Roman Fever Elsden, Annamaria Formichella
2004, c2004.
eBook
Critical studies have frequently acknowledged the nineteenth-century American fascination with Italy, but none specifically examines the impact of Italy on American women’s writing. A number of ...nineteenth-century women were privileged and daring enough to travel abroad, using a range of genres to respond discursively to their new surroundings. Annamaria Formichella Elsden’s study groups six women, whose writings were shaped by their encounters with Italy, to investigate women’s attempts to leave behind the domestic, in all the senses of that term. Roman Fever foregrounds how women writers counteracted dominant stereotypes. Popular nineteenth-century portrayals of women abroad often fell into two categories: the overly assertive “feminist” and the hyper-feminine lady. Texts about Italy by American women move beyond these stereotypes. The author acknowledges that women wrote beyond the narrow boundaries ascribed to them by too much criticism. Elsden argues that the work of these women, which included Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Sophia Peabody Hawthorne’s travel writings, Margaret Fuller’s news dispatches, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Agnes of Sorrento, and Constance Fenimore Woolson’s and Edith Wharton’s short stories, challenged American individualist ideology while contributing to the patriotic rhetorical tradition.
Fanny Churchill’s pink villa, alluded to in the title of Constance Fenimore Woolson’s 1888 short story, has an almost mystical beauty. Called a “delicious nest” by a visiting Englishman, the villa ...“crowns one of the perpendicular cliffs of Sorrento, its rosy façade overlooking what is perhaps the most beautiful expanse of water in the world—the Bay of Naples.”¹ A central rendezvous point for a circle of British and American expatriates in Italy, the terrace is described as “an enchanting place for lounging, attached as it was to a pink-faced villa that overlooked the sea” (839). Indeed, the villa virtually
Watery Angels ANNAMARIA FORMICHELLA ELSDEN
Reinventing the Peabody Sisters,
04/2006
Book Chapter
Sophia Peabody Hawthorne’s journal entry for 12 January 1862 reads, “I copied Raphael’s angel all day” (Woodson, Rubino, and Kayes 287). Two years after her return from Italy, she still made time for ...art amidst domestic routines, and spirituality continued to figure as a significant component of that art. The influence of Italy stayed with her: on March 22 she “read Arnold’s Rome,” on December 15 she “read Ellery’s Rome,” and on a June 11 visit to Dorchester, she “talked Rome all the evening” (Woodson, Rubino, and Kayes 295, 304, 322). Similarly she maintained the efforts—“All day I drew
In many ways Margaret Fuller was an eccentric among her peers, a puzzle who mystified her contemporaries and who continues to elude her critics. Fuller herself questioned her identity in an 1831 ...diary entry that recalls a childhood moment of perplexity: “How is it that I seem to be this Margaret Fuller? What does it mean? What shall I do about it?” (Von Mehren 6). Henry James framed her as an enigma when he reportedly inquired, “Would she, with her appetite for ideas and her genius for conversation, have struck us but as a formidable bore, one of the worst
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