SOURCE: “Anger in the House: Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall and the Redrawing of Emotional Boundaries in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America,” in Studies in the American Renaissance, edited by Joel Myerson, University Press of Virginia, 1995, pp. 251-61.

[In the following essay, Grasso argues that Fern's Ruth Hall was part of a larger mid-nineteenth-century debate over the public expression of anger by women, and whether this type of public expression could be considered appropriate “female” behavior and whether it posed a threat to existing gender roles.]

[I]n view of this entire disfranchisement of one-half the people of this country, their social and religious degradation—in view of the unjust laws above mentioned, and because women do feel themselves aggrieved, oppressed, and fraudulently deprived of their most sacred rights, we insist that they have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of the United States.

Declaration of Sentiments (1848)¹

[A] few months since a man escaped from bondage and found a temporary shelter almost beneath the shadow of Bunker Hill. Had that man stood upon the deck of an Austrian ship … he would have found protection. Had he been wrecked upon an island or colony of Great Britain, the waves of the tempest-lashed ocean would have washed him deliverance. … Beside the ancient pyramids of Egypt he would have found liberty. … But from Boston harbour, made memorable by the infusion of three-penny taxed tea, Boston in its proximity to the plains of Lexington and Concord, Boston almost beneath the shadow of Bunker Hill and almost in sight of Plymouth Rock, he is thrust back from liberty and manhood and reconverted into a chattel.

Frances Harper, “Liberty for Slaves” (1857)²

“Fourth of July.” Well—I don’t feel patriotic. … I’m glad we are all free; but as a woman—I shouldn’t know it. … Can I go out of an evening without a hat at my side? … Can I have the nomination for “Governor of Vermont” …? Can I be a Senator …? Can I even be President? Bah—you know I can’t. “Free!” Humph!

Fanny Fern, “Independence” (1859)³

In 1855, the prime architect of the Declaration of Sentiments, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, responded to criticism leveled against Fanny Fern's best-selling novel Ruth Hall in a woman's rights newspaper.⁴ Outraged by the reception Fern's “tale of sorrow” was receiving in both the mainstream and abolitionist press, Stanton felt compelled to defend the book against its detractors who claimed that Fern had violated standards of propriety by publishing a thinly-veiled description of a contentious family feud. In direct opposition to the prevailing view, Stanton applauds the appearance of Fern's novel because it explodes the notion that women can rely on men for economic, legal, and social protection. To Stanton, Fern's writing of Ruth Hall is an inspiring act of resistance against the “romance” of dependency. As the story of one woman's self-willed triumph over economic adversity, it teaches the “great lesson” “that God has given to woman sufficient brain and muscle to work out her own destiny unaided and alone.” That Fern exposes the cruelties of her own family is irrelevant, because whether “selfish male monsters” are “a father, a brother, a husband, or a Southern slave-holder,” when a man “robs” a woman of her “God-given rights,” he is a tyrant and should be named as such.

Because Fern has made the unwritten story of “petty tyrannies in the isolated household” public, Stanton regards the publication of Ruth Hall as a major triumph, for now other women will be able to recognize their own oppression and respond appropriately. As a specifically gendered example of American resistance to “tyrants,” Stanton believes that Ruth Hall provides a useful model of fearless expression. She encourages women to relinquish “false notions of justice and delicacy” and claim their “right … to condemn what is false and cruel wherever we find it” just as Fern does. She wants women to associate their own experiences with Fern's and recognize that anger at male members of their own households is justified. For when a woman “awakes to the consciousness” that her own father, brother, or husband is a “tyrant,” “her honest indignation will ever and anon boil up and burst forth in defiance of all ties of blood and kindred.” Stanton especially wants to impress upon her readers that, as Fern's example demonstrates, woman's public expression of anger is a strategic political tool. “If all tyrannical parents, husbands and brothers knew that the fantastic tricks they play at the hearthstone, would in time be judged by a discerning public,” Stanton wans, “no one can estimate the restraining influence of such a fear.” Because Ruth Hall reveals an intimate portrait of “tyrannical parents, husbands and brothers” in the patriarchal house of woe, Stanton commends Fern for helping women recognize that their own anger at men is both justified and politically powerful.

