Free Thinker Page 12
The problem with most fiction, she thought, was that it had been written from a male point of view. “Much of life means one thing to men—quite another to women,” she explained. “Literature has yet to picture life from her standpoint.”4 Popular works advertised as “safe stories for girls” generally depicted a husband as a woman’s ultimate salvation and marriage as a guaranteed happily-ever-after. At the other end of the spectrum sat stories decrying “fallen women” and the varied ways these women came to their sad demise. Neither mainstream romances nor cautionary tales depicted love and sex from a woman’s point of view. Gardener dismissed such stories as “rubbish.”5
“Every hapless girl who reads such a story is led to believe that she is the household fairy who will meet the prince and somehow (not stated) redeem her father’s family from want and despair,” opined Gardener. “We pray . . . we sit down and wait but no rich relation dies and leaves us a legacy,” as she knew all too well, “nor does the prince appear and wed us.” According to Gardener, the most dangerous “fiction of fiction” was also the “one that dominates” the genre: “the idea that woman was created for the benefit and pleasure of man, while man exists for and because of himself.”
Fiction did not prepare women, the majority of novel readers, for “real people . . . for the exigencies of life that come; for the decisions and judgements we are called upon to make.” Instead, Gardener contended, “the fictions of fiction have contributed to disarm us.” Women deserved novels that provided them with “the armor of truth and the ability to adjust it to life.”6
In response to an editor who complained about women’s tendency to write “immoral and erotic literature,” Gardener suggested that authors like herself had simply “ventured to portray passion and pleasure, virtue and vice, or joy and sorrow from an outlook considered by men either nonexistent or unmentionable from the established male critics’ position.”7 Just as she had done on the freethought podium and in the pages of Popular Science Monthly, Gardener sought to break down institutionalized sexism through her writing. But to write openly about sex, she had to turn to fiction.
THE FIRST SHORT STORY published under the name Helen Hamilton Gardener appeared in Belford’s Monthly Magazine in October 1888. “The Time-Lock of Our Ancestors” introduced readers to a forward-thinking, witty, and attractive woman named Florence Campbell who would star in two subsequent short stories, “Florence Campbell’s Fate” and “My Patient’s Story.” In all of Gardener’s short stories and novels, Florence Campbell is the only repeat character. Campbell was Gardener’s literary doppelgänger.
Neighbors and friends perceive Florence Campbell as a beautiful, charming woman who “spoke as if she were very old, although to look at her one would say that she were not twenty-eight.” She was one of “those Dresden-China women” who “often carry their age with such an easy grace—it sits upon them so lightly—in spite of ill-health, mental storms, and moral defeats, that while their more robust sisters grow haggard and worn, and hard of feature and tone, under weights less terrible and with feelings less intense, they keep their grace and gentleness of tone in the teeth of every blast.” Campbell was also a woman “who either did not know, or did not care to investigate too closely, the career of her husband,” a charming but unreliable man named Tom.8
“Time-Lock” centers on a conversation between Florence and her young friend Nellie, who had been living with Florence and Tom since she was orphaned. Overcome by emotion, Nellie tries to summon the courage to confess a transgression. Florence comforts her by explaining that, in reality, right and wrong were often difficult to distinguish—“as if there were but one ‘right’!” Nellie would learn in time, Florence intimates, that the line between right and wrong was arbitrarily drawn, especially for women.
After much prodding, Nellie admits that she slept with Florence’s husband Tom, in the Campbell’s own home. Nellie feels tremendous guilt for betraying Florence, but explains that she was charmed by Tom’s attention and promises of love. Florence is not surprised by Nellie’s confession. Emphasizing that Nellie is not to blame, Florence sends Tom to Europe the next morning and asks that Nellie remain with her because “no one—no one in all the world has ever loved me truly.”9
In this story, Gardener can be read as both Florence, a world-weary woman slow to judge others, and Nellie, a young woman begging forgiveness from an older woman whose husband she has stolen. As she observed in an essay entitled “The Fictions of Fiction,” one of the most “insidious” and harmful themes in literature was the idea that “the good are so because they resist temptation, while the bad are vicious because they yield easily.”10 In her experience, the demarcation had not been so clear. No one outside of Ohio knew about her extramarital affair with Charles Smart, and even those who had witnessed it may have been convinced that Smart did eventually divorce his wife so that he could marry her. Only Gardener and Smart knew the truth, and this shared secret bound them together in spite of illness, economic uncertainty, and the constant weight of having to lie to their increasingly wide circle of New York friends and acquaintances.
