Constance Fenimore Woolson

by Anne Boyd Rioux

  The most likely culprit was Constance’s younger brother, Charlie, considering that years later he would express “horror” when his sister published a poem in a magazine promoting women’s rights. In one of her earliest writings, Woolson would portray the intolerance of a male relative in The Old Stone House, where the oldest boy declares, “I do not think that types adorn a woman’s name. A woman ought not to appear ‘in the papers’ but twice; when she is married, and when she dies.” His talented female cousin finds it unfair that an unmarried woman has no “chance of being anybody until she is dead.” He assumes she is “shrieking for suffrage,” shaming her by equating her aspirations with a desire to participate in the male sphere of politics.15 The doodling on Jane Porter’s portrait sent the same message—to write for publication was to forsake femininity and therefore lovability. Constance would never be able to free herself entirely from the fear of disapproval that accompanied her ambitions.

  The introduction of Harper’s into the family circle was nonetheless a sort of Trojan horse. Over the next decade, the growing number of women’s names in its table of contents indicated that women were increasingly expanding their horizons beyond the domestic sphere, planting in young Constance’s mind the idea that one day she could do more than simply read Harper’s and sign her name in its pages.

  Her father’s views on women’s authorship remain a mystery, but his example and training helped to offset Charlie’s intolerance. By taking her with him on his travels and teaching her to be someone on whom nothing is lost, he put his daughter on the path toward her eventual literary career. Jarvis preferred to travel by carriage rather than train so that he could pause and look—“he knew every tree and its manner of growth,” remembered Constance, who sat beside him on those trips. Along the way, he taught her to observe closely every feature of the landscapes and communities they visited. Their favorite spots were the Zoar settlement in Ohio, an enclave of German separatists in the Tuscawaras Valley, and Mackinac Island on Lake Michigan, where they had a summer cottage from Constance’s fifteenth to seventeenth years. There she edited a manuscript newspaper with a male friend, Zephaniah Spalding, the only evidence that remains of her beginning to imagine her literary productions in print. Inspired by local Indian legends, she produced what she thought of as her first piece of original writing, a poem in the vein of Longfellow’s epic “Hiawatha.” When, after the economic crisis of 1857, the Woolsons had to give up their Mackinac cottage, Constance and her father “went gypsying” throughout Ohio, seeking out the picturesque valleys and villages off the well-worn tracks trod by most tourists.16 Constance must have been observing and writing all along the way, for so many of her early writings were inspired by these trips.

  CHILDHOOD INTERRUPTED

  As Jarvis Woolson fed his daughter’s desire to travel, he also taught her that new scenery was a powerful tonic. Looking outside of oneself was his most potent remedy for the depression and grief that followed life’s inevitable misfortunes, of which the Woolsons had already experienced more than their share. Unfortunately, Constance would need every coping strategy she could acquire during her early adolescence, which was marred by fresh tragedies reminding her of life’s frailty.

  Emma, the second daughter and most beautiful and musical of the Woolson girls, had an intense, passionate nature that led her at sixteen to fall hopelessly in love with a young minister staying in their home. The Reverend T. Jarvis Carter had come from New York to become rector of Grace Episcopal, a missionary church that sought to bridge the gap between Cleveland’s rich and poor. Emma was smitten by his idealism and good looks, her own religious zeal merging with infatuation. Constance, who was only nine, was just as taken with her big sister’s suitor. She would later memorialize him in The Old Stone House as the young minister John Leslie, “so manly in his goodness, and so frank in his religion.”17

  But Emma and Jarvis Carter’s love was ill-fated. He suffered from an unknown and incurable disease, making him only more worthy of worship to Emma. Her parents, however, were terrified at their teenage daughter’s precipitous plunge into a hopeless romance. Seeing only heartache ahead, they sent her back to school in New York, but Emma was so miserable in her exile that they brought her home. As Jarvis Woolson explained to a friend, “It is a hard thing for a Parent, in my opinion, to refuse to consent to a connection which carries with it the best affection, and the happiness, perhaps, of the whole life in this, at best, troublous world.”18

