The subtext for this letter to Stedman can be found in Woolson’s own struggles with what she thought of as “the great question” of her own poetic abilities. While Stedman encouraged her in her fiction, he had little to say of her poetry, which she also published prolifically. So she had asked Stedman if he knew a fair critic who would give her an objective opinion of an ambitious verse drama she had written titled Two Women. It was about an urban socialite from Washington, D.C., and an Ohio farm girl rushing to the deathbed of the dying soldier they both love. Stedman had recommended his friend the critic R. R. Bowker, who advised Woolson to put Two Women in a drawer for a year and read Shelley and Keats.44
Bowker’s opinion pointed out her deficient knowledge of the English poetic tradition and the lack of polish in her verse. Woolson became convinced that her fault was a certain coarseness. She was trying too hard to counter her impression “that women run too much into mere beauty at the expense of power.” As a result, she feared that she had “gone too far the other way; too rude; too abrupt.” Then she had read Stedman’s Victorian Poets. Just as she was noticing how Stedman placed Barrett Browning in a subordinate category, she realized that her ambitions for Two Women could not be realized. She would not be able to distinguish herself from most other female poets, who privileged beauty over power, for the simple fact that her work would always be judged the work of a woman. In addition, she realized that she was up against a male tribunal whose training was vastly superior to her own. In the same letter to Stedman in which she addressed his Browning essay, she also mentioned that she had withdrawn Two Women, which she had apparently submitted for publication against Bowker’s recommendation. However, a year later, the verse drama did appear. The critical reaction confirmed what she had expected. Reviewers were deeply impressed by the emotional power Woolson’s poem conveyed but also forthright in their criticism that its versification was “rugged” and “imperfect,” with one critic wishing it had been written in her fine prose instead of verse.45
Thereafter Woolson published almost no poetry and declined all offers to publish a volume of her verse. By bowing out of the arena of poetry, she not only abstained from direct competition with her closest literary friend and adviser, but she also made a decision to stake her claim in fiction, a genre more hospitable to women and just as significant as poetry, she believed. She roundly disagreed with Stedman’s claim in his essay on Barrett Browning that although Sand, Brontë, and Eliot were her peers, they “have been writers of prose, before whom the poet takes precedence, by inherited and defensible prerogatives.” Woolson wrote in the margin: “Not at all.”46
Another literary friend during these years, the poet Paul Hamilton Hayne, who lived with his wife outside of Augusta, Georgia, would be a lively correspondent for many years, but he looked more to her for advice than she to him. He admired her work greatly, finding it full of “freshness, originality, & real artistic power,” as well as “ ‘grit,’ vigor, and almost manly verve.” He noticed how she had gained access to the premier magazines so quickly and hoped to glean from her any information about how he could do the same.47
Hayne was particularly eager to court Howells’s attention at the Atlantic, which Woolson seemed to have won. She maintained a good working relationship with Howells during these years, but his attack on “Castle Nowhere” suggested he would not be the kind of supportive friend she sought. She agreed with Hayne that Howells was tiresome. In the winter of 1876, she met the Atlantic’s publisher, Melancthon Hurd, in St. Augustine. “He has let out that Howells has ‘favorites,’ ” she gossiped to Hayne. “Chief among them at present, Henry James, Jr. I suspect there is a strong current of favoritism up there. As to poetry, I have been told several times that Howells was exceedingly difficult.” In her next letter she wrote, “If I please him, I am glad; if I do not please him, I am not in the least dismayed. He is a man of strong and peculiar tastes, and (I fancy) subject to caprices. . . . You never know what he is going to do or say.”48
