Thank you all for coming to join in a discussion about the lives of creative woman as described in seven novels. Although six of the seven authors of these books are totally forgotten today, they were all bestsellers that were widely and respectably reviewed. Their books were books every literate woman of their day would have read.
Before getting to them, I’d like to say a few words about the phenomenon known as the “true woman,” a phrase that during most of the 19th century was shorthand for a bundle of attributes that defined what a woman was supposed to be: pious, gentle, forgiving, self-sacrificing, modest, and above all submissive – first to God, then to her minister, her parents, and her husband – none of whom were ever to be defied. Obviously such a woman would hardly be fit for any world outside the home, and in fact, for the first 70 years of the century, with very few exceptions, she worked only if she was widowed or orphaned and had no family to take her in.
Only in the 1870s did authors begin to write about women who wantedto work, and even then, of the 160 major novels focusing on women that appeared between 1789 and 1939, only 20 deal directly with the issues faced by such strange creatures. And only seven are about women artists – a minority even among the minority. Today we’ll talk only about how those 7 heroines dealt with the question: “Is it possible for a woman to maintain a real relationship when she has an urgent need to create?” I’m going to be very sketchy in my descriptions of the books because I’d like to talk about all 7 of them in chronological order.
The first of those novels is The Deserted Wife by E.D.E.N. Southworth – the initials were of her first, middle, and maiden names – which came out in 1850 and was one of the 19th century’s six biggest blockbusters. Southworth herself was either a deserted or a deserting wife who came back to her hometown – Washington, D.C. – with a toddler in tow and a baby in her belly and without Mr. Southworth. She went back to the teaching she had done before her marriage but couldn’t make a living at it (which was why most teachers were women) and began to write for the same reason most women did: to support herself and her two children. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to learn that her second and most famous novel is this 586-page tear-jerker in which the heroine, Hagar, is pregnant with a third child when her husband, Raymond, deserts her and their twin toddlers for her cousin, Rosalia. Since he leaves her without any money and she isn’t equipped to do anything else, she ends up as a singer because an impresario hears her voice, which is totally untrained, and pronounces it great, after which – abracadabra, without any trouble, any lessons, any apprenticeship – she immediately becomes a world-famous star.
After following the stories of the wife, husband, and other woman through a couple of years’ worth of incredibly complicated and melodramatic plot lines – this was really the 19th century’s equivalent of a soap opera and still surprisingly readable – readers finally have the satisfaction of seeing Hagar give up her career without a moment’s hesitation as soon as the unapologetic Raymond returns to her. Because Southworth couldn’t even conceive of any woman choosing to be an artist rather than a wife, she created a heroine who was the very model of a “true” woman – one who faces trouble with faith in God, unassailable virtue, and a belief in the sanctity of the marriage tie, all of which were the bedrock virtues of the mid-19th-century woman in fiction and in life. Hagar hushes her great voice, renounces her fame, and weeps thankful tears for the return of a flawed husband because she will then be able to lead a more “natural” life.
It’s easy to laugh at this grossly oversimplified synopsis, but readers loved the novel so much that publishers fell over themselves to come out with “fool’ems” written by other combinations of initials!
The second blockbuster is just as unrealistic and just as unconcerned with presenting a true picture of an artist. Augusta Evans’s St. Elmo – the title is the hero’s name – appeared in 1866, but Edna, the heroine, is still a pre-Civil War true woman, adding to the usual virtues an obsession with self-improvement in order to improve the world. At 17 she is learned in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, science, math, history, philosophy, and literature and wants to use this knowledge to be an “instrument of some good to her race” through her writing – though she admits that she also wants to win “the golden apple of immortality.”
As a heroine, Edna lacks the fire of Hagar, just as Evans lacks the fantastic imagination of Southworth, but it doesn’t matter because it’s the hero who made the book such a smashing success with women readers. He was a combination of Heathcliff, Mr. Rochester, and an early Rhett Butler, and babies, boats, and merchandise were named after this paragon who is bitter, sardonic, disillusioned, handsome, brilliant – even more so than Edna! – skilled in all manly sports, etc. When Edna is 17, he realizes he loves her and proposes, but also confesses his evil past as a gambler, drinker, seducer, and blasphemer and begs her to help him reform. Though she knows that she loves him for now and eternity, she refuses, telling him that such a reform is useless because it would be for love of her not for love of God.
