SOURCE: "Anna Cora Ogden Mowatt Ritchie's Fairy Fingers: From Eugène Scribe's?" in Text and Performance Quarterly, Vol. 2, April, 1989, 125-34.

On March 29, 1858, Les Doigts de fée (in English, Fairy Fingers) opened at the Comédie française to dismal reviews. Undeterred, French audiences flocked to see this latest play by Eugène Scribe, and publishers immediately offered it to the reading public.¹ Once again Scribe, the father of the well-made play, had a hit on his hands.²

In August 1860, Anna Cora Ogden Mowatt Ritchie, author of Fashion, arrived in Paris.³ The recent death of her father, the serious illness of her sister, and—perhaps most important of all—the dallying of her new husband with a slave woman had driven her to leave America for France. In Paris and in need of money, she planned "to eke out an existence with her pen."⁴ Almost at once she began work on a novel, a work that she continued after her move to Florence (June 1861) and completed during her visit to New York (1862-1864). By the time ill health forced her return to Florence (1864), the novel, Fairy Fingers, had been accepted for publication. It appeared in 1865.⁵

Are the two Fairy Fingers mere coincidence? Almost certainly not. As evidence, let us consider this unlikely story:

Madelaine, an orphan of aristocratic but poor stock, lives in Brittany with a dowager countess and her son (the count), and Bertha, another orphan—who, unlike Madelaine, is rich. The count's son, Maurice, secretly loves Madelaine; a young French businessman, Gaston, secretly loves Bertha. Regrettably, the countess and count intend that Maurice will wed Bertha.

Madelaine believes that she cannot confess her love or marry Maurice without the count's and the countess's blessing; therefore, Maurice does not know that his love is requited. Likewise, Gaston, thinking that he is not good enough for Bertha, does not declare his love and learn that it is also requited. The count's marriage plans for Maurice and Bertha cause Madelaine, aided by Gaston, to run away. Maurice frantically searches for her, following leads of jewelry, dresses, and handkerchiefs first to London, then Paris, and finally Dresden, where he at last receives a note from Madelaine asking him to abandon his search. He resolves to do so.

Madelaine, now using the name Mlle. Melanie, flees to America and opens a dress shop that quickly becomes the talk of fashionable Washington society. Even while she was living with the count and countess, Madelaine had displayed such magical dexterity with needles and thread that she was called "Fairy Fingers."

Meanwhile, the count, the countess, Bertha, Gaston, and assorted friends decide to go to America, where Maurice owns land that a railway may buy for a new track. Because the location of the new track will be decided by a committee of nine prominent men, Maurice gives his father power of attorney and sends him to Washington to secure the votes. The count so misuses the power of attorney that soon the railroad track must be secured or the family will be ruined—disgraced and bankrupt.

Maurice and the count are at the home of a Washington socialite, seeking her husband's vote, when Mlle. Melanie arrives to deliver a breathtakingly beautiful ball gown. All but Gaston are shocked to learn that the famous Mlle. Melanie is in fact their Madelaine. Discovering her new American influence, the count pleads with her to help secure the votes for the railroad so that Maurice can repay the loan. Madelaine agrees, delivers the necessary votes, and repays the loan herself, using money intended for the last installment on her own home.

The countess is enraged to learn that a poor relative has rescued the family from scandal and ruin. The count falls ill. Madelaine takes him home to nurse, even remodeling her home so the countess can visit unobserved. But the countess grows angrier still, because Madelaine refuses to marry a wealthy nobleman, refuses to close her dress shop, and continues to care for the count in her home. The countess determines to take everyone but Madelaine back to Brittany.

The impending separation finally causes Madelaine to declare her love for Maurice. The count gives his consent to the marriage—and dies. The countess, overcome with grief, collapses. A huge ornamented curtain crashes down, and Madelaine hurls herself over the countess to protect her. The countess awakens and sees a bleeding Madelaine. She then relents and gives permission for Madelaine and Maurice to marry. Bertha and Gaston, who had refused to wed until Maurice and Madelaine could join them in a double ceremony, embrace.

The family is reconciled; the complications are resolved; the young lovers are married; and the countess returns happily to Brittany—alone.

