SOURCE: Tracey, Karen. “Britomarte, the Man-Hater: Courtship during the Civil War.” In Plots and Proposals: American Women's Fiction, 1850-90, pp. 132-47. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000.

[In the following essay, Tracey explicates E. D. E. N. Southworth's novel Britomarte, the Man-Hater as it portrays social and ideological disruptions in gender roles caused by the Civil War.]

E. D. E. N. Southworth's post-Civil War serial Britomarte, the Man-Hater, published in two volumes as Fair Play; or, The Test of the Lone Isle (1868) and How He Won Her (1869), includes the typical features of Southworth's best-selling novels: action-adventure plots alternate and intersect with sentimental-domestic plots, courageous and unconventional heroines contrast with traditional true women, and realistic descriptions and events are interwoven with highly improbable sensational episodes. That much of the second volume of the narrative is set during the Civil War might appear to be incidental to Southworth's entertaining story; she suggests as much herself: “I shall not burden this light and simple story with the politics of civil war. I shall only allude to it where it immediately concerns the people of whom I am writing” (Fair Play 354). But where the war “immediately concerns the people” of whom Southworth writes, it also immediately concerns the people for whom she writes. In addition to promoting her own pro-Union politics, the Britomarte serial investigates how the Civil War acted upon those aspects of American life that had interested Southworth in her antebellum novels: the lack of security for women within the home, the restrictive nature of gender roles, and the consequent and profound importance of marrying wisely.

Southworth's Civil War novel, though presented as another entertaining narrative, participated in the crucial cultural work undertaken by Americans as they attempted to understand, explain, define, and control the momentous impact of the war. The war created havoc or at least disruption in almost every area of life, and conventional nineteenth-century distinctions between the genders were no exception. The notion of “separate spheres” and generalizations about the distinct attributes of women (ruled by the heart) and of men (ruled by the head) never did reflect reality even for the privileged white classes, but as the Civil War disrupted homes and forced women to take on new roles, it became difficult to protect even the linguistic fiction that men and women inhabited different spheres or that they could be defined by different characteristics. In her narrative Southworth explores the effect on four heroines when the Civil War shatters the fragile, and artificial, barriers that had been rhetorically constructed between the public and the private world, the political and the domestic sphere. No one could pretend any longer that the domestic space could be protected from the rough male world. Categories treated as naturally separate in antebellum language collapsed under the pressures of war. Love and courtship could not be kept distinct from political loyalties. In fact, women themselves were no longer always distinguishable from men. The task of Southworth in her pair of novels was, in part, to use double-proposal plots to examine the disruptions war forced onto the characters' lives, to chart new paths for women in the territory opened by the destruction of old barriers, and to negotiate marriages that would heal personal and national wounds, helping to reconstruct a domestic and public order in which women could retain some of the responsibilities and privileges that they had proven they deserved during the war.

Southworth's postwar serial capitalizes upon war-born changes in women's lives to demonstrate that women are stronger and more complex than conventional ideology allowed. She set her story largely in Washington, which as a border city and the seat of federal government was a strategic location for a tale about how the Civil War disrupted domestic life in both northern and southern families. Four heroines—Alberta Goldsmith, Erminie Rosenthal, Elfie Fielding, and Britomarte Conyers—open the narrative dressed alike in white graduation gowns, planning futures that are subsequently disrupted by the war in a variety of ways, demonstrating how thoroughly the Civil War may have redirected and redefined women's roles and women's understanding of those roles. Three of Southworth's four heroines are given double-proposal plots, and conventional gender ideology would have suggested that since women are ruled by the heart, their political commitments would be subject to their emotional ones. Not so for these heroines. In both courtship renegotiations and individual developments, the political and the personal are intertwined. By linking narrative structure with historical events, Southworth suggests that while women do indeed love passionately, they may be at least as passionate about their political convictions.

