The Development of Women’s Writing

Writing by African American women

The world of the naturalists is, on the whole, a determinately male one, defined by power and struggle. In the work of Norris and London, in particular, there is a distinctively and additionally masculine strain: marked by barely concealed homoerotic feelings and loving admiration for those men who have understood and perhaps embody the principle of force. In the work of a number of women writers of the later nineteenth century, there may be a similar interest in the allocation and distribution of power. However, it tends to express itself in different forms, less conspicuously wedded to the notion of life as war. The forms in which women writers expressed themselves during this period were several, and usually involved a continuity with writing before the Civil War. Some of the forms they took up and developed, such as spiritual autobiography, Gothic and polemic, had not been the special preserve of earlier women writers. Some, like domestic realism, had. But there was a marked tendency to use these forms to explore, as Kate Chopin did, the condition and vocation of women, their relationship to the changing worlds of home and work. And there was an equally marked tendency to look, as Mary Wilkins Freeman did, at how women could get the attention of society, and men in particular, how they could acquire a voice that mattered and get themselves heard. Such tendencies are, quite naturally, to be found with especial force in the work of those who came from, and saw themselves as representing, the most powerless, underprivileged community of women, African Americans: among them Julia A. J. Foote (1827–1900) and Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (1859–1930). Foote, the daughter of former slaves, was born in New York State and, while still only ten, began work as a domestic servant for whites. At the age of fifteen, she converted to an African Episcopal church in New York and began to devote herself to evangelical work. What she preached, above all, was the doctrine of sanctification: the belief that a Christian could be completely liberated from sin and empowered to lead a life of spiritual perfection. And her conviction that she herself had been sanctified made her sure that her destiny was to be a preacher: something that brought her into conflict with church leaders, and the general customs and prejudices of the day.

This, and other notable events in Foote’s life, are recounted in her autobiography, A Brand Plucked from the Fire (1879). To an extent, the book goes back to a tradition of spiritual autobiography that finds its American roots in the earliest writings of the Puritans. But it also reflects a growing commitment to the idea of spiritual androgyny, to be found in similar texts by black and white women of the time. Foote details her problems, when the minister of her church in Boston denied her access to the pulpit and threatened to throw her out of his congregation. She also describes how she took her case to higher church authorities; how, when she received no help from them, she embarked on a professional preaching career;

how she was involved in the holiness revivals that swept across the Midwest in the 1870s; and how she became the first woman ordained a deacon and the second woman to become an elder in her church. As she does so, she insists on her spiritual equality with men, and the spiritual equality of women in general. Women have ‘suffered persecution and death in the name of the Lord Jesus’, she points out; ‘The conduct of holy women is recorded in scripture’, and ‘in the early ages of Christianity many women were happy and glorious in martyrdom’. Citing the Bible, to the effect that ‘there is neither male nor female in Christ Jesus’, Foote makes an eloquent case for spiritual parity that is, in her humble opinion, further proven by her witness and testimony. Her conversion, her experience of the Holy Spirit and her successful pursuit of the vocation of preacher are all, she infers, evidence that she, and indeed all women, stand equal in the sight of the Lord. And, she clearly indicates, that should make them equal in the sight of society and its institutions as well.

Unlike Foote, Pauline E. Hopkins worked in many forms and genres, and was the most productive African American woman writer of her generation. Born in Maine and raised in Boston, where she was encouraged to develop her considerable literary talents, she won a prize for an essay on The Evils of Intemperance and Their Remedy (the prize was presented by the earlier African American writer, William Wells Brown) at the age of fifteen. At the age of twenty, she composed and produced a musical drama dealing with the underground railroad. And some years later, in 1900, she became involved as literary editor and major contributor with the Colored American Magazine, one of a number of important black periodicals of the time that included imaginative writing, journalism, scholarship and political commentary. Hopkins published a large body of work in the Colored American, including short stories, biographical articles and historical sketches. What has secured her reputation, however, are her four novels, three of which were serialized in the Colored American and one of which, Contending Forces: A Romance of Negro Life North and South (1900), was published by the press that issued the magazine, the Colored Co-operative Publishing Company. These novels are remarkable for the use of established popular genres to explore the themes of race and gender. In Winona, A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest (1902), for instance, a love story about a beautiful, tragic mulatta becomes a means of exploring the contentious issues of slavery and racial and sexual oppression. And in Of One Blood; or, the Hidden Self (1903), Hopkins produces an early example of black science fiction writing, using an imaginary underground African city as an imaginative site for exploring the racial mixing of blacks and whites. Most notable of all, in Contending Forces, Hopkins takes on a wide canvas and the mainstream literary genres of domestic and historical romance. The setting ranges from Bermuda in the 1790s to Boston in the late nineteenth century. Thrilling episodes, involving endangered heroines and lecherous villains, are juxtaposed with scenes of domestic bliss. Tragic misunderstandings and melodramatic coincidences are mingled with scenes of marriage and motherhood. And, throughout all this, Hopkins presses upon the issues of racial injustice and sexual oppression, as her

