[In the following essay, Warren evaluates two of Fern's works—her serialized novella “Fanny Ford” and her second novel, Rose Clark. Warren argues that one of the most significant aspects of the novella is its social criticism—Fern confronted such issues as the need for educational reform, the plight of women workers, the necessity of improved child-rearing methods, and the unjust conditions in a patriarchal society. According to Warren, the most valuable aspects of Rose Clark are the insights it affords into Fern's second marriage; its satire; and its theme, style, and structure.]

We are tired … of the piled-up horrors with which some novelists bait for readers. Anybody can introduce a ghost or a bloody head; it takes genius, and that of the very highest order, to make what are called “common-place” events and persons interesting.

[New York Ledger (NYL)], April 20, 1861

In addition to Ruth Hall Fanny Fern wrote two other works of long fiction, “Fanny Ford,” the hundred-dollar-a-column novella that was serialized in the Ledger in the summer of 1855, and Rose Clark, a novel published in December of 1855.

“FANNY FORD”

“Fanny Ford: A Story of Everyday Life” began publication on June 9, 1855, occupying four and a half columns on the front page of the Ledger. In 1856 it was translated into German and published in Pesth and Leipzig in a volume also containing Ruth Hall, and in 1857 it was published as part of the collection Fresh Leaves.

In the novella, the wealthy Jacob Ford had been the owner of a sweatshop that exploited poor seamstresses, and his wife, Lucy, who had been one of the seamstresses, feels that his money is ill-gotten; her fears are confirmed early in the story by a fortune-teller who prophecies “retribution.” Soon after this, their daughter Mary's fiancé, Percy Lee, is imprisoned for embezzlement, and the shock throws Mary into a stuporlike state of depression. In prison Percy attacks a man named Scraggs, who accuses Percy of having seduced Mary. News of this rumor is brought to Mary, who sinks further into depression. Jacob is so distraught at the condition of his daughter that he is unable to concentrate on his business, and the Fords lose all of their money. Jacob dies, leaving Lucy to care for the feeble Mary.

At this point, Tom Shaw, a rival of Percy's, marries Mary in order to spite Percy. Lucy, who is penniless, allows the marriage to take place; Mary offers no resistance. Shaw soon tires of Mary and takes up with his former mistress. Mary dies when her daughter is born, and Lucy stays at Shaw's home to look after little Fanny, whose father takes no interest in her. Shaw brings his mistress to live in the house, and later he dies in a drunken fall down the stairs. The mistress evicts Lucy and Fanny, who have no possessions but the painting of Mary, Fanny's mother. Lucy works as a seamstress to support the two of them, and one day Percy Lee, who has been released from prison and is working as a peddler, stops at their house. He sees the painting and realizes that Fanny is Mary's daughter, but he does not tell them who he is.

Percy Lee visits the house whenever he is selling wares in the neighborhood, and when Lucy dies, he arranges to have the child brought up and educated while he travels to build up his business. When she is grown up, he returns, and they marry. Their wedding day is darkened by the death of Scraggs on the church steps. Seeking vengeance for the beating he had received from Percy, Scraggs had whipped himself into a drunken frenzy with the intention of telling Fanny that Percy was a jailbird who had murdered her mother. His accidental death while wrestling with a policeman on the church steps prevents him from destroying the couple's happiness, but effectively destroys the possibility of an unmixed fairy-tale ending for the story.

The story, which spans eighteen years in less than a hundred pages, uses the same abbreviated style and sudden scene shifts that Fern had developed in Ruth Hall. The chapters are slightly longer, averaging four and a third pages, and there are no sudden shifts of tone as there are in Ruth Hall. The tone throughout is world-weary, often cynical, undercutting the conventional language and stereotyped situations of the sentimental story. In the first chapter, the narrator sets the tone, commenting that the love of Percy and Mary is first love, “before distrust has chilled, or selfishness blighted, or … worldiness evaporated the heart's dew.” Though the lovers are blind to “care and sorrow” now, they will find that once this early love is past, everything in life is “stale.” The voice of the narrator makes clear that, though her characters may fall in love or sentimentalize, she knows that, as one of the characters says, “If you own a heart, it is best to hide it, unless you want it trampled on” ([Fanny Fern, “Fanny Ford,” in Fresh Leaves (New York: Mason Brothers, 1857). Originally published serially in the New York Ledger, 1855. (“FF”)], 115-116, 200).

It is not only the tone of the story that provides the reader with an indication that the story is not the simple one it at first seems. A careful reader will find sewn into the fabric of the story innumerable threads of “difference,”¹ which point to a subversive subtext in this ostensibly sentimental tale. The reader who is familiar with Fern's work cannot help but realize that if Mary had married Percy Lee, she would have become Mary Lee—which is the name of the woman in Fern's 1852 article whose husband tired of her and had her committed to an insane asylum to get rid of her ([Boston True Flag, 1851-1855. American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass. (TF)]. May 8, 1852). The sketch “Mary Lee” provided the basis for the tragic story of Mary Leon in Ruth Hall. This association, coupled with the cynical comment in the first chapter and the ironic undertone throughout the story, indicates the extent to which Fern's story provides a critique of conventional love stories and of marriage itself.

An understanding of this theme helps to explain why some of the characters seem to be turned inside out. The “heroine,” Mary Ford, is beautiful and good, but she turns into a zombie—the passive heroine carried to its grotesque extreme. The “hero,” Percy Lee, is handsome and kind, but he is a crook. Jacob Ford is a loving father, but he is a cruel exploiter—even murderer—of poor seamstresses. Fern's portrayal of these characters suggests that such duality is not uncommon in life; that in romanticized stories, perhaps, it is simply hidden from us.

