[In the following essay, LaMonaca studies Catharine Sedgwick's Means and Ends and Anna Jameson's Characteristics of Women, suggesting that both are progressive conduct books stressing the value of women's intellect and the importance of women's self-improvement through intellectual development, though neither challenges women's traditional roles in society.]

… I resolved to form Dora's mind.

I began immediately. When Dora was very childish … I tried to be grave—and disconcerted her, and myself too. I talked to her on the subjects which occupied my thoughts; and I read Shakespeare to her—and fatigued her to the last degree. I accustomed myself to giving her, as if it were quite casually, little scraps of useful information, or sound opinion—and she started from them when I let them off, as if they had been crackers. No matter how incidentally or naturally I endeavored to form my little wife's mind, I could not help seeing that she always had an instinctive perception of what I was about, and became prey to the keenest apprehensions. In particular, it was clear to me, that she thought Shakespeare a terrible fellow …

(Charles Dickens, David Copperfield)

This description of David Copperfield's attempts to “form” his wife's mind highlights issues of female education in Victorian society, particularly anxieties over the preparation—or lack thereof—of young women for marriage and motherhood. Dora, deprived of the benefits of motherly instruction, wreaks havoc on the Copperfield household. She can neither cook, nor manage servants, nor maintain the household accounts. Copperfield's gift of a domestic advice manual—a “Cookery-book”—comes to naught; it functions mainly as a perch for a dog. Most troubling to Copperfield, however, is not Dora's domestic ineptitude, but rather her unsuitability as an intellectual companion. While mentally accomplished, highly literate Victorian women were often derided as “strong-minded women” and “bluestockings,” an opposing current of thought attempted to justify female intellectual prowess. Such writers as Sarah Ellis viewed the mental cultivation of a woman essential to her calling as a future wife; the educated woman would be “a companion who will raise the tone of his mind … from low anxieties and vulgar cares.”¹ This paper attempts to examine the nineteenth-century construction of an ideal, highly literate woman—woman as accomplished reader—particularly as it is presented in domestic advice manuals and conduct books of the era. This inquiry will focus on two conduct books, Means and Ends; or Self-Training (1840) by Catharine Maria Sedgwick, and Characteristics of Women (1832) by Anna Jameson. While the texts themselves reveal much about contemporary thought on the subject of literate/intellectual women, equally revealing are the motives and circumstances behind Sedgwick's and Jameson's work.

An especially important consideration in this study is how Sedgwick's and Jameson's conduct manuals “market” literacy. What is their conception of female literacy, and why do they endorse it? A major question posed by historical literacy studies, as Karl Kaestle phrases it, is: “Does literacy have a liberating or constraining effect on individuals' lives?”² Do Jameson and Sedgwick portray literacy as a means of self-discipline or as a strategy of empowerment? It is all too easy, it seems, to label conduct manuals solely as an example of the “constraining effect” of literacy. A close reading of Sedgwick's and Jameson's books, however, reveals a multidimensional construction of literacy, one which seems to embody the personal concerns and ambivalences of the authors themselves.

The fact that Victorian conduct manuals encouraged literate practices in women often becomes obscured by other aspects of the genre. Much contemporary scholarship emphasizes the repressive nature of these books as a means of social control. “Although a female genre, often written by women and directed at female readers,” states Nancy Armstrong, “conduct books of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries … were attuned to the economic interests that they designated as the domain of the male.”³ Both Nancy Armstrong and Mary Poovey interpret the conduct book genre as an ideological tool of the rising middle class. The ideal woman of the conduct book, a submissive household angel, supported her husband's endeavors in the workplace, thereby affirming capitalist values.⁴ Viewed in strictly economic terms, the conduct book becomes a means of commodifying women. It defines a woman whose “sexual identity has been suppressed by a class that valued her chiefly for material reasons.”⁵ These arguments are entirely plausible; what, after all, could be more repressive to women than the cult of the Household Angel? An important consideration, however, is whether conduct books, despite their political implications, advanced the abilities or position of Victorian women in any respect.⁶

The view of conduct books as a means of social control emphasizes their role in regulating women's literacy, restricting and silencing the woman reader/writer. These books discussed, often in exhaustive detail, what specifically women should and should not read. Along with the spread of literacy in the nineteenth century, Carla Peterson points out, a persistent suspicion of books as moral “poison” remained embedded in European culture.⁷ Fictional literature—novels and romances—posed the greatest threat to the highly impressionable minds of young women. Thomas Broadhurst, in his Advice to Young Ladies on the Improvement of the Mind and Conduct of Life (1810), warns against the woman who “to the culpable neglect of the most important obligations, is daily absorbed by philosophic and literary speculations, or soaring aloft amidst the enchanted regions of fiction and romance.”⁸ Some writers, like Broadhurst, felt that imaginative literature drew women away from household duties; others worried that it gave women false, deceptively glamorous views of the world. Others condemned the novel—with its scenes of passion—as a threat to the purity and innocence of young girls.⁹ Conduct manuals devoted less attention, it seems, to the regulation of writing practices, but some issued admonitions against the “literary woman.” The woman writer, once published, abandoned the private sphere and immodestly thrust herself into the public arena. Hannah More, in Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799), argues that women's knowledge “is not often like the learning of men, to be reproduced in some literary composition, nor ever in any learned profession, but to come out in conduct.”¹⁰