To make this point without violating the conventions of popular women's novels, Southworth historicized her adventure tale while disavowing interest in writing about the war: “It would be presumptuous in a mere story-writer to dwell upon these magnificent themes, so much beyond her power of treatment. This story does not pretend to be a history of the campaign or of any portion of it; it is only a simple narrative” (How He Won Her 468). Despite such disclaimers, Southworth interlaces her “simple narrative” with references to particular battles, significant dates, and historical figures, invoking enough conventional history to remind a reader that the story is set in quite real, and quite recent, times. She alludes gingerly, for example, to the assassination of Lincoln, enhancing her novel with the “seriousness” of history even as she excuses herself for mentioning it: “Let us reverently pass over that awful calamity of April the fourteenth, which followed so swiftly upon the winged feet of Victory, quenching all her lights of joy and of triumph in darkness and in blood. The Nation's holy sorrow is too sacred a subject to be treated here” (How He Won Her 480). And when Southworth describes a Confederate prison “as I saw it in May, 1865,” she vouches for her own historical veracity. She even invites her readers to call upon their own memories: “Everyone knows how hopefully the campaign of the Spring of 1864 opened. In almost every engagement the Union arms triumphed” (366).

But Southworth is selective in invoking history and does not encourage her readers to think about the pressing problem of race. In the wake of emancipation, she fails to imagine a role for freedmen even though in one of her antebellum novels, Mark Sutherland (1853), serialized as India; or, The Pearl of Pearl River, she had celebrated a character who chose to sacrifice his wealth and free his slaves. Southworth joins many of her contemporaries in imagining the Civil War to be about the disunion and reunion of a white America. Nina Silber finds that white northerners, sympathizing with the defeated planter class, “eventually cast southern blacks outside their reunion framework altogether” (6), while Kathleen Diffley observed that black characters in Civil War stories usually die on the battlefield protecting whites or continue as servants in white households (53). Diffley's second category describes the one black character who appears regularly in Britomarte. Southworth devotes just one-half of one page to acknowledging emancipation and the black contribution to the Union war effort: Britomarte is freed from a Richmond prison by black Union soldiers who are being joyously welcomed “by the colored population on the sidewalk” (How He Won Her 476). Southworth is more than ready to gloss over issues of race to promote the particular interests of white women and, more generally, the progress of white reconciliation.

Thus Southworth's central subject is the impact of the Civil War on gender roles as the genteel white classes had conventionally defined them. The war intervenes in the heroines' courtship plots and provides narrative and historical space in which women could take, in fact had no choice but to take, aggressive roles. Her novels reveal the same patterns of expanded opportunity for women during the war and varying degrees of retrenchment after the war that have been discovered and examined in recent years by social historians. A woman's war job was to “keep the home fires burning,” but in the absence of men, she also had to supply the fuel. In the border states and in the South, she moreover often found herself watching the home itself burn down unless she could defend it. Planter class women frequently took control of plantations, managing overseers and slaves and directing agricultural and financial operations. Occupations were opened to women in the North and South as men were absorbed by the armies and labor was needed to supply soldiers with the necessities of war and civilians with the necessities of life. Many women who did not work for wages extended traditional domestic skills into the public realm. Many of them organized large volunteer groups, demonstrating impressive managing skills. Others broke a strong taboo by nursing wounded soldiers in public hospitals. By choice or by necessity, thousands of women breached convention to serve their men, their country, or their own desire for expanded liberty. Whether individuals embraced gender transformation or had it thrust upon them, the war forced reconsideration of conventional gender roles in both the North and the South.¹ Southworth's Man-Hater narrative provides us with one contemporary exploration of the very trends that have only recently been researched by historians.

For one of her four heroines the breach of convention results in tragedy. Alberta Goldsmith, the heiress of a wealthy planter, rejects her family to marry Corsoni, an itinerant Italian. She does not, however, reject her southern upbringing. On the contrary, she inspires her husband to fight for the rebel cause, and both are killed by one bullet when a Union force attacks their guerrilla band. Southworth's depiction of Alberta Goldsmith's fate is a cautionary fable about the tragic end of the “model young lady of her set” (Fair Play 31), a southern belle who is raised only to ornament family circles and therefore does not internalize the moral standards that motivate the other three heroines. As the narrator puts it, “So far from having any affinity or mission on this earth, she had scarcely a sentiment or an opinion of her own” (31). A woman who is such a blank slate is vulnerable, at the mercy of her passions and unable to reason on serious moral or political issues. With the outbreak of the war, Alberta commits herself to her husband and her Confederacy. Southworth's “model” southern belle comes to a tragic end, but not because she abandons traditional feminine passivity. Rather, she dies because she acts for a mistaken cause.

