#carolyn heilbrun

[winterfable]

Introduction: Frog Conjunctions

The Pregnant Virgin is a study in process. In its conception, it was called Chrysalis. By the time it was born, the baby had outgrown its chosen name. Its skeleton—the process of metamorphosis from caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly—was intact. The whole, however, had become more than the sum of its parts. The parts concentrate on the periods in the chrysalis when life as we have known it is over. No longer who we were, we know not who we may become. We experience ourselves as living mush, fearful of the journey down the birth canal. The whole has to do with the process of psychological pregnancy—the virgin forever a virgin, forever pregnant, forever open to possibilities.

The analogy between the virgin with child and the chrysalis with butterfly does not originate with me. In ancient Greece, the word for soul was psyche, often imaged as a butterfly. The emergence of the butterfly from the chrysalis was analogous to the birth of the soul from matter, a birth commonly identified with release, hence a symbol of immortality. The Divine Child, the Redeemer, the child of the spirit shaping in the womb of the virgin, finds a natural image in the winged butterfly transforming in the chrysalis, preparing to be free of the creature that crawls on its belly. This book does not, however, make the traditional body/soul distinction between caterpillar and butterfly, mortal and immortal life. Rather it explores the presence of the one in the other, suggesting that immortality is a reality contained within mortality and, in this life, dependent upon it. The Pregnant Virgin, that is, looks at ways of restoring the unity of body and soul.

Flora, one of the figures in Botticelli's Primavera, captures the paradoxical external stillness and internal kindling of pregnancy. She embodies the evanescent beauty of the maiden blossoming into womanhood. As the shy earth­nymph Chloris, she has surrendered to the breath of Zephyr, and is now being awakened into the calm, luxuriant Flora. Like Mary, impregnated by the Holy Spirit, she stands radiant and full of grace, her femininity forthright and lyrically tender as she looks the beholder straight in the eye.

Writing The Pregnant Virgin has been a nine months' pregnancy. The book rejected its preconceived pattern; it evolved in its own metamorphic process. Last August in my second month, I suffered severe morning sickness. One look at an expanse of white paper made me ill. I feared a miscarriage. Then, as usually happens when I am conscious enough to ask the right question, the answer came in a dream:

I am sitting on steps near the waters of Georgian Bay. I am attempting to roll a big lily pad into the shape of a cylinder. It won't do what I want it to do. One end keeps falling open as I hold the other end rolled. Behind me is an old hotel. Two men are fighting on the balcony. I can feel their blows in my bones. I think I should try to do something about that, but a voice says, "Fashion your pipe."

I continue with the lily pad, and suddenly one man throws the other off the balcony, right over my head. Now I really must do something. I am about to rise when the voice commands again, "Fashion your pipe."

Now I understand—I am creating an instrument. I see beside me and a little behind, a huge smiling frog sitting in a po of green eggs, immensely proud of herself and waiting for me to finish the piccolo-pipe so the eggs can go through and be played into meaningful sounds.

I woke up knowing what the problem was. Instead of putting my full concentration into making the "pipe," I was allowing my energy to be drained by the blows of the two men on the balcony. Their voices I knew well enough: "Forget writing. Live your life as you always have. You can't write anyway." But there was another voice, a submerged feminine voice, tenacious and proud: "I want to write, but I don't want to write essays. I want to write my way." There was the impasse.

I walked through the bush to Iris Bay. I thought about the water lily—the Canadian lotus, whose blossom carries much the same symbolism as the rose. Its roots grow deep in the life-bestowing mud, sending nourishment up the sturdy stem to the leaves and flowers. Serene in its creamy white simplicity, the blossom opens petal by petal to the sun, symbolic of the Goddess—Prajnaparamita, Tara, Sophia—Creation opening herself to Consciousness. She is the blossom in the heart, the knowing, the dawning of God in the soul. Her divine wisdom brings release from the passion and pain of ego desire.

