knife when she jumps in front of it to save Murray, allowing her to die in Murray’s arms. We learn that Murray is the father of Tahmeroo’s British seducer, and he oversees his son’s reformation, which allows the young couple to live a prosperous life on Catharine’s English estate. Obviously, the novel is breathtaking in its entertainment of female adultery and white female miscegenation, not to mention “feminine rule” and polyandry. Moreover, these topics are broached primarily by the perpetrator herself, in a first-person voice. Fascinating as the plot is, I propose that we might best examine Stephens’ treatment of these very issues through the language and figure with which she embellishes her heroine and her heroine’s articulations of self. Moreover, we will find that the novel’s “flowery superstructure,” to use an apt term from Stephens herself, allows for a different play of figure, desire, and language than do the structural aspects of the narrative (220). In particular, Stephens’ ambivalence regarding her protagonists’ transgressions is less resolvable within the heightened descriptive registers of her text, which registers themselves fail to fold into the narrative teleology that punishingly resolves Catharine’s transgression. Stephens’ novels in general are marked by what Yu-Fang Cho, in a study of Stephens’ dime novel, Malaeska, calls “the co-existence of subversive and conservative elements,” which Cho explains as Stephens’ privileging of gender over racial politics:€while Stephens’ stresses, in words from her dime novel, the “mournful picture of womanly self-abnegation” across Indian and white culture, she also makes Malaeska, also in Stephens’ words, “whiter” and “whiter.”53 Cho argues that Stephens critiques both white racism and patriarchy, but erases differences between women by proposing middle-class femininity as a universal ideal. Indeed, in Mary Derwent, Catharine’s daughter Tahmeroo, already a docile subject to her white seducer, is subsumed into the white middle-class ideal, as Malaeska will be. But I would argue that, as the above lament on womanly self-Â�abnegation reveals, middle-class femininity is an unstable ideal in Stephens’ works. Mary Derwent reveals that white, middle-class femininity is neither universal nor ideal when Catharine resides with the matriarchal Iroquois. The costs of feminine self-abnegation are weighed

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in counterfantasies of illicit indulgence in passion, material and sensual pleasure, and power that are centered in the madness sequence and in her Indian residency. Catharine’s Indian sojourn, it seems clear, is less of an exercise in cultural relativism and more of an exploration of the discursive territory outside of middle-class femininity. Gender politics continue to trump race politics, but the “co-existence of subversive and conservative elements” is most evident within Stephens’ treatment of the middle-class ideal of femininity. After inheriting a grand fortune (which the text makes clear is possible only in Britain and with unentailed estates, thus adding property rights to the list of female transgressions enjoyed on the one hand and chastised on the other), Catharine claims, “the predominating feeling was a deep and almost masculine consciousness of power, a sense of personal dominion” (119). Her new-found sense of dominion extends, for the first time, to herself. It is as if her new luxurious surroundings, surroundings that she now owns, stimulate an erotic self-possession€– one that paves the way for the acknowledgement of her extramarital desire. In a moment that may mirror the reader’s own pleasure in the transgressive fantasy of the text, Catharine claims, “My brain was thronged with shifting and brilliant visions, and I lay with sleepless eyes and aching temples, extended on my silken bed, exhausted and weary with pleasurable excitement” (120). “Almost forgetful” of her sleeping husband, Catharine’s description lingers on each sumptuous component of her apartment: The sun was stealing through rose-colored curtains of the richest silk, which fell heavily over the windows, and shed a mellow and blooming light through the room. Crimson drapery, lined with the same soft rose-tint, looped and fringed with gold, fell from the canopy above my couch, and swept the Persian carpet which spread away in a succession of brilliant and yet subdued colors over the floor. The foot sunk deep into its moss-like texture when it was trod upon, and it seemed breaking into bloom beneath me, so natural did the gorgeous flowers glow up in the tinted light. Two exquisite cabinet pictures hung before me, and my recumbent form was reflected back by a tall mirror as I half leaned out of bed, that I might comprehend in one view all the luxurious arrangement of my chamber. There was a charm flung over everything; for all was enjoyed for the first time, and all was mine. (120; Stephens’ italics)

This is highly figured language€ – aware of its extravagance and admiring its reflection in the riches it treats. In this description, so plush and foregrounded are the textures that they seem to team with presence. The heavy, sensuous textiles at the window and on the bed, the unusual give of the carpet, and (in the next passage) Catharine’s loose, flowing hair,

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ensconce her figure. The rhythm of the sentences is languorous, as each dependent descriptive clause seems to fall from the next, perhaps like the plush folds of textiles described. “Fall” and its cognates are in fact repeated words:€“the rose-colored curtains … which fell,” “crimson drapery fell,” “the Persian carpet which spread away,” “the foot sunk.” Such repetition and its effect may also recall the unrepresentable pleasures of that other sensuous fall around which the story revolves. The reader sinks into the scene, and the language of ripeness€– “heavy,” “rich,” “mellow,” “blooming”€– sinks the reader into the sensuality of the passage. The carpet that “spread away” and seems “breaking into bloom,” the hair “broken loose,” the light “blooming”:€the decorative elements threaten to surge through the boundary between figure and ground. Rather than overcoming Catharine, the décor seems to reflect stirrings in Catharine as well, as her exalted “all was mine!” menaces gendered barriers between (male) subject and (female) object. As with the orange blossom-turned-magnolia, female self-possession heralds new rhetorical and linguistic models. Catharine continues: After I had become satisfied with dwelling on the splendor which surrounded me, I turned with newly-aroused vanity to gaze upon myself€– upon the long and beautiful hair which, in my restlessness, had broken loose over my shoulders€– upon€– but my husband awoke … [W]hen he arose and kissed my cheek and spoke in his old familiar voice, it seemed as if a strange spirit had flung coldness on my aspiring wishes. (120)

The waking of Varnham, the kiss that reminds her that she belongs to him, and the voice that intrudes on her autoerotic fantasy in which she claims “in all that I had looked upon, he was forgotten” pull Catharine back into a world that makes her “blushing and ashamed” of her newly acquired selfpossession (120). Catharine loses mastery of her body because the gaze and words of her husband disable her delineation of the contours of her body. In syntax strikingly similar to the orange blossom’s complaint of only “producing€ – an orange,” Catharine’s gaze falls upon her hair, her shoulder, and then “upon€– ” but her husband’s awakened gaze blocks her further delineation of self. She is unable to re-present herself, or at least her words cannot perform the mirroring of a body, a referent, that we expect to find in this moment of self-examination. But is it that she cannot complete this erotic definition of herself in her husband’s presence, or that she will not? Instead of focusing upon what we assume will be an erogenous zone, her sexual expression dilates out to the sumptuous details of the chamber’s décor, so that the tactile sensations insinuated into the sumptuous textiles of the chamber reside there as an erotic presence belonging to and

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known only to herself, not unlike the rich details of Stephens’ prose for the reader. The subjects of the sentences in the first description€– “the sun,” “the crimson drapes,” “the foot,” “two cabinet pictures,” and “my recumbent form” seem to form the same kind of sensuously connected constellation as Fuller’s yucca, moon, and clouds, and here they create a textual space, an interval in the narrative, that yields a momentary rhapsody, connecting all. The odd phrasing, “the foot,” may seem to speak to the fragmentation of the female body or the hysterical division of the body from the female psyche, but I think it is instead a kind of pleasurable throwing of the body into a sensual scene. Catharine’s resounding “all was mine!” claims this vision as her own, and it is a vision that is inclusive of, but not limited to, the sight of her body. Forced to suppress her sexual desire, particularly her forbidden love for Murray, Catharine goes mad. In the remarkable chapter narrated from the point of view of the mad Catharine, Stephens seems to take us within the “shifting and brilliant visions” that had “thronged” Catharine’s mind in the above scene. For Catharine, “madness took a strange and pleasant form. It was but the loss of reason and acuteness of feeling, while the fancy was left unbridled to revel at will among the high and beautiful things of its own wild creation” (163). Like the orange blossom, Catharine narrates an escape from a physical existence, a body that is a prison, and, simultaneously, “retires within” an alternative, differently constructed, form. The chapter imagines an existence outside of culturally defined womanhood since “the laws which regulate earth were unknown in this world” (163). Conveniently, the primary law obfuscated here is the marriage contract:€the beings that peopled her imagination “could not understand how affection for any thing might be wrong” (163).54 More importantly, Catharine imagines herself no longer recognizable as a woman; like the unfixable essence at the center of Fuller’s magnolia sketch, Catharine states, “Almost every day I took to myself some new form” (163). Also as in Fuller’s sketch, Catharine’s dream world is a female world. Despite the apparently rampant heterosexuality of her waking life, Catharine “peopled the world with shapes of aerial beauty” and they are all “sister spirits” (163). Homoerotically linking scent and women’s secret stories, Catharine recalls, “How I loved to interlace my wings with the bright beings I have but faintly described, and while we nestled together among the vines, or lay on the odorous flowers, to whisper to them of the things I had seen on earth” (163). Female sexuality is not registered as a fixed or biological identity, but like the always-shifting form that Catharine

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assumes, self and desire flit just out of reach of incorporation in any fixed system of understanding. On the other hand, though she “peopled the world with shapes of aerial beauty” the context in which they are suspended is elaborately adorned (163). The chapter in fact completes and extends the interrupted reverie in Catharine’s chamber, not by restoring Catharine to a visual perusal of self, but by heightening her connection to and indulgence in an ornamental mise en scène. The language that threatened to “burst into bloom,” that nudged the boundary between figuration and excess, is in full flower here. Naomi Schor traces the feminization of the detail throughout aesthetic discourses and its corresponding threat to a unified worldview, that is, “its tendency to subvert an internal hierarchic ordering of the work of art which clearly subordinates the periphery to the center, the accessory to the principle, the foreground to the background”.55 Barbara Johnson locates a related “counterstory” in what she calls the potential recursivity of conventional figure and ground, where ground is typically feminine negative space presenting the masculine figure.56 But if, Johnson argues, the two can be imagined as potentially recursive, cutting both ways so that negative and positive are exchangeable or possibly do not even fit together, we might have a counterstory of gender, a new model of how the feminine is related to the masculine, or set free of relation to it. We might look for this counterstory in Catharine’s fantasy world, which is only a more elaborate, more fantastic version of the “ground” that presents her figure in the chamber scene. We already sensed a world within a world in the flowers that leap up from the Persian carpet, itself designed as a microcosm of a Middle Eastern walled garden. The muted light, the glittering ornament, and the flowers of the carpet are transformed into an ornate fantasyscape in which she “wander[s]” and “bathe[s],” literally Â�losing her figure in the scenery, as her foot is earlier lost in the carpet (120, 163). But if in the earlier scene in Catharine’s chamber we sunk into voluptuous language describing a plush interior, here in the dreamscape passages, some other kind of imagery seems to rise up to meet us with its fantastic ponderousness: Nightly I went to my ideal world, and we sported together, my sister spirits and I€– in groves where the trees were transparent and waterlike in their clearness€– every trunk a column of clouded agate spreading out in to a canopy of thick leaves€– each leaf a broad emerald, which struck against its fellow with a soft, bell-like chime, making the air melodious, as with a thousand fairy harps set in motion by the breeze. We wandered together, to and fro beneath the emerald shade, where

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columns of heavenly sculpture shot their snowy shafts up from among the trees, and where temples, pillared with jasper and domed with fluted pearl and burning opal stone, stood in clouds of soft light, which curled upward for ever, with a continued silvery smoke emitted from their own exhaustless censers. (163)

The sentences are marked by isocolon, the repeated sound, length and syntax of phrases, for instance:€“we sported together, my sister spirits and I” and “We wandered together, to and fro.” Such patterning endows the passage with a musical rhythm that helps establish the grace and ease of movement of the feminine beings in the dreamscape. Attached to these resonant opening clauses, we again have a network of descriptive phrasing, more structured than in the description of the chamber. The first sentence is particularly reminiscent of the kind of play with stylistic branching or appending, visually and semantically performed by the dashes, that was demonstrated in Fuller’s sentence about the orange blossom that “produced€– an orange” and Catharine looking “upon€– .” These cases foreground gambits at self-directed, nonreproductive, autoerotic expression. How does one extend the self into expression without replicating the containments of the gendered body is the question they pose, and both authors respond by extending and elaborating a space in language. The multiple dashes in Stephens’ sentence also recall the dashes that link the vining sentence in Harriet Prescott Spofford’s Azarian, examined in my introduction as an example of an arabesque pattern. Stephens’ sentence is more structured than Spofford’s:€its dashes append descriptive phrases of similar length and rhythm and at fairly regular intervals. Stephens’ final two phrases are absolutes, phrases that act like nouns and therefore do not modify the content of the sentence but instead extend or direct its meaning. Spofford also uses absolute phrases, a copious number of them, and the effect is to amplify the principle of development in the sentence€– the feeling of more and more material being produced as more noun phrases come forth. (I examine the spirit Spofford intends by this in Chapter 3.) Stephens shares in this effect of appending weight and volume, but her absolute phrases direct as well as extend:€they telescope our perspective, directing us from the “ideal world,” to “groves,” and then to “every trunk” and “each leaf.” Stephens’ stylistic arrangement takes us in a few measured but vertiginous steps into a sudden encounter with the detail of the mise en scène. Our disorientation is compounded by the conglomerating effect of each strange image in each appended phrase or clause. The sensation is disquieting, not least because of the mixed discursive registers in which the detail into which we are thrust is presented:€“the

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thick vines which drooped to the margin [of the fountain were] heavy with emerald leaves, and with clusters of blood-red rubies and purple amethysts, each gem shedding a light from its own burning core upon the pellucid water, that sparkled and laughed in their basin; and then flowed away in soft liquid murmurs toward the grove we had left behind” (163). Stephens converts the flora of the scene into a language of gems (indeed another, if lesser, industry in nineteenth-century publishing)€ – where leaves and flowers are agate, emerald, amethyst, and ruby, and where water is “pellucid” and “sparkl[ing],” smoke “silvery,” and shade “emerald.” Elements of Catharine’s chamber are reminiscent in the canopy of the tree that recalls the canopy of the bed, the thick and heavy vines that act like curtains, and a mirror-like pool that throws prismatic reflections of Catharine and her sisters. But the “soft” and tactile idiom of her earlier sensuous language, couched in a floral register€– the voluptuous, blossoming ripeness of the chamber€– is replaced with a scenic economy of dazzling images. What might Stephens want us to see or feel in this scene and its shifts of registers? Our discomfort with the scene is fed by a figurative economy of flora and jewels that is obliquely at work. If we recall again Fuller’s orange tree and its reproductive concerns (not with the nonreproductive pleasures that troubled health reformers, but with reproductive success and its lack of nonreproductive pleasures), one of Stephens’ most striking images, the transparent trunk laden with heavy branches of gems, gains some relevance. While the trunk is admittedly strong, being agate, its transparency and “water-like[ness]” carry the suggestion that life and color have been leached in the production of its prodigious and cacophonous canopy of chiming emerald-leaves, a yield that extends to the zealous proliferation of ornamental and luxury materials in its vicinity. In this topsy-turvy (or at least top-heavy) world where foliage, conventionally stamped with the beauty of impermanence in floral aesthetic languages, takes on more substance than the structural trunk or vine, other possibilities for reapportionment glitter. Given the book’s treatment of extramarital passion, we can certainly read this within the context of nineteenth-century sexual reform discourses as a kind of squandering of bodily energies beyond the proper channels. Here those energies have gone into a quantitative and qualitative overproduction of fruit and foliage, where trees bear sparkling gems of fruit. We can read Catharine’s sexual incontinence in this proliferation of foliage, just as we can sense it in the profuse verbiage and accreting syntax of the quoted passages.

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It is more difficult to know how to value such “gems” in either their figurative or stylistic registers€– do they disturb or please? Certainly, the foliage and fruit weigh heavily in this world, as, through some alchemy that literalizes metaphor, the leaves are precious stones:€the leaves are not like emeralds, and they are not emerald leaves€– leaf and emerald are collapsed rather than juxtaposed. The short-circuiting of metaphor seems to close down interpretive possibilities and instead instantiate an impassible limit, enclosing Catharine’s expression in a nonproductive and ornamental register, the fruit and foliage a figure of blockage like the orange blossom’s orange, but rendered even more so by their unnatural obduracy, and though they are jewels, partaking of no particular economy of either meaning or use. The conventional symbolic functioning of gems and flowers is disabled, nor do they circulate in any diegetic economy as did the orange blossom’s flower and fruit. Catharine’s expression is figuratively rendered impenetrable, self-contained, jewellike, and it is syntactically rendered such by branching phrases that lead only to strange conglomerations of images€– images that signify luxury, but of an obdurately material, hard and not sensuous, variety. The “jewels” are a figure of blockage, but unlike the orange, which is harvested, alienated from the tree, these jewelfruits seem to obstruct those who would consume them. Certainly we might link this effect of impasse to Stephens’ dutiful condemnations of crass, self-indulgent materialism, of riches that merely decorate Catharine’s new ancestral estate without finally fulfilling her desire. Such accoutrements, which extend to her elaborate embroidery and jewels, are textually linked to her own misdirected ambitions and emotions that flow into luxury goods, decadent sexuality, and wanton colonialist power (recognized by the text as aberrant only for its “masculinity” not its imperialism)€ – these are the fruits of Catharine’s thwarted and misdirected efforts. Catharine’s maternal efforts produce similar results:€she tells Tahmeroo, “[Y]our nature has been to me a blooming garden, which I could enter and cultivate beautifully … but there is one thing I have not done. I have laid no strong foundation of religion and principle for my flowery superstructure” (220). Stephens protests the conditions under which Catharine’s greatness is squandered or contorted:€if only she had an adequate partner for her passion, or if only, Catharine reflects, Varnham had “counseled action instead of patience and submission, had he bade me to go forth in the world … and win for myself a station highest among women” instead of marrying her (118). But Stephens is extraordinarily ambivalent about whether Catharine’s social alienation speaks to society’s gender constrictions (the sexual double standard, domestic confinement,

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the denial of property rights) or to Catharine’s failure to femininely submit to such prescription. Catharine’s visions are linked to those of Mary, who is often found “dreaming and tilling the paradise of her mind” and within whom “genius” is found “struggling for utterance” though she is concerned to “conceal its bright hoard of ideas”€ – its gems (20).57 Does Catharine’s expression flow disproportionately into the ornamental registers of dress, language, or social conduct because society contorts it or because her desire€– its objects, intensity, and even presence€– is unnatural and unfeminine? Stephens answers differently at various turns, but she remains fascinated with the presence of this florid “utterance,” and the flowery superstructure of the tree is one of the narrative’s most memorable manifestations of it. The jewels of Catharine’s dreamscape tree and vines seem to record this utterance and its fascination without chastening it or translating it, and in this they telegraph a kind of relation with the jewels of Catharine’s attire. In both cases, the jewels are indeed signs of unchastened power and unregulated passion, but perhaps they are not signs of aberrant coldness or tragic compensations for loss of feminine softness and warmth but are simply pleasing in their weight and obduracy. When for Murray’s wedding Catharine adorns herself with jewels that entwine her hair like the gems that will weight the vines of her fantasy, using so many that they “light” her face, husband Varnham instantly reads in them her refusal to relinquish her passion€– “the evil destiny that I had wrought for myself,” as Catharine paraphrases his interpretation (126). The jewels continue to speak of such in her American sojourn as well. Varnham, now incognito as the missionary, and our surrogate during Catharine’s confession, visibly recoils in horror, shielding his eyes when Catharine opens her jewel casket at Tahmeroo’s wedding. These gems say something more than Denis Diderot’s “les bijoux indiscrets,” the enchanted jewels of his eponymous first novel that broadcast the state of the wearer’s “jewel”€– her virginity or lack thereof.58 While certainly proclaiming Catharine’s promiscuity, jewels are also the sign of what can only be called her anti-confession. For, despite replaying the actions for which she seeks penance to the missionary/ Varnham, including what she rather unrepentantly calls her breaking of “a moral and conventional rule for which society extols such penalties from the woman,” Catharine’s revelations hinge not on the expected conversion to the fold but on the admission that she yet continues to harbor her illicit passion, “lasting as the soul itself” (122, 124). Thus, the jewels that signify unreformed desire do say something crucial, unregenerate and enduring, that the narrative machinery cannot seem to eradicate. They constitute the

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overbearing nature of women’s expression denied clear channels, much like Mariana and her cinnamon fires, but they also suggest that such expression will not be tragically extinguished. They suggest the artificiality into which women’s expression is pressed, but also a denial of access to women’s “nature.” Stephens’ plot ambivalently corrects such aberrant assertions of desire, whisking Catharine offstage by way of a death that is part martyrdom for the social stunting of women, part divine justice meted out to female transgression. Arguments rightly suspicious of this quick narrative resolution could point to the extended narrative “middle,” here rendered in Catharine’s own voice, but they must also point to the weight of the literal and rhetorical jewelry of the text. Stephens’ jewels seem most to broadcast that the unproductive and ornamental register has a certain value for expression precisely because it is impenetrable and self-contained, preserving the ironically virginal integrity of a gemlike female passion in fruit that cannot be eaten and gems much harder than hymeneal rubies. Might Stephens’ prose at its most elaborate and fantastic pitch then form the basis for a different form of sensational body to which the text provokes our response? The watery trunk beneath the emerald canopy seems to recall Catharine’s body and the way it branches into the scenic ground of its venues when she extends her body into the sensual details of her chamber, including the “canopy” over her couch, now reiterated in the canopy of the tree. Those details constitute a kind of extra-embodiment, but the new “unbridled” form she claims in her dreamscape is a grotesque version of the one she imaginatively claims in her chamber. By “grotesque” I mean to recall the style of ornament that is a variation of the arabesque:€it is also a flowing, vining pattern but it incorporates human and animal figures in addition to the botanical.59 A definitive distinction between the two styles is notoriously difficult to come by, but theories generally propose a difference in effect, one produced by the incongruity of mixing plant and animal or human motifs. Through Stephens’ conglomerating images and bizarre mix of registers, a fantastic€– meaning to make present or show to the mind€– form arises. Thus a grotesque form is not necessarily a gruesome one like the contorted, tortured, cadaverous bodies of Lippard’s sensation fiction. Rather, the jewels of the dreamscape are a shocking distortion of the material delicacy of flowers and foliage, just as the breach of feminine delicacy (the fall of Catharine) that the language of the dreamscape protects and the female self-containment it announces are also shocking distortions of genteel femininity. We might detour momentarily to examine the grotesque form of the feminine that issues from another imaginative experiment in the period.

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In Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Garden,” Dr. Rappaccini creates monstrous vegetables that are not unrelated to Stephens’ grotesque feminine form.60 If Rappaccini has also experimented with his own daughter, putatively tainting her with botanical poisons from the hybrid flowers amongst which he has raised her, he grafts the human with the floral, creating the disturbing mix of registers that comprises the grotesque. As Charles Boewe has pointed out, in the nineteenth century, the practice of grafting was controversial because it often created sterile, hence “unnatural,” flowers and because it excited analogies to racial miscegenation.61 Rappaccini’s flowers thus raise the specter of both racial impurity and unnatural purity (i.e., reproductive sterility). Rappaccini’s tinkering is tragic because it defiles, or poisons, what the story seems to posit as the “natural” and pure sexuality of women€– sexuality that is natural by virtue of being reproductive and pure because “untainted” by foreign corruptions. Giovanni’s encounter with Beatrice pivots on whether such corruptions can be seen, verified, to determine whether Beatrice is angel or demon. But the story finally turns to Giovanni instead, to ask whether such judgments of character can be empirically based, a process that risks replicating Rappaccini’s grotesque admixture of human spirit and scientific procedure. As Thomas Mitchell has convincingly argued, Hawthorne may be responding to his friendship with Fuller and the recently published flower sketches. As Mitchell reads it, the flowerlike Beatrice’s enchanting voice, making Giovanni “think of deep hues of purple or crimson and of perfumes heavily delectable,” is like Fuller’s forging of a sensual disembodiment that evades a strict visual regime.62 But Fuller, as writer of the flower sketches, might also be like Rappaccini in her own productions of alternative versions of woman (a visitor’s discussion of a magnolia grafted to an orange blossom was in fact the inspiration for the her sketch and is reflected in its mixed scent). Hawthorne seems to allow the question of Fuller’s flower politics to remain a question, but Rappaccini’s attempt to contrive an improvement on “natural,” embodied, reproductive female sexuality is for Hawthorne the sine qua non of a monstrous artificiality that perverts the natural order of the creation. Stephens’ project, on the other hand, is to make female sexuality utterly apparent through her own contrivances, manipulations, and discursive grafts, and so she seems to construct a different relation between artifice, nature, and femininity. Stephens roots the desire she portrays in her heroine, the longing for a way of being€– non-monogamous, self-pleasuring, and self-defining€– in the buried “utterance” of woman, which she posits as a natural utterance that can only appear as artificial and fantastic

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as it develops within the social order it betrays. Again, it is not always clear whether Stephens condones this manifestation, but she does seem Â�fascinated with its appearance. In the highly wrought scenes of Stephens’ text, there is an ecology between the artificial and organic, one we witnessed in the flow of décor and self in the chamber and one that is also to be seen in the amalgamated registers and the hybridization of jewels and flowers in the dreamscape, a contrivance that nonetheless yields the sincerest expression. Stephens’ text seems to revaluate artificiality as the only true expression, just as it recuperates sexual impurity as a form of purity. Stephens’ Mary Derwent thus calls into question official abstractions and the decorporealizing of female sexuality not by the social particularity or even the spectacle of the body, but through the sensual materialism of her style. In doing so she offers neither the sensational embodiment of Lippard’s sensation fiction, nor the transcendence of sensation to be had in the genteel, middle-brow fiction Lippard critiqued. Stephens’ most ornate, elaborate passages explore the rebellious pleasures of indeterminacy on the one hand and alternative forms of presence in the textures of language on the other. There was no way to fully own such a project in realist representation of character or in the plots allowable for women’s stories; this is a counterstrategy, a way of presenting expression via textual effect rather than by representing it in character, dialogue, or action. It is one that is facilitated by the performance of style on language. The uncanny embodiment of transgressive passion, showing up where it is not imagined to exist, gathers substance from Stephens’ conglomerating prose, grotesque discursive mixture, and fantastic imagery, and her prose interposes itself between reader and narrative to block easy consumption of the story. It is disturbingly sterile in its refusal to contribute to the symbolic resolution of the narrative or to produce the status quo. The non-collaborative surface of her highly wrought prose is subtly thematized in relations between Catharine and her confessor, the missionary/Varnham, from whom she withholds her repentance (and her passion). The opaque style closes around that withdrawal, protecting the desire of which it is the synecdoche from a collaborative circuit of sympathy or identification. In doing so, it provokes perverse sensations:€recoil from its strange and stubborn aspect, but also perhaps vicarious pleasure in its glittering refusals. Lurking on the underside of, and even within, the idea of flower language is the notion of a foreign, alien, and resistant language€– flowers present a material resilience that will not be translatable into words but into some spectrum of feeling€– emotional, sensual, and erotic. In conventional understandings of flower language, when flowers are taken

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as the fleeting materiality that language renders symbolic and so puts at a wistful distance, the elusive secret of flowers lies in their temporal rarity. But writers like Stephens and Fuller instead use flowers to generate systems of language that hinge on the flower’s life rather than death and that allow its multiple sensual registers to speak and trouble its conventional tropic capacity. The alterity of flower language, its secret, manifests in Fuller’s and Stephens’ writing as excess, as both represented riches and a richness of language. Fuller and Stephens exploit the flower’s “rarity,” not as a temporal rarity but as a material and artifactual rarity€– its material fineness on the one hand and its intricate, elaborate construction on the other€– as a model for their own style of expressing desire that is neither anatomically embodied nor spiritualized, neither sublimated nor exposed, but that has a weight, mass, and a sensual aspect that, through the alchemy of the performance of style, might be palpable in language. Pu r s u i ng s t y l e s of a lt e r i t y i n Or i e n ta l i s t g a r de ns of pl e a s u r e Walled gardens of fantasy, ornament, fountains, and rich perfumes:€ the “flowery superstructures” of Fuller’s and Stephens’ explorations of a language of the feminine inevitably cite the fabled gardens of the Near East, drawing both on biblical gardens, including that of the Song of Songs, and the Orientalist fantasies that claimed the harem as the origin of flower language. These associations can be seen to lend more than romantic embellishment:€ornament, voice, and gender are closely linked in a specific dynamic bearing many connections to Orientalism. Certainly the texture and mode of ornamentality has commerce with Orientalist fantasies of scenes replete with luxuriant materials, walls of rich inlay and mosaic, piles of sumptuous textiles, or the tropical blooms of vibrant gardens. In the Orientalist art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such scenes conveyed an imagined Eastern accumulation of wealth that never circulated, never entered into a Western capitalist economy, and therefore spoke in Orientalist terms to the regression of Eastern empires. That Orientalism posits a large-scale gender binary dividing the rational masculine West from the sensualized feminine East has been well known since Edward Said’s path-breaking Orientalism.63 The women in this study did not explicitly partake in the Orientalist project of representing the East, with the notable exception of Harriet Prescott Spofford in Chapter 3, but rather respond to a context in which their construction as women fluctuates between two diametrical poles€– an exoticizing

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sexualization on the one hand, and a narrowly defined purity on the other. In other words, it should not be surprising to learn, Orientalism helped to organize various configurations of separate gender spheres while itself operating as a significant racial binary of Western ideology. Fuller and Stephens, and all of the writers I examine as highly wrought, enter into this discursive terrain when they adopt styles of indulgence, material accrual, and ornament as variously inflected modes calculated to confront Western constructions of femininity. But the writers examined in this study seem to sense in the discourse, for instance in the “other” or “woman’s” language of flowers associated with harems, a less stable or total division of gender and power than Said relates. By this I do not mean that these writers looked explicitly and self-consciously to the harem as a different model of gender spheres available cross-culturally, but that they located an ambivalence in the Western discourses around the otherness of the feminine East, and of the Oriental woman. They located a possible alterity, a knot in the homogenizing system of gender that worried its resolution into gendered binaries, and they chose on some level to exploit it. As Madeleine Dobie has cogently argued of French eighteenth- and Â�nineteenth-century Orientalist writing (by men), “the representation of others generates a sense of otherness within knowledge that undermines rather than authorizes formulations of sameness and difference.”64 This sense of alterity inheres particularly in language; Dobie describes the way in which engaging a discourse of otherness can reveal language as a foreign, alien, and resistant code, though that sense of alterity is often reabsorbed in the kind of Western universalisms Said interrogates. Certainly the Orientalist strains of Victorian flower language dictionaries court a possible sense of linguistic alterity in their stress on its mysticism and otherness as language. In exploring that possibility, the writers of this study identify with that otherness (if not with the other) rather than aiming to suppress or exclude it. It is more common to view Western feminism as raising the specter of the East€– domestic immurement, supposed sexual slavery€– as admonition to the West to eradicate its similarly “barbaric” practices in a “conservative effort to make the West more like itself” and less like the East.65 In imagining a restructuring of language and its social dynamics from the occluded point of view of women or the feminine, the subjects of this study effect instead a potentially more radical challenge to the construction of the West itself. Of course that identification with the foreign can easily slide into an occupation of it. The fact that women engaged Orientalism as a structuring device of gender without necessarily examining its racializations

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led to certain predictable results. Catharine’s exotic wigwam in which she makes for Tahmeroo a “couch of boughs … heaped with the richest furs and overspread with a covering of martin skins, lined and bordered with fine scarlet cloth” on which “a chain of gorgeous worsted work linked the deep scallops on the border and heavy tassels fell upon the grass from the four corners” (62) suggests that Stephens can explore through luxury Catharine’s resistance to the transcendence of self and materiality required especially of women in Western Christianity, while also keeping it at arm’s length as a form of primitivism, here perhaps drawing on an Orientalization of the Indian that works to legitimize colonial conquest of a race imagined to be engaged in older economies of sensual gratification and accumulation rather than investment and industry. The space of her wigwam replicates that of the harem when her chief-husband appears as a kind of shadowy despot in a house of women. The chief is in fact emasculated by Catharine’s superior powers, and the text codes this as an effect of feminine power, a subversion of Western gender arrangements, but also as an effect of Indian inferiority. In another instance, the space of the wigwam codes an Orientalization of relationships that works to undermine racial essentialism through gender:€ it fosters a mother–daughter bond energized by an intensity and identification on Catharine’s part that emphasizes Tahmeroo’s gender, in the form of her oppression by men and the constraint on her desire, and thus obviates a racial essence that would bar her, as mixed, from completing the narrative resolution that integrates her into [more liberal British] society in Catharine’s place€ – perhaps a dubious reward, but also a fate few other mixed-race characters, including Stephens’ tragic mulatto-type Indian heroine in Malaeska, enjoyed. Thus the gorgeous textiles of Catharine’s chamber function as the seat of an exploration of resistant constructions of femininity, but her luxurious surroundings, including her Persian carpet€– a virtual, but also portable and consumable Eastern walled garden€– can also reveal the Western female privilege of consuming Oriental styles without racializing consequences.66 Fuller’s engagement with Eastern cultures, including her appropriation of the talisman of Isis as her personal sign, are based on studied efforts at cultural relativism, which allow her to launch the kind of multifaceted exploration of gender we find in Woman in the Nineteenth Century. We have seen that her interest in a “hieroglyphic,” the term itself of course from ancient Egyptian culture, of femininity intersects with both popular and scholarly interests in the origin of language. But in the flower sketches, we find the traces of the ascribed Oriental(ist) origin of flower language enmeshed in Fuller’s desire to generate new models of language and subjectivity. Does the

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orange blossom leave a Mediterranean bondage to find freedom in the States (thus using the East to exemplify gendered slavery)? Is her exploited sexual past, her sexual experience, then mapped onto other minority women by her proximity to stateside models of the harem in the New Orleans slave market and concubine system and her now mixed (orange and magnolia) perfume? We learn that a magnolia’s “blossoms, if plucked from their home, … drooped and grew sallow, like princesses captive in the prison of a barbarous foe” (45); it is a muted example of the disingenuous denial and projection of sexual vulnerability by white women onto women of other races that Karen Sanchez-Eppler and others have delineated (though the characters are not women but flowers, the emphasis on their whiteness is racialized€– and Orientalized€– by the quoted comment).67 The transposition of Orientalist discourses onto new spaces and for new purposes is fraught with vestiges of the imperialism that generated them. Nonetheless, it is worth asking why Orientalist motifs appear, with more insistence than seems attributable to the exoticization of female sexuality, in the works I examine. The spatial topography of highly wrought fiction shares with Orientalist travel accounts the idea of access to a special space which highly wrought fiction constructs as a world of women, or, in its most phantasmic turns, feminine beings. Thus in Fuller’s flower sketches and Stephens’ Mary Derwent, we find a subtle generic affinity with Orientalist accounts of the harem, but here that “rare account of the interior,” as Ros Ballaster has styled it in her recent study of Orientalist tales, comes not from the usually male European tourist of harems, but from the occupant herself allowing us to peep into boudoir or into remote gardens filled with feminine “sister spirits,” flower queens, or Diana’s correspondents.68 The narrative structure of these embedded speech acts frames them to insist that the account is “rare” in that it is given once in a life (the magnolia’s “tale of my being,” Catharine’s confession) or is contingent on a highly specific conjunction of events (the “night … of melody” relayed in the “Yuca” sketch); the account seems to cost its speaker something (the division of words from self for the magnolia, a feminization of Catharine that leads to her death), but the account is also rare, the texts seem to insist, in its intricacy and complexity of expression, as the interior worlds the speakers present are ornate, intricate, and singular, straining and often resisting the communicative functions of language. That the voices of the magnolia and Catharine reach us across a narrative frame in which we listen with male interlocutors, aware of the privilege entailed, alerts us to the gendered boundary-crossing the texts set up, a structure encasing and presenting the female first-person voice as itself fascinating

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and rare. The interlocutors are silent, awed, and even implicated by the stories, much as “the piercing sweetness of [the yucca] flower’s look in its nuptial hour conquered even [Alcmeon’s] obtuseness. He stood before it a long time, sad, soft, and silent” and “realized the wants of his nature more than ever” (“Yuca,” 52). There are other possible locations for the reader; we might join the speaker just as “the young moon greeted [the speaker]” from her luxurious “throne of clouds, clouds of pearl and opal” allowing the speaker to access and join the network of sensuous female interactions that compose the living hieroglyphic of the yucca’s bloom (“Magnolia,” 51). Conversely, we have seen the way that Stephens’ prose thrusts us into close and unwanted intimacy with a feminine dream world, an alien garden of gems, turrets, and censors where feminine beings whisper secrets to each other. “Harem” means both sacred and hidden; in the stories I have examined, the subtle associations with the harem provide an important setting for the presentation of female voice, coding its articulation as rare in terms of its high value, its complex and ornamented composition, and its difficulty of access. The associations with the harem, as an alien feminine world, heighten and charge the textual intimacies the texts call us to. Thus it is not only the luxuriant textures of the harem (or “harems of the mind,” in Ruth Bernard Yeazell’s more appropriate phrasing) that resonate through women’s highly wrought writing; models of female voice in Orientalist literature also seem on some level to inform such writing, as the biblical and fabled East provide unusually effective and even fascinating models of female voice.69 The Canticles’ Shulamite, the only female speaker in the Bible, is a powerful example of a sensuous female voice calling out from the walled space of her garden and body, much as the magnolia, “full displayed to the eye of day, yet guarded from the too hasty touch even of the wind by its graceful decorums of firm, glistening, broad, green leaves,” beckons the traveler from the road while maintaining measured control through the same play of voluptuous yet reticent language (Fuller, “Magnolia,” 45). According to Ballaster’s analysis, the women of the Oriental tales, especially Scheherazade of Arabian Nights and Roxana of Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, like Fuller’s flowers and Stephens’ bejeweled Catharine, “control through visual and verbal language the consuming look of their audience” (65).70 In particular, these storytellers gain authority over male listeners and rulers through the “deployment of physical ornament and verbal dexterity,” which can highlight for us as well the connections between Fuller’s and Stephens’ investments in ornamental styles and the new Â�enunciative position given to the female voice in Fuller’s dialogic narrative form and Stephens’ framed first-person female narration (Ballaster, 131).

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This confrontation between female voice and the male gaze suggests the other levels of gendered confrontation€– the friction generated by female expression within sexual economies, within the regulations of symbolic language, or within gendered complementary spheres€– that my analysis has located in these texts, and particularly in the use of flower language. The textual intimacies these texts invite or require can produce new gender relations. Such confrontation between clearly gendered positions does not necessarily argue for the continued binaries of segregated spheres. An effort to bring feminine voice into a different, certainly noncomplementary, relation with masculinity hinges on the importunities of the inter-, intra-, and in some cases, extratextual addresses of the female-voiced texts. As Scheherazade tells her stories at the request of sister Dinerzade, in a concerted effort to seduce the listening sultan into delaying the murder he has mandated for each nightly lover, so we are involved in a dynamic that links us through the speaker to worlds of women. We are linked, like the sultan, to female voices and conversations, reminding us of how Fuller also, as Jeffrey Steele puts it, “dramatized imaginary dialogues between masculine representatives of the dominant culture and subversive female speakers who oriented themselves through relationships with powerful female beings”.71 Thus, enclosure in the context of the harem can just as often signify, as Dobie’s account reminds us, “the spatial embodiment of excessive female influence and deleterious mixing of the sexes” (50). Dobie has argued that in French Orientalist literature, the enclosures of the harem signaled masculine anxiety over the potential erosion of sexual difference in French culture€– the harem became a negative vision of sphere dissolution rather than containment. Dobie further traces the transfer of this Orientalist dynamic onto Western forms in the work of Rousseau, who likened the effeminizing dangers of the French salon to that of the harem and the talk of the salonnière, or hostess, to that of the sultana. It was not only the influence of the hostess and the sheer numbers of her many female participants that concerned Rousseau, but the kind of intimacy entailed:€the mixture of public intellectual discourse with intimate parlor talk; the closeness of men’s and women’s bodies brought into nondomestic relations within a private space; and the new circulation and value given to women’s talk in the salon. One can imagine that the Â�sensual intimacy between women is also threatening because it trades on the dissolution of complementary sexual relations. The Orientalization of the salon thus bred a form of “domestic intimacy that was linked to erotic life€– and for many contemporaries, to the sphere of the feminine” that many sought to circumscribe (Dobie, 101).

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Rousseau’s example points us to the slippages Western women experienced between their own positions and that of the Oriental woman. Fuller and Stephens, as featured New York salon participants (and Fuller, partly styling her own reputation and particularly her Conversations after Corrine, the fictional improvisatrice of Madame de Stael, the renowned French salon hostess), were surely familiar with such sensualized constructions of their own “talk.” Emerson’s recounting of Fuller’s conversational style, mentioned in my introduction, as involving a dispensable “pile of native and foreign ornaments” or Orestes Brownson’s description of Fuller as a “heathen priestess” is consonant with Rousseau’s anxieties about intellectual women in French culture and his diffusion of those anxieties through Orientalism.72 In a letter to Fuller on her sketch Emerson further remarked, “The Magnolia is a new Corinna with a fervid Southern eloquence that makes me wonder as often before how you fell into the Massachusetts.”73 But both Fuller and Stephens turn images of “fervid” Orientalized feminine talk to their own purpose to create a narrative dynamic structured to propel their readers into intimacies with a feminine voice that will necessarily disrupt gendered binaries and challenge the confinement of female sexual intimacies to domestic and heterosexual (reproductive) relations. Highly wrought writers pursue in Orientalist motifs what they perceive to be a style of alterity in an attempt to accommodate language to the articulation of women’s desires. The issue of voice and a stylistic texture of accrual and indulgence are related. Ballaster suggests that “the stories of the Arabian Nights, like the woman who tells them, transform the world around them by repetitive acts of simple accretion” (108). The events of her stories matter less in Scheherazade’s redemption from the sultan’s tyranny than the “stubborn vitality of their matter itself,” the endless ability of her fascinating talk to defer her death sentence (108). The intensity and extent of Stephens’ stylistic effort in Catharine’s chapter-long narration of her dreamscape similarly protects the desire it enfolds from a consuming look. The untranslatable fascination of Stephens’ imagery requires an aesthetic apprehension of its arrangements of sentences and image repertoires and of its mass and weight in the narrative. Fuller’s elaboration of the yucca dilates (and repeats, for the next night) the flower’s moment of bloom, and it also impedes our moving through her prose or past the moment with its enlivening of sensual female voices. Making a feminine voice palpable, sensuous, and intricate is an attempt to present a new version of the feminine. The sensuousness of the language produces our feeling of its alterity. We pause and savor or grapple with the language as

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it works to alternately refuse, invite, or complicate the reader’s access to a space coded as “other.” By imagining flower language as the sensual and strange language of the flower and by envisioning the speech of the flower to come from an enunciative position of alterity, Fuller, the subject of the next chapter as well, begins to work through the version of the feminine, or what she will call the “feminine principle,” that she presents only a few years later in Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Fuller’s and other women’s investment in the soul of the flower, which is significantly not transcendent of its sensuous characteristics, is connected to a wider, burgeoning political and cultural exploration of the nature of spirit, adduced with particular intensity in interests in mesmerism and feminism. In the next chapter, the feminist investment in spirit evolves into an interest in an alternative ontology for “woman”€– not just speaking from the position or in the language of the flower but imagining other ways of being, a new embodiment and new sensations. Fuller’s efforts, shared if not owned by Stephens, in reorienting perspective to a new version of the feminine are extended and vivified in the spaces created by highly wrought style in the examples to follow.

ch apter 2

Sensing the soul:€mesmerism, feminism, and highly wrought fiction

In an article entitled “A Panegyric on Witchcraft, Mesmerism, and Cheap Literature” written for The Columbian Magazine in 1846, James Kirke Paulding satirically commends the practitioners of witchcraft, mesmerism, and cheap literature for offering “a positive and acute pleasure arising from what are called excitements.”1 As befits his analogy, Paulding figures the “exploits of Mesmerism” in much the same way as one might figure the exploits of a heroine of popular literature. While the body is “insensible to pain” during the trance state, the soul becomes totally independent of its old associate, leaving it fast asleep and wandering away to distant regions, seeing sights without the aid of eyes, and exercising all the functions of the five senses, without waiting for the participation of the honest old clay image, which remains quietly at home like an obedient husband while his wife is gadding about enjoying all the delights of a locomotion, exceeding in speed the famous wooden horse of the Arabian knights, the achievements of Aladdin’s lamp, or the magical arrow of Abaris the Scythian. (213)

Paulding equates the titillation offered by this mesmerist excursion into “the spheres” to the excitement produced by an excursion out of woman’s sphere. Likewise, Paulding notes that cheap literature departs from traditional gendered expectations by discarding “the old rusty dogma which makes chastity the prime virtue of woman and exploding the vulgar error, that virtue and vice are direct contrasts and cannot act in perfect harmony with each other” (213). Paulding thus figures the excitement produced by both mesmerism and popular literature as moments of female sexual license. Paulding’s formulation is convenient for my purposes because I want to suggest that his analogy works on a somewhat literal as well as figurative level in the fiction I examine; that is, a kind of freedom, and Â�particularly sexual freedom, is achieved by leaving “the old clay image” at Â�home. Leaving the body and leaving the home are parallel movements:€by moving out of the space of woman’s sphere, highly wrought fictions withdraw 81

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from the space where their heroines are assigned meaning in culture. But by evacuating the female body, highly wrought writers change the way that body counts in social structures. To leave the old clay image at home was not necessarily to abandon the body or its senses, but to abandon certain constructions of it and live it differently. Paulding’s thumbnail sketch of mesmerism, an encapsulation of popular knowledge on the subject, clearly shows the contemporary fascination with transcending the body and, paradoxically, the sensual revel that might result€– an ecstasy of unhampered movement and locomotion and an unrestricted visual capacity. I will therefore find exceptions to what has become the received wisdom on nineteenth-century American women writers€– that, as Nina Baym has summarized it, they were “disinclined to acknowledge the body and physical sexuality as elements of self either inherently spiritual or capable of being spiritualized … Hence rather than integrating physical sexuality into their adult personalities they tried to transcend it”.2 I argue precisely the point that this view has precluded. The genteel Christian notion of what spirit is and does was not inevitable:€certain writers did locate self, difference, and pleasure somewhere between the female body and the sexless soul, in the realm of a “sixth sense”€– one that does not correspond to a bodily organ, but is a sense nonetheless. In this chapter, I explore the seemingly contradictory use of out-of-body strategies by highly wrought writers to construct and explore a disembodied and sexual self. This proposal necessarily entails as well a reexamination of the current critical valuation of spirit as antithetical to body and matter, to history and the social, in nineteenth-century literature. From Ann Douglas to Russ Castronovo, critics have too quickly assumed that spirit, in its less canonical manifestations, is an anemic and “feminized” entity in nineteenthcentury American culture:€ wan, bodiless, generating private ineffectual ecstasies. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance (1852) has become the touchstone for many such assumptions, which take mesmerism as particularly emblematic of the political impoverishment of spirit. By contrast to these studies, which I will examine in more detail, this chapter posits the experience of the trance state, rather than Hawthorne’s Svengali-like model of dominance, as the crux of widespread interest in mesmerism. What emerges from a closer study of mesmerist manuals is a very different version of spirit€– one that has a dynamic and transformative relation to materiality, one that has the muscle to propose social change, and one that can embody female sexuality and desire. Access to such spirit does not involve crossing over a divide and away from matter, as

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Ralph Waldo Emerson’s visionary crosses from opacity to transparency in Nature’s famous figure of the “transparent eye-ball,” but involves instead a form of spirit reoriented toward the material.3 The soul, in fact, arises as central to mid-nineteenth-century feminist visions for social change, and mesmerism provides the effective imaginative vehicle for reconceptualizing gender, sexuality, and spirit in the feminist writing of Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Oakes Smith, strategies found as well in the popular fiction of many women writers, such as the now-forgotten Mary Clemmer, whose Victoire (1864) provides a particularly striking example of what I call Â�feminist–mesmerist discourse.4 Like the better-known bachelor “reveries” of Donald Mitchell, highly wrought narrators access fantasy to explore alternative subjectivities in emotional and physical detail. In the fictions of a later decade, from 1854 to 1864, that I examine here, the dreams and visions featured are not portrayed as the hallucinations of madness as in Ann Stephens’ Mary Derwent, but rather they are visions of insight and truth, they have elements of actual clairvoyance or second sight, and they are often explicit in their plotting of alternative realities. The conjoining of mesmerism and feminism underwrites the development of highly wrought style, especially its investment in spirit and fantasy and the desire to create new spaces and experiences in language. My readings of Fuller, Oakes Smith, and Clemmer demonstrate how the feminist appropriation of mesmerist notions of spirit allowed these writers to develop stylistic floridity into a synecdoche for an alternative form of embodiment with striking consequences for social relations. Their styling of language sculpts our own experiential sense of a pleasurable undoing of the body and our visionary possession of an alternative ontology. Va r i e t i e s of m e s m e r i s m:€be yon d t h e e n t r a nc e d m a i de n According to Oneida founder John Humphrey Noyes mesmerism was “condemned and executed in France” at the end of the eighteenth century, but by the 1840s it had “risen from the dead” in the United States.5 By 1853, Oakes Smith writes in her autobiography, “All the ‘isms’ of every shade were heartily endorsed or rejected by both sexes. There were clairvoyance and magnetism, and phrenology and gymnastics to be talked about and thought about (spiritualism had not yet appeared to any extent, though we all read Swedenborg); and now we women dashed into politics with a zest”.6 A survey of the primary scientific literature on mesmerism of the

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1840s and 1850s provides a complex portrait of its concerns and reveals why it attracted those who, like Noyes, Fuller, and Oakes Smith, sought to describe spirit, gender, and body in new terms.7 Mesmerism is named after the eighteenth-century Viennese physician Anton Mesmer, who claimed to discover a superfine substance that permeated the physical world. The constant flow of this ethereal substance, which Mesmer called animal magnetism, between, within, or through physical objects was the medium through which sensations passed from one object to another. Mesmer held that imbalances in this vital invisible fluid accounted for all disease, and he restored balance in a series of manual passes over the patient’s body using magnets to equilibrate the patient’s fluid. Mesmer’s student, the Marquis de Puysegur, dispensed with Mesmer’s clunky baquet and magnetic rod (ridiculed by all who followed) and discovered the remarkable trance state that his passes could induce.8 Mesmerism traveled to the United States in 1836, via Puysegur’s student Charles Poyen, and, beginning in the 1840s, the trance state became familiar to the East Coast populace through itinerant lecturers. Fascination with mesmerist displays spread quickly at all levels of society as mesmerists performed their demonstrations on stage, in parlors, and in intellectual clubs.9 As how-to handbooks proliferated, men and women from all walks of life discovered their own magnetic propensities and began to experiment with healing techniques. Despite the growing nineteenth-century emphasis on the trance state itself, recent readings of the cultural meaning of mesmerism in Â�mid-Â�nineteenth-century America almost without exception take as their example par excellence the staged show of mesmerist and entranced maiden, probably because they also take Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance as the central representation of mesmerism and its cultural freight.10 It is worth emphasizing, by contrast, that one of the most common ways for women to encounter mesmerism was not through the infamous traveling shows of entranced maidens, but through healing practices. Surely one mesmerist’s query, “Can it be denied that too many physiologists love to view man as only a result of various organs?” was a poignant one for many American women, as, increasingly, women’s illnesses were attributed to gynecological sources and feminine nature was chained to reproduction.11 In 1848, for instance, medical Doctor Charles Meigs called on his students to study female physiology in terms of “the strange and secret influences which her organs … are capable of exerting, not on the body alone, but on the heart, the mind, and the very soul of woman,” thus cleverly using magnetic relations to figure women as under

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the all-powerful sway of their bodily functions.12 Considering as well the “general, frequent, and drastic use of the knife in American gynecology” (Barker-Benfield, 94) and the variety of poisons in the regular doctor’s pharmacy (Sophia Hawthorne was dosed with mercury, arsenic, opium, and morphine, to which she acquired an addiction), it is hardly surprising that many women turned to alternative notions of the body to understand and treat their symptoms. Sophia Hawthorne, Harriet Martineau, Ann Stephens, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Margaret Fuller, and Louisa May Alcott all consulted mesmerists or magnetic physicians, many of them women, to cure various ailments.13 Such magnetic physicians might conduct a “clairvoyant examination,” in which the physician used her psychic ability to see into the body’s sickness and recommend a treatment (clearly noninterventionist in the extreme). Fuller’s 1845 Tribune review of Stanley Grimes’ Etherology; or, The Philosophy of Mesmerism and Phrenology speaks of her own encounter with a “blind somnambulist” who immediately sensed the headache from which Fuller was suffering and offered a compelling remedy.14 Fuller claims she “saw my true state more clearly than any other person did.” Fuller was also successfully relieved of chronic back pain in two months of sessions with a magnetic physician in New York, Dr. Theodore Leger.15 Magnetic physicians made passes with their hands over the patient’s body (in Fuller’s case, the base of the spine)€– passes that did not touch the body, but rather used the operator’s magnetic field to adjust the patient’s. Magnetic physicians could also induce a trance in the patient that often proved therapeutic in and of itself, releasing the self from the body’s claims for a span of time, as Harriet Martineau claimed in her Letters on Mesmerism.16 If, as Robert Fuller has argued of mesmerist discourse at midcentury, the terms spiritual and psychological were “completely interchangeable” and both “referred to the fact that the mind was, in some fundamental respect, irreducible to physical conditions,”17 then mesmerist discourse could be appropriated to make women irreducible to their body parts at a time when a focus on reproductive organs was taking on increased importance in the medical interpretation of women’s nature. Many Americans also found in mesmerism a vocabulary with which to articulate and validate a variety of imaginative experiences, from clairvoyant dreams or premonitions to other extrasensory feelings. Upon its Â�resurrection in America, mesmerism began shifting away from the emphasis on changes in mechanistic properties like electricity or “vital fluid” (animal magnetism) to an interest in the transformations wrought by exploring psychological depths. Mesmerists posited that it was possible through the trance state to suspend bodily functions and sensory input

