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The Literary Fate of the Woman Artist Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Story of Avis
Although the "male imagination" (if such a thing exists)
proved extremely ingenious in the 19th century in the creation of
strong female characters such as Anna Karenina and Isabel Archer,
the female artist as major protagonist was rare in novels by
men.(1) The reason may well lie in the frequently autobiographical
background of many a künstlerroman. For the most part, the
female artist as heroine is the creation of women writers, as in
Rebecca Harding Davis's Earthen
Pitchers, Elizabeth Stuart
Phelps's The Story
of Avis or Willa Cather's The Song of the
Lark, to name just a few.(2) It is interesting to note, however,
that none of these novels has ever achieved even minimal
canonization, let alone the fame of Gottfried Keller's Der Grüne Heinrich or James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Phelps's novel, which caused a literary uproar at the time
of its publication in 1877 and may well have influenced W.D.
Howells and Henry James, is known at best to feminists or
specialists in late nineteenth century American literature.
As early as the middle of the nineteenth century, several
novels appeared in America with a female artist as central
character, among them Augusta Evans's St. Elmo and Fanny Fern's
Ruth Hall. Despite the unusual occupations of their heroines,
these two novels can still be classified in the general category
of "literary domesticity" or "sentimentalism." Many women
authors in the middle of the nineteenth century created strong,
competent female protagonists, but at the same time they
continued to subscribe to a traditional separation of the
spheres.(3) While the reformation of man seemed to consist of his
acquiring "feminine" virtues, the literary domestics still
insisted that woman's place was in the home, the difference being
that she was accorded the power to save the world from her
limited sphere.
Although the literary domestics were not directed
exclusively by a conservative impulse, their critique of the
"defects of man"(4)often amounted to little more than the
idealization of traditional feminine virtues, thus strengthening
the old role assignments. When Ruth's daughter asks her if she
shall write books too when she grows up, Ruth gives an utterly
conventional response: "`God forbid,' murmured Ruth, ... "no
happy woman ever writes. From Harry's grave sprang 'Floy.'" (175)
Their domination of the marketplace was accompanied by a self-effacing attitude and a reluctance to regard their work as a
legitimate feminine occupation.(5) There is no doubt that the
literary domestics wanted to exert a moral influence on society,
but as Myra Jehlen has pointed out, "... the women novelists,
being themselves conceived by others, were conceptually totally
dependent." (593) Literary domesticity was limited by women's
self-conception (or lack of it) and characterized by fantasy and
wish-fulfillment - the urge to make the average, mundane female
existence more attractive. The glorification of domesticity was
intended to advance women's social position within the given
system, at least on an ideological plane - but without changing
the social system itself.
> One of the first American women novelists to point out the
fallacy of this logic after the heyday of the cult of domesticity
was Elizabeth Stuart Phelps in her novel The Story of Avis.
Phelps was in a singular position to recognize the fiction in the
fantasy: she was herself the daughter of a successful literary
domestic, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Sr., whose major novel, The Sunny Side (1851) portrayed a
nineteenth-century "superwoman", the wife of a clergyman who manages to
fulfill all her domestic duties, help her husband in his work, deal with
financial difficulties, and still maintain a sunny nature. Phelps Sr.
herself, however, died at the age of thirty-seven of "cerebral disease"
after suffering from nervous disorders ever since her marriage. Her
daughter was eight at the time, and at some point after her mother's
death, she assumed her name. The young Elizabeth Stuart Phelps apparently
saw her mother as a victim of
the impossibility of reconciling artistic ambition and a woman's
traditional role: The Story of Avis is in part based on her
mother's biography.
Avis Dobell, a gifted painter, has already decided at the
outset of the novel that she will never marry. She has spent
several years studying in Europe, and her teacher in Paris has
given her two years to make a reputation for herself. On a visit
home to the university town of Harmouth, however, she meets the
promising young professor Philip Ostrander. She represses her
attraction to him at first, rejecting him when he speaks to her
of love. After his disappointment, he enlists and is wounded in
the Civil War, and in his weakness Avis finds it increasingly
difficult to resist him. She finally admits she loves him but
begs him not to ask marriage of her; she has her work and her
life, which she cannot yield to anyone. Besides, she adds,
thinking of him, "the coffee wouldn't be right." (108) But
Ostrander assures her that he will not ask anything of her that
he cannot give:
"I will take from you only what I can yield to you,--the
love of a life. I do not want your work, or your
individuality. I refuse to accept any such sacrifice from
the woman I love. You are perfectly right. A man ought to
be above it. Let me be that man." (107)
But even in this generous offer not "to accept any such sacrifice
from the woman I love," Ostrander betrays a male posture. He
makes his proposal with "haughty humility," and he sees his own
response to Avis's originality as a challenge to his manhood.
