Ungentlemanly Acts Read online

  Geddes had suggested that the members of the court read Infelice and decide for themselves, but they had failed to embrace this idea. When Geddes took the stand, he testified that he had indeed lent Lillie some books, but that none was “highly sensational or sensational in any sense of the term.” He denied having given her Infelice. What he recalled her borrowing were the works of the proper neoclassical poet Oliver Goldsmith, as well as a religious tract sent to him by his sister: “The other books were all returned to me except this tract which Miss Orleman informed me her father had thrown in the fire, saying that that trash would do for me to read but that he did not want any such in his house.”

  So Orleman destroyed either a novel that he regarded as trashy and sensationalistic or a religious tract that he mistook for a scandalous novel. In this matter Geddes’s desire to protect himself from the accusation of furnishing improper reading material to Lillie produced a weak story, for even in a rage it seems improbable that Orleman would have confused a novel with a religious tract—unless the tract was a book rather than a pamphlet, and he simply pitched the suspect volume into the fire without first examining it. If he was expressing his anger over his daughter’s relationship with the philandering captain, destroying anything associated with Geddes and labelling it “trash” would have made the point.

  Geddes’s denying that he gave Infelice to Lillie may have been literal without being accurate; that is, an intermediary arranged the loan, but the book belonged to Geddes: if he did not hand it to Lillie directly, he certainly acquiesced in making it available to her. Lieutenant Scott had already said as much, and he was a witness for the defense. What would have been more natural at the time when Geddes and Lillie were on friendly terms than for Lillie, who had already borrowed a number of books from Geddes, to ask to borrow the novel? By characterizing the work as suitable for a young girl, Scott had pointed the way to the strongest defense on the matter—that Infelice was a highly moral work in a respectable genre and Geddes’s loan a token of high-mindedness.

  Making such an argument might have been difficult: the substitution of a religious tract for a novel in Geddes’s account shows his own awareness of the lingering American belief that fiction was inherently frivolous or even dangerous. Although it made his story implausible, the religious tract could not be assailed on grounds of impropriety.

  Orleman might well have confiscated the novel had he assumed, as many people still did, that all novels were improper reading material for unmarried young women. In a book called Ladies Guide in Health and Disease, Girlhood, Maidenhood, Wifehood, Motherhood, John Kellogg, the man who revolutionized the American breakfast, wrote that the emotional stimulation that accompanied novel reading tended “to develop the passions prematurely and to turn the thoughts into a channel which led in the direction of the formation of vicious habits.” He concluded that the physician should oppose novel reading as “one of the greatest causes of uterine disease in young women.”36

  Another contemporary writer went further. Orson Fowler, a well-known phrenologist, proclaimed that novel reading could directly affect the reproductive system, “producing or increasing a tendency to uterine congestion, which may in turn give rise to a great variety of maladies, including all the different forms of displacement [of the uterus], the presence of which is indicated by weak backs, painful menstruation, and leukorrhea.”37 Such ideas exemplified the widely accepted principle that “the brain and ovary could not develop at the same time.”38

  Nevertheless, many “proper American girls … voraciously devoured novels,” causing a certain amount of anxiety among the guardians of public morality.39 In 1881 the American Library Association Cooperation Committee sent a questionnaire to seventy major public libraries to determine which authors were objectionable. Ten writers of “women’s fiction”—themselves women—made the list, including the author of Infelice. 40 In addition to whatever occurred between the covers of their books, many people were undoubtedly made uneasy by the spectacle of popular women authors making large sums of money.

  There was a more specific reason for Geddes to avoid all association with Infelice other than not wanting to be guilty of recommending a novel to a young woman. Had any members of the court bothered to read the novel—and there is no evidence they did—they would have discovered that Mr. Palma, the man who wishes to marry the heroine, Regina Orme, tells her that in private he will always call her by his own name for her—Lily. Had Geddes admitted giving the book to Lillie, it would have suggested that he did indeed have designs on her, improper designs, since, unlike Palma, he was a married man. The novel would have invited—undoubtedly did invite—Lillie to identify the all-powerful rescuer of Regina with the possible rescuer whose copy of the novel was in her hands.