Stanton's emotionally charged, partisan response was far from anomalous. On the contrary, her voice was one among many taking part in a debate that was shaped by the increasing commercialization of the publishing industry. For Fern's novel was a locus of attention not only because she was a popular newspaper columnist known for her daring satire, but also because her enterprising publishers had decided to use “extraordinary exertions to promote [its] sale.”⁵ Launching a publicity campaign devised “to titillate the sensibilities of the public” through a barrage of advertising, mystery, and allure, one of their tactics was to introduce the idea that Ruth Hall was autobiographical. Indeed, they went so far as to suggest that the vengeful portrait of the protagonist's brother was based on Nathaniel Parker Willis, an editor and poet well known in New York publishing circles. Willis was in fact Fanny Fern's brother.⁶

Providing this information was a particularly enticing ploy since Fern had been writing pseudonymously up until that point. Confident that her pseudonym would protect her from slander, she based her first novel on her own harrowing experiences as a genteel mother who struggled to support herself and her children after she could no longer depend on male support. Essentially a Franklinian story of success that is recast in gendered terms, Ruth Hall celebrates an heroic protagonist's triumph over selfish and hypocritical fathers, brothers, businessmen, and lawyers in her quest for professional and economic independence. But once the novel is regarded as autobiographical, a pseudonym can no longer protect Fanny Fern from public censure. Indeed, within a few weeks, her situation worsened considerably when one of the newspaper editors she had previously worked for completed her “unmasking” with a vengeance. Because he was so incensed that she had left his employ for a more lucrative position, and then portrayed him as a greedy scoundrel in Ruth Hall, he retaliated by publishing a book which contained a slanderous version of her biography, as well as unfavorable criticism of her work.⁷ Since the very first line of the first chapter, entitled “Genius in Pantalettes,” identifies Fanny Fern as Sarah Payson Willis, “daughter of Mr. Nathaniel Willis, one of the most industrious and respected citizens of Boston” and “sister to Mr. N. P. Willis, the brilliant essayist and poet,” there was no longer any question as to who was the author of Ruth Hall. Vulnerable and exposed, Fern was lambasted for expressing “unfemininely bitter wrath and spite” against the male members of her own family.⁸ Accused of “demean[ing] herself as no right minded woman should have done,” her most heinous crime was engaging in unfilial behavior.⁹

The fact that so many people seized the opportunity to pronounce whether Fern's vitriolic depiction of undemocratic men was a criminal breach of moral ethics indicates just how contested the ideal of “womanly” behavior had become by the mid-nineteenth-century. For what was ultimately at stake in the debate over Ruth Hall was whether a woman had the right to publicly express anger at men and still be deemed “womanly,” respectable, and capable of rational authorship. The herculean efforts both male and female reviewers made to enforce the disjunction between anger and womanhood betrays a lurking fear that emotional boundaries were being redrawn. Indeed, it is clear from the reviewers' anxious response that the public expression of women's anger signified a direct challenge to the maintenance of unequal gender roles and privileges. As one reviewer of Ruth Hall candidly admitted, “As we wish no sister of ours, nor no female relative to show toward us, the ferocity [Fern] has displayed toward her nearest relatives we take occasion to censure this book that might initiate such a possibility.”¹⁰

The fact of the matter is, however, that “such a possibility” had already been “initiated” by the institutionalization of the woman's rights movement, and Ruth Hall was just one of its popular manifestations. Like much woman's rights literature, Ruth Hall expressed anger at exclusion by castigating the hypocrisy of a male-defined version of democracy. Also like much woman's rights literature, Fern “initiated” an angered confrontation between the sexes that was considered unavoidable. As the remarks of one woman's rights activist suggest, there was an implicit understanding among some of the movement's most vocal members that the public expression of anger was a necessary part of the woman's rights enterprise. In an essay addressing the issue of separatism that was published in the Una in 1855, for example, Paulina Wright Davis assures her readers that engendering “antagonisms” and “competition” between “one class or sex” is not the movement's primary goal. At the same time, however, she acknowledges that “in the transition state through which women must pass from the drudge, the frivolous toy, up to the ideal woman, we see not how she is to escape this evil; she must e’en pass through the fiery furnace, and we can only pray that she may come forth unscathed, with not even the smell of fire upon her garments.”¹¹

