Rewriting the Necessary Woman: Marriage and Professionalism in James, Jewett, and Phelps

Rewriting the Necessary Woman: Marriage and Professionalism in James, Jewett, and Phelps By Valerie Fulton, Colorado State University Writing in 1868 to criticize those who would satirize match-making, Henry James notes that "it is a very dismal truth that the only hope of most women, at the present moment, for a life worth living, lies in marriage, and marriage with rich men or men likely to become so, and that in their unhappy weakness they often betray an ungraceful anxiety on this point" (EL 22). Despite James's sympathy with the economic plight of nineteenth-century women and his hope for their eventual progress, the main point of this statement—that women are bound to seek marriage as a necessary condition, their "only hope...for a life worth living"—is borne out in the writer's fictional treatment of women as well. With few exceptions, James's novels feature marriage as the most viable option for women, even when other opportunities present themselves; the tragic dimension of his work as frequently results from heroines having chosen destructive marriage partners or betrayed "ungraceful anxiety" at the prospect of remaining single.1 Although I wish neither to question the legitimacy of marriage as a novelistic theme nor to decide what James's habitual use of this theme implies more generally about his attitude toward women, I nonetheless would like to suggest that the way James structured his plots can shed valuable light on how we have come to think about the stories told by his contemporaries, as well as on how we understand the historical circumstances in which novelistic plots and conventions are grounded. I will argue that the presumed aesthetic superiority of James's novels has given them a cultural authority that has served in turn to undermine The Henry James Review 15 (1994): 242-256. © 1995, The Johns Hopkins University Press Rewriting the Necessary Woman 243 the existence of other alternatives for nineteenth-century women, notably as these are inscribed within the narratives of women's fiction. In order to demonstrate this assumption, I will focus on two narrative alternatives to James's The Bostonians, a novel that reconstitutes the idea of "necessary" marriage by presenting marriage and professionalism as mutually exclusive options for women. By foregrounding James's characterization of the "lady doctor" and combining the successful professional status of this figure with the marriageability of the conventional nineteenth-century sentimental heroine, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and Sarah Orne Jewett revise the root assumptions that inform James's examination of this "most salient...point in [nineteenth-century] social life"—"the situation of women" and "the agitation on their behalf" (CN 20). Moreover, I suggest that their novels Doctor Zay and A Country Doctor have escaped critical attention precisely because the positive view of social change to which they subscribe works against received notions of canonicity, even in scholarship that presumes to challenge the traditional American literary canon. In one of the first studies to examine the political implications of James's work, Mark Seltzer suggests that a main reason James's texts have resisted politicization is that literary criticism itself has been influenced "along the lines that James has so clearly drawn": "his novelistic and critical practice has been appropriated [by later generations of critics] to support an absolute opposition between aesthetic and political claims" (14, 13). Indeed, the tendency to naturalize James's insistence that "imagination" triumph over "social reality" is integral to the academic reception and understanding of American fiction in the twentieth century.2 Frank Kermode, for instance, evokes a standard argument when he notes that "our sense of reality" depends on an ability of the novel to upset "the ordinary balance of our naive expectations " : " the falsification of an expectation... is a way of finding something out that we should, on our more conventional way to the end, have closed our eyes to" (18). This criterion has been used most often to distinguish between canonical and popular texts, the latter of which keep "the reversals [of basic convention] infrequent and the endings happy"—ultimately providing little more than "the solace of platitude" (Veeder 6). It is, of course, no coincidence that the dismissal of normative...