Alternative Economies: Authorship and Ownership in Elizabeth Stoddard's "Collected by a Valetudinarian"

ALTERNATIVE ECONOMIES: AUTHORSHIP AND OWNERSHIP IN ELIZABETH STODDARD'S "COLLECTED BY A VALETUDINARIAN" Ellen Weinauer University of Southern Mississippi As a successful "Eastern correspondent" for the Daily Alta California from 1 854-1858, Elizabeth Stoddard usedmany ofher columns to air what might be called cynical opinions on the contemporary woman's rights movement and its female participants. In one column, for example, Stoddard mocks feminist-abolitionist Lucy Stone's insistence on retaining her maiden name after her marriage to Henry Blackwell, calling it an instance of"miserable egotism" motivated only by a "desire to gain notoreity [sic]."1 And after attending the Woman's Rights Convention of 1856, Stoddard asserts that she will "tak[e] an humble place in the ranks of Women's Rights and Women's Shall Haves" only after she has "done laughing" at what she takes to be the ludicrous nature of the convention proceedings (pp. 328, 327). As Lawrence Buell and Sandra Zagarell note in their collection of Stoddard's work, although her "temperament committed her to exploring and challenging the systems ofpower that disadvantaged her as a woman," Stoddard herself"rarely invoked—or displayed—the bonds of sisterhood."2 It is perhaps surprising, then, to find precisely such bonds operating in Stoddard's own "Collected by a Valetudinarian."3 Published in Harper 's New Monthly Magazine in 1 870, "Collected" is an intricate tale about Alicia Raymond, a little-known "woman ofgenius" (p. 289), and the women who encounter her through a diary she leaves as an inheritance. Written at a significantjuncture in her career—Stoddard had at this point virtually abandoned the novel form, where she met with a very limited readership, in favor ofthe short story—"Collected" manifests a perhaps predictable interest in the nature of authorial vocation and literary audience.4 What is less predictable is how Stoddard makes use ofthe "bonds of sisterhood" to frame her inquiries. "Collected by a Valetudinarian" gives such bonds a central salvific function. They help restore Eliza Sinclair—the "valetudinarian" ofthe title and our first-person narrator—to physical and emotional health. Eliza has, she tells us, gone "traveling ... in search ofsomething lost, i.e., health, and to appease a heart disquieted by grief (p. 285).5 In her 168Ellen Weinauer "search," she goes to "an old village on our sea-board" (p. 285), a place where "neither laws nor men could trouble a solitary stranger" (p. 286).6 Eliza's return to health originates on the periphery of larger, conventional social structures, in a world that resembles what historian Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has called the "female world oflove and ritual"—a world where "men made but a shadowy appearance" and women looked to one another for "support and intimacy."7 Stoddard's story begins in such a world, but does not end there. Indeed, "Collected" suggests that this notion of a "closed"8 world is, finally, limiting, and, at least for the woman writer, detrimental. In the text, a world of" 'heart'-felt friendship between women" offers a point of entry into a crucially larger world.9 Although we begin the story with "sisterhood," we end with an extended, affectively-connected, mixed-gender familywhere gifts—specifically, the diary ofone woman writer—freely circulate. Through this notion ofcirculation, Stoddard's story comes to apply the model ofkinship relations to the literary marketplace . She uses those relations to counter the anonymity of that marketplace, reimagining it as a site not of the acquisitive drives of what C. B. Macpherson has called the "possessive individual," but rather ofbequest and creative inheritance.10 In so doing, Elizabeth Stoddard finds a way to solve a riddle that vexed so many of her male counterparts and continues to vex critics today: a riddle about the relationship between the "true" artist and a marketplace that seems inimical to his (or, less often, her) concerns. Taking their lead from various nineteenth-century writers—Hawthorne, Melville, and others—literary critics ranging from Michael Gilmore to Henry Nash Smith have defined the mid-nineteenth century as a period dominated by a hopeless conflict between the "artists" and the "market."11 Ever interested in challenging the boundaries of convention , Stoddard breaks down these boundaries as...