SOURCE: "Place and Race in American Fiction," in American Fiction: An Historical and Critical Survey, D. Appleton-Century Company, 1936, pp. 332-42.

[In the following excerpt, Quinn discusses Woolson 's ability to blend vibrant descriptions of physical settings with the actions of realistic characters.]

Usually a novelist's impulse to deal with the life of a locality was confined to one section, but Constance Fenimore Woolson dealt not only with the North-west and the South but also with the European scene. She was born in Claremont, New Hampshire, in 1840, her mother, Hannah Cooper Pomeroy Woolson, being the niece of James Fenimore Cooper. She was educated in Cleveland, Ohio, and as a girl spent her summers at Mackinac Island in the straits between Lake Huron and Lake Michigan. In 1858 she graduated from Madame Chegary's school in New York City, which was to appear in her novel Anne, and began her contributions to periodicals with a sketch, "The Happy Valley," in Harper's for July, 1870. This description of a German community on the Tuscarawas River in Ohio, which she used later in a short story, "Wilhemina," was her first article to be written and shows how like Howells she began with an interest in the scene, out of which characters later developed. In the same month her sketch, "The Fairy Island," a description of Mackinac Island, appeared in Putnam 's. With this Lake region she was thoroughly familiar, and when she turned to it as material for fiction, after a few preliminary stories of a somewhat conventional character, it is interesting to see how the quality of her work improved. Even in a comparatively poor story, "One Versus Two," the writing becomes alive when the characters reach the Lake country.² From 1872 to 1878 she made the Lake country the background for twenty-three stories.³

Miss Woolson had the rare gift of self-criticism, and her selection for her first volume of stories, Castle Nowhere; Lake Country Sketches (1875), includes the most significant of her early work, although "A Flower of the Snow,"⁴ might easily have been included. How far she had come in three years may be seen by comparing this book with her first published volume, The Old Stone House (1873), a rather pietistic story for children. How strong Bret Harte's influence was upon her is seen in the story "Misery Landing," in which the hero, who has fled from a love he does not wish to pursue, tells in his diary his admiration for Harte, "who shows us the good in the heart of the outcast," and who makes the shrewd observation that "everywhere it is the cultivated people only who are taken with Bret." "The Lady of Little Fishing" shows even more clearly Harte's influence. The narrator, Mitchell, tells of the saintly woman who suddenly appeared among the rough hunters and trappers, thirty years before, and preached to them, so that they worshipped her. The relapse of the rough men when they discover their idol is simply a woman, is not badly done, and the fact that the narrator is the one she loved is concealed to make a dramatic ending. It is the "moral contrast" again. Some of the stories deal with Mackinac Island, some with the shores of Lake Superior, some with Ohio. Nearly always, however, the scenery is the background; the central character is an outsider who proves sometimes a disturbing influence or, as in "The Old Agency," in which she describes from real life the courtly French priest who forms such a contrast to his parishioners, he is a mystery and a benediction. Miss Woolson, like Bret Harte, remains an observer rather than a partaker of the life. But her descriptions of the marshes in "St. Clair Flats" or of the fog in "Castle Nowhere" are masterly.

On account of her mother's health, Miss Woolson was constantly traveling, and between 1873 and 1879 she spent her time largely in Florida and the Carolinas. The result came, as before, in the form of travel sketches, short stories, and novels. Between 1875 and 1879 she published fourteen short stories with a Southern background. The best of these are included in Rodman the Keeper (1880). She used first the Florida scene. "Miss Elisabetha," laid before the Civil War, is a tragic story of the efficient Northern woman who manages the life of her ward, "Doro," keeps him from his proper career and sees him sink into contented laziness. "The South Devil" is one of her finest achievements. The way she establishes the mystical relation between the great swamp and Carl, the young musician who hears the harmonies the swamp sings only to him, and who cannot keep away from it though it may mean death to him, reveals her great power of understanding the relations of place and human character. It is not only vivid descriptions of the "rank luxuriance of the heart of the swamp, a riot of intoxicating, steaming, swarming, fragrant, beautiful tropical life, without man to make or mar it. All the world was once so, before man was made." The swamp is active, living. When Mark goes "into it to save his brother, "the matted water vines caught at his boat like hundreds of hands; the great lily leaves slowly sank and let the light boat glide over them." In "Sister St. Luke," a story of the boundless courage of a timid Spanish nun who saves two shipwrecked men from the tornado, Miss Woolson not only showed her knowledge of the seacoast of Florida, but also revealed the breadth of her understanding of races not her own. So in "Felipa," the passionate devotion of a little Minorcan girl to a man and a woman, themselves lovers, whom she adores in different ways, is rendered powerfully and objectively.

