WHITEWASHING America

When Scarlett O’Hara determines to conquer the heart of Ashley Wilkes in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936), she understands that it will take the perfect dress and a tiny waist. Therefore, she cannot conquer alone; she calls in Mammy, who urges her to wear the proper style of dress and lectures her about ladylike behavior. Mammy, in fact, shows herself to understand the rules shaping femininity even as she violates all of them. She shuffles into Scarlett’s room with a tray of food in her “large black hands”; she is a “huge old woman” and a “shining black, pure African”—but she cautions Scarlett against “ ‘gittin freckled affer all de buttermilk Ah been puttin’ on you all dis winter’ ” (25, 80). Most memorable, of course, is when Mammy laces up Scarlett’s corset, cinching her tiny waist to seventeen inches to fit her green muslin dress. Scarlett readies herself, “bracing herself and catching firm hold against of one of the bedposts. Mammy pulled and jerked vigorously and, as the tiny circumference of whalebone-girdled waist grew smaller, a proud, fond look came into her eyes” (81).

This shrinking corset manages to romanticize within its fabric the many underpinnings of nineteenth-century femininity, pairing and reconciling the conflicts upon which this femininity depends. First, the lady’s presentation must be constructed. It is built from among understood fashion rules and choices of dress; it is created within the confines of a private, feminine architecture, the lady’s bedroom; it is the product of a collusion of women. Secondly, it depends upon invisible “vigorous” labor: Mammy struggles and tugs while Scarlett struggles to stay put. Finally, Mammy must participate in this construction. Scarlett’s invincible femininity contrasts at every point with Mammy’s mere femalehood. Scarlett is proud of her impossibly small waist—and as America approached the Civil War, corsets grew smaller and fashionable women laced themselves more and more tightly; in contrast, Mammy “lumbers” and “shuffles” her “huge” body and arrives everywhere huffing. Mammy has a shining black African face, but Scarlett bleaches her skin with buttermilk to erase any freckles. Mammy’s dress is simple, although she might adorn herself with garish colors or a turban according to a slave’s taste; Scarlett debates among several dresses, considering the occasion, the time of day, her own personality, and the company she will be keeping.

Mammy’s pride in viewing Scarlett’s fashioned femininity reveals the romanticism of the scene: she not only knows that what “a young miss could do and what she could not do were as different as black and white,” she enforces the difference, and loves her mistress for illustrating it (79). Mammy understands and agrees that a “feminine sphere” exists, has definite boundaries, and must exclude her, despite her mastery of its rules.¹ In this scene, the two women’s bodies become part of a portable geography, and the mistress’s fashionable clothes create a visual segregation even within the same room. The things that became whiter in the early nineteenth century—dishes, house paint, and gravestones, as well as interior walls and furniture, women’s clothing, and the sentimental heroine’s skin—did not only become more ordered and refined. They also came to center around the “woman’s sphere”: the house grew to be gendered as feminine as men left to work outside the home, and the cemetery assumed a feminine aspect with its angelic engravings. The way these white things were used, and by whom, constructed an antebellum understanding of “femininity.” The class implied by white things also underlays this understanding: one had to be able to afford refined white goods in order to manage them properly, so mainly upper- and middle-class women could be deemed feminine. In addition, the things’ whiteness, which sentimental fiction developed as an ideal, included white skin, so that black women were always excluded from a feminine designation.

In antebellum America, “feminine” participated in a set of binaries—feminine and masculine, as well as feminine and female. “Female” designated the corporeal woman, the body made concrete through manual labor or physical marking—blackness, deformity, slovenliness. Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, decries the use of the term “female” because it insists on the body: “ ‘When used to discriminate between the sexes,’ ” she argues, “ ‘the word female is an adjective; but many writers employ the word as a noun, which, when applied to women, is improper, and sounds unpleasantly, as referring to an animal …. It is inelegant as well as absurd’ ” (qtd. in Berlant 272). She refers, in part, to the problem of physicality for women: she enters a conventional struggle where “women and blacks could never shed their bodies to become incorporeal ‘men,’ ” and therefore gain access to the rights and privileges of fully fledged citizens (Sánchez-Eppler, Touching Liberty 3). “Female” signifies a physical form, and therefore ungenders the feminine: according to Hale, the proper woman can best be referred to by adjective, eliding the noun that marks her as a person, place, and thing.

“Feminine,” I would argue, can be better imagined as the proper relationship to material things; the feminine “sphere” can be marked by the range of a woman’s command over these things. Feminine depended upon a seeming contradiction, variously expressed throughout the nineteenth century: the claiming of valuable things joined with a disavowal of their importance. “Masculine” might be read as an opposite, because in it, the desire for goods was not disavowed but rather emphasized: competitiveness and marketplace aggression marked masculinity. The female fell short of femininity in both ways: a working-class woman or slave could not claim expensive things, nor could she unclaim the things she possessed—she had to use them as tools, instruments, in order to earn her living. Lori Merish posits the proper feminine response to things as “sentimental materialism”—its own internal contradiction—which allows women to value products, but only through “loving proprietorship,” not “instrumentalism” (Sentimental Materialism 153). Instrumentalism, the use of a thing as a tool, either for physical work or for social climbing, is unfeminine because it fails to disavow possession. Yet class remained, theoretically, a suspended judgment in relation to gender. A poor woman might demonstrate her femininity by showing the proper relationship to the few things she had; a wealthy woman might exclude herself by valuing her things for their expense or display, or by valuing money over sentimentalized things.

The feminine sphere was therefore a concrete conception: the delimited area where a woman could both claim things and claim not to need them. This relationship was materially expressed largely through white things. Claiming things in the material world, in everyday life, took the form for women of visually allying themselves with their household goods. Through clothing styles, women could match the white things in their houses—the dishes, the furniture, the interior décor—and in the cemetery. Clothing fashion, following a constantly varying design, traveled throughout the feminine sphere tying all things together visually. This same fashion disavowed her claim by so manipulating her body as to suggest a disembodiment and link her to a spiritual world where refined goods could not possibly be an economic benefit to her. The corset rendered her body as thin and unsubstantial as possible; her clothing matched the furniture and allowed her body to blend in with its surroundings; her modestly downcast eyes directed the gaze elsewhere. At the same time, the popular depiction of women in literature and the graveyard remained, in spite of fashion, a simple white dress. The sentimental heroine’s ubiquitous white dress was nod to both a classically ordered society and the Quaker’s spirituality, and was cast as the ideally feminine clothing. In addition, the white dress was a blank slate, a denial of fashion’s materialism, as well as a disavowal of the “things” it referred to—including the woman’s own body. Popular cemetery trends in the early nineteenth century worked along with other white things, to separate the body from the spirit, but to render the spirit physically accessible and at the same time feminine. Indeed, “femininity” as established by one’s relationship to things is not a bodily identity at all, but a claim by the mistress that her body is a disconnected, tightly controlled white thing among the other refined white things in the household. Her corset and clothing speak not of ownership of this body, but merely of management of it—just as the mistress manages her white china and household furniture.

Through this visual disembodiment she also rescued herself from being another white thing, merely one of the collection of refined household goods owned by the male householder, since she could be separate from her own body and from her body’s physicalizing labor. The things were her domain even if not her possessions; she herself was not part of that domain—as she was “in the world but not of it”—and therefore not possessible. Femininity as an articulated identity was an expansion of the bodily identity—a woman’s things were a part of her; her household was a “second body.” The feminine woman therefore ruled a realm more farflung than the effusive and uncontrolled, perspiring and uncorseted, corporeal limits of the working female. Thus imaged, however, femininity could be exercised only within a carefully controlled environment, and in this way was entrapping and constrictive—only as mobile as the woman’s household or another specially designed setting. Such a built identity was necessarily a source of anxiety: a woman’s best-loved things might be lost or appropriated and therefore compromise her femininity; at the same time, a male was always in danger of becoming feminine should he use or value these things in a feminine way. Mammy’s participation in Gone with the Wind is therefore a crucial twentieth-century review of romanticized femininity. Mammy voluntarily, even lovingly, refrains from encroaching upon Scarlett’s sphere, and therefore saves Scarlett from the female power negotiations constantly enacted in actual antebellum households.

The sympathy imagined between white and black women, based on sex, was reproduced in a feminized version of the Wedgwood abolition china, figuring a black female silhouette kneeling and crying, “Am I not a woman and a sister?” Such sisterhood was imagined in both directions: women’s rights activists adopted an argument of “sex slavery”: according to Karen Sanchez-Eppler, the abolitionist-feminist could “ ‘emphasize the similarities in the condition of women and slaves’ ” although the “alliance attempted … is never particularly easy or equitable” (“Bodily Bonds” 414, 409). Unlike the efforts of industrial reformers, whose use of “wage slavery” was contested both by ex-slave abolitionists and by slavery apologists, the women’s rights movement’s connecting slavery to wifehood was not protested—both institutions depended upon the power of “patriarchy” (Roediger, “Race” 182). The connections between women and slaves, but not between industrial workers and slaves, rested in the physical fact of freedom: though factory workers might be materially poorer than well-treated slaves, they could leave their position without physical threat. Wives, like slaves, legally owned no property and could not travel alone. Mary Chestnut from South Carolina felt the connection strongly enough to claim, “ ‘There is no slave, after all, like a wife’ ” (qtd. in Donaldson and Jones 3).

Sojourner Truth echoes the ceramic plea for sisterhood in her of often-anthologized “Ar’n’t I a Woman?” But her question is disingenuous, as she displays her body, her muscles, and her ability to labor, as proof that women do not need excessive protection. She allies the “niggers of de South and de women at de Norf” against white men and solicits applause among abolitionist-feminists (to use Sánchez-Eppler’s term). But though she disputes the white construction of femininity by saying, “Dat man ober dar say dat women needs to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have de best place eberywhar. Nobody eber helps me into carriages, or ober mud-puddles, or gives me any best place,” she ultimately cannot claim company with the “women at de Norf.” In the article reporting her speech in 1851, Frances Gage concludes her praise by stating of Truth, “She had taken us up in her great strong arms and carried us safely over the slough of difficulty, turning the whole tide in our favor.”² Gage re-establishes the privilege of feminine weakness and merely transfers the labor from men’s arms to those of a black woman. Similarly, though Hale emphatically denounces the use of the noun “female” as animalistic, she reveals that exemption from this term does not apply to the working class. Boasting that her Godey’s Lady’s Book supports many women for its production, she claims, “Not to reckon the host of female writers, who are promptly paid, there are besides more than one hundred females, who depend for their daily bread on the money they receive for colouring the plates of fashion, stitching, doing up the work, and so on” (Dec. 1842, qtd. in Piepmeier 193, italics in original). The writers, perhaps, enjoy the advantage of the adjective, but the manual laborers cannot claim as much.

Gillian Brown traces the way “both labor and women are divested of their corporeality” through a “[d]isengagement from the body that labors,” since “to be a working body is virtually to be a slave.” Figuring women’s work as spiritual exercise, writers such as Catharine Beecher render the body performing it ethereal; further, the body could be dissociated from the individual self (Gillian Brown 63–64). The equation, fully borne out in fashion but articulated through the progression of gravestones, was that manual labor required a body, a laboring body was a slave, and slaves were black; whiteness therefore required the absence of visible labor and, to be safe, the absence of a visible body. The feminine sphere was the narrow space where such fictions, with the help of servants and specialized architecture, could possibly be performed.

