AMERICAN ANTIGONE: WOMEN, EDUCATION, NATION, 1800-1870 by ROBERT E. NELSON

266 Pages·2008·0.97 MB·English

AMERICAN ANTIGONE:
WOMEN, EDUCATION, NATION, 1800-1870
by
ROBERT E. NELSON
A Dissertation submitted to the
Graduate School-New Brunswick
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Graduate Program in History
written under the direction of
James Livingston
and approved by
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New Brunswick, New Jersey 
October, 2008

©2008

Robert E. Nelson

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION

American Antigone: Women, Education, Nation, 1800-1870

by ROBERT E. NELSON

Dissertation Director:

James Livingston

My dissertation explores women’s moral and educational labor—teaching,
writing, and reforming—in the United States during the nineteenth century. Focusing on
the social ideas and the lives of Emma Willard (b. 1787), Catharine Beecher (b. 1800),
and Elizabeth Peabody (b. 1804), this study argues that an expansion of women's moral
and educational labor played a significant role in political and social changes during this
period. The Sophoclean heroine Antigone of the play named for her serves as a
representative of womanhood in the emerging democratic culture of the United States.
Antigone tells the story of a woman who tries to fulfill her family obligations by
burying her brother, killed in a civil war. The conflict between a citizen’s duties to the
state versus a sister’s duties to family, illustrates the concept of “separate spheres,” with
its firm distinction between private and public. That these duties are not separate, that
they come into conflict, is the moral dilemma of the play. Antigone challenges the state
by publicly articulating her sense of family duty. Unlike her brothers, she does not claim
the throne for herself. Like many American women in the nineteenth century, Antigone
makes political arguments as a woman without claiming the same political rights as a
man.
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American women of this generation did not all believe in sexual equality, and so
their social ideas imagined reform within a different framework than political parties and
elections. Willard, Beecher, and Peabody understand themselves and other middle-class
women as participating in the democratic culture of the United States. This participation
was through their moral and educational labor, not voting. Their ambivalence toward
women’s suffrage was less a case of reactionary conservatism and more an attempt to
assert the importance of civil society as the best ground for reform. Today, that position
can seem alien in its conception of women as non-voters, but the social ideas of these
women continue to speak to debates over the role that electoral politics can play in social
change and to the way that the disenfranchised can speak to political authority.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Title Page i

Abstract of the Dissertation ii

Table of Contents iv

Introduction: 1
Beyond Tragedy: Antigone in American History

Chapter One: 15
Abandoning Spheres: Civil Society, Sexual Polarity, American Antigone

Chapter Two: 64
The Moral Economy of Women’s Educational Labor, 1810-1835

Chapter Three: 116
A Woman’s Duties: Scenes of Educational Labor, 1835-1850

Chapter Four: 187
Black Antigone: Abolition and the Educational Labor of Women

Chapter Five: 231
Antigone’s Politics: Subordination and ‘Something Better than the Ballot’

Curriculum Vitae 260
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1
Introduction

