THE MORGESONS

"I confess to secular habits entirely," proclaimed Elizabeth Stoddard (1823–1902) in one of the semi-monthly "Lady Correspondent" columns she wrote for San Francisco's Daily Alta California (20 January 1855). Virtually unique in the published writing of nineteenth-century American women, her secularism informs her work. Like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson, she emphasizes individuals' responsibility to live without benefit of religious or other doctrine and with self-awareness, courage, and integrity. Yet Stoddard contrasts with most of her contemporaries because she brings this exacting philosophy to bear on the domestic realm, considered in her day the most comforting and protected area of human life. In her powerful first novel, The Morgesons (1862), as in Two Men (1865) and Temple House (1867), it is home that is precarious, not, say, the quest of an obsessed captain. The most consequential realities—philosophical and ethical, economic, psychological and sexual—take their starkest form there. Stoddard's fiction thus disputes the antebellum ideology of separate spheres, which cast the home, associated with women, as a refuge from the public realm of men. Indeed, she casts men's participation in commerce and other aspects of public life and women's preoccupation with piety or domestic routine as escapes from the existential pressures that mark home life.

NARRATIVE DESIGN AS PHILOSOPHICAL CHALLENGE

Like life as Stoddard viewed it, The Morgesons is intense and exacting and comes without reliable guidelines. The novel seems to immerse readers in the experiences of its protagonist, Cassandra Morgeson, as they unfold. That Cassandra is also the novel's narrator is essential to this effect: she tells her story without overt explanation or assessment. Unaided by a directive narrator like those favored by the best-selling domestic fiction—the mode of contemporary writing that most commonly featured female protagonists—readers must constantly find their bearings by taking the measure of Cassandra as narrator as well as of her narrative. The novel's design also contributes to the effect of immersion without guidelines. The very form of domestic fiction, that of the bildungsroman (novel of development) served to orient readers. Following a clear trajectory characterized by the literary historian Nina Baym as one of trials and triumph, novels like Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World (1851) and Maria Cummins's The Lamplighter (1854) keep pace with their heroines' childhood ordeals (including separation from family or orphanhood) and the difficul-ties and temptations encountered in the course of the figurative and literal road to a mature adulthood. The journey is rewarded by marriage. Recursive rather than developmental, The Morgesons focuses on Cassandra's fortitude and consciousness as she leaves and returns to her family home in the village of Surrey, at the base of Cape Cod. Process, not progress, is the operative concept, with staples of domestic fiction like dramatic action and entertaining characterization of less importance than Cassandra's observations, thoughts, and feelings and, to a lesser extent, those of her eccentric younger sister, Veronica.

As a child in Surrey, Cassandra is already the alert, willful, impetuous person she will remain. Neither her affable, conventional father, Locke, nor her pious but withdrawn mother, Mary, gives her much guidance. Eventually they send her to nearby Barmouth to live with her stern maternal grandfather and attend a school for the daughters of the town's elite. There her incipient sense of alienation from her world is consolidated, as her snobbish classmates educate her effectively in her social inferiority and the Puritan-like patriarchal asceticism of Grand'ther Warren's house confirms her atheism.

Cassandra also becomes strikingly beautiful, and shortly after she returns to Surrey, her irreverence and looks attract a chance visitor and distant cousin, Charles Morgeson. He invites her to his home in relatively cosmopolitan Rosville to acquire social "finish" and study at its widely respected academy, open to women as well as men. Her Rosville experiences include such conventional novelistic fare as the formation of several friendships and her acquiring of social polish and formal education, but their epicenter is Cassandra's emergent sexuality. Sustained evocation of her awareness of her own sexual appeal and her strong attraction to the married Charles, uninflected by moral comment, seems designed to urge readers' acknowledgment of sexuality not just as a powerful force but as one that can occur outside marriage. Just as radically, at a time when literature subsumed respectable women's sexual feelings within romantic love, The Morgesons shows that Cassandra is paralyzed by an inability to distinguish between the two. She dislikes Charles, but she can only conceive her attraction to him as romantic, a "bond" (p. 123); only after he dies in a carriage accident in which she herself is injured does she feel able to leave Rosville.

