SOURCE: “Inscribing and Defining: The Many Voices of Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall,” in Nineteenth-Century American Women's Novels: Interpretative Strategies, Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 111-27.

[In the following essay, Harris argues that Fanny Fern had a deliberate strategy in mind while writing Ruth Hall:according to Harris, Fern subverted the constructs of sentimental literature in order to express her own ideas about women's independence and to challenge the very notion of the “ideal” nineteenth-century woman.]

Fanny Fern's (Sara Payson Willis) 1855 novel Ruth Hall¹ is the story of a woman who, losing her economic security on her husband's death, and finding herself sole support of two small children, becomes a highly successful popular writer. The book has autobiographical elements: Willis did lose her first child and first husband and was thrown out on the world to fend for herself. Like her heroine, she too went through a period of trial before she found her vocation as a writer.²Ruth Hall records some of her actual experiences; more importantly, it records how she felt about them. There’s a wicked mood in the portrayal of some of her fictional characters that suggests she was reaping revenge on those who had wronged her. Certainly her contemporaries understood that: The novel was soundly condemned in some quarters because it furiously satirized Willis's brother. Peterson's Magazine commented that “Much as we see to praise in the work, we cannot, however, keep down a suspicion that it is intended to pay off certain old scores of fancied neglect or insult; and this, we confess, we are sorry to see. We do not mean to say that the author has not been badly treated; but only that the public does not and cannot know the merits of private controversies. …”³ With this one reservation, Peterson's liked Ruth Hall; Godey's, on the other hand, took such offense at the family scandal that it essentially refused to review the book: “As a writer, the author of this volume has been very successful and very popular,” the reviewer begins. And concludes: “Her success and popularity may be increased by this ‘domestic tale;’ but, as we never interfere in family affairs, we must leave readers to judge for themselves.”⁴

Twentieth-century readers have not been offended by Willis's personal attacks, but many have been offended by her language. The text's mixture of the sentimental with the cynical confused early critics like Fred Pattee and Helen Papashvily, to whom flowery rhetoric was simply a sign of debased or manipulative emotion. Recent critics, however, have focused on that mixture, seeing it as a sign of the novel's bifurcated sensibility. Both Baym's Woman's Fiction and Kelley's Private Woman, Public Stage tackle the thematic implications of Ruth Hall's dualities, Baym discussing them as deviations from the generic norm of nineteenth-century women's novels, and Kelley seeing them as an expression of the contradictions inherent in the life of any nineteenth-century woman who accepted the prevailing definition of women's nature at the same time that she sought power in the public sphere.

Additionally, Ann Douglas Wood's “The ‘Scribbling Women’ and Fanny Fern: Why Women Wrote” (1971) and Joyce W. Warren's introduction to the Rutgers University Press reprint of the novel (1986) explore the novel's linguistic radicalism as well as its thematic divisions. Anticipating Kelley, Wood studies Ruth Hall within the framework of women writing, suggesting that the excessively “feminine” language used in women's novels was a facade that helped the authors to write, to produce, without facing the social and psychological consequences of doing so. Fern's work she sees as exceptionally forthright but also “confused”; according to Wood, Fern “waged a curious and confused battle in which she often utilized the techniques of the subculture to fight against it” (17), manifesting this confusion through her “two selves … two voices, one strident and aggressive, the other conventional and sentimental” (18). Though she views Fern's dual voices as unintentional, Wood recognizes Fern's deliberate manipulations of her culture's gender conventions, especially their conventions about women's writing. Warren, on the other hand, sees the sentimental rhetoric as a reflection both of the period's rhetorical tastes and of the protagonist's initially innocent state of mind (xxvii). Whereas Wood sees Fern's florid writing as only partly premeditated, then, Warren sees it as a deliberate strategy.

With Warren, I take Fern's sentimental voice as a conscious creation. Rather than seeing it as a reflection of Ruth's innocence, however, I suggest, with Wood, that Fern used the sentimental mode against the subculture that mandated it as proof that the writer was a “true” woman.⁵ But the problem lies not, as Wood claims, in Fern's “confused battle.” Rather, it lies in our confused reading. Our interpretive conventions have been inadequate for assessing just how deliberately nineteenth-century women writers were capable of manipulating the writing conventions of their day. Ruth Hall is an excellent text to begin reexamining this question because in it Fern used sentimental imagery and language patterning as means, first, of disguising her goal to project a woman who grows into self-definition and verbal power and, second, of bringing the worldview implicit in the sentimental mode into doubt. In exploiting and subverting a rhetorical mode not only closely associated with women's writing but also commonly held to be reflective of women's nature itself, Fern was actively challenging the prevailing nineteenth-century view of ideal women.

Fern's manipulation of these conventions occurs both in the associations she evokes for her protagonists and the specific words and syntactical patterns she employs. Iconographically, Ruth is framed by a variety of the culture's cherished associations with good women, with flowers, for instance, and, fused with them, God.

Ruth had a strong, earnest nature; she could not look upon this wealth of sea, sky, leaf, bud, and blossom; she could not listen to the little birds, nor inhale the perfumed breath of morning, without a filling eye and brimming heart, to the bounteous Giver (29).

