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

Works cited

• Bardes, Barbara, and Suzanne Gossett. Declarations of Independence: Women and Political Power in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction. Rutgers UP, 1990.
   Google Scholar
• Basch, Norma. In the Eyes of the Law: Women, Marriage, and Property in Nineteenth-Century New York. Cornell UP, 1982.
   Google Scholar
• Baym, Nina. Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America. Cornell UP, 1984.
   Google Scholar
• Blackstone, William. “Chapter the Fifteenth: Of Husband and Wife.” Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England: Book the First: The Rights of Persons, Clarendon, 1765, pp. 430–32. The Avalon Project, Yale Law School, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/blackstone_bk1ch15.asp. Accessed 5 Dec. 2019.
   Google Scholar
• Casey, Joseph. Bear’s Administrator v. Bear. Pennsylvania State Reports, Vol. 33: Comprising Cases Adjudged in the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania Containing Cases Decided in January and May Terms, 1859, vol. 9, Kay and Brother, 1859, pp. 525–30. 36 vols.
   Google Scholar
• ———. Ritter v. Ritter. Pennsylvania State Reports, Vol. 31: Comprising Cases Adjudged in the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania Containing Cases Decided in Part of January Term, and in May and Part of October Terms, 1858, vol. 7, Kay and Brother, 1859, pp. 396–401. 36 vols.
   Google Scholar
• Casper, Scott E., et al., editors. A History of the Book in America: Volume 3: The Industrial Book, 1840-1880. U of North Carolina P, 2014.
   Google Scholar
• Chapman, Mary, and Glen Handler. Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture. U of California P, 1999.
   Google Scholar
• Custer, Joseph A. “The Three Waves of Married Women’s Property Acts in the Nineteenth Century with a Focus on Mississippi, New York, and Oregon.” Ohio Northern University Law Review, vol. 40, 2014, pp. 395–440.
   Google Scholar
• Dahlinger, Charles W. “The Dawn of the Woman’s Movement: An Account of the Origin and History of the Pennsylvania Married Woman’s Property Law of 1848.” Women’s Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 2 Nov. 1914, Google, journals.psu.edu/wph/article/view/1150/998/. Accessed 5 Dec. 2019.
   Google Scholar
• Davidson, Cathy, editor. “No More Separate Spheres!” Special issue of American Literature, vol. 70, no. 3, 1998. doi:10.2307/2902705.
   Web of Science ®Google Scholar
• Davis, Rebecca Harding. “‘In the Market.’” Peterson’s Magazine, vol. 53, no. 1, Jan. 1868, pp. 49–57. Rpt. in Rebecca Harding Davis’s Stories of the Civil War Era: Selected Writings from the Borderlands, edited by Sharon M. Harris and Robin L. Cadwallader, U of Georgia P, 2010, pp. 285-304.
   Google Scholar
• ———. “The Second Life.” Peterson’s Magazine, vol. 43, nos. 1–6, Jan.–June 1863, pp. 33–39, 121–30, 204–11, 293–300, 348–353, 425–30. Google, books.google.com/books?id=mKBHAAAAYAAJ. Accessed 17 June 2020.
   Google Scholar
• Dougan, Michael B. “The Arkansas Married Woman’s Property Law.” The Arkansas Historical Quarterly, vol. 46, no. 1, 1987, pp. 3–26. doi:10.2307/40030771.
   Web of Science ®Google Scholar
• Garrett, Peter K. Introduction. Gothic Reflections: Narrative Force in Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Cornell UP, 2003, pp. 1–32.
   Google Scholar
• Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. 1979. Yale Nota Bene, 2000.
   Google Scholar
• Harris, Sharon M. Rebecca Harding Davis and American Realism. U of Pennsylvania P, 1991.
   Google Scholar
• Hartog, Hendrik. Man and Wife in America: A History. Harvard UP, 2002.
   Google Scholar
• Kalsem, Kristin. In Contempt: Nineteenth-Century Women, Law, and Literature. Ohio State UP, 2012.
   Google Scholar
• Ledoux, Ellen Malenas. Social Reform in Gothic Writing: Fantastic Forms of Change, 1764-1834. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
   Google Scholar
• McCall, Laura. A Shared Experience: Men, Women, and the History of Gender. New York UP, 1998.
   Google Scholar
• Nerone, John. “Newspapers and the Public Sphere.” Casper, et al., pp. 230–48.
   Google Scholar
• Park, You-me, and Gayle Wald. “Native Daughters in the Promised Land: Gender, Race, and the Question of Separate Spheres.” American Literature, vol. 70, no. 3, Sept. 1998, pp. 607–33. doi:10.2307/2902711.
   Web of Science ®Google Scholar
• Pelletier, Kevin. “Introduction: The Sentimental Apocalypse.” Apocalyptic Sentimentalism: Love and Fear in U.S. Antebellum Literature, U of Georgia P, 2015, pp. 1–33.
   Google Scholar
• Pfaelzer, Jean. Parlor Radical: Rebecca Harding Davis and the Origins of American Social Realism. U of Pittsburgh P, 1996.
   Google Scholar
• Renfroe, Alicia Mischa. “The Specter and the Spectator: Rebecca Harding Davis’s ‘The Second Life’ and the Naturalist Gothic.” Haunting Realities: Naturalist Gothic and American Realism, edited by Monika Elbert and Wendy Ryden, U of Alabama P, 2017, pp. 205–17.
   Google Scholar
• Roberts, Siân Silyn. Gothic Subjects: The Transformation of Individualism in American Fiction, 1790-1861. U of Pennsylvania P, 2014.
   Google Scholar
• Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “The Structure of Gothic Conventions.” The Coherence of Gothic Conventions, Methuen, 1980, pp. 1–27.
   Google Scholar
• Sicherman, Barbara. “Ideologies and Practices of Reading.” Casper, et al., pp. 279–302.
   Google Scholar
• Stoner, Ruth. “Rebecca Harding Davis’s ‘Second Life’; or ‘Her Hands Could Be Trained as Well as His.’” Legacy, vol. 19, no. 1, 2002, pp. 44–52. doi:10.1353/leg.2003.0017.
   Web of Science ®Google Scholar
• Sullivan, Kathleen S. Constitutional Context: Women and Rights Discourse in Nineteenth-Century America. Johns Hopkins UP, 2007.
   Google Scholar
• Tompkins, Jane. “Introduction: The Cultural Work of American Fiction.” Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860. Oxford UP, 1985, pp. xi–xix.
   Google Scholar
• Warren, Joyce W. Women, Money, and the Law: Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Gender, and the Courts. U of Iowa P, 2005.
   Google Scholar
• Welter, Barbara. “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860.” American Quarterly, vol. 18, no. 2, part 1, 1966, pp. 151–74. doi:10.2307/2711179.
   Web of Science ®Google Scholar