The possibility of becoming a “pure spirit,” the necessity of its being white, and the importance of its femininity was established within the cemetery among the gravestones. In the nineteenth century, the cemetery became a feminine domain.³ In an early study of New England gravestones, Dethlefsen and Deetz note that the inscriptions on eighteenth-century stones “indicate a heavy paternal bias,” since stones for women and children name ties such as “wife of” and “child of” while stones for adult men simply state their names. This bias weakens, however, at the turn of the century, as seen by the use of a “Mr.” or “Mrs.,” or the deceased’s name alone. From 1840 until 1900, they argue, “some slight maternal bias is present,” shown by the stones’ naming the wife first or using larger letters for the wife’s name (509). Those who could not read could also believe the cemetery to be a new part of the feminine realm, however; a cult of piety imaged the cemetery as an extension of the home, and the markers themselves displayed designs explicitly linked with femininity. When Justice Joseph Story dedicated Mount Auburn cemetery in 1831, he announced his wish “ ‘to provide a home there with our friends, and to be blest by a communion with them’ ” (Combs 190). The theme of heaven as the site of the protected or re-united household occurs throughout the nineteenth century in consolation literature and on epitaphs, and the cemetery is the physical entranceway to heaven. Reverend Theodore Cuyler offers to bereaved parents the hope that “ ‘as this link is formed with the heavenly world, may you be gathered there at last, an unbroken household’ ” (Combs 189). Heaven became the site of the ultimately idealized household. In this way, women came to take charge of issues surrounding the cemetery and death, as these were extensions of their rightful place, the home.

Trade card for the W. B. Corset. Disembodied corset, topped by a cherub design, linking the feminine with the cemetery.

As the use of darker slate in the eighteenth century waned and was replaced by use of white marble around the turn of the nineteenth century, the popular motifs displayed on gravestones changed as well. Death’s-head designs appeared early—before 1750—to be replaced after 1760 by a cherub design. As stones began to be purchased in white marble, the popular design became “urn-and-willow” in the early nineteenth century (Dethlefsen and Deetz 508). The changes in gravestone iconography were also accompanied by an altered apprehension of the connection between body and spirit, or body and self, as seen on gravestone inscriptions. A popular example from the earliest slate stones contains the sentiment, “Remember me as you pass by”:

Indicating the deceased on these stones took the form of statements such as, “ ‘Here lies …’ ” or “ ‘Here lies buried… ’ ” (Deetz, Small Things 71). These phrases meet with the death’s-head design in emphasizing the physical reality of death and perhaps a reluctance to expect anything better than decomposition. When motifs merged into cherubs, with fleshier faces and happier expressions, the inscriptions turned to “ ‘Here lies the body of … ’” or “ ‘what was mortal of …’ ” (71). Deetz suggests that the addition of these few words signals a new emphasis on resurrection. The gravestone marks the burial not of the person, but of the body alone—the soul has traveled elsewhere. The power of the deceased’s speech then wanes, and epitaphs discontinue their direct addresses to the viewer. In an example of a cherub stone, the epitaph addresses the viewer but refers to the dead in the third person:

The detachment of the spirit from the body is here a matter of display, presuming an audience. The cherub design, generally found on dark slates, nonetheless is a fleshed and happier version of the leering skull design it replaces. At the same time, the cherub face has no body, and somewhat feminine features.

As gravestone design shifted to the urn-and-willow, inscriptions began to exclude the viewer altogether. On the white stones of the nineteenth century, the deceased were usually memorialized with “Sacred to the Memory of…” Deetz reads in this change a depersonalization of the marker and a “secularization of religion,” since the deceased is more often praised for worldly accomplishments on these stones (72). Indeed, these depersonalized messages appear as the stones shift to white, and one of the most popular motifs is the image of an urn memorial over which a female figure mourns, or sometimes a grieving woman and children. Although this picture calls to mind a widow grieving over her lost husband, in Charleston, South Carolina, churchyards even the gravestones for adult women generally depicted mourning females.⁴ These images of grieving women, while they acknowledge a viewer, never address one: they become a white portrait of a woman dissociated from the world, even as they publicly display her. Where a body-spirit division on earlier stones allowed for a feminine disembodiment, the later “depersonalized” feminine portraits replaced her body with a detached white thing, and then affected not to notice an outside gaze. The same femininity is expressed repeatedly in Godey’s Lady’s Book: the drawings of fashion models are standardized, white-skinned blonde ladies with eyes downcast (Halttunen). The downcast eyes disavow attention, even as the images display fashion. Gravestone motifs performed the same work: to detach the body from the spirit and embody the spirit instead in refined white goods and images.

Women used clothing fashion likewise to ally themselves with their household furnishings, architecture, and dishes, thereby designating all as part of the feminine domain and marking themselves with the whiteness of their things. As the nineteenth century began, popular styles in dishes and women’s dress paralleled architectural house paint trends. In the first years of the nineteenth century, women commonly dressed in “classically draped white gowns … drawn in at a high ‘empire’ waist” which “displayed plain surfaces and clean, vertical lines, with a minimum of distracting ornamentation” (Halttunen 73–74). At the same time, undecorated creamware adorned the fashionable, higher-class tables. Meanwhile, Roman classicist houses, popular from 1790 to 1830, showed the verticality of plain white columns and moldings.⁵

By the early 1820s, just when paneled, colorfully rimmed dishes appeared, “classical dress had been fully transformed into romantic dress” (De Cunzo 90). The romantic gown “was a profusion of flounces, flowers, ruching, thick piping, and colored ribbons, and was further ornamented with plenty of jewelry” (Halttunen 74). It “disguised the body with tight lacing, padding, and whalebone supports, and called attention largely to the costume itself” (Halttunen 75). The paneled ceramics echoed the paneled dress of fashionable women: the shift of focus from the flesh to its containers took place on both the table and its mistress. These decades also gave rise to Gothic revival houses, with all their ornamental trim. Glassie further documents the white homes with many-colored trim appearing at this time in folk housing, which was far less responsive to architectural trends.

By the time Glassie notes houses becoming monochromatically white, ceramic manufacturers had produced a completely white ironstone and female fashion had shifted to a sentimental gown, ideally rendered in white. In 1836, clothing styles changed abruptly to a “sentimental form [which] was long and willowy, with narrow, sloping shoulders and a slender, lengthening waist” (Halttunen 75). A shift to a “willowy” fashion in clothing coincides with the appearance of willow patterns on tableware, and to the predominance of the “willow-and-urn” design appearing on the nearly universally white marble gravestones. The inside of the house, argues Beverly Gordon, corresponded to the woman’s clothing as well—aesthetically and technologically. At mid-century, the furniture of the women’s rooms such as the parlor was draped in “richly textured cloth” in lambrequins or valances (Gordon 296). The “scalloped edgings and fringes of these valances” she continues, “also echoed the undulating edges of the trim on fashionable women’s dresses.” Furthermore, construction of women’s dress mirrored the construction of home decoration: at mid-century, the crinoline of hoop skirts was shaped by the use of “lightweight steel hoops as structural support,” which was “paralleled in furniture design by the use of steel springs as an internal support in the upholstery”—a technology available for furniture by 1830, but not popular until it was also used in clothing in the late 1850s (Gordon 296, 297).

As the house was viewed as feminine, rooms were defined by gender within the house as well. Specifically masculine rooms included the study or library and any number of smoking rooms, billiard rooms, and “odd rooms” depending on the extravagance of the house (Spain 117). The study, as a wholly masculine domain, was where the gendered topics of business and politics could be freely discussed (Spain 123). Some cottage design books suggested that the study have a separate entrance so that “gentlemen with a ‘professional occupation or literary taste’ could come and go without disturbing the family.” The dining room and parlor were designed for co-recreational contact, although the parlor was deemed feminine (Spain 123). But beyond the parlor, the feminine rooms were kept private—the upstairs nursery and the kitchen in the basement or the back of the house were not intended for visitors’ view. The bedroom, also a strictly feminine and strictly private room, was usually isolated to the back of the house or the upstairs. Victorian houseplans often did not even label the bedrooms out of “a sense of modesty” (Snyder 16).

Furthermore, furniture was designed in the early decades to address its user as much as its use. Michael J. Ettema argues that from the 1840s to the 1870s, when refined furniture partook of codes of conspicuous consumption but before it came to be designed for “art” or “aesthetics,” furniture design “was primarily categorized by social situations of use” (193). The rigidity and complexity of furniture design was determined by the degree of formality associated with a room and its occupants: the “hall was the most formal, followed by the reception room, drawing room, dining room, library, sitting room, bedroom, kitchen, and finally, servants’ rooms.” Each room required “its appropriate ceremonies, postures, gestures, and topics of conversation” (193). The furnishings of each informed the visitor of his or her degree of welcome and of the formality required, and each room enforced this formality by the structure of its furnishings. For example, the hall chairs were generally straight-backed and unpadded, with a plank seat “because it would not be damaged by contact with wet or soiled outer garments; because it contributed to the stern, somewhat intimidating grandeur of the hall; and possibly because it was uncomfortable” (Ames 32). Degree of formality and depth of admittance into the house spoke of the visitor’s class as well: Clarence Cook writes that because only socially inferior visitors are kept waiting in the hall, “ ‘messenger boys, book-agents, the censusman and the bereaved lady who offers us soap, … considerations of comfort may be allowed to yield to picturesqueness’ ” (Ames 34).

The distinctions between “formal” and “informal” merged with the gendered divisions of “private” and “hidden.” Servant quarters, the kitchen, and work areas were generally in the back of the house beyond numerous formal barriers. In upper- and middle-class houses, labor and blackness were cast beyond these boundaries, hidden and denied to public view. The privilege of such privacy declared upper-class status and refinement and belonged to the construction of white femininity. Stansell finds that working-class women “observed no distinction between public and private” as their work “spread out to the hallways of their tenements, to adjoining apartments and to the streets below” (41). Similarly, Lori Merish finds the narrator’s bursting unannounced into Uncle Tom’s cabin for a readerly tour to be an indication of his slave status, even within the picturesque walls that Stowe has provided him (“Sentimental Consumption”). Within the same novel, Stowe idealizes the dissociation of visible labor from femininity in her portrait of a Northern household, which fully expunges the blackness of slavery but not its implications. “There are no servants,” but the housekeeper still sits in the “family ‘keeping-room,’ ” “sewing every afternoon among her daughters, as if nothing ever had been done, or were to be done,—she and her girls, in some long-forgotten fore part of the day, ‘did up the work,’ and for the rest of the time, probably, at all hours when you would see them, it is ‘done up’ ” (Uncle Tom’s 150, italics in text). Stowe even invokes in this ideal the audience, or visitor to the house, claiming that we would never see the mistresses do work: the place of the proper lady, as far as we ever know, is always the parlor and never the kitchen or cellar.

