Presented at the Virginia Humanities Conference
Christopher Newport University
April 9, 1994
by
In Gendered Spaces Daphne Spain proposes that there is a relationship among gender, status, and space such that "societies attribute greater value to the public forms of status defined as masculine" and restrict women's access to the spaces where the masculine knowledge that conveys status is located. More specifically, valorized knowledge has almost universally been limited to spaces where women are not permitted (for example, in nineteenth-century colleges or in many work places), thus sustaining gender stratification. Even when women began to be admitted into universities, for example, various forms of gender segregation persisted. Therefore, "both geographic distance and architectural design established boundaries between the knowledge available to women and that available to men" (5). In the home, in places of learning, and in the work place, space has been defined by gender, while cultural constructions of gender have determined the definition of space.
Daphne Spain reminds us that ". . . domestic architecture mediates social relations, specifically those between women and men. Houses are the spatial context within which the social order is reproduced. Hillier and Hanson . . . define a dwelling as a set of social categories crosscut by a system of controls, which together define reality for both inhabitants and visitors" (140). In the transitional space of the Restoration South, both an economic structure (capitalism) and an ideology (patriarchy) define gender and space (107). As a result, "Dwellings reflect the cultural values as well as the technological and geographic characteristics of the societies in which they are built" (111). In the nineteenth-century home, spaces were distinguished by class, gender, and utility (and in the South, race); and the higher the class of the home owner, the more numerous were the distinctions--and the rooms. Southern plantation homes were modeled after those of the British gentry, though usually on a more modest scale. In these homes white women, idealized as fragile and delicate, had space for leisure, while black women were consigned to work areas (117-22).
Spain's analysis of domestic, educational, and economic spaces in both nonindustrial and industrial societies refers to status and knowledge, both of which are salient features of the nineteenth century bourgeois novel. The first readers of these novels came to them with certain expectations about the social, cultural, or moral hierarchies they would represent. And around issues of point of view, characterization, and plot development, formal criticism of the novel has likewise been concerned with the reader's knowledge.
Using Spain's analytic method to read Virginia writer Molly Elliot Seawell's Reconstruction novel Throckmorton, I propose that the gendered spaces of the nineteenth century constructed women's lives in ways that made writing a novel difficult. First, Seawell had to pay attention to the gender and class conventions of space with her characters. In particular she had to attend to the places where she affords privacy to her characters. And privacy for a woman, especially a widowed or unmarried woman, was problematic. In addition, by attending to these gender and class distinctions, Seawell had to negotiate some narrative limitations that might not otherwise affect male authors or authors writing more male characters than female.
Born in Gloucester, Virginia in 1860, Molly Elliot Seawell supported her mother, sister, and household, after the death of her father, by writing 40 books and assorted journalistic pieces, until her death in Washington, D.C. in 1916. A grandniece of President John Tyler and born into one of the First Families of Virginia, Seawell was deeply rooted in the Virginia soil as part of a Virginian aristocracy whose vestiges exist today. Much of her writing is informed by a perspective both traditional and patrician. She was, for example, a staunch anti-feminist (writing for The Critic in 1891 a controversial essay on "The Absence of the Creative Faculty in Women,) and an anti-suffragist (in her 1911 The Ladies' Battle).
First published in 1890, Throckmorton is concerned with Reconstruction plantation life in Virginia's Tidewater. The setting of the novel offers contrasting spaces defined by gender, marital status, and race. Judith Temple, the widowed wife of a young Confederate officer, and her infant son, live with her deceased husband's parents and sister--Gen. Temple, his wife, and their daughter Jacqueline--at the family plantation, Barn Elms. Seawell informs us that in this household as in most of Virginia, "the men have a magnificent but imaginary empire, and the women conduct the serious business of life" (10). These gender roles are heightened by Seawell's making Gen. Temple a comic character, who spends his leisure hours writing a history of "the War," while in fact his military leadership was inept. George Throckmorton, a widower, who at the onset of the war had joined the Union Army and led with distinction, returns with his son Jack to his nearby ancestral plantation. The neighbors shun this "traitor," but the Temples soon renew their friendship with him. The presence of a widowed man as a visitor to the Temple household engages the two young Temple women: the flighty young Jackie, and her sister-in-law, Judith.