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from the material world in order to access a higher interior essence, “some inner source of feeling,” as Chauncy Townshend’s influential Facts in Mesmerism or Animal Magnetism, with Reasons for a Dispassionate Inquiry into It (1841) put it (57). Yet even the efforts to describe essences and understand higher feelings are everywhere marked by the continuing interest in the materiality, however subtle, of what was previously indetectable. Grimes, in Etherology, the volume reviewed by Fuller, focused on the physics of connection that Mesmer’s animal magnetism had suggested. Grimes’ “etherium” is the universal substance through which all invisible motions are carried between objects, as between mind and mind in mesmerism, between internal organs and the nervous system in basic physiology, and even between the moon and the sea in the action of the tides. (Mesmer himself wrote a 1776 dissertation entitled Of the Influence of the Planets upon the Human Body.) The materialist premise of early mesmerism is further refined in Grimes’ account of “Consciousness,” the centralizing “organ” of the brain:€“The essential element of the organ may, for aught we know, be an ultimate and indivisible atom of matter, which has the inherent property of being conscious, when placed in proper relations to the senses and other organs, so as to have this property excited.”18 Grimes goes on to produce a startling animistic account of matter, arguing not only that each “indivisible, indestructible atom of matter is immortal in its existence and its identity,” but also that “every atom of matter in existence is capable of Consciousness, when placed in the circumstances … favorable to its development” (106). It is not surprising then, that, like the later event of Spiritualism with which it is often conflated, mesmerism was seen by both religious and scientific communities as offering long-awaited physical evidence of spirit.19 Thus, Lydia Maria Child, in her multivolume comparative religious history, The Progress of Religious Ideas, Through Successive Ages (1855), revisited events that the ancients called “miracles” and attributed them to “the laws” of animal magnetism, a new insight made possible, she said, by her historical vantage point. She claimed that the enlightened nineteenth century had begun “to recognize the existence of laws connected with the relation of soul and body, and their action on each other; though as yet we have made no approach toward understanding them.”20 In Noyes’ discussion of the spirit, we can see the linkage between mesmerist theories of superfine substance and a new scientific theory of the spirit. Spirit is not simply immaterial, he asserts; those “etherealists” who would argue so commit as great an error as do the “materialists.” Spirit is fluid, Noyes insists, on the basis of many New Testament passages that

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figure spirit as water and drink. Though it has no weight and no mass, it is in a class of matter that chemists call “imponderable fluids”; caloric, light, electricity, galvanism, and magnetism belong to the class as well. “Spirit is in many respects like these fluids, and is as truly substantial as they”; for instance, it shares in the “pervading quality of caloric” and in the “radiation of light” (The Berean, 55–6). Departing from Grimes’ bestowal of potential consciousness on every atom, Noyes claims that spirit differs from other fluids because it has “vital powers.” Matter has no power to move itself, but spirit “superadd[s] … the power of self-originated motion” (The Berean, 56). It is important to note that for Noyes, such spiritual fluid was important because it was the basis of sexual exchange at his Oneida community. Noyes held that through sexual intercourse two people could share a sacred spiritual affinity, which involved the exchange of actual, but imponderable, spiritual fluid. The release of bodily fluid in sperm, on the other hand, would make the relation carnal and was withheld through the practice of “male continence.” In this conception, Noyes promulgated a version of male purity that had potentially misogynistic effects. However, his interest in entwining spirituality and sexuality is in some ways analogous to the sexual alternatives many women writers sought in mesmerist discourse.21 Quasi-scientific theories of spirit, like Noyes’, were not formulated as proof of the kind of spirit manifestation encountered after the Rochester Rappings in 1848 (the primitive knocks, body parts, and inchoate messages of third-tier notables that characterized much Spiritualist demonstration led one observer to speculate that only “abortions among spirits” chose to communicate with the living).22 Rather, mesmerist theories fed into a widespread interest in developing a science of spirit, one that could capture the spirit’s irreducibility and its materiality. The spirit they debated was a general quality of the living and the world rather than the enduring personality of a deceased individual. As Noyes put it, “‘Mysticism’ has assumed a visible and popular form in the phenomena of Mesmerism, and has gone out into the ‘highways and hedges,’ compelling men, high and low, to believe that spirits are actual and potent substances” (The Berean, 54–5). Like Noyes, Fuller distances herself from the reductive materialism adduced in Grimes’ Etherology in her Tribune review. Fuller finds that Grimes’ “classification is unsatisfactory, his theory inadequate, his point of view uncongenial.” But she resigns herself to the fact that “man is always trying to get charts and directions for the super-sensual element in which he finds himself involuntarily moving” and sees Grimes and his ilk as part of a valuable “corp” of “workmen” investigating “the power of this more subtle and searching energy” that all “prescient souls … more or less

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… share the belief in.” We will see that Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century forged connections between mesmerist descriptions of vital fluid and Transcendentalist faith in an Oversoul, an energy that connects each individual soul to the larger life of the universe. Mesmerist findings in fact give her conception of a universal energy a thicker texture, even a gendered specificity, which departed from Emerson’s exalted transparent force. If Fuller’s Oversoul had more texture and less transparence than Emerson’s, so her version of the social barriers to its free flow had more bulk. In Fuller’s feminist view, such energies were impeded by social identities, relations, and institutions that women could not peel off as easily as Emerson could “shun father and mother and wife and brother,” but rather than dwelling in the present of difficult impediment, the tendency of Fuller’s feminist writing was to seek routes to an unhampered future, and mesmerism was one conduit to such future alternatives.23 Her own experience with a clairvoyant, she remarks in the review of Grimes, is a clue to “the mysteries of future states of being.” Fuller was not alone in this regard. In her Letters on Mesmerism (1845), Martineau, like Fuller, denounced the clank and twaddle of much that passed for mesmerism, particularly the “performances,” but in lofty tones she propounded the great possibilities of mesmerism for uncovering new “faculties whose scope is a new region of insight and foresight” and developing the potential greatness of the human race.24 Martineau’s utopian anticipation echoed one of the most influential and widely read accounts of mesmerism (one she recommended to her readers):€Townshend’s Facts in Mesmerism. Townshend claims to approach mesmerism not as a medical problem, but as a “phenomenon of our nature.”25 Townshend asserts that in the trance state, mesmerism “is capable of eliciting the highest state of moral and intellectual advancement, to which man, in this existence, can probably attain” (viii). Unlike Grimes, or Mesmer before him, Townshend is less interested in whether “such a power as mesmerism exists,” but rather “whether there is a state so denominated” (7). His approach is a clever one:€as we have seen, many believed in mesmeric phenomena, but few were entirely Â�satisfied with the accompanying explanations. Townshend is able to provide rafts of empirical evidence as to the states produced by mesmerism, and he thus lures the reader toward an admission of the fact of mesmerism itself, if not all of its controversial explanations, which he downplays (though he does nod later to the etherium). But in his emphasis on and descriptions of the trance state itself, he also taps into a vein of intense midcentury interest that has been overlooked in our own preoccupations with the magnetic relations that induce trance. More than involuntary

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motions and physiological changes, the trance “is a state which appears to possess its own laws of perception and action; and, in this point of view, a mesmerised person may be considered as learning a new language in which he cannot express himself with eloquence or with ease until he has mastered its idioms and possessed himself of its copiousness” (131). This state is “a rise in man’s nature” (160), a “link in the eternal chain of things” (261), not a result of a diseased condition (as others maintained, especially of female mediums):€“Separated from the usual action of the senses, the mind appears to gain juster notions, to have quite a new sense of spiritual things, and to be lifted nearer to the fountain of all good and of all truth” (160). Not unlike Paulding’s soul-as-adventuress, those in trance “seem to be taken out of common life, with all its heartless forms and plausible conventions” (160). It has the “elements of a future existence” (293). It was not, then, any particular clairvoyant account of the future that attracted Fuller and her contemporaries to mesmerist discourse but the new mode of being, requiring in turn new social “conventions” and new “forms” of expression, that the trance state seemed to herald. While critics have understandably been interested in the models of power and relationality in representations of mesmerism, to assume that such is the sole or even primary emphasis of mesmerism is a significant distortion that eclipses the fascination with taking up the material forms and perceptual life of spirit in trance. We miss, too, the intensity and detail with which the soul, a central figure in so much mid-nineteenth-century romantic literature, is made and remade through mesmerist accounts. The literature on mesmerism even offers a more complicated picture of magnetic relations than the trance maiden model we have adopted. LaRoy Sunderland, who began as a Methodist revival preacher intrigued by the strange effects his preaching produced, was the most interested in magnetic relations among philosophers of mesmerism.26 He was also the first to dispense completely with fluids and magnetism and attribute the effects to the power of mind, a kind of “mental sympathy,” which he also called “Pathetism.” But he ultimately located that power in the mind of the mesmerized subject. He or she must have the “power of belief” in order to be induced; thus all trances are actually “self-induced.”27 This power of “selfinduction,” Sunderland asserted, is “a force inherent in all minds … by which the mind entrances and withdraws itself from the consciousness of pain”; it is not the power of one over (gendered) others (136). Virtually all manuals, even those with particular stress on magnetic relations, concede such a stage of trance beyond the operator’s influence. Joseph Haddock describes the many stages of trance in his 1853 Psychology;

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or, The Science of the Soul Considered Physiologically and Philosophically.28 The highest is “clairvoyance or magnetic vision, or to speak more truly and plainly, the internal sight of the soul” (60). The state is to be distinguished from the now more frequently cited states of “Phantasy” or “Transfer of State and Feeling,” in which the thoughts and responses of the magnetizer become those of the patient. In this magnetic state, the cerebrum (front brain) of the subject is dormant, so the subject’s cerebellum (back brain) is guided by the magnetizer’s cerebrum that has become the “common cerebrum of both parties” (60). In clairvoyance, by contrast, the patient’s “soul” is not relying on the relay of images from the magnetizer’s cerebrum. It is using its own unique senses. Nor does this mean it is relying on the subject’s physical senses. Rather, the soul “acts independently of the external visual organs, so it is not trammeled by those natural laws to which they are necessarily subject … [T]hings may be seen which are out of the range of natural sight, and altogether above its nature” (62). The “rotundity and opacity” of the earth are barriers to the visual range of the eyes, but the soul is ultimately not limited to the body, so it is not bound by its senses. “To the higher stages of clairvoyance there seems, comparatively speaking, no bounds”:€the clairvoyant can see across oceans or within bodies “as if the external and internal parts were alike as transparent as glass” (62). Townshend, also speculating on the mechanisms of clairvoyance, suggests that the physical senses are actually “masks” for “blunting, not for heightening, the sensibility” (327), but in trance one can dispense with the sense organs and experience an expanded sensibility. If one possessed the ability€– the developed “higher organism,” as Haddock put it€– to go beyond the operator’s influence, it was often the case that one need not rely on an operator even for induction (66). As he moves from magnetic relations to clairvoyance, Haddock’s language shifts from that of the physiology of mind to what he calls “the science of the soul” because “physiology as such, that is, as the science of our outward organism” cannot explain the activities of the inward organism, which are better discussed in the terms of “psychology and philosophy” (63). But the soul can be studied scientifically; it is not “that simple entity, that abstract nothingness so generally represented by metaphysical writers” (63). It is “a subject of the laws, and possesses the properties of that world which have nothing in common with time, space, or common matter, it displays those powers which can be explained by no merely natural or physiological knowledge” (65). The trance in its highest state provided the opportunity to experience such other worlds, or to encounter this one on very different terms. Reading mesmerism as the sign of a threat to a

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spectacularly passive feminine integrity has obscured its use in an almost antithetical venue€– as the vehicle for imagining a radically reconfigured subjectivity and for granting substance to that which is almost impossible to conceive. Both efforts were central to early nineteenth-century feminist thought. Ou t of wom a n’s sph e r e :€f e m i n i s tm e s m e r i s t di s c ou r s e As Carolyn Karcher has suggested, the high pitch of the most fervent adversaries of mesmerism was likely a veiled acknowledgement that occult discourses were potentially “a potent means of aiding the transformation of society by altering individual and mass consciousness.”29 What has not been remarked is the way in which mesmerist discourses opened up exploratory possibilities for emerging feminist theories of gender. For feminists Fuller and Oakes Smith, the soul functioned as the central metaphor for a female self and its unreleased potential. Both feminists explore notions of what Fuller called the “the electrical, the magnetic element,” the “especial genius of woman,”30 and conceptualized their dreams and desires according to mesmerist notions of self and body and using mesmerist vocabulary. “It has been a part of my experience several times to become clairvoyant of a sudden€– when I have prophesied and such predictions have always been true,”31 Oakes Smith wrote in her journal. Her 1852 publication, Shadow Land; or, The Seer, is an astonishing account of her dream life, in which she tours several continents with clairvoyant accuracy, forecasts events, anatomizes her spouse’s aura, and gets a look at her spiritual body. As Barbara Welter has noted, Fuller’s “mystical feminism” extended to her own person, for Fuller “gloried in her role of Sibyl, and relished all reference to her as Delphic and/or Oracular.”32 That Fuller and Oakes Smith experienced their vision as a particularly feminine dispensation is evident in their deployment of semiautobiographical portraits of exceptional, electric women throughout their writing. Yet this feminine quality is not one that inhered in the biological body, and that distinction gives their concept of gender a degree of innovation and possibility that should be attended to. The close affinity between Oakes Smith’s feminist writing, particularly her feminist tract Woman and Her Needs (1851), but also her semiautobiographical portrait in Shadow Land (1852), and Bertha and Lily (1854), often labeled her women’s rights novel, provides evidence that Fuller was not the party of one we often imagine her to be. Their writing also reveals how

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popular mesmerist ideas significantly informed feminism and how certain tropes of mesmerism, such as the female visionary, popular in fiction at the time, were in dialogue with a feminism that was far more disseminated than is often assumed. While Oakes Smith is conceptually indebted to Fuller, Fuller may well be indebted to Oakes Smith for her continued circulation in the 1850s, for their careers were notably entwined. When, in 1845, Fuller came to New York to write for the New York Tribune just as Woman in the Nineteenth Century was published, Oakes Smith was already the established author of the well-received long poem, The Sinless Child, and the two intermingled in the New York salon culture of the mid-1840s. When Oakes Smith turns to a more explicitly feminist agenda in the early 1850s, her career comes to look like an extension of Fuller’s. Immediately after Fuller’s untimely death, Oakes Smith seemed to step into her shoes at the Tribune and began contributing the feminist essays that would make up Woman and Her Needs and that reveal Fuller to be an important source for her. She became the first woman to lecture on the famed Concord Lyceum and made Fuller the topic of one of her women’s rights lectures. Because Oakes Smith’s essays and lectures were greeted with anticipation by a ready-made audience, the reading public she had cultivated in more than a decade of literary success, scholars have thus speculated that the popularity of her Tribune essays led Greeley to republish Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century in 1852 and that, in general, she brought those feminist ideas to a wider public.33 Oakes Smith was, and still is, best known for The Sinless Child. Both Stowe and Longfellow adapted the main character, Eva, for their portrayals of little Eva St. Clare and Evangeline. Oakes Smith was up to something a bit different from Stowe and Longfellow, however. As Baym has noted, Oakes Smith’s poem “was less concerned with childhood than womanhood,” and Susan Phinney Conrad extends that assessment to Oakes Smith’s career€– beginning with The Sinless Child, Oakes Smith became a public symbol of the woman of intellect, popularly known as “Eva” in the New York literary salons (a persona she reportedly accessorized by bringing her pet snake along).34 But the fallen heroine of Oakes Smith’s later Bertha and Lily takes the Eva figure several steps further:€instead of Eva dying to make the world a better place, her worldly seducer dies so that she can live. She is in fact somewhat literally resurrected (she levitates and glows) from her fallen state to become a female Messiah, a second Eve who restores woman to paradise-on-earth by literally renovating a garden and erecting a temple from whence to deliver her feminist lectures.35 I mention this novel, which space precludes reading in detail, not only because its

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protagonist-narrator is herself clairvoyant, uses self-inductive mesmerist techniques, and successfully brings about the feminist future she envisions in trance, but also because of the paradigmatic way it imagines such a future as the restoration of an experienced Eve to the garden, of women’s perspectives to foundations of knowledge, and of female sexuality to natural registers. We might say that Oakes Smith’s novel taps an Evic voice in American literature€– not one that evokes something out of nothing, like her Adamic counterparts, but one that seeks to recover by tracing and enlarging something that is already there but is yet misnamed or unarticulated. For feminists like Oakes Smith and Fuller, as for the larger group of fiction writers in this study, that something was an element of “woman” that had been misunderstood and suppressed, and its resurrection was an expressly political goal. In Ann Stephens’ Mary Derwent, we recall, both Catharine and Mary have access to a constrained and spectral knowledge that is, circularly, both the cause and the result of their alienation from feminine roles. Their “genius … exists unwritten and unrecorded, save in luminous flashes or keen sensation” and in the vigorous floridity of Stephens’ highly wrought passages where the “genius … struggling for utterance” is given a sensual presence.36 A central task of authorship for all of these writers is one they often translate into a mystical register:€they seek to divine and flesh out the spirit of such truths in language. Both Fuller and Oakes Smith placed their emphases on theories of gender, leaving social reforms like female suffrage to follow naturally from woman’s reformed state of freed and expanded individuality, a strategy that distinguishes their rhetoric from the legal rights agenda, but that was perfectly compatible with the romantic strains of early women’s rights. “Whether we wear this or that costume, or go to the polls or stay away, seems of less importance than a radical understanding of our true selves,”37 wrote Oakes Smith. Likewise, Fuller urged woman “as a nature to grow, as an intellect to discern, as a soul to live freely and unimpeded” (Woman, 261). Fuller’s lanuage is that of the Transcendentalist concept of self-culture, first described by William Ellery Channing; the notion hinged on “a metaphor of the soul as a dynamic organism capable of cultivation to ever-Â�increasing harmonious growth.”38 Both Fuller and Oakes Smith radicalized the concept to urge the cultivation of women’s individual souls according to their own “law of growth” while fiercely decrying the social structures that impeded them. The treatment of woman as a soulless body, Â�according to Oakes Smith, was the central problem with woman’s condition:€“It is the making of woman a creature of luxury€– an object of sensuality€– a vehicle for reproduction€– or a thing of toil, each one, or all of these€– that has caused half the miseries of

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the world. She, as a soul, has never been recognized” (Woman and Her Needs, 20). The soul offered a voice to women in a world where “men have written for us, thought for us, legislated for us; and they have constructed from their own consciousness an effigy of a woman, to which we are expected to conform” (20). Oakes Smith urged women to discard the “effigy of a woman” to reveal thinking, desiring selves€– to “evolve her own thoughts, recognize her own needs, and judge of her own acts by the best lights of her own mind” rather than by rigid models of gender (22). Just as Fuller championed a wider sphere of action for women with her proclamation, “Let them be seacaptains” (Fuller, Woman, 345), Oakes Smith saw “no reason why [women] who have a fancy to tinker a constitution, canvass a country, or preach the Gospel, should not be permitted to do so” (Woman and Her Needs, 27). (Oakes Smith herself would in her seventies become a pastor to an independent church.) In this feminist conception, the soul was infinitely more diverse than a dimorphic model of the sexed body. A woman’s or a man’s soul could take an infinite number of shapes; thus, the unimpeded soul of woman was the basis from which to argue a feminist agenda of expanded action and intellect rather than of separate spheres. Oakes Smith incisively captured the self-annihilation that seemed to her the central tenet of “woman’s sphere”:€“it is a sphere by which every woman creature, of whatever age, appending to [a man], shall circle very much within his own€ – see and hear through his senses, and believe according to his dogmas, with a sort of general proviso, that if need be for his growth, glorification, or well-being, in any way, they will instantly and uncompromisingly become extinct” (28). Women must look to the soul to produce a new embodiment of self. “Let woman learn to take a woman’s view of life,” and she would learn to see differently, Oakes Smith argued (22). We see the importance of mesmerism to Oakes Smith’s feminism:€women must release themselves from their assigned sphere, itself a kind of mesmerized slavery in which she “see[s] and hear[s] through [man’s] senses” (28). Once women achieve the visionary encounter with their own souls, however, they will slough off the “effigies” of the socially defined women’s sphere. They will be endowed with the expanded senses Townshend’s Facts in Mesmerism spoke of, and the soul’s vision will allow women to see beyond what Townshend called “heartless forms” (160). But Oakes Smith’s argument moved beyond Townshend’s more general claim for visionary access to a just future. She wished women to access “a difference in the soul as in the bodies of the sexes,” which she variously dubbed “woman-thought,” “woman-perception,” and “woman-intuition” (24). In language that sounds strikingly current, Oakes Smith postulates

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in Woman and Her Needs, “I see no way in which harmony can result in the world without entire recognition of differences” (28). In contrast to the “woman’s sphere” of popular phraseology, in which a woman rotates around a man like a dark star around a sun€ – “must merge her being, be absorbed and annihilated in marriage€– be an extinct world, a goneout soul, in the chaos of a household”€– Oakes Smith proposes different bodily alignments (43). “There is a Woman’s sphere€– harmonious, holy, soul-imparting,” but since its orbits are independent of the “private circle” it cannot be defined in relation to that system (28). “Let [women] not feel disparaged at the difference which I have recognized; it is a difference that crowns women with a new glory,” she asserted, with the oracular ring that characterized her feminist writing, as if relaying something she sees with her own “woman-perception” (24). The different vision and new senses to which Oakes Smith alludes were more than metaphor for her and for Fuller. Fuller claimed “the especial genius of woman I believe to be electrical in movement, intuitive in function, spiritual in tendency” and borrowed the term “Femality” to label such feminine energies (Woman, 309). She regretted the fact that this element had never been fully developed in women and looked to it as a future source of power for them. While Emerson directs his listeners to heed a universal “Genuine Man” or “Universal Man” accessible to every individual in his growth, Oakes Smith and Fuller posit access to energies they assert are feminine. A long history of Fuller scholarship has debated the status and location of the feminine in Fuller’s feminist theory. For many years, Fuller was cherished for promoting androgyny, an amorphous merger of masculine and feminine traits that effectively dispense with gender. Since then, she has alternately been linked to the masculine or feminine sphere, but in either position she is still made to disavow or at least distinguish herself from the feminine. Ann Douglas, as I detailed in Chapter 1, describes Fuller as a heroine of masculinity combating the rancid “feminization” of American culture. Sandra Gustafson has more recently argued for the continuities between Fuller and “feminine” culture. Gustafson focuses on Fuller’s use of “sentimental ideals to justify antisentimental forms”€– to justify in fact a genderless rhetorical form.39 Taking issue with these views, Cynthia J. Davis argues that “in the final analysis, Fuller disavowed both femininity and masculinity for an identity that transcended or at least incorporated both.”40 For Davis, Fuller’s disavowal is evident in her escape from gendered form, specifically the body. In Fuller’s Woman, “an abstract gÂ�eneric ‘soul’ displaces concrete gendered essences as that which is

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contained within bodies, whether male or female” (Davis, 45). I agree that Fuller moved out of body to formulate her concept of woman, but that move does not entail a loss of gender nor the “resistance to materiality” that Davis posits (45). While Fuller detached gender from the body, she nonetheless preserved it as an essence available to the soul. In the following passage, significantly located in the center of her discussion of the “electrical element in woman,” Fuller articulates her concept of gender: Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But, in fact, they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman. History jeers at the attempts of physiologists to bind great original laws by the forms which flow from them … Nature provides exceptions to every rule. She sends women to battle, and sets Hercules spinning … Of late she plays still gayer pranks. Not only she deprives organizations, but organs, of a necessary end. She enables people to read with the top of the head, and see with the pit of the stomach. (Woman, 310)

In Fuller’s view, pure gender is never resurrected in the flesh; instead, the spheres of Fuller’s great radical dualism are permeable bodies that pass into and out of each other, mingling in various amounts and at varying locations. Fuller defeats the compartmentalization of gender into separate spheres by releasing gender into the cosmic spheres, where bodies are permeable, shifting, and transmuting versions of their former state. In this heaven that gets gender right, essences of souls are made plain and are freed from the limiting binary of biology to occupy a zodiac of possibilities. She mocks physiologists for whom only bodies, “forms,” are legible, whose theories could never account even for practices like Hercules spinning or women battling. Men and women should not be confined to exclusively masculine or feminine roles since “in fact” their constitution, in which gender traits are “perpetually passing into one another,” reflects more diversity.41 At the same time, there are, it seems, in principle essential feminine and masculine “energies.” Though both men and women can tap into either energy, women’s souls are more likely to be modified to partake of femality. Fuller’s final task in this passage is to embody her vision of this truer world. This she does by moving from “organizations” to “organs,” from social body to individual body. If first she scrambled the signifying power of the body politic by disbanding its organization into gender spheres or parts, she next works at the level of the individual body, depriving organs of their usual functions. The body is being rearranged here in order to replace its orientation toward the physical world with an orientation toward

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the spiritual or interior realm. In a manifestation of Oakes Smith’s “new senses” for women, Fuller imagines the scalp reading and the stomach seeing. Fuller goes on to show that these other senses “enabled Cassandra to foresee the results of actions passing round her; the Seeress to behold the true character of the person through the mask of his customary life” and “the daughter of Linnaeus to see the soul of the flower exhaling from the flower,” a vision ranged against Linnaeus’ classifying gaze (Woman, 310). The feminist-mesmerist discourse, then, is characterized by an emphasis on the soul, its different senses, and a will to tinker with the body, to reorganize its organs. For Fuller, each person is pervaded by and a part of “a great radical dualism,” the immanent divine spirit that holds masculine and feminine in balance but is obstructed by contemporary social barriers. This cosmic “dualism,” in other words, is akin to Emerson’s “Oversoul” but it is gendered. Fuller also claimed in Woman that “In so far as soul is in [women] completely developed, all soul is the same; but as far as it is modified in her as woman, it flows, it breathes, it sings, rather than deposits soil, or finishes work, and that which is especially feminine flushes, in blossom, the face of earth, and pervades, like air and water, all this seeming solid globe” (309). Again, the feminine self is not the “seeming solid” earth, despite formulations of the female body as just such utter matter; rather, it is that which troubles solidity, which points to another dimension. Fuller’s notion of a gendered “essence” is neither biological nor psychological; in practice, each person partakes of different portions of each gender through spirit, despite their biological sex. Spirit is the location of a feminine “essence,” but as Judith Butler has noted, an essence in the traditional metaphysical sense is opposed to appearance; it is “something that strictly speaking does not appear” and is not available to description.42 That essence cannot finally be captured to describe a fixed feature of femininity or its “place.” Fuller’s and Oakes Smith’s feminism sought to acknowledge a sense of the feminine as a force€– in the material world, in language and literature, and within each person – while simultaneously freeing women from socially prescribed versions of femininity that failed to acknowledge internal gender diversity. Scholars have been reluctant to acknowledge Fuller’s belief in essence, because they have not understood how it could serve feminism. Its historical interest, however, is in the way that a notion of an essence of the feminine, here a version of spirit akin to Emerson’s Oversoul, allowed Fuller and her contemporaries to formulate a model of gendered resistance that was facilitated through the notion of spirit, that allowed for the imagining

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of alternative models of gender that could not be tied to the body and to the anatomic dualism that makes the masculine the primary value. In a rich and productive paradox, it is a form of positive presence based on spirit€– one that formulates a different way of being in the world as did the experience of trance, which deeply influenced Fuller and her literary and feminist peers, a way of being embodied as spirit, with a different set of senses that peeled away the barriers to one’s ideal interaction with the world and its essential truths. This feminine principle can be felt within the body, but it does not originate there; it seems a transpersonal force, a modality that seeks to pervade old structures and, in asserting its own uncategorizable presence, to unravel the logic of the separate spheres. The trance state introduced women to the precincts of an imagined interiority, where they found the material for a new relation to the world and a new construction of woman. Their journey was navigated through the medium of language, in which they sounded the depth of their vision. They held that they had access, through trance, to an essential truth, and that a concept of the feminine, free of its determination by masculinity, was the suppressed content of that truth. At the same time, their emphasis on spirit comes hand-in-hand with the understanding that essences cannot be captured and that bodies cannot determine essences; thus the emphasis on spirit can open on to a fluid and creative plane of sex and gender configurations rather than the determinism we might expect. Femininity takes shape primarily as a force, a physics of spirit, that actively reformulates the world at its most basic, material levels, from which will follow conceptual and structural changes. Its effectiveness lies in its nature as an essence€– something that cannot be catergorized, particularly as a visible object. Yet, given the emphasis on a materiality of spirit shared by these writers and many of their contemporaries, essences could be otherwise sensed, registered, or felt. On this view, their version of femininity is a resistant presence and an agent of change. T h e p ow e r s of v i s ion:€ t h e b l i t h e d a l e rom a nce a nd fe m i n ism While feminist interest in mesmerism has received little critical attention, Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance is well known for its portrayal of mesmerism, vision, and gender, but it notoriously registers the dystopian results of forays into new and experimental relations between material and spiritual realms, body and spirit, and man and woman. Recently, Hawthorne’s novel has become our critical authority not only on the cultural valences

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of mesmerism but on the viability of spirit in antebellum America and its linkage to femininity, even when these are issues that Hawthorne misrepresents as blithely and zealously as his characters advocate their causes. Critical readings participate in the novel’s caricature of feminism when they take the text as objectively explicating the dangers of reformist spiritualizing discourses. Blithedale has much to say about the status of vision and the connection of gender and spirit, and Hawthorne inflects these issues in important ways, but the character of the larger debate should not be confused with his interested depiction of it. Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance and, later, James’ The Bostonians (1886) feature male rescue of the clairvoyant girl from those who penetrate and violate her soul.43 Such is generally the plot of the popular “magnetic romances” of the 1850s€– of Orestes Brownson’s The Spirit Rapper (1854), Bayard Taylor’s Hannah Thurston (1858), and T. S. Arthur’s The Angel and the Demon (1858). But conspicuously absent from this fairly routine litany of the literature of mesmerism are any accounts by women, who were apparently so enthralled by its forces€– enslaved by a potent male mesmeriser such as Hawthorne’s Westervelt or seduced by the sway of reform discourses and the aberrant women who crave a feminine medium for their message as were James’ Vera Terrant and Taylor’s Hannah Thurston (a Quakeress-turnedwomen’s rights lecturer). The pseudonymous Fred Folio’s Lucy Boston:€or, Woman’s Rights and Spiritualism: Illustrating the Follies and Delusions of the Nineteenth Century (1855) also invidiously connects women’s rights, spiritualistic discourse, and marriage reform, culminating in an increasingly absurd dystopia in which men are in thrall to women in government, in love, and in the home. In doing so, Lucy Boston uncovers one of the organizing fears of the “magnetic romances”€– the fear of topsy-turvy social relations€– and belies the image of fragile dependence, of misplaced feminine self-abandonment, that has come to be associated with mesmeric women. Examining magnetic relations from another angle, historians Alex Owen, Judith Walkowitz, Alison Winter, and Ann Braude have studied the role of the female medium and argue that the medium’s apparent lack of control in 44 fact authorized a wide array of unconventional behaviors and utterances. Â� Braude, for instance, cites the female trance speaker’s ease, fluidity, and force at the podium, while many accounts of nonmesmerized women activist speakers note them to be uncomfortable and even inaudible. And yet mediumship in either its repressive or liberating form is of little interest to the women writers examined in this study. Even so, the female medium has been central to accounts of spirituality in antebellum America. Thus it is common to read Hawthorne’s character

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Priscilla, the wan girl-medium who comes to live at the Blithedale utopian community, as the icon of spiritual true womanhood:€ she is insulated, passive, withdrawn, insubstantial. Richard Brodhead asserts that Priscilla, or the Veiled Lady as she is known during her “performances,” is “a figure for the disembodiment of women in nineteenth-century domesticity, that is, for the construction of ‘woman’ as something separate from or opposed to bodily life and force.”45 Not only has Priscilla transcended the bodily life, as Baym also asserted of the sexless woman writer, but her withdrawal behind the veil segregates the interior from the exterior and the private from the public in a dramatic reenactment of domestic retirement.46 It is thus that Priscilla placed on stage reenacts the dilemma of the woman who would write and publish. Yet Zenobia, Priscilla’s lively, sensual half-sister€– adorned by a single exotic flower (“indicative of the pride and pomp which had a luxuriant growth in [her] character”) and attracted to Blithedale by her feminist reform efforts€– is a storyteller in her own right and cannot be so easily assimilated to this recent critical portrait of the woman author.47 Zenobia emerges as a weighty antagonist to the story’s bachelor narrator, Miles Coverdale, but, her reformist zeal being ever entangled with her erotic desire in Hawthorne’s account, she drowns herself when her romantic desires fail to come to fruition. Russ Castronovo takes the critical focus on Priscilla a step further to argue that the Veiled Lady becomes more than the paradigmatic representation of true womanhood; she indexes the value of spirituality in the dominant culture more generally. Castronovo reads her “passivity and unresponsiveness,” “the vaporous sphere of insensibility” to which she retreats, as the definitive expression of “an occult sphere of citizenship that popularized the suspension of historical awareness.”48 The Veiled Lady is the ultimate emblem of “necro citizenship” in Castronovo’s panoply of morbid examples of the white male liberal fantasy of abstraction from the public sphere into an idealized citizenry unencumbered by history, bodily claims of gender and race, or material conditions.49 Yet, as I have argued in relation to feminist-mesmerist discourse, spirit is no more inherently apolitical than it is inherently immaterial, especially in its particular constitution in mid-nineteenth-century America. An absurd kind of materialism results when the critical denunciation of spirit is carried too far, one that proposes, with Castronovo, that Zenobia, in her gruesome drowned body, “expresses herself via rigor mortis, an unyielding posture that raises questions about the capacity to move effortlessly between sociocelestial (and sociopolitical) spheres” (Castronovo, 143). In this argument, Zenobia’s expression “via rigor mortis” is a staunch victory over those, like Coverdale,

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who attempt to transcend materiality via Â�“spiritualizing discourse[s]” (Castronovo, 143). But what Castronovo identifies as Coverdale’s spiritualizing discourse€– in which Coverdale describes Zenobia’s rigid, bent arms and legs and “clenched hands” as “Thank God for it! bent in prayer” and “her soul, bubbling out through her lips,” as having “given itself up to the Father, reconciled and penitent”€– is patently facetious (Hawthorne, 209). Coverdale by no means wishes to “create a spiritual symbol” in place of Zenobia’s drowned, bloated body, as Castronovo maintains, but to mock those who do€– especially those Â�women’s rights advocates who would locate Zenobia’s great spirit in her spirit or in some arena irreducible to biological claims, and not in the blood that bubbles from her lips (Castronovo, 143). Not that such advocates would in turn wholly spiritualize Zenobia; rather, as in the feminism of Fuller (Fuller’s ideas are as much subtext as is her death by drowning), they would seek some way to manifest female spirit or essence, but without reducing it to body. The bloody issuance from Zenobia’s lips is Coverdale’s parting shot at her rhetoric of spirit and gender and at all those who would, in Hawthorne’s words on mesmerism in a letter to Sophia, “mistake the physical and material for the spiritual,” or who would, like Fuller, attempt some transformative commerce between them.50 Coverdale’s own wish for spirit is that it be a transcendent entity, and he scorns reformers’ efforts to materialize spirit or heaven on earth. In fact, the sensualizing of all that should remain abstract or spiritual is the effect of all reform in the novel and the novel’s abiding concern. Coverdale ridicules reform by citing its reductionism everywhere. Coverdale draws Moodie out in the bar scene by manipulating (and mocking) that “muddy medium,” that vital fluid€– here deflated as wine (165). Just as Mrs. Silas Foster continues to knit as she naps in her rocker, thereby producing outrageous, outsized socks, so all dreams and dreamers (especially of the reforming ilk) are about as grand and as useful as said sock. The dream of Blithedale lies in “delectable visions of the spiritualization of labor,” but the conversion works the other way:€though they “constantly belabored and turned over” clods of earth, their thoughts become “cloddish” (85). Nor are Zenobia’s labors inspired€ – a terrible cook, she produces witches brew; her piano makes the canaries screech; we are left to imagine the even more frightful results of her pen. Zenobia’s great flower wilts when exposed to the “fervency” of Blithedale’s reform, here reductively emblematized as the kitchen fire. By contrast, Priscilla, who is captive to reformers but not one of them, sews beautiful purses, creations Hawthorne characterizes as symbolic and mysterious, perhaps like that true spiritual receptacle€– true womanhood. Her purses are “apertures” onto other arenas of meaning and being,

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not unblinking, nonreferential matter like Mrs. Foster’s colossal sock or Zenobia’s rigid corpse. And perhaps like the veil of true womanhood, the repository of irreducible spirit for Hawthorne, Priscilla’s purses are not meant to be “looked into” in the spirit of feminist reform or mesmerist investigation. Yet one dream in The Blithedale Romance has a potency that others do not. That is Coverdale’s antireformist vision, centering on his desire to “exorcise” Zenobia (156). Whether he means by this term to dispossess her of the “spirit” of rebellion (thus deploying a common antireformist idiom characterizing women’s rights as a “fit” that seizes its proponents from without) or whether he wishes to excise her person from the troupe of actors he watches as he says this, both senses converge in her death.51 Critics have perhaps overstated Coverdale’s passivity:€ Coverdale, a poet, circumvents labor only to find his dreams and visions, unlike those of the reformers he depicts, remarkably productive. Upon returning to Blithedale at the end of the novel, Coverdale imagines that Blithedale had been “nothing but dream-work and enchantment,” and indeed a dreamy disconcerting veil is cast over this final section, making permeable the boundary between dream and action, between imagination and reality, with a kind of facility the reformers were never able to muster (188). When the Â�costumed Blithedalers, reveling after a masquerade, smoke Coverdale out of his retreat in the woods, he is “like a mad poet hunted by chimaeras”€– chimeras, perhaps, of his own creation (192). Like a bona fide clairvoyant, Coverdale claims to have a presentiment of Zenobia’s death (189), one that seems less to predict the future than to determine it. He looks at a deep pool in the woods and wonders “if any overladen soul had ever flung its weight of mortality in thither … And perhaps the skeleton of the drowned wretch still lay beneath the inscrutable depth, clinging to some sunken log … with the gripe of its old despair” (189). In the following scene, Coverdale witnesses Zenobia’s final romantic undoing, but forgoes an opportunity to intervene in her sorrow and, hence, her fate. Rather than “ministering to her affliction,” Coverdale muses, “Destiny … could do no better for Zenobia, in the way of quick relief, than to cause the impending rock to impend a little further, and fall upon her head” (200). Discovering him as she always does, Zenobia sums up the situation:€“Ah, I perceive what you are about! You are turning the whole affair into a ballad. Pray let me hear as many stanzas as you happen to have ready!” (201). It is as if Zenobia addresses her author rather than a fellow character. Such an apostrophe to her author disrupts the strange dreamlike quality Coverdale has thrown over this final section and draws attention to the way it is crafted; in doing so, it places extreme

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pressure on Coverdale’s already dubious reliability and on the details of Zenobia’s death. Coverdale’s retrospective clairvoyance is subtly contrived, but his version of events nonetheless endorses his “presentiments.” As Zenobia challenges Coverdale to think about how her story will end, one realizes that he already has:€suicide appears to be an alternative that Coverdale, rather than Zenobia, is weighing to effect her “end” and the end of his story, which has morphed into a potent blend of fact and fiction, dream and reality.52 The “dream” with the tragic conclusion comes to conspicuously gruesome fruition in the story Coverdale tells (204). With Zenobia dies her penetrating insight into the “hermitages” of his privilege€ – his physical and emotional retreats from activity and engagement, his bachelor quarters, and, ultimately, the mantle of authorship. After casting reformist visions as hocus pocus that turns the gold of spirit to the dross of matter, Coverdale assumes that very power over Zenobia, whose look into social relations, particularly his, is potent and threatening after all, if not transformative. Our final, lingering, detailed look at Zenobia’s corpse through the gleeful eyes of Coverdale effects the thorough objectification of Zenobia. Coverdale delights in the prolonged and futile impropriety of Silas’ efforts to compose her rigid limbs. In his death wish, Coverdale has already composed them just as they are€– exposed, fixed, mortifying. Contrary to Castronovo’s reading, the female body has not been the site of Zenobia’s unruliness. Her spirit, its vision and its quickened senses, seem to have been the greatest impediment to Coverdale’s authority. Tellingly, Zenobia’s grave, where her soul now feeds the grass rather than reforming society, has “all this while” been the site of Coverdale’s storytelling (215). There is giddy satisfaction on Coverdale’s part when he exorcises Zenobia’s spirit in his version of her gruesome death, but there is also ironic self-incrimination on Hawthorne’s part. The mysterious boundary between fact and imagination that so captivated Hawthorne in previous romances seems to lose its enchantment when that boundary is interrogated under the reformist spotlight of inquiry and critique that presumes to penetrate both social and metaphysical boundaries. Those who trade in its crossing become sinister and manipulative, including, in the end, authors. Perhaps Hawthorne comes to see the prophetic authorship extolled by Melville in “Hawthorne and His Mosses” as distastefully akin to the reform discourse of his day, and the author as just another charlatan among the sordid visionaries.53 Zenobia’s vision has been more successful and more compelling than Coverdale cares to admit. Some such uneasy affinity between Zenobia’s feminist-mesmerist vision and Hawthorne’s work as a romancer€– similarly

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constituted but used for different ends€– may finally be the “one secret” of the “analogy” to which Coverdale cryptically refers when he says, “It suits me not to explain what was the analogy that I saw, or imagined, between Zenobia’s situation and mine” (200). Criticism has long debated the values Hawthorne placed in his light and dark heroines, the nature of the division between the ethereal spirituality of Priscilla and Zenobia’s earthy embodiment, without considering the potential entwinement of the bodily and the spiritual in the wider discourses, including mesmerism and feminism, that Hawthorne’s novel treats. Hawthorne may in fact be responding to the imbrication of body and spirit in other forms of fantasy and what such a phenomenon might mean for his own. Thus, while The Blithedale Romance has been read as a critique of the bankruptcy of antebellum spiritualities as epitomized by the exploitation of the Veiled Lady, it is also an anxious parody of the assumed potency of vision to materially transform the world, a possibility embodied in Zenobia, but co-opted by Coverdale and annexed to the power of the male author. As far as it comments on women’s roles, Blithedale is as much a comment on the challenging viability of Zenobia’s insights as it is a comment on the retreats and privileges of domestic true womanhood, the ethereal spirituality of which Hawthorne prefers to preserve from feminist efforts to illuminate or dismantle it, or materialize alternatives to it. As Teresa Goddu has argued, Zenobia’s feminism rends veils€– it penetrates Coverdale’s masks of disengagement, and it sees through Priscilla’s veil and the fictions of spiritual presence cloaking true womanhood.54 Zenobia’s looks into Coverdale’s retreats, her sixth sense about his presence, trace and delineate his personal interconnectedness despite his wish to deny it. If the Veiled Lady, displayed for all, is a version of the domestic woman writer who must paradoxically publish fiction that sacralizes the separation of private and public, Zenobia, Coverdale’s rival storyteller, is another kind of woman author, who in her legend of the “The Silvery Veil” manipulates boundaries, exposing myths of true womanhood and revealing the complicity of masculine spectatorship while threatening to instantiate alternative sexual relations. Zenobia indexes the challenges of feminist-mesmerist vision that led a stronger assault on the division between spirit and body, and dream and reality, than Hawthorne seems to have desired and that challenges his dominion over the realm of romance. Her character reveals the deep complication of Hawthornian “romance” by the idealism of reform and particularly by a blend of feminism and mesmerism that, as the next section argues, shifts the borders of the “real” and the imagined to create a zone of transformative possibility.

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But as author, Coverdale instead confines that transformative power to fiction, which in the story has no more to do with social change than the absurd efforts of his companions at Blithedale. Coverdale’s unreliability gives him power by confining his authority to the story he tells. His unreliability cautions us not to take his authority too far, and he is not clearly culpable for the license he takes with Zenobia’s death, the fiction he creates with the narrative materials of her death. The final irony is that in this text, as in highly wrought fiction, feminist vision actually threatens a much more agile and volatile movement between the literal and the figurative. That transformative power is what Coverdale siphons and contains in the realm of fiction, denying it further agency and leaving feminism a rigid corpse, to express itself via rigor mortis after all. S t y l e s of fa n ta s y: €D on a l d M i t c h e l l and M ary Clemmer Hawthorne’s novel usefully demonstrates that during this period the intensely contested relations between one set of binaries could inform the workings of another set of binaries as well:€dream and reality, spirit and matter, body and soul, were mutually informing and often gendered. Moreover, these relations are central to nineteenth-century fiction and the forms it took, reaching as far as Hawthorne’s own perception of genre, gender, and authorship. Blithedale is one of many contemporaneous literary portrayals of dream and fantasy implicitly engaged in questions about what kind of territory fiction occupied in relation to the social and the ideal. The status of other states or modes of being, portrayed most frequently as dream, vision, or fantasy within the fiction of the period, is underwritten by debates about the nature of aesthetic experience and what it means to be subject to an experience of the ideal. Coverdale’s character is inspired by another bachelor dreamer, that of Reveries of a Bachelor; or A Book of the Heart (1850) by Donald Grant Mitchell (as Ik Marvel).55 Hawthorne’s distinction is partly in placing the power of vision, if not in the service of the status quo exactly, then as the antagonist of alternative social arrangements, but Mitchell’s bachelor’s reveries bear a different relation to social alternatives. As Samuel Otter and Katherine Snyder have argued, Mitchell’s bachelor forges an alternative narrative economy with the reader in which affection is not binding and can be expanded and savored outside of the restrictions on feeling in normative masculinity.56 He shares Hawthorne’s distaste for dreams converted into reality (and so made sordidly palpable), but his dreams themselves

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dilate the pleasures of the bachelor’s already liminal space. His fireside dreams conjure scenes of domestic affection that invite the sentimental responses of his readers even as he maintains and often relishes his independence, as a bachelor, from that same domestic sphere. Thus Mitchell’s bachelor dreams of the domestic and the familiar, but it is not a fantasy he necessarily wishes to materialize:€“What if [these fancies] have no material type€– no objective form? All that is crude,€– a mere reduction of ideality to sense,€– a transformation of the spiritual to the earthly,€– a levelling of soul to matter” (491), Mitchell’s narrator asks of those who scoff at dreams of wives and children that never existed, who refuse to commune with the sentiments of joy or loss he stages. Like Paulding’s mesmerized heroines, Mitchell enjoys a trespassing frolic through spheres to which he has no access in his waking life. But the figure of the bachelor carries an additional sense, sometimes smug, sometimes precarious, of enjoying both worlds, of entering or exiting them as he likes, a prerogative he would have to forgo in the role of husband or father. Mary Clemmer’s Victoire wishes to co-opt the bachelor’s prerogative for the maid. Clemmer, a protégé of poets Alice and Phoebe Cary who undoubtedly encountered Oakes Smith and a host of New York writers and radical reformers who gathered at the Carys’ social evenings, is known only to (a very few) historians of the period as the author of the Carys’ biography and as the Washington D. C. political correspondent for the influential New York Independent. Yet her forgotten first novel is arresting for its complicated but explicit engagement with theories of free love.57 In a scene that deliberately evokes Mitchell’s Reveries, in which fires are obsessively described and cataloged according to their fuel type, Clemmer’s young Victoire specifies that she sits dreamily before “the anthracite in my little cathedral stove … all ablaze.”58 In tones that echo Mitchell’s dreamy sentimentality, she muses, “I could fancy that a mimic sunset was streaming through its windows of isinglass. Every object in the room reflected its radiance … Oh! it was golden all!” (71). As so often happens to Mitchell’s bachelor, Victoire’s “little palace of golden visions” is soon punctured by the mundane, workaday concerns of a female servant, a class with no leisure and no dreams (71). While Clemmer also subscribes to such classist beliefs, the single woman’s social hold on the privilege of reverie is more tenuous than the bachelor’s, and Clemmer’s protagonist is not immune to the workaday concerns the servant raises. In this case, the servant’s concern stems from gossip that Victoire has been improperly entertaining the attentions of her bachelor neighbor in her boardinghouse, which has more than petty consequences for the maiden boarder.