Next Miss Woolson turned to the mountain regions of Tennessee and western North Carolina. But in her first story of this region, "Crowder's Cove,"⁵ the mountaineer, John Crowder, appears only as a "neutral" in the Civil War, and the main characters are a New England woman and a Southern girl of very different origin from the mountain people. Even in "Up in the Blue Ridge," which appeared in Appleton 's for August, 1878, three months after Miss Murfree's first story had been published in the Atlantic, the mountaineers are described but are only the background. The conflict is between the Northern characters like Stephen Wainwright and John Royce, and the Southerner Richard Eliot, who, though he is associated with a gang of moonshiners, is distinctly one of the planter class. The story is really a study of the reactions of Wainwright, who risks his life to save Eliot, because of his interest in Honor Dooris, Eliot's cousin.

Much more significant than her stories of the mountaineers are Miss Woolson's sympathetic revelations of the conditions in Reconstruction days in the South. "Old Gardiston," laid in no very definite spot in the rice lands of the Carolinas, is a touching picture of a girl's proud resistance to her growing love for a Northern officer, made real by the description of brave economies a man could not have imagined. "In the Cotton Country," on the other hand, is a story of a woman's hopeless suffering from the effects of war, without any expectation of the future, a woman whose husband had been called away at the altar and whom she had never seen again. This picture of apathy, of courage only to endure, is as realistic as it well can be. It is to her credit also that while Negro rule was still being imposed upon the South with Federal bayonets, a Northern woman told through her fictional characters the truth. She made it even more evident in 1878 in "King David," a story of a New England teacher who goes South to educate the Negroes and fails hopelessly because of their shiftlessness and drunkenness. It is another Northerner, a liquor-seller and political organizer, who helps to defeat him, but King David's failure is inherent because he tries to treat the Negroes as his equals. The very title shows her skill in her implication of the magnitude of the problem. These, together with "Rodman the Keeper," a study in the isolation of a Northern officer who becomes the warden of a Union cemetery in a Southern community, are the best of the post-war stories.

Miss Woolson began her first novel, Anne (1882), on the island of Mackinac, which she knew so well, and the scenes of Anne's girlhood as she grows up, a strong, tender, brave nature, meeting the responsibilities of her young step-sister Tita and the boys, when her father's death leaves them to her, have been the favorite portions of the book. There are remarkable character portraits in Miss Lois, a New England Puritan who had come out to convert the Indians, and the two clergymen, Père Michaux and Dr. Gaston, who watch over Anne. It seems a pity that after establishing so well these characters and the atmosphere of an army post in the 'fifties, Miss Woolson should have taken Anne away to New York City, to the school she herself had attended, but after all she builds up by deft touches the girl's reaction to the social organization which meets her with the cruelty which is the lot of "the islander." Her life under the patronage of her wealthy aunt gives Miss Woolson ample opportunity for keen social satire, and there has hardly ever been written a better picture of an American girl of character and natural breeding thrown into unconscious rivalry with women of the world, first suffering defeat and finally accomplishing victory. Anne's relations with Helen Lorrington and their rivalry for the love of Heathcote are developed with that insight into the capacity of women for friendship, love, and hate in which the realist again shone. There is, of course, too much in the novel, especially at the end, where Helen's murderer is brought to confession by means hardly credible; but the novel created marked critical approval even in its serial form in Harper's Magazine.⁶

