ABSTRACT
Title of Dissertation: MISS SCHOOLED: AMERICAN FICTIONS OF 
FEMALE EDUCATION IN THE NINETEENTH
CENTURY
 Jaime Osterman Alves, Doctor of Philosophy, 2005
Dissertation directed by: Professor Jonathan Auerbach
Department of English
This dissertation argues that the emergence of schoolgirl culture in nineteenth-
century America presented significant challenges to subsequent constructions of
normative femininity. Seeking to understand how literary texts both shaped and reflected
the century?s debates over adolescent female education, I concentrate on fictional works
and historical documents that feature descriptions of girls? formal educational
experiences between the 1810s and the 1890s. In Elizabeth Stoddard?s The Morgesons,
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.?s Elsie Venner: A Romance of Destiny, selections from the
Wreath of Cherokee Rosebuds (a student-written school newspaper), S. Alice Callahan?s
Wynema: A Child of the Forest, Frances E. W. Harper?s Trial and Triumph and Iola
Leroy, and other texts, I contend that the trope of the adolescent schoolgirl is a carrier of
shifting cultural anxieties about how formal education would disrupt the customary maid-
wife-mother cycle and turn young females off to prevailing gender roles. 
To assuage these anxieties and garner support for the controversial work of
adolescent female education, schools incorporated into their curricula dominant ideals of
femaleness from the contexts of family, the scientific-medical field, the press, and racial
and community uplift movements, and delivered these ideals as ?lessons? to girls from
the white middle- and upper-classes, mixed racial and ethnic heritages, dispossessed
Native American tribes, and working-class African-American families. In four chapters, I
explore how nineteenth century Americans perceived of and represented the distinct life
stage of female adolescence, and how they imagined the processes of institutional sex-
role socialization that would involve schools and other organizations in the activity of
molding adolescent girls into ideal American women. I have been most intrigued by
narratives of female education that depict girls? exploitation of their opportunities at
school to consider and respond to their cultures? idealizations of American womanhood.
By tracing the figure of the schoolgirl at crossroads between educational and other
institutions?in texts written by and about girls from a variety of racial, ethnic, and class
backgrounds? my study joins an emerging critical project to transcend the limitations of
?separate spheres? inquiry and enrich our understanding of how girls negotiated complex
gender roles in the nineteenth century.
MISS SCHOOLED:
AMERICAN FICTIONS OF FEMALE EDUCATION 
IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
by
Jaime Osterman Alves
Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the
University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
2005
Advisory Committee: 
Professor Jonathan Auerbach, Chair
Professor Ralph Bauer
Professor Carolyn Karcher
Professor Robert S. Levine
Professor Deborah Rosenfelt
? Copyright by
Jaime Osterman Alves
2005
ii
DEDICATION
For Betty and Sylvia
iii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank my extraordinary community of friends, colleagues,
professors, and family, who have generously shared with me their abundant gifts
throughout my writing of this dissertation. Jennifer Solomon, Min Kim, and Mike Duvall
are dear friends whose early and persistent enthusiasm for this study encouraged me to
follow my instincts. Emily J. Orlando, a wise sister-friend, inspiration, and constant 
champion of my work, read numerous drafts, asked probing questions, and offered
excellent suggestions for improving the clarity and quality of my writing. Our frequent 
constitutional walks through Sligo Creek Park, which I have so dearly missed since
Emily?s move to Tennessee, are written between the lines of this dissertation.  My
comrades at the Center for Renaissance & Baroque Studies?Adele Seeff, Karen Nelson,
Nancy Traubitz, Pamala S. Deane, and Allyson Fetterhoff, in particular?extended
encouragement and support as I strove to maintain a writing life balanced by other kinds
of creative and intellectual work, and, of course, play. Their professionalism and great
sense of fun allowed me to build and flex muscles I had rarely had opportunities to use in
graduate school, and for that I am grateful.
My dissertation committee epitomizes the vital scholarship, consummate
professionalism, and great humanism of the University of Maryland faculty. I appreciate
Deborah Rosenfelt?s willingness to serve as Dean?s Representative; the excitement she
has shown for my project has taught me to trust its interdisciplinary appeal for women?s
iv
studies scholars and cultural historians, as well as scholars of American literature. Ralph
Bauer and Carolyn Karcher have each made excellent recommendations for further
reading, and thoughtful suggestions for editing and organizing my chapters into a more
coherent whole. I value the seriousness, curiosity, and respect with which they have
approached my ideas and writing. Bob Levine has been a thorough, careful reader and an
unfailing advocate for my work, connecting me with numerous other Americanists who
share my interests, and exposing me to multiple opportunities for grants, scholarships,
conferences, and publication venues. Jonathan Auerbach is, quite simply, my most ideal
dissertation director and a great friend: his high standards, deep engagement with my
subject matter, clear respect for my interests and my autonomy, and insightful, incisive,
lightning-fast responses to my work have motivated me to become a better writer and a
more critical reader and thinker. He is a model for the kind of professor and advisor I
would like to be. 
    My parents and sister, extended family and in-laws, and my best girlfriend,
Linda, have shown remarkable faith in my abilities to complete this project and enormous
patience and love as they cheered my efforts to do so, even though it has meant that we
would sacrifice years of living nearer to one another. Finally, my husband, Steven, has
blessed me with a devotion and love that knocks me off my feet every day. He has been a
patient, careful, and perceptive reader, ever willing to discuss my writing and the texts I
study, to help me untangle my thoughts, and to celebrate every victory, no matter how
small. He may never acknowledge how profoundly he has influenced and shaped this
study, but I know it. For these gifts, and for so much more, I am eternally grateful to him.
v
Miss Schooled: 
American Fictions of Female Education in the Nineteenth Century
Jaime Osterman Alves
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: 
Telling Tales Out of School: Representing Adolescent Female 
Education in Nineteenth Century America...............................................................1
     
Chapter One: 
?Oh, I am homesick at the idea of a school and a master?: 
Negotiating Domestic Education in Elizabeth Stoddard?s 
The Morgesons........................................................................................................26
     
Chapter Two:
To Teach and to Cure: Medical Interventions to Female 
Education and Oliver Wendell Holmes?s Elsie Venner: 
A Romance of Destiny............................................................................................68
Chapter Three: 
Reading, Writing, and Re-presenting: The Newspaper and 
the Schoolgirl in A Wreath of Cherokee Rosebuds and S. Alice 
Callahan?s Wynema: A Child of the Forest........................................................122
Chapter Four: 
?How shall we ever get out of slavery??: Frances E. W. Harper?s 
Trial and Triumph and Black Female Education in the 
Post-Reconstruction Era.......................................................................................190
1
Introduction
Telling Tales Out of School:
Representing Adolescent Female Education in Nineteenth-Century America
On July 8, 1858, Dr. Christopher Cox delivered his poem, ?Female Education,?
before an audience of adolescent schoolgirls, their parents and siblings, teachers,
neighbors, and school administrators, at the Annual Commencement of the Frederick
Female Seminary in Frederick, Maryland. Over one thousand lines long, the poem was
prepared, writes the medical doctor, ?amid engrossing professional cares and duties, with
no view to publication,? but merely to ?aid the excellent Institution of learning for which
it was especially designed? (3). Like the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of occasional
poems and essays written on this subject for girls? school commencements across the
country and throughout the nineteenth century, Cox?s poem praises the efforts of the
particular school for which it was written and celebrates the broader aims of adolescent
female education while simultaneously lamenting the many ways in which the process of
American girls? schooling frequently goes awry. The doctor explains, for example, that
the Frederick Female Seminary deserves special commendation because it provides a
?sacred bower? wherein ?Instructor, Parent, [and] Friend? collaborate during
?childhood?s hour? to prepare the students for the mental, emotional, and physical
challenges of adult female life, and especially for their roles as spouses, parents, and
educators of the very young (41). After reminding the Frederick graduates that their
2
?mission? as American wives, mothers, and teachers, will be ?to guide, to soothe, to
cheer, to bless,/ To make man?s home a scene of happiness; By solid learning, sentiment
refined,/ To mould and educate a nation?s mind,? Cox paints a picture of countless other
American schoolgirls who, because they were denied adequate, practical preparation
during their formative years, are not well-educated enough to perform the crucial female
tasks of marrying, raising children, and teaching:
The pert young Miss just entering on her teens,
The admiration of the lesser weans, 
Leaves home for school some sunny afternoon, 
Armed with two towels and a silver spoon. 
A whiskered Frenchman teaches her to say
?Je ne sais pas,? and ?Parlez vous Francais;?
A moustached German trains the finger ends
For torturing keys to edify her friends; 
A dancing master of the latest mode
Instructs in all the Terpsichorean code; 
While Madame Paris makes the whole complete
By teaching how to walk upon the street; 
Entrees to make with dignity and grace, 
Ballooned in crinoline and flounced with lace!
Is it indeed the little learned from France?
A bar of music?an exciting dance?
3
A wretched smattering of the books at school?
A nod, a smile, to be performed by rule?
Make up the important sum of human life, 
And fit the girl for mother, maid or wife? (34-36) 
Thus, while the Frederick graduates are armed with a ?youth and beauty, innocence and
grace? that Cox finds ?bewitching,? and are ready ?to meet with courageous breast? the
?toil and sorrow,? ?pain and strife? that mark ?the coming life? of adult American
womanhood, other girls who have been trained for ornamental and frivolous adulthood
have no valuable ?lessons conn?d/ to fill the dreary vacancy beyond? (7, 41, 37). In his
contrasting representations of these two groups of adolescent schoolgirls, Cox seeks to
aid the Frederick seminary by publicly acknowledging the ways in which the school has
avoided the pitfalls of (stereotypical) deficient European-styled education, and instead
enriched the lives of its students, the local community, and the nation as a whole. His
attention to the useless and possibly damaging work done by more ornamental schools,
on the other hand, was undoubtedly aimed at reinforcing the audience?s appreciation for
the more rigorous and useful school they hosted in Frederick, to extend their financial
and ideological support, and to ensure future enrollment from among their younger
daughters.
For the contemporary reader, Cox?s poem also raises many questions regarding
the goals of female education in the nineteenth century, the administrators, teachers,
students, and other citizens that endeavored to fulfill these goals, and the broader
relationship between literary representations of female education and the realities of
4
girls? schooling. What is this ?solid learning? that purportedly helped the Frederick
graduates, among others, to become ideal American women, able to serve the nation as
mothers, wives, and schoolteachers? How did the girls themselves perceive those role
assignments, and were they ever encouraged to imagine other possible futures for
themselves? What are the parameters and characteristics of ?childhood?s hour,? and how
are they different from the ?toil and sorrow,? ?pain and strife? of female adulthood?
What can we discover about the educational institutions that endeavored to prepare girls
for such adulthood, and about the pedagogical methods they employed to do so? How
common was it for doctors (like Cox) and other non-educators to devote their time to
questions of female education, and how (other than writing commencement poems) did
they manifest their concern? What did it mean, exactly, for ?Instructor, Parent, and
Friend? to collaborate in the teaching of adolescent girls, and what forms did that
collaboration take?
Like Cox?s poem and myriad other literary representations of female education
from the nineteenth century, these questions have long been ignored by scholars of
American literature and culture. Three pioneering feminist studies on representations of
normative femininity in late-eighteenth and nineteenth century American
culture?Barbara Welter?s Dimity Convictions (1976), Linda Kerber?s Women of the
Republic (1980), and Mary Kelley?s Private Woman, Public Stage (1984)?each
acknowledge, in passing, that fictional representations of formal girls? schooling played a
role in popularizing the ideals associated with ?the Cult of True Womanhood,?
?Republican Motherhood,? and ?private womanhood,? respectively (Welter 15; Kerber
5
203-6, 281-85; Kelley 68, 70); however, none performs a significant or extended analysis
of these texts in order to understand how narratives of female education presented the
transmission of those ideals. On the contrary, these authors tend unquestioningly to treat
pre-adolescent and adolescent girls as ?little women? (as do many of the primary texts
they examine), skimming over the portions of fictional plots that focus on adolescent
development to arrive at the all-important story of the adult ?True,? ?Republican,? and
?private? woman, fully developed. Thus, even as Nina Baym?s groundbreaking Woman?s
Fiction (1978) explains that, in 130 novels written between 1820 and 1870, ?the
heroine?s ?self? emerges concurrently with her growth from child to adult,? Baym?s
analysis of those texts largely ignores that process of emergence?which frequently
happens at school?and lingers instead over the life of the woman the heroine has
?turned into? (68).
A second and related reason we have not reckoned with these subjects is that our
discipline?s conceptualization of American female life in the nineteenth century has in
the past made no room for female experiences outside of the home. Indeed, the separate
spheres paradigm that, as Cathy Davidson has argued, has been for the past twenty-five
years both ?immediately compelling and [yet] ultimately unconvincing as an explanatory
device,? has so permeated our critical conversations about nineteenth-century American
letters that we have been unable to wrangle with the complexities of a literature that does
not fit the narrow model wherein females act within a narrowly domestic, private sphere,
and only men venture onto the more public stage of the world ?beyond? the home (444).
6
However, during the past decade our discipline has launched a new rallying cry,
that there be ?no more separate spheres!? for nineteenth-century male and female writers
and characters, no more forced separation between ?public? and ?private? lives that were,
in fact, complexly intertwined. Gillian Brown?s Domestic Individualism (1990), Lora
Romero?s Home Fronts (1997), and Monika M. Elbert?s collection, Separate Spheres No
More: Gender Convergence in American Literature 1830-1930 (2000), all recognize the
need for literary scholarship to take what Linda Kerber has called ?an interactive view of
[the] social processes? wherein public and private intersect (Toward an Intellectual
History 171). Recently, critics have returned to fundamental texts like Kerber?s Women
of the Republic, Nina Baym?s Woman?s Fiction and American Women Writers and the
Work of History, 1790-1860, and found there early germs of thought about separate
spheres ideology that suggest this binary model was indeed more ?metaphorical? than
?actual,? more expressive of a desire for codes and rules in a chaotic and changing world
than of any real, deep, permanent divisions between male and female life (Baym,
American Women Writers 11). These revisions to American literary and cultural study
have opened the way for a more comprehensive exploration of nineteenth century female
life, including the experiences of younger females, inside the home and outside of it, in
order to more fully answer questions about how such metaphorical notions as ?private
space? and ?True womanhood? were transmitted to different populations of females over
time, and came to be perceived as ideal or even mandatory.  
In Miss Schooled: American Fictions of Female Education in the Nineteenth
Century, I engage and extend that spirit of inquiry, exploring narratives of formal female
7
education in order to better understand how nineteenth century Americans perceived of
and represented the distinct life stage of female adolescence, and how they imagined the
processes of institutional sex-role socialization that would involve schools and other
organizations in the activity of molding adolescent girls into ideal American women. My
project is enabled by several historical studies of female education that focus on
influential nineteenth century girls? schools: Elizabeth Alden Green?s Mary Lyon and
Mount Holyoke: Opening the Gates, Willystine Goodsell?s Pioneers of Female
Education in the United States: Emma Willard, Catherine Beecher, Mary Lyon, and
Anne Firor Scott?s ?The Ever-Widening Circle: The Diffusion of Feminist Values from
the Troy Female Seminary 1822-72,? each brought early recognition to some of the
founders of formal girls? schools and the curricula they developed, ?to create from
nothing,? as Green put it, ?a major new educational institution? and affect nothing less
than ?the course of life of the United States in the nineteenth century?(xiii). In their
efforts to show how much impact was made by each of these remarkable women and
their schools, however (note that the diffusion of feminist values issues from Troy, for
example, and not between and among Troy and other institutions), these scholars neglect
to investigate the schools as organizations enabled by and responsive to other social
institutions of their day. I contend that such an investigation is crucial to our appreciation
of how adolescent female life was imagined and negotiated during this period, given that
nineteenth century female life in general is now understood to have unfolded across
multiple contexts, not just within the domestic space of the home, and that the process of
growing up female, in particular, occurred, for tens of thousands of girls, in schools
8
enjoying mutually influential relationships with local families, churches and missionary
groups, community and national organizations, and professional associations. My project
explores the ways in which American letters record, amplify, and critique the
relationships between girls? schools and other socio-cultural organizations, and thus
expose the larger institutional milieu through which young girls were socialized into
adult womanhood. I thus direct my study to readers interested in American literature and
culture as well as women?s studies, education, and the history of American institutions.  
In Miss Schooled, I examine texts by a variety of fiction and non-fiction writers to
explore my basic thesis that nineteenth century schools were widely perceived as crucial
components in a network of social and cultural institutions working together to
strengthen local communities and fortify the nation by building ideal American citizens.
Girls? schooling, I argue, was at the center of a constellation of institutions?including
the family, the scientific and medical establishment, the press, and certain racial uplift
movements?concerned with monitoring and shaping female familial roles, female
sexuality and reproductive roles, the role of the female as a consumer of and contributor
to print media, and the role of the adult woman as a teacher. That each of these roles exist
at the intersection of ?public? and ?private? life is made exquisitely clear in the context
of female schooling: the intimate and private familial roles of daughter, wife, and mother,
for example, take on a particularly public, artificial, and constructed aspect when they are
not only performed by individuals within the space of the home but ?taught? as subjects
and modeled in school settings by strangers unrelated to students. Similarly, the deeply
personal process of female sexual maturation in early adolescence becomes invested with
9
public significance, as well, when entire classrooms of adolescent girls begin almost
simultaneously to ?fill out,? menstruate, and attract the amatory attention of potential
mates. In the fictional works I examine by Elizabeth Stoddard, Oliver Wendell Holmes,
Sr., S. Alice Callahan, Frances E. W. Harper, and others, the simultaneously public and
private aspects of these female roles are magnified via adolescent schoolgirl characters
whose self-emergence is recorded as a prolonged negotiation between themselves and the
various individuals responsible for their education. Each narrative dwells briefly on the
type of academic instruction that was available for girls in different schools; however, the
tales devote considerable space to what John Dewey would, in the twentieth century, call
?collateral learning?: the attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors one develops while more
overtly engaged in the study of specific academic subjects (Experience and Education
48). For the fictional schoolgirls in my study?Cassandra Morgeson, Elsie Venner,
Wynema Harjo, and Annette Harcourt?as well as the real schoolgirls whose writings are
also featured here (in Chapter Three, especially), collateral learning involves the
absorption of their culture?s attitudes toward and expectations of adult women, as well as
the development of their own, often conflicting, attitudes toward and expectations
regarding their own adult lives. Throughout this dissertation, I probe the interplay
between the collateral lessons learned by adolescent girls at school and via the auxiliary
institutions that comprise their educational milieu, and the ways in which schoolgirls
were imagined to embrace and/or resist such lessons to suit their individual and
developmental needs. I show how the educational process was perceived to encompass
not merely the gradual transmission of prescribed gender roles and scholastic lessons, but
10
also the development of a critical facility in young females, with which they might
explore their own feelings about intellectual work, marriage, sexuality, self-expression,
and vocation.  
The work of investigating adolescent education in the nineteenth century has been
further hampered by the fact that, even as nineteenth century Americans clearly struggled
to define and understand adolescence, they did not yet have at their disposal a common
language about, or uniform perception of, this distinct developmental stage. Psychologist
G. Stanley Hall?s monumental and influential 1905 study, Adolescence: Its Psychology
and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and
Education, was among the first to definitively offer a name and detailed set of
characteristics for this period of youthful development. His claim that ?the adolescent
stage of life has long seemed to me one of the most fascinating of all themes, more
worthy, perhaps, than anything else in the world of reverence, most in need of study, and
in most crying need of a service we do not yet understand how to render aright,? sparked
and fed an enormous enterprise in the early twentieth century that revolved around
studying and serving that population of youth (xviii). As numerous historians of
American childhood attest, however?and as my own project verifies, again and
again?myriad nineteenth century educators, doctors, scientists, clergy, fiction writers,
activists, and laymen were similarly obsessed with discovering the general parameters
and specific features of this turbulent period in order to best control its progress and
shape its final product, the American adult. Indeed, as Joseph Kett notes in his seminal
11
Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America 1790 to the Present, the concept of
adolescence originated in America during the early nineteenth century, when large
numbers of the country?s young people became ?uprooted? from agriculture and rural
life, witnessed a blossoming of occupational and intellectual options, and experienced a
dramatically increased ?disorderliness? in the institutions (such as the family and the
church) they had previously relied upon for shelter, nurture, and stability (5). Apparently,
this disorderliness began to be imagined as characteristic of the young people themselves.
Harvey J. Graff claims, in his Conflicting Paths: Growing Up in America, that
educational institutions became particularly important to the emerging middle-class
during this era because of the schools? apparent abilities to socialize children to fit a
?narrow code of character? and a ?uniformity of response and action? that seemed
necessary for adult success and entry into the upper classes (183). In one especially
powerful description from the 1850s, Edward Mansfield thus explains that the ?ideal
American education? should be 
in conformity with the idea of a complete republic; in conformity with the idea of
a Christian republic; and in conformity with the idea of both a physical and a
spiritual development of all the faculties in each individual. It is not necessary, in
order to attempt this, that we should assume the perfection of any such system, or
of society itself, at present. It is only necessary to place before us such an IDEAL
of what education ought to be, in order to stimulate zeal, excite ambition, and
energize effort....American education must ever keep in sight the fact that it is not
the most glorious nation of antiquity, nor the greatest of modern days, that we are
12
to imitate; but that, on the contrary, there is no model for us. We are to be
ourselves a model: we are a model (60). 
How it was imagined that young people in general, and adolescents in particular, would 
respond to this pressure to conform, Mansfield himself does not venture to say. But
numerous others suggested that the willfulness and wildness characteristic of both male
and female youth would set them at odds with such an exacting educational plan. Thus,
Alcott?s Young Men?s Guide (1833) asserted that adolescent males are frequently (and
perhaps rightly) characterized as ?thoughtless,? ?forward,? ?rash,? and ?unwilling to be
advised? (19), while Dr. Edward H. Dixon?s Woman and Her Diseases (1846) testified
that pubescent females were especially prone to hysterical fits that made them violent,
depressed, nervous, withdrawn, tearful, fatigued, and in pain (133). Clearly, the notion
that such young people would obediently adhere to a narrow and uniform code of
conduct was up for some challenges.  
For adolescent girls, in particular, the pressure to a conform to a narrow and
uniform code was especially acute since it was imagined that, in addition to cultivating
their own characters, they would soon be called to act as progenitors and stewards of the
future citizenry, and be responsible for developing their children?s characters. Whereas
very young girls (at one end of the spectrum) and fully grown, adult women (at the other)
were frequently, though by no means universally, conceived as pliable, obedient, angels
of the house, the adolescent girl was so visibly in the throes of physical, emotional, and
mental upheaval that she became a lightning rod for anxieties about how such young
females could be shaped into responsible adults in time to attract husbands and bear and
13
raise healthy, stable children. In myriad newspaper and magazine articles, private letters,
public speeches, and fictional works, many Americans worried that anything but the most
narrowly focused domestic education would result in ?mannish young women, ambitious
to excel in everything but as matrons of families?a life which they abhor,? while others
fretted that the female mind was inherently incapable of absorbing, processing, or
producing intellectually meritorious work?that is, not without doing significant damage
to her reproductive functioning (Wright 114).  
As the nineteenth century progressed and increasing numbers of adolescent girls
attended school, public debates over the possibly detrimental effects of female education
continually stoked public anxiety about formal girls? schooling, and the schools
themselves remained in a precarious position, dependent as they were upon popular
support. I suggest here that, in order to assuage public anxieties, the schools frequently
incorporated into their curricula dominant ideals of femaleness garnered from several
more powerful and influential institutional contexts of their own cultural moments,
including the family, the scientific/medical field, the press, and certain racial and
community uplift movements. Generally speaking, I discuss the relationships between
girls? schools and these other institutions one at a time (that is, one per chapter);
however, due to the resilience of certain institutions (such as the church) and the
longevity of certain ideologies (such as the Cult of True Womanhood) across time as well
as racial and ethnic lines, there is some overlap among my individual chapters. The
formal educational institution was increasingly imagined by proponents of girls schooling
as a stage on which girls could learn and practice the roles that their culture(s) expected
14
them to play as adult women at the same time that they learned about and created their
emerging ?selves,? their wishes and desires for grown-up life. By integrating dominant
models of femininity into the curriculum of these institutions, adolescent girls? schools
stabilized their public image and helped to ensure their own perpetuity. They also,
whether deliberately or inadvertently, created a space?a ?sacred bower,? as Cox called
it?for young females to learn, reflect upon, embrace, and sometimes reject those same
models. As the readings in Miss Schooled suggest, I have been most intrigued by
narratives of female education that depict girls? exploitation of their opportunities at
school to consider and respond to their cultures? idealizations of American womanhood.
One distinguishing feature of my study is that it showcases adolescent girls, real and
imagined, who ?talked back? to teacher, parent, and culture, and amplifies the voices of
young females that were ?heard? by nineteenth century writers and readers, but have
been silenced in our own day and time. 
Indeed, notwithstanding Barbara A. White?s claim, in her Growing Up Female:
Adolescent Girlhood in American Fiction, that ?our early novelists lack any conception
of female adolescence,? and ?tend to ignore the years from eleven to sixteen or
seventeen...as a period of little importance in itself or of little interest to the reader,? my
own research has shown that narratives of female education tend to center around girls at
precisely this period of development, and that such narratives were produced as part of
numerous, ongoing, public conversations about adolescent female development?a
subject of great and compelling interest to many potential nineteenth century readers
(22). The chapters of Miss Schooled are organized around four such conversations
15
selected for their ability to best lay open the most salient debates over adolescent female
education in the nineteenth century. The four chapters present in loose chronological
order, beginning with the first flourishing of formal girls? school in the 1810s and ending
in the 1890s, just as the focus of public debates over female education began in earnest to
shift away from concerns about adolescent students and toward the plight of adult female
learners being trained in colleges and vocational schools. Within this larger chronological
structure, my more particular concerns with attending adequately to the variety of races,
classes, and ethnicities of students in American girls? schools determined the
organization and direction of individual chapters. Since, for roughly the first half of the
nineteenth century, formal education was described and debated with regard mostly to
white (and part-white), middle- and upper-middle class girls in New England, my first
two chapters reflect this demographic and focus on narratives featuring schoolgirls of this
race and class. Similarly, since formal education became increasingly available to less
advantaged Native American and African-American populations during the second half
of the century, I chose for the second half of this study to examine texts in which girls of
color were sent to schools somewhat further west and south. Finally, for each population
and time period I examine, I tease out and explore the relationships that existed between
formal girls? schools and the powerful social institutions and movements that helped to
shape them. Moving back and forth between the historical realities of those relationships
and their fictional representations in literature helps me to explain how the texts I
examine participated in the process of institutional socialization that ultimately affected
thousands of American girls and women throughout the nineteenth century.    
16
Chapter One, ??Oh, I am homesick at the idea of a school and a master?:
Negotiating Domestic Education in Elizabeth Stoddard?s The Morgesons,? examines the
relationship between the family and the girls? school in New England of the 1810s, 20s,
and 30s. Written in the 1860s, Stoddard?s autobiographical first novel looks back at the
institutional underpinnings of the Cult of True Womanhood that were taught to females
of her generation during the early decades of formal girls? schooling. Stoddard?s heroine,
Cassandra Morgeson, attends three different schools, each representative of the most
common types of educational institutions in Massachusetts at the time?one room
schoolhouses, seminaries, and finishing schools?which, despite their differences, shared
in common with families an emphasis on training females for the domestic roles of
dutiful child, daughter, and wife. For each school that she attends, Cassandra lives in a
different domestic setting, first with her parents, then with her maternal grandfather and
aunt, and finally, with a married cousin (with whom she falls in love) and his family. In
each place, Cassandra confronts the shared expectations of her schoolteachers and family
members that she will learn, as Cox put it, ?to guide, to soothe, to cheer, to bless,/ To
make man?s home a scene of happiness?; however, unlike Cox? audience (from whom we
never hear during the course of his poem), Stoddard?s Cassandra expresses feeling a
mixture of enthusiasm and oppression in response to this pervasive cultural expectation
that she will exist to serve and please others. In addition to exploring how Cassandra?s
repeated travels away from home, to school, and back again, reflect the experiences of
actual New England schoolgirls in the 1810s, 20s, and 30s, my reading of the novel
regards Cassandra?s cyclical journeys as Stoddard?s metaphor for what she understood as
17
the adolescent female?s desire to escape from domesticity and the family structure, and
the sometimes equally powerful desire to return to those institutions and the (however
illusory) permanence and stability they offered females. I contend that Cassandra?s
travels afford her the time, space, and perspective necessary to reflect upon the
differences and similarities between the families and institutions she comes to know. Her
journeys allow her to understand that the gender roles taught at school and within
families are not ?natural? but constructed, and that, because this is true, she can construct
her own adult role that will suit her specific needs and the needs of her particular family. 
In Chapter Two, I argue that, as the family became a less dominant social force
during the 1830s, 40s, and 50s, and therefore a less trusted organizing principle for
schools, the increasingly powerful scientific and medical communities were drawn into
debates over education in general, and adolescent female education in particular. Such
debates gradually moved away from the subject of training females to be dutiful
daughters (as a precursor to wifehood) and more squarely toward the training of females
as spouses  and sexual/reproductive partners for adult men. ?To Teach and to Cure:
Medical Interventions to Female Education and Oliver Wendell Holmes?s Elsie Venner:
A Romance of Destiny,? focuses on mid-century scientific and medical arguments about
the adolescent female mind and body. In Holmes?s treatment of Elsie Venner?a hyper-
sexualized schoolgirl, supposed by her classmates and townsfolk to be part-human and
part-snake?I trace how the discourses of science, medicine, and education gradually
became interwoven in the 1830s, 40s, and 50s, to produce an educational program
focused on normalizing female sexuality and preparing girls to be ideal mates for young
18
American males. Though Elsie Venner is now out of print and its author excluded from
most anthologies of American literature, Holmes had, by mid-century, established
himself as both a major scientific thinker and medical doctor, as well as a man of letters.
Numerous scholars have recently begun to rediscover Dr. Holmes as an important figure
in mid-century literary circles, particularly for his invention of a colloquial literary style
that mimics the intimate consultations Holmes conducted with his patients (Gibian 1), for
his interest in applying medical ?insights and subjects? to his literary works, and for 
bridging the ?residual? sentimental mode of literature with the ?emergent,? realist mode
(Davis 16, see also Thrailkill 679-707 and Traister 205-228). Despite their interest in
Holmes?s convergence of literature and medicine, however, none of these critics have
recognized Holmes?s lifelong personal and professional obsession with delineating the
depth and breadth of female intellect, nor how his Elsie Venner, first serialized in the
Atlantic Monthly in 1860-61, applied specific scientific and medical theories to the
pathologizing of adolescent female sexual and intellectual development at school. I
illustrate in this chapter how Holmes builds upon his era?s medical models of normal and
abnormal femininity to define the process of sex-role socialization for adolescent
schoolgirls. Narrated by a medical school professor who relates the experiences of his
medical student-turned-girls? school teacher, Holmes?s novel reads the social process of
female education through the lenses of Lamarckian, Spencerian, and especially
Darwinian concepts of natural and sexual selection. He implies that if adolescent girls are
taught at school by handsome, upwardly mobile, scientific-minded young men, their
natural instincts toward mating can best be teased out, monitored, and potentially
19
modified. This process Holmes imagines leading ?normal? girls safely through the
primitive sexual awakening of puberty and into reserved and demure womanhood.
?Abnormal? girls like Elsie, on the other hand, prove more difficult (even impossible) to
extricate from their animal nature; Elsie?s sexual appetite and aggressiveness?which we
see blossom as a key part of her adolescent self-emergence?do not diminish but
increase as a result of her being taught by the handsome doctor-in-training, even though
such traits will keep her from finding a desirable mate. Ultimately, these traits contribute
to her death. Through Elsie?s life and early death, Holmes suggests that medically- and
scientifically-informed adolescent girls? schooling is useful for highlighting early in life
which girls are physiologically and socially fit for marriage and motherhood, and for
helping to weed out of the breeding pool those who are not.
My next chapter takes a broader chronological view of the history of female
education, examining key moments in the evolution of the female school and the press in
two Native American tribes over a period of more than six decades, through the
published writings of actual adolescent schoolgirls as well as of adult journalists and
fiction writers. In these two features?its chronological breadth and its attention to
narratives penned by real schoolgirls?Chapter Three represents a deliberate departure
from the others in Miss Schooled. ?Reading, Writing, and Re-presenting: The Newspaper
and the Schoolgirl in the Wreath of Cherokee Rosebuds and S. Alice Callahan?s Wynema:
A Child of the Forest? begins with an investigation into the work of Elias Boudinot, a
brilliant Cherokee editor who joined forces with white missionaries in the 1820s and 30s
to raise funds for the simultaneous establishment of tribal schools and a newspaper. After
20
sketching out Boudinot?s rationale for creating these two kinds of institutions, I trace the
influence of his ideas in the 1850s newspaper writings of the schoolgirls at the Cherokee
National Female Seminary, a school Boudinot helped to found, and then in an 1891
fictional work written by a Creek (Muskogee) woman, Sophia Alice Callahan, whose
native community had close cultural and political ties to Boudinot?s own. I find that,
although Boudinot viewed the newspaper and the school as two distinct institutions with
separate (if complementary) functions in saving Native tribes from extinction, the
schoolgirls who came after him would successfully combine these two institutions in
order to preserve their own cultural identities while simultaneously learning to adopt
certain features of white femininity. I show how, in the Cherokee National Female
Seminary?s Wreath of Cherokee Rose Buds, actual female students used newspaper
writing as part of their formal education, writing in order to learn and communicate about
their anticipated roles as women straddling two cultures. Their journalism served as a
vehicle for showcasing the new knowledge they had gained at school, expressing their
frustration over difficult lessons or their ambivalence about being away from home,
trying out new identities (when they wrote in English and used American pen names),
and maintaining their old ones (as when they wrote in Cherokee and used their birth
names). Later in the century, in S. Alice Callahan?s novel, Wynema, Child of the Forest,
a young Creek schoolgirl uses newspaper reading to explore the fraught relationship
between her Native community and the white community in the 1880s. Trained by white
missionaries at a school in Creek territory, Wynema?s critical and bilingual literacy
enables her to read, and read between the lines of, both white and Native newspapers. By
21
comparing white and Native representations of individual ideas and events?such as U.S.
government-proposed allotment policies, or the career of Buffalo Bill?she comes to
understand that her role as an educated female living among whites and Natives is to
mediate informal discussions that can help the two groups understand and respect one
another, and peacefully coexist. 
In this respect, Wynema?s education bears striking similarities to the education of
Annette Harcourt, the heroine of my fourth and final chapter. ??How shall we ever get out
of slavery??: Frances E. W. Harper?s Trial and Triumph and Black Female Education in
the Post-Reconstruction Era,? turns to Harper?s much neglected 1888-89 serial novel to
address questions about her vision of African-American female education that are left
unanswered by Harper?s more famous work of fiction, Iola Leroy. Specifically, I argue
that in Trial and Triumph?a novel recounting the education of a young black girl in a
post-Reconstruction, Northern, urban, African-American community?Harper defines a
replicable pedagogical strategy through which educated black adults supplement
Annette?s formal schooling in order to prepare her to become one of the educated, adult
female race leaders so needed by the black community. I contend that, unlike Iola Leroy,
which was published in its entirety, Trial and Triumph?s serial publication in a small,
influential, black Christian newspaper, the Christian Recorder, enabled the novel?s
didactic function and ensured the relevance of Harper?s schoolgirl story for her
predominantly black audience. In fact, Trial and Triumph emerged not only from a long
line of public, African-American newspaper debates over black education, but more
particularly from a specific discussion that Harper conducted with a fellow educator in
22
the pages of yet another black, Christian periodical, the A. M. E. Church Review in 1885.
My study is the first to explore this correspondence, and to reveal Harper?s educational
agenda for adolescent black females, which consisted of preparing young women to be
teachers and informal mentors for other blacks who, even in the post-Reconstruction era,
were still feeling the effects of slavery?s prolonged and mandatory ignorance. My reading
suggests that Annette Harcourt learns to be a race leader by drawing both on the
academic and social lessons she learns at her Philadelphia public school, and those she
learns from two informal, neighborhood sages?one male and one female mentor, both
former schoolteachers, who take Annette under wing and prepare her for a life of
personal achievement and racial service. Annette?s educational experiences in the racially
integrated but racist environment of her formal school teach her how hard she must work
to excel in a white-dominated society; as she becomes valedictorian, her experiences also
teach her that she has the talent and perseverance necessary to do so. Harper balances
Annette?s personal successes in school, though, with her dawning acknowledgment that
success in life requires something more than the attainment of individual goals: service to
the race. Annette eventually carries her talents in writing and public speaking out of the
racially mixed world of post-Reconstruction Philadelphia to a more segregated, all-black
community in the South, in order to help uplift the neediest of her race. Like the
Cherokee students and the character of Wynema from Chapter Three, Annette does not
become a paid professional writer or teacher; however, her adult life is imagined to
include significant engagement in the world outside the home, where she helps to create
23
and strengthen a new American community around values formed and forged during her
adolescence. 
Indeed, for all of the schoolgirls in this study, no matter how surrounded and
constrained by institutions they may be, adolescence reserves a period of time between
the carefree days of childhood and the responsibility-laden days of adulthood. During this
time, and from this ?sacred bower? of their educational institutions and experiences, they
explore their cultures? expectations and attitudes toward females, and in the process of
self-emergence develop responses to those expectations and attitudes that most of the
girls (with the exception of poor, dead Elsie) carry over into their grown-up lives, in
effect extending the inquisitive and rebellious spirit of adolescence well into their adult
years. In individual chapters, the dissertation traces this process of exploration and
maturation for individual characters and the larger populations of females they represent;
as a whole, it also charts how representations of adolescent schoolgirls and their
educational experiences interacted throughout the century with other cultural
pronouncements about the preparation of young females to participate most fully in
American life. I find that the institutions involved in girls? education required less
exclusively domestic functions of females as the century unfolded. From her role in the
family (portrayed in several domestic settings to which she must travel outside of her
own home) to her role as patient (in a ?sick bed? but also on display for scientists and
doctors well outside the domestic space), to her position as reader, journalist, and
commentator on cultural events (circulating among many homes), and finally to her role
as community leader (traversing the boundaries dividing North and South), the life paths
24
for which adolescent schoolgirls were imagined to be preparing were far more varied and
complex than the model of little women in separate spheres had previously allowed us to
imagine. 
In light of these findings, the closing lines of Cox?s poem resonate with special
significance. Urging the graduating Frederick girls to reflect on how commencement
marks the end of their schooldays as well as the beginning of the rest of their lives, he
calls upon them to put adolescence away, to let their time at school (and thus their time in
between childhood and adulthood) recede as they recall instead the lighthearted days of
younger childhood, and steel themselves for mature womanhood to come:    
From this fair scene let memory wander back,
A moment free o?er life?s unclouded track. 
The household group?the cottage in the vale?
The song that floated on the evening gale?
The mother?s tone, the sister?s gentle word?
The well remembered step at twilight heard?
All that were cherished once in childhood?s hour, 
Come o?er the spirit with resistless power. 
But these are past?you bid them here adieu?
And other scenes are rising into view.
A chequered picture is the coming life,
Where toil and sorrow blend with pain and strife?
25
Go forth to meet it with courageous breast,
And from the conflict you will conquer rest! 
For too long, we have heeded Cox?s request, looking back at young girl?s experiences
within the ?household group,? and forward to the ?pain and strife? of adult women,
without pausing to consider how representations of the school period itself, and the
adolescent years it encompassed, importantly contributed to the perception and
experience of being female in the American 1800s. It is my hope that this dissertation
will promote greater attention to the emergence of schoolgirl culture as a mainstream
social force, and will continue to challenge our constructions of what it meant to be
female in the nineteenth century.
26
Chapter One
  ?Oh, I am homesick at the idea of a school and a master?: 
Negotiating Domestic Education in Elizabeth Stoddard?s The Morgesons
From the moment we first meet Cassandra Morgeson, the first-person narrator of
Elizabeth Stoddard?s 1862 novel, The Morgesons, she is engaged in travel and in pursuit
of an education. The novel?s opening scene finds ten-year-old Cassandra in her mother?s
sitting room, flanked by her mother, Mary, who reads a religious newspaper, and her
maternal aunt, Mercy, who knits. In stark contrast to these older women engaged in
stereotypically domestic, feminine activities, young Cassandra tomboyishly clambers up
the side of a bureau to reach her favorite adventure book, a tale of polar exploration
called The Northern Regions, that sits on the top shelf among other volumes belonging to
her parents (this is her father?s). Having ?made a dash at and captured? her book, she
settles ?on the edge of the chest of drawers, and [is] soon lost in an Esquimaux hut? (5).
As she reads, Cassandra is observed by her mother and aunt, who make comments about
her behavior and appearance: Mercy, for example, remarks that Cassandra is
?possessed,? referring to her persistent determination to reach the book she likes; the aunt
also notes that there is something wrong with Cassandra?s stockings; Cassandra?s mother,
meanwhile, wonders why she will ?waste so much time on unprofitable stories? when she
might read the Bible instead, or sing hymns along with her aunt. Cassandra?s response to
their critique is to flee the ?oppressive atmosphere of the room? and, indeed, the entire
27
house (6). Once outside, she again dares to climb up high and balances on a gatepost,
showing off her new shoes and mimicking the pose of a coquettish figure she has seen in
a painting. When her Aunt sees her perched thus, she shrieks, retrieves Cassandra, feeds
her dinner, and puts her to bed.
The girl we meet in this opening scene is only ten years old; however it is an adult
Cassandra who narrates the events in this memoir-like novel, from the perspective of her
married life and across a period of about seventeen years. The plot recounts Cassandra?s
growth and development as she matures from age 10 through age 27, focusing in on key
life events and formative interpersonal interactions, including moments from her
childhood when she is surrounded by her parents, grandparents, and younger sister
Veronica; her schooling; her first love (a calamitous and tragic relationship with her
married cousin Charles); her near romance with another cousin (and classmate) Ben
Somers; her mother?s death and her father?s remarriage to Charles?s widow; and finally,
her own marriage to Ben?s brother Desmond. It is fitting that Cassandra begins her
memoir with this series of events relating her own restless curiosity, her family members?
attempts to steer her toward a specific model of femininity that modern scholars have
come to associate with the Cult of True Womanhood, her simultaneous attraction to and
rejection of those traditional female activities, and the circular path Cassandra makes
(leaving the house and being brought back in to it) in trying to satisfy her family?s desire
to instill in her the behaviors and traits deemed appropriate to her sex, and her own thirst
for knowledge and experience. Indeed, this first scene?the earliest childhood memory
that Cassandra will share with her reader?is both a signal of the rebellious and
28
1
 Cassandra also recounts a final journey to Belem, the home town of her distant cousins
Ben and Desmond Somers, the latter of whom becomes Cassandra?s husband, and the
former of whom becomes her brother-in-law. This trip is not directly related to education,
as Cassandra does not attend school while she is in Belem; therefore, I do not offer an
extended analysis of this portion of the novel, but refer to it only briefly in the conclusion
to this chapter.  
independent spirit with which she will approach her life, and a lens through which we
may read her subsequent interactions with others.
Too, the structure of this first scene rehearses themes and patterns that Stoddard
will revisit and repeat, on a somewhat larger scale, for the remainder of Cassandra?s
narrative. The novel is organized around a series of four journeys that take Cassandra
away from, and return her to, her parents? home in the fictional seaport town of Surrey,
Massachusetts. Critical for our purposes here, three of Cassandra?s journeys occur during
her early-, middle-, and late adolescence (at 13, 15, and 18, respectively), when she
leaves home for varying periods of time to attend three different schools.
1
 At 13,
Cassandra is away from home only during the day, yet, as we shall see, this hiatus from
her familial context introduces her to the important concept that institutional rules and
gendered social roles are arbitrary and capricious. During Cassandra?s later journeys,
moreover, she stays away from home for longer and longer periods of time, living with
other relatives while attending their town schools. Though Cassandra remains, then,
within the context of her immediate or extended family at all times, her periodic
immersion into new school settings and new familial configurations allows her
opportunities continually to assess and reevaluate the relationship between the
institutions of family and school. Her journeys exaggerate Cassandra?s characteristic
29
2
 See my ?Home Coming and Home Leaving: Interrogations of Domesticity in Elizabeth
Stoddard?s Harper?s Fiction, 1859-1891.?
attraction and repulsion to traditional female roles, prompt her to interrogate the domestic
duties that she is expected by her culture to embrace, and enable her to determine for
herself which of those duties she will finally accept as her own.
Stoddard?s ?crusade against Duty?  
This chapter explores how Cassandra?s three school journeys represent early
schoolgirls? ongoing negotiations with domestic education. More specifically, it
examines the compromises with domestic duty that Stoddard imagined women of her
generation had to make, when they were girls in the 1810s, 20s, and 30s, in order to
satisfy their own, often conflicting desires for personal autonomy and domestic
responsibility, and the wishes of their families. As I have argued elsewhere, though
Stoddard was herself attracted to the domestic aspects of True Womanhood?particularly
to marriage and motherhood?she was also disdainful of what she perceived to be her
culture?s too-narrow conception of female abilities, and the notion that women were
supposed to be pious, pure, and submissive (Welter 21).
2
 In her verse, journalistic
writings, novels, and short stories, over a forty-year literary career Stoddard consistently
strove to expose and challenge the admonitions directed at women?from books,
magazines, families, religious authorities, and schools?to sacrifice their own desires for
the sake of other people?s happiness. She was determined to flesh out and complicate
what she viewed as contemporary literature?s saccharine and unrealistically flat portrayal
30
of women and their domestic lives, as well as to express her own ambivalence about the
narrow domestic roles that so many of her contemporary female writers?most notably,
best-selling authors such as Susan Warner and Harriet Beecher Stowe?had embraced. In
her scathing 1856 review of Caroline Chesebro?s domestic novel, Victoria, or the World
Overcome, for example, Stoddard neatly sums up the authorial philosophy she would
maintain throughout her own literary career: 
After the title (for why should the world be ?overcome??) Miss Chesebro?s
dogmatic and pious ideal of a woman assails me in reading her book. I object to
the position she takes in regard to the reader?that of a teacher. The morality is
not agreeable, and quite impossible....Why will writers, especially female writers,
make their heroines so indifferent to good eating, so careless about taking cold,
and so impervious to all the creature comforts? The absence of these treats
compose their good women, with an eternal preachment about self-denial, moral
self-denial. Is goodness, then, incompatible with the enjoyment of the senses? In
reading such books I am reminded of what I have thought my mission was: a
crusade against Duty?not the duty that is revealed to every man and woman of
us by the circumstances of daily life, but that which is cut and fashioned for us by
minds totally ignorant of our idiosyncrasies and necessities. (Daily Alta
California, 3 August 1856)
Thus refusing to idealize either women or their domestic relationships and
responsibilities,  Stoddard?s own works, like those of her contemporaries Harriet Prescott
Spofford, Alice Cary, Constance Fenimore Woolson, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps,
31
3
 Matlack cites a variety of other evidences that Stoddard?s novel is highly
autobiographical. Like Cassandra, Stoddard was the child of a shipbuilder who
accumulated great wealth during the whaling booms of the early- to mid-nineteenth-
century (her family owned the Acushnet whaler that Herman Melville sailed in 1841) but
who also went bankrupt three times due to his poor business skills; these vagaries of
fortune Elizabeth felt keenly in the ways that household provisions were reduced and
expanded accordingly (Matlack 15-17). During her childhood in the 1820s and 30s in
Mattapoisett, a Massachusetts seaport town like her fictional Surrey, she enjoyed an
?intense but quarrelsome? relationship with a younger sister Jane (Veronica?s
counterpart); the grievous loss of her mother in 1849, just three months after Jane?s death
of consumption (when Stoddard was 26, just slightly older than Cassandra is at the time
of her mother?s death) remained fresh in her published fiction and private letters for
many years to come (Matlack 40).
consistently feature unconventional portraits of marital discord, sororal betrayal, and a
variety of females whose generous appetites for sex, food, and adventure frequently
conflict with their attempts to adhere to the dominant cultural view of appropriately
demure and reserved femininity.
Evidence suggests that Stoddard?s own educational experiences initiated and
fueled her adult crusade against Duty.
3
  Stoddard biographer James Matlack points out
that, like Cassandra?s scholastic career, Stoddard?s schooling was spotty. She had several
years of primary and intermediate schooling in and around her seaport hometown of
Mattapoisett, Massachusetts (the pattern for Cassandra?s Surrey), which likely provided
the model for Cassandra?s first school experiences in Surrey, and likely attended a female
academy in Fairhaven, her mother?s hometown (34, 36). At ages 14 and 17 (for the
summer 1837 and winter 1840-41 terms, respectively), Stoddard then attended the
Wheaton Female Seminary (now Wheaton College) in Norton, Massachusetts. A
boarding school modeled on Zilpah Grant and Mary Lyon?s influential Ipswich
Academy, Wheaton was dedicated to preparing ?young middle-class women for ?useful
32
and creative lives as wives of the middle-class professionals, businessmen, and
prosperous farmers of southeastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island,?? and was described
as ?a Christian school emphatically, with emphasis upon higher spiritual values, nothing
of the utilitarian type of education and nothing of the finishing school type? (Helmreich
Reference History of Wheaton College, 49, cited in Matlack ). Matlack suggests that her
parents sent her to boarding school ?in an attempt to channel her intellectual impulses
into [the] systematic scholarship? and domestic education that prevailed at Wheaton (35). 
Though Stoddard left no direct record of her experiences at Wheaton or the other
schools, it is clear from The Morgesons that, despite her sporadic and brief attendance at
these various schools, Stoddard was deeply impressed by their emphasis on preparing
girls to be good mothers and wives. The novel records what historian Barbara Finkelstein
has referred to as the ?process of obliterated selfhood? that characterized such schools,
whose ?wrenching and abrupt removal from family...into a school setting of relentless
regulation and intrusive control? were designed to ?stamp out differences among
individual students...secure a rigid conformity to rules and regulations,...[and] substitute
the rule of law for the rule of personal persuasion? (?Acquisition? 116). Note how Mary
Lyon?s description of another of her schools, Mount Holyoke, demonstrates this
philosophy: 
Social and Domestic Character. The excellence of the female character in this
respect consists principally in a preparation to be happy herself in her social and
domestic relations, and to make all others happy around her. All her duties, of
whatever kind, are in an important sense social and domestic. They are retired and
33
4
 From Principles and Design of Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, 1837. 
private and not public, like those of the other sex. Whatever she does beyond her
own family should be but another application and illustration of social and
domestic excellence. She may occupy the place of an important teacher, but her
most vigorous labors should be modest and unobtrusive. She may go on a foreign
mission, but she will find there a retired spot, where, away from the public gaze,
she may wear out or lay down a valuable life...her work is to be done by the
whisper of her still and gentle voice, by the silent step of her unwearied feet, and
by the power of her uniform and consistent example.
4
 
