Writings Displaying 1900’s Women As Submissive And Pious Essay, Research Paper

….a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman…….He has monopolized nearly all profitable employments…….He closes against her all avenues to wealth and distinction…..He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorough education……He has endeavoured, in every way that he could, to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life. From the first women’s rights convention, Seneca Falls,18481 Pre-twentieth century American society prescribed a rigid model of femininity to which its women should conform. The concept of femininity was surrounded by notions of devout religiosity, limited intelligence and a passive sexual role. Barbara Welter, writing in Dimity Convictions, describes what has been called, ‘The Cult of Womanhood’: Anti-intellectualism was implicit in the cult which exalted women as creatures who did not use logic or reason, having a surer, purer road to the truth – the high road of the heart.2 The notion of women differing from men in that they are reliant upon their hearts rather than their heads, is a theme that dominates the prescriptive writings of the era. Women are seen as having an innate affinity with God that makes religion a necessity, ‘religion is far more necessary to you than self-sufficient men,’ writes a mid-nineteenth century minister to his female parishioners, ‘in you it would be not only criminal, but impolitic to neglect it.’3 The Bible was used to support such a philosophy, in which women are represented as having ‘a natural and simple piety, the unquestioning obedient religion of a docile child.’4 Women are presented not only as being less intelligent than men but also as almost devoid of sexuality. O.S. Fowler, who described himself as a ‘Practical Phrenologist’, highlighted the difference between men and women, the latter being ‘more virtuous and less passionate.’5 For women, the sexual act is seen only as a necessary action to achieve the ultimate goal of childbearing. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, the dominant image of the American female was a patriarchal construction, ‘Woman was supposed to be, if she were a true woman, pious, pure, submissive and domestic.’6 However, it is important to note that this is a ‘prescriptive’ definition of the ‘true woman’. If the literary writings by women in this era are analysed it brings into question whether American women actually conformed to this pre-conceived description. In her introduction to The Feminization of American Culture, Ann Douglas describes her youth spent reading about ‘the timid exploits of innumerable and pious heroines.’7 Though some popular works of fiction could be said to reinforce patriarchal representations of American women, it is inaccurate to assume that all the literature of the period confirmed these stereotypes. It is somewhat ironic that in a nation in which women were thought to exist outside the sphere of the intellectual, the first volume of poems to be published by a resident of America should come from the pen of a woman. That woman was Anne Bradstreet, who was born in England in about 1612 but emigrated to America following her marriage to Simon Bradstreet an official of the Massachusetts Bay Company. Anne Bradstreet failed to fit in with the existing stereotype of the uneducated woman. Her father ensured that she received ‘an education superior to that of most young women of the time,’8 and the very fact that she wrote at all is a factor that distinguishes her from most women of her day. Though born into a Puritan family, Bradstreet did not unquestioningly accept the doctrines of Christianity: She tells us in one of the Meditations written for her children, that she was troubled many times about the truth of the Scriptures; that she never saw any convincing miracles, and that she always wondered if those of which she read ‘were feigned’.9 Such sentiments would be challenging expressed by anyone in a strict seventeenth century Puritan community, but particularly by a woman. From Bradstreet’s poetry the reader is always aware that the poet is conscious of her position as a female writer. As a woman, Bradstreet is outside the literary tradition. In The Prologue she has to try to find a position for herself, a niche within written culture, without overtly admitting this aim. These conflicting interests produce a paradoxical opening. The first line imitates the epic tradition: ‘To sing of wars, of captains, and of kings.’ These are male roles: the fighter, like the writer, is associated with a tradition of which Bradstreet cannot be part, they ‘are too superior things.’ However, the very action of writing these lines, of alluding to the epic, is in effect demonstrating she can be a writer. She is aware of poetic conventions and her apology for writing paradoxically constitutes a breach of patriarchal literary culture. In order to justify her writing Bradstreet must first acknowledge her inferiority. While her ‘envious heart’ and ‘wond’ring eyes’ turn to the ‘Great Bartas’, she is not just conceding that she can never emulate the achievements of the male poet. In doing this she is also placing herself alongside him: she has at least located herself in the same poetic sphere. Ostensibly, the third and fourth stanzas are an affirmation that women, whose Muse is ‘foolish, broken, blemished’, can never rise to the level of the male poet. The divide between men and women cannot be bridged: ‘ ‘Cause nature made it so irreparable’. Though the Greek orator, Demosthenes overcame a speech defect, he was male. The obstacle that impedes Bradstreet – the very fact that she is a woman – cannot be overcome: ‘A weak or wounded brain admits no cure’. Bradstreet’s references to the Muses are significant. Even as she speaks of women’s exclusion