THE TRIBE OF UNHAPPY WOMEN WRITERS
Significantly, Woolson did not look to other women writers for friendship or counsel. Her encounters with them tended to make her painfully self-conscious, which may explain why she developed no close ties to any during the early years of her career. She didn’t like the feeling that being both woman and writer made her in most people’s eyes not only less of a writer but also less of a woman. When Woolson met Hayne’s friend the writer Margaret Junkin Preston, she was pleased to find her “a charming woman; quiet, gentle, and the reverse of the common idea of a ‘literary woman.’ ” But the writer Mary Mapes Dodge, whom she met in New York at the home of Stedman and his wife, excited her anxiety about what it meant to be a woman who was a writer. “Mrs Dodge is ‘fine looking,’ ” she wrote Stedman afterward, “but—anyone would know she was literary. Why must it inevitably be so?—But perhaps it is ‘compensation’; as we gain money, or fame, just so surely must we lose that which in our hearts we prize a great deal more.” Meanwhile, she imagined “how glad you must be in your inmost soul that your wife was not a writer. How much prettier and lovelier a thousand times over was Mrs Stedman in every motion look and tone than the best we other three could do! What is the reason that if we take up a pen we seem to lose so much in other ways?”49
She also met that evening the novelist Elizabeth Stoddard, who was married to the poet Richard Stoddard. Even though Elizabeth had long before given up her a career as a novelist, when Constance later heard she was ill, she couldn’t help but reflect, “[W]hy do literary women break down so, and—I do not allude to Mrs Stoddard here of course,—act so? It almost seems as though only the unhappy women took to writing.”50 Such had been her characterization in “The Ancient City” of the disappointed magazine writer Sara. The common perception, Woolson sensed, was that literary women were a despondent, disagreeable bunch, making her eager to disassociate herself from them.
Her encounters in St. Augustine in 1875 with the writer Elizabeth Stuart Phelps again made her anxious about others’ perceptions of her as “literary.” Phelps was the best-selling author of The Gates Ajar (1868) and a regular Atlantic contributor. They stayed in the same boardinghouse, but Woolson found it impossible to get to know her. Phelps was accompanied by her friend Dr. Mary Briggs, who wore a man’s jacket and mystified Woolson’s niece. “Mamma, sometimes he wears a skirt, just like a lady,” Plum said quizzically, to which Clara could only respond, “Hush.” Phelps promoted dress reform, which she hoped would lead to women’s mental and social liberation. Her pamphlet What to Wear (1873) advocated the shortening of skirts and the removal of the corset, among other modifications. The point, as Constance saw it, was “to look as man-ish as possible.” Meanwhile, she was trying her best to look less “literary.” Clara insisted that she wear more attractive dresses, and Hannah wouldn’t let Constance wear her glasses because they would “give the finishing touch” to her bookish image.51
An unusual portrait of Constance in the fashionable dress her mother and sister insisted she wear.
(The Western Reserve Historical Society)
Yet in spite of the uncertainties of her identity as a woman writer, Woolson was making peace with it. She had long since given up attempting to attract men. “I am as truly out of that kind of talk as a nun,” she assured Arabella. “I go about a great deal, but always as an ‘observer.’ ”52 She felt eminently more at ease watching from the sidelines, storing her impressions for later use.
6
Dark Places
ST. AUGUSTINE was paradise, but only during the winter. As the heat and humidity returned, and with it Hannah’s old enemy, rheumatism, the Woolson women turned northward, beginning a pattern of wintering in Florida and summering in cooler parts—first in the Upper South, where they could live more cheaply than in the North, and finally in the North with family. Clara often brought her daughter to the Benedicts in Cleveland during the summer, leaving Constance in charge of their mother.