I picked a lily pad. I concentrated on fashioning my pipe. I remembered my grinning frog. Surely the lotus leaf was the right instrument to pipe her eggs. But how? How does one put psychological concepts through a lotus leaf? What would frog syntax sound like? How would it conjunct? Certainly not with "and," "but," and "for." It would have much more to do with leaping through the air from lily pad to lily pad, leaping intuitively with the imagination, or swimming through water. Leap—leap—out of sheer faith in my froggy instincts. Leap—trusting in another lily pad. Leap—knowing that other frogs would understand. Leap—leap—remembering my journal that looks like a Beethoven manuscript—blots, blue ink, red, yellow and green, pages torn by an angry pen, smudged with tears, leaping with joy from exclamation marks to dashes that speak more than the words between, my journal that dances with the heartbeat of a process in motion. How does one fashion a pipe that can contain that honesty, and be at the same time professionally credible? How can a woman write from her authentic center without being labeled "histrionic" or ''hysterical"? Splat! Long Pause!

And then my frog spoke from the mud.

"Why don't you write as you feel? Be a virgin. Surrender to the whirlwind and see what happens."

"Impossible!" I replied. "I'm not going to make a fool of myself. I'm not going to set myself up to be shot down. I know the guns too well."

That conversation put Chrysalis into a cocoon. For weeks I tried to find a syntax that could simultaneously contain the passion of my heart and the analytic  detachment of my mind.

I was encouraged by a picture of an Indian Goddess holding her hands in a gesture that would contain the lily pad. Known as "link of increase," meaning "marriage" or "coronation," its highly differentiated fingers seem to cradle a pearl or flower. The tips of the two middle fingers, gently brought together, symbolize a coincidence of opposites. Some firm, gentle, androgynous style seemed to be indicated.

Further enlightenment came with Nietzsche's essay "Truth and Falsity," in which he writes, "I'm afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar." Yes, I did feel answerable to that hatchet god—Jehovah, by whatever name—that god who stares down with his "thou shalts" writ in stone, a demonic parody of the creative imagination. Unaware of leaping, he keeps everything concrete and literal.

And then I read Carolyn Heilbrun's review of Lyndall Gordon's biography of Virginia Woolf. Heilbrun points out that Woolf was, like all women, trained to silence, that "the unlovable woman was always the woman who used words to effect. She was caricatured as a tattle, a scold, a shrew, a witch." Women felt "the pressure to relinquish language, and 'nice' women" were quiet. She concludes that "muted by centuries of training, women writers especially have found that when they attempted truthfully to record their own lives, language failed."

If that is true of the artist, it is no less true of any woman attempting to speak with her own voice. It is also true of the man who dares to articulate his soul process. The word "feminine," as I understand it, has very little to do with gender, nor is woman the custodian of femininity. Both men and women are searching for their pregnant virgin. She is the part of us who is outcast, the part who comes to consciousness through going into darkness, mining our leaden darkness, until we bring her silver out.

Anyone who tries to work creatively understands this. I remember, for example, when I was directing creative theater with high school students. We worked without a script for months before the show. Students who were trained to "give a good performance" found the process intolerable. Their rigidity, their fear of being "the hole in the program" blocked their creativity. They waited to be told what their lines were, what their moves had to be, what their attitudes should be. The quiet introverts who were accustomed to dropping into their own space had no difficulty concentrating until the images that sprang from their own bodies came alive. They loved being free. They loved to play. They loved to be challenged to go deeper into the darkness, to allow whatever wanted to happen to happen.

And things did happen. The whole theater came alive with roars, tears, laughter, movements of poignant beauty and hilarious irony. The curious visitors who ventured through the theater door shook their heads and fled from the chaos. But for those of us inside, it was contained chaos. We were used to the intensity. Two months before the show, the students, the dance director, the music director and I decided what movements we wanted to explore further, what poems, what music. This basic skeleton was added to and subtracted from until the very last performance.

All of us involved, whether actors, directors or stagehands, were responsible for our own process. As our confidence grew, for example, our energies increased, and our student stage manager had to look within himself to find new ways of keeping discipline backstage without destroying the fire. At the time, I had no conceptualized idea of what was going on. In retrospect, however, I see our theater as the womb of the Great Mother in which the virgin souls of the students came to birth in their own bodies and emerged to a level of psychological consciousness, confident enough and flexible enough to allow the wind of the spirit to blow through. Part of their process was to recognize in themselves and in each other whether their poem or dance was being allowed to live its own life or whether they were obstructing it with "a good performance."

What we were interested in was individual process, group process and eventually process between the audience and the cast. Since it was theater-in-the round, the students usually seated their parents so that at some point in the program they would kneel two feet away and look them straight in the eye.  More than one parent found the naked encounter with their own adult-child overwhelming, and struggled to choke back the unexpected tears.

