Sharing Secrets: Nineteenth-Century Women's Relations in the Short Story (review)

In her call for a rereading of nineteenth-century women’s short stories, Palumbo-DeSimone presents the credible hypothesis that if we are to understand what “happens” in these stories, stories that have been dismissed as seemingly uneventful or trifling, we would do well to use Susan Glaspell’s “A Jury of Her Peers” as a metaphor for critical analysis and a paradigm for our investigation. Palumbo-DeSimone argues that “the broad critical assumption that such stories are inherently inconsequential parallels the men’s conviction in Glaspell’s story that ‘nothing important’ transpired in Minnie Foster’s kitchen.” Palumbo-DeSimone exhorts us to emulate the women in the story and figure out what the clues in the kitchen tell us about what happened there. She contradicts the view of reclamation scholars who see these nineteenth-century stories as history rather than art and also resists reading these texts for what they say to us rather for than what they said to their audience. In order to give the art of the stories due consideration, they must be read in their context. Palumbo-DeSimone emphasizes the shared social experience of the women readers of these stories as an encoding device for reading the “gaps,” as necessary information for helping us understand authorial clues.

The study is consciously limited to “relationship stories” written by white, native-born, middle-class women such as Kate Chopin, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Sarah Orne Jewett. Three types of relationships are explored in the three main chapters. The first is “Family Secrets,” which looks at mother-daughter relationships. A chapter on female friendships follows, and the study concludes with an analysis of women’s community stories.

Critics are cautioned to rethink traditional readings that privilege the limited lens of the male-female relationship and ignore the underlying dynamic of female friendship that informs many plots. Palumbo-DeSimone makes her case in a reading of “Mariana” by Margaret Fuller and “At Bay” by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. To read perceptively, she reminds us, it is necessary to understand the sexually segregated worlds of nineteenth-century women. Arguing that women inhabited a separate sphere and that given such distinct spheres, the female relationship was crucial, Palumbo-DeSimone quotes Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s now familiar conclusion: “Romantic love between women was both socially acceptable and compatible with heterosexual marriage.” About such relationships, the female audience would understand what the male audience wouldn’t.

While Palumbo-DeSimone makes a convincing case for her strategy of rereading women’s relationship stories, highlighting the artistic intricacy involved, she does not necessarily prove that these stories need be “celebrated.” Still, one is grateful for her insight that there is more to them than meets the eye. She is sensitive to the fact that it is “not possible for a post-Freudian audience to refrain from allowing psychological and pseudo-psychological conceptions of gender relations, sexuality, and gender identity to enter into our reading of texts.” This study, however, reminds us to try.