For our first day of class, we’re reading a number of stories written by women pertaining to the struggles of women writers coming under masculine scrutiny. One of the most illuminating of these is, I think, “Miss Grief”—an 1880 short story written by Constance Fenimore Woolson, great-niece of James Fenimore Cooper, and friend and contemporary of Henry James.
Throughout the text, Woolson demonstrates that her narrator and protagonist, a well-regarded male author, seeks to exert his masculine influence on women in all facets of life. Of course, one can see this in his treatment of Miss Aaronna Moncrief, and her writing. Consider, for instance, how her name is altered. Her father wanted sons, and feminized the name “Aaron” when he was given a daughter. The narrator of the story refers to her as “Miss Grief,” when she actually goes by “Crief”—at first mistakenly, but eventually because he thinks it suits her better. He’s doing more than just changing her name; he’s altering her legacy, and molding her to suit his own artistic designs.
But this aspect of the narrator’s character is also made clear through his treatment of Aaronna’s foil—his romantic partner and eventual wife, Ethelind Abercrombie. The following passage, in which Woolson overtly contrasts the two figures, is especially elucidating:
Not that poor Aaronna’s poems were evil: they were simply unrestrained, large, vast, like the skies or the wind. Ethelind was bounded on all sides, like a violet in a garden-bed. And I liked her so (329).
In this passage, it becomes clear that what the narrator finds distasteful in Aaronna’s writings, and what he hopes to curb in his alterations of them, is artistic liberation. He is infatuated by—and eventually marries—Ethelind for exactly the opposite qualities. The comparison of Ethelind to a circumscribed flower is especially revealing; it suggests that she is, to him, an object to be pruned, restrained, and controlled.