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AUTHOR:	SUSAN LYNCH FOSTER
TITLE:	Romancing the Cause: Fourierism, Feminism, and Free Love in Papa's Own Girl
SOURCE:	Utopian Studies 8 no1 31-54 '97

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    IN 1874, A REVIEWER of Marie Howland's newly published novel, Papa's Own Girl,(FN1) blithely reported: "This is a book that we can cheerfully recommend to all readers. It is a story of American life, with characters naturally drawn, and with a high tone." Another reviewer wrote:

This is an excellent story.... It depicts the good effects which may be expected to follow the introduction of many of the various reforms demanded by the age. The tale is simple, is naturally and easily told, and is very fascinating.... There is no need to desire for such a work speedy success, for, we understand, it has already attained it; and the near future will assuredly prove, that, in popular favor, it will take its place between Robinson Crusoe and Uncle Tom's Cabin.

    These reviews seem utterly unremarkable, and so they would be, were it not for the journals that carried them. The second review appeared in the notorious free-love, feminist(FN2) journal, Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly, the radical organ with a circulation "in the tens of thousands" (Stoehr 6) that had published an English translation of the Communist Manifesto in 1871.(FN3) Present-day readers of Papa's Own Girl would not find it surprising that Victoria Woodhull, first female candidate for the presidency of the United States, had endorsed the novel. But the first cheerful recommendation comes from a much more unlikely source: Godey's Lady's Book, the literary arbiter of middle-class, female respectability, edited by the august defender of conservative domestic ideology, Sarah Josepha Hale.(FN4)
    How could this novel, which advocated Fourierism, feminism, and free love, be enthusiastically endorsed by two publications so diametrically opposed in their visions of ideal womanhood, sexual morality, and politics? One might suspect that the reviewer for Godey's simply hadn't read the novel, if it were not for favorable reviews in other mainstream publications. The eminently respectable Harper's gave the novel the closest attention. Its reviewer declared:

No novel has yet appeared so comprehensive in its range, bearing upon the great social questions of the day: the position of woman and the conditions of labor. Its publication is very timely now, when the long-continued agitation of these topics has rendered it desirable that the problems involved should be clearly presented, and their possible solution indicated from the most hopeful point of view.... it is the great argument of the story, with its glorious forecast of the future, that will most impress thoughtful readers.... (443)

    The circumspect language of the Harper's review suggests that Papa's Own Girl is somehow a mainstream publication, a rational, reassuringly optimistic distillation of the problems that engrossed its educated, liberal-minded, middle-class readers. Yet other evidence suggests that such a bland representation of Howland's novel is misleading--perhaps purposely so. While the recent passage of the Comstock Law(FN5) in 1873 may well have led Howland to temper her language, Papa's Own Girl was sufficiently explicit in its discussions of women's sexual rights (and the sexual wrongs done to them) that several libraries, including the Boston Public, banned the novel for its "immorality" (Preface, POG second edition). Howland herself was prevented from borrowing the book from a Philadelphia library: The solicitous librarian, unaware that he was speaking to the book's author, informed Howland that she would need "an order from the chief librarian" to check out Papa's Own Girl because "'its doctrines are corrupting.'" As Howland recalled the encounter, she "left the library without revealing the fact that [she] wrote the book and therefore could not be very badly corrupted by its doctrines."(FN6)
    The disparate and sometimes puzzling responses to Papa's Own Girl reflect the complexities of Howland's interweaving of radical utopian premises and sentimental literary conventions. These conventions include the set of character types and plots that dominated mid- to late-nineteenth-century women's novels, as well as the emphasis on the emotional aspect of social relationships and the cultural power of feminine influence that permeated these novels. The mere fact that Howland combined sentimental and utopian discourse does not account for the deeply ambivalent reception that was accorded the work. Sentimentality and domesticity would, in fact, seem ideal candidates to disguise or mitigate the potential social threat of a politically radical work. The paradigmatic utopian novel of the nineteenth century, Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888) uses sentimental discourse precisely to such effect. As Kenneth Roemer has persuasively argued, Bellamy invoked the conventions of sentimentality in order to help situate his readers in the unfamiliar political and social space of utopia, in effect creating a home for the reader in the text. Roemer observes:

... if a nineteenth-century author intended to write a book that would motivate middle-class readers to change their self-images and their society, it made sense to draw upon the types of settings familiar to readers of domestic fictions--settings that could easily be read into their own lives where they could begin to translate the fictional narrative into real-world action or at least into altered perceptions of their environment. ("The Literary Domestication of Utopia," 110)

