‘It biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder’: female rivalry in Caroline Lee Hentz’s novellas

ABSTRACT

Nineteenth-century literature often depicts women as rivals, a phenomenon Virginia Woolf attributes in ‘A Room of One's Own' to the male-dominated nature of literature up until the twentieth century. This led to women being defined in relation to men. Feminist critics often reject female competitiveness as it challenges the collective effort to contest patriarchal control, focusing instead on female friendship. However, there is a lack of critical exploration into rivalry among female characters in nineteenth-century literature by nineteenth-century female novelists, particularly regarding overt spite or ill will. This article addresses this gap by examining poisonous relationships among female friends and siblings in novellas by Caroline Lee Hentz. Drawing from Freud's theories on female sexuality, critiques by feminist scholars like Janice Raymond, and Sianne Ngai’s studies on negative affects, the study uncovers the origins and often-tragic outcomes of toxic relationships among women. It contextualizes these themes using biblical imagery from Psalm 140:1-3, which depicts metaphorical venom resonating with jealousy and treachery in nineteenth-century literature. Additionally, this analysis highlights societal barriers in the judgmental Victorian society that hindered the establishment of genuine relationships among women.

KEYWORDS:

• Female rivalry
• jealousy
• competition
• social hostility

Acknowledgements

I express my gratitude to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable insights, comments, and suggestions, which greatly contributed to the enhancement of this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Caroline Lee Hentz (1800–1856) was born in Massachusetts but spent most of her adult life in the West and the South, living in Ohio, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, and Florida. She is best known for her novel The Planter’s Northern Bride (1854) in which she confronts anti-slavery allegations within the nation, chiefly those found in Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), which she believed shattered national accord and threatened national unison. Although Hentz wrote more than a dozen novels, published several plays and numerous short stories in well-reputed magazines and became a best-selling novelist at the time, she is mostly remembered for her polemical pro-slavery novel which has caused later critics to discredit her literary production. Hentz’s other works have been almost totally disregarded, despite her popularity among mid-nineteenth-century readers. Recent scholarly interest in women’s domestic fiction has called some attention to her work.

2 Hélène Cixous, et al., ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1, no. 4 (1976): 875–93.

3 Victoria Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric: From the Counter-Reformation to Milton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 229.

4 See, for example, Fırat Karadaş, ‘The Collective Phallic Gaze, the Evil Eye and the Serpent in John Keats’ Lamia and Yashar Kemal’s to Crush the Serpent’, Folklor/Edebiyat 26, no. 102 (2020): 347–59, or Daniel Orrels, ‘Freud’s Phallic Self’, in Classical Myth and Psychoanalysis. Ancient and Modern Stories of the Self, eds. Vanda Zajko and Ellen O'Gorman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 39–40.

5 Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, ‘The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth Century America’, Signs 1 (1975): 11–29, 13.

6 Ibid., 7.

7 Ibid., 24.

8 Nina Auerbach, Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978).

9 Lillian Faderman, ‘Female Same-Sex Relationships in Novels by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Henry James’, New England Quarterly 51 (1978): 309–32.

10 Adrieanne Rich, ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’, in The Signs Reader: Women, Gender, and Scholarship, eds. E. Abel and E.K. Abel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).

11 Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 194.

12 Janice Raymond, A Passion for Friends: Toward a Philosophy of Female Affection (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), 37.

13 Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2007), 4.

14 Helena Michie, Sororophobia: Differences among Women in Literature and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 9.

15 Anne D. Wallace, Sisters and the English Household: Domesticity and Women’s Autonomy in Nineteenth-century English Literature (London: Anthem Press, 2018), 12.

16 Ibid., 27.

17 Frances B. Cogan, All-American Girl: The Ideal of Real Womanhood in Mid-Nineteenth Century America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989).

18 Ibid., 5.

19 Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 3.

20 Raymond, A Passion for Friends, 20.

21 Cixous et al., ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’.

22 See, For example, such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1859), Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth (1853), Sarah Grand’s The Beth Book (1897).

23 See, for example, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) or Ellen Wood’s East Lynne (1861).

24 Caroline Lee Hentz, Love after Marriage and Other Stories of the Heart (Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson, 1857), 40.

25 Ibid., 45.

26 Ibid., 46.

27 Smith-Rosenberg, ‘The Female World of Love and Ritual’, 1.

28 Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press 1978), 169.

29 Hentz, Love after Marriage, 62.

30 Ibid., 43.

31 Laurette T. Liesen, ‘Feminist and Evolutionary Perspectives of Female Competition, Status Seeking, and Social Network Formation’, in The Oxford Handbook of Women and Competition, ed. Maryanne L. Fisher (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2017), 71–87, 75.

32 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (London: Murray, 1871), 398.

33 Hentz, Love after Marriage, 62.

34 Ibid., 62.

35 Ibid., 70.

36 Ibid., 77.

37 Ibid., 77–8.

38 ‘Fain’ comes from the Old English fægen, meaning ‘happy, glad, or well pleased’; ‘rivet’ means ‘directing one’s attention on something’. Vocabulary.com Dictionary, Vocabulary.com, https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/fain (accessed May 2, 2024). In this context, Cecilia suggests that she would have been pleased if Clinton had directed his smiles and attention toward her instead of toward Alice.

