Inventing a Feminine Past Author(s): David Schuyler Source: The New England Quarterly, Vol. 51, No. 3 (Sep.

, 1978), pp. 291-308 Published by: The New England Quarterly, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/364610 Accessed: 22/03/2010 06:53
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THE

NEW

ENGLAND

Q4ARTERLY
SEPTEMBER 1978 INVENTING A FEMININE PAST
DAVID SCHUYLER

IF critical applause is a measure of scholarly worth, Ann

Douglas can fairly claim that her Feminization of American Culturel is preeminent among the numerous studies of American women published in the last decade. Her book has been enthusiastically reviewed both in the scholarly and in the general press,and various critics have hailed it as an important contribution to the cultural history of the United States.2 John Leonard of the New York Times ranked Feminization as one of the ten best books of 1977, and early the following year Douglas was elected a Fellow of the Society of American Historians.
Douglas' thesis is that from 1820 until the 1870's, America

was split into two cultures: the male-dominated economic realm and the female-dominated world of sentimentality and domesticity. During that period two "disestablished"groups1 Numbers in parentheses within the text refer to pages in Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York, 1977). This book was reviewed in the December issue of THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY, L, 695-697 (i977). 2 See, for example, John Leonard, "Books of the Times," New York Times, May 27, 1977, C:23; Willie Lee Rose, "American Women in Their Place," New York Review of Books, xxiv, 3-4 (July 14, 1977); Margo Jefferson, "The Triumph of Treacle," Newsweek, LXXXIX, 94 (June 13, 1977); Ruth Mathewson, "Worshipping the Sentimental," New Leader, LX, 14-15 (Aug. 1, 1977); and Beverly Voloshin's review in THE NEW ENGLANDQUARTERLY, L, 695-697 (Dec., 1977). 291

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the liberal clergy and women-became allies in the attempt to create by influence a more sentimental society. According to Douglas, ministers lost their traditional power in society as a result of church disestablishment, and women lost their former role as producers in the aftermath of industrialization. Excluded from participation in the great nineteenth-century drama, "the transformation of the American economy into the most powerfully aggressive capitalist system in the world" (6), these two groups became the arbiters of a mass culture and successfully established as behavioral norms the values of a consumer-oriented, "feminine" society. Douglas believes that this massive and regrettable transformation, the "feminization of American culture," was achieved by an insidious form of guerrilla warfare known as "sentimental sabotage" (327). She mourns the "tragedy"of our nineteenth-century feminine society because of the absence of a "viable, sexually diversified culture," and because it guaranteed the "continuation of male hegemony in different guises" (13). Douglas presents her thesis in part I of Feminization, three chapters collectively called "The Sentimentalization of Status." The second part, "The Sentimentalization of Creed and Culture," attempts to illustrate her argument. In four chapters she discusses the loss of rigor in theology, the sentimentality of antiquarian history, the use of death and the "posthumous congregation" as a means of extending feminine influence, and the emergence of the periodical press as an arena in which women and the liberal clergy battled for status. In part III, Douglas investigates as "case studies" two persons who stood for what she considers alternatives to sentimentality -Margaret Fuller and Herman Melville. Throughout the book Douglas examines popular literature to demonstrate the ways in which nineteenth-century American women sought to define their feminine identity through their writings. More broadly, she claims to describe American culture by projecting upon the consumers of popular literature the values ascribed to its authors.

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Despite the attractiveness of her subject matter for contemporary readers, Douglas fails as a historian. In the first place, she neglects to define exactly what she means by "culture," and is unsuccessful in attempting to prove that she is dealing with issues of general importance in the American past. Her two "disestablished" groups, the liberal clergy and sentimental women, are scarcely representative. They all live in the Northeast and, by Douglas' own figures, the liberal, nonevangelical clergy ministered to only a small portion of the churchgoing population. In 1855 the Congregationalists numbered 207,608 and the Unitarians only 13,350 (23). Douglas

