Literature and Work Mix on Many Levels

“What book now, Miss Devon?” 

“‘Jane Eyre,’ sir.”

 Mr. Fletcher sat down just where her hat-brim was no screen, pulled off his gloves, and leisurely composed himself for a comfortable lounge. 

 “What is your opinion of Rochester?” he asked, presently. 

 “Not a very high one.” 

 “Then you think Jane was a fool to love and try to make a saint of him, I suppose?” 

 “I like Jane, but can never forgive her marrying that man, as I haven’t much faith in the saints such sinners make.” 

 -      Louisa May Alcott, Work: A Story of Experience

As a bookseller, of course, literature is my work, but like Louisa May Alcott I’ve also done a wide variety of other things to keep body and soul together, from teaching and tutoring to gardening and picking apples, so this novel of hers, largely autobiographical, fascinates me. The introduction by Sarah Elbert provides excellent background on the Transcendentalist Movement, the Alcott family (read about them here), their friends among writers of the period, and the challenges facing nineteenth-century women trying to reconcile, in their own lives, then-contemporary principles of individualism and self-fulfillment with the still-current belief that woman’s place was in the home, marriage and family her only rightful sphere. And how could I not sit up and take note at the passage quoted above, after my recent launch of the new novel Mr. Rochester, by our own local Sarah Shoemaker? What would Louisa May Alcott make of Shoemaker’s portrait of Edward Rochester and the odds that he would become a good man with Jane Eyre as his wife?

Only a little over a hundred pages into Work so far, I’m astonished that this work is not better known. True, Henry James did not care for it, but then he was also dismissive of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Most women’s writing, “parlor literature,” he considered beneath his notice. Alcott herself felt obliged to apologize for the quality of the novel. Written while the author was caring for her mother and two nephews, she observed of her finished product, “Not what it should be—too many interruptions. Should like to do one book in peace, and see if it wouldn’t be good.”

But being left to write “in peace” was not the destiny of Louisa May Alcott. Her idealistic father never managed to support his family financially. That task fell to friends and, when she became of age, to daughter Louisa, as did the job of nursing any family members who fell ill. She underwrote her younger sister May’s art education in Europe (think Amy in Little Women), and when that sister married and died shortly after the birth of her own daughter, Louisa took on the responsibility for her niece's upbringing.

When Mr. Fletcher, in Work, using Charlotte Brontë’s characters to plead his own case, asks Christie if she doesn’t think a man “with only follies to regret” might not be made happy and good with the right woman for a helpmeet, this is her response:

“If he has wasted his life he must take the consequences, and be content with pity and indifference, instead of respect and love. Many good women do ‘lend a hand,’ as you say, and it is quite Christian and amiable, I’ve no doubt; but I cannot think it a fair bargain.”

Alcott gave Christie a simpler background than her own. An orphan, left to the care of her mother’s brother and his wife, Christie strikes out on her own with their blessing to make her way in the world of work. Housemaid, actress, paid companion, governess, seamstress—all Christie's various work experiences were ways of earning money that Louisa Alcott had experienced prior to achieving enough success as a writer that, although a “slave” to her pen, she was able to provide for her family with her stories alone.

(Harriet Beecher Stowe had a husband and children to support; Louisa May Alcott had parents, siblings, nieces and nephews. Both women wrote to earn for their families. Neither was a pampered dilettante.)

Alcott’s protagonist in Work, Christie, has both an easier and a lonelier time of it than did her creator, but both Louisa and Christie found meaning in lives of activism, and I will learn more about Alcott’s vision as I read further in this fascinating novel, undeterred by the opinion of Mr. Henry James. Yes, Alcott’s stories veer into melodrama, and yes, she can also be didactic at times, but I pity any American woman who never managed to enjoy Little Women, and I appreciate Alcott too for not being afraid of work and for not letting the opinions of others discourage her from the work she most loved--writing--because, make no mistake, writing well enough to please publishers and a national audience is very serious work.

Not Too Late to Read the Book -- Either One

Two days after finishing my reading of Uncle Tom’s Cabin for our August reading group discussion, it was my privilege and pleasure to meet (in my very own bookstore, no less) Joan D. Hedrick, the Pulitzer-winning biographer of Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life. Here is an interview with Hedrick on Stowe from the Library of America that provides a short introduction to the iconic American writer’s life and work.

My conversations with Joan, following my evening bookstore event featuring Barbara Stark-Nemon, left me eager to read the biography, and I finished it this morning, having devoured the story morning and night, compelled from the first page.

