Frances Victor, Corvallis, Oregon Area Suffragette
"Mind is the same, whether it resides in a man's form, or a woman's. All the laws of the mind, the soul, the affections, are the same in men and women, so far as observation and science can determine. What affects the one, affects the other, and in exactly the same way." - Frances Fuller Victor, New Northwest (1874)
Note: the New Northwest was Abigail Scott Duniway's newspaper
To the young woman confronting life there is the same world beyond, there are the same human energies and human desires and ambition within. But all that she may wish to have, all that she may wish to do, must come through a single channel and a single choice. Wealth, power, social distinction, fame,not only these, but home and happiness, reputation, ease and pleasure, her bread and butter, - all, must come to her through a small gold ring. This is a heavy pressure. - Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women in Economics (1898)
Frances Fuller Victor's western stories of the 1870s represent the nineteenth-century institution of marriage as unfit for women.(1) But Victor, the historian and social critic, also keenly perceived how thoroughly women as a group were molded and pressured by society to accept marriage as their primary social destiny. The social and economic - and psychological and sexual - consequences of women's grappling with this deep-seated contradiction are the subject of Victor's seventy-page novella, "The New Penelope" (1877). Through the eyes of its main character, the Oregon pioneer woman Mrs. Anna Greyfield, Victor explores how a woman struggles against the marital bonds that circumscribe her social identity and personhood and how women can embark on the project of resolving this profound social dilemma.
The small but remarkable body of western fiction produced by Frances Fuller Victor (1826-1902), historian, journalist, and poet, has ironically been obscured by Victor's reputation as a historian. Called the "Historian of the Northwest" and the "Mother of Oregon History," Victor played a public role in the Far West in the second half of the nineteenth century.(2) She documented the early fur trade in her biography of Joe Meek, The River of the West (1870). In her book All Over Oregon and Washington (1872), she undertook to "correct false impressions [of the Pacific Coast] in the minds of the people of the East."(3) Avidly embracing historical research in the late 1860s and 1870s, she sought "to peer into the past, present and the future" and to ensure that things "which were speedily becoming extinct will now be made matters of history."(4) From 1878 until 1890, she worked for Hubert Howe Bancroft on his monumental series History of the Pacific States. Her professional, intellectual contribution to this series was far greater than her contemporaries knew, as she asserted later in her "Autobiographical Sketch" (1895): "Thus my work on the Bancroft histories aggregates six full volumes of from 700 to 800 pages each. If I had been able to place my name where it properly belongs on these six volumes I should have made an international reputation."(5) Victor's voluminous historical writings are impressive in part because they are the work of a woman competing in a male field and because of her research methods, which emphasized questioning accounts and weighing conflicting "facts" about early settlement. However, Victor articulates some of her most profound historical and experiential insights in her fiction, much of which centers on women in the West. Particularly in "The New Penelope," she figuratively "peer[s] into the past, present, and future" of gender construction.
The ideas prominent in Victor's social columns for San Francisco's Daily Morning Call in the mid-1870s, written under the penname Dorothy D., compose the philosophical-social vision that underpins "The New Penelope." Historian Joan Smyth Iversen explains the dominant trend in nineteenth-century sexual politics in these terms: Women conducted their "search for power and authority in home and nation" based on sexual difference and a belief in innate female morality.(6) For Victor, though, woman's sphere was an oppressive social construct that was unworkable, especially as a base for social power. She also questioned the ability of woman's sphere to nurture gender solidarity. She continued to pose one disturbing question in her western journalism and fiction: How can women expect to have power in the world or even in the home when men - in her words - "claim for themselves all the privileges of life" and women, who are for the moment socially protected and economically provided for by men, accept this gendered allocation of power?(7)
Victor's countervision, articulated in her 1870s journalism, also argued that woman's sphere failed to describe or develop women's real abilities. In opposition to domesticity's notion of womanhood, Victor argued that marriage and children, far from being a biological destiny, cannot be regarded as women's only purpose? Most of all, she believed that women, individually and as a group, needed to undergo a transformation of consciousness, and to that end she exhorted women to break out of conventional molds. She advised them to resist the "inferior position" in which they have had to "submit themselves to the wishes and opinions of others" and to actively engage in "establish[ing] the precedent of an intelligent, independent womanhood."(9) These writings and her fiction point toward the division in Victorian social conceptions of gender that were to become more pronounced with the public discussions of the New Woman in the 1890s.
Influenced by Victor's own marital tensions, "The New Penelope" expresses her mature, complex views of marriage, women's social status, and female subjectivity. In 1877, Victor collected a body of her poetry and ten of her short stories, many of them published formerly in the Overland Monthly, in The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems published by Bancroft of San Francisco. Her novella, "The New Penelope" (not published previously), is an artistically sophisticated hybrid of women's sensational western adventure tale, vivid regionalism, and social critique. It portrays the Far West in its regional and historical specificity as a site that dramatically exposes nineteenth-century American culture's cherished "civilized" notions of gender as seriously flawed. Despite the apparent conventionality of its denouement which, I will show, is actually nuanced and conflicted - "The New Penelope" attacks cultural norms of masculinity and challenges simple domestic visions.
In this article I examine how "The New Penelope" functions as an imaginary arena in which Victor wrestles with the specific historical gender problems preoccupying her at this time and seeks symbolic solutions to them: alternative ideas of womanhood auguring that late-nineteenth-century gender identity, the New Woman. Her analysis of the problems facing women is informed by John Stuart Mill's theory of the corruption of power expounded in The Subjection of Women (1869). (Victor cites Mill in her 1873 serialized novel Judith Miles; or, What Shall Be Done with Her?(10) and affirms his critique of marriage and women's status by infusing his theses into her fictional conflicts in both Judith Miles and "The New Penelope.")(11) Consequently, "The New Penelope" analyzes the interrelationship between male social, economic, psychological, and sexual power and projects an incipient reconfiguring of that gender power dynamic. In accordance with Mill's social theories, Victor depicts marriage and the home as deeply problematic, fraught with constraints and covert but powerful inhibitors of women's achievement of full personhood. In turn, she portrays women's need for economic independence and dramatizes women's right to self-determination and self-fulfillment. "The New Penelope" also asserts women's right to be fully developed persons and sexual beings with affectional, sexual needs. Thus, Mrs. Greyfield, Victor's protagonist, presages the early twentieth-century feminists. New Women, said Marie Jennie Howe, organizer of the 1914 New York "feminist mass meetings," were "sick of being specialized to sex" and sought to be their "whole, big, human selves."(12) In "The New Penelope," Victor's roles as independent western woman, historian, social critic, and fiction writer converge, producing a narrative notable for its fusion of historical realism and feminist utopian solution. The story anatomizes the dynamics of social power between women and men, and between women and women; proposes more equal terms for marriage; envisions a new basis of women's support of women; and depicts the emergence of a new, well-rounded female subjectivity that prefigures the New Woman who strove for social position and identity based on equality with men.
