Abstract
This chapter focuses on antebellum gift books—annual anthologies of fiction, poems, and engravings sold as gifts, usually in Christmas season. Tokens, souvenirs, or forget-me-nots, gift books developed their own, dense metaphoric and conspicuously gendered “dialect” of gift-giving. This chapter examines the transgression of gender boundaries in the gift book fiction on the example of three stories: “Cacoethes Scribendi” (1829) by Catharine Maria Sedgwick, “The Minister’s Black Veil” (1832) by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and “The Purloined Letter” by Edgar Allan Poe (1844). This chapter demonstrates how irony, homosocial Gothic devices, and elements of the mystery genre/revenge narrative interact with the gift book’s sentimental framework, “un-gendering” its generic conventions and revealing the dark side of the commodified seduction embodied in the image of the pure token of affection.
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Notes
- 1.
I am using the terms “annual” and “gift book” interchangeably, following the practice of American antebellum authors, editors, and readers, though originally there was, strictly speaking, a “technical” distinction between them (Dickinson 1996: 54). On the generic specificity of gift books, see Urakova (2020b) and” (2020a).
- 2.
The vogue for gift books, published annually to be given away for Christmas and New Year, came from Great Britain in the mid-1820s. The vogue faded only in the wake of the Civil War, when gift books could no longer meet the public’s changing tastes and compete with cheaper monthly magazines.
- 3.
Here I am referring to what I call a generic gift book while it is also important to mention that as the market developed, publishers began to fill in narrower niches by addressing specific and diverse audiences: abolitionists, temperance supporters, Masons, juveniles, and so on. Chapter 5 will focus on abolitionist or anti-slavery gift books.
- 4.
This assessment belongs to Henry A. Beers, a turn-of-the century biographer of Nathaniel Parker Willis. Qtd. In Moore (1994: 6).
- 5.
- 6.
These images, not specific to gift books, are the variation of the passive female reader stereotype: a girl languidly musing over a book page. On the passive female reading in the Western nineteenth-century literature see, for example, Felski (2003: 23–56). Sush and similar engravings “promoted an image of the ideal woman as specular, as the object rather than the owner of the gaze” (Mellor 1993: 111).
- 7.
- 8.
The Gender of the Gift is the title of the famous book by Marylin Strathern (1988).
- 9.
Plate article, a poem or a story, was intended to “illustrate” a gift book engraving.
- 10.
“Few people, including those who foolishly spend their money for them, read the annuals … [A]s the happy custom still prevails of making presents at Christmas and new-year, these books are yet purchased and presented, though seldom read, even by the presentee.” … “Now an annual is bought to look at. No one ever thinks of reading them.” John Sartain, Sartain’s Magazine, 1 (1849); qtd. in Mott (1930: 421).
- 11.
- 12.
The latter example is anonymously published “Confessions of a Novel Reader” (1839).
- 13.
On the carnivalesque character of gift books, see Lehuu’s Bakhtinian analysis of gift books, Lehuu (2000: 76–101).
- 14.
Maglina Lubovich shows how Sedgwick elsewhere promoted a positive image of a spinster as an independent woman and a role model (Lubovich 2008: 23–40). While this is not the case in this story, we can nevertheless see that here the daughter’s linear, doctrinal, and purposeful attitude is contrasted with unstructured, transgressive, and purposeless (except for the itch to write and publish) pleasure of reading impersonated in the mother’s original reading habits.
- 15.
McGill writes of Hawthorne’s “fiction of obscurity” as “a nationalizing tool, part of a large attempt to rid his writing of a taint of the feminine, the childish, the regional, and the foreign” (McGill 2002: 221).
- 16.
See my lengthy discussion of this in Urakova (2016).
- 17.
The Token more than once republished the lines from the poem as mottos to its subsequent volumes.
- 18.
As, for example, discussed in Sedgwick Kosofky (1990).
- 19.
On the history of Poe’s collaboration with gift books, see Shinn (2013).
- 20.
This contrast is even sharper if we take into consideration that Poe’s tale was published alongside tales by Caroline Kirkland and Nathaniel Parker Willis both with a motif of stolen or dangerous letters. See Urakova (2009).
- 21.
We do not know from the story whether the letter concerns a secret love affair or a political complot against the King. If it is the former, then Dupin sustains (presumably) adulterous relations, very much at odds with the didactical character of the annual. Dupin who restores the letter to the Queen may be seen as an accomplice in the “crime” against the royalty and, as one might suspect, against the moral.
- 22.
What Griffith describes in her tale often happened in the publishing world. It was a common practice to repackage pages “from old gift books in new bindings” or to rebind pages “from unsold periodicals … as gift books.” On the gift book fraud, see Cohen (2012: 8).
- 23.
Poe, an astute critic, was called “Our Literary Mohawk” in A.J.H. Duganne’s poem “A Mirror for Authors,” published in Holden’s Dollar Magazine 3 (1849), together with a caricature by F.O.C. Darley representing Poe as a ferocious Indian with a tomahawk in his hand. This “assumed almost the status of a critical cliché” in the 1840s (see Jackson 2002: 97). There has been a long tradition of reading “The Purloined Letter” as an autobiographical tale, and of reading this particular final scene as an allusion to Poe’s own literary battles. The rivalries, thefts, invasions of privacy, and personal assaults that Poe witnessed during his magazinist career are, indeed, looming behind the plot.
- 24.
Cynthia Jordan, for example, comments: “The epigraph to the first tale, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ introduces the idea of crossing gender boundaries to recover the now ‘dim-remembered story’ of female experience.” Jordan (1987: 13).
- 25.
Jordan, “Poe’s Re-Vision,” 5.
- 26.
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Urakova, A. (2022). Un-Gendering the Gift Book. In: Dangerous Giving in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. American Literature Readings in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93270-1_4
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