What we were not interested in was product or external performance. In the Tostal, the theater, there was no examination, no predetermined goal, no such thing as failure except betrayal of the process. In other areas of the school we might undergo dismemberment—history student in Room, poor athlete in the gym, excellent flutist in the music room. Culturally, we might also be dismembered—smelly feet in the shoe store, myopic eyes at the optometrist's, armpits in the drugstore, acne at the doctor's. In that room, we took our bodies out of the culture that tinkered with its parts. There we could be whole. We came from our own place of vulnerability, and by staying with that vulnerability we perceived our own strength and our own wounds.

The Pregnant Virgin is coming from that same place. All my analysands are a part of this book. Together we have experienced death and rebirth, together we have analyzed hundreds of dreams. Many of the repetitive motifs introduced in my two earlier books are further developed here. While many of my analysands have eating disorders and hence struggle with some form of food addiction, their psychological framework has much in common with those who are addicted in other ways—to work, alcohol, drugs, sleep, futile relationships, etc. The soul material presented here, my analysands have generously agreed to share, in the hope that it will shed some light on emerging feminine consciousness. Knowing that others are on the same demanding journey seems to ease the load.

I, too, am on the journey. The process that goes on in the kitchen in chapter I is the same process that goes on in India in chapter 7, with one crucial difference. The butterfly on the curtain (page 13) is transforming according to the laws of nature; the butterfly on the ceiling (page 178) is transforming through the fire of conscious choice. And this book too is on the journey. Two of the chapters were originally written for lectures, two for journals, and the others are attempts to wrestle light out of darkness. Each one is a prism through which the difficulties of Becoming and Being may be looked at from different angles.

I have not yet solved the problem of frog conjunctions, but my frog is still laying eggs. I think she enjoys my syntactical pregnancy. Meanwhile, this is not an apology for a polliwog. It is a challenge to myself and my readers to listen with the heart, to hear the language that lives in the Silence as surely as it lives in the Word.

--Marion Woodman en "The pregnant Virgin"

[quotelr]

Marriage, in short, is a bargain, like buying a house or entering a profession. One chooses it knowing that, by that very decision, one is abnegating other possibilities. In choosing companionship over passion, women like Beatrice Webb and Virginia Woolf made a bargain; their marriages worked because they did not regret their bargains, or blame their husbands for not being something else--dashing lovers, for example. But in writing biographies, or one's own life, it is both customary and misleading to present such marriages, to oneself or to one's reader, as sad compromises, the best of a bad bargain, or scarcely to speak of them at all. Virginia Woolf mentioned that she, who is reticent about nothing, had never spoken of her life with Leonard. but we know that she said of him that when he entered a room, she had no idea what he was going to say, a remarkable definition of a good marriage. Such marriages are not bad bargains, but the best of a good bargain, and we must learn the language to understand and describe them, particularly in writing the lives of accomplished women.

Carolyn G. Heilbrun

[alrederedmixedmedia]

Alredered Remembers Carolyn Heilbrun, aka Amanda Cross, non-fiction author and mystery writer, on her birthday.

"A literary academic can no more pass a bookstore than an alcoholic can pass a bar."

-Carolyn Heilbrun

[boomerbroadcaster]

I Gifted Myself The Last Gift of Time

The Last Gift of Time, Life Beyond Sixty by Carolyn G. Heilbrun is a little book that some readers may not have the patience to read, but if you do, you will find it enormously enlightening. Heilbrun was a retired Professor of English Literature at Colombia University. She wrote the book twenty-five years ago in 1998 when she was in her seventies. I recently came across an article about the book…

[bonnettsbooks]

Prof. Carolyn Gold Heilbrun as #AmandaCross wrote the #KateFansler murder mysteries set in the world of academia – among her other accomplishments. This batch is fresh off the to-do pile. Come and get 'em! 11/15/22 Open 6:30-9p Mask recommended. No open containers, please. (at Bonnett's Book Store) https://www.instagram.com/p/Ck_yKGOPmJK/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[hell-bound-and-diversivolent]

Carolyn Heilbrun (1926-2003) was an American literary scholar, feminist, and mystery writer.  Her mystery books published during the 1970s featured a strong female protagonist, and sold millions of copies world wide.

Heilbrun was very specific in her memories of being a celebrated female professor at Columbia. "When I spoke up for women's issues, I was made to feel unwelcome in my own department, kept off crucial committees, ridiculed, ignored," Heilbrun told the New York Times. "Ironically, my name in the catalogue gave Columbia a reputation for encouraging feminist studies in modernism.