A Feminist Historicizing and Rewriting of the Old Western Narrative
The revised literary and historical paradigms that underwrite "The New Penelope" attest to the feminist historical consciousness that Victor brings to this fictional representation of women's problems with men and marriage in the West and contribute to its social historical value and its literary complexity. Structured as a frame within a frame within a frame, "The New Penelope" establishes a feminist focus on all three levels of its story. An unnamed, middle-aged woman narrator, obviously a persona of Victor, speaks the remarks that open and conclude the story. The second narrative level, the immediate past, dramatizes a companionable evening spent by the narrator and her close friend, Mrs. Anna Greyfield, at the latter's home in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of northern California. The third narrative level, which comprises most of the story, reaches back twenty years into the past. In this flashback, Mrs. Greyfield unravels for the narrator the spicy mystery of her reputed multiple marriages as she recounts to her friend her pioneer experience on the Oregon urban frontier in the early 1850s. Now in her late forties, having achieved a competence through running her second high-class boardinghouse, this one on the mining frontier in California, Mrs. Anna Greyfield is confronted with the complications of the reappearance of the husband of her youth.
At its most obvious reading, "The New Penelope" is a feminist substitution of a western woman hero for a male hero. New Western Historian Richard White has summarized the generic Old Western narrative encoded by Frederick Jackson Turner as "the story of a journey, a challenge, and a dual transformation of land and people."(13) "The New Penelope" encompasses Frederick Jackson Turner's thesis and adapts it to a tale of a woman's heroic survival. Like the Greek Penelope, Mrs. Anna Greyfield, the abandoned wife, is a resourceful survivor who repulses male aggression. Transposed to the far western frontier, this new Penelope, through quiet heroism and sheer perseverance, demonstrates how the adversity of frontier life can become for women too the forcing ground for opportunity.
But Victor's feminist historical consciousness also revises the tale of western individualism in her depiction of a conflicted, socially complex West, raising issues that resonate beyond individual heroism. In "The New Penelope," Old Western History narratives intersect with what we now call New Western History narratives, the latter subsuming the former. Against a more univocal idea of the frontier, New Western Historians envision multiple frontiers, multifarious western experiences: a "variety of gender ideologies held in the West" as Elizabeth Jameson says,(14) and a West that Donald Worster describes as "a scene of intense struggles over power and hierarchy, not only between races but also between classes, genders and often groups within the white majority."(15) When the narrator comments, "I had heard so many stories of deserted Eastern homes, and subsequent illegal marriages in California," she situates Mrs. Greyfield's experiences within the widespread social upheaval of western settlement, focusing on its effects on women.(16) Victor, the historian turned fictionist, forges her prototypical New Woman within a perceptively drawn social context.
A second major male influence appears in the literary paradigms borrowed from Bret Harte, who dominated the San Francisco publishing scene in the late 1860s and whose popularity was at its height when Victor was writing "The New Penelope."(17) Just as Harte "concentrated the irregularities of early California life,"(18) she capitalized on the distinctive, most exciting midcentury features of the Far West. In the preface to her volume containing "The New Penelope," Victor recommends her sketches of Pacific Coast life for their "scenes and characters having the charm of newness and originality, such as belong to border life."(19) One strain running throughout her western fiction is the desire to capture for oldtime residents, newcomers, and outsiders, a place and passing era that are fascinating because of their uniqueness and evanescence.(20)
Again, Victor's keen historical awareness transforms male regional writing through her gender critique that reaches beyond a romanticized West to an artistic territory characterized by interrogation of domestic ideology.(21) Prefiguring what Peggy Pascoe has noted as New Western History's double interest in regional differences and national connections,(22) Victor's historical knowledge enables her to complicate regional writing by linking western social history to nineteenth-century social historical issues and even to world history.(23) "The New Penelope" suggests that the frontier merely aggravates and fully manifests a deeper and omnipresent disparity in men and women's social status: Life in the West betokens the socially oppressive state of gender everywhere in the mid-nineteenth century. The story interrogates and reconceptualizes the equation of women and home as it shows both what regionally specific and wider class- and gender-specific conflicts women must negotiate to create new personal and social identities.
Victor reworks and historicizes these male literary and historical influences through a clever artistic strategy in "The New Penelope." In this story, she plays with a style of western writing that borrowed images from Greek heroes and legends and that was popularized by Harte and others, yet she reinvests the literary allusion to Greek myths - in this case, Penelope - with historical content and reflection: Her dominant literary allusion becomes a vehicle for a historically and socially complex critique. The opening paragraph of the story establishes the Homeric echoes but also boldly intimates its feminist revisionist approach. The first-person woman narrator adopts the empowering role of epic singer in likening herself to Homer: "In the early life of the Greeks, Homer found his Penelope; in the pioneer days of the Pacific Coast, I discovered mine" (TNP, 9). This seemingly innocent statement substitutes a woman's voice and a woman's experiences for Homer's narrative of male adventure. Women venture out into the world in this story; the narrator appropriates for herself an identity as worldly-wise traveler when, echoing both heroic and bardic roaming, she announces, "My wanderings up and down among the majestic mountains and sunny valleys of California and Oregon, had made me acquainted with many persons" (TNP, 9-10). Furthermore, Penelope will be the focus of this story, which will be a western version of the deserted wife and mother and the moral and social conflicts that result from her uncertain social status as wife or widow. In the flashback tale that unfolds on the third narrative level, Mrs. Anna Greyfield describes how their wagon train left Mr. Greyfield behind on the Overland Trail, believing he had died from cholera. She recounts her subsequent hardships as she ended up in Oregon, not California, and struggled to maintain her integrity and support herself and her young son in the new town of Portland. Unlike Homer's dominant, questing Telemachus, Mrs. Greyfield's son appears mainly as an emotional and physical burden to the young mother and otherwise remains offstage in the story; the husband's adventures also receive scant attention. Throughout the story, Victor ironically compares and contrasts the Greek Penelope's besieged home and uncertainty about her long-absent husband's death with her counterpart's involvement with boardinghouses and bigamy in frontier Portland in 1850. In short, a reinvigorated literary allusion - originating in a male literary tradition and having a voguish, shallow currency at the time of her writing - becomes the means to foreground nineteenth-century gender inequality and to explore the social and economic status of women. Defying literary paradigms and social scripts, this successful western woman who emerges from hard, transformational experiences is neither resocialized into a simplistic, conventional nineteenth-century femininity nor punished by the narrative for failing to do so.
"Most Persons ... Said I Should Have to Marry"
"The New Penelope" brings Victor's personal experiences and her incisive social observations to bear on the institution of marriage in the West. Despite her bias as a white, intellectual, cultured woman, her insights exhibit a moral complexity and reflect her own movement from congruence with cultural norms of femininity to the embattled borders of conventional gender identity. Her personal experience of two unsuccessful marriages in the West thrust her out of woman's sphere into what she called the position of "lone woman," inciting her to embrace an egalitarian, politicized feminism.(24) From about 1855 until 1857, Victor pioneered on a claim near Omaha, Nebraska, with her first husband, Jackson Barritt, whom she divorced in 1862 for "grossly neglect[ing] his duty toward her."(25) On April 18, 1863, she arrived in San Francisco on the steamer Sonora from Mexico en route from New York. Victor, along with her sister Metta Fuller Victor (who was married to the brother of Victor's second husband), already had a reputation as a poet in the East. Frances had also published a romance in her youth and two Beadle dime novels; in addition, she had written a history book for young people. By August of 1863, she was contributing articles to San Francisco's Evening Bulletin and the Golden Era to supplement the pay of her second husband, a naval engineer, and to employ her substantial writing talents. For the next thirty-nine years, until her death in 1902, Victor wrote history, journalistic articles, poetry, and fiction as a Far Westerner.
