CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON'S LIFE AND WORK:  AN INTRODUCTION

         Although Constance Woolson was born in New Hampshire, she soon became a child of the frontier, and it would be frontiers that shaped her personal and professional lives until she died in Italy in 1894 at the age of fifty-four. After the deaths of three of her sisters from scarlet fever in 1840, Woolson's family moved to Cleveland, Ohio, to start over, the way of many in the nineteenth century. She grew up in what was then known as the West, watching as the Old Northwest Territories--the Great Lakes region explored by fur traders and black-robed French priests in the seventeenth century--became the industrial heart of the United States.

            Woolson would set her early fiction, poetry, and travel narratives on this frontier, then move to Florida after the Civil War to explore another borderland with different cultural conflicts in the Reconstruction South. Later, she shifted the focus of her work to Europe where, like Henry James, she scrutinized the newly wealthy American expatriate communities on the Continent. Although her work can be divided into three periods that correspond with the three regions she described, several themes informed her writing from the outset: an environmental consciousness and concern with landscapes, an awareness of the complexities of race, and an abidingly careful eye for the shallowness that sometimes accompanies wealth or social pretensions. Her experience as a professional writer during a century that valorized domesticity gave her another perspective as well: that of a woman artist who pioneered the use of controversial subjects and methods in fiction and who was sometimes criticized as a result.

            Woolson published early and well, placing her first efforts at travel narratives and fiction in Harper's New Monthly Magazine and Putnam's Magazine. While some early stories such as "An October Idyll" and "Cicley's Christmas," were no better than many of the sentimental sketches popular at the time, soon after she began writing for publication two forces converged that would affect her career. Apparently dissatisfied with her early efforts, Woolson decided to become a serious realist rather than a genteel storyteller, and the national market for fiction changed from pre-Civil War sentimental fiction to a form of Realism known as "local color" that was being championed by William Dean Howells, the influential editor of The Atlantic Monthly.

            Drawing on her youthful observations of the Great Lakes, Woolson crafted some of the first and finest realistic fiction of that frontier. She also began to rework the models of her local color predecessors, such as Brete Harte, into searing stories that her readers did not always find amusing. She had trouble placing "St. Clair Flats," for example, and her readers objected to the brutal ending of "Peter The Parson" because it lacked the sentimental marriage many expected. Occasionally she rewrote herself as well. "The Lady of Little Fishing," which was a more realistic version of Harte's "Luck of the Roaring Camp," eventually became a complexly satirical examination of women's places on the frontier in "Mission Endeavor," a story Woolson never chose for her collections of stories, undoubtedly because of its subversive heroine and its negative portrait of men.

            Woolson worked with her Great Lakes materials until the mid-1870s, setting her stories in increasingly more northern places and making them more bleakly realistic until she reached the literal and metaphorical end of her materials in the Apostle Islands in western Lake Superior. Although both her stories and travel narratives were written for sophisticated literary magazines that catered to an educated and often prosperous middle class, Woolson's risky experiments with realism were still courageous. But because she was self-supporting, she also wrote stories, travel narratives, and poetry that would appeal to all the readers in her audience. Thus, her work ranged from deliberately charming travel narratives such as "American Cities: Detroit," which described Detroit as it had not been in a hundred years but which her readers preferred to the contemporary reality, to broadly humorous satires such as "Round By Propeller" for Harper's in 1872 that mocked the Great Lakes travelers she described, mocked its readers, and left no questions about what Woolson thought of the industrial transformation of the once-pristine lakes. As she would throughout her career, she pushed constantly at the limits of what was acceptable for a writer, and a woman, to publish. Because she used a wide range of voices and wrote in several genres, her work has been dismissed as uneven by twentieth-century critics who lack the historical acumen to recognize how innovative she often was.

            Her father had died in 1869 and in 1873 Woolson moved with her invalid mother to St. Augustine, Florida. This small city had been colonized by Spain in the seventeenth century, the same period the Great Lakes were being colonized by the French, and once again Woolson found herself on a frontier, a borderland between cultures. This time, however, the cultural issues were not industrialization and conflicts with indigenous populations, but the Reconstruction South and its different racial issues. Even as she completed her narratives of the Great Lakes, Woolson began to catalog the conflicted territories being negotiated between the traditions of the Old South just destroyed and those of the New South being born, including tourists from the North. Once again she was a pioneer, not only because she wrote the first Reconstruction fiction by a northerner after the Civil War, but also because she early articulated cultural tensions that would not be resolved even in the twentieth century.

            In stories like "Rodman The Keeper" and travel narratives like "The Ancient City," Woolson described for her readers in northern magazines how they might think about the post-Civil War South and the racial issues the United States grappled with anew in the context of debates about Reconstruction. Using the indigenous Minorcans of Florida much as she had used the American Indians and French of Michigan, Woolson created stories that explored strategies of accommodation to the new realities of race relations and economics that her readers needed to know to understand the changes taking place in the South.  She was not always kind.

