Constance Fenimore Woolson

by Anne Boyd Rioux

  The first two—“St. Clair Flats” and “Solomon”—appeared in October 1873. The latter was her first story in the august Atlantic Monthly, the home of writing by Emerson, Hawthorne, and other American luminaries. After only three years, she had arrived where a lasting reputation could be made. The papers in Boston, New York, and Cleveland took notice, calling it her “very best literary production” and “quite worthy of the hospitality of the Atlantic.” It gave her “great pleasure to enter within the ‘Atlantic’ circle,” she wrote to the editor, William Dean Howells, who also hailed from Ohio. In the coming years, whenever her work appeared there, she would feel as if she had been “presented at court.” For not only was the Atlantic the magazine with the highest literary reputation, but it was also, not coincidentally, “our masculine magazine.”2 There was no doubt that the exclusive sphere it represented was largely a man’s world.

  About this time Woolson’s work became less autobiographical and more self-consciously literary. She had taken, as she told Arabella, “a new departure in my writing. I have gone back to nature and exact reality.” This meant breaking not only with children’s literature but also with the majority of women’s writings, which, she was “sorry to say,” were rarely “vigorous and fresh.” She had “such a horror of ‘pretty,’ ‘sweet’ writing” that she was willing to risk “a style that was ugly and bitter, provided it was also strong.”3 Her ambitions had grown exponentially as she set her sights on realism, a new literary form of which Howells was the primary arbiter.

  Woolson told Howells that she had “three models, whose styles I study and admire”: George Eliot, Bret Harte, and himself.4 She may have been trying to flatter the Atlantic editor, but her choices exhibit a decided effort to write high literary fiction. Eliot was widely considered the greatest living novelist, while Howells and Harte were both western writers, like herself, who had conquered the eastern literary establishment—Howells by reaching the summit of the Atlantic Monthly and Harte by earning an astonishing $10,000 contract from that magazine for one year’s output.

  Harte’s phenomenal success with stories of rough, uncivilized miners and outlaws in California woke Woolson up to the literary marketability of the West. The region she knew best—a Middle West of rapid urban growth and bucolic country towns—was not quite foreign enough to capture readers’ imaginations. She could find no inspiration in smoke-covered Cleveland, where in certain parts of town every mouthful of air tasted of petroleum. Instead she looked to the islands dotting the Great Lakes or the rustic logging towns along the shores, wild or frontier places that had disappeared during her lifetime. Readers were captivated by the novelty of her scenes. Appletons’ called the field of her fiction “a region as fresh and new as any that American literature has touched.”5

  Following in Harte’s footsteps, she also peopled these landscapes with male characters fleeing civilization (and the refined women who inhabited it), producing some of her best Great Lakes stories: “St. Clair Flats” (1873), “Peter the Parson” (1874), “The Lady of Little Fishing” (1874), and “Castle Nowhere” (1875). In an unusual move for a woman writer of the time, she often wrote from the male point of view, frequently exposing the limitations of her male characters’ ability to understand women’s minds and motives. Her male adventurers, eager to lose themselves beyond the frontier and recapture some of the freedom of Natty Bumppo, were also modeled on the men she had known growing up. “[T]he same fellow persistently appears,” she explained to Howells, “because that is the kind of young man I have always known.” She possessed the same yearning to escape the smoke and social world of Cleveland, but she could follow them only in her imagination. Her female characters who run off to these wild places have been pushed away from a civilization in which men have failed them, such as the religious exile fleeing her husband in “Mission Endeavor” (1876) and the lighthouse keeper Joanna fleeing a broken engagement in “Ballast Island” (1873). The latter is one of her strongest early works, yet Woolson never put it in a collection, perhaps because its portrayal of a woman who finds out her fiancé is in love with another, younger woman reflected her own experiences too closely.6