However, her second marriage also crumbled under western pressures. Henry Victor, her second husband, was enamored of western possibilities and continuously lost money in economic ventures: speculations in St. Helens townsites, Santiam gold mines, and coal, iron, and salt mining. In 1869, after six years of marriage, Victor separated from him; then in 1875, she found herself a widow when the ship Henry was sailing on sank off the coast of Washington. Restrained in her public comments about Henry, Victor's fiction nevertheless portrays willful, selfish husbands unilaterally exercising their social and economic prerogatives to the detriment of the couple, particularly the wife. Victor herself inherited the legal and financial problems Henry incurred through his irresponsibility and bad luck. Thus, personal experiences in the West continued to mold her ideas of women's subjectivity and social status, and the necessity to make money and the opportunity to write for western dailies and weeklies enabled her to develop her views on gender. Although she was involved in woman's suffrage organizations in Oregon and eventually in California, Victor, like Charlotte Perkins Gilman later, believed that women's problems were much more complex than the suffrage issue; the problems were rooted in gender consciousness and in the historical institutions and social customs that shape the way men and women think about themselves and each other.(26)
"The New Penelope" addresses the connection between women's identity and the dynamics of power in male-female social and sexual relationships. Unmasking nineteenth-century gender relations in her rewriting of the Greek epic, Victor employs the allusion to Penelope, the faithful, threatened wife/widow(?) as a means to problematize the whole issue of marriage as central to women's social identity and value. The story's constant reference to the characters as "Mrs. Greyfield," "Mr. Greyfield," and "Mr. Seabrook" underscores Victor's concern with marriage and with the discrepancy between the public dimension of marriage (as a social institution that beneficially unites the sexes) and its private realities, disclosing the psychological, emotional, and sexual distance between these men and Mrs. Greyfield. The story asks: When men exploit their social and economic power and self-indulgently pursue their dreams, what happens to the women legally and emotionally bound to them? Are Penelope and Mrs. Anna Greyfield still wives? If they are widows, how should they support themselves? Finally, this story compels readers to ponder how far the social condition of women has progressed from Homer's Greece to the nineteenth-century West when this new Penelope also discovers just how entirely "a woman's position depended on her relationship to men" (TNP, 40).
Like Penelope, Mrs. Anna Greyfield's social status is uncertain and, as a woman alone, she represents an economic and sexual prize. First, her vulnerable, besieged position exposes the large economic component of marriage. She faces enormous social pressure upon her arrival in Portland: "Most persons - in fact everybody that I talked with - said I should have to marry" (TNP, 18). The passage of the Donation Act in 1850 granting double land to a man with a wife, leads to repeated, intrusive proposals from mere acquaintances and total strangers seeking economic gain:
He told me that he had no "woman," and that I had no "man," a condition that he evidently considered deplorable. He assured me that I suited him "fustrate"; that his children . . . "liked my victuals;".... He also impressed upon me that he had been "considerin" the "rangement of jinin" firms for some time. To close the business at once, he proposed that I should accept of him for my husband then and there. (TNP, 22)
Mrs. Greyfield experiences how laws collapse the distinction between women and property, depersonalizing and objectifying women. Like Penelope's social world, Mrs. Greyfield's western community identifies her primarily as owned or ownerless (and therefore obtainable) property.
Besides representing an economic asset, an attractive, unmarried woman is a desirable sexual object. The solicitations "of men who did not care to marry" disturb Mrs. Greyfield the most, filling her with self-doubt and disgust: "I know it is constantly asserted, by men themselves, that no woman is approached in that way who does not give some encouragement. But no statement could be more utterly false" (TNP, 24, 25). Mrs. Greyfield suffers humiliation and guilt to the point of sickness, believing "that there must be something wrong in my deportment" (TNP, 25). Here Victor refutes one of domestic ideology's central tenets, the belief that women's moral purity shields them from male sexual aggression. Instead, the story reveals that this ideology casts the blame for men's behavior on women, doubly oppressing women as offenders and victims.(27) Widows, as Mrs. Greyfield discovers, are unprotected property and fair game.
"An Awful Power"
If widowhood, the state of being unattached to and unsheltered by a man, is dangerous for women, marriage, contrary to publicly accepted ideas, provides questionable sanctuary. Victor, agreeing with Mill's analysis, views nineteenth-century marriage as domestic slavery, a state in which the unequal distribution of social and legal power is fraught with potential for abuse of that power. As widow but also as wife, the young Mrs. Anna Greyfield finds herself caught within a male-dominated social order. Finally worn down by constant social pressures, the supposedly widowed Mrs. Greyfield agrees to marry Mr. Seabrook, who has frequently offered friendly advice concerning her sickly son and who has helped her start a boardinghouse. Only when she has married him does she discover that he is bigamist with a wife and children back in Ohio. When she chooses not to consummate the marriage, the Portland community does not credit her accusation of Mr. Seabrook's bigamy, does not believe that she has not slept with him, and never condones her ungracious conduct toward him. In her isolation and entrapment, Mrs. Greyfield discovers' that marriage itself is exploitive and morally reprehensible:
Although there is nothing in the wording of the marriage contract converting the woman into a bond-slave or a chattel, the man who practices any outrage or wrong on his wife is so seldom called to account. In the eyes of these men, having entered into marriage with Mr. Seabrook, I belonged to him, and there was no help for me. (TNP, 51)
Mrs. Greyfield concludes that the husband's position represents "an awful power to be lodged with any human being" (TNP, 51). She also recognizes men's investment in perpetuating this marital power.
The distinction between socially sanctioned "sacred" marriage and illegal, immoral relations between men and women is further deconstructed through the confounding of "good" husbands and bigamists. Victor rewrites Homer, completely undermining male heroism, in order to show the corrupting socialization of men and husbands. She unmasks male behavior in Mill's terms: "How many are the forms and gradations of animalism and selfishness, often under an outward varnish of civilization and even cultivation."(28) Whereas Homer boldly distinguishes between the greedy, cowardly, lustful suitors besieging Penelope and her heroic husband (who is allowed a few dalliances by virtue of his stature as hero), Victor shrinks this distance. The seeming gentleman, Mr. Seabrook, is really a bigamist; the good husband, Mr. Greyfield, also makes himself a bigamist through his second marriage. The behavior of both men pushes Mrs. Greyfield into "illegal marrying" (TNP, 76).
Mill writes, the family "is still oftener, as respects its chief, a school of wilfulness, overbearingness, unbounded selfish indulgence, and a double-dyed and idealized selfishness."(29) Victor embodies this insight in her troubling depiction of the inequitable psychological dynamics between husbands and wives. When Mrs. Anna Greyfield describes her first marriage before and during the move west, the emphasis interestingly is not on woman as "reluctant pioneer"(30) but on the subtle abuses of power within marriage. She says: "I deceived myself in expecting Mr. Greyfield to give up anything he had strongly desired"; "My husband was strong and cheerful, now that he was having his own way" (TNP, 13, 15). These statements echo what Mrs. Greyfield later says about Mr. Seabrook: "He was one who would be kind to man, woman, or child who would be governed by him; yet resistance to his will, however just, roused a tyranny" (TNP, 55). Male power shows its longevity when the dying Mr. Greyfield consigns her to his friend, which results in her ending up in Oregon instead of California, in her losing her property, and in her being vulnerable to victimization by Mr. Seabrook. Good men and bad men, the story testifies, exhibit a selfishness grounded in their assumption of rightful dominance.