An unusual aspect of Fern's fiction is her technique of characterization. Particularly effective in the story is the introduction of numerous short scenes and dialogues between minor characters. One function of these dialogues is to provide a comment on the action. Except for an occasional comment from the author, like the one about first love, Fern relies upon these scenes to shape the theme. For example, the draymen reflect the public attitude toward Percy's arrest; Miss Snip's callous do-goodedness points up the cruel attitude of the “good” people toward a woman who has been slandered; Mrs. Jones and the Reverend Parish's conversation highlights the horror of Tom Shaw's marriage to Mary; the Irish servants' comments about Tom Shaw reveal the despicableness of his behavior; and the conversations between Zekiel and John Pray, the tailor, underscore Jacob Ford's criminal treatment of his employees. It is in these quick characterizations, such as she used in her newspaper articles, that Fern excels.

Fern uses this same technique in portraying her main characters. She portrays each of them in a series of vignettes. Their characters are suggested, not developed. Fanny Ford is a child until the end of the story. She appears in a series of isolated scenes or pictures. We see her as a very young child looking out the window of her dark attic at the children and the dog playing in the fountain; we see her touching her father's face as he lies dead at the bottom of the stairs; we see her being reprimanded by Mrs. Quip for picking flowers on Sunday; we see her walking along the road with the peddler; we see her as a young girl talking to a friend in boarding school; we see her on her wedding day. Some of these images are very vivid, and although they do not give us the connectedness that is necessary for full character development, they enable Fern to develop her theme with great precision.

The most interesting character in the story is Lucy Ford, the mother of Mary and grandmother of Fanny. She is more fully developed than the other characters, and she has the strength and flexibility that Mary lacks. Moreover, as a mature character, she has an interest and a complexity that the child Fanny does not have.

The story begins with Lucy reminding her husband of the tainted source of their money:

“It was lonesome enough, Jacob, stitching in that gloomy old garret. I often used to think how dreadful it would be to be sick and die there alone, as poor Hetty Carr did. It was a pity, Jacob, you did not pay her more, and she so weakly, too. Often she would sit up all night, sewing, with that dreadful cough racking her.”

“Tut—tut—wife,” said Jacob; “she was not much of a seamstress; you always had a soft heart, Lucy, and were easily imposed upon by a whining story.”

“It was too true, Jacob; and she had been dead a whole day before any one found it out; then, as she had no friends, she was buried at the expense of the city, and the coffin they brought was too short for her, and they crowded her poor thin limbs into it, and carried her away in the poor's hearse. Sometimes, Jacob, I get very gloomy when I think of this, and look upon our own beautiful darling; and, sometimes, Jacob—you won’t be angry with me?” asked the good woman, coaxingly, as she laid her hand upon his arm—“sometimes I’ve thought our money would never do us any good.”

“Pshaw!” exclaimed Jacob, impatiently shaking off his wife's hand; “pshaw, Lucy, you are like all other women, weak and supersititious. A man must look out for number one. Small profits a body would make to conduct business on your principles. Grab all you can, keep all you get, is every body's motto; why should I set up to be wiser than my neighbors?”

Lucy Ford sighed. A wife is very apt to be convinced by her husband's reasoning, if she loves him; and perhaps Lucy might have been, had she not herself known what it was to sit stitching day after day in her garret, till her young brain reeled, and her heart grew faint and sick, or lain in her little bed, too weary even to sleep, listening to the dull rain as it pattered on the skylight, and wishing she were dead. (“FF,” 117-118)

In this passage is a thread that the reader who knows something of Fern's life will find particularly significant. Fern, who had herself experienced the suffering of the exploited seamstresses, similarly refused to be convinced by the faulty reasoning of the patriarchal culture, which idealized marriage and insisted upon seeing woman as safely under the protection of man. Fern's experience had shown her that this was a false picture; that women could not always rely upon men and that marriage was not ideal.

Throughout the story, when the other characters falter or fall, Lucy has the strength to carry on. When Jacob dies, she takes care of Mary. When Mary dies, she takes on the care of Fanny, working long hours sewing to support them. She is fortunate that the man she sews for, a former employee of her husband's, has vowed not to treat his seamstresses as unfairly as Ford did.

This criticism of society's treatment of seamstresses, whose hard struggle Fern had shared, indicates another aspect of the story: its social criticism. Not only does Fern point out the plight of underpaid seamstresses, she portrays the need for prison reform, the need for improved child-rearing and educational methods, the causes of prostitution, the disparity between the haves and the have-nots, the wastefulness of the fashion-conscious, and the injustices in the marriage relationship. All of these are issues that figure prominently in her newspaper columns. In “Fanny Ford” they are presented as part of the action, however. As we have seen, the slave wages paid to seamstresses at the time are an integral part of the story. The need for prison reform becomes clear in the scenes of Percy Lee in prison: the disgusting food, the sorry accommodations for the sick, the cells even at noonday too dark for the prisoners to read the Bibles that had been philanthropically placed in every one, the crushing punishment of “The Douche.”

Fern's social criticism is most effective in her creation of dialogue, as in this conversation between a visitor and the keeper in the prison room where Percy works:

“Bah! how these fuzzy bits of lint and flax fly about the room; my throat and nose are full. I should think this would kill a fellow off before long.”

“It does,” said the keeper, coolly.

