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Elizabeth Stoddard’s Extravagant “Uncle Zeb” and the Question of New England’s Fraught Wealth

Audrey Fogels

Résumés

Dans cet article sur « Uncle Zeb », une nouvelle publiée par Elizabeth B. Stoddard en 1860 à la veille de la Guerre de Sécession américaine, je montre que le récit de Stoddard n’explore pas seulement la violence masculine ou le déclin de la Nouvelle-Angleterre, comme l’ont montré Opfermann et Roth dans leur lecture de la nouvelle (xxii). Je souligne comment, façonnée par les tropes et les auteurs de la Nouvelle-Angleterre (on pense à la fois au roman domestique et au genre régionaliste du character sketch, mais aussi à Nathaniel Hawthorne et Harriet Beecher Stowe), la nouvelle de Stoddard en modifie néanmoins les formules. Parallèlement à cette mise en crise des formes littéraires, Stoddard interroge la logique d’extractivisme et de prédation, et notamment le commerce transatlantique qui fonde la richesse américaine. Avec Zeb, elle brosse le portrait d’un personnage hybride et disruptif qui se détourne d’une existence balisée par les récits domestiques pour emprunter un chemin plus marginal qui s’extrait de la logique de (re)production. Dévoilant la richesse frauduleuse sur laquelle repose la puissance de la Nouvelle-Angleterre, Stoddard rend visible dans « Uncle Zeb », comme ailleurs dans son œuvre et pour reprendre les mots de Stoddard elle-même, « l’envers » du réel.

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Introduction

1If Elizabeth B. Stoddard is still a somewhat obscure name in the canon of nineteenth-century American women writers—she is often absent from academic anthologies and has so far been the object of only one monograph—, the strong interest she elicited during her lifetime together with the many efforts at recovering her work over the years are a sign that her voice and writing matter. In the past twenty years, Stoddard’s most famous works, like the short story “Lemorne versus Huell” (1863) or her most extensively read novel The Morgesons (1862), have garnered interest as examples of her negotiating the boundaries of mid-century domestic culture all the while redefining the contours of “female self expression” (Mahoney 25). More recently, critics like Christopher Looby (2021) or Carina Pasquesi (2014) have concentrated on Stoddard’s offensive tone and disturbing characters, reading them in light of affect and queer theory. In the wake of Lawrence Buell’s landmark New England Literary Culture (1986), other critics, like Opfermann and Roth for example, have focused on Stoddard’s inscription in New England poetics and have argued that her texts are caught in the mid-century discourses on national division and New England economic decline.

  • 1 A literary weekly newspaper published in New York City from 1858 to 1860 and then again from 1865 t (...)

2In their edition of Stoddard’s collected stories, it is under the heading “Geography and character: New England stories” that Opfermann and Roth introduce the sketch “Uncle Zeb,” which was published in The Saturday Press1 on February 25, 1860, on the eve of the American Civil War. In one of the only critical paragraphs about this story, Opfermann and Roth present the piece as a tale on “the abuse of male power,” a thesis which underscores an undeniable feature of the eponymous story and recognizes Stoddard’s clear interest in power relations at the heart of social interactions. When he returns to his New England home after having been at sea, Zeb acts as an unpleasant son and brother who lords over his family and distresses everyone around him with his offensive behavior. Both critics also argue that the tale “illustrates the interconnectedness of the psychological and the regional” and suggest that Zeb’s demolished house at the end of the story “recalls the numerous abandoned New England houses that stood as monuments to the region’s decline” (Stoddard, 2003 22).

3However, in claiming that “Uncle Zeb” illustrates male abuse and New England’s economic demise, Opfermann and Roth fail to underline the critical affordances of Zeb’s resistance to the domestic script that awaits him upon his return. In this paper, I propose to explore the fertility of this disruptive behavior and argue that it questions the system of extractivism and (re)production that lies at the basis of New England’s transatlantic wealth.

  • 2 Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse together with Lawrence Buell explain that by the 1830s, the New (...)

4I start by showing how the story is fashioned by various New England literary traditions. From its incipit onwards, “Uncle Zeb” brings to light Elizabeth Stoddard’s indebtedness to different voices and tropes even as it reveals the process through which she actually authorizes her own story. If the opening lines of the tale read as a complex homage to Hawthorne, the rest of her story resonates with other well-known conventions, namely those linked to the domestic tradition and the regional sketch.2 Further, in presenting Zeb as a cultural mix on the eve of the Civil War, when sectional debates were tearing the country apart, the narrative reasserts the profoundly hybrid, transnational nature of New England—and of America, for that matter. Finally, in depicting her main character as one who turns away from the well-worn script of middle-class domesticity personified in the tale by his self-managed, kind and gainful brother, I argue that Stoddard questions the very foundations of domestic, heteronormative plots. Squandering his money and his family’s inheritance, Zeb embraces an eccentric existence. But his refusal to settle down, marry, and make his family’s wealth fructify, I propose, signals in fact a deeper rejection, that of extractivism and its trajectory based on appropriation, accumulation, and reinvestment. Framed by his family’s and the entire nation’s entanglement in global commerce, Zeb’s resistance to a conventional domestic life actually questions an economic system based on the circulation of goods and bodies. In other words, his refusal to embrace the middle-class script of respectability and reinvest his wealth into the family business is a refusal of the logic of exchange that underpins American economy—implicitly interrogating one of its foundational cogwheels, the plantation economy. Ultimately, I contend that “Uncle Zeb” invites readers to recognize America’s entanglement in a global network of power and to reconsider its dubious, fraught origin.

