Constance Fenimore Woolson

by Anne Boyd Rioux

  Like Eliot, Woolson was faced with her era’s insistence that women write from a conventional Christian point of view. She had to assert her right to participate in the decidedly secular movement of literary realism and write with force rather than beauty or moralism.

  Overall, the response to Castle Nowhere: Lake-Country Sketches was encouraging. Appletons’ praised Woolson for contributing to American literature “something fresh and vigorous beyond the common.” The New York Tribune declared she had bested the up-and-coming Henry James “in the use of unhackneyed scenery and incident.” Her “positive genius” and “marked power” made the reviewer “ready to offer Miss Woolson glad welcome into the field of letters.”21

  THE ANCIENT CITY

  Joining the field of letters had not exempted Constance from the duties of a daughter. Hannah’s health still took priority over everything else. During the severest winter Clevelanders had ever known, in 1872–73, Hannah suffered from rheumatism and a painful bout of shingles.22 Another winter there might kill her. Thus it happened that the one thing keeping Constance at home—caring for her mother—also allowed her finally to leave it, but not for Europe as she most desired. While her brother, Charlie, ventured across the ocean (likely with the Mathers’ assistance), Constance prepared to take her mother south.

  In November 1873, shortly after the publication of “Solomon” and “St. Clair Flats,” Constance, Hannah, Clara, and Plum headed to New York, where they saw Charlie on his return from Europe. (His plan to stay there for some years and pursue business had been interrupted by financial trouble, no doubt caused by the Panic of 1873.) On their way south they stopped in the nation’s capital, where they spied President Grant pacing the White House portico, and then joined the crowds of northern invalids and pleasure-seekers streaming to Florida. The most noticeable change for Hannah as they crossed the Mason-Dixon Line was “the swarms at every station of curious looking negroes.” For Constance it was the ubiquitous evidence of the recent war: the shattered, resigned faces, the rows of soldiers’ tombstones passing by the train windows, and the names of bloody battles called at each stop. Most troubling were other travelers’ casual inquiries about whether she had seen this or that battlefield. She was stunned to discover that the war-scarred South had become a tourist attraction.23

  Their destination—the coastal town of St. Augustine—was a wholly un-American place that would excite Constance’s imagination for many winters to come. Having been enchanted in her youth by the French history of Mackinac Island and the German inhabitants of Zoar, she was now captivated by this former Spanish colony, founded in 1565, forty-two years before Jamestown. It felt like the next best thing to Europe. In the words of Harriet Beecher Stowe, a recent resident, it seemed “as if some little, old, dead-and-alive Spanish town, with its fort and gateway and Moorish bell towers, had broken loose, floated over here, and got stranded on a sand-bank.”24

  The Ancient City, as it was called, was “ancient indeed,” Constance wrote home to the Herald, “with its Spanish houses, narrow streets, and overhanging balconies.” The Woolson women were delighted with the old Spanish fort that dominated the north end of town. It was their “first bona fide ruin [with] dungeons, moat, and draw-bridge.” Hannah admired the exotic palms and orange, olive, and guava trees, as well as the dark-eyed inhabitants, descendants of Spaniards and Minorcans. The “Romish Priests with their large hats, and garments as long as a woman’s” enhanced the foreign atmosphere.25

  They found rooms at Mrs. Fatio’s boardinghouse, rumored to serve the best meals, on Hospital Street, the oldest street in the United States. The rooms were on the second floor and at night they could hear through their open window the surf striking the seawall two blocks away.26

  By January, Hannah and Connie were thinking seriously of buying their own small house there. Hannah was so content that Constance, when she wasn’t writing, was able to leave her and explore their surroundings. Her glee fairly leaps off the page of a letter to Arabella:

  The life here is so fresh, so new, so full of a certain wild freedom. I walk miles through the hummocks, where it looks as though no one had ever walked before, gathering wild flowers everywhere. . . . Then on other days I take a row boat and go prowling down the inlet into all sorts of creeks that go no one knows where; I wind through dense forest where the trees meet overhead, and the long grey moss brushes my solitary boat as I pass. I go far up the Sebastian River as utterly alone as Robinson Crusoe. I meet alligators, porpoises, pelicans, cranes, and even deer, but not a human soul.

