Wilhelmina

Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840–1894)
From Constance Fenimore Woolson: Collected Stories

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“Constance Fenimore Woolson and Zoar” (Etta Madden)

Podcast: “The Lady Novelist: Constance Fenimore Woolson” (with Anne Boyd Rioux, What’sHerName)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Solomon,” Constance Fenimore Woolson
• “The Village Feudists,” Theodore Dreiser
• “Peter,” Willa Cather
• “The Man of Adamant,” Nathaniel Hawthorne

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Strollers in the Zoar community garden, with the greenhouse in the background, 1892. Photographer unknown. For more than fifty years, the garden was supervised and maintained by Simon Beuter (1819–1907), one of the commune’s trustees, who befriended Constance Fenimore Woolcott and her father when they stayed at the village hotel during the 1850s and ’60s. Courtesy of the Ohio History Connection.

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After Zephaniah Swift Spalding returned to Cleveland from Manhattan, where he had been serving as a private in New York’s Seventh National Guard regiment, and before he enlisted on July 25, 1861, in the Twenty-Seventh Ohio Volunteer Infantry, he and Constance Fenimore Woolson secretly became engaged and planned to marry after he returned from the war. They had known each other since childhood; their families vacationed each year on Mackinac Island, and together, Woolson later recealled, they had published “a little ms. newspaper which we amused ourselves with one summer.”

For the next four years, Woolson would follow the news closely for reports on Spalding’s regiment; he was given command of one of the companies, which he led to victory in the Battle of Corinth in Mississippi on October 4, 1862; a month later, he was promoted from major to lieutenant colonel. He was later captured and imprisoned at Cahaba, Alabama, and was subsequently released in a prisoner exchange. Woolson, still in her early twenties, volunteered with the Soldier’s Aid Society of Northern Ohio, served as postmistress at a Sanitary Fair, sang at fundraising concerts, and greeted trainloads of wounded soldiers with food and medicines—all the while waiting for the return of her fiancé. A decade later she would write that “the war was the heart and spirit of my life, and everything has seemed tame to me since.”

Spalding resigned his commission in February 1864 and eventually returned to Cleveland. The historical record is silent on his relationship with Woolson during the years after the war, but at the end of 1867 Secretary of State William Seward, a friend of his father’s, enlisted Spalding as a spy on a secret mission to the Kingdom of Hawaii. Some officials in the American government urged passage of a treaty that would remove tariffs on sugar in exchange for land near Pearl Harbor for a naval base, and Spaulding was sent to gauge the sentiment among the island’s leaders and residents. Within a year he was apppointed as the U.S. consul and soon became an investor in a local sugar plantation. And then, in July 1871, Spalding married Wilhelmina Harris Makee, a 24-year-old sugar heiress.

Woolson was devastated when she heard the news. “She would never get over the sting,” Woolson’s biographer Anne Boyd Rioux notes. “By then she had started her literary career, and she soon began to write stories featuring unfaithful, inconstant men who prefer younger, wealthier women.” In fact, that year’s Christmas issue of Appleton’s Journal contained Woolson’s early story, “Cicely's Christmas,” in which the heroine’s marriage is threatened by a beautiful rival named Wilhelmina Van Airytop. In Woolson’s fictional version, however, the rich young man ends up choosing the Cicely/Constance character.

“Cicely’s Christmas” is one of Woolson’s weaker stories; it has never been reprinted and if not for the name of its secondary character would be entirely forgotten. But the same can’t be said for “Wilhelmina,” a story that appeared in The Atlantic Monthly three years later and has long been considered one of the standout selections in the remarkable debut short story collection, Castle Nowhere: Lake-Country Sketches (1875). Like its less successful predecessor, the story portrays a young woman whose future is threatened by the fickleness of her fiancé—in this case, a soldier who, like Spalding, has returned from the war.

“Wilhelmina” is set in the Separatist community of Zoar in Ohio, about seventy miles to the south of Cleveland. A small utopian commune founded in 1817 by German immigrants, Zoar had been going through many changes in the 1850s and ’60s when their hotel and its accompanying garden became an increasingly popular vacation destination. Outside influences intensified when some twenty of the town’s young men enlisted in the Union Army, defying the steadfast pacifism of the community’s elders. It was during this period that Woolson and her father vacationed in Zoar. “While her contemporaries were so enthralled with society’s rapid changes,” Rioux points out in an interview, “Woolson was intrigued by the Old World communities that had been transplanted to America. . . . Woolson felt it was important to notice the overlooked and marginalized not only among people but also among places.”

What Woolson had not anticipated was the reaction of the Zoarites to her story. As she wrote to Samuel Mather, her nephew, soon after the story appeared:

So you went to Zoar? Didn’t you hear any “mad” remarks about my “Wilhelmina”? Since I have been here some one sent me a New Philadelphia paper containing a savage article on “Wilhelmina” based upon the idea that my characters were all from life, and consequently “the leathery woman” was the good Mrs Beuter, the gardiner’s wife, &c&c. Of course the article in the country paper was of no consequence; but I was distressed to think that perhaps the Beuters, always good friends of mine, thought so, too. I therefore wrote to Mr B. telling him it was but a fancy sketch &c. . . .