In fact, although Mrs. Greyfield herself insists on the difference, the story draws other disturbing likenesses between Mr. Greyfield and Mr. Seabrook. Self-interest and selfish materialism dominate the motivation of both. When Mr. Greyfield apologizes and reintroduces himself to his wife twenty years after his apparent death, he writes:
You may wonder, dear Anna, that I did not go to Oregon when I had the barest suspicion of your being there. The distance and the trouble of getting there were not what deterred me. I was making money where I was, and did not wish to abandon my claim while it was producing well, for an uncertain hint that might mislead me. (TNP, 74)
The disparity between Mr. Greyfield's vision of his wife's situation and the reality mark an immense gulf between the social and personal perceptions and experiences of the sexes. Mrs. Greyfield's disgust and anger reveal that she ultimately judges her "good" husband to be the cause of all the suffering she has experienced:
Who suffered all this to come between us?... Does it not seem to you that if Mr. Greyfield had done his duty, all this terrible trouble and illegal marrying would have been avoided? Do you think a man should consider anything in this world before his wife and children, or fail of doing his utmost in any circumstances for them? How else is marriage superior to any illicit relation, if its duties are not sacred and not to be set aside for anything? I could never have done as he has done, blameless as he thinks himself! (TNP, 76-77)
Victor shows that men and women are conditioned to embrace divergent views of marriage to the wives' detriment. Furthermore, when men and women are not equally bound to marital commitment, marriage cannot be regarded as sacred. As they are, laws and social customs validate husbands' abuse, neglect, and devaluing of wives while they promote male privilege.
Overcoming "the Inertia of Women"
Besides refuting the idea "that women were idealized and idolized" (TNP, 12) in early frontier days - or any time - Victor also writes this story to address what she perceives as a serious social problem: in Mrs. Greyfield's words, "The inertia of women in each other's defense is immense" (TNP, 50). Throughout "The New Penelope," the frame story vies with the flashback story for the readers' attention; indeed, we are not allowed to forget that a woman is telling her story to a compassionate and like-minded woman. The effect of foregrounding this companionate experience between women is to turn the readers' thoughts to a consideration of women as a social group. However, rather than take the more dominant social stance of celebrating gender difference as the basis of the bonds among women, Victor's new Penelope voices a subversive and oppositional perspective of the hollowness in this solidarity and proposes a new foundation for woman-to-woman relationships.
Once again Victor finds Mill useful in examining the divisions among women. Victor's emphasis on Mrs. Anna Greyfield's social estrangement from women dramatizes the idea that, because of gender inequality, middle-class women's social status is always insecure, and even women's bonds with women are warped and contaminated by women's social and economic dependence on men. In "The New Penelope," the early urban frontier has few women, but the real problem is that these women don't stick together. In fact, the story challenges the concept of woman's sphere formulated by Carroll Smith-Rosenberg: that is, of woman's sphere as that nurturing female world where women "turn[ed] automatically to other women for support and intimacy."(31) The narrator comments: "For, among the vices of women I had long counted uncharitableness; and among their disadvantages want of actual knowledge of things - the latter accounting for the former" (TNP, 1 0). By exposing the suffering that women experience at the hands of women as well as men, Victor hopes to increase women's solidarity. In her New Northwest article "Some Thoughts About Ourselves," Victor explores "the curious question... why women so rarely stand by women in any undertaking," why "they do not sustain each other" (Victor's italics):(32)
But why enumerate the disabilities of the "lone woman"? Whatever she might have been with liberty to use her natural, God-given abilities, she is nothing now. And why? Primarily, because men claim for themselves all the privileges of life; and secondly, because more fortunate women agree to sustain men in the assumption, and become the most merciless critics of their helpless sisters. By a singular and most illogical mode of reasoning, a woman is womanly in proportion as she forsakes all allegiance to her own sex, and devotes herself to the other.(33)
Mrs. Anna Greyfield and the narrator discuss how women's economic dependence intensifies women's self-interest and leads them to excuse and abet male culpability: "We are born and bred to this narrow view of ourselves, as altogether the creatures of sex" (TNP, 58). The women in the community exert social control through their gossip, compelling Mrs. Greyfield to marry Mr. Seabrook, who has contrived through his familiar behavior to make himself and Mrs. Greyfield appear engaged. Nor do the women help Mrs. Greyfield after she has discovered the existence of his other wife and family. The women she consults tell her, "that I 'should have thought of all that before I married!' They treated it exactly as if, having gone through the marriage ceremony, I was bound, no matter how many wives Mr. Seabrook had back in Ohio" (TNP, 50). Mrs. Greyfield remarks that all the women she sought for help counseled her to "submit quietly"; "not one encouraged me to resist Mr. Seabrook" (TNP, 51). The helplessness and indifference of these women illustrates Mill's idea that "In the case of women, each individual of the subject-class is in a chronic state of bribery and intimidation combined."(34) Gender inequality builds barriers between women that trap some women within socially accepted bonds and shut other women out.(35) The story maintains that women will be truly supportive of each other and able to achieve a new personhood only when they recognize and resist the social forces that subjugate them individually and as a group.
It is the second narrative level of the story that embodies a significant corrective to women's troubled relationships to women. Victor suggests that the first step toward changing women's social behavior toward women is raising their awareness of their real condition as, in her words, "humanity held in intellectual [and] personal subjection" and arousing sympathy for each other.(36) The narrator of"The New Penelope" introduces herself to the reader as "that anomalous creature - a woman who loves her own sex" (TNP, 9), and she relates Mrs. Greyfield's story in order to develop respect for single, divorced, independent women. She demonstrates compassion in her relationship to this western Penelope and hopes to elicit a similar empathy from the readers.
The second narrative level also exhibits the new appreciation and friendship that can exist between independent women. Like the narrator, Mrs. Anna Greyfield has acquired worldly knowledge through experiential testing. The narrator describes her seasoned friend as, "Intellectual and intelligent without being learned or particularly bookish; quick in her perceptions and nearly faultless in her judgment of others; broadly charitable, not through any laxity of principle on her own part but through knowledge of the stumbling-blocks of which the world is full for the unwary" (TNP, 10). It is this enlarged experiential knowledge of society possessed by these two women that the narrator shares with her readers. Also like the narrator, this Penelope has been mobile, on her own initiative eventually relocating herself and her son from Portland to the Sierra Nevada in northern California. Expanded female consciousness molded by the world outside the conventional home can form a foundation for new bonds between women.
