The Literary Landscape of a Woman's Rights Periodical: The Una, 1853-1855

The Literary Landscape of a Woman's Rights Periodical: The Una, 1853-1855 PHYLLIS COLE In the twenty years since Jane Tompkins proposed that we consider antebellum American literature through its "cultural work" of audience persuasion and social change, the sentimental fiction that she and others reintroduced has continued as a primary focus of study. At the same time, public engagement and influence have been claimed for a wider variety of texts, whether canonically secure (Emerson's essays) or newly recovered (slave narratives, women's satiric verse). And encompassing these possibilities, the periodical has won attention as a genre and a primary print space for engaging the nation's readers .1 The nineteenth-century periodical was a forum literally incorporating audience response, through letters to the editor as well as direct submission of material. In its outwardturning , datelined reference to passing events, this kind of text offered "news" overlapping with the daily press, as well as incremental development of its themes through time. However, it is also decisively part of literary history, providing a means of dissemination without which notable literary careers and cultural work would have been impossible—including, perhaps most famously, Tompkins's test case of Harriet Beecher Stowe and her initial publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin. With an eye to such recent discussions of literature as cultural communication, this essay surveys the literary landscape fSQ I V. 49 I 1ST-3RD QUARTERS | 200J 81 PHYLLIS COLE of the 1850s in America from the reforming, feminist perspective of the nation's first major woman's rights periodical.2 The Una: A Paper Devoted to the Elevation of Woman arose from the woman's rights conventions and lasted from 1853 to l855> peak years of what F. O. Matthiessen called the "Renaissance" of American literature.3Though a relatively short-lived production , it amounts to both an intrinsic site for cultural study and a map of the larger terrain—including in its monthly miscellany feminist and antislavery politics, book reviews, letters to the editor, female and male authorship, sentiment and satire, fiction and poetry, rationalist argument and high romantic myth making. Its principle, as editor Paulina Wright Davis writes in the opening prospectus, is simply service to "the interests of woman" within "the solidarity of the race."4 As a result , almost every page of this understudied text mingles canonical authors and authorities with popular and amateur writers in a way that challenges our current setting of boundaries on the American literary turf. Davis, founder of the national convention movement in 1850, is here positioning its civic demands within a wider and more literary perspective—an eclectic romanticism affirming the transformative power of women's creativity. In one review, Davis declares 1854 "woman's year of creation"—a characterization deserving our attention alongside Hawthorne's famous dismissal of "scribbling women" just four months later. She actively seeks to turn readers into writers, urging women not to banish their lame progeny to the deep as the goddess "Here" had, but to find friends like the Nereids who will "heal their deformities, and bring them out perfected" (2·9·33°)· As her classical allusion implies, she hopes to locate women's creativity within the great Western traditions. Nonetheless, she is also calling for something unprecedented—a new birth and not a "renaissance"—out of the decade's democratic swell of writing and activism. The paper's writers reach wide and high in search of models for understanding women's condition. Elizabeth Palmer Peabody compares Eve and Pandora as mythic figures of fall and redemption , while Caroline DaIl reclaims the Greek Hypatia as a Platonic thinker, eventually a martyr to Christian fanatics (3-4-51» Ϊ-4-51)· 82 LITERARY LANDSCAPE OF THE UNA Davis's own title, the Una, refers to the one ideal truth, as the motto emblazoned on the masthead confirms: "Out of the Great Heart of Nature Seek We Truth." Una, Davis explains, is also Spenser's heroine, a female type of holiness—implicitly a Christ figure—who, when abandoned by the Red Cross Knight, "journeys alone in the wilderness" (2.2-212). New England transcendentalism strongly influenced this quest for models of individualistic truth seeking. Though originally from...