Love seeketh only self to please
To bind another to its delight
Joys in another’s loss of ease,
And builds a Hell to Heaven’s despite.*
To readers familiar with negotiating personal spaces through public places, the Punch cartoon on page 84 must have provided a quick laugh. On careful examination, however, the image holds a fascinating key to understanding gender relations among the elite of the Victorian era. The man’s umbrella, his top hat, his beard, his girth, the dark and muted colors of his frock coat and peg-top trousers all suggest the stolid and mature man of means who by the 1850s had become the fashionable world’s male ideal. Early in the century the ideal had been quite different—plates depicted lithe, clean-shaven, boyish men sporting tighter trousers and brighter colors. By midcentury, however, a gentleman was seen less as a gentrified pleasure seeker against a rural backdrop than an urbane professional against an urban backdrop. Here he needed to be solid, immovable. His was a mature society—prosperous, conservative, and market-oriented—and his fashion reflected it.
Women’s fashions matured over the period as well. In 1800 the fashionable female had a slim, girlish body made all the more so by a tubelike dress of airy material. She was generally portrayed in a well-groomed garden, looking sprightly and sylvan, as innocent and virginal as a fawn. With the maturation of her society, however, came an elaboration of her costume. Her husband had gone out into the harrowing world of stocks and banks, railroads and financial markets, and he needed a lieutenant who could oversee the details of the household he left behind. Bonnets, which before had been worn like a horse’s blinkers, now slipped back on the head, suggesting the expansion of vision commensurate with the wearer’s increased responsibility. And like her male counterpart, the midcentury Victorian lady was allowed to take up some real estate. The vast hoops of her crinoline could be thirty feet in circumference, making her wider than she was tall and accommodating a matronly figure as easily as a girlish one. In the streets and shops the skirt provided a buffer between her and a world she was in but not of; she sat atop a kind of cloud, moving without motion in her portable, domesticated space.
“A Terrible Moment,” Punch, 1856.
The situation depicted by the image is certainly ludicrous—the simplest of gestures is made awkward and self-defeating. But there is something sad about it too, as the title of the illustration—“A Terrible Moment”—makes clear. Surely the man has as much to do with the lady’s wearing the skirt as she does herself. His businesses bought the cloth, cut it, and shipped it. He more than she, it seems safe to say, believes at some subconscious level that she needs to be isolated from the temptations and trials of the manly world she moves through. In this image, it is as if the two sexes meet across a great divide, the man making an elaborate display of closing the gap of his own creation, the woman barely reaching out from the sanctity of the ruffled spaces that keep her safe and secure but also unapproachable and alone. Somehow the simple act of touching the opposite sex had been made “terrible.”
To be sure, men and women of the antebellum South were separated by a wide divergence of interest and attachment. Raised in and to their separate spheres, there was a chasm between them, the contemplation of which could leave either party with a sense of vertigo. This said, it is important to remember that men and women have a habit of finding their way to each other, whatever the distance or difficulty. It has been suggested, for instance, that men of the nineteenth century wanted their women to be pure, pious, domestic, and submissive. What historians sometimes miss, however, is what men of the period understood perfectly: a woman who was truly pure, pious, domestic, and submissive was also uncommonly boring. Men paid homage to this feminine ideal, but they lived it less in the observance than in the breech. Women were to embody such virtues always, to practice them where convenient, and to above all rise above proscriptions and proprieties to be, privately among their menfolk, at least, open-tempered, compelling, and reasonable, engaging and unguarded, human and whole, mischievous and lively, interesting to talk to and diverting to spend time with.
But more important than all this was the gulf introduced in the last chapter. However flexible on some subjects, men believed that women were supposed to bear witness to male becoming, to cheer men to greatness, and to comfort them along the way. Every free white man had a personal empire to build, whether it was a private plot on a scrubby canebrake or a personal dominion on a vast tract of good earth. And each man had another empire to build in a woman, through whose eyes he could see himself succeed. That the two imperial projects should become tangled up together, as in Tamerlane, was not so much surprising as inevitable. Having projected their own aspirations onto their women, men could not help but see them as part and parcel of the larger project of immortality.
This confusion comes out very clearly in the way men talked among themselves about courtship. A woman was not merely to be courted, as the saying went, but wooed and won. As with everything else a man might win, calculation and stratagem were an expected part of the process. After falling in love with his future wife, South Carolina rice planter J. Motte Alston began plotting how best to ensnare her, worried lest he be “out-generaled” by her other suitors. Louisianan Roberdeau Wheat viewed his courtship of various women as a “matrimonial campaign.” He did not love any of them, but that did not matter. “I want some woman who will love me so much that she will in time teach me to love her,” he confessed. When finally he found a good candidate, it was not her own rare qualities that attracted him but her credulity about men. “She is not beautiful,” he noted, “but she is good, not brilliant but amiable, not witty but looks as if she would think her husband so even when others said he was dull and stupid….I have not courted her yet but feel that I shall win her.” Military metaphors, as in the cases of Alston and Wheat, were undoubtedly the favorite in referring to courtship. A woman was a sort of fort besieged, and men understood that it would take no common set of tactics to secure her surrender. “An earnest lover has all the senses of a North American Indian,” reported a writer for the Messenger, “with tenfold more sagacity, acuteness and cunning, and will march steadily on to his purpose, and leave no trace of his goings which can attract the notice of hostile eyes. Day or darkness, alone or in a crowd, in the parlour or along the way,—anywhere, everywhere, opportunities present themselves, where a man is ready for the work.”1
And indeed, men fully expected courtship to be work. They did not begrudge the effort, however, because without effort there could be no sense of achievement, no sense of pride when the battle was won and the spoils taken. South Carolina jurist James Petigru thought he saw exactly this dynamic at work in the story of a thirty-two-year-old woman who had become the most sought-after sweetheart in Virginia. To all pleas and entreaties the woman remained steadfastly single, though she “consign[ed], every year, new lovers to despair.” Her unusual power over men, Petigru surmised, had nothing to do with attractiveness, wit, or wealth. “She is not beautiful,” he admitted, “she never was and nobody, not even among the great rejected, would probably say he thought she was.” Neither did she possess a great fortune—her father was a simple judge who had “nothing but his salary…and can’t resign because he would starve.” Nor was the woman a vivacious conversationalist. Indeed, Petigru noted, “she is remarkable in no way; makes no effort to shine and does not shine, but dresses, talks and sits like a staid, sedate, imperturbable person.” This, in fact, was the wellspring of her appeal. There is “no doubt in my mind,” Petigru remarked, “that [her] secret…is to be found in that principle that leads men to take pleasure in a difficulty overcome…. It is because she is so hard to please, that all the world are smitten with the desire of pleasing her.”2
