Between the Novel and the News: The Emergence of American Women's Writing

By Sari Edelstein

While American literary history has long acknowledged the profound influence of journalism on canonical male writers, Sari Edelstein argues that American women writers were also influenced by a dynamic relationship with the mainstream press. From the early republic through the turn of the twentieth century, she offers a comprehensive reassessment of writers such as Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Harriet Jacobs, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Drawing on slave narratives, sentimental novels, and realist fiction, Edelstein examines how advances in journalism—including the emergence of the penny press, the rise of the story-paper, and the birth of eyewitness reportage—shaped not only a female literary tradition but also gender conventions themselves.

Excluded from formal politics and lacking the vote, women writers were deft analysts of the prevalent tropes and aesthetic gestures of journalism, which they alternately relied upon and resisted in their efforts to influence public opinion and to intervene in political debates. Ultimately, Between the Novel and the News is a project of recovery that transforms our understanding of the genesis and the development of American women’s writing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Apr 30, 2014
• ISBN: 9780813935911

Book preview

Between the Novel and the News

The Emergence of American Women’s Writing

Sari Edelstein

University of Virginia Press

Charlottesville and London

University of Virginia Press

© 2014 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

First published 2014

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Edelstein, Sari, 1980–

Between the novel and the news : the emergence of American women’s writing / Sari Edelstein.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8139-3589-8 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-8139-3590-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-8139-3591-1 (e-book)

1. Women journalists—United States—History—18th century. 2. Women journalists—United States—History—19th century. 3. Women and journalism—United States—History—19th century. 4. Journalism and literature—United States—History. 5. American fiction—Women authors—History and criticism. 6. American fiction—18th century—History and criticism. 7. American fiction—19th century—History and criticism. I. Title.

PN4888.W66E44 2014

810.9’9287—dc23

2013039218

A book in the American Literatures Initiative (ALI), a collaborative publishing project of NYU Press, Fordham University Press, Rutgers University Press, Temple University Press, and the University of Virginia Press. The Initiative is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. For more information, please visit www.americanliteratures.org.

For Holly Jackson and Michael T. Gilmore

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Seditious Newspapers and Seduction Novels

2. Rereading the Fallen Woman and the Penny Press

3. Category Crisis in Antebellum Story-Papers

4. Eyewitness Literature and Civil War Journalism

5. Colorful Writing in the Era of Yellow Journalism

Afterword

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

I am happy to acknowledge the teachers, colleagues, friends, and family whose support made the publication of this book possible. At Brandeis University, Michael T. Gilmore directed the dissertation out of which this book developed, and his boundless knowledge and intellectual charisma ignited my passion for studying the nineteenth century. I feel fortunate to have benefited from his razor-sharp mind, his impossibly high standards, and most of all, his model of integrity and commitment. Susan S. Lanser encouraged my focus on women writers and always took the time to improve both the substance and style of my work; she is truly the exemplar of a feminist scholar-teacher. Chris Wilson, who served as an outside reader, pushed me to consider the complexities of gender-based arguments, gave me hope that this project was bookable, and also supported my efforts on the job market. Professors Paul Morrison, Caren Irr, and John Burt equipped me with a body of knowledge and a range of critical methods that I hope are manifest in these pages.

A number of other academic communities have supported this project as well. I am grateful to the American Antiquarian Society for a Peterson Fellowship and to Joanne Chaison, Paul Erickson, Jaclyn Penny, and Caroline Sloat in particular, for making the AAS a productive and accessible place to do archival work. The Nineteenth-Century Women Writers Study Group has been my traveling home in the profession; I am especially indebted to Robin Bernstein for introducing me to the group when I was in graduate school and to Ellen Gruber Garvey and Betsy Duquette for reading portions of this project. Through the Charlotte Perkins Gilman Society and Legacy, I have had the good fortune to work with Catherine Golden, Theresa Strouth Gaul, Nicole Tonkovich, and Jennifer Tuttle, whose supportive mentorship has been invaluable. At Skidmore College, I formed friendships with Jennifer Delton, Mason Stokes, and Susan Walzer, relationships which remain some of the most gratifying in my life and which spurred me toward the completion of this project.

