Rediscovering Hawthorne.

Ideology and Emancipation in Maria Susanna Cummins

“…the authors) expressed a wish to live somewhat less brutal lives than their sex had in the past." [8] The question is how authors like Cummins viewed the role of women at the time and how they assessed and depicted the possibility of first steps toward emancipation. By putting the home space at the center of the plot, the literary domestics especially contrasted "world" with "home" as anti-poles.…”

“…Yet, just as without internal order human relations will not work; "(…) in this view "home" is not a space but a system of human relations; (…)." [13] Cummins here has her protagonist experience utmost feelings of happiness: "(…) that happiness -perhaps the highest earth affords -of feeling that she had been instrumental in giving joy to another." [14] To have recipients not jump the gun in anticipating external and internal disarray in low class only, Cummins puts Nan Grant in opposition to the widow Holbrook: Gerty´s low class mother ersatz is in no way inferior to upper class Holbrook who is not only well-off and pleasure seeking but in her escapism is entirely unable to keep any internal order.…”

“…The lesson itself is an entertainment in that the heroine´s triumph over so much adversity and so many obstacles is profoundly pleasurable to those readers who identify with her." [24] Then again, some fifty years later, Kate Chopin would turn triumph into doom, hinting at the limitations of female development [25] in the context of inwardness or escalation, vitality or surrender. [26] At the same time, the question can be asked what the vision of a better world would actually look like.…”

“…It rather seems it is aimed at an inner reflection in readers as to the values that both spaces, home space and worldly space, are to hold: "If worldly values could dominate the home, perhaps the direction of influence could be reversed so that home values dominated the world." [27] How might contemporary male readers have read the novel? [28] Having an elaborated plot, it still carries quite a simple message; in a reception aesthetics perspective it might have been perceived as affirmative by male readers.…”

“…superior to ostentation and feverish pleasure -then, our authors believed, a true social revolution will have taken place, American life will have been transformed." [49] This exactly would be the main concern of the literary domestics; a new vision of a political framework that derives its existence from private life, transforming it into political life.…”