  For the first time in her life she felt free to roam without surveillance, unlike in the claustrophobic social world of Cleveland or under the scrutinizing glances of Manhattan socialites.27

  The study of nature would begin to replace Woolson’s love of music as her chief interest outside of literature. She was particularly drawn to ferns, identifying with the “shy little maids who dwell in the woods.” Florida had nineteen new species of fern for her to learn and collect. For guidance, she began corresponding with Yale professor and fern specialist Daniel Cady Eaton, sending him specimens for identification. Over the next few years, as her “circle of human friends [grew] narrower,” a by-product of her hearing loss, she would become a dedicated botanist.28

  Woolson had always been very responsive to the natural world, but in her earliest works nature tended to be unpredictable and even deadly, particularly in the form of shipwrecking storms that signified her characters’ (and her own) inner turmoil. In Florida, nature both healed and stimulated her in new ways. The tranquility and laziness of St. Augustine and its surroundings were a great comfort after the cares and anxieties of the past few years. During her solitary walks in the sandy forests, she discovered a solace she lovingly described in the poem “Pine-Barrens”:

  Abroad upon the Barrens the care-worn soul awakens

  From brooding on the long hard paths its weary feet have trod:

  How little seem earth’s sorrows, how far off the lost to-morrows,

  How broad and free the Barrens lie, how very near to God!29

  It is not too much to say that Woolson was in a sense reborn during her stay in St. Augustine. In her explorations of Florida, she mastered the objectivity necessary for an artist. She felt inspired by Thoreau, whom she references throughout the story “A Voyage to the Unknown River,” and Emerson, whose aphorisms she pinned above her desk. Her turn outward is also reminiscent of George Eliot, who combined a love of natural history with her deep affection for the variety of humanity.

  The transition Woolson was undergoing materializes in her most autobiographical work of this period: “The Ancient City” (December 1874–January 1875). The thirty-four-year-old author put much of her earlier uncertainty and hopelessness into her characterization of Sara, a magazine writer in her late twenties. She is unusually sensitive, caustic, and isolated, we learn, because of a broken engagement. When her former fiancé, John, shows up in St. Augustine and appears to fall for a young beauty, Sara is so unhappy that she longs for death.

  Sara is also the first but not the last of Woolson’s failed female artists. Others look down on Sara for being a writer, and the narrator, Aunt Martha, declares, in reference to Sara, “Why is it that women who write generally manage to make themselves disagreeable to all mankind?”30 Ultimately, a more experienced male writer who arrives in St. Augustine determines that Sara is the type to live poetry rather than write it. A woman who lives cannot write, and a woman who writes cannot live, an expression of the split that Woolson would feel again and again in her own life. Fortunately for Sara, John proposes to her once again, allowing her to live an ordinary woman’s life. For Sara writing has clearly been a replacement for marriage. If Woolson viewed her own writing similarly at first, it was clear that was no longer the case. She was beginning to find ample compensations in the life of a literary spinster.

  Woolson’s new view of unmarried life emerges in the character of the narrator of “The Ancient City,” th
e forty-year-old Martha. She looks out for Sara because “no one comprehends a girl passing through the shadow-land of doubt and vague questioning that lies beyond youth so well as the old maid who has made the journey herself, and knows of a surety that there is sunshine beyond.”31 Martha is content never to have married and enjoys her freedom to travel. Although not actually a writer, she possesses the gaze of the artist observing the world around her. Martha ventures into the parts of town the other tourists avoid, mirroring Woolson’s own tendency to roam beyond the bounds of what is expected of women of her class.

