Title: <em>The Morgesons</em>: Elizabeth Stoddard's <em>Ars Erotica</em>
Abstract: T his essay takes up the often noted but seldom analyzed rage at the heart of Elizabeth Stoddard's novel The Morgesons.I argue that the outsized antisocial feeling that pervades the book comes out of Stoddard's profound dissatisfaction with dominant social models for being and belonging in Victorian America.While her counterparts internalized their anger with existing models and opportunities for women, Stoddard externalized hers by staging sadistic scenes that bear no trace of the baroque interiority of the sentimental novel.Yet for all its negativity, her rage is generative, enabling alternatives, however unsustained, to conventional notions of family and romantic love.Drawing on insights from what has been termed the antisocial thesis in queer theory, I read the bad behavior in The Morgesons-frustration, anger, narcissism, stubbornness, sadism, masochism-not as behaviors that need to be domesticated but as alternatives to the dominant life narrative and the institutions that perpetuate it.Informed by a nasty sensibility, this coming-of-age story enacts an antipedagogy against the domestic novel's lessons of romantic love, family life, and private property. 1Stoddard foregrounds the life of her anti-heroine, Cassandra Morgeson, from childhood to adulthood as beset with frustration at the limitations that the prescribed passage to maturity entails.As such, The Morgesons chronicles the rage of a frustrated woman sensing foreclosure, not unlike Harriet Beecher Stowe's broad social vision whittled down in her later novels to the pleasures of shopping, decorating, and bossing one's spouse around.Yet unlike her contemporary, Stoddard lets her heroine's rage and the non-normative intimate possibilities it brings into being stand against the meager pleasures of domestic ownership and privatized sexuality. 2