Passages such as this draw on readers' prior acquaintance with other texts, especially flower books and the language of flowers, which, as popularizations of mid-nineteenth-century American Protestantism's conviction that nature reflected its creator, also projected blossoms in tandem with God. “I am the spirit that dwells in the flower,” begins one poem in Hale's Flora's Interpreter.⁶ Another ends on a typically pious note: “I would that thus, when I shall see / The hour of death draw near to me, / Hope, blossoming within my heart, / May look to heaven as I depart.”⁷

Twentieth-century readers have trouble with such language; our only response to it seems to be to dismiss it as “sentimental” and “stereotyped.” But as we have seen in Queechy, it is more useful to see works employing it as intertextual constructs. Within any given text, sentimental language functions as a system of codes, or shorthand symbols designed to help readers know where a character stands in the value hierarchy of a (presumably) shared world. By associating Ruth with flowers and piety Fern creates a protagonist her readers will recognize as deeply feminine, a woman who feels as a woman should feel, and who therefore qualifies as a heroine the general culture can accept. Similarly, Ruth's maternal solicitude “marks” her as a woman who knows that her most important function lies in her nurturing duties, while her lovingly subordinate relationship with her husband valorizes her as a woman who, as a contributor to one gift-book phrased it, knows that “she is made to be cherished and loved, and to be so, must confine herself to that refined and delicate sphere, the charms of which, form her principal claims to the affection of man.”⁸ These were the images that defined a good woman in the middle of the nineteenth century, that created her image—realities notwithstanding—in the public eye. They are facets in the complex of associations we call sentimental.

In Sacred Tears: Sentimentality in Victorian Literature, Fred Kaplan points out that British Victorian sentimentality was a rearguard action struggling to defend eighteenth-century concepts of the moral affections against the encroachment of a realist worldview that denied human nature the possibility of transcending its own limitations.⁹ Similar concepts undergirded American sentimentality. Since one function of the female icon in nineteenth-century literature was to represent a retreat from—or alternative to—the realist worldview, the sentimental language that engendered her served as a sign of her difference from male characters, who tended to be associated with harsh “realities” and described in the language of commerce. Women were especially associated with feeling. Certainly this kind of inscription appealed to reviewers of Ruth Hall; The Knickerbocker singles out the scenes when Harry dies and when Ruth is forced to give up his clothes as “touching” enough to merit extensive quotation,¹⁰ while Peterson's found “an earnestness, breathing through the whole, which is often terrible.”¹¹

The problem for us—as twentieth-century readers for whom the concepts no longer have validity—lies in learning how to interpret sentimental language and its associations and, if possible, in determining its effects on contemporary readers. One interpretive strategy is to examine the patterns into which sentimental passages fall—to see just how consciously writers are employing them. The dual narrative voices of Ruth Hall indicate a writer trying to transcend the language and references that had already created her heroine. For Fanny Fern, the answer to the dilemma of a priori characterization lay in its unveiling, in a work that is as intent on demonstrating how the society defines and circumscribes women as it is in developing its plot. Fern's own strategy is to orchestrate a variety of voices, all focused on the central character but all exhibiting their own will to power as they inscribe (and therefore define) the protagonist. The question of voice is at the heart of this novel, then; the work is structured to show, first, how Ruth is defined by the voices of her culture; then, to suggest what kind of voice she might have when she finally begins speaking and writing for herself.

As with other nineteenth-century novels, it is difficult to determine how private readers perceived these opposing discourses. Reviewers generally reflect the novel's dualism in the way they alternate between criticizing its exposure of family squabbles and praising its sentimental episodes. But reviewers, as Baym points out, tend to uphold cultural stereotypes, and often it is necessary to read between their lines to determine exactly which values they are supporting and which they are opposing. What they dislike, we should examine closely. In Ruth Hall, they dislike Fern's anger, her furious, and linguistically barbed, attack on real people. But the novel makes it clear that the brother, in-laws, publishers, and employers Fern attacks stand for the establishment that deprives women, first, of ways to achieve economic independence; and, second, of the voice to protest their helplessness. The cultural values reviewers were upholding, then, mandated women's silence and dependency. But as we have seen, nineteenth-century women readers admired members of their sex who conquered their misfortunes, who became famous for their achievements, and who spoke out in the world.

Some readers—not many—also recorded sensitivity to the artificiality of language chosen to project sentimental idealism. Julia Newberry objected to Lydia Sigourney's “Lucy Howard's Journal” because Howard's “language seems to me too studied, and her words are the longest she can find,”¹² and another reader mocked the studied repetitions sentimental literature employed—singling out one of Fern's especially florid novels as well as Fern's brother Nathan's Home Journal. “Wonder if you ever read Rose Clark by Fanny Fern?” Lucy Sherwin wrote to her sister Nancy in 1862. “Wonder if you have ever read ‘Ernest Linwood’ by Caroline somebody? Wonder if you read the Home Journal? … Wonder if this repetition of the word wonder will divest it of any of its old charm, or invest it with anything new?”¹³ Finally, we know that most women were actively reading literature by and about women in search of models for conduct and ambition. Ruth Hall offers two models, each presented through a particular linguistic mode; the one the reviewers disliked embodies Fern's anger against sentimental language and the model of female behavior it inscribes.

In Ruth Hall the concern for defining (inscribing) proceeds through a continuous alternation of sentimental (or iconizing) and cynical (or iconoclastic) modes. As I have already noted, by the mid-nineteenth century the function of sentimental prose, especially clichéd prose, had evolved from a verbal representation of ideal qualities—the exaltation of sentiment for the specific didactic purpose of demonstrating moral excellence—to the evocation of chords of associations already constructed by prior texts. In other words, sentimentality itself had become an intertextual construct, functioning to evoke reflexive responses—usually emotional responses—rather than to stimulate readers to measure their own behavior in terms of moral ideals.