Conduct manuals simultaneously encouraged and restrained women's reading practices, for “reading was at once the most useful and the most dangerous way to take up a woman's time.”¹¹ A woman could read romance novels, and neglect her housework or she could read the Bible, and instruct her children. Reading, furthermore, was an activity which kept the woman within the confines of her home, and out of the contaminating public sphere. It could (as the immense popularity of conduct books shows) instruct women in appropriate feminine behaviour and duties, and thus contribute to the formation of the private, domestic sphere. Undoubtedly, what was considered “acceptable” reading for women varied, but conduct manuals frequently recommended the Bible, devotional works, poetry, various forms of non-fiction, and certain “polite novels” by “lady novelists.”¹² Conduct books, although strictly regulating women's reading, at once encouraged it as a duty. Typically, they justified women's reading as education for marriage and motherhood. Sarah Newton considers such mixed messages in regard to women's literacy, ultimately, as restrictive ones. “These anti-intellectual messages,” she states, “even when they seem contradictory, become powerful arguments for the woman to focus her curiosity within rigorously guarded role limitations.”¹³ While many conduct books undoubtedly sought to limit women's intellectual development, elements of Catharine Sedgwick's and Anna Jameson's works seem to encourage women to cultivate interests in matters outside the domestic sphere. These writers, in many respects, embraced highly conventional views of women's place in society. At the same time, however, they evince a keen awareness of social inequalities between the sexes, and argue for improvements in women's education and social status. This current of thought, arguably, contributed to the growth of a female intellectual elite which sought social and political reform. Furthermore, later in the century, educational reformers applied conduct book ideology—the belief that educated women made better wives and mothers—to their appeals for higher education for women. The conduct book ideal of the literate woman, therefore, was not a liberating end in itself for women, but part of a gradual process of social enlightenment and reform.

This paper's assessment of Jameson's and Sedgwick's books differs from the general perception of conduct books as overwhelmingly conservative in character. Conduct books, Newton argues, stubbornly resisted the growing current of female political activism in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. “As women become more vocal and political,” she states, “American conduct writers continue to find both mission and market … these later writers find that their task is to affirm and defend it [women's traditional place in society].¹⁴ Although conduct books did, to a large extent, serve a conservative political agenda through their construction of a conventional feminine ideal, many conduct book writers—by virtue of their identity as female authors—were unconventional women who upheld progressive ideas. In the early nineteenth century, women were overwhelmingly denied “access to the means of literary production.”¹⁵ Women such as Sedgwick and Jameson, then, as published women writers, were through this fact alone quite extraordinary. Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1789-1867), an American novelist ranked in her day with leading male writers, published Means and Ends; or Self-Training in 1840. Anna Jameson (1794-1860), a British writer, wrote essays, art criticism and travel narratives, along with the 1832 Characteristics of Women. These two writers make for an interesting parallel study. Although Sedgwick was American and Jameson British, the writings of each were well received in the other's native country. The women, only 5 years apart in age, were contemporaries and personal friends. Each greatly admired the work of the other; they met in 1837 during Anna's trip to the USA and Canada, and kept up a correspondence thereafter. Both Sedgwick and Jameson were, in many respects, nonconformists to the Victorian feminine ideal. Their education, while largely informal and self-directed, was unusually broad for a woman of the period. Both received extraordinary support from male relatives in pursuing their literary work. While marriage and motherhood was the ideal, both women remained independent—Sedgwick through choice, and Jameson by way of a failed marriage. Although Sedgwick and Jameson, in their books, constructed a female intellectual along the lines of polarized gender roles, each called for the improvement of women's social and political status.

Catharine Maria Sedgwick was born in 1789 in Stockholm, Massachusetts. She was the third of six children in a highly distinguished family. Her father, Theodore Sedgwick, served in the Massachusetts legislature, both houses of Congress, and sat on the bench of the Massachusetts Supreme Court. Her family life, it seems, was somewhat troubled by her mother's recurrent bouts of depression and mental illness. Sedgwick was therefore left much to herself as a child; later, she lamented the “want of female supervision” in her early years. Perhaps this lack inspired Sedgwick to act, through her writing, as a moral guide to other young women. Sedgwick also expressed regret over the inadequacy of her formal education. Of the district schools she attended, she states, “Our minds were not weakened by too much study—reading, spelling, and Dwight's Geography were the only paths of knowledge into which we were led.”¹⁶ At the age of 11 Sedgwick attended a boarding school in Albany where she learned a smattering of “accomplishments”—dancing and French.

