The domestic transcendentalism of Fanny Fern.(Critical essay)

In rediscovering Fanny Fern (Sara Willis Parton), critics have focused on the elements that make her most accessible to contemporary audiences: her feminism and lively style. (1) Joyce W. Warren, discussing her "revolutionary writing style" ("Fanny Fern, Performative," 17), draws parallels to gangsta rap, and in particular, to those female performers who "redefine the conventional definition of 'woman'" (22). Elizabethada A. Wright, focusing on irony and black signifying, reaches a similar conclusion, noting that Fern "use[d] supposed norms to destabilize many culturally sanctified beliefs" and wound up "trouncing the patriarchy" (109). And Alfred Habegger underscores her rebellious irony by quoting a mock-review she wrote of her own writing (887). Thus, although Ann Wood refers to the strategy by which the sentimentalists eschewed the role of professional writer while writing professionally (5-7), Fanny Fern, in Elaine Showalter's words, "spoke of writing as a form of resistance for women imprisoned by their social and sexual roles" (116).

This outspoken feminist sensibility is what finds its way into most collections of American literature. For example, The Heath Anthology of American Literature puts Fern in a section entitled "Literature and 'The Woman Question'" (Lauter, 2031-38). Of the six selections, only one is a sentimental sketch of a widow and her two children striving to keep warm on a frigid December evening by remembering their former days of happiness when "papa" was alive (2032-33). The other excerpts from Fern are first-person pieces in which she ridicules conventional wisdom about woman's place in the home (2031-32); criticizes society for mistreating its female servants (2033-34); lambastes the aesthete Apollo Hyacinth, a thinly veiled reference to Fern's brother who refused to help her when she was struggling financially (2034-35); defends, ironically, male critics of women's books (2035-36); depicts humorously a female author torn between her desire to write and the domestic catastrophes that keep occurring around her; and denounces Independence Day in a country that restricts freedom for its women (2036-37). The Norton Anthology of American Literature is similarly biased (Baym, 1748-1757). Of the six excerpts from Fern, five deal with feminist issues or are sharply critical of society in some way. Only one contains a rather sentimental portrait of childhood and a belief in God's benevolence in watching over a sleeping infant. Yet this sketch is part of a description of the poorhouse on Blackwell's Island, and even her sentimental musings are tinged with social conscience as she wonders why God laid the poor child "in that pauper bed, instead of the downy one which plenty delights to deck for its own" (1754).

The popular view of Fern as a rebel, however, overlooks the vast amount of unabashedly sentimental writing in her six anthologies, writing that led Fred Lewis Pattee to characterize her first volume of collected prose pieces as "a tear-drenched section of goody-goody inanity" (118). More recent critics are similarly bothered by her sentimental pieces. Mary Kelly, referring to Fern's triumphant address to her ink stand after her hard-won success, observes that she finally comes down on the side of feeling in a later essay as she asks "literary fame!--Alas, what is it to a loving woman's heart, save as it lifts her out of the miry pit of poverty and toil" ("Charlotte Bronte," Fresh Leaves, 334). Despite the fact that Fern is commenting on the pathos of Bronte's life, Kelly construes this as a direct contradiction of her earlier pride at her own literary success (158-59). Terry Novak simply notes that her sentimental writing is less popular with modern audiences (127), but Ann Wood goes as far as to say that her "earliest work reads like an exercise in artistic schizophrenia" (18). Nicole Tonkovich, on the other hand, sees her sentimentalism as a ploy, saying that she "used the feminine stereotype to pave the way for more daring work" (45). Such a comment implies that there is a more authentic Fern not represented by her sentimental writing. (2)

I would like to examine the collected nonfiction of Fern to attempt to place her within a cultural context and also to evaluate her literary strategies. I will be looking at Fern Leaves from Fanny's Portfolio (1853); Fern Leaves from Fanny's Portfolio, Second Series (1854); Fresh Leaves (1857); Folly as It Flies (1868); Ginger-Snaps (1870); and Caper-Sauce (1872). (3) I am especially interested in how the transcendentalism and sentimentalism of her day qualify and enrich each other in her work, in terms both of content and style. I would like to borrow Susan K. Harris's taxonomy for evaluating non-canonical women's fiction, what she calls process analysis, in which historical, rhetorical, and ideological concerns intersect (45). For as a woman in the nineteenth century, Fern has rhetorical decisions to make in order to convey her ideas to the mass audience for which she writes. I will focus on her nonfiction in order to compare it to the nonfiction of other authors writing in the same period, most notably the transcendentalists Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and Whitman.

Transcendentalism is difficult to define since its adherents are such a heterogeneous group. (4) Nevertheless, several themes often emerge in transcendental writing: a rejection of original sin, an appreciation of childhood, a rejection of society's norms, a love of nature, a reliance on self, a commitment to equality, a respect for intuition, a rejection of materialism, and a regard for nonconformity. While one can hardly discuss an overall style of transcendentalism, one concern was first-person writing (Buell, 270). Since the individual was ultimately important, his or her perceptions and stylistic eccentricities were equally prized. As Thoreau says, "I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well" (Walden, 1). Or, as Whitman says in "Song of Myself," "I celebrate myself, and sing myself" (1) precisely since the equality of all human beings means that "every atom belonging to me as good as belongs to you" (3). While the poetic bent of transcendentalism that Buell notices (9) might argue a rarefied style at odds with Fern's newspaper persona, he has also remarked on the emphasis the transcendentalists gave to conversation as the art most approaching spontaneous and egalitarian inspiration (80). In this respect, as we shall see, Fern's conversations with her readers--one critic characterizes her as "chatting cozily with the reader in her kitchen over a plate of cookies and a pot of tea" (Novak, 128)--are part of her worldview, not simply a stylistic quirk.

Sentimentalism, another important component of nineteenth-century literature, can hardly be said to exist only in this time period. Ever since Mackenzie's Man of Feeling, sentimental heroes and heroines have been weeping, sighing, and generally emoting on the pages of novel after novel. Joanne Dobson argues that "tales of abandoned wives, widows, orphaned children, and separated families," far from being "reductive narrative cliches," become in the hands of the skilled writer "evocative metaphors for a looming existential threat--the potential devastation of deeply experienced human connections" ("Reclaiming," 272). Elsewhere, Dobson discusses the problem of evaluating sentimentalism and links it to a gender issue:

 
  ... the problem rests with modes of definition and evaluation 
  developed exclusively within the framework of a critical valorization 
  of romantic, individualistic, culturally dissenting, self-consciously 
  artistic aspects of the classic masculine texts. In an era defined 
  primarily as characterized by romantic individualism, for instance, it 
  has been all too easy to overlook the emerging realistic aesthetic of 
  much women's writing, and to despise and misconstrue the immediately 
  apparent sentimentalism. ("American," 168)