SOURCE: “Sentiment and Satire: Fern Leaves,” in Fanny Fern, Twayne Publishers, 1993, pp. 23-39.

[In the following essay, Walker provides an overview of the prevailing themes and topics of Fanny Fern's newspaper columns, including those reprinted in Fern Leaves and Shadows and Sunbeams (the title of the reprinted version of Fern Leaves, Second Series).]

THE RISE OF THE COLUMNIST

The twentieth-century newspaper, with its clear distinction between the objective reporting of news and the opinions expressed on editorial pages, is the product of a long evolution in which columns such as those of Fanny Fern played an important role in the mid-nineteenth century. Although the editorial pages and the choice of which stories to give prominence may still cause newspapers to be regarded as “liberal” or “conservative,” their political biases are quite muted when compared to the overt partisanship of America's earliest newspapers. Nathaniel Willis's creation of the Eastern Argus as a paper that would espouse Whig views in opposition to the Federalist stance of the Portland Gazette in the early nineteenth century was typical of the period. In the absence of other media that could inform and influence the electorate, newspapers were often clearly identified with specific political interests. In addition to serving political ends, nineteenth-century newspapers also served as outlets for fiction, poetry, and essays on the arts and culture—a function still performed in some small towns and rural areas. The few poems of Emily Dickinson that were published during her lifetime appeared in the Springfield Republican, a newspaper published in Springfield, Massachusetts, and many lesser-known authors looked to the newspaper as one of the few available forums for their work.

The newspaper column that develops a clear persona and perspective—such as contemporary columns by Art Buchwald and Ellen Goodman—emerged as a hybrid of the political and creative impulses. As partisan control of newspapers began to decline after 1830, a number of editor-writers put their stamp on their newspapers by championing various causes and commenting on a wide range of social and cultural issues. Editors such as Horace Greeley and Samuel Bowles expressed concerns about American culture that rose above specific party platforms to concern themselves with ethics and morality. In an era of intense struggle to define a national identity, such writers were as likely to lecture their readers on the state of the arts as to espouse the abolitionist cause. The fact that such editor-writers were expressing personal, individual views rather than reflecting the stances of parties or groups justified their addressing a variety of topics without claiming a particular expertise in all areas; they wrote, as Fanny Fern was later to do, as educated, alert citizens possessed of the right to express their opinions in print. Twentieth-century columnist Westbrook Pegler would later call into question the credentials of writers who displayed such a catholicity of interests. Pegler defined a columnist as one who “knows all the answers off-hand and can settle great affairs with absolute finality three or even six days a week.” Living in an era of greater specialization than was the nineteenth century, Pegler expressed concern about the authority that print could lend to the nonexpert: “What is it that you would like to be told about by your favorite myriad-minded commentator? Economics, pig prevention, the Constitution, the law, politics, war, history, labor, the C. I. O. and the A. F. of L., housing, Naziism, Communism, inflation, agriculture or phrenology? Name me something we can’t tell you all about with absolute irrefutable authority and no two, perhaps, in agreement on any single point.”¹ Despite Pegler's reservations, the tradition of the “myriad-minded” columnist has flourished in American newspapers since the mid-nineteenth century.

Robert Bonner, publisher of the New York Ledger, was instrumental in the transition from the editor-writer, such as Greeley and Bowles, to the commentator invited to contribute regular, signed columns to a newspaper. Born in Ireland, Bonner emigrated to the United States in 1839, at age 15. Following a five-year apprenticeship to a printer in Hartford, Connecticut, Bonner moved to New York to work as a printer for the New York Evening Mirror. His skills as a printer soon attracted the attention of the owner of the Merchants' Ledger, who hired Bonner to work for that paper. By the time he was 26, Bonner had bought the Merchants' Ledger from its previous owner and set out to transform it into a general-interest paper that would have wide appeal to readers. The commercial emphasis of the paper was gradually replaced by a focus on literature for family reading, beginning with serialized stories pirated from London papers. By 1855, the name of the paper had become simply the Ledger; it was a weekly combination of magazine and newspaper that featured popular literature as well as news and financial reports. Such weekly papers were intended to appeal to a mass audience, and therefore included features that would attract readers with different interests; in addition to serialized fiction, each issue might include a fashion column, an agricultural column, and a humor section, along with selected news stories. Bonner's Ledger advertised itself as devoted to “Choice Literature, Romance, The News, Commerce,” and in this sense was little different from other such periodicals. What distinguished Bonner's paper was the inclusion of the signed weekly column—and hence the development of the columnist as highly-paid celebrity.²

Although Robert Bonner gambled on the success of his newspaper in some ways, he took few chances in selecting the authors whom he invited to contribute fiction, poetry, and columns to the Ledger. Most were household words: Charles Dickens, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Cullen Bryant, Alfred Lord Tennyson. Nor did he ignore the fact that the majority of readers of the literary weeklies were women. In addition to Fanny Fern, Bonner engaged the services of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mary Virginia Terhune, E. D. E. N. Southworth, and Lydia Sigourney. By 1855, when Fanny Fern began writing regularly for the Ledger, her first two volumes of Fern Leaves had been published to resounding success, and the controversy about her novel Ruth Hall had only increased her prominence. Nor was Fanny Fern taking any great risk by committing herself to write exclusively for Bonner's paper: not only was she handsomely rewarded financially, but she was also able to continue writing the pithy, conversational columns that suited both her temperament and her readers.