Although Sedgwick deplored the inadequacy of her formal education, she appreciated her home schooling. “I was reared in an atmosphere of high intelligence,” she remarks. “My father had uncommon mental vigor. So had my brothers. Their daily habits, and pursuits, and pleasures were intellectual, and I naturally imbibed from them a kindred taste.”¹⁷ Sedgwick's father regularly read Hume, Shakespeare, Cervantes and Hudibras to the family. Sedgwick also recalls reading Rollin's Ancient History to herself at the tender age of 10. “My school life was a waste,” Sedgwick concludes, “my home life my only instruction.”¹⁸ She also read less scholarly texts. Another passage from her letters states: “I read constantly, but chiefly novels [italics mine]. I remember little of that winter, but falling romantically in love with a handsome young man … It was the fancy of a few weeks of a girl of eleven! I knew him afterwards, a cold selfish but still handsome man.”¹⁹ Here Sedgwick seems to imply that novel-reading had a direct effect on her foolish fancies; she would have behaved differently, the reader infers, if she had known better.

In the course of her literary career, Sedgwick wrote numerous didactic tales and sketches, but she is best known for her six novels: A New England Tale (1822), Redwood (1824), Hope Leslie (1827), Clarence (1830), The Linwoods (1835), and Married or Single? (1847). Sedgwick, initially, published with reluctance; probably she wished to avoid public notoriety as a female author. Interestingly, her four brothers had the greatest influence on her writing. Charles, Harry, Theodore and Robert praised Catharine's work, and conducted transactions with her publishers. In 1821, Catharine wrote to a friend, “My dear brother Theodore makes a most extravagant estimate of my powers. It is one thing to write a spurt of a letter, and another to write a book.”²⁰ Shortly afterwards, Harry persuaded Catharine to expand a religious tract she had written—originally intended for Sunday School instruction—into a full-length novel. The result, A New England Tale, was published anonymously in 1822, but her identity became known in due course. From the very beginning, the public received her work enthusiastically.

Although Sedgwick wrote only a few works explicitly designed as conduct or advice manuals, “everything she wrote,” states Mary Walsh, “had a lesson to convey.”²¹ She seemed to view herself less as a writer of imaginative literature than as an educator and moral guide. After the publication of a domestic manual in 1837, Live and Let Live—a discussion on how to secure competent servants—Sedgwick writes, “I thank heaven that I am not now working for the poor and perishable rewards of literary ambition … Neither pride nor humility should withhold us from the work to which we are clearly “sent.” … There is much sin from mere ignorance …”²² One Reverend Dr Channing praised Sedgwick for this same book; in a letter to her he writes, “Thousands will be the better and happier for it; thousands, as they read it, will feel their deficiencies, and resolve to do better.”²³ This seems like unduly exalted praise for a manual on domestic help, but the sanctity of the Victorian home, after all, was at stake. It should be no surprise, furthermore, that Sedgwick's novels are highly moralistic as well. This moralism, argues Walsh, ultimately compromises Sedgwick's writings. “The ever prevailing shadow of didacticism is over her work,” she states, “and for this reason alone her novels make no appeal to the modern reader.”²⁴

In the first chapter of Means and Ends; or Self-Training, Sedgwick clearly states her authorial intent. She means to address an audience of fellow “young countrywomen,” 10 to 16 years in age: “I have written the following pages to aid you in your self-education … [The book] has been written with a deep interest for your welfare and improvement, and I should be sorry if it proved a total failure” (pp. 10, 12).²⁵ Sedgwick defines her conception of education for women: “It is not enough, believe me, to get hard lessons in arithmetic, grammar, and geography, French, Italian, and Music … More than all this is required to make you a good wife and mother” (p. 16). Although Sedgwick stresses the necessary moral dimension of a woman's training, she encourages intellectual development as well. In Chapter XI, “What to Read, How to Read,” Sedgwick eloquently praises the book: “What is a book, my young friends? Is it not a cabinet which contains the most interesting creation of God, the mind of a human being, a portion of the Divine mind?” (p. 222). She discusses the importance of reading in the formation of good character. “Resolve to devote a portion of every day, for a year to come, to reading,” she advises (p. 226).