“And what’s that horrible smell? Faugh—it makes me sick.”

“That? Oh, that’s the oil used in the machinery.”

“Why the fury don’t you ventilate, then?” asked [the visitor], thinking more of his own lungs than the prisoners’, adding, with a laugh, as he recollected himself, “I don’t suppose the Governor of your State is particular on that p’int.” (“FF,” 133-137, 169-171)

Another example of Fern's social criticism is her ideas on child-rearing and educational methods. Her ideas on education are apparent in the contrast between the narrow views of Mrs. Quip and the progressive methods of Mrs. Chubbs, who, Fern says sarcastically, would have been “turned out of office by any modern school committee” (“FF,” 188-190, 196-197). Fern also uses dialogue to develop her ideas on child rearing. Of particular interest is the dialogue between two farmers who are neighbors of Lucy Ford: Farmer Rice tells his neighbor that scolding a boy all the time will “discourage any lad, such a constant growling and pecking. … If you lace up natur too tight, she’ll bust out somewhere” (“FF,” 148-151).

A final consideration is Fern's portrayal of the marriage relationship. “God pity her,” she writes of the woman “who, with a great soul, indissolubly bound, must walk ever backward with a mantle (alas! all too transparent), to cover her husband's mental nakedness!” (“FF,” 122). In Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Margaret Fuller wrote: “What woman needs is … as a soul to live freely and unimpeded, to unfold such powers as were given her.”² Fern here depicts the tragedy of the woman who has a “great soul,” which should be expanded to the fullest; instead, linked to a man of meager intellect, she must try to hide his deficiencies and “walk backward” to submerge her own superiority lest he and society condemn her. This apparently was one of the causes of Farrington's jealousy: not only was he jealous of Fern's friendships with others and of her dead husband's memory, he was jealous of her—her person, her intellect, her conversation—and she learned to be constantly on the watch lest she seem more talented than he.

It is this revelation from the perspective of the “other” in “Fanny Ford” that constitutes the subversive subtext of Fern's story. We hear the voice of the female “other”—the wife, the mother, the grandmother, the seamstress. Fern's perspective is that of the “other,” the woman no longer silenced, raising her voice—sometimes obliquely, sometimes overtly—in criticism of the patriarchal givens. Lucy Ford criticizes her husband's treatment of the seamstresses; she is stronger than he as well as morally superior. By itself, this portrayal of a strong and long-suffering woman is not inconsistent with the sentimental theme of many women's novels. It only becomes significant in relation to the many oblique references and seemingly unimportant details that point to the author's critique of marriage and of male authority: Scraggs's death on the church steps on Fanny Ford's wedding day; the author's cynical tone; the associations of the name Mary Lee; the duality of the main characters; the presentation of the seamstresses’ point of view; the use of dialogue as social commentary; and the wife's revelation of how she must hide her own talents in order to allow her husband to appear superior. It is not without significance that the titular character is not even referred to by the name of her father; although her mother was legally married to Tom Shaw, Fanny Ford is known by the name of her mother. Ostensibly a story of tragedy overcome, ending in a happy marriage, “Fanny Ford” contains so many elements of “differance” that, when the story is deconstructed in this way, with particular attention to Fern's life and work, as well as to the details of the text, the subtext overpowers the text, providing a pungent critique of the marriage convention and phallogocentrism, or the male-dominated ideology of the central culture.

ROSE CLARK

If “Fanny Ford” provides a suggestion of one of the problems in the Farrington marriage, Rose Clark provides a detailed description of several of those problems. The autobiographical Ruth Hall closely followed the events in Fern's life, but with one very important omission: her second marriage. The circumstances surrounding that marriage are introduced into her second novel. Both novels are, of course, fictionalized accounts, and cannot be read as literal histories of Fern's experiences. However, enough is known of Fern's life from her newspaper columns and other sources to indicate that the events in Ruth Hall and the description of Gertrude's marriage in Rose Clark are based on Fern's life and follow the basic outline of her experiences.

Before we look at other aspects of Rose Clark, then, let us examine the novel for its description of the disastrous second marriage of Gertrude Dean. After the death of a loving first husband (who dies in October, as did Charles Eldredge), Gertrude, like Sara Eldredge, marries a man she does not love in order to support herself and her child. Like Samuel Farrington, he is a widower with two children; Gertrude, like Fern, believes him to be a good man. Like Samuel Farrington, Gertrude's husband, John Stahle, is ostentatiously pious, but after their marriage she finds him to be a “hypocrite, and a gross sensualist.” She is disgusted with him and finds him sexually repulsive. Like Sara Eldredge, however, she resolves to do her duty as his wife and as the stepmother of his two children. But Stahle is jealous of her. He hears others comment on her superiority, wondering how “such a fellow” as Stahle managed to get such a superior wife. Gertrude describes him to Rose:

He was under-sized, with a pale complexion, and light brown beard. He wore his hair long, and parted on the left temple, its sleek, shining look, giving him a meek appearance; his lips were thin, and, in a woman, would have been called shrewish; this tell-tale feature he dexterously concealed with his beard. I have never seen such a mouth since, that I have not shuddered; his eyes were a pale gray, and were always averted in talking, as if he feared his secret thoughts might shine through them. He appeared to great disadvantage in company, both from his inferior personal appearance and his total inability to sustain a conversation on any subject. Of this he seemed to be unaware until we appeared in company together. I soon found that the monosyllabic system to which he was necessarily confined, it would be necessary for me also to adopt, when addressed. ([Fanny Fern, Rose Clark. New York: Mason Brothers, 1856. (RC)], 241-242)