I consider myself extremely lucky to have landed at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, where my colleagues in the English Department have demonstrated exceptional support for my career. Louise Penner, Pamela Annas, Cheryl Nixon, and Shaun O’Connell provided crucial insight on this project at the proposal stage, and the vibrant cadre of Americanists, including Betsy Klimasmith, Nadia Nurhussein, Shaun O’Connell, Emilio Sauri, Rajini Srikanth, Susan Tomlinson, and Len Von Morze, make the study and teaching of American literature feel perpetually relevant and vital.

Beyond these institutional settings, Melissa Axelrod, Ross Barrett, Lara Cohen, Melissa Feuerstein, Cecily Parks, Bess Rouse, and Ashley Shelden have sustained me over the course of writing this book, whether by reading drafts or simply offering welcome distraction. And I cannot imagine being in this line of work without Danielle Coriale as a compatriot; her critical acumen and wry sense of humor enhance my work and my life. I am grateful as well to my earliest supporters: Robert Edelstein, for always believing I would write a book, even when I doubted it; James Leo and Marcy Edelstein, for the different kinds of support that make an academic career possible; and Robin Hendricksen, for encouraging my early love of reading and writing and for learning to love American literature because I do. Jane Jackson-Edelstein arrived as I was finalizing this project; the idea of her was a powerful incentive to complete it, and her presence will forevermore be a reminder to look up from the screen.

Finally, Holly Jackson, the love of my life and my dearest friend, thank you for giving me all your best words and for putting my work before your own. My deepest joy is sharing ideas with you.

Portions of this work are reprinted with permission from the following sources: A version of chapter 3 first appeared in Studies in American Fiction 37.1 (2010): 29–53. Copyright © 2010. The Johns Hopkins University Press. A brief excerpt from chapter 4 first appeared in Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 29.1 (2012): 148–56. Copyright © 2012. The University of Nebraska Press. Part of chapter 5 first appeared in Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 24.1 (2007): 72–92. Copyright © 2007. The University of Nebraska Press. I am grateful to those publications for allowing me to reprint and expand my arguments here.

Introduction

The Only News I know

Is Bulletins all Day

From Immortality.

The Only Shows I see—

Tomorrow and Today—

Perchance Eternity—

The Only One I meet

Is God—The Only Street—

Existence—This traversed

If Other News there be,

Or Admirabler Show—

I’ll tell it You—

—Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson read the newspaper every day.¹ Although she is perhaps just as famous for her reclusive, inward life in Amherst as for her poetry, Dickinson was connected to the world around her through the daily press, especially the Springfield Daily Republican. Many of her poems make reference to journalism, telegraphy, and publication, and Dickinson draws on the vocabulary of news culture to establish a rivalry between documentary and imaginative forms of discourse.² For instance, The Only News I Know, written during the Civil War, appropriates the language of the press to position poetry as an alternative mode of truth-telling. News and bulletins refer not to sensational accounts of battle but rather to the spiritual truths that only poetry can convey. That she only knows news from immortality and only sees the shows of tomorrow and today signals her devaluation of conventional news in favor of intangible, existential kinds of knowledge. When the poem ends, Dickinson promises to relay what we need to know—I’ll tell it You, she insists—implying that poetry is the direct and singular conduit to worthy news.³

Though women’s literary productions are often associated with private or domestic concerns, Between the Novel and the News demonstrates that American women’s writing emerged through a dynamic, often critical, relationship with mainstream journalism, the most public of print discourses. From the early republic through the turn of the twentieth century, women writers engaged in a representational dialogue with newspaper culture that was both a competition and a mutually constitutive dialectic. In both form and content, women’s writing registers a dual impulse to utilize journalistic methods and also to criticize mainstream journalism for its representational biases, oversights, and ideological premises. In slave narratives, sentimental novels, and realist fiction, women writers thematize newspapers and journalistic practices, highlighting the inadequacies as well as the potentialities of the press. Ultimately, this interchange with the popular press manifests itself in a female literary tradition deeply attentive to the politics of truth discourses, suspicious of objectivity, and invested in spreading alternative kinds of news.

