Panic Fiction: Women and Antebellum Economic Crisis by Mary Templin (review)

In Panic Fiction: Women and Antebellum Economic Crisis, Mary Templin brings to light an unstudied body of novels authored by women in response to the panics of 1837 and 1857, the most severe economic crises in the United States before the Civil War. Widely read and reviewed at the time, these novels focus on women’s efforts to mitigate, if not reverse, the economic damage wrought by those panics on middle-class households and on the gender and class identities these households anchored. Templin uses this fresh and fertile archive, which includes works by Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Maria Cummins, and writers unknown to us today, to reveal how many middle-class women writers saw themselves and their heroines as consequential economic actors whose financial experience and wisdom in the home legitimated their participation in wide-ranging debates about economic morality, the risks and ravages of speculative behavior, and national economic policies. Financial catastrophe, Templin shows, presented an “extraordinary chance for women who [had] been excluded from that marketplace to find, if not a foothold there, at least a voice” (4).

Panic Fiction fruitfully conjoins two lines of literary scholarship: one that studies the relation between American imaginative literature and economic crisis, and another that studies the cultural work of antebellum women’s domestic writing. Joseph Fichtelberg, David Anthony, María Carla Sánchez, and others have explored how nineteenth-century American novels, confronting a volatile and transforming economy, helped to forge new models of gender and class identity and new modes of moral analysis. Templin’s archive of exclusively women-authored panic novels sets her study of antebellum domestic economics, gender roles, and class formation apart from this scholarship. The “panic fiction” she has unearthed includes a few southern novels and a group of novels written after the panic of 1857, but her archive consists primarily of several dozen novels rushed into print between 1836 and 1840 by northern women. Taking advantage of the nation’s rapidly expanding print market, these authors capitalized on readers’ urgent interest in the economy’s sensational collapse, its wrenching effect on urban and frontier domestic life, and the opportunity it afforded women as home economists—that is, as consumers, managers of household budgets, employers of servants, and philanthropists—to demonstrate the financial rationality, competence, and integrity conspicuously lacking among the men whose reckless and grasping speculations, many insisted, brought on the economic crisis. Templin observes that unlike male-authored panic literature of the period, which focused on men’s frenzied financial behavior leading up to the panic, women’s panic narratives typically concentrated on women’s rescuing financial behavior in the panic’s aftermath. In this way they not only “solicit[ed] admiration and imitation for their heroines’ responses to panic from readers who might be experiencing similar circumstances” but also exposed the far-reaching damage wrought inside and outside the home when women there were granted little economic agency (13). In fact, the most self-assured of these novels went further and “depicted panic and failure as breakdowns in a masculine economic system that called for a new approach and opened up opportunities for women to contribute their expertise and values to the creation of a better system” (109).

Often appearing in popular magazines, and, in one sensational case, published in a five-volume set that went through thirty editions, these novels comprised a subgenre of women’s domestic fiction. However, as Templin observes, their sustained preoccupation with the economic dimensions of women’s domestic roles distinguishes them from other domestic writing of the period. Indeed, asserting the interdependency of the nation’s economic health and the smooth functioning of the home, filled in some cases with detailed financial commentary, and implicitly urging women readers to educate themselves about economic matters, these “panic novels” dismantle the putative line between domestic and economic fiction. In doing so, they serve as a bridge, Templin argues, between women’s fiction in the opening decades...