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  • Roman Fever: Domesticity and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Writing
  • Carey R. Voeller
Roman Fever: Domesticity and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Writing. By Annamaria Formichella Elsden. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004. 155 pp. $52.95/$23.95 paper.

Roman Fever: Domesticity and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Writing furthers our understanding of nineteenth-century American, middle-class, white women and their negotiation of social and political identities. Annamaria Formichella Elsden analyzes how Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, Constance Fenimore Woolson, and Edith Wharton used and manipulated Italy and Italian imagery in their texts. Italy, as Elsden maintains, provided these writers with “their feminist projects by portraying escape from both domestic boundaries and the stereotype of nineteenth-century femininity” (x). Through an Italian lens, these women proved not only able to articulate identities that challenged nineteenth-century notions of normative femininity, but also “to bolster their arguments for more truly democratic republics” (xv). Previous scholars have neglected women writers in their discussions of nineteenth-century Americans’ fascination with Italy. This is where Elsden steps in, and she delivers an insightful and engaging study.

Discussing Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home, Elsden argues that although sections of the text conform to other popular, escapist travel narratives written by men, Sedgwick also manipulates the genre in order to offer a realist “political agenda” that speaks to the disenfranchisement of women, the stereotypes of Italians, and the treatment of American Indians by the United States (12). Elsden’s next chapter deals with Fuller’s journalism for the New- York Daily Tribune. According to Elsden, Fuller sees the attempts of numerous Italian city-states to declare independence in 1847 as an opportunity to renew America’s own patriotism and nationhood. She “enlist[s] the aid of fellow Americans in the ultimate goal of transporting American ideals and experience to Italy. . . . The suggestion is that America will rise anew by sustaining other countries in their struggles for freedom” (33). Both Sedgwick and Fuller’s distance from the United States and from the middle-class boundaries in which they were expected to remain and write allowed them a wider space and freedom to articulate their political concerns.

Elsden interprets the fifteenth-century Italian setting of Agnes of Sorrento as a reaction to Stowe’s narrator’s own moment of capitalism, slavery, paternity, and domesticity. This negation of the present allows Stowe to configure a new domesticity, one that moves beyond the home and into a boundless and lush Italian landscape. Moreover, the absence of geographical and social boundaries [End Page 170] permits an all-inclusive global community based on Christianity and nourished by maternal affection. This chapter contains some of Elsden’s best close reading and analyses.

Two chapters deal with either women artists or their fictional representations. Sophia Hawthorne’s Notes in England and Italy allows its author, who is also a copy painter, to offer critical judgments on the art she visited. At the same time, “The visual perspective afforded by Italy and the freedom to create outside of domestic boundaries . . . allow Sophia’s artist’s eyes to see America’s future through the Italian past” (77). Italy acts as a liberating force, both personally and nationally. In contrast, Woolson’s stories “Miss Grief” and “The Street of the Hyacinth” reveal an Italy that squanders feminine artistic creativity. It is representative of “patriarchy itself” (95). Male artists and critics set the standards, and ultimately both the United States and Italy come to figure as “the cultural imperative that sought to domesticate [Woolson]” (110). In closing, Elsden offers a hopeful reading of Wharton’s “Roman Fever.” She argues that the story’s Roman setting, particularly the Coliseum, helps to shed light on “the New Woman and the historical centrality of women’s affairs” (128).

In her attempts to show how each woman breaks boundaries, Elsden occasionally neglects the topic at hand. In the chapter on Fuller, for example, Italy seems marginal, almost an afterthought, and Elsden’s argument for its importance is not always convincing. More crucially, she does not examine the politics and problems of the authors’ idealization...

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