Page 263 - DENG502_PROSE

Unit 24: Harriet Martineau-On Women...

The work was highly successful, and provided her with enough money to fund an extensive tour Notes
of the United States. Her experiences in America formed the basis of two books, Society in America
(1837) and Retrospect of Western Travel (1838). From 1839 to 1844, a uterine tumor left Martineau
bedridden. In search of a cure for her condition, she allowed herself to be hypnotized, after which
her pain vanished. In 1846, she traveled again, this time to the Middle East, where she studied
ancient Egyptian religion and visited biblical sites. During the course of these studies, Martineau
ceased to believe in Christian doctrines, including the afterlife. In the late 1840s and early 1850s,
Martineau became a prolific contributor to the London Daily News and other liberal periodicals,
writing several articles per week. Despite a recurrence of her illness in 1854, Martineau continued
to write, and over the course of her career she wrote more than 1,600 articles for the Daily News.
Her illness forced Martineau to retire in 1866, and she died from bronchitis in 1876.

24.2 Major Works

Martineau worked in many genres and discussed many social, religious and political issues during
her prolific career. Several of her first articles argued that the apparent differences in intellect
between men and women were the product of educational discrimination. Her focus on education
continued in Household Education (1849), which was based on personal experience. In this work,
Martineau condemned the Christian practice of teaching a child that his or her nature is inherently
evil and emphasized parental love as vital to the development of an individual’s self-esteem. Her
American travel experiences provided the material for Society in America, in which Martineau
expressed a generally favorable impression of democracy. However, she also commented on several
shortcomings she found in democratic society, including the fact that the free enterprise system
allowed the greed of a few people to trample the rights of the many. Martineau also noted that
women seemed more restricted in their lives than what she had anticipated after reading the
Declaration of Independence. Her long illness prompted the writing of Life in the Sick-Room, in
which she counseled readers on how to live with illness as well as how to behave when visiting
those who are sick. Martineau’s trip to the Middle East yielded Eastern Life, Present and Past (1848)
in which she explained the reasons for her religious conversion. Her Autobiography, written in
1854 and 1855, but published posthumously in 1877, raised a furor due to its atypically secular
focus as well as the perceived lack of decorum with which she described the inadequacies of her
family.

24.3 Critical Reception

While she was admired and respected by many during her lifetime—Auguste Comte reportedly
stated that he preferred her translation of his Positive Philosophy to his text—Martineau was also
vehemently criticized for her writing on behalf of social causes. While Martineau was largely
ignored by critics after her death, in recent years there has been a renewed interest in her political,
social, and economic writings. Many of Martineau’s social and philosophical beliefs, in the view of
Mitzi Myers, were shaped by the author’s early home life. Myers claims that the “key details in
Harriet’s early domestic history were fear, emotional deprivation, remorse, and lack of self-respect.”
Gillian Thomas has observed that in writing Illustrations of Political Economy, Martineau’s aim was
to “reach working-class readers” by rendering information on a complex subject in the style of a
work of a fiction rather than that of an academic treatise. Valerie Sanders has expressed her
agreement with this assessment, stating that “[Martineau’s] Illustrations teem with teacher-figures,
mostly clergymen and manufacturers, who try to enlighten the poorer members of their local
community.” Many critics believe that Society in America is Martineau’s most enduring work
because of its astute observations on early American society and how that society was living up to
the goals set forth in the Declaration of Independence. It has often been compared to Alexis de
Tocqueville’s classic work Democracy in America. According to Shelagh Hunter, Martineau’s study

LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY 257