Nous Autres: Reading, Passion, and the Creation of M. Carey Thomas
What does it mean to read? Does an author fill readers with a text, etching impressions on the blank slates of their minds? Or do readers shape a text, giving it content and meaning to suit their bents and instincts? As reader-response theorists engage in this new version of the philosophical debate between John Locke and Immanuel Kant, something critical is being lost. Although reading is a varied activity taking different forms on different occasions, some reading can be as dynamic as personal conflict. Texts are not infinitely plastic, capable of being molded in any form by readers. Texts have hard edges; they pose challenges and riddles to be unraveled. Reading can be a no-holdsbarred tussle between reader and author.
I have looked at the reading of M. Carey Thomas, a prominent American educator and feminist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.1 In her youth, reading was an intensely active experience that evoked her deepest emotions. An inheritor of the romantic tradition, she asked works of imaginative literature to speak directly to her. Questioning the faith of her parents, she sought in books answers to her most profound questions of life and love. As she matured and read with friends, the reading of poetry and fiction became part of her most intimate relationships: passionate words merged with passionate acts. She discovered works that changed her and works that confirmed those parts of herself that found no resonance in the lives of her parents and community. Through reading she shaped an identity that, although forced under cover by the demands of a religiously conservative segment of society, nonetheless guided her personal relationships for the rest of her life. Through reading, M. Carey Thomas created herself.2
It has not been easy to see this. Thomas was a formidable public figure who sheathed herself in the conventions of her era. She is remembered for her achievements as an educator. She was the founding dean and second president of Bryn Mawr College and the leading advocate of higher education for women in the early twentieth century. Educated at the Howland School in upstate New York and at Cornell University, she received her B.A. in 1877. She was one of the first women in the United States to obtain a graduate education. She entered Johns Hopkins University but withdrew after one year. Although granted the formal right to take a second degree, she was denied the ability to participate in graduate seminars, and working on her own proved demoralizing. In 1879 she went to the University of Leipzig and in 1882 was the first woman to receive a Ph.D. summa cum laude from the University of Zürich. At age twenty-five she proposed herself as president of the new college that was to become Bryn Mawr. The position of dean was created that she might fill it. Determined to turn what was endowed as a Quaker college for women into a center of cosmopolitan scholarship, she set entrance standards high, established a graduate school, and recruited an outstanding faculty trained abroad and at Johns Hopkins. Modeled after the University of Leipzig and Johns Hopkins, Bryn Mawr aspired to offer the highest-quality education to its undergraduate and graduate female students. In 1894, Thomas became Bryn Mawr College's second president and served until her retirement in 1922.
Thomas also moved to the broader stage. With the collaboration of female friends, she created the Bryn Mawr School, a college-preparatory secondary school for girls in Baltimore. These same friends united in a successful effort to endow the Johns Hopkins Medical School as a coeducational graduate medical school. She was one of the founders of the Naples Table, which offered a scientific research position in Italy for American women, and of the Athens Hostel for students in Classics, which assured graduate men and women a safe and comfortable residence. In the first decades of the twentieth century, she lectured extensively on women and higher education.
An ardent feminist, she joined actively in the suffrage movement and headed the Collegiate Equal Suffrage League. In the years of her retirement, she gave her support to the Equal Rights Amendment, the peace movement, and the efforts at immigration restriction that led to the National Origins Act of 1924.
Scholars and students in women's history and women's studies have been interested in the Thomas of the early years.3 A child and young woman of strong will and vibrant personality, she broke through conventions that bound many others of her sex. Knowing that marriage would end her autonomy, she forced herself to dampen her attraction to men and turned to women for her life's loves. Her intimate relations with Mamie Gwinn and Mary Garrett have intrigued contemporary researchers because of what they might suggest about women's sexuality and same-sex love in the late nineteenth century.
Thomas has proved to be a baffling subject because she' had to hide so much of herself from public view. She began her public activity within the context of a Quaker college for women, headed by a board of trustees of thirteen conservative Quaker men who included her father, her uncle, and several cousins. Her female friendships were well accepted within this world because they were misunderstood. But her agnosticism and her aestheticism were dangerous and would have ended her career at Bryn Mawr had they been known. Her behavior in public had to accord with nineteenth-century orthodox Quaker codes, which condemned most imaginative and artistic expression. She could not attend theater or opera or frequent art museums where she might be seen; she largely reserved the satisfaction of her cultural tastes to European summers. To negotiate the boundaries between private and public required Thomas to develop a complex persona in which her religious doubt and her aesthetic passions were kept from view.
Perhaps unwittingly, Thomas left for historians a collection of papers that permit a reconstruction of hidden elements of her experience. Her mother kept a journal of her daughter from her birth. As a child, Minnie, as she was nicknamed, began her own diary, which she kept, with some lapses, throughout her life. In it she recorded the most important and anguished thoughts of her adolescent years. In her extended absences from home for education, daughter wrote to mother, and mother answered. Letters were a record and were saved. As a woman, Carey, as she called herself, wrote to friends and family members. Her letters were preserved and ultimately returned to her. In addition, she kept a running list of what she read. These materials are preserved in the Bryn Mawr College Archives.
At a crucial moment I decided to read what Thomas read, and I turned to her own writing for guidance. I began to weave back and forth from Thomas's letters and diary to works of poetry and fiction. What I found astonished me. I had known of nineteenth-century British poets only from the sanitized collections of my own youth or from their diminished late twentieth-century reputations. A completely different literature of high romanticism and early decadence opened before me, and with it I was able to understand M. Carey Thomas for the first time. Through poetry and fiction, Thomas learned that passion lay at the core of her being.
The critical clue came in a letter of August 12, 1880, to her mother. Carey Thomas was twenty-three and attending lectures in literature and philology at the University of Leipzig. She had been abroad for almost a year studying and traveling with Mamie Gwinn. Her mother, Mary Whitall Thomas, was a prominent Baltimore Quaker and moral reformer. In the letter, Carey argued for the right to publish an article about art in Rome as she had written it. For propriety's sake, Mary had urged Carey to delete references to the body. After presenting her case, Carey then paid her mother a compliment. She reported that when Mamie had learned of Mary Thomas's broad appreciation of literature, she had exclaimed, "Why I did'nt know any one who did not belong to us . . . believed that." Carey explained that by us, she and Mamie meant "nous autres—the Gautier, Rossetti school."4
"Us," "nous autres," "the Gautier, Rossetti school": these are remarkable phrases for a Quaker daughter from Baltimore to relay in 1880 to a mother whose life was infused with religious and moral enthusiasm. Although it was a throwaway line in a letter devoted to other purposes, as with many such gestures, it had a major underlying import. After pages of argument about her right to publish her own words, Carey Thomas was attempting to establish a bond of connection with her mother. She and Mamie imagined themselves linked to the French novelist Théophile Gautier and the British Pre-Raphaelites. In a gesture of magnanimity, Carey reached out to compliment her mother for having aesthetic tastes broad enough to meet her own. If Mary Thomas understood the meaning of her daughter's words, however, she would have realized the unbridgeable gap between the generations.
