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With Friends Like These: E. D. E. N. Southworth and Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes’s Pathological Poisoners

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Women in Medicine in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

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Abstract

Crosby examines how two of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s colleagues, E. D. E. N. Southworth and Oliver Wendell Holmes, kept her medical frame for the poisonous woman but nonetheless tried to contain the radical political potential of her medicinal poisoner. Southworth’s novel Vivia; or the Secret of Power reconceived the medically empowered woman as sociopathic, while Holmes’s bestseller, Elsie Venner, presented the mixed-race “Spanish” female poisoner as a medical problem rather than a medical hero. Both worked to maintain the white woman as a pure, all-giving resource for white men, rather than an agent for women’s or minorities’ own power. Stowe answers these arguments with her magnum opus, The Pearl of Orr’s Island, and with My Wife and I, which insist on a cross-racial, self-preserving, and medically-informed female heroism.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Cinders from the Ashes,” The Atlantic Monthly 23 (January, 1869): 116–17.

  2. 2.

    It seems especially likely that a slave character, Minny, from Southworth’s first novel Retribution furnished some hints for Stowe’s characterization of Cassy. On the relationship between Stowe and Southworth, see Regis Louise Boyle, “Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth, Novelist” (PhD diss., Catholic University of America, 1939), 10. For Southworth’s abolitionist politics and their intertwining with Stowe’s see, Paul Christian Jones, “‘This Dainty Woman’s Hand…Red with Blood’: E. D. E. N. Southworth’s The Hidden Hand as Abolitionist Narrative,” ATQ 15, no. 1 (2001): 59–80 and Vicki L. Martin, “E. D. E. N. Southworth’s Serial Novels Retribution and The Mother-in-Law as Vehicles for the Cause of Abolition in the National Era: Setting the Stage for Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” in E. D. E. N. Southworth: Recovering a Nineteenth-Century Popular Novelist, ed. Melissa Homestead and Pamela Washington (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2013), 1–24.

  3. 3.

    Linda Naranjo-Huebl recovers the critics’ overwhelmingly negative reviews of Southworth. They objected specifically to her supposed “wildness” and “her frank depictions of men’s abuse of women, her prodigious output, and her unprecedented popularity, none of which they could control.” She observes that: “The reviews reveal the opinion that literature written by women should adhere to a more restricted code of propriety than other fiction and should target a more limited audience (the family, particularly women and children), not the masses to which Southworth appealed.” Linda Naranjo-Huebl, “The Road to Perdition: E. D. E. N. Southworth and the Critics,” American Periodicals 16, no. 2 (2006): 99, 124.

  4. 4.

    For the most reliable estimate of her output, see Melissa J. Homestead and Vicki L. Martin, “Southworth: A Chronological Bibliography of E. D. E. N. Southworth’s Works Privileging Periodical Publication,” in E. D. E. N. Southworth: Recovering a Nineteenth-Century Popular Novelist, ed. Melissa Homestead and Pamela Washington (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2013), 285.

  5. 5.

    Charlene Avallone, “E. D. E. N. Southworth: An ‘American George Sand’?,” in E. D. E. N. Southworth: Recovering a Nineteenth-Century Popular Novelist, ed. Melissa Homestead and Pamela Washington (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2013), 163.

  6. 6.

    Susan Coultrap-McQuin, Doing Literary Business: American Women Writers in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 50.

  7. 7.

    Quoted in Regis Louise Boyle, “Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth, Novelist” (PhD diss., Catholic University of America, 1939), 12.

  8. 8.

    Ibid., 12.

  9. 9.

    E. D. E. N. Southworth, Vivia; or, the Secret of Power (Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson & Brothers, 1857), 253.

  10. 10.

