Education (1799), British educator Hannah More (who is generally credited with the founding of domestic ideology) criticized her contemporaries for educating their daughters 'for the world, and not for themselves.' Patriarchal interests dictated the shape of the system of female education More wanted to reform. Consisting almost exclusively in ornamental graces requisite for obtaining an advantageous familial alliance through the marriage contract, this education, More felt, treated women as little more than commodities bought and sold - 118- on the marriage market. Rousseau expressed the degree to which women were raised 'for the world' rather than for themselves when he argued that a woman's knowledge and powers of reasoning should be developed only enough so as to prevent her from being tedious in conversation with her husband. Using the home as a metaphor for interiority (in the sense of 'selfhood'), More was attempting to redefine woman's value in terms of internal qualities: sound judgment, knowledge of how to run a household, moral tendencies — qualifications that suited a woman to be a good wife and mother rather than merely making her satisfying to the male gaze.
Historical romances written by women clearly express domesticity's antipatriarchal content. We see this in Child's romance of ancient Greece, Philothea (1836). Aspasia, who herself relentlessly cultivates the gaze of the crowd, holds entertainments at her home in which women dance and sing before a male audience. Child's retiring heroine Philothea, seemingly voicing the author's view, explains to Aspasia that the renown women gain from performing before men is a sign of their thralldom rather than a measure of their freedom. The presence in the narrative of a woman who is literally enslaved (Philothea's friend Eudora) only strengthens the force of an analogy that later antislavery novels like Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) and Child's A Romance of the Republic (1867) would pursue in a native and more contemporary setting.
Like Philothea, Eliza Buckminster Lee's Parthenia (1858) constructs the domestic woman in order to criticize patriarchy. Set in the fourth century, the novel describes the youth of Emperor Julian, who dedicated himself to reviving the worship of the pagan gods just as Christianity seemed on the verge of establishing its ascendancy. Lee transforms the struggle between paganism and Christianity into a struggle between men and women. The warrior Julian (reputed to be a woman-hater) believes that Christianity is a religion suited only to women. In its story of the crucifixion he sees none of the male heroism he so admires in Homeric literature. In meeting the beautiful and wise pagan priestess Parthenia, however, Julian learns firsthand that there are forms of power other than physical force. He proposes that she become his empress and use her feminine charms to promote the cause of paganism. But because in her gradual conversion to Christianity she learns that the only way to make woman a 'puri-119- fying and refining influence infused through society' is to 'elevate [her] to her true place in the family,' Parthenia declines the honor. Lee, it seems, detects in Julian's offer the patriarchal tendency to reduce women to mere objects for public display.
More was concerned that the patriarchal display of woman robbed her of any authentic identity. Hence she associated the fashionable life with a lack of authenticity. The life of the young lady, More had lamented, 'too much resembles that of an actress: the morning is all rehearsal and the evening is all performance.' The association of wealth and fashion with the loss of female authenticity is particularly apparent in some of the more didactic novels of the period, including Sedgwick's Clarence (1830) and The Poor Rich Man and the Rich Poor Man (1836), Elizabeth Oakes Smith's Riches Without Wings (1838), and Ann Stephens's Fashion and Famine (1854). The association, however, also seems to inform Alcott's compelling and not in the least bit didactic novella Behind a Mask (1866). Subtitled 'A Woman's Power,' Alcott's gothic romance is set in an aristocratic English household. The young and lovely governess Jean Muir ingratiates herself with the members of the Coventry household — particularly its male members — until she has all of them at her beck and call. At the end of the first chapter the reader sees what the Coventry family does not. Alone in her room after a first impressive day on the job, Jean declares aloud, '[T]he curtain is down, so I may be myself for a few hours, if actresses ever are themselves.' She then proceeds to remove her makeup, wig, and several false teeth. The narrator remarks that the 'metamorphosis was wonderful, but the disguise was more in the expression she assumed than in any art of costume or false adornment.' The setting of the tale suggests that Alcott, like More, saw loss of authenticity as the inevitable fate of women in the patriarchal household. Like Lee and Child, Alcott selects a foreign setting for her novel in order to suggest that such a household has no place in the modern United States.
