Blog Assignment One

As far as my reading of Linda Grasso's "Anger in the House: Fanny Fern's 'Ruth Hall' and the Redrawing of Emotional Boundaries in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America goes, I found the lack of the author's input and ideas rather unattractive, but Grasso uses Elizabeth Cady Stanton's analysis of Ruth Hall to make several interesting connections. The most outstanding of these is the relationship of the women's rights movement to the abolitionist movement. Grasso explains that women used the abolitionist arguments to organize their own outcry of activism, and that Stanton directly related the plight of women to that of the slave. Grasso also provides Caroline Dall as a contrasting opinion, mentioning that Dall not only believes that Fanny Fern is disrespecting her male family members in her writing but also lacks talent. This idea of respect and a “ladylike” resistance to oppression strongly contradicts Stanton’s idea that a woman’s anger is key in expressing her need for liberty, in writing and in protest.

One part that stood out to me in stark contrast to the points Grasso’s essay was in Chapter 47 of Ruth Hall, when Mr. Skiddy’s wife walks out on him, leaving Mr. Skiddy with their nursing baby. There are plenty of examples of perfectly kind and generous men in Ruth Hall and of course the odious mother-in-law Mis. Hall to give a perfect example of a wretched woman – therefore in my interpretation the novel is not quite as extremely feminist or activist as the essay suggests. The reason the scene with Mr. Skiddy caught my attention was because of the phrase at the end of the chapter that calls him “the victimized man” (Fern 177). In a way, this could be seen as ironic and almost sarcastic in making out the man’s life to have taken a tragic turn just because he now has to care for an infant. Because of the tone of the rest of the story however, I chose to see this part more as an equalizer, showing that a man could just as easily as a woman be left in utter distress with the loss of a partner. The parallel to Ruth’s situation drew more of a relationship to the destructive results of corruption within a family unit rather than an allusion to the struggle of women in particular.

Anger in the House: Fanny Fern's "Ruth Hall" and the Redrawing of Emotional Boundaries in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America

Linda Grasso

Studies in the American Renaissance , (1995), pp. 251-261

Published by: Joel Myerson

Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30227673

Fern, Fanny. Ruth Hall. Mason Brothers 1855. Harvard University. Sep 23, 2005.

http://books.google.com/books/reader?id=R2R5cJtXkxAC&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&pg=GBS.PA178.w.1.1.0