does not attempt to prove that most members of liberal churches shared the values she describes, nor does she make a plausible case for ministerial influence extending beyond the congregation and shaping the broader culture. The number of women who suffered economic "disestablishment" may have been even more miniscule. Douglas admits that feminine "disestablishment" hardly affected all women in all parts of the United States. For the majority of American women living between 1800oo and 1865, there was probably no economic dislocation and no concomitant "disestablishment" process comparable to that affecting the northern middle-class woman. For the countless girls who moved from a life of labor on a farm to a life of labor in a factory, for the feminine immigrants who came in increasing numbers straight from a ship to a northern sweatshop or a midwestern frontier, for the thousands of enslaved black women who served King Cotton, disestablishment clearly had little or no meaning (49). Nevertheless, in the course of her argument, "disestablished" women come to stand for American women in general. Equally unfortunate is Douglas' anticapitalistic value judgment, the notion that economic "disestablishment" was a woeful occurrence. This reasoning could only result from the author's tendency to project contemporary values backward into the past. Simply because many women today are struggling to gain a place in the economy, she believes that nineteenth-century

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women lost status with industrialization. Somehow, Douglas has forgotten that the "majority" equated status not with production but with leisure, and would gladly have traded their place in the farmstead or in the factory for the amenities enjoyed by the urban middle and upper classes. Douglas is nervously aware that her case for the "feminization" of American culture is tenuous, and thrice in the volume offers qualifications. In one passage she admits that the women and ministers she studies are "members of subcultures" (227), and in another she describes "my chosen period-which covers the 'feminization' or sentimentalization of northeastern culture" (255). Even more incredibly, in a lengthy footnote she identifies her ministers and middle-class women as members of "a special [my italics] subculture" (347). Obviously, Douglas is not defining American culture at all. She is using the concept of culture as a catchword to inflate the importance of a phenomenon which she has extrapolated from its historical context and thereby distorted. Douglas' second grave error concerns the formulation of her thesis, the belief that nineteenth-century American culture was split into the male and sentimental (female) spheres. This allegedly astonishing thesis is anything but novel. The idea that American society is separated into two cultures is at least as old as the twentieth century. William James long ago perceived a dichotomy between what he called "toughminded" and "tenderminded" thinkers, and both George Santayana and the young Van Wyck Brooks attached sexual connotations to those distinctions. Santayana, for example, divided the American mind into two halves: one, "slightly becalmed," was represented architecturally by a "neat reproduction of the colonial mansion"; the other, "leaping down a sort of Niagara Rapids" of technology and social organization, had its metaphorical representation in the skyscraper. According to Santayana, The American Will inhabits the sky-scraper; the American Intellect inhabits the colonial mansion. The one is the sphere of the American man; the other, at least predominantly, of the American

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woman. The one is all aggressive enterprise; the other is all genteel tradition.3 Like Santayana, Brooks thought he saw a tragic separation between business enterprise and aesthetic culture: we have in America two publics, the cultivated public and the business public, the public of theory and the public of action, the public that reads Maeterlinck and the public that accumulates money: the one largely feminine, the other largely masculine.4 Brooks traced this bifurcation within American culture to the middle of the eighteenth century. For that generation, Franklin represented the "self-interested practicality" of the business mentality, Edwards the "vaporous idealism" of the man of learning.5 To Brooks the fundamental split in American culture was apparent long before the 1820's.

In their analysis of the twentieth-century United States Santayana and Brooks engaged in mythmaking. They were rebelling against Victorian values and the hegemony of a group of older writers and critics Henry May has called the "custodians of culture."6 Moreover, they hoped to make more cosmopolitan a nation that had suddenly become a world power. As a
result, they portrayed the American mind as split across the brow and compared it invidiously with a European culture

thought to be unified and organic. Douglas perpetuates this hoary myth. She argues that Victorian England had a "greater
cultural cohesiveness" than America (6). In her estimation, Britain "was less entirely dominated by what we think of as the worst, the most sentimental, aspects of the Victorian spirit" (5). Although Douglas does not suggest that English
3 George Santayana, The Genteel Tradition: Nine Essays by George San-

tayana, Douglas L. Wilson, Editor (Cambridge, 1967), 39-40.

