Pastoral Escapes from the City: Alice Cary's Resistance to Patriarchal Romanticism in the New York Ledger

Abstract:Nineteenth-century readers of the New York Ledger, the leading story paper of the time, regularly encountered Alice Cary's pastoral writing as metaphorical Romantic escapes from the cityscape. But Cary's writing did more than deliver pastoral reprieves to readers. Her Ledger columns also resist the patriarchal aestheticization of the pastoral and the rural. Via pastoral settings, Cary details how both nature and women denounce social standards of beauty and youth. In other words, the pastoral for Cary is anti-patriarchal. It is pure and beautiful not because it is young and youthful but because it is full of experience and knowledge, traits that she associates with feminine beauty. Ultimately, Cary's pastoral writing in the Ledger delivers readers outside of the city into a pastoral setting that definitively rejects patriarchal forms of Romanticism.