As a representational and commercial rival, journalism heavily influenced nineteenth-century American fiction, and many scholars have examined the work of canonical male writers, including Walt Whitman, Henry James, Stephen Crane, and William Dean Howells, in the context of the daily paper.⁴ Most recently, Mark Canada has termed the relationship between antebellum literature and the commercial press a sibling rivalry.⁵ But the gendered aspects of this relationship have largely gone unexamined.⁶ While scholars have eagerly embraced the opportunity to assess both the progressive and insidious types of cultural work accomplished by female-authored texts, longstanding critical assumptions about the scope of women’s interests and the style of public writing have precluded any sustained treatment of how women’s writing was similarly shaped by an ongoing dialogue with the press.⁷ However, if we view key tropes and aesthetic shifts in this tradition, such as seduction plots and sentimentalism, as born out of a conversation with the mainstream press, women’s writing appears as a multivalent, intertextual tradition profoundly shaped by America’s first mass media.

While women writers shared many of the criticisms of the press made by their male counterparts, their relationship to the press differed in fundamental ways. Most significantly, without the vote or the ability to hold public office, women writers drew on the cultural power of newspapers and co-opted journalistic techniques to telegraph their engagement with the sociopolitical world.⁸ Their dialogue with journalistic modes served as a point of entry into political debates, from Federalism to sectionalism, as well as into debates about the ethics of documentary practice itself.⁹ By adopting and revising the major representational techniques of the press, women writers could intervene in political conversations, stage dissenting points of view, and comment on the forms of public discourse.

For women with literary aspirations and commitments to social change, mainstream newspapers presented both obstacles and opportunities. As repositories for cultural mores, newspapers were architects of and barometers for public opinion about gender roles themselves, and as such, they also served as sites of criticism and social discipline. Therefore, I invoke the category of women’s writing not to posit biological sex as the basis of a literary tradition but because women did have gender-specific experiences in their attempts to participate in the print culture marketplace, though these experiences were shaded by their diverse social locations. Judith Sargent Murray and Elizabeth Keckley—divided by race, historical period, class, and region—have little in common other than their mutual engagement with print culture, in which they both saw enormous potential for social change and self-making even as they suffered its punitive effects. Between the Novel and the News is premised on the notion that those shared experiences and commitments had a sustained impact on their texts, making it germane to continue to conceive of women writers as constituting a tradition, not separate from but overlapping with that of male writers.

Feminist scholars including Sharon Harris, Ellen Gruber Garvey, and Alice Fahs have demonstrated that the press was not the male bastion that previous scholars imagined and that women acted on the press in a range of capacities and styles, with particular influence as periodical editors. The careers of Jane Swisshelm, Sarah Josepha Hale, Margaret Fuller, and Kate Field, for example, have all received recent scholarly attention.¹⁰ Lydia Maria Child, who was deeply invested in the political possibilities of print culture, vacillated between journalism, fiction, and polemical writing in her efforts to end slavery and advocate for other reforms.¹¹ Child and her contemporaries used this range of print forms to influence public opinion and to intervene in political debates.¹² Consequently, they were deft analysts of the prevalent tropes and aesthetic gestures of journalism.

What remains unacknowledged, however, is the impact of newspaper culture on these writers’ imaginative productions. Between the Novel and the News demonstrates how writers of fiction, such as Catharine Sedgwick and E. D. E. N. Southworth, borrowed from journalistic modes, competed with the press for social relevance and immediacy, and used fiction to criticize newspaper discourse. They infiltrated the pages of newspapers, the foremost vehicle for the dissemination of women’s fiction, where their work often subverted the ideological aims of editors and capitalized on the mass circulation of the mainstream press. Between the Novel and the News offers an alternative account of print culture, chronicling the intersections between these too often segregated discourses.¹³

