Search Results

This chapter examines why Woolson abandoned poetry at the height of her popularity as a poet and how her most ambitious poem, Two Women: 1862. (1877), responds to the “romance of union” popular in the aftermath of the Civil War. It suggests that Two Women represents Woolson’s attempt to craft a bold tragic heroine modeled not a little upon Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, who embodied the wartime experience of her own generation. Ultimately, Woolson’s Civil War romance unfolds as a drama of difference that exposes a gulf between North and South, and between old-fashioned ideals of femininity and new possibilities for women’s lives.

Constance Fenimore Woolson offered an alternative and polyvocal account of Reconstruction gleaned from her extended sojourns and continuing Southern travels. During the 1870s and thereafter, she effectively opened a space for backwater listening, disintegrating social codes, and sustained literary endeavor, a quiet reckoning with sudden loss and even more sudden opportunity. This chapter sets out the book’s purpose—to examine the portrait Woolson painted of the South she saw. It also provides an overview of the subsequent chapters.

This chapter presents a reading of Henry James' “A Figure in the Carpet” and Constance Fenimore Woolson's “Miss Grief.” It is about intimacy; but the intimacy generated takes place less within the pages of each individual story and more across the texts, through characters, and in form. It establishes the centrality of gender performance in “Miss Grief” and the parodic confusions those performances entail, which “breed more capacious forms of social and sexual intercourse and more capacious forms of reading.” The aesthetic dimension permits Woolson the freedom to write and to parody the conventional sexual and textual relations expected of “the master” toward a potential disciple (the plot of Woolson's story). The two writers are able to forge an intertextual relation with each other that eventuates in an acknowledgment of Woolson's literary value, a recognition that “brings one into relation with the possibilities that unfold”.

This chapter presents a reading of Woolson’s East Angels, which traces the encounters between a group of transplanted northerners and the local Floridians: the impoverished gentry, the African American house servants and field hands, and the poor whites of the region. It examines the “lapidary comedy of North/South manners” in the novel. It then considers the novel’s ultimate tragedy and, through it, Woolson’s unsparing commentary on James.

This chapter presents a reading of Woolson’s “The South Devil” (1880), a story of a Florida swamp by that name. It suggests that “The South Devil” investigates differing paradigms for national reform and multiple postwar ways of seeing what is literally beneath the surface.

This chapter examines the work of Constance Fenimore Woolson, who imagined freedpeople, particularly freedwomen, as successful citizens in an ethnically diverse America. Her writings contributed to the ongoing debates over the definition of citizenship, the meaning of freedom, and the fate of the free-labor ideology. Additionally, her magazine articles helped foster the rise of a consumer culture, transforming the military district of Eastern Florida into a tourist paradise for her fellow northerners. The chapter analyzes three key strategies which Woolson used in her writing. First, her travel sketches relocated national origin myths from New England to the ancient cities of Florida, taking advantage of the state’s varied colonial history. Secondly, she mainly wrote about the freedpeople and recognized their rightful place in Florida’s cultural, political, and economic life. Lastly, Woolson substituted a work ethic suitable to Florida’s challenging climate and landscape for the northern, gendered work ethic.

This chapter presents a reading of Woolsen’s For the Major, which explores one of the South’s most potent myths—that of the Southern lady. The novel depicts the Southern Belle archetype in the character Madam Carroll, only to dispel it. Woolson does this not to condemn the Southern lady, but to expose her Northern characters’ narcissistic investment in fantasizing Southern womanhood. Woolson plays with stereotypical aspects of the Southern archetype to suggest that a complex and paradoxical sexual dynamics underwrites the myth of the antebellum Southern woman.

This chapter analyzes Woolson’s Rodman the Keeper: Southern Sketches (1880). It attempts not only to excavate binaries in Woolson’s Southern fiction, but also examine what happens to the tensions between them. Ultimately, these tensions are not neatly resolved, as they often were in popular postwar reunion romances. As many postcolonial theorists have noted, sooner or later the encounter between cultures and peoples results not only in clashes but also in a mingling that creates forms of doubleness or hybridity, a term often used today to connote the mixture of cultures, but which has its origins in nineteenth-century conceptions of racial difference. A reading of Woolson’s fiction in this context suggests her discomfort with the effects of imperialism, particularly a form of hybridity predicated on an inequality that blurs cultural and racial distinctions. In the process of registering this discomfort, Woolson also manages to decenter her texts in ways that challenge her Northern readers’ presumed cultural superiority in the wake of the Civil War and Reconstruction.