We know that Farrington was similarly jealous of Fern, and one suspects that this very detailed description is an accurate description of him. Increasingly jealous and apparently angered by Gertrude's reluctance to sleep with him (although as a wife she is forced to comply), Stahle breaks up house-keeping, sending his children to a relative and taking Gertrude and her son to a boardinghouse. We can only hypothesize concerning this aspect of the Farrington marriage, but the evidence suggests that, like Gertrude, Sara Farrington found herself married to a man whom she did not respect and whom she found sexually repulsive. We also know that Farrington moved her into a boardinghouse and that, like Stahle, he refused to allow her any money. One wonders how much of Stahle's behavior in the boardinghouse parallels Farrington's: Stahle makes clear to the landlady that she is not to wait upon his wife; he also allows the landlady and the men in the house to think that his wife would welcome the attentions of other men—believing that in her desperate need (since he will give her no money) she will gladly turn to other men. Gertrude, however, does not fall into this trap, and manages to subsist in her humiliating position.

Gertrude tells of specific incidents that revealed the “pettiness of Stahle's revenge.” On one occasion she had stepped on a needle. He refused to help her or to obtain medical assistance. On another occasion her son was hit by a carriage. Stahle refused to obtain medical help for the child, remaining away from home that day and all night as well, while the penniless Gertrude attempted to nurse her injured son by herself (RC, 247-250).

These two incidents underscore the vulnerability of the economically dependent woman, who, without assistance from the man she is dependent upon, cannot purchase necessities for herself or for her child. Whether the incidents are based on actual events in Fern's marriage to Farrington, they are important as evidence of Fern's growing realization of the need for economic independence for women. Another event that Gertrude tells of provides a further comment on marriage. When she returns home one day she finds that Stahle has opened her private writing desk and is going through its contents, including the letters from her first husband. When she takes them from him, declaring that they are hers, he replies: “The law says you can have nothing that is not mine” (RC, 251).

After this incident, Stahle begins to stay away from home nights and eventually leaves her, moving out of the state. Wishing to protect himself, however, he does not want to give her any evidence for legal complaint. He writes to her regularly, fraudulent letters which on the surface ask her to join him—but without her son and in the company of his brother, who had “uttered the foulest slanders” about her. “Every letter,” she says, “was legally worded,” but “was so managed as to render compliance with it impossible, had I desired to rejoin a man who had done, and was still covertly doing, all in his power to injure my good name” (RC, 253). Meanwhile, Stahle and his brother continue to slander Gertrude, making insinuations of sexual irregularity. Gertrude describes the result of these slanders, which not only cut her off from family and friends, who failed to come to her defense because they did not want to have to support her, but also made it difficult for her to find employment: “Men stared insolently at me in the street; women cast self-righteous scornful glances; ‘friends’ worse than foes, were emboldened by his villainy to subject themselves to a withering repulse from her who sought to earn her honest bread. … Even blood relatives have been known to circulate what they knew to be a slander to cover their own parsimony” (RC, 253-254).

The outlines of this story closely parallel Fern's experience with Farrington, who, anxious to preserve his own religious reputation, attempted to drive his wife into indiscretions that would enable him to get a divorce, cutting off her money and, with his brother, spreading slanders about her from which her family and friends did not defend her. In January 1851 Fern left him, taking her children to a hotel; Farrington left Massachusetts, writing her fraudulent letters and eventually settling in Chicago, where he obtained a divorce in 1853 on the grounds of desertion. The principal difference is that in the novel Gertrude does not leave her husband; one suspects that Fern, remembering how violently she had been condemned for leaving her husband—regardless of the circumstances—changed the facts hoping to make Gertrude a sympathetic character.

Eventually Gertrude is able to support herself and her son by painting. Later, when she has become wealthy and famous, Stahle, who has divorced her, reappears with the intention of getting money from her. Deeming her ignorant of the law and still vulnerable to his threats, he plans to intimidate her into sharing her wealth with him. “All women are fools about law matters,” he says (RC, 345). However, Gertrude's newfound brother appears and threatens to give him a beating, and Stahle, who, Fern says, is a coward like all “woman slanderers,” retires, tail-between-legs (RC, 346-348). In this scene it is clear that Fern is writing what she wished had been a conclusion to her own second marriage—that a protective brother had stood up for her before Farrington. Even more important, as the lawyer's letter in the Sophia Smith Collection makes clear, Fern had informed herself of the facts regarding Farrington's rights to her property after the divorce. It is probable that Farrington, like Stahle, attempted to get money from his former wife soon after she became wealthy and famous as Fanny Fern. Armed with the letter from J. C. Derby's attorney and a copy of the divorce decree, however, Fern was herself prepared to send him packing.³

Rose Clark is not only valuable as an exposé of Fern's second marriage. It is also interesting as a novel. Of particular interest are the novel's structure, theme, and style, and Fern's satiric portrayal of character and event.

The principal criticism of Rose Clark as a novel is that it relies too much on coincidence: John Perry happens to meet his long-lost sister Gertrude in New Orleans; Vincent happens to stop at Mrs. Bond's where Rose had lived; Stahle happens to come to Niagara when Gertrude is there; John Perry happens to meet Vincent in Boston. Primarily because of this reliance on coincidence, the plot strains the reader's credulity. Fern was aware of this problem and, foreseeing criticism, attempted to answer it within the novel in Gertrude's comment in Chapter 68 with respect to Vincent's story: “His history is so singular that in a novel it would be stigmatized as incredible, overdrawn, and absurd; in truth, a novelist who would not subject himself to such charges must not too closely follow Nature” (RC, 405).