(108)(6) Thus it comes as no surprise when he is unable to live up
to his idealistic proposal. Ostrander proves to be vain and
dishonest, losing his position at the university and even
starting a flirtation with another woman.
As Avis has foreseen it is her inability to take care of his
"creature comforts" that makes him dissatisfied with her after
all. The cream is sour, the steak is cold, and the coffee causes
"bilious headache" (153) - and of course Ostrander complains.
Despite his promises, he takes it for granted that she will make
their life "comfortable." In this situation, Avis the artist
finds herself drowning in domesticity: crying babies, unreliable
servants, cooking and cleaning, all these little details of
domestic life overcome her and her talent. The studio Philip has
promised her never materializes and they are plagued by debts.
Even after his death, Avis finds that she can no longer paint.
The one hope remaining to her is her young daughter Wait, whose
name indicates that the time has not yet come for the fulfillment
that Avis dared to dream of, but that perhaps a future generation
will be able to enjoy.
One of the most extraordinary things about The Story of Avis
is the radical and explicit critique of marriage and the ideology
of "women's place" that it contains, a marked contrast to the
vague discontent expressed by many of the literary domestics.
Avis's personal tragedy is not caused only by her disappointment
in a specific man: it is to a large extent a result of the of the
forms of male domination and the institution of marriage itself.
As Avis herself has foreseen artistic ambition and marriage are
irreconcilable for a woman: "... there is no division of labor
possible in her economy." (69)
The initial presentation of Philip is relatively
sympathetic, and Avis's reasons for falling in love with him are
well established, even though the reader is given clues early of
his superficiality. This discrepancy between the character's and
the reader's level of information may well account for the
objection of some critics that Avis's marriage seems overly
contrived. Alfred Habegger, for example, very defensively takes
exception to the character of Ostrander and implies that anyone
with a little sense would never have married him, ignoring the
circumstance that even the faculty of Harmouth University is
initially enthusiastic about the young man.(7) All the rest of the
characters, including Avis's father, are impressed by Philip as
well.
Avis's gradual disillusionment with her husband, who is weak
rather than evil, forms a large part of the drama, but just as
important if not more so is the deterioration of the integrity of
the woman artist through marriage. An indication that marriage
itself is more at fault than the man is that Avis's weariness and
hopelessness begin before she finds out about any of Philip's
more serious betrayals. In fact, at one point Philip is described
as speaking to Avis "more tenderly than a husband who has been
six months married may be expected to speak upon an especially
busy day." (142) At this point in the novel, Philip does not
appear any worse than the average, run-of-the-mill husband, but
rather relatively typical in his insensitivity to his wife's
concerns. This makes the indictment of marriage itself much
stronger than it would be if Philip were simply a "bad guy," an
obviously evil character. By adopting the strategy of making
Philip barely worse than average, Phelps implies that Avis's fate
is the rule rather than the exception, and that a talented woman,
even without a husband quite as weak and selfish as Philip, would
have a great deal of difficulty finding fulfillment in an
institution which relies upon the selflessness of the wife. Avis
postpones her painting and her ambitions when domestic duty
calls; she is not selfish enough to put herself first. As
Phelps's narrator proclaims:
Women understand--only women altogether--what a dreary will-o-the-wisp is this old, common, I had almost said
commonplace, experience, "When the fall sewing is done,"
"When the baby can walk," "When house-cleaning is over,"
"When the company has gone," "When we have got through with
the whooping-cough," "When I am a little stronger," then I
will write the poem, or learn the language, or study great
charity, or master the symphony; then I will act, dare,
dream, become. Merciful is the fate that hides from any
soul the prophecy of its still-born aspirations. (149)
In portraying marriage as detrimental to women's
aspirations, Phelps was making a radical break with the kind of
fiction written by American women before her, including her
mother.(8) Ruth Hall, despite the audicity of its artist heroine,
conforms to the wish-fulfillment of the popular category of
"woman's fiction," as Nina Baym calls it, telling the story of
"the `trials and triumph' ... of a heroine who, beset with
hardships, finds within herself the qualities of intelligence,
will, resourcefulness and courage sufficient to overcome them."