    But Howland's invocation of sentimental types and relationships differs from Bellamy's in a crucial way: While demonstrating how certain sentimental strategies, such as the use of female influence for social evangelism, can forward the cause of radical utopian change, Howland also uses utopian radicalism as a means of challenging and correcting problematic aspects of sentimentality and its close companion, domestic ideology. Sentimentality and domesticity help to situate the reader in the unfamiliar terrain of Papa's Own Girl, but Howland's feminist, Fourierist, and free-love principles inevitably change some of the familiar coordinates of the sentimental or domestic novel. The sentimental apparatus of the novel offers a superficial sense of orientation, the feeling that this text is familiar terrain. But this very assurance that the text is a terra cognita opens the way for a profound experience of disorientation as typical characters and plots are subtly reshaped and re-aligned.
    Papa's Own Girl raises questions about the interpretation of sentimentality as a generically subversive as well as simultaneously reassuring literary discourse. While Roemer's explication of Looking Backward helps to establish the relevance of sentimentality to utopian fiction on the grounds of nineteenth century reader-response, other critics have been more suspicious of sentimentality, especially in women's utopian writing. Nan Albinski has contrasted nineteenth-century British and American women writers, finding the latter prone to getting lost in a "sentimental romance" that is "irrelevant" to the utopian message and subversive of the text's feminism (50). With the re-evaluation of domesticity and sentimentality in American literature, ongoing since the 1970s, sentimentality is less easily dismissed; in contrast, a certain body of criticism celebrating sentimentality has developed in the wake of Jane Tompkins's landmark Sensational Designs (1985). Tompkins's argument is, briefly, that "a novel's impact on the culture at large depends not on its escape from the formulaic and derivative, but on its tapping into a storehouse of commonly held assumptions, reproducing what is already there in a typical and familiar form" (xvi; see also 126-127). In rescuing women's sentimental writing from critical oblivion, she re-reads submission--whether that of Stowe's Uncle Tom or of Susan Warner's best-selling heroine Ellen Montgomery--as an act of Christian heroism that has radical consequences for redefining society according to Christian and matrifocal millennial principles (Tompkins 163-172). Tompkins's formula has proved enabling for feminist scholars who have sought to rescue mid-nineteenth-century women's novels from the old critical assumption that these novels are literarily as well as politically vacuous. Although Tompkins limits her assertion that the "the popular domestic novel ... offers a critique of American society far more devastating than any delivered by better-known critics such as Hawthorne and Melville" to "certain cases" (124), her interpretation of sentimental power with its revolutionary potential grounded (ironically) in what still appears to be sexual and economic conservatism suggests broader conclusions about the genre itself.
    Albinski's uneasiness is understandable, for the relationship between sentimental discourse and progressive politics, especially feminism, is ambiguous at best. Certainly, the merger of sentimentality and utopia may produce a powerful if in some ways compromised discourse, as Roemer suggests. But the triangulation of sentimentality, utopia, and feminism poses an even knottier problem and produces a more conflicted discourse. What I hope to do in my reading of Papa's Own Girl is not merely to affirm or reverse Albinski's critical judgment that sentimentality weakens American feminist utopian writing but to investigate the following questions, in one particular case: To what degree and in what ways does sentimentality, a literary form so common as to constitute a cultural template, absorb and transform a potentially radical set of ideas and concerns? And in what ways does the utopian genre transform the sentimental?
    Howland's "high tone[d]" "story of American life" (Godey's), her "glorious forecast of the future" (Harper's), subverted precisely the aspects of domesticity that would have allowed the novel to pass as a properly mediated, and therefore unthreatening, work of female social reform. However, the very parts of the novel that aroused the censors, and which probably limited its general circulation, validated the novel for a smaller but historically significant audience. Woodhull and Claflin's prediction that Papa's Own Girl would rub shoulders with Uncle Tom's Cabin on the figurative bookshelf of fame was eventually justified, not by sales figures but by the novel's ability to spur its readers to action: Some of Howland's readers attempted to establish a Fourierist utopia like the one sketched in her novel--not in New England but, more adventurously, on the west coast of Mexico.
    How a former mill girl, now, in the 1880s, a middle-aged and tenuously middle-class New Jersey matron, came to be partly responsible for the emigration of more than a thousand American men, women, and children to the Mexican harbor of Topolobampo (Fogarty 88) is a fascinating and complex story, of which only a small part can be outlined here.(FN7) Howland (then Marie Stevens Case) spent the years of the Civil War in Europe with the man who was to become her second husband, Edward Howland. While in France, she visited Godin's Familistère, the cooperative ironworks and worker's home that served as her model for her fictional Social Palace in Papa's Own Girl. The novel attracted the attention of Albert Owen, who had a railroad scheme to sell; together, the Howlands and Owen came up with the plan for a Fourierist colony to be built on the west coast of Mexico as the terminus of a cross-continental railroad. Marie and Edward Howland were indefatigable publicists for the venture, editing the colony newspaper from their home in New Jersey. They themselves emigrated to the young colony, named Pacific City, in 1888. Although Pacific City ultimately failed both as a Fourierist utopia and as a railroad scheme, it attracted over twelve hundred people between 1886 and 1893 (Fogarty 88).
    As letters written to Howland in the late 1880s show, Papa's Own Girl was crucial in convincing many of these people to invest their all in the Topolobampo venture.(FN8) That Howland advertised the novel in The Credit Foncier of Sinaloa, the organ that publicized the utopian colony, could only have reinforced readers' tendencies to interpret the novel as a schema for a better life. Like Woodhull and Claflin, these readers saw Papa's Own Girl as a new "Uncle Tom's Cabin ... a light shining in dark places, leading up to the realization of fond hopes through weary efforts" (Gray). Perhaps also like the two free-loving, feminist publishers, the potential colonists were prone to aggrandizing the significance of the novel. But their response was not merely that of a marginalized radical fringe. To the contrary, John Jewett himself, the publisher of Stowe's anti-slavery novel and the initial publisher of Papa's Own Girl, may have been the first to draw the analogy: according to the translator of the French edition, Jewett wrote: "This artistic and powerfully written novel is to the social questions that agitate the civilized world, what Uncle Tom's Cabin was to the question of slavery."(FN9) Although Jewett had a pecuniary incentive to boost the novel, his comment proceeds from a verifiably mainstream sensibility.
    The consistent comparison of Papa's Own Girl to Uncle Tom's Cabin made by contemporary readers would seem to bolster a Tompkins-esque interpretation of the novel. The analogy, implausible as it may appear to a modern critic, was, for these readers, more than superficial.(FN10) Several correspondents personify the book as an evangelical missionary; one eloquent writer describes how one of the precious 3,000 copies of the first edition (figure given by Edward Howland) was passed "from hand to hand, till out of very weariness it threatened immediate dissolution. Then some pitying friend gave it a new and stronger back and sides, and thus recreated and restrengthened, it went on as the evangel of the old-new gospel of human brotherhood" (Hogeland). F.A. Atwater, writing in 1889, notes that he bought copies of Papa's Own Girl and Looking Backward to send to Australia, a brief but suggestive indication of the imperialistic reach of both American utopian novels. Like a good distributor of tract literature, Atwater remarks that he has "bought many a copy of [Papa's Own Girl] ... to give away" since first reading it in 1876. William F. Channing's(FN11) letter suggesting a reprint of the novel indicates the general theory of the role of literature in radical reform to which Howland's readers seemed to subscribe:

... If you could see the dilapidated covers of Papa's Own Girl on the table before me, due to much missionary work which it has done, you would perhaps see a reason and find an excuse for this letter.

Into that book, in ideal form, you have put something of Charles Fourier's grand thought. I have always been grateful for this service to the society of the future. The parable and indirect word teach better than direct precept. Fiction is the greatest teacher of the present day. The books written by women in modern literature have introduced a new factor in the thought of the world.

Uncle Tom's Cabin was a lever of revolution. A powerful socialistic impulse has just been given by Looking Backward. Much of the "Nationalist" movement must interest every constructive socialist. Yet the element of State Socialism in that movement is so dangerous that it calls for the best positive statement of free, voluntary, industrial association.

I am very unwilling that the presentation of the associative movement in Papa's Own Girl, should be lost to the present time.

    While Papa's Own Girl is a "lever of revolution," like Uncle Tom's Cabin, Channing carefully (and accurately) notes that the novel is not a vehicle of the most profoundly radical movement of the time, communism. Like Stowe's novel, Howland's communitarian romance is ultimately conciliatory, echoing some of the significant moderating moves of the Fourierist discourse of the 1840s.
    As Carl J. Guarneri has observed, "Fourierism's semicapitalistic community plan, and its dissenting-but-loyal system of thought" offered a middle road between capitalism and socialism (10). While such mediation initially helped to garner support for Fourierism, Guarneri argues that "utopian socialism was co-opted and absorbed into an emerging national consensus," having been "[f]atally compromised by its affinity with mainstream practice" (11). The same charge could be made against Papa's Own Girl in regards to its reliance on a romantic hero to resolve both the sentimental and the utopian plot. Like Fourier, who waited all of his life (in vain) for a rich benefactor to fund his first phalanx (Guarneri 20), Howland predicates the multiple happy endings of her novel on the arrival of an entrepreneur-aristocrat, the Count von Frauenstein, who marries the divorced primary heroine, adopts the illegitimate child of the secondary heroine, and invests his fortune in erecting a "Social Palace" on the edge of a New England town. But an emphasis on the ideologically compromised end of the novel, like an emphasis on the practical failure of Fourierism, obscures the boldness with which Howland attempted to suture radical thought to mainstream discourse. A more productive approach to Papa's Own Girl would investigate its moments of formal and ideological compromise as points of structural resistance where friction between the text's sentimental and utopian modes shows the limits of the strategy of mutual mediation. The ideological resolutions achieved in the novel are frequently tenuous. That she reached them at all is a testament to Howland's innovative artistry and talent for ideological synthesis; the degree to which she fails testifies to the disparity between the modes of thought she sought to fuse.
    Whatever the ideological and literary flaws of the novel, it appears to have been an effective domestic missionary in recruiting many of those who undertook the journey to Mexico, or who supported the colony from home. Napoleon Hogeland(FN12) credits the novel with changing his life:

One of the epoch-making books that I have read, epoch-making as regards my own personal history, was your Papa's Own Girl.... My sister Ida read the book and it helped give her a new birth into a higher life. She remains one of the brave to-day with the faithful pioneers in Sinaloa. I think I never made an investment that gave me and others more satisfaction, more help and fructifying thought than the few cents spent for that one book....

