SOURCE: “Catharine Sedgwick's ‘Cacoethes Scribendi’: Romance in Real Life,” in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 27, No. 4, Fall, 1990, pp. 567-76.

[In the following essay, Fick examines Sedgwick's short story “Cacoethes Scribendi” as a protorealistic piece dealing with antebellum conceptions of literary realism.]

Although Catharine Sedgwick was one of the most respected and popular authors writing before the Civil War, until recently she has been largely ignored by twentieth-century critics. In an 1835 review of The Linwoods, Edgar Allan Poe wrote that “of American female writers we must consider [Catharine Sedgwick] the first” (95), but after her death in 1867 she came to merit only passing references in literary histories and critical works. During the past few years, however, her literary reputation has undergone a minor revaluation, at least in part because her work shows a remarkable sensitivity to literary modes and conventions. Her first novel—A New England Tale (1822)—established the major conventions of what Nina Baym calls “woman's fiction” and, as Michael D. Bell points out, in Hope Leslie she demonstrated an unusual knack for working with existing conventions. It is therefore not surprising to find that two recent collections of women's fiction open with exemplary stories by Sedgwick: Judith Fetterley begins Provisions: A Reader from 19th-Century American Women with “Cacoethes Scribendi” (1830) and Susan Koppelman chooses “Old Maids” (1834) to introduce her anthology Old Maids: Short Stories by Nineteenth Century U.S. Women Writers. Koppelman goes so far as to claim, with considerable justification, that not only does “Old Maids” set “the classic pattern for a story written in defense of old maids,” it also introduces “the major themes characteristic of women's short fiction” (9, 10). Clearly, Sedgwick's fiction is attractive both for its graceful execution and for its articulation of formal and thematic concerns—the implicit (and sometimes explicit) commentary on operative conventions as well as subjects. For these reasons, Sedgwick's works are interesting both for themselves and for what they can tell us about the development of modes and genres.

In this essay I want to consider “Cacoethes Scribendi,” one of Sedgwick's most rewarding short fictions, for what it reveals about antebellum conceptions of realism in literature. This “protorealistic” writing shares some characteristics with formula fiction and is often marked by interventive authorial commentary—a narrative strategy virulently attacked by almost all American proponents of realism since Henry James.¹ Yet despite such narratological faux pas, protorealistic fiction explicitly presents itself as engaged in exploring “reality” both by the structure of the story (which like Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn centers on an opposition between reality and aristocratic romance) and by the authorial voice. It is my contention that we must grant a tentative legitimacy to these structural and authorial assertions of realism if we are to understand how the real is conceived and portrayed in antebellum literature.

“Cacoethes Scribendi” (Latin: writer's itch) is a compact tale that explores the opposition between the “real” and the ideal through two converging lines of development. On the one hand, the story is about women and writing. Mrs. Courland (the matriarch of an all-female household) and her sisters indulge their passion for writing with an exuberance that, as Judith Fetterley rightly observes, suggests no trace of the “anxiety of authorship” that Gilbert and Gubar find central to the woman writer's experience (5). On the other hand, the story concerns the subjects of women's fiction: while Mrs. Courland is engaged in the act of writing, her daughter Alice acts out a courtship and marriage that exemplifies the sort of fiction Mrs. Courland should write. Thus “Cacoethes Scribendi” explores both the act of writing and one subject of writing, in this case the unfolding romance between Alice and her cousin Ralph—a text-book example of true love.

While the parallel plots clearly indicate that the story has something to say about the relation between writing and living—technique and subject—modern readers can easily be deceived about the precise nature of that relation. In her introduction to the story, for example, Fetterley argues that Alice's lover Ralph emerges “as the genuine writer” because “His is a ‘true story,’ based on real feelings,” and because when he writes his declaration of love for Alice “he writes only what he has to say.” In this view, the story endorses a conception of reality, and of realistic writing, that stands opposed to what are presumed to be the sentimental and formulaic productions of Mrs. Courland, who presumably writes standard odes to romantic love. Yet Fetterley's notion of realism is both tautological and ahistorical: Ralph's is an ostensibly “real” story because it is based on “real” feelings, with the unexamined assumption that real feelings (in this case love) are spontaneous, unmediated—presumably the result of something like “instinct” or nature, and that hence endure as transhistorical constants. Yet real feelings, like right actions or even true love, are products of their times and are expressed in different ways: one “has to say” what one has learned is possible and appropriate to say. Further, “true stories” about real feelings are recognized as true only within the literary conventions that define the consensus about what constitutes reality. (Literary realism is itself determined by conventions, as critics have long acknowledged.) We should resist the temptation to find “Cacoethes Scribendi” significant to the extent that it anticipates the particular conventions of postbellum literary realism—a teleological conception of genre. If we move beyond vague, incantatory evocations of “true stories” and “real feelings,” we find that Ralph's feelings, and hence the truth of his story (a very conventional love story), have a logic of their own.

