During the Civil War years the influential women's magazine Godey's Lady's Book never once alluded to the conflict that so en-121- grossed the attention of the nation. Along with the novels Northwood (1827) and The Lecturess (1839), Godey's was an important vehicle for its editor Sarah Hale's rather conservative domestic philosophy, and Hale's critics have taken the magazine's failure even to acknowledge the major conflict of the day as evidence that women intellectuals retreated to the home to escape harsh realities. "Reality," however, was not something these women were attempting to escape so much as something the particular form of their antipatriarchal critique encouraged them to redefine. According to Child's The Mother's Book, "Nothing can be real that does not have its home within us." If under the editorship of Hale Godey's manifested little interest in the war, this is in part because domestic ideologues were skeptical about the importance of the merely external. Hence in addressing the question of discipline, The Mother's Book stresses that behavior matters far less than the motives that impel it. The modern concept of the self and the modern experience of the self would be inconceivable without the transvaluation that domesticity helped effect.
Domesticity's valorization of character over conduct gave novelists license to produce some of the era's more reverent representations of non-Western cultures. In Hobomok (1824) the prolific Child (whose 1868 An Appeal for the Indians refers to the belief in white superiority as a "curse") protests the undue harshness of Calvinist doctrine that would damn the unconverted but noble savage to everlasting punishment in the afterlife. Like Stephens's later Malaeska (1860), Hobomok is a tale of interracial marriage. At one point Mary Corbitant, who marries Hobomok and bears his child, has a vision of the Christian God smiling "on distant mosques and temples" and "shedding the same light on the sacrifice heap of the Indian, and the rude dwellings of the Calvinist." The narrator lays the groundwork for an early theory of cultural relativism when she asserts that "spiritual light" shines equally on all people but is refracted in many different ways.
Women novelists' willingness to entertain notions of cultural relativism was not entirely disinterested, of course. Like her earlier A New-England Tale (1822), Sedgwick's Hope Leslie (1827) employs -122- relativism to buttress its own antipatriarchal critique as much as to ennoble aboriginals. Through the generous actions of her native heroine Magawisca, Sedgwick legitimates the alien culture rejected by Puritan "fanatics" because it does not conform to their ethnocentric standards. At the same time, and through a similar logic, Sedgwick legitimates the acts of defiance against the Puritan elders committed by her white heroine Hope Leslie. In an age of what Sedgwick calls "undisputed masculine supremacy," Hope fails to demonstrate the "passiveness" that the Puritans define as woman's chief virtue. Sedgwick describes Hope as someone whom the Puritans perceive as, like the natives, in need of "civilizing" restraints. But Hope's conduct only appears immoral; steadfast principles in fact guide her actions throughout the novel.
The domestic emphasis on cultivating principle in order to preserve the authenticity of the self may also account for the frequency with which orphans appear in women's novels. In three of the most popular novels of the time, Warner's The Wide, Wide World, Cummins's The Lamplighter, and Finley's Elsie Dinsmore, the death of one or both parents or the abandonment of children is a compelling donnée for women novelists because it provides an opportunity for distinguishing between character and conduct. Only with the parent absent can the child's internalization of principle be gauged. In women's novels, as in Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay on the subject, "selfreliance" is not freedom from duty but rather subjection to an internalized standard of duty. This is not to say that by internalizing duty domesticity merely introjected patriarchal rule but rather to suggest that even oppositional ideologies can have normalizing as well as liberating aspects.
While one could read assertions of women's moral superiority to men as empowering to women, historical romances written by women suggest that because theirs is the power of influence rather than of force, domesticity is always on the verge of reproducing patriarchal culture's male gaze. Harriet Vaughan Cheney's historical romance A Peep at the Pilgrims (1850) suggests that even in her private relations the domestic woman is necessarily a spectacle (as suggested by the titular "peep"). Even more so than Lee, Cheney -123- makes clear the erotic nature of the influence that domesticity assigned to women. Mr. Grey, voicing the wisdom of the Puritan patriarch, warns his daughter Miriam that she must accept male authority without question because women are more prone to err than men. "Women are born to submit," he claims, "and as the weaker vessel, it is meet they should be guided by those who have rule over them." Miriam argues in response that to the contrary women appear better suited to dispense the gospel rather than to receive it — since their erotic power makes their "influence" over men well-nigh irresistible: "If the entreaties of Delilah could subdue Samson, how much more powerful must be the arguments of religion from the lips of a virtuous woman," she asserts. Even though Miriam works toward Christian ends, Cheney cannot rid her "virtuous woman" of all the erotic power represented by the biblical Delilah.
Similarly, Stowe's representation of the virtuous Tina Percival in Oldtown Folks (1869) participates in the logic of the male gaze. Like Cheney, Stowe suggests that women's power over men depends upon their ability to please them. Tina's spectacular beauty, far from being a source of temptation for Stowe's male characters, is instead presented as, potentially, an agent of their regeneration. The narrator speaks of romantic "LOVE" as "greatest and holiest of all the natural sacraments and means of grace." Stowe contrasts this perspective with that of the Calvinist minister Dr. Stern, who believes that "the minister who does not excite the opposition of the natural heart fails to do his work." Significantly, the minister's sermons excite only "revulsion" among the townsfolk. Stowe had previously relocated gospel authority from the clergy to the eroticized domestic woman in The Minister's Wooing (another local color tale set in Puritan New England that Stowe published in 1859). There her character James Marvyn asserts that he does not understand a word of the minister Dr. Hopkins's tedious sermons but that the lovely Mary Scudder is his "living gospel" — the same phrase that the skeptic George Harris uses to describe his pious wife Eliza in Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Although thinking of women as the living gospel for men gives women a certain authority, it also defines them strictly in terms of men's needs. Because domestic ideology posits a moral difference between men and women, it always threatens to reduce women to little more than vessels for male salvation. One could argue that Stowe's -124- representation of the virtuous heroine not long for this world (the archetypal expression of which is, of course, Eva St. Clare in Uncle Tom's Cabin) results from the moral difference between the sexes posited by domestic ideology. Referring to Mara Lincoln's little Evalike demise at the end of Pearl of Orr's Island, the narrator notes that some people die young in order to aid in the spiritual development of those whom they leave behind. Mara's death has this effect on her skeptical fiancé Moses Pennel, whose salvation seems much more assured after her death than before it. In fact, on her deathbed Mara asserts that her Christian influence on him will be greater when she is dead than it would have been had she lived to marry him. For Stowe, then, a woman's dying gospel is perhaps even more potent than her living one.