Consider the contrast of Erminie's double-proposal story, in which Southworth uses the circumstances of war to argue that the ideal “true woman” of the North may have strength untested by her usual domestic employments and to suggest that the country would benefit from a revised understanding of true womanhood. Erminie has a contented home life. Although her mother is dead, her father is a benevolent patriarch and her brother a loving protector. When she leaves school, she falls in love with Colonel Eastworth, a “distinguished son of South Carolina” (57) whose good looks, heroic military background, and “superiority in age” attract her because “reverence was so large an element” in her love (72); they are quickly betrothed, but her father asks them to wait two years because Erminie is too young to marry. Had the Civil War not intervened, she would have been peacefully transferred from loving patriarchal father to loving patriarchal husband. But instead, Southworth gives Erminie a courtship and marriage that is emblematic of the division and reunion between North and South.

The war disrupts the courtship and challenges Erminie to prove she is more than a simple domestic creature. Eastworth is blinded by ambition and by secessionist propaganda, becoming embroiled in a (failed) plot to prevent Lincoln from taking office. When discovered, he escapes to serve as a general in the Confederate army. He takes advantage of his residence in the Rosenthals' home to carry on clandestine activities. Neither Erminie nor her father, both committed Unionists who assume Eastworth is on their side, notices anything amiss; Erminie does not even catch on when Eastworth becomes upset over her rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” (371-73). The Rosenthal household, like much of the North, perhaps, failed to take secessionist talk seriously, and Erminie, “who was no more of a politician than her father, and had no more misgivings about the safety of the national union than she had about the certainty of her own union with the husband of her choice, went gaily about her household business” (369). Erminie is still bounded by her domestic space, but the narrator foreshadows the conflict that will disrupt both national and private unions.

Domestic ideal though she is, Erminie is no more fully defined by her conventional gender role than was Alberta, the model (and misguided) southern belle. In Erminie, Southworth offers an embodiment of the traditional “true woman,” yet the heroine has strengths and convictions not accounted for by typical true woman ideology. When she discovers that Eastworth is a rebel, she refuses to elope with him to the South as he expects her to do. Eastworth assumes that Erminie can easily transfer her allegiances, personal and political, from father to husband because she is a domestic creature; he tells her, “Daughter-like, you take your opinions from your father, and, parrot-like, repeat the words he uses, without attaching much meaning to them” (450). He is wrong. He attempts to “plead the cause of Secession with all the arguments by which astute leaders influence the opinions of people. … But they made no impression on the mind of Erminie Rosenthal” (452-53). The simplicity of her faith, instead of making her pliable, makes her strong: “I see this all too clearly to deceive myself. I have loved this Union so much! … And would you aim a death-blow at her? … I would give my life—almost my soul—to save you from this vortex!” (452). Eastworth departs for the South while Erminie remains in Washington to volunteer as a nurse. Erminie's interproposal plot parallels the story of many historical women, as she extends her role as nurturer beyond the bounds of home, testing and extending her own endurance. Erminie refers to the hospital as “a great school for the spirit” (How He Won Her 41-42). When Eastworth returns at the end of the war, defeated, humbled, and mutilated, Erminie has grown from a naive girl into a strong woman, and she plans to continue her active role to help heal her country.

The parallel between Erminie's “union” and the country's “Union” is sustained throughout her plot. Reconciliation is possible because General Eastworth recants his Confederate convictions. Erminie welcomes Eastworth back, to his amazement: “What a welcome, and how unworthy I am to receive it! Do angels always welcome returning sinners so, Erminie?” (495). He protests that he is “old and gray and broken and mutilated,” having lost his right arm “in a bad cause”; furthermore, he is “poor and penniless. … My once spotless name is stained with reproach” (496). All this makes no difference to Erminie, and “these two were reconciled, and this was but the forerunner of a deeper and broader reconciliation yet to come” (496). Southworth obviously hopes that the North, like Erminie, will welcome the South back into the Union without rancor. Once married, Eastworth and Erminie go to Virginia, planning to work to “restore order and industry in their own section of country, and to promote peace and good-will between the North and the South” (511). In narrating the story of Erminie's war experiences, Southworth redefines the concept of “true woman,” suggesting that the many domestic women who proved themselves during the war should be understood as having a substantial postwar role to play in healing both their families and their country. This fictional representative of a cultural icon has been strengthened by asserting herself as a political as well as a domestic creature. Southworth appears to have understood a phenomenon explained by LeeAnn Whites, who maintains that women's war work “served to reveal the way in which their own domestic labors literally created, or at least underpinned, the public position of their men” (136-37). Erminie's story suggests that the country will benefit by allowing women to continue to extend their domestic labors beyond the home.

