DOMESTICITY AND SELF-POSSESSION IN THE MORGESONS AND JANE EYRE Louise Penner Rice University Sandra Zagarell has described Elizabeth Stoddard’s The Morgesons asa feminist bildungsroman that borrows gothic conventions, particu- larly from the Bronté sisters’ Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, to articulate female discontent with the confining sphere of dom Ly in the nineteenth century.' However, recent critical re-examinations of nineteenth-century domestic novels have recognized a connection be- tween the representation of the private, feminine sphere and the pos- session and strong articulation of an individual self in representations of women’s lives. Both Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fic- tion: A Political History of the Novel and Gillian Brown's Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America power- fully articulate this relationship, though in different ways. Their con- tributions to our current understanding of domestic fiction complicate the impulse of critics such as Zagarell and Stacy Alaimo to see the domestic sphere in the nineteenth century and particularly in The Morgesons as unquestionably a place of social, economic, and psychic imprisonment for women. These recent re-examinations call for a new look at how the do- mestic functions in Stoddard’s bizarre novel, one that has mysteriously resisted much substantive critical commentary beyond Zagarell’s and Alaimo’s. Armstrong’s theory of the birth of the bourgeois subject through the construction of the desiring domestic heroine in the late eighteenth-century novel invites new interpretations of the relation be- (ween the female self and the domestic sphere she inhabits. Her read- ing of Jane Eyre, in particular, highlights crucial connections between the novel’s romantic elements, ils ambivalence about the domestic sphere, and its heroine’s search for self-possession. These same con- nections are highlighted in The Morgesons. Brown's focus on the im- portance of the domestic as a source of American individualism and as a stabilizing force in opposition to the U.S. market economy also cre- ates new interpretive possibilities for domestic scenes, not only in do- mestic fiction but also in so-called canonical novels. Her focus is particularly helpful in approaching a novel as difficult to assign a ge- neric label as The Morgesons.132 Louise Penner Stoddard’s first novel tells the story of a New England family who acquire and then abruptly lose great wealth through the shipping ven tures of the father, Locke Morgeson, Jr. Narrated by the eldest daugh- ter, Cassy, the novel loosely follows the pattern of the traditional bildungsroman. Cassy focuses on her desire for self-possession through childhood; school; her disastrous first romance with her married cousin, Charles Morgeson; the death of her mother and re-marriage of her fa- ther to Charles’s widow, Alice; and finally ends with her decision to marry and return to domestic life in her parent's former home. Through- out the novel, she describes a strange sense of disconnection between the family members, particularly between Cassy, her reclusive younger sister, Veronica, their mother, Mary, and their father, Locke Jr. The disconnection evident in the Morgesons’ domestic sphere in the begin- ning of the novel appears to sets a tone of discord and confusion that dominates the rest of the novel. As we will see, that discord appears to have a basis, at least in part, in the instability introduced into the do- mestic by the father’s economic ventures. Despite my feeling that economics play an integral part in setting the bizarre tone of Stoddard’s novel, | am also interested, like Zagercll, in the echoes of Jane Eyre's romanticism that pervade The Morgesons. Stoddard herself insisted that she was by no means a realist author, but rather a romantic one.’ Stoddard’s imitation of Jane Eyre’s mixture of realism and gothic romance results in a much more complicated repre- sentation of the social and economic functions of the domestic in The Morgesons than its critics have to date articulated.’ Despite huge dif- ferences in the socio-economic and geographic positions of their hero- ines—Jane is (or appears to be) an orphan left destitute by her Yorkshire parents, and Cassy comes from a newly wealthy New England fam- ily—Jane Eyre and The Morgesons present their heroines’ struggles to attain and give voice to their own desires in a fairly similar manner. Both novels begin with the story of a rebellious young girl’s yearning for self-possession and transcendence of the domestic sphere she in- habits, Both heroines, at a young age, are sent off to school in order to be tamed of their wild behaviors; both, as adults, eventually fall in love with a married man. In each case sexual desire is linked fundamentally to the heroine's articulation of her individualism and self-possession. Ineach novel, the relationship between the heroine and another woman’s husband seems more erotically charged and more compatible than the man’s relationship with his lawful wife, so much so that each narrative seems to propose a spiritual or supernatural connection between theSiudies in American Fiction 133 two that defies convention. Finally, each story ends ambivalently with the heroine acting as caretaker and wife, firmly ensconced within the domestic sphere. My focus on the ideology and ceonomics of the do- mestic sphere in each novel helps to articulate how, in Stoddard’s novel, the heroine’s self is governed by desires that are absolutely unique in the novel, that