Whittier, John Greenleaf - James E. Rocks (essay date 1993)
James E. Rocks (essay date 1993)
SOURCE: "Whittier's Snow-Bound: The Circle of Our Hearth and the Discourse on Domesticity," in Studies in the American Renaissance 1993, edited by Joel Myerson, University Press of Virginia, 1993, pp. 339-53.
[In the following excerpt, Rocks relates Whittier's poem Snow-Bound to nineteenth-century debates on home and family.]
When John Greenleaf Whittier's younger sister Elizabeth, the companion of his mature years, died on 3 September 1864, he suffered a loss no less severe than if a wife of many years had died. More sociable than her shy brother, Elizabeth had been at the center of his life, the person whose support had helped nurture a public career of considerable success and fame and a private domestic life of exceptional warmth and security. Writing to his wide circle of friends, particularly to Gail Hamilton, Grace Greenwood, and Lydia Maria Child, he expressed the profound depression...
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