discovering the urban angloamerican lady in post colonial literature

8/14/2019 Discovering the Urban AngloAmerican Lady in Post Colonial Literature

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Discovering the Urban Anglo-American Lady in

Post-Colonial English Literature: Considerations

by Judyth Vary Baker

Introducing the Background

Post-Colonial English literature presented a new creature the Anglo-

American woman as lady -- in a manner reflecting the outcome of a

conflict of traditions and the breakaway of American Anglos from their

Puritan and English colonial roots. Post-colonial literature today tends to

focus on events and experiences in other countries; early American post-

colonial literature tends to be analyzed in the context of socioeconomic and

political viewpoints that may have been "ineluctable" (ref. James Joyce's

Ulysses--"the ineluctable modality of the visible.") when they wereoriginally written. When we look back, through modern lenses, at what was

then considered a modern Anglo-American lady, we must not forget where

we now stand, compared to the writers of the past who formulated their

vision of that lady perhaps better described today as the urbane Anglo-

American lady. Paul Brians defines todays stance well when he writes:

It should be acknowledged that postcolonial theory functions as a

subdivision within the even more misleadingly named field of "cultural

studies": the whole body of generally leftist radical literary theory and

criticism which includes Marxist, Gramscian, Foucauldian, and variousfeminist schools of thought, among others. What all of these schools of

thought have in common is a determination to analyze unjust power

relationships as manifested in cultural products like literature (and film, art,

etc.).

Brians not only succinctly describes the modern position of post-colonial

literatures most prominent features of mentality and morality, but he also

reminds us that when this genre of literature was being created, contributions

to the genre via American literature were usually denied:

Practitioners generally consider themselves politically engaged and

committed to some variety or other of liberation processthe label is

usually denied to U.S. literature, though America's identity was

formed in contradistinction to that of England, because the U.S. is

usually viewed as the very epitome of a modern neo-colonial nation,

imposing its values, economic pressures, and political interests on a


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wide range of weaker countriesWe continue to use the term

"postcolonial" as apis aller, and to argue about it until somethingbetter comes along.

.

The American colonial era produced its own compendium of literature,

including contributions not only by Puritan women, but also a few by native

American and African-American women. Largely, these womens works

were edited, published and sometimes even stolen by males.

For a long time, the most popular American post-colonial literature depicted

the Anglo-American woman, generally ignoring non-Anglo women. These

women, themselves, had relatively few opportunities to express themselvesin literature without resorting to male-dominated conventions. In 1650,

Anne Bradstreets book of poems, The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung Up in

America, was published in England, without her knowledge or permission: it

was the first work written by an Anglo-American woman to be published.

She, herself, was forced into a wilderness exile by her fellow Puritans for her

liberal religious beliefs. Ivy Schweitzer tells us that the first edition of her

poetry is in

contrast (to) the frequent apologies and self-deprecation

of the poems collected in the 1650 edition ofThe Tenth Muse,Lately

Sprung up in America (compared) with the self-confident, un-

apologetic voice of the later poems and revisions published in the

post- humous second edition of 1678.

Schweitzer goes on to say that

As Timothy Sweet has recently pointed out, in the elegiac and epic

traditionsa fundamental convention for the production of voice is

the "specification of gender": the speaking and writing subject is

always male Bradstreet, as female, was self-conscious of the effects

of sex and gender on her ability to speak and write in public, and her

early poetry discloses what Sweet calls "certain effects of power"


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produced byconventional Renaissance assumptions of masculine

subjectivity and feminine objectivityThe daughter of a powerful

public figure in Puritan New England, well-educated and steeped in

the Elizabethan poetic tradition, Bradstreet was limited to imitating

the poetic conventions of the literary tradition she inherited. (290-291)

Even when the womans experience is uniquely her own, in early examples,

permission by the husband to publish was standard. The Narrative of the

Captivity and the Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (Massachusetts,

1682) was the first book (and it was a best-seller) published by an Anglo-

American woman. She considered herself a Puritan gentlewoman, the wife

of a clergyman, and her book was published by permission of her husband.

Rowlandsons narrative is important because she considers herself a native

American. However, she is captured by Wamponoag Indians, who of courseinhabited the same territory for centuries before any Rowlandson arrived on

the scene.