Our brief meeting with Cassandra at the start of the novel is almost a direct refutation of
such an agenda: Cassandra wants to be happy herself, not to make her aunt or mother
happy. She chooses adventure books, typically associated with males and public life,
rather than the newspaper or Bible readings that seemed more suited to females in
?private,? domestic spaces. Instead of being modest and unobtrusive, Cassandra longs to
show off her new shoes and be noticed. And as we will see on the pages that follow, her
travels function not to carry Cassandra on a ?foreign [Christianizing] mission,? but to
increase her own knowledge about herself and the world. 
The literature of school description
Stoddard?s novel, in fact, offers a unique counternarrative to the literature of
school description, a genre that flourished during the early decades of female education,
when school founders and advocates?individuals such as Benjamin Rush, Emma
34
Willard, Catherine Beecher, Mary Lyon, Joseph Emerson, Sarah Pierce, and Zilpah
Grant?frequently published verbal portraits of their schools, depicting their institutions
as places where American girls would learn how best to create and sustain a nurturing,
private, domestic environment for their families (Tyack and Hansot 38). ?Broadcast
through such educational publications as the American Journal of Education, the
American Annals of Education, state common-school journals, women?s magazines, and
various associations? pamphlets,? their school prospectuses and plans routinely
emphasized how a girl?s removal from her parents? home would nevertheless teach her to
conform to a set of domestic codes and rules to guide, purportedly, any American family.
In order to teach a girl how to ?be happy herself in her social and domestic relations, and
to make all others happy around her,? many educators deemed it necessary to construct a
school environment in which her proper relationship to the public and private spheres
could be learned and rehearsed. To this end, boarding schools, ?seminaries,? and
?finishing schools? would be run as homes away from home, where the ?teachers and
pupils [would] constitute one family,? complete with ?sisters? (classmates), ?mothers? or
mother-figures (teachers, headmistresses), and a largely absent but nonetheless powerful
set of ?fathers? (such as the donors, trustees, and other male officials) (Stowe, Mount
Holyoke Seminary 22; qtd. in Woody v.1, 359). Even non-residential schools
created?through the choice of instructional content, the structure of the day?s chores,
and even the layout of the buildings?the feeling of a private domestic space within the
public domain (Scott, ?What, Then? 46). Although curricula would vary among these
different types of institutions, most followed the general principle outlined in the first
35
5
 See Harvey J. Graff?s excellent and comprehensive Conflicting Paths: Growing Up in
America for a discussion of the ways in which male and female education differed in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  
number of the American Journal of Education (January 1826), which argued that, in the
?unspeakably important? arena of female education, ?the culture of the female mind,
extends ultimately to the formation of all minds, at that early and susceptible period,
when maternal influence is forming those impressions which eventually terminate in
mental and moral habits? (?Prospectus? 3). Unlike male schoolchildren, whose
educational training placed them on a path directed away from domestic duties and
toward the more ?masculine? duties associated with the larger world, girls? education
prepared them almost exclusively for a return to the domestic space, and to roles that
were themselves cyclical in nature: in becoming wives and mothers, girls might someday
bear daughters whom they would need to prepare for marriage and maternity.
5
Schoolgirls were routinely portrayed in these texts as moral guardians-in-training whose
obedience and service to their parental families were prerequisites to the ?immortal? roles
they would soon play, as wives and mothers, in their conjugal homes.  
Indeed, some of the most influential and successful ?plans? for particular girls?
schools described the project of female education as an effort to strengthen the American
family by cultivating family loyalty and cohesiveness. In her 1819 ?Plan for Improving
Female Education,? for instance, Emma Willard addresses the New York state legislature
(from whom she sought financial and legal support) as ?You...our natural guardians,
?our brothers, ?our fathers and our rulers,? simultaneously emphasizing the
?naturalness? of patriarchal rule and Willard?s promise that female education at her
36
6
 See also Scott, ?What, Then, Is the American: This New Woman?? and ?The Ever-
Widening Circle: The Diffusion of Feminist Values from the Troy Female Seminary
1822-72,? as well as Glenda Riley?s ?Origins of the Argument for Improved Female
Education.? 
institution would not disturb patriarchal order (Willard, ?Plan,? 33).
6
 On the other hand,
Catharine Beecher?s ?Suggestions Respecting Improvements in Education? (1829),
written during her tenure at Hartford, emphasizes instead the maternal care provided by
female teachers ?exclusively occupied...in enforcing the rules of neatness, order, and
propriety, and in administering the government of the school? (Goodsell 156). Still other
plans suggest that the entire institution would be organized as a large but orderly
extended family, with a disciplinary ?head? governing small and manageable groups of
students. Mary Lyon?s ?New England Female Seminary for Teachers? (1832) explains: 
The family discipline should be very systematic, but of a kind adapted to the age
of its members. The whole should resemble a well-regulated voluntary
association, where the officers and members are all faithful to their trust.  
1. It is such that the whole family will naturally and necessarily be
arranged in a convenient number of sections, each of which can be easily directed
by an appropriate head. 
2. It is such as to bring all the young ladies under a direct and natural
supervision. This will tend at once to secure order and propriety, and at the same
time to exclude all necessity of anything like apparent watchfulness or nice
inspection, even if the age and character of the members of the institution should
not render everything of the kind needless (rpt. in Goodsell 256-57).
37
Though the slight shifts of focus reflect subtle differences in the ways these authors
understood the family and home to be organized?from Willard?s emphasis on the rule of
fathers, to Beecher?s accent on the governance of mothers, and finally, to Lyon?s stress
on supervision and self-surveillance?the broader symbol of the family consistently
provided a recognizable structural template for educators to point to in reassuring parents
and other citizens that girls? schooling would not undermine the foundations of social
order. Schooling would remove females from the home for extended periods; however,
educators promised to return them better equipped to perform those social and domestic
duties properly belonging to their sex.   
On the other hand, many educators also noted that schools were different from the
domestic space in key ways that made them superior to the home environment as an
educational context for young girls. For example, Mary Lyon argued that teachers in
large female seminaries were less likely than parents to tolerate or indulge a girl?s
personal whims, and thus would teach her ?by practice, as well as by principle, that
individual accommodations and private interests are to be sacrificed for the public good?
(?Principles and Design? 299-301). Catherine Beecher added that mothers, frequently too
preoccupied with performing domestic management to teach its required skills to their
own daughters, would do well to turn them over to formal schools devised for the sole
purpose of surrounding them with multiple, well-trained models of adult womanhood,
and systematically teaching them how to make and keep a home (?Essay on the
Education of Female Teachers? 171-4).
38
Even though schoolgirls were being prepared for adult roles in conjugal
relationships, educators consciously drew upon the idealized relationship between female
children and their parents in order to model expectations of adult behavior, and also to
model the relationship they desired to see between schoolgirls and school authorities.
Evidence suggests that they did so for three reasons. First, the students? deferential
relationship to her blood relations supplied a compelling, ready-to-hand structural model
for the organizational hierarchy of the school, transferring expectations of obedience,
loyalty, and duty between children and parents to the relationship between students and
teachers. Second, a girl?s deference to parents and teachers would not only guide her
conduct at school, but would underwrite the lessons she learned there about her future
role as wife and mother, when she would also be expected to exhibit these qualities.
Schools exploited similarities between daughter-, wife-, and motherhood, collapsing
distinctions between them rather than separating them out into unique stages of life the
way we do today. The fact that schools were not yet divided into grades by age, as they
would begin to be in the 1840s (see my next chapter), surely contributed to this
conflation of life stages and the roles that were thought to inhere in them. 
Third, the deliberate employment of the model of family relationships
additionally provided an ideological bulwark against growing concerns that, because
female education took a girl out of her domestic space, it might lead to the demise of the
family. Some had quarreled that formal schooling would rob the family of a crucial
female helpmeet and usurp a mother?s influence over her daughter (Woody v.1, 360).
Others lamented that, because girls were achieving literacy and studying such
39
?masculine? subjects as geography or government, learned ?wives and daughters would
look over the shoulders of their husbands and fathers? and upset family order by offering
?to correct such errors in spelling as they might commit? (?Thoughts on the Education of
Females,? 349; Small 281, qtd. in Tyack and Hansot 26). Still others feared that girls in
school were making ?rapid advances towards manhood,? and thus echoed a common
complaint that educated women would not catch husbands or bear children?a recurring
theme that I take up in my next chapter?and they argued that this would ultimately bring
about the downfall of the American family. In response to these concerns, school leaders
promised that teacher-student relations would honor the filial duties of parents and
children without permanently replacing or otherwise challenging them. Many advocates
of female education emphasized their intentions to protect the sanctity of the home, and
to cultivate the girls? proper sense of responsibility in actively preserving both
consanguineal and conjugal family integrity. 
Given the prevalence of this genre and the cultivation of a schoolgirl?s ?still and
gentle voice,? it is little wonder that the early nineteenth-century American schoolgirl
was rarely heard to ?whisper? her own desires to study (or not), much less to challenge
the particular educational practices that, paradoxically, took her out of her parents? home
only to more deeply entrench her in the domestic sphere. Though many of the earliest
American novels featured either schoolgirl characters or stories about the education of
women during the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth centuries?for example, Foster?s
The Coquette, Rowson?s Charlotte Temple, Brown?s The Power of Sympathy, and
Sedgwick?s A New England Tale?none featured a first-person narrator, and none are
40
7
 Many scholars have noted the similarities in voice and tone between The Morgesons
and Charlotte Bront??s Jane Eyre, which Stoddard claimed as a favorite. See Sandra
Zagarell?s ?The Repossession of a Heritage: Elizabeth Stoddard?s The Morgesons,? and
Louise Penner?s ?Domesticity and Self-Possession in The Morgesons and Jane Eyre,? as
well as Susan K. Harris?s ?Projecting the I/conoclast? and Dawn Hendwood?s ?First-
Person Storytelling in Elizabeth Stoddard?s Morgesons.? 
concerned with exploring how a young girl might profitably adapt such an oppressive,
?self-obliterating?  educational system to more liberating ends. In 1862, however, the
publication of Elizabeth Stoddard?s The Morgesons finally gave American readers a
pointedly ambivalent (albeit fictional) first-person account of a schoolgirl?s experiences
with domestic education, at home and at school, in the 1810s, 20s, and 30s.
7
 Given the
above depictions of female education and its intimate relationship to the interests of the
patriarchal family, it is unsurprising that Cassandra?s family is ever-present in her
narrative of her school years; even the novel?s title suggests the predominance of her
forbears in this account of her deeply personal experiences growing up female in early
nineteenth-century Massachusetts. In The Morgesons, though, Cassandra negotiates her
conflicts with such potentially self-obliterating educational systems via the process of
leaving and returning home?alternating between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the
private and the public, duty to self and duty to others?until, I argue, she is finally able to
strike a compromise between the expectations that are ?cut and fashioned? for her, and
the circumstances of her daily life, her idiosyncrasies, and her personal wishes. Stoddard
foregrounds her protagonist?s struggles to reach these compromises by focusing on a
specific type of family relationship?parental, ancestral, and conjugal?during each of
Cassandra?s three school terms. 
41
As Cassandra attends each school and lives with a different group of relatives, she
learns about a particular kind of female duty that is expected of her?filial obedience,
Christian benevolence, and wifely submission?and explores the discrepancies she
perceives between her needs and the needs of others. On a literal level, Cassandra?s
home-leaving and home-coming pattern reflects the movement of many middle-class
adolescent females whose attendance in the new coeducational and all-girls? schools was
often sporadic, due to the fact that their parents remained unconvinced of their
educational or social value, or else required their daughters? help at home. Figuratively,
though, Cassandra?s repeated travels also underscore how the roles for which adolescent
girls were being formally educated took them out of their parental homes and yet never
truly removed them from the domestic sphere, precipitating a frustration over what many
girls observed as ?the contrast between ideals of independence and liberty learned from
books and the actuality that they had to confine their aspirations to marriage and
motherhood? (Boylan 161; cf. Kelley 62). Thus, when Cassandra exclaims at the start of
one school term, ?Oh, I am homesick at the idea of a school and a master,? she refers at
once to the sense of loss she feels over being away from her parents? comfortable
domestic space, and to the sense of malaise?of being ?sick of? home?that she feels
about being educated for domestic duty.
The one-room schoolhouse, filial obedience, and the parental family
When she is 13, for example, Cassandra attends the one-room schoolhouse in
Surrey, where she and her teacher, Mrs. Desire, have ?been at enmity a long time,?
42
presumably because of Cassandra?s recalcitrance (12). Cassandra?s mother, Mary, is
particularly keen on sending her to school so that the child might be kept out of the way
while she supervises the hired help during the ?crisis of soapmaking and whitewashing?;
as an added benefit, the typically boisterous and impious Cassandra might read some of
the New Testament at school and thereby become more reserved and religious (11).
However, Cassandra dawdles along the road and deliberately arrives late at school in
order to skip the Bible reading that typically begins the day?s lessons. When she enters
the classroom, she finds Mrs. Desire ?walking up and down the room; a class of boys and
girls stood in a zig-zag line before her, swaying to and fro, and drawling the
multiplication table? (11). Even the teacher is ?yawning? (she lacks passion, a play on
her name: she misses desire) and the ?younger children [are] drowsy already, lulled by
the hum of the whisperers? (11). Indeed, the entire school seems ready for a nap when
Cassandra determines to wake them up: ?Feeling very dull, I asked permission to go to
the water-pail for a drink; let the tin cup fall into the water so that the floor might be
splashed; made faces at the good scholars, and did what I could to make the time pass
agreeably? (11). Later in the day, Cassandra?s disruptive antics escalate when she and the
other children are asked to recite their lessons for a visiting minister and two other
?strangers.? ?Exasperated? and resentful because her mother has sent word that
Cassandra must stay at school until evening (since the housework is not completed), she
intentionally performs her recitation with ?dignified inaccuracy,? yet she is commended
by her teacher?a breach of the teacher-student relationship that offends Cassandra?s
sense of order and discipline. To ?punish? Mrs. Desire, Cassandra makes a scene in front
43
of the visitors, challenging her teacher?s authority by twice kicking a loose board with
her foot; for this, Cassandra is delighted to be expelled from the school (12). Upon her
return home and the requisite explanation regarding her dismissal, Cassandra?s father,
Locke, Jr., is completely unfazed; he is preoccupied with more public matters, such as
?creating a great business which should improve Surrey,? and notes only that Cassandra
is ?almost a woman,? as if to suggest that her dame school days were likely to come to a
close soon, anyway. However, her mother is disturbed by the news of Cassandra?s
misbehavior, and looks upon her with ?doubt and sorrow,? saying that now Cassandra
?must be useful at home? (14). For her part, Cassandra is content never to return to Mrs.
Desire?s school, and in fact ceases her formal studies for the next two years. 
As this brief scene illustrates, the purpose of Cassandra?s formal schooling at
Surrey, at least from the standpoint of her mother, is to teach obedience and to serve as a
kind of daycare. Though local dignitaries might visit the dame school to observe the
teaching and learning that is taking place there?their authoritative presence causing a
noticeable increase in the teacher?s attention to actual instruction?in their absence,
educational activities are entirely lacking in rigor, energy, and a coherent sense of
academic purpose. To be sure, they lack the ?neatness, order, and propriety? of which
Beecher boasts in the above description of Hartford. That fact seems not to matter to
Cassandra?s mother, for whom her daughter?s schooling is primarily a means toward
enabling the smooth functioning of her own domestic space, and as a method of
acclimating the rambunctious Cassandra to a system that requires physical self-control
44
(as when the children must stand in lines or recite in unison), mental concentration (as
when they engage in rote learning), and obedience to adult and religious authority. 
Mary?s decision to charge another woman with the considerable task of reigning
in Cassandra?s high-spiritedness is noteworthy, as Mary herself is known to have
something of an independent streak, particularly with regard to her own father and father-
in-law. This irreverence is exemplified in the scene just prior to Cassandra?s leaving
home for Mrs. Desire?s school, when her paternal grandfather enters the Morgeson home:
?Say good-morning, Cassandra,? said my mother, in a low voice.
?No,? I answered loudly, ?I am not fond of my grandfather.? Mrs.
Saunders mopped her face again, grinning with delight behind her handkerchief.
[...] 
?He?s a mighty grand man, he is,? commented Mrs. Saunders [after
grandfather Morgeson departs]. ?I am pesky glad, Mis Morgeson, that you have
never put foot in his house. I ?plaud your sperit!?
?School-time, Cassy,? said mother.... ?Tell me when you come home what
you have read in the New Testament.? (11)    
Though it is clear that Mary Morgeson has attempted to set a good example for her
daughter by extending her own (reserved) politeness to her father-in-law and instructing
Cassandra to do the same, it is equally clear that Cassandra has learned from her mother?s
example (and from Mrs. Saunders) to resist conventional womanly deference to
patriarchal authority when it does not suit her. Indeed, Mary?s exclamation that it is time
for school conveniently interrupts Mrs. Saunders?s delighted encouragement of Mary?s
45
rebellious behavior?exactly the kind of behavior that she hopes to suppress in
Cassandra. 
Clearly, her interruption comes too late. The unintended lessons that Cassandra
gleans at home and at school ultimately have little correspondence to those that her
mother intended for her. Instead, they underscore Cassandra?s precocious awareness of
the contradictions inherent in adult life, the disparity, for example, between what adults
say and what they mean or do, and between the distinctly different roles that male and
female parents play with regard to their children and the domestic space. The details of
the scene that she recalls portray both home and school as chaotic and disorganized
settings in which children are burdensome and mostly in the way. They are institutions
guided by seemingly arbitrary rules?Cassandra goes to school but her sister does not;
she performs poorly at school, but is praised anyway by her inattentive teacher; mothers
fret over disobedient children but fathers do not?all of which suggest the capriciousness
of those two institutions that, ironically, shoulder the responsibility for developing her
into an organized, rational, and rule-bound woman capable of systematically raising other
good, rule-bound citizens. Even at this early age, Cassandra perceives these
inconsistencies and develops a critical eye which enables her to seek out contradictions
and hypocrisy later in her educational experiences, and to cultivate a sense of personal
autonomy and individualism she would not otherwise have learned.
Not intimidated by these contradictions, Cassandra uses them to her advantage
and ends up developing precisely the sort of personal autonomy and individualism that
was typically reserved for boys in this period. Whereas Cassandra is permanently barred
46
from Mrs. Desire?s classroom, ?which was considered an indelible disgrace and long
remembered [by] my schoolmates [who] regarded me in light of a Pariah,? she is
forgiven and indulged by her mother, who says that Cassandra must be useful at home
but then neglects to assign her any duties, and only rudimentarily instructs her in sewing
and the Bible, two clearly feminine pastimes:
She sent me to Temperance [a hired woman], and Temperance sent me to play, or
told me to go ?a visitin?.? I did not care to visit, for...my [former]
schoolmates...put on insufferably superior airs when they saw me. So, like
Veronica, I amused myself, and passed days on the sea-shore, or in the fields and
woods, mother keeping me long enough to make a square of patchwork each day
and to hear her read a Psalm?a duty which I bore with patience, by guessing
when the ?Selahs? [musical notations] would come in, and counting them (14).
Each female caregiver passes Cassandra off to another until, finally, she must fend for
herself, out of doors and away from home and school. Thus, although her parents and
teachers have failed to stifle Cassandra?s rebellious behaviors and to impress upon her
the feminine filial obedience that is so widely considered to be the foundation for all
other womanly traits, they also unwittingly provide her with the opportunity to step
literally outside of the confines of domesticity. From this vantage point, Cassandra can
perceive the similarities and differences between the home and school environments, and
can grasp the lessons she is supposed to have learned in each place; however, she is
unbound by those lessons, and free to contradict them at her will. 
47
8
 For more information about the methods of instruction and subjects studied at Ipswich,
see also ?Motives to Study in the Ipswich Female Seminary??attributed to ?one of the
teachers of the institution,? and likely contributed by Zilpah Grant herself?in the same
number of the American Annals of Education, Rita S. Saslaw?s ?Zilpah Polly Grant
Banister,? and Woody?s History of Women?s Education in the United States, v. 1 (350-
52).  
The female academy, Christian benevolence, and the ancestral family
Cassandra?s first journey out of Surrey takes her to Barmouth, the town in which
her own mother was raised, where she stays with her aunt Mercy (whom we met earlier),
and her grandfather John Warren (called Grand?ther by Cassandra). Now 15 years of age,
Cassandra is  ?robust? and ?inattentive, and seeking excitement and exhilaration,?
conditions that are well-served by her father?s increased wealth and generous spending
habits (23). Aunt Mercy ?considered my present state a hopeless one,? however, and
?called mother?s attention to my non-improvement, and proposed that I should return to
Barmouth with her for a year, and become a pupil in a young lady?s school, which had
recently been established there, by a graduate of the Nipswich Female Seminary, a school
distinguished for its ethics? (27). Stoddard?s Nipswich is clearly designed to evoke for
the reader the image and reputation of Mary Lyon?s and Zilpah Grant?s well-known and
respected Ipswich Female Seminary, which (as I noted above) claimed to instruct girls in
the values and virtues of benevolent Christian womanhood, and such ?precepts and spirit
of the gospel? as sisterly sympathy, affection, morality, and charity, so that they would
make ?faithful and enlightened teachers? and mothers ( Lyon ?Tendencies,? 286-7;
?Seminary for Female Teachers at Ipswich? American Annals of Education, February
1833, 69).
8
 At the same time, though, the school?s name is also meant to disparage that
48
institution by connoting the ?nipping? or sharp curtailment of growth that, as we shall see
below,  characterizes this portion of Cassandra?s education. Although Cassandra?s
mother is initially opposed to the idea of sending her daughter to Barmouth?she recoils
at the thought of subjecting Cassandra to the Puritanical sternness and asceticism of her
own father?she eventually consents because ?she wished me to comprehend the
influences of her early life, and learn some of the lessons she had been taught,? and also,
Mary explains, because ?I trembled at the prosperity of your opening life, and believed it
best for you to have a period of contrast? (46). Her father, too, agrees that the religious
and frugal atmosphere of Barmouth ?was a good place to tame me? (though he will make
frequent trips to Barmouth and, hypocritically, supply Cassandra with all the luxuries she
requires) (27, cf. 46). Cassandra?s trip to Barmouth, then, encompasses a double
educational function: She is to be a student at Miss Black?s Ethical School by day, and a
student of her mother?s early years by evening.
Miss Black?s Ethical School at first appears to offer precisely the kind of
educational curriculum and social training that Cassandra?s aunt and parents desire for
her. Each school day begins, as it did in Surrey, with a Bible reading, followed by the
teacher?s interpretation of the scripture. Miss Black decides that Cassandra will study
geology, botany, composition, and arithmetic, subjects intended to ?lead [her] mind up
from nature to nature?s God? (37). Cassandra is also, for the first time, surrounded by
girls of her own age who are similarly training to become learned Christian women, and
who might therefore be expected to serve as mirrors or models for one another. 
49
9
 Such biting comments, or ?nips,? are also suggested by the school?s name; an additional
connotation for this word, having to do with small, surreptitiously enjoyed sips of
alcohol,  is also suggested in relation to the rum-running family, above.
10
 Later in the novel, Cassandra?s renaming takes on a different resonance, as she
identifies with the sea, a symbol of the sexual attraction she feels toward powerful men
like her cousin Charles and her cousin Desmond (the latter of whom becomes her
husband). This identification initially is made during Cassandra and Charles?s first
conversation when he asks her if she ?knew whether the sea had any influence? on her
(62). Cassandra?s reply, that she ?had not thought of it? elicits a cryptic and loaded
response from Charles: ?There are so many things you have not thought of,? he
answered, ?that this is not strange? (62). In the context of their erotically-charged
relationship, the exchange between them suggests that Cassandra had not previously
thought of herself as a sexual creature, or perceived her susceptibility to sexual attraction.
From this point forward, though, Cassandra embraces the image of the sea. 
It soon becomes apparent, however, that the ?Ethical? in the school?s title is a
severe misnomer, and that Christian virtues are in short supply. Cassandra?s classmates
are a haughty, competitive bunch whose families? wealth has for generations relied upon
such unethical business practices as the slave trade, insurance fraud, and rum-running.
With their teacher?s tacit approval, the Barmouth girls ostracize Cassandra, whispering
openly about her inferior (plain) style of dress, teasing her about her mother?s rumored,
youthful romantic indiscretions (still remembered in town gossip), and ridiculing her for
being the granddaughter of a lowly tailor (34-6).
9
 While the girls home in on Cassandra?s
maternal history, Miss Black herself targets Cassandra?s paternal ancestry. Stripping
Cassandra?s personal identity down to her father?s surname on her first day at the school,
Miss Black announces ?Miss C. Morgeson, we will call you? as ?the name of Cassandra
is too peculiar? (35).
10
 In addition to emphasizing her intolerance of non-conformity,
Miss Black?s tailoring of Cassandra?s name draws attention to her status as a ?parvenu,?
one of the newly wealthy families whose success and good fortune seems surprising and
50
unlikely to last. Finally, when a revival comes to town, the school is closed for two
weeks, ?that the pupils might profit in...The Scheme of Salvation? (47). When the school
reconvenes, however, ?Miss Black did not touch on the topic,? and Cassandra ?found that
not one of my classmates had met with a change? (48). Thus, rather than demonstrating
ethical, Christian behavior (or appropriate virtues, such as temperance, faith, or charity)
Cassandra?s teacher and classmates (and their families) display an abundance of sinful
behaviors, including pride, greed, gluttony, and envy. 
At Grand?ther Warren?s, on the other hand, religious doctrine overrules.
Cassandra is socially and emotionally isolated by the ?formal, petrifying, unyielding?
relationship between her now ?timid? Aunt Mercy (who ?is not the Aunt Merce I had
known at home?) and Grand?ther Warren, a Puritan with a ?morbid conscience,? and
?without gentleness or tenderness? (28). Indeed, Cassandra?s life at her grandfather?s
house is characterized by a profound ?gloom,? ?sternness,? and ?silence,? the latter of
which is broken only by Grand?ther Warren?s frequent bible-readings and prayers, to
which Cassandra is forced to listen. When her grandfather and aunt do communicate with
Cassandra, they continually compare her to her mother, with Mercy insisting upon their 
physical likeness (it is Mercy, in fact, who notices that Cassandra is assuming a
?womanly shape? and needs to lower the hem of her skirts?a show of sexual
development and maturity in the nineteenth century), and her grandfather comparing their
mischievous temperament with complaints that she is always ?playing over [her]
51
11
 Barbara Welter discusses this convention of lowering the hem of one?s skirt?and also
of wearing one?s hair up off the neck, something Cassandra will begin to do at her next
school?as signs of sexual maturity. (Dimity Convictions 13). 
mother?s capers? (37, 28, 30).
11
 Visiting tailoresses long in Grand?ther Warren?s employ
recognize her rebellious nature and assert that the only way she can be ?managed? is ?if
things are cut off, and kept out of sight, or never mentioned before her? (31).
In some ways, the atmosphere of these two settings and their approach to teaching
youngsters are very different, especially in their relation to Christianity. Miss Black?s
school, for example, is an entirely female social environment that encourages girls to
develop alliances with one another based on class and social status rather than genuine
fellow feeling; Christianity is a pretext for those alliances, claimed by the upper class
students and their teacher as yet another mark of their distinction above Cassandra. On
the other hand, Grand?ther Warren?s home is sincerely devout but rigidly Puritanical.
Cold and unsympathetic, Cassandra?s grandfather imposes his will upon her and her Aunt
Mercy not by presuming to be holier than they, but by demanding their religious devotion
under penalty of his ?thundering? anger (48). 
From the start, however, Cassandra recognizes similarities between her school
and her temporary home, complaining that ?[m]y life at Grandfather Warren?s was one
kind of penance and my life in Miss Black?s school another? (28, cf. 42). In particular,
she notes that both her Grandfather and her schoolteacher, Miss Black, are determined to
break her of her illusions regarding her family?s high social status, strip her of her
personal and individual identity, tame her willfulness, and impose upon her a sense of
52
how the religious, economic, and emotional legacies of her ancestors shape her place in
the community.  
In the end, Cassandra learns neither to adopt her grandfather?s asceticism nor his
religious fervor, and she returns home still ?lawless? and ?possessed,? her ?wild oats
green and flourishing,? confessing not to have experienced any more religious conversion
than her newborn brother (60-1, 50). Her father?s frequent shopping trips play a role in
shielding Cassandra from lessons in frugality, to be sure, but more than this, her teacher?s
unethical behavior and lack of Christian charity reveal the hypocrisy behind her assertion
that she will ?endeavor to do her Christian duty toward Cassandra,? and her grandfather?s
unyielding stoicism reveal to her, as well, the hypocrisy of those whose religious
observance is disconnected from the fellowship of other people (36). 
Nevertheless, in this atmosphere that is so focused on using ancestral
relationships to teach girls how their family legacy shapes other people?s perceptions of
them and helps determine their public identity, Cassandra does importantly learn to focus
on the future and the past, those two temporal directions that stretch away from the
present and connect Cassandra both to the women who came before her and those who
may come after. Miss Black?s school, for example, alerts Cassandra to the potential
drudgery of the years ahead: ?Though I entered my duties under protest,? she explains, ?I
soon became accustomed to their routine, and the rest of my life seemed more like a
dream of the future than a realization of the present? (38). Her studies and their purported
relation to wife- and motherhood?but, perhaps especially, their routineness?bring
Cassandra to an understanding, for the first time, that she is being educated for those
53
roles. With respect to the past, on the other hand, Cassandra learns by experience what it
was like for her mother and aunt to grow up in Barmouth under their stern father, and in a
town obsessed with wealth and privilege. She perceives that, through her own genuine
Christian pity, fellow feeling, and benevolence, she might offer acceptance and love to
family members like her mother and aunt, who have been shamed by other people?s
rumors, class posturing, and strict religious devotion. 
The female academy, wifely submission, and the conjugal family
Cassandra?s final school trip occurs two years later, when she is barely 18, after a
stranger appears at her parents? home announcing himself as a cousin. Charles Morgeson
stays in Surrey three days, during which time, Cassandra recalls, he exerts over her a
mysterious ?authority [that] I did not resist? (62). Though Charles is married and a blood
relative, his irresistible authority over Cassandra is quickly revealed to be sexual in
nature, and an undeniable mutual attraction not to be quelled by social (or even Biblical)
prohibitions against adultery and incest. Now nearing the end of her adolescence and,
therefore, particularly sensitive to physical and sexual stimulation (for she is always
?hungry? and ?conscious of the ebb and flow of blood through my heart, felt it when it
eddied up into my face, and touched my brain with its flame-colored wave? (67, 77)),
Cassandra finds herself fascinated by (and somewhat naive about) Charles?s influence
over her. Thus, when Charles proposes to Locke and Mary that Cassandra would benefit
from ?our Academy? and the ?advantages? of their ?society,? and asks if they wish to
?give Miss Cassandra a finish at Rosville,? she appears eager to live with Charles and his
family while attending the local school (62-3). Her parents hardly know Charles
54
12
 In this respect, Rosville is not a typical ?finishing school??a type of educational
establishment that was frowned upon in Stoddard?s day for its strictly ornamental focus,
its mimicking of European upper-class schools, and its rejection, therefore, of the
purportedly more democratic and egalitarian American academies (Cott, Bonds 118). As
Mary Kelley has noted, however, American female academies like the one Cassandra
attends were not as egalitarian as they liked to claim. These schools ?offered [girls] the
cumulative and final academic experience, rather than preparation for the more advanced
learning awaiting males in colleges. It was a clear signal directly related to the
contrasting roles to be played by men and women as adults. The male?s role would be
public and his choice of occupation multiple, while the female?s would be private and her
occupation singularly domestic...Regardless of the rigor or depth in their academic
offerings, these institutions? basic mission and intent were to instill a sense of female
being and place that was unmistakably social and domestic? (Private Woman 61). 
Morgeson, yet they consent to let her go, as Cassandra?s father seems particularly
interested in her finding a suitable mate among their cousin?s affluent social set (79, cf.
87, 101). 
If Cassandra?s education in Surrey was about the role of the parental family in
one?s development, and Barmouth about the influence of a girl?s ancestral family upon
her status in the community, her year spent at Rosville is meant to instruct her more
directly in the domestic duties that women are expected to fulfill in conjugal
relationships, including housekeeping, entertaining, and child rearing. At Rosville?s
Academy, where 60 boys and girls of varying ages are taught in separate (gendered)
departments, Cassandra is also to learn the academic and social skills that her culture
expects middle-class women to know in order to be good wives. Thus, her studies in
history and physical philosophy (science), for example, are rounded out by the
ornamental branches of singing and dancing, a combination that is intended to turn
women into agreeable companions for accomplished young men (73).
12
 Her school
lessons, moreover, find their complement in Charles?s home, where Alice puts theory
55
into practice: ?an excellent housekeeper,? a devoted mother to her and Charles?s three
children, and an attractive, socially accomplished, indulgent wife who tolerates her
husband?s ?oddities? (and especially his extravagant expenditures on horses and flowers),
Alice models the wifely behaviors for which Rosville Academy girls are being trained
(70). Cassandra learns from her ?how to adjust chairs, books, and mats in straight lines,
to fold articles without making odd corners and wrinkles. At last I improved so much that
I could find what I was seeking in a drawer, without harrowing it with my fingers, and
began to see beauty in order? (75-6). In addition to learning how to meet the ?exacting,
systematic taste? of Alice?s husband, Cassandra learns how to dress well, how to wear
her hair in a becoming way, and how to be sociable and well-liked (76). ?Gratified? that
Cassandra is ?sought by the young people of her set and the Academy,? Alice gives
?little parties and large ones? as rewards for her learning her lessons so well, and also,
perhaps, as opportunities to further practice and hone her new skills (75). 
Perhaps most importantly, though, from her intimate vantage point in their home,
Cassandra perceives that Alice and Charles contentedly coexist in separate spheres?of
emotion, if not location?and that Alice?s submission to Charles?s ?exacting taste? is not
necessarily a signifier of her affection for him (nor is his providing for his family
financially a marker of his love for them): 
I discovered that there was little love between him and Alice. I never heard from
either an expression denoting that each felt an interest in the other?s individual
life; neither was there any of that conjugal freemasonry which bores one so to
witness. But Alice was not unhappy. Her ideas of love ended with marriage; what
56
came afterward?children, housekeeping, and the claims of society?sufficed her
needs....Their relation was no unhappiness to him [either]; he thought, I dare say,
if he thought at all, that it was a natural one (74). 
Though Cassandra expresses surprise at this ?discovery? she has made, Stoddard
suggests that the Academy?with its overemphasis on the showiness of marriage and the
apparently  ?natural? lack of intimacy in married life?may prepare females and males
alike to banish their cherished expectations for a more passionate and connected conjugal
union. Indeed, Stoddard?s critique of the superficiality of the Academy and its
overemphasis on marriage for marriage?s sake is beautifully exemplified in one scene
where Cassandra meets her cousin Ben Somers for the first time. Enjoying a walk behind
Rosville?s Academy one evening, Cassandra watches her friend Helen as she begins to
practice a new dance step. Suddenly, as if on cue, 
The door of a house opposite us opened, and a tall youth came out, hat in hand.
Without evincing surprise, he advanced toward Helen, gravely dancing the same
step; they finished the figure with unmoved countenances. ?Come now,? I said,
taking her arm. He then made a series of bows to us, retreating to the house, with
his face toward us, till he reached the door and closed it (88, my emphasis).   
Like some bizarre human cuckoo-clock, Ben and Helen represent the ways in which the
finishing school reduces romantic relationships to a choreographed and passionless
formality. Like Charles and Alice, who seem merely to go through the motions of
marriage and who evince no interest or sympathy for one another?s daily cares, Ben and
Helen quite literally revolve around one another, yet they say nothing and show no
57
emotion. Their exchange is purely physical without being passionate or sexual, perhaps
like the relationship that, between Charles and Alice (and likely many other couples), has
produced children but not real emotional connection. Because Ben and Helen are both
students, Stoddard suggests that it is part of their educational training that Ben learns to
respond to the ornament being displayed by the dancing female outside his dormitory,
and that he always be at the ready, hat in hand, for such an opportunity to meet and
partner with her. On the other hand, Helen?s willingness (not eagerness) to dance with the
approaching male, and the ease with which she is drawn away from him, suggests a kind
of (understandable) take-it-or-leave-it attitude toward such mechanical romantic
relationships that are really just for show.  
By contrast, however, Cassandra?s own relationship with Charles teaches her that
relationships between men and women can be much more complex and internally
motivated than the relationships she perceives between Charles and Alice, or mimed in
the dance shared by Ben and Helen, even as they exhibit some of the same inherently
automatic or mechanical qualities. Describing her own acclimation to her new living
arrangement, Cassandra notes: 
I fell into the habit of guessing each day whether I was to offend or please him,
and then into that of intending to please. An intangible, silent, magnetic feeling
existed between us, changing and developing according to its own mysterious
law, remaining intact in spite of the contests between us of resistance and
defiance. But my feeling died or slumbered when I was beyond the limits of his
personal influence. When in his presence I was so pervaded by it that I moved as
58
13
 This lack of agency, so important in concepts of True Womanhood emerging during
this decade, is echoed in Cassandra?s frequent illnesses at Rosville (Cassandra falls ill
four times while at Charles?s house) (84, 99, 106, 109).
if under a pivot; when away my natural elasticity prevailed, and I held the same
relation to others that I should have held if I had not known him. This continued
until the secret was divined, and then his influence over me was better
remembered (74).
?The secret? to which Cassandra refers is her developing sexual and emotional attraction
toward Charles, which compels her to move automatically in a way that pleases and
brings her closer to him. Unlike Ben and Helen?s passionless movements, which follow a
pattern already laid out for them in advance, Cassandra?s automatism is an expression of
her overpowering desire for Charles and her lack of control over her own physical
response.
13
 
Charles seems similarly attracted to Cassandra because of the ways in which she
does not meet the expectations that are laid out for women by their culture, and especially
because of the ways in which she defies his expectations. As their attraction deepens and
Cassandra feels increasingly adult (?I no longer feel like a schoolgirl,? she explains), she
is determined to explore the mutual influence that she and Charles exert upon one another
and she purposefully flouts his wishes (and all of what she has learned about ?proper?
relationships at school) in order to see what the consequences will be. On the same day
that she decides to stop going to school, she also provokes Charles by ceasing to wear a
ring that he has given her, and she stops wearing her hair in the way that he prefers it
(115). When Charles notices the missing ring and her mussed hair, ?[a]n expression of
59
unspeakable passion, pride, and anguish came into his eyes; his mouth trembled; [and] he
caught up a glass of water to hide his face, and drank slowly from it,?so distressed is he
that she should go against his wishes. Ultimately, though, Charles becomes even more
passionate, daring to embrace Cassandra and tell her that he loves her while they stand
just beneath the window of his own home, within earshot of his wife and children (118). 
Thus, although Cassandra learns that wifely submission may be the key to a
successful marriage relationship?for Charles never contemplates leaving Alice, and
Alice remains blissfully ignorant of the relationship that Charles and Cassandra
share?she also learns in this, her first love relationship, that being a wife and being in
love are not necessarily contingent upon one another. Later in the novel, when she meets
her future husband, Desmond, Cassandra will manage to reconcile submission and
passion; for now, it is important that her first lesson in love suggests they need to be
reconciled, and may not naturally coexist. 
Cassandra?s year in Rosville ends tragically. One night, on a much-anticipated
carriage ride with his wildest horse (a mare that Cassandra has named Aspen, perhaps
drawing from her botany lessons and comparing the horse?s skittishness to the ever-
quaking leaves of the aspen tree), Cassandra and Charles are overturned. Charles is able
to thrust Cassandra out from under the falling horse before he is himself crushed and
killed. Cassandra escapes with her life, though her arm is broken and her face deeply
scarred. Numerous critics have noted that their carriage ride symbolically represents
Cassandra and Charles?s intentions to consummate their physical relationship and be
driven or lead by the powerful, wild animal who so clearly represents passionate
60
sexuality (Matter-Seibel 30, Zagarell 48). Others have argued how remarkably feminist it
seems Stoddard does not ?censure? Cassandra for acting on her feelings of sexual desire,
while she does punish Charles severely (Harris 163, Weir 433).
I would add that Charles?s death importantly emphasizes the extent to which
Cassandra is responsible for her own learning. Throughout her educational experiences at
Surrey, Barmouth, and Rosville, others attempt to teach Cassandra by forcing her (and
other children) to stand in straight lines, to perform recitations, or to absorb information
(such as from the Bible) by listening repeatedly to lectures and readings. However, as we
have seen above, Cassandra learns most by the empirical process of observing and
interacting with others, as when her emotions?rather than Grand?ther?s or Miss Black?s
Bible readings?guide her to act benevolently toward the tailoresses, for example, or
when Charles?s exacting tastes guide her to perform specific housekeeping duties, and to
tend to her own appearance in specific ways. With Charles?s death, however, and the
physical consequences that Cassandra herself must pay after the carriage overturns, she
perceives that, although empirical study can be liberating (for one?s will directs what one
learns), it is also limited by individual desires (rather than familiar or communal needs),
and shaped, quite literally, by accident.
Returning home
After her school journeys away from home, Cassandra?s returns to Surrey prompt
her to reflect upon the lessons she learned while she was away, and these reflections
serve both to diminish the oppressive power of her family and her childhood domestic
61
space over her life, and to motivate her to rescue her sense of self from their obliterating
forces. On her journey back from Gran?ther Warren?s house, for example, Cassandra
imagines the elation she will feel about reuniting with her mother and sharing the
camaraderie of having also done some growing up in Barmouth. When she gets arrives in
town, however, Cassandra is immediately disappointed: 
When we rode over the brow of the hill within a mile of Surrey, and I saw the
crescent-shaped village, and the tall chimneys of our house on its outer edge,
instead of my heart leaping for joy, as I had expected, a sudden indifference filled
it. I felt averse to the change from the narrow ways of Barmouth, which, for a
moment, I regretted. When I entered the house, and saw mother in her old place,
her surroundings unaltered, I suffered a disappointment. I had not the power of
transferring the atmosphere of my year?s misery to Surrey (50).
Though Cassandra has learned at school that she need not follow ?the narrow ways of
Barmouth,? and can survive, even thrive, among the criticism of her peers and her
grandfather, her mother?s persistent obedience disheartens her and dashes her hopes for
their fellowship. With mixed emotions, Cassandra comes to realize that, in growing
beyond the reach of her culture?s stifling prescriptions for women, she has outgrown her
own mother. 
Too, after Cassandra?s carriage accident with Charles, she looks forward to
returning home, and especially to the contrast between the physical confines of her
parents? domestic space (so unlike Charles?s lavish home) and their liberality in dealing
with her (so unlike Charles?s demanding ways). ?In my room,? she says, ?I shall find
62
myself again,? for that place ?is the summary of my wants. It contains me? (110, 131).
Indeed, Cassandra does find relief upon her return to Surrey: ?I had a comfortable sense
of property, when I took possession of my own room,? she reports. ?It was better, after
all, to live with a father and mother, who would adopt my ideas. Even the sea might be
mine? (129). However, ?for all this,? Cassandra claims slightly later, ?a mad longing
sometimes seized me to depart into a new world, which should contain no element of the
old, least of all a reminiscence of what my experience had made me? (152). Again
contrasting her experiences at school against her experiences in Surrey, Cassandra
confronts the ways in which her own maturation and learning has unsuited her for the old
roles she once played in her parents? home, and her need to create a new domestic arena
that will suit her better. When Cassandra?s mother asks her to tell of her accident, of her
life in Rosville and her experiences, Cassandra?s reply, and their subsequent
conversation, reveals these changes: 
?Dear Mother, I never can tell you all, as you wish. It is hard enough for
me to bear my thoughts, without the additional one that my feelings are
understood and speculated upon. If I should tell you, the barrier between me and
self-control would give way. You will see Alice Morgeson, and if she chooses she
can tell you what my life was in her house. She knows it well.?
?Cassandra, what does your bitter face and voice mean??
?I mean, mother, all your woman?s heart might guess, if you were not so
pure, so single-hearted.?
?No, no, no.?
63
?Yes.?
[....] ?You are beyond me; everything is beyond.?
?I will be a good girl. Kiss me, mother. I have been unworthy of
you.?(133) 
Cassandra?s confession that she can never tell her mother ?all? is an acknowledgment of
how dramatically she has transgressed the boundaries of female duty, as they have been
defined by her culture and modeled by her family. Unable to fathom or accept the
changes in her daughter, Mary Morgeson admits that, while she loves Cassandra (and
does bestow a hug and kiss), the chasm between their life experiences is too great to
bridge. Cassandra?s returns home ultimately teach her that, in some ways, she cannot go
home again. She must create a new role for herself that will satisfy her desires to be ?a
good girl,? as well as an adult woman, in Surrey.
Cassandra makes one final trip away from Surrey to Belem, the home of her
former Rosville classmate, Ben Somers, and his family. This time, Cassandra?s aim is not
to receive an education at school, but to help pave the way for Ben?s marriage to her
sister, Veronica. At Belem, Cassandra also meets her own future husband, Ben?s brother,
Desmond. A Byronic and devilish figure, like Charles, Desmond is nevertheless more
temperate, and vows to tame his own demons (drinking, gambling) before offering
himself in marriage to Cassandra. Perhaps the most important feature of Desmond and
Cassandra?s relationship (and its most significant difference from Charles and
Cassandra?s relationship) is their mutual respect for each other?s independent
64
experiences, and for the ?scars,? both physical and emotional, that each have incurred in
the course of living and loving others (172). Cassandra loves Desmond despite (or
perhaps, because of) his vices; Desmond loves Cassandra despite (or because of) her
indiscretion with her married cousin. Their early allowances for, and curiosity about,
each other?s idiosyncracies,  prefigure a marriage relationship in which husband and wife
need not conform to social dicta about proper role behaviors.   
Upon her final and permanent return to Surrey from Belem, Cassandra
experiences both her most severe break from her parents, and also her most profound
acceptance of domesticity. James Matlack brilliantly observes that Cassandra?s journey
home from Belem is the most prolonged of the novel, and gets increasingly slower as
Cassandra nears Surrey first by train, then stagecoach, then buggy (where she observes
that ?the streets and dwellings looked as insignificant as those of a toy village,? again
emphasizing the diminished power of her parents? home), and finally, on foot, until she
reaches her doorstep and finds her mother dead (205, 252). After the funeral, Cassandra
leaves the ?vacuum of our [grieving] atmosphere? to contemplate the nearby sea?a force
that is associated throughout the novel with sexual energy, passion, and vitality?and she
has an epiphany in which she imagines reconciling the duty she owes to others in her
family with the duty she feels she owes herself. Lying on a ?flat, low rock,? she looks
into a pool of water in an inlet until her own reflection appears to her. She ponders on it,
?till I suddenly became aware of a slow, internal oscillation, which increased till I felt a
strange tumult. I put my hand in the pool and troubled its surface.? At that moment,
Cassandra hears a voice calling ?Hail, Cassandra! Hail!?, and 
65
I sprang up the highest rock on the point, and looked seaward, to catch a glimpse
of the flying Spirit who had touched me, My soul was brought in poise and
quickened with the beauty before me! The wide, shimmering plain of
sea...mingled its essence with mine...I stopped on the verge of the tide-mark; the
sea was seeking me and I must wait. It gave tongue as its lips touched my feet,
roaring in the caves, falling on the level beaches with a mad, boundless joy!    
?Have then at life!? my senses cried. ?We will possess its longing silence,
rifle its waiting beauty. We will rise up in its light and warmth and cry, ?Come,
for we wait.? Its roar, its beauty, its madness?we will have?all.? I turned and
walked swiftly homeward, treading the ridges of white sand, the black drifts of
seaweed, as if they had been a smooth floor (214-15, emphasis in original).
When Cassandra enters the house, she announces to her Aunt Merce, ?you may depend
on me. I will reign and serve also? (215). With her mother?s spot vacated, Cassandra
finds herself prepared to occupy her mother?s place, but only if she can incorporate into
that ?vacuum?  the vitality of the sea, which has become a symbol for her own passions
and life force.  
At the end of the novel, Cassandra is, in many ways, the very picture of female
duty depicted in the school plans examined earlier in this chapter. She is married to her
cousin (a recovering alcoholic), living in the home she inherited from her parents (her
mother dead, her father estranged from her), and, as she writes (or speaks) this memoir,
surrounded on all sides by her widowed, ever-sickly younger sister, Veronica, her aging
Aunt Mercy, and her sister?s apparently disabled child who ?smiles continually, but never
66
cries, never moves, except when it is moved? (252). Though Cassandra does not have any
children of her own, she nevertheless bears responsibility for the welfare of her husband,
her aunt, her sister, and her niece or nephew (for the child?s sex is unspecified, apparently
important here only as a symbol of dependency). The various infirmities that are hinted at
here?alcoholism, aging, and physical disability?emphasize the weight of her
obligations to her parental, ancestral, and conjugal families, as well as Cassandra?s
singular ability, as the woman of the house, to abate the effects of those infirmities upon
those she loves.
From another perspective, however, Cassandra?s life appears quite a bit less
constrained than either the epigraph or the girls? school plans suggest. She owns the
property in which her family is situated; she does not bear the burden of raising her own
children; she indicates no plans to become a mother; and she enjoys a mutually respectful
and loving marriage which thrives precisely because both husband and wife have
embraced each other?s flaws and idiosyncratic tendencies. Thus, although Cassandra
maintains ties to her parental, ancestral, and conjugal families, she does so on her own
terms. In these respects, Cassandra appears to have figured out how to ?make all others
happy around her? while satisfying many of her own desires ?to be happy herself in her
social and domestic relations.? Crucially, the lessons about family that Cassandra learned
at school?regarding the capriciousness of gender roles, the impotence of many authority
figures, the emptiness of a loveless marriage?give her confidence in her own abilities to
create her own female identity and position in her family, rely on her own power to make
67
decisions for herself and others, and choose for herself a marriage partner with whom she
can experience mutual respect, sexual attraction, and love.    
It is important to note that, in Stoddard?s mid-century representation of the
relationship between schooling and family during the 1810s, 20s, and 30s, the process of
obliterated selfhood is the norm, and Cassandra?s ability to escape that process is
remarkably rare. My next chapter focuses on a schoolgirl from the 1840s and 50s who,
despite her own willful and rebellious character, is unable to extract or save herself from
her culture?s campaign toward gender conformity, and its particular expectations that
females will be obedient and sexually submissive. If The Morgesons was Stoddard?s
ambivalent reply to the ways in which family and female education supported the
coming-to-power of the Cult of True Womanhood during the early decades of the
nineteenth century, Elsie Venner is Oliver Wendell Holmes?s defense of the ways in
which science, medicine, and girls? schooling might fortify that power and end girls?
negotiation with domesticity, once and for all.  
68
  