FERN LEAVES

As Fanny Fern notes in the Preface to the first volume of Fern Leaves, published in 1853, many of the selections in the volume were written originally for the Boston True Flag and Olive Branch and the New York Musical World and Times, whereas others were written specifically for the volume. The opening paragraphs of the Preface seem to be a combination of the conventional author's apology for the book and Fanny Fern's genuine surprise that she is to have a book in print: “I never had the slightest intention of writing a book. Had such a thought entered my mind, I should not long have entertained it. It would have seemed presumptuous. What! I, Fanny Fern, write a book? I never could have believed it possible. How, then, came the book to be written? some one may ask. Well, that’s just what puzzles me. I can only answer in the dialect of the immortal ‘Topsy,’ ‘I ’spect it growed!’ And, such as it is, it must go forth. … ” The author goes on to say that she wishes the book were “worthier of your regard. But I can only offer you a few ‘Fern leaves’ gathered at random, … which I little thought ever to press for your keeping” (Leaves, n. p.). The play on the word press is characteristic of the kind of word play that Fanny Fern was increasingly fond of using.

In characterizing what she terms the “articles” in Fern Leaves, Fanny Fern makes several suggestive comments: “Some of the articles are sad, some are gay; each is independent of all the others, and the work is consequently disconnected and fragmentary; but, if the reader will imagine me peeping over his shoulder, quite happy should he pay me the impromptu compliment of a smile or a tear, it is possible we may come to a good understanding by the time the book shall have been perused.” Of the 115 short selections in this first volume of Fern Leaves, more than one-half are more apt to evoke tears than smiles; more than a dozen of the sketches have as their subject the death of infants or small children, and others deal with neglected children, young widows, and the consolations of religion. Slightly more than midway through the collection, such topics give way to pointedly satiric sketches of pompous, self-indulgent, hypocritical people. Despite the mixture of tones, and despite Fern's description of her book as “disconnected,” the persona that emerges is consistent in her values: a deep belief in family, motherhood, love, and charity, and an equally deep distrust of cant, selfishness, and the pretensions of genteel culture. Drawing upon her own experience and perceptions, Fanny Fern clearly intended her reader to “come to a good understanding” of these values and priorities.

At least two dozen of the essays and stories in Fern Leaves—including those that deal with the deaths of small children—are in some sense autobiographical, and a number of these seem to be preliminary sketches for her novel Ruth Hall. In “Summer Days; or, the Young Wife's Affliction,” the idyllic marriage of a young couple comes to an end with the death of the husband from a fever. Not only does this recall the death of Charles Eldredge, but the author also emphasizes the young widow's ensuing poverty: “the necessary disposal of every article of luxury … her removal to plain lodgings … her untiring efforts to seek an honorable, independent support” (Leaves, 46). In “Dark Days,” a young widow named Janie confronts an unfeeling world as she tries to support herself and her child by working as a seamstress; when the child dies, she recalls the words of her dying husband; “who will care for you, Janie, when I am dead?” (Leaves, 185). The story “Thorns for the Rose” parallels in part the account of Ruth Hall being forced to send one of her daughters to live with her husband's parents for a time. In the novel, this story has a happy ending when the child is restored to her mother, but in the Fern Leaves sketch the child dies and the mother is driven mad by grief.

Not all of the autobiographical sketches in Fern Leaves end tragically. Some show the young widow using her talent as a writer, like Ruth Hall, to triumph over both adversity and individual adversaries. The most extended treatment of this theme is contained in “The Widow's Trials.” In this story the young widow is again named Janie; she has one child—a son—to support, and immediately thinks of writing as a way to do so. The person from whom she initially seeks assistance in this endeavor is an amalgam of three characters that were to figure in Ruth Hall: Ruth's brother, the self-interested writer and publisher Apollo Hyacinth; Ruth's sanctimonious father; and her father-in-law. Uncle John, this composite figure in “The Widow's Trials,” is the editor of a highly successful newspaper named The Morning Star and is a hypocritical Christian. Pathos and satire are mingled in this sketch as the widow's plight is juxtaposed to scathing portraits of Uncle John such as the following: “Uncle John was a rigid sectarian, of the bluest school of divinity; enjoyed an immense reputation for sanctity, than which nothing was dearer to him, save the contents of his pocket-book. … He pitied the poor, as every good Christian should; but he never allowed them to put their hands in his pocket;—that was a territory over which the church had no control,—it belonged entirely to the other side of the fence” (Leaves, 18-19). Uncle John thus combines the parsimoniousness of Ruth Hall/Sara Willis's father and father-in-law with the lack of charity of Apollo/N. P. Willis. When Janie, in “The Widow's Trials,” approaches her uncle about writing for his newspaper, he rejects her: “Can't afford to pay contributors, especially new beginners. Don’t think you have any talent that way, either. Better to take in sewing, or something” (Leaves, 20). His remarks prefigure Ruth Hall's brother's denial of her talent for writing and his cavalier suggestion that she find another means of supporting herself. Yet, like Ruth Hall, Janie succeeds as a writer without the assistance of her relatives, whereupon Uncle John is quick to claim their kinship: “he took a great deal of pains to let people know that this new literary light was his niece” (Leaves, 23).