They
spent their first summer away from home in Asheville, North Carolina, at that time a remote resort town in the Blue Ridge Mountains, twenty-five miles away from the closest railroad. Hannah’s health flourished in the dry, mild climate, and Constance fell in love with the mountains. In the afternoons, she took her microscope and searched for ferns, gathering eleven new species for her collection. What thrilled Constance most was the feeling that Asheville was virtually hidden from the world.1
However, the harrowing journey out of town in November dampened her enthusiasm. Sitting on the back of a wagon, they traveled along the French Broad River on a narrow road cut out of the surrounding rock. They could only see a sliver of blue sky above. Then it turned dark and a deluge began. Connie moved up to sit next to the driver and watched as the wheels passed within inches of the edge of the road that dropped down to surging water below. They never returned to Asheville after that tormenting ride, but the region lingered long in Constance’s imagination as the most beautiful expanse of wild nature she had ever seen. Twenty years later she would set her novel Horace Chase there and have a character warn its railroad-baron protagonist, who wants to make a tourist attraction out of the region, “[W]hen you perceive that your last acre of primitive forest is forever gone, then you will repent.”2
Next to wilderness, Constance prized antiquity, an even rarer commodity in the forward-looking United States. She fell in love with Charleston, South Carolina, where she and Hannah spent parts of the summer and fall of 1875. She was charmed by the colonial tombstones, the watchman’s cries announcing the time throughout the night, and the aristocratic inhabitants’ stubborn adherence to tradition. She also noted how little had been done to rebuild Charleston after the war, making this most aristocratic city also one of the most impoverished and dilapidated. Constance was fascinated by the skeletal remains of plantations outside of town, many of them dating to colonial times. She researched their history at the old Charleston library, discovering that one of their owners had been a signer of the Declaration of Independence. She also unearthed a lost town, the only vestige of which was an abandoned church still standing in the middle of the thick woods that had grown up around it.3
LIVING AMONG THE GRAVES
In June 1875, Hannah and Constance left for Cleveland Springs, North Carolina, a secluded resort two miles from the nearest town. It had sulfur springs and baths for Hannah and mountains for Constance. But three weeks of rainy weather brought on Hannah’s rheumatism and drove them on to Virginia. They stopped at Monticello and Charlottesville, then found a wayside cottage in Goshen, about sixty miles west of Charlottesville, where they stayed through August. Day trips to Lexington, where Constance stood for a long time at the grave of her favorite Confederate general, Stonewall Jackson, and The Greenbriar at White Sulphur Springs, the most fashionable of the southern spring resorts, broke up the monotony of their quiet existence in Goshen. Near the end of their stay, they met Clara and Plum at Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, to see the site of John Brown’s raid, then went on to Gettysburg, where friends of Constance’s had died in battle. The day they spent walking over the grassy mounds of the battlefield was so bright and peaceful she could hardly imagine the horrors that had occurred there. The Harpers offered her a handsome sum to write up her impressions, but she refused. A comment from Clara suggests why: “We could not sleep for nights afterwards, although so long after the Civil War.”4
The experience of visiting battlegrounds touched Constance deeply. “I always go to see the soldiers’ graves,” she told Hayne. “I cannot bear to think that they are so soon forgotten; as they are, at the North.” She still could not “hear the old war tunes, or pass those soldiers’ cemeteries at the South, or see an old flag, without choking up and turning away.” The war may have quickly receded from collective memory in the North, but Constance declared she would always be one of the “people who remember.” Living in and writing about the South made it difficult to forget. Waking up in the morning, she sometimes thought she still could hear the call of the newspaper boy announcing news of the latest battle.5
After their trip to Gettysburg, Hannah returned to Cleveland with Clara, while Constance, against her family’s wishes, stayed behind in Goshen. She had much work to do and was convinced that Goshen was the perfect place, with its mountain air and freedom from interruptions, for writing and perhaps even starting her novel. She had her own little cottage away from the hotel. However, life there proved too tranquil. She endured five weeks of cold, rainy weather, with only the mail to break up the dismal evenings. Just as she had in New York, she found the solitary writer’s life dispiriting.6
