Barbie's House

Okay, you have got to watch this! Talk about domesticity and women's roles:

Blog #3 Girl Power! Nineteenth-century Style by Larisa

Even though Nina Baym calls The Lamplighter “more absurd” (165) than Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World, I truly enjoyed Gerty's journey from abused orphan to independent woman. However, for a few days I have been puzzled about my reasons. But then today as I was reflecting on Gerty, I realized I admired her because she is a “girl who does things”(to borrow a phrase from Robin McKinley's Newbery Speech given in 1985. (You can find the speech here:
http://web.archive.org/web/20061028014102/http://www.robinmckinley.com/Essays/Newbery1985.html)). My entire life my appetite has always been for fiction that has an active heroine who gets busy making her life happen, instead of waiting around at home for life to come knocking on her door. I feel just as Amanda does and echo her sentiment: “If isn't about a woman, I don't want to read it.” So even though The Lamplighter was written in the 1850s and we are living in 2009, there is much to admire about Cummins work and indeed, we are indebted to women writers like her. Thanks to them there are many more novels about “girls who do things” and the things we do today are even more diverse and varied than in 1850.

First of all, let me talk a little bit about Robin McKinley and why I admire her writing. She writes fantasy novels that feature strong female protagonists. I am not sure which one of the five girls in my family first discovered her, but we quickly shared all her novels amongst ourselves and literally ate them up. My favorite is The Blue Sword. A romance in the true literary sense, it is the adventure story of a social misfit who discovers that she has a magical gift and saves her people from annihilation. McKinley borrows heavily from J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and sets her story in a familiar British colonial landscape. Her writing is fresh and engaging, her heroine is flawed and real, and the adventure story is one that girls and boys alike can relish. One of my sisters loves McKinley's heroines so much that she has even named one of her daughters after her (Aerin). The Blue Sword is a book I read again and again—just for the thrill of seeing a girl have all the adventures typically ascribed to her male counterpart. McKinley talks about her writing in this speech when she got the Newbery medal and refers to Tolkien's one fully developed female character, Eowyn. Let's pause here and revisit this character as portrayed in the cartoon version—just to refresh our minds about what a girl who does things looks like.

It is because of authors like Maria Susanna Cummins that we now have contemporary fiction like McKinley's that features these strong female protagonists. The girl power of the nineteenth century is the mother of the girl power in the twenty-first century.

We see this girl power clearly in Gerty. She is a strong and resourceful middle class girl who saves herself, a marked shift from the seduction narratives of the eighteenth century that featured passive and easily seduced maidens. The contrast between Gerty and Eliza Wharton in The Coquette is striking. When a man like General Sanford, Ben Bruce, tries to entice Gerty into a life of indolence and wastefulness, she gives him the cold shoulder and eventually drives him off by her strength of character and words. If Eliza Wharton had been able to do that, there would be no tragic ending. Bravo for Gerty, the girl who does things! I do recognize that she must be helped and mentored along this journey of self actualization, but once she is on the path, it is her choice to continue that makes it all happen. Uncle True picks her up out of the gutter, but she first puts herself into the position of being noticed. Her physical effort to embrace the light he carries and escape the dark represented by Nan Grant starts Gerty's journey.

Gerty then makes many more choices that take her through trials and tribulations that make her into the independent and empowered woman we see at the novel's conclusion. These choices I see falling into four main categories: 1. education; 2. domesticity; 3. religion; 4. self-control and identity. Education first of all provides Gerty not only with a career, but it also teaches her self control and focus. Her intellectual gifts bring her satisfaction and independence. When she is given the command by Mr. Graham to travel with them, she instead chooses her own course: to work in the school as an assistant teacher and to care for Mrs. Sullivan and Mr. Cooper. She says, “I believe it to be my duty, and am therefore willing to sacrifice my own comfort” (146). This education also empowers Gerty to give her financial and familial independence when many young women orphans of her time and social standing would have had little other careers open to them. Secondly, Gerty chooses domesticity. She learns homemaking skills from Mrs. Sullivan and then creates a home space for herself and Uncle True. Knowing how to run a home and care for people are valuable skills and important for a woman on the marriage market, but also allows Gerty to create a family of her own choosing. This family eventually includes her childhood friend Willie, now a grown man, her recovered father, and new stepmother/mentor, Emily. Thirdly, Gerty chooses to create a personal relationship with God after receiving instructions from Emily Graham. She is empowered by this relationship when she suffers terrible personal losses. The narrator tells us that, “In many a time of trouble did she come to God for help; in many an hour of bitter sorrow did she from the same source seek comfort and, when her strength and heart failed her, God became the strength of her heart” (41). And finally, Gerty is able to master her temper and submit to circumstances. Every time she does, situations favor her and she comes off the winner. Time and again she puts up with insults and bad treatment, but eventually her Christian patience rewards her with the marriage and financial situation she so deserves. The novel ends with Gerty and Willie watching the lamps lit by God (the stars) and all former enemies are now her friends.