Although this explanation hardly justifies the heavy reliance on coincidence in Rose Clark, it is interesting as an indication of Fern's awareness of the extent to which she was exceeding the probable in the novel. One wonders if she was consciously parodying the improbable plots of many popular sensation novels. Certainly, despite this heavy reliance on coincidence, the novel focuses not on the sensational but on the everyday problems of ordinary people. As the reviewer for Harper's wrote in December of 1855, “The plot of the story is of an unpretending character, free from extravagant incidents and artificial complications.”⁴ And as Fern said, she did not feel that a writer should rely for interest upon the spectacular or the supernatural. She found sufficient interest in the ordinary people who make up society, and, as she demonstrates in Ruth Hall and Rose Clark, one can find hair-raising cruelties in the ordinary, the law-abiding, even the avowedly pious. In the Halls' treatment of Ruth, Mrs. Markham's and Aunt Dolly's treatment of Rose (and of everyone else in their power), Stahle's treatment of Gertrude, Fern's powerful satire demonstrates that evil is not found solely in the criminal and the macabre. It forms a very real part of the commonplace.

The other principal criticism of Rose Clark is that the multiple events and swift scene changes create a structural disconnectedness in the novel. Although the introduction of numerous characters and the many scene changes give rise to charges of disconnectedness, there is an unusual symmetry to Rose Clark. First of all, the story begins and ends with a six-year-old child's confrontation by Mrs. Markham, the cruel matron of the orphanage. In the first chapter, six-year-old Rose, who has been newly orphaned, enters the orphanage where for the next several years she is to be victimized by Mrs. Markham. Mrs. Markham has absolute power over the children in the orphanage. Because of her drive for wealth and power, and through her machinations and clever manipulation of one of the trustees, she is able to exercise that power for evil, destroying the lives and spirit of the children in her charge. In the last chapter Rose's six-year-old son Charley sees what appears to be a bundle of rags in the gutter and with the help of his parents rescues the dying Mrs. Markham, who begs for mercy. The difference in the scenes and the characters' respective power and the use they make of it comment on the action that takes place between the two scenes.

Also significant is the novel's form. Rose Clark, which covers sixteen years and takes place in a number of totally different settings, is structured like a five-act play. Act I (chapters 1-18) encompasses Rose's childhood and covers the scenes in the orphanage and in Aunt Dolly's home. It ends with the death of the minister's baby and Aunt Dolly's callous comment, which ironically foreshadows Dolly's own child's death. Considerable time has passed before Act II (chapters 19-31) begins with the reappearance of Rose as a young mother at Mrs. Bond's and Dolly's (now Mrs. Howe). This act ends with the death of Dolly's baby. Act III (chapters 32-48) begins with Rose on shipboard on her way to New Orleans to search for the absent Vincent, whom she believes to be her husband, but who others tell her—and who the reader also believes—is a fraud. After the scenes on shipboard, the rest of Act III takes place in New Orleans, where Rose meets Gertrude, John Perry, and the mother of the other—evil—Vincent. The act ends when Anne Cooper, the vindictive housekeeper at Mrs. Vincent's, tells Rose's landlady that Rose is an unwed mother and Rose is evicted. Act IV (chapters 49-58) takes place primarily at Niagara Falls. The first chapter in Act IV focuses on the servants' talk in the kitchen, firmly grounding the action in the present and indicating that the retribution will be sure and swift. In this act Mrs. Markham is found out, Stahle is driven off, and the act ends with the violent death of the cruel and selfish Dolly Howe lying alone and friendless in the police station. Act V (chapters 59-71) takes place in Boston. John Perry meets Vincent, and, overcoming the temptation to withhold the information from Rose, whom he wants to marry, leads Vincent to Rose and little Charley for a happy reunion. The middle of the act portrays the peaceful death of the good Mrs. Bond, loved and respected by all who knew her, in contrast to the violent and lonely death of Dolly Howe. The final act ends with the retributive death of the power-seeking Mrs. Markham, who ends her life in the gutter.

It will be apparent that all of the acts end with a death, except the central act, Act III, which ends with the sisterly embrace of Rose and Gertrude and the “Satanic laugh” of Anne Cooper, who is the principal evil character in the book who does not meet retributive justice at the end of the novel. That Fern ends the central chapter with this woman's vindictive speech rather than with the embrace of the two female protagonists undercuts the sisterliness of their embrace; in fact, Gertrude is urging Rose to marry her brother and thus become her sister-in-law, which, however well-intentioned, is, to Rose, an abhorrent idea. Moreover, since Anne Cooper is never punished, to end the central act with her “Satanic laugh” undercuts the faith in a beneficent universe that is contained in the ostensible happy ending. Fern has deliberately constructed a novel with an apparently symmetrical design. Built into this ordered structure, however, is an overarching disconnectedness that implicitly questions the order and provides an important indication that the religious ending is not the whole story; that the order implicit in such an ending is an ideal, not an accurate assessment of the experiences related in the book.