Sedgwick spends a goodly portion of the chapter advising what girls should and should not read, but “The selection of books is next in importance to a love for reading” (p. 226, italics mine). Clearly, she stresses the importance of reading first and attempts to regulate it only afterwards. Interestingly, Sedgwick—a writer of didactic tales herself—actually discourages the reading of religious tracts. Many are badly written, she feels, and thus, “You are attracted by a story, and, to get a little pure gold, you receive a great deal of dross” (p. 227). Rather, she encourages her audience to read the Bible daily. In addition, she recommends histories of the USA, travel narratives, good biographies, and certain works of “English Literature,” including Shakespeare. “In the wide department of fictitious writing,” she warns, “let your consciences restrain and direct your inclination …” (p. 229). Sedgwick, however, gives her readers a few hints. “You have no excuse for reading the profligate and romantic novels of the last century, or the no less profligate and far more insidious romances of the present day, such as Mr Bulwer's, and the trash that fills the circulating libraries” (p. 232). She concludes the chapter with advice on the care of texts, including the strict rejoinder, “Do not wet the fingers to turn over the leaves of books!” (p. 232).

Although Sedgwick, like many of her contemporaries, attempts to regulate women's reading practices, she nonetheless encourages her audience to read widely, educate themselves, and develop critical thinking skills. Furthermore, in her final chapter, “Might Makes Right,” she addresses the issue of women's rights. Sedgwick condemns those who agitate for equality with men. “It has been well and truly said,” she states, “that when a woman claims the rights of a man, she surrenders he own rights” (p. 253). Sedgwick has no wish to see women voting or sitting in legislatures, but she does acknowledge the need to improve women's lot in society. In particular, she mentions laws which deny a married woman's right to hold property, and prevent a separated woman from taking custody of her own children.

Sedgwick proposes that women attain certain rights not by demanding them outright, but by educating themselves and thereby proving themselves worthy. “Women as yet, for the most part, have exercised but half their powers.” Sedgwick expresses confidence that if women but prove their rational and intellectual capabilities, men will grant them their rights. Hence her chapter title, “Might Makes Right.” While this view seems anything but enlightened in the present day, it was, arguably, progressive for the times. Although Sedgwick advocates different duties for men and women, she never ranks women's intellectual abilities below those of men. Furthermore, she encourages women to cultivate an interest in topics traditionally considered male terrain, such as politics. She argues,

Make yourself acquainted thoroughly with [your country's] institutions, its past and present condition, its extent, climate laws, productions, and commerce. All these subjects come within our own sphere—they may be called domestic matters. Think you, if a woman was well instructed and well read on these topics, would she be as incapable of business, and therefore as dependent as she now is?

(p. 229)

Sedgwick expresses concern over a woman's ability to depend on herself. As an unmarried woman (albeit a financially secure one) herself, she realized that despite the ideal, not all women would become wives and mothers. Thus she upheld self-education also as a preparation for earning a living.

In Means and Ends, Sedgwick presents mental acuity as a natural, desirable, even essential feminine trait. When women are highly (self-) educated, men “may hold more communion on their great social duties with their mothers, wives and sisters” (p. 254). In this manner, she implies, women can have an enormous influence upon social and political reform, all without leaving their appropriate sphere. The female intellectual, then, is always a domestic intellectual. Sedgwick saw herself, as a “literary woman” in a similar light. In 1835, Sedgwick wrote in her journal, “My author's existence has always seemed something accidental, extraneous, and independent of my inner self. My books have been a pleasant occupation … But they constitute no portion of my happiness—that is such I derive from the dearest relations of life”.²⁶ Although Sedgwick never married, she remained with her family all her life. As she implies here, she regarded her true calling not as an author, but as a devoted sister and aunt. Mary Dewey, Sedgwick's earliest biographer, wrote admiringly of her in 1871, “She could make a cake as well as books, and provide for all the household exigencies as ingeniously as she could conduct a story …”.²⁷

Like Catharine Sedgwick, Anna Jameson idealized a distinctly feminine intellectual as well. This author was born Anna Murphy, in Dublin, in 1794. Her father, who shortly thereafter moved his family to London, was a miniature portrait painter who struggled to support his wife and five daughters. Nonetheless, the girls had a governess who supervised their education. When she left the family in 1806, Anna, at age 12, took charge over the education of herself and her sisters. Geraldine MacPherson, Anna's niece and earliest biographer, states that, “Anna's education progressed, chiefly at her own will and pleasure, with an extensive breadth and desultory character as conspicuous as its ambition.”²⁸ She was encouraged by her father, who took pride in his intellectually precocious oldest daughter. Anna studied French, Italian and Spanish, developed a passion for poetry, as well as Sir William Jones's Indian and Persian romances. Her reading varied from classical works such as The Odyssey and The Iliad, to religious tracts by Hannah More. Interestingly, Jameson's opinion of such didactic tracts is as negative as Sedgwick's, although for different reasons: “It is most certain that more moral mischief was done to me by some of those than by all Shakespeare's plays together. These so-called pious tracts first introduced me to the knowledge of the vices of vulgar life, and the excitements of a vulgar religion …”.²⁹