Davis' notion that it would be impossible for women to “escape” the “evil” of “antagonisms” in their quest for rights and freedom gives an indication of how attitudes about anger were changing by the mid-nineteenth-century. A number of factors contributed to this change. To begin with, women such as Lydia Maria Child, Maria W. Stewart, Sarah Grimke, Angelina Grimke, Margaret Fuller, and other writers and reformers who became publicly visible in the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s, created a “space” for articulations of discontent that an organized woman's movement could fruitfully exploit. Most importantly, however, it was the cumulative effect of abolitionist agitation that affected the change in attitudes most profoundly. For it was the abolitionist movement that created a public discourse of exclusion and moral outrage that woman's rights activists were able to adapt and apply to their own purposes.¹² In other words, abolitionist rhetoric and strategy gave woman's rights activists a way to challenge the assumption that womanhood and anger were mutually exclusive.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the way Elizabeth Cady Stanton relies on abolitionist rhetoric to justify the validity of white women's anger in her essay on Ruth Hall. As Fern's case clearly demonstrates, it was not possible for women to “come forth unscathed” when they criticized men in public. Because Stanton was acutely aware of this, she knew that the accusations against Fern offered a useful opportunity to argue that fighting for the right to equal expression was an essential part of the woman's rights enterprise. Using Fern's experience as an example, she shows how women are oppressed by a double standard of expression. While men can “ridicule” “mothers, wives and sisters” with impunity “since [they] first began to put pen to paper,” when a woman exposes “a few specimens of dwarfed and meager manhood,” a “furor” erupts. What is most significant, however, is that in order to argue her point convincingly, Stanton draws a direct relationship between Fern's experience as an oppressed white woman and that of a slave's. Distressed that Ruth Hall received a “severe” review in the Anti-Slavery Standard, Stanton contends that Fern's story should be read as if it were a slave narrative. “Read Ruth Hall, as you would read the life of ‘Solomon Northrup,’ a Frederick Douglass,” she commands, “as you would listen to the poor slaves in our anti-slavery meetings.” By employing this strategy, Stanton argues that in the same way abolitionists are outraged by the oppressed slave, they should also be outraged by the story of the oppressed woman. Like slaves struggling valiantly for their freedom, Fanny Fern is also a quintessential American crusader for justice. Moreover, by equating gender oppression with racial oppression, Stanton establishes a direct correlation between the validity of the slave's anger and that of the white woman's. In the same way the slave has the right to express anger at the deprivation of freedom, so does the white woman who finds herself in a similar situation. This tactic allows Stanton to show that woman's anger is not only an appropriate response to injustice; it is also socially transformative and heroic.

Stanton thus shrewdly attempts to sever anger from its specifically gendered significations. Concluding the essay with the provocative question, “What are the strokes, the paddle or the lash, to the refined insults, with which man seeks to please or punish woman?,” Stanton equates the white woman's position with that of the slave to show that “the cruelty … of father and brethren” are the same for white women in domesticity as they are for blacks in slavery, and therefore they have the same right to get angry. Vehemently rejecting a Jesus-like, feminine-styled doctrine of “Love your enemies,” Stanton's main point is that women, like slaves, should not be expected to love their tyrannical fathers. “Because a villain for his own pleasure, has conferred on me the boon of existence, by what law, other than the Christian one—‘Love your enemies’—am I bound to love and reverence him who has made my life a curse and a weariness, and who possesses in himself none of the Godlike qualities which command veneration?” By using the logic and language of abolitionism, Stanton not only vindicates white women's “cruel wrongs” and her feelings about those “wrongs,” she also urges their unrestrained expression, regardless of the costs.¹³

