A Renaissance for Elizabeth Stoddard

For almost one hundred years writer Elizabeth Stoddard (1823–1902) has been absent from most critical considerations of the nineteenth-century American literary landscape. This is despite numerous attempts at recuperation via republication, the earliest within her lifetime. The late twentieth century also saw attempts to return her to the public stage: In 1971, Johnson Reprint Corporation made available her novels The Morgensons (1862) and Temple House (1867); in 1984, Lawrence Buell and Sandra A. Zagarell presented a critical edition of the former, with additional materials, including letters and articles. These efforts importantly situated Stoddard as a crucial precursor of American Realist writing—something acknowledged by that movement's leader, William Dean Howells—and a feminist foremother, astute in her representation of female desire and critique of the institution of marriage.

While Elizabeth Stoddard began writing professionally in the 1850s, it was not until 1862, with The Morgensons, her first novel, that her artistic vision was fully realized. To some degree autobiographical—enough to alienate the people in her New England hometown—the novel is the coming-of-age story of the strong-willed Cassandra Morgenson. Written in the first person, The Morgensons is an antidote to those period novels and tracts chronicling the struggles of a young woman who must learn to sublimate her own desires as a means of submitting to God and Man, as epitomized by Susan Warner's best-selling The Wide, Wide World (1850). Instead, Cassandra must learn to acknowledge and accept her own desires—particularly those that are sexual—mastering the impulsive or sentimental. In contrast is her sister, Veronica, whose submission to the sentimental resonates with gothic bleakness in its enactment and outcome. The idea of a personal darkness—constructed as almost demonic in parts—that must be confronted permeates the novel, and the happiness of any character depends upon the degree to which he or she proves capable of confronting such. It is this psychological darkness that perhaps best characterizes Stoddard's novels, inspiring Nathaniel Hawthorne to write, "There are very few books of which I take the trouble to have any opinion at all, or of which I could retain any memory so long after reading them as I do of The Morgensons" (qtd. in Buell and Zagarell 262).

Despite such endorsements, this first novel did not sell, nor did Stoddard's second, Two Men (1865), also concerned with the effect of repressed desires and their potentially perverse eruptions. Her third and final novel, Temple House, takes up these concerns for a final time, embodied in the claustrophobic domestic sphere that provides the title. Stoddard's success at reproducing and sustaining, in the jagged text, the claustrophobia of the home provides incredible narrative tension and demonstrates her development as an author from her earlier short stories and journal pieces. Yet Stoddard called this novel both her "truest work"—in its artistry—and her "worst failure"—in its inability to garner public attention (Giovani 159). This failure to secure the marketplace popularity that would suggest a wider critical endorsement weighed heavily on the author. At various points, Stoddard attributed such poor sales to her publisher's lack of promotional effort (true), as well as to her timing, publishing as she did at a time of national upheaval, when escapist and uplifting tales, paired with those about national issues and/or war, alternately gripped the emotionally exhausted American reading public. While quipping that The Morgensons was her equivalent of the Civil War's "Bull Run," Elizabeth Stoddard little realized how out of step with the market she really was—her novels do not provide the requisite escape or adventure or reassurance; they insist upon confrontation and painful self-examination. Nor are they conventionally liberating exercises; rather, they...