Married or Single? by Catharine Maria Sedgwick (review)

The recent republication of Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Married or Single? with an introduction by Deborah Gussman is a powerful addition to the recovery of nineteenth-century American women writers. This reprint in the University of Nebraska Legacies of Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers series makes another of Sedgwick’s novels readily available for scholars and students. This novel explores marriage as a broad social issue and creates a positive space for single women. Married or Single?, originally published in 1857, resists the cultural imperative of marriage. In Sedgwick’s preface she suggests, using the royal we, “we raise our voice in all our might against the miserable cant that matrimony is essential to the feebler sex—that she is but an adjunct of man—in her best estate a helm merely to guide the nobler vessel. . . . [S]he has an independent power to shape her own course, and to force her separate sovereign way” (6). The novel makes this strong argument with a soft touch, providing positive examples of marriage (Eleanor’s marriage) and negative examples of marriage (Anne’s marriage for social and financial gain) and tabulating the high price of an unhappy marriage (Augusta’s marriage). Sedgwick’s protagonist, Grace Herbert, wrestles with the attentions of suitors, one who would like to marry her for her social value and one who does not think he is worthy of her.

Gussman’s introduction establishes Sedgwick as a significant presence in nineteenth-century American fiction. Not only was Sedgwick included in The National Portrait Gallery of Distinguished Americans beside James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving, but Edgar Allan Poe praised Sedgwick as “not only one of our most celebrated and most meritorious writers, but attained reputation at a period when American reputation in letters was regarded as a phenomenon” (ix). According to Gussman, contemporary reviewers either wrote about consistent themes across Sedgwick’s novels and reinforced her identity as a “significant and morally up-standing American author” or relegated her to a second class of “feminine writers” (xii). Sedgwick’s novel about women’s lives outside marriage is ready for a critical reexamination.

Married or Single? is set in New York City and is an exploration in manners, but also includes plot conventions such as epistolary story telling, a seduction plot, and a slave narrative. It offers up characters familiar to benevolence literature such as the beautiful but impoverished Jessie Manning and the wealthy and single Julia Travers, who devotes her energy to running “The Colored Orphan Asylum.” Gussman’s introduction raises provocative questions for classroom discussion about the novel and Sedgwick’s own concerns at publication—including her own ambivalence about “significant social and political issues of the antebellum period, including slavery, immigration, and women’s rights” (xvii). This edition is well researched with extensive explanatory notes. For students and faculty, the works cited provides an excellent foundation for more in-depth research. This text is suited for both nineteenth-century Americanist and women’s literature courses and history courses.