by Thomas L. Long, Department of English, Thomas Nelson Community College, Hampton, VA
On the day Molly Elliot Seawell's obituary was published on the pages of the New York Herald, November 16, 1916, there appeared on the same page an account of the second arrest of birth-control activist Margaret Sanger for "outraging public decency." Nothing could more aptly signify the death of one age and the robust birth of modernity than the juxtaposition of these two women. By her own admission, Molly Elliot Seawell was raised and educated more in the manner of the late eighteenth century than the late nineteenth. Socially she was hostile to feminism and women's suffrage. Her books reviewed by the New York Times were often described as "sweet" or "wholesome." However, she remained a single woman and worked as a prolific writer who supported a household by her publication.
Baptized as "Mary," Molly Elliot Seawell was born into one of the older families of English-speaking North America and one of the first families of Virginia. Her father was John Tyler Seawell, a lawyer and orator and a nephew of President John Tyler. Her mother (Tyler's second wife), Frances Elizabeth Jackson Seawell, was a native of Baltimore whose father, Maj. William Jackson, had fought in the War of 1812. Descendants of the original Seawells spell the family name in one of two forms: "Sewell" (as in Sewell's Point, Norfolk, Virginia) and "Seawell." Otis Notman interviewing Molly Elliot Seawell for the New York Times Saturday Review of Books noted that the regional pronunciation of the name was "Sowell," although Molly Elliot Seawell pronounced her name as it was spelled ("Talks" 392).
Born in Gloucester, Virginia, on October 23, 1860, Seawell spent her early life at the family's plantation home, "The Shelter," which had been a hospital in the Revolutionary War. She described her early formation as a ". . .secluded life . . .in the library of an old Virginia country house, and in a community where conditions more nearly resembled the eighteenth than the nineteenth century" (The Ladies' Battle 116). Her father was a student of the Classics, who influenced her learning. She was not allowed to read a novel until she was 17, instead reading history, encyclopedias, Shakespeare, and the Romantic poets. Her education was primarily informal at home, where she learned riding, dancing, and household management. In addition to these influences and her Tidewater surroundings, Seawell's seafaring uncle, Joseph Seawell, contributed to her future literary subjects.
The death of her father when she was 20 (Notman "Talks" 392) prompted Molly Elliot Seawell, her mother and her younger sister, Henrietta, to move from "The Shelter" in Gloucester to Norfolk and later to Washington, D.C. It was either in Norfolk or in Washington that Seawell began her literary career in earnest. She first wrote under pen names (including the patrician "Foxcroft Davis" [the novels Mrs. Darrell and The Whirl) and the Russian "Vera Sapoukhyn") until the publication of her short story "Maid Marian" in 1886, a tale she later dramatized for actress Rosina Vokes. Her first novel, Hale-Weston, published in 1889, was widely read and translated into German. These successes established her literary career; in her own words, "That I succeeded was due to tireless effort, unbroken health, a number of fortunate circumstances, and above all, what I am neither afraid nor ashamed to say, the kindness of the good God. In the course of time, I became, through literature alone, a householder, a property-owner, a taxpayer, and the regular employer of five persons" (The Ladies' Battle 116). Her literary production included forty books of fiction, collected short fiction, and non-fiction, as well as numerous political columns from Washington for New York dailies and essays.
Seawell's fiction might be distinguished into three genres: regional fiction, romances, and books for boys (primarily nautical stories). Their strong suit is Seawell's ability in characterization rather than her plots. In an interview with her, Notman observed this strength ("Talks" 392), to which she replied: "My people usually seem flesh and blood to me. If they do not have the breath of life in them at the beginning, no amount of labor can make them real." Mitchell in American Women Writers remarks more critically, "Plot was never her strong point, and the perfect ladies and gentlemen, the overt racism, and the condescending tone are interesting only because they reflect values once widespread" (41).
Of Seawell's regional fiction, Throckmorton, is the most interesting. It was popular when published, in part because its attitudes about such things as marriage or blacks are conventional. At the same time it does not represent the nostalgic view of Reconstruction Virginia that one might expect. General Temple, in whose home most of the action occurs, spends his retirement studying battles in which his soldiering was inept at best. His daughter-in-law, Judith, the novel's heroine, lives in a reluctant widowhood over the family's martyred son, Beverley Temple, whom Judith had hardly known before he died in the War and whom, she comes to admit to herself, she may not really have loved. Judith finds herself falling in love with the neighbor George Throckmorton, a Virginia officer who had served in the Union army, whom Judith is led to believe may have killed her husband in battle. While Throckmorton desires a wife who will bend to his sovereignty, the strong and independent Judith is the only character worthy of his nobleness of character. Parallels with Jane Austen would seem obvious. What is interesting about the novel is that Seawell, particularly given her pedigree, is remarkably unsentimental about the War Between the States and the hopelessness of its goals.
