SOURCE: “Text and Context in Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall: From Widowhood to Independence,” in Joinings and Disjoinings: The Significance of Marital Status in Literature, edited by JoAnna Stephens Mink and Janet Doubler Ward, Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1991, pp. 67-76.

[In the following essay, Warren explores how Fern's own experience as a vulnerable and powerless widow served as the basis for her novel Ruth Hall and caused her to urge all women—married and unmarried—to secure economic independence for themselves.]

When Fanny Fern's novel Ruth Hall was published in 1855, it created a sensation. In this largely autobiographical novel, Sara Willis Parton (1811-1872), writing under the pseudonym of Fanny Fern, satirized her male relatives (her father, her father-in-law, her brother, and her brother-in-law), who had provided neither compassion nor adequate financial assistance when she was left a widow. Although her novel was published under her pseudonym, one of the Boston editors who did not like his own satirical portrait in the novel revealed her identity, and the novel became a roman a clef. Fern was condemned by the critics for her “unfeminine” and “unfilial” writing. As the reviewer for the New York Times commented, if the novel had been written by a man, it would be “a natural and excusable book,” but, asked the reviewer, how could a woman write such a book? (12/20/1854).

It is precisely because Fern was able to write in defiance of the restrictions that conventional nineteenth-century American society imposed upon women writers that Ruth Hall possesses the value that it does. Fern does not hide her anger, nor romanticize the position of women and the role of men. It is this “unfeminine” frankness that makes Ruth Hall both a significant literary achievement and a valuable social document.

With respect to its literary significance, Nathaniel Hawthorne, after reading Ruth Hall in February 1855, qualified the statements that he had made in an earlier letter to his publisher criticizing the work of American women writers and castigating the authors as a “damned mob of scribbling women.” Ruth Hall, he felt, was a superior book because the author had not been inhibited by the straitjacket of convention that constricted most women writers:

In my last, I recollect, I bestowed some vituperation on female authors. I have since been reading Ruth Hall; and I must say I enjoyed it a good deal. The woman writes as if the devil was in her; and that is the only condition under which a woman ever writes anything worth reading. Generally women write like emasculated men, and are only distinguished from male authors by greater feebleness and folly; but when they throw off the restraints of decency, and come before the public stark naked, as it were—then their books are sure to possess character and value. Can you tell me anything about this Fanny Fern? If you meet her, I wish you would let her know how much I admire her.

(Letters to Ticknor, 1:78)

As a social document, Fern's novel is valuable because the author frankly and critically portrays the situation of a widow at mid-century. Fern does not sentimentalize the experience of widowhood, either to glamorize or melodramaticize the experience. Using her characteristically sharp, crisp prose which Harper's Monthly in 1854 praised as evidence that “the day for stilted rhetoric” was declining (July 1854), Fern reveals in Ruth Hall the societal shortcomings and familial conflicts that characterized the widow's experience. Although the family experience of her protagonist is particular, Fern's portrayal of the social factors surrounding widowhood is significant as it reflects the position of the widow in mid-nineteenth-century America. It was through her experience as a widow in a patriarchal society that Fanny Fern was brought to a realization of the need for a change in the position of women. Widowhood radicalized her and led to her advocacy of women's rights, and to her revolutionary conclusion that women could not be truly independent until they were financially independent.

In this essay, I will examine the text or narrative of Ruth Hall against the context of the situation that propelled Fern to write the novel. Before we analyze the novel and its relation to the specific events in the life of the author, let us look briefly at the societal attitude toward independent women that was prevalent at the time.

Women in nineteenth-century America were led to believe that they were weak and dependent creatures whose best defense was to rely on man, whose strong right arm and knowledge of right would guide him in protecting weak womanhood. In 1855, the same year that Ruth Hall was published, Ralph Waldo Emerson told the women assembled at the women's rights convention in Boston that women should remain in their parlors and leave public affairs to men. If a woman wanted anything done, he said, her best resource, and the one best suited to her abilities, was to rely on a good man: “Woman should find in man her guardian … Whatever the woman's heart is prompted to desire, the man's mind is simultaneously prompted to accomplish” (Works, 11:403-26).