[writeyoufools]

"Women have long been nameless. They have not been persons. Handed by a father to another man, the husband, they have been objects of circulation, exchanging one name for another. That is why the story of Persephone and Demeter is the story of all women who marry: why death and marriage, as Nancy Miller pointed out in The Heroine's Text, were the only two possible ends for women in novels, and were, frequently, the same end. For the young woman died as a subject, ceased as an entity."

- Carolyn G. Heilburn, Writing a Woman's Life

[celebratingamazingwomen]

Carolyn Gold Heilbrun (1926-2003) was an academic and prolific writer. She was the first woman to receive tenure in the English department of Columbia University.

She taught English at Columbia for more than 30 years, with a focus on feminist study. She co-founded and edited the Gender and Culture Series of Columbia University Press. She received the Guggenheim Fellowship twice, in 1966 and 1970, as well as a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1976.

[chaoticambivalence]

Power consists to a large extent in deciding what stories will be told.

Carolyn G Heilbrun

[thelonguepuree]

Like a sliver under the skin, my grading and assessment of student writing has always bothered me. Often I’d leave a student conference or the grading of a paper feeling unsatisfied with my strategies, knowing that the student will not hear the good in my comments, only see the disappointing grade. And that grade will overdetermine not only how that student understands her writing in my class, but our relationship and her ability to grow as a writer. The pedagogical advice I got in grad school to “just get them to write and write a lot” doesn’t work most of the time. The problem lies, as I have come to see it, in the fact that my past students weren’t a part of the assessment process at all. They didn’t contribute to the creation of the assessment rubrics used, the assessment processes, or the figuring of grades. These were things I did because I apparently knew best. But there was a time when I didn’t know best, yet I was allowed to do these things as a first-year graduate teaching assistant. In a few years, I began to learn what “good writing” could mean in various contexts, how to see this in writing, and talk about it to others. In short, I learned what good writing was by assessing writing myself and talking to others about it. In soft terms, this is what community-based assessment is all about. … should I [as an instructor] assess and give grades, [students will] figure out what’s really going on: They’re writing and I’m evaluating. It’s the same old thing. The bottom line is: They have little need to form active learning stances and few opportunities to develop into self-conscious, reflective writers. And more importantly, they haven’t been pushed to become agents in their own education: How will my writing course help them in their future writing? Have they addressed how their self-assessments might diverge from their teacher’s or their peers’? Have they explored how they might find reliability in a network of varying and vying voices making evaluative claims about their texts? In short, have they struggled with an understanding of assessment as it pertains to their writing? These are the core questions my pedagogy attempts to urge students to explore through a framework of repeated assignments, and class-constructed rubrics. … Feminist pedagogy agrees with this kind of classroom, in which difference and the centrality of the male professorial voice is reframed. Carolyn G. Heilbrun, in “The Politics of the Mind: Women, Tradition, and the University,” asks if we can “conceive [of] difference without opposition” and thus “challenge the ancient male-female binarism as an intellectual imperative” within the academy (Gabriel & Smithson, 1990, p. 31). Essentially, Heilbrun attempts to show how Trilling’s famous notion of the “life of the mind” has come to characterize academic endeavors in general. And I include the classroom in these endeavors. This notion embodies “wholly male-centered culture and university,” binarism (Gabriel & Smithson, 1990, p. 28). Furthermore, she asks: “what is lost to this ‘life of the mind’ — to mind itself, to colleges and universities, to that proud contemplation of texts and culture to which Lionel Trilling devoted his life — when women are excluded from taking their full part?” (p. 29). If we rephrased Heilbrun’s question to fit the writing classroom, the answer, to me, seems obvious. What is lost when we exclude most of the stakeholders in the classroom from fully participating in their own assessment and the grading processes — in their own praxis? Can a full, rich democratic community of fellow-writers, fully engaged in all aspects of their writing as active learners, critically reflective, bound together in mutual endeavors, be fostered without their own participation in the assessment and grading of their writing?

Excerpts from Asao B. Inoue, “Community-based assessment pedagogy”

But seriously this article is SO GOOD

[ladystardustsoul]

"Romance is the glamour which turns the dust of everyday life into a golden haze." Carolyn Gold Heilbrun.