This improbable tale encompasses the plot of Anna Cora Ogden Mowatt Ritchie's novel, Fairy Fingers. The novel, long even by standards of its day (fifty-seven chapters, made up of four hundred sixty "fine printed pages"),⁶ shares both the story and many lengthy verbatim sections with Scribe's play.

The structural relationship between the novel and the play is quite clear. The first seven chapters of Mowatt's novel are the first two acts of Scribe's play, and her chapters twenty-one through thirty-four are his third, fourth, and fifth acts—except that the play's last two scenes are Mowatt's chapters thirty-eight and fifty-two, respectively. A chart can clarify the overall pattern (see Figure 1). Brief sections from the novel and the play can illustrate their verbatim relationship (see Appendix A).

I cannot account for the structural and verbatim similarities with certainty. Three possibilities exist: Mowatt drew from Scribe; Scribe drew from Mowatt; they both drew from a third source. The only compelling argument for either of the last two explanations is that Scribe's play, Les Doigts de fée, is quite atypical of his other works. It is more obviously episodic, more rambling, and more sentimental than his typical well-made plays and so might be presumed to draw on some other work, probably a novel.⁷

The weight of evidence, however, clearly favors the first possibility: that is, Mowatt drew from Scribe. The evidence is briefly this:

(1) Scribe's play was first performed at the Comédie française in 1858 and published immediately; Mowatt's novel was not published until 1865.

(2) Mowatt lived in Paris in 1860. Born and raised in France, she spoke and read French fluently. She certainly had access to Scribe's published text, and, because she was both an actor and playwright, her interest in such a text can be safely assumed.⁸

NOVEL (MOWATT)	PLAY (SCRIBE)
I	1, i, ii, iii, iv, part of v
II	1,vii
III	2,vii; 1,viii in part
IV	1,viii; 2,iv; 2,iii
V	2,i,ii
VI	2,iv, v, vi, vii, viii
VII	2,viii, ix, x
VIII-XIX
XX	similar to 4,x, xiii; 3,iii
XXI	similar to 3,iv
XXII	3,x, xi, xii, xiii, xiv, xv
XXIII	3,xvi, xvii
XXIV	4,i, ii, iii, iv
XXV	4,v vi
XXVI	4,vii, viii, ix
XXVII	similar to 4,x
XXVIII	4,xi, xii, xiii
XXIX	4,xii, xv
XXX	5,i, iv, x
XXXI	5,xi
XXXII	5,v
XXXIII	5,xi, xii in part
XXXIV	5,ii, vi
XXXV	mostly new, but also 5,vii
XXXVI-XXXVII
XXXVIII	mostly new, but also 5,xii in part
XXXIX-LI
LII	5,xii in part
LIII-LVI

(3) Mowatt was, in the early 1860s, desperately seeking money. She even considered a return to acting, which, with her writing, had supported the family when her first husband, Mr. Mowatt, had lost his money. It seems reasonable to speculate that she felt pressured to write something quickly in order to get paid quickly.

(4) Mowatt had before lifted materials, unattributed, from other sources. When her play Armand was first in rehearsal, for example, one critic noticed a "strong resemblance to a passage in Byron's Sardanopolus."⁹ Mowatt said the resemblance was unintentional and offered to change it. By contrast, Scribe had a reputation for crediting even the most casual contributions to his plays, citing as co-authors people who contributed only an idea to the finished product.¹⁰

(5) I have located neither a third source nor references to such a source.

If we can assume that Mowatt used Scribe's play as the basis of her novel, we have a rare opportunity to explore the choices made by an experienced writer. Through her choices, we can glimpse major formal differences between a novel and a play and major social differences between Mowatt's nineteenth-century world and our own. We can, as well, seek insights into Mowatt the writer and Mowatt the woman.

