SOURCE: “Against Novels: Fanny Fern's Newspaper Fictions and the Reform of Print Culture,” in American Periodicals, Vol. 6, 1996, pp. 61-91.

[In the following essay, Pettengill examines newspaper and novel writing in the mid-nineteenth century and shows how Fern's work in these two genres at times blurred the distinction between them.]

I. INTRODUCTION: REFLECTIONS ON GENRE AND HIERARCHY

To The Reader

I present you with my first continuous story. I do not dignify it by the name of “A novel.” I am aware that it is entirely at variance with all set rules for novel writing. There is no intricate plot; there are no startling developments; no hair-breadth escapes. I have compressed into one volume what I might have expanded into two or three. I have avoided long introductions and descriptions, and have entered unceremoniously, and unannounced, into people's houses, without stopping to ring the bell …

—Fanny Fern, Preface to Ruth Hall

My assumption is that an author in making a generic choice involves himself in an ideological choice, and that the critic in reconsidering the generic choices, he attributes to a text involves himself in certain ideological, social, and literary commitments.

—Ralph Cohen, “History and Genre”

Fanny Fern wrote only two novels, and she wrote them back-to-back in the first half-decade of a long career (1851-72), in which she produced thousands of newspaper columns and at least seven book-length collections of her work. Though several scholars have argued that newspaper columns, not novels, represent her best writing,¹ most recent critical work on Fern has focused on her first, best-selling novel, Ruth Hall (1855), the story of a virtuous woman's hard-fought rise to fame and fortune as a newspaper columnist, based largely on events from the author's own life.²

This critical focus on Ruth Hall is explicable not in terms of the “timeless appeal” of her novel itself, but above all in the context of various contemporary academic debates, especially those revolving around issues of gender and genre. The current edition of Ruth Hall and other Writings, issued by Rutgers University Press as part of its “American Women Writers” series, draws attention to this context. Its back cover includes a description of Ruth as a woman who “realizes the American Dream solely on her own, becoming the incarnation of the American individualist—regarded at that time as a role designed exclusively for men”; in addition, a blurb by Joyce Carol Oates praises the Rutgers series as a “highly valuable contribution to the reclamation of American women's lost literature.” These quotations provide contemporary audiences with reasons to read and appreciate Fanny Fern, and to frame what is meant to be the novel's modern function. On the one hand, the series editors are reclaiming neglected works by women, bringing to light forgotten treasures—a “lost tradition”—implicitly equal in merit to canonized works by white male authors. The Oates quote evokes the sense of discovery and excitement accompanying such a project. On the other hand, because literary value is never self-evident, and has often been denied to works by women and minorities, the editors tailor their description of Ruth Hall to fit, even as it interrogates, dominant theories of the value of “American Literature” constructed (largely for white male writers) since the nineteenth century. In other words, referring to Fern's appropriation of the “American Dream” and “American individualism” creates a theoretical place for this novel alongside works by Melville, Twain, and others; these quotes grant Ruth Hall literary value both on its own terms (as part of a lost, possibly coherent female tradition) and on conventional canonical terms (as embodying “universal” American myths).

Fern's newspaper writings, which make up a large portion of this edition, are noted in a separate paragraph on the cover, in basically descriptive terms much less evocative of debates over and theories about the literary canon. The cover describes her as a “journalist” who, “writing on such taboo subjects as prostitution, venereal disease, divorce, and birth control … stripped the façade of convention from some of society's most sacred institutions.” Implicitly, Fern's novel has large aims—to make room for women in American myths of selfhood, while her columns have more direct and practical utility—to attack the particular social ills she observed around her every day.

At first glance, the kind of critical “frame” described above might seem unwittingly to reproduce a conventional distinction in English studies between “artistic” and “practical” prose, a distinction that underlies, for example, Shelley Fisher-Fishkin's comparison of the journalistic and “creative” works of certain “great” male American authors:

The conventional nonfiction narratives they wrote as journalists were designed to be taken at face value by passive readers who would trust what they read; the self-effacing, open-ended, fiction-blasting fictions they wrote as poets or novelists were designed to create active readers capable of questioning everything they read and constructing new patterns of meaning on their own. (9)

For Fisher-Fishkin journalism, as “fact,” is inherently nonliterary, though its practice can provide “artists” with skills of observation and the “raw materials” they need to write “important” works. In her schema, fiction blatantly gains merit from its contrast with nonfiction; genre entails a system of hierarchies in which a poem or a novel is important in comparison with a lesser genre. Indeed, she gives Walt Whitman's “best” journalism, epitomized by his account of a fire, credit for traits it shares with his poetry, traits that implicitly raise it in her hierarchy of genres. The story of the fire becomes a hybrid genre, somewhere between fact and fiction, gaining status from its amphibious nature.

As Ralph Cohen points out, genre classifications have always “possessed social purposes in a community,” in that generic distinctions reflect distinctions of social value (“History and Genre” 206):

Genres do not exist by themselves; they are named and placed within hierarchies or systems of genres, and each is defined by reference to the system and its members. … What is at stake is not some single trait that would place [a work in a particular generic class] but the purpose for so classifying it within a generic system. (207, emphasis mine)

In other words, distinctions between journalism and fiction serve specific social purposes derived from and reproductive of critics' social contexts. Probably unintentionally, the deployment of genre hierarchy in the example described above reaffirms the gendered notion of American genius that has long bolstered the traditional American literary canon.

In spite of the distinction it makes between Fern's “journalism” and her novel, however, the American Women Writer's series seems to present literature within a completely different frame of reference, meant to serve a radically different purpose. Joyce Warren's introduction to the volume elaborates upon, and helps clarify these differences. Warren insists upon the importance of Fern's journalism for her fiction, but in terms that grant the columns much higher status. For Warren, Fern's newspaper writing is her “true forte,” and it is the columnist's skill that makes Ruth Hall special:

[W]ith her talents as a writer of short, pointed newspaper articles … Fanny Fern has ordered the sort chapters into a well-structured contrapuntal pattern. Writing from her own experience and developing her theme with characteristic sharpness and vitality, she has created in Ruth Hall an original and effective novel of extraordinary power. (xxx-xxxi)

Here, a novel gains power from its appropriation of (rather than its escape from) the generic traits of newspaper writing; Warren constructs a critical framework that, putting into practice a revisionary respect for women's writing, insists at the same time upon a revision of conventional genre hierarchies. Warren's analysis, like that of many feminist literary critics, seeks, in the words of Ralph Cohen, to “oppose … in order to reform the genre system without abandoning a theory of genres” (“Genre Theory” 88).

Despite her acceptance of Fern's newspaper columns on their own terms, however, an act that implicitly interrogates conventional evaluations of both gender and genre, Warren devotes most of the introductory section on the newspaper articles to description of their content; and even though she refers briefly to Fern's place in a journalistic tradition shared by Lydia Maria Child and Margaret Fuller, her only concrete observation in this regard is that “the language and style of Fern's articles are very different” from Child's and Fuller's. Warren's major project in this introduction is not to canonize Fern's articles, but to make a place for Ruth Hall in theories about the American novel.