In the famous preface to his novel Mademoiselle de Maupin, published in 1835, Gautier set out the principles that would govern all his writing. "Nothing is really beautiful unless it is useless," he declared. It was a declaration of aesthetic independence. Art is not a tool of politics, religion, or philosophy; the aim of art is the exploration of ideal beauty. Heady words when they were first published, they still had power in 1880. They proclaimed the supremacy of art and beauty against the claims of family and Quaker Meeting. What is more, as we shall consider, they prefaced a book of special import.5
And Rossetti? Carey Thomas's conjunction of Gautier with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the British poet and painter, is curious, and it is one that would not ordinarily have been made in 1880. Although Carey enjoyed Rossetti's poems and responded powerfully to his paintings when she saw them two years later, in the 1880 aside to her mother, Rossetti was probably a stand-in for the far more controversial poet Algernon Charles Swinburne. Very soon after the letter to her mother, Carey wrote Mary Garrett a long letter about her dreams of art. Mamie was then reading a Swinburne chorus aloud to her, and Carey wrote, "It is lovelier than even my remembrance of it—I do not think any one of the past generation can realize the rapture and fire which this new pre-Raphaelite school strikes to our hearts." When writing to her mother about art, even when the comment was an aside, Carey found Rossetti, the leading Pre-Raphaelite, a safer choice than her true artistic passion, Swinburne. More than any of his English contemporaries, Swinburne had insisted on the utter independence of art from standards outside itself, on the necessity that art be free of service to religion and morality. The paganism and eroticism of his poems scandalized the English-speaking public.6
For Carey Thomas to accept Mamie Gwinn's identification with Gautier and Rossetti/Swinburne as one of the "nous autres" was to say a great deal about herself—far more, perhaps, than she intended. Her sentence holds a key to her consciousness. Moreover it opens an understanding of how a Quaker daughter born in the constricted world of mid-nineteenth-century Baltimore could emerge by her early twenties as a free-thinking woman capable of pursuing an independent course in Europe to attain the Ph.D. and of passionately loving another woman. In the most fundamental way, M. Carey Thomas refashioned herself through reading. As she read, she traveled beyond her immediate milieu into the intense world of the imagination. Reading gave her the materials with which to fabricate a new self.
Her mother, Mary Thomas, was a deeply religious member of the Society of Friends. The daughter of prosperous and pious Philadelphia Quakers, she married James Carey Thomas, a Baltimore doctor and Quaker minister. Minnie was the eldest of their ten children, eight of whom survived into adulthood. Mary was recognized as a leader in the Women's Meeting and a minister to women. By 1880 she was a powerful force in the Woman's Christian Temperance Union of Maryland. She regarded her marriage as a happy and successful one, but she often said that her primary affections went out to other women, especially her sisters and daughters.7
Mary Thomas is an example of the world captured so tellingly in Carroll Smith-Rosenberg's landmark article, "The Female World of Love and Ritual." She was, it seems, a mid-nineteenth-century woman who loved other women sororally and unselfconsciously. When Smith-Rosenberg examined the correspondence of such women, she found that as they moved from the mother-daughter bond to the peer world of friendships, they brought expectations of emotional and physical closeness. Women were each other's most important intimate friends, sustaining each other through the crises of the life cycle.
Although such women had fathers and may have married and had sons, their emotional world was peopled most intensely by other women.8
Born in Baltimore in 1857, Minnie received much from her mother but would fail her in a critical respect. As the firstborn, she was the special object of Mary's deep love and solicitude. From her earliest moments, Mary watched for signs of Minnie's "new heart," her rebirth in Christ. But it never came. At age seven, Minnie received a lifethreatening burn. Mary recorded in the journal that she kept of her daughter that Minnie had "said she did not see why Heavenly Father was not with her then, He was with Shadrach, Meshach, & Abednego in the fiery furnace, and she thought He might have been with her." Although Mary's attention was already divided among her growing brood, her need to care for Minnie during the long recovery restored their earlier closeness. The daughter that emerged from convalescence remained for a time within the Quaker fold, but the experience of saving grace eluded her.9
By her early teens, Minnie Thomas's energy and imagination began to open new possibilities to her. Her lively spirit searched the social and cultural world about her for confirmation. In a Quaker family, theater and music could not be enjoyed, but books there were in abundance. Minnie Thomas had the advantage of intelligent parents and an extraordinary aunt, the renowned spiritual writer Hannah Whitall Smith, who offered unusual companionship and conversation; but the family circle insisted on the literal word of Scripture, conformity to Christian ways of thinking, and personal faith. Alone and with a book, however, Minnie Thomas could think her own thoughts.
One can look at many forces in the shaping of a life. In M. Carey Thomas's biography, a compelling case can be made for the influence of an unusual family, the childhood burn, and educational advantages. But these were all enabling factors, necessary but not sufficient. The critical element that gave substance and direction to her life was her reading.
Loving parents had encouraged Minnie to read the Bible, poetry, and mythology. As she matured, she gradually took hold of her own choices and formed her own judgments. As she was exposed to adult conversation, lectures, and discussion about controversial issues, Minnie reached out to the intellectual world. Living away from home at seminary and college opened her to new thought and the influences of friends. Increasingly, her reading took place within the shared world of peers. Heretical texts challenged Quaker creed. She read poetry within her most intimate relationships. Literature and love became conflated. In the years of her schooling, these new influences were in an unstable equilibrium with the demands of family and Quaker Meeting. But once she went abroad with Mamie Gwinn, Carey Thomas was able to consolidate the self that her reading had inspired. She searched out texts and sites that confirmed her identity, along with that of Mamie Gwinn, as one of "nous autres."
Thomas's reading took her in two directions. Both began with the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley. The first path—not our central concern here—led from Shelley to Herbert Spencer. By her early twenties, Thomas rejected Christianity and believed in positivist science. When she sought graduate training in Germany, it was as a philologist, a scientist of literature. She created Bryn Mawr as a graduate school and college that would bring German scholarship to the United States. That scientific truth and the most advanced learning were to be brought to women students was a particular source of satisfaction to her.
The second path forms the subject of this study. It led from Shelley to the poetry of Swinburne and the fiction of Gautier. By August 1880, as she aligned herself with "nous autres—the Gautier, Rossetti school," Carey Thomas defined herself in a way that took her far beyond Baltimore, Quaker Meeting, and the sentimental consciousness of the women of her mother's generation.
As a young child she had memorized Shelley's shorter poems; as a seventeen-year-old, she read his longer works. In her retirement, M. Carey Thomas wrote a list of "the great liberal influences" that led to "her emancipation": "first of all came Notes to Queen Mab." Queen Mab is an early Shelley poem, suppressed when it was published in 1813 as a revolutionary work. It offers an indictment of past and present society and a vision of a just and democratic order. The poem is searingly anti-Christian, going beyond anticlericalism to hold up to ridicule and ignominy the sacred myths of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Shelley's extensive notes to his poem address a range of issues: the necessity of political justice (citing William Godwin, the political philosopher whose daughter by Mary Wollstonecraft became Mary Shelley), opposition to marriage, and belief in a universe governed by necessity—all of which would inform the young Minnie Thomas. Most dramatically, the notes declared, "There is no God!"—at least in the Christian sense—and submitted proofs that belief in God was a passion contrary to reason.10
Shelley proved to be a powerful stimulant to Minnie Thomas. She wrote in her journal the year before she went to Cornell, "How well I remember my half distressed delight when I read the first infidel views I ever met with in the raving of Shelley—yet such thoughts are very familiar now." A few years later she wrote to a friend, "You know I have Shelley to thank and thru him Godwin, for almost all the light I walk by."11
Shelley was a step to one of the most important influences in Carey Thomas's life, Swinburne. In the summer before she entered college, Minnie met Francis Gummere and Richard Cadbury, lively Germantown Quaker youths a little older then herself who fancied themselves aesthetes and who read, memorized, and imitated the poetry of Shelley and Swinburne. At Cornell, Professor H. H. Boyesen, a published writer of fiction as well as a scholar, became both mentor and intellectual companion. Relations between some of the female co-eds and the younger male professors were informal and involved elements of courtship. In the fall of her first year at Cornell, Carey—as she called herself beginning in the fall of 1875—wrote home that Professor Boyesen had asked her to waltz with him but that she had refused, having just told one of her male classmates that she did not know how. Boyesen, she wrote, "flushed crimson but I do not think he was angry for he sat down and talked very interestingly about Swinburne, Rossetti, etc." He lent her a volume of Swinburne's poetry. They had long talks about literature. Boyesen guided much of the extracurricular reading that fundamentally shaped her sense of herself and the world.12
Although Carey studied literature intensively at Cornell, her reading of Swinburne took place outside of class. At Cornell she formed a romantic friendship with Margaret Hicks. She did learn to waltz, a violation of Quaker mores. When she wrote of waltzing with Margaret, her mother was appalled but was reassured that at least Carey waltzed only with members of her own sex. The two co-eds began to read Swinburne together in the evening. Carey wrote to a close friend, "Well I have been and gone and done it." She and Margaret had fallen in love. "It was dancing and Swinburne that did it." Miss Hicks had taught her how to waltz "and we waltzed and waltzed together." They would study and then "about half past nine we would finish studying and she would undress and put on her trailing wrapper and come in to my bed room and we would lie there and read." One evening as they were lying together reading Swinburne, "I made an unguarded remark and was perfectly astonished at the way she responded."13
In her diary, Carey constructed a slightly different narrative. The two were reading Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon together. "Miss Hicks would come in her wrapper after I was in bed and we would read it out loud and we learned several of the choruses. One night we had stopped reading later than usual and obeying a sudden impulse I turned to her and asked 'do you love me?' She threw her arms around me and whispered ' love you passionately' She did not go home that night and we talked and talked. She told me she had been praying that I might care for her." Carey's diary version fit the conventions of the romantic novels she knew so well, except for the same sex of the two lovers.14
That Carey's love during her years at Cornell was a woman never struck her as other than natural. And her mother accepted it in the same vein. Mary Thomas consistently supported her daughter's involvement in special friendships. To a woman of Mary Thomas's era, the love of women for women was an essential part of life, although she mistakenly assumed that Carey shared her generation's construction of sentimental friendship. More threatening to both mother and daughter was the possibility that Carey might fall in love with a man. In fact, during her Cornell years Carey was secretly enamored of Francis Gummere.