Judith comes to admit to herself that her widowhood is without grief--she did not really know her husband long before his death, and is not sure that she even loved him--and that she continues the mourning only as a concession to General and Mrs. Temple's deep grieving. When Throckmorton has begun to visit both Jackie and Judith, the General's nephew, Temple Freke, returns from Louisiana where he has married and divorced a Cuban woman. He is attentive to Judith, who spurns him; in revenge, Freke insinuates to Judith that George Throckmorton killed her husband, Beverley Temple, in combat. (It turns out that Throckmorton did in fact engage in hand to hand combat with Beverley Temple, but the fatal shot was fired by one of Temple's own men aiming for Throckmorton.)
While Judith finds herself attracted to Throckmorton, he proposes to young Jackie, who accepts but really does not love him. Pretending to visit an aunt, Jackie runs off to meet Freke, marries him in a fraudulent ceremony, but soon escapes him and returns home. The engagement to Throckmorton, which had not been "public," is now off, and the reason for its end becomes grist for the local rumor mills. The neighbors shun Jackie, who decides to die rather than live with the shame. Finally, after two years away, Throckmorton proposes to Judith, who has realized that he is the only man she has ever loved. Other characters in the novel include the neighbor, Mrs. Sherrard; her nephew, the parish rector, Rev. Morford; the Temple family servants, Delilah and her husband Simon Peter; and Throckmorton's Irish servant, Sweeney.
In order to show how Seawell manages the gender conventions of space in the narrative settings, I will organize these places in the novel by region, landscape, and architecture.
The novel compares two regions of the South, Virginia and Louisiana. Throckmorton returned to Virginia after the war because, although "himself the most unassuming of men, he cherished, unknown to those who know him best, a strong desire that his name should be kept up in Virginia where it had been known so long" (30). In Virginia a (man's) name is important, but the name of an estate or plantation will long outlive the man who owns it. In Virginia, Seawell tells us, divorce is practically unknown, suggesting the stability of family names and family life. In contrast, the "outsider" who complicates the action of the novel, Temple Freke, comes from Louisiana where he was born and raised. That territory is a region of indeterminacy: he marries an ethnic woman, then divorces her; but is the divorce really valid, especially in Virginia? This regional contrast works throughout the novel as Virginia values come into conflict with those of Louisiana; Virginia prevails at least because these values reflect Seawell's commitments (though the novel might have been quite written differently by other nineteenth-century regionalist writers like Grace King or George Washington Cable.)
Although the landscape of Virginia's Tidewater is rather level and poses few natural obstacles, the novel makes some gender and class distinctions. Simon Peter, the Temples' man servant, and Sweeney, Throckmorton's Irish servant, are the only characters who walk in the public road. The grounds of the plantation, however, are accessible to both genders as they represent the extent of the father's sovereignty. When taking a walk, for example, Jackie "would go as far as the gate of the lane that led into the main road, and then turn back" (68). When her father lets her take a train on her own to Richmond, she becomes vulnerable to Freke, who intercepts and seduces her. The grounds circumscribe the world in which a woman might safely operate without the immediate protection of a man. Moreover, a woman's responsibility to the home entailed providing "a calm retreat where husbands and children were protected from the outside world" (Spain 144). Almost by necessity Seawell has to get Jackie outside of the home and its grounds in order for Freke to seduce her. In this way, Jackie brings her shame back to Barn Elms from the outside, although Judith manages the sacred domestic space in order to protect the General and Mrs. Temple from scandal.
And even for the male, the estate represents the custody of his class and gender: "By this time [Throckmorton] was at his own grounds, and Sweeney's honest Irish face . . . was watching out for him" (40). In a curious rhetorical strategy, the servant Sweeney becomes the patriarch to the returning Throckmorton. Beyond the grounds are woods and fields, a male domain of the hunt, which represents a wider world of both danger and possibility.
