Abstract
This chapter posits that Constance Fenimore Woolson utilizes Gothic literary elements to critique postbellum sectionalism and resistance to a unified national identity. The chapter examines the novella and titular story of her 1875 collection of short stories, Castle Nowhere, as well as the titular story of her 1880 collection, Rodman the Keeper, with an eye towards the ways in which these stories navigate the complexities of attempts at unification in a stratified nation. Further, this chapter argues that by gothicizing Northern imperialism and industrialism in each text, Woolson envisions a republican nation-state that is dependent upon a kind of moral economy, rather than the remnants of a violent antebellum economy that necessitated the input of both human and spiritual capital.
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Notes
- 1.
The review to which Woolson is replying was published in Scribner’s Monthly in 1881 and later revealed to be the work of Norwegian novelist, Hjalmer Hjorth Boyesen. In her response, Woolson offers a small defense of the “grandiloquent” speech patterns of her Southern women characters along with the short anecdote about the strife of loyal southern women, which appears in the epigraph to this chapter.
- 2.
From a letter written to Paul Hamilton Hayne, sent April 17, 1876 from Summerville, South Carolina. See Woolson, Constance Fenimore (CL 66–7).
- 3.
Patrick Gleason has refuted claims that Jewett was apolitical or silent on the tensions of Reconstruction. However, Gleason’s reading remains a scholarly outlier. To read more about how Jewett might be advocating for the protection of the local, see, among others, Elizabeth Ammons and Coby Dowdell.
- 4.
Although I use Brodhead’s definition to demonstrate what Woolson is not doing, it is important to note that Brodhead does read Woolson as a regionalist who performs the same functions as regionalists like Jewett, whom he analyzes at length.
- 5.
Woolson satirizes these education missions in her short story, “King David,” which was also published in Rodman the Keeper: Southern Sketches (1880). In this story, David, a Northerner whose idealism causes him to move South after the war to teach freedmen comes face to face with the issues of having a savior complex in a culture that he both knows nothing about and hasn’t attempted to learn.
- 6.
Kathleen Diffley has recently argued that Woolson’s model for Rodman’s former prison and state cemetery was Salisbury Prison in North Carolina. Diffley’s claim, based upon a recently located letter from Woolson to an Ohio newspaper revises previous assertions that Woolson’s model was actually the infamous Andersonvile Prison in Georgia.
- 7.
“Miss Grief,” was originally published in Lippincott’s Magazine, 1880, vol. 25, pp. 574–585.
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Aman, J.M. (2021). Gothic Spaces and the Nation in Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Tales of the Great Lakes and Reconstruction. In: Elbert, M., Bode, R. (eds) American Women's Regionalist Fiction. Palgrave Gothic. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55552-8_14
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