“A Deceptive Affair”

5“Uncle Zeb” opens with Zeb’s tombstone. In this paradoxical incipit, which starts with the end of the life of the eponymous character, Zeb’s niece describes the monument her late uncle had himself ordered before his own death. Intricately carved and lavishly decorated, the slab of stone reads as a homage to Hawthornean tropes, inscribing Stoddard’s tale in New England poetics:

This monument is a deceptive affair, like most tombstones; a wreath of heart’s ease is carved round an open book on the square of the pedestal, and a column runs up from it, ornamented with the long stems and flowers of the white waterlily. As I hang over the window ledge, my recollections of Uncle Zeb assume the shape of imps which grin at me through the meshes of the lily-stems, and they slide their elfish fingers on the stony leaves of a book, as if they were writing the true story of a life that I alone can read. (Stoddard, 2003 10)

6Like Hester’s fantastic letter A or the richly adorned headstone that concludes The Scarlet Letter, Zeb’s official tombstone is exhibited as a sign (“a book”) that jeopardizes even as it invites the process of interpretation. It is indeed a “deceptive affair” that immediately brings to mind that “certain affair of fine red cloth” which “strangely interested” the narrator of the “Custom House,” who sees in it “a riddle” which “[he] saw little hope of solving” (Hawthorne 43, emphasis mine). But “affair” of course also evokes Hester Prynne’s secret romance with Arthur Dimmesdale, further thematizing the idea of mystery. Laced with gothic tropes triggered by the presence of “grinning imps” and their “elfish fingers […] sliding on the leaves of the stone book,” which are not without recalling the impish and unreadable Pearl of Hawthorne’s romance or even Poe’s disruptive “Imp of the Perverse,” the tombstone appears actually haunted by different stories whose twists, turns and visual arabesques obscure rather than clarify its surface. In the end, the creative scrolls produced by the flowery, hieroglyphic signs (“wreaths,” “heart,” “carved,” “meshes”) prove unreadable, “evading analysis” altogether (Hawthorne 43; Poe 472).

7Placed at the beginning of Elizabeth Stoddard’s narrative, the narrator’s description recalls Hester Prynne’s funeral monument which concludes Hawthorne’s classic New England romance but takes up the story where Hawthorne had left it. Both chiasmic and intertextual, the incipit pointedly signals both Stoddard’s debt to her famous New England cousin as well as her departure from his heritage. Having paid tribute to Hawthorne’s letter in her lush incipit, Stoddard eventually seizes its power even as she introduces a telling gender twist when she rewrites it: while Hester is the object of attention in the first pages of Hawthorne’s romance, with an unnamed male narrator describing her as she crosses the prison threshold, Stoddard places a woman narrator at the incipit of her own story. In this foundational act, Stoddard “authorizes” both her narrator and her own legitimacy as a female storyteller.

8Identifying herself as the “only one” able to read the “true” story of her uncle’s life, in other words as the only who can decipher her uncle’s monument, Stoddard’s narrator occupies from the start a powerful and singular position. Introduced as “straddling” the “threshold” of the window frame and looking “down unto” Zeb’s tombstone, both inside the tale and framing the narrative, she occupies a liminal, “slant” perspective, to borrow Emily Dickinson’s word. From this peripheral position, within the space of the New England region which is “less a geographical determination, and more a vantage point within the network of power relations that provides a location for critique and resistance” (Fetterley and Pryse 11), Zeb’s niece sets out to unravel the “real” story behind Zeb’s arguably eccentric life and brings to the surface the hidden and, at times, disturbing tale that its tombstone cannot spell out.

  • 3 Stoddard both admired and feared her distant cousin, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Writing to Julian Hawthor (...)
  • 4 In identifying Zeb as a queer figure, I follow Fetterley and Pryse’s argument: “These various formu (...)

9The complicated homage to the tropes of her distant New-England cousin Nathaniel Hawthorne3 gains purchase when read in light of her famous January and May 1860 letters to James Russell Lowell. Written around the time of the composition of “Uncle Zeb,” they both reveal Stoddard’s vexed relation to literary tradition. In January 1860, Stoddard explained to the Atlantic Monthly editor how hard it was for her to find the right form to write her stories. Asking him for advice about the tellingly entitled “My Own Story,” a narrative she wanted him to publish in the Atlantic Monthly, she wrote: I have an idea that my story is rickety, round shouldered and big headed—it may have fine eyes and a good complexion” (Stoddard, 2012 51). Presenting her story as a Dickensian misfit that does not comply with the established boundaries of convention, the bodily metaphor Stoddard uses obviously refers to “My Own Story.” But more subtly, the “deformed” figure also resonates with her regional sketch, whose main character, Zeb, comes across as an unstable figure, a queer4 character who evades and upends categories altogether.

