Silences (25 page)

Fred Pattee, the literary historian who affixed the label “feminine fifties,” writes that he did so because ten words characterized the decade: “Fervid, fevered, furious, fatuous, fertile, feeling, florid, furbelowed, fighting, funny”—and the “single
adjective that would combine them all” is “feminine.”

*
The “Is that all of their lives?” may well have been partially roused by the determined struggles of working people—all through the 1850s—for a ten-hour workday. These must have been strongly visible in Wheeling.

*
“. . . the starry leap from the springboard of exact observation.”

*
“The supremacy of the
Atlantic
was unquestioned. To have
published . . . in it . . . was to be known among writers all over the country. It was a force . . . setting the critical standard and spreading suggestions.”

To Emily Dickinson it was “a temple.” To appear in it was a true accolade, and guaranteed a wide and distinguished audience. It was the first to use the expression “realism.” One of its editors, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a great and influential
male champion of women’s rights, actively promoted the development and publication of women writers. An
Atlantic
article of his—“Women and the Alphabet”—was credited with resulting directly in the founding of Smith College and the opening of the University of Michigan to women.

*
Yet by 1860, one of every seven Americans were mine and mill “hands,” who lived and worked in circumstances like Deb and Hugh.

There had been a white Satanic mill, the paper factory in Herman Melville’s “Tantalus of Maids,” sequel to “Paradise of Bachelors” (
Harper’s,
1855). It left no impress, perhaps because it was written as sexual analogy. As for furnace fires, they burned but three times
before in American literature: in that small hillside lime kiln where Hawthorne’s Ethan Brand incinerated himself for his Unpardonable Sin—(the separation of the intellect from the heart); in the “try works” on the “red hell” of the “Pequod” in Melville’s
Moby Dick;
and in occasional descriptive lines in Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “A Song for Occupations,” and “A Song of Joys”:

   
           
The fires from the foundry chimneys burning high and glaringly into the night,

              
Casting their flicker of black contrasted with wild red and yellow light over the tops of houses, and down into the clefts of streets.

No satanic mills. The human being is omitted. Contrast the critiques of the machine, of industry, of materialism in that period, with that in
Life in the Iron
Mills
and
Margret Howth.
Instead of “things are in the saddle and ride mankind,” Rebecca Harding alone concerned herself with the wrong of how those making the things were being ridden.

*
She is one of Rebecca’s precedents, the first “working girl” heroine in American fiction, and shown in her working habitat. Even the occupation is ahead of its time. Women bookkeepers were exceptional; keeping
books was primarily a man’s occupation then.

*
In this remarkable story, a century ahead of its time in its understanding of racism and the right of the enslaved to freedom, the white southern guilt-fear—the fear that the oppressed when free will behave as oppressively as they were treated—breaks out at the end. What had been understood earlier as “the same heroic dream” as William Tell’s and
Garibaldi’s to be “men and free,” becomes an animal lust for revenge, to be master—and for the young sister of Lamar. As to the actuality, years later in
Bits of Gossip
Rebecca makes a special point that “during the Civil War, the women and children of the South were wholly under the protection of their slaves, and I have never heard of a single instance in which they abused a trust.”

*
Quotations
from Margaret Fuller appear throughout Rebecca’s writings.

*
The quotations in the account of Rebecca’s New England visit, if not otherwise footnoted, come from her
Bits of Gossip.

*
“Saw Miss Rebecca Harding, author of
Margret Howth
, which has made a stir, and is very good. A handsome, fresh quiet woman, who says she never had any troubles, though she writes about woes. I told her I had had lots
of troubles, so I write jolly tales; and we wondered why we each did so.”—Louisa May Alcott’s
Journal
, May 1862.

**
Annie Fields’s “angel in the house” contribution to American literature (and British-American literary relations) has never been assessed. For half a century, “writers as famous as Thackeray and Dickens, down to starving poets from the western prairies” came and stayed there; friendships
were formed, cemented. She was Sarah Orne Jewett’s closest friend. They invariably summered together, and it was she who introduced Willa Cather to Jewett. There is a memorable tribute to Annie Fields in Cather’s
Not Under Forty,
and a book on her by Mark de Wolfe Howe,
Memories of a Hostess
. After Fields’s death, Annie published two books of poems,
Under the Olive
and
The Singing Shepherd and
Other Poems,
as well as
The Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe
and a book of reminiscences,
Authors and Friends
.

*
“Mr. Emerson stood listening, his head sunk on his breast, with profound submissive attention, but Hawthorne sat astride of a chair, his arms folded on the back, his chin dropped on them, and his laughing, sagacious eyes watching us, full of mockery.”

*
The Flowering of New
England
.

**
Hawthorne died in May 1864, within two years of their meeting.

*
“O Annie,” she wrote on returning, “the inexpressible loathing I have for it [the war]. If you could only see the other side enough to see the wrong, the tyranny on both. I could tell you things I know that would make your heart sick.”

*
1976—Yes, there was a Blind Tom. It was probably in 1858 that Rebecca heard him.
Mary Austin in
Earth Horizon
records an early childhood memory of hearing him (or a similarly named, gifted, Blind Tom) play. Martha Collins suggests that possibly Blind D’Arnaud in Willa Cather’s
My Antonia
is also based on him.

*
Margaret Fuller.

*
Atlantic Monthly,
May, June, and July 1863. The comment is made in the story that contrary to expressed attitudes, although supposedly “women are
angels,” they are invariably treated as if they were idiots, but “in these rough & tumble days, we’d better give ’em their places as flesh and blood, with exactly the same wants and passions as men.”

*
The full description of Lucretia Mott in
Bits of Gossip,
is recommended as of special interest for biographers, students, and historians.