On the first of October she met her mother in Baltimore, from which they sailed to Norfolk, Virginia. There they spent one chilly week and then returned to South Carolina, where they stayed at Society Hill and in Charleston until December. Then it was back to St. Augustine, where the abundance of grandees from New York increasingly irritated Constance. She admitted to Stedman that she was “not in very good spirits this winter.” It was at this time that she was wrestling with the question of whether to try to publish her long narrative poem Two Women and was unsuccessfully trying to begin her novel. In January she gave Hayne the advice she needed: “I beg you to fight against ‘Depression,’ that evil spirit that haunts all creative minds. Do not let him conquer you. Think of yourself highly, persist in thinking of yourself, as well as you can; be just as ‘conceited’ as possible. It will buoy you up.”7
Yet the depression from which Woolson suffered was more deep-seated than a fear of failure might produce or confidence conquer. It was exacerbated by difficult circumstances, but she knew it was much more than situational, admitting, “I think it is constitutional, and I know it is inherited.” Today we would likely say that she suffered from clinical depression, an illness typically characterized by recurring periods of very low mood, poor self-esteem, disruption of sleep and appetite, a loss of interest in everyday activities, lack of pleasure, hopelessness, and a longing for death or suicidal thoughts. At the time, when the study of psychology was still in its infancy, depression in women was typically understood as “neurasthenia,” a largely female malady that left one feeling “incapable of meeting life,” as described by Alice James, sister to Henry James and one of the most famous neurasthenics of the century. While society may have put her in that category, Constance never saw herself as one of that female band of sufferers. Instead, she understood her condition as inherited from her male relatives. To Stedman she explained, “I am overweighted with a sort of depression that comes unexpectedly, and makes everything black. My grandfather gave up to it and was a dreary useless man; my father battled against it all his life, and again and again warned me about it; but I was young then, and only half believed in it. Now, he is gone, and it has come to me. I try to conquer it and sometimes I succeed, sometimes—I do’nt [sic].” As a masculine malady, depression was also a way to connect with male peers such as Stedman and Hayne, who spoke of similar afflictions. Later in life, she would connect on like grounds with other men who struggled as she did.8
Woolson’s depression did not incapacitate her for life. As she explained once to Arabella, “Do’nt fancy I am sad all the time. Oh no. I am much too busy and too full of plans of all kinds. But at times, in spite of all I can do, this deadly enemy of mine creeps in, and once in, he is master.” Sometimes her enemy would mysteriously leave on his own. She would once refer to a “ray of light which sometimes comes, so unexpectedly, to cheer one at the darkest hour of gloom,” which she thought of as a gift from God. Yet most of the time she viewed herself as a kind of warrior battling with dark spirits, following her father’s example. Many years later she would write that “simple courage seems to me to sum up all the virtues of life.—There was an old phrase which my father (a New Englander) sometimes used,—namely ‘Keep a stiff upper lip.’ ”9 In an era that lacked antidepressants or psychotherapy, “simple courage” was her only real defense against the “evil spirit” that
haunted her throughout life.
The condition of the devastated South and its ubiquitous graves and battlefields contributed to the depression she suffered throughout 1875 and 1876. But rather than be overcome by it, she was able to use the empathy she felt toward the ruined region to produce some of her most powerful work. The stories she wrote during this period encapsulate the postwar South like no other stories of the period. Successfully transcending a northerner’s perspective, she was able to write about southerners, as a reviewer put it, “[w]ithout blind partisanship.” Henry James would write many years later that she had spoken for the voiceless South as “one who evidently did not glance and pass, but lingered and analyzed.”10
The first of Woolson’s southern Reconstruction stories to appear was “Old Gardiston,” in the April 1876 issue of Harper’s. Set in one of the old mansions outside of Charleston, it portrays a proud young woman who defends her country’s honor by heaping bitterness upon the occupying soldiers trying to court her. In the end, the impoverished Gardis reluctantly agrees to sell her ancestral home but out of pride still resists the advances of a northern suitor. When the house burns down and she is left with nothing, she finally admits her love for him and surrenders to his embrace. Some critics thought Gardis overdrawn, particularly in her dramatic tendencies, but Woolson insisted her portrait was true to life. She was pleased when the New York Times felt she had conveyed “a very touching sympathy for her southern sisters.” “Old Gardiston” had clearly hit a nerve, however. One of the Harper brothers happened to be in St. Augustine when it came out and advised her to write no more about the effects of the war and following occupation in the South.11
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