defy social convention, and thus act on “the social sur- face of experience,” as Armstrong has argued of Jane Eyre’s (194), This focus helps illustrate too how that female self is, at the same time, shaped by the specificities of its social, economic, and geographical position. In comparing and contrasting the ways that each novel represents the connection between the domestic and the heroine’s sense of indi- vidualism and self-possession, I will be interested in four specific is- sues: how each novel presents the domestic as potentially both protective and oppressive to the heroine's sense of self; how Stoddard's focus on Cassy’s family history and the economic pressures on their domestic life reflects specific nineteenth-century conflicts about the so-called separation of private and public spheres, and how this focus illustrates Stoddard’s insistence on the impact of economic realities on the heroine's sense of self; how, in the figures of Alice, Veronica, and Mary Morgeson, Stoddard imitates Bronté’s use of double figures to represent the different ways that domestic enclosure shapes the female self; and finally, how Stoddard revises Bronté’s purportedly happy ending in domestic isolation and romantic transcendence. The Romantic Heroine and the Liminal Domestic Space Both Bronté and Stoddard present the domestic alternately as an empowering space offering the possibility of the female heroine’s tran- scendence of social, economic, and psychic boundaries repressing in- dividualism, but also as a nightmare place of enclosure, repetition, and submersion of self for the preservation of others. The first scene of each novel suggests this double valence, as each focuses on a young heroine's impressions of the domestic sphere she inhabits, Jane Eyre’s position in the window seat of her aunt’s home, Gateshead, has be- come iconic for twentieth-century readers of Victorian novels. Enclosed in privacy on one side by a scarlet drapery, and on the other side “protect[ed], but not separat[ed] . . . from the drear November day” by a window (8), we see Jane’s desire to transcend the confines of the domestic sphere by looking at a picture book of British birds in north-134 Louise Penner ern regions, but we also sense the importance of her being “‘protect[ed |” by her position within that sphere from elements outside the domestic. The heroine’s liminal place shows both the perils and privileges of the domestic sphere, suggesting ambivalence about the heroine’ s position either inside and outside of it. Similarly, in The Morgesons’ first scene, Cassy attempts to escape the “oppressive” domestic atmosphere she inhabits by reading a book entitled The Northern Regions (6). Unlike Jane, Cassy narrates her dis- gust with her position within this domestic scene, apparently unaware at this time of the protection that it offers her. Later in the novel, Cassy complicates her early impression of the domestic as a place of oppres- sion and confinement through her reactions to different domestic spaces, particularly after her mother’s death and her father’s financial collapse. As will become clear, the Morgesons’ domestic situation is much more precarious than young Cassy ever realizes. Nevertheless, her position within the domestic sphere in her parent’s home is almost always pre- sented as being much more secure than young Jane's. As an orphan living in her aunt’s home, Jane’s social position leaves her without the rights of the rest of the family, as her cousin's brutally denying her access to his family’s books so clearly illustrates. Cassy’s economic position as well as her experience of feeling oppressed within the feminine domestic arena are, at first glance, much milder versions of Jane’s experiences. While Jane’s tormentor, Reed, goes so far as to hurl her book at her, knocking her unconscious, Cassy’s oppressors, her beloved mother and her mother’s sister, merely ex- press their disapproval at her reading “unprofitable [secular] stories” (6) while they, in a stereotypically domestic scene, knit and read eccle- siastical literature. Nevertheless, Stoddard is, in a sense, writing in ac cord with Charlotte Bronté’s own transformation of the traditional gothic romance plot, where fear of boredom, rather than, or as well as, fear of physical harm, poses the major threat to the heroine’s happiness.° Each novel thus provides its own version of what Paul Morrison has called the “domestic carceral.”* Both Jane and Cassy particularly fear being “becalmed” by others and thus losing their capacity for self-expression and selt-possession,’ Each heroine’s rebellion against her oppressors marks the begin- nings of her individualism, her desire for self-possession and expre: sion. As Adrienne Rich says of Jane’s response to being locked in the red room, “it is at this moment that the person we are finally to know as Jane Eyre is born: a person determined to choose her life with dignity,a a Studies in American Fiction 1 integrity and pride.’