Constance Fenimore Woolson

by Anne Boyd Rioux

  When she received this warning she had just published in Appletons’ two stories that look back on the war: “Crowder’s Cove,” about a border-state family’s divided loyalties, and “In the Cotton Country,” a moving and melancholy story about a once-patrician woman who has lost everything. Another Reconstruction story was already slated for publication in the Atlantic. Howells had accepted “Rodman the Keeper” in June of 1875 but had been holding on to it for close to a year.12 Mr. Harper’s warning and the heightened tensions over Reconstruction in the lead-up to the 1876 presidential election suggest why.

  Hostility toward the northern occupation was high throughout the South but particularly in still-occupied areas such as South Carolina. From Cooperstown, where she and her mother spent the summer of 1876, Woolson wrote to Stedman, “[W]e are holding on here as long as possible on account of the yellow fever, and the election fever, at the South, the latter disorder I consider the most dangerous; we cannot spend October and November of this year in the interior of South Carolina, as we did last. Should not dare to be there now.” She pointed to “[t]he insolence of the blacks and the bitterness of the whites,” giving the impression of a volcano about to erupt. That fall riots broke out in Charleston.13 After the contested presidential election, resulting in the Compromise of 1877 that enacted the withdrawal from the South of the remaining federal troops, the Woolson women avoided South Carolina altogether.

  Howells finally published “Rodman the Keeper” in March 1877, placing it as the lead piece in the Atlantic Monthly. The story, set in a nameless southern cemetery of northern soldiers, had its germ in Woolson’s visit to the Union cemetery in Salisbury, North Carolina, when she was staying in nearby Asheville in 1874. At the time she had written home to the Cleveland Herald describing the ex-soldier who kept watch over the graves, the long lines of trenches into which the prisoners had been thrown without record, and the crowds of black people who visited on Decoration Day while their white neighbors stayed away—all elements that reappear in “Rodman.” In her letter, she expressed sympathy with both the captives and the Confederates who starved along with their prisoners. In the story, John Rodman, a Union officer who is the keeper of such a cemetery, feels no such sympathy. He hasn’t put the war behind him and walks the rows of gravestones, talking to the dead. Yet when a Confederate veteran in the area falls ill, he nurses him, in spite of his partisanship, teaches his former slave to read, and forms an attachment to his cousin, Bettina, who cannot give up her hatred toward those who killed most of her family and ruined her home. The story focuses on Rodman’s transformation from keeper of the dead to caretaker of the living, a transformation the whole North is implicitly asked to make, in spite of the South’s continued resistance. But Woolson does not end the story with an enforced reconciliation—just simple understanding and respect. Rodman tells Bettina, as she leaves to find work as a teacher, “[D]o not think, dear, that I have not seen—have not understood.”14

  “Rodman the Keeper” was reprinted or noticed in many of the leading papers, and gratifying letters of praise came pouring in. It was recognized in its time as “one of the few artistically perfect tales that the history of the civil war has inspired,” in the words of the well-regarded Christian Union. If, as Walt Whitman declared, “the real war will never get in the books,” Woolson succeeded in capturing the aftermath of the war like no other writer of her generation. The story’s popularity “called out a letter from a well known firm,” Constance wrote to her nephew, Sam, “asking whether it would not be possible for me to send all I wrote to their house?” They told her she could name her price, but she declined the offer, reluctant to tie herself to the fortunes of one firm. Meanwhile both Osgood and Hurd & Houghton offered to publish another collection of stories, this time focused on the South, but Woolson wanted her next book to be a novel.15

  Only one more story, “King David,” published in April 1878, would address Reconstruction politics with its portrayal of a school for freedmen. It can be read, in fact, as a parable of the failure of the white North to truly care about the plight of freed slaves. The story may have been written earlier, since Woolson had declared as early as April 1876, after the publication of “Old Gardiston,” that she was done writing about the South. To Hayne, she wrote, “Do’nt you think that for a red hot abolitionist, Republican and hard-money advocate, I have behaved well down here in Dixie? . . . I have tried to ‘put myself in their place,’ and at least be fair. Finis! The page is turned. I shall write no more about the South.”16 Although she set more stories there, Woolson was, like the rest of the country, finally ready to look forward.

