For my blog post this week I decided to write about Edith Wharton’s short story, “Writing A War Story.” In this story, a young author and nurse, Ivy, is working in a hospital in Paris when she is asked to write a short story for a magazine that will be sent to soldiers. A quote that really stood out to me was,
But that very afternoon the ‘artistic’ photographer to whom she had posed for her portrait sent home the proofs; and she saw herself, exceedingly long, narrow and sinuous, robed in white and monastically veiled, holding out a refreshing beverage to an invisible sufferer with a gesture half way between Mélisande lowering her braid over the balcony and Florence Nightingale advancing with the lamp (Wharton, 253)
The mention of this picture is ironic because by the end of the story the only thing that the soldiers care about is the picture, no one cares about the story itself. I find this way of describing her picture and then making the soldiers only care about her picture a smart way for Wharton to comment on the participation of women in the war and also women as writers. WWI was the first time women and men, regardless of their marriage status were able to spend time together. Women were able to prove that they could handle being in difficult situations. However, women were also still objectified and it seems to me that Wharton is really trying to make sure that the reader understands that.
The soldiers want to remember Ivy as the “hot nurse”, not by her intelligence and ability to write. This piece sets up the mood for our class— women struggling to be taken seriously.
“Writing a War Story” by Edith Wharton is shocking—and it isn’t. Spending weeks crafting a war story for a magazine for soldiers, Ivy Spang is particularly proud of herself when she completes it. She buys copies of the magazine for the soldiers she looks after in the hospital, nervous but excited for them to read it. The men are outwardly impressed— but not by her story, but rather her portrait on the cover page. Reading this I was disgusted but unsurprised. In an age where things like last Saturday’s Women’s March are still very much needed, I see truth in Wharton’s short story even today.
What troubled me even more though was Spang’s conversation with Harold Harbard, another solider and famous novelist. Nervous for his opinion on her work, Spang enters his room to find him laughing at her story. When she works up the courage to ask him the reason for his laughter, their conversation goes like this:
“…But it’s queer—it’s puzzling. You’ve got hold of a wonderfully good subject; and that’s the main thing, of course—‘ Ivy interrupted him eagerly. ‘The subject is the main thing?’ ‘Why, naturally; it’s only the people without invention who tell you it isn’t.’ ‘Oh,’ she gasped, trying to readjust her carefully acquired theory of esthetics.”
Earlier in the story Spang experiences intense writer’s block. What helps her essentially is a magazine that insists that a ‘subject’, in fact, is not the most important part of a story, but rather the delivery and art form of it. What we see above is Harbard turning that logic on its head, and Spang not only resigning her own thoughts on the matter, but also preparing to reshape her entire mindset on it. She is hurt and disrespected by Harbard and yet, because he is a successful man in literature, she takes what he says as ultimate truth, disregarding all that she thought she knew.
‘I am your friend,’ replied Miss Grief. Then, after a moment, she added slowly, ‘I have read every word you have ever written'” (Woolson 318).
This excerpt from Constance Fenimore Woolson’s story “Miss Grief” highlights the intersection for women of literacy and intimacy that Gere explores in the first chapter of her book Intimate Practices: Literacy and Cultural Work in U.S. Women’s Clubs, 1880-1920. Miss Grief, or Crief, feels close to the male narrator of the story because she has read all of his work—she feels close enough to him through his writing alone to reveal all of her own writings to him in return. By taking a chance on a potential relationship based solely on literacy, she makes herself very vulnerable to him, since the disparity of their powers both in the literary world and in society at large is vast. He says himself that her writing abilities are not what he would expect from a woman, and throughout the piece he constantly calls attention to her gender and how odd it is for him to acknowledge her literary superiority. When he does recognize her talents, he begins to reciprocate (somewhat) the feelings of admiration she feels toward him. Of course, this relationship is different from those of club women since it is between a powerful man and a destitute woman, but this story still highlights the way that a woman’s shared literacy can create unique and intimate relationships. These characters would never have associated with one another were it not for this link of literacy, and if this pretentious, chauvinistic man can bear to read Miss Grief’s work, we can only imagine how prosperous a relationship she could have had with a fellow woman writer.
Works Cited
Gere, Anne Ruggles. “Literacy and Intimacy.” Intimate Practices. University of Illinois, 1997, pp. 17-53.