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black women are violated, and her black men characters brutalized and killed, by the dominant whites.

At the centre of Contending Forces is a character called Sappho Clark. Sold into prostitution by her white uncle at the age of fourteen, she has a son who was conceived during the period when she was effectively a sexual slave. To a degree, she is the conventional romance heroine, the tragic mulatta. Perhaps exploiting the prejudices of the time, but more probably reflecting them, Hopkins even attributes to Sappho the conventional beauty of the white heroine. Sappho is ‘tall and fair’, the reader learns, ‘with hair of a golden cast, aquiline nose, rosebud mouth, soft brown eyes veiled by long, dark lashes which swept her cheek’. So far, so conventional: Hopkins is not above subscribing to racial stereotype. Particularly, she is not above stereotyping lower-class black characters, who seem to have a virtual monopoly on dialect, ‘wild vivacity’, a tendency towards easy morality, and the provision of comic relief. But Sappho is more than meets the eye. For a start, Sappho is not her real name. She has adopted it to disguise her identity, and it is a clear allusion to the ancient Greek poet who created a school of women’s poetry and music on the island of Lesbos. The portrait of Sappho Clark, beneath its conventional veneer, has a definite political agenda. Her personal story exposes what Hopkins, in her Preface to the book, refers to as a history of ‘lynching and concubinage’, a series of ‘monstrous outbreaks’ of injustice ‘under a government founded upon the greatest and brightest of principles for the elevation of mankind’. Her character and stoicism, in turn, are meant to inspire admiration, and so contribute to what Hopkins saw as the ultimate aim of the book: ‘in an humble way’, as the author puts it, ‘to raise the stigma of degradation from my race’. And Sappho’s declarations of independence – her insistence, for example, that she actively enjoys working outside the home for pay – add to our sense that this is a book that uses literary stereotypes, of race and gender, only to resist and subvert social ones. The domestic scenes and the eventual destiny of Sappho bring this out with particular force. While Sappho is at a boarding house, she shares in gatherings of women at sewing circles and tea parties. What at first appears a commonplace of domestic fiction, however, turns out to be much more than that. The domestic sphere was an important site of resistance, at this time, for African American women; and the black women’s club movement of the 1890s, which Hopkins is effectively describing in these scenes, became a powerful collective force for change, fighting for integration and sexual equality and against racial prejudice and sexual abuse. The ‘sewing circle’, as Hopkins presents it, is a political forum, whose members celebrate their solidarity as women and blacks – while discussing such pressing issues as ‘the place which the virtuous woman occupies in upbuilding the race’. The reader is given a rare insight into the lives of African American bourgeois women here. More to the point, he or she is also in at the beginnings of a seminal political movement, permitted to witness meetings that both confirm the dignity and community of African American women and interrogate the elaborate machinery of legal instruments and social prejudice that keeps them down. There is a pungent realism of attitude at work in these domestic scenes, and implicitly

throughout the book: ‘The great cause of the evolution of true womanhood’, the narrator quietly reminds us, would be greatly assisted by ‘money, the sinews of living and social standing’. ‘It is an incontrovertible truth’, one member of the sewing circles acidly observes, ‘that there is no such thing as an unmixed black on the American continent.’ At her best, Hopkins uses romance to communicate that realism and to express hope for the future founded upon it. That is nowhere more clearly illustrated than in the fate of Sappho. Falling in love with the son of her landlady, Will Smith, she fears that her past will prevent their union and, for a while, runs away. But she is finally reunited with Will, who recognizes that she is not to blame for her life as a prostitute and is happy to marry her. The resolution may seem, and indeed is, romantic, even sentimental. But it presses home the point that woman is the victim, the innocent here. In acknowledging this, and acting on the acknowledgement, Will is a romantic hero making a realistic judgement of what can happen to women, especially poor, black women, in a society dominated by men. He is doing what his creator set out to do: as she put it in her Preface to Contending Forces, ‘pleading for justice of heart and mind’.

