Sentimentality and Gender Performance: Cap and Clara Put on a Show

We’ve talked quite a few times about sentimentality in The Hidden Hand, most commonly in reference to how the text challenges/revises ideas of the sentimental in 19th Century fiction. In the beginning of the novel Old Hurricane urges Herbert to accept his forgiveness and subsequent support saying, “Come, come, boy; I am not sentimental, nor romantic, nor melodramatic, nor nothing of that sort.” We expect this dismissal of sentimentality of Old Hurricane, who is one of the text’s oldest, whitest, richest patriarchs. We don’t expect our heroine to ridicule the power of feeling, but Capitola is decidedly not sentimental. In fact, Southworth tells readers early on that “the soul of Capitola naturally abhorred sentiment,” much to the frustration of other characters in the novel. For instance, when Craven Le Noir declares his love for Capitola, she responds by mocking his feelings: "’Well, I declare!’ said Cap, when he had finished his speech and was waiting in breathless impatience for her answer; ‘this is what is called a declaration of love and a proposal of marriage, is it? It is downright sentimental, I suppose, if I had only sense enough to appreciate it! It is as good as a play; pity it is lost upon me!’" Craven, who is on his knees proposing marriage, is emotionally wounded and cries, “Cruel girl! How you mock me!" But he’s not the only one who is baffled by Capitola’s behavior. Old Hurricane is forever frustrated by Cap’s hardened nature, especially when trying to tailor Cap’s wild ways: “Yes, if I could only get her to be serious long enough to listen to me! But you see Cap isn’t sentimental! and if I try to be, she laughs in my face” (175). She is, instead, a “witch,” a “wag,” a “mimic,” and a “droll.” But even though Old Hurricane finds Cap infuriating, these stereotypically negative qualities are what readers love most about the heroine. She’s got spunk!

Throughout the text Capitola openly disavows all things sentimental; her open (and textually accessible) distaste for sentiment alerts readers to the possibility that Southworth is commenting on fictional sentimentality. What comment she’s making, however, is up for debate. I, of course, have some thoughts and would like to turn to the scene when Cap and Clara switch places. When Clara tells Cap that the Le Noir are men threatening her with a “fate worse than death,” Cap shows “very little sympathy, for there was not a bit of sentimentality about our Cap.” Rather than shed tears and lament Clara’s dismal situation, Cap sets about fixing matters. In order to escape, Cap recommends fooling the Le Noir men by switching places. Cap very plainly instructs Clara saying, “If you go doing the sentimental you won't look like me a bit, and that will spoil all. There! keep your veil close, for it's windy, you know; throw back your head and fling yourself along with a swagger, as if you didn't care, ahem! for anybody, and–there you are!” In this scene Cap is encouraging Clara to act a part, to perform Cap’s masculine persona; Cap “swaggers” and walks with her head thrown back, just like a man. I have to admit, I find this self-satisfied attitude irritating and obnoxious in a man (and I’ve spent enough time with other women to know that I’m not alone), but Cap’s adoption of this affect is both delightful and humorous. Interestingly, too, is that Cap is aware of her every day performance and thus able to give Clara instruction. More to the point though, encouraging Clara to also “put on” the airs of a man, in effect, saves her life. The text seems to argue that there’s something to be said for putting on masculinity: Cap is engaging and Clara is empowered. In a very real way, the texts makes clear that gender is performed and women are capable of wielding “masculine” powers.