  Despite Harte’s influence, Woolson insisted she was not imitating him but was only impressed by his style. He was merely “the sensation of the hour; that was all.” The most enduring influence on her fiction was George Eliot. Although she would never meet the famous author, she thought of her as a “dear friend,” whose death in 1880 would touch her deeply.7 She saw in Eliot a kindred spirit, particularly in her autobiographical The Mill on the Floss, the book Constance often called her favorite. It had been published when Constance was twenty years old, and it reminded her of herself, particularly in Maggie’s hunger for intellectual stimulation, her unconditionally loving father who made a pet of her, and her brother, who is granted all the advantages of his sex while Maggie is expected to grow into conventional womanhood. The Mill on the Floss had shown Constance the power of literature to make one feel less alone in the world.

  Eliot also provided Woolson with a model of the great woman artist. Eliot’s aesthetic theories would in many ways inform Woolson’s own, producing creative differences with her closest peers, Howells and Henry James, in the coming years. James would not make his presence felt until Roderick Hudson in 1875, but Howells had already begun his assault on idealism and romanticism, declaring in Their Wedding Journey (1871), “We shall never have a poetry of our own till we get over this absurd reluctance from facts, till we make the ideal embrace and include the real.” Woolson did not disagree. She would never think of herself as a romantic or idealistic writer; rather she thought of herself as naturally pessimistic and preoccupied with the real. But she would see limitations in what a critic called Howells’s “extreme and almost photographic truth to nature.” She believed that writers must possess not only “eyes and ears (occasionally noses); but [also] imagination, or soul.” Writers should interpret their characters as they do their mothers, children, or spouses: with intuition and love.8

  As her contemporary realists increasingly excluded moral and emotional concerns from their definition of literary realism, Woolson adhered to a kind of empathetic realism most famously articulated by Eliot in Adam Bede (1859): “[D]o not impose on us any aesthetic rules which shall banish from the region of Art those old women scraping carrots with their work-worn hands. . . . [L]et us always have men ready to give the loving pains of a life to the faithful representing of commonplace things—men who see the beauty in these commonplace things, and delight in showing how the kindly light of heaven falls on them.” Eliot wanted to show readers their “fellow mortals” so that they “should tolerate, pity, and love” them.9

  Woolson found a similar approach in George Sand, a writer she greatly admired but never knew or corresponded with (Sand would die in 1876). While living in New York, Constance had translated Sand’s novel La Mare au Diable (1846), which she hoped Roberts Brothers would publish. Unfortunately, another translation appeared before hers was ready, so it was never published. The simple peasant tale, Sand wrote in the preface, was a reaction to the new vogue of portraying “poverty as so ugly, so debased, sometimes so immoral and so criminal.” The “mission of Art” should instead be “that of inducing people to love the objects of [the artist’s] care.” Similarly, Woolson, would copy into her notebook two decades later, “Not a single novel or play is considered a masterpiece which fails to arouse sympathy.” This concern with human connection was more than aesthetic; it was the foundational ethic of her life. As Clara would write after Constance’s death, “She always helped people—knew not only what to say and do—but just how they felt,” particularly those “who earned their own livings—oh! how she did admire and like them.”10 Constance’s empathy, instilled by her upbringing and religious training at Grace Church, would remain at the center of her life.

  In her pursuit of empathetic realism, Woolson helped pioneer a key feature of the local-color literature that would dominat
e American literature from the late 1870s through the 1890s: the sophisticated, metropolitan narrator visiting remote regions and encountering uneducated, lower-class characters who often speak in dialect. Although many other local-color writers, including Harte, tended to portray their regional characters as comically uncouth, Woolson was more interested in revealing the limitations of her urbane visitors’ perception. She portrayed without sentimentality marginal or outcast characters struggling for the same things her readers did: love, dignity, and respect.