We get some sense of how radical Stanton's ideas about women and anger were when we consider how another influential woman's rights activist, Caroline Dall, responds to Stanton's comments in the next issue of the Una.¹⁴ While Dall begins by commending Stanton for expressing her “moral indignation” with such “fearlessness,” she feels compelled to offer a different view of Fern's “slanderous autobiography.” Like many of Fern's detractors, Dall finds Fern's depiction of her relatives an inexcusable offense. Personally acquainted with “those readers in the city of Boston and its vicinity who have known its authoress and her family connections on all sides for years,” she suspects that Fern is as “imprudent and heartless” as they say she is. According to Dall, not only is Fern devoid of good character and sound morals, she also lacks talent. In order to discredit Fern's authority to speak anger in public, Dall judges the novel on aesthetic grounds and pronounces it wanting. She agrees with other “competent judges” that Ruth Hall is a “slovenly performance,” “by no means the work of a ripe and well-trained woman.” Because Fern was incapable of transcending her “peculiar irritations,” she had no “right” to “hold [them] up for the benefit of [her] fellow-men.” Only authors who “outlive” anger-provoking experiences are worthy of creating art.¹⁵ Here we see Dall using the institutionalization of aesthetic standards to invalidate an author whose vision threatens her own value system.

What clearly offends Dall are Fern's “bitter views of men and things” as well as her “lack of nobleness and generosity.” But Fern's cynical world view and obstinate self-centeredness are not the only things that bother Dall. The fact that Fern flaunts a male-styled confrontational approach to sexual warfare is what upsets her the most. Indeed, what her disagreement with Stanton ultimately reveals is that Dall is terribly uncomfortable about women using “‘manly’ wit and the sarcasm of a soured soul” in their emancipation struggles. Whereas Stanton asserts that confrontational “resistance to tyrants is obedience to God,” Dall counters that “Resistance may be a duty, but not that which consists in warlike defence—only that which abides in noble self-restraint.” Whereas Stanton believes that public exposure is a deterrent, Dall insists that “holding [a father] up to public scorn in his old age will … never lead him to the God whom he has outraged.” Whereas Stanton wants the oppressed daughter to tell her story without restraint, Dall believes that “if the child owes the father … no respect,” she nevertheless “owes him—her silence.” Given these views, it is not surprising that while Stanton takes pains to draw a relationship between “domestic” novels and slave narratives, Dall vehemently denies the association. “When Fanny Fern offers us Ruth Hall as a true narrative, and proves it, we will read it as we would the story of a fugitive; until then we can only judge it as a fiction, and denounce it for want of ‘literary merit.’” Thus Dall seeks to disengage the relationship between gender oppression and racial oppression that Stanton works so hard to establish. Because in her view Fern's crude tactics foster a “great depravity in the public taste,” she is horrified at the idea that Fern should be associated with “the cause.”

Dall's class-conscious analysis makes it impossible for her to regard woman's public expression of anger as a socially acceptable political tool. To her, anger is inappropriate and crass, thus she advocates a traditional female-styled model of forgiveness and stoical self-restraint that preserves class boundaries by keeping unruly emotional expression in check. Dall's position helps us to appreciate the brilliance of Stanton's tactics. By suggesting that virtuous, middle-class citizens should respond to gender oppression in the same way they respond to racial oppression, Stanton argues that gendered anger was worthy of the same respect, approval, and sympathy as racial anger. In other words, Stanton was attempting to prove that white, middle-class woman's anger was not “unwomanly” or indecorous because it, too, was sanctioned by a natural rights philosophy as well as God's laws. When we see how Dall perceives Fern's angered expressions once they are severed from an acceptably moral context, we understand why Stanton makes the argument that she does.