But that doesn’t mean “masculine” powers are more, well, powerful. We can’t forget that Cap’s performance of the “feminine” sentimental allows her to escape the Hidden House in the same fashion. When Clara has successfully “passed” for Cap, now it’s time for Cap to play Clara: “’Hush! here comes Dorcas Knight! Now I must make believe I’m Clara, and do the sentimental up brown!’ concluded Capitola, as she seated herself near the door where she could be heard, and began to sob softly” (312). Capitola does the sentimental "up brown," allowing her to conceal her identity and safely make it into town where she may have a chance to escape. True, the timely arrival of Herbert Greyson enables Cap to free herself of the Le Noir men, but we can’t forget that performing the sentimental got her to the altar in the first place. (I can only imagine that Southworth intended this mild irony.) When Cap and Clara switch places, then, the female performances of feminine sentimentality and masculine defiance are equally as effective. Even though the text seems to poke fun at sentimentality, it does not mock feminine emotion or feeling or experience. In fact, it seems to challenge the essentialist idea that there is a common, shared female experience. Cap and Clara are equally defiant and determined in their own right, and both are equally capable of sentimentality or defiance. I'd like to make clear that I'm not arguging (nor do I believe) that there are certain traits/behaviors that are decidedly "masculine" or "feminine." And I certainly don't think the text is promoting this idea either. Rather, it seems that Southworth is challenging the ideas of essentialist gender roles.

"'What Fools Men Are!'" A Reading of Behind A Mask by Larisa

We talked in class about the idea of performance and performing as a woman, especially of Jean Muir’s performance and her conquests of Edward, Gerald, and Sir John. What struck me in the concluding chapter, was the following line from Jean's letter to Hortense: "'What fools men are!'" (450). I immediately remembered Puck, from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, who says something very similar: "Lord, what fools these mortals be!" Jean’s use of this assertion reinforces not only the foolishness of humans--males especially--in matters of love but it further aligns Jean with Puck, who is a “shrewd and knavish sprite.” Characters in the novel frequently describe Jean in similar terms, which fit well since she is a trickster like Puck. I did a word count on the electronic version of Behind A Mask found at Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/8bhmk10.txt) and counted six different times that she is called or described as a witch or bewitching.

So taking this idea of “witchery” in mind, I re-read the denouement and found some interesting descriptions of Jean. For instance, when her letters are discovered and read, Lucia protests that, “’A woman could not do it!’” (446)--meaning a woman could not artfully set out a plan to seduce a man like Major Peter Sanford did of Eliza Wharton in The Coquette. Here we see Lucia assert that Jean is something other than a “woman” or a woman like herself. Lucia does nothing in such a calculated method. Ned describes Jean as not being a woman, but as possessing “’the art of a devil‘” and using “’charm’” on their friend Mr. Sydney (445). Alcott further describes Jean in other worldly terms as “an apparition” (451) and describes her as “fixing on Gerald the strange glance he remembered well” […] “before she vanished from their sight” (453) saying she fixed a look seems to be similar to putting a spell on someone, and saying she vanished just once again reinforces this witchery about her.

All of these descriptions Alcott uses further complicate Jean’s role in the text. And so I still wonder, is she a woman? Is she a “Scotch witch”? What exactly is she? She gets married in the end to a rich lord (every girl's dream match: wealth+title+old man=independence in a few years)--but the way she does it seems to bother some people in our class. And really, if we were to find out at the novel’s end that she is a witch, we would not really be surprised. This confusion and complexity makes her a fascinating character to analyze--especially when we see her role as Lady Coventry will be her best performance yet.

Reading the Domestic Spaces: Capitola's Bed Room/Body

We talked at length in class about the trap door and underlying pit in Capitola’s bed room. It is really the only domestic space that we see her in and we get a lot of description of the space, the furnishings and furniture in that space. It is a “large shadowy space” (72) that instantly lead me to feel anxiety for Capitola being taken into by Mrs. Condiment. However, once I saw that it has a nice big bed, a rocking chair, two arm chairs, a dresser and wash stand, I thought she would be very appreciative because it was much better than living on the streets. But as soon as Mrs. Condiment starts talking about the trap door, and the author drops hints like, “the simple accident of its arrangement, depended, on two occasions, the life and honor of its occupant” (72)--I started to feel concerned again. And then when Mrs. Condiment tells Capitola that the trap door was used to trap Indians, I started to feel sick. But now that I have finished the novel and see how the trap door functions as a plot device and a symbol, there is much more to be discussed than we talked about in class. For instance, it perplexes me that Capitola tells Pitapat, “I do not like the smell of food in my bedroom” (261). Why does she not want food in an obvious domestic space, especially when she was someone who lived on the streets and food was hard to come by? An obvious answer is that perhaps Southworth is just setting up the later scene with Black Donald’s invasion of Capitola’s chamber. So I went on and re-read the scene of her “awful peril” and looked at that domestic space again as representative of Capitola's body.