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Few in America, the novel soon asserts, can afford to dream. In a survey of New York City working conditions for unmarried women as broad as Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall and nearly as vertical as Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth, Clemmer lets the air leak slowly out of Victoire’s fierce desire to live the American dream (for which she emigrated from France). A painter trained under a Parisian master, Victoire is too ill and destitute to enter her work in the annual Academy of Art exhibition as she planned, and, instead, her paintings become collateral for the rent she owes. She, as well as Morna and Hope, her seamstress roommates, live a hand-to-mouth existence despite their own artistic talents. A cast of minor characters also perish, languish, or return to their homeland. At the end of her depleting and degrading urban odyssey, Victoire again gazes dreamily at dancing light, this time sunlight:€“A resplendent March sun looked full upon [my face] with the first touch of spring warmth in its glory. I nestled in its radiance. I drank, and drank, yet felt that I could not drink enough of its life-inspiring splendor. Quiescently, dreamily, as invalids will, I watched the golden motes dance in a shimmering shaft of light which smote my couch through the broad interstice of a half-open shutter” (210). Following Mitchell’s pattern again, Victoire is interrupted, but she does not turn from visions of courtship and affection, nor does she awake to the cozier, if lonelier, reality of a sequestered life. Rather, her sensuous revel is dispersed by the very real threat of marriage in the shape of persistent suitor Henri Rochelle, to whose medical arts and money she is now indebted for her returning health. “How I longed to bring back the halfslumbrous minute just departed, in which I forgot that there was a Henri Rochelle” (211), Victoire confides. Victoire may wish she could stir the fire and have the prospect of marriage disappear, but unwanted heterosexual relations impinge on the maiden dreamer in material rather than hypothetical form. Clemmer seems to argue that the single woman’s liminality is economically and socially precarious, and she cannot long afford to not choose marriage. Clemmer’s is not just a critique of bachelor leisure, nor is it a plea for realism instead of fantasy; rather, fantasy takes on a different character and role in her book, one that assails the border between fantasy and reality. Mitchell’s bachelor and Clemmer’s Victoire want the same thing:€to suspend the expected culmination of the bachelor’s and the maid’s plot, to dilate the present moment and keep interdependence and compulsory monogamy at a remove. But Clemmer’s plot disrupts this wish; at the midpoint of the book, in “A Marriage Before the Last Chapter,” Victoire rationalizes marriage to Henri. Marriage and domesticity are a different

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kind of alternative for Victoire. She has never fantasized of marriage, but instead found it relentlessly imposed on her. She calculates that it is the best option for a woman’s survival in New York, and as she predicts, her dream of a painting career fares extremely well, given a studio and financial support. But marriage is the crisis on which the book pivots, rather than the conclusion on which it rests or the future that it contemplates at leisure. Reverie continues, but I will argue that its content, centering on a “stranger,” is now adulterous and its critique of marriage becomes more weighty. If the pressures of gendered existence punctured maiden reveries in the first half, the matron’s reveries exert equally unbearable pressure on the circumstances that gender expectations, specifically, compulsory marriage for women, have brought about in the second half. These pressures extend as well to the boundary between reverie and reality, a boundary erotically suspended by Mitchell and alternately cherished and exploited by Coverdale. In Victoire’s latter reverie, above, Clemmer seems to intend certain departures from Mitchell’s type, in style and tempo as well as in content and context. While Mitchell’s bachelor carefully and methodically stokes the fires of his imagination, controlling its temperatures and withdrawing from the warmth of its pictures should they, and the affect they explore, get too intense, in Clemmer’s tableau, Victoire asserts that the fiery light “smote my couch” and a “resplendent March sun … looked full upon [me],” and she turns her face to its radiance (210). Gone are the gentle golden visions. Chastened by harsh circumstance, there is a new style of intensity, and even a kind of agency to fantasy that was not present in Victoire’s earlier bachelor-like reflections in front of the anthracite fire. The source of this reverie (the sun, no longer the “mimic sunset” produced at the hearth) now comes from outside of the domestic space and is not manufactured by her. Seeking to “delight in the simple sensuous existence” (210), she caresses her description with alliteration and consonance (“quiescently, dreamily, as invalids will,” “shimmering shaft”), with verbal repetition (“I drank, and drank, yet felt that I could not drink enough”), and with intensifiers (“resplendent,” “life-inspiring splendor”)€– and this reverie is only a small blaze compared to conflagrations I will discuss momentarily. Using a word that Victoire coins to describe the effect of certain natures, we might say that the textures of reverie are “intensated” by Clemmer’s style (70). Mitchell coaxes his language into double entendre, allowing for a modulation between literal and metaphorical fires, kindling, guns, dogs€– and the igniting, stoking, shooting, and stroking they require. In his style, then, Mitchell again enjoys his controlled vacillation

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and careful suspension between two spheres of meaning. As Otter points out, Mitchell’s “fancies need not have a material type or an objective form because they have a conventional form” in the sentimental tropes of “the death of a child, the loss of a wife, the coffin in the parlor,”59 and we might add that Mitchell’s sexual fancies also play with conventions of sexual allusion. As a woman writer, Clemmer’s access to a shared repertoire of sexual pun is limited at best. Alliteration draws attention to the sounds of words at the cost of verbal reference, including the shared meaning or context played on by both sentimental tropes and double entendres. Like others in this study, Clemmer contrives rather than borrows expression to make words express what they cannot say. Her language urges us to, with Victoire, “delight in simple sensuous existence,” of the words themselves, experiencing them as newly palpable (210). A transformation takes place during Victoire’s reverie in which she herself is also newly alive to sensation, and her language enacts that transformation for us, one that troubles distinctions between reality and fantasy. In other ways, dream life does not remain dream life in Victoire. Reveries produce material alternatives within the script of female Bildung. In the midst of Henri’s initial marriage proposal, which he expects her to accept, Victoire reflects on the “rights” of the soul, much as Fuller and Oakes Smith had, and muses on the open spaces it requires:€“Every soul holds an inner life and this should be allowed to expand, to grow, safe from the pressure of any outward hand”; nonetheless, she goes on, “that bent of the mind, which can neither be given nor taken away, which distinguishes its possessor from every other human being, is generally regarded as a fault (Clemmer, 45). Instead of acquiescing to the proposal, Victoire receives what she calls the “prophecy of an individual mission,” instructing her to be an artist rather than a wife, and she refuses Henri (45). Here Victoire demonstrates the feminist-mesmerist tenet that locating a self in the soul rather than in a social body that needs protection and a mate, or in a heart that needs a head, as the Victorian sentimental formulation posits, has material consequences and paradoxically allows her to maintain control over her body. The radical implications of Victoire’s vision are that though social contracts attempt to bind her body, her soul remains free to range in arenas outside of them. Her desire does not necessarily follow into the spaces assigned to her gendered, embodied self. Mitchell also claims such freedoms via reverie and the free flow of affections, but in Victoire, these freedoms partake of a different character by their analogy to the trance state. Feminist-mesmerist discourse, its insistence on other ways

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of knowing and experiencing the world and the self and the accessible palpability of those alternatives, give fantasy its edge in Victoire, a possible potency that would threaten the careful modulation of dream and reality that keeps Mitchell’s fantasy afloat. This is made explicit when in the proposal scene above, as Henri presents his suit, she closes her eyes and “sees,” in the “trance of [her] new vision” (44), not only alternative career paths, but the face of someone whom she clearly prefers to the present applicant. Victoire’s life of drudgery, her tedious courtship, her restless marriage, are punctuated by such fervid visions of a man she has only met in passing, but for whom she conceived an immediate and intense passion. Her visions transport her to the lush bounty of Les Delices, her childhood garden in France. In his work on mysticism, Michel de Certeau reminds us that, far from a passive retreat, the mystical “gesture of ‘going on retreat,’ or of ‘withdrawing,’ is the universal indication of the tendency that countered the necessary ‘docility’ or ‘compliance’ of State-connected religious institutions with the segregation of a place.”60 Certeau is particularly interested in how the journey of the mystic itself produces the “social redistributions of space by and for new practices” (21). The effect is of a “‘nomadization’ of space,” an increase in “the number of cartographic strata within the same space,” or a “drifting of the borders” (Certeau’s emphasis, 63). As Victoire mentally wanders from the proposal scene to her garden, she clears a space in which to experience the “tremble” of “the pulses of life” even as her suitor drones on about her “needs” for protection, for money, and so on (44). She thus counters her seemingly docile (according to her status as female) and passionless body by abandoning the “old clay image,” to use James Kirke Paulding’s term, and manifesting her pleasure at another location altogether. In fact, the status of Victoire’s fantasies as imaginary is troubled by their frequent grounding in reality:€in one, Victoire sees a man (the same man as in her earlier vision during the dry proposal) in this garden who we later find out was really there at the time. His recurring presence in “the soft spring realm of [her] being, whose pulses tingle with the delicious stir of youth’s enkindling ecstacy,” as she refers to the space she accesses in vision, and the electricity of their out-of-body connection charges this vision with sexual overtones (189). In the mystical space opened up by Victoire’s sixth sense, a space that need not correspond to the spatial or temporal limitations of her physical body any more than her clairvoyance does, what constitutes a sexual encounter becomes ambiguous. Since these two have exchanged only a fleeting glance prior to Victoire’s visions of him, her out-of-body encounters provide, paradoxically, the material for

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their subsequent attraction:€her visions precede and explain the intensity of the reunion when they meet again, as if the visionary encounter had the status of an actual event. The text itself has experienced a reformulation of its layers and a leveling of the hierarchy between them, as fantasy bleeds into and becomes an alternative reality. Victoire’s visions offer an experience much like the highest trance state the mesmerist manuals describe, in which she can “see” more:€she can in fact apparently see from New York to France. She can also see or sense that “future state of being” mesmerists had promised, a world geared to spirit, rather than to the body or the forms of convention. Strikingly, the spiritual reality to which Victoire has access encompasses a full-scale sexual alternative that reaches beyond the personal limits of autoerotic reverie. The stranger, appropriately named Ambrose, appears in America after Victoire has finally consented and married Henri. In the chapter entitled “Free Love,” Victoire refuses to act on Ambrose’s proposal to flee with him to Europe. Yet the eponymous principle of the chapter is everywhere validated. Victoire portrays another reality in which we wake to find ourselves possessed with a mysterious feeling of kinship for one standing without the sphere of our individual life, with whom we are never to enter into any intimate personal relations, yet the vines of alliance, reaching out from that soul, cling closely to our own … So illusive is its tissue, we cannot sunder it, so tense its subtle fibre, we cannot lengthen it … There are hours when longings for the absent presence pierce the soul as the wondrous vision of unattainable joy … the mocking glory of the ‘Might Have Been’. (96–97)

Victoire describes spheres of desire and affection€– haunting, spectral, flowing outside and through social and physical structures. Human desire moves in mysterious, unpredictable ways; it cannot be stoked, manipulated, or projected by the individual. It is “spontaneous and independent of our volitions” (223). Persons with no evident role or significance in one’s life yet impinge on and impress that life more than those who are physically proximate and involved:€“Souls separated by a thousand barriers yet act and react upon each other; that beings who seem far distant from us sometimes exert a deeper influence over our lives than the companions who walked by our side” (293). She here offers a radical and strict configuration of a love so free it roams about of its own volition taking little heed of persons, spatial relations, social circumstances, or the self’s instructions to it. Attraction that surpasses all bounds, circulates outside of the marriage contract, exceeds the companionate love of the domestic circle, and is fundamentally antithetical to social institutions pervades the

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book and challenges its marriage plot. Affectional feelings generated and transmitted from one individual to another, or the projection of the self for circulation to others€– these self-generated bonds and collaborations that Mitchell forges with his audience€– are not the kind of medium that shapes the visions in Victoire. Like Fuller’s feminine principle, the free love described operates as a spirit that can have social impact, and it can be felt in the body but does not originate there. Free love amounts to a kind of pantheistic force, a vital fluid; the force of spirit is so radical that it cannot be conjured or contracted. Mitchell also poses an alternative realm of feeling, between writer and reader. As in Mitchell’s narrative dynamic, in fact, fantasy life in Victoire is imagined to be constituted by social bonds, rather than by an individualist escape from them. In Clemmer’s construction, this dynamic seems less secure; these bonds are not of one’s own making. One’s sexuality is not something that can be projected in private or shared at will; sexuality comes from outside of the self and threatens to€– perhaps pleasurably€– undo one’s self. One who is responsive to such force, however, can partake of its radical freedoms. Victoire is remarkable not only for probing and developing an alternative space of free love and the agony of living outside it, but also for not finally renouncing or eradicating it. Ambrose goes on to marry Hope, Victoire’s protégé, and so the spiritual lovers resign themselves to separation.61 After being assured that Ambrose loves Hope differently (less passionately), Victoire is content to follow the advice she finds in “an antique book”:€“Thy friend is always thy friend. Not to have or to hold to love, or to rejoice in, but to remember.” But this memory may be cherished even as her passion cannot be:€“Deny it not, despise it not; respect its secrets … And so kept it shall never be like a dead thing in thy heart” (372–73).62 Although Victoire has conducted rigorous experiments in the asceticism of seventeenth-century French mystic Madame Guyon, among others, the conclusion suggests that Victoire will not purge her feeling, but harbor it, and the text suggests it may find the light of day again. The text expresses ambivalence about such ascetic (perhaps also conventional feminine) renunciation:€“Was it ignoble to ignore the world in which God had placed us, to shut ourselves away from the temptations by which He had surrounded us … ? Had we any right to abuse the very natures which He had given us?” (274). Renunciation would also deny the spirit of free love; the conclusion allows Clemmer to maintain the socially correct fidelity to the marriage vow as a kind of “meantime” in which the spirit of free love exists as an immanent future.63 If the antique book also condones the preservation of feeling through reverie, we must understand that withdrawal

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into and indulgence in one’s vision has had the power to destabilize the social structures, especially marriage, it has momentarily abandoned. The dream realm is not private, isolated, and contained; indeed, it reveals another reality that conventions have masked. It has produced another plane of experience that competes in the diegetic space and time with the marriage plot, causing the narrative to break open around marriage rather than resolve with it. Mitchell and Clemmer both understand what Judith Butler, in Undoing Gender, has called “the critical promise of fantasy”€– that “fantasy is not the opposite of reality; it is what reality forecloses, and, as a result, it defines the limits of reality.”64 The critical promise of fantasy “is to challenge the contingent limits of what will and will not be called reality” (29). For Mitchell and Clemmer, fantasy questions whether monogamy is the consummation of a life. But Mitchell and Clemmer manage this border of fantasy Â�differently. The bachelor maintains his liberty to cross between spheres of waking and dreaming, of married and bachelor life, of masculine freedom and domestic “bonds,” by maintaining dream life as dream. He thus carefully secures the modulation between the stasis of bachelor life and the flux of domestic/dream life. He will dream and (or so that) nothing will change. As both Katherine Snyder and Vincent Bertolini have shown, in this suspension the bachelor narrator can preserve his liminality, a politicized lack of commitment to heterosexual masculinity.65 Rather than a modulation of vision and reality, as in Mitchell, or a separation of their powers, as in Hawthorne, in Clemmer’s fiction informed by a feminist-mesmerist investment in spirit, the boundary between vision and reality is opened up and altered. Victoire’s sixth sense, her visions, open the narrative to what Certeau calls “the experience of [mysticism’s] strangeness in ordinary life.”66 The spiritual is no longer confined to an elsewhere, and desire (of women, for proscribed plots and experiences), which is here entwined with spirit, has established its Â�presence in the text. In her American “Bel Eden” garden (wonderfully, a recreation of Les Delices by Ambrose, but bought by Henri when Ambrose despairs of finding Victoire), Victoire rejects the temptation, the ambrosia, she discovered in the French Les Delices, but she does not reject the knowledge she found there€– the registers of feeling and desire entertained in other, lusher, garden plots. (Victoire remains less figuratively in touch with these registers through her “psychometric sense,” which discerns the “effluence” of Ambrose’s spirit in the garden [279, 278].) Hers are no longer discrete visions and experiences belonging to an Â�originary paradise; they infuse and inform all parts of her story, where they apply their subterranean pressures to the

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sexual containments of marriage, its gendered social requirements, and its literary plots. Fantasy is not the stabilizer between two alternatives€– affectional freedom or conventional bonds€– as it is for Mitchell. Its presence becomes palpable in the waking world, pervading and destabilizing its forms. Just as mesmerism grants access, not to separate worlds or afterlives, but to previously inaccessible regions of this one, so Clemmer’s novel posits other itineraries for women that are temporally and spatially coincident with the realities of Victoire’s plotted existence; they are “here” not elsewhere, present, for those who know how to access them. Clemmer’s text, I will argue more specifically in the next section, fulfills the potential of feminist-mesmerist vision to instantiate alternatives. It operates under the recognition that, as Judith Butler writes, “Fantasy is what allows us to imagine ourselves and others otherwise; it establishes the possible in excess of the real; it points elsewhere, and when it is embodied, it brings the elsewhere home (29). T h e s e ns uous s ou l The nature of fantasy in Clemmer’s text epitomizes the political investment of highly wrought writers in the spaces that their style could open and vivify. The women I examine assert that literature is a medium that can develop the border space fantasy occupies between vision and reality, and they labor to augment and enhance that space through style. In their view of that space, the ideal or the visionary is made available for experiencing and refashioning€– it is manipulable and tangible. In Victoire, fantasy occupies a space very much like that of the highest trance state, not the stupor of the mesmerized maiden, but the clairvoyant state that provides a purchase on both social fictions and “spiritual” realities, a vantage point that feminism used to clarify its vision of social transformation. We can return to this conception of the trance state to help us understand the alternatives that fantasy was thought to make available, alternatives that the authors are accessing through their stylistic expansion and enhancement of that visionary space. The trance state offers women the conceptual possibility of relinquishing anatomy and the social worlds that devolve from it in order not only to appropriate space to their desires, but to access new forms of embodiment. In her model of organs without necessary ends in Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Fuller suggests that the body and senses are available for reorganization and that those reorganizations open onto transformative social arrangements. We can find a template for this type of

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experience in Victoire’s reverie induced by the “resplendent March sun,” in which, as the sun touches her face, she claims, “I nestled in its radiance. I drank, and drank, yet felt that I could not drink enough of its lifeinspiring splendor.”67 As her pleasure expands under the intensifying light of her reverie, her being changes to one that responds to light’s subtle matter with the force of a sexual encounter; she nestles against its body and drinks its substance. Victoire’s reveries and visions are not those of a self that “watches itself feel”68 within a shifting tableau of domestic affectional dramas as did Mitchell’s narrator, but of a self that is made newly palpable to itself. Another female narrator of dreams, Margaret Sweat’s Ethel of Ethel’s Love-Life:€A Novel (1859), makes this move explicit, describing her dreams as “a sort of double consciousness in myself, through which I am able to pause and examine, as it were, each subtle change in emotion”.69 By this, she does not mean she reflects on her emotional state at various points in time. She actually examines her emotion as a tangible thing that moves, expands and contracts, and varies consistencies. She watches as its bulk impinges on others, causing various reactions in the physical composition of their emotions. Like this narrator, Victoire watches herself as she takes in and takes on the subtle substance of her reverie, the “palpable fluidity” of light that radiates and saturates. Both texts create a space of fantasy through which to access richer styles of being. We have seen how Clemmer uses alliteration as a way of stripping sense from words, not to tie them more closely to an original referent, but to make them seem newly alive by intensifying the sensual life of language itself. According to Certeau, mystical vision entails just such a move away from referential and toward poetic language€– it “‘converts’ [signs] into an aesthetics” in which “expression … fades away before the ‘palpable’ and ‘sensible’ quality of the signifier itself.”70 “This metamorphosis is frequent among the mystics:€t he criterion of the beautiful replaces that of the true. It carries the sign from one space to another, and it produces the new space. It is by this metamorphosis that a chart of knowledge is transformed into a garden of delights” (Certeau, Mystic, 58).71 The movement from one register to another effects both the Â�transformation of the sign and the creation of a space to accommodate its transformed being. What Certeau claims for the signifier in mystical vision is also true of the body in trance:€Victoire herself is transformed under the intensifying light of reverie, she “becomes iridescent from a different air” and her “being changes in a different space”€– that of her own visionary Garden of Delights (Certeau, Mystic, 58). When words are peeled of conventional sense to intensify their aesthetic sense, there is an analogy between the

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transformation wrought in language and the transformation wrought on the body of Victoire, making Clemmer’s highly wrought style the perceptive vehicle for our own entry into an apprehension of the social and sexual alternatives of Clemmer’s text. Before I return to this claim it is worth examining the experience of the trance state in women’s actual and fictional accounts, in order to gain a wider sense of the alternative forms of experience and embodiment there. The experience Elizabeth Oakes Smith records in her Shadow Land; or, The Seer is remarkably like that of Paulding’s mesmeric adventuress, with which I began: We may imagine the spiritual being laying down its material companion tenderly to slumber, withdrawing itself gently from the exhausted receptacle, and rejoicing in its freedom from the frettings of daily life; while itself, needless of repose, goes out into new untried spheres, filling its urn at divine fountains, lighting the torch of its existence in the glories of the Infinite Source; holding its companionship with undying affinities, and enlarging itself by ranging through illimitable space.72 Leaving the body behind allows her to “enlarge” the self, extending into “new untried spheres” to enjoy freedom of movement and a negation of gendered boundaries.

As we have seen, literary representation of the trance state often cited the issue of control over one’s own body or other’s bodies, but when Fuller, Clemmer, and Oakes Smith wrote about trance, they were not likely to thematize the “magnetic violation of vulnerable innocence”.73 Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century questions this formulation of external control over a female self:€“[T]he trance of Ecstatica purports to be produced by the agency of one human being on another, instead of, as in her case, direct from the spirit” (emphasis added).74 Following Fuller’s lead, a more complex exploration of female sexuality arises when women writers rejected the idea that the mesmerizer held the key to their inner selves, thus transforming mesmerism to produce the mesmeric heroine whose power was unauthorized by male institutions. Caroline Chesebro’, in her 1851 story “The Clairvoyant,” dismisses the mesmerist summarily:€“He had looked upon me, and I know not how it was, but his strange gaze overpowered my nervous system, inducing a sleep of the animal life, and then this panting, struggling soul escaped his influence, as it had that of the body.”75 Rather than positioning herself as victim of male powers, Chesebro’s out-of-body flight narrates simultaneously an escape from the body and from male control. Women were just as likely to feature self-induction, or, as we have seen in Clemmer, simply a particular disposition toward special facilities.

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Oakes Smith’s Bertha, of her novel Bertha and Lily, claimed, “If I place my hands upon each side of my head, over the region of hope, and love, and ideality (according to Dr. Buchanan’s theory), I fall into a soft, dreamy state.”76 Bertha here borrows techniques of a particular branch of phrenology, phrenomesmerism, that concentrated magnetic powers on particular brain “organs” or bumps, to induce a state in which the corresponding characteristics were isolated and intensified. But such technology is not necessary; Bertha informs us that “the [Water] Lily at once throws me into the same state” (283). Bertha’s self- (or flower-) induced trance, she says, “is so delicious, that one of less integrity of life might be tempted to repeat it. I seem to float in air€– my senses are cottoned upon me€– faint music and exquisite odors float about me” (283). Rather than using mesmerism to position women as the victim of male powers, Oakes Smith, Chesebro’, and Fuller unfold an anatomy of possibility. This version of the soul, described by Chesebro’ as “panting” and Oakes Smith, in Bertha and Lily, as “volcanic” with “lava depths,” impedes the familiar impulse to chalk these instances up to conventional feminine spirituality. It would be misguided to think that this sexual register of the soul was lost on nineteenth-century readers. The Christian Enquirer, for instance, in a respectful but nervous review of Oakes Smith’s Bertha and Lily, suggested that some new configuration of sense and spirit was the implicit project of the novel: As might be expected, coming from the pen of Mrs. Oakes Smith, there is in it at times, a tinge of transcendentalism; yes, and of spiritualism too; to say nothing of a strong flavor of Swedenborgianism, all through. It makes us ask the question, whether sensualism may not be spiritualized, and so made fascinating? The accomplished authoress seems to us to prove the possibility.77

We have seen that mesmerism sought a new relation of matter and spirit€– to see and feel the soul in trance and, conversely, to transform the material world through the vision of the soul. Hence, discourses of the soul took on a funny sort of literalism. That is, figures of the soul were just that:€conceptions of the soul as a tangibility, and even a body. Much mesmeric discourse is explicit about the existence of a material soul, what Spiritualists called “the electrical body,”78 and Child, in The Progress of Religious Ideas, described as “the sensuous soul”€– “a subtile [sic] invisible body, the seat of the spiritual faculties, the mediator between the soul and the senses.”79 Child found evidence of such a spiritual body in the example of “the soul of Hermotimus, the Greek philosopher, [who] frequently left his body apparently lifeless, and wandered

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all over the earth, bringing tidings from remote regions, and foretelling futurity,” which of course returns us to the independent, adventuring soul. But the soul’s mobility, clairvoyance, and prophecy are only made possible by its embodiment:€Child tells us that the ancients “sometimes called it an aerial body, and sometimes a sensuous soul; and they described it as having all of sensation in each and every part of it; as ‘all eye, all ear, and all taste’â•›” (vol. I, 26, Child’s emphasis). Child presents these historical examples as evidence of a protomesmeric sensibility that allowed the ancients to partially comprehend the miracles that they witnessed, such as Cassandra’s prophecies. If we return to a historical context, then, that was deeply interested in acquiring a sense of the soul€– a religious sense to be sure, but also a sense of its history, even its form and faculties€– then we must surely take seriously figurations of the soul in women’s writing. The sensuous soul offers a range of possibilities. The soul’s escape from the body allows for an exploration of interiority free from gender prescription, but, being embodied, it provides an arena to explore female sexuality free from the entrapments of a specular, culturally scripted body. The sensuous soul is an unexpected configuration of gender, body, and sexuality strikingly formulated through a conception of spirit. An embodiment of Fuller’s organs without necessary purpose, the sensuous soul involved a rearrangement of the body and its faculties. As I have indicated, mesmerist manuals like Joseph Haddock described the clairvoyant state in just such terms, as “a closing of the common external of our being, a transfer of the sensational perceptions from the ultimate of the body to the ultimate of the spirit€– and thence, and simply from this transfer of ultimates, arises an awakening of the conscious sensational perception of the inner man, or spirit.”80 While the bodily senses were shut down, encountering the soul through the trance state depended on the notion that it could be sensed; that is, physically encountered precisely because the soul was sensate€– capable of sensing and of being sensed. As in what Certeau called “social redistributions of space by and for new practices” in the mystic’s vision, the trance state redistributes body to summon into being new ways of inhabiting social space (Mystic, 21). Harriet Martineau’s description of the trance state in her Letters on Mesmerism provides a model of erotic experience that quite literally avoids the snares of the physical body: As the muscular power oozes away under the mesmeric influence, a strange inexplicable feeling ensues of the frame becoming transparent and ductile. My head

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has often appeared to be drawn out, to change its form, according to the traction of my Mesmerist; and an indescribable and exceedingly agreeable sensation of transparency and lightness, through a part or the whole of the frame, has followed. Then begins the moaning, of which so much has been made, as an indication of pain. I have often moaned, and much oftener have been disposed to do so, when the sensations have been the most tranquil and agreeable. As such times, my Mesmerist has struggled not to disturb me by a laugh, when I have murmured, with a serious tone, “Here are my hands, but they have no arms to them:” “O dear! what shall I do? here is none of me left!” (16)

The body is exaggerated and attenuated, weirded and rearranged, at the same time. Finally Martineau’s body melts away in inverse proportion to the ascendancy of her pleasure, until there is none of her left, experiencing the most intense pleasure at the moment of utter selfabandonment. Cora Hatch, the famous trance maiden whose lectures even Henry James and N. P. Willis attended, described (while channeling Epes Sargent’s spirit) the experience of encountering the spirit’s body after death of the material one:€ “Suddenly and with full power, I sprang upright, and was aware immediately of being a form, a being whose intensity pervaded and thrilled me, until I seemed a part of all the universe around; a form that was so unlike the form that lay at my feet that I was startled.”81 Hatch’s grammar conveys a dispersion of self and even a confusion of selves:€Is the speaking “I” that springs up as a new form the same as the being that pervades her and thrills her? Does she then pervade herself? How can we understand the multiplication of pronoun reference here? The dispersion of self, nonetheless, leads to an experience of concentrated sensations€– of power and thrilling intensity. Hatch and Martineau describe disembodied states of transparency and dispersion even as they narrate distinctly sensual responses€– the “moaning” and “the sensation of transparency,” and the “thrill” and “intensity” of dematerialization. Oakes Smith, in Shadow Land, also describes the experience of seeing “her spiritual anatomy” in a dream, including the nerves, a perfect forest of them, but beautiful in themselves, like threads of pearl; next I saw the bones, and these were of the purest ivory. Palpable as these parts were, they were exquisitely beautiful to the eye, and made up a floating, transparent, white shape, affecting me with a sense of pleasure; but within all these€ – breathing, and diffused through all, and making up the solidness of what here, in this world, is flesh and blood, for I saw none in my dream€– was a rosy light that seemed to live of itself, imparting completeness to the whole body. (34–35)

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Here we have again the semantically and grammatically impossible experience of seeing and describing the experience of one’s (spirit) body from a place outside of bodies. We see through to the jeweled interior and structural ornament (ivory bones) that is the soul’s embodiment. As with Fuller’s yucca, when the spirit is revealed it comes forth with the luminous rarity of a hidden jewel€– ornament, in rhetoric and as image, is the medium for its expression. The jewel is perhaps a conventional representation of the soul, especially in mystical discourse, but Oakes Smith’s emphasis on ornament as a structure is indicative of the particular project of embodying spirit, or giving the soul (very fine) bones and flesh (made of light). Her construction turns on the transformative paradox of making something impalpable or ethereal into something substantial. What Stephens’ jeweled tree had done for the ephemeral nature of female purity when defined as virginity, Oakes Smith does here for any notion of spirit as feminized vacancy. In this passage we have the same descriptive strings, even piling of metaphor, that indicate the elaborating impulse we have seen in other highly wrought passages. The passage bewilders like Stephens’ conglomerating prose and imagery in her dreamscape, but seems without an organizing motivation in its development, as Stephens’ was organized around a kind of aggressive and resistant weirdness. In Oakes Smith’s passage we get tangled in the language because the metaphor and logic breaks down€– how do these parts work together? How can the nerves look like both strings of pearls and forests? How can strings of pearls and rosy light form shape or “solidness”? We find the pieces€– superfine breath and light and even jewels of the finest work€– from the repertoire of a style that seeks to produce an alternative to the physical body. But here, in the attempt to map the spiritual body back onto the bones, flesh, and blood of the physical one, the imagery baffles, as if the process of being mapped back onto a physical body denied the spirit its integrity. The passage returns us to Certeau’s account of the sign in mystical vision when it moves from the criterion of the true to that of the beautiful€– these dreamy phrases and imagery are “interrelated by aesthetic rather than semantic relationships” (Mystic, 70). Without the semantic knitting of the images, we lose track of the way this spiritual body is put together, and it may be we lose track of ourselves in the language and imagery. Perhaps, however, that is the point. The language is conveying us out of ourselves and away from our bearings. As we wander through these clauses that provide such an inadequate map or anatomy, we nomadicize the body it describes and give it extra, unmapped dimensions. We also feel, like Hatch, the “thrill” of diffusion. This passage

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describes€– but also acts as a conveyance for€– a feeling of the self pouring out of its bounds. But the diffusion also spreads and enlarges the self, here filling the new space of trance. We have seen that the pattern Martineau describes€– of shedding the body to unfold pleasure€– is actually a common one. We will recall that Stephens’ protagonist, Catharine, retreats within a fantasy world where, she claims, “I imagined myself no longer a woman … almost everyday, I took to myself some new form.”82 I would emphasize, again, that in their construction of pleasure as remaining outside of both representational and bodily incorporation, highly wrought novelists reached for an expressive mode reducible to neither body nor soul. The form encountered is rarely one that can be grasped:€it pervades, overflows, bursts:€“my own soul was exhaustless in its opulence,” narrates Victoire, “I was drunken with the exuberant wine of my own overflowing life. I fed upon the delectable juices of my own bounteous vitality, and was satisfied” (Clemmer, 101). While both Catharine’s and Victoire’s fantasies are marked by disembodiment€ – they are morphing self and liquid soul respectively€ – the move out of the body is a move into a space newly alive to pleasure. The self has become uncontained but yet is substantive and accessible in ways it had not been before. One of Victoire’s reveries in which she is transported back to Les Delices, is paradigmatic of how authors used style to create a sense of the soul in language, and it is worth returning to it in detail now. This is the vision in which Victoire sees the stranger in Les Delices, and we later learn he was actually there. At the very moment she is transported from her body, in fact, she employs an utterly corporeal vocabulary: Before my second inmost sight it stood in the trance of a summer noon. The mountain summits burned in smouldering clouds of electric crimson. The cascade fell in sheets of crystallized sunshine€– trailed its glory over blistering rocks, dropping at last on the cool hearts of purple mosses which waited its coming in the humid gorges below. Again the fruits in the hands of Ceres flushed with mocking mellowness. More than ever the redolent flowers blushed above the mirrors of the fountains. Waters trickle in the throats of marble lilies€– tinkled, gurgled in myriads of murmurous jets. (99)

Packing body into the soul’s landscape has resulted not in an attenuation of sense but in a multiplication of female erogenous zones, here encountered at every turn. Yet the dizzying proliferation of pleasure, the manic movement from one sensual event to another, confuses any reading that stops with the notion that the passage operates as a metaphor for the physical body. The language of the passage is highly deliberate, but reference is

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not determining the language chosen here; it seems instead to be chosen according to an aesthetic grammar in which words are arranged (and so not dictated by signifieds) according to aesthetic qualities they offer or the syntactical events they might orchestrate. Thus, the intensive consonance of the passage insists on the phonic qualities of language and the arrangement of words according to an aesthetic grammar of sounds and imagery. The consonance in the passage is so motivated, it asks for and I think rewards a closer look at its particular phonic scheme. The predominant “s” sound that marks the entry into trance and second sight, and connects it to the hiss of heat (and the conflagration of vision) in “summer,” “smouldering,” “crimson,” “sunshine,” and “blistering” is punctuated by the intermittent hard “c” beginning at the end of the second sentence. The repeated joining of the sounds in four consecutively stressed words (“clouds,” “crimson,” “cascade,” “crystallized”) imitates both the crackle of fire and the hard “cascade” of water, but both sounds soften in the second half, where the softer “f,” “sh,” and then “m” predominate, evoking the effusiveness of “flush[ing]” and “blush[ing],” actions stressed by their rhyme, and the “murmur[ing]” of flowing water, a sound the words make even before the onomatopoeic “murmurous” appears in the last phrase. The brash crescendo of consonance in the final sentence, which seems to flaunt the loud but unspecified sexuality ringing through the syllables of the passage, brings together the three predominant sounds, “s,” a hard “c,” and “m,” in a baroque waterworks of hard and soft sounds and the hard and soft flows, from jets to gurgles, they indicate. Rather than using metaphor to figure alternative embodiment, this language seeks to wring from language’s material qualities€– here, its sounds€– a palpable form for the sensuous soul. Clemmer turns to the qualities of language to fill the gap between the language she has to use and the thing she wishes to embody. Gerard Genette, who defines figure as the space or gap between sign and meaning, takes figures of language to create a form by the space they delineate when language “turns” from simple, common expression, where “sign and meaning are contiguous.”83 That space is not empty, it is a form that is productive and substantive€– it is the “inner space of language” (49). Genette defines “poetic language” not as that which seeks to widen the gap, as we might expect literary “flights” of language to do, but as that language that seeks to efface the gap between words and meanings. Poetic language is even, he ventures, “language in a state of dreaming”€– dreaming of “language without gap” (96, 97) between sign and signified. Clemmer, then, seems not content with the creation of a metaphorical figure for women’s desire, but instead seeks to fill the gap

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between the figure of language and the embodiment of female desire:€she dreams of a new form and wants to eke it out of language. Genette asserts that poetic language does not deviate further from the signified into the oblivion of language divorced from worldly usage, but instead “withdraws from common language from the inside” by a “deepening and reverberation” that he compares to the “exalted perceptions gained through drugs” (96; Genette’s emphasis). Poetic language is thus not a different kind of language, but a different, deepened, intense state€– “the poetic state of language,” similar to dream€– a relation to language that Clemmer, Oakes Smith, Fuller and others laid claim to when they evoked the trance state in their writing (Genette, 96). The intensification of language enables the author’s visionary possession of a space, just as Richard Poirier argued for the “place” that style creates in literature, but highly wrought writers wished not just for the envisioning of an ideal, that ideal must also be sensible. Clemmer intensifies what she takes to be the ontological qualities of language itself€– its dual status as embodiment and sign. She enhances the materiality of the signifier (for instance, sound) and dissolves the relation of signs to referents; at the same time, she allows the pattern or musicality of her sound arrangement to form a new figure of the sensuous soul. Genette cites Baudelaire on the transformation of language under an exalted perception:€“[T]he words rise up in flesh and bones, the substantive, in its substantial majesty, the adjective, a transparent garment that clothes it and colors it like a glaze, and the verb, angel of movement, which sets the sentence in motion” (qtd. in Genette, 96). Language becomes a subtle body in the poetic state, one that bears some striking resemblances to the sensuous soul we’ve been encountering. Words become something in and of themselves, the poetic state intensifies their own life. It is Clemmer’s performance of style that “turns” language and effects this transformation. What we have here is not what Margaret Homans found in her classic study of nineteenth-century British women realists, Bearing the Word, in which women writers revealed their struggles with the ambivalence of their position as women€– as the “other,” the outside, of the male symbolic, who nonetheless write.84 Homans holds that women writers sought to return the literal to a pretextual (presymbolic and maternal) place through the transparent representation of nature and the suppression of figure and rhetoric. Stylistic experiment with such an effort was Â�rare; instead, Homans’ writers thematically depicted reproducing (rather than producing) the word€ – making copies, repeating language, etc. Writers like Clemmer, by using the trance state and women’s particular aptitude

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for it as permissive license, seem instead to fully claim poetic language, and perhaps even gloat in their claim to it. (Clemmer’s seems an inflation of the “beautiful”€– an urge to amplify its effect that is an attempt to sound out, somewhat literally, the “copiousness” of language in the visionary state, as Chauncy Townshend’s mesmerist manual called it, but also perhaps to stage her claims to art as a medium of vision with a sense of challenge to the literary field, a type of claim my next chapter will treat [135].) Clemmer’s poetic turns further show us that dream is only the other face of reality, a truer, more intense state of it. The writers strive to efface a similar gap in language, to allow the spirit of meaning to take on substance in language, rather than in a place outside of language. Like all poetic writers, they dream of what Genette calls “the necessary and absurd utopia of language without gap” (97). Their distinction is in the particular correlation of political to poetic project. But what then can be said of the form the sensuous soul takes? Looking at Clemmer’s passage again, we find a familiar lexicon of flowers, ornamental material (crystal and marble), and saturated color (crimson, purple); yet, here those words as signs capture little of what the passage seems to be about. If the final crescendo of consonance seems to bring hard and soft together, that phonic event seems to also point to the primary semantic event in the passage€– the oxymoronic meeting of opposites. The movement of the passage (traced by water and recorded by its changing sound) is from high mountains and clouds to humid gorges and the throats of lilies, where hot also meets cool, and the directed action of sunshine and cascade finds receptivity and response in open hands, blushing flowers, and waiting mosses. In the spasmic spray of the final sentence, however, such distinctions between active/passive, hot/cool, up/down, or top/bottom, and the sexual distinctions we believe we read are confused and made nonsensical. The conjoining of oppositions occurs at a syntactical level as well, especially in the strange “crystallized sunshine,” but also in the decadent “marble lilies,” where things ethereal are substantialized by their modifiers. But solids also melt, as in the “burning mountain summits” and “blistering rocks.” If bodies might be said to lurk behind this imagery with its clear sexual charge€– to wait, open, seek, and release€– such activity is not easily sexually divided, as such oppositions are transformed by their conjoining. (Here it might be said that Clemmer’s Les Delices may well take as its intertext Hieronymus Bosch’s infamous fifteenth-century painting, The Garden of Delights, as part of the mystic canon that interweaves the text, but also as a figure of free love. Bosch’s central ornate fountain is

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surrounded by bodies in every configuration of union and hybridity, just as Clemmer’s central cascade is surrounded by these strange syntactical figures of union). As with her alliteration, in Clemmer’s paradoxes language becomes denotative:€something takes shape in the writing, rather than connoting a referent. Certeau identifies the oxymoron as a basic feature of mystic language:€it “shows what it does not say. The combination of the two terms is substituted for the existence of a third, which is posited as absent” (Mystic Fable, 143). The contradiction raised by oxymoron “is not ‘tragically proclaimed’ as in antithesis but ‘paradisiacally assumed.’ It has the value of fullness” rather than the “insurmountable tension” of antithesis (143). In Certeau’s account the fissure produced by the terms’ Â�conjoining is a hole in language equivalent to the wound of the mystic’s stigmata, where the spirit has touched the body. In my account, what is “paradisiacally assumed” is the palpable fullness of body and spirit brought together in the sensuous soul. The sensuous soul is itself such an unthinkable conjunction€– of the spiritual and the material€– and it calls into question their (gendered) antithesis. Clemmer’s oxymorons are tropic; they deviate words and the orders they signify to create new linguistic entities and accommodate the unsayable sexual desire she wishes to denote. In Clemmer’s hands, then, language is turned and intensified to figure forth the sensuous soul, effecting that transformative movement between vision and reality that Coverdale was determined to deny his circle of reformers. Clemmer’s passage proves a further ironic truth of Hawthorne’s biting critique of reform:€political and sexual desires are entwined in midcentury reform, not because of the inevitable solipsism of reformers but because sexual economies are at the base of so many visions of utopian reform, visions that in restructuring American society begin by taking aim at its basic unit, the family, and the heterosexual couple at its heart. If the envisioned rearrangement of society began with rethinking the nature of marriage and sexual union in Noyes’ pantagamy, in Fourierist communal households, and even in the liberal reconception of marriage as companionate, Clemmer’s wedding of opposites similarly envisions a new kind of sexual union, one that can acknowledge difference rather than subsuming it, and one in which coupling does not rely on anatomies but on the unassigned pleasures of receptivity and activity. In Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Fuller uses a similar paradox to forecast a future for women once their souls are released from falsely gendered social forms:€“We believe the divine energy would pervade nature to a degree unknown in the history of former ages, and that no discordant

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collision, but a ravishing harmony of the spheres would ensue” (260). This harmony of “spheres” evokes Fuller’s interest in an alternative organizing model of how the masculine and feminine can be thought in relation. She posits a new order, a music of the spheres, based on reciprocity and dynamic flow between masculine and feminine rather than the subordination of the feminine. Fuller’s perfect future is full of movement and energy; her harmony is not a static balance or a unification, but a continual process, a ravishment. The ecstasies of Clemmer’s final line might be equivalent to Fuller’s “ravishing harmony” made flesh€ – or sense. Such a paradoxical figure as the sensuous soul, and even the sexual or gender hybridity that might follow from it, is given the fullness of possibility through Clemmer’s language. Thus, while we might point to the throats of lilies and humid gorges to posit Clemmer’s expression of female sexuality and difference, these images seem ancillary to the great hive of activity I have already begun to dissect. Waters change to jewels and back again. The landscape of desire is one of transubstantiation where mountains become fire, sunshine crystal, and air is electric and colored. There is a constant morphing of the material into the ethereal and the ethereal into the material, the seen into the unseen and the unseen into the seen, the soul into body and body into soul. The passage in fact closely tracks Fuller’s conception of gender at the heart of Woman, where “fluid hardens to solid and solid rushes to fluid” (310). Fuller, we recall, wished to claim these metamorphic energies for a feminine “soul” or principle in order to articulate a new order of experience in which the spiritual and the sensual are brought into dynamic relation through its agency, as when she claimed “that which is especially feminine flushes, in blossom, the face of earth, and pervades, like air and water, all this seeming solid globe” (309).85 Pleasure resides in the ecstatic work of transformation itself, work Fuller’s femiminst-mesmeric vision reserves as the special dispensation of a long pent feminine principle. Similarly, Victoire’s desire is perhaps best embodied in the vigour of the cascading language of the passage that crashes on the ear, that pervades semantically opposing features to bring them in to syntactical relation, and diffuses distinctions in a spray of words. Clemmer’s passage is buttressed by feminist-mesmeric vision, taking as its premise the ability to unlock a nonbiological but gendered essence in an out-of-body state, an essence that can go on to confound binary oppositions. If mesmerism offers “a conceptual model for affirming a lawful relationship between matter and spirit” (R. Fuller, Mesmerism, 55), then Fuller’s and Clemmer’s gendered energies are here the vital fluid that connects and transforms them€– an

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elemental essence leaving its mark as a particular sensation€– a flush, blossom, breath. Less material and just beyond incorporation, it infuses bodies but is not incarcerated there. Such constant unfolding, I would argue, is the bodily work of the sensuous soul. The being needed to occupy the nomadicized space of the illimitable mystical spheres is an agile, fluid one that can move across time and space with impossible ease. In passages like Clemmer’s on the garden of delights or Fuller’s on the feminine principle, we are made to feel the agency of the principle at work in the activity of the language. In fact, it is more than anything else what Genette called the stylistic “turning” of language that creates our experience of it as we are propelled into its “inner space” (49). For Certeau’s mystic, it is the journey itself, the act of withdrawing, that designates a new space. And in trance, we recall, it is the very movement between states that effects the transfer of senses from “the ultimate of the body” to “the ultimate of spirit,” as Joseph Haddock’s manual described it, and awakens the sensuous soul (67). The movement that Clemmer’s and Fuller’s passages foreground is at the core of how their passages work. Like the reviewer of Bertha and Lily who discerned that some effort to spiritualize sensualism, “and so” make it “fascinating,” we also recognize the erotic energy of these passages. In that recognition, we acknowledge the turn that shows spirit as the other face of sensuality, or fantasy as the other, deeper and more intense, face of reality, and thus our own reorientation may have already begun. When we “see” a new form for sensual life in these sounds and word arrangements, have our own senses been rearranged to comprehend a subtler body and its expanded pleasures? When we pause and savor language that has been torqued and worked, have we already deviated, turned, from proper meaning? Stylistic performance turns this language so that it acts as a vehicle that carries us to an alternative, and in that transport we sense our own exposure to a different space and a shift in meaning. Style is here “the utopia of those with almost no place to go,” as D.â•›A. Miller has put it.86 Style creates its own places and through them Â�transforms perception (an alchemy replicated in the mesmeric vision featured in the texts) and asks us to take language seriously as a location of social experiment. This formulation of the aesthetic dimensions of literature as transformative, as a potential locus and agent of social experiment, is an argument that has been fraught in recent critical discourse. The editors, Christopher Castiglia and Russ Castronovo, of the recent special issue of American Literature on aesthetics signal the tentativeness of many Americanists to treat aesthetic issues for fear of a loss of political critique in what they posit as the socially disinterested and universalized nature of aesthetic experience. However,

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they take some solace in the Â�political Â�potential of aesthetics by stressing the “collectivizing” pleasures and principles of aesthetic experience, an experience they deem transcendent, transpersonal, but available to all by virtue of the possession of sensory receptivity.87 In this equivocal account, aesthetics seem an undifferentiated realm contained and shaped by social “disciplinary frameworks” that remain “the object of cultural studies” (429). But in the texts shaped by feminist-mesmerist idealism, the work of style opens by contrast a space of fantasy not as a space apart, but as a space from which to reengage the social from a new vantage point. Contrary to a formulation that posits fantasy as bracketed by social and political frameworks, fantasy itself is a social framework in the most important sense. As Judith Butler has argued, “human bodies are not experienced without recourse to some ideality, some frame for experience itself (Undoing, 28).” Fantasy, much like the trance state, provides a crucial alternative framework through which to experience embodiment, but it is not an escapist or private one. In Clemmer’s novel, the notion of pantheistic energy accessed through fantasy, (or rather, in this book where fantasy has actuality, the entrance into a visionary realm) entails the essence of human relation itself. To experience sexuality in the way that Clemmer’s principle of free love suggests is to understand that our sexuality involves a dimension of ourselves that we cannot know or determine, one that comes from outside of ourselves. Sexuality is a “mode of being disposed toward others” (Butler, Undoing, 33), one that involves risk and exposure. I would argue that this dynamic, while transpersonal, need not be so blandly universal or politically disinterested as Castiglia and Castronovo warily propose of the potential “collectivizing principle” generated by aesthetic experience; rather, Clemmer’s principle of free love proposes an exhilarating dynamic that constitutes the self in and by the social, a dynamic she wishes to make available in her text and palpable to her readers through the space that style creates. If fantasy is essential to an experience of one’s own body, or another’s, as gendered, the highly wrought writers across this study access that space with an intent to grasp and shape that experience on behalf of a feminist politics. Visionary space as it is developed by Fuller, Clemmer, Oakes Smith, Martineau, and others is a framework not only for rethinking embodiment but also for understanding, and experiencing, other less observable ways that we are constructed. To be undone in trance is to relinquish conventional anatomies, of both social forms and individual body, and it also entails a relinquishment of a bounded or even possessive notion of the self. These are no “fantasies of an integrated and enriched

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personhood” (Castiglia and Castronovo, 424). Reflecting on the ways we “do” our gender or sexuality, that is, choose to perform or improvise each, and on the ways gender or sexuality simultaneously “undo” us because each is part of a larger social ideality outside of ourselves, Butler poses questions that seem also to be suggested by Martineau, Hatch, or Oakes Smith about their experience of the sensuous soul in trance. Butler asks, “But what if sexuality is the means by which I am dispossessed? What if it is invested and animated from elsewhere even as it is precisely mine? Does it not follow, then, that the ‘I’ who would ‘have’ its sexuality is undone by the sexuality it claims to have, and that its very ‘claim’ can no longer be made exclusively in its own name?” (16) Strikingly, Butler draws on figures of spirit and ecstasy to much the same effect as the historical projects I have described:€she uses figures of spirit and ecstacy to describe the way that sexuality and gender work to do and undo the person, to acknowledge the ways in which fantasy is constitutive of frameworks for bodily experience, and to understand how fantasy works within and on the social. Butler continues, “If gender is for and from another before it becomes my own, if sexuality entails a certain dispossession of the ‘I,’ this does not spell the end to my political claims. It only means that when one makes those claims, one makes them for much more than oneself” (16). For Clemmer or Fuller, it seems that spirit is no metaphor€– but then, our experience of the ideality of sexuality and gender is no metaphor for Butler either. When these writers render their experience of the trance state and we participate through the aesthetic experience of their style, they make a claim about the body that is inherently political and inherently social:€feelings of sensateness, receptivity, activity, and pleasure involve us in a realm that is not bounded by our bodies. These writers understand that realm as one through which we access ways of experiencing gender and sexuality that exceed the personal and the bodily and can thus open onto alternative social relations. In the logic of highly wrought scenes, our aesthetic receptivity is challenged to comprehend new realms of a “sixth” sense that must necessarily reformulate our pleasures. Such a sense, not tied to a bodily organ, potentially reorients sensory experience so that one might begin to apprehend alterity as possibility. Feminist and biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling rejects the current fundamental split between “real bodies” and their cultural constructions. She suggests that in fact “as we grow and develop, we literally, not just ‘discursively’ (that is, through language and cultural practices), construct our bodies, incorporating experience into our very flesh. To understand this claim, we must erode the distinctions between

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the physical and social body.”88 I understand feminist-mesmerist use of the trance state to operate under this very insight€– that our experience of the body is not a given, it is subject to the ideality that provides a framework for its experience and that ideality is never fully pre-determined nor fully self-determined. A feminist vision can and must help to imagine and shape the way we think about gender and sexuality and the possible forms they can take, and highly wrought writers found the performance of style on language to be the best method for appropriating a space to that vision and making its claims felt. Their language works on us, making us feel its excesses. We are conveyed out of our moorings and made subject to its energies. We experience the turn into the inner space of language and must ourselves forge a new relation to the world the writers make there. To enter the trance state is to have your senses “transferred” to just such a more responsive and dynamic embodiment. By this logic, the reader’s apprehension of a sensuous soul through the experience offered by highly wrought style can install a new sense in the reader, and thus begin to reformulate her or his way of being in the world.