10Introduced by his niece as a world adventurer caught in a web of transatlantic relations, Zeb skirts spatial categorization and clear geographical allegiance:

Uncle Zeb bought up the Dryad, piece by piece, and went in to all the ports in the world, from St. Petersburg to Calcutta. The merchants from whom he purchased his cargoes, or to whom they were consigned, invited him to their houses, and in this way, he picked up a bit of eccentricity, which he grafted upon his ordinary manners, and made a very strange compound of himself. At home he travestied foreign ways and introduced unheard of fashions in Grandfather’s house. He swore beautifully in all languages; but his native dams never left him, any more than his appetite forsook him for the salt junk and grog, after he had learned to like what he called foreign kickshaws. (Stoddard, 2003 12)

  • 5 “That new mode of life brings along with it a new set of manners, which I cannot easily describe. T (...)

11Travelling around the world, Zeb conflates “native” and foreign habits. The reference to his voyage all the way to Calcutta as well as to his newly acquired taste for foreign foods and unknown languages all underline his cultural hybridity. The bit of “eccentricity” he picked up during his journeys, which is “grafted” onto his ordinary manner, makes of him a compound, a mix where the “strange” and the “ordinary” coexist. The botanical metaphor that describes him after his sea voyages (“graft”), evoking Hector Saint John de Crevecoeur’s metaphor to characterize American identity,5 brings to light the fertility of such cultural transfers. It also conjures the actual commodities that crossed oceans and continents during back-and-forth transatlantic exchanges, the literal plants and seeds which gave rise to new species, and signals, perhaps other more shameful goods transported by New England ships.

12Linking the domestic space of New-England to the faraway world of foreign customs and manners, Zeb reveals how enmeshed New England was within what Mark Storey has called the “world system” (104). As Zeb travels the world, he blurs the oppositions between American/foreign, domestic/global, regional/national, reasserting the profoundly relational nature of New England. At a time of growing sectional opposition, when regional lines were being reasserted in the context of the Civil War, Stoddard’s story reawakens the near iconic trope of a porous New England and underlines the extent to which New Englanders were caught in a web of global commerce. Ultimately, depicting New England as a transnational space, and not as a self-enclosed site defined by rigid boundaries, Stoddard’s narrative dislodges spatial lines, inviting readers to ponder anew the heterogeneity of the American experience.

13Like his tombstone, Zeb’s life evades classification and defies easy interpretation. It also sheds light on the underside of reality. When Stoddard returns to the subject of her writing in her May 1860 letter to Lowell, she continues in the following way:

Do I disturb your artistic sense by my want of refinement? I must own that I am coarse by nature. At times I have an overwhelming perception of the back side of truth. I see rough lathes behind the fine mortar—the body within its purple and fine linen—the mood of the man and the woman in the dark on the light of his or her mind when alone… (Stoddard, 2012 51)

  • 6 “Your warning strikes me seriously—am I indeed all wrong, and are all right about ‘going too near t (...)

14In her answer to Lowell’s comment about her “going too near the edge,”6 Stoddard is not afraid to portray herself as a “coarse” writer who sees through the “purple and fine linen” of reality. Making visible the “back side” of New England’s unsightly truth, one which the Atlantic Monthly editor might have found rather distasteful, “Uncle Zeb” also eventually goes “near the edge,” upsetting yet other lines.

Upsetting the Boundaries of Domesticity

  • 7 Central to white middle-class culture, domestic novels depict the private home as a well-managed mi (...)
  • 8 I use Sklar’s definition of domesticity as “the daily construction of patterns of intimate values a (...)
  • 9 Although criticism has brought to light its complexity, I take Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (18 (...)

15When abroad, Zeb pushes limits and forms new affiliations, metamorphosizing into a hybrid subject. Back at home, the Rabelaisian Zeb undermines the “well-regulated” (Stoddard, 2003 11) organization of his middle-class home, transforming it into a generalized site of tension: he twists well-worn patterns and skirts the very idea of “reproduction,” whether it is understood as repetition or procreation. As he swerves away from the script of domestic narrative,7 he upsets its very logic, challenging some of its most basic tropes, like family concord, marriage and property. In doing so, he repeatedly upends the conventional vision of domesticity8 portrayed in narratives such as Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women.9

  • 10 While Zeb does not evince the virulence of Cassandra Morgeson, “Uncle Zeb” enacts, to use Carina Pa (...)