    Recognized at once as propaganda, the novel was lauded for its pleasing romance as well as its political doctrines; L.D. Baker called it "Truly artistic, alike satisfactory and delightful to reason and feeling." As contemporary readers recognized, Howland's novel rewards careful reading as a literary production as well as a political tract. Enterprising readers such as Atwater enabled the novel to carry its message to the distant shores of Australia, but perhaps more importantly, the "corrupting" doctrines cozily ensconced in the sentimental text were able to penetrate the private spaces of middle-class parlors and even of young ladies' seminaries. The censoring librarians in Boston and Philadelphia could not restrict the hand-to-hand circulation of the novel described by its enthusiasts: "Its sentiment is grand. It makes a splendid propagande [sic] document, and I have started my copy around the neighborhood. Mother read it at first, and was much pleased. She has been wanting to go into some co-operative scheme ever since" (Vrooman). Even a "A School-girl Co-operator," in Ottawa, Canada, entered the community of utopian readers after her brother, one of the Topolobampo colonists, sent her a copy. Young Mary Youmans confided in a letter to Howland that the novel had "given me ideas of equity and justice that I never had before. I have lent it freely among my friends so that the noble sentiments contained there might be instituted in their minds too." From Harry Vrooman's mother to Mary Youman's girlfriends, Papa's Own Girl found eager and receptive readers whose hearts and minds were kindled by the Uncle Tom's Cabin of free love, feminism, and Fourierism.
    Letters casting Papa's Own Girl as a tireless evangelist circulating among parlors from Canada to Australia occasionally--and understandably--conflated the novel with the character who is the "papa's girl" of the title, Clara Forest (see Crouch, Baker). Readers were generally quite taken with Clara, the primary Angel in the Novel, whose every radical impulse is rooted in her exquisitely developed moral sensibilities. If Clara pursues an education, divorces her husband, closes down saloons, goes into business, speaks at a suffrage convention, rescues fallen women, and generally does everything imaginable to shock her conventional mother, it is all because "love was her religion--the one necessity of her higher life" (POG 393). Clara's religion of love demands a purity of purpose in all of her interactions, social as well as personal. For an audience accustomed to pious heroines, Clara's holier-than-thou rationales for her unusual agenda might have lessened the threat of her more radical theories and actions. If Papa's Own Girl was a "lever for revolution" (Channing), its action was subtle and its fulcrum well concealed. The reforms effected in the novel are brought about not by revolutionary violence (the threat of marxist socialism) but by the gentle powers of feminine influence, as Clara carefully converts the conservative people of her town by her fortitude, patience, and mild arguments.
    While Clara's politics seemingly refute central tenets of true womanhood, such as Christian piety and purity, Papa's Own Girl proposes that Clara represents an even truer kind of womanhood than that of popular domestic ideology. Much of the novel's social criticism is effected through the young heroine's encounters with a world that slowly reveals itself as corrupt and exploitative. Foremost among Howland's targets is the politics of gender and sexuality, particularly as shaped by traditional marriage. As Nina Baym has noted, the sentimental heroine is "frequently ... contrasted to two other feminine types," the "passive woman" and the "belle," the woman of fashion (28). Like her literary counterparts, Clara defines herself against both types, combined in the character of her nemesis Ella. Clara's reaction to Ella's negative "feminine" traits of passivity and narcissism, which Howland criticizes as manipulative strategies employed by women to gain advantage over men, launches her on a trajectory that takes her far past the point of corrective rebellion where most heroines of domestic novels would stop.
    The conflict between Ella and Clara is overtly one of sexual and emotional rivalry for the attention of Clara's first husband, Albert. The competition between the two women--the loving wife and the heartless flirt--ignites a domestic tinderbox, providing an occasion for Howland to expound upon the free-love notions of sexuality and marriage that led to the novel's being censored. The most significant threat of free-love to traditional domesticity was that free love refused the legitimacy of marriage as an act that legally enclosed the wife. Free-love theory re-cast marriage as fundamentally openended (see Sears). Similarly, Howland's free love plot disrupts the usual closure provided by marriage in the domestic narrative. Far from putting an end to the heroine's story, marriage is the catalyst that accelerates Clara's development into a practicing as well as a theoretical radical.
    The chapter entitled "Clara's Wedding" puts into play the tension between traditional notions of marriage and its radical revisions. While Clara believes that her marriage to a desirable young Boston physician, a man she idolizes, is a free-love match, a perfect union sanctioned by true love, she nevertheless submits to the traditional ceremonial trappings of a middle-class wedding (POG 168, 197, 203). Her father's wry observations about marriage and weddings deflate but cannot destroy the romance surrounding "'the supreme hour for girls'" (POG 203). Ever the genial critic of the status quo, Dr. Forest comments that "'a young woman conventionally gotten up as a bride, simply suggests a victim tricked out for sacrifice'" (POG 199) and advises that "Marriage festivals should take place after marriage, if at all, when the union has proved a success, and there is something to rejoice over" (POG 204). His advice fails to deter his daughter, who, for the sake of her fiancé and her mother, decides to "submit even to the orange blossoms, though [she] can't bear their oppressing odor" (POG 199). Clara's submission to conventional bridal forms comes as a relief to Mrs. Forest, who sees Clara's marriage as providentially foreclosing her radical inclinations:

There was no knowing, in her opinion, what Clara would have come to, with her inherited tendency to freedom, so unlike other girls, if she had not fortunately married young. Why, she might have become a frequenter of conventions, an agitator of woman's rights--that was indeed what Mrs. Forest feared most--but, thanks to Providence, she had made an excellent match, and the mother's soul was at rest, or free to plan and scheme for the respectable establishment of her two remaining daughters. (POG 208-9)