    Kenneth Salzer, “An Exclusive Engagement: The Personal and Professional Negotiations of Vivia,” in E. D. E. N. Southworth: Recovering a Nineteenth-Century Popular Novelist, ed. Melissa Homestead and Pamela Washington (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2013), 26. Deborah Barker reads Vivia as carrying out a broader attack on elite, masculine literary publishing. Deborah Barker, Aesthetics and Gender in American Literature: Portraits of the Woman Artist (London: Associated University Presses, 2000), 51–63.

  11. 11.

    Southworth, Vivia, 53–54.

  12. 12.

    Ibid., 54.

  13. 13.

    Ibid., 498.

  14. 14.

    Ibid., 514.

  15. 15.

    Ibid., 207, 523.

  16. 16.

    Ibid., 267, 464.

  17. 17.

    Ibid., 54.

  18. 18.

    Ibid., 248–49, 258.

  19. 19.

    Ibid., 215, 267.

  20. 20.

    Ibid., 491.

  21. 21.

    Ibid., 535.

  22. 22.

    Capitola contrasts sharply with the self-effacements of Vivia. Amy Huduck points out that with Capitola, Southworth offers us a female hero in the enfranchising sense that I have noted: she “creates a woman who flaunts her independence, laughs at the overwhelming specter of Holdfast, and survives to tell the story. Capitola is no Hester Prynne, Cora Munro, or Daisy Miller [or Helen Wildman], killed off or restrained as punishment for violation of the established order; she triumphs to show her readers that they too can risk, strive, and succeed.” Kristen Pond argues persuasively that Capitola, in all her brazen outspokenness, “performs a specific challenge to restrictions against women’s ability to talk [or write] when and how they pleased.” Amy E. Huduck, “Challenging the Definition of Heroism in E. D. E. N. Southworth’s The Hidden HandATQ 9, no. 1 (1995): 18 and Kristen Pond, “‘With Badinage and Repartee’: Freeing Women’s Talk through Capitola in Southworth’s The Hidden Hand, Or Capitola the Madcap,” Women’s Studies 42 (2013): 142. Michelle Ann Abate has a fascinating reading of Capitola as a manifestation of “tomboyism”: “a new code of female conduct that stressed proper hygiene, daily exercise, comfortable clothing, and wholesome nutrition” and which was designed to forward eugenicist purposes. Her inclusion of Helen in this category, however, seems premature. Michelle Ann Abate, Tom-Boys: A Literary and Cultural History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008), 6.

  23. 23.

    Burton J. Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America (New York: Norton & Co., 1978).

  24. 24.

    Richard Brodhead, The School of Hawthorne (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990).

  25. 25.

    And thus a close colleague of the Dr. Storer humiliated in the infamous Hannah Kinney trial. See Crosby, Poisonous Muse, 77–111.

  26. 26.

    Much of the biographical information in this and subsequent paragraphs can be found in Eleanor Tilton, The Amiable Autocrat: A Biography of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes (New York: Henry Schuman, 1947).

  27. 27.

    For an analysis of the Atlantic as a key “missionary agent” for high literary culture, see Ellery Sedgwick, The Atlantic Monthly 1857–1909: Yankee Humanism at High Tide and Ebb (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 4.

  28. 28.

    Peter Gibian, Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Culture of Conversation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 2.

  29. 29.

    Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table: Every Man His Own Boswell (Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1891), 2–5.

  30. 30.

    Democrats, like Hawthorne, for instance, routinely condemned would-be canonical texts which “set themselves apart from their age” with a “pretension…of permanence” and argued that the only great literature was “ephemeral” writing, which like a newspaper directly reflects and expresses the common man. Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Old Manse,” in Mosses from an Old Manse, ed. William Charvat, et al. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1974), 20–21.

  31. 31.