16Upon his return, Zeb invites disreputable friends to his parents’ house: “a piratical looking captain,” “a foreign merchant,” drinks heavily in their kitchen in a “tumbler of red wine,” tells “equivocal” stories to the servants, and acts rudely with all his family members (Stoddard, 2003 13). Calling his niece a “Trollop!” while he expects his mother to wait on him and ignores his brother (10), Zeb is portrayed as a badly-behaved family member.10 Much like Melville’s confidence-man who lays bare the mid-century crisis in trust, Zeb’s dissonant behavior undermines family ties as it points to the fraudulent (“pretense,” “game,” “play”) and interest-driven (“capital,” “credit”) nature of domestic bonds:

He always talked as if he knew I must know that virtue was only a pretense. It was a game we were all playing. It was becoming in a woman to affect modesty: it was her capital. He gave me credit for my shrewdness, and he had no doubt but that I should play my cards admirably […]. His manner was usually deferential to women; but his ribaldry would break out now and then, and I have known him to be as coarse as Rabelais in a room full of ladies. It was done with an air, as if he were obliging us with his candid wit. (Stoddard, 2003 14)

17His disregard for the rules that undergird family domesticity is further mirrored in his comic contempt for national politics. When he becomes Representative of the State, with a seat in the State House, he is shown to be more interested in the quality of room and board when the House is in session than in the rule of law—“he only spoke of the toughness of the pie crust and the hardness of his bed at the boarding house” (Stoddard, 2003 14)— figuring the widespread “hypocrisy that was poisoning social relations among the rising generation threating to destroy those relations, to dissolve those ties of confidence that bound men together in society” (Halttunen 51). His final decision to put away the Revised Statutes of New England in the garret with “the dried herb” speaks for itself (Stoddard, 2003 14).

  • 11 Carina Pasquesi argues that sadism is a way for women to reclaim their power in the private sphere (...)

18Unlike his more docile and well-mannered brother who “was married at once” (Stoddard, 2003 11), Zeb repeatedly evades the advances of the three women who all want to marry him, rejecting the conjugal ties that found domesticity and twisting the well-worn pattern of the domestic script, marriage. In fact, skirting the heteronormative plot, transgressive (“swore”), disguised (“travestied”) and strange (“unheard of”) Zeb comes across as a bachelor, a recurrent nineteenth-century figure which Christopher Looby describes as a “loose category that incarnated a wily evasion of normality” (2007 90). With the extravagant dress and flamboyant attitude that links him to a variation on that figure, Zeb the dandy repeatedly questions the norms linked to mid-century conjugality. When the “ignorant,” “low,” and “cunning” Sally Packer deploys elaborate strategies to marry him— “she dragged him to bed, she washed him, she dressed him, and she fed him”11— Zeb launches a tragi-comic war, cursing and ridiculing her “every day of his life” (Stoddard, 2003 17-18). Eventually, Zeb “set his bed on fire; he fell off the dining-table and crashed the dishes; he rolled off his horse with his feet in the stirrup; he laid in the street” (18). If the rapid succession of verbs is rather comic, it cannot hide Zeb’s—nor Stoddard’s for that matter—desire to literally crush the marriage script altogether.

  • 12 If Stoddard can be said to adopt the stereotypes of her class describing these working-class women (...)

19As for Zeb’s mother’s repeated resistance to the marriage script, it makes visible the economic and class interests that actually underwrite marriage plots, bringing to light the “coarse” truths that lie behind conjugal attachment. Much like in her story “Two Chimneys,” Stoddard lays bare the material benefits that marriage brings, underlying the contractual rather than the romantic nature of such ties. Representing the old New England stock with her family reaching back to the Puritan forefathers, Zeb’s class-conscious mother is introduced as if she wanted to keep the domestic space of New England home “safe” and arguably white and “pure” from outside pressures. To the day of her death, she is depicted as striving to safeguard Zeb from the race of females”12 who all want to improve their social conditions through marriage and to protect her home from the assaults of lower middle-class women (two tailoresses and a housekeeper), all obsessed with money and a desire to “refashion,” one might say even to “Taylorise,” the family’s fabric: Sally Packer “did not profess to know much […] but she would like to see the woman who understood tailoring better” (Stoddard, 2003 17, emphasis mine). In the context of the various social, economic, and ethnic changes brought about by the American Civil War, Zeb’s mother’s efforts to preserve her home’s original “pattern” and to block her son’s alliance with lower class seamstresses reads as reactionary at best.

20Zeb’s mother does manage to fire Nancy Goring, a poor relative who has come to stay with her as a “companion and housekeeper” before the latter tries to make herself a place in the family by seducing Zeb, but she is unable to stop the marriage of Zeb’s younger brother with a “very resolute” but “poor tailoress” (15)— even if she “felt above” her (11). When Sally Packer, who is also a seamstress and “whose respect for money was immense” (17), attempts to marry into the family, Zeb’s mother is dead and can no longer “protect” the family heritage from that “race of females” (Stoddard, 2003 15). In the end, Sally does not marry Zeb; she nonetheless manages to move into the family homestead, symbolically modifying its contours and make-up by her sheer presence. Ultimately, the marriage script still operates but the text implies it is more a means to advance economic comfort and class mobility than the result of conjugal love and harmony.

  • 13 In a letter written to her friend Margaret Sweat, two months after her marriage to Richard, Stoddar (...)