This argument itself is not new. Southworth is writing in the tradition of domestic authors who envisioned the home as a positive and active influence on the public realm. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin is perhaps the most famous example of a novel in which domestic influence is exerted for political ends. The writers in the woman's fiction tradition identified by Nina Baym were, along similar lines, “thinking about a social reorganization wherein their special concept of home was projected out into the world” (Woman's Fiction 48). Baym adds that the “decade of the 1850s was the high point of their fiction because the motives of self-development and social reform could run together so smoothly” (49). The Civil War provided the opportunity for women to prove that domesticity had the strength antebellum novelists had claimed for it. When Eastworth first proposes to Erminie, he arrogantly assumes that she is exclusively a domestic creature, and although appreciative of how adeptly she arranges rooms and plans meals, he fails to recognize the depth and strength of her convictions and the clarity of her sense of political as well as domestic duty. He understood the domestic role to be entirely subordinate to the political interests of the head of household, whereas Erminie had a more inclusive vision. When she welcomes him back, her love unchanged in spite of his humiliation, he recognizes her moral superiority and sees the strength and clear-mindedness that goes with it. Through the double proposal, Southworth invokes historical parallels and literary precursors to negotiate a marriage that will strengthen the woman's role and humble the man so that he recognizes and must rely on that strength.

The progressive impetus of Southworth's courtship plot becomes clearer when her story is contrasted with other post-Civil War writing that imagined national reunion through private unions. Kathleen Diffley found that approximately one-fourth of romance stories of the period “aligned courtship rituals with sectional politics,” but that such tales usually featured a northern suitor and a southern heroine to imply that the conquered South must submit to the government of the North (62-63). Nina Silber discovered the gendered reunion metaphor to be pervasive in both fiction and nonfiction. She argues that the “image of marriage between northern men and southern women stood at the foundation of the late-nineteenth-century culture of conciliation and became a symbol which defined and justified the northern view of the power relations in the reunified nation” (6-7). In their reunion stories Southworth's contemporaries typically presented the South as conquered and submissive, and therefore feminine, and the North as triumphant and dominant, and therefore masculine. Erminie and Eastworth's union inverts this power relationship, as the male represents the defeated South who must be forgiven, while the female stands for the strong, true, and victorious North, waiting patiently for her wayward partner to repent and acknowledge her moral superiority.

Thus, while Southworth's narrative implies on one level that men will benefit from women's extended role, she also reveals her awareness that increased power for women may be tied to decreased power for men. In the defeated South, surviving men were often physically mutilated as well as economically and ideologically stripped. Eastworth, with arm amputated and secessionist politics recanted, suggests the fate of planter class men, who were forced to dismantle the slave system upon which they had founded their claims of racial and gender superiority. According to the historian George Rable, when southern men failed to successfully defend themselves and their homes, they were perceived as “no longer men,” while at the same time, women gained strength because, through their contributions to the war, they “no longer saw themselves as passive victims” (137). Southworth apparently comprehended how the war had opened possibilities for extended women's roles and more egalitarian marriages, and under the protection of a conventional courtship closure, she inverts the typical reunion courtship and marries the chastened Eastworth to the strengthened Erminie. Southworth thus manipulates literary conventions and Reconstruction politics to recast gender roles.

