This post, and several others to appear in due course, are generously sponsored by a gentleman-scholar from County San Francisco, supportive of the production and assessment of nasty novels, dealing familiarly with gamblers, misandrists and flashy reprobates.
Before there was Liz Lemon, there was Avis Dobell: devoted to her career, proudly single (for a while, anyways), lovably fallible, vociferously feminist, and trying to Have It All. (Unfortunately, Avis’s sense of humor isn’t as finely honed as Liz Lemon’s, but she makes up for it with earnestness.)
The title character of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s 1877 novel The Story of Avis is an aspiring painter in Civil War-era Boston, determined to eschew marriage and motherhood for a career as an artist. Unfortunately for her, she meets golden boy Philip Ostrander—he is literally described as an “amber god” at one point in the novel—who falls deeply and desperately in love with her. Some sexually fraught flirting goes down, but, scared of having to sacrifice her career, Avis does her best to scare Philip off. Her critiques of nineteenth-century gender roles are pretty pointed, as you can see from her solemn rejection of Philip’s love: “My ideals of art are those with which marriage is perfectly incompatible. Success—for a woman—means absolute surrender, in whatever direction. Whether she paints a picture, or loves a man, there is no division of labor possible in her economy.” Avis is really determined to Lean In to her art career—and in an era when reliable birth control was not widely accessible and women worked primarily within the home, it’s not totally surprising that she sees marriage and a career as mutually exclusive.
In the midst of the pair’s courtship, the Civil War begins to escalate, and Philip is off to battle. In a perhaps insensitive literary decision by Phelps, given the bloody devastation of the Civil War, the war becomes a running metaphor for Avis’s conflicted feelings about her love and her profession. Her internal conflict rises to a fever pitch that happens to coincide with the battle of Bull Run. Painting in her studio, she hears boys singing army songs outside her window, is vexed into a frenzy, and takes a generous swig of a strong French liqueur.
This is where the novel starts to go off the rails a bit, in the best possible way.
The room spins. Avis’s ears ring. She feels a “dull but not painful pressure set slowly in the brain.” And she starts to see things. A series of hallucinations pass before her eyes: porcelain vases, deserts, forests, oceans, downtrodden laborers, and Jesus (yes, Jesus) all swim through her booze-addled mind, each representing a potential artistic project. She rejects each one in turn for being too boring, too grand, too sad, and too holy.
And it’s a good thing too, because after all these rejections the room suddenly becomes FULL OF WOMEN. It’s like a feminist hall of fame: “Cleopatra was there, and Godiva, Aphrodite and St. Elizabeth, Ariadne and Esther, Helen and Jeanne d’Arc, and the Magdalene, Sappho, and Cornelia,–a motley company.” (Really, this whole section is so great that I had to use some serious self-control to resist quoting it all.) After the famous ladies vanish, a “silent army” of unknown women appears before giving way to…The Sphinx. With the casual Orientalism that is so common among nineteenth-century writers, Phelps presents the Egyptian sphinx as the subject of Avis’s next artistic project. The sphinx even comes to life and talks to Avis: “The mutilated face patiently took on the forms and hues of life; the wide eyes met her own; the dumb lips parted; the solemn brow unbent. The riddle of ages whispered to her. The mystery of womanhood stood before her, and said, ‘Speak for me.’” And with that, Avis passes out. She knows what she has to paint.
So on the one hand, this is a great moment. Ladies everywhere! Celebration of womanhood! Feminist art project! But on the other hand, this scene also perpetuates some troublingly stubborn stereotypes: womanhood as mysterious and exotic, and the Middle East as foreign and Other. Phelps’s depiction of the sphinx in particular reveals that white, middle-class, cis-gender feminism has long had issues with intersectionality, promoting gender liberation while simultaneously marginalizing based on race, class, ethnicity, or sexuality. These contradictory moments are what make Phelps’s work so fascinating (and, at times, frustrating).