  On one excursion outside of St. Augustine’s tourist areas, Martha encounters “a dark-eyed, olive-skinned people” who regard her “with calm superiority.” Minorcans, she is informed, are descendants of indentured servants brought from the isle of Minorca off the coast of Spain to Florida in 1767, after the British had taken over the colony. The Minorcans mutinied against their oppressors and were given land on which they continued to live. Woolson was fascinated with this community, peopling the margins of her Florida fiction with them and occasionally giving them center stage, as in her fascinating story “Felipa” (1876), where a Minorcan girl who dresses like a boy attracts the attention of a trio of visiting white northerners. Here and elsewhere, Woolson granted her Minorcan characters agency, allowing them to speak back or assert their own value systems. When the artist narrator tells Felipa she can never be as beautiful as Christine, a northern tourist, Felipa turns the mirror back on her, shouting, “You are not pretty either. . . . Look at yourself! look at yourself!” The final line of the story is given not to the narrator and her friends but to Felipa’s Minorcan grandfather, who sees what the narrator cannot. While they have dismissed Felipa’s powerful feelings, he realizes her great capacity for love, even at eleven years of age.32

  In “Felipa,” Woolson also crossed boundaries of another sort, depicting Felipa’s and the female narrator’s attraction to the beautiful Christine, complicating notions of women’s sexuality at a time well before lesbianism and “Boston marriages” were recognized. In the coming years, Woolson would also portray schoolgirls’ crushes on their female teachers in her novel Anne and argue in a review that she had herself witnessed “the deepest devotion, in mature, well-educated, and cultivated women, for some other woman whom they adored,” although all of those women had since married and put their earlier adoration behind them. It is possible that Constance had herself felt such devotion toward Arabella. Looking back on it now, her feelings seemed remote and no longer possessed the same intensity. Their memory allowed her, however, to recognize in other women their love for each other.33

  Woolson’s time in St. Augustine also exposed her to freed slaves. Her counterpart Martha deliberately seeks them out to see firsthand how they are faring. In spite of other white northerners’ claims that they “don’t know what to do with [their freedom] yet,” Martha notices the freed slaves’ defiance and independence. She also visits the schools for freedmen, where the older pupils eagerly learn to read and the younger students “show quick understanding.” Woolson would later explore these themes more fully in what remains her most controversial story, “King David” (1878). Just as she refused to condemn Old Fog and the murderer of “Peter the Parson,” she did not denounce her lead character, a white teacher who was an abolitionist but is physically repulsed by his black students. Instead of passing judgment herself, Woolson allows one of his pupils to speak on behalf of the freed slaves: “You hab nebber quite unnerstan us, sah, nebber quite; an’ you can nebber do much fo’ us, suh, on ’count ob dat fack.”34 Always an outside observer, Woolson, like Martha, took no overt position on such issues but allowed her characters to assert their own perspectives, thereby conveying her deep respect for those marginalized voices that were otherwise rarely heard. By refusing to state her opinions directly, she split from the moralizing tone of George Eliot and Bret Harte and declared her affiliation with American literary realism.

  LITERARY FRIENDSHIPS

  In St. Augustine, Woolson also found her first literary friend, Edmund Clarence Stedman, a genial married man in his forties with a prodigious graying beard that he parted down the middle and brushed to each side. Like many of the other northerners, he had come south in search of a cure. His particular ailment was overwork in his job as a Wall Street broker. But it was Stedman’s other identity, as one of New York’s most prominent critics and poets, that drew Woolson to him. He was, as the poet Harriet Monroe later dubbed him, “the friend and helper of young aspirants.”35

  Stedman met Woolson on March 7, 1874. He showed an interest in her at once. “Rarely have [I] met so gentle, earnest, and brilliant a woman,” he wrote to his mother. They talked about poetry, criticism, and her career as they walked together in the afternoons along the coquina seawall on St. Augustine’s waterfront. Since leaving Cleveland she had been publishing travel essays and poetry and was eager for advice about where her strengths as a writer lay. His first impressions of her were of “a woman gracefully impulsive and independent.” He was struck by how “she ignored the formal, fashionable strata of society at St. Augustine” and noticed that under a surface of “inviolable reserve” she had “the gipsy instinct, the love of liberty.”36

  Edmund Clarence Stedman, Woolson’s most devoted literary friend during the 1870s.

  (From Life and Letters of Edmund Clarence Stedman)

  A view of the St. Augustine seawall, along which Woolson and Stedman took long walks and discussed her career.