The architectural spaces of the novel are the most attenuated of all those I will look at here. First, I want to look at the plantations themselves as the kind of unitary objects that Seawell presents, before wandering into the rooms of the great houses that dot the novel's landscape.
Barn Elms, the Temples' home is "rambling and shabby . . . patched and pieced . . . [with an] utter disregard of architectural proportion . . . partly of brick and partly of stone . . . [having] a step up or a step down in every room" (7) Its uncarpeted floors are polished daily by "an able-bodied negro" (8). The house is metonomic not only of the Temple family's faded glory, but also to the South itself, a ragged racial, cultural, and historical patchwork.
Seawell contrasts it with Throckmorton's Millenbeck, a home that had been sold, but which Throckmorton repurchased after the war. In this architectural narrative, Yankee capital--the product of the North's industrialization--restores the South:
Within the house was more magnificence. The inevitable great, dark, useless hall was robbed of its coldness and bleakness by soft Turkish rugs placed over the polished floor. There was no way of heating it in the original plan, but Throckmorton's decorator and furnisher had hit upon the plan of having a quaint Dutch stove, which now glowed redly with a hard-coal fire. The startling innovation of lighting the broad oak staircase had likewise been adopted, and at intervals up the stairway wax candles in sconces shed a mellow half-light in the hall below. (151-52) The house also reflects the character of its master in that while the rest of the house is luxuriously appointed (by a decorator, not by Throckmorton, which would be unmanly), his own room is Spartan: "Since most people liked luxury, he had his house made luxurious; and his own room was the only plain one in it" (154).
The two remaining manors of the novel are treated in less detail, in part because they and the characters who own them figure less in the community and in the novel. Mrs. Sherrard's Turkey Thicket is the site of many parties, now that the estate has been freed from the debt brought on by her late husband's prodigalities. Its entrance hall--"no earthly use the best part of the year, and for which all the rooms around it were unnecessarily cramped" (51)--is the dance floor. Temple Freke buys a nearby property, but "It was not much of a place, being at most about three hundred acres, with a small, untenanted house on it . . ." (98). Freke, however, attempts to ingratiate himself with Jackie by telling her falsely, "You would be happier even at Wareham with me, than at Millenbeck with Throckmorton." (176)
In the plantation houses, the drawing-rooms are the most conspicuously public spaces, accessible to both men and women, though clearly gendered as female rooms in which women spend their leisure time, later joined by the men. The drawing room at Barn Elms is "old-fashioned, low-pitched" (14) with a "wheezy old machine" for a piano (16). Most of the conversation of the novel takes place in the Temple drawing-room or in Mrs. Sherrard's, constructing an interesting chiastic formula. On a visit to Mrs. Sherrard with the Temples, Throckmorton, and Freke, Judith realizes after a while that Jackie and Freke are not in the drawing-room, so she slips out to find them in the "cold hall":
Jacqueline made a little futile effort to pretend that they were looking at some prints by the light of a solitary kerosene-lamp; but Freke, who at least had no pretence about him, held on boldly to Jacqueline's hand, until she wrenched it away. (123) Judith returns from the hall to the drawing-room with her sister-in-law and Freke. Later that evening in the "cold hall" of Barn Elms, Judith tells Jacqueline, to go upstairs to her room before the young widow goes into the drawing-room to speak with Freke. In the drawing room she admonishes him to leave Jackie alone and vows that she will do all that she can to get him out of the Temples' home (thereby ejecting this moral infection that has come into the home from the outside and threatens the inner health of the home). In this interview Freke alleges that Throckmorton was responsible for her late husband's death.