Another way of seeing this is as a convention, a shortcut to making popular literature readily accessible—of making what Roland Barthes calls the readerly text,¹⁴ or Hans Robert Jauss, the culinary text¹⁵: the text that draws so heavily on standard plot lines and conventional values that it can be “consumed” without requiring much effort on the reader's part. Readers who indulged in the “fast read” that Augusta Evans Wilson castigated as “the hasty, careless novel-reading glance”¹⁶ could find in sentimental clichés assurance of their emotional responsiveness rather than challenge to their moral behavior. Consequently, when the narrator of Ruth Hall interprets Ruth sentimentally—when, for instance, she says that in marriage Ruth's “craving heart” had “at length found its ark of refuge”—she is sounding a note that will stimulate readers to assume that empathy with Ruth's loneliness will be rewarded by Ruth's (and, by extension, their own) rescue by a life-long companion; in other words, that little girls deprived of love will find it and live happily ever after.

In Wolfgang Iser's terms, such language stimulates the creation of a gestalt, or illusion, on the reader's part; in Ruth Hall the illusion is clearly that we are reading an updated version of Cinderella. But Iser's model for the reading process also suggests that in all reading such illusions are continually altered and even destroyed by the continual input of new information.¹⁷ In Ruth Hall this process is intensified by the interruptions of the narrator's voice speaking in its iconoclastic mode, which in the first part of the novel alternates with the sentimental mode to create an almost continuous pendulum of raised and lowered expectations about exactly what constitutes the nature of this woman. To conflate Iser and Peter Rabinowitz¹⁸ (that is, to conflate phenomenological and rhetorical paradigms of narrator-reader relationships) for a moment, perhaps we can see this process of creating and destroying expectations as a method of forcing readers to shift rapidly back and forth between audience levels. Here, the most naive—or the most intertextually dependent—audience accepts the narrator's interpretations in the sentimental mode, thus creating the gestalt for the Cinderella paradigm in the novel. But while all readers “receive” the sentimental interpretation, other interpretive modes exist as well. The narrator's cynical commentary challenges attentive readers to doubt the fixed truths of the iconizing clichés. The result is that those readers are continually challenged, forced to question the gender values implicit in the voice that iconizes the silent, loving, and ultimately victimized woman.

This alternation of voices, each revealing a worldview that contradicts the worldview of its opposing voice, is continued in the voices of other characters (including some who are only present in their letters to Ruth), each of whom reveals her- or himself as she or he defines Ruth. This is skaz, written speech fashioned to represent oral patterns revealing socially distinct points of view¹⁹; in this novel the narrative voices initiate the central dialectic and the other voices continue the process of dual (and contradictory) inscription. The play of many voices, then, is Fern's primary tool for first rendering the verbal-political power structure of gender relationships in mid-nineteenth-century American culture and then casting the values associated with it into doubt.

The narrative voice introducing Ruth calls on the intertextual context of her readers by presenting the protagonist as a deprived child who, like Cinderella, is emotionally abused by her family despite her own exemplary qualities. This paradigmatic child has spent her childhood craving love, especially from men, and has been denied it, especially by her father, Mr. Ellet, a tight-fisted religious hypocrite, and her brother, Hyacinth, a sensuous fop. Love here is a synonym for recognition: The narrator's brief review of Ruth's childhood suggests that her companions have defined Ruth less in terms of her own emotional needs and personal talents than in terms of her usefulness for their selfish purposes. Her father, for instance, uses her as a vehicle for tyrannizing her mother; her classmates tease her for being studious and then borrow her compositions to cover up their own deficiencies; her brother makes it clear that her existence is of no consequence to him, ignoring her presence and assuming she is the maid when she performs small services for him. Ruth's response to this refusal to value or even admit her existence has been to retreat into silence, to voluntarily isolate herself: Because none of her acquaintances is willing to take the child on her own premises, “Ruth was fonder of being alone by herself” (14). Although this move evokes accusations that Ruth is “odd” and “queer” (14) because she refuses to play the public roles her society dictates, it does not signal Ruth's rejection of her culture's gender definitions. Rather, in isolating herself Ruth tacitly agrees that her female voice should not be heard. The alternative to being a silly woman is to be a silent one.

Predictably, Ruth's first sense of public identity comes through her first experience of sexual notice, when she acquires a beau: “She had arrived at the first epoch in a young girl's life,—she had found out her power!” With this discovery, the narrator continues, had come a change in bearing: “Her manners became assured and self-possessed. She, Ruth, could inspire love! Life became dear to her. There was something worth living for. … She had a motive, an aim; she should some day make somebody's heart glad … her twin-soul existed somewhere” (15-16). This is traditional women's power, defined as power to attract in order to serve. Harry Hall, her husband, becomes that soul mate, and in her marriage Ruth lives “in a sort of blissful dream” (18), delighted by “this new freedom, this being one's own mistress.”