The many different positions on anger and womanhood that the controversy over Ruth Hall generated reveal not only a debate about whether anger could be regarded as a proper “female” response, but also whether it posed a threat to a rapidly industrializing nation that was reliant upon an ideology of rational self-restraint.¹⁶ For by the mid-nineteenth-century, the notion that anger signified danger was deeply entrenched. In their study of marriage and child-rearing manuals as well as women's magazine fiction, Carol Zisowitz Stearns and Peter N. Stearns found that, “Victorians often chose metaphors for anger implying that the feeling came from an evil source outside the self. The essential self was the rational self, while the angry feelings were intrusions.”¹⁷ They also conclude that while in theory prescriptions against anger were supposed to apply to both men and women, there was clearly a gendered double-standard. In their assessment:

The bottom line was … that angry women were worse than angry men. … [A]t least there were some discussions of the anger felt by decent men, who must, of course, struggle with their anger and overcome it. No such struggle was allowed a woman, for even in feeling anger she proved her bad character. … Anger in women made the Victorians more uncomfortable than did anger in men. If the advice books could mention the subject in passing, it was almost impossible to write a story with a good but angry woman, for the Victorians had a failure of imagination in actually conceiving of a woman who could be both.¹⁸

Clearly, however, the proliferation of slave narratives, domestic novels, and woman's rights literature made anger in and at the familial, marital, and national house much more imaginable than it had been earlier in the century. Indeed, scholars who have studied these genres have noted that the expression of anger shapes content as well as themes. In her study of slave narratives, for example, Frances Smith Foster points out that after the Compromise of 1850 sanctioned the expansion of slavery and the fugitive slave law that permitted agents to track down runaway slaves who had found a haven in northern “free” states and return them to slavery, “slave narratives began to display anti-American tendencies. … [T]he writers' displeasure is directed not only against slaveholders but against the U.S. government as well.”¹⁹ She cites the tone and sentiment of Ellen and William Craft's realization that they “thought it best … to leave the mock-free republic, and come to a country where we and our dear little ones can truly be free” as a representative example.²⁰ Marion Wilson Starling also comments on the heightened antagonism of the mid-nineteenth-century narratives. “The slave narratives of this period,” she writes, “are generally distinguishable … from those of other years by virtue of [a] vogue for rhetorical vindictiveness.”²¹ In a similar finding, students of women's literature have also noted an angered undercurrent in the stories, novels, and essays that were written primarily for women by women. In her study of women's domestic fiction, for example, Nina Baym matter-of-factly states that “the presence of anger is understood as a basic fact of the [domestic] heroine's emotional makeup.”²² And not surprisingly, the editors of a collection of woman's rights literature conclude that their selections “represent some of the lively, important debates of the nineteenth-century, as the women expressed anger, hope and disagreement about the obstacles and possibilities for change in the conditions of women's lives.”²³

The presence of these interrelated discourses did not mean, however, that anger could be expressed straightforwardly or without consequences. Indeed, as the response to Ruth Hall clearly demonstrates, for white middle-class women to express anger directly at men was far from acceptable. Nor was the overt expression of anger at whites and their racist institutions an unproblematic matter for authors of slave narratives. As many scholars have noted, African-American writers and their northern abolitionist sponsors had to be acutely sensitive to their white reader's expectations, prejudices, and value systems, and thus shape their stories accordingly. Since the main function of the slave narrative was to provoke action by generating sympathy, narrators had to be particularly careful about how they represented characters, events, and the sources of blame and misery. Because they did not want to alienate the very audience they hoped to politicize, they had to be especially inventive when it came to expressing anger at whites and their exploitative and dehumanizing institutions. Moreover, in order to appeal to middle-class values that included the repression of anger and the triumph of self-control, it was not in the narrator's best interest to depict a protagonist who did not share these traits and values.²⁴

Large-scale religious changes also contributed to the repression of anger in mid-nineteenth-century literature. The shift from a harsh Calvinism to a more optimistic, humanitarian religious culture that many scholars attribute to the growth of capitalism involved a highly gendered imaginative reconstruction of, and relationship to, religious icons. During a period in which, as Barbara Welter evocatively puts it, the “skyscraper … replace[s] the steeple as a symbol of the American dream,” religion had become relegated to the realm of the feminine.²⁵ As the repository of culturally sanctioned, female-gendered values such as meekness, humility, and lack of greed, it is not surprising that by the mid-nineteenth-century a humane, forgiving, socially aware Christ had gradually replaced the earlier Calvinist-styled angry and punitive God.²⁶

