Miss Grief and Other Stories (3 page)

However, when Lizzie Duveneck died in March 1888 and her father subsequently took the baby home to America to be raised by relatives, Woolson became despondent. Compounding her sense of loss were her fears about her precarious finances. In her attempt to maintain her villa, she had racked up large debts, which her nephew kindly paid. Although she earned decent money for her novels as well as modest interest from some American bonds, she worried for the rest of her life about money and her ability to support herself.

Her sister again tried to cure her grief and depression with travel, this time to Greece, Egypt, and the Holy Land. Woolson was enchanted with Cairo, where she stayed on alone for three months in early 1890, during which time she felt herself reborn. She reveled in the exotic atmosphere of these foreign countries and developed a wider view of the world, learning to no longer “look down” on the Middle East from a “superior Anglo-Saxon standpoint.”
¹¹

Although she longed to continue her travels, Woolson returned to England, knowing it would best allow her to work without interruption. She lived for over a year in Cheltenham, but she found it too dull and moved to Oxford in 1891. Now closer to London, she began to see James more frequently and traveled often to the city, where she took in plays and visited galleries. She also tried a new remedy for her growing deafness, artificial eardrums, which worked briefly but then
caused severe pains that she found difficult to endure. Meanwhile the Russian flu epidemic had reached England, causing Oxford to shut down for the first time in living memory.

Leaving England for Venice in June 1893, Woolson regretted leaving her friend James behind but hoped he would visit her in Italy as soon as he could. In Venice, she tried to recuperate from the flu she had contracted just before her departure, as well as the depression and physical collapse she often experienced after completing a novel. She spent the summer and fall floating in gondolas through the canals and out among the islands in the lagoon, solidifying friendships within the small expatriate community there and searching for an apartment where she could settle down again. She found temporary lodgings on the Grand Canal and brought her belongings out of storage from Florence, gathering around her the many reminders of her friends Boott and the Duvenecks.

During the six months Woolson lived in Venice, she tried hard to relieve the depression and ill health troubling her and planned to start writing again on January 1, 1894. However, as the new year dawned, she felt writing had become too great a strain for her to continue. She fell ill and began preparing for her death, although the doctor thought she was in no danger. During a sleepless night, around midnight of January 24, she instructed the nurse to fetch a special cup for her milk. When the nurse returned, she found the window open and Woolson on the pavement three stories below. The servants brought her upstairs, but she never regained consciousness, living only a few hours.

Although many believed that Woolson took her own life, her preparations for her death—most important, a will—were
incomplete at her death. Weakened by her recent illness, she may have fallen as she opened the window for fresh air. This was her family's firm belief. There are strong indications, however, that Woolson, who despaired of finding a home she could afford and of continuing to make her living as a writer, was ready to die. A firm believer in an afterlife that would solve the “cruel riddles” of this existence, she may have hastened her way there.
¹²

Woolson was buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, as she had earlier requested of her caretakers. The funeral was attended by a small group of mourners, expatriates who, like her, had not seen their homelands in many years. One of her closest friends, James, remained in London, prostrated by grief. Her memory would haunt him for many years, making its way into some of his later works, such as
The Beast in the Jungle
and
The Wings of the Dove
, in which he portrayed women who loved selflessly and unrequitedly. Yet Woolson's insistence on being buried in Rome's Protestant Cemetery, amid so many famous foreign writers and artists who had died in Italy, including Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats, indicates how much she hoped to be remembered in her own right—as an important writer rather than simply as a tragic inspiration to others.

WOOLSON
'
S WRITINGS WERE
so intimately tied to the places she traveled to and lived that they can be divided into three periods: the Great Lakes fiction of the early- to mid-1870s, the Southern fiction of the mid- to late-1870s, and the European fiction of the 1880s and early 1890s. This classification applies
only to the short stories and travel narratives, however. The settings of her novels stayed firmly in the United States, even when she was thousands of miles away. As she once explained, she would never be able to set a novel in Europe because all of her deepest feelings were “inseparably associated with home-scenes …[t]he Lake-country & Mackinac, the beautiful South, the farming-country of Ohio.”
¹³