Many of her changes resulted from the formal differences between a novel and a play. For example, Scribe's play (like all plays) could rely on scenery to establish locale (scenery that needed to be only briefly described in stage directions), but Mowatt's novel (like any novel) had to substitute detailed descriptions of each location—various European drawing rooms, an American dress shop, a sick room in a private home, and so on. Whereas Scribe (like any dramatist) could depend on the actors' physical appearance and the details of their costumes for basic characterization, Mowatt (like all novelists) needed to construct portraits of each character with words and, with words, to clothe them. Again in keeping with the formal differences between plays and novels, Scribe as playwright could depend on his actors to embody emotions and relationships that Mowatt as novelist had to describe in detail. It is testament to Mowatt's confidence in writing both plays and novels that she seems to have made the conversion from a play to a novel so surely.

Quite apart from changes occasioned by the shift from the form play to the form novel were others that were more clearly matters of personal choice. Of such changes, four major categories can be adduced.

First, Mowatt lengthened the novel by multiplying the number of complications, introducing many incidents not present in Scribe's work. For example, Scribe closed his second act with Fairy Fingers' running away from home, and he opened his third act with the family's assembling at the fashionable residence to which Fairy Fingers would bring the ball gown and so be recognized. Moving between the same two points, Mowatt introduced fourteen chapters detailing Maurice's frantic searches, false leads, new friendships, serious illness, early career as a lawyer, and trip to America, as well as tracing his family's reasons for joining him there. Again, Scribe moved briskly to the eve of Fairy Fingers' marriage as soon as she delivered the railroad votes and paid off the debt. Mowatt added the illness and death of the count, the illness and rescue of the countess, and the promise of a double wedding before moving to close her novel.

Second, Mowatt sentimentalized both the characters and the action, muting the humor of Scribe's original in favor of "a joy too exquisite for laughter," to borrow Steele's description of the aims of the sentimental.¹¹ For example, she made the count and countess villainous, while Scribe made them merely foolish. She transformed Scribe's sympathetic heroine into a perfect, flawless heroine, loved by all who encountered her (except, of course, the count and countess). Mowatt had one character describe Madelaine as a woman who "exerts a holy influence upon all with whom she is thrown in contact, and works more good, teaches more truth by the example of a patient, noble, holy life than could be taught by a thousand sermons from the most eloquent lips."¹²

By painting extremes of character and situation, Mowatt heightened the sense of not only the mistreatment of the heroine but also her self-sacrificing response to it. For example, the countess had refused to let Madelaine marry, had rebuked her publicly for repaying the family's debt, had complained about her caring for the count in her home, and had refused her hospitality because the countess did not wish to be seen with a working woman. Still, Mowatt explained how, when the countess was ill, "Madelaine longed to see [the countess], and make some few, needful arrangements for her comfort, but she could not doubt that her presence would do more harm than good. All that she could effect was to instruct Maurice … in the requirements of a sick-room, and to have prepared, in her own kitchen, the light food suitable to an invalid…. indeed, the only nourishment the invalid tasted was provided [secretly] by the thoughtful Madelaine."¹³ Madelaine's was indeed "a nature peculiarly susceptible to the pure delight of serving, aiding, sparing trouble to those whom she loved."¹⁴

Third, Mowatt set a good part of the action of her novel in America, whose virtues she extolled and whose people she contrasted favorably with the French. Mowatt wrote, for example, that Americans are "in an advantageous position in Paris by the very fact of being an American … coming from a land where distinctions of rank are not arbitrarily governed by the accident of birth but where men are assigned their positions in the social scale through a juster, higher, more liberal verdict."¹⁵ American men were characterized as "self-made and self-educated, at an age when young Frenchmen [had] scarcely begun to be aware that they [had] any independent existence."¹⁶ American women were depicted as strong and pragmatic: to the countess's boasts about her ancestry, an American nurse scoffed, "I suppose she don't trace back further than Adam does she? And we all do about that."¹⁷ And of course Madelaine herself had a nature "which responded to the spirit of self-reliance, energy and industry, which are so essentially American characteristics."¹⁸

Fourth, Mowatt used the play to make a number of social comments—on health, women, and especially work, the dignity of which Mowatt took as her major theme.

