Mimesis and “The Man Marriage”: Protesting Marital Rape in Rebecca Harding Davis’s “The Second Life”

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Acknowledgments

With thanks to Tara MacDonald and Marissa Lynn Gemma for their feedback, and to Alicia Mischa Renfroe and Robin L. Cadwallader for their keen editorial eyes.

Notes

¹ Stoner references “Life in the Iron-Mills,” a proto-naturalist exposé of the bleak reality of the lives of Appalachian laborers and Davis’s first nationally published story, which appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1861, to argue that “The Second Life,” which was serialized in the popular Peterson’s Magazine from January to June of 1863, suggests a contrast “with Davis’s first ‘Life’ – in the ‘Iron Mills’ – and denotes the inferiority of the one to the other; it heralds the second phase in the private life of a thirty-two-year-old spinster [Davis] about to become a wife and mother; and it acknowledges the acquiescence of a double profession, the first as a public advocate of social reform … and the second as a private woman” (50). Renfroe claims that “The Second Life” bears all the hallmarks of a popular gothic sensational romance as well as the elements of social protest and determinism that have allowed critics to long identify Davis as a realistic, proto-naturalist writer (“The Specter”). Therefore, the story may be seen as having two lives unto itself: one as a gothic sensation tale, the other as a realist protest text.

² Fanny Aikin Kortright (1821–1900), the true author of Pro Aris et Focis (1869), also wrote under the pseudonym Berkeley Aikin and is best known for her sensation fiction. Ironically, Kortright had signed a Women’s Suffrage petition just three years prior to the publication of her pamphlet (Crawford). See Eppard for more on the misattribution of this work to Davis.

³ In “Writing Behind a Curtain,” I discuss at length Davis’s disdain for publicity and celebrity activism.

⁴ Harris writes that Davis “had always argued against large charitable institutions, preferring direct charity by any individual in a position to aid another human being” (Rebecca 188).