Similarly interesting among her historical romances (Mitchell calls them "Ruritanian fantasies") is The House of Egremont. This novel is set in late seventeenth-century England and France after the "glorious revolution" that exiled James II and crowned William and Mary. Seawell offered a revisionist view of the two kings: "James II was an honest man, though an incompetent King, and William of Orange, though a great man, was about as bad as men are made" ("James II"). The Times had taken exception to her assessment in its review of the book in 1900 ("The Villain"), to which Seawell replied in January of the next year, revealing her care in researching the period. The novel is interesting, too, as an allegory of the South's "Lost Cause" in fighting the Civil War. Distanced in time and geography we watch petulant aristocrats spend their days in a shabby court in exile while idly anticipating "coming into their own" when the Stuart monarchy is someday restored. It is only Roger Egremont, both faithful and pragmatic, who "comes into his own" and has his English estate restored to him. The novel is remarkable also in that Seawell abandons her conventional delicacy in describing the execution of Richard Egremont, the young Jesuit priest. The Times' review took her to task for her realism, commenting, "Against the details of an execution we protest. We take our fiction sadly, . . .but we draw the line at surgery and hangings. We are resigned to tears, but we object to being made sick and faint, and we note a growing tendency in the writers of tales to introduce us to the operating table and to drag us to executions" ("The Villain"). Here Seawell shows herself a daughter of less squeamish eighteenth century sensibilities rather than of the Victorian. It would probably be inaccurate, however, to claim that she gives evidence of nineteenth or twentieth century realism (the Times reviewer notwithstanding) since in form and tone the novel is closer to historic romance.
This novel and Seawell's other historical romances reveal her Roman Catholic sympathies. This religious affiliation is unusual in someone of Seawell's background, which one might expect to be Episcopalian. Youthful reading of Macaulay's "History of the Popes" had prompted her to examine the Roman Church and his critique of the Church of England similarly impressed her with the result that she would later convert to Catholicism (Harkins and Johnston 120-21). Her romances include a heroic Jesuit priest-martyr (Dickie, in The House of Egremont), a courageous nun who nurses at the front lines of battle (Lady Betty in The History of Lady Betty Stair), and an assortment of priests, nuns, bishops, and a pope. She also shows some familiarity with St. Thomas Aquinas (Children of Destiny) and the Venerable Bede (Throckmorton).
With the publication in 1890 of the prize winning Little Jarvis, Seawell began a series of very popular books for boys, primarily sea stories. Mitchell observes that these "dwell on honor, not action; heroism is demonstrated by dutiful self-sacrifice instead of valiant aggression" (40). Typical of the period in which they are written, these books are not condescending in tone or diction. In fact we might surmise that the sophistication of young readers a hundred years ago was very much greater than that of youth today. Influenced by her seafaring uncle, Joseph Seawell, these books were commercially successful. Moreover, Twelve Naval Captains (1897) is said in Seawell's biographical entries to have been used as a text at the Naval Academy in Annapolis.
After her father's death and between her move to Norfolk and settling for life in Washington, Seawell made the first of many trips to Europe. Her visits took her to England, France, Germany, and even as far as Russia. Apparently the appeal of Russia and Germany was the therapeutic waters of the baths, to which Seawell attributed the improvement of a chronic eye condition (Notman "Some Authors," "Talks"). Her summers in Europe, returning to Washington in October, became a regular event. These travels extended the material of her literary subjects which as we have seen included the sea, England, France, and Central Europe.
For a woman of obvious independence, intelligence, and resourcefulness, Seawell was, to the modern mind, myopic in regard to two social issues: blacks and women. Her depictions of black people are quite frankly racist without apology. Blacks are the servants or slaves in her regional novels (for example Simon Peter and Delilah in Throckmorton). We can only excuse this racism by recognizing that it was the prevailing social attitude. In its review of Seawell's A Virginia Cavalier, the Times remarked of her depiction of young George Washington's slave, Billy: "[Seawell introduces us to] the living, breathing, inimitable image of a true Virginia slave boy. . . .'Billy' makes everything right by his undisputable humanity. His very adoration for 'Marse George' has in it the touch of histrionic extravagance which is as the breath of life to the negro" ("Seawell's Washington"). This review has the touch of prevailing mores that is the very life of the paper that claims to print all the news that's fit.