The winning of a woman, then, was a quest not unlike any other male quest for distinction and éclat. She was a great, glittering prize, like Keitt’s bright chalets and diadems, and men set about success in the romantic arena just as they had set about it in their professions. Lord King, for instance, saw courtship as a clash of wills, stylistically similar to lobbying for a railroad contract or an important bill. Traveling with his father as a representative of the Southern Pacific Railroad, he made the comparison quite explicit. “The uncertainty of Legislation,” he wrote his brother, “is so great that that of women is a fool to it. With a woman you may understand ‘yes’ for ‘no’ and return to the charge, but with Legislation, if you let it floor you, you have to stay down.” For a writer at the Messenger, hunting provided a better metaphor. The courting male, he noted, needed to be ever vigilant about women, “lest as…wild steed[s] of the prairies, they dash away beyond your power to subdue them.” But if a man was careful and “pressed his suit with vigor,” he might gain a favorable answer “before she could reach the shelter of her home.” For another gentleman, the world of banks and bonds provided the best model for courtship. “If I could go to the old gentleman’s counting-room in business hours, state my wishes, and leave the whole matter in his hands, I shouldn’t mind marrying,” he noted, “but if I must ask his daughter, then I’ll be hanged before I’ll be married. Not that I would object to asking her, if I could do it as readily as I enquire the price of stocks, or the latest European news; but I cannot do that, and indeed, to be honest, the only time I ever tried, I found myself getting… red in the face.”3
This mixing of professional and romantic metaphor makes perfect sense from one perspective. Men were expected to be the pursuers in courtship; their quarry, like fame or fortune, was something to be achieved, won, prized, treasured, taken. “Women, by the inalienable delicacy of their natures, do not act the part of wooers,” the Messenger reported. “But as to men, if they deserve the name, they can in a great measure control their own destiny.… Among other things which they can do, they can marry.” And marry they should, suggested most antebellum Southern magazines. In a piece entitled “On Old Bachelors,” F. W. Shelton noted that for all the criticism they endured, old maids were not the problem. “Let them alone, since God has so willed it,” he advised. They are a “chirping and vivacious class of women who, from mere accident and the force of circumstances over which they have no control, bloom solitary in the desert.” Shelton was not as sympathetic when it came to old bachelors, whom he called an “unfortunate class who will be esteemed by many as scarcely worth the labor of an essay. And they are not, except as a solemn warning, a painful yet salutary lesson to others. They are, for the most part, mere fragments of humanity, scattered links of the golden chain which connects the family of man.” There was no good excuse, then, for a man not to marry. He had only to roll up his sleeves and go at it. To be sure, the world of courtship could be a brutal and competitive one, but no more so than the world of banks and politics, and antebellum magazines were full of advice for the timid courtier. “Women, like dreams, go by contraries,” intoned one magazine sagaciously. “If the man be humble in his petitions, the woman will be haughty in reply; if he be bold in questioning, she is modest in answering.… Humility in a man subjects him to the suspicion of cowardice, and women hate and condemn cowards more than men do. Bravery and manliness… they adore, but an effeminate milksop they detest and despise.” Successful courtship, then, depended on the same qualities of character that men were expected to bring to their professions. If a man was bold and pressed his suit with vigor and determination, he might succeed in any arena, even romance.4
As in the case of Laurence Keitt, however, most men found that a courtship based on bullying and bluster was not only ineffective but altogether unsatisfying. Despite the advice given them by magazines, heedless of the need always to appear manly, men longed for a rest from their own competitive drives and masculine pursuits. Romance gave them this opportunity, and men usually seized on it when they stopped playing at love and gave themselves over to it whole. Victorian proprieties could be rigid; the public culture of romance could stress a tight reign on the passions and a battery of tricks and tactics. But, as in any age, love will out and write its own rules. As high as they could be built, as fast as they could be written, antebellum men and women scaled the walls of Victorian propriety and damned the advice of the magazines, and struggled, sometimes with success, to find each other whole.
For many middle-class couples, this struggle and this search took place on paper. For a variety of reasons, correspondence was, in the antebellum period, an integral aspect of courtship. Most obviously, couples were often separated by unnegotiable distances in an era of slower, more restricted travel. Then too Victorian proprieties and the prying eyes of small town life made the letter one of the most private, and therefore most sacred, romantic spaces. But these were not the only reasons romantic parties often preferred writing to meeting. Raised to their separate spheres, men and women had a vast psychic distance to close, a distance that could seem overwhelming when they met face-to-face. Letters allowed couples to come at this distance more obliquely, more tentatively. In letters, personal attention could be paid without the discomfiting awkwardness that attended public presentation; in correspondence, men and women hid behind an authorial voice, an anonymity of sorts, that helped compensate for the natural shyness they felt in the first flush of romance. “I believe that I can write to you more freely than I can talk,” Harriet Alexander noted in a letter to her beloved Wallace. “Everything reads smoothly, no matter how often the pen falters in the writing, & the written page cannot reflect the color that mounts to the cheek of the writer….I believe that I am a little frightened of you yet, & I wonder how I ever have written & do write you the vain & idle things with which I often fill my letters….I believe [I] play that I am writing in my journal & that what is written will not be for inspection.” A woman identifiable only as “Toosie” employed a similar method of make-believe in her letters to Lord King. Writing late at night, after everyone had gone to bed, the stillness hypnotized her, allowing her to drift to her lover and back in the comforting abstractness of her mind. “It still rains on, and the clouds are thick and dark,” she wrote him, “I am beside an open window, sister is sleeping, and I hear nothing except the quiet & measured falling of the rain… until I ha[ve] almost forgotten you in the Lord of my imagination….I am scarcely aware who I’m writing to. You are again becoming ideal, and I wish I could write you a volume.” Letters, then, were a sort of incubator of romantic interest and attachment; there shyness and reserve could be peeled back, layer by careful layer, until a person’s inmost self was revealed.5
Such revelations could become quite intense, especially for men. Obliged to be so often stoical and self-possessed, courtship offered them one of the few arenas in which they could explore and disclose the softer side of their psyches. Laurence Keitt, remember, thought introspection actually dangerous, a sort of cannibalism in which the heart turned on itself to feed. Henry Craft was living proof of Keitt’s theory; self-examination brought him only loneliness and grief. But in courtship letters, men could take an inward turn that did not suggest retreat. Here weakness could be confessed and indulged; here introspection was not merely safe but essential. As North Carolinian Wes Halliburton noted, the letters he exchanged with his dear Cousie brought him his greatest peace because they gave him an excuse “to retire into [him]self.”6
In romance, then, the constrictions on a man’s heart and expression were lifted. To a woman he could surrender, with all the force of his being, and be no less a man for the fall. New to such a feeling, men clung to it desperately, damning the advice books and relishing the most submissive, even the most servile, aspects of courtship. “Do you feel as if I belonged to you?” one Mississippi youth asked his beloved, “and that you have a property in me? If you do, you should give me full directions how to behave myself.” After a man’s surrender, no task was too menial, no sacrifice too great, where it was performed in her service. She was his superior, especially morally, and he knew it, said it, and admitted it to himself and her, over and over again. “I am perfectly willing, nay it is imperative, that you be above me,” wrote a Tennessee boy to his sweetheart, “for man, civilized man, always looks up for something to adore, and I have found that something in [you].”7