Domesticity Unhoused and Rehoused
The exact crystallization of Victor's feminism is difficult to identify; however, her western journalism traces her articulation of a feminist position that subscribed to the social construction of gender and espoused gender equality. In her editorials in Abigail Scott Duniway's Portland suffragist paper, the New Northwest, throughout the early 1870s, her social column for San Francisco's Daily Morning Call during 1875, and in her articles for the West Shore (first a monthly, then a weekly out of Portland) between 1876 and 1878, her feminist social vision emerges as a group of themes. Her articles advocate education reform for women, particularly the need to promote practical education designed to prepare women for self-support, and the search for a better way of making "intellectually cultivated women."(37) She frequently emphasizes the necessity for the expansion of economic opportunities for women in light of the failure of marriage as a occupation and, conversely, the need for women actively to embrace the pursuit of self-support to avoid being "moneyless, tradeless, professionless, and thoroughly helpless."(38) Perhaps her most important issue is the reformation of social ideals for women. She underscores the acceptance of woman's "right to be a thinking, observing, reasoning creature, with an identity of her own."(39)
"The New Penelope" moves beyond a deconstruction of marriage to a construction of a new image of womanhood. In the character of her enlightened Penelope, Victor portrays a woman who exerts her agency in resisting and overcoming social forces. Her heroism includes bravery in the face of physical dangers and endurance amid inequitable conditions, but most of all it is defined by a healthy attention to and assertion of self often against diverse, powerful social pressures. Embodying the new heroism that Victor has proclaimed in her journalism, Mrs. Anna Greyfield breaks out of dependent, subservient molds: Heroism "is when a good woman dares to loose all her claims upon the man popularly known as her protector, and to go out into the world alone, to make her way as best she can, rather than live in constant association with vices she is powerless to restrain."(40) This new subjectivity is very different from women's entirely relational existence circumscribed by marriage, a social position Victor shows to be subordinate no matter what cultural ideals allege. Victor's new basis for moral character claims that "you must first be true to yourself before your devotion to another is morally of any consequence."(41) Thus, this story explores the transformative process of forging new female selves, exemplifying potential choices for other women. And it explores the product, a new female subjectivity that resembles historian Louise Michele Newman's description of the New Woman who "aspired to individuality and autonomy, claiming the right and ability to decide how to best employ her talents in living her own life."(42) As Mrs. Anna Greyfield moves from conformity to eventual resistance, she follows a path from innocence and submission through disillusionment to worldly wisdom, self-possession, and economic self-sufficiency to become an independent New Woman.
Therefore, Victors reimagined Penelope is more active in her suffering and in her resistance, more engaged and responsible, less prize and more participant than the Greek heroine: She is a new Penelope. In Homer, it was Odysseus's house and stock and Telemachus's inheritance that the unscrupulous suitors were devouring. Victor's Penelope, on the other hand, is viewed as both property and the exploitable producer of property: "Just think of it? There were three years I had supported, by my labor, a large family of men, for that is what it amounted to. My money purchased the food they all ate, and I had really received nothing for it except my board and the clothes I worked in. The fault was not theirs; it was Mr. Seabrook's and society's" (TNP, 62). Mrs. Greyfield refers to the law whereby a husband is entitled to all his wife's earnings. In portraying the suffering this law exacts from women, Victor revealed its extreme inequity.
Rescued by no heroic male relatives, Mrs. Greyfield must extricate herself by managing herself and her own property. Sexual threats push her more and more toward active resistance when she has to continue to reside in the same boardinghouse with Mr. Seabrook (the one she is maintaining with her labor) while she refuses "to live with Mr. Seabrook as his wife" (TNP, 38). She experiences prolonged psychological torture and eventually physical threats. First, he tries to arouse her passion for him; then, he tries to force himself on her. After months of sleepless nights lying in fear of him, she tells him, "if he ever laid a finger on me, I should certainly shoot him dead" (TNP, 50). Ultimately, her deliverance comes from her own decision to take action against the social pressures of custom and public opinion. She steels herself against the social judgments that reckoned her a bad wife, and then sacrifices her reputation as a manager of a fine boardinghouse in order to starve out her boarders, including Mr. Seabrook. Mrs. Anna Greyfield assumes some agency in her own escape while accepting that she has to work within the definitions and rules of society; she finally curbs her pride and dissolves her "nonmarriage" to Mr. Seabrook through a divorce.
Just as the novella attacks the failings of the institution of marriage, so it also complicates that other cherished Victorian notion - the home. The story proclaims that making a home - indeed having a home at all - is more problematic than social ideals maintain, especially in the West where men are presented with numerous enticements. Mrs. Greyfield herself bemoans the group of deserted, economically oppressed middle-class women (whose husbands have gone off in search of mining adventures or employment) and who now live "in the sunless backrooms of San Francisco boarding-houses," "doing a little fine sewing for the shops" to supplement their meager teacher's pay (TNP, 13). Unfortunately, a large number of middle-class women in the West found themselves homeless with no means of acquiring homes of their own. In one of her Daily Morning Call columns, Victor pinpoints two main obstacles to women's self-support. Women's as well as men's disapprobation inhibits women's effort to attain a livelihood on their own: "Women despise the business woman; men half contemptuously patronize her, and totally set her aside when looking for a woman to marry, as being 'out of her sphere.' As if woman's sphere was to be a beggar!"(43) But lack of opportunity also discourages women, necessitating unusual fortitude to persist against real barriers: "How few things there are she is permitted to do."(44) As Mrs. Greyfield comments, "Men talk about our getting out of our places [whenever] we clamor for paying work of some kind, for something to do that will enable us to live in half comfort by working more hours than they do to earn lordly livings" (TNP, 13). Throughout her writing, Victor acknowledges that men hold the social and economic power, but she also exhorts women not to accede to this distribution of power, not to be deceived by class and gender expectations that render them dependent. Mrs. Anna Greyfield models successful revolt from within a specific class of women.
First, this character represents a practical feminist perspective of women's social and economic problems. After eking out a living sewing men's clothes when she first arrives in Portland, Mrs. Greyfield turns her substantial domestic abilities to running a boardinghouse, one of the few respectable channels by which some energetic, unmarried, middle-class women could make a social place for themselves and earn a comfortable livelihood. Yet this story reconceptualizes woman's nature and woman's work and offers domestic talents as commodifiable skills, thus challenging the essentialist notion that managing and beautifying a home are part of woman's nature and indisputably women's role. Years in advance of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's concept of professionalizing housework, Victor uses Mrs. Greyfield to address and dismantle the idea of innate domestic skills: "Did it never strike you as being absurd, that men should expect, and as far as they can, require all women to be good housekeepers? They might as well expect every mechanic to carve in wood or chisel marble into forms of life" (TNP, 24). Although Mrs. Greyfield happens to be unusually talented in the domestic realm and fortunate in her ability also to capitalize on her skills, Victor's point in emphasizing her talents is to suggest that society should give women the same opportunities as men to exercise their various abilities.
The story also exhibits a wistful, utopian element in its vision of "lone women" achieving the independence and economic security represented by having their own homes.(45) Again the feminist rewriting of the Greek epic appears in the prominence and premium placed on female action. Whereas Penelope holds off her suitors by weaving and unraveling her shroud for her father-in-law, Mrs. Greyfield builds a new life and succeeds financially by marketing her domestic talents. The second narrative level of the story accentuates the elegance and refinement of the middle-aged Mrs. Anna Greyfield's home: "two elegant goblets," "an air of substantial comfort," the "dainty cakes and confections," the "charming views," "a bright wood fire in an open fireplace" (TNP, 23, 24, 10). In this female-dominated space, provided, furnished, and sustained by her own earnings derived from the running of her second boardinghouse, this one in a mining town in California, Mrs. Anna Greyfield and the narrator share their ideas and experiences.
This image of a comfortable home resembles conventional middle-class notions of domesticity; however, Victor's point is that a home established through women's economic accomplishments and artistry and enjoyed free from male domination may look similar to domestic ideology's ideal of home but is fundamentally different. Women should have homes, not because they are innately domestic, but because homes symbolize and represent social independence and economic security. Women, like men, should have the means to provide themselves with homes. Victor has identified, separated, and demystified three different ideas embedded within normative ideas of domesticity: the ideology that associates women exclusively with the home and subservience to its inhabitants; the domestic talent to manage and beautify a home; and the right to have a home. In short, Victor redefines home and reconceptualizes women's roles.
Refashioned Gender Relations?