* Stoddard presents Cassy’s streak of individualism as also developing in response to her feeling of oppression; unlike Jane Eyre’s, however, that individualism has a complicated previous history in the lives of her parents and their ancestors. Cassy initially associates individualism with the sea and with her father’s side of the family be- cause she admires her great-grandfather Locke Morgeson, whom she imagines as a bearer of “the spirit of progress” because she is told he “had the rudiments of a Founder” (9). She imagines that he was “born under the influence of the sea, while the rest of the tribe inherited the character of the landscape” (9). And yet Cassy also senses in her mother “an indescribable air of individuality” (17) that she cannot seem to understund or identify. Much of The Morgesons is concerned with Cassy’s attempt to articulate this “indescribable” individuality in rela tion not only to her mother, but to herself and the other female figures in her life. Individuality, Family, and Domestic Economics As we will see, Cassy’s family history functions both as a way to begin to understand her strong sense of individualism and as a kind of reality check to the romance plot that at times threatens to subsume the realistic elements of the noyel. For this reason, Cassy’s family history actually operates in a way that is directly opposite to the way Jane’s functions in Jane Eyre to help bring about the ostensibly happy roman- tic ending in seclusion. Whereas the introduction of Jane’s long-lost uncle late in the novel almost magically provides her with the eco- nomic equality that she needs in order to return to Rochester, Cassy’s family relations complicate her economic situation late in the novel and her ability to choose her own life. Even Jane Eyre’s inheritance, however, is not without its basis in ceonomic realism, foras Terry Eagleton, Gayatri Spivak, Susan Meyer, and others have noted, the inheritance Jane receives from her uncle comes from the British colonial trade.’ Fairfax Rochester’ s fortune too comes through his arranged marriage to his Jamaican wife, Bertha. The connection between Jane and Bertha is significant for the eco- nomic and colonialist emphasis that it brings to the text, but also, as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have famously argued, because Bertha’s confinement within the attic of Rochester’s home serves as a symbolic parallel to Jane’s potential position as Rochester’s economi-136 Louise Penner cally dependent second wife lodged in Thornfield. Gilbert and Gubar connect Jane’ s rebelliousness to Bertha’ s maniacal laughter, which Jane hears as she stands on the roof of Thornfield reflecting on women's need for “action,” “exercise for their faculties,” and “a field for their efforts.”'" The thematic connections between “stagnation” and the “too rigid restraint” that Jane says is unfairly demanded of the female self and Bertha’s violent self-destruction as a means to ending her domes- tic imprisonment have been extensively treated in Madwoman and else- where. I mention these connections, however, because they resonate significantly in Stoddard’s novel, particularly as they suggest that the most effective means to ending domestic imprisonment is to destroy the structures that separate the domestic from the social—the inside from the outside worlds. In Bertha’s case, though perhaps not as de- finitively in Jane’s, this action is tantamount to self-annihilation. Bertha’s is only the first model of female transcendence of the domestic sphere that Jane Eyre proposes, but it is one that resonates with the many accounts in The Morgesons of women negotiating their relationships to the domestic. While Bertha’s actions symbolize fe- male rebellion against domestic confinement, in Stoddard’s novel that confinement is more directly connected to the economics of the do- mestic sphere. The different ways that each woman in The Morgesons functions in regard to the domestic reflect specific nineteenth-century attitudes towards the private, feminine sphere, and particularly its rela- tion to the market economy. The domestic sphere, family, and eco- nomics are interrelated much more overtly here than in Jane’s story. Early on in the novel, the adult narrator Cassy places herself within her family’s history in Surrey, a history that she finds boring and indis- tinctive. Speculating about the first Morgeson in Surrey, Cassy pre- sents that family record as being more fully preserved in domestic traditions than in masculine labor or commerce: So our name was in perpetuation, though none of our race ever made a mark in his circle, or attained a place among the great ones of his. day. The family recipes for curing herbs and hams, and making cor- dials, were in better preservation than the memory of their makers. It is certain that they were not a progressive or changeable family. No tradition of individuality remains concerning them (8). Cassy finds the Morgesons uninteresting precisely because their his- tory is preserved in the passing on of domestic traditions. Apart from the great-grandfather whose individuality she so admires, she finds noStudies in American Fiction 137 other interesting figures among her ancestors. Her dislike of the do- mestic traditions, therefore, partially stems from her own inability to distinguish her relatives from one another over time: the housewives and their servants who passed on these traditions are themselves for- gotten, and their identities become inseparable one from another while the products of their labor produce a kind of continuity and stability that preserves the domestic over time. In Domestic Individualism, Gillian Brown asserts the importat of continuity and stability as pri erving forces for the domestic sphei and as important contrasts to the instability of the growing market economy. As Brown explains, the masculine market economy encour- ages the circulation of property (including slaves") and financial risk while the feminine economy of domesticity offers stability and isola- tion from the insecurities of the market. In Brown’s words, “women offer a preserving rather than a