Constance Fenimore Woolson

by Anne Boyd Rioux

  As a counterpart to Horace, Woolson included a man unfit for business. Jared Franklin is her most fully realized portrait of her brother, Charlie. Loved above his sisters by their mother, he fails at every enterprise and is so broken in body and spirit that he dies before his fortieth birthday. In his final days, he suffers from a “brain-fever” that leaves him ranting madly. In a scene reminiscent of Ferdie’s rampage in Jupiter Lights, Jared climbs onto a roof in an apparent suicide attempt but is rescued by Horace. Nonetheless, Jared dies of fever within a few days.42

  Jared’s mother, Mrs. Franklin, resembles Hannah in many ways, and shows how much Constance was reflecting on the past during her lonely months in Cheltenham and Oxford. Details from her life with her mother make their way into the book, such as how she and Clara pretended Hannah was the grandmother of their dog, Pete Trone, Esq., who also appears. Mrs. Franklin’s daughters—Dolly and Ruth—also tease their mother with a refrain modified from one that Connie and Clara chanted to their mother.43

  Mrs. Franklin is plagued by financial worries, which disappear when Ruth marries Horace Chase, having fallen for his wealth. She is the feminine half of the Gilded Age’s excess, with “no conception of life . . . as a lesson in self-control.” She is the intellectual woman’s foil: her “sweet, pure, physical womanhood . . . had not been refined away by over-development of the mental powers.” She had a “great charm,” to be sure, but the lack of “more masculine qualities [such as] stoical fortitude and courage” have left her vulnerable. This time, rather than allow the shallow beauty to simply triumph over her plainer, more intellectual counterpart, Woolson complicates her character by giving her the broken heart her more sensitive heroines usually suffer. When she falls in love with Chase’s young partner, Walter, and discovers that her love is not returned, she becomes desperate and loses the will to live. In the end, she confesses her adulterous intentions to her husband, who forgives her and thus also proves himself to be a more complex character and a more noble man than most believed him to be. The heart of the novel, for Woolson, lay in Horace’s final words to Ruth: “Have I been so faultless myself that I have any right to judge you?” Just then his “rugged face . . . was striking in its beauty; its mixture of sorrow, honesty, and grandeur.”44

  In contrast to Ruth, Woolson’s portrait of the younger sister, Dolly, evokes Alice James and herself. Like Alice, Dolly suffers from an unknown malady. When a conventional woman waxes on about the “privilege of being a good wife,” Dolly bursts out, “Privilege?” She possesses the observant eye and mind of a writer and writes poetry, but not seriously. Dolly explains to Horace, “I think in elegies as a general thing, and I make sonnets as I dress. Epics are nothing to me, and I turn off triplets in no time. But I don’t publish, Mr. Chase, because I don’t want to be called a minor poet.”45 Woolson had felt the same way. Dolly is also socially isolated by her infirmity, staying home while others go out or sitting in the corner while others dance.

  One might wonder why, in her most modern novel, Woolson chose to incapacitate her most intellectually capable female character. However, all around Woolson were Dollies—women whose talents lay fallow, whose bodies were broken, who were ashamed of their uselessness. If she was well, Dolly says, she would work, as she hates being a burden. “Nobody stops to think how dreary it is to be always a care,” she says, in words that seem to come straight from the lips of Alice James. Dolly is also not appreciated by men, as Alice felt she was not. One young man grows impatient with her “clever talk.” Although he “was interested in clever men[,] in women he admired other qualities.”46 As a reflection of Alice, Dolly was also an image of what Woolson feared becoming as her health deteriorated.

