Or: Why I Write About Obscure Early American Women Writers

Angela Vietto

fell in love with Wuthering Heights, and then with Emily Bronte, when I was nine. Browsing in the dim light of Murphy’s five-and-ten, I snatched up the nearly square black college textbook as soon as I saw the price: 25 cents. I’d never heard of the book or its author, but the title and the romantic, crackled portrait of Bronte on the cover attracted me, and for a quarter, any book was a deal. I took it home and read it cover-to-cover, first the editor’s introduction and chronology of Bronte’s life, then Charlotte Bronte’s introduction to her sister’s novel, and finally the novel itself.

What I remember from the introductory material is biography. The sisters’ choice of gender-neutral pseudonyms struck me as consummately clever, and their childhood especially fascinated me. I could sympathize with the isolation in which the young Brontes found themselves; I pictured vividly the siblings’ collaboration on fantastic tales that constructed an alternative

reality. Walking along the half-frozen river by the fenced-off industrial park where no one else walked on a Saturday, I could imagine the starkness of solitude that led the Brontes to create imaginary worlds. An only child, I yearned for sisters or a brother like Branwell with whom to dream up a landscape different from the bleak rustbelt reality of Pittsburgh in the 70s. In fantasy, Emily became that sister, the closest thing I ever had to an imaginary friend.

So I read my “sister’s” novel very attentively. Though I knew the world of the novel must have resembled the real social world Emily Bronte inhabited, I was also amazed by Emily’s ability to create characters who were larger than life yet somehow real and a story that seemed almost epic but played itself out in the confined space of a tiny community. I knew no one was really like Cathy or Heathcliff; I knew it was all incredible and even, on some level, corny—and yet as I read the novel, it all seemed compellingly real. Cathy’s impetuosity and stubbornness appealed to me, a tractable and docile child, and one of the reasons I read the book rapidly four times in a row was that I would have liked to be Cathy. But far more I worshipped Bronte, who had imagined and created all of it, who had, it seemed to me, defied so many attempts to limit her, who had asserted her intellectual independence by imagining a world more dramatic than the one in which she lived, by making her alter-ego Cathy (for so I imagined the author’s relationship to her character) the subject of an undying love and thereby making both Cathy and Emily immortal, by publishing a book that Charlotte Bronte’s Introduction told me she and readers of her day had found wild and strange. That I had not been born in the same time and place as Emily Bronte seemed incredible, so fervently did I believe in our kinship of spirit.

This pattern repeated itself throughout my adolescent and teenage reading. I fell in love with more authors in those years than I did boys. Alcott and her Jo, of course, for the same reasons as Emily and Cathy; Mark Twain for his marketing of himself; Dreiser for his political earnestness; Lawrence for what seemed to me then his fearlessness in the face of Victorian repression; Dostoyevsky for the depth and complexity of his thought, for his moral rigor, for the great artistry that I could sense but not explain in the tapestries of his novels; Whitman for his palpable greatness of heart. I’d enjoy a book, learn about its author, fall in love, and read everything else I could get my hands on by that writer. The only break in that pattern came when I fell in love with Joyce, having met him through Dubliners, and then returned to the library to find nothing on the shelf but Finnegans Wake, over which my father and I laughed in disbelief before I gave up. But I had decided I loved Joyce, so I gave it my best try.

(A moment of anxiety occurs for me here: I imagine this story sounds familiar to anyone in our profession. Why write about my merely personal experience as a reader? I think of the advice I was given when going on the job market—“No one wants to know where your work came from, we just want to know whether it’s any good”; I think of the far more compelling and unusual story about reading Marty Scott tells in his essay “On Stealing Books”; I think of the very learned and sophisticated analyses that colleagues like Jad Smith and Chris Kuipers have presented in these virtual pages—and I fear that I’m wasting your time. But this anxiety over the personal, over the very thing that draws me to our work, is what I set out to get at here, so I choose to press on with the merely personal, the merely individual, the untheorized, a bit longer.)

Mind you, I was doing all this reading and loving without any idea that it would be my profession. A series of surprises led me to major in English, and suddenly I was surrounded by professional readers. I was grateful to learn that there were ways to make a living that included loving books as part of the job description, but a bit saddened that many of my teachers disapproved of loving authors. I learned about the Intentional Fallacy; I learned to say “writer” rather than “author” since the writer was to be accorded no particular authority; I learned that most of my professors scorned the biographical enthusiasms of the department Joycean as “unprofessional” and “fanatical.”

Only my creative writing teachers, it seemed, thought it was okay to love writers. One of my favorites, John Balaban, was particularly addicted to biographical anecdotes, and as I recall some of the stories he told, I realize they’ve probably been embroidered, whether by him or by my own memory I’m not sure. One I recall in particular was about Theodore Roethke, who had taught on our campus briefly early in his career. Balaban told us that campus lore held that Roethke got such bad nerves before teaching that he vomited before every class, and that once his own students had observed him just before their class, disgorging his breakfast in the bushes outside Sackett Building—the very building in which we sat. I fell in love with Roethke on the spot and read every word of his I could find. But when I wrote about Roethke for another class, I took care to hide my unprofessional, deep affection for the greenhouse owner’s son.