4 Van Wyck Brooks, America's Coming-of-Age (1915), reprint ed. (New York, 1975), 1ii. 5 Brooks, 26-34. 6 Henry F. May, The End of American Innocence. A Study of the First Years of Our Own Time, 1912-1917 (New York, 1959), 30-51. See also James Hoopes, Van Wyck Brooks: In Search of American Culture (Amherst, 1977), passim.

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culture was not similarly vitiated by a split between capitalism and aesthetics, she does assert that the major English writers of the period (Dickens, Thackeray and Eliot) "dedicated their enormous talents to an exploration of Victorianism" and its sentimental subject matter, while American writers (Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville and Whitman) merely described "alternatives to cultural norms"-"the forest, the sea, the city" (5). Because she fails to accept the forest, the sea, and the city as cultural constants in the New World, Douglas equates English writers with English culture, relegating the best American writers of the mid-nineteenth century to that favorite habitat of theg1960's-the counter-culture. Douglas' resuscitation of the bicultural model suggests that like the young Brooks, she too is rebelling against inorganicism. But in her case, rebellion takes the form of wholesale rejection. She wants to consign both aspects of our cultural schizophrenia, our male-dominated, capitalistic economy, and our female-dominated world of domesticity and "culture," to the ash can of history. In their place Douglas creates a new synthesis composed of the radical anticapitalism of the 1i960's
and the feminine narcissism of the
1970's.

Equally questionable in the formulation of her thesis is Douglas' chronological framework, i.e., the claim that a "feminization" process took place between 1820 and the 1870's. We have already seen that Van Wyck Brooks dated what Douglas calls "feminization" from the middle of the eighteenth century. As a corollary to the split between "lowbrows"and "highbrows," Brooks believed that the status of the New England clergy changed: "The minister was no longer a man of affairs, -he was a stark theologian, and usually of a type which the majority of his flock had outgrown."7More recently, historians of the Great Awakening have pointed out the existence of a decline in clerical authority in the eighteenth century. Richard Bushman, for example, located a "decline of voluntary
7 Brooks, America's Coming of Age, 20-21.

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establishment.8

297

loyalty" in Connecticut congregations long before legal disNevertheless, Douglas' justification for beginning her study in the 1820's is her assertion that the ministry lost real power in New England after the disestablishment of the Congregational Church. Without the traditional sanction of law, she argues, the liberal, non-evangelical clergy served only at the behest of their congregations and thus lost economic and political influence. Douglas portrays this as a change from colonial practice: "Congregations had always chosen their minister, but they had also been legally required to support him and, more important, the church to which he belonged. The new voluntary system meant that the church itself, as well as any given minister, must curry favor in order to survive" (24).
In 1775, Douglas claims, nine colonies had established

churches "comparable in status to the Anglican one in England" (23). Even if that were the case elsewhere, it hardly describes her area of investigation, New England. There the very nature of the congregational way precluded an Anglican-type of establishment. As Clifford K. Shipton pointed out a decade ago, "There never was an established church in Massachusetts .. . it had only individual and independent churches." Moreover, he found that many towns failed to support the ministers they had called, despite laws requiring that they do so.9 As most towns were reluctant to call upon the Boston clergy to arbitrate disputes with their minister, and as provincial authorities were understandably reluctant to inter8 Richard L. Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, I690-I765 (Cambridge, 1967), 163. See also Richard Hofstadter, America at I750: A Social Portrait (New York, 1971), esp. chs. 7, 8. 9 Clifford K. Shipton, "The Locus of Authority in Colonial Massachusetts," in G. A. Billias, Editor, Law and Authority in Colonial America (1965), reprint ed. (New York, 1970), 137. The degree to which the Southern established churches compared to the Anglican establishment in England is challenged by the findings of the minister Charles Woodmason. See Woodmason, The Carolina Backcountry on the Eve of the Revolution: The Journal and Other Writings of Charles Woodmason, Anglican Itinerant, Richard J. Hooker, Editor (Chapel Hill, 1953), passim.

