[In the following excerpt, Baym investigates domestic fiction's emphasis on a woman's ability and responsibility for attaining religious grace by dutiful self-sacrifice, as demonstrated both in The Lamplighter, about an orphan's spiritual rise above her volatile temperament, and in Mabel Vaughan, about an heiress' fall from the superficialities inherent in her life of wealth.]

The most successful imitation (in Harold Bloom's sense, misreading) of The Wide, Wide World, The Lamplighter (1854) was both more benign in its vision of society and more social in its ideology. It would appear that the author, Maria Susanna Cummins, had grasped the antisocial implications of Susan Warner's view of life and striven to rectify them. Author of four novels all anonymously published (though their author's identity was soon known), Cummins (1827-1866) lived an intensely private life, unmarried, with her prosperous family in Dorchester outside of Boston. She was educated at home and in the young ladies' school run by Mrs. Charles Sedgwick, a sister-in-law of Catharine Sedgwick. Her father was a judge, and she felt no financial pressure to write; perhaps this accounts for her small output. The Lamplighter is said to have sold 40,000 copies in the first two months of publication, and 70,000 in its first year; it inspired Hawthorne's ill-tempered outburst against “scribbling women,” under which blanket epithet all the mid-century women authors are so often dismissed.

Although, like The Wide, Wide World, The Lamplighter depicts characters and scenes in various grades of society—it polarizes slum and mansion rather than town and city—its rendering of locale is much less graphic. Susan Warner (and Anna as well) had drawn representative local types in convincing concreteness; Cummins creates representative moral types and costumes them in localisms. Despite its pietistic orientation, The Wide, Wide World educated its heroine pragmatically and piecemeal; The Lamplighter has a more abstract design. The Lamplighter, too, is far more melodramatic than The Wide, Wide World. Ellen's father was truly drowned at sea. Gerty's father is assumed drowned, but returns at the denouement to authenticate our early intuition that Gerty was no true slum child (and thereby, though perhaps inadvertently, to undercut the asserted democratic egalitarianism of the narrative). This same father is revealed to be the long-lost love of Gerty's mentor, Emily Graham (The Lamplighter's equivalent of Alice Humphrey) and to have been the cause of Emily's blindness. So, where Warner had been willing to leave her events disconnected and apparently random, Cummins felt that she needed to tie everything together; where Warner had been constrained to some degree by probability, Cummins was enticed by the melodramatic flourish. The Lamplighter, then, though a more tidy book than The Wide, Wide World, is also more absurd.

Yet much the most significant difference between The Wide, Wide World and The Lamplighter is that the guardians and caretakers in the latter book are kind and loving. Ellen is thrust from an original situation of protected happiness into a long bondage to insensitive, indifferent, and dictatorial overseers. Gerty is rescued from misery and neglect by Trueman Flint, the kindly old lamplighter, when she is eight years old and thereafter experiences only love and concern from her protectors. (The derivation of The Lamplighter from The Wide, Wide World is shown in Cummins' use of Warner's opening image of the lamplighter.) Flint shelters her. Next-door neighbors, Mrs. Sullivan and her son Willie, divide Gerty's education between them, Mrs. Sullivan teaching her housekeeping and Willie foreign languages. Emily Graham, a benevolent blind lady of indeterminate age for whose father Flint does odd jobs, provides money for good clothes so that Gerty can attend school; like Alice Humphrey she instructs the young girl in manners, morals, and religion. Together these people help her develop from a wild, passionate hooligan into a decorous young lady.

Cummins replaces the Warner world of human cruelty and exploitation with one of mutual support and guidance. But she shares Warner's sense of divine injustice. The characters league together for mutual aid in a world characterized by illness, poverty, accident, death, and separation of loved ones. The heroine says, “I begin to think everyone has trouble.” Emily answers, “It is the lot of humanity, Gertrude, and we must not expect it to be otherwise.” “Then, who can be happy?” “Those only, my child, who have learned submission; those who, in the severest afflictions, see the hand of a loving Father, and obedient to his will, kiss the chastening rod.” “It is very hard, Miss Emily.” “It is hard, my child, and therefore few in this world can rightly be called happy; but if, even in the midst of our distress, we can look to God in faith and love, we may, when the world is dark around, experience a peace that is a foretaste of heaven.”

