Elizabeth Stoddard, Goth
One of the interpretive phrases I use to describe the Queen of Wands (Elizabeth Drew Stoddard) in the American Renaissance Tarot is “gothic.” This has only partly to do with the fact that her 1862 debut novel, The Morgesons, has been categorized variously as a “female gothic,” “domestic gothic,” and “American gothic.” It is all three, making it America’s answer to Wuthering Heights, if Wuthering Heights was rewritten by a literary modernist like Virginia Woolf. Indeed, Stoddard’s avant-garde, unconventional writing style is the reason that she has been forgotten by history — well, that and the fact that The Morgesons was published at the onset of the American Civil War. That would have been a difficult time to try and interest anyone in a sarcastic takedown of American values penned in terse, elliptical prose.
Elizabeth Drew Stoddard
It’s true that in literary terminology, Elizabeth Stoddard qualifies as a gothic writer, but I also describe her as “gothic” to convey her sour personality and contrarian attitudes. And yes, I am absolutely meaning to class Stoddard with the archetype of the morose, all-black-wearing, Sisters-of-Mercy listening aesthetes who see beauty in decay and take a jaundiced eye to society’s attempts to promote constant happiness. I mean, just look at this fierce black-and-white striped dress Stoddard’s rocking in this photo of her I lifted from Wikipedia! That style is practically a staple at Hot Topic and other goth clothing retailers …
Before your raven feathers get ruffled, I’ll say that I feel entitled to comment on the contemporary goth experience, having been a goth since I was a teenager. The parameters of goth are famously difficult to define: is it about the music, though the genres that fall under the goth heading are all over the map? Is it then just about fashion, a macabre aesthetic? Many goths will tell you in all seriousness that a certain taste in literature, film, and art is a defining feature of goth. I’ll argue in this blog that goth is also about certain heretical attitudes and acerbic personality traits. (For more discussion of goth as a social identity, see my review of Leila Taylor’s Darkly in Medium).
As a feminist, I take unabashed pleasure in the descriptions of Stoddard’s awful personality, and in all the contemporary reviews of The Morgesons which complain about her creepy and disturbing worldview. From a twenty-first century perspective, it’s easy to look back and see that Stoddard’s awkward reception in her times had everything to do with her flouting of nineteenth-century womanhood, or the ideal of the “angel in the house” who was fulfilled by tending to the needs of her home and family. In The Morgesons, family relationships are unsatisfying at best and often hostile, small-town life is an insipid bore, and religion provides no comfort whatsoever. It’s hard to imagine a fuller rejection of the “angel in the house” archetype, but unfortunately The Morgesons never found its way to the legions of nineteenth-century women who were also seething with barely concealed rage at the narrowness of their prescribed role in life.
Portrait of Ur-goth, Lord Byron, by Richard Westall
As readers, we tend to tolerate awful personalities in male writers, because their florid imaginations and uncompromising visions often lead to vivid verse (Lord Byron anyone???) Closer to home, Edgar Allan Poe has become a figure of fascination for his gloomy romance with his young cousin, Virginia, and for his tragic life that included bouts with alcoholism and vicious quarrels in print with other writers. Lord Byron has literally become the definition of the gothic hero, and Edgar Allan Poe is now America’s most enduring nineteenth-century literary icon, in spite of the fact that he wrote frequently and erotically about dead women. Poe also rejected nineteenth-century mores and expressed contempt for his peers, and yet he is celebrated for these attitudes instead of criticized.
The “Byronic hero” is defined by a nineteenth-century critic thusly: “a man proud, moody, cynical, with defiance on his brow, and misery in his heart, a scorner of his kind, implacable in revenge, yet capable of deep and strong affection.”[1] I like this definition because I can imagine most of the goths I’ve met at clubs over the decades nodding along in recognition as the self-consciously Byronic heroes they are. More to the point, this definition fits Elizabeth Stoddard to a T. She was such a “scorner of her kind” that a friend described her as a champion “hater.”[2] In her personal letters, Stoddard “recounts tag ends of quarrels, begs people to forgive her while continuing to criticize them, or comments on the squalor of human nature.”[3] Both Stoddard and her alter ego in The Morgesons, Cassandra, are ardently sexual; Stoddard wondered whether any woman could be more passionate than she, and Cassandra has a talent for conducting forbidden affairs.[4]
Elizabeth Stoddard’s talent at “hating” always reminds me of the Playa Haters from Chappelle’s Show.
