I feel it is appropriate for me to begin this paper by comparing the writing style of the two authors I would be discussing. The language Margaret Fuller employs in Our City Charities is much more proper and allusive in comparison to Fanny Fern’s (Moses 114). Since Fern’s sympathy lies with the common people, as highlighted in her roman à clef Ruth Hall, she tends to communicate her radical ideas through down-to-earth and plain writing that often strikes readers as supremely satirical. As seen in “Blackwell’s Island,” she sometimes uses direct addresses like “Sir Cynic” and “Mrs. Grundy” to give a hint of the context of what she is about to write (114). She would also imitate the sounds of human speech with typographical devices as well, as seen in Tears of a Wife—"What have you to cry for? A-i-n-t- y-o-u m-a-r-r-i-e-d?" (114) Fuller, however, embraces a style that abounds in mythology, allusions, and complete sentence structure. (114) The product surely is a rich one, but it definitely could not appeal to an audience as wide as Fern’s. Raised in a highly educated family, Fuller naturally strives to persuade the upper-class citizens who most likely possess a certain degree of sway over the legislative system when demanding change in a social issue. This notion could be detected in the last paragraph of Our City Charities in which she expresses her awareness of politics as it changes “from Whig to Democrat. From Democrat to Whig” can be attributed to the poor condition of the asylum and “the care of the Insane, and suffering Poor, should be preserved from the uneasy tossings of this delirium.” (Fuller 892) Karen Rogenkamp mentioned in her book Sympathy, Madness, and Crime that Fuller targets wealthier readers with her work because she thinks that the comforts of their class have allowed them to sink into a state of “ennui, dejection, and gradual ossification.” (46) Joyce W. Warren wrote in the introduction of the 1986 edition of Ruth Hall that Fern’s sympathy is with “the decent people” and has always directed her satire at “pretentiousness and pomp.” (Fern, and Warren xxviii) Fern writes for the common people against the upper-class while Fuller’s audience usually is the other way around. I noticed as well Fuller’s use of “we” instead of “I” in Our City Charities. I seek to explain this usage of the pronoun with the conjecture that Fuller sees her visit to Blackwell’s Island as a responsibility of hers to inform the public of the condition of the mental asylum, hence the pronoun “we” could be interpreted as an attempt to include the reader into the experience or it could simply be Fuller’s way to indicate that she did not go alone. Fern’s Blackwell’s Island, on the other hand, swerves toward more personal and sentimental rhetoric of which many commoners find themselves agreeing with.
In the nineteenth century, the newspaper business was far from being accepted as an appropriate field for women to dabble in. Take this incident that happened in the year 1859 as an example, an “editress” of a Cleveland paper called the Spy was attacked by a very offended male reader who, after “smashing things intimate, went so far as to beat her with his fists” and “[threw] the type out the window.” (Roggenkamp 1) Being a woman of spirit, the editress “declared war” and “undertook to give him a wholesale.” All this had unfolded because she had written and published a paper containing some “very spicy articles.” (1) The explicit antagonism newspaper women faced for subverting the view that they are after all “gentle creatures” who are “inherently emotional” and thus “useless for the newsroom” is not such an uncommon thing to hear back then (5). Still, Margaret Fuller and Fanny Fern managed to make names for themselves in the literary world despite all the misogynistic views directed upon the literary capacity of women. In the following section of the paper, I would like to discuss how Fuller and Fern had written about a specific set of issues relating to mental asylums, penitentiary, and institutionalized women through the language of sympathy. Fuller and Fern had solidified a “womanly” language that insists on their capacities to enter public discussions about American institutions (6). Through sentimental writing that is often gendered as “female,” these two successful newspaper women managed to produce radical writings on various social issues, in particular on women patients, by merging the concerns belonging to the “domestic” and “public” domains and ultimately direct private feelings into public reform (6).