Of Seawell's anti-feminist and anti-suffrage writings, we can only note how much she was a product of her time and Southern culture. In 1891 Seawell published an essay "On the Absence of the Creative Faculty in Women" that created a debate in the pages of The Critic for several months. Through articles and in a book, The Ladies' Battle (1911), she argued against women's right to vote. Mitchell observes that Seawell "attacked suffragists as women 'born with socialistic and communistic rather than domestic tendencies' who 'have an antagonism to men'" (41). While these sentiments may surprise us, they might not shock us when we remember that similar claims have been made in the last twenty years about the National Organization for Women, the Equal Rights Amendment, and the feminist movement generally.
Molly Elliot Seawell's essay in The Critic begins "It may be stated, as a general proposition, that no woman has ever done anything in the intellectual world, which has had the germ of immortality. This is equivalent to saying that the power to create is entirely lacking in women" (292). Clearly she is arguing from a particular definition of "creative," which she relates to "genius" and the contributions of men, as distinct from mere "talent." In addition, she argues her case from the traditional canon of "works of genius" of the Western world, whose constructors we might call today "dead European males." While she admits the talent of Sappho, George Eliot, George Sand, and Mme. de Stael, their renown was temporary: "It is a singular fact, that all women whose claims to genius have been seriously considered, have had an enormous contemporary reputation--and it is strikingly true that posterity has not in a single instance endorsed this contemporary verdict" (293). Even Jane Austen, who comes closer than any woman to threatening the male artistic hegemony, lacks the "universality which is the mark of genius" (293), a universality evident in Shakespeare, for instance. The woman artist, therefore, cannot create; "she can only describe, and hence her work must always lack the catholicity of genius" (293). She acknowledges the claim that women may simply have lacked the opportunity for creative action. But she asserts that women have been putting pen to paper as long as men and that civilizations first give women the leisure that creative action requires. Miss Seawell goes on to dismiss women's contributions to music, painting, technology: "For thousands of years women did all the baking and washing and sewing done on this planet--and yet every contrivance to lighten their labor has been put into their hands by men. . . .women left to themselves would have remained in utter barbarism" (294). Interestingly, Horace Traubel, Walt Whitman's literary executor, brought this article to the poet's attention in his last year. Whitman was astonished that Seawell had dismissed Sappho, Madame de Stael, George Sand, and George Eliot, and replied: "Damn the woman! But stick to George Sand! That would be dangerous doctrine for her to pronounce in Europe. It would be hard lines for anyone to pretend that Dickens and Thackeray and that class can anyway approach the best women: it would show there was no sense in talk."
Miss Seawell's arguments are part of a larger nineteenth-century discourse about gender and genius that has been explored by Christine Battersby. While Romanticism valorized feminine qualities in men and their related creativity (e.g. the metaphor of the male poet "giving birth" to a poem), the Romantics did not include women among creative geniuses. This "cultural apartheid," as Battersby calls it, was the result in part of an aesthetic of the universal over the particular. Moreover, as Naomi Schor has noted, the particular was equated either with the ornamental (and therefore a signifier of the effeminate, indulgent, and decadent) or with the quotidian, the everyday (and therefore a signifier of the prosaic and domestic), a world presided over by women (3-4). In part the initial resistance to realism in the nineteenth-century novel reflects its (feminine) obsession with detail, a sure symptom of anarchy and cultural dissolution (Schor 42-43). We might recall that Seawell was not permitted to read novels until she was 17. And although Seawell's argument published a little over a hundred years ago may seem quaint to us it has some contemporary echoes. In her Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia asserts "If civilization had been left in female hands, we would be living in grass huts" (38). This attitude towards women's culture, often coming from other women, is persistent.