When Avis awakens from her fever dream, she finds out that Philip has been shot in the battle of Bull Run; significantly, her moment of artistic ecstasy coincides with his injury. He returns home to convalesce, and their courtship resumes. Despite Avis’s earlier panicked protestations that “marriage is a profession to a woman. And I have my work; I have my work!” she eventually agrees to marry Philip, who promises she won’t have to sacrifice her art for housework. (If you’re cynical, you kind of have to wonder if Avis is guilted into the marriage because of Philip’s war injury.) As Avis feared, once the two are married, her art gives way to domestic duties—a compromise that she is constantly, vocally bitter about. At one point she reminds Philip, “you didn’t marry me to be your housekeeper,” and he replies, cruelly, “Yes, I remember. I don’t know what we were either of us thinking of!” When Philip commits a marital indiscretion—if you consider hand-holding cheating, which Avis does—Avis goes pale and silent with rage. The tragic death of their son and Philip’s gradually declining health exacerbate an already tense domestic situation.
Avis’s romance with Philip briefly rekindles when they travel to Florida for his health, but Philip somehow gets lost in the Florida swampland and dies a melodramatic death. Avis returns home having lost not only her son and her husband, but also her artistic genius. The novel closes with Avis reading a book to her young daughter, with the implication that perhaps the suggestively named young Wait will be able to strike the balance between home and career that her mother never could.
For a novel ostensibly presenting a fantasy of first-wave feminist empowerment, this conclusion is pretty grim. Some critics have read it as evidence of Phelps’s short-sightedness—a recapitulation to the conservatism of her era, but others see the ending as a desperate plea for broader definitions of gender roles, and a cautionary tale for women who might be tempted to sacrifice their dreams; given Phelps’s history of activism that I’ll discuss in a minute, I tend to agree with the latter.
Phelps was enormously popular and prolific in her lifetime. She is perhaps most well known for her novel The Gates Ajar (1868), a best-seller that offered a comforting, if unorthodox, view of the afterlife to give solace to Americans facing unprecedented losses after the Civil War. She corresponded with George Eliot, and made the acquaintance of many famous New England writers, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lydia Maria Child, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. There is even evidence that The Story of Avis was read by Louisa May Alcott: Alcott wrote to a friend that she hoped her artist sister May would “prove ‘Avis’ in the wrong” when she got married.
So why does nobody read Phelps’s work today? For one, her novels can come off as kind of preachy to a modern reader. Phelps was an activist for a smorgasbord of progressive causes, including women’s equal rights, safe labor conditions, dress reform, and anti-vivisection. She takes up these causes with gusto and without subtlety in her fiction; her sincerity is charming, but it can also be a little off-putting. Besides that, her prose style is ornate and at times even fussy. This frilly, meandering prose is one of the reasons I love Phelps’s work, but unfortunately it also makes her novels sound pretty retro.
But Phelps’s moralizing tone and baroque prose shouldn’t scare you off. Novels like The Story of Avis give us an important picture of how women advocated for themselves before the age of Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, bell hooks, Judith Butler, and good ol’ Liz Lemon. And it also connects us to a tradition of novels by women writers that celebrated female artists as their heroines. This trope of the lady artist is surprisingly common—think of Jane Eyre’s weird arctic iceberg watercolors, or of Lily Briscoe’s purple triangle painting in To the Lighthouse. American women writers took this trope and ran with it. Along with The Story of Avis, there’s Louisa May Alcott’s unfinished novella Diana and Persis, which presents a slightly more optimistic picture of the woman artist’s life; Lillie Devereux Blake’s Fettered for Life, nearly as grim as Avis but with the added bonus of cross-dressing and train wrecks; and Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun, in which the African American protagonist faces racial prejudice while trying to make it as an artist in the big city. That’s just to name a few.
