“At Sea on the Plains with James Beckwourth.” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth Century Americanists 11.2 (2023).
In Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970), I encountered James Beckwourth, also known as Medicine Calf. A fur trapper, adventurer, scout, and spy, he was hired by Colonel John Chivington—one of the American nineteenth century's most odious villains—to serve as a guide to locate a Cheyenne-Arapaho encampment at Sand Creek. But Beckwourth took ill and never led Chivington to Sand Creek. Brown writes, "For a guide Chivington conscripted sixty-nine-year-old James Beckwourth, a mulatto who had lived with the Indians for half a century. Medicine Calf Beckwourth tried to beg off, but Chivington threatened to hang the old man if he refused to guide the soldiers to the Cheyenne-Arapaho encampment."Did Beckwourth "beg off" because he was sick, as Brown claims? Or did he not want to be accomplice to the massacre where Chivington and his men murdered and mutilated the bodies of more than a hundred Cheyenne and Arapaho civilians? Would the fact of his being a mixed-race person from another region inform his unwillingness to participate? Such were the questions I brought to The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth: Mountaineer, Scout and Pioneer, and Chief of the Crow Nation of Indians—the 537-page narrative of his life published in 1856 by Harper and Brothers. I wanted to know at what point someone objects to the violence that is everywhere around them. I wanted to learn how another stranger who lived in this place where I find myself strange managed to survive its violent past.
“Power of Body / Power of Mind: Arts & Crafts, New Thought, and Popular Women’s Fiction.” American Literature 93.4 (2021).
This article describes the impact of two popular fin de siècle philosophical movements— Arts and Crafts and New Thought—on both well-known authors like Frank Norris and Charlotte Perkins Gilman as well the lesser-known writers and movement leaders it reads more closely: Madeline Yale Wynne and Ella Wheeler Wilcox. Although their values were antithetical, Arts and Crafts and New Thought shared striking similarities in the way they yoked consumption habits to personal wellbeing and used fiction as way of understanding and endorsing popular secular philosophies. These women-led movements shaped enduring national ideologies and the literature of their period, which tends to either synthesize the beliefs of both movements or represent one as patently superior to the other through satire or protest. The recovery of the history of these movements and their contribution to American literature not only retraces a lost genealogy of popular ideas that have shaped our culture, but also demonstrates the centrality of female thinkers and writers to the development of our present-day notions about how to transcend the grinding forces of consumer capitalism in everyday life.
“Roundtable: The Age of Innocence: New Centenary Essays,” Edith Wharton Review 36.2, Special Issue: The Age of Innocence at 100 (2020):181-204.
Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence: New Centenary Essays (Bloomsbury, 2019) is the most recent volume focused on Wharton’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel. Edited by Arielle Zibrak, it brings new critical approaches to Wharton’s work and draws connections between the novel’s gaze back at the late nineteenth century and our own. Wharton scholars were invited to respond to each of the collection’s essays and the authors of the essays, in turn, wrote back to their respondents. The following conversation expands the insights of the original volume and points toward new directions in Wharton scholarship.
“Mimesis and ‘the man marriage’: Protesting Marital Rape in Rebecca Harding Davis’s “The Second Life.’” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 49.7 (2020): 748-765.
Rebecca Harding Davis was both a homemaker and a successful professional author, a writer for profit and for prestige of both popular genre and literary fiction, a political writer who shirked social activism. This essay considers how these various divisions—between reform and entertainment, social and economic gain, realism and sensation—work together to create a protest of one of the most contentious issues of the day, marital rape, while simultaneously demonstrating how fiction might play a role in this pressing social problem. By addressing marital rape in her fiction, Davis inserts herself into the feminist debates of her own moment. Marital rape divided the American women’s rights movement prior to the Civil War. In the postbellum period, suffrage eclipsed the subtler (and arguably more radical) issues that the protest of marital rape raised—such as the right to divorce, the existence of female sexual desire, and the ownership of one’s body regardless of sex. Arguably, these conversations initiated a centuries-long discourse about consent. This essay redraws attention to this moment within the closely linked women’s rights and temperance movements and demonstrates Davis’s awareness of the intricacy of these debates while it outlines her role within them as a critic of literature, culture, and gender.
“Kissing a Photograph: Reproductive Panic in Kate Chopin and Thomas Hardy,” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 58.3 (2017): 355-374.
Anxieties about sexuality and art may be found surrounding the advent of a new technology of representation in many eras, but for the second half of the nineteenth century, the representational technology that inspired panic in the realms of sex and art was undoubtedly photography. Multiple scenes that depict erotic physical relations with photographs in the fiction of Thomas Hardy and Kate Chopin reveal the joint discourse of panic over the future of sex and the future of art in which writers at the fin de siècle passionately engaged. I will argue here that the conservative fear of sex outside of marriage, a prospect seen as a threat to the reproduction of legitimate and viable offspring, is dialogically engaged with the artist’s fear of work that is merely a copy of a copy, a hollow referent without meaning or vitality. Both fears constitute a shared panic over aesthetic and sexual modes of reproduction, a link that scenes of photograph kissing illustrate. I locate Hardy and Chopin’s fictions in a moment of skepticism about the realist mode of literature that coincides with the proliferation of photography, a technology that raises anxieties about both unchecked sexual desires and artistic reproduction.
“The Woman Who Hated Sex: Undine Spragg and the Trouble with ‘Bother,’” Edith Wharton Review 32 (2016): 1-19.
Edith Wharton has long been associated with misogyny and prudishness, both by scholars and by popular critics. This article examines Wharton’s 1913 novel The Custom of the Country alongside contemporary feminist criticism such as Ariel Levy’s 2005 Female Chauvinist Pigs to argue that Wharton’s acid-tongued portrayal of The Custom of the Country’s antiheroine Undine Spragg is evidence of her forward-thinking critique of the replacement of authentic female sexual experience with the consumer-driven publicity. In Zibrak’s reading, The Custom of the Country emerges as a prescient portrait of a culture saturated in sexual imagery but devoid of sexual pleasure.