It is a mistake to interpret the wish-fulfillment ending as a reflection of Fern's vision of human experience. The novel ends with the injunction that “God is Just,” and the events of the story presumably prove that good will be rewarded and evil punished: the good Rose is rewarded in the end, while the evil Dolly Howe and Mrs. Markham are more than amply punished. This is a simplistic interpretation of a complex novel, however. Although Rose appears to be portrayed seriously, it is clear that Fern is spoofing the sentimental portrayal of the “good” heroine in her portrayal of the innocent Rose: she uses expressions and situations that elsewhere she criticized and satirized. For example, she calls Rose an innocent maiden of “sixteen summers,” which was an expression that she explicitly criticized in her newspaper articles (NYL, April 28, 1860).

Moreover, the Gertrude Dean story undercuts the credibility of the Rose Clark story. As we saw in the discussion of Ruth Hall, what seems like disconnectedness in the novel is a carefully constructed contrapuntal pattern designed to illustrate the protagonist's gradual evolution of self and the consequent deconstruction of the cultural order that had previously defined it. Fern uses a different technique in Rose Clark, but the same principle is at work. Instead of following the development of one protagonist, in Rose Clark Fern introduces two female protagonists, one of which (Gertrude) provides the principal means by which the reader can deconstruct the cultural order represented by the story of the other female protagonist (Rose) and explicitly stated at the end of the novel. The Gertrude Dean story, which derives from Fern's own experience, provides a significant element of “difference” and points the way to the ultimate dismantling of the text. Just as Ruth Hall was told from the point of view of the innocent, domestic Ruth at the beginning of the novel and the experienced businesswoman Ruth later on, with the narrator undercutting the sentimental by juxtaposing it with the satirical throughout the novel, there are similarly two points of view in Rose Clark—Rose's and Gertrude's—juxtaposed against the satirical and sentimental scenes presented by the narrative voice. Rose remains trusting and faithful to the long-absent Vincent, despite the overwhelming evidence indicating he is false. Gertrude, on the other hand, tells her brother: “Men are so gross and unspiritual, John, so wedded to making money and promiscuous love, so selfish and unchivalric; of course there are occasionally glorious exceptions, but who would be foolish enough to wade through leagues of brambles, and briars, to find perchance one flower?” (RC, 283). The reader discovers at the end that, despite all of the evidence that seemed to point to the contrary, Vincent is that “one flower” and Rose was right to believe in him. On the other hand, he could just as easily have been the other Vincent, who had deserted the young woman whom he had tricked into a false marriage—which is what everyone but Rose believes her Vincent is guilty of.

Other evidence in the novel indicates that Gertrude's cynicism outweighs Rose's faith. One important clue is the names of the male characters: just as there are two Vincents, who might be said to be mirror images of each other, it is not accidental that four of the principal male characters are named John. John Perry is a good man; John Stahle is a bad man; John Howe is a weak man; and John Grey is a bad man who reforms. “John” is Fern's everyman: bad and good, weak and strong—in other words, human. The repeated use of the name John connects the different stories and makes the men all a part of the human condition. In Rose Clark Fern gives us her vision of life as it is and life as it should be. As she said in an 1857 article, she was annoyed sometimes by the “microscopic spectacles” that she said had been “mounted on my nose by the hypocrites I have known,” and that ever came between her and her inclination to love or trust in humankind (NYL, August 1, 1857). She might have struggled against the cynicism of a Gertrude, but she never attained the faith of a Rose.

In order to understand Fern's point of view in this novel, however, one needs to look closely at Fern's portrayal of the other characters. Rose Clark contains a veritable gallery of characters, the most interesting of which are treated satirically. The first part of the novel in which Fern portrays the cruelty of Mrs. Markham and Aunt Dolly is by far the strongest section of the book. The realism of these scenes is striking: the pale children standing at attention, Mrs. Markham maneuvering with Mr. Balch, Aunt Dolly jealously cutting off Rose's hair, or refusing to give her her mother's thimble, or bruising her arm. After Dolly marries John Howe, the scenes between the Howes are reminiscent of those between the Halls in Ruth Hall, humorously satirical and vividly portrayed. Also well done is Fern's satire of Dolly Howe as a fashion-conscious, pretentious woman, made a fool of by the parasitical poet Tom Finels. Particularly interesting is the satirical treatment of the unregenerate Finels himself, whose letters provide an ironic comment on the action, throwing into question the conventional piety of the narrative voice. These characterizations are far more numerous and more vivid than the portrayals of “good” people, and cannot help but undercut the affirmative ending of the novel.

All of these elements of “differance” help to deconstruct the metaphor of the beneficent universe, or “transcendental signified,” that is represented by the novel's conventional ending.⁵ The optimistic belief in a metaphysical order that Fern's contemporaries were happy to see in Rose Clark is thrown into question by the discontinuities in the text and the discordant realities that Fern portrays. Although Fern herself maintained a belief in a divine Being, and found comfort in the idea of immortality, this novel is consistent with her rejection of any system of closure that idealized or romanticized reality.

When Rose Clark appeared, some of the critics were kinder to Fern than they had been after the appearance of Ruth Hall. In fact, it seems clear that Fern wrote Rose Clark partly to vindicate herself before the harsh criticism that had been heaped upon her after her previous novel. After the publication of Ruth Hall, Fern had been criticized so widely that the conclusion of the public was that no “true woman” could write such a book. In writing Rose Clark Fern set out to show the public that despite her outspoken opinions on marriage and women's rights, and in spite of her satirical treatment of her relatives, she was essentially a “true woman.” That she did not recant in her insistence on independence and even economic independence for women is clear from her inclusion of the Gertrude Dean sections in the novel. Similarly, her satirical treatment of her second husband in Rose Clark reveals that she did not recant in response to the outcry against her for her criticism of her male relatives in Ruth Hall.