Coupled with this assurance that man would help and protect dependent woman, was the societal stipulation that respectable middle-class women must be dependent and must never—even if in danger of starving—be guilty of self-assertion. The “cult of the lady” insisted that women were selfless and passive. It would be vulgar and unfeminine to be so self-assertive as to earn one's own living. In an 1861 newspaper article Fern bitterly described the situation of a dependent woman in a society that would not permit her to help herself:

There are few people who speak approbatively of a woman who has a smart business talent or capability. No matter how isolated or destitute her condition, the majority would consider it more “feminine” would she unobtrusively gather up her thimble, and, retiring into some out-of-the-way place, gradually scoop out her coffin with it, than to develop that smart turn for business which would lift her at once out of her troubles; and which, in a man so situated, would be applauded as exceedingly praiseworthy.

(New York Ledger, 6/8/1861)

Just how insistent mid-nineteenth-century Americans were on this aspect of woman's behavior—passive dependence—is apparent in James Fenimore Cooper's 1850 novel The Ways of the Hour. In this novel, Mary Monson (Mildred Millington) is an independent woman, the only one of Cooper's heroines who acts to save herself rather than relying on male protection. When she is falsely accused of murder and her male lawyers are unable to save her, she successfully conducts her own defense and is acquitted. Cooper's verdict, however, is that she is guilty of self-will and self-assertion; apparently, the more feminine thing for her to have done would have been to allow herself to be hanged. Women's real power, Cooper insists, comes by “keeping within the natural circle of their sex's feelings, instead of aping an independence and spirit more suited to men” (Works, 24:311). Cooper's purpose in this novel is to attack the new laws that would give a married woman control of her property. Such laws, Cooper maintains, are contrary to the law of God: “The Creator intended woman for a ‘help-meet,’ and not for the head of the family circles; and most fatally ill-judging are the laws that would fain disturb the order of a domestic government … derived from divine wisdom” (Works, 24:364, 431).

This is the social context in which Fanny Fern wrote Ruth Hall. In order to understand the way in which the novel is a response to these social factors, it is necessary to examine the real events in the life of Fanny Fern, her own widowhood and her successful efforts to extricate herself from poverty, without the help of and in spite of the hindrance of her male relatives. Ruth Hall is based closely on the author's own life.¹ When her husband died suddenly of typhoid fever in 1846, Sara Willis Eldredge was left a widow with two young children to support. Her husband's creditors having taken whatever assets he had left her, she was thrown upon the mercy and good will of her relatives. Her father, who had recently remarried, grudgingly provided a small pension for her, and her father-in-law contributed an equally small amount. Their assistance was accompanied by recriminations, her father berating her dead husband for having been such a poor businessman that he had left her destitute, and her in-laws maintaining that her poverty was due to her extravagance as a housewife. At the same time that this pension was so grudgingly provided, her relatives—particularly her father—urged her to remarry as the best means of supporting herself.

When Samuel Farrington, a widower with two children, asked her to marry him, she at first refused. But, with pressure from her father and other relatives, she finally capitulated, and, frankly telling Farrington that she did not love him, she married him in January 1849. The marriage was a terrible mistake. Farrington was violently jealous and suspicious, and the evidence of her second novel suggests that he was also sexually offensive. In Rose Clark (1856), Gertrude, whose character and situation are patterned after Fern's, had married a widower after her husband died, and like Fern found that the marriage was a terrible mistake. Not only was her husband jealous like Farrington, she also says that he was a “gross sensualist” and describes the “creeping horror” with which she listened for his approaching footsteps: “Whole days he passed without speaking to me, and yet no inmate of a harem was ever more slavishly subject to the gross appetite of her master” (pp. 231-5, 245). In January 1851, Fern took a step that scandalized her relatives: she hired a lawyer and, taking her children with her, she left her husband. Farrington spread malicious rumors about her and sought to blacken her reputation.