  That Lillie was moved by the book appears in Friedlander’s testimony. He recounted a conversation with her on March 2 in which she remarked “what a fine character Palma was.” Lillie had been crying, Friedlander said, because her father had scolded her for making an error in some army reports she had helped him examine—not, as in Lieutenant Orleman’s version, because the novel had upset her.

  The work in question is a typical example of a popular nineteenth-century literary genre written by that group of authors whom Nathaniel Hawthorne characterized as a “d———d mob of scribbling women.” Hawthorne resented the success of these writers but he also disliked the formulaic nature of their fiction and the unfailingly happy endings: “Worse they could not be, and better they need not be, when they sell by the 100,000.”41 The fame of his remark has perhaps led modern readers to an assessment of this genre as fiction written exclusively for women, but at least three young officers stationed in West Texas evidently read Infelice with pleasure.

  Augusta Evans Wilson published Infelice in 1875, eight years after her triumph with St. Elmo (1867). St. Elmo sold a million copies, making it possibly the single most successful example of nineteenth-century women’s fiction and one of the most successful books of the nineteenth century.42 Wilson was the oldest of eight children born into an affluent Georgia family that had lost its money by the time she was ten. The Evanses moved first to Texas and then to Mobile, Alabama, but only recovered their fortunes through Augusta’s first best-seller, Beulah, published in 1859 when she was twenty-four. After breaking off an engagement to a Yankee because of the Civil War, Evans remained single until the age of thirty-three, when she married Colonel Wilson, a neighboring widower with grown children. Adding his name to her own, she continued to be a popular writer, but published at long intervals.

  Beginning with the title itself, there is much in Infelice that bears upon the circumstances that produced the Geddes court-martial. Infelice is Italian for “unhappy,” or “the unhappy one,” a general rubric that can be applied to the heroines of the plot and subplot. In the novel’s conclusion we learn of the more specific meaning of Infelice as the title of a play written by Odille Orme, the mother of Regina, to expose those who have wronged her. Much like Hamlet’s mousetrap play, the stage drama Infelice tells the true story of an event that has been masked by a fabrication, but this account, since it clears up the mystery of the heroine’s identity, is withheld until the novel’s final pages.

  A similar situation confronted Captain Geddes, according to his version of his introduction to Lillie Orleman: “She said she was unhappy, never expected to be happy again, and that what made her unhappy was a secret that concerned only herself and her family.” When asked about this statement, Lillie denied having a secret but said that if she had said that she was unhappy, it was a matter concerning only herself. The two statements are strikingly similar: Lillie’s denial simplified Geddes’s statement without contradicting it. Moreover, her statement was internally inconsistent since she denied that she had a secret, but invoked secrecy by describing her unhappiness as “a matter concerning only herself.”

  Infelice begins with mystery: out of a stormy night a strange young woman appears at the country parsonage of
Dr. Peyton Hargrove. She tells the minister that she is Minnie Merle, whose wedding to Cuthbert Laurance he had performed four years earlier. Without revealing anything further, she obtains proof of her marriage from Hargrove and his promise to act as guardian to her daughter, should it become necessary. The next day he discovers that his study has been broken into during the night and the actual marriage certificate stolen.

  Lillie would claim on the stand that what appeared to be her own behavior inculpating her father had been the result of Geddes’s influence over her: “When I was in Captain Geddes’s presence I was completely mesmerized and consequently he could make me say and do as he pleased.” Although the brand of hypnosis popularized in the nineteenth century by Franz Mesmer was so commonly known that his name became a general noun and verb, Lillie might have gotten the idea of being “mesmerized” from reading Infelice. When Regina Orme, the child in question, is brought to Reverend Hargrove, the two enjoy an instant rapport. Commenting on this, Regina’s co-guardian, the lawyer Erle Palma, asks Hargrove, “Did you mesmerize her?”43 Palma lives in New York City and sees Regina infrequently. She finds him stern and remote.