Ch a p t e r 3

Harriet Prescott Spofford’s philosophy of composition

The startling debut and success of writer Harriet Prescott Spofford in the first issues of the Atlantic Monthly marks an important moment in the development of women writers’ interest in rendering an abundant, ornate style that challenges the existing representation of women and the Â�feminine and offers something else in its place. Readers from Emily Dickinson to William Dean Howells were struck by what Howells called the “sumptuous and glowing fancy” of Spofford’s vividly conceived stories.1 Anyone who has taught Spofford’s widely anthologized “Circumstance,” the mythicized tale of a woman who, in the clutches of a Maine woods’ panther, lulls the beast by singing all night, knows how unsatisfying it is to narrowly insist on the significance of the religious content of the songs the protagonist sings. Though Spofford uses the conversion arc of the captivity narrative to shape a story of the woman’s awakening, the protagonist’s expanded perception encompasses far more than God’s grace as she communes with the terror and beauty of nature and comes to a new sense of self, embodied in song, upon her radical break with domesticated life. The music of her song€– the notes it strikes, the melodies it holds, the aural embodiment of emotion€– as much as its content, marks the birth of the new self. How her voice moves in the wilderness, as it “repeated and yet repeated, dying with long sighs of sweet sound, [and] vibrated from rock to river and back again from depth to depth of cave and cliff” and how it “soars” to the “potent sway of sound,” provides the measure of her liberation on a plane that seems uninflected by religious doctrine.2 As her husband nears “the heart of the forest” and the “intimation of melody seemed to grow more actual, to take body and breath, to come and go on long swells and ebbs of the night-breeze, to increase with tune and words” (94), we understand, like him, how the protagonist’s voice has taken form and substance in music and how her song is the embodiment of a new self released by her break with social structures and her intimacy with the wilderness. We also see Spofford’s own repetitions of words, sounds, and clause structures in these quotes€– the alliterative reverberations, 131

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the Â�anaphoric “swells and ebbs,” and even the syntactical “increase”€ – as embodying the mobility and sound of the voice. We may think of music in this story as a figure for how style functions across Spofford’s prose work, as an experiment in showing how voice moves, accrues, and takes substance to form some new entity. Spofford was in fact interested in more than a figurative crossing of the techniques of other art forms with prose:€her early “art stories,” as Godey’s called them in 1863, attempt to render the artistic mediums of music, painting, and the decorative arts in prose.3 The most remarkable elaboration of this effort occurs in Spofford’s “The Amber Gods,” a story of equal renown to “Circumstance,” that seemed to contemporary readers to capture Spofford’s aesthetic for the way sound, color, and ornament come alive in her prose.4 Running in the Atlantic Monthly in January and February 1860, “The Amber Gods” presents a striking equation of narrative voice and style, in which elements of visual style, like color and light, do take on life and expression through a verbal medium, and in which highly wrought style seems to be speaking for itself. This is managed not only thematically through the lavish narrator who is herself “a study in color,” but through her verbal performance as well. This chapter examines how Spofford frames this performance of style as a literary position, one that responds to the figures, conceits, and stylistic modalities of American literary romanticism. Indeed, Spofford’s story bodies forth with increased self-consciousness the literary position staked by highly wrought writing, attracting copious comment from her contemporaries, from James Russell Lowell to the very young Henry James. In “The Amber Gods,” Spofford seems to conceive of her literary reviewers as antagonistic interlocutors, and the narrative voice emerges from within this hostile exchange.5 Like other antebellum romantic fiction, Spofford’s story addresses issues of gender and art through “the death of the beautiful woman,” that “most poetical topic” identified by Poe in “The Philosophy of Composition.”6 In the classic archetype, woman is the material of art inseminated by male spirit, but in Poe, there is always some type of precipitate from this process:€the death of the woman is never quite resolved, the matter of art never fully absorbed. With both irony and a sense of affinity, Spofford deploys a diverse range of Edgar Allan Poe’s writing€– from “The Oval Portrait” to “Philosophy of Composition” to “How to Write a Blackwood Article”€– to build the intertextual foundation of her story.7 “The Amber Gods” explicitly shapes a narrative arc in tandem and in tension with “The Oval Portrait,” but it also

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comments on textual portraits of women in writing more widely and relates these to suppressed analytics of women and writing. Spofford’s defense of style thus arises partly as a response to Poe, but it is also shaped within the charged and often adversarial context of the literary and aesthetic debates her writing focuses for us. Spofford recognizes in Poe a set of issues concerning gender, ornament, and spirit that women writers had been addressing before her, sharing her investment in elaborate voluptuous prose. That she anticipated, in her narrative dynamic and her thematic, the reception of her own departures from feminine literary decorum, on the one hand, and from gendered romantic literary codes on the other, reveals to us that highly wrought style was already a symbolically freighted mode. Spofford exploits its association with the feminine and florid and draws on the challenges such style has posed in the hands of women writers, allowing us to understand the style’s literary power and position with new clarity. The undead woman, among other of Poe’s experiments with matter and spirit, leads Spofford to explore modes of expression that preserve woman’s presence (whether authorial or characterological) without mortifying her. Working with what is left of Poe’s women€ – the oval portrait’s “life in death,” Ligeia’s undying will, perhaps even Psyche Zenobia’s loquacious corpse (still determined to publish in Blackwood’s)€ – Spofford explicitly crafts a language from remains. Amber, an amorphous residue, gorgeous ornament, and natural embalmer, is here the complicated figure for Spofford’s style itself, in which some fantastic version of nondomestic woman might abide, or bide her time. If my project of resuscitating the lost body of highly wrought fiction eerily echoes Spofford’s and Poe’s stories€– of female revenants, undead women who yet speak, and embalmed secrets biding time€– Spofford’s fiction cannily anticipates the analogy:€her story “The Amber Gods” is precisely about the survival of style in a hostile environment. Its acidic, sensuous narrator frames the same challenges to the reader that highly wrought writing posed to reviewers. No one had more style than Spofford, quantitatively speaking:€a Harper’s reviewer spoke for many when he claimed no writer “manifests so marked an individuality of style as Miss Prescott. Its most obvious Â�characteristic is its affluence of diction … an apparently inexhaustible wealth of words,” words that “sparkle and glow like diamonds and rubies, like roses, nectarines, and golden wine.”8 “If few are so lavish and reckless,” T. W. Higginson asserted, “it is because few have access to such wealth”; yet her efforts turn monstrous when she is “often betrayed into … wanderings into the realm of words unborn.”9 But Spofford will recalibrate style’s value and redefine its work. She will recast and reorient relations between women and style,

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but not to offer socially purposive solutions. The absence of a proposal for practical social change is often taken as a shortcoming by today’s readers, who feel the story offers no alternative to the cult of feminine beauty it features, but they miss the fact that the story seeks its primary intervention in literary relations, which can open out onto social relations. Instead of interrogating the oppressive dictates of personal style, of fashion or beauty regimens, for women, Spofford mines the possibilities of gorgeous or ornamental style for a woman writer, perversely developing its potential as a feminist aesthetic. Given the oppositional relation to the literary establishment Spofford poses, Poe’s cantankerous ground is natural footing. Moreover, Poe’s ground, the place from which he speaks, not only teems with literary contrariness, it is the restless site for the premature burial of his dead women, who can never be dissociated from Poe’s literary lady “lovers” and competitors.10 The recession of Poe’s figures of women into ground, both into earth and, as I will argue, into the decorative ground of his compositions, is the process that Spofford suspends, inhabits, and eerily reverses. Spofford is as enthralled with the decadent and perverse conflation of women and décor as Poe and shares his underlying suspicion of the sharp division between matter and humanity and the ability of art to mark such distinctions.11 But Spofford exploits the location of the feminine within Poe’s seething compositions to stake out her own aesthetic ground. Joan Dayan has acknowledged Poe’s entwining of gender and style, located in the effusive “verbiage” of his Ligeia:€“If women in nineteenthcentury America must bear the trappings of style, must inhabit most fully the external as essence, Poe shows how such a spectacle both exploits and consumes its participants, both men and women.”12 Somewhat more skeptically, I propose that if for Poe, “there is philosophy even in furniture,”13 and if in his tales that furniture is so often alive with some incarcerated spirit, then Spofford might deduce philosophy from Poe’s furniture, his conflations of women and ornament in the elaborate surfaces of interiors, persons, and landscapes. In a kind of ghostly game of wits she plays with and alongside Poe, Spofford seeks to break the spell that mutes the incarcerated spirit of the textualized ornament. It is in her luxuriant, sumptuous prose style that Spofford finds a counterstrategy to representational modes and a means of undoing the objectification of persons, and especially women, that she finds reified in romanticist portrayals of the creative process. Though Spofford defends her extravagant style with a sophistication that predicts her inaugural role in the American Aesthetic Movement as the author of Art Decoration Applied to Furniture (her own

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philosophy of furniture), her aestheticism ultimately retains much of the earnestness of antebellum romanticism€ – hers is an art for expression’s sake that does in fact “inhabit the external as essence” and finds in ornament the means of potent expression.14 “Ornamental” modes and philosophies emerge as a significant form of portrayal, or expression, a viable alternative style of gendered aesthetic presentation. I reconstruct Spofford’s connections with the British Aestheticist theories of ornament of Christopher Dresser and Owen Jones to demonstrate their shared interest in the idea that ornament might have a primary expressive role in a composition, generating relations, events, and feelings. In her fiction, Spofford develops the idea of expressive ornament to suggest that her exquisitely rendered prose might produce registers of readerly experience distinct from an identification with the depicted reality of her texts. In the relation Spofford scripts between the reader and her ornamental style, personified by her narrator, she calls out a series of gendered assumptions and actively repositions the reader in such a way as to forge a new kind of relation to her text. This relation is generated by her aesthetic and reflects imaginative possibilities, but Spofford’s aesthetic also begins to instantiate those relations by making the reader “feel” both the discomfort and the pleasures they bring. With as much energy as that with which Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Edith Wharton would later critique the suffocating consignment of women to ornamental surplus, Spofford plies ornamental femininity in the figure of her extravagant narrator Giorgione, not only to comment on social gender roles but to cast a bid for stylistic virtuosity, a bid she premises, with deliberate irony, on the greater feminine proximity to the matter and spirit of art, the stuff of style. (That ornament is not only the object of Gilman’s and Wharton’s critiques but, in their intensively wrought tropes of ornamentality, a hallmark feature of their aesthetics, speaks to the aesthetic turn Spofford impels.) Spofford’s work articulates the value of ornament for midcentury women writers:€ ornamentality is not the agent of social death, nor does it entail certain artistic death by way of suffocating surface matter. Instead, ornament is the mediator between art and its beholder that animates the expressive capacities of art. P or t r a i t of a l a dy “The Amber Gods” features a drama of competing aesthetic modes of presentation, centering on the question of whether the young painter and male love interest, Vaughn Rose (called “Rose”), will be able to capture on Â�canvas

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the protagonist and first-person narrator, Giorgione Willoughby, or Yone for short. But in this story the female subject provides a formidable stylistic challenge of her own. Yone introduces herself to the reader through a series of portraits. Most obvious is the namesake painting attributed to Italian Renaissance painter Giorgione in a church in Fiesole, Italy. It was under this painting that Yone’s father first laid eyes on her mother, who was Â�praying on an amber rosary, a string of amber beads carved as “heathen” amber gods and goddesses. It is as if Yone sprang from this initial encounter, at the moment when “all of a sudden a great ray of sunset dashed through the window, and drowned the place in the splendor of the illumined painting … It was a Venus;€– no, though, it couldn’t have been a Venus in a church, could it? Well, then, a Magdalen, I guess, or a Madonna, or something.”15 As the first-person narrator, and positioning the reader (uncomfortably) as a tangible interlocutor, Yone significantly paints her own portrait as well, in which we see that she is the light-drenched offspring of the encounter in Fiesole. In the first, and by far the longest, of the two sections, “Story First:€Flower o’ the Peach,” Yone sits at her toilet, preparing for her noon wedding, as she describes herself and narrates the story of her life up to this point. Strikingly, her canvas is, in this case, a mirror, which has much to say to the gender politics of art that the story addresses. It is worth giving an extended sample of her self-portraiture: I’m a blonde, you know,€– none of your silver-washed things. I wouldn’t give a fico for a girl with flaxen hair; she might as well be a wax doll, and have her eyes moved by a wire; besides, they’ve no souls. I imagine they were remnants at our creation, and somehow scrambled together, and managed to get up a life among themselves; but it’s good for nothing, and everyone sees through the pretence. They’re glass chips, and brittle shavings, slender pinkish scrids,€– no name for them; but just you say blonde, soft and slow and rolling,€– it brings up a brilliant, golden vitality, all manner of white and torrid magnificences, and you see me! I’ve watched little bugs€– gold rose-chafers€– lie steeping in the sun, till every atom of them must have been searched with the warm radiance, and have felt that, when they reached that point, I was just like them, golden all through,€– not dyed, but created. Sunbeams like to follow me, I think. Now, when I stand in one before this glass, infiltrated with the rich tinge, don’t I look like the spirit of it just stepped out for inspection? I seem to myself like the complete incarnation of light, full, bounteous, overflowing, and I wonder at and adore anything so beautiful; and the reflection grows finer and deeper while I gaze, till I dare not do so any longer. So, without more words, I’m a golden blonde. (37–8)

Strengthening her relation to the “illumined” painting by Giorgione by posing in a ray of sunlight, Yone here facilitates her own aestheticization

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into the object of her (and our) artistic, admiring gaze. Yet Yone’s depiction of her sensual surfaces continues to support her expression while it begins to script ours:€when we “say blonde, soft and slow and rolling,” our open-mouthed admiration (ah, oh) is registered and amplified in the soft and long “o”s of the alliterative phrasing repeated throughout the portrait. Recent critics suggest that Yone merely “fashions an identity as an aesthetic object.”16 but her fashioning of the reader, style of talk, and philosophy of art€– all related to the unexamined central conceit of amber€– indicate that she continues to be as much fashioner as fashioned. In fact, Yone never stops talking; the story is most famous for the unsettling denouement, in which she continues to speak to us after death. Given the namesake painting, a possible Magdalene, the setting of Yone’s preparations at her toilet, and Yone’s flamboyant narrative description of herself, Spofford seems to be offering in part a sardonic comment on the status of the woman artist as entangled with that of the “painted woman,” where to paint oneself is not self-portraiture but self-Â�commodification.17 This comment is sharpened as she entwines the fate of women in art with that of women in marriage. After eight paragraphs of audacious self-description, Yone recounts her courtship with Vaughn Rose (called Rose), a young man she lures from her gentle-natured cousin, Louise. Now a rising artist, Rose had formerly been the playmate of Louise and Yone. After several years of studying art abroad, he returns for his childhood sweetheart, Louise, but is captivated by Yone’s beauty and provoked by her imperiousness. His interest in her is never far from his interest in art and his career (though one should note the reversal suggested in their names, where Yone is named after a male painter and Rose’s name evokes the feminized subject of art). During their courtship, we get the third instance of portraiture seeking to represent Yone: He generally put me into a broad beam that slanted from the top of the veiled window, and day after day he worked. Ah, what glorious days they were! how gay! how full of life! I almost feared to let him image me on canvas, do you know? … I feared lest he should see me as I am, in those great masses of warm light lying before him, as I feared he saw when he said amber harmonized with me,€– all being things not polarized, not organized, without centre, so to speak. But it escaped him, and he wrought on. Did he succeed? Bless you! he might as well have painted the sun; and who could do that?18

But Rose’s efforts are not unrepaid:€“shades and combinations that he had hardly touched or known, before, he had to lavish now” (72), thanks to Yone. Yone has previously summed up Rose’s creative deficiencies and her role in remedying them:€“Till this time, it had been the perfection of form

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rather than tint that had enthralled him; he had come home with severe ideas, too severe; he needed me, you see” (51). What Yone has to offer is similar to what her namesake, Giorgione, offered Renaissance painting:€a new, lyrical use of light to create mood rather than define objects.19 The distinction is intrinsic to Spofford’s overarching conceit as well:€Yone in the shaft of light is like a bug in amber that Rose hopes to capture and “image” in the amber of his art, but as her earlier self-portrait insists, Yone herself is more like the amber or light. Her self-portrait, in its profusion of comparison, fails to present a visual form; like the color it goes to some lengths to specify, it has no center or visual point itself. Rose’s severity of form needs modification, whereas Yone seeks ever to modify her object through adjectives that tint, or qualify, the object to such a degree that coloring, rather than delineation, and embellishment, rather than exposition, seems the artistic purpose. Spofford’s story stages a debate over aesthetic styles in order to ask which mode can best present the vitality and sexuality of Yone herself. As we will see, Yone’s values of color, tint, and light are ornamental values while Rose’s insistence on form are those of classicism and representational portraiture. Despite the critical instruction she provides, Yone is hounded by the fear that she will be “used up” and discarded once he learns his lesson. The second part of the story, “Story Last:€Astra Castra, Numen Lumen,” reveals that Yone’s fears were well founded. Yone continues to narrate, but ten years have passed since she last addressed us in her bridal chamber, and she is now on her deathbed. The elision of the wedding (there is no “Story in Between”) makes clear that marriage is a kind of death for Yone. As wife, she has also become more amenable to Rose’s artistic powers. In her disjointed deathbed musings she remembers, “when he spread his easel, when he abandoned love … He became artist,€– ceased to be man. … He could paint me then,€– and, revealed and bare, all our histories written in me, he hung me up beside my ancestors. There I hang” (79–80). Despite Yone’s repeated insistence that her image cannot be duplicated, Rose’s mastery of his subject, marked by this final portrait of Yone, is generally taken to be the point of the story by critics. Alfred Bendixen suggests, “Spofford ultimately concludes that the artist must first come to know and then transcend the world of sensuous experience represented by Yone.”20 In his reading, “[T]he true hero of ‘The Amber Gods’ is Vaughan Rose.” Spofford, a “romantic rebel,” identifies with Rose as artist, and like him, “manages to strike a compromise with the culture that has produced her” (xxvi). Lisa Logan launches a feminist critique of the romantic sensibilities at work in Bendixen’s critique:€he fails

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to take the annihilation of Yone’s self seriously and, in fact, replicates Rose’s maneuvers when he removes her from the center of the narrative. Logan argues that the story critiques the imperialist agenda of romanticism, but that in doing so it nonetheless traces that agenda and is therefore bound to reproduce it. Articulating a familiar double-bind, Logan maintains that Yone can only express her critique using the “master’s tools” and can therefore find no real place for resistance:€ “Giorgione, a creative self-fashioner herself, fails to generate a language or position outside of domesticity that affords her subjectivity. Instead, she fashions an identity as an aesthetic object” (42).21 Yone’s comment, “I’ve no more right than any other piece of Nature to refuse an artist a study in color,” seems to speak from the place that Logan specifies€– that of the objectified other whose only place is either “death or decoration”.22 But critics tend to forget that Yone continues, impossibly but emphatically, to speak from both of these places.23 In Spofford’s hands (as in Poe’s), death and decoration have a certain life of their own. “The Amber Gods” does not simply register its critique; it performs its resistance through voice and style. First, the continuing energy of Yone despite her death leaves a residual power after all is said and done. Such residue is in excess of the romantic plot of the annihilated art/love object. Second, careful attention to the text’s construction of a relation with the reader (much commented upon but never analyzed) reveals a volatile text that, both echoing and exceeding Yone’s resistance, cannot be easily objectified or framed. Finally, there has been a failure, or an inability, to read the most important figure in the text:€ amber, the complex figure for Spofford’s highly wrought style itself. Contemporary readers easily grasped the conceit. In an 1872 article on amber in Appleton’s Journal, author Emma Converse called Spofford’s description of the amber rosary “a bit of glowing word-painting in harmony with the characteristics of the gem.”24 Thus, Yone does not fail to generate her own language or position from which to speak. Through Yone’s voice, Spofford stakes an uncompromising position for her particular style as an aesthetic of beauty and power. As I have indicated, Rose’s portrait of Yone is not the final resting place of her narrative. After proclaiming, “There I hang,” Yone addresses Rose’s portrait of her and commands, “Come from thy frame thou substance, and let this troubled phantom go! Come! for he gave my life to thee. In thee he shut and sealed it all and left me as the empty husk.”25 Several pages later, her substance seems to have accepted the invitation and Yone narrates the reunion:€“How clear the space is! The wind from outdoors,

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rising again, must have rushed in. There is the quarter striking. How free I am! No one here? No swarm of souls about me? … Drop, mask! I will not pick you up! Out, out into the gale! Back to my elements!” (83). When, after another paragraph, Yone ends with, “I must have died at ten minutes past one,” we realize that she was already dead when, in the previous passage she notes, “the quarter is striking” (83). In the same way that we are to imagine Yone’s essence breaking the frame of Rose’s portrait of her, so Spofford breaks the frame of conventional narrative by allowing the dead to speak. Spofford’s contemporary readers were fully alive to this breach, as indicated by their vivid visceral and textual responses. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, whose The Story of Avis is an elegant and explicitly intertextual response to the problem of the woman artist raised by “The Amber Gods,” claimed in 1910 that she couldn’t remember any of the plot. It “took a grip upon something deeper than taste or imagination in me.”26 She still remembered vividly the “alien chill” she experienced when the final “unexpected sentence smote [her] eye” (119). Writing to Susan Dickinson, Emily Dickinson exclaimed, “Sue, it is the only thing I ever read in my life that I didn’t think I could have imagined myself!” and she demanded, “Send me everything she writes.”27 Indeed, “The Amber Gods” has been credited with inspiring Dickinson’s experiments with “dead” poetic voice.28 It is the survival of voice, not the death of the body that interested and even haunted Spofford’s contemporary readers. Like the “wind from outdoors” that, “rising again,” “rushed in” to her death chamber, Yone’s resurrected voice punctures narrative time (83). P or t r a i t of a r e a de r If Yone paints herself both in story time, as she prepares for her wedding, and in narration, the two activities are further collapsed by her interpolation of the reader into story time. “Hand me the perfume-case first, please,” she says in one of these startling direct addresses to the reader, as if scent, which she proceeds to describe in great detail, were part of the palette she is using, and the reader is a diegetic presence that can hand it to her (40). In fact, the reader is abused throughout the story with much wit. Her brusque inclusion of the discomfited reader in her private chambers and grooming ritual is as subversive of feminine modesty and decorum as is her unabashed narcissism. The reader’s disorientation, even agitation, is only exacerbated when, at the end of this text framed by frame-breaking, one finds oneself addressed by a dead woman (leading readers from “Why

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is she talking to me?” to “Why is she still talking?”). The reader cannot remain a detached observer and must instead be constantly reminded of his or her involvement with Yone and the text, a dynamic that is particularly disruptive of any project of romanticizing the beautiful woman. Spofford’s interest in the reader’s experience of the continuing “life” of her protagonist is further developed through an intertextual riff on Poe’s sentient remains of women and his consistent but deliberated failure to complete the process of their death and objectification. Like “The Amber Gods,” Poe’s “The Oval Portrait” stages the dynamic of the romantic artist and the romanticized woman through a recursive series of portraits. The story is itself “framed” in that the narrator encounters a fascinating portrait of a woman and then introduces us to the story of the portrait he finds in a volume of commentary on hand. “The Oval Portrait,” however, constructs the project of aestheticization not as one of looking at the woman, but as not looking. Twice, when he feels overpowered by the portrait, the narrator looks away. Likewise, the artist is twice described, in the convenient volume discovered by the narrator, as a man so lost in art that “he would not see” that it was killing his subject (and wife), that “the tints which he spread upon the canvas were drawn from the cheeks of her who sate beside him.”29 The difference between Poe’s “would not see” and the implied “could have seen” is not any kind of blindness, but a willed “not see[ing],” as suggested by the way his emphasis parses the phrase. This is the essence of the aestheticizing vision at work in the story:€each frame’s effort to describe the woman serves not to protest the obliteration of her life but to ratchet prurient interest in the process of her aestheticization, a quest for the “true secret of [the portrait’s] effect” that is satisfied through the narrative of her death, the pleasure of which does not have to be claimed because it is safely distanced by the layered frames of the story (664). While the critic, the narrator, and the reader could see that their own construction of the painting further captures/frames the woman within it, they would not see. That is, it is not only hypothetically possible for them to see the violence done by aestheticization, this event is as essential to the pleasure as is its denial. Yone also captures the paradox of the idealizing gaze when she recalls Rose as “turning and looking directly past me” when he asks if he can paint her.30 But Spofford’s rendering of the dynamic is also starker. While Poe’s artist represses consciousness of the violence of his aesthetic (his willed “not looking”), Spofford’s Rose openly avows both the violence and the pleasure that inheres within mastery of his subject. When Yone stumbles on a train track and barely escapes gruesome death, Rose claims, “[I thought] that you were lying dead and torn, and I should

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see you.” He “said [it] as if he liked to say it, experiencing a kind of savage delight at his ability to say it” (64). Rose’s “I should see” does not take reflexive pleasure in the distancing techniques of aestheticization that I have described in Poe’s text. Rather, he baldly proclaims his right to dominate Yone, to see her as a (dead) object, and the violence of that desire is plain. As I have indicated, however, the real interest of the story does not lie in the Rose–Yone relation, any more than the interest of “The Oval Portrait” rests entirely in the vignette of the artist and his wife. It lies instead in Yone’s relation with the reader, which unfolds quite differently from the inexorable march toward destruction dictated by her relation with Rose. In Poe’s story, the frame is not so much broken as unfinished:€with no commentary from the narrator to enclose the critical book’s explanation of the portrait and thereby close the story of “The Oval Portrait,” the reader is left in the narrator’s position to draw his or her own conclusions about the portrait, thereby sealing the reader’s complicity with the series of interpreters and artists. We are left with the feeling that this is the effect that Poe has worked toward, an effect derived from placing us in such a position€– a position of prurience, of accessing but not avowing the secret of masculine re-creation through an annihilation of the woman. Poe’s challenge, I would argue, is to the hypocritical moralism of the reader rather than to the ethics of the gendered dynamic of art he reveals. Spofford takes this challenge to the reader a step further, pulling him or her into the frame in order to examine the gendered dynamic in which the reader participates. As in “The Oval Portrait,” Spofford’s reader is implicated in the iterative processes of interpretation. But the subject of the portrait circumvents her series of frames to address us directly, a relation she summarizes:€“There, now! you’re perfectly shocked to hear me go on so about myself … but if the rose please to open her heart to the moth, what then?” (39). The shock has as much to do with her narrative eruption through the layers of abstraction through which we expect to encounter the aesthetic object as it does with her immodest character. Though it might seem that as reader/witness of Yone’s beauty and death, we would be aligned with Rose, Yone takes care that we do not have that comfort. (Nor does she ever describe Rose’s finished portrait for us to “see.”) While Poe’s series of artists and art appreciators would not see, we have no such agency and choice vis-à-vis Yone. She insists, through relentless prosopoeia and other rhetorical interrogation and positioning of the reader, on explicitly directing how we look:€“There’s the amber rosary! You needn’t speak; look at it! Bah! is that all you’ve got to say? Why, observe the

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thing; turn it over; hold it up to the window; count the beads … See the tint. Now bring it near; see the carving … you didn’t notice that before!” (40). This series of commands is a digest of Yone’s earlier instructions for seeing herself (know me, know my amber), for Yone instructs our gaze throughout her self-portraiture:€“Now see the face,€– not small, either; lips with no particular outline, but melting, and seeming as if they would stain yours, should you touch them. No matter about the rest, except the eyes. Do you meet such eyes often? You wouldn’t open yours so if you did” (38). Just when we would not look, we are caught looking. Where the tint of the woman’s cheeks in the oval portrait is “drawn from” her person, here Yone paints her own lips (both literally, with rouge for her wedding, and figuratively, in her textual portrait), and that paint threatens to smear onto our lips, involving the reader now in an eroticized confusion of painter and painted. As the abstracted viewer becomes the intimate interlocutor, the boundaries of the textual portrait seem to be “melting” under Spofford’s withering treatment. In this way, Spofford emphasizes the style of Poe’s oval portrait, which is done in a “vignette manner” with a “Moresque” frame (Poe’s emphasis)31. A vignette manner is “an art technique to soften the edges of a picture so that it shades off into the borders or frames, blurring the distinction between picture and frame,” and it “is often associated with an unenclosed decorative design.”32 In his description of the oval portrait, the vignette style seems to display Poe’s interest in the merger of women with the ground of the composition or with art:€“the arms, the bosom and even the ends of the radiant hair, melted imperceptibly into the vague yet deep shadow which formed the back ground of the whole.”33 Though the painting’s frame, which is “oval, richly gilded and filigreed in Moresque,” might seem to enclose the portrait, its highly worked intricacy may instead announce Poe’s delight in his own radiating framework for the story, its elaborative development reaching out to stealthily include the reader or radiating in to enmesh the woman in its extensions (664). As such, it suggests the point of affinity between Poe and Spofford, or Poe and highly wrought writers€– the shared technical interest in elaboration as a way of breaking out of conventional textual forms to make claims on the reader, and a shared philosophical interest in ornamentality as mode that offers extensions of subjectivity or spirit into ornamental mise en scène via stylistic effects. Spofford’s ominous embrace of the reader does not merely denaturalize the relation between viewer and viewed, it reverses the relation:€the interlocutor is as much a reflective surface for Yone’s textual construction of self as is the mirror she uses in her bridal preparations. Our widening eyes

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collaborate with and amplify Yone’s exceptional narrative of self. Replacing the maid Yone “turned out … to find a chance for all this talk,”34 we are handmaidens to her image, fetching accessories and perfumes and validating her appearance through our silent (and silenced) presence. Moreover, if she is the “rose … open[ing] her heart to the moth” the unseemliness of her bloom is due at least in part to her exposure to an inappropriate, even parasitic audience. Most commentators assume that the reader’s aversion stems simply from a reaction to Yone, but if Yone can tint the reader’s lips as well as her own, the reader is painted too. The reader’s displeasure is already scripted by the text; he or she is positioned as officiously unsympathetic to Yone’s unconventional manner. The image of Yone casting her point-lace veil over the interlocutor who “would look like a ghost” perfectly captures the way the reader is netted and dragged into the margins, quasimaterialized but not in a speaking part. While Rose may finally accede to power and vision to play out the story’s theme, another dynamic unfolds in the narrative economy, where the reader must become the accessory to Yone’s artistic creation. Our status is debased, our pleasure denied, our taste instructed, and our presence implicated in the process of viewing this portrait of a woman. P ort r a i t of t h e au t hor Like “The Amber Gods,” “The Oval Portrait” pivots on the recognition that artistic expression has a social dimension. Masquerading as a story of the artist’s intensely alienated creative processes, “The Oval Portrait” actually delights in its stealthy suggestion of the social dimensions of art€– its production costs (including a life), the layered tiers of reception, and the interpolation of audience. One might, in fact, suggest that “The Oval Portrait” includes its own covert production history. It pays to recall that Poe’s narrator begins the story by forcing entrance into a sumptuously furnished chateau chock-full of art, “one of those fantastic piles of commingled gloom and grandeur” one is most likely to encounter “in the fancy of Mrs. Radcliffe.”35 The mildly derisive description of this “pile” of Radcliffe’s fancy is an odd way to begin a story that seems to posit an antithetical relation between the masculine creator of art and the feminine material of art (“frolicksome as the young fawn,” the artist’s wife is “Life itself” transferred to art [665, 666; Poe’s emphasis]). The woman artist is not entirely missing in Poe’s story after all:€her territory has been invaded to stage a drama of further trespassing on the feminine in the name of art. Unlike the painter’s portrait, the house that Radcliffe built is empty,

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lifeless:€it is “tattered,” “antique,” and “abandoned”€– until the narrator and his valet reinhabit it (662). Is it implied that Poe’s narrator reanimates Radcliffe’s territory by studying her “effects,” as it were€– the furnishings of her house of style€– and then dipping his brush in her ornate and gothic palette? As Eliza Richards has argued of Poe’s poetry, Poe “encase[es] the evidence, the female corpse, within the poem that has absorbed the female spirit.”36 If, as Elizabeth Bronfen has claimed, woman as the representative of natural materiality is an “aesthetic risk,” a double to the portrait that betrays its derivative, artificial nature and must be removed, so it seems that the woman writer, in doubling her male counterpart, is also a presence endangering (and yet enlivening) the artwork.37 Poe subtly invites us to study the “secrets” of his storyteller’s “effects,” buried in “The Oval Portrait” yet manifest as its very theme. When viewed this way, “The Oval Portrait” is not just a dead woman’s story€– that Poeian motif is hinged to his other renowned motif:€a portrait of the author. These two motifs intersect in “The Amber Gods” as well. For like Poe’s portrait of the author in “The Philosophy of Composition,” Yone’s guided tour of her beauty is a theatrical staging of the creating self. As Poe’s narrator invites the public into his study to “peep behind the scenes” at the “properties of [his] literary histrio,”38 so Yone has Â�solicited the intimacy of the reader in her boudoir to reveal the secret of her beauty:€“Probably you felt all this before, but didn’t know the secret of it.”39 Yone is simultaneously the artist revealing her philosophy of composition and the art object itself revealing “the true secret of its effect” to the inquiring spectator, to use the narrator’s words from “The Oval Portrait” (664). In this way, Spofford debilitates the romantic aestheticization of the feminine figure, first by giving new presence not only to the reader but to the art object and woman artist (both of whose subtraction provides the drama in “The Oval Portrait”), and then by emphasizing the textual relations that buttress the role the feminine is made to play in romantic art. Just as Poe’s literary satires provide a kind of “satirical mirror”40 to romanticized accounts of the production of literature, so Spofford’s story provides a kind of satirical mirror to accounts of how women make art. Rachel Polonsky has noted Poe’s use of the word “point” in the first paragraphs of “The Philosophy of Composition,” a reductio ad absurdum of his process of composing “The Raven,” to mark out the shape and coordinates of the poem. But Polonsky shows that when Poe’s speaker repeats the word to refine his key term, “artistic effects,” as “more properly points, in the theatrical sense,”41 the reader realizes that Poe’s points are part of his farcical theater of literary production, for theatrical “points” are moments so

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underlined by gesture or inflection that they risk undermining the integrity of the performance in the desire for immediate applause. Tellingly, Spofford peppers her opening paragraphs with this word as well. But the “point” with and at which her story opens is literal as well as selfreferential:€Yone opens with a paean to yellowed “point lace” (and amber). Though Yone promises to start over and “to begin at the beginning,” she is soon exclaiming, “Dear me! you think I’m never coming to the point,” and, indeed, is mocking the conventions of cause and effect upon which Poe’s spectacularly rational philosophy depends.42 The “point,” as she calls the lace, is not a coordinate on a map or trajectory; it is instead “all tags and tangle and fibrous and bewildering” (37); it is a pile of material, akin to Radcliffe’s. Spofford deflates even Poe’s deflated philosophy of composition. Poe’s points make exaggerated gestures toward their own performativity. Spofford’s “point” is nothing so histrionic; it refuses to act as abstraction or comparison. The “point” of Yone’s story is at once its origin, the thing with which it begins, and her end, as the point-lace wedding veil doubles as a funeral shroud. As we shall see, Henry James lamented Spofford’s “fatal gift of fluency” (which she possessed “like the majority of women writers”); her creations, he thought, were either “still-born” or she “smother[ed] them with caresses.”43 The woman artist fails to inspire her creations with life. Spofford’s punning collapse of women’s writing into an inanimate object in the word “point” exposes as it mimics presumptions about women’s doomed assumption of artistic license. In Poe’s tales, too, there is a pervasive synonymity of women writers with ornament and décor. The “lamps” of Ligeia’s eyes are transfigured into the “writhing” censors that light the bridal chamber, projecting a phantom script on the wall. The fantastically landscaped domain of Arnheim is said in the story to supersede even the “rapt daydreams of de Stael.”44 More subtly, Landor’s Cottage, in the sketch by that name, is papered with zigzag wallpaper like that owned by poet Sarah Helen Whitman, the zigzag suggesting an abstracted, decorative writing.45 (Poe also wrote to Whitman that Ligeia’s eyes were based on hers). Spofford shrewdly engages these and other conceits of décor writhing with reference to the writing of women. But as a metaphor for art’s transforming capacities, the “life in death” of the woman in the oval portrait also conveys Poe’s reservations about art’s ability to transform matter or transcend its materials. The woman’s remainder scintillates in the portrait’s uncanny “lifelikeness.”46 Poe registers art’s incomplete success in the face of the world’s clamoring mass of things, savoring rather than critiquing the muffled feminized sentience that resides in his own Â�creations.

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His texts display an erotic entanglement with, rather than artistic detachment from, that presence. Poe’s metaphoric equation of woman with the matter of art is knowingly incomplete, and that attracts Spofford to his particular renditions of this analogy. In such stories, Poe’s theory of composition meets his materialist philosophy. As a materialist, Poe believed that each atom of matter had the capacity for sentience because God and spirit are material. God is infinitely diffused throughout the universe, but could never be separated from the tiniest particle of matter. The right arrangement of matter, of particles or of materials, could induce the native spirit of matter. Arthur Robinson has tied Poe’s theory of order and matter to his interest in arabesque design, arguing that Poe felt that matter attains sentience “in certain inorganic organizations of intricate and repetitive nature.”47 Poe’s tales were interested in depicting this phenomenon, for instance the arrangement of the stones of the House of Usher is mysteriously responsible for generating a charged electrical atmosphere and exerting its unnerving influence over the heightened senses of Roderick Usher. Poe was of course also enthralled by the possibility of extending this phenomenon to his own designs, which he notoriously avowed to be exquisitely and hyperrationally constructed. Poe seems to feel that he did this best in his poetry, especially through an arrangement of sound like that in “Ulalume,” that he claimed produced the effect of the subtle matter of spirit. In these experiments, Poe swerves very close to the women’s highly wrought writing I have been examining. But in his tales, Poe’s interests have more to do with adducing the spirit of (feminized) matter than eliciting a new embodiment of spirit and his effort tends to require a dead female body as the matter with which and in which he attempts to locate spirit. Notably, however, this process is antithetical to the notion of romantic inspiration by the artist:€in Poe’s philosophy, the materials of art have their own spirit which, through technique, the artist can induce but never bestow. Spofford shares his skepticism of the artist’s mastery, but she also sees in Poe’s agencied remains of women and their writing€– indeed, in women’s expression reduced to ornament and matter€– a counterforce. Spofford’s goal is to reawaken the things that have become the stuff of art and to imagine the effect of that reverse conversion€– to speak from both death and decoration. In a paean to the expression of gems, we can detect Spofford’s interest in the radical possibility of ornamental expression, one that is akin to Fuller’s wish to hear flowers’ language:€ “How magnificent it would be, if every atom of creation sprang up and said its one word of abracadabra, the secret of its existence, and fell silent again.

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O dear! you’d die, you know; but what a pow-wow.”48 One can hear Yone riffing on the sentimental apostrophe to the “dear reader” in her “O dear [reader]! You’d die … ” and the grinding of the gears as she dislocates the reader in relation to her text/talk, insisting on its distance from and danger to the reader. Here, as elsewhere, Spofford aligns Yone’s expression with that of racial, often Orientalized, others whose identities have likewise been consigned to the mise-en-scène of the reader’s worldview, even as they serve as her own props. At once a foreign, opaque cacophony that alienates and an all-expressive revelation that consumes its listener, the speech of “every atom of creation” effects a radical dissolution of identity. When matter talks back, whether portrait, woman, gem, or Spofford’s amberlike prose, these things impinge on the vaunted introspection of a romantic perceiver like Poe’s artist, shattering that reflective surface he or she prefers to find in the world of things.49 We cannot possess or enjoy the beauty, for she possesses us in alternating modes of captivation and assault. Yone’s own expression is a kind of voice of a maligned feminine and sensual style that insists on its presence, and through its effects specifies a response to the female sensuality and creativity it expresses. The reader’s textualized responses register the undeniable existence of something we would rather imagine as vacant, as mute, and as prior to art. P or t r a i t of a s t y l e Indeed, it is with a kind of Poe-like perversity that Spofford has animated her portrait of highly wrought style in collaboration with its reception history. Yone steps fully formed out of the pages of reviews of women’s highly wrought writing to turn Janus-faced on her critics, embodying all of their fears and contradictions.50 Reviewers repeatedly return to the “gorgeous coloring,” “the wealth,” the “superabundance” and “splendor” of Spofford’s style.51 Yet the style “dazzles … with a kind of fascination” only to “fatigue,” it adorns elements of plot and character that are “repulsive,” and it veers toward “gaudy profanation.”52 It attracts and repels; it is beautiful and profane, powerful and indolent, powerfully mixing these contradictory responses in its readers. Spofford’s reviewers display great anxiety that she will be carried away by public “flattery” of her gorgeous style;53 meanwhile, Yone spends vast stretches of her narrative detailing her beauty in superlative terms and in front of a mirror. Both Elizabeth Petrino and Susan Coultrap-McQuin have shown that reviewers operated on a model of women’s writing as the reflection of authentic feminine feeling, unmarked by any hint of labor,

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composition, or experiment with language. Of Louise Chandler Moulton, one reviewer glowed, “Her poetry is the mirror, clear, limpid, unspotted by any blemishes of style, which contains the beautiful reflection of her personality and experience.”54 As we have seen, Yone’s mirror reflects not just her own dazzling person, full of style, but those onlookers who would prefer to be the disembodied and objective voice of judgment. In this configuration, one can sense the authorial delight behind Yone’s repeated and deliberate affront to audience values.55 “I mean to show him my amber,” she declares upon the arrival of the prim cleric Mr. Dudley, who is sure to be repelled.56 In Yone’s simple sentence lies the essential recurring action of the story, both within and across its frame€– the delighted trotting out of an aesthetic object, indeed philosophy, for a horrified captive audience. Spofford, in turn, never takes her eyes off of her literary reception, resolutely occupying the position she has been given, but holding critics hostage to their views as well. Breaching feminine and artistic decorum simultaneously, Yone revels in her “redundant” vitality (70). But reviewers recur to the agrarian conceits of the discourse of self-culture, urging Spofford to “trim away … tropical superfluities”57 and wishing her “luxuriance … pruned.”58 James Russell Lowell recommends a course of “honest self-culture” and uses the occasion of his review to ruminate over the definition of “genius,” lest it be applied too readily to Spofford’s work: [G]enius in Art is that supreme organizing and idealizing faculty which, by combining, arranging, modulating, by suppressing the abnormal and perpetuating the essential, apes creation … For genius is the shaping faculty … It is something capable of education and accomplishment, and the patience with which it submits itself to this needful schooling and self-abnegation is one of the surest tests of its actual possession. (253)

Spofford’s exclusion from the category of genius quickly comes into focus:€“superabundance” is her “chief defect” and Spofford is unwilling to train it. If she “raise[d] natural qualities to conscious and beneficent powers” by “honest self-culture,” she would surely earn her place in the ranks of literature (254). Yet in “The Amber Gods,” this cultivating work of self-improvement is artifice, and luxury and fantasy are natural. Only those who are “not dyed, but created” have inborn soul. Those who have “somehow scrambled together, and managed to get up a little life for themselves” are not quite authentic€– “everybody sees through the pretence.”59 In Yone’s view, Lu, the modest, “pure” figure is a fake. She has “grow[n] a soul in her eyes,” an artificial and artificializing process (39). Yone, on the other hand, asserts that

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even her “fantasies” have no production history; they are “in my veins,” she says, “not that they are fantasies, at all; on the contrary, they are parts of my nature” (45–46). Sweeping aside the creative work ethic that critics ask Spofford to take on, Yone asserts a different philosophy of composition, claiming “it is much better to be than to do” (53). Since Baudelaire, critics have noted how Poe’s “Philosophy of Composition” functions to expose the labor (in Poe’s words, “the wheels and the pinions€ – the tackle for scene shifting€ – the step-ladders and demon-traps”) disguised by the romantic conception of “genius” in which the creative process is a “fine frenzy€– an ecstatic intuition.”60 Poe’s speaker in “Philosophy” seems to cry out with his Thingum Bob of another of Poe’s satires, “Look at me!€– how I labored€– how I toiled€– how I wrote!” when he elaborates the step-by-step process, the tidy formulas and precise calculations, of his compositional method.61 Like Poe’s speaker, Yone also exclaims, “Look at me!” as she draws us into her boudoir to tell us the “secret” of her beauty. But Yone actively abjures work of any form; “I don’t need to work!” seems her rejoinder to Poe. In her opening portrait, she details the construction of lesser “flaxen blondes” from the scraps of the Creator’s workbench, but treats us to no such clue to her own composition€ – she was “not dyed, but created” (37, 38). Like Poe, Spofford pays close attention to the “effect” of her work, a quality she too demystifies€– not by a treatise on technique, but by interpolating the dynamic between art and its perceivers into her story as we have seen. Unlike Poe’s, her story actively denies any technique or process of arriving at that effect. While Rose “wrought on” in his apprenticeship to Yone, attempting to capture light and color on canvas, Yone simply radiates these qualities (72). Spofford takes the equation of woman to art and beauty and evolves it into a hyper-romantic conceit of feminine genius. Yone’s genius is so organic, so innate, that no cultivation, nor even frenzy, is required. Indeed, the distance between the artist’s imagination and the beauty of the art is as short as the space between Yone and her mirrored reflection because the two are one and the same. Something like Yone, amber cannot be cultivated. It accretes over Â�millennia of ecologic time rather than unfolding over the annual cycle of seasons from planting to harvest. It is a remainder of the life cycle, not its harvest:€Yone says the tree from which amber came “stripped itself of all its lush luxuriance, and left for a vestige only this little fester of its gashes.”62 The process requires no husbandry, is the result of death rather than growth, and yields not fruit but a “vestige.” “Or,” Yone proposes, perhaps the tree, “bursting with juices,” has “hidden and compressed all its

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secret” in the amber, suggesting that amber is the substantiation and persistence of that essence (43, 56). Amber also extends life:€“What if in some piece of amber an accidental seed were sealed; we found, and planted, and brought back the lost aeons?” (56). Though it has its own ancient event of organic development, amber is also immune to organic time:€it encases life, arrests and preserves it, and is itself a vestige or residue of prehistoric life. As the totem symbol of her style, Spofford’s amber mocks critics’ attempts to improve her ground, to cultivate her “gifts,” or to make fruitful her plots. Perhaps it was a sense of this recalcitrance in Spofford’s writing, of amber to cultivation and of Yone to the busywork of artistic and moral perfection, that drove reviewers to single out the labor of Spofford’s craft in spite of her attempt to mystify it. While one might think that “tropical superfluities”63 flourished by neglect, many reviewers instead called attention to Spofford’s indulgence in her craft. She is castigated for her puns and warned against neologism, or treading in the “realm of words unborn.”64 They criticized her tendency to “lavish so much pain on the more gorgeous portrait.”65 One review was especially keen to expose Spofford’s labor, claiming that her “slender narratives” are “worked up” by “lavish use of rich color”€– comments that seem calculated to embarrass Spofford’s celebration of amber’s organic beauty and her heroine’s smug lassitude. Almost always Spofford’s writing is represented as an active imposition€– on her creations (James claimed she “smothers them with caresses”66), on her own integrity (according to Lowell, she is “drowned” in her “own overflow”67), but particularly on the reader’s integrity. Another review is alarmed by her “power of enchaining the reader’s attention.”68 Everywhere her style “dazzles” and “fascinates,” creating reviewers anxious about the “power” they located in her prose. When reviewers are not trying to embarrass her labor, they too elide it, investing her style instead with a kind of insidious agency. As we have begun to see, it was not uncommon to identify the distinct presence of style with an agencied, material, and feminine entity. Poe’s “How to Write a Blackwood Article” is a satire of a woman writer seeking advice on developing a style of “fine writing” and “intensities.”69 In it, Poe explores his own interests in style, but he also develops its gendered inflections. (The story is published directly on the heals of “Ligeia,” and Zenobia can well be read as the satiric mirror of Ligeia, for both are bluestocking writers of “intensities” ultimately reduced to gross embodiment.) Would-be writer Signora Psyche Zenobia arrives at the Blackwood’s Â�magazine office after carefully choosing her dress “with the green agraffas, and … orange-coloured auriculas” (338).

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Poe’s fanciful use of a species of primrose, auricula, puns on the floridity of her dress as well as the Latinate and overreaching style at hand, indicating that the lesson in stylistic finery will be Â�redundant. Zenobia is told upon greeting the Blackwood’s editor to “sit down. The matter [of style] stands thus,” creating confusion as to whether the advice that follows or Zenobia, just described, is “the matter” of style (339). The editor recommends Zenobia introduce an element of excitement into her Blackwood’s writing by making it especially turgid€– literally:€she must press hard with a flowing, fat pen. The Blackwood’s editor continues enthusiastically, “And, mark me, Miss Psyche Zenobia! …€– that pen€– must€– never be mended!” (339). The “very blunt nib” is “the secret, the soul of intensity” (339). Likewise, the editor enthuses, the way words sound, the “noise” they make, “answers remarkably well instead of meaning” (341). The italicized connection between Zenobia’s sartorial ornaments, the flowing pen, and the genre of “intensities,” as well as the defective, broken “nib,” signal a gendering of “the matter” of style. Poe jokes that the performance of style, as the aspect of a text that manipulates language, is a literal matter of manipulating and enhancing the physical aspect of the print on the page. Such enhancement works not to deepen content, but only to further physicalize the text. While Poe is mocking his own investment in rhyme, meter, and stylistic intensification, the woman writer who attempts such stylistic performance is muffled by her own greater proximity to feminine matter and can only fecundate the material qualities of her composition. If Moulton’s reviewer praised the mirrored surfaces of her poetry, “unspotted by any blemishes of style,” Zenobia’s paper will literally be blotted by her style. Spofford gauges the gendered implications in exchanges such as that between Poe’s Blackwood’s editor and woman writer. Yone’s emphasis on her own looks and sounds riff on Poe’s sardonic definition of style as a sensual, material, and feminine presence. Yone’s relentless calling of attention to her beauty and her insistence on her presence are impossible to ignore. She stands between us and our full absorption in the narrative, as if reminding us of the woman artist’s opaque presence:€her brushstrokes, her tangled point. Yone refuses transparency, as compliant art, crystalline virtue, or egoless woman author. And so, when Poe’s editor cries, “Mark me, Miss Psyche Zenobia!” his joke registers the (erotic) threat of the woman who writes with style, who breaks pens and sets them flowing. Obstructing our view of that clear page, “style” becomes an aggressive€– and feminine€– presence that threatens to “mark” the reader, much as Yone’s lips threaten to stain ours.

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When she breaks the frame to include us, when she talks forever, when she describes her beauty in bewildering and hyperbolic terms, Yone’s voice enacts the threats of highly wrought style. Like amber, her voice flows out of its containers; it captures us in its liquid embrace. She is also Â�captivating, as she sees when she catches us looking. As Yone’s voluptuous description accumulates and no conventional portrait arises, we cannot help but look at her prose and its pieces of lush imagery, rather than looking through it. The ever-thickening amberlike accrual congeals into the ornamental artifact that rivets our attention. In Yone’s abuse of the reader, we see the ironic reflection of Spofford’s purported manipulations of language€– her twisting, smothering, melting of language. The aggression of Yone’s Â�narrative voice indexes the agency Spofford herself located in her style€– in its vivid imagery, its intensified sensuality, and its dense presence on the page. Amber’s resistance to cultivation, on the one hand, and its unstructured and nontransparent materiality, on the other, seem traits Spofford flaunts in her writing, while critics attempt to discipline her gifts and bring her admired but troublesome style within their purview. But though it may seem she is only perversely denying her labor, Spofford is also suggesting an opposing model of creativity through amber. The trick of aesthetic creation lies not in construction, in Lowell’s aping and shaping of nature, but in realization or expression. After telling us that she was “born with” her fantasies “in her veins,” Yone goes on to link those fantasies to nectar (and amber resin), and to describe a process of development:€“Not that I always was what I am now. Oh, bless your heart! Plums and nectarines and luscious things that ripen and develop all their rare juices, were green once, and so was I.”70 Yone’s “ripening” suggests an intrinsic and autonomous filling and rounding out, as opposed to Lu’s efforts to “grow” a soul where (it is implied) there was not one naturally. The tree from which amber came develops its juices similarly, “drinking the primeval weather, resinously beading each grain of its rare wood and dripping with a plash to filter through and around the fallen cones below” (43). In the resin that “oozed from the pores of that beautiful tree€– how bursting with juices it must have been” (43), Spofford specifies an essence that comes from within and spills out of form in a reverse of Rose’s stated desire (quoting Robert Browning) “to produce form out of unshaped stuff” and “further, to evoke a soul / From form” (74). Spofford might be said to see her prose developing the inherent essence of things by accruing words and images, in order to attain an almost literal fullness of expression, or just for the sake of increase, as she savors the rank growth of endless syntactical linkage. In

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an essay review of British sensation writer Charles Reade for the Atlantic Monthly, Spofford (still taunting her critics) laments his “want of elaboration,” but she admires that he inhabits his genre with “exuberant and superabundant vitality” because (and here she gives her own definition of genius) the cells of the honeycomb “whose sides break the usual uniformity contain the royal embryos.”71 For Spofford, the more pressure volume applies to form, the more expressive it is. Though intensity is often achieved by subtraction and concentration, Spofford favors cumulative over extractive processes. Just as the only ornaments Yone can wear are “concretions and growths”72 rather than gems that can be cut, so Spofford carefully (and a bit perversely) situates her stylistic techniques€– increase, accumulation, elaboration€ – under the sign of “natural” expression, of processes intrinsic to the matter her art treats. As James saw it in his 1864 essay review of Spofford’s Azarian, however, Spofford’s entire oeuvre, displaying a “venturesome, unprincipled literary spirit” that had “steadily grown in audacity,” was the epitome of artificiality.73 In a ten-page review in the North American Review, James pilloried Spofford’s “inverterate bad taste” for “chromatic epigrams” and “word-pictures … strung together … like ‘beads on a leash’” (276, 274, 270).74 “Miss Prescott uses far too many words, synonymous words and meaningless words … [She] adds, tacks on, interpolates, piles up” (275). While for Spofford accumulation and elaboration are the quintessence of life, for James they toll the certain death of expression. Spofford and James agree that Spofford’s voluminous description places pressure on what James calls “things in their order of place” in narrative (274). Description thereby increases and enhances (her growth and ripening) the presence of its object, taking up the space of a reader’s attention and shifting emphasis away from character and event. Spofford’s “strings” of imagery and chains of sentences take up narrative time as well, clogging its progression. Spofford, according to James, is obsessed with things and with describing them with piles of words. She composes by “affix[ing]” “a thick impasto of words” to her conceptions, a process that “smuts out” the spirit of the story (271, 274). For James in this review, words are signifiers, a kind of currency through which thought is exchanged, but Spofford does not see the inherent value of meaning; rather, she treats words as if they were mere things, the “brute metal out of which forms are moulded” (270), creating “bric-a-brac” instead of composing narrative (274).75 Richard Brodhead has delineated the contours of James’ career as one that begins in an early avowed commitment to realism, which ultimately

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proves inassimilable with James’ artistic passions. In his late writings, James reconsiders the possibility of a less referential, more elaborately created style, one that Brodhead labels “thoroughly wrought.”76 Bill Brown’s fascinating study of objects in late-century American literature reveals another potential link to Spofford:€James’ literary interest in the “indeterminate ontology” between persons and things that also intrigued Spofford and Poe.77 Though the literalism with which they depict this ontology is partly what makes James wince here, there may also be a certain shock of recognition that James hurries to deny in his review. But despite his later turn to some of the very techniques he here castigates, in this quite early review (he is a mere twenty-one years of age), James is effectively introducing, and gendering, what Naomi Schor has described as a distinction between the mimetic detail (for James, the description of things “only in so far as they bear upon the action”) and ornamental detail (for James, the description of things “for themselves”)78 a distinction crucial to the rise of realism. In claiming the value of realism’s particularizing impulse over the long-prevailing generalizing and universalizing mode of classical idealism, Naomi Schor argues, a primary task was to remasculinize the detail for realism, in part by distinguishing its kind of detailism from Â�ornamentality.79 But Spofford’s story (itself about ornament and narrated by woman-as-ornament) seems not just a symptom of her “inordinate fondness for the picturesque”;80 it actively advocates the value of ornament. What if, Spofford’s story seems to ask, description-for-the-sake-of-description took on a life of its own and became the primary vehicle of expression? What if color functioned as a character (a stance she articulates with passion in a foreword she writes for Jane Eyre)? What if, contrary to James’ anxious disavowal, some great vitality inhered in ornament? According to “The Amber Gods,” things do have a life of their own. Yone herself is a great primordial thing come back from across the eons, the essence of amber in all its golden life and electric power. Spofford is less interested in amber as an object, it should be said, than in the suggested vivacity of its stylistic, ornamental qualities€– its color, line, or mass. She vivifies the notion that color might be a character. In her introduction to Jane Eyre, Spofford asserts that Brontë’s descriptive passages are not extraneous to the plot; rather, “they are living and silent actors in every crisis.”81 Through such passages, “[S]ome color, some object, enters on the drama like the burden of a Greek chorus” (xxiv). Not only is description “living,” not moribund, it plays a role in (narrative) form and structure. In the chapter “The Ornament” in her Art Decoration, Spofford promotes ornament as a “constructive accessory.” While it may seem to “run riot” (keeping

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company here with Spofford’s flourish of language), “paying no more attention to rules than we suppose a wild-blackberry vine in August pays to geometrical progression,” the best ornament does not exist for its own sake, but as part of the “constructive design.”82 Ornament is not superficial or incidental when it is organic. Amber is the animating principle of “The Amber Gods”€– embodied in the narrator, determining its motifs of color and light, suggesting its themes of art and immortality, and informing the style which seeks to make the language amberlike. Spofford’s abstraction of design principles from natural ornament in her amber style is related to a new theory of ornament emerging from the South Kensington school of Christopher Dresser and Owen Jones for which her Art Decoration would be the American emissary.83 Spofford anticipates these ideas in her prose aesthetic and in her insistence on the naturalness and organicism of ornament. Dresser, Jones, and Spofford advanced a very specific theory of ornament, favoring stylized over representational ornamentation, that is often considered the “left wing” of British aestheticism in its opposition to John Ruskin and William Morris’ preference for the realistic portrayal of nature in ornament.84 Spofford herself maligned the “merely imitative”85 as the lowest order of ornament and extended her view to literature, as when she stated her distaste for the particularizing “accuracy” of Anthony Trollope in her review of Reade (a detail that irritates James and that he will disparage in his review of Spofford).86 Instead of duplicating the organic, an artificial process of “copying” that Yone disdains (the mimetic and substitutive process that visual portraiture references) and that proves deadly to the organic, Spofford takes her cue from organic processes of creation. In his The Art of Decorative Design, Dresser, too, sought to extrapolate underlying natural principles that would inform the creation of ornament.87 An ornament should “not imitate the object the spirit of which it embodies”;88 instead, his technique was to glean an essential pattern, character, or idea from an object and make this “truth” the basis of his own design. Ideal ornament, as opposed to natural, is “an embodiment of mind in form” (40). By “mind” Dresser means to stress the imaginative labor of the ornamentist (and enhance the status of the decorative arts), but he does not advocate any kind of projection of an idea onto its object. He also intends to oppose the pictorial school of ornament, which makes no attempt to convey ideas in ornament. Dresser’s search for a nonhistorical basis for ornament led him to assert that nature was more than a storehouse of forms and materials:€it is alive with ideas that ornament should express.

