Holgrave's Legend of Alice Pyncheon as a Godey's Story

HOLGRAVE'S LEGEND OF ALICE PYNCHEON AS A GODETS STORY Jane Benardete Hunter College At the end of chapter twelve of The House of Seven Gables, Holgrave introduces his account of Phoebe's ancestress Alice Pyncheon by remarking that he has cast this "incident of Pyncheon family history" in "the form of a legend" and means to publish it "in a magazine." Phoebe is astonished to learn that the daguerreotypist writes for "the magazines" and he is equally surprised that she has not heard of his "literary fame." He assures her that his name has figured on the covers of Graham's and Godey's and is as "respectable" as any other in their "canonized bead-roll" of authors.1 With this exchange, Nathaniel Hawthorne, in effect, identifies the style of the tale that Holgrave tells and indicates that it should be read as an example of literary imitation, pastiche, or, perhaps, parody. Of the two publications Holgrave mentions, Godey's Lady's Book was the more important, being throughout the 1840s the undisputed leader in the growing field of publications for women. Where Godey's led Graham's followed, styling itself in the early 1840s half a lady's magazine. Today Godey's is remembered for its hand-colored, steelengraved fashionplates, but they are just one example of the elaborate standard of dress and interior decoration the magazine encouraged. Through an era of economic expansion, it urged its readers to amplify the physical comforts and aesthetic delights of their homes. Every issue carried instructions for fanciwork items to wear or display. A longrunning feature was "Godey's Cottages," which showed how to remodel simple homes with ornamental additions in styles like the Gothic or the bracketed. Recent scholarship3 has emphasized the magazine's contribution to the religion of domesticity and its depiction of the home as a counterbalance to the prevailing American values of individualism and commercialism. But the home Godey's glorified, in issue after issue, is—somewhat ambiguously—both an oasis of peace in the competitive world and a showcase for material success. The magazine was also consistently apolitical, concentrating upon the personal and domestic arts and ornaments to which its "lady readers" were assumed to be devoted, and its fiction reflected this editorial policy. In 1851, when The House of Seven Gables appeared, Godey's had just completed its most successful decade as a literary 230Notes magazine. Frank Luther Mott calls the list of contributors in the 1840s "brilliant."4 The "canonized bead-roll" to which Holgrave refers appeared on the title-page of each issue and included virtually all wellknown American writers of the period, among them Catherine Sedgwick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, "Grace Greenwood," Richard Montgomery Bird, Horace Greeley, Edgar Allan Poe, and Hawthorne himself. Yet despite its distinguished list, Godey's stories are lamentably uniform because they reflect the magazine's stereotyped view of woman's role and "sphere of influence." There is stylistic variety, but whether the fiction is set in high life or low, in America or Europe, in standard English or "Down-east" vernacular, it presents woman as the tastefully dressed manager of her well-decorated home whose comforts draw husband, brother, or husband-to-be from worldly entaglements. She herself is not an ornament but a servant in the domestic scene who knows that "labor is not a weariness when we work for those we love."5 So long as she clings to this doctrine, she cannot be charged with selfish indulgence or materialism, although the life she lives might seem to encourage both, and it is obvious that these are the pitfalls in her path. Tailored to this pattern, most of Godey's fiction reads like moralized fashionplates. Woman, the stories insist, should not indulge in personal display for its own sake; if she does, a lover or husband (shrewd critics of feminine demeanor) will reprove her. In Emma C. Embury's story "The Lady's Lesson, or How to Lose a Lover," for example , a frivolous beauty who likes elegant gowns is rejected by her lover because she ignores the plight of her seamstress, a "sister woman" condemned to "unbroken labor and privation." He prefers to wed a...