Constance Fenimore Woolson

by Anne Boyd Rioux

  Woolson’s equation of dying with “going home” was not mere sentimental prattle she felt compelled to dish out to her young readers. It was a common component of the Christian faith in antebellum America and one in which she fervently believed. In the coming years, as the scientific thought of the age explained away many of the mysteries of life on earth and many of her contemporaries became agnostics or atheists, she never let go of her “firm and beautiful belief in immortality,” as she would later describe it. She clung to it as if to a life preserver in a sea of uncertainty. Referring to the dead, she wrote to her nephew, Sam, “We shall see them again; & they and we shall then be freed forever from all the imperfections & clogs of this lower life.” At the age of forty-nine, she still insisted, “I have the firmest faith in another, & brighter existence; to me it is the only solution of the pain & cruelties, and griefs, of this one.”31 Her belief in an afterlife was the one certainty that would carry her through the troubles that at times left her feeling hopeless.

  The lingering image of Emma’s and Georgiana’s deaths, therefore, was not simply frightening but also inspiring. Theirs were considered “good deaths” because they demonstrated the submission of the individual to God’s will. They helped Constance believe that “death was not really death at all.”32 Immortality would be granted to those who believed in it and suffered for it. What she and most American Christians envisioned on the other side was a place where broken families would be reunited and ties shattered on earth would be mended. Death promised the ultimate homecoming.

  With heaven described in such ideal terms, many Christians could not help longing for it. Constance was not immune to its siren call, having watched Emma will herself into the next life. In The Old Stone House, the Reverend Leslie delivers a sermon admonishing his parishioners to “wait patiently for the Lord in the world in which He has placed [you].” This, admits Leslie, “is sometimes the hardest duty of a long life.” Christians must not be so enraptured with thoughts of the next world that they neglect to notice the beauties (and duties) of this one. An early poem of Constance’s, based on John 17:15, elaborates this message:

  Not out of the world, dear Father,

  With duties and vows unfilled,

  With life’s earnest labors unfinished,

  Ambition and passion unstilled;

  Not out of the world, dear Father,

  Until we have faithfully tried

  To burnish the talent Thou gavest,

  And again other talents beside . . .

  Not out of the world, good Father,

  Until we have suffered the loss

  Of self-loving ease and indulgence

  In willingly bearing the Cross;

  Not out of the world, good Father,

  Till bowed with humility down,

  The weight of the Cross is forgotten

  In the golden light of the Crown. . . .33

  However much her sisters’ deaths had encouraged her to look forward to her own, Constance also inherited from her church a fervent appreciation for the beauties of this world that she would carry with her as she explored the natural world in the Great Lakes and the southern United States and, eventually, the man-made wonders of Europe and the Middle East. Her later writings would convey just how much pleasure she derived from this life and how hard she tried to remember the grace of God’s gifts in the face of so much loss. But never far from her mind was the idea that death, and those who had gone before, were waiting for her.

  3

  Turning Points

  THE YEAR after Georgiana died, Constance began the serious studies that would allow her one day to compete on the same intellectual playing field as men. Yet she would always feel that her education had been incomplete, preventing her from being their true equal.

  In addition to the reading and presumably writing she did under her father’s tutelage, her early formal education had been fairly cursory: first the Episcopalian girls’ school Miss Fuller’s and then the coeducational private academy Miss Hayden’s. At thirteen, Constance had received a comprehensive education alongside boys for one year at a public school named Rockwell. At the end of the year she performed impressively in the public examinations, naming as well as any medical school graduate the parts of the digestive and muscular systems, according to one observer.1

  At fourteen she began what passed for higher education for girls at the time. If she were a boy, she might have been heading off to college, but such opportunities were scarce for girls. (Nearby Oberlin, which Harriet Grannis had attended, was one of the few exceptions.) The pioneering phase of women’s higher education, from which her mother and older sisters had benefited, had not yet given way to the progressive movement that would create the first large wave of female college graduates in the 1870s and ’80s.

  In 1823–1824, Hannah had gone to the first institution of higher learning for women in the United States, Emma Willard’s Troy Female Seminary. In the late 1840s, Georgiana had gone east to the Albany Female Academy, while Emma went to a school (now unknown) in New York. Such schools professed to prepare young women for motherhood but also taught them to read and think for themselves, training them in the same subjects young men learned at college.2 Just as Constance turned fourteen, a new school brought such principles to northern Ohio.

  A SEPARATE EDUCATION

  When the Cleveland Female Seminary opened in 1854, it was housed in a new, poorly heated, three-story brick building on a wooded, seven-acre lot, about two miles southeast of town. There students were trained in the arts of poetry, painting, and music alongside more academic subjects. In her three years there, Constance studied Latin, rhetoric, chemistry, physiology, geometry, algebra, trigonometry, zoology, botany, philosophy, logic, English literature, and the histories of Greece, Rome, and England. The sciences and languages were all taught by male professors recruited from the nearby colleges, while English, history, and math were taught by women. Constance’s physiology teacher taught the girls how to dissect a calf and string together a skeleton. Years afterward, Constance still remembered being pursued by a “French Manikin” in her dreams. But she prided herself on having been “medically educated . . . up to a certain point.” Her favorite of the male professors—her “demi-god”—was Samuel St. John, former professor of chemistry and geology at Western Reserve College.3 It is probably due to his instruction and encouragement that natural history in all its forms, but especially botany, would become a lifelong interest of hers.