Beyond Tragedy: Antigone in American History

Antigone entered American culture as part of the celebration of ancient Greece
that characterized the intellectual response to the rise of democracy. The first American
edition of the play was published in 1835. It was first performed professionally in New
York City during 1845. Caroline Winterer suggests that the arrival of Antigone in the
United States “illuminates the moment at which Americans reimagined the function of
classicism in women’s education, and in turn women’s preparation for citizenship.” The
play was part of the cultural landscape in which women entered educational and political
life in the United States and remains crucial to understanding how political culture is
understood in relation to gender.1
Perhaps the most obvious lesson of Antigone is about the exclusion of women
from politics. The play is centered on the conflict between Creon, who represents the
justice of the state, and Antigone, who tries to fulfill her family obligations by burying
her brother, killed in a civil war trying to overthrow Creon. The conflict between Creon
and Antigone, duty to state versus duty to family, illustrates the concept of “separate
spheres,” with its firm distinction between private and public. That these duties are not
separate, that they come into conflict, is the moral dilemma of the play. Antigone
challenges the state by publicly articulating her sense of family duty. Unlike her brothers,
she does not claim the throne for herself. Like many American women in the nineteenth
century, Antigone makes political arguments as a woman without claiming the same
2
political rights as a man.
The difference between the Greek and the American Antigone is the difference
between mythic and historical narrative. As a story centered on the doomed fate of
Oedipus’s family, the Greek Antigone ends in death and madness. Denied her public role
and prevented from fulfilling her family duty, Antigone dies by her own hand after being
buried in a cave. Creon is driven mad by the consequences of her death. His wife and
son, who was betrothed to Antigone, commit suicide. Translated to the American
nineteenth century, there is reason to see a similarity in the exclusion of women from
politics and the denial of their civil rights. The lives of some American women were
tragic, their voices silenced, their public lives denied. And like Antigone, many
experienced the contradictions and frustrations of making women’s concerns public. Yet,
the stark clarity of Antigone’s death does not reflect the complex history of women’s
civil and political life in the United States.
Another crucial difference, one that was repeated in nineteenth century reviews
and commentary on the play, is between the “heathen” Greek play and the predominantly
Christian society of the United States. The consensus among scholars and philosophers
writing in national magazines was that Greek drama needed Christianity to complete its
moral framework. As a reviewer of the first American editions of Antigone and the
Alcestis of Euripides put it, “In point of morality they [ancient Greeks] reach the highest
point of heathen purity.”2 As pre-Christian art, Greek drama was limited in its ability to
reflect true morality, which was only available after Jesus had appeared. Thus, in an
article titled “The Influence of Christianity on the Family,” one writer suggested that
3
Antigone “reaches out prophetically beyond the domain of Heathenism. Antigone is an
ideal creation of poetic fancy, realized only in Christian nations.” And realized, we can
assume, not only in nations, but within the gendered framework of morality as well. The
writer concluded, “Christianity alone raises woman to her true dignity.”3
Like many writers of his day, the author of “The Influence of Christianity on the
Family,” understood women’s social roles through the family roles of wife and mother.
His discussion of women’s dignity focused entirely on Paul’s description of the relation
between husband and wife as being like the relation between Christ and church. The
directive in Ephesians 5:22 "Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord" is followed
by the analogy in Ephesians 5:23 that "the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the
head of the church" and the complex view of marriage reflected in the rest of Ephesians
24-33. Like the author, American men and women of the nineteenth century interpreted
these passages as meaning that wives were subordinate to husbands. Yet, it is worth
noting that Antigone, unlike her sister Ismene, is not married. Whatever the meaning of
Paul’s description of marriage, it does not directly address women who, like Antigone,
have live outside the marriage relation. How then was Antigone “realized in Christian
nations?” If the role of wife defines women as subordinate, what does the story of an
unmarried woman who resists state authority mean?
Christianity was not the only moral framework for making sense of Greek drama.
The transatlantic intellectual culture that began flourishing outside church structures
during this period also struggled to make sense of Antigone’s meaning. George Eliot
argued that rather than see Antigone’s moral in terms of an “antagonism between valid
4
claims” specific to the polytheism of ancient Greece, we should see that “the struggle
between Antigone and Creon represents that struggle between elemental tendencies and
established laws by which the outer life of man is gradually and painfully being brought
into harmony with his inward needs.”4 Eliot suggested that the conflict between
Antigone’s claim and Creon’s authority reflects something universal about the necessary
dangers of a belief too strong or a political authority too unyielding. In the passage that
serves as the epigraph to this study, Eliot beautifully described the unintended
consequences of following individual conscience. Perhaps this modern sensibility
informs more recent engagement with the figure of Antigone.
Antigone seems to have re-entered American cultural consciousness in a major
way. In 2005, Starbucks chose to feature the debut CD by an all-women’s band named
Antigone Rising in all its stores. That same year, New Antigone, a journal focused “on
postgraduate women writing and arts, without being exclusively for and about 'women'
and 'postgraduates'” began publication. In 2004, “The Antigone Project,” a collaborative
project by five women writers and five women directors ran at the Julia Miles Theater,
New York.5
In August 2005, Cindy Sheehan, bereaved mother turned anti-war activist,
captured the imagination of the nation. The news media ran stories on her courageous
stand outside President Bush’s ranch in Texas. Pundits suggested she would single-
handedly mobilize the movement to end the United States occupation of Iraq. Jan
Hartman, a columnist for the progressive website Common Dreams, called Sheehan an
“American Antigone” because “both women are driven by grief to speak Truth to