Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Subversive Politics

This seminal study reveals how Constance Fenimore Woolson participated in debates on nineteenth-century political topics considered the province of men. She commented on the most important issues of her time: monetary policy, post-Reconstruction legal decisions, racial justice and interracial marriage, women’s rights, religious hypocrisy, environmental destruction, destabilizing international developments, and the moral character of the nation. The innovative essays in this book introduce her techniques and the political concerns that inspired her complicated art, encouraging scholars to begin the process of rereading and reanalyzing Woolson’s oeuvre to understand the compelling allegories and satires she created. The oppositional, intertextual, and referential techniques she developed allowed her to enter contested political conversations about compelling nineteenth-century problems like few women of her century, sometimes making her work political commentary as much as fiction.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter 1. “The Lady of Little Fishing” (1874) and “Castle Nowhere” (1875): The Politics of Race and Money Chapter 2. “Mission Endeavor” (1876): Jerusalem on Lake Superior Chapter 3. “Mrs. Edward Pinckney” (1879): Interracial Marriage in the Post-Bellum South Chapter 4. “A Florentine Experiment” (1880): J. P. Morgan and the Responsibilities of Wealth Chapter 5. For the Major (1882): Lies, Secrets, Silence Chapter 6. Horace Chase (1893): Gilded Age Sense and Sensibility Chapter 7. “A Waitress” (1894): American Complacency at the Fin de Siècle Conclusion Bibliography About the Author

About the Author :
Victoria Brehm is retired professor of American literature and helped found the Constance Fenimore Woolson Society.

Review :
Victoria Brehm makes us look deeper into Woolson’s prose and motivations in order to uncover her profound concern with national events, international politics, and the ambiguities of social and political leaders. Brehm pierces through the self-protective screens that Woolson often used to mask these issues by analyzing seemingly minute references and by uncovering a complex underbody of satire, allegory, and yes, anger at a world that denies women rights. Particularly strong readings of "For the Major" and Horace Chase impress, but shorter works, we find, underneath romantic surfaces, also provide sharp takes on the gold standard, industrialization, and the corruptions of the gilded age. Well researched, and eloquently written, this study gives us unsuspected and rewarding apertures into a great artist’s ideological concerns and methods. For decades, scholars have engaged in the careful work of exposing the depths beneath the surfaces of Constance Fenimore Woolson’s texts – pulling a thread here and another there. Dr. Brehm’s book progresses that work further than any Woolson scholarship to date. Her grasp of nineteenth-century politics and culture allows her to reveal a rich informed view of Woolson’s engagement with postbellum American society. Best yet, Brehm reveals resonances between the deeply politically polarized postbellum America and the equally polarized America of our own time. She makes an irresistible case for Woolson’s relevance to America today while simultaneously grounding her texts in post-Civil War America. Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Subversive Politics is the most recent of Victoria Brehm’s extensive contributions to the study of Great Lakes Literature and history. Brehm has authored articles and edited important anthologies – collections that rescue many nearly forgotten Great Lakes texts, making these works widely available to readers and scholars. In Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Subversive Politics, Brehm’s focus is on the works of Great Lakes author Constance Fenimore Woolson. One of the challenges of reading Woolson’s work is understanding the layering of references to issues, people, and concerns of post-Civil war America… While Woolson’s contemporaries could be expected to recognize many of the hints and clues woven into her texts, today’s readers may miss out on the richness of what Woolson’s texts reveal about 19th Century politics and culture. Essentially, Brehm decodes some Woolson’s texts for a new generation of readers, including Great Lake stories like “The Lady of Little Fishing,” “Castle Nowhere,” and “Mission Endeavor.” Even readers who may have studied Woolson’s texts before will find themselves eager to re-read with the new lens Brehm provides- a lens that reveals surprising similarities between the politically polarized postbellum America and America in our own time.