Chapter Two
To Teach and to Cure: Medical Interventions 
to Female Education and Oliver Wendell Holmes?s Elsie Venner: A Romance of Destiny
As my previous chapter illustrated, the most influential American girls? schools of
the 1810s, 20s, and 30s?located almost exclusively in New England?endeavored
primarily to prepare their white, middle-class students for the duties of domestic life.
Much to Elizabeth Stoddard?s dismay, educators? concerns with students? wifely and
maternal ?destiny? frequently superceded their concerns for students? intellectual
potential or individual self-fashioning, and dashed the hopes of many young females that
education would lead them to freedom from domestic constraints. The republican concept
of the family as a building block for the nation?a definition which underwrote many
arguments in favor of female education?demanded that girls? schools nurture, protect,
and increase students? sense of obligation to serve their consanguineal families as sisters
and daughters, and their conjugal families, in later years, as wives and mothers. 
As mid-century approached, however, key shifts in demographics, economy, and 
religious faith during these earlier decades threatened again to radically destabilize
domestic family life and the prevailing roles of the female within it. Between 1815 and
1840, for example, a revolution in transportation technologies for building roads, canals,
and railroad lines to aid westward expansion inspired many young men to leave
69
1
 For more information about the True Woman ideal, see Barbara Welter?s ?The Cult of
True Womanhood,? Mary Ryan?s Empire of the Mother, Nancy Cott?s ?Passionlessness,?
and Anne Firor Scott?s ?The Ever Widening Circle: The Diffusion of Feminist Values
from the Troy Female Seminary 1822-1872.? See also Jann Todd?s 1998 Physical
Culture and the Body Beautiful on ?Majestic Womanhood? (16); Anne Cogan?s 1989 All-
American Girl: The Ideal of Real Womanhood in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America; and
Linda Kerber?s 1980 Women of the Republic, for a discussion of the ?Republican
Mother? (235).
agricultural work in search of commercial and industrial labor opportunities in the cities,
thus depriving the rural eastern population of its fathers, brothers, and eligible bachelors
(Kett, Rites 30). At the same time, the Second Great Awakening?an evangelical
revivalism that swept the country between 1790 and 1840, and was especially
concentrated in New England and upstate New York?was diluting the puritanical
Calvinism of this region with a number of more forgiving strains of Protestant
Christianity (Menand 7). Among other critical changes ushered in by this mass
evangelism, Calvinist beliefs in predestination and innate moral depravity gave way to
(though were not completely obliterated by) the notion that people were innately good
and redeemable by God?s grace. With regard to females, in particular, Calvinist portraits
of women as sinful, lascivious daughters of Eve were attenuated by a variety of new
stereotypes including the Majestic Woman, the Real Woman, the Republican Mother,
and, most prominently, the True Woman, the last of which presented women as
essentially maternal, domestic, submissive, pure, pious, and passionless.
1
 As a result,
more and more women were attracted to the northeast to enjoy the victories that
evangelism and these new views of womanhood had to offer, including greater spiritual
authority in the home, opportunities for itinerant preaching, teaching, and public
70
2
 See especially Catherine Brekus?s Strangers and Pilgrims, 119; Cott?s
?Passionlessness,? 228; Mary P. Ryan?s Cradle of the Middle Class, 74; Keith Melder?s
?Mask of Oppression,? 28; and Tyack and Hansot?s Learning Together, 16.
speaking, and ultimately an enlarged sphere of influence over Christian social reform
efforts such as abolition and temperance.
2
 Ironically, though, these patterns of male
emigration and female immigration contributed to such a ?marked excess of women? in
?eight Eastern states?Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New
Jersey, New York, North Carolina, and Rhode Island??that by 1860 women would
outnumber men in this region by 74,360. ?These figures brought home to many a
realization of the fact that home life, in the normal sense, was no longer even a
possibility? for many females, since fewer women could expect to marry, or widows
remarry, in states with such a high gender imbalance (Woody History v.2,1). A crisis of
?superfluous? women erupted, and along with it, an ?unprecedented growth of
institutions? that would endeavor to control, order, and organize the female and youth
populations until such time that the family could be restabilized (Woody History v.2,1;
Melder 28). 
Common schools, of course, already formed the core of this evolving institutional
infrastructure (Scott 78). They provided employment for those unmarried, ?superfluous?
women, and childcare for the thousands of youth whose parents labored during the day.
However, after 1840, teacher complaints regarding ?the difficulty of managing classes
that contained a promiscuous assemblage of infants, boys, girls, large boys, big girls,
young men, and young women? issued loudly from the now ubiquitous one-room
schoolhouses that dotted the American landscape, and educators began to look beyond
71
3
 Though the terms ?scientist? and ?doctor? were not quite identical at this particular
cultural moment, doctors were perceived primarily as group of scientists who observed
the body, while other kinds of scientists observed other aspects of the natural world. I use
the terms ?scientist? and ?doctor? interchangeably in this chapter, to reflect that men of
medicine were also considered to be men of science?happily so, for that increased the
size and scope of their community and authority. For more information about the
relationship between professional scientists and doctors, see Nina Baym?s American
Women of Letters and the Nineteenth-Century Sciences, and Cynthia Davis?s Bodily and
Narrative Forms.  
their own institutions for help in solving the problems of overcrowding and disorder
(Kett, Rites 124). The (overwhelmingly male) scientific and medical communities  shared
with educators a basic concern for the healthy perpetuation of individuals and families, as
well as a mutual interest in establishing their relatively new professional organizations as
permanent features of the American institutional landscape.
3
 These communities
trumpeted their methods and theories ?not...simply as a means of exploring nature and
matter, but as tools for approaching moral and social problems, as well,? and were thus
readily drawn into these problem-solving efforts (Davis 17; Trecker 190). Emerging
organizations such as the American Medical Association (founded in 1846) and the
American Association for the Advancement of Science (founded in 1848)?two
beneficiaries of what Nancy Cott has identified as the post-Calvinist ?shift in moral
authority from religion to science??offered a particularly compelling solution that
would divide large numbers of students into smaller and more manageable groups, or
grades, according to the newly delineated stages of youth development (Davis 19; Baym,
American Women of Letters 19; Cott, ?Passionlessness,? 221 n.4;). 
Breaking the student body into smaller groups according to science-based theories
of development did help address the crisis of overcrowding and disorder in American
72
4
 Cultural attentiveness to corporeality in the second quarter of the nineteenth century
was, of course, not restricted to the adolescent female body, nor was it attributable only
to the increasing zest for science. Karen Sanchez-Eppler?s Touching Liberty, Mark
Seltzer?s Bodies and Machines, and Carolyn Sorisio?s Fleshing Out America each
suggest how concerns over slavery, industrial labor, and gender equity all required more
focused attention to the physical body after the 1820s. Whereas their scholarly efforts
tend to center on the adult body, however, this chapter examines how the education
movements of the 1840s and 50s brought the child body into focus for the American
public.    
schools (Kett, Rites 124). However, because it stratified the youth population by age and
isolated adolescents by gender, this partitioning also brought into focus new crises related
to the distinct biological characteristics and physiological needs of each life stage and
each sex. Adolescent females in all-girls? schools were a particular lightning rod for
doctors, scientists, and educators because, as a concentrated group brimming with
untapped (virginal) reproductive potential, they represented a collection of future mothers
who might build and stabilize family life in the next generation. At the same time, they
served as a reminder of the current discrepancy between females and males in the
northeast, and were thus a renewed source of cultural anxiety over superfluous women
and their non-motherhood. 
As I will explore in this chapter, Oliver Wendell Holmes?s 1859 novel, Elsie
Venner: A Romance of Destiny, represents one important textual example of how
adolescent schoolgirls and their bodies were obsessed over in a new strain of American
letters concerned with systematically nurturing and mining their physiological potential.
4
I investigate how Holmes?s novel dramatizes the practice of social gynecology at school,
and illustrates how this influential doctor and author imagined that scientific, medical,
and educational institutions might together determine methods of helping adolescent girls
73
cross the bridge from physiological to social puberty, and thus navigate the terrain
between what was perceived to be their essentially primitive, bestial, adolescent identity
on the one side, and their essentially social and civil adult identity on the other. Though
Holmes was not, strictly speaking, an advocate of female education?he did not see the
benefit of intellectual stimulation for most girls and women?his novel does find value in
the socializing mechanism of the school, and particularly in the figure of the male
schoolteacher as a catalyst for the socio-sexual awakening of pubescent female students,
and their resulting maturation toward socially-prescribed sex roles. Adding to the
organizing principles that science and medicine had already contributed to education in
general and female education in particular, Holmes?s novel brought into public view the
idea that adolescent females could be further categorized according to how well their
individual physiologies and psychologies would allow them to conform, as they aged, to
culturally-approved models of femininity. He delineated a spectrum of female bodies and
behaviors ranging from normal to abnormal, and relied on cutting edge
science?especially Darwin?s Origin of Species, published simultaneously with his
text?to imply that most girls could be moved along that spectrum, toward proper
femininity, through the influence of their male teachers. Holmes?s text is tentative and
subtle on these points: He did not intend to produce a tract either for or against female
education. Nevertheless, it is possible to tease out of his bizarre novel Holmes?s deep
engagement with the educational theories of his day, and to observe how his innovative
contributions here anticipated and influenced a bevy of later, better-known works such as
Edward H. Clarke?s Sex in Education (1874) and S. Weir Mitchell?s Doctor and Patient
74
(1888), which delineated ever more sharply the qualities of abnormal femininity and their
relationship to education. In subsequent sections of this chapter I trace Holmes?s
engagement with female education in Elsie Venner, focusing on his interest in classifying
and pathologizing a wide range of adolescent females, identifying biological imperatives
to justify, scientifically, the Cult of True Womanhood, and applying Darwin?s theories of
Natural and Sexual Selection to the concept of sex-role socialization for girls at school.
Later in the chapter, I explain Holmes?s stake in female education, not immediately
apparent to most students of nineteenth-century American culture, who know him
primarily as a doctor, poet (especially of ?Old Ironsides?), and essayist. Finally, I return
to Holmes?s novel to examine how the education of his central character reflects his
extreme ambivalence toward females who do not conform to the prevailing model of
femininity, and to suggest the implications of his work for the writers and cultures he
influenced. First, though, it is useful to examine briefly how doctors, scientists, and
educators conceived of the development of all children, from infancy to pubescence,
since each life stage is to some degree determined by the previous one, and since
adolescent females, in particular, were expected not only to navigate these life stages but
understand them in order to prepare for bearing and raising their own children. 
Medico-Educational Theories of Childhood Development at Mid-Century
Children from birth to age six, included in the first life stage, were considered to
be constitutionally delicate (and, according to recently adopted religious doctrine,
innately good); therefore, they came to be perceived as extremely vulnerable to
75
corrupting influences and mental strain. Dr. Amariah Brigham?s influential Remarks on
the Influence of Mental Cultivation and Mental Excitement Upon Health (1832) typified
physicians? warnings against strenuous mental exertion, claiming that the brains and
central nervous systems of young people would become diseased?perhaps fatally?if
taxed with studying subjects beyond their capabilities (8). Of the various systems of
educating children in America, Brigham writes, ?they must all...be wrong...[if] they do
not conform to the requirements of the laws of nature, and wait for organs to be
developed before they are tasked? (21). Such beliefs, along with the Lockean view that
the very young child was a tabula rasa or ?blank slate,? suggested to social reformers
from Bronson Alcott to Lydia Childs, Jacob Abbott, Thomas Gallaudet, and George
Combe that such children should be supervised in what were called ?infant? schools,
where instruction in basic literacy, writing, arithmetic, and the Bible would nurture them
morally and intellectually without overtaxing their delicate minds and bodies (Kett, Rites
124; Boylan 155). Infant education emphasized the moral and physical simplicity of a
young child?s female-dominated learning environment; infant schools, furthermore, tried
to mimic or reproduce the idealized home lives of middle-class children whose mothers
or female guardians would remain with them at home while male adults worked outside
of that space. 
Children aged six to twelve, on the other hand, were understood to require a more
rigorous school environment which would offer broader opportunities for peer
socialization, weaken the intensity of the child?s reliance on adults, and strengthen self-
confidence. The common school was ?smaller, more protected, and more controllable
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5
 Pestalozzi and Lancaster were first popularized in the United States in the 1820s;
however, the rigidity of their methods soon brought them into disfavor and the trend
waned by the mid-1830s. Parkerson and Parkerson have suggested that the population
increase I have noted above in the northeast is partly responsible for their renewed
popularity; too, the influence of science upon these strategies in the 1840s and 50s helped
vindicate their use for a new generation of students (Transitions in American Education
99). These pedagogical methods would continue to wane and wax, and be retooled,
throughout the nineteenth century, and Pestalozzi in particular continues to enjoy a 
profound influence on current early education methods in America. See also Woody v.1,
531.  
than the marketplace, the street, or field, but larger than the immediate circles of parents,
ministers, and playmates,? and was therefore considered ideal for helping children to lose
some of their earlier dependence on parents and guardians (Finkelstein ?Casting? 131).
At school they would begin to learn the self-reliance that adult life would require, and to
form social and emotional bonds with their peers, whose characteristic goodness would
make such affiliations benign, even beneficial. Monitorial or ?mutual instruction?
schools, inspired by Pestalozzi and Lancaster, altered children?s associations with one
another such that students who formerly engaged equally in play activities and other
forms of non-structured socialization now acted as proxies for their teachers in a highly
rigid hierarchical system.
5
 Select student ?monitors? who had mastered certain academic
content more quickly than his or her peers were charged with teaching that content to the
rest of the class; they also maintained the  authority to award merits or demerits for good
or poor performance (?A Manual of the System of Monitorial or Mutual Instruction?
341). When discipline was necessary?say, as a result of those demerits?teachers would
punish children by withholding affection and reward them by bestowing it, a tactic of
moral suasion that was quickly replacing the practices of shaming and corporal
77
punishment (Goshgarian 39; Parkerson and Parkerson 152). Moreover, it was theorized
that children would learn to internalize moral restraint by reading instructive tales, and by
checking their own behavior against the actions of their classmates (Kett, Rites 113).
Though supervised by adult guardians, young people of both genders would exert a great
deal of influence upon one another in lessons both academic and social (Goshgarian 36).
The perception that young people would benevolently influence one another did
not extend to the next life stage, however, when, between the ages of thirteen and
eighteen, both sexes entered and endured the throes of puberty, that ?most dangerous
time of life that needed careful watching? (Kett, Rites 135). Indeed, a ?pedagogy of
surveillance? formed a key link between teaching adolescents and treating what was
widely perceived as the ?crisis? of their budding sexual maturity and rapid physical
growth (Goshgarian 36). Parents and teachers were admonished to ?watch over, guard,
and restrain? the adolescents in their charge, keeping an eye out for sexual transgressions
such as masturbation (?self-abuse?) and flirtatiousness, and even using ?observational
journals? that recorded the efficacy of these surveillance methods (Bostwick 184, qtd. in
Goshgarian 39; Boylan 163). Catherine Beecher?s 1841 Treatise on Domestic Economy
for the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School, to name one highly popular
example?it was reprinted almost every year for the next fifteen years?thus warned
mothers (and mothers-in-training) to be watchful over pubescent children who, ?in
solitude, and without being aware of the sin or danger...may inflict evils on themselves,
which not infrequently terminate in disease, delirium, and death? (233). Similar
admonitions were delivered in such popular texts as Sylvester Graham?s Lecture to
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Young Men on Chastity (1837), and William Alcott?s The Young Man?s Guide (1833),
The Young Wife (1844), and Physiology of Marriage (1866). Of course, anxieties over
youthful sexuality were not new to the 1840s and 50s: John Demos explains that Cotton
Mather?s The Pure Nazarite (1723), a religious tract explicitly denouncing the sin of
masturbation, initiated a popular ?new genre of sermon devoted entirely to the topic?
(152). What is different about texts such as Beecher?s is the way in which religious
concerns merge with scientific ones, to produce admonitions against masturbation that
speak equally of sin against God and sin against one?s body and health. Thus, Beecher
writes about masturbation as ?evil,? a ?sin? that brings not only spiritually damning but
physically damning consequences, as well.   Even doctors of divinity?perhaps eager to
maintain moral authority by infusing religion with science?wrote educational tracts
emphasizing the need to regulate strictly the adolescent?s physical and spiritual health:
?Almost every affliction of the body, as well as of the mind, arises from the fact that we
refuse to obey law,? wrote Reverend John Todd in another popular text, The Daughter at
School (1854):
God has given the ten commandments for the welfare of human society, and no
one can be universally violated without destroying society, and no one can be
partially violated without injuring society just in proportion as it is violated. So he
has given laws for the body, ?not spoken, indeed, on Sinai, but written on the
body, ?laws which cannot be violated without injuring the health. These laws
often clash with our wishes and habits, but they are inexorable (163). 
79
It was hoped that constant surveillance by adult authorities would cause the adolescent to
internalize the disapproval of his or her elders, and eventually lead to the self-policing of
his or her own undesirable behaviors. More immediate and aggressive approaches
advocated by science and medical professionals, however called for placing a physical
buffer between boys and girls, whose increasingly obvious sexual differences and mutual
attraction could pose a distraction to learning and a threat to chaste behavior. Male and
female students were thus often segregated at puberty into separate classrooms and, in
many cases, separate schools, which mirrored the notion of distinct gender spheres that
males and females were ideally expected to inhabit as adults.
Of course, for a variety of reasons, adolescent females remained worrisome to
those in the medical field, even while they were segregated from boys. For one thing,
their imminent reproductive maturity, ripening sexual interest, and increased bodily-ness
were at odds with the period?s burgeoning ideals of adult True Womanhood, which was
often represented as maternal yet passionless, disembodied yet physically infirm. One can
imagine how, in contrast to the True Womanhood ideal, such physical changes as the
onset of menstruation?more apparent now that girls were frequently concentrated by age
into a single grade and classroom, rather than dispersed throughout a school?would
have acutely demonstrated adolescent girls? physical natures, their reproductive power,
sexual purpose, and physiological ?destiny.? As Diane Price Herndl has argued, girls
who maintained their health and vigor throughout this developmental stage posed a threat
to many (male) doctors who were ?seeking to improve their economic and professional
standing [by] asserting women?s weakness and innate unhealthiness? (22). Such doctors
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6
 A wonderful little poem at the end of Mary Davenant?s 1850 short story, ?Fanny?s Fine
Education,? complains that young girls fashioned for ornamental wifehood at school are
nothing more than ?genteely got up marionettes,? and implies that schooling has affected
their insides: ?Yes! Puppet?s the word; for there?s nothing inside/ But a clock-work of
vanity, fashion and pride!/ Puppets warranted sound, that without any falter/ When
wound up will go?just as far as the altar;/ But when once the cap?s donned with the
matronly border,/ Lo! The quiet machine goes at once out of order? (445). The poem is
quoted in Brackett, 34; the short story can be read in its entirety in Harper?s New
Monthly Magazine XVII no. CX, September 1850.
Later in the century, educator Anna Brackett would note that many American
girls were quite conscious of this loss of social leverage, and responded to it with
resistance and subversion. Regular admonitions from doctors that puberty is ?necessarily
a period of great physical and mental disturbance,? she wrote, only served to make girls
afraid of their impending adulthood, and resistant to its required roles and behaviors (The
Education of American Girls 54). While American females have ?common sense
enough,? she went on, to accept inevitable changes in their bodies and their roles, they
also have common sense enough to ?fight against, and to conquer, what is not inevitable,
provided it is not desirable [to them]? (54). As Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has argued, one
way in which females fought against undesirable roles of wife- and motherhood was to
purposely adopt hysterical behaviors, for which rest and a total cessation of domestic
duties were often prescribed (669-71).       
would come to portray menstruation as both a blessing and a curse: that is, while the
reproductive functioning of the ovaries and uterus provided welcome physiological proof
that a girl was ready to take on the weighty responsibilities of wife- and motherhood,
menarche also marked the beginning of her susceptibility to a variety of illnesses, most
especially hysteria, a disorder marked by ?emotional indulgence, moral weakness, [and]
lack of will power? that would be exacerbated by the duties of parenting and
homemaking (Smith-Rosenberg ?Hysterical Woman,? 669-71). Thus, whatever social
leverage might have been gained from being a young female at the peak of her sexual
vitality was just as quickly lost again as a result of the same physiological development.
6
  
