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

“In this republican country,” Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote in 1851, “amid the fluctuating waves of our social life, somebody is always at the drowning-point.”¹ That premise, and its far-reaching effect on women, is explored in Mary Templin’s incisive Panic Fiction: Women and Antebellum Economic Crisis. Examining a significant strand of popular responses to the panics of 1837 and 1857—those written by women—Templin argues that the “genre,” as she terms it, reveals both the moral costs of these catastrophes and the unanticipated benefits for women seeking greater authority in the public sphere (p. 3). Discussing exemplary texts from numerous social, literary, and ideological perspectives, Panic Fiction is likely to become the definitive work on the genre.

Templin’s analysis exposes what Vladimir Lenin might have called the uneven development of America’s market revolution. While unprecedented growth in transportation, manufacturing, and commerce created vast wealth, fiscal instability and trade imbalances posed severe risks. When the inevitable downturns came, tens of thousands suffered. Whereas bankrupt men in panic fiction often limped home or to an early grave, their wives and daughters, Templin demonstrates, attempted to restore order. Their efforts reveal a range of attitudes. Fiscally and morally conservative, longing for a vanishing ideal of republican simplicity, these protagonists champion reason and domestic order as a model for social relations and defend their fragile middle-class status against the incursions of speculators and the poor. The nation’s lurching progress toward modernity allowed panic fiction wide latitude for cataloging and correcting social ills.

Class anxieties are paramount in these texts. While republican values prized independence and integrity, class was often identified through fungible possessions that panics destroyed. Domestic stability, Templin argues, thus rested “upon a fundamental instability” magnified in hard times (p. 86). In two best-selling novels by Hannah Farnham Sawyer Lee, for example—Three Experiments of Living (1837) and Elinor Fulton (1837)—the Fultons exchange modesty and simplicity for extravagance and speculation, a process begun when Frank Fulton abandons his true calling as a doctor for the mercantile life. When his fortune disappears, he goes west to recoup his losses, and the women must bear the consequences. Daughter Elinor restores moral order by sacrificing possessions and giving piano lessons; although she rejects social climbing, she will not forgo status objects like the piano. Similarly, Lee’s Rosanna, or Scenes in Boston (1839) portrays the downfall of a servant who rejects her well-to-do employer’s advice and marries a lower-class lover. Rosanna’s drunkenness and destitution highlight her former employer’s integrity and discipline. Such class markers, Templin demonstrates, were just as urgent twenty years later. In Maria Cummins’s Mabel Vaughan (1857), the ruin precipitated by Mr. Vaughan’s speculations can be recouped only by migrating from New York to Illinois, where Mabel takes charge of land in her father’s portfolio and fashions a new home of republican simplicity. Providentially, they reunite with impoverished New York neighbors transformed by land ownership in the West. Ironically, Templin observes, this new home not only restores class harmony but also advances “Manifest Destiny” (p. 200). Yet such forthright rejections of unproductive labor could also betray a certain class nostalgia. Lee’s The Harcourts (1837) praises a family “of old and established fortune” whose security, poise, and culture put them beyond the market’s challenges, much like the noble family in Washington Irving’s “The Country Church” (1819), whose old money values recall a shattered Federalism (p. 82). Panic authors’ ideological remedies were entangled in these contradictory ideals.

These largely conservative elements of panic fiction, however, were counterbalanced by more progressive attitudes. In opposing speculative excess, Templin argues, protagonists also rejected the sentimentality associated with older popular novels, replacing passion with reason. Eliza Follen’s Sketches of Married Life (1838) is the signal example, presenting “the most ambitious economic role for women” of that era (p. 123). The protagonist, Amy Weston, endures two...