Her list of “home-scenes” did not include her original home, Cleveland, which she felt had been spoiled by the rise of industry and the spread of blast furnaces and petroleum refineries. Instead, she listed the places she had loved best to visit. Although traditionally women had written primarily from the vantage point of their homes, Woolson was inspired to write by the new scenes she encountered on her travels. The landscapes that most attracted her were those that remained largely untouched. She spent much of her youth exploring nature: rowing, hiking, and studying flora and fauna. In adulthood, she was a devoted botanist, with a particular love of ferns, and many of her American stories are filled with the observations of a naturalist, particularly “St. Clair Flats,” “Sister St. Luke,” and “The South Devil.” She was also drawn to places that bore the marks of Old World influence, through immigration or colonization, such as Zoar and St. Augustine. She regretted the way Americans, particularly in the Midwest, valued the new over the old and thus erased all evidence of the past, be it the American wilderness or earlier human habitation. James would later write of her early stories, “she has a remarkable faculty of making the New World seem ancient.”
¹⁴

Critics applauded Woolson for discovering so many new scenes and expanding Americans' view of their nation in
the wake of the Civil War. Although some questioned the veracity of her works, Woolson was adamant that she drew strictly from life in the creation of her settings, plots, and characters. She also insisted on the importance of making her readers feel for her characters, who are often misunderstood and overlooked. While many of her contemporaries portrayed their provincial characters comically, Woolson portrayed without sentimentality social outsiders struggling for dignity, love, and respect. Her literary aesthetic can best be described as empathetic realism, a mode that she adapted from George Eliot, the favorite author of her early adulthood, and that she maintained even as she came to know and admire the analytic realism found in James's works.

In spite of practicing what might seem a more feminine version of realism, Woolson (like Eliot) was considered a quasi-masculine writer for writing realistically at all, and she understood herself as entering into a male sphere of literature. She regretted that, in her view, “women are prone to run off into the beautiful at the expense of strength.” She had “such a horror of ‘pretty,' ‘sweet' writing” that she was willing to risk “a style that was ugly and bitter, provided it was also
strong.
” Throughout her career, in fact, she sought out the companionship and support of influential male writers. The first such was the New York poet and critic Edmund Clarence Stedman. With his encouragement—he told her he found her stories as powerful as some of Hawthorne's—she was able to ignore the critics who expected her to write more sentimentally and preferred moral endings (like punishment for evil deeds) rather than what she felt was more “artistic and truthful-to-life.”
¹⁵
She became known, in fact, for her refusal to end her stories happily.

Woolson's earliest stories, set in the Great Lakes, many of which were published in
Castle Nowhere: Lake-Country Sketches
(1875), were atypical for women writers of her day, peopled as they were with miners, missionaries, and male adventurers. Often writing from a male point of view, she also exposed the limitations of her male characters, who generally assumed the superiority of their sophisticated, masculine view of the world. In many of these stories, she carefully examined the way some men observed women and held them to a narrow set of expectations, refusing to acknowledge their full humanity. For instance, in “St. Clair Flats,” the narrator's male friend can see no pathos in the isolated life of a religious zealot's wife; in “Jeanette,” an officer on Mackinac Island who, against his better judgment, falls in love with a half-Indian girl is surprised when she refuses him; and in “The Lady of Little Fishing,” a female missionary loses the respect of her all-male flock when she falls in love with a degenerate fur trapper.

As Woolson moved south, she extended her empathetic gaze to new regions, types, and conflicts. Her Southern stories, collected in
Rodman the Keeper: Southern Sketches
(1880), dealt extensively with the effects of the war on the South and the intrusions of Northerners into a beautiful and sometimes hostile region. Although the North was eager to forget the Civil War and Woolson was cautioned by one publisher against writing any more about it, she continued to portray white and black Southerners struggling to rebuild their lives. In stories such as “Rodman the Keeper,” “In the Cotton Country,” and “Old Gardiston,” she acknowledged the bitterness of the former
planter class and allowed those who had lost everything to speak for themselves, at a time when their real-life counterparts had virtually no means of telling their own stories. In “King David,” she depicted the racism of a white Northerner who has come south to educate freed slaves, ultimately giving voice to one of the students, who rejects David's feeble attempts at understanding. Woolson's Florida stories, such as “Sister St. Luke,” “Felipa,” and “The South Devil,” reveled in the exotic, wild landscape and portrayed Northern visitors who have a hard time accepting the carefree lifestyle of the locals, particularly Minorcans, an ethnic group from the Spanish island of Minorca. Once again, Woolson allowed these marginalized characters, particularly in “Felipa,” to speak back to the unwitting tourists trying to understand them.