21Framing class as race (“a certain race of females”) in the description of the women who want to marry into Zeb’s family, the text also adumbrates Stoddard’s own white, upper-middle-class “panic” over the racial and ethnic transformations the Civil War period. In other words, Zeb’s repeated resistance to conjugal alliance might be understood as signaling Stoddard’s own discomfort with national transformation. Alternately, the narrative might also be reminding her readers of the profoundly diverse fabric of her country—since the narrator does mention how “this race [of women] is apt to be distantly related” (15) with “related” evoking both links and kinship. Whatever Stoddard’s own position regarding the social transformations at work in the Civil War period, her story debunks the vision of domestic harmony upheld by conventional domestic narratives and presents mid-century domesticity as the site of (gender) friction, (racial) assaults and contested (class) aspirations. In the end, her plot also makes visible the actual economic and class interests that motivate the marriage script, revealing it for what it is: “a humbug.”13

The Art of Unproductivity

22Zeb’s evasion of the dominant script of life also gains purchase when framed by the brotherly rivalry over parental heritage that lies at the heart of the tale and in which wealth, partly accumulated through transatlantic commerce and slave trade, plays a major role. The conflict, which resonates with the fratricide warfare about to tear apart the nation, pits the two brothers against each other. Repeatedly, the financially savvy and world adventurer older brother Zeb is opposed to his regionally-bound and less successful younger brother. This opposition between the two is exacerbated when Zeb’s younger brother goes bankrupt and Zeb, having previously “clawed into his possession all he could” and tricked their father into handing over to him “every cent of his family property” (Stoddard, 2003 16), refuses to help him. The younger brother becomes destitute— “so we were ruined […] mother and the rest of us, gave up pour purple and fine linen” (17)—while Zeb, who had anticipated his brother’s business failure, holds on to the family money and remains in his own house with all expenses paid.

23Zeb makes sure he inherits and takes possession of his family’s money, but he neither wants to save, accumulate nor even invest it. Unlike his prudent and docile brother who amasses income over the years to be able to “begin the world again” (17) and implicitly pass on the capital he has acquired through trade to his children, no sooner does Zeb obtain his father’s fortune than he starts to dissipate and spend it:

He began then to fling his money into wild schemes; he would amuse himself with using up as much as he could of his property, he said, before he was summoned to move off for good. He had some trouble, for he would not give it away; so, he built and rebuilt inconvenient houses, and drained barren fields; and planted in the sand, and blasted in the rocks, and made roads that lead nowhere. (Stoddard, 2003 19)

24Squandering money and devising ever more unrealistic plans, Zeb uses up every penny of the family capital and opts for a non-(re-)productive future (“barren,” “nowhere,” “blasted”), stalling the expected family script. Both childless and dispendious, Zeb resists the intertwined logic of production and reproduction, holding back from the domestic (national) plot of what Lee Edelman has called “political futurity” (19) and the capitalistic logic of production/extraction. In the context of Zeb’s family’s participation in the nineteenth-century world of globalized commerce and trade, one where slavery played no small role, Zeb’s life holds other meanings as well: it can be understood as a form of resistance to a capitalist economy based on the exploitation of lands and people. Ultimately Zeb does not save his family’s fortune. He embarks instead on a life of financial prodigality, dissipating his family’s wealth whose origin arguably rests on the plunder of the ocean and perhaps even slavery.

  • 14 In her novel Two Men, for example, Stoddard reveals the foundational violence at the heart of Ameri (...)

25In fact, the questionable origin of the family’s wealth, while it is never actually identified, haunts the entire narrative.14 In the very first lines of the tale, it is significant that Zeb is introduced as returning with crockery that he plans to sell in New York from Liverpool, a town which played a key role in the Atlantic slave trade. Later in the narrative, the description of “the landowners [who] put their savings into small vessels, which coasted from Maine to Florida, and even went on six months’ trip into the Atlantic for whales” (Stoddard, 2003 11) evokes the role played by New Englanders in a thriving global trade made possible by transatlantic and domestic commerce. Commanded by the well-named captain Southern and heading towards Florida, the New England vessel adumbrates its ties to the South and its plantation economy. As for the very popular nineteenth-century porcelain figurine that Zeb brings back to his niece from his distant voyages—“a red and white cow and a calf of earthenware” (Stoddard, 2003 10)—, it conjures the fashionable tea sets of the period and another commodity linked to slavery, namely sugar. Finally, the tale’s widespread emphasis on merchandise and trade anchors it in the world of New England’s history, one close to the Stoddard family. Zeb’s “poking at piles of lumber” (Stoddard, 2003 17) as he wanders in the shipyard waiting for creditors to decide over the company’s fate directs attention to other modes of extractive capitalism that underpin American wealth—in the case of New England, the plunder of the ocean through the whale industry. In the end, Zeb’s decision not to bail out his family’s business is more than mere brotherly rivalry: framed within a story of transatlantic commerce, it can hardly hide his resistance to an economic system where commodities—and bodies, through the domestic slave trade—are exchanged, suggesting Elizabeth Stoddard’s own discomfort with the origin of her country’s wealth and maybe her own.