(22) Phelps indicated in her autobiography, Chapters From a Life
(1896) that she was not in the habit of reading the popular
domestic novels (91) but it may be assumed that she was familiar
with the typical plot construction and subject matter. As
opposed to these novels of the successful, beloved heroine, who
gets everything she wants in the end, including a man she wasn't
looking for, Phelps refused to go through with the wish-fulfillment and compromise of the domestic happy ending.
She also refused to make her heroine a successful housewife.
Even Fanny Fern, a feminist as well, made her artist Ruth Hall an
exemplary housekeeper and mother in the tradition of the literary
domestics; Avis on the other hand is unequal to clogged
drainpipes and unexpected guests. Phelps shows little reverence
for the myth of blissful domesticity. Rather, she points out
that the negative effect of a romanticized myth is ignorance.
This is pointedly demonstrated in The Story of Avis by the
difficulties her young married couple has in dealing with a baby:
Their vague ideas of the main characteristics of infancy
were drawn as, I think I may safely say, those of most young
men and women are at the time of marriage chiefly from
novels and romances, in which parentage is represented as a
blindly deifying privilege, which it were an irreverence to
associate with teething, the midnight colic, or an
insufficient income. (151)
In an article which appeared in 1871, Phelps explicitly
attacked the ideal of the "true woman," calling it "an
impertinence and an absurdity," the purpose of which was in
"regulating the position of women by conformity."(9) During this
period, Phelps published a number of feminist articles, and The
Story of Avis reflects many of the concerns current in the
feminist movement of the time. These included women's financial
dependence on men, the negative effects of unrealistic feminine
ideals, and the question of careers for women, in addition to the
debate on marriage. These concerns were overshadowed when the
women's movement concentrated on the battle for suffrage at the
turn of the century, and this may well be the reason that the
ideological criticism in Avis still appears surprisingly
pertinent to the modern reader.
For Phelps, there was a basic injustice in the traditional
relationship between men and women. One of the most crippling
aspects with which Phelps was concerned in her fiction, was the
fact that a woman's identity was defined by the men in her life,
primarily her husband. In her earlier novel of social protest,
The Silent Partner (1871), both of the female protagonists refuse
attractive offers of marriage, and Phelps regarded this as one of
the strengths of the novel.(10) In her correspondence with George
Eliot, Phelps wrote that Dorothea Brooke should "...never accept
wifehood as a metier. The woman's personal identity is a vast
undiscovered territory--with which Society has yet to acquaint
itself, and by which it is yet to be revolutionized."(11)
With The Story of Avis, Phelps attempted to write a book in
which the heroine did not accept wifehood as her metier, "a
woman's book" as she called it in her autobiography.(12) She was
well aware of the serious intent of such a project, although she
did not feel qualified to carry it out, as she indicated in the
same letter to Eliot. She was also aware that a book of such a
radical nature probably would not be popular: "I had not expected
that book to have a wide circle of friends." (Chapters, 156-7)
As a result, she was very grateful for the recognition and
understanding that she did receive as her praise of Longfellow
shows:
I have ... never met with any other man who showed, from the
author's point of view, such a marvelous intuition in the
comprehension of an unusual woman; or of what the author of
"Avis" tried to do, in relating her history. (Chapters, 157)
Her own father, by contrast, began publishing anti-feminist
essays opposed to women's suffrage directly after the appearance
of his daughter's novel. Phelps, perhaps as a result of her
conservative background, appears to have been a reluctant
radical; after the completion of Avis, she experienced a physical
collapse, the nineteenth century version of an "anxiety attack."