  (From “The Ancient City,” Harper’s)

  On her side, Woolson couldn’t help noticing how Stedman consistently kept the conversation focused on her. She was, she later told him, “accustomed to the eternal ‘I’ of all my male friends.” She had been the listener for so long that it was a novel experience to be the one commanding attention. “[A]t this late hour I have gotten hold of the pen,” she realized, “and now people must listen to me, occasionally.”37 She would look the rest of her life for other men who could listen to her as well as Stedman had.

  In “The Ancient City” Stedman appears as Eugenio, “the poet whom poets love.” He walks with Sara on the seawall and assesses her writings, leaving her convinced that “[t]here isn’t a thing . . . worth the paper it is written on.” Nonetheless, he “was generous and kind” and gave her “solid assistance, . . . suggestive hints worth their weight in gold to an isolated beginner like myself,” Sara tells Martha. Despite the fact that Woolson had begun to gain the attention of critics (Castle Nowhere would come out the next year), she too felt like “an isolated beginner” and solicited Stedman’s advice, but his response was nothing like Eugenio’s to Sara. He liked “Peter the Parson” and “stir[red] up” his friend Richard Watson Gilder to publish it and another story, “Jeannette,” in Scribner’s. After The Nation’s scathing review, she asked him, “I wonder if you meant all you said about the stories.” His reassurance then and in the coming years was key to her ability to tune out the critics who seemed to hold her life in their hands. He told her, “[W]hen we find a perfect and dramatic short story which is so rare, we both rejoice and jump for it. The best stories since Hawthorne, with American themes and atmosphere, are yours and Bret Harte’s.”38

  Stedman also became Woolson’s adviser, helping to fill the void left by George Benedict’s death. He helped her deal with editors and publishers, beginning with Gilder. In her negotiations with Osgood for the publication of Castle Nowhere, Stedman provided continual assistance. When Stedman assumed she had “other advisers,” she corrected him. “Whether for good or for ill, the fact remains that I am entirely alone.” 39

  On her side, Woolson praised Stedman’s writings so often that he apparently tired of her repeated admiration. Her strategy was to approach him as a writer rather than as a man, establishing a nonthreatening, literary intimacy with him. She invited him to “picture” his essays “lying on my toilette-table where I do my most prized reading, and myself poring over your pages the first thing
in the morning, and the last at night.”40 She felt safe expressing her infatuation with his words, establishing the ground on which she would later meet other male writers. She formed an intimacy with their works that was unavailable to her on a personal level, as that was the province of wives and male friends.

  However, Woolson was not simply the submissive mentee. Although Stedman didn’t like her story “Castle Nowhere,” she published it anyway. He disapproved of her travel sketches, yet she continued to publish them, telling him, “Well, Mr Stedman, we must all do what we think is best for own selves.”41

  In one important area, Stedman’s views were particularly discouraging. Woolson had eagerly devoured his critical essays collected as Victorian Poets, published in 1876, sometimes talking back to him in the margins. When she came to the essay on Elizabeth Barrett Browning, she paid close attention to how he treated her compared to the male poets who dominate the collection. She couldn’t help noticing a lack of regard that troubled her. She wrote in the margins, “Mr Stedman does not really believe in woman’s genius. His disbelief peeps through every line of the criticism below, whose essence is ‘She did wonderfully well for a woman’!”42 With her own ambitions growing, his comments felt somehow directed at herself. It was her first stark realization that the men she looked to for validation—even the most generous, like Stedman—would always view her as their inferior.

  When she wrote directly to Stedman, she acquiesced to his view of separate literary spheres for men and women: “I smile a little every time I turn over the ‘Victorian’ pages to see how nicely you have veiled your entire disbelief in the possibility of true fiery genius in woman. . . . You have no objection to a woman’s soaring to lofty heights in the realm of space allotted to her; the only thing you wish understood is that it is in her allotted space, and nobody else’s. . . . Well,—I do not quarrel with you about this; and the reason is—that I fully agree with you!”43 Clearly, she was eager to retain Stedman’s friendship and support and therefore wanted to show him that she was not trying to compete with him. Nothing else Woolson ever wrote indicated that she agreed with Stedman about women’s inherent inferiority as writers. She would suggest, however, that women were hampered in their ability to ascend to the heights male authors had reached by nature of their upbringing and education.