Yet Mara Lincoln's martyrdom for the sake of her fiancé's spiritual well-being is just one logical extreme to which domestic ideology's claims for the moral superiority of women could lead. It is important to stress that domesticity was not an ideology in the impoverished sense of the term. Domesticity did not become a dominant discourse because it provided people with a finite and orderly set of beliefs relieving them from the burden of thinking; to the contrary, domesticity was compelling precisely because it gave people an expansive logic and a series of rich cultural symbols through which to think about their world. As a result, domestic ideology, while it certainly manipulated antebellum intellectuals, could also be manipulated by them. Hence Alcott could take it to what is perhaps its feminist extreme in her novel Work (1873). Work opens with the orphan Christie Devon (invoking the "Declaration of Sentiments" revealed by women's rights supporters at their convention in Seneca Falls in 1848) announcing to her guardians that "there's going to be a new Declaration of Independence," namely, her declaration of economic independence from them. Alcott uses domestic ideology in order to identify not just work but meaningful work for women. Christie ultimately becomes a mediator in an organization composed of both middle- and working-class women. There she helps to heal the class conflicts that arise. Alcott's fictional character Christie, one could argue, anticipates historical figures like Jane Addams, who at the turn of the century established social work as a legitimate profession for women. Because domesticity placed the welfare of society -125- in women's able hands, women could claim that certain social professions outside of the home were the logical extension of their work inside the home.
Alcott perceived that the particular skills and knowledge women developed in managing households had extra-domestic applications, and this perception no doubt influenced her own decision to become a nurse during the Civil War. After the war other women intellectuals like Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell (who in 1849 received the first medical degree granted to a woman in the United States) also tried to expand the terrain of women's civilizing mission to include all of society and not just her own household. Declarations of women's moral superiority and civilizing influence, as well as claims for the managerial and practical skills they acquired through labor in the home, buttressed women's entrance into careers in medicine, education, and social welfare. Ironically, in the second half of the century domesticity itself enabled women's forays out of what the antebellum period identified as women's proper sphere. To add to the irony, postwar suffragists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton even used the logic of domestic ideology in their fight for women's political empowerment. Amongst these suffragists, antipatriarchal domesticity seems at last to have developed a recognizably feminist character.
The influence of domestic ideology on the suffragists, however, guaranteed that early feminism would not be without its political ambiguities. As early as 1838 in her Letters to Mothers Lydia Sigourney attempted to expand the terrain of domesticity into the world at large. Appalled that "the influx of untutored foreigners" had made the United States "a repository for the waste and refuse of other nations," Sigourney maintained that it was the responsibility of women "to neutralize this mass" through an internal missionary movement that would spread the good word of the Anglo-American middle-class home. Unfortunately, postwar suffragists, retaining domesticity's vision of the custodial role of women, used an argument reminiscent of Sigourney's to press for the vote. If white women were enfranchised, they argued, it would help offset the deleterious influence of lower-class immigrants and recently emancipated slaves (who during Reconstruction were allowed to vote). The same millennial -126- zeal that gives domesticity its custodial mission, then, also makes it both classist and ethnocentric.
A reading of Harriet E. Wilson's novel Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859) suggests that some African American women were acutely aware of domesticity's normative contents; however, because most of the other important mid-century African American women intellectuals (including Sojourner Truth, Harriet Jacobs, and Elizabeth Keckley) expressed their suspicions about domestic ideology in nontraditional literary forms, any history devoted to a genre like the novel will necessarily underrepresent the contributions of African American women to the discourse on domesticity. Wilson's autobiographical tale (believed to be the first novel published by an African American in the United States) is yet another story of an orphaned girl in search of what Wilson calls "selfdependence." This orphan, however, is an African American woman living in the North who is taken in as a servant by a white family when her mother abandons her.
The willfulness of the orphan Frado recalls that of Cummins's character Gerty in The Lamplighter, but unlike Gerty's guardian Emily Graham, Frado's mistress Mrs. Bellmont is hardly a domestic woman. Intent upon "breaking" Frado's will, she rules over not just Frado but the entire Bellmont household with an iron hand. Wilson opposes Mrs. Bellmont's method of governing to Aunt Abby's more gentle methods. Befriending the abused child, the Bellmont family's maiden aunt manifests their concern for her spiritual welfare by attempting to convert her. But Wilson establishes this opposition between Mrs. Bellmont and the domestic woman Aunt Abby only to render visible what they have in common. The author orchestrates the death of Frado's defender James Bellmont in such a way as to provide an opportunity for Frado to provide evidence of her conversion to Aunt Abby's god. As the opening of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps the younger's novel The Gates Ajar (1869) suggests, in the nineteenth century the death of a loved one was often seen as an occasion for manifesting one's submission to a divine wisdom that passes human understanding. But just when she appears on the verge of submitting to the higher authority that Aunt Abby attempts to impose on her, Frado suddenly rebels against Mrs. Bellmont, threatening henceforth -127- to return any blows that her mistress inflicts on her. At the same time the narrator abruptly drops the question of Frado's conversion. Because race gave Wilson a marginal status within the dominant culture, perhaps she was in a better position to see the way in which the advocates of what Bushnell called a new "domestic" religion had not entirely erased "conquest" from Christianity.
Introducing the women's novel into the canon of the American Renaissance, some object, will involve discarding aesthetic criteria and instituting political considerations as the determinants of literary merit. We must not forget that even the acknowledged male "classics" of the American Renaissance were themselves at one point noncanonical and that their cultural ascendency in fact owes a good deal to politics in the form of American nationalism. Few critics have found even the handful of acknowledged male classics (including Moby-Dick, The Scarlet Letter, The Last of the Mohicans) entirely satisfying from a strictly aesthetic standpoint, particularly in comparison to the British and European "masterpieces" of the same period. Indeed, a comment by Melville in Hawthorne and His Mosses suggests that if nineteenth-century critics had applied aesthetic rather than political standards to literature, most of the classic male novelists we now read might languish in the same literary obscurity to which their female contemporaries have been relegated. Concerned over the ill-repute of American writers and wondering where the American Shakespeare was, Melville enjoins, "[L]et America first praise mediocrity even, in her own children, before she praises. . the best excellence in the children of any other land. Let her own authors, I say, have the priority of appreciation."