As a captive, Burnham writes, Mary Rowlandson occupies a hinge that

divides one cultural subjectivity from another, for during her captivity she

belongs wholly neither to the Puritan nor to the Indian cultural system

Rowlandson is constantly in conflict with the pronoun usage; identifying

herself with the Indians one minute, then when they do something againsther Puritan culture, objectifying them." (66)

Marys dichotomous position gives us a glimpse of the kind of thinking that

such an Anglo-American Puritan lady, educated, literate and devout, may

also have exercised regarding her distance from her English cousins, now

long left behind. She encounters aboriginal resistance and understands that

she is not quite a full citizen of the New World, but concurrently, she does

not belong in the European world, either.

The urban Anglo-American lady (the typical white female with Puritan roots

with a British (or western European) genetic component), as she emerged in

post-colonial English literature, would frequently be described as a woman

of consequence and rank sometimes representing the very embodiment of

the emancipated female and as such, the literature created a distinct niche

for her, among her countrywomen, that persists to the present.


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Jane Johnston Schoolcraft

Such a fine distinction did not include native American or African-American

women. The first Native American writers work to be published occurred

later than Puritan times, and was never seen under her own name. Jane

Johnston Schoolcraft was the daughter of Oshauguscodawaqua, an Ojibwa.

Her father, John, was of Scotch-Irish decent and a successful fur trader. Born

in 1800, Jane was the third of seven children. Her writings were

appropriated by her husband, Henry, in such volumes as Algic Researches:

these writings eventually fell into the hands of Henry WadsworthLongfellow, who polished them to make the Song of Hiawatha.

The earliest surviving work of literature in America created by an

African-American writer was written by a female the slave-woman, Lucy

Terry -- who was purchased and set free by her husband-to-be, Abijah

Prince, in 1756. Her poem, Bars Fight, was aballad about an August 25,

1746 attack upon two white families by Native Americans. Bars Fight

was transmitted orally until 1855, when it was finally published. Jean Fagin

Yellin, in an online review of Frances Smith Fosters book, Written ByHerself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746-1892, tells

us that African American women, like all the marginalized who chose to

participate in public discourse, according to Foster "appropriated the

English literary tradition to reveal, to interpret, to challenge, and to change

perceptions of themselves and the world in which they found themselves."

We can generalize the fact that the mainstream literature of post-colonial

American writers, written largely by males, included few portraits of non-

Anglo-American women. And those Anglo-American women who raised a

pen to write about themselves felt no real kinship with Native American or

African-American women. In general, social status, location, and prejudices

precluded much intermingling.

And further, though we must avoid a mere survey, ignoring some literary

efforts that might have helped forge the image of the post-colonial urban
http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/balladhttp://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Native+Americans+in+the+United+Stateshttp://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/balladhttp://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Native+Americans+in+the+United+States


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Anglo-American lady of concern, we can nevertheless make an assay of her

emergence from transplanted Puritan huswife to the more sophisticated,

worldly Anglo-American female, daring to hazard suggestions as to why and

how she thus emerged. The post-colonial world is full of contradictions, of

half-finished processes, of confusions, of hybridity, and liminalities notrestricted to literature alone, but also involving social structure and the

progression of human rights, including womens rights.

An examination of post-colonial English literature reveals aspects of the

rising status of this kind of American woman as she is released from her

traditional confines. In Post-Colonial Drama: theory, practice, politics,

Gilbert and Tompkins tell us that "the term postcolonialism according to a

too-rigid etymology is frequently misunderstood as a temporal concept,

meaning the time after colonialism has ceased [but, rather than] a naveteleological sequence which supersedes colonialism, postcolonialism isan

engagement with and contestation of colonialism's discourses, power

structures, and social hierarchies.

Confining our efforts to a few representative examples that mark the

emergence of the urban Anglo-American lady, well keep this paradigm in

mind.

We do not intend, then, to discourse on the writings of William Bradford,

move through to the era of Kate Chopin, and then top the sundae with a

cherry picked from Post Colonial and African American Womens Writing

(Wisker, 2000), but instead, we will focus on the portraiture of the Anglo-

American woman, particularly in post-colonial literature after she emerges

from Puritan huswifery -- not because we are fraught with prejudice -- but

because the condition and status of the Anglo-American woman was

generally better than that of non-Anglo women in their own country, and

better than that of most women under/emerging from under colonial systems

elsewhere, in regard to the pressures of patriarchy, tradition, and male

dominance. In fact, such pressures, even today, continue to influence the

condition and status of Woman worldwide.

