The Feminization of American Culture

Contemporary Review, July, 1996 by Joan Bridgman

Ann Douglas is one of America's most respected cultural historians. Feminization developed out of her research on the relationship between popular medieval drama and ecclesiastical thought. One can see how the multi-disciplinary approach of her thesis, the yoking of popular culture with religious ideas, led to this ambitious study. Her argument is that the alliance of two powerless groups, women and the clergy, formed a special subculture with far reaching effects on popular literature in nineteenth century America. Clerical disestablishment had resulted in a loss of ministers' traditional authority and, since they no longer received automatic revenue from taxes, created economic dependence on their mainly female congregations. At the same time publishing was becoming a hugely profitable and growing business. Literary magazines proliferated, predominantly domestic and religious in content, and were written by clerics and women for a readership of middle class northeastern women with no real work to do except to read and consume. Women no longer married to help their husbands get a living, but to help them spend their income.

The author is concerned to discover the reason why the nineteenth century produced mainly sentimental fiction, often centred on death and mourning, by both men and women, and particularly why there were so few elite women writers. In a period that produced Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Thoreau, Emerson and others, Ann Douglas can only find Margaret Fuller and Harriet Beecher Stowe to be of equal rank. Feminist scholarship has moved on since Douglas wrote this. The major woman poet of this, or any period, Emily Dickinson, receives only one reference as does Louisa M. Alcott, but it is fair to say that these writers, along with Charlotte Perkins Gilman, were culturally invisible during the period; they were only comparatively recently 'discovered' and critically acclaimed. To do her justice, the author acknowledges in her preface to the 1988 edition that the low esteem in which she held feminine authors was the most controversial aspect of her book, yet she still stands by her assessment.

Ann Douglas devotes a chapter to Herman Melville, who attempted to stem the sentimental tide, stoutly resisting his readership by imposing masculine concerns and vitality on his work. James Fenimore Cooper carved out the same space as did Mark Twain. But these authors tell boys' adventure stories in the main, omitting adult sexuality and are pathologically obsessed with death, proving at least part of the author's cultural critique. Their work exemplifies her opinion that there was a troubling bifurcation within the culture between masculine 'intellect' and feminine 'feelings' which did violence to both in the name of gender.

Harriet Beecher Stowe is highly praised for Uncle Tom's Cabin, because it is a great novel and a great revival sermon, but Ann Douglas undercuts this praise in her introductory analysis of the archetypically Victorian sentimental death bed scene of Little Eva in Uncle Tom's Cabin, remarking that the 'infantile heroine anticipates that exaltation of the average which is the trademark of mass culture.' The child is the forerunner of Miss America, of 'Teen Angel'; she is a religious Barbie doll. In her later sketches for Atlantic Monthly, Harriet Beecher Stowe foreshadows the bumbling male of today's television sitcoms, by nature a failure, 'stumbling among feminine subtleties.' His wife, Eva (a resurrected Little Eva?), is the proto-consumer, the shopper, embodying the drift to a superficial, materialist society dominated by the feminine ethic and spirit.

The appeal of the sentimental in Victorian literature, says the author, comes down to us in a direct line, arguing for the intimate connection between critical aspects of Victorian culture and modern mass culture. She relates the sentimental content of the best-selling novels and magazines of the nineteenth century with the soap operas of today. This is an intriguing idea, and appears to have developed during the writing of the book. She admits as much in her 1988 preface, where with hindsight she sees that her real interest lay not in male versus female literary production but in past and present interaction between mass and elite art. This is a correct assessment, though I would modify this a little more. During the ten years of the book's gestation, her ideas developed away from the effects of dwindling clerical influence towards a concern with the growth of feminine power and finally to the banal cultural results of this.

This is an extraordinary book in its scope, which is nothing less than to understand, resist and revivify American culture. It is exquisitely written, convincingly backed by solid scholarship and what must have been a mind-numbing amount of reading of popular novels and magazine articles. It is a major polemical work.

JOAN BRIDGMAN