Industry and the Creative Mind: The Eccentric Writer in American Literature and Entertainment, 1790-1860

5. “As Crazy as a Fly in a Drum”: The Eccentric Woman Writer

{ 5 } “As Crazy as a Fly in a Drum” The Eccentric Woman Writer It has been a long-standing conviction among scholars that antebellum women writers, by virtue of being women, were barred from association with the putatively lofty aesthetic realms of the Romantic, exilic artist. In Naomi Sofer’s words, midcentury culture “de‹ned woman and artist as mutually exclusive.”1 But in fact women writers frequently traf‹cked in the images of artistic alienation and persecution that typi‹ed so much of the work of their male contemporaries. In 1853, Grace Greenwood celebrated the “genius” of her female contemporaries by putting them in a group with the stereotypical tortured souls who had haunted the transatlantic culture ‹eld since the 1780s: It is sad, terrible, to mark how wretchedness is almost ever the hard, peculiar lot of genius. Oh Heaven! It might seem that this thy great immortal gift were but a robe of royal splendour, falling in crimson and gold round the form of some mighty and godlike grief; or a royal crown of martyrdom, whose gems, that light the world with their strange brightness, shoot madness into the brain beneath them. Milton , Tasso, Burns, Byron, Shelley; Hemens, Landon, Norton, Butler, and many, many more have been “With such a woful weight of misery laden, / As well might challenge the great ministry / Of the whole universe to comfort it.” Greenwood goes on to pay special tribute to George Sand as “‹rst among the women of our time, for the depth of her sorrow and the grandeur of 193 her genius”: “Her genius has a free, bold sweep through the broad world of thought, through the measureless universe of mind; it can scale the loftiest heights of human aspiration, and sound the deepest depths of human crime and passion.”2 And yet modern scholars are not incorrect to note something odd and compromised about women writers’ af‹nities with these sweeping, Romantic visions of the genius’s lofty intellect and tragic fate, for instead of elaborating extended portraits of these grandiose visions of genius’s female form, antebellum women writers notoriously ‹xed their attention on the production of alternative and entirely antithetical pictures of female genius. Even as Greenwood in her 1853 essay paid tribute to “the sorrow and grandeur” and “the free, bold sweep” of the mind of George Sand, whose genius aimed at “the loftiest heights” and “deepest depths,” she also celebrated in an 1850 essay a different kind of “intellectual woman”: “True feminine genius,” said Greenwood in this earlier essay, “is ever timid, doubtful, and clingingly dependent; a perpetual childhood.” The female genius’s “ways and words,” Greenwood goes on, “have nothing of the lofty and severe; over her face, sun-gleams and shadows succeed each other momently; her eyes are alternatively dreamy and tender, and their intensest ‹re quivers through tears.” Unlike Greenwood’s other female geniuses, who are “mighty and godlike,” this female genius is entirely earthbound: “her most celestial visions have always a ladder leading earthward.” The woman writer in this version of female genius, in other words, occupies the seemingly “natural” domestic world so often detected and analyzed by modern scholars: her poetry, far from aiming at “wild” and imperious strains has a “delicious thrill of home-music.”3 In this study so far, I have looked at eccentric author ‹gures that are generally recognizable within transatlantic rubrics: the tortured genius, the Byronic rebel, the lounging ›aneur. In this chapter, however, I will suggest that in the late 1840s and early 1850s, the U.S. entertainment industry , more and more dependent on “outsiders” for its regimes of pro‹t and productivity, generated its own set of eccentric author ‹gures, ‹gures that had no counterparts in Romantic authorial discourse but nevertheless evinced, both in their representation and performance by authors, a commensurate exile and alienation. Instead of being related to familiar Romantic images of the artist, these new eccentric ‹gures, I suggest, were related in often curious and circuitous ways to the “true feminine” spirits so often conjured by women writers in the late 1840s and 1850s, in particular by the women writers who were af‹liated with { 194 } industry and the creative mind the exponential expansion of an industry in locally produced, low-cost diversionary literature aimed at women and children. Scholars have long understood that the late 1840s and early 1850s witnessed important changes in the way in which...