Constance Fenimore Woolson

by Anne Boyd Rioux

  As their home’s proximity to Euclid Avenue suggests, the Woolsons belonged to the city’s social elite. But, while the Woolson stove foundry was the first “of importance in Northern Ohio,” Jarvis suffered a series of setbacks, including the perfidy of his partner (a brother of Hannah’s, who absconded with thousands of dollars), and a fire that destroyed most of his business. He started over with a new partner, creating Woolson & Hitchcock, later Woolson, Hitchcock, & Carter. Still, he never prospered on the scale of the city’s other industrialists, such as John D. Rockefeller. Despite bringing the Woolson stove to a brand-new market, one that expanded exponentially during his lifetime, business was fickle. In 1851, Jarvis complained of persistent money problems, explaining, “I have been in such a constant struggle with the world ever since I came west, that I have never had a moment to spend for anything beyond my daily efforts to provide for the large number dependent upon me.”26 It wasn’t until the 1860s that Jarvis would be able to provide a comfortable, steady living for his family.

  As the daughter of a father who forever felt like an exile from New England, Constance never felt like a “Daughter of Ohio.”27 But growing up among eastern transplants in Cleveland, as it became more and more diverse with Irish and German immigrants, she developed a broader patriotism. There was something about northern Ohio that would produce five U.S. presidents in the last thirty-two years of the nineteenth century and that would also make Woolson a thoroughly American writer, no matter how far away she moved from her Cleveland roots. Ohio was, at the time, the virtual center of the United States and would become a major economic and political force, if never a cultural one.

  In Cleveland, Constance grew up among the men of the future—men who would make the coming era the “Gilded Age.” The brother of one of her best friends would become a major stakeholder in Standard Oil. Another friend would become one of Hawaii’s wealthiest sugar planters. Her nephew would build one of the most ostentatious mansions on Euclid Avenue with the fortune he earned in the coal industry.28 But the question of what role women would play in shaping the nation’s future remained to be answered.

  2

  Lessons in Literature, Life, and Death

  MOVING WEST provided the opportunity to start over. For Jarvis that meant a new business. For Hannah it meant more children. She got her longest break from childbearing after Constance’s birth—three years and nine months. Then she bore another girl on December 20, 1843. Clara would become Constance’s closest confidante and rival. Just over a year later, the eighth girl, Ellen Alida, was born, on January 8, 1845. She would soon fall ill. Her first and only year was one of “grief and anguish, in which her lovely little caressing ways were the only cheerfulness in our sorely smitten household,” Hannah later wrote. After a long year of worry, Ellen Alida died on January 30.1 Although Constance had been unaware of her three sisters’ deaths in Claremont, this time the five-year-old watched her mother and the baby anxiously, sharing in her parents’ fears and torment.

  Hannah, nearly thirty-eight years old, gave birth to her last child later that year, on September 7, 1846. What a surprise when this one turned out to be a boy. “In the sultry heat,” she wrote, “when flies buzzed and mosquitoes stung, Number Nine arrived—a small, thin boy, who cried so loudly and squared his fists so fiercely in the first moments of existence that the doctor remarked: ‘The little chap seems all ready to fight the Battle of Life!’ ”2 The family was elated. They named him Charles Jarvis Woolson Jr., and called him Charlie.

  A SERIOUS CHILD

  Connie was now six years old and such an inquisitive child that her nickname was “And Why?” Why, she must have wondered, did the birth of a boy cause so much excitement? What made him different and so much more valuable than her and her three sisters? According to Hannah, Charlie showed his family that he was a new sort of being right away: “I could not but notice the difference—throughout his infancy and childhood—between the sisters and this their only brother. He would not be petted, and made a baby of; he would have playthings that made a noise.” So Clara remained the indulged baby of the family and probably didn’t mind Charlie’s arrival.3 Constance, however, seems to have resented it. As she grew older, she noticed the way her mother favored Charlie, despite his shortcomings. A different set of rules and standards applied to him. When she became a writer, she would portray the unconditional love of mothers for their profligate sons. During her youth, she watched resentfully as her mother doted upon the son who could do no wrong.