Given the fact that no American museums of art were officially established until after the Civil War, the proliferation of the female artist character in nineteenth-century fiction is especially interesting. The relatively recent emergence of an American high culture meant that there was a lot still up for grabs, and women writers wanted a piece of the pie. As literary scholars have suggested, women writers like Phelps depicted women painters in their fiction as a way of telegraphing their own artistic integrity, in order to carve out a place for themselves in this developing project of American art. Despite The Story of Avis’s melodrama, didacticism, and verbosity, we should appreciate the serious aesthetic endeavor it represents.
Tags: books, feminism, heather wayne, the gentleman scholar sponsorship series
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I’m pretty sure The Toast is giving me a second degree in literature. It is unquestionably superior to my first one, which was way too heavy on the Shakespeare and clearly not heavy enough on Feminist Novels Through the Ages.
I want long, wonderful pieces about all the novels mentioned above! *clasps hands* Pretty please?
Agreed – but I daresay this article was not long enough… would read many more pages of this.
When you say that no American museums of art were officially established until after the Civil War, do you mean national museums of art? Because that’s true, but the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia opened in 1807 and even allowed women to study in the galleries and take classes there by the 1860s. They didn’t offer any live modeling classes for women until after the war, which is a bummer, but it was still a massively influential institution for the training of female artists. I haven’t read The Story of Avis (but I will now thanks to your review), but I’m wondering if it said anything about where she trained (I’m guessing somewhere private in Boston?). Anyway, I mention all this not to criticize but just in case anyone is further interested in this topic–and to give a shout out to the Pennsylvania Academy, which is still doing good work in fine arts education.
Ah, yes, thank you for the clarification! (And for the lead on the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts…I will definitely do more reading about that.) I’m drawing from Alan Wallach’s discussion of the museum “boom” in the 1870s in the US, which led to the formation of the Met in New York, the MFA in Boston, and the Corcoran Gallery in D.C. As you point out, there were definitely galleries and academies earlier in the century, but Wallach marks the establishment of these kinds of national museums as a turning point in American art culture.
And yes, the novel does talk about her training: she studied in Paris, I think under the tutelage of an established artist. I know it was common for male artists to train in Europe–do you have any sense of how common this was for young women?
Oh, the 1870s were definitely the turning point for museums as we think of them now, that is, repositories of original “great works” as opposed to teaching academies. I guess I don’t think of them that way because I have a secret ambition that if I were ever in the position to be a fantastically wealthy philanthropist, I would open a seriously Old School free teaching academy where all the held works are plaster replicas or forgeries of “masterworks,” thus engendering an organic disdain for arbitrarily inflated value, prestige of location, and authorship in my unsuspecting pupils…I also have a thing for the Peale family, which opened the Pennsylvania Academy, so there you go.
As for women training in Paris in the mid-nineteenth century, it wouldn’t surprise me, though that’s not my specialty so I can’t say for certain. Everything I know about art training in France revolves around the Grand Tour from a British perspective. I’ve always been taught that that was an exclusively male privilege, though I’m not sure that’s true. If you could pay for it, you could probably do whatever you wanted, especially when the Grand Tour was a glorified vacation.
As for formal training, most of the women artists of that time period I know about had family members in the art business. I would guess women had their own salons if they weren’t allowed in the Royal Academy, which I would imagine might be pretty strict, but again, it’s not my area so I don’t know. It’d make an excellent research question!
I can’t speak to how common this kind of private tutelage was for young women, or if there was a sizable (for values of nineteenth century lady artists) population doing training in Paris, but this is exactly what Mary Cassatt did in the late 1860s: went to Paris for private study with Jean-Léon Gérôme, one of the masters at the École des Beaux-Artes, which at the time didn’t admit women students, so private study with one of the professors was the next best option. Wikipedia is also pointing me towards Emily Sartain and Elizabeth Jane Gardner as examples of other women studying and painting in Paris during the same time period under similar circumstances, so it makes me think there’s something to be said for American women art-ing in Paris in the 1860s and 1870s. Seconding whittingly, this would be a great research question, and someone should pursue it and pitch it to The Toast!