It is important to recognize that in no way was a man surrendering his masculine drives. He had merely shifted the arena of their pursuit, as Keitt did so effortlessly, to the personal empire he fashioned out of woman. In her he hoped to create something all his own—a Civilization as magical as any he might found on earth, a great kingdom of love where he could surrender and still reign supreme. A student at the University of North Carolina, Wes Halliburton had as prickly a sense of honor as any of his classmates. “I have learned by being taught in adversity’s school to depend upon myself,” he claimed. “I never have and never will ask a favor of any man if asking that favor is a mark of inferiority.” But with Cousie, Haliburton could ask anything, give anything, do anything, be anything. Cousie had given him something the rest of the world hadn’t, and his opinion of the world suffered as a consequence. “I love to think that every body hates me,” Halliburton confessed to his beloved, “I love to be alone. I love to be called ‘Ishmael.’ I love to look out on the land and in all eyes see hatred, on all brows a frown, on all lips anathemas. I love to believe that I am of no use to any body save you. I don’t care, yes I care, but I would not turn on my heel to gain the love of a living man. Cousie, sweet darling, I love you. Every breath, every fibre, every chord, every throb, is yours and only yours.… When you write all is joy and love, when you write I feel independent of all the world.” In marrying, Halliburton underscored his manhood, took possession of his first, most important dependent, and achieved the most basic, the most primal, of empires. Far from compromising him, his surrender to Cousie actually established his independence.8
There was, of course, another model of legitimate surrender available to men—surrender to God. It isn’t too surprising, then, that antebellum men often borrowed from the language and power of Christianity to help them sacrilize their romantic projects. Their love, they knew, was not merely physical but spiritual and required therefore a spiritual vocabulary. “Keep your sweet heart buoyed up,” wrote one husband, “with the reflection that I love you fondly & will cherish and reverence you as the good christian does his maker.” “To love you dearly and consider you as the ‘idol of my affections,’” wrote another, “requires no effort: it is natural as it is for me to breathe. Every breath I draw is perfumed with the holy incense of this sacred affection, and every wish invokes the protection of a thoughtful Providence upon your head.” For some men the similarities between religion and romance ran so deep that spiritual vocabulary was not enough. Their love of woman had progressed past the merely spiritual to the devotional, requiring more liberal nicking from the established faiths. Romance had become, for them, itself a personal religion, complete with intercessor (the beloved), church (the home), conversion experience (falling in love), and sacraments (engagement, marriage, physical intimacy, writing letters, and mourning).9
For most men, romance did not replace organized religion but bled into it until the two were indistinguishable. Their wives became their conduits to God, and that was often as close to Him as they really wanted to be. William Pender’s determination to become a Christian, for instance, was less a religious quest than a romantic one. Possessed by a love for his wife that surpassed his ability to explain it, his search for answers ended, as it often does, at the doorstep of the Almighty. Perhaps God could explain to Pender what he felt and why. But because it was his heart and not his soul that led the quest, Pender could not find his way to God to ask Him anything. Fanny’s gravity was too strong; Pender’s orbit around her too stable. Each time he set out to find religion, he found only Fanny; all roads led to Romance. “Honey, whenever I try to reflect upon the future and to resolve to do better,” Pender wrote his beloved, “I think of you first and your image rises up and intrudes in upon my thoughts of Christ and the future so that I have almost come to feel that you are a part of my religion.” Pender was being modest. Fanny was not so much a part of his religion as the whole of it. He wanted to love God, but the truth was, God had His drawbacks. God was remote, stern, inscrutable, and publicly available, traits He shared with Pender and most other males. Could Pender really be expected to love another male, to surrender to Him? The whole notion violated something fundamental to Pender’s basic being. Fanny, on the other hand, was real, warm, manipulable, and, most important, her divinity existed for Pender alone. “I have not had that love for Christ in me that I ought to,” Pender admitted to his wife. “I know I am grateful for all the mercies He has shown us, I love his name, but it has not a part of my existence like my love for you. My feeling for my Savior partakes more of that arising from a sense of duty, but for you it exist[s] and how it commenced and upon what principle high up I hardly know or think about. I know you are my wife, that I love you and am anxious about you and desirous of pleasing you because I love you.” Here, then, was a suitable foundation for a religion. No stuffy churches. No hypocritical preachers. No parishioners meddling in each other’s affairs. Just Fanny, Pender’s personal intercessor with the Almighty.10
When a man attempts to make an intercessor of his wife, he may run into problems. His beloved may not be particularly religious, for instance. William Nugent experienced this difficulty with his fiancée, Nellie. Younger than he and more frivolous, Nellie not only attended a dance in his absence but also took her turn on the floor. William was beside himself. What was the fiancée of a “poor, sober-sided Methodist” doing “whirling thru the mazes of the dance” and pressing the flesh “with the devotees of fashion”? His reaction, though, was not that of the jealous lover but of the disappointed acolyte who stumbles on the rector tippling in the vestry. “You occupy a sacred position in my affection; Almost that of an idol,” William reminded his intercessor. “If it is broken and destroyed, who will be the iconoclast?” George Peddy had the opposite problem—his wife, Zerlina, was caught up in her own faith, whose doctrines conflicted with his own devotional enthusiasm for Romance. “The fact that nothing can elicit such soft expressions & such pleasant ones from you as [talking about God],” Peddy wrote his wife, “teaches me that your affections are concentrated upon divine things. Hence I am forced to the conclusion [that I] share only a finite portion of your pure affection. If this be so, alas for me: better far that I never had been born.” And even if a man’s wife had just the right amount of religion, she was still his wife as well as his intercessor, creating grave problems in the confessional. Pender himself ran into this problem while seeking spiritual guidance for his sexual gluttony: “Honey, the same that causes you so much trouble [Fanny was pregnant] is my stumbling block in this world….I do feel humbled and mortified to think that the most dangerous of all our passions and the most sinful when indulged, should be the one that I cannot conquer.” Fortunately, he claimed, whenever he had impure thoughts he had only to conjure up Fanny’s face and the mood passed. For her part, Fanny seems to have overlooked these references, telling her husband to go forth and sin no more. But when Pender admitted to having had “a very nice time dancing and flirting with a very nice girl” at a party, she demanded penitence: “Now, I ask you candidly, in your sober senses, why you wrote me such a thing as that? Was it to gratify your vanity by making me jealous, or to make me appreciate your love still more? You are very much mistaken.… Nothing you have ever said—nothing you have ever done, nothing you have ever written in this whole of our married life—ever pained me so acutely or grieved me so deeply.” Pender was staggered; in his religious ecstasy he had severely misjudged the temper of his confessor. His next letter was an impassioned act of contrition—“Fanny…you have torn my heart…you have brought tears, bitter tears [to] the eyes of one who has loved you and tried to honor you”—and he subsequently confined himself to confessing sins of omission rather than commission. “It is certainly lonely enough [here] to satisfy a monk,” he grumbled after things had blown over.11
But even as he sat groveling at the hem of his confessor, the surrendering male had his eye on his ambitions. These women were not saints. They may have been more morally upright than their menfolk, but they had done nothing worthy of worship and were, few of them, comfortable with the notion. Rather it was the men themselves who had made gods of their women and placed them so carefully in the heavens. Their professions might be mundane; their quests for greatness might rise or fall. But their women were always their own, and in romancing them men found a spiritual quest, a poetic purpose, with all the éclat and energy of empire building. And when finally they became great, as each man believed he one day would, his woman would be close at hand to witness and reward his suffering and his sacrifice.