Warren discusses Ruth Hall not only in terms of content, including the novel's relationship to Fern's own life, but also in terms derived from theories about nineteenth-century women's fiction (xxii-iv), the sentimental novel, and novels in general (xxvi-ix), concluding that it “combines the realism of woman's fiction with the self-determining theme of the American (male) writers of the period” (xxix). Again, Ruth Hall is placed within—and gains importance from—contemporary theoretical debates about the novel; indeed, Warren performs with Fern's novel a kind of critical alchemy, reconciling contending theories about nineteenth-century novels that segregate them by the sex of their author. Clearly, the hierarchical genre distinction that matters most to Warren is not that between journalism and fiction, but between the long-maligned “sentimental” (or women's) and the higher-status “American” (or male) novel, and, by extension, that between feminist and traditional literary theory. Ruth Hall becomes a generic hybrid, a “missing link” able to bear fruit in terms of current, feminist theories about women's novels and rival theories about male/“American” novels.

Admirable though it is, Warren's project stops short of pursuing the implicit re-vision of the hierarchical genre distinction between journalism and fiction that her appreciation of Fern's columns seems to promise. In fact, her critical investment in novel theory hints at the continuing, marginal status of newspaper writing in English studies, a situation that limits the ways in which we are able to utilize genre to gain insight into complex historical situations.

In her anthology of nineteenth-century women's writing, Provisions, Judith Fetterly argues that American women writers of this era did their “best work” in forms other than the novel, because the novel

received the most interference from the male literary establishment; it was the form most highly programmed and most heavily burdened by thematic and formal conventions. … Writers who wished to avoid … conceptual dependency or who wished to experiment with artistic form might well have chosen to work in genres less formalized, less pretentious, and less predetermined, and therefore more open, fluid, and malleable to their uses. (14)

Fetterly finds alternative literary forms—letters, newspaper columns, short stories—liberating for women, enabling them to write with untroubled confidence, a trait some critics have found lacking in women's novels.³

… the voice that speaks to us … in the pieces by Fanny Fern is strong, clear, confident and unconflicted; it is a voice comfortable with the authority of the public forum, the written word. For such women, the text may have provided a temporary “world elsewhere” away from and outside of the general conflict. (7)

Fetterly's analysis is provocative, demonstrating a sophisticated approach to some of the extrinsic (social and economic) factors shaping an author's relationship to genre. It draws attention to the useful role contemporary genre theory might play in considering some of the problems raised by women's writing in this era. Rather than allowing conventional attitudes toward genre to shape our critical attitudes toward works by nineteenth-century women writers, a more fruitful approach would be to examine the attitudes toward genre that shape the works themselves. Rather than treating novels and newspaper columns as inherently “different” genres requiring “different” critical approaches, we might begin by looking at these types of writing as existing in a more fluid, “dialogical” relationship—not only with one another but with other forms of writing—the dynamics of which in turn reveal some of the social, political, and literary values of the cultural context within which writing acquires meaning.

Fetterly acknowledges that “much of the significant work being done on nineteenth-century American women writers focuses on the novelists” and suggests that her own “view of this tradition” might “be skewed by my decision to exclude the novels” from analysis (16). Obviously, the view of critics who focus only or predominantly on novels is similarly “skewed.” The problem is that there are still so few persuasive ways to discuss either newspaper writing in general or nineteenth-century women's writing in particular; both kinds of writing suffer from marginalization within the theoretical system that serves today to legitimize not only literary scholars but literary genres.⁴ Accustomed as we are to consider the newspaper as a source or origin of “higher” literary forms, especially the novel, we lack productive ways to think about a literary relationship, such as the one between newspapers and novels, that in the mid-nineteenth century in particular was extremely intimate, involving a complex, shifting matrix of influence and reference that worked in both directions.⁵

Many novels, for example, began as story-paper serials, heavily advertised and promoted by publishers; only after they had won an audience did they appear in book form, again highly publicized. There was no clear distinction between novelists and newspaper writers; as Mary Kelley observes:

Practically all [of the literary domestics] … appeared in a wide variety of periodicals—literary monthlies or quarterlies, weekly story papers, or newspapers—in which they published stories, sketches and essays, and frequently serialized their novels before they appeared in book forms. A number … also began their careers in such publications. (19)

Popular authors like E.D.E.N. Southworth and Harriet Beecher Stowe published in both journals and books; according to William Charvat, by 1870 almost all recognized novelists were selling their work first to periodicals, a fact which had important consequences for both the form and content of novels (309). Further, the audiences—and expectations—for both literary forms overlapped significantly. As Charvat argues, “Increasingly, writers were trained to write and readers to read, by periodicals” (307). Marketing strategies presumed a reading audience that would consume both newspapers and novels; newspaper publishers often capitalized on the fame of a writer's novels, and novel publishers on the success of her newspaper stories.⁶ For historicizing scholars, this relationship provides a valuable opportunity to examine particular ideologies from more than one angle, refracted through the closely related but slightly different lenses of what might be called a culture's “generic expectations.”

Nowhere, perhaps, are the dynamics of this relationship more apparent than in the work of Fanny Fern. Between 1856 and 1872, Fern wrote for Robert Bonner's New York Ledger, a weekly story paper that was not only the best-selling “magazine” of its day (Chielens 461), but “the success story of [an] era” (Nye 361), in which technological innovations, the birth of modern advertising, increasing literacy, improved transportation and circulation made newspaper publishing a potentially profitable “national,” rather than local, enterprise. Bonner was one of several New York businessman/publishers who spearheaded the transformation of the newspaper world; his innovative policies included paying famous writers enormous sums to write exclusively for the Ledger, and then advertising these agreements both in other newspapers and in the Ledger itself. Fern, who joined the paper in 1856 at the unheard of rate of 100 dollars a column, was the first of many “big names” employed in this way to help boost the Ledger's circulation—to more than 400,000 a week by 1860.⁷

Bonner actively promoted Fern's work, including Ruth Hall, since her continued success, even if it profited other publishers, could only help the Ledger. The pages of the Ledger are filled with “puffs” of Fanny Fern; Fern reciprocated by publicly promoting Bonner and the Ledger. This cozy relationship epitomizes the alliance of woman writer and “gentleman publisher” that Susan Coultrap-McQuin describes as characteristic of the age, and which also functioned to knit together popular novelists and family newspapers in a generic “family resemblance” of shared formal and thematic traits.⁸

Fern's columns and novels, fiction and nonfiction, often blur generic distinctions; what is striking about Fern's works, from a generic perspective, is how “porous” they are. Columns refer to other columns and to her novels; and her novels pick up on and elaborate upon stories and themes from her columns. Joyce Warren notes several instances of columns by Fern that served as the “germ” for pieces of her novels, and there are many more cases where Fern repeats themes—sometimes almost obsessively—in several columns, or in columns and novels. Intertextual reference, for Fern, is ubiquitous; reading her writing involves recognizing in both novels and columns a series of repetitions and reiterations that call attention to Fern's generic obsessions.⁹

Fern's intertextual references extend to the dense context, within which her work was read, of novels and articles by hundreds of other contemporary writers. Not only does she address popular themes, offering her own perspective on social and moral issues widely discussed in the media of the day (frequently on the very pages in which her columns appear), but she often discusses and/or appropriates texts from other places and inserts them into her novels and columns in order to comment on there.

Finally, Fern directly addresses the cultural status of novels and newspapers in her writing, often describing and characterizing newspaper culture and contemporary novels, furnishing her readers with ways of evaluating what had become both big business and the dominant literary-cultural context shared by growing numbers of literate Americans. Thus, her work provides a rich source of material for assessing the dynamic relationship of newspapers and novels in this era, both to one another and to prevalent cultural ideologies.