    Mrs. Forest's relief is, of course, premature, for while she views marriage as a sacred social and legal institution, an indissoluble bond, her daughter hearkens to the free-love line, placing love over law.
    By representing love as the daily litmus test that legitimizes marriage, rather than regarding marriage as the unchangeable consequence of a ceremonial vow, Papa's Own Girl opens up all kinds of options that cannot be considered in other sentimental novels that criticize marriage, such as Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's popular work, The Story of Avis (1877). In antebellum novels in particular, divorce was unacceptable, "even if woman's worst fear materialized and her great and only destiny became her great and only disaster," for "[t]o countenance divorce was to open Pandora's box, to trigger countless unimaginable fears" (Kelley 237). However, Clara's exalted view of love, apparently so similar to Avis's and countless other domestic heroines, derives not from such novels, but rather from the principles she has acquired from her father and select authors such George Sand. When her marriage begins to disintegrate, the lesson Clara (and Howland) adduces is not that Clara's demand for complete satisfaction in marriage is unrealistic, but that she has been deceived regarding her husband's commitment to the free love ideals she endorses. Albert believes that his question, "'Are we not irrevocably bound to each other by the very act of marriage?'" is self-evidently rhetorical. Clara, however, returns a firm answer: "'The divine spirit of Love makes and justifies marriage. The body is nothing to me, when the soul is gone'" (POG 228). Clara (like Howland herself) appears to adhere to the exclusivist rather than the varietist school of free-love thought: "Although both factions generally held that, for sexual purposes, true love created true marriage, the exclusivists argued that such love could exist only between two people; whereas the varietists held that love, like lust, was general rather than specific in its objects, and therefore it naturally sought plurality and variety in its arrangements" (Sears 22). Ironically, divorce becomes Clara's moral duty when her husband ceases to return her love. As Clara melodramatically proclaims to her baffled mother, "'There is no marriage when love is dead'" (POG 290).
    Before separating from Albert, Clara has abundant opportunities to acquire a critical perspective on marriage and sexual relations between men and women. Unlike the lower-class women in the novel who suffer from physically abusive fathers or lovers, Clara's trials are largely emotional. A rather mild episode of flirtation between Albert and Ella disturbs Clara's treasured conviction "that love in all its divine freshness, could be preserved" (POG 226-29). Clara herself questions whether her sensitivity is morbidly excessive. And of course, she is excessively sensitive--but only because she is a utopian character trapped, at this point, in a dystopian world. Clara's love life tracks the progress of utopian realization throughout the novel; her role in the novel is to be, in effect, the sentimental barometer that registers the presence or absence of utopian possibilities. Or, to develop the floral metaphor so important to the long middle of the novel, Clara languishes in conventional society and in her conventional marriage, but flourishes in the utopian spaces that open out from her failed union with Albert.
    The emotional predicament of Howland's heroine is the more compelling because Papa's Own Girl makes explicit the sexual tension usually so heavily encrypted in sentimental discourse. Instead of, for example, the inadvertently funny displacement of erotic desires onto tame little ponies and big unruly stallions in Susan Warner's enormously popular evangelical novel, The Wide, Wide World (1850), Papa's Own Girl refers to sex with an explicitness perfectly sufficient to communicate free love views. When Mrs. Forest wants to bring Dr. Forest around to her point of view, she "appear[s] in the doctor's room in a ravishing night toilet that had been packed away in lavender since the days of their honeymoon" (POG 143). In case some readers missed the point that Mrs. Forest's behavior amounts to sexual manipulation and borders on prostitution, Howland apostrophizes, tongue in cheek: "Is it possible that even virtuous married men are sometimes the victims of artful women?" (POG 143). In an inverse scenario, Clara finds herself wishing that she "might have the one right the Turkish woman has!--if I might put my slippers outside my door, with the certainty that it would protect me from all intrusion, even from that of my husband!" (POG 235). Sexual coercion within marriage seems to be an equal-opportunity evil; Howland does, however, indicate the different possibilities for resistance available to men and to women. Mrs. Forest's seduction of the old doctor is presented wryly as a commentary on the husband's weakness of will. Clara's inability to avoid Albert's advances is a pathetic revelation of the wife's legal and physical subordination to her husband.(FN13) Free-love feminists were keenly aware that the freedom not to submit to sex at all represented as great an advance for women as did the freedom to choose to have sex with a desired partner (Sears 22).
    Ejected from "Love's perfect Eden" (POG 237), Clara retains her faith in the sentimental and sexual utopia of free love. Her vision of an ideal partner will eventually be embodied in the person of Count von Frauenstein, the founder of the economic and social utopia that puts an end to the narrative. But between the dissolution of Clara's first marriage and the resolution of her second, "true" marriage, the plot takes an unexpected turn away from heterosexual romance. Clara's failed marriage results not in her consumptive decline, as sentimental readers would expect, but instead in her self-liberation as she leaves her husband and joins a small domestic utopia composed almost exclusively of women. This modest feminist utopia--a kind of commune, in fact--is the work of Clara's lower-class parallel, Susie.
    Even more than Clara, Susie's function is to debunk the sentimental valorization of female suffering as the hallmark of the True Woman, replacing pious suffering and denial with an ideal of female self-fulfillment. An unwed mother, Susie dissociates virtue from virginity by learning to interpret her sexual experience in the terms of free love philosophy rather than by the hegemonic double standard (POG 96). In contrast to the traditional fate of pregnant girls in early-nineteenth-century novels of seduction, Susie becomes a prosperous business woman instead of drowning herself or dying in childbirth. When a typical sentimental heroine lives to the end of the novel, her suffering is usually rewarded by marriage to a socially established, financially successful man (Baym 38-39). The vindication of the heroines in Papa's Own Girl, in contrast, is essentially accomplished two-thirds of the way through the novel, before the appearance of the romantic hero and chiefly through the efforts of the women themselves. Faithless lovers and husbands are left to enjoy the bitter fruits of their folly while Susie and Clara profit from the more literal fruits of their "flower business," a capitalist venture in the service of feminism. The heroines conceive of the business as "a great industry for poor women who wish to gain an independent position" (POG 337). "Dykes and Delano," as the venture is called, "never employ a man when a woman could be found to do the work required" (POG 343). If, as Tompkins asserts, in mainstream sentimental literature, "dying is the supreme form of heroism" (127), in Papa's Own Girl, living, and living well, is not only the supreme form of feminist heroism; it is also the best revenge.
    The most significant divergence of Papa's Own Girl from the archetypal domestic novel (see Baym) is initially, at least, its most subtle: in place of the maternally-oriented values of sentimental novels, Howland's novel substitutes radical values encoded explicitly as masculine. Ellen Montgomery, Gertrude Flint, and other domestic heroines are emphatically their mothers' daughters, even if the mother dies early on in the story. Clara is truly her father's daughter. Only by separating herself from her mother's conventionalities, which Howland describes as dancing in a "pint-pot" (POG 66), and embracing her father's liberal attitudes does Clara become a true utopian woman. Indeed, Howland even inverts the normative mother-daughter relationship by having Clara educate and eventually convert her own mother to feminism and Fourierism (although not necessarily to free love).
    Maternal power lies at the heart of domestic ideology and constitutes the putatively radical base of sentimental discourse (Tompkins 141-143). But in Papa's Own Girl, mother-love alone, even as re-constituted as an ideal in the relationship between Susie and her daughter, is an insufficient principle for restructuring society. Notable domestic heroines such as Ellen Montgomery internalize the lost, idealized mother, but Clara must reject rather than introject her mother. Sentimental idealizations of maternity, in Howland's analysis, collapse too often into a narrow parochialism. The contrast between Clara's mother and father illustrates Howland's critique: "Mrs. Forest, gentle, mild, pious, as she undoubtedly was, could not understand the doctor's broad love of humanity" (POG 108). Howland's description of Mrs. Forest is highly ironic; she is not merely a passive type of womanhood (see Baym 28)--she is pathologically passive-aggressive. In characterizing Clara's maternal heritage as oppressive and disempowering, Howland severs her novel from the domestic tradition.
    Clara's schoolgirl letters to her parents encode the tension between sentimental and political discourse that structures the novel. From her mother's perspective, Clara's closeness to her father amounts to a betrayal:

The doctor's radical ideas had always alarmed her [Mrs. Forest], and it had troubled her exceedingly to find that Clara delighted in just those radical notions that were her horror. It was clear, too, that Clara wrote her mother from duty--short, dutiful, correct, and very commonplace notes. To her father she scrawled long, rapid, charmingly frank and interesting letters, signing herself, "Papa's Own Girl." To her mother she invariably subscribed herself, "Your affectionate daughter," which indeed Mrs. Forest considered in rather more ladylike taste, but she was a little jealous all the same. (POG 70, emphasis in original)