  Emma married Carter on May 7, 1851, at Avon Springs, New York, a resort with mineral springs thought to have the power to cure a multitude of maladies. Marriage and the sulfur waters seemed to improve his condition, and the family began to hope that he could recover. But by July a turn for the worse sent Hannah rushing to New York to assist Emma, whose husband was now surely dying. He did not go quickly. The doctors tried everything they could, all to no avail. Meanwhile Emma nursed him tirelessly, refusing to be relieved of her duty. In August, Georgiana reported that Emma had not had one night’s complete rest for twelve weeks.19 Despite her sleepless care and devotion over the coming months, Carter died in New York on November 15, 1851. His body was brought back to Cleveland and buried under the chancel of Grace Church. His widow was only eighteen years old.

  Emma returned to her family with her heart and health broken. It quickly became clear that she nurtured an intense longing to join her husband in heaven. “St.” Jarvis Carter, as a typo in a newspaper fittingly dubbed him, seemed to haunt her as she wasted away in the very room he had first occupied in the Woolsons’ home. The family had long received alarming reports of ghosts in the room (including several from Carter himself), but Emma “seemed to take pleasure in the thought of spirits coming to her from the unknown world, to which she was so rapidly hastening.”20 Emma died on August 14, 1852, at age nineteen, nine months after her husband. His father, the Reverend Lawson Carter, had moved to Cleveland just in time to preside over the funeral of his daughter-in-law. She was buried with her husband under the altar in Grace Church, which the Woolsons and Carters would thereafter faithfully attend, worshipping each Sunday alongside the graves of Jarvis and Emma.

  Although Emma was remembered by her family as having “literally given up her life to her love,” she also had a very real illness that took her life and probably her husband’s as well. She was described as having died of “quick consumption,” and in Constance’s first surviving letter, written when she was about twelve years old, she explained that Emma had been “quite sick ever since she came from New York. She took a bad cold and has had some trouble with her lungs.” Although Carter’s disease was only described as mysterious and baffling in the few letters that have survived, Emma’s was surely tuberculosis, then known as consumption, and the likelihood that she contracted it from her dying husband is very high. The disease killed more people than any other in the nineteenth century. It usually claimed its victims, most often women, before they reached the age of thirty. In popular mythology, tuberculosis was the disease of grieving lovers and passionate artists, those of a highly sensitive nature who could not endure the hardships of life.21 Such was the enduring remembrance of Emma and her husband.

  Despite its romantic image, tuberculosis was a brutal disease. It usually began with symptoms similar to a cold and progressed to lingering, harassing coughs, high fevers, throat ulcers, and lung hemorrhages. Suffering at the end was severe. Bodies ravaged by the disease appeared cadaverous, and victims were often suffocated by the blood or mucus they coughed up. At Emma’s bedside, Constance would have encountered the sight of gushing blood, the stench of rotting flesh, and the sounds of choking and gagging, all of which she and her family were helpless to stop.22 The disease’s real cause (the tubercle bacillus) would not be discovered until 1882. Until then the disease was presumed to be hereditary. But there was no doubt in the family’s mind that Emma’s marriage had caused her untimely, horrific death. Constance would never forget the sight of her beautiful, talented sister, so
full of life and promise, wasting away. Sadly, it was not long before the oldest sister, Georgiana, also recently married, began to come down with similar symptoms.

  At the age of nineteen, Georgiana had married Samuel Livingston Mather on September 24, 1850, scarcely eight months before Emma’s doomed marriage. Unlike the later event, it was a happy occasion. At nineteen, Georgiana had chosen a spouse with excellent prospects, “a consummate nineteenth-century capitalist/entrepreneur” who would become one of Cleveland’s richest men and a lifelong benefactor of the Woolson family. Georgiana, although reputedly not as attractive as Emma, “possessed a radiant and magnetic personality” that drew people to her, not least her great-uncle James Fenimore Cooper, who had called her “Romping Granite” when she was young because of her boisterous personality and birthplace in the granite state of New Hampshire.23 The writings Georgiana left behind convey a perceptive, lively, and witty mind. Less than ten months after her marriage, she gave birth to a son, Sam. A second child, Katharine, called Kate, came along two years later. These children would be among their aunt Constance’s closest family to the end of her life. Many of her later surviving letters were written to Sam and Kate and convey her gratitude for their emotional and financial support. She, in turn, would help them know a mother they could not remember.

