Morgesons (1862) and St. Elmo in Augusta Evans Wilson's St. Elmo (1867) owe more than a little to Samuel Richardson, the seduction plot so prominent in the early sentimental fiction intrudes only occasionally in women's novels published after 1820. Female Bildungsroman more adequately describes much of this fiction. Yet, while Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World (1850) and Martha Finley's Elsie Dinsmore (1867) are exemplary instances of the novel of female development, Caroline Lee Hentz's Linda (1850) and E. D. E. N. Southworrh's The Hidden Hand (1859) flaunt the realist conventions of the Bildungsroman and might be more accurately classified as female picaresque or sensation fiction. Finally, to call women's popular fiction 'domestic novels' is also somewhat misleading. Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Home (1835) is little more than a fictionalized treatise on housekeeping and child-rearing, but -110- Fanny Fern's semiautobiographical Ruth Hall (1855) records the adventures of a woman whose domestic ties have been severed and Caroline Chesebro's Isa: A Pilgrimage (1852) tells the story of a radical feminist who lives with a man to whom she is not married.
'Women's novels' might be the only rubric elastic enough to encompass the diversity within this literature. But since historically the gender distinction has worked at the expense of women writers (as Hawthorne's comment suggests), we now must wield it very carefully. Arguably, the only way to avoid inadvertent replication of the invidious nineteenth-century gender distinction would be to dispense with the category of 'women writers' altogether. And yet, entirely abandoning this category of analysis seems unwise at this particular historic juncture. Literary historians, accepting Hawthorne's comments about scribbling women at face value, have assumed that women novelists of the period do not merit serious study, and hence these writers languish in undeserved obscurity. Given that women novelists have been excluded as a class, feminist literary histories must include them as a class — albeit with the understanding that the category of 'women novelists' intervenes rather than describes, which is to say that it is used provisionally to redress strategic omissions in the scholarship rather than used to suggest either that women's novels are all the same or that they are necessarily different from men's novels.
One could argue that the ill-repute of mid-century novels by women owes less to their individual literary infelicities than to the rhetorical uses toward which scholars attempting to define the classic tradition of the novel have deployed them. Acts of definition are necessarily acts of differentiation. The highly contingent process of defining a classic tradition in part involved distinguishing it from what is not the classic tradition. By aligning the distinction they produced between canonical and noncanonical with gender difference, scholars could give that distinction the look of a difference found in nature (as it were) rather than in the opinions of mere human beings. Literary historians evolved a complex history of nineteenth-century culture in which they associated femininity with the passive reproduction of the status quo and masculinity with the willful transgression of norms. In defining the classic tradition they excluded not just -111- women but also male novelists whom they perceived as capitulating to the conventional, and they exalted those male novelists who most visibly thematized their own defiance of cultural expectations.
The crucial role of gender difference in defining the classic tradition of the novel helps explain some counterintuitive representations of the male classics that have been taken as truisms — for example, that James Fenimore Cooper's historical romances and what are called his 'Indian novels' are a reaction against the feminization of the vocation of novel writing and an attempt to articulate a 'masculine' novelistic countertradition. This claim is made despite the fact that Lydia Maria Child's 'Indian novel' Hobomok (1824) exercised a profound influence on The Last of the Mohicans (which appeared two years after Child's book) and despite the fact that the historical romance was a preferred mode amongst women writers. Further evidence of the role played by the rhetoric of gender in the construction of the American Renaissance is the fact that, rather than describing The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851) with the 'feminine' term of 'domestic novels,' literary historians generally refer to them as 'romances,' and they do this despite the fact that Hawthorne's relentless and gendered opposition of public and private spheres, his hostility toward the Puritan patriarch, and his representation of imperiled womanhood are precisely the materials of the domestic novel. Similarly, the need to manufacture the difference that would separate canonical from noncanonical, one could argue, dictates that Herman Melville's Pierre (1852) be generally regarded as a parody of the domestic novel rather than an instance of it.
Traditional concepts of the American Renaissance do not ignore women novelists so much as use them as the demonic double of the classic novelists of the period. Taking their cue from Melville's Hawthorne and His Mosses (a review of a collection of Hawthorne's tales that Melville published anonymously in 1850), literary historians have argued that classic writers used the conventions of best-sellers in order to communicate their own original and profound meanings. Popular women novelists, they have claimed, merely reproduced a standardized product that appealed to a mass audience composed primarily of undereducated and underemployed middleclass women desperate for something to fill their empty days. >-112-
Yet, even if women writers (like male writers) had to fulfill certain conventions in order to sell their novels, what prevented them from manipulating those conventions toward their own ends, as Melville describes Hawthorne doing or as he himself perhaps does in Pierre? In Little Women (1869) Louisa May Alcott's satiric transposition of E. D. E. N. Southworth into S. L. A. N. G. Northbury, her humorous treatment of Jo March's conflicting commitments to economic success and truth-telling when she launches her career as a writer, and Jo's disparaging references to notions she finds too 'sentimental' — these suggest that the classic male novelists were not the only ones who felt that writing for the literary marketplace imposed some limits on what they could say. Only if one assumes that women writers were incapable of manipulating popular conventions can one read Little Women (as it so often is read) as an uncomplicated and unselfconscious capitulation to the demands of the marketplace.
Revisionary feminist scholarship has suggested that women like Alcott encoded 'subversive' feminist messages in texts that merely appear conventional. Women novelists may also have been in the business of 'hoodwinking' a public composed primarily of 'superficial skimmers' (to borrow Melville's language). A more radical feminist critique, however, would note that the images of passivity and addiction characteristic of descriptions of the rise of mass culture are themselves gendered. The belief that by mid-century the reading audience was increasingly (if not overwhelmingly) female may itself account for scholarly consensus that antebellum Americans were hostile to any novel that manifestly challenged the literary, moral, or political conventions that permitted the masses to proceed through their lives with as little reflection as possible.
Literary historians' use of a rhetoric of gender in the construction of the American Renaissance has antecedents in the work of the canonical male writers of the period. For example, in The Spy (1821) Cooper (who published his first novel, Precaution, under a female pseudonym) satirizes the literary predilections of 'our countrywomen, by whose opinions it is that we expect to stand or fall.' Taking statements by male writers at face value, scholars have gone so far as to claim that the antebellum United States was 'a society controlled by women.' One dubbed the middle decade of the nine-113- nine- 'the feminine fifties' and exclaimed: 'And to think of the masculine Melville and Hawthorne and Thoreau condemned to work through their literary lives in an atmosphere like that.'
Increasingly, the 'feminization of American culture' (that is to say, the alleged determining influence exercised by women over midcentury culture at the level both of consumption and of production) appears to be largely a fiction created by the nineteenth century and perpetuated by literary historians in the twentieth. No direct evidence corroborates Cooper's assertion that the success or failure of a novel depended on women's tastes; contemporary historians of reading have little firsthand data on the gender composition of the early nineteenth- century reading audience. The belief in the femininity of the audience for novels rests primarily upon indirect evidence like The Spy's introduction and upon the patently chauvinist assumption that because most middle-class women were 'only housewives' they had enormous quantities of free time on their hands that they squandered reading trash. (Harriet Beecher Stowe's letters suggest that some middle-class women were in fact driven to states of nervous exhaustion by the amount of work required to run a household prior to our age of 'modern conveniences.' Her descriptions of trying to dry sheets in the humid summer air while a cholera epidemic that would eventually take the life of one of her children raged through Cincinnati seems particularly to the point.)
