Winnie Woodfern Comes Out in Print: Story-Paper Authorship and Protolesbian Self-Representation in Antebellum America

Sometime after July 1851, Mary Field Williams Gibson, a teenage orphan from Vermont, moved to Boston to seek her fortune. By the following summer, the seventeen-year-old had begun publishing poems, sketches, and short stories in several of the city’s “story papers,” weekly periodicals that imitated the format of conventional newspapers but were mostly filled with popular fiction. During the early 1850s, more than half a dozen such papers were based in Boston, each claiming a national readership numbering in the tens of thousands. In that crowded and competitive field, editors scrambled to procure a sufficient quantity and wide enough variety of original American fiction to appeal to a heterogeneous mass audience. “Stories, give us stories!,” the editors frantically demanded, and aspiring young authors of both sexes gladly answered their calls. And so, writing mainly under the pseudonym “Winnie Woodfern,” Gibson soon established herself as a regular contributor to several of Boston’s most popular story papers. Responding to the varied needs of her editors, Gibson mastered a remarkably eclectic repertoire, including prose reveries, light satirical sketches, comical Yankee dialect pieces, sentimental narratives, tales of romantic intrigue, violent adventure stories, supernatural thrillers, and various types of poems.¹

But even as she launched her career as a successful author, Mary Gibson’s personal life was engulfed in crisis. In July 1852 she abruptly married a much older man, only to see the relationship fall apart within a matter of months. Far from treating the breakup as a hidden disgrace, Gibson integrated aspects of her personal crisis into many of her early published writings. Indeed, her real-life struggles became central elements in the crafting of her pseudonymous literary persona as Winnie Woodfern. In a series of poems, Gibson alternately mourned her shattered marriage, feuded with her estranged husband, and alluded to other intense friendships or romantic relationships with various men and women. In satirical sketches, she expressed disillusionment with heterosexual courtship and hostility toward the conventional gender ideals of domesticity. In some domestic tales, she explored the dynamics of marital discord and infidelity, while in others, she described the struggles of young women torn between the conflicting pulls of artistic or literary ambition and the traditional female goal of fulfillment through marriage. And in several sensationalistic thrillers, she recounted the adventures of young heroines who defied gender norms, adopted masculine roles, enjoyed intimate relationships with other women, and inflicted lethal violence on men. Collectively, Gibson’s disparate writings not only expressed considerable ambivalence toward conventional marriage—and heterosexual relations, more generally—but also explored two daring alternatives: the autonomous power of “female masculinity” and the dreamy pleasures of same-sex love.²

In its profusion of genres and sexual stances, Winnie Woodfern’s output challenges the standard scholarly division of antebellum American popular literature into two dichotomous, gender-based modes: woman-identified “domestic” or “sentimental” fiction, on the one hand, and male-oriented “adventure” or “sensation” fiction, on the other. Women’s domestic fiction achieved its greatest cultural visibility and commercial success during the early 1850s with such massive best-sellers as Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1850) and Maria Cummins’s The Lamplighter (1854). Contemptuously dismissed by critics throughout much of the twentieth century, such novels were rediscovered in the 1970s by feminist scholars and have received far more serious and systematic treatment ever since. Whereas scholars such as Nina Baym and Jane Tompkins claim that domestic fiction conveyed a feminist critique of society’s male-dominated “ethos of money and exploitation,” others emphasize the genre’s conservatism, implicating it in the rise of American consumerism, possessive individualism, and even imperialism. Despite these disagreements, however, virtually all affirm that such fiction embodied the popular middle-class ideology of domesticity—centered on “home, family, and religion”—with its core assumption that men and women are “essentially different” and hence destined to assume different social roles.³

In contrast to the upsurge of scholarship on domestic novels, far less work has been done in recent decades on nineteenth-century...