    In the midst of the rain of abuse, he wrote a kind letter to Stowe, assuring her that he was “always taking your side in a quiet way.” Oliver Wendell Holmes to Harriet Beecher Stowe, September 25, 1869, in Oliver Wendell Holmes, Life and Letters of Oliver Wendell Holmes, vol. 2, ed., John T. Morse, Jr. (New York: Chelsea House, 1980), 228. For Stowe’s and Holmes’s friendship and their “conversation” in the Atlantic Monthly, see Dorothy Z. Baker, “Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Conversation with the Atlantic Monthly: The Construction of The Minister’s Wooing,” Studies in American Fiction 28, no. 1 (2000): 27–38.

  32. 32.

    Gibian, Culture of Conversation, 155.

  33. 33.

    Journalist Christopher Hayes’s has recently analyzed how meritocracy ultimately undermines merit to create an anti-egalitarian elite. In what he terms “the Iron Law of Meritocracy…eventually the inequality produced by a meritocratic system will grow large enough to subvert the mechanisms of mobility…. Whoever says meritocracy says oligarchy.” Christopher Hayes, Twilight of the Elites: America after Meritocracy (New York: Crown Publishing, 2012), 57. Stephanie P. Browner, Profound Science and Elegant Literature: Imagining Doctors in Nineteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 119.

  34. 34.

    Holmes, Autocrat, 63–64; Dorothy Broaddus, Genteel Rhetoric: Writing High Culture in Nineteenth-Century Boston (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999), 67.

  35. 35.

    Holmes, Autocrat, 64.

  36. 36.

    Quoted in Tilton, Amiable Autocrat, 226–27.

  37. 37.

    Holmes, Autocrat, 66.

  38. 38.

    Holmes, The Professor at the Breakfast Table, 71–2.

  39. 39.

    Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Professor at the Breakfast-Table with the Story of Iris (Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1891), 148, 70, 136–137.

  40. 40.

    Oliver Wendell Holmes, Elsie Venner: A Romance of Destiny (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1891), 8.

  41. 41.

    Agassiz gave international credence to the American School of Anthropology and particularly to the proponents of polygenesis—the theory that so-called inferior races had a separate creation from that of whites—or, as Agassiz put it, blacks and whites were “a separate species.” Robert Wald Sussman, The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea (Cambridge: The President and Fellows of Harvard College, 2014), 38–41. For how Agassiz’s endorsement enabled the backers of polygenesis to win the “battle” with the somewhat less virulent race scientists who backed monogenesis, see Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 133.

  42. 42.

    Bryce Traister and Anne Dalke examine how the “romance of destiny” revolves around Bernard gaining money and cultural power. See Bryce Traister, “Sentimental Medicine: Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Construction of Masculinity,” Studies in American Fiction 27 (1999): 205–28 and Anne Dalke, “Economics, or The Bosom Serpent: Oliver Wendell Holmes’s ‘Elsie Venner: A Romance of Destiny,’” ATQ 1, no. 2 (1988): 57–68. Gibian argues that Holmes saw John Quincy Adams’ defeat by Andrew Jackson as an infuriating loss for the “intellect,” and he seems “to have gone on to refight that contest—in dialogue form, at the breakfast-table or in the dinner-club—for the rest of his life.” Gibian, Culture of Conversation, 152.

  43. 43.

    Joan Burbick, Healing the Republic: The Language of Health and the Culture of Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 242.

  44. 44.

    Critics have noted that the novel works to establish a new professional, masculine authority—in medicine and literature—by defeating the feminine. For the novel’s assertion of a masculine medical hegemony, see Diane Herndl, Invalid Women: Figuring Feminine Illness in American Fiction and Culture, 1840–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 106–110 and Traister, “Sentimental Medicine,” 205–228. Traister further argues that Bernard uses Elsie for a “male medical self-fashioning” that “might inform the antebellum male profession of literary authorship more generally” (2-7-208). For the novel’s (still awkward) assertion of realism and masculinity over feminine sentiment, see Cynthia J. Davis, “The Doctor Is In: Medical Insight, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Elsie Venner,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 24, no. 2 (2002): 177–193.

  45. 45.