from the field of art, we are reminded that in Greek mythology, a seminal source of literary tradition, the female Muses were the nine goddesses of art and science. This irony lies uneasily alongside Bradstreet’s eloquent apology for a female intrusion into the male bastion of poesy. If we consider the poem in the context of seventeenth century Puritan America, Bradstreet’s early them is a necessary device – it grants her access, a licence to write. Having carved her niche, she can oppose those who think she should exchange her masculine pen for the domestic needle. She argues that even if she writes well, her work would attract the criticism, ‘it’s stol’n, or else it was by chance’. This view marks a significant development. Previously, anything written by a woman was ‘obscure lines’, now it is identified as poetry that could have been written by a man. The poem commenced in a humble apologetic tone but Bradstreet adopts a more assertive stance. She returns to the them of the Greeks, asking why the ancients should have created a female the muse of epic poetry in the form of Calliope. It is difficult to accept the notion that women should remain outside the sphere of poetry, when for the Greeks, a female muse held sway over this most essentially masculine poetic forms. Bradstreet seems aware that these line would be discomfiting for the male reader. She mockingly suggests they would undo this ‘weak knot’ by arguing that the Greeks (who it should be remembered initiated the epic tradition) ‘did nought, but play the fools and lie’. The opening line of the seventh stanza is highly ambivalent. ‘Let Greeks, be Greeks’, could be interpreted as: They would be regarded as the initiators of great male traditions or fools and liars to suit the male readers arguments. ‘(Let) women (be) what they are’ sees Bradstreet unwilling to fix the female position, woman remains undefined. There is a sense that her perception of women differs greatly from the accepted patriarchal model. Her tone suggests there is little point in arguing as ‘Men have precedency’ and will assume supremacy. Her poem seeks to subtly subvert the male tradition. The final stanza appears to return to the predominantly defensive manner of the opening – men write with ‘high flown quills’, she writes ‘lowly lines’. However, the tone is so hyperbolic it lacks sincerity and the poem culminates with an ironic couplet: ‘This mean and unrefined ore of mine/ Will make your glist’ring gold but more to shine.’ In truth, Bradstreet’s Prologue does not exist as an inferior version of male poetry, which benefits from the comparison. On the contrary, her poem undermines the male poetic tradition. She cultivates a female voice to question and subvert the patriarchal literary system from within its core. A significant aspect of Bradstreet’s poetry is her attitude towards religion. The Puritan theology of the community in which she wrote was one which placed great emphasis on the omnipotence of God. The Puritan ideology was imbued with a strong belief that God had the ultimate power to decide who would be saved and who would be damned. There existed a widespread belief in Providence – that all events and actions were part of God’s pre-ordained masterplan. Puritanism allowed few opportunities for challenging traditional beliefs which expected women to have an immovable, unquestioning faith. Two centuries after Bradstreet, the importance of faith in women’s lives, and in particular their passive relationship with religion, is conveyed by Horace Bushnall. He tells his daughter, in 1845, ‘a woman should be a Christian….whose character can be finished only by assimilation to God’10 Anne Bradstreet’s more personal poems, particularly those that deal with the death of her grandchildren, offer an important insight into her relationship with God. They capture some of the difficulty she has reconciling the death of three of her grandchildren with a God who is ‘merciful as well as just’. The poems convey the feelings of a sensitive, bereaved grandmother who is trying to express herself within the oppressive confines of a religious structure underpinned by the belief that everything that happens is the will of God and therefore right and good. On the death of Elizabeth in 1665, the author is almost admonishing herself for grieving: ‘why should I once bewail thy fate.’ In this poem the dominant view is that God must not be challenged and Bradstreet is able to accept Elizabeth’s death. Following the death of Anne, another Grandchild, four years later, Bradstreet finds the infants death less easy to accept. ‘Was ever stable joy yet found below/ Or perfect bliss without mixture of woe?’ The mere presence of question marks conveys the change of tone. The poet is reminded of her own mortality, ‘I shall go to thee.’ After the death of Simon, less than half a year later, Bradstreet’s grief is infused with angry undertones. God is viewed as an Almighty Harvester; the image of Him cropping the children is quite different to a hand ‘that guides nature and fate’. The underlying notion that God is just seems less convincing here – ‘yet is he good’. There is a strong sense that though Bradstreet writes ‘let’s not dispute’, she really wants to do the reverse. Though overtly affirming her faith in God, as in much of her poetry, she conveys her meaning as much through implication as that which is openly stated. Two hundred years later, women writer’s in America were still thought of as intruders in a male domain. Rebecca Harding Davis’ principal work, Life in the Iron Mills, despite being proclaimed ‘one of the revolutionary documents in American writing’,11 has remained until recently, like its author, in literary obscurity. Tillie Olsen, writing in Silences, claims of this groundbreaking writer, ‘Few have read any of her work; fewer still teach