So while our lives in 2009 are different from Gerty's in the 1850s, there is much to learn about power and choice. We can thank Cummins and McKinley alike for inspiring us all to be girls who do things.

Blog 2: Woman’s Fiction by Larisa

This week I have been reading about women and “woman’s fiction,” the term coined by Nina Baym in her book, Woman‘s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-1870. Even though I have always been a reader of women’s writing it was not until this week that I realized there was a difference between a novel written by a woman, and a novel written following specific conventions that Baym calls “woman’s fiction” (13). What surprises me is that I did not know this earlier. How could I have gone so far into my study of women’s writing and not know this?! Thankfully I realize now that there are specific plots and rhetorical moves that make woman’s fiction. Along with reading Baym and having this epiphany, this week I have also re-read Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s article “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America” and started reading The Lamplighter by Maria Susanna Cummins. These three texts have helped me see the following three points: women’s relationships with other women were central to their lives, woman’s fiction follows a set criteria, and domesticity was seen as a preferable alternative to politics and money-making.

Last week I wrote about the importance of female friendships in my life and in The Coquette. The importance of those friendships has only been reinforced by the content of Smith-Rosenberg’s article. She points out that these relationships were “an essential aspect of American society” and that women created “a world in which men made a shadowy appearance” (2). Using these ideas to look back again at Eliza Wharton, it is clear that her rejection of the networks she had with her mother and friends was fatal. Smith-Rosenberg points out that women and men inhabited distinctly different worlds, but when Eliza chooses to submit to Major Sanford’s seduction, she puts herself in between the two worlds, in a liminal space. This is evidenced when she leaves her mother’s home and goes to live among strangers; she is physically acting out on what has she has already done socially. Living alone and in this liminal space kills her--she gets a consumptive disease and physically wastes away while carrying Sanford’s child. But if she had stayed within the boundaries of the female friendships and firmly rooted in a female-centered world (and had not been seduced by Sanford) her story might have followed the formula that Baym points out as woman’s fiction. These stories are of the heroine’s “triumph over so much adversity and so many obstacles” (17) and are a direct rejection of the seduction plot. The authors of this genre wanted their readers to live, not die the death of a seduced woman (26). This emphasis on living, and giving women and girls the necessary knowledge on how to live, is the focus of woman’s fiction, according to Baym.

While I have only read a few chapters in The Lamplighter, it does show evidence of these elements that Baym points out in her chapter, “The Form and Ideology of Woman‘s Fiction.” Gerty is an orphan who lives in an unhappy home where she is underfed and unloved. Surviving by her wits, she is able to find a friend in Uncle True, the old lamplighter, and eventually a new home with him. Taught by another woman, Mrs. Sullivan, she learns to create a warm domestic space that is a haven from the cold world that Uncle True operates in--a world of politics that is driven by economic forces, a world in stark contrast to the domestic one. So, while I have only got to this point in the very long novel, I agree with Baym’s point about the pleasure of reading. I am enjoying every page of this journey to see how Gerty goes from poor ragamuffin to independent and self-sufficient woman. It will be interesting to see how the networks she makes with other women help her through her journey.