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vene in jealously guarded local prerogatives, in the end it was the minister who served at his congregation's wish. Douglas reasons that as a result of disestablishment, the ministry was forced to cultivate an alliance with women in order to retain some measure of influence. She implies that without the force of law, males would not attend church or lend financial support to the ministry. But she does not inform the reader of the proportion of male and female church attendance in the nineteenth century, of the minister's relationship with the male members of his congregation, or of the percentage of the clergy's support derived from male contributions. And if female church membership in these years was higher than male, Douglas does not suggest how it differs from the colonial period, when it was also higher.10As a result, Douglas' assertion that in the aftermath of disestablishment the ministry was forced to cultivate an alliance with women is at best unverified. Douglas attempts to bolster her case for "feminization" by arguing that after 1820 "disestablished"women lost their role as domestic producers and became consumers, cogs in the engine of capitalism. Such a characterization of the woman's role is both presentist and misleading: it diminishes the importance of household tasks and child rearing as production. Nineteenth-century women who wrote about domesticity, however, believed theirs was a significant contribution. Catharine Esther Beecher, for example, emphasized the importance of the woman's sphere by entitling her 1841 volume A
Treatise on Domestic Economy. By using the word "econ-

omy," Beecher related, perhaps even equated, the housewife's functions to extradomestic affairs. In addition to the usual prescriptions on household efficiency,she included as information essential to the "compleat woman" materials on architec10 Robert G. Pope's study of the Congregational churches at Roxbury, Dorchester, Charlestown, and Boston (Third Congregational Church) presents conclusive evidence that women entered communion and owned the covenant in substantially larger numbers than men. Pope, The Half-Way Covenant: Church Membership in Puritan New England (Princeton, 1969), esp. ch. 8 and appendixes, 279-286.

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ture, interior furnishings, and such new improvements as dumbwaiters, water closets and interior plumbing. Beecher thus conceded to her feminine audience an important role in the major economic decision of a couple's marriage, for no family expense was greater than the purchase or construction of a home. Her sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, defined the woman's role as producer by ascribing to numerous fictional charactersthat quality she called "faculty"-the innate ability to perform numerous household tasks effortlessly and simultaneously. To conclude, as Douglas does, that women lost their role as producers and instead became consumers is only part of a larger problem. Even the minority, the "disestablished"group she describes, performed innumerable chores that involved production. Unfortunately, there is no simple way of defining such output. There is no place in Douglas' logic for the woman who baked bread-who acted, in other words, both as a consumer (because she may have purchased the ingredients) and as a producer. Douglas has created a fictional world for nineteenth-century women. They have no children to raise and care for, have no one to feed, and do no shopping except for finery and goods so useless as to require advertising. These "disestablished"women evidently have nothing to do but read, write, and consume. Douglas is projecting back into the past the unencumbered woman of the 1970's-the childless wife, the unmarried worker, the divorced professional who performs few domestic chores. Another major area in which Douglas fails as a historian is her use of evidence. Especially regrettable is her tendency to shape literary materials to conform to her thesis. Douglas' treatment of Herman Melville, for example, is both contradictory and inaccurate. Because she wants to write about Melville, he becomes the personification of American romanticism: "Indeed, no American author clung more tenaciously to American material than Melville. Whitman of course is as con-