Emily's sentiments appear to embody a deeply orthodox and antiromantic position and imply a Victorian ideal of feminine submissiveness. But as feminine ideology it is not quite conventional. It denies that women are submissive by nature and asserts that submission is the means by which a woman can overcome or at least check her chief adversary, God. Try as they might, the Puritans reminded themselves, they could not force God's hand; it was his to dispense grace, that “peace that is a foretaste of heaven,” as he chose. The dialogue above between Emily and Gertrude asserts that grace is self-achieved, not even granted according to a covenant that an honorable God will not refuse to honor, but attained through one's own effort, discipline, and toil. The goal of submission may now appear as acquiescence in an oppressive system, but Cummins' purpose is something different—to persuade woman that she is responsible for saving herself and equal to the demand. For the religious mind, this is as radical an appropriation of power as the franchise to the political.

Moreover, Cummins does not require such submission from Gerty in her human relations. When she is thirteen, her beloved lamplighter becomes fatally ill, and Gerty cheerfully nurses and sustains him in the last months of his life. Far from an instance of feminine self-sacrifice, Cummins shows this as a reversal of power relations: Trueman Flint has become Gerty's child. After his death, Gerty goes to live with Emily, alternating between Boston in the winter and the Graham's beautiful suburban home in the summer (The Lamplighter gives America one of its early fictional representations of the suburb). Emily's self-absorbed father acquiesces in his daughter's sponsorship of Gerty but has little to do with the girl himself. Her life is made painful at first by the malice of a jealous housekeeper (a much diminished version of Aunt Fortune), but her forbearance disarms the woman and greatly increases Emily's respect for her. In childhood Gerty was a passionate and embittered child, who, in a fit of rage, threw a stone through a window. Now she has achieved “the greatest of earth's victories, the victory over self” and become “at last a wonder to those who knew the temperament she had to contend with.”

When Gertrude turns eighteen, she prepares to act on a long-nurtured plan of self-support through teaching. Mr. Graham, unexpectedly, asserts that Gertrude is beholden to him, and will not hear of her leaving. He feels that in exchange for her five years of residence beneath his roof Gerty owes him a lifetime's service. Technically perhaps Gertrude owes him exactly as she owed Trueman Flint, but she refuses to acknowledge a claim that rises from a love for power rather than a love for her. She thinks at first, “It is cruel in Mr. Graham to try to deprive me of my free will.” “Sorry as I shall be to offend Mr. Graham,” her reformulation runs, “I must not allow fear of his anger to turn me from my duty.” Justifying inclination as duty, Gertrude is freed to do as she pleases. One can say “I must” where outer and inner constraints prohibit one from saying “I want.” This strategy gives Gertrude a flexibility in dealing with life that the Warner heroine never achieves.

Thus justified, Gerty goes back to the city, helps Mrs. Sullivan nurse her dying father, and takes a daytime job as assistant in a school. Soon the old man dies and then Mrs. Sullivan; alone, Gerty now has the pleasure of refusing several friendly offers of a home by explaining that it is her duty to Mr. Graham not to appear to prefer any other friends to him. And, she explains, “I am anxious to be so situated, on Mr. Graham's return, that he will perceive that my assurance, or boast (if I must call it so), that I could earn my own living, was not without foundations.” So Gerty gets a room of her own.

Gerty is now in a position to weigh all demands made on her and reject or accept them as she sees fit. And she responds only to demands that allot her the dominant role in a relationship. Having established the terms of her independence she willingly returns to the Grahams when a call comes from Emily. Neglected by her father, who has remarried suddenly, and mistreated subtly by her fashionable stepmother, Emily turns to Gerty as a dependent to a benefactor. “It does seem a sacrifice for you to leave your beautiful room, and all your comforts, for such an uncertain sort of life,” says Mrs. Jeremy, a friend, to Gertrude as they discuss her future. Dr. Jeremy adds, “It's the greatest sacrifice that ever I heard of! It is not merely giving up three hundred and fifty dollars a year of her own earning, and as pleasant a home as there is in Boston; it is relinquishing all the independence that she has been striving after.” “No, doctor,” says Gertrude (“warmly”). “Nothing that I do for Emily's sake can be called a sacrifice; it is my greatest pleasure.”

Her route has been devious, but considering her limited resources, Gertrude has done remarkably well. She has a place. In the last section of the novel after she had returned to the Graham's, various women try to wrest it from her. Especially persistent are the new stepmother and her glamorous niece, Belle (Isabelle) Clinton. Except that Willie Sullivan, who has been rising in the world, appears to be in love with Belle, their malice and spite scarcely affect her. Willie's apparent defection deeply hurts her, and she sublimates her misery in a life-risking rescue of Belle from a steamship explosion. In fact, she has misread the evidence. Willie has always been hers. Just in time to give Gertrude away, her lost father returns. This last event subverts the story not only because it is so unlikely, but because Gertrude does not need her father. She is her own woman, and requires no parent to provide identity. In fact, the rationale for the father's return is to provide Emily, who would be left alone by Gertrude's marriage, with a new home. For Gertrude's father had been, before he inadvertently caused Emily's blindness and fled, Emily's fiancé. For all her goodness, Emily has not the force of character that Gertrude has; unlike the heroine, she needs a rescuer. The heroine has surpassed all her mentors.

