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E. D. E. N. Southworth: An “American George Sand”? Charlene Avallone If the southern literary Messenger were the arbiter of reputation, E. D. E. N. Southworth would have been damned as the American George Sand. The magazine awarded her some part of “the doubtful honors of a Dudevant” beginning with The Deserted Wife, “a work of the very worst description of the loose-tunic and guilty-passion school” of “French sentimentalism.”1 shannondale, too, the Messenger found “equally vicious in its tendency” as “the compositions of George Sand,” although this novel lacked “those striking qualities” that make hers “fascinating .”2 By contrast, The Mother-in-law ranked as the “strongest” of Southworth’s “highly-colored ‘artist’ productions,” while containing no “positively immoral passages” akin to the notorious steamboat seduction scene in The Deserted Wife. Still, this novel too displayed “questionable . . . morality” and numerous formal features that betrayed Southworth’s “strong, unfeminine, thoroughly french organization ” and established her as an “admiring reader of the more exceptionable productions of the present French School of Romance writers.”3 Together the Messenger’s three reviews of Southworth’s novels suggest multiple parallels between her writing and Sand’s, parallels in sentiment, moral tone and tendency, the flouting of social and literary decorum, the treatment of passion (especially adulterous passion), “indelicate” plot incidents, “general moulding [sic] of character ,” an insinuating or allusive mode of representation (rather than verisimilitude and directness), intense and “Frenchified” style, and self-conscious artistry.4 Yet Southworth did not become “the American Sand” as, say, James Fenimore Cooper became “the American Scott” or Catharine Sedgwick “the American Edgeworth.” No other journal took up the parallel. Writing after the Messenger’s review of shannondale, Henry Peterson, the publisher of Southworth’s serials in the saturday evening Post, consoled himself in an editorial “that she is outgrowing ” such “faults” as “a leaning in certain parts to the French school,” if not as fast as “[w]e hoped.”5 Aside from Nina Baym, the first actually to label Southworth “the American George Sand,” modern critics largely ignore the equivalence. Baym 156 Charlene Avallone generalizes that nineteenth-century reviewers “called” Southworth “the American George Sand” because she wrote “something called ‘high-wrought fiction’” or “[n]ovels of passion”—a dramatic, popular form in an “intensified” style, what reviewers saw as “the antithesis” of the domestic novel.6 Linda Naranjo-Huebl, the only other critic who notices the linking, lays greater stress on objections to Southworth’s “moral tone”; reviewers disapproved not only of her “style” but also her “subject matter” as “excessive, extravagant, wild, . . . dangerous.”7 Both Baym and Naranjo-Huebl approach the linking of Southworth and Sand exclusively as a question of reception history, and therefore neither extends the reviews’ connection of the two writers. The lack of critical attention to parallels between the two writers reflects the general lack of attention to intertextuality in Southworth studies. Most of the small notice that does exist positions her work against canonical men’s writing as derivative, serving to deny her originality and artistry. Frank Luther Mott offers no support for his contention that “she was a born imitator” whose work simply “echoes” that of Scott, Dickens, and Cooper.8 Still, his detraction recurs as if authoritative . Even in an entry in a feminist encyclopedia asserts Southworth “perhaps unconsciously echoes” these writers. The most extended address of literary intertextuality in her work deems Southworth less creative than Melville because she “reinscribes” sentimental ideology through “happy endings” of marriage, “[t]rue to the formula made popular by Scott and Cooper.”9 Southworth herself emphatically denied any facile imitation in her writing. Toward the end of her career, she “challenge[d] anyone to find anything in my stories that ever was published in any preceding story.”10 She was wary, however, of others trading off imitations of her fiction, counting the “Points of Identity” between her own and later novels to judge whether they added up to plagiary.11 Yet while originality appears essential to her sense of her achievement, her sense of originality appears to accommodate correspondences with earlier texts and genres. Her fiction openly acknowledges when a character develops from a Shakespearean “prototype and namesake” and registers when genre features of a “domestic tragedy” she fictionalizes concur with those of “old Greek drama.”12 Together, Southworth’s attention to literary pilfering and her fiction’s selfconscious assimilation of pretexts reveal concern about the part that another’s writing may legitimately play in the creation of a...

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