When Fern left Farrington, her father and father-in-law refused to resume her support, apparently hoping that she would be starved into submission and return to her husband. She refused, however, and determined to earn her own living. Job opportunities were few, and although she worked long hours as a seamstress, she was able to earn very little money. She took the teachers' examination to teach in the Boston public schools, but she lacked the influence to obtain an appointment. Her father, who was a well-known editor in Boston, and her brother-in-law, who was a member of the school committee, could have used their influence on her behalf if they had wanted to. But clearly, the family had decided to offer no assistance that would enable her to be financially independent. She tried writing newspaper articles and sold her first one for fifty cents. She sent several articles to her brother, N. P. Willis, who was a successful editor and writer in New York, and asked if he could help her place her articles. He wrote back that he could not help her, and urged her to find less obtrusive work. However, she succeeded as a writer without his help. Her articles were copied in newspapers all over the country, and in 1853 she published a collection of her articles in book form. The book was a best-seller, and she soon became independently wealthy. Several publishers urged her to write a novel, and in December 1854, Ruth Hall was published.

Of particular importance in Fern's portrayal of widowhood in Ruth Hall are three social factors: the widow's vulnerability, her poverty of opportunity, and her powerlessness. It was these factors in Fern's own experience as a widow that led to her recognition of society's shortcomings. In order to understand how widowhood radicalized Fern, let us look at the correspondences between the novel and the life of the author with respect to these factors.

The first and most important characteristic of the widow in Fern's view was her vulnerability. She was both personally and economically vulnerable. After the death of Ruth Hall's husband, Fern portrays several ways in which Ruth is vulnerable. First, her in-laws and her father argue about her future, each claiming that the other should support her, and they resolve that they will starve her into giving up her children (pp. 65-72). Not only is Ruth vulnerable to the mechinations of her relatives, but, as a lone and impoverished woman, she is also vulnerable to sexual advances by men. In Chapter XXXVI two loungers in the low-rent boarding house where Ruth's poverty has forced her to live discuss their chances of obtaining sexual favors from the new widow. “I like widows,” one of them comments. “I don’t know any occupation more interesting than helping to dry up their tears; and then the little dears are so grateful for any little attention.” As they assess Ruth's charms and accessibility, they express contempt at the thought of marriage and boast that any woman can be “bought with a yard of ribbon, or a breastpin” (pp. 73-4). The next chapter shows Ruth's vulnerability in other areas: business and the law. Mr. Develin, executor of her husband's estate, concludes that it would be to his advantage to give her husband's clothes to Ruth's father-in-law, who might be able to help him in business, rather than to Ruth, who, although she does not know it, is legally entitled to them (pp. 75-7).

All of these aspects of Ruth's vulnerability are derived from Fern's own experience as a widow. Her granddaughter, Ethel Parton, wrote in her manuscript biography of Fern, that when her husband died and she was left without resources, Fern's father and father-in-law argued over who would spend the least in her support (p. 101). She was forced to give up one of her children to her in-laws, who sought by monetary means to force her to give up all claim to her children. In his will written in 1851 her father-in-law specified that the money from his estate could be used to support Fern's two daughters only if she relinquished them entirely to his wife, or after her death, to the trustees of his estate. With respect to sexual vulnerability, Ethel Parton describes in her biography, how, when Fern was sewing for a living, male employers made sexual advances (Parton, p. 103). Her vulnerability in legal and business matters is also revealed in her early newspaper articles, where she describes how her ignorance and inexperience cause tradespeople and relatives to take advantage of her.

Not only was the widow vulnerable, she was almost wholly without opportunities to help herself. Ruth Hall finds that sewing is the only means of support open to her. This means long hours of work with minimal remuneration. She attempts to found a school or to obtain a teaching position, but she cannot succeed without people in high places to help her or at least to recommend her. Similarly, Fanny Fern also worked long hours as a seamstress. Her relatives refused to help her obtain a teaching position, and there were no other avenues open to her. Fortunately she was a talented writer, but not all impoverished widows are able to use their writing talents to support themselves. Throughout her career Fanny Fern wrote of the plight of the underpaid seamstresses, and urged that more job opportunities be opened to women. It is no wonder that young girls are driven into prostitution, she said, when the only alternative open to them is to work at starvation wages as seamstresses.² Women printers, waiters, doctors, lecturers, artists, women working in the mint: these are only a few of the occupations that Fern wrote about in her columns.³ As she said in the New York Ledger in 1863, she was always glad to see “any new and honest avenue of interest or employment” open for women (5/23/1863).