[female-sleuths]

Kate Fansler

“I didn’t say I object to Freud,” Kate said. “I said I objected to what Joyce called freudful errors—all those nonsensical conclusions leaped to by people with no reticence and less mind.”

This is the first we get to know about Kate in her debut in the 1964 novel In the Last Analysis by Amanda Cross (Carolyn Heilbrun years later explained she took the pseudonym because the crime novel genre had such a bad reputation it would have stunted her university career if she had been known to write them).

You either love her or hate her just after those two lines.

Kate is a professor of literature at a New York university and bristles when asked if she is single by a police officer asking for her alibi in the first chapter. We soon learn that Kate doesn’t suffer fools gladly and is easily annoyed, feels somewhat protective of her students, and relates more to the detective novels she read than the real-life case she is thrown into. (I’d say she is Lord Peter Whimsey’s goddaughter, Kate does think of him often, but she probably wouldn’t agree.)

The 1960s start to make themselves known and Kate finds herself on the fence mostly sympathizing with the feelings and aims of the student’s and feminist movements more than most people of her set but deploring the changing manners following from them.

Kate is first thrown into detection because a former student, who asked her for a recommendation of a psycho-analyst is found murdered on that man’s very couch. As Emanuel, the man she recommended, is a long-time friend and ex—the one she was discussion Freund with in her first sentence—, and the police seem to believe they need not look further, Kate gets involved.

Private life

Kate was born to a well-to-do white New York family, youngest of four, only girl and 14 years younger than her youngest brother. She grew up in a loving family who indulged her and “stood by hopelessly when she turned her back on society and became not only an ‘intellectual’, but a Ph.D.”

We first meet her at a never quite spelled out age. Her nephew-by-marriage-to-be, Jerry (22), whom she hires for footwork, thinks or her as “middle-aged”. She is already established as a university professor of English Literature, her nieces and nephews range between teenagers and “old enough to vote” (which would have been 21 in 1964); so probably somewhere in her middle-to-late thirties or early forties. Though nephews and nieces grow up, Kate doesn’t quite age at the same rate.

In the last Analysis, she lives “in faded elegance” in a four-room apartment overlooking the Hudson river.

In the first books, she is single, though she had lovers in her past. She sometimes rants about there being no word for the kind of relationships she had, where passion is but a small part of the whole.

Detection Style

Kate sort of follows in Lord Peter Whimsey’s footsteps.

Due to her many relatives, she usually knows someone who knows someone to introduce her to the people she wants to talk to. She’s sending Jerry out to talk to people she, due to her gender and position, can’t without arousing suspicions. And her line into the police is district attorney Reed Amhearst, whom she marries later in the series (keeping her maiden name).

She gathers facts by talking to people, in most cases with some pretext or another, not telling them she is investigating. She is often baffled and  brooding over facts. Like Miss Marple, she is good at recognition of structures, though her most of her cases and solutions hang on literature.

Books

In the Last Analysis  ( 1964)

The James Joyce Murder (1967)

Poetic Justice (1970)

The Theban Mysteries (1971)

Question of Max (1976)

Death in a Tenured Position (1981)

Sweet Death, Kind Death (1984)

No Word from Winifred (1986)

A Trap for Fools (1989)

The Players Come Again (1990)

An Imperfect Spy (1995)

The Puzzled Heart (1998)

Honest Doubt (2000)

The Edge of Doom (2002)

Commentary

Especially the early books have a screwball comedy feeling about them and I somehow always imagined Kate to look a lot like Kathrine Hepburn.

Violence is not graphically described, but a lot of topics come up, and the view on sex in the early books is still strongly influenced by Freund and moves in the tension between Freudian “Freedom to have sex” and sex as the main driving force of humanity vs old-fashioned religious morals (read: hang-ups) about sex. Modern interpretations of the characters would paint quite a different picture and part of the motive for murder in the James Joyce Murders is more horrifying now than it was then.

On the All about Agatha podcast, they deduct points for Christie’s own prejudices showing up in the text, especially when they exceed the level that was usual at the time of writing. In the two novels I read recently (as opposed to the 1990s), I haven’t caught her in that, though most of her characters sometimes say things that would be inexcusable to say today. I recommend to read the books as you read a text about a strange und unknown culture. The 1960s are, in a way, just that.

The first book of the series I read was Death in a Tenured Position (1981), which is set in the Harvard English department which struggles with a female professor in its midst, unfortunately not Kate, who visits to help said professor even though she doesn’t really like her. Here, Kate meets women from an undoubtedly lesbian commune, some of whom she likes better that the aforementioned female professor.

