切り貼りされる自己語り―セアラ・ヘイルの自伝的記述における家庭性―

Sarah Josepha Hale （1788-1879） was one of the foremost women engaged in literary print culture in the middle of nineteenth-century America. As a writer, she published novels, poetry, books on cooking and housekeeping, children’s books, anthologies, and an ambitious nine-hundred-page encyclopedia of prominent women in history. As an editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, the most widely circulated woman’s magazine especially in the 1860s, she wrote monthly editorials and book reviews, regularly contributed fiction and poetry to the magazines, and published the work of such writers as Edgar Allan Poe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Lydia Sigourney. Hale and her magazine were “the arbiter of the parlor, the textbook of the kitchen —— the last word of authority in every home.” 　In the anti-professional climate of magazine publishing world in the 1820s, Hale condemned many magazine editors for relying on pirated material, declaring candidly that her “periodical is not a compilation, ［…］. The work is to be wholly original articles.” But in spite of her condemnation of the so-called “scissors editors,” Hale herself was what might be called a “scissors autobiographer.” Her sketches “memorialize” the events of her literary life, and repeatedly tell the story of how she was involved in the public sphere of print culture. 　In antebellum America, Hale advocated her domestic ideology based on the philosophies of the republican Enlightenment and the ideas of Victorian gendered morality. She has long been considered as a conservative who formented a sentimental culture predominantly of white middle-class women, and as an “anti-feminist” who promoted the “separate spheres” ideology which called for women’s retreat into the private home. I believe, however, that Hale’s domesticity was a discourse that could justify women’s public presence, against the predominant doctrine of the “woman’s sphere”: the domestic discourse that a woman could be a “citizeness” in the civil society. How does the domestic ideology function in her autobiographic sketches, then? These texts carefully create the self-image of Sarah Josepha Hale, a Godey’s “venerable authoress and editoress.” This image is of a respectable woman, performing privacy even as she is undertaking public work; she appears pious and moralistically submissive while enacting public agency. This paper, therefore, explores the ways in which she strategically negotiated the domestic discourse in her sketches, and provided her young readers with a template for the discursive construction of a private woman in public. 　In her autobiographic sketches, Hale tells only about her literary history: （1） her mother’s influence on Hale’s reading habits, （2） a formative reading experience in her childhood, （3） academic tutelage of her brother and her husband, （4） widowhood with five fatherless children, and （5） her decision to accept the editorship to support and educate her children. Through the domestic discourse in her sketches, Hale scrupulously produced her public image that embodied the magazine’s unchanging ideal of womanhood. She thus attempted to provide a vocabulary of how women could achieve a public presence without being too controversial in nineteenth-century America. She hoped that there would be more female citizens who would be responsible for and contribute to the moral development of civil society, as herself who featured on the pages of her own autobiographic texts.