A valuable context for interpreting Ruth Hall, in other words, in addition to knowledge of Fern's personal struggle is the reality of her fame as a columnist and the desire and ability of her publishers to capitalize on it; similarly her Ledger columns can profitably be read not only in terms of her gender and her social conscience, but also in the context of her amicable relationship with Bonner, her celebrity, her stature as a best-selling novelist, her function as a literary commodity, and the complex economic and social changes shaping American society, toward which Bonner's Ledger took a particular didactic stance.

It is impossible, of course, to reconstitute in an act of interpretation the vast historical context within which Fern wrote. Still, awareness of the intimate relationship between her columns and her novels, shaped by the material and ideological realities of the publishing world, offers a productive alternative to ostensibly historicist studies that strand themselves on unexamined distinctions between genres. In the following pages, I would like to demonstrate the value of an approach sensitive to inter-generic transactions in writing by Fanny Fern and offer some tentative conclusions about the possible function of genre classification in her work.

II. RE-READING FANNY FERN

In Ruth Hall and Other Writings, Joyce Warren offers a representative selection of Fern's newspaper columns, one that successfully acquaints readers with Fern's main concerns and her strong, original style. Inevitably, of course, selection involves exclusion, and I have selected one of Warren's exclusions as an opportunity to begin the kind of generic exploration that interests me here.

Warren prints an essay by Fern that appeared in the December 13, 1856, Ledger, entitled, “To Gentlemen: A Call to Be a Husband,” which provocatively argues that men's institutionalized selfishness, reflected in the legal and social conventions of marriage, can destroy women's lives. The opening passages lay bare the prevailing sexual double standard as undermining not only ideals of marital happiness, but women's health and happiness, by spreading veneral disease and prostitution. Fern also attacks male control of the household economy as degrading to women. Her critique begins, then, as a serious and sweeping indictment of the structural inequities of marriage. Yet in the second half, Fern's tone becomes almost comic as she focuses on seemingly trivial matters associated with conventions of middle-class appearance and respectability. Arguably, these “lighter” criticisms also convey her overall theme—that men must respect women and respond to their needs—by presenting conventional male behavior as reflecting a structural inequality of the sexes that always degrades women, to a greater or lesser degree. Fern's title demands that male readers examine their consciences to determine their own suitability for marriage; each question aims to provoke the kind of soul searching that might change destructive behavior. In addition, and perhaps more provocatively, the column invites women readers to examine critically the behavior of their husbands. Fern's questions, outlining the impact of male “group behavior,” create at the same time a collective oppositional consciousness for women, transforming the dominant ideology of “separate spheres” into a potential arena of gender conflict.

As presented in the Warren edition, in the context of the other selections that surround it, it is easy to read this piece as reflecting Fern's serious commitment to reform, and her freedom from “the conventions of femininity which restricted many American women” (Warren, xxxv). As Warren points out, Fern's open discussion of issues like veneral disease outraged many who believed women should avoid such “indelicate” issues.

But the move from serious to comic in this piece might also serve another function: to “contain” the implicitly radical nature of Fern's critique, not only by evoking smiles rather than anger from readers, but also by dividing truly oppressive male behavior from the merely annoying. In moving from weighty to trivial issues, Fern arguably alleviates the burden of her more searching questions, permitting readers to identify themselves or their spouses with less damning habits, and seeming to endorse behavior modification rather than structural reform in the domestic realm.

This type of interpretation gains strength from the second half of this piece—which appeared in the Ledger on the same day on the same page and column, but which Warren fails to include in her selection. In “To the Ladies: A Call to Be a Wife,” Fern extends her soul-searching invitation to women, asking them frankly to examine their own contribution to marital unhappiness. Fern makes some serious points about women's ambition for social and material success, but her expectations for women are very high, and extremely conventional: a wife should keep her husband well fed and well dressed; be cheerful and attractive at home (rather than in the outside world); and welcome a “house full of rosy children” as constituting the highest happiness. This last point in particular presents a jarring contradiction to the first part of the column, which argues flatly, without the aid of rosy pictures, that excessive childbearing debilitates women and drives husbands to the arms of prostitutes. Read as a pair, then, the columns seem contradictory, undermining the implicit structural critique with which “Call to Be a Husband” began.

This sense of contradiction is reinforced by other articles and stories that appear in this issue of the Ledger and which form part of the context within which Fern's piece would acquire meaning for her readers. A few examples, taken primarily from the same page on which Fern's column appears, will suffice to make my point.

At this point in her career, Fern's column usually appeared on page four of the Ledger, the “editor's” page, which included Bonner's reflections on current events, editorial announcements of various kinds, items promoting the Ledger's contributors and comparing the paper favorably to its competitors, brief descriptions and moral reflections on true stories (usually unattributed), brief “news” items (of the “amazing but true” variety), and “Wit and Humor” (brief anecdotes). The other seven pages of the paper typically included several long pieces of fiction (some serialized, others complete in one issue), as well as other stories, poems, and didactic essays, usually signed.

In this issue, at the bottom of the column in which Fern's articles appear, an item reads: “Is it Libel?” with the following (complete) text: “A contemporary advances the opinion that no woman who is formed to excite general admiration is capable of conferring individual happiness.” The title indicates this is a question: food for thought. But the body of the text might be read as suggesting that the unattributed opinion contains a generally recognized truth, and that the most desirable women display their charms in the privacy of their own homes. This seems to mesh with Fern's negative assessment of a woman who “flirts with every man she meets, and reserves her frowns for the home fireside,” and with the prevalent notion that a woman's sphere was private and domestic. An article in column 2 of page 4 also promotes this ideal; “Coffee and Cookery” lauds the fortunes of men whose wives “can make good coffee and good bread,” hinting that such lucky husbands would never “stray.” Again, a small note on p. 7, speculating on “the main disqualification of women to rule,” concludes that “it arises from the easiness with which they are ruled” and their “proneness to give the reins into dishonest and usurping hands,” but hastening to point out that the traits which make this possible—“the Christian virtues of humility, docility, and obedience”—are at the same time women's “safety and their merit.” This piece constructs women as innately virtuous and passive, a combination that (again) reinforces the impression that the Ledger supports the separate sphere ideology obvious in the other texts described above.

On the other hand, several other articles and comments in this edition of the Ledger seem to align themselves with the more critical possibilities of Fern's columns. In the column beside hers, an essay entitled “A Fortunate Jilting” describes the wedding-day ordeal of the celebrated “Hannah Moore” [sic], who, abandoned at the altar by her immature fiancé, wins from him an annuity that enables her to write:

Instead of being yoked for life to one who thus gave evidence of a degree of instability unfitting him for the companionship of such a soul as hers, and filling the ordinary sphere of wife and mother, with perhaps trouble, sorrow, sickness and early death,—it may have been even worse in wedlock—she became one of the Most powerful and useful writers of the age.

Marriage here becomes a trap for genius which Moore has mercifully escaped. Not only marriage to the wrong man, but even “the ordinary sphere of wife and mother,” might have sapped Moore's abilities. Furthermore, her career is presented as made possible by her financial independence, and her fame as preferable to mundane “private” obscurity. Another, briefer article on page 7, “Women's Truest Happiness,” also raises doubts about the capacity of marriage alone to make women happy: “How many disappointed wives would answer, ‘No!’”—and urges that girls be taught early that “in our own hearts must the jewel lie, or vain will be the search.” What these examples demonstrate is that seeming contradictions or discrepancies in Fern's columns, muted in the context in which Warren presents them, intensify when the columns are examined in the context of the Ledger as a whole, revealing not a simple or single dominant popular ideology about the relationship of women and marriage, for example, but a set of possible responses on the part of writers and readers to values that were above all in the process of being constructed, or tested.