The imperial drives and poetic ambitions of antebellum men had tremendous consequences for antebellum women. To be sure, a woman had her own sphere, a domestic one, over which she exercised considerable power. “Home—that is [a woman’s] empire,” remarked Robert Mallard in a letter to his fiancée, “there she governs with… all but despotic sway.” And in ways that are just beginning to be appreciated, antebellum Southern women used their dominion over domestic concerns to justify the formation of benevolent societies that exercised a significant influence in the period. In these pursuits women were generally encouraged, and, as in the antebellum North, female education was expanded to include more than the social graces. Indeed, by the 1850s, a woman’s curriculum looked a lot like her brother’s. Southern women were encouraged to keep abreast of the political developments of the day, their counsel was often sought and followed, and, in the very differences of their outlook, their behind-the-scenes influence was seen as a natural corrective to the brutalities of a man’s world. “In families, as well as empires, there is oft a power behind the throne greater than the throne itself,” intoned George Fitzhugh in DeBow’s, “and that power is usually clad in petticoats.” Men’s judgments, Fitzhugh argued, were often of little worth because men believed too much in their powers of analysis to derive answers from complex systems. “These old fogy lawyers,” he complained, “get cramped and stiffened equally in body and mind.… They have a self-important, turkey-cock strut, ‘walk wide between the legs as if they had the gaffs on,’ and bear their heads as carefully as a milk-woman does her pail, for fear of spilling their redundant brains, of which commodity each member, it is obvious, believes that he possesses a close monopoly.” Women, on the other hand, reacted instinctually, trusting in their innate goodness—of which they did possess a close monopoly—to lead them to sound conclusions.12
Then too, the rigid proprieties that so stifled and contained women could also be used as a weapon. Annoyed by a pestering beau, Laura Cole told her would-be swain that there was nothing she should like so well as for him to recover her missing pencil. The boy spent hours blithely looking for an implement that didn’t exist, happy to be of such minute service to the fair sex. “He… searched very diligently,” Laura confessed to a cousin, “for what had not been lost. He peeped under chairs, tables, sofas, annoyed the old ladies by removing their foot-stools, got a reprimand from his grandmother, a gentle reproof from his gentle mother, and a sour look from his aunt.” To be sure, Laura could not come at her disaffection for the young man directly. But in sending him on a fool’s errand, she drew on a wellspring of feminine power which, so long as it was exercised obliquely, could thwart and dull the wills of ostensibly more powerful men.13
In the main, though, a Southern woman’s province was a precariously small one. All of the spaces from which she exercised her power also circumscribed and contained her. Everything about her was supposed to be smaller—her influence, her appetites, her interests, and, especially, her size. Calling his dear Nellie “my own little wife,” William Nugent explained that he did not mean “little in the sense of a precious consort, & agreeable companion.” In this Nellie filled “every sacred corner of” his heart. Nor was she little “in those qualities of mind” that made him contented in “the contemplation of a long life of prospective happiness.” Rather she was “little only in that best & to me dearest of all senses, Size.” Such endearments and belittlings were not all bad, of course. Some women relished the adoration of the opposite sex and were never so contented as when swinging in the arms of their larger, stronger husbands. “It seems to me if I were with you I could not suffer you to do anything in the world,” wrote George Peddy to his beloved Kate, “not even walk. I should want to carry you tenderly with my own hands.” For her part Kate rather liked the idea. Twisting her ankle on the fireplace, Kate became dizzy with pain, and her daughter was “distressed to death for fear” she would cry. But all at once the little girl “looked up with a brightened face and said, ‘Mama, hush, Pappie will tote you.’” “She is like her mother,” Kate wrote her husband, “[she] believes you [can] make all things right.” But there were occasions, too, when a woman’s physical powerlessness seemed not a consolation but a curse. In an altercation with her siblings, Harriet Alexander discovered just how frustrating her small stature could be. Standing next to her younger brother Porter one evening, she remarked that if he grew any taller she would no longer be able to kiss him on the forehead. The statement attracted the attention of her older brother, Felix, who responded, “Never mind, poor little thing, I’ll put you up on my shoulder[s] & then you’ll be as tall as any body.” “I saw what was coming & tried to drop on my knees,” Harriet noted, “but before I could utter one cry for mercy, there I was, mounted on [his] shoulder[s] & in such an agony of fruitless & impotent wrath as ought to have crushed him with its weight. He carried me round & round & would’nt put me down & I felt so insulted that I would’nt deign to scold a bit…. If my ability had been as good as my will, they would have had a sound drubbing apiece.” But of course her ability could not match her will, however titanic it might be. Her brother was stronger and bigger, and if he chose to exercise these advantages, she could do little to stop him.14
As with size, so it was with other aspects of female powerlessness. When mediated with respect and restraint, a woman could enjoy being adored, even possessed. But when mediated otherwise, she was left only with Harriet’s “agony of fruitless & impotent wrath,” which, finding no outward expression, had to be simply swallowed. Unlike a man’s world, where action and projection were staple themes, a woman’s world was marked by restraint. Her frustrations could not be sublimated in a boxing match; her drive for excellence could not carry her to the White House. For this reason, women’s imaginative lives were crucial. On flights of fancy, they could travel to far-off places and sample novel experiences. But the imaginative life, while vivid and vibrant, seemed so frail and weak, founded as it was on airy nothings, that it could occasionally come crashing in on itself.
The life of Anna King suggests the degree to which this internalization could weigh on a woman. Anna Matilda Page had been a happy, confident child. She lived her whole life at Retreat, a plantation on St. Simons Island, Georgia. She was educated at home, a live-in tutor and a neighbor’s knowledge of French equipping her with the learning and polish befitting a belle. In 1823, she was sent to Savannah to display these accomplishments, to throw herself into the oh-so-brief quickening of time and loosening of restraints that attended a woman’s coming out. “I dance a great deal,” Anna exulted to her mother, “and [am] much pleased of course as is always the case when I can dance as often as I feel inclined.” But after her marriage, Anna began to slip into a despondent sort of trance. Her husband, Thomas, was inclined to be away much of the time, leaving the planting in the hands of his wife and their overseer. “The birds are very troublesome to the corn which is now filling,” she noted in one of her reports to Thomas. “Sanders broke your double barrel gun all to pieces so that I have no means of destroying them. John Demere shot the best ox I have yesterday. This fact he acknowledged himself to Dunham [the overseer]. The animal is not yet dead. Now put all these things together & you must think I have enough to try even old Miss Job.”15
But it was not the petty trials of plantation management that overwhelmed Anna—it was the fact that she had no one with whom she could share these things. Anna’s concept of her social circle was family oriented and intensely nuclear. She did not seek or find sisterhood in the wider society of women; she did not fraternize with extended kin or with the other members of her community or class. Despite the concerns that weighed her down, she derived comfort only from her family, lamenting the presence in her home of anyone who was not a member.