I have generally been disregarding the subplots of these long novels, since my concern is with heroines; yet I cannot leave The Lamplighter without pausing at Mrs. Sullivan's dream vision. Mrs. Sullivan is resigned to her death except that she will never again see her son; she is reconciled even to this through the agency of a dream. Her soul, she dreams, leaves her body and flies to a gay, thronged city, where it discovers Willie in a gambling palace, on the brink of vice (capitalized in the text). Stationing itself at Willie's shoulder, the soul guides him safely through a sequence of temptations, culminating in the seductive snares of a fashionable beauty: “I seized the moment … and, clasping him in my arms, spread my wings and soared far, far away, bearing with me the prize I had toiled after and won. As we rose into the air, my manly son became in my encircling arms a child again, and there rested on my bosom the same little head, with its soft, silken curls, that had nestled there in infancy. Back we flew, over sea and land.” Why has this vision prepared Mrs. Sullivan for her death? “I now believe that Willie's living mother might be powerless to turn him from temptation and evil; but the spirit of that mother will be mighty still.”

A mother who has watched her soft little boy grow into an angular youth might respond to the nostalgia of this passage; a Fiedler-Freudian would see the clear wish of the mother to emasculate the male. Mrs. Sullivan, however, interprets the dream in terms of the social theory of woman's ability to deter the male from evil and stimulate his better nature. But observe how Mrs. Sullivan's original wish—the desire to gratify herself by seeing Willie again—has been sublimated into the desire to do him good; and this desire is further refined as death is required as the price of such influence. In Cummins' next novel, Mabel Vaughan (1857), she develops at length a story of woman's influence and decides that after all women do not have to die to wield power over others.

The Lamplighter tells one of the two favorite woman's stories: the orphan's rise. Mabel Vaughan tells the other: the heiress's fortunate fall. Both of these, in Cummins' handling, are stories of spiritual as well as social regeneration. Gerty rises from poverty, while Mabel rises by means of poverty, for her situation of wealth and fashion is corrupt and hollow. Moreover, it is a situation in which women lack all power. In the fall of the family from high station, woman finds her chance as organizer, administrator, counselor, and support. Perhaps fashionable life is corrupt precisely because it is organized to exclude woman's influence. Supremacy in the ballroom, one understands, is meaningless; there woman is bought off by hypocritical flattery, offered paste for jewels. Her merely decorative function gives her no true power. The power base for a woman—the place from which her influence can radiate and within which it is centralized—is of course the home, which all the customs of fashionable city life ignore or destroy.

As the novel opens, Mabel, third child of a wealthy family, is about to leave the country home where she has been boarded and educated since she was eight. Her widower father is looking forward to her return and to her debut in fashionable society. It is owing to the training she has received away from him with her teacher and surrogate mother, Mrs. Herbert, that Mabel will be able to triumph over the temptations that await her. For she is beautiful, energetic, vivacious, and lovable, sure to become a belle, likely to succumb to vanity and self-love despite her good heart. In her father's elegant mansion, Mabel neglects her domestic opportunities, leaving her father to his money-making and her brother Harry to idle dissipation, ignoring her rustic dependent aunt, Sebiah, and falling under the sway of her married sister who lives in a hotel and has no interests beyond clothes and parties. Mabel is thoughtlessly attracted, even entranced, by the glitter and display and excited by the admiration and attention she receives. She feels that her life is rich and full. She responds to the dallying advances of an older sophisticate, Lincoln Dudley, with an emotion that she mistakes for love.

Most of her first winter at home has worn away before she realizes that her brother is becoming an alcoholic. This discovery dramatically changes her opinion of fashionable life; yet she finds it difficult to sacrifice all social pleasures to stay home and lure her brother away from his bad habits, as she now realizes she ought to do. Support comes unexpectedly from a family of virtuous poor, consisting of the widowed Mrs. Hope and her three children: Lydia, Jack, and an invalid child, Rose. Rose, a representation of the divine child so beloved by the nineteenth century, provides Mabel with a model of patience, cheerfulness, and selflessness; bedridden, she is continually devising little amusements to keep her older brother Jack at her side and thereby out of trouble. Christian, domestic, and feminine coalesce in this image: Christian woman morally regenerates a man by keeping him in the house.