  “SO MUCH FOR MYSELF”

  The summer in Cooperstown in 1876 relieved temporarily Constance’s feeling of being exiled in the South, reminding her that she could one day, if she wished, have a home there among her mother’s family. In addition to her Cooper relatives, Jane Carter and her children welcomed her, as did Arabella, who was visiting them. The two friends walked arm in arm on the hills surrounding placid Lake Otsego, renewing their old intimacy. Taking daily exercise rowing or searching for ferns also seemed to begin to break up Constance’s melancholy. By September she was writing to Hayne that she found his interest in Hinduism and longing for unconsciousness troubling, for this world was “a very beautiful and generally speaking a very good sort of world.” She couldn’t see the dark side of it or want to escape it.17

  As the leaves began to turn and the Woolsons contemplated their next move, Constance hoped to go to Europe but had to give up her plan again. “So much for myself,” she told Stedman.18 Hannah and Clara wanted to return to St. Augustine, but Constance didn’t think she could endure another season among the loquacious society women increasingly abundant there. She made no effort at polite small talk and thus inevitably felt out of place among them, managing to isolate herself by her bluntness. But Hannah and Clara, who thrived in such an atmosphere, outvoted her.

  When they arrived in St. Augustine, they found lodgings across the road from the waterfront. Constance’s room was on the top floor, from which she could see the fort Castillo de San Marcos, the seawall, Anastasia Island, and, beyond that, the ocean. At night she watched the lighthouse beacon flash through the darkness. All was well until the grandees began to arrive, with their “tiresome atmosphere of gold dust and ancestors.” The Astors and Rhinelanders (Edith Wharton’s family, although not Wharton herself) were among the exclusive visitors that year. Constance felt like an impostor sailing out on the bay with men who boasted six-figure incomes and always traveled with valets and portable baths. She resented not only their affluence but also the way they scorned Dickens or any author who wrote of the lower classes. “They have only two adjectives, ‘nice,’ and ‘beastly,’ ” she scoffed. She couldn’t help quarreling with them.19 Her time among the ultrawealthy was not wasted, however; she stored up her observations for use in a novel, if she could ever find the courage and the peace in which to write it.

  To make matters worse, upsetting letters from Charlie, then in Chicago, began to arrive. He had completely broken down, physically and mentally, complaining of an intolerable “pain in his head.” At the first of the year, he sent frightening telegrams that may have expressed suicidal thoughts. Constance and Clara did everything they could to shield Hannah from the bad news. “Her whole happiness,” Constance explained, “even her life I might almost say, depends, and always has depended upon how Charl[ie] is, and how he feels.” Hannah was perennially disappointed in him—he rarely wrote to her and couldn’t seem to settle down—but he was her only son and apparently her dearest child.20

  For over two months, Connie and Clara wrote letters back and forth with Charlie, trying to do what they could at such a distance. By the end of February, he had seen Dr. Weber, who was probably their family physician, in Cleveland and appeared to be improving. Constance was sure that his incessant smoking and lack of care for himself had caused the collapse. She firmly believed in her family’s constitutional w
eakness, exposed by the early deaths of Emma and Georgiana.21 She and Charlie shared another, more virulent, weakness, however, revealed by the psychological aspect of his illness. In Charlie’s telegrams and letters, Constance thought she glimpsed her own darkness, although frighteningly amplified. The culprit, Constance believed, was morphine. When Dr. Weber took Charlie off of the drug, which he may have taken for migraines, he began to stabilize.

  Charlie likely suffered from manic depression, as suggested by his migraines and erratic moves from one location to another. He frequently tried new ventures when he was up, then abandoned them when he was down, emotionally and economically. When his family reached out to him, he accepted their money but not their closeness. Charlie had never been happy with them, Constance confessed to Sam, so they could not live with him and care for him. She took some of the blame on herself, admitting that her bad temper made her at times impatient with him.22 Yet Charlie was also fiercely independent and couldn’t stand being looked after by his mother and sisters.