This is not to say that because the Ledger (and possibly, other papers of this era) seems to endorse contending values, it offers no dominant value-system. Instead I would argue that underlying the explicit presentation of opposing views about women's role (only one of several issues I could have chosen to analyze in the pages of the Ledger), lies the crucial, uncontested notion that one of the most important functions of the popular media is the construction of female subjectivity.¹⁰ The obsession of Ledger contributors, including Fanny Fern, with female traits, female roles, and female responses to male behavior indicates not only the vast audience of women which this paper reached, but also the important role papers like this played in a national debate about acceptable forms of American female selfhood. The question in this context, then, is not whether or not Fanny Fern's potentially radical critique is “contained” by her own text, by the texts surrounding hers, by the Ledger itself, or by the culture at large, but rather, the degree to which female subjectivity represents, in her work, a solution to cultural problems. Whether “home” is a paradise or a hell for women—and the Ledger's articles offer evidence for both formulations—the dialogism of the newspaper format reveals the effort to shape a (female) consciousness able to encompass both possibilities. Women as subject, and the subjectivity of women, seem in these articles to delineate a crucial cultural arena, a structural “location” of historical change.

Arguably, the Ledger's apparently contradictory attitudes toward women's “place” parallel the “sentimentality and common sense” Nancy Armstrong describes as characteristic of the nineteenth-century domestic novel, which in her view works to cement the hegemonic alliance of the modern state with the middle class. Obviously, however, this “associational cluster” is not, as Armstrong insists, confined to or most clearly represented in the domestic novel.¹¹ “Though the problem deserves more study there is to date no compelling argument for privileging the novel as the only or even the main instrument of cultural hegemony. Again, an issue well worth exploring is the degree to which the novel's allegedly “special” ability to embody the relationship between culture and writing arises from contemporary institutional needs—that is, from materially based genre hierarchies within the modern academy—rather than from some novelistic “essence” inherent in the birth and development of the form.¹²

III. NEWSPAPERS VS. NOVELS

As the above discussion suggests, current critical investment in novels skews the way we perceive and interpret other, less privileged forms of writing, such as newspapers. Although scholars have been attentive to some aspects of genre hierarchy, such as the early novel's lowly cultural status in relationship to genres like history, the essay, and biography, they have not as carefully considered past constructions of the relationship between novels and periodicals, or how the modern understanding of their connection shapes our vision(s) of the past.

Obviously, the fact that many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conduct books, educational treatises, essays—and even novels—highlight the relationship of the novel to “higher” genres helps justify the focus of modern critical narratives that trace the “rise” of the novel to its appropriation of the norms of, for example, history writing.¹³ Yet when these same primary sources address the relationship between periodicals and novels, critics have been on the whole less interested. Possibly modern genre hierarchies interfere. We tend to withhold from newspapers and periodicals literary status, even to the point of denying their claim to genericity; and when eighteenth-century sources, for example, mention novels and newspapers in the same breath, we may assume they are comparing apples and oranges, as we would be. The modern attitude is exemplified by Ian Watt's statement that

It was not until the rise of journalism that a new form of writing arose which was wholly dependent on printed performance, and the novel is perhaps the only literary genre which is essentially connected with the medium of print: it is therefore very appropriate that our first novelist should have been a printer himself. (166, emphasis added)

For Watt, “genre” is a category reserved for “literary” forms; as a result, his important effort to demystify the novel by linking its original concerns not only to the “history of ideas” but to popular forms like religious tracts and newspapers (50-51, passim) ironically works to devalue (and elide) journalism in order to elevate the novel. Casting the novel (or any other genre) as “the” dominant modern form not only describes but maintains its institutional power, at the expense of other forms. Watt is far from the only critic who has subjected journalism and periodical literature to such a process; another relevant example is David Reynolds' Beneath the American Renaissance, which insists first on the centrality of noncanonical writing in nineteenth-century America and second on the special “literariness” of “great” works that “transcend” these noncanonical forms through appropriating their styles and concerns.¹⁴

Because of the basic tenets that underlie our literary history—that novels have “risen,” for example, or that periodicals are not “genres” in the sense that novels are—we tend to understand past constructions of these forms as supporting our version of history, whether the evidence justifies such a reading or not. If a nineteenth-century writer denigrates novels, or distinguishes novels from newspapers, in other words, we assume her purposes somehow complement our version of literary history, and ultimately our own distinctions, when in fact they may not. For example, in Fanny Fern's day novels were often denigrated, but not always in comparison to “higher” forms. In the New York Ledger, on the contrary, the relevant distinction was between the novel and the newspaper. In Fern's writing as well, the novel is always “placed” in relationship to a wide range of publicly available printed commodities, but above all to newspapers and periodicals, with which Fern often compares novels unfavorably.

Importantly, all of these terms—“newspaper,” “periodical,” and “novel”—were simultaneously “under construction” in the mid-nineteenth century, each acquiring meaning through shifting distinctions from and links to one another. This accounts for one of the most significant anomalies between the Ledger's genre definitions and our own: its deployment of the term “newspaper.” Modern readers would not consider the Ledger a newspaper. After 1855, it contained no “news”; instead, imitating the popular London Journal, publisher Robert Bonner filled its pages with fiction, essays, poems, jokes, “puffs” of contributors, and advice to correspondents (Mott, Magazines 357). Despite its newspaperlike physical format, the Ledger's “miscellaneous” content resembles a modern magazine's—indeed, historians Frank Luther Mott and Edward Chielens define it as such in their influential studies of American magazines. Tellingly, however, Mott also includes the Ledger in his study of American newspapers, where he calls it a “cheap story-paper” that “nearly everyone read … at some time or other” (Journalism 319). In short, the Ledger is difficult to classify using relatively rigid modern standards; Russel Nye compromises by defining it as “a periodical that fitted halfway between a newspaper and Harper's [magazine]” (361).

Significantly, however, the Ledger itself, which had evolved from what we would consider a “real” weekly newspaper—the Merchant's Ledger and Statistical Record—continued under Bonner to refer to itself as one, apparently without embarrassment. When discussing “literature,” the Ledger barely distinguishes between newspapers and magazines, or among periodicals in general, as if these terms were interchangeable, or so closely related that strict definitions were not necessary. The utility of such strategy becomes apparent if one reads the Ledger; by assuming the title of “newspaper,” Bonner's publication lays claim not to a particular format, but to a range of progressive ideologies—it becomes a concrete link between economic and technological progress and liberal social reform.

In the Ledger, newspapers represent the most recent (and therefore most “advanced”) production of the printing press—“The Great Revolutionizer” which

more than all other arts and agencies has, within two centuries past, given the masses of mankind knowledge and hedged them round with educational defenses … it has dissipated superstitions, courtly and priestly juggleries, and chased the most venerable errors into oblivion. … Surely the world is moved by the human mind through the press. (NYL 1/24/57)

In this scheme of things, the press in general is an instrument of (Protestant) democracy, fostering both widespread literacy (“educational defenses”) and providing concrete information that strips outmoded political and religious hierarchies of their mythical status, while newspapers are democratic “leaves of light” which ought to “fall on every hearth”—latter-day heirs of the inherently revolutionary spirit of the press:

Interposing between the people and the follies and vices of society, the errors of legislation, and the tyranny of government, [newspapers] are in our age acknowledged as the paramount reformers. (NYL 1/24/57)

Further, the Ledger represents its own reforming role in terms of generic hierarchy, in which all periodicals, and especially newspapers, are superior to other popular genres, most notably popular fiction, or “light books.” The article entitled “The Great Revolutionizer” insists that “[n]ewspapers, and not books, form and guide public opinion, beat down fortresses, and unseat despotisms.” Another, entitled “Newspapers Against Books,” reports that demand for books is down, as a result of the spread of

superior family and daily newspapers and magazines. … What chance does a book … stand alongside of such a vigorous, healthy, rushing tide of news, history, romance, literature, and pictoral embellishment? (NYL 5/21/56)

Books, in other words, are passe, as well as implicitly morally suspect (unhealthy); newspapers of all kinds, whether they contain news or not, partake of—indeed embody—the relentless “tide” of progress toward a utopian future.