Both the sentimental voice and the cynical voice interpret Ruth's progress to this pinnacle of womanly happiness. The first approves it: Ruth's search for a love object and her discovery of self-worth in the reflection of a loved one is consistent with prevailing definitions of female nature: “it is not admiration which that young beating heart craves; it is love,” the voice solemnly informs us (17). Moreover, Ruth's power is limited to the evocation of sexual love. Thus happiness, freedom, and self come about through the agency of a male, the gestalt called for by the Cinderella paradigm in the novel. Intertwined with this interpretation, however, is the other voice, which disillusions the reader as quickly as the first panders to her. This is the voice that characterizes Ruth's first admirer as a “smitten swain” who accompanies his floral tribute with “a copy of amatory verses” (15). “Swain” and “amatory” were still in use in the mid-fifties, but self-consciously; the 1854 edition of Webster's suggests that “swain” is only appropriate for pastoral poetry, and the reviewer who employed “swain” in reference to Queechy clearly meant it to refer to a sturdy country lad. Used as Fern uses these words, in a paragraph otherwise composed of very simple language, “amatory” and “swain” become metalinguistic markers, signaling the narrator's dubiousness about the ultimate importance of the phenomenon she is recording. As she describes this Cinderella's discovery of sexual love, she begins to bring the values implicit in the cultural paradigm into doubt.

In fact, in this passage the iconoclastic voice alternates so continuously with the sentimental voice that even in this first chapter the notion of love as the summa of woman's power is undermined. The play of voices is so continual that the passage is worth quoting in full.

In the all-absorbing love affairs which were constantly going on between the young ladies of Madame Moreau's school and their respective admirers, Ruth took no interest; and on the occasion of the unexpected reception of a bouquet, from a smitten swain, accompanied by a copy of amatory verses, Ruth crimsoned to her temples and burst into tears, that any one could be found so heartless as to burlesque the “awkward” Ruth. Simple child! She was unconscious that, in the freedom of that atmosphere where a “prophet out of his own country is honored,” her lithe form had rounded into symmetry and grace, her slow step had become light and elastic, her eye bright, her smile winning, and her voice soft and melodious. Other bouquets, other notes, and glances of involuntary admiration from passers-by, at length opened her eyes to the fact, that she was “plain, awkward Ruth” no longer. Eureka! She had arrived at the first epoch in a young girl's life,—she had found out her power! Her manners became assured and self-possessed. She, Ruth, could inspire love! Life became dear to her. There was something worth living for—something to look forward to. She had a motive—an aim; she should some day make somebody's heart glad,—somebody's hearth-stone bright; somebody should be proud of her; and oh, how she could love that somebody! History, astronomy, mathematics, the languages, were all pastime now. Life wore a new aspect; the skies were bluer, the earth greener, the flowers more fragrant;—her twin-soul existed somewhere (15-16).

Here we have what Mikhail Bakhtin would call “double-directed discourse,” two voices, expressing two worldviews, occupying the same linguistic space.²⁰ Lines such as “her lithe form had rounded into symmetry and grace” belong to the sentimental mode of projecting a heroine as she matures physically (i.e., into sexual maturity); “Eureka!” to a worldview that questions Ruth's adolescent discovery that sexual maturity means power. “Eureka” is not even listed in the 1854 Webster's; though it may have become famous by the discovery of gold in California in 1848, it was not the kind of word generally associated with a tender young woman's sexual awakening. One way to look at its occurrence in this passage is as a sign of the adult narrator's perception of adolescent sexuality. Within the context of Ruth Hall's development, however, it is also the voice of a narrator commenting on one of the culture's favorite sexual myths. Her facetious equation of Ruth's discovery of sexual power with the discovery of gold suggests that readers should reevaluate the idea that sexual maturity is the crowning achievement of a woman's life.

To read this paragraph as without ambiguity is to see it only through the lenses called for by the sentimental mode. Recognizing it as double-directed discourse, however, mandates moving between narrative modes—that is, being forced to evaluate the worldview implicit in each. Once this movement has begun, most readers perceive that these worldviews are antithetical. The opposition can be resolved by seeing the book as confused—as the product of a writer who did not understand her own motives; or as ironic—as the product of a writer who is consciously manipulating writing conventions. The frequency of double-direction occurring in the midst of the sentimental mode in Ruth Hall suggests that the latter is the most appropriate response. But to discover irony in the novel means to believe that from its inception the text embodies radical doubt about “woman's power,” its awakening, and its manner of defining and limiting a girl's life.

Thematically, grounds have already been laid for this rhetorically layered skepticism. As with flower imagery, this is intertextually determined. As we have seen, throughout the nineteenth century most writing directed to or about women valorized education, from diary entries by young women who, like Mary Guion, lamented her “neglected education”²¹; through educators like Catharine Beecher, who called for the establishment of women's universities even in the midst of disavowing the franchise²²; to the many women's novelists who portrayed heroines like Edna Earl, who lust for education far more than they do for lovers. In Ruth Hall the classmates who wondered “why [Ruth] took so much pain to bother her head with those stupid books, when she was every day growing prettier, and all the world knew that it was quite unnecessary for a pretty woman to be clever” (16) are in turn denigrated by the narrator, who praises Ruth's academic seriousness and treats it as an integral part of Ruth's own nature—that is, emphasizes this aspect of the protagonist as none of her fictional companions do. If the specter of “love” makes this studious girl forsake her studies and dream only of making some male happy, the initial highlighting of her academic zeal and its subsequent dismissal once the possibilities of “love” are discovered should also bring “love” into question. And of course Ruth's education, especially her writing skills, will become vitally necessary to her livelihood later in the novel. Finally, the narrator notes that Ruth's recognition as a love object is only “the first episode in a young girl's life,” implying that there will be others. And the others—as subsequent events show—do not lend credence to the durability of sexual power.