26A mobile sea adventurer at the onset of the narrative, one who has benefited from a system based on plantation capitalism and extractivism, Zeb deviates from that script by the end of the story: the furniture piled away in a corner together with the closed shutters of his house and the covered mirrors of the room suggest Zeb has left the past behind him, if not erased it altogether. Leading an existence that is not founded on a capitalist economy whose logic rests on the exploitation of lands and people, Zeb eventually cultivates marginal unproductivity:

The old house grew darker and more dismal every day. He was continually cutting doors and passages through the walls; he seemed to have an idea that they would enable him to elude some enemy that might come upon him. Sally had all the carpets taken out and put away, and all the beds stripped. She slept on a stuffed bench outside Zeb’s door. All the furniture was piled away; the looking glasses were covered, and the shutters of every room were fastened. (Stoddard, 2003 19)

27If Zeb does not re-invest his family fortune and dissipates it instead, ­he nonetheless occupies the family estate to the end. Once inside it, he “continually” refashions it inside out to create new passageways and corridors. If he is static, he is not inactive. Turning away from his family’s remunerative activity, he invests his craft elsewhere, spending his energy on “wild schemes” (Stoddard, 2003 19) and ideas to produce another narrative. An artist of sorts, in some ways like Stoddard herself, he “builds” and “rebuilds” new passages, inventing perhaps ever new routes of meaning. The house Zeb fought to inherit from his father but whose inside structure he spends his time modifying symbolizes both the ruin of New England at a time when one of its main sources of wealth, the whale industry, was in decline (Matlack 22) and the demise of the domestic plot. But the house holds another story yet, and the last lines of the narrative invite readers to ruminate on the lives of Zeb and Sally away from the family’s wrongly acquired wealth:

Sally’s chair was in one corner of the hearth, where she could poke the fire, or stir the contents of pots and kettle; her snuff box, and comb, and almanac, were on the shelf above the fire. Her hair was thick and gray, and she was fond of combing it when she had a leisure moment. She wore short dresses of black bombazine, which never required washing, and went barelegged; her shoes were made of coarse carpet, on account of her corns. Uncle Zeb generally reclined on a wooden settee under the window; an old woolen cloak, rolled up, served him for a pillow. At the foot of the settee, whenever Uncle Zeb reposed on it, there lay an ugly dog, which was Sally’s property, by name “Spot.” Picked bones, the remains of Spot’s feasts, were strewed under the table and under the settee. Spot had a habit of howling in his sleep, and Uncle Zeb had a habit of kicking him for it…. He took snuff lying down; the result to his nails and beard, and clothes, was deplorable. After grand-mother’s death he resumed the habit of dram-drinking, minus the drugs, in the full expectation of killing himself. (Stoddard, 2003 20)

28The dramatic quality of this closing scene is emphasized by its stage-like set-up—“once in a while I lifted the latch of the porch-door” (20). Embracing a form of marginality, Zeb and Sally, who have turned away from material possessions, have slipped here into a form of precarity. All around them structures collapse, even as their bodies are pulled downward (“low-ceiled,” “reclined,” “lying down,” “at the foot of,” “under”), dirt and filth have invaded their home (“never required washing,” “strewn with bones”). They have become wild-like (“thick and gray hair,” “corns,” “barelegged,” “kicked”). Addicted to alcohol and snuff, Zeb and Sally end their lives as paupers; they also stand as evidence of Stoddard’s interest in eccentric existences, that have deviated from the conventional trajectories underpinned by America’s questionable history. Still, to the end, their lives remain enmeshed in the world of capitalism, as the presence of bombazine, alcohol and tobacco all demonstrate. In a way, even those who have resisted the lures of production/reproduction die ensnared within the objects produced by an extractive capitalism whose logic is almost impossible to elude.

Conclusion

29In the opening lines of her tale, Stoddard pointedly draws her narrative strength from a tribute to Hawthornean poetics even as she deviates from its influence to stage a clearly female narrator, one who can be said to “authorize” in return Stoddard’s own voice. At the end of her story, she reverts to a sentimental tone and depicting Zeb’s dying moments, she exploits the pathos of a classic nineteenth-century death-bed scene. In the story’s near-formulaic finale, Zeb is portrayed as an aching figure who has hidden a distressing secret that he partially confesses, namely that he has been in love with his brother’s wife throughout his life:

The night he died father staid by his bedside. About one o’clock Uncle Zeb turned over, the first time he has moved since the stroke. His fingers trembled towards father’s. The first kindly look he ever gave his brother, beamed in his wild eyes then; faint broken words struggled on his lips; but it was too late for speech­­­­­–your wife, Mary was all he said–so he went out of this world, an unhappy mutilated spirit. (Stoddard, 2003 20)

30In this conventional ending, Zeb reveals his emotional fragility which his “wild eyes” cannot mask. His offensive eloquence has given way to a disabling muteness: he is unable to speak (“faint,” “broken,” “struggled”) and can express himself through ellipsis and interpolated clause only (— “your wife, Mary was all he said”—). Both obnoxious and fragile, oscillating between excess and reserve, power and powerlessness, Zeb appears here as a deeply fissured character. His nickname, Esau, condenses well this fundamental crack for it too contains two stories: the public one of Zeb’s apparent self-serving drives, and the private, hidden tale of his wounded existence. In the Old Testament, the eldest Esau is cheated out of his heritage by his younger twin brother, Jason. But in Stoddard’s rewriting of the Biblical narrative, it is the eldest brother Esau/Zeb who deceives his younger brother out of his heritage. Still, like in the Old Testament story, Esau/Zeb is also, but this time invisibly, cheated out of something by his younger twin Jason since the latter marries the woman Zeb has secretly loved all his life.