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The traditional relation between artist and object shifts when the designer must study his object with almost obeisant care and embody its idea, or “spirit” as Dresser also calls it, in ornament (“If a week is not too long to spend in the consideration of a simple leaf, how long should we meditate upon a flower? Say a month” [23]). Dresser urged his design students to observe a plant’s habits of growth and discover how to design ornament to “radiate” and “flow.” He had in mind something more than simply transferring botanical “morphology” to decorative design; he asserted that the “designer’s mind must be like the vital force of the plant, ever developing itself into forms of beauty” (188). Dresser’s instructions to the designer ring with Emerson’s famous call to the poet:€“For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem,€– a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own.”89 And yet in Dresser’s formulation, the analogy between the shaping spirit of art and that of organisms slides into an identification between the two, where vegetal juices become the shaping spirit of art. Dresser proposes a phenomenological approach that does not see nature as an empirical object to be infused with the creative spirit or shaped to the contingencies of form. Here we have not Emerson’s “translator of nature into thought” converting “nature’s picture-language” into “flowers of the mind” (“The Poet,” 195, 192). Rather, we have a kind of florification of the mind and its art, similar to Spofford’s amberfication of speech and writing. Certainly in “The Amber Gods,” the “path of things” is not “silent,” and things need not “suffer a speaker to go with them” (“The Poet,” 191). Much like Fuller’s version of flower language, in Spofford’s and Dresser’s aesthetic theories, the natural image has inherent spirit, inherent function, and inherent beauty, making it averse to transcendence. Nature thus provides the shaping spirit of art, rather than art giving nature its form. Above all, Dresser vaunted the “power of ornament to express feelings.”90 Yet in the chapter of that name, one is hard pressed to discover any vocabulary of emotion offered by ornament. Dresser seems to seek instead that state one reaches when “content to study a flower till his eyes grow weary with viewing it, and his heart learns to feel the beauty which his eyes perceive” (23; Dresser’s emphasis). Once the eyes fatigue, another unnamed sense or complex of senses allow the observer to acquire some kind of empathic immediacy, a felt rather than perceived sense of the flower. The created ornament should produce a “sense”€– physical, conceptual, aesthetic€– of a thing or event and its beauty, without representing it literally. The “feelings” Dresser’s ornament expresses include

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such phenomena as the opening of a flower, a temporally expansive effect achieved through the arrangement of forms, or the soft Â�ambiguity of a “sense of evening” imparted in the shading of colors, the use of light and shadow, and angles that recall the closing petals of flowers (173). He is taken as well with the physics of matter€– liquid cohering in a teaspoon, waves breaking on rocks. Dresser is careful to indicate that an ornament does not convey meaning through it, and he in fact inveighs against symbolism in ornament precisely because it depends on the historical, conventional significance of an object rather than the ornament’s own capacity for “utterance” (167). Ornament expresses by producing, by way of lines, arrangements, textures, colors, and shadings, a feeling or sensation in its viewer, a feeling generated not by cognitive association with an image, but by the immediate experience of the ornament’s qualities. Retaining a romantic insistence on expression, Spofford and Dresser nonetheless attempt to free that expression from an anthropomorphic perspective in order to glean what the world of colors, forms, and movement might have to say. I would argue that we can recognize the roots of this philosophy of ornament not only in Spofford’s earlier fictional experiment, but in the patterns of highly wrought style, from which and for which Spofford speaks in “The Amber Gods.” This philosophy of ornament is a further revolution of Margaret Fuller’s revisionist view of flower language, in which flowers were valued for their language of the senses, leading Fuller and Ann Stephens to probe the alterity of flowers and ornament as locations with a capacity for “utterance” (Dresser’s term resonates with Stephens’). Dresser’s fascination with creating ornament that embodies the “feeling” of a flower echoes Fuller’s interests in reproducing in language what it is like to be a flower, an experiment carried on by writers like Clemmer and Oakes Smith who wish to explore alternative ontologies of sexual or gendered embodiment. Dresser does not have such political ends in mind, but shares an interest in aesthetic experience as an experience of alterity. Spofford doubles back on all of these positions to suggest that the experiments with highly wrought style are themselves alive with a spirit of alterity that imposes itself on the reading experience and talks back to the literary field as it alternately parodies and breaches its codes. Dresser’s dedication to ornament as a perceptible surface that bodies forth a sense of itself, that is alive with the idea of itself, has resonance with the other school of style with which Spofford often associates her writing€ – the school of painting that had been defined since the

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eighteenth century as ornamental art, founded by the Venetian Renaissance painters Titian and Veronese and called “the school of Giorgione” by Walter Pater in his 1877 The Renaissance. As Schor points out, neoclassicists such as Sir Joshua Reynolds used the classification to mark what they felt were the superior distinctions of a school of Italian painting centered in Rome and exemplified by the classic, anatomically proportioned figures of Michelangelo and Raphael. In this division of Italian Renaissance painters, the ornamental school favored “sensuality over reason, dazzle over affect, color over line, ornament over severity.”91 The painters Spofford references, Giorgione (Yone’s namesake) and Gifford (in her review of Charles Reade), and those, such as Turner (Godey’s called her compositions “Turnerian”), that her readers associate with her are known in particular for their use of light.92 Pater rooted the school of Giorgione in the “last, stiff, half-barbaric splendours of Byzantine decoration.”93 The Venetian painters that followed (the Ornamental school) never seemed to “forget that painting must be before all things decorative, a thing for the eye, a space of colour on the wall” (89). Spofford’s insight is to situate highly wrought writing as an extension of this established (if controversial) aesthetic mode€ – as an experiment in ornamental writing. It is her full elaboration of this aesthetic position and her skill in exemplifying it€– an aesthetic as well as a market challenge€– that motivates James to defend nascent realism against Spofford’s challenge. For Yone, the West Indies are “a grand composition” precisely in the vein of Pater’s discussion of the ornamental school: Everything there is an exaggeration … When you see a white sky, a dome of colorless crystal, with purple swells of mountains heaving round you, and a wilderness in golden greens royally languid below, while stretches of a scarlet blaze, enough to ruin a weak constitution, flaunt from the rank vines that lace every thicket,€– and the whole world, and you with it, seems breaking to blossom,€– why, then you know what light is and can do … Nothing startles; all is like a grand composition utterly wrought out.94

Light composes the scene and its expressive mode is exaggeration, as it nourishes profuse vegetal surfaces, heightens contrasts, and coaxes scene and perceiver into bloom. The growth, intensification, and other forms of “exaggeration” are not necessarily excess, for “nothing startles” in the composition, and the composition is “utterly wrought out.” It must be interjected here that Yone’s next line here is most certainly meant to provoke, for she effuses, “The blacks are in utter consonance” with the fullness of the West Indian composition. Like an earlier exclamation – that her great-grandfather

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“was a sea-captain, and actually did bring home cargoes of slaves!”€– this observation smacks of Yone’s “slang,” her aggressive stance against bourgeois Â�proprieties (43). Her slang is a stylistic accessory to her self-presentation, and the primary provocation here is in making aesthetic use of what is a virtual sacrament€– Â�abolition€– in 1859. Yet, in the case of the West Indies passage, a subtle political effect is twinned with an aesthetic purpose. In emptying blackness of its referential sociological value to use it as an aesthetic value, Yone’s statement also denaturalizes ways of reading race as identity, drawing attention instead to the skin’s surface, its color as one among many. That effect is in keeping with Spofford’s emphatic rejection of sentimental identification and her dismantling of imprisoning representational modes, but it is also mitigated by her use of blacks and, more spectacularly, of Little Asian, as an element of her composition€– a kind of exploitation she does not allow by way of gender. But again the Â�prudish reader becomes an element of the composition, interpolated into close proximity and subtle affinity with that which he or she abjures, here the tropics and their occupants, as light’s ripening powers reach beyond the frame to bring “you” into (colorful?) bloom as well. Much like the ornamental school of painting, Spofford enhances the ornamental values of her medium, making language full, redundant, sonorous, in order to body forth the essence of her main character. The style yields little by way of moral or mental psychology, but rather asks us to respond to Yone and her voice on a visceral and sensual level. She is not that character in a drama James longs for; she expresses the energy and the threat of female artistry and verbal license, and thus the primary drama is between reader and text. As Pater writes of the Venetian school:€“all poetry, all ideas however abstract or obscure, float up as visible scene or image:€it is the colouring€– that weaving of light, as of just perceptible gold threads, through the dress, the flesh, the atmosphere, in Titian’s Lacegirl, that staining of the whole fabric of the thing with a new, delightful physical quality” (84). By rendering expression palpable, such style bestows presence on the art itself and seeks a response from the reader. In this conception, ornamental style does not encrust a surface or deaden the figures and scenes of the composition. It is instead the labile agent of effect. Like Poe’s, Yone’s philosophy of composition is a reductio ad absurdum, but rather than elaborate the labor by which she arranges her composition, she gives us her ingredients. She elaborates the materials that compose her beauty, or that are composed similarly to hers€– honey, gold beetles, yellowed point lace, amber, tree gum, sunlight, nectars, apricots. Spofford’s

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composition begins with her materials, and in them she finds the spirit of things. The extravagance of Yone’s initial portrait of her Â�sensuous aspect; the layering of things€ – animal, vegetable, mineral€ – the great stack of matter to which she compares herself; and the sensuality of her language€– alliterative, “slow,” “rolling”€– evolves into a different style of portraiture altogether, one that balks idealization or mimetic “use.” As one reviewer of Spofford wondered, “Do we find fault with the hundred-leaved rose?”95 Yone’s redundancies€– her verbosity, her abounding sensuality, her supplemental status as the living double of her portrait and society’s ornament€– are the stuff of Spofford’s art where such matter becomes a method. The story enjoys a symmetry in that Yone’s opening self-portrait, reducing Yone to her elements€– her sounds (“say ‘blonde,’ soft, slow, and rolling”), her textures (rich cream, golden calm, torrid magnificences), her materials (rose-chafer bugs, pansies lit by fireflies, bounteous light)€– is mirrored by her escape from Rose’s portrait and her return to her “elements” on the final page. Discarded and “used up” as she feared she would be if Rose painted her, Yone’s character nonetheless gleans her essence in the residue, that twinkle in Poe’s oval portrait or the mute force of Ligeia’s spirit. Yone’s repudiation of the severity of form in Rose’s art has informed her attraction to the expressive qualities of that which has no form:€light, color, scent, magnetism, aura (all qualities she also specifies in amber). Her liberation from portrait and body into her elements is the same move she has been stressing all along€– a flow out of form, a release of spirit or expression into sensual substance. Spofford sets art’s amber flowing again, effecting a release of spirit in ornament. Yone’s spirit is not released from materiality; its elements recompose to escape from physical form. The expressive spirit is preserved rather than muffled or absorbed by its reunion with matter. The reserve of spirit in highly wrought fiction here manifests itself as a kind of vivacious animating principle, which Spofford’s archly vengeful pen casts as perverse in its refusal to be fixed to form and threatening in its palpable and ubiquitous expressiveness and, in this text, somewhat sinister in its earthbound relentlessness, its lack of a sense of a spiritualized elsewhere. Oriented toward a prehistoric time of amber and the life embalmed there rather than the future to which feminist-mesmerist vision looked, Spofford’s version of spirit tilts toward Poe’s materialism in its refusal to relocate to an alternative space, but it maintains the radical agility to move through the boundaries of this world. In using amber to figure the art of Yone’s self-portraiture, Spofford engages the age-old theme of immortality through art with a nod to Poe’s cutting sense of “life in

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death” (the subtitle of “The Oval Portrait”). Immortality redoubles on the “beauty” of this piece, as the producer of the beauty is the beauty herself. Amber is the crystallized, preserved juice of life, the remainder after death, a residue that is an essence. Just as if “in some piece of amber an accidental seed were sealed … [and] found, and planted, and brought back across the lost aeons,”96 so Spofford represents her story as an archaic blast of a feminine creative style brought back across time and space. Through Yone’s amberfied speech, its ornate, shapeless, and endlessly accruing beauty, Spofford creates a textual space out of remains€– out of what is left to the woman artist and of the female art object. As “Story Last” opens on Yone’s death, Yone disjointedly recalls, “Once, in the pride of a fool, I fear having made some confidence, some recital of my joy to ears that never had any” (79). We know by now whose joyless ears those are, and we are, for once, like Rose, implicated in Yone’s impending demise. Yone fears our consumption of her, and in strikingly similar terms to Walter Benjamin’s description of novel reading, in which the “stranger’s fate by virtue of the flame which consumes it yields us the warmth which we never draw from our own fate. What draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about.”97 But, as I have argued here, Yone has more in common with Benjamin’s storyteller. As the ultimate example of storytelling in Benjamin’s essay involves Leskov’s story of a gem-cutter, who sees in semiprecious chrysoberyl, a “natural prophecy of petrified, lifeless nature concerning the historical world in which he himself lives,” and through which, as storyteller, he “fashion[s] the raw material of experience … in a solid, useful, and unique way” (377), so Spofford has seen in amber a way to fashion her parable of gender and storytelling. The amberlike style€– opaque, textured, sedimented, amorphous, flowing out, congealing the essence of a life and enfolding others in its spectacular embrace€– bestows a substance that preserves the story and makes it transmissible, but not consumable. The ornamentist’s close attention to the “feelings” and “ideas” of the nonanthropocentric world allows Spofford to express the challenging, even hostile and alienating presence of something alterior, that does not reflect the reader’s self or ask for identification, and that is not Â�amenable to use. The story becomes something that involves us, that asserts its presence, that is difficult in manner and content; it can be “taken in but not absorbed … it becomes part of the ‘life’ of the listener”98 as so many of its first readers, from Phelps to Howells, testified.99 It is not consumable partly because it is not finalizable; we cannot warm ourselves

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by Yone’s death because she keeps talking to us, and shows her elements escaping their form. But these are analogies for the Â�preservation of the presence of the storyteller in style, in Spofford’s craft. Where previous writers reveal the political or expressive stakes of highly wrought writing in the name of a new spirit of “woman,” Spofford reveals the literary and aesthetic stakes of the style for the woman writer. In the “gorgeous” opacity and flourishing ornamentality of her language, Spofford has materialized the vital alterity of the woman writer and made her art transmissible as distinctive literary style.

Chapter 4

Pauline Hopkins’ baroque folds:€the styled form of Winona

In an 1892 essay titled “Pomegranate Flower and Apple Blossom,” Harriet Prescott Spofford seems to denounce her earlier, lush style by celebrating the ethereal delicacy of New England native flowers over the exotics to which her early writing was so frequently compared.1 Yet, closer consideration reveals that Spofford’s highly wrought technique continues unabashed in this essay, though there has been a modification in the favored subject matter that yields a shift in emphasis toward a more evanescent materiality. Spofford still inundates the reader with waves of lavish prose as she recounts the seasonal procession of New England blooms. In the essay, the eponymous apple blossom is not the opposite of the pomegranate flower; rather, the native flower rivals the tropical with its finer, but no less intricate and fascinating material aspect:€ “How gauzy, fine, and thin is each separate floret of the dandelion! How like something only just thicker than twilight is the tissue of the wood-violet! And how, with scarcely more substance than a sunset cloud, comes the scarlet columbine springing like a tongue of flame from the rocky crannies!” (Pomegranate Flower, 450). The native flowers are less easy to overlook when Spofford amplifies their sensual presence through her prose. Spofford’s stylistic virtuosity crowns the essay, in which the “refined” and the “delicate” are only deceptively moral values; refinement is here the mode by which materiality becomes ever more supple and sensuous. The ultimate flower in Spofford’s procession, blooming on the cusp of winter, will soon become the linchpin of African American writer Pauline Hopkins’ magazine novel, Winona:€A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest, published in serial installments for The Colored American Magazine in 1902.2 In “Pomegranate Flower” Spofford writes, “the Indianpipe, shows itself on small heaps of moulds, sometimes of a faint rosecolor, and sometimes pallid and ghastly enough to warrant its name of corpse flower, in which capacity perhaps it shines upon the covers of Emily Dickinson’s wondrous verses” (451). Spofford refers to the painting 164

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of Indian pipes given to Dickinson by Mabel Loomis Todd in 1882 and then used after her death to adorn the first edition of her poems in 1890, edited by Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Dickinson’s own poem on the Indian pipe first appeared in the 1896 Poems, Third Series, published by Todd. In it, Dickinson uses the Indian pipe to muse on the immateriality of spirit:€“’Tis whiter than an Indian Pipe€– / ’Tis dimmer than a Lace€– / No stature has it, like a Fog / When you approach the place” (“’Tis Whiter,” 625). Even as her explicit focus is to question the existence and desirability of the absolute spiritual state exalted by genteel Christianity, Dickinson uses the ghostly materiality of the Indian pipe (and of lace) to suggest by contrast the vacancy of conventional Christian spirit that is the poem’s concern. Spofford’s comparison of Dickinson’s poetry to the Indian pipes surely turns on her recognition of the evocative border of spirit and matter that Dickinson’s poems so often limn. Though Dickinson’s Poems, First Series is declared by Thomas Johnson to have been the literary event of 1890 and its cover likely to have been glimpsed by the then thirty-one-year-old Pauline Hopkins, my point is not that Hopkins responds explicitly to Dickinson or to Spofford. Nonetheless, her literary use of the Indian pipe is perfectly calibrated to theirs and invested with comparable aesthetic experimentalism and ideological concerns. In Winona, Hopkins uses the Indian pipe as a subtle mystic cipher for her heroine:€the flower functions conventionally as an emblem of delicacy but also less conventionally as a node of subtle sensuality, and like the heroine it is rooted in the racialized contexts of Indian lore and the politics of native, free, and slave soils. The Indian pipe becomes the cryptic signature of Hopkins’ authorial project as well. Hopkins seeks an articulation of black femininity through the play of spirit and matter, as well as style and form, that flowers facilitated for her predecessors. The resonance of Hopkins’ novel with the network of concerns that Spofford’s and Dickinson’s evocations of the Indian pipe condense for us also reveals that Hopkins turns to highly wrought techniques within a print context in which the voices, concerns, and even texts that I have treated in this study are still reverberant. The end of the century finds Spofford continuing to regularly publish magazine fiction, primarily for Harper’s Bazaar, making her very much a contemporary counterpart to Hopkins, her fellow Boston magazinist and author. Hopkins herself registers Spofford’s celebrity when she begins a 1901 article on John Greenleaf Whittier for The Colored American Magazine with a literary tour through his native Massachusetts that first passes “the home of Harriet Prescott Spofford, on Deer Island.”3 She comments that Spofford wrote “one of her

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finest stories” at Deer Island€– “The South Breaker,” a regional romance included in Spofford’s 1863 The Amber Gods and Other Stories (251).4 Elizabeth McHenry’s study of black women’s literary clubs in the Â�nineteenth century has revealed the expanse and variety of middle-class women’s reading and their intensive study of literature as a method of developing and fomenting social change. Hopkins, in her own extensive nonfiction prose and commentary on literature, displays a particularly keen and deep sense of the antebellum literary field.5 In “Whittier, The Friend of the Negro,” Hopkins reveals her detailed knowledge of his literary context when she writes of the inclusion in 1859 of Whittier “on the staff of the Atlantic Monthly with Holmes, Prescott [Spofford], Emerson, Longfellow, Rose Terry Cooke and Mrs. Stowe” (256). Hopkins may gravitate to the period because, as Ira Dworkin has noted, for Hopkins the interracial antislavery movement “provides a model for the abolition of Jim Crow.”6 Certainly, in Winona, the antebellum history of John Brown’s defense of Free Soil politics in the “Bleeding Kansas” crisis provides the backdrop for both political and romantic interracial unions. Winona in particular is saturated with the antebellum context, and Hopkins revisits its literary models to rework them for African American purposes at the turn of the century. Scholars have not remarked that the story also harkens to Longfellow’s 1855 The Song of Hiawatha, as the female characters are named after Hiawatha’s grandmother, Nokomis, and mother, Wenonah. After Longfellow, Hopkins charts a nation’s epic story, but her story highlights the legendary antislavery heroism of both blacks and whites, and as her title announces, she makes space for the occluded role of women of color (whereas Longfellow’s Wenonah dies after bearing Hiawatha and being abandoned by his father, the West Wind).7 Like Ann Stephens, Hopkins finds that reinserting women into the narrative of national history requires elaborate plotting, and such efforts seem therefore to lead to further formal experiments in creating textual spaces more accommodating to women. Hopkins is in fact often cited as writing in the “dime novel” tradition, but scholars have assumed Hopkins’ adventurous plots are derived from a largely male tradition. But as dime and hardbound novels, Stephens’ fictions continued to be sold and were among the most popular volumes to borrow from libraries.8 She is one of the faces of the popular literature on which Hopkins’ fiction is said to draw. My inclusion of Hopkins in this study suggests more concretely the nature of Hopkins’ literary investments, antecedents, and innovations. As a black woman writer at the turn of the century, Hopkins had additional constraints with which to contend when entering the domain of

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fiction, let alone its more sensational manifestations. It is well known by now that a primary goal of black women writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was to assert their personhood in the face of racist constructions of black women as animalistic and lascivious. Many argue that the cost of such a project entailed, as Lauren Berlant puts it, “the evacuation of erotic or sexual or even sensational life itself as a possible ground of personal dignity for African American women.”9 But even on the face of it, Hopkins’ generic choices€– interweaving popular romance and western€– lend themselves more readily to an exploration of the “sensational life” than to racial uplift. The project of racial uplift was a many-faceted tactic employed by elite black intellectuals and leaders of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to simultaneously combat racism and claim full, integrated citizenship in the United States, a momentous task in the context of Jim Crow segregation. Confronting a concept of race steeped in oppressive stereotypes, scientific racism, and white cultural supremacy, black proponents of uplift proposed accessing full citizenship by subscribing to dominant bourgeois class and gender codes, optimistic that racial difference could be subsumed. For these African Americans, the “appropriation of gentility meant approximating racial equality.”10 Black women writers’ participation in this political movement is reflected in their production of domestic novels and genteel poetry, which provided the ideal venue for the positive representation of the black family’s bourgeois values and the feminine virtue and sexual purity of the black heroine. Thus, though marriage is often the manifest goal in these African American domestic novels, courtship is eclipsed or displaced, as in Amelia E. Johnson’s Clarence and Corrine, or converted into a politicized coupling of companionate race workers who confirm their bond through their duty to the race. The honeymoon of Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy is, as Claudia Tate puts it, “an occasion for public service,” not private pleasure (170). At the same time, Tate points out, “the codes that sanction the heroine’s unquestioned social station” also must “restrict topics for fictional treatment, restrict the manner of their presentation, and define the work’s audience … These codes demanded, in particular, that they delete … not only allusions to sexual passions but anger as well” (63).11 Hopkins herself felt the pressure of these codes, but the absence of a domestic trajectory in her story signals a desire to explore other itineraries for fiction by black women. My aim is not to undercut the politics of the domestic novel but, as I have done with the other texts in this study, to release Winona from those generic expectations. Of Hopkins’ three lively

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magazine novels, I have chosen to discuss Winona because, like the other texts I have examined and as its title indicates, it presents itself as a story of female adventure, one that confronts the limitations imposed on female desire, particularly through the problematic of marriage (though the intermarriage of this story is focused on gendered and racial restrictions, imposed on the desire of both men and women). Winona does not, as a domestic novel would, concern itself with a story of female development and preparation for a gendered position within the racial family, terminating in a testimony to racial achievement or national citizenship. Winona imagines not a public role for its heroine but a romantic interior. Hopkins seems interested in representing female sexual desire for its own sake, instead of sublimating it to political, economic, or social advancement€– itself a political move for a turn-of-the-century black woman writer. Still, Hopkins was affected by the same strictures as her contemporaries. It is precisely because gender, race, and genre were tightly bounded categories that allowed little room to explore passion, anger, romance, and sex in a black woman’s text that the representational and formal strategies Hopkins employs are notable. Hopkins’ formal choices in fact allow her story to embody the pleasures and passions that her black heroine’s body is not supposed to own. A primary strategy in Hopkins’ novel is to alternately trouble, shift, and incapacitate the signifying power of bodies, despite the apparent immutability of race and sex markers. Hopkins’ political goal was to expose the artificiality of binary categorizations of race and gender, while simultaneously carving out an interior space for the black subject. As she put the matter in her preface to Contending Forces, her objective was to “faithfully portray the inmost thoughts and feelings of the Negro with all the fire and romance which lie dormant in our history.”12 Despite the pressure on black literature to fulfill the sociological goals of positive representation, a number of Hopkins’ fellow African American writers joined her in stressing that literature had a more nuanced role in the struggle for legal rights and cultural recognition. In her essay “One Phase of American Literature,” Anna Julia Cooper identified the African American as the “great silent factor” not yet acknowledged in American cultural productions.13 At the 1895 First Congress of Colored Women in Boston, Victoria Earle Matthews delivered “The Value of Race Literature,” a speech Elizabeth McHenry has called “nothing less than a manifesto of the women’s club movement itself” and its investment in literature.14 In lines that do indeed seem to have become a manifesto for Hopkins, Matthews declared that literature by African American authors should aspire to

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“win a place by the simplicity of the story, thrown into strong relief by the multiplicity of its dramatic situations; the spirit of romance, and even tragedy, shadowy and as yet ill-defined, but from which our race on this continent can never be dissociated.”15 Literature, she asserted, should provide the outlet for “the unnaturally suppressed inner lives which our people have been Â�compelled to lead” (131). These women, like Hopkins, seek a fuller Â�articulation of African American life€– of less tangible desires and emotions that are located by Hopkins and Matthews in an “interior” that racist culture pathologized or denied, thereby making its representation fraught for African American writers. W. E. B. DuBois is of course well known for his own elegant meditations on African American “spiritual strivings” in The Souls of Black Folk, and he shared interests with Hopkins in the kinds of contemporary discourses that promised access to the interior and spirit, especially resurgences of mesmerist practices in Charcot’s hypnotism or William James’ “New Psychology,” as many Hopkins scholars have noted.16 Hopkins’ particular innovation was to forge a cultural form of African American romance, that could admit, include, and articulate the pleasures and desires of African Americans without making this “inmost” realm available to racist ideology. Such spaces are opened up in Winona by Hopkins’ way of working between and through the western and popular romance forms she employs. Hopkins implicates one in the other, making each genre comment on and revise the thematic in the other€– revenge in the western and marriage in the popular romance, thus generating modes of anger and pleasure forbidden in the “race literature” of late century. Hopkins thus finds “fire and romance” not in the heroine’s psychic interior but in new ways of styling western and romance as connected and mutually informing, itself productive of a fecund structural inner space that is an analogue for interiority rather than a realist representation of its workings. Hopkins plies and arranges the content of her chosen genres to expose the material interim between things usually classified as separate:€genres, people, races, sexes.17 Hopkins’ recourse to spiritualized discourses thus does not, as has been assumed, abandon racial protest. She finds in flower language a better way to grant material resonance to African American suffering and sensual immediacy to independent black female sexuality. As it did for Fuller or Spofford, flower language leads to a textual mode that offers other forms of expression; it guides a stylistic rendering of self that is not subject to the specular regime of racist culture. She finds in mesmerism the power to imagine the self in other ways than through dominant frameworks for

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race and gender and to project alternative social relations in Â�out-Â�of-body Â�fantasies. She claims for her protagonists the power to move, emote, desire, love, and even suffer outside of race and gender prescriptions. In distinction from her predecessors, it is at the level of form, even more than Â�language, that we locate Hopkins’ elaborate craft:€it is the design of her text that is worked, elaborated, highly wrought. Our encounter with the generic crossings, infusions, unfoldings, and imbrications provides the sense of intricacy, complication, and free movement that suggests an alternative formation of black femininity. E n fol di ng “f i r e a n d rom a nc e” To illustrate the supple maneuverings of Hopkins’ text, I use Gilles Deleuze’s notion of “the fold,” derived from the theories of baroque philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Deleuze’s fold conceptualizes space using a metaphorics of matter as layers of earth, folds of fabric, and creases of bodies. The texture, style, or expression of any matter is defined not by its heterogeneous parts, but by the way the matter is folded. The fold provides a way to think of Hopkins’ text as pliable, as unfolding to reveal new enfoldings (literally, implications, plic being derived from the Latin root for fold or pleat), and refolding (complicating), just as Hopkins both explicates and complicates anew the raced and gendered script she has been assigned. In other words, this chapter examines the different way that Hopkins has of “doing” the western and the romance together, genres that, in juxtaposition or alone, have troubled critics searching for the political work of Hopkins’ popular fiction.18 Critics tend to proceed on the assumption that such nonrealist fictional modes are antithetical to the realities of black experience, that its forms are a superficial cover for some more authentic expression. As in her work with genre, I will argue that in Hopkins’ text, fiction and political expression work together, are of a piece, rather than in conflict. The fold also allows us to see how Hopkins goes about the hard work of constructing an embodied identity that acknowledges the perils of sexual victimization by white men while authorizing an autonomous and pleasurable sexuality, a sexuality embodied not least in the folds and nooks of the body of Hopkins’ text. Mieke Bal has also recently speculated on the usefulness of the Deleuzean fold for overcoming current gridlock in Â�feminism, by “the way, as a figure, it helps us think, not the position of the subject caught in the abyss between victimhood and pleasure, … but the relationship between the two.”19 Hopkins goes about this task not with

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schizophrenic attention to alternating modes of protest and pleasure, but with conjoined attention to systemic victimization and individual agency, for both are entwined in the fabric of embodied black female experience. In the final analysis, the intricacies of Hopkins’ text complicate Deleuze’s theory by incorporating dimensions of race and gender in theories of the fold.20 The narrative of Winona follows two trajectories:€ a popular romance plot involving Winona and a white Englishman, Warren Maxwell, and a westernlike plot that centers on Winona’s adopted black brother, Judah. Winona’s mother was a slave who escaped to upstate New York on the Underground Railroad. There she met Winona’s white father, who had eschewed his culture to live with an Indian tribe, inhabiting an island on the border of the United States and Canada. White Eagle, as the tribe calls Winona’s father, and Winona’s mother were legally married in Canada under English law. Winona is raised by her white father when her mother dies soon after Winona’s birth. Winona is raised with Judah, an older adopted brother who is also black, the son of a runaway slave woman who escaped with Winona’s mother, but died in the process. Also included in the immediate family is Nokomis, an Indian woman who acts as housekeeper. Winona’s happily mixed family is part of a larger “mixed community of Anglo-Saxons, Indians and Negroes” (287) living in the Buffalo, New York, area. At the precise moment when she is made more vulnerable by her budding sexuality, Winona is abducted and sold into slavery via the then newly created Fugitive Slave Law (the story is set in the 1850s). After two years, Winona is rescued from slavery and taken west, where she and her rescuers join forces with John Brown’s Free Soilers in Kansas. Winona contains the most optimistic exposition of integration in Hopkins’ work, returning as it does to a high point of interracial political coalition in John Brown’s radical Free Soil politics while, simultaneously, integrating the private sphere through an honorable interracial romance between Winona and a white English hero, Warren Maxwell. Winona’s rejection of her black adopted brother, Judah, as a contender for her hand in marriage marks Hopkins’ break from “the sibling model of ideal love,” the dominant model in fiction by black women at the turn of the century.21 By abandoning what had become a generic requirement, Hopkins departs from the marriage-as-duty-to-the-race thematics of black women’s domestic fiction, in order to explore marriage and courtship as passionate rather than ideal love. As Siobhan Somerville has pointed out, “Hopkins’s insistence on claiming African American desire, which included the possibility of interracial desire, was part of her larger attempt to refuse the racialized

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boundaries that Jim Crow and antimiscegenation legislation increasingly imposed and naturalized during the 1890s and 1900s.”22 Taking the plot at face value, critics invariably emphasize the western, leading them to lament the absence of female agency.23 Claudia Tate has observed that “rescue missions largely displace the courtship story, with the exception of intermittent romantic flashes between Maxwell and Winona,”24 and, indeed, Winona often functions as an object to be rescued and abducted by different bands of men. Elizabeth Ammons argues that the anti-imperialist agenda of Winona “is trapped into profound selfcontradiction by its generic participation in the western.”25 However, a reading of Winona as formulaic (rather than pliant) proves unsatisfactory when complexity opens up at unanticipated intervals€ – wrinkles in the midst of the western. While this chapter primarily follows the popular romance strand of Winona, once the hidden folds of the text are explored, we find that the two strands are implicated, one in the other. Both protecting and exposing the body of Winona’s text, the western envelops the erotic story of Winona even as it unfolds her sexual vulnerability in a racist society through its thematics of captivity and escape, here displaced onto the slave South. Moreover, the western and romance, like geological seams or veins of rock, each contain a concentrated deposit of circumscribed pleasures€– anger and righteous violence are Judah’s portion, while eroticism is Winona’s. These strands are clearly gendered, but, because they are creviced in the same textual matter, the desires explored in each genre inform the other:€Winona is able to turn violence back against those who turned it against her, while action, as sheer unrestricted movement, is eroticized. Winona’s very presence in the western signals a disruption of both a feminized love plot and a masculinized action plot. All of this folding of generic bodies into each other is exemplary of the way in which Hopkins will bend categories, disturb boundaries, and overlap contents of physical bodies throughout. Certainly Hopkins’ need to maintain tight control over the eroticism of her text is echoed in the strangely inscrutable and often silent Winona. Thus Winona illustrates Hazel Carby’s contention that “the representation of the struggle for sexual autonomy was to remain a crucial organizing device of the narrative structures of black women writers”;26 however, this struggle is not always waged at the level of plot or character but in compressed pockets of textual encoding. The novel is just as importantly, if not as overtly, a tale of “romantic happenings,” as Hopkins herself states in the very first paragraph, and the titular character is central to this romance (287). Not to be dismissed, the “romantic flashes” in the novel are textual

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folds where Hopkins’ suddenly sensual language employs a vocabulary of dreams, flowers, and spirits€– delaying the action of the plot and lingering over seemingly superfluous nonevents (even more attenuated by the serialization of the novel). These textual folds create the sense of personhood, depth, or interiority for Winona that to many feminist critics has seemed to be missing from the novel, or diluted and restricted by genteel codes. That is, Hopkins uses such language much in the way that highly wrought writers had earlier in the century€– not to provide a realist exposition of the psychological interiority of an individual character, but to create a new kind of space within fictional form, a space that is typologically feminine; or, put differently, to open an interim in which to sense, in the ways this book has been describing it, an alternative presence, not one that emanates from the force of Winona’s character but rather is something to which she, more than any other actor in the story, has access. In Hopkins’ hands that positive presence is tied to the suppressed maternal knowledge of people of color. T h e f l ow e r of bl ac k f e m a l e s e x ua l i t y As if to ensure that Winona’s “inmost thoughts and feelings” remain under her control, rather than fueling racist myths, pleasure is often secreted in the nooks and crannies of the text; to read into these folds is to discover not evacuated ground that is void of sensation or sexuality, but a space manifold with possibility. The key to unfolding the encoded pockets of Winona is the language of flowers.27 As Chapter 1 delineated, flower language had long been both a lexicon of conventional femininities and a field of alternative signification by the time Hopkins wrote her novel. For many black women, flowers provided a way to depathologize black female desire through a metaphorics steeped in both gentility and benign natural imagery, though black women writers frequently decentered flower language conventions to some degree. The array of floral figurations available€– the spectrum of shapes, colors, and sizes€– made flower language a particularly pliable semiotic of femininity, though Hopkins, like Fuller and Stephens, is interested in developing a space for spirit that depends on an enriched understanding of flowers as more than emblems. Charlotte Forten castigated the showy white camellia in her flower fable “The Flower Fairies’ Reception.”28 Alice Dunbar-Nelson is careful to distinguish the “wild, shy kind” of violet, her signature flower, from those in the florists’ shops.29 Both writers thereby signal that they would embrace genteel femininity on their own terms. Flower language allowed Hopkins to approach

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the issue with which black women writers would continue to grapple in the coming century€– in Deborah McDowell’s words, “[H]ow to express female sexual desire … without becoming an icon of racist projection.”30 Hopkins’ Winona offers one of the most striking and elaborate uses of flower language among her contemporaries.31 Hers is a complex appropriation sensitive to the pitfalls and privileges involved in such a model of femininity, and aware that flower language had various ways of reinscribing race. Though Hopkins appropriates flower language to describe Winona’s sexual coming of age (in a scene I will soon return to) and to critique racist distinctions between a delicate white female body and a fleshly sexualized black female body, such language was often used to other ends. Probably no flower was more racially coded than the magnolia€ – as we have seen, the heavily scented flower was central to white women’s erotic encoding for its ethereality; the fragrance enabled a sensuous rendering of a female erotic self that avoided the snares of embodiment, that remained elusive and unseen, that could not be plucked or harvested. But we recall that Fuller’s “The Magnolia of Lake Ponchartrain” claimed that magnolias, though naturally of a “dazzling hue,” “drooped and grew sallow” when plucked “like princesses captive in the prison of the barbarous foe,”32 its whiteness seeming the visual analogue of the delicate sensuality the scent evoked. In a familiar calculus, as the flower shifts from an inviolable and high-souled presence to a material object that has been plucked and bruised, its loss of whiteness is the chief signifier of its degraded state. Hopkins sets about materializing this discourse of white female sexuality in spite of its claims to ethereality. Her initial description of Magnolia Farm, the plantation to which the captive Winona is brought, appears to be straight out of the “moonlight and magnolias” school of popular plantation fiction: The air was redolent with the scent of flowers nor needed the eye to seek far for them, for the whole front of the dwelling … [was] rendered picturesque by rich masses of roses and honeysuckle that covered them … Mingled with the scent of the roses was the fragrance of the majestic magnolia whose buds and blossoms nodded at one from every nook and unexpected quarter. (315–16)

But this is not a picturesque scene for Winona, whose master, Colonel Titus, is biding his time until she is old enough for her sexual wares to be sold at a handsome price; Magnolia Farm is the home of Colonel Titus, and we are told that “all was grist that came to his mill” (316). The ubiquity of the magnolia and its fragrance takes on an insidious quality, for Winona’s story bears witness to the brutal underbelly of the “moonlight and magnolias” school.

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As if to make this very point, Hopkins stages the following scene at Magnolia Farm. Maxwell and Judah are sitting in the darkness, the sweet scent of the magnolia enveloping them in its fragrance, the faint sound of insect life mingling with the murmur of rustling leaves. Warren Maxwell listened to whispered words that harrowed up his very soul. To emphasize his story, Judah stripped up his shirt and seizing the young white man’s hand pressed it gently over the scars and seams stamped upon his back [by Colonel Titus’ whip]. (334)

Hopkins thus burdens the ephemeral evocation of white female sexuality with the corporeality it so eschews. In this case, she saddles it with a materiality so horrific that when Maxwell’s nose fills with the fragrance of magnolias while his hands trace the welts on Judah’s back, it becomes impossible not to forever associate the two sensations. Hopkins inverts the magnolia’s meaning so that, instead of standing in direct opposition to the bruised, commodified, utterly material and spiritless brown or black flower, it is now bound in a symbiotic relationship with the sexual and physical abuse of black bodies. These associations are folded into the very perfume of white female sexuality as Hopkins extends our grasp of the potential “hidden meanings” of flower language. Hopkins further challenges the racist constructions of flower language by choosing the Indian pipe as the flower that figures her heroine’s sexuality. In Winona’s first encounter with the Indian pipes on the remote island of her childhood, “a distant gleam among the grasses caught the girl’s quick eye. She ran swiftly over the open and threaded her sinuous way among the bushes to drop upon her knees in silent ecstacy [sic]. In an instant Judah was beside her. They pushed the leaves aside together, revealing the faint pink stems of the delicate, gauzy Indian-pipes” (291). Occurring as it does in the first chapter of the novel, the figure of the Indian pipe, including the (rather elaborate) mise-en-scène and dialogue Hopkins contrives to accompany it, is crucial to the rest of the novel. The concluding chapter returns to the scene to assure the reader that the Indian pipes still “lay concealed among the bushes as of old” (434), another signal that Hopkins intends her flower language to have significance for the full comprehension of the whole of her narrative. Creviced in the landscape, the Indian pipe is a tight textual bud whose plicated meaning unfurls throughout the narrative, allowing Hopkins, via her own arrangement of flower language, to explore the many layers of an embodied black female self. Winona’s “sinuous way” and “silent ecstacy,” when read in the context of flower language, alert us to the possibility that this discovery of the concealed Indian pipes entails an erotic awakening for Winona. When

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Winona parts the leaves to reveal the small, waxy, nodding flowers of the Indian pipe, Hopkins employs the same quasi-reference to clitoral imagery (buds, seeds, jewels) as previous writers. “In the waxlike jewel, the flower bud,” to borrow Paula Bennett’s phrasing, Hopkins found a way “to represent woman to herself€ – not as a space to be entered but as a presence to be uncovered and adored.”33 The identification of the Indian pipes with an eroticized Winona is immediately confirmed when Judah feels “a strange sense of pleasure stir his young heart as he involuntarily glanced from the flowers to the childish face before him … the olive complexion with a hint of pink like that which suffused the fragile flowers before them … gave his physical senses pleasure to contemplate. From afar came ever the regular booming of Niagara’s stupendous flood” (291–2). Obviously, Judah is also awakened to Winona’s sexuality. But why, if Hopkins has already concealed the flower of her black heroine’s sexuality on a remote island and ensconced it in highly euphemistic language, must she also bleach the color of her flower? It would not be in keeping with Hopkins’ explicit goal of ridding culture of any such superficial racial identity to transvalue binaries by choosing an oppositional vocabulary of colored or exotic flowers. Winona’s variously colored body€– her “brown hand” (289); “olive complexion” (292); “brown fingers” (309); “soft, dark face” (356); “white throat” (359)€– is intended to show that it is “in vain to find the dividing line supposed to be a natural barrier between the whites and the dark-skinned race” (287). The interesting thing about Hopkins’ choice of Indian pipes is that they have no chlorophyll, a widely known attribute of this indigenous flower. Thus Hopkins chooses a “colorless” or, if chlorophyll may be thought of as the floral equivalent of melanin, a racially unmarked flower. The translucence of the flower’s membranes enforces Hopkins’ ideal of a society that sees past skin color. The scene between Winona and Judah continues to both advance and complicate Hopkins’ intervention in the raced and gendered erotics of flower language. “But they turn black as soon as you touch them,” Judah says, ostensibly returning his thoughts to the Indian pipes after his Â�arousing contemplation of Winona. Winona responds, “Yes, I know; but we will leave them here where they may go away like spirits; Old Nokomis told me.” To which Judah scoffs, “Old Nokomis! She’s only a silly old Indian squaw. You mustn’t mind her stories”; and he adds, “[I]n school you learn not to believe all the silly stories that we are told by the Indians” (292). If the meditation on the Indian pipes is a meditation on Winona’s own budding sexuality, the import is that, while she might thrive in the color-blind, panethnic community of the island, coded as “natural” in the

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novel, her removal from that community will entail the death of her spirit and racialization of her sexuality. That is, the color of her skin will code her as a plucked flower:€impure and a husk, only a body with no spirit. The purity or soulfulness of Hopkins’ flowers is dependent on their geopolitical location. To extend the implications of Hopkins’ revised floral color vocabulary, it must be pointed out that the color black often functions in the novel as a sign of what is done to African American bodies as a result of a racist social order€– a social order that violently imposes meaning on what Hopkins would otherwise have us see as the artificial category of race. Reflecting as much on the violence concurrent with her writing as on the antebellum race struggles her story narrates, Hopkins evokes “the ghostly ruins of charred houses [that] lifted their scarred skeletons against the sky in a mute appeal for vengeance” (360), like the ghostly or blackened Indian pipes, as a metonym for the remains of African American homes and bodies that littered her own post-Reconstruction landscape. She bends the formula that equates a black flower with impurity to show that the black flower has instead been violated. Hopkins questions “the worth of a white man’s love for a woman of mixed blood; how it swept its scorching heat over a white young life, leaving it nothing but charred embers and burnt-out ashes” (357–8). Though ostensibly referring to the quick cooling of a white man’s lust (the “burnt-out ashes” of “white young” desire), the ambiguous syntax of the sentence€ – the uncertainty over just who is victimized€ – seems to imply that “scorching heat” can apply to the violence committed by white lust, charring and violating the African American woman, like a blighted Indian pipe. One reading of the Indian pipe, then, is as a sign of white racist violence. In this reading, blackness refers not to skin color but to an identity violently enforced and persecuted. Where blackness invokes marked and tortured bodies, the Indian pipe that turns black when violated is a powerful and visceral symbol of the black woman’s abused body, scorched by white violence. Male-dominant attitudes espoused by both white and black men have historically refused to view rape as a hate crime, choosing instead to view it as an act of passion in which the female victim is somehow complicit, particularly when she is black. If, as Hazel Carby has asserted, “the institutionalized rape of black women has never been as powerful a symbol of black oppression as the spectacle of lynching,”34 then Hopkins, through flower language, rends the veil from the body that suffers this obscured history, granting material resonance to its pain.

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True to the eroticism of flower language as I have described it, Hopkins is as concerned with the spiritual dimension as she is with the physicality of her flower, choosing as she does a flower that is at once highly delicate (even going away like a spirit), even as it remains physically suggestive of female genitalia. Judah’s focus on only the physical attributes, his alternating rhapsody on and repulsion from the color of the flower depending on what side of the color line it appears, and his dismissal of its spiritual attributes (again due to the colored origin of the story) mark him as already marred by contact with a racist society, one source of which is the Indian boarding school (run by whites to acculturate Native Americans to white society) he has been attending. Later, he presumes that Winona “ought naturally” to marry him, not Maxwell, because they are both “of the same condition in life in the eyes of the world” (377, 378). While Judah’s love for her is tender and honorable, he does not consider whether her spirit shares as much affinity with him as does her color. Unfortunately for Judah, flower language does indeed prove to be “the vocabulary needed to conduct a love affair,” as many flower dictionaries claimed, for when Judah rejects the discourse’s insistence on the flower’s (Winona’s) soul, he finds he has no suit.35 It is Maxwell who follows the “arc between the material and the immaterial”36 that the Indian pipes evoke:€he sees the “soft, dark face [of Winona] so full of character, so vivid with the light of the passionate soul within” (356). By rejecting Judah, who attempts to impose a color line on her desire, Winona asserts an independent sexual desire and refuses to be objectified in a struggle between men over ownership of her body. Moreover, Judah’s rhetoric is overlaid with the patriarchal slant of many race leaders, who wished to ensure that black women married within the race (when, in fact, significantly more black men than women married interracially). By effecting this type of racial conservation, as Kevin Gaines has shown, male leaders hoped both to assuage concerns (not least their own) about black women’s purity and to maintain the integrity, or purity, of the race.37 Sexuality, for black women, thus became a matter of reproducing the race. Exposing this masculinist project through Judah’s relation to Winona, Hopkins then dispenses with it to clear the way for Winona’s sexual independence. By eschewing racial conservation, she destabilizes racial identity€ – and not for the last time in the novel. In his preoccupation with the way racist society defines race through biology, Judah misses another, more capacious, idea of race dear to Hopkins’ political project in all her fiction:€a culturalist notion of race. Winona’s alliance with Nokomis in the Indian pipe scene is reminiscent

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of other bonds, in other novels, between Hopkins’ mulatto heroines and racialized maternal figures. As an (albeit shadowy) mother figure for Winona and as the source of flower lore, Nokomis recalls Madame Frances, the black fortune-teller and aunt of the heroine in Contending Forces, and foreshadows Aunt Hannah, the black slave, voodoo practitioner, and grandmother of the central female character in Of One Blood. These women have telling links to the heroines:€as in a novel of passing, these related and racialized bodies “tell on” the biological race of the heroine and are a source of information about racial history and cultural knowledge. Winona is not passing, a strategy Hopkins resolutely condemned, but she is cut off from a black slave past by the death of her mother before the story begins. Though by killing off Winona’s slave mother, Hopkins has seemingly set Winona free to pursue assimilation into white society and an unproblematic marriage to a white man, the presence of Nokomis is calculated to undermine that potential by pulling Winona back into a racialized dynamic (one characterized as oppositional to white culture) that threatens the colorlessness on which such a plot would seem to be depending. A storyteller and the purveyor of the mystical language of flowers, Nokomis also has knowledge potentially useful to Winona. Her story of the Indian pipes allows Winona to access an alternative reading of them and of her body. More than material husks, Indian pipes in Nokomis’ version have spirits, a being beyond their color, and Hopkins holds out this possibility to Winona. This is not something that Judah’s school, in its attention to the color rather than essence of knowledge, has taught him; consequently, his attention to race and oppression lead him to near despair. His embittered view of how race relations operate contributes significantly to Hopkins’ protest, but this is not the sum total of her message. Winona, on the other hand, though she certainly feels her oppression, has spiritual resources on which to rely. The ideal of the novel, which, in one of its variations, is stated as, “[T]here is no respect of persons with God” (374) is echoed in Winona’s ability to imagine a self outside of bodily categories. Yet that imagined self is still racially rooted, as Hopkins returns flower language to its nonwhite origins. By ascribing flower language to a nonwhite source, Hopkins may have thought of herself not as appropriating a white genteel discourse but as reappropriating a nonwhite, even African, discourse.38 As we have seen, many flower dictionaries made much of their ancient and non-European origins in ways that would have been of great interest to Hopkins, as author of the pan-African history A Primer of Facts

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Pertaining to the Early Greatness of the African people of the African Race; for example, John Ingram offered this as �context for his flower dictionary: The indestructible monuments of the mighty Assyrian and Egyptian races bear upon their venerable surfaces a code of floral telegraphy that Time has been powerless to efface, but whose hieroglyphical meaning is veiled, or, at the best, but dimly guessed at in our day.39

Indeed, despite the flurry of amalgamating activity in Hopkins’ idealized locale, flower language and its accompanying mystical insight into nature linger and haunt the text as a racial knowledge, in this case Native American. At the same time, Native American and, though unspoken, African histories and identities intersect in Winona. The “island [that] has no name” (294) on which Winona and her tribe live is suggestive of America before its discovery, but it also evokes Africa, when Winona and Judah are snatched from it. The colonization of the two continents are fused in the “violent invasion of this world [of the island] by two white men whose first language is gunfire, not words.”40 As a veiled Africa, the island functions (as Africa often did in black texts of this time) as an “uncolonized territory of the spirit.”41 Uncolonized and nameless, the island is a prelapsarian body before race is named, before the notion of race violently issued from contact with other peoples. Though colorless, then, the Indian pipe invokes a nonwhite cultural identity (a mystical colored spirituality and interiority) as well as a historical black experience of slavery and violence. Both senses are specifically gendered, for the Indian pipes speak to a culturally based mystical knowledge that includes a knowledge not only of spirits but of the female body, and to a history of institutionalized rape of black women. The stories of Nokomis€– her flower language, in which Winona has invested her faith, but which Judah has discredited€– enfold three aspects of a potential black female self in the hidden meaning of the Indian pipe:€that self’s history of oppression; a potentially radical alterity, accessed through nonwhite cultural resources (a possible Africanity); and a positive space for sexuality and pleasure. Considered taboo by many middle-class blacks working for racial uplift and integration, and manipulated by the dominant white society in the service of primitivist stereotypes, these discredited stories must be both recovered and protected from racist interpretation and circulation. What had been a void becomes delicately present, voluminous, in Hopkins’ story. By plucking Winona off of her island and sending her over the border and into slave territory (thus plunging the black reader into the past),

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Hopkins finally refuses either an idealized version of colorlessness, in which the material consequences of racism are effaced; or, alternatively, a return to an idealized cultural identity that predates race (the golden age that the island invokes). Perched between slavery in the United States and freedom in Canada, between legal rape under United States law and legal marriage under English law, between a horrific past of oppression and a hope for an ideal future without racism, Winona’s symbolic predicament recalls the position of the post-Reconstruction black subject, who must adjudicate between optimism about full and equitable citizenship and despair over ever-increasing racism. Evasion of history is not an option Hopkins offers to Winona or her readers. Winona will have to recover the liminal space she needs to explore her sexuality, despite the racist society in which she lives. B a ro qu e pl o t s: €rom a nc i ng t h e w e s t e r n, av e ng i ng t h e rom a nc e Though Winona experiences the extreme sexualization of slavery in which she is regarded only as a body to be trafficked by white men, the portion of her life she spends in slavery is foreshortened in the narration. Instead, it is Maxwell, in yet another seemingly impossible fold of Hopkins’ text, who must undergo the violent racialization portrayed by the blackened Indian pipes. A white man and English to boot, Maxwell knows little (and believes less) about the cruelty and inhumanity of slavery. Most of the portion of the novel that occurs in Kansas with John Brown, the western plot, is devoted to Maxwell’s education in the realities of racism. Rather than relying on mere sympathy to solidify the coupling of Winona and Maxwell, Hopkins makes Maxwell realize that “experience is a stern teacher” (395) and schools him in a politicized version of the Golden Rule:€“Remember those in bonds as bound with them” (374). Maxwell’s horrific bodily indoctrination into the ways of slavery includes being the object of mob violence, being placed on display “much as is a wild beast caged in a menagerie” (382), and experiencing a “trial” that is a “farcical mockery of justice” (382). Not least, Maxwell is in danger of being burned at the stake in a scene that refuses to avert the reader’s gaze from a single detail; in fact, Hopkins rewinds the scene between monthly installments, so that the pile under Maxwell is lit twice (368, 370). Hopkins not only lifts the veil of Maxwell’s ignorance about black history; she marches him across the color line€– twice, in case he does not get it the first time. Maxwell is “saved” only to be further tortured with imprisonment and the

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promise of execution, but not before his skin has been scarred by the fire. Like Winona, Maxwell is raced by a racist society, literally blackened like the Indian pipes. Race unfolds as a fiction with material consequences, a mobile category whose organizing principle is not biology but domination. The “exchange of situation” (386) between the dominated and the oppressors that the Bible promises and that Hopkins delivers serves to reverse the imperialist ideology of the western at the same time that it makes Maxwell, because of that very reversal, a fit match for Winona. Hopkins reveals the costs of western fantasies of lawlessness and freedom while appropriating the revenge mode of the western to subject her romance hero to a stern lesson. Cast from a privileged position and made into the object of imperial domination, Maxwell learns what it is like to occupy a body that is, at least temporarily, no more privileged than Winona’s. If having Maxwell live out one trajectory of racial embodiment enfolded in the Indian pipes seems not only to blacken him but also to feminize him through an association with flower language, that is because Hopkins does not miss the opportunity to reveal rape as another act of terrorism endured by both black women and men. A hole in the floor of Maxwell’s prison cell “afforded diversion for the invalid who could observe the full operation of the slave system” (384) by watching the treatment blacks received in the cell below. Indeed, one day he sees “a Negro undergoing the shameful outrage, so denounced in the Scriptures,” which causes him to fall “fainting with terror and nausea upon the floor” (385). If Maxwell witnesses a slave being sodomized as Hopkins seems to suggest, the implications are doubled:€Maxwell vicariously experiences the rape that Winona has narrowly escaped (by escaping slavery), as the sight and sounds of the rape penetrate his eyes, ears, and cell through the small hole, while his voyeurism implicates him in the white man’s act. Hopkins thus invests the masculine generic form of the western with a radically different spirit, and Winona replicates this move on a personal scale. When Maxwell is first captured by the mob, Judah’s overseer, Bill Thompson, tries to bargain with Maxwell for information on the whereabouts of Winona and Judah. At the moment when Maxwell is considering his reply, Winona mystically appears to Maxwell, even though she is physically far away:€“Winona stared at him across the shadows of the dim old woods. ‘Be true,’ she whispered to the secret ear of his soul. With rapture he read aright the hopeless passion in her eyes when he left her. He knew now that he loved her” (363). Winona, as the agent (staring, whispering) in this encounter, is represented as exercising her power of suggestion according to mesmerist beliefs, in which Hopkins was well versed and which she