That any women, anywhere in todays world, might still be denied

opportunities available to men to acquire literacy, exercise the vote, enjoy

the right to drive an automobile, or to walk outside their homes without the


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permission of a relative of the opposite sex that a woman might be required

to cover her head because a dominant religion insists that she do so though

she has other beliefs -- all such demands and constraints tell us how far we

must yet travel as we dare view the urban Anglo-American lady as a logical

product of a more enlightened society, despite the flaws, weaknesses andshortcomings of that society, whose roots are manifestly colonial.

Those who insist that certain rights must continue to be denied to women,

such as the right to reject arranged marriages, childhood marriages, female

circumcision, and even sequestering, may, through sheer force of numbers,

yet prevail in forbidding true liberation to half the human race, but we will

do our best here to tread against the pull of that tide. One strategy is to note

the emergence of the post-colonial urban Anglo-American woman who

attained a distinct identity as a relatively free woman, as reported in post-colonial literature.

Identifying the Urban, Postcolonial Anglo-American Lady

We are cognizant of the existence of the independent post-colonial Anglo-

American Lady in English literature by the time Henry James writes his

famed novels comparing and contrasting Americans with Europeans. James

was fascinated with the American persona, which included the Anglo-

American woman, and, in particular, her position as an enlightened and

relatively liberated urban American lady. He evidenced special interest in

her cultural and psychological makeup: in Daisy Miller (1879) , James

explored the question of how a quintessential American young lady of new

money --Daisy Miller -- should be classified. Was she a real lady, or did

she merely exhibit the veneer of one, assisted by the advantages of wealth?

Daisy does not achieve any distinction as a true Lady: Shes completely

uneducatedbut shes wonderfully pretty, and in short shes very nice

(21).

Daisy, in fact, does not satisfy the requirements expected of her by her

patronizing aristocratic critics to fill the role of a true American Lady.

Her rejection by the elite, chic English and American upper-class represents

their general attitude toward non-aristocratic American ladies. In Daisy

Miller, James presents the post-colonial, urban American girl of class as a


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new creature threatening the stereotypes already indelibly set in stone in

European society. She is an upstart a social rebel:

From this seed of rebellion, feminist readers draw out a counter-narrative of

American womanhood defined by freedom despite social constraints. Within

James criticism feminist critics consistently emphasize the liberatorydimension of Daisy's story, placing the evidence of patriarchal control --

Daisy's death -- in brackets. (Johnson 41)

By the time James wrote Wings of the Dove (1902), he had already decided

that the urban American Lady was a significant and well-developed entity

that he could present as falling victim to the decaying maw of Venices high

society. (James 400-475)

Henry James's views...the city as ....splendid in her decay. The cold-blooded deception plot in Wings is characterized by a setting of

wintry coldness, splashing rain, and even a touch of "high water."

Sinking Venice is a mirror of sinking Milly Theale; a sense of

coldness and despairing death prevails in the end. (Perosa 290)

Edith Wharton, a little later than James, presents readers with a wider range

of female personalities, many of them also Ladies and all of them Anglo.

Her urban women are fully developed in character, albeit bona-fide denizens

of the New World now largely severed from their primeval colonial roots,

though trappings of modesty, tradition and ladylike behavior persist as

vestigial remnants of their heritage. We also must note that Whartons

women are all trapped, one way or another, by the expectations of their

society. In fact, the more lady they appear to be, the fewer their options.

Escape occurs only through suicide physical or social. Ranji Kapoor tells

us that Wharton sees no escape for the Anglo-American Lady from the

demands made upon her by society:

Charity Royalls and Lily Barts all suffer the indignity of economic,

social and political subjugation. They have no freedom to shape their

destinies or to realize their aspirations in the temporal world. They are

reduced to decorative ornaments and sex objects and most dangerous

of all, their natures reveal the psychologically debilitating effects of

their situations. Wharton does vaguely imply the need for growth by


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showing how painful and frustrating this process can be for a woman.