This made it more difficult when family members left her, as Thomas did on business, or as all her children did for their education. But Anna’s concern for her “absentees” went beyond her own unmet need for social support or companionship; she was nearly paralyzed with worry that one of them would be struck down by disease. In her letters she discusses health and sickness, her children’s, the neighbors’, the slaves’, with what might seem an obsessive frequency. These were times when illnesses were omnipresent and deadly, and Anna acted as the family doctor, nurse, and pharmacist. She often spent a great part of her day ministering to the sick of her extended household, occasionally passing entire nights at the bedside of the “stricken.” Anna’s preoccupation with the subject, however, ran deeper. Her first-born had been taken at an early age, sending her into dark depression. Suddenly all her children seemed to her like “shades,” suspended somewhere between life and death, under her care but ultimately beyond her control. If one could be taken from her then so could another, and another. She got over her grief but was left with a “soul harrowing fear that harm might befall” another member of the family, a fear aggravated by their frequent travels. To her husband, she admitted the concern “drives me almost crazy. I can settle down to no employment,” and she berated her children sharply if they did not send constant updates on the state of their health. By the 1850s, Anna would often ask one of her children to skim incoming mail before she read it to make sure it did not contain dread news. As soon as the letters had been given a once-over, she devoured them with a great relief that her loved ones were yet safe. “God has been most merciful,” she told a daughter with characteristic pessimism. “Our numbers are still the same. May this blessing be continued to us yet a while longer. We cannot expect it to last forever. No, my child,a change must come. We know not at what hour or who will be the first to go.” For Anna, life was a precarious enterprise and she saw her loved ones as being in a nearly constant state of deadly peril.16
Certainly loneliness aggravated these anxieties. After evening tea, if Thomas was gone and all the children were in bed, Anna would lie awake, unable to read or write or sew for fear her eyesight might worsen with the strain. This, she said, is “my most lonely time.” “You have so much to divert your mind,” she wrote her husband, “but poor me I have no change—the same dull roteen [sic] of ordering breakfast, dinner and supper, looking after the servants and then darning socks and thinking. “Indeed, it was the thinking that most plagued her. “My mind seems in a constant confusion,” she noted in a common refrain, “if I could just be relieved of this fullness in my head.” Anna’s anxiety was not an occasional or affected phenomenon. Helplessly, in letters to her husband, daughters, and sons, she formulated and reformulated her “nervous derangement” until the words lost all meaning: “I have much to take up my attention & find it harder to collect my thoughts every time I have to put them down on paper”; my mind “is so clouded from various causes, I can scarce find ideas to form a sentence”; “if I could only keep from thinking I would do better”; “I cannot control my thoughts”; “I can’t think or look for anything but further trouble”; “I do believe my head cannot be right. I feel no dependence on my own judgment”; “I feel like a vessel tost on the waves to be driven as the wind or circumstances may”; “if I was good enough to die what a world of troubles I would escape”; “I have interest in nothing and no one has interest in me”; “I feel such anxiety for the living”; “I must say I am tired of my tread mill life”; “I am the greatest slave on the plantation”; “I wonder…if I shall ever know what peace is”; “My life seems entirely wrapped up in the lives of you beloved ones. I live in constant dread of what may happen to you”; and on and on. For all the years of her married life Anna fretted and stewed over matters beyond her control, trapped between her understanding of the passivity of woman’s proper role and the realities of her active life. However ably she ran the plantation and ordered her house, her gardens, her table, she returned at night by channels well-worn to worrying about the plantation and house, gardens and table, the sick, the dying, and the absent. Her own health was uncommonly good—in thirty-six years of letter writing she never noted suffering even a sniffle. And she could even deal with gruesome death, so long as it did not stalk her own family. When the steamship Magnolia exploded, Anna helped turn a cotton barn into a makeshift hospital. Such accidents could be incredibly gory affairs and the Magnolia was no exception; great billowy mounds of cotton were soaked in blood, and days after the explosion limbs were still washing up on Retreat’s beaches. An entire torso was retrieved from the inlet—Anna examined it minutely to determine if the decomposing corpse had any characteristics that might help identify the deceased.17
But for all her strength, Anna wanted most to be weak, to be dependent, to feel that a man was taking care of things, even if less ably than she could take care of them herself. “We want a head among us,” she noted of her family. “I have no mind of my own. Neither have I experience or judgment.… Alas poor me I have no head for anything.” A woman, Anna had taught her daughters, was supposed to set a passive example, to exercise her influence by moral suasion and demur suggestion. Forced by circumstances to adopt a stronger role in her own family, Anna regarded her own authority as something usurped and improper, and she exercised it apologetically, tentatively. “I do indeed feel that mine is a most responsible situation,” she wrote Thomas. “Responsible to my God! To my husband! To my children!!! The spirit truly is willing but the flesh is weak. I cannot do all that is required of me. I find myself constantly looking for aid from you my beloved! What a misfortune to all of us your being so little at home! When Oh! when will you again remain at home!” The answer, of course, unspoken but understood, was never. But Anna would not, could not, admit it. And this, finally, was the underlying cause of her “soul harrowing” fear that one of her absent family members might be struck down. So long as they lived there was a possibility that her stewardship over her husband’s family might one day come to an end, that they might return to make her a wife again, a mother again, a woman who again made sense to herself.18
In the meantime, Anna struggled to cobble a family together out of paper, almost literally writing out her eyes in long letters to her “absentees.” “It gives me very little trouble to write,” she told her daughter, “& it is so much pleasure to hold communion with you beloved ones… that I could spend my time in doing little else.” Anna could be petty about letters—she sometimes numbered hers to show how often she wrote and scolded family members if their letters were deficient in quantity or quality. If letters became the measure by which their love was judged, however, it is understandable. “Your dear Father & beloved selves,” she wrote her daughter, “are all I have on earth…. As much as you think you love me your love is as nothing compared to the ardent love I feel.” Devoted entirely to her family, Anna demanded reminders that they were devoted too, that they in some small way echoed her feelings. Otherwise, “stuck down on this lost end of the world,” she could convince herself that she had only imagined them all in her scribblings. As she put it, if her family did not write, she “didn’t exist.”19