The field of journalism transformed over the course of the nineteenth century, evolving from a specialized realm of partisan debate in the post-Revolutionary period to a broad-ranging commercial enterprise and a fixture in the daily lives of average Americans. Alongside technological innovations such as the invention of the telegraph and the rise of literacy rates, editorial conventions arose to attract and serve the wider reading public. The major urban dailies of the 1790s, which served primarily as sites for political wrangling and mercantile news, were displaced by the emergence of the penny press in 1833. With a heavy emphasis on scandal, gossip, and crime stories, penny papers appealed to newly urban populations looking to the press for a blend of information and amusement. As sectional anxieties escalated in the 1840s and 1850s, story-papers used family-friendly fictions and illustrations to assuage anxieties about disunion. When the Civil War broke out, newspaper editors catered to a reading public hungry for eyewitness news and on-the-ground details, and Northern newspapers had staffs of reporters that traveled with regiments, experiencing the physical hardships and uncertainties of encampment and battle. By the century’s end, such commitments to what we now call hard news had fallen out of vogue. Sensational journalism—eventually labeled yellow journalism—marked the institutionalization of scandal and human-interest stories at the expense of civic engagement.

One goal of this book is to chart the ways in which the emergent representational values of objectivity and sentiment became freighted with gendered meanings over the course of the century. Though historians tend to associate the birth of objectivity with the turn of the twentieth century and the professionalization of journalism, I trace objectivity’s roots to the penny press journalism of the 1830s.¹⁴ Penny papers claimed special access to the truth by publishing graphic details about women’s bodies, couching these reports in the language of public service and full disclosure. Coupled with the use of the female body as a site of knowledge, the penny press employed a discourse of factuality, emphatically positioning itself as a more reliable, trustworthy form of representation than sentimentalism. James Gordon Bennett, editor of the New York Herald, characteristically refers to female writing as sickly sentimentalism, fit only for the kitchen and the laundry.¹⁵ Such condemnations of a feeble, feminine sentimentality shore up the masculine authority of the penny press while keeping its ideological investments invisible. Furthermore, the description of sentimental writing as sickly affirms what Elizabeth Grosz calls the longstanding coding of femininity with the unreason associated with the body.¹⁶ Grosz and other feminist philosophers have questioned the reliance of epistemology and objectivity on the notion of a static reality that exists apart from embodied or subjective experience.¹⁷

Nineteenth-century women writers anticipated the overvaluation of objectivity long before the term and concept became articulated as a journalistic standard, and they recognized the inadequacies and limitations of purely empirical modes of assessing social reality.¹⁸ When placed alongside the emergence of empirical reporting, for example, sentimental discourse appears as a self-conscious counterpoint to the emphasis on fact and science circulated by the press. Moreover, women’s writing acknowledges the limits of knowledge, breaking down the press’s illusion of epistemological authority and directing readers to inhabit instead what Barbara Johnson calls that space where knowledge becomes the obstacle to knowing.¹⁹ Women’s writing challenges the logic of mainstream journalism by inviting readers to consider what they do not know rather than providing the safe and satisfying sense of being informed.

This is precisely the task of Rebecca Harding Davis’s novella Life in the Iron Mills (1861), which introduces readers to the inhumane conditions of the mills and the impoverished lives of the workers: I want you to hide your disgust, take no heed to your clean clothes, and come right down with me,—here, into the thickest of the fog and mud and foul effluvia. I want you to hear this story.²⁰ Unlike the voyeuristic, anonymous penny press accounts of urban destitution and crime that merely titillate passive readers, Davis jolts her readers out of their own subject positions, an experience that only fiction can enable. Indeed, this emphatic, first-person narrative voice is juxtaposed with those of several upper-class men, including a doctor and a bureaucratic journalist, visiting the mill. The detached, commercially motivated newspaperman, hoping to get up a series of reviews of the leading manufactories, embodies mainstream journalism’s complicity with capitalism and its passive and prurient treatment of human suffering.²¹