desiring version of economics, family protection rather than ventures endangering family stability” (30). Stoddard’ s novel, published in 1862, strongly reflects these same anxi- eties regarding the growing market economy’s potential threat to the domestic sphere, as becomes evident when Cassy’s father, Locke Jr., sets himself apart from the rest of the nondescript family by his great success as a merchant. As he becomes more and more successful, he moves his family to a larger home, where family privacy and seclu- sion, considered so important by nineteenth-century proponents of do- mestic ideology," begin almost immediately to erode. As Cassy says of their changing situation, “a rich Morgeson was a new feature in the family annals,” and consequently “as his business extended, our visit- ing list extended” (22). Cassy’s description of the effects of her father’s market success on her houschold suggests a diluting of the purity of the family home with the constant arrival of guests. “Distant relations,” “infirm old ladies,” the “inconsolable” wives of other sea captains, “ministers,” and other “chance visitors,” all arrive, anxious to take advantage of the hospitality of their only rich relation or friend (22). Cassy details the effects on her young self of the sudden and constant influx of guests: “Instead of the impression which my after-experience suggests to me to seek, I recall arrivals and departures, an eternal smell of cookery, a perpetual changing of beds and the small talk of vacant minds” (23). As a result, “there was,” Cassy claims, “but small opportunity to cultivate affinities; they were forever disturbed” (23), The invasion of the Morgesons’ home by others as a result of the father’s commercial138 Louise Penner represents how people’s lives, particularly women’s, are set circulation outside of their own domestic sphere by successes and failures in the market, and it is also a sign of how the domestic sphere becomes part of that market circulation. The influx of visitors to the Morgesons' home illustrates how home itself can take on negative quali- ties of the market: transitoriness, instability, and the resulting inability of family members to “cultivate affinities” to one another. Even the dining room, which Cassy describes as being the space in the home where one could always find community when one desired, becomes, in her words, “a caravansary where people dropped in and out on their way to some other place” (24). Locke Jr,’s financial success has other effects on himself and his family apart from destabilizing the domestic arena, effects that further threaten the family’s relationships to one another. First, his success leads him to become an avid participant in consumer culture, spending large amounts of money on clothes and furnishings for his family, making them quite literally a model family for their poorer Surrey neigh- bors. As a result of his success, his time is spent either working to earn money (Cassy claims that he, himself, never spends time with their guests as he is always working) or compulsively spending to distin- guish them from their neighbors. Mrs. Morgeson’s time is, as a result, almost entirely spent entertaining while the “little systematic house- keeping” that is done in their home is left to the family servants Hepsey and Temperance (23).'? As Brown has argued, the family’s inability to maintain good housekeeping is a sign of the instability brought about by the entrance of market values into the domestic realm. The family’s connections to the traditional domestic sphere and even to one another are clearly strained and confused by the burden of their father’s eco- nomic success. The family’s alienation is at the same time both a cause and a re- sult ofeach member’ s individualism, Cassy and Veronica’s unique per- sonalities develop partly as a result of the neglect of their parents, and their parents’ neglect in turn derives from their own individualism their father’s is represented by conomic success; their mother’s is left sig- nificantly, as Cassy says, “indescribable” (17). Cassy recognizes that Veronica’s and her own proper domestic educations have been stunted by cach parent’s neglect, though the two forms of neglect themselves differ: Veronica and I grew up ignorant of practical or economical ways. We never saw money, never went shopping. Mother was indifferentStudies in American Fiction 139 in regard to much of the business of ordinary life which children are taught to understand. Father and mother both stopped at the same point with us, but for a different reason; father, because he saw noth- ing beyond the material, and mother, because her spiritual insight was confused and perplexing. (23-24) Cassy sets up her father and mother’s limitations along gendered lines of material versus spiritual affinities. She does not say but implies that her father’s obsession with materialism and market success helps to foster the confusion that she recognizes in her mother's sense of the world. Although Cassy is unable to define what the “indescribable air of individuality” (17) is that she recognizes within her mother, she does present it as somehow an obstacle to her mother’s ability to understand or accept completely the domestic sphere she inhabits. Stoddard’s mud- dying of the separation of public and private spheres intensifies and complicates Mrs. Morgeson’s sense of alienation: her perplexed sense of the world ultimately results in her self-alienation. Cassy says of her mother that, as a result of her “indifferen{ce] to the world” she be- comes “to herself a self-tormentor” (17, my emphasis). Mrs. Morgeson echoes this sentiment when, in trying to explain to Cassy her desire to “cultivat{e]” in her daughters behavior different to her own, she enig- matically expresses the conflict she feels between her individual will and the social pressures of the domestic sphere: “How miserable was my youth! Tt is too late for me to make ny attempt at cultivation. T have no wish that way. Yet now I feel sometimes as if T were leaving the confines of my own life to go I know not whither, to do I know not what” (72, my empha: That Mrs. Morgeson should feel that the twanscendence of the “confines of [her] own life” should be happening to her without knowing where it could possibly take her, without sens- ing a specific “will” towards any particular object, speaks to the almost complete loss of her sense of self and of her own desires. In a sense, Mrs. Morgeson’s self-alienation has a parallel in the figure of the madwoman Bertha Mason, who is alienated from herself through madness and therefore apparently incapable of rationally ar- ticulating her rage at domestic confinement. Yet Mary Morgeson's “confusion” as a result of, among other things, the market economy's entrance into her domestic sphere is harder to interpret than it might at first seem. In Bertha’s case, domestic confinement is clearly a forced enclosure that brings about not only her self-destruction but also the destruction of the domestic scene of her imprisonment, s if the escape140 Louise Penner from the domestic carceral required the destruction of the boundary between inside and outside worlds. In Mrs. Morgeson’s case, by con- trast, it is not clear that enforcing rather than erasing the boundaries between inside and outside, home and market, would not be a better strategy for attaining self-knowledge and self-possession Enforcing a complete separation of public and private spheres ap- pears to be the strategy by which Veronica preserves her sense of self- possession. Veronica, who rarely leaves her home and instead creates images of the outside world within her room to educate herself, ap- pears to maintain rigid control of the space she occupies. Outside ele- ments only enter her private room by her own reproduction of them She has blue silk curtains and a green carpet and to imitate the sky and “the carpet of the earth” (134). Her walls are “ash-colored” with “pencilled lines,” leading Cassy to comment that “she had cloudy days probably” (134). Veronica likes the enclosed nature of their domestic situation because, as she says, “if the landscape were wider, T could never learn it” (135). While their mother seems to have lost any sense of her own desires, Veronica is painfully aware of the presence of hers and tries desperately to control them through strict self-denial. Thus, when the family goes shopping, Veronica buys things for poor missionary children rather than spending exorbitant amounts of money on herself as Cassy does. Veronica also claims that she will live only on toast in order to improve her “temper” (52) Veronica is both an agoraphobic and anorexic figure who is only able to negotiate the relationship between home and market by radi- cally separating them. Speaking of another such figure in nineteenth- century literature, Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener, Brown provides a useful explanation of the connections between the logic of anorexia and agoraphobia and nineteenth-century domestic ideology: [Bartleby’s] radical refusal to partake of, and participate in, the world makes [him] “self-possessed” [54] and impenetrable: The uaditional goal of domestic life. Simultaneously fulfilling and negating the logic of agoraphobia—establishing sclfhood in the extinction of com- merce—anorexia secures the agoraphobic division of self from world, home from market (Brown, 189). This description could equally apply to Veronica, who also assures her self-possession through denial, through her assertion of her body’s independence from objects that she desires. Interestingly, however,Studies in American Fiction 141 and contrary to the biological facts of actual anorexia, Veronica be- comes pregnant and thus must not have stopped menstruating (or al Jeast she must have begun menstruating again close to the time of her marriage to Ben Somers). After Veronica decides to marry Ben, Cassy notices that Veronica's “love for order” has been “subdued,” that she looks strangely “dispossessed,” and even at supper is “hardly aware that she was eating like an ordinary mortal” (158-59). After her mar- riage, Veronica's fantasy of complete self-enclosure thus ultimately and even tragically fails, as the birth of her apparently mentally re- tarded baby (probably a result of Ben Somers’ alcoholism) and her hopeless dependency on her sister by the novel’s end would suggest. And yet the novel is highly ambivalent when, after the death of her husband, Alice Morgeson takes the opposite strategy towards achiev- ing self-possession. While Veronica attempts to maintain her own through complete self-enclosure, Alice takes control of her life by eras- ing the boundaries between her domestic sphere and exterior elements. I grant that the novel’s ambivalence towards her is partly the result of Cassy’s former romantic relationship with her husband, but Alice’ s actions are portrayed as threatening for other reasons. On Charles Morgeson’s death, Alice assumes control of his mills and even leaves her children when she goes away from home, thus deviating from the ideal of domesticity