But it is only in her non-fictionFrench Ways and Their MeaningthatWharton comes closest to what the feminists might cherish: "No

nation can have grown up ideas till it has a ruling caste of grown up

men and women and it is possible to have a ruling caste of grown up

men and women only in a civilization where the power of each sex is

balanced by that of the other."

In Ethan Frome, Wharton portrays even rural/village women as straitened

ladies: they inhabit a civilized setting almost fit for those European ladies of

rank who spent an occasional summer far from the madding crowd in

country mansions. (Rae, 66-67). In The Age of Innocence, Wharton

describes a world analogous to a Jane Austen universe of manners and

mores. But this is not Europe: it is wholly an American vista, to which aNew York urban Lady is similarly subscribed.

These are lives led in gilded cages under clan control, and Wharton sees no

escape: all such attempts make things only worse. And Wharton removes

any question that the Anglo-American urban Lady is a true peer of her

European counterparts : Countess Oleska, though American-born, marries

and lives in Europe for an extended period, becoming so thoroughly

Europeanized by her marriage to the Count that her elite New York clan

refuses to allow her both the luxury of divorce, and any permanent return to

America, which would reduce the clan to a lower rank. The Countess is

sent back to Europe after an elegant dinner verifying the importance of her

status, which must be retained at all costs. No American-born lover can

equal the social rank of the Count, so Archer is subtly warned never to

approach the Countess again. (Wharton, 220)

Indeed, it was after reading Whartons The Age of Innocence concurrently

with Coopers The Leatherstocking Tales that I suddenly realized how

Whartons use of terms such as clan, tribe, ritual, and primitive

were actually the clues for which I had been searching in my quest to

understand the mechanics of emergence of the urban post-colonial Anglo-

America woman. The creation of this socially-structured American Lady

occurred despite the dynamics inherent in a coarse, pioneer setting where

survival meant that the womans place was both flexible and free to adapt.


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Wharton wrote her books while womens suffrage movements were in full

swing and she ignored them, spending much of her time in France.

Kate Chopin is a different kind of writer. She is a southern-born (1850)

woman who also uses the same terminology rites, rituals, clan expectations as Wharton. Published in 1899, The Awakeningwas scandalous because

of its portrayal of a strong, unconventional woman whose adulterous affair

forced her to commit suicide. In her novella, her protagonist is trapped in a

clan-supported marriage to a man she doesnt love. Edna must obey the

conventions that embody the fundamental valuesof her tribe in an elitistCajun setting or make her exit as gracefully as possible, by submerging her

existence literally and symbolically by suicide via drowning (Chopin, 150-

163). In"The Story of an Hour," Chopin describes the reaction of a woman

who learns of her husband's death and dreams of her future, free of his

gentle but endless dominance. Suddenly seeing him appear his death

having been reported mistakenly, she dies due to a rush of horror that her

relatives interpret as a shock to her weak heart.

From the examples of Chopin, Wharton and James, then, at the end of the

Romantics and within the era of the Realists as a literary movement, the

urban Anglo-American post-colonial lady has already emerged as a fully-

developed and recognizable type distinct from a European model, yet

inextricably bound by the same kind of cultural chains.

Yet, while it is certain that the break with European stereotypic models, and

the establishment of the American female persona occurred earlier than the

end of the 19th century, the dating of the event itself, if we may so term it,

can be approximated. We sought in vain for the urban Anglo-American

Lady, in colonial times, since William Bradford could write : (our children)

ought...rightly say: Our fathers were Englishmen which came over this

great ocean, and were ready to perish in this great wilderness; but they cried

unto the Lord, and he heard their voice and looked on their adversity...

(American Literature Survey 14, emphasis mine). The Puritan forefathers

were Englishmen, but what would their descendants be called? For a long

time, they were known as colonists, attached by an ever-lengthening

umbilical cord to Europe, to Kings, and to European ways, however homely

and different their frontier life.


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Their colonies were founded on death, famine, and massacres. When the

newly-arrived colonists settled, their need for food was paramount and

immediate. Wrote Bradford: [we found]a good quantity of clear ground

where the Indians had formerly set corn, and some of their graves. (16)

Bradfords men, upon inspection, discover the Indians winter food hoardsand carry off the corn and beans for themselves, rejoicing that here they got

seeds to plant themselves corn the next year, or else they might have

starved... which might well have then been the fate of the Indians thus

cruelly misused.