IN THEIR ALABASTER CHAMBERS

The physical explanation of this “femininity,” based upon having but not desiring, having done but not doing—because other bodies, nonwhite bodies, publicly do the work—is illustrated in two scenes, interestingly cut from the published novel, of Susan Warner’s best-seller The Wide, Wide World (1850). Although the scholarship debates Ellen’s role in the marketplace—whether she ultimately renders herself an “ornament” or actually participates in the marketplace in a sentimental or literal sense—few scholars have noted that her participation in, and shrinking from, the world is clearly marked in racial as well as class terms. Insofar as the novel privileges “female subjectivity” and outlines a strictly feminine struggle and means of coping with it, it also describes an escape from waged labor that characterizes the black servants, the brown farmhands, and nonwhite mercenaries in the story. This escape entails, for Ellen, not only a sentimental self-control and an enclosed domesticity, but also an upper-class refinement and a dismissal of blackness. In the novel’s final chapter, resurrected in the 1987 published version, Ellen Montgomery marries her patriarchal brother-figure, John, and moves into an interior room that he has painstakingly prepared for her. Guiding her through a room full of statues and paintings, John explains to Ellen the intellectual and spiritual import of each item. The “luxury of the mind” that these things represent nonetheless also speaks of material wealth—fine works of art, antique frames, and items from across Europe. Within her “delightfully private” room, which offers access only through John’s room, lies also a beautiful escritoire with “costly antique garniture.” Within one of its drawers lies another “concealed drawer,” and within this lies ample “gold and silver pieces and bank bills.” Ellen shrinks from this stark vision of wealth—“ ‘Money!’ said Ellen, ‘what am I to do with it?’ ”—just as she is horrified to tears when an old gentleman gives her money as a Christmas present (582). But the money, as well hidden as her desire for it, supports the morally charged room. The escritoire, necessarily, has not been purchased but rather inherited, from John’s “father’s mother and grandmother and great-grandmother,” thoroughly establishing a tradition of femininely managed and disavowed materiality. This ultimately elaborated vision of femininity constitutes the happy ending—perhaps understood well enough that Warner could excise it from her published draft. It demonstrates the proper relationship to money—which is to remain hidden, denied, and disavowed, as well as possessed—and also the proper relation to things—explained as moral teachers and sentimental treasures rather than utilitarian devices.

As the novel demonstrates, the improper attitude about money can also deny white women access to the whiteness of material femininity. Aunt Fortune’s industry provides her with white walls and dishes, but her house cannot appear white because she openly values money and because she does not invest her industry in producing refinement, only utilitarian objects. Although the aunt’s name provides a pun as “Miss Fortune,” it also links her to a mercenary domesticity as she runs her farm and performs her own manual labor in order to maximize her profits. Aunt Fortune’s insistence on performing the rough chores of the house, her failure to provide for refined articles such as silver spoons, wash basins, or clothed furniture, marks her as less than white despite her industry and money. She is nearly “masculine” in her acquisitiveness, and nearly “female” in her manual laboring. Accordingly, when Ellen approaches her house for the first time, though she “strained her eyes, [she] could make out nothing,—not even a glimpse of white” (98). Miss Fortune’s house does indeed show a few marks of improvement: the “cheerful-looking” kitchen walls are white. But in Ellen’s initial view, even these white things “were yellow in the light of the flame” (99). Her room, likewise, though “perfectly neat and clean,” is carpetless, with walls “not very smooth nor particularly white” and unpainted doors faded to “a light-brown colour” (102). Attempting to look on “the bright side of things,” Ellen enjoys the novelty of “brown bread,” even though she must breakfast with a primitive two-pronged fork, with Mr. Van Brunt the field hand, and without a silver spoon (106).

On the first day of her stay, Ellen rushes to “find something pleasanter” than the “very brown outhouses” with “very rough walls” and “brown beams and rafters” strewn with rubbish and all manner of “what not” (106–107). In her excursion, however, she muddies her stockings. The reader can sympathize with Ellen despite her obvious class pretensions when Aunt Fortune dyes all of Ellen’s stockings from white to “a fine slate colour”—a clear message that Ellen must struggle alone for the femininity that allows disembodied escape from labor (113). Uncomfortable and dissatisfied, Ellen “seemed in her imagination to see all her white things turning brown” (113). This literal browning signals Ellen’s lifelong trial: Ellen must spend the rest of the novel learning the discipline, self-denial, and piety that she enjoyed with her mother, when all her things were white.

Alice and John Humphrey’s house offers hope for redemption, both in spiritual and classed terms. Alice’s is a “large white house” though not lately painted; within, Alice’s bedroom floor is painted white and covered in the center by a carpet, the curtains are white dimity, the “toilet-table” is “covered with snow-white muslin” (161, 163). In the upper kitchen, Alice dons a white apron and upon a white table rests a “white moulding-board” where she prepares for baking “nice little white things” (168). Alice does not, however, work in the lower kitchen, where the servant does the rough work, and she pities Ellen for her lack of washbasin and other feminine furniture. The redundant whiteness of the household reinforces one of the last lessons delivered by Ellen’s mother as well. Before her final departure, Mrs. Montgomery directs Ellen to a Bible passage: “ ‘And one of the elders answered, stating unto me, What are these which are arrayed in white robes? and whence came they? … And he said unto me, These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb’ ” (28). Later, John interprets for Ellen a white camellia as “the emblem of a sinless pure spirit,—looking up in fearless spotlessness. Do you remember what was said to the old Church of Sardis?— ‘Thou hast a few names that have not defiled their garments; and they shall walk with me in white, for they are worthy’ ” (324–325). White garments, always worn by Ellen whenever her clothing is commented upon, mark the femininity her mother represents: an escape from the dirt that colors her stockings at Aunt Fortune’s, a moral spotlessness that happens to adhere to refined households, and the freedom of being a “pure spirit”—detached from mercenary or bodily concerns.

Ellen ultimately accomplishes an ideal whiteness through a futuristic forgetting, a focus on heaven that can whitewash her things on earth and allow her to transcend the corruption of the market. Lori Merish points to the popular idea, “regularly repeated in architectural pattern books and home decorating texts, that domestic possessions constitute a ‘second body’ ” as evidence of the importance of things in reflecting bodily identity, especially in discussions of race (231). The bodily statement made by things differs according to user, however: for slaves, their specially issued dark things reflect the darkness of skin that determines their slavery, working as a “second body” that over-corporealizes them. For feminine women, white things are instead a replacement for a body; the whiteness of her household reflects her spirituality or bodilessness. Ellen Montgomery’s feminine project likewise achieves whiteness through a process of expunging blackness—racial as well as spiritual.

The second elided scene that helps explain “femininity” was unearthed by Susan L. Roberson; it appeared in Warner’s original draft but was cut in order to shorten the published version. As Roberson reports, the scene occurs in an early chapter after the “old gentleman” has finished helping Ellen purchase her clothes and material. In this scene, Ellen stands on the street eating the figs the gentleman has bought her, when she sees a little black girl in a “dress miserably thin and poor,” “large & clouted” shoes with “great holes through which her feet could be seen peeping out,” and no bonnet or cap. Because Ellen “could not help drawing a comparison between her own condition & that of her less favoured fellow creature,” she offers the girl, Rebecca, her figs. Later, Rebecca appears at Ellen’s hotel apartment to return Ellen’s lost purse, Mrs. Montgomery lectures her about honesty, and Ellen and her mother resolve to visit the girl later with gifts afforded by the money she has returned. When Ellen sees the girl on the streets, Rebecca is foraging for coals discarded in household coal buckets, and her blackness is emphasized by the coal ash covering her hand. But when Ellen returns home and tells her mother about the old gentleman’s kindness and her adventures in shopping, she does not mention the incident with the “little coal carrier,” so that her later appearance is a surprise (Roberson 19–20).

That Warner has written this passage and then “expunged” it, Roberson argues, shows not only “Warner trying to come to terms, if only briefly, with relations between the races and the role of white Americans in alleviating the distress of poor, subjugated black Americans,” but also the “porousness of space” separating class and race.⁶ But Ellen “expunges” this encounter before Warner does: Ellen’s relation with the black girl is forgotten in her account of the day’s shopping. When the Montgomerys later visit Rebecca, they find her living in a cellar marked by a sign reading “Washing done by Mary Ann Richardson.” Here, they meet her mother, a “stout black woman,” whose laundering has brought the marketplace as well as “a variety of unsweet and unsavoury odours” into the home. Rebecca sits “[f]lat on the floor” for lack of furniture. Ellen has sacrificed a new winter bonnet in order to present Rebecca with a “brown stuff” frock and “stout shoes” (24—25). This scene explains even better the flight from blackness that white garments signify throughout the novel. In the expurgated section, Ellen sacrifices a new travelling bonnet, which she can afford because the old gentleman has bought her a new winter bonnet himself, in order to buy Rebecca’s dress and shoes. This sacrifice is marked by the old-fashioned white bonnet she must wear instead when she travels to Aunt Fortune’s later—a scene unexplained in the published novel. The white bonnet therefore represents her earliest gestures of self-sacrifice, for which she suffers mockery by her fashionable fellow travelers. Though her mother has had to pawn her grandmother’s ring to buy clothes, Ellen can still look upon Rebecca’s “round uncovered head” and think of her own “new blue silk hood” and feel “some token” is due to mark her own happier condition (19). Although Ellen is herself the object of charity, she distinguishes herself from the black girl by her feminine rather than manual labor: she sews, while Rebecca digs in coal buckets.

Ellen’s avoidance of blackness and brown-ness manifests itself directly in simple naming that occurs throughout the published novel as well: just as she shrinks from slate-colored stockings, she would rhetorically erase all evidence of stains. When she and Nancy Vawse begin naming the rivers and streams around them, Nancy suggests for one, “Black Falls,” because “the water’s all dark and black” (Warner 122). Ellen exclaims, “Black … why!—I don’t like that” and submits with “Well … let it be Black, then; but I don’t like it” (122). When trying to decide a name for her new horse, she rejects naming him after his color, because “ ‘Brown’ was not pretty” (378). Alice’s early geography lessons hint that Ellen’s erasure is racial as well as color-coded. Ellen prefers not to try naming countries, she says, because “ ‘I can’t remember those queer countries in Asia and South America half so well as Europe and North America’ ” (172). Besides shrinking from the “queer countries” whose inhabitants are predominantly nonwhite, she forgets even to shrink from Africa, a continent certainly notable enough and closely linked to Southern and Northern markets and populations.⁷ Africa, as with the African American characters, is necessarily excluded, but Ellen’s ideal white femininity attempts further to weaken the threat of blackness, lower-classness, and manual labor by erasing the exclusions.

WAIST NOT, WANT NOT

The architecture of a house, the form of the furniture, and the decoration and construction of clothing set out to distance the white woman from her enabling labor and servants. Though the women’s movement might have commiserated with slaves, most white women in the upper classes would not have felt themselves aligned with the household help and would have emphasized the distinctions. To this end, a more popular “slavery” for middle- and upper-class white women was fashion. Godey’s Lady’s Book, although devoted to promoting new dress fashions in an intellectual manner, redounds that “ ‘Fashion is the voluntary slavery which leads us to think, act, and dress according to the judgment of fools’ ” (qtd. in Halttunen 67). While the early nineteenth century saw the popularity of men’s conduct books such as William A. Alcott’s Young Man’s Guide (1833), which “discussed at great length the importance of dress,” fashion became the specific domain of women during these years (Halttunen 40; Merish, Sentimental Materialism 235). Whereas from the beginning of the century men’s fashion adopted a “plain, dark, uniform three-piece suit” that remained relatively constant over the decades, women’s fashions changed frequently and featured bright, ornate decorations, requiring from women a constant vigilance and service to remain in style (Merish, Sentimental Materialism 235). The fashion rules expounded in two volumes of men’s advice books—which were repeatedly reprinted over the decades before the Civil War—required instead weekly and monthly updates for women’s dress, especially in periodicals such as Godey’s Lady’s Book.

