Style, Gender, and Fantasy in Nineteenth-Century American Women's Writing by Dorri Beam (review)

In focusing on a set of texts filled with "adultery, free love, interracial marriage, female rule, and withdrawal from society" (6), Dorri Beam's Style, Gender, and Fantasy in Nineteenth-Century American Women's Writing counters criticism's long-standing emphasis on the domestic and sentimental novel in this period. But Beam is interested less in narratives of adventurous women and more in a style of being a feminist through imagination and aesthetic excess. She offers an innovative perspective on the massy images and accretive syntax of Margaret Fuller, Ann Stephens, Margaret Oakes Smith, Mary Clemmer, Harriet Prescott Spofford, and Pauline Hopkins. Such "highly wrought" prose can be hard on the reader, but one of Beam's central insights is that the intractability of elaborate style manifests a form of will (1). She argues that whereas the culture saw women as objects of physical pleasure or passionless ciphers, highly wrought style fashioned a forceful feminine spirit that was experienced physically and could reshape how the gendered body was experienced.

One of the finest things the book yields is a persuasive new sense of Margaret Fuller's significance. Ann Douglas's The Feminization of American Culture portrayed Fuller as a heroine interested in historical conditions and serious politics and as a solitary alternative to a culture of female novelists celebrating the confines of domesticity. In contrast, Beam argues that Fuller's feminism relied upon literary style and the imagination; unlike many a reading of Fuller that laments her prose, Beam reveals its centrality to Fuller's feminism. In Beam's reading we see how even in the early flower sketches Fuller envisions a mode of feminine being that is at once spiritually infused and materially experienced, thereby setting the terms for her later work's sense of the pertinence of spiritual to cultural change. In a convincing chapter on the importance of mesmerism to nineteenth-century feminism, Beam shows how Fuller thought trance states might enable access to a feminine essence liberated from historical conditions but able to work back upon them.

Beam's account also reveals Fuller's connections to other women writers. Like Fuller, Ann Stephens used the language of flowers to offer an alternative sense of desire, as her style "provokes perverse sensations: recoil from its strange and stubborn aspect, but also perhaps vicarious pleasure in its glittering refusals" (72). Scholars working on the language of flowers will benefit from Beam's discussion of its deployment as more than a code. Margaret Oakes Smith believed that mesmerism enabled access to a vision of liberated femininity that was essential to feminist politics; Mary Clemmer suggests that "language" can be "turned and intensified to figure forth the sensuous soul," thereby enabling a "transformative movement between vision and reality" (125); and the image of the Indian pipe in Pauline Hopkins's Winona expresses "black femininity through the play of spirit and matter" (165). In her readings of this broad span of writers, Beam uncovers a major strain of feminist literature in which visions of the spirit and luxurious language fuel a forceful politics.

Beam also argues that the terms of florid feminist writing cross over into the work of canonical American romanticists. She offers compelling discussion of Hawthorne's alert hostility to this style, especially in "Rappaccini's Daughter." In considering Melville's Pierre, Beam discerns "a coalescing concern with formlessness, florid language, and reform" across the period (22), a point she carries into a discussion of the connections between Spofford's The Amber Gods and the work of Edgar Allan Poe. Beam's discussions of style's relation to reform in American literature feed into her contention that Americanist critics are still too fearful that speaking of aesthetics—and of the spiritual—entails a dangerous abandonment of political analysis. In contrast, she draws on postructural theorists including Judith Butler, Gilles Deleuze, and Rosi Braidotti to show that we can "take...