So why, then, does this independent new Penelope take back her wandering husband, who far from being a "long-suffering" Odysseus, has been happily married to another woman (now dead) and had a daughter with her in the intervening years? The story suggests several answers, intriguing for their social and psychological complexity. Mrs. Anna Greyfield's magnaminity dramatizes a new basis for women's bonds with women: Her sympathy for illegitimate and orphaned Nellie leads her to adopt her husband's daughter by his second "wife": "She is a charming girl, and I could not bear to leave her motherless" (TNP, 77). Demonstrating how women should uphold and love other women, Mrs. Greyfield transcends jealousy and vindictiveness toward a man and focuses her attention on a young woman in need; Mrs. Greyfield remarries, in part, to legitimize Nellie.
Furthermore, women's relationship to men is also complicated by women's own affectional, sexual needs. Throughout the story the narrator comments on the unusual beauty of Mrs. Anna Greyfield; even in her late forties, she is still remarkably attractive, lovely and lovable, and a theme of passionate attraction between the sexes runs throughout the narrative. Earlier in the story, Mrs. Greyfield reveals how her own longings confused her thinking, making her wish Mr. Seabrook truly was the intelligent, handsome, affectionate gentleman he had initially appeared to be: "There was a yearning desire in my heart to be petted and cared for" (TNP, 40). Now years later, the still handsome, middle-aged Mrs. Greyfield admits that in Mr. Greyfield's second courtship, she is being influenced by "passion and romance" (TNP, 77). Thus, sexuality and physical desire play a recognized role in women's reconstituted subjectivity.
The ending of the novella poses yet another critical riddle. Although a remarriage concludes the story, I argue that the narrative does not capitulate to the conventional nineteenth-century love plot, or, rather, that such a reading overlooks important elements of the ending: the refiguring of marriage and the disturbing reservations that resonate at the end of the story. The story suggests that Mrs. Anna Greyfield remarries to satisfy personal and sexual needs and not to achieve a social identity or to provide for herself financially. In addition, she reestablishes the marriage on her own terms from a position of strength. Having achieved a comfortable, independent home, she can accept Mr. Greyfield's companionship and share his wealth. By her decision, their pasts will remain undiscussed and their future will begin with a European trip. This trip testifies to their financial success and their social status as wealthy, cultured people, but it is also a new experience for both of them on a neutral territory. This initially male-dominated marriage has been reconstructed to give Mrs. Anna Greyfield a larger role in making decisions and in determining the character of the relationship; it has become an equal partnership in which the parties agree on the conditions, which resemble the redistribution of power within marriage that Mill recommends.
Furthermore, the ending of "The New Penelope" is nuanced and ambiguous, testifying to the complications of female and male realities. Mrs. Anna Greyfield's veiling of the past shows a mature approach to painful facts (her husband's contented second marriage) that she cannot bear, but the story's ending also bespeaks a sad, realistic need to compromise. Her choice to withhold her own experiences, not "to inflict" her story upon her husband, intimates the persistence of a perceptual, experiential distance between them (TNP, 78). In contrast, Mrs. Anna Greyfield has conveyed this story in detail to her woman friend, the narrator. And while stating that men like Mr. Greyfield are unprepared for such a close of reality (would he disbelieve her purity, fume jealously, blame her, or hurt her by failing to empathize with her suffering?), Victor nevertheless implies in the writing and publishing of this narrative that men (male readers) as well as women need to hear this female story. By focusing on the inner workings of relationships and on the barriers to male-female communion, Victor portrays the emotional and psychological untidiness of life and the difficulty of transforming gender consciousness. Once Mrs. Anna Greyfield has transgressed confining gender roles through her sensationally disruptive bigamous "marriage" and her independent entrepreneurship, she sees social norms as dysfunctional but realizes she must compromise to obtain a qualified happiness. The achievement, then, in this tempered vision is that Victor, always practically aware of the slowness of social change, portrays a new female self creating and asserting herself within the limits of social and historical conditions while also actively seeking to redefine those limits.
Exemplifying New Women
"The New Penelope" appeared during the 1870s, a decade of renewed contention over women's sexuality and gender identity. Contemporary historians have examined the late 1800s as a time of increasing divergence in the terms in which women sought to validate their bids for new social power. At stake (and, we might note, still integral to late twentieth-century feminist debates) was the issue of whether gender difference or gender equality should form the foundation of social, economic, and political power for women. In 1873, in his widely read book Sex in Education: or, A Fair Chance for Girls, Dr. Edward Clarke, who was affiliated with Harvard University, articulated the quintessential medical professions subscription to the physiological fact of gender differences. He and other doctors asserted that biological forces limit women's intellectual capacity, make the pursuit of the mental and physical rigor of male education dangerous to women's reproductive system, and thus "naturally" establish distinctly different social roles for men and women, upholding women's connection to the home and motherhood.(47) Meanwhile women responded to these apparently scientifically sound pronouncements with competing images of women's nature and roles, with different, often contradictory, ideas of who women are and what they should be able to do in society. While both women who remained within the confines of woman's sphere and those who expanded its boundaries to include civic housekeeping and the right to vote grounded their idea of womanhood in the concept of women's distinct nature, New Women sought economic independence, professional opportunities, and a sense of selfhood based on equality with men. Victor's fiction - much more than her historical writing and more powerfully than her journalism - participates in this exploration of sexual and gender equality through its portrayal of mature, independent womanhood and its fashioning of a new social script for women's lives.
Not only does Victor's fiction stand in an interesting relationship to its historical moment of production, but its recovery now has an intriguing, timely connection to the late twentieth century. In questioning the nineteenth-century social concept of woman's sphere as a natural, biologically determined social space for women and as a social position where they can securely live their lives, Victor anticipates the recent historical studies that show us a West of intra- and intergender struggle. In The Legacy of Conquest, historian Patricia Limerick has warned against the tendency "to project a sentimentalized hope for women's essential solidarity into the past."(48) In Victor's stories, we can glimpse the socially embattled and fragmented West increasingly recreated for us in the 1990s by the new historiography of New Western History. Victor helps us to resist the temptation to stress the cohesion of middle-class white women in the West. Appropriating Mill's social analysis to interpret the external and internalized webs of social control that set women in conflict with themselves and with each other, Victor also dramatized the beginning moves women could make toward self-liberation, support of other women, and gender equality.
I suggest that Victor, who was in her late forties and early fifties in the 1870s at the time when an increasing number of young women were attending college and grappling with decisions about careers and marriage, exemplified a professional and personal life that came to be identified with the New Woman.(49) She abandoned two discordant marriages and constantly worked to make a place for herself in the West as an intellect, poet, and professional writer. A roving historian gathering primary documents, she journeyed by stagecoach and steamboat and traveled to the headwaters of the Columbia River, to the rim of Crater Lake, and to Indian reservations, a "lone woman" having adventures, studying the West, supporting herself. Her profession as a historian continuously immersed her in a male world and pitted her intellect and her resources against male writers, scholars, and publishers. After publishing The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems, Victor disappeared into the writing of history as part of Bancroft's literary industry for twelve years, emerging at age sixty-four to more historical projects of her own, to journalistic support of women's contributions to early California literature, and to active participation in the Women's Press Association of California and the Woman's Congress Association of the Pacific Coast. In the 1870s, though, her experiences as a single woman and professional historian and the feminist ideas voiced in her journalism had coalesced and materialized in "The New Penelope," remarkable for its anticipatory fictional hybridity.(50)
Like their creator, Victor's women characters - Mrs. Anna Greyfield and the female narrator - roam and wrestle with the problem of women's independence, ultimately affirming women's rights by openly staking a claim to personal, sexual, social, and economic power for women. The central theme of "The New Penelope" is the discovery of the need for new female selfhood and power, women's empowerment through self-assertion, and the subsequent remaking of female identity. One of the keys to that selfhood is economic independence. Mrs. Anna Greyfield does not pursue a college education, but she does succeed in her own business. And she does exemplify "intelligent, independent womanhood." She is a woman who chooses to reenter marriage from a position of economic autonomy and psychological strength, philosophically and practically foreshadowing the New Woman.