  As the plot wends its leisurely and complicated way, shifting between scenes of Regina’s mother making her living as an actress in Paris and Regina growing up in America, the novel pauses from time to time to consider the role of women. The young hero of the early part of the text, Hargrove’s nephew Douglass Lindsay, argues in favor of the education of women and against the “popular fallacy, that in the same ratio that you thoroughly educate women, you unfit them for the holy duties of daughter, wife, and mother.”44 He asks rhetorically, “Can an acquaintance with literature, art, and science so paralyze a lady’s energies, that she is rendered utterly averse to, and incapable of performing those domestic offices, those household duties so preeminently suited to her slender dexterous busy little fingers”?45

  Such a fear had in fact been promulgated by those doctors who believed that mental activity sapped feminine energy needed for childbearing.46 And aside from that specific belief, there was a general idea that advanced education unsexed females.47 Even the highly educated Lieutenant Bigelow recoiled from the idea of educating women to the same degree as men. In a conversation he had with a Miss Bishop, a young woman who regretted not having gone to Vassar, he justified his position that she should instead be congratulated by telling her that women might be damaged by the effect of “strong intellectual effort in the department of science.” Rather, they should pursue “the aesthetic studies, poetry and art.” Miss Bishop failed to appreciate this argument and reiterated that if she had any daughters, she would send them to Vassar. The exasperated Bigelow concluded that “a woman was not deserving of being taught to think since it was not in her nature to use such a power if she had it.”48

  In the heated debate on the issue in Infelice, Douglass’s mother announces that notorious bluestockings like Harriet Martineau and Madame Dudevant [George Sand] were impelled by their intellectual pursuits to cast aside the clothing of women and cut their hair short. She maintains that she would prefer to see Regina in her coffin than shorn of her “gloriole of ebon locks.”

  As the voice of good sense, Reverend Hargrove asserts that there is little danger of Regina’s “becoming a blue-stockinged ogre.” Such extreme learning “offers little temptation to a young girl.” His idea is to educate her only to the point of producing “a cultivated, refined woman, sufficiently conversant with the sciences to comprehend their contemporaneous development, without threatening us with pedantry.”49

  The Reverend’s sermon continues by explaining modern-day feminism as a reaction to centuries of repression:

  Amazonian excesses of this epoch are the inevitable consequence of the rigid tyranny of former ages; which sternly banished women to the numbing darkness of an intellectual night, denying them the legitimate and natural right of developing their faculties by untrammelled exercise … . This woman’s rights and woman’s-suffrage abomination is no suddenly concocted social bottle of yeast; it has been fermenting for ages, and having finally blown out the cork, is rapidly leavening the mass of female malcontents.50

  Douglass objects that his uncle’s diatribe confuses a few “ambitious sciolists” with “the noble band of delicate, refined women whose brilliant attainments in the republic of letters, are surpassed only by their beautiful devotion to God, family, and home.” Although his long argument winds its way down to a conventional denouement, the description of women’s wrongs “fermenting for ages” until they produced an explosion was eloquent enough to make social conservatives uneasy.51

  Ultimately, the Hargrove home is disbanded upon the death of Reverend Hargrove: Regina must go to her other guardian, Erle Palma, while Douglass becomes a missionary to India.

  Meanwhile, Regina’s actress mother pursues her long-nourished life scheme of obtaining revenge against the Laurances—the father who destroyed her marriage and the son who has remarried an heiress. (The reader does not learn how these events came about until the end of the novel.) Odille Orme has not taken the customary route of bringing suit for bigamy because such a course would have brought her reputation under attack, and this she preserves for the sake of her daughter. Between her career and her machinations against the Laurances, Odille falls ill and retreats to Naples. She is followed there by General Laurance, who, unaware that he is her father-in-law, has fallen in love with her.