    Holmes, Elsie Venner, 423, 194.

  46. 46.

    Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (New York: The Modern Library, 1906), 257.

  47. 47.

    Holmes, Elsie Venner, 105.

  48. 48.

    This plot self-consciously revisits Keats’s Lamia but with a fan-fiction-like attempt to radically revise the ur-text’s perceived ideological failings. The tragedy of the poem is driven by Lycius’s and Apollonius’s exertion of a tyrannical power over Lamia, but Holmes’s novel reasserts Philostratus’s moral: masculine power, properly backed up by a homosocial alliance, must control the dangerous poisonous woman. Unlike Lycius, Bernard heeds the patriarchal (or professional) advice offered him, rejects Elsie, and exerts his own power over her. For the links between Elsie Venner and Keats’s Lamia (and Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter”), see Kathleen Gallagher, “The Art of Snake Handling: Lamia, Elsie Venner, and ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter,’” Studies in American Fiction 3 (1975): 51–64 and Margaret Hallissy, “Poisonous Creature: Holmes’s Elsie Venner,” Studies in the Novel 17 (1985): 406–19. For a detailed argument about this particular writerly exchange between Holmes and Hawthorne, see Taylor Stoehr, Hawthorne’s Mad Scientists: Pseudoscience and Social Life in Nineteenth-Century Life and Letters, (Hamden: Archon Books, 1978) 119–120, 130. Holmes also included a lecture on Keats in his series of Lowell lectures on poets and poetry. Unfortunately, this lecture has been lost, but Samuel Hayakawa recovers fragmentary accounts from newspaper reports. These accounts emphasize Holmes’s critical “tenderness” (286) toward Keats. See Samuel I. Hayakawa, “Holmes’s Lowell Institute Lectures,” American Literature 8 (1936): 281–90.

  49. 49.

    Ibid., 226, 228.

  50. 50.

    Holmes, Elsie Venner, 309–310.

  51. 51.

    Most modern commentators have found Bernard’s behavior problematic, blaming him for his failure to accept the exceptional woman and his self-interested and brutal rejection of her, but Michael Weinstein argues that Holmes is the one at fault and contends that, “Were Holmes to have rescued Elsie, he would have had to affirm a woman of great strength, which he was obviously incapable of doing when he wrote the novel.” Michael A. Weinstein, The Imaginative Prose of Oliver Wendell Holmes (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006), 88.

  52. 52.

    This narrative seems to go well beyond even Democratic poisoner narratives in its overtly punitive misogyny. For instance, when Dr. Baglioni cons Giovanni into murdering Beatrice in Hawthorne’s “Rapaccini’s Daughter,” the narrator Aubépine at least offers some critical commentary on the killing.

  53. 53.

    Holmes, Elsie Venner, 446, 262, 447.

  54. 54.

    Ibid., 446, 457.

  55. 55.

    For example, one magazine piece records the antics of a little girl who surreptitiously reads Elsie Venner and decides that she, too, is a poisonous lamia—uncomfortably attesting to the novel’s power and to how “everybody” was reading it. Frank Lee Benedict, “Unlucky Bab,” Peterson’s Magazine 47, no. 4 (1865): 288–295.

  56. 56.

    Harriet Beecher Stowe to Oliver Wendell Holmes, September 9, 1860, in Charles Edward Stowe, Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe (Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2004), 359–360.

  57. 57.

    Oliver Wendell Holmes to Harriet Beecher Stowe, September, 13, 1860, in Holmes, Life and Letters, vol. 1, 263–265.

  58. 58.

    Not only did he defend her in the Byron controversy, she made sure to affirm her solidarity with his liberal religious principles after he was blasted by reactionary critics. Harriet Beecher Stowe to Oliver Wendell Holmes, February, 18, 1861, in Charles Edward Stowe, Life, 360–362. Also, Holmes’s description of her literary project as “colonizing” suggests that he was recasting her work to better line up with his, as well. Their letters exhibit a tug-of-war dynamic, in which they each try to redefine the other as an ideological ally.