Solidarity Sisters: 19th Century Female Relationships and The Lamplighter

I’d like to begin by taking a moment to reflect on Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s “The Female World of Love and Ritual.” I had never read this article, even though I’ve seen it cited and referenced many, many times. It was a good read, and it’s easy to see how many of the ideas introduced in this piece have been further developed and explored in subsequent scholarship. In fact, there were a couple of moments when I found myself shocked (and pleased) by how much our theories about sex and sexuality have changed since 1975. Early on in the essay, Rosenberg argues that the “essential question is not whether these women had genital contact and can therefore be defined as heterosexual or homosexual,” for “the twentieth-century tendency to view human love and sexuality within a dichotomized universe of deviance and normality, genitality and platonic love, is alien to the emotions and attitudes of the nineteenth century” (8). Rosenberg highlights an antiquated idea about sex and sexuality, typical of the 1970’s and 1980’s, that depends on sex acts between people of the same or opposite gender to determine who is gay and who is straight. It is, of course, quite different some 30 years later. A woman can identify as “straight” but still desire sexual intimacy with other women, and a man can identify as “gay” and still engage in sex acts with his wife. No one bats an eye. Well, at the very least it’s becoming more common. We certainly don’t depend solely on sexual intimacy to determine sexual identity, which, when I think about it, seems more and more like relationships in the nineteenth century when love between two women was considered “socially acceptable and fully compatible with heterosexual marriage” (8). I’m not saying that I think all the women in nineteenth-century novels were engaging in lesbian sex acts, even within the institution of marriage; I’m only thinking that nineteenth-century feminine relationships seem more like those of today (thank you, Adrienne Rich and countless others) than 30-something years ago. That being said, I’d like to look at some passages from The Lamplighter.

**WARNING: I’m going to spoil some points of the plot, so if you haven’t finished Larisa, stop reading now!!**

There are a lot of intimate, female relationships in The Lamplighter. Gerty’s relationship with Nan Grant is both intimate and terrible, making it painfully clear that all not all feminine relationships are affectionate. Most other female relationships in the novel are friendly and loving, but the most intimate and important feminine relationships in the novel are also portrayed as instructive. Gerty’s first feminine companion is Mrs. Sullivan, who teaches young Gerty the ways of domesticity. She learns to cook, clean, and generally keep house from this surrogate mother, so it should come as no surprise that Gerty eventually marries Mrs. Sullivan’s son, Willie. The second intimate, feminine relationship that Gerty develops is with Emily. This relationship, which dominates the plot of the novel, is also instructive, though not necessarily “maternal.” Emily is portrayed as a beloved, refined, and wise big sister who teaches Gerty to trust in a higher power. Emily, the kind benefactress, teaches young Gerty to be a lady, but as Gerty gets older the relationship is reciprocal; they depend on each other for mutual love and support. Both of these relationships are rich for further exploration, but the relationship I would most like to explore is one in which Gerty becomes the “instructor,” teaching a young girl the ways of true virtue and refinement.

In her relationship with Kitty, Gerty becomes the feminine mentor, instructing Kitty to prioritize and value “true” sentiments. (We could read “true” sentiments as “sentiments from other women,” but I don’t necessarily have any textual evidence to support that claim.) The relationship between Gerty and Kitty was honest and kind, though not markedly intimate, until Gerty refused a proposal from Mr. Bruce (Kitty’s favored gentleman). Gerty refuses the proposal with grace and poise, taking care not to damage Mr. Bruce’s feelings. But when Kitty’s deceived heart enters into the mix—Mr. Bruce had been using Kitty to make Gerty jealous-- Gerty is overwhelmed with emotion: “She could say no more, but, sinking into the nearest seat, burst into tears, and hiding her face in her hands, as had been her habit in childhood, wept without restraint” (264). Championing for Kitty, Gerty lays plain Mr. Bruce’s deceit: “But, think of her happy, trusting nature, and how it has been betrayed! Think how she believed your flattering words, and how hollow they were, all the while! Think how her confidence has been abused! How that fatherless and motherless girl, who had a claim to the sympathy of the world, has been taught a lesson of distrust” (265). Of course, Kitty, who is listening to the entire exchange, is heartbroken, but the lesson she learns is not one of “distrust,” but of feminine solidarity. Rather than turning her back on love and marriage, she, through her now intimate relationship with Gerty, shuns all silly behavior and coquettery in search of a deeper bond. The scene immediately following Gerty’s admonition of Mr. Bruce begins this new, intimate, and instructive female relationship.

