Description
Book SynopsisThis seminal study reveals how Constance Fenimore Woolson participated in debates on nineteenth-century political topics considered the province of men. She commented on the most important issues of her time: monetary policy, post-Reconstruction legal decisions, racial justice and interracial marriage, women’s rights, religious hypocrisy, environmental destruction, destabilizing international developments, and the moral character of the nation. The innovative essays in this book introduce her techniques and the political concerns that inspired her complicated art, encouraging scholars to begin the process of rereading and reanalyzing Woolson’s oeuvre to understand the compelling allegories and satires she created. The oppositional, intertextual, and referential techniques she developed allowed her to enter contested political conversations about compelling nineteenth-century problems like few women of her century, sometimes making her work political commentary as much as fiction.
Trade ReviewVictoria Brehm makes us look deeper into Woolson’s prose and motivations in order to uncover her profound concern with national events, international politics, and the ambiguities of social and political leaders. Brehm pierces through the self-protective screens that Woolson often used to mask these issues by analyzing seemingly minute references and by uncovering a complex underbody of satire, allegory, and yes, anger at a world that denies women rights. Particularly strong readings of "For the Major" and Horace Chase impress, but shorter works, we find, underneath romantic surfaces, also provide sharp takes on the gold standard, industrialization, and the corruptions of the gilded age. Well researched, and eloquently written, this study gives us unsuspected and rewarding apertures into a great artist’s ideological concerns and methods.
-- John Wharton Lowe, University of Georgia
For decades, scholars have engaged in the careful work of exposing the depths beneath the surfaces of Constance Fenimore Woolson’s texts – pulling a thread here and another there. Dr. Brehm’s book progresses that work further than any Woolson scholarship to date. Her grasp of nineteenth-century politics and culture allows her to reveal a rich informed view of Woolson’s engagement with postbellum American society. Best yet, Brehm reveals resonances between the deeply politically polarized postbellum America and the equally polarized America of our own time. She makes an irresistible case for Woolson’s relevance to America today while simultaneously grounding her texts in post-Civil War America.
-- Jacqueline Justice, Bowling Green State University-Firelands College
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1. “The Lady of Little Fishing” (1874) and “Castle Nowhere” (1875): The Politics of Race and Money
Chapter 2. “Mission Endeavor” (1876): Jerusalem on Lake Superior
Chapter 3. “Mrs. Edward Pinckney” (1879): Interracial Marriage in the Post-Bellum South
Chapter 4. “A Florentine Experiment” (1880): J. P. Morgan and the Responsibilities of Wealth
Chapter 5. For the Major (1882): Lies, Secrets, Silence
Chapter 6. Horace Chase (1893): Gilded Age Sense and Sensibility
Chapter 7. “A Waitress” (1894): American Complacency at the Fin de Siècle
Conclusion
Bibliography
About the Author