Several other Fern Leaves sketches foreshadow characters and incidents in Ruth Hall. In “Self-Conquest,” a young bride endures the criticism of her mother-in-law, who accuses her of being a spendthrift, criticizes her housekeeping skills, and resents the time she spends with her own mother. Like Mrs. Hall, the mother-in-law in “Self-Conquest” seems to resent having to share her son with anyone, and she makes the young woman's life miserable. Fortunately, the husband is sensitive to his wife's plight and buys a house in the country where the couple can live in peace. “A Page from a Woman's Heart” is the story of a young woman who has been deserted by her husband and receives no assistance from her wealthy father as she attempts to support herself and her child by writing translations. Trying to maintain her dignity and self-sufficiency, she rejects an offer of help from a young man who admires her; but when she faints in the street from hunger and fatigue, the young man's father decides to adopt her, telling her father, “She is my daughter from his day, sir, and may God forgive your avarice!” (Leaves, 310).

Still other sketches in this first collection of Fern Leaves include clear autobiographical elements that are not so clearly incorporated into Ruth Hall. Sara Willis's ambivalent feelings about her own religious upbringing surface in several of the selections. In “The Prophet's Chamber,” for example, she recalls the frequent visits to her father's house in Boston (changed in the story to her grandfather's house) by members of the clergy. Calling the house “to all intents and purposes, a ministerial tavern;—lacking the sign” (Leaves, 214), Fanny Fern writes of the warm hospitality extended to these visitors by Deacon Willis and his wife, and recalls her particular joy at the visits of the Reverend Edward Payson, from Portland, Maine, to whom Sara Willis owed her middle name. Called “Mr. Temple” in this sketch, but identified by James Parton as the Reverend Payson (MV, 28), he is described as a kind, gentle man who was especially fond of children and told them Bible stories in his “low and musical voice” (Leaves, 216). Such attentiveness by this clergyman seems to have inspired the young to model behavior, at least temporarily: “I used to think that if I could always live with dear Mr. Temple I should never be a naughty little girl again in my life—never! never!” (Leaves, 217). But the high spirits that led to childhood “naughtiness” also produced sketches such as “A Fern Soliloquy,” in which she satirizes the churchgoing behavior of the “Misses Pecksniff,” whose uniformity of dress and demeanor suggests a hypocritical piety: “{W}ith their six pink silk bonnets, and six rosettes on corresponding sides; with their six sky blue shawls, crossed over their six unappropriated hearts, six pair of brimstone kid gloves, clutching six Village Hymn Books, folded in six pocket-handkerchiefs trimmed with sham cotton lace; six muslin collars, embracing their six virgin jugulars, fastened with six gold crosses all of a size! It’s perfectly annihilating!” (Leaves, 375). Fanny Fern's mention of the Misses Pecksniffs' “unappropriated hearts” and “virgin jugulars” suggests that their appearance in church has less to do with religious devotion than with attracting husbands.

Also growing out of the experience of Sara Willis are Fanny Fern's sketches that deal with the woman as professional writer. These sketches, taken together, provide insight into several aspects of the situation of the woman writer in the midnineteenth century, including the attitudes of men toward what was termed the “bluestocking,” and writing as financial salvation. In both “The Practical Blue-Stocking” and “A Chapter on Literary Women,” Fern reflects the widespread assumption that the “scribbling woman” was ill-suited to be a wife and mother, her literary activity making her impractical and unfeminine. The most direct statement of this assumption occurs in “The Practical Blue-Stocking,” in which a young man is reluctant to visit a friend who has recently married a woman writer. As he tells his uncle: “I understand he has the misfortune to have a blue-stocking for a wife, and whenever I have thought of going there, a vision with inky fingers, frowzled hair, rumpled dress, and slip-shod heels has come between me and my old friend—not to mention thoughts of a disorderly house, smoky puddings, and dirty-faced children. Defend me from a wife who spends her time dabbing in ink, and writing for the papers. I’ll lay a wager James hasn’t a shirt with a button on it, or a pair of stockings that is not full of holes” (Leaves, 100).

Finally persuaded to visit his friend James, Harry finds that his fears are unfounded: James's wife is attractive and well-groomed, and she serves them a wonderful meal. When Harry confesses his former suspicions about literary women to James, he is further informed that James's wife had begun writing in secret at a time when the family finances were in jeopardy, and her success had saved them from ruin. The message is clear: the literary woman is acceptable if she is discreet about her activities and if she does not neglect her domestic responsibilities in favor of her writing. This same theme is central to “A Chapter on Literary Women,” in which Colonel Van Zandt seeks a wife, but does not want a “literary woman”: “I should desire my wife's thoughts and feelings to centre in me,—to be content in the little kingdom where I reign supreme,—to have the capacity to appreciate me, but not brilliancy enough to outshine me” (Leaves, 176). Because of her use of a pseudonym, the Colonel is unaware that the woman he marries is a successful writer, but he is not dismayed when her identity is revealed to him, because she has proven herself to be attentive to him and to their home. At the conclusion of the story, the Colonel sums up prevailing opinion when he announces that “a woman may be literary, and yet feminine and lovable; content to find her greatest happiness in the charmed circle of Home” (Leaves, 179).

