Domestic Novelists in the Old South: Defenders of Southern Culture.

McCandles, Amy Thompson

Long denigrated for their "scribbling" style and simplistic plots, nineteenth-century domestic novelists merit reconsideration by twentieth-century scholars. These authors were extremely popular with the American reading public, and their works influenced and were influenced by contemporary cultural and political developments. As recent books by Mary Hiatt, Professor Emerita and former Chair of the English Department at Baruch College, City University of New York, and Elizabeth Moss, historian for the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, Washington, D.C., illustrate, an examination of the form and content of nineteenth-century women's fiction reveals a good deal about the interrelationship of gender, literature, and politics.

Both Moss and Hiatt cite Hawthorne's famous complaint about the "d_____d mob of scribbling women" whose domestic novels were adversely affecting the sales of his own books. Piqued by the female invasion of their turf, Hawthorne and his fellow members of the literary establishment dismissed popular fiction by women as "trash." Despite the lack of any "objective stylistic research or evaluation of nineteenth-century American fiction" (Hiatt, p. 13), Hawthorne's negative view of women's writing has survived into the twentieth century.

It was this absence of empirical evidence which led Hiatt to undertake an investigation of nineteenth-century writing styles. Her 1977 study of contemporary American prose, The Way Women Write, discovered significant stylistic differences between men and women writers of the late twentieth century. Did such differences exist in the nineteenth century, she wondered, and if so, did they make women's work stylistically "inferior" to men's? Hiatt was not concerned with the content of nineteenth-century fiction but with the "structural and lexical aspects of written style, such as sentence length and complexity, the frequency of parallelism and rhetorical devices of repetition, and the use of similes and adverbs, as well of certain adjectives" (p. 22).

Four 500-word selections from forty books, twenty by women and twenty by men, all published between 1860 and 1884, were used in Hiatt's nineteenth-century study. In order to avoid the subjectivity of reader response, she chose the works and passages randomly, scanned the excerpts by computer, and used two software programs to search for specific literary constructions and conventions. When she compared these patterns of written expression by sex and by century, Hiatt found very little difference between the writing style of nineteenth-century women and men. If nineteenth-century women writers "scribbled," so, too, did their male counterparts.

Women and men's average sentence length and use of parallelism and rhetorical devices were quite similar in the nineteenth century. Women tended to use adverbs and exclamation marks which expressed emotion more than men, and men tended to use dependent clauses in complex sentences more than women, but in the final analysis, nineteenth-century writing styles did "not vary consistently in any reliably discernible manner" (p. 137). The greatest gender differences were between the centuries. Men's writing changed considerably in the hundred years after 1860, and consequently, stylistic differences between men and women increased significantly.

It is difficult to justify the exclusion of domestic novelists from the literary canon on the basis of style, Hiatt concludes, since the canon includes nineteenth-century men with essentially identical patterns of expression. Ironically, the major impediment to the critical acclaim of the domestic novelists seems to be that they wrote too much like nineteenth-century men. In the last century this meant that they threatened the male dominance of the literary market. In the 1990's they are considered "terrible writers because they [do] not write like twentieth-century male writers" (p. 144). Hiatt believes that domestic novelists have been dismissed by literary critics not because of their style but because of their sex: "For it is beyond doubt that inclusion of more nineteenth-century women writers in the canon is a matter of sexual politics" (p. 144). Her analysis suggests that modern critics need to rethink their construction of the canon and to adopt more objective criteria for evaluating nineteenth-century women writers.

In her study of Domestic Novelists in the Old South, Elizabeth Moss concludes that the content of nineteenth-century novels merits re-examination. Whereas Hiatt looks at gender differences in writing styles, Moss examines regional distinctions in the plots of domestic novels. Using historical studies of the family such as Elizabeth Fox-Genovese's Plantation Household, Moss argues that slavery was essential to the world view of elite women in the antebellum South and that the defense of slavery was an integral component of domestic novels in the region.

Focusing on five Southern authors - Caroline Gilman, Caroline Hentz, Maria McIntosh, Mary Virginia Terhune, and Augusta Jane Evans - Moss discusses the ways in which women writers set the tone for the antebellum discourse on slavery. Despite the domestic nature of their plots, domestic novelists were not apolitical. They were very aware of the sectional differences tearing the nation apart in the years after 1830, and they offered "Southern" solutions to what they perceived as "Northern" problems facing American society.

In story after story, the five described the "systematic destruction of the northern home and family generated by a social ethic fueled by greed" (p. 131). In their novels, it was marriage to a Southerner and adoption of Southern values and lifestyles which redeemed the Northern hero/heroine; in real life, only the national adoption of the South's hierarchical, patriarchal structure could save the country from the divisive threat of Northern bourgeois individualism.

Moss believes that historians have underestimated the impact of such literature on American public opinion. The works of Southern domestic novelists were popular throughout the United States, and - until 1852 - they provided many Northern readers their only view of plantation society. The publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852 "irrevocably altered the course of antebellum southern domestic fiction" (p. 103) by forcing Southern novelists to shift their "focus from the planter elite to their chattel" (p. 136). Southern writers countered with their own descriptions of slave character and life, and justified the South's peculiar institution "in terms of intense relationships and the sense of community it fostered" (p. 125).

The Civil War brought an end to both slavery and the Southern domestic novel. Although Evans in Macaria (1864) and Terhune in Sunnybank (1866) tried to explain this family tragedy, the destruction of the Union made it difficult to propose a happy marriage of Northern and Southern interests. Yet the influence of the Southern domestic novelists lived on: "The lives and work of Gilman, Hentz, McIntosh, Terhune, and Evans may have been wholly forgotten, but their ideas and imaginations continue to shape perceptions of the South and its people, its past, and, to some extent, its present" (p. 220). The romantic view of the South which emerged in later plantation novels was essentially the creation of the Southern domestic novelists.

The "d_____d mob of scribbling women" have a lot more to offer literary critics and historical analysts than Hawthorne contended. As Moss demonstrates, they were "pivotal in shaping the political consciousness of America" (pp. 61-62). Their fiction transposed the burning issues of the day into a language the average reader could understand. The modern critic may consider their sentences too long and their language too emotional, but the nineteenth-century reader found both their message and its vehicle appealing.

Moss's study is more interdisciplinary than Hiatt's and could be used in either a history or a literature class. Her provision of plot summaries for the major novels and an overview of historical developments enables even the general reader to follow her argument. Examples from Northern novels other than Uncle Tom's Cabin would have strengthened her case for Southern distinctiveness, however.

Hiatt's methodology, although essential to her argument, makes for rather dry reading, and her book will appeal to few readers outside collegiate courses in literary theory. In a field which prides itself on individual interpretation of works, Hiatt's computer analysis of written expression will no doubt be criticized, but her study does reveal how difficult it is to view literature objectively. Certainly for the domestic novelists and their critics, the personal was political.