Critical Turns in the Study of Nineteenth-Century Women Writers

A decade into the twenty-first century, the study of nineteenth-century women writers is flourishing, as indicated not only in the publication of the three books under review here but also in efforts to reconceptualize the role of women writers in American literary history more generally in Elaine Showalter’s A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx (2009) and the collection of essays in A New Literary History of America (2009), the Harvard volume coedited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors.¹ The increased accessibility of digital archives of periodicals and what Amy Dunham Strand calls “cultural texts” have provided new ways of understanding previously recovered writers while also enabling the recovery of new ones (2). At the same time, as the three works I discuss below demonstrate, this new archive has given fresh ways of considering questions that have been at the heart of the field for the past 30 years. Broadly speaking, these questions pivot on a number of key binaries that have proven to be of enduring interest: private and public; domestic and global; privileged and underprivileged; exceptional and common; vocal and silent; subversive and compliant. Taken together, the three books considered here reify certain of these binaries while destabilizing others, showing the difficulty of developing frameworks that, as Felicity Nussbaum has put it, “avoid the generalizations that contribute to oppression based on gender” (qtd. in Laffrado 15).

As Nussbaum also suggests, one way to avoid such generalizations is to ground the study of “the spoken and unspoken commonplaces [women] share . . . in particular and local instances of history” (qtd. in Laffrado 15), and the critics considered here have done so in inventive and often illuminating ways, thinking in particular about the specific historical contexts of Jacksonian Indian removal and slavery; the Civil War and Reconstruction; and the emerging discourses of New Womanhood and turn-of-the-century immigration. In studying these contexts, these critics raise provocative questions about the relationship between literature and history. On one hand, they give examples of the agency of literature in creating national ideologies. Strand, for example, argues that “American language and American literature were linked,” and that a full history of the development of national language ideologies needs to consider the role of literature in shaping those ideologies (7). On the other hand, they suggest that literature, while shaped by history and politics, also provides a way for women writers, in particular, to imagine alternative identities that are individually powerful but not always publicly effective; in these views, women’s literature is marked less by its political agency than by its demonstrations of the limited ability of the aesthetic to influence ideological norms.

Another enduring question regarding the study of women’s writing in the nineteenth century has been the extent to which such writing should be studied as a special subfield or as a central part of the development of literary history broadly construed. These three books move across this continuum. Strand studies gendered discourses of language in works by both male and female writers, focusing in particular on Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Susan Warner, Charles Chesnutt, and Henry James. She argues that these writers all represent language in gendered terms that tend to equate national unity with the management and frequent silencing of the feminine voice. Such discourses lead not only to the linguistic self-discipline of key female characters like Warner’s Ellen Montgomery and James’s Verena Tarrant but also to the equation of masculine individualism with resistance to linguistic standardization: a resistance that, by the 1930s, H. L. Mencken could celebrate as being the achievement of American English in comparison with British (Strand 189). Laura Laffrado takes a different tack, focusing primarily on a group of women writers from the...