    Clara has mastered the forms of sentimental discourse; her correspondence with her mother is perfectly "correct," yet emptied of the affective content that animates the mother-daughter relationship in more typical domestic novels. Instead, the daughter is completely oriented to her father, absorbing his philosophy with his love. With an unselfconscious candor possible only in a pre-Freudian age, Clara declares, "I always wanted to marry Papa" (POG 90). The symbolically incestuous relationship between "Papa" and his "Own Girl" is the source of the novel's success as a textbook for radical proselytizing. Dr. Forest is a Fourierist, free-lover, and feminist. (Papa's Own Girl 67-68 gives a good sample of his opinions.) While the doctor pronounces the bulk of the novel's radical political theory, his opinions are too brusque, too strong, too threatening to persuade the other characters. Instead, radical political theory, in the person of "Papa," seduces via the daughter Papa has intellectually impregnated, his "Own Girl," that is, the sentimental novel.
    The love triangle between Dr. Forest, Frauenstein, and Clara reinforces Clara's role as a conduit of a radical tradition characterized as masculine. The millionaire count Frauenstein, a fantasy figure of the phallic father, capable of satisfying every feminine need, is the mate hand-picked for Clara by her adored Papa. Dr. Forest falls in love with Frauenstein long before he has the opportunity to introduce his daughter:

So far in his life, he had never found a man who was so much "after his own heart." He believed in him fully from the first hour he conversed with him, since when they had corresponded, expressing their views fearlessly; and thus far had found them in perfect accord. To say they loved each other like brothers would by no means express the sentiment existing between these two men, so unlike in many respects, yet so closely in sympathy that thought answered to thought like the voice of one's own soul. (POG 372)

    To Frauenstein's question, "'Doctor, have you ever been in love?'" the older man readily replies, "With a woman--no; with a man, yes" (POG 373). Despite such perfect "sympathy" between the two male radicals, a feminine medium is required to complete the bond; there are unspecified "needs" that only a woman can meet (POG 373). Clara slips naturally into place between the two men, cementing the passional attraction that links her father and her lover. Appropriately, "Papa" performs the "gloriously radical marriage ceremony, [designed] after our wicked latitudinarian hearts" (POG 489). The consummation of the radical and the sentimental in Clara's wedding "beneath the two blossom-laden orange-trees, that dropped their fragrant petals on the united hands of Paul and Clara" (POG 489), culminates the bildungsroman plot of Clara's development as a female radical, but it also presages her early retirement.(FN14)
    As feminist critics such as Darby Lewes, Carol Farley Kessler, and Barbara Quissell have noted with understandable disappointment, Howland does not represent the triumphantly successful Boston marriage of Clara and Susie as her ultimate utopian vision. Instead, the grandiose vision of the phalanstery, hinted at throughout the novel, finally overwhelms the feminist utopian niche that these women have carved out of the hostile social and economic environment that surrounds them. I would argue that the firm of Dykes and Delano must give way, not because it is feminist, but because it is capitalist; as Howland prepares readers for their tour of the Social Palace, she asserts that "Even the narrowest and most selfish have learned that the happiness and continued prosperity of the individual lies in, and is indissolubly interwoven with, the happiness and prosperity of the whole" (POG 507). In contrast to the homely "vine-shaded porch" of the "ordinary-sized country house" inhabited by Clara, Susie and her child, and an ever-increasing number of worthy and mostly female employees, the "grand facade of the palace ... presents an imposing appearance" (POG 509). The frieze of this striking edifice is "illuminated" with the words "LIBERTY," "EQUALITY," AND "FRATERNITY," underscoring the status of the Social Palace as an American translation of French ideals.(FN15) The amenities offered by the Social Palace are staggering: the list merely begins with a "café, restaurant, and billiard-room;" a "great public kitchen;" a child-care and educational complex for newborns to adolescents; and "fine swimming-baths ... heated in winter by the exhaust steam of the silk factory" (POG 508-510). All of this collective luxury is supported by the conveniently multipurpose silk factory, a "brick-making establishment" (POG 510), and greenhouses run by Susie (POG 528).(FN16)
    Despite the opulence of her fictional phalanstery, Howland's innovative design restructures rather than eliminates its residents' experience of class divisions. As Dolores Hayden has noted, Howland's Social Palace "is faithful to the Fourierist plans which inspired it: 'passional attraction' was to erase class divisions in time, but not immediately ..." (101). Although not erased, the signification of "class" is substantially modified by the social and physical architecture of the communal, integrated residence and workplace. While Hayden interprets the Social Palace as a fantastic revision of "the cramped quarters of the 'mill girls' in the Lowell(FN17) boardinghouses of Howland's youth" (100), a more direct inspiration may have been Howland's tour of Versailles during her residence in France.
    The founder of the fictional Familistere describes his projected Social Palace as "'a magnificent structure, besides which the palace of Versailles will seem the work of a 'prentice hand'" (POG 372). Howland's article based on her visit to Versailles, "The Trianon Palaces," published in Lippincott's in 1874, betrays an intense fascination with the overwhelming grandeur of the royal estate, and particularly with the lavish bucolic fantasy constructed by Marie Antoinette. Enamored of the exquisite luxury of the Petit Trianon, Howland nevertheless returns repeatedly to the starving masses whose exploitation supports such royal extravagance. The painful irony of Marie Antoinette's having "installed a dozen poor families in the cottages as permanent residents" is underscored by Howland's observation that "the queen [was] spending money enough on each entertainment to save thousands from the hunger that consumed them" ("The Trianon Palaces" 36, 38). In Papa's Own Girl, Howland reconciles her love of aristocratic luxury with her commitment to the working class by creating a true Versailles for the people, "those who by labor create the wealth of the world" ("The Trianon Palaces" 39).
    In contrast to Marie Antoinette's bizarre collection of show-peasants, the workers who inhabit the Social Palace can build equity in their collective home; they are investors rather than objects of a sinister charity (POG 412-414; 507). As Frauenstein declares to his recruits: "'You are not working to build a stately palace for the rich, while you keep yourselves and your children in hovels, or mean tenement houses. The palace you are to build is to be your own home and that of your children after you. A capitalist builds this, but hereafter labor organizations will build them for themselves, all over the world, until, as I hope, it shall become one fair garden from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from China to Gibraltar'" (POG 413-414). Godin explains in Social Solutions that association itself is the key to improving the lot of the poor: "If the families of the poor cannot have the sumptuous apartments of the rich, they can still enjoy all the advantages necessary to make a home pleasant and wholesome, with all those general advantages which the palace of the Association affords to its inhabitants, and which the family in isolation could not procure" (50). Such a sense of collective ownership, with a baseline standard of living that far outstrips middle-class standards of comfort and culture, defuses the possibility of tension between the classes in the utopian phalanstery. "Class" becomes a transitory category rather than naming a group position in an oppressive social matrix; one's place on the socioeconomic staircase virtually ceases to signify when that staircase is fantastically transformed into an endlessly rising escalator.
    While all classes from the poorest workers to the richest capitalists are integrated into the Social Palace, the utopian phalanstery absorbs ethnic difference into the colorful decor of the residence without abandoning racial stereotypes. Among the lost souls that the Count rescues is "a poor Chinaman, who can scarcely speak a word of English, and who was suffering from hunger" on the streets of what seems to be an almost uniformly white New England town. "Too Soon," as this Asian immigrant is named, is offered the chance to run "our great steam-laundry ... which will free [the workers'] wives from the wash-tub" (POG 415). Apparently not conscious of his own egregious stereotyping, the Count exhorts the white laborers to respect the "Chinaman's" cultural differences: "no man is worthy of the name, who thinks he is better than another, because he dresses differently or happens to be born in a different country" (POG 415). Dinah, the Forest family's cook and a former slave (POG 12) fares similarly. The quintessential stereotype of the inexplicably loyal black servant, "good old Dinah" (POG 98) still serves the Forests after they move into the Social Palace, even though her cooking duties have been reduced to bringing fully prepared meals from the communal kitchen to the family's private dining room. Even without any real work to do, Dinah remains a servant.
    Gender roles are similarly modified rather than evacuated in the Social Palace. Like Fourier, Howland assumes that "natural attraction" will lead women to concern themselves with "the internal interests, nurseries, schools ... the food and other supplies," although they are not officially limited to these issues (POG 452). Fourier went so far as to quantify "gender traits into series [work groups] composed two-thirds of one sex and one-third the other; thus cooking, cleaning, and other domestic tasks in the phalanx, theoretically open to all, would in practice engage twice as many women as men" (Guarneri 131). But for Howland, typical feminine concerns do not necessarily mesh with individual women's actual employment. As Frauenstein announces, "The world has generally believed that women are by nature devoted to the cooking-stove, the wash-tub, and the cradle. We have found out positively that this is a mistake" (POG 54). As collective, professional services replace the labor of the private home, women are freed to undertake paid work, traditionally female or otherwise.
    While the Social Palace permits class, ethnic, and gender distinctions, it purports to empty them of their invidious character. As one of Howland's correspondents explains the logic of the phalanstery,