The idea that a woman could be accepted as a writer only if she maintained the proper standards of femininity is also elaborated in the sketch titled “Our Hatty.” A young woman who is regarded as unattractive and unintelligent by her family comes under the loving influence of a family friend—an unmarried woman who encourages her latent talents as a writer. When she is later revealed to her family as the author of a book of poems, Hatty wants their love more than their admiration of her talent: “O, what is Fame to a woman? Like the ‘apples of the Dead Sea,’ fair to the sight, ashes to the touch!” (Leaves, 39). Home and the love of family, not fame, were supposed to be woman's rewards. As Susan Coultrap-McQuin states in Doing Literary Business, “Being woman was the primary fact and being womanly the major glory, according to the proponents of True Womanhood … being a True Woman was a vocation in itself, more distinguished than any other.”³ So deeply was this concept ingrained in women of the period that Fanny Fern's contemporary Grace Greenwood, who obviously admired the boldness of her writing, felt constrained to emphasize Fern's adherence to standards of female behavior: “whatever masks of manly independence, pride, or mocking mischief Fanny Fern may put on, she is, at the core of her nature, ‘pure womanly’” (Greenwood, 84).

Part of the task of the free-lance writer, male or female, was of course to interest editors of periodicals in their work. Given Sara Willis's initial difficulties in placing her work with editors, it is not surprising that two of the satiric portraits in Fern Leaves are of newspaper editors, emphasizing the luxuries to which they are treated and the general ease of their lives. In “Editors,” Fanny Fern describes editors as spending their days smoking cigars, receiving visitors, and exchanging political and social gossip. The men described here, like those in “Everybody's Vacation Except Editors,” are the recipients of free passes to plays and other entertainments, free books for reviewing, and “a slice of wedding-cake every time a couple makes fools of themselves” (Leaves, 367). Yet in another sketch, Fanny Fern takes the side of the editor whose work day is interrupted by a boring visitor named “Mr. Leisure,” who uses the newspaper's stationery to write a letter, smokes the editor's cigars, and criticizes his newspaper. Given the fact that satiric sketches of other “types” appear in Fern Leaves, this piece seems more a generic portrait of “Mr. Leisure” than a defense of editors, and Fanny Fern had not yet found the editor—specifically, Robert Bonner—who could change her impressions of the profession to positive ones.

The type of column that Fanny Fern had developed by the time the first volume of Fern Leaves was published in 1853 was one that would vary little during her career: a brief story or monologue that illustrates a moral, ethical, or social point. Whether sentimental or satiric, the pieces begin without preamble and establish immediately the tone the column will have. A piece about a homeless child, for example, begins in short, matter-of-fact sentences—“It is only a little pauper. Never mind her” (Leaves, 105)—establishing the cold attitude of the public toward those in need. In contrast, a satiric sketch titled “Bachelor Housekeeping” begins with crisp, vivid phrasing that quickly establishes Fanny Fern's attitude: “I think I see him! Ragged dressing-gown; beard two days old; depressed dickey; scowling face; out at elbows, out of sorts, and—out of ‘toast!’” (Leaves, 324). The sketches in the first two volumes of Fern Leaves display an impressive range of voices and attitudes, as Fanny Fern responded to whatever issue claimed her attention, from the amusing plight of the helpless bachelor to the real tragedy of neglected children. In her later collections of columns, the voice is more consistent, as Sara Willis's persona becomes more secure in a stance of moral outrage, and she largely abandons the use of pathos to make her point. But Fanny Fern's role remained that of gadfly rather than reformer; she seldom proposed solutions to the problems she identified, except by implication. In “Fanny Fern: Our Grandmothers' Mentor,” Elizabeth Bancroft Schlesinger comments on the columnist's limitations as a social reformer: “Her interest in social problems was emotional and romantic. Often sorrowing over the tribulations of the poor, she never troubled her head over the causes of their pitiful lives, nor did she offer any suggestions for improvement. … Likewise her concern for the unhappy inmates of a prison reached no further than her inkpot. She frequently chided women about their treatment of servants, but withheld any criticism of employers who allowed thousands of women to work under wretched conditions.”⁴ While it is true that Fanny Fern did not offer programs for social reform in her columns, it is important to keep in mind that despite strong movements for female suffrage and the abolition of slavery, the 1850s was not an era of widespread social reform such as that which would characterize the end of the nineteenth century. Nor was Sara Willis in any sense trained as a social scientist; her role as columnist was to entertain and to some extent enlighten her readers. Indeed, it is remarkable that, especially in her writing for the New York Ledger, she was able to identify such a great number of social issues, from the frivolity and artificiality of women's fashions to the failure of conventional religion to minister to the real needs of people.