After a dramatic farewell, he goes off to do some work on his soul and she goes off to Ny, where she has gotten a job as a governess. Once there, she begins to write at night after her work, sells some articles, and then writes a book, which is published and becomes a popular and a critical success. Her employers insist that she join them at dinner, and she meets the elite of NY – while also writing a second book at night after her work and her socializing. This second one is meant to assure women that no outside work is as important as “reigning at home . . . if married in the hearts of husband and children, if single in the affections of brothers, sisters, and friends.” If they have talent, they can indeed be “sculptors, painters, writers,” but when she thinks of her own life progressing in this way, she develops a mysterious “heart disease” – which is miraculously cured when St. Elmo reappears, this time so truly reformed that he is now a minister!
At this point she happily turns her back on present fame, future glory, and the sense of doing God’s good work because as every “true” woman knows, ambition is only for those who have no personal home to enrich. She glows as St. Elmo proclaims immediately after the wedding ceremony: “Today I snap the fetters of your literary bondage. There shall be no more books written! . . . You belong solely to me now.” Of course, this is no more a realistic portrait of a driven writer than Hagar was of a superb singer. Both books serve to reinforce the prevailing image of a woman’s nature, which was already beginning to be questioned.by the time St. Elmo appeared.
The third vision of the woman artist is found in Marian Harland’s Phemie’s Temptation (1877). Harland, the pseudonym for Mary Terhune, was an enormously productive writer who wrote both fiction and nonfiction and already had a national reputation when this book appeared. Though she too made her heroine a writer, it was only to make the points that neither fame nor self-fulfillment is as important as marriage; that the husband is the head of the family by God’s and man’s law; and that even if he turns out to be a bounder, marriage is forever.
Phemie becomes responsible for the support of a mother, two sisters, and a blind younger brother, and she discovers that the work available to an untrained 17-year-old is hard, poorly paid, and filled with humiliating demands. As a way to escape her boredom and exhaustion, she starts to write articles after work, soon begins to sell them thanks to a connection with an older woman – one of the first feminists in fiction, and very sympathetically portrayed – quickly develops a reputation, and attracts as a suitor Robert, a leading editor who admires her intelligence and talent. At first she refuses because she’s afraid it would be a misalliance for him because he’s so much better educated and knowledgeable than she, but he persuades her and she gives up her writing and her growing reputation without any problem. Trouble begins when he takes her to England, and his intellectual friends soon realize that she’s more intelligent and better read than he is – this despite the fact that she never speaks until she’s spoken to and behaves with the proper modesty of a true woman.
Trouble erupts when she tells him she has arranged to publish anonymously a book she has written because she doesn’t want him to pay for educating her blind brother. Instead of being proud, he accuses her of “unsexing” herself and complains that everyone will refer to them as “Mrs. Hart and husband.” She offers to withdraw the book, but that doesn’t satisfy him, and they both return home unhappy. Things get worse, and after his publishing house fails, he abandons her in the middle of her pregnancy, leaving her to support herself and their daughter. (Another deserting husband!) She publishes another book, not as good, and works as a bookkeeper at home to earn the rent. When he returns because he’s broke and makes no effort to find work, she’s not resentful at having to turn over all the money she earns for the rent because she says the law gives it to him and she’d do it anyway because he’s her lord and master. What she really hopes is that their child will reconcile them. Instead, he’s irritated by the child, and it’s only when he strikes the girl that she decides to divorce him, miserable at what she considers her life’s failure.
So her writing brought her a husband, but also lost her one. As one of her sisters, who represents the majority opinion even in 1870, says: “Phemie’s career and her present condition are a striking proof of the punishment that waits upon a violation of natural laws.” Natural laws being, of course, the requirement that women remain domestically centered. This transitional novel by a transitional author was the last of these books about artists that emphasized the values of the true woman rather than the difficulties of combining art and emotional commitment. Harland’s books weren’t blockbusters, but she wrote into the 20th century and had a wide and appreciative audience.