     
Lucretia Mott [is] one of the most remarkable women
that this country has ever produced. . . . Even in extreme old age she was one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen . . . a little, vivid, delicate creature, alive with magnetic power . . . that charming face with its wonderful luminous eyes . . . is as real to me at this moment as ever. . . . When you were with [her], you were apt to think of her as the mother and housekeeper, rather than
as the leader of a party. . . . Her fingers never were quiet. Until the day of her death she kept up the homely, domestic habits of her youth.”

*
Margaret Fuller.
Women in the Nineteenth Century.

*
Clarke was ill in March, and Rebecca wrote Annie of herself: “And then I was just enough ailing in mind to be nervous and irritable, a stupid desire to be quiet and forgotten. Do you never feel as if
every faculty has been rasped and handled unbearably and must rest?”

*
Among others, and still unequaled, the 1877 classic by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps,
The Story of Avis
(partially reprinted in
American Voices, American Women,
1974); Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s “Babushka Farnham,” in
Fables for Parents
(1937); Mary Gray Hughes’s “The Thousand Springs,” in her collection so entitled (1970); and Cora
Sandel’s
Alberta.

*
The self-belittlement, the wound to a woman, in having to feel that a male child is preferable, more to be valued than a female child, is written of for the first time here. It was realistic recognition of objective fact: “man’s world”; (“ . . . what I had lacked in gifts and opportunities, he should possess”).

*
Anny, Nat’s wife, is speaking to Rosslyn, a white woman:

“De
debt de whites owes us is to give us a chance to show what stuff’s in us . . . . De next five years is de trial day for us. . . . Your chile has every chance open to him; but dar’s few schools in de country beside dem kept by de Quakers dat will admit a cullored boy or girl. Dey calls us lazy an’ idle, but wher’s de mechanics’ shop or factory open for Tom to learn a trade? What perfession is free
to him? His hands is tied. His father giv’ his blood free for de country.” Proudly: “He has a right to ask de chance for his son dat neber was gib to himself!”

“The negroes will be given a vote,” confidently.

“I don’t see what real use to dem dat is yet,” gravely. “It’s edication my people needs, and ways for work. It’s de fever time wid ’em now in de Souf; dey’s made for de chance to learn.
Ole men an’ young stretch out dere hands for de books. It won’t last if dey’re balked now. . . .”

*
Margaret says to a house slave who asks her what freedom does for blacks up North:

“It does nothing for them” carelessly, remembering to whom she was speaking. . . . “They are like Mose. He does light work here; he shaves beards, or whitewashes walls, or steals; he does the same in Philadelphia.
He is thick-lipped and thriftless and affectionate, go where he will; only in the South they hunt him with dogs, and in the North they calculate how many years of competition with the white race it will need to sweep him and his like off of the face of the earth.”

*
This remains true to this date. In Daniel Aaron’s
The Unwritten War, American Writers and the Civil War
(1973), considered to be
the authoritative volume on the subject (it was commissioned by the Civil War Bicentennial Commission), his major thesis is that the war remained largely unwritten. With a few notable exceptions, writers, “the antennae of the race,” “had revealed little of the meaning or causes of the War; nor discerned its moral and historical implications, nor written the complexities, the seamy and unheroic side.”
Rebecca Harding Davis is not included among his few notable exceptions—nor does her fiction figure anywhere.

Aaron mentions “the sterility of the American literary imagination” as a possible explanation for writers avoiding the war as subject, does not examine the idea, but instead ascribes the phenomenon to “emotional resistance [because race cannot be dealt with] blurring literary insight”
and to “spiritual censorship,” primarily “the fastidiousness of lady readers. . . . The ‘real war’ [was] too indelicate for female ears.”

As Rebecca Harding Davis (“a lady writer” furthermore), almost alone, and singularly in her time wrote directly of meaning, causes, moral and historical implications, the seamy and unheroic, the complex question of race (“disturbing truths and portents . .
. understandings far ahead of her time”) it seems the gravest of omissions to have ignored discussion of her work as Aaron does. One paragraph of her
Bits of Gossip
account of Emerson, Alcott, and Hawthorne is included.

*
Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote to her later: “
The Nation
has no sympathy with any deep & high moral movement—no pity for human infirmity. It is a sneering respectable middle-aged
sceptic who says I take my two glasses & my cigar daily . . . dont mind them & dont hope for a sympathetic word from them
ever.
”

*
1976: There is now some question as to whether she was its author.

**
Yes, Rebecca, who did not do much resting in her husband’s house, said “rest.” In “The Wife’s Story,” she also uses the word “rest”—in a differing meaning: “To nestle down into this man’s heart and
life! To make his last years that warm Indian summer day! I could do it! I! What utter rest there were in that.”

†
Prevalent—and oft expressed—medical opinion of the period.

*
Though Richard Harding Davis’s multitude of books do not have the intrinsic merit and interest of his mother’s, he was one of the celebrated writers of his time, a man of action and letters whose example supposedly influenced
Hemingway and John Reed.

His was the most famous face of his generation. Booth Tarkington wrote of him: “To the college boy of the 90’s, he was the beau ideal. His stalwart good looks were as familiar to us as were those of our own football captain; we knew his face as we knew the face of the President of the United States, but we infinitely preferred Davis’.”

Davis was the model for Charles
Dana Gibson’s man-about-town, appearing over and over in the famous Gibson Girl drawings. Later, during his roving correspondent days, he was often seen in press photographs with presidents, warring generals, revolutionary leaders, explorers.

He wrote Rebecca almost every day of her life, and took care of her the last few years.

*
All the stories previously quoted from, including
Life in the
Iron Mills
, remain uncollected.