(See Chapters, 226)
Phelps's criticism of institutionalized roles for men and
women and her creation of a female protagonist who want to be
defined through her art rather than her marriage was indeed a
radical revision of the traditional American marriage plot; not
surprisingly, Avis caused quite a controversy when it appeared
and was reviewed in the major journals of the period. Some
critics admitted that there was hardly a fault with it
artistically but objected to the moral, "no less dangerous than
untrue,"(13) as one critic saw it. Conversely, others thought it
displayed weakness in form, but praised it anyway for its
sincerity and advanced opinions. The feminist Lucy Stone gave
the work her unqualified approval, certain that the artistic
skill and message would give it "a permanent place in English
literature."(14) This obviously did not prove true, but at its
publication, The Story of Avis was a literary event which was not
to be ignored. W.D. Howells even published a number of anonymous
commentaries in the Atlantic Monthly's "Contributor's Club" which
reflected the intensity of the controversy.(15) Howells may well
have been indebted to Phelps himself in his portrayal of broken
marriage in A Modern Instance (1882), and even Henry James, who
did not participate in the discussion surrounding Avis, may well
have been influenced by Phelps when he wrote The Portrait of a
Lady (1881). Remarkable parallels between the two novels have
been noted by critics familiar with Avis, even if the critical
opinion of the merits of Phelps's novel has differed widely.(16)
James himself, of course, had the reputation for being an
incorrigible snob, and although he appears to have been
acquainted with Phelps, he never acknowledged it. Phelps
reviewed James's unpopular study Hawthorne in The Independent,(17)
and James participated in at least two collaborations in which
Phelps was also a contributor.(18) Constance Fenimore Woolson
refers to her in a letter to James as "your poor serious soul-to-soul enemy" and goes on to ask, "I wonder if you saw her," only
to answer her own question: "But you do not want to know the
little literary women. Only the great ones--like George Eliot."(19)
The attitude toward Phelps displayed here, however, does not
rule out the possibility that Avis influenced Portrait.(20) On this point, it is tempting to say that the novels speak for
themselves. Avis and Isabel are both exceptional, independent
women who do not intend to be defined by marriage, but end up
succumbing to the institution anyway. Both are associated with
the imagery of birds and flying, sporting telling names which
refer to their initial high-soaring freedom: Avis Dobell, and
Isabel Archer. The construction of the novels is also similar:
approximately the first half is devoted to the establishment of
the heroine's unusual character and her courtship, and concludes,
of course, with her marriage; the second part traces the
development of her disillusionment. Both women marry men who are
their moral and intellectual inferiors, and even the names of
their husbands are similar: Ostrander and Osmond.
Especially striking is the similarity in the way their
disillusionment is portrayed despite the fact that Avis is not
the psychological novel that Portrait is. Avis realizes during a
dismal night when she cannot sleep for considering her situation
that "it shall befall the stronger to wear the yoke of the weaker
soul." (178) This scene, although only a page long, is
reminiscent of the chapter in Portrait in which Isabel recognizes
that in the future, Osmond "would have the better of her there."
(357) Isabel sees her situation as "a dark, narrow alley" (357)
and Avis hers in "solitary corridors." (178) For both heroines,
it is the cooling of their own affection which is especially
painful for them, in both cases linked with a sense of terror:
With a terror ... Avis watched departing love shake the slow
dust of his feet against her young life. With a dread which
shook to the roots of belief, she received that her own
slighted tenderness had now begun to chill. (201)
Isabel too first feels love disappear and then terror: "She could
live it over again, the incredulous terror with which she had
taken measure of her dwelling." (360)
One of the major differences in the novels, however, is in
the characters of the two men the protagonists marry. While
Ostrander is merely weak and superficial, Osmond is malignant,
even evil. Avis is not the victim of a deliberate deception, but
rather the charm of an attractive, intelligent man too
superficial to live up to his potential. Interestingly enough,
it is especially to the character of Ostrander that many male
critics object. Habegger for example claims:
The terms under which Isabel must live with Osmond are set
before us with infinitely greater honesty than the terms
Phelps fantasized in The Story of Avis. Philip Ostrander
was basically a crude boyish scapegrace.... But Gilbert
Osmand is real and strong. (69)
One conclusion that can be drawn form this interpretation is
that, for Habegger at least, it is preferable, or perhaps I
should say more realistic, for male characters to be evil than to
be weak. Habegger's assertion that James shows greater honesty
in his portrait of a marriage is difficult to substantiate as
well. Phelps may have made Avis too ideal for modern tastes, but
this is not what Habegger is objecting to here. The terms of
Avis's ordeal differ in two important aspects from those of
Isabel, which makes a comparison of the "honesty" difficult:
first, Isabel is an heiress, and Avis is an artist; second, James
was primarily concerned with the inner drama of Isabel's
disillusionment whereas in Avis we are confronted in great detail
with the torture of domestic chores for a talented, exceptional
woman. In this respect, Avis was perhaps unique in its time:
cooking and cleaning certainly do not play a part in Isabel's
ordeal. But it has yet to be proven that metaphysical despair is
more "honest" than domestic drudgery.