In Elfie Fielding's courtship plot Southworth examines the relationship of a second politically divided couple who never reconcile their political commitments, although they are briefly reconciled in marriage. Both Elfie and her suitor, Albert Goldsmith, are Southerners, but Elfie remains loyal to the Union while Albert conspires with Eastworth before joining the band of Confederate guerrillas led by Alberta Goldsmith's husband, Corsoni. Elfie is forced to flee to Washington as a refugee because she displays the Union flag and shoots a man who tries to take it down: “The first public act of my life resulted in getting our house burned over our heads!” (404). She later discovers the rebel plot brewing in the Rosenthal house when Albert, assuming that she is on the Confederate side, unwittingly discusses it with her. Elfie breaks her engagement, denouncing secession in terms that articulate her understanding of a continuity between political and domestic relations: “If a state has the right to secede from the Union, a county has the same right to secede from a state; and a township to secede from a county; and a farm from a township; and the barn from the farm; and the husband from the wife, and the child from the father!—and there you have disintegration and anarchy!” (Fair Play 429). Albert wants to marry Elfie immediately and take her South, but she refuses: “She loved him and hated him at the same moment; her heart was breaking, and she wished for death. But she never dreamed of flinching from her duty!” (428). Elfie links her private decision to terminate her courtship with political rhetoric: “If I were fool enough to marry you this week, why, next week, or next month you might secede from me!” (431). She reports Eastworth's plot to the government, although in so doing she endangers the man she loves, and then attempts to get herself drafted by the Union using her androgynous middle name, “Sydney”; her father refuses to let her go to war, but he does buy a substitute for her.

Albert, like Eastworth, refuses to believe that a woman's political loyalties could be stronger than her private affections. He kidnaps Elfie and, in spite of her violent opposition (she nearly tears his ears off with her bare hands), forces her through a marriage ceremony while promising not to consummate that marriage without her consent: “You shall be as sacred to me as my sister” until “you will forgive me and love me” (How He Won Her 272). Elfie is rescued by Union forces and returns to Washington, where she helps Erminie in the hospitals. Albert, like Eastworth, is badly wounded and loses a limb (in his case a leg). Elfie, overcome by grief and love, dons her hated wedding ring and acknowledges her marriage so that she may nurse him. Each recognizes the other's right to a different opinion; Albert tells Elfie, “Diametrically opposed as we are, we are each of us true to our firmest convictions of duty. … And so far each of us is right” (348). But because Albert dies, he and Elfie are never faced with the problem of reconciling their marriage with their irreconcilable political divisions.

No doubt Northerners, like Elfie, find the fallen and disarmed (or dislegged) rebel easier to love than a rebel in arms: “When I saw him at the head of his band; strong, rampant, insolent; in arms against the government; doing his arrogant will with everybody, and with myself among the rest, I hated him. … And now, when I see him stretched, broken, helpless, and writhing in agony in that bed, as if it was a rack, I feel as if my cruel prayers had been granted, and I had brought him to it!” (How He Won Her 332-33). But only converted rebels and those true to the Union are left to promote reconciliation; Southworth cannot envision a union between characters whose public commitments are not compatible. Elfie can express her love for Albert only after he admits her right to hold to her own convictions and after he can no longer exert “his arrogant will” over her. In this courtship, again featuring a couple whose sectional allegiances invert the more common motif, the North (coded female) survives while the unrepentant South (coded male) dies. In addition to pointing out that Confederate ideology is doomed, Southworth conflates history and narrative to suggest that, especially given the death of so many men, the reunified nation must rely on its strengthened women for survival.

While Alberta, Erminie, and Elfie all illustrate ways in which women could be politicized and energized by the war, the fourth heroine, the “Manhater” Britomarte Conyers, is the most aggressively political and action-oriented of them all. Her prolonged courtship with Justin Rosenthal (Erminie's brother) is resolved only after the Civil War has offered the heroine the opportunity to display the incredible courage and bravery of which she is capable. Britomarte rebels “against the fate that made her woman and the law that limited her liberty to woman's sphere” and vows never to marry and therefore to subject herself to laws and customs that circumscribe her freedom (Fair Play 29). She draws unabashedly feminist conclusions about “not only the rights of married women to the control of their own property and custody of their own children, but the rights of all women to a competition with men in all the paths of industry and a share with them in all the chances of success” (53). Justin finds in her words “much of right, strongly asserted” (“strong” probably carrying the pejorative connotation associated with “strong-minded women”) and quickly falls in love with her. Britomarte, to her dismay, returns his passion, but “she combatted that love with all the strength of her strong will” (111). Britomarte and Justin survive a shipwreck, build a home on a deserted island (“chaperoned” by the Irish servant Judith), fight pirates, and then return home to act in the theater of the Civil War.