Writing and the condition of women

Pauline Hopkins tried to write for a living but, much of the time, had to support herself by working as a stenographer. Writing was also the means that Louisa M. Alcott (1832–88) sought to support not only herself but her mother and sisters. Her father, Bronson Alcott, was more interested in pursuing his utopian ideals than bread-winning – indeed, he tended to regard working for money as inconsistent with his Transcendentalist ideals. And Louisa Alcott, who never married, having experienced debt and dependency as a child was determined to avoid them as an adult; she was determined to save her family from them too. She completed her first book, Flower Babies, when she was only sixteen, although it was not published until 1855. Working as an army nurse during the Civil War, she used this experience as the basis for Hospital Sketches (1863). During the remainder of her life, she produced over three hundred titles. What she is mainly remembered for, however, are her domestic novels written for children. The best known of these is Little Women: or, Meg, Jo, and Amy. This novel was originally published in two parts: the first, Little Women, appeared in 1868, the second part, Good Wives, was published the following year, and in 1871 the two came out as a single volume, Little Women and Good Wives. Alcott drew on her own life and family experiences in writing these and other domestic tales: Jo March, for instance, one of the ‘little women’, is based on Alcott herself. But the March family live in genteel poverty, whereas the Alcotts, when Louisa was young, often suffered a fiercer deprivation. With the spectacular commercial success of Little Women, however, the financial security of Alcott and her relatives was assured. She continued to write domestic tales. But, before and after the publication of Little Women, she also continued to try her hand at other forms. Between 1863 and 1869, for instance, she published anonymous and pseudonymous Gothic romances and thrilling tales with titles like ‘Pauline’s

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Passion and Punishment’; these were eventually collected and published in 1975 as Behind a Mask. She wrote, under her own name, Moods (1864), a grimly realistic account of adultery and divorce as alternatives to unhappy marriage, and Transcendental Wild Oats (1873), a satirical treatment of Fruitlands, the utopian community founded by her father. ‘Tired’, as she put it, ‘of providing moral pap for the young’, she also produced a tale influenced by Goethe called A Modern Mephistopheles (1877), in which an innocent young woman resists seduction by the diabolic genius with whom her poet husband has made a Faustian pact. And, in 1873, she published what is perhaps her most interesting book, an autobiographical fiction that covers nearly twenty years in the life of its heroine, Work: A Story of Experience.

Work begins with Christie, its heroine who is twenty-one, declaring her independence of her guardian, Uncle Enos. It ends with her, at the age of forty, discovering her vocation as a spokesperson for the rights of women. Christie is resolved, as she puts it, ‘not to be a slave to anybody’. And, in pursuing that resolution, she takes jobs ranging from sewing to acting. She is also helped and inspired by the companionship and the stories of female friends, the women she meets after her declaration of independence: among them, a runaway slave and many fellow women workers. The episode in which Christie becomes an actress is typical of the narrative as a whole, in its cunning mix of realism and melodrama, empirical detail and romantic allusion. ‘Feeling that she had all the world before her where to choose’, like Eve after she is expelled from the Garden of Eden, our heroine meets two boarders at her lodging house, ‘an old lady and her pretty daughter’. They are both ‘actresses at a respectable theatre’, and they help Christie to acquire the role of ‘Queen of the Amazons’ in a ‘new spectacle’. Christie is spurred on to take a role that clearly expresses her own sense of her power as a female by the thought that Uncle Enos would disapprove. ‘Uncle Enos’, she reflects, ‘considered “playactin” as the sum of all iniquity’; and, in becoming an actor, ‘a delicious sense of freedom pervaded her soul, and the old defiant spirit seemed to rise up within her’. Christie has ‘no talent except that which may develop in any girl possessing the lively fancy, sympathetic nature, and ambitious spirit which make such girls naturally dramatic’. But she soon rises in the theatrical ranks. As she does so, however, she becomes aware that she is growing, as a result of her success, ‘selfish, frivolous, and vain’. She has ‘reached the height of earthly bliss’, she reflects; she may become ‘a fine actress perhaps, but how good a woman?’ Play-acting has served its purpose, in further liberating and developing her; and she quits it, after an appropriately melodramatic episode in which she forgets herself and risks injury to save a fellow actress from an accident onstage. She has shown her mettle as a true woman, caring selflessly for another woman, and it is time to move on. By the close of the story, Christie has a daughter, and is joined with her and other females in what is termed a ‘loving league of sisters’. Devoted now to the cause of women, she is roughly the same age as her creator was when she published this novel; and it is hard not to see her sense of her own empowerment as something shared with Alcott. Work is a celebration of female liberation and labour