As much as her letter writing testifies to Anna’s commitment to her family, it also suggests her detachment from the wider world. Unable to bring her absentees to her side, she absented herself; her mind flew to them and back, leaving little behind but a life spiraling always into itself. She would go to church, but members would inquire after Thomas. “Our neighbors congratulated me on having heard from you,” she wrote wryly, “for I believe the most envious must pity me.” She could not explain Thomas’s absences, could not quite condemn them openly, but she understood that they reflected on her, shamed her, and she stopped going to church. She complained that the island had “just enough people on it to make it disagreeable,” but found she could not easily leave as “the passage in a boat has for me so many terrors I can’t think of it.” Hers was a world within a world, a place that year by year grew smaller and smaller, more and more isolated. Certainly this was true spatially—“If I had all my family with me,” she admitted to a daughter, “I could live for years without going outside the front door.” But it was also true temporally. “I must not look back,” she noted after a series of reminiscences, “and I fear to look forward.” Anna’s entire world was collapsing in upon a single point—wait and hope, wait and hope, nothing could be fully resolved until Thomas would finally return and make them a family again. In the meantime, Anna could not have been surprised that her sons and daughters pitied and babied her—Anna did no less. Constantly thrown back on herself as she searched in vain for advice, companionship, or support, she could only threaten and scold, gestures that by their very emptiness became the kind of quaint character trait her family could indulge but not take seriously. Even when the family (excluding Thomas) went on vacation, Anna could not escape the role she had made for herself. “No one thinks of asking me to go [anywhere],” she confessed to a daughter. “I suppose they all look on me as [just] as much of a fixture here as I am when at home.”20
On January 20, 1859, Anna’s waiting ended. Her oldest son, Butler, stood brushing his hair before a mirror when he felt an odd twitching in his left eyelid. He turned to his brother to “point out this strange symptom” but found he could not speak distinctly. He was quickly placed in a tub of hot water—a galvanic battery was hooked up and he was given a mustard emetic. His hands were paralyzed so one of his brothers put a finger down his throat. “A little blood came the first throw—then it came up in volumes.” “Great God! What a sight,” Anna noted. She felt sure her son had retched up his heart. Laid out on a bed, Butler seemed to be resting peacefully when he was seized by “awful convulsions” that persisted until “his mind left him” and “his noble soul left his body.” Suddenly Anna could stop worrying over where or when the ax would fall. Butler’s death gave her something real to lament and with it came an odd sort of relief. In her anguish, she felt “none of the torturing anxiousness which ofttimes” made her miserable. “How many years of happiness,” she wrote with uncharacteristic clarity, “have I wasted in gloomy anticipation of misfortunes… that spirit of continual fretting and moping over fancied ill, that temptation to exaggerate the real or supposed dangers which surrounded my beloved absentees, the disadvantages of our condition, magnifying the trifling inconveniences of our everyday life into enormous evils.”21
Months after Butler’s death, Anna’s letters continued thick with religion and despair. She wrote Thomas that she was “looking to Jesus! for help in this our deep sorrow, looking to Him to guide us in the strait and narrow path which will lead us to His mercy’s seat. Sometimes I feel comforted, then again all is dark, dark.” Anna held regular prayer meetings in her dead son’s room, believing his glorious spirit descended from the heavens to be near his family. She called her grief “a deep sorrow which time does not lighten” and chastised her daughters for wearing anything but black. When, a few months after the funeral, Thomas returned to politics, she did not bother to ask when he would return. Anna had once written her daughter, “Oh! that I could once more see you all around my table, I think I would then be content to die.” Butler’s death had ensured that such a reunion would never happen; despite the writing and worrying, the waiting and hoping, her family would never be all together again. Now only heaven afforded such a possibility and Anna clung to the idea tenaciously. “Tho my heart’s idol has left me to return no more,” she wrote her daughter Georgia, “each day takes us nearer to the new home Christ has given him….I long for that better world.” On August 22, 1859, seven months after the death of her son, Anna King passed away. Given her impeccable health, it is difficult not to concur with her daughter that she had died of grief. Her life had finally collapsed upon itself bearing her away to her long-sought reunion with her “departed treasures.”22
Anna King’s case is undoubtedly extreme. Her husband was unusually inattentive; her disposition was unusually morbid. To be sure, there were also cases, like the Perrys of Greenville, where wives demanded that their husbands absent themselves and not come home until they had achieved something miraculous. But Anna King’s psychic trajectory was all too common in the antebellum South. “I do not know if I have any positive disease,” noted Sarah Gayle typically, “but I have my own proper share of nervousness, weakness, swimming in the head and a dull, sleepy sensation…. My family claims untiring attention.” The life of a planter’s wife consisted of routine—and more routine—and she rarely had the opportunities her husband did for altering patterns worn with overuse. A planter’s business took him often to town. His profession took him often farther still. The plantation became for him a place to put his feet up and recuperate from the trials of his various absences. But for women, the plantation could be a place of excruciating dullness, a world within a world where the petty cares of children and slaves seemed all but inescapable. Returning from a trip to the city, Mary Chesnut quailed at being once again bottled up on her plantation. “Already I feel the dread stillness and torpor of our Sahara at Sandy Hill creeping into my veins,” she noted. “It chills the marrow of my bones.… There is nothing but frizzle-frazzle talked in this house….I would sleep on bare boards if I could once more be amidst the stir and excitement of a live world. These people have grown accustomed to dullness….I feel abandoned of God and man here in this dismal swamp.”23
But it was not just the loneliness and the routine that got into the bones of planter wives—it was the ridiculously petty details that were left to their capable care. Ordering the house, tables, garden, and children involved little of the éclat on which men rose and fell. A woman’s sphere was smaller, and her cares were supposed to be smaller too. Some women, perhaps a majority, reveled in this sphere, finding in the rich rewards of farm and family a peace and pride of place they wouldn’t have traded for the world. But even the happiest recognized the dark road down which women less fortunate were apt to go. Her head bowed down by trifling complaints and trivial duties, a woman could sometimes feel buried under a mountain of other people’s needs. “I have many petty trials to which my temper gives way,” noted Susan Cornwall. “It seems impossible to feel pleasant under a sarcastic remark, or patient when there are so many little ones to manage. The negroes are careless, the children out of sorts and something hinders the dinner or tea, the good man comes home hungry (and therefore savage) and away flies my pleasant face and I feel like wishing myself a huge pair of scissors to cut everything in my way.” “I feel sometimes such an impatience of my life & its lot as I can hardly describe,” echoed Cornelia Spencer. “I want to go & see & do something better than I have known….I want to… take wings & fly & leave these poor & sordid occupations [behind].” And Cornwall and Spencer still had their pluck. After enough “petty trials” and “sordid occupations” a woman could go altogether numb, the smallness of her world, like Anna King’s, collapsing in on itself. “I look at [some of my women friends],” noted Sarah Morgan, “and wonder if God thought it worth while to give them souls to be crushed in that narrow little casket of the brain, which seems to die, and yet leave them living.” For women like these, the consuming cares of farm and family offered not peace but torpidity. Whatever vibrancy had shone from them in their youth had been systematically dulled by the monotony of their lives. “We are very quiet, now, in this delectable little world of ours,” Laura Cole explained, “and we have no better way of cheating ennui than to engage in all manner of housewifery, which employments are, doubtless, no less creditable than disagreeable.” Slipping away to write a letter to a friend, Laura admitted that she was taking refuge from the other women of the household, who were caught up in “discussing the merits of a crimson, velvet riding-dress.” But just as Laura had begun to slip into her epistolary reverie, one of the women came in to solicit her opinion. “Alas! alas! my fine structure is blown into air by a fair lady’s breath,” she noted, “Here is Miss——with her crimson, velvet riding-dress again. Oh, crimson, velvet riding-dress. You are… odious to my ear.”24