The New York Tribune, which had complained about the character of Ruth Hall, called Rose Clark “the most attractive character” Fanny Fern had created.⁶ The New York Times, which criticized every other aspect of Rose Clark, declared that the sweet Rose was the “only character in the book at all real.”⁷ And the Boston Daily Bee said that “a more beautiful character than Rose herself does not exist in English literature.”⁸ Not only were the critics fond of the gentle Rose, they liked what they perceived to be the religious message of the book—that a trust in a beneficent God will bring its own reward—and the gentler, more charitable tone. The New York Mirror praised the “general tone and sentiment of the book,” and noted that the book “inculcates a philanthropy as wide as the world, and a charity that reaches to the honest depths of human degradation and suffering.”⁹ The Boston Daily Bee acclaimed the “noble” purpose of the book.¹⁰ And Harper's New Monthly Magazine predicted that Rose Clark “in tone and temper will be deemed a marked improvement on ‘Ruth Hall.’”¹¹ This latter was, of course, what Fern had hoped.

Although today's readers will perhaps find Rose Clark's religious assertions intrusive and its heroine, Rose, less interesting and less credible than the strong-minded Gertrude Dean or Ruth Hall, it was these aspects of the book that caused many critics to hail it as Fern's “best work to date” and “ten times better than Ruth Hall.”¹² Fern knew what the critics wanted from a woman writer, yet, fortunately for her readers—her contemporary readers and the readers of today—she could not wholly write pap. As Herman Melville said when his works were not selling, “What I feel most moved to write, that is banned. … Yet altogether write the other way, I cannot.”¹³ Fern's problem was different from Melville's: his works did not sell, whereas she was criticized for being unwomanly. As a woman she was expected to be religious and affirmative; she was not supposed to be angry or satirical or to know about the dark side of life. In her 1857 essay “Facts for Unjust Critics,” she cited appreciatively the comment of Charlotte Brontë, who was similarly frustrated by the critics' standards for women writers: “I wish all reviewers believed me to be a man; they would be more just to me. They will, I know, keep measuring me by some standard of what they deem becoming to my sex; where I am not what they consider graceful, they will condemn me” (NYL, June 13, 1857).¹⁴

To understand the climate in which Fern was writing, one needs to look at the comments that critics were making about women writers who were perceived as having exceeded the bounds of feminine propriety. It is clear from these comments that American society at the time had very rigid requirements for women and for women novelists. Caroline Chesebro's Isa (1852) was criticized as “painful—shocking—we might add disgusting.”¹⁵ E.D.E.N. Southworth was criticized because in her adventure novel, The Curse of Clifton (1853), she had “rushed out of her sphere,” writing about violence instead of “good and pleasant things” and her “every-day sentiments” as a woman.¹⁶ E. Marion Stephens was criticized for a “recklessness of propriety” in her 1855 novel, Hagar the Martyr; the reviewer said that a woman's name on the title page should be a guarantee against “gross faults of principle.”¹⁷ And an article in The Living Age in 1864 declared that women should not “understand the meannesses of the world” which were necessary for great writing; any woman who attempted to do so would have to do so “by a defeminizing process.”¹⁸ In Rose Clark Fern sought to prove that although she was independent and aware of as well as critical of society's wrongs, she had not been “defeminized.” The modern reader tempted to ask “why did she bother?” has only to remember the anguish she suffered in her personal as well as her public life because of the gossip and scandal to which her writing made her vulnerable. To many Americans at the time, her “strong-minded” writing only seemed to confirm the scandal spread by Farrington and the author of The Life and Beauties.

As a literary work, Rose Clark served a dual function: its religious tone and gentle heroine demonstrated that Fanny Fern was at heart a “true woman,” while at the same time its portrayal of the Gertrude Dean story reiterated Fern's criticism of society's restricted role for women. The novel also served a purpose in Fern's personal life. The Gertrude Dean story told Fern's side of the story of her second marriage. A not unimportant result of this aspect of the novel was the element of revenge. Just as Ruth Hall was Fern's revenge on her brother and father, Fern must have felt some satisfaction in knowing that in Rose Clark she had evened the score with Samuel Farrington.

The Mason Brothers used many of the same advertising techniques with Rose Clark that they had used so successfully with Ruth Hall. They began advertising in late November, comparing the two novels and suggesting that Rose Clark might even be better than Ruth Hall. Successive advertisements quoted from favorable reviews, and then, on December 6, the publication day, Mason Brothers announced that twelve thousand copies had already been ordered in advance of publication. In this advertisement Mason Brothers commented that unfavorable reviews of such a successful book are often motivated by jealousy—the critic is often the author of an unsuccessful book—and suggested that this was the explanation for the unfavorable review in the New York Times.¹⁹ There are no sales figures available to make a final comparison with the sales of Ruth Hall, but contemporary sources reported that Rose Clark “also met with success.”²⁰

Although some reviewers responded positively to Fern's portrayal of Rose and took the novel at face value as a work with a noble purpose, other reviewers focused on the less gentle aspects of the novel. In its scathing review of Rose Clark, the New York Times criticized most vehemently those aspects of the novel that a modern reader finds most appealing: the satirical portrayals of Mrs. Markham and Aunt Dolly and Fern's use of down-to-earth language. Pronouncing the novel a “failure,” the reviewer expressed disgust with a woman writer who would attempt to portray ordinary members of society as such despicable people and who would use words that are not “delicate.” Rose Clark, the reviewer asserted, “contains a superfluity of painful incident and passages so exaggerated as to be extremely unnatural.” Maintaining that characters like Mrs. Markham and Aunt Dolly were too monstrous to be real, the reviewer continued:

