Style, Gender, and Fantasy in Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Writing (review)

In her stylishly written new book, Style, Gender, and Fantasy in Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Writing, Dorri Beam argues for the “aesthetic pleasures and feminist politics of ornament, profusion, and verbosity” in nineteenth-century American women’s writing (p. 1). Beam considers a range of writers, including Margaret Fuller, Pauline Hopkins, and Ann Stephens, who are united by the floridity and excess of their prose. In drawing attention to these “highly wrought” writers, Beam joins a recent critical turn toward aesthetics, making style itself the object of her analysis (p. 1).

At first glance, it seems less than groundbreaking to reclaim flowery women’s writing. Critics have been doing this work since Jane Tompkins’s landmark Sensational Designs (1986) ushered in a wave of studies on sentimentalism. However, Beam’s archive and aims are distinct from critical work on sentimentalism in significant ways. In fact, she argues that the post-Tompkins collective eagerness to recover nineteenth-century American women writers from neglect and obscurity resulted in the “critical eclipse of highly wrought writing by women” (p. 10). Unlike sentimentalism, aesthetic excess, fantasy, and floridity seek to “render the world opaque and strange rather than assimilable and interpretable,” and consequently, these modes of writing do not fit comfortably within the established critical paradigms for women’s writing (p. 7). Beam claims we have been too quick to overlook this strain of literature in favor of texts that complicate the separate spheres model of gender and/or advance activist projects like abolition.

The case Beam makes is long overdue; her focus on ornamentation, profusion, and elaboration is utterly refreshing. She asks innovative questions about women’s writing that yield new and unexpected interpretive possibilities. Significantly, her attention to style does not dispense with the political altogether; rather, politics simply takes on a new valence here. The texts under consideration are not explicitly interested in social change; they do not tether stylistic excess to moving the reader toward sympathy nor do they focus on illustrating contemporary social ills. Instead, these authors use style to refigure female desire, power, and potential. They articulate a feminist epistemology, which is often critical of male discourses and resistant to gender conventions. For example, Beam considers how “flower language” in texts by Stephens and Fuller works not as a code for alternative or transgressive desires but as a language in itself. As she puts it, stylistic fiction envisions ways of being that are not bound or determined by the morphology or materiality of the female body. In other words, style can be used to render “other ways of being present or alive” (p. 32). In one of two substantial chapters on Fuller, Beam makes a case for how feminists appropriated mesmerism, reclaiming Fuller’s belief in a feminine essence, long dismissed as incompatible with feminism’s commitment to gender as socially constructed.

Several of the chapters interrogate conventionally masculine genres by illustrating how highly wrought texts by women resist or participate in constructing those genres. A chapter on Harriet Prescott Spofford, for example, aims to revise longstanding accounts of literary romanticism. Focusing on Spofford’s use of ornamental writing in The Amber Gods (1860), Beam locates a “counterstrategy to representational modes and a means of undoing the objectification of persons, and especially women” in Edgar Allan Poe’s writing and in other romantic texts (p. 134). Though Beam acknowledges that Spofford’s primary intervention is in literary relations, not in social relations, she claims that stylistic excess enables her to “break out of conventional textual forms . . . to make claims on the reader” (p. 143). A subsequent chapter on Pauline Hopkins’s Winona (1902) locates floridity not at the level of the language but in the plot, which Beam sees as a manipulated, intricate remaking of the conventional western genre.

Ultimately, Beam seems to suggest that feminist aesthetic practices do exist, or at least, some nineteenth-century women writers practiced a specific type of writing linked directly...