Women were associated with clothing from the early stages of its production to the final product: those women who worked in factories largely worked in textile mills, and weaving “homespun” was traditionally a female occupation outside of industry. Sewing and embroidery were viewed as a determinant female skill. Readers of popular literature could expect a woman at leisure nonetheless to be working on needle-work at any time of the day, and genteel women in straightened circumstances could still sew for others as a socially acceptable means of earning a living. The connection between sewing and femininity was “ ‘deemed to be natural’ ” by the nineteenth century: “ ‘Women embroidered because they were naturally feminine and were feminine because they naturally embroidered’ ” (qtd. in Yentsch and Beaudry 229). White middle- and upper-class women’s clothing was the most mobile means to display a household’s wealth and refinement. A contemporary author remarks, “ ‘Fashion says that the chief use of woman is to exhibit dry goods fantastically arranged on her person” (qtd. in Nelson 21). Besides displaying current fashion, and social status based on the elaboration of ornament and expense of the fabric, a woman’s dress also proclaimed the time of day, the activity she was engaged in, and her proper location—“the ballroom gown, lawn party dress, riding habit, walking dress, or morning wrapper” demonstrated her mastery of the etiquette of fashion as precisely as her sets of dishes did (Mattingly 7).

Despite the specificity and variety of fashions sported by women, however, the idealized portrait of the American woman remained simple: in literature, in monuments, and on stage, the ideal woman after the Revolution always wore white. Between 1783 and 1815, Americans developed the self-representative figure of Columbia, a “bareheaded, or helmeted,” woman “wearing a simple white dress surrounded with the attributes of freedom” (Cunningham 182). The “classical” style in the first decade of the nineteenth century mimicked this simple whiteness, as women’s fashion imitated not the dress of ancient Greeks but the “appearance of classical statuary” (Halttunen 73). Eventually this simple whiteness became ornamented, and “frills began to appear” by 1803, complicated further by “[f]lounces, vandyked borders, gores, puffed and frilled hems” until replaced around 1822 by “romantic” fashion (Halttunen 74).

Nonetheless, the ideal of the simple white dress remained pre-eminent, as represented by Stowe’s Little Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1854). The most famous feminine symbol of the century, Little Eva is “[a]lways dressed in white,” never “contracting spot or stain,” with “long golden-brown hair that floated like a cloud” around her head, a “deep spiritual gravity” in her “violet blue eyes,” and always a “half smile on her rosy mouth” (230–231). The Veiled Lady of Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance (1852), whom the narrator Coverdale confesses to love at the end, also appears as an untouchable, spiritual mist: her figure “came gliding upon the platform, enveloped in a long veil of silvery whiteness,” and she remains unaffected by all attempts to shake her otherworldly composure (185). The literature likewise makes a clear connection between a woman’s white dress and her spirituality. Indeed, Godey’s Lady’s Book, as it advises young ladies on the “True Principles of Dress” in 1845, reminds its readers that if they “recall the works of any good author, his description of his heroine (that mirror of perfection) will be a rigid adherence in the same rule: as, for example: ‘Her dress was of simple white muslin, flowing in graceful folds even to her feet’ ” (326). The magazine offers to “multiply examples” of this standard, but wishes instead that ladies “look for themselves, and find cause to prove the truth of this assertion.” Thus the periodical invested in fashion variation and complexity appeals to literature for the ideal conception of female dress—white and flowing—even as it contradicts it on surrounding pages.

As textile manufacture made material more available to lower classes and female factory workers gained possible means to buy these goods, control over clothing and access to fashion became a space for contesting class and race constructions. Godey’s Ladys Book admonishes women to dress according to class; like flowers, they should seek the “accordance of the dress of the blossom with the plant beside which it dwells.” Beneath the prepositions, Godey’s cautions its readers against spending a disproportionate amount on clothing or becoming “overpowered by too much vanity” and attempting to “outshine [their] companions in color and material beyond their grasp” (vol. 28: 326). Just as with dishes and housing design, clothing was a “barrier which had to be surmounted by those entering the more privileged bourgeois circles and as a standard which could be applied to the claims of those seeking admission from below” (Halttunen 62). Competitive dressing, or overt imitation of the fashion standards designating a higher class, would have been a violation of the feminine disavowal of instrumental things. More gravely, inordinate interest in fashion could be viewed as a moral issue for working-class women—a temptation to prostitution as both a means and an occasion to wear fine clothes (Valverde). The Society for the Relief of Poor Widows claimed in 1822 that “ ‘the greatest proportion of the Misery, and Poverty which actually exists among the lower classes in this City, arises principally from the two following causes—viz.—Intemperance among the men, and the Love of dress among the Women’ ” (qtd. in Stansell 164, 44n). At mid-century, a magazine editor called for the return of the tradition of servant girls who would wear the clothes of a menial, “ ‘which differed in make and material diametrically from the “robe” or “gown,” worn by the lady mistress’ ” (qtd. in Stansell 165).

Fashion depended upon visible contrasts in its assertion of femininity; the transferability of such material identity meant that class and racial distinctions in clothing were carefully guarded by the upper classes. Slaves and free black women also recognized clothing as an important ingredient to femininity, sometimes rejecting the slave-issue clothing and imitating the white mistress. Former slave Maggie Black recalls for interviewers “her own efforts to imitate [white women’s] wide skirts by using vines for hoops” (Weiner 14). Another slave woman remembers, “ ‘We wore hoop skirts on Sunday jest like the white folks. I never did like them things; if you didn’t sit down this-a-way, that old hoop skirt would shoot up like this. I never had no use for them things’ ” (Weiner 114–115). This unidentified slave shows the elements of a battle between white and slave women, but also the intricate construction of femininity based on white goods.

An imitation of fashion should be read as a claim to ladyhood, as ladyhood was depicted through clothing. The sameness of dress constitutes only one part of femininity, however, as the unidentified slave testifies. Though she wears hoop dresses on Sundays, she never does, in fact, have a “use” for them: they cannot signify femininity unless accompanied by the feminine furniture and household, as well as white skin. If she sits the wrong way, the slave claims, her skirt “shoots up,” rendering her ridiculous rather than genteel; white women in the big house had specially designed chairs to accommodate their enormous skirts and rescue them from such disasters, as well as training in the proper way to manage their bodies as they sat and stood. Chairs designed specifically for ladies had bracket arms or no arms, in order to accommodate the hoop skirt (Robertson 81). Slave furniture, on the other hand, remained unspecialized at best: for example, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, slaves arrive at Uncle Tom’s to sing hymns, bringing their own seats—barrels with boards laid across them, and overturned “tubs and pails”—as even Aunt Chloe’s “rickety chairs are moved away” (30). The unidentified slave woman, if allowed to sit in the planter’s house, would be afforded only the uncomfortable lower-class chairs—where she could hardly “use” her hoop skirt at all.

On the plantation, the mistress was generally in charge of preparing clothes for the slaves, at least cutting the cloth for others to stitch, to ensure that fitting was correct and distribution fair (Weiner 43). Slave clothing was typically made of “negro cloth” or simply handed-down clothing from the white householders, following a pattern similar to ceramic distribution. Clothing for slaves was recognized legally as powerfully constructive of identity: laws in many Southern states forbade slaves to wear clothing resembling that of their masters. Slave laws in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822 decreed that “ ‘Negroes should be permitted to dress only in coarse stuffs such as coarse woolens or worsted stuffs for winter—and coarse cotton stuffs for summer … every distinction should be created between the whites and the negroes, calculated to make the latter feel the superiority of the former’ ” (qtd. in Stachiw 35). The free use of finer clothing, the law claims, had given slaves “ ‘ideas not consistent with their condition and made them “insolent to whites”’ ” (qtd. in Merish, Sentimental Materialism 238). While house slaves in particular might receive handed-down clothes—as one former slave recalls, “ ‘[M]aster’s children and his wife would have white cotton suits made, and after they got tired of them they would give them to us’ ”—and thereby acquire the white clothing of the ruling class, some states “denied slaves the right to wear clothing that appropriated the status of free whites, even when those clothes were deemed no longer adequate for white masters” (qtd. in Starke 70; Mattingly 11).

Most slaves, however, as field hands, received an allotment of clothing once or more during the year—shirts and pants of wool and cotton, and shoes, with distinctions made only for summer and winter. Women would have received dresses, although one former slave recalls that slave women would “cut up men’s pants to make ‘pantalets’ ” (Starke 70). An insistence on coarseness in the material, as well as a broad disregard for specialized clothing based on activity or time of day—even, for women, a disregard of gendered clothing—trumpeted the differences between white and black on the plantation. Even as Frederick Law Olmsted surveys a gang of mixed-sex slave workers, he recoils from black women who appear so distant from feminine fashion. In his example, slave women work alongside the men, repairing a road with their skirts tucked up, wearing heavy shoes and men’s caps or handkerchiefs. Taught no feminine refinement by their unladylike clothes and occupation, the women in particular suit their animal-like housing. Olmsted describes them as “[c]lumsy, awkward, gross, elephantine in all their movements; pouting, grinning, and leering at us; sly, sensual, and shameless in their demeanour: I never before had witnessed, I thought, anything more revolting” (162). Olmsted traces these women’s degraded capacity to their clothing as a natural course and nearly concludes that their character suits them to their situation, since they seem fat enough and unconscious of their misery.

Not coincidentally, these women belong to a degraded plantation, and their housing reflects and enforces their brutalized character. In the Carolinas, where most houses for whites were made of logs “hewn but little,” with the spaces between the logs “not‘ chinked,’ or filled up in any way; nor … lined on the inside,” the slave cabins were respectively more humble. Here, the cabins were the smallest he has seen—twelve feet square, “built of logs, with no windows—no opening at all, except the doorway, with a chimney of sticks and mud …. I should have conjectured that it had been built for a powder-house, or perhaps an icehouse—never for an animal to sleep in” (161). His final choice of words then seems ironic: far from producing “anything … revolting,” the plantation hovels attempt to convince not only the slaves but a sympathetic outsider of the propriety of the institution.

In Olmsted’s estimation, the femininity marked by dress lays claim to social status and class as well. Lori Merish asserts that “[b]lack women’s appropriation of fashion commodities can be read as an effort to dislodge the black female body symbolically from slavery’s processes of ungendering and inscribe that body as ‘feminine,’ thus claiming the privileges of gender in nineteenth-century civil society” (Merish, Sentimental Materialism 236). Another slave asserts equality on the grounds of clothing—Lila Nichols from North Carolina describes her mistress’s attempts to whip another female slave, “ ‘[A]n’ de ’oman sez ter her, “No sir, Missus, I ain’t ‘lowin’ nobody what war de same kind of skirt I does ter whup me”’ ” (qtd. in Weiner 122). As Nichols attests, this is a conversation among women: the rebellious female slave refuses to be whipped—subjected bodily and physically marked—by someone in the “ ‘same kind of skirt.’ ” Her claims are two-fold. If her mistress indeed wears a skirt of the same material, her slave claims a class equality that weakens the mistress’s dominance. If she intends to imply that they both wear skirts, the slave is claiming sisterhood—a shared gender—that also challenges the dominance of one over the other. Either way, the slave understands the material makings of gender and claims “femininity” as a class, gender, and ultimately racial construct through this article of clothing.