  There is very little documentary evidence of Constance’s early years before she began her writing career, but photos and passing comments in scattered sources give us glimpses of her. The earliest surviving photograph of her shows Connie and Clara, about nine and six years old, staring solemnly into the camera. Their hair—Connie’s dark and Clara’s light brown—is parted down the middle and curled in long ringlets. Clara looks languid, the corners of her mouth turned slightly down, her shoulders slightly drooping, and her hands crossed and relaxed. Connie, on the other hand, sits up straighter and looks serious and resolute, her lips pressed together, her hand clenched. The likeness illustrates perfectly one contemporary’s description of her as a “quiet, thoughtful child.” Her eyes are intent, as if she is taking in all that she sees, while Clara’s are almost blank by comparison. By all accounts, their personalities were quite different. Their paternal grandmother wasn’t sure which one she loved best. “When Connie comes before my mind’s eye, with her serious, beautiful face, I think she is the one. Then Clara’s laughing good-natured face seems to creep in between, as much as to say—‘Love me as well as Connie!’ ”4 The shy, earnest child had already seen too much to be so carefree.

  The intensity of Connie’s personality, which sometimes peeked through her stoic exterior, was harder to capture in photographs. Her eyes would brighten, betraying her pleasure as she listened quietly to adults’ conversations or heard a song she liked. They could flash in anger just as suddenly. According to her niece, she had “a passionate and dramatic nature, and a high temper,” which as an adult she would manage to hide from nearly everyone outside of her family. She learned early to control it, covering up her feelings not with boisterousness, as some do, but with silence. Her acute sensitivity masqueraded as reticence, which only her closest friends were able to penetrate. An acquaintance of her youth wrote of her, “She talked but little . . . , impressing an observer with the idea that the highways and byways of her thinking were not trodden by every casual acquaintance.” Only those who knew her well were familiar with her keen sense of humor and astute observations. One of her most intimate friends would later call her “a most entertaining companion,” but few knew the pleasure of her friendship. Her later writings and letters (very few of which have survived from before she turned thirty) are full of a vivacious wit. She felt freer to let out her humor and irreverence on paper. In spite of the many tragedies in her life, she would never lose the ability to laugh at the foibles of others and be amused by life’s incongruities.5

  Constance (l.) and Clara (r.) as children.

  (From Constance Fenimore Woolson, vol. 2 of Five Generations (1785–1923))

  Her personal reserve also concealed a painfully low self-regard. Clara was the more widely loved, receiving presents from friends and admirers while Constance recalled receiving none. She could not help feeling, as she put it, “un-lovable, and very unattractive.”6 Her excruciating shyness and insecurity, rather than any physical deficiencies, led her to believe she was ugly. She did not struggle under the burden of homeliness; rather, hers was the burden of self-consciousness and self-criticism, which would only intensify as she aged.

  Throughout her adult life she would shy away from the camera, even turning her back on it, showing her profile or less to the viewer. However, some photographs taken in her youth and early adulthood reveal her lovely features. In one taken when she was fifteen, she still wore her hair long and parted down the middle, with the long corkscrew curls
then fashionable framing her oval face. The three-quarters profile shows a straight, rather small nose and thin but finely shaped lips. She always hated her nose, lamenting that it was too short by nineteenth-century standards, which prized long, classical noses.

  Contrary to Constance’s low opinion of herself, others thought of her as vibrant and pretty. They most often noted her gracefully straight posture and clear, smooth complexion. Photographs never revealed her animated expressions, her deep blue eyes, the bright tints in her hair, or the rich coloring in her lips. As one acquaintance summed up her appearance, “Miss Woolson is attractive without being beautiful.”7 But she would never accept even that much commendation.

  Constance at fifteen.

