Women’s literary culture was grounded not only in novels, but in a number of magazines that catered to specifically middle-class interests, notably Godey’s Ladies Book, founded in the 1820s under the editorship of Sara Josepha Hale, and Peterson’s Lady’s Magazine, which began in the 1840s. Women readers were also an important constituency for Harper’s and The Atlantic, both begun in the 1850s. (Harper’s, a monthly, should not be confused with Harper’s Weekly, a more broadly based publication with a newspaper flavor. Its illustrations and dispatches were particularly prized during the Civil War.71) In addition to poetry and nonfiction, these periodicals published stories and serialized novels, launching the careers of Ann S. Stephens, Rebecca Harding Davis, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps.
These women came of age at a time of reconfigured gender relations. The ideal of Republican Motherhood that had circulated during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had gradually evolved into what historians have called “separate sphere ideology.” This construct was more class-bound than Republican Motherhood because it was predicated on the formation of a proto-managerial class of men who could earn enough for their wives to raise children without engaging in wage-earning labor. For those who subscribed to separate spheres, life was divided into the aggressive, dynamic world of work (the male sphere) and the placid, nurturing world of home (the female sphere). After a day in the industrial jungle, a man would return to his pastoral refuge, where the woman spent her time raising children—who, unlike their working-class counterparts, would never work in factories.
“Separate spheres” can be a misleading phrase. Although it was widely used and understood by nineteenth-century women, the separate spheres were far more an ideal than a reality. One intriguing hint of this emerges from the circulation statistics of an elite private lending library, which showed no major distinction between the kinds of novels read by men and women.72 On the other hand, the prevalence of the phrase gave it a kind of reality. One consequence of the growing acceptance of separate sphere ideology was a “feminization” of print culture, as women began to play a discernibly greater role in teaching, reading, and writing books.
The fiction that described this culture and reflected its values, from Hale’s Northwood (1827) through Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1850), has been classified by scholars under the rubric of the “domestic novel.” Domestic novels have been criticized as sickly sweet, hidebound in their conservatism, and boring—The Wide, Wide World, stuffed with the bromides Warner acquired as a colporteur for the American Tract Society, daunts even the most committed reader of nineteenth-century women’s fiction—but such a view overlooks some significant aspects of this writing. First, these books represent a notable departure from the seduction-and-abandonment tales of the late eighteenth century. Like the works of Richardson and Rowson, domestic novels place women front and center, but their protagonists are not victims but resilient people who triumph over all kinds of adversity. The heroines of Maria Cummins’s The Lamplighter (1854) and Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall (1855) demonstrate a wiliness, and even sauciness, that stretched the boundaries of Victorian propriety.73
Indeed, a vein of subversion runs through many domestic novels. The morally powerful and assertive women who inhabit their pages were an oblique commentary on the decline of male religious authority at a time when the immoral reformer was an archetype in the sensational and reform literature.74 And while separate spheres was a confining model of behavior, some women used it to argue for their responsibility to speak out on public issues, especially temperance and slavery, that affected their lives at home.
In fact, after a certain point the very phrase “domestic fiction” becomes inaccurate, for women writers—who in any case transgressed spheres by writing books—depicted characters who strayed far from hearth and home. Rebecca Harding Davis anticipated the rise of literary realism with her grim look at women’s labor in Life in the Iron Mills (1861), first published in The Atlantic. Racial issues were also explored. Lydia Maria Child, a member of Washington Irving’s Knickerbocker circle, won renown for Hobomok (1824), a novel about a (temporary) interracial romance between a white woman and an Indian chief. Catherine Sedgewick also explored red-white romance in Hope Leslie (1827), a novel that depicts a spirited black woman who rescues a white man being held captive by Indians and defeats the attacker who tries to stop her. Such feats—like Harriet Tubman’s celebrated real-life rescues of slaves during the Civil War—may have been considered permissible because black women were not really “ladies” anyway. But relative to the often vicious stereotypes depicted on the stage, such characters were a step in a more liberal direction.75
By the 1830s, a number of domestic novelists were being drawn into the growing abolitionist movement. Child was active as a journalist throughout this period, an involvement that culminated, in the aftermath of John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859, in the publication of an exchange of letters about the raid with the governor of Virginia.76 She also explored black-white interracial relationships in her later fiction, notably Waiting for the Verdict (1867).
Both male and female abolitionists were influenced by the black writers who began to surface before the Civil War. The foundation for this African-American literary culture was the slave narrative. The first of these stories appeared in 1701, when Judge Samuel Sewall of Boston published the anonymous The Selling of Joseph, a description of the horrors of the slave trade and a call for the end of the institution. Beginning in the 1830s, the slave narrative grew in visibility as the abolitionist movement gained new momentum and as attention became focused on the problem of the slaveholder. The most famous work of this type was the Narrative of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself (1845), which was revised and expanded during Douglass’s long and eventful life. Recent scholars have focused on Harriet Jacobs’s autobiographical Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), which was edited by Child. Slave narratives, which were based on fact but necessarily rooted in unverifiable memory, were the forerunners of the first novels written by African Americans: William Wells Brown’s Clotel (1853) and Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig (1859). Both challenged the optimistic endings of domestic fiction and also took Northerners to task for the racism they considered a Southern problem.
While New England abolitionists showed the most interest in reading books about African Americans (and writing them on their behalf), these books reached other audiences as well. A magazine writer in the 1850s lamented that “the whole literary atmosphere has become tainted” with “literary nigritudes.”77 Perhaps even more striking, the hugely successful dime novel firm of Beadle and Adams, which published books for the soldiers at the front in the Civil War, published Metta Victor’s Maum Guinea and her Plantation “Children”; or Holiday Week on a Louisiana Estate (1861), a novel that clearly was influenced by slave narratives.78
Whatever the interest in these works, none compared in impact with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was serialized in the abolitionist newspaper The National Era in 1851 and published in book form in 1852. The daughter, sister, and husband of clergymen (her brother Henry Ward Beecher would be ridiculed as the stereotypical immoral churchman after a marital scandal in the 1870s), Stowe was deeply immersed in the religious culture of the early nineteenth century and was a professional writer who struggled to support her husband and raise their children. Uncle Tom’s Cabin distilled into one potent whole the swirling currents of gender and racial politics, the moral fervor of reform literature, and the graphic realism of slave narratives.79
Uncle Tom’s Cabin gave U.S. culture a series of characters—some would say stereotypes—that became household names over the following century: Little Eva, the angelic child whose death scene was the ultimate tearjerker; Simon Legree, the slavetrader