81
Female education was early influenced by these clinical estimations and
expectations of pubescent female health, especially by the subsequent medical prejudice
against female intellectualism that developed in the 1840s and 50s and gained momentum
as the century advanced. Although the model of True Womanhood suggested that
maturing females would naturally develop wifely (reproductive) and maternal (nurturing)
instincts, it was also a view widely disseminated by well-known doctors such as Charles
Meigs that those instincts could easily be warped by either internal or external factors. A
maturing female had to be monitored carefully because of ?the strange and secret
influences which her organs, by their nervous constitution, and their functions, by their
relation to her whole Life-force, whether in sickness or in health, are capable of exerting,
not on the body alone, but on the heart, the mind, and the very soul of woman? (Lectures
on Some of the Distinctive Characteristics of the Female 6). The notion that female
reproductive organs were inherently nervous, and that, from their enfeebled disposition
they controlled the rest of the female body, mind, and soul, suggested that a girl could
derail her own health simply by developing. Any number of other, outside
influences?but especially intellectual work?would only increase the likelihood of
debility and deformity. As Meigs asserted in 1847, ?it is not woman?s province, nature,
power, or mission? to ?develop? ?strong idea[s]? ?in the tender soil of her intellect?;
moreover, the ?certain women? who do possess ?male powers? of intellect are
?monsters...things out of, or beyond the common course of nature? (Lectures 9-11). Thus,
concerns that had been expressed in the 1810s, 20s, and 30s about the ways in which
education would pervert girls? abilities to be good sisters, daughters, mothers, and wives
82
mingled with newer worries, in the 1840s and 50s, about the ways in which intellectual
endeavor might degrade their maturing bodies, compromise their abilities to reproduce,
or otherwise divert females from the cardinal virtues of femininity?piety, purity,
submissiveness, domesticity, and passionlessness. Where a typical argument against
female education had previously contended that girls who ?devote their lives to
study...throw off the female character,? science-minded critics of female education
began in the 1840s and 50s to posit that girls who studied would also ?throw off? the
female sex and become masculine, barren, hysterical, nymphomaniacal, or freakish
(Burton 168, my emphasis).
In response to such arguments, proponents of female education were compelled to
adjust their approaches to girls? schooling so that the lessons and skills they imparted
would facilitate the development of the future wife and mother, and not be at odds with
the purported physical needs and limitations of budding True Women. Many
conservative educators embraced as a middle-ground the approach that had been
endorsed almost a century earlier in Jean-Jacques Rousseau?s controversial and quasi-
scientific philosophical novel, ?mile, or On Education (1762), which celebrated
adolescence as a delicate period of natural and necessary sexual awakening for both
males and females, and recommended that education allow boys (who are ?active and
strong?) and girls (who are ?passive and weak?) to develop as the sexual partners God
intended them to be (358). Rousseau claims that, because females were created as the
sexual counterparts of males, female education should focus on eliciting the natural
sexual allure of young girls, teaching them to cultivate their ?charms,? arouse male
83
desire, strategically resist premature mating advances in order to provoke more vigorous
arousal in the strongest of suitors, and eventually, once the best suitor is identified,
become passive and timid to encourage the male?s advances (preferably through
marriage) and finally allow sexual congress and reproduction. ?The Supreme Being
wanted to do honor to the human species,? he wrote; ?While abandoning woman to
unlimited desires He joins modesty to these desires in order to constrain them. All this, it
seems to me, is worth more than the instinct of beasts? (Rousseau 359). Of course,
Rousseau?s radical suggestion that woman had unlimited sexual desires threatened to
undermine the concept of True Womanhood and its attendant ideas that females were
?naturally? pure or asexual, and ?passionless.? At the same time, however, it shared with
that concept an assumption that adult females are not sexually aggressive but, by God?s
design, submissive and malleable, traits which serve to increase their dependency upon
men. As historian Keith Melder has put it, Rousseau?s work lent credence to the idea that
educational institutions ?had a role in character formation to smooth nature?s way, in
easing the girl?s passage from an unsure childhood to an assured feminine maturity and
domesticity? by fostering both her sense of having a sexual purpose and her sense of 
?modesty and shame? about her sexual feelings (25). Schoolteachers could perform the
crucial function that Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has described as ?social gynecology,?
funneling girls? pubescent, ?animal? physicality and interest in sex into a socially
acceptable interest in courtship, mating, Christian motherhood, and domesticity (?Female
Animal? 352). They would shepherd girls from physiological puberty, or the stage of
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being physically prepared for reproduction, to social puberty, or the more mature stage of
being socially ready, as well, for wifehood, motherhood, and True Womanhood.
The Girls? School as Medical Theater in Elsie Venner
Holmes?s Elsie Venner proposes just such an agenda. The novel features a
strikingly beautiful, wealthy, motherless, and ?wild? adolescent schoolgirl, the title
character, whose primitive, bestial characteristics outstrip her civilized traits, and whose
unconventional behavior makes her an outcast in her small society of Rockland, Maine in
the 1840s and 50s. The narrative centers around the complex relationship that develops
between Elsie and one Bernard Langdon, a young doctor-in-training who has temporarily
abandoned his medical studies in Boston in order to teach and thus raise funds to support
the remainder of his professional education. Bernard?s search for employment brings him
to Rockland?s Apollinean Female Institute, where Elsie is enrolled. 
Of course, Elsie is not Bernard?s only student. According to the novel?s unnamed
narrator?Bernard?s medical school professor, with whom he corresponds by mail?the
Institute serves ?a hundred young lady scholars,? each of whom is perceived as needing
assistance crossing the threshold from girlhood to womanhood. Among this hundred, the
narrator claims, there were  
girls of all ages, little creatures, some pallid and delicate-looking, the offspring of
invalid parents, ?much given to books, not much to mischief, commonly spoken
of as particularly good children, and contrasted with another sort, girls of more
vigorous organization, who were disposed to laughing and play, and required a
85
strong hand to manage them; ?then young growing misses of every shade of
Saxon complexion, and here and there one of more Southern hue: blondes, some
of them...brunettes, some...with that swarthy hue which often carries with it a
heavily-shaded lip....With these were to be seen at intervals some of maturer
years, full-blown flowers among the opening buds, with that conscious look upon
their faces which so many women wear during the period when they never meet a
single man without having his monosyllable ready for him ?tied as they are,
poor things! on the rock of expectation, each of them an Andromeda waiting for
her Perseus (47-51).
Thus described, the Institute serves as a context in which Bernard can scrutinize all of
these young girls, measure them against one another, especially physiologically, and
contrast them with regard to health, strength, maturity, and ?consciousness? about their
relationship to men as potential brides (i.e., we may presume the monosyllable is ?yes,?
as in, ?I will marry you?). His relationship to these students will include imparting
appropriately feminine academic subjects?Bernard teaches poetry, not science?as well
as serving as a kind of practice beau, a Perseus to their Andromeda. According to the
myth, Andromeda is offered as a sacrifice to a sea serpent?a phallic, snake-like creature
that, as a symbol both of untamed male and female sexuality, gets a lot of play in this
novel?but she is saved by and then married to Perseus, who beheads the serpent and
thus figuratively eradicates unbridled sexual desire. The suggestion here that each student
(from ?little creatures? to ?growing misses? to ?full-blown flowers?) anticipates marriage
as an answer to potentially perilous, untamed sexuality corresponds with the narrator?s
86
declaration, later in the novel, that the Institute is performing a crucial ?task? in the ?new
social order? by preparing its students to be wives of ?American-born men, any one of
whom may be President of these United States. Any one of these girls may be a four-
years? queen? (172). Thus, the school?s primary function is to prepare young females of
all different physiological constitutions to become marriageable young ladies, potential
First Ladies, suitable mates, then, for the most ideal of American suitors?men who,
presumably, will have also succeeded in sublimating their own sexual urges to the more
selfless pursuits of civil service and nation building.
As the narrator acknowledges, some of the hundred Institute scholars are harder
to manage than others; however, Elsie is by far the Institute?s most unruly student: her
physiological and social development appear compromised by a number of forces which
threaten her ability to make the crucial transition from girlhood to womanhood.
Seventeen years of age at the start of the novel, Elsie rejects every aspect of proper
femininity that she is supposed to embrace: ?her temper was singular, her tastes were
anomalous, her habits were lawless, her antipathies were many and intense, and she was
liable to explosions of ungovernable anger? (192). She is non-domestic, asocial, and
apparently reluctant to worship at church; in addition, she ?shuns all the other girls,?
preferring instead, to wander the town?s mountain wilderness alone, undeterred by the
dangerous rattlesnakes that infest the area (212). Whereas these qualities seem to
diminish Elsie?s femininity?she is by turns masculinized by her fearlessness and
unsexed by her irreligiosity?still other qualities paradoxically suggest her
hyperfemininity. Elsie is, for example, what we might today call an ?early bloomer,?
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physically mature, sexually provocative, and more emotionally passionate than one might
expect from a girl her age. Her precocity is linked, at various points in the novel, to her
Portuguese heritage (on her deceased mother?s side), her profound ties to her African
servant and surrogate mother, Sophy (figured throughout the novel as a descendant of
primitives and cannibals), and a kind of hysteria associated with the onset of puberty
(150, 179, 194). As a result of her unpredictable pubescent impulses, she is feared and
loathed by many of her townsfolk, who struggle particularly to reconcile her apparent
physical ?magnificence? with her perverse resistance to ?normal? femininity. Indeed,
despite her wealth and beauty, Elsie is unanimously considered unmarriageable: her
father asks himself, ?Who would dare to marry Elsie??; her classmates think she is a
?man-hater,? and her female teacher, Miss Helen Darley, fears that Elsie may have been
?born so out of parallel with the lines of natural law that nothing short of a miracle can
bring [her] right? (192, 197, 74). Even her cousin Dick Venner?a scoundrel, and the
only character in the novel who seriously considers Elsie as a potential wife (because he
wants a cut of her inheritance)?suspects that she would probably attempt to kill him in
one of her inevitable fits of rage (262-4; 268-9). Many in Rockland?including the
town?s own Dr. Kittredge?even believe that Elsie?s perplexing behaviors may stem
from her having absorbed some traits of the rattlesnake that bit her mother while Elsie
was still in utero. (This bite is, in fact, what killed Elsie?s mother shortly after she gave
birth (445).) As a result of her independence and willfulness, Elsie remains uncontrolled
by those few adults who are charged with cultivating her mental, physical, and emotional
growth. She is permitted to grow up virtually unsupervised and unsocialized and is, at the
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start of the novel, a ?wild creature? who ?ordered everybody and was ordered by none?
(277). 
Before Bernard?s arrival, Holmes indicates, the Apollinean Institute is not quite
up to the task of converting its young charges into potential First Ladies, and is especially
ill-equipped to deal with the intensive challenges Elsie presents. Hindered by its distance
from any modern metropolitan center?particularly from Boston, ?the Hub,? Holmes
would say, of civilization and medicine?the school is a chaotic and backwards
organization, isolated from the influences of current scientific theories and therefore
plagued by many of the institutional problems I enumerated at the beginning of this
chapter. For instance, rather than organizing the institute into grades (as was customary
by the 1850s), the owner, Silas Peckham, ?kept [the] young ladies? school exactly as he
would have kept a hundred head of cattle, ?for the simple, unadorned purpose of
making just as much money in just as few years as could be safely done,? and packing
the classrooms full of female students of different ages and abilities (48). As a result, the
?miserable? and ?frail? Helen Darley is overworked and overwhelmed; one of those
superfluous women who seems destined never to marry, she ?had bartered away the life
of her youth...breath[ing] in the hot air of schoolrooms,? and is thus always on the verge
of a physical or emotional breakdown (69, 124). The consequences of the school?s
mismanagement are experienced also by the students whose instructors, like those we
observed in Cassandra Morgeson?s first school in Surrey, possess insufficient knowledge
of their subjects and poor pedagogical and disciplinary skills (49). Many of the girls
attend irregularly, and most turn out uninspired academic work when they do attend;
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some students have even been so tempted to challenge the authority of the school as to
steal or attempt arson (71, 76). Elsie?whom Dr. Kittredge has predicted might ?take to
some of the girls or teachers? at school, which might in turn ?set her [proper female]
nature at work...for love would be more like to bring her right than anything
else??proves too strong a personality to be loved by her peers, managed by the likes of
Miss Darley, or by any means brought into the fold of True Womanhood (195-6).  
Upon the arrival of Bernard Langdon, however, Holmes hints that a solution to
Elsie?s (and the school?s) problems may eventually be found. As a ?man of science?
trained in the city, Bernard possesses ?uncommon sense? and a ?finer perception? than
the Rockland natives, two key traits that can help him interpret and look beyond the
?demonstrable facts of physics and physiology? to ?explore...behind the scenes which
make up...the show which is called Nature,? and thus to ?solve the problem of Elsie?s
influence to attract and repel those around her? (396-7). Although he is still a student
himself, Bernard is introduced to us as a man fully identified with his impending role as a
doctor. On his first day at the Institute, for example, he classifies each arriving schoolgirl
he observes as though she were a medical patient: 
Hannah Martin. Fourteen years and three months old. Short-necked, thick-
waisted, round-cheeked, smooth, vacant forehead, large, dull eyes. Looks good-
natured, with little other expression....Rosa Milburn. Sixteen. Brunette, with a
rareripe flush in her cheeks. Color comes and goes easily. Eyes wandering, apt to
be downcast. Moody at times. Said to be passionate, if irritated. Finished in high
relief. Carries shoulders well back and walks well, as if proud of her woman?s
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life...but seems restless, ?a hard girl to look after....Charlotte Ann Wood.
Fifteen....Long, light ringlets, pallid complexion, blue eyes. Delicate child, half
unfolded. Gentle, but languid and despondent....Undervitalized..... (76-77)
Bernard?s attention to the girls? ages, physical comportment, and emotional propensities
demonstrate his ability to read outward signs and divine their corresponding internal 
meaning, to taxonomize and classify the adolescent girls according to science?s
understanding of True Womanhood?s physiological characteristics: submissive ?good
nature? is expressed in one girl?s ?smooth, vacant forehead? and another?s ?pallid
complexion,? for example, whereas intractability is observed in a third?s ?proud? posture,
?restless carriage,? and flushed cheeks. Though Elsie proves more difficult to
categorize?when he first sees her, Bernard wonders aloud, ?And who and what is
that???his tendency is not to accept as true the rumors that Elsie is ?insane? or ?evil,? or
that she had inherited serpentine qualities as a result of ?pre-natal poisoning? from her
mother?s fatal snakebite (219); ?His professional training had made him slow to accept
marvellous [sic] stories and many forms of superstition, [and] he was disposed...not to
accept the thought of any odious personal relationship? between her and the snake that bit
and killed her mother (398-9). Instead, Bernard becomes ?convinced? that, though she
?had something of the feral nature....whatever alien impulse swayed her will and
modulated or diverted or displaced her affections came [rather] from some impression
that reached far back into the past....that she had brought her ruling tendency, whatever it
was, into the world with her? ?vigorous womanhood,? like a ?clouded streak seam[ing]
the white marble of a perfect statue? (398-9, my emphasis). Indeed, Bernard?s scientific
91
perspective helps him convert the girls? school into a kind of medical theater or
observatory, and restore to the Institute the spirit of its namesake, Apollo, a deity
associated with masculinity, patriarchy, medicine, order, harmony, and civilization.
The Good Doctor: Science, Sex, and Pedagogy
 The figuration of Bernard Langdon as Apollo incarnate has another significance,
as well, for in the legend Apollo slays the massive snake, Python, just as Perseus slays
the sea-serpent. (Bernard, meanwhile, keeps a rattlesnake caged in his study while he
teaches at the Institute, aiming to study its powers of ?fascinating? or hypnotizing prey
and to see how they compare with Elsie?s own magnetism (207-10).) Both killings
symbolize the subduing of their own raw sexuality by powerful, heroic men via their
intellect (for it takes some cunning to lure and trap each beast), the physical strength of
their bodies, and willful self-control. So, too, will Bernard?s efficacy in taming the
pubescent sexuality of his female students depend not only on his scientific mind but also
on his attractive physical body, his ability to resist the sexual appeal of his students, and
his more general exemplariness as a male specimen:
  Anybody might see what would happen, with a good-looking, well-dressed, well-
bred young man, who had the authority of a master, it is true, but the manners of a
friend and equal, moving about among these young girls day after day, his eyes
meeting theirs, his breath mingling with theirs, his voice growing familiar to
them, never in any harsh tones, often soothing, encouraging, always sympathetic,
with its male depth and breadth of sound among the chorus of trebles, as if it were
92
a river in which a hundred of these little piping streamlets might lose themselves;
anybody might see what would happen. Young girls wrote home to their parents
that they enjoyed themselves much, this term, at the Institute, and thought they
were making rapid progress in their studies. There was a great enthusiasm for the
young master?s reading-classes in English poetry. Some of the poor little things
began to adorn themselves with an extra ribbon, or a bit of such jewelry as they
had before kept for special occasions. Dear souls! they only half knew what they
were doing it for. Does the bird know why its feathers grow more brilliant and its
voice becomes musical in the pairing season? (175; cf. 231)
Without their realizing it, and without any conscious effort on Bernard?s part, the girls
automatically respond to their teacher?s natural sexual allure (adorning themselves with
ribbons and jewels to catch his eye), suggesting that education is best and most easily
conducted according to Nature?s plan. Most of the students are nearly hypnotized into
obedience by Bernard?s soothing voice, frequent eye contact, and tantalizing physical
nearness. The girls? obedience springs entirely from their sexual and romantic attraction
to their teacher, whose first name, incidentally, means ?sturdy bear,? and whose last
means ?enclosed town,? signifying Bernard?s position as Rockland?s resident hunk; they
flow to him the way that streamlets flow to larger bodies of water, and long to ?lose
themselves? in him, a phrase that points toward anticipated sexual ecstasy as much as it
does to nineteenth-century married life, in which women?s identities were absorbed into
their husbands? own. 
93
Meanwhile, Bernard remains ?distracted? by the sheer number of girls in his care
and yet naturally ?self possessed? enough to resist them, writing to his medical school
classmate, ?I always want to give a little love to all the poor things that cannot have a
whole man to themselves. If they would only be contented with a little!? (50, 231). (Over
the course of the novel, he will be tempted several times by various girls, and will
ultimately end up betrothed to Letitia Forrester, a ?thorough-bred schoolgirl? ?fit to be a
Crown Prince?s partner,? however he never engages in any untoward behavior with his
students (304-5).) Thus, the ?good-looking, well-dressed, well-bred? Bernard brings
order to his classroom not only indirectly, through his knowledge of science and nature,
but also through his inadvertent ability to elicit a sexual response in his young students
while remaining relatively detached from (if not impervious to) their own charms. Of
course, just as Elsie proves difficult for Bernard to categorize, she may also be harder to
tame than most Institute students, and harder for Bernard to resist: No ?piping little
streamlet,? Elsie exudes a ?counter-charm? to Bernard?s powerful magnetism, the
intensity of which rivals his own (105). However, by likening Bernard to Apollo and
Perseus, Holmes implies that his idealized maleness may be potent enough to overpower
and convert even this most contrary female student. This reading certainly squares with
Dr. Kittredge?s advice, above,  that love would set Elsie?s nature at work. Under the
influence of an intelligent, handsome, eligible bachelor in particular, she will, like her
classmates, become simultaneously more bestial and mating-driven (like birds in the
pairing season) and more cultivated, increasingly conforming to socially-prescribed
94
models for proper femininity, and acquiescing to Bernard?s masterly (but gentle)
authority. 
The influence that Holmes describes here was a quite common pedagogical mode,
though not one that had yet been explicitly theorized in the pedagogical literature of the
1850s, in which students learn to conform to adult sex role behaviors when they are
taught by members of the opposite sex. Deborah Fitts and Barbara Finkelstein have each
located short stories and memoirs about boys? education during this period, which
frequently depict male students responding differently to male teachers (with whom they
are generally competitive and belligerent) than to female teachers (under whose influence
they become, automatically, mild and protective) (144-45; ?Pedagogy as Intrusion? 247).
Moreover, G.M. Goshgarian has found evidence that a female?s ??acquaintance with the
opposite sex?? in puberty was expected to ?easily arouse the ?dormant passion?...and
?exercise a potent influence on the female organization?,? such that her emotional and
physiological states could mature successfully together into adult womanhood (King,
Woman: Her Diseases and Their Treatment (1858) and Johnson, An Essay on the
Diseases of Young Women (1849), qtd. in Goshgarian 60). Related to the concept of
disciplining through love, which, as I noted earlier, had been explicitly theorized in the
pedagogical literature, the teachers in these scenarios are effective to the degree that their
disapproval of student behavior is registered as an emotional rejection by a member of
the opposite sex, while their approval is registered as an emotional acceptance
(Goshgarian 39).  
95
  To these teaching models Holmes adds the power and authority of science. As is
hinted in the above passages?which compare human society to the animal kingdom and
suggest that Bernard Langdon is an ideal mate for whose attention his young students
eagerly compete by ?adorning themselves with extra ribbon? and jewels?Holmes?s
novel was enormously influenced by Darwin?s Origin of Species, also published in 1859,
which introduced the revolutionary theories of Sexual and Natural Selection and
reanimated the work of Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck (specifically, his 1801 Theory of
Acquired Characteristics) and Herbert Spencer (especially his 1852 Development
Hypothesis and his 1860 Synthetic Philosophy). As we have already seen, Bernard?s
powerful magnetism?his ability to attract the girls and make them compete for his
attention?is an excellent illustration of the principle of Sexual Selection, for example, in
which ?a struggle [ensues] between the individuals of one sex...for the possession of the
other sex? (Darwin 60). Darwin?s more complex theory of Natural Selection,
moreover?the incremental process by which inherited traits are maintained in, modified
in, or eliminated from each species?is also suggested in Bernard?s thought that whatever
influence had ?modulated or diverted or displaced? Elsie?s feminine warmth was
inherited from some distant source in her lineage, and that, through ?common influences?
she might be further modulated (Darwin 50; 398-9). As Darwin acknowledges, human
societies have always adopted Nature?s ?Survival of the Fittest? model by favoring
certain traits and discouraging others (50). The school, Holmes argues, is one of society?s
most powerful mechanisms for enacting this model with respect to young females,
96
because it will teach future wives and mothers the behaviors they will, in turn, pass on to
their own children. 
While the above passages only implicitly reference Darwin?s work, however,
other moments in the novel refer to Darwin explicitly, as when the narrator advises that,
when girls are being prepared for their role in the social world?as they are by Bernard,
at school?they must be made to understand that they are in competition with other
females to attract the best mate, and that 
there are dozens, scores, hundreds, with whom [they] must be weighed in the
balance....[They] have got to learn that the ?struggle for life? Mr. Charles Darwin
talks about reaches to vertebrates clad in crinoline, as well as to mollusks in
shells, or articulates in jointed scales, or anything that fights for breathing-room
and food and love in any coat of fur or feather! (94) 
In other words, in order to succeed socially?a benchmark evidenced by her catching the
?fittest? mate (and provider of ?breathing-room, and food? and, significantly, both
human, emotional and bestial, sexual ?love?)?the professor contends that each girl must
compete with her peers to best display those qualities most favored by Nature. Though
Bernard does not consciously choose to magnify his role in this competitive process, the
professor?s pronouncement signals to the reader that Bernard already is a part of it, and
that his position as a girls? schoolteacher automatically amplifies his role, allowing him
to routinely influence a large number of pubescent female students such that they become
aware of their place in the natural and social order. 
97
Thus, Holmes echoes the beliefs of many of his contemporaries?that all
pubescent girls are potentially resistant to the dictates of True Womanhood; and that
puberty is, by definition, a delicate crisis during which young girls? minds and bodies are
constantly in danger of being overtaken and deformed along the way to adulthood?and
suggests that the girls? school, if properly administrated, can help balance and regulate
the tension between the young female mind and body, identify those females who are
unbalanced (and how that balance is manifested), and even rebalance those females in
whom this equilibrium has been upset. Indeed, through Bernard?s interactions with his
students, the school is implicitly presented as the place best suited for the social and
scientific shaping of young girls into True Women. The girls who are ?fittest? can be
trained to attract suitable mates and produce healthy children for the good of the country.
Those who have trouble making the transition from girlhood to healthy adult womanhood
are ?slight obliquities,? as Bernard calls them, who may nevertheless be rescued by
?common influences? within the context of the educational institution (74). Those who
are unfit, however?the severe obliquities or ?right-angle cases??will need to be
whisked away to ?penitentiaries? or ?insane asylums,? or may suffer some worse fate
(74). The girls? schoolteacher, ideally armed with the most advanced scientific theory of
the day, can help to distinguish between these three types of girls (the ?fittest,? the ?slight
obliquities,? and the ?right-angle cases?), and can employ those ?common influences?
Holmes never specifies?but which I will argue consists mainly of Bernard?s masculine
sex appeal?in order to set right the females who are slightly off Nature?s course. Well
before anyone would so name it, Holmes engages in a kind of social Darwinism, the
98
7
 Numerous biographers concur that Holmes?s anti-Calvinist sentiments were a major
motivating force in his life and his literary work. Lifelong friend Harriet Beecher Stowe,
to cite one example, wrote to Holmes as the novel was being serialized that the story ?is
of deeper and broader interest than anything you have done yet....The foundations of
moral responsibility, the interlacing laws of nature and spirit, and their relations to us
here and hereafter, are topics which I ponder more and more.? Eighteen years later she
would write in a letter to Holmes that ?my daughters and I have been reading ?Elsie
Venner? again...all your theology in that book I subscribe to with both hands? (cited in
Fields, 289 and 373, respectively).
theory that human beings should engineer their social environments to favor the survival
of the strong and the elimination of the weak or unfit, specifically by selectively
introducing sexually appealing males into the adolescent female environment.
Dr. Holmes and the Construction of Femininity
Clearly, Holmes did not deliberately or consciously compose his novel as a
treatise on the relationship between science and female education. In fact, he proclaimed
in two of the novel?s three Prefaces (written in 1861, 1883 and 1891) that he wrote Elsie
Venner as a challenge to Calvinist doctrines of original sin. Asserting that ?the real aim?
and ?only use of the story is to bring the dogmas of inherited guilt and its consequences
into a clearer point of view,? he argued that Elsie should not be judged as ?evil? simply
because she inherited undesirable moral qualities from her ancestors (ix, xii).
7
Nevertheless, Holmes was also deeply interested in defining the physical and psychical
parameters of normative and abnormal femininity, and his efforts to do so form a
recurring theme in Elsie Venner and Holmes?s larger career as doctor, educator, and
author.
99
8
 Although Holmes had himself studied medicine under a female doctor in Paris, and had
even lobbied on behalf of Harriot K. Hunt for admission to Harvard?s medical lectures in
1847 and 1850, his arguments in favor of female medical education were lukewarm, at
best: Holmes ceased to champion Hunt?s cause when students protested that they would
leave the school rather than study beside a female; he similarly backed down from
supporting the admission of several black petitioners to Harvard Medical
School?including Martin Delany, Daniel Laing, and Isaac Snowden?when students
protested again. See Nora Nercessian?s Worthy of the Honor and Peter Gibian?s Oliver
Wendell Holmes and the Culture of Conversation.
In fact, in the broad nineteenth-century movement to bring science and medicine
to bear on female education, Holmes was not merely an adherent but a chief and early
architect, influencing many of his medical colleagues?including his former teacher,
Edward H. Clarke and his friend, S. Weir Mitchell, two men who would, later in the
century, profoundly influence educational policies affecting girls and women?in their
conceptualization of female health and illness. Biographer E. M. Tilton notes that,
beginning in the early 1840s when Holmes was first starting out as a doctor, his medical
casebooks in several places describe pointedly ?the shy, consumptive girls?the New
England type?reluctant to submit to [medical] examination...whom Holmes constantly
uses as an example? in his works (163). In the later 1840s, Miriam Small further attests,
Holmes?s interest in defining female capabilities and restricting the female sphere took a
more striking turn when, as Professor of Anatomy (1847-1870) and Dean of Harvard
Medical School (1847-1850), he advised that most females were better suited to be
nurses than doctors, since the rigors of scientific study were above the ken of most
women?s intellectual and physical abilities.
8
 By 1860, Dr. Holmes was lecturing to his
male students that females are not only intellectually inferior to males, but are, by nature,
physically infirm: 
100
Invalidism is the normal state of many [female] organizations. It can be changed
to disease, but never to absolute health by medicinal appliances. There are many
ladies, ancient and recent, who are perpetually taking remedies for irremediable
pains and aches. They ought to have headaches and back-aches and stomach-
aches; they are not well if they do not have them. To expect them to live without
frequent twinges is like expecting a doctor?s old chaise to go without creaking; if
it did we might be sure that the springs were broken (?Currents and Cross-
Currents? 200, emphasis in original).
Thus, thirteen years before Clarke would publish his enormously influential Sex in
Education (to which I will return later), and nearly three decades before Mitchell (the
father of the ?rest cure?) would famously exclaim that ?the man who does not know sick
women does not know women,? Holmes began to teach his own medical students at
Harvard that all normal femininity was, by definition, infirm (Mitchell Doctor and
Patient, 10). Women were not to be considered well unless they were ill.
Holmes aired his opinions on the subject of female health not solely before a
medical audience, but a lay one, as well. From December 1859 through December 1860,
at the same time that he was writing the medical lecture cited above, Elsie Venner was
published serially as ?The Professor?s Story? in the Atlantic Monthly?a magazine that
Holmes had helped found in 1857, alongside Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, John Lothrop Motley, J. Elliott Cabot, and the
publishing firm of Philips, Sampson & Company (Tilton 233-4). The title of his serial
novel probably served to carry over Holmes?s significant readership from his earlier
101
9
 The story of Elsie Venner enjoyed other audiences, as well. It was dramatized in Boston
in 1865 (Holmes did not like the adaptation), ?with one of America?s leading emotional
actresses, Mrs. D. P. Bowers, playing the title role? (Tilton 163, n.2); the novel was also 
revised in 1883, and brought out again in 1885, 1890, 1891, 1892, and 1893, and as a
Cambridge Classic in 1903. 
column, ?The Professor at the Breakfast Table,? which had itself followed his popular
?The Autocrat at the Breakfast Table.? Indeed, in 1859 the Atlantic enjoyed 40,000
regular subscribers?a fact often attributed to the popularity of Holmes?s
contributions?many of whom we may therefore assume read the text that would later be
printed as Elsie Venner.
9
 Here, Holmes compares females to untamed and
undomesticated woodland landscapes: 
Strange! The woods at first convey the impression of profound repose, and yet, if
you watch their ways with open ear, you find the life which is in them is restless
and nervous as that of a woman: the little twigs are crossing and twining and
separating like slender fingers that cannot be still; the stray leaf is to be flattened 
into place like a truant curl; the limbs sway and twist, impatient of their
constrained attitude; and the rounded masses of foliage swell upward and subside
 from time to time with long soft sighs, and, it may be, the falling of a few rain-
drops which had lain hidden among the deeper shadows. I pray you, notice, in the
sweet summer days which will soon see you among the mountains, this inward
tranquility that belongs to the heart of the woodland, with this nervousness, for I
do not know what else to call it, of outer movement. One would say that Nature,
like untrained persons, could not sit still without nestling about or doing
something with her limbs or features, and that high breeding was only to be
102
10
 For more about this eighteenth century concept of ?cultivation,? see Jay Fleigelman?s
Prodigals and Pilgrims, 25, also discussed in my third chapter. 
looked for in trim gardens, where the soul of trees is ill at ease, perhaps, but their
manners are unexceptionable, and a rustling branch or leaf falling out of season is
an indecorum (186, my emphasis).
Though in this passage Holmes is ostensibly talking about the wild qualities of the
natural landscape, he also categorically describes females as ?restless? and ?nervous?;
like twigs and vines they are ?impatient? of the constraints that inhere in their own
physical shape and form. Holmes accords this nervousness a decidedly sexual energy:
?rounded masses...swell upward...with long soft sighs,? and there ?may be? some
dampness ?hidden away among the deeper shadows,? evidence, perhaps, of sexual
arousal or even menstrual fluid. And yet, ?breeding? and ?training,? Holmes suggests,
can only help many females, like their botanical counterparts, appear more contented
with their lot.
10
 For woodland species, ?training? means both the act of guiding branches
to grow in a desired direction, and trimming or paring down and weeding out wayward-
growing branches. For the female species, Holmes would argue in this novel, ?training?
comes with formal schooling, the act of guiding girls in a desired direction, for the sake
of ?stimulat[ing] the higher tastes and partially instruct[ing] them?(172). Just as medicine
could never revert invalid women to absolute health, education could not hope to train
them into absolute conformity with social codes.
Several of Holmes?s biographers have compellingly suggested that his conception
of the wayward female and his stance against female intellectualism originated in his
103
11
 See also Miriam Rossiter Small?s Oliver Wendell Holmes (25, 130). 
childhood rivalry with classmate Margaret Fuller (they attended the same Dame school in
Cambridge, Massachusetts) and was spurred on by his continuing feelings of attraction
and repulsion toward the brilliant feminist who, for her public eloquence and remarkable
intellect, would in their adulthood come to be known as the New England Corinne. Tilton
notes that Holmes himself suspected ?that he had always been jealous? of the 
strange tall girl with a disconcertingly aloof manner...a watery aqua-marine lustre
in her light eyes [and a] long, flexible neck, arching and undulating in strange,
sinuous movements....[Fuller] was not pretty like the ?golden blonde? who
bewitched half the school, but she was supposed to be smart and she talked about
?nah-vels.? When some themes were sent home from the school one day for his
father?s literary judgement, Wendell got a look at Margaret?s. It began: ?It is a
trite remark...? The reader went no further; he did not know what trite meant. He
did not like the girl and could not like the woman she grew to be?learned,
intellectual, and given to philosophy (24).
11
In what Holmes may have taken as a direct affront, Fuller had argued against the
purported intellectual disparity of the sexes in her 1843 Woman in the Nineteenth
Century, charging that ?history jeers at the attempts of physiologists? to make rules about
?what can and cannot be? in woman?s abilities or nature, despite observable proof that
women can ?be? and do so much more than is claimed for them (293, 260). Fuller does,
indeed, appear to be the most obvious model for Holmes?s characterization of Lurida
Vincent, a precocious and brilliant schoolgirl attending the significantly-named Corinna
104
Institute in his third novel, A Mortal Antipathy (1885). Lurida?whose first name means
?sallow? or ?ghastly,? and whose last means ?conquering??is known at her school as
?The Terror,? because of the unusual ?freedom of movement? she ?manifested in the
world of thought,? and because of her self-described masculine mind (122, 124).
However, it is in Holmes?s descriptions of Elsie, whose ?glittering eyes? are full of ?still,
wicked light,? and whose body she ?coil[s] and uncoil[s]...snake-like? that he provides
the closest physical likeness to what he had once described as Fuller?s ?lustrous? eyes,
?long, flexible neck,? and ?arching, sinuous movements? (393, 421, 145). Moreover, his
ambivalence toward Elsie?he pities her, but kills her off in the end, for being unable to
achieve a stable True Womanhood?seems to reflect something of his attraction and
repulsion (like Hawthorne?s and others?) toward this intense female figure. Of course,
Elsie Venner is no stand-in for Margaret Fuller: she is neither the intellectual nor the
feminist that Fuller was. Yet, in their similarly perverse femininity, Fuller and Elsie (and
Lurida, for that matter) embody for Holmes a challenge to preconceived medical notions
of what females essentially are like, and a threat to the social order that presumed a
fundamental disparity between the sexes.
I disagree, therefore, with the novel?s previous critics who have unquestioningly
accepted its most outrageous and unlikely explanation for Elsie?s behavior?that she is
part snake, a ?species of one,? and, thus, a biological fluke, representative of no real
?type? at all (Traister 205, Hallissy 407). Instead, I contend that Holmes considers Elsie
one of a species, a human being who, like all human beings, has inherited from her
ancestors tendencies for which she is not responsible, and which, perhaps, can be
105
modified by the influences of culture. The argument that Holmes explicitly claimed for
his novel?that it is a challenge to the doctrine of original sin?can only work if Elsie is
human; religious moral categories of sin or grace would otherwise not apply to her. But
more importantly for our purposes, Holmes?s implicit argument?that females who are
out of step with their culture are also ?out of step with the very pattern of the
universe??also demands that we view Elsie not as some sort of chimera but as a human
female, subject to specific cultural expectations of human female behavior (Trecker 200).
She is, in fact, a symbol of the difficulties inherent in training, for wife- and motherhood,
any female who overturns gender expectations and resists her culture?s dictates of proper
femininity. 
Throughout the novel, Elsie is not presented as part-snake but as a young female
whose physiological makeup is so quintessentially pubescent?so volatile and
unstable?that it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to fully adapt her to the ideals of True
Womanhood. Rather than being a total anomaly, she is an extremely perverted specimen
of what Holmes conceived to be a sex by nature perverted. She is part of a lineage of
difficult females that began with the very first woman and promises to continue into the
future. Elsie?s name is significant in this regard: her initials nearly spell out the name of
that first woman, Eve, whose seductive and rebellious nature Elsie has inherited to a
greater degree than other females. Through her connection to Eve, and also to a variety of
other dangerous, aggressive, serpentine female figures throughout the novel?including
murderous Lilith (by some accounts, Adam?s first and even more rebellious wife), Pythia
(the female seer from the Apollo myth, who breathes the fumes exuded by the Python?s
106
12
 Holmes makes liberal reference to each of these folkloric and mythological figures
throughout the novel. See the following pages for specific references: to Pythia (190,
413); Dido (176, 421); Christabel (73, 78); Lamia (214, 220, 225). Lilith is not referred to
by name; however, scholars of the lamia myth have located its roots in Jewish folklore
and specifically in the story of this anti-patriarchal virgin-seductress. Lilith voluntarily
leaves Eden after she quarrels with Adam over the position she should take during
intercourse: she does not want to lie beneath him because she perceives that position to
be  subordinate. As punishment for deserting Adam, Lilith must kill one hundred of her
own children every day. She conceives these children with sperm ejaculated during
masturbation and nocturnal emissions. 
burning carcass and has hallucinatory visions others take for premonitions), Virgil?s
passionate Dido, Coleridge?s Christabel, and Keats?s vampiric Lamia?Elsie represents
the most recent incarnation of a tenacious variety of the female species which has
survived throughout history.
12
 In fact, the long form of her name, ?Elizabeth,? means ?the
oath of God,? whereas Venner shares its root with the Latin verb venir, ?to come,?
making Elsie both a promise and curse, some portentous omen to be paid in the future. 
Teaching and Curing the Perverse Schoolgirl 
In other words, Elsie Venner is part of a prolific and established but dangerous 
species of female who has transmitted (and may continue to transmit) from generation to
generation the tendency to resist or rebel against social codes defining clear roles and
behaviors for males and females. The codes that Elsie resists are precisely the same ones
that fortify the Cult of True Womanhood: domesticity, piety, submissiveness and purity
for females, and adventurousness, dominance, and forward sexuality for males. For
example, Elsie frequently sleeps out of doors on Rattlesnake Ledge?the most dangerous
and serpent-infested geologic feature of the Mountain?and decorates her own bedroom
107
not with feminine flowers but natural specimen from the woods, ?sculpture-like
monstrosities that...helped to give her room a kind of enchanted look, as if a witch had
her home in it? (266). One particular item, ?a long, staff-like branch, strangled in the
spiral coils of one of those vines which strain the smaller trees in their clinging embraces,
sinking into the bark until the parasite becomes almost identified with its support,?
metonymically represents the threat that Elsie poses to masculine authority in the
domestic space (the staff) and to her own potential maternity (the smaller trees in her
clinging embrace) (267). Elsie is also reportedly ?very uncertain in her feeling about
going to church,? and remembered by one priest for having ?tore out the frontispiece? of
a Bible and keeping it, while flinging the rest of the book ?out the window? (256). Not
surprisingly, the frontispiece image that Elsie keeps is a portrait of Eve?s temptation,
about which the priest recalls Elsie saying that ?Eve was a good woman, ?and she?d
have done just so if she?d been there? (256). 
Perhaps more importantly for our purposes, Elsie is defiant of female pedagogical
authority, refusing to submit to her teacher?s expectations that she will act like a normal
girl. In one unintentionally humorous scene, Elsie?s teacher, Miss Darley, sets about
grading student compositions, which she wearily anticipates will contain ?their
occasional gushes of sentiment, their profound estimates of the world,? and imagery
consisting  ?principally of roses, lilies, birds, clouds, and brooks, with the celebrated
comparison of wayward genius to a meteor? (70). By contrast, Elsie?s composition?a
?descriptive rhapsody? about ?The Mountain??shows ?a startling familiarity with some
of the savage [and phallic] scenery of the region. One would have said that the writer
108
must have threaded its wildest solitudes by the light of the moon and the stars as well as
by day? (70). Helen Darley is so startled by Elsie?s unexpectedly masculine theme that
she is driven into an hysterical fit:
      Still she could not help reading, till she came to one passage that so agitated her,
that the tired and overwearied girl?s self-control left her entirely. She sobbed once
or twice, then laughed convulsively, and flung herself on the bed, where she
worked out a set hysteric spasm as she best might; without anybody to rub her
hands and see that she might not hurt herself (72).
Unfortunately, Holmes?s reader does not have the privilege of looking over Darley?s 
shoulder to see what Elsie wrote; however, it is clear that Elsie?s ?familiarity? with the
?savage scenery? and ?wild solitudes? of the region have not only unfeminized the
student  but even threatened to overfeminize the teacher. Indeed, it is especially
remarkable that Darley cannot stop herself from reading Elsie?s ?rhapsody??by
definition, a composition having no form or plan and thus mirroring Elsie?s own
disorderliness?and is, in fact, drawn to Elsie?s composition in spite of herself,
suggesting that Elsie holds a kind of sexual attraction for Helen Darley. This reading is
supported as well by the action Helen takes after her ?set hysteric spasm? ends: from her
bedroom bookshelf, Helen ?took down a volume of Coleridge, and read a short time, and
so to bed, to sleep and wake from time to time with a sudden start out of uneasy dreams?
(73). Holmes does not tell which Coleridge poem Helen might have read, but it is
impossible not to think of his unfinished ?Christabel,? which features the sexual
seduction of a young woman (Darley) by an evil female spirit who pretends to be an
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endangered damsel (the troubled Elsie) so as to lure her prey. Although it is unlikely that
the act of reading this poem would calm Helen Darley?s nerves, Holmes?s sequencing of
events?Elsie?s composition seduces the teacher and triggers an hysteric (and therefore
sexual) response?seems intended to evoke ?Christabel? and the masculinized female
spirit who, like Elsie, preys upon good-willed young women like Darley herself.  
If the above scenes demonstrate Elsie?s resistance to domesticity, piety, and
submissiveness, the following scene best illustrates Elsie?s sexual and racial impurities.
When Dr. Kittredge spies Elsie through the window of her home one day, he finds her
moving about wildly and almost against her will, coiling her arms and undulating like a
snake: 
Elsie was alone in the room, dancing one of those wild Moorish fandangos, such
as a matador hot from the Plaza del Toros of Seville or Madrid might love to lie
and gaze at. She was a figure to look upon in silence. The dancing frenzy must
have seized upon her while she was dressing; for she was in her bodice, bare-
armed, her hair floating unbound far below the waist of her barred or banded
skirt. She had caught up her castanets, and rattled them as she danced with a kind
of passionate fierceness, her lithe body undulating with flexuous grace, her
diamond eyes glittering, her round arms wreathing and unwinding, alive and
vibrant to the tips of the slender fingers. Some passion seemed to exhaust itself in
this dancing paroxysm; for all at once she reeled from the middle of the floor, and
flung herself, as it were in a careless coil, upon a great tiger?s skin....she lay
panting [and...] In a few moments...she was sleeping (147-8, italics in text).
110
In addition to arousing voyeuristic desire, the scene would likely have raised familiar
fears of self-pollution for Holmes?s mid-century readers. Undeniably erotic, Elsie?s half-
naked ?dancing paroxysm? has a masturbatory quality that evokes Dionysus and his
maenads, the mythical, female, and pleasure-loving counterparts to masculine and orderly
Apollo. Elsie?s long hair, ?floating unbound far below the waist,? is a metonym for her
unconfined  pubic area, and a metaphor for her unbridled lustfulness; moreover, her
?lithe? and ?graceful? bodiced form, her skirt, and her likeness to a fandango dancer in
Spain?all present to the reader a ?passionately fierce? female figure who needs no man
to satisfy her physical desires while she is ?alone.? Too, Elsie?s performance of a
specifically ?Moorish? dance that evokes her Iberian heritage and her relationship with
African Sophy, whose savage, animal nature Holmes repeatedly evokes (238, 348, 419).
The fandango, a courtship dance in which two partners entice and arouse one another, but
are not allowed to touch, serves as a kind of chaste mating ritual. Thought to have
emerged in Spain by way of the African chica (a similar courtship dance), the fandango
was described by a writer in 1830 as springing from ?the effect of a burning climate, and
ardent constitutions? (Blasis 29). Elsie?s connection here to the African and Iberian
cultures, perceived in nineteenth-century America to be exceedingly primitive and hyper-
sexual, underscores again why Elsie would be perceived as being on the verge of a
perverted sexuality, dangerous to herself, to the men of Rockland (by fueling their hard-
to-control sexuality), and, by extension, to the culture at large.
111
Until Bernard arrives, none of the guardian figures who watch over Elsie is able
to help correct her ?perverted? nature. Neither her father nor Sophy can convince her to
decorate her bedroom in a more cultivated, feminine style; her teacher, Helen Darley,
cannot stop Elsie from the seemingly masculine activities of wandering the Mountain or
from writing about it; and Dr. Kittredge cannot prevent her from having her
hyperfeminine ?dancing paroxysms? (in fact, he does not even try, does not enter the
house, but instead simply ?shook his head...returned to his sulky, and rode away, as if in
a dream?). 
However, Elsie is so instinctively drawn to Bernard?the fittest male specimen in
Rockland and ?the only person who had ever reached the spring of her hidden
sympathies? ?that she begins, under his influence, to adopt and display the attributes of
True Womanhood as she never has before (393). Her transformation is precipitated by
Bernard?s masterful, masculine presence in the classroom, and is rooted, therefore, in the
student-teacher relationship; like her classmates, Elsie ?had taken a new interest in her
books, and especially in certain poetical readings which the master conducted with the
elder scholars,? and ?a new life? had been ?awaken[ed]...in her singularly isolated
nature?; ?she would lift her eyes toward Mr. Bernard, and let them rest upon him....Then
they seemed to lose their cold glitter, and soften into a strange, dreamy tenderness. The
deep instincts of womanhood were striving to grope their way to the surface of her being
through all the alien influences which overlaid them? (183, 395, 393). She begins to keep
hymnals and a clasp bible in her bedroom, for example, and to attend church, evidence
that she is attempting piety and reversing the behaviors that caused her, once, to throw a
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bible out the window (268). She even writes an anonymous request to the reverend that
he have the congregation pray ?that God would be pleased to look in mercy upon the soul
that he has afflicted? (401). While she waits for the prayer which never comes (the
reverend forgets about the note that he has placed in his pocket), she sits
uncharacteristically still, even ?statue-like,? ?as if she had been frozen where she sat,? no
longer undulating like a snake (417, 415). Importantly, it appears that Elsie has not
learned these behaviors from anyone?not from her dead mother, nor Sophy, nor her
classmates or female teachers, whose company she has mainly shunned. They are all,
rather, naturally and automatically motivated by her attraction to Bernard.
But Elsie?s transformation is also accelerated by the attention that Bernard returns
to her, singled out from among all of the other students as a most intriguing specimen and
provocative female figure. Indeed, Bernard?s relationship to Elsie quickly expands
beyond the boundaries of the classroom, beyond their teacher-student roles, when, in his
efforts to ?solve the mystery? of this student he recruits the advice of Dr. Kittredge and
the professor-narrator, creating a coalition of medical men?a new kind of Trinity,
perhaps, of the ?new gods of science??who are more inclined to locate physiological
justifications for her behavior than to reify outmoded explanations from religion or
folklore. Too, Bernard displays a masculine interest in Elsie and a sexual attraction to her
that, while he does not admit it to himself (there was ?more curiosity...than he would
have owned?), is nevertheless evident to the reader and operates to quiet Elsie?s primitive
character and amplify her civilized nature (185). As an ideal male and a budding young
doctor, Bernard brings to his teacher-student relationship with Elsie several layers of
113
13
 Cynthia J. Davis?s ?Medical Insight: Oliver Wendell Holmes and Elsie Venner? and
Bryce Traister?s ?Sentimental Medicine: Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Construction of
Masculinty? each explore at length Holmes?s use of sentimental narrative features to
evoke sympathy for Elsie. 
cultural authority?masculine, patriarchal, sexual, and medical?which, as we shall see
below, gradually draw into conflict the ?awakening,? more adult side of her nature, and
the more established, childhood side that revels in nonconformity. Ultimately, this
conflict is what kills Elsie: In love with Bernard but rejected by him, Elsie grows
lovesick and dies, finally controlled by the twinned mechanisms of natural and social
order. Holmes?s response to her death is calculated to evoke readerly sympathy for his
heroine, but also serves to reify his scientific perspective that a female like Elsie can
never be fit enough, nor True Woman enough, to catch a mate like Bernard.
13
 He closes
out the story with the suggestion that, while science and female education can classify,
pathologize, and even transform adolescent females, they cannot perform miracles. Like
a ?huge South American crotalus? that the narrator describes, ?of a species which grows
to more frightful dimensions than our own,? Elsie is a larger-than-life female, more
frightful in her vigor and vitality than most of Rockland?s other female population. She
is, in the end, a mutation of the female species, which ?we must not hate, unless we hate
what God loves and cares for,? but which we are nevertheless ?warned to shun,
and...even suffered to slay, if need be? (208, cf. 225).      
Bernard confesses to himself in the classroom that Elsie?s new interest in her
books ?gave [him] a good chance to study her ways...to notice the inflections of her
voice, [and] to watch for any expression of sentiments,? and he ?could not help feeling
114
that some instinct was working in this girl which was in some way leading her to seek his
presence? (183-4). Once he has ?half persuaded himself? that his interest in her is purely
scientific, but that ?he did not wish to study her heart from the inside,? Bernard decides
to travel up Elsie?s beloved Mountain to see what more he can learn about her, all the
while ?thinking what the chances were that he should meet her in some strange place, or
come upon the traces of her which would tell secrets she would not care to have known?
(185). A telling (and, again, humorous) symbol of his sexual interest in Elsie, and his
need to repress that interest, Bernard brings with him a forked stick ?very convenient to
hold down a crotalus with? (188). Certainly, the actual snakes that live on the Mountain
do provide Bernard a reason for caution; however, they also serve as living extensions of
the Mountain?s phallicism, and, more generally, of the erotic quality that is added to Elsie
and Bernard?s relationship as he pursues more information about the ?strange and secret
influences? that Elsie?s pubescent physiology exerts upon her character.     
Two key events occur as a result of Bernard?s trip up the Mountain, which
suggest to Elsie that Bernard is a potential mate for her, and which therefore cause her to
adopt more and more characteristics of the True Woman. First, Bernard does meet up
with a rattlesnake and becomes hypnotized by its gaze, but he is rescued by Elsie herself,
who, unbeknownst to Bernard had preceded him up the Mountain, and is able to counter-
charm the snake with her own cool stare and lead an entranced Bernard to safety (203).
After this encounter, all of Rockland perceives a change in the relationship between
Bernard and Elsie, and they assume that romance is afoot. Elsie?s cousin Dick Venner,
jealous of the teacher who might stand in the way of his marrying Elsie and claiming her
115
14
 Elsie does address Bernard, briefly, when she is on her death-bed, but he does not
answer her. For the remainder of this novel preoccupied with their intense relationship, it
is both astounding and fitting that Holmes does not portray them in verbal
communication with one another. The ?animal intelligence? that he describes as passing
between Elsie and Sophy passes here, too (419).  
inheritance, then attempts to kill Bernard, but he fails and is banished from the town
(368-81). These events are critical because they encourage Elsie to feel a sense of
possession over Bernard that provokes in her both a series of True Womanhood-like
behaviors, as well as a kind of animal territoriality that buck up against the conventions
of proper femininity. Again, I would emphasize that the contradictory nature of these
behaviors lend an incoherence to the novel and to Elsie?s personality, particularly at the
end; however, they also reflect a key tension?in Holmes and his culture?between
competing views of schoolgirls at mid-century.     
At the moment that Elsie saves Bernard from the rattlesnake, she is portrayed as a
suddenly maternal and wifely figure, saving ?her? young man from sexual temptation and
excessive arousal as Beecher and others had advised women ought to do. On the other
hand, because she rescues him?and not the other way around?she unmans him: 
If Master Bernard felt a natural gratitude to his young pupil for saving him from
imminent peril, he was in a state of infinite perplexity to know why he should
have needed such aid. He, an active, muscular, courageous, adventurous young
fellow, with a stick in his hand, ready to hold down the Old Serpent himself...to
stand still...stiff where he stood,?what was the meaning of it? (203)
Bernard is similarly emasculated when, in the novel?s climactic scene, he and Elsie have
(amazingly!) their first and only real conversation in the entire novel.
14
 After school one
116
day, Elsie asks Bernard, in an appropriately demure, ?very low voice, little more than a
whisper,? if he will walk with her home from school, and he agrees to accompany her.
However, Elsie?s fatal flaw?her assertiveness, her resistance to submission that was
?perhaps the most feminine virtue expected of women??rears its head again, and signals
her undoing (Welter 27-8):
?I have no friend,? Elsie said, all at once. ?Nothing loves me but one old
woman. I cannot love anybody. They tell me there is something in my eyes that
draws people to me and makes them faint. Look into them, will you??
She turned her face toward him. It was very pale, and the diamond eyes
were glittering with a film, such as beneath other lids would have rounded into a
tear.
?Beautiful eyes, Elsie,? he said,--?sometimes very piercing,--but soft now,
and looking as if there were something beneath them that friendship might draw
out. I am your friend, Elsie. Tell me what I can do to render your life happier.?
?Love me!? said Elsie Venner. 
What shall a man do, when a woman makes such a demand, involving
such an avowal? It was the tenderest, cruellest, humblest moment of Mr.
Bernard?s life. He turned pale, he trembled almost, as if he had been a woman
listening to her lover?s declaration.
??I do love you, Elsie,?? is the crux of Bernard?s reply, ??as a suffering sister with
sorrows of her own....More than this you would not ask me to say?? (423, emphasis in
117
text). ?It was all over with poor Elsie,? the narrator reports. She falls ill immediately after
they part company, and eventually, she dies. 
Diagnoses and Prognoses
As these two scenes demonstrate, Elsie?s transformation into a True Woman is
profound but ultimately incomplete. Though Holmes imagines Elsie adopting the
attributes of female piety, of maternal and conjugal feeling, and of physical self-control,
there is something essential in her nature that prevents her from being appropriately
submissive, for, while her plea asks Bernard to love her (a passive construction), rather
than professing love for him (active), her demanding and ?extraordinary request, so
contrary to the instincts and usages of her sex? makes manly Bernard tremble like a
?suffering sister? (446). Here again Elsie reminds us of Lilith, Eve, and Dido, and their
similar refusals to bow to patriarchal rules governing what woman should be and do in
relation to her mate. It is Elsie?s lack of submissiveness that prevents her, finally, from
being loved in a romantic way by Holmes?s ideal man, the only positive marriage choice
in the novel. His impotence notwithstanding, Bernard remains the arbiter of Elsie?s
transformation. In fact, his impotence and his feminization?more, even, than her
death?are what communicate, to Elsie and to Holmes?s readers, that she has failed to
reach successful, mature womanhood, despite her other, unimpeachable behaviors.           
I want to quickly gloss Elsie?s preposterous death scene here and arrive, finally, at
its consequences in and beyond Rockland, to emphasize the major, but no doubt
unintended, influence of Holmes?s novel with respect to female education. When Elsie
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falls ill, much of Holmes?s carefully-crafted scientific realism goes out the window like
Elsie?s bible. On her death bed, Elsie continues to display stereotypically feminine
attributes, such as weeping, expressing grief over the loss of her mother, and embracing
her father, each for the first time in her life (442, 453). As a symbolic representation of
her continuing transformation, Holmes has her send away from the foot of her bed the
primitive and loyal Sophy, only to ask for Helen Darley, that frail and sickly True
Woman, to take Sophy?s place (426). Yet, just as Elsie reaches the height of her
femininity, Holmes returns to the novel his gothic, snaky imagery. Elsie?s lovesickness is
exacerbated when she receives a  basket of flowers from her classmates, which Bernard
has lined with ash leaves; unbeknownst to him, such leaves are poisonous to rattlesnakes,
and evidently, to Elsie as well. When she finally dies, it is unclear whether the cause was
lovesickness (affecting her as a human) or poison (affecting her as a snake that, to
continue to analogy, Bernard would have finally succeeded in killing). Holmes wants to
have it both ways, it seems, and is finally unable to reconcile his own attitudes toward
Elsie, whom he both pities and suffers to slay. 
What is clear from the novel?s ending, though, is that Elsie?s death has positive
consequences for a variety of Holmes?s characters, and for the larger town of Rockland.
After Elsie?s burial, Rattlesnake Ledge caves in on itself, ridding the town of vipers once
and for all. This cataclysmic event kills Sophy, too, who had been outdoors, keeping vigil 
at the foot of Elsie?s grave, when that part of the Mountain fell. Thus rid of all primitive
women and snakes, the town settles into stability and patriarchy is reestablished: Elsie?s
father remarries Helen Darley, rescuing her from superfluity and the perils of teaching;
119
Bernard returns to school and graduates a doctor, and is last seen engaged to Letty
Forrester, whose name signifies that she is the ?joy? (Letitia) of the forest, one of those
tamed specimen of high breeding, so unlike Elsie, whose ?manners are unexceptionable?
and for whom a ?rustling branch or leaf falling out of season is an indecorum? (186).
Holmes even suggests, in the end, that Elsie?s death was good for her in some way. We
are reminded at Elsie?s death of a claim Dr. Kittredge makes, earlier in the novel,
comparing God to a ?Great Physician?: ?If a man?s pain exceeds a certain amount, he
faints, and so gets relief. If it lasts too long, habit comes in to make it tolerable. If it is
altogether too bad, he dies. That is the best thing to be done under the circumstances?
(320).        
Although Holmes was in many ways a progressive thinker, bringing the most 
advanced science of his day to the problem of female education, his views in this novel
also represent an early example of the kinds of conservative thinking that would, later in
the century, restrict adolescent and adult females from all levels of rigorous, academic
instruction. After the publication of Elsie Venner, the advent of the Civil War closed
most schools for young females (indeed, for most children of both sexes), and yet, once
these institutions started to reopen and rebuild, they were met with fiercer resistance than
ever, by doctors like Edward H. Clarke, whose 1873 Sex in Education; or, A Fair Chance
for Girls contended: 
The growth of this peculiar and marvellous [sic] apparatus [the ovaries and
uterus], in the perfect development of which humanity has so large an interest,
occurs during the few years of a girl?s educational life. No such extraordinary
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task, calling for such rapid expenditure of force, building up such a delicate and
extensive mechanism within the organism...is imposed upon the male physique at
the same epoch....The importance of having our methods of female education
recognize this peculiar demand for growth, and of so adjusting themselves to it, as
to allow sufficient opportunity for the healthy development of the ovaries and
their accessory organs, and for the establishment of their periodical functions,
cannot be overestimated. Moreover, unless the work is accomplished at that
period, unless the reproductive mechanism is built and put in good working order
at that time, it is never perfectly accomplished afterwards (37-8).
Of course, only the publication of Clarke?s text could have provoked Julia Ward Howe?s
equally vigorous 1874 Sex and Education; a reply to Dr. E. H. Clarke?s ?Sex in
Education,? which compiled testimony from hundreds of doctors, scientists, and
educators, each arguing that intellectual work was not harmful to females. It would not
do to overstate Holmes?s influence in inspiring these debates, which would become so
important to later developments in female educational, vocational, and political
opportunities. However, his novel?s early scientific and cultural work?to limn female
normativity, to explain how Darwin might bear on female schooling, and to define the
educational institution as an appropriate site for sex-role socialization?clearly fleshes
out for modern-day readers the impact of the shift from religion to science (as a means of
explaining the world, as well as female nature) in the second quarter of the nineteenth
century, and helps to explain how adolescent females were early incorporated into the
nineteenth-century movement to define female nature and shape female opportunity.
121
Chapter Three will explore certain other branches of this broad movement, as we look at
Native American female education and the ways in which certain groups of Cherokee and
Creek seminary students learned to adopt ?white? ?female? values while retaining the
values of their own ?Native? cultures, all the while discovering that none of these values
were essentially or fundamentally hardwired, but were choices to be made.
122
1
  The philanthropist, Dr. Elias Boudinot (1740-1821), served as a delegate to the
Continental Congress twice, as a U.S. Representative from 1789-1795, as the Director of
the U.S. Mint, and most notably, for one year as President of the United States under the
articles of Confederation. Most relevant to Buck Watie, though, was probably Boudinot's
1816 work, Star in the West, which suggests that the Indians are the ?lost tribes of
Israel,? and his founding, in that same year, of the American Bible Society. An
abolitionist and staunch supporter of Native American rights, Dr. Boudinot met Buck
Watie when the young Cherokee traveled to New Jersey around 1818. At this time, Dr.
Boudinot took a strong liking to Watie, and offered him financial support; in return,
Watie adopted the name of his benefactor. It is ironic that Buck Watie was ultimately
seen as a traitor to his own people. Bearing the name of Elias Boudinot, the Cherokee
would eventually sign the Treaty of New Echota in 1835, agreeing that the entire
Cherokee nation would willingly emigrate to New Echota, Georgia. Watie/Boudinot was
ultimately axed to death by a group of his fellow Cherokee for what they saw as his
betrayal of the tribe in this act.
     