  However progressive Constance’s training at the Cleveland Female Seminary, it nonetheless segregated her from young men her age and thus taught her that women’s minds and ultimately their lives were intended for a different, lesser purpose, a belief she would have a hard time leaving behind. In later years she would implore that women be educated alongside men, for it was the only way to widen their minds. Women were not mentally inferior, she believed; they had simply been “kept back, and enfeebled, & limited, by ages of ignorance, & almost servitude.”4

  The seminary’s most prominent female teacher and its de facto principal, Linda Guilford, lamented that the vast majority of her students would never use their training. As a graduate of Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, the school started by Mary Lyons in 1837 to provide a college-level education for women, she had used her education in the only way available to women of her generation: teaching. Of the typical student at the seminary, she wrote, “When all her powers were stretching into rapid growth, and her mental resources were being developed to fill your own ideal, she left you, and in a few months was a bride.” Speaking particularly of young women who married men beneath them, she observed, “The intellect has died of starvation. Worn out with early cares, she is but a wreck.” However, Guilford did not suggest any alternatives except for her pupils to attach themselves to more worthy mates. It wasn’t until three decades later that she would able to look back and see how some of her former students had used their training to gain meaningful work.5

  In Constance�
��s case it was Linda Guilford who made such work possible by teaching her how to write well. While outside the snow blew sideways through the wide-open fields and inside the furnace barely warmed the drafty rooms, Constance bent over her desk each week to write her compositions. And each week Miss Guilford patiently corrected her errors in logic and pointed out her faults in style. She was the budding writer’s first critic, setting a high mark Constance was anxious to reach. Soon her classmates took notice. One of them later recalled how eagerly “we girls anticipated the Wednesday composition class. I can see the large room now, holding a full circle of intent listeners, while the weekly productions are read, and mark the flush of pleasure on Connie’s face as her audience break [sic] into open applause after one of her characteristic essays.”6

  Constance made many friends at the seminary who would comprise her social circle during her Cleveland years. No doubt she was a member of the “K.R.T.’s,” who read and acted Shakespeare, one of her favorite authors. And she was certainly among the forty students who, after hearing Rev. Ross from New Orleans speak in town about the “Divine Origins of Slavery,” held an impromptu assembly. A self-described “red hot abolitionist,” she would not have missed this rally against “Southern sentiment and domination.” In their leisure time, she and her classmates went for long walks in the Water Cure Woods behind the school, gossiped about the neighboring wealthy bachelor who would provide a perfect match for one of their teachers, and stole freshly baked cherry pies left carelessly on a windowsill to cool.7

  Although Constance met many amiable girls there, one rose above the rest. She was captivated by Flora Payne, the daughter of Henry B. Payne, former U.S. senator and soon-to-be governor of Ohio. They spent hours together in Flora’s room, talking of literature and life, Flora impressing her with her wit and original ideas. Although Flora was two years younger than Constance, she seemed so much more worldly and mature. While the other girls were pretty and smart, Flora was simply brilliant. “[N]o one else approached her,” Constance declared many years later.8

  After their three years together at the Cleveland Female Seminary, both Constance and Flora went east for further education, but their paths diverged widely. Flora went to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and attended the school of Harvard professor Louis Agassiz, a forerunner to Radcliffe College, where many of the students—including Clover Hooper (future wife of Henry Adams) and Ellen Tucker Emerson (daughter of the author)—wondered what they were supposed to do with the Greek, geology, and embryology they learned.9

  Meanwhile, seventeen-year-old Constance went to New York and attended the French finishing school run by Madame Chegaray. In existence since 1814, the school was steeped in tradition and gentility. Located in Lower Manhattan near Washington Square, it prided itself on educating “only the daughters of the rich and socially prominent,” said former student Julia Gardiner, wife of President John Tyler. Although at other modern schools girls might be publicly examined by “bearded professors from boy’s colleges,” Madame Chegaray’s was a relic of a fading age where girls learned “every talent of the agreeable and decorative order,” Constance would later write.10

  The decision to send Constance to Madame Chegaray’s, which may have been the school Emma attended, suggests that her parents were not entirely sold on the idea of women’s higher education. They wanted their daughter to gain the cultural refinements that the Cleveland Female Seminary had failed to impart. A year of voice lessons, attending the opera, and instruction in French and Italian would make her more attractive to potential suitors than any amount of Latin or calf dissection, especially when she didn’t have the fortune Flora had to attract a husband.

