“Am I Dead Now?”: Confronting the Gothic Realities of Coverture in Rebecca Harding Davis’s “The Second Life”

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

¹ See, for example, Hartog, Basch, and Sullivan.

² The idea of the True Woman derives from Welter’s 1966 American Quarterly article, “The Cult of True Womanhood,” in which she describes nineteenth-century women’s preoccupation with and men’s expectation of piety, purity, submission, and domesticity as a cult. The paradigm Welter describes has since been complicated by several book-length studies, such as those by McCall, Chapman and Handler, and Davidson, and individual articles, such as that by Park and Wald, that consider not only the somewhat limited scope of Welter’s initial study but also how class and race make True Womanhood an ideal attainable only for upper- and middle-class white women.

³ Indeed, the formula became so pervasive that Sedgwick has produced a book-length study dedicated to examining Gothic conventions. In this study, she identifies what Gothic scholars would eventually refer to as the “laundry list” of stock elements, at least a handful of which readers are likely to encounter in any Gothic tale:

These include [to name a few] sleeplike and deathlike states; subterranean spaces and live burial; unintelligible writings, and the unspeakable; the poisonous effects of guilt and shame; nocturnal landscapes and dreams; apparitions from the past; Faust- and Wandering Jew-like figures; the charnel house and the madhouse. (9–10)

For more detailed discussions of the Gothic form, as well as its function as a device for reform, see, for example, Roberts and Ledoux.

⁴ For a detailed examination of the inherent Gothic elements of coverture, see Kalsem.

⁵ Renfroe finds that Davis employs Gothic tropes in the story, especially in Esther’s spectral “haunting” of the text, “to foreground injustice” and provide “a powerful reminder of cultural anxieties that resist easy solutions and clear-cut narrative closure” (206).

⁶ New York’s “Act for the Effectual Protection of the Property of Married Women,” passed 7 April 1848, is often mistakenly considered the first of the United States’ married women’s property acts, but southern states such as Arkansas and Mississippi had passed laws allowing women to own property in marriage in 1835 and 1839 respectively. See Custer and Dougan for more on this topic.

⁷ In an address delivered in Pittsburgh before the Women’s Historical Society of Pennsylvania in 1914, Charles W. Dahlinger noted that though Judge Woodward “did not write all the opinions on the law of 1848 handed down by the Supreme Court during his term of office … in the reasoning of almost all the opinions, where the names of other judges appear, there is a distinct resemblance to the reasoning of the opinions credited to Judge Woodward” (80).

⁸ See, especially, “Chapter 2: Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship” of Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic for a detailed discussion of this critical model.