By far the majority of the selections in the first volume of Fern Leaves deal with human relationships, especially those in the family setting: parents and children, husbands and wives, grandparents and stepmothers. Like most of those raised in America's genteel culture in the early nineteenth century, Sara Willis had been taught that the family was a sacred institution, and Fanny Fern holds the happy nuclear family in high esteem. This is particularly evident in her many depictions of the sorrow attending the disruption of the family unit, such as through the death of a spouse or a child. It is also clear that most of the responsibility for family unity and harmony falls on the woman. In “How Husbands May Rule,” for example, a young wife gives up a close friend whom her husband dislikes. The issue is clearly that of the husband wishing to maintain control over his wife, because when the wife protests that her friend is “lady-like, refined, intellectual, and fascinating,” her husband responds that it is these very qualities he is afraid will influence “one so yielding and impulsive as yourself” (Leaves, 116). In “How Woman Loves,” the wife's sacrifice is far greater: when her husband is sent to prison for embezzlement, she not only remains loyal to him, but also withholds from him the news of the death of their son, so as not to increase his unhappiness. At the end of the story, a stranger remarks that her face reminds him of “a Madonna,—so pensive, sweet and touching” (Leaves, 156).

Although at this point in her career Fanny Fern to some extent approved of such female self-sacrifice, she had no sympathy for the cruelty with which men could treat women. Such behavior is always linked, as in “How Husbands May Rule,” to a masculine need for control. In both “Mary Lee” and “Edith May,” the husband's obsessive jealousy leads to the wife's destruction. In a story horrifying in its simplicity, Mary Lee's husband's unfounded jealousy prompts him to commit her to an asylum, where she pines away and dies. The husband in “Edith May” is more calculating. Edith has married the “ossified old bachelor,” Mr. Jones, following a quarrel with her true love. Although Edith is a faithful wife to Jones, he tests her by leaving on a business trip and arranging for word of his death by drowning to be sent to her. After a suitable period of mourning, Edith and her young lover are reunited, whereupon Jones appears to claim his wife, saying, “I happen to be manager here, young man!” (Leaves, 113). Edith dies within a week, and her lover goes insane. Sometimes such tyrannical men are eventually made to feel remorse for their behavior—but only after members of their families have died. In “The Passionate Father,” a man who bullies his wife and his young son learns to control his temper only after his son dies. “Grandfather Glen” tells the story of a wealthy man who has banished his daughter when she married a man who was not his choice. Now living in poverty with her consumptive husband and six-year-old son, the daughter sends her father, on Thanksgiving Day, a plea for help, which he ignores. In desperation, she next sends her son in hopes of softening the heart of Grandfather Glen; the strategy works, but she and her husband die before help arrives.

Such sketches, with their innocent, imperiled children and long-suffering wives and mothers, are undeniably melodramatic, a fact which was doubtless part of their appeal to the midnineteenth-century reader. But they also reflect certain cultural realities: the economic dependence of women, the vulnerability of children to now-preventable diseases, and the sin-and-redemption theme promulgated by conventional religion. Another reality of nineteenth-century culture was the role of women as stepmothers—not, as is the case today, as a result of divorce, but as the result of the mother's death, frequently in childbirth. At the time that Fanny Fern wrote the sketches collected in this first volume of Fern Leaves, she had not yet experienced the role of stepmother in her brief marriage to Samuel Farrington, but in three of the sketches she demonstrates her understanding of the difficulties inherent in the position. In two of these—“The Lost and the Living” and “The Step-Mother”—Fanny Fern shows women overcoming their stepchildren's resistance to them through loving persistence, but the third takes a satiric approach to the situation, suggesting that no amount of self-sacrifice on the stepmother's part can make everyone happy. “The Model Step-Mother,” which is one of several descriptions of “models” filling various roles in the volume, delineates in a series of clauses the efforts of an unnamed, generalized stepmother to please everyone. She “gratifies every childish desire, how injurious soever, or unreasonable, and yet maintains the most perfect government; … looks as sweet as a June morning, when she finds them in the kitchen, lifting the covers off pots and kettles.” Yet, “after wearing herself to a skeleton trying to please everybody, has the satisfaction of hearing herself called ‘a cruel, hard-hearted step-mother’” (Leaves, 301-2).

Despite Fanny Fern's sympathy with the difficulties of women's lives, she was not at this point in her career an outspoken proponent of women's rights. Having begun her career as a professional writer just a few years after the 1848 Seneca Falls Woman's Rights Convention, Fanny Fern was well-aware of the controversy surrounding such outspoken women and was reluctant at this point to identify herself with them. As Elizabeth Schlesinger describes the situation, “Females on public platforms were damned before opening their mouths. Many prominent women who worked unceasingly for better education and wider opportunities for their sex were unwilling to fight for their political rights. Their arguments buttressed the sheltered wives and daughters who balked at the idea of voting. Many feminine writers strove hard to dissociate themselves from their unladylike belligerent sisters” (513). The most direct statements regarding women's rights in Fern Leaves from Fanny's Port-Folio occur in “A Little Bunker Hill,” which is a response to a statement by an unidentified author urging that “rights are rights, and, if not granted, should be demanded.” Fanny Fern first notes that she hopes “no female sister will be such a novice as to suppose [the statement] refers to any but masculine rights,” and goes on to call the issue of women's rights “debatable ground,” and “a vexed question.” Conscious of reactions against what Schlesinger terms “unladylike belligerent sisters,” Fern asserts that “granted we had ‘rights,’ the more we ‘demand,’ the more we shan’t get them,” and she ends her brief essay by advising, “Make your reins of silk, keep out of sight, and drive where you like!” (Leaves, 346-47). The same advice—and indeed the same imagery—characterizes “The Weaker Vessel,” in which Fanny Fern asserts that “what can’t be had by force, must be won by stratagem.” Women's strength lies in getting what they want without appearing to do so: “It is only very fresh ones, Monsieur, who keep the reins in sight” (Leaves, 338).