Fair Play contains passionate and well-reasoned arguments about women's wrongs and their need for political protection. Britomarte lectures Justin and Erminie's father, the gentle but firm patriarch Dr. Rosenthal, when he claims to have had “no hand in making these laws or encouraging these customs”; the heroine points out, “You live under these laws without raising pen or voice to modify them. You profit by these customs without ever remembering that you do so” (125). Her concerns for women go beyond her class, and at least tentatively beyond her race, and she draws on personal observation and statistics to prove her case. She deplores the unequal working conditions and pay for working-class women that exist because “your diabolical laws and customs have not only barred against woman in almost every field of labor, but have reduced her to the lowest pittance of wages in those few fields in which you permit her to work” (122); she asks that her listener “take into consideration the humanity of freeing the poor white slave women of the cities” in addition to “the slaves of the plantations” (124). She further notes that among the “semi-professional classes … the male teacher gets from ten to twelve hundred dollars a year, the female, for teaching the same branches and doing the same amount of work, gets but two hundred and fifty or three hundred” (122-23). Britomarte vows to live a life of protest rather than submit to the unfair play of laws and customs: “In the first place, so long as the barbarous law in changing a woman to a wife makes her a nonentity, I will not marry. … In the second place, so long as your barbarous customs close half of woman's legitimate field of labor, and open the other half only to admit her to work at degrading rates of wages, I will not work for any wages whatever. … In the third place so long as man continues to wrong woman, I will never accept assistance from any man whomsoever” (125). Britomarte moderates her hatred of men gradually, talking less of women's rights as circumstances give her more opportunities to act.

The transition between the two volumes of the serial, as the action moves from fantasy island to historicized war, suggests what Southworth, as a writer interested in women's lives, found so valuable in the changes brought about by the Civil War. To put antebellum heroines in positions where they could display their strengths, she created fantastic situations. Her best-known heroine, Capitola Black of The Hidden Hand, dressed as a boy to survive the streets of New York, fought a duel in defense of her own honor, rescued a maiden from a forced marriage, and captured a dreaded outlaw. And while Capitola's transgressive adventures clearly comment upon contemporary gender roles and restrictions, they of necessity carry an air of the fabulous that is underscored by the wild, even gothic, settings in which they take place and by the quest romance language Southworth uses to describe them. When the men in that novel leave to fight in the Mexican War, the narrator reluctantly leaves Cap at home, commenting, “Our little domestic heroine, our brave little Cap … when women have their rights, shall be a lieutenant-colonel herself. Shall she not, gentlemen?” (348).² The Civil War offered Southworth the opportunity denied in the earlier conflict. Using the cross-dressing and role-playing strategies that made Capitola successful, and working herself for a time when “women have their rights,” Britomarte does indeed fight in battles and rise in rank (to captain) in a man's army. The fantastic adventures of Southworth's earlier fiction continue, but are now historically situated.

Britomarte says that the war allowed men to prove their heroism and therefore earn her regard, but it also offered opportunities for women. While many women remained in their home communities to tend the house and participate in local volunteer efforts, others, both northern and southern, went to war even if the war was not coming to them. Most often, they worked as nurses or other support personnel for soldiers, but also, more frequently than has been suspected, they became soldiers themselves. Historians have documented that many women served dressed as men in Union and Confederate armies (both as enlisted soldiers and as officers) and that many women who served as nurses, daughters of the regiment, or vivandieres came under fire. Catherine Clinton notes that “over four hundred women were discovered posing as soldiers” (85), and Richard Hall suggests that women perhaps made a much greater contribution than that because (like Southworth's Britomarte) they kept their secret during and after the war whenever possible; one Civil War veteran was not discovered to be female until 1911 (20-26).³ Elfie announces, “Nothing but our crinoline, if that is to stand for our sex, keeps thousands of us out of the army!” (How He Won Her 338). Hundreds did breach convention, abandon their crinoline, and enter the army, as Elfie attempts to do, and as Britomarte succeeds in doing, demonstrating “patriotism, courage, fortitude, and self-devotion” as valiantly as any male soldier (How He Won Her 509).