As this female attests, clothing could be a transferable signifier of class and femininity; in response, “white middle-class women typically complained of the ‘inordinate development of negro women’s love for dress’ ” (Mattingly 11). As the Industrial Revolution made corsets more universally available, the complaint extended to lower-class women as well (Steele 36). While upper-class women “liked to think of themselves as distinctively different from the laboring classes,” and “[c]aricatures not infrequently contrasted the ample torsos of working-class women with the diminutive corsets worn by bourgeois ladies,” working-class women of the United States wore corsets as well, even in factory work. Slave women and free blacks might also wear corsets, especially the house slaves (Steele 49). Nonetheless, corsets, especially tightly laced as they became in the mid-nineteenth century, combined with dress fashion to render the fashionable lady incapable of heavy labor. The sentimental style popular after 1836 consisted of a small top and tight sleeves, “making it virtually impossible for the wearer to raise her arms above a right angle to her body” (Halttunen 75). In addition, the petticoat, designed to add fullness to the skirt, was worn “five or six at a time, [and] impeded a woman by adding to her frame an additional weight of as much as fifteen pounds” (Nelson 23). Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) claims that the corset seemed designed for its “elaborate insistence on the idleness, if not the physical infirmity of the wearer”—or at least “to impress upon the beholder the fact (often indeed a fiction) that the wearer does not and can not habitually engage in useful work” (182, 179). The corset could be a visual denial of work, therefore, but it was also a visual denial of the body. Cartoons compared the corseted figure with examples of female beauty depicted in ancient art, ostensibly arguing that the corseted woman was less beautiful because unnatural. But such cartoons also illustrate the feminine woman as unbodily, by the contrast her shape has to an actual female body. The contrast was rendered even more spectacular, then, when cartoons and literary descriptions drew working-class and slave women as thick or corpulent. Thus the corset colludes with household architecture in implying that the lady does not work; indeed it requires the laboring force that it defines itself against for the leisure it proclaims.

Corsets were nearly always white, made of “white cotton or linen, or at most white satin” (Steele 39). Though always hidden beneath the clothes in the nineteenth century, patterns for stays were also regularly displayed in magazines such as Godey’s Lady’s Book—of course, without a female body inside them (Steele 40). One fashion magazine states, “ ‘The corset is an ever-present monitor indirectly bidding its wearer to exercise self-restraint: it is evidence of a well-disciplined mind and well-regulated feelings’ ” (qtd. in Nelson 23). At the same time, the corset was considered an “unmentionable”: as late as 1947 a fashion book illustrating nineteenth-century dresses shied from direct reference to it. James Laver’s Costume Illustration (1947) explains that around 1820 the “skirt swelled out (many petticoats beginning to be worn underneath) and the other device adopted, to make the waist look even smaller than it was” (3, emphasis mine). Hidden, the corset nonetheless becomes evidence; encasing the body, it nonetheless signals a controlled mind and emotions. In their simultaneous status as “unmentionable” and expected, in their everyday use and literary popularity, corsets functioned as white things in the same way dishes, fashion, and houses did, with the feminine addition of disavowing its power.

RE-MOTTLED KITCHENS

The securing of a tight corset and fashionable dress could be a ritual establishing race, therefore, but one inviting certain problems for an abolitionist writer. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe reveals the tension in the supposed sisterhood between slaves and mistresses when Eliza appeals to Mrs. Shelby about Mr. Shelby’s plans to sell her son. The novel’s clothing scenes demonstrate the anxiety of femininity’s resting in the hands of one not invested in it—of the dependence of femininity on the symbolic image and physical labor of the black woman, who by definition can neither participate in nor benefit from this gendered ideal. Conflicts in the novel’s racialist treatment of slaves throughout can be viewed in light of the antebellum “Negro problem”: how does a white woman protect femininity when it depends upon a self-willed, human support? The plot of Uncle Tom’s Cabin is motivated largely in exploring solutions to this problem: the white woman can gain the sympathy and support of the excluded black female; she can continue to depend on her servant but keep her hidden away; or she can send her away entirely. Stowe tests the success of each of these: with the first, the supportive slave must be constantly supervised and negotiated with in order to maintain her fidelity. For the second, slaves continually unsettle the hidden-ness of their work by appearing, observing, and talking back. Stowe is left with the final alternative only—self-willed blacks must leave the country or die.⁸ Stowe later voices a concern that “ ‘the essential animus of the slave system still exists’ ” in the relationship between housekeepers and their servants; in an article called “A Family Talk on Reconstruction” in 1869, Stowe worries that the “ ‘desire to monopolize and to dominate’ ” will manifest itself with domestic employees, suggesting that the mistress-slave relationship would remain a constant temptation even without its legal sanction.⁹ A household “without servants” is the only solution—although, I would argue, Stowe’s reformed domesticity continues to rely on the racial underpinnings of conspicuous leisure. The visible expulsion of labor by its always already being “done up” depends upon the slavery-induced flight from physicality informing femininity.

In the novel’s opening scene, Eliza obtains information that her mistress is not privy to, because, as a slave, Eliza listens at the door while Mr. Shelby agrees to the sale of Tom and her son Harry. Eliza moves between the masculine realm of men discussing business in the parlor and the feminine realm of Mrs. Shelby’s bedroom. Although the subject of the conversation, she is also a disrupter in the household, through her mobility among realms and her observant presence. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Gillian Brown argues, slavery “undermines women’s housework by bringing the confusion of the marketplace into the kitchen, the center of the family shelter” (16). The slave’s presence in the household does create this disruption: that the slave conflates work and home in her person is bad, but what is worse is that her status as “ungendered” gives her a mobility that undermines the masculine and feminine realms of her owners. As Eliza tries to learn more about her son’s sale, Mrs. Shelby calls her away—so Eliza can dress her. Eliza’s problem is introduced to Mrs. Shelby, purportedly a “woman of a high class, both intellectually and morally,” when Eliza upsets the wash pitcher and work stand, “and finally was abstractedly offering her mistress a long nightgown in place of the silk dress she had ordered her to bring from the wardrobe” (Stowe, Uncle Toms 20, 18). Though she will be properly sympathetic towards Eliza when she learns the news from her husband, in this scene Mrs. Shelby is disturbed by Eliza’s attack on her femininity, as well as her momentary visibility created by her failure to do her job smoothly. The wash pitcher and work stand are feminine furnishings, marking Mrs. Shelby’s class status, as cleanliness still reflected refined living, and her intellectual development, as the work stand was a feminine desk for personal rather than business letters. Mrs. Shelby is preparing for “an evening visit,” and Eliza’s offer of a nightgown in place of a silk dress is a shocking affront to Mrs. Shelby’s modesty, class status, and awareness of time-appropriate fashions.

Her response to Eliza seeks to restore the household balance by constructing a strictly feminine sphere, where black and white women can co-exist peacefully, apart from masculine integration. She does so, however, first by over-feminizing Eliza, and then by re-establishing a racial hierarchy between the females. She denies that Mr. Shelby intends to sell Harry, exclaiming, “ ‘Sell him! No, you foolish girl! … Why, you silly child, who do you think would want to buy your Harry? Do you think all the world are set on him as you are, you goosie?’ ” (19). Her protests attempt at each pause even further to infantilize Eliza, from mother to “girl” to “child” to “goosie.” Rhetorically rendered a toddler, Eliza cannot seriously offend: Mrs. Shelby can imagine that Eliza’s foolishness rather than her distress has led her to disregard fashion and that Eliza cannot really understand what she sees when she trespasses into improper realms. Mrs. Shelby then seeks to reassure Eliza through the ritual of constructing Mrs. Shelby’s own femininity: she continues, “ ‘Come, cheer up, and hook my dress. There now, put my hair back up in that pretty braid you learnt the other day, and don’t go listening at doors anymore’ ” (19). Mrs. Shelby re-negotiates her servant’s support here, positioning herself as mother to the “goosie” and sister to the hairdresser. As a caveat, however, she adds a command, in the position of mistress, to avoid the need for further negotiations: stay hidden and immobile when not serving—don’t go listening at doors.

The novel moves from Eliza to an unshakably reliable slave, Aunt Chloe, who combines evidence of an investment in femininity and contentment with her exclusion from it. The easy intrusion into Uncle Tom’s cabin as the narrator states, “Let us enter the dwelling” marks it as a slave dwelling, but also signifies the occupants’ willingness to be supervised (Merish, “Sentimental Consumption”). Indeed, in the family scene following, the slaves’ attention remains on the white master, Mas’r George, as he eats Aunt Chloe’s cooking and corrects Uncle Tom’s writing. The cabin itself displays an investment in white middle-class femininity. On the outside, flowers cover its “rough logs,” leaving “scarce a vestige … to be seen” (28). Inside, Aunt Chloe has carved out a “drawing room,” consisting of a piece of carpeting that for Aunt Chloe signifies “the upper walks of life” and a bed “covered neatly with a snowy spread.” This portion of the “snug” cabin imitates middle-class fashion and pretensions and shows, with the flowers, Aunt Chloe’s valuing of these pretensions. But it is the other corner of the cabin that is “designed for use.” (29, italics in text). Here, there rests a “much humbler” bed, scriptural prints on the wall, a portrait of George Washington colored black. Elsewhere, for use, are a table “somewhat rheumatic in its limbs,” “cups and saucers of a decidedly brilliant pattern,” and a “cracked teapot” (30, 34). Aunt Chloe “uses” her white bedspread and refined articles in the same way the earlier slave used a hoop dress on Sundays—as a signal of imitation and investment in white middle-class ideology, but also as a collection of things segregated from her everyday life. Aunt Chloe’s practical furnishings mark her rather as a slave, with cracked and handed-down dishes in colorful rather than white patterns.

But Aunt Chloe also displays on her person the “sentimental ideal of transparency,” revealing through her skin a true portrait of her soul—the model for beauty set forth by Godey’s Lady’s Book in what Karen Halttunen calls the “cult of sincerity” (Halttunen 71; 88). Aunt Chloe has a “round, black, shining face … so glossy as to suggest the idea that she might have been washed over with white of eggs” (29). Her blackness, Stowe suggests, is enabled and exaggerated by the whiteness washed over it, just as her cabin is all the more clearly a slave cabin because middle-class pretensions render half of it unusable. She emphasizes for her white master her own bodily blackness and how it fits her for labor. Aunt Chloe narrates a subtle struggle for control of the kitchen when she says to Mrs. Shelby, “ ‘Now, Missis, do jist look at dem beautiful white hands o’ yourn, with long fingers, and all a-sparkling with rings, like my white lilies when de dew’s on ’em; and look at my great black stumpin hands. Now, don’t ye think dat de Lord must have meant me to make de piecrust, and you to stay in de parlor?’ ” (32–33). Claiming control of a territory was one form of slave rebellion, and plantation mistresses had a particular problem supervising the kitchen against territorial cooks (Weiner). A cook for Caroline Merrick in South Carolina also invoked race as architecturally constructed to convince her mistress not to interfere with the cook’s labor: she would say, “ ‘Yer ain’t no manner er use heah only ter git yer face red wid de heat …. Jes’ read yer book an’ res’ easy till I sen’s it ter de dining-room’ ” (Weiner 122–123). Aunt Chloe goes further, recognizing her rebellion as a necessary act in enforcing the God-directed activities allowed to femininity, and her own blackness as a declaration of her mistress’s femininity. Even under the most ideal of slave environments, Stowe suggests with these early examples, labor’s blackness will reveal itself and undermine a white wife and mother’s domestic authority.

