Battling Girlhood

Sympathy, Social Justice, and the Tomboy Figure in American Literature

Kristen B. Proehl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429842023
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

From Jo March of Little Women (1868) to Katniss Everdeen of The Hunger Games (2008), the American tomboy figure has evolved into an icon of modern girlhood and symbol of female empowerment. Battling Girlhood: Sympathy, Social Justice, and the Tomboy Figure in American Literature traces the development of the tomboy figure from its origins in nineteenth-century sentimental novels to twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature and film.

1 Tomboys in Rag Alley

Understanding Cap Black and the Sentimental Tradition

“Demmy, you New York newsboy, will you never be a woman?”

—Major Ira Warfield, E.D.E.N. Southworth,

The Hidden Hand (1859)

The opening chapters of E.D.E.N. Southworth’s The Hidden Hand (1859) introduce Hurricane Hall: a “dark, red sandstone” mansion nestled away in “one of the loneliest and wildest of the mountain regions in Virginia” (7). Its “lonely proprietor,” Major Ira Warfield, lives in virtual seclusion, with “only his old-fashioned housekeeper, Mrs. Condiment, and his old family servants and his favorite horses and dogs” (7). Southworth’s repeated invocation of the term “family” to characterize Warfield’s household prompts readers to reconsider their assumptions about this term at a moment in which its definition was in flux.¹ In lieu of a biological family, Warfield has constructed a non-consanguineous, surrogate one with his housekeeper, slaves, and domesticated animals.² His bachelor lifestyle, which is marked by his apparent refusal or inability, even at his advanced stage in life, to produce an heir to his family’s estate, resists gendered social expectations for elite, white men in nineteenth-century United States.³ Warfield’s surrogate family may offer a temporary substitute to a consanguineous one, but Southworth’s repeated references to his loneliness hint at the emotional limitations of this arrangement. Tellingly, rather than remedying his isolation with romantic courtship and marriage, he adds yet another unconventional member to his household by adopting young Capitola Le Noir or, as she calls herself, Cap Black: the cross-dressing, street urchin, “newsboy” from Rag Alley, a fictional street in New York City’s Bowery district. As Cap challenges gender norms for young, nineteenth-century women through her stereotypically masculine speech, behavior, and dress, she becomes the first clearly recognizable tomboy figure in American literature. Like many sentimental protagonists, as well as later tomboy figures, Cap experiences the early dissolution of her biological family and, as a result, comes of age amid two non-consanguineous families. This key trope of the sentimental novel becomes a defining convention of The Hidden Hand and many of the other popular tomboy narratives that follow in its footsteps.

While tragic circumstances such as parental death or abandonment may initially compel the child protagonists of sentimental novels to develop surrogate families, many also display a heightened capacity to develop sympathetic bonds with non-blood-related individuals, such as neighbors, adopted guardians, and friends. In both sentimental fiction and tomboy narratives, reimagined families become a metaphor for the strengths and weaknesses of the nation’s political bonds. As relationships within these families succeed and fail, they comment upon the limits and possibilities of membership in the body politic, particularly for white women and people of color.⁴ Offering a metaphor for communities in early America, as well as an implicit critique of British nobility, the families of sentimental fiction insist that sympathy is a more powerful social building block than blood kinship or marriage. Both tomboy narratives and sentimental novels invoke this trope in order to advocate for equal rights and full citizenship for white women and African American men and women. However, this is just one of many ways in which Southworth draws upon key sentimental conventions in order to construct the tomboy narrative.