Regarding Jameson's mention of Shakespeare, he was, according to Clara Thomas, “on the forbidden shelf” in the Jameson home. This is especially interesting in relation to the Sedgwick household, which endorsed the reading of Shakespeare. Although a significant number of conduct manuals recommended the author as well, others worried about his influence on young, impressionable readers. In The Young Ladies' Reader (1845), Sarah Ellis states, “It is scarcely possible to imagine a prudent and judicious mother allowing the unrestrained and private reading of Shakespeare amongst her children …”.³⁰ However, she continues, a mother “thoroughly imbibed with a sense of the beautiful and pure” could read aloud selected passages “to improve the taste of those around her.” Anna, however, read Shakespeare in secret, and considered herself no worse for the experience. “I had read him all through between seven and ten years old,” she recalls. “He never did me any moral mischief. He never soiled my mind with any disordered image. What was exceptional and coarse in language I passed by without attracting any meaning whatever to.”³¹ Jameson, in fact, seems to feel that regulating a child's reading achieves little, if anything. Drawing upon her own experience, she states, “it was not the forbidden books that did the mischief, except in their being read furtively.” Rather, certain “approved” reading disturbed her as a child, religious tracts, for example, and violent passages from the Old Testament and Goldsmith's History of England.

Jameson, obliged to help support her family financially, took three successive positions as a governess between 1810 and 1825. Later, in 1845, she complained bitterly about her former profession in a work entitled On Mothers and Governesses. “I have never in my life heard of a governess who was such by choice,” she states.³² This is the only avenue for impoverished middle-class women, she points out, and laments the fact that governesses are held in such low esteem. The proper education of governesses, she argues, would raise the status of their profession in the eyes of society. “A college expressly to teach women the art of teaching would be very useful; we want good and efficient female teachers for all classes …”.³³ As much as Jameson later disparaged the profession, her tenure as governess provided the springboard for her subsequent writing career. In 1821 she accompanied her employers on a European tour. Her experiences and observations on this tour served as the material for her first book, The Diary of an Ennuyee (1826), which was expanded and reissued in 1834 as Visits and Sketches.

Jameson, much like Catharine Sedgwick, was at first a reluctant author. In 1825 she left her position to marry Robert Jameson, a barrister. Although the marriage was a miserable failure, Robert did encourage his wife's literary abilities. At his prompting, she wrote short pieces of her travels, published anonymously, for London Magazine; shortly thereafter, he secured the office of an “eccentric cobbler-bookseller” to publish Anna's Diary.³⁴ Anna seemed to embark on the venture as a joke. Geraldine MacPherson describes her attitude: ““You may print it if you like,” said Mrs Jameson, adding, half in jest, “if it sells for anything more than will pay the expenses, you shall give me a Spanish guitar for my share of the profits.””³⁵ Jameson and her publisher, nonetheless, took an extreme measure to protect the author's identity. “A final paragraph was added … Herein it was stated that “the writer died on her way home at Autun, in her twenty-sixth year, and had been buried in the garden of the Capuchin Monastery near that city.””³⁶ Despite Anna's reluctance to draw attention to herself as a female author, her identity became known along with the success of her first book. Once Anna separated from Robert in 1829, writing became more a necessity than a hobby. In order to support herself, her parents, and two unmarried sisters, Jameson wrote well over a dozen books in her lifetime. She was best known as an art critic, although her criticism, like Sedgwick's novels, contains a heavy dose of moral didacticism. This strand runs throughout her oeuvre, as certain titles of her books reveal: Memoirs and Essays on Art, Literature and Social Morals (1846), Legends of the Madonna (1852), The History of Our Lord, as Exemplified in Works of Art (published posthumously, 1864).

Jameson's Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical, and Historical (1832) is technically literary criticism; however, the work presents literary analysis in a sort of conduct manual format. Despite the ambiguity of its genre, Jameson clearly wrote the book—a study of Shakespeare's heroines—in order to define a womanly ideal. At the very outset, the author denies any motives for writing which would be considered unfeminine. “Accident made me an authoress,” she states, “and not now, nor ever, have I written to flatter any prevailing fashion of the day for the sake of profit … This little book was undertaken without the thought of fame or money …” (p. ii).³⁷ According to this disclaimer, Jameson writes not for public display, nor as a means to earn her own living (a less believable claim, however). Rather, her purpose is to enlighten and instruct, but in as unobtrusive a manner as possible. “I do not choose presumptuously to fling … opinions in the face of the world, in the form of essays on morality, or treatises on education. I have rather chosen to illustrate certain positions by examples, and leave my readers to deduce the moral themselves, and draw their own inferences” (p. v). Jameson, obviously, feels it necessary to preface her work with an apology for the female author/intellectual.