In For the Major (1883) Miss Woolson showed none of the faults but all the virtues of Anne. It is much shorter, and the tone is kept with a restrained power that is almost beyond praise. The people are Southerners with high standards of conduct, living in "Far Edgerley," a hill town on the eastern flank of "Chillawassee Mountain" in North Carolina. They are not mountaineers, however, but a little group of survivals from the past of the South. Major Scarborough Carroll; his second wife, Madam Marion Carroll; Sara, his daughter by his first wife; and "Scar," his little son by his second, live on the Farms. He has been a distinguished man, but he is beginning to fail. The skill with which Marion Carroll guards the Major from the townspeople, so that his mental faltering shall not be apparent, even more the way she keeps Sara from tiring her father by insistence on his preserving the high ideals which Sara has had from her childhood about him, is unusual. Gradually through the conversations of different characters we learn, just as we do in real life, how Major Carroll has married Marion, a widow much younger than himself, how her first husband had fled, after a shooting affray, taking their boy away with him, and how she had heard of the pursuit and the drowning of both of them. Beginning with gratitude, her love for the Major has grown into a devotion that makes her an epic figure. How she conceals her real age, not from vanity but because of the Major's delight in her youth, how her blonde beauty lends itself to her brave artifices, above all how her unwavering watchfulness fights for the security and peace which her earlier life makes precious to her, is told with an art that no one of that day could surpass. Then into that security comes the disturbing element. Her eldest son, who is not dead, finds her and, under an assumed name, comes to Far Edgerley. She cannot acknowledge him, and here Sara plays her part, acting as go-between and almost killing her own chance of happiness with the young rector, Frederick Owen, so that her father will not suffer. There is a remarkable scene in which Marion Carroll waits until the Major is asleep to go to the death-bed of her son, which for quiet heroism is hard to surpass. Then when the Major's mind finally fails and he becomes like a child, Mrs. Carroll at once relaxes her vigilance of years, becomes overnight her real age, and tells her story to Owen. The passage in which she reveals to Owen her wellguarded secret, is an example of the art of fiction in which a great novelist pays a tribute to the imaginative power of her reader:

" … And now I must come to my second reason for telling you. You remember I said that there were two. This is something which even Sara does not know—I would not give her any of that burden; she could not help me, and she had enough to bear. She could not help me; but now you can. It is something I want you to do for me. It could not be done before, it could not be done until the Major became as he is at present. No one now living knows; still, as you are to be one of us, I should like to have you do it for me."

And then she told him.

Miss Woorson scorns to spoil her effect by explanations. But when Owen marries the Major to Marion, the reader suddenly realizes that this is the last gesture of a great soul, who, having learned from her son that her first husband was alive at the time of her marriage to Major Carroll, does what she can to make herself in truth the wife of the man she has loved so dearly. All her life she has lived for others; this at least she can do for herself.

If For the Major reminds one of an etching in which one central figure stands out in exquisite proportions against a background whose very limitations present that figure to perfection, East Angels (1886) is a glowing canvas, rich with color, where the characters gain each in his own way in vividness from their contrast or association with the rich languor of the Florida landscape. The principal actors are from the North. Miss Woolson proceeds to build up slowly a strong moral contrast between two groups of characters, those who insist upon doing right even at the cost of happiness and those who demand their own happiness and sweep ruthlessly aside anyone in their way. Margaret Harold, married at seventeen to a charming, selfish husband who leaves her for a French-woman shortly after their union, is one of those women who builds her life on self-sacrifice. Not only does she crush down the love she begins to feel for Evert Winthrop, but she does the harder thing—she bears quietly the implicit blame of the separation. Miss Woolson shows how the others, led by Mrs. Rutherford, a professional invalid who succeeds in making the attentions she demands from Margaret seem like a favor to her, all expect Margaret to "do her duty." Even Evert Winthrop is deceived at first, but when Lance Harold returns to Margaret, leaves her again and once more comes back, an invalid, Margaret has to combat not only her own desire but also Winthrop's determined passion. To draw a character whose achievement lies in renunciation is not easy, for her very inarticulate acceptance of the path she has chosen forbids the expression of her deep feeling. Winthrop's final restraint and respect for her determination are not so credible, but, as he is drawn, they were at least possible.

