Book Review

Canada and the United States

In this imaginative reading of the writings of antebellum New England rural women, Catherine E. Kelly positions her cultural/intellectual analysis as an extension of the work of Christopher Clark, Jonathan Prude, and Jeanne Boydston to show us how rural women contributed to the development of a distinct, provincial middle class. In a carefully, closely argued first chapter, she insists that women's experiences as reflected in the language of their literary expressions provide new ways to understand the social and cultural dimensions of the process and implications of rural industrialization. She thus draws together social and intellectual history with gender and class analysis. "Narratives about town and country, and particularly about the special nature of rural life, marked the uneasy intersection of tradition and transformation that characterized capitalist development" (p. 8).

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This rich written legacy first spelled out the superiority of rural life over urban society as a way of clarifying economic change. But in revering and later creating the mythic, sentimentalized traditional household and New England village, the writers were actually participating in developing a provincial middle class to accommodate the great economic changes that were driving rural New England into the system of market capitalism. Especially after 1840, the hallowed traditions of the rural New England household preserved in women's narratives served to conceal and thus ameliorate the distinctive marks of that rising provincial middle class. As Kelly contends, the narratives reflect first an attempt to resist, then complicate, and finally to obscure the penetration of rural New England by market capitalism. This subtle, clever analysis insists that the intersection of gender, class, and cultural studies provides an additional key to revealing and understanding the impact of nineteenth-century economic change.

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