  Woolson did include one progressive female character, the sculptor Maud Muriel Mackintosh, who smokes a pipe and strikes terror in the hearts of ordinary men. After being kissed by a man for sport, she declares that men’s kisses “are very far indeed from being what is described. There is nothing in them. Nothing whatever!” She cares not for men’s good opinion or protection and instead plays the role of protector to the spinster Billy Breeze. There is something in Maud of Katharine Loring, who was perceived by the Jameses as possessing a masculine vigor and as replacing the role of a man in Alice’s life. Maud pronounces that female suffrage is most certainly coming, if not in their generation, then in the next one, a view shared by Loring. Maud is, however, broadly drawn, not only in her masculinity and feminism but also in her aesthetics. She is a realist of the strictest type, searching out the ordinary instead of the beautiful. The other villagers in Asheville find her art ridiculous for its lack of pleasing subjects, but she stands up for realism: “Prettiness is the exception, not the rule. . . . I prefer to model the usual, the average; for in that direction, and in that only, lies truth.”47 Although Woolson herself had begun her career in a similar vein, she ridicules in Maud the elevation of the ugly that she saw in so much of modern literature. Maud’s failing is that she cannot look beyond the surface of the ordinary to find its inner beauty.

  Nonetheless, Maud is one of the few happy spinsters in Woolson’s body of work. Not merely content with her lot, she has actively sought out the company of women over that of men. The humor Woolson expends on this wooden character, however, suggests she did not entirely sympathize with her. Men’s derision toward such women is reflected in her depiction of Maud. (James had made his discomfort with protofeminist lesbians clear in his portrayal of Olive Chancellor in his 1886 The Bostonians.) Sadly, Woolson did not choose to uncover Maud’s inner beauty. She was interested in the ways some women were beginning to actively reject the feminine standard against which she had always measured herself, but she was never able to escape the powerful hold it had on her.

  In Horace Chase Woolson tried to realize her highest ideal of where the modern novel should go. In her notebooks, she had written, “While I describe as accurately as ‘Story of a Country Town’ [an 1883 novel by Edgar Watson Howe], I must not be dreary—like . . . Zola.” Her sincerest belief was expressed in a quote (somewhat altered) from Emerson’s “Poetry and Imagination”: “When we think of the really great statues, poems, pictures, music—we find . . . that they present a noble portion of the human soul. Artists may be satisfied with perfect specimens of a craftsman’s skill, independent of his theme; but the mass of men will not be satisfied. Art exists for humanity.”48

  Nonetheless, Horace Chase lacks the psychological depth of East Angels and the emotional power of Jupiter Lights. It is a novel very much of its time, so convincingly does it portray the types and tensions of its era. In spite of Woolson’s desire to secure a lasting fame with this novel, its realism is time-bound rather than transcendent, reminding one more of Howells’s novels than the best works of Eliot, James, and Woolson herself. It seems that her choice of a central male character kept her at a distance and unable to create with a sure hand the kind of convincing, immediate portraits she had made of Anne Douglas, Madame Carroll, Margaret Harold, and Eve Bruce. It was almost as if she could no longer delve into the emotional depths her earlier novels had plumbed and expect to emerge once again.

  SAYING GOODBYE

  As 1893 dawned, Woolson went to London to see James, who was feeling depressed and suffering from gout (he could hardly walk). Within a few days she was also ill, having developed a bad cold. She sat by the fire, “enveloped in linseed,” while vapor from the kettle filled the room. It was another unusually cold winter in England, yet she lingered on, anxious to finish her work on Horace Chase.49

  In the middle of March, with two more parts yet to complete of the novel, now in serialization, her health was barely holding up. She wasn’t any worse, she guessed, than she had been at the end of her last two novels. But the doctor had put her “on a modified form of rest-cure,” meaning, “I write, but I do absolutely nothing else. And I go to bed at six p.m., & rise at 9 a.m.—Then I have very nourishing food; & quinine, phosphorus, & iron.” In a letter to Boott, who was feeling that his own death
was not far off, she wrote, “Don’t talk of ‘going.’ I shall very likely go before you do.” When Jane Carter’s daughter Grace had recently visited her in Oxford, she bluntly told Constance, “I never saw any one so changed. You look like death.”50 Constance did not appreciate her frankness.

