Elizabeth Stoddard’s Unruly Girlhood

“Loïe Fuller” (c. 1904-1908), R. Moreau. Courtesy of The National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; acquired through the generosity of Elizabeth Ann Hylton.
Weird girls are having a literary moment. A search for “weird girl books” on TikTok confirms this, yielding hundreds of videos celebrating the genre. Authors like Mona Awad, Sayaka Murata, and Ottessa Moshfegh feature heavily. These books vary widely in content but have in common depictions of young women and girls behaving in strange and even off-putting ways. They obsess, and they lie, and they loaf around the house.
These behaviors feel delicious and revelatory because the literary canon, at least in the United States, has trained us to expect decorum and sweetness from the adolescent girls of literature. But long before the weird girls of BookTok—before even earlier iterations of the trope, from Shirley Jackson to Heathers (1988)—weird girls have had a rich literary lineage, one that has been suppressed by the American canon.
For readers of American classics, girls tend to behave in predictable ways. Louisa May Alcott’s titular Little Women—even the rebellious Jo—gather together to play with dolls in the winter and perform virtuous gardening work in the warm months. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Eva, the sickly and angelic emotional center of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), walks the grounds of her family home with benevolent grace before obligingly settling into bed to die beautifully and peacefully. There is a script for how these literary girls will behave as they are trained into the world of white womanhood. They will moderate their impulses, and they will help around the house. There is a set of orderly paths they will tread from kitchen to drawing room to garden to bed, day after day.
The tidy movements of well-behaved 19th-century American girlhood represent what theorist Sara Ahmed, in her 2006 book Queer Phenomenology, might call a “vertical axis” of 19th-century American domestic life. A “vertical axis,” for Ahmed, is a way of naming a prominent, standardized, or “normative” direction along which one is trained to move toward order and regularity. Ahmed articulates the regulating function of this vertical axis: “Things seem ‘straight’ (on the vertical axis), when they are ‘in line,’ which means they are aligned with other lines.” But this kind of normative orientation in space, she insists, is a construction, not a natural phenomenon. The “process of alignment” is one by which social norms constrict the possibilities for an individual’s movement, keeping them in line.
Comparatively unknown 19th-century author Elizabeth Stoddard, by contrast, sets girlhood flying, crawling, and crashing in all directions in her 1862 novel The Morgesons.
Comparatively unknown 19th-century author Elizabeth Stoddard, by contrast, sets girlhood flying, crawling, and crashing in all directions in her 1862 novel The Morgesons. She provides, in other words, a reorientation, a model of literary historical girlhood out of line with its axis.
Despite the striking virtuosity of Stoddard’s writing, she has never achieved the canonical status of contemporaneous writers of similar ability. Most scholars attribute this critical failure to a consciously cultivated, occasionally off-putting oddness, a quality of uncanniness that is difficult to pin down but suffuses her work.
The Morgesons, a haunting and wonderfully strange female coming-of-age tale set on the New England seaside, is no exception. The novel follows the development of sisters Cassandra and Veronica as they grow from strange little girls into even stranger women, and the text is rife with Stoddard’s signature oddness. Dialogue is often inexplicably weighty, as if delivered for the benefit of a stage audience; characters are born and die with minimal preamble or explanation. Perhaps most disarming of all are the dark and moody attachments between the novel’s central characters. Erotic connections are frequently marked by uneasiness, while family units themselves are often fragmented by unexpected deaths or unexplained absences. In an echo of the brooding Atlantic always looming outside the windows of the Morgeson family home, a reader would be justified in feeling left at sea by the text.
The novel opens on adolescent Cassandra Morgeson mid-climb, scaling a piece of furniture to grasp her favorite book stored upon a high shelf, much to her aunt’s chagrin. Stoddard writes:
“That child,” said my aunt Mercy […] “is possessed.” When my aunt said this I was climbing a chest of drawers, by its knobs, in order to reach the book-shelves above it, where my favorite work, “The Northern Regions,” was kept.[…] I seated myself with difficulty on the edge of the chest of drawers.[…] Presently, in crossing my feet, my shoes, which were large, dropped on the painted floor with a loud noise.
Cassandra’s scrambling movement through space, the ungainly positioning of her body, the undignified thunk of her shoes dropping off her feet are all fundamentally out of order, incorrect, as her aunt’s disapproval signifies.
While Cassandra’s path to her “favorite” book does perhaps align with the normative value of efficiency—she gets there in the straightest line possible—it is otherwise in marked contrast to the kind of vertical axis of spatial movement that sentimental literature of the period prescribed. Cassandra’s reach is across a wild diagonal, marked by the awkwardness which comes with going off-script. The precariousness of her seat, the thud of her too-large shoes hitting the floor—both suggest an ungracefulness to Cassandra’s use of space that contrasts dramatically with the angelic movements of, for example, Stowe’s angelic Little Eva.
Crucially, Cassandra’s movements are inspired by the desire to reach an object of interest.
Crucially, Cassandra’s movements are inspired by the desire to reach an object of interest. She moves toward the desired object—the book on the “Northern Regions”—impulsively, messily. Cassandra’s orientation is toward desire, enjoyment, moving in the quickest possible path toward the thing she wants. What Aunt Mercy characterizes as a kind of demonic possession, we might instead read as Cassandra’s possession of herself and her drive to possess the things around her. This unruly movement in the direction of desire and possessiveness rather than productivity also marks Cassandra’s adulthood, as she enters into erotic attachments that some scholars have read as bordering on sadomasochistic and that, crucially, do not produce children.
