'shedding the same light on the sacrifice heap of the Indian, and the rude dwellings of the Calvinist.' The narrator lays the groundwork for an early theory of cultural relativism when she asserts that 'spiritual light' shines equally on all people but is refracted in many different ways.
Women novelists' willingness to entertain notions of cultural relativism was not entirely disinterested, of course. Like her earlier A New-England Tale (1822), Sedgwick's Hope Leslie (1827) employs -122- relativism to buttress its own antipatriarchal critique as much as to ennoble aboriginals. Through the generous actions of her native heroine Magawisca, Sedgwick legitimates the alien culture rejected by Puritan 'fanatics' because it does not conform to their ethnocentric standards. At the same time, and through a similar logic, Sedgwick legitimates the acts of defiance against the Puritan elders committed by her white heroine Hope Leslie. In an age of what Sedgwick calls 'undisputed masculine supremacy,' Hope fails to demonstrate the 'passiveness' that the Puritans define as woman's chief virtue. Sedgwick describes Hope as someone whom the Puritans perceive as, like the natives, in need of 'civilizing' restraints. But Hope's conduct only appears immoral; steadfast principles in fact guide her actions throughout the novel.
The domestic emphasis on cultivating principle in order to preserve the authenticity of the self may also account for the frequency with which orphans appear in women's novels. In three of the most popular novels of the time, Warner's The Wide, Wide World, Cummins's The Lamplighter, and Finley's Elsie Dinsmore, the death of one or both parents or the abandonment of children is a compelling donnée for women novelists because it provides an opportunity for distinguishing between character and conduct. Only with the parent absent can the child's internalization of principle be gauged. In women's novels, as in Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay on the subject, 'selfreliance' is not freedom from duty but rather subjection to an internalized standard of duty. This is not to say that by internalizing duty domesticity merely introjected patriarchal rule but rather to suggest that even oppositional ideologies can have normalizing as well as liberating aspects.
While one could read assertions of women's moral superiority to men as empowering to women, historical romances written by women suggest that because theirs is the power of influence rather than of force, domesticity is always on the verge of reproducing patriarchal culture's male gaze. Harriet Vaughan Cheney's historical romance A Peep at the Pilgrims (1850) suggests that even in her private relations the domestic woman is necessarily a spectacle (as suggested by the titular 'peep'). Even more so than Lee, Cheney -123- makes clear the erotic nature of the influence that domesticity assigned to women. Mr. Grey, voicing the wisdom of the Puritan patriarch, warns his daughter Miriam that she must accept male authority without question because women are more prone to err than men. 'Women are born to submit,' he claims, 'and as the weaker vessel, it is meet they should be guided by those who have rule over them.' Miriam argues in response that to the contrary women appear better suited to dispense the gospel rather than to receive it — since their erotic power makes their 'influence' over men well-nigh irresistible: 'If the entreaties of Delilah could subdue Samson, how much more powerful must be the arguments of religion from the lips of a virtuous woman,' she asserts. Even though Miriam works toward Christian ends, Cheney cannot rid her 'virtuous woman' of all the erotic power represented by the biblical Delilah.