Gerty finds Kitty listening outside the window, and upon discovery Kitty throws herself into Gerty’s arms, unable to speak or cry, she merely “shook and trembled with an agitation which was perfectly uncontrollable” (266). Gerty “supported her to a seat, and then, folding the slight form to her bosom, chafed and cold hands, and again and again kissing the rigid lips, succeeded at last in restoring her to something like composure. For an hour she lay thus, receiving Gertrude’s caresses with evident pleasure, and now and then returning them convulsively, but speaking no word, and making no noise” (266-67). Let me begin my analysis by saying that I read Rosenberg’s article and understand her argument about the nature of feminine relationships in the 19th century, and even though I understand that not all intimacy is codified as sexual, this passage paints an undeniable sexually intimate portrait. To be honest, I resisted my temptation to read sexual intimacy into this passage, because it felt juvenile and silly, but the language is so suggestive that to ignore the sexuality may do the text a disservice. These two women, both suffering from a certain kind of trauma, find comfort in one another. They caress each other “with evident pleasure,” returning each other’s love “convulsively,” in a scene that transcends both words and sounds. That they are lovers, there can be no doubt. In a scene more sexually intimate than all other scenes of heterosexual love (and subsequent marriage) in the novel, I have to wonder what’s at stake in Cummins’ choice to depict this scene of healing in such a sexually intimate manner. I don’t pretend to have any answers to this question, but I do have some ideas.

Kitty, whose most intimate female relationship is with the silly, frivolous Isabel, lacks any refined female instruction or solidarity, a piece of feminine identity prized by the novel. In the wake of romantic heartbreak, the trust and support of another woman would have been a powerful draught for Kitty, intensely personal and private. I have to wonder, then, if in order to do Kitty and Gerty’s new relationship justice, in the wake of Mr. Bruce’s villainous dishonesty, the union of these two women had to be codified as sexual. I’m just working this out in my head, but if Gerty’s instruction and friendship are to change Kitty for the better, making her into a new woman of poise and grace (as we know it does), then the experience would have to be intensely intimate and almost unrestricted. I’m not arguing that all intense and intimate female relationships must be sexual, but this moment between Kitty and Gerty, a mere ½ page after Mr. Bruce’s thwarted romantic efforts, channel some (if not all) of that romantic intimacy and reclaim it for personal, feminine agency to reinvent Kitty. Just some things to think about. :)

Rose Petal Cottage

Piper shared this advertisement for Rose Petal Cottage with me today and I was horrified with how blatantly this product reinforces patriarchal values. The little girl is limited to her "box" and doing her domestic duties. You'll have to cut and paste the following links from YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dXlAjCU8G4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVgHrV9H-8k
Let me know what you think.

Position Paper/Blog Posting #1: The Coquette and Liberty’s Daughters by Larisa

I was married last June and soon thereafter moved to Texas and for a few weeks was blissfully happy. But soon I was crying all the time. The littlest thing my husband did hurt my feelings or even going to the grocery store could cause me to burst into tears when I could not find something. My husband was beginning to wonder if I was crazy. But then one day when I was talking to my mother, it dawned on me—I was homesick for my girlfriends. Before my marriage, I was surrounded by women who were either faculty like me, students, or neighbors. My roommate in Hawaii is a teacher like me and we associated with other single women like ourselves. We always had a great time together. But reflecting back on those happy times from the loneliness of my newlywed apartment taught me an important lesson: I needed my women friends and they were all far away. So as I completed this week’s reading from Liberty’s Daughters by Mary Beth Norton and The Coquette by Hannah Webster Foster I was struck with the importance of female friendships in both texts. While my study of women’s lives and literature has shown me previously how important these relationships were, it was not until reading Norton’s historical narrative and using it to see Eliza Wharton’s experience, while comparing it to my own, that I was able to fully appreciate the necessary function that female friendships played in the lives of women in the Early National Period.

