Grief's Theatrical Tutelage: Drama, Recitation, and a Collaborative Sociability in Constance Fenimore Woolson's "Miss Grief"

In an 1875 letter to Edmund Clarence Stedman, Wall Street broker and one of New York's most prominent critics and poets, Constance Fenimore Woolson writes of her excitement at having found in him "her first literary friend" (qtd. in Rioux 90). Reminiscing about their encounter in St. Augustine the previous year, Woolson wistfully remarks, "I am so accustomed to the eternal 'I' of all my male friends that I forgot how to talk when I was with you those times" (83). "You see," she adds for explanation, "I have played the part of 'listener' all my life . . . at this late hour I have gotten hold of the pen, and now people must listen to me, occasionally" (83–84). Written at the start of the first major phase of her career, Woolson's announcement perfectly captures the mixture of high confidence (notice the double emphasis and modal "must") and lingering self-doubt ("occasionally") that would define her early attempts to establish herself as an American realist. But it also wonderfully illustrates Woolson's love for talk, her deep appreciation for conversation as a medium for mutual understanding and the equal exchange of ideas. This appreciation takes on additional meaning when we remember that Woolson, like her father and grandmother before her, was deaf—or almost deaf—for most of her life. As Anne Boyd Rioux has documented, Woolson's hearing first became affected in her early adult years and steadily receded throughout her life (6). Indeed, good conversation for Woolson meant in the first place that it could be heard, or that is was sonorous and reverberating—rich in its aural dimensions. In an 1882 letter to Henry James, whose booming voice Woolson took a particular liking to, she confesses, "I have always been critical about voices (of late years there is of course a second reason), &, when I find one to my mind, my temper becomes beatific" (182–83). "[O]n account of the voice," she adds, she would always forgive him any "horrible things" he might say (182).

Given that Woolson was clearly interested in orality not merely as an aspect of daily life and friendship but as an integral part of writing as well (in her letter to Stedman, her pen, after all, enforces listening rather than reading), it is surprising that we have not yet paid attention to the importance of orality in Woolson's most acclaimed story about female artistry, "Miss Grief." Many critics have noted that in the story, Miss Crief first truly gains the male narrator's attention—indeed, his ear—when she recites for him a fragment of his own work. Less often but still regularly, it is also observed that she insists throughout the story that her work be listened to first and read only second. Both Paul Crumbley and Susan Williams, for example, have emphasized the story's ambivalence toward print publication, and have suggested that Aaronna Crief prizes alternative, more reciprocal modes of recognition and circulation.¹ But by and large, Aaronna's preference for oral delivery has been treated as an idiosyncrasy of her gender and authorship rather than a choice significant in and of itself, indicative of a mode of artistic expression altogether different from the one preferred by the narrator and, by extension, his literary colleagues.² Dorri Beam's provocative reading of "Miss Grief" illustrates this point. She proposes that Woolson "mock[s], sometimes savagely, suppositions about the woman writer as naive, natural, and unselfconscious" by offering in Aaronna Crief something of a "feminine grotesque" (143, 141). In other words, Aaronna's penchant for oral delivery is a sign of her (feminine) inability to take any distance from her work, her inability to comprehend or penetrate her work as opposed to merely inhabit it.

However, this interpretation reveals an anti-theatricalism as old as theater itself. Such an attitude might be expected of the narrator, espoused as he is to an evaluative process dependent on reading and print circulation. But if we as readers unequivocally accept that Woolson mocks, through Miss Crief's...