This theological shift had a profound effect on women's literary imaginings. Not only did the model of a sacrificed Christ allow women writers to elevate the pain and suffering of their protagonists to a sacred level, it also suggested that their experiences, like those of the martyred Christ, were worthy of recognition and respect. The problem, however, is that when a forgiving, turn the other cheek, Christ-like model becomes the only justifiable “womanly” response to injustice, women are left without a way to express anger that does not automatically threaten their gendered source of power. Because the shift to a “more domesticated, more emotional, more soft and accommodating”²⁷ religious world-view provided a cultural model that encouraged the repression of female anger, we can see why woman's rights activists found abolitionist rhetoric so compelling. Rooted in Old Testament vengeful God logic, it preserved the right to respond to injustice with anger.

The pursuit of rights and liberty by women and African Americans created a new context for the expression, reception, and contestation of female anger by the mid-nineteenth-century. Indeed, the struggle both black and white women engaged in to claim an equal right to feel and express moral outrage in the century's earlier decades made the collective expression of a specifically gendered moral outrage by the mid-nineteenth-century possible. When the debate over Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall is considered within the larger context of a politicized battle over women's right to express anger, it becomes possible to chart a history of the battle as well as its gendered implications.

Notes

1. “Declaration of Sentiments”; rpt. in Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings, ed. Miriam Schneir (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), pp. 77-82.

2. Frances Harper, “Liberty for Slaves”; rpt. in The Rhetoric of Struggle: Public Address by African American Women, ed. Robbie Jean Walker (New York: Garland, 1992), pp. 37-40.

3. Fanny Fern, “Independence”; rpt. in Ruth Hall & Other Writings, ed. Joyce W. Warren (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986), pp. 314-15.

4. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Ruth Hall,” Una, February 1855, pp. 29-30. For information about the role of the Una in the antebellum woman's rights movement, see Susan P. Conrad, Perish the Thought: Intellectual Women in Romantic America 1830-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 157-82, and The Radical Women's Press of the 1850s, ed. Ann Russo and Cheris Kramarae (New York: Routledge, 1991).

5. Susan Geary, “The Domestic Novel as a Commercial Commodity: Making a Best Seller in the 1850s,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 70 (3d Quarter 1976): 365-93. According to Geary, the publisher's promise to use “extraordinary exertions” is stated in Fern's book contract.

6. Geary, “Domestic Novel,” 387, 388-89. Fanny Fern was a pseudonym for Sara Payson Willis. Joyce W. Warren's interpretation of these events differs slightly from Geary's. In her biography of Fern, Fanny Fern: An Independent Woman (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992), Warren writes that the publishers “responded to the critics who had insisted on reading the book as autobiography” with suggestive hints about its autobiographical nature (emphasis added; p. 123). Thus Warren does not attribute full responsibility to the Mason Brothers for revealing Fern's identity.

7. Although Life and Beauties of Fanny Fern (New York: H. Long and Brother, 1855) was originally published anonymously, scholars have identified William U. Moulton, the editor of the True Flag, as its author; see Florence Bannard Adams, Fanny Fern, or a Pair of Flaming Shoes (West Trenton, N.J.: Hermitage Press, 1966), p. 10; Geary, “Domestic Novels,” 390; and Warren, Independent Woman, p. 123-24.

8. Anon., “Editorial Notes—American Literature,” Putnam's Monthly, 5 (February 1855): 216, cited in Linda Huf, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman: The Writer as Heroine in American Literature (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1983), p. 20. Huf, as well as Joyce W. Warren provide a critical assessment of Ruth Hall's reception by quoting liberally from contemporary reviews. See Huf, pp. 17-35; Warren's introduction to the American Women Writers reprint edition of Ruth Hall (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988), pp. ix-xxxix; and Independent Woman, pp. 120-42.