  (From Constance Fenimore Woolson, vol. 2 of Five Generations (1785–1923))

  A LITERATE CHILDHOOD

  Not surprisingly, for one so insecure, Connie found her closest childhood companions in books. Her family often said that by the age of twelve she had already read everything of significance. That was also the age at which she began her love affair with Dickens, having received from her father a complete collection of his novels, which she read to tatters before she turned twenty. Although she also read history and poetry, her greatest affection was for novels. Besides Dickens, she loved Alexandre Dumas, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and George Sand. She had a strong taste for romantic adventure and stayed up all night reading The Three Musketeers. But dearest to her were novels about the struggles of thwarted lives, such as those of Jane Eyre and Maggie Tulliver, young women who, like her, were tormented by the need for self-control and their desire for approval.8

  However much Constance may have longed to pick up the pen in emulation of her favorite authors, she received mixed signals about what it meant for a girl to have literary aspirations. The Woolson household presented plenty of models and opportunities for girls’ writing, but always with an understanding of its inherent limits. Literature and writing were meant to be decidedly domestic affairs.

  The parlor of the Woolson home was often filled with family and friends—young and old, male and female—taking part in the creation of music, theatricals, and literature. A large red sofa dominated the room. Comfortable chairs were scattered about, and a piano stood in the corner. White muslin drapes were pushed aside to let in fragrances from the garden. Spread across the floor was a muted, figured carpet, and adorning the gray walls were two vibrant pictures, probably idealized landscapes, and a bookcase full of well-worn books. In the evenings, the Woolsons gathered with friends and visiting family members to play games that tested players’ knowledge of history and literature. While too young to play herself, Connie would silently take it all in. Some evenings were spent sharing homemade literary productions. In her most autobiographical novel, The Old Stone House, Woolson would portray an “Editor’s Sanctum,” in which compositions ranging from the serious to the humorous were read aloud, among them a ghost story, a lyric tribute to the month of June, a moving story of a dying soldier, and a humorous poem—one of Woolson’s—written in the voice of one of the family’s beloved dogs, Pete Trone.9 Such literary productions provided an evening’s entertainment and were not intended to have a life outside of the family circle.

  Such was also the case for the writings of the Woolson women, which were associated with familial relationships and domestic tasks. Hannah “used her pen for her children’s pleasure in it,” a cousin later wrote, perhaps referring to stories and poems she wrote for their amusement. The oldest daughter, Georgiana, enjoyed writing notes in rhyme. One began, “Behold of ‘Earth’s Apples’ I send you a quart / Neither wet nor decayed, but quite a ‘good sort.’ ” Perhaps more important, when they left home their pens traveled with them. Although none of Constance’s early journals has survived, those recording Hannah’s 1839 trip out west and Georgiana’s stay in Marquette, Wisconsin, in 1853, have. Georgiana’s journal focused on her close observations of the flora and fauna she saw during her afternoon walks. She also reported on evidence of Indians’ continued presence in the region and of earlier habitation by European settlers, as well as the history of nearby Presque Isle.10 Not surprisingly, Constance’s first publications, nearly twenty years later, look very similar. They would be travel essays that began, no doubt, as letters home or journal entries that included numerous historical explanations and observations of the natural world, modes of writing she seems to have learned from her mother’s and oldest sister’s examples.

  Yet while they were content to write for family and friends, very early on Constance displayed a talent that begged for recognition beyond the home. When she was about eight, her long poem titled “Symmes’ Hole” impressed her teacher, who called it “a remarkable production, and predicted that [Constance] would excel as a writer.”11 Unfortunately, no one saved the poem. Its subject, at once whimsical and learned, hints at the playful irony that would mark her mature writings. (“Symmes’ Hole” refers to John Cleves Symmes’s much-ridiculed theory that the North and South Poles were large openings that would lead to the globe’s hollow interior, as well as to a popular phrase for lost things, which might be said to have fallen into a Symmes’ Hole.)