After returning home, Cassandra continues to "advance by experience" (p. 150) rather than progress through trials toward triumph. She observes the nuances of her family's dynamics and the limits of Surrey life with new clarity, but like most women of her class and era, she can do little to change her external circumstances. When her Rosville friend Ben Somers visits Surrey and becomes engaged to Veronica, Cassandra is invited to leave again, this time as ambassador of the undistinguished Morgesons to Ben's aristocratic family in Belem (modeled on Salem, Massachusetts, known for its wealthy elite as well as for its infamous witch trials). This visit is another inconclusive encounter with uncharted experiences. Cassandra faces down Ben's formidable, hostile mother; she learns to conduct herself well with the elite; and fusing love and desire, she and Ben's alcoholic older brother, Desmond, fall in love. But her life coheres no more than it had. She returns to Surrey, where a series of unrelated events cast life's peril and unpredictability into high relief. Upon reaching home, she discovers her mother dead "in [her] chair" (p. 206); shortly thereafter her father declares bankruptcy. Ben and Veronica marry; Cassandra's father precipitates Cassandra's estrangement from him by marrying Charles's widow, Alice. Cassandra's sense of self fluctuates as unpredictably as her circumstances, shifting from despondency to powerful self-affirmation to a determination to subordinate herself to her family's needs. Finally she comes to terms with living independently; eventually Desmond appears, his alcoholism conquered, and they marry. The novel ends inconclusively. Cassandra's marriage receives virtually no attention, and the book's final pages return to the lives of all the Morgesons—Cassandra's continued alienation from Locke's new family, Ben's death as the result of alcoholism, Veronica's psychological collapse. It closes with Desmond's ambiguous religious explanation for catastrophes like Ben's death—"God is the Ruler. . . . Otherwise let this mad world crush us now" (p. 253)—and the contrasting image of Cassandra "in her chamber" in the old Morgeson house continuing to struggle with "this mad world" (p. 252) by writing The Morgesons.

REPRESENTATION OF DOMESTIC LIFE

As in domestic fiction, depictions of commonplace domesticity constitute much of The Morgesons. Unlike writers such as Warner and Harriet Beecher Stowe, though, Stoddard does not shape these depictions to tutor readers in religion or conduct. Her compressed style and sparing use of conventions that guide readers, such as scene setting or the clear identification of speakers, contribute to her representation of domestic life as charged and unpredictable. Here is a typical passage, a conversation Cassandra witnesses among her mother, her mother's sister Mercy, the Morgesons' longtime servant Temperance, and Fanny, an impoverished girl Mrs. Morgeson has recently taken in, as they inspect the bedroom Cassandra has redecorated after returning from Rosville:

"Do you like my covered doors?" I inquired.

"I vow," Temperance exclaimed, "the nails are put in crooked! And I stood over Dexter the whole time. He said . . . that you must be awfully spoiled to want such a thing. 'You get your pay, Dexter,' says I. . . . I do believe the man is a cheat and a rascal. . . . But they are all so."

"In my young days," Aunt Merce remarked, "young girls were not allowed to have fires in their chambers."

"In our young days, Mercy," mother replied, "we were not allowed to have much of anything."

"Fires are not wholesome to sleep by," Temperance added.

"Miss Veronica never has a fire," piped Fanny, who had remained, occasionally making a stir with the tongs.

"But she ought to have!" Temperance exclaimed vehemently. "I do wonder, Mis' Morgeson, that you do not insist upon it, though it's none of my business" (P. 144)

Speakers' concern with their status and feelings of grievance thicken the air in this perfectly mundane scene. Everything Temperance says affirms her standing as a quasi-family member, superior to manual laborers and to Fanny; her indirection and show of deference to Mrs. Morgeson also acknowledge her lesser position as "help" while allowing her to reproach Mary Morgeson for inadequately mothering Veronica. Fanny justifies her presence by appearing to work but tries to sow discord between the sisters and to needle Cassandra for a luxurious life dependent on others' labor. The references to Veronica also register the often slipshod, sometimes destructive child-rearing practices that are commonplace in The Morgesons; so too does the household's stunning lack of reflection about why Cassandra might want so opulent a room.