But Mabel must elect to do what Rose is constrained to do because she is an invalid. Is not Mabel being asked to cripple herself to save her brother? So it seems to her for a time. She cannot perceive her choices rightly until she fully appreciates the emptiness of social life and learns to draw satisfaction from doing good for others. She must have a change of heart that radically alters her sources of pleasure. Mabel's first lessons in the joy of helping others come when she performs small services for the Hope family. These lessons in gratifying others come not a moment too soon, for hardship strikes her and her family. Dudley begins a flirtation with another woman. Harry drinks increasingly and is badly hurt in a carriage accident occasioned by his intoxication. Her father and brother-in-law are in a train wreck in which the brother-in-law is killed. Like many men of presumed wealth in woman's fiction, he dies insolvent. His wife, Mabel's sister, goes into shock and dies too. Mabel's father loses all his money, and suddenly these rich, fortunate people are poor and beset by calamity.

Harry, nursed back to new life by Mabel, journeys west to join his father on their one remaining property, a tract of Illinois land. Mabel follows soon after with her two young orphaned nephews, her sister's boys. The reduced and reconstituted family begins life anew on the prairie. Vaughan hopes that the railroad will buy his land and make him rich once more; Mabel and Harry, now wisely conservative, see that they must become farmers. So Harry works the land and Mabel turns housekeeper, supporter to her father, counselor to her brother, teacher and surrogate mother to her nephews. We are asked to compare Mabel's happiness and power as queen of the ballroom and queen of the homestead. Cummins has constructed her story so that the answer is self-evident and convincing.

We see that woman cannot exert her influence or fulfill her nature in the city because the city is a realization of an acquisitive economic system where money shapes human relations. Getting is the man's job, and spending the woman's. Although such a system is degrading to both sexes it seems ultimately more harmful to woman, for it reduces her to a display mannequin. She accepts this self-limitation in exchange for gratified vanity. The cult of domesticity in Mabel Vaughan is thus an attack on American materialism. Regenerating the Vaughans in the West, Cummins prophesies that in the land of the future a domestic society will be founded to purify the corrupt urban East, just as in individual relationships women would purify men. Like Southworth, she puts her ideal community in the West.

Mabel's fall and rise had occurred within a year; she was eighteen when she left Mrs. Herbert and nineteen when she took her nephews west. Cummins now permits six years to pass before she arranges a marriage for Mabel, to a displaced easterner like herself, Bayard Percival, a fine young man who is both a prospering farmer and a rising politician. In these six years the territory around the Vaughans has become magically populated with the good people the Vaughans had known in New York. Aunt Sebiah comes out to live with them; the Hope family (except for Rose, who has died) relocates. To be sure, Cummins gives Mabel a splendid husband eventually, but the stress of her ending is on this loose, extended, quasi-kinship system of friends and neighbors. A larger version of the Vaughan family unit dominates the western territory and is ruled by a woman—Bayard's redoubtable widowed mother, Madam Percival. Mabel Vaughan's ideal is the United States as a matriarchy.

After these two important novels, each a kind of generic epitome, Cummins turned her attention to other popular types. El Fureidîs (1860) is a romance of Palestine, which features—as do so many “exotic” romances—a fantasy of the “natural woman” as she develops in a nonwestern culture. These parochial romances often equated all nonwestern civilizations with a state of nature. Their fantasy represents a significant recoil from woman's fiction. The natural woman carries over her Protestant American sister's beauty, piety, innate purity, and delicacy; but she is much more expressive, athletic, passionate, poetic, brave, and physically daring. (The incredible success after the Civil War of Ouida's Under Two Flags is surely owing to the apotheosis of such a type in the camp-follower Cigarette, whose purity is spiced with suggestions of impropriety.) Cummins' example of the type, the heroine of El Fureidîs, is Havilah, daughter of a French-American father and a Greek mother, brought up in the mountains of present-day Lebanon. In her character, purity and passion exist in one person. The plot fantasizes a situation in which the free expression of passion by women is not dangerous or degrading. Importantly, it recognizes that passion in itself is not impure, but that the social context in which western woman lives makes the expression of passion strategically unsound.

The heroine of Cummins' last, historical novel, Haunted Hearts (1864), is at an opposite extreme—a woman whose one night of minor self-indulgence leads to a lifetime of social oppression and self-repression. She is a thoughtless flirt, and one evening's coquetry drives her disheartened lover—apparently—to murder and suicide. Thereafter she lives as a social pariah until her rehabilitated lover returns to vindicate himself and her. Haunted Hearts allows women no power except to injure, and no moral destiny other than silent suffering. Distanced by its setting in the past as El Fureidîs was by its exotic locale, Haunted Hearts is the polar opposite of that romance. Between romantic self-assertion and reactionary masochism, novels like The Lamplighter and Mabel Vaughan tried to find a way for women to negotiate in their cultural reality.