"A Woman of Genius is but a Heavenly Lunatic": Stoddard's Subversive Use of Music in The Morgesons

I respect the mosquito; he is apparently an insignificance, but he sings and stings satanically. I am but a small bit myself; so I admire power in smallness.

—Elizabeth Stoddard, August 20, 1855¹

In an early chapter of Elizabeth Stoddard's 1862 novel, The Morgesons, three vivacious old ladies assert in unison: "Miss Cassy don't play [the piano]. . . . Miss Verry's sun puts out her fire" (62).² Their enthusiastic assessment of Verry's musical performance, rendered in metaphor, underscores a duality in the novel and points to musical skill as one basis of comparison. Stoddard offers here two distinct delineations of female musicianship: that of Cassy (or Cassandra), the novel's protagonist and narrator, in the form of the publicly sanctioned performer and singer in the parlor; and that of Verry (or Veronica), her younger sister, in the form of privately realized musical genius. Although music plays an integral role in the work, with almost forty references in the text, little critical analysis has been offered concerning its importance. Scholars have not considered this difficult novel in light of nineteenth-century attitudes toward female musical performance, composition, or genius. This paper discusses these conceptualizations and considers how Stoddard uses them in depicting her female characters' search for agency and self-expression. Additionally, it examines how the text's musical references contribute to its strikingly proto-modernist style. Often subversive in her use of music, Stoddard, like the mosquito referenced in the opening epigraph, both sings and stings throughout her self-styled recitative.

Best known in her lifetime for nearly fifty short stories and poetry printed in various periodicals as well as a newspaper column in the Daily Alta California, Stoddard also published three novels in the 1860s. All but disappearing from the American literary scene for nearly a century, she was brought into public view once more by Lawrence Buell and Sandra A. Zagarell's 1984 critical edition of The Morgesons, followed by the inclusion of her story "Lemorne versus Huell" in several anthologies, including the Norton Anthology of American Literature, in which she is described by the editors as being "[s]omewhat ahead of her time" (Levine and Krupat 2524). Indeed, of mid-nineteenth-century American writers, few produced works as enigmatic and baffling as those conceived by Stoddard. Marked by irony, cryptic dialogue, elliptical phrasing, and abrupt shifts in narrative, her fiction contains stylistic features most evocative of Emily Dickinson's poetry and of the later movement of modernism. In a now well-known comment made after he visited Dickinson in Amherst, Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote his wife that she could fathom Dickinson's home life if she had read Stoddard's work (Buell and Zagarell xii).

As Higginson's comment suggests, Dickinson and Stoddard share a number of parallels. Both were products of well-educated, prominent New England families living in small but established towns and both attended female seminaries, rejected evangelical Protestantism, and evinced a certain rebelliousness in work marked by an ironic façade. Although Dickinson demanded a secluded world and Stoddard a public arena, both incorporate music—particularly piano music—into their work in intriguing ways.³ Such inclusion in an era that considered piano study a valuable part of a young woman's upbringing is understandable; however, each suggests a departure from nineteenth-century acceptable patterns. Much of Dickinson's musical imagery suggests the power of music to shock. Music "stun[s]" us "With Bolts of Melody!" ("Poem 505," 23-24). Music, in the intensity of its beauty as either Robin song or piano, may be too much to bear. "I thought," Dickinson's persona reasons, "if I could only live / Till that first Shout got by - / Not all Pianos in the Woods / Had power to mangle me—" ("Poem 348," 5-8). Despite its beauty, or perhaps because of it, the piano is a potential instrument of torture. Stoddard presents the piano in an equally ambivalent manner. In "Lemorne versus Huell," protagonist Margaret Huell seems compromised by her musical expertise as a piano teacher, both economically...