At the same time that she encouraged subterfuge instead of overt action, however, Fanny Fern made clear that the institutions—chief among them marriage—that were supposed to protect women and make them happy frequently failed to do so. In addition to the cruel, jealous husbands depicted in “Mary Lee” and “Edith May,” she satirizes in several sketches the notion that marriage is the fulfillment of every woman's dream. In “The Tear of a Wife,” she adopts the stance of someone scolding women who dare to reveal that they are not perfectly happy in their marriages: “You miserable little whimperer! what have you to cry for? A-i-n-t y-o-u m-a-r-r-i-e-d? Isn’t that the summum bonum,—the height of feminine ambition? You can’t get beyond that! It is the jumping-off place! You’ve arriv!—got to the end of your journey! Stage puts up there! You have nothing to do but retire on your laurels, and spend the rest of your life endeavoring to be thankful that you are Mrs. John Smith!” (Leaves, 324-25). “Aunt Hetty on Matrimony” takes a similarly jaundiced view of marriage, although in a straightforward rather than parodic way. Fern's persona warns a group of young women that “Love is a farce; matrimony is a humbug; husbands are domestic Napoleons, Neroes, Alexanders,—sighing for other hearts to conquer, after they are sure of yours” (Leaves, 377). Aunt Hetty characterizes husbands as penny-pinching, inattentive, and useless as parents, but ends by acknowledging the power of cultural mythology: “I’ll warrant every one of you will try it the first chance you get; for, somehow, there’s a sort of bewitchment about it” (Leaves, 379).

SHADOWS AND SUNBEAMS

The irreverent tone associated with Aunt Hetty dominates the second volume of Fern Leaves, published in 1854. Reprinted under the title Shadows and Sunbeams by the John W. Lovell Company of New York, this collection of columns seems—as well it might—more self-assured, its author more experienced and cosmopolitan. Fewer of these sketches are autobiographical and melodramatic; more of them address social issues, from religious hypocrisy to prison conditions, with many satiric looks at marriage and domestic life. Fanny Fern's deep concern for the welfare of children is still evident, and death is described in mournful tones, but her eye ranges widely over human concerns and situations most often in a mood of detachment or even skepticism.

Several techniques and approaches that appear in the first volume of Fern Leaves are used more frequently in Fern Leaves, Second Series. These became established trademarks of the “Fern Leaves” columns—of Fanny Fern's distinctive style—and some of them prefigure the characteristics of twentieth-century newspaper and magazine columnists. One of these devices is the column as a response to a statement made by another writer—frequently an anonymous statement. The quoted statement, set as an epigraph, serves as a springboard for Fanny Fern's views on the same subject, enabling her to enter into a kind of public debate on matters of manners or morality. Many of these columns respond to pieces of advice or conventional maxims. “Sunshine and Young Mothers,” for example, is a rebuttal to the conventional wisdom that women are at their most contented as wives and mothers; the quoted statement concludes, “If you would take a peep at sunshine, look in the face of a young mother,” to which Fanny Fern retorts, “They are worn to fiddle strings before they are twenty-five!” Despite her reverence for the mother-child relationship, she declares that marriage is a “one-sided partnership,” with the wife responsible for the care of both husband and children, making her old before her time (SS, 144-45). In “Mrs. Weasel's Husband,” Fanny Fern's persona, Mr. Weasel, takes issue with the old saw, “A woman, a dog, and a walnut tree, / The more they are beaten the better they be.” Married to a woman who rules the household and attends women's rights meetings, Mr. Weasel does not dare confront his wife, let alone beat her: “I’d as lief face a loaded cannon!” (SS, 187).

Fanny Fern's columns are frequently responses to contemporary news items, and prefigure a similar technique used by such writers as E. B. White and Dorothy Parker in the early twentieth century—notably in The New Yorker. “A Model Husband,” for example, is a response to the news that the husband of a woman who has eloped with another man has given her $100 to help with her expenses. Fanny writes that if she were the wife, she would return to such a magnanimous husband and do her best to keep him happy. In more than one of these columns, Fanny Fern extends the dialogic nature of the informal newspaper piece by responding to an item in which she has herself been quoted. Such is the case in “Who Would be the Last Man.” An anonymous writer quotes Fanny Fern as having stated that “If there were but one woman in the world, the men would have a terrible time,” and asks her to comment on what would happen were there only one man left—whereupon she remarks that, for her, “the limited supply would not increase the value of the article” (SS, 95). Several of these response columns serve as reminders of the close literary ties between the United States and England in the midnineteenth century, when the absence of international copyright laws facilitated the reprinting of British publications in this country. Items in the British humor periodical Punch serve as provocations for several “Fern Leaves,” including one in which she takes issue with “Mr. Punch's” assertion that whereas men will admit that they are wrong, women will confess only to being “mistaken” (SS, 257-58). She is in complete agreement, however, with William Thackeray's remark in Household Tyrants that “A husband may kill a wife gradually, and be no more questioned than the grand seignor who drowns a slave at mid-night.” In a remarkably insightful response, Fanny Fern comments on the kind of emotional wife abuse that is difficult to prove, “So the only way we can get along, is to allow them to scratch our faces, and then run to the police court, and show ‘his Honor’ that Mr. Caudle can ‘make his mark’” (Leaves, 245).

