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.