A Medium for Change

In response to this week’s blog assignment, I have written a summary of Linda Grasso’s essay titled “Anger in the House: Fanny Fern’s “Ruth Hall” and the Redrawing of Emotional Boundaries in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America.”  I have also provided an excerpt from Fanny Fern’s novel, “Ruth Hall’ in conjunction to the content of Grasso’s article.  Linda Grasso’s critical essay examines the social and gender implications of Fanny Fern’s evocative novel, “Ruth Hall.”  Grasso draws insight from proponents and opponents of Fern’s novel such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Caroline Dall to provide a holistic sense of the struggle for gender equality during that time.  Grasso describes Fern’s literature as “an inspiring act of resistance against the ‘romance’ of dependency (252).  The "romance of dependency" socially defined gender relationship during the time and still does so currently in many cases.  She also emphasizes Stanton’s attempts to junction the cause for women’s rights movement and abolitionism through the injustice condoned by society.  The historic and powerful technology that is the novel provides a “useful model of fearless expression” for abolitionists and women alike to strike the emotional chord that would compel responsive change in a “tyrannical” and patriarchal society.  By publically exposing the anger in which women were entitled to feel against their “tyrannical parents, husbands, and brothers,” Fern pronounces the “gendered double standard”, provoking detractors to criticize the novel in defense of social and moral propriety.  The novel poses “direct challenge to the maintenance of unequal gender roles and privileges” amidst the “hypocrisy of a male-defined version of democracy” (Grasso 252).  Interestingly enough, the apprehension surrounding the redrawing of emotional boundaries as women’s anger was exposed surmounted to inevitable “sexual” warfare similar to the class and racial warfare that undergoes  in the same system of influence which is capitalism.   According to Grasso, “anger could be regarded as a proper ‘female’ response, but also whether it posed a threat to a rapidly industrializing nation that was that was reliant upon an ideology if rational self-restraint” (257).  The latter ideology was further reinforced by the subjectivism of natural law philosophy and religious precepts which marked a shift in social norms mainly attributed to the “growth of capitalism” (258).  Critiques like Dall, argue on behalf of the system in which they base their ethics and identity. Thus, they denounce Fern’s writings as inappropriate, especially for a women.  In the novel, a dispute between a husband and wife in regards to his desire to venture to California during the gold rush initiates a vindictive response from the spouse prompting her to leave her husband with the burden that befalls women in rearing a child.  Fern writes, “Still, he could not believe that her desire for revenge would outweigh all her maternal feeling” (Fern 116).  The unexpected reaction of the “obedient wife” signified the potential change that was brewing in a national scale, as women began liberating themselves of the social conventions enacted by men through exploits of the novel for fundemental change.                    

                                                                    

                                                                   Work Cited

Fern, Fanny.  Ruth Hall. 1855.  New York: Penguin Books, 1997. Print.

Grasso, Linda. "Anger in the House: Fanny Fern's "Ruth Hall" and the Redrawing of Emotional Boundaries in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America." Studies in the American Renaissance , (1995), pp. 251-261. Published by: Joel Myerson

Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30227673