Finally, Fanny Fern wrote of women's powerlessness. First of all, because of her vulnerability and poverty of opportunity, Ruth Hall is powerless to give her children a comfortable home. In Chapter XXXVIII, after she is widowed, she sits with her children in their dingy boarding house looking out at a row of brick walls. When her child asks, “Why don’t we go home?” Ruth feels her own powerlessness. She is also powerless to protect her children from the cruelty of others—including her own relatives—who ill-use them because of their poverty, and she is powerless to help them when they are sick because she cannot afford to pay a doctor (p. 126). She is powerless to command more money for her sewing or for her newspaper articles. “Only fifty-cents for all this ruffling and hemming,” Ruth notes with dismay after working constantly on a sewing assignment for two weeks (p. 96). And although her newspaper articles increase the profits of her editors, the editors continue to pay her substandard wages because they know she desperately needs the money and has no other recourse: “Ruth accepted the terms, poor as they were, because she could at present do no better, and because every pebble serves to swell the current” (pp. 125, 131-2). Ruth Hall's powerlessness reflects closely the feelings of powerlessness that Fern herself felt during this period of her widowhood and which are contained in the cynical and sarcastic early articles that chronicle Fern's experience with hypocrisy, exploitation, and “summer friends.”

Just as important as what is contained in the text or narrative of her experience in Ruth Hall is the material that Fanny Fern left out of the narrative. There is no mention in the novel of Fanny Fern's remarriage to Samuel Farrington and subsequent desertion of him. Ruth Hall is widowed and her male relatives treat her as Fern was treated—but without the excuse of her disobedience in refusing to remain with her objectionable husband. Fern may have left out the Farrington episode partly because she did not wish to be associated with him. He divorced her in 1853, two years after she had left him, and she attempted to forget what was for her a very painful experience. She may also have left out the Farrington episode because artistically the book is less complicated without it.

However, the most important reason why she omitted the second marriage was probably because the morality and propriety of her heroine would have been made suspect to a mid-nineteenth-century American audience if the Farrington episode had been included. Fern did not want to draw criticism on her heroine such as she herself had experienced when she left her husband. She wanted her readers to admire and sympathize with her heroine. If Ruth Hall had remarried and then left her husband, the majority of readers would have agreed with Fanny Fern's male relatives who condemned her for leaving Farrington. First of all, they would have felt that remarriage was the best way for a widow to support herself. Even more important, once she was married, the majority of her readers would have regarded her desertion of her husband as a criminal act. Consequently, they would have felt that her male relatives were justified in not helping her financially after she left her husband because such behavior made a woman's morality suspect. As Fern says in Rose Clark, Gertrude's relatives want to believe her husband's slanders about her: “If they defended her, they would have no excuse for not helping her. It was the cash, you see, the cash” (p. 347). Ruth Hall does not remarry. Her male relatives provide grudging assistance and no compassion, but she is not guilty of anything except poverty.

The omission of the Farrington episode from Ruth Hall, which otherwise follows so closely the events of Fanny Fern's own life, tells us something very important about the reality of the widow's situation at the time. First of all, Fern's experience had shown her that the independent woman would be judged harshly, and that it would be impossible to have a heroine who had left her husband, whatever the reason. Moreover, she also discovered that after her husband died, the widow had no identity. Fern's relatives wanted her to remarry to support herself and her children; but they also wanted her to remarry so that she would have a settled status. In Ruth Hall Ruth's relatives do not want to be burdened with her after she is widowed. Her brother Hyacinth does not want to “lose caste” by associating with the poor widow (p. 82); her father insists she is the responsibility of her husband's parents (p. 71). The concept of an unattached widow was discomforting to the widow's male relatives. She was a financial burden and an embarrassment. Moreover, they found it disconcerting not to know what she was going to do. Remarriage was a way of settling her.