The supportive slave functions fairly well under Mrs. Shelby’s capable hands—even George, slave to a cruel master, agrees that Eliza should obey her mistress because of Mrs. Shelby’s kindness (26). The slave cook at the St. Clare plantation, Dinah, commandeers the kitchen in the same way Aunt Chloe does, but Dinah’s organization is secretive and hidden, and her mistress does not supervise. While Mrs. Shelby is an “uncommon” housekeeper, Marie St. Clare is an “unsystematic and improvident housekeeper,” leaving the household slaves to their own devices and lounging lazily about the parlor and breakfast-room complaining about her suffering. When Miss Ophelia begins to organize the house, “hidden things of darkness were brought to light to an extent that alarmed all the principalities and powers of kitchen and chamber” (194). Miss Ophelia finds the slave Dinah’s mode of organization to be “without any sort of calculation as to time and place,” so that supervision and order are impossible (195). She opens drawers containing, amidst nutmegs, onions, old shoes, and hymnbooks, “one or two gilded China saucers with some pomade in them [Dinah’s hair oil] … several damask table-napkins, some coarse crash towels,” along with “a fine damask table cloth stained with blood, having evidently been used to envelop some raw meat” (196). Beyond experiencing the obvious revulsion of eating food that has commingled with shoes and hair oil, Miss Ophelia reacts against the systematic contradictions of the drawer. Dinah uses the master’s display china for her private bodily attentions; she integrates the “working” towels with the dining damask napkins. Even during her “ ‘clarin’ up times,’ “when Dinah scrubs the tables “snowy white” and dons a “smart dress, clean apron, and high, brilliant, Madras turban,” she can accomplish such order only by tucking “everything that could offend … out of sight in holes and corners” (198).

The bloodstained tablecloth encapsulates the danger of this disorder, however: that which is hidden away will continue to haunt and reappear. Revealing that it has “evidently” enclosed raw meat, the marked tablecloth has failed in its purpose to hide the animal aspect of dining, and the bloodstained cloth is much more repulsive than the table it was intended to hide. It discloses its fineness as a veneer over the rawness of the bloody slave institution: in fact, Dinah pollutes the white veneer with this evidence of what has given it shape.¹⁰ These stains, in fact, haunt the narrative, and it is appropriate that they appear on linen. Little Eva’s ideal white dress “never contract[s] spot or stain,” but the working household is in constant danger.

The impulse among white masters to hide slaves while yet to supervise them is seen historically in an exemplary instance of control and design in Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, which has been thoroughly documented since the nineteenth century. The design of Monticello ostensibly was to transform its owner “ ‘into an all-seeing I’ ” where Jefferson might supervise his grounds without being observed; yet he “also went to extraordinary lengths to render his enslaved workforce invisible.” Outside the house, the landscape was arranged to hide slave cabins and work areas; in 1804 Jefferson cleared away wooden sheds and slave cabins along Mulberry Row and built a “ha-ha” at the base of his gardens (Epperson 70). Terrence W. Epperson refers to “ ‘spaces of constructed invisibility’ ” on Jefferson’s plantation: inside the house, “Jefferson developed devices such as dumbwaiters, lazy Susans, and a garde-robe privy that could be emptied from the basement to minimize intimate contact with his slaves” (64, 70). The problem with such ideals of hidden-ness, as in the problems encountered at Monticello, is that the mobile, self-willed workforce will reappear. At Monticello, for example, domestic garbage could never quite be kept from view. William Kelso finds archaeological evidence that drainage from the privy probably washed out onto a carriage road (15). Slave cabins in varying degrees of decay, surrounded by deep layers of trash, and an equally strewn kitchen yard stood between the great house and the garden walks. Carriage turnarounds were paved with trash (Kelso 15–16). Like Jefferson, Miss Ophelia in Uncle Tom’s Cabin would hide “everything that could offend,” but for Ophelia the offenders would be the slaves themselves. The slave Dinah resists this strategy, talking back through the linens and dishware, controlling her realm by refusing supervision. Stowe recognizes that though Ophelia might possibly impose order on Dinah’s kitchen, such organization would only deny, not destroy, the fact of slavery. A proper plantation mistress would not allow a bloodstained linen; she would have the meat cooked and placed in a white dish above the damask tablecloth. But it is only a more civilized version of the same mess.¹¹

Dinah seems perfectly capable of small rebellions in the running of her kitchen, but even as she critiques the system by wrapping meat with a tablecloth, she implicates femininity in her dishwashing. Arguing over slave supervision with his sister, Augustine St. Clare asks, “ ‘Don’t I know … that she washes dishes with a dinner napkin one day, and with a fragment of an old petticoat the next?’ ”. (199). More overtly than she exposes slavery in the tablecloth, she exposes her own participation in femininity with an old petticoat. Because it is underclothing, Dinah’s open use of the petticoat is at least embarrassing; but she washes the dishes with it, soiling a hidden feminine article in the process of cleansing dishes, themselves feminine items meant for display. Dinah’s hand tells the tale that Monticello and other plantations tell, and Miss Ophelia’s Northern home as well: that femininity is unavoidably soiled in its construction of white refinement and that the black hand that prepares both will leave neither fully white.

INSTITUTIONAL WHITES

If Dinah rebels against her mistress’s tyranny by washing the dishes with an old petticoat, fashion reformers sympathized, rebelling against the tyranny of the petticoat itself. In response to the unhealthy and uncomfortable fashion of tightly laced corsets and multiple petticoats, Amelia Bloomer designed a knee-length walking dress that required no corset, but nonetheless provided for modesty by adding ankle-length pantaloons. Although for a brief period at the turn of the century, corsets fell out of fashion and classical gowns depended upon a “minimum of underclothing,” the Bloomerists’ rejection of stays in the 1850s signaled for detractors “immodesty and immorality” (Halttunen 73; Mattingly 67). By 1851 when Bloomer introduced her design, the corseted dress had become a mark of feminine self-control set against the unrestrained corporeality of slave women and the more flexible work clothing of lower-class women, as well as the simple limb-dividing pantaloons required for men’s maneuverability in the marketplace. Therefore, although doctors and magazine editors initially praised the bloomer design as more healthy and practical, publications soon settled upon criticism and ridicule (Mattingly).

Carol Mattingly examines the progress of the dress reform movement as it was debated in popular periodicals and medical journals. Underpinning negative reactions to bloomers were medical arguments against women in pants, appeals to proper femininity, and subtle racial concerns. The simple demand for bodily comfort voiced by bloomer-wearers confronted the disembodying work of the corset and unnatural fashions; bloomers could be seen as a challenge to “femininity” in general, and a disregard for the racial and class structures used to create it. Petersons magazine states that “ ‘Nature has decided this matter, and there is no escaping Nature. A woman, in walking, moves the lower limbs in a circular sweep. A man moves them straight forward. This any anatomist will declare’ ” (qtd. in Mattingly 77). Appeals to femininity entrusted all of feminine and masculine behavior on the simple corset and skirt, as various articles threatened a complementary end to “gallantry” when femininity was thus abandoned (70–72). Specific opponents attacked Bloomerists’ femininity subtly by connecting them to African American women: one set of opponents made a present of “ ‘the Turkish costume and a gypsey hat’ to a ‘colored lady’ in Syracuse” (73). Elsewhere, a reporter for the New York Daily Times describes a woman in Bloomers as “ ‘quite pretty, but her ungainly pantalets of purple linsey-woolsey were shocking’ ” (82). Linsey-woolsey, commonly understood to make up slave clothing, critiques this woman’s neglect of fashion as, at least, smacking of lower-classness and, more “shockingly,” suggesting an ungendering that would affiliate her with slave women. Sojourner Truth rejected the Bloomer, according to Stowe, because it resembled her slavery costume (Mattingly 110). Since slaves were allotted a standard length of “nigger-cloth” apiece, Truth’s skirts never fully covered her long legs: for her, Bloomers represented not freedom from excessive material, but the paucity of dress suffered by slaves.

While Bloomer wearers were mocked in public and in print, women wearing men’s clothing were often arrested. Sumptuary laws regulated slave clothing in the South, but they also influenced male and female clothing in the North. The 1850s saw several famous cross-dressers—always women dressed as men—and newspapers reported on their various arrests. Carol Mattingly reports on two famous women in the 1850s, Dr. Mary Walker and Emma Snodgrass. Dr. Mary Walker was a public speaker who had received the Congressional Medal of Honor. Even though she was able to produce a congressional letter granting her the privilege to wear men’s clothing, she was repeatedly arrested for appearing in male attire for her public lectures (99). Mattingly reads a “contradictory message” in the newspaper treatments of Emma Snodgrass, the attractive young daughter of a New York police captain. Though the cross-dresser is “ ‘unsexed’ ” by her costume, she also creates “ ‘a sensation among romantic loving young men’ ” (102). In fact, the message agrees with the contemporary construction of femininity: lacking a dress and restraining corset, the young woman cannot be feminine, but femininity is characterized by purity and self-control—which are not necessarily conducive to romantic sensation.

For Confederate soldiers viewing Dr. Mary E. Walker on stage, the “unsexing” of the cross-dresser renders her not only unfeminine, but inhuman. Although their reaction is mixed, their impression is definite: “ ‘[We] were all amused and disgusted … at the sight of a thing that nothing but the debased and depraved Yankee nation could produce …. She was dressed in the full uniform of a Federal Surgeon …. She would be more at home in a “lunatic asylum”’ ” (qtd. in Mattingly 85). Women appearing as public speakers already posed a threat to notions of the “feminine realm,” and most compensated by emphasizing their femininity in white gowns. These women assumed the costume of Quaker clothing, whose whiteness seemed “ ‘incapable of receiving soil; and cleanliness in them [seemed] to be something more than the absence of its contrary’ ” (Charles Lamb, qtd. in Mattingly 17). Dressed as one of the “ ‘troops of the Shining Ones,’ ” they could “divert attention from their bodies” to assert their femininity and thereby “ensure some consideration for their cause’ ” (17, 34). Although blackface minstrelsy often featured men dressed as women even as the whites portrayed blacks, such play was amusing rather than threatening. The inclination of a woman to dress as a man, however, challenged femininity: and in the mid-nineteenth century, femininity was a crucial ingredient in the material construction of whiteness. Its challenge or rejection in the form of loose-fitting pants called for institutional control to replace the self-control no longer practiced by the wearer—the prison or insane asylum.

E.D.E.N. Southworth’s The Hidden Hand or, Capitola the Madcap (1859) approaches this threat of the institution—asylum or prison—as a means of exploring the limits of clothing’s power in shaping gender identity. Joanne Dobson argues that the novel is safely able to challenge gender norms because “Cap remains in the realm of fantasy, her character and her story exaggerated to the point of remaining … obvious and self-conscious literary constructions”—that the novel’s humor allowed it to become a “compensatory fantas[y]” for its nineteenth-century readers (Dobson, “Hidden” 235, xiii). However, its own “self-conscious” construction calls attention to the humor as a safety device; the novel full of puns, doubling, and jokes never fails to explain itself. Clara Day becomes a pun soon explained—“ ‘Clare Day—how the name suits her! … Her face is indeed like a clear day,’ ” exclaims Traverse (Southworth 137). Dorky Knight is first encountered on a dark night (277). Mrs. Condiment is Old Hurricane’s housekeeper, and Mr. Breefe is his lawyer. Of course the layering of blacks—Capitola Black, Black Donald, Colonel Le Noir, Granny Raven, Herbert Greyson, Father Gray—all intimately bound up with Capitola’s past and future, cannot be missed by the reader. The novel calls attention to its manipulation of gender and race in the same way: so that whatever might be hidden in their construction becomes evident. The reader is left no work to do or mystery to unveil—even the ghost that haunts Hidden House and later Clara Day’s house is obviously the missing Madame Le Noir. Just as she does with the punning names, Southworth hides the constructing agents and then exposes their hiddenness—thus exposed, they cannot haunt. On her first night at Hurricane Hall, Capitola establishes a rhetorical sisterhood with her newly assigned slave Pitapat, based on the shared “pit” in their names. The similarity is architecturally expressed as well by the “pit” existing in Capitola’s bedroom. When she inspects this pit, she discovers only “darkness ‘visible’ ”: and it is the visibility of the darkness, the acknowledgement of the backgrounded slave, that defines Capitola’s gendered freedom and privilege (76).