What this chiasma between spaces shows is that unattached women must carefully negotiate public and private spaces. In fact, since their private spaces cannot admit men, women must crisscross drawing-rooms and halls, the most public spaces of the house, balancing the need for privacy (which they might have in their own bedrooms) with the need for a place to converse with men (which the unattached woman could not do in her bedroom). It becomes a matter not of finding a private space, but of finding a less public space, which Judith and Jackie do by moving between drawing room and hall, first at Turkey Thicket, then at Barn Elms. In this chiastic movement between rooms, Judith and Jacqueline are trying both to disclose knowledge and to conceal knowledge. In the hall at Turkey Thicket, Jacqueline wants to reveal her attraction to Freke, while concealing it from her family, and in the hall at Barn Elms she wants to find out what Judith will say to Freke, until Jackie is sent to her room. Judith wants to discover what Jacqueline is concealing in Mrs. Sherrard's hall, but she later meets Freke in the Temple drawing-room both to reveal her animosity to the young man and to conceal her concerns from the Temples. Later, Judith further takes on herself the duty to conceal from General and Mrs. Temple what has happened to Jackie even when their daughter becomes mortally ill. This chiastic episode enacts the feminist insight that for women, and in particular circumstances, single women, the distinctions between public and private are rather like a Mobius strip--in which the inside is the outside--constructed by men.
In Throckmorton the exception to this movement between spaces is the married woman, like Mrs. Temple, whose bedroom or "charmber"--"as the bedroom of the mistress is called in Virginia" (10)--is the site of Mrs. Temple's numerous private conversations. The "charmber" is a kind of sacred space, as George Throckmorton remembers it:
The 'charmber' at Barn Elms was a sort of star chamber, and utterances within its precincts were usually of a solemn character. As Throckmorton entered, Mrs. Temple rose from the big rush-bottomed chair in which she sat. Throckmorton remembered the room perfectly, in all the years since he had been in it--the dimity curtains, the high-post mahogany bed, the shining brass fender and andirons, the tall candle-sticks on the high wooden mantel. He remembered, with a queer, boyish feeling, sundry moral discourses gently administered to him in that room on certain occasions when he had been caught in the act of fishing on Sunday, or poking a broomstick up the chimney to dislodge the sooty swallows that built their nests there in the summer-time, and other instances of juvenile turpitude. (77) In this room Mrs. Temple meets with Throckmorton to reconcile herself with him when he returns from the war the first time. It is the room where Gen. and Mrs. Temple retreat when they first hear of their son's death; where the Temple family goes to hear again from Freke the story of Beverley Temple's death in battle; where they shut themselves up at Jacqueline's death; and where the General goes to recuperate from the gout. Mrs. Temple's "charmber" is a privileged space, however, only because of her negotiation of power in the relationship with her husband, whose library is clearly a privileged, segregated space by social convention. Mrs. Temple has, in a sense, negotiated an individual dispensation in the domestic economy of the region; this arrangement would not necessarily transfer to other homes.
For the unattached woman, her own bedroom is a private site for herself or other women or, on rare occasions, a man accompanied by a woman. Jackie locks herself in her room after Freke has tried to persuade her that Throckmorton is too old for her. She recuperates from her "elopement" with Freke there (where Throckmorton's son Jack is permitted to visit her). Jackie dies in her bedroom where her body is laid out before burial. In this way the single woman's bedroom is constructed in the novel as the site of both her physical and moral vulnerability.
By comparison Judith's room offers a literal and symbolic connection with others. Like Jackie, Judith retreats here when she is unwell (once for several days after a fainting spell, the result of Freke's alleging that Throckmorton killed her husband). But it is also where her baby sleeps and where Judith plays with him. Moreover, the windows of her bedroom offer a view of Throckmorton's Millenbeck, and the novel often presents her or Jackie looking out those windows: "From the window which she knew well enough belonged to Throckmorton's own den the cheerful light still streamed" (130). (How she knows this window is his den's is unclear since she hasn't yet visited the house.) Judith's bedroom is the site of her legal and emotional vulnerability as a widow and a mother living with her in-laws. The windows of her bedroom offer a passage to a world outside of Barn Elms, but a world that goes only as far as Millenbeck and marriage with Throckmorton. Her desire for a life outside of Barn Elms is clear throughout the novel, but never more so than at the conclusion when Throckmorton goes to find her walking on the grounds in order to propose marriage to her. The gendered spaces of the novel seem to construct an axis between her bedroom and the den where Throckmorton sits smoking cigars.
