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Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911), the proli¤c and popular nineteenthcentury writer, was deeply interested in benevolence, and many of her novels deal with it. One of her earliest stories, “The Tenth of January” published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1868, described the 1860 collapse of the Pemberton mill in Lawrence, Massachusetts, an accident that resulted in the deaths of many of the 750 mill employees. Phelps, who had been sixteen years old when the accident occurred just a few miles from her home in Andover, credits this event with heightening her awareness of the working classes. In her autobiography, she explains: Upon the map of our young fancy the great mills were sketched in lightly; we looked up from the restaurant ice-cream to see the “hands” pour out for dinner, a dark and restless, but a patient throng. . . . Sometimes we counted the great mills as we drove up Essex Street . . . but this was an idle, aesthetic pleasure. We did not think about the millpeople ; . . . One January we were forced to think about the mills with curdling horror, which no one living in that locality when the tragedy happened will forget. (88–89) Her engagement with this event intensi¤ed several years later: At the time this tragedy occurred, I felt my share of its horror, like other people; but no more than that. My brother, being of the privileged sex, was sent over to see the scene; but I was not allowed to go. 7 “Oh the Poor Women!” Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Motherly Benevolence Jill Bergman It is certain that I very early had the conviction that a mother was a being of power and importance to the world. —Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Chapters from a Life Years after, I cannot say just how many, the half-effaced negative came back to form under the chemical of some new perception of the signi¤cance of human tragedy. It occurred to me to use the event as the basis of a story. (91) In this multilayered event—combining the mill’s collapse from which she was barred as a woman, her later re®ection upon it, and her use of the event to write a story—coalesce Phelps’s interest in human suffering, her awareness of “the peculiar needs of women as a class” (Chapters 99), and her commitment to writing, a joining that would inform her literary theory for the next forty years. Defending her status as a realistic writer in the face of William Dean Howells’s criticism of writers who “still helplessly pointed the moral in all they did” (Chapters 260), Phelps vehemently asserted that a great writer could not lose sight of morality: “In any highly-formed or fully-formed creative power, the ‘ethical’ as well as the ‘aesthetical sense’ is developed. Where ‘the taste’ is developed at the expense of ‘the conscience,’ the artist is incomplete” (Chapters 262). Following her conscience, Phelps constructed the act of writing as an avenue for benevolence—both as a way of comforting suffering readers and of offering instruction in benevolent behavior—and in this way, she claimed for herself a benevolent role as a writer. She theorized and dramatized benevolence as a personal, familial reform particularly available to women and indebted to the antebellum ethos of domesticity. Moreover, she cast this motherly benevolence as distinct from—and superior to—religiously oriented reform models of the antebellum era as well as the institutionalized and formal postbellum reform models. This maternal model gave rise to contradictions in her work, however . While Phelps’s maternal metaphor holds promise for a feminist and socialist vision, calling for a close and affectionate connection between benefactor and recipient of care, the model does have limitations. Her motherly position allows her as an author—and her middle-class readers as potential reformers—to solidify her middle-class status by maintaining a position of superiority over the “children” of the model. Phelps’s notion of motherly benevolence, then, is a double-edged sword that encourages benevolent behavior and grants authority to middleclass women but undermines the possibility of sisterhood across class lines. Motherly Benevolence 191 The Motherly Writer As she re®ected on her life in her autobiography, Chapters from a Life (1896), Phelps conceived of the act of writing as a form of and site for benevolence, and she described her writing as a distinctly feminine endeavor , an act she linked closely to mothering. The subject of mothering and motherlessness became very real to Phelps...

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