Abstract
Despite the claim that The Household of Bouverie; or, The Elixir of Gold (1860) is “By a Southern Lady,” the novel lacks many of the markers that we have come to associate with southern literature, at least until its later sections. This essay examines Bouverie’s shifting relationship to region, focusing on the role that the Gothic plays in telling a story of spousal abuse that simultaneously indicts the institution of slavery. While it is unlikely that this “southern lady”—writing on the eve of the Civil War—intended to critique the “peculiar institution,” slavery’s ghosts haunt her novel nonetheless.
Keywords
- Spousal abuse
- Southern literature
- National literature
- Slavery
- Pro-slavery
- Enslaved people
- Civil War
- Haunting
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Notes
- 1.
As Bertram Wyatt-Brown notes, writers such as Mary Chesnut, Evans, and Caroline Lee Hentz “are all relatively familiar figures compared with the dozens”—like Warfield—who are “remaining to be reclaimed” (“Female Percys” 178). Wyatt-Brown has worked to bring attention to Warfield, her sister Eleanor, and their very interesting niece, Sarah Ellis Dorsey, largely (but not exclusively) by situating them in relation to their more famous literary descendants, William Alexander Percy and Walker Percy. It is, as Paula Bennett notes, “Thanks to Bertram Wyatt-Brown’s archival efforts” that Warfield’s life “is unusually well-documented” (45).
- 2.
James B. Lloyd offers modest treatment of Warfield in his important compendium, Lives of Mississippi Authors, 1817–1967; see 452–54.
- 3.
Dorsey is an interesting figure in her own right. A prolific author of both fiction and biography, she is perhaps most well-known for housing the former President of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, assisting him as he wrote his memoirs, and eventually bequeathing him her entire estate, including Beauvoir, her home on the Mississippi Gulf coast and today a museum and historical site. For more information on Dorsey, see the chapters devoted to her in Wyatt-Brown, The House of Percy; and Lloyd, 137–40.
- 4.
Catherine Ann Warfield, The Household of Bouverie; Or, the Elixir of Gold. Hereafter cited parenthetically.
- 5.
This is one of many biographical echoes in Household of Bouverie. Others include Camilla’s marriage to Lilian’s grandfather at the young age of 16 (similar to Warfield’s own young marriage) and the depiction of a family patriarch who is powerful, compelling, and emotionally distant. For a discussion of such echoes, see Wyatt-Brown, “Female Tradition,” and The Literary Percys 26–32.
- 6.
Hawthorne made his now infamous remarks in two different letters to his publisher, William Ticknor; see Hawthorne, Letters 304, 308.
- 7.
Although Tardy does not remark on them, there are numerous thematic connections that suggest Warfield had Hawthorne on her mind when writing Bouverie. The disregard of human consequences with which Erastus conducts his experiments are reminiscent of Hawthorne’s Rappacini, for example, and the hand-shaped “crimson” birthmark that “marks” Camilla’s daughter (II: 302) recalls “The Birth-Mark.”
- 8.
After secession, Simms became an ardent supporter of the Confederate cause, once complaining that “I am so much excited in this present condition of things that the labour of the desk is irksome—I go to it with reluctance, and leave it on the slightest pretext” (qtd. in Masur 213). For Rogers, this shift should not be understood as one from nationalism to sectionalism; rather, “Simms was a southern sectionalist who became a southern nationalist” (71). Warfield becomes similarly militant during and after the war.
- 9.
The first two essays were published under the title “Northern Literature,” on October 10 and October 16. The second essays were entitled “Southern Literature,” and appeared on October 30 and November 6. I am indebted to Melissa Homestead for providing transcriptions of these essays, which are only available in archives.
- 10.
“If an author writes for a particular section, if he appeals to the sympathies of that section, if he professes to have special regard for it, in short, if he localizes himself on any ground, ten chances to one he is pronounced a poor fellow by the very community for which he professes to feel so deeply, and left after a little time without a reader anywhere,” Evans insists (“Southern Literature,” October 30).
- 11.
Moss is here discussing Mary Terhune as well as Augusta Jane Evans.
- 12.
Lilian, for example, refers to the “strange, sad, devoted household of Bouverie” as a “mournful hall of Vathek” (I: 166); she also notes that, while she was still in Scotland, her tutor tried to curtail her reading of “objectionable” books, including “Mr. Beckford’s strange book, ‘Vathek’” (I: 173). Published first in French and translated into English in 1786, Vathek is a founding text of the Gothic tradition. Although Warfield eschews Vathek’s debauchery and sensuality, she borrows from Beckford an interest in a compelling, but morally corrupt antihero whose quest for knowledge and power comes at great cost to those around him.
- 13.
For a treatment of Warfield and other southern women poets in relation to Poe, see Paula Bernat Bennett’s very helpful “Gothic Landscapes.”
- 14.
For a reading that places Warfield’s treatment of marital abuse (in Bouverie and in her poetry) in the context of southern patriarchal culture, see Bennett 45–48.
- 15.
See, for example, Morrison, Playing in the Dark; Goddu, Gothic America and “The African American Slave Narrative and the Gothic.”
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———. The Literary Percys: Family History, Gender, and the Southern Imagination. U of Georgia P, 1994.
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Weinauer, E. (2021). The Gothic and the “Southern Lady”: Catherine Warfield’s The Household of Bouverie. In: Elbert, M., Bode, R. (eds) American Women's Regionalist Fiction. Palgrave Gothic. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55552-8_10
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