  59. 59.

    See, for example, Albert Smith, The Poisoners of Paris (1849) and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Lucretia; or The Children of the Night (1846), which feature Italian and French poisoners. Also, recall Charles MacKay’s insistent connection of poisoning to Roman ladies.

  60. 60.

    American pamphlet writers also evinced a fascination with the Borgias, sometimes because of the opportunity their story afforded for explicit anti-Catholic propaganda, but even then the families were singled out as “Spanish wolves!” Caesar Borgia; or, The Times of Pope Alexander VI. An Italian Romance. Translated from the French. (New York: H. G. Daggers, 1845), 5. See also, One Link in the Chain of Apostolic Succession; or, The Crimes of Alexander Borgia (Boston: E. W. Hinks & Co., 1854) and its fabulously loony “Dedication”: “This Work, a Revelation of the Borgias, is Dedicated to Archbishop Hughes, as a Token of Eternal Enmity! With the Hope that it will be Instrumental in Awakening Americans to their Duty, and in Forming a Bulwark of Defence against Foreign and Papal Aggression around the Rights of all Protestant Americans.”

  61. 61.

    Many of Barclay’s and Orton’s pamphlets, for instance, include “Spanish” characters or take their protagonists to Cuba, Mexico, or California. For a few quick examples, see Orton’s Grovenor I. Layton, Margaret Waldegrave, and Ellen Irving and Barclay’s Eleanor Burton and Madelaine H. Everett, as well as William C. Murdock’s Mary B. Thorn.

  62. 62.

    Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 208–228. Amy Greenberg notes that in the 1840s and 50s antebellum Americans were particularly fascinated by Latinas and their supposed sexual charms. Holmes portrays Elsie very much along these exoticized and sexualized lines, most noticeably when he has her performing wild and disturbing Spanish dances . Amy Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 112–123.

  63. 63.

    Quoted in Shelley Streeby, American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 169. Streeby points out the fear of racial contamination in this seemingly anti-imperial stance.

  64. 64.

    Quoted in Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2001), 102 and Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 283. See Marouf Arif Hasian, The Rhetoric of Eugenics in Anglo-American Thought (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996).

  65. 65.

    Samuel Otter, “Stowe and Race,” in The Cambridge Companion to Harriet Beecher Stowe, ed. Cindy Weinstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 19–20. Fredrickson has called Uncle Tom’s Cabin “the classic expression of romantic racialism.” George Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), 110.

  66. 66.

    Julia Stern, “Spanish Masquerade and the Drama of Racial Identity in Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” Passing and the Fictions of Identity, ed. Elaine K. Ginsberg (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 110, 107.

  67. 67.

    Carolyn Vellenga Berman identifies the importance of Cassy’s disruptive “Creole” ethnicity, but argues that the end of Uncle Tom’s Cabin allows “her to survive only at the cost of a transformation that robs her of her Creole identity” (38). Again, I think The Christian Slave does a great deal to reassert both Cassy’s ethnicity and her disruptive power. Berman also identifies Cassy as a French Creole because she speaks French, but Creole heritage in Louisiana is very complicated. French was the dominant language even among Creoles of Spanish descent, and by the mid-nineteenth century the two groups had mixed very extensively . Carolyn Vellenga Berman, “Impersonating the Creole: The American Family and Its Lines of Flight,” in Just Below South: Intercultural Performance in the Caribbean and the U. S. South, eds. Jessica Adams, et al. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007), 25–48.

  68. 68.

    Suzanne Bost points out that “the subversion of racial classification often produces, or is produced by, a subversion of sex and gender.” Suzanne Bost, Mulattas and Mestizas: Representing Mixed Identities in the Americas, 1850–2000 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003), 16.

  69. 69.