9. Quoted in The Life and Beauties of Fanny Fern, cited in Huf, p. 17.

10. From a review in the New Orleans Crescent City (January 1855), cited in Warren, Independent Woman, pp. 125-26.

11. Paulina Wright Davis, Una, February 1855, p. 25, cited in Radical Women's Press of the 1850s, p. 29.

12. Many historians have explored the integral relationship between the abolitionist and woman's rights movement; see, for example, Ellen Carol Dubois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America, 1848-1869 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978); Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Woman's Rights Movement in the United States (New York: Atheneum, 1974); and Blanche Glassman Hersh, The Slavery of Sex: Feminist-Abolitionists in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978).

13. Stanton, “Ruth Hall,” 29-30.

14. Caroline Healey Dall, “Ruth Hall,” Una, March 1855, pp. 42-43.

15. Another of Fern's contemporaries, Grace Greenwood, also shared this view. In an essay on Fern, Greenwood wrote: “As a novelist, she is somewhat open to the charge of exaggeration, and she is not sufficiently impersonal to be always artistic. Her own fortunes, loves, and hates live again in her creations,—her heroines are her doubles” (see “Fanny Fern-Mrs. Parton,” in Eminent Women of the Age; Being Narratives of the Lives and Deeds of the Most Prominent Women of the Present Generation, ed. James Parton [Hartford, Conn.: S. M. Betts, 1868], pp. 70-84; quote from p. 82).

16. In their pioneering historical study of anger, Carol Zisowitz Stearns and Peter N. Stearns theorize that “the growth of capitalism” may have been a significant factor in the development of an ideology of anger control. They note that many scholars “have seen an association between investment capitalism, with its need to defer gratification, and the development of a modern personality that emphasizes impulse control and introspection” (Anger: The Struggle for Emotional Control in America's History [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986], p. 34). Also see Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982).

17. Stearns and Stearns, Anger, p. 42.

18. Stearns and Stearns, Anger, p. 48. In her study of “sentimental culture,” Halttunen also notes that “Above all, the sentimental woman was instructed to exercise moral self-control. Passions, especially envy and anger, were believed to be injurious to the skin” (Confidence Men, p. 88).

19. Frances Smith Foster, Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Ante-bellum Slave Narratives (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1979), p. 16.

20. The narrative Foster refers to is by William Craft and Ellen Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; or, The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery (1860). Excerpts are reprinted in Black Women in Nineteenth-Century American Life: Their Words, Their Thoughts, Their Feelings, ed. Bert James Loewenberg and Ruth Bogin (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976), pp. 104-23.

21. Marion Wilson Starling, The Slave Narrative: Its Place in American History 2d ed. (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1988), p. 129.

22. Nina Baym, Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels By and About Women in America, 1820-1870 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), p. 252.

23. Ann Russo and Cheris Kramarae, Introduction to Radical Women's Press of the 1850s, p. 9.

24. Keith Byerman, “We Wear the Mask: Deceit as Theme and Style in Slave Narratives,” in The Art of Slave Narrative, ed. John Sekora and Darwin T. Turner (Macomb: Western Illinois University, 1982), pp. 70-82; Frances Smith Foster, Witnessing Slavery; James Olney, “‘I Was Born’: Slave Narratives, Their Status as Autobiography and as Literature,” in The Slave's Narrative, ed. Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 148-75.

25. Barbara Welter, “The Feminization of American Religion: 1800-1860,” in Clio's Consciousness Raised: New Perspectives on the History of Women, ed. Mary Hartman and Lois W. Banner (New York: Harper, 1974), p. 138.

26. In addition to Welter, see Ann Douglas [Wood], The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977); Perry Miller, “From Edwards to Emerson,” Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956), pp. 184-203; and John L. Thomas, “Romantic Reform in America, 1815-1865,” in Ante-Bellum Reform, ed. David Brion Davis (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), pp. 153-76.

27. Welter, Feminization, p. 138.