In the literary economy of this tale, “reality” emerges as a reflection of moral codes and social formulae—a collective human construction that bestows meaning upon the actions of the individual. (In contrast, the post-Darwinian notion of realism posits an individual working out the imperatives of impersonal and inhuman forces; the world of conventional morality is frequently considered unscientific, artificial, and hence irrelevant.) As one consequence, the characters and plots in antebellum realism tend to be portrayed in broadly representative terms—as what might seem to us now as stereotypical or formulaic. What I am suggesting is that we look for the “real” story in antebellum fiction not in the portrayal of thorough-going individuality, but in characters and plots that explicitly represent shaping conditions and expectations, and that thus often appear to the modern reader to be formulaic in the case of plot and conventional in the case of character. By adhering to a moral and collective notion of the “real,” Sedgwick performs an essentially conservative cultural function that is upsetting both to liberal critics who look for an enlightened ideology (or literary practice), and to formalist critics who value intricate aesthetic shape, complex verbal resonance, and moral ambiguity. Yet for antebellum writers the portrayal of what Sedgwick elsewhere calls the “beau actual” (“First Love” 83) was the dominant form of representing contemporary conditions, and to read such tales as “Cacoethes Scribendi” as a justification of Howellsian realism is quite simply untrue to the narrative. We can see how the “real” operates in much antebellum fiction by looking closely at Sedgwick's carefully crafted tale.

Mrs. Courland's profession of authorship begins when Frank returns from Boston with two annual collections of poetry and fiction, a form of publication then extremely popular among middle-class readers.² Although intended for Alice, these collections have their most immediate and obvious effect on Mrs. Courland: “she felt a call to become an author, and before she retired to bed she obeyed the call, as if it had been, in truth, a divinity stirring within her” (53). She inspires her three unmarried sisters to follow her writerly example, and together they turn out examples of almost every form of popular prose: religious tracts, treatises on botany and child rearing, with an emphasis on romantic sketches. There are several other consequences of this obsessive “itch.” First, in her search for subjects Mrs. Courland cannibalizes her daughter's public life with such energy that Alice grows “afraid to speak or to act, and from being the most artless … little creature in the world, she became as silent and as stiff as a statue” (56). A comic version of the tortured artists that appear in Nathaniel Hawthorne's tales, Mrs. Courland violates her subject's public and private self, but she changes her daughter from artless girl to statuary rather than, like Ethan Brand, her own heart to stone.

The other results of writing are in some ways more positive. A hundred years before Virginia Woolf called for a room of one's own, Mrs. Courland and her three sisters abandon the parlor for their separate bedrooms, and their retreat from the space of domestic action turns the parlor from “a sort of village exchange” to a “tower of Babel after the builders had forsaken it” (56). Writing silences the sort of social discourse that comprises the typical nineteenth-century woman's world and substitutes another whose lack of conviviality is at least partly balanced by an increase in authority. But the story does not validate the romantic notion of an isolated Promethean creator. Indeed, most antebellum fiction by women portrays the community of the parlor in positive terms and conversation as an alternative to the linear masculine narratives of business and adventure—as Sedgwick's play on “village exchange” neatly suggests. The true “bluestocking,” as Sedgwick indicates in another short story, is as unpretentious, social, and neighborly as any other member of her community.³ Since Mrs. Courland separates herself from the community it is reasonable to conclude that her fiction may also be misconceived: Mrs. Courland seeks inspiration not in her world but apart from it. The anxiety of authorship is therefore not an issue, but the nature of what Mrs. Courland authors most certainly is.

While Mrs. Courland easily enlists her sisters in a life of joyous scribbling, neither example nor exhortation can convince her daughter Alice to write a line. Yet in an important sense Alice's refusal to touch a pen doesn't cut her off from the subjects of fiction as Mrs. Courland cuts herself off when she abandons the hospitable “village exchange.” Indeed, while Mrs. Courland pursues her writing, in the now-empty parlor Alice and her cousin Frank are enacting the age-old tale of true love—a literal rather than a literary endeavor. The women's withdrawal to their unsocial space clears a space for acting out a flesh and blood social drama: “Not a sound was heard [in the parlor] save Ralph's and Alice's voices, mingling in soft and suppressed murmurs” (56)—and these are murmurs Sedgwick has no need to translate for her audience. This, as we shall see, is the real story that Ralph and Alice enact—a story that is real precisely because it represents the common and expected lot.