and defying the strict separation of spheres she had upheld before her husband's death. Her marriage to Cassy’s father after his financial collapse not only breaks up Cassy’s relationship with him, but it also marks Alice’s acceptance of the market within the pri- vate sphere." Veronica’s marriage to Ben Somers, though presented as more of a love match, actually serves a similar purpose, for Ben's money financially secures the two sisters’ home. Cassy’s attempt at maintaining her individualism, her self{-posses- sion, is affected by and depicted in opposition to the desires and behav- iors of the other female figures that surround her. Like Jane Eyre, Cassy retreats into domestic enclosure and marriage at the end of the novel, but does this retreat signify domestic confinement or home protection? preservation or annihilation of the self? Eugenia C. De Lamotte argues that Jane Eyre's ending in seclusion at Ferndean represents the possibility of “romantic transcendence through domestic enclosure,”'’ but is this claim true of The Morgesons? or, indeed, of Jane Eyre?142 Louise Penner Individualism and Transcendence Despite the emphasis on economics and the obvious disjunction made between the search for self-possession and financial security in The Morgesons, Stoddard herself rejected the efforts of those who wanted to claim her as a new kind of realist author. As in Jane Eyre, the heroine’s childhood desire to transcend the domestic sphere is, to a degree, translated into romantic attachment as she grows into adoles- cence and adulthood. Sandra Zagerell claims that ““Cassandra’s sexu- ality makes her, like Jane Eyre, one of the rare nineteenth-century heroines who matures beyond the attractions of Byronism to attain a love at once equal and complete” (Zagarell, 53). What exactly Zagarell means here by “complete” love is not clear, but she seems to refer to an ideal of romantic transcendence that unites two souls in defiance of social convention. Jane Eyre expresses this ideal to Rochester in the edenic scene in which he first proposes marriage to her, Here, Jane presents her relationship with Rochester as one that defies convention and that presupposes an equality of souls: Do you think because 1 am poor, obscure, plain, and little, Lam soul- less and heartless'W—You think wrong[!]—I have as much soul and full as much heart! . . . 1 am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh:—it is my spirit that addresses your spirit: just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God’s feet, equal,—as we are! (256) This statement of equality is important both for the quality of romantic transcendence it suggests and for the way in which it represents the pair’s desire for one another as unique and in opposition to convention. In Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel, Nancy Armstrong claims that the distinctiveness of Jane and Rochester's de- sire for one another is a landmark in the history of the novel because it explicitly stresses the personal content of that desire over its social form, marriage. Stoddard also presents Cassy and Charles Morgeson’s desire for one another as highly particularized in quality and force, though not by virtue of their “plain[nes: Rather, they are linked by their recogni- tion of each other's uniqueness and individuality, a recognition that is clearly missing in Charles’s conventionally perfect marriage with Alice. Charles perceives immediately Cassy’s special affinity for the sea, a symbol of both her individuality and sexuality, and his first words toStudies in American Fiction 143 her inquire about it: “He asked me if I knew whether the sea had any influence upon me; I replied that I had not thought of it. ‘There are so many things you have not thought of,’ he answered, ‘that this is not strange’” (62). Like Rochester’s attraction to Jane, Charles’s almost mystical recognition of, and attraction to, Cassy’s uniqueness appear to signal a similar kind of love that transcends conventionality and even rationality. The Morgesons takes this idea to its apparent limit by implying that Cassy’s desire for Charles is somehow responsible for his death when a wild horse overturns his carriage. Soon after Charles gives Cassy a ring in the presence of his wife (and here The Morgesons seems to be imitating Jane Eyre’s repetition of mock or bizarre wedding scenes'*), a wild horse he cannot tame arrives at his home. One suspects that the ring, representative of a desire on his part to possess or tame Cassy for himself, fails to control her and thus the horse, and that his death is the result of that failure. Their desire thus seems to have a kind of force that “acts on the social surface of experience,” as Armstrong, says of Jane Fyre’s (194). Stoddard’s suggestion of the possibility of the transcendence of conventionality and rationality through romantic love seems clearly to be in imitation of Bronté. And yet Stoddard revises Bronté’s ideal of transcendence by complicating the reader’ s notion of what or who Cassy desires. Armstrong has argued that the particular achievement of Char- lotte and Emily Bronté in the history of the novel is that “at this mo- ment in cultural history |the time in which the Bronté’s are writing] desire suddenly became the metonymic exploration and discovery of more or less adequate substitutes for the original object of desire” (192). In other words, in the case of Jane Eyre, Jane and Rochester's desire serves as a force that is so powerful it dominates over all other desires in the book, thus making the representations of