This chapter presents a reading of Woolson’s last novel Horace Chase, where she links the industrial and commercial exploitation of the South with her contributions to illustrated magazines. By connecting periodical writing with Gilded-Age commercial development, the novel thus provides an oblique commentary on Woolson’s own avocation and livelihood, even as her pages offer an elegy for the lost landscapes of the South.

This chapter presents a reading of Woolson’s Jupiter Lights (1889). The novel fosters a retrospective engagement in order to question the nation’s increasingly conservative drift toward segregation as national policy, culminating in the 1896 landmark case of Plessy v. Ferguson. The novel argues against keeping anyone in confined places and constricting roles by celebrating the freedom available in movement.

This chapter presents a reading of Woolson’s novella “Castle Nowhere” (1875). It examines the role of monetary metaphors in Woolson’s fiction, how she maps these metaphors onto social fissures, and how her story is a participant in, not merely a chronicler of, the monetary debates of the period. It suggests that even if Woolson did not consciously write the monetary politics of the era into the morality play that is “Castle Nowhere,” her contemporaries would have had no difficulty making this connection on their own. The reason is because it was a common practice among public figures of the era to articulate their preferences for one monetary standard over another by joining this discourse to the language and imagery of the Bible. The Book of Amos facilitates such grafting by taking as one of its principal subjects the standards of money and measure and the collusion of the powerful that leads to their abuse.

This chapter examines the compositional dynamics of Woolson’ approach to travel accounts. It suggests that Northern nostalgia and Northern investment were intimately related when it came to appropriating the postwar South in print.

This chapter examines Woolson’s “King David,” where David King contemplates what he will do in the South as a teacher in a new freedom school. His words reveal this white man’s enduring prejudice as well as his abolitionism. Enlisting Eric Cheyfitz’s sense of “translation,” the chapter reads a teacher of freedmen as the projected figure of Northern deliverance, and sees Reconstruction’s miscarriage as a savior’s comeuppance.

This chapter examines Constance Fenimore Woolson’s story “Rodman the Keeper” (1877). It considers Northern sentiment about national cemeteries for the Union dead, and investigates the ways in which Pierre Nora’s “sites of memory” were fashioned once historical events began to fade.

This chapter presents a reading of Woolson’s short story “Pink Villa” (1888). It raises the following questions: what index to America does Woolson’s story provide? When Horace Bartholomew calls David Rod “a modern and a model pioneer,” casting him as the symbolic repository of his nation’s ideals, how confident should we be in the notion of American “progress”? The chapter explores how other concerns complicate the plot’s romantic resolution and undermines what might too easily seem a defense of American pragmatism and masculine enterprise. It suggests that the feminine values emphasized in the story’s title articulate Woolson’s ambivalence about Eva’s fate in Florida and the masculine project of America.

This chapter examines the familiar marriage of Northern enterprise and Southern bloodlines in “Old Gardiston” and thereby establishes Woolson’s place in “Lost Cause” pitches and the postbellum appeal of resorts such as Virginia’s White Sulphur Springs, particularly in a leisured world dominated by Saratoga and Cape May. It assesses the white racial hegemony that was bolstered by the protocols of Southern hospitality, by class distinctions among whites (especially as hotel guests), and by the “foreignness” of a suddenly emancipated black population.

This chapter considers one of the most provocative and controversial forms of popular justice in the postbellum period. Through numerous examples of how lynchings were depicted in the fiction of the time—both as a racially-aggravated act and as a violent response to crime by groups of citizens—the chapter examines lynching through an explicitly geographical lens. The intricate relationship that expressions of violent justice have to an inchoate and emerging modernity frame the readings of rural lynchings in works by Charles Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Hamlin Garland, Constance Fenimore Woolson, and Owen Wister. Rural space and its literary representations emerge as a prime arena for understanding the uneven development of legal modernisation in the late nineteenth century.

During the 1870s, tourist guide books gave descriptions of St. Augustine for travellers. Constance Fenimore Woolson and Abbie Brooks painted verbal pictures of the “Ancient City” as the most unusual American town--more like old Spain than America. Its Minorcan population gave it an exotic tinge. John F. Whitney promoted St. Augustine as the land of Ponce de Leon. Winter visitors found ways to amuse themselves amid resort society. Local residents found ways to make money from the visitors. Some of the seasonal guests were quite wealthy: George Lorillard; architect James Renwick; William Aspinwall; and William Astor.