  Her empathetic aesthetic is apparent in “Solomon,” in which the character Erminia says, “In real life we are all masked; but in fiction the author shows faces as they are.” “Solomon” portrays an ignorant genius who works in a coal mine to support his disheartened, seemingly shallow wife. He is an untrained artist who has spent his youth trying to capture her beauty on canvas. When a pair of educated women visit the couple, one of them teaches Solomon the techniques of perspective and shadow, allowing him to create a portrait “so noble in its idealized beauty that it might have been a portrait of her glorified face in Paradise.”11 The very next day Solomon dies in an accident at the coal mine. The portrait has accomplished its final work, however, allowing the visitors (and readers) to see the pathetic wife as Solomon had. Woolson had found in a frustrated coal miner/artist and his wife her old women scraping carrots.

  THE COMMAND OF THE CRITICS

  “Solomon” also introduced a figure that would reappear at key moments in Woolson’s career: the failed or frustrated artist. The recurring theme in her fiction of an artist’s unfulfilled desires exposed the friction between her own rising ambitions and her ever-present fear of failure. It is not surprising that this theme initially surfaced in Woolson’s first story in the Atlantic. She knew it would not be easy to court the favor of the male literary elite. When Arabella praised her talent, Constance responded, “You are mistaken, I have but little ability of the kind you mention; all I have is immense perseverance and determination.” She compared herself to her favorite dog, who would allow himself to be torn apart before letting go of a mat between his teeth.12

  The chink in her armor, however, was her immense sensitivity. She often could not sleep after reading her reviews. “[T]hese critics seem to hold my very life in their hands,” she later confessed to Howells.13 She needed to develop a thick skin, particularly as her embrace of realism made her vulnerable to conservative critics’ attacks.

  The flood of condemnation she received for “Peter the Parson” in September 1874 must have cost her many nights of sleep. Scribner’s had hesitated publishing it, presumably because of its dark themes. The story of an Episcopal minister sent to save the irredeemable souls in a crude mining town on the shores of Lake Superior offered a bleak view of the fate of idealism. The ignorant miners prefer the bombastic preaching of an evangelist con man over Peter’s strict adherence to High Church rituals. Retreating into an ascetic existence, Peter excites suspicion and is ultimately murdered by one of the miners as he attempts to save the thieving evangelist from the mob’s retribution. The story’s complex portrayal of religious and moral issues—Peter is both misguided and honorable, and his murderer is never brought to justice—made it controversial, especially coming from the pen of a genteel woman. Woolson thought it “the most powerful thing I have written,” but many readers balked. One unnamed literary man who wrote to her gave her “up as hopelessly lost . . . into the hard realistic tendencies of the day.” Meanwhile, another wrote to her with approbation. She wasn’t sure whom to believe. In the face of such censure, however, she insisted “that both in an artistic and truthful-to-life point of view, my ending of the story was better than the conversion of the miners, the plenty to eat and the happy marriage proposed by my critics.”14

  The most virulent attack came from The Nation. It called “Peter the Parson” “a story . . . noticeable for the raw coarseness of its assault on the feelings” and found another of Woolson’s stories, “The Lady of Little Fishing,” about a female missionary who civilizes a camp of hunters and trappers, “wildly improbable.” (By contrast, Howells, who had published it in the Atlantic, found it full of “dramatic force and skill.”) The Nation’s critic then launched an offensive on the “band of heart-wrenching female dealers in false feeling” unable to “write a moderate word when the reader’s feelings are to be touched.” Their “indecent” fiction was no better than that of “the leading graduate of a young ladies’ seminary.” Such criticism, designed to make women writers feel inferior to their better-educated male peers and unsexed for writing out of their sphere, touched on Woolson’s greatest fears. Fortunately, The Nation reviewer did not represent the dominant view of the budding writer’s merit.15

  Despite The Nation’s peevishness, Woolson’s stories gained in reputation and popularity. Early on Mark Twain had noticed the power of her writing, although she would never know that his coauthor Charles Dudley Warner had plagiarized her in an early draft of The Gilded Age. Twain told his wife, “[H]e saw it & yet I’m hanged if he didn’t hate to lose it because there was a ‘nip’ & a pungency about that woman’s phrases that he hated to lose—& so did I.”16 (Upon Woolson’s death, Warner would write one of the most admiring obituaries she received.)