  • 15 James Matlack suggests there are strong biographical elements in the tale since Stoddard’s own fath (...)
  • 16 Stowe’s “Uncle Lot” can be understood as a revision of Washington Irving’s “Legend of Sleepy Hollow (...)
  • 17 Fetterley and Pryse argue that Stowe’s Uncle Lot introduces “an approach to the representation of r (...)

31Portrayed as a cleft and dual regional character, one who hides15 a soft heart behind his prickly outside, Zeb comes across as a prototypical New England figure. In these last lines, he can be compared to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Lot, the protagonist of the eponymous tale which Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse read as a foundational regional text.16 However, unlike Stowe and other regionalists after her, Stoddard does not create in the closing scene the conditions for durable “empathy”17 which Fetterley and Pryse have identified as a key feature of the genre. The emptiness of Zeb’s house and the absence of visitors “since the day of the funeral” contrast with the warm communal gathering that characterizes that tradition: the sentimental strain introduced when Zeb dies is quickly muted, and replaced by the distanced, sardonic, and cool tone more typical of Stoddard’s realist and dissonant voice. To the end, navigating between tropes, tones and traditions, Stoddard’s heterogenous war story both exploits and upends literary categories. In revealing the tensions at the heart of Zeb’s home, Stoddard’s narrative also invites readers to reconsider the boundaries of mid-century domesticity and to recognize the “dark truths” that undergird it. Ultimately, the power of “Uncle Zeb” resides in its capacity to make visible other, less normative forms of life, ones that exist alongside more conventional ones, a reminder that seems today more urgent than ever.

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ALCOTT, Louisa May. Little Women. 1868. New York: Penguin Classics, 1989.

BERLANT, Lauren. The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.

CREVECOEUR, J. Hector St. John. Letter III. “What is an American?” Letters from an American Farmer. 1782. The Norton Anthology of American literature, vol. 1, New York: Norton, 1994, p. 657-666.

EDELMAN, Lee. “The Future Is Kid Stuff: Queer Theory, Disidentification, and the Death Drive.” Narrative, vol. 6, no. 1, 1998, p. 18-30. www.jstor.org/stable/20107133. Accessed 24 November 2025.

FETTERLEY, Judith, and Marjorie PRYSE. Writing out of Place, Regionalism, Women and American Literary Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003.

HALTTUNEN, Karen. Confidence Men and Painted Women. A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982.

HAWTHORNE, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter and Other Writings. 1850. Ed. Leland S. Person. New York: Norton, 2005.

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LOOBY, Christopher. “Elizabeth Stoddard’s Depravity.” Revue française d’études américaines, no. 167, 2021, p. 57-70.

MAHONEY, Lynn. Elisabeth Stoddard and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Culture. New York: Routledge, 2004.

MATLACK, James H. The Literary Career of Elizabeth Barstow Stoddard. Ph. D. dissertation. Yale University, 1967.

PASQUESI, Carina D. “The Morgesons: Elizabeth Stoddard’s Ars Erotica.” Legacy, vol. 31, no. 2, 2014, p. 183-206.

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SKLAR, Kathryn Kish. “Reconsidering Domesticity through the Lens of Empire and Settler Society in North America.” The American Historical Review, vol. 124, no. 4, October 2019, p. 1249-1266.

SMITH, Robert McClure, and Ellen WEINAUER, eds. American Culture, Canons, and the Case of Elizabeth Stoddard. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003.

STODDARD, Elizabeth. Stories. Eds. Susanne Opfermann and Yvonne Roth. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003.

STODDARD, Elizabeth. Two Men. 1865. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008.

STODDARD, Elizabeth. The Selected Letters of Elizabeth Stoddard. Eds. Jennifer Putzi and Elizabeth Stockton. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012.

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Notes

1 A literary weekly newspaper published in New York City from 1858 to 1860 and then again from 1865 to 1866, edited by Henry Clapp Jr. It was meant to be New York’s answer to The Atlantic.

2 Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse together with Lawrence Buell explain that by the 1830s, the New England village had become a cultural icon that carried with it a “meta-fictional” meaning (Fetterley and Pryse 82).

3 Stoddard both admired and feared her distant cousin, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Writing to Julian Hawthorne, his son, Stoddard stated: “Your father was my torment and my delight. I will never forgive myself, for not seeking him, but I was afeard” (Stoddard, 2012 187). In the same letter, Stoddard reasserted the importance of Nathaniel Hawthorne for her writing: “I have one immortal feather in my cap. Nathaniel Hawthorne recognized me” (187).

4 In identifying Zeb as a queer figure, I follow Fetterley and Pryse’s argument: “These various formulations point to the fact that ‘queer’ is a shifting signifier, capable of being self-consciously adopted and deployed as a mode of critique against what in any given moment gets constructed as the ‘normal’” (Fetterley and Pryse 319).

5 “That new mode of life brings along with it a new set of manners, which I cannot easily describe. These new manners being grafted on the old stock, produce a strange sort of lawless profligacy, the impressions of which are indelible. The manners of the Indian natives are respectable, compared with this European medley” (Crevecoeur 664).