            In her Great Lakes stories she had valorized historic French culture at the expense of earlier Native cultures and white industrialists. In some of her Southern stories, she critiqued the possibilities for African-American education and citizenship, misguided northern missionary attempts, northern condescension, and the failure of antebellum fantasies. "Rodman The Keeper" praises no one, not Yankees, Freedpeople, or Rebels.  Similar stories such as "King David" and "Old Gardiston" examine the damage caused by illusions. The only southern population Woolson did not view with a jaundiced eye were the Minorcans, an early immigrant group. Some commentators have suggested Woolson used the Minorcans as a model for what African-Americans could become, given enough time, and therefore she justified to northern readers the ending of Reconstruction and help for Freedpeople.

            Although she may have mollified her northern readers about racial issues, Woolson continued to introduce innovative subjects in her fiction. Gender critics read some of her southern stories, particularly "Felipa," as early examples of nineteenth-century lesbian fiction. The novel Jupiter Lights describes not only the friendship between two women, but foregrounds female battering as well, a rare and early use of that subject. "The South Devil" explores the idea of the artist, debates what constitutes art, and critiques the temptation to strive for commercial success rather than excellence.  These latter were dilemmas Woolson experienced personally and could never resolve because the commercial success necessary for survival was too frequently antithetical to experimental art.  In addition, recent biographical and critical work has determined that the Harper brothers, Woolson's publishers, forbade her to write about race after 1876.  Woolson responded by developing a method of encoding elaborate subtexts in her work that referred to issues she thought important. Thus, while For the Major appears to be about the relationship between a woman and her elderly husband in a small community, the subtext is devoted to detailed references to slavery and racial passing. Other subtextual subjects would follow: art and realist innovation in "A Florentine Experiment," US imperialism in "Dorothy" and "The Front Yard," and a satire on the calendar of saints in the Catholic Church in "A Transplanted Boy."

            When her mother died in 1879, Woolson left for the Continent where she would spend the rest of her life, alternating between England and Italy while she traveled to cosmopolitan spas and tourist destinations to catalogue the vagaries of the American expatriate communities in Europe. After perfecting her craft analyzing the Great Lakes frontier and the Reconstruction South, Woolson had a prescient eye for the conflicts arising in transitional cultures, and Americans abroad offered her a new cultural geography to explore in local color fiction. Unimpressed by wealth and social position, and becoming increasingly frustrated by the condescension women artists were forced to endure, Woolson began the third and last period of her career with her most anthologized story, "'Miss Grief,'" which encapsulates all the frustrations she felt. Many critics have inaccurately read the story as her comment on Henry James, unaware that the story was published the same month she met him and escapes any narrow biographical limits.

            Seldom out of print since its publication in 1880, "'Miss Grief'" is a tour-de-force rendering of the status of women of genius in the late nineteenth century and the failure of powerful male literary figures, such as James and Howells, to recognize women's brilliance and potential. No short story by any contemporary of Woolson's expresses so well the double bind of the woman artist, which explains its continuing popularity. Did she find that her prediction was fulfilled when she met James? Although they wrote each other daily for many years, they destroyed their correspondence, so readers will not know. But careful study of Woolson's work suggests she was frequently the first to venture forms and subjects that James later adapted to create even more memorable portraits of Americans abroad.

            When she moved to Europe, Woolson concentrated on her novels, but the form of the realistic novel does not appear to have been something she mastered easily, perhaps because she had few models for her experiments. Like her earlier, best-selling novel Anne, Woolson's later novels are inclined to melodrama, but they also probe subjects, such as failed marriages, that few writers scrutinized. Even while laboring on her novels, Woolson continued to produce short stories and travel narratives, and as before, these are her most polished work, produced by an artist sure of her medium. Woolson's European texts, many written during the complacent Gilded Age, often critiqued Americans' willful ignorance about what was already an international world, and her writings offer a disturbing foreshadowing of the self-satisfied imperialism that would mark American attitudes before World War I.  While these stories can be read without knowing the subtext, they are best appreciated if readers follow Woolson's references to names, dates, and places to learn what particular American problem she had in mind when composing.  The result is that familiar romantic stories, such as "Dorothy," resonate with new depth when readers understand Woolson was critiquing British and American imperialism in Egypt.

            Woolson also continued to explore the dilemma of the artist in stories such as "In Sloane Street" and "A Florentine Experiment." Although there has been commentary about Woolson's sufferings as an artist who may have committed suicide from depression, she was also a sophisticated, worldly intellectual with a comfortable income derived from her popular and critical success. While she may have sometimes felt a martyr to her craft, it is important to understand her foremost as a dedicated experimenter who resisted whatever would circumscribe her freedom. She was as well a savvy artist who understood what her market expected, gave to that market what it demanded when she had to make a living, and continued to push at the limits of what was acceptable to pursue in her art. Hers was an economic accommodation to craft by a self-supporting artist working in one of the greatest capitalistic periods of United States history. 

            Because Woolson trained herself to be unsparing in her critique of the Great Lakes frontier, one of the first frontiers of EuroAmericans on the continent, it is not surprising that she was able to elucidate the problems of all the other nineteenth-century frontiers she observed: racial relations, the land and environment, business and industry, and American consumption of cultures and places. She watched the country change from frontier agrarianism to industry, from a collection of local cultures to an international one, and she observed Americans making the same mistakes, on Lake Superior or in Venice: failure of love and trust, condescension, sexism, racism, hatred. Even as her early work set on the Great Lakes looks back with nostalgia to a mythical frontier, her final stories look forward to an international one Americans were ill-prepared to understand or accept.

                                                                                               Victoria Brehm, Ph.D