Carey had met Frank Gummere when she was at Howland, but her real interest in him grew the summer before she attended Cornell when she was visiting at the country home of her close friend Anna Shipley. Frank had accompanied his friend Richard Cadbury, who was in love with Anna. Carey found herself often in Frank's company, and the two talked about their religious doubt and poetry. For example, two years later Carey recalled in her journal that one day when they were together Frank spoke about Shelley's The Cenci. His reference to the scandalous dramatic poem of incest shocked Carey. That evening after the four played a game and talked, they recited poems. Carey and Anna failed at William Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality." Carey got embarrassed as she attempted a poem by Robert Browning. Frank recited two Swinburne poems, "The Garden of Proserpine" and "Hymn to Proserpine." Carey recalled in her journal that those poems "haunted me for two years until I found them last year in 'Laus Veneris.'" At such moments, as earlier when she and Margaret Hicks fell in love, the language of Swinburne's poetry was the language of courtship.15
But for Carey Thomas it was clearly more. In these years she was breaking with the forms and the content of traditional religion, which in her pious family had shaped the rhythms and terms of life. Science and poetry came to take the place of religion: while scientific speculation became her theology, reciting poems was her ritual. The poems of Swinburne were a powerful substitute for Quaker Meeting.
In her college years, Carey read Swinburne's long narrative poems. Atalanta in Calydon presented a theme from Greek mythology in the manner of ancient Greek drama. It is a poem of vengeance, of a mother's rage, not her love. Since Carey was pursuing studies in Greek literature, she would have appreciated the poem's faithfulness to both Greek narrative and form. Given the state of her religious uncertainty, she would have been interested in its stark paganism. The virgin huntress Atalanta would have appealed as a model of chaste power. The poems that Frank Gummere recited were Swinburne's presentation of the Proserpine myth. In "Hymn to Proserpine," a Roman worshipper of the goddess of the underworld bewails that Proserpine has been displaced by the mother of Christ. The cult of the Galilean has conquered Rome, bringing its gray shadows, its pale virgin, and its martyred saints to replace the intense colors and sensuous delights surrounding the old Roman gods. As he awaits death, the Roman refuses to accept the new faith: "I kneel not, neither adore you, but standing, look to the end." "The Garden of Proserpine" celebrates death, a death that is an end, a "sleep eternal / In an eternal night." It contains some of Swinburne's most-quoted lines, asserting a pre-Christian Roman vision:
From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.16
These two poems were published in 1866 in England in Swinburne's Songs and Ballads. We know from Carey's journal entry that she first learned of the poems in 1875 when she heard Frank Gummere recite them. Only in 1877 did she find them in Laus Veneris, an American edition of Songs and Ballads that highlighted the poem of that title. Both in England and in the United States, the poems of Songs and Ballads created a scandal. Unlike Shelley, Swinburne did not write treatises in verse. He presented his poems not as testaments of his own beliefs, but as experiments with the verse forms and mentalities of other ages. However, the poems' celebration of paganism—an outrage to Christianity—and their intense, unconventional eroticism shocked many readers.
In poetry and life, Swinburne crossed boundaries and deliberately sought the perverse. Many of the best known poems in the volume—"Anactoria," "Faustine," "Laus Veneris," "Dolores"—link love and pain. The pleasure of pain and the pain of pleasure were to be Swinburne's most enduring themes. In "Anactoria" Swinburne recasts a poem of Sappho, the Greek poet of the seventh century B.C. In the poem Sappho rages against her beloved female disciple, who has turned to another. In Swinburne's version, anguish is mixed with lust, and in over three hundred lines the Greek poet reaps her imagined vengeance:
That I could drink thy veins as wine, and eat
Thy breasts like honey! . . .
.....
... oh that I
Durst crush thee out of life with love, and die,—
Die of thy pain and my delight, and be
Mixed with thy blood and molten into thee!17
In "Anactoria" and other poems Swinburne portrays a world of sexual ambiguity and same-sex love. The poem "Hermaphroditus" was suggested by the statue in the Louvre of the Greek mythological figure, the son of Hermes and Aphrodite, who became united in one body with a nymph, one of the mythological female nature spirits. Swinburne plays with the way that male and female are blended in the god, evoking longings that cannot be satisfied:
Love stands upon thy left hand and thy right,
Yet by no sunset and by no moonrise
Shall make thee man and ease a woman's sighs,
Or make thee woman for a man's delight.
To what strange end hath some strange god made fair
The double blossom of two fruitless flowers?18
"Sapphics" is based on the legend of Sappho and her school of women disciples devoted to the worship of Aphrodite. Swinburne tells of Aphrodite's reluctant flight from the island of Lesbos, her "hair unbound" and her "feet unsandalled." Sappho, the tenth muse, sang a song for her. Sappho did not see Aphrodite, shaken and weeping, as she left, but
Saw the Lesbians kissing across their smitten
Lutes with lips more sweet than the sound of lutestrings
Mouth to mouth and hand upon hand, her chosen
Fairer than all men
Above them soared her song:
Newly fledged, her visible song, a marvel,
Made of perfect sound and exceeding passion,
Sweetly shapen, terrible, full of thunders,
Clothed with the wind's wings.
"Such a song was that song" that the other muses and gods, "All reluctant, all with fresh repulsion," fled from her and Lesbos, leaving the land "barren / Full of fruitless women and music only," singing "Songs that break the heart of the earth with pity."19
Songs and Ballads opened to Carey Thomas a poetic world of vivid images, an often pagan world in which Swinburne explored and exploded conventional boundaries between desire and pain, men and women. To one familiar with Greek mythology and medieval lore, as Carey Thomas was, nothing in the poems is arcane or obscure. To Carey, searching for moorings and for a way of understanding her emotions, Swinburne's poetry could offer confirmation not only of her religious doubt but also of her passionate feelings toward women as well as men.