of many kinds: including the liberation experienced in and from the labour of writing.

Harriet Spofford (1835–1921) also wrote to support herself and her family. Her reputation was established when the Atlantic Monthly published her short story, ‘In a Cellar’, in 1859. She went on to write poetry, articles and several novels. The longer fiction includes Sir Rohan’s Ghost (1860), a Gothic story of a man who tries to kill his mistress and is later plagued by her daughter, and Azarian: An Episode (1864), a more poetic tale concerning an artistic Bostonian called Constant Azarian who is too self-absorbed to appreciate the devotion of the idealistic Ruth Yetton. Born in New England, and moving to Washington, DC, after marriage, Spofford also wrote of her New England friendships in A Little Book of Friendships (1916) and the local colour of the capital city in Old Washington (1906). Notable among her non-fictional work is her book Art Decoration Applied to Furniture (1878), where she develops her belief that style in dress and furnishings reflects the people who wear and acquire them. That belief informs what is undoubtedly her best work, her short stories, collected in such volumes as The Amber Gods and Other Stories (1863), New-England Legends (1871) and The Elder’s People (1920). In the title tale of her first, 1863 collection, for instance, the two major, female characters are defined by the jewellery they wear. The passionate Yon wears ‘pagan’ amber ornaments, while the placid and patient Lu wears ‘light’ and ‘limpid’ aqua-marina. What also informs the best of these stories is a firm commitment to female power and community. In ‘A Village Dressmaker’, for example, the dressmaker Susanna gives the wedding gown she made for herself to Rowena Mayhew, who is marrying the man they have both loved. And she is happy to do so because, as her two maiden aunts recognize, she has acknowledged necessity and, at the same time, she has helped another woman. That tale is from Spofford’s final, 1920 collection, which is a detailed, realistic account of New England life. Some of the earlier stories are more strangely, hauntingly romantic but they still explore the terms in which women can express and assert themselves: through companionship, say, or through the quilts and clothes they make or the way in which they dress themselves.

One particularly remarkable earlier story is ‘Circumstance’ (1863). In this, an unnamed woman returns home through ‘those eastern wilds of Maine in that epoch frequently making neighbours and mile synonymous’. In the gathering dark, she appears to see a winding-sheet and hear a melancholy voice. But the woman is tough: she has been brought up on the frontier and ‘dealing with hard fact does not engender a flimsy mind’. Besides, she is determined to get back to her husband and child. Further on, however, she encounters ‘a swift shadow, like the fabulous flying-dragon’. It turns out to be ‘that wild beast . . . known by hunters as the Indian Devil’: a panther, which leaps upon her and begins to gnaw at her arm. The woman cries out; the beast is suddenly still; and the woman realizes that she can keep the beast from harming her, at least for the moment, by breaking the silence of the forest. So she sings, all the songs she knows, all through the night. ‘Still she chanted on’ is a refrain in this strange, dreamlike tale. Eventually, as dawn comes, the woman loses her voice, and is only saved by the timely arrival of her husband,