Poor little rich girls usually marry at the end of the novels that concern them. One who marries in the first chapter (itself an unusual event in nineteenth-century women's fiction) must be destined for a sea-change; the Cinderella paradigm does not take us beyond the wedding. For Ruth, this begins in yet more voices inscribing her, from yet other centers of personal desire. Having set the tone for multiple views of her protagonist, the narrator moves to a rear seat in this text, leaving the process of defining Ruth to other characters.

One of the first to “redefine” Ruth after her marriage is old Mrs. Hall, her mother-in-law, who sees her as simultaneously incompetent and cunning. Jealous because she perceives Ruth as having stolen her son's love, Mrs. Hall interrogates, castigates, and generally intimidates Ruth about her imperfect housewifery, her curls, and what the parsimonious Mrs. Hall perceives as her extravagance. Declaring, “that girl is no fool … she knows very well what she is about: but diamond cut diamond, I say” (31), Mrs. Hall makes Ruth into an antagonist and conducts an almost open, one-sided warfare with her. To this Ruth offers almost no resistance. “ … Ruth kept her wise little mouth shut; moving, amid these discordant elements, as if she were deaf, dumb, and blind” (23).

Her silence is interpreted by the narrator in the sentimental mode: “Oh, love! that thy silken reins could so curb the spirit and bridle the tongue, that thy uplifted finger of warning could calm that bounding pulse, still that throbbing heart, and send those rebellious tears, unnoticed, back to their source” (23). For all its floridness, this voice is a protesting one: In iconizing the good wife it also brings the injustice of her situation into question. “Ah! could we lay bare the secret history of many a wife's heart, what martyrs would be found, over whose uncomplaining lips the grave sets its unbroken seal of silence” (23). Silence, in other words, may be the sign of an ideal wife—forgiving, uncomplaining, accepting her inferior status in her intimate relationships—but it also makes her a martyr, a sacrifice to an unjust system—a system that runs counter to God's wishes. If uncomplaining wives are martyrs, those who oppress them are tyrants. Certainly Mrs. Hall is a tyrant, but in moving out from the specific case to the general situation, the narrative voice implicitly takes in the entire system of intimate relationships women experience in their marriages. Here, the “system,” the total cultural valuation of female sacrifice, is implicitly cast as tyrannical. And those who accept women's silence as acquiescence in the system are themselves in complicity with the forces of oppression.

Most importantly, the wife who moves “deaf, dumb, and blind” among “discordant elements” is the woman who has removed herself from the play of voices that define her, accepted their inscription as definitive, opted out of the possibility of inscribing herself in opposition to their words. As she had done in her girlhood, then, during her marriage Ruth retreats from conflict rather than meeting its challenge, thus acting in complicity with her own oppression. Her complicity has its very real compensations; not least of which is to be defined by her lover as his beloved, his queen: “Did not [Harry's] soul bend the silent knee of homage to that youthful self-control that could repress its own warm emotions, and stifle its own sorrows, lest he should know a heart-pang? … Ruth read it in the magnetic glance of the loving eye … and in the low, thrilling tone of the whispered, ‘God bless you, my wife’ …” (23-4). As Ruth's story is told prior to her husband's death, her victimization by others is a minor irritant in a life that shows an accommodation to being defined from the outside.

Ruth's early years are marked by two sanctioned modes of female behavior: first silence, then entreaty. Ruth's first pleas are in behalf of her first child, Daisy—emblem of her mother's innocence—who dies of croup; they are not successful. Her first movement out of these patterns occurs as Harry is dying, when she refuses to leave his room. Resistance joins entreaty to become her dominant modes of response during the early period of her widowhood, when she alternately pleads for money to support her daughters and resists the family's efforts to take the children away. Again, neither mode is successful. Ruth's own voice—a voice that speaks for her own self-interest—does not sound until after the narrative has detailed her move to the city and her unsuccessful efforts to get work as a seamstress, laundress, and schoolteacher—about the limit of occupations open to unskilled women during the time. This period is recorded through the voices of Ruth's “friends,” none of whom wish to acknowledge her needs; through the voices of prospective employers, who want to exploit her; and even through the voices of two male residents in her boarding house, who see her as sexual prey.

Two apparently irrelevant stories of other women are interpolated into this stretch of the novel. One concerns Mrs. Leon, a wealthy, intelligent, beautiful woman whose husband incarcerates her in an insane asylum, where she dies of grief and neglect. The second, a comic sketch about an Irish-American family that could easily have been one of Fern's light newspaper columns, concerns Mrs. Skiddy, Ruth's landlady. Like Mary Austin's “The Return of Mr. Wills” some fifty years later,²³ this sketch bears a feminist punch. Once Mrs. Skiddy discovers that her erring husband has finally deserted her, she takes nominal as well as practical control of her affairs and flourishes at it. When Mr. Skiddy writes a year later to ask for money to come home, she refuses. “Drawing from her pocket a purse well filled with her own honest earnings, she chinked its contents at some phantom shape discernible to her eyes alone; while through her set teeth hissed out, like ten thousand serpents, the word ‘N-e-v-e-r!’” (109).