In Women's Place on the American Frontier (1995)Margaret Walsh writes

that Traditionally, women have been either ignored by frontier history or

described in male-defined ways, a pattern established by Frederick Jackson

Turner.We find this pattern threaded through the earliest American literature, from

Colonial and Federal to 1800 (Survey: subtitle) all the way to James

Fenimore Cooper, without discovering that truly American Lady though

she might be labeled as such.

Cooper, for example, presents Judith in The Deerslayer as basically an

English hothouse transplant languishing in neglect -- a clone of the typical

Englishwoman. And where he described the occasional rural-dwelling

American woman, she will speak in her own native, rude dialect, wear

pioneer attire, and be engaged in hard daily chores, unless she is an outright

savage. Such are the women in Coopers American frontier world. And why

not? The early American pioneer woman is rarely dressed or addressed as a

gentlewoman, though in 18th century Williamsburg and other English

colonial outposts they often saw themselves as well-bred ladies who could

play a pianoforte and dance with finesse.

Generally, if the author displays an American woman in wilderness mode,

her roots, as her petticoats, are bemired and low. When we understand that

Coopers American women are either savages or wilderness lasses

convenient caricatures, actually, against which fully-developed masculine

super-heroes shine brightlyand that we are approaching within a few

decades of the Civil War, we are still seeking that line of demarcation. It

did not begin with Rowlandson.

Mary Rowlandson, writes Deborah Madsen,


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and other women like her Hannah Swarton and Hannah Dustan, for

example who were otherwise denied a public voice found a voice in

the genre of the captivity narrative. It was a compromised voice, and

Mrs. Rowlandsons narrative included in the first editions a sermon byher husband as if to legitimate her story, but still allegory provided a

means by which the otherwise silenced and marginalized subject

could articulate her sense of her role within the exceptional destiny of

the New World.

But then Charles Brockden Brown offers the classic Gothic novel Weiland,

written at the end of the 18th century. Within its pages, Brown allows an

educated woman to speak as narrator: she is an amalgam of both thetraditional well-bred Englishwoman and that new American creature, an

American lady on the cusp of urban and urbane sensibilities. Brown had

been reared among Philadelphia Quakers...which had always proclaimed

the spiritual equality of women (Deegan 130). Of Miss Conway, Clara

says, Her education and manners bespoke her to be of no mean birth,

(934) in typical European fashion. But Claras habit of running freely with

two males of similar age through the countryside, as well as alongside her

friend Catherine, with picnics and leisurely readings of the classics in wild

rural settings, without the presence of chaperones, would hardly have been

tolerated in European society, no matter how idyllic the countryside setting.

In fact, Claras rural-based contemporaries in Europe were sometimes

criticized for daring to leave their homesteads and hearths (Aitken 56-57),

though urban ladies of consequence labored under no such conceits. (96-98)

And, of course, there is a price to pay for the households failure to keep

Clara and her companions in perfect order.

We should take one more cursory look at the course of early American

literature, much as if we followed the swing of a pendulum, to pin down that

line of demarcation where the Anglo-American urban Lady emerges as a

type, not a mere anomaly. Lippy et alhave concisely described the set of

conditions that could produce such a creatureconditions that created a

unity of form among that variegated collection of European hothouse

transplants and crude pioneers, as Europeans continued to emigrate to the


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New World, especially into the Colonies, where Puritan-based families were

now beginning to point with pride to their showcase Mayflower origins:

By...1776, the tensions between all Christian(s)...and the way

colonists regarded the native Indians and the Africans forced toimmigrate as slaves...(caused) concerns in the political sector...(But)

Once the move to independence was under way, nearly all New

England, except for some of the adherents of the Church of England,

set aside their differences to unite behind the American cause. (333)

Now colonists -- formerly European immigrants have come to commonly

ascribe to themselves separate identities as citizens of a new nation, no

longer viewing themselves as related to Europeans. Men and women (thisis important)now begin to see themselves as distinctly American men and

women. With starts and halts, they revel in their newfound sense of freedom

a development that did not go unnoticed in Europe. For example,

Coleridge and his friend Southey formed the society of Pantiscrats, in an

attempt to found, despite their own European status, a free American

colony of their very own:

The Pantisocrats...as denizens of a vast modern nation-state, (decided

they) had no alterbativer but to remove themselves from it, and found

their own Republic on the banks of the Susquehanna...(with) twelve

gentlemen of good education and liberal principles...(along with)

twelve ladies....(to) fix their abode in a delightful part of the back

settlements...the women were not only to look after the infants, but

also to cultivate their own minds. (Willey 6-7)

Only a few years later, Charles Lamb refused to promote a book about a

typical purse-proud wretched American Farmer with no virtue but

industry...calling Ladies young women & praising them for decent mirth and

needle-work... (Woodring 270) For though the new American was strong

and prosperous, that did not make him or his women gentlemen and gentle

ladies, nor could they produce their own worthwhile literature: Foerster

comments that When political independence came, they could not create an


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independent literary culture. (46) And since the proud wretched American

Farmer and his young ladies could be looked down upon by Lamb, others

in high literary circles, if not already convinced, now followed Lambs lead.

Henry James found ample fuel to elaborate on the lingering obligation that

Puritan-based, aristocratic American families still felt regarding theirEuropean roots, even into the 19th century. Thus James describes a matrons

concern that her three daughters must replenish their heritage by visiting

their roots in his short story Europe:

Theres a duty that calls them to these wonderful countries, just as it

called, at the right time, their father and myself if it only be the

laying up for the years to come the same store of remarkable

impressions...(to which Jane asked) Do you know everything...inEurope? (37)

But you cant go home again. This story, written only two decades after the

Civil War, acknowledges the widening gap between American and European

ladies of means, and it would never close, no matter how many visits

American girls might make to obtain remarkable impressions. By now,

the American urban Lady was truly post-colonial, a distinct entity in her own

right. It might have taken the exigencies of the Civil War to ultimately force

the nation to forge its unique identity as America. The bitter hostilities of

the 1860s ended with threads of hope weaving itself into a new pattern.

Stephen Crane (1895) wrote:

(The young soldier)...had rid himself of the red sickness of battle.

The sultry nightmare was in the past. He had been an animal blistered

and sweating in the heat and pain of war. He now turned with a

lovers thirst to images of tranquil skies, fresh meadows, cool brooks

(The Red Badge of Courage 212)

Edgar Allan Poethat literary iconoclast and great literary critic surely

should have been in the vanguard in depicting the distinctive urban Anglo-

American Lady of post-colonial times, but one searches in vain. Poes

Ligeia is a lady all of European cloth; Morella is merely another such


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stereotyped female; Eugenie LaLande is Parisian (696). Poes American

women remain largely sketchy and undeveloped, though he, himself,

secretly married his 13-year-old cousin, Virginia surely a Lady who broke

the mold!

Susannah Rowson, Hannah Foster, and a Mrs. Southworth all wrote novelsabout women before the Civil War, but none of these are considered major

works, which we wish to inspect for that major event of demarcation. Jane

G. Austin wrote two collections of popular fairytales introducing young girls

to their own American brand of whimsy, and the characterization of both

boys andgirls, or male and female animals, playing out their roles fearlessly

and cheerfully, might have impressed young readers of both sexes. (In

Moonfolk)...a child...goes to the moon and meets Little red Riding Hood and

other characters from traditional fairy tales. (West 27)Nathaniel Hawthorne dubbed such enterprising female writers a damned

mob of scribbling women, (1854,Baym 64) and Baym comments that The

earliest American literary critics began to talk about the most American

work rather than the best work because they knew no way to find out the

best, other than by comparing American with British writing. (65)

The work of American writers was interpreted in the light of British writers

itself a burdenconsidering that only British publishers provided truly

significant income for English language writers at this time. (54) The

pressure to conform to British literary standards would hinder American

literary evolution in its own right.

British class consciousness was in broad conflict with the emerging

American classless societya situation affecting emerging American

writers. (Davidson 212) The country versus the city, the American versus

the European dichotomies comes under scrutiny, writes Davidson.

The European was becoming the bad guy as Tylers popular American

play The Contrast demonstrated: The Contrast Davidson reminds us,

was the most popular play in early America, satirizing, as it did, the

uncomfortable difficulties between European gentlemen and decent

American fellows in 1790: (In)...the early American novel...the modern

world radically differs from the traditional...and democracy may (be seen to)


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permit new groups of people to reach the top... (91) This included women,

however uncomfortable in their gilded cages.