sistently wedded to American subjects as Melville, more so in

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fact" (293)-and then she explains why Melville is more American than Whitman. This illogical and incorrect statement demonstrates Douglas' tendency to shape the past from her own contemporary perspective. Douglas divides Melville's opus according to two classifications, Marxist and Freudian. Works concerned with matters of class exclude American women; the psychological novels include them. According to Douglas, Moby-Dick is a work in which "Melville is interested primarily in questions of class" (298), one that, in Marxist terms, describes the "acquisitive brutality of the fishing enterprise" (304). Despite Douglas' reasoning, Ahab's quest is anything but Marxist. On the quarterdeck, when Ahab first announces his search for the white whale, Starbuck qualifies his assent: I am game for his crookedjaw, and for the jaws of Death too, Captain Ahab, if it fairly comes in the way of the businesswe follow; vengeance. but I came here to hunt whales, not my commander's How many barrelswill thy vengeanceyield thee even if thou gettest it, CaptainAhab?It will not fetch thee much in our Nantucket market. Ahab, hardly the prototypical capitalist, replies "Nantucket market! Hoot!"1l Moby-Dick is not a Marxist novel, and the Pequod is not chasing profits. Nor is Douglas certain that Melville is portraying a class struggle between the captain and the crew. Despite her "roughly accurate" (299) categorization of Moby-Dick as a Marxist novel, Douglas later argues that the class struggle becomes psychological as Ahab and the boys abandon the pursuit of the whale and instead act out the drama of the sexes. By this feat of logic, Starbuck comes to represent feminine sensitivity, Ahab masculine authority. Starbuck becomes, in this interpretation, the "spokesman for the softer, more 'human' values" (304), and his death becomes a "demonstration of the inefficacyof the sentimental creed" (306).
n Herman Melville, Moby-Dick: Or, The White Whale (New York, 1961), 166-167.

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Melville's character differs significantly from Douglas' Starbuck: "Looking into his eyes, you seemed to see there the yet lingering images of those thousand-fold perils he had calmly confronted through life." Although the "domestic memories" of a wife and child have tempered his "dare-devil daring," Starbuck was nonetheless brave: "courage was not a sentiment; but a thing simply useful to him, and always at hand Starbuck had to die, upon all mortally practical occasions."'12 not because he represented sentimentality but because all members of the crew save Ishmael had to die. The choice of Ishmael as narrator predetermines his survival, as does his name, which means "may God hear." Like Coleridge's ancient mariner, and like the wandering Ishmael of Genesis, he must live in order to testify. As a result, Starbuck's death does not represent the "inefficacy of the sentimental creed," nor does Ahab's represent that of masculine authority. Melville was hunting bigger, more metaphysical whales. But in Douglas' allegorical scheme, Starbuck has become the villain. He must die because, to her, he symbolizes middle-class, capitalistic values. Douglas is also an inadequate critic in her discussion of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novels. In this instance, however, she projects modern feminism back into the Victorian consciousness. Douglas focuses on two of Stowe's "important" novels,
My Wife and I (1871) and We and Our Neighbors (1875),

written at the time of Henry Ward Beecher's affair with Libby Tilton. According to Douglas, the Beecher-Tilton scandal unmasked the "tableau of women at men's mercy"; Stowe's novels, on the other hand, "triumphantly displayed the scene of man abject under feminine rule." By this interpretation, Stowe sought "to analyze and mock the futilities inherent in the position of the liberal minister and the male sentimentalist" (244). The resulting achievement, Douglas believes, demonstrates Stowe's "bitterness" and her "new-felt freedom in
the early and mid-i87os" (244, 246).
L2Moby-Dick, 121-122.

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My Wife and I begins with a passage (ascribed to the narrator, Harry Henderson) entitled "The Author Defines His Position." In order to "give the flavor"of the book, Douglas quotes (with several errors in transcription) the announcement of a sermon to be delivered by the Reverend Dr. Cool Shadow, which will show that "everybody should cultivate general sweetness" (249). Douglas asserts that this is "in part a cruelly piercing attack on the often pathetic attempts of the contemporary liberal clergy to rationalize and popularize their predicament" (249). But if it is only "in part" such an attack, what is the flavor of the rest? Douglas evidently finds this unimportant, but it is critical: Stowe is attacking not the ministry but the periodical press, and especially the popularity of the serialized story.13 Douglas errs in representing Stowe's New York novels as feminist tracts. She argues, for example, that in Stowe's "acerbic pages" Harry Henderson "seems weak in every sense." He is so emasculated that his "subjugation" at the hands of Eva Van Arsdel "is not apparent but real" (250). Such a reading distorts the meaning of Stowe's novels. Her writing was prescriptive in intent and attempted to establish or reinforce social and behavioral norms. When Eva first appears, she is the coquettish eye of a social hurricane, totally absorbed in the whirl of fashionable New York. Harry, a struggling young writer, exists outside Eva's society, but he has published several poems she admires. In the ensuing saga of courtship (Eva decides to marry Harry, whom she loves, instead of a wealthy suitor she does not), the financial collapse of the Van Arsdel family, and the establishment of the Hendersons' home, Harry and Eva represent the power of true love. Their story is cast in sentimental terms but the meaning is clear: Stowe champions not fashion or feminism or the castration of the male, but domesticity and the tenacity and strength two married people can derive from each other.
13 Stowe, My Wife and I: Or, Harry Henderson's History, in The Writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Riverside Edition, 16 vols. (Boston and New York, 1896), XII, Vii-X.