Sympathy, in the simplest terms, is “the capacity to feel the sentiments of others.” (7) Fuller’s model of sympathy rejects the voyeuristic gaze normally pointed at institutionalized women (44). She, like Fern, transforms the sympathy evokes from the private act of reading—be it a fiction novel or newspaper—into a public act of sympathy, a useful one at that (48). Clever than ever, these two women writers have fashioned a mode of writing that chiefly gives rise to women sentimental fiction and markets it in a medium that was controlled predominantly by men. Margaret Fuller opens up Our City Charities with a grim description of the sky that perfectly sets the mood before she reveals what horror hides behind the institution’s doors: “The aspect of Nature was sad; what is worse, it was dull and dubious… The sky was leaden and lowering, the air unkind and piercing.” (44) While other journalists might elaborate on the gothic setting, Fuller diverges from the stereotyped narrative framing and urges her readers to be aware of the “stern realities” that “should be looked at by all” because “so little is done” and “the right principles” are still yet to be discovered (45). She inspires the desire to sympathize in the newspaper readers by encouraging them that everyone could “enlighten themselves as to the means of aiding their fellow creatures in any way, public or private.” (45) She models the “right principles” by gazing sympathetically on a young Dutch girl who would have suggested a “thousand poetical images and fictions in the mind of Victor Hugo or Sir Walter Scott.” (45) She effectively prompts the reader to reconsider their image of the girl by juxtaposes her unusual appearance—“large head, ragged dark hair, a glowering wizard eye”—with her sunny and childlike disposition when she “run[s] to the gate whenever it opened.” (Fuller 890) Another figure of “high poetical interest” was a Catholic woman who “never ceased the chanting of the service of the Church.” (890) By saying that “she is surely a Nun in her heart,” Fuller might have just successfully captured the sympathy, or at least, the attention, of religious readers (891). By constructing novelistic portraits of her subjects, Fuller suspends the audience’s implicit urge to view the patients in degrading terms. Rather, she insists on the humanity in the unfortunates and pushes the readers to immerse themselves physically into the institution, blurring the borders between subject and reader (Roggenkamp 45).
Maria Rotch wrote in January 1985 that Margaret Fuller had “always felt great interest in [fallen women], who are trampled in the mud to gratify the brute appetites of men.” (45) The writer believed that “the cause of reform can be advanced only by basing it upon the expression of sympathetic feeling.” (45) Comparing it to the reforms at Sing Sing prison, Fuller writes that the prison on Blackwell’s Island lacks “the more righteous feeling” of sympathy for the prisoner which the author thinks is the only quality that could produce enduring reforms (46). Fuller’s sympathy also allows her to detect how uncomfortable it must be for the mothers with their infants for being “exposed to the careless scrutiny of male visitors.” (50) She acknowledges that those with children are “not secure from the gaze of the strangers” and compels the readers to actually see through the eyes of the reporter as the reporter attempts to see through the mother’s eyes (50). By doing so, she is rendering the mother’s visceral pain public with her insistence on sympathetic identification. (50)
Fanny Fern described herself as who is “characterized by unusual sympathy and tenderness of feeling” in Ruth Hall. (170) Unlike Fuller who had opened up her account of Blackwell’s Island by dwelling on the sky and then relating it to the grim nature of what she is about to write, Fern uses the exact opposite strategy. She states that it hardly matters how “lovely” the surroundings are if men and women are being locked in tight cells (Fern 1217). Fern then follows up by questioning the reader about how much do they have to do with the people “located on this lovely island.” (1218) This confrontation is very much like Fuller’s, albeit a much gentler reminder of the “stern realities.” Now there are two ways to interpret Fern’s account of Blackwell’s Island. Roggenkamp insists that she sees sympathy in her rhetoric while Ana Navascues wrote in her article, Anywhere Out of This World: The Exiles of “Blackwell’s Island” that she is somehow finding “amusement” in the behavior of the patients and in some ways shows approval of how they are being treated. In the second installment of ‘Blackwell’s Island,” Fern recounts the military regime she saw that was composed of the insane with “caps and drum” and were “parading under the trees” with a “ludicrously solemn earnestness.” (Navascues) Navascues accuses Fern of her inability to recognize that this preposterous description of the patients only reinforces the idea that people in the asylum could never fit in with society. This patronizing accusation is in great contrast with Fuller’s tendency to paint relatable and respectful portraits of the patients. Going back to Roggenkamp, she asserts that Fern’s meeting with each of her patients leads her to sympathize with them. The journalist essentially believes that the patients are the same as everyone with the exception that they are careless enough to enact the impulses that people outside have learned to suppress (Roggenkamp 65). A quiet-looking woman bluntly tells Fern that she can visit the asylum, provided that she “don’t stay too long, and talk too much.” (65) This then leads Fern to dwell on what would happen if she “spoke out in [tiresome and long winded] meetin” like that in a “diplomatic world.” (65) She returns to the theme of “public domesticity” when she glances through the door into a young woman’s room who “starts to her indignant feet with a tragic ‘How dare you?’” (65) Fern disrupts the readers’ instinctive categorization of the woman as a violent threat, persisting that they should be aware of how looking in itself could be considered a violation. “I was forced to believe that the proverb, ‘Every man’s house should be his castle,’ held as true of the lunatic as anybody else.” (65) Rogenkaamp posits that it is her recognition of shared humanity as the bedrock for genuine sympathy that typifies all of Fern’s writings about prisons and asylums (65). As with Fuller, Fern had also taken notice of the mothers with their infants living in the “long halls.” Unlike Fuller though, instead of worrying that her readers would consume the mothers’ suffering uncritically and voyeuristically, Fern dwells on the possibility of these newborns being “fated, perhaps, who knows? To come back to that very spot with their babies, as their mother had before them.” (1220) This indication of a cursed cycle of life, coupled with the innocent description of the babies’ “gleeful, dancing hands....” and the pride of motherhood, in my opinion, is Fern’s own way of creating a brand of sympathy that could possibly appeal to the mothers who are reading it.
