“Married or Single?”: Catharine Maria Sedgwick on Old Maids, Wives, and Marriage

Abstract

[M]arried life is the destiny Heaven has allotted to us, and therefore best fitted to awaken all our powers, to exercise all our virtues, and call forth all our sympathies. (19) Catharine Maria Sedgwick, "Old Maids" (1834) As slaves must be trained for freedom, so women must be educated for usefulness, independence, and contentment in single life ... as a mode of life in which one may serve God and humanity, and thus educate the soul, the great purpose of this short life. So considered, single life would not long be regarded as either "helpless, joyless, or ridiculous," and that dreaded stigma, "old maid," would soon cease to be a stigma, and in the lapse of ages possibly become obsolete. (2:214) Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Married or Single? (1857) One question seems to reside at the heart of Catharine Maria Sedgwick's life and literature, as it does for the world of antebellum America of which she is part--married or single? Since Sedgwick's (re)discovery, however, critics have read her relationship to marriage and her own spinsterhood as ambivalent at best. The consensus is that Sedgwick ultimately places her true sentiment with marriage, holding it up as a state that is more "natural" than and preferable to its opposite. (1) Mary Kelley's essay "A Woman Alone" begins with the following claim: "The life of Catharine Maria Sedgwick was betwixt and between" (209). Kelley further explains, Sedgwick is representative of the ambiguity to be found in the sentimentalists' fiction. Her anchorless existence reflects its ideals and aspirations as well as its doubts and fears. ... Even when in her fiction Sedgwick sought to legitimate the status of the unmarried woman, it is clear that her true sentiments lay in the home. In saying that the greatest fulfillment for woman was to be found as a wife and mother, she was automatically ascribing an inferior status to the unmarried woman, despite her protests. (224-25) Later, in her study of nineteenth-century "literary domestics," Kelley further developed these ideas, going so far as to claim that Sedgwick's own position as a single woman left her feeling "unnatural," alone, and in a state of domestic "crisis" (Private Woman, Public Stage 239). (2) She writes, "[L]ife was a crisis of domesticity, the woman's crisis of being" (239). Susan Koppelman, introducing Sedgwick's short story "Old Maids," perpetuates this reading when she explains that "the bulk of [Sedgwick's] fiction serves to reinforce the belief that a woman's greatest satisfaction and fulfilment comes from marriage and motherhood" ("Catharine Maria Sedgwick" 10).Some twenty years later, Deborah Gussman concurred. Although she thinks less in binary terms than earlier critics, the result is much the same. Gussman argues that in Sedgwick's Married or Single? "the novel's ambivalent endorsement of single life (and its efforts to present fairly the challenges of marriage) is consistent with the views Sedgwick offered in her journal" (261). She then quotes a passage that admittedly does present what appears, at least in part, to be the author's remorseful acknowledgment of the painful existence of single life: "[I]t is the necessity of a solitary condition--an unnatural state. ... I would not advise anyone to remain unmarried--for my experience has been a singularly happy one" (261). Such quotations, used either as evidence for Sedgwick's ambivalence or for her reluctance to honor spinsterhood, must be comprehensively analyzed to recognize the multiple meanings inherent in such claims Calling Sedgwick ambivalent implies contradiction. It suggests that she held two oppositional views simultaneously or that she alternated between the poles of married and single. In setting up marriage and singlehood as conflicting identities, critics imply that Sedgwick's ambivalence means an inability on her part to claim one position or the other, that she regarded marriage as natural and best one moment, only to turn around and claim spinsterhood as woman's ideal the next. …