Dynamics like those evident in this scene recur in The Morgesons so frequently that they can be said to have narrative heft, yet they do not cohere into distinct themes or subjects. Rather, Stoddard's representations of domestic life seem almost like unedited transcripts. This was an artistic choice and one she did not make for the more conventional short fiction she penned to sell to magazines like Harper's. A consequence of this artistry is that readers must scrutinize dialogue and sequence with a care they may normally not extend to domestic practices, whether in fiction or their own lives, to catch the overtones and comprehend the nuances of everyday domestic life.

The Morgesons solicits the same kind of attention to domesticity's center of gravity, the family. In ante-bellum ideology, the white, middle-class family constituted a cultural, social, and political treasure: a haven in a harsh world and the source of members' moral values, religious conviction, and education. Domestic fiction criticized individual families for failing to live up to the ideal, but it venerated "the family" writ large. Precisely because the family perpetuated social norms, Ralph Waldo Emerson, America's foremost cultural commentator, sometimes cast it as stifling and mediocre, urging self-reliant men to shun it. For The Morgesons, the family cannot be evaded: it is a condition of human life, characterized by the vagaries and tragedies that characterize all life. Indeed, the novel's representation of families anticipates the famous first sentence of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (1876), "All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," with the caveat that "happy family" is an oxymoron.

Many commentators have responded to The Morgesons' depiction of family life by concentrating on defects of particular families or on the damage caused by specific historical matters like antebellum definitions of gender. Yet each family in the novel is troubled, the variety of ways attesting to life's variability. Every child in the natal family of Cassandra's mother is marred by Gran'ther Warren's Calvinist, patriarchal authoritarianism. The Somers' home life is toxic—"a devil's household," Desmond terms it (p. 191). Bellevue Pickersgil Somers, through whom the family wealth and aristocratic status have descended, is an economic and emotional tyrant: her sons are alcoholic and her daughters incapable of affection. The conventionalism of the family of Charles and Alice Morgeson is disastrous. They assume their marriage is normal and happy. Charles takes pleasure in his domestic authority and his business, Alice is "almost exclusively preoccupied" with her children (p. 75); only their interests in social status and luxurious living unite them. This traditional arrangement allows Charles to make Cassandra the subject of his desires and Alice to fail to notice until Cassandra tells her after his death.

In this context, the fault lines, flaws, and mutual disappointment in Cassandra's own family seem commonplace. The novel highlights the yearning Cassandra and Veronica feel for a mother who is often tantalizingly remote, the sisters' rivalries and hostilities, the perniciousness of the family's faithfulness to sanctioned ideas about gender. But it also emphasizes family members' intense love for each other, even as it belies the contemporary faith in love as a universal solvent, able to dissipate problems. The Morgesons love each other, and they are self-absorbed, partly incompatible, and often discontented with each other. The interests and temperaments of Locke and Mary Morgeson are so different that their lives diverge despite their love. Although they love their children, neither can give them adequate guidance or emotional sustenance. (When the eighteen-year-old Cassandra, uncertain about what she should do with her life, asks her mother, the reply is "mechanical": "Read the Bible, and sew more" [p. 64]). Despite family members' commitments to each other, moreover, the Morgesons are as vulnerable to disaster and uncertainty as other families. By the novel's end, all of them have died or founded new families; the latter, of course, are, or are likely to be, unhappy in their own ways.