To be sure, antebellum women sought and found various releases for the nagging pressures of their lives. On their horses, for instance, women found a solution to their smallness and weakness; in the speed and exhilaration of the ride they found power, direction—and happiness. Riding on the beaches of Retreat plantation, Georgia King and her brother Mallery came across a porpoise, flailing in the shallows, obviously dying. Mallery went to the lighthouse to get a shotgun, returned and shot twice, putting the animal out of its misery. By the time the carcass had been dragged out into the ocean, a “storm was coming on grandly,” and the two needed to hurry home. “Oh! How beautiful it was,” Georgia noted. “We galloped home as fast as we could. It was very exciting, the black clouds, the driving wind, the lurid light of the storm-setting sun, & our horses foaming and racing on the open beach. I enjoyed it very much.” In most of Georgia’s letters, as in most of her mother’s, death overshadowed life, dulling it like a heart swathed in cotton. In this letter death was controlled, dispensed, and somehow made to amplify life, to make the air saltier, the wind fiercer, the experience more exhilarating. Stuck in her parlor entertaining, Sarah Morgan indulged a similar idea of making her getaway on horseback. “So very interesting,” she wrote in her diary, “to be reposing [here] in an arm chair looking ‘pale’ and ‘spiritual’ and playing with cords and tassles! Very nice, but I would rather be the observer, than the observed; or better still, I would rather be up and away, galloping over the hills with the pure air of heaven around me.”25
But for the most part, the diversions available to women echoed the same inward turn as their duties and cares. “What a mysterious thing is music,” noted an anonymous Selma diarist. “I know of nothing that can excite my thoughts as it does, if I were mistress of my time it would occupy the principal part of it.… [Music] drowns [my] thoughts, and is like a voice that speaks of things beyond this melancholy sphere.” The production of music was no mean accomplishment in the mid-nineteenth century. With no Victrolas or radios about, an antebellum house was often a musicless one without the efforts of its women. “I suffer so much for the want of musick,” William Elliott noted when his daughters left home. “I try to amuse myself by my own discords—and so open the piano—and strum my old favorite melodies, [but you] will think I am sure that my taste is on the mend when I assure you that I can no longer endure them.” Stuck womanless on his new plantation, Tristram Skinner was, like Elliott, dumbfounded by the silence. “I wish… very much to hear some of your fine music,” he wrote his sweetheart, Eliza. “I never hear any here except that of the birds which, though very sweet, I would prefer if mixed with more art.” But women could not escape the notion that in music, they poured out their emotions in a pretty performance for others. Their thoughts and feelings had always to be groomed, made safe and pleasant and pleasing to the ear. “I have been down stairs playing & singing for nearly an hour,” noted Harriet Alexander. “Nobody in this house knows anything about music & it gives them pleasure to hear even the semblance of it, so I play for them & do it the more cheerfully because I hope that it is the last time in my life that I will ever have to play for anybody…. It would be good news to me to be told that I would never touch another piano.” In this, women were like the birds they so often kept as pets, pressured to be charming and quaint, pretty to look at and listen to. “I had my mocking bird out in the yard to day, sitting on a table,” noted a Selma diarist, “and while I was looking at it from the gallery another mocking bird came and danced upon the table all round the cage [and] my bird opened his wings and bill and screamed.” She knew how the bird felt. “It [oft-times] makes me… miserable,” she said of her life. “I feel as one who has not even the liberty of its cage.”26
In all of their trials, women turned often to diaries to record their frustrations. In the nineteenth century, a woman’s diary was seen less as a record than as a confidante. When Elizabeth Ruffin found “no society within doors, tho’ every room in the house filled,” she settled into the comfortable society of her journal. Clara Solomon saw her diary as a “cherished friend” and told her book, “you have bound yourself so firmly around the tendrils of my heart that your existence now seems essential to my own.” Frustrated by a lack of outlets for her private thoughts, Ella Thomas also sought solace in her journal. Thomas had an “irresistable inclination…to confide in someone,” but even Jesus, by his own maleness, was disqualified as a candidate. “There are some moments,” she confessed, “when I must write—must speak or else the pent up emotions of an overcharged heart will burst or break.” Thomas never felt wholly comfortable in her own diary—she wrote as if someone might be looking over her shoulder, straining to discover truths she was desperate to hide. But each time she protested that she would not write out her heart, she had already partly done so. Each entry in her journal became an exercise in losing and regaining control, a release of just enough pressure to prevent her from boiling over.27
In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, these women should be taken at their word that journalizing was crucial to their lives. But we should not necessarily take these journals at their word. In a rare moment Sarah Morgan admitted that she regularly lied in her diary. “As I look back [on my journal],” she noted, “I see nothing but Sarah, Sarah, as though there was no one living save myself.” Her self-absorption, she claimed, could not be helped. “I am trying to persuade myself that Sarah is worth thinking of!… In revenge for not being a favorite of the whole world,…[I] naturally take to petting [my]self,…to show[ing] [my]self off in the most amiable light.” At first this seems absurd—lying in a diary is like cheating at solitaire. But people cheat at solitaire for a reason—they do it to feel better, to control a simple outcome, to compensate for bad luck. In her journal Sarah was someone she could understand, even like. She had craved since the age of twelve “for something beyond this present life [which] holds me down,” and she finally found it not within her day-to-day living but in the life she crafted on the pages of her diary. Her journal, then, not only reveals a woman but helped constitute one. To Sarah, life outside her book was crushing, confining; within it she indulged a desire she could not define, a feeling which “sweeps over me… and I feel myself floating out, out, I know not where, except that it is to a higher Something…[a] something which I feel to be my right.” Certainly, these were thoughts Sarah might have had without the journal. But like lovers who carve their names on a tree, Sarah was engaged in a kind of sympathetic magic. In writing out her imagination she captured it, made it real; and when she was done she had a transcript of her own liberation to read and reread—she had created a witness to the hidden life that safeguarded her dignity.28
