Hungry Heart: The Literary Emergence of Julia Ward Howe (review)

Hungry Heart: The Literary Emergence of Julia Ward Howe. By Gary Williams. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999. 288 pp. $34.95 cloth.

Among Julia Ward Howe’s pre-Civil War writings, her “Laurence manuscript,” an unpublished novel about a hermaphrodite, most strikingly confirms Gary Williams’s analysis of a remarkable friendship between the poet’s husband Dr. Samuel Howe and four-term Senator from Massachusetts Charles Sumner. Hungry Heart: The Literary Emergence of Julia Ward Howe is a literary biography that explodes conventional wisdom about the lyricist of “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Williams argues that the conciliatory bride became a vengeful wife when she tried to come to terms with what he carefully articulates as a striking intimacy between her husband and his friend. Black and white illustrations of the Howes, Julia’s friends, and hermaphrodite figures Julia likely saw in Rome, as well as fifty-three pages of notes, support this strong reading. I enjoyed Williams’s wonderfully literary treatment of what still to some are not very literary texts, and he provides a model of archival research and scholarly synthesis that should be repeated for many nineteenth-century women poets. Yet sometimes his “relentless impulse to autobiographize” (150), as even Williams characterizes his focus on Howe’s response to her husband and Sumner’s relationship, tends to preclude possible alternate readings of her novel manuscript and of her poetry.

     Williams’s study doubtless traverses some of the rockiest terrain in the marriage. In its first two chapters, Williams details the couple’s courtship and early years, when Julia grew aware of a stark contrast between the passion of the Greek war hero and reformer she had married and his icy reserve toward her scholarly and literary impulses. To set the stage for fraught scenes in the novel, Williams reads with care even the first love letters between the founder of Boston’s Perkins Institute for the Blind and Julia Ward—the willful daughter of a New York banker, a laughing socialite, and already a published poet and critic when she married Howe at twenty-three. Alert to the doctor’s forcible attempt “to construct a being ‘animated by the same spirit . . . bound on the same errand’ as its author” (29), Julia responded lightly, but she was clearly irritated by his letter. Samuel’s return missive blended, as Williams unfolds it, both “jocular counterattack and didacticism” in a text that is more sermon than love letter (31). Williams’s similarly sensitive reading of Sumner’s letters to and about Dr. Howe is the most thoughtful and complex treatment of nineteenth-century male affection I have read anywhere. If intricacies of their attachment were “perhaps both inexpressible and incomprehensible” to the two men, maybe, as Williams says, “it was left to Julia Howe . . . to discover a way to articulate these meanings” in her novel (44). But could it be that Julia’s reflections on gender in the novel also resonate with her own role as that ambivalent antebellum oxymoron, woman writer?

     I won’t give away much about the novel manuscript, “quite a little romance,” as Howe termed it at first mention to her sister Louisa (81). Its hermaphrodite protagonist seeks and spurns, is sought out and rejected by, both men and women. Laurence is poet, scholar, contemplative, lover, adventurer, rake, and “superhuman mystery” (94). What resonates for me, along with many suggestive fragments Williams gives us, is this characterization of Laurence just before his death: “It is true that she [sic] can reason better than most women, yet is she most herself when she feels . . .” (94). And this of another ambivalently gendered figure in the novel: “[N]o man can feel as she feels, no woman can reason as she reasons” (93). It may well be that Julia wrestled here with apparently conflicting facets of her husband’s behavior, but just as surely she struggled with characterizations of apparently “unnatural” women, of herself as wife and scholar...