The Ledger presents newspapers in general, and itself in particular, as “medicine” for social ailments of all kinds. Marriages, schools, children, and servants will all be happier with a daily infusion of newspaper. Often, the claim is comic, as in an article about “Scolding Women,” which offers a “recipe for a cure of the disorder. In the first place, read, ‘mark, learn and inwardly digest’ the ledger every week” (5/3/56). But the Ledger also makes serious claims, as in the following piece, which quotes “Bishop Clark” on the decline of crime in New England:

This remarkable fact is a convincing proof of the value of education, and especially of that newspaper literature by which the people are amused, instructed, and thus raised above the debasing pleasures which lead to crime. (“Crime,” NYL 8/23/56)

The Ledger (and newspapers in general) are presented as amending domestic life, improving the spirits and manners of both husbands and wives. The Ledger appears as an arena where male and female interests can meet and thrive. “Be Good Natured,” counsels wives and husbands to treat one another courteously; wives should make sure their spouses “find the ledger in its accustomed place, unsoiled and untorn,” while every husband, to please his wife, should “be sure to bring the ledger home with him, if it be not served in the home” (NYL 5/21/56).

Tellingly, the Ledger associates women's interests with “progress,” the same inevitable force that gives the newspaper its power. If newspapers are instruments, women are subjects of progressive development, and the Ledger defends their interests as if they were synonymous with its own. Assisting this identification, of course, was the increasing number of female readers, as well as women writers, whose success profited newspapers like the Ledger.¹⁵

According to Ronald Zboray, such liberal values were widespread among the antebellum publishing industry, reflecting

faith in the inevitability and salutary nature of technological progress and a belief, under the banner of artisan ideology, that progress, liberal values, and the democratization of society—and thereby the reading public—were intertwined. (66-67)¹⁶

What is important here is that Bonner in the Ledger links these values to a particular form of print, casting his version of the newspaper as the embodiment of the highest values of modern print culture. Though his deployment of genre is far from systematic or self-conscious, its alignments are clear, and establish a crucial context within and against which Fanny Fern's genre hierarchies must be understood.

Fern also links newspapers and progressive values, especially the improved status of women. In many columns, including “A Call to Husbands,” she describes men refusing to share their newspapers with women who hunger for access to the window-on-the-world that papers provide. She contrasts miserable families with happy ones, where “the evening paper is read,—not silently, but aloud” (“Look on This Picture, and Then on That,” quoted in Warren 250), and has “Aunt Hetty” attack the thoughtless husband who lights his cigar with the “last evening's paper” his wife has not yet read (qtd in Warren 250). Fern characterizes herself as a lifelong fan of newspapers—“I hate anything new except newspapers, and I was born reading them” (“In the Dumps,” NYL 7/4/57)—and recounts the pleasure she takes in their uninterrupted perusal (“How I Read the Morning Papers,” NYL 4/27/67; “Breakfast at the Paxes,” NYL 3/22/55).¹⁷

Further, despite her success as a popular novelist, Fern sometimes denigrates novels, representing their impact as diametrically opposed to the salutary influences she associates with (good) newspapers. Like the Ledger essays quoted above she associates novels with physical and moral decline, implying that they are passe in a culture (tellingly symbolized by a healthy woman) moving rapidly into a better future: “Thick-soled boots and skating are coming in, and ‘nerves,’ novels and sentiment (by consequence) are going out” (“The Coming Woman,” NYL 2/12/59). In this column, bad “novels” are “sentimental”—stereotypical feminine—but Fern associates them elsewhere with stultifying “rules,” with rigid male critics—like the “dictionary on legs” invoked only to be dismissed in her preface to Rose Clark—and with literary ossification. Fern rejects the view, propounded in the twentieth century by literary critics like Fred Pattee, that nervous sentimentality characterizes “feminine” writing; rather, she sees this trait resulting from hegemonic views of the novel—and women.

In this light, Fern's well-known preface to Ruth Hall, which observes that the work lacks the characteristics of popular novels, signals not Fern's insecurity, as Mary Kelley and others have argued, but her confident rejection of the forms and values she considers “novelistic.” For Fern, novels are “unhealthy,” not because they stoop to popular taste, but because they are out of touch with what is truly “popular.” Rebelliously, she aligns herself with what she considered her era's most popular and progressive literary form. Understood in the context of a generic hierarchy that privileges periodicals, Fern's preface is not an apology, then, but a boast. Her story will enter “unceremoniously and unannounced into people's houses, without stopping to ring the bell”—just like a newspaper.

IV. GENDER, GENRE AND “FAMILY LETTERS”

Obviously, both Fern and the Ledger evince more complex attitudes toward novels (and newspapers) than these few examples indicate. Bonner, for example, wrote approvingly of novels authored by his contributors; and given the often light tone of Ledger comments on the subject, we might read his pro-newspaper stance somewhat skeptically: as tongue-in-cheek, obviously self-serving, and perhaps not philosophically heartfelt.

But Fanny Fern's generic views deserve more serious critical attention. For one thing, her observations about newspapers and novels are a major theme of her work—recurrent, persistent, and woven into her most pointed arguments about the need for social change. Fern explicitly links genre hierarchy and gender opportunities, insists that they are mutually dependent, and calls for the reform of each. Her special interest in the relationship between gender and genre means that much of her “sociological” writing functions as genre criticism, and vice versa.

For Fern, American print culture is a family, as much as a republic, of letters. She values print primarily for its ability to strengthen family ties and through them, the nation. Indeed, Fern consistently represents both newspapers and novels as printed extensions of “family letters.” One good way of understanding Fern's generic views, then, is to consider how well newspapers and novels respectively are able to carry out the functions she associates with the “best” family letters. And to understand these functions, it is necessary to consider the relationship between letters and other commodities that circulate (or fail to circulate) in Fern's imagined domestic scenes.

A key, recurrent image in Fern's work is that of the self-absorbed, rigid male who withholds from a woman something she greatly needs and/or desires. The object can be money, as is so often the case in Ruth Hall, where inflexible men ranging from Apollo Hyacinth to the “wooden” Mr. Millet refuse to assist the widowed Ruth. It can be clothes, as when bachelor Mr. Develin, “perpendicular as a ram-rod,” keeps from Ruth the comfort of her dead husband's coats and pants (75-6). It can be love, as in the case of the wealthy Mr. Leon, whose wife goes insane while he maintains “the same rigidity of feature, the same immobility, of the cold, stony, gray eye, the same studied, stereotyped, conventionalism of manner” (Ruth Hall 50). Often, it is literary approval, as when the “dictionary on legs” in the preface of Rose Clark prefers to Fern's “unpretending” story “‘literature’ … with its stony eyes, fleshless joints, and ossified heart” (iii-iv). Symbolized by the conjunction of inflexibility and manhood, patriarchy takes on protean form in Fern's work, wreaking economic, social, personal, and literary damage—not violently, but through tight-fisted control of valuable material or emotional resources.

