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Gender Training: Male Ambitions, Domestic Duties, and Failure in the Magazine Fiction of T. S. Arthur

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Tim Ruppel
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Extract

Although T. S. Arthur'S extraordinary literary presence and popularity were acknowledged during the antebellum period, studies of both the American Renaissance and domestic fiction have failed to provide anything more than a passing reference to his fiction. Arthur's meager current reputation has been defined by a single work, the sensationalist temperance novel, Ten Nights in a Bar-room, And What I Saw There (1854). More generally, cultural historians have labeled Arthur as one of the “fictional eulogists of the self-made man” and a purveyor of the “rags to riches” myth. However, the magazine fiction that Arthur regularly produced for Godey's Lady's Book in the 1840s had nothing to do with either temperance or the myth of autonomous individualism. Instead, his tales focused on the relationship between behavior in the home and in the marketplace. Writing in the aftermath of the devastating Panic of 1837, Arthur sought to identify the causes of domestic disorder and economic failure. Significantly, his narratives of personal accountability asserted that failure and disorder were the inevitable results of deviations from emerging gender norms. The prospective urban merchant and domestic women who appeared prominently in his magazine fiction must learn that the management of troublesome bodies is the key to economic and domestic stability.

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Research Article
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Prospects , Volume 24 , October 1999 , pp. 311 - 337
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1999

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References

Notes

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54. The reform of the extravagant or willful wife is a major preoccupation in Arthur's fiction. The two terms are virtually equivalent: to be a willful woman is to be an extravagant woman. For further examples in Arthur's fiction, see “Tired of Housekeeping,” Godey's 20 (03 1840): 136–40Google Scholar; “Sweethearts and Wives,” 264–69; “I Will!,” Godey's 28 (05 1844); 213–15Google Scholar; and “Managing a Blue,” Godey's 33 (12 1846): 261–64Google Scholar.

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57. Quoted in Clark, , Roots of Rural Capitalism, 217Google Scholar.

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60. The need for supervising clerks is made clear in Arthur, T. S.'s “It's None of My Business,” Godey's 29 (09 1844): 109–14Google Scholar. As the obtuse merchants in this tale discover, their clerks have been making false entries in the account books and skimming cash from the register.

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65. Brodhead, Richard, “Sparing the Rod: Discipline and Fiction in Antebellum America,” Representations 21 (Winter 1988): 70CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Brodhead's invaluable account of this theory of socialization, however, does not examine its use as a form of social organization.

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