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps – 14 years younger than Harland – began her writing life with an emphasis on spiritual values, but she then became a committed and vocal feminist before finally turning increasingly conservative. The Story of Avis (1877) is the last and best novel of her feminist period, and if it’s not a totally convincing portrait of an artist, it’s at least a very convincing description of the life of a woman who does try to combine domesticity and art.
After six years of study in Europe during which her art teachers predict a great future for her, Avis returns home to live with her professor father and continue to paint. She has determined never to fall in love, and she insists on considering Philip – a delicate, cultured young man who understands her work and says he admires her commitment – only as a friend. She tells him: “I must not think of love because I cannot accept the consequences. Success – for a woman – means absolute surrender. Whether she paints a picture or loves a man, there is no division of labor possible.” Even when he persists in his wooing and promises to help her achieve her aims, she continues to refuse him, explaining all the things that would go wrong and ending with a simple example that sums it all up: “Everything would be so hard for you! . . . the coffee wouldn’t be right. And men mind such things.” Note that in her mind it is he, not she, who would suffer most. The true woman dies hard.
Rejected, he goes off to fight in the Civil War and returns in ill health. Out of pity as much as love, she wills herself to believe that he’s different from other men and agrees to marry him – and the rest of this long (457 pages) novel details the results. Because his teacher’s salary isn’t enough for the little luxuries he likes, she feels she must paint for money to buy them for him; because he wants all her attention, she has no time for serious work; because he leaves the entire care of the eventual baby to her, she has sleepless nights and weary days dealing with colic, teething, crying; because he is weak and self-indulgent, he incurs debts, flirts with women, and is finally fired from his job. But she never reminds him of his promises or thinks of leaving him.
Despite her devotion, he eventually deserts her (another!) and goes to Europe, leaving her with his debts to pay and two small children to feed. More hack work is necessary – and again I quote: “She was stunned to find how her aspiration had emaciated during her married life. Household care had fed upon it like a disease. She wished that the gift with which God had created her would return to Him who gave it. She wished she were like other women – content to stitch and sing, to sweep and smile. She bowed her face on the soft hair of her children, but she could not forget that they had been bought with a great price.”
When he returns, ill and penitent, she takes him back without one reproach – just as Hagar and Phemie did, and they live together while he slowly dies. Widowed, she returns to her father’s house to resume her serious work, only to find that she has lost her unique vision and skill after years of hack work. There is nothing left to live for but her remaining child, for whom she hopes “it would be easier to be a woman that it had been for her.”
What makes this novel so unusual for the time is not only its portrait of the sacrifices a serious artist must make in marriage but its questioning of many of the stereotypes about women: Do all women love domesticity? Avis hates cooking, cleaning, sewing. Is there a universal maternal instinct? She finds her first baby “a great deal of trouble.” Can a woman pursue ambition as single-mindedly as a man? She says no because world expects self-sacrifice on the part of a woman but not on that of a man.
Phelps was in her mid-30s when she wrote this book, and it may have been an imagined version of what her own life as a writer would have been had she married – which she did, but not until her mid-40s. One final quote might explain why. In an authorial aside she explains how galling it is for a woman who has to postpone writing or painting until “the fall sewing is done, the baby can walk, the housecleaning is over, we have got through with the whooping cough.”
This was the last 19th-century novel about an artist-heroine The next 3 books didn’t appear until just before World War I, 35 years later.
The 510-page A Woman of Genius, by Mary Austin, was published in 1912. Her main interests were history and the environment, but she also wrote a very atypical novel about, as she put it, “the struggle between a genius for tragic acting and the social ideal of Taylorsville, Indiana,” where all intercourse for the respectable lower-middle-class woman is organized so that whatever she has “of intelligence and worth is excised as a superfluous growth, a monstrosity.”
Olivia is brought up to become a housewife centered on husband and home like every other woman, and she doesn’t even know she’s dissatisfied until she meets and is attracted to Helmeth, a man who is visiting Taylorsville and talks to her about books and ideas. They begin to fall in love, but before anything can happen, her family, afraid of his bad influence on her, persuades him to leave without even saying good-bye. She, not knowing about their interference, decides there’s nothing to do but marry hometown Tommy.