any of it.’12 Rebecca Harding Davis was born in 1831 and, although she received a middle class upbringing, the dual oppressions of slavery and the factory system were never far from her mind. Highly affected by the miserable world around her she wrote Life in the Iron Mills, the story of an iron worker Hugh Wolfe. The grim descriptiveness of the work places it in the vanguard of realism, despite its first publication as early as 1861. Harding would have little time for ‘the exploits of innumerable and pious heroines’:13 You want something… to lift you out of this crowded, tobacco stained commonplace, to kindle and chafe a glow in you. I want you to dig into this commonplace, this vulgar American life, and see what is in it. Sometimes I think it has a raw and awful significance that we do not see.14 Life in the Iron Mills opens with the vision of a woman looking out of a window. This is a highly symbolic image: Davis is a woman and middle class, protected from the ‘massed vile, slimy lives’(p.2412) but at the same time she is caged like the canary beside her. The window is an ambivalent boundary, simultaneously shielding and entrapping. The text too has something of an ambiguous quality. It is both the window that lets one see out but at the same time the barrier that stops one getting out. For Davis, the reader cannot get close enough, ‘I want you to come right down here with me, here, into the thickest of the fog and mud and foul effluvia.’(p.2412) Outside the window Davis sees a faceless populace lacking individuality, ‘only the outline of a dull life, that long since with thousands of dull lives like its own, was vainly lived and lost.’(p.2412) Davis’ depiction of women is one that runs contrary to many of the representations of females in the literature of the time. While much popular fiction was trying to ‘lift out’ of the commonplace with genteel, feminine heroines, the central female image in Davis’ text is Hugh Wolfe’s construction the Korl-Woman: There was not one line of beauty or grace in it: a nude woman’s form, muscular, grown coarse with labor, the powerful limbs instinct with some poignant longing. (p.2421) This figure stands in rude opposition to the prescriptive projection of women of the day, she is hewn from waste material, that which society discards. It is through this form that Wolfe can convey what he calls a ‘hunger’. ‘Not hungry for meat’ but ‘Summat to make her live’.(p.2422) It is significant that the figure which carries the texts central message is, paradoxically, a silent woman. For although Davis is overtly illustrating the cruelties of the ever-growing factory system, as a woman she is aware of the parallels between herself and her central character, Wolfe. As Olsen points out in Silences, Davis was unlikely to have found that boarding school education provided her with the ’stimulus, exploration, range and substance’ her mind required: ‘The ardent “hunger to know” (later ascribed to Hugh Wolfe and other fictional people) was already deep in Rebecca.’15 Throughout the text there is a sense that Davis is thinking not just of the factory workers, or using them purely as a metaphor for the contemporary issue of slavery, but she is acutely aware of the repression of her own sex. Wolfe himself can be viewed as an icon of the female struggle against patriarchy. Harding emphasises Wolfe’s femininity: his face is a ‘woman’s face’, ‘In the mill he was known as one of the girl-men: “Molly Wolfe”‘.(p.2417) Just as Hugh, whose name is appropriately a homonym of ‘hew’, must carve out this magnificent statue, so Harding must hew her text from the raw materials beyond the window. Both are looking for a voice, both are creators, despite the constraints society places upon them because of their class or gender. Wolfe’s anger stems from the realisation of his wasted potential; the realisation that he is trapped in the mill by his class. Harding is trapped behind the window by her sex and so the canary is trapped in the cage, its desolate chirp a parallel of Wolfe’s sculpture and Harding’s writing. The writings of both Anne Bradstreet and Rebecca Harding Davis, though separated by two centuries, have common themes. Faced with a literary establishment that is hostile to women writers and a patriarchal culture that has a strict notion of femininity, these two writers have turned to their observations and experiences to find a female voice. Bradstreet is not prepared to accept that women do not have the right to write and refuses to unquestioningly accept Puritanism like the ‘docile child’.16 Similarly, Davis will not draw the curtain across the window and write of ‘pious heroines’17- ‘I open the window’ (p.2411) and ‘I live in the commonplace’.18 The most real American female is not that male-constructed image of the pious, domestic, submissive woman. It is Wolfe’s Korl-Woman, continually being carefully carved out then destroyed, always with that elusive look – a hunger for ‘Summat to make her live.’ REFERENCES 1. Silences Tillie Olsen -Delaware Press (New York, 1978) p.55 2.Dimity Convictions Barbara Welter -Ohio University Press (Athens ,1976) p.71 3.The Feminization of American Culture Ann Douglas -Alfred A. Knopf inc.(New York, !978) p.44 4. Welter, p.72 5. Ibid., p.58 6. Ibid., p.57 7. Douglas, p.3 8. The Norton Anthology of American Literature vol.1 Norton & Co. inc. (New York, 1989) p.92 9. Ibid., p.92 10. Douglas, p.44 11. Norton, p.2410 12. Olsen, p.113 13. see 6. 14. Norton, p.2409 15. Olsen, p.53 16. see 3. 17 see 6. 18 Olsen, p.61 BIBLIOGRAPHY Douglas, Ann The Feminization of American Culture Alfred A. Knopf. (New York, 1978) Olsen, Tillie Silences Delaware Press (New York, 1978) Welter, Barbara Dimity Convictions Ohio University Press (Athens, 1976) The Norton Anthology of American Literature vol.1 Norton & Co. inc. (New York, 1989) .