It was in a journal entry of March 1878 that Carey noted that she had found Swinburne's Laus Veneris, the American edition of Songs and Ballads. Her list of books read does not include it; however, it lists many of Swinburne's other works in prose and poetry read during the two years that she spent in Baltimore after she graduated from Cornell. This was the most terrible time in her life. She was locked in linked crises of faith, commitment to work, and love that put her in conflict with her parents, made her unable to study in a sustained fashion, and drew her alternately to Francis Gummere, Mamie Gwinn, and Mary Garrett. Love for a man posed a danger to her dream of independence and a life of scholarship. Frank Gummere was handsome, intelligent, ambitious to become a scholar, and poetic, and he was from an impeccable Quaker family. Carey was deeply attracted to him. But for Carey Thomas to contemplate marriage in the late 1870s was to foresee giving up her "soul life" for a vicarious existence serving a husband and children. Carey cooled Frank's interest and forced herself to give him up. He quickly became engaged to another. Carey refocused her affections on Mamie and Mary, two young Baltimore women she had met on her return home after Cornell. As women, neither Mamie nor Mary threatened her independent future.20
Swinburne was in her mind much of the time. In June 1878, she wrote to Mary that her last week had been "almost transfigured" by reading Swinburne's new book of poems, the Poems and Ballads, Second Series. "The high water mark of his poetry is reached in the 'Last Oracle' and 'the deserted Garden' and 'Ave Atque Vale' are inexpressibly beautiful." She recommended them to Mary as perfect for her voyage to Europe. "It is just the thing to read on the deck with the 'rose red sea weed' and the 'cruel and bitter sea' that he is forever immortalizing before you." Swinburne's poems were deeply connected to her loss of Christian faith: "Oh Mary it is all so sweet, so sad, so absolutely hopeless—and for me I see nothing better."21
In July 1878, Mamie came to visit Carey at the family summer cottage. They "talked and read Swinburne." One day at sunset they read his "Hymn of Man," from Songs before Sunrise. Written to promote Italian unification, these poems followed the Shelleyan tradition of interlinked atheism and political radicalism, portraying a world made right by human action. Carey wrote in her journal, "It is a paean of triumph over the vanishing of the Christian religion. To Mamie it was elixir to me poison: though I could not help the bewildering beauty of it carrying me away." Again Carey confronted both the loss of religious faith and the reawakening of love, this time for Mamie.22
In August 1879, her personal crisis was suddenly over. Her parents agreed to allow her to go abroad to study for a higher degree, if she could find a companion to live with her. Mamie Gwinn convinced her own mother to let her go. Carey and Mamie went to live abroad together for four years.23
The two settled in Leipzig, Germany, where the university allowed women to attend lectures. Carey Thomas began serious preparation for a degree while Mamie Gwinn, who had not had formal secondary schooling in Baltimore, continued to read more eclectically. They avoided socializing with men and found the women students beneath their notice. With the exception of letters and visits from family and friends, for Carey and Mamie, their social world abroad was each other.
Carey's friends included both Francis Gummere, also studying in Leipzig, and Richard Cadbury, who was in Paris writing a long dramatic poem. Engaged to be married, Frank had shifted in Carey's mind from being the object of love to being one of imitation and competition. Richard proved to be an important catalyst for Carey's thoughts on art and life. When he was courting Anna Shipley, he had spent time with Carey; and in the June before they left for Europe, they enjoyed an afternoon together, rowing and getting soaked in a thunderstorm. Richard got Carey's permission to establish a friendly correspondence.
In her letters to Richard, Carey wrote of her reactions to the glories of European art and her desire to be a writer. These letters are filled with the intensity of her aesthetic experiences. To Richard, she denied that scholarship mattered to her in any inner sense. What she wrote about were her aspirations to create. At Cornell, her academic work was separate from her intellectual interests. This continued in exaggerated fashion in her two Baltimore years when she had tried unsuccessfully to study Greek. By the time of her study abroad, Carey had constructed a hierarchy of ambition in which artistic (in her case poetic) creation was most valued, followed by interpretation, and then service to others. Despite the stimulating professors at Leipzig and the excitement of the new science of philology, Carey sustained her earlier belief in the conflict between creative work and scholarship.24
To Richard, she distanced herself from Germany, which she likened to "Scholastic Europe in the Middle Ages," although she admitted, "It may be I shall be drawn in and race with the rest." The real joy was poetry. The meaning of Europe was the inspiration that it allowed. In Carey's understanding, the subject of poetry was the European landscape and its history. Americans knew it only through literature, but the sojourner in Europe could experience it firsthand. She wrote to Richard that in a Gothic cathedral she "felt what sent men on the Crusades. . . to feel a thing is far beyond knowledge." In her new enthusiasm she asserted that Swinburne, Rossetti, Gautier, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, William Morris, and Charles-Pierre Baudelaire "have not felt strongly enough, have not put themselves—their impassioned ecstacy and agony into their work—perhaps because they could not—that their works are 'cheap show.'" She was setting her sights on Greece and Rome and Venice where she would store up her impressions for poetry. "Don't you think that thoughts come from every new sensation?" Late at night, after Mamie fell asleep, she tried to compose. Her poems were as yet unworthy, "mere spelling, putting word and word together." In somewhat the same vein, Carey wrote to Mary Garrett. She felt that her reading of Swinburne was inspiring her efforts at poetry: "I feel as if my daimon had broken out of his bottle." She had sketched out her dramatic lyric, its scene set in Venice.25
Richard's efforts to write a poem in the Swinburne manner made Carey envious. She criticized it carefully and promised to send him in return anything that she wrote. As early as her first November abroad, however, she knew the prospects were not good. "My experiments or rather the experiments I hoped to try here have come to an abrupt close." She needed all her time to study and to soak up impressions. She was clearly daunted by the examples before her. She wrote to Richard about Swinburne's poems: "Atalanta is modern in the best sense but Erechtheus. .. . is truly Greek. If one has the lyrical power that form is a wonderful one but one which only Shelley and Swinburne have thus far been able to use. Ergo I cannot send you any samples of my work I have done nothing since I wrote you."26
As she attempted to deal with the counterclaims of art and scholarship, Carey Thomas made a pact with herself. During the term she would pursue scholarship, as diligently as any German man in the university. But in the four months of university vacation each year she would travel, storing up impressions that she would later turn into the material of poetry and fiction. In early spring of her first year abroad, she wrote to Richard, "I have decided now to make comparative literature my center—one might call it my circumference and therein is its charm—travel all vacations—4 months of the year—take time for writing-practice—and take a degree at the end—well because I'm a woman Father and Mother are willing to extend the time to 4 years if needful."27
Carey's letters to Richard and Mary are misleading, for they tend to emphasize only one side of what was for her a less-balanced debate. In Leipzig she was working very hard as a university student, attending lectures, reading, mastering the elements of philology. To be a good letter, a letter to an intimate friend could not be about work; it had to be about her inner life. Poetry was the medium of feeling as well as a creative pursuit to which Carey aspired. Letters are moreover deceptive in that they are written to those who are absent. Carey was trying to win both Richard and Mary; thus she never referred to the one who meant the most to her and was shaping all her thinking—Mamie Gwinn.
Mamie was four years younger than Carey, eighteen when she went with her to Europe. Anglican, raised in wealth, she was the daughter of Maryland's attorney general, a prominent lawyer whose clients included the late Johns Hopkins. Members of Mamie's family were, as were Carey's, university trustees. Mamie was brilliant, elusive, and precocious—moody, restless, not easily satisfied. And she was beautiful, with a languid beauty, set off by pale skin and soft dark hair. In Baltimore, Carey had fallen in love with her in the familiar way: "We talked and read Swinburne." Mamie was intensely literary. She knew English poetry well and wrote poems that Carey admired. Carey, in her work mode, feared Mamie as "a terrible temptation. . . . She represents all that side of my nature I am trying to suppress—the roving through literature and study seeking out whatever the bent of my fancy leads to and, the dilettante spirit, the complete contradiction to the steady working spirit I am endeavoring to summon."28
It was Mamie's influence above all that drew Carey to imagine herself as an artist and to think of living abroad as cultivating aesthetic sensibility. Mamie chafed under the restrictions of the academic year. Whenever Mamie or Carey was sick or had time free from work, they read poetry to each other. Mamie insisted that all their vacations be spent in travel.