The Social Palace is one of the great inventions of this or any other age. It is the only thing that can give one-half the human race, woman, freedom and comfort. No woman can have time to cultivate herself, and be a household drudge, and no woman, or man either, can earn enough, and do it honestly, to pay good wages to servants, enough to make his wife and family and himself comfortable. And, of course, the servants, being human beings need servants, comfort, and freedom, as much as himself, and so on ad infinitum.... (Jones)

    Achieving comfort, even luxury, without exploitation is the goal of the phalanstery. The Social Palace must not be complicit with the oppressive aspects of capitalism; as Godin argues "the amelioration of the working-classes cannot be real until they are in possession of the equivalents of wealth, or in other words, advantages analogous to those that wealth secures" (217, emphasis in original). The notion of "equivalence" promises that the ends of capitalism (understood as essentially exploitative) can be attained through the ethically superior economic system of Fourier.
    The logic that appropriates the goals of capitalism by the cleansing action of analogy also abstracts a domestic ideal from the exploitative and wasteful practices of private domesticity. Howland re-maps the domestic terrain through the landscape and architecture of the phalanstery. The Social Palace transforms the private home, seen as fundamentally dysfunctional, into a public and communal domesticity that encloses and protects a kernel of familial sentiment. Howland's Fourierist vision thus paradoxically reinstates the divide between the private and the public, the feminine and the masculine, that the novel sets out to eliminate. The most striking instance of this ideological paradox occurs at the conclusion of the novel. In the last chapter, Clara is tucked away in a back room giving birth to the symbolic heir to the Social Palace, while her husband and father are busy conducting a public gala celebrating the opening of the phalanstery. The final line of the novel is spoken by Clara, who holding her baby, looks up at her father and says, "Am I not Papa's Own Girl?" (POG 547, emphasis in original). Several critics have commented on the problematic implications of this conclusion (Kessler; Quissell); Darby Lewes has cited this scene as showing that "the androcentric social view is still firmly in place" as the novel's "unconventional women doggedly pursue the conventions of the domestic sphere" (95). Further evidence for interpreting this ending as a collapse into patriarchalism is provided by the French translation, which was funded by Godin himself. The French translator puts these words in Clara's mouth: "May my child be the worthy son of his father and grandfather!"(FN18)
    Certainly the feminism of the novel seems to be undermined by this closing bow to patriarchy. Yet I would argue that this birth scene must be read in the context of the space (both physical and political) in which it takes place. The closing childbirth is in fact a revision of the childbed scene that opens the novel, in which Clara's mother, who has just given birth to twins, is pictured "lying very pale and still among her pillows." Mrs. Forest "watched [Clara's] delight with sad eyes, and then turned her face wearily to the wall" (POG 5). Clara's mother may well be weary, for in the tradition of the mothers of domestic fiction, she is a delicate woman who is strained by the labors of life in her private household. Clara, in contrast, hears the cheers of a whole phalanstery full of people who will support her in raising her son, the "child of the Social Palace." According to the good doctor, "It is our baby.... Every man is its father, every woman its mother, and every child its brother and sister" (POG 546). The reader, who has just been given a detailed tour of the Social Palace, will recall that any time Clara likes, she can drop off her child at the round-the-clock nursery (POG 518-522), while she takes part in the work and governance of the collective home. All employments are open to her, and the cultural and recreational facilities offer the means to maintain perfect mental, emotional, and physical health. She faces none of the burdens of the isolated housekeeper or traditional mother. If this is where being "Papa's Own Girl" has brought her, her rejection of her maternal heritage is fully validated.
    The suggestion that the end of Papa's Own Girl merely capitulates to androcentrism or, alternatively, that the heterosexual romance represents a cagey submission to an already-subverted sentimentality are responses that perhaps come all too easily to contemporary feminist critics. Carol Farley Kessler's analysis of Papa's Own Girl as a "feminist critique of the institution of heterosexual marriage" (69), for example, leads her to conclude that

Howland does bow to the conventional happy ending of marriage, but with the requirement that to woman belongs her body and her labor.... The novel, as is so often the case in feminist fiction of the period, ends with only the promise, and not the practice, of marital well-being. The happiness for women depicted in Papa's Own Girl occurs in the business and the household run by Susie and Clara. (74-75; parenthetical references omitted)

    While the women's entrepreneurial household does constitute a limited feminist utopia, Kessler's conclusions ignore the weight Howland gives to the romance plot with its (symbolically) orgiastic consummation.
    A more searching, if less comfortable, interpretation of the idyllic marriage that seemingly erases Clara's previously forceful feminist presence can benefit from understanding Howland's personal investment in a sentimental view of heterosexual relations. From her first husband, Lyman Case, who encouraged her to follow her heart and Edward Howland; to her utopian collaborator, Albert Kimsey Owen; and her lifelong literary mentor, the editor and poet Edmund Clarence Stedman, Marie Howland seems to have experienced deeply and apparently mutually satisfying relationships with male friends (and possibly lovers).(FN19) Her husband Edward, the model for Paul von Frauenstein as well as Dr. Forest, perhaps most reinforced Howland's inclination to idealize heterosexual relationships spanning the spectrum from the collegial to the romantic (Howland, "Biographical Sketch of Edward Howland" 138).
    Howland's belief in the utopian promise of heterosexual union reflects the idealism of free-love theory.(FN20) Writing to Stedman on the anniversary of Edward's death, Howland remarks, "surely, of all the misfortunes that can befall a woman, to lose her husband is measurably greatest. Not a legal companion, I mean, but one who is a real husband, friend, comrade, mentor, brother, lover all in one, as was Edward to me" (Howland to Stedman, December 25, 1896). Howland's "Biographical Sketch of Edward Howland," published in the Credit Foncier of Sinaloa after his death in Mexico, is not entirely uncritical, but it does demonstrate that the couple had a rich and deeply affectionate partnership. Many years later, Howland described Edward as "a divine soul if ever one was born on the earth" (Howland to Anna Hoffman, Jan. 16, 1916). Such idealization apparently co-existed with Howland's sharp understanding throughout her mature life of women's oppression in a patently patriarchal society.
    As Dolores Hayden succinctly comments, "In her own life Howland was more assertive about women's equality" than the ending of Papa's Own Girl might lead one to believe (101). In a letter to the prominent woman's rights activist Isabella Beecher Hooker,(FN21) Howland firmly settles the concern that she might subordinate women's interests to a socialist agenda: "In an address ... before the Internationals I gave them an unsugar coated [sic] does of our opinions.... When I ended I think most of them saw that if there comes a struggle between capital and labor or between the Devil and the rest of his sex against women's freedom, women will enroll themselves on the side that promises them political equality [sic]" (emphasis in original). Speaking at an 1872 women's rights convention chaired by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Howland attacked female inequality from a squarely structural perspective:

Our ears are filled with the glories of the nineteenth century, with laudations of the modern enterprise that has given us the railroad, the telegraph, and the steam printing press, and we hear loud praises of the democratic form of government, from the advanced minds of all civilized countries, while the fact that there has never been a true democratic principle in the world seems to be utterly ignored. To-day the world is about ready for the inauguration of the democratic form of government, and the conditions are only delayed by ... a blunder that has made the political leaders of the day proceed upon the supposition that the American eagle could fly straight with only one wing.... The law of equilibrium rules everywhere, and the compensation for disfranshising [sic] one-half the race is terrible, mask the facts as we may.... Woman, shut out from all voice in making the laws that govern her, from the broader education of man, forced to submit to taxation without representation, denied the privilege of being tried by a jury of her peers, taught from the cradle that self-reliance and pecuniary independence were not to be sought by her, who but a fool can wonder that her life from the cradle to the grave is a pint-pot dance, and to secure the richest and best 'catch' in the matrimonial market the great object of life? ... the time had arrived when woman should be recognized and take an active part in the government of the country. (qtd. in "The Woman Suffragists" 2)

    Possibly in part because Edward Howland shared her feminist views, Marie Howland was able to engage in social and political criticism of men, as a power-wielding class, while retaining her faith in the utopian potential of equal and enlivening heterosexual relationships.(FN22) Still, Howland's metaphor of the eagle with two wings, one implicitly female and one male, suggests a sexual ideology that may help further explain the displacement of the women-centered utopian community headed by Clara and Susie by the sexually integrated utopia of the Social Palace. The "matrimonial market" may be held up to scorn, but only because women's dependence turns both parties into kinds of merchandise. The veritable rash of happy weddings celebrated as the novel progresses to its conclusion suggests that other forms of sexual exchange, rooted in an erotic rather than a market economy, remain very desirable indeed.
    One woman, however, remains unwed at the end of the novel. The conundrum of Clara's ending tends to obscure the fact that Clara is not Papa's only girl. Susie, the mother of Dr. Forest's grandchild, is his daughter through her affinity with him, if not through a legal tie. A self-educated, self-supporting woman, Susie is at the conclusion of the novel a figure of female independence. Although a skeptical feminist reader might note, as Lewes does, that "Susie's hard-earned capitalist enterprise is swallowed up by [Frauenstein's] Fourierist communal scheme," (95) contemporary readers may well have understood that Susie, who has gone to France to study the Familistère with Frauenstein (POG 451-454), is an important participant in the utopian scheme(FN23) and that her successful horticultural business is a cornerstone of the phalanstery's success (POG 409). In a sense, the novel is more Susie's than Clara's story, for it is strongly hinted in the first few pages that Susie is the unnamed narrator of this unusual tale.
    As this analysis of the complexities of Howland's interweaving of sentimentality and utopian radicalism has indicated, the conjunction of these two discourses mediates, with varying degrees of success, a series of seemingly incompatible desires and beliefs. Female independence (financial and sexual) is reconciled with heterosexual marriage; capitalism is conjoined to communitarianism; the sentimental heroine claims a patriarchal radical tradition. Ultimately, however, the novel's discourse of radical utopianism has a greater impact on its sentimental discourse than the reverse. Clara, as a sentimental heroine, is a double agent in the service of a novel that overturns some of the central conventions of domestic ideology. However, the gradual erasure of Clara from the central activity of the last third of the novel, the construction of the Familistere, or Social Palace, reflects the text's decreasing need for her as a mediating device between the sentimental and the political. The "child of the Social Palace" (POG 546) is equally the product of his mother and his father, but his gender finally signifies the dominance of the "masculine" radical tradition.
    Papa's Own Girl did not succeed in becoming another Uncle Tom's Cabin, despite the predictions of its most enthusiastic readers. Or, more precisely, Howland's novel did succeed in effecting its "sensational designs," but only for a limited audience of readers seemingly predisposed to radicalism. The wary review written by the editor of the local paper in Lebanon, New Hampshire, Howland's childhood hometown which provided the setting for Papa's Own Girl, is probably more representative of the majority of her readers:

"Papa's Own Girl" is meeting with a large sale here, and many are now reading it. Without endorsing all its peculiar ideas, it is but just to say that it is written in a style peculiarly fascinating, so that whoso [sic] reads a single chapter is tempted if possible to complete the book at a single sitting. Yet it would be difficult to do so, since, on account of the novelty and radicalism of certain passages, one feels compelled to pause now and then for digestion. It is pretty severe at times on men in general, so much so that one almost feels that the authoress must have been peculiarly unfortunate in the type of manhood with which she has been most familiar.... It seems to us, moreover, to go quite too far in the direction of contempt for law and established usages. We suppose it must be taken for granted that such a system of co-operation is practicable, since we learn from other sources of the successful operation of the Mr. Godin's experiment in France. That much good might result from a similar system in many instances we can readily see. Whether upon the whole, it is likely to become general, or is desirable that it should do so, is quite another matter....(FN24)

    The alternately positive and negative connotation of the "peculiarity" of both Howland's ideas and her style suggests that, tempting as the novel is to the middle-brow literary palate, the mixture of sentimental and radical ingredients tends to induce ideological indigestion.
    Howland's rearrangement of the familiar coordinates of the domestic novel was, in the end, too destabilizing for the novel to attract the wide readership that she evidently desired. However, if, as measured by broad popular influence, Howland's gospel of Fourierism, feminism, and free love finally failed to convert many readers, the failure is in part a testimony to the novel's real strengths: its striking challenge to the feminine subordination required by domestic logic, and its feistily optimistic willingness to propose alternatives to mainstream sexual and economic relations. But the novel does more than show the limits of Howland's bold hijacking of sentimental conventions for politically and economically radical ends. The main action of Papa's Own Girl takes place in the late 1850s through the mid-1860s, providing an alternative reading of American culture at the height of sentimentality's discursive hegemony. Howland's "most hopeful point of view" "upon the great social questions of the day: the position of woman and the conditions of labor," in the words of the Harper's review, re-works the politics of sentimentality in the direction of a social, sexual, and economic radicalism sharply at odds with that of Stowe, Warner, and many other domestic writers.
    The utopian radicalism of Papa's Own Girl can usefully contextualize and qualify our assessment of the domestic "radicalism" of the sentimental writers, whose novels Tompkins "values" for the "kind of cultural work" they perform "within a specific historical situation" (200). Howland did see the strengths of the essentially woman-centered household (and little world) paradigmatically represented by Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe in their compendium, The American Woman's Home (1869): Clara and Susie's flower business is a viable domestic fortress in an economically and socially hostile capitalist society. But the mother-ruled utopia at the heart of domestic ideology is too small for Howland, for to accept Beecher and Stowe's sentimental vision (and Tompkin's interpretation of it) one must also remain within the close parameters of evangelical Christianity and the economic status quo. Papa's Own Girl, with its linkage of radicalism and reform not to a maternal but rather to a paternal tradition, performs a sort of cultural work that proved to be less popular than that of Uncle Tom's Cabin or The Wide, Wide World. But the novel would have been much less interesting had it not overstepped the boundaries that would have contained it. Titled with equal appropriateness, although with a critically different emphasis, as The Familistere or Papa's Own Girl, Howland's novel embodies an evangelical--but crucially, not Christian--utopian impulse, loosening the hold of maternal sacrifice and feminine self-abnegation on the potentially powerful strategy of sentimental seduction for utopian ends.
ADDED MATERIAL
    This essay presents a modified version of the chapter entitled "Utopian Seductions: The Radical Plots and Sentimental Strategies of Papa's Own Girl" in my unpublished dissertation, "Making Utopia Home: Domestic Discourse and Radical Politics in Nineteenth-Century American Women's Writing" (Cornell U, 1997).