39 Ibid., 67–8.

40 Sigmund Freud, Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides), Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 12, trans. James Strachey, (London: Hogarth), 66. Freud never developed his theory of projection beyond this passage in ‘The Case of Schreber’.

41 Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, cited in Schoeck, Helmut, Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour (London: Secker & Warburg, 1969), 172.

42 Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 90.

43 Gerald H. Zuk and Carmen V. Zuk, ‘Freud’s Theory of Paranoid Delusion Based on the Schreber Case Contrasted with Related Theories’, Contemporary Family Therapy 17 (1995): 209–16, 211.

44 Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur, 161.

45 Rhoda Coleman Ellison, ‘Mrs. Hentz and the Green-eyed Monster’, American Literature 22, no. 3 (1950): 345–50, 345.

46 Charles A. Hentz, Autobiography, ed. Steven Stowe (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000), 18–19, quoted in Rhoda Coleman Ellison, ‘Mrs. Hentz and the Green-eyed Monster’, American Literature 22, no. 3 (1950): 345–6.

47 Caroline Lee Hentz, Ernest Linwood (Boston: J.P. Jewett, and Co., 1856), 202.

48 Ibid., 336.

49 Most of the biblical references to serpents are of a figurative nature, and they usually imply poisonous qualities. The wicked (Psalms 58:4), the persecutor (Psalms 140:3), and the enemy (Jeremiah 8:17) are likened to venomous serpents. The effects of wine are compared to the bites of serpents (Proverbs 23:32). Satan is a serpent (Genesis 3; Revelation 12:9; 20:2). The term ‘offspring of vipers’ is applied by John the Baptist to the Pharisees and Sadducees (Matthew 3:7), or to the multitudes (Luke 3:7) who came to hear him, and by Jesus to the scribes and Pharisees (Matthew 12:34; 23:33). The image of the serpent as a source of wisdom or expanded consciousness, or as representing fertility and a creative life force, often depicted in some cultures, does not appear in Hentz’s work.

50 Paradoxically, Medusa, the victim of female jealousy, has become a feminist symbol. Her image has been adopted by feminists as a symbol of female rage and used as a map to guide women through their terrors, through the depths of their fury into the sources of their power as women. Hélène Cixous, in ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, contends that female animosity, and consequently the image of the Medusa as a destructive force, has been created and nourished by men. According to Cixous, ‘men have committed the greatest crime against women. Insidiously, violently, they have led them to hate women, to be their own enemies, to mobilize their immense strength against themselves, to be the executants of their virile needs’, 878.

51 Hentz, Love after Marriage, 83.

52 Ibid., 85.

53 Ibid., 86.

54 Ibid., 90.

55 Ibid., 85–6.

56 Ibid., 85.

57 According to Catherine Maria Sedgwick, Means and Ends, or Self Training, ‘God has appointed marriage. He designed you [women]. It is the great circumstance of your lives’, 17. She adds that unless a spinster has an independent useful pursuit, she will be considered ‘the old main, touched by every ill’, 19.

58 Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (London: The Athlone Press, 1993), 105.

59 Sedgwick, Means and Ends, 19.

60 Hentz, Love after Marriage, 83.

61 Ibid., 84.

62 Ibid., 99.

63 Ibid., 84.

64 Ibid., 104.

65 Psalms 5:3.

66 Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 5.

67 Ibid., 35.

68 Interestingly, Hentz’s tale ‘The Bosom Serpent’ was first published in 1843 in Godey’s Lady’s Book journal, the same year as Nathaniel Hawthorne published his well-known tale, ‘Egotism; or The Bosom-Serpent’. Hawthorne’s tale appeared in the March 1843 issue of The United States Magazine and Democratic Review in New York, the first appearance of the short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864). Bush claims that the portrayal of the ‘bosom serpent’ lore ‘was known both to the uneducated man and to professional people in medicine, religion, and the arts’, and the terms ‘Bosom Snake’ and ‘cherish a viper’(184) were proverbial and often referred not just to a metaphorical but to a real/live serpent residing in one’s body. See, Sargent Bush, Jr., ‘Bosom Serpents before Hawthorne: The Origins of a Symbol’, American Literature 43, no. 2 (1971): 181–99.

69 Caroline Lee Hentz, The Victim of Excitement; The Bosom Serpent (Philadelphia: Parry & McMillan, 1854), 201.

70 Ibid., 208.

71 Ibid., 210.

72 Amanda Koontz Anthony, et al., ‘When Beauty Brings Out the Beast: Female Comparisons and the Feminine Rivalry’, Gender Issues 33, no. 4 (2016): 311–34, 318.

73 Ibid., 318.

74 Sianne Ngai, ‘Competitiveness: From “Sula to Tyra”’, Women’s Studies Quarterly 34, no. 3/4 (2006): 107–39, 112.

75 Janet Todd, Women’s Friendship in Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 409.

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Irina Rabinovich

Irina Rabinovich is a lecturer in the English Language Department at Holon Institute of Technology, Israel. Most of her research deals with the representation of women, especially Jewish female artists in 19th century British and American Literature. She is the author of Re-Dressing Miriam: 19th Century Artistic Jewish Women (2012). She is also a co-editor of a forthcoming Special issue of Women’s Writing (Taylor & Francis)—‘Unveiling Untold Narratives: Rediscovering the Literary Legacy of Jewish Female Writers and Representations of Jewish Women by Female Writers from the 1700s to the 1920s’.