With the exception of creative writing classes, then, as an undergraduate I had tacitly accepted the need to hide my love for authors and focus on the text, the whole text, and nothing but the text. When I returned to graduate school after a brief hiatus I discovered that while I was out, the Author had died, something called Theory had happened, and it became necessary, or so I thought, finally to internalize what seemed to be the profession’s official position: that authors as people did not count and that caring about them was irrelevant, if not downright embarrassing.

I worked hard at it. When I started feeling pretty friendly and sisterly toward Margaret Fuller, I made myself write a seminar paper in which I analyzed how Woman in the Nineteenth Century unavoidably reinscribed the binary gender system it ostensibly opposed. The night I finished that paper I dreamed of Fuller drowning, but I shook it off in the morning, turned in my paper, and congratulated myself when it came back with high praise. I could, it seemed, overcome my weakness and emerge a professional.

(Now I hear Chris Hanlon’s voice reminding me that historicism dominates the field and that biography is an integral part of that approach; can I really have believed I had to renounce it to be professional? Yet it’s not so much biography that I was driven to renounce as emotion—the problem with talking about loving an author as a person is that you’re talking about feelings rather than analysis. And biography for its own sake savors of hero worship a little too much when we’re trying to establish ourselves as objective analysts.)

When I’m asked why I chose to specialize in early American literature, I often respond by talking about the excitement of the Revolutionary era, the sense of possibility and the construction of an imaginary national identity. In the context of my struggle to overcome loving authors, though, this choice makes even more sense. On one hand, many of the canonical writers of colonial and Revolutionary America are people with whom I distinctly do not sympathize or identify. Conversely, much of the literature of the era is autobiography or biography of some kind—from Cotton Mather’s biographies of colonial heroes to Franklin’s immortalization of himself, life narrative is central to the field. Early American literature offered me at least two easy ways to cope with my predilection for falling in love with authors: write about texts penned by authors for whom I didn’t care much personally, or make life writing itself my subject.

That’s not how things worked out, though. The reason is simple: I found a group of early American writers for whom I couldn’t help but feel great affection, not only because I loved their works, but also because I found them admirable and intriguing people. I ran into these women first when working with my mentor Carla Mulford and then-fellow-graduate student Amy Winans to edit a volume of the Dictionary of Literary Biography covering American women prose writers before 1820. I took on an entry that none of our contributors claimed, on a writer to whom I’d never paid much attention, Leonora Sansay. I had looked briefly at Sansay’s novels and found them enjoyable and interesting, but I was hooked once I began to learn about her life—a narrative that I had to trace primarily in the footnotes of the papers of Aaron Burr, with whom she had an affair of a few years in the 1790s that was continued in epistolary form for decades more. If it hadn’t been for Sansay’s connections to Burr, in fact, her novels would remain anonymous productions of “A Lady of Philadelphia” and there would be virtually no traces of her life.

And what a life—an American married to a French Haitian coffee planter who traveled to Haiti during the last years of the Revolution there—a woman who, when she found her marriage stifling, separated from her husband for the remainder of her life and made her financial way alone—a woman of many ambitions, who, it seems, expected to be part of the upper echelons of society had Aaron Burr succeeded in his takeover of western territories—and, of course, a woman of literary ambition, who left behind her at least two fascinating novels and dozens of sparkling letters. That such a life should be lived and virtually forgotten seemed as wrong as that Sansay’s remarkable novels had never been reprinted.

The details of Sansay’s life were so fugitive that tracing her biography remained a pet project for me long after the DLB volume was finished. I also became aware of a number of other women writers whose lives were as fascinating as their works, all of them, it seemed to me, too much ignored by literary history and criticism. When Carla noted that my enthusiasm for these women suggested they’d make a good dissertation topic, predictably, I resisted. It simply couldn’t be right, I felt instinctively, to write about people I thought of so fondly. Having fun writing your dissertation had to be wrong. More coherent resistance grew out of my conversations with other young feminists about “second wave” and “third wave” approaches and attitudes: working on women writers simply because they’d been ignored was, I had by

then become convinced, pointless and even potentially harmful. And the notion of writing a separate literary history of women writers was also dangerous: the time to integrate men’s and women’s literary history was now.