Jameson's Characteristics, unlike Means and Ends, does not explicitly discuss women's reading practices. Its use of Shakespearean heroines for moral examples, however, assumes a thorough grounding in Shakespeare (and a fairly high degree of literacy) among its audience. Furthermore, its primary concern is the state of women's education and contemporary views of the female intellectual. “It appears to me that the condition of women in society,” she states, “as at present constituted, is false in itself and injurious to them,—that the education of women … at present conducted, is founded in mistaken principles, and tends to increase fearfully the sum of misery and error in both sexes …” (p. v). Jameson is not concerned here with a lack of opportunity for women's intellectual development. Rather, she fears that women are becoming educated at the expense of their moral instincts and sympathies. The current system of education, she argues, “inundates us with hard, clever, sophisticated girls … with whom vanity and expediency take place of conscience and affection” (p. xxxi). While the poorly-taught woman, as Sedgwick emphasizes, is an unfit wife and mother, problems can develop from the wrong sort of education also. A woman's education, Jameson argues, must not neglect her moral development. “A time is coming perhaps,” she states, “when the education of women will be considered with a view to their future destination as the mother and nurses of legislatures and statesmen; and the cultivation of their powers of reflection and moral feelings supersede the … [means] by which they are now crammed with knowledge and accomplishments” (p. xxxi).

Through her discussion of Shakespeare's heroines, Jameson means “to illustrate the various modifications of which the female character is susceptible, with their causes and results” (p. iv). She has chosen Shakespeare's work, because in his plays “the male and female characters bear precisely the same relation to each other that they do in nature and society—they are not equal in prominence or power” (p. xv). For example, Shakespeare's women are capable of great emotion, but men surpass them even in this: “Juliet is the most impassioned of his female characters,” she writes, “but what are her passions to those that shake the soul of Othello?” (p. xv). Still, Shakespeare's heroines exhibit a superior moral sensibility. While Lady Macbeth and Richard III are both depraved characters, Lady Macbeth suffers womanly pangs of remorse, while Richard, as a male villain, “has neither pity, love nor fear” (p. xvi). This technique of Jameson's shows itself most amusingly in her discussion of Much Ado About Nothing. She describes the scene where Beatrice orders Benedict to kill Claudio as having a “comic effect,” for she thinks that Beatrice, as a good, virtuous woman, must surely be joking.

Jameson divides Shakespeare's heroines into four types: characters of intellect, characters of passion and imagination, characters of the affections, and characters of history. She discusses “characters of intellect” first however; and since her preface addresses questions of women's education, this appears as her greatest interest. Women's intellects, Jameson states explicitly, are inferior to those of men. They are also qualitatively different. “In man the intellectual faculties exist more self-posed and self-directed—more indifferent of the rest of the character.” Women's intellect, however, is “modified by the sympathies and moral qualities” (p. 39). This “feminine” quality of the intellect, however, is natural and desirable in a woman. Male authors, argues Jameson, have traditionally misrepresented women of intellect. “Men of genius have committed some signal mistakes … they could form no conception of intellect which was not masculine, and therefore have either suppressed the feminine element altogether and drawn coarse caricatures, or they have made them completely artificial” (p. 40).

Jameson lauds Shakespeare because, she argues, he presents realistic, believable portraits of intellectual women. She discusses four heroines in this chapter, those “at once distinguished by their mental superiority”: Portia (Merchant of Venice), Isabella (Measure for Measure), Beatrice (Much Ado About Nothing) and Rosalind (As You Like It). “The wit which is lavished on each,” she declares, “is profound, or pointed, or sparkling, or playful—but always feminine; like spirits distilled from flowers, it always reminds us of its origin;—it is volatile essence, sweet as powerful” (p. 41). Jameson, incidentally, praises all Shakespeare's heroines in this same flowery and effusive vein, for two volumes. As part of her discussion on Portia, Jameson implies that women's intellect is inherently feminine. “I never yet met in real life, nor ever read in tale or history, of any woman, distinguished for intellect of highest order, who was not also remarkable for [feminine qualities] … which is compatible with the most serious habits of thought, and the most profound sensibility …” (p. 50). This statement seems directly to contradict the concerns Jameson states in her preface. If all intellectual women are inherently feminine, how can any form of education remove this quality? Despite Jameson's ambivalence in this passage, she obviously believes that intellect and femininity are highly compatible. In this respect, her views on female intellect are analogous to Sedgwick's in Means and Ends.

As Jameson's argument in Characteristics indicates, her views on the position of women are highly conservative to a modern day reader. Nonetheless, her construction of the female intellectual, like Sedgwick's, is an attempt to bridge traditional views of women with women's increasing literacy and educational opportunity. Although Jameson does not explicitly address the subject of women's rights in this book, she became increasingly outspoken on the topic in succeeding years. Her lifelong concern for the education and welfare of women is particularly evident in On Mothers and Governesses (1845), and The Communion of Labor: A Second Lecture on the Social Employments of Women (1856). One of her most scathing criticisms of women's position in society appears in Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (1838), the result of a 9 month North American tour. Jameson describes the Native American women she encountered, and states that their lot, in some ways, is superior to that of European women. The Native American woman, she argues, “is sure of protection, sure of maintenance, at least while the man has it; sure of kind treatment; sure that she will never have her children taken from her but by death …”.³⁸ Jameson's observation did not pass uncriticized by male reviewers.