Whereas Erminie's work in the hospitals and Elfie's heroic defense of her own home, effort to be drafted, and willingness to betray her lover to the federal authorities attest to women's heroism and patriotism, Britomarte's actions outdo them both. While her adventures are more harrowing and dramatic than were Capitola's, many parts of Britomarte's story might have been drawn from historical accounts. Amy Clarke joined the Confederate Army with her husband and suffered two wounds before being taken prisoner, redressed in women's clothes, and returned to her home (Faust, Mothers of Invention 203). And Emma Edmonds entered the Union Army as a man, later assuming various disguises to penetrate Confederate lines on spying missions (Sizer 117). Britomarte's adventures recall the experiences of both these women. Dressed as a man, she enlists in Justin's regiment and becomes his aide; she later dons other disguises as an undercover agent for the Union. She participates heroically in armed conflict, at times leading charges into the teeth of enemy fire, and she spies for information that leads to the capture of the rebel guerrilla band. The heroine is finally caught and imprisoned; she was “more than a suspected spy in the hands of the enemy, and as such, she was only saved from the usual fate of a spy by that consideration for her sex which restrained her captors from putting a woman to death for anything less than a capital crime proved upon her … by direct testimony” (469-70).

Southworth justifies Britomarte's “unwomanly” behavior in the war by tying it to her great love for Justin, deflecting criticism that might be directed at how Britomarte cross-dresses, lives with men in army camps, fights in battles, and spies on enemies: “Justin, my beloved, I abjured my womanhood, disguised myself and followed you to battle; I have been by your side on twenty well fought fields; I have dared what woman never dared before, that I might be ever with you!” (440); in other words, Britomarte is more, not less, womanly for having “transformed and disfigured” herself (441). Southworth's rhetoric has shifted; whereas she once called her readers to admire the “brilliant Amazon” because of her strength and talents, she now adds to that heroine's character the trait of supreme selfless love. The “manly” strengths Britomarte demonstrates throughout the novels are derived from, rather than existing in spite of, her “womanly” traits. The story of Britomarte and Justin represents the possibilities for expanded roles for women and for progressive marriage within this new order, even an order in which unjust marriage laws are still in effect.

Yet Southworth is not excessively optimistic about the increased power women might be able to take in marriage or about the increased respect they might be able to command as a result of their heroic activities during the war. She must have been aware of the desperate efforts at retrenchment undertaken by men who returned from war longing to reassert their dominance over the domestic sphere. The reassertion was particularly crucial in the South, as Whites explains: “Confederate men looked to the domestic arena as their one remaining location of legitimate domination just as the same war that had defeated them on all other terrains had increased, however painfully, the autonomy of their women” (136). And Elizabeth D. Leonard finds that in the North, women had to struggle to maintain the advances they made during the war, for early postwar historians were creating “a carefully constructed postwar image of Yankee womanhood designed to circumscribe the social and political consequences of wartime stresses on the gender system” (182). To a degree, the conclusion of Southworth's novel seems to follow the same design, to participate in the common historical pattern wherein, following the disruption to domestic life caused by war, women and men return with relief to household relations reflecting conservative prewar ideologies of gender.⁴ Following their wedding, Justin asks Britomarte, “How about Woman's Rights now, sweet wife?” to which she responds with a protest that sounds like a younger Britomarte, but with a disclaimer: “While I live … I will advocate the rights of woman—in general. But for my individual self, the only right I plead for is woman's dearest right—to be loved to my heart's content all the days of my life!” (512). Britomarte compromises her political convictions by accepting happiness for herself in marriage to her beloved fellow soldier. Elfie does not recant her unionist convictions, but she does accept her rebel suitor as a husband so that she can fulfill her wifely role as nurse and deathbed attendant. And Erminie envisions her future domestic role as promoting the healing of national wounds, but does, after all, marry her reformed Confederate soldier. The Britomarte narratives may work in part to restrain postwar anxiety about women's increasing power by intimating that women had always been political as well as domestic creatures and that despite this truth, women were ready to fulfill their old duties as well as to claim some new ones. Perhaps the title change between serial publication and two-volume novel signifies most strongly the conservative shift. The serial title, Britomarte, the Man-Hater, focuses on the single heroine as women's rights activist, while the novel titles, Fair Play and How He Won Her, stress the courtship and foreshadow the marriage ending.⁵