  As the heat approached in the spring, the Woolson women moved to Yonkers, a bustling town about fifteen miles north of New York City, where Clara had rented a furnished house. They were glad once again to have a semblance of home after so much wandering. Constance’s mood had finally improved, she told Stedman: “I am better; in better spirits. I told you I should come out of the shadows in time.” The success of “Rodman” the previous spring and Osgood’s interest in the novel she wanted to write surely helped. But she had lost more than a year on her novel, “owing to the depressed state of my mind.”23

  Yonkers was certainly no place for her to begin writing it. Despite the presence of family, she complained that she felt “more isolated than ever.” She broke up her loneliness with visits to nearby friends she had made in St. Augustine. Eleanor Washington—“the best friend I have ever had,” Constance once wrote—lived in Navesink, New Jersey.24 Her two young sons called Constance “aunt,” and her husband and sons would in later years, after Eleanor’s death, continue to treat her like family. Another friend, Emily Vernon Clark, whose sister had a home in Yonkers, would become a valued traveling companion in the years ahead. But Constance longed for a visit from Stedman. She was starved for literary companionship.

  Woolson was persistent in her pleas for a visit from him that summer. Finally, in September, Stedman came. He brought her a shell necklace and made up for his long absence with his witty conversation. They talked of the novel and whether she should give the southern stories to Osgood, whom she felt had not sufficiently promoted Castle Nowhere.25 After dinner and much conversation, Stedman stayed the night and took the train back to the city in the morning.

  As the cold weather returned, Constance wanted to stay in the North, but Hannah’s health and comfort took precedence. In mid-December they arrived, with eight trunks full of books, herbariums, and wine, at Hibernia, a plantation near Green Cove Springs, Florida, on the St. Johns River about forty miles northwest of St. Augustine. They took rooms in a cottage next to the plantation home-cum-boardinghouse, where they ate their meals. The other residents were sportsmen and families. “Our life will be very different from that at St. Augustine,” Hannah wrote to Sam, “but Constance wished an uninterrupted winter of work.”26 At last, Connie had gotten her way. Hibernia was the perfect place to write her novel.

  LOOKING INTO CHAOS

  Over the next five months, Constance rose early and wrote until the afternoon, when she took her mother for their daily row. Hannah was very good to her during these months, Constance later reflected. She never told her to stop working or urged her to socialize. She kept all of the small details from worrying her daughter, who, when focused on her writing, could get easily agitated. Once, when planning a new story, Constance had told Arabella, “Now I must look into chaos.”27 Trying to delve all alone into the chaos of creativity, as at Goshen, had been a failure. But at Hibernia, with her mother at her side, she found the balance of human connection and peace that she needed to make the words flow.

  She also found the courage to push ahead in spite of her fears about her novel’s success. “I generally throw half across the room all the new novels of the day,” she had told Hayne. “Now these novels the Public like! Moral: will they not be likely to throw mine entirely across the room? I fear so.” The criticism she had received for her story “Castle Nowhere” had made her think twice about writing a novel. “For I wo’nt write [the novel] at all unless I write it as I please,” she insisted to Stedman. How, she wondered, could she please herself and the general audience who preferred “ ‘pretty and pleasant’ stories—not too long”? She imagined, in particular, the women who seemed incapable of feeling deeply and therefore could not “in the least appreciate the tragedy of deep feelings in others.” Having been so uncomprehended in life, Woolson wondered how she could expect her novel to be understood. “One would like to plough up such persons and make them suffer!” she wrote in her notebooks. “ ‘Pretty and pleasant stories,’ indeed!”28