This is all so intriguing and helpful! As a character, Avis is from a socially and economically privileged background, so I imagine that’s how she would have gained access to European artistic training. In my work on this novel, I’m really interested in the way Phelps depicts (and critiques) symbols of international status and prestige, so looking into a bit more of this background about artistic training might help me explore that question. Thanks, Toasties!
The Gates Ajar has achieved perfect symmetry on Amazon. The are only two reviews: a one star review and and a five star review. Please let this never change. As a bonus, the one star review refers to a book about death as a “grave disappointment.”
“and the Middle East as foreign and Other.” Well, it kind of *was* in 1877 I dare say….And equally we to them.
That's perfect. I read The Gates Between (which is part of her afterlife trilogy) earlier this year. It was, perhaps not a grave disappointment, but disappointing. From the point of view of a dead man in limbo, which seems hard to mess up, but happened nonetheless.
This is all so intriguing and helpful! As a character, Avis is from a socially and economically privileged background, so I imagine that's how she would have gained access to European artistic training. In my work on this novel, I'm really interested in the way Phelps depicts (and critiques) symbols of international status and prestige, so looking into a bit more of this background about artistic training might help me explore that question. Thanks, Toasties!
At some point I would like the toast to talk about Sarah Grand, specifically the Beth Book, which is similar to the description on Phelps driving interests – anti-vivisection included. The Beth Book was semi-autobiographical, as was all of Grand’s work, and very white-victorian-proto-feminist. Fascinating, and incredibly forward thinking for its time.
However, Elizabeth Caldwell (the Heroine of The Beth Book) having been heavily pushed by societal mores and her own family into an early marriage and the sacrifice of her goals, has a rather happier ending.
At some point I would like the toast to talk about Sarah Grand, specifically the Beth Book, which is similar to the description on Phelps driving interests – anti-vivisection included. The Beth Book was semi-autobiographical, as was all of Grand's work, and very white-victorian-proto-feminist. Fascinating, and incredibly forward thinking for its time.
However, Elizabeth Caldwell (the Heroine of The Beth Book) having been heavily pushed by societal mores and her own family into an early marriage and the sacrifice of her goals, has a rather happier ending.
I read this in college and I remember liking it a lot! I just looked to see if I had saved anything on it and apparently I wrote a 10-page paper called “‘Not Like Other Girls’: Female Friendship And Gender Roles In ‘The Story Of Avis'”
I read this in college and I remember liking it a lot! I just looked to see if I had saved anything on it and apparently I wrote a 10-page paper called "'Not Like Other Girls': Female Friendship And Gender Roles In 'The Story Of Avis'"
A few years ago I did a guest lecture on women artists in Britain and France in the 19th c as part of an exhibition of women artists at a local museum. While I would in no way call my lecture a work of scholarship, my source reading was pretty fascinating and I’m happy to share what I found, mind_grapes.
Women artists proliferated in the second half of the 19th c, but faced many obstacles to getting training on an equal level with men. Some women artist set up their own schools in the face of ongoing refusal to be admitted to the Royal Academy school and Ecole des Beaux Arts. There was a union of women artists in France that held their own parallel Salon with different hanging principles than the state-sponsored Salon and gave women a chance to have their works displayed in a way that could actually be seen rather than shoved in to a corner of a gallery. As mentioned above, Emily Sartain, Mary Cassatt and Elizabeth Jane Gardner all made their way to Paris to study under different artists, the latter eventually marrying her teacher, William-Adolphe Bouguereau one of the most famous French academic painters of the day. He taught at the Academie Julian, which was one of the few art schools that accepted women and men.
One woman I didn’t get to research as much as I would have liked is Marie Bashkirtseff. She was an outspoken feminist and total badass who died at the age of 25 and who wrote in 1881: “We are asked with an indulgent irony how many great women artists there have been. Ah, gentlemen, there have been some and that is surprising given the enormous difficulties that they have encountered.”