[In the following essay, Duus suggests that realist fiction of the late nineteenth century allowed for more variety in the representation of women than previously possible.]

In “Seduced and Abandoned in the New World,” Wendy Martin argues that American heroines, the daughters of Eve, “are destined to lives of dependency and servitude as well as to painful and sorrowful childbirth because, like their predecessor, they have dared to disregard authority or tradition in the search for wisdom or happiness.”¹ This generalization, like many generalizations about American fiction, proves out if one limits oneself to the novels of Cooper, Hawthorne, James, and Hemingway, but it necessitates ignoring a very large number of other writers, particularly those exploring new fictional modes in the late nineteenth century. While it is true that the realists held to the notion that marriage is sacred and that the possibility of independence for female characters remained limited, they at least allowed for a greater variety of individuality in the women so entrapped. James's “chill winds of change” blew equally on men and women.

As early as 1862, Rebecca Harding Davis in Margret Howth / A Story of To-day, takes a step toward providing an accurate picture of the commonplace life of the American woman. The novel is understandably much neglected in favor of Mrs. Davis' “Life in the Iron Mills,” which, by virtue of being shorter, is more tolerable to read. The plot is negligible, the characters sketchy, and the prose awesomely bad. The heroine, Margret Howth, is a Virginia-born girl, who, with her elderly parents, has migrated to a mill town in Indiana. Margret is forced to work as a bookkeeper in the mill to support her parents since her father, a former school teacher, is going blind. Two years before the action begins, Margret has been jilted by—or has jilted, it is not entirely clear—Stephen Holmes because she stands in the way of his ambition to make a great deal of money. He has now returned to buy half interest in the factory in which Margret works, using a loan from a man whose daughter he has agreed to marry. Ultimately, the uninsured factory burns down and Holmes, a wiser, though considerably less interesting man, is restored to the arms of Margret, his first and finer love. The chief instrument of reconciliation is Lois, a crippled, semi-imbecilic Negro girl, whose father is an ex-con, who repeats with appalling frequency in the face of overwhelming odds, including her own dying, that “It's all going to come right.” And indeed it does, because in the last pages of the novel, oil is discovered on the Howth land; and the young couple can presumably look forward to “carpets an' bunnets, an' slithers of railroad stock.”

This is standard sentimental fare, and yet, having acknowledged this, one is obliged to recognize the degree to which Mrs. Davis anticipates both the theory and the practice of later realists. In an apology for the crudeness and homeliness of the tale, Mrs. Davis attacks her readers' preference for “idylls delicately tinted; passion-veined hearts, cut bare for curious eyes”: “You want something, in fact, to lift you out of this crowded, tobacco-stained commonplace, to kindle and chafe and 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 new and awful significance that we do not see.”² She objects to the notion that all heroines “glide into life full-charged with rank, virtues, a name three-syllabled, and a white dress that never needs washing” or that “all peasants are old women miraculously grateful, in neat check aprons.”³ She proposes that spinsters are “mixed generally, and not unlike their married sisters” as far as she can see, and she makes no judgment on the fifteen-year-old factory girl who drinks herself to death because her lover was killed in a mill accident.

Her heroine, Margret, is the essential domestic “blonde” heroine, but in fact she is a quiet, dark girl with a dull skin and dead-dull eyes, who obviously bears some physical resemblance to the scrawny and miserable chicken who shares her office. Further, she has a complicated inner life. She has moments of real truculence about the sacrifices she has been forced to make and grows pettish on busy days. She feels balked and thwarted by the bleakness of her working world and the “white leprosy of poverty” that characterizes her desolate and shabby home. She is aware of a pain different from her own, to be discovered in the grim poverty of the alleys and dens inhabited by the factory workers, through which she passes, but puts aside whatever social wrong or mystery faces her in a creature like Lois, whose mind has been destroyed by the din of the factory looms. She does not, in short, take the normal route of those disappointed in love by throwing herself vigorously into charitable works. She is neither saint nor sinner, nor does she provide an improving model for her female readers. She is simply a girl who has been disappointed in love and tries as best she can to cope with this fact.

Mrs. Davis can not, unfortunately, release her character from the old formula that the only true source of happiness is marriage; and, for all we know, in Margret's case this formula will work. The oil in the back yard is likely to smooth the path for Margret and her husband, a man whose “fingers thrill with pleasure to touch a full pocket-book as well as his mistress's hand.” But one may legitimately wonder what the marriage will be like since Margret, when she and Holmes meet again after two years, recognizes that he would crush the life out of her if it would serve his purposes, even though he might regret having to do so. Later realists would explore more fully the cruelty of the idea that marriage brings happiness. One thinks of the terrible confusions of Marcia Gaylord and Trina McTeague in their relationships with their husbands.

But Margret is most interesting as a character when she finds herself without a goal, for it is in this condition that the plight of women is most keenly felt. If she is not going to be married, as it seems for a while she might not, what is there for her to do with her energy besides work as a bookkeeper in a factory? Knowles, a utopian reformer with an interesting taint of Indian blood, wants to transform this virgin into a dynamo by making her part of his scheme for the future. But Margret isn't interested, and Knowles is attacked for talking about her as if she were a machine. Henry Adams explores the same problem for a woman of a different social class in Democracy, Madeline Lee, the precursor of the dissatisfied modern woman, is stripped of her function as wife and mother and is dissatisfied with philanthropy. In her quest for an alternate goal for her energies, she is permanently damaged and left without an objective. Although she can afford to flee to Egypt, whereas Margret must go to work every day, they are sisters in their needs. Kate Chopin's Edna Pontellier, though she has the will to break out of her marriage, is left finally without an acceptable goal on which to expend her artistic gifts and emotional energies.

Wendy Martin worries about the effect of fiction on the female psyche; she worries that it will contribute to women's self doubt. Our novelists ought to provide a different model for women, “a new Eve, a woman who is self-actualizing, strong, risk-taking, and independent but also capable of loving and being loved.”⁴ It is true that the realists do not provide such models; perhaps that is one reason they are called realists. Occasionally one finds in the work of a writer like Jack London examples of women who find personal liberation within the framework of love and marriage. Maud Brewster has a literary reputation in her own right and, though invincibly moral, demonstrates considerable competence during the interlude on the seal island; Avis Everhard is as successful an agent provacateur as her husband and seems to enjoy the role thoroughly. But this is not the norm of female experience. In their quest for verisimilitude, objectively rendered, it was inevitable that the realists call attention to the social and economic limitations imposed on women. It was left for Dreiser to show that being seduced might prove a profitable venture and that a woman might as easily abandon as be abandoned; but the justification for Carrie's action rests in our knowledge that there were few alternatives open to her, an idea made acceptable by the less daring writers who preceded him.

Notes

1. Wendy Martin, “Seduced and Abandoned in the New World: The Fallen Woman in American Fiction,” in The American Sisterhood, ed. Wendy Martin (NY: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 258.

2. Rebecca Harding Davis, Margret Howth / A Story of To-day (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1862), p. 6.

3. Davis, pp. 102-103.

4. Martin, p. 271.