First of all, the bedroom is in a far distant corner of the house. It takes a lot of time to get to that space. There are many passageways one has to go through, corners to turn, and empty rooms to pass. Pitapat is the only one who regularly goes there besides Capitola. Mrs. Condiment goes there only twice. General Warfield is only there once. So I find it very interesting that Black Donald and his gang members have no problem finding that space and can make it there without getting caught. The gang members all hide under the bed, which is a personal and intimate space representing Capitola. Since a bed is usually one shared with one who is a lover or child, their close proximity to it shows how Capitola could become like them or be with them. But she manages to get rid of them before she is violated in that personal space.

Black Donald, on the other hand, actually gets laid in Cap’s bed after he is retrieved from the pit. Even though they are not in the bed together, they have still shared the same bed, which invites further exploration of the pre-pit scene. I see it as a seduction scene that Southworth rewrites to empower Capitola instead of Black Donald. He thinks that by locking the door he has captured her, an uninvited entrance that can be read as a near rape and/or kidnapping. But unlike other maidens in similar scenes, Capitola does not faint or scream. Instead she remains cool--as a cucumber. Black Donald’s equation of her with an object of consumption, and the ensuring scene in which he eats ham, then cheese, and then bread while swigging away on the brandy is a precursor to the consumption he plans of Capitola’s physical body in a seduction or rape. The inevitability of the sexual consumption seems even more imminent when they start making the egg nog, since they prepare it together and the eggs themselves represent fertility and female sexuality. Capitola tells him, “it takes two to make egg-nog” and then she shudders when he takes off his coat, a definite physical response of excitement and/or fear (367). Then after Black Donald consumes the egg nog, it seems he will go on further to consume Capitola, but then Southworth shifts the power dynamic when Black Donald moves his chair onto the rug that conceals the trap door. Sitting in a chair, he is over the pit, under the trap door. This pit, or old cellar, is a yonic symbol or space that represents femaleness and Black Donald falls into it because he will not yield to Capitola’s attempts to convert him into a Christian male. Perhaps if he had listened to her pleadings to reform and given into her female power, he would not have had to enter a dark and scary space. However, Southworth doesn’t kill him in that space--instead, he is reborn, violently, from entering Capitola‘s domestic space--the bedroom and the pit underneath. And like a helpless baby emerging from a mother’s womb, he has to be helped out of the space and lays in bed for an extended period of time before he can walk to the judge and await his trial. When Capitola gives him the tools to break his chains, she is again acting like a figurative mother who gives her child the tools needed to go out into the unknown world. In this way we can read the bed room as a representation of Capitola herself and her body. She is the bedroom and the bedroom is her.

Love, Death, and Narration from Beyond the Grave: Howe's The Hermaphrodite and Spofford's "The Amber Gods"

The Hermaphrodite wrestles, in various ways, with the idea of a physical versus spiritual love or connection. Laurence, whose body is fraught with tension, cannot know physical love and must maintain romantic relationships on a spiritual/emotional level. In fact, a spiritual connection between lovers is both romanticized and valorized in the novel, making it seem like the ideal sort of love. Again and again, characters are engaged in love that transcends all physicality, beyond death, existing only on the spiritual plane. Quite fittingly, then, the novel ends with the death of Laurence, whose inability to love in physical form has always been written on his body. But the final passage of the novel doesn’t reflect any of the idealized, spiritual, or transcendent love. In fact, it’s rather morbid: “I heard the sound of many footsteps ascending the stairs, and silently entering the room. My brain was now excited to a vivid consciousness of the horror of my fate, and I longed earnestly for the power of averting it by giving some token of life. At this moment, I heard another step, of how well known, and then the falling of one upon his knees beside me. Silence, dead silence from all—of that he could have spoken, that I might but hear his voice once more” (Howe 198). The present and active consciousness of Laurence’s narration is, perhaps, the most disturbing element of this scene. He is not narrating from beyond the grave but rather from inside it. The present tense—“my brain was now excited to a vivid consciousness to the horror of my fate”—gives the distinct impression that Laurence narrates from a point of consciousness, “vivid” consciousness to be exact. We, of course, have to wonder what “the horror” of his fate might entail. It could simply be death, but I’m not sure one “averts” death by giving “some token of life;” averting death is as simple as being alive. One might, however, want to give a sign of life if their spirit were trapped in an apparently deceased body and wanted to avoid being buried or burned alive.

