Sibling Romance in American Fiction, 1835-1900

E. VanDette

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137316905
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

This study posits that the narrative of sibling love as a culturally significant tradition in nineteenth-century American fiction. Ultimately, Emily E. VanDette suggests that these novels contribute to historical conversations about affiliation in such tumultuous contexts as sectional divisions, slavery debates, the Civil War, and Reconstruction.

CHAPTER 1

SIBLING PEDAGOGY: THE BROTHER–SISTER IDEAL IN DOMESTIC ADVICE AND CHILDREN’S PERIODICAL LITERATURE

What can be a more lovely sight than that of brothers and sisters who truly love one another, and who seek to elevate, adorn, and improve each other?¹

William Alcott

WITH HIS CLAIM FOR THE UNSURPASSED LOVELINESS of sibling devotion in his 1850 book of advice for American boys, William Alcott, one of the most prolific American domestic educators of the nineteenth century, articulated a social fixation that predominated in advice literature, fiction, and the real lives and correspondence of brothers and sisters in nineteenth-century America. The tradition of American family values discourse that emerged with unprecedented emphasis throughout the nineteenth century placed a special spotlight on sibling dynamics. As the trope of tyrannical parents and rebellious children that dominated Revolutionary discourse wore out its salience in the era of national identity building, an era more conducive to the antipaternalism and egalitarianism of Enlightenment thinking, American discourse increasingly invoked the lateral dynamic of brothers and sisters to resolve crises of identities, attachments, obligations, and filial duties. At once evocative of sameness (generational, familial, biological, cultural, and hierarchical) and difference (namely, and significantly, gender), the opposite-sex sibling pair presents the richest potential within the family for interrogating the extent and boundaries of individual identities and their bonds and duties to others. It is the goal of this book to demonstrate how American writers, especially from the antebellum era through the movement of the African American nadir, seized upon that potential in their fiction. Beyond its capacity for allegorizing social and political identities and dynamics in fiction, representations of the love between brothers and sisters had a resounding role in the moralizing discourse of domestic instruction as well. In this chapter, I will trace the popular dissemination of ideal sibling love through the traditions of domestic advice manuals and children’s periodical literature, genres that share a widespread popularity and appeal, as well as a rich capacity for disciplining family dynamics. The sibling pedagogy that emerges in these prolific fields of discourse establishes the cultural salience and rhetorical appeal of the sibling affiliation that writers of American fiction would seize upon in their depictions of lateral affiliation.

“NOW, MY YOUNG FRIENDS, BE ‘WHAT A SISTER SHOULD BE’ ”: THE IDEAL OPPOSITE-SEX SIBLING BOND IN DOMESTIC ADVICE LITERATURE

When they imagined American civic and social relationships through the paradigm of sibling dynamics, writers of nationalizing domestic fiction were tapping into a family ideology widely articulated in the advice literature of the day. In their depictions of intensely attached and mutually devoted brothers and sisters, nineteenth-century novels reflected a cultural trend that posited the opposite-sex sibling pair as the ideal, reciprocal, and unsullied social dynamic.² The popular genre of domestic advice literature gave special attention to codes of conduct for opposite-sex siblings throughout the nineteenth century. Resembling the traditional heteronormative marriage values of the day, the advice to young adults often defined the brother’s responsibility to protect and serve his sister, and the sister’s duty to confide in and depend upon her brother. As Hemphill has established in her history of siblings in America, “By the 1830s, brothers and sisters were advised directly to spend time with and confide in each other, and that they were properly a great influence on each other.” The antebellum advice for siblings encouraged young men to protect their sisters and asserted as a particular charge to young women the moral improvement of her brothers. Brother–sister pairs were raised to practice the sort of dynamic they were to aspire to as married adults, as their sibling relationship allowed children to test their skills and feelings in an intense, affectionate relationship with the opposite sex.³ Mintz attributes the cultural trend of encouraging marriage-like closeness between siblings to the reality that, as the typical marriage age was increasingly older due to socioeconomic pressures, many Victorian parents would not live to see their children married and settled into adulthood, and were therefore anxious to foster sibling solidarity to ensure familial support. Mintz also points to “the ethic of purity that discouraged early love affairs,” as well as the tradition of educating children at home, which placed siblings in constant contact and fostered their intellectual and emotional attachment to one another.⁴ Particularly given that the literature for American children historically reflects a strong attachment to Lockean principles for consent-based and antipatriarchal governance and education, the emphasis on sibling love presented a fitting opportunity to reinforce egalitarian dynamics, solidarity, and cooperation.⁵

That some of the most popular and prolific writers of domestic fiction also contributed to the growing discourse of family conduct reinforces the emphatic role of sibling love in both of those genres. In her historical novel The Linwoods (1837), Catharine Maria Sedgwick would allegorize the imminent danger of Southern secession signaled by the historic Nullification crisis of the 1830s in the story of a Revolutionary-era family fraught with a divisiveness that could only be repaired by the passionate attachment between the Linwood brother-and-sister pair. If sibling affiliation would signify the terms of national recuperation in that novel (a reading that I will expand upon in the next chapter), Sedgwick would promote the more practical codes of sibling attachment in her conduct book for young women, Means and Ends, or Self-training (1839), in which she presents to her young readers ideal womanhood through the model of a sister’s devotion to her brother. In Means and Ends, “Mary Bond,” the young woman whose manners Sedgwick implores her young readers to emulate, exhibits impeccable industry, conscientiousness, familial devotion, as well as piety in a central chapter that describes Mary nursing her sick brother back to health during their parents’ extended absence from home.