On the question of women's suffrage, Seawell's The Ladies' Battle makes both constitutional arguments against votes for women and ad hominem attacks on its proponents. Her constitutional argument is founded on the notion that voting is a privilege not a right. Moreover, it is a privilege predicated on two principles: the ability of the electorate to enforce (physically if necessary) its will and the freedom of the electorate from economic dependency for its maintenance. She argues that women cannot physically enforce laws and that their economic dependence offered them privileges of law (for example, the right to a husband's support even in infirmity or after divorce) that would be taken away with the right to vote. Her character attacks on suffragists are typical: they are ignorant of government and politics, are socialistic, and are rude and unruly. As Elna C. Green has documented Seawell's antisuffrage sentiments were consistent with others' in the movement, particularly in her patrician ancestral roots, her association of the issues of states rights and race in the struggle for national women's suffrage, and in the insistence of many unmarried antisuffragists like Seawell on the sanctity of marriage, which the right to vote supposedly threatened. Long after Seawell's cause was lost, however, The Ladies' Battle has had a curious afterlife, appearing on the bedside table of a female character in E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime--where it is mistaken for a pro-suffrage tract!
The household Seawell sustained with her mother and her younger sister Henrietta near Washington's fashionable Du Pont Circle was the location of an artists' salon of sorts. The home on P Street still exists and has recently been renovated as a commercial property. She entertained artists and writers there in addition to such notables of the time as the Earl of Carlisle and his daughter, Lady Dorothy Howard (Notman "Some Authors," "Talks"). After the death of her mother and later of her sister Henrietta, Seawell temporarily withdrew from social life, despite an enormous capacity for friendship and interest in people.
Her own health had been precarious for a number of years. Molly Elliot Seawell died of cancer in her home on November 15, 1916, only a few weeks after her 56th birthday. Her Roman Catholic Requiem mass was held in the Romanesque St. Matthew's Church, now the cathedral of the Archdiocese of Washington. Her body was laid to rest at Baltimore's Greenmount Cemetery.
Molly Elliot Seawell was a popular and widely read writer in her time, included at the beginning of the century in standard reference works on American writers and among the Times's Otis Notman's interview subjects with William Dean Howells, Jack London, and Theodore Dreiser. While much of her fiction might be described as "escapist" or "romantic" she was not reluctant to discuss some of the important issues of her day. Her attitudes toward these issues, however, are not always what we would consider modern. She represents the end of one generation of independent and self-reliant though socially and politically conservative women, and provides the background for the emergence of modern women.
Works Cited
Primary Sources
Davis Foxcroft. [Molly Elliot Seawell.] Mrs. Darrell. New York: Macmillan, 1905.
- - - . The Whirl: A Romance of Washington Society. New York: Dodd, Mead, & Co., 1909.
Notman, Otis. "Some Authors At Close Range." Interview. New York Times Saturday Review of Books. 24 Nov. 1906: 776.
- - - . "Talks With Four Novelists." Interview. New York Times Saturday Review of Books. 15 June 1907: 392.
Seawell, Molly Elliot. Children of Destiny. New York: D. Appleton, 1893.
- - - . Hale-Weston. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1889.
- - - . The History of Lady Betty Stair. New York: Scribner, 1897.
- - - . The House of Egremont. New York: Scribner, 1900.
- - - . "James II." New York Times Saturday Review of Books. 5 Jan. 1901: 3.
- - - . The Ladies Battle. New York: Macmillan, 1911.
- - - . Little Jarvis. New York: Harper, 1899.
- - - . "Maid Marion." Maid Marian and Other Stories. New York: D. Appleton, 1891.
- - - . "On the Absence of the Creative Faculty in Women." The Critic. 29 Nov. 1891: 292-94.
- - - . Throckmorton. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1909.
- - - . Twelve Naval Captains. New York: Scribner, 1897.
- - - . A Virginia Cavalier. New York: Harper, 1896.
Secondary Sources
Battersby, Christine. Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1989.
Green, Elna C. Southern Strategies: Southern Women and the Woman Suffrage Question. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1997.
Harkins, E.F., and C.H.L. Johnston. Little Pilgrimages Among the Women Who Have Written. Boston: L.C. Page & Co., 1902.
Mitchell, Sally. "Molly Elliot Seawell." American Women Writers: A Critical Reference. Ed. Lina Mainiero. Vol. 4. New York: Unger, 1982. 40-1.
"Molly Elliot Seawell's Washington." Rev. of A Virginia Cavalier. New York Times Saturday Review of Books. 9 Jan. 1897: 3.
Paglia, Camille. Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. New York: Vintage, 1990.
Schor, Naomi. Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine. New York: Methuen, 1987.
Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden. Vol. 9. Eds. Jeanne Chapman and Robert MacIsaac. Oregon House, CA: W.L. Bentley, 1996.
"The Villain Taken Out of James II." Rev. of The House of Egremont. New York Times Saturday Review of Books. 10 Nov. 1900: 764.