On health, Mowatt's views echoed those of Swedenborg, whose spiritual approach to health found important adherents in this country in Dr. Phineas Quimby and his more famous student Mary Baker Eddy.¹⁹ Thus, in Fairy Fingers can be found this prescription: "As all matter exists from, and is influenced by, spiritual causes, the happy workings of this mental ministry are very comprehensible. Madelaine invariably found medicinal and restorative properties in the pages of an interesting and healthful-toned volume which would draw her out of the contemplation of her own ailments…. In this manner she successfully counteracted the depression and unrest that attend bodily disease, and often succeeded in lifting her mind so far above its disordered mortal medium that she was hardly conscious of suffering…. Sceptical reader! You smile in doubt, and think that if Madelaine's wisdom and patience could accomplish this feat, she was a rare instance of womanhood. Try her experiment faithfully and then decide!"²⁰

Of women, Mowatt wrote most sympathetically, exploring their problems, which were most often caused by men. For example, good women protected men from themselves. Maurice explained to Madelaine: "You do not know the thousand perils [threatening a young man in Paris] … the siren lures … thrown in his way to ensnare his feet…. You do not know that your holy image, rising up before me, shining upon the path I trod, and beckoning me into the right road when I swerved aside, has alone saved me from falling into that vortex of follies and vices by which men are daily swallowed up, and from which they emerge sullied and debased…. Would you reign over my soul and keep it stainless? It is under your angel guardianship."²¹

But while protecting men, women had also to protect themselves from men; women in the workplace especially suffered unwanted advances. Mowatt confided in her reader: "We shall not dwell upon the manifold and humiliating trials to which [Madelaine] was subjected."²² Men often expected sexual favors in return for business favors. When thus propositioned, Madelaine responded angrily: "Under ordinary circumstances, I should have been your debtor. As it is, you and I are quits! The privilege of insulting me will suffice you! And now, my lord, you will excuse me, if, being a woman who earns her livelihood and whose time is valuable, I bring this interview to a close."²³

Women's lot was made harder still by their capacity for love, a capacity not shared by men. Mowatt repeatedly commented on this vexing difference: "A woman who is gifted with the power of throwing her soul into looks and language and loving ways, runs the risk of producing upon certain men an effect approaching satiety. The woman who has instinctive wisdom will never dash herself against this rock; yet few woman are wise; fewer give too little of their rich, heart-treasures than too much."²⁴ And again, "Men are constitutionally, unconsciously ungrateful; give them abundance of what they covet most and they prize the gift less highly than if its measure were stinted. And women have an instinct that warns them not to be too lavish. Those women who love most fervently, most deeply, most internally, seldom frame the full strength of that love into words, or manifest it in looks even; that is, in the waking presence of the one who holds their entire being captive."²⁵

Mowatt's most sustained comments, however, were on the importance of work. Indeed, for her, a large part of America's virtue rested on its being a land where honest work was respected above birth. She contrasted the countess's (French) view that Madelaine was disgraced because she worked with an American socialite's view that Madelaine's work should be a source of pride. The American explained, "In this land where labor is a virtue and the most laborious, … become the greatest,—in this land it will be no blot upon her noble name … that she has linked that name with work. She will rather be held up as an example to the daughters of this young country."²⁶ Maurice was made sympathetic in part because he adopted the attitudes of America rather than those of his birthplace, France. He congratulated himself: "Thank Heaven, I have lived long enough in this land, where men (and women too) have sufficient courage to use their lives, and senseless idlers are the exceptions; to realize that man's work and woman's work are alike glorious; … and that you, Madelaine, the daughter of a duke,—you, the duchess-mantuamaker, have reached a higher altitude through that very labor than your birth could ever command."²⁷ And, of course, Madelaine—the working woman—taught her colleagues that one "may be very poor and very dependent and yet be the daughter of a duke; and even a duke's daughter may find it less irksome to earn her own bread than to eat the bread of charity."²⁸

What can we learn from this brief comparison of the two Fairy Fingers?