  As her second pregnancy had progressed, Georgiana already felt old. A poem she wrote at the time conveys her sense of having lost her youth: “. . . No! my day for long rambles, is over, / For the strength, comes not with the will; / I cough, from the scent of the cloves, / And pant when I climb up a hill! . . .” Georgiana was only twenty-two when she wrote these lines. Two days later, she gave up walking entirely, as she wrote to Samuel in a letter she signed, “Your most affectionate weak wife.” She probably never got out of bed after Kate was born. She beckoned Connie and Clara to her side as she lay dying. They said their tearful goodbyes and heard her whisper to Hannah a farewell message for their deaf father: “Tell Father how I have always loved him.”24

  Georgiana died on November 2, 1853, just over a year after Emma’s death. Tuberculosis appears to have been the cause. She had complained of coughing and shortness of breath, and symptoms of the disease often worsen after giving birth. Despite these known risks, female consumptives were rarely discouraged from bearing children.25 Many young women like Georgiana essentially sacrificed themselves in order to bring their children into the world.

  Emma and Georgiana’s deaths would make Constance enduringly anxious about her own health. Although it appears that no other family members contracted the disease, Constance would for the rest of her life behave as if it were lurking in the shadows waiting to claim her. The fear of consumption and the suggested treatments for it, particularly exercise, fresh air, and travel to warmer climates, shaped her understanding of health for the rest of her life. She would spend much of it chasing the sun and seeking clear air on hilltops.

  Above all, the Woolsons learned to behave as if serious illness was inevitable if they were careless about their health. As Constance wrote to Georgiana’s son, Sam, over two decades later, “we as a family can not do what many other people can, without breaking down. We cannot go without sleep; we cannot overtax ourselves; we cannot ‘overdo’ in any way. If we persist either from ignorance or obstinacy, we break down.”26 Having watched Emma and Georgiana succumb to consumption after exhausting themselves, the rest of the family had to be careful of too much mental, physical, and emotional exertion. And having seen her sisters waste away as the disease consumed their flesh, Constance would forever rejoice when she put on weight.

  At the age of thirteen, Constance became the oldest daughter, although she had been the sixth born. The responsibility of looking after Clara and Charlie, now nine and seven, fell to her, as would the care of her parents in the coming years. Her mother, in particular, would lean on her. Like that of most married women at the time, Hannah’s health had deteriorated rapidly due to the physical toll of childbearing, child rearing, and housework, which kept her inside where, incidentally, the effects of tuberculosis were most pronounced. The surviving accounts of Hannah’s illnesses in Jarvis’s letters suggest that she suffered from a variety of maladies that worsened as she cared for and lost her children. As early as 1846, he reported that she suffered from “Inflammation upon the Lungs, very severely.” In 1850, she had a “Spinal affection . . . wh. affects also the head very disturbingly.” Her recurring attacks worsened after Emma’s death and would eventually be labeled rheumatism. Looking back, Clara would describe her mother as an “invalid, having been sick a greater part of her life.”27 Hannah would live for many years still, but she increasingly needed others to care for her.

  Hannah’s invalidism and the deaths of Georgiana and Emma attuned Constance to the ways women gave up their health and even their lives to love and marriage. She understandably harbored complicated feelings about her own romantic prospects, both yearning for and fearing passionate devotion to loved ones. Without such ties, life was hardly worth living. With them, life could also be cut short or, perhaps worse, made unbearable through the deaths of children and one’s own broken health.