- from June Bube
Notes
1. Victor was not unique among early feminists in unmasking the flaws in nineteenth-century marriage. For example, in an article entitled "The Man Marriage," Elizabeth Cady Stanton declared that "Marriage, today, is in no way viewed as an equal partnership, intended for the equal advantage and happiness of both parties" (The Revolution, April 8, 1869, 218). Stanton proposed to rectify the problem by empowering women to employ their innate qualities "for everyone knows that morally and spiritually woman is superior to man" (217): "Exalt woman, make her the sovereign and not the slave of the fireside.... Help her to be an independent, virtuous, self-supporting being, by giving her a free pass in the world of work and thought wherever she has the power to stand. Then she will no longer degrade marriage, by accepting it as a pecuniary necessity" (218). These ideas resemble Victor's except that she emphasized cultural conditioning and gender equality over essentialist traits and underscored women's right to independence from marriage.
2. "Talented Writer Dies in Oregon [:] Frances Fuller Victor, Known as 'The Historian of the Northwest' Passes Away," San Francisco Chronicle, November 26, 1902, 8; and Hazel Emery Mills, "The Emergence of Frances Fuller Victor - Historian," Oregon Historical Quarterly 62:4 (December 1961): 300.
3. Frances Fuller Victor, "Autobiographical Sketch," Daily Oregon Statesman, June 16, 1895, 2.
4. Mills, "The Emergence of Frances Fuller Victor," 316, 317.
5. Victor, "Autobiographical Sketch," 2.
6. Joan Smyth Iversen, "A Debate on the American Home: The Antipolygamy Controversy, 1880-1890," in American Sexual Politics: Sex, Gender, and Race Since the Civil War, ed. John C. Fout and Maura Shaw Tantillo (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 130. Historian Peggy Pascoe has also studied the popularity of sexual politics based on gender difference in her Relations of Rescue: The Searcher Female Moral Authority in the American West, 1874-1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). She writes:
In identifying and playing on the Victorian "women's values" of purity and piety, nineteenth-century Protestant mission women tapped a vein rich with strategic advantages. Their search for female moral authority allowed women to turn familiar - even culturally approved - ideas about female nature into tools to challenge male power. So appealing was this approach that missionary groups were the largest women's organizations in the country from the 1870s to 1900. (xviii)
7. Frances Fuller Victor, "Some Thoughts About Ourselves," Portland (Oregon) New Northwest, February 27, 1874, 2.
8. Victor, the historian, disputed this notion of women's biological destiny as wives and mothers in part on the grounds that it was unfeasible for many women given the social repercussions of the Civil War: "The proportion of men and women changed[,] by the war that carried off so large number of men in the prime of life" ([Dorothy D.], "Cultivated Women," San Francisco Daily Morning Call, June 27, 1875, 1).
9. Frances Fuller Victor, "Dorothy D. Contrasts Masculine and Feminine Nature," San Francisco Daily Morning Call, August 1, 1875, 5, and "Some Thoughts," 2.
10. Frances Fuller Victor, Judith Miles; or, What Shall Be Done with Her? (Portland [Oregon] New Northwest, December 5, 1873 through May 8, 1874). In chapter one of this novel, the narrator remarks that the main character, Judith Miles, had not had the opportunity to learn about Mill "and the rest of the advocates of women's equality." This novel examines the idea that women need to be socially and economically free to discover their own potential. For a discussion of Judith Miles and women's economic constraints, see June Johnson Bube, "From Sensational Dime Novel to Feminist Western: Adapting Genre, Transforming Gender," in Change in the American West: Exploring the Human Dimension, ed. Stephen Tchudi (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1996), 64-86.
11. Victor echoes and adapts two of Mill's main concepts. She subscribes to his framing of the gender problem and his proposed solution: "That the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes - the legal subordination of one sex to the other - is wrong in itself ...; and that it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other" (John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women [1869; reprint, New York: Prometheus Books, 1986], 7). One of Mill's main themes that Victor develops is that "equal rights" are needed to remedy the current male abuse of power: "[Men] would no longer be taught to worship their own will.... There is nothing which men so easily learn as this self-worship: all privileged persons, and all privileged classes, have had it" (Mill, 48). Implied throughout "The New Penelope" is another of Mill's concepts: "Women, and not a few merely, but many women, have proved themselves capable of everything, perhaps without a single exception, which is done by men, and of doing it successfully and creditably" (Mill, 56).
12. Judith Schwarz, Radical Feminists of Heterodoxy: Greenwich Village 1912-1940 (Norwich, Vt.: New Victoria Publishers, Inc., 1986), 29.
13. Richard White, "Trashing the Trails," in Trails: Toward a New Western History, ed. Patricia Nelson Limerick, Clyde A. Milner II, and Charles E. Rankin (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1991), 32.
14. Elizabeth Jameson, "Women as Workers, Women as Civilizers: True Womanhood in the American West," in The Women's West, ed. Susan Armitage and Elizabeth Jameson (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 159.
15. Donald Worster, Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 15.
16. Frances Fuller Victor, "The New Penelope," in The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems (San Francisco: A. L. Bancroft & Company, 1877), 11. Subsequent references to this story are cited in the text with the abbreviation TNP.
17. Although Harte was a regular contributor to the San Francisco Golden Era between 1860 and 1863 (Gary Scharnhorst, Bret Harte [New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992], 4-7), and Victor wrote her column for the Era slightly later, between April 1863 and January 1865, she most likely met Harte at this time and read his stories. Between 1868 and 1870, as the first editor of the Overland Monthly, Harte published his own western stories and invited Victor's stories and historical articles, especially encouraging her to pursue the latter.
18. Franklin Walker, San Francisco's Literary Frontier (1939, reprint; Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969), 264.
19. Victor, preface to The New Penelope.
20. "The New Penelope" also represents a culmination of the ideas of female heroism and western conflicts that Victor had experimented with in her earlier dime novel westerns, East and West. The Beauty of Willard's Mill (Dime Novel #35, New York: Beadle and Adams, February 1, 1862) and The Land Claim. A Tale of the Upper Missouri (Dime Novel #39, New York: Beadle and Adams, May 31, 1862). From these earlier westerns, Victor brought a number of colorful sensational, adventurous elements that selected and exaggerated realistic features of the West: specific western geographical and environmental conditions (for example, the periodic flooding of the Missouri River); specific western conflicts (fighting over land boundaries and water rights); the sense of a rapidly changing region and thus a highly charged historical moment; a view of women's sexuality under assault by the minimally restricted powers of men; and a female subjectivity poised on the border of respectability, between the need and opportunity for expanded action (roaming the prairies, defending the family's dam) and the physical, social, sexual risks incurred by such actions.