First, Anna Cora Ogden Mowatt Ritchie's decision, on two separate occasions, to seek money from acting and from writing adds to the growing body of evidence that these two fields offered nineteenth-century women some uncommon chance of financial independence. Occupational data show clearly that female writers and actors were less highly valued than male writers and actors, but the data also confirm that women had better financial opportunities in those fields than in most others of the time.²⁹

Second, Anna Cora Ogden Mowatt Ritchie's life—and name—invites our reflection on the social manipulation of a nineteenth-century (and indeed a contemporary) woman's identity. But into a well-known and prestigious family named Ogden, Anna Cora Ogden, when she married, changed her last name to Mowatt, a name with much less social power and panache. After almost twenty years of building an independent international reputation through acting and writing under the name of Mrs. Mowatt, Anna Cora Mowatt became, overnight, Anna Cora Ritchie when she remarried. Thereafter she repeatedly had to explain who she was, as the thirty-third citation in this paper reminds us.

Third, Anna Cora Ogden Mowatt Ritchie was most probably what we would call a plagiarist. But in the absence of an international copyright agreement, her appropriation of Scribe's play was neither illegal nor likely to be viewed as unethical. The history of Uncle Tom's Cabin, to cite a single example, testifies to the free-wheeling nature of nineteenth-century borrowing that we now call plagiarism.

Mowatt's decision to plagiarize is probably explained by her acute need for money. Certainly, the structure of the novel—specifically, the nature of Mowatt's additions to the original play—argues for this conclusion: She just added complications. To take over a successful plot and lengthen it merely by adding complications (rather than reworking to make a different point, as with the many versions of Electra, for example) suggests someone who is working quickly.

Fourth, Anna Cora Ogden Mowatt Ritchie understood that writing plays and writing novels were different, and she chose her form knowledgeably. Given the evidence of Fashion, we know that Mowatt could have adapted Scribe's work into a play suited for American audiences. She chose, however, to write a novel. Probably the reason was at least in part economic; that is, some income from the publication of a novel was both more certain and more rapid than from the production of a play. But it seems clear as well that Mowatt the writer enjoyed the opportunities granted by the novel's form for commenting on issues that interested her.

For the rest, we can only speculate, for firm evidence is not yet available. Her appropriation of the specific play Les Doigts de fée most likely reflects Mowatt's interest in women, especially strong women and working women. Indeed, she seems to have found in Scribe's play, quite serendipitously, a character that had long interested her. We learn from Mowatt's 1853 autobiography that she "could never write mere fiction," that she "needed a groundwork in reality."³¹

We learn as well that she had observed for several years "a young girl, belonging to a ballet company, … [who] supplied the whole wants of the family" by her sewing skills, "only laying down the needles, which her fingers made fly, when she was summoned by the call boy, or required to change her costume by the necessities of the play."³² This real-life woman worker first found a clear echo as the major secondary character in Stella, a vaguely autobiographical story published as a part of Mowatt's book Mimic Life in 1856.³³ In Scribe's play, Mowatt found just such a young seamstress cast as the play's central figure, a coincidence perhaps too enticing for Mowatt to resist.

Mowatt's decision to change Scribe's play by moving the action to America and sentimentalizing the characters perhaps reflected her assessment of the market. The middle of the nineteenth century was well into the Victorian age and the age of melodrama, with all that both imply about simple visions of right and wrong, the purity of women, and so on. Moreover, Mowatt may have reasoned that her readers would be American (she had a New York publisher) and that they would be mostly female readers of popular fiction, because she had, early in her career, published regularly in serials like The Ladies Companion, Graham's Magazine, The Columbia Magazine, and Godey's Lady's Book.³⁴ She may have adjusted Scribe's comedy in order to cater specifically to this women's readership. If so, her changes provide helpful insights into that readership—its expectations, interests, and tastes.

Her decision to comment on issues of health, women, and work no doubt reflected an assessment of her readership. But the substance of her comments on these issues seems most logically explained by her own life. Married to an older man when she was fifteen, forced to support herself and her sick husband at twenty-five, widowed at twenty-seven, Mowatt early in her life had intense experiences with illness, work, and womanhood. Remarried and retired from the stage at thirty-four, Mowatt soon found herself again forced to be financially independent. Separated from an unfaithful husband and in ill health, Mowatt earned her own way until she died at fifty.

Thus, the novel Fairy Fingers is very much the story of a woman who, like Mowatt, had to take control of her own life. On the one hand, Mowatt sought to use this novel as a means to survive. On a different level, she seemingly sought through this novel to teach other women what she had learned about surviving in a man's world: how to avoid the medical establishment and stay healthy, how to ward off seducers and remain virtuous, how to pay men's debts and keep their love.