Mrs. Thorne, the owner of East Angels, is another illustration of self-sacrifice. A New England school teacher who had married a Southern planter of English descent, she is described delightfully by her neighbor, Mrs. Carew:

" … However, I ought to say that poor little Mistress Thorne has certainly done her very best to acquire our Southern ways; she has actually tried to make herself over, root, stem, and branch, from her original New England sharpness to our own softer temperament, though I always feel sure, at the same moment, that, in the core of the rock, the old sap burns still—like the soul under the ribs of death, you know; not that I mean that exactly (though she is thin), but simply that the leopard cannot change his spots, nor the zebra his stripes, nor," added the good lady—altering her tone to solemnity as she perceived that her language was becoming Biblical—"the wild cony her young. …"

Mrs. Thome's desperate sense of duty, which makes her try to become a Southern woman, while she prays secretly during the Civil War for "her own people," leads to a remarkable scene on her death-bed when she confides to Margaret how she has loathed the life she has had to live. Opposed to these stern self-schooled people are not only Lance Harold and Mrs. Rutherford, who are drawn with malicious insight, but, more important, Garda Thorne, Mrs. Thome's daughter. With a good deal of Spanish" blood, her beauty, her utter selfishness and her rapidly changing emotional reactions make her very much alive. Miss Woolson does not draw any conclusions or preach any lesson; nor does she reward her good characters, like George Eliot, with the satisfaction of self-respect. They are unhappy, but they cannot do otherwise. Marriage, to Margaret Harold, is for better or worse, and divorce is out of the question.

There are some remarkable scenes, as usual, in East Angels. The landscape plays its part in the nightlong search of Winthrop and Margaret for Lance in the great swamp with its deadly poisonous sweetness. And how well Miss Woolson conveys her knowledge of woman's nature in the conversation between Margaret and Winthrop concerning Garda:

"We seem to have much the same idea of her," said Winthrop. "I shouldn't have thought it possible," he added.

"That we should agree in anything?" said Margaret, with a faint smile.

"No, not that; but a woman so seldom has the same idea of another woman that a man has. And—if you will allow me to say it—I think the man's idea often the more correct one, for a woman will betray (confide, if you like the term better) more of her inner nature, her real self, to a man, when she knows him well and likes him, than she ever will to any woman, no matter how well she may know and like her."

Margaret concurred in this.

"So you agree with me there too? Another surprise! What I have said is true enough, but women generally dispute it."

"What you have said is true, after a fashion," Margaret answered. "But the inner feelings you speak of, the real self, which a woman confides to the man she likes rather than to a woman, these are generally her ideal feelings, her ideal self; what she thinks she feels, or hopes to feel, rather than the actual feeling; what she wishes to be, rather than what she is. She may or may not attain her ideal; but in the mean time she is judged, by those of her own sex at least, according to her present qualities, what she has already attained; what she is practically, and every day."

In Jupiter Lights (1889), Miss Woolson combined the coast of Georgia and the Lake country, but as usual the characters dominate the scene. In Eve Bruce, a Northern woman who comes to Romney Island in the sounds south of Savannah, Miss Woolson depicted a strongwilled nature, impatient of the weaker but none the less tenacious Southern woman, her brother's widow. Her horror when she finds Cicely has remarried, her rescue of Cicely and her little nephew from the crazed dipsomaniac husband, her flight with them to Port aux Pins on Lake Superior, and her own ultimate love story make up a novel with more action than is usual with Miss Woolson, some of it, especially the final scenes in Italy, being too melodramatic. It is, however, a fine study of the havoc made by any woman who tries to manage another's life.