It is interesting to consider how Jameson's view of herself as a female intellectual and writer compares with that of Catharine Sedgwick. While Sedgwick saw her identity as an author as secondary and extraneous to her family life, Jameson was much less tied, by dint of frequent travel, to her family. Furthermore, writing for Jameson must have taken a far more central role, as she made her livelihood from it. Although Jameson originally published with reluctance, she later vigorously defends the role of the woman writer. In Winter Sketches, she depicts writing as a necessary means of advancement for women. “Women must find means to fill up the void of existence. Men, our natural protectors, our lawgivers, our masters, throw us upon our own resources … We have gone away from nature, and we must—if we can, substitute another nature. Art, literature and science, remain to us …”.³⁹ Here Jameson views the role of female intellectual as an inevitable response to social inequalities. She expresses contempt for those who ridicule female writers. During her visit to Toronto in 1837, she describes the society she encountered: “The cold narrow minds, the confined ideas, the by-gone prejudices of the society, are hardly conceivable … The women here express, vulgarly enough, an extreme fear of the “authoress” and I am anything but popular.”⁴⁰

Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Anna Jameson were but two contributors to an enormous body of conduct literature for women in nineteenth-century England and the USA. As scholars have noted, these books served a highly conservative purpose. By encouraging women to conform to a womanly ideal, conduct books prescribed rigid norms of behaviour which confined women to a domestic sphere, and thus reinforced Victorian patriarchal structures. The books addressed all aspects of a woman's life: dress, household training, manners, morals, health (Means and Ends devotes a chapter to “Care of the Skin”), and mental development. Very often, this last topic referred primarily to women's self-education, or private reading practices. Regarding the subject of women's literacy, conduct books often sent mixed messages to their readers. Like everything else in a woman's life, reading must serve a morally edifying purpose and conform to certain standards. Women's minds, then, were to be molded and shaped by the “right” sort of reading. This attitude took for granted a woman who was mentally docile, easily impressionable and likely to be swayed by any argument. The literate woman, having read the proper books, would be a suitable companion for her husband, and thus strengthen the power of the domestic sphere and perpetuate the status quo. In Catharine Sedgwick's Means and Ends, however, this strand of thought coexists with the idea of female intellectual development as a politically powerful force. Sedgwick encourages her readers to develop critical thinking skills and cultivate interests not traditionally regarded as part of a woman's sphere. In this manner, women can improve their position in society. Furthermore, she acknowledges the economic necessity of independent, self-supporting women. Anna Jameson, in Characteristics of Women, regards women's intellects as inferior to those of men. Nonetheless, by praising Shakespeare's “Women of Intellect,” she portrays strength of mind as an admirable and necessary quality in a woman. In other of her didactic works, Jameson, like Sedgwick, calls for reforms in women's social, educational and economic positions.

A closer examination of the multiple constructions of literacy in Means and Ends and Characteristics of Women reveals four primary definitions. For both Jameson and Sedgwick, female literacy was a means of self-discipline and training; it contributed to the formation of a “good character.” A woman of “good character” reinforced a conservative, patriarchal social order. The second construction of literacy in these books is an economic one. Literacy was portrayed as an economic investment; after all, the literate woman made a more desirable wife and mother, thus improving her chances for a good match. Although this dimension served a conservative agenda as well, an “economic” definition of literacy could also challenge the status quo. Sedgwick and Jameson both evince an awareness of literacy's importance for the single, unsupported woman. Literate women, they recognize, could more easily support themselves as part of a growing female workforce divorced from the domestic sphere. The third definition of literacy, as it appears in these conduct manuals, reinforces class hierarchies, and helps define a growing middle class. Literacy is a badge of wealth and social status, as the mistress of a comfortable, well-staffed household would have more leisure, and thus greater opportunity, to read all Shakespeare's plays, for example, or set aside an hour a day for reading. Sedgwick and Jameson, after all, were upper middle-class women writing for an upwardly mobile segment of society. The fourth of Sedgwick's and Jameson's definitions is literacy as a means of empowerment. Sedgwick encouraged women to educate themselves, and thus effect social reform through their fathers, brothers and husbands. Jameson used much of her didactic writing as an outlet for her concerns over women's role and welfare in society.