STODDARD'S LIFE AND LITERARY REPUTATION

Although The Morgesons is a work of fiction, its challenging artistry reflects the drive and iconoclasm of its author. Born and raised in Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, Elizabeth Stoddard was hungry for broader experience of the world. On a visit to New York City in 1851, she attended a literary soiree, where she met the poet Richard Henry Stoddard. The two married in 1853 and thenceforth made their home in New York City, though Elizabeth continued to visit Mattapoisett. The Stoddard marriage was apparently happy, but success, even luck, eluded them. Only one of their three children, Lorimer, lived to adulthood, and he too pre-deceased his parents: he died in 1901, just as his career as a playwright was taking off. The family was always beset by financial difficulty: Richard's earnings as a poet were meager (unsurprisingly, given the mediocre quality of his verse) and were insufficiently augmented by his labors as a magazine editor. For a while the fiction Elizabeth began to write shortly before her marriage and the poetry she took up just after it were favorably received, and she had high hopes for The Morgesons. But the book's idiosyncrasy, along with the outbreak of the Civil War, made for poor sales in spite of positive reviews.

Disappointing sales were especially difficult for Stoddard because readers' interest inspired her creativity. Her first published writing, the "Lady Correspondent" columns (1854 to 1858), plays to readers' appreciation. Declaring "I own I am an egoist," she clearly expected her readers to relish her thoughts as much as she did (17 February 1856), and she flaunted her maverick opinions on subjects ranging from women's rights, recent literature, and gossip to life in New York City. Although the short fiction she wrote for the cash she and Richard needed so badly does superficially adhere to conventions about love and marriage, even this work smuggles in her desire to appeal on the grounds of non-conformist views about both. Even though her later novels are stylistically and structurally more accessible than The Morgesons, they too brandish their own singularity—and they too failed to command the wide readership she craved.

By the 1870s, lack of recognition so discouraged Stoddard that her writing tapered off. Aside from Lolly Dinks' Doings (1874), a quirky book for children based on tales she told Lorimer when he was a boy, she produced mainly regionalist sketches, memoirs about the antebellum New England of her youth, and a few poems in her last decades. When she died in 1902 few people knew her work or that of Richard, who died the next year. Only in the mid-1980s, with the republication of writing by nineteenth-century American women and feminist literary historians' devising of frameworks for reading it, did readers begin to respond to The Morgesons. For a time, commentators sought to align it with domestic fiction and other genres favored by contemporary women, but they are recognizing its unusual psychological dimensions as well as Stoddard's generic, stylistic, and philosophic iconoclasm. In consequence, interest in her literary journalism, her short fiction, and her novels continues to grow. Both The Morgesons and some of her other writing are now available in modern editions.

See alsoCalvinism; Childhood; Courtship; Domestic Fiction; Female Authorship; Marriage; Philosophy; Romanticism; Sexuality and the Body; The Wide, Wide World

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Stoddard, Elizabeth Drew Barstow. "The Morgesons" andOther Writings, Published and Unpublished. Edited by Lawrence Buell and Sandra A. Zagarell. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984.

Stoddard, Elizabeth Drew Barstow. Stories. Edited by Susanne Opfermann and Yvonne Roth. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003.

Stoddard, Elizabeth Drew Barstow. Temple House. 1867. Rev. ed. Philadelphia: H. T. Coates, 1901. Reprint, New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1971.

Stoddard, Elizabeth Drew Barstow. Two Men. 1865. Rev. ed. Philadelphia: H. T. Coates, 1901. Reprint, New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1971.

Secondary Works

Baym, Nina. Woman's Fiction. A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820–1870. 2nd ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.

Buell, Lawrence. New England Literary Culture fromRevolution through Renaissance. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Harris, Susan K. 19th Century American Women's Novels:Interpretive Strategies. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Henwood, Dawn. "First-Person Storytelling in Elizabeth Stoddard's Morgesons." ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 41, no. 1 (1995): 41–63.

Smith, Robert McClure, and Ellen Weinauer, eds. AmericanCulture, Canons, and the Case of Elizabeth Stoddard. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003.

Zagarell, Sandra A. "Strenuous Artistry: Elizabeth Stoddard's The Morgesons." In The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Women's Writing, edited by Dale M. Bauer and Philip Gould, pp. 284–307. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Sandra A. Zagarell