SOURCE: "Foreword" to All the Happy Endings: A Study of the Domestic Novel in America, the Women Who Wrote It, the Women Who Read It, in the Nineteenth Century, Harper and Brothers, Publishers, 1956, pp. xiii-xvii.

[In the following essay, Papashvily argues that the domestic novel constitutes a more subtle but equally powerful form of resistance to nineteenth-century patriarchy than the 1848 Seneca Falls convention.]

On July 19, 1848, in Seneca Falls, New York, a Woman's Rights Convention, the first ever held, met and after two days of impassioned discussion issued to the press a Declaration of Sentiments beginning:

The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.

A detailed list of women's grievances followed. Man, the convention charged, had denied woman the franchise, a thorough education, and a chance at the more profitable occupations. He had taken her property and wages, taxed her without representation, made her morally an irresponsible being, usurped the prerogatives of Jehovah Himself over her conscience, and endeavored in every way that he could to destroy her confidence and lessen her self-respect. The assembly at Seneca Falls, determined to correct these injustices by every means possible, concluded on a threatening note:

We shall employ agents, circulate tracts, petition state and national legislatures and endeavor to enlist the pulpit and press in our behalf . . .

Most men reading the accounts of the convention could congratulate themselves and each other on their good luck and good sense in possessing wives and daughters, sisters and mothers who never made such ridiculous accusations or impossible demands but stayed quietly at home content to reign like queens over pretty parlors.

Their dove-eyed darlings, all gentlemen no doubt felt confident, spent their leisure as ladies should. They embroidered and painted on velvet and copied verses into albums and pressed leaves and arranged bouquets according to the "language of flowers." At their rosewood pianos they sang and played fashionably pathetic refrains or, reclining on the sofa, they whiled away the time with a sweet novel by Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth or Augusta Evans Wilson or Mary J. Holmes or Martha Finley or Marion Harland or some other "scribbling woman."

If a curious husband or father glanced through one of these volumes he found a simple tale of home and family too full of sentiment, sacrifice, devotion and piety perhaps for masculine taste although most suitable and edifying for the female mind.

Throughout the nineteenth century this peculiar literary form, the domestic novel, flourished as never before or since. Hundreds of authors turned out thousands of titles that sold millions of copies. Scarcely a literate woman in the United States but read some of these novels—The Wide, Wide World, Ishmael; or In the Depths, Tempest and Sunshine, Elsie Dinsmore, St. Elmo, Sunnybank—to name but a few that in time acquired a kind of subclassic status.

Now these sentimental tales and their authors are almost, if not quite, forgotten by a new generation of readers; accorded only the briefest mention by literary historians, banished from library shelves. Yet such books possess greater value today, perhaps, than when they were written, for in them, as in all popular literature, are mirrored the fears and anxieties and frustrations, the plans and hopes and joys of those who read them so avidly. Their crumbling pages reveal the dream world of women—as it existed in the nineteenth century and lingered on to influence the twentieth.

The domestic or, according to its critics, the sentimental novel was in general what the terms imply—a tale of contemporary domestic life, ostensibly sentimental in tone and with few exceptions almost always written by women for women. This and a certain similarity in the binding style, "large, handsome duodecimo, cloth, gilt," would seem, at first glance, to be all many of the domestic novels had in common.

Some, in their gory sensationalism, rivaled the old ballad sheets and chap books while others, oozing sanctimonious piety, imitated tracts. Quite often, to avoid even the slightest taint of fiction, these novels bore as subtitles, "A True History," "Founded on Fact," "Drawn from Incidents in Real Life," or appeared disguised as diaries, memoirs, journals, collections of letters, autobiographies, or some similar form of eyewitness account by an innocent bystander.

A few of the authors wrote merely to amuse; more hoped to do that and at the same time plead a special cause or share their convictions on a variety of controversial subjects. Several of the domestic novelists had real talent, imagination and skill and one possessed true genius. Those who did not borrowed from their contemporaries and predecessors, thereby proving the feminine knack with leftovers as useful in the library as in the kitchen. A Richardson heroine, a Brontë hero, bits of pathos and drollery out of Dickens, a seasoning of supernatural horrors from Mrs. Radcliffe or Monk Lewis mixed well and liberally garnished with local color could be served up as original concoctions.

Yet, despite their varied form, basically the domestic novels were ever the same. The center of interest was the home although that edifice might range from one of Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth's noble English castles to the tastefully adorned wigwam of Malaeska in Mrs. Ann Stephens' book of the same name. The common woman was always glorified, her every thought, action, gesture, chance word fraught with esoteric meaning and far-reaching influence; her daily routine of cooking, washing, baking, nursing, scrubbing imbued with dramatic significance; her petty trials and small joys magnified to heroic proportions.

There were no historical figures, few excursions into the past or the future. Their own world and the immediate present occupied readers and writers exclusively.

The authors of the domestic novel shared curiously similar backgrounds. Almost all were women of upper-middle-class origin who began very early in life to write, frequently under pressure of sudden poverty. Several published while still in their teens (usually a temperance tale). A majority lived or visited in the South. Most important for many of these women, somewhere, sometime, someplace in her past some man—a father, a brother, a husband, a guardian—had proved unworthy of the trust and confidence she placed in him. This traumatic experience, never resolved, grew into a chronic grievance.

The small crimes of men—their propensity to make noise and dirt and war and trouble—the insensitivity, the violence, the lust inherent in the masculine character might sometimes be overlooked, but readers and writers and their unifying symbol, the heroines, could never forget how a man boasted and swaggered and threatened and promised and commanded—nor ever forgive that in the end he failed.

No man, fortunately for his peace of mind, ever discovered that the domestic novels were handbooks of another kind of feminine revolt—that these pretty tales reflected and encouraged a pattern of feminine behavior so quietly ruthless, so subtly vicious that by comparison the ladies at Seneca appear angels of innocence.

Even so astute an observer as Vernon K. Parrington could dismiss the sentimental novel as weak "cambric tea." Like the rest of his sex, he did not detect the faint bitter taste of poison in the cup nor recognize that these books were rather a witches' broth, a lethal draught brewed by women and used by women to destroy their common enemy, man.

It is not to be imagined that the ways and means of correcting a long list of feminine grievances were communicated on a conscious level. The link between reader and writer forged by every popular book is a mystic one. The writer may not know all he has said; the reader all he has heard; yet they understand each other perfectly.

Nineteenth-century women, if they were to achieve freedom in what seemed to them a hostile world, needed direction, inspiration, appreciation, reassurance, a sense of self-importance and of group unity, a plan of action.

The Seneca Falls Convention supplied this to a few women but uncounted hundreds and thousands more found their Declaration of Rights, their Statement of Intentions within the pages of the domestic novel.