Upon the men’s tour of the mill, they encounter a life-size sculpture of a woman, produced by one of the workers out of the refuse of the iron. What does the fellow intend by the figure? I cannot catch the meaning, wonders the doctor. I thought it was alive, another man exclaims.²² These reactions to the sculpture, produced by Hugh Wolfe, dramatize the power of art to stymie and surprise. While the men pause their tour to contemplate the meaning of this sculpture, the worker’s untrained genius, and the limits of social responsibility, they eventually leave Wolfe to return to his grueling labor. A month later, the doctor is reading to his wife at breakfast from this fourth column of the morning-paper and learns that Wolfe has been wrongfully imprisoned for a theft he did not commit.²³ Upon hearing the news, the doctor’s wife said something about the ingratitude of that kind of people, and then they began to talk of something else.²⁴ This episode encapsulates Davis’s concern about the daily paper, which is passively read and summarily dismissed without rousing its readers from their breakfast routine. The wife’s reaction to the story reveals her sense of absolute confidence in her comprehension of the world. To return to Johnson’s formulation, the newspaper becomes the obstacle to knowing, as it merely confirms her rigid (and incorrect) sense of certainty about the world rather than enlarging her consciousness. By contrast, we might read Life in the Iron Mills as an extension of Wolfe’s sculpture, a strange and unclassifiable kind of art that forces readers to inhabit a position of edifying uncertainty. Abandoning a clear, straightforward plot in favor of a confrontational first-person narrator, Life in the Iron Mills is unsettling and startling. With this novella, Davis elaborates on that which evades mainstream journalism and challenges the reflexive ways in which readers make sense of the world.

Davis’s elliptical novella would have no place in Jürgen Habermas’s vision of the public sphere, which privileges rational discourse as the fundamental currency of democratic life. For Habermas, the public sphere is an imaginary space in which the cultural productions of disinterested individuals mediate between the state and the intimate realm. Critics of the Habermasian public sphere have vigorously argued that the prerequisites for participation are not available to all individuals; some bodies and subject positions are not granted the status of neutrality, and rationality and detachment are not attainable or even desirable goals for many individuals.²⁵ As Michael Warner observes, Movements around gender and sexuality do not always conform to the bourgeois model of ‘rational-critical debate.’ . . . [Those] movements seek to transform fundamental styles of embodiment, identity, and social relations.²⁶ It is often the case that disenfranchised populations seek not only to reform political life but also to revise the very forms and styles available for those interventions.

Given the impossibility for neutrality and the undesirability of rational-critical debate for many individuals and groups, some scholars have theorized the existence of multiple publics, or what Nancy Fraser terms subaltern counterpublics.²⁷ Such alternative arenas serve to protect the expressive norms of subordinated groups as well as to create rhetorical space for styles of dialogue that might be unwelcome or incompatible with those of the mainstream.²⁸ Others, however, are less inclined to celebrate breaks from rational discourse as liberatory. Lauren Berlant, for example, defines popular women’s culture as an intimate public, predicated on political inaction. For Berlant, the sentimental-feminine sphere cannot be considered an activist or politically efficacious public; rather, it marks the consolidation and commodification of middle-class femininity. In other words, just because a semisubordinated population (in this case, middle-class white women) unites around a critically maligned set of cultural productions, we need not identify those productions as radical or even progressive. In the case of popular women’s culture, Berlant sees this intimate public as fundamentally at odds with social transformation; the persistent lamentation of the female condition, what she terms the female complaint, merely serves to perpetuate it. Between the Novel and the News takes a more generous view of women’s writing, which it locates somewhere between Fraser’s utopic subaltern counterpublic and Berlant’s toothless mass cultural intimate public.²⁹

Nineteenth-century women’s writing is not purely a space of political engagement, but neither is it simply a venue for reinscribing gender or class norms through pathos. If we jettison the Habermasian ideals of rationality and criticality, we can consider alternative forms of discourse as politically viable. Far from consolatory or default mediums, relegated to people without access to more official modes of public discourse, we might recognize poetry, fiction, and other forms of imaginative writing as privileged domains with singular powers to activate and alter readerly consciousness.³⁰ According to Jacques Rancière, art can shift and transport meaning through its redistribution of the sensible: Fiction is a way of changing existing modes of sensory presentations and forms of enunciation; of varying frames, scales, and rhythms; and of building new relationships between reality and appearances, the individual and the collective.³¹ Rebecca Harding Davis represents fiction, and art more generally, as endowed with these capabilities to shift consciousness and open up unknown worlds. In contrast to the daily paper, Wolfe’s sculpture and the novella itself disturb the familiar and make demands on their audiences.