  Meanwhile, she began to plan for her departure to Venice and was surprised to find that she could still feel the joy of anticipation. If she could not return to the East, then Venice was the next best thing. She had realized after her time in Cairo why she loved Venice so much—it was “the oriental color.”51

  Venice began to look more and more like the key to her future happiness—and survival. Her friends Daniel and Ariana Curtis were helping her look for an apartment and would be nearby, if she were to fall ill. The climate would suit her so much better than England’s, and she thought it a perfect place to work. She expected to put together a collection of her Italian stories and imagined that writing a novel in Venice would be easier than it had been in England. She was also eager to get her things out of storage in Florence, to have a home again. She longed to see the writing table Boott had given her, as well as the other items associated with their time at Bellosguardo.52

  The one drawback was that by moving to Italy she would be leaving James behind. She explained to Sam, “You will see that in all this, I am giving up the being near my kind friend, Mr James. . . . But Mr J. will come to Italy every year, and perhaps we can write that play after all.”53

  The first week of May, Constance mailed off the last pages of Horace Chase to the Harpers and was proud to report to Sam that English publishers were battling over the English rights to the book. Meanwhile, she had packed up her books and few belongings and said goodbye to her dear landlady and other friends. One was a dog named Colin, to whom she had become quite attached. He was “the most wonderful dog I have ever seen,” she wrote to his owner. “I do’nt wonder you love him. He is a person. I am sure he has a soul.”54

  Before leaving for Venice, Constance saw a dentist in London. While there she fell seriously ill with a fever but had no other symptoms. The doctor who was called at four in the morning diagnosed her illness as influenza, her first attack of the disease that continued to plague England. The bout left her even weaker than before, and the long journey to Venice still lay ahead. She hoped that once it was over she would finally regain her strength.55

  James was not in London but in Lucerne with William and other family members. On her way to Venice, Constance stopped over for four days in Paris, where they met. He took her to the theater and showed her his favorite galleries, as he had done thirteen years earlier in Florence.56 James planned to visit Venice periodically and told her he might even get an apartment there. Theirs would once again be a long-distance friendship. After three years of relative nearness the loss would be significant. They could only assure each other that their separation would be brief.

  15

  The Riddle of Existence

  EARLIER, CONSTANCE had called Venice her “Xanadu” and wondered “whether the end of the riddle of my existence may not be, after all, to live here, & die here.” Now she was determined to see if that were true. By the end of May, she had settled in temporarily at the Casa Biondetti. She had four rooms, five windows that commanded a spectacular view up and down the Grand Canal, and access to the roof. As she stood above the water-laced city, catching the sea breezes and watching boats slide into the canals, she felt rejuvenated.1

  Her afternoons throughout the summer and fall were spent floating out to the islands beyond Venice, often in the company of friends, filling her notebook with observations and thinking she might one day write a short book about the lagoons. She jotted notes about the boats and their picturesque sails. She noted the varying cargo of grapes, melons, fish, or great bunches of flowers, depending on the season. She admired the men leaning into their oars, “very graceful, outlined against the low sky.” Everywhere she looked were artists and their easels, floating by in gondolas or sitting on church steps. As she passed the island of San Clemente, home to an insane asylum, she could hear the women’s cries: “O, mamma mia, mamma mia!” or “My dear Mother will come and take me out. . . . Yes—she will! she will!”2

  For these excursions Woolson had her own gondolier, who was referred to her by the wife of John Symonds. She had resided above the family in the Palazzo Gritti-Swift in 1883. The art historian, who died in April 1893, had lived a double life, conducting a love affair with his strikingly handsome gondolier, Angelo Fusato. Mrs. Symonds was probably eager to be rid of the gondolier. Although James was aware of the affair, it is not clear whether Woolson was as well. She was delighted with Angelo, who knew “every out-of-the-way fresco and bit of carving, and interesting church, not only in Venice, but for ten miles around.” Gondoliers also acted as servants, so Angelo also brought in wood, polished shoes, did the shopping, and waited at table.3