So if you like arrogant, rebellious women and a total lack of sentimentality, The Morgesons is probably for you. The novel also features the weird erotics of cousin sex and a disfiguring horse accident (that’s actually the same scene) all told cryptically through the Victorian language of flowers. In The Morgesons, the vaunted ideals of American life deteriorate (am I the only person to notice Stoddard’s gothy pun — the Morgue-sons?) as characters descend into illness, alcoholism, and anorexia, or whatever is going on with Cassandra’s mystic sister, Veronica. You can get a sense of the novel’s acrid tone by considering its first sentence, “That child is possessed!” along with its last: “Let this mad world crush us now.”
As for the “goth” label, there are some formal literary definitions that are tedious to recount, but suffice it to say that the novel The Morgesons is characterized by an intense atmosphere of oppression, and also by unspoken psychological undercurrents that haunt the characters like ghosts. What makes this an “American gothic” is that the oppression is not coming from old Europe or old religions like Catholicism, but from the social strictures of nineteenth-century New England. Stoddard replaces “Salem” with the stuffy town of “Belem” in The Morgesons, which is likely her pun for Bedlam.
I would also maintain that Stoddard’s own persona of Byronic hero, both in life and on the page, is what links the literary term “gothic” to the contemporary goth scene in music, fashion, and art. Stoddard’s “talent for the disagreeable,”[5] to quote her father, may be understood as her rejection of contemporary social norms, coupled with a corresponding willingness to embrace society’s shadow elements. I resonate so much with this identity personally that it has found its way into my business name as an astrologer (see “Seven Signs You’re a Pluto Babe” if that concept sparks your interest). So it’s probably no surprise that I adore Stoddard’s caustic iconoclasms.
A contemporary reviewer of hers wrote, “Mrs. Stoddard’s power seems to be in the minuteness and steadiness of her vision of vulgarity, narrowness, superstition, meanness, and eccentricity.”[6] For those of us exhausted by constant pressure to be cheerful and accommodating, Stoddard’s method of deflating social ideals by depicting their shadow qualities is as delightful as it is validating. It’s also goth as hell.
And as for the Tarot?
Elizabeth Stoddard: no fucks left to give.
In the American Renaissance Tarot, I made Elizabeth Stoddard the Queen of Wands because of her give-no-fucks attitude. (Check out the engraving of Stoddard, in which she appears to be all out of fucks). Wands is the suit in the Tarot associated with fire and passion, and Stoddard’s unabashed depictions of women’s sexuality, unusual for her times, certainly fit the Wands archetype. We chose to depict all our nineteenth-century Queens indoors, to emphasize how women were constrained by domestic roles, and our Queen of Wands in particular looks to be dwarfed by both the demands of childcare and the oppressive bric-a-brac of the Victorian home.
We used the Kings and Queens of the American Renaissance Tarot to comment on the separate spheres allotted to men and women in the nineteenth century. Here compare Melville’s world travel to Stoddard’s smoldering domestic gothic.
It occurs to me that our King of Wands, Herman Melville, is likewise a representation of sexual repression, symbolically if not visually, because of the alienation he experienced as a gay man. There’s a logic to the King and Queen of the Wands suit both suffering for their passions in the prudish Victorian age. Stylistically, Stoddard is the nineteenth-century female writer most on par with Melville’s genius, because she was self-consciously experimental in her use of literary form. Almost all women writers in the nineteenth century pretended to have been “forced” to the pen because of economic necessity or moral urgency, and so Stoddard is exceptional in that she took up writing out of her own need for self-expression. As Feldman writes, “She never needed to engage in any of the usual ruses adopted by women writers of the day, who felt they had to hide or explain away personal literary ambition and creative drive. She meant to be a writer of genius.”[7] Her “wand” is a drawing compass to allude to the creative fire associated with the Wands suit.