Woolson, Constance Fenimore. “Miss Grief.” Wielding the Pen, edited by Anne E. Boyd. Johns Hopkins University, 2009, pp. 315-332.
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.
Constance Fenimore Woolson in 1886.
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.
Since finding out about the existence of the Woman’s Literary Club half a decade ago, I’ve been wondering what members of the club thought of one of my great literary heroes (I’m not going to call her a heroine), Edith Wharton.
As a jaded grad student in the 1990s, Wharton’s novel The House of Mirth (her first, published in 1905) was the only book I read that actually brought me to tears.
It was also a novel that challenged American literary history as it was viewed at the time. Back then, when people talked about American literature of the 1890s, they talked about the “Age of Realism” and “the big three”– Mark Twain, Henry James, and William Dean Howells–who supposedly exemplified its principles.* Entire courses were titled “Twain, James, Howells,” focusing just on these three writers. During the 1990s, Wharton muscled her way into this stalwart triumvirate. Now she is usually paired off with James on American literature syllabi; both are represented as novelists of consciousness and as prose stylists who bridged the divide between realism and modernism.
What, I wondered, did the women of the Club—elite, educated, and cultured contemporaries of Wharton—think of her? Were they scandalized by the fact that she divorced her husband? Or did they admire her for abandoning her stifling society life in New York for a life among fellow intellects in Europe? Did they wish to emulate her as a stylist? Did they recognize her as one? Did they share her ironic ambivalence about what Thorstein Veblen described in 1890 as the “leisure class”? Did they share her desire to validate female independence, female intellect? So many questions.
So imagine my delight when, in the midst of transcribing the 1905-1906 minutes (and slogging through the Recording Secretary Mrs. Philip Uhler’s curlicued handwriting), I encountered a review of The House of Mirth, offered as part of the program from the Committee on Current Criticism (Mrs. Percy M. Reese, Chairman) on Feb. 13, 1906. It was reviewed by Club member Miss L. M. Kirk. Mrs. Uhler wrote,
Miss Kirk spoke of the power and strength of the book and of the interest of its conversations. We were told of a young girl, who chiefly for want of money, drops out of the pale of society, loses her courage, and even, innocently, her reputation. There is much shown of weakness, of the want of moral training and self-control. After reading it, we were reminded that we can be glad that the “Smart Set” is a small set. But Mrs Wharton’s subjects do not run away from her, as Mrs [Humphrey] Ward’s sometimes do. “The House of Mirth” is called the book of the year, and has a great sale. Miss Kirk quoted a review of it from “Life,” which considered its heroine as not well-balanced, and not a cause for tears. Miss Kirk treated “The House of Mirth” as literature, rather than as pleasing or satisfactory.
Yep– that’s it. A rather cursory review of the so-called “book of the year.” But there are a couple of interesting things to be said. One is the obvious distance Miss Kirk places between the “Smart Set” (the cosmopolitan elite centered in New York City) and the women of the Club. Based on the tone, Kirk rather dismisses this group, known in the press as “The Four Hundred” (sort of like the Fortune 500, but primarily including the social elite rather than the elite of the business world).
It’s also significant, I think, that Kirk focuses on Lily Bart’s “weakness,” her “want of moral training and self-control.” Clearly, Miss Kirk did not read Lily’s demise as the result of societal forces, as the novel is predominantly read now. Kirk faults Lily for her demise; she finds nothing wrong with society itself. This complacency is in keeping with what we’ve seen with the Club throughout its early years.
But most of all, I’m intrigued by Miss Kirk’s judgment of the novel “as literature, rather than pleasing or satisfactory.” These distinctions– between literature, pleasure, and satisfaction– are ones that continue to differentiate those who consider themselves scholars, and those we might call “lay readers,” people who read for fun. Clearly, this Club saw themselves as litterateurs, not dabblers or pleasure readers.
And—based on her comments—it looks like The House of Mirth may have made Miss Kirk cry, too.
(As a side note, which may become the subject of a future post, the 38th annual convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association was occurring just a few blocks away at exactly the same hour that the Club was meeting, but they made no mention of it in the minutes.)
* Note. In retrospect, it seems to me that the only reason why Twain was classified as a realist at all is because he was held up as one by his good friend Howells. Howells, too, was never able to fully adhere to realist principles, even though he played a large part in defining them.