When she loses their baby, he persuades her to join an amateur theatrical group, which she enjoys but which leaves her still depressed. He then suggests she visit a childhood friend who is now married and living in Chicago. There she soon becomes involved with another theater group and is thrilled when told she has real talent. She begins to study acting seriously, but eventually has to go back home. Tommy to refuses to relocate to Chicago, but he reluctantly agrees to let her accept work with a touring company. While she’s gone, he becomes involved with his partner’s wife, and when she returns, he asks for a divorce. Before she can recover from the shock, he dies – and she’s free to go back to Chicago.
There, she learns how inadequate the moral standards of small-town America are in the larger world: her best woman friend, an actress as chaste and austere as she is, once had an affair with a married man; her good male friend, a playwright, is serially unfaithful to his wife because he needs excitement in order to create; her old friend’s husband has a chorus girl for a mistress, etc. Unfortunately, though she’s learning a lot about life, she’s unable to find work and is about to give up on her career before it’s even started when an agent offers her a small job in New York. Unhesitatingly, she accepts, slowly becomes successful, and decides that there’s still more for her to learn, so she sets off for London.
As she continues to work and improve her skills, she runs into Helmeth, now a widower. Still in love, they have a passionate affair that makes her very happy but leaves him wanting to “make things regular.” She refuses because she knows of only one kind of marriage, which she rejects because she’s both “a woman and a genius.” The woman in her wants to bear and take care of his children; the genius knows she can’t renounce her art. They break up, and after a while she marries the philandering playwright – a marriage that will work because each understands and accepts that for the other the art is more important than love.
The differences between this novel and the earlier ones is striking: the heroine has unmarried sex; she opts for art rather than love; and she marries someone she likes but doesn’t love. The true woman has turned into the new woman – more or less. The shakiness of the change – in allaspects of a woman’s life – is clear in many novels of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Mary Johnston, was a southerner, a feminist, and the author of 23 novels of all genres, many of them bestsellers. This one, Hagar, gives us a heroine who is also a southerner, a feminist, and a writer.
Written in 1913 when Johnston had already written several bestsellers, Hagaris both the title of the book and the name of its heroine, a name shared by the heroine of The Deserted Wife and appropriate for women who are aliens within their families and societies. Hagar is a well-born and well-bred Southern girl brought up to be yielding, incurious, and unquestioning, but she develops into a 20th-century social activist who does what Edna said she wanted to do in St. Elmo – write books as a means of changing the world. In one sense, the novel is almost a rerun of the first three, because the author isn’t really interested in the artistic nature or in the conflict between it and love or domesticity.
Hagar grows up in her paternal grandparents’ house because her father has left her and her mother with his antebellum-like parents to live in the freer air of Europe. (Again!) Because her nature is curious and intellectual, her childhood in this antebellum atmosphere is not happy, and even when her mother dies and she’s sent to a boarding school run by another typical southern gentlewoman, she’s a teenage misfit until she’s sent home because of an innocent romance with an English teacher. Bored, she writes a story and soon wins a prize in a contest, writes another and sells it – another easy and unrealistic conquest! – and now that she “knows” she can earn a living, is free to refuse Ralph, her southern-gentleman suitor. When her father, still in Europe, marries a wealthy woman and sends enough money to give her a year in New York, she meets socialists, settlement workers, reformers, and suffragists who put into words what she has always felt and what she begins – successfully, of course – to write about.
Returning home to visit her grandparents, she identifies herself as a feminist and again refuses Ralph. Her life changes when – still back in Europe – her stepmother is killed and her father injured in an accident that will leave him a cripple forever. Though he doesn’t even know Hagar, he asks her to come to Europe and travel with him as his companion. After getting him to promise that he will allow her complete freedom beyond her duties, she agrees, and goes everywhere with him, making new friends in the socialist, labor, and feminist movements and somehow finding the time to gain an international reputation for her writing.