The drama of the young couple's lovemaking stands in contrast to Mrs. Courland's literary apprenticeship, for the annual has a different but equally powerful effect on Alice and Frank. Unlike her mother, Alice responds to the meaning of the stories rather than the idea of writing, to the presence of desire rather than the desire to write. When Frank first brings the annuals that trigger Mrs. Courland's “itch,” Alice is particularly affected by one tale about “two tried faithful lovers, and married at last!” and she calls Frank's special attention to the ending: “I hate love stories that don't end in marriage” (52). Frank passionately agrees, and “for the first time Alice felt her cheeks tingle at his approach” (52). Ralph and Alice's love is given shape and direction by the conventional story in the annual: love becomes real because fiction makes its habitual and accepted plot available to the two participants. As one young woman comments in a story by Susan Pindar, “If I could only hear one true love story, something that I knew had really occurred—then it would serve as a kind of text for all the rest. Oh! how I long to hear a real story of actual life” (54). Similarly, before Ralph and Alice found their own “text” they “had always lived on terms of cousinly affection—an affection of a neutral tint that they never thought of being shaded into the deep dye of a more tender passion” (52). A later exchange between Ralph and Mrs. Courland clarifies the relationship between the activity and the subjects of writing that is suggested by the annual's double effect. When Mrs. Courland asks Ralph to corroborate her opinion that Alice is a fool to fear being called a “blue-stocking,” he answers “It would be a pity, aunt, to put blue stockings on such pretty feet as Alice's” (57). The conversation continues for a while in the same vein, with Ralph converting “blue-stocking” into clumsy compliments about Alice's dainty feet. His word play mimics the relationship between the two narrative lines: “Cacoethes Scribendi” is a story about literary women—about bluestockings—but it is also about well-turned ankles and lovers' compliments. The relationship between the two plots is further explored in the episode that moves Ralph and Alice's passion from the private to the public realm, reinscribing their drama in the social world and bringing the story to its anticipated conclusion. Mrs. Courland has been pestering Ralph to write about his experiences, and he finally gives in: “I will sit down this moment, and write a story—a true story—true from beginning to end” (57). He takes up his pen and with much labor writes a single scratched and interlined paragraph that presents a “short and true story of his love for his sweet cousin Alice.”

Ralph's single act of authorship raises one of the central questions of the story: in what way is Ralph's story true? Does Ralph emerge, as Fetterley maintains, “as the genuine writer” because “His is a ‘true story,’ based on real feelings, and [because] he writes only what he has to say”? On the one hand Ralph's paragraph is not a fiction; it represents his actual feelings and evokes a response that shapes the rest of his life. In a more important way, however, both his written and lived stories are—or become—“literary” and conventional: as we have seen, the courtship was given shape and bodied forth from the nebulous realm of adolescent affection by a sentimental story whose plot it mirrors from beginning to end. Ralph becomes an adult when he learns accurately to “read” the conventional plot of true love. Indeed, “Cacoethes Scribendi” concludes with a one-sentence paragraph describing Alice's nuptials and the young lover's disappearance into the space of generic bliss: “her mother and aunts saw her the happy mistress of the Hepburn farm, and the happiest of wives.”

As my discussion of the story should make clear, Fetterley is right but for the wrong reasons: Ralph's story is a “true story,” not because it conveys his special feelings in contrast to conventional ones—for clearly it does not—but precisely because it fulfills common expectations about the course of events.⁴ The truth of this story is therefore confirmed partly by the difficulty with which Ralph writes it, and partly by the confidence with which he lives it, a confidence generated by seeing it as repeating a cultural formula. We miss this notion of what constitutes real life if we insist on judging “Cacoethes Scribendi” by postbellum definitions of realism, which are profoundly suspicious of predictable narrative shape.⁵ We miss it also if we equate realism with biological or sociological pessimism (the great descending curve of the naturalists). By all indications Mrs. Courland is a bad writer not because she writes “romance” but because her fiction pays no attention to the form, balance, and restraint of common plots such as the one that unfolds in her parlor—“The Romance in Real Life,” as Sedgwick titles another of her short stories.