It’s hard (pretty impossible, actually) to know what happens next in the novel, if anything. And we can’t really know if this “ending” is really the end, since Howe’s novel was recovered as an unfinished work in disjoined pieces. Laurence could, potentially, escape from his mortal body and transcend the earthly plane to await (or meet) his lovers. Or he could be trapped in his hybrid body forever, meaning that no matter how long Ronald (I can only assume it’s Ronald’s familiar footsteps he hears) waits, they will never reunite with God. It seems, from the textual evidence available, that Laurence is trapped in his body for eternity. At the very least, Laurence’s death provides a shocking alternative to the other moments of death and dying in the novel.

I plan to do more with this alternative ending, but first I’d like to look at the end of another novel ending in death, potentially narrated from beyond the grave. Harriet Prescott Spofford’s “The Amber Gods” is, throughout the story, rather grim and eerie and ends with the death of the narrator, Yone: “So I passed out of the room, down the staircase. The servants below did not see me, but the hounds crouched and whined. I paused before the great ebony clock; again the fountain broke and it chimed the halfhour; it was half past one; another quarter, and the next time its ponderous silver hammers woke the house, it would be two. Half past one? Why, then, did not the hands move? Why cling fixed on a point five minutes before the first quarter struck? To and fro, soundless and purposeless, swung the long pendulum. And, ah! What was this thing I had become? I had done with time. Not for me the hands moved on their recurrent circle any more. I must have died at ten minutes past one” (Spofford 83). Unlike Laurence, Yone does not remain in her lifeless body but moves about the house, readily acknowledging her death. The servants did not see her, but the hounds sensed her presence, marking her deceased soul as tangible. And time stops; Yone simply acknowledges that the hands on the clock no longer move for her. She plainly says, “I must have died as ten minutes past one.” In “The Amber Gods,” death is simply life without progression. The text never indicates that death would bring transcendence or eternal love, though Yone does wish that she could stop time to isolate particular moments of love and adoration.

We’ve been discussing all semester the morbid process of becoming a “true” woman; a true woman requires avoidance of all pleasures of the flesh, a pious nature, and angelic, selfless behavior. We see this trend in The Lamplighter especially Emily becomes more perfect as she nears death. And Mrs. Sullivan has more influence beyond the grave than she did while rooted in her mortality. But Spofford’s “The Amber Gods” (1860) and Howe’s The Hermaphrodite (1846) seem to revise these ideas, offering an alternative ending. We know from Toni Morrison that “the subject of the dream is the dreamer,” and so I have to wonder what’s at stake as the authors work through, in impossible postmortem narration, different options for living and dying. Spofford’s Yone exists in the world of the flesh and refuses to minister to the sick, tend house, or demurely receive suitors. Her character is both earthly and sensual, and though she doesn’t live past the end of the novel, she most certainly lives during it. She doesn’t ascend to a higher plane after death but remains in the same world, only now she’s unable to act or affect change. Howe’s Laurence, on the other hand, forgoes most worldly pleasures (sex, food, etc.) in favor of fulfillment from a higher power. But Laurence’s fate does not mirror other characters’ eternal reunions. He remains trapped in his body. Both authors seem to argue that postponing earthly pleasures, detaining romantic love until the possibility of an eternal bond, isn’t as desirable as some fictional scenarios may suggest.