Women now found themselves welcomed into the republic of letters (and

became) citizens who had previously been invited to stay out. (79)

The Anglo-American Lady was becoming an educated American lady,identifying herself as nearly the equal of her male American compatriots.

Hannah Webster Fosters The Coquette focuses on the negation of the

female selfher freedoms, her possibilities---....(as) the basis of the

sentimental plot. (146) But there is no doubt that the heroine is an

American lady. The ideals of the new American nation argue that women

must join men in articulating the ...concerns of the nation. (146)

In doing so, American women could finally identify themselves as

independent of former ancestors, and higher-ranking American women nowgained a place in European high society. She might visit Europe, no longer

considered automatically inferior, and only tolerated because of her wealth.

(A) new republican freedom enhanced her character. (Parrington 191)

Americas wealthiest citizens (now) became a kind of nobility (Davidson

226) of which the urban, post-colonial Anglo-American Lady was one

visible result.

The coalescence began due to ...two quite different feminist camps in the

early 1850s, Stoehr explains: ...the womens rights proponents and the

free-love enthusiasts. (194) Such is the very meat of the novelist, of

course. Horace Greely had his opinion of writer Margaret Fuller, who wrote

material helping to define the role of the urban Anglo-American Lady.

Greely sneered that ...a good husband and two or three bouncing babies

would have emancipated her from a great deal of cant and nonsense. (195)

But this cant and nonsense was now being read by an educated, high class

of urban American women who wanted to be recognized as emancipated

Ladies in their own right. (195)

The Gilded Age, with its brief bloom of sophisticated manners and

tribal/clan relationships among Americas urban elite, was about to dawn,

and the newly emerging Anglo-American urban Lady was being socially

fitted and filtered to play her part. Europe still offered the better role


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models: England had already...experienced many...social transitions yet to

reach America, due to its earlier entry into industrialization. (Lee, 9) But

though the same afflictions came thundering down upon the heads of the

working classes in both America and Europe, Lee wrote that

...there remains in American thought a strain of blatant optimism and

expectation...(so that) the (various) debates about Darwinism, science,

religion, pragmatism, and socialism took interestingly different forms

in America, and these forms were necessarily reflected in fiction....

(American writers) were not Europeans any more: they were

Americans, who had just witnessed the bloody carving out of their

nation.

Whitmans self-examination, after using up his health nursing a multitude of

wounded soldiers, is a good example. It was described by Asselinneau (30)

this way: ...he was impelled by a restless urge to explore the frontiers of his

self and to explore its patent possibilities in imagination. War had created a

tribe of male and female intellectuals who dared expressed their new identity

through literature. Harriet Beecher Stowe an American womanwrote

the most popular book of the 19th centuryUncle Toms Cabin

---articulating principles of freedom applicable to females as well as males.

And then Kate Chopin, not long after, herself emerges from a long inquiry

into her inner self, confessing in Confidences that I had been...groping

around, looking for something big, satisfying, convincing, and finding

nothing but myself, a something neither big nor satisfying. (Chopin, 2

68) Nevertheless, she emerge(d) from the vast solitude in which she

had been making (her) own acquaintance.

Self-definition was a task that the post-colonial urban Anglo-American

woman faced in order to establish her own identity. Susan B. Anthony, at

age 80, began to establish suffrage headquarters in various cities and towns,

and was seen marching at the head of parades for womens rights. Her

power emanated from a mass of urban-based women who now formed a true

middle class. From their ranks would rise a class of wealthy merchants and

manufacturers who could afford the luxuries previously afforded only by


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nobility, and thus begin to challenge the aristocratic traditions in England.

(Brewer, et al1)

In 1865, many American writers not unnaturally believed that the New

World could avoid the errors of the Old, But by 1900 the general mood haddarkened and disillusionment was widespread... ( 9-11) But also by then,

the Anglo-American post-colonial urban Lady -- most often portrayed as a

creature surrounded by tragedies and sorrows caused by her repressive

culture, itself a vestige of her European heritage-- was firmly established in

the annals of American literature.

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discovering the urban angloamerican lady in post colonial literature

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