Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 193well: poetry, short fiction, and, from 1854 to 1858, a regular column for the Daily Alta
California. The short fiction tends to fall into one or other of two categories: formalized
sketches like “Collected by a Valetudinarian” (1870) and tales blending realism and
romance such as “Lemorne Versus Huell” (1863). The columns, in turn, reveal Stoddard’s
resistance to the received wisdom of the day. Stoddard mocked belief in Manifest Destiny,
established religion, and the notion of a separate domestic sphere for women. She also
poked satirical fun at the sentimental novel, with its “eternal preachment about self-
denial.” “Is goodness, then, incompatible with the enjoyment of the senses?” she asked in
one of her columns, and insisted that, on the whole, it was not. It was the 1860s, however,
that were to witness her finest work. In 1862 she published her first novel, The Morgesons.
It impressed Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom Stoddard sent a copy, and many critics and
reviewers including William Dean Howells. But it failed to secure her a reading public.
Her two other novels, Tw o M e n (1865) and Temple House (1867), suffered a similar fate.
In the later two books, unlike The Morgesons, Stoddard adopted a male protagonist’s
point of view. All three, though, are characterized by an elliptical narrative style, carried
along by rapid transitions of scene, conversations stripped to an explanatory minimum,
and a dramatic, aphoristic, densely imagistic idiom. All three, also, reveal a world where
social institutions are both repressive and in decay and religious belief is difficult, even
impossible; and they also show the family as a site of struggle rather than a source of
security, full of strangeness and secrecy, where passion is thwarted, impulse denied.
The Morgesons is exemplary in this respect. Its central character and narrator,
Cassandra Morgeson, is clearly modeled on Stoddard herself; and what the book
charts is a female quest for empowerment. Described as headstrong, even arrogant
by many of her acquaintances, Cassandra seeks personal autonomy. Born in a small
seaport town, between land and sea, she is drawn as her great-grandfather Locke
Morgeson was to “the influence of the sea:” to escape, adventure, breaking
away from convention and the commonplace. “The rest of the tribe” of Morgesons,
Cassandra caustically observes, “inherited the character of the landscape.” The
Morgesons imitates the pattern, the structure of the domestic novel, to the extent
that it shows a young woman undergoing a sentimental education that ends in
marriage, but it imitates it only to subvert it. Cassandra remains bold and willful,
and an outsider, throughout the novel. She nurtures a dangerous attachment to a
married man; she falls in love, later, with a dark, handsome stranger called Desmond
Somers, whom she eventually marries; but she always remains in control, her own
woman. Another man who loves her, Desmond’s brother Ben, finally admits that
Cassandra is too much for him, and chooses to marry her sister Veronica instead.
“You have been my delight and misery ever since I knew you,” Ben tells Cassandra:I saw you first, so impetuous, yet self-contained!... Then, to my amazement, I saw that,
unlike most women, you understood your instincts; that you dared to define them, and
were impious enough to follow them. You debased my ideal, you confused me, also, for
I could never affirm that you were wrong; forcing me to consult abstractions, they gave
a verdict in your favor, which almost unsexed you in my estimation. I must own that
the man who is willing to marry you has more courage than I have.GGray_c02.indd 193ray_c 02 .indd 193 8 8/1/2011 7:54:43 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 43 AM