Their first trip was Italy. How Carey reveled in it! As the train neared Rome she wept with joy.29 Rome was all that she dreamed. She and Mamie dedicated themselves to art, visiting and revisiting the papal palace and the Sistine Chapel. To Carey every ruin was imbued with artistic and historic meaning. This first trip was a lover of literature's visit. Carey and Mamie searched out the places described by Virgil and the tombs of poets. As they visited the Borghese Gardens, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun was in their minds. Carey made "a pilgrimage to Shelley's grave." Something deeply personal happened to Carey in her years abroad, something she particularly identified with Italy. At times she expressed it as "tropical life in ones veins," "mellowing," and "faun life." Carey dreamed that Italy would be the wellspring of great poems that would bring her fame. Poetry remained a private avocation, but Italy was forever associated with leisure, Mamie, and the pleasure of their life together.30
Before going abroad, Carey had written in her diary in reference to Mamie, "There is a passionate devotion between girls I feel sure." In Leipzig, the two shared a suite of rooms. They ate three meals a day together. After lectures, they usually changed to their wrappers and read in the same room. Mamie might put her head in Carey's lap. They nursed each other in sickness, reading poetry to each other. They accompanied each other to medical examinations. They crawled into the same bed during a storm. They kissed each other on the lips each morning and night.31
As Carey came to comprehend her love for Mamie, she could draw on her mother's world, so tenderly evoked by Smith-Rosenberg. The notion that women loved women best of all was embedded in her family—her mother's closeness to her own sisters, her mother's and aunt's special affection for their female children and their nieces. In her family, such love for women was sustained even as young women fulfilled the biblical injunction and society's expectation in marriage and motherhood. As a typical young woman reached early maturity, the women of her family would prepare her for courtship and marriage. But as Carey went to Cornell and then abroad, her own ambition and commitment to women's advancement coupled with her parents' fears about a potential marriage outside Quaker circles broke this pattern. In the years after Cornell, she herself, without confiding in her mother, silenced her attraction to Francis Gummere because marriage would end her dream of scholarship and power.
As Carey fell in love with Mamie, she, as in her girlhood, turned to focus on a special female friend. No one around her suggested that this was inappropriate or wrong. In fact, because her family insisted that their daughter have proper companionship abroad, the opposite message was delivered. Only when Mamie was allowed to go with her to Germany could Carey's parents countenance her study abroad.
But Carey Thomas was a woman with energies and consciousness very different from those of her mother. Shelley and Swinburne were shaping her sensibility. Through Swinburne she was learning of the intensity of sapphic love. Works of fiction, especially Gautier's Mademoiselle de Maupin, were opening to her a sensuous world of eroticism between women.
From childhood Thomas was a reader of fiction. Although in moralistic flights as an adolescent she had condemned novel reading, she read novels and romances voraciously. As she matured, she regarded fiction as a pleasure for off-hours or as a path to aesthetic knowledge. After college, as Carey dreamed of becoming a poet or a writer, she turned to the popular writers of the day. Much of what she read contained endless variations on the marriage plot, in which a beautiful young woman overcame the obstacles to true love. Many of these books confirmed the heterosexual prescriptions embedded in Western culture—many, but not all. In some French novels, male writers described women's erotic feelings toward each other. They did not enter empathetically into a woman's world for women's enlightenment but offered titillation to their male readers. Just as brothels staged spectacles of women making love to each other to arouse male patrons as a prelude to heterosexual embrace, so novels paired women to provoke men. But a woman who loved another woman might read such a book in a different spirit.
Mademoiselle de Maupin was a text that could enhance a woman's knowledge of her sexual responses to a woman. In this novel, the heroine of the title dresses as a man to learn of men's ways. As Theodore de Serenne, she rides, fights, drinks, and dines with men and learns of their crudity and utter contempt for the women they profess to love. Rosette, the sister of one of Theodore's companions, falls in love with her, as does Rosette's lover, the poet d'Albert. The male poet suffers sharp feelings of self-loathing before he learns that the man he has fallen in love with is a woman. However, for Maupin/Theodore and Rosette, there is no such pain. In one scene, narrated by Maupin, Rosette lures her to a rural retreat where they partake of wine and sweets. Rosette sits in her lap, "her arms round my neck, her hands interlaced behind my head, and her lips pressed to mine in a maddened kiss. I felt her half-naked and insurgent breasts leap against my breast and her fingers tighten about my hair. A thrill ran right through my body and the nipples of my breasts grew hard." The only regret that Maupin feels is that she is physically unable to consummate this love.32
In addition to Rosette, Maupin wins the love of Ninon, a girl just entering puberty, and spirits her away from a vicious mother. Ninon, dressed as a boy, serves Theodore as her page. Ninon, in her innocence, thinks she is Theodore's mistress. "Her illusion was made perfectly complete by the kisses I gave her," Maupin recalls. To the erotic play among adult women is thus added that of an older woman with a girl, one "so diaphanous, so slender, so light, of so delicate and exquisite a nature" that she made even the beardless, effeminate Maupin/Theodore seem masculine by comparison. Theodore took "a malicious pleasure" in keeping Ninon "from the rapacity of men. . . . Only a woman could love her delicately and tenderly enough."33
To d'Albert, Maupin/Theodore's passionate embrace of women makes her all the more desirable. Nothing in her past is understood by him as casting a shadow over her future as his perfect mistress. She comes to him pure, declaring herself "as virgin as the Himalayan snows."34 In his pursuit of her, d'Albert applies well the vast sexual experience that many of the earlier sections of the novel graphically describe. Their single night of repeated lovemaking is the passionate climax of the novel. What writers write, however, is not what readers necessarily read. While Gautier's masculine audience may have been satisfied by the book's outcome, certain of his female readers may have read the book for its earlier descriptions of female-female embrace.
Carey Thomas read Mademoiselle de Maupin in Baltimore in December 1878. Her letters and diary entries of the time make no mention of it, but a letter to her mother written abroad reveals its importance. In the fall of 1881, Carey and Mamie received an extended visit from Gertrude Mead, a friend of Mary Garrett, who was traveling after graduation from Vassar College. During this visit Gertrude made a play for Carey, trying to take her away from Mamie, something Mamie never forgave. (Many years later, Carey described Gertrude as having made "the wildest sort of love" to her on that visit.) Carey enjoyed Gertrude very much and the attention that she bestowed. After Gertrude left, Carey wrote home to ask her mother to send to Gertrude her copy of Mademoiselle de Maupin. Carey was never a neat person, and she often did not know where her immediate possessions were. Yet, after more than two years away from home, she could tell her mother just where the book was located. By recalling where she had placed the book and by having it sent to Gertrude after her visit, Carey signaled its special importance. In autobiographical notes penned late in her life, Thomas left a short list labeled "Youth" and "Sex." Mademoiselle de Maupin is one of its four entries.35
Much was still to come after Carey Thomas's revealing letter of August 1880 to her mother. In the three years that Carey and Mamie remained abroad, they consolidated their relationship into a secure and satisfying intimacy. In letters home Carey argued for the right of women to choose women as their "life's loves," and she suggested that she regarded Mamie as linked to her as in a marriage.36 Poetry was the retreat of their life together; Italy, the location of their vacations. During the term Carey put away her artistic dreams and concentrated her energy only on scholarship. After two years in Leipzig, she prepared for her Ph.D. at the University of Zürich, the only European university that allowed women to take a degree. She wrote two these: one on the legends of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; the other, written with Mamie's direct help and possibly with many of her words, on the poetry of Swinburne. She passed her examinations summa cum laude. After Carey took her degree, Carey and Mamie traveled to England to see an exhibition of Rossetti's paintings. They ventured to the Jersey coast to experience the site of some of Swinburne's most notable poems. And they spent a good part of a year in Paris, intentionally living for a time near Gautier's haunts and studying the very paintings that he admired.