Similarly, Stowe's representation of the virtuous Tina Percival in Oldtown Folks (1869) participates in the logic of the male gaze. Like Cheney, Stowe suggests that women's power over men depends upon their ability to please them. Tina's spectacular beauty, far from being a source of temptation for Stowe's male characters, is instead presented as, potentially, an agent of their regeneration. The narrator speaks of romantic 'LOVE' as 'greatest and holiest of all the natural sacraments and means of grace.' Stowe contrasts this perspective with that of the Calvinist minister Dr. Stern, who believes that 'the minister who does not excite the opposition of the natural heart fails to do his work.' Significantly, the minister's sermons excite only 'revulsion' among the townsfolk. Stowe had previously relocated gospel authority from the clergy to the eroticized domestic woman in The Minister's Wooing (another local color tale set in Puritan New England that Stowe published in 1859). There her character James Marvyn asserts that he does not understand a word of the minister Dr. Hopkins's tedious sermons but that the lovely Mary Scudder is his 'living gospel' — the same phrase that the skeptic George Harris uses to describe his pious wife Eliza in Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Although thinking of women as the living gospel for men gives women a certain authority, it also defines them strictly in terms of men's needs. Because domestic ideology posits a moral difference between men and women, it always threatens to reduce women to little more than vessels for male salvation. One could argue that Stowe's -124- representation of the virtuous heroine not long for this world (the archetypal expression of which is, of course, Eva St. Clare in Uncle Tom's Cabin) results from the moral difference between the sexes posited by domestic ideology. Referring to Mara Lincoln's little Evalike demise at the end of Pearl of Orr's Island, the narrator notes that some people die young in order to aid in the spiritual development of those whom they leave behind. Mara's death has this effect on her skeptical fiancé Moses Pennel, whose salvation seems much more assured after her death than before it. In fact, on her deathbed Mara asserts that her Christian influence on him will be greater when she is dead than it would have been had she lived to marry him. For Stowe, then, a woman's dying gospel is perhaps even more potent than her living one.
Yet Mara Lincoln's martyrdom for the sake of her fiancé's spiritual well-being is just one logical extreme to which domestic ideology's claims for the moral superiority of women could lead. It is important to stress that domesticity was not an ideology in the impoverished sense of the term. Domesticity did not become a dominant discourse because it provided people with a finite and orderly set of beliefs relieving them from the burden of thinking; to the contrary, domesticity was compelling precisely because it gave people an expansive logic and a series of rich cultural symbols through which to think about their world. As a result, domestic ideology, while it certainly manipulated antebellum intellectuals, could also be manipulated by them. Hence Alcott could take it to what is perhaps its feminist extreme in her novel Work (1873). Work opens with the orphan Christie Devon (invoking the 'Declaration of Sentiments' revealed by women's rights supporters at their convention in Seneca Falls in 1848) announcing to her guardians that 'there's going to be a new Declaration of Independence,' namely, her declaration of economic independence from them. Alcott uses domestic ideology in order to identify not just work but meaningful work for women. Christie ultimately becomes a mediator in an organization composed of both middle- and working-class women. There she helps to heal the class conflicts that arise. Alcott's fictional character Christie, one could argue, anticipates historical figures like Jane Addams, who at the turn of the century established social work as a legitimate profession for women. Because domesticity placed the welfare of society -125- in women's able hands, women could claim that certain social professions outside of the home were the logical extension of their work inside the home.
Alcott perceived that the particular skills and knowledge women developed in managing households had extra-domestic applications, and this perception no doubt influenced her own decision to become a nurse during the Civil War. After the war other women intellectuals like Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell (who in 1849 received the first medical degree granted to a woman in the United States) also tried to expand the terrain of women's civilizing mission to include all of society and not just her own household. Declarations of women's moral superiority and civilizing influence, as well as claims for the managerial and practical skills they acquired through labor in the home, buttressed women's entrance into careers in medicine, education, and social welfare. Ironically, in the second half of the century domesticity itself enabled women's forays out of what the antebellum period identified as women's proper sphere. To add to the irony, postwar suffragists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton even used the logic of domestic ideology in their fight for women's political empowerment. Amongst these suffragists, antipatriarchal domesticity seems at last to have developed a recognizably feminist character.
The influence of domestic ideology on the suffragists, however, guaranteed that early feminism would not be without its political ambiguities. As early as 1838 in her Letters to Mothers Lydia Sigourney attempted to expand the terrain of domesticity into the world at large. Appalled that 'the influx of untutored foreigners' had made the United States 'a repository for the waste and refuse of other nations,' Sigourney maintained that it was the responsibility of women 'to neutralize this mass' through an internal missionary movement that would spread the good word of the Anglo-American middle-class home. Unfortunately, postwar suffragists, retaining domesticity's vision of the custodial role of women, used an argument reminiscent of Sigourney's to press for the vote. If white women were enfranchised, they argued, it would help offset the
