Naturalist sentimentalism: ageing between hopefulness and decline in Rebecca Harding Davis’s short fiction

Abstract

This article examines four short stories by the American writer Rebecca Harding Davis (1831–1910), who became a nationally acclaimed writer with the stylistically innovative novella Life in the Iron Mills (1861). Using the double perspective of age studies and ‘naturalist sentimentalism’, the essay analyses Davis’s representation of the paradoxes of old age. Davis blends sentimental ideals of sympathy, sacrifice and hope with naturalist themes of entrapment, the inevitability of decline and biological determinism. Four short stories by Davis will serve as cases in point: ‘At Noon’ (1887), ‘At the Station’ (1888) and ‘Anne’ (1889) present middle-aged and older women who struggle with ageist notions of decline; ‘The Coming of the Night’ (1909) examines from a male perspective issues of retirement, care, and the denigration and marginalisation of the elderly in a ‘Home for Aged Men’. In these stories, Davis discusses the meanings of age and ageing, intergenerational conflicts, gender, and the impact of the body and social context on the experience of ageing. In drawing on both sentimental and naturalist themes and combining them, Davis’s stories reflect conflicting notions about ageing and old age in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Keywords:

• Rebecca Harding Davis
• old age
• ageing
• naturalism
• sentimentalism
• gender
• late nineteenth-century America

Notes

1. Jean Pfaelzer (2014: xv) lists ‘275 stories, 12 novels (most published serially), 125 juvenile stories, over 200 identifiable essays, and perhaps an equal number of unsigned essays’.

2. For example, in most countries in the Western hemisphere, a child enters school at six or seven years and a person retires at approximately 65 years. These fixed ages are externally defined and de-emphasise individual capacity.

3. This mirror motif has been a productive concept in age studies (e.g. Woodward, 1986; Marshall, 2012). The mirror confronts the older person with an image that does not reflect a whole, coherent self (as in Lacan’s theory) but a fragmented, disintegrated self that is rejected by the person who does not recognise or accept the mirror image. The look into the mirror can lead to a denial of ageing altogether or trigger a search for an ageless self (Lipscomb, 2016: 48). I am grateful to the peer reviewer who pointed out this striking connection to me.

4. In her essay ‘Women as Imitators of Men’ (1906), for example, Davis criticises the young, modern women, who feel superior to their grandmothers, for their belligerent attitude towards men, their vanity and ‘constant noisy boasting’ (Davis, 2016: 250).

5. The theme of a woman’s self-deception recurs in the short story ‘A Middle-Aged Woman’, which Davis published in 1904. The protagonist, Frances Shore, remembers a man whom she did not marry but still longs for. She is ‘cured’ from the assumption that she might have been happier if she had chosen a different man when she learns that the man she pined for has been married to two women. Davis ends the story with a clear moral: ‘Not until middle age – old age sometimes – do we see the difference between our dreams and the realities which God gives us’ (494).

6. Davis became acquainted with Emerson after the national success of Life in the Iron Mills. To Davis, meeting Emerson, whom she had idolised from afar, was a disappointment: Davis found that Emerson lacked ‘human sympathy’ and that she herself ‘had been merely a human specimen for his study’ (Rose, 1993: 34).

7. See for example ‘An Old-Time Love Story’ (1908), which chronicles the sacrifice of a renowned scientist for the love of his life and the family they raise together.