In the northwestern corner of Connecticut the roads rise gradually through heavily forested hills toward the town of Litchfield, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s birthplace. Like much of her writing, Litchfield bears the strong stamp of geography and local culture. This is emphatically a New England town.

I’m hooked. I appreciate a “strong stamp of geography and local culture.”

But no, I should be more honest. I was hooked before I even got the book, by Joan’s telling me (and this is a strong thesis running through the biography) that it was largely owing to the rise of American literary critics like Henry James – actually, pretty specifically Henry James – that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was demoted to something less than literature, making it now one of the least-read of famous American novels. Everyone knows the title, some characters' names ("Uncle Tom" in a stereotype that hardly begins to do justice to his character in the book), and a few scraps of the story, but it’s presumed to be “old-fashioned," rather than a classic novel. Joan asked me how our reading group happened to choose Stowe’s book to read. Well, one person suggested it, and we all agreed.

And so, owing to a fortuitous coincidence, I moved quickly from the novel to the biography.

In the New England and the West (i.e., Ohio) of Stowe’s young womanhood, writing had not yet become professionalized but was practiced by both men and women, often as what Hedrick calls “parlor literature,” read aloud to groups gathered in the parlor, groups not yet separated by gender as they would be in the later Victorian age. This was an important formative element in the making of Harriet Beecher Stowe the writer.

Stowe’s years in Cincinnati, on the Ohio side of the river dividing a free from a slave state, gave her an orchestra seat on the fugitive slave issue, and passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, signed into law by President Millard Fillmore, tipped her once and for all into the antislavery camp. The death of her beloved Charley, perhaps the most dearly loved of her seven children, was a profound grief, inspiring Stowe’s descriptions of a slave mother like Eliza threatened with the loss of her child.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published in March of 1852, “sold 10,000 copies within the first week and 300,000 by the end of the first year.” Hedrick quotes from a review in the London Times, later reprinted in the New York Daily Times, that the $10,000 the author received in the first three months of sales was

...the largest sum of money ever received by any author, either American or European, from the sale of a single work in so short a period of time.

One of Stowe’s gifts as a writer, Hedrick says, was her ability to address readers in an intimate voice. Another was her ability to introduce characters with distinctive regional voices of their own. Subsequent developments in American literature, however, made of professional writers’ clubs an entirely male affair, and reviews by Henry James in the Nation took a “professional approach to book reviewing” went several steps further: Books, to be considered literature, or art, now had to abjure anything the critic might label sentimentality, earnestness, and moralism. Strangely, for someone priding himself on “objectivity,” James apparently found it possible to pass judgment on a book, if written by a woman, without reading it: “It was a woman’s book and he knew the type,” Hedrick comments dryly.

As the mother of seven living children who also suffered numerous miscarriages, and as a daughter and sister often drawn into family schemes for setting up schools, it is amazing that Harriet Beecher Stowe managed to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin at all, let alone other books and numerous published articles and private letters. She did, of course, have servants. And, crucially, her husband and children depended on her income to keep the household out of debt.

In her later work, Hedrick notes that Stowe had recourse to a male narrator’s voice, losing in the process her own natural advantages as a writer. She was also prone to rushing into print without taking the time to revise and rewrite that even her husband counseled her would help her work. So it is likely that the obscurity of Stowe’s other novels today (“Did she write anything else?” is a frequent question when one mentions her or UTC) is an accurate measure of their worth. But the same cannot be said of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Yes, parts of Uncle Tom’s Cabin reflect the author’s prejudices, but the same might be said of the majority of novelists who hide their bias in the voice of an omniscient narrator. And yes, the author makes religious appeals to the reader. But how does either of these features of her writing affect a reader’s sense of her characters as living, breathing human beings? Can anyone read this novel and not be caught up in the characters’ lives, their hopes and joys and fears and sorrows?

Hedrick neither romanticizes her subject nor tears an idol to shreds. She does not oversimplify the personality of Stowe or her culture and time. What emerges from this history of Harriet Beecher Stowe is the complicated portrait of a complex woman, determined to exercise her gifts but often blown off-course by the winds of personal conflict, social fads, finances, criticism (whether deserved or otherwise), and, as is true of almost all of us, contradictions within her own character.

If you read the novel first, you will want to read the biography, of which I barely began to scratch the surface in this post. If you begin with the biography, on the other hand, you will quickly reach for the novel. 

Don't forget: this Thursday our guest at Dog Ears Books will be Luisa Lang Owen, reading from Casualty of War: A Childhood Remembered. We will convene at 7 p.m. in David Grath's gallery, but enter please through the bookstore.