Avis was also unique in the situation of the heroine - none
of the classic "problem novels" of the nineteenth century
concerned a heroine who was an artist, with the exception of
Meredith's Diana of the Crossways (1885). Of course, the
disillusionment and "fall" of the exceptional woman was a
standard plot of European realism at the time, and Phelps and
James were admittedly both influenced by Eliot. But even taking
this into consideration, the similarities between the two novels
are striking and probably would have been noted more frequently
by now if Phelps's novel hadn't drifted into almost total
obscurity. Apart from the interest of the novel itself, the
influence Avis may have exerted on America's two greatest
Realists once again makes the old feminist question relevant -
was this particular novel really "worthless" enough to warrant
such a failure of memory? Or is it just the fate of the woman
artist? Both Avis and Avis can be seen as victims of sexual
politics, of the rules and regulations of artistic creation and
survival.
The main reasons for Avis's descent into obscurity are
probably to be found in the objectionable subject-matter and the
radically female perspective of the novel. Phelps's much cited
"stylistic infelicities"(21) are no worse than those of many
accepted and respected male authors, Theodore Dreiser for one,
and offer only a weak pretext not to take this particular novel
seriously. At its best, her prose is characterized by memorable
imagery and poetic expression; it is not merely unalleviated
melodrama and, as some critics seem to imply, a constant
embarrassment to her readers.(22) According to the critical
assessment of Arthur Hobson Quinn in 1936, twenty-five years
after Phelps's death, her narrative art is anything but absurd
and belletristic:
With an artistic sincerity, a narrative ability of a high
order, and a descriptive power at times rising to greatness,
she combined a sense of moral values which give weight and
substance to her fiction. (203)
Her characteristic seriousness is necessarily objectionable by
modern standards, which set a premium on ironic distance, but
Victorian works are frequently regarded with a relatively lenient
eye in this respect. Phelps is not without humor, or even irony
at times. The reasons for her obscurity are probably to be
sought elsewhere.
The outright feminist point of view from which Avis is
related may well be one of the main reasons that it has lost its
status as a memorable work of American fiction. As feminist
critics have been pointing out for years, the male perspective,
as represented by the works of Henry Fielding, Herman Melville,
and Ernest Hemingway, to name just a few, can be praised as
"universal" when it obviously is not, while a female perspective
is criticized for being partial rather than objective. The few
exceptions to the rule do not disprove this fact. Most of the
women writers who have survived the test of time are so obviously
great that it would be hard to ignore them; Jane Austen, George
Eliot and Virginia Woolf come to mind. It is more difficult to
find women's names among the "minor" writers. It would be hard
to dispense with a George Eliot, but an Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
can be allowed to drift into obscurity by merely cutting her from
the literary histories. Fred Lewis Pattee, Phelps's contemporary
and an influential and respected critic at the turn of the
century, considered Avis required reading for students of
American literature; (416) today, few scholars have even heard of
Phelps.
Another reason for her current obscurity may be her
bestselling utopian religious novels, The Gates Ajar and its
successors. The Gates Ajar was the second best selling novel of
the century, preceded only by Uncle Tom's Cabin,(23)
and this incredible success may have served to obscure her other,
artistically superior works. The Gates series, with its
sentimental heavenly visions, does not appeal to the modern
sensibility, and since it is these books that initially made
Phelps internationally famous, it shouldn't be surprising when
she is known only for her religious writings today.(24) In the
footnotes to Leon Edel's edition of the letters of Henry James,
for example, she is referred to as a New England religious
writer.
But it was not only her religious works which lead to her
exclusion from the canon - the figure of Avis as the woman artist
who who is incapacitated by marriage was offensive to the male
sensibility. The sarcastic, superior tone of Van Wyck Brooks
comments on Avis in New England: Indian Summer (1940) make this
all too obvious:
Should woman artists marry? Should Avis have married? This
question reverberated in many a feminine breast in Boston;
and many a reader rejoiced in Miss Phelps's conclusion.
Avis's daughter, please God, should only be an artist!(25)
Given the combination of an offensive, unusual heroine, an
offensive righteous tone, stylistic infelicities and a religious
ouvre, it is not surprising that Phelps's fame was allowed to
fade. But even if the situation is not surprising, it is still
unfortunate. The Story of Avis is pertinent, interesting and
highly readable, and like Kate Chopin's The Awakening could serve
as another appropriate and necessary correction to the overly
masculine view of American literary history.
The original version of this paper was delivered at the
annual meeting of the German Society for American Studies in
Bremen in June 11 1987.
WORKS CITED
Baym, Nina. Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1829-1870. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1978.
