Elizabeth Drew Stoddard
Encyclopedia
NEE
NEE is a political protest group whose goal was to provide an alternative for voters who are unhappy with all political parties at hand in Belgium, where voting is compulsory.The NEE party was founded in 2005 in Antwerp...
Barstow (May 6, 1823 – August 1, 1902), was a United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
poet
Poet
A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...
and novelist
Biography
Elizabeth Stoddard was born Elizabeth Drew Barstow in the small coastal town of Mattapoisett, MassachusettsMattapoisett, Massachusetts
Mattapoisett is a town in Plymouth County, Massachusetts, United States. The population was 6,463 at the 2008 census.For geographic and demographic information on the village of Mattapoisett Center, please see the article Mattapoisett Center, Massachusetts....
. She studied at Wheaton Seminary
Wheaton College (Massachusetts)
Wheaton College is a four-year, private liberal arts college with an approximate student body of 1,550. Wheaton's residential campus is located in Norton, Massachusetts, between Boston, Massachusetts and Providence, Rhode Island. Founded in 1834 as a female seminary, it is one of the oldest...
, Norton, Massachusetts
Norton, Massachusetts
Norton is a town in Bristol County, Massachusetts, United States, and contains the village of Norton Center. The population was 18,036 at the 2000 census...
. After her marriage in 1852 to poet Richard Henry Stoddard
Richard Henry Stoddard
Richard Henry Stoddard was an American critic and poet.-Biography:Richard Henry Stoddard was born on July 2, 1825, in Hingham, Massachusetts. His father, a sea-captain, was wrecked and lost on one of his voyages while Richard was a child, and the lad went in 1835 to New York City with his mother,...
, the couple settled permanently in New York City, where they belonged to New York's vibrant, close-knit literary and artistic circles. She assisted her husband in his literary work, and contributed stories, poems and essays to the periodicals. Many of her own works were originally published between 1859 and 1890 in such magazines as Harper's Monthly
Harper's Magazine
Harper's Magazine is a monthly magazine of literature, politics, culture, finance, and the arts, with a generally left-wing perspective. It is the second-oldest continuously published monthly magazine in the U.S. . The current editor is Ellen Rosenbush, who replaced Roger Hodge in January 2010...
, Harper's Bazaar, and The Atlantic Monthly
The Atlantic Monthly
The Atlantic is an American magazine founded in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1857. It was created as a literary and cultural commentary magazine. It quickly achieved a national reputation, which it held for more than a century. It was important for recognizing and publishing new writers and poets,...
.
Writing style and criticism
Stoddard is most widely known today as the author of The Morgesons (1862), her first of three novels. Her other two novels are Two Men (1865) and Temple House (1867). Stoddard was also a prolific writer of short stories, children's tales, poems, essays, travel writing, and journalism pieces.Her work combines the narrative style of the popular nineteenth-century male-centered bildungsroman
Bildungsroman
In literary criticism, bildungsroman or coming-of-age story is a literary genre which focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood , and in which character change is thus extremely important...
with the conventions of women's romantic fiction in this revolutionary exploration of the conflict between a woman's instinct, passion, and will, and the social taboos, family allegiances, and traditional New England restraint that inhibit her.
Her most studied work, The Morgesons is set in a small seaport town, and is the dramatic story of Cassandra Morgeson's fight against social and religious norms in a quest for sexual, spiritual, and economic autonomy. An indomitable heroine, Cassandra not only achieves an equal and complete love with her husband and ownership of her family's property, but also masters the skills and accomplishments expected of women. Counterpointed with the stultified lives of her aunt, mother, and sister, Cassandra's success is a striking and radical affirmation of women's power to shape their own destinies. Embodying the convergence of the melodrama and sexual undercurrents of gothic romance and Victorian social realism, The Morgesons marks an important transition in the development of the novel and evoked comparisons during Stoddard's lifetime with such masters as Honoré de Balzac
Honoré de Balzac
Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon....
, Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist...
, George Eliot
George Eliot
Mary Anne Evans , better known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, journalist and translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era...
, the Brontë
Brontë
The Brontës were a nineteenth-century literary family associated with Haworth in the West Riding of Yorkshire, England. The sisters, Charlotte , Emily , and Anne , are well-known as poets and novelists...
sisters, and Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American novelist and short story writer.Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in 1804 in the city of Salem, Massachusetts to Nathaniel Hathorne and the former Elizabeth Clarke Manning. His ancestors include John Hathorne, a judge during the Salem Witch Trials...
.
One major source of Stoddard's importance to American literature is the historicism of her work, the manner in which her writing embodied and subverted the tension of her present-day culture with the archetypal or received values of the American past. A pioneering predecessor of regionalist authors Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman
Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman
Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman was a prominent 19th century American author.- Biography :She was born in Randolph, Massachusetts, and attended Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, for one year, from 1870–71...
, Sarah Orne Jewett
Sarah Orne Jewett
Sarah Orne Jewett was an American novelist and short story writer, best known for her local color works set in or near South Berwick, Maine, on the border of New Hampshire, which in her day was a declining New England seaport.-Biography:Jewett's family had been residents of New England for many...
, and Kate Chopin
Kate Chopin
Kate Chopin, born Katherine O'Flaherty , was an American author of short stories and novels. She is now considered by some to have been a forerunner of feminist authors of the 20th century....
, as well as a precursor of American modernism, Stoddard's writing is remarkable for its almost total lack of sentimentality, pervasive use of irony, psychological depth of richly drawn characters, intense atmospheric descriptions of New England, concise language, and innovative use of narrative voice and structure. Her investigation of relations between the sexes, a dominant focus of her fiction, analyzes emotions ranging from love and desire to disdain, aggression, and depression.
Further reading
http://www.upne.com/1-55553-563-1.html- Putzi, Jennifer ""Tattooed still": The Inscription of Female Agency in Elizabeth Stoddard's The Morgesons" Legacy - Volume 17, Number 2, 2000, pp. 165–173 University of Nebraska Press
http://www.lsu.edu/lsupress/Books/Lightning%20Source/Moss_Domestic.htm
- Smith, Robert McClure and Ellen Weinauer, eds. American Culture, Canons, and the Case of Elizabeth Stoddard. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2003
- Stockton, Elizabeth. “ ‘A Crusade against Duty’: Property, Self-Possession, and the Law in the Novels of Elizabeth Stoddard.” The New England Quarterly 79.3 (2006): 413-438.