Unable to confide in anyone, Gardener created characters whose experiences mirrored her own and whose troubles she could resolve, for better or for worse, within a few short pages. Gardener drew on her own experiences with Smart and inserted as characters the people closest to her. Through her fiction, Gardener attempted to change the way men and women thought about heterosexual relations. She also endeavored to make peace with her own life choices, settle a few scores, and, ultimately, create a more fitting backstory for herself.
THE PUBLICATION of Gardener’s first short story collection in June 1890 marked her turn away from the lyceum circuit and toward writing as a vehicle for social change. By the summer of 1890, “Ingersoll in Soprano” had become “a writer with purpose.” A Thoughtless Yes contained nine short stories (most previously published in magazines) and went into at least ten editions, the first of which sold out in just eight days. Ingersoll declared that Gardener had found her field because in fiction “her dramatic genius can better reach the people than by direct preaching.”11
Yet fiction, as some reviewers observed, did not come as naturally to Gardener as essay writing. In her earliest stories, the narration often confusingly switches from omniscient third person to first person, and characters come and go with little introduction. Other readers complained that Gardener’s fiction was too heavy-handed. Donn Piatt, the editor who solicited her first short story, entreated Gardener to “write me a love story but don’t put anything in it—any thought. Don’t suggest any ideas.” But Gardener insisted on writing fiction “for a purpose.” Piatt eventually stopped championing her work and told her, regretfully, “you are a rare genius ruined by sincerity.”12
In her short stories, Gardener cast about for themes and tried to secure for herself a permanent place in the crowded landscape of late nineteenth-century reform literature. After the unprecedented success of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), reform fiction reached a historic highpoint. The same year that Gardener started publishing short stories, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) became one of the top-selling books of the century and inspired a mass movement of Bellamy Clubs throughout the nation. The temptation for ambitious reformers to turn to fiction was great, but the competition overwhelming. To gain a foothold in this publishing environment, an author needed a distinctive voice and an issue to call her own.
Gardener’s short stories clustered around a few core themes: the failings of men in marriage; society’s tendency to misjudge women; folksy, nostalgic, and, to modern eyes, racist Southern stories; heredity; and the injustices of capitalism. Her strongest pieces centered on the issue she knew best: the romantic plights of middle-class white women. Here her powers of subtle observation and empathy offered original takes on sexual assault, courtship, and matrimony. Women with stingy husbands turn to theft, only to watch their children become thieves; women with brutes for hu
sbands die from the strain of not being able to obtain a divorce; a young stepmother, so eager to please her new family that she sacrifices visits to her own parents, has a son with an uncontrollable urge to run away. Even seemingly happy marriages are plagued by husbands who lord their power over their wives in every small household decision. No princes save the day in Gardener’s stories. Male doctors often figure as benevolent narrators, but women either rescue themselves or die.
Gardener’s reform fiction reached an apotheosis in her first novel Is This Your Son, My Lord? published in November 1890, just six months after her first story collection. This novel changed the trajectory of Gardener’s career and introduced her unique blend of feminine frankness to readers across the country.
ONE THING that continued to irk Gardener about the challenges facing women who wanted to go to college was the unquestioned, and often unappreciated, access to higher education enjoyed by young men of privilege, including her own nephew, Ernest Bernard Chenoweth, son of her brother Bernard. After Bernard died in China in 1870, his widow, Caroline Van Deusen Chenoweth, settled in Boston and sent her two boys to the city’s best schools. The Chenoweth sons were one generation removed from wealth—on their mother’s side—but they enjoyed all its trappings nonetheless.
