Reviews for The Columbia Guide to American Women in the Nineteenth Century

The average rating for The Columbia Guide to American Women in the Nineteenth Century based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-05-01 00:00:00 Rob Flury Angel in the Forest is the history of two utopias which occupied the same ground in New Harmony, Indiana, in the nineteenth century, written in poetic prose. That is to say, Angel is perhaps an historical novel, or a history written for the readers of novels. Father Rapp established a failed religiously organized utopia. Purchasing the town from Rapp, Robert Owen sought to establish a utopia based upon rational principles. But what is clearly established is that Young has written a book in utopic prose. Utopia? We, post-twentieth century, are too cynically well-informed to believe in such a possibility. It would seem that a better world is neither possible nor necessary. Even as the thesis concerning the end of history has run its course, I suspect that an even older thesis has taken ahold of us quite unaware ; that we are in fact living in the best of all possible worlds, quite in spite of our voltairian cynicism. The measure of the degree to which we subscribe to such an out-moded thought, despite all of our modern sophistication, is the degree to which we insist that the utopic imagination is stultifying. We know that all such attempts are bound for failure. It is human nature, we believe, and this world is as good as it gets. How fortunate! But even as the socialist dream of a better world is left behind we find our minds slipping into various forms of messianisms ; for the capitalists we are already living in the kingdom of god, and but for those who suffer under such a kingdom, salvation is displaced yet further into the future out of time and out of space. As with her final great work (of which only a portion was finally published), Harp Song for a Radical, a socio-biography of both Eugene Debs and the movement of labor towards a better world in the nineteenth century, Young leads us back into the past to discover what we have forgotten. We have forgotten that it was not always as it is now ; that where we are now was built upon the backs of failed possibilities, possibilities left unredeemed and now most certainly scorned by our Besserwissen. Nineteenth century America is a forgotten land ; even Pennsylvania, a pacifist attempt at utopia which persisted for 200 years (during which time only six executions?), is scarcely written in our text books. A giant road-block -- the disasters of the twentieth century -- obscure our view of the hopes and dreams of our nineteenth century forebearers. Perhaps this is all pre-ordained, for was it not in that most millennial of years, 1844, that Nietzsche was born? Young, I am beginning to suspect, is a genius. I do mean a literary genius, her sentence-making ; and too I think she is a kind of moral genius, given that the more I read of and about her as both writer and human being the more I suspect that anyone who interacted with her would be the much-better for it. And today we may still interact with her through the pages of her books where both her mind and her heart may be heard. I feel well prepared for the reading of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling and believe that it may have suffered the same undeserved fate other great works of encyclopedic scope and style from recent decades have suffered ; but I ask, Where is our Jack Green for our Ms. Young?

Review # 2 was written on 2011-12-23 00:00:00 Stanley Wagner "What far from average people have walked these streets, in old time! An angel like a hermaphrodite butterfly, a butterfly catcher, a Daniel Boone of the infinite, a finite Elijah, a herb doctor, Lot's wife, many pastorals, many mechanics, clouded dreamers, a celibate breeder of horses, poor Yahoos, the Spirit of Nature, rational man, irrational man, patriarchs, undertakers. Nor does this list, inclusive as it seems, exhaust the possibilities of nineteenth-century salvationism, as expressed by two Utopias - the first, forerunner of a New Jerusalem, exclusive and arbitrary; the second, forerunner of a New Moral World, to encompass all nations and all governments. Two Utopias comprehended, within a half-mile square surrounded by a vast wilderness, past, present, and future, however abstrusely - the burning of Rome, city planning, explosion of stars, a new calendar, anarchy, a New Jerusalem, repression, expansion, moneyless Eden, exaltation of pearls, a three-hour working day, exaltation of horses, infinite regress, the united nations of earth, the many, the few, Lucifer, lotus-eaters, the falling of autumn leaves, the myths of Narcissus, good dentistry, many fictions. So that such perfectionist orders, which would have excluded much of mistaken life, seem mistaken life itself, with all its infinite variety." At times in her prose I hear echoes of the 17th century, in particular that wonderful baroque technique which found its apex in Sir Thomas Browne. At other times I can hear Stein, or DH Lawrence, or Woolf...But, of course, fundamentally she is uniquely herSelf. Her word choice, and her sentence structure, is often unexpected and unusual in its grammar and its lexicon. This is a Good Thing. The above quote, from page three of this novel?history?prosepoem?, is both a good indicator of her thematic concerns in this text, and her techniques. We have lists, dualism, contradictions, humor, density....and details of these two extraordinary attempts at perfecting human society which took place in the early 19thc. Both failed, of course, as all Utopias must, but the differences in why and how they failed tell us much about human nature and the realities of socio-economic pressure. And, of course, throughout we have soundings of her major themes - the irrational within the rational, the rational within the irrational, the seeds of dystopia within Utopia, the dreaming of mankind...Impossibly Romantic dreams of a Realist Utopia...We must, it seems, confront and accept our failure as a necessary part of any success. That we are always already broken, and that are lives are riven with disappointment and dissolution. But still such Beauty hiding here and there... One could, in fact, imagine the whole thing as a prologue to Miss MacIntosh - the final ten pages in particular lead very nicely to the start, and the concerns, of that extraordinary novel. A beautifully written exploration of a truly fascinating subject. What more could you want? Copies are cheap and all over the interwebs and this seems like a good place to start for those of you hesitant before the size of Miss Mac...