This book argues that The Hidden Hand is the first in a series of iconic tomboy narratives to rely upon but also reconfigure sentimental literary conventions. Southworth’s portrayal of Cap, in particular, builds upon but also diverges from several earlier, iconic sentimental protagonists—namely, Gerty of Maria Susanna Cummins’s The Lamplighter (1854) and Ellen Montgomery of Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1850). As Joanne Dobson has noted, “it is entirely possible that Southworth had Ellen, the ultimate sentimental heroine, in mind in the composition of this book, and intended Cap as a corrective to her” (234). The novel also capitalizes upon the popularity of sentimental narratives of orphaned street children that appear throughout the pages of nineteenth-century American and European fiction, such as Hans Christian Anderson’s “little match girl” (1845), a street waif who freezes to death selling matches, or Charles Dickens’s feisty but sympathetic pickpockets, Oliver Twist and the Artful Dodger. As scholars of the history of childhood have noted, literary and photographic representations of street urchins simultaneously evoke and reverse the conventions of the eighteenth-century Romantic child (American Child 4, 185).

Along similar lines, representations of newsboys have appeared across dime novels, artwork, magazines, and newspapers.⁵ Because newsboys grappled with poverty, harsh working conditions, and health threats, philanthropists and reformers took interest in them and sentimentalized their plight.⁶ Newsboys laid the groundwork for other iconic boy protagonists of the late nineteenth century, such as Huck Finn; they are liberated from the constraints of domesticity but are also associated with cultural anxieties and juvenile delinquency. Cap’s newsboy persona, I would suggest, demonstrates Dobson’s and Sanders’s claims that The Hidden Hand functions as both a sentimental and post-sentimental text. She transforms herself into a more sympathetic subject even as she distances herself, via cross-dressing and other non-gender-normative behaviors, from classic, sentimental representations of girlhood.

In addition to her cross-dressing, physicality, and desire for adventure, Cap defies sentimental expectations through her expression—or, in some instances, lack thereof—of sympathy. She often appears markedly unsympathetic toward the individuals in her midst, such as her adopted family members and servants, but simultaneously displays an excessive amount of sympathy for the novel’s villains. Perhaps most significantly, Cap differs from other sentimental protagonists, such as Little Eva of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, who express sympathy for marginalized members of their communities. The politics of The Hidden Hand, however, are a bit more ambiguous than later tomboy narratives. As Christopher Looby has noted, The Ledger, which published The Hidden Hand and much of Southworth’s other work, retained “apolitical neutrality” and failed to take a stand on slavery even in the years leading up to the Civil War.⁷

The Hidden Hand establishes one of the tomboy narrative’s central concerns, which is the relationship between childhood gender development and the family. On a symbolic level, tomboy figures may be frequently associated with non-consanguineous families because of the challenge they pose to the cultural dominance of the biological family. As the tomboy figure resists domestic norms and rituals, she signals a potential unwillingness or inability to reproduce a biological family of her own. Southworth not only integrates sentimental representations of the family into the tomboy narrative but also conventions such as disciplinary intimacy and sympathetic identification, both of which prove crucial to the tomboy narrative’s development in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Southworth’s invocation and subversion of sentimental forms create a literary–cultural space that allows for the emergence of the tomboy figure.

Even Cap’s subversion of sentimental expectations for young women, however, unfolds amid the backdrop of other sentimental conventions—and, in particular, those that involve representations of the family. As Cindy Weinstein has explained, “separations of parent and child constitute the foundational plot mechanism upon which so many sentimental texts depend”; indeed, sentimental novels display “far more aunts and uncles, guardians and wards, adoptive parents and adopted children than living biological mothers and fathers” (26–7). After enduring the loss of her parents and sadistic abuse from her new caretaker, Gerty is mercifully adopted by True Flint, the neighborhood “lamplighter.” Like many orphaned, sentimental child protagonists, Gerty displays a capacity to forge sympathetic bonds with neighbors and friends. Ellen experiences a similar traumatic loss when financial and medical concerns prompt her parents to move to Europe and abandon her with an unsympathetic relative. Like Gerty and, eventually, Cap Black, Ellen responds to this abandonment by constructing a surrogate family—in her case, with Alice and John Humphreys, the children of a local minister. In all cases, bonds of sympathy prove to be a more powerful social building block than blood kinship or marriage. Although the tomboy narrative reimagines the sentimental female protagonist in many ways, it also appropriates the sentimental novel’s emphasis on the importance of the individual’s affective ties to the community.