It is easy to misread the indications of Mrs. Courland's weakness as a writer. We might, for example, decide that her error lies in composing romantic tales of love rather than realistic ones of misery or thwarted affection. This possibility is first suggested when Mrs. Courland reminds Ralph of three encounters he could make into wonderful articles, “founded on fact, all romantic and pathetic.” Here she appears to be the sentimental romancer, cut off from the conditions of everyday life and lost in romantic haze. Indeed, Alice not-so-gently counters that:

The officer drank too much; and the mysterious lady turned out to be a runaway milliner; and the man in black—oh! what a theme for a pathetic story!—the man in black was a widower, on his way to Newhaven, where he was to select his third wife from three recommended candidates.

To this objection Mrs. Courland brashly responds, “do you suppose it is necessary to tell things precisely as they are?” In this exchange Alice seems to function as the voice of modern realism, reminding her mother that desire must not overpower fact, and urging attention to the dark side of life. From a post-Jamesian perspective, therefore, it is tempting to see Mrs. Courland as the misguided romancer who distorts the available topics of everyday life; in this view Mrs. Courland is a bad writer because she doesn't recognize the marvelously gritty topics that would attract, say, Stephen Crane or Theodore Dreiser (if not W. D. Howells).

But such a reading just won't do. After all, Sedgwick herself does not give us the “realist's” (more properly the naturalist's) story of a drunken officer or fugitive milliner or hardhearted, mercenary widower, but a tale of courtship and marriage. When evaluated according to the criteria of antebellum realism, the “romantic” content of the story subverts its supposed realism and hence we must consider the story hopelessly confused. However, “Cacoethes Scribendi” does not define unrealistic writing as stories of true love rather than drunken soldiers. Within the tale's world “things precisely as they are” (as demonstrated by Alice and Ralph's courtship) can be remarkably conventional, even what we might now consider sentimental. Mrs. Courland's fault lies not in the desire to write of true love rather than drunken soldiers, but in her inability to see such plots when they unfold in her own parlor, and to render them with appropriate decorum and proportion—something that Sedgwick most emphatically does. “Cacoethes Scribendi” offers several examples of the sort of writing Mrs. Courland should but cannot do. Take, for example, the narrator's description of Ralph—the actual lover to Mrs. Courland's fictional ones: “Ralph was no prodigy; none of his talents were in excess, but all in moderate degree” (51). Alice perfectly complements her lover: no girl of seventeen, the narrator remarks, “was ever more disinterested, unassuming, unostentatious, and unspoiled” (52). None, all—the language of absolutes humorously characterizes the perfectly average lover in contrast to the extravagant pretensions of aristocratic romance.

What I am suggesting may be hard to stomach—that we take authorial claims to represent the real seriously, rather than as excuses for writing fiction.⁶ This means entertaining the possibility that a structured social and moral world—which can appear to us as formulaic—can be the reality to which earlier writers respond, the one they wish to represent as the primary experience of their lives. At issue is not whether we consider such a world to be true, but whether the writers did—and clearly the oppositional structure of the tales tells us that this is the case. Any other attempt to understand realism seems to me culturally and temporally limited. There is obviously much about Sedgwick's conception of the “real” that the modern reader must find unacceptable. As the product of a white middle-class woman, it downplays, even if it does not entirely ignore, suffering, injustice, prejudice, disease—the dark panoply of human misery. These are indeed large omissions. However, I maintain that we cannot disregard repeated assertions of what constitutes part of the author's “reality” when such assertions occur within an oppositional structure pitting real against ideal—that is, when the work clearly recognizes that the nature of reality is a primary issue. The difficulty of recognizing the relation between the reality of protorealism and the conditions it ostensibly reflects is that we expect realism to be mimetic in a particular way: always to reflect the consequences as well as the conditions of society—in short, structurally to contain a commentary as well as a vision of the world. Prose which does not contain such commentary is considered documentary if it is not fiction, or romance if it is literature that uncritically and unselfconsciously expresses how a society would like to see itself. But fiction like “Cacoethes Scribendi” can be considered neither documentary nor romance—hence our discomfort with its generic indeterminacy. While presented as an explicit alternative to dangerously deceptive romantic expectations, this vision of the real is not scientific or “natural” but subjective and human: one hears nothing of the impersonal forces that scholars of realism have seen as the focus of postbellum realism.⁷ Instead, something is real to the extent that it functions as a representative text, one agreed upon and validated, a reality of consensus rather than objective inquiry. This sort of common text, rather than the scientific and essentially dehumanizing realism of post-Civil War America, marks the “protorealism” of much fiction by antebellum women. Sedgwick's exemplary tale helps us to understand the very different conventions of this mode.