Ruth's own decision to try writing for a living comes directly after these interpolated stories. Clearly they delineate the two choices facing her: Either continue to be defined and controlled by others, and die from it, as had Mrs. Leon, the model of upper-class wifely forebearance; or begin to define herself and take control over her life, as had Mrs. Skiddy, a “comic,” lower-class character. As with many other women's novels of the mid-nineteenth century, the unacknowledged model for the successful heroine's behavior is the lower-class woman, whose status frees her from the gender definitions and restrictions of the middle and upper-middle classes. For the heroines of these novels, such freedom and consequent self-definition come only in isolation, in the lack of protection by others. These heroines have to learn what it is like to be entirely freed from familial and class “protections.”

In Ruth Hall, Ruth comes to understand this slowly. Her most important lesson comes on the eve of her rebirth as a writer, when she sends her initial sketches to her brother Hyacinth, editor of the Irving Magazine, assuming that he will help her launch her career. Not only does Hyacinth reject them, but he informs her that she has no talent and advises her to seek some “unobtrusive” employment (116). Whether or not Willis's own brother actually sent her a similar letter, the incident's occurrence in the novel demonstrates the uselessness of class and family ties. With this, it also reinforces the society's dictum that women must be neither seen nor heard. In other words, Ruth's unprovoked fall from grace has thrust her into a world where she must labor not only to create a speaking self but to be responsible for it, to protect herself. Finally understanding this, Ruth moves from entreaty and resistance to challenge, swearing that “I can do it, I feel it, I will do it” and embracing her children “with convulsive energy,” the first energy she has shown.

Ruth's evolution into a writer is chronicled, as had been her evolution into a wife, largely through other voices, from those of editors who use her naïveté against her to those of fans whose letters assume that she is rich and powerful. Ruth's own voice develops as she learns how to pit these antithetical voices against one another for her own gain. Here, Mary Kelley's study helps illuminate the dilemma Ruth faces in learning to articulate her demands; she must learn to be aggressive in order not to be victimized, but she must counter the unfeminine aggressiveness by showing her deeply womanly exceptional circumstances: She is the sole support of two young children, one of whom, in fact, has been “captured” by her wicked grandmother on the premise that Ruth cannot support her; during much of the story, the child patiently awaits rescue. As Kelley demonstrates, her children's needs legitimize Ruth's aggressions in her own eyes as well as in her contemporaries’. Certainly it provides a “cover” that allows Ruth (and Fern) to write and also to maintain their status as “natural” women in their society's eyes. But though the sentimental narrative voice stresses Ruth's parental anxieties, the iconoclastic voice emphasizes Ruth's evolution into a professional writer whose own voice is at least as business oriented as it is parental.

Ruth's initial encounters with the two editors who first publish her work exhibit these tensions. Narrative time is collapsed here; though the two encounters with editors are shown occurring on the same day, they illustrate modes of business acumen and self-confidence that come developmentally far apart. Rather than exhibiting Fern's confusion or carelessness, this temporal fold successfully accomplishes Fern's purpose of showing the inadequacy of feminine passivity and the necessity of business aggressiveness in the pursuit of a livelihood. Ruth's first interview is with Lescom, the editor who has published her first sketches and whose dialogue reveals his insistence on putting all of Ruth's reactions into gender-defined patterns. Lescom begins this interview by congratulating Ruth on her popularity; her first articles have been copied by Lescom's wire-linked “exchanges” and are netting him new subscribers. When Ruth's “eyes sparkled, and her whole face glowed” at the news, he patronizingly responds that “Ladies like to be praised.” But Ruth hastily disclaims a desire for admiration, admitting a desire for success only “because it will be bread for my children” (130). In this scene, when Ruth, pulling her gloves off and on and pleading family responsibility, finally “muster[s] courage” to ask that her success be translated into money, she fails. The voice of the womanly woman who pleads family responsibilities is clearly not the appropriate one to wrest pecuniary rewards from the business world.

Ruth's second interview of the “day” is more successful. Mentally reviewing Lescom's “business practices” as she goes to the next magazine office, she realizes that her best interests lie in her ability to play one editor off against another, and her voice has a very different ring in the next editor's office. The novice author who had twisted her gloves in front of Lescom speaks out firmly in front of Tibbetts: When the second editor realizes she is “Floy,” the pseudonym under which her articles have been published, he pressures her either to write for him under a different pseudonym, or to write for his journal exclusively. This time Ruth does not mention her family. Rather, she casts her reply in terms of self-interest and trade, the appropriate “language” for communicating with a man who sees literature in terms of producers and consumers. Ruth meets Tibbetts's demands by asserting that “if I have gained any reputation by my first efforts, it appears to me that I should be foolish to throw it away by the adoption of another signature; and with regard to the last, I have no objection to writing exclusively for you, if you will make it worth my while” (132). Her speech gains her a second job but little profit; it does, however, mark an important step in her evolution from passive victim to active speaker. Not only does she speak, she demands; not only does she demand, she does so in the language of the business world. And she also gathers ammunition for further attacks. Overhearing Tibbetts's plan to exploit her services as long as he can, she thinks to herself, “Thank you gentlemen … when the cards change hands, I’ll take care to return the compliment” (132).

Ruth's success as a writer is evinced in the letters she receives in response to her articles. These range from simple appreciation of the mark she has made on the writers' lives, through demands that she provide pecuniary help through her literary skills, to proposals of marriage. All perceive Ruth as powerful. Their accumulated effect is to make her understand that she is wielding a very different kind of power than that which she had experienced as a girl. Through her writing she is creating a self, not just a persona; Ruth (like Sara Payson Willis) writes under a pseudonym, but as she masters her craft the distinction between Ruth and “Floy” becomes increasingly blurred.