The pairing of two sub-plots in Ruth Hall provides an indication of Fern's solution to the widow's—or any woman's—dependence. Whereas Mrs. Skiddy earns her own independent living, Mrs. Leon, who, as she bitterly admits, is herself only one of the pretty “appendages” to her husband's establishment (p. 51), ends up dying alone in an insane asylum, where she had been confined by her husband after “her love had outlived his patience” (pp. 109-12). Earlier, Mrs. Leon had warned Ruth never to marry her daughter to a man she does not love simply to obtain the money (pp. 51-2). Her death in the insane asylum where she had been confined by her husband when he wanted to get rid of her underscores the warning. That Fern intended to apply the warning not only to Ruth's daughter but to Ruth herself is clear from what we know of Fern's own disastrous marriage of convenience, and from the evidence of her second novel, Rose Clark. In that novel Gertrude Dean, who entered into a similar marriage of convenience after she was widowed, comments when she looks around the house that she feels she has sold herself: “my bill of sale every where met my eye” (p. 238). The contrast between Mrs. Skiddy's comfortable independence, which comes from “a purse well filled with her own honest earnings” (p. 109), and Mrs. Leon's tragic dependency emphasizes Fern's message that economic independence is necessary to maintain autonomy as a human being. The woman who is economically independent will not be vulnerable and powerless: her relatives cannot take her children from her; she will not be prey to sexual abuse; businessmen will not want to offend her; and her male relatives cannot easily dispose of her by having her placed in an insane asylum.

Like the character she created in Ruth Hall, Fanny Fern felt her own powerlessness as an impoverished widow. Her newspaper articles written at the time reveal that it was this vulnerability and powerlessness as a mother and as a wage earner that drove home the realization that only by gaining financial independence could she hope to gain the autonomy necessary to protect herself and her children from exploitation and abuse. And it was Fern's anger at her powerlessness that impelled her to create the narrative of Ruth Hall.

Clearly the narrative of Ruth Hall does not conform to the narrative constructed by society regarding women. Living in a society that did not countenance female assertiveness and independence, a society that preached the simultaneous doctrine of male protection for female weakness, Fanny Fern as a widow learned that the myth of male protection for dependent women was just that—a myth—and concluded that women would be better off if they learned to rely on themselves. As a widow, she found that male help was not always forthcoming, and that when it was proffered, it was often grudging and came with strings attached. Ultimately she found that it was used as a lever to exact the behavior desired by the benefactor. This latter was what Fanny Fern's relatives did in their attempt to force her to return to her husband. By withholding financial support, they hoped to starve her into submission. Similarly, when Ruth refused to give up her children, her father and father-in-law resolved to withhold support to force her to comply with their wishes.

The principal reason why Fern's novel was so shocking to her contemporaries was because she revealed the reality behind the myth with respect to male protection and also with respect to the dependency of women. First of all, she revealed the cruelty and indifference of her male relatives. Reviewers castigated Fern for her “unfilial” behavior in writing the book. As one reviewer indignantly commented, the novel was reprehensible because no man wants to think that a female relative of his would say such things about him—even if they were true.⁴ Fern broke the unwritten law in nineteenth-century American society that women should not criticize men, that they should bow their heads in silent suffering and acquiescence despite injury and abuse. As a story in Godey's Lady's Book stated in April 1850, when a young girl was physically and mentally abused by her father, she was right not to complain, but should continue to honor her father, however cruel and unkind he might be; she would find her reward in heaven, the author piously noted (pp. 269-73).

Secondly, Fern's novel revealed that a woman could succeed on her own—that she could obtain financial security and support herself and her children independent of marriage. Ruth Hall is almost unique among nineteenth-century American novels in that it portrays a woman who achieves the American Dream, a goal at the time reserved only for male Americans; she becomes rich and powerful wholly through her own efforts—and the novel does not even end with a wedding. Fanny Fern's conclusion was that a woman would never be independent until she was financially independent.

This, then, was how widowhood radicalized Fanny Fern. When she was left a widow with relatives who would not help her unless she agreed to their terms, she realized that as a dependent woman she was powerless, vulnerable to abuse and exploitation, and with little or no opportunity to improve her situation—short of remarriage. The experience of widowhood brought her first to a strong belief in women's rights. Not only did she support women's suffrage and educational and professional opportunities for women, she wrote warmly on such controversial subjects as birth control, divorce and the mother's right to custody of her children (which at the time was not the law), venereal disease, prostitution, and equal pay for equal work. Although—or probably because—she was immensely popular (she was the highest paid newspaper writer of her day), she was able to express controversial opinions which most writers of her day—even those who supported rights for women—shied away from.