Southworth connects the color white with femininity and then explores how this construction might be manipulated; she supports this femininity with troops of blackness—servants, settings, and names—but then revels in the buoyancy their support offers. The layers of things surrounding each character determine his or her complexion and femininity, but the things can also be changed to transform identity. Such possibility for change causes anxiety in real life, expressed through sumptuary laws, Negro codes, segregating architecture: but Southworth invests her heroine with the power simply not to take them seriously, so that she can control their movement rather than be controlled. In this way, the central name game of the novel, “capital Capitola,” enjoys the mobility offered by capitalism and its ability to confer privilege strictly through things. At the same time, the novel signals danger with its white things, marking their potential to re-fix gender, class, and race in its radiant meanings (338, italics in text). Capitola enacts her femininity not through having and pretending not to want, but by pretending to pretend not to want. She establishes her racial whiteness not by contrasting and expunging the enslaved blackness that serves her, but by openly using it and becoming stronger through that use.

The opening scene reveals the hidden-ness of the hand, and the rest of the novel continues in this revelatory mode. Hurricane Hall is a “dark, red sandstone” mansion in Virginia, occupied by Major Warfield, with “his complexion dark red” (7–8). The first scene shows him in his bed chamber, preparing for bed, and surrounded by his comforts: “Old Hurricane, as I said, sat well wrapped up in his wadded dressing-gown, and reclining in his padded easy chair.” Having established his padded comfort, the narrator describes the accessories surrounding him: “On his right hand stood a little table with a lighted candle, a stack of clay pipes, a jug of punch, lemons, sugar, Holland gin, etc …. On his left hand stood his cozy bedstead with its warm crimson curtains festooned back, revealing the luxurious swell of the full feather bed, and pillows with their snow-white linen, and lambswool blankets inviting repose.” Only after describing the luxury of the room and meditating on its overwhelming fluffiness does the narrator attend to the slave enabling this comfort: “Between this bedstead and the corner of the fireplace stood Old Hurricane’s ancient body-servant, Wool, engaged in warming a crimson cloth nightcap” (9). Besides playing with the obvious racial standard of a woolly-headed slave in the naming of this servant, Southworth also overtly connects him with his surroundings, layering his wooliness with the lambswool, padding, wadding, and coziness. Further, she alerts us to the fact that she has elided him earlier: the narrative eye moves from Old Hurricane’s left side, to his right side, and then back between them to note the hidden “hand.”

Just as Southworth brings forth the hidden laboring force of the novel, she exposes the fabricated basis of gender: clothing. Scholars have noted the novel’s gender play variously as a subversion of popular femininity, a reconciliation of contrasts—mainly masculine and feminine—and even a pronouncement against sex itself.¹² In fact, however, the novel is an exploration of the detachability of gender, the material basis of femininity that allows it to be removed and replaced at Capitola’s convenience. Early in the story, Capitola does not assume a masculine role as a bootblack in order to earn a living; rather, she changes clothes when she “ ‘made up [her] mind to be a boy!’ ” (46, italics in text). When she is arrested for her male attire, she can nevertheless take refuge in her femininity: once Old Hurricane recovers from his shock at mistaking her sex, he demands that the arresting officer “ ‘treat her with the delicacy due to womanhood’ ” (39, italics in text). Capitola repeatedly sets aside her femininity in the midst of an adventure—saving a damsel in distress, fighting a duel, capturing Black Donald—but she gathers it around her when femininity might protect her.¹³ She persists in referring to herself as a “hero” rather than a heroine, and she fulfills this title by saving herself and her friends repeatedly—not by virtue and moral suasion in a feminine fashion, nor “ ‘by the strength of [her] armm,’ ” the manly route, but by daring and wit (77, 308).

The upper-class women in the novel are submissive and properly white-clad, but remain powerless against their male abusers. Clara is a “fair, golden-haired, blue-eyed, white-robed angel”; Madame Le Noir is a “beautiful pale, spectral woman” “clothed in white.”¹⁴ These very white garments help to imprison them, however; Madame Le Noir appears as a ghost in her “white raiment”: Clara Day must change into Capitola’s riding habit in order to save her honor and to avoid suicide. Even as Clara Day escapes from danger in Capitola’s nonwhite dress, Marah Rocke connects her changed clothing to her character. When Clara exhibits the spunk to suggest she work for a living, Marah accuses her of “ ‘contract[ing] some of [her] eccentric little friend Capitola’s ways, from putting on her habit’ ” (326).

Southworth’s critique of femininity as produced by white things becomes clear as Southworth describes Capitola’s much-abused mother. She appears only near the end of the novel, having been enclosed in an attic for most of eighteen years. Small and graceful, with a “snow-white cheek” and a face of “marble whiteness,” arched eyebrows and ringlets “black as midnight,” Madame Le Noir languishes in an insane asylum, placed there by an evil brother-in-law eager to collect her husband’s wealth (440–441). This institution, enforcing an architectural control over femininity, is in fact the only edifice in the novel that is white. As Traverse approaches the asylum, he sees a “large, low, white building, surrounded with piazzas and shaded by fragrant and flowering southern trees,” which “looked like the luxurious country seat of some wealthy merchant or planter” (439). Inside, the cells of the imprisoned women have “white-washed walls, and white curtained beds and windows,” and are “excessively neat” (440). Thus describing the ideal of a Southern plantation or a middle-class feminine home, Southworth deftly links femininity to an entrapping confusion of the mind.

Southworth’s disassembly of femininity occurs both materially and philosophically. Having exposed some of the physical ingredients defining the feminine, she undermines its institutional agents—in a conversation, appropriately, between a planter and a minister. Soon after assuming care of Capitola, Major Warfield has cause to complain, “ ‘She won’t obey me, except when she likes! she has never been taught obedience or been accustomed to subordination, and don’t understand either!’ ” Major Warfield seeks the advice of a minister to help him control his female charge, and the minister responds with a guidebook means to managing women: “ ‘Lock her up in her chamber until she is brought to reason’ ” (175). Various other suggestions—masculine “firmness,” an appeal to Capitola’s gratitude, and moral suasion—likewise fail because Capitola sees through their constructedness. When Capitola teases the minister with the hint that she has hidden a man in her bedroom, the minister’s response reveals the devastation Capitola has wreaked upon the gender constructions so carefully built. He rushes to Major Warfield and exclaims, “ ‘Thrash that girl as if she were a bad boy—for she richly deserves it!’ ” (185). In desperation, the minister reverts to her corporeality, but Capitola can respond to this new threat by re-assuming her femininity and wondering that a gentleman would consider hitting a lady.

More directly, Capitola saves herself and her servant by removing her corset, in a scene nearly a mirror opposite of Scarlett and Mammy’s. Discovering a set of armed desperados under her bed one evening, Capitola must contrive to leave the room without arousing their suspicion. She accomplishes this by abusing her slave girl and demanding a tray of food, cursing her corset properly with “ ‘come here this minute and unhook my dress, I can’t breathe! Plague take those country dressmakers, they think the tighter they screw one up the more fashionable they make one appear! Come, I say, and set my lungs at liberty’ ” (193). Having lured her servant from the dangerous environs of the bed, Capitola orders Pitapat to the kitchen for more food, and then follows her because the slave is afraid of the dark. Outside the room, she covers the sound of her locking the door with “loud and angry railing against poor Pitapat” (195). Her sisterhood with this slave has been established on Capitola’s first night, but this sisterhood is still one of mistress and slave. Capitola escapes the threat of the desperadoes because she knows when and how to remove her feminine “unmentionables,” and she visibly performs her dependence on a slave for the process.

Southworth demonstrates in this exchange between the heroically abusive mistress and the stereotypically comic slave the power of the corset constraining them both. Her ultimate message seems to be, however, that for all its power, femininity limits those who invest in it. Femininity, as with its constituent white things, is best viewed as a tool rather than an identity it constructs. The object of Southworth’s critique appears to be, then, not femininity itself, nor slavery or class distinctions: these are made into jokes but ultimately upheld. What the novel will not re-establish is the hidden-ness that enables whiteness and the whiteness that has to hide the hand. The novel’s “compensatory” fantasy is based upon an appropriation and exposure of the enabling blacks and blackness. Where Stowe would hide or expel the slave’s blackness, Southworth will flatten and detach it—for if the white things creating femininity can be detached, so can the black things threatening and supporting it. Her ultimate statement about slavery, sentimentality, and even clothes seems to be, then, “lighten up”—at least enough to enjoy the darkness.

VEILED THREATS

It is the detachability of femininity’s ingredients that distresses the narrator of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance. While Capitola revels in her ability to don and divest herself of femininity, Coverdale becomes victim to it, rendered disembodied, passive, ornamental. The feminine realm of the cemetery included an increasing variety of images sculpted in stone, some identified by Susan K. Harris as part of a “code” for femininity in nineteenth-century literature—and many of these objects begin to adhere to Coverdale in his narrative. Flowers, Harris asserts, marked the “heroines’ natural piety,” but they also carried individual meanings that were decoded in floral dictionaries (79). Flowers were sometimes carved along the border of slate gravestones, among the geometric designs popular in the eighteenth century, but blossoms appear as the central image on nineteenth-century marble markers. The motif of the flower gathered in full bloom was a widespread romantic image for the death of a young person especially, and appears in sentimental novels and tombstone inscriptions alike (see Combs, 201–209). Other popular gravestone images included angels, grieving women, willow trees, columns, and veils. Prevalent designs include a partially veiled urn, a veiled column or obelisk, and a veiled tomb. Each of these images, by association—especially the veil—comes to symbolize or signify femininity.

In The Blithedale Romance, Coverdale reveals his implicit faith in specifically white things as a reliable measure of identity. Throughout the novel, the narrator never fails to describe the clothing of the ones he observes and deduce a class, gender, and moral status from it. As Zenobia first appears, she is immediately described as “dressed as simply as possible, in an American print” and “a single flower” in her hair, and Coverdale’s first conversation with her is about clothing (17). Priscilla arrives “dressed in a poor, but decent gown, made high in the neck, and without any regard to fashion or smartness” (27). Moodie’s clothes are consistently introduced; as he visits Blithedale “dressed rather shabbily yet decent enough, in a gray frock-coat, faded towards a brown hue, and … a broad-rimmed white hat, the fashion of several years gone by” (77). When Coverdale leaves Blithedale and returns to town, he renews his costume descriptions as he meets each character again: he himself dons a fashionable coat “with a satin cravat … a white vest, and several other things” (126). Coverdale describes Zenobia’s and Priscilla’s town dresses as well, and he suggests their power when he teases Zenobia by asking, “ ‘has Hollingsworth ever seen [Priscilla] in this dress?’ ” (156). Coverdale resents Westervelt for his fashioned superiority: “I hated him, partly … from a comparison of my own homely garb with his well-ordered foppishness” (86).

Veiled tomb, woman mourning with urn in white marble, Mt. Auburn Cemetery, Boston, Massachusetts. Amos and Mary Ann Binny, died 1847 and 1884, respectively. Photography by Bridget Heneghan.

