Autobiography as Professional Ethic: Fanny Fern's Vision of Literary Partnership

Public controversy—displays of wild unfettered rage and aggression in broad daylight between respected figures otherwise known as proper ladies and gentlemen—was not uncommon in the streets of antebellum New York City. Victims of famous author Nathaniel Parker Willis's infidelity openly aired their rage on a national stage, as the most talked about romantic rivalry at the time drew Willis, Home Journal editor and fastidious dandy, into the unforgiving glare of the public spotlight. The spectacle occurred in 1850 on a June evening in New York City's Washington Square, where famous actor Edwin Forrest flogged Willis prostrate with a school master's gutta-percha whip (made from natural rubber introduced to the West in 1843) before an astonished crowd of onlookers. Merchants, vagrants, and bystanders rushing to Willis's aid withdrew immediately when Forrest screamed, "this man is the seducer of my wife!" (qtd. in Baker 115). To make matters worse for Willis, his sister Fanny Fern would deliver, in many ways, a more painful and lasting drubbing in her autobiographical rags-to-riches novel, Ruth Hall. As the novel presents it, Willis's sin against her, like his crime against Forrest, was also infidelity, only of the filial sort as he coldly spurned her desperate requests for aid in launching a literary career to escape the acute poverty threatening the welfare of her children. Ruth Hall indicts Willis for breaching codes of sibling sympathy and succor, loyalty and protection, virtually unpardonable transgressions by antebellum standards.¹

If Willis was the wrong literary brother, then Oliver Dyer, editor of the New York Musical World and Times, who is John Walter in Ruth Hall, was Mr. Right, the capital companion and literary partner she needed to realize her full literary and commercial potential. All the repellent features of Willis were rectified in Dyer and later in Robert Bonner, editor of the New York Ledger. Mr. Walter embodies Dyer and Bonner's patronage of generous financial protection, investment and loyalty exceeded only by the tender warmth of the sympathetic tears he sheds at several key moments in the novel, the most telling of which is when he first sees Ruth's impoverished living condition. As the foil to Hyacinth Ellet, Willis's fictional counterpart in Ruth Hall, Mr. Walter reflects Fern's code of literary business ethics and practice in the guise of a "real, warm-hearted, brotherly brother such as she had never known" (Ruth 144). While Hyacinth may wear the clothes and pantomime the manners of a gentleman,² he lacks the love and loyalty that Mr. Walter provides. This essay establishes that Fern's business ethic borrows liberally from the larger culture's obsession with filial love and sympathy and imagines its superior function within the context of laissez-faire capitalism³ and its attendant radical individualism taking hold in the young Republic. I argue that Ruth Hall offered the print culture a clear code of ethics governing publication practice, deftly combining the cultural premium of sympathy, especially as articulated through the dynamics of sibling love, with a strong belief in economic independence⁴ promised to the champions of laissez-faire capitalism. Fern's emphasis on the filial love at the heart of the best business partnerships speaks to her understanding of the limitations of individualism and the power of cooperative teamwork, adding a crucial and complicating dimension to her well-established independence—as seen in Joyce Warren's groundbreaking biography Fanny Fern: An Independent Woman—for which Fern has justifiably become an icon in literary history.

Marketing Scandal

The Willis adultery scandal only gained momentum during the five years between his public beating and the appearance of Ruth Hall as a gory divorce trail during the winter of 1851–1852 drew out in lurid detail the full portrait of the affair. The press seized upon the story, endlessly titillating a general public who delighted in the inversion and compression of such an arbiter of moral wisdom, manners, and etiquette they came to know through his editorship of The Home Journal. The trial also inverted and compressed accepted understandings...