Male control of letters—and newspapers—especially irks Fern. Probably her most common images of casual-yet-galling patriarchal privilege involve men withholding these two items from long-suffering women. The column “A Call to Be a Husband,” for example, includes both objects, and provides a useful introduction to their special place in Fern's work:

Has he any call to be a husband, who reads the newspaper from beginning to end, giving notice of his presence to the weary wife, who is patiently mending his old coat, only by an occasional “Jupiter!” … and who, after having extracted every particle of news the paper contains, cooly puts it in one of his many mysterious pockets, and goes to sleep in his chair?

Has he a call to be a husband, who carries a letter, intended for his wife, in his pocket for six weeks, and expects anything short of “gunpowder tea” for his supper that night?

In this column, and in others like it (such as “All About Lovers,” NYL 7/30/59), Fern characterizes newspapers and letters as objects that, circulating in the public sphere, are subject to male control. Fern here critiques separate sphere ideology, underlining the hypocrisy of assigning the public, rational realm (newspapers) to men, and the private, emotional realm (letters) to women, as long as women lack authoritative jurisdiction over “their” realm—control impossible from within the inherently passive private sphere. Fern casts newspapers and letters, usually considered different on account of their association with “opposite” spheres, as identical twins in the sociological drama of gender inequity; they become interchangeable “signs” of patriarchal privilege.

On the other hand, in claiming both forms for women, Fern recalls and exploits their constructed generic (literary institutional) difference. Fern accepts the traditional association of family letters as the literary genre intended for women, in other words (“a letter intended for his wife”), but expands the realm of female letters to include newspapers: a modern, progressive “version” of family letters.

Repeated throughout her work, in a variety of sketches and scenes, Fern's newspaper-letter link always serves this double function: as symbolic shorthand for Fern's critique of systematic male entitlement, and as a specific critique of the gender/genre system shaping the nineteenth-century literary marketplace. In a pivotal scene in Ruth Hall, the wooden Mr. Millet, an unfeeling relative of the heroine's, forgets to deliver a letter from their son, John, to Mrs. Millet, who frets for several pages about John's well-being before Mr. Millet remembers:

“… Poor John—I wonder why we do not hear from him. Suppose you write to-day, Mr. Millet?”

Mr. Millet wiped his mouth on his napkin, stroked his chin, pushed back his cup two degrees, crossed his knife and fork transversely over his plate, moved back his chair two feet and a half, hemmed six consecutive times, and was then safely delivered of the following remark:

“My—over-coat.”

The overcoat was brought in from its peg in the entry; the left pocket was disembowelled, and from it was ferreted out a letter from ‘John,’ (warranted to keep!) which had lain there unopened three days. Mrs. Millet made no remark;—that day had gone by;—she had ate, drank and slept, with that petrifaction too long to be guilty of any such nonsense. She sat down with a resignation worthy of Socrates, and perused the following epistle … (200)

Though the novel as a whole paints the entire Millet family as incapable of finer feelings or genuine sympathy, at this moment the narrative sympathizes, briefly and ironically, with the long-suffering wife, unable to influence the behavior of the master of the house. As in the newspaper column, Fern utilizes the “undelivered letter” to ridicule male rigidity that can make martyrs of women in marriage, an institution that legalizes male privilege. Yet the woman's interest in letters, and the man's lack of it, also indicates gendered relationships with writing: for (rigid) men an object or commodity to be controlled (“warranted to keep”); for women a vehicle for “news” as well as emotional satisfaction. Men like Mr. Millet are incapable of “delivering letters” in the fullest sense of both words. Ironically, Mrs. Millet's materialism stultifies her “natural” womanly interest in letters, preventing her from “receiving” them appropriately. The letter itself, a nasty attack on Ruth, completes Fern's critique of the Millet family circle and its family letters. Written, delivered, and received in a system corrupted with tight-fisted, narrow prejudice, such letters both reveal and maintain the diseased American family, reinforcing its rigid selfishness and preventing it from extending charity and sympathy to the larger national “family” that Ruth, along with the Millet's various servants, represents. In this context, Ruth's long struggle to become a writer despite people like the Millets represents her heroic effort to “deliver” what they cannot: writing that simultaneously reformulates the hierarchy of American letters and reforms the American family/nation.

Ruth's columns move countless readers to respond in kind, connecting her to a wide, American “family” of readers who read—or misread—her, through the lenses of their own domestic relations. Many of these readers write back to Ruth. Millet-like correspondents withhold approval and attack her writing, while sympathetic writers address her as “my unknown sister” (1371); imagine her as resembling beloved relations (“I guess you look like mamma”) (189); and plead with her to protect their children (165). More important, they demonstrate that Ruth's “newspaper letters”—unlike the Millet kind—have changed their families for the better:

Dear ‘Floy’:

… I am a better son, a better brother, a better husband, and a better father, than I was before I commenced reading your articles. May God bless you … M. J. D.(183)

Ruth's family letters function not to exclude and malign; rather, they fortify and expand the family circle, strengthening the bonds among parents and children, and including neighbors as well:¹⁸

To ‘Floy.’

… I have a family of bouncing girls and boys; and when we’ve all done work, we get round the fire of an evening, while one of us reads your pieces aloud. It may not make much difference to you what an old man thinks, but I tell you those pieces have got the real stuff in ’em, and so I told my son John the other night; and he says, and I say, and neighbor Smith who comes in to hear’em, says, that you ought to make a book of them, so that your readers may keep them … (135)

Tellingly, readers' letters move Ruth in the same way that hers move them; she sometimes weeps with gratitude as she peruses them (183). For Fern, the best literature is “letterature” that promotes this kind of reciprocal response; it moves people to share, rather than hoard, their spiritual and material blessings.

But although these letters convey Fern's general sense of literature's social function, they also specifically link letters to contemporary forms of print, especially newspapers—just as the “Call” columns did. For example, in scene with the Millets, John's letter specifically discusses newspapers:

I, … myself, have sent several anonymous paragraphs to the papers for insertion, contradicting the current reports, and saying that “‘Floy’ lost her self-respect before she lost her friends.” … I find it very difficult, too, to get any adverse paragraph in, she is getting to be such a favorite (i.e., anywhere it will tell); the little scurrilous papers, you know, have no influence. (201)

On the one hand, this letter underscores the incapacity of rigid men to make proper use of letters.¹⁹ In addition, when John complains that the “scurrilous” papers that would print his allegations aren’t widely read, while the better—and significantly, more popular—papers wouldn’t condescend to print libel, Fern pointedly defines newspapers that “deliver” emotional and material support to women as the literary form that can best deliver “truth” to the American people. (Good) newspapers, implicitly, are “democratic letters.”

In Ruth Hall, Fern's commitment to newspapers as the best modern venue for family/female letters is made clear not only through the plot—Ruth's path to success as a newspaper writer—but through scenes like this one, and through numerous anecdotes, references, and asides that add up to a thematic exploration of the dynamic possibilities of newspapers as a literary form. Yet Fern's approval of (reputable) newspapers extends beyond their content or their editorial practices, both of which only serve to highlight their rather conventional liberal values. More important, Fern implies that newspapers are not only aligned with progressive “family letters,” but possess distinctive features necessary for their efficacy in the modern world.

