Imprisoned In/At Home: Criminal Culture in Rebecca Harding Davis' Margret Howth: A Story of To-day

LISA A. LONG Imprisoned In/At Home: Criminal Culture in Rebecca Harding Davis' Margret Howth: A Story of To-day 'idway through Rebecca Harding Davis' first novel, Margret .Howth: A Story o/To-day (1862), her social reformer, Dr. Knowles, exposes the seemingly uninhabitable dens of the homeless to the title character, demanding of her, "Home! . . . oh, Margret, what is home?"1 Knowles' deceptively simple question conjures up issues central to the text: the ravages of industrial capitalism, the dictates ofdomestic ideology , and the vulnerability and marginal status assigned to those unsuccessfully negotiating either one. Several critics have already noted that despite the fact that mainstream culture reified the home as a secluded refuge, untainted by the public world of work, there was as Michael Grossberg identifies it, a mid-century anxiety about the home. Many nineteenth-century writers suspected that "public America seems almost to pour into the private sanctuary," infecting the apparently insular sphere with anti-democratic ideals and capitalist notions. Indeed, one critic has noted that the crime stories and murder mysteries contemporaneous to Margret Howth repudiate the effectiveness ofthe home as safehouse.2 In Margret Howth Davis shows us that the domestic space is part of a criminal culture in which homes are prisons and prisons become homes. Especially striking is how the discourses of "home" and "criminality " animate each other; criminals are defined as homeless, while non-traditional homes and the people who inhabit them are considered criminal. Davis' pairing is neither isolated nor incidental; prison reform Arizona Quarterly Volume 54, Number 2, Summer 1998 Copyright © 1998 by Arizona Board ofRegents ISSN 0004-1610 66Lisa A. Long was evolving in the 1860s as legal scholars were creating domestic law.3 The industrial "home" most clearly inscribes domesticity and penology within a strengthening U.S. capitalist economy, for that home is always inhabited by criminals: either the poverty-marked victims of a brutal economy who labor there, or the unscrupulous opportunists who exploit them. Prisons and homes come to infuse each other so thoroughly —in legal and reform documents, as well as in Davis' novel— that the differences between them become practically negligible. Davis' acute interest in the socioeconomic dynamics ofan emerging capitalist society, as well as her editorial work at the Wheeling lntelli' gencer, would have made her familiar with the evolution of domestic law and prison reform; most likely, she knew Enoch Wines, the leading proponent of penological reform during the 1860s.4 Wines and Theodore Dwight's "epoch-making" Report on the Prisons and Reformatories ofthe United States and Canada (1867) posits that an inadequate homelife causes criminal behavior, while a home-like environment may stem that impulse.5 Legal maneuvering such as that exhibited by James Schouler in A Treatise on the Law Of Domestic Refotions (1870), the leading casebook of its time, further weds the notions of homelessness and criminality.6 Thus the intensely sympathetic alliance white, middle -class, women writers like Davis forged with the enslaved, impoverished , incarcerated, and other marginalized groups, reflected not only their shared disenfranchisement, but also the social policies and legal foundations which were solidifying and amalgamating their common oppressions. While many critics contend that the family is a creation of nineteenth-century domestic law, Davis adds, I will argue, that the home is as much created by the dictates of mid-century criminal law and prison reform.7 With the development of a criminalized domestic culture, Davis nuances her understanding of mid-nineteenth-century capitalism, articulated a year earlier in her highly-acclaimed Life in the hon Mills.8 However, scholars cite the novice author's ongoing struggle with the powerful Aaantic Monthly editor, James T Fields, as tempering the cultural analysis offered in her second effort, as well as vitiating its aesthetic power. Fields' insistence that Davis change the "assembled gloom" of her manuscript into "sunlight" prompted Davis to destroy the original text and append the novel's seemingly traditional ending (lovers are reunited, fortunes fortuitously attained) to its unremittingly bleak Imprisoned in/At Home67 beginning. Margret Howth is generally deemed a "failure in artistic terms" because of the unevenness of tone forced upon her.9 Jean Fagan Yellin, whose efforts recovered Margret Howth...