Cynthia contacted me about a month ago and asked if she could help us transcribe the WLCB records. (I said yes.) Though she’s retired now, she’s been volunteering at the Loyola/Notre Dame archives, and she heard about our project through Loyola’s archivist. It turns out that she was a curator at the Maryland Historical Society and processed the WLCB collection way back in 1975. That’s right: 1975!
Crazy how history moves in circles and repetitions … no?
Since we’ve gotten her set up, Cynthia’s been plugging away, transcribing the minutes from the 1901-1902 season. And her archivist brain has been leading her to sources that help confirm or elucidate what she’s been transcribing, which she’s been passing along to the team. It’s all been quite exciting.
This week, Cynthia sent me a link to the 1905-1906 Baltimore Blue Book (aka the “Society Visiting List”), which she noticed happens to include the complete WLCB officer & membership list. It did not even occur to me that the Blue Book would publish such a thing.
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One question we’ve been asked repeatedly about the Club is how many women belonged. Based on this list, the WLCB had 71 members during the 1905-06 season, and 15 honorary members (most of these were published authors). We also have wondered how the WLCB cultivated its membership and brought in new members. The fact that the entire membership list was published in the Blue Book shows that yes, belonging to the Club was seen as a worthy attainment for the upper crust—and those who aspired to rise to their level.
Perhaps most interesting to me, though, is what appears a few pages after the WLCB listing: the listing for the Daughters of the Confederacy—Maryland chapter.
1905-06 Society Visiting List, pages 456-457.
As several of the team members’ posts testified this summer, the white supremacist sentiments expressed by some of the members of the Club were a source of concern and dismay. We harbor suspicions verging on certainty that members of the WLCB were also members of the Daughters of the Confederacy, since many of them were born during the Civil War or in the years immediately surrounding it—but we have not had the chance to look into the DotC records (also at MDHS) to find out.
The Blue Book confirms that Mrs. Francis Dammann, a teacher at Boys’ Latin School and an active member of the WLCB during the early years of its existence, also belonged to the Daughters of the Confederacy. Not only that, she was an officer.
The Blue Book also provides an answer to another question that came up over the summer. At several points, the minutes mention another Baltimore literary society for women, the Arundell Club. We hadn’t had a chance to look into the history of this club, but the Blue Book brought the history to my eyes. A few pages before the WLCB entry, the Arundell Club also has a listing—which shows a much larger membership that includes many names I recognized from the early years of the WLCB. Most of them now belonged to the Arundell Club instead.
The numbers imply that the Arundell Club surpassed the WLCB in social cachet, at least. But were they actually in direct competition? I recalled reading in the minutes that the WLCB expressed the desire for both clubs to co-exist and thrive together, so I wondered if the two clubs defined themselves differently—carved out different niches for themselves, as it were.
I did a quick Google search and found an online copy of Jane Cunningham Croly’s History of the Women’s Club Movement in America (1898), a vast compendium of information about women’s clubs in the 19th century. And there, I discovered that Croly described both the Arundell Club and the WLCB in some detail.
If we’d only known in June when we started this project! Alas, this is so often how research goes—you find the source you need after you’ve figured out (mostly) what you wanted to know.
Croly tells us that the WLCB was founded before the Arundell Club, and so had the advantage of precedence. However, neither club had been in existence for more than a few years when Croly wrote her book.
Croly distinguishes between the two Clubs, highlighting the literary aims of the WLCB and the social, cultural, and philanthropic aims of the Arundell Club. She quotes at length from a June 1896 address from Francese Litchfield Turnbull—a real find, since the minutes book from 1896 has been lost. (In fact, we are missing minutes from the entire 1896-1899 period, so Croly’s book is especially valuable.)
Turnbull’s speech succinctly characterizes the aims and goals of the Club, at least as I’ve seen it reflected in the hundreds of pages of documents I’ve now read. She begins by reflecting on the name of the Club—the Woman’s Literary Club of Baltimore—which, we know, was decided after a great deal of deliberation. She asks:
“Does our title hold any hint that we are to strive tacitly, if not specifically, for some special good to woman in our literary work; that we are, in some sense, to uphold those qualities which are essentially womanly—not necessarily attributes of women only, nor sought for as differentiating them from men, but that we are to emphasize, as opportunity may offer here, those gifts and qualities which conduce to a nobler womanhood?”