Shortly after signing an exclusive contract with John Walters, an editor who has offered an honest remuneration, Ruth receives another business offer that is placed, narratively, to echo the major thematic question of the book: the relative merits of love, or sexual, power versus economic power. Again, the debate is presented through the agency of letters, disembodied voices that project Ruth. The first letter to Ruth is a request for her autograph, her sign of her own existence. The second is an offer of marriage from a rich Southerner who offers her “a box at the opera, a carriage, and servants in livery, and the whole heart and soul of Victor Le Pont” (153). Like the self-consciousness of “amatory” and “swain” used earlier by the narrator, the double-direction of the voice that reports this proposal highlights the artificiality of the culture's sexual mythology. Here we have the end of the Cinderella story, the retreat from worldly struggle; this narrative thread—if carried through—would fulfill readers' intertextually created expectations for a retreat into stasis, the triumph of sexual love, the reassumption of protection. Ruth Hall rejects this. Rather, “the next [letter] was more interesting. It was an offer to Floy from a publishing house, to collect her newspaper articles into a volume. They offered to give her so much on a copy, or $800 for the copyright” (153). Ruth gives the marriage proposal to her toddler for drawing paper and keeps the book proposal for herself. “‘Well, well,’ soliloquized Ruth, ‘business is accumulating’” (153).

In addition to showing that Ruth has become far more interested in business power than in love power, Ruth's new voice also demonstrates how positively she has responded to the image of her projected in the letters. Trying to decide whether to accept the flat fee or risk the royalties, knowing that the flat fee would enable her to redeem her other daughter from her in-laws immediately but also might lose her thousands of dollars if the book is successful, Ruth refuses the “temptation.”

Ruth straightened up, and putting on a very resolute air, said, “No, gentlemen, I will not sell you my copyright; these autograph letters, and all the other letters of friendship, love, and business, I am constantly receiving from strangers, are so many proofs that I have won the public ear. No, I will not sell my copyright; I will rather deny myself a while longer, and accept the per-centage;” and so she sat down and wrote her publishers; but then caution whispered, what if her book should not sell? “Oh, pshaw,” said Ruth, “it shall!” and she brought her little fist down on the table till the old stone inkstand seemed to rattle out “it shall!” (153).

This voice marks Ruth's rebirth; it shows her conviction that she can effect economic power through her writing and signals the beginning of an entirely different mode of discourse in her business relations.

When one of her former editors threatens to defame her in retaliation for her move to Walters's magazine, Ruth not only refuses to be intimidated, she even moves differently. The woman who had stood in editors' offices nervously pulling her gloves off and on now “smiled derisively,” then answers in a tone soft enough to constitute an intimate threat in return:

“Mr. Tibbetts, you have mistaken your auditor. I am not to be frightened, or threatened, or insulted,” said she, turning toward the door. “Even had I not myself the spirit to defy you, as I now do, for I will never touch pen to paper again for ‘The Pilgrim,’ you could not accomplish your threat; for think you my publishers will tamely fold their arms, and see their rights infringed? No, sir, you have mistaken both them and me.” And Ruth moved toward the door (157).

Ruth is not entirely accurate here: Tibbetts has not mistaken her; he has continued to act upon the assumption that his is the hegemonic voice in their relationship. The difference lies in Ruth, who now projects herself through a sense of her own pecuniary power and who knows she has earned the right to claim a new group of “protectors,” men who acknowledge her existence in the world of commodity values. An indication of the shift in gender perspective that her new stance implies is the suddenly archaic language her erstwhile employer speaks:

“Stay!” exclaimed Mr. Tibbetts, placing his hand on the latch; “when you see a paragraph in print that will sting your proud soul to the quick, know that John Tibbetts has more ways than one of humbling so imperious a dame” (157).

Once more, Fern's language calls attention to itself, a sign that her speaker can no longer be taken seriously within the novel's discursive world. Both the phrases (“sting your proud soul to the quick,” “Humbling so imperious a dame”) and the scenic placement (the man preventing the woman from leaving the room) evoke eighteenth-century seduction novels and their degraded descendents, nineteenth-century melodramas; in a work by Richardson or on a Bowery stage, this passage would introduce a rape. Here, it illustrates the sudden impotence of the male figure. Ruth has found her voice, through writing; her self-inscription and self-creation work in tandem. This voice, rather than the others, articulates the new kind of woman the novel finally projects.

The portrait of Ruth's daughter Nettie supports this latter image. Nettie is “courageous, impulsive, independent, irrepressible, but loving, generous, sensitive, and noble-hearted,” the child who has weathered her mother's trials and found her own voice (198). “Independent” is the key word here; despite Ruth's earlier claim in response to Nettie's query whether she will become an author that “no happy woman ever writes. From Harry's grave sprang ‘Floy’” (175), the fact is that Nettie will never experience her mother's cold plunge into the world and language. Rather, Nettie already reflects her mother's success in her verbal dexterity and confidence; she is a punster and an avenger who vows to cut her wicked grandmother's head off (192). Her linguistic maturity and her confrontational readiness show that Nettie—easily nettled—will become a woman for whom independence and self-reliance are axiomatic.

