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American Literature 75.1 (2003) 31-60



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"Carry[ing] a Yankee Girl to Glory":
Redefining Female Authorship in the Postbellum United States

Naomi Z. Sofer

Hurrah! My story was accepted. . . . People seem to think it is a great thing to get into the "Atlantic," but I've not been pegging away all these years in vain, and may yet have books and publishers and a fortune of my own.

—Louisa May Alcott, Journals, 1859

I . . . shared the general awe of [the Atlantic] . . . and, having possibly, more than my share of personal pride, did not very early venture to intrude my little risk upon that fearful lottery. . . . . I have yet to learn that . . . [my first Atlantic story] attracted any attention from anybody more disinterested than those few friends of the sort who, in such cases, are wont to inquire, in tones more freighted with wonder than admiration: "What! Has she got into the Atlantic?"

—Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Chapters from a Life, 1896

Despite their pleasure at having published in the most prestigious literary magazine of the day, both Louisa May Alcott and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps express, in the epigraphs above, ambivalence toward their achievement. Alcott implies that people's excitement at her appearance in the Atlantic Monthly is misplaced, since this event is not a guarantee of success but merely one high point in a long literary life. Phelps's account of her first publication in the Atlantic registers a similar mixture of pride and bafflement. Her decision to delay submissions to the Atlantic until after she had published elsewhere points to a self-imposed, systematic literary apprenticeship; her claim to be confused by the story's acceptance, and her somewhat sarcastic [End Page 31] depiction of the backhanded compliments such success elicits, reveals her determination to view the episode as part of her artistic development rather than its completion.

The ambivalence both Alcott and Phelps express about their first appearance in the Atlantic marks a change in U.S. women writers' self-conception in the second half of the nineteenth century. Willing to call themselves artists, they could now claim a place within the emerging U.S. cultural elite. But as the past twenty years of feminist scholarship have shown, a woman writer of the nineteenth century who claimed the status of artist set herself immediately in conflict with her own culture, which defined woman and artist as mutually exclusive. Alcott's and Phelps's ambivalence is symptomatic of this dilemma, which is at the heart of the complex, conflicted, and often internally contradictory visions of female authorship that abound in postbellum fiction.

Before they could claim to be artists, Alcott, Phelps, and Rebecca Harding Davis, among others, had to redefine what it meant to be an American woman writer. That process of redefinition is the subject of this essay. Between 1860 and 1880, U.S. women writers self-consciously examined and revised the two models of authorship available to them: the popular female author and the romantic male genius. Harriet Beecher Stowe's famous declaration that "God wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin" reflects the denial, or subordination, of artistic ambition in the antebellum model for women, which figured the author as a mere medium, usually for a religious or moral message. 1 At the same time, success in the marketplace was regarded not only as a woman's primary motivation but also as evidence of her lack of artistic ambition, as when Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall explains to a fictitious reader that she writes for "bread and butter, not fame." 2 Redefining female authorship required, as a first step, that women writers circumvent the antebellum assumptions that popular women writers had no artistic ambition. Members of what I call the transitional generation—women writers who came of age professionally in the 1860s—not only rejected the antebellum model for women but also transformed it, inverting many of its premises to redefine themselves in terms that conformed to the newly demarcated realm of high-cultural production. But postbellum women writers did not simply...

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