Equally important to my reading of this scene is its habitual nature. The book Cassandra reaches for is described as a “favorite,” a detail which suggests this path up the drawers toward the shelf to be one she treads often. For Ahmed, repetition is what produces scripts, orients our bodies to move through space in predictable ways. She writes, “The work of repetition is not neutral work; it orients the body in some ways rather than others.” But Cassandra’s habitual motion here offers opportunities for reorientation. Though the movement is habitual, it remains ungainly, disordered, lacking the decorum of routine. Through Cassandra’s messy movement through space toward something she wants, Stoddard suggests that the axis upon which Cassandra moves might be her wants, her impulses.
Cassandra’s unruly orientation in space is no trivial thing for the novel. By dislodging Cassandra from the axis of predictable girlhood movement, Stoddard is able to slip her out of alignment with the normative gender configurations of the white, upper-middle-class domestic sphere altogether.
Cassandra’s desires, attachments, and appetites, the forces that motivate her movements, are among the novel’s strangest and most striking features.
Cassandra’s desires, attachments, and appetites, the forces that motivate her movements, are among the novel’s strangest and most striking features. Stoddard uses Cassandra as a vehicle to explore what is possible for a woman to want and how it is possible for her to want it. Cassandra’s romantic relationships with men are characterized by a brooding eroticism, while her bonds with women—from family and friends to domestic servants—are often marked by intensely fraught struggles for power and authority. And in contrast to her sister Veronica, whose refusal of food and reluctance to leave the home have caused critics to read her through diagnoses of anorexia and agoraphobia, Cassandra’s appetites are voracious; she is a figure of consumption, imbibing food and sensory experiences with equal enthusiasm. In all of her desires and dislikes, bodily or psychological, Cassandra is a figure of extremes.
Permitted over and over again to move in unruly and abnormal ways toward the objects of her desires and whims, Cassandra is decidedly not oriented toward a future of normative womanhood defined by productive housewifery and motherhood. As the novel goes on, we can see this orientation away from the vertical axis of womanhood everywhere in Cassandra’s upbringing. With the exception of disapproving Aunt Mercy, the rest of the Morgeson family is generally disorganized. They take meals at odd hours at tables laid with mismatched dishes, drift in and out of rooms aimlessly, and even decorate their spaces strangely. Cassandra’s room is so overstuffed with decoration that the maid is certain it will catch ablaze when the fireplace is lit; Veronica’s room, meanwhile, is papered with leaves and branches, reminders of the outside world she rarely visits. Across a wide range of habits that constitute dwelling, Cassandra and her sister Veronica are allowed to move askew from the conventions of 19th-century white, middle-class girlhood.
Stoddard’s ability to trouble the categories of sex and gender is predicated on the stability of the category of whiteness. While white feminine gendering supplies an axis against which Cassandra moves, it also provides a kind of guardrail that protects her from the consequences of her capriciousness. It is, in large part, Cassandra’s racial status as a white child that makes her wild movements permissible to both the social world and Stoddard’s reader. While she certainly faces judgment and even discipline for her unruliness, as her aunt’s condemnation in the novel’s opening paragraph evidences, Cassandra never experiences lasting social or economic uncertainty, as her access to white middle-class social circles ultimately results in a financially stable marriage. And while Stoddard endows Cassandra and her fellow white female characters with emotionally rich and even, occasionally, unlikable inner lives, ethnically othered characters enjoy no such nuance. Irish servants, the novel’s most explicitly racialized characters, are rendered as a homogenous group—“a Celtic dynasty” of housekeepers arriving on New England shores. While she explores the wants and willfulness of other members of the servant class, Stoddard has little interest in the inner lives of these women, who figure primarily as a nuisance and a grim sign of changing times. Stoddard’s liberatory space of unruly girlhood has room for white New Englanders, but little else. Like many of the most commercially successful weird girls of our own literary moment, in other words, Cassandra’s ability to test the conventions of her gender is made possible by her whiteness.
Through the undisciplined movements of her female protagonists, Stoddard stages a crisis of the category of white womanhood itself. And if Stoddard’s girls are moving away from, or out of line with, girlhood and womanhood, it makes sense to ask what they are in fact moving toward. The novel declines to provide a singular, coherent alternative to the norms that constitute the period’s vertical axis. I read Stoddard as generally uninterested in producing holistic theories; as those who have read her work will know, her writing tends instead toward disruption and fragmentation. Stoddard is, however, making a claim for the radical possibilities inherent to the act of dwelling itself. If, as Ahmed argues, the habits and routines that make up the practice of dwelling are what produce orientation over time, Stoddard helps us see how each individual action that constitutes dwelling is an opportunity to orient anew. The laying of plates on a table, the selection of paint for a room, the pairing of curtains with chairs are avenues for moving otherwise.
Introducing Stoddard to the literary history of weird girlhood is about more than simply revising the canon. By turning the mundane habits of domestic life on their heads, Stoddard helps us to understand the wealth of unexpected ways that girlhood can be subversive and subverted. She helps us destabilize the vertical axis of normative girlhood across history, attuning us to the fundamental strangeness of girlhood itself. Even the way a character moves across a room—even such a small act as using a chest of drawers as both ladder and stool—is a chance to be reoriented.

Elena Bellaart
Publab Fellow 2024
Elena Bellaart is an editor, educator, and PhD candidate at Northwestern University. She is currently at work on a dissertation examining 19th century women’s writing about domestic space, investigating how depictions of gender, race, and architecture intersect to produce various ways of dwelling and being at home.