The multiple roles of literacy set forth by Jameson and Sedgwick highlight their complex ideological positions. Although both authors were progressive in their social/political outlook, they upheld the ideal of an intelligent yet traditionally feminine woman—a “domestic intellectual” of sorts. For these writers, women's literacy promised both continuity and change. Through perusal of the Bible, for example, a woman might read about the necessity of wifely submissiveness—and learn to conform to an age-old feminine ideal—while also developing a political consciousness through reading the newspapers. This construction of the domestic intellectual—at once progressive and highly traditional—seems to reflect the personal ambivalence of the authors themselves. Sedgwick and Jameson both shied away, at least initially, from the role of female writer, a persona typically mocked in the contemporary press as that of a masculinized woman. Both used writing, however, to carry out an acceptable female duty—the moral and spiritual edification of society. Both were highly intelligent, independent, and keenly aware of women's social and political wrongs—yet they never, in any respect, viewed themselves as crusaders for women's rights. Rather, Sedgwick and Jameson, as self-constructed domestic intellectuals, attempted to effect political change through quiet persuasion. Their conduct books cannot be interpreted so much as bulwarks of a conservative social order, but as the products of women living in a complex era and a rapidly changing society.

Notes

1. Ellen Jordan (1991) “‘Making Good Wives and Mothers’? The Transformation of Middle-Class Girls' Education in Nineteenth-Century Britain”, p. 477, History of Education Quarterly, 31, pp. 439-462.

2. Karl Kaestle (1988) “The History of Literacy and the History of Readers”, in Eugene R. Kintgen, Barry M. Kroll & Mike Rose (Eds) Perspectives on Literacy, p. 97 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press).

3. Nancy Armstrong (1987) Desire and Domestic Fiction: a political history of the novel, p. 94 (New York: Oxford University Press).

4. Mary Poovey (1984) The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer, p. 10 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

5. Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction, p. 95.

6. We should acknowledge at this point the existence of a parallel conduct book tradition for men. Nancy Armstrong, in Desire and Domestic Fiction, notes that by the mid-eighteenth century, “the number of books specifying the qualities of a new kind of woman had well outstripped the number of those devoted to describing the aristocratic male” (p. 62). Conduct literature for men, she argues, evolved into other forms (such as political satire) while women's conduct books retained their popularity well into the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, Sarah Newton, in Learning to Behave, lists well over a hundred conduct books for men published in the USA in the nineteenth-century. While women's conduct literature prepared its readers for marriage and motherhood, men's advice manuals often patterned themselves after Poor Richard's Almanack, encouraging ambition and industrious habits as the means to economic success.

7. Carla Peterson (1987) The Determined Reader, p. 13 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press).

8. Quoted in Poovey, The Proper Lady, p. 68.

9. Kate Flint (1993) The Woman Reader: 1837-1914, p. 214 (New York: Oxford University Press).

10. Quoted in Poovey, The Proper Lady, p. 35.

11. Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction, p. 100.

12. Poovey, The Proper Lady, p. 97.

13. Sarah E. Newton (1994) Learning to Behave, p. 76 (Westport: Greenwood Press).

14. Ibid., p. 78.

15. John Guillory (1993) Cultural Capital, p. 19 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

16. Mary Kelly (Ed.) (1993) The Power of Her Sympathy: the autobiography and journal of Catharine Maria Sedgwick, p. 11 (Boston: The Massachusetts Historical Society).

17. Ibid., p. 76.

18. Ibid., p. 84.

19. Ibid., p. 92.

20. Mary E. Dewey (1871) The Life and Letters of Catharine M. Sedgwick, p. 150 (New York: Harper & Brothers).

21. Sister Mary Michael Walsh (1937) Catharine Maria Sedgwick, p. 6 (Washington: Catholic University of America).

22. Dewey, The Life and Letters of Catharine M. Sedgwick, p. 271.

23. Ibid., p. 270.

24. Walsh, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, p. 34.

25. Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1840) Means and Ends, or Self-Training (Boston: Marsh, Capen Lyon & Webb)

26. Kelly, The Power of Her Sympathy, p. 151.

27. Dewey, The Life and Letters of Catharine M. Sedgwick, p. 330.

28. Geraldine MacPherson (1878) Memoirs of the Life of Anna Jameson, p. 12 (London: Longman, Green & Co.).

29. Quoted in Clara Thomas (1967) Love and Work Enough: the life of Anna Jameson, p. 6 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press).

30. Flint, The Woman Reader, p. 83.

31. Quoted in Thomas, Love and Work Enough, p. 6.

32. Ibid., p. 18.

33. Ibid.

34. Ibid., p. 28.

35. Quoted in MacPherson, Memoirs of the Life of Anna Jameson, p. 41.

36. Ibid., p. 42.

37. Anna Jameson (1833) Characteristics of Women (Annapolis: J Hughes).

38. Quoted in Thomas, Love and Work Enough, p. 138.

39. Elizabeth Helsinger, Robin Lauterbach Sheets & William Veeder (Eds) (1983) The Woman Question: Literary Issues, p. 24 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

40. Quoted in Mrs Steuart Erskine (Ed.) (1915) Anna Jameson: letters and friendships, p. 150 (London: T. Fisher Unwin).