The cornerstone of Fern's radicalism, however, was her revolutionary opinion that all women should be able to support themselves independent of marriage. Although some women writers advocated economic opportunities for single women and widows, it was generally conceded that once the woman married, she did not need to continue her profession. Thus many nineteenth-century novels by women describe a poor girl, usually an orphan, who is forced to work as a teacher or writer, for example, in some cases becoming wealthy and successful. But her profession is regarded only as a stop-gap measure. That marriage is her true vocation, is the opinion of the heroine, the author, and the readers of the novel. In these novels, once the heroine has married, she gives up her profession. Fanny Fern, however, concluded that all women should have the capacity to be financially independent, whether they were married or not. She herself remarried in January of 1856, but she continued her writing career until her death in 1872. As she wrote in the New York Ledger in 1869, “I want all women to render themselves independent of marriage as a mere means of support” (6/26/1869).

The middle-class white woman in mid-nineteenth-century America was supposed to be selfless, passive, and submissive. The widow without resources and without the help of her male relatives could only fit the image if she allowed herself and her children to starve. She could accept her relatives' help if she was prepared to give in to their wishes (give up her children or remarry, for example). But if she wanted to maintain her autonomy, she would have to become financially independent. And Fern concluded that this was a desirable goal for all women: “sweet is the bread of independence,” she wrote in 1871, after having maintained her own independent career for twenty years (New York Ledger, 7/8/1871). For, as she wrote in the New York Ledger on June 8, 1861, her widowhood had taught her that there is “no crust so tough as the grudged crust of dependence.”

Notes

1. The facts about Fanny Fern's life have been obtained from a variety of sources, including her private papers in the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College, her husband James Parton's papers in the Houghton Library, Harvard University, information at the Massachusetts Historical Society, and information contained in her newspaper columns in The New York Ledger, the Boston Olive Branch and True Flag, the Philadelphia Saturday Evening Post, and the New York Musical World and Times. See also, James Parton, Fanny Fern, A Memorial Volume (New York: G.W. Carlton, 1873); J.C. Derby, Fifty Years Among Authors, Books and Publishers (New York: G.W. Carlton, 1884); Ethel Parton, “Fanny Fern, An Informal Biography,” unpublished manuscript in the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College.

2. See, e.g., Olive Branch, 6/18/1854; Philadelphia Saturday Evening Post, 1/7/1854.

3. See, e.g., New York Ledger, 5/23/1853, 7/18/1854, 4/11/1857, 7/16/1870.

4. Review of Ruth Hall, in the New Orleans Crescent City. Cited in the Boston Olive Branch, 1/13/1855.

Works Cited

Cooper, James Fenimore. The Ways of the Hour Vol. 24 of Complete Works. Leatherstocking Edition. 32 vols. New York: Putnam, 1893?

Derby, James C. Fifty Years among Authors, Books and Publishers. New York: G. W. Carlton, 1884.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Complete Works. Centenary Edition. Edited by Edward W. Emerson. 12 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903-1904.

Fern, Fanny. Rose Clark. New York: Mason Brothers, 1856.

———. Ruth Hall. New York: Mason Brothers, 1855.

Godey's Lady's Book. April 1850. pp. 269-73.

Harpers Monthly. July 1854.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Letters of Hawthorne to William Ticknor, 1851-1869. 1910. Edited by C. E. Frazer Clark, Jr. 2 vols. Rpr. Newark, N.J.: Carteret Book Club, 1972.

Musical World and Times. New York. 1852-1853. New York Public Library.

The New York Ledger. 1855-1872. Watkinson Library, Hartford, Connecticut.

The New York Times. December 20, 1854.

Olive Branch. 1851-1855. American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

Parton, Ethel. “Fanny Fern, An Informal Biography.” Unpublished manuscript in the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College.

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

———. Papers of. Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Parton, Sara Willis. See Fern, Fanny.

Saturday Evening Post. 1853-1854. Philadelphia Public Library.