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• 60 • chapter 3 sS “Walter Cannon Is My Comfort” Marriage and Family In August 1897 Cornelia James received an invitation to the wedding reception of a Radcliffe classmate. This was not the first fellow student she lost to marriage, and Cornelia was disgusted. “That is what they do—give up education for men—base men,” she sighed, wondering “if I shall ever find the man for whom I would be willing to give up my dear old Radcliffe.”1 Her outburst of feminist righteousness was somewhat dubious, for it was expressive less of deep-seated convictions than of personal frustration . The past week had been marred by a clash with one of her admirers, a Mr. Wakefield. He was a prominent member of Clifford Jaynes’s Unitarian congregation and a cherished guest at the Jayneses’ Sunday dinners, a wealthy bachelor, thoroughly conservative, sincere. Small wonder the family thought him an ideal suitor for their poor, unruly relative. No doubt Cornelia was duly impressed; still, this man was no match for her. Despite his education, social standing, wealth, reliability, she just could not take Wakefield seriously. The more earnest his intentions, the more the imp in her acted up, rebelling against this prematurely old “proper Bostonian.” Their encounters usually culminated in frustration and dismay on his side, a wild medley of laughter and embarrassment on hers. A night at the theater, described in a letter of 1 May 1897 to Helen, is indicative of this ill-fated relationship. Cornelia had not been enthusiastic about it in the first place, and she expressed her suppressed anger by assaulting him with iconoclastic remarks on religious matters, well aware that he was “very easily hurt in this respect.” Then fate struck in the form m a r r i a g e a n d f a m i l y • 61 of a broken garter. Cornelia’s dramatization of the mishap is so typical of her position in this relationship that it deserves being quoted in full. With her garter and stocking “spreading in white masses” around her feet, the young woman, conscious of how embarrassed her companion was by any reference to the human body, said coolly, “I beg your pardon but my stocking is coming off,” quite as if it were a usual occurrence. . . . Meanwhile the garter’s snapping had unbuttoned my drawers and they were slipping down around my feet also! I could not hitch the whole thing up in one grand sweep on the public street so I said, “Can’t we go back to the ladies’ dressing room at the theater?” . . . [W]e started back, I clutching my drawers with one hand and my stocking with the other and talking in a light, conversational tone. . . . Mr. Wakefield you know is perfectly exquisite about his clothes, and I don’t suppose his garters ever break. . . . I had to encourage and cheer him up or I fear he would have fainted on the spot and could only answer me in gasping monosyllables. . . . I got home and laughed for fully an hour by myself. It was an episode in which Cornelia’s gifts showed to the fullest: her sense of humor and self-ridicule, her ability to improvise. In the midst of a most embarrassing situation she was sparkling. It was also an episode that revealed the absence in Wakefield of all those qualities that, for Cornelia, spelled life: laughter, flexibility, presence of mind. The scene is encoded as an oppositional pattern that was stifling instead of challenging. Where she laughed, he gasped; where she performed, he almost fainted; her voice clashed with his silence. A situation that empowered her threw him into a state of paralysis. Yet no matter how ruthlessly she teased him, he always came back, and she tolerated him, for not only was she pleased at so much ardor, but also she pitied this man for his inability to embrace life, and for his desperate struggle to grasp a glimpse of it through her. The relationship collapsed when Wakefield, not satisfied with nourishing his stifled nature by observing her vitality, tried to establish property rights by reducing her to that state of paralysis in which he made himself at home. Attracted as he was to this vivacious woman, he felt he must tame her before he could claim her as his wife, never realizing that in doing so he would obliterate everything that attracted him. On a boat ride on the Charles River he upbraided her for...

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