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often deployed in her fiction.42 While this scene involves an out-of-body reunion of lovers like the vision I discuss in Chapter 2, Winona’s agency in the scene also reveals Hopkins revising the gendered power dynamic of the magnetic romance. Like the mesmerist who demonstrates his power over the trancee, Winona takes up a position of control over Maxwell’s mind and body. She in fact invades his body through “the secret ear of his soul” and by obtruding herself upon his vision. Once in possession of Maxwell, she infuses him with new spirit:€“With sudden boldness he answered his tormentor. ‘You have no right to claim either Winona or Judah as your slave. They are as free as you or I. I will never aid and abet your barbarous system, understanding it as I do now’” (363). Maxwell’s epiphany has long been coming, but Winona’s act of “suggestion” gives him new zest in his convictions, demonstrating my claims in Chapter 2 that fantasy becomes a tool of reform when visionary spirit takes on subtle materiality. A black woman in possession of a white man’s body, particularly when she makes him commit political acts on her behalf, such as refusing to collude with the western’s imperialist agenda, is surely a powerful image unavailable in the dominant discourse. Hopkins effects “an exchange of situation,” a crossing of the color line, that is not an act of passing or uncritical assimilation, but of usurping and occupying white space (of Maxwell’s body, of the western, of flower language) in order to transform it and empty it of privilege. In doing so even momentarily€– by allowing a black soul to “possess” a white body, or blackening the white body, or meeting somewhere else altogether in the etherium€– the color line becomes difficult to place. This is the model of interracial relations Winona offers, a confusion of bodily identities and an affinity of souls, but one that nonetheless impresses upon each body and mind the historical effects of race. The envisioned relationship between the races (which Hopkins does not conflate with current realities) is one of neither passing nor rape, precisely because the body’s burden of representation has been relieved in a new emphasis on spirit. That spirit, however, emanates from a locality outside of white structures and bodies, remaining primarily a futuristic vision and limited to the microcosmic interracial relation between Winona and Maxwell.43 Winona uses mystical knowledge to exercise control over her own body as well as Maxwell’s. After escaping slavery and joining John Brown’s camp in the frontier territory of Kansas, Winona’s return to a natural, geographically liminal, and racially integrated setting like that of her childhood island helps her to recapture the sense of self promised by the Indian pipes, to fuse body and soul:€“Some impulse of the wild things among

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whom she had lived drove her to a hole in under the bluff. It was necessary to descend to find it. Presently she was in a tunnel which led to a cavern” (375–6). Significantly, Hopkins has once more, as in the opening scene with the Indian pipes, placed the female body onto the landscape, as indicated by the “hole in under the bluff” and the “tunnel which led to a cavern” (375–6), and with her previous description of this landscape as “naked woods” with “the cup-like shape of the hills” and “ribs of rock” (358). Again Hopkins ascribes Winona’s primal knowledge of the female-bodyin-the-landscape to Winona’s Indianness (just as Nokomis was the source of flower lore) and furthers the idea that a nonwhite Â�mystical knowledge allows Winona to access an erotic identity that is both sexual and spiritual. This identity, in its refusal of binaries that were both raced and gendered, is an alternative to the utterly bodily identity Winona was assigned in slavery; instead, it returns her to the model of femininity offered through flower language and Hopkins’ particular arrangement of its metaphorics in the Indian pipe. While in Hopkins’ Of One Blood, the “undiscovered country within ourselves” (448) is materialized in a hidden ancient African city, in Winona, the undiscovered country is the hidden female body, thus giving a gendered inflection to notions of a “hidden self” usually associated with a DuBoisian, and male, mode of identity formation. (Even in Of One Blood, the male character discovers and explores the depths of a hidden self in the ancient city while the female character suffers a hidden self in a hysterical mode.) Precisely because the female body is hidden (just as it is geographically underground, so that Winona must rely on “underground,” or occult, knowledge to locate it), Hopkins can more fully realize what Carby calls the “desire for a pure black womanhood, an uncolonized black female body,” so elusive in her other works.44 I agree with Ann duCille when she emphasizes that late-nineteenthcentury black women writers (Frances Harper specifically) did not Â�displace sexuality but rather placed it€– unto a safer realm,45 but Hopkins does not place Winona’s “nook” in the woods for Maxwell’s benefit, in order to facilitate his coupling with Winona; the “nook” is strictly for Winona to explore. Upon entering, Winona “made herself a divan of dried moss and flung herself down at full length to think” (376). Via the feminine landscape, Winona has entered her own body as sole proprietor. Posed for her own pleasure, not someone else’s, Winona can now engage in what can only be called an autoerotic fantasy: Time’s divisions were lost on those days when the girl felt that she neglected no duty by hiding herself in her nook. She had come upon the eternal now as she lay in a sweet stupor until forced to arouse herself. She stared across the space

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that divided Maxwell from her with all the strength of her inner consciousness. That light which falls on the spot where one’s loved one stands, leaving the rest of the landscape in twilight, now rested about him. With rapture she saw again the hopeless passion in Warren’s eyes. Her hands and feet were cold, her muscles knotted, her face white with the force of the cry that she projected through space, “Come back to me!” (376)

A climactic moment in many ways, this scene suggests Winona to be an exception among other turn-of-the-century novels by black women, of which Tate has said:€“There is love in these novels; however, it is not passionate ardor but rather compassionate duty, spiritualized affection, and sentimental attachment.”46 But here Winona experiences€ – both physically and emotionally€ – that most censored feeling, passionate ardor. Ensconced in the earth, rooted to her moss divan, Winona is once again like the Indian pipes. As in that scene, Hopkins releases the compressed intensity of a textual fold, a creviced bud, an enfolded nook, and Winona’s embodied pleasure. At the same time, and also like the Indian pipes, she is free to “go away like a spirit.” In a quite literal way, there is spiritualized affection, for this scene narrates an out-of-body reunion with Maxwell. As previous chapters have demonstrated, such spiritualized affection was not necessarily antithetical to sexual desire. As Hopkins’ probing of flower language’s “arc” between spirituality and corporeality demonstrates, it was a necessary strategy for binding emotional with sensual feeling. By emphasizing her soul’s response, Hopkins mitigates against racist readings of black sexuality as entirely physical, even animalistic, and places her heroine’s desire on another plane altogether. By stressing spiritual affinity, she exposes the artificial distinction upon which antimiscegenation laws were based, suggesting, as did Mary Clemmer, that “souls separated by a thousand barriers yet act and react upon each other.”47 Winona literally channels her desire across “the space that divided Maxwell from her,” across the color line. Here one minute, spirited off the next, this quality of ephemerality renders her unavailable as a commodity. Even attempts to “fix” or determine her color will be confused, just as Judah wavered over the color of the Indian pipes. Momentarily released from a racially determined sexuality, Winona can enjoy erotic moments of “sweet stupor,” “arous[al],” and “rapture.” If, as Lauren Berlant has argued, under the illogical system through which race is produced in a racist society, the black woman impossibly occupies two bodies€– “sensual and public on the one hand; vulnerable, invisible, Â�forgettable on the other”48€– Hopkins unfolds two other versions of the body for Winona. Hopkins represents the vulnerability of the raced body through

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the blackened Indian pipes and reveals the violence by which bodies are raced; she goes public with this body to protest its violation. Nonetheless, she also claims ownership of a sensuous, sexual body by privatizing it, even spiritualizing it, so that only her heroine and those readers attentive to the textual folds of sensual language know how to access it. She wants to reveal both pain and pleasure as embodied experiences of African American women. At the same time, by enveloping one body and unfolding another, she controls how and by whom the black woman’s body is seen. The two acts work in tandem folds, for this erotic space cannot remain Winona’s own if it is exposed. Yet these very acts of covering and uncovering the black female body through the language of flowers coalesce in an act of recovery and reclamation. Ecstasy€– like that which Winona experienced when she first discovered the Indian pipes and gazed upon them with “silent ecstacy”€– by definition means “a being put out of its place,” so when the Indian pipes go away like spirits, they are directly analogous to Winona’s own pleasure or ecstasy. Politically speaking, Winona is a being out of her proper place. She neither occupies the white-assigned position of sexual Jezebel nor the defensive posture (assumed by both white and black women) of passionlessness. Far from a passive maiden, Winona is shown in these mystical romantic flashes to be an agent and not just an object of desire, channeling it at will, and able to “arouse herself.” In these moments, she is not “put out” of her place€– she puts herself out of it. This freedom of movement, of entering or transcending her (or Maxwell’s) body at will, is informed by both an anger that protests its constrictions and a pleasure that revels in its unboundedness. The eroticized movement of Winona’s spirit is an embodiment of African American desire, but it is not a body bound by the specular constraints of skin or gender. V i s ion a r y for m s Such renderings of autonomous quasi-material spirit are related to another tradition of African American writing, the spiritual autobiography, and to the African spirit traditions that such autobiography often implicitly draws on. As scholars from William Andrews to Carla Peterson have remarked, Jarena Lee, Rebecca Cox Jackson, and others derive their authority from dreams and visions, rather than the acquisition of Western literacy pursued in many slave narratives published for a white abolitionist audience.49 Peterson describes Lee’s evocation of a “secret space” and “closet,” and Sojourner Truth’s retreats to her “rural sanctuary” as “heterogeneous

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sacred space that enables the ontological passage from one cosmic plane to another.”50 A similar argument might be made for the function of Winona’s nook and her visions there, for Winona’s nook similarly signals the passage Hopkins has opened between romance and western, black and white, and body and spirit. The miscegenating force of the romance heroine’s infusion of the western operates to reveal the spiritual connection rather than division between black and white, a basis for a future in common rather than divided. Winona is positioned, as the occupier of visionary space in the novel, as the medium channeling the surviving spirit of African cultural traditions, getting them to manifest in the physical world. Like Frederick Douglass’ “root” given him by a slave as a talisman or the “hieroglyphics” witnessed on leaves of corn that urge Nat Turner to revolution, Winona’s Indian pipes operate as a radical black flower language in dialogue with African spirit traditions, and Hopkins places them in dialogue with genteel flower language and its feminist appropriations as well.51 In “African Signs and Spirit Writing,” Harryette Mullen has argued that Douglass and Turner find, in the gnarled root and hieroglyphic, an analogue of the African mystic’s ciphers, scribbles, or spirit writing.52 Textually, Hopkins’ Indian pipe and its elaborate stylistic encasing, relative to Hopkins’ otherwise streamlined style of language, indicate its similarly charged value and its dense and complicated presence. I want to make a similar case for the twists and turns of Hopkins’ Â�plotlines. Ammons has commented on Hopkins’ “bizarre mixture of literary genres,” her “contradictory” themes and symbols, and her “chaotic” plots to rightly argue that her novels “release new possibilities.”53 But these possibilities are not released by reason of being “barely controlled or contained … by [the novel’s] form” (Ammons, 213); rather, Hopkins’ baroque style creates and sustains possibilities. I have been arguing that Hopkins’ drama of contrasts turns politically on its replication of the baroque fold, where interior and exterior are not mutually exclusive but quite simply of a piece. Mieke Bal reads the drapery in Renaissance painting as embodiment of the baroque fold that provides its “instruction for use,” informing us that “depth circles back to the surface” as we follow the folds of the fabric into its depths and then back out again.54 So the fold might be considered a figure revealing body and soul, interior and exterior, and even black and white to be related and continuous phenomena. A counterpoint of passion and protest, Hopkins’ novel dilates and recedes, extends protest, retracts stereotypes, and unfurls alternatives. Winona remakes censored and flattened modes into voluminous depths in the folds of conventional discourses and forms, as Hopkins moves between dominant representation and unspeakable black desire. The

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very movement of Hopkins’ form defies static formulas, just as Hopkins’ complications of embodied black female identity slip away from stereotypes and counterstereotypes. If Winona herself is “incredibly virtuous but almost invisible,”55 Hopkins’ form offers its intricate dimensions, bold reformulations, and enfolded sensual textures as a way of eliciting new perspectives of race, color, and sexuality and achieving what representation could not yet. Mullen notes that African spirit script, illegible writing produced in trance, is valued for its incomprehensibility and uniqueness and shows an aesthetic preference for irregularity and variation that is typical of African American art and music as well. The scripted spirit signature embodies spiritual ecstasy by materially recording the ripples of a trembling hand and possessed body. Hopkins’ wrinkles in the western, possessed by a protesting spirit; her union of romantic marriage with the lessons of racial segregation; and her infusion of the integrating romance heroine with African spirit have their own formal analogue in Hopkins’ baroque plotlines that embody the new spirit that has possessed her generic forms. What stands out to me about Hopkins’ novel is its elaborate craftedness at the level of genre€– its plot lines and its manipulated content have been saturated with Hopkins’ vision of other ways of being. The intricacy of Hopkins’ highly wrought style surfaces less at the level of language, or the arrangement of words, than in the ways she has arranged the formal material of the narrative. Her labored form doubles as a visionary repossession of African American female subjectivity€– not that it grants a Â�particular Â�identity, but that it offers an aesthetic model for holding together what racist and sexist culture had sundered. The body of the fiction offers something other than a picture of this model; in fact the point is to call into question the specular economy of race and gender in the United States. The body of the fiction, then, enfolds a model of African American female subjectivity that offers a sense of its own possibilities as a way of living€– a way of claiming the pleasures of living and understanding one’s relations to others that is not determined by the oppressive regimes of slavery and Jim Crow, yet that remains engaged in the struggle against those regimes from a position that is articulated as African American and female.

Coda. The value of ornament:€Gilman and Wharton

Hopkins is certainly not the only writer to return to highly wrought style and assess its value for a later moment. Hopkins finds its mediation of spirit and sense particularly salient regarding her quest for a more Â�capacious and just embodiment of African American female desire, and she adapts highly wrought techniques to her innovation of a new generic as well as stylistic form. Hopkins’ contemporaries Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Edith Wharton isolate and reflect on another aspect of highly wrought style:€they turn specifically to the political efficacy of ornament in highly wrought fiction to interrogate its value for a moment when the middle- and upper-class white woman is increasingly excluded from social and political economy, a position often cast as “ornamental.” Both authors offer a critical meta-reflection on, rather than a stylistic adaptation of, the entwined compositional and social value of ornament as a potential idiom for women’s expression and representation. Gilman most memorably engages the intersection of female expression and ornamentality in “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” and in its predecessor in her oeuvre, “The Giant Wistaria.”1 The paper and the wisteria, both ornaments of the “arabesque” style (the wallpaper explicitly so) weigh so heavily on their supporting structures€– walls and homes that imprison women€– that they pull them down quite literally. But the victory is pyrrhic, as Gilman’s ornaments also entangle and seem to sacrifice the women whose desire they encode. In “The Giant Wistaria,” the vine’s rapacious growth is meant to contest the severe chastisement of a young woman’s sexual and maternal desire, but her bodily remains are found entwined in its gnarled roots. In “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” the narrator’s increasing identification with figures in the paper is registered in the designs her body makes in the paper and in the paper’s smell and color rubbing on to her. The stylized repetition, the color, and the scrolling pattern of the wallpaper, the lavish growth of the wisteria:€in Gilman’s stories none of these ornamental compositional values can effect the conversion of the 189

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woman’s life onto an alternate plane of perspective. And in “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” the attempt of the woman to do so, to join the woman-inthe-ornament or to release her expression, is both admirable and deeply deluded. Something like the treatment of desire in Melville’s Pierre with which I began, Gilman’s wallpaper testifies to the impressive extravagance of female desire, registering its anguished presence, but in Gilman’s rendition that desire also remains mute and without a counterlanguage or counterlogic that is not affixed to the patriarchal structures it challenges. We might assume that Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth treats ornament with colder skepticism and without the longing for ornamental expressivity that Gilman seems to manifest but reject. The novel’s working title was “A Moment’s Ornament,” which appears to suggest Lily Bart’s artificial and dispensable social worth. Indeed, page after page conveys the rarity and fineness of Lily’s person with all the detail that has been lavished on interiors, accessories, flowers, and landscapes in the previous texts I have examined, suggesting the objectification of Lily’s person as ornament, an obverse process to the personification and expression of ornament effected by highly wrought style. “She must have cost a good deal to make,” thinks Lawrence Selden at the novel’s opening, inaugurating its discourse of commodification and connoisseurship that alienates Lily from her beauty.2 As her name suggests, Lily is “like a waterplant in the flux of the tides,” subject to her moods and sensitive to the feelings of others (52). Far from exerting the kind of agency we have seen in Spofford or even in Gilman, Lily is always molding herself, adapting to the social scene with the kind of ornamental dependence that the other authors abjured in their figures and characters. Yet Lily’s integrity might be located in the extent to which she adheres to her ornamental status for all its capriciousness. “But what is your story, Lily? I don’t believe anyone knows it yet,” queries Gerty Farish midway through the novel, after Lily’s spectacular fall from social grace in Monte Carlo (221). In the preceding scene, Lily’s failure to vindicate herself with a story is read by Selden as unwitting self-indictment; he thinks her failure to tell a story reveals her participation in€– even her plotting of€– events, actions that she cannot admit to. But as Lily tells Gertie, “I never thought of preparing a version in advance as Bertha did€ – and if I had, I don’t think I should take the trouble to use it now” (221). Lily speaks to women’s determination by, rather than their determining of, social economy€– and also to women’s distance from narrative authority, as the discussion crucially suggests to the reader. But Lily’s failure to plot her life in the diegetic world modulates into the refusal of plots associated with the gestures of

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her character; it is a formal version of one of her redemptive evasions of her social and narrative destiny in marriage, an attempt to exist in some way outside of story. Lily exasperates the reader when she fails to take decisive or timely action in pursuit of a successful match or to connect with Selden because Wharton has so skillfully set the marriage plot and female Bildung out to do its work. But Lily’s delay is not only a resistance to the social regulating forces working so powerfully on her character and on us; it is the gesture of the ornament. Lily’s beauty is not simply in her person or in the tragic nobility with which she has failed to meet her social destination, but in the fascinating, intricate extravagance€– the style€– with which she fails the marriage plot. In Wai Chee Dimock’s account, Lily is ironically the only character who pays her debts, and she “pays scrupulously,” refusing to make her self the object of exchange. When she tosses Selden’s letters into the fire instead of blackmailing Bertha with them, “she throws away her love in an act of wanton expenditure … making what is perhaps her most eloquent protest against the ethics of exchange.”3 Because “the nobility of her action … lies in its fruitlessness, in its utter lack of material consequence,” such moments register in the social materiality of the book only as “moments of ill-advised improvidence” (78). Dimock concludes that The House of Mirth “provides no transcendent language, no Â�alternative way of being, but feeds directly into the market. Lily’s rebellion … is doomed” (78). Yet Lily holds an attraction beyond her story line and her doom. Her “extraordinary appeal” is the “single most powerful aspect of the novel,” which criticism has not been able to explain, avers Joan Lidoff:€ “Lily somehow exceeds the bounds of critical definition as she does the intentions of Edith Wharton’s narrative structure.”4 The lavishness of Lily, her repertoire of extravagant delays and costly resistance, her shining presence, arrests us, perplexes us, enchants us. “A moment’s ornament” cuts both ways. It speaks to the commodification of women as disposable objects of exchange. But given Wharton’s own clear attachment to rich textures and exquisite finishes, it may also name a salutary, if tenuous, reprieve from debasing social and narrative regulation, and treat us instead to the pleasures of a nonproductive ethic, a way of appreciating ornament that the characters in the text cannot achieve. This is not to deny Wharton’s devastating social critique, but to query what we think we know about the place of ornament in that critique. Ornament’s potential is more ambiguous and circumscribed in Wharton’s novel than in those of her predecessors, and it can never be fully dissociated with its obverse as commodity. But there is little denying

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Wharton’s investment in the pleasure of what ornament can offer and what it can refuse, investments that Style, Gender, and Fantasy has shown to have deep roots in Wharton’s predecessors. For Stephens, Fuller, Clemmer, Spofford, and Hopkins, the pleasure of the efflorescence of highly wrought style resides in lushness that refuses the natural ontological slippage into the physical female body and its social designations. They amplified, embellished, and overproduced “the feminine” to call it into question and reformulate it as the substance of expression. They linked their refusal of the physical body and its social determination with a twinned refusal of anti-materiality in what is still a radical gesture today. Richard Poirier’s A World Elsewhere:€ The Place of Style in American Literature stresses literary environment at its most realized€– where stylistic effort is most intense€– as a rupture or a break with literary and social convention, but also as a break with the text from which it emerges. These moments, scenes, are weighted by the author’s stylistic effort; they have to do with “the proportions of time that a writer feels he can give to some as against other kinds of events.”5 Such passages are demonstrative of literary language in the very effort to make a break. As Leo Bersani puts it in his incisive foreword, “‘The weight of language’ is greatest at those moments of rupture which are perhaps constitutive of what we call literature. The aspiration toward ‘pure art’ is most visible when the work appears to be striving to separate itself from all artfulness, to be freed, finally, from its own constraining contexts” (xv). Poirier finds value precisely in those moments that are not coherent or organic with the rest. In emphasizing this point, Poirier is also (as Bersani notes) breaking from an older history of “organicist” readings that sought to demonstrate the organic wholeness or unity of a literary text. Though it may seem to us that an argument about highly wrought style would go much the same way as Poirier’s and make a claim for floridity as a rupturing efflorescence, or spirit as an entity that seeks to break from the world, or ornament as a line of energy that repudiates its relation to a whole, the way these authors calibrate their relations and recast the oppositions they handle suits neither a paradigm of rupture nor of unity. Highly wrought style enhances€ – but, crucially, it also embodies€ – textual and philosophical excesses:€of the spirit to the body, of ornament to essence, and of fantasy to reality. It works to reformulate as essential and palpable what was extraneous, remaindered, or excluded. By its effects, such style calls for social and aesthetic engagement rather than transcendence, and it endorses the contingency rather than self-sufficiency or unity of form.

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Highly wrought prose is not prose in the act of separating itself from “artfulness” because such terms as art and nature are themselves what the authors I have examined set out to repossess. Their recurring interest in a developed, foliate line€ – a sentence that scrolls, branches, or conglomerates; a plot line that develops intricacies; an arrangement of words, imagery, or components of metaphor that radiates like a bloom, or effloresces€– is mimetically organic. Such stylistic mimeticism nonetheless displays their aesthetic labor and their interest in the ornamental values of nature€ – of color, light, substance and especially the energy of a line. These writers trouble themselves with what Whitman pejoratively labeled “fluency” when he wrote that the poet “who troubles himself about his ornaments or fluency is lost.”6 We may now wonder what Whitman was thinking to castigate fluency, since few writers express themselves with more abundant ease than he, but perhaps the stress is on the verb “troubles” and in the dubious linkage of fluency with ornament, for to trouble oneself with fluency is to manufacture something that should be natural and hence to place fluency on par with ornament. This unsettling of the distinction between fluency and ornament is precisely what troubles about highly wrought style. The author’s stylistic performance is only apparent as it creates this trouble, as it overdevelops feminine prosiness, redundancy, or floridity so that it is neither clearly the artifice of female literary presumption nor the spontaneous effusion of the natural woman. We also see this trouble when labor appears a luxury, as the authors work on language in an act of sustained pleasure, but avoid working through it to completion or fruition. Their pleasure is linked to an aesthetic and sexual ethic of nonproduction and to prose that resists being cultivated or worked through to fruition, even as the heroine may go on to her conventional denouement in the diegetic world of the story. These writers are claiming a space for themselves in prose. As Spofford shows us, our encounter with the sensuous beauty of the prose entails other possibilities, residual energies, that the text also encompasses and that trouble its resolution. What seem at first to be indulgences of the author that are extrinsic to form and meaning€ – highly ornamental passages, scenes of fantasy, even an excessive plot€– turn out to be an essential locus of expression that makes its claims on the text. By investing language with their labor and extending and complicating their lines, these authors make a place where there was no place for the woman author, but they also thereby make space for the other energies such passages express. Through amplification and augmentation, they

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effect an exposure and occupation of the place of the feminine within a romanticist framework. Through techniques of intensification and personification, they assert a feminist epistemology concerned with the transformative energy linked to principles of gender. Through the enhancement of language, of its dual status as embodiment and sign, they propose new ways of being that are embodied and spiritual without also being reductive. By amassing opaque, sensual prose, they allow the literary work to exert its resistance. Yet when the authors use style to develop their writing in ways that conjure in art the “spirit of a plant,” as Emerson called it, they court charges of “formlessness” rather than the unity of organic form, as Matthiessen understood Emerson’s aesthetic philosophy. However, in women’s highly wrought writing, we find an indulgence in disproportion that reformulates its excesses as essential to artistic expression, to the text of female development, and to a vision of social change. In their conception, the growth, development, or augmentation of language takes the shape of a re-form that exceeds the symmetry of patriarchal gender relations. All of these authors needed literary language and fantasy to embody their vision. Highly wrought language is not language seeking to break its relations, but language seeking to claim its relations to literary and social environments and, finally, to make a claim on its reader. Its invitations, refusals, and commands, even abductions, of the reader attempt to assert its social power. Our encounter with amassing prose, the turn into poetic language that transports us, our forced march into the detail of the mise en scène, and even our stint as an accessory in “The Amber Gods,” are all instances of highly wrought style redirecting, often aggressively, our pleasure or obstructing it. This prose “moves” us:€it dislocates our textual pleasures and interposes other ones. It moves us to new relations with the text of the woman author, and with the body of women’s desires and pleasures. In recovering these works my goal is, like theirs, to effect a transformation in aesthetic responsiveness€– not as a means of adopting wholesale the political project they propose, which is fashioned for a particular time and place€– but to learn to read a forgotten mode, one that is integral to understanding women writers’ gendered relations to canonical romanticism and to an enhanced, more inclusive, picture of American Â�romanticism itself, not simply because such a picture includes women but because it accommodates a body of works that presented a contemporaneous challenge from within romanticism’s ranks. Highly wrought writing presents a Â�challenge today as well, especially if the reason these texts are forgotten

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may have much to do with our own aesthetic and political �(especially recoil from floridity and its related register of femininity. When � feminist) we pause to attend to the way highly wrought texts �defamiliarize without �disowning either floridity or associations with the feminine, we are instructed in new ways of reading that our political and aesthetic dispositions could neither predict nor project.

Notes

I n t roduc t ion. H igh ly w rough t s t y l e 1╇The Oxford English Dictionary, for instance, uses this example from Morton Paley’s 1819 Natural Theology under its definition of highly:€“The hinges in the wings of an earwig … are as highly wrought as if the Creator had nothing else to finish” (http://dictionary.oed.com). 2╇Nina Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers:€Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America (Ithaca, NY:€ Cornell University Press, 1984). Baym dismisses the reviewers’ sense of disparity between the two types by equating their basic plots. Each type equally fits her definition of woman’s fiction€– “the story of female trials and triumph”€– but I find this umbrella plot too general and the stylistic distinctions to be more than superficial (Baym, Novels, 208). 3╇As Mary Loeffelholz has noted, “recovery efforts in nineteenth-century American writing have tended to privilege social themes as a principle of selection and as their critical means of understanding literature’s embeddedness in history,” until recently leaving more formalized modes like poetry behind. Mary Loeffelholz, From School to Salon:€Reading Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Poetry, 2 (Princeton:€Princeton University Press, 2004). 4╇Henry James “Miss Prescott’s Azarian,” North American Review (January, 1865):€268–77 (276, 270, 273, 274, 271, 274, 275). 5╇Review of Ann Stephens, The Heiress of Greenhurst, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 15.86 (July, 1857):€264. 6╇Review of Ann Stephens, Mary Derwent, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 17.99 (August, 1858):€407. Poe dissented:€“[Stephens’] style is what the critics usually term ‘powerful,’ but lacks real power through its verboseness and floridity. It is, in fact, generally turgid€– even bombastic€– involved, needlessly parenthetical, and superabundant in epithets … Her faults, nevertheless … belong to the effervescence of high talent if not exactly of genius” (“The Literati of New York City,” in The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison, 17 vols., Vol. xv, 57 [New York:€Thomas Y. Crowell, 1902]). 7╇Review of Harriet Prescott Spofford, Azarian:€ An Episode, Harper’s 29.174 (November, 1864):€806. 8╇Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Review of Harriet Prescott Spofford, Azarian:€An Episode, Atlantic Monthly 14.84 (October, 1864):€515–17 (516). 196

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╇ 9╇ Quoted in Sarah J. Hale, “Ann S. Stephens,” in Woman’s Record; or, Sketches of All Distinguished Women, from “The Beginning” till A.D. 1850, 796–8 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1873), 797. 10 Orestes Brownson, “Miss Fuller and Reformers,” in Critical Essays on Margaret Fuller, ed. Joel Myerson, 19–25 (Boston:€Hall, 1980), 19. 11 Lydia Maria Child, Review of Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, in Myerson, ed., Critical Essays on Margaret Fuller, 7–9 (7). Caleb Stetson, Review of Margaret Fuller, Summer on the Lakes, in Myerson, ed., Critical Essays on Margaret Fuller 3–4 (4). Orestes Brownson, Review of Margaret Fuller, Summer on the Lakes, in Myerson, ed., Critical Essays on Margaret Fuller 5–6 (5). 12 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Concord,” in R. W. Emerson, W. H. Channing, and J. F. Clarke, Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, 2 vols., Vol. i, 199–316 (Boston:€Phillips, Sampson, 1852), 216. 13 Susan K. Harris, Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Novels:€Interpretive Strategies, 21 (Cambridge:€Cambridge University Press, 1990). 14 Julia Stern describes Stoddard’s condensive technique as a type of “demetaphorization” (taking literally what is meant figuratively) and “incorporation” (swallowing whole, failure to internalize) techniques that radically disrupt readerly identification (“‘I am Cruel Hungry’:€Dramas of Twisted Appetite and Rejected Identification in Elizabeth Stoddard’s The Morgesons,” in Robert McClure Smith and Ellen Weinauer, American Culture, Canons, and the Case of Elizabeth Stoddard, 107–27 [Birmingham, AL:€University of Alabama Press, 2003], 108, 112). 15 Jessica R. Feldman, “‘A Talent for the Disagreeable’:€Elizabeth Stoddard Writes The Morgesons,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 58.2 (2003):€ 202–29 (208). 16 Katherine Swett describes the “scenery fiction” of Woolson and others as characterized by “a disruptive reversal of the accepted fictional hierarchy in which imagined plot and character dominate actual scenery”; in Woolson’s fiction, “description erupts as a counterforce to plots in which male characters generally succeed in silencing and restraining female characters.” Katherine Swett, “Corrine Silenced:€Improper Places in the Narrative Form of Constance Fenimore Woolson’s East Angels,” in Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Nineteenth Century, ed. Victoria Brehm, 161–72 (Detroit:€Wayne State University Press, 2001), 162. 17 Sandra Zagarell, “‘Strenuous Artistry’:€Elizabeth Stoddard’s The Morgesons,” in The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Writing, ed. Dale M. Bauer and Philip Gould, 284–307 (Cambridge:€ Cambridge University Press, 2001), 305. 18 See Cindy Weinstein, Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge:€Cambridge University Press, 2004); Mary Louise Kete, Sentimental Collaborations:€Mourning and Middle-Class Identity in Nineteenth-Century America (Durham, NC:€Duke University Press, 2000); Elizabeth Dillon, “Sentimental Aesthetics,” American Literature 76.3

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Notes to pages 7–10

(2004):€ 495–523; Stern, “I am Cruel Hungry,” 108; Virginia W. Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery:€ A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton, NJ:€ Princeton University Press, 2005); Loeffelholz, From School to Salon; and Eliza Richards, Gender and the Poetics of Reception in Poe’s Circle (Cambridge:€ Cambridge University Press, 2004). In addition, essay collections, such as Karen Kilcup, ed., Soft Canons:€American Women Writers and Masculine Tradition (Iowa City:€University of Iowa Press, 1999); Monika Elbert, ed., Separate Spheres No More:€ Gender Convergence in American Literature, 1830–1930 (Tuscaloosa:€University of Alabama Press, 2000); Joyce W. Warren and Margaret Dickie, eds., Challenging Boundaries:€ Gender and Periodization (Athens, GA:€University of Georgia Press, 2000); and McClure Smith and Weinauer, American Culture, have sought new rubrics of relation between men and women writers and reframed literary contexts and periods. 19 Fuller was the first and primary editor of the Transcendentalist The Dial and later, at the New York Tribune, the first female columnist in America. Oakes Smith took over Fuller’s column after her death. Stephens was on the ediÂ� torial board of Graham’s (with Poe), and later coeditor of Peterson’s Magazine, the lady’s magazine that surpassed Godey’s during Stephens’ association with it. She is said to have written many of the book reviews in that magazine. Stephens founded her own magazine, The Portland Magazine, and for a brief time published her own, Mrs. Stephens’s Monthly. Oakes Smith also owned and edited magazines at different intervals. Margaret Sweat was the notable exception to the male reviewers at the well-known North American Review, where Henry James would also get his start. Spofford was the darling of the Atlantic Monthly during its, and her, debut years from 1859 to 1865 and published several long review essays there. Hopkins was pivotal in the establishment and editing of The Colored American Magazine. 20 George G. Foster, New York in Slices (New York:€ William Graham, 1849), 61–62. 21 Christina Zwarg, Feminist Conversations:€ Fuller, Emerson, and the Play of Reading (Ithaca, NY:€Cornell University Press, 1995), 230; Joan von Mehren, Minerva and the Muse:€ A Life of Margaret Fuller (Amherst:€University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 219. 22 Perry Miller, Margaret Fuller:€ American Romantic (Ithaca, NY:€ Cornell University Press, 1963), xvii. 23 In fact, New York tends to be the scene of Fuller’s masculinization. Her writing, a number of critics have averred, becomes spare and hard-boiled under the tutelage of the daily news column. She is characterized as turning outward to social and political concerns, in a welcome relief from intense Concord introspection that had bordered on what Ann Douglas characterizes as narcissism. In a tidy formulation that masculinized New York while simultaneously isolating “hyperbolically female intellectualism” and nullifying its New York existence, Perry Miller claims that New York hated ideas and loved Dickens; with “the best will in the world it could create no Corrine, no Leila” (The Raven and the Whale, 143 [New York:€Harcourt, 1956]), novels

Notes to pages 10–12

199

by French writers Madame De Stael and George Sand that Fuller herself had ushered into American libraries. In exiling both the symbolic feminine and actual females from New York, Miller presents a Fuller detached from other women€– either stateside or abroad€– hovering on the edge of the male New York literati, much as she so often is cast in relation to the Concord Transcendentalists. 24 Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York:€Anchor, 1988), 282. 25 I refer to Nina Baym’s “Melodramas of Beset Manhood:€How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Writers,” in Feminism and American Literary History:€Essays, 3–18 (New Brunswick, NJ:€Rutgers University Press, 1992), in which she argues that male critics cast women writers as the enemy against whom male writers struggled in a battle to uphold “artistic” standards, just as characters from Rip Van Winkle to Huck Finn struggled against feminine encroachments on their independence. 26 Fuller is not even mentioned in Baym’s encyclopedic Woman’s Fiction:€ A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820–1870 (Ithaca, NY:€Cornell University Press, 1978). Of course, Fuller wrote little fiction, the reason Douglas appreciates her. But given that Baym is writing in response to Douglas, the omission is telling. The exception to the 1980s’ tendency to treat Fuller separately from other women writers is Annette Kolodny’s The Land before Her:€Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630–1860 (Chapel Hill:€University of North Carolina Press, 1984). While Douglas identified Fuller with her father and described her mother as “a self-sacrificing, gentle woman who tended her garden” and “clearly counted for little in Fuller’s childhood” (Feminization, 267), Kolodny paints the mother’s garden as a refuge from Fuller’s father’s oppressive demands, and the site of her consciousness-raising. I would suggest that perhaps Fuller did not belong fully to either her mother’s garden or her father’s study. Fuller’s feminism may emerge precisely from that tension between a longing for the expanded sphere of thought she found in her father’s study and an impulse to escape the confines of reason (coded as masculine in her house and culture) when it chafed her. 27 The important exception is Jeffrey Steele’s recent Transfiguring America:€Myth, Ideology, and Mourning in Margaret Fuller’s Writing (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2001). 28╇ See Larry J. Reynolds, European Revolutions and the American Literary Renaissance (New Haven, CT:€Yale University Press, 1988), 54–78. 29 Again the exception has been the work of Steele. See the introduction to his anthology of her works, The Essential Margaret Fuller (New Brunswick, NJ:€Rutgers University Press, 1995). His anthology reprints for the first time the mystical flower sketches that I treat in Chapter 1. Also see “‘A Tale of Mizraim’:€A Forgotten Story by Margaret Fuller.” Attributed by Jeffrey Steele, New England Quarterly 62.1 (1989):€82–104. 30 Mary Loeffelholz, “Essential, Portable, Mythical Margaret Fuller,” in Challenging Boundaries:€Gender and Periodization, ed. Joyce W. Warren and

200

Notes to page 12

Margaret Dickie, 159–84 (Athens:€University of Georgia Press, 2000), 175. Douglas, Feminzation; Baym, Woman’s Fiction; Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs:€The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York:€Oxford University Press, 1985). Recent biographical work on Mary Moody Emerson, Elizabeth Peabody, and Julia Ward Howe has begun to trouble Fuller’s stature as a lone romantic woman intellectual. On Mary Moody Emerson, see Phyllis Cole, Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism:€ A Family History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). On Elizabeth Peabody, see Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters:€Three Women who Ignited American Romanticism (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2005); Bruce A. Ronda, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody:€ A Reformer on Her Own Terms (Cambridge, MA:€Harvard University Press, 1998); and the excellent essays anthologized by Monika M. Elbert, Julie E. Hall, and Katharine Rodier, eds., Reinventing the Peabody Sisters (Iowa City:€University of Iowa Press, 2006). On Julia Ward Howe, see Gary Williams, Hungry Heart:€The Literary Emergence of Julia Ward Howe (Amherst:€University of Massachusetts Press, 1999); and Judith Bean, “Margaret Fuller and Julia Ward Howe:€A Woman-to-Woman Influence,” in Margaret Fuller’s Cultural Critique:€Her Age and Legacy, ed. Fritz Fleischmann, 91–108 (New York:€ Peter Lang, 2000); and Howe’s own The Hermaphrodite, composed in the 1840s and recently published for the first time with an introduction by Williams (Julia Ward Howe, The Hermaphrodite, ed. Gary Williams [Lincoln, NE:€University of Nebraska Press, 2004]). Carolyn L. Karcher’s work has long reminded us of Lydia Maria Child’s importance as a feminist intellectual (Carolyn L. Karcher, The First Woman in the Republic:€A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child [Durham, NC:€Duke University Press, 1994]). See also Charles Capper’s biography of Margaret Fuller, Margaret Fuller:€An American Romantic Life, 2 vols. (New York:€Oxford University Press, 1992; 2007). I seek to reveal the reach of these women’s romantic intellectual interests into the wider domain of fiction by women. 31 Claudia Tate, Domestic Allegories of Political Desire:€The Black Heroine’s Text at the Turn of the Century (New York:€Oxford University Press, 1992). The No More Separate Spheres! special issue of American Literature, ed. Cathy N. Davidson, American Literature 70.3 (1998):€443–706, is notable for its inclusion of two articles on nonwhite writers (though only Jose Aranda’s treats a nineteenth-century writer), yet these writers can enter the discussion because their relationship to domesticity is foregrounded. The other women writers treated are well known for their devotion to the domestic scene:€Catharine Sedgwick, Sarah Orne Jewett, Sarah Hale, Catherine Beecher, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. The volume’s focus on domesticity also excluded the more politicized writing of the African American women that Carla Peterson treated in Doers of the Word:€African American Women Speakers and Writers in the North (1830–1880) (New York:€Oxford University Press, 1995), and described as “self-marginalized” from culturally dominant modes and spaces. 32╇Amy Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” American Literature 70.3 (1998):€581–606.

Notes to pages 12–13

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33 Fine examples include the volume of essays edited by Mary Chapman and Glenn Hendler, Sentimental Men:€ Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture (Berkeley:€University of California Press, 1999); Richards, Gender on Poe; Samuel Otter, Melville’s Anatomies (Berkeley:€University of California Press, 1999); and Weinstein, Family, on Melville (in the last chapter of each of their monographs); and Kete, Sentimental Collaborations, on Longfellow, Emerson, and Twain. Glenn Hendler, Public Sentiments:€Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Chapel Hill:€University of North Carolina Press, 2001); and Katherine Snyder, Bachelors, Manhood, and the Novel 1850–1925 (Cambridge:€Cambridge University Press, 1999) additionally address issues of the construction of masculinities in the context of sentimentality and domesticity. 34 Eliza Richards, Gender and the Poetics of Reception in Poe’s Circle (Cambridge University Press, 2004). See also Charlene Avallone, “Catharine Sedgwick and the Circles of New York,” Legacy 23.2 (2006):€155–31, on the importance of acknowledging Sedgwick’s New York, as well as New England, presence. In From School to Salon, Mary Loeffelholz addresses the scene of Annie Field’s later salon as the site of a new formation of the woman poet, one not linked to the earlier “domestic-tutelary complex” in which Loeffelholz sees earlier women poets rooted (6). (I feel the earlier salons could also function to generate “a more autonomous sense of the aesthetic” for women writers [6].) Some of the most informative sources on Lynch’s salon include “Foster, New York; Charles Hemstreet, Literary New York:€Its Landmarks and Associations (New York:€J. P. Putnam’s Sons; London:€K nickerbocker Press, 1903); Memoirs of Anne C. L. Botta:€Written by Her Friends (New York:€ J. Selwin Tait and Sons, 1894); Edgar Allan Poe, “The Literati of New York City,” in The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison. 17 vols., Vol. xv, 1–137 (New York:€Thomas Y. Crowell, 1902); Madeline Stern, “The House of Expanding Doors:€Anne Lynch’s Soirées, 1846,” New York History 23 (January, 1942):€42–51; Richard Stoddard, “Mrs. Botta and Her Friends,” Independent 46 (February 1, 1894); and Dwight Thomas and David Jackson, The Poe Log:€A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe, 1809–1849 (Boston, MA:€Hall, 1987). See J. C. Derby, Fifty Years among Authors, Books, and Publishers, 250–1 (Hartford, CT: M. A. Winter and Hatch, 1886), for more names of those who attended the Carys’ gatherings. See also Hemstreet, Literary New York, and Mary Clemmer, A Memorial of Alice and Phoebe Cary, with Some of Their Later Poems (New York:€Hurd and Houghton; Cambridge:€Riverside Press, 1873). 35 Fuller’s letters give a glimpse of her participation in Lynch’s salon. See Robert N. Hudspeth, ed., The Letters of Margaret Fuller, 6 vols., Vol. iv (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984). While Fuller experienced a degree of ambivalence about New York literati culture, she hosted her own evening in 1846, described in her letter to Mary Rotch on March 9, 1846 (Hudspeth, Letters of Margaret Fuller, 197). In a letter to Caroline Sturgis on March 13, 1845, Fuller expresses discontent with the “the second-hand literary gossip” at Lynch’s (59–60). However, in a letter of April 17, 1845, she is quite animated in her

202

Notes to pages 13–20

discussion of attendees at Lynch’s (81). Six months later, Fuller writes to Rotch, comparing herself to the reclusive Lydia Maria Child:€“But I think she lives at disadvantage by keeping so entirely apart from the common stream of things. I shall never go out when busy, or [just] to keep late hours, but to go sometimes is better and pleasanter for me. I find many entertaining acquaintances and some friends” (181). By February 1846, she feels comfortable enough to invite others to Lynch’s when she dashes off a simple “Be at Miss Lynch’s Saty night, wont you?” to Rebecca Spring (185–6). 36╇Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Woman and Her Needs (New York:€Fowler and Wells, 1851). Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, in The Essential Margaret Fuller, ed. Jeffrey Steele, 243–378 (New Brunswick, NJ:€Rutgers University Press, 1995). 37╇Mary Clemmer, Outlines of Men, Women, and Things (New York:€Hurd and Houghton; Cambridge, MA:€Riverside, 1873). 38╇ Perry Miller, Margaret Fuller, xvii; Douglas, Feminization, 271. 39╇Larry J. Reynolds, “Prospects for the Study of Margaret Fuller,” in Resources for American Literary Study 26.2 (2000):€139–58, (149). 40╇ Julie Ellison, Delicate Subjects:€ Romanticism, Gender, and the Ethics of Understanding (Ithaca, NY:€Cornell University Press, 1990), 234. 41╇Harriet Prescott Spofford, Azarian:€ an Episode (Boston, MA:€Ticknor and Fields, 1864), 19–20. 42╇ Gabriele Rippl, “Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Feminization of Edgar Allan Poe’s Arabesque Aesthetics,” in Soft Canons:€ American Women Writers and Masculine Tradition, ed. Karen L. Kilcup, 123–40 (Iowa City, IA:€University of Iowa Press, 1999), 124. 43╇Alejo Carpentier, “The Baroque and the Marvelous Real,” in Magical Realism:€Theory, History, Community, ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, 89–108 (Durham, NC:€Duke University Press, 1995), 93. 44 In fact, Spofford may be deliberately rewriting Fern’s Ruth Hall (Ruth Hall and Other Writings, ed. Joyce W. Warren [New Brunswick, NJ:€Rutgers University Press, 1986]). Her heroine is also Ruth, and she successfully vies for market and artistic success with her flower painting. Spofford’s Ruth seems to enjoy some of the more subversive pleasures that Fern displaces onto minor characters. Ruth enjoys the revenge of Fern’s Mrs. Skiddy when she finally rejects her errant suitor. Ruth basks in the glow of her actress friend, Charmian (possibly named after famed actress Charlotte Cushman, known for her romantic friendships with women), and they set up house together and adopt children, enjoying the homoeroticism Fern’s Ruth only briefly experiences with Mrs. Leon. 45╇McArone [George Arnold], “Rantanquero de Boom-Jing-Jing; or, The Wrath of the Rebel Rival,” Vanity Fair 4 (1861):€259. 46╇ Qtd. in Walter Blair, “Burlesques in Nineteenth-Century American Humor,” American Literature 2 (November, 1930):€236–47 (238). 47╇ Qtd. in F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance:€Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York:€Oxford University Press, 1941), 134.

Notes to pages 20–26

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48 Walt Whitman, Preface to Leaves of Grass, in Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, ed. Michael Moon (New York:€Norton, 2002), 622. 49 Lora Romero’s Homefronts:€Domesticity and Its Critics in the Antebellum US (Durham, NC:€Duke University Press, 1997) overturns the assumption, inherited from the nineteenth century, that American women writers were more popular than their “literary” peers. See also Davidson, Preface to No More Separate Spheres! for a discussion of who read what. Charlene Avallone, “Calculations for Popularity:€Melville’s Pierre and Holden’s Dollar Magazine,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 43.1 (June, 1988):€ 82–110, suggests Melville based an idea of popular taste on the “exaggerated emotion … exaggerated language, and exaggerated humor” of the popular magazine Holden’s (89). The magazine praised Pierre’s “fine writing and poetic feeling,” which Avallone suggests the magazine encouraged, in contrast to other magazines that were more wary of exaggerated language (review quoted in Avallone, “Calculations for Popularity,” 102). 50 While Spofford was quick to deflate the gendered high seriousness of masculine quest in both pieces, she displays her interest in their literary embodiment of “will” and inassimilable desire, one that is the hallmark of her own stories as well. 51╇ Qtd. in Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker, eds., Critical Essays on Herman Melville’s Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (Boston, MA:€G. K. Hall, 1983), 55. 52 Richard H. Brodhead, Hawthorne, Melville, and the Novel (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 185. 53 Sacvan Bercovitch, “How to Read Melville’s Pierre,” in Herman Melville:€A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Myra Jehlen, 116–25 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:€Prentice Hall, 1994), 117. 54 Samuel Otter, Melville’s Anatomies (Berkeley, CA:€University of California Press, 1999), 242. 55╇Herman Melville, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (Evanston, IL:€Northwestern University Press, 1971), 134. 56╇ Cindy Weinstein, Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2004). 57 See Otter, Melville’s Anatomies, for a full treatment of the modes associated with each character. The fecund foliage associated with Lucy arabesquely outpaces sentimental form and suggests the paradoxically sexual nature of Lucy’s chastity that will culminate in her virgin consecration to Pierre. 58 F. O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance reads Pierre’s treatment of oppositions as contradictory:€ spirit cannot be accommodated in earthly forms. “Refuting the transcendental doctrine of Correspondence,” Melville’s book “emphasized the difference between the ideal and the actual” (471). Melville’s extravagance and formlessness are a symptom of this dark vision€– a failure of form to accommodate spirit. My view has been that Melville’s extravagance embodies his vision despite the social and literary forms that would contain it. For Matthiessen, Melville’s articulation of the tenuousness of idealism, a noble goal, is led astray by “the lack of any norm” (484–5). This trouble is

204

Notes to pages 26–37

spatialized geographically as “provincialism” and textually as disproportion (473). This seems vaguely the site of the feminization of Melville’s rhetoric in Pierre€– in America, far from the literary metropole, he becomes an “impotent echo of the Lady’s Book” (486). 59╇ Walter Spengemann, Introduction, in Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, vii–xx (New York: Penguin, 1996), xiv. 60╇Richard Poirier, A World Elsewhere:€The Place of Style in American Literature (Madison, WI:€University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 91. 61╇ Gerard Genette, Figures of Literary Discourse, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York:€Columbia University Press, 1982), 49. 62╇D. A. Miller, Jane Austen; or, The Secret of Style (Princeton, NJ:€Princeton University Press, 2003), 17. 63╇Margaret Cohen, The Sentimental Education of the Novel (Princeton, NJ:€Princeton University Press, 1999), 18. 64╇ Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious:€Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London:€Routledge, 1983), 102. 65╇Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses:€ Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Cambridge:€Polity, 2002). 66╇Lisa Logan, “Race, Romanticism, and the Politics of Feminist Literary Study:€Harriet Prescott Spofford’s ‘The Amber Gods’,” Legacy 18.1 (2001):€35–51 (44). 67╇Henry James, “Miss Prescott’s Azarian,” North American Review (January, 1865):€268–77 (271). 68╇ Pauline Hopkins, Contending Forces:€ A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South, introduction by Richard Yarborough (Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers. New York:€Oxford University Press, 1988), 14. 1â•… F l or i d fa n ta s i e s :€F u l l e r , S t e ph e ns , a n d t h e “o t h e r” l a nguag e of f l ow e r s 1╇Margaret Fuller, Summer on the Lakes, introduction by Susan Belasco Smith (Urbana, IL:€University of Illinois Press, 1991), 61. 2 I discuss Bataille’s “The Language of Flowers” below (Georges Bataille, “The Language of Flowers,” in Visions of Excess:€Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl, with Carl R. Lovitts and Donald M. Leslie, Jr. (Minneapolis:€University of Minnesota Press, 1985). Roland Barthes appropriates the language of flowers in a famous adumbration of semiology: Take a bunch of roses:€I use it to signify my passion. Do we have here, then, only a signifier and a signified, the roses and my passion? Not even that:€to put it accurately, there are here only “passionified” roses. But on the plane of analysis, we do have three terms; for these roses weighted with passion perfectly and correctly allow themselves to be decomposed into roses and passion:€the former and the latter existed before uniting and forming this third object, which is the sign. (Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers, 120–1 [New York:€Hill and Wang, 1984])

Notes to pages 37–41

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╇ See Claudette Sartiliot, Herbarium/Verbarium:€ The Discourse of Flowers (Lincoln, NE:€University of Nebraska Press, 1993), for a discussion of Derrida’s use of flower language in his concept of “dissemination.” These theorists explicitly refer to the language of flowers as presented in flower dictionaries, which originated in French popular culture. John T. Irwin’s American Hieroglyphics:€ The Symbol of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance (Baltimore, MD:€ Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983) best describes the canonical American romanticists’ interests in a language of material forms, though without addressing the related phenomenon of flower language. ╇ 3 Paula Bennett, “Critical Clitoridectomy:€ Female Sexual Imagery and Feminist Psychoanalytic Theory,” Signs 18 (1993):€235–59; Christopher Looby, “Flowers of Manhood:€Race, Sex, and Floriculture from Thomas Wentworth Higginson to Robert Mapplethorpe,” Criticism 37.1 (1995):€109–56; Elizabeth A. Petrino, “‘Silent Eloquence’:€The Social Codification of Floral Metaphors in the Poems of Frances Sargent Osgood and Emily Dickinson,” Legacy 15.2 (1998):€139–58. ╇ 4 John Ingram, Flora Symbolica; or, The Language and Sentiment of Flowers (London: Frederick Warne, 1869), 7. ╇ 5 For the prehistory of American flower language, see both Jack Goody, The Culture of Flowers (Cambridge:€ Cambridge University Press, 1983); and Beverly Seaton, The Language of Flowers:€A History (Charlottesville:€University of Virginia Press, 1995). ╇ 6 Elizabeth Washington Gamble Wirt, Flora’s Dictionary (Baltimore, MD: Fielding Lucas, Jr., 1829). ╇ 7 Sarah J. Hale, Flora’s Interpreter; or, The American Book of Flowers and Sentiments, 2nd edn. (Boston:€Marsh, Capen, and Lyon, 1833) v. ╇ 8 Sarah J. Hale, Flora’s Interpreter, and Fortuna Flora, rev. edn., iv (Boston: Benjamin B. Mussey, 1853). ╇ 9 Seaton, The Language of Flowers, 122. 10 J. J. Grandville, The Flowers Personified:€ Being a Translation of Grandville’s “Les Fleurs Animées,” trans. N. Cleveland (New York:€R. Martin, 1849). 11 Sarah J. Hale, Flora’s Interpreter; or, The American Book of Flowers and Sentiments, 3rd edn. (Boston, MA:€Marsh, Capen, and Lyon, 1834), vi. 12 Sarah Mapps Douglass, “Fuchsia,” album entry of 14 November 1846, in the Mary Ann Dickerson album in Special Collections at the Library Company of Philadelphia. 13 Anna Christian Burke, The Coloured Language of Flowers (London: Routledge, 1886). Flora Symbolica’s preface is typical of such a color vocabulary. It claimed:€“ That the ‘white investments’ of the childlike Daisy should, as Shakespeare says, ‘figure innocence,’ is self-evident” (Ingram, Flora Symbolica, 6). 14 Chapter 4 of this book shows how Hopkins uses flower language to reclaim the black female body from oversexualization without also sacrificing sexuality. She also intervenes in the “color vocabulary” of flower language and the prevalent equation between black flesh and exotic colored flowers.