  When Constance began to write, her passionate nature found an outlet in her fiction and poetry, where the themes of love and marriage are prominent. Her sisters’ noble sufferings and terrifying sacrifices would become in many ways the great themes of her writing and her life. In herself she would discover the capacity to love as devotedly and selflessly as they had, a prospect both thrilling and frightening. Ever receptive to the wider culture’s messages about the all-consuming nature of romantic love—she was too much like the passionate Emma not to be—Constance was also reluctant to give herself away. She would throughout her life feel torn between her desire for love and her fear of its consequences.

  FINDING GRACE

  The Woolson family coped with their tremendous losses as many families did—by finding strength and community in their church. The Woolsons were Episcopalians and had probably attended Cleveland’s Trinity Church, as many of their friends did, until Jarvis Carter entered their lives. Grace Episcopal, the church he and then his father, Lawson, led, became the center of Constance’s world as the Woolson and Carter families formed many lasting ties. Jarvis’s sister Arabella, six years older than Constance, was soon her closest friend, taking the place of the sisters she had lost. Jarvis’s youngest brother, Henry, became a buddy of Charlie’s. And the oldest brother, Lawson, became a partner in the Woolson stove business and married Jane Averell, the daughter of one of Hannah’s closest friends from Cooperstown, also named Jane. Constance would be very close to Jane Carter, too, and play the role of aunt to her children until the end of her life.

  But Grace Church provided much more than an extended family for Constance. It also shaped the fundamental beliefs that would guide her through this life and, she believed, into the next. Grace Church, as part of the High Church movement within the Protestant Episcopal Church (as opposed to the evangelical wing that resented anything redolent of Roman Catholicism), included in its worship traditions from the pre-Reformation Church. These included Gothic architecture, stained-glass windows, elaborate vestments, choral music, candles, flowers, incense, paintings, and Christmas greenery. The High Church movement appealed particularly to Romantic sensibilities that were drawn to forms of worship invoking beauty, passion, and the sublime. Constance, like her father, who would become a churchwarden, was particularly receptive to such an atmosphere. She would for the rest of her life seek out the serene beauty of churches and cathedrals. They would be one of the few constants in her wandering life.

  Grace Church’s devotion to the beautiful did not blind it to the ugliness of urban life. It was a mission church that offered free seats to the poor and preached equality before God.28 Its anti-elitism and charitable projects were a strong influence on Constance, whose future writings would often focus on the marginalized and forgotten (albeit without direct reference to religion). God’s gifts sh
ould be available to all, she believed, not only to those who could afford them.

  Constance was strongly attracted to the power of the Church’s mission, vestments, and rituals. During her early school years, she at least once delivered a sermon to her classmates on the school steps, with a surplice-like white cloth draped around her.29 Had she been a boy, she might have carried her childhood performance further and eventually entered the Episcopal priesthood, as did the Carter child closest to her in age, George. The most a girl could do was marry a clergyman, as Arabella would do one day. Ultimately, Constance would have to find other ways to express her faith. It would not be through her writing, however. While many other nineteenth-century women writers used the pen as their pulpit, Constance became a decidedly secular writer, with one notable exception: her first book, The Old Stone House, was a children’s Sunday school novel, which she wrote for a contest. Although she wrote it under a pseudonym and never acknowledged it, the novel contains many of the beliefs that grew out of her experiences at Grace Church and at her sisters’ deathbeds.

  The parental figure in the book, the aptly named Aunt Faith, preaches to her young nieces and nephews the necessity of preparing for death. “When I think of our family circle,” she tells the youngest child, Grace, “I know that it is possible, I may even say probable that among so many a parting will come before very long.” Yet she insists that dying will not be anything “dreadful” but “like going home.” Only by submitting to God’s will can one be truly ready. He prepares us for the afterlife by purifying us through suffering and loss here on earth. “We must all sometimes be content to give up our wills to the guidance of a Wiser Hand,—be content simply to trust,” Aunt Faith counsels. The time “will come to you, as sooner or later, it comes to almost all of us.”30