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who shoots the panther. Returning home, she and her family then find that, in their absence, their home is a ‘smoking ruin’, destroyed by Indians. There is desolation but there is also a sense of hope. ‘The world was all before them,’ the tale concludes, ‘where to choose.’ Like Alcott, Spofford recalls the description of Adam and Eve leaving Eden, in the concluding lines of Paradise Lost (1667) by John Milton, to inscribe her emancipatory theme. Her heroine has saved herself by finding her voice; she has tamed the beast by rehearsing her own will to live in song. Her chant, like the dramatic performances of Christie in Work, is her art: her way of surviving and asserting herself. Thanks to that art, she has the world before her and can begin again. And ‘Circumstance’ itself, of course, like the novel Work for Alcott, is Spofford’s art: it is the author’s way of announcing not only the power of female action but the power, and necessity, of female narrative.

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911) was less convinced that women would be allowed the time for their art. At least, in her best work she was. The daughter of a popular author, whose name she took as her own, she continued her mother’s interest in religious fiction by writing The Gates Ajar (1868). This was not so much a novel as a series of conversations by fictional characters about the beauties of heaven. It was immensely popular, particularly with women readers, and was followed by a number of books, the ‘Gates’ series, exploring the same theme. But Phelps also wrote Hedged In (1870), a novel that attacks the hypocrisy of society in its treatment of women who transgress conventional moral standards. This was followed by other novels that focus on the condition of women, and, in particular, on women and work: among them, The Silent Partner (1871), a story of New England mill girls, and Dr Zay (1882), an account of a successful woman physician. Of these novels, the most memorable is The Story of Avis (1887). At the beginning of this novel, the talented heroine, Avis Phelps, returns home to New England after training as an artist in Europe for four years. She is courted by Philip Ostrander, who has been wounded in the Civil War; and, while she is aware of the risk to her career as an artist involved, she marries him. She soon realizes her mistake. The care of her husband (who eventually becomes too much of an invalid to continue work), and then her son Van and daughter Wait, leave her little time for her art. In particular, she finds her work on her major project, a painting of the sphinx, constantly frustrated. Phelps uses a mixture of irony, incantation and allusion here, to measure the losses of her heroine’s life. There is irony, for instance, in Phelps’s account of Philip’s obliviousness to his wife’s needs, his quiet satisfaction in the way he has helped her into being ‘so comfortable a housekeeper’ as he perceives her to be. There is incantation in the way the narrative describes how Avis is ground in the mill of domesticity. One such description repeats the ironic phrase, ‘it was not much’, while going through the details of Avis’s daily routine, then concludes: ‘It was not much, but let us not forget that it is under the friction of such atoms, that women far simpler, and so for that yoke, far stronger, than Avis, had yielded their lives as a burden too heavy to be borne.’ And there is an adept use of allusion, as Avis looks at her painting of the sphinx and seems to see ‘meanings’ in its enigmatic expression, ‘questionings . . . to which her imagination

had found no controlling reply’. The riddle of the sphinx, for Avis, is how to be both a woman and an artist. It is a riddle she never manages to resolve for herself. Unlike ‘other women – content to stitch and sing, to sweep and smile’, she never completes her masterwork to her own satisfaction. All she can hope for, at the end of the novel, is that her daughter will not repeat her mistake. Her husband dead, and her son, Avis moves back into her father’s house, where she will give Wait, she hopes, the training necessary not to waste her talent as she has.

A similar concern with the waste to which most women’s lives are subject informs nearly all the writings of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935). Regarded as the leading intellectual in the women’s movement around the turn of the century, Gilman was mainly known during her lifetime for her non-fictional work. In Women and Economics (1898), she argued that the economic dependence of women on men hindered the happiness of all. Blending history, sociology, psychology and anthropology in her analysis of the present and the past, Gilman suggested that ‘women’s work’ and women themselves should be separated from the domestic sphere. The work would then be done by trained and paid professionals, and women would be free to follow the vocation of their choice in the public sphere. The programme Gilman developed here was based on the abolition of the sexual division of labour; as she saw it, only child-rearing should remain the special preserve of women. This programme was publicized in extensive lecture tours she undertook in the United States and elsewhere. And it was developed in other works of non-fiction. Concerning Children (1900) and The Home (1904), for instance, proposed further changes to liberate women to lead more productive lives; while Man Made World (1911) and His Religion and Hers (1927) anticipated a major role for women in international affairs and the church. Gilman explored similar or related themes in her fiction, which received less attention from her contemporaries. Late in her career, for example, she wrote three utopian novels that offered feminist solutions to social problems: Moving the Mountain (1911), Herland (1915) and With Her in Ourland (1916). Herland, the best of these, is typical of all three. It describes a society of women without men, governed by principles of nurturing and caring in which children are raised by the community and cherished as the most important collective resource. Like her non-fiction, it resists any division of labour based on gender, or any definitions of behaviour founded on a distinction between ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ traits. And it works actively against any map of being that charts its territory in terms of gender – that portrays any area of life as determinately female or male.