By showcasing Mary’s devotion to her brother in the setting of a sick room, Sedgwick draws upon a particular expectation that sisters serve their brothers in this capacity. As one of Sedgwick’s contemporaries articulated in an 1837 conduct book, “As woman seems formed by nature to execute the offices of a nurse, sisters should be particularly kind and tender to sick brothers; for there are few things which tend more to conciliate affection, than sympathy with us in our sufferings, and all those gentle and willing efforts, which, if they cannot mitigate our pains, have such a power to soothe our minds and divert our attention from the sense of suffering.”⁶ The importance of Mary’s competence in this context underscores the exclusivity of her sisterly love and care, as she learns to take full responsibility for her brother’s care when all others who take turns as “watchers” risk the invalid’s life with their absurd and careless bedside blunders. When even the family doctor declines credit for Raymond’s recuperation and admits to the grateful parents that “Raymond owes his recovery to Mary,” Raymond’s sentimental expostulations affirm the power of his sister’s devotion: “ ‘Oh, mother!’ exclaimed Raymond, bursting into tears, ‘she is the best sister in the world!’ ‘She is the best sister in the two worlds!’ cried little Gracie Bond, a child of five years old.” Not only does the main recipient of Mary’s loyal and competent care validate her fulfillment of ideal sisterhood, but Mary’s success also serves as a model for the younger sister looking on. The moralizing voice of the narrator articulates the broader implications of Mary’s conduct: “A source of true comfort and happiness is such a child, and such a sister, as Mary Bond!—a light in her parent’s dwelling, and destined to be the central sun of a little system of her own” (140). By practicing her domestic skills, devotion, and selflessness upon her brother, the primary object of her familial love and devotion during her childhood, Mary exhibits her capacity for assuming the role of wife and mother in “a little system of her own” after her eventual separation from her brother.

While the practice of sisterly devotion as training for domesticity was standard enough family pedagogy, Sedgwick returns to Mary Bond, a name rich with affiliation-laden significance, to make a compelling case for the relationship between sibling love and the campaign for women’s rights in a chapter titled “Might Makes Right.” While she demurs against placing women in some of the higher offices of “man’s sphere,” claiming that women were never intended to “lead armies, harangue in halls of legislation, bustle up to ballot-boxes, or sit on judicial tribunals,” Sedgwick urges her readers to uplift the social status of women through their own intellectual development, which will qualify them for a closer intercourse with the men in their families. Although not quite as radical in her agenda for women’s rights as to demand equal enfranchisement to men, Sedgwick advocates for the reform of property rights as well as divorce and custody laws, and she insists upon the importance of women elevating themselves intellectually in order to make private interventions in the public sphere. She asks, “ … may we not hope there will be less folly and corruption in the places where men most do congregate, when women are so educated, that men may hold more communion on their great social duties with their mothers, wives, and sisters?” (271) It is the last of those familial roles that Sedgwick will draw upon to illustrate for her young readers the power of “women’s work” in her extensive example of Mary Bond’s capacity for influencing her brother.

In this illustration of a woman’s sisterly devotion equipping her to influence her brother’s character, Sedgwick explains the ideal mutuality of the relationship between a loving sister and her brother, as the sister who inspires her brother’s admiration and respect may count on gaining educational advantages beyond the conventional sphere of womanhood. Her rationale invokes the idea of the supremacy and intensity of sibling love:

The tenderest friendship existed between [Mary] and her brother Raymond. The love of a brother and sister has been called the only Platonic love; and if by that is meant an affection with the tenderness of love, and the purity and disinterestedness of friendship, it is so. Mary was next to Raymond in age, and they were bound together by that bond of sympathy which often unites particular members of a family, when, not loving the others less, they love each other more. Raymond saw Mary’s accurate and intelligent performance of her domestic duties; he saw that nothing in her “woman’s sphere” was neglected or slighted. Her habitual, thorough personal neatness, excited his respect, and her delicacy, and the perfect purity of her mind, his reverence.

As a reward for Mary’s model execution of domesticity, she shared the masculine privileges of her brother’s world: “Mary was not confined to ‘woman’s sphere.’ Raymond, as far as was possible by the communication of letters, participated his studies with her; and, during his vacations, they studied and read together, and talked on those intellectual subjects that most interested him” (272). While not advocating for such social reform as would extend educational access and political agency directly to women, Sedgwick encouraged her young readers to earn access to their brothers’ world through the virtue of their domestic prowess, which would render young women, and their domestic sphere, irresistible safe havens to men. “Believe me, my young friends,” she insists, “there is no spell of enchantment like that wrought by domestic love” (273).

