Introduction to “Adam Floyd”

By the early 1890s, Mary Jane Holmes was one of the most famous and financially successful American novelists of the nineteenth century. Consequently, she was invited to contribute to a collection of short stories by American women authors: The Woman’s Story: As Told by Twenty American Women. The text includes Holmes’s short story “Adam Floyd,”¹ as well as pieces by such literary luminaries as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rebecca Harding Davis, Augusta Evans Wilson, Sara J. Lippincott, and Louisa May Alcott. Laura C. Holloway, the collection’s editor, notes in her preface that the twenty stories are “a composite picture of the representative fiction work of the female writers of the republic.” She adds in Holmes’s biography that of the twenty authors published in the collection, Holmes is among the wealthiest, “a prolific and a popular author, and her success has been uninterruptedly great” (333).

While Holmes is known best for the thirty-eight novels² she published between 1854 and 1907, “Adam Floyd” is useful as a condensed representation of her writing style, her themes, and her character types, especially the male hero. In her well-known 1981 essay “Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors,” Nina Baym argues that the male hero in canonical American fiction, who functions separately from domestic life and concerns, sees women as a barrier to his independent life. While this figure is not found in all examples of American fiction, Baym points out that the image of the male as aloof and heroic in his individuality is found more typically in canonical American fiction (132–33).

Certainly Adam Floyd is an example of a protagonist who challenges and revises the representation of the male hero in American fiction; he is the complete opposite of the male protagonist who resents and resists so-called feminizing influences and domestic life.³ At the beginning of the story, readers learn that Adam is deeply religious, hard working, talented, kind, handsome, devoted to his blind mother, and nearly desperate to marry his fiancée Anna.

Anna is a good match in some ways for Adam; she loves him, and she is intelligent, beautiful, and wants to be faithful to him, but she is also immature and fickle. Holmes tells us that Anna has been away to school where she acquired a second language and studied “Algebras and Euclids.” Further, she is one “whom all the village lads coveted, and at whom it was rumored even Herbert Dunallen, the heir of Castlewild . . . had cast admiring glances” (336). Adam adores Anna, but fears he does not measure up to her, as he is merely an uneducated carpenter. Unfortunately for Adam, Anna has come to the same conclusion, thanks to Dunallen’s attentions.

Of course, Holmes does not agree with Anna or Herbert or Adam: She points out that while Herbert is elegant and graceful with his “hands . . . so white” like Anna’s, and Adam “could neither dress, nor dance, nor flatter, nor bow as Dunallen,” it is Adam who is “tenfold more worthy of Anna’s esteem” (338). Adam does not know yet about Herbert, but he senses Anna’s waffling affections. He considers offering to end the engagement, but Holmes tells us that “the very idea had made his great, kind heart throb with a pang so keen that he had striven to banish it, for to lose his darling now would be worse than death” (336).

Holmes’s solution to Adam’s anxieties is not to masculinize him in the tradition of the American male hero (a tradition found in literature, of course, but also in film, television, and popular culture), but to erase his fears about his own worthiness and then to offer him as a prize to her rehabilitated heroine, Anna. Adam requires some fine-tuning, but, ultimately, he reflects Holmes’s view that male heroes are those who are committed to white, middle-class domesticity. As Baym points out, the domestic novel “assumes that men as well as women find greatest happiness and fulfillment in domestic relations, by which are meant not simply spouse and...