[shippingsincebeforeyouwereborn]

Carolyn Heilbrun, the first woman tenured in English at Columbia University, wrote academic murder mysteries under the name Amanda Cross.

She also wrote Writing A Woman’s Life - a treatise/memoir about the ways in which authors find themselves confining women to a limited handful of stories repeated over and over, which do not begin to describe the breadth of women’s lives.

I often think of Writing A Woman’s Life when approaching texts about lgbt* women. For years they were relegated to “unrequited love results in death”. Then requited love results in death” was added. Then we got “internalized homophobia and shamed coming out results in death.” Then we had “couple wants to have baby results in death.” It was as if it was impossible to imagine any other possible story to tell.

Only in perhaps the last 5 years or so have we started to get stories that don’t fall into those categories. I rejoice that there are now lesbians in probate fights, bisexuals on submarines, vampire lesbians, straight women who pretend to be lesbians, wlw half mechanical aliens who save interstellar refugees. Now if there were just more than one story going at a time, that would be better.

*Yes, I know women who identify as gay and not lesbian or bi.

[thefoxhuntingman]

[...] public discourse has long needed to include the unrecorded truth of women's lives. Women today do not flee public discourse; they attempt to redefine it.

Carolyn G. Heilbrun, "Contemporary Memoirs: Or, Who Cares Who Did What to Whom?"

[dwellordream]

“Relations with real parents, of course, provided the context and often times much of the subterranean content of girls’ socialization. As the age of marriage increased, middle-class daughters resided for a longer and longer time with their parents. The historical literature has appropriately stressed the dependence of Victorian daughters, yet it has disagreed on how to interpret it. Historians of medicine and of the prescriptive literature have tended to stress the costs of such training in self-discipline, seeing girls’ exercises in self-suppression as the origins of a range of psychosomatic ailments.

With a more positive emphasis, historians of domesticity have emphasized the health of girls’ gradual socialization into the world of their mothers and grandmothers, depicting daughters and mothers ‘‘lolling [together] in placid domesticity.’’ The legacy of the Victorian home was more variegated than either vision allows, though, with maternal dependence often suppressed in accounts of actual lives. In some sense, the object relations theory of gender socialization was designed for the Victorian family. Nancy Chodorow’s argument about the ‘‘reproduction of mothering’’ assumes an asymmetrical family structure with mother at home and father at work. Unlike her brother, the theory goes, the girl learns gender behavior through imitating her mother, often blurring her own sense of self with her mother’s.

In this environment, affiliation and nurturance emerge naturally at the center of her identity. (Her brother needs to learn masculinity from a largely absent father and must therefore break abruptly from his nearest love object, his mother, in order to assume an abstract masculinity.) This insight about the blendedness of female identity in late-Victorian America helps to explain the anomalous position of mothers in many of the documents of girlhood. Frequently mothers simply did not appear in their daughters’ daily accounts of their lives. The absence of a mother in a diary often did not reflect her real-life absence. Instead, it was likely to suggest that she was omnipresent, part of the assumed background of her daughter’s life rather than its figure or pattern.

Even fictional accounts of girls and their journals acknowledged this absence. Mothers frequently emerged in diary accounts only to depart or to return or to get sick. In diaries from three different years in the 1880s, Mabel Lancraft, daughter of an oyster grower in Fair Haven, Connecticut, mentioned her mother scarcely at all. Her mother took an active role only in regard to three separate events: a contentious shopping trip, a trip to school as her daughter’s advocate, and her rare absence from home, which required that Mabel herself prepare dinner. It is in such moments as the last that daughters paid tribute to mothers and to their particular and often archetypal qualities.

When Bostonian Agnes Garrison was in New York and got an earache, she realized how much she counted on her mother in the normal run of things: ‘‘I don’t know when I have had such a hard time or when I have missed my dear Mamma so much. Cried as much for her as for earache. . . . There is nobody like Mamma when one is sick.’’ Southerner Lucy Breckinridge ‘‘spent the day’’ watching for her mother to return, and noted that when she finally arrived, ‘‘The house is much brighter now.’’