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Pink and White Tyranny, Stowe's other novel of 1871, also concerns New York society. My Wife and I offered prescriptive advice on how to find the most suitable wife and establish a domestic paradise; Pink and White Tyranny catalogued the pitfalls of a marriage without love. Lillie Ellis, an unregenerate social belle, weds John Seymour not for love but for "wealth and ambition." John tragically mistakes Lillie's beauty for virtue and blindly allows her to wreck the family economy by reckless spending and ruin their marriage by endless flirting. Lillie even has John's family home redecorated in the then-fashionable French taste, a danger signal to readers of sentimental novels as clear as Lear's decision to divide his kingdom among his three daughters was to Shakespeare's audience. John eventually realizes the terrible mistakes he has made, and after some soul searching decides he must continue to love his wife. Lillie finally learns to recognize her husband's goodness, and after recognizing her immortal soul dies in peace. Stowe's concluding passageadmits that Pink and White Tyranny is "not a novel, but a story with a moral," the inviolability of the marriage contract.l4 Although markedly different in content, Stowe's intent in My Wife and I and Pink and White Tyranny reveals a general concern for the traditional, moral virtues of marriage and domesticity. We and Our Neighbors, the sequel to My Wife and I, is, like the other New York novels, a paean to domesticity. It catalogues the establishment of home life and humble society by the newlyweds, offering examples of how to set up a residence on a modest scale, how to entertain on a limited budget, and how to employ feminine "influence" to shape male character.'5 It is, in short, a fictional version of The American Woman's Home. Clearly, the New York novels of the 1870'S do not convey a sense of the bitterness of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Douglas' interpretation, however, reveals the
14 Stowe, Pink and White Tyranny: A Society Novel, in The Writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe, XI, 503-523. 15 Stowe, My Wife and 1, xii; Stowe, We and Our Neighbors: Or, The Records of an Unfashionable Street, in ibid., xiII, passim.

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extent to which she projects contemporary values into the past

and thereby misinterprets her own evidence. In addition to abusing literary materials, Douglas plays fast

and very loose with the historical record. She includes, for example, a questionable profile of the liberal, nonevangelical ministry. Attempting to supplement literary "impressions," Douglas selected thirty ministers and, with the resulting collective biography, offers observations on the kind of men attracted to the clerical profession. The result, she believes, will make it possible "to obtain more precision about the causes and workings of the feminization process under discussion" (80). Unfortunately, Douglas' evidence itself casts doubt on her formulation of the "feminization process." Throughout the nineteenth century, Douglas' ministers "increasingly assumed a conjunction between their profession and poor health" (88). Refusing to claim that the clergy died "in greater numbers than their non-clerical peers" (she really means suffered a greater proportion of early deaths), Douglas assertsthat the death toll among youthful liberal ministers "was at least conspicuous" (89). From this modest disavowal of broad claims, Douglas nevertheless speculates that "Boys with weak health or indoor tastes, likely to be introspective and sensitive, stayed at home. Of necessity more closely drawn to their homebound, religious, and supposedly 'weaker' mothers than to their more secular-minded,active fathers, they were naturally attracted to the clerical profession" (89). Douglas could only reach such a conclusion by relying more on pedestrian psychology than on her own evidence. If the collective profile of the ministry is of any consequence, it should

have been used to test this hypothesis. The information in Douglas' own biographical tables (upon which the collective profile is reputed to be based) disproves the assertion that maternal influence led boys to careers in the clergy. Most of her sample of ministers had in their fathers models who spent much of their time at home: twelve were ministers, seven were farmers, two were judges, one was a teacher, one an anti-