For Sedgwick, a more important reciprocity a brother could offer his sister than the sharing of his formal education, and an ultimate goal of such domestic pedagogy, is his public-sphere stewardship over the rights of women. Extending her example of Mary Bond’s successful application of ideal domesticity to the purpose of securing her brother’s love and respect, Sedgwick follows the Bond siblings to their young adulthood, when Mary exhibits her intellectual capacity to manage their father’s estate for their widowed mother, while educating and nurturing the younger siblings of the family, “and, in the midst of all these new cares, and multiplied responsibilities, preserving the sweetness and cheerfulness of her temper, the modesty and deference of her manners, and the unpretendingness of her conversation” (273). Sedgwick credits such an impressive balance of domesticity and intellectual capacity with inspiring the brother to act on behalf of women’s interests in the public sphere:

What, think you, was the effect of the conviction of his sister’s competency and goodness upon his character, and upon his views of the rights of women? Would he not have a faith in the capabilities of women which no argument could shake, and no ridicule could touch? If called upon to legislate in the matter, would he not maintain a married woman’s right to her own property? Would he not allow that she and her husband were equal partners in their pecuniary concerns, and that in case of survivorship, she was competent to manage the property? Would he, above all, deny her right to separate from a tormenting or drunken husband, and to retain the custody of the children she had borne to him? (274)

Taking a more conservative approach than such radical contemporaneous feminists as Margaret Fuller, whose Woman in the Nineteenth Century would demand women’s right to participate fully in the shaping of public policy, Sedgwick nevertheless uses her domestic advice as a vehicle to advocate for the reform of women’s rights in divorce and property cases. Revealing the loaded social significance of her book’s title—that is, that domesticity functions as the “means” to the “ends” of women’s elevation in society—Sedgwick would turn emphatically to the potential that lies in the affectionate loyalty between a brother and sister for reforming woman’s status in the social world.

The example of Mary Bond illustrates that a sister’s love represents the power to influence her brother’s political righteousness as well as his moral character, crucially interrelated civic virtues for Sedgwick’s ideal American man. In their instructions for the mutual obligations between a brother and sister, domestic-advice literature typically places the brother’s moral life, especially as it will be reflected in his eventual marriage choice, as a particular charge to his sister. The disciplining voice of Sedgwick’s Means and Ends asks, “Would a young man who had enjoyed an intimate intercourse with such a sister as Raymond’s, be in danger from the allurement of vicious women? Would he not disdain the society of emptyheaded, frivolous, and gossiping girls, and with the image of actual living excellence cut into his heart, would he run the slightest risk of yoking himself to an uneducated girl, however beautiful, high-born, rich and fashionable she might be?” (274). To reinforce her argument for a sister’s moral influence over her brother, Sedgwick shares the ostensibly first-hand testimony of a letter from a “college-boy … to his sister” (presumably a letter to the author from her own brother), which declares, “ ‘One who has an affectionate and loveable sister who can sympathise with him, and show an interest in his welfare, has a greater safeguard for his own character, than he ever could create within himself. If all sisters were aware how much power they exert over their brothers, if the sisters of the present day were what they should be, we should see a much higher standard of character and principles among the young men of this generation.’ ” (274) Imploring her readers to “be ‘what a sister should be,’ what Mary Bond was, is to her brother,” (275) Sedgwick insists that by such means the present generation of women may become “competent to exercise all the rights which your friends claim for you; and when you are thus competent, they will not, as I have said before, long be withheld from you.” Despite the militant overtones of her concluding declaration that “Your might will enforce your right,” Sedgwick’s optimistic estimation of the social power of women’s strict application of sibling codes interestingly echoes the conservative rationale for the gradual emancipation of slaves that trickled into abolitionist debates of the same era. Perhaps seizing upon the reciprocal capacity for sibling devotion that she experienced in her own life⁷ and represented over and over again in her nationalistic fiction, Sedgwick would reinforce in her conduct literature the social importance of nurturing strong attachments between the brothers and sisters of a family.

As the central figures of the domestic world, siblings represented the potential of the family to inculcate and insulate, a socializing process deemed critical in a nation of self-determining citizenry. In the dynamics parents were to encourage between opposite-sex children lay an opportunity not only for instructing the accepted gender roles and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgement
• Introduction
• 1. Sibling Pedagogy: The Brother–Sister Ideal in Domestic Advice and Children’s Periodical Literature
• 2. Remembering Resistance and Resilience: The Revolutionary Sibling Romances of Sedgwick, Simms, and Kennedy
• 3. “She carried the romance of sisterly affection too far”: Sibling Love and Violence in Caroline Lee Hentz’s Ernest Linwood
• 4. “A whole, perfect thing”: Sibling Bonds and Anti-slavery Politics in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred
• 5. Reconstructing Family in the African American Nadir: The Trope of Sibling Affiliation in Works by Harper, Chesnutt, and Hopkins
• Epilogue: Sibling Romance in/and the Canon; Or, the Ambiguities
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index