Gautier and Swinburne opened up an intense and passionate world to Carey Thomas, a world that in her leisure with Mamie she sought to make her own. In 1883 that world took on a visual dimension at the exhibit of Rossetti's paintings in London. Carey wrote to Mary Garrett that for three weeks she sat "before them day after day and absorbed as one can imagine a sponge thrown into an ocean of depth and colour gradually expanding till every cell is full of light." She was fascinated with the woman's face repeated in many of Rossetti's important paintings, "with its sensuous mouth and intellectual forehead. .. . the same wonderful eyes and more than wonderful neck, which curves and undulates and upbears the 'small head of flowerlike.'" This figure, modeled after the wife of William Morris, reappeared in many of Rossetti's paintings of women. The repeated figure was to Carey an inhabitant "of a land of dreams." The beauty of the paintings was revealed only to those who brought "the desire" of their "hearts. .. . It was our desire, and it is quite impossible for me to talk about the pictures calmly." Mamie was sending Mary the catalog. From it Mary would see "how many and how desirable they were for those of us who care for dreamers of dreams, and seers of visions." The Rossetti figure stayed with Carey for the rest of her life, as the image of ideal beauty. It has been called "androgynous" by modern critics. Carey saw it as exotic, provocative, cerebral, desirable. Rossetti's friendship with Swinburne, especially during the period in which Swinburne wrote his early lyrics, linked Rossetti's paintings to Swinburne's highly charged, erotic images. Long afterward in writing Mamie about an actress she had seen in a London play, Carey described her as "such a beautiful Rossetti-Swinburne woman."37
As Carey set her sights on the new Quaker college for women that Joseph Wright Taylor was establishing in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, she began to assume the mantle of conventional public behavior necessary for a woman seeking the trust of conservative Quaker men. But an important part of herself remained with Mamie the "nous autres" of 1880. Gautier and Swinburne/Rossetti were the stars of her firmament that set the course of her emotional life. She had moved far beyond her mother's world, beyond Baltimore, beyond even Cornell. Through her reading she had entered an alternative realm that allowed her remarkable personal freedom. No longer bound by Christianity, its theology or its moral strictures, she had the possibility of imagining herself as a being exempt from the boundaries of traditional womanhood. In Gautier's fiction, ideal beauty and the responses it evoked were neither male nor female. In Swinburne's poetry, life and death, pain and joy, lovers who knew not male and female swirled in passionate embrace. At age 23, Carey sealed her identity as one of "nous autres—the Gautier, Rossetti school."
This self-definition would stay with her always. In time, Mary Garrett would replace Mamie Gwinn as the center of her passionate life. In the 1890s Carey Thomas would pay close attention to the Oscar Wilde trial and read the medical literature on sexuality. But what she learned from the sexologists would only be added to a more fundamental identity formed during her young womanhood. By her early maturity, identifying deeply with Swinburne and Gautier, Carey Thomas could believe that her love for another woman was passionate in its nature. "Passionate" to her meant full of "rapture and fire" like the Pre-Raphaelite poems she loved.
Carey Thomas was an unusual woman, but she did not exist in a cultural vacuum. She shared her aestheticism with her male and female friends at Cornell and in Baltimore and Philadelphia. They read and chanted Swinburne's poems to each other. Atalanta in Calydon and "The Garden of Proserpine" formed the matter of courtship and intimacy. Mademoiselle de Maupin was passed among female friends.
As other historians probe the lives of M. Carey Thomas's female contemporaries and their interrelationships in the 1870s and 1880s, they should be alert to a new possibility. After the sentimentalism of the mid-nineteenth century and before the lesbian consciousness that emerged at the turn of the century, there may have existed a mentality that defined itself as passionate.
Since 1975, when Smith-Rosenberg first framed it, historians of women have been working with a specific chronology of same-sex love. A number of writers, including Jeffrey Weeks, George Chauncey, and Jane Caplan, have focused on the social construction of homosexuality as it emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. Smith-Rosenberg summarized this literature and connected it explicitly to the attack on women's higher education in "The New Woman as Androgyne," published in 1985. These studies have established that, at the end of the nineteenth century, male scientific practitioners began to tell women that they were sexual beings. The most important texts were Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis, first published in Stuttgart in 1886 and translated into English in 1908, and Havelock Ellis's articles, which began appearing in the mid-1890s. These male sexologists drew a distinction between the sexual feelings and behavior between women and men that they called "normal" and those they labeled "abnormal." They defined the "Mannish Lesbian" as a woman who imitated men intellectually, professionally, and sexually. Through their detailed case studies, they informed women about themselves.38
Basic to this conceptualization of the change from sentimental friendship to lesbianism is the understanding that nineteenth-century, white, middle-class women were taught to deny their sexual feelings. The prescriptive literature insisted on the woman's fundamental innocence before being sexually awakened by a man. In an era that valued men's consistent labor and women's domestic authority, commitment to premarital chastity and postmarital restraint provided powerful sources of control.39
Other historians have questioned these critical assumptions about nineteenth-century culture. In At Odds, Carl N. Degler challenged historians to explore the difference between prescription and behavior and presented significant anecdotal evidence of women's willing engagement in sexual activity. Ellen K. Rothman strengthened Degler's case with her emphasis on emotional and sexual intimacy between men and women. In her new book, Searching the Heart, Karen Lystra has pushed the argument for sexual expressiveness even further. She argues that by the 1830s the American middle class was committed to the ideal of romantic love. Nineteenth-century, middle-class individuals "fell in love." The two selves merged, and as they did they expressed their love in sexual language and behavior. In drawing a sharp distinction between public and private behavior, they enhanced the eroticism behind closed doors.40
Lystra's work makes it clear that it is not enough to juxtapose prescriptive literature with behavior. It is not only what one does that is important; it is the construction one places on it. Moreover, the understanding that one gives to one's acts turns back to shape what one does. Lystra demonstrates that nineteenth-century letter writers fell in love using their era's language of romance and feeling. Although she discounts the influence of etiquette-book models on actual love letters, many of those she cites suggest that their authors may have taken their cues from fiction.41
As we revise our notions of love and sexual expressiveness between women and men in the nineteenth century, we must rethink the question of women's love for other women. We should return to Smith-Rosenberg's exploration of the letters women wrote each other to see the way in which Anglo-American poetry and fiction helped shape the way that women defined their relationships. My own intensive look at one woman's reading forces us to question the prevailing paradigm of women's same-sex love. Carey Thomas and the women of her circle were not part of either the world of sentimental friendship or that of lesbianism. They did not take their primary cues from prescriptive literature. They were not passive victims of male definitions. They sought out and read works of fiction and poetry, written largely by men, that opened them to a sensuous world of eroticism between women. They actively and willingly chose the passionate sensibility of "nous autres."42
In turning away from prescriptive literature as the primary guide to personal awareness in the late nineteenth century and toward the works of poets and novelists, we need to explore the insights of reader-response theory. What happens when a piece of literature written by a man for men is read by a woman? We have generally assumed that nineteenth-century female readers responded directly to the misogyny of male writers. What if some women readers simply ignored any negative messages being sent and received from the text positive signals? If this is possible, where might such a female reader place herself in the text? What lessons might she take from a poem or a novel? What knowledge might she glean about herself from the characters? Such questions are the more pressing when we realize that readers such as Carey Thomas, unleashed from the moorings of organized religion, were looking to literature for answers to their essential questions about life and love.43
At the same time, we must insist that the text itself, if it has been freely chosen, has a content capable of stirring the imagination and emotions of a reader. Reading a poem, discussing it, making love to its stanzas can force a reader to think and feel anew. The reader and the text confront each other, and neither may be the same after the encounter.
It was from the works of Swinburne and Gautier that Carey Thomas, as a young woman, learned about herself She never forgot. Her ambitions required her to hide this private self from the world outside. From her return to the United States in 1883 until her retirement from Bryn Mawr College in 1922, she had to maintain public conformity to Quaker codes and to avoid offending Quaker taste. Although Bryn Mawr's Jacobean Gothic architecture and certain English courses in the curriculum gave outward expression to Thomas's aesthetic, the trustees did not have the knowledge necessary to read these traces.44
M. Carey Thomas came to wear a protective mantle of Quaker usage, but underneath it she was a woman of heady passions who lived in the intensely romantic and erotic universe of Swinburne's poetry, Gautier's fiction, and Rossetti's paintings. In 1884 she wrote an untitled poem for Mary Garrett, meant for her eyes alone. In it Carey imagined the Ideal as the woman of a Rossetti painting sending thoughts from "some far land of passion":
These many years within the sanctuary
Which is my heart, alone I break and eat
The bread and wine of dreams. I hear the beat
Of hurrying thoughts, that wing from over sea
From some far land of passion crying to me
Until at morn or eve I go—and meet
Mid dreams and thoughts made manifest her feet
Mid many hearts her heart's deep mystery.