other desires simply a series of substitutions for that primary one. In The Morgesons, how- ever, that primary desire, though also represented through a series of substitutions in the figures of Alice, Veronica, and Mary Morgeson, is much more difficult to locate as it is more explicitly wrapped up in each character's quest for self-possession Perhaps the clearest illustration of the difference between each novel's ideal of transcendence comes from a comparison of two of their strikingly similar scenes that invoke the supernatural. Jane Eyre initially turns down the marriage proposal of St. John Rivers, one that she knows will require her to sacrifice to him all power to control her144 Louise Penner own life. Just as her resistance to him is clearly beginning to wane, she mystically, impossibly, hears Rochester’s voice crying to her from many miles away, “Jane, Jane, Jane” (424). The reader later learns that, on the same night, Rochester did indeed cry out her name from Thornfield, This moment suggests a kind of spiritual communication between the two characters. The Morgesons contains a similar moment that helps illuminate the difference in the primary desires of the heroines. Cassandra hears a specter cry out, “Hail, Cassandra! Hail!” as she gazes out at the sea towards the end of the novel (214), just before she decides to “give up [her]sel” in order to “reign, and serve also” in her family home after the death of her mother (215). It might appear that Cassandra's deci- sion to give up her individualism to care for her family reverses Jane’s decision not to sacrifice herself to the “iron shroud” (408) of St. John’s matriage proposal. The cry Jane hears urges her back to Rochester and their supposed union of equals;!” the cry Cassandra hears, by contrast, causes her spirit to react with a kind of ecstatic elation to “have then at life” claiming se/f-possession— “we will have—all!” (214-15). As the timing of the death of Charles Morgeson suggests, it i ‘assy’s indi- viduality and self-possession that provide a force that might allow for the possibility of transcendence. However, unlike her mother or even Jane Eyre, Cassy realizes the impossibility of ever “leaving the confines of [her] own life” (72) in either a spiritual or a mystical union of equals. Instead, Cassy resigns herself to the notion that she will “reign, and serve also” in her home, a paradox that suggests both her self-possession and subordination of her own wants to the needs or desires of others (215). Though she does voluntarily seclude herself wi in the domestic sphere, that decision is neither entirely positively nor negatively valenced. Her position as fam- ily caretaker restores domestic order at the cost of her realization that she will never fully control her own life. This comparison of connections made between the domestic sphere and the possession and articulation of the heroine's self in Jane Eyre and The Morgesons reveals ways that Elizabeth Stoddard apparently revised Charlotte Bronté's ideal of romantic transcendence in domes- tic seclusion. While it is true that Bronté also undercuts her happy end- ing, most obviously in the physical mutilation of Rochester, her investment is still clearly in illustrating the possibility of a desire be- tween two people that transcends social and economic pressures and conventions, though perhaps at some cost to the integrity and individu-Studies in American Fiction 145 ality of the female self. Stoddard’s novel, while also considering the possibility of that kind of transcendence, ultimately cannot let it over- come the economic and social pressures that threaten the heroine's control or possession of both the domestic sphere and the female self. If Cassy’s decision to “reign, and serve also” in the domestic sphere suggests a kind of impossible paradox, it is because Stoddard wants to represent the domestic as neither entirely a place of nightmare-like confinement, nor a place offering romantic transcendence. If one reads the ending of The Morgesons as representing Cassy’s ultimate denial of her own individualism, one must acknowledge that this conclusion does not reflect a unified, unequivocal perception of the function of the domestic in either nineleenth-century America or in Stoddard’s representation of Cassy’s life. Both Jane Eyre and The Morgesons are aware of the potential benefits of the heroine’s seclu- sion, even protection, within the domestic sphere, as Jane Eyre’s os- tensibly happy conclusion at Ferndean (however problematically) illustrates. Stoddard’ s emphasis on the economic instability of the do- mestic sphere relentlessly puts the romantic heroine's story through a kind of reality test. Her representation of Cassy’s unrealized desire for transcendence of her sphere clearly articulates the unromantic version of the heroine’s will to self-possession and a union of equals. Thus the ending of The Morgesons presents an alternative realist ending to the romantic heroine’s story despite Stoddard’ s insistence on the romantic nature of her work, Notes ' Zagarell focuses on Bronté and Stoddard’s reversals of gothic iconography, an issue that I will only address tangentially. See Sandra Zagarell, “The Repossession of a Heritage: Elizabeth Stoddard’s The Morgesons,” Studies in American Fiction 13 (1985), 45-56. Blizabeth Stoddard, The Morgesons and Other Writings, Published and Un published, eds, Lawrence Buell and Sandra A. Zagarell (Philudelphia: Uniy, of Penn- sylvania Press, 1985). Hereafter cited parenthetically. Charlotte Bronté, Jane Eyre (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987). Hereaiter cited parenthetically. * Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford Univ, Press, 1987). Hereafter cited parentheticully. Gillian Brown, Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley Univ. of California Press, 1990). Hereafter cited parenthetically > Blizabeth Stoddard to Fdmund Stedman, April 21, 1888, quoted in Dawn Henwond,146 Louise Penner “First-Person Storytelling in Elizabeth Steddard's The Morgesans: Realism, Romance and the Psychology of the Narrating Self,” ESQ 41 (1995), 41-63, Henwood quotes from James Matlack, “The Literary Career of Elizabeth Barstow Stoddard” (PhD diss. Yale Univ., 1967), 218 * Most of The Morgesons critics, Stacy Alaimo and Sandra Zagarell in particular, concentrate on the novel as a feminist bildungsroman, See Stacy Alaimo, “Elizabeth Stoddard’s The Morgesons: A Feminist Dialogue of Bildung and Descent,” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 8, no. | (1991), 29-37. See also Sybil Wier, “The Morgesons: A Neglected Female Bildungsroman,” NEQ 49 (1976), 427-39. Maurice Kramer focuses on the figure of Stoddard herself, and ues the figures of Cassy and Veronica to Emily Dickinson in ways that, however interesting, are not particularly revealing in terms of nineteenth-cemtury domesticity and domestic eco- nomics. See Kramer, “Alone at Home with Elizabeth Stoddard,” American Transcen- dental Quarterly 47-48 (1980), 159-70. Susan K. Harris attempts to place Stoddard’ s writing in the context of other nincteenth-cemtury U.S. women writers though also without focus on the economics of the domestic sphere. See Harris, “Stoddard’s The Morgesons: A Contextual Evaluation,” ESQ 31 (1985), 11-22. More recently, Henwood discusses the specific achievement of Stoddard’ first-person narratorial style and the difficulty of plucing her work alongside that of her contemporaries, both writers of domestic and traditionally canonical fiction. See Henwood, 41-63 * For more on thit of Nineteenth. see Eugenia C. De Lamoue, Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study tury Gothic (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990), ‘aul Morrison, “Enclosed in Openness: Northanger Abbey and the Domestic Carer Texas Studies in Language and Literature 23, no. | (Spring 1991), 1-23. 7 De Lamotte (205) draws attention to this quotation, * See Adricane Rich, “Jane Eyre; The Temptations of a Motherless Woman” in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Setected Prose, 1966-1978 (New York: Norton, 1978), 465. * Terry Eagleton, “Jane Eyre’s Power Struggles” in Jane Eyre, 2” ed., ed, Richard Dunn (New York: Norton, 1987), 491-96; Susan Meyer, “Colonialism and the Figu- rative Strategy of Jane Eyre,” in Macropolitics of Nineteenth-Century Literature: Na- tionallism, Exoticism, Imperialism, ed. Johnathan Arac and Harriet Ritvo (Philadelphia Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 159-83; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Three Woten’s Texts: A Critique of Imperialism,” Critical Inquiry 12 (1985), 243-61 Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Imagination (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979), 110. More recently Susan Wolstenholme and Kari J. Winter have addressed this connee- tion, Winter suggests x kind of “sisterhood” between Jane and Bertha in Subjects of Slavery, Agents of Change: Women and Power in Gothic Novels and Slave Narra- tives, 1790-1865 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992). Wolstenholme inter- estingly suggests that Jane and Bertha function as doubles “through the image of the nightmare, which becomes a fluid position where they exchange positions” (65). This interpretation recalls Veronica’ s dream about « man who looks like her future husbandStudies in American Fiction 147 Ben, but who is apparently Desmond, ‘he marks on Veronica’s arm that Cassandra sees after Veronica tells her of the dream suggest the same relation between nightmare and repressed embodiment that Wolstenholme suggests. See Wolstenhome, Gothic Revisions: Writing Women as Readers (New York: State Univ. of New York Press. 1993) * This comment raises the issue of slavery, one that seems to be almost entirely re- pressed from Stoddard’s text, which is surprising given that The Morgesons was pub- lished a year after the start of the civil war. The racial otherness of Bertha is not present in Stoddard’ s depiction of Alice Morgeson. Brown discusses some of these figures, of whom Catherine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, seem to be the most influential. They promoted the “rhetoric of femi- nine difference and spiritual mission” with regard to women being moral exemplars preserving the domestic sphere from the influence of the marketplace (23) " Brown argues that nineteenth-century texts like Uncle Tom's Cabin represent good housekeeping (sign of a stable, secure domestic economy) as opposed to the insecure market economy. " Brown discusses this as “absorption of credit relations into the domestic circle” (180), 'S DeLamotte, 227. ‘© Armstrong discusses these wedding scenes as examples of Bronté’s use of substitu- tion in illustrating Rochester and June’ s desire for one another, a strategy that, she says “expands the semiotic space for representing desire” and repression in the nineteenth century (192). "Iris imteresting to note that the only other instance in Jane Eyre of the presence of supernatural voices is Jane’s dead mother’s voice urging her to “flee temptation” (324) and leave Rochester.