One might draw a similar axis between the drawing-room and the church, both feminized public spaces. The rector of the Episcopalian parish, Edmund Morford, is handsome, affected, and an "effeminate beauty" (140). Throckmorton's Irish servant characterizes him thus: "'Be jabers, the parson's more of an ould wouman than mesilf,' Sweeney would remark to his colored coadjutors. 'He can make as good white gravy as any she-cook going, and counts his sheets and towels every week as reg'lar as the mother of him did, I warrant . . .'" (139). It is not surprising that Throckmorton refuses numerous invitations to join the church. Even Morford's aunt, Mrs. Sherrard, refers to him with the same disparagement that Seawell uses to describe Gen. Temple, the late Mr. Sherrard, Simon Peter, and other husbands. But even here, space is gendered. Again strong women like Mrs. Temple and Mrs. Sherrard are able to negotiate spaces and power for themselves: Throckmorton remembers that, when he was a boy, women led hymn singing from a gallery beside the pulpit. Nonetheless, both the pulpit and the Temple pew are spaces owned and legally managed by men.
Black characters in Throckmorton are relegated to tertiary status in several respects, including space. In the dialogue of Delilah and Simon Peter, Seawell does not deviate from the dialect conventions of the plantation novel as established by William Gilmore Simms before the war and Thomas Nelson Page during Reconstruction. While they are permitted access to both private and public spaces, the servants have little to do there and less to say. Their sites are the pantry, the kitchen, the dependencies (or outbuildings), and the novel often only allows us to overhear Delilah and Simon Peter in the pantry or kitchen. Their marital relationship, not surprisingly, mirrors that of the "gen'l and mist'is."
When the reader deconstructs the gendered spaces of region, landscape, and architecture in a novel like Seawell's Throckmorton, the text discloses a framework of relations along class, gender, and race lines. The bourgeois novel's preoccupation with female rituals and artifacts circumscribes the sites the novel attempts to represent. Forbidden rooms (the pantry; the barn; the den) are accessible only by long views or eavesdropping. In order to maintain the expectations of the reader, the novelist must negotiate the novel's requirements of verisimilitude (there are some places that a lady can't go if the lady is a character in the novel), propriety (there are some places that a lady can't go if the lady is the novelist), and what used to be called "incidents" (the readers want to go somewhere). Unlike the heroic romance, whose male figure was tested by a quest or journey before finding what he sought, the sentimental romance has a heroine whose femininity is tested within the domestic space.
Moreover the gendered spaces of the nineteenth century were a gloss on the gender and class differentiations of knowledge. Thus part of the scandal of novels in the early nineteenth century and of realism and naturalism later was that novels took some people (for example, women) places where they ought not be and disclosed knowledge (for example, about sexuality) that they ought not possess. By maintaining firm control on the conventions of literary genre as Molly Elliot Seawell's Throckmorton did, the apparatus of a dominant culture can control knowledge. While this distinction may not warrant what is good fiction or bad fiction (and a modernist sensibility would probably be prejudiced in favor of a novel that took us to places where we shouldn't be), it does tell us something about what a novel can or cannot do for its readers.
The world of Seawell's Throckmorton is a relatively static one with respect to gender, class, and race, which the novel's fairly narrow use of spaces and its regionalist conventions attempt to underscore. The world of this 1890 novel's reception, however, was the site of contested gender roles, with increasingly vocal claims for women's suffrage, education, employment, and reproductive rights. All this Seawell, an unmarried woman and an outspoken antisuffragist, knew well. In novels and romances Seawell constructed a domestic, fictional shelter from modernity.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Daphne Spain, University of Virginia, and to Karen Dandurand, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, for their careful and insightful readings of this piece.
1. D. Spain. Gendered Spaces (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1992), xv. Hereafter cited in the text.
2. M.E. Seawell. Throckmorton (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1909). Hereafter, pages from this edition cited in the text.
3. N. Baym. Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1984), 75ff, discusses this feature of the nineteenth century novel in relation to the formal requirements of plot.
4. See N. Baym's discussion of the idealized female character in her chapter on "Character" (82-107).
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