6 “Your warning strikes me seriously—am I indeed all wrong, and are all right about ‘going too near the edge’ business? Must I create from whose, and what standard?” (Stoddard, 2012 52).

7 Central to white middle-class culture, domestic novels depict the private home as a well-managed middle-class haven steered by a benevolent and nurturing mother and opposed to the ruthless public sphere of competition and commerce. In these novels, sentimentality is often deployed to trigger in characters and readers alike emotional response, empathy or “identification” (Berlant 57) which is then supposed to lead to political action.

8 I use Sklar’s definition of domesticity as “the daily construction of patterns of intimate values and behavior to govern the reproduction of domestic life in ways that shape both personal and social selves” (1249). Recent studies on domesticity provide a useful framework to interpret Stoddard’s handling of the marriage plot and of domestic relations at large in “Uncle Zeb.” In her essay, “Reconsidering Domesticity…”, Sklar explains that far from being a private world sealed off from outside forces, domesticity has been viewed since the 1990s “as a process that articulate[s] race, class, and ethnic differences” (1253). As for the nineteenth-century American home, it has been understood as a “contested site where cultures conflicted or converged.” The groundbreaking volume Cultures of United States Imperialism, edited Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, for example, underlines the importance of “viewing empire from the social relations of domestic life” and explains how the practices of intimate life must be articulated with, and read alongside, the imperial thrust that underwrote the nineteenth-century American project.

9 Although criticism has brought to light its complexity, I take Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868) as symbolizing mainstream domestic narratives. It was, after all, Thomas Niles, of the Roberts Brothers, who asked Alcott to write a “girls’ book” (Alcott 15).

10 While Zeb does not evince the virulence of Cassandra Morgeson, “Uncle Zeb” enacts, to use Carina Pasquesi’s words, “an anti-pedagogy against the domestic novel’s lessons of romantic love, family life, and private property” (183).

11 Carina Pasquesi argues that sadism is a way for women to reclaim their power in the private sphere (195).

12 If Stoddard can be said to adopt the stereotypes of her class describing these working-class women as “cunning,” deceitful and “low,” she does not provide a flattering portrait of Zeb’s upper-class mother either. In fact, Stoddard’s own mother Betsy Drew was a tailoress and looked down on by her father’s family (Matlack 21). This biographical element, together with the transitional moment she writes in, might explain her own ambiguity regarding the “assaults” of these lower-class women. Her negative description of these working-class women can also be understood in the context of her shame regarding her own father’s romantic involvement with his housekeeper: “For six weeks I have re-lived a trouble of many years’ growth and endurance. It has broke (sic) into dreadful publicity (to me). My father has married lately a girl who has lived many years in our family as a servant” (Stoddard, 2012 17).

13 In a letter written to her friend Margaret Sweat, two months after her marriage to Richard, Stoddard writes: “Marriage in a certain & true sense is a humbug. I cannot see why the married should deny this—” (Stoddard, 2012 15).

14 In her novel Two Men, for example, Stoddard reveals the foundational violence at the heart of America when one of the protagonists associates the wealth of the old American Parke’s family with downright plunder: “The Parke family are next to the Lord, in this country though it is not what it was […] one of ‘em settled here—cheated the Indians, I guess out of the pine wood that belong still to the old Squire, and died universally unlamented” (Stoddard, 2008 3).

15 James Matlack suggests there are strong biographical elements in the tale since Stoddard’s own father, Wilson Barstow, shares a lot of features with the younger brother of the story, who also goes unnoticed. Stoddard’s uncle, Zaccheus, Barstow’s older brother might have been the source of inspiration for Zeb even though he was Zac and not Zeb. Her grandfather Gideon Jr., and not her uncle, was a representative to the state legislature and a delegate to the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention. Her father also played a role in political life serving as representative to the Massachusetts General Court. Finally, the financial downturns experienced by Stoddard’s fictional family are steeped in her own family’s experience as her father’s firm also failed (in 1843, 1852 and 1856) and was constantly “on the brink of insolvency but with an outward display of affluence” (Matlack 19, 22, 28).

16 Stowe’s “Uncle Lot” can be understood as a revision of Washington Irving’s “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and namely of its central character, Ichabod Crane, initiating a regionalist tradition where the “female circle” and the “sleepy region” are valued. This tradition, in which the region is described from the inside, is opposed to another tradition, embodied by the masculine and boisterous Brom Bones, whose outside vision in fact mocks the region (Fetterley and Pryse 87).

17 Fetterley and Pryse argue that Stowe’s Uncle Lot introduces “an approach to the representation of regional people and values that involves respect and empathy and grants voice to the regional characters in the work” (83).

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Audrey Fogels, « Elizabeth Stoddard’s Extravagant “Uncle Zeb” and the Question of New England’s Fraught Wealth »Transatlantica [En ligne], 2 | 2025, mis en ligne le 01 décembre 2025, consulté le 16 février 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/27103 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15i26

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Audrey Fogels

Université Paris 8 Vincennes – Saint-Denis, UR TransCrit

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