It is no coincidence that Fuller and Fern both had discussed at length the topic of prostitution. Those who are familiar with Fanny Fern’s history would feel no surprise to see her aligning her sympathy with suffering humanity. She harbors hatred for injustice and the belief that society has the responsibility to help “life’s unfortunates.” (Fern, and Warren xxi) With the confession of feeling her “heartstrings tugg[ed]” at the sight of the “fallen women” of Blackwell’s Island, she expresses disgust at privileged women, addressed as “Mrs. Grundy” in the article, who believe that their “sons and daughters” should “grow up ignorant of their existence.” (Fern 1221) Fern knows as well as anyone that these wealthy women would “push them ‘anywhere out of the world’ as unfit to live, as unfit to die.” (1221) Fuller shares Fern’s sentiment that it is the upper-class citizens who are perpetuating prostitution. As someone who identifies with the group, she asks, in Woman in the Nineteenth Century, “her sisters” whether “the women at the fashionable houses would not be answerable for those women being in prison?” (Fuller) Both Fuller and Fern highlight as well the absence or carelessness of mothers that lead to their daughters being prostituted. Fern is especially scathing when she calls out mothers who “welcomes him with a sweet smile to the parlor where sit your young, trusting daughters” and “turns away with bitter, unwomanly words from his penitent, writhing women.” (Fern 1221) “You have something to do with it,” Fern’s attempt to urge her readers to take action on their outrage sounds very identical to Fuller’s rhetoric that verges on sermonology to those “women who have not yet considered this subject” to “take the place of mothers” by “giving them tender sympathy, counsel, employment.” (Fuller)
My conclusive thoughts after comparing both Fuller’s and Fern’s account of Blackwell’s Island are that Fuller’s primary objective for having written “Our City Charities” is to inform the public, especially the intellectuals who actually could do something about it, about the conditions of the patients and prisoners on the island and Fern seeks instead to move her readers and confront them to reflect on their own culpability of the same issues. Nevertheless, both women writers had successfully created a language imbued with womanly sympathy and had fearlessly employed it on writings about social issues happening in the public sphere at a time when most women and men alike agree that “men are differently constituted from women” and “women’s sphere is home.” (Fern 1222) Though their ways of writing sentimentally might differ, I think we can all agree that these two newspaper women are undeniably the revolutionary figures in American literature of the early times who are not afraid to violate powerful ideologies about “proper” gender roles with their proudly feminine style of writing.
Works Cited
Fern, Fanny, and Joyce W Warren. Ruth Hall And Other Writings. Rutgers Univ. Press, 1986.
Fern, Fanny. "Blackwell’s Island". The Bedford Anthology of American Literature, Volume One: Beginnings to 1865 / Edition 2, edited by Susan Belasco and Linck Johnson. Bedford St. Martin’s, 2014, pp. 1217-1223.
Fuller, Margaret. "Our City Charities". The Bedford Anthology of American Literature, Volume One: Beginnings to 1865 / Edition 2, edited by Susan Belasco and Linck Johnson. Bedford St. Martin’s, 2014, pp. 888-892.
Fuller, Margaret. "The Project Gutenberg Ebook Of Woman In The Nineteenth Century, By Margaret Fuller.". Gutenberg.Org, 2012, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/8642/8642-h/8642-h.htm.
Moses, Carole. “The Domestic Transcendentalism of Fanny Fern.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 50, no. 1, 2008, pp. 90–119. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40755501.
Navascues, Ana. "Anywhere Out Of This World: The Exiles Of “Blackwell’s Island” | Magnificat". Commons.Marymount.Edu, 2009, https://commons.marymount.edu/magnificat/anywhere-out-of-this-world-the-exiles-of-blackwells-island/. Accessed 11 Dec 2019.
Roggenkamp, Karen. Sympathy, Madness, and Crime: How Four Nineteenth-Century Journalists Made the Newspaper Women’s Business. The Kent State University Press, 2016, pp. 1-72.
Tonkovich, Nicole. Domesticity With A Difference: The Nonfiction Of Catherine Beecher, Sarah J. Hale, Fanny Fern, And Margaret Fuller. University Press Of Mississippi, 1997, pp. 14-46.
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