  Constance felt out of place at Madame Chegaray’s. Besides knowing more about geology than Italian opera, she was also one of only three northern girls in an enclave of southern debutantes, and the only westerner. To a “red-hot abolitionist” coming from a school that had been riled by a New Orleans minister’s defense of slavery, these new beings were a source of wonder. Their sectionalism intrigued her: while they proudly called themselves “The Daughters of Carolina,” she had never thought of herself as a “Daughter of Ohio.” Their refinement, from their perfectly curled hair down to the high arches of their feet, awed her. And their dependence on servants mystified her. As they sat in the third-story room they shared, one of the girls would repeatedly call out to the Irish chambermaid to come up and close the door. “Now Kate, why not get up and shut it yourself?” Constance would ask, to which Kate would laugh and answer, “I never thought of it.”11

  This was not only Constance’s first encounter with southerners but also with American aristocracy. In an early story she would spoof the way a western girl becomes obsessed with proving her patrician ancestry after attending a fashionable boarding school where the girls wanted to see her family tree and test whether water could run under the arches of her feet. In her novel Anne, the title character, also a westerner, is made aware of her “deficiencies in dresses,” while her southern classmates wound her with their amused glances. “Girls are not brutal, like boys, but their light wit is pitiless,” the narrator observes.12

  However much the girls at Madame Chegeray’s may have wounded her pride, Constance also came to admire them. The enduring result was that she could no longer think of the South simply as the aggressor she had envisioned back in Cleveland. The memory of those girls would stay with her throughout the war and its aftermath, when she would write sympathetically of the losses southerners had endured.

  At the end of her year at the school, Constance won top prizes for her compositions. But her first love had always been music, the most passionate of the arts—and the one closest to madness, she would later write. In Anne, singing opera music is a powerful outlet for the main character’s pent-up emotions, as it was for the adolescent Constance, whose contralto voice thrilled her listeners.13 In the coming years, however, as her hearing faded, she would have to strain to hear the arias that had so moved her, and she would cease to sing except to herself and select family and friends.

  At the end of her finishing year at Madame Chegeray’s it was time for eighteen-year-old Constance to put her new charms and talents to use. After attending the graduation in New York, her family outfitted her with a supply of stylish new dresses and took her to visit some of the fashionable resorts along the eastern seaboard where eligible young men abounded. Clara thought of her big sister as “a great belle,” but it was also clear that Constance didn’t fit in at this veritable marriage market. During their trip, a telling incident occurred. Her mother had persistently warned her, “Connie, do not carry an inkstand up and down stairs as you do—you will some day fall and injure yourself, and spoil one of your pretty new dresses!” One day, as Constance descended the hotel stairs thinking of the writing she was to do on the piazza, she balanced an uncorked bottle of ink atop her limp portfolio. Predictably, she tripped on her voluminous skirts, spilling black ink all over her smart gray dress.14 There was no surer way to announce to the world her disregard of the courtship rituals in which she was expected to participate.

  Behind her family’s exasperation at Connie’s absentmindedness and destruction of her dress was also a concern that she was in danger of becoming that much-ridiculed figure, a bluestocking. Now that she was grown, her parents had to decide how to handle the fact that she had a distinct inclination and talent for writing. It seems they determined more or less to ignore it, much as they did Clara’s acting abilities. One day, when Clara critiqued an incompetent actress’s performance and declared she could have done better, Hannah calmly kept up her mending and said matter-of-factly, “Your father and I knew it long ago—that you could act—but we hoped you would not find it out until too late.’ ”15 The last thing they wanted was for Clara to become an actress or Connie to become an author. They wanted their daughters to marry, and then it would be too late to be anything else. Sending Constance to Madame Chegaray’s was supposed to ensure that she would have the acc
omplishments to attract a husband and adorn his home. But soon it would be too late even for that.

  Constance sometime after her graduation from Madame Chegaray’s.

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

  THUNDERBOLT

  Constance returned to Cleveland determined not to marry anytime soon. Five years after her homecoming she wrote to Flora Payne, “[A]lthough I am willing to settle down after thirty years are told, I do not care to be forced into quiescence yet awhile.”16 The intervening years would be consumed by a much larger drama than her own, however.

  As the 1860s dawned and sectional discord intensified, Cleveland readied itself to answer the call to war. For years the city had been an abolitionist stronghold, a major stop on the Underground Railroad, and a layover for John Brown’s fund-raising tours for his Harper’s Ferry raid. In January 1861, the capture of a runaway slave down the street from the Woolsons’ home focused national attention on the city and almost catapulted the country into war. A friend of the Woolsons, Judge Rufus Spalding, led the defense team that unsuccessfully tried to free Lucy Bagby. Less than a month later, in the midst of news of the southern secession, president-elect Abraham Lincoln visited Cleveland on his way to Washington, encountering the largest crowds that greeted him on his tour. Constance’s father helped plan his reception.17

  In spite of the tensions that had been mounting for months, news of the beginning of hostilities at Fort Sumter on April 11, 1861, came like a lightning bolt into Constance’s life, as it did for so many. The thunder that followed quickly rolled toward Cleveland. As the first regiments to heed the call marched through the city on their way to the nation’s capital, every resident seemed to have poured into the streets to see them off. Constance stood among them overcome with emotion. Each departing soldier seemed as though “he had been crowned king” because he was going away “to real battle-fields, where balls would plow through human flesh, and leave agony and death behind.”18 She would never forget their ultimate sacrifice nor the feeling of standing uselessly in the wings while the young men she had grown up with took center stage in the great national drama.