Literary critics have often noted the propensity of nineteenth-century female authors to ‘‘express hostility toward their mothers by eliminating them from the narrative,’’ in contrast to twentieth-century authors, who dramatized the conflict. One such contemporary observer was Florence Nightingale, who during her own crisis over her life purpose commented on how the novels of her age featured a heroine who ‘‘has generally no family ties (almost invariably no mother), or, if she has, they do not interfere with her entire independence.’’ According to the critic Carolyn Heilbrun, the removal of familial impediments represented wish fulfillment—a magical, fictive freeing from real-life constraints, especially those imposed by families. Girls’ diaries seem to have shared in both the plotting templates and the psychological bedrock which underlay such portrayals of familial displacement and liberation.

…So what do we make of girls’ frequent decisions to leave their mothers out of the record? We might conclude that a mother’s absence from journals and diaries represented the same thing as a mother’s absence from novels—an easy resolution to the need for imaginative space, without yet the daring demonstrated by such writers as Virginia Woolf, who confronted and considered killing the smothering, maternal ‘‘angel in the house.’’ The potency of the maternal ideal became especially apparent when mothers had died. Indeed, the death of a mother might be the initial inspiration for a daughter to write. Grief over a loss that often seemed equal to a loss of self found a ready outlet in one strand of girls’ autobiographical writing in which the spirit of the ‘‘angel of the house’’ was described, memorialized, and apotheosized.

The critic Elaine Showalter has observed that many Victorian women writers had lost, or were alienated from, their mothers. Showalter concludes that the resulting male-identification contributed to their careers. The diary evidence from the United States suggests another possibility—that the loss of a mother may have encouraged writing which was initially a form of communication with an absent or imagined ‘‘other’’ from beyond the grave. In such journals, the palpable agenda of the journal writer was to apply a salve of words and an illusion of communication to the intense aloneness of the orphaned or the motherless. When Helen Ward Brandreth began her journal, at the age of thirteen, she described herself (‘‘a low forehead, light hair and eyes’’), noted her age, and then recorded the next significant information about herself: ‘‘My Mama is dead, she died March 5, 1871, so my eldest sister May takes care of me.’’

The death of a mother during a girl’s childhood or youth distilled and romanticized maternal imagery. In their depictions of their dead mothers, girls concocted a powerful maternal essence which inhibited and censured with far greater impact than could any living representative. As such, dead mothers came to stand in for a potent superego—an angel in fact rather than simply in allusion. In Victorian America, the association of mothers with religious virtue, as a ‘‘channel of God’s grace’’ (according to Jane Tompkins), was a commonplace. For girls whose mothers had died, the association was fixed: mothers, feminine virtue, and an idealized but elusive better self.

…In some sense, idealizing mothers, especially dead ones, bespoke a universal urge for the perfect unity of the womb or before. In that sense, the strong identification and attachment between mothers and daughters argued by Nancy Chodorow and others was intensified by its arbitrary dissolution through death. Testimonials in diaries about lost mothers provide the words to suggest the bonds which often remained unvoiced in the diaries of the daughters of living mothers. Mothers were often absent from the record when present in fact, and most clearly articulated in the fabric and manuscript of self when they were in fact dead, sick, or away.

Whichever the case, the writings of Victorian daughters confirm the prolonged attachment of daughters to mothers with whom they shared a largely domestic sphere. Yet that primal bond of identification, encouraged by the Victorian separation of male and female spheres, was also subject to countercurrents from the culture of selfhood itself. As adults claimed a private self removed by propriety from public view or discourse, they taught those same values to growing girls. In theory, a girl told her mother all, and had no secrets. In practice, daughters, like their mothers, resisted expressing or confessing controversial emotions. In rooms and journals provided by their parents but taken for their own, girls, too, elaborated a layered culture of private secrets which sometimes pitted them against their mothers.

This was less true earlier in the nineteenth century. Parents claimed privacy for themselves but resisted giving it to children. Parents who had scrutinized their children’s writings for signs of grace earlier in the century were not indulging idle curiosity but fulfilling their highest parental responsibility to see to the spiritual salvation of their children. The substitution of character building for salvation seeking as the goal of adolescent socialization was a change in vocabulary rather than a revolution in parent-child relations. Adults’ increasing rights to privacy within their homes meant greater parental obligation to monitor children, rather than less. When parents took their children inside and closed the door, they gained sole responsibility for their upbringing.