  As Woolson had expected, Venetian society suited her. She had known the Curtises and Katherine de Kay Bronson and her daughter, Edith, since 1883. Lady Layard, whom she had also met then, was soon an equally valued friend. Lord Layard was a British archeologist who had carried out excavations at Nimrud and Ninevah and retired to Venice with his much younger wife, Enid. Dr. Baldwin was also in Venice, staying with the Bronsons. Harry Washington, son of her old St. Augustine friend Eleanor, lived across the canal from Woolson. One day, seeing the Stars and Stripes waving from his balcony and realizing she had forgotten it was the Fourth of July, she sent Angelo out to find a flag. Her circle of friends also led to invitations to Ca’ Rezzonico, the magnificent palazzo restored by the artist Pen Browning, son of Robert and Elizabeth. She had heard the rumors of Pen’s affair with his beautiful housekeeper and model. “Let us hope they are not true,” she gossiped to Boott.4

  Knowing that her rooms were only temporary, Constance could not fully rest. She was “so disheartened at the thought of all the labor that must be gone through before a new place is any where near comfortable,—that it seems as if, after I am settled this time, I shall never have the strength or courage to move again.”5

  A GATHERING GLOOM

  That summer, as she explored the city James had once described as “the most beautiful of tombs,” Constance’s thoughts turned ever more to those she had lost. She became fascinated with a book called The Law of Psychic Phenomena (1893), about telepathy, hypnotism, and communicating with the dead. It described many instances of spirits making contact with the living and argued that the subconscious minds of living persons could communicate telepathically. Her deafness may have made such a possibility appealing, but it is interesting that Woolson, whose writings often concerned themselves with the pressures on women to conceal their thoughts and feelings, was so drawn to the idea of speechless communication. She gave Dolly, in Horace Chase, the ability to read others’ thoughts and had long felt herself capable of intuiting the suppressed longings and griefs of others. This intuition was at the heart of her literary work, and it is what made her such a powerful writer. Yet her interest in telepathy also suggests an almost desperate wish to be read by others. She had become a master at hiding her own secret thoughts, so as not to burden others with her pain. She was, James would later write, like an invalid who puts flowerpots in the windows, allowing most people to saunter by and see only their joyful color, missing the suffering inside.6 Very few could see past the amiable mask she wore during these last months of her life.

  In August Constance confided to her niece Kate, “I have been a good deal depressed in spirit all summer, but no one knows it, for I do’nt let it be seen.” The one person she did let glimpse her state of mind was Dr. Baldwin. She empathized with his dark moods. His “grim & desperate will to be resolute” gave her courage to face the blackness that descended upon her as well. When he came to Venice in July, she sought out as many visits with him as she could, inviting him to tea and for gondola rides. As they floated, the two friends combined her version of a water cure with his form o
f talking therapy. William James’s wife believed that during the previous winter he had cured her husband, at least temporarily, of his dark despair by empathizing with him. This was not the “talking cure” or psychoanalysis that Freud and others were then developing.7 Baldwin’s method was basically stoical commiseration. Although comforting, it did not relieve Woolson’s suffering.

  She sensed a limit to Baldwin’s or anyone’s understanding of her troubles, explaining to him, “There is no use in our advising other people; for we do not know all the circumstances of their lives; there are always some which they do not (perhaps cannot) tell. Each heart knows its own griefs, or aches, or disappointments, & my own heart knows mine.”8 She did not confide in Boott, as she had before; in fact, she did not write to him at all that summer, although she had received a letter from him in May. And she very likely did not confide in James either, as nothing in his letters to Boott or Baldwin betrays any concern about her. She was inside the cocoon of the depressive, shrouded in an armor no one could penetrate.