    Judith Fetterley argues that Stowe took so long to write Pearl in part because it was a “romance” version of Lady Byron’s story of abuse , a painful topic that Stowe found difficult to address until after her friend’s death in 1860. Judith Fetterley, “Only a Story, not a Romance: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Pearl of Orr’s Island,” in The (Other) American Traditions: Nineteenth-Century Women Writers, ed. Joyce W. Warren (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1993), 108–125.

  70. 70.

    Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Pearl of Orr’s Island: A Story of the Coast of Maine (New York: AMS Press, 1967), 148.

  71. 71.

    Stowe, Pearl, 163.

  72. 72.

    Stowe, Pearl, 230, 148, 213. Again, Stowe’s attack on this attitude as characteristic of barbaric and under-developed humanity directly challenges the misogyny promoted by reform discourse and prominent “regular” doctors such as Augustus Kinsley Gardner (who hails from Roxbury, Massachusetts, the hometown of Stowe’s maternal relations). Barker-Benfield characterizes Gardner’s arguments as implying that “[m]en needed to ‘consume’ women (or else be consumed), to ‘recruit’ their ‘exhausted energies’…Woman should be inexhaustible and undemanding resources.” Barker-Benfield, Half-Known Life, 305.

  73. 73.

    Josephine Donovan in a somewhat unfortunate, racially inflected choice of words described Moses as “an early example of the machismo male—aggressive, morally insensitive and uncontrollable.” Josephine Donovan, “Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Feminism,” The American Transcendental Quarterly 47–48 (1980): 151. Weinstein, Imaginative Prose, 46.

  74. 74.

    Stowe, Pearl, 325.

  75. 75.

    Ibid., 181.

  76. 76.

    Ibid., 250, 257.

  77. 77.

    Ibid., 313. John Gatta reads Mara as one of Stowe’s figures for the “Virginal Maternal” or “divine womanhood” of the Virgin Mary, but in this image Stowe is invoking the figuration of Mary with her foot on the Satanic serpent and thus showing us that Sally, too, partakes of Mary’s ideal womanhood. The new ideal, however, has shifted to Mary’s assertive and even militant aspect. John Gatta, American Madonna: Images of the Divine Woman in Literary Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 67–71.

  78. 78.

    Stowe, Pearl, 313.

  79. 79.

    Ibid., 11.

  80. 80.

    Ibid., 402.

  81. 81.

    Ibid., 402, 401.

  82. 82.

    Monika Mueller focuses on Moses and reads this plot as “containing” him and his “alterity,” whereas I read it as more about unleashing Sally and her “Spanish” and serpentine energies. Monika Mueller, “New England Tempests? Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Minister’s Wooing and The Pearl of Orr’s Island,” in Beyond Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Essays on the Writing of Harriet Beecher Stowe (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2011), 125–144.

  83. 83.

    See for instance Dorothy Berkson, “Millennial Politics and the Feminine Fiction of Harriet Beecher Stowe,” Critical Essays on Harriet Beecher Stowe, ed. Elizabeth Ammons (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1980) and Amy Easton-Flake, “Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Multifaceted Response to the Nineteenth-Century Woman Question,” New England Quarterly 86 (2013): 29–59. Although Easton-Flake sees My Wife and I as “an indictment of the NWSA in favor of a model of rights for women that draws from the both the AWSA and the female-led antisuffrage movements,” she argues that it nonetheless “does advance the cause of women” (43, 58).

  84. 84.

    Harriet Beecher Stowe, My Wife and I, or Harry Henderson’s History (New York: J. B. Ford and Company, 1874), 177.

  85. 85.

    Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Lucretia; or The Children of the Night vol. 2 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1868), 135.

  86. 86.

    Stowe, My Wife and I, 198.

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Crosby, S.L. (2018). With Friends Like These: E. D. E. N. Southworth and Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes’s Pathological Poisoners. In: Women in Medicine in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96463-8_4

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