Nine years later, in her thirties, she arranges for her father’s future care and returns to New York, where her old suitor Ralph comes to visit her. After he sees her apartment, he asks if she can really consider it a home “without a man or a child.” She answers that her work was her child, and that “Did I ever meet a man whom I loved, my home would probably open to that man. But if it does not happen, none the less will I have my home and be happy in it.”
And of course, there is such a man – John, an engineer who loves her and proposes. When she asks him if he is aware that “the Woman Movement has me for keeps,” he replies, “I’m aware. I’m going to help you.”
This exchange makes it clear that her commitment isn’t to writing but to the woman’s movement – in other words, to something other than the imperatives of art. And, as in the older novels – with the exception of The Story of Avis – the book ends before Hagar has to deal with any practical or emotional conflicts.
The final book is – very aptly, given the room we’re in – a novel by Willa Cather called The Song of the Lark, published in 1915. Cather is the only one of the 7 authors whose reputation is even higher now than during her lifetime. Very atypical of her work and unknown even to many devotees of her other fiction, this isn’t a problem novel but a work that tries to get at the essence of the artistic character – which turns out to be, for Cather, not very nice and no different in women than in men.
Again, we begin with a childhood far removed from art, but Thea grows up not with the small-town pressures to conform that was the background of Olivia, the actress-to-be, but in Colorado with the expanses of the American West, and with family, friends, and neighbors who are pioneers or the children of pioneers rather than conformists. Instead of being held back by men wanting to enforce their vision of what a woman should be, she’s befriended and encouraged by them. The town doctor arranges for her to take music lessons, the music teacher helps her as much as he can, Spanish Johnny teaches her his people’s music, and her best friend, a railway man who shares her passion for the landscape and recognizes “something different” about her, tells her stories about the outside world. More important, when he dies in an accident, she finds that he has named her the beneficiary of his insurance policy, which allows her to go to Chicago for further study.
There, her music teacher realizes she isn’t a pianist but a singer and turns her over to a fine voice teacher, in whose studio she meets Fred, a wealthy, young, music-lover who recognizes her genius, feeds her when she’s hungry, teaches her social graces and how to dress, finds her recital engagements, and, when she collapses from overwork, sends her to convalesce at his family’s Arizona ranch, where she soon revives thanks to the splendor of the scenery and the history of the ancient cliff-dwellers. After a while, he appears there himself, confesses his love, and asks her to marry him. She knows she loves him as much as she can love anyone, and that he won’t tie her to a domestic life, so she agrees. And she has no scruples about sleeping with him, either – at least until she learns that he’s married and his wife won’t give him a divorce, which makes it, in terms of her own moral values, impossible for her to stay with him or even accept his help.
She continues to work hard and manages to get to Europe, where she studies and performs so intensely for the next ten years that she doesn’t even return home for her beloved mother’s becomes seriously ill because she doesn’t want to interrupt her work. What’s worse, she knows that she would do the same thing again, despite knowing how guilty she would be for the rest of her life. . . . The result of this intense preoccupation with her art pays off artistically when, at the age of 30, she gets a chance to sing Wagner at the Met and has a great triumph – one seen by the town doctor, Spanish Johnny, the piano teacher, the voice teacher, and Fred. Her satisfaction is only momentary, however, and it’s almost immediately followed by a resolve to dig even deeper and do even better.
A short epilogue takes place 10 years later, and we learn that Thea is married to Fred and still singing. There’s not a word about what kind of marriage they have because for Cather, it’s clearly not men as such or household chores or child care that are the problems for the creative woman but the difficulties of maintaining a human relationship that can survive being of lesser importance than the work one must do. In this novel, it’s clear that Thea’s choice is her music and that Fred accepts the second-best role in her life.
Before I turn this over to you for comments, questions, arguments or whatever, I’d like to add a couple of comments. First, the only novels about creative women were written by women, though of the 80 authors discussed in my book, more than 35% of them are men. Second, during the 25 years following the publication of Cather’s novel – years that included a world war, the Roaring 20s, and the Depression 30s – there was not one single bestselling or critically well-received novel that dealt with the topic, despite the fact that women had much more freedom in the real world to choose unconventional life-styles.
Book talk at Jefferson Library, undated.