206

Notes to pages 42–49

15 Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, in The Essential Margaret Fuller, ed. Jeffrey Steele, 243–378 (New Brunswick, NJ:€Rutgers University Press, 1995), 310. 16 Elaine Scarry, “Imagining Flowers:€Perceptual Mimesis (Particularly DelphinÂ� ium),” Representations 57 (1997): 90–115, (102). 17 Thomas Miller, The Romance of Nature; or, The Poetical Language of Flowers, ed. Elizabeth Oakes Prince Smith (New York:€Riker, 1847), 27. 18 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, The Turkish Embassy Letters (London:€Virago, 1994). 19 Qtd. in Goody, The Culture of Flowers, 234. 20 Margaret Fuller, “The Magnolia of Lake Pontchartrain,” in Steele, Essential Margaret Fuller, 44–9 (44). See Jeffrey Steele, Transfiguring America:€ Myth, Ideology, and Mourning in Margaret Fuller’s Writing (Columbia, MO:€University of Missouri Press, 2001), for more on Fuller’s motivations for writing her flower sketches. See also Steele’s Introduction to The Essential Margaret Fuller (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995). 21 Historian G. J. Barker-Benfield has dubbed this discourse the “spermatic economy,” 175. G. J. Barker-Benfield, Horrors of the Half-Known Life:€Male Attitudes toward Women and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century America, 2nd edn. (New York:€Routledge, 2000). 22 Steven Marcus notes, in The Other Victorians:€ A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England (New York:€Norton, 1985), that until the end of the nineteenth century, the colloquialism for orgasm was “to spend.” He says, “The economy envisaged in this idea is based on scarcity and has as its aim the accumulation of its own product” (22). 23╇ Bennett, “Critical,” 246. 24╇ Barbara Johnson, “Is Female to Male as Ground Is to Figure?” in The Feminist Difference:€ Literature, Psychoanalysis, Race, and Gender, 17–36 (Cambridge, MA:€Harvard University Press, 1998), 31. Johnson takes up suggestions in Gayarti Spivak’s “French Feminism in an International Frame.” Yale French Studies 62 (1981):€154–84. 25 I borrow this construction from Michel de Certeau’s discussion of the way mystical language transforms the garden as encyclopedia into a garden of delights. I treat de Certeau’s ideas more fully in the next chapter. Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 26╇Looby, “Flowers,” 111. 27╇ Georges Bataille, “The Language of Flowers,” in Visions of Excess:€ Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl, with Carl R. Lovitts and Donald M. Leslie, Jr. (Minneapolis, MN:€University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 3. 28╇Lydia Maria Child, “Letter xxvi,” in Letters from New York, 179–84 (New York: Francis, 1850), 183. 29 As Looby further remarks, “Heade’s magnolias, unlike those observed and smelled in their natural setting, are denatured by their being cut from the

Notes to pages 49–51

207

tree and posed in dishabille, as it were, before voyeuristic eyes.” Christopher Looby, “Flowers of Manhood,” 126. 30╇Margaret Fuller, “Yuca [sic] Filamentosa,” In The Essential Margaret Fuller, ed. Steele, 50–2 (50). 31╇Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, in Emerson’s Prose and Poetry, ed. Joel Porte and Saundra Morris, 27–55 (New York:€Norton, 2001), 36. 32╇ John T. Irwin, American Hieroglyphics, 11. 33 See also Lawrence Buell’s chapter on Emerson in Literary Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in the American Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973) for a discussion of Emerson’s deep interest in correspondence as a structural principle shaping many of his essays. Buell argues that the principle of correspondence is, on the other hand, “blurred and defied by [Emerson’s stylistic] improvisation and diffuseness,” giving both concept and essay a richer depth, and reflecting his interest in a greater dynamism than a strictly formal use of correspondences would allow (155). Nonetheless, Fuller seems to be challenging such notions at their very basis, as either ideas of natural order or as structural principles. 34 In Transfiguring America, Jeffrey Steele posits that the sketches convey Fuller’s unrest in their staging of “dialogic confrontations” between her flowers and their Emersonian interlocutors (the traveler in “Magnolia,” and the narrator’s companion, Alcmeon€– also a veiled Emerson, according to Steele€– in “Yuca”) (68). Just as the yucca corresponds differently with moon and sun, Fuller sought from Emerson an acknowledgement that, in Steele’s words, “their friendship was founded on a dialogue between two truths, not a common dwelling within the same frame of reference” (70). 35 Christina Zwarg identifies “conversation” as crucially structuring the relation between Fuller and Emerson and, further, providing a form for Emerson’s “release from a logic of opposition by allowing seemingly oppositional positions to be set in relation to one another”€– an event that shaped the essays and arc of his Second Series (Christina Zwarg, Feminist Conversations:€Fuller, Emerson, and the Play of Reading, 153 [Ithaca, NY:€Cornell University Press, 1995]). “Conversation” has justly become a watchword of Fuller studies, both because of the important “Conversations” she held for women in Boston between 1839 and 1840, and because of her dialogues with Emerson and other intellectual interlocutors. Many have studied conversation as a formal structure of her writing, entailing feminist and democratic commitments to including the reader. In addition to Zwarg, see Mary E. Wood, “‘With Ready Eye’:€Margaret Fuller and Lesbianism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature,” American Literature 65 (March, 1993):€1–18; Julie Ellison, Delicate Subjects:€ Romanticism, Gender, and the Ethics of Understanding (Ithaca, NY:€Cornell University Press, 1990); Annette Kolodny, “Inventing a Feminist Discourse:€Rhetoric and Resistance in Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century,” New Literary History 25 (1994):€355–82; and Judith Bean, “Conversation as Rhetoric in Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century,” in In Her Own Voice:€Nineteenth-Century American Women Essayists,

208

Notes to pages 51–55

ed. Sherry Lee Linkon, 27–40 (Hamden, CT:€Garland, 1997). Others have illuminated the way Fuller’s specific conversations, feminist in content as well as in form, reciprocally shaped the thinking of the participants, including herself. Zwarg’s Feminist conversations most fully engages both sets of issues. Like Steele (Transfiguring America) and Zwarg, Susan Belasco, “‘The Animating Influences of Discord’:€Margaret Fuller in 1844,” Legacy 20 (2003):€ 76–93, and Judith Bean, “Texts from Conversation:€Margaret Fuller’s Influence on Emerson,” in Studies in the American Renaissance 1994, ed. Joel Myerson, 227–44 (Charlottesville:€University of Virginia Press, 1994) also find Fuller and Emerson’s conversation shaping their publications. 36 Mary E. Wood, “With Ready Eye,” 12. Wood’s emphasis, however, is on Fuller’s “inversions” and “ambiguity” of narrative voice as lesbian narrative techniques. I would argue that in her flower sketches, Fuller disrupts what Wood calls “the heterosexual distinction between essential and complementary masculine and feminine qualities,” not by inverting or distorting a masculine position, as Wood suggests, but by opening a space for a feminine position and voice, one that does not correspond to masculinity as an assimilable or complementary value. (Wood, “With Ready Eye,” 14). In keeping with Sharon Marcus’ recent “notion of the erotic that does not posit gender difference as the origin of eroticism” (“Reflections on Victorian Fashion Plates,” Differences 14.3 [2003]:€4–33 [7]), we might note that within the noncomplementary space of the flower sketches, desire between feminine beings proceeds not on an axis of difference but of similarity, where “inversion” to a masculinized position is not required in order to create an erotic circuit. 37 Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses:€ Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Cambridge:€Polity, 2002), 13. 38 Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” in Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, ed. Michael Moon, 26–77 (New York:€Norton, 2002), 27. 39 Christopher Looby, “‘The Roots of the Orchis, the Iuli of Chesnuts’:€The Odor of Male Solitude,” in Solitary Pleasures:€ The Historical, Literary, and Artistic Discourses of Autoeroticism, ed. Paula Bennett and Vernon A. Rosario II, 163–88 (New York:€Routledge, 1995), 172. Flowers often mediated another kind of textual and sensational interface, when the book as an object was figured as a flower from the author, such as Fanny Fern’s Fern Leaves or Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Herman Melville suggests the potential eroticism€– the touch of the author himself€– behind such a gesture when he reports being given a copy of Hawthorne’s Mosses from an Old Manse that has moss pressed to the frontispiece, an encounter with “that flowery Hawthorne” that makes him “spill his raspberries” (Herman Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” in The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces 1839–1860, ed. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, and G. Thomas Tanselle, 240 [Evanston, IL and Chicago:€Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1987]). 40 Michael Moon, Disseminating Whitman:€Corporeality and Revision in Leaves of Grass (Cambridge, MA:€Harvard University Press, 1993), 6. 41 Charles Baudelaire, “Correspondances,” in Les Fleurs du Mal, ed. and trans. Richard Howard, 193 (Boston, MA:€Godine, 1985) 193, my translation.

Notes to pages 56–60

209

42 Qtd. in Lee Rust Brown, The Emerson Museum:€Practical Romanticism and the Pursuit of the Whole (Cambridge, MA:€Harvard College, 1997), 116. 43 See Theo Davis, Form, Experience, and the Making of American Literature (Cambridge:€Cambridge University Press, 2008) for an excellent discussion of how such abstraction yields the experience of transcendence for Emerson. 44 Brown, Lee Rust, The Emerson Museum, 65. 45 Margaret Fuller, “American Literature:€Its Position in the Present Time, and Prospects for the Future,” in The Heath Anthology of American Literature, ed. Paul Lauter, 3rd edn., 2 vols., Vol. i:€1735–42 (Boston, MA:€Houghton Mifflin, 1998). 46 Shelley Streeby, American Sensations:€ Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture (Berkeley, CA:€University of California, 2002). 47 Review of Ann Stephens, Fashion and Famine; or, Contrasts in Society, The Athenaeum 27 (26 August 1854):€1036–37 (1036). 48 Notable revisions took place when she published it as a much longer novel in T. B. Peterson’s 1858 collection of four of her novels; when she condensed it again for Beadle and Adams’ dime novel series in the 1860s; and before the twenty-three-volume uniform edition of her works in 1886, also with Peterson. Interestingly, the late edition contains almost none of the passages I cite here, having been revised to emphasize its action-filled plot and to excise most of its descriptive excesses. 49 Already a foil for Catharine’s passionate character, Mary is revealed in the 1858 and later editions to be Catharine’s English daughter, maimed when Catharine pushes her from her ancestral garden balcony in the fit of insanity I discuss below. In this analysis I focus on the tighter original novella, where the familial connection to Catharine is not made. 50 Stephens “corrects” the historical inaccuracies of her original story in which her Catharine Montour is a British newcomer, by noting in 1858 that she has only assumed the name of Catharine Montour. The historical Catharine Montour was also sister to the more vilified Queen Esther, long held responsible by white historians for the Wyoming Massacre (this view supported by Stephens’ 1858 expansion, in which Esther is also a character). For more on Stephens’ revisions and how they kept pace with views of Native American culture, see Paola Gemme, “Rewriting the Indian Tale:€Science, Politics, and the Evolution of Ann S. Stephens’s Indian Romances,” Prospects 19 (1994):€376–87; Yu-Fang Cho, “A Romance of (Miscege)Nations:€Ann Sophia Stephens’ Malaeska:€The Indian Wife of the White Hunter (1839, 1860),” Arizona Quarterly:€A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 63.1 (2007):€ 1–25; and Colin Ramsey, “Ann Stephens’s Malaeska:€An Unknown Early Version and Some Thoughts on Dime Novels and the Gender of Readers,” Dime Novel Round-Up 75 (2006):€67–76. 51 Ann Sophia Stephens, Mary Derwent, The Ladies’ Companion:€ A Monthly Magazine; Devoted to Literature and the Fine Arts 13 (1840):€ 121. The quote is from the 1840 reprint in The Ladies’ Companion, which ran in volume 13 in May 1840, 18–24, and continued as “200 Dollar Prize Story” in the June 1840 issue, 60–66; July 1840, 114–27; August 1840, 163–74; September 1840, 217–27. All other quotes are from this edition.

210

Notes to pages 60–73

52 Catharine claims, “My heart recoiled at the unnatural suggestion, but I had no scorn for the free, firm Mohawk who made it. If his mode of wooing was rough and untaught, it was also eloquent, sincere and manly, and those were properties which my spirit has ever answered to” (167). Nevertheless, she also claims, “it was far better that blood should be shed than that I should force my heart to consummate a union so horrible, as mine with a savage” (168), a view she overcomes when she learns the victim is Murray. 53 Yu Fang Cho, “A Romance of (Miscege)Nations,” 16. Malaeska quoted in Cho, 12, 15. 54 Drawing on the mysticism that girds flower language, Stephens pushes the language of souls and spirits to a radical limit€– to a place that looks like “free love.” Free love is further discussed in the next chapter of this book. 55 Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail:€ Aesthetics and the Feminine (New York: Methuen, 1987), 20. 56 Barbara Johnson, “Is Female to Male as Ground is to Figure?,” 31. 57 Mary, like Catharine, harbors an “idol” that she must banish, which she does through self-conquest, a foil for Catharine’s conquest of others in lieu of self. While Mary wins the moral victory, an example of what Catharine should have done, in the text’s double logic both are heroines of a feminine antiÂ�economy, Catharine for refusing confession and Mary for declining to parÂ� ticipate in a heterosexual plot. 58 Denis Diderot, The Indiscreet Jewels, trans. Sophie Hawkes (New York: Marsilio, 1993). 59 Though Poe used the terms to title his first collection of stories, Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque (1840), he is notoriously vague about what he means by them, but his interest in literary effect may have much to do with it. 60 Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” in Selected Tales and Sketches, ed. Michael Colacurcio, 386–420 (New York: Penguin, 1987). 61 Charles Boewe, “Rappaccini’s Garden,” American Literature 30.1 (1958): 37–49. 62 Hawthorne, “Rappaccinni’s Daughter,” 391. Thomas Mitchell argues that in “Rappaccini’s Garden” Hawthorne Â�explicitly engages with Fuller’s flower sketches to allegorize the ambivalence of his reaction to her. Through Giovanni, Mitchell argues, Hawthorne is compelled to read what he called “the riddle” of Margaret Fuller’s character while detesting his need to do so. Mitchell writes, “the natural, creative forces that Fuller’s symbolism [in the flower sketches] celebrated are redefined through male consciousness, contained and transformed – by Rappaccini in his garden and by Giovanni in his mind – into the unnatural and destructive.” Thus, “fearing these creative forces in nature and woman, Rappaccini imposes artificial hybridization of the natural and unnatural on flower and daughter.” Thomas Mitchell, “Rappaccini’s Garden and Emerson’s Concord: Translating the Voice of Margaret Fuller,” in Hawthorne and Women: Engendering and Expanding the Hawthorne Tradition, ed. John L. Idol, Jr. and Melinda M. Ponder, 75–91 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 83. 63 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979).

Notes to pages 74–83

211

64 Madeleine Dobie, Foreign Bodies: Gender, Language, and Culture in French Orientalism (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 8. 65 Joyce Zonana, “The Sultan and the Slave:€ Feminist Orientalism and the Structure of Jane Eyre,” Signs:€A Journal of Women in Culture and Society 18.3 (1993):€592–617, (594). See Zonana for more on what she calls “feminist orientalist discourse” and a treatment of its deployment in Jane Eyre. She cites the writing of Mary Wollstonecraft and Fuller herself as examples of her broader argument about feminism and orientalism. 66 On consumption as a more affordable version of the Grand Tour, with all its imperialist consequences, for women in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, see Mari Yoshihara, Embracing the East:€White Women and American Orientalism (New York:€Oxford University Press, 2003). For the rise of “commercial orientalism,” also a somewhat later phenomenon of the 1870s and 1880s, see John Tchen, New York before Chinatown:€Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776–1882 (Baltimore, MD:€Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). 67 See especially Karen Sanchez-Eppler, “Bodily Bonds: The Intersecting Rhetoric of Feminism and Abolition,” Representations 24 (1988): 28–59. 68 Ros Ballaster, Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England: 1662–1785 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 75. 69 Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Harems of the Mind (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 3. 70 See Ballaster, Fabulous Orients for an extended discussion of these storytellerÂ�types and their use by British women writers, particularly Delarivier Manley and Mary Pix. Ballaster argues, “European women ventriloquize the position of the loquacious harem woman as a means of figuring female political agency, whether dangerous or ameliorative, within their own culture” (129). 71 Jeffrey Steele, Transfiguring America, 64. 72 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Visits to Concord,” in Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, ed. R. W. Emerson, W. H. Channing, and J. F. Clarke, 2 vols., Vol. i, 199–316 (Boston, MA:€Phillips, Sampson, 1852), 1:€216. Orestes Brownson, “Review of Margaret Fuller,” Summer on the Lakes, comp. Joel Myerson, Critical Essays on Margaret Fuller. (Boston, MA:€Hall, 1980), 5–6 (5). 73 Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ralph Rusk, 6 vols. (New York:€Columbia University Press, 1939) 2:€378. 2 â•… Se ns i ng t h e s ou l :€m e sm e r ism , f e m i n i sm , a n d h igh ly w rough t f ic t ion 1╇ James Kirke Paulding, “A Panegyric on Witchcraft, Mesmerism, and Cheap Literature (by an Amateur),” The Columbian Magazine 6 (November, 1846):€209–14 (21). 2╇Nina Baym, Woman’s Fiction:€ A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820–1870 (Ithaca, NY:€Cornell University Press, 1978), 18. 3 Emerson writes: In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life,€– no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair.

212

Notes to pages 83–84

Standing on the bare ground,€ – my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,€– all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. (“Nature,” in Emerson’s Prose and Poetry, ed. Joel Porte and Saundra Morris, 29 [New York: Norton, 2001])

4╇ For an account of Fuller’s interest, throughout her life and writing, in mysticism as a site for alternative constructions of female identity, see Jeffrey Steele, Transfiguring America:€ Myth, Ideology, and Mourning in Margaret Fuller’s Writing (Columbia, MO:€University of Missouri Press, 2001). For a detailed account of Fuller’s interest in a variety of nontraditional and occult beliefs, see Deshae Lott, “Preaching Mysticism:€Margaret Fuller and the Veiled Lady” (Studia mystica 20 [1999]:€ 57–112). Christina Zwarg, Feminist Conversations:€ Fuller, Emerson, and the Play of Reading (Ithaca, NY:€ Cornell University Press, 1995), 116–19, treats Fuller’s interest in mesmerism through the section on the Seeress of Prevorst in Margaret Fuller, Summer on the Lakes, ed. Susan Belasco Smith (Urbana:€University of Illinois Press, 1991). Eliza Richards, Gender and the Poetics of Reception in Poe’s Circle (Cambridge:€Cambridge University Press, 2004) provocatively relates the role of the poetess, including that of Elizabeth Oakes Smith, to that of mediums who transmit rather than produce ideas, a type of poetic performance that Poe sought to adopt and upstage and that Oakes Smith struggled against. My account will differently contextualize mesmerist discourse to elaborate models of feminine participation that seek neither to transcend the social world nor to transparently transmit its values. 5 John Humphrey Noyes, The Berean:€A Manual for the Help of Those who Seek the Faith of the Primitive Church (Putney, VT:€Office of the Spiritual Magazine, 1847), 65. 6 Leigh Kirkland, “A Human Life:€ Being the Autobiography of Elizabeth Oakes Smith:€A Critical Edition and Introduction,” Ph.D. diss., Georgia State University, 1994, 245. 7 Noyes’ beliefs are part of the nexus of sexual reform in which feminists like Fuller and Oakes Smith participate. Feminists shared many of his ideas:€his beliefs about spirit led him to disband monogamous and contractual marriage at his socialist community at Oneida because it wrongly contracted and contained the forces of (albeit male) desire manifest in the spirit, rather than in the body. In its place, Noyes developed a system of group marriage, or pantagamy, and male continence. Through his system of pantagamy at Oneida, Noyes hoped to free women from the drudgery heaped on them by the work of the isolated household and conventional nuclear family. Through his system of male continence (withholding male climax to prevent reproduction and the exclusive bonds of parents with each other and their offspring), Noyes sought to promote mutual pleasure among couples by alleviating the fears and physical burdens of pregnancy. In practice, however, Noyes’ system could be exploitative, permitting incest and intercourse with very young women. And philosophically his system was concerned with male spirit,

Notes to page 84

213

taking on misogynistic tones by seeking preservation of male purity through the withholding of male fluids from female bodies. For the firsthand account of a woman who struggles with the dictates of the community yet remains passionately committed to it see Robert S. Fogarty’s edition of Tirzah Miller’s diary, Desire and Duty at Oneida:€Tirzah Miller’s Intimate Memoir (Bloomington:€Indiana University Press, 2000). See also Spencer Klaw, Without Sin:€The Life and Death of the Oneida Community (New York:€Penguin, 1993); John C. Spurlock, Free Love:€Marriage and Middle-Class Radicalism in America, 1825–1860 (New York: New York University Press, 1988); and Taylor Stoehr, Free Love in America:€A Documentary History (New York:€AMS, 1979) on Oneida. ╇ 8 For more on continental mesmerism, see Robert Darton’s classic study, Mesmerism and the End of Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, MA:€Harvard University Press, 1968). ╇ 9 See, for instance, the account of Philadelphia’s “Psychological Society” in M. E. Cadwallader, Historical Spiritualism:€ The First Association of Spiritualists of Philadelphia (Chicago: Progressive Thinker Publishing, 1922). 10 See, for example, Gillian Brown, Domestic Individualism:€ Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley:€University of California Press, 1990); Richard H. Brodhead, Cultures of Letters:€ Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago:€University of Chicago Press, 1993); Teresa Goddu, Gothic America:€Narrative, History, and Nation (New York:€Columbia University Press, 1997); and Russ Castronovo, Necro Citizenship:€ Death, Eroticism, and Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Durham, NC:€Duke University Press, 2001), whom I discuss below. Other treatments of Hawthorne’s engagement with mesmerism include Maria Tatar, Spellbound:€ Studies on Mesmerism and Literature (Princeton, NJ:€Princeton University Press, 1978); Samuel Coale, Mesmerism and Hawthorne:€ Mediums of American Romance (Tuscaloosa:€University of Alabama Press, 1998); and Taylor Stoehr, Hawthorne’s Mad Scientists:€ Pseudoscience and Social Science in Nineteenth-Century Life and Letters (Hamden, CT:€Archon, 1978). Coale’s study mounts a suggestive exploration of both Hawthorne’s interest in the master–slave dynamic of mesmerism and Hawthorne’s formal approach to romance. According to Coale, “the structure of Hawthorne’s shadowy stuff of romance itself constitutes a form of mesmeric expression” as it approximates the relations between mesmerist, medium, audience, and the spiritual realm (18). 11 Chauncy Hare Townshend, Facts in Mesmerism or Animal Magnetism, with Reasons for a Dispassionate Inquiry into It (New York:€Harper, 1841) 45. Mary Poovey, Carol Smith-Rosenberg, and G. J. Barker-Benfield have argued that the medical profession, to legitimate its increased interventions, paradoxically returned to an earlier, often pathologized, notion of women as sexual beings in need of control. Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments:€The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago:€University of

214

Notes to page 84–85

Chicago Press, 1988); Carol Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct:€Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York:€Oxford University Press, 1986); and G. J. Barker-Benfield, Horrors of the Half-Known Life:€Male Attitudes toward Women and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century America (New York:€Routledge, 2000). 12 Qtd. in Barker-Benfield, Horrors, 83. 13 Stephens’ letter of April, 1872 indicates she was in the habit of consulting a clairvoyant woman about diagnosing a friend’s illnesses (Ann Sophia Stephens, Letter, April, 1872, Huntington Library, MS 2969). See Stoehr, Hawthorne’s Mad Scientists, 38–47, for a detailed account of Sophia Hawthorne’s, Fuller’s, and Alcott’s use of mesmerism for healing purposes. I discuss Martineau’s experience below. 14 Margaret Fuller, Review of J. Stanley Grimes, Etherology; or, The Philosophy of Mesmerism and Phrenology, New-York Daily Tribune, (February 17, 1845):€1, in Margaret Fuller, Critic:€ Writings from the New-York Tribune, 1844–1846, with CD-ROM, ed. Judith Bean and Joel Myerson (New York:€ Columbia University Press, 2000). 15 Fuller reviewed Leger’s Animal Magnetism; or, Psychodunamy for the Tribune in 1846. Margaret Fuller, Review of Theodore Leger, Animal Magnetism:€or, Psychodunamy, New-York Daily Tribune (May 30, 1846), supplement, 1, in Bean and Myerson, eds., Margaret Fuller, Critic. See Georgiana Bruce Kirby’s description of Fuller’s treatment by Leger (Georgiana Bruce Kirby, Years of Experience [New York:€Putnam, 1887] 213–14). Joan von Mehren’s biography of Fuller reports that Fuller’s friends Sam and Anna Ward were so shocked by the transformation in Fuller that Anna put herself into Leger’s care. By the doctor’s account, Fuller’s shoulders had evened out and she had gained four inches in height. Von Mehren speculates on the curative powers of Fuller’s romance with James Nathan, whom she would regularly meet outside Leger’s office after her appointments (Joan von Mehren, Minerva and the Muse:€A Life of Margaret Fuller [Amherst:€University of Massachusetts Press, 1994] 206). For Fuller’s interest in mesmerism around the time of the earlier review of Grimes, see Susan Belasco’s account (“‘The Animating Influences of Discord’:€Margaret Fuller in 1844,” Legacy 20 [2003]:€76–93) of Fuller’s 1844 epistolary exchanges with Emerson, in which she teases him about avoiding evenings with a clairvoyant at the home of James Freeman and Sarah Clarke. 16 See Harriet Martineau Letters on Mesmerism, 2nd edn (London:€Edward Moxon, 1845). Moxon, 1845). I discuss Martineau’s claims in more detail below. Oakes Smith received a “psychometric reading” of her personality by a clairvoyant physician in 1852. Her notes indicate that she was impressed with the evaluation. The physician’s stationery delineates the nature of her work. It reads: Mr. and Mrs. J. R. Mettler, Psycho-magnetic Physicians. Clairvoyant Examinations, with all the diagnostic and therapeutic suggestions required by the patient, carefully written out. Mrs. Mettler also gives Psychometrical delineations of character by

Notes to pages 85–87

215

having a letter from the person whose qualities she is required to disclose. It is much preferred that the person to be examined for disease should be present, but when this is impossible or inconvenient, the patient may be examined at any distance by forwarding a lock of his hair to Dr. J. R. Mettler. (Report of the psychometric evaluation of Oakes Smith’s handwriting by Dr. J. R. Mettler, 1852. Elizabeth Oakes Smith Collection, New York Public Library)

Fuller also partook in a session with Brook Farmer Anna Parsons, who was credited with psychometric powers. Novelist and health reformer Mary Gove Nichols also claimed an ability to perform psychometric examinations. Jean Silver-Isenstadt, Shameless:€The Visionary Life of Mary Gove Nichols, 168 (Baltimore, MD:€Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). 17 Robert C. Fuller, Mesmerism and the American Cure of Souls (Philadelphia, PA:€University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), 59. 18╇ Stanley Grimes, Etherology and the Phreno-philosophy of Mesmerism and Magic Eloquence (Boston, MA:€J. Munroe, 1850), 106. 19 Despite the strong support of Spiritualists for women’s rights documented in Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage, 3 vols., Vol. iii (Susan B. Anthony, 1886) and in Ann Braude’s Radical Spirits:€Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in NineteenthCentury America (Boston:€Beacon Press, 1989), I am distinguishing mesmerism from Spiritualism. Mesmerism is a science and philosophy rather than a religion and is generally interested in channeling a self or selves as opposed to departed spirits. Spiritualism ultimately implies a religious conviction of the reality of spiritual manifestation in séances or the channeling of spirits through a medium, ideas that many found clumsy in practice but intriguing in the abstract. It was used to validate a notion of the afterlife, while mesmerism aimed to access and explore the spirit living within. 20 Lydia Maria Child, The Progress of Religious Ideas, Through Successive Ages, 3 vols., Vol. 3, 446 (New York:€C. S. Francis; London:€S. Low, Son, 1855). The Progress of Religious Ideas is an exhaustive study of world religions that distilled the latest scholarly work on both Asian and African religions as well as Christianity and Judaism for a wider audience. See also Carolyn L. Karcher, The First Woman in the Republic:€A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child (Durham, NC:€Duke University Press, 1994). 21 See Noyes’ pamphlet, Male Continence (Oneida, NY:€Office of Oneida Circular, 1872). He claims, “sexual intercourse, pure and simple, is the conjunction of organs of union, and the interchange of magnetic influences, or conversation of the spirits, through the medium of that conjunction” (12). Comparing the three functions of the mouth to those of the sex organs, he illustrates his theory of magnetic exchange in sexual intercourse:€“As speech, the distinctive glory of man, is the superior function of the mouth, so the social office of the sexual organs is the their superior function, and that which gives man a position above the brutes” (13). See above, n. 4, on the possible misogyny of Noyes’ beliefs. 22 Quotation from Spurlock, Free Love, 95.

216

Notes to pages 88–92

23 R. W. Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in Porte and Morris, eds., Emerson’s Prose and Poetry, 120–36 (123). 24 Martineau, Letters, 40, 64. 25 Townshend, Facts in Mesmerism, vii. 26 See Ann Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions:€Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton, NJ:€Princeton University Press, 1999) for an important comparison of evangelical conversions and mesmeric trances, and for a detailed discussion of Sunderland. 27 LaRoy Sunderland, The Trance, Pathetism, and Correlative Phenomena (Chicago:€James Walker, at the Office of The Liberal, 1868), 109. 28 Joseph Haddock, Psychology; or, The Science of the Soul Considered Physiologically and Philosophically (New York:€Fowler and Wells, 1853). 29 Carolyn L. Karcher, “Philanthropy and the Occult in the Fiction of Hawthorne, Brownson, and Melville,” in The Haunted Dusk:€ American Supernatural Fiction, 1820–1920, ed. Howard Kerr, John W. Crowley, and Charles L. Crow, 69–97 (Athens, GA:€University of Georgia Press, 1983), 93. 30 Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, in The Essential Margaret Fuller, ed. Jeffrey Steele, 243–378 (New Brunswick, NJ:€Rutgers University Press, 1995), 302. 31 Joy Wiltenberg, “Excerpts from the Diary of Elizabeth Oakes Smith,” Signs:€Journal of Women in Culture and Society 9.3 (1984):€534–48 (542–3). 32 Barbara Welter, Dimity Convictions:€The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century (Athens, OH:€Ohio Universitiy Press, 1976), 96. See also Steele, Transfiguring America, who discusses Fuller’s development of a personal mythology of goddess symbols as a feminist template. 33 Timothy Scherman, “Going Public:€Authorship and Its Production in Antebellum America,” Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1992, 174; Susan P. Conrad, Perish the Thought:€Intellectual Women in Romantic America 1830–1860 (New York:€Oxford University Press, 1976) 132. Fowler and Wells, the reformoriented publishers, known for books on hygiene, physiology, marriage, and mesmerism, published Elizabeth Oakes Smith’s feminist tracts and then reprinted all of Fuller’s volumes throughout the 1850s. In addition to Woman and Her Needs (New York:€Fowler and Wells, 1851), Oakes Smith published Shadow Land; or, The Seer (New York:€Fowler and Wells, 1852) and The Sanctity of Marriage Woman’s Rights Tracts, no. 5 (Syracuse NY: Lathrop’s Print n.p., 1853). See also Madeline Stern, “Margaret Fuller and the PhrenologistPublishers,” in Studies in the American Renaissance 1980, ed. Joel Myerson, 229–37 (Boston:€Twayne, 1980). 34 Nina Baym, Woman’s Fiction, 259. Susan Phinney Conrad, Perish the Thought:€ Intellectual Women in Romantic America 1830–1860 (New York:€Oxford University Press, 1976), 124–30. 35 Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Bertha and Lily; or, The Parsonage of Beech Glen:€A Romance (New York:€ J. C. Derby, 1854) has received no sustained critical attention. Her poetry has lately been the subject of important scholarship from Eliza Richards, Gender, who reads Oakes Smith’s poetic output

Notes to pages 92–100

217

as occupying a critical and singular position in Poe’s circle of poets. See also Mary Louise Kete, “Gender Valences of Transcendentalism:€The Pursuit of Idealism in Elizabeth Oakes-Smith’s ‘The Sinless Child,’” in Separate Spheres No More:€Gender Convergence in American Literature, 1830–1930, ed. Monika M. Elbert, 245–60 (Tuscaloosa:€University of Alabama Press, 2000). 36╇Ann Stephens, Mary Derwent, The Ladies’ Companion:€A Monthly Magazine; Devoted to Literature and the Fine Arts 13 (1840):€18ff. (20). 37 Oakes Smith, Sanctity, 5. 38 David M. Robinson, “Margaret Fuller and the Transcendental Ethos:€Woman in the Nineteenth Century,” PMLA 97.1 (January, 1982):€83–98 (84). 39 Sandra Gustafson. “Choosing a Medium:€Margaret Fuller and the Forms of Sentiment.” American Quarterly 47.1 (1995):€34–65 (50). 40 Cynthia J. Davis, “What ‘Speaks in Us’:€Margaret Fuller, Woman’s Rights, and Human Nature,” in Margaret Fuller’s Cultural Critique:€ Her Age and Legacy, ed. Fritz Fleischmann 43–54 (New York: Lang, 2000), 45. 41 Oakes Smith, too, insisted on gender fluidity in the flesh while continuing to pursue her theory of gendered essence. She pays homage to “the infinitude of shades in either sex by which they blend into each other, and those great occasions in life which may transform a woman into a Medea,” and (in a valiant attempt to better Fuller’s example of Hercules spinning) “the American savage even into a nursing mother to his bereaved child” (Oakes Smith, Woman and Her Needs, 41). In her example of the nursing father, even the dimorphism of biological sex is challenged. 42 Pheng Cheah and Elizabeth Grosz, “The Future of Sexual Difference:€An Interview with Judith Butler and Drucilla Cornell,” in Diacritics:€A Review of Contemporary Criticism 28.1 (1998):€19–42 (22). 43 For more on the use of mesmerist themes by male writers see Howard Kerr, Mediums, Spirit Rappers, and Roaring Radicals:€ Spiritualism in American Literature, 1850–1900 (Urbana:€University of Illinois Press, 1972); and Karcher, “Philanthropy and the Occult.” 44 Alex Owen, The Darkened Room:€ Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (Philadelphia, PA:€University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990); Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight:€Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago, IL:€University of Chicago Press, 1992); Alison Winter, Mesmerized:€ Power of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago, IL:€University of Chicago Press, 1998); and Ann Braude, Radical Spirits. 45 Brodhead, Cultures, 50. 46 See also Goddu, Gothic America; Brown, Domestic Individualism; and Castrovnovo, Necro Citizenship. 47 Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance (Boston, MA:€Bedford, 1996), 47–8. 48 Castronovo, Necro Citizenship, 105, 115, 116. Tending to conflate mesmerism and spiritualism, Castronovo identifies assemblages of disembodied spirits as a kind of fantastic, eviscerated public sphere. Gauri Viswanathan, on the other hand, working in a turn-of-the-century British context, argues that the occult

218

Notes to pages 100–105

collects forgotten (colonized) knowledges and “recovers lost histories” (Gauri Viswanathan, “Occult Transmissions:€Religion after Religion in Literary Modernism,” Lecture, University of California, Berkeley, CA, April, 2006). Such a reading has use for the American context as well if we look forward to the way Pauline Hopkins and even W. E. B. DuBois used the “new psychologies,” derived from mesmerism, to figure a national unconscious haunted by suppressed memories of racial injustice, and to reclaim forgotten histories and knowledges. 49 To ground such claims in Hawthorne’s interested critique of midcentury socialism, as if it were a transparent representation of reform, is problematic, though it is easy enough thereby to channel a long history of the generally debasing link between women and spirituality that mesmerism seems neatly to package. 50╇Nathaniel Hawthorne to Sophia Peabody, Brookfarm:€October 18, 1841, in Love Letters of Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1841–1864 (Chicago, IL:€Society of the Dofobs, 1907), 64. 51 Lucy Boston claimed, “When the fit was on, which at length had become chronic,€– or, to use a more charitable expression, when her spirit of independence was aroused,€– she would peremptorily demand her ‘rights,’ and vow that she would have them ‘any how.’” Fred Folio, Lucy Boston; or, Woman’s Rights and Spritualism:€Illustrating the Follies and Delusions of the Nineteenth Century (New York: J. C. Derby, 1855) 256. 52 Frederick Crews argues not to take Zenobia’s comment that Coverdale is turning the whole affair into a ballad on face-value because to do so would exaggerate the definiteness of Coverdale’s intention and the steadiness of his aesthetic detachment. I would agree that Coverdale is not aesthetically detached; his turning the affair into a ballad is his way of staking claim to aesthetic territory that he does not wish to share with others by incorporating their threat. See Frederick C. Crews, The Sins of the Fathers:€Hawthorne’s Psychological Themes (New York:€Oxford University Press, 1966), 195–205. 53 See Richard H. Brodhead, The School of Hawthorne (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986) for his argument that Hawthorne never avowed the prophetic authorship that Melville bestowed on him. 54 Goddu also argues that the startling revelation of the narrative does not concern Coverdale’s love for Priscilla but his similarity to Zenobia, in that both are manipulators of the veil between private and public. She reads this as Coverdale’s affinity to the sentimental woman writer, an example of which she counts Zenobia. “The romance obscures its engagement with reality and in so doing denies its accountability to a market economy” (Goddu, Gothic America, 116). My view is that Hawthorne sees Zenobia’s type of vision as a threat to the separation of the powers of romance from reality. He does not fear that the real will puncture the magic of romance, but that romantic vision can constitute a threat to the real if not contained. 55 Donald Grant Mitchell [Ik Marvel], Reveries of a Bachelor, in Popular American Literature of the Nineteenth Century, ed. Paul C. Gutjar (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

Notes to pages 105–115

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56╇ Samuel Otter, Melville’s Anatomies (Berkeley, CA:€University of California Press, 1999); Katherine Snyder, Bachelors, Manhood, and the Novel 1850–1925 (Cambridge University Press, 1999). 57 Clemmer may have had personal interest in marriage reform as well€ – she separated permanently from her husband in 1865, and divorced him in 1874. 58 Mary Clemmer, Victoire: A Novel (New York:€Carleton, 1864), 71. 59 Samuel Otter, Melville’s Anatomies, 226. 60 Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable:€The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago:€University of Chicago Press, 1992), de Certeau’s emphasis), 21. 61 One intertext here is Bellini’s opera, Norma, which Ambrose and Victoire see alone the night Ambrose proposes that Victoire run away to Rome with him. The narrative says little about the content of the opera, but it clearly comments on Clemmer’s characters. In the opera, the seeress Norma is secretly married, against her vows as priestess, to a Roman proconsul, Pollione. Pollione falls in love with Adalgisa, a young temple virgin who agrees to run away with him, until she confesses her love to Norma, who reveals Pollione’s infidelity. Adalgisa, who reveres Norma, then refuses Pollione. Norma considers a variety of vengeful responses, but magnanimously overcomes the temptations, and impeaches herself by confessing her marriage. As she mounts her funeral pyre, her great strength and character are brought vividly back to Pollione and his love for her returns. He joins her in death. 62 The quote, said to be from an “antique book,” is taken from British author Dinah Mulock Craik’s 1859 A Life for a Life. The novel may have appealed to Clemmer for its presentation of a marriage of equals. 63 See Robyn Wiegman, “Feminism’s Apocalyptic Futures,” New Literary History 31.4 (Fall, 2000): 805–25, for a discussion of the uses of a “meantime” for contemporary feminist impasses. 64 Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York:€Routledge, 2004), 29. 65╇ Katherine Snyder, Bachelors; Vincent Bertolini, “Fireside Chastity:€ The Erotics of Sentimental Bachelorhood in the 1850s,” American Literature 68.4 (1996):€707–37. 66 Michel de Certeau, “Mysticism,” Diacritics 22.2 (1992):€11–25 (19). 67 Clemmer, Victoire, 210. 68 Otter, Melville’s Anatomies, 214. 69╇Margaret Jane Mussey Sweat, Ethel’s Love-Life:€A Novel (New York:€Rudd and Carleton, 1859), 73. 70 Certeau, Mystic Fable, 58. 71 Certeau speaks specifically here of Hieronymus Bosch’s mystical Renaissance painting The Garden of Delights; it is intriguing that this is also the name Clemmer gives to the garden of Victoire’s visions and childhood. Victoire is a painter who knows the Renaissance well, though no mention is made of Bosch by name. Clemmer displays knowledge of other mystics as well, such as Madame Guyon.

220

Notes to pages 116–127

72╇Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Shadow Land; or, The Seer (New York:€Fowler and Wells, 1852), 14. 73╇Howard Kerr, Mediums, Spirit Rappers, and Roaring Radicals:€Spiritualism in American Literature, 1850–1900 (Urbana, IL:€University of Illinois Press, 1972), 212–13. 74 Fuller, Woman, 303. 75 Caroline Chesebro’, “The Clairvoyant,” in Dream-Land by Daylight:€ A Panorama of Romance (Clinton Hall, NY:€Redfield, 1851), 77. 76 Oakes Smith, Bertha and Lily, 283. See also John Humphrey Noyes, The Berean, 72–8, on “animal magnetism,” for more on Dr. Buchanan. 77╇ Qtd. in J. C. Derby, Fifty Years among Authors, Books, and Publishers (Hartford, CT:€M. A. Winter and Hatch, 1886), 549, emphasis in original. 78 John Edmonds, Intercourse with Spirits of the Living (New York: n.p., 1858), 7. 79 Child, The Progress of Religious Ideas, Vol. i, 26. Haddock’s Psychology said much the same: Metaphysicians have studied mind irrespective of form or matter; and some philosophers would resolve all things into material operation, irrespective of mind. I believe that fact and demonstrative evidence will prove both classes of philosophers to be wrong. From Divine Revelation we know that there is both spirit or mind, and matter; both a spiritual body and a natural body. (10)



Sarah Helen Whitman, friend of Oakes Smith, spiritual kindred of Poe, professed Spiritualist, and poet, also expressed interest:€“The idea of an existing spiritual body enshrined within, and veiled by the material, has long attracted my attention” (quoted in Eliab Wilkinson Capron, Modern Spiritualism:€Its Facts and Fanaticisms, Its Consistencies and Contradictions, 238 [New York:€Arno, 1976]). 80 Haddock, Psychology, 67; emphasis in original. 81 The Day after Death:€A Discourse by Epes Sargent, Delivered through the Medial Instrumentality of Mrs. Cora L. V. Richmond, 8 (Boston:€ Colby and Rich, 1881). 82 Ann Sophia Stephens, Mary Derwent, 116. 83 Gerard Genette, Figures of Literary Discourse, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 54. 84╇Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word:€ Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing (Chicago, IL:€University of Chicago Press, 1986). 85 Julie Ellison also notes that for Fuller, “sexual difference reveals women’s ability to mediate between binary opposites, which gives the feminine its particular ethical quality … Fuller claims these metamorphic energies for woman but also thinks of them as the state in which we are released from the claims of gender altogether.” Julie Ellison, Delicate Subjects:€ Romanticism, Gender, and the Ethics of Understanding (Ithaca, NY:€ Cornell University Press, 1990), 263. 86 D. A. Miller, Jane Austen; or, The Secret of Style (Princeton, NJ:€ Princeton University Press, 2003). Miller’s work on Jane Austen’s style persuasively argues that style is “the utopia of those with almost no place to go” (29). Connected

Notes to pages 127–132

221

to the underrepresentability of persons “who can’t seize enough social fabric” to “cohere in the field of representation,” Austen’s detached, impersonal style covers and compensates for her unrepresentable spinsterhood (29). Style can only emerge at the expense of substance, and that is Austen’s refuge. In my study, style creates effects of substance that provoke new social possibilities. 87╇ Chris Castiglia and Russ Castronovo, “A ‘Hive of Subtlety’:€Aesthetics and the End(s) of Cultural Studies,” American Literature 76.3 (2004):€423–35 (429). 88 Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body:€Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (New York:€Basic Books, 2000), 20. 3 â•…H a r r i e t Pr e sc o t t Sp offor d’ s ph i l os oph y of c om p os i t ion 1 William Dean Howells, Literary Friends and Acquaintances:€ A Personal Retrospect of American Authorship (New York:€Harper, 1900), 125. Dickinson’s enchantment with the story is legible in its marks on her poem, “He fumbles at your Soul,” which likewise uses captivity and conversion to express an experience of ecstasy without being its initiating agent. The final couplet also recalls Spofford’s story:€“When Winds take Forests in their Paws€– The Universe€– is still€– .” Emily Dickinson, “He fumbles at your Soul,” in The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson, 148 (Boston:€Back Bay, 1976). 2╇Harriet Prescott Spofford, “Circumstance,” in The Amber Gods and Other Stories, ed. Alfred Bendixen, 84–96 (New Brunswick, NJ:€Rutgers University Press 1989), 86, 91. 3 For instance, Spofford wrote a long commemorative review of British writer Elizabeth Sheppard for the Atlantic Monthly that Dickinson clipped and saved. Sheppard wrote a novel attempting to capture Mozart’s music in prose. Review of Harriet Prescott Spofford, The Amber Gods, and Other Stories, Godey’s Lady’s Book 67 (November, 1863):€482. 4 After its run in the Atlantic Monthly, “The Amber Gods” quickly became the signature piece of the “new genius … destined for great things,” (James Russell Lowell, Review of Sir Rohan’s Ghost:€A Romance, Atlantic Monthly [February, 1860]:€ 252–4 [254]). A series of Vanity Fair editorials the following autumn lampooned her “dreamy and gorgeous and tenderly sensuous” style (McArone [George Arnold], “Spuytentuyfel Abroad,” Vanity Fair 2 [November 10, 1860]:€ 240–1 [240]) and the newly fashionable “discourse on nectar, Amber Gods, and the Bacchae” (Anon., “Homes Worked by Steam,” Vanity Fair 2 [September 15, 1860]:€144–145 [144]). 5 Spofford was reviewed in a range of publications, from Godey’s to the North American Review, and by such avatars of literary taste and Â�fashion as Thomas Wentworth Higginson, James Russell Lowell, and Henry James. One reviewer asserted that “the early productions of a writer, who has at once achieved so large a popularity as Miss Prescott has already won, can never be matters of indifference to anyone who is interested in the growth of American literature” (North American Review 97.201 October, 1863:€568–70 [568]). Hence the detailed dissections we now have of her work.

222

Notes to pages 132–137

╇ 6 Edgar Allan Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition,” In Edgar Allan Poe:€Essays and Reviews, G. R. Thompson, ed., 13–25 (New York:€Library of America, 1984), 19. ╇ 7 Spofford was in fact an attentive and wide-ranging reader of Poe’s work:€her detective story, “In a Cellar,” is often linked to Poe, and her “Dark Ways,” featuring heroine Lenore, to Poe’s “Tamerlane.” She attends to The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym with bemused scorn for the masculine quest narrative in both a literary review and in her “Moonstone Mass.” In her review of Joaquin Miller’s poetry, she reflects on Miller’s debts to Poe’s poetry. Harriet Prescott Spofford, “Joaquin Miller’s Poems,” Old and New 4 (September, 1871):€371–6. ╇ 8 Review of Harriet Prescott Spofford, Azarian: An Episode. Harper’s 29.174 (November, 1864):€806. ╇ 9 Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Review of Harriet Prescott Spofford, Azarian:€An Episode, Atlantic Monthly 14.84 (October, 1864):€515–17 (515). 10 Eliza Richards, Gender and the Poetics of Reception in Poe’s Circle (Cambridge:€Cambridge University Press, 2004) makes an excellent case for this dynamic in the context of Poe’s relation to women poets and the sentimental/lyric voice. 11 On Poe’s materialist philosophy, see especially Joan Dayan, Fables of Mind:€An Inquiry into Poe’s Fiction (New York:€Oxford University Press, 1987). 12 Joan Dayan, “Romance and Race,” The Columbia History of the American Novel, ed. Emory Elliott, 89–109 (New York:€ Columbia University Press, 1991), 95. 13 Edgar Allan Poe, “The Philosophy of Furniture,” Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, 6 (May, 1840):€243–5 (243). 14 Spofford is accorded an early prominence in the aesthetic movement’s transfer to America that has gone unnoted in literary scholarship, while her literary accomplishments go unnoted in histories of the decorative arts. The most egregious lacuna occurs in Jonathan Freedman’s Professions of Taste:€ Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture (Palo Alto, CA:€Stanford University Press, 1990), in which Spofford stands in for the American version of aestheticism that “manifests itself not in the creation of art or poetry nor in social criticism” but in a newly “aestheticized consumerism” (109). Freedman seems unaware either that Spofford was a highly regarded fiction writer or that she was a literary force with which James reckoned. 15 Harriet Prescott Spofford, “The Amber Gods,” in The Amber Gods and Other Stories, ed. Alfred Bendixen, 37–83 (New Brunswick, NJ:€Rutgers University Press, 1989), 37–8. 16 Lisa Logan, “Race, Romanticism, and the Politics of Feminist Literary Study: Harriet Prescott Spofford’s The Amber Gods.” Legacy 18.1 (2001): 35–51 (42). 17 See Elizabeth A. Petrino, Emily Dickinson and Her Contemporaries:€Women’s Verse in America 1820–1855 (Hanover, NH:€University Press of New England, 1998), for further discussion of analogies of women writers to prostitutes during this period.