Norton showed in great detail the limits of women’s lives based on legal, cultural, and societal expectations. While I do not need to validate her writing here, her text gives added depth and richness to Foster’s novel. And as I think about Eliza Wharton, I have to compare her to another fictional heroine who shared her fate: Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple. Both their stories follow the seduction plot narrative: they are seduced, give birth to a baby, and die. Both novels have strong narrative voices, but the epistolary form of The Coquette underscores the significance of female friendships. Where Charlotte Temple is a passive protagonist with little voice in her own story, the women in The Coquette—Eliza, Lucy Freeman, Mrs. Richman, Julia Granby, and Mrs. Wharton—all have strong, active voices in the story’s narrative. Eliza leaps off the page as a character that is enjoying her single-girl freedom and making conquests. Eliza’s letters and the responses from her friends show that, “friendships were essential to a woman’s happiness” (Norton 108).

After finishing The Coquette I realized that the real tragedy is not Eliza’s seduction and death, but her abandonment of her female friendships. Once Eliza allows herself to be conquered by Mr. Boyer’s rejection and Major Sanford’s desertion, she becomes like Charlotte Temple, a shadow. Her health fails and her spirits are depressed. Nothing her female friends can do will restore her to the vivacious person she once was. By allowing herself to be thus controlled and contained by the patriarchy, she abandons her female friends. Her letters are fewer and less revealing. She keeps secrets from her friends and mother. Eliza’s voice disappears from the narrative as her friends’ takes over—she is erased and lost from the female sphere. When she removes herself from her mother’s house and the protection of her friends to live with strangers, she finally signals her departure from the domestic sphere that would have and could have protected her in her own historical moment.

I hope you will forgive a personal conclusion to this posting. I have learned interesting lessons from looking back at female friendships in the Early National Period and at the friendships in The Coquette. First of all, I have learned that a husband cannot be a girlfriend, no matter how adorable he is. Secondly, I need to ask for help and comfort when I fell lonely and take it when it is offered. And like Eliza, I need to keep in touch with my female friends—I do this by writing to my girlfriends, mother, grandmother, and sisters while negotiating this new phase of my life as a married woman. Hopefully, if I ever have a friend or daughter like Eliza Wharton, she will take my advice since our female friendships are just as important today as they were in 1797.

Reading Liberty's Daughter's: Charlotte and Eliza

I have read pieces of Norton’s Liberty’s Daughters before, but it’s been a long time. When I saw it on the syllabus I figured that I already knew the gist of her argument—women had repetitive, domestic lives and found it difficult to fantasize a reality outside of that (sometimes unhappy) married realm—but there is, of course, more. One aspect that I had completely glossed over in my memory (and this seems a little silly given the title) was the emphasis on daughters. Ever since the AAUW published their study Where the Girls Are: The Facts about Gender Equity in Education, which feeds into the recent Girl’s Studies movement, I’ve been thinking about the experiences of young girls, both in early America and contemporary society. And I'm not the only one. I mean, even Barbie is getting on board (with the help of Amy Pholer):



Ok, so Amy and Ruby don't talk about the experiences of girls in early America, but Mary Beth Norton does. And so do Hannah Webster Foster and Susana Rowson, though until now I had never read Liberty's Daughters, The Coquette, or Charlotte Temple as about "girls." In my mind they were always simply texts about early American "women," which is a fine way to read the material, but I wonder how our readings of the primary and secondary material may transform when we make this differentiation. As I've re-read The Coquette and Charlotte Temple this week, I've been thinking about the transition from girlhood to womanhood in early America, and it all seems to center around one thing: marriage.

In Liberty’s Daughters, Norton directly addresses the social construction of an early American women’s “private” sphere. Her first chapter discusses the work girls did around the house in service to their mothers; however, these chores of spinning, cleaning, and cooking were more than simply a way to contribute to the maintenance of a household. They were part of a larger domestic training. Girls were taught about “’the mysteries of housewifery’ by conscientious mothers,” so that they could become good housewives and active mistresses of their families (25). There was, of course, a class divide between the motivations for this type of instruction: “Farm daughters learned to perform household tasks because their family’s current well-being required their active involvement in daily work, whereas city girls acquired domestic skills primarily so that they could eventually become good wives and mothers” (25). Even though these two groups of girls learned these skills for different reasons, the common feminine curriculum points to a skill-set deemed appropriate for early American women-- a skill-set always relegated to the domestic realm.