By degrees, I became convinced that most of these arguments were misguided. There was no need to write about mediocre women writers simply because they had been ignored: there were plenty of stellar, fascinating writers like Judith Sargent Murray, Sarah Wentworth Morton, Annis Boudinot Stockton and Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson who had been mostly ignored. (Here I’ll stop for one final moment of anxiety, remembering a question, a legitimate one, asked me by a senior colleague: Are these writers really any good? The short answer is Yes. Eighteenth-century aesthetics are obviously not what most of us have grown up on, but if you can enjoy eighteenth-century poetry, you’ll find Morton, Stockton, and Fergusson clever and lively; if you enjoy Addison and Steele, you’ll enjoy Murray. And I was gratified no end when my graduate students last spring told me, and seemed sincere, that they enjoyed Leonora Sansay’s novel more than any other we had read—despite the fact that we read two novels by Charles Brockden Brown, still called by some the “father of the American novel.”)

Moreover, while it may indeed be high time for literary history to take full account of the works of both men and women, in early American literary history it was still possible for a work like Michael Warner’s Letters of the Republic to become a standard despite the fact that it seriously skews literary history by discussing women writers only as novelists, and only during the 1790s—a misrepresentation that lends credence to arguments about the “feminization” of American culture in the nineteenth century. As Margaret Ezell has argued persuasively in Writing Women’s Literary History, accounts of women writers within standard literary histories have been so driven by the nineteenth century as a standard—and so fueled by the myth of Judith Shakespeare—that women writers, even when they worked in what were clearly groups and even schools, have tended to be treated as exceptions and anomalies unless they fit a particular historiographical narrative.

In the case of early American literature, that story has run something like this: Women did not participate in literary culture in meaningful numbers until the 1790s (Bradstreet, of course, being treated as entirely exceptional, along with a few others). The impetus toward the development of an American literature in the 1790s gave rise to increased American authorship of novels treating typically “female” themes like seduction and marriage—and thus, women were “able” to break into print and were welcomed into the fold of American literature for the first time.

Whatever the merits or demerits of linear narratives of literary history, surely, I became convinced, correcting such a misrepresentation of the past was worthwhile. After all, our understanding—and our students’ understanding—of what it means to be a writer, of what the value of literary work might be, and how we can identify it—is based at least in part on our understanding of the past. The myth of Judith Shakespeare, as Ezell points out, is more than just an inaccuracy: it gives rise to seriously mistaken notions of the past, which may in turn color perceptions of the present. If we miss the fact, for example, that significant numbers of women of the Revolutionary era participated in political and social critique; if we do not know that Mercy Otis Warren’s propaganda plays were second in importance only to Common Sense; if we ignore the fact that women circulated political manuscripts in a society in which high prestige was still associated with manuscript rather than print culture; if we ignore these facts, then we can see nineteenth-century women’s participation in abolition and suffrage movements as something new, as an unequivocal mark of progress in women’s ability to speak. And we may mistakenly accept the Enlightenment view of history: that humankind is always getting better and better. And from accepting that notion to abandoning the vigilance required by democracy is a short and easy step, one I think too many Americans have already taken.

All this made it easy for me to change my mind and write a dissertation on Revolutionary American women’s political writing, and more recently to transform my interest in these women into my current broader project of revisionary literary history, a book tentatively titled Women and Authorship in Revolutionary America. What I still can’t do in that book, though, is to admit that, even if there were no need to correct literary history more broadly, I would still feel that these women deserved a book of their own, recognition of their lives and careers that has mostly been inadequate so far.

I hear my earlier self telling me that’s sentimental and by no means objective. I can only agree and confess that I’m not here for objective reasons. I’ll go even further and assert that although yes, texts live lives separate from their authors and are susceptible to interpretations of which their authors would not approve, and yes, texts take on different resonances and meanings for readers at a remove of time and yes, those things are worth analyzing—still, literature is the only means we have of speaking with the dead. There are people behind those texts, and the reason it’s so hard for younger students to stop talking about what an author intended is that it’s intuitive to think of texts as intentional objects created by real people. And so it’s intuitive, too, to think that reading might have something to do with hearing from or getting to know those people, and that there’s something intrinsically valuable about that.

That intuitive understanding of reading as having something to do with getting to know the person behind the text was already ingrained in me at the young age of nine. I recognize just how ingrained as I look back now at that copy of Wuthering Heights, the one with the introduction that I remembered all the biographical information from. There’s actually remarkably little biography there. The introduction, by Frederick T. Flahiff, is a classic piece of structural criticism, with the expressed goal of “demonstrating the unity of Wuthering Heights.” The biography that I remember learning from the introduction actually appears only in brief hints in a timeline of Bronte’s life and in Charlotte Bronte’s Introduction. Those brief hints, though, were what I as a young and inexperienced reader chose to cling to, the things I built my love for Emily Bronte around. It would be easy, I guess, to write that off to adolescent enthusiasm. I think it’s more true, though, to acknowledge that, no matter the inherent problems in thinking of literature as communication, connecting writers and readers is one of the things literature does. And that connection has the potential to change minds, lives, and dare I say the world when it results in admiration, respect, and yes, even love.