Ernest B. Chenoweth, who went by Bernard like his father, entered Harvard in the class of 1888. Even though he and his rich friends were the chosen acolytes of famed Boston minister Phillips Brooks, young Bernard was expelled from Harvard for bad behavior. For a young man of privilege, this was not a cause for alarm. Life offered a long series of safety nets and second chances. Bernard moved to New York, right around the same time that his radical aunt was auditing classes at Columbia, to pursue his own career as a writer.13 Through her nephew and the men in her New York reform circles, Gardener became acquainted with the social customs of the Ivy League elite.
An aspect of this rarefied male culture Gardener could not abide was the encouragement young men received to “sow their wild oats” before marriage, often with prostitutes or by enticing lower-class women into sex with the promise of favors and gifts. For Gardener’s premarital affair, she had been fired and run out of town. The contrast galled her. Even more appalling, such male behavior was endorsed by parents, ministers, teachers, and even police officers. Who had decided, Gardener demanded in an essay titled “Sex Maniacs,” that providing a sexual outlet for men justified the “regulated slaughter (social, moral, and actually physical) of hundreds of thousands” of young women?14 Gardener used fiction to draw attention to the physical and psychological ravages that resulted from rape, unwanted pregnancy, and sexually transmitted disease—all of which women were supposed to endure in silence.
Readers were familiar with stories of “ruined women” meeting their unfortunate, yet deserved, ends, stories that had for decades “served to sharpen and supply the novelist’s pen.” But hardly anyone had been moved to empathize with the fallen woman’s perspective, much less defend it. Female purity reformers in the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union had begun campaigning for a single sexual standard in the 1880s, but few Americans thought that anything would ever change the seemingly natural and inevitable custom whereby men could do as they pleased sexually with little or no consequences while for women the consequences of extramarital sex could not have been more severe. With Is This Your Son, My Lord? Gardener challenged the tradition of young men “sowing their wild oats” by telling the story of a man’s “first false step.”
“This novel was not written as history,” she proclaimed in the preface to the second edition, “but there is not a material point in it which is not based on fact.”15 She later revealed to her friend Adelaide Johnson, the sculptor, that she knew elements of the story firsthand from Charles Smart, who had been asked by a friend in Michigan—the superintendent of schools in Muskegon—to accompany his young son to New York so that he could lose his virginity. Gardener also confessed to Johnson that the villain of the novel, Fred Harmon, was based on her nephew Bernard and that Fred’s scheming, social-ladder-climbing mother was modeled on her sister-in-law, Caroline Chenoweth.16
Is This Your Son, My Lord? centers on the activities of three young Harvard graduates: Fred Harmon, Preston Mansfield, and Harvey Ball. Preston had fallen victim to an epidemic common among “young fellows who had been too intimately crowded together.” He had “harmed himself” with “certain unwholesome practices.” Preston had become a masturbator. Aghast, Preston’s father, the head of the local school board, begs the family doctor to accompany the boy to New York City and help him “pick out a good dove.”
After the doctor thwarts this plan, the father takes matters into his own hands by raping a lower-class, fifteen-year-old girl whom Preston had befriended in order to blackmail her into having sex with his son. Preston then fathers two children with her, and the girl becomes a prostitute. Wracked with guilt, Preston ultimately kills himself. Preston’s friend Fred, the character based on Gardener’s nephew Bernard, feels no such moral compunctions about his analogous lifestyle. At the urging of his mother, he marries for money, becomes an Episcopal priest for the social standing, and continues to cavort with prostitutes after hours.