Wife abuse is the subject of other selections in Fern Leaves, Second Series, most forcefully in “Our Nelly,” a mournful tale of a lovely, gentle young girl whose spirit—and subsequently life—is destroyed by a mean husband. Fanny Fern's narrator in this sketch is explicit about the lack of legal protection for such abused women in terms that sound remarkably contemporary: “Ah! There is no law to protect women from negative abuse!—no mention made in the statute book (which men frame for themselves), of the constant dropping of daily discomforts which wear the loving heart away—no allusion to looks or words that are like poisoned arrows to the sinking spirit. No! if she can show no mark of brutal fingers on her delicate flesh, he has fulfilled his legal promise to the letter—to love, honor and cherish her. Out on such a mockery of justice!” (SS, 216). More minor forms of unfair treatment of women by men include women's economic dependence. In “Women and Money,” Fanny Fern responds with indignation to the quoted pronouncement that “A wife shouldn’t ask her husband for money at meal-times.” In Fanny's opinion, women who have shown themselves to be capable of managing money sensibly should not have to beg their husbands for money at any time. The annoyances of marriage are detailed in “How Is It?”—especially a husband's thoughtlessness and inattentiveness: “Think of Mr. Snip's lips being hermetically sealed, day after day, except to ask you ‘if the coal was out, or if his coat was mended’” (SS, 118-19).

Although by far the majority of Fanny Fern's columns in this volume are brief and topical, some are longer, more reflective essays that record the panorama and variety of urban life in the manner of the “Talk of the Town” section of The New Yorker. As immigration and industrialization began to create distinct urban centers in the Northeast, there was much to remark in the contrast between rich and poor, the simple and the pretentious, the transient life of hotels and boardinghouses and the permanence of great houses. The society that Fanny Fern describes in these essays is one still in transition from frontier to settled metropolis; ladies' skirts get muddy in unpaved streets, and there are no social services to see to the needs of homeless children, but the “cult of gentility” affects the buying habits of a growing middle class that yearns to be fashionable. The three-part “City Scenes and City Life” records impressions of street vendors, urban architecture, and earnest people going to work while “the fashionables” are still asleep—scenes, as she writes, worthy of the engraver William Hogarth. Stereotypes typical of the period abound in these sketches: boardinghouses have “slip-shod Irish servants” (SS, 322), and a Spanish-speaking immigrant dies before a priest can hear his last confession. In addition to using national types, Fanny Fern also notes several emerging urban types, such as the “New York business men, with their hands thrust moodily into their coat pockets, their eyes buttoned fixedly down to the sidewalk, and ‘the almighty dollar’ written legibly all over them” (SS, 317).

Although Sara Willis was a city-dweller all her life—first in Boston and then in New York—Fanny Fern many times expresses a preference for country life, with its nostalgically imagined purity, virtue, and human caring. The two worlds already seemed so irretrievably different by the early 1850s that one accustomed to life in either city or country found it difficult to be transplanted. In a number of sketches, “Jonathans” from the country are duped by urban con artists, and Fanny Fern anticipated by 100 years the plight of the suburban commuter: in “Uncle Ben's Attack of Spring Fever, and How He Got Cured,” Uncle Ben finds it difficult to give up the conveniences of urban life when he moves his family to the country for the summer. Contrasting city Sundays to country Sundays, Fanny Fern emphasizes the commercialism and frivolity of the former and the peace and serenity of the latter; and in “The Fashionable Preacher,” she describes a fashionably dressed congregation ministered to with sophisticated rhetoric, but lacking true piety and conviction: “Oh, there’s intellect there—there’s poetry there—there’s genius there; but I remember Gethsemane—I forget not Calvary!” (SS, 231). Worst of all is to be ill in the city, where even your neighbors do not know you, as opposed to experiencing illness in the country, where, “unchilled by selfishness, unshrivelled by avarice, human hearts throb warmly” (SS, 272). Fanny Fern's attitude toward the artificiality and pretention that she associates with urban life is best summarized by her essay titled “Best Things,” in which she argues against owning useless finery—“a carpet too fine to tread upon, books to dainty to handle, sofas that but mock your weary limbs” (SS, 161).

As in the first volume of Fern Leaves, Fanny Fern remarks in this second volume on the situation of the woman writer. Several of the sketches here describe the hostility of editors and critics to female authors. The sources of such male scorn for the female writer seem to be a need for power and control, and an unwillingness to separate the author's work from her personal life. In the “Soliloquy of Mr. Broadbrim,” a critic feels that a woman whose work has gotten good reviews might become too “conceited,” and sees it as his responsibility to “take the wind out of her sails.” Sanctimoniously, he decides that for the “welfare … of her soul” he must “annihilate her” in his review (SS, 63). Although Fanny Fern could not have anticipated that the publication of her novel Ruth Hall would be followed by Moulton's antagonistic “biography,” The Life and Beauties of Fanny Fern, she describes, in “Critics,” one who would “lash a poor, but self-reliant wretch, who had presumed to climb to the topmost round of Fame's ladder, without his royal permission or assistance, and in despite of his repeated attempts to discourage her” (SS, 87-88)—a statement that seems to echo perfectly Moulton's attitude.