Throughout the nineteenth century, women were already associated with the novel form and were therefore in a position to take advantage of the singular potential of art to question the self-evidence of the visible, as Rancière puts it, and to undermine or expose embedded or nonobvious truths. We might see Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous injunction to feel right at the end of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as emblematic of how sentimental fiction more generally sought to reanimate affect in the face of a news industry that replaced ethics and feeling with salacious detail and overexposure.³²

Lydia Maria Child’s 1843 story Slavery’s Pleasant Homes positions fiction as a counterforce to journalism’s detached, partial account of life under slavery. The story describes how George, an enslaved African American man, murders his master and brother in order to avenge the rape and death of his lover. At the end of the story, another slave is about to be lynched for the crime when George confesses and is hung up, like a dog or wolf.³³ The story concludes with the following:

The Georgian papers thus announced the deed: "Fiend-like Murder. Frederic Dalcho, one of our most wealthy and respected citizens, was robbed and murdered last week, by one of his slaves. The black demon was caught and hung; and hanging was too good for him. The Northern papers copied this version; merely adding, These are the black-hearted monsters, which abolition philanthropy would let loose upon our brethren of the South." Not one was found to tell how the slave’s young wife had been torn from him by his own brother, and murdered with slow tortures. Not one recorded the heroism that would not purchase life by another’s death, though the victim was his enemy. His very name was left unmentioned; he was only Mr. Dalcho’s slave!"³⁴

Child charges both Southern and Northern newspapers with reporting only part of the story, eliding the complexities of the truth to confirm prevailing, crude stereotypes about black-hearted monsters. Rather than investigating the details of the story, the newspapers reflexively reproduce commonplace assumptions about African American men. The omission of George’s name underscores the press’s complicity with the dehumanizing regime. As a work of fiction, Child’s story is offered as a far more truthful account of Southern slavery and its effects on family and marriage than the newspapers dared to render.

Decades later, Frances Harper similarly used poetry and fiction to rouse readers from a news-induced indifference to racial violence. Consider her 1895 poem The Martyr of Alabama, which begins with this parenthetical note:

The following news item appeared in the newspapers throughout the country, issue of December 27th, 1894: Tim Thompson, a little negro boy, was asked to dance for the amusement of some white toughs. He refused, saying he was a church member. One of the men knocked him down with a club and then danced upon his prostrate form. He then shot the boy in the hip. The boy is dead; his murderer is still at large.³⁵

Prefacing the poem with a quotation that was reprinted in newspapers throughout the country, Harper formally stages the relationship of poetry to the press. Poetry, she suggests, must take over after the news gives the facts. Her account of the crime, juxtaposed against this brief and banal report, replaces balance and objectivity with biblical language, exclamations, and rhyme. Alas! that in our favored land / That cruelty and crime / Should cast their shadows o’er a day, / The fairest pearl of time.³⁶ Harper reinscribes the event with the urgency and seriousness denied to it by the press, suggesting that certain stories cannot be adequately conveyed according to the conventions of journalistic reportage. Harper’s use of direct address and rhetorical questions counteract the impersonality of the news, implicating her readers in the narrative. Heard they aright? Did that brave child / Their mandates dare resist? / Did he against their stern commands / Have courage to resist?³⁷ These questions seek to move the reader from indifference and detachment to emotional investment and anger. Thus, just as Dickinson privileges poetry as the only news, so too does Harper offer poetry as a crucial supplement to the newspaper, as a site for heightening readerly sensitivity and imbuing everyday events with texture and depth.

Harper’s poem models the dialectical relationship between journalistic and imaginative prose that defines nineteenth-century women’s writing. Harper poaches on the publicness of mainstream journalism and remains reliant on what Michel de Certeau calls the scriptural economy of the hegemony, or those practices and styles of writing sanctioned by cultural authorities. Within this circumscribed textual