As Southworth draws upon the conventions of the sentimental novel to construct the tomboy narrative, she challenges a variety of social assumptions about the power and importance of the family. Tellingly, Cap’s blood relations appear to cause more problems for her than her adopted family members. This reinforces the sentimental novel’s tendency to portray adoption as “the most reliable expression of affection” and raises questions about whether or not consanguinity is truly “the best indicator of love” (Weinstein 11). Representations of nontraditional families in tomboy narratives likewise resonate with the utopian experiments of the nineteenth-century United States, such as Brook Farm, and popular religious sects, such as Shakerism, both of which challenged the dominance of the procreative biological family and introduced new models of social organization.⁸

In many tomboy narratives and sentimental novels, nontraditional families emerge in response to the dissolution of the immediate family due to death, separation, or abandonment. Southworth’s portrayal of the details surrounding Cap’s early familial loss is somewhat convoluted and disclosed gradually throughout the novel.⁹ Eventually, however, she reveals that Cap’s mother left her in the care of Nancy Grewell, a biracial midwife and former slave. She did so in order to prevent Cap’s death at the hands of her evil uncle, Gabriel Le Noir, who plotted to murder Cap in an effort to seize the family’s fortune. In a fantastic sequence of events, Grewell and Cap were sold onto a slave ship, shipwrecked, and then escaped to Rag Alley. The narrative of The Hidden Hand thus begins thirteen years after Cap Black and Grewell fled to New York to escape from Cap’s murderous uncle. After serving as a surrogate parent for over a decade, Grewell becomes ill and, recognizing that Cap’s welfare is at stake, heads to Virginia to inform others of Cap’s whereabouts and existence.

Southworth has a great deal in common with her fellow sentimental novelists in regard to her portrayal of unexpected family reunions and connections. As Joanne Dobson has argued, the “patent improbability” of The Hidden Hand alerts readers

this is not a realistic fiction but, rather, a fantastic universe where elements of the story—of feminine sentiment, of masculine adventure—are primary, taking a life of their own, and certainly taking precedence over the rigid possibilities of ‘real life’.

(xxx)

Although Grewell dies in Virginia, she successfully relays information about Cap’s existence to Major Ira Warfield, who has his own reasons for hating Gabriel Le Noir. In typical sentimental fashion, Warfield then travels to New York City to find Cap, whom we later learn is the child of his long-lost friends. He miraculously locates her through a chance encounter, figures out her identity even though she is disguised as a boy, and brings her back to Virginia to live as his adopted “niece.” With no knowledge of her family history and lawful inheritance, Cap is initially delighted by the dramatic sequence of events that led her from urban poverty to Hurricane Hall. However, she soon comes to resent the gendered restrictions of upper-class domesticity and her tomboy traits persist, even in this new environment.

Cap’s physicality, assertiveness, irreverence for authority, and desire for adventure, among other characteristics, originate in Rag Alley and appear closely connected to this setting. Southworth leaves the details of Cap’s early years with Grewell, who served as a surrogate parent to Cap, rather ambiguous. Grewell appears to have curbed Cap’s tomboyism, as Cap does not begin to cross-dress until after her departure. Nevertheless, the ease with which she adopts masculine attire suggests that her non-traditional familial upbringing in Rag Alley may have prepared her to take the steps necessary in order to survive. Without a wage-earning parent, Cap must generate income; however, as a young girl in the mid-nineteenth century, she would have been automatically disqualified from most paying jobs, such as shelling oysters or selling papers. Cap cross-dresses, in part, as a means of bypassing the limited legal options for employment as a young, female worker. Even positions such as fruit and flower peddling had long-standing ties to prostitution. Therefore, financial necessity, as well as a desire to deflect unwanted attention from “bad boys and bad men,” as she claims, leads Cap to dress as a newsboy (45). Southworth’s portrayal of the Bowery gestures to some of the most pressing social issues of her era, including class inequities and child labor, but fails to offer a coherent social critique of them.

