Literary Interiors, Cherished Things, and Feminine Subjectivity in the Gilded Age

The so-called Gilded Age is generally perceived as a time when a materialist mentality took hold of Americans—a period when their country underwent tremendous economic and social transformations that had a major impact on people's lives, attitudes, and ways of self-fashioning. Indeed, the dominant narrative about the Gilded Age is, as Winfried Fluck and Leo Marx have pointed out, the one about America's "historical turn towards materialism" (415). In his recent study A Sense of Things (2003), Bill Brown draws attention to the centrality of the physical object world in late nineteenth-century American culture; he speaks of an "age of things," referring to an era when the invention, production, distribution, and consumption of material objects took on unprecedented forms and quantities (5). My focus here will also be on things and the relations people maintain with them, but I am less concerned with discontinuity—the narratives of a new materialism—than with certain continuities. I will concentrate on the domestic, subjective, and feminine dimensions of human object-relations—relations that are embedded in and shaped by specifically gendered interiors. In this paper, "interiority" denotes both subjectivity and interior space, and I explore the connections between spatial, material, and psychic aspects of interiority, including the inner or secret life of things. Accordingly, it is the inside of "materialism" rather than its conspicuousness that interests me here—a materialism that is intimate rather than public, moral rather than fetishistic, idiosyncratic rather than narcissistic.

Concretely, I will analyze the literary life of domestic objects in two short stories, one by Sarah Orne Jewett and one by Mary Wilkins Freeman. In these writings, the domestic sphere is the major arena of women's development, influence, and self-articulation, and it is also the realm where the relations between the genders, parents, and children, and, most significantly, people and things are mapped out. I consider the literary treatment of domestic material culture with regard to the cultural revaluation of the so-called "woman's sphere" in mid-nineteenth-century America, which attributed a major responsibility to women as guardians of civilization. In this tradition, the white middle-class home was closely associated with an ideal of feminine domesticity. The contemporary advice literature—most prominently Harriet Beecher Stowe and Catherine Beecher's The American Woman's Home (1869)—emphasized women's vital role as "ministers" of the family home. A Christian and moral dimension was ascribed to the tasks of housekeeping, child-rearing, and interior decoration—and woman's civilizing role was estimated accordingly. My paper sets out from the perception that this ideal domesticity does not simply encompass a woman's care and love of her husband and children but also that of physical objects. Like the family, domestic things are in her charge, they are objects of her affection and devotion as well as media of feminine self-expression that articulate her aesthetic sensibility and refinement. While the association of material and psychological forms works rather harmoniously in the work of Stowe, it is rendered more complicated in the stories by Jewett and Freeman where the emotional bonds between female characters and private objects are still significant but have ceased to correspond to an ideal of feminine domesticity in an unproblematic way.

Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Motherly Chair

I will briefly exemplify the relevant aspects of Stowe's "sentimental materialism" (see Merish) with regard to the famous chapter in Uncle Tom's Cabin entitled "The Quaker Settlement."¹ Here, the emotional investment in things is often accompanied by an animation of the home's object world; that is, things assume a lively, sometimes even a human aspect. A case in point is offered by Rachel Halliday's prominent rocking chairs: There is "a larger sized one, motherly and old, whose wide arms breathed hospitable invitation, seconded by the solicitation of its feather cushions,—a real comfortable, persuasive old chair, and worth, in the way of honest, homely enjoyment, a dozen of your plush or brochetelle drawing-room gentry" (utc 116). Rachel Halliday's chair reflects the human...