194 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865Cassandra is far more self-confident and sexually emancipated than any sentimental
heroine or even, for that matter, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne. In her stern
self-reliance, she recalls the definition of true womanhood in Woman in the Nineteenth
Century by Margaret Fuller. In her passion for life, and her intense dedication to her
own needs, she resembles the heroines of those writers whom Stoddard herself
especially admired, Charlotte and Emily Brontë. There are, in fact, elements of the
Gothic as well as the sentimental novel in The Morgesons. There is violence both emotional
and literal, a frequent melodramatic heightening of feeling, and the doubling – and, as
Ben Somers intimates, the transposing, the crossing over – of males and females. And the
ultimate view of life in this feminist Bildungsroman is tough, bleak, stoical. “My audacity
shocked,” Cassandra admits, “my candor was called anything but truthfulness; they
named it sarcasm, cunning, coarseness.” A woman “whose deep, controlled voice
vibrated in the ears, like the far-off sounds we hear at night from woods or sea,”
Cassandra intimidates even her father with her outspokenness, her intellectual courage
and her “sense of mystery.” When her mother dies, Locke Morgeson, the father, soon
marries a woman far more manageable and malleable than Cassandra and moves out
of the Morgeson family home. With Ben Somers and Veronica gone, Cassandra is left,
as she triumphantly observes, “alone in my own house”; “I regained an absolute self-
possession,” she adds, “and a sense of occupation I had long been a stranger to.” Walking
by her native element, the sea, she casts a cold eye on human existence, accepting its
loneliness and challenge: “Have at thee life!” her senses cry. It is only then, in possession
of herself and the Morgeson house (a structure the architecture of which makes it the
material embodiment of the family history), that she is willing to take on a loving but
equal partnership with Desmond Somers, who returns from a sojourn in Europe, a man
quite different from the imposing figure she first met, visibly altered, even defeated –
“I hope I am worthy of you,” he confesses. It is not a comforting ending, any more than
Cassandra is a comforting heroine. Writing the closing words of her story from her
chamber overlooking the ocean, she tells us there is “no pity, no compassion” in the
“eternal monotone” of the waves. Nature is indifferent; life is abruptly challenging,
casually violent (Ben Somers, for instance, suddenly dies in the last paragraph of the
book); there is no sense of a community of faith or custom promising safe harbor. Of
the sea, her constant companion and spiritual mentor, Cassandra declares, at the end,
“its beauty wears a relentless aspect to me now.” Much the same could be said of
Cassandra herself, and the remarkable novel of which she is the dramatic and narrative
center. The Morgesons anticipates later fiction in its ellipses, its disjunctive, allusive
idiom. It rehearses and reinvents both the Gothic and the sentimental fiction of its own
time, in its curious, subtle mix of romance and realism (“I am not realistic – I am
romantic,” Stoddard once insisted, “the very bareness and simplicity of my work is a
trap for romance”). And it enters vigorously into the contemporary debate about
whether there should or should not be separate spheres for women and men. But it is,
above all, a book that is far more than the sum of these or any other connections: a
novel that, in the spirit of those writers Stoddard most admired like the Brontës and
Hawthorne, captures both the mundane and the ineffable – the materiality and the
mystery of life.GGray_c02.indd 194ray_c 02 .indd 194 8 8/1/2011 7:54:43 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 43 AM