Stoddard and Playing Card Divination
While Elizabeth Stoddard is best known for The Morgesons, her other works are starting to gain more attention, in particular the novel Two Men (1865). I read Two Men in an archive over a decade ago, so it’s something of a blur to me — all except for one scene which I was careful to record in my notes. The scene depicts an interlude of playing card divination, and I registered it as unusual because I can’t recall having seen anything similar in the nineteenth-century American canon. Though popular grimoires and divination how-tos like the “Napoleon Dreambook” were certainly in circulation in that century, low-cultural texts of the sort are rarely mentioned by writers with lofty literary aims. Melville, for example, wrote a whole novel inspired by astrology without mentioning any of the Zodiac signs by name.
I submit for your curiosity the playing-card divination scene from Two Men:
[Elsa] looked at Philippa with such cunning, crafty eyes that she was disposed to turn away from them.
“Dear me, Elsa, what an old gipsy you are.”
“A dark-complected man is going the same road you are. You will meet, if a light-complected man, who is not thinking of you, does not cross the seas in three days, three months, or three years. A piece of bad luck is coming from the Jack of Spades to you all.”
“Patience, and shuffle the cards.”[8]
The absence of attributive pronouns is typical of Stoddard’s dialogue scenes, as is the ambiguous tone. Does Philippa say “Patience” to Elsa because she thinks fortune-telling is silly, or because she doesn’t like the fortune she heard? (I’m reading “Patience” as a nineteenth-century idiomatic expression that’s a shortened form of “Lord, give me patience”). Does Philippa say “shuffle the cards” because she wants a different fortune, or because she wants to change the subject and play Whist? Elsa, notably, is the house-keeper for the upper-class Philippa, and American culture through the nineteenth century is pretty consistent in characterizing divination as a lower-class affair.
Elsa’s reading is so specific that I assumed it must be a reference to a text, and Mary Greer’s wonderful blog article, “Origins of Cartomancy (Playing Card Divination),” is so chock full of references that it was easy to discover the source. It turns out to be a very topical one, published a year or two before Stoddard’s Two Men, Robert Chambers’ Book of Days. You can read the short interpretations Chambers gives each playing card by clicking here and scrolling down, and see how much playing card divination has influenced contemporary Tarot divination. For example, the Nine of Hearts (Cups) is the Wish card, while the Nine of Spades (Swords) is Grief.
The intense focus on complexion in the court cards likely originated in European tradition to describe varying shades of white people (blond, brunette, etc.), yet Stoddard uses the reference to Chambers to good effect to allude to inter-racial relationships, one of many transgressive topics she broaches in Two Men.
Stay tuned!
Thanks for diving into the Stoddard rabbit hole with me! The American Renaissance Tarot is due out in August, 2021. Email me at theawirsching @ gmail.com to be placed on our email list, and be the first to hear about pre-orders and other opportunities …
Sources:
[1] Macaulay, Thomas Babington. The Works of Lord Macaulay, Volume 5.(London: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1866), 412.
[2] Stoddard, Elizabeth. The Morgesons and Other Wrtings, Published and Unpublished. Edited by Lawrence Buell and Sandra A. Zagarell. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984). “Introduction,” xiii.
[3] Feldman, Jessica R. “‘A Talent for the Disagreeable’: Elizabeth Stoddard Writes The Morgesons.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 58.2 (Sept. 2003), pp. 216-217.
[4] Stoddard, The Morgesons, xii.
[5] Feldman, 217.
[6] Feldman, 202
[7] Feldman, 215.
[8] Stoddard, Elizabeth. Two Men (New York: Bunce and Huntington, 1865) 269.