THESE companion anthologies attempt to reframe American literature in order to accommodate not only the pervasive voice of 19th-century American women, but also the heterogeneous cultures which shaped the pioneering spirit and the multiple conflicts of 19th-century America. However, while Janet Gray scoured archives across the nation in order to recover the speaking voices of real women" in She Wields a Pen, Elaine Showalter, in Scribbling Women, chose a more travelled route in her selection.
Gray is clearly revisionist in her assumption of an audience which is asking "new questions" and seeking to change the present through the recovery of forgotten dimensions of the past, and the enthusiasm with which she posits this assumption is persuasive and infectious. In her introduction to She Wields a Pen, Gray insists that the sixty poets represented in this anthology, with the sole exception of Emily Dickinson, were ignored by modern academics solely because their views, and their voices, did not fit with masculine ideals and the Modernist view that gives precedence to heroic individualism over the collective concerns of human communities. She calls for the reevaluation of these poets and an understanding that the fact that their work was made in the context of other work (domestic or community) and had "vital cultural roles" in no way diminishes their achievement.
Indeed, many of Gray's selections celebrate the family and community, but many more question the self-professed "liberty" of a nation which dispossessed its native people, based its economy upon slavery, and continued to regard the fair sex as weak and ineffectual outside the narrow confines of the home. As Eliza Lee Follen (1787-1860) put it in "For the Fourth of July",
My country, that nobly could dare
The hand of oppression to brave,
O, how the foul stain canst thou bear,
Of being the land of the slave?
And as Ina Coolbrith (1842-1928) put it in "Longing",
O foolish wisdom sought in books!
O aimless fret of household tasks!
O chains that bind the hand and mind
A fuller life my spirit asks!
Yet some of the poets here also question the motives of other women. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, for example, in "The Anti-Suffragists", launches a scathing attack on those "ignorant women - college-bred sometimes,/But ignorant of life's realities who "think - or think they think - that woman's cause/is best advanced by letting it alone".
In some respects, these poems take on a muscularity and a disdainful tone which is more associated with the voice of men than of women. On the other hand, their employment of patriarchal strategies to subvert patriarchal assumptions is neither inconsistent nor hypocritical for, to paraphrase Eavan Boland, this is the construct which formed these women and it was within the parameters of this construct that they lived and wrote.
With her well-anthologised story, "The Yellow Wallpaper", Charlotte Perkins Gilman also figures strongly in Showalter's somewhat more subdued Scribbling Women. Here, Gilman uses irony and feigned naivete in one of the first portrayals of post-partum depression to question and subvert the husband's motives in isolating the narrator in a disused nursery with maddening yellow wallpaper, and disallowing her to write. "John is a physician and perhaps . . . this is one reason I do not get well faster. You see he does not believe I am sick! . . . What is one to do?"
As in Size Wields a Pen, the fourteen writers Showalter selected for inclusion in Scribbling Women assert the right of women to interest themselves in events beyond their immediate domestic surroundings. Rebecca Harding Davis, in "Life in the Iron Mills", engages in a socio-economic protest which is reminiscent of Sinclair Lewis's The Jungle; Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman's stories are embedded in the devastation left by "the century's pivotal trauma, the Civil War".
These short stories like the poems selected by Gray, represents the work of women who had domestic lives to organise and a shortage of time. All writing had to be done within the framework of domestic chores and community obligations; if these women were to find their voice through writing, it had to be done largely on the sly and always, like the nation itself, in a hurry. The inherent restrictions of the short story made it a perfect genre for these women. Yet Nathaniel Hawthorne complained bitterly in 1855 that "America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women", and their work has been for the most part undermined by a predominantly phallocentric critical canon.
These anthologies bring to the fore credible and frequently well-crafted poems and stories which have been as constricted as the women who wrote them. Both, books include invaluable chronologies which put the achievements of each writer into an historical context, and both serve to subvert the lingering patriarchal assumptions about 19th-century American women writers.