Chapter Three
Reading, Writing, and Re-presenting: The Newspaper and the Schoolgirl in the Wreath of
Cherokee Rosebuds and S. Alice Callahan?s Wynema: A Child of the Forest
On May 26, 1826, Elias Boudinot, a Cherokee schoolteacher and clerk of the
Cherokee National Council, spoke before an all-white audience at the First Presbyterian
Church of Philadelphia. Although the audience did not yet know him, Boudinot had been
familiarizing himself with whites and white society for many years. Born Gallegina
(Buck) Watie around 1800, the Cherokee had attended white mission schools since the
age of six and had, as a young man, adopted the name of a white philanthropist and
Native American advocate whom he admired and from whom he had accepted financial
support during his schooldays in Connecticut, circa 1818 (Purdue 6).
1
 A vocal proponent
123
of Indian acculturation and eventually of Indian Removal policies?which he favored
over Indian extermination, the only alternative to Removal that he could foresee?the
Cherokee Boudinot had also during his school days befriended a white missionary named
Samuel Worcester, whose similar views supported their mutual advocacy of these
policies and practices among white and Indian communities alike. Indeed, Boudinot?s
May 26 speaking engagement was part of an extensive campaign that took Worcester and
Boudinot together up and down the east coast of the United States, as they attempted to
gain the financial and ideological backing of white church and philanthropic groups for
institutions promoting their shared projects of Indian acculturation and ?improvement.?
This money would supplement funds already being donated to missionary societies by
the United States government in an effort to establish schools and churches in the
Cherokee nation and thus convert the population to Christianity while teaching them
basic academic subjects (such as reading, writing, arithmetic, history, and geography)
and ?the arts of civilization??hoeing, plowing, chopping wood, spinning, weaving,
cooking, and sewing (Purdue 6). With their own relationship on display as part of the
campaign?s performance, wherein the Indian man spoke and the white man supportively
listened, Boudinot and Worcester must have made quite a spectacular and convincing
piece of proof that the Indian and the white man could comfortably, and even
congenially, coexist. 
On this particular occasion in May, Boudinot delivered his ?Address to the
Whites,? a rhetorically complex speech reflecting both his remarkable ability to straddle
two cultures and his often-conflicting allegiance to the white and the Indian nations (rpt.
124
in Murphy 167-76). The ?Address? is at once a defense of the Indian and a rationale for
an Indian education system modeled on white institutions. Boudinot argues, for example,
that ?[w]e must silence forever the remark that ?it is the purpose of the Almighty that the
Indians should be exterminated?,? and instead focus on including Indians in white
American life (168). Boudinot?s repeated use in this document of the word ?we? connects
him to his white audience; it demonstrates his shared belief in ?the Almighty,? and it
suggests that his audience agrees with his own view on preventing extermination and
promoting acculturation. As he turns away from the question of whether the Indian is to
be in American society and toward the question of what is to be done with the Indian in
American life, Boudinot argues that Native Americans are essentially the same as white
Americans, ?formed of the same materials with yourself,? and sharing identical desires to
?ever be fostered, regulated and protected by the generous government of the United
States? (167, 169). Indians (in general, and his own Cherokee people in particular) should
therefore have the same advantages as white Americans in order to contribute equally to
the great nation that they all share. ?More than ordinary means should be employed,? he
urges, for the continued ?christianization and civilization of this tribe? (173). Thus,
Boudinot finally issues his specific request:  
[T]he Cherokees has [sic] thought it advisable that there should be established, a
Printing Press and a Seminary of respectable character; and for these purposes
your aid and patronage are now solicited (173).  
Downplaying the very real threat of Indian extermination and focusing instead on Indian
progress?on what can help the Native American and the larger, predominantly white,
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nation to thrive?in the end, Boudinot makes only the modest proposal that his tribe be
aided in establishing a printing press and a seminary (or high school), two institutions
that whites themselves had already set up to improve their own society in America. 
Joined together via the special place that the school and the press each assign to
writing, reading, and the dissemination of information to a mass public, these endeavors,
Boudinot believed, would help the Indians fortify and preserve their society around a
core of institutions designed by whites: ?I do not say that Indians will produce learned or
elaborate dissertations in explanation and vindication of their own character, but they
may exhibit specimens of their intellectual efforts, of their eloquence, of their moral, civil
and physical advancement, which will do quite as much to remove prejudice and to give
profitable information? (174). Linking the educational and acculturative benefits to
Indians of both the printed word and the formal school, established ?upon a footing
which will insure to [them] all the advantages, that belong to such institutions in the
states,? Boudinot hoped to sustain the Indians? racial population in ways that would be
seen as harmonious with, and indebted to, white society (174). 
In this chapter I examine the impact and legacy of Boudinot?s request for a school
and a printing press upon several Native American communities and their girl children
through the middle- and late-nineteenth century. I explore what effects these groups
anticipated the press and the seminary would have upon their lives and, more
specifically, what roles they imagined these institutions would play in the girls? abilities
both to acculturate to white society and to preserve some of the distinctive features of
their own cultural heritage. I argue that Boudinot?s ideas about the concomitant roles of
126
2
 See Brodhead?s Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-
Century America. As Brodhead makes clear, ?writing is always an acculturated activity,?
one which ?always takes place within some completely concrete cultural situation...that
surrounds it with some particular landscape of institutional structures, affiliates it with
some particular group from among the array of contemporary groupings, and installs it
[in] some group-based world of understandings, practices, and values? (8).
the newspaper and the school formed a set of core values that placed writing and reading
in an important new relationship to Native American life, and acted as a catalyst for the
rapid development of Native schools and newspapers throughout several North American
tribes. Though it is not clear that Boudinot envisioned the printing press being used as
part of the curriculum at the seminaries he worked to establish, that is, in fact, what
happened. The literatures that emerged from these schools and their newspapers vary
widely in form, style, content, and skill (for the Cherokee culture had only begun to use
written language about a decade before Boudinot?s campaign) yet they share in creating
what Richard Brodhead would call a ?culture of letters??a set of beliefs and practices
belonging to a particular cultural group about ?what writing is, does, and is good for,?
which shapes the way that a social group uses letters in its daily life (8).
2
 In Boudinot?s
understanding, as we will see here, what writing ?is, does, and is good for? includes the
promotion of white ?Literature, Civilization, and Religion? among Native peoples, as
well as an implicit consent that the Indian nation be governed by the white nation, and an
imperative to record the gradual ?progress? being made toward the erasure of Native
identity; the Native press and the process of achieving literacy at school would continue
until ?they arrive at that state of advancement, when I trust they will be admitted into all
the privileges of the American family? (Purdue 15, 31; Murphy 172). However, as
127
3
 See especially Brown?s introduction to her 2001 book, The Consent of the Governed:
The Lockean Legacy in Early American Culture; see also Lawrence Buell?s 1992 essay, 
?American Literary Emergence as a Postcolonial Phenomenon.?  
adolescent Native schoolgirls took up Boudinot?s charge in the decades to follow, they
often reinterpreted the functions of the school and the press as institutional media through
which they might both adapt to white culture and preserve tribal unity and ethnic
identity. For example, though Boudinot saw his own Christianity, and his newspaper?s
Christian focus, as a bridge between white and Native cultures, the newspaper articles
that Native schoolgirls read and wrote?about white Christian womanhood and Native
womanhood, for example?reflected far more ambivalent views about religion, not to
mention patriarchy, femininity, adult life and roles, and the goals of female education,
virtually every aspect of individual behavior and group culture with which adolescent
girls were to struggle at school.
This chapter traces the history of Boudinot?s ideas about writing as they
manifested in a loosely cohesive culture of letters which emerged during the middle- and
late nineteenth century in writings by Native American schoolgirls from the Cherokee
and Muskogee (or Creek) tribes after their contact with whites. As both Gillian Brown?s
and Lawrence Buell?s work on American literary emergence has suggested, we can
expect the broad survey of Native American writing I examine here exhibits the ?gestures
of imitation, appropriation, preservation, parody, duplication, subversion, and
innovation? that are so common to postcolonial literatures, of which the girls? writing
from these oppressed groups are a vivid specimen (Brown 13).
3
 My objective in this
chapter is to help explain how the educational context created by the joining together of
128
4
 For an excellent and exhaustively researched account of the Cherokee formal school
system, see Devon A. Mihesuah?s Cultivating the Rosebuds: The Education of Women at
the Cherokee Female Seminary, 1851-1909. Although Mihesuah?s book is ostensibly
about the Female Seminary, her early chapters describe how both the Male Seminary and
the Female Seminary came into being, as well as the creation of elementary schools,
mission schools, and government-owned boarding institutions.
press and school offered Native American girls extraordinary new opportunities to shape
the representation of the white and Indian cultures in which they participated, and to
shape, as well, the nature of their own participation. Unlike previous studies of the Native
American girls? school, which have suggested that in the schools? newspapers students
found merely ?an alternative to class work? and some vague ?educational usefulness,? I
argue that the Native American females who appropriated Boudinot?s ideas about the
conjunction of the school and the newspaper learned to use newspaper writing to further
their educations about themselves and their role in the world around them, and also to
resist the sometimes oppressive force of the educational institutions themselves
(Mihesuah, Cultivating 36).
4
 Whereas the texts I have examined in previous chapters
showed schools drawing on institutional frameworks such as the family and the scientific
and medical establishments to articulate their hopes for what an educated female would
be like, the texts under study here show schools importing the institutional framework of
the press and its ready-made roles of journalist, editor, and reader/subscriber. In direct
contrast to the models of proper (Christian) womanhood that the Native girls were also
imbibing from their curricula, copied from the example of white schools like Mount
Holyoke, their roles as newspaper readers, writers, and editors at school were attended by
the expectation that those who fill them?in this case, educated Native females?will
129
5
 Prior to LaVonne Brown Ruoff?s 1997 recovery of Wynema, the 1927 Cogewea: The
Half-Blood by Hum-Ishu-Ma (or Mourning Dove) was thought to be the first Native-
authored American fiction. 
value the free expression of ideas and the ability of the newspaper to balance the
promotion of white culture and the preservation of tribal culture.
To this end, I look closely at a number of newspapers that were produced by
female Native American seminary students between the 1850s and the 1890s, such as The
Wreath of Cherokee Rose Buds (Cherokee Female Seminary, 1850s), Our Monthly
(Tullahassee Mission, 1870s) and the Harrell Monthly (Harrell International Institute,
1890s). These papers tell us a great deal about the cultural work that was performed by
the schools at which they were read and written, as well as about the cultural function of
the schoolgirls? presses themselves. Additionally, I examine a variety of ?home papers,?
or Indian-produced newspapers often affiliated with a particular Indian tribe (for example
the Cherokee Phoenix and the Muskogee Phoenix), looking especially at their frequent
articles on the importance of newspapers and education to the life and survival of all
indigenous American tribes. Equally crucial to our understanding of the ways that these
educational and assimilative organs were conceived by Native Americans is the
imaginative and fictional rendering of Creek (Muskogee) schoolgirl life presented in S.
Alice Callahan?s 1891 novel, Wynema: A Child of the Forest. This novel, now thought to
be the first penned by a Native American female, offers a narrative account of the daily
life of a Creek Indian schoolgirl in the 1870s and 80s, and renders accessible the
interrelationship that might have existed among a Native American female student, her
school, and the Native press.
5
 Partly fictional and partly historical, Callahan?s novel
130
provides a key piece of the puzzle over how Native American educators wanted the
newspaper to function. Though I am not suggesting that Callahan consciously used the
Wreath of Cherokee Rose Buds as a model, nor even that the Rose Buds themselves
adhered to principles that Boudinot would have accepted, I have been interested in
prosecuting the persistence of Boudinot?s ideas over time, in Native female student
communities that grew increasingly hostile to his brand of assimilationism. That female
students maintained and expressed this hostile stance is especially compelling since
females in these tribes were not (contrary to popular, romanticized portraits of them)
granted political voice or matriarchal power. This chapter?s comparative look at the
relationship among Native American schoolgirls, both real and fictional, as well as the
schools they attended and the newspapers they read and wrote for, can help us answer
key questions regarding the formation of female identity and the role of the acculturated,
educated female within the dual national contexts of white and Native America.   
Boudinot?s vision of the role of the newspaper in Native life
Before we can trace the legacy of Boudinot?s request, though, we need to look
more closely at the precise favors that Boudinot asks of his audience, and the benefits
that he imagines Native Americans will reap as a result of their cooperation with whites.
Despite the fact that Boudinot seems to back away from making a more sweeping plea
for the Native American (say, by calling for an end to Indian Removal, or by extending
his early argument that ?we? must give up the idea of Indian extermination by divine
131
will), his request for a Printing Press and a Seminary is both more subtle and more
ambitious. Boudinot plans, for example, to purchase type fonts for the press in both
?English letters and Cherokee characters,? enabling the publication to speak to its
segregated white and Indian audiences, as well as to that ever-increasing number of
Native Americans who can boast fluency in both languages and cultures (173). ?The
most informed and judicious of our nation,? Boudinot claims,  
believe that such a press would go further to remove ignorance, and her offspring
superstition and prejudice, than all other means....Such a paper, comprising a
summary of religious and political events...[and] exhibiting the feelings,
disposition, improvements, and prospects of the Indians; their traditions, their true
character, as it once was and now is; the ways and means most likely to throw the
mantle of civilization over all tribes; and...to diffuse proper and correct
impressions ...?such a paper could not fail to create much interest in the
American community, favorable to the aborigines, and to have a powerful
influence on the Indians themselves (173).
Boudinot?s argument suggests that if the Indians are given the means to create and
sustain a newspaper with their printing press, they will not need to offer any further proof
of their humanity or their value to white culture: they will show it, rather than tell it. Like
the brilliant Cherokee blacksmith and silversmith, Sequoyah (born George Guess, 1760-
1843)?whose obsession with the written language of the whites inspired him to devote
twelve years of his life to creating the Cherokee written alphabet in the first quarter of the
nineteenth century?Boudinot was convinced that if Native Americans could adopt a
132
system so successfully used by the powerful whites, they, too, would inherit power and
agency. Crucial to Boudinot?s vision of the newspaper and the readers it would serve,
though, is the distinction he makes between ?the American community? of whites, who
will find in the paper ?much interest? that is ?favorable to the aborigines,? and, on the
other hand, a separate community of ?Indians themselves,? whose newspaper production
will make them like the whites, but not part of or competitive with the white nation in any
threatening way. Again, Boudinot?s use of a single ambiguous word is illustrative of his
rhetorical skill: referring at times to the Cherokee tribe as ?our nation,? and at other times
allowing that signifier to point toward the larger, largely white, United States which
grudgingly and guiltily harbors the Indian tribes, Boudinot relies greatly on verbal
slippage to serve his ends. The praise incorporated into his statement that ?the most
informed and judicious of our nation? see the value of the printing press virtually ensures
that his white audience will read themselves into such a knowledgeable and virtuous
body. On the other hand, when he claims (as he does below) that the Cherokee only want
help becoming ?respectable as a nation,? Boudinot is unmistakably differentiating the
Indians from their white counterparts. He enables his white audience to view themselves
as both culturally tolerant of and politically separate from the Indian. Setting aside
Boudinot?s presumably unintentional display of his own conflicted allegiances?his own
confused perception of himself as simultaneously an insider and an outsider in white
American life?we see here epitomized his ability to walk a fine line between rallying his
audience?s consent to help the Indians and justifying the actions of those who would
exclude the Indian from participating in white society.    
133
As in his justification of the printing press, Boudinot suggests that the seminary
will help the whites even more than it will help the Indian, in effect performing a kind of
Indian Removal far less drastic than genocide. A ?Seminary of respectable character?
will take the Indian-ness out of the Indian, eradicating his ?savage? qualities and creating
a race of civilized men and women who will no longer stall America?s progress by their
lack of education. Even so, though the newly educated Indians will be less primitive and
more like the white American men and women they so admire, Boudinot still imagines
them as a separate political entity, an imperium in imperio, giving much to and asking
little of the whites. Thus aligning his own interests with those of his white audience,
Boudinot strokes the sense of righteousness that he perceives in the white ego. ?With
[your] assistance, what are the prospects of the Cherokees?? he asks: 
Are they not indeed glorious, compared to that deep darkness in which the nobler
qualities of their souls have slept [?] Yes, methinks I can view my native country,
rising from the ashes of her degradation, wearing her purified and beautiful
garments, and taking her seat with the nations of the earth.  I can behold her sons
bursting the fetters of ignorance and unshackling her from the vices of
heathenism. She is at this instant, risen like the first morning sun, which grows
brighter and brighter, until it reaches its fulness of glory. 
She will become not a great, but a faithful ally of the United States. In
times of peace she will plead the common liberties of America. In times of war
her intrepid sons will sacrifice their lives in your defence. And because she will
be useful to you in coming time, she asks you to assist her in her present
134
6
 See also Mihesuah?s 1991 essay, ?Out of the ?Graves of the Polluted Debauches?: The
Boys of the Cherokee Male Seminary? and, under the name Devon Abbott, her 1987
essay, ??Commendable Progress?: Acculturation at the Cherokee Female Seminary.? 
struggles. She asks not for greatness; she seeks not wealth; she pleads only for
assistance to become respectable as a nation, to enlighten and ennoble her sons, 
and to ornament her daughters with modesty and virtue (174).  
Here again, Boudinot?s language and speech patterns mimic white verbal expression:
?methinks? seems an especially Anglo word choice. But deeper evidence of Boudinot?s
own acculturation lies in the ways he appears to have internalized many of the
stereotypes about Native Americans that were circulating in white, nineteenth century
culture, and which Native Americans were commonly taught in white-run schools
(Purdue 9-11): heathen, ignorant, dark, ignoble, and degraded, the unacculturated Indian
(he calls them ?my country?) is not yet worthy of a ?seat? among white Americans.
6
However, with the educational advantages for which Boudinot seeks support, the Indian
can become in many ways indistinguishable from his lighter-skinned fellow Americans,
and can serve the country most ably in his and her new, ?purified? forms. The men will
become soldiers of freedom, putting their ?savagery? to good use by ?bursting the
fetters? of ignorance and breaking the shackles of heathenism, rather than directing their
(considerable) aggression toward the whites.  The women, on the other hand, will
become beautiful and cultivated, ?ornamented with [all of the] modesty and virtue? of
white republican mothers, ready to bear children and raise them according to the
standards of propriety taught in the country?s finest white boarding schools. Importantly,
even these improvements will not make the Indian nations ?great,? but only ?faithful?
135
7
 Among experts of American Indian journalism, the Native press is widely believed to
have begun in 1828 with the publication of the Phoenix. Some scholars, such as Daniel F.
Littlefield, Jr. and James W. Parins in American Indian and Alaska Native Newspapers
and Periodicals, 1826-1924, argue that ?a strong case? can be made for Henry Rowe
Schoolcraft?s The Muzzinyegun,? begun in 1826 (xii). 
and loyal to the white leaders of the United States. Boudinot takes special care to ensure
and remind his white audience that schooling will not turn the Indians into intellectual
giants, nor will it make them competitive with whites or hostile toward them; instead, the
Indian nations will constitute a grateful and ?useful? corps, whose very salvation will be
a credit to the whites of the United States. 
The Cherokee Rose Buds
Boudinot?s 1826 campaign helped to create institutions that folded white values
into Indian culture while simultaneously advocating for tribal sovereignty and
independence. In 1827, with funds raised by Worcester and Boudinot?s tour, the
Cherokee Council secured a printing press from Boston, with type fonts in both English
and Cherokee characters; the council used it to print primary school books and Cherokee
translations of the Bible before Boudinot and Worcester employed it to create the
Cherokee Phoenix, a dual-language newspaper that they jointly edited, beginning in 1828
in New Echota, near present-day Georgia.
7
 The Phoenix?bearing a title which reflects
Boudinot?s vision of the Cherokee nation ?rising from the ashes of her degradation,? and
which again suggests both a superhuman invincibility and a more humble, degraded
social status?functioned as Boudinot had earlier imagined a Native American
newspaper would do, reproducing legal documents and printing editorials, news articles,
136
8
 In Boudinot?s editorials one can trace the evolution of his political opinions, which
ranged from his wanting to preserve Indian lands for Indian peoples (and resisting, too,
the application of specific Georgia state laws to Native populations) to a completely
opposing viewpoint?the support of Indian Removal policies. This shift eventually posed
an enormous problem for the paper, since the Phoenix was founded, in part, to fight
removal and advocate on behalf of Indian rights to the land. Chief John Ross (who
would, in 1843-44, found another paper, the Cherokee Advocate) eventually demanded
that Boudinot stop publishing opinions that ran contrary to those of the Cherokee
National Council; he ?believed that such reports would only encourage the enemy by
letting him see that he now had a divided people to prey upon? (Murphy 29, 33). On the
other hand, Boudinot cherished the press as a democratic organ of free expression, and
wanted to not only give voice to his views but to preserve, too, the neutral, balanced
stance he felt was required of any journalistic endeavor. As a result of his differences
with the Chief, Boudinot resigned from the paper on August 11, 1832, explaining in an
open letter to the paper?s readers: ?Were I to continue as Editor, I should feel myself in a
most peculiar and delicate situation. I do not know whether I could satisfy my own views
and the views of the authorities of the nation at the same time....I do conscientiously
believe that it is the duty of every citizen to reflect upon the dangers with which we are
surrounded?to view the darkness which seems to lie before our beloved people?our
prospects, and the evils with which we are threatened?to talk over all these matters, and,
if possible, come to some definite and satisfactory conclusion, while there is time, as to
what ought to be done in the last alternative. I could not consent to be the conductor of
this paper without having the privilege and the right of discussing those important
matters [...] my usefulness would be paralyzed.?
and advertisements as well as lessons in spelling, grammar, sentence structure, and
conjugation of both the Cherokee and English languages.
8
 It was not until the late
1830s?after the 1835 Removal had displaced thousands of Cherokee from Georgia to
Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma, and after Boudinot was axed to death in 1839
by Cherokees angry over his signing, four years earlier, of the Treaty of New
Echota?that the Council was able to set up a committee to prepare and establish a
formal educational system, and not until the 1840s that they finally allocated funds for
the creation of two Cherokee seminaries. Nonetheless, Boudinot?s campaign had initiated
a process that would, over the next quarter century, foster an educational coalition
137
9
 Abbott/Mihesuah?s ?Out of the ?Graves of the Polluted Debauches?? notes, too, that the
delegates David Vann and William Potter Ross were authorized to visit schools in
Boston, Andover, and New Haven, in addition to Mount Holyoke. For the Male
Seminary, they secured two male teachers as a result of this trip: Thomas Budd Van
Horne, from the Newton Theological Seminary, and Oswald Langdon Woodford, from
Yale (505).  
10
 Students at the Cherokee Male Seminary followed suit shortly thereafter, with the
publication of the Sequoyah Memorial, beginning in 1855. However, this paper was less
regularly produced than the paper at the girls? school. See Mihesuah, Cultivating 38, 42-
3, and Murphy and Murphy 36, 61.   
between whites and Native Americans that, for the most part, projected an image of the
Indian as happily aspiring toward and succeeding in her assimilation into white culture.
In 1850, the Council sent delegates to white schools in Connecticut and Massachusetts
(including Mount Holyoke) to learn the shape of their curricula and to interview students
and graduates as prospective teachers for the Seminaries (Abbott ?Commendable
Progress,? 188-9).
9
 As a culminating achievement, in 1851, both the Cherokee Male
Seminary and the Cherokee Female Seminary opened their doors to offer Cherokee youth
a curriculum of instruction designed according to the principles and methods laid out in
the finest, white, New England schools. And in an important turn of events that even
Boudinot probably did not foresee when he called for the simultaneous creation of both a
printing press and a seminary more than a quarter-century earlier, in 1854 students at the
Cherokee Female Seminary began to publish their own dual-language newspaper, the
Cherokee Rose Bud.
10
 
The Cherokee Rose Bud manifests and conjoins the two educational projects that
Boudinot so prized, the seminary and the newspaper, and yields a clearer picture of the
relationship that may have existed between these two institutions within the larger Native
138
11
 Only a handful of issues survive: August 2, 1854 (microfiche); August 1, 1855
(microfiche); February 11, 1857 (typescript). All of these are housed at the Vaughn
Library of Northeastern State University. I am grateful to Dolores Sumner, Special
culture. To be sure, there are many reasons why the Rose Bud cannot accurately be said
to represent the much larger phenomenon of the Native American school-Native
newspaper relationship between 1850 and 1890. Foremost among these, of course, is the
fact that the Cherokee National Female Seminary and the Cherokee national press were
conceived in the same moment?uttered into existence, in a manner of speaking, by
Boudinot?s request?and therefore these institutions enjoy a close relationship not shared
by other tribes or their schools in precisely the same way. Moreover, the Rose Bud and
the Cherokee Female Seminary present an irresistible but highly unusual case study
because they are the only Native American school-and-newspaper pair for which so
many pieces of textual evidence still exist. However, the Rose Bud does offer an occasion
for us to identify the seminary?s and the press?s wider mutual efficacy as tools that
helped acculturate and educate a great number of Native American female seminary
students. Just as the Phoenix would leave its imprint on the Native presses that followed
it, the Cherokee Female Seminary was enormously influential upon other Native
American schools, establishing itself as a standard of excellence to which the other
institutions aspired. Its newspaper, too, is a manifestation not only of the seminary's
particular values and those of its students, but also some of the more broadly received
and widely diffused praxes of Native American female education. 
Early issues of the Cherokee Rose Bud make abundantly clear the paper?s
indebtedness to Boudinot?s Phoenix.
11
  Like its model, the Rose Bud presents articles in
139
Collections Librarian, for her help in locating these slim volumes for me. Unfortunately,
no other information exists regarding the creation of the Rose Bud; for example, there are
no diaries or papers from the school to explain who spearheaded the creation of the paper
within the seminary, or what discussion there must have been regarding the layout and
content of the paper, or the distribution of duties among the students. 
both the English and Cherokee languages; it reports social events (such as marriages and
temperance meetings) and ?natural? events (such as a solar eclipse) witnessed in the town
of publication and throughout the area of distribution; and, just as African-American
newspapers would do (beginning in the 1830s; see my chapter 4), it excerpts relevant
articles from national white papers such as the Saturday Evening Post and the Chicago
Press. According to Boudinot?s edict that a newspaper should comprise ?a summary of
religious and political events [... and exhibit] the feelings, disposition, improvements, and
prospects of the Indians; their traditions, their true character, as it once was and now is,?
the Rose Bud prints articles describing such customs as ?An Osage Wedding,? and
detailing a local Indian ?Celebration of the 4
th
 of July,? and it even reprints an essay
celebrating ?Free Schools? by the educational pioneer Horace Mann. In these respects,
the schoolgirls? newspaper manifests Boudinot?s ideas that the Native press should
educate and uplift its Indian readership while at the same time exhibiting to a white
readership that the preservation of select Indian customs (such as wedding rituals) have
not hindered Native advances in acculturation such as the adoption of the English
language and the embrace of white American values. 
More complicated to trace, and yet even more important, are the conflicting
beliefs and attitudes toward the Indian race that Native school newspapers like the Rose
Bud exhibited. As we saw earlier, Boudinot internalized the oft-expressed ?white?
140
notions that the Native American culture and mind is naturally inferior to the white
culture and mind. Alternatively, he sometimes argues in his newspaper that the Native
American is equal to the white in his abilities, intelligence, and humanity. This in itself
would not surprise Native press scholars Daniel Littlefield, Jr. and James Parins, who
argue that the Phoenix ?was a propaganda device established by and reflecting the views
of, Cherokee leaders then in power. Its purposes were to demonstrate that the Cherokees
were not ?savages? but were rapidly acculturating and to rally support for Cherokee
sovereignty?(xii). That these contradictory positions would be repeated in papers written
by the schoolgirls and, as we will see later on, in Callahan?s Wynema, is not necessarily a
sign of Boudinot?s influence alone: surely, many oppressed peoples report feeling both
shame and pride about those things which make them stand out and which make them
susceptible to oppression. However, Boudinot?s Phoenix provided the most visible and
influential model wherein a newspaper was claimed by a Native group as its own
mouthpiece and forum, and yet served simultaneously to ventriloquize non-Native (and
even anti-Native) attitudes in the voice of the Indian newspaper contributor.
Most compelling for our study are the contrary attitudes toward female intellect
and female newspapers expressed in the Phoenix and later embodied by the Rose Bud.
One might expect the seminary students to have been deliberate and careful about the
attitudes toward female ability that they selected to reprint; the Rose Bud writers, though,
seem at times to have taken wholesale the sort of articles about girls and women that
appeared regularly in papers throughout the country to disclaim female intellect and
emphasize the image of woman as a pretty little thing without need for thought.
141
12
 Boudinot had also, as a student in 1818, translated into Cherokee an anonymously
written tract called ?Poor Sarah, or, The benefits of religion exemplified in the life and
death of an Indian woman,? and this text similarly voices doubts about Indian and female
intellect, even while it argues that (especially female) Indians can become sincere and
devout Christians. ?Poor Sarah? is a conversion narrative about an elderly Indian woman
who is beaten but otherwise neglected by her incorrigibly and perpetually drunken
husband. Her sorrows lead her to a Bible meeting and to a love of Jesus, which helps her
to surmount the pain of her husband?s beatings (as well as the pain of loneliness when he
dies), to endure the sufferings of poverty and hunger, and to rejoice when a benefactor
gives her a clean suit of clothes for her own burial. Though Sarah learns to read the
Bible, she does not wish to read anything else. In English, the text may have functioned
as a reminder to missionaries Boudinot met (at his school, administered by the American
Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions) of the population best served by their
work. Imagine it translated into Cherokee for an Indian audience, though, and it reads
more like an exemplum, instructing particularly Indian women that the only learning they
need is scriptural, and that they can achieve that knowledge by attending prayer meetings
and rehearsing over and over again the biblical passages that would most comfort them
and most please God.  
Boudinot?s influence is strong here, too: although his ?Address? explicitly requested the
founding of educational institutions for both boys and girls, thus suggesting an equal-
opportunity approach to male and female education, in his other writings?including,
most significantly, his journalistic efforts?he expresses an ambivalence about female
education that rivals his conflicted attitude toward Indian abilities.
12
 And so, where
Boudinot prints an essay on ?Female Delicacy,? which argues that girls? ?bodies,?
?features,? ?voices,? ?tempers,? and ?intellectual powers? should all ?denote a
characteristic delicacy,? the Rose Bud publishes essays on kindness, flowers, music,
beauty, analyses of the nighttime dreams of various seminary students, and their flitting
?Thoughts In Study Hour? (which are not strictly about the lesson at hand?suggesting
that girls may not be entirely serious about their academic work?but instead about the
imagined ?destiny? of the ?reporter?s? classmates). 
142
13
 William Penn Boudinot was likely named by Elias for his friend Jeremiah Evarts,
secretary of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, who published
many newspaper columns advocating on behalf of the American Indian, using the nom de
plume ?William Penn.?
On the other hand, where Boudinot expresses, in a column immediately
juxtaposed with the essay on ?Female Delicacy,? his ?Thoughts on Newspapers,?
claiming that these printed vehicles ?are the great engine that moves the moral and
political world...[and are] infinitely powerful to establish the character of a people, as
well as to preserve their liberties [of] self-government,? he implies that all newspapers,
including those printed in girls? schools, lend force, power, and independence to their
writers and readers. In other words, he suggests that newspapers can offer girls a way out
of their more traditional social roles, a kind of sanctioned rebellion in a social context
that otherwise prescribed more strictly demure behaviors for females. Native papers in
particular, the Cherokee Advocate later argued (under the editorship of Elias Boudinot?s
son, William Penn Boudinot), can offer a community of readers ?a voice enabling it to
speak for itself, ?to expose attempted outrage, ?to defend disputed right, ?to
expostulate and protest against the works of bad men, ?to appeal to the honor and
honesty and solicit the moral aid of good men...? (?Indian Newspapers,? November 5,
1870, 2).
13
 This attitude, also taken seriously by the students of the Cherokee Female
Seminary, manifests itself in the Rose Bud via articles that defend the girls? own news-
writing endeavors. Such essays ?speak? in the first person about the writers? will toward
self-government, and claim for the schoolgirls their rights to express frustration, anger,
disagreement, and other ?indelicate? emotions they feel about the process of growing up
143
14
 Forums for private writing, such as letters, scrapbooks, and autograph books, took on
the same cathartic function. Sallie Rogers? autograph book, for example, housed at
Northeastern State University?s Vaughn Library, contains this entry from her cousin Ada
at Christmas, 1880, just before Sallie?s graduation from the Cherokee Female Seminary:
?Cousin mine:/ The world is a nettle; disturb it, it stings./ Grasp it firmly, it stings not./
On one of two things/If you would not be stung, it behooves/ You to settle;/ Avoid it or
crush it.?/ Ada? (unnumbered). It is just this sort of awareness of the world and one?s
place within it that the Rose Bud sometimes records, albeit in a much more public forum
than the autograph book. Ada does not attribute the lines to anyone, but it is taken from
the British Edward Bulwer-Lytton?s Lucile, a long romantic poem the students probably
read at school.
Indian and female in a white world.
14
 There is no outward sign that the girls consciously
wrestled with the competing images of female ability that their newspaper exhibits, no
specific essay by a schoolgirl that directly queries what it means to be both female and
Indian. However, the very contradictory nature of the messages these schoolgirl news
articles send?the seminarians are at once both willful and submissive?suggests that
this struggle ensued volubly and violently. 
A Rose Bud article by a seminarian named Na-Li, titled  ?The Algebra-Sum
Soliloquy? and printed August 2, 1854, for example, ostensibly works through the
frustration this student feels over not being able to determine the answer to her math
problem. Beginning with a complaint about how long, hard, and unavailingly she has
worked at her task, and ending with a narrative of the deliberate and careful steps she
must take to finally achieve success, the essay is a tale of perseverance but also of woe:
?I wonder what the Algebra man made such sums to be published for? I do not see what
good it does me; it seems as if the more I try to get it right the more difficult it is; just
making one?s brains ache for nothing? (3). The February 11, 1857 issue similarly
includes ?A School Girl?s Complaint,? lamenting the difficulties of geometry and Latin,
144
as well as a distressing, brief article entitled ?My Fate Twenty Years Hence,? in which
the schoolgirl imagines herself looking back on her school days from her own dismal,
post-graduation future. Although she plans to remember herself a ?merry school girl at
the Female Seminary, surrounded by a happy company collected for the purpose of
acquiring useful knowledge,? and looking ?forward to a bright future where our path
should be strewed with roses,? the writer also imagines bleak days ahead: ?...time passed
and stole away the joys of our youth?our happy band was scattered long ago to tread on
different roads...Here I am then, a poor impatient, cross, old school ma?am...? (not
paginated). Clearly, the schoolgirls? forays into newspaper journalism allowed them to
air grievances about the subjects they studied, their frustrations with teachers (those poor,
impatient and cross old women), their considerable anxiety about the future, and their
concern over how well or ill served they would be by their formal education at the
Seminary. Taken together, the articles exhibit a culture of letters for which public writing
is a sort of community sounding board, having cathartic appeal for many students
experiencing the hardships of acculturation via the schoolhouse, and perhaps functioning
as a warning, too, for those readers who would yet choose to be students there, as well. 
More than simply registering the conflicting attitudes of the schoolgirls toward
their school environment, though, or the pride and shame that they felt, simultaneously,
about being Indian in a white-dominated world, the Rose Bud highlights the influence of
both the newspaper and the seminary upon Native American females in the nineteenth
century, and it foregrounds their association in three particular ways that are useful to our
study. First, the impression made upon the girls? lives by the newspaper and the seminary
145
15
 Boudinot suggests in his ?Address? that Cherokees must be acculturated by a variety of
means, simultaneously?that they should be immersed in the new culture?s language and
values and methods of transmitting information?in order for the process to take root
well. It is also crucial that the process take root quickly enough to convince the whites
that such acculturation is possible, and thereby stave off Indian annihilation: the ?adult
part of the nation will probably grovel on in ignorance and die in ignorance...unless the
proposed means [of creating a school and a newspaper together] are carried into effect?
(Qtd. in Murphy 173). 
was not merely sequential but simultaneous.
15
 That girls could go to school and read and
produce newspapers at the same time, rather than merely using print media to extend the
reach of their educations after graduation, indicates the transformative, socializing
function of the press in seminary life. Second, as both the seminary and the newspaper
were influenced by the presence of white Christian female teachers from schools such as
Mount Holyoke, both were organs for female students to learn specific standards of
Christian femininity and to demonstrate what they had learned in person and in print.
Third, conflicts between the school?s mission to adopt white models of female intellect
and virtue, and the newspaper?s mission (based on Boudinot?s model) to preserve the
Native heritage of Cherokee femininity, created a rift through which the girls could
perceive the constructedness of female and racial identity. Ultimately, many students
would write newspaper articles from the confusing, challenging, sometimes liberating
perspective of looking through that rift between two cultures. 
The simultaneity of the school and the newspaper was critical in mutually
enforcing and shaping the students' acculturation toward the (white) culture of the school,
giving the students opportunities not only to read about but also to write of their own
successful and unsuccessful experiences with the values they were learning to adopt and
146
the behaviors they were learning to practice. In a broader sense, too, the publication of
the newspaper at school, to be disseminated not only among the students but also
outward to the wider Cherokee community, facilitated the sense that Indian education is a
public endeavor, one in which the entire community has an interest and a stake. Since
newspapers like the Rose Bud regularly reported the results of examinations, the
proceedings of graduation ceremonies, and brief narrative accounts by students who felt
they had failed academically or socially for some specific reason, the newspaper
expanded the disciplinary and evaluative audience to include teachers, students, and
potentially the entire local Native American community, as well.
Later papers, such as Tullahasee Mission?s Our Monthly, also functioned as a
centripetal force in the lives of Tullahassee?s students and the larger Creek community.
Architectural diagrams of the school show a separate room designated specially for the
press, and indicate the central place of the newspaper in school life. The first issue of that
paper also stated the Monthly?s broader goals, encouraging a community to form around
the school and its press:
The main object of our paper will be the moral and intellectual improvement of
our Tullahassee boys and girls. We hope that the prospect of getting their
compositions once a month into our paper will be a motive which will urge them
on to greater painstaking in writing them. 
But while it is intended chiefly for the boys and girls of Tullahassee...they
are not the only ones we would like to reach and also to hear from. Contributions
from any of our friends in the Nation who feel interested in the welfare of our
147
school, and of our paper will be very thankfully and gladly received...(rpt. in Bass
242; italics in original).
As with the Cherokee Rose Bud, the Creek Our Monthly began as a school newspaper
that had at its roots the intention of grounding the larger Creek community in the life of
the school. In both of these cases, the student contributors understood it to be their duty
to produce writing good enough to represent the acculturative machinery of the school
and its value to the surrounding community. 
Relatedly, that sense of the larger community as audience helped to foster a 
connection between the students and the uneducated or less educated population of the
Indian territories. Part of the schools' mission was often (and this was certainly so with
the Cherokee Female Seminary) to prepare female students to teach and thereby uplift the
uneducated masses of Native Americans both young and old. The girls? newspapers gave
seminary students the opportunity to begin developing links between themselves and
their future students, teaching those younger than themselves by example and from
within the somewhat close atmosphere of the seminary building. As important, the
simultaneity of seminary education and school newspaper production also helped to
prevent students from feeling cloistered by the seminary, or removed by their education
from the rest of the Indian world. As a matter of public record, the circulating newspaper
brought the girls repeatedly out into the wider community, in some sense declaring the
girls' presence, impact, and intention despite their distance from home and their inability
to act as real teachers until their own graduation. The girls? simultaneous projects of
conducting lives at the seminary and recording and disseminating reports of that conduct,
148
16
 The Harrell Monthly, a paper issued from the Harrell International Institute in
Muskogee in the 1890s, even went so far as to explicitly prohibit political and sectarian
subjects, favoring instead that only religious and educational articles be transmitted from
the Methodist school to proselytize to the larger community. See Foreman, Oklahoma
Imprints 1835-1907: A History of Printing in Oklahoma Before Statehood, 236. 
as shown on the pages of the Rose Bud, together reinforce the efficacy of the school and
the newspaper in helping Indian students to envision themselves as productive agents and
accountable members of a community they would help to build, fortify, and uplift.
Both the seminary and the newspaper were organs for female students to learn and
circulate specific lessons about their own educational and assimilative process. The dual
media of school newspapers and seminary classes helped to clarify and reiterate for
female seminarians the particular goals and standards of (white) femininity to which they
should aspire. As girls took classes in botany, rhetoric, mental philosophy, and literature,
the lessons students absorbed were reflected in their contributions to the school
newspapers. In its articles on ?Beauty,? ?Intemperance,? ?Music,? and ?The Power of
Kindness,? for example, the Rose Bud points to the ways that seminary life enforced
behaviors linked to the Cult of True Womanhood, and so prominently enforced in the
white schools on which the Cherokee Female Seminary and countless other Indian
schools were modeled. Although the girls did take classes in government, as well (to
understand the operation of both the United States government and the tribal
governments of their own Indian nations), no evidence exists of overtly political
discourse on the pages of the Rose Bud, and this fact may be attributed to the prevalent
Cult of True Womanhood-type standards dictating women?s absence from political life.
16
Additionally, classroom use of ?object lessons,? with which girls could analyze and
149
17
 The author of this ?before? scene is Na-Li, the same seminary student whose work we
read on previous pages; the ?after? scene is authored by a girl who calls herself Fanny. 
Na-Li?s identity is somewhat controversial among Native American historians.
According to Lisa Stopp at the Cherokee Cultural Center in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, oral
tradition suggests that Na-Li was later known as Lucy Lowrey Hoyt Keyes, author of the
Wahnenauhi Manuscript (an 1889 account of Cherokee life and traditions which Keyes
transmitted to the U.S. Government before negotiating the terms of its sale herself).
However, Na-Li describes herself as a full Cherokee and an orphan of uneducated parents
(in an August 2, 1854 article entitled ?An Address to the Females of the Cherokee
critique the behaviors of other real or fictional girls according to these standards of
femininity, were complemented by articles in the school newspapers that explicitly
examine the differences in Indian female life before and after the introduction of formal
schooling. With exempla like ?A Walk? (August 1, 1855), which details the regret of two
students who put off their studies to explore the woods and, forgetting the time, miss
their study hour, fall behind in their work, and embarrass themselves during the next
day?s class, the Rose Bud demonstrates, too, how the school newspaper then served as a
vehicle to remind students that their successful or unsuccessful adaptation of these
behaviors were subject to constant scrutiny, that they were observable and recordable for
all to witness. Too, the poignant essay, ?Two Scenes In Cherokee Land,? also printed in
the August 1, 1855 edition of the Wreath of Cherokee Rose Buds (to which the Cherokee
Rose Bud changed its name that year), instructively pairs, like a ?before? and ?after?
picture, one scene of Indian life prior to the availability of seminary education against
another scene taking place after the introduction of formal schooling. The first scene is
set ?[i]n rudeness and uncivilization,? where ?[n]o little stand of books, no vase of
flowers, filling the room with fragrance, no neat papers are to be seen; nothing but the
mere necessaries of life.?
17
 By contrast, the ?after? picture indicates ?[b]y the fenced
150
Nation?), whereas Lucy Hoyt was reportedly of mixed ancestry (part white) and was not
orphaned; her parents, furthermore, were both wealthy and educated.
It seems unlikely to me, though not impossible, that Na-Li and Lucy Keyes are
nevertheless one and the same person. That is, Na-Li may have been of mixed ancestry
and only pretending to be a full-blooded Cherokee in order to cultivate a more persuasive
Native ethos for her writing. The Muskogee poet, Alexander Posey would participate in
this kind of literary passing later, in his Fus Fixico letters (1902-1908), published in the
Indian Journal newspaper he edited. There, Posey took on the persona of a full blooded
Creek who was uneducated or poorly educated. His letters offered political critiques of
the white government and the Creek government, so his pseudonym gave him a safe
cover for his true identity. If Lucy Hoyt was also adopting a full Cherokee persona, she
would be the first Native American on record to do so. 
fields of wheat and corn [... that] civilization and nature are here united in our Cherokee
land.? ?What has produced the change?? asks the author of this article. She responds to
her own query thus: 
The Missionaries came and brought with them the BIBLE. They taught our
ancestors the precepts of religion and the arts of civilization; to cultivate farms
and erect neat little cottages. They taught them also the knowledge of books, and
the value of education. Thus, under the influence of the religion of the
Missionaries, the wild Indian was changed and became a new man.
By listing all of the domestic features that she has noticed are absent from the first
scene?books, vases filled with fragrant flowers, ?neat? papers, and other decorative
attributes?the author of this story displays her understanding that her education is
supposed to equip her as much with the appearance of a cultivated mind, as with the
cultivated mind itself. Similarly, her proud exposition of the changes that are wrought by
the missionaries?changes that include the reorganization of the tribe?s spiritual,
religious, and cultural values, as well as their agricultural practices?demonstrates that
151
18
 See also Ann Stephens? 1860 novel, Malaeska: Indian Wife of the White Hunter, which
is mentioned in Kristin Herzog?s introduction to her Women, Ethnics, and Exotics:
Images of Power in Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (1983, pp. xxi): ?the
heroine [in Stephens? novel...] appears as the noblest of all savages. She possesses all the
requirements of the beautiful Indian: a laugh as musical as a birdsong, hair that glowed
like a raven?s wing, and motion as graceful as an untamed gazelle. ?Her language was
pure and elegant, sometimes even poetical beyond...comprehension, and her sentiments
were correct in principle, and full of simplicity...She was never seen to be angry, and a
sweet patient smile always hovered about her lips..., the poetry of intellect and of warm,
deep feeling, shed a loveliness over her face seldom witnessed on the brow of a savage.?
She spent her life ?in piling up soft couches for those she loved, and taking the cold stone
for herself. It was her woman?s destiny....Civilization does not always reverse this
mournful picture of womanly self-abnegation.?? (xxi).   
she has accepted a Christian value system which transcends both race and nationality.
Dedicated to ?The Good, the Beautiful, and the True,? the Wreath thus incorporated the
Cherokee National Council?s goals for female education, which were remarkably like the
goals of various white seminaries for their own white students: just as Mount Holyoke,
for example, strove to refine and graduate girls to be good wives and mothers, and
teachers to future generations of students, the Cherokee Female Seminary sought to
create good wives for educated Cherokee males, and a corps of teachers for the
uneducated Cherokee tribesmen.
18
 In Boudinot?s own words, the school newspaper
would help to ?reclaim [the girls] from a savage state? (Purdue 94). As Laura Wexler has
argued much more recently, ?through teaching reading,? Native American educational
institutions ?would be able to do what the persuasive powers of the entire U.S. Cavalry
had tried and failed to do: to persuade the Western tribes to abandon their communal,
nomadic way of life, adopt the prizes, mores, and values of consumer culture, and turn
their little girls into desirable women on the middle-class commodity plan? of the Cult of
True Womanhood (Wexler 25-6).  
152
19
 Images deleted in electronic copy of dissertation; author awaiting permission. By
contrast, Lucy Keyes describes Cherokee dress before contact with whites: ?In early
times, the clothing of the Cherokees was made entirely of the skins of animals which they
killed in hunting. The Cherokee women became quite skillful in making clothes for their
families, when very young, girls were instructed in the art of preparing material for, and
making clothing. After dressing, the skins were rubbed and polished until they were very
smooth and soft, often nicely ornamented, by painting in different colors; for paint, or
dye, the juices of plants were used...
?The women wore a skirt and short jacket, with leggins and moccasins, the jacket
was fastened in front with silver broaches, the skirt was fringed and either painted or
embroidered with beads, and the moccasins were trimmed with beads, in many colors.
Their hair, they combed smooth and close, and folded into a club at the back of the head,
and tied very tight with a piece of dried eel skin, which was said to make the hair grow
long? (190-1). Jack Kilpatrick, who edited this version of the manuscript, notes that
artists Francis Parsons, George Catlin, and John Mix Stanley all corroborate
Wahnenauhi?s statements about early nineteenth-century Cherokee dress in their
paintings.     
Photographs of the Rose Buds themselves?the seminary students?indicate how
deeply the girls learned to adopt those values and internalize a white, middle-class
sensibility of what it meant to be an educated female. Such images demonstrate the girls?
sense of belonging to a highly visible and easily identifiable community bound by
elaborate rules and rituals for female appearance. Meant to express the students?
wholesale, group adoption of white standards for feminine beauty, the picture shows the
girls dressed alike in white blouses buttoned up to the neck and down to the wrist; their
?every hair [is] in place,? combed, braided, and pinned to signify a civilized dominance
of will over the unruliness of the savage body.
19
 The very fact that a photograph was
taken for the express purpose of showing the backs of the girls? heads and indicating,
thereby, the amount of time and energy that each girl devoted to her appearance, gives a
sense of both the importance that was placed at the seminary on looking ?right,? and the
matter-of-fact regularity of girls being inspected as goods bound for market. To the
153
20
 Ellen Whitmore, that former Mount Holyoke student who, in 1851, became one of the
Cherokee Female Seminary?s first teachers, reported in her journal of October 8 that
year, the following tidbit: ?The girls [students] are very pleasant and very happy?had a
little fun just as the bell rang for study hour in which I joined heartily. Two of the girls
called [on me?] in the guise of Indians and succeeded very well in carrying out their
farce? (20). Unfortunately, Whitmore does not elaborate: it is unclear whether these
particular students were themselves Native American or not, and how, precisely, they
disguised themselves. Nevertheless, it is fascinating that these students would, so soon
after the opening of the school term, understand enough about the stereotype of the
surrounding community of Cherokees living near the school, the girls? uniform
appearance would immediately mark them as seminary students who, it was widely
advertised, were preparing to devote their lives to Indian improvement and uplift. No
doubt, their distinctive style would also mark these girls as eminently qualified to impart
white values to the rest of the Indian community, since they had obviously learned them
quite thoroughly. 
Other equally staged photographs indicate the insidiousness of those values and
the girls' internalization of racist attitudes toward Indians and other non-whites. One such
image portrays a group of seminary students ?playing Indian? by wearing feathered
headdresses and preparing to shoot with a bow and arrow; their dark, loose-fitting skirts
and short-sleeved blouses (exposing more skin than middle-class white women would)
are more suited to a life spent out of doors?hunting game, for example?than are the
white blouses in the images referred to above. Although the photograph represents a
socio-cultural inaccuracy?for it was the Cherokee males, not the females, who hunted
and protected the tribe militarily?the scene captured here surely reinforced for seminary
students the notion that uneducated Indians used primitive tools and dressed in bizarre
costume (Purdue 4).
20
 Like the article ?Two Scenes from Cherokee Land? discussed
154
Indian to ?dress up? as a ?Native? for fun. A possible alternative interpretation is that
Whitmore misunderstood the girls? intention in their play, missing the fact that the joke
was on her for ?mistaking? the girls as Indians just because they were dressed in
traditional garb, and thus mistakenly seeing them as non-Indian when they are dressed in
the more conventionally ?white? clothing of the school ?uniform.? See The Journal of
Ellen Whitmore. 
21
  It is unclear to me where the girls first witnessed or conceived of these caricatures,
however there are myriad possible sources. Many of the seminary students, for example,
came from slave-owning families whose social atmospheres may well have bred these
parodies of the uneducated Negro (Purdue 11).
above, this image suggests how ?rude? and ?uncivilized? were the values and behaviors
of the Indians before contact with the whites. Similarly loaded, another image reveals a
group of seminary students and their teachers (including a white male, possibly a visiting
missionary from the boys? seminary) performing in blackface, with costumes comprised
of the folksy clothing and elaborate haberdashery that denoted a stereotype of African
American southern society of the late nineteenth century. The exaggerated postures of the
students and teachers in this photograph, along with their suppressed smiles, point toward
the performative aspects of the scene; the photograph captures how the students
entertained themselves and one another, and shows how they adopted a white mode of
revelry and used it to ?pretend? that, as schooled Indians, they were less Other than the
negro caricatures they perform  here.
21
 That the skit being performed is entitled ?De
debatin? club? reminds us again how keenly aware these students were of the power of
language and dialect to identify a person as a member of a particular ethnic, racial, and
class grouping. All of these photographs make clear that other activities at the school,
together with the production of the newspaper, confirmed and fortified a hierarchical
vision of American society which placed whites at the top, Indians and blacks near the
155
bottom, and the educated or acculturated Other somewhere in between these two poles,
depending on how closely they could approximate white, upper- or middle-class
behaviors and attitudes, and how easily they could spurn associations with their non-
white ancestors: the more white they could ?become??not by changing their skin color,
obviously, but by appropriating blackface entertainment, as whites had done?the better.
These group poses all suggest, too, that the school administrators approved of placing
large numbers of students together in carefully orchestrated situations and controlled
environments, and thus supervised the mechanism of mutual indoctrination among the
girls at the seminary.
And yet, another remarkable photograph hints at the other side of this coin of
mutual influence: the subversive threat posed by just such an educational environment
that would congregate masses of young and spirited females, some of whom may rebel
against the values overtly taught to them at school, and who may easily, by the school?s
own prized system of control, influence one another also to rebel. An untitled photograph
of the Cherokee Female Seminary?s 1874 graduating class pictures a large number of
students standing before the seminary building. Strikingly, the girls appear both
cultivated and wild, refined and unkempt, carefully posed (as are those in the
background, standing on the front steps of the building) and haphazardly scattered about
(like those standing on the front lawn in tall, untamed grasses). Although all of the girls
in the foreground have traded traditional Native garb for Victorian-style dresses and
woven hair, more than a few have kept their long hair loose in this photograph. Some
stare defiantly into the camera, refusing to offer the smile that was, by the 1870s, a
156
widely accepted convention of posing for photographs. Compared to the other images of
Cherokee Female Seminary students which proudly demonstrate their knowledge of that
convention as well as, for example, the girls? impeccable grooming and corporal
discipline, this image stands out as pictorial evidence of the girls? ambivalence toward
the forces that would constrain them at school. 
Such defiance is certainly also present on the pages of the Rose Bud, in verbal
rather than visual form, and this third association between the school and the newspaper
encouraged not only group cohesion but also group subversion and anti-acculturation
activities. Publishing partly in English and partly in Cherokee (as Tullahassee Mission?s
Our Monthly would later publish in both English and Creek), the Wreath as a whole
makes manifest for the girls that their education was designed literally to verse them in
both cultures, and to teach them to identify with speakers of both languages. Indeed,
since the girls alternately signed their contributions using their Cherokee and their
(adopted) English names, the Wreath evinces that the paper succeeded in enforcing this
dual identification. Through its bilingualism, as well as through the paper?s emphases on
Christianity and domestic virtue, the schoolgirls' newspaper would help them to
participate in their own acculturation to white society; yet, some articles in the Wreath
also shed light on the ways that seminary students could also resist acculturative forces
through newspaper writing and reading. 
Certain pairs of articles?close, but non-identical ?translations? of stories written
in both Cherokee and English, and published in a single issue of the Wreath?gave
students the opportunity to tell a single story from both a ?Native American? and a
157
22
 By contrast, ?very little content of [the Phoenix] appeared in parallel Cherokee and
English? (Littlefield and Parins 26).
?white American? perspective.
22
 An example of this double-voiced phenomenon was
published in the Wreath on August 1, 1855, and presented in both English and Cherokee
(the English version is on pages 5 and 6; the Cherokee version is on page 7). The English
version, contributed by a student named Icy and entitled ?The Two Companions,?
personifies Hope and Faith as two young girls, not unlike the seminary students
themselves. In this story, on ?a bright and beautiful morning in Spring,? an unnamed
?maiden of about sixteen began a journey in a new and untired [untried?] way.? Although
she is warned that her path will be difficult and ?strewn with thorns and briars,? ?a
venerable friend had promised that she should be accompanied by two lovely
companions, to guide and support her? (italics in original). To be sure, when the going
gets rough for the young maiden, the ?silvery voice[d]? ?HOPE? appears and assuages
the girl?s discomfort with her cheerful presence. After a while, though, Hope?s springing
step carries her far ahead of the story?s main character, leaving her alone again,
uncomfortable, and afraid. Next, a ?tiny blue-eyed child [comes] running up to her? and
offers her support. The main character scoffs; the child is far too small to provide
assistance to a sixteen year old girl. But, the child ?insists,? her name is ?FAITH...and
she would...grow larger.? Soon, the pair catches up to Hope, and all three walk on
together. In a conclusion that echoes Bunyan?s Pilgrim?s Progress (as well as other
parables of Christian faith the seminary students might have read), they arrive at ?the
Beautiful City where her journey was to end,? and after crossing a ?cold, dark river?
158
23
 Inventories of the seminary?s library holdings are hard to come by and quite
incomplete: library holdings and other papers were destroyed several times by fire, as
well as by troops who used the seminary building to store arms during the Civil War
when the school was closed, and also, of course, by the ravages of time. However, some
mention is made in the catalogues from graduation ceremonies of the kinds of texts the
girls read. The Catalogue of the year closing February 11, 1857, for example, lists
Milton?s Paradise Lost among the studies of the First Class of students. Other scripture-
based readings were likely for the Bible lessons included in the curriculum. The
Catalogue is included in the Northeastern State University Vaughn Library, Special
Collections. Again, I thank Dolores Sumner, Special Collections Librarian, for her help
in locating this document. 
together, ?the gates of the Glorious City were thrown open, and amidst strains of
heavenly music, she entered and received the victor?s crown? (italics in original).
23
 
This Christian parable is so heavy-handed that it hardly seems to require
interpretation. However, it is especially noteworthy that the young maiden at the story?s
center, like the environment she passes through, is almost completely featureless. She has
no clear markers of race or ethnicity, which likely made it all the easier for readers to
imaginatively project themselves into her place?in that nowhere land which is as
nondescript as it is supposed to be inviting. We know that the main character is
approximately the age of the seminary students, that she speaks English (as must the
reader of this version of the story), and can perhaps be best described as a reluctant or
new devotee of Christian principles (otherwise, why would she doubt Faith?s ability to
sustain her?).  To the Cherokee schoolgirl reader, the story may have held out a promise
that even her hesitant initiation into Christian values would be rewarded in the end, and
that efforts to erase her own Indianness?by heeding the advice of her ?venerable
friends,? or teachers, and adopting their values as her own?would assure her not only of
a place in the heavenly domain but of God?s grace here on earth. In this version of the
159
24
  I am extremely grateful to Lisa Stopp and Anna Huckaby of the Cherokee Nation
Cultural Resource Center in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, for their help translating Cherokee
articles from the Rose Bud into English. I also wish to thank the Graduate School of the
University of Maryland for awarding me a QCB Travel Grant to fund my research trip to
Oklahoma in July 2001.   
story, non-Indianness,  whiteness, and Christianity are bound up together as a set of goals
toward which it is attractive and noble to strive.  
By contrast, the Cherokee-language version of the story suggests that Christianity,
whiteness, and non-Indianness are worthwhile but almost unattainable pursuits for an
Indian.
24
 Entitled ?Two Should Walk Together,? this version of the story differs in
several important respects. For example, the main character in the Cherokee version is a
sixteen year old male named Wood. Although he, too, sets out on a beautiful spring day,
?the path is hard for him to find? because it is ?uncleared and hard to keep sight of.? Both
his name and the wildness of his path suggest Wood?s affinity (via his Indian-ness) with
the state of nature, uncivilized and uncultivated. An elderly female friend informs Wood
that ?it takes two to walk in harmony,? and recommends that ?you should have someone
to encourage and help you?; this version does not promise Wood ?two companions? but
instead seems to encourage him toward a romantic coupling with a female helpmeet?a
fact which underscores the gender difference between Wood in this version and the
unnamed female protagonist of the English-language version. Eventually, Hope does
appear, described as ?the one who would walk with him.? When she tells Wood that she
is ?here to comfort you on your journey? and that with her, he will know ?peace and joy
[such as he has] never known,? Hope sounds more like a human wife than an embodied
virtue, however closely those two concepts were meant to mimic each other in the mid-
160
25
  Devon Mihesuah has observed the tendency in the Wreath to use blue eyes to
epitomize ?enlightenment and civilization? (41). She notes that many of the seminarians
may have had blue eyes, as their racial and ethnic heritage was often mixed between
Native American and white ancestry. In the school, a caste system developed that placed
mixed blood girls above full-blooded Cherokees; having white traits and white ancestry
made a girl innately closer to the state of achievement and civilization toward which she
was supposed to aspire. 
nineteenth century. When Hope bounds ahead of him (just as she did in the English-
language version), the same small, blue-eyed child appears and announces herself as
?Faith? (or ?Belief?). The two soon catch up to Hope, just as they did in the other
version. By virtue of the age, gender, and racial or ethnic differences between Wood and
the blue-eyed Faith, the Cherokee-language version makes it seem that Wood has
somehow walked into a story where he does not belong.
25
 Until his entrance into Heaven
at the end (which, as we shall see below, feels rather tacked on), it almost appears that
Wood?s story is about finding a white, Christian wife for himself on his journey through
the American landscape. 
The second major difference from the English text is in the conclusion to the
Cherokee version, wherein lies a direct address to the reader and instructions for living:
If you ever feel you should give up, no matter what path you are on, remember
Hope and Belief. Traveling with both of these will lead you back to the rays of
sunshine and eventually the streets of Heaven, even though there are many
unpleasant obstacles on the way.  
Finally, we are told, Wood reaches his ?destination,? ?nervous,? but flanked by his new
friends: ?They entered the gates of Heaven victorious and crowned with blessings.? The
direct address seems designed to make clear to the Indian reader that the tale is an
161
exemplum, suggesting both that non-English speaking Cherokee readers would not
otherwise understand that the tale is a scriptural parable, and that readers of the English-
language version?who did not need such a description?would be so familiar with the
genre as to recognize it on their own. The difference is indicative, in other words, of a
major division between readers in the Wreath?s audience pool?some of whom are
familiar with Christian principles and others who are not?and it underscores, finally, the
acculturating and even evangelical function of the newspaper in the Cherokee
community.  
Overall, the differences between these stories make clear that one is a version of
the other, rather than a simple, word-for-word translation: the author of the Cherokee
text (for that one probably followed the English-language text, considering its undeniable
Christian influences) made very deliberate choices to preserve certain features of the
original story and to alter some others. I would argue that the differences between the
Cherokee and the English versions are proof of the newspaper?s function (and the girls?
awareness of that function) in interrogating, if not undermining, the applicability of white
Christian values to a Native American audience. 
For example, by choosing to make Wood a male character, the author removes the
primary similarity which exists in the English-language version between the female
seminary reader and the protagonist. The author may be attempting to increase the male
audience?s imperative toward Christianity (for with Wood?s example, male readers may
choose to insert themselves into the story). However, she also removes the imperative
toward Christianity for any of the Cherokee students at the school who do not yet read in
162
English. The author?s choice, then, directly subverts the newspaper?s goal to educate
female students in the values taught at the seminary. Consider, too, her decision to alter
the goal of the story?s plot. In the English-language version, the girl?s acceptance of Faith
and Hope as her life companions provides both the motivating force of her journey and
the moral of her story: her Christian acceptance of faith and hope denotes a righteous life,
culminating in heavenly reward. By contrast, in the Cherokee-language version,
heterosexual marriage is the goal. This version?s more age-appropriate interest in
sexuality and romance would not have been subversive to the dominant white culture
(unless Wood really were looking for a white wife) but perhaps to the dominant authority
in the seminarians? lives?the teachers and guardians of their chastity. Finally, by
including in the text a direct address to her reader, the author makes manifest the idea
that newspapers are good for actively engaging and  instructing the audience in the
knowledge, ideas, and behaviors transmitted there. Less passive than the English-
language story ?The Two Companions,? the Cherokee version, ?Two Should Walk
Together,? encourages readers to question the influence of Christian values upon their
lives, challenge the authority figures at the school, and reject passive reading practices in
favor of active ones. For the Wreath readers who understood both English and Cherokee
and could make these comparative evaluations themselves, the differences in these stories
would have had even greater impact. 
Textual examples from the Wreath and visual images of the girls? lives at the
Seminary suggest together that Boudinot?s Phoenix was an important model, sometimes
exerting enormous influence upon students? writing practices and other times not,
163
depending on the varying needs of individual students at different moments in time. For
the girls who required a forum to express how well they had absorbed school rules
regarding proper etiquette for educated females, or to practice what they had learned
about the value of the Bible and Christian morality in Native American life, the Wreath
emulated the Phoenix and provided a primary means of exposition, distribution, and
audience. On the other hand, Native American students for whom the rules of white
culture and its educational, religious, and other cultural institutions seemed too
oppressive had at their disposal a ready-made sounding board on which to post their
complaints about teachers (those ?impatient, cross, old school ma?am[s]?) and academic
subjects, their perplexity over the different codes of ?civilized? conduct for boys and
girls, and their rather clever manipulation of Christian parables that seem at once genuine
translations and  purposeful mistranslations. Students in this last group, especially, are
poised to teach us the greatest lesson about the ways that Boudinot?s early ideas were
adopted by female students as they took control of the newspaper at their school, and
used it as a vehicle for free speech and for cultivating a political voice to fit their own
needs for female self-government and self-sovereignty. Somewhere along the way, the
Cherokee Female Seminarians figured out that Boudinot?s two creations could be used to
do more than merely help them survive in a white world. The school-newspaper nexus
was also the right place for schoolgirls to create themselves, as a part of or apart from the
whites? image of what they should be. Above all, the Wreath illustrates that the
schoolgirls understood the press and the school to offer them choices for behavior and
thought; that the positions of schoolgirl or educated female, like those of editor,
164
26
 In her introduction and notes to the reissue of Wynema, Native American literature
scholar LaVonne Brown Ruoff writes: ?The title of the novel is probably derived from
the name given to a Modoc woman who served as liaison between the Modocs and the
U.S. government peace commissioners.? Ruoff explains that ?Winema,? whose real name
was Toby Riddle, was esteemed by the U.S. commissioners especially after she saved the
life of a white commissioner who was scalped and stripped by dissenting Modocs in a
surprise attack. The man she saved named her Winema, meaning ?Little Woman Chief?;
he later wrote of the incident in Wi-ne-ma (the Woman Chief) and her People (1876).
William Apess?s A Son of the Forest (1829) may also have been important to the naming
of this text. Ruoff points out, in  ?Early Native American Women Authors: Jane Johnston
Schoolcraft, Sarah Winnemucca, S. Alice Callahan, E. Pauline Johnson, and Zitkala-?a,?
that Apess?s was the first published autobiography written by an Indian, and was
influential upon many later Native American writers (81). That Apess was a missionary
increases the chances that Callahan, a devout Christian, knew his work well.   
journalist, and newspaper reader, each had as a primary defining quality the ability and
the imperative to turn the page, write and rewrite the story, and recreate oneself in time
for the next installment.  
 