21. Victor's western fiction emerged from a thriving, unique, sophisticated western literary scene and also contributed to women's nationwide artistic conversation on women's identity and social status. Within this large dialogue, Victor's fiction incorporates elements of women's polemical writings about women's wrongs and the anguished, artistically complex fiction of mid-nineteenth-century eastern writers such as Alice Cary, Fanny Fern, Rebecca Harding Davis, Elizabeth Stoddard, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Rose Terry Cooke, and Harriet Prescott Spofford. Her argumentative discussions of women's economic and social degradation seem to align her with women's rights fiction, the political genre that David S. Reynolds says "dramatized the need for legal and social change on behalf of women" (Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988], 387). Yet her stories never seem driven by issues. They also evince some of the dark themes, psychological probings of feminine subjectivity and marital relations, and examples of the strange, stark images found in the body of eastern women's writing that Reynolds (borrowing and revaluing a negative term coined by Samuel Bowles in an editorial in the Springfield Republican in 1860) has labeled "the literature of misery" (Beneath the American Renaissance, 395). But neither the label "women's rights fiction" nor "the literature of misery" can categorize Victor's stories, which also bring together dime novel western conventions and western local color features.
22. Peggy Pascoe, "Western Women at the Cultural Crossroads," in Limerick, Milner, and Rankin, Trails: Toward a New Western History, 43.
23. Even though Ella Sterling (Cummins) Mighels states that Victor's stories were sometimes, when copied in the East, credited to Bret Harte, her most ambitious stories actually appropriate and refashion male regional writing (The Story of the Files: A Review of Californian Writers and Literature [San Francisco: Co-operative Printing, 1893], 160). Whether we interpret Harte as a sentimentalist who "adapted the perennially successful romantic formulas to the Western scene" as Franklin Walker does (San Francisco) Literary Frontier, 264), or as a western humorist who infused his stories with biblical parody and harsh irony as Gary Scharnhorst does, Victor's characterization and narrative purpose show a marked difference from Harte's. For Harte's stereotypical gamblers, drunkards, mining partners, prostitutes, and illegitimate babes, Victor substitutes middle-class wives, mothers, and widows, respectable but threatened girls, intemperate, irresponsible husbands and military officers, tyrannical fathers, gentlemanly bigamists, and cultured land agents. Exhibiting both playful and risque elements, Victor's stories lack Harte's deadpan humor and strive for more psychological and social realism than Harte's stories do.
24. Victor, "Some Thoughts," 2.
25. Jim Martin, A Bit of a Blue: The Life and Work of Frances Fuller Victor (Salem, Ore.: Deep Well Publishing Company, 1992), 9.
26. The paths of Charlotte Perkins Stetson [Gilman] and Frances Fuller Victor crossed at the Woman's Congress, a week-long meeting held in San Francisco from April 30 to May 6, 1894. The Congress covered a range of topics of interest to women, among them, dress for women, education, women in business, women's pioneer experiences, and social reform. The San Francisco Chronicle, reporting on the proceedings of May 1, commented, "'The Physical Evolution of Woman,' written by Frances Fuller Victor of Salem, Or., was read by Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Stetson" (Wednesday, May 2, 1894, 7:4). Victor was one of three delegates from Oregon. Both Victor and Stetson were active in the Pacific Coast Women's Press Association in the mid-1890s. In January of 1895, Stetson wrote an article for the Impress, the magazine of that organization, featuring Victor's accomplishments as a western journalist and historian.
27. In this story and also in her journalistic writing, Victor addresses the topic of sexual harassment as the subtle and overt ways that men abuse their socially privileged position and exert their power to intimidate women. Her arguments and examples sound eerily contemporary.
28. Mill, The Subjection of Women, 41.
29. Mill, The Subjection of Women, 42.
30. Susan Armitage, "Reluctant Pioneers," in Women and Western American Literature, ed. Helen Winter Stauffer and Susan J. Rosowski (Troy, N.Y.: The Whitston Publishing Company, 1982), 40.
31. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 65.
32. Victor, "Some Thoughts About Ourselves," 1.
33. Victor, "Some Thoughts About Ourselves," 2.
34. Mill, The Subjection of Women, 17.
35. One theme that emerges in Victor's journalism is the economic and social barriers women erect against other women by their adherence to class and gender prescriptions. She writes: "But just so long as women content themselves to be parasites, no matter how graceful or beautiful in their dependence, so long will they degrade the idea of work for their less fortunate sisters, make more thorny the path of the honestly struggling of their sex, reduce the wages that woman receives for her work, and perpetuate their own moral enslavement" ([Dorothy D.], "Poor Ladies," San Francisco Daily Morning Call, April 25, 1875, 1).
36. Victor, "Dorothy D. Contrasts Masculine and Feminine Nature," 5.
37. Victor [Dorothy D.], "Cultivated Women," 1.
38. Victor [Dorothy D.], "Poor Ladies," 1.
39. Frances Fuller Victor [Dorothy D.], "Common-Place Women," San Francisco Daily Morning Call, July 25, 1875, 1.
40. Frances Fuller Victor, "Women as Know Nothings," Portland (Oregon) West Shore, February 1876, 2.
41. Victor, "Women as Know Nothings," 2.
42. Louise Michele Newman, Men's Ideas/Women's Realities: Popular Science, 1870-1915 (New York: Pergamon Press, 1985), 298.
43. Victor [Dorothy D.], "Poor Ladies," 1.
44. Victor [Dorothy D.], "Poor Ladies," 1.
45. In a letter written from the East to her Oregon friend Judge Matthew P. Deady, October 27, 1872, Victor (then separated from her husband) relates her experience applying for the job of librarian in the Portland Library and includes this remark: "I have no home - never shall have as long as I am alone in the west - and it is a very ardent wish of mine to set up my lares and penates somewhere soon, as I observe the gray beginning to show among my auburn locks" (quoted in Hazel Emery Mills, "Travels of Lady Correspondent," Pacific Northwest Quarterly 45:37 [October 1954]: 114). I believe we can read the rich descriptions of Mrs. Anna Greyfield's attractive home as a feminist fantasy of self-sufficiency. Throughout her thirty-nine years in the West, Victor actively pursued a means of providing adequately for herself; unfortunately, her intense, rigorous writing career never yielded financial compensation commensurate with her efforts and achievements. Although Victor's six volumes for Bancroft "were pronounced the best in the series," Bancroft, not she, profited from their success ("Talented Writer," 8). Her life continued to testify to the economic vulnerability of a lone woman, and she spent the last four years of her life as a tenant of a boardinghouse in Portland (Alfred Powers, The History of Oregon Literature [Portland, Ore.: Metropolitan Press, 1935], 312).
46. See Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Albert Cook (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1974).
47. For a detailed discussion of the social and cultural force of Clarke's writings and other supposedly scientifically based rationalizations of women's roles, see Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982); Newman, Men's Ideas/Women's Realities; and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "The New Woman as Androgyne: Social Disorder and Gender Crisis, 1870-1936," in Disorderly Conduct, 245-96.
48. Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1987), 50.
49. Sara M. Evans, Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America (New York: The Free Press, 1989), 147.
50. In many ways, Victor's stories anticipate the fiction of Mary Austin and Willa Cather. Although I am not claiming that Mary Austin and Willa Cather were familiar with Victor's writing, comparisons stand out in the fiction of these three western women writers: their similar sexual politics, their female characters' defiance of social norms, and their focus on strong, independent, self-assertive women. Consider, for example, Mrs. Anna Greyfield's affinities with Cather's Alexandra Bergson of O Pioneers! (1913) and Thea Kronborg of The Song of the Lark (1915) and with Austin's Walking Woman in Lost Borders (1909) and Dulcie Adelaid of Cactus Thorn (written in 1927).