While Cap’s anxieties about sexual violence are well founded, they reinforce the widespread perception of New York City’s working class neighborhoods as areas of “concentrated vice” (Stansell 64). Her decision to cross-dress may challenge gender norms, but her claim that she does so in order to protect herself from men also reinforces them. As Christine Stansell explains, middle-class female reformers often targeted working-class women because their perceived “sexual and social demeanor subverted strict notions of female domesticity and propriety” (xiii). Southworth frames Cap’s tomboyism in the context of Victorian gender ideologies and thereby makes it more legible to her readers. That said, the fact that Cap must dress as a boy in order to support herself financially reflects the limited options available to impoverished girls in mid-nineteenth-century United States. It is also telling that her tomboyism persists long after she leaves the Bowery, as it suggests that her gender nonconformity is not merely a function of this urban setting.

The early chapters of The Hidden Hand portray a constitutive relationship between Cap’s tomboyism and her familial environment. With no memory of her parents, she grows up in a non-traditional household, under the care of a biracial servant who becomes her surrogate parent. When she gets into trouble with the law for posing as a boy, Warfield refers to her as “a poor, friendless, motherless, fatherless child, lost and wandering in your great Babylon!” (39). Warfield thus presents a vision of Cap as an individual whose life has been defined by her early parental loss. He implies that if Cap had grown up with a protective patriarch, such as himself, she might not have needed to cross-dress in order to protect herself from the sexual dangers of city life. Shortly thereafter, as Cap discusses her parentage with Warfield, she rather humorously claims that she “never had any” father and “never had a mother, either,” as far as she has heard (40). With no sense of familial history or even thoughts about her parentage, Cap is liberated from the gendered expectations and constraints of her class status. Her relatively anonymous life in Rag Alley has granted her the opportunity to reimagine and create her own, unique identity as a tomboy figure.

Despite her general adaptability, Cap’s transition from poverty to upper-class life disrupts the relatively stable sense of identity that she has developed as a newsboy in Rag Alley. Startled by “an intense realization of the contrast between her past and her present life,” she asks herself: “Can this be really be I myself, and not another? I, the little houseless wandered through the streets and alleys of New York?” (108). As she surveys her new, upper-class surroundings and situation, she even starts to wonder if she has gone insane, musing:

This fine old country seat, of which I vainly think myself the mistress, is just the pauper mad-house…this fine old military officer whom I call my uncle is the head doctor. The servants who come at my call are the keepers.

(109)

It is telling that class privilege and the gendered expectations that accompany it appear to trigger Cap’s concerns about her mental sanity. Her crisis of identity resonates with mid-nineteenth-century cultural anxieties about social mobility. As historian Karen Halttunen explains,

in what was believed to be a fluid social world where no one occupied a fixed social position, the question ‘Who am I?’ loomed large; and in an urban social world where many of the people who met face-to-face each day were strangers, the question ‘Who are you really?’ assumed even greater significance.

(xv)

Cap’s imaginative world becomes a vehicle through which Southworth critiques the artificiality of middle- and upper-class lives. Cap has so adapted to the chaos of the Bowery, however, that she finds more potential for insanity and confusion within the walls of Warfield’s Hurricane Hall mansion than in the New York City streets.

While Cap’s parental loss certainly shapes her early childhood experiences, she does not appear to have any memory or emo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Tomboys in Rag Alley: Understanding Cap Black and the Sentimental Tradition
• 2 Teaching Jo: Philanthropy, Education, and the Tomboy Trajectory in Louisa May Alcott’s Trilogy
• 3 Tomboys on the Prairie: Violence, Discipline, and Community in the Little House Series
• 4 Queer Sentiments: Tomboyism and Familial Belonging in Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding
• 5 Scout as a Social Critic: Sympathetic Alliances in To Kill a Mockingbird
• 6 Beasts of the Southern Wild: Queer Childhood, Race, and the Dystopian South
• Coda
• Works Cited
• Index