Wynema   
Sophia Alice Callahan?s 1891 novel, Wynema: A Child of the Forest, draws as
well from Boudinot?s ideas about the dual role of the school and the newspaper in the
lives of Native American girls, and yet there is in these two poles the dim sort of family
resemblance that one would expect of ancestors removed by seven decades.
26
 Both
Boudinot and Callahan express support (as do the Cherokee Female Seminary students)
for a school system that aims to acculturate and civilize Indians according to white and
Christian models. Both emphasize, too, that a primary function of the newspaper in
Indian life is to broadcast with a clear voice the otherwise muffled expressions of a
fading Native American population, evidence of their noble character, and the injustices
165
27
 Even her publisher?s 1891 ?Preface? prominently featured Callahan?s intention to
persuade Indian-friendly whites to take up the slack for their more hostile white brothers
and sisters, declaring that ?[t]he fact that an Indian, one of the oppressed, desires to plead
her cause at a tribunal where judge and jury are chosen from among the oppressors is our
warrant for publishing this little volume? (ix).
that have been perpetrated against them. Like Boudinot in his ?Address,? Callahan
attempts to engage the support of a high-minded white audience who would gently
?whiten? the Indian population through education (and, also permissible in Callahan?s
view, through interracial coupling).
27
 Simultaneously, she excoriates whites who would
slaughter Indians or advocate various measures of Indian removal, from relocation to
genocide. However, Callahan breaks most distinctly from Boudinot and the Wreath of
Cherokee Rose Buds writers in the greatly diminished degree of trust that she places in
the ability of the missionary-run Native school and press to uplift and save America?s
Native populations. Though her novel offers two heroines, an Indian girl and her white
schoolteacher, whose personal lives are enriched and intertwined in the school and the
press, Wynema ultimately evinces little faith that either the newspaper or the school will
have any lasting impact in preserving a recognizably Indian life and culture. Indeed, in
Wynema, these institutions are tools for transition rather than uplift, for assimilation (or
racial admixture) rather than acculturation (racial integration); the value of the school and
the press, according to the novel, is to help smooth the way from a time when Indians are
abundant to an inevitable and not-too-distant future when they will not exist at all. The
Indian schoolgirl at the convergence of these institutions factors prominently in ushering
in the sea change of assimilation.   
166
28
 Ruoff offers here readings of these authors? most important and relatively well-known
texts, including Schoolcraft?s contributions to the literary magazine she edited with her
husband, called Muzzeniegun (or The Literary Voyager); Winnemucca?s Life Among the
Piutes; Callahan?s Wynema; Johnson?s poetry that was published in a variety of
magazines, but especially her volume, The White Wampum; and Zitkala-?a?s American
Indian Stories (among others).    
In Callahan?s recently rediscovered novel, a schoolteacher and several
newspapers serve simultaneously to educate a young Creek girl named Wynema about
the political conflicts with the United States government in which her own and other
Indian tribes are embroiled. The education system and the press are also used to instruct
Wynema regarding gender-appropriate behavior: during political discussions with her
white female schoolteacher, and later with both women?s male suitors (including one pro-
Indian missionary and one Indian, in a brotherly relationship that recalls Boudinot and
Worcester), Wynema learns which responses and reactions are expected of her, as a
woman, with regard to printed news of political strife and conflict between Indians and
whites (indignation but not rebellion). Too, the simultaneous presence of the school and
the press in Wynema?s life helps her to achieve what many of Callahan?s more separatist
Native American contemporaries? Zitkala-?a, Sarah Winnemucca, and E. Pauline
Johnson?would also argue is one of the most important goals of Native American
female education: Wynema learns that she must read between the lines that are written by
others, to assess critically printed representations of the white and Native cultures in
which she participates, and to understand with increasing acuity that the newspaper
reports and school lessons she receives are not the truth so much as someone?s version of
the truth (Ruoff 81-111).
28
 In Callahan?s articulation, one goal of female schooling may
167
29
 As many of the novel?s critics would agree, it is deeply unfortunate that Callahan is
finally content to see the Indian characters discarding much of their own cultural heritage
in favor of white institutions of religion, education, and information. To her
credit,though, the white culture that Callahan advocates as a model for her white and
Indian readers is founded on missionary principles, aimed at relieving suffering and
preventing murder, while nevertheless equating increased civilization with increased
whiteness. I would argue that, by offering her schoolgirl character the opportunity to
learn how to read with a critical eye the world around her, and thereby make a choice to
adopt the white culture, she is in some way trying to empower Indians. Rather than
having white ways forced upon her, Wynema seems genuinely to want to ?improve?
herself by adopting Genevieve?s world view. It is significant that Genevieve?s world
view is good hearted and not murderous, even if it does see Native American culture (and
religion) as inferior to white culture.
well be to make the girls fit into white culture, but it is also to make them more
politically astute and to give them a critical facility and consciousness as they assimilate
into and participate in both cultures. Newspaper writing helps present for the schoolgirl?s
evaluation the different ideas and values that are available to Native American females
from both cultures, and to help her pick and choose which ones to keep, and which to
discard.
29
 In the novel?s ambivalent conclusion, Callahan articulates a hope, however
faint, that the seminary and the press will work in the near future to promote an even
more equitable and happy coexistence between Indian and white peoples. In her idyllic
portrait of a mixed community of whites and Indians, schools and the press provide
occasions for the two groups peacefully to discuss their differences, their shared goals,
and their shared history. The most far-reaching consequence of these discussions, though,
lie within their function as social events, designed to provide courtship opportunities that
will, by encouraging marriage (and, by extension, childbirth), ease the full-blood Indian
out of existence. Callahan thus revises Boudinot?s ideas about what newspaper writing
?is, does, and is good for? so that, in the Native presses and schools of the fictional 1870s
168
through the 1890s, news writing no longer functions to preserve Indian culture and
promote white culture in any wholesale way, but on the contrary to eliminate Indian
culture by systematically talking it out of existence.
Thus, though the school and the newspaper are clearly important to Callahan?s
text, we would do well not to overstate the case she makes in the novel regarding the
long-range preservative value of either formal education or the press. In fact, the novel
does not explicitly foreground either institution, centering instead around two interwoven
plot lines driven by sentimental and romantic conventions, and the historically fraught
relationship between the United States government and various Indian nations. The first
plot line traces the personal and intercultural relationships that develop between
Wynema, her white teacher Miss Genevieve Weir (whose first name means ?white
wave,? and whose presence in Wynema?s life certainly does have a whitewashing effect),
and their several suitors. As Wynema helps Genevieve acclimate to the Indian culture in
which she teaches, and as Genevieve helps Wynema assimilate into the white culture
which she models for her students, their relationship is transformed from teacher and
student to friend and friend, and, ultimately, to sisters-in-law (for Wynema marries
Genevieve?s brother). The troubles they endure together, too?such as their individual
difficulties acclimating to these new cultures, and their mutual distress over the plight of
the Indians?helps them to bond together as women, made more similar by their gender
than they are made different by their racial categories. As LaVonne Brown Ruoff has
noted, Callahan maintains around her women characters the boundaries that characterize
much women?s fiction of the middle and late nineteenth century: both Wynema and
169
30
 This passage from Baym?s Women?s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women
in America, 1820-1870 (1978) is quoted in Ruoff?s introduction to Wynema, xxi. 
Genevieve are, as Nina Baym has observed of the period?s heroines, ?beset with
hardships, but find within [themselves] the qualities of intelligence, will, resourcefulness,
and courage sufficient to overcome them.?
30
 What is most unique about their relationship,
though, is that it develops across racial and cultural lines and, we will see below, as a
result of their shared interest in education, political events, and newspaper reading. Thus,
it transcends the more characteristic domestic bonds that frequently marked women?s
relationships in antebellum sentimental fiction and situates the novel more squarely
within the expanded parameters for women?s fiction of the later nineteenth century.  
A second plot line overlaps with the first and involves the relationship between
the Muskogee Indian nation (and occasionally other tribes) and the United States
government. More than mere historical backdrop, the conflicts over allotment, Indian
Removal policies, and the Indian War of the Northwest are major preoccupations of the
novel?s main characters. Reported in the local and national newspapers, these events and
conflicts are discussed at length by Wynema, Genevieve, and their beaus. Generally
speaking, in these conversations Genevieve shows herself to be quite knowledgeable
about Indian-white political affairs (and yet altogether ignorant of Indian tribal custom),
and she leads her young student, Wynema, to understand how the white government has
cheated and continues to cheat the Native American. The educational institution,
therefore, provides the context for her characters? relationships, so central to the novel?s
plots. Within this context characters discuss and display their political allegiances, which
170
lead them to marriage and, importantly, in Wynema?s case, intermarriage. Ultimately, it
is implied that these marriages will hasten breeding out of Indian blood. Crucial as the
institutions of the press and the school may be, these institutions are always blurry in the
background of the main plot lines. Only a handful of chapters involve discussions of the
press at all, and although Wynema?s relationship with her white schoolteacher is the
primary relationship in the novel, Wynema?s education at the hands of this schoolteacher,
with writing at its center, is not explicitly thematized. 
I want to foreground and theorize here the relationship of this Native schoolgirl to
the press and to her school by examining the trajectory of Wynema?s education as a
reader over the course of Callahan?s tale. I agree with the novel?s critics that Wynema is a
deeply flawed text: it lacks cohesion, fails to develop characters convincingly, and suffers
in places from the same pandering tone as Boudinot?s ?Address,? directed as it is toward
a similar audience of white philanthropist readers whom the author wants to persuade to
contribute funds and moral support. Indeed, as Siobhan Senier has observed, ?Wynema
does strike one as a rather haphazardly constructed and even racist book,? citing as
evidence its ?hastily executed? multiple plot lines and its ?failure to produce [a tribal or
nationalist] discourse? that ?would show indigenous peoples and institutions as viable
and enduring? (423). However, to discount the novel entirely on these bases would be to
miss an opportunity to explore the earliest treatment of Native American female
education in existence in American literature and, as already noted, the first novel ever
published by a Native American woman. Attending to the path that Wynema travels, in
particular, from illiteracy to immersion in newspaper culture can help us to understand
171
the schoolgirl?s role in the demise of her culture that Callahan?s novel anticipates. My
interest in this novel therefore stems from the several chapters in Wynema that directly
engage the relationship of the schoolgirl to her school?represented here by
Genevieve?as well as to newspaper journalism. What is striking about these textual
moments is that the subjects of the news articles and conversations between characters
are strictly political: there is none of the emphasis on ?Beauty,? ?Temperance,? or
?Kindness? that we witnessed on the pages of the Wreath, nor are there mentioned essays
on ?Female Delicacy? such as in the Cherokee Phoenix and other ?home papers? from
various Indian nations. Rather, the news articles discussed in Wynema?each ascribed to
real, not fictional, newspapers?have to do with issues of land allotment and per-capita
payments that were promised but never made to the Indians by the American
government, the exploitation of Native American individuals by white men like Buffalo
Bill Hickock, and the deception practiced by both whites and Natives against Sitting Bull
in the Indian War of the Northwest. In some cases, as well, newspaper reports are tested
against oral narratives, Native eyewitness accounts of these historic events, which differ
significantly from the accounts printed in the popular press. 
The novel?s treatment of these issues, as they are represented in newspapers and
through oral narrative, indicates Callahan?s fascination with print as well as her deep
distrust of written culture. Both of these attitudes are evinced by Wynema herself, who
develops (rather too quickly) from a ?lisping? and illiterate ?little savage?(1), to a wide-
eyed reader who trusts entirely the printed word, to a more skeptical and discerning
consumer of texts, and finally to a kind of translator, comparing the representations of
172
narratives and facts across newspapers and verbal tales in several different Indian
languages (Creek, Sioux) as well as English. In the character of Wynema, Callahan offers
an ingenue, in many ways an idealized Native American student of the written word.
Over the course of the first few chapters, under the tutelage of Genevieve and white male
missionary, Gerald Keithly, Wynema matures from a tiny child with very poor English
skills to a well-spoken, adolescent Victorian lady-in-the-making. Of the growing
Wynema, Genevieve writes home:
She learns faster and retains more of what she learns than any child of
whatever hue it has been my fortune to know. She is a constant reader and greets
a new book with the warmth of a friend. I have directed her course of reading, and
I venture to say, there is not a child in Mobile or anywhere else who has read less
spurious matter than she. It is amusing to see her curl up over Dickens or Scott,
and grow animated over Shakespeare, whose plays she lives out; and it is
interesting to watch the different emotions, in sympathy with the various
characters, chase each other over her face. Of the good ones she will say, ?This is
you, Mihia, but you are better.? Dear child; would that I were as perfect as she
believes me to be! (23)  
Genevieve?s early report sets up Wynema as a sort of child prodigy whose relationship to
the written word is all-absorbing, emotional, thrilling, and creative, but not exactly
intellectually rigorous and not precisely self-motivated. Like the Indian in Boudinot?s
?Address,? she is smart and capable, but not a threat in her intellect, not a ?giant.? An
avid reader, and perhaps also a lonely child, Wynema is eager to feel sympathetic to the
173
characters in her books, and eager to find those characters who are ?good.? She needs
Genevieve, whom she continues to call ?Mihia? (or ?teacher?), to tell her what to read,
and, as we shall see, what to think about what she reads. Indeed, she fairly worships her
white teacher, and poses no subversive challenge whatever to the white institutions that
govern her education. Callahan presents for her readers? delight a Native American
student who loves the English books she reads and the characters in them; she also
creates a character for whom the process of learning to read critically is absolutely
essential to her own survival. Easily taken by appearances and enthralled by sweet-
talking characters, the guileless girl has no idea how to distinguish between the way
things seem and the very different way they may truly be. 
It should be clear by now that I do not believe Callahan intended for her Indian
character to advocate the total erasure of Indian life. Though separatist critic Craig
Womack asserts that the novel is an anti-Indian, ?assimilationist and Christian
supremacist tract,? I find Callahan sincere in her belief, so like Boudinot?s, that
assimilation is the only real option for ensuring the survival of actual, living people, if
not the future of the race and culture (Womack 109-10). Callahan herself clearly
embraced both the press and the school, having had much contact throughout her
girlhood with Native American newspapers and educated ?mixed bloods.? Born in 1868
in Sulphur Springs, Texas, Alice Callahan was raised in an aristocratic, mixed-blood
family that, it would seem fair to say, was a mass of contradictions. Her heritage was
both white and Creek, and her family sympathized with the plight of the Indians though
they also sought heartily to rise above the status of the ?full bloods?; just as
174
31
 One of the main reasons for this paper?s significance is that it was established by the
International Printing Company, whose members included tribesmen from all of the Five
Civilized Tribes (Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole). Their decision
to incorporate the printing company and then create a newspaper vehicle that would be
?devoted to the interests of the Indian race? suggests how thoroughly the tribes had come
to understand the need to join forces and present a unified media campaign that would
defend and protect their common interests. 
32
 This newspaper was affiliated with Harrell and did print some student pieces, but it was
otherwise not student-written. The Harrell Monthly (also called Our Monthly), was a
school paper reflecting the Methodist teachings of the school. Our Brother in Red, a
Muskogee paper with a somewhat wider distribution had a similarly strong Christian
influence and occasionally printed exemplary student pieces among its columns. 
contradictorily, her father, Samuel Benton Callahan, owned slaves before the Civil War,
and yet he purportedly opposed slavery (Ruoff xiv). Little is known about Alice?s own
life, and especially her first 17 years, which she spent in Sulphur Springs before her
father moved the family to Okmulgee, Indian Territory in 1886 or 87. There, he was
active in business, as a hotel proprietor; in politics, as a clerk in the House of Kings?the
Creek nation?s equivalent to the U.S. Senate; and in newspaper work, as the editor of the
Indian Journal, ?one of the most important newspapers in the Creek nation, and
comparable to the Cherokee Advocate in significance? (Murphy 47).
31
 
Indeed, Alice?s personal history emerges only in relation to her educational
experiences as teacher, student, and newspaper editor. After the move to Okmulgee and
for the remainder of her life, Alice would play all three of these roles, sometimes
intermittently and sometimes simultaneously. In 1886, she taught at Okmulgee, and in
1887 and 88, she herself took classes at the Wesleyan Female Academy in Staunton,
Virginia. The year she published Wynema, 1891, found her teaching again at the Harrell
International Institute, and editing the Methodist newspaper Our Brother in Red.
32
 By
175
33
 It is unclear just what kind of medical problem caused the students? ?sore eyes,?
however it is likely that some contagious infection plagued the school at this time as it
had in many other instances.   
1892-3, Callahan was teaching at Wealaka Boarding School for Muskogee Children, for
which her father served as superintendent. In the early months of 1893, Alice wrote a
letter to a friend, expressing her disappointment over how health problems at Wealaka
had prevented the printing of the school newspaper which she and her students had
worked so hard to produce: ?Our paper Wealaka Wit and Wisdom came out last week, but
as our press was out of fix and our printers had the sore eyes, we got out but two copies?
(rpt. in Foreman 312).
33
 Still, she expresses in her letter great pleasure in her teaching
profession and her teaching colleagues:
My classes are much more interesting & pleasanter than they were before. I have
four I like real well: i e , Mental philosophy, Mythology, Physics, Geography and
Algebra.....We have a much nicer set of girls than we have ever had before. And
the teachers! Oh, that?s just the best of all!    
Indeed, the letter emphasizes Alice?s desire to finish her own education and open ?a
school of my own? (312). Unfortunately, she would never get the chance to do either. On
January 7, 1894, Callahan succumbed to an attack of pleurisy and died at the age of 26. 
During her life, then, Alice lived perhaps more like Genevieve?the itinerant
white teacher who sympathized with the Indian?than like Wynema, the gifted but
unusual Creek heroine of her novel. Like Genevieve, Callahan was well-read, devoutly
Christian, and had been ?surrounded by the luxuries of a Southern home? (4). What is
perhaps so striking, then, is how well her novel advocates on behalf of the Indians,
176
despite its author?s personal distance from the lived reality of the full-blood Creeks she
fights to help. Whereas Our Brother in Red and the Harrell Monthly?two newspapers
for which Callahan wrote?disallowed articles of a secular or a political nature (Murphy
62), her novel dares to take on worldly, polemical concerns, and aspires to compensate
for the dearth of Indian voices in the press, as compared to the plethora of anti-Indian
viewpoints so vehemently expressed in many white newspapers. Thus, her narrator
describes, for example, the representation by white newspapers of the losses suffered in
the Indian War of the Northwest:  
With a few slight skirmishes, the papers say, only the death of a few
?Indian bucks,? the war of the Northwest ended. 
?But,? you ask, my reader, ?did not the white people undergo any
privations? Did not the United States army lose two brave commanders and a
number of privates?? Oh, yes. So the papers tell us; but I am not relating the brave
(?) deeds of the white soldier. They are already flashed over the world by
electricity; great writers have burned the midnight oil telling their story to the
world. It is not my province to show how brave it was for a great, strong nation to
quell a riot caused by the dancing of a few ?bucks??for civilized soldiers to
slaughter indiscriminately, Indian women and children. Doubtless it was brave,
for so public opinion tells us, and it cannot err. But what will the annals of history
handed down to future generations disclose to them? Will history term the
treatment of the Indians by the United States Government, right and honorable?
177
Ah, but that does not affect my story! It is the Indian?s story?his chapter of
wrongs and oppression. (92-3)
Callahan?s use of sarcasm here (?Doubtless it was brave...?) reveals her anger toward
many whites who both participated in the slaughter of Indians, and who reject the truth
about the number of Indian lives lost in the battle. Yet this passage also indicates the
remedy that Callahan most fervently believed would help to right the wrongs done to the
Muscogee and Sioux populations. By competing with the white press, whose writers have
?flashed? their questionably ?brave deeds? ?all over the world by electricity,? Callahan
wants her novel to do political battle, and to correct for posterity the history of the Indian
before his chapter draws to an inevitable close.
This passage also points to the reasons why Callahan displays such a great deal of
anxiety over Wynema?s reading practices once this character matures enough to consume
(ostensibly) non-fictional, historical texts like newspaper reports. Staging frequent
competition between oral and written narratives, and between white and Indian
narratives, Callahan always privileges either the Indian point of view, or the side of a
conflict that would, in her assimilationist opinion, most benefit the Indian population;
however, she is quick also to provide opposing viewpoints in every case, indicating an
unease with the way that newspapers validate, by virtue of being printed in a respected
publication, every opinion that is expressed on their pages.  Though her own novel is
intended to record the Indian?s ?chapter of wrongs and oppression? at the hands of
whites, and its truth is meant to be taken at face value, Callahan also warns that most
Native American readers can be easily duped by the conventions of writing with which
178
they are unfamiliar, or tricked into believing some article merely because it is printed and
published, and she presents Wynema as an example of the Indian reader who is at first
misled (?dazzled? might be a more appropriate word) by printed texts, but who
eventually comes to understand how they work. I would argue that Wynema?s
development as a reader and consumer of stories embodies the most substantial
articulation of the role that Callahan wanted writing, through school and the press, to play
in Native American life. In this respect, especially, Callahan displays a much more
nuanced appreciation than Boudinot did (especially early on in his career) for the
educational function of the newspaper and the educational value of teachers who instruct
new readers to distinguish between verity and deception.  
Genevieve?s own strategy for teaching Wynema is therefore an important
consideration in our examination of the girl?s education as a reader. On the few occasions
in the novel where news articles are discussed?and we will look closely at these scenes
in a moment?Wynema does learn to read with a more critical eye. As she matures,
Wynema sets aside poetry and stage plays for the real-life drama that is printed in
newspaper columns throughout the Creek nation and across the United States. Through
Wynema?s experiences misreading some of these texts, Callahan demonstrates the
important lesson that tone is more easily conveyed and understood when a speaker is
present and a listener (or ?reader?) can rely on facial and aural cues, as well as body
language, as a context for meaning and a gauge of sincerity. Though all words are never
created equal, this seems more true for printed words than for spoken ones, where tone
can be more easily misread, misleading the reader; and though some persons are better
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than others at lying, the written word can be particularly difficult to read through for truth
or falsehood.
In Chapter 13, for example, Wynema and Genevieve discuss the question of land
allotment, which they have read about in various newspapers and heard spoken about in
the community of Indians and whites to which they belong. Written several years after
the passage of the U.S. Government?s 1887 Dawes Severalty Act, which allotted or
distributed parcels of (stolen) land to Indians in exchange for citizenship, the chapter
represents in a nutshell the debates that preceded Dawes? passage. Callahan voices the
opinions of those who felt that the Dawes Act would provide Indians with some measure
of restitution for the lands that had been taken away from them during Removal, and
would ?give Indians a pride in their own land that will encourage them to become
farmers rather than continue living as hunters and fishers,? thus giving them further
impetus toward civilized society (Ruoff xxxv). Through the Indian girl, she expresses the
opinion that ?so many idle, shiftless Indians who do nothing but hunt and fish? would,
?knowing the land to be their own...have pride enough to cultivate their land and build up
their homes? (51). On the other hand, through Genevieve, she also represents the
perspective of those who felt that the Dawes Act, which required Indians to become
citizens of the United States in exchange for the rights, protections, and obligations of
?Americans,? would suddenly and unfairly subject the Indian people to laws and
180
34
 Indians became American citizens as soon as they received their land allotment: "And
every Indian born within the territorial limits of the United States to whom allotments
shall have been made under the provisions of this act, or under any law or treaty, and
every Indian born within the territorial limits of the United States who has voluntarily
taken up, within said limits, his residence separate and apart from any tribe of Indians
therein, and has adopted the habits of civilized life, is hereby declared to be a citizen of
the United States, and is entitled to all the rights, privileges and immunities of such
citizens..." (Dawes Act, Section 6).    
concepts with which they were unfamiliar (such as land ownership), and would therefore
entrap Indians in legal battles over land that they were unlikely to win.
34
 
Over the course of portraying Wynema?s development as a reader, Callahan
creates opportunities to articulate her own political views. More importantly for our
purposes, though, she also equates education with political awareness, and lays out a
method for teaching the Indian child to read and understand newspaper representations of
urgent political import for the Indian population. Callahan?s method, ascribed here to
Genevieve, relies heavily on the Indian child?s emotional attachment to her teacher, and
on ?the gradual unfolding of [Wynema?s] mind and soul to the touch of her magic
wand?the influence of love opening doors that giant force could not set the least ajar?
(23). As the chapter opens, Genevieve is reading a news report about allotment when
Wynema, who had been out walking, enters to find her distressed. The scene foregrounds
Wynema?s clear ability to ?read? the person standing before her, and it also points up her
inability (she is, as yet, untutored in this skill) to read between the lines of a written text.
?What is it you are reading, Mihia, that you look so troubled?? queried
Wynema coming in one afternoon from a stroll she had taken with Robert and
Bessie, and looking very pretty with her bright, merry eyes and rosy cheeks. She
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came and looked over her friend?s shoulder in a loving way. ?Oh, what a long
article!? drawing down her face. ?Shall we allot? allot what? Oh, that is a home
paper! Surely it cannot mean allot our country?? (50)
Here, Wynema does not appear so eager to read lengthy newspaper articles, but to use her
?bright, merry eyes?  to read instead the face of her friend and instructor, over whose
shoulder she peers ?in a loving way.? When Genevieve explains that the article in the
?home paper? or Indian-nation paper (as opposed to white-run news media) does mean
precisely to debate the issue of land allotment, though, Wynema is all ears. Eager to
understand what is written in the paper?perhaps as much to know what is troubling her
beloved teacher and friend as to be informed upon a subject affecting ?our country??and
yet unable or unwilling to discern by herself the full ramifications of the allotment issue
or what is at stake within the debate, Wynema continues to ply Genevieve with questions
for clues about what she should believe.
Genevieve explains that though allotment has been a subject of debate for a long
time in Indian country, the ?matter assumes a serious aspect? presently because ?even the
part-blood Indians are in favor? of the United States government?s plan to divide Indian
lands, and ?if the Indians do not stand firmly against [this plan], I fear they will yet be
homeless? (50). In reply, Wynema expresses her own thoughts on the issue, but
repeatedly checks herself against Genevieve?s reaction to see if she is learning correctly.
We have already looked at some of what Wynema has to say; here, what is important is
the self-doubt that frames her opinion and springs from the emotional attachment
Genevieve has fostered in her student.  
182
?See! This is the way I see the matter. If I am wrong, correct me. There are so
many idle, shiftless Indians who do nothing but hunt and fish; then there are
others who are industrious and enterprising; so long as our land remains as a
whole, in common, these lazy Indians will never make a move toward cultivating
it;...if the land were allotted, do you not think that these idle Indians, knowing the
land to be their own, would have pride enough to cultivate their land and build up
their homes? It seems so to me;? and she looked earnestly at Genevieve, awaiting
her reply. (51, my emphasis)
Clearly, Wynema has internalized the point of view of the white newspapers she reads,
and the stereotypes of ?lazy? and ?idle Indians? they frequently contained. She is eager to
demonstrate to her teacher how well she has absorbed the lessons of those white papers,
but also to receive confirmation that those lessons are good ones. 
The brilliance of Genevieve?s own response has, to my mind, little to do with her
political opposition to allotment and much to do with her strategy of instructing Wynema
by repeating and reflecting back to the girl her own mistaken ideas?a strategy we will
see again, in a somewhat different permutation, in my next chapter. ?I had not thought of
the matter in the way you present it,? suggests Genevieve, ?though that is the view many
congressmen and editors take of it? (51). By not passing judgement, the teacher leaves
open for further analysis this opposing viewpoint. She portrays Wynema?s opinion as
having political clout, presented in the same manner and with the same relevance as
statesmen and newsmen alike. In fact, it may as well be printed alongside those columns
in the very newspaper they are perusing. In this vein, Genevieve continues:
183
Then again in support of your theory that allotment will be best, this paper says
the Indians must allot, to protect themselves against the U.S. Government, and
suggests that the more civilized apply for statehood; for it says ?if the protection
provided for in treaties be insufficient, more certain protection should be
secured.? Another paper says, ?Gen. Noble, Secretary of the Interior...suggests
that the period now allowed a tribe to determine whether it will receive allotment
be placed under the control of the President, so that it may be shortened if tribes
give no attention to the subject or cause unreasonable delays; and
discountenances the employment of attorneys by the Indians to aid in negotiation
with, or to prosecute claims against the government.? This sounds like the lands
will be allotted whether the Indians like or no. I cannot see the matter as it has
been presented by you, and as these papers advocate it...? (51-2) 
Again aligning Wynema?s viewpoint with other anti-Indian voices, Genevieve resists
chiding Wynema. Instead, she allows the girl to perceive the logical extension of her
own, flawed beliefs and guides her to draw what seem to Wynema to be her own
conclusions. As a result, she must own responsibility for the opposing position in which
this disagreement will place her with regard to her beloved teacher, and by extension, the
distanced position in which it places the Indian with respect to benevolent, if paternalistic
(or, in this case, maternalistic), whites. ?Genevieve was so intensely earnest that she had
risen and was pacing the room, her hands clasped together, her brows knit. Wynema, who
seldom saw her in such moods, was frightened, and reproached herself with having been
the cause of it.?
184
?Oh, I am so sorry, dear Mihia?so sorry I was so foolish! Pray, forgive
me! It is always the way with me, and I dare say I should be one of the first to sell
myself out of house and home;? And the girl hung her head, looking the picture of
humiliation. 
?No, dear, I am the one to ask forgiveness for needlessly disturbing you
so. Now go along and enjoy yourself, for I dare say nothing will come of all this;?
and Genevieve kissed her friend, hoping that she might never have cause to be
less light-hearted than at present. (53)  
In the end, Genevieve and Wynema share the same viewpoint, not because the teacher
has told her student what to think, but because she has required her student to evaluate
the ramifications of her own opinions, to justify the practical impact they might have
upon the world around her and the emotional impact they have upon her teacher and
friend. 
Later in the novel, as Wynema matures, so do her critical reading faculties. In
Chapter 22, ?Is This Right?,? Wynema demonstrates how well she understands irony and
sarcasm, not only by employing this sophisticated rhetorical strategy herself, but also by
expressing appreciation for it in the printed news. Callahan illustrates Wynema?s
appreciation of tone by incorporating references to an actual news article into her fiction.
Talking with Robin Weir?Genevieve?s brother and, by this point in the novel,
Wynema?s husband?she declares: ??Robin, there was such a scathing criticism of the
part the United States Government has taken against the Indians of the Northwest, in the
185
35
 LaVonne Brown Ruoff has tracked down the actual newspaper article that Wynema
misplaced. See the St. Louis Republic, 16 December 1890. 
St. Louis Republic. I put the paper away to show you, but it has gotten misplaced. The
substance of the article was this:? 
[T]he writer commended the Government on its slaughter of the Indians, and
recommended that the dead bodies of the savages be used for fertilizers instead of
the costly guano Mr. Blaine had been importing. He said the Indians alive were
troublesome and expensive, for they would persist in getting hungry and cold; but
the Indians slaughtered would be useful, for besides using their carcasses...the
land they are now occupying could then be given as homes to the ?homeless
whites.? I don?t believe I ever read a more sarcastic, ironical article in any
newspaper. I should like to shake hands with the writer, for I see he is a just,
unprejudiced, thinking man, who believes in doing justice even to an Indian
?buck.? (97)
35
Compared to the earlier scene in which Wynema expressed so much uncertainty
regarding her own interpretive abilities, and first learned to appreciate the newspaper as a
vehicle for communicating and communing with others in her social and emotional
sphere, here Wynema is expresses readerly competence and confidence, appropriately
evaluating the article as ?scathing,? ?sarcastic,? and ?ironical,? and demonstrating that
she had read it carefully and thoroughly enough to be able to paraphrase its most salient
points. It is significant that Wynema has, as an adult, ?replaced? Genevieve with her
brother (and now implicitly seeks Robin?s approval and emotional acceptance), for while
186
Genevieve and Wynema could only mirror one another in their similar opinions about
Native-white relations, Wynema and her white husband have the potential to go a step
further in achieving assimilation: they can have a child. (They do not do so within the
plot of the novel itself, however it is suggested at the end of Callahan?s text that children
may be in the couple?s future.) Also importantly, Wynema perceives the writer?s work as
a sign of his character?he is a ?just, unprejudiced, thinking man??and this makes her
feel connected to him as a human being. Thus, in addition to learning that newspaper
writing can bring together communities of readers, Wynema learns that it can also ally
readers and authors who may be of different ethnicities or races, but who share the same
core ideals and values.    
Conclusion
In a similar fashion the figures and texts I examine in this chapter, from three
different historical moments, are also joined. Boudinot?s argument that newspapers and
schools were necessary for the survival of Native peoples may not have anticipated the
precise ways in which later generations of Native schoolgirls would utilize these two
institutions (or interpret the concept of Native survival: Does a people survive if its
cultural identity does not? Does a people survive via the preservation of individual lives,
and the perpetuation of those lives via their offspring?). However, the self-styled
Cherokee Rose Buds and the fictional schoolgirl in Callahan?s novel each wrangle with
the ways in which the institutions of school and newspaper might bring them together
with?or separate them from?other readers and writers, and serve the ends of
187
acculturation or assimilation. For the Cherokee National Female Seminary students in the
1850s, writing for the school newspaper allowed them to create and flesh out for
themselves both Native American and white identities, to align themselves with the
school and thereby partake in its ability to effect change in their culture (as when they
penned articles aimed at recruiting new students and ?improving? the uneducated
Indians), and also to distance themselves from it (as when they published complaints
about their teachers and course work). Crucial to their forays in journalism is a consistent
effort to use the newspaper forum as a means of conceiving, publicly, what it will mean
to be an educated, adult female, once their schooldays are through. As we have seen,
many of the extant articles from the Wreath of Cherokee Rose Buds envision some
blending of the traits of adult, white True Womanhood with what is, in their imaginings,
the more self-governing, ?outsider? traits of the adolescent Cherokee female. Writing for
the Wreath clearly afforded these students many opportunities to straddle and occupy a
number of social positions (white and Native, adolescent and adult)  that might otherwise
have been perceived or portrayed as mutually exclusive of one another. Taken together,
their articles portray a culture of letters that uses writing both to delineate the boundaries
of those social positions and to maximize the number of social positions that one may
inhabit.
Callahan?s text shifts the emphasis from newspaper writing to newspaper reading,
which accentuates the capacity of the printed word for uniting people around a set of
received ideas and promoting discussion about them, their relevance for the community,
their truth or untruth. In Wynema, the newspaper is a kind of bridge between the
188
schoolgirl and her white mentor, facilitating their communication about white-Native
relations and U.S. government-Cherokee government relations. But the newspaper also
gives Wynema herself opportunities to act as a bridge when her multilingual skills allow
her to read and translate news articles from several different communities that had
otherwise been divided by language and culture. As a female living in the somewhat
utopian, mixed community of Cherokees and white missionaries, Wynema learns that
females can use newspapers to help preserve their Native language and convey a Native
point of view to non-Natives while exploring the many different points of view (hostile
toward Native Americans? sympathetic and friendly?) expressed by whites in their
newspapers. Though Callahan is subtle on this point, it is important to note that she offers
up another possible bridging role for Wynema?that of potential mother to a mixed race
child?and yet subsumes that role beneath the less traditional position of newspaper
translator, and facilitator of conversation between whites and Native Americans. As with
the Cherokee Rose Buds, who also only dimly conceive of their adult lives as mothers,
Wynema learns from the institutional relationship between the school and the newspaper 
that females can serve themselves and their Native cultures by vocalizing, in their own
language and in English, their concerns for the preservation and perpetuation of their
people, and their desires to work and live harmoniously with whites.     
My next chapter takes up some of these same issues, though we shift focus from
Native American schoolgirls in the 1850s and 1890s toward Frances E. W. Harper?s
fictional account of an African-American schoolgirl living in post-Reconstruction
Philadelphia. Harper?s novel is serialized in an African-American newspaper?a form
189
which aims at encouraging readers to discuss each installment of the story, and
collectively imagine its development and resolution. The main character, as we shall see,
is also a talented writer (modeled after Harper herself) who uses her words to portray the
plight of her people after slavery. Annette Harcourt also becomes a kind of bridge
between the whites and African-Americans in her urban culture, and also between the
educated and uneducated African-Americans in her own local neighborhood, and in the
South. Though she will, like Wynema, marry at the end of the novel, Harper, like
Callahan, does not focus on the wedding, the marriage, or the potential motherhood of
her main character. These similarities between mid-to-late century Native American and
African-American schoolgirl portraits pose important questions about the extent to which
non-white cultures trusted their girls to white institutions, as well as about how the larger
project of female education changed over the course of the nineteenth century. 
190
Chapter Four
 ?How shall we ever get out of slavery??: Frances E. W. Harper?s Trial and Triumph and
Black Female Education in the Post-Reconstruction Era 
    
Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted, Frances E. W. Harper?s best-known novel
(1892), outlines a concise history of African-American education, beginning with the
period just prior to the Civil War and ending in the midst of Reconstruction. Moving
from barely literate slavery days through a cultural moment of enlightened, political
conversazione among a free black intellectual elite, the text traces a sweeping arc over
more than three decades of African-American life. As her narrative unfolds from South to
North and back again, Harper alights briefly on several important scenarios in black
education, illuminating an array of figures whose spotty and arbitrary achievements in
learning reflect the struggles of many African-Americans to elevate themselves during
this period. In Tom Anderson and Robert Johnson, for example, Harper memorializes
slaves who bravely and illegally taught themselves to read, or who, having been taught
by white masters, spread literacy surreptitiously among their fellow bondsmen. In the
education of Iola?s mother, Marie Leroy, by her owner (and future husband), Harper
acknowledges slave masters who, however rarely, sent their slaves to Northern schools in
preparation for freedom. In Iola and her brother, Harry, she shows how those masters
sometimes passed their racially-mixed offspring as white, educating them at white
191
1
 See also Harper?s 1878 speech, ?Coloured Women of America? reprinted in Foster?s A
Brighter Coming Day, 271-75. See similar language in Iola Leroy, pps.177, 185, and 191.
schools with the intention of keeping from their children the pain of their ?connection
with the negro race? (71). On the other hand, in Reverend Carmicle and Lucille Delaney
she also portrays darker-skinned blacks who attended school, even college, as blacks, and
ultimately distinguished themselves as professionals and community leaders. Though her
novel ends with the oft-quoted author?s note that ?the race has not had very long to
straighten its hands from the hoe...and to erect above the ruined auction-block and slave-
pen institutions of learning,? still it anticipates a time beyond the scope of the book when
?the negro?s rising brain? will collectively achieve the progress Harper charts in these
individuals (212).
As several critics have already noted, Harper installs educated African-American
females at the forefront of the wide-scale uplift she envisions in Iola Leroy (Carby 69-70,
Ernest 506, Peterson ?Further Liftings? 102-3). Indeed, though in that novel she applauds
all of her characters? contributions to uplifting the race?including the efforts of
unschooled women like Aunt Linda and Jinnie, and educated men such as Reverend
Carmicle, Frank Latimer, and Harry Leroy?only those women who have been formally
educated possess the essential combination of ?devising brain and feeling heart? that
Harper perceives as key to the cultivation of ?the moral and spiritual faculties destined to
play the most important part in our [race?s] future development? (?A Factor in Human
Progress? 275-76).
1
 Apparently, in this novel, formal schooling supplements the African-
American female?s innate ethical and emotional sensitivity by sharpening her intellect
192
2
 See especially pages 64, 111, 164, 176, 188, 191,194 in Iola Leroy, for specific
references to the role of the educated female in racial uplift. 
3
 ?A Rallying Cry? is ascribed to another fictional female in the novel, but in fact penned
by Harper herself and published in the Christian Recorder in 1891. 
with practical skills and information. Immersion in the school system, too, endows her
with a model for gaining and imparting knowledge, and impassions her to raise herself
and others out of the ignorance and degradation imposed by slavery.
2
 Thus, during the
novel?s culminating salon programme, Iola?s speech on ?The Education of Mothers? and
Lucille?s reading of the religious poem, ?A Rallying Cry,? neatly illustrate the influence
educated women can exert over their community by speaking publicly and eloquently to
other community leaders on matters of piety and domesticity.
3
 Most crucially, both
women?s professionalization as teachers at the end of the novel demonstrates their
continuing commitment and devotion to ?do something of lasting service for the race,?
such as using their own educational advantages to erect permanent ?institutions of
learning? ?above the ruined auction block and slave-pen? (197, 212). According to Iola
Leroy, the ideal result of black female education is someone like Iola or Lucille who
readily exploits the uplift function of the school, seizing upon the potential value of the
institution to teach trades, increase literacy, and sever the long-standing association
between being black and being ignorant.
Given Iola Leroy?s large background cast of African-American characters seeking
instruction, and its duo of female protagonists learning and teaching in formal
educational settings, it is evident that Harper meant for her novel to portray ?the great
need of education for the colored people? in general (144), and to demonstrate the
193
4
 Unfortunately, little record of Harper?s life survives. Foster notes that most biographical
material on Harper comes from a single source, one thirty-page chapter in William Still?s
1871 The Underground Rail Road (Foster, Brighter 5). 
5
 See especially ?The Colored People in America? (1857), ?The Great Problem to be
Solved? (1875), and ?Coloured Women of America? (1878).
importance of female race leaders in particular (191). Certainly, this emphasis squares
with the best-known details of Harper?s life and work.
4
 As Frances Smith Foster avers,
the broad ?life goal? unifying all of Harper?s work for more than six decades?as a
student, teacher, writer, orator, and activist?was to prescribe education as a kind of
alchemical trick converting every individual?s resources to ?the building up of ?true men
and true women? who would make every gift, whether gold or talent, fortune or genius,
subserve the cause of crushed humanity and carry out...the glorious idea of human
brotherhood? (Foster, MS xiv). While she was a child and adolescent in the 1830s and
40s, Harper enrolled in her uncle?s Baltimore, Maryland school, The William Watkins
Academy for Negro Youth, and absorbed a blend of high academic standards and
devotion to Christian service, and she developed aspirations toward social leadership and
political advocacy that she would teach her own students in Ohio and Pennsylvania in the
1850s (Boyd 36-8; Foster, Brighter 7-8). These ideals carried over into speeches and
essays she authored before and after the Civil War, through which Harper lobbied to
increase the educational opportunities that would allow blacks to demonstrate (and
whites, the chance to witness) that abilities are neither lessened nor increased according
to skin color.
5
  Though her live audiences and readers included whites as well as blacks,
evidence suggests that Harper?s enormous popularity and influence as a lecturer were
194
due, in large part, to her particular recognition of her African-American audiences?
?receptivity to guidelines for achieving their ideals? of racial equality, and to what
William Wells Brown called the ?forcible,? ?fervent,? and ?soul-stirring? style with
which she expressed in speech and print the fundamental need for the black community
to foster the development of moral, self-sacrificing men and women (Foster, Brighter 15,
25). But, as William Still?s 1892 introduction to Iola Leroy confirms, Harper?s greatest
personal interest was ?in meetings called exclusively for [black] women? who most
needed role models and clear patterns for their relatively new lives as free people:
?indeed,? Still writes, ?she felt their needs were far more pressing than any other class?
(3-4). That Iola and Lucille share Harper?s goals establishes their function not only as
stand-ins for the author, but also as model characters to be emulated. Claudia Tate calls
them ?spokeswomen? for what Harper felt should be ?the central ambition of late-
nineteenth-century black women?education? (182). Hazel Carby agrees that Iola and
Lucille were ?created to fulfill? the ?role of intellectual black leadership? Harper felt it
was her ?duty? to inspire (77).    
Despite Harper?s pointed focus on the salvific place and purpose of the educated
female in the black community, several gaping lacunae prevent Iola and Lucille from
serving as viable models of race leadership for young African-American female readers
living in the post-Reconstruction period during which the novel was published. How,
precisely, were Lucille and Iola educated to write and argue so well on behalf of their
race? How is the portrait of post-Civil War adult femininity that they embody applicable
to the lives of girls and women after Reconstruction? It is, in fact, these lacunae, rather
195
6
 Trial and Triumph was recovered in the early 1990s by Frances Smith Foster, along
with two other novels also serialized in the Christian Recorder. All three novels are
reprinted in Foster?s Minnie?s Sacrifice, Sowing and Reaping, Trial and Triumph: Three
Rediscovered Novels by Frances E. W. Harper, cited here as MS. 
than Iola Leroy itself, which shape my inquiries into several of Harper?s earlier and less
well-known works in this chapter. For, while I agree with previous critics that Harper?s
efforts to reach a racially-mixed (but predominantly white) audience with Iola Leroy
limited the novel?s ability to provide a detailed model of black female leadership, I want
to recognize Harper?s attempts elsewhere to offer less ambiguous, more purposeful
guidelines for young black female readers to follow through the critical stage of
adolescence and toward the noble womanhood she imagines (Carby 64, Ernest 502,
McDowell 285, Peterson 99). 
Contending Novels: Iola Leroy and Trial and Triumph
Thus, I turn here to Trial and Triumph?Harper?s much neglected 1888-89 serial
novel about the education of a young black girl in a post-Reconstruction, Northern,
urban, African-American community?to address questions about her vision of African-
American female education that are left unanswered by Iola Leroy and unexamined in the
critical literature on Harper and her most famous work of fiction.
6
 Specifically, I argue
that in Trial and Triumph, Harper defines a replicable pedagogical strategy through
which educated black adults supplement a young African-American girl?s formal
schooling in order to prepare her to become one of the educated, adult female race
leaders so needed by the black community. I contend, furthermore, that unlike Iola
196
7
 I wish to thank Dr. Jean Mulhern, chief librarian at Wilberforce University in Ohio, for
her help locating Elliott?s essay. The Booker T. Washington Papers, Vol. 2, includes a
letter from Elliott to Washington, and a footnote explaining that ?George M. Elliott, born
in Virginia in 1849, was a preacher and principal of Knox Academy, a normal school in
Selma, Ala. Later he moved to Beaufort, S.C., where he was pastor of the Berean
Presbyterian Church and one of the founders of an industrial school? (275).
Harper?s ?A Factor in Human Progress? has been reprinted in Foster?s A Brighter
Coming Day. All future references to the essay will direct readers to that version.    
Leroy?which was published in its entirety?Trial and Triumph?s serial publication in a
small, influential, black Christian newspaper (the Christian Recorder, affiliated with the
African Methodist Episcopal Church) enabled the novel?s didactic function and ensured
the relevance of Harper?s schoolgirl story for her predominantly black audience. In fact,
the novel emerged not only from a long line of public, African-American newspaper
debates over black education which began in the 1820s, but more particularly from a
specific discussion that Harper conducted with a fellow educator in the pages of yet
another black, Christian periodical, the A. M. E. Church Review in 1885.
7
  Both the
genealogy of the novel and the methodological details of Harper?s plan reveal how Trial
and Triumph?s emphasis on the black community?as a source of readers and character
models?anchors it in the panorama of late-nineteenth-century African-American
educational movements I will trace below. In turn, as we shall see, those African-
American educational movements, which ultimately balance a reliance on formal
education with less formal educational methods, reveal the broader trajectory of
nineteenth century American female education that I have been tracing throughout this
dissertation.
197
In the context of this chapter then, Iola Leroy speaks loudest in the places it is
silent, in the rifts Harper creates between the African-American social world that novel
represents, and the African-American audience it is purportedly intended to serve. For
example, Harper could not possibly be said to advocate Iola?s peculiar path toward social
activism, nor proffer her as a model for young black schoolgirls. After all, Iola is raised
as a white girl, and it is at first only her direct experience of slavery that forces her to
identify involuntarily with others of her race and devote herself to their uplift. Moreover,
she is educated in a predominantly white Northern school according to middle-class
values and Cult of True Womanhood standards. ?Although this ideology of domesticity
was the veritable antithesis of the black woman?s reality,? Deborah McDowell asserts,
Harper ?ironically accommodated her ?new? model image of black womanhood to its
contours? in this novel (284). Iola?s visibly white appearance and her conformity to
standards of white womanhood have suggested to critics from McDowell to Hazel Carby,
John Ernest, and Carla L. Peterson, that Harper was seeking the support of white
audiences for an elite group of blacks more pointedly than she endeavored to model the
development of a black character for the black community. Yet, even if we set aside these
significant impediments to Iola?s role as a model for African-American readers, her story
is also too outdated to offer a relevant guide for black female activity at the end of the
nineteenth century. Written and published in the post-Reconstruction period, the novel
nevertheless describes Iola?s upbringing in the radically different Civil War era and ends
before the cataclysmic failure of Reconstruction policies in the South. Iola?s actions,
198
admirable as they are, are impractical and inapplicable to the lives of most readers, white
or black, in 1892. 
Lucille Delaney presents a different kind of problem. Introduced quite suddenly
in the last third of the novel as an acquaintance of Harry Leroy, Lucille is a dark-skinned,
college-educated black woman whom Iola idolizes almost on sight. With equal speed, the
reader recognizes excellence in Lucille?s character, for she is self-sacrificing, intelligent,
visionary, and utterly devoted to teaching others of her race. As soon as she appears, P.
Gabrielle Foreman observes, Lucille takes over as ?the most political woman in Iola
Leroy? and ?arguably the proto-feminist heroine of the novel? (343). And yet, Lucille is
in many ways a blank page. Harper again offers little clue to her black female readers as
to how they might themselves develop Lucille?s exemplary character, for we never learn
her personal or family history, nor how she overcame the obstacles she surely faced as a
black female seeking entry to college. Though Foreman and others have acknowledged
that both characters? names reference prominent, contemporary historical models for
Harper?s black female readers, and thus implicitly update the novel??Lucille? evokes
the former slave and autobiographer Lucy Delaney while ?Iola? refers to the radical
activist Ida B. Wells? the text itself gives no explicit suggestions for how those readers
might specifically emulate the educational pathways that these real women carved out to
become race leaders themselves. 
In Trial and Triumph, however, Harper presents the story of Annette Harcourt, an
adolescent schoolgirl who grows up in the context of a minutely-drawn formal and
informal education system, and who matures into an adult race leader thanks to that dual
199
context. Much more than the female protagonists in Iola Leroy, Annette would have
presented to Harper?s intended audience a recognizable, familiar example of post-
Reconstruction African-American urban girlhood. Annette is a plain-faced orphan, not an
exceptional beauty, who must learn to develop her intellect and talent in an atmosphere
where, as we shall see, most of the white population is hostile to blacks, and much of the
black population is skeptical and wary of its intellectually ambitious brethren. If Iola is
one-dimensional, beautiful and ?angelic? (193), resembling ?a human being less and less,
and a saint more and more? as she ?fulfills her role as exemplary black woman?
(McDowell 286), Annette is ?an anomalous contradiction,? not a ?pattern saint?; when
she ?looked in the [mirrored] glass...no stretch of imagination could make her conceive
that she was beautiful in either form or feature?; furthermore, her personality is, by turns,
?loving,? ?obliging and companionable,? and ?unsociable, unamiable, and repelling?
(250, 273, 216, 251).  By creating in Annette a more ordinary-looking and more
?realistic? character (that is, one with a less predictable and less perfect temperament
than Iola?s), Harper is better able to submit her to the reading public as an attainable
model for a teenage girl.   
Relatedly, where Iola Leroy arguably reserved its broadest appeal for a white,
middle-class readership accustomed to those female angels of the hearth that so heavily
populate sentimental fiction, Trial and Triumph aimed to shore up a newer African-
American literary tradition that would speak more convincingly to blacks who did not
relate to (and felt excluded from) the white middle-class American model (Peterson
?Frances Harper,? 43). Indeed, though the novel is clearly influenced by the standards of
200
8
 Evidence suggests that Christian Recorder readers, as well as its contributing writers,
understood that the public conversation held (or ?recorded?) on its pages was somehow
protected by the insularity of the black community, even though the newspaper was
publicly available to anyone who might wish to purchase it. One subscriber wrote in
January, 1877, ?is not only our church paper, but [is] truly the colored people?s organ in
the United States, and the best family paper (colored) now published....Better than all, it
is read and is creating a taste for reading. Fathers and mothers that cannot read, when a
day?s work is done, press the school children or some friend into service and the
Recorder is read in the family circle. The sayings of different writers are commented
upon, the news is discussed, and pleasant, instructive evenings are spent. It is thus giving
food for thought during the day. The question is now quite common when a friend meets
another to ask, ?What does the Recorder say this week??? (Qtd. in Foster, ?Gender? 53)
white womanhood promulgated by white women?s sentimental and domestic fiction, as
we will see, Harper adapts these models to demonstrate how they may usefully apply to
African-American womanhood, and how they do not. 
One of three Harper serials published in the Christian Recorder newspaper?a
vehicle of the African Methodist Episcopal Church with a nationwide but almost
exclusively black readership?Trial and Triumph foregrounds the vulnerabilities and
strengths of the 1880s African-American community, even as it shields that community
from the criticism of a potentially unsympathetic white audience (Toohey 202; Rouse
128; Foster, ?Gender? 51; and Peterson, ?Frances Harper? 41).
8
 During the post-
Reconstruction period especially, as Michelle Campbell Toohey has observed, ?[w]hile
the white press was trying to erase the horrors of slavery in an attempt at moral catharsis
and economic reunification, the black periodical became one of the few vehicles left to
continue the discussion of slavery?s repercussions? and to imagine ways of overcoming
continued economic, intellectual, and racial oppression via education and religion (205;
see also McHenry 188). In fact, P. Joy Rouse adds, writers for the black periodical press
201
9
 The Booker T. Washington Papers, Vol. 2, includes a letter from Elliott to Washington,
and a footnote explaining that ?George M. Elliott, born in Virginia in 1849, was a
preacher and principal of Knox Academy, a normal school in Selma, Ala. Later he moved
to Beaufort, S.C., where he was pastor of the Berean Presbyterian Church and one of the
founders of an industrial school? (275).    
10
 I will cite here just two examples. Elliott writes: ?If there be no avenues before us, we
must make one. The ancients were sometimes accustomed to represent perseverance by a
man with a pick-axe bearing this motto: ?Either I will find a way or make one?? (333). In
Harper?s novel, by comparison, Mr. Thomas says on several occasions, ?If I don?t see an
opening I will make one? (186, 244), and Harper even goes so far as to call this ?his
motto? (244). Similarly, Elliott cites with disdain members of the black community who
argue that ?it is no use to educate? by claiming ??There are no positions open for us.?...
often took advantage of the circumscribed nature of the medium: they ?wrote to make the
issues they identified a matter of public [African-American] discourse...[and] contributed
to a public literacy grounded in action and critical consciousness of the political and
social dynamics within and involving the black community? (128). I would posit that
Harper?s novel represents one significant recording of her voice in that discourse,
particularly as a direct response to an essay in the A. M. E. Church Review, where
Alabama preacher and normal school principal George M. Elliott asked in the April 1885
issue ?How shall we educate?? (?We Must Educate,? 331).
9
 Eliott?s own answer to that
question presented a specific ?line of action? Harper felt was ?finely mapped?;
specifically, she praised his recommendations for cultivating self-respect and self-
reliance (that is, the race?s reliance on itself) in her own A.M.E. Church Review essay, ?A
Factor in Human Progress,? in the subsequent issue of that publication (Foster, Brighter
276). Trial and Triumph in fact develops according to Elliott?s recommendations, and his
stamp is felt upon the novel in Harper?s liberal use of phrases and quotations from his
essay, throughout her book.
10
 However much critics may debate the audience for whom
202
?Education is not necessary.? [and] ?I got on in the world without any education, and my
children can do the same.?? (337). In Trial and Triumph, Annette?s grandmother and her
aunt Eliza offer many of these same rebuffs (182, 230); I discuss their discouraging
comments at length later in this chapter.   
Harper wrote Iola Leroy, it is very clear that Trial and Triumph was not ?merely carrying
[a] white message in a black envelope? (Foster, ?Gender? 52).    
Perhaps most importantly for our purposes, where Iola Leroy presents two
African-American adult female race leaders with no observable or replicable training and
education, Trial and Triumph recommends specific pedagogical strategies that nurture its
adolescent protagonist to become a race leader, one who is steady enough on her own
feet to endure the trials of growing up black and female in 1880s America and broad-
minded enough to advance not only her own interests but those of her downtrodden
community. With a sense of purpose and level of detail that Harper avoids in her later
novel, in Trial and Triumph she asks how the black race can best benefit from a white-
dominated public education system that it does not fully trust to shape its young female
students into strong adult women. Harper?s answer contributes to an emerging body of
progressive educational reforms that attempt to use the public school system for the
variety of academic and social opportunities it affords the schoolgirl, but also to decrease
the predominantly white institution?s authority over the black schoolgirl?s life. Of
particular importance is Harper?s conviction that formal public schooling can provide
necessary training and information for black females, but that it should not be counted
upon as an unbiased (non-racist) source, nor as the sole educational resource for African-
American success at the end of the nineteenth century. Instead, Harper suggests, the girl
203
must look to herself and to educated members of the black community in order to
develop a curriculum that will supplement her formal school lessons and educate her as a
future teacher who can help uplift the race. Although surprisingly little attention has been
paid to it, Trial and Triumph thus provides a crucial counterpoint to Iola Leroy,
demonstrating how differently Harper thought to depict black, educated females to an
exclusively African-American rather than a mixed-race audience. Annette?s adolescent
narrative represents an earlier, more deliberate, and more fully articulated phase in the
development of Harper?s thinking about how black females should be educated, and how
female race leaders are created in the face of sometimes fierce opposition from both
white and black society.
Competing Views: Black Education in the Black Periodical Press
Before we examine the pedagogical strategies that make Trial and Triumph such
an essential contribution to the field of African-American and American schoolgirl
literature, it is important to acknowledge the novel?s literary genealogy in the black
periodical press for, though Harper would incorporate into Trial and Triumph many of
the same themes, tropes, and plot devices from white women?s fiction on which she relies
in Iola Leroy, the predominating features of her earlier novel arise from its publication in
an African-American newspaper that had strong ties both to its audience and to more than
six decades of increasingly complex newspaper debates among black writers regarding
black education.  
204
11
 See, for example, ?African Education,? February 15, 1828 and ?Education in
Philadelphia,? October 10, 1828, Freedom?s Journal. See also ?Make Your Sons
Mechanics and Farmers?not Waiters Porters and Barbers,? March 18, 1853, Frederick
Douglass?s Paper (formerly The North Star), and ?Slavery Against Public Schools,? The
National Era, June 25, 1857.  
Indeed, if newspapers were an essential tool in the education of Native
Americans, as I argued in my previous chapter, they were also fundamental in spreading
the word, throughout the nineteenth century, that education was the key to delivering
African-Americans from slavery and from the ignorance and degradation that system
imposed upon them. Between 1827 and 1829, for example, Freedom?s Journal, the first
American newspaper written by and for blacks, printed many brief advertisements for
schools enrolling black youth and adults, and article-length admonitions that all free
blacks should seek out formal education, even though questions about how and where
that education would be put to use?in America, or in Liberia, for example?were still
far from being decided.
11
 From the 1830s through the 1850s, black newspapers like The
Colored American and Frederick Douglass?s North Star urged readers to find ways of
educating their children, despite the fact that many Southern states imposed compulsory
ignorance laws punishing slaves for attempting to achieve literacy or gain other forms of
intellectual training (Bond 175-6). At mid-century, furthermore, The National Era (1847-
1860)?the white abolitionist weekly that first serialized Uncle Tom?s Cabin?printed
articles and letters protesting that only institutions or governments ?founded on wrong
and injustice? could oppose the establishment of public schools for blacks. Every one of
these newspapers folded before the end of the Civil War?some due to financial
difficulties, others because editors felt the war had removed their abolitionist raison
205
12
 P. Joy Rouse has noted that 1,187 black newspapers were founded between 1865 and
1900, as compared to only 40 before the war?a jump that surely fueled and was fueled
by postwar gains in both black literacy and formal education (130).
13
 Christy, C. F. ?We must commence now!? Christian Recorder, January 19, 1867. 
d??tre?but while they existed, they helped originate among blacks and whites a public,
printed conversation about the struggle for black liberty and the intimately related
struggle for black access to formal schools. 
Despite the loss of these particular newspapers, many other small, black-owned,
and in most cases, church-affiliated periodicals continued to thrive during and after the
Civil War.
12
 Gradually, essays on black education shifted away from the role it would
play in ending the national problem of slavery, and toward the newer role that black
teachers and students should adopt in lifting the race out of the poverty and inequity that
remained after emancipation. Some took a militant tone, admonishing blacks to use
education as a kind of weapon, like David facing a powerful Goliath. ?We must
commence now!? insists one such 1867 article in the Christian Recorder:
We as a people should begin now, and teach our oppressors that we are men
amongst men. Will the barbarous traitor cease to murder your brethren in the
South as long as you are destitute of intellectual power?....Will you ever become
MEN?great MEN?in this government if you allow that cruel monster who has
been in your midst for past generations?ignorance?always to be your leader to
destruction?....We must have improvement?improvement in
mind?improvement in knowledge?improvement in every practical thing.
13
 
206
14
 See Alexander?s ?A Letter from Logansport, Ind.? Christian Recorder, Feburary 10,
1866.
15
 Throughout this chapter, I refer to ?the? African-American community as a shorthand
for the large group of blacks who comprised the intended audience of these local and
national periodical publications. In fact, there were many different African-American
communities bearing significant cultural, linguistic, and socio-economic differences (just
to name a few). Later in this chapter, I discuss one such community?the Gullah culture
of South Carolina, Georgia and northern Florida. 
On the other hand, some writers imagined that if blacks could only endure the isolation of
their second-class status a little longer, education would gradually and peacefully smooth
the transition from enslavement to full citizenship: ?A little more patient waiting, and all
will be well,? wrote one Charles Alexander in February, 1866; ?Mean time we may best
approve our manhood by our deeds. Religion and education are the best agencies for the
strengthening of our cause. Let the black man once become a model of moral deportment
and enlightened culture, and his legal and political status will be as favorable as he could
desire.?
14
 Alexander?s sentiment typifies that of many black writers who advised other
blacks to accept their segregated position, using it as an opportunity to withdraw from
competition with whites, mobilize as a group, and prepare intellectually for the coming
day that would both allow and require them to contribute to a racially integrated and
equal society.   
After the closing of the Freedman?s Bureau in 1872 and the consequent
withdrawal of federal funds for black schools, the newspapers? focus on black education
increasingly reflected a burgeoning philosophy of racial self-help, which argued that
blacks should rely solely on their own community to do for themselves what whites
either would not or could not do for them.
15
 Papers such as the Christian Recorder, the A.
207
16
 The Free Speech and Headlight was edited by part-owner Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and the
Christian Banner was edited by Nannie Helen Burroughs.
M. E. Church Review, The Free Speech and Headlight, and The Christian Banner
aggressively ?positioned the black community in opposition to a government that was
failing them,? and portrayed self-education?the schooling of black students by black
teachers?as the cornerstone of racial self-help (Rouse 136, 139).
16
 
Of course, within the self-help and self-education movements, diverse opinions
developed regarding the academic fields and methods of study that would be of greatest
use to the race, and, after the end of Reconstruction in 1877, the black periodical press
began to enjoy a peak period as a forum for the African-American community to discuss
and weigh each of these new educational options (Rouse 131). A proliferation of
newspaper articles, sketches, letters, and serial literature aimed to help the black
community sort through an unprecedented array of educational agendas, pedagogies, and
schooling opportunities being offered by state-supported black schools in the south and
newly desegregated schools in the north. In debates we now associate almost exclusively
with Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois?indeed, one might argue that the
entire array of debates over black education has been obscured by the history of their
rivalry?some writers argued in favor of industrial or vocational training, while others
advocated classical academic education. Yet, many essayists also debated the
responsibilities of black churches to establish universities that would combine religious
and secular education for older students, while others urged black philanthropists to fund
black schools privately in order to give black children alternatives to attending integrated
208
17
 See, for example, ?Responsibility of the Church For the Character of the Scientific  
Education of Our Youth,? Christian Recorder, April 27, 1867.
18
 See especially Gertrude Mossell?s regular column, ?The Women?s Department,? in the
New York Freeman, 1885-86; Reverend D. I. Satterfield?s essay ?The Education of Afro-
American Girls? in The American Missionary, July 1892; Miss Parmenter?s ?A Plea for
Colored Girls,? in The American Missionary 1895 See also John H. Adams? ?Rough
Sketches: A Study of the Features of the New Negro Woman? and ?The New Negro
Man? in Voice of the Negro, August and October 1904, respectively. 
(but commonly racist) institutions (Bond 129).
17
 Many articles, too, were devoted to the
education of black youth and to delineating distinct curricula for black girls and black
boys.
18
  
Despite their differences, by the 1880s many writers for these publications shared
a common vision that black schools would educate black students, and then the students
who emerged from these schools would go on to influence and teach yet more black
students, thus perpetuating a cycle of uplift that would begin and remain inside the
African-American community. Even writers who argued that it was preferable to send
black children to mixed-race schools rather than all-black ones (because mixed-race
schools were better funded, for example, or because they would perhaps accustom black
and white children to life in an integrated society) ultimately maintained that at the end of
the school day, black children would return home to black neighborhoods with critical
knowledge which they would then impart to an undereducated, adult black populace.
Black students were thus portrayed as pivotal to racial uplift, receiving knowledge from
black or white teachers and then distributing that knowledge back out to the black
community, whether as formally trained school teachers or as role models providing
inspiration and informal instruction to other blacks.
209
This issue of whether black youth education should center around the creation of
professional school teachers or informal role models is at the heart of a public
conversation between Harper and George M. Elliott in the 1885 A. M. E. Church Review.
Here, Elliott advocates that individual blacks should educate themselves as role models
for others (a model that avoids active nurturing), while Harper contends that individual
blacks must be trained to educate others more directly, as teachers (a model she
perceived as essentially feminine). Though Elliott and Harper differ on this key point, it
should be noted that they share a hearty suspicion of the educational institutions blacks
were increasingly occupying with whites at this time, and therefore a deep ambivalence
toward formal education. Both of their essays argue that formal education is essential to
African-American progress; however they also suggest that other, informal means of
instruction are necessary to supplement the inferior academic training that young blacks
could secure at either white (often racist) schools or underfunded black ones.
In ?We Must Educate,? Elliott prescribes a three-tiered approach to African-
American formal schooling in the post-Reconstruction era. He asks the question which
gives this chapter its title, ?How shall we ever get out of slavery??, because he sees the
black community still suffering from slavery?s repercussions, and especially from their
lack of formal education. Elliott declares that, in order to slough off the legacy of slavery,
blacks must prioritize formal schooling above all other endeavors. He suggests that the
African-American community should (1) ?practice rigid economy,? foreswearing luxury
items and forgoing immediate material gratification in exchange for gradual intellectual
uplift (331). Economizing financial resources so that blacks can go to school, Elliott
210
19
 One noteworthy, humorous and biting reference to this line of reasoning (that
adversity?even slavery?has value as a training ground, appeared in the Christian
Recorder as early as 1866: The ?Letter of a Self-Made Colored Man,? reads in part:
?Now whatever may be said of the literary and intellectual abilities of your worthy
correspondents, in which their interesting communications prove them to be all that is
desirable, and which to my mind will stand the test of jealous critics, I beg leave to say
that my alma mater was the University of negro slavery, in which from freshman to
senior student, I graduated N. B. N. [,] Nothing but negro? (June 2, 1866). The essay goes
on to name other ?degrees? earned by this former slave, including ?F.R.C. First Rate
Cobbler,? ?F.R.B. First-rate Blacksmith,? and ?C.D.L. Common Dock Laborer.?  It is
attributed to ?one of the most influential colored men of this country,? who signs himself
?Simon Peter Barjona.?     
argues, will help the race to (2) ?cultivate self-reliance?; by ?looking more to ourselves
for help, and relying less upon others to do everything for us,? the race will learn to
depend on itself, not only for goods and services, but ultimately for less tangible prizes
like confidence and self-esteem (332). Self-reliance, finally, will lead to (3) racial and
individual ?self-respect,? the sense that whatever the race does achieve it achieves on its
own merits, and whatever the African-American individual has accomplished, he or she
has accomplished within the context of a supportive black community (334-5). Indeed,
Elliott argues, blacks need temporarily to embrace their segregation from the racially-
mixed American culture, withdrawing from interaction and competition with whites at
least until such time as they can claim to be as well-educated and self-sufficient as that
dominant race: ?[W]ith a wise head and a diligent hand,? he writes, ?we may take
advantage of this training [in adversity] and turn it as a means to an end in our education
and elevation? (331).
19
 
When Elliott?s essay caught Harper?s attention she was already a frequent and
popular contributor to the black periodical press, having previously serialized two other
211
20
 Neither novel deals with the issue of black education as such, though Minnie?s
Sacrifice does involve the formal education in the North of a Southern-born boy and girl
who, like Iola Leroy and her brother Harry, do not know they are black until they are
near adulthood. 
novels in the Christian Recorder (Minnie?s Sacrifice in 1869 and Sowing and Reaping in
1876-77
20
), and having published a number of essays on education, several of which I
have mentioned above. With the publication of ?A Factor in Human Progress,? though,
Harper indulges a desire to make the black periodical press into an even more engaging
forum for debate, and she initiates a public discussion of self-help and education by
responding directly to Elliott?s earlier essay. Harper demonstrates her sympathy with
Elliott in her essay?s opening lines: ?In the last number of the A. M. E. Review was a
thoughtful paper entitled ?We must educate.? The first question asked was: How shall we
educate? And a line of action was finely mapped? (275); Harper goes on to approve,
specifically, of the importance Elliott places on self-reliance and self-respect, as well as
his insistence that black education be ?thorough,? ?practical,? and ?Christian? (275;
Elliott 341-44).
However, Harper finds that the most important, but underdeveloped, facet of
Elliott?s plan is the perpetuation of racial self-help through individual ?self-surrender?
(278): ?the question worth asking,? she claims, ?is not simply, What will education do for
us [as individuals]? but, What will it help us do for others?? (276). Harper perceives
Elliott to be saying that individual blacks should prioritize education, and that they will
encourage other blacks to attend school simply by setting their own example;
consequently, the self-respect that each individual builds up for him- or herself will
212
gradually permeate the entire race and ?lift them up.? But the shortcoming of Elliott?s
plan, in Harper?s view, is that it is overly reliant on the indirect and slow-acting influence
of one person on another. By contrast, Harper argues that in order for the race to rise as a
race (rather than as a group of disconnected individuals), some blacks must be willing to
make personal sacrifices that will bear directly upon the improvement of others: there
must be black students who are willing to devote their lives to the pursuit of learning and
teaching, even at the expense of pursuing other personal or educational goals that might
bring them more individual glory, money, or fame:
Do you point me with pride to your son, and tell me that the best college in the
country is his alma mater; that he has passed triumphantly through its curriculum;
that he is well-versed in ancient lore and modern learning, and that his mind is an
arsenal of well-stored facts, fully equipping him for the battle of life? I ask, in
reply, Is he noble and upright? Does he prefer integrity to gold, principle to ease,
true manhood to self-indulgence?....If not, I answer, his education is unfinished.
He may be brilliant and witty; eager, keen and alert for the main chance; but he is
not prepared to be a moral athlete, armed for glorious strife, ready to win on hotly
contested fields new battles for humanity (276). 
This ?self-surrender??the act of subordinating one?s own needs to the greater good?is,
finally, the factor to which Harper?s essay title refers, the single most important factor in
human progress. 
Self-surrender is also at the heart of Trial and Triumph, which Harper pens
shortly after her exchange with Elliott. The novel is devoted to Harper?s concern with
213
teacher training and novelizes a detailed pedagogical system by which, Harper argues,
African-American girls can be trained as future teachers who will, more selflessly than
boys, devote and ?surrender? themselves to the cause of racial uplift. As we shall see,
Trial and Triumph expands upon Harper?s earlier response to Elliott?s essay, turning
what seemed to be a subtle disagreement with Elliott into a full-blown treatise on the
education of black girls in the post-Reconstruction era, and into an argument for nothing
less than the reconfiguration of a self-segregated black community around educated, self-
surrendering female race leaders.
Complementary Pedagogies in Trial and Triumph
The novel revolves around young Annette Harcourt, who attends an integrated
school by day and is mentored by two former black schoolteachers during extracurricular
hours. Her informal education, it turns out, is as important as formal schooling in helping
Annette to develop her intellect and talents in a social atmosphere where most of the
white population is hostile to blacks, and much of the black population is wary of
predominantly white institutions. As Harper?s characters wonder how the black race can
best benefit from a white-dominated public education system that it does not fully trust,
their dialogue is peppered with phrases and quotations from Elliott?s essay,
demonstrating both his direct influence upon the novel and the deep resonance of their
conversation upon Harper?s own developing ideas about black education. Casting a wider
net, the novel showcases a variety of popular educational philosophies, endorsing a
combination of classical and vocational training for boys and girls, and anticipating such
214
21
 I refer, of course, to W. E. B. Du Bois?s concept of ?the talented tenth,? made famous
in his 1903 essay of the same name and published in his The Negro Problem: A Series of
Articles by Representative Negroes of To-day. For an excellent discussion of the women
who ?lived and worked DuBois?s theories in both political activism and education,? but
have been largely ?absent from history,? and especially the history of DuBois?s own
development and impact, see Waite?s 2001 essay, ?DuBois and the Invisible Talented
Tenth.?     
According to Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in ?Harlem on our Minds? (1997), Alain
Locke?s essay ?The New Negro,? first published in 1925, ?enshrined? the concept and
movement of the ?New Negro?; however, Gates notes that this movement took ?at least
three forms? prior to the publication of Locke?s essay: Dvor?k?s declaration that black
spirituals were America?s ?first authentic contribution to world culture,? Picasso?s
references to African sculpture in the ?signature? modernist painting Les Demoiselles
d?Avignon, and the work of Du Bois himself, all highlight the ?potential for political uses
of black art and literature in America? as a means for African-Americans to ?save
themselves? (3).
22
 Toohey 202; Rouse 128; Foster, ?Gender? 51; and Peterson ?Frances Harper? 41. 
concepts as ?the [race?s] upper tens? and ?the new Negro?  that would not gain currency
until more than a decade later, via the works of W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, and
others.
21
 As a serial publication, too, Trial and Triumph promoted group discussion as a
means of uniting and educating blacks, while the Recorder?s limited distribution shielded
from the criticism of a potentially unsympathetic white audience the vulnerabilities and
strengths of the black urban community Harper represents.
22
 But most importantly, the
novel?s primary focus on the education of a female student drove home Harper?s belief
that, while both black men and women should strive to be agents of change??sculptors
of life? she writes in ?Factor??it is young black females who are best-equipped to
voluntarily delay personal gratification for the sake of studying hard to become teachers
and leaders of racial uplift. Ultimately, Harper suggests that the black community should
be reconfigured around the educated black female, whose ?devising brain and feeling
215
23
 P. Gabrielle Foreman dubs this strategy ?histotextuality,?which she investigates in Iola
Leroy. See ??Reading Aright?: White Slavery, Black Referents, and the Strategy of
Histotextuality in Iola Leroy.?
24
 I wish to thank Dr. Charles Blockson, founder of the Blockson Library at Temple
University, Mr. Lee Stanley of the Philadelphia Archives in Philadelphia?s City Hall, and
especially, Dr. Richard Tyler (also of the Philadelphia Archives), who helped to confirm
that Harper?s A.P. is based on the 7
th
 ward in Philadelphia. According to Tyler, an 1866
map of the city shows a small alleyway type of street called ?A. P. Place? in the 7
th
ward?an area that Du Bois would make famous with his ethnographic study, The
Philadelphia Negro, in 1899. This street is located 8 blocks east and 6 blocks south of
where Harper herself lived in Philadelphia (on 1006 Bainbridge street), making it
extremely likely that she would have known A.P. Place, and indeed the whole ward, quite
well. Though I have so far been unable to determine the significance of the initials
?A.P.,? it makes sense that the neighborhood setting of the novel is based on the 7
th
 ward,
which Du Bois reports was home to a diverse socio-economic group of African-
Americans and whites, not only at the time of his writing but for decades earlier, as well.
It is described by Herbert Aptheker in his 1973 introduction to Du Bois?s study, as both
?a center of Black population,? ?a ghetto,? ?and also?somewhat ironically?[a center] of
the very rich? (10-11). Du Bois writes: ?It is a thickly populated district of varying
character,? and ?every class is represented,? including ?noted criminals, male and
female,...gamblers and prostitutes....many poverty-stricken people, decent but not
energetic....stevedores, porters, laborers and laundresses,? ?shrewd and sleek politicians,?
and ?many respectable colored families....wealthy in a small way? (58-62).  Moreover, in
Samuel McCune Lindsay?s 1899 introduction to the original text, he notes that the 7
th
ward is ?peculiar in its excess of females and of young persons, men and women,
between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five....Why the abnormal excess of females in
heart? contain both the emotional and intellectual capacity to unify and mobilize others
of her race (?Factor? 275-276).
Baldly emphasizing the relevance and timeliness of the story for readers of the
Christian Recorder, Harper renders the black urban post-Reconstruction community in
minute detail in Trial and Triumph, embedding historical and geographical markers in
the surface of her narrative.
23
 For instance, the novel is set in the fictional city of A.P.?
probably Philadelphia, where Harper lived, on and off, since 1854, and where the African
Methodist Episcopal Church was founded, and the Review printed.
24
 Harper?s omniscient
216
this city Negro population? The limited occupations open to men have much to do with
it? (xii; see also 55-56).    
25
 The first public school system in Pennsylvania was established in 1834. It was,
however, ?public? in name only: schools were segregated by race and supported by tax
monies kept in separate funds, one for black taxpayers and one for white taxpayers. The
white taxpayers? fund was larger and white schools far superior to those for colored
children. In 1854, a law was passed in Pennsylvania to combine the state?s tax monies
and fund all public schools equally. However, a loophole in the 1854 law also allowed
individual districts to exclude African-American students from public schools if the
district housed a private, all-black facility that was open for at least four months of the
year, and if there were 20 or more black students to attend that school within the district.
If these few conditions were unmet, black students were supposed, by law, to be able to
attend publicly funded schools, yet evidence suggests that few actually did. In 1881,
however, the 1854 law was repealed and schools desegregated, making it illegal for any
separate schools to be maintained in the state (Woodson 309, Bond 377). The 1881
desegregation in Philadelphia is likely the real impetus for Harper?s Mr. Thomas losing
his job.  
26
 Several critics examining Trial and Triumph focus on the labors of Mr. Thomas. Born
into slavery, Mr. Thomas enrolls himself in a Southern manual labor school after
emancipation. He learns carpentry, but becomes a teacher in the North, since that
narrator follows two characters, with alternating chapters on Annette Harcourt and on her
former schoolteacher, Mr. Thomas, a black man who, ironically, loses his job to a white
teacher once the schools in their city are desegregated (in Philadelphia, this occurred in
1881): ?Public opinion which moves slowly, had advanced far enough to admit the
colored children into the different schools, irrespective of color, but it was not prepared,
except in a few places to admit the colored teachers as instructors? (186).
25
 Annette?s
intellectual and social development is recounted in tandem with Mr. Thomas?s search for
new employment; they share a social setting that allows African-Americans to be
formally educated and leaves room for black neighborhoods to emerge and even thrive,
although the larger urban environment places sharp boundaries on those neighborhoods,
and is most uncongenial to blacks outside those boundaries.
26
 Classrooms are integrated
217
profession can offer more to the uplift of the race than can his skills in construction.
Nevertheless, once Mr. Thomas is fired from school teaching, he must again seek
employment as a manual laborer. Despite his expertise he is repeatedly rebuffed by white
employers, and his verbal responses to the racism he encounters in the North constitute
some of the novel?s most compelling diatribes on the subject of skilled black labor in the
post-Reconstruction era. See especially Peterson?s ??Further Liftings of the Veil?? and
Jennifer Campbell?s ??The Great Something Else?: Women?s Search for Meaningful
Work in Sarah Orne Jewett?s A Country Doctor and France E. W. Harper?s Trial and
Triumph.?
27
 There is also a male adolescent student in the novel, Charley Cooper, and he is also
mentored by Mr. Thomas. However, Charley is a secondary character, and Harper does
not accord him, or his education, the same attention that she gives Annette.
but poisoned with racial prejudice; workplaces are heavily circumscribed and segregated,
and the general atmosphere is so rich with discontent and despair that ?the fires of
anarchy? lurk at the edges of civil conversation between black men, and free young black
girls like Annette begin at school ?to feel the social contempt which society has heaped
upon the colored people? (226). Before Annette and Mr. Thomas can triumph by finding
meaningful work?and in Annette?s case, love and marriage, as well?they must endure
significant trials brought on by the historical, social, and political challenges of their
place and time.
27
Despite its parallel plot lines, which follow Annette?s and Mr. Thomas?s struggles
over a period of approximately eighteen years, the novel begins and ends with Annette
(from age 13-31), thereby accentuating her prominence for the author and reader. The
orphaned and abandoned illegitimate daughter of a giddy schoolteacher (now dead) and
her scoundrel, bar-owner boyfriend, Annette lives with her maternal grandmother in an
atmosphere of ?moral contagion? (197). In fact, the frequently overbearing presence of
Annette?s neighbors and family members complicates the value that community will hold
218
28
 No ?Tennis Court? exists on any of the city maps I have consulted.
29
 See also pps. 183, 215-217, 226, 270 for more references to Annette?s temper. 
for Annette; like the suspicious institutions of the public school system and the urban
workplace, the neighborhood in which Annette lives is frequently a scene of negative
influence. The very name of their street, Tennis Court, makes punning reference to the
competitive, back-and-forth bickering exhibited by many of the block?s residents, which
undermines the potential for communal feeling in the neighborhood: ?a fearful amount of
gossiping, news-carrying and tattling went on, which often resulted in quarrels and
contentions, which, while it never resulted in blood, sadly lowered the tone of social life.
It was the arena of wordy strife in which angry tongues were the only weapons of
warfare, and poor little Annette was fast learning their modes of battle? (196).
28
 In
addition to these daily perils, Annette must contend with her neighbors? intemperance
and disdain (183, 196); her grandmother?s ambivalent attitude toward both her and her
intellectual improvement (181-2, 228-9); and her own notoriously quick, surly temper
(179).
29
 Harper introduces and explains Annette?s complex character, thus: 
She was the deserted child of a selfish and unprincipled man and a young mother
whose giddiness and lack of self-control had caused her to trail the robes of her
womanhood in the dust. With such an ante-natal history how much she needed
judicious, but tender, loving guidance. In that restless, sensitive and impulsive
child was the germ of a useful woman with a warm, loving heart, ready to respond
to human suffering, capable of being faithful in friendship and devoted in love.
Before that young life with its sad inheritance seemed to lay a future of trial, and
219
30
 The basis for the character of Anna Lasette also appears in Harper?s ?A Factor in
Human Progress,? again demonstrating that essay?s importance to the genesis of this
novel. Harper writes there: ?I remember once talking with a school teacher in a Southern
State, who, speaking of her lack of society, said of those by whom she was surrounded:
?They all talk gossip, and wouldn?t improve me.? Suppose she had viewed the social
condition of her neighbors from another standpoint, and said, These women cannot
improve me, but I will try to improve them. If they talk nothing but gossip, I will try to
raise the tone of conversation, and show them a more excellent way. I will study to teach
these mothers how to take care of their little ones....because I have had advantages that
were denied them; as a friend and sister I will share with them my richer heritage?
(Foster, Brighter 280).
It is of some significance that Mrs. Lasette once lived in the same neighborhood
as Annette, but, due to a smart property investment made by her husband years ago, lives
in a different ward during the time of the novel?s action. Mrs. Lasette mentions the move
in Chapter 6, when she is explaining why she believes the desegregation of schools is so
important to the life of the nation. She claims that the public school serving her
neighborhood, Ward 19 (which is east of Ward 7, and home to a far greater number of
whites), is a sound facility with excellent teachers; on the other hand, the black-only
school, not supported by public monies, was ?ungraded,? ?poorly ventilated and
how much, humanly speaking, seemed to depend on the right training of that life
and the development within her of self-control, self-reliance, and self-respect
(184-5).
From these inauspicious beginnings, Annette must somehow overcome her personal and
cultural limitations and emerge as a role model for Harper?s similarly situated black
female readers.
Fortunately, Annette harbors ?a love for literature and poetry,? and is believed by
some to have literary ?talent or even poetic genius? (185). She is smart, passionate, and
interested in learning, and her love for books can be counted on to ?keep that child out of
mischief? (181). In addition to conducting her own extracurricular program of reading,
Annette is counseled by her neighbor, Mr. Thomas, and another former schoolteacher,
Mrs. Lasette.
30
 These exemplary adults stand in stark contrast to the largely unfriendly
220
unevenly heated? (55) Once the schools were desegregated, though, her own daughter
was able to attend the publicly funded school and get a good education in a racially-
mixed environment. 
31
 Clarence?s ?flaw? stems from his having once been married, in his home of New
Orleans, to a woman of questionable reputation, and to his desertion of that woman many
years before he meets Annette. When Clarence and Annette become engaged, Clarence
reveals his prior marriage, explaining that he and his first wife, Marie, had separated due
to irreconcilable differences in their characters. After the separation, when a drowned
woman is found wearing his wife?s clothing?but otherwise unrecognizable, due to her
environment where Annette lives; they continually reinforce Annette?s studies,
augmenting her reading list from time to time, emphasizing Christian duty and
supplementing the academic lessons she learns at school with personal attention and
advice. Periodically, too, both Mrs. Lasette and Mr. Thomas converse with Grandmother
Harcourt, endeavoring to tip the scales of her ambivalence so that she, too, eventually
comes to support the cultivation of Annette?s unique gifts. Once Annette is duly
encouraged by these key figures to pursue her informal and formal education, she
becomes a devoted scholar, as eager to help others as she is to help herself. 
True to the novel?s title, Annette faces many trials which also motivate her plot
line and present the series of ?cliffhangers? that define the serial format. For example,
she is ?orphaned? for the second time in her young life by the death of her grandmother
in the middle of the novel (254); she is scorned by jealous peers who envy her intellect
but are repulsed by her being ?very odd and queer, and often go[ing] out into the street as
if she never saw a looking glass? (230); she is heartbroken when the flawed past of her
lover, Clarence Luzerne, becomes an obstacle to their marriage (and supplies one of the
most forced and melodramatic plot-twists in American literature
31
). Converting the force
221
gruesome death?Clarence believes his estranged wife to be dead and himself to be free
of obligation to the marriage. The moment Clarence discloses this story to Annette,
however, while they sit in a park in the city of A.P., his ?dead? wife suddenly and
unbelievably appears before them. The series of misunderstandings that led to Clarence
and Marie?s separation are eventually revealed. At Annette?s prompting, Clarence
remains married to Marie until she dies a natural death; then Clarence sets out to find
Annette and rekindle their relationship. Despite the dramatics of the story, it is worth
noting that Clarence?s full name means, roughly, ?clear light,? suggesting to the careful
reader (if not to Annette) that his good reputation will indeed be reestablished in the end. 
of these many heartaches into energy for helping others, Annette moves South to teach
the freedmen and is eventually joined by a repaired and repentant Clarence, ?come not to
separate her from her cherished life work, but to help her in uplifting and helping those
among whom her lot was cast? (285). Annette?s self-reliance, as well as her love of
learning, respect for teaching, and desire to help uplift the race?all traits learned as a
schoolgirl?give her the strength, courage, and internal resources to emerge triumphant
after her many trials, and finally to have the work, love, and leadership status for which
she has been so singularly educated.
As she would do again later, in Iola Leroy, in Trial and Triumph Harper
showcases a variety of scenes of black teaching and learning, in both formal and informal
settings. For example, Mr. Thomas counsels his former student, Charley Cooper, that
although Charley is light-skinned enough to pass for white and thus find work, doing so
would be dishonest and ultimately detrimental to the race?s progress (213-15). Mrs.
Lasette similarly imparts character lessons to her daughter when she tells the story of
Lucy, Annette?s fallen mother, and thus encourages her to practice ?self-control? so she
can avoid being seduced by irresponsible men (259). Too, a number of brief references to
222
32
 See Evelyn Ashton-Jones?s 1995 essay ?Collaboration, Conversation, and the Politics
of Gender,? and Frances Maher?s 2001 essay ?John Dewey, Progressive Education, and
Feminist Pedagogies: Issues in Gender and Authority.?
the academic and vocational school experiences of other A.P. residents helps to flesh out
the picture of how African-Americans were educated, at home and at school, at the end of
the nineteenth century (203, 233). 
However, Harper?s most extended focus on t he educational training of black
youth in this novel comes with the weaving in of two complementary teaching strategies
which contribute directly to the development of Annette?s exemplary character and
leadership role, and create the core of Harper?s model educational program for African-
American girls at home and at school. Both of these recommendations emphasize the
importance of male and female adult black mentors providing constant guidance over and
support for the study habits of the female student and future teacher. Each strategy,
furthermore, is both gendered and racialized: Mrs. Lasette, as we shall see below, relies
on a style of teaching and learning that is conversational and therefore ?collaborative?
(like Genevieve Weir?s efforts with Wynema) and which functions, according to Evelyn
Ashton-Jones, ?in contradistinction to [the] ?patriarchal? values [of] competition,
specialization, hierarchy, and more traditional, presentational pedagogies? (8).
32
 By
employing private conversation within the confines of a domestic space, Mrs. Lasette
constructs a model of teaching aimed at cooperative problem solving and grassroots
uplift. Crucially, she engages in what Gillian Brown calls ?politicized domesticity,? and
Claudia Tate terms ?politicized motherhood,? bringing together the tenets of the Cult of
True (white) Womanhood with, in this case, the social reform needs of her black
223
33
 Isaac Watts?s 1813 Improvement of the Mind, an enormously popular teaching guide
throughout the nineteenth century, differentiates between the Socratic method and the
?Academic method? frequently practiced in formal classrooms (112-121). The Academic
method involves students adopting a position or hypothesis that they are given by their
teacher, and either refuting or defending that position by recalling evidence and
testimony they have learned. A key difference, then, is that where the Socratic method
involves uncovering the students? own viewpoints and latent knowledge, Academic
conversations ask participants to adopt personae not integral to their experience or
personality. The emphasis in Academic conversations is on testing skill in debate,
argument, and rote learning. Socratic style conversation, on the other hand, emphasizes
mutual effort to achieve consensus. For an excellent discussion of the influence of Watts?
text on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century formal schools, see Joseph Kett?s The Pursuit
of Knowledge Under Difficulties (15 and 42, especially).  
audience (17). Mrs. Lasette?s commitment to unifying the intimate, personal details of
her life as a mother with the more public and overtly political needs of her community
and her race (for she combines these the ?moment? she becomes a mother) models for
Annette and for Harper?s readers, ?the inseparable progress of the self and race,? wherein
heroines? lives as ?wives, mothers, and teachers? are correlated to ?their performance and
training of African-American citizens, to the acquisition of their collective civil rights,
and to the general advancement? of African-Americans (13-14). Though Mrs. Lasette?s
method is more casual than classroom teaching it is nevertheless quite structured, and
though Annette is clearly a participant in her own learning, it remains clear throughout
the conversation that Mrs. Lasette is in charge. As they talk, Mrs. Lasette carefully
monitors Annette?s use of ?proper? language, and steers the conversation toward topics
she herself determines important. However, her method is still very different from the
public classroom forum where students vie for a teacher?s attention, contend for the best
grade, display their knowledge before a group of their peers, and perform debates over
concepts and intellectual problems.
33
 Importantly, too, the conversations that Mrs. Lasette
224
initiates with Annette pointedly fuse assertions of racial equality with proclamations of
Christian faith, a combination that is repeated over and again in the pages of the
Christian Recorder. By using her conversational teaching method to impart lessons about
having faith in God and faith in black equality, Mrs. Lasette models a mentoring role that
other black women can take on while remaining true to the core ?feminine? value of
piety. 
By contrast, Mr. Thomas?s method offers a model of teaching that male readers
might more comfortably adopt as they, too, set out to counsel and mentor young students.
Where Mrs. Lasette relies on intimate, private conversations between herself and
Annette, Mr. Thomas encourages Annette to fulfill her dream of being an artist by
creating a writerly persona, cultivating professional work habits, and indulging in self-
promotion and public readings. Though Mr. Thomas?s methods themselves are not
racialized, his descriptions of them are; he compares the plight of the post-Reconstruction
black searching for work in a white-controlled business arena to the plight of the runaway
slave who must knock down the barriers that bar his way to freedom in white-controlled
America (186). Both types?the black worker and the runaway slave?must carve their
own paths, Mr. Thomas avers, making openings where there were none to be found. 
Seeking to mold Annette into a self-reliant and self-sacrificing adult, Harper
ultimately has her characters employ both of these teaching methods to lead Annette to
the all-important discovery that, in her academic, intellectual, and creative performances
she risks ?winning, or losing, not only for herself but for others?; she labors ?day and
night to be a living argument of the capabilities in her race? (227). Her talents reach an
225
increasingly larger audience as Annette moves from writing poetry, to making a
politically-charged commencement speech before a community audience, and finally to
teaching and mentoring large numbers of youth and adults in the South. As Ashton-Jones
suggests, above, Mrs. Lasette?s method of teaching functions to support matriarchal or
feminine values while Mr. Thomas?s method serves patriarchal or masculine ones.
However, Harper clearly sees these two teaching styles as complementary, not mutually
exclusive. She does not restrict black females to learning (or teaching) in only the
collaborative, ?feminized? mode?for Mrs. Lasette also encourages Annette?s writing
(185, 231)?nor does she insist that self-promotion or competition is just for boys.
Rather, she seems to see these teaching modes in combination as essential to Annette?s
success, and thus argues that both male and female adults must be involved in the
education of black youth. In other words, Harper integrates these two styles in Annette?s
learning experience. She gives the girl two mentors who work with her simultaneously.
Ultimately, her education demonstrates that black girls, roundly encouraged by black
adults and teachers, can transform themselves and teach others of their race to lift
themselves out of slavery. 
Annette?s tutelage under Mrs. Lasette is referenced throughout the novel but
foregrounded in a single chapter near the center of the text (chapter 8 of 20). Their
conversation is about a racially-charged conflict that occurs between Annette and a
young Irish girl?a classmate of Annette?s at her racially mixed school?and which
consists primarily of their calling each other names. Though both girls are equally guilty
of prejudicial sentiment, the argument takes place within a racist context that supports the
226
Irish girl?s biases against Annette: after all, their teacher regularly punishes misbehaving
students by seating them beside black students (216); higher up the administrative chain
of command, too, the white school superintendent goes out of his way to expose the
?true? race of a light-skinned black man, with the conscious intention of getting him fired
from his job (210). While conversing about both the argument and the larger social
context in which it occurs, Mrs. Lasette guides Annette through a dialogue that will
reveal to the girl the extent to which she has internalized the racist attitudes of her school
teacher, as well as the flawed beliefs about blacks in the larger culture. Mrs. Lasette thus
provides Annette with both a method of learning (achieved by asking and answering
questions) and a method of personal and racial empowerment (achieved by expressing
her mind, and thereby proving herself and her race equal to whites in ability to reason,
think, and participate in society in a meaningful and valuable way). 
The conversation between Annette and Mrs. Lasette occurs one day when
fourteen-year-old Annette enters Mrs. Lasette?s home, exclaiming ??I never want to go to
that school again,??and ?throwing down her books on the table and looking as if she were
ready to burst into tears?(215). Mrs. Lasette learns from Annette of the argument she had
with Mary Joseph?an argument which stems from Mary Joseph?s evident disgust at
being seated next to a black girl?in which they call one another ?nigger? and ?mick.?
The older woman is eager to use this opportunity to teach Annette that such discouraging
words should not cause her to stop learning, to give up on her education. Mrs. Lasette
begins, and Annette replies, on alternating lines, below:
227
??Do you think because Miss Joseph is white that she is any better than
you are[?]?
 ?No, of course not.?
?But don?t you think that she can see and hear a little better than you
can??
?Why, no; what makes you ask such a funny question??
?Never mind, just answer me a few more questions. Don?t you think if you
and she had got to fighting that she would have whipped you because she is
white??
?Why of course not. Didn?t she try to get the ruler out of my hand and
didn?t because I was stronger[?]?
?But don?t you think she is smarter than you and gets her lessons better??
?Now you are shouting.? (218)
Mrs. Lasette?s method of mentoring is aimed at getting Annette to compare her
own beliefs (about herself and about blacks in general) to those beliefs she perceives in
the people around her, white and black. Beginning with the assumption that whites are
inherently better than blacks (?Do you think because Miss Joseph is white that she is any
better than you are??), and moving to the related ideas that whites are more physically
perfect (?that she can see and hear a little better than you can??) and intellectually
superior to blacks (?is smarter and gets her lessons better??), Mrs. Lasette draws attention
to the ways in which notions of black inferiority ?evolved and [were] thrown out among
the masses,? by whites and blacks, to become ?interwoven with their mental and moral
228
life? (?Our Greatest Want? in Foster, Brighter 102). Her leading questions challenge
Annette?s most basic learned assumptions about essential racial differences, and
encourage her to interrogate and scrutinize the status quo. 
Yet, similar to Genevieve Weir?s teaching method, Mrs. Lasette does not merely
tell Annette that her assumptions are wrong. Rather, her questions are rhetorical; Mrs.
Lasette knows that Annette does not think Miss Joseph is better or smarter than she, but
she wants to make Annette more aware that, deep down, she knows it, too (218). By
asking questions and having Annette articulate the falseness of these beliefs, she recruits
Annette to participate in her own learning, instilling in her (and, by extension, the novel?s
readers) an appreciation of the ways that exercising one?s voice and expressing one?s
opinion are crucial to dispelling ignorance and dismantling a false and destructive view
of blacks, both in the girl?s own mind and in her larger social context. Kenneth Seeskin
explains that the Socratic method was intended not merely to impart conclusions but to
impart a means for arriving at conclusions through conversation. The method is called
?elenchus, which means to examine, refute, or put to shame:
[Elenchus] lends itself to dialogue because it requires that at least two voices be
heard. It requires, in addition, that the people whose voices we hear be intimately
connected with the positions they take. The first rule of elenchus is that the
respondent must say what he really thinks....The result is that the respondent has
more at stake than the outcome of a philosophical argument....At stake are also
the moral intuitions which underlie everything one stands for (11).
229
As practiced by Mrs. Lasette, this question-and-answer method helps to reshape the girl?s
perception of herself as a participant in a vital, ongoing, and increasingly public
conversation that can impact and change long-held stereotypes about blacks and
influence the social and political future of her people. By saying what she really thinks
(i.e. that whites are not inherently better, stronger, or smarter than blacks), Annette
reveals a discrepancy between her actions (specifically, her fight with Miss Joseph,
which gives credence to Miss Joseph?s notion that whites are better than blacks) and her
beliefs; she reveals that she has internalized her culture?s racism to some degree, even
though Annette also feels, in a deeper way, that her culture?s view is false. Indeed, this
conversation directs readers toward the kind of group effort that is required to repair the
psychic damage caused by centuries of enforced subordination to whites. That is, the
conversations between Annette and Mrs. Lasette are meant not only to provoke readers
into thinking about race, but also to mirror public conversations encouraged by the serial
format of the Christian Recorder, whose African-American readers reportedly used the
time between weekly installments to contemplate and question, as a group, the issues and
topics discussed on its pages (Peterson, ?Frances Harper 44; Foster, ?Gender? 53). 
In addition to teaching self-respect, Mrs. Lasette urges Annette toward
conversation and collaboration, thereby emphasizing different but complementary
leadership values of cooperation and verbal exchange. In all of Mrs. Lasette?s
appearances in the novel and interactions with other characters, in fact, she evinces her
proficiency and interest in coordinating the needs and voices of large numbers of
individuals so that they can better function as a cohesive unit, such as in a classroom, or
230
34
 Throughout the novel, we see her visiting Grandmother Harcourt?s house for a
conversation about the race; holding a salon for conversation in her own home (and
inviting her former neighbors from ward 7 to mingle with other black thinkers from other
parts of the city); and mentoring Annette both in her own home and in Annette?s home.
Harper tells us that ?In lowly homes where she [Mrs. Lasette] visited, her presence was a
benediction and an inspiration. Women careless in their household and slatternly in their
dress grew more careful in the keeping of their homes and the arrangement of their attire.
Women of the better class of their own race, coming among them, awakened their self-
respect. Prejudice and pride of race had separated them from their white neighbors and
the more cultured of their race had shrunk from them in their ignorance, poverty, and low
social condition and they were left, in great measure, to themselves?ostracized by the
whites on the one side and socially isolated from the more cultured of their race on the
other hand? (198). As a model teacher, for both Annette and the reader, Mrs. Lasette
demonstrates the proper cycle of personal and group advancement. She moves up in the
world economically and intellectually, but she does not neglect her duty to reach back
down (economically and intellectually) in order to help uplift those others of her race
who have been less fortunate.  
family, or community. These proficiencies and interests, gained during her former
professional experience as a schoolteacher and her current experiences as wife and
mother, comprise Mrs. Lasette?s highly gendered teaching style, and they are magnified
in her decision to cease teaching school after she marries and becomes a mother: ?instead
of becoming entirely absorbed in a round of household cares and duties, the moment the
crown of motherhood fell upon her...she had poured a new interest into the welfare of her
race....[S]he soon became known as a friend and helper in the community in which she
lived. Young girls...and young men...often came to consult her and to all her heart was
responsive? (186). Determined that marriage and parenthood should not restrict her to
caring only for her nuclear family, Mrs. Lasette becomes a surrogate mother and teacher
to many of her neighbors, and especially those seeking ?council and encouragement amid
the different passages of their life [sic]? (186).
34
231
Mrs. Lasette also holds more formally structured salons for adult men and
women, anticipating those conversazione Harper would describe later, in Iola Leroy:  
Anxious to do what she could to benefit the community in which she lived, Mrs.
Lasette threw open her parlors for the gathering together of the best thinkers and
workers of the race, who choose [sic] to avail themselves of the privilege of
meeting to discuss any question of vital importance to the welfare of the colored
people of the nation. Knowing the entail of ignorance which slavery had left
them, she could not be content by shutting herself up to mere social enjoyment
within the shadow of her home (245-6). 
Mrs. Lasette is proud that at her salons, blacks from different walks of life?both thinkers
and workers?are able to meet and build fruitful connections that will advance individual
and common goals, and compensate for differences of class and caste which tend to
separate members of the local community. Her intimate meetings and salon gatherings
model and mirror socially beneficial activities that her readers can follow in their own
lives so that the whole community can together contemplate the pressing questions of the
moment, and address the problems they face as a group. (Even Grandmother Harcourt
gets into the act and hosts her own such gathering, 200-09). 
Of course, the common thread between these two kinds of activities?Mrs.
Lasette?s private counseling sessions with individual girls and women, and her hosting of 
community salons?is their emphasis on talk. Mrs. Lasette ?regarded speech as one of
heaven?s best gifts, and thought that conversation should be made one of the finest arts,
and used to subserve the highest and best purposes of life,? and therefore she focuses
232
35
 Indeed, if we take these two novels together, we can trace an evolution of talk from
oral slave culture through folk conversations and Socratic style teaching methods, and
ultimately to the more exclusive salon conversazione of a kind of talented tenth.
upon cultivating that skill in herself and in Annette (199). Carla Peterson has suggested
that in Iola Leroy, Harper?s narrator allowed ?the political debates conducted by the
folk...to anticipate the conversazione of the elite and to propose a similar program of
racial uplift, thereby providing living testimony that the black masses can raise
themselves out of degradation and slavery? (?Veil? 105). I would suggest here that
Harper?s focus on talk as a high art form in Trial and Triumph allows her to similarly
present black oral culture as an effective educational tool.
35
 