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quarian, and one a dentist.16None of these occupations conforms to Douglas' caricature of the male sex as aggressively capitalistic. Only three members of her sample, the fathers of Joseph Tuckerman (merchant), William H. Channing and William Peabody (lawyers),possibly conform to such a sweeping characterization. Based on this evidence, Douglas' assertion that the nineteenth-century liberal minister followed the maternal role model defies belief. Moreover, the birth and death dates given in her sample belie the claim that ministers probably died at a younger age than men in other occupations. Of Douglas' thirty clergymen, one died in his twenties, one in his thirties, seven in their forties, three in their fifties, four in their sixties, eight in their seventies, three in their eighties, and three in their nineties. Average age at death for the sample was more than 64 years. It seems reasonable to ask how this statistic compares with the longevity of workers in other occupations. Douglas also distorts the historical record in her discussion of the Christian Examiner. She believes that this periodical, founded in 1813 as a "strongly sectarian organ," "gradually became more neutral theologically, and more oriented to belles lettres" (231). By the i86o's, "the journal was decidedly literary and secular." Unfortunately, Douglas fails to locate the date and reason for the magazine's secularization. "The Christian Examiner's demise" as a religious journal, she writes, "came from many causes, not the least of which, one suspects, was the increasing competition of the A tlantic
Monthly, begun in 1857 . . ." (231). Alas, secularization began

long before the establishment of the Atlantic Monthly, and for an eminently logical reason: the economics of circulation. In 1828, under the editorial direction of J. G. Palfry, the magazine bore the subtitle "And Theological Review." Every article in the journal of that year had a religious theme. The following year the magazine changed its subtitle to "And Gen16 Douglas does not identify the occupationsof the fathers of AndrewsNorton, J. F. Clarke,and Henry Bacon.

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eral Review," and fifteen of twenty-nine articles discussed secular matters. By 1835 the proprietors of the Christian Examiner faced additional economic problems and attempted to broaden the magazine's appeal. "As the subscription list of the Examiner has, owing to several causes, considerably diminished during the last two or three years," they proposed to "introduce a greater variety of topics than hitherto, and to give in the same space a greater amount of religious and literary information."'7 During the editorship of William Ware (May, 1844), whom Douglas credits with maintaining 1839g-January, a "strongly sectarian organ," the Christian Examiner had a strongly secular tone. Another example of the bad history in Feminization is Douglas' treatment of the rural cemetery movement, which appears in a chapter entitled "The Domestication of Death: The Posthumous Congregation." In this she argues that grief became a form of compensation, a "therapeutic self-indulgence," and a means of extending sentimental influence by
making converts of the dead (201-205). Douglas believes that

this new attitude toward death relates to the rural cemetery movement, as surely it does. But her assertion that it is "hardly surprising that the same groups who produced the consolation literature of the period promoted and extolled the rural cemetery" (208) is questionable. One of her own examples, Nehemiah Adams, author of Agnes and the Key of Her Little Coffin, opposed the establishment of Mount Auburn because he feared it would lead to pantheism and relieve too completely the apprehension of death.'8 Douglas' treatment of the rural cemetery movement is lamentably presentist. By her interpretation, the cemeteries acted to "camouflage" death and "functioned as a Disney World for the mortuary imagination of Victorian America"
17 Quoted in Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, I74I1850 (Cambridge, 1930), 287. 18 Nehemiah Adams, "Mount Auburn," American Quarterly Observer, in (July, 1834), 157-161. For a discussion of death as a literary convention in the nineteenth century, see Herbert Ross Brown, The Sentimental Novel in America, 1789-1860 (Durham, 1940), 124-127.