Having made important contributions to the rise of the short story in the post–Civil War period, Woolson then set her sights on a bid for the Great American Novel, turning to what she knew best, the lives of women. Drawing inspiration from Eliot's
The Mill on the Floss
and Charlotte Brontë's
Jane Eyre
, she wrote
Anne
(1882), the coming-of-age story of an unconventional young woman, much like herself, growing up on Mackinac Island and forced to make her way in the world after the death of her father. The opening chapters are themselves a regional masterpiece, a loving portrait of the island and its remarkable inhabitants, including a New England spinster, a French priest, Anne's mixed-race (Native American and white) half siblings, and her Thoreau-like naturalist-philosopher father. Determined to write a national novel, however, Woolson left Mackinac behind and followed Anne to a finishing school in New York, a fashionable Eastern
resort, the battlefields of West Virginia during the Civil War (where Anne is a nurse), and ultimately to the rural hinterland of the Maryland–Pennsylvania border, where Anne must solve a murder in order to free the man she loves. At its core, however,
Anne
remains a story about a young woman discovering her considerable strengths and talents at a time when women were expected to hide them and remain at home. Anne does neither and thus joins the pantheon of literature's iconoclastic heroines.

Woolson's next novel was much less ambitious but more finely crafted.
For the Major
(1883) is the portrait of an isolated mountain village near Asheville, North Carolina, in the aftermath of the Civil War. At its center is a wife's attempts to hide from her husband her former marriage and motherhood. It subtly critiques the infantilization of women as it insists on the wife's noble self-sacrifices for her husband. Ultimately,
For the Major
provides a rather startling exposé of the duplicities that marriage requires. In Woolson's fiction, women know that they must play the roles men want to see them in, if they are to win men's affection.

This theme emerged in many of Woolson's short stories of the period as well. In “A Florentine Experiment” and “The Château of Corinne,” for instance, Woolson's female characters openly denounce men's expectations that women behave simply and adoringly. During the early years of her friendship with James, Woolson also returned to the theme of failed artists that she had first explored in “Solomon,” one of her Great Lakes stories. “‘Miss Grief,'” “The Street of the Hyacinth,” and “Château” most vividly portray the defeat of female writers and artists who possess the same serious ambitions that
Woolson harbored, reflecting the crisis of confidence occasioned by her engagement with European art and culture, as well as her friendship with James. A later story, “In Sloane Street,” never published in book form until now, again picks up these themes, showing how astutely Woolson observed James and inferred his disapproval of women writers.

In these and other stories, Woolson also began experimenting with the analytical style James was known for, emphasizing description and character analysis over plot. While she felt this style had much to offer, she lamented its lack of feeling. Nowhere does she more overtly seek to redress this deficiency, infusing analysis with intense emotions, than in her third novel,
East Angels
(1886), set in the region near St. Augustine. In this work she answered James directly by rewriting, to a degree,
The Portrait of a Lady
. Woolson had earlier written to James that she couldn't tell whether Isabel Archer really loved Osmond, for if Isabel had, surely “heart-breaking, insupportable, killing grief” would have followed his betrayal.
¹⁶
In
East Angels
, Woolson exposes her heroine Margaret's great, suppressed passion, showing the severe emotional costs of the self-renunciation she and similarly Isabel practiced. Woolson wanted to reveal what women, in their ordinary lives, could not. As Margaret explains, “We go through life, …more than half of us—women, I mean—obliged always to conceal our real feelings.”
¹⁷
As in so many of Woolson's works, this concealment has both emotional and physical consequences. The mind affects the body in mysterious ways that male physicians are helpless to understand or remedy, a theme Woolson explored most fully in her Italian story “Dorothy.”