This appreciation of oral culture is key to understanding Annette?s use of the
word, ?shouting,? in the exchange cited above between the girl and her teacher. In a final
response to Mrs. Lasette?s continuous and provocative questions about whether Annette
thinks Mary Joseph is better, stronger, or smarter than she, Annette ultimately protests,
?Now you are shouting,? indicating a kind of frustration with her mentor?s interrogatory
method. Mrs. Lasette takes issue with Annette?s use of this word:
?Why, Annette, where in the world did you get that slang??
?Why, Mrs. Lasette, I hear the boys saying it in the street, and the girls in
Tennis Court all say it, too. Is there any harm in it??
?It is slang, my child, and a young lady should never use slang. Don?t use
it in private and you will not be apt to use it in public. However humble or poor a
person may be, there is no use in being coarse or unrefined.?
?But what harm is there in it??
233
36
 She consistently takes on this role with other members of the A.P. community, too, and
she ?always regretted when [speech] was permitted to degenerate into gossip and
backbiting....she always tried to raise the tone of conversation at home and abroad? (199-
200), and ?to teach mothers...how to build up light and happy homes? (197).
37
 Frequent references in the Christian Recorder to the practice of  ?shouting? make it
likely that Harper?s readers would have perceived this connotation in Annette?s comment
to Mrs. Lasette. See especially ?Letter from North Carolina,? (dated February 28, printed
in the March 25, 1865 issue). Orderly Sergeant Co. E 30
th
 U. S. C. T., John W. Pratt,
writes: ?At the appearance of our troops [in Wilmington harbor, North Carolina] and the
old flag the people gathered. I noticed an old man and woman, ?both seemed to be lame,
?I don?t say that there is any, but I don?t think it nice for young ladies to
pick up all sorts of phrases in the street and bring them into the home. The words
may be innocent in themselves, but they may not have the best associations, and it
is safer not to use them? (218-19).
Mrs. Lasette?s staunch objection to the word ?shouting,? as slang, suggests that part of
her feminine mentoring role is to sanitize Annette?s use of language and to monitor its
effect in the home.
36
Mrs. Lasette?s objection here to this specific slang word is also a signal that
?shouting? refers not simply to the raising of one?s voice but to something more coded
and mysterious. In fact, ?shouting? refers to a racially-specific style of singing ?derived
from, or related to, the declamatory sermons of the rural preacher? (1871, OED, 2
nd
edition). More particularly, as Harper?s readers would have known, ?shouting? is rooted
in the traditional west African culture of the Gullah people who were, starting in the early
1800s, enslaved on the Sea Islands of South Carolina, Georgia, and north Florida, but
freed in 1861?just a few months after the Civil War began?when Union troops first
invaded the area.
37
 ?Shouting? in Gullah culture involves more than just preaching: it is a
234
shouting and giving God the praise, to see this day....The children shouted and clasped
their hands. I was indeed speechless. I could do nothing but cry and look at the poor
creatures overjoyed.? Other noteworthy references to shouting apply that term to
religious observance in black churches well beyond the Sea Islands. See ?The Fair at
Cincinnati,? where it is described that ?for an hour after the dismissal of the evening
service the people remained in church, shouting and praising God? (December 29, 1866);
see also ?Letter from Maryland,? which states that ?as they leave the church many go
away crying and shouting, and other under the influence of God? (December 8, 1866);
and ?From New Haven,? a letter from one Jonathan Weaver noting that ?on my arrival
here [in New Haven] I heard that the good Lord was doing a great work among the
people. I at once repaired to the church and found seven children shouting praises to God,
who had pardoned and delivered them from their sins ? and mourners at the altar
praying for mercy? (October 8, 1864).    
method of beating a rhythm with one?s hands and feet as a physical accompaniment to a
preacher?s sermon, and thus it is a means of participating in a vocal and active group
who, in concert with the preacher, creates a complete religious service (Hutchisson par.
5). 
Annette?s reference to this black cultural form of worship draws attention to key
similarities that exist between the ?shouting? of the Sea Islanders and the conversation in
which she is engaged with Mrs. Lasette. For example, both forms elevate the traditionally
more passive receiver/listener (the student or parishioner) to an active and participatory
status without diminishing the status or role of the authority figure (the teacher or
preacher). Too, the A. P. community is similar to the Gullah community in that both are
relatively isolated from other groups and are therefore somewhat resistant to change.
Like the Sea Islanders, who did not have much contact with whites, or even with other
Africans, (a factor that probably contributed to the preservation of their west African
languages and traditions such as shouting), the A. P. community seems to Mrs. Lasette
235
38
   Moreover, the Gullah people?s experience with rice agriculture in Africa had
equipped them with specialized knowledge of terrain and crops such as those that were
cultivated in the Sea Islands. This experience provided them some leverage in
establishing a labor system unlike any other on the mainland, which allowed the slaves to
determine how work would be divided among them.
The Gullah also enjoyed the first school for freed slaves, known as Penn Normal
and Agricultural School, established on St. Helena Island in South Carolina in 1862.
Charlotte Forten was the first black teacher to teach here, 1862-1864. For more
information on shouting and Gullah culture, see Sterling Stuckey?s introduction to his
1987 Slave Culture, esp. pps. 83-84. 
especially stagnant and in need of fresh influences.
38
 Finally, Mrs. Lasette?s sermonizing
is thematically linked to Gullah shouting, since both emphasize the importance of having
faith in God and in oneself: ?You do not think that she can see or hear any better than
you can or learn her lessons any quicker than you can,? argues Mrs. Lasette, ?and when it
comes to a trial of strength that she is stronger than you are, now let me ask you one more
question. Who made Miss Joseph??
?Why, the Lord, of course.?
?And who made you??
?He made me, too.? [...]
?Does God ever make any mistakes??
?Why, no!?
In this stunning culmination of elenchus and ?shouting,? of interrogating and
sermonizing, Mrs. Lasette?s method demonstrates the principles of a politicized
domesticity, which blends intimate conversation, the evocation of sentiment, and
236
39
 It is worth noting that Annette?s conversation with Mrs. Lasette echoes and inverts a
conversation in Harriet E. Wilson?s Our Nig (1859), between Frado and James Bellmont,
her master?s son, in which Frado concludes that, since God made her black, and other
people white, she ?don?t like him? (51). Claudia Tate discusses this passage of the novel
at some length in Domestic Allegories (esp. pp. 45). 
proclamations of faith with the more assertive and ?masculine? act of preaching and
imparting wisdom.
39
Also critical to Harper?s instructional program for African-American youth is the
practice of allowing one?s own interests and talents to dictate a path of formal and
informal study, in and out of school. Again taking issue with one of Elliott?s
suggestions?he argues that individual blacks should pursue individual paths toward
success and become role models, where Harper asserts they should create wider avenues
for success by becoming teachers?Harper here advises students to build expertise in a
subject area or skill they can teach to others. Necessitated by the racism and neglect
suffered by African-American youth in the nation?s public schools, Harper counsels
students to tend diligently to their own passions and curiosities during school and non-
school hours, to whatever extent possible, in order to maintain their interest in learning,
and thus develop the discipline required for extended study of any subject. 
Mr. Thomas, Annette?s other mentor, is an especially vocal advocate for this
motive to study. He claims that ?every woman, and man, too, should be...taught how to
do some one thing so thoroughly so as to be able to be a worker in the world?s service,?
and that ?one thing? should spring from a person?s interest and aptitude, regardless of
gender (203). In addition to his recommendation that black boys and girls should study
subjects of personal relevance and interest, Mr. Thomas encourages his students to create
237
for themselves public and professional personae that are skilled, assertive, and
competitive. As a complement to Mrs. Lasette, who is perhaps too feminine to argue
outright for these methods, Mr. Thomas helps teach Annette that her generation of black
females can be pious and pure without having to be submissive or strictly domestic?in
short, that they can model themselves after certain key features of the Cult of True
Womanhood, but that they need not adhere so stringently to all of its tenets. Despite
vehement opposition from many other black characters, as we shall see below, Mr.
Thomas?s pedagogical philosophy takes seriously the intellectual talents and ambitions of
all black children, and prepares them for remunerative work that will enrich them
personally, and the race, communally.
For Annette, the ?one thing? in which she is most interested is literature. Her
course of study revolves around her passion for reading and writing, and is motivated by
both her own enthusiasm and the support she gets from her two mentors. From the
novel?s opening pages, Harper shows Annette devouring poetry and prose, and learning
that she has within herself a rich reserve of innate poetic talents and latent writing skills
to develop; she even ?talks about writing a book, and is always trying to make up what
she calls poetry? (228, see also 185, 202). Annette forms an early ambition to be a
professional writer, and the crucial support she receives in this area from Mr. Thomas
fuels a desire to share her writing with audiences at school and at home. As we shall see
below, Annette?s family and peers react with ambivalence and even fierce resistance to
what they see as Annette?s frivolous craft and her selfish pursuit of personal satisfaction;
238
however, these responses only spark in Annette another, more altruistic urge to apply her
literary talents to teaching and uplifting others of her race.
Where Mrs. Lasette concerns herself with Annette?s inner life and conducts her
training in a semi-private setting, Mr. Thomas is more concerned with Annette?s
professionalization, and her more public, writerly persona. Like Mrs. Lasette, Mr.
Thomas understands that ?with Annette, poetry was a passion born in her soul, and it was
as natural for her to speak in tropes and figures as it was for others to talk in plain,
common prose? (228). Perceiving the public space of the school as the best arena for
Annette to practice her art, Mr. Thomas does all ?he [can] to keep her interest in her
studies from flagging? (227). Determined that Annette?s talents should have a practical
end, he focuses on preparing Annette for a vocation as a writer and readying her for
remunerative work she will find fulfilling on a personal level, and enriching on a
community level (203). Too, Mr. Thomas?s approach to mentoring Annette is infused by
his own assertive approach to making his way in the world. That is, when his livelihood
is taken away because he is black, Mr. Thomas vows, ?I am all at sea, but I am going to
be like the runaway slave who, when asked, ?Where is your pass?? raised his fist and said
?Dem is my passes,? and ?If I don?t see an opening, I will make one?? (186, 244). He
similarly encourages Annette?s efforts in writing and, having been ?pleased and
delighted? with ?several of her early attempts at versification,? shows them around ?to a
few of his most intellectual friends,? aggressively publicizing her work and referring to
her as ?our inveterate poet? (228). Essential here is Mr. Thomas?s ability, as a former
schoolteacher, to perceive in Annette her latent talent; his good will to help her develop
239
those talents; his training as a teacher to devise methods for Annette to study and practice
at home; and his respected position in the black community to advocate for Annette,
protect her study time, and publicize her writerly skill among an African-American
audience.    
The assertive and competitive approach that Mr. Thomas forwards is well-suited
to Annette?s racially and ethnically mixed classroom?a sort of microcosm for the larger
urban area in which she lives. Indeed, we are told that, as Annette ages, ?the treatment of
the saloon-keeper?s daughter [Mary Joseph], and that of other girls of her ilk, has stung
[Annette] into strength. She feels that however despised her people may be, that a
monopoly of brains has not been given to the white race? (226-7). Annette eventually
comes ?to feel the social contempt which society has heaped upon the colored people, but
she has determined not to succumb to it. There is force in the character of that fiery,
impetuous and impulsive girl, and her school experience is bringing it out. She has been
bending all her mental energies to compete [in a writing contest] for the highest prize at
the commencement of her school? (227). The spirit of competition?for which the prize
is the honor of delivering at her graduation an original essay composition, before a large
community audience?pushes Annette to sharpen her talents, motivates her to continue
reading and versifying, and fuels her resolve to succeed in the world of letters. Thus, by
the middle of the novel, when Annette graduates and makes her eloquent, visionary, and
passionate commencement speech on ?The Mission of the Negro? (for she, of course,
wins the competition), she reaps the rewards of her mentors? devotion and her own
dedication to learning. Motivated study, at home and at school, helps Annette rise to the
240
40
 I am grateful to Jonathan Auerbach for reminding me that the black valedictorian
becomes a standard trope in African-American literature, certainly by the time that
Richard Wright pens Black Boy (1943) and Ralph Ellison writes Invisible Man (1952).
Though I have not yet been able to verify this suspicion, it is possible that Harper?s
Annette Harcourt is the earliest instance of the black valedictorian in African-American
fiction.     
top of her class and propels her onto a public stage to affirm that African-Americans are
capable of exemplary academic achievement, and African-American females are worthy
of the right to shape the political and social missions of the race.
40
  
Maledictory and Valedictory
I want to look more closely at the message of Annette?s speech, because what she
writes there is at least as important to Harper as the fact that she writes at all. First,
however, we should recognize that Annette?s support systems are only one part of the
motivating force behind her success?her critics also play a large part in galvanizing
Annette?s intellectual energies. Indeed, it is both her triumphs and her trials that propel
Annette to find her ultimate calling as a teacher. In numerous serial installments, many of
the novel?s other characters discuss and resist Annette?s study habits and they express
concern over the ways they expect her studies will impact Annette?s ability to function in
and contribute to society. It is useful to explore their objections to Annette?s absorption
in writing, since their arguments bring to life the post-Reconstruction-era debate over
how black female education should be conducted and to what end. Especially instructive
are the characters? motives for dismissing both Annette and her study habits, as these
tend to adhere to the generation to which the character belongs?a neat classifying
241
strategy that allows Harper to develop not only a nuanced sense of her opposition?s
arguments but a history, as well, of the ways in which three generations of African-
Americans (including one born into slavery) perceive and debate black education. The
eldest generation complains, for example, that there may be no use in educating Annette
because it is as difficult for educated blacks to find work as it is for uneducated blacks in
the current social climate. A slightly younger generation differently argues that domestic
skills are the most important skills black females can have, and that it is foolish to
prioritize formal academic education above more basic skills such as cooking and
cleaning. Even Annette?s own peers protest: too much education is snobbery. I agree with
P. Joy Rouse and Frances Smith Foster that, by offering the perspectives of a multitude of
African-American characters on this issue, Harper emphasizes its importance and
promotes discussion that will engage Christian Recorder readers of all ages in the
controversy over black female education (Rouse 128, Foster, ?Gender? 53). Along the
way, Harper rejects those who disdain female education while gradually foregrounding
the idea that such a course is the surest way to develop individual intellect and ability,
and the surest way to create African-American adult women who, with fully developed
faculties, can do good work in the world and inspire others to do the same. It may seem
curious that all of Annette?s critics are female, though I contend that Harper?s goal in this
respect is to alert African-American females to the particular disservice they do when
they neglect their special duty to support young females in their intellectual endeavors.  
Annette?s grandmother, for example, complains that she does not see what good
will come of so much schooling for her granddaughter. Her perspective is understandably
242
limited by her own life experiences: Susan Harcourt is a former slave, born and raised in
the South. She herself bore and raised six children there, during an era that had only just
begun to erect schools for black students (with the help of the Freedmen?s Bureau) and,
under those auspices, to train black boys for professional life and black girls for
traditionally female domestic service or barely-skilled teaching jobs. Now residing in the
North, Susan Harcourt supports the idea of Annette going to school, but she has trouble
understanding why the girl should remain a student beyond the age of twelve or thirteen
(216): ??What?s the use of giving her so much education? There are no openings for her
here, and if she gets married she won?t want it?? (182). Though even Mrs. Harcourt once
acknowledged (of her own children) that to educate young people for work and adulthood
it is ideal to ?first consult their tastes and inclinations,? still she understands that wisdom
to apply only to males, whose gender affords them greater freedom than women have to
pursue a wide variety of jobs (181). Mrs. Harcourt has special difficulty accepting the
social and cultural transition that, in the post-Reconstruction era, is beginning to grant
girls extensive educational training according to their ?tastes and inclinations,? and the
option to labor in jobs previously held only by men.  
For the benefit of converting Susan Harcourt (and Harper?s readers of that
grandmotherly generation), Mr. Thomas and Mrs. Lasette gently endorse the new
educational climate, and offer proof that modern changes, such as extended educational
training and equal opportunities for African-American males and females, are for the
best, even though no one yet knows for sure what professional opportunities may arise
for girls like Annette. Mr. Thomas mentions several females of Annette?s generation
243
whose intelligence and appreciation for school and professional opportunity helped them
distinguish themselves inside and outside the community: 
Mr. Clarkson had a very intelligent daughter whom he wished to fit for some
other employment than that of a school teacher. He had her trained for a
physician. She went to B., studied faithfully, graduated at the head of her class
and received the highest medal for her attainments, thus proving herself a living
argument in the capability of her race. Her friend, Miss Young, had artistic talent,
and learned wood carving. She developed exquisite taste and has become a fine
artist in that branch of industry (203).
Eventually, Mrs. Harcourt is won over. Speaking to Annette?s skeptical aunt Eliza, she
defends her decision to let Annette remain in school until she graduates: ??Maybe
something will turn up that you don?t see just now. When a good thing turns up if a
person ain?t ready they can?t take hold of it?? (229; also 182). Although this is not exactly
a ringing endorsement for Annette?s extended education, and although Susan Harcourt?s
change-of-heart may seem slight to modern readers, it is nevertheless a significant
concession. Acknowledging that professional opportunities are on the increase for girls
like Annette, even though Mrs. Harcourt herself cannot yet see those opportunities, is an
important rhetorical move designed to model behavior for Harper?s older audience,
whom the author would similarly like to persuade.   
Annette?s aunt Eliza, a generation closer to Annette herself, is, surprisingly, much
more hostile and more deeply entrenched in her opposition to her niece?s education. Her
most vehement attack against Annette?s education comes when Annette shows her aunt a
244
41
  See DuBois?s ?The Talented Tenth? in The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by
Representative Negroes of To-day (43). See also Joy James?s 1997 Transcending the
Talented Tenth, which describes DuBois?s rejection of his own theory in 1945. 
poem she has written. Following Mr. Thomas?s public promotion of her work, Annette
declares with evident pride, ?that is one of my best pieces.? Her aunt quips back: ?Oh,
you have a number of best pieces...Can you cook a beefsteak?...You seem to think that
there must be something very great about you. I know where you want to get. You want
to get among the upper tens, but you haven?t got style enough for that? (228). In Aunt
Eliza?s comment (constituting what may be the first literary reference to the concept of
?the talented tenth,? not to be articulated as such until W. E. B. DuBois?s 1903 essay of
the same name), Harper suggests that some adults in the black community may have
perceived ambition like Annette?s as an arrogant rejection of the less educated blacks in
contemporary society (that other ninety percent whom DuBois would claim in 1903 had
become cowards and vacillators, ?faint-hearted? and ?blind worshippers of the Average,?
afraid or without genius enough to rise up).
41
 It seems to Eliza that Annette?s education
has made the girl haughty and equipped her with unfair advantages over others of her
race and sex who have developed primarily domestic skills. These advantages,
furthermore, appear to Eliza to be based on selfishness and greed (because Annette?s
continued dependence costs money of Mrs. Harcourt), frivolous rather than helpful skills
(writing poetry rather than cooking), undue conceit (she does not have enough ?style? to
be among the upper tens) and egotistic self-promotion (229-30).
Annette?s peers and classmates, too, express disdain for her bookishness, not
because they are jealous of the opportunities available to Annette so much as because
245
they are aware they should be ashamed of their own laziness and lack of interest. When
one classmate marvels aloud that Annette ?is just as deep as the sea,? another responds,
not without irony, ?It is not that she?s so deep, but we are so shallow? (268). This
comment underscores Harper?s point that Annette?s black classmates are making choices
not to study: their laziness is not a quality of the race but a characteristic of these
particular teenaged girls who have the (improbable, fictional) insight to recognize that
they are mistaken to revere beauty over intellect (which they nevertheless continue to
do). They read Annette?s attentiveness to her work as a sign that she thinks herself too
good for them: ?She don?t care for anything but books,? they scowl; ?oh she is so self
conceited, and thinks she knows more than any one else? (270). Additionally, they cannot
relate to a female so stubbornly uncaring about her appearance as Annette: Aunt Eliza
reports that the other girls ??all say that she is very odd and queer and often goes out into
the street as if she never saw a looking glass??(230). Stung and threatened by what they
perceive to be Annette?s rejection of values they prize?chiefly, social charm and
beauty?Annette?s peers sting back, refusing to invite her to most parties and ignoring
her at those few events she does attend (268). Of course, Harper agrees that these girls
are shallow, and decries the young social set who ?took life as a holiday?;  ?the lack of
noble purpose and high and holy aims,? she wrote, ?left its impress on their souls...?
(226). Harper argues that these girls? ?parents have failed to strengthen? their children?s
character, and worries that they will confirm the suspicion of some whites that, for the
black race, emancipation has signified nothing more than freedom from responsibility
(202). These classmates of Annette?raised by women envious like Eliza and ignorant
246
like Susan, in the ?atmosphere of moral contagion? that is Tennis Court?suffer because
they have not learned to rightly value the program of self-education on which Annette
has embarked.
Taken separately and over the course of many serial installments, most of these
characters? complaints about female education are easy to dismiss because the
complainants themselves are presented as unenlightened, resentful, and lazy. However,
taken together they achieve, if not a set of strong arguments then, at least, a compellingly
loud chorus of African-American voices that Harper may have culled from her own
experiences as a schoolgirl, and from audiences at her various speaking engagements and
women?s meetings. Clearly, she found it important to articulate and refute these
viewpoints because she knew that if social outcomes developed according to these
characters? ideas, girls would continue to be educated for domestic service, or what is
worse, they would be entrusted to teach others despite the fact that their own intellectual
achievements and abilities would never be more than a few steps ahead of their own
students. Annette, and girls like her, would be more interested in looking fashionable and
being popular than in improving their minds and improving the race; there would be no
black ?upper tens? to lead African-Americans from inside the race, up and out of
oppressive conditions such as those existing in A.P. and toward increasingly greater
social, legal, and intellectual freedoms.
247
Commencement
Ultimately, Harper forgives her characters their apathetic, jealous, and antiquated
views, explaining that the most deep-seated reason for their resistance to Annette is a
lack of confidence in their own abilities deriving from the race?s past enslavement: ?They
were living,? her narrator explains, ?too near the poverty, ignorance, and debasement of
the past to have developed much race pride, and a glowing enthusiasm in its progress and
development. Although they were of African descent, they were Americans whose
thoughts were too much Americanized to be wholly free from imbibing the social
atmosphere with which they were in constant contact? (239-40, my emphasis). Thus, she
concludes, it is not ?to be wondered at, if under the circumstances, some of the more
cultured of A.P. thought it absurd to look for anything remarkable to come out of the
black Nazareth of Tennis Court? (240). As much as any single character?s or generation?s
ideas about female education, Harper finds that the imposition of (white) American
cultural values upon blacks is also responsible for their lack of faith in Annette, and in
themselves.
Harper links each of the black community?s arguments against Annette?s
education to its acceptance of gender inequity and racial self-hatred, both of which, she
implies, spring from the race?s past enslavement. By blaming slavery as the real source of
these problems, Harper can deflect the black community?s anger away from Annette, in
particular, and from female self-education, in general, redirecting it toward a more
deserving target: the history of bondage and compulsory ignorance. Ultimately, Annette?s
education helps her (and Harper?s reader) to understand that her anger, and her
248
community?s anger, springs from the same source. Moreover, their shared goal?of
?getting out of slavery,? as Elliott would put it?can best be served by reinscribing their
communal trials as stepping stones toward communal triumph. 
Annette herself embodies this shift in three key ways, providing models for how
the reading audience can also reshape the legacy of slavery from a devastating and
oppressive force to an obstacle or trial on the race?s path to triumph. One of these we
have seen already: her self-motivated and mentor-motivated course of study helps
Annette to combat the oppression and ignorance suffered by all Africans and African-
Americans who, under thralldom, could not study what they pleased nor train for
remunerative employment, and who continued to believe (as they were taught) that they
were innately inferior to whites. By attending school and by continuing her education
independently, outside of school, Annette becomes a symbol of the new African-
American freedom to participate in the nation?s opportunities for personal success
through gradual academic achievement and persistent effort.
Additionally, though, Annette celebrates two commencements which suggest how
her education will help the race rise above the legacies of slavery, and it is with a
consideration of these twin celebrations that I would like to close this chapter. In
Annette?s valedictory speech (at her first commencement, near the center of the text), she
argues that the mission of the African-American race?indeed, its inevitable
trajectory?is to move from the pagan naivete of Africa, downward through the depths of
slavery, and ultimately up to the pinnacle of modern civilization. Her speech makes use
of Annette?s education in history, reading, and public speaking, and communicates to the
249
42
 It is important to recognize that Annette first travels to the South to be a teacher only
after she and Clarence painfully part ways: after Clarence?s wife?whom he believed to
be dead?surfaces in the city of A.P., Annette insists that Clarence fulfill his obligations
to her, and breaks off their engagement. Distraught, Annette seeks the counsel of Mrs.
Lasette, saying ?I must have a change; I must find relief in action,? upon which Mrs.
Lasette finds a teaching position for Annette in the South: ?Here she soon found work to
enlist her sympathy and bring out all the activity in her soul. She had found her work, and
the people among whom she labored had found their faithful friend? (281-2). 
entire assembled audience (readers included) that formal education crucially enables the
oppressed race to finally tell its own story, to wrest history away from the ?victors.?
Ultimately, Annette becomes a teacher, helper, and friend to a Southern black community
before she is finally reunited with Clarence Luzerne (in a second commencement, at the
end of the novel), during her thirty-first birthday party in the novel?s final scene. I refer to
this culminating scene as a commencement of sorts because, even though it is not literally
a formal school graduation, it does clearly mark an end to one period of Annette?s
education in life, and the beginning of another.
42
 Just as Annette?s discouraging
experiences as a schoolgirl are redeemed by her success as valedictorian, Harper claims
that ?the strange trial [of Clarence?s wife resurfacing (see fn.31)] was destined to bring
joy and gladness and yield the peaceable fruit of righteousness in the future? (282).
Annette?s two commencements finally serve to anchor her at the center of two black
neighborhoods, one in the North and one in the South, symbolically inscribing this
educated black female at the core of a nationwide African-American community. Both
commencements also heavily emphasize Annette?s femininity, her ?politicized
domesticity,? by deflecting attention away from her public speaking role (which is
perceived as masculine), for example, and toward the sentimentality of her
250
commencement speech, or by focusing on Annette?s romance plot with Luzerne at the
same time as her community is celebrating her intellectual and professional successes.
The act of balancing Annette?s personal determination and success with her key attribute
of self-surrender helps Harper to paint a picture of an ideal, adult female race leader who
understands that her own trials and triumphs are inextricably linked to the trials and
triumphs of blacks everywhere.    
In Annette?s first commencement, her graduation from school, she presents a
valedictory speech that she has written. Harper?s description of Annette?s ?remarkable
production? bears reproducing in its entirety, so as to make clear the precise way that
Harper imagines great female leaders can transform even slavery into an opportunity for
learning and growth : 
At first she portrayed an African family seated beneath their bamboo huts and
spreading palms; the light steps of the young men and maidens tripping to music,
dance, and song; their pastimes suddenly broken upon by the tramp of merchants
of flesh and blood; the capture of the defenceless [sic] people suddenly surprised
in the midst of their sports, the cries of distress, the crackling of flames, the cruel
oaths of reckless men, eager for gold though they coined it from tears and
extracted it from blood; the crowding of the slaveships, the horrors of the middle
passage, and the sad story of ages of bondage. It seemed as if the sorrow of
centuries was sobbing in [Annette?s] voice. Then the scene changed, and like a
grand triumphal march she recounted the deliverance of the Negro, and the
wondrous change which had come over his condition; the slave pen exchanged
251
for the free school, the fetters on his wrist for the ballot in his right hand. Then
her voice grew musical when she began to speak of the mission of the
Negro....?His mission,? she said, ?is grandly constructive.? Some races had been
?architects of destruction,? but their mission was to build over the ruins of the
dead past, the most valuable thing that a man or woman could possess on earth,
and that is good character.  That mission should be to bless and not to curse. To
lift up the banner of the Christian religion from the mire and dust into which
slavery and pride of caste had trailed it, and to hold it up as an ensign of hope and
deliverance to other races of the world, of whom the greater portion were not
white people. It seemed as if an inspiration lit up the young face; her eye glowed
with unwonted fervor; it seemed as if she had fused her whole soul into the
subject, which was full of earnestness and enthusiasm (240-1).
As Harper?s narrator represents it, Annette?s performance incorporates the experience of
capture and enslavement into a sweeping cathartic narrative that both grieves and puts
into the ?dead past? the history of African-American slavery. The movement Annette
charts, through grief into deliverance, is feminized by Harper?s sentimental vocabulary
(her ?sobbing? yet ?musical voice,? for example) and Annette?s own emphasis on
Christian faith (which is not only her subject, but the rationale underlying her public
speech: she is not daring to be political and rhetorically skilled so much as baring her
earnest and enthusiastic, faithful ?soul?). Ultimately, she portrays the African-American
race as a model for other races because they will demonstrate how to rise above slavery
252
by building good, Christian character?typically, a mother?s custodial role, as we saw in
my first chapter?and proselytizing to all the world.    
Harper?s feminizing of Annette?s valedictory moment is frustrating to modern
readers because in this, Annette?s finest hour of the novel thus far, Harper does not allow
us to hear Annette?s words directly. Instead, we are given the narrator?s synopsis of the
speech and report about the speech. Too, though the solitary, somewhat introverted (and
feminized) behaviors of reading and writing that Annette engaged in her youth is
metamorphosed into (more typically masculine) public speaking at her graduation, we are
denied the experience of ?hearing? Annette?s speech, which finally demonstrates to her
very critical black community audience how her talents can uplift them to greater thought
and action. I would argue, however, that this device functions to take Annette out of the
spotlight in a way, returning to her an air of demure femininity that Harper saw as
necessary for female leaders to maintain. The description of Annette?s performance
nonetheless proves wrong all of those detractors who had feared Annette?s schooling
would be useless (Grandmother Harcourt), or make the girl selfish and conceited (Aunt
Eliza), or haughty and introverted (her peers), for the subject and tenor of her speech
verifies that Annette?s education has not made her self-centered but selfless. As she
describes the forced migration of captured Africans, the middle passage overseas, and the
periods of enslavement, emancipation, and Reconstruction, Annette foregrounds the
history of an entire people?not her own achievement?as inspiration.
Nevertheless, Annette in fact becomes a race leader in this scene: ?Men gr[o]w
thoughtful and attentive,? and ?women tender and sympathetic,? as they listen to her
253
speak about the race?s past and its future greatness (241). Her valedictory performance
also demonstrates that Annette can operate within the confines of the educational system
and master its prescribed skills, that she can pass through her own personal trials and
emerge triumphant. Her perseverance in reading and writing beyond the classroom,
moreover, has taught her that she must transcend the limitations of the racist school
system (which would never have included the empowering lesson of that speech) if she
wants to fulfill her own ?rich possibilities? and ?set young hearts to thrilling with higher
hopes and loftier aspirations? (185). And though Annette does not in fact find work as a
writer?she becomes a teacher, instead?the verbal eloquence and concern for her race
that she develops while learning to write for a public audience serves that noble
professional aim, too. 
Indeed, when the novel ends eighteen years after it began, we see Annette at the
very center of her adopted Southern community, the epitome of politicized domesticity
that balances public activism and self-motivation (taught by Mr. Thomas) with maternal
and domestic pursuits (imparted by Mrs. Lasette). In the novel?s final pages, we see
Annette 
doing what she could to teach, help and befriend those on whose chains the rust of
ages had gathered....Her home was a beautiful place of fragrance and flowers.
Groups of young people were gathered around their teacher listening eagerly to a
beautiful story she was telling them. Elderly women were scattered in little
companies listening to or relating some story of Annette?s kindness to them and
their children (284). 
254
In the end, her education prepares Annette to champion students of her own race, just as
she was once championed by her own mentors. Her withdrawal into the heart of an all-
black community is a fitting metaphor for what Harper sees as the aim of Annette?s entire
course of study?to become a leader who can uplift the race from the inside, and start a
new cycle that creates more mentors for future generations of black children. Even here,
on the novels? final pages, Harper adheres to Elliott?s prescription from ?We Must
Educate? that, ?at the age of thirty every one...ought to have something to show for the
way he has used his time and talent,? but she also is sure to emphasize that as Annette?s
personal trials have become her personal triumphs, she has not been satisfied merely to
be a role model for others (332). Instead, Annette has yoked her own success to the
success of her community.  
In fact, even at the novel?s end, when Annette is well past her school days, Harper
continues to put off her marriage and motherhood, subordinating the importance of actual
motherhood to the importance of Annette?s more figurative, maternal role at the center of
her new community. Luzerne, we are told, 
had not come to separate her from her cherished life work, but to help her in
uplifting and helping those among whom her lost was cast as a holy benediction,
and so after years of trial and pain, their souls had met at last, strengthened by
duty, purified by that faith which works by love, and fitted for life?s highest and
holiest truths (284).
Harper?s acknowledgment that romantic love need not be forsaken by intellectual women
nevertheless resists the conventional ending of the sentimental or domestic novel, which
255
would have portrayed Annette and Clarence?s wedding, and quite possibly imagined a
domestic scene in which two happy parents dote over a new, baby girl. By contrast, the
final lines of the text show Annette and Luzerne doting over the crowd of her figurative
children, who have gathered to celebrate their ?mother? Annette?s 31
st
 birthday. 
The circle of affectionate ties that bind Annette, Luzerne, and Annette?s
?students,? illustrates the finally-realized aims of Annette?s own education. Via her
trying experiences with formal schooling (where she first learned to read and write, and
also to take pride in herself and her race), the naysaying of her various family and
neighbors (which encouraged her to persevere, despite obstacles in her path), and the
help of her male and female community-based mentors (who assisted her in devoting her
personal talents to the welfare of others), Annette has improved herself and become a
model race leader, as dedicated to her people as they are to her. Importantly, the help that
she gives to others now does not occur within the context of a formal school, but in
informal neighborhood gatherings at neighborhood homes, such as the one that closes
Harper?s novel. In fact, it does not appear that a formal school exists in Annette?s new
town. Instead, her intimate relationships with all of her neighbors?on display in the
stories people tell of her kindness, and in their evident acceptance of her as a kind of
neighborhood mother-figure?will provide a semi-private, semi-public context for
teaching and learning as Annette guides others toward self-sufficiency and race
leadership.
256
Harper?s apparent suspicion of the formal school in this novel invokes fertile
comparisons with the works I examined in earlier chapters of this dissertation, and
suggests directions for further study. While all of the texts I have analyzed here
demonstrate that adolescent female education was, from its inception in America,
perceived to conjoin formal schools and other socio-cultural institutions (and never as a
strict function of the schools alone), Stoddard?s The Morgesons and Holmes?s Elsie
Venner place much greater emphasis than do the later texts on the influence of the formal
school upon the process of molding adolescent girls into ideal American women. In both
of those texts, the schools evoke an ?atmosphere of relentless regulation? via ever-
watchful teachers, large groups of vigilantly critical students, and intrusive pedagogical
attitudes. By contrast, the Wreath of Cherokee Rose Buds, Wynema, and Trial and
Triumph each imagine the formal school as an auxiliary to the process of raising girls,
with far less imposing or complete authority. Thus, readers of these texts gain a dimmer
portrait of their school settings, but a more distinct picture of the intimate relationships
that their schoolgirls share with teachers and other community members as they learn life
lessons in and out of school. No doubt, the relative impact of the formal school and the
other kinds of institutions we have been looking at here is distinguished by subtle
degrees: I am not suggesting that, in the earlier texts, schools are portrayed as all-
powerful, and in the later texts, they are without power, but that, on the contrary, as the
century progresses, adolescent female education is increasingly represented as a process
that occurs more and more frequently outside of school, or in a more even and balanced
way both within and outside of school grounds. 
257
Clearly, the race and ethnicity of the student populations at these schools has
significant bearing on this phenomenon: unlike Cassandra Morgeson and Elsie Venner,
whose educational experiences in mostly-white New England schools were focused on
improving the individual girls and bringing them into conformity with models of (white)
womanhood, the Rose Buds, Wynema, and Annette Harcourt receive educations that are
more outwardly focused?beyond themselves, beyond narrow conceptions of gender that
would keep females within some private sphere, and beyond the individual schools?and
which aim at preparing the girls to improve other people of their sex, tribal group, and
race. Yet race and ethnicity, however important, are not the only factors contributing to
the gradual diminution of formal school authority over the lives of adolescent females in
America. To be sure, other conditions we have explored here?for example, demographic
changes, class struggles, and the rise and fall of numerous other socio-cultural institutions
over the course of the nineteenth century?played a part in these changes. It is my hope
that this study will encourage others to locate and prosecute additional narratives of
adolescent girls? schooling, so that we may understand more fully how the intellectual,
physical, and emotional experiences of growing up female in nineteenth century America
was imagined and construed.      
258
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