Brooks, Van Wyck. New England: Indian Summer 1865-1915. Cleveland
and New York: The World Publishing Co., 1940.
Buitenhuis, Peter. The Grasping Imagination: The American Writings of Henry James. Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1970.
Donovan, Josephine K. New England Local Color Literature: A Woman's Tradition. New York: Frederick Unger, 1983.
Edel, Leon, and Dan H. Laurence. A Bibliography of Henry James.
London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1961.
Habegger, Alfred. Gender, Fantasy and Realism in American Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.
Jacobson, Marcia. Henry James and the Mass Market. University, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1983.
(James, Henry.) Henry James: Letters. Volume III, 1883-1895. Ed.
Leon Edel. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1980.
------. The Portrait of a Lady. Ed. Robert D. Bamberg. New York:
W.W. Norton, 1975.
Jehlen, Myra. "Archimedes and the Paradox of Feminist Criticism."
Signs 6,4 (1981), 575-601.
Kelley, Mary. Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth Century America. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.
------. "The Sentimentalists: Promise and Betrayal in the Home." Signs 4,3 (1979), 434-46.
Kessler, Carol Farley. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. Boston: Twayne Pub., 1982.
Lears, T. Jackson. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture 1880-1920. New York,
Pantheon Books, 1981.
Nestvold-Mack, Ruth. Grenzüberschreitungen. Die fiktionale weibliche Perspektive in der Literatur. Erlangen: Verlag
Palm und Enke, 1990.
Pattee, Fred Lewis. A History of American Literature. New York,
Boston, Chicago: Silver, Burdett, 1897.
Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart. Chapters From a Life. Boston and New
York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1896.
------. The Story of Avis. Ed. Carol Farley Kessler. New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1985.
Quinn, Arthur Hobson. American Fiction: An Historical and Critical Survey. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1936.
Stansell, Christine. "Elizabeth Stuart Phelps: A Study in Female Rebellion." Massechusetts Review 13 (1972), 239-56.
NOTES
1. The great exception to this rule is George Meredith's novel,
Diana of the Crossways (1885). Hawthorne's novel The Marble Faun
contained no less than two women artists, but their artistic
careers are not decisive for the plot of the novel.
2. Elsewhere I have called these novels of the female artist
"Künstlerinnen-Romane": see Grenzüberschreitungen (140).
3. See Kelley, "Sentimentalists" (436).
4. Kelley, "Sentimentalists" (444).
5. See Kelley, Private Woman, Public Stage (180-83).
6. For this insight, I am indebted to an unpublished paper by
Christian Schmidt, "The Transformation of the Woman Artist: Fanny
Fern's Ruth Hall and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Story of Avis.
7. See Habegger (48). On the critical reception of Avis see also
Kessler, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (126-27).
8. An exception is Rebecca Harding Davis's Earthen Pitchers.
Phelps's own earlier novel, The Silent Partner, also portrayed
marriage even to a superior man as damaging to a woman's
individuality.
9. "The True Woman," rpt. in The Story of Avis (270).
10. See Kessler, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (50).
11. As quoted in Kessler, "Introduction," The Story of Avis
(xviii).
12. See Chapters (157, 272).
13. Review from Philadelphia Inquirer, rpt. in Avis (273).
14. See review from The Woman's Journal, rpt. in Avis (274). See
also Kessler's summary of her contemporary stature (124-27).
15. See Habegger (45-46).
16. See Habegger (46 and 54), where he quotes a contemporary
commentator, Elizabeth T. Spring. See also Kessler,
"Introduction" (xvii). Quinn too refers to Phelps as a
predecessor of Howells and James (192).
17. See Buitenhuis (105-6).
18. See Edel and Laurence (235-38).
19. Letter of Feb. 12 1882, rpt. in Henry James: Letters (528).
20. In Henry James and the Mass Market, Marcia Jacobson makes a
convincing case for Phelps's influence on James while he was
working on The Bostonians, pointing out that he could hardly have
been unaware of the important novels by women at the time (24-27). Phelps published in all the major magazines of the period,
which James read.
21. See for example Donovan (83).
22. Compare Habegger's comments (46 and 48).
23. See Stansell (239).
24. See for example Lears's comments on Phelps (23-24) in which
he lumps her with the reactionary views of the literary
domestics. Buitenhuis lets this prejudice lead him to the
conclusion that The Independent is a religious publication (105).
25. Brooks (155-56).
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