For in that hour, afar or near at hand,
When I shall pass beyond her eyes and know
The very dreaming heart of her to grow
One with my thought and splendid, understand
Why I have loved her silence, I shall go
Content, nor lonely, in the passionate land.45
No single expression better captures Carey Thomas's consciousness. She imagines herself, severed from religious belief, as living within the "sanctuary" of the heart, taking communion with art, breaking and eating "the bread and wine of dreams." God is absent; but the Ideal—Rossetti's compelling woman—calls from the land "from over sea." Death—passing "beyond her eyes"—will bring Carey union with her. Carey then will "know the very dreaming heart of her to grow one with my thought," and joined with the Ideal, she will go "content, nor lonely, in the passionate land."
In the decades that followed, Carey continued to express this side of herself to Mary and Mamie, especially in her intense reactions to opera and theater. At times, however, Carey revealed her private, passionate self in a mere phrase or an image. One example from an 1899 letter to Mary allows a fleeting glimpse into Carey's consciousness, kept shielded by her public persona. M. Carey Thomas, now a college president and a leading spokes-woman for women's higher education, took the public stand for Prohibition expected of a prominent Quaker. Mary kept an apartment in New York for their use but was traveling abroad at the time the letter was written. "Ah," wrote Carey, "if we could have some champagne and sandwiches and a talk in our pretty bedroom under the Rossetti and the Ariadne!"46
To one familiar only with the public persona of M. Carey Thomas in 1899, this image of her—drinking champagne under a Rossetti painting in the bedroom she shared with Mary Garrett in a New York City apartment—defies belief. To us, aware of the young woman who envisioned herself as one of "nous autres," it recalls Carey Thomas's private identity as a passionate woman who reveled in aesthetic delights and formed intense, loving commitments to other women.
Carey Thomas created this self through her reading. Within a shared world of intimate friendships, she found in the poetry of Swinburne and the fiction of Gautier works that guided her for the rest of her life. Underneath the thick layers of protective convention that came to encase her, a part of Carey Thomas always remained linked with "the Gautier, Rossetti school."
Our recovery of Thomas's private identity through her reading has led us to rethink the way we have understood women, sexuality, and same-sex love in the 1870s and 1880s. Ultimately it has forced us to think about reading itself, both as a private act and as a social experience, a charged encounter with words capable of evoking intense emotions and of changing a person forever.
NOTES
1 This article is part of a larger study of the life of M. Carey Thomas, to be published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1994. Biographical information has been gleaned from the principal repository of Thomas material: the M. Carey Thomas Papers (Bryn Mawr College Archives, Bryn Mawr, Pa.). The bulk of the collection has been published on microfilm: Lucy Fisher West, ed., The Papers of M. Carey Thomas (microfilm, 217 reels, Woodbridge, Conn., 1982). Biographical studies of Thomas are Laurence R. Veysey, "Martha Carey Thomas," Notable American Women, 1607-1950: A Biographical Dictionary, ed. Edward T. James (3 vols., Cambridge, Mass., 1971), III, 446-50; Edith Finch, Carey Thomas of Bryn Mawr (New York, 1947); and Marjorie Housepian Dobkin, ed., The Making of a Feminist: Early Journals and Letters of M. Carey Thomas (Kent, Ohio, 1979), 1-27.
A note about the use of names. When I use the full name M. Carey Thomas, it is to refer to the biographical subject and adult woman who became the college president. She was never addressed by her first name, Martha. Minnie is the name she used as a child, although close friends and family continued to use it long afterward. She assumed the name Carey when she went to Cornell University in 1875. When I refer to her as a child I call her Minnie Thomas or Minnie. When I refer to her as an adult in her personal capacity, I call her either Carey Thomas or Carey. In referring to her in professional capacity, I call her Thomas. Because this piece centers on her personal life, I normally do not refer to her as Thomas, except when confusion between her two first names requires it.
2 Barbara Sicherman first alerted me to the importance of reading in shaping the consciousness of late nineteenth-century educated women. Her paper on women's reading at the June 1987 Berkshire Conference in Women's History at Wellesley College has recently been published: Barbara Sicherman, "Sense and Sensibility: A Case Study of Women's Reading in Late-Victorian America," in Reading in America: Literature & Social History, ed. Cathy N. Davidson (Baltimore, 1989), 201-25. My thinking and research have been stimulated by Barbara Sicherman, "Engaging Texts: Stories of Reading of the Progressive Generation of Women," paper delivered at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians, St. Louis, April 1986 (in Barbara Sicherman's possession).
3 Dobkin, ed., The Making of a Feminist; Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "The New Woman as Androgyne: Social Disorder and Gender Crisis, 1870-1936," in Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York, 1985), 245-96.
4 M. Carey Thomas to Mary Whitall Thomas, Aug. 12, 1880, West, ed., Papers of M. Carey Thomas, frame 413, reel 31. Here, as elsewhere, I note the frame on which the letter begins. Throughout I have corrected Thomas's spelling and have spelled out the words that she abbreviated.
5 Théophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin, trans. Joanna Richardson (Harmondsworth, Eng., 1981), 39.
6 M. Carey Thomas to Mary Garrett, Nov. 11, 1880, West, ed., Papers of M. Carey Thomas, frame 222, reel 15. The emphasis is mine.
7 James Thomas Flexner, An American Saga: The Story of Helen Thomas & Simon Flexner (Boston, 1984), 92-99, 174-76. See, for example, Mary Whithall Thomas to M. Carey Thomas, Aug. 19, 1876, West, ed., Papers of M, Carey Thomas, frame 316, reel 61.
8 Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth Century America," Signs, 1 (Autumn 1975), 1-29.
9 Mary Whithall Thomas Journal, vol. 2, Jan.-Oct. 1864, West, ed., Papers of M. Carey Thomas, frame 141, reel 1.
10 M. Carey Thomas to Elizabeth S. Sergeant, June 17, 1927, ibid., frame 1088, reel 28; Percy Bysshe Shelley, Queen Mab, in The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck (10 vols., New York, 1926-1930), I, 55-165, esp. 146.
11 M. Carey Thomas Journal, vol. 11, Thanksgiving 1874, West, ed., Papers of M. Carey Thomas, frame 516, reel 1; M. Carey Thomas to Richard Cadbury, April 7, 1880, ibid., frame 235, reel 13.
12 M. Carey Thomas to Mary Whitall Thomas and James Carey Thomas, [Fall 1875], ibid., frame 143, reel 31.
13 Mary Whitall Thomas to M. Carey Thomas, Oct. 23, 1875, ibid., frame 358, reel 61; M. Carey Thomas to Anna Shipley, Nov. 21, 1875, ibid., frame 166, reel 29.
14 M. Carey Thomas Journal, vol. 11, June 12, 1877, ibid., frame 524, reel 1.
15 M. Carey Thomas Journal, vol. 22, March 24, 1878, ibid., frame 879, reel 2.
16 Algernon Charles Swinburne, Laus Veneris, and Other Poems and Ballads (New York, 1867), 75-81, esp. 78, 189-92, esp. 192.
17Ibid., 68.
18Ibid., 90.
19Ibid., 228-29.
20 M. Carey Thomas Journal, vol. 12, "List of books read, 1873-82," West, ed., Papers of M. Carey Thomas, frames 555-62, reel 1; ibid., vol. 22, Feb. 22, 1878, frame 875, reel 2; ibid., Feb. 13, 1878, frame 872, reel 2.
21 M. Carey Thomas to Garrett, June 14, 1878, ibid., frame 15, reel 15.
22 M. Carey Thomas Journal, vol. 22, March 24, 1878, ibid., frame 879, reel 2; ibid., Aug. 25, 1878, frame 894, reel 2.
23 M. Carey Thomas to Mary Whitall Thomas, [Aug. 29, 1879], ibid., frame 202, reel 31.
24 M. Carey Thomas to Cadbury, Nov. 2, 1879, ibid., frame 225, reel 13; M. Carey Thomas to Cadbury, Nov. 10, 1881, ibid., frame 253, reel 13; M. Carey Thomas to Cadbury, Feb. 10, 1881, ibid., frame 257, reel 13.