There is another character, Gertrude, whose adventures occupy a large portion of the volume, who is also anything but akin to reality. [She] is a strong-minded woman—“drawn mild”—a victim, of course, to marital tyranny, self-boasted as the incarnation of purity, but, while telling her story to a female friend, using such suggestive language as this, “Whole days he (the husband) passed without speaking to me, and yet, at the same time, no inmate of a harem was ever more slavishly subject to the gross appetite of her master.” This high-bred Gertrude is made to speak of a child as “this little piece of quicksilver squirming around her,” and the use of this word is not a mere slip of the pen, for we have it more than once. The wit (and delicacy) of the book may be judged from a description of a “pompous city autocrat, all dignity and shirt collar, following his abdomen and the waiter.”²¹

This review helps us to understand what Fern was up against. It was not enough that she concluded her novel with a religious affirmation and made her titular heroine sweet and gentle; in order to meet the requirements for women writers of critics like the Times reviewer she would have had to water down all of her characters and have them, as well as the narrator, speak in carefully guarded euphemisms. The most revealing aspect of this review, however, is its denunciation of a woman for mentioning—even to a female friend—the horror of being used sexually by a husband who degraded and mistreated her and for whom she felt neither love nor respect.

After reviews like this one, it is not surprising that Fern wrote no more long works of fiction. Reading a review like the one from the Times, which criticized everything that she must have known was most successful in the novel—her pungent satire, her deft characterization, and her candid portrayal of Gertrude's marriage—Fern no longer desired to seek a future as a novelist. In the 1850s the boundaries for women novelists were too tightly drawn. During the remainder of her career, Fern would be outspoken and satirical—but in the essay; in a sense she had invented the form, and the boundaries were her own.

Notes

1. See, e.g., Jacques Derrida, “Differance,” Speech and Phenomena, tr. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 140, 150. Derrida writes, for example: “Every concept is necessarily and essentially inscribed in a chain or a system, within which it refers to another and to other concepts, by the systematic play of differences. Such a play, then—difference—is no longer simply a concept, but the possibility of conceptuality, of the conceptual system and process in general” (140).

2. Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, in Bell Gale Chevigny, The Woman and the Myth: Margaret Fuller's Life and Writings (Old Westbury, N.Y.: The Feminist Press, 1976), 248.

3. Samuel Blatchford, letter to J. C. Derby, September 17, 1853, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College. Oliver Dyer's defense of Fanny Fern in Boston is reflected in The Life and Beauties (New York: H. Long, and Brother, 1855), 55-59. The author sarcastically calls him (as John Walter) “Fanny's man-at-arms” and describes how “Walter” confronted him and other editors who had criticized Fern.

4. Review of Rose Clark, Harper's New Monthly Magazine 12 (December 1855): 260.

5. See, e.g., Derrida, Of Grammatology, tr. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 49.

6. Review of Rose Clark, New York Daily Tribune (December 6, 1855): 6.

7. Review of Rose Clark, New York Times (November 30, 1855): 3.

8. Review of Rose Clark, Boston Daily Bee (December 8, 1855), printed in the New York Times (December 12, 1855): 5.

9. Review of Rose Clark, New York Mirror, quoted in New York Times (November 30, 1855): 5.

10. Review of Rose Clark, Boston Daily Bee.

11. Review of Rose Clark, Harper's.

12. Review of Rose Clark in Maysville Eagle, New York Entre’Acte, Boston Saturday Evening Gazette, quoted in the New York Times (December 12, 1855): 5. Also, New York Mirror, quoted in the New York Times (November 30, 1855): 5.

13. Herman Melville, letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, quoted in Lewis Mumford, Herman Melville (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1929), 155.

14. Fern took the quotation from Mrs. Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë, published in 1857. Some women writers accepted the conventional view of women and joined in the criticism of Fern. In a letter telling of her own difficulty in earning money by her writing (which suggests that she may also have been jealous of Fern), one woman writer criticized Fern's writing as “vulgar”: “Because Mr. Bonner of the Ledger, thinks enough of Fanny Fern to give her $6000 a year to write for him exclusively, that does not prevent me from thinking her writings vulgar trash.” See C. B. Cheeseborough, letter to Paul Hamilton Hayne, September 16, 1872, Perkins Library, Duke University.

    For a good discussion of the restrictions on women writers, see Nina Baym, Novels, Readers and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 257. Baym writes of the restrictions on nineteenth-century women writers: “Women may write as much as they please providing they define themselves as women writing when they do so, whether by tricks of style—diffuseness, gracefulness, delicacy; by choices of subject matter—the domestic, the social, the private; or by tone—pure, lofty, moral didactic.”

15. Review of Isa, by Caroline Chesebro’, Southern Literary Messenger (May 1852): 319.

16. Review of The Curse of Clifton, by E.D.E.N. Southworth, Graham's Magazine (April 1853): 508-509.

17. Review of Hagar the Martyr, by E. Marion Stephens, National Era (June 14, 1855): 95.

18. “Literary Women,” The Living Age (June 25, 1864): 609-610.

19. Advertisement for Rose Clark, New York Times (December 6, 1855): 5.

20. S. Austin Allibone, A Critical Dictionary of English Literature and English American Authors (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1872), 2:1520.

21. Review of Rose Clark, New York Times.