From 1910 until 1916, Gilman edited a magazine, The Forerunner, consisting entirely of her own fiction and articles on women’s issues. Over her lifetime, she also wrote more than two hundred stories, most of them for her magazine. Of these, easily the most famous is ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’ (1892). Gilman based the story on her own experience of a ‘rest cure’: a regimen of bed rest and confinement that almost drove her, she said later, to ‘utter mental ruin’. In it, an unnamed woman records her strange experiences when she and her husband, ‘John’, go to live in ‘ancestral halls’ for the summer. Her husband is a physician, she tells us, so

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is her brother; and so, although she does not believe she is sick, when they tell her she has ‘a slight hysterical tendency’, she feels helpless to refute them. ‘What is one to do?’ she asks. At their new house for the summer, John chooses the room where she is to stay to deal with her ‘nervous condition’. She would have preferred another room, ‘but John would not hear of it’. And the room where she is to spend most of her time she soon begins to dislike, because it is covered with a wallpaper the colour of which is ‘repellent, almost revolting, a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight’. John, who is, his wife says, ‘practical in the extreme’, does not take her complaints about the wallpaper seriously. Alone in her room, though, discouraged from writing or any other labour, she becomes obsessed with it. She first sees eyes staring from the wallpaper. Then she begins to see a ‘shape’ behind the pattern. There is a ‘front pattern’ and a ‘back pattern’, she believes; the front pattern is like bars, and the shape is that of ‘a woman stooping down and creeping about behind’. As her obsession with the paper grows, she can see the front pattern move as, she believes, ‘the woman behind shakes it!’ ‘I think that woman gets out in daytime!’ the narrator confesses; ‘I can see her . . . creeping all around the garden’, ‘when I creep by daylight’.

The narrator, it is clear, is starting to see the shape in the paper as a double, a secret sharer in her own imprisonment. And as that intensifies, she tears at the yellow wallpaper that constitutes her jail as well as that of her doppelgänger, in a desperate effort to liberate herself and her reflection, the pair of them. In her own eyes, that effort meets with success. The story ends with the narrator declaring to her husband – who has had to break down the door with an axe to get into the room – ‘I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!’ She has broken down and broken out. Under the coercive pressure of her husband, and other physicians, she has become what they prescribed her to be. They have resisted taking her, and her needs, seriously; unsympathetic and unimaginative, their best intentions have made her a prisoner. She has taken the only way out she sees or senses: through the ‘bars’ of the wallpaper and into insanity. The power of this story stems from its mix of the surreal and the simple, the Gothic and the realistic. The narrator records her extraordinary experiences in an ordinary style, the style of a journal, because each strange event she describes is utterly real to her. The subtlety of the story, in turn, issues from the way the author frames the narrator: allowing us to see what she does not see, just how much her manacles are mindforged and man-forged. ‘John says’ is a constant, deferential refrain in the tale. Even when John denies precisely what the narrator most wants, she is reluctant to resist him. She writes her journal, this story, in secret, for instance, because she knows he does not like her to write. ‘He hates me to write a word,’ she confesses, ‘but I must say what I feel and think in some way – it is such a relief !’ Subject to the prevailing pieties about the superior wisdom of men and the necessary subordination of women, she is forced into guilt or denial. She can only write herself on the secret paper of her journal or the wallpaper. Gilman shows us all this, while never permitting us to waver in our sympathy for the narrator, or to feel the grip of her own rapt imagination upon our own. We know her strange experiences, because