  The encouraging words about Constance’s poem may have come from Harriet Grannis, Constance’s teacher at her first school, Miss Fuller’s, on the Public Square, a rather typical girls’ school of the period, which she attended with Georgiana and Emma. Grannis, who happened to be Jarvis’s cousin, was an unmarried woman who supported herself by teaching and also had a reputation as a gifted poet. After attending Oberlin, she had published in the New York Tribune, the Cleveland Herald, and the Western Literary Messenger. Unfortunately, no record of Constance’s impressions of her teacher remains. But Grannis recalled Constance as “quiet and silent, standing behind my chair while the others were asking the final questions of the day, saying nothing but taking everything in, . . . and gathering for her future work.” Connie must also have observed her teacher intently, for Grannis was that rare breed, a woman who wrote for the public. The image did not last long, however. In 1848 she married fellow teacher Oliver Arey and moved to Buffalo, New York, where she edited a children’s magazine and in 1855 published a volume of poetry. Its title—Household Songs and Other Poems—suggests how Miss Grannis, now Mrs. Arey, presented herself as a model of literary domesticity, even as she ushered her productions into print.12

  Another female relative also earned a reputation as a writer, making an impression on Constance. Susan Fenimore Cooper, daughter of James, published with her father’s recommendation and support her private journal, Rural Hours, in 1850. It is one of the earliest pieces of American nature writing, anticipating Thoreau’s Walden by four years. Constance did not have much contact with Susan until she was beginning her own career, but this example suggested to her how thin a veil separated women’s private writings and their sometimes public manifestations.

  In spite of such models, however, Constance did not begin to publish her own writings, many of which she surely composed throughout her youth, until she was thirty years old and prodded by the necessity of earning a living. The reasons for her delay are both personal and a product of the times she lived in. Already shy and reticent, Constance was deeply affected by her era’s dispiriting attitudes toward women writers. During the 1850s, when she was in her teens and thus most vulnerable to outside perceptions, a widespread and often rancorous debate erupted on the merits of women’s authorship. The phenomenal successes of writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Fanny Fern, and Susan Warner—who outsold and outearned their male counterparts by the tens of thousands—provoked many male critics to discourage women from attempting to follow in their footsteps. A characteristic note was struck by the Putnam’s reviewer who wrote in 1854, “[T]he books of almost all lady authors are readable, just as the conversation of all women is entertaining; the errors, volubility and misconceptions, which we will not tolerate in men, become amusing and entertaining in the case of a lady, or a child.” P
rivately, some men could be even more reproachful. Nathaniel Hawthorne must have dipped his pen in venom when he wrote to his publisher in 1856 that the poet Julia Ward Howe “ought to have been soundly whipped” for publishing her passionate poetry. He even wrote to his own wife, herself a gifted writer, that he thanked God she had “never prostituted [her]self to the public, as . . . a thousand [women] do.”13

  The Woolson household, it seems, was not immune to such prejudice. One measure of its discomfort was scrawled into the family’s copy of the first volume of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, published in 1850, when Connie was only ten years old. The volume survived repeated moves over the years alongside the family Bible—no doubt because Harper’s played a central role in Constance’s later life as an author. Its significance in the family long before the advent of her career is apparent, however, in its front pages adorned with Jarvis’s signature in fancy script and in the children’s drawings, colorings, and signatures, some of them dated as late as 1860 and 1864, when the family lived at Cheerful Corner. In the middle of one month’s “Literary Notices,” Constance carefully wrote her name, perhaps intimating her desire to see it there one day in print. The markings on one page, however, suggest how uneasy the family would feel if the name of one of its female members actually did appear there. The page contains an article about the novelist Jane Porter, in which it is argued that although England has had some accomplished women of which it is proud, no amount of public reputation can make up for what these women have presumably lost in the way of home life and familial love.14 The portrait of Jane Porter accompanying the article has been overdrawn with a top hat, handlebar moustache, and goatee.