In addition to the resentment of female writers by those who felt that their territory had been usurped, women faced the dilemma of public versus private. In spite of the fact that writing was a relatively acceptable career for a woman by the 1850s, in part because she could write while remaining in the domestic setting, the duties of her role as mother and homemaker often interfered with her profession—a circumstance that Virginia Woolf was later to term “The Angel in the House”—the person whose time is always considered interruptible. Although little evidence suggests that Sara Willis/Fanny Fern was often a victim of the “Angel in the House” syndrome—certainly not during her marriage to James Parton—she had no difficulty imagining a woman having to juggle her two responsibilities. In “Mrs. Adolphus Smith Sporting the ‘Blue Stocking,’” Fanny Fern depicts a woman trying to finish a newspaper column while interrupted repeatedly by her husband, children, and servant, until she is finally driven to comment, “It’s no use for a married woman to cultivate her intellect” (SS, 102). The selection in Fern Leaves, Second Series, that most directly predicts the controversy that would greet the publication of Ruth Hall is “Have We Any Men Among Us?”, in which she writes, “Time was, when a lady could decline writing for a newspaper [as Fanny Fern had refused to continue to write for Moulton's True Flag] without subjecting herself to paragraphic attacks from the editor, invading the sanctity of her private life” (SS, 181). Yet if Fanny Fern had not written Ruth Hall, and thereby invited such “invasion,” her reputation might not have been revived more than a century later, and the “Fern Leaves” columns might have been forgotten.

Notes

1. Quoted in Gayle Waldrop, Editor and Editorial Writer (New York: 1948, 304-5. Westbrook Pegler's column “Fair Enough” was syndicated from 1933 until 1962. In 1941, he won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing corruption in several labor unions.

2. Ralph Admari, “Bonner and the Ledger,” American Book Collector, vol. vi (May-June 1935):176; Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, vol. I (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1938), 156-57.

3. Susan Coultrap-McQuin, Doing Literary Business: American Women Writers in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 11.

4. Elizabeth Bancroft Schlesinger, “Fanny Fern: Our Grandmothers' Mentor,” New York Historical Society Quarterly 38 (October 1954): 512; hereafter cited in text.

Selected Bibliography

Primary Sources

novels

Rose Clark. New York: Mason Brothers, 1856.

Ruth Hall. New York: Mason Brothers, 1854.

newspaper columns

Caper-Sauce. New York: G. W. Carleton, 1872.

Fern Leaves from Fanny's Port-Folio. Auburn, N.Y.: Derby and Miller, 1853.

Fern Leaves from Fanny's Port-Folio. Second Series. Auburn, N.Y.: Miller, Orton, and Mulligan, 1854.

Folly As It Flies. New York: G. W. Carleton, 1868.

Fresh Leaves. New York: Mason Brothers, 1857.

Ginger-Snaps. New York: G. W. Carleton, 1870.

books for children

Little Ferns for Fanny's Little Friends. Auburn, N.Y.: Derby and Miller, 1853.

The New Story Book for Children. New York: Mason Brothers, 1864.

The Play-Day Book. New York: Mason Brothers, 1857.

Secondary Sources

books, parts of books, and articles

Adams, Florence Bannard. Fanny Fern; or, A Pair of Flaming Shoes. West Trenton, N.J.: Hermitage Press, 1966. …

Breslaw, Elaine Gellis. “Popular Pundit: Fanny Fern and the Emergence of the American Newspaper Columnist.” Master's thesis, Smith College, 1956. …

Greenwood, Grace. “Fanny Fern—Mrs. Parton,” Eminent Women of the Age. Hartford, Conn.: S. M. Botts, 1868, 66-84. …

Harris, Susan K. 19th-Century American Women's Novels: Interpretive Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, 111-27. …

Kelley, Mary. Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. …

[William U. Moulton]. The Life and Beauties of Fanny Fern. 1855. New Haven, Conn.: Research Publications, 1975. …

Parton, Ethel. “Fanny Fern at the Hartford Female Seminary,” New England Magazine 30 (March/August 1901): 94-98. …

———. “A Little Girl and Two Authors,” The Horn Book (March-April 1941): 81-86. …

———. “A New York Childhood.” The New Yorker 13 June 1936: 32-46. …

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

Pattee, Fred Lewis. The Feminine Fifties. New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1940. …

Ross, Ishbel. Ladies of the Press. 1936. New York: Arno Press, 1974. …

Schlesinger, Elizabeth Bancroft. “Fanny Fern: Our Grandmothers' Mentor,” New York Historical Society Quarterly 38 (October 1954): 501-19. …

———. “Proper Bostonians as Seen by Fanny Fern,” New England Quarterly 27 (March 1954): 97-102. …

Warren, Joyce W. Fanny Fern: An Independent Woman. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992. …

Wood, Ann D. “The ‘Scribbling Women’ and Fanny Fern: Why Women Wrote,” American Quarterly 23 (Spring 1971): 3-24. …

Zlotnik, Mae Weintraub. “Fanny Fern: A Biography.” Master's thesis, Columbia University, 1939. …