Separate spheres no more : gender convergence in American literature, 1830-1930

Although they wrote in the same historical milieu as their male counterparts, women writers of the 19th- and early 20th-centuries have generally been "ghettoized" by critics into a separate canonical sphere. These original essays argue in favor of reconciling male and female writers, both historically and in the context of classroom teaching.
While some of the essays pair up female and male authors who write in a similar style or with similar concerns, others address social issues shared by both men and women, including class tensions, economic problems, and the Civil War experience. Rather than privileging particular genres or certain well-known writers, the contributors examine writings ranging from novels and poetry to autobiography, utopian fiction, and essays. And they consider familiar figures like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emily Dickinson, and Ralph Waldo Emerson alongside such lesser-known writers as Melusina Fay Peirce, Susie King Taylor, and Mary Gove Nichols.
Each essay revises the binary notions that have been ascribed to males and females, such as public and private, rational and intuitive, political and domestic, violent and passive. Although they do not deny the existence of separate spheres, the contributors show the boundary between them to be much more blurred than has been assumed until now.

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The informing assumptions of Elbert's collection--that the masculine and feminine, the public and private interacted and interpenetrated in 19th- and early-20th-century literature and life--will surprise no one who has followed feminist literary and historical scholarship over the last 15 years (another example of this scholarly trend is Sentimental Men, ed. by Mary Chapman and Glenn Hendler, CH, Apr'00). Still, Elbert's introduction is a useful summary of "separate sphere" scholarship, and the essays she includes in the volume examine a varied selection of canonical and less-known writers of literary and historical interest. Explorations of works by Susie King Taylor, Melusina Fay Peirce (wife of Charles Peirce and advocate of a cooperative housekeeping model based on business-derived standards of efficiency), health reformer Mary Gove Nichols, and little-known utopian writers Mrs. J. Wood and Annie Denton Cridge are juxtaposed with discussions of Emerson, Hawthorne, Crane, and Stowe. Although one could quibble with particular conclusions--e.g., it is far easier to see the heroine of Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World as practicing heroic self-censorship rather than a revised Emersonian self-reliance--the essays are thought-provoking and nuanced. Especially impressive is Debra Bernardi's contextualization of Pauline Hopkins' domestic spaces within US imperialistic discourse and action. Recommended for academic collections at all levels. M. L. Robertson; Sweet Briar College

Preface	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
Part I Intertextuality and Authorial Interconnectedness
1 To Be a "Parlor Soldier": Susan Warner's Answer to Emerson's "Self-Reliance"	p. 29
2 "Astra Castra": Emily Dickinson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and Harriet Prescott Spofford	p. 50
3 The War of Susie King Taylor	p. 73
4 No Separations in the City: The Public-Private Novel and Private-Public Authorship	p. 92
Part II Body Politics: Framing the Female Body
5 The Ungendered Terrain of Good Health: Mary Gove Nichols's Rewriting of the Diseased Institution of Marriage	p. 117
6 Male Doctors and Female Illness in American Women's Fiction, 1850-1900	p. 143
7 Gender Bending: Two Role-Reversal Utopias by Nineteenth-Century Women	p. 158
Part III On the Home Front and Beyond: Domesticity and the Marketplace
8 A Homely Business: Melusina Fay Peirce and Late-Nineteenth-Century Cooperative Housekeeping	p. 179
9 Narratives of Domestic Imperialism: The African-American Home in the Colored American Magazine and the Novels of Pauline Hopkins, 1900-1903	p. 203
10 Public Women, Private Acts: Gender and Theater in Turn-of-the-Century American Novels	p. 225
Part IV Sentimental Subversions
11 Gender Valences of Transcendentalism: The Pursuit of Idealism in Elizabeth Oakes-Smith's "The Sinless Child"	p. 245
12 Sentimental Epistemologies in Uncle Tom's Cabin and The House of the Seven Gables	p. 261
13 "I Try to Make the Reader Feel": The Resurrection of Bess Streeter Aldrich's A Lantern in Her Hand and the Politics of the Literary Canon	p. 282
Contributors	p. 297
Index	p. 301

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