So far Miss Woolson had made a woman the central character of her novels, but in her last, Horace Chase (1894), she presented a study of the self-made man, thirty-seven years old, who marries a girl of nineteen, Ruth Franklin. The Franklins are from New York but live either in Asheville, North Carolina, or at St. Augustine because they have been left property there by an aunt who belonged to a North Carolina family. The situation is one of frequent occurrence in which a family without much energy depend upon a strong nature and at the same time secretly look down upon him as beneath their social stratum. Horace Chase dominates the novel, and his reception of Ruth's confession of her infatuation for a younger man, and her journey to her lover only to find he has forgotten her, is quite in keeping with a largeness of view which success has given Chase. But while there is good character analysis, especially of the women, who care more for the son and brother than they do for each other, Horace Chase does not leave the same sense of artistic completeness as do the earlier novels.

Miss Woolson's later short stories were concerned largely with European scenes. After her mother's death in 1879, she went to England and the Continent, staying most frequently in Italy. Her first short story written abroad, "Miss Grief,"⁷ is of special interest because the central character is a woman who dies of privation rather than change her powerful but crude drama to suit the critical judgment of a popular author. Curiously enough, it was not included in either of the two collections published after her death, The Front Yard and Other Italian Stories (1895) and Dorothy and Other Italian Stories (1896), for it is one of the best. The similarity of this theme to some of those used later by Henry James is also noteworthy, since it was in 1880, under his guidance, that she grew to know Florence, her favorite among Italian cities. In these later stories, the American characters are the most important; sometimes indeed they are the only ones. The European scene remains the background, but it is an integral part of the narrative. Sometimes, as in "The Street of the Hyacinth,"⁸ it is the belief that she can paint which brings an American girl to Rome, but it is her poise and courage under disappointment that lend distinction to the narrative. In "The Front Yard"⁹ not only the scene but also the Italian characters form a contrast to the American. This is a fine study of a New England woman, Prudence Wilkins, who has married an Italian and who takes care of his family after his death, including a terrible old woman, the grandmother of his first wife. Living in Assisi, Prudence is oblivious to its meaning. To her life is not beauty but duty. The one thing she longs for is a "front yard" such as she had had in New Hampshire, but each time she saves up enough to start one, she makes a new sacrifice for her adopted family. Courage and fixity of purpose make the Americans in the later stories memorable. The way Mrs. Azubah Ash, an elderly woman, rises to command the situation after her son has killed his rival in "Neptune's Shore,"¹⁰ the clear grit of the fourteen-year-old lad in "A Transplanted Boy,"¹¹ who plays a man's part, without heroics; both are revelations of a power that showed no sign of weakening.

When the social scene is important, her Americans are never the vague uncertain figures of Henry James. Even the expatriated Americans like Mrs. Churchill in "A Pink Villa" are real. But what distinguishes Miss Woolson's stories from the usual magazine fiction is the way she can fix a character with one brief sentence. "No vulgar affluence oppressed Isabella. She had six hundred dollars a year of her own and each dollar was well bred." Her art is a fine art; one returns to her fiction for the sheer joy in well-controlled creation. She knew her own limitations as well as those of her characters. For the daring female of literature she had no respect, and she puts the case for her own manner brilliantly in one of her short stories, "At the Chateau of Corinne." In her delicate and distinguished art, she and Miss Jewett represented at its height that ability to guide with a firm hand the steeds of imagination and introspection which carried the so-called feminine impulse in American fiction very far toward perfection. Henry James in his Partial Portraits chose to place her with George Eliot, Trollope, and Turgenev, and his judgment was sounder than that which has apparently forgotten her. But at the time of her death (she fell or threw herself from her window in Venice in 1894), she was recognized as one of the most consummate artists in that great epoch of the novel.

Notes

…²Lippincott's, August, 1872.

³ See Kern, John D., Constance Fenimore Woolson (1934), for a complete analysis of these stories.

⁴Galaxy, January, 1874.

⁵Appleton's Journal, March 18, 1876.

⁶ See J. Henry Harper, The House of Harper, 484-487.

⁷Lippincott's Magazine, May, 1880.

⁸Century Magazine, May-June, 1882.

⁹Harper's Magazine, December, 1888.

¹⁰Harper's Magazine, October, 1888.

¹¹Harper's Magazine, February, 1894.