She does not wait for an answer before continuing. “Then,” she says, “as a Woman’s Literary Club, this purpose should fix our point of view in our contact with literature.”
Croly then includes the following, verbatim:
The “modern need of the ideal” — that’s a nice turn of phrase. The need, in modern times, of the lofty aspirations of the past; and the need to apply the modern “precision of method” and “carefulness of study which realism has introduced into art” to bring hazy idealism into the sharp focus of the present. And the womanly attention to morality, beauty, and truth—coming out of the 19th-century Cult of Domesticity—governing all.
In contrast, the Arundell Club (whose president, Miss Elizabeth King, is pictured above) seemed to be a less “idealistic” organization, at least in Turnbull’s characterization of the word. They focused on philanthropy and social reform, on the one hand, and social activities, on the other. While the Arundell Club’s 300 members more than tripled the membership of the WLCB in 1898, Croly notes that the Literary Committee had just 25 members. So perhaps they ceded the literary ground to the WLBC. We should find out for sure, of course.
Regardless of the Arundell Club’s activities, Turnbull’s speech and the characterization of the WLBC in Croly’s book confirms for me what I and the rest of the Aperio team discovered this summer: the WLCB was, at least in its early years, a serious literary organization, not a social club. It was the kind of book club where the members actually read the books—and also wrote them.
And knowing that the Arundell Club took on the more social and philanthropic roles expected of women’s clubs of the time, I’m now willing to give the WLCB a bit of a pass on their decisions not to engage directly with “causes.” I wonder if the rest of the Aperio team will agree.
In the meantime, thanks to Cynthia for helping us—me, anyway!—answer some questions. She’s passed along lots of other discoveries, but I’ll save them for future posts.
This past Friday, September 29th, Dr. Cole and I attended the Bmore Historic Unconference at the Baltimore Museum of Industry. The Unconference’s mission is dedicated to “people who care about public history and historic preservation in and around Baltimore.” The group of people who fit this description and attended the unconference covered a wide range of ages and professions. I had never heard of an ‘unconference’ before, and the democratic system behind it was very interesting. Any participant could propose their own session and pitch it to all the other attendees at the start of the conference. Then, everyone had the chance to vote for whichever proposed sessions they were most interested in, and based on the results of the voting process, the conference organizers and leaders set up the session schedule that included the most voted-for programming. Each session also designated a note-taker, so the information discussed in each could be shared with all the attendees.
The main hall where the Unconference was held. Image from the Baltimore Museum of Industry’s website: http://www.thebmi.org/exhibitions-collections/permanent-exhibitions/
Dr. Cole proposed the session we wanted to give: “Scripto Transcription Session: Woman’s Literary Club of Baltimore (1890-1920),” and it made it onto the schedule! Our initial plan was to spend the first few minutes of the 50-minute session giving an overview of the Aperio project, what we accomplished and learned over the summer, and our goals for the project moving forward. Then, we wanted to have attendees try their hand at transcribing a file containing some WLCB meeting minutes through the Scripto plugin on our Omeka site. Unfortunately, technical issues with the museum’s wifi made it difficult for everyone to do this, and we ended up talking a lot more about the details of the WLCB and the project than we had initially planned. Luckily, the people who came to our session were interested in more than just the process of transcription—we got a lot of great questions regarding the goals, demographics, and inner workings of the Club itself! Despite the internet issues, we were able to get people up and running and transcribing for us, and questions and discussion regarding the Club continued throughout this process.
A photo from the Bmore Unconference’s twitter (@bmorehistoric) of the transcription session we gave!
We also attended a very useful session right before ours about easy digital mapping techniques with Google Maps that will prove relevant in our own digital endeavors as we map Club members’ addresses over time. The final session we attended was an interesting discussion on how to best go about (if there is a ‘best way’) memorializing the sites in Maryland where lynchings occurred. There were also a myriad of other sessions we were unable to attend, covering topics including the recent removal of Baltimore’s Confederate monuments, Civil War history in general, Baltimore neighborhoods and their history, and museum and archival strategies. Overall, the Unconference was a fascinating experience! We got to share our own research and learn a great deal about others’ as well.