25 M. Carey Thomas to Cadbury, Nov. 2, 1879, ibid., frame 225, reel 13; M. Carey Thomas to Garrett, Nov. 11, 1880, ibid., frame 222, reel 15.
26 M. Carey Thomas to Cadbury, Nov. 26, 1879, ibid., frame 229, reel 13; M. Carey Thomas to Cadbury, [Feb. 10, 1881 on envelope], ibid., frame 257, reel 13.
27 M. Carey Thomas to Cadbury, April 7, 1880, ibid., frame 233, reel 13.
28 M. Carey Thomas Journal, vol. 22, March 24, 1878, ibid., frame 879, reel 2; ibid., Nov. 12, 1878, frame 901, reel 2; ibid, March 24, 1878, frame 879, reel 2; ibid., March 18, 1878, frame 875, reel 2. Outside of scattered manuscript sources, there is no known biographical material on Mamie Gwinn.
29 M. Carey Thomas to Mary Whitall Thomas, March 7, 1880, ibid., frame 312, reel 31.
30 M. Carey Thomas to Cadbury, April 7, 1880, ibid., frame 233, reel 13; M. Carey Thomas to Cadbury, Oct. 14, 1880, ibid., frame 242, reel 13; M. Carey Thomas to Cadbury, Nov. 23, 1880, ibid., frame 247, reel 13.
31 M. Carey Thomas Journal, vol. 22, Oct. 12, 1878, ibid., frame 901, reel 2. What Carey Thomas understood as passion in 1878 is conveyed by her section of a never-published joint novel she wrote with her friends during her years in Baltimore. A young male character, Percy, suggested by the poet Shelley, draws a woman toward him, and the narrator sees in his glance "deep love, & reality of passion in his eyes." An older woman tells the narrator that Percy is "sensitive to the least influence, passionate, sensuous—Pleasure is now his only rule." Vol. 123, ibid., reel 2. Letters from M. Carey Thomas to her mother from 1879 to 1881 convey something of the life that Carey and Mamie led in Leipzig, but the clearest sense is gained from Mamie Gwinn to M. Carey Thomas, [March 1882], ibid., esp. frame 41, reel 53.
32 Théophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin, trans. R. Powys Mathers and E. Powys Mathers (London, 1948), 222.
33Ibid., 264, 265.
34Ibid., 277.
35 M. Carey Thomas Journal, vol. 12, "List of books read, 1873-82," Dec. 1878, West, ed., Papers of M. Carey Thomas, frame 561, reel 1; M. Carey Thomas to Garrett, Oct. 18, 1896, ibid., frame 79, reel 20; M. Carey Thomas to Mary Whitall Thomas, Dec. 28, 1881, ibid., frame 798, reel 31; Manuscript fragment, Autobiographical Materials, ibid., [no frame numbers], reel 74.
36 M. Carey Thomas to Mary Whitall Thomas, Nov. 13, 1880, ibid., frame 560, reel 31. In February 1882, as she schemed to get away from work for an excursion, Carey wrote to her mother that she and Mamie hoped for "some cheap little journey of a week or two some where—'a wedding trip up side down' as Mamie says." M. Carey Thomas to Mary Whitall Thomas, Feb. 12, 1882, ibid., frame 37, reel 32.
37 M. Carey Thomas to Garrett, March 18, 1883, ibid., frame 314, reel 15; M. Carey Thomas to Mamie Gwinn, July 1, 1898, Alfred Hodder Papers (unprocessed collection, Princeton University Archives, Princeton, New Jersey).
38 Although these writers differ significantly in their interpretations, especially on the weight to give to the sexologists' influence, they accept an essentially two-stage chronology. See Jeffrey Weeks, "Havelock Ellis and the Politics of Sex Reform," in Socialism and the New Life: The Personal and Sexual Politics of Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis, ed. Sheila Rowbotham and Jeffrey Weeks (London, 1977), 139-92; George Chauncey, "From Sexual Inversion to Homosexuality: The Changing Medical Conceptualization of Female 'Deviance,'" in Passion and Power: Sexuality in History, ed. Kathy Peiss and Christina Simmons (Philadelphia, 1989), 87-117; Jane Caplan, "Sexuality and Homosexuality," in Women in Society: Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. Cambridge Women's Studies Group (London, 1981), 149-67; Smith-Rosenberg, "The New Woman as Androgyne," 245-96. Women's historians have judged much of the sexologists' impact to be negative, for in telling women that they could be homosexual, they made intense woman-to-woman friendship suspect, a source of loss for those women who defined themselves as heterosexual. They labeled and stigmatized lesbian relationships. However, they provided lesbians with a definition of their emotions as sexual, which—when rephrased in an accepting era—could lead lesbians to positive understanding and enhanced experience.
39 Nancy F. Cott, "Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology, 1790-1850," Signs, 4 (Winter 1978), 219-36; Daniel Scott Smith, "Family Limitation, Sexual Control, and Domestic Feminism in Victorian America," Feminist Studies, 1 (Winter-Spring 1973), 40-57; Ben Barker-Benfield, "The Spermatic Economy: A Nineteenth Century View of Sexuality," Feminist Studies, 1 (Summer 1972), 45-74.
40 Carl N. Degler, At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present (New York, 1980); Ellen K. Rothman, Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in America (New York, 1984); Karen Lystra, Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1989).
41 See, for example, the correspondence between Robert Burdette and Clara Baker. Lystra, Searching the Heart, 92-100.
42 I have avoided two words in describing the acts and feelings of M. Carey Thomas in the 1870s and 1880s: lesbian and sexual. I have done so quite consciously. Only when she read the sexologists in the mid-1890s was Carey Thomas told that women's passionate feeling for each other had a sexual basis.
43 For an excellent selection of this literature, introduced by an informative essay, see Jane P. Tomkins, ed., Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism (Baltimore, 1980), esp. ix-xxvi. For important examples of the range of possibilities in applying reader-response critical approaches to contemporary American subjects, see Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill, 1984). For a telling example of how Madame de Staël, Madame Roland, and George Sand found inspiration in the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, works understood as profoundly antifeminist by today's readers, see Gita May, "Rousseau's 'Antifeminism' Reconsidered," in Samia I. Spencer, French Women and the Age of Enlightenment (Bloomington, 1984), 309-17. I am grateful to Barbara Sicherman, whose work helped provoke these questions.
44 I have written extensively about Thomas and Bryn Mawr College architecture in Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Alma Mater: Design and Experience in the Women's Colleges from their Nineteenth-Century Beginnings to the 1930s (New York, 1984), 105-33. One delightful example of a Thomas misstep comes from the Bryn Mawr College Oral History Project. An alumna recalled a moment from 1904, her freshman year: "We were sitting in chapel. The poet Swinburne had died—she always gave these little talks before daily chapel—and she gave her recollections of hearing his poetry. . . . she was absolutely carried away. Evidently Dr. Barton, the poor, learned Quaker who always was there at the same time for the religious part of the service that we had—evidently he told her it wasn't the proper thing to show such enthusiasm for Swinburne before young ladies. The next day she made an absolutely deadpan speech about Swinburne's less commendable qualities." Agnes Goldman Sanborn interview by Florence Newman Trefethen, Nov. 18, 1987, typescript, p. 140, Bryn Mawr College Oral History Project (Bryn Mawr College Archives).
45 M. Carey Thomas to Garrett, July 3, 1884, West, ed., Papers of M. Carey Thomas, frame 471, reel 15.
46 M. Carey Thomas to Garrett, Dec. 21, 1899, ibid., frame 816, reel 22.
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Martha Carey Thomas: The Scholarly Ideal and Bryn Mawr Woman
Reading and Ambition: M. Carey Thomas and Female Heroism