Norton uses the terms “girls” and “daughters” interchangeably, and “women” and “wives” are used in a similar manner. In our contemporary society this distinction may seem obvious, but in the late 18th-early 19th century when girls were marrying earlier, we cannot rely on age as a determining factor. And the ages of Charlotte and Eliza are so dissimilar that we can't really use that as a gauge either. Charlotte Temple was barely 15 when she became pregnant and Eliza Wharton was in the “37th year of her age” when she died in childbirth, but both are described in their respective texts as “girls,” marking the transition from girl to woman as not biological but socially constructed for it happens through marriage and not motherhood. Norton discusses this marital-based transition explicitly in her second chapter, describing married and unmarried women as members in “two different, equal, and exclusive clubs” (40). But what do we make of girls like Eliza Wharton and Charlotte Temple who were having the lived motherhood experiences of “women” and are yet still described textually as “girls”? These characters seem to occupy a liminal position in the trajectory of femininity.

In the early pages of the novel, Charlotte Temple is described as a “tall, elegant girl” and “the sweetest girl in the world” (3). Likewise, in the retelling of her parents’ courtship, Lucy Temple is described as a “love-sick girl” (25). After her marriage to Temple, however, Lucy is described as a “wife,” “mother,” and “woman.” The Coquette's Eliza Wharton is described as a “foolish girl,” while Mrs. Richman is called a “poor woman” and “matron” (6). And even after their childbearing and subsequent deaths, these main characters are referred to, respectively, as girls. At the end of Charlotte Temple, as a stranger describes Charlotte’s death to Montraville, he depicts Charlotte as a child: “ ‘tis a poor girl that was brought from her friends by a cruel man, who left her when she was big with child, and married another” (117). Even after motherhood and death, Charlotte is still described as a “girl.” The same is true for Eliza Wharton. In a letter to Charles Deighton, Sanford laments Eliza’s death and his own miserable situation: “Thus, that splendor and equipage, to secure which, I have sacrificed a virtuous woman [his wife], is taken from me; that poverty, the dread of which prevented my forming an honorable connection with an amiable and accomplished girl [Eliza], the only one I ever loved, has fallen, with redoubled vengeance, upon my guilty head; and I must become a vagabond in the earth” (165). Let’s ignore for the moment Sanford’s (typical, for his character) selfishness, and focus on his differentiation between the women and girls in his life. The married counterpart is termed “woman,” whereas Eliza remains an accomplished “girl,” even though she died giving birth to Sanford’s child.

There are, obviously, many reasons for the distinction between women and girls in print culture. The conventions of marriage dictated, and still do to a certain extent, a lady’s title. And there are clear rhetorical strategies for referring to a victimized, fallen woman as a “girl” in the sympathetic seduction genre. But I wonder how much we, contemporary readers, can infer about the lives of early American girls, especially “fallen” girls like the one in this week’s novels. These characters are experiencing “womanhood” by contemporary standards, and yet they’re described as juvenile in print culture. I have to wonder if this liminal, gendered position is part of the reason why Eliza and Charlotte (and like characters) never seem to live past the end of the novel; they don’t fit into any prescribed definition of “woman” or “girl” and, thus, cannot remain alive and fixed in a text. Contemporary women (girls?) seem to have similar problems in a cultural narrative, though they are no longer subject to certain death. I can think of one telling example: Britney, singing in her early, pre-fall days, “I’m not a girl, not yet a woman.”

That is a great illustration! Where did you find it? Can I steal it for my eCollege website? It would make a great book cover.

I've never blogged before, so this will be fun! I'm looking forward to seeing what you'll do with this.

I love the design of the blog!

This is going to be a great place for our sparkling insights and fabulous ideas.

Happy First Day

Happy first day of school! And welcome to the blog. We can talk more about how we plan to use this space when we meet on Wednesday, but please feel free to make any changes you'd like. And if you know how to center that picture, clue me in!