Notes

¹ Eugène Scribe, Les Doigts de fee (Paris: n.p., 1858).

² See, for example, Eugene Lataye, "Revue—Chronique," La Revue de Deux Mondes 1 June 1858: 716-717.

³Fashion, or Life in New York was first performed in New York in 1845 and then published in London, by Newberry, in 1850. An American edition (slightly different from the London version) appeared in Anna Cora Mowatt, Plays (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1855). The play is now widely anthologized and occasionally revived (e.g., Provincetown, 1923-24).

⁴ Eric Wollencott Barnes, The Lady of Fashion; The Life and the Theatre of Anna Cora Mowatt (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1954), 365. This work, the standard source on Mowatt, is the source for the chronology that follows.

⁵ Anna Cora Ritchie, Fairy Fingers: a Novel (New York: Carleton, 1865).

⁶ The description is by Marius Blesi, "The Life and Times of Anna Cora Mowatt," diss. U of Virginia, 1938, 386.

⁷ Patti P. Gillespie, "The Well Made Plays of Eugène Scribe," diss Indiana U, 1970, 130-131.

⁸ Mrs. Anna Cora Mowatt, Autobiography of an Actress: or, Eight Years on the Stage (Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields, 1854); unsigned mss, John Seely Hart Collection, Rare Books Room, Cornell U Library; and Barnes, The Lady of Fashion, are the major sources for details of her life and work.

⁹ Ritchie, Autobiography, 297.

¹⁰ Helene Koon and Richard Switzer, Eugène Scribe (Boston: Twayne Publ., 1980), 15-19, 25; and Neil Cole Arvin, Eugène Scribe and the French Theatre, 1815-1860 (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1924), 12, 15, 25-26. Ernest Legouvé is listed as coauthor of this play, as several others, but, as is often the case, the nature of the contribution is unclear.

¹¹ Sir Richard Steele, "Preface to The Conscious Lovers," in Bernard F. Dukore, Dramatic Theory and Criticism: Greeks to Grotowski (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1974), 397.

¹² Ritchie, Fairy Fingers, 299.

¹³ 352.

¹⁴ 371.

¹⁵ 140.

¹⁶ 174.

¹⁷ 398.

¹⁸ 37.

¹⁹ Mowatt was active in the "New Church," one of several holistic health and religion centers in New England at the time. Bliese, 158ff; 170ff. See also Robert Peel, Mary Baker Eddy (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1966) and Judith Anderson, Outspoken Women (Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall Hunt, 1984), 43-50, on relationships among the various spiritualists, like Swedenborg, and the emergence of Christian Science in this country.

²⁰ Ritchie, Fairy Fingers, 314.

²¹ 73-74.

²² 172.

²³ 288.

²⁴ 442.

²⁵ 334.

²⁶ 220.

²⁷ 261.

²⁸ 341.

²⁹ Claudia Johnson, American Actresses: Perspective on the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1984); Edna Hammer Cooley, "Women in American Theatre: A Study in Professional Equity," diss. U of Maryland, 1985, esp. chs. two and three.

³⁰ Mowatt's decision to retain Scribe's title, Fairy Fingers, may suggest that she viewed wholesale borrowing as neither illegal nor unethical. On the other hand, its retention may suggest simply that she did not anticipate getting caught: How many Americans were likely to encounter this particular French play, when America was poised for a civil war and American theatre, to the degree that it sought foreign models, sought them in England rather than France? Her reaction to the allegations surrounding Armand seem to indicate some sense of guilt about borrowing.

³¹ Mowatt, Autobiography, 186-187.

³² Mowatt, Autobiography, 314-315.

³³ Anna Cora Ritchie (formerly Mrs. Mowatt), Mimic Life: or, Before and Behind the Curtain. A Series of Narratives (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1856), esp., 53, 69, 71, 81, 99.

³⁴ A complete and annotated list of Anna Cora Ogden Mowatt Ritchie's publications can be found in Imogene J. McCarthy, "Anna Cora Mowatt and Her Audience." M.A. thesis, U of Maryland, 1953.