Notwithstanding, the novel appears to end on the sentimental note. The last chapter shows Ruth and the children visiting Harry's grave, where the sentimental narrator reports that “the moon had silvered the old chapel turrets, and the little nodding flowers glistened with dewdrops, but still Ruth lingered” (211). But the arousal of feeling here focuses largely on scene, rather than action. Action, in fact, works against the paradigm evoked by the association with Harry, the life that has passed. Although Ruth's implicit request that Walters promise to bury her next to Harry both evokes her marital happiness and reasserts her status as a true woman, loyal and deeply feeling, it also suggests that Ruth has no intention of remarrying, an unusual ending for a women's novel of the period. In addition, the family's pending removal to an unspecified part of the country evokes American male rather than female myths of success.²⁴ The narrator's voice, in other words, seeks to evoke associations that the plot does not support.

This is consonant with the many voices that have defined Ruth and her circumstances throughout the novel. In this last chapter, as in the first, the narrator speaks rather than Ruth herself. But it is a mistake to assume that the narrative voice projects confused authorial values. Rather, the dominance of the sentimental mode in this section works as a disguise, a deliberate strategy rather than evidence of a split consciousness, a continuation of the process of dual inscription that is one of the novel's themes. The tension between the image of the silent, devoted woman as the iconizing narrator presents her, and the characters' futures as the plot anticipates them, suggests that Fanny Fern understood how to manipulate her society's conventions at the same time that she was determined to change them. This scene comforts the reader hesitant to endorse a heroine who has learned to live, and speak, for herself—like The Knickerbocker reviewer, whose reading allowed him to “infer … although this last is not very explicitly stated” that the “poor widow finally succeeded … in winning … a husband.”²⁵ This reader is processing Ruth Hall through the Cinderella paradigm, assuming that the ending the cultural plot—the plot suggested by the narrator's sentimental language—denotes as “happy” will in fact transpire. But the novel's actual plot implies that Ruth has chosen a future in which she will be both self-supporting and outspoken. For all her indulgence in a day of nostalgia in the graveyard, Ruth is no longer silent, and the plot suggests that her next performance in a wifely role will be when she is dead. Meanwhile Ruth clearly anticipates a new life for herself and her children. By the end of the story, Ruth Hall has inscribed a new woman, one who will write her own story rather than allowing it to be written for her.

Notes

1. Joyce W. Warren, ed., Ruth Hall and Other Writings by Fanny Fern, American Women Writers Series (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986). All citations will refer to this edition.

2. The autobiographical elements of Ruth Hall are discussed both by Warren and by Mary Kelley, in Private Woman, Public Stage (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).

3. Peterson's Magazine, Vol. 27, No. 2 (February, 1855), 179.

4. Godey's Lady's Book and Magazine, Vol. 50-1 (February, 1855), 176. In her introduction to the Rutgers edition of Ruth Hall, Joyce Warren notes the controversy it engendered.

5. Nina Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 257. In other words, writing was supposed to reflect ideal gender definitions.

6. Sarah Josepha Hale, ed., Flora's Interpreter; Or, The American Book of Flowers and Sentiments (Boston: Thomas H. Webb and Co., no date). First published by Marsh, Capen and Lyon, Boston, 1832, 234.

7. Ibid., 235.

8. “Women,” in F. A. Moore, ed., The Present; or A Gift for the Times (Manchester, NH: R. Moore, 1850), 43.

9. Fred Kaplan, Sacred Tears (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 5-6, 37. Chapter 1, “The Moral Sentiments,” explores the history of British sentimentality.

10. The Knickerbocker, Vol. 45 (January, 1855), 84-6.

11. Peterson's, Vol. 27, No. 2 (February, 1855), 179.

12. Julia Newberry, Diary (New York: Norton and Co., Inc., 1933), 67.

13. The Story: A Bundle of Letters of an Age Gone By, copyright 1966 by Reginald Barr, 2907 W. Montebello, Phoenix, Arizona. Antiochiana Archives, Yellow Springs, Ohio. This is a collection of privately printed letters of the Sherwin family, who lived in and around Yellow Springs, 1858-60 and 1861-4, mostly as students at Antioch College.

14. Perhaps Jonathan Culler explains Barthes best, when he notes in his discussion of Barthes that “the lisable [readerly] is that which accords with the codes and which we know how to read, the scriptable [writerly] that which resists reading and can only be written.” See Culler, Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 32.

15. In Toward an Aesthetic of Reception (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), Hans Robert Jauss defines culinary or entertainment art as “precisely fulfilling the expectations prescribed by a ruling standard of taste, in that it satisfies the desire for the reproduction of the familiarly beautiful; confirms familiar sentiments; sanctions wishful notions; makes unusual experiences enjoyable as ‘sensations’; or even raises moral problems, but only to ‘solve’ them in an edifying manner as predecided questions” (25).

16. Augusta Evans Wilson, St. Elmo, 439.

17. Wolfgang Iser, “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach,” in The Implied Reader (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 274-94.

18. Peter J. Rabinowitz, “Truth in Fiction: A Reexamination of Audiences,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Autumn 1977), 121-41.

19. M. M. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” from The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 192.

20. Ibid., 324.

21. Mary Guion, Diary, typescript, 159, NYHS.

22. Catharine E. Beecher, Woman's Suffrage and Woman's Profession (Hartford: Brown and Gross, 1871).

23. Mary Austin, “The Return of Mr. Wills,” in Stories from the Country of Lost Borders, Marjorie Pryse, ed., American Women Writers Series (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 181-7.

24. Nina Baym, “Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors.” Reprinted in Elaine Showalter (ed.) The New Feminist Criticism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 63-80.

25. The Knickerbocker, Vol. 45 (January, 1855), 84-6.