Clothing creates social identity for Coverdale. Even non-material designations take on import through being allied with clothing: Coverdale worries that the company’s enthusiasm for the experiment might “grow flimsy and flaccid as the proselyte’s moistened shirt-collar” (77). As he speaks of Christianity he describes the “One, who merely veiled himself in mortal and masculine shape, but was, in truth, divine” (112). Even at Blithedale, costume becomes the common pastime, as the company performs “tableaux vivants” with “scarlet shawls, old silken robes, ruffs, velvets, furs,” and later the group enjoys an outdoor festival dressed as Native Americans, mythical characters, religious and military figures, and African Americans, and dress in flowers for a May Day procession (198, 191). Coverdale does not, in fact, shun the marketplace, but trusts in materially developed identities so completely that he finds himself constantly in danger, among the fluid signifiers of Blithedale, of becoming someone else altogether. The veil that hides the Veiled Lady fully reveals her femininity, and Coverdale trusts this white thing with nothing beneath it, because it defines a feminine relationship to goods: a disembodied whiteness that can claim but not possess.

At Blithedale, it “was impossible … not to imbibe the idea that everything in nature and human existence was fluid, or fast becoming so,” and gender roles are confused to the extent that some “that wear the petticoat, will go afield, and leave the weaker brethren to take our places in the kitchen” (18, 129). Within this fluid environment, Coverdale feels his former identity to be likewise confused and discovers that the material things of the Blithedale farm have the power to reshape his identity. The main image of the narrative, the white veil introduced by the Veiled Lady, then becomes the motivating force and symbol for Coverdale’s narrative. Coverdale explains of the veil, “It was white, with somewhat of a subdued silver sheen, like the sunny side of a cloud; and falling over the wearer, from head to foot, was supposed to insulate her from the material world, from time and space, and to endow her with many of the privileges of a disembodied spirit” (6). But, as Zenobia’s legend suggests, beneath this veil lies nothing; the whiteness of this signifying cloth encompasses all of its power; only an idea supports it. In Zenobia’s legend, to be beneath the veil is to be in bondage “worse than death,” but when Zenobia’s hero lifts the veil, the pale maiden beneath it disappears. As with the idea of the “feminine,” the veil contains no person, place, or thing. Similarly, Coverdale designates the (white) sexes by noun and adjective—when he returns to Blithedale and encounters a costumed parade, he encounters its participants first as voices, “male and feminine” (190). The veil then represents for Coverdale both the power of femininity and its dangers. But it also remains throughout a powerful white thing—the ultimate white thing that invests its wearer with ideal femininity.

Coverdale experiences this ideal and danger personally through an accidental accumulation of feminine things. The sickbed is the first artifact of femininity donned by Coverdale, the first morning after he arrives at Blithedale. As he lies in his sickbed, Coverdale whispers about the “magical property in the flower” in Zenobia’s hair—specifically, that it signals her sisterhood to the Veiled Lady. In response, Zenobia presents him this added memento of femininity: the hothouse flower. Administered medicine enough to have “lain on the point of a needle,” and fed such food as to reduce him to “a skeleton above ground,” he becomes intuitive and ethereal, feminine qualities that, minus his masculine flesh, leave him susceptible to the “spheres of our companions” (44–45). The combination of feminine codings begins to tell upon him. “Zenobia’s sphere,” he confesses, “impressed itself powerfully on mine, and transformed me, during this period of my weakness, into something like a mesmerical clairvoyant” (45). He is transformed by this woman’s sphere into a “mesmerical clairvoyant,” the exact role of the Veiled Lady, that symbol of femininity.

For Coverdale’s final initiation into the ranks of wispy womanhood, Priscilla enters Coverdale’s sick-chamber and presents him with the emblem of pure womanhood, white garb. Approaching the weakened narrator, Priscilla holds out “an article of snow-white linen” that symbolizes a woman but is tailored for a man. The object’s message is so startling that the narrator sets it off in an emphatic paragraph of its own: “It was a night-cap!” (47). After being overpowered by the feminine sphere, assuming the role of the Veiled Lady, and accepting this white clothing, Coverdale appropriately emerges from the sick-bed on May day, festival of flowers and the crowning of the May queen (230).

Coverdale’s distress at assuming a feminine identity through his white clothes and things derives from his being, this once, behind the veil, and understanding costume as a performance entirely detachable from the body beneath it. His body, he repeatedly reminds his readers, is tanned and muscular, with “great brown fists [that] looked as if they had never been capable of kid gloves” (60–61). Even in this observation, his body contradicts his clothing, and Coverdale responds by anxiously reconstructing a masculine, upper-class identity in town. Preparing to leave Blithedale, Coverdale appears at the dinner table “actually dressed in a coat”: “with a satin cravat, too, a white vest, and several other things that made me seem strange and outlandish to myself” (126). And when Zenobia accuses him of resuming “the whole series of social conventionalism, together with that straight-bodied coat,” he can acknowledge it without regret (130). The material things that a town identity depends on are numerous and stable: Coverdale dresses in upper-class masculine clothing and retreats to town to surround himself with masculine architecture and props. If his identity is based on the things around him, as he has discovered, he must more carefully select these things to avoid the threat of a feminine construction.

Escaping the fluidity of Blithedale, Coverdale establishes himself within the solid materiality of the city, listening to the clocks ring “[h]our by hour,” the traffic on the streets and in the hotel, and the sound of a diorama show (134). His view from his hotel window offers “the backside of the universe,” which is more real than the dressed-up fronts of buildings because the fronts are “always artificial … and [are] therefore a veil and a concealment” (134). With this view, he elaborates for himself the social structures underlying gender and class in the form of a “stylish boardinghouse” (137). He spends the afternoon after leaving Blithedale smoking cigars in a bachelor hotel room and begins to study the interiors of the neighboring hotel. There, he sees on the top floor “a young man in a dressing-gown, standing before the glass and brushing his hair, for a quarter-of-an-hour together” (138). The bachelor continues to dress, spending another fifteen minutes adjusting his cravat, and finally donning a dress-coat that looks new. On the floor below the bachelor’s is a family: two children playing are surprised by their “papa” “coming softly behind them,” and he in turn is surprised by “mamma, stealing as softly behind papa, as he had stolen behind the children.” The couple then steals a kiss, unnoticed by the children, and Coverdale proclaims it “a prettier bit of nature” than he has seen even at Blithedale. On the next level down, the chambers are uninhabited, but Coverdale watches instead “two housemaids … industriously at work.” The next day, he will see Zenobia and Priscilla in this apartment. Below them, in the “lower regions” of the building, he sees “the red glow of the kitchen-range” as the cook comes out to “draw a cool breath” and an “Irish man-servant, in a white jacket, crept slily forth and threw away fragments of a china-dish, which unquestionably he had just broken” (138). Later, Coverdale sees a “lady, showily dressed,” with “what must have been false hair, and reddish-brown, I suppose, in hue” making a “momentary transit across the kitchen-window” as she supervises the preparation of food (138–139). Above all, at the peak of a dormer window, sits a dove, which flies “so straight across the intervening space, that I fully expected her to alight directly on my window-sill.” She does not, however, but rather swerves aside and vanishes, “as did likewise the slight, fantastic pathos with which I had invested her” (139).

Coverdale reconstructs a social hierarchy from this scene based not upon gender roles or class, but upon a person’s relationship to things. The bottommost level is lower-class and nonwhite, colored by the “red glow of the kitchen range” and by the hue of physical labor. Here, a servant sneaks into the alley and hides a piece of china that he has broken. The house mistress down here is also deceitful and nonwhite: even from a distance Coverdale can detect her false hair, “reddish-brown” in color. Directly above these lower-class laborers is the apartment of Priscilla and Zenobia, who reside within the architecture of material femininity. Their apartment is almost completely veiled by a white muslin curtain. What Coverdale sees within is, first, two maids laboring, and later, Priscilla and Zenobia. The female labor is temporally separated from the feminine leisure, and both are modestly veiled, but they do belong in the same place. The hotel’s next highest apartment belongs to a husband and father, head of an economically successful and devoted family. While Coverdale declares this scene to be “natural,” he also undercuts its material happiness by repeatedly using “stolen” to describe their actions. Perhaps, in fulfilling natural as opposed to social roles—man, woman, and children displaying physical affection—they are cheating the material economy, even as they invest in it enough to dress prettily and enjoy luxurious housing. Their identities are not material, he suggests, but rather “natural”—nonetheless their status appears above the feminine. At the top of the hotel architecture is the bachelor, who enjoys a clear-cut relationship with his things—he alone can have them, enjoy them, and purchase more.

Above all stands the dove, clearly significant as Coverdale invests “her” with a “fantastic pathos.” The dove appears ready to fly to Coverdale, but instead veers away and reappears at the dormer window peak the next day. This dove is Coverdale’s ideal femininity, divested of a material-based identity. He imagines that this spiritual whiteness has approached him on his sickbed, as he experienced femininity, and he imagines he can invest Priscilla with it in her immaterial mesmeric trance. He clings to this dove, this imaged free-floating femininity only a scant level above his own bachelor apartments, for the rest of the narrative. The symbolism that he invests in his white dove—that of disembodied femininity—he also applies to other creatures. As he leaves Blithedale, he says good-bye last to the pigs: “four huge black grunters, the very symbols of slothful ease and sensual comfort” and parallel portraits to the four unhappy actors in his love square (132, emphasis mine). Coverdale presents the pigs as the symbolic opposite of the feminine dove: “they were involved, almost stifled, and buried alive, in their own corporeal substance” (132). In the material world clothes and coded things signify gender and class considerations; in Coverdale’s symbolic imagining, the highest status is marked by white ethereality and the lowest classes by redness and deceit or by blackness and corporeality.

When he concludes his story by revealing his “one secret,” he recounts his own masculine bachelorhood, but grasps at a way of realizing his myth of white femininity. He proclaims at the end his love for Priscilla, presenting it as a hesitant, shameful confession. But in fact, the faltering dashes of the final phrase—“I—I myself—was in love—with—PRISCILLA!”—admit Coverdale’s failure to settle femininity even by the end. His concluding confession admits the truth of his initial claim, that the Veiled Lady’s “pretensions” “have little to do with the present narrative” (8). The lady herself, embodied in Priscilla, moves throughout the story, but her “pretensions”—her claims to an ethereal white identity that disavows class and ambition—have “little to do” with Coverdale’s story. Rather, the characters in every scene are built and rebuilt by the things around them.

Femininity as demonstrated by the proper fashion, as demonstrated by the proper maintenance and management of the household, was culturally understood and established in the nineteenth century. The racial component in antebellum America required, however, a devotion to the color white, to white things that could not be tainted, because the upper- and middle-class mistress depended upon the labor of a black servant or slave, or the unrefined presence of lower-class “help.” At the same time, the tension of the polarities pulling on the posture of femininity—female physicality at one side and masculine ambition on the other—produced a shimmering “sphere” that required constant negotiation, constant performance, constant renewal. The concreteness represented by the white things dependably delivered in standardized shapes offered to offset these tensions, stabilize an identity into a fixed, delimited realm. They signified an expunging of the blackness that could always undermine the constructions, a victory in the household negotiations between dark and white women. And they became yet another message to negotiate and control.

CHAPTER THREE

IN THEIR ALABASTER CHAMBERS

WAIST NOT, WANT NOT

RE-MOTTLED KITCHENS

INSTITUTIONAL WHITES

VEILED THREATS