  Regina, loyal to the conventions of nineteenth-century women’s fiction, has found herself in an unhappy situation at her guardian’s house. Palma appears to be a monster of cold ambition; his stepmother, who lives with him, is hostile and cruel to Regina. Madame Palma’s own daughter, Olga, is good-natured but fast, a stereotype of the laxly supervised urban girl. When Palma’s cousin falls in love with Regina, the rigid and censorious Palma realizes that he loves her, too. Typical of his controlling nature, he informs the girl that when they are alone he will call her Lily.

  A villain appears on the scene with the intention of getting money from Regina by claiming to be her father. When Palma discovers Regina’s meeting with this man, his accusation that she is seeing a lover provokes a passionate outburst from Regina: “Lover! Oh merciful God! When I need a father, and a father’s protecting name;—when I am heart-sick for my mother, and her shielding healing love … God grant me a father and a mother, a stainless name.”52 Coming from her different but equally anguished circumstances, Lillie Orleman might have cried out in similar pain.

  Not surprisingly, given this need, Regina begins to be attracted to her older, fatherlike guardian, an authority figure with a godlike omniscience and omnipotence. Her youthful love, Douglass, must be removed from the field by death because his desirability as a suitor is compromised by poverty. (In spite of the romantic nature of novels such as Wilson’s, a hardheaded Puritan ideology dominates: the favored suitor is invariably rich as well as good.)

  In the subplot, after General Laurance discovers that he is actually Odille’s hated father-in-law, he dies—possibly of a bad conscience for having separated the young couple and convinced his son that Odille was dead. Other characters are also tidily disposed of: Cuthbert Laurance’s second wife and their handicapped child die in a sea disaster, freeing him to return to Odille. When Regina marries Palma, her mother and father are reunited and reconciled, creating the respectable family unit their daughter has always missed.

  Infelice thus furnishes a contrasting pair of women protagonists, the active older woman and her passive daughter. Odille Orme brings to her vengeance as much energy, talent, and single-mindedness as any male character might muster. Like a man in her society, she shapes her destiny, while her daughter is passed from one guardian to another without the power to affect her own life. Odille’s strength, independence, and ability to act may seem enviable, but the novel hints on more than one occasion that her unwomanly passion for revenge has deformed her character. She is saved at novel’s end by becoming a wife once more.
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  This restoration of the original Laurance marriage is in its way as significant as Regina’s marriage. It emphasizes the importance of proper antecedents and the power of the father. As the child of an absent father, Regina never knows domestic security: without the means to resist, she is moved from one surrogate family to another. And as a girl whose father is unknown, she becomes vulnerable to an illiterate ruffian who claims the paternal role. She is horrified when this repulsive man presses his claim, but has no way to refute it—simply an instinctive reaction that they cannot be of the same blood. Her passive endurance is rewarded with marriage to Palma.

  Lillie Orleman could have identified with Regina Orme quite naturally. Both girls had spent periods of time in convents. Both had reasons to be unhappy centering on family, and both lacked power to materially affect their situations. Both needed a heroic rescuer.

  Reading Infelice at a time when her romantic attachment to Geddes was at its peak, Lillie Orleman may have seen in Erle Palma, who called his love Lily, a parallel with her own hoped-for savior. Although Palma appeared forbidding at first because Regina had not learned enough to appreciate him, his great wisdom allowed him to play every male role in his charge’s life—God, father, and husband. He had all knowledge in his possession; most important, he recognized that the man who accosted Regina, frightening her more by his assertion of kinship than his demand for money, was a false father.

  Lillie could not repudiate her own father as false—such is the difference between fiction and reality—but she might have imagined that Geddes, almost twice her age, could play the role of Palma in her life, extricating her from her unideal family and replacing it with himself.