Fern presents her writing, explicitly associated with expanding modern print culture, as destined to succeed, unlike works promoted by bookseller/publisher Mr. Develin, who

meddled very gingerly with new publications; in fact, transacted business on the old fogy, stage-coach, rub-a-dub principle; standing back with distended eyes, and suppressed breath, in holy horror of the whistle, whiz-rush and steam of modern publishing houses. (Ruth Hall 76)

Here, anti-patriarchal progress is symbolized by the changing publishing industry that makes Ruth's (and Fern's) career possible; in this context particular kinds of writing—“new publications” that embody both technological and moral dynamism—represent an irresistible antidote to the system of inflexible male privilege Mr. Develin incarnates.

Crucially, the publicity associated with successful newspapers—a function not only of their circulation in the public sphere but of their popularity—works to reveal and to counteract the grudging hypocrisy of conventional literature, which conceals its reactionary agenda beneath the apparently natural division of private spheres from public spheres, letters from newspapers, women's writing from men's writing. Widely available in popular newspapers, Ruth's letters transcend the material/emotional problem of access represented in the “Call” columns and central to the archaic patriarchalism represented by the Millets. Further, newspaper publicity helps protect Fanny Fern and her readers from the potent meanness of private letters like John Millet's. Publicity—conventionally viewed as threatening women's virtue, and requiring their restriction to private literary genres—becomes Fern's radical ally in the project of literary and social reform.

Through publicizing the potentially devastating consequences of “private” letters, Fern not only reveals the oppressive function of an ideology that equates female publicity with sexual license (coded as loss of “self-respect”) but turns that ideology (and its generic hierarchies) upside down, insisting on publicity as a moral safeguard and on popular newspapers as guarantors of integrity. It is important to recognize that Fern and her fictional surrogate acquire more than material security from her writing: Cash and publicity, both made possible by newspapers, offer protection from the protean manifestation of rigid patriarchal control.

That Fanny Fern actually suffered a great deal from (newspaper) publicity is well known;²⁰ her repeated efforts to cast publicity as her ally thus represent a complex rhetorical stance the complete ramifications of which are beyond the analytical scope of this article. Similarly, it is notable that Ruth Hall, Fern's most sustained paean to newspapers, takes the form of a popular novel. Obviously, Fern obtained profit and publicity from novels, despite her avowed preference for newspapers.

One way of reconciling this apparent contradiction is to read Ruth Hall as a “reformed” novel—transformed structurally and generically as a result of Fern's deployment throughout the story of stylistic conventions borrowed from her columns. As a number of critics have observed,²¹ the novel's vignettelike chapters, sketchlike characterizations, and forthright syntax mimic Fern's newspaper writing; in this light, we might consider Ruth Hall less a “novel” than an experimental hybrid, infused with “fresh leaves” from Fern's newspaper “portfolio.”

Arguably, however, Fern not only imports newspaper conventions into her novels, but novelistic tropes and themes into her columns. Thus it is that many of Fern's newspaper sketches are miniature fictions—sometimes even representing the “germ” of one of her novels.²² This reciprocity forcefully reminds us that Fern, throughly versed and vested in the conventions of popular fiction, was not a “journalist” in the modern sense of the word.²³ Nor does her distinction between newspapers and novels require that she be. To a large degree, both her columns and novels depend upon what we might term cultural rather than generic conventions—conventions most familiar to us from novels, but deployed by Fern in both forms of print. These facts suggest, moreover, that Fern sometimes blurs, rather than distinguishes, the boundaries between newspapers and novels.

Yet, and to complicate the issue still further, Fern occasionally seems to stress the differing possibilities of newspapers and novels, underlining their divergence but privileging both equally. For example, if we return once more to the “letter anecdote,” it is apparent that despite the similar social and literary issues it raises in both column and novel, it serves slightly different functions in each case. In the “Call,” the anecdote highlights the fractured, contradictory ideology of marriage present in the column as a whole, which is magnified in the context of the Ledger that surrounds it. To put it one way, Fern's authorial persona shares with its print context and with the reader the contradictions inherent in conventional gender ideology.

In Ruth Hall, on the other hand, the flawed, middle-class marriage of the Millets, epitomized by Mr. Millet's forgetting the letter, serves to raise Ruth above them, to validate her success in moral terms, and to invest her writing with moral purpose. Ruth sees and criticizes moral folly, but she is not implicated in it—the letter anecdote is something that happens to “them.” The fractured, contradictory (“realistic”?) nature of marital reality obvious in the columns (illustrated by the letter anecdote) becomes in the novel more explicitly a didactic division (illustrated by the same anecdote) that cannot threaten the novelistic heroine who transcends it.

As these examples indicate, to insist on a stable thematics of genre in Fern's work—one in which she always privileges newspapers—would be to underestimate the complexity of her position, which reveals through its apparent contradictions the intricate material and cultural links between newspapers and novels in this era. Obviously, both novels and columns are deeply involved in the project to “subjectivize” both women's consciousness and the culture's consciousness of women. And Fanny Fern's attempt to address from two perspectives (through her investment in two dominant genres) both fragmentary and “unified” versions of feminized consciousness, suggests that she envisioned her authorial persona in terms that could straddle and encompass—and perhaps resolve or “contain”—some of the cultural tensions she addressed.

Nonetheless, Fern's repeated insistence on the special value of newspapers cannot be lightly dismissed. It serves as a important reminder of the centrality of newspapers and periodicals in nineteenth-century literary life and illuminates a historical moment when “novel” and “newspaper” stood in a particularly intimate—and tension-laden—relationship. As we read Fanny Fern, acquiring momentarily her vision of a literary world dominated by newspapers, where the American novel appears as a brittle and vulnerable legacy of outmoded institutions, our investment in particular generic hierarchies—in our own fictions about newspapers and novels—becomes increasingly, and instructively, apparent. It is in this context that American literary history can continue to derive benefit from Fern's fresh leaves.

Notes

1. See for example, Friebart and White, who argue that while Fern “had a talent for the short, informal essay, she could not sustain a long work of fiction” (340).

2. See for example, Nina Baym, Susan K. Harris, Linda Huf, Mary Kelley, Ann Douglas Wood. Lauren Berlant is a notable exception.

3. Mary Kelley, for example, emphasizes the crippling effect on nineteenth-century women writers of the pressure to conform to strict gender roles; she reads the seemingly uncritical emphasis on domestic virtues in so many women's novels of the era as demonstrating the psychic costs of the ideology of “separated spheres.”

4. See Beth Daniell for a discussion of Stanley Fish's argument that while “theories don't alter practice and only rarely change beliefs,” engaging in “theory-talk brings status … not merely in literary studies but in the academic community generally” (8-9). I would argue that not only scholars, but genres, as central or marginal subjects of “theory-talk” also acquire status from its practice, and that the construction of genre in theory, like the construction of gender in fiction (for example), “[serve] the interests of a discipline … while at the same time protecting the discipline's most deeply held view of itself, its ‘hard core’ of assumptions and beliefs” (5).

5. Mikhail Bakhtin notes that the novel has a “special relationship” with what he calls the “extraliterary” and preparatory genres: “the genres of everyday life and … ideological genres,” (33), and he describes the novel as having inherent characteristics that, in certain historical eras extend their sway over these and other genres, which become “novelized.” Perhaps he has in mind the kind of mutual influence I mean here, but don’t think so. I see a different kind of “dialogism” in Fern's novels and columns—one where the novel is becoming “newspaperized” almost as much as the newspaper is becoming “novelized.”

