Have read four stories so far, all from her first volume of stories, *Castle Nowhere: Lake-Country Sketches*

"Peter the Parson" - a priest in a rough-and-tumble mining town has few congregants and gets little respect. His fate gets tangled up with a deceitful pastor and he falls victim to vigilante justice.

"Jeannette" - a woman of mixed background (indigenous, French, English) is the recipient of a white do-gooder's attention, who seeks to educate her, as well as the attention of an older white gentleman who wants to marry her. Neither of them actually know Jeannette very well at all.

"Solomon" - two vacationing, interloping upper-class women fall for the love story of an artist who gives up his craft so he can support his wife as a miner. This is the first of the stories presented here to happen near Zoar, Ohio, with reference to the separatist community that settled there.

"Wilhelmina" - this one takes place within the Zoarite community. When young men from the community go off to fight in the civil war - against the rules of the community - one leaves behind a young woman (Wilhelmina) who refuses to move on. This one is also told from the perspective of an interloping do-gooder who gets wrapped up in the titular character's romance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoar,_Ohio

So Woolson wrote several volumes of short stories (two published during her lifetime, two posthumously), a number of novels, and quite a bit of poetry.

Much of her stories and a few of her novels are available in e-copies via @gutenberg_org and other sources.

Yet very little of her #Poetry has been published online! It's a really good example of how even prominent writers (of their time), whose stuff is fully in #PublicDomain, has not yet it made its way to the internet.

(I find it good to have these examples to share with students, when encouraging them to visit a physical library and not just rely on what they can find in electronic databases!)

#ConstanceFenimoreWoolson #NineteenthCenturyLiterature

#MorningReading was Fenimore Woolson's "St. Clair Flats" and *whoa* -- this is the first of the bunch to really stand out!

When, a few pages in, two travelers (including the narrator), somewhat lost upon extensive marshland, are directed to the house of someone named Waiting Samuel for shelter. We are treated to this humorous scene:

"'What is he waiting for?' I called back over my shoulder; for Raymond was rowing.

'The judgment-day!' answered Liakim, in a shrill key. The boats were now far apart; another turn, and we were alone."

(By that point I knew I was in for a treat! Some notes later.)

#ConstanceFenimoreWoolson #GreatLakesLiterature #NineteenthCenturyLiterature

A few quick notes on "St Clair Flats":

1) There's something satirical or parodying about the story, riffing on the gothic interests of the 19th c. The traveling strangers swap bits of poetry a few times, usually in a sort of coded commentary on things they are witnessing. "Annabel Lee" is one; a bit of "Haunted House" by Thomas Hood is another. And certainly there are portions of the story that are, if not suspenseful, strange and a bit creepy.

The travelers are witty and humorous; they take what they witness with a fair bit of distance and irony. Yet they aren't wholly above being unnerved by certain aspects of their journey, and neither is the reader.

2) That use of poetry to distance her travelers from the world they are observing and moving through is itself really interesting. At first, I was bored by this repetition of CFW's narrators being strangers, interlopers/tourists/quasi-anthropologists. But it's clearly done consciously, and the differences of class (among other distinctions) between her narrators and their subjects are part of the story.

"St. Clair Flats" reads, to me, as something more than nostalgia, or more than mourning for a fleeting past as represented by a exclusionary religious order or isolated cult-ish visionaries. But I think I need to sit with it longer, maybe even give it another read, to parse that out.

3) I am working on a project right now that centers on constructions of religion in the rural Midwest, late 19th/early 20th century --- so what a joy to find an attentiveness to religious diversity in these stories I've read so far, all in the Great Lakes region!

In "Peter the Parson," there are Protestant/Catholic issues simmering behind the social drama.

In "Wilhelmina" and "Solomon," the Zoarite community looms large.

And here in St. Clair Flats, we get a would-be millenarian prophet, complete with his own interpretation of scripture and a hint of astrology.

"Rodman the Keeper" is very much a late-Reconstruction era, North-South reconciliation story.

A man from the North who had fought in the war has taken a job as a national cemetery keeper in the South. He is a loner but winds up tending to an ex-Confederate soldier that is ill and has little family. They never reconcile, per se, but their tentative relationship is (I presume) Woolson's way of suggesting that reconciliation between sections, though hard, may be possible.

The ex-Confederate is primarily cared for by a black servant named Pomp, who had been enslaved by the family prior to the war... The servants/freedpersons in the story are mostly to the side and flat in dimension, and yet Woolson makes at least one interesting move in her presentation of them: she waffles in how to refer to Pomp's status. He is referred to as a slave, as a servant, and (if I remember right) decisively as free, at one point.

And black southerners play one more curious role here: in one scene, on Memorial Day, a black procession at the cemetery is the only significant show of respect.

What is so hard, with literature from this period, is to parse what is intentional and what is incidental, in how these authors deal with matters of race, slavery, the war itself, and extending to matters of nationalism and history, etc.

One could mount a generous reading of the story by recognizing it is largely told from the perspective of the Northerner, and thus shows the limited vision of both parties, including the supposedly more noble of the two.

Or, one could argue that this is just Woolson's own well-intentioned but limited understanding of race and the war showing, one she very much shares with many others of her time. The North's literary fascination with the South after the war is deep and a lot of it feels like this (in my limited reading of it).

I tend toward the latter, I think... but it's easy to take something like the waffling on the status of Pomp and start to probe. Because that is no doubt intentional.

The relationship between the parties is what is most interesting, and there are differences of culture and religion that are centered here. Woolson sets a lot of the story around a sort of exaggerated Catholic mystery: the nun, whose world is the convent and the men take for being rather dull and of limited mind, ultimately saves the men in a storm.

(This act leads the lighthouse keeper's very Protestant wife to begin attending a local mission weekly.)

Anyhow, this has nowhere near the mystery and beauty of St Clair Flats or some of the stories from that earlier volume, but it does show off Woolson's interest in defined subcultures, or in moments of cultural/religious difference.

That's what stood out to me from my reading of her earlier, and I hope one or stories from this collection do that interest a bit more justice.

Two more quick notes:
1) Woolson's women characters are often markedly independent but in subtle ways. In Sister St Luke, the lighthouse keeper's wife, Melvyna, effectively keeps her maiden name w/o formally keeping it, and has a strong identity apart from her husband that ties her back to her (New England?) roots.

2) There is a recognition of the southern east coast's long history in Sister St Luke, with references to territory being passed from the Spanish to the English and finally the U.S. Yet there is a brief allusion to indigenous history, in describing a trail "made by the fierce Creeks three centuries before." I've become lowkey fascinated by this period's fictional treatments of indigenous history, where they are aware of it, acknowledge it, but often write around it. Logging this here to come back to later, maybe.