Notes

1. As John Cawelti remarks: “Two central aspects of formulaic structures have been generally condemned in the serious artistic thought of the last hundred years: the essential standardization and their primary relation to the needs of escape and relaxation” (8). Protorealistic prose is frequently standardized, but within this cultural standardization it attacks rather than promotes escape. Robyn Warhol's recent work on narrative strategies in nineteenth-century women's fiction suggests one way of reconciling the intrusive narrator and literary realism. In “Toward a Theory of the Engaging Narrator,” Warhol proposes to add the term “engaging narrator” to our critical lexicon; unlike the “distancing narrator” the engaging narrator addresses a narratee directly in order to stir her to sympathy and ultimately to action in the extratextual world. Elsewhere she argues that Stowe's explicit didacticism and direct addresses to the reader do not violate verisimilitude but promote a sense of continuity between textual and extratextual worlds (“Poetics and Persuasion”).

2. “Cacoethes Scribendi” appeared in just such a collection (The Atlantic Souvenir) in 1830.

3. In a story published in 1832, Sedgwick defends literary women against charges of desexing themselves by describing a visit by the “bluestocking” Mrs. Rosewell to the home of one of her admirers. Mrs. Rosewell is revealed to be modest, sociable, and adept in smoothing the course of true love—not at all the terrible literary lion and “mannish writer of reviews” (336) the company anticipates. Indeed, it is her dilettantish host Mrs. Laight who delves into ponderous tomes and produces an unreadable essay on “the intellectual faculties” (344). Sedgwick's strategy is to justify Mrs. Rosewell's writing by promoting her participation in daily activities; to one questioner Mrs. Rosewell responds that “my last work was cutting out some vests for my boys” (341). This is a culturally conservative strategy that appears frequently in antebellum fiction: writing and women's traditional activities are shown to be complementary and authorship is reduced to an affirmation of the status quo. Given these values, Mrs. Courland's retreat from social space must be considered an inappropriate move, since she defines her literary “work” as separate from the middle-class woman's domestic work.

4. A number of recent scholars have shown that what Alfred Habegger calls “domestic bitterness” (34-37) was of great interest to antebellum writers. David Reynolds, for example, discusses “the literature of misery”—works that focus on the dark side of women's experience, which frequently focus on nightmarish and even savage fantasies of violence and revenge against conventional patriarchal society (340, 352).

5. William B. Stone's formulation of the problem is typical: “For a work to be termed an example of literary realism it must be able to impose an aesthetic order on its materials, but it must do so unobtrusively” (48; original emphasis).

6. For a discussion of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century suspicion of fiction, see Martin. On antebellum responses to fiction see Nina Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers, especially Chapter 2, “The Triumph of the Novel,” in which Baym argues that the supposed hostility to fiction in nineteenth-century America has been greatly exaggerated.

7. George J. Becker, for example, writes of “the sense of blind, impersonal force which is the mark of the great realistic novels” (130).

Works Cited

Baym, Nina. Novels, Readers, and Reviewers; Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1984.

———. Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-1870. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1978.

Becker, George J., ed. Documents of Modern Literary Realism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1963.

Bell, Michael Davitt. “History and Romance Convention in Catharine Sedgwick's Hope Leslie.” American Quarterly 22 (1970): 213-21.

Cawelti, John. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1976.

Fetterley, Judith, ed. Provisions: A Reader from 19th-Century American Women. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985.

Habegger, Alfred. Gender, Fantasy, and Realism in American Literature. New York: Columbia UP, 1982.

Koppelman, Susan, ed. Old Maids: Short Stories by Nineteenth Century U.S. Women Writers. Boston: Pandora, 1984. 53-61.

Martin, Terence. The Instructed Vision: Scottish Common Sense Philosophy and the Origins of American Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1961.

Pindar, Susan. “Aunt Mable's Love Story.” Koppelman 53-61.

Poe, Edgar Allan. Review of The Linwoods, by Catharine Sedgwick. The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. James A. Harrison. New York: AMS, 1965.

Reynolds, David. Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville. New York: Knopf, 1988.

Sedgwick, Catharine Maria. “Cacoethes Scribendi.” Fetterley 49-59.

———. “First Love.” Sartain's Magazine 4 (1849): 81-84.

———. “A Sketch of a Blue Stocking.” The Token: A Christmas and New Year Present. Ed. S. G. Goodrich. Boston, 1832. 334-46.

Stone, William B. “Towards a Definition of Literary Realism.” Centrum I (Spring 1973): 47-60.

Warhol, Robyn. “Poetics and Persuasion: Uncle Tom's Cabin as a Realist Novel.”

———. “Toward a Theory of the Engaging Narrator: Earnest Interventions in Gaskell, Stowe, and Eliot.” PMLA 101 (1986): 811-18.