Informal writing, then, became for these women part of the process by which they redrafted their lives to make them read a little better and reconciled the stories they dreamed with those that had been dreamed for them. These women, for example, were expected to have a marriage in their story; everything they heard from the time they were sensible prepared them for this climactic scene in their would-be lives. They were encouraged to build and rebuild the set, to cast and recast the characters, to script and rescript the dialogue. But they also understood how precious little control they had over the actual scene. Indeed, many felt that their control could be distilled to a single moment, a single yes or no. “[Woman] is born,” noted an Alabama woman, “to suffer, and endure, and not complain, to foresee, to divine almost the results of doings which she has not power to avert or repel! She is made to live upon the breath of another, her very existence is depending on beings upon which she has no control, excepting the mockery submission of the hour when she is marked out by her tyrant for a still deeper slavery—and she knows it all, and still she will go on suffering, and yet smiling, cheering the spirit of the being who dooms her to this bondage, and cherishing the hand that plunges her into the abyss.” Here it is clear that the great insult is not that women were subordinate to men, but that women were supposed to pretend not to notice. In making this declaration to her journal, the diarist has at least told someone that she does notice and doesn’t much like it. This is a minuscule act of rebellion, a thing as harmless as any other thing made of paper. But for the diarist the process was critical because it was the silence that was unbearable. Any voice, even a small one, recorded for no one, made a difference. “Good night little journal,” she wrote her book one evening, “you have been the source of more comfort that I should ever have imagined such an insignificant repository could have afforded.” While most women were less vehement in their denunciation of women’s place in the South, all had to, as any human being does, reconcile a lived and a wished-for life. Diaries were one of the places that this reconciliation was allowed, even encouraged, to take place.29
But again the female life, like Anna King’s, spiraled always into itself. “I think this journal will be disadvantageous for me,” wrote Mary Chesnut, “for I spend the time now like a spider, spinning [out] my own entrails.” In the monotony of her rhythms, in the inward turn of her pastimes and cares, a woman led a dreamy sort of existence, always threatening to implode. “When we survey life,” noted Sarah Wadley, “when we recollect how our short pilgrimage is full of fruitless cares and idle sorrows, life seems as a fitful dream, until it is again dignified by the thought that God has placed us here to prepare ourselves for heaven.” And to be sure, in the contemplation of the hereafter, where the trivialities of life were cast off and the wages of goodness were meted out, a woman could take considerable comfort. But in the meantime there seemed always another day to face here on earth, replete with pettiness and sorrow, longing and confinement. Standing before her mirror one morning, Sarah Morgan found herself facing an existential crisis: “the thought…has occurred to me ‘What, or who am I?’ and it is so abrupt, so unanswerable, that a feeling of dreadful awe creeps over me at the sight of this curious, mysterious figure, so familiar, yet so unknown.” Sarah tried to reassure herself that it was only her own reflection she saw, and she struggled to bring herself back into focus. Instead, the “unspeakable mystery” only grew “darker and darker”: “though seeing myself, I lose all sense of my personal identity, and feel as though I stood face to face with the ghost of one who perished centuries… ago.” Almost bizarrely, Sarah Wadley had the same reaction to the gauzy dreaminess of her life. “Whenever I for a moment lose sight of the bible and of religion,” she said, “my mind becomes involved in mazy labyrinths of doubt ‘till I almost question the fact of my existence and wonder if I am not one of the fabled creations of ancient days.” Many, of course, have had much to answer for in front of a mirror and many have felt themselves dissolving in the face of existential angst. But in the nineteenth century, men were less likely to dissolve. Identified as they were with their professions and their accomplishments and their last names that passed on from generation to generation, men had a clear sense of self, even in their self-loathing. Women, on the other hand, were linked only to self-sacrifice in a great chain of being that reached behind and before them for time immemorial.30
One evening while rummaging around, Meta Grimball found a cache of old letters exchanged by her mother and grandmother. Her husband wondered at her enjoyment of them, but for Meta they were fascinating. “It is the history of a whole family,” she wrote her diary. “My Grandmother’s style is very fine, so simple and so clever…. The tone of these letters, the gradual change from full happiness to the sad desolation of being nearly alone…is very painful.… [but] I rejoice that such charming, elegant people belonged to me, and their memory and their lives, delight me.” In these letters, Meta Grimball was connected to a vast womanly enterprise, which, while not composed of dramatic or grandiose lives, at least made sense of her own. In her diary, Meta fretted and stewed over the well-being and future of her family, hoping for better times but having little confidence in her own power to bring them about. In the letters of her female forebears, she found an echo of herself and her concerns, and it brought her comfort to know that she was not alone in the world and that her trials were not unique. Meta would be in the grave soon enough; she would join her mother and grandmother and her daughters would pick up where she left off. “Generation after generation [of women] have felt as we now feel,” wrote Eliza Clitherall in her diary, “and their lives were as active as our own. They passed like a vapor, while nature wore the same aspect of beauty as when her Creator commanded her to be. The Heavens shall be as bright over our graves, as they now are over our paths. The world will have the same attractions for our offspring yet unborn, that she had once for our children. Yet a little while, all will have happened. The throbbing heart will be stilled, we shall be at rest. Our funeral will wind its way, and hymns sung, and prayers said and then we shall be left behind, in silence and darkness for the worm, and it may be for a short time we shall be spoken of, but the things of life will creep in, and our names will be soon forgotten. Days will continue to move on, and laughter and song will be heard in the room in which we died and the eye that then mourned for us will be dried and glisten again with joy; even our children will cease to think of us, and will not remember to lisp our names.” Unlike their menfolk, whose imperial scheming held out the promise of immortality, women would never live forever. They passed their time in a world that grew ever smaller, until, quietly and simply, they faded away.31
Men were not wholly insensitive to the hardships of a woman’s life. Before they became husbands, men had been sons, watching with a child’s intensity as their parents’ emotional drama unfolded before them. In the theater of family, boys came to understand implicitly that father symbolized the family’s ambition while mother symbolized its goodness. Father’s ambition, of course, could be full of grand illusions and vanity, but for this he was to be excused, even loved. Mother’s goodness, for its part, could be full of martyred carping and histrionics, but for this she was to be excused, even loved. Men and women, quite logically, had separate duties, separate excuses, separate burdens. Women were forced into subservient roles that occasionally hollowed them out and robbed them of life; men were forced into dominant roles that occasionally left them impoverished and humiliated.
Exactly what constituted a Civilization was a matter of debate, North and South, but all agreed that it was embodied by a woman. “A Winter in the South,” Harper’s Weekly, January 1858. North Carolina Collection, UNC.
As boys matured, the divisions between men and women became not merely a replication of notions absorbed in the family but an elaboration of lessons learned in school and in life. By the dictates of Civilizing manhood, women required protection—not merely because they were frail but also because they were good. White women, after all, were not just more refined than men; they were the most refined creatures on earth. As the sacred vessels that bore their Civilization’s best instincts and aspirations, women were to subject themselves to male protection; this was their job, their contribution, their sacrifice, to the cause of Civilization itself. Men, too, had sacrifices to make. They had appointed themselves the protectors of women not merely because they were stronger but because they were expendable. If a man became sullied in the process of building a Civilization, so be it; if he died in the cause of defending a Civilization, so be it. The formula was as simple as it was clear: men were to build a Civilization; women were to embody it. And so the divide would remain and the attempts to close it would remain awkward, even terrible.
