Cassandra and Charles: Revising Male/Female Relationships in Stoddard's The Morgesons

I’ve been thinking about Elizabeth Stoddard’s The Morgesons ever since I read it, mainly because it’s a really creepy book. Larisa recommended that I blog about it, which I thought was an excellent suggestion to work out some of the weirdness. I’ve been using words like “creepy,” “haunting,” and “weird” to describe The Morgesons, mainly because of the slightly mocking, satirical tone. Stoddard seems to call into question firmly established nineteenth-century (and contemporary) social conventions, mainly through her main character, Cassandra, and her interaction with others. Stoddard criticizes the idea of female solidarity (Cassandra’s relationship with her sister is bizarre, to say the least), the job of the feminine/domestic sphere (the women in the Morgeson family take no part in domesticity), and women’s reliance on familiar male figures for care and support before marriage (Cassandra’s father and cousin both fail her in different ways). Stoddard lays bare the difficulties of these conventions, which she seems to argue are fine in theory but become increasingly difficult when mixed with actual, roiling humanity. I suppose that’s why the text is so unsettling; we still privilege these conventions today, and drawing them into the proverbial light of day is uncomfortable. The entire text deserves far more treatment than I can give it here, but I’d like to isolate one textual moment for further exploration: Cassandra’s relationship with her cousin Charles.

Throughout the semester we’ve discussed writers’ attempts to revise male/female relationships and the institution of marriage. Young lovers are described as brother and sister—Willie and Gerty in The Lamplighter and Ellen and John in The Wide Wide World (among others). Young girls’ relationships with their fathers seem slightly romantic—Gerty and Philip Amory in The Lamplighter, for instance. We’ve generally seen this as an attempt to revise marital relationships; if we transfer lover-like relationships on to caring platonic, familial men (like fathers and brothers) it will model appropriate behavior for future husbands. Stoddard calls idea/practice into question in The Morgesons, playing out her criticism in the relationship of Cassandra and Charles.

Cassandra travels to stay with her cousin Charles and his wife Alice to attend a finishing school. From their first meeting, Charles affects Cassandra physically, though not in ways we’ve seen in other texts. Cassandra is not overcome with feelings of love or goodness; rather, Cassandra narrates, “His face was serene, dark, and delicate, but to look at it made me shiver” (69). She goes on to say that something “intangible, silent, magnetic” existed between them: “An intangible, silent, magnetic feeling existed between us, changing and developing according to its own mysterious law, remaining intact in spite of the contests between us of resistance and defiance” (74). These are not the feelings of “brotherly love” we’ve seen in other novels. These are dark and mysterious, and according to the text, wrong. Even though Charles and Cassandra share a mutual attraction, the consummation of their relationship is marked as a violation in the text.

In a swiftly moving textual moment, Cassandra offers a flower to one of Charles’s associates. The narration continues: “He was about to take it with a blush, when Charles struck it out of my hand and stepped on it. ‘Are you ready now?’ he said, in a quick voice. I declared it was nothing, when I found I was too ill to rise the next morning” (84). Cassandra, who is described as healthy and vivacious in comparison to her sister Verry, has never been sick in the novel. But after Charles “crushes her flower,” she inexplicably falls ill and has a sickly temperament for the rest of her life. The physical/emotional relationship between Charles and Cassandra is certainly a transgression. Charles is married and her cousin, and the consummation of their relationship is shrouded in violence.

As Stoddard revises the platonic, paternal narrative of male relatives in women’s fiction, she seems to argue that the protective paradigm is all well and good until humanity and attraction intervenes. When real-life is thrown into the mix, even familial relations have the potential to fail women. Her father later fails her economically, and Charles fails her sexually. All in all, Stoddard is most certainly questioning the hopeful status quo of “platonic” relationships in fiction as a means of revising the institution of marriage.