More's American protégé Catharine Beecher used images of physical confinement to express patriarchal culture's violence against the integrity of female selfhood. Beecher authored what is probably the single most influential statement of American domesticity, A Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841), which she later (with the aid of her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe) revised and published under the title - 120- The American Woman's Home (1869). Throughout her work, Beecher expresses concern that young girls spend too much time indoors in overheated rooms and that when they are permitted outdoors are instructed not to run around and 'romp' like boys. Women are further restrained by corsets and other 'monstrous female fashions,' which, by impeding the natural growth and development of the body, 'bring distortion and disease' — literally to the female body, but metaphorically to the female self. The tomboy Jo March in Little Women expresses the domestic critique of monstrous patriarchal fashions when she complains, 'I hate to think I've got to grow up and be Miss March, and wear long gowns, and look as prim as a China-aster.' In Little Women Alcott uses the backdrop of the Civil War to create a value system that gives priority not just to women but to women as the representatives of the interior life.
The figure of domestic woman then cannot be separated from the modern reconstruction not just of the female self but of selfhood in general. In Little Women the March sisters remain at home, while the Northern men have gone off to fight. Jo rails against the destiny of her sex: 'I'm dying to go and fight with papa, and I can only stay at home and knit like a poky old woman.' Through her representation of the March sisters' attempts to overcome their 'bosom enemies,' Alcott relocates within the home the heroism traditionally identified with the battlefield. Alcott suggests that, in part because heroics attract the attention of the world, it is far easier to be a hero than it is to purify one's own heart; temporary hardship and even death in the name of a virtuous cause are more easily endured than a quiet, lifetime struggle for virtue. The same logic that led Alcott to valorize the (feminine) quotidian over the (masculine) heroic led minister Horace Bushnell to propose a new 'domestic' form of worship. Referring in part to the histrionic conversion experiences that accompanied the religious revivals that punctuated the entire antebellum period, Bushnell complained in Christian Nurture (1860): 'We hold a piety of conquest rather than of love, a kind of public piety, that is strenuous and fiery on great occasions, but wants. . constancy.' In Bushnell's opinion all Christians, not just women, should cultivate domesticity of character.
During the Civil War years the influential women's magazine Godey's Lady's Book never once alluded to the conflict that so en-121- grossed the attention of the nation. Along with the novels Northwood (1827) and The Lecturess (1839), Godey's was an important vehicle for its editor Sarah Hale's rather conservative domestic philosophy, and Hale's critics have taken the magazine's failure even to acknowledge the major conflict of the day as evidence that women intellectuals retreated to the home to escape harsh realities. 'Reality,' however, was not something these women were attempting to escape so much as something the particular form of their antipatriarchal critique encouraged them to redefine. According to Child's The Mother's Book, 'Nothing can be real that does not have its home within us.' If under the editorship of Hale Godey's manifested little interest in the war, this is in part because domestic ideologues were skeptical about the importance of the merely external. Hence in addressing the question of discipline, The Mother's Book stresses that behavior matters far less than the motives that impel it. The modern concept of the self and the modern experience of the self would be inconceivable without the transvaluation that domesticity helped effect.
Domesticity's valorization of character over conduct gave novelists license to produce some of the era's more reverent representations of non-Western cultures. In Hobomok (1824) the prolific Child (whose 1868 An Appeal for the Indians refers to the belief in white superiority as a 'curse') protests the undue harshness of Calvinist doctrine that would damn the unconverted but noble savage to everlasting punishment in the afterlife. Like Stephens's later Malaeska (1860), Hobomok is a tale of interracial marriage. At one point Mary Corbitant, who marries Hobomok and bears his child, has a vision of the Christian God smiling 'on distant mosques and temples' and