6. See, for example, Geary.

7. For information on Bonner, see Coultrap-McQuin, Chielens, Derby, Kelley.

8. What Frederick Jameson might call “ideologemes” (roughly, narrative manifestations of particular ideologies) (87), or Raymond Williams would call “structures of feeling” (132).

9. I am indebted here to Kenneth Burke's concept of analyzing literature through tracing “associational clusters.” In his words:

   … the work of each writer contains a set of implicit equations. He uses ‘associational clusters’ … the motivation out of which he writers is synonymous with the structural way in which he puts events and values together when he writes. (20)

10. For discussions of the cultural function of obsession with female subjectivity (in England), see Armstrong. Also Clifford Siskin, The Historicity of Romantic Discourse.

11. Though I find Armstrong's argument compelling in many respects, I question several elements: first, her assertion that the consolidation of the modern state was “accomplished largely through cultural hegemony” rather than economic change (see, for example, p. 9), and her assertion that the subversive potential of “dialogism” is always contained by the dominant ideology (see, for example, footnote 14, p. 263). I tend to see culture and economy working together to shape human subjectivity. The value of examining a culture's generic expectations is to see how an author takes up, through what he or she perceives as different genres, slightly different aspects of prevailing ideologies, revealing the contradictions at their heart. I see these contradictions forming both the possibility and the motivation for ideological change.

12. Of the contemporary theorists, Michael McKeon perhaps makes the strongest claim for the novel's cultural preeminence. According to McKeon, the novel has attained its modern institutional stability and coherence “because of its unrivaled power both to formulate, and to explain, a set of problems that are central to early modern experience” (20):

    This is the clearest sign of the new genre's triumph as an explanatory and problem-solving mode, its powerful adaptability in mediating questions of truth and virtue from opposed points of view. (21)

    Ironically, despite his effort to historicize genre—to view it as a “quasi-objective category … which both preexists, and is precipitated by its conceptual formation” (15)—McKeon reifies the cultural meaning of the novel, asserting that the novel exactly reproduces/enacts the Hegelian dialectic that serves as the ground of his literary history. Seemingly incongruously, given his often incisive theoretical self-consciousness, he insists on the identity between his dialectical conception of history (and genre) and history itself: “It is … not method but history that is dialectical” (420). In short, while historicizing “the novel” for the eighteenth century, McKeon fails fully to explore the historical implications of his own theoretical investment in a dialectical conception of the novel.

13. See Ina Ferris' recent study of Sir Walter Scott for an illuminating discussion of nineteenth-century critical efforts to raise the status of the novel by linking it with “history.”

14. Laurel Brake argues that the institutional division of literary from journalistic discourse marks the cultural repression of journalistic knowledge.

15. A New York Daily Times column from the same era observed:

    American women read newspapers as much as their liege lords. The paper must accommodate itself to this fact, and hence the American sheet involves a variety of topics and a diversity of contents. … Our dailies have domestic habits. They possess the requirements of the family journal. (quoted in Mott, Journalism 304)

16. The Ledger projected itself as on the cutting edge of technological progress, announcing the deployment of new machines and processes with a flourish:

    Our paper is electrotyped this week for the first time; so that we can supply back numbers after this date, without fail. (5/14/56)

    Often, Bonner links advances in technology to reader interest, cementing the “democratic” notion that popularity, technology, and progress are intertwined:

    There is no other family paper in the country that has sufficient circulation to afford to electrotype their pages. (7/5/56)

    Bonner repeatedly assured his readers that the Ledger would continue to incorporate new processes, as part of his effort to attract the widest audience possible.

17. Importantly, Fern associates some negative traits with newspapers. Not only do “bad” newspapers spread libel, but the very act of reading a newspaper sometimes becomes an experience of fragmentation and chaos. See for example, “How I Read the Morning Papers.” Since newspapers for Fern are associated with modernity, I read in these kinds of references her awareness of the potential cultural fragmentation accompanying the rapid growth and “progress” the newspaper both reflects and embodies. This ambivalence would be well worth further study; my point here is not that Fern took a naively positive view of the newspaper, but that she participated in linking newspapers to progress and the emancipation of women.

18. Compare this letter to the one from Hyacinth Ellet, Ruth's brother (and publisher of the “Irving Magazine”) to Horace Gates, an editor in his employ. Ellet orders Gates to stop publishing Ruth's articles:

    “It is my wish that all articles bearing that signature should be excluded from our paper, and that no allusion be made to her, in any way or shape, in the columns of the Irving Magazine … the writer is a sister of mine, and … it would annoy and mortify me exceedingly to have the fact known … ” (159)

19. See also Fern's direct criticism of male attempts to imitate female letters in her column, “Things I Should Like to See” (NYL 3/8/56).

20. See for example, Derby and Parton. The anonymous Life and Beauties of Fanny Fern, a vicious attack on Fern, reveals the potential danger to Fern of unauthorized publicity about her. Arguably, Fern found regular newspaper writing a way to control or “own” a celebrated public image that enemies might appropriate for their own purposes.

21. See part I of this article.

22. See, for example, “The Charity Orphans,” (Ruth Hall 258) and Joyce Warren's note (380).

23. Arguably, critics like Joyce Warren, who have labeled Fern a “journalist,” are attempting to align her columns with the “realism” that this label conveys in contemporary critical thought.

Works Cited

I. Primary Sources

Derby, James. Fifty Years Among Authors, Books, and Publishers. New York: Carleton, 1884.

Fern, Fanny. Ruth Hall and Other Writings. Ed. Joyce Warren. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1986.

———. Rose Clark. New York: Mason Brothers, 1856.

The Life and Beauties of Fanny Fern. Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson, 1855.

The New York Ledger

Parton, James. Fanny Fern: A Memorial Volume. New York: G. W. Carleton, 1873.

II. Secondary Sources

Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.

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

Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981.

Berlant, Lauren. “The Female Woman: Fanny Fern and the Form of Sentiment.” American Literary History (1991): 429-54.

Burke, Kenneth. The Philosophy of Literary Form. 3rd ed. Berkeley: U of California P, 1973.

Charvat, William. The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800-1870: The Papers of William Charvat. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1968.

Chielens, Edward E., ed. American Literary Magazines: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Westport: Greenwood, 1986.

Cohen, Ralph. “Genre Theory, Literary History, and Historical Change.” Theoretical Issues in Literary History. Ed. David Perkins. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991. 85-113.

———. “History and Genre.” New Literary History 17.2 (1986): 203-17.

Coultrap-McQuin, Susan. Doing Literary Business: American Women Writers in the Nineteenth Century. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1990.

Daniell, Beth. “Theory, Theory-Talk and Composition.” Writing Theory and Critical Theory. Ed. John Clifford and John Schilb. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1994.

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

Ferris, Ina. The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverly Novels. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991.

Fisher-Fishkin, Shelley. From Fact to Fiction: Journalism and Imaginative Writing in America. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1985.

Friebert, Lucy M. and Barbara A. White, eds. Hidden Hands: An Anthology of American Women Writers, 1790-1870. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1985.

Geary, Susan. “The Domestic Novel as a Commercial Commodity: Making a Best Seller in the 1850s.” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 70.3 (1976): 365-93.

Harris, Susan. Nineteenth-Century American Women's Novels: Interpretive Strategies. New York: Cambridge UP, 1990.

Huf, Linda. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman: The Writer as Heroine in American Literature. New York: Unger, 1983.

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