American Women of Letters and the Nineteenth-Century Sciences: Styles of Affiliation (review)

REVIEWS Baym, Nina. American Women ofLetters and the Nineteenth-Century Sciences: Styles ofAffiliation. New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 2002. xii + 265 pp. Cloth: $60.00. Paper: $22.00. As in her previous books on nineteenth-century American women writers , Baym' s most recent book presents an impressive survey and synthesis of women cultural producers and their products. Even though nineteenth-century American women had neither the education nor the opportunities to be research scientists in the modern sense (a sense that was only beginning to be formulated and institutionalized), Baym contends that they nevertheless "affiliated " themselves with the sciences and used print culture to promote science and (male) scientists to America as essential to its national identity. "Ceding most ofthe doing of science—the production ofnew scientific knowledge in the field, laboratory, or study—to men, they allotted tasks like disseminating , popularizing, appreciating, and consuming it to women, thereby linking the genders in a constructive division of labors" (14). This synthesis was both progressive and conservative, progressive because women affiliates insisted that women had the intellectual capacity to understand science but conservative because they conceded that women could not produce science and should not leave the domestic sphere to attempt it. In each of her eleven chapters, Baym defines a "style of affiliation" through case studies of particular women: Almira Phelps writing popular botany textbooks for children , Sarah Hale promoting scientific education and knowledge for women and providing the means of that education through publication of scientific articles in Godey 's Lady 's Book, Elizabeth Carey Agassiz ghost-writing for her husband and promoting his legacy as his biographer, Catharine Beecher defining and promoting "domestic science," Susan Fenimore Cooper promoting botany and natural history as appropriate genteel pursuits for country "ladies ," and so forth. Baym's strongest influence as a scholar has been in the field of fiction. The Shape ofHawthorne's Career is still a touchstone in Hawthorne scholarship , and her Nineteenth-CenturyAmerican Woman 's Fiction set the agenda for the project of recovering women' s novels from the period. Even American Women Writers and the Work ofHistory included substantial analyses of women as writers of historical fiction as well as writers of history proper. Oddly enough, she spends a considerable amount of time in this book explaining why portrayals of women engaged in scientific pursuits are almost entirely absent from women' s fiction. Her most developed analysis of a single literary figure is a chapter on Emily Dickinson, whom she reads as skeptical of the synthesis of science and orthodox faith promoted by Amherst college' s 250Reviews curriculum (and, of course, by refusing to publish, Dickinson also elected not to engage in the public work of scientific affiliation as practiced by other women). In her chapter on "The Sciences in Women's Novels," Almira Phelps' children's novel Caroline Westerley; or, The Young Travelerfrom Ohio and Susan Warner's The Wide Wide World stand as the only examples of novels that programmatically engage their heroines in scientific inquiry as part of their educations. Augusta Jane Evans' Macaria features a heroine who spends every night observing the stars through a telescope and making astronomical calculations, but Baym ultimately argues that Irene Huntington engages in astronomy as "a form of private worship, a playing at research, not the real thing" (165). In short, she is not Maria Mitchell, the astronomer, the one American woman recognized as a "real scientist" because she discovered a comet. Baym's thesis as to why female heroines do not engage in scientific pursuits is provocative but developed primarily through assertion. "Fiction by women," she writes, "tended to an esthetic approach to female subjectivity " (153). Such an esthetic approach and the concomitant "feminization of belles lettres came about in historical conjunction with ideas of women as more intuitive, emotional, and imaginative than men" (153). As the "rational heroine" of the antebellum "conduct novel" was replaced by the subjective heroine of "the art novel," science as subject matter lost its tenuous foothold in women's literature (154). "The baroque rhetoric of women's fiction and poetry enunciated a specifically female perception of imaginative reality, whose imaginary opposite was utilitarian, earth-bound science" (154). She demonstrates this sweeping...