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Legacy 17.2 (2000) 235-236



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Book Review

Plots and Proposals:
American Women’s Fiction, 1850–90


Plots and Proposals: American Women’s Fiction, 1850–90. By Karen Tracey. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000. 224 pp. $45.00/$16.95 paper.

Plots and Proposals analyzes numerous nineteenth-century American appropriations of the originally British double-proposal marriage plot, arguing that in the hands of American women writers the “double-proposal novel” that appears to “offer no challenge to literary or cultural expectations” in fact “alter[s] the very conventions it appears to blandly reproduce” (8). Tracey claims that American versions of this plot provide readers with conventional narratives of courtship and marriage only to frustrate readers’ expectations by including a failed first proposal that paves the way for heroines to resist and potentially renegotiate patriarchal expectations of women’s domestic roles. By first invoking a traditional marriage plot and then distancing readers from that plot, the woman-authored American novel during the second half of the nineteenth century “creates dissonance within the reader that is not entirely resolved by apparently harmonious happy [End Page 235] endings” in which hero and heroine are reunited (8). The discordant echoes these double-proposal plots produce in their readers, Tracey argues, “contribute to social change” (181).

     Tracey begins her analysis of the double-proposal plot in an American context by exploring its articulations in the antebellum South, with close readings of works by Caroline Lee Hentz and Augusta Evans. She argues that these two “avowedly conservative writers” use the double-proposal form to carve a niche for the white woman in a culture based upon white male supremacy. By refusing their first marriage proposals, Hentz’s and Evans’s heroines register a desire for social progress that is not entirely negated by their final acceptance of second proposals, which reaffirm a southern patriarchal society that denies women equal political participation. In her accounts of Laura J. Curtis Bullard and E.D.E.N. Southworth, Tracey shows how women who write from the vantage point of the North create a more “progressive, even radical” account of heroines’ renegotiation of marriage and the social ideals it encodes (110). Tracey is particularly convincing in her account of how Southworth’s Britomart, the Man-Hater employs the history of the Civil War, using the political rhetoric of secession and conflict to point out the power inequities undergirding the initial marriage proposal. Less clearly accounted for is how the gothic elements that Tracey equates in Bullard’s and Southworth’s texts with women’s disempowerment are related to the particular history and narrative form the writers use to reimagine women’s social roles. As a result, one wonders how other woman-authored gothic stories that employ the double-proposal plot (such as Louisa May Alcott’s “A Whisper in the Dark”) might provide complicating accounts of the heroine’s ability to develop greater autonomy through the gothically-inflected double-proposal structure.

     Tracey’s compelling, final reading of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Story of Avis by showing how references to the Civil War combine with references to British-authored double-proposal stories like Aurora Leigh in order to represent Avis’s intense struggle with the conflicting demands of career, marriage, and motherhood. At this important juncture a more detailed, well-developed account of the interrelations between British narrative form and American political history would be useful. Such an account would make less vague Tracey’s claim, for example, that “Barrett Browning’s ambitious model seemed to have combined with the drama and anguish of war to inspire Phelps to write” (152). It is clear from Tracey’s impressive account of their repeated alignment in late nineteenth-century texts that America’s history of war politicizes the British double-proposal plot for American women writers and by extension the female characters they create. One wonders if the same might be true for male writers of the period, such as Henry James, who employ the double-proposal plot, and, if so, what role the author’s gender identity plays in...

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