Sales of Is This Your Son, My Lord? surpassed Gardener’s and the publisher’s wildest expectations. The novel quickly sold over 35,000 copies and went into multiple editions.17 One journalist described the book as having taken “an almost unprecedented hold upon the thinking public.”18 Suffrage leader Carrie Chapman Catt recalled reading the novel, as a young woman, behind closed doors because few dared outwardly acknowledge the issues Gardener so fearlessly raised. According to Catt, Gardener’s novels “stirred consciences underneath the surface from the Atlantic to the Pacific.”19 Advertisements for the novel proclaimed it to be “a fascinating story of radical truths on religion and social matters.”20 Another ad promised it was “without question the most radical and, in many respects, the boldest assault on the respectable conventionality and immorality in high places that has ever been written.”21
In a roundtable review in The Arena magazine, Elizabeth Cady Stanton praised the book, written by a “representative thinker among women,” for highlighting to women that “the stronghold of their slavery lies in social customs.” As for its merits as a story, however, Stanton frankly surmised that “one can see the able essayist, and the clever pamphleteer, but not the born novelist.”22
The harshest criticism came from Gardener’s former publisher, Donn Piatt, who characterized the novel as “a fierce plunge into the horrible” that “turns on an impossible crime.” Piatt charged that the problem with Gardener and other women reformers was that they had been “shielded in the home from the cradle to the coffin by fathers, brothers, sons, and husbands.” Women, he proclaimed, “laugh at wounds but have never felt a scar.” Piatt further insisted that the father’s rape of the young woman was unthinkable.23 This turned out to be a dividing line among readers: women thought the crimes depicted by Gardener were realistic, commonplace even, while some men denied such horrors existed.24
Gardener claimed that the reviews she prized the most were those she had received from young men themselves. Men thanked her for opening their eyes to an evil all around them, and men confessed they wished they had read her novel years before. She asked one young man if he thought the novel was “overdrawn.” He reported that he was just twenty-three and yet he could think of at least fifty cases like the ones she dramatized. With pride, she recounted a review published in Princeton’s literary magazine, which concluded that “it comes very close to any college boy who has kept his eyes open. When we finish we may say, not ‘Is this Your Son, My Lord?’ but, Is it I? Is it I?”25
In March 1891, Gardener traveled to Boston to promote her novel, which, a local paper reported, “in spite of its crudeness and its plain-speaking, it is said to be selling at the rate of 1000 copies a week.”26 While there, she embarked on a tour of nearby Salem, visiting the home of the writer Nathaniel Hawt
horne, author of The Scarlet Letter (1850), and the famous Witch House. Gardener observed that had it not been for the scientific revolution, she likely would have suffered the same fate as the misunderstood witches of Salem, to say nothing of Hester Prynne, the adulterous protagonist of The Scarlet Letter.27
In what was becoming a common pattern, Gardener’s professional triumph as a novelist was followed by another physical collapse. After the banner success of Is This Your Son, My Lord?, The Truth Seeker reported in June 1891 that she had decamped to Florida to restore her health.28 Gardener fulfilled her promise to be the woman who dared voice things others could not express, but this audacity came at a price.
CHARLES SMART also continued to struggle with his health and in his post at the Equitable Life Assurance Society. On October 27, 1891, he received a friendly but admonishing letter from Henry Hyde—the fiercely admired company president and one of the richest men in America. Just what, precisely, had Smart been up to the past several months, Hyde inquired. In all the office memos that survive in the Equitable Life Assurance files, this is one of only two instances in which Hyde involved himself in such a relatively small personnel issue. Smart must have been doing a remarkably bad job to prompt such a letter.
Smart immediately replied in a plaintive, three-page-long missive written in drowsy, loopy cursive. No one, Smart asserted, worked harder to promote the success of the Equitable Life Assurance Society than he had. “I challenge any man under the officers of our great society to show more earnest loyal incessant personal effort to add to the Equitable success,” he stressed, “than I have always given when not disabled by unavoidable sickness.” Smart had “worked up” several promising contacts, men who could afford $10,000 policies or more, but “the unusual expenses . . . incurred by illness” left him without the money to close the deals. He told Hyde that he did not even have enough for postage or street car fare to make it to the office or to meet with his prospective clients. “I am working all the time at a disadvantage past telling,” Smart rationalized. And if he could access the little money he needed—“not a gift, I work for all I get”—he was sure he could make his monthly allotment.29