  The general reaction to her Great Lakes stories was so favorable that in the fall of 1874 James R. Osgood—former publisher of the Atlantic Monthly and Harte’s The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Stories—wanted to publish a collection of them. He saw in Woolson a rising star and let her choose what she thought was her best work. She chose “Solomon,” “Peter the Parson,” “The Lady of Little Fishing,” and four other stories, among them what is probably her best early work, “St. Clair Flats.” This story, set in Michigan, also plays out the struggle between idealism and realism, this time told through the perspective of a romantic narrator who views the maze-like marshes as “an enchanted land, whose memory haunts me as an idea unwritten, a melody unsung, a picture unpainted, haunts the artist.” His cynical companion, with whom he relishes “the wild freedom of the watery waste,” contradicts him at every turn, finding no beauty in the land, nor in the prosaic wife of a religious fanatic who lives in the only house on the marsh and takes them in. When the narrator returns, many years later, he discovers that the utilitarian view has triumphed and laments the “unmitigated ugliness” of the canal that has brought commerce to the region and scared off the wildlife and reclusive human inhabitants alike. The subtle biblical symbolism of the story’s Edenic setting is overlaid with the realism of women’s thwarted lives and the industrial development of the Great Lakes region, making it a prime example, Howells wrote in his review for the Atlantic, of “what our strangely varied American real life can do in the way of romance.”17

  For the collection, Osgood also wanted Woolson to write a new story, which would provide the book’s title. The ambitious story, “Castle Nowhere,” featured another of her male adventurers, Jarvis Waring, who has intentionally lost himself along the wild northern edge of Lake Michigan. There he discovers Old Fog, a man who lures ships to their destruction in order to pilfer goods for his adopted daughter, Silver. Jarvis is horrified by Old Fog but falls in love with the innocent girl and marries her, bringing her out of seclusion. Woolson insisted to Howells that “the fogs, the islands, . . . the false lights and the wreckers are all from real life,” yet the allegorical nature of the story made it the least realistic in the collection. Woolson was uncertain about its obvious romanticism. “I find I cannot go far out of my natural [realistic] style; it makes me feel as though I was telling a thousand lies,” she told a friend.18

  When Castle Nowhere: Lake-Country Sketches was published in 1875, a flood of letters told her the title story was the best in the collection, “so much more ‘beautiful’ than the others.” Yet Howells soundly disagreed in his review of the collection, calling it “the least satisfactory of the stories” and asserting that “one is harassed from beginning to end by a disagreeable fantastica
lity.” The rest of his review was very favorable, noting the “high truth to human nature never once weakened by any vagueness of the moral ideal in the author.” Yet Constance was stung by the one note of criticism and dashed off a letter to Howells explaining why she had written a more romantic tale. She had heard too many times, “You are too realistic; you have gone after false gods. Give us something ideal, something purely imaginative;—like Undine.”19 So she had, but she swore she would never do so again.

  Some readers were uncomfortable with “Castle Nowhere” for another reason, namely its lack of moralizing. Like the murderer in “Peter the Parson,” Old Fog was neither condemned nor punished for his crimes. In fact, it appeared to some that his selfless love for Silver was meant to compensate for his deeds. When Arabella expressed her disapproval, Constance insisted upon an artist’s prerogative:

  Now just hold your peace about my “want of morality.” At least twenty awful letters have I received because I made “Old Fog” say he did not believe in eternal punishment. Is it possible that I am to be held personally responsible for the theology and morality of all my characters? I want you to think of me not as your old friend, when you read my writings, but as a “writer,” like anyone else. For instance, take [George Eliot’s] “Adam Bede” . . . Would you like to have a friend of yours the author of such a story? Dealing with such subjects [adultery and infanticide]? And yet it was a great book. . . . The truth is, Belle, whatever one does must be done with one’s might and I would rather be strong than beautiful, or even good, provided the “good” must be dull.20