Notes to pages 137–140

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18 Spofford, “The Amber Gods,” 72. 19 Spofford revisits this distinction between form and less easily reproduced spirit and/or mood as conveyed in color or light, which she genders, in her other stories of artists and their muses, particularly Azarian (New York:€Ticknor and Fields, 1864) and “Desert Sands” (in The Amber Gods and Other Stories, 173–216 [Boston:€Ticknor and Fields, 1863]). Eos, an artist repressed by her egotistical artist husband, sings in order to help him hit the right “note” of color in “Desert Sands.” 20 Alfred Bendixen, Introduction, ix–xxxiv. 21 Paula Bennett elaborates on Spofford’s investment in the sensual, but concludes, “Transformed into an objet d’art by the end, Yone returns to where she began:€an image created by men for their own gratification … [Yone] has, in this scene, no life apart from the script she inhabits.” Paula Bennett, Poets in the Public Sphere:€ The Emancipatory Project of American Women’s Poetry, 1800–1900, (Princeton, NJ:€Princeton University Press, 2003), 166–7. 22╇ Spofford, “The Amber Gods,” 71; Logan, 44. 23╇Dana Luciano’s “Geological Fantasies, Haunting Anachronies:€Eros, Time, and History in Harriet Prescott Spofford’s ‘The Amber Gods’,” in ESQ:€A Journal of the American Renaissance 55.3-4 (2009):€ 269–303 shares my interest in the text’s alternative aesthetics, pleasures, and embodiments; however, Luciano’s article appeared as this book was in production. I thank Dana for alerting me to it and sharing it with me. 24 Emma Converse, “Amber,” Appleton’s Journal (November 30, 1872): 599– 601 (600). 25 Spofford, “The Amber Gods,” 80. 26 Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, “Stories that Stay,” The Century Magazine (November, 1910):€118–23 (119). 27 Quoted in Jay Leyda, The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson, 2 vols., (Hamden, CT:€Archon, 1970) Vol 11, 6. Though Martha Dickinson Bianchi, The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (Boston:€Houghton Mifflin, 1924) claims Dickinson is here referring to “Circumstance” and much Spofford scholarship follows suit, Leyda, Years has noticed a discrepancy in dates and suggests that Dickinson was actually referring to “The Amber Gods,” which was running in the Atlantic Monthly at the time of this letter and preceded “Circumstance” by several months. 28 See Barton Levi St. Armand, “â•›‘I Must Have Died at Ten Minutes Past One’:€Posthumous Reverie in Harriet Prescott Spofford’s ‘The Amber Gods,’â•›” in The Haunted Dusk:€American Supernatural Fiction, 1820–1920, ed. Howard Kerr, John Crowley, and Charles Crow, 101–19 (Athens, GA:€University of Georgia Press, 1983). See Katharine Rodier, “‘Astra Castra’:€Emily Dickinson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and Harriet Prescott Spofford,” in Separate Spheres No More:€ Gender Convergence in American Literature, 1830–1930, ed. Monika M. Elbert, 50–72 (Tuscaloosa:€University of Alabama Press, 2000), for a delicate tracing of the “evanescent intertextuality” existing between Dickinson, Spofford, and their mutual preceptor, Higginson. Van Wyck Brooks briefly speculates

224

Notes to pages 140–148

about Spofford’s influence on Dickinson’s style and figural vocabulary as well. Van Wyck Brooks, A New England Indian Summer 1865–1915 (New York:€World Publishing, 1950) nn. 156–7. Dickinson also scissors the title of Spofford’s commemorative review of British writer Elizabeth Sheppard. See Leyda, Years, 60. 29 Edgar Allan Poe, “The Oval Portrait,” in Edgar Allan Poe: Tales and Sketches, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott, 2 vols., Vol. i, 659–67 (Urbana:€University of Illinois Press, 2000) 665; Poe’s emphasis. 30 Spofford, “The Amber Gods,” 71. 31 Poe, “The Oval Portrait,” 664. 32 The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. G. R. Thompson (New York: Norton, 2004), 297, n.4. 33 Poe, “The Oval Portrait,” 664. 34 Spofford, “The Amber Gods,” 77. 35 Poe, “The Oval Portrait,” 662. 36 Richards, Gender, 14. 37 Elizabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body:€Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic (Manchester:€Manchester University Press, 1992). 38 Poe, “Philosophy,” 14. 39 Spofford, “The Amber Gods,” 39. 40 Rachel Polonsky, “Poe’s Aesthetic Theory,” in The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Kevin J. Hayes, 42–56 (Cambridge:€ Cambridge University Press, 2002), 46. 41 Poe, “Philosophy,” 17. 42 Spofford, “The Amber Gods,” 37, 40. 43 Henry James, “Miss Prescott’s Azarian,” North American Review (January, 1865):€268–77 (271, 275). 44 Edgar Allan Poe, “The Domain of Arnheim,” in Mabbott, ed., Edgar Allan Poe, Vol. ii, 1266–88 (1277). 45 Edgar Allan Poe, “Landor’s Cottage,” in Mabbott, ed., Edgar Allan Poe, Vol. ii, 1325–43 (1342). 46╇ Poe, “The Oval Portrait,” 664. 47 E. Arthur Robinson, “Order and Sentience in The Fall of the House of Usher,” PMLA 76.1 (March, 1961):€68–81 (70). 48 Spofford, “The Amber Gods,” 42. 49 Thoreau’s loon and its mocking “demoniac laughter” in the “Brute Neighbors” chapter of Walden likewise insist on the “wildness” and autonomy of the object. Henry D. Thoreau, Walden, in Walden and Resistance to Civil Government, ed. William Rossi and Owen Thomas, 2nd edn., 1–225 (New York and London:€Norton, 1992), 158. While Spofford or Fuller wish to align their voice with the object, Thoreau seeks to bring the wildness of the object into dialogue with his position as subject. 50 Because Spofford serialized “The Amber Gods” within a year of her literary debut, just as reviews to her first published book, Sir Rohan’s Ghost (a novel), came out, I am not arguing that her story is literally responding to her own reviews. (Though surely Spofford was already familiar with the critiques of Higginson, her mentor,

Notes to pages 148–154

225

and Lowell, her editor, prior to their published reviews.) Nonetheless, the way in which her story dialogues so precisely with the language and the tropes of the reviews is more than coincidental. Spofford is replying to a long history of response to highly wrought writing; indeed, early reviews of her work only dilate and enhance positions that reviewers had always taken in relation to the mode. 51 Review of The Amber Gods, Godey’s, 482; Higginson, Review of Azarian, 515; Lowell, Review of Sir Rohan’s Ghost, 254; Review of The Amber Gods, Littell’s Living Age 80 (January 30, 1864):€201–2 (201). 52 Review of The Amber Gods, Littell’s, 201; Review of Azarian, Harper’s, 806; Higginson, Review of Azarian, 516. 53 Higginson, Review of Azarian, 516. 54 Quoted in Susan Coultrap-McQuin, Doing Literary Business:€ American Women Writers in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill:€University of North Carolina Press, 1990) 15. 55 We might even say that, through amber and through golden Yone, Spofford perversely chooses to be “yellow”; that is, she courts a comparison with the racy, decadent “yellow literature” (already called such in the 1860s) decidedly outside the purview of the Atlantic Monthly. 56╇ Spofford, “The Amber Gods,” 54. 57 Review of Amber Gods, Littell’s, 202. 58 Lowell, Review of Sir Rohan’s Ghost, 254. 59 Spofford, “The Amber Gods,” 38. 60 Poe, “Philosophy,” 14. 61 Poe, “The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq.,” in Mabbott, ed., Edgar Allan Poe, Vol. ii, 1124–1148 (1145). I am indebted to Polonsky, “Poe’s Aesthetic Theory,” 46–50, for this formulation. 62 Spofford, “The Amber Gods,” 55. 63 Review of Amber Gods, Littell’s, 201. 64 Higginson, Review of Azarian, 515. 65 Review of Amber Gods, Littell’s, 201. 66 James, “Miss Prescott’s Azarian,” 271. 67 Lowell, Review of Sir Rohan’s Ghost, 254. 68 Review of Amber Gods, North American Review, 569. 69 Edgar Allan Poe, “How to Write a Blackwood Article,” in Mabbott, ed., Edgar Allan Poe, Vol. i, 334–62 (338). 70 Spofford, “The Amber Gods,” 46. 71 Harriet Prescott Spofford, “Charles Reade,” the Atlantic Monthly 14.82 (August, 1864), 137–49 (143). 72 Spofford, “The Amber Gods,” 40. 73 James, “Miss Prescott’s Azarian,” 268–9. 74 In this image, James perhaps reveals the extent to which Spofford controls the terms of her reception. James’ dismissal of Spofford is far from thorough€– several scholars have suggested connections between James’ early fiction and Spofford’s stories. Arthur Hobson Quinn’s American Fiction:€ An Historical and Critical Survey (New York:€Appleton, 1964) notes that James’ “Osborne’s

226

Notes to pages 154–155

Revenge,” first published in 1868 (Henry James, “Osborne’s Revenge,” in Henry James:€Complete Stories, 375–98 [New York:€Library of America, 1999]) is derivative of Spofford’s “Rougegorge,” first published in 1864 (Harriet Prescott Spofford, “Rougegorge,” Lippincott’s Magazine 3 [May, 1869]:€501–16). Jessica Amanda Salmonson notes that James names the New England family in “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes” Willoughby, which is also Yone’s last name (Introduction, in Harriet Prescott Spofford, The Moonstone Mass and Others, ed. Jessica Amanda Salmonson, ix–xxxvi [Ashcroft, BC:€Ash-Tree Press, 2000]). Finally, many have noted that Vera Terrant wears amber beads in The Bostonians. 75 It is unclear whether James’ review played any role, but Spofford experienced a rapid eclipse from critical notice after Azarian. Though she continued with a long and prolific career, she afterwards wrote primarily for Harper’s Bazaar. Julian Hawthorne and Leonard Lemmon’s 1891 American Literature textbook commemorated “The Amber Gods,” as well as Azarian and Sir Rohan’s Ghost, but noted that, since then, “the conventional requirements of ‘family periodicals’ have stifled her genius.” (Julian Hawthorne and Leonard Lemmon, American Literature:€ An Elementary Text-Book for Use in High Schools and Academies ([Boston:€D.C. Heath, 1891], 282). To Fred Lewis Pattee she wrote, “You wonder why I did not continue in the vein of ‘The Amber Gods.’ I suppose because the public taste changed. With the coming of Mr. Howells as editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and his influence, the realistic arrived. I doubt if anything I wrote in those days would be accepted by any magazine now” (Fred Lewis Pattee, The Development of the American Short Story [New York:€Harper, 1923], 163). “The Amber Gods” continued to be remembered as a literary sensation, and both it and Azarian were reissued in 1881 in Holt’s Leisure-Hour Series. An earlier review of The Amber Gods and Other Stories in the North American Review is frequently, beginning with Fred Lewis Pattee (Development of the American Short Story), mistakenly attributed to James as well. An index to the North American Review, however, indicates that the first review was by a C. C. Smith. James’ review of Azarian, appearing months after the other notices of it, reversed the prevailing critical assessment of that work, which had celebrated Spofford’s overcoming of her tendency to “lavish so much pains [sic] on the more gorgeous portrait” and fully present the “gentler, tenderer, and more simple-natured type of heroine” (Review of Amber Gods, Littel’s, 202). 76 See Richard H. Brodhead, The School of Hawthorne (New York:€Oxford University Press, 1986) for a thorough discussion of James’ early avowals of realism as a corrective to romanticism. Brodhead emphasizes that in fact James is finally able to embrace realism only superficially, as a style that is already stamped by other writers like Balzac, and thus one he wills his middle career to follow without ever successfully internalizing it. For example, James’ attempt to rewrite Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance as the realist The Bostonians remains primarily a superficially stylistic change, and his realist detail ironically becomes what Brodhead calls “an ornate marginal

Notes to pages 155–156

227

decoration around the action’s text” (157). In his late writings, James develops the notion of what Brodhead calls a “thoroughly wrought” style, after James’ articulation in the preface to The Golden Bowl of his desire for a form “that gave out its finest and most numerous secrets … under the closest pressure”€– an expression so wrought as to have meaning packed in its ‘every point’” (168). Brodhead comments that the late style “has the look finally of a struggle against natural time itself:€an effort, through the act of work, to realize oneself in a willed form, and so escape the ‘desolation’ time makes of everything insufficiently made” (171), a struggle that resonates with Yone’s fierce attempt to fashion herself in the elaborate, preserving material of style. 77 See Bill Brown’s A Sense of Things:€The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago:€University of Chicago Press, 2003). Brown rethinks post-Civil War literary treatments of people’s relations to and investments in objects as relations that exceed those described by the commodity or the fetish. In James’ late fiction, consciousness operates like a form of subtle matter, a “thinging” as much as a thinking (162). 78 James, “Miss Prescott’s Azarian,” 273. 79 Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail:€ Aesthetics and the Feminine (New York: Methuen, 1987). See also Nancy Glazener, Reading for Realism:€The History of a US Literary Institution 1850–1910 (Durham, NC:€Duke University Press, 1997); and Margaret Cohen, The Sentimental Education of the Novel (Princeton, NJ:€Princeton University Press, 1999) for other salient views on the gendered codes of realism. Glazener specifically treats James’ review of Spofford (23). See also Ann Dalke for a reading of James’ realist tenets in the review and Spofford’s “Circumstance” (“‘Circumstance’ and the Creative Woman:€Harriet Prescott Spofford,” Arizona Quarterly:€A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 41.1 [Spring, 1985]:€71–85 [72]). 80 James, “Miss Prescott’s Azarian,” 270. 81 Harriet Prescott Spofford, Introduction, in Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, iv–xxiv (New York:€D. Appleton, 1898), xxiv. 82 Harriet Prescott Spofford, Art Decoration Applied to Furniture, 74 (New York:€Harper and Brothers, 1878). 83 See the essays in Doreen Bolger Burke, ed., In Pursuit of Beauty:€Americans and the Aesthetic Movement (New York:€Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1986) for more on Spofford’s role. See Roger B. Stein’s essay, “Artifact as Ideology:€The Aesthetic Movement in Its American Cultural Context,” in In Pursuit of Beauty, ed. Burke, 22–51, for a rich overview of gender, literature, and the decorative arts during the aesthetic movement. 84 Dresser is to the left of Ruskin and Morris for his desire both to locate a nonhistorical basis for ornament€ – one that does not depend on convention or historical symbolism€– and to enable mass production of ornament through mechanization, a desire facilitated by his stylization and abstraction of ornament. Unlike Ruskin and Morris, who prefer to return to hand-crafted production, Dresser wished to democratize access to aesthetic products. He nonetheless continued to place high value on the role of the designer. That

228

Notes to page 156

Yone’s image cannot be “copied,” and that the text rails against “copyists” presages Spofford’s resistance to Ruskin and Morris’ “natural school” of pictorial representation. See Michael Whiteway, ed., Shock of the Old:€Christopher Dresser’s Design Revolution (New York:€Smithsonian, Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, 2004), for a full discussion of Dresser. 85 Spofford, Art Decoration, 77. 86 Spofford actually castigates Trollope in decorative€– and ethnographic€– terms when she maligns the way he “with Chinese accuracy gives us gossiping drivel that reduces life to the dregs of the commonplace” (“Charles Reade,” 137). Spofford displays her scorn for the mimetic tendencies of realism, comparing it to Chinese art, an inscrutable allusion until we note that, in the aestheticist’s ethnographic compendium of historical ornamental styles, Chinese ornament had been labeled “imitative,” merely copying nature. See Owen Jones, The Grammar of Ornament (London:€Bernard Quaritch, 1868). The Orientalist valences of aestheticism are enormously varied and complicated; Moorish, Persian, Indian, and Japanese styles were prized over European styles and appropriated for their “ideal” (because nonrepresentational) designs. On “Arabian Ornament” Jones heaps the highest praise of the South Kensington school:€“They ever worked as nature worked, but always avoided a direct transcript, they took her principles, but did not, as we do, attempt to copy her works” (70). For more on Orientalism in American Aestheticism see Holly Edwards, Noble Dreams, Wicked Pleasures:€Orientalism in America 1870–1930 (Princeton, NJ:€Princeton University Press and Sterling and Francine Clarke Art Institute, 2000). Any account of Spofford’s Orientalism must take into account its deep aesthetic dimensions; a full and convincing account eludes Logan (“Race”) when she situates Spofford’s Orientalism only in terms of ethnographic contexts, limiting her critique to moments of racial representation. To my mind, this fails to open Spofford’s text, which takes little interest in representational practice and is in fact about locating other modes of presentation. Rather than registering an anachronistic fear of the Asian “yellow peril,” it seems more accurate to understand Yone as posing something like an odalisque, luring the reader into transgressive, disturbing intimacy with the textures of an illicit femininity. Little Asian functions as a touchstone, both a contrastive backdrop and foregrounded simile, for Yone’s sexuality, much as the black slave attending the odalisque in Orientalist paintings. But, also like Yone, she is a corrosive force not always contained by the discourses that shape her representation. Malini Johar Schueller, US Orientalisms:€Race, Nation, and Gender in Literature, 1790–1890 (Ann Arbor:€University of Michigan Press, 1998) argues that Spofford’s “Desert Sands” offers a “subversive Orientalism,” but the analysis is based on a misreading of the story’s plot, claiming that the Arabian woman, Vespasia, “simply disappears,” when in fact the male narrator kills the veiled Vespasia when they sword-fight. I do not find Spofford at pains to subvert Orientalism; rather she is using Orientalism to subvert gendered codes (109, 125). 87 Dresser published both botany guides and philosophies of art, such as The Art of Decorative Design (New York:€Garland, 1977)€– a detailed adumbration

Notes to pages 156–162

229

of the proposal that “vegetable nature is full of ornamental ideas” (30). His earlier The Rudiments of Botany (London:€J. S. Virtue, 1859) catalogs the intricate parts, structures, and arrangements of vast ranges of plants. This anatomy of plants, intended for art students as well as botanists, makes equally clear how design can€– indeed should€– be derived from vegetative example. 88 Dresser, Decorative Design, 39. 89 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet,” in Emerson’s Prose and Poetry, ed. Joel Porte and Saundra Morris, 183–97 (New York:€Norton, 2001), 186. 90 Dresser, Decorative Design, 167. 91 Schor, Reading in Detail, 19. 92 It should be noted however that the light of Gifford, an American Luminist, is often distinguished from that of a painter like Giorgionne. As Barbara Novak defines it, “Luminist light tends to be cool, not hot, hard, not soft, palpable rather than fluid, planar rather than atmospherically diffuse.” Barbara Novak, “On Defining Luminism,” in American Light:€The Luminist Movement 1850–1875, ed. John Wilmerding, 23–30 (Washington, DC:€National Gallery of Art, 1980), 32. Moreover, “paint, touch, handling, stroke interfere with the purity of luminist light” (25). Lacking this “sense of paint,” “luminist anonymity erases both artist and spectator,” leading to a kind of “impersonal expressionism” (27), the antithesis of Yone’s egosaturated aesthetic. Nonetheless, nineteenth-century art historian James Jackson Jarves characterized Gifford’s art as having “an opulent sense of color, but its tone is artificial and strained, often of a lively or deep brimstone tint, as if he saw the landscape through stained glass” (quoted in Earl A. Powell, “Luminism and the American Sublime,” in Wilmerding, ed., American Light, 94–7 [96]), revealing the perceived affinities of Gifford with the ornamental school. 93 Walter Pater, The Renaissance:€Studies in Art and Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 89. 94 Spofford, “The Amber Gods,” 53. 95 Review of Harriet Prescott Spofford,€ Azarian:€ An Episode, Continental Monthly 6.4 (October, 1864):€476. 96 Spofford, “The Amber Gods,” 56. 97 Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in The Novel:€An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, 1900–2000, ed. Dorothy J. Hale, 361–78 (Oxford:€ Blackwell, 2006), 373. 98 Dorothy J. Hale, Introduction to Part V, “Marxist Approaches,” in Hale, The Novel, 343–360 (Oxford:€Blackwell, 2006), 347. I am indebted to Hale’s incisive discussion of Benjamin and to her suggestions to me. 99 For Phelps’ reaction to Spofford’s “The Amber Gods” in her “Stories that Stay,” see my earlier discussion. William Dean Howells reflected on the enduring resonance of Spofford’s style at the end of the century:€ “From time to time I still come upon a poem of hers which recalls that earlier strain of music, of color, and I am content to trust it for my abiding faith in the charm of things I have not read for thirty years.” Howells, Literary Friends, 126.

230

Notes to pages 164–167

4â•… Pau l i n e Hopk i ns ’ b a ro qu e fol ds:€t h e s t y l e d for m of W inona ╇ 1 Harriet Prescott Spofford, “Pomegranate Flower and Apple Blossom,” Harper’s Bazar 25.23 (June 4, 1892):€450–51. See Katharine Rodier, “‘Astra Castra’:€Emily Dickinson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and Harriet Prescott Spofford,” in Separate Spheres No More:€ Gender Convergence in American Literature, 1830–1930, ed. Monika Elbert, 50–72 (Tuscaloosa:€Universitiy of Alabama Press, 2000) for an evocative reflection on this essay and the connections it traces to Dickinson and Higginson. ╇ 2 Pauline Hopkins, Winona:€A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest, in The Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins, ed. Hazel V. Carby, Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers, 285–437 (New York:€Oxford University Press, 1998). ╇ 3 Pauline Hopkins, “Whittier, the Friend of the Negro,” In Daughter of the Revolution:€ The Major Nonfiction Works of Pauline E. Hopkins, ed. Ira Dworkin, 251–8 (New Brunswick, NJ:€Rutgers University Press, 2007), 251. ╇ 4 Hopkins also mentions the 1877 Harper’s poem, “Inside Plum Island”; both story and poem use the natural scenery around Newburyport, and allow Hopkins to make her next stop Whittier’s poem, “The Merrimac.” ╇ 5 Ira Dworkin’s recent collection of Hopkins’ essays, Daughter of the Revolution, gives an excellent sense of the scope and number of Hopkins’ ed. Ira Dwarkin, nonfiction productions. ╇ 6 Ira Dworkin, Introduction, in Daughter of the Revolution, xxxvii. ╇ 7 African American sculptor, Edmonia Lewis, also took Longfellow’s poem as a subject, portraying Minehaha (Hiawatha’s wife) in The Old Arrow-Maker and His Daughter, Hiawatha’s Wooing, and Marriage. Hopkins profiled Lewis in her “Famous Women of the Negro Race. x:€Artists” (in Dworkin, Daughter of the Revolution, 185–92) in The Colored American Magazine as Winona was also running there. Lewis’ biography is strikingly similar to Winona’s:€according to Hopkins, she was also of mixed race (Chippewa and African American) and was adopted by the tribe after both parents died. ╇ 8╇A twenty-three-volume set of Stephens’ works was published by T. B. Peterson in 1878. Mary Derwent was one of these volumes, and it was a Beadle novel as well. Though she began her career as a literary notable, Stephens’ work became a prime target for genteel crusaders seeking to purge sensational and immoral literature from libraries in the last quarter of the century. The first names on the American Library Association’s 1881 list of authors “whose works are sometimes excluded from public libraries by reason of sensation or immoral qualities” were Ann Stephens and E. D. E. N. Southworth. Esther Jane Carrier, Fiction in Public Libraries, 1876–1900 (New York: Scarecrow, 1965), 268. ╇ 9╇Lauren Berlant, “The Queen of America Goes to Washington City:€Harriet Jacobs, Frances Harper, Anita Hill,” American Literature 65 (1993): 549–74 (564). 10 Claudia Tate, Domestic Allegories of Political Desire:€The Black Heroine’s Text at the Turn of the Century (New York:€Oxford University Press, 1992), 59.

Notes to pages 167–170

231

11 For a lively dissenting opinion, see Geoffrey Sanborn on Iola Leroy, “Mother’s Milk:€ Frances Harper and the Circulation of Blood,” ELH 75 (2002):€691–715. 12 Pauline Hopkins, Contending Forces:€A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South, ed. Richard Yarborough, Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers (New York:€Oxford University Press, 1988), 14. 13 Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South, Schomburg Library of NineteenthCentury Black Women Writers (New York:€Oxford University Press, 1988) 178. See Hannah Wallinger, Pauline Hopkins:€A Literary Biography (Athens, GA:€University of Georgia Press, 2005), 135–54, for a full discussion of Hopkins’ and other African American women writers’ views of the cultural and political role African American literature should play at the turn of the century. 14 Elizabeth McHenry, Forgotten Readers:€Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies (Durham, NC:€Duke University Press, 2002), 192. 15 Victoria Earle Matthews, “The Value of Race Literature,” in With Pen and Voice:€ A Critical Anthology of Nineteenth-Century African-American Women, ed. Shirley Wilson Logan, 126–48 [Carbondale:€Southern Illinois University Press, 1995], 131; Wallinger, Pauline Hopkins, also suggests the connection between Victoria Earle Matthews’ lines, and Hopkins’ own manifesto in the Preface to Contending Forces. Matthews points to the literary usefulness of the recent discovery that “among students of the occult, certain powers are said to be fully developed innately in certain types of the Negro” (“Value,” 146). By comparing such powers to George Du Maurier’s Svengali, Matthews may have inspired Hopkins’ linkage of mesmeric vision with African ancestry and suggested the crossing of racial and visionary power her novels explore. 16 See Cynthia D. Schrager, “Pauline Hopkins and William James:€The New Psychology and the Politics of Race,” in The Unruly Voice:€Rediscovering Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, ed. John Cullen Gruesser, 182–209 (Urbana:€University of Illinois Press, 1996) and Susan Gillman, “Pauline Hopkins and the Occult:€African-American Revisions of Nineteenth-Century Sciences,” American Literary History 8 (1996):€57–82, for discussions of Hopkins’ creative use of mesmerism and the philosophy of William James. 17 In her study of women’s fictional narratives, Fictions of Authority:€ Women Writers and Narrative Voice (Ithaca, NY:€ Cornell University Press, 1992), Susan Sniader Lanser reports locating no novel before 1970 by a black woman that adopts a “public personal voice,” and only one that uses “a private personal voice,” thus pointing to the “difficulty of saying I” for nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American women. My reading finds other, less personal forms of expression that do not amount to “self-silencing” but do recognize the avoidance of mimetic or narrative representation as important “gestures of resistance” (196). 18 See Elizabeth Ammons, “Afterword:€Winona, Bakhtin, and Hopkins in the Twenty-First Century,” in Gruesser, Unruly Voice, 211–19; and Tate, Domestic Allegories. Both are discussed below as well.

232

Notes to pages 170–176

19 Mieke Bal, “Enfolding Feminism,” in Feminist Consequences:€ Theory for the New Century, ed. Elizabeth Bronson and Misha Kavka, 321–52 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 325. 20 See Gilles Deleuze, The Fold:€ Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis:€University of Minnesota Press, 1993), for more on theories of the fold. For excellent discussions of how the fold applies to conceptual space, see John Rajchman, “Out of the Fold,” Architectural Design 63.2 (1993):€60–63; and Greg Lynn, “Architectural Curvilinearity:€ The Folded, the Pliant, the Supple,” Architectural Design 63.2 (1993):€8–15, to both of which I am indebted. See Bal, “Enfolding Feminism” for a discussion of the usefulness of the fold to feminism. 21 Tate, Domestic Allegories, 176. 22 Siobhan Somerville, “Passing through the Closet in Pauline E. Hopkins’s Contending Forces,” American Literature 69 (1997):€139–66 (140). 23 Following Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood:€The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York:€Oxford University Press, 1987), Ammons (“Afterword”) and Tate (Domestic Allegories) have viewed Winona as marred by its dime novel formulation. By emphasizing the western plot, these readings, especially Carby’s and Ammons’, elide the narrative trajectory that I explore. Carby discusses only Judah, to the neglect of Winona. Ammons’ essay is important for calling attention to the complexity of Winona, but she dwells on the contradictions she believes inhere in Hopkins’ adaptation of the western, including the absence of female subjectivity in the genre. Tate, while treating the romance, feels the western displaces the “woman-centered discourse of female development” (208). 24 Tate, Domestic Allegories, 201. 25 Ammons, “Afterword,” 216. 26 Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood, 39. 27 See Beverly Seaton, The Language of Flowers:€ A History (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995) for a full bibliography of late-century flower dictionaries and compilations. 28 See Carla Peterson, Doers of the Word:€African American Women Speakers and Writers in the North (1830–1880) (New York:€Oxford University Press, 1995), 222–3. 29 Alice Dunbar-Nelson, The Works of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, ed. Gloria T. Hull, 3 vols., Vol. i, 915 (New York:€Oxford University Press, 1988). 30 Deborah E. McDowell, “The Changing Same”:€ Black Women’s Literature, Criticism, and Theory (Bloomington:€Indiana University Press, 1995) 97. 31 See Peterson, Doers of the Word, 222–3, for a reading of Frances Harper and Forten’s uses of gardens as an allegory of the nation. 32 Margaret Fuller, “The Magnolia of Lake Pontchartrain,” In The Essential Margaret Fuller, ed. Jeffrey Steele, 44–9 (New Brunswick, NJ:€Rutgers University Press, 1995), 45. 33 Paula Bennett, “Critical Clitoridectomy:€Female Sexual Imagery and Feminist Psychoanalytic Theory,” Signs 18 (1993):€235–59 (244).

Notes to pages 177–187

233

34 Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood, 39. 35 Seaton, The Language of Flowers, 122. 36 Elaine Scarry, “Imagining Flowers:€ Perceptual Mimesis (Particularly Delphinium),” Representations 57 (1997):€90–115, 102. 37 Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race:€Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill:€University of North Carolina Press, 1996) 120–7. 38 For excellent discussions of Pauline Hopkins’ use of Ethiopianism and Egyptology in her next and last novel, Of One Blood; or, The Hidden Self (in The Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins, ed. Carby, 439–621), see Eric Sundquist, To Wake the Nations:€Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge, MA:€Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1993); and Gillman, “Pauline Hopkins and the Occult.” Hopkins’ interest in the African origins of civilization and, particularly, the mystical components of that civilization, is developed most strikingly in Of One Blood, and is documented in her history, A Primer of Facts Pertaining to the Early Greatness of the African People and the Possibility of Restoration by Its Descendants€– with Epilogue, republished in Dworkin’s volume of Hopkins’ nonfiction works, Daughter of the Revolution, 251–8. 39 John Ingram, Flora Symbolica; or, The Language and Sentiment of Flowers (London:€Frederick Warne, 1869), 1. 40 Ammons, “Afterword,” 214. 41 Sundquist, To Wake the Nations, 559. 42 See Schrager, “Pauline Hopkins and William James”; and Gillman, “Pauline Hopkins and the Occult.” 43 For a different reading of interracial relations in Winona, see Sean McCann, “‘Bonds of Brotherhood’:€ Pauline Hopkins and the Work of Melodrama,” ELH 64 (1997):€789–822. 44 Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood, 144. 45 Ann duCille, The Coupling Convention:€ Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction (New York:€Oxford University Press, 1993), 45. 46 Tate, Domestic Allegories, 167. 47 Mary Clemmer, Victoire: A Novel (New York: Carleton, 1864). 48 Berlant, “The Queen of America,” 556. 49╇ See William Andrews, Sisters of the Spirit:€Three Black Women’s Autobiographies of the Nineteenth Century (Bloomington, IN:€Indiana University Press, 1986); Katherine Clay Bassard, Spiritual Interrogations:€ Culture, Gender, and Community in Early African American Women’s Writing (Princeton, NJ:€Princeton University Press, 1999); and Peterson, Doers of the Word. 50 Peterson, Doers of the Word, 83. 51╇ Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself (New Haven, CT:€Yale University Press, 2001), 53; Kenneth Greenberg, ed., The Confessions of Nat Turner and Related Documents (Boston, MA:€Bedford, 1996), 47. 52╇Harryette Mullen, “African Signs and Spirit Writing,” Callaloo 19.3 (1996):€670–89.

234

Notes to pages 187–193

53 Ammons, “Afterword,” 212–13. 54 Bal, “Enfolding Feminism,” 330. 55 Ammons, “Afterword,” 216. C oda . T h e va lu e of or n a m e n t: €Gi l m a n a n d W h a rton 1╇ Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Giant Wistaria,” in Herland, The Yellow Wall-Paper, and Selected Writings, ed. Denise D. Knight, 154–62 (New York:€ Penguin, 1999). Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” in Herland, ed. Knight, 166–82. Perhaps influenced by “The Amber Gods,” yellow seems to become Gilman’s synecdoche for ornamentality. During her ambivalent courtship with her first husband, Walter Stetson, Gilman records in her diary in March, 1884 searching for yellow flowers to wear to a reception for Stetson, an emerging artist. To the party, she records wearing “yellow ribbon, yellow beads, gold comb, amber bracelet; yellow breast on bonnet, yellow flowers. Many people there, and all seem pleased.” Denise D. Knight, ed., The Abridged Diaries of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Charlottesville:€University of Virginia Press, 1998) 67. Gilman is covered in yellow and her outfit becomes the subject of positive reception, perhaps creating an uncomfortable analogy to Stetson’s art, also on display. 2╇Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (New York:€Modern Library; Random House, 1999), 5. 3╇Wai Chee Dimock, “Debasing Exchange:€Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth,” in Carol J. Singley, ed., Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth:€ A Casebook, 63–84 (Oxford:€Oxford University Press, 2003), 77. 4╇Joan Lidoff, “Another Sleeping Beauty:€Narcissism in The House of Mirth,” in Singley, ed., Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, 181–208 (181). 5╇Richard Poirier, A World Elsewhere:€The Place of Style in American Literature (Madison:€University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 14. 6╇Walt Whitman, Preface to Leaves of Grass, in Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, ed. Michael Moon, 622 (New York: Norton, 2002).

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Index

Aesthetic Movement, 134, 156 aesthetics and politics, see€American Literature (issue on aesthetics) African American literature, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century, and racial uplift, 167–9 spiritual autobiography, 186 romance form, 8, 169 slave narratives, 186 and women’s literary clubs, 166, 168–9 see€also€African American women writers African American women writers, 12, 200n31 and domestic-sentimental fiction, 167, 171 and language of flowers, 173 and racial uplift, 166 and sexuality, 172, 184 alterity, see€highly wrought style; Orientalism American literature, see€African American literature, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century; nineteenthcentury American literature issue on aesthetics, 127, 129 Ammons, Elizabeth, 172, 187, 232n23 Andrews, William, 186 art African American, 188 baroque, 17, see€also€under ornamentality and gender, 132, 137, 142, 144, 145; see€Spofford, Harriet Prescott Italian Renaissance painting, 158–9 Orientalist, 73 and ornament, see€highly wrought style; ornament, theory of; ornamentality philosophy of, 137 social dimensions of, 144 and spirit, 157 vignette style, 143 and vision, 124 Atlantic Monthly, 8, 131, 132, 140, 221n4, 223n27

Avallone, Charlene, 32, 201n34 Bal, Mieke, 170, 187, 232n20 Ballaster, Ros, 76, 77, 79, 211n70 Barthes, Roland, 37, 204n2 Bataille, George, 107, 37, 53, 204n2 Baudelaire, Charles, 117, 123 Baym, Nina, 2–3, 10, 11–12, 14, 82, 92, 100, 196n2, 199n25 Bendixen, Alfred, 138 Benjamin, Walter, 162, 229n98 Bennett, Paula, 37, 46, 47, 139, 176, 223n21 Bercovitch, Sacvan, 23 Berlant, Lauren, 167 Bersani, Leo, 192 Blair, Walter, 19 Boewe, Charles, 71 Braidotti, Rosi, 31–3, 52 Braude, Ann, 99 Brodhead, Richard, 23, 100, 154, 155, 218n53, 226n76–227n76 Bronfen, Elizabeth, 145 Brooks, Van Wyck, 140, 224n28 Brown, Bill, 155, 227n77 Brown, John, 166 Brown, Lee Rust, 56 Brownson, Orestes, 4, 99 Buell, Lawrence, 207n33 Butler, Judith, 97, 113, 128, 129 Carby, Hazel V., 172, 177, 232n23 Carpentier, Alejo, 17 Cary (sisters), Alice and Phoebe, 13, 106 Castronovo, Russ, 29, 82, 100–1, 103, 217n48 Certeau, Michel, see€de Certeau, Michel Chesebro’, Caroline, 13, 117 “Clairvoyant, The,” 27–9 Child, Lydia Maria, 5, 50, 52 “Letter from New York,” 49 Progress of Religious Ideas, Through Successive Ages, 86, 215n20 the “sensuous soul,” 117

254

Index Cho, Yu-Fang, 61 clairvoyance, see€mesmerism Clemmer, Mary, 13, 106, 185, 219n57 examination of language in, 108, 115, 121–2, 124–5 and fantasy, 105 and feminist-mesmerist discourse, 83, 109, 110, 113 and free love, 106, 111–12, 125, 128 and gender, 108, 109 and marriage, 107, 108 Outlines of Men, Women, and Things, 13 and trance state, 115, 116 Victoire, 34, 219n61 Coale, Samuel, 213n10 Cohen, Margaret, 30 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 20 Colored American Magazine, The, 8, 164, 165 Conrad, Susan P., 10 Cooper, Anna Julia, 168 correspondences, doctrine of, see€Fuller, Margaret: and theories of correspondence; nineteenthcentury American literature: and Transcendentalism: doctrine of correspondences Cott, Nancy, 45 Coultrap-McQuin, Susan, 149 Crews, Frederick, 218n52 Dalke, Ann, 227n79 Davis, Cynthia J., 95 Davis, Theo, 56 Dayan, Joan, 134, 222n11 de Certeau, Michel, 110, 115, 120, 125, 206n25, 219n71 Deleuze, Gilles, 171, 232n20 concept of the fold, 170, see€also€Hopkins, Pauline: Winona: A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest Derrida, Jacques, 37, 205n2 Dickinson, Emily, 131, 132, 140, 165, 221n3 and Harriet Prescott Spofford on, 140, 224n28 Dillon, Elizabeth, 7 Dimock, Wai Chee, 191 Dobie, Madeleine, 74, 78 domestic-sentimental fiction and highly wrought style, 1, 3, 17–19 and nineteenth-century American women writers, 7, 12–13 Douglas, Ann, 10, 12, 14, 29, 82, 95, 198n23, 199n26 Douglass, Sarah Mapps, 40–2 Dresser, Christopher, 156–9, 227n84, 229n87

255

Du Bois, W. E. B., 169 duCille, Ann, 184 Dunbar-Nelson, Alice, 173 Dworkin, Ira, 166, 230n5 Ellison, Julie, 11, 14, 220n85 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 5, 50, 56–7, 79, 83, 88, 95, 157, 194, 210n62, 211n3 fantasy, 105, see€also€highly wrought style; nineteenth-century American literature; nineteenth-century American women writers Fausto-Sterling, Anne, 129 Feldman, Jessica, 7 feminism, 34, 104, 105 and female sexuality, 170 and highly wrought writing, see€under€highly wrought (writing) style and materialism, 31–2 and mesmerism, see€feminist-mesmerist discourse nineteenth-century, 93, 97–8 and literature, 9, 11 soul and social change, 83 and Orientalism, 74 and separate spheres, 9–15 feminist utopian conceptions, 34 feminist-mesmerist discourse, 83, 91–8, 101, 126, see€also€highly wrought style; individual writers gender and soul in, 93–7 Fern, Fanny, 208n39 Ruth Hall, 17–19, 107 flower language, see€language of flowers Folio, Fred, 99, 218n51 Forten, Charlotte, 173, 179 Foster, George New York in Slices, 9–10, 13, 24 Freedman, Jonathan, 222n14 Fuller, Margaret, 8, 13, 22, 51, 58, 71, 83, 85, 92, 198n19, 201n35, 207n33, 212n4, 215n16, 216n33 and Elizabeth Oakes Smith, 92 and fantasy, 14, 46 “living hieroglyphic,” 44, 50–7, 58, 75, 77 “Magnolia of Lake Ponchartrain, The,” 44–6, 50, 57, 174 feminine principle, 57, 59, 80, 112, 126, 127 feminism of, 22, 88, 91, 216n32 gender and soul in, 93–4, 95–7, 118, 125–6 in context of women writers, 9–13, 199n26, 200n30 masculinization of by critics, 10, 199n23

256

Index

Fuller, Margaret (cont.) and mesmerism, 85, 88, 214n15 mystical flower sketches, 34, 38, 44, 71 nineteenth-century critics on, 4 on Etherology: or, The Philosophy of Mesmerism and Phrenology (Grimes), 85, 87 and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 56–7, 207n35 and spirit, 57, 80 Summer on the Lakes, 37, 83, 212n4 and theories of correspondence, 34, 50–2, 55–6 and Transcendentalist concept of selfculture, 93 and Transcendentalist Oversoul, 88 use of flower language, 34, 38, 44–57, 147, 148, 157, 224n49 and Orientalism, 75, 76–7 and Walt Whitman, 54–5 Woman in the Nineteenth Century, 34, 46, 92, 95, 97, 114, 125–6 on trance state, 116 “Yuca [sic] Filamentosa,” 50–3, 57 Gaines, Kevin, 178 Genette, Gerard, 123, 124, 127 Gillman, Susan, 233n38 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 36, 135, 189, 234n1 “Giant Wistaria, The,” 189 writing of ornamentality in, 189 “Yellow Wall-Paper, The,” 189–90 Glazener, Nancy, 227n79 Goddu, Teresa, 104, 218n54 Greenough, Horatio, 21, 22 Grimes, Stanley Etherology; or, the Philosophy of Mesmerism and Phrenology, 86, 88 Gustafson, Sandra, 95 Haddock, Joseph Psychology; or, The Science of the Soul Considered Physiologically and Philosophically, 89–90, 220n79 Hale, Dorothy, 162, 229n98 Hale, Sarah J., 39 Harper, Frances, 167, 179, 184, 232n31 Hatch, Cora, 24, 119 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 5, 8, 27, 59, 84, 208n39, 213n10 Blithedale Romance, The, 34, 82, 84, 98–105 and Margaret Fuller, 101 and mesmerism, 99 “Rappaccini’s Garden,” 70–1, 210n62

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth (T. W.), 48, 133, 165 on Azarian (Spofford), 4 highly wrought style, 127, see€also€individual writers 1–2 and alterity, 34, 56, 58, 73, 74, 79–80, 158, 163, 180 continuing resonance of, 165–6 correlation of political to poetic project in, 124 criticism of, 19–21 and domestic-sentimental fiction, 3, 5–7, 17–19 and fantasy, 9, 14–15, 34, 38, 83, 128–9, 194 and female sexuality, 5, 34, 76, 82, 168, 189 and feminism, 1, 9, 30–3, 83, 105 and feminist-mesmerist discourse, 34, 83, 113, 127, 128–31 Fuller, Margaret and spirit, 52 and gender, 4, 22, 29–33, 35, 59, 65, 66, 67, 93, 98, 163, 188 generic innovations in, 8, 35 language of, 30, 48, 119–23, 124–5, 127, 193–4 language of flowers, see€language of flowers literary position staked by, 28, 132, 193 literary reception of, 3–5, see€under€individual writers, reviews of male writers and, 26, 28 marriage in, 138 and mesmerism, 83, 212n4 and Orientalism, 34, 73–80 and ornamentality, 15–26, 134, 135, 143, 155, 158, 159, 189, 192, 193 reader experience of, 7, 28, 44, 127, 194 and romanticism, 8, 9, 26–30, 132, 194 sensationalism in, 59 and spirit, 44, 57, 80, 83, 97, 98, 112, 117, 120, 125, 128–9, 165, 173, 192 as synecdoche, 29–30 Homans, Margaret, 123 Hopkins, Pauline, 8, 166, 198n19, 230n4, 231n13 and African American romance form, 8, 169 A Primer of Facts Pertaining to the Early Greatness of the African Race and the Possibility of Restoration by Its Descendants – with Epilogue, 179 Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South, 168 “Famous Women of the Negro Race. x: Artists,” 230n7 literary context of, 166–7

Index Of One Blood; or, The Hidden Self, 179, 184, 233n38 on Harriet Prescott Spofford, 165 Winona: A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest, 35, 172, 183, 189, 232n23, 233n43 and African American spirit traditions, 186–7 and antebellum history, 166 and Deleuzean fold, 170–1, 172–3 and fantasy, 183, 187 and female sexuality, 168, 173–81 generic innovations in, 167–8, 187 highly wrought style in, 165, 188 and interracial relations, 166, 171, 178, 183 language of flowers in, 41, 164–5, 173–81, 205n14 and race, 174, 179–80 and mesmerism, 182–3 and ornamentality, 187–8 politics of, 170 and spirit, 177, 180 and The Song of Hiawatha (Longfellow), 166 “Whittier, the Friend of the Negro,” 166 Howells, William Dean, 162, 229n99 Ingram, John, 38, 180, 205n13 Irwin, John T., 50, 205n2 Jackson, Virginia, 7 James, Henry, 27, 119, 132, 154–5, 198n19, 227n79 Bostonians, The, 99 on Harriet Prescott Spofford, 146, 154–5, 156, 225n74 review of Azarian (Spofford), 3, 154, 226n75 James, William New Psychology, 169 Johnson, Barbara, 46, 65 Jones, Owen, 156, 228n86 Kaplan, Amy, 12 Karcher, Carolyn, 91 Kete, Mary Louise, 7 Kolodny, Annette, 199n26 language of flowers, 37, 38–43, 232n27, see€also€individual writers 30, 34 as alternative language, 34, 38, 42, 47, 73 conventional understandings of, 38–40, 72 and female sexuality, 34, 40, 42–3, 46, 173–81 and gender, 34, 37, 39–40, 42–3, 46, 56–7, 74

257

idea of, in contemporary theory, 48–50 and Orientalism, 38, 43 racist constructions of, 177 and Transcendentalism, 49 Lanser, Susan Sniader, 231n17 Lewis, Edmonia, 166, 230n7 Leyda, Jay, 140, 223n27 Lippard, George, 58, 72 literary salons, see€salons, literary Loeffelholz, Mary, 7, 12, 196n3, 201n34 Logan, Lisa, 138, 156, 228n86 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 166 Looby, Christopher, 37, 48, 53, 54, 206n29 Lott, Deshae, 212n4 Lowell, James Russell, 132, 149 Lynch, Anne, 9, 13, 201n35 Lynn, Greg, 232n20 male sexuality, discourse on, 45, 206n21 Marcus, Sharon, 208n36 Marcus, Steven, 206n22 Martineau, Harriet Letters on Mesmerism, 85, 88, 119, 121 Matthews, Victoria Earle “The Value of Race Literature” (speech), 168–9, 231n15 Matthiessen, F. O., 19–21, 194, 203n58 McCann, Sean, 233n43 McDowell, Deborah, 174 McHenry, Elizabeth, 166, 168 Melville, Herman, 8, 22, 27, 103, 203n49, 208n39 Pierre, 22–6, 190, 203n58, see€also€highly wrought style: male writers and reviews of Pierre, 22–3 Mesmer, Anton, 84, 86 mesmerism, 34, 82, 83, 91, 104, 117, see€also€highly wrought style clairvoyance, 13, 83, 90 female mediums, 89, 100 and feminism, see€feminist-mesmerist discourse and healing, 84–5, 214n13 magnetic relations, 89–90 in nineteenth-century America, 82, 84, 85 origins of, 84 and the “sensuous soul,” 118 and the soul, 89 and spirit, 29, 86, 111, 119, 126 and Spiritualism, 86, 215n19 trance state, 34, 81, 82, 85, 88–90, 98, 114, 118 and women’s fiction Miller, D. A., 30, 127, 220n86 Miller, Perry, 10, 198n23 Miller, Thomas, 43

258

Index

Mitchell, Donald Grant (Ik Marvel) Reveries of a Bachelor, 34, 83, 105–13 Mitchell, Thomas, 71 Moon, Michael, 54 Morris, William, 156, 228n84 Mullen, Harryette, 187, 188 Nichols, Mary Gove, 13, 215n16 nineteenth-century American literature African American, see€African American literature, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century; African American women writers binaries in, 105 common themes in, 132 and fantasy, 8, 34, 100, 104 and gender, 7 “magnetic romances,” 99 male writers and mesmerism, 99, 217n43 and ornamentality, 15–26 sensation fiction, 58–9, 70, 72 and the soul, 89 and spirit, 82–3 stylistic interests within, 8 and Transcendentalism concept of self-culture, 93 doctrine of correspondences, 50 Oversoul, 88 women’s fiction and mesmerism nineteenth-century American women writers, 8 African American, see€African American women writers and domestic-sentimental fiction, 12–13, 200n31 and male contemporaries, 12, 201n33, 203n50 and ornamentality, 135 as part of intellectual milieu, 13, 198n19 relations among, 9 and romanticism, 8, 9, 11–12, 13–15 and trance state, 115, 116 No More Separate Spheres! (issue of American Literature), 12, 200n31 Novak, Barbara, 159, 229n92 Noyes, John Humphrey, 83, 117, 125, 212n7, 215n21, 220n76 theory of spirit, 86–7 O’Brien, Fitz-James, 23 Oakes Smith, Elizabeth, 8, 43, 83, 85, 92, 116, 198n19, 212n4, 214n16, 216n33 Bertha and Lily, 91, 92, 117 feminism of, 92 gender and spirit in, 93–5, 97, 217n41 and mesmerism, 94, see€also€feministmesmerist discourse

feminist writing of, 34, 91 and Margaret Fuller, 92 review of Bertha and Lily, 117 Shadow Land; or, The Seer, 91, 116 examination of language in, 119–21 Sinless Child, The, 92–3 Woman and Her Needs, 13, 92, 94–5 Orientalism, 76, see€also€highly wrought style 73–4 and alterity, 74 and salon culture, 78–9 Orientalist art, 73 Orientalist literature models of female voice in, 77 ornament, theory of, 156–9 ornamentality, see€also€highly wrought style; nineteenth-century American literature; individual writers arabesque style, 15–18, 20, 21, 66, 189 baroque style, 17, 20–1, 26, 187 and Orientalism, 73 Otter, Samuel, 23, 24, 105, 109, 203n57 Owen, Alex, 99 Pater, Walter, 159, 160 Pattee, Fred Lewis, 154, 226n75 Paulding, James Kirke, 81–2, 110 Peterson, Carla, 12, 179, 186, 200n31 Petrino, Elizabeth A., 37, 137, 148–9, 222n17 Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart, 140 Poe, Edgar Allan, 5, 8, 9, 59, 83, 133, 155, 198n19, 210n59, 212n4, 222n7 and Harriet Prescott Spofford, 150 “How to Write a Blackwood Article,” 132, 151–2 materialist philosophy of, 147 on Ann Sophia Stephens, 3, 196n6 “Oval Portrait, The,” 132, 141–8 “Philosophy of Composition, The,” 132, 145 Poirier, Richard, 27–9, 30–1, 33, 192 Polonsky, Rachel, 145 Quinn, Arthur Hobson, 154, 225n74 Rajchman, John, 232n20 Reynolds, Larry, 14 Richards, Eliza, 7, 13, 83, 134, 145, 212n4, 222n10 Rodier, Katharine, 223n28, 230n1 romanticism, American literary, see€style; literary; highly wrought style Ruskin, John, 156, 228n84 Said, Edward, 73 Salmonson, Jessica Amanda, 154, 226n74

Index salons, literary, 13, 78–9, 92; see€also€Cary (sisters), Alice and Phoebe; Lynch, Anne; Foster, George Sanborn, Geoffrey, 231n11 Sanchez-Eppler, Karen, 76 Sartiliot, Claudette, 205n2 Scarry, Elaine, 42–3, 49, 53 Schor, Naomi, 65, 155, 159 Schueller, Malini Johar, 228n86 Seaton, Beverly, 40 separate spheres, 9–15, 58, 94, 96, 98 woman’s sphere, 81–2, 94–5 see€also€nineteenth-century American women writers Sheppard, Elizabeth, 132, 221n3 Snyder, Katherine, 105 Somerville, Siobhan, 171 soul, see€spirit Spengemann, Walter, 26 spirit, 100, 132, 133, 134, 147, 165, 169 feminine principle, 98 and mesmerism, 29 nineteenth-century ideas of, 100 the “sensuous soul,” 30, 31, 114, 117–18, 122 and sexuality, 87 soul, 90 and mesmerism, 90 in relation to body, 86 science of, see€Haddock, Joseph Transcendentalist Oversoul, 88 theories of, 86, see€also€mesmerism; Noyes, John Humphrey see€also€feminist-mesmerist discourse; highly wrought style; and spirit Spiritualism, 83, 86, 99 Spivak, Gayatri, 46 Spofford, Harriet Prescott, 8, 19, 22, 32, 73, 131, 132, 138, 154, 198n19, 203n50, 221n3, 223n19, 225n74, 226n75 aesthetic of, 132, 135 and Aesthetic Movement, 134, 222n14 “Amber Gods, The,” 35, 132–54, 155–6, 157, 159–63, 221n4, 224n50 and Edgar Allan Poe’s, “The Philosophy of Composition” in 35, 146 engagement with Edgar Allan Poe’s writing in, 132–5, 141–53, 160–2 examination of language in, 137 and fantasy, 149 gender politics of art in, 136, 137, 148, 150, 161–3 and highly wrought style, 132, 148, 158 literary reception of, 139, 140, 148–9 narrative voice in, 132, 140, 142, 153

259

ornamentality in, 147, 155, 159–61 race and aesthetics in, 160 racialization and Orientalism in, 148, 160 reader experience of, 140, 142–4, 162–3 Amber Gods and Other Stories, The, 166 Art Decoration Applied to Furniture, 35, 134, 155–6 Azarian, 66, 202n41 ornamentality in, 16–17 “Circumstance,” 131, 140, 154, 223n27, 227n79 examination of language in, 131–2 and Edgar Allan Poe, 133, 222n7 and Emily Dickinson, 140, 224n28 and highly wrought style, 133, 159 “Inside Plum Island,” 230n4 on Jane Eyre (Brontë), 155 Orientalism of, 228n86 “Pomegranate Flower and Apple Blossom,” 164–5 reviews of, 4, 19, 133, 151, 221n4 “South Breaker, The,” 166 theory of ornament, 155–8 Steele, Jeffrey, 78, 83, 199n29, 207n34, 212n4, 216n32 Stephens, Ann Sophia, 8, 13, 22, 59, 85, 166, 198n19, 209n50, 214n13, 230n8 Fashion and Famine, 59 Malaeska, 58, 61, 75 Mary Derwent, 58–72, 83, 93, 209n49, 209n51, 210n57 and dreamscape, 60, 65, 69–70, 79, 120 and fantasy, 59, 62–5 and female sexuality, 61–5, 72 “flowery superstructure of,” 34, 38, 58, 61, 68–9 and Orientalism, 75, 76–7 ornamentality in, 62, 66–70, 72 reviews of, 3 and sensation fiction, 58–9 Stern, Julia, 7, 197n14 Stoddard, Elizabeth, 13 Morgesons, The, 6, 7 Streeby, Shelley, 58–9 style, literary, 26–33, 127, 139, 192, see€also€highly wrought style romanticism, 8, 9, 14, 15, 132, 194 and spirit, 26 twentieth-century criticism of, 20 as synecdoche, 28, 30 Sunderland, LaRoy, 89 Sundquist, Eric, 233n38 Sweat, Margaret, 8, 198n19 Ethel’s Love-Life: A Novel and feminist-mesmerist views, 115

260

Index

Swett, Katherine, 7, 197n16

Viswanathan, Gauri, 217n48 von Mehren, Joan, 10, 214n15

Welter, Barbara, 10, 91 Wharton, Edith, 36, 135, 189 House of Mirth, The, 107, 190–1 women as ornament in, 190, 191 Whitman, Sarah Helen, 146, 220n79 Whitman, Walt, 20, 54, 193, 208n39 and Margaret Fuller, 54–5 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 165, 166, 230n4 Wiegman, Robyn, 219n63 Willis, N. P., 119 Winter, Alison, 99 Winters, Yvor, 28 Wirt, Elizabeth, 39 Wood, Mary E., 46, 51, 207n35, 208n36 Woolson, Constance Fenimore, 7, 197n16

Walkowitz, Judith, 99 Wallinger, Hannah, 169, 231n13, 231n15 Weinstein, Cindy, 7, 24

Zagarell, Sandra, 7 Zonana, Joyce, 211n65 Zwarg, Christina, 11, 83, 207n35, 212n4

Tate, Claudia, 12, 167, 172, 185, 232n23 Taves, Ann, 216n26 Thoreau, Henry David, 20, 21, 148, 224n49 Todd, Mabel Loomis, 165 Townshend, Chauncy, Facts in Mesmerism, 86, 88–9, 94, 124 Trollope, Anthony, 156 utopian communities, 25, see€also€Noyes, John Humphrey utopian conceptions, feminist, 34