  Woolson was determined to write much more than a pretty, pleasant story. The summer before she began to write, she had outlined some of her ideas about what made a great novel in reviews for the Atlantic Monthly’s “Contributors’ Club,” a new section of the magazine for which Howells asked her to write. All of the pieces were anonymous, so she felt free to develop her critical principles inconspicuously. In her assessment of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s That Lass O’ Lowrie’s, she was particularly drawn to the heroine, Joan, a “grandly-shaped, majestic creature, with her deep inarticulate love.” Such a memorable portrait was hard to find in recent literature, she contended. “How few modern novels add distinct personages to the galleries of our memory.” Grandcourt from Daniel Deronda qualified. Joan likewise “kep[t] standing at the door in a haunting kind of way, and looking in.” Woolson also declared that a novel should affect its readers, not merely amuse them. The French writer Victor Cherbuliez’s novel Samuel Brohl et Cie was “not great,” she insisted, because “it does not lift you off your feet, nor send hot chills down your spine, nor call up a tear.” In another review, she assessed the novel of analysis “so much in vogue to-day,” in which characters “don’t do anything . . . but . . . think a [great] deal.” She admitted to being a bit of a traditionalist, preferring a story full of vivid action and dialogue.29 Nonetheless, the new form would exert considerable influence on her throughout her career. For her first novel, however, she wanted above all a vibrant, memorable heroine to whom something life-altering happened. That would make her readers care, always her primary goal as a writer.

  Anne was an ambitious first novel. It is an engrossing book, carrying readers along on a sea of absorbing observations and then sweeping them up in scenes of intense emotion. Its great originality is to be found in what many saw as Woolson’s thoroughly American heroine and her loving tribute to Mackinac Island in the opening chapters, which many readers (including Henry James) felt was the novel’s strongest section. If she had stopped there, she would have written a regional masterpiece to rival Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs. But she was determined not to be one of those writers who could excel on only a small canvas, like Bret Harte or Jewett, whom James would one day damn with faint praise for her “beautiful little quantum of achievement.” Instead, Woolson wrote a sprawling Victorian novel, ripe for magazine serialization, that plucked the heroine out of her secluded island home and exposed her to a series of challenges on the road to adulthood, carrying her meanwhile across a good part of the northern United States and introducing her to a considerable cast of well-drawn characters. Ultimately, Anne tries to do too much, as many first novels do. Woolson wanted to show what she was capable of in both rural and urban settings, in realism and idealism, in contemplative analysis and suspenseful action. The resulting novel—which progresses from a coming-of-age story to a social novel to a whodunit—was serialized for an unusually long eighteen months in Harper’s magazine and ended up as a 540-page book
.30

  Despite the vast territory it covered, Anne was also a deeply personal novel. Woolson confessed she wrote Anne “with all my heart.” Like many first novels, it is highly autobiographical. Anne, whose name recalls Woolson’s earlier pseudonym Anne March, has strong arms that can row for over an hour and does not conform to “[t]he usual ideal of pretty, slender, unformed maidenhood.” Anne grows up on Mackinac Island—the favorite haunt of Constance’s youth—as naturally as if she were a wild deer. During the bitter winter, rather than stay inside near the hearth, she runs and sleds with the boys. When she does come in, she brings nature with her, decorating the island church with greenery as Constance had done at Grace Church in Cleveland.31 Woolson also gave Anne a strong bond with her father as well as the responsibility of having to support other family members when he dies.

  At the outset, Anne is innocent and unaware. She has “never analyzed herself” or “lived for herself or in herself.” After being thrust into the world to find a way to make a living, she wanders the country from New York to Cleveland to West Virginia, adapting to new circumstances yet remaining the simple island girl. In New York, a wealthy aunt has funded Anne’s education at a school modeled on Madame Chegaray’s, where she has many of Constance’s experiences and feels just as out of place. Woolson also invested Anne with her own feelings of being misunderstood. Her closest friend claims she could not love because her “nature was too calm, too measured.” Yet Anne loves deeply and silently, as Constance had. When the man she loves marries another, she is thrust into an existential crisis that is temporarily solved by committing herself to a nun-like existence “of self-abnegation and labor.” She teaches school in Cleveland, where her female students idolize her, but she feels empty. When the Civil War erupts, she throws herself into work for the Soldiers’ Aid Society and nurses the wounded. Eventually, however, she must confront “the problem of [her] own existence.”32