FOOTNOTES
1. Throughout the essay, references to Papa's Own Girl are to the 1975 reprint of the 1918 edition, which was re-titled The Familistere. As the two editions are otherwise textually identical, I have retained the earlier title for clarity. References are cited parenthetically as POG.
2. It should be noted that the term "feminism," as Nancy Cott has demonstrated, did not come into popular use until around World War I. Although Woodhull and her colleagues would not have recognized the label, I find the term useful for indicating the broad sweep of nineteenth-century woman's rights activism, and its continuities with the self-proclaimed feminist movement of the early twentieth century. See Cott.
3. According to Dolores Hayden, this was the first English translation of the Communist Manifesto to appear in print (103). The translation ran under the title "German Communism--Manifesto of the German Communist Party" on December 30, 1871, not in 1870, as Hayden writes.
4. Godey's circulation was 150,000 "before the Civil War" (Bercovitch 55).
5. The "Comstock Law," as the Postal Act of 1873 is commonly known, made it illegal to send materials related to sex through the mail, including birth control information. The law provided the postal service with broad censorship powers and imposed severe penalties upon violators, who could be sentenced to prison at hard labor (Sears 71, 181). Hal D. Sears documents the serious impact that this anti-obscenity law had on free-lovers and free-thinkers. See also Taylor Stoehr.
6. Howland eventually capitalized on this censorship by incorporating the episode into the preface of the 1885 edition of the novel.
7. The following account of Howland's Topolobampo episode is drawn from Paul M. Gaston's Women of Fairhope, the best published source of biographical information on Marie Howland. Holly Blake is currently working on a social biography of Marie Howland. See also Ray Reynolds history of the colony in the forthcoming revised edition of Cat's Paw Utopia (Borgo Press).
8. The letters discussed in this essay represent only one segment of Howland's readership, those committed to (or at least interested in) the radical reorganization of American society. When considering the status of the letters published in the Credit Foncier as historical evidence, it is important to note that Howland selected and in some cases apparently solicited these responses to her novel. While some of the published letters do offer objections to certain aspects of Papa's Own Girl, Howland's private correspondence indicates that other readers were more severe in their criticisms.
9. The French edition reads, «Ce roman artistique et puissamment écrit ... est aux questions sociales qui agitent actuellement le monde civilisé, ce que «La Case de L'oncle Tom» fut pour la question de l'esclavage» (Howland, La Fille de Son Père iv). The translation back into English, given above, is mine.
10. Even near the turn of the century, Kenneth Roemer writes, authors of literary utopias proceeded on "the traditional American assumption that serious literature should be didactic--an expression of the authors' faith in the power of the written word to change behavior." Roemer notes that "Looking Backward and Uncle Tom's Cabin were often used to support this faith" (Obsolete Necessity 3).
11. The writer is very likely the same William F. Channing, nephew of the "famous unitarian preacher William Ellery Channing," who had been pilloried in the press for divorcing his first wife in 1859 (Leach 59). After Channing defended himself with a public letter criticizing the divorce laws, he lost his Boston medical practice (Leach 60). According to Leach, William F. Channing "was a utopian reformer and a feminist" who "believed in cooperative labor" and other Fourierist principles (59).
12. Napoleon Hogeland, a minister from Greeley, Colorado, joined the colony in 1890 (Reynolds 135). His two sisters, Ida and Clara Hogeland, were already residents. The family name is spelled "Hoagland" in some sources.
13. In a later episode, at a time when Clara is separated but not yet legally divorced from Albert, she does lock the door to her room to prevent him from "trying to force" himself upon her (POG 389).
14. The orange-blossoms seem not to affect Clara here as they did at her first wedding when she found them "oppressing" (POG 199), but the detail is an uncomfortable reminder of the earlier occasion.
15. The illumination of the Social Palace also echoes Edward Howland's decoration of his and Marie's home with quotations from Fourier and others, which he stenciled all over the interior. The house became quite literally a domestic text inscribed with utopian sentiment. See Marie Howland's "Biographical Sketch of Edward Howland."
16. Both Howland's fictional phalanstery and Godin's account of the real Familistère in Guise almost transparently display the disciplinary discourses embedded in architectural spaces. Godin's Social Solutions, translated by Howland in the early 1870s and published in English in 1886, is a particularly rich study for Foucauldian analysis: Godin promises, "The most searching examination of the material arrangements of the Familistère will more and more confirm this truth, that the social progress of the people is dependent upon the progress of social architecture" (241).
17. Hayden 100. According to Paul M. Gaston, Howland "did not live in one of the [Lowell] dormitories--she was with her mother and her older brother in Lowell," where she worked in a textile factory. However, Howland did at an earlier time live in "a boardinghouse along with twenty-seven other girls and young women" in Manchester, New Hampshire (Gaston 24).
18. The French edition supplies this final line: «Puisse mon enfant être le digne fils du son père et de son grand-père!» (Howland, La Fille de Son Père 618). According to a letter from Howland to Stedman, April 21, 1907, Mme. Godin herself was responsible for translating the end of the novel. The sources that I have consulted do not indicate whether Howland authorized the significant alteration made in the French translation.
19. In an amusing instance of fiction anticipating reality, Ray Reynolds asserts that after Edward's death in Mexico, Marie Howland had an affair with C.B. Hoffman, a married millionaire from Kansas who backed Topolobampo (83). Not a Count, but close enough.
20. Marie Stevens Case met Edward Howland in 1859 and married him in 1865; for several years they lived in an extralegal free-love union, with the approval and support of the man who was legally still Marie's husband, Lyman Case.
21. Isabella Beecher Hooker was the half-sister of Catherine Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Henry Ward Beecher, against whom she sided in the infamous Beecher-Tilton scandal incited by the free-love feminist, Victoria Woodhull.
22. I do not mean to suggest that the Howlands were unique in being happily married suffragists; Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell are the most prominent example of such a couple.
23. Susie is one of the "[female] council of directors" that administers the Social Palace (POG 518).
24. Cheney, emphasis added. Residents of Lebanon, having long since lost track of the little girl who inhabited the social margins of their town some thirty years earlier, guessed "that Mrs. Howland [as the author's name was given] is intimate with the topography and history of Lebanon" and industriously tracked her down. Cheney's review is thus not mere puffery for a local author, although, strangely, Lebanon residents do seem more flattered than dismayed by Howland's representation of their town.

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