The story not only takes place in the very real town of Zoar with its very real hotel and garden, but it also features as main characters the town gardener, his wife, and their daughter—and from 1845 until the commune’s dissolution in 1898, the town had only one gardener: Simon Beuter, who also had a wife, Anna, and a daughter, Emilie. (Their daughter, however, was only nine years old when Zoar’s soldiers returned from the war, and there’s no evidence she was “adopted.”) Beuter’s response to Woolson was surprisingly friendly if pointed:

Your story “Wilhelmina” was the cause of a great stir up, not only here at Zoar but in the whole neighborhood. . . . I myself took the novel with philosophical coolness—but not the others over here, because they do not understand enough about what novels are—. Then you gave the names of the people too exactly—you say for example Wilhelmina was the adoptive daughter of the gardener—and‚ the leathery woman was the gardener’s wife, who certainly doesn’t like to be called “leathery”. . . .

Many people asked me, if this or that were true in “Wilhelmina” and when I said no, the people wondered and said—: such lies should not be published in public about people one knows so well. . . .

The tempest apparently blew over by the time the story reappeared later that year in Castle Nowhere, when reviewers continued to single out the story for praise.

“Wilhelmina” was not the last time Spalding would serve as inspiration for Woolson’s fiction. When she was finishing up her last novel, Horace Chase, she asked her nephew, a wealthy industrialist, for advice on dialogue between the title character and another businessman. “At the time of this conversation (1874), he is about embarking in a new business in California,” she wrote. “The only big Californian business I know anything about, is sugar, & it is more connected with the Sandwich Islands, after all, than with California. . . . But I thought Col. Spaulding [sic] would be too much amused by my making use of sugar,—! which is the business in which he has made all his money.” In addition, one of the novel’s comic characters, who waits in vain for an offer of marriage, is thirty-five-year-old Miss Billy—whose full name is Wilhelmina Breeze.

Judging from her letters to her nephew on the subject, Woolson’s fixation with her old beau seems to have become a source of introspective humor. Mather and Spalding traveled in overlapping business circles, and he occasionally shared news about him with his aunt. “I hear he is abroad (Italy) with his wife and handsome children, & that he has become a rich man,” she wrote in January 1891. “I am very glad. He deserves good fortune, for he always was a good fellow. The glamor that the war threw over the young officers who left their homes to fight, made me fancy I cared for him. But I see now that it was never a serious feeling.” Weeks before she died, Woolson responded to a humorous story Mather had related about Spalding:

I should like to see him again. If I could get him alone, I dare say we should have a very friendly and funny talk. But, meanwhile, we should both be inwardly thinking, “Great heavens—what an escape I had!” It was only the glamor of the war that made brought us together. Every girl wanted to have a soldier-lover in those intense years, and every soldier (especially the volunteers) was wrought up to the highest point of excitement & romance. I remember Judge Spaulding’s making a splash at a public meeting in Cleveland, shortly after Col. Zeph had gone to the front with his regiment; he said “And if it is to help save his dear country, I am willing to have my son brought back to his home on his shield!”—And we all wept.—Now it sounds rather funny,—as shields are not common on the battlefields of today, and Zeph was always rather stout.

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Part of Simon Beuter’s letter quoted above was written in German and was translated by Bill Weisßker and Silke Weißker-Vorgias for publication in The Complete Letters of Constance Fenimore Woolson (ed. Sharon Dean). For more information on the history of Zoar and on Woolson’s visits, see the introduction to “Solomon,” a previous Story of the Week selection.

Notes: Among the German words and phrases in the story: Wirtshaus: tavern or inn | veilchen: violet | verliebte: beloved | verlobt: engaged | Das macht nichts: That doesn’t matter.

Der Fliegende Holländer is The Flying Dutchman, a German-language opera of 1843 by Richard Wagner, based on Henrich Heine’s retelling of the seventeenth- century maritime legend of the doomed ghost ship. In Wagner’s opera, the Dutchman must wander the seas deathlessly until he finds a wife. The 107th Regiment, O. V. I. (Ohio Volunteer Infantry), comprised mostly of German Americans, was organized at Cleveland in August 1862 and mustered out of service at Charleston, South Carolina, on July 10, 1865. Jean Paul was the pen name of Johann Paul Friedrich Richter (1763–1825), a German Romantic novelist and humorist, who was known as “Jean Paul der Einzige,” or “Jean Paul the Only.” In Greek mythology, Pygmalion fell in love with one of his own sculptures. Taking pity on the sculptor, Aphrodite brought the statue to life. The Middle French phrase cap-à-pie means “head to foot.”

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