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(2 io). Douglas also claims that "Until the 1i880's,proprietors disfigured their plots by the erection of iron railings. Cemeteries bristling with such jealous markers gave evidence of squatters' rights rather than of mourners' grief" (212). The first sentence is factually incorrect. As early as 1846 Adolph Strauch designed a cemetery according to the lawn plan, which prohibited such enclosures, and three years later Andrew Jackson Downing editorialized against the "hideous ironmongery" of some plots. Thereafter many cemeteries prohibited such enclosures.'9 The second sentence is more interpretative and reveals the length to which Douglas carries her own ideology. She is most unhappy about so capitalistic an idea as private property, even in a cemetery, and fails to accept ornamental railings on their own terms. To nineteenth-century survivors, the decorations placed around family plots symbolized reverential respect. But because Douglas ascribes to the nineteenth century her own contemporary values, she classifies such decorative fences as "jealous markers." Douglas also errs in claiming that Victorian women did not have a "room of their own" (77). This is a feminist clich6, borrowed from London's Bloomsbury set, which has at best a dubious validity when applied to nineteenth-century American domestic architecture. In a series of designs entitled Cottage Residences
(1842),

Downing

provided

plans for two

houses with boudoirs. He described this room as a space to be "used by the lady of the house as a morning room for receiving social calls."20Douglas may not have occasion to read architectural books, but there is ample evidence in mid-nineteenthcentury fiction that women did indeed have rooms of their own. Harry Henderson's mother, for example, had "a little room all her own," and Hepzibah Pyncheon had a "room
19 Jacob Weidenmann, Modern Cemeteries: An Essay upon the Improvement and Proper Management of Rural Cemeteries (Chicago, 1888), 7-9; [Downing], "Public Cemeteries and Public Gardens," The Horticulturist, and Journal of Rural Art and Rural Taste, iv, 10 (July, 1849). 20 Downing, Cottage Residences; Or, A Series of Designs for Rural Cottages and Cottage Villas, and their Gardens and Grounds, Adapted to North America, 4th ed. (New York, 1852), 148.

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THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY

which she would probably have called her boudoir, had her education embraced any such French phrase."21Clearly, at least some women had rooms of their own, and the middleclass, northeastern women Douglas describes would be the most likely to have them. In addition to previously mentioned errors of fact and interpretation, numerous mistakes plague the reader. The wellknown historian Page Smith appears as "Paige" (359, n. 62; 366, n. 11); Fitzgerald's "T. J. Eckleburg" has become "T. J.
Ecklesberg" (311); Downing's magazine is "Horticulture"

(212); there are incorrect dates for the first publication of

Henry Ward Beecher's Norwood (240) and Stowe's We and

Our Neighbors (244); and a mention of the New Englander

of 1831, several years before its first appearance (211). Such

errorsmay seem trivial, but they demonstrate Douglas' cavalier regard for her materials. She is interested in placing her own version of the present on the past, one that combines 1960's anticapitalistic rhetoric and 1970's feminism. To do so she has spun an allegory, and admittedly a clever one. But it is not history. The Feminization of American Culture is not about nineteenth-century America but about contemporary feminism. Douglas reveals this most poignantly in her introduction. Describing her experience in reading Victorian literature, she admits: "I expected to find my fathers and my mothers; instead I discovered my fathers and my sisters" (1i1). Given the

great number of appealing and thoroughly maternal mothers who adorn the pages of the books she discusses, it is surprising that Douglas could not find any. But then, Ann Douglas was looking for her feminist "sisters," and finding none, she invented them.
21 Stowe, My Wife and I, 2; Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables, in The Complete Novels and Selected Tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne, with an introduction, Norman Holmes Pearson, Editor (New York, 1937), 286. Doctor Wentworth's house in the fictional village of Norwood also had a "mother's room," which served as the "heart of home." H. W. Beecher, Norwood; Or, Village Life in New England (New York, 1867), 72.