Whitewashing America by Bridget T. Heneghan

Author:Bridget T. Heneghan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2003-03-17T16:00:00+00:00

IN THEIR ALABASTER CHAMBERS

The physical explanation of this “femininity,” based upon having but not desiring, having done but not doing—because other bodies, nonwhite bodies, publicly do the work—is illustrated in two scenes, interestingly cut from the published novel, of Susan Warner’s best-seller The Wide, Wide World (1850). Although the scholarship debates Ellen’s role in the marketplace—whether she ultimately renders herself an “ornament” or actually participates in the marketplace in a sentimental or literal sense—few scholars have noted that her participation in, and shrinking from, the world is clearly marked in racial as well as class terms. Insofar as the novel privileges “female subjectivity” and outlines a strictly feminine struggle and means of coping with it, it also describes an escape from waged labor that characterizes the black servants, the brown farmhands, and nonwhite mercenaries in the story. This escape entails, for Ellen, not only a sentimental self-control and an enclosed domesticity, but also an upper-class refinement and a dismissal of blackness. In the novel’s final chapter, resurrected in the 1987 published version, Ellen Montgomery marries her patriarchal brother-figure, John, and moves into an interior room that he has painstakingly prepared for her. Guiding her through a room full of statues and paintings, John explains to Ellen the intellectual and spiritual import of each item. The “luxury of the mind” that these things represent nonetheless also speaks of material wealth—fine works of art, antique frames, and items from across Europe. Within her “delightfully private” room, which offers access only through John’s room, lies also a beautiful escritoire with “costly antique garniture.” Within one of its drawers lies another “concealed drawer,” and within this lies ample “gold and silver pieces and bank bills.” Ellen shrinks from this stark vision of wealth—“ ‘Money!’ said Ellen, ‘what am I to do with it?’ ”—just as she is horrified to tears when an old gentleman gives her money as a Christmas present (582). But the money, as well hidden as her desire for it, supports the morally charged room. The escritoire, necessarily, has not been purchased but rather inherited, from John’s “father’s mother and grandmother and great-grandmother,” thoroughly establishing a tradition of femininely managed and disavowed materiality. This ultimately elaborated vision of femininity constitutes the happy ending—perhaps understood well enough that Warner could excise it from her published draft. It demonstrates the proper relationship to money—which is to remain hidden, denied, and disavowed, as well as possessed—and also the proper relation to things—explained as moral teachers and sentimental treasures rather than utilitarian devices.

As the novel demonstrates, the improper attitude about money can also deny white women access to the whiteness of material femininity. Aunt Fortune’s industry provides her with white walls and dishes, but her house cannot appear white because she openly values money and because she does not invest her industry in producing refinement, only utilitarian objects. Although the aunt’s name provides a pun as “Miss Fortune,” it also links her to a mercenary domesticity as she runs her farm and performs her own manual labor in order to maximize her profits.

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