But for two thick volumes Southworth celebrates Britomarte's strength and independence, and the images of Britomarte the Man-hater, the soldier, and the spy far outweigh the brief final pages during which, in the afterglow of wartime glory, she accepts marriage. And in history as in these novels, returning to prewar conditions or ideas is not so easy. Many women appreciated the increased liberty and strength they gained during the war and were reluctant to return to a sphere as circumscribed as it had been before the war. Others, deprived of male support, were forced to fend for themselves and their children whether they desired independence or not. Still others, particularly in the South, having discovered they could not rely on men to defend and support them, retained a degree of autonomy in self-defense. And many of the men left by the war were weakened, physically or economically, and therefore were forced to rely on the work of their women. Thus the widened horizons of possibilities for women combined with the demands of rebuilding the Union could not be controlled by revisionary postwar rhetoric; popular works such as Southworth's would make sure that reactionary postwar voices did not go unchallenged. A “simple story” like Southworth's had all the potential influence wielded by popular literature cast in historical context: “This is the power of popular culture: to offer large numbers of people explanations of why things are the way things are—and what, if anything, can be done about it. Infuse this power with history—explanations of how things came to be the way they are—and you have a potent agent for influencing the thinking, and thus the actions, of millions of people” (Cullen 13). Despite her protestations to the contrary, Southworth's voice spoke through her narrative to a popular audience about the meaning of the war. Out of the confusion the Civil War infused into conventional concepts of gender roles, Southworth's novels redefined traditional feminine virtues by recasting women's sphere as both political and domestic and by advocating marriages that are built on this broadened definition of women's role. As Britomarte's final words remind the reader, women “in general” need and have earned increased political and legal rights. Their heroic behavior during the Civil War should help to convince doubters that women are fit to participate in public spheres of action, and that, in fact, the survival and healing of the nation depend on the growing strength of its women.

Notes

1. Nina Silber concludes that “the Civil War had wreaked havoc on the stability and rigidity of the Victorian code of gender. … Women everywhere had assumed new responsibilities and new roles which ran counter to accepted notions of the feminine sphere” (28). Elizabeth D. Leonard, in Yankee Women: Gender Battles in the Civil War, reveals in detail how three northern women capitalized on the needs and opportunities brought to women by the war, while LeeAnn Whites, in The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender, explores how the privileged white community of Augusta, Georgia, confronted threats to gender roles and redefined them to protect as best they could the southern notions of gender roles and white identity that were thrown into disarray by the Civil War. Leonard writes that the Civil War “rapidly made untenable the strict adherence of northern, middle-class Americans, at least, to this very particular, and in many minds apparently fixed and perfectly harmonious web of ideals about the social roles and relative power of men and women and about their proper interaction” (xxii). Whites finds that “gender roles as well as gender relations played a critical role in the initial outbreak of the war, as well as in its course, its conduct, and its eventual outcome in the ‘reconstruction’ of the South. For individual men and women, this moment of gender transformation in the social order at large created a crisis in the very way that they perceived their appropriate gender roles” (3). Drew Gilpin Faust argues that while southern women did develop new identities because of their accomplishments during the war, their experiences should not be construed as positive: “This new sense of self was based not in the experience of success but in desperation, in the fundamental need simply to survive” (Mothers of Invention 243).

2. The Hidden Hand has received a significant amount of critical attention, no doubt in large part because the Rutgers edition has made it widely available. As work by Alfred Habegger, Joanne Dobson, Lynette Carpenter, Amy E. Hudock, and Katharine Nicholson Ings shows us, The Hidden Hand rewards multiple readings from varied perspectives. The Britomarte serial surely deserves similar study.

3. Hall surveys women's roles as vivandieres, daughters of the regiment, and nurses; Lyde Cullen Sizer and Hall discuss the role of women spies in the Civil War. Marilyn Mayer Culpepper collects and analyzes extensive primary materials that reveal how women acted in and were acted upon by the Civil War.

4. Karen Lystra's study of nineteenth-century courtship correspondence suggests that private correspondence registered the same kinds of war-related disruption in gender relations that historians have documented and that Southworth explored: “Although men's and women's outward role behavior may not have changed greatly, evidence indicates there was more tension over sex roles from the Civil War to the end of the century than in the antebellum period. Certainly the Civil War itself may be a factor in what appears to be a new level of sex-role insecurity in postbellum male-female relationships” (147).

5. A reviewer for The Nation suggests an opportunistic justification for the title change, arguing that the novel's title was changed from “‘Britomarte, the Man-Hater’ … or something equally felicitous and suggestive” to Fair Play to capitalize on the popularity and superior reputation (among the critical elite) of the novelist Charles Reade, who had published a novel entitled Foul Play about a pair of lovers stranded on an island (“Recent Publications” 55).

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