…Yet the idea that ‘‘a secret is not a good thing for a girl to have’’ became harder to defend as Victorianism evolved to encourage the privacy of the individual. The surreptitious surveillance which we associate with Victorianism was the result of the twin beliefs in the abstract value of privacy and the responsibility of parents to monitor children. Motivated perhaps by the greater actual autonomy of their daughters, who were no longer constantly at their mothers’ elbows, and also by their own increasing responsibility for girls’ upbringing, parents were often interested in the contents of daughters’ diaries and journals. Although we think of the Victorians as inappropriately intrusive, their recourse to indirection was a sign of their deference to the idea of privacy. Earlier generations would have had fewer scruples about direct intervention.

As youths made the transition to adulthood, they at first felt guilty about secrets they kept from parents. Lucy Breckinridge neglected to tell her father about her engagement, and remonstrated with herself for the omission: ‘‘I am afraid it is deception, and yet, I cannot make up my mind to do it. I am a coward! I try to reconcile myself to it by arguing that if I am silent now, there may something occur to make Pa favor my plan and if I told him now, it would distress and anger him. . . . And then, all girls do it. Sallie Grattan did not even tell her mother! But that’s small comfort. I’ll think of it and try to make up my mind.’’ Lucy Breckinridge’s defenses of her secrecy in the 1860s lacked conviction. In resorting simply to fashion—‘‘And then, all girls do it’’—she was leaning on a reed so weak as to offend even her own sense of righteousness.

Yet at the same time, Breckinridge was offended at an incursion on her own sense of privacy. When a letter came into the house from Captain H., the man to whom she was engaged, ‘‘Pa got hold of the letter and read it and then sent for me to get it, a very bad thing in Papa.’’ When Lucy decided to break off with her Captain H., largely because of her parents’ disapproval, Lucy referred again to her father’s intrusion on her privacy: ‘‘Pa opens all my letters since Eliza’s alluding to Capt. H., and I have not a doubt was very much interested in the Capt.’s letter today.’’ It was wrong for her to withhold important information about her engagement from her father, Breckinridge seemed to feel. It was perhaps even worse for her father to pry into her mail, without her express permission, ‘‘a very bad thing.’’ The certainty of that last judgment suggests that girls were increasingly claiming a right to their own privacy.

As might have been expected between such a fiery duo, the etiquette and the morality of privacy also figured in the relationship between the feminist orator Lucy Stone and her diary-keeping daughter Alice Stone Blackwell. Perhaps not surprisingly, as in her campaign to restrict her daughter’s reading, Lucy Stone upheld woman’s self-sovereignty—as long as it did not extend to her daughter. In February 1872, when Blackwell was fourteen, her mother scolded her sharply for reading someone else’s letter. ‘‘Mama told me I had never done so naughty a thing since I was borne.’’ This strong rebuke upset Alice ‘‘utterly,’’ and she described herself going off to school ‘‘in a very low state of mind.’’ Several months later, though, the tables were turned. Alice recorded: ‘‘I accused Mama of scratching out something in my diary, and she confessed to having done so. We had a conversation which nearly resulted in my giving up keeping a diary and burning the old ones, but the affair ended satisfactorily.’’

Coming from the champion of women’s rights, Lucy Stone’s act of willful intrusion on her daughter is shocking. Not only had she read her daughter’s journal, but she had been unable to resist obliterating contents which displeased her. The conversation between mother and daughter nearly ended in a dramatic scene of destruction, with the daughter threatening to break off the edifying practice of journal writing and to burn the old ones if her mother couldn’t guarantee their privacy. Clearly, Alice had learned the lessons about the sanctity of privacy which her mother had been trying to teach her. Equally clearly, Lucy Stone was still participating in a nineteenth-century culture which exempted relations between mothers and daughters from the strict code of privacy which characterized relations between adults.

As late as the 1890s, Ladies’ Home Journal was still declaring the rights of parents to open letters addressed to a daughter, but even this conservative publication suggested, ‘‘This is seldom done where the confidence between the parents and child exists.’’ The controversy in the spring of 1872 between the women of the Blackwell family, like those of myriad other families throughout Victorian America, were skirmishes in a prolonged cultural conflict over the rights of daughters to identities separate from their mothers’.”

- Jane H. Hunter, “Houses, Families, Rooms of One’s Own.” in How Young Ladies Became Girls: The Victorian Origins of American Girlhood

[whatpennymade]

“Romance is the glamour which turns the dust of everyday life into a golden haze.”✨✨✨

-Carolyn Gold Heilbrun