Linda Grasso's "Anger in the House: Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall and The Redrawing of Emotional Boundaries in Mid-Nineteenth Century America": If You See Something, Say Something

Nadine Hamoui, a Muslim American speaker at a Densho event in 2003, used a public platform to discuss her experiences after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. She draws similarities between a personal incident (her family was detained by the government) with the experience of Japanese Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Hamoui’s speech not only publicizes the injustice of her family’s detainment, but the reality of other Muslim Americans. Hamoui eventually says, “History doesn’t repeat itself, it’s people that repeat history.” Hamoui speech serves as an outline, illuminating how post 9/11, Muslim antagonism circumnavigates and perpetuates the hate and trauma of the terrorist attacks. And in the same air, Fanny Fern’s novel, Ruth Hall, sheds light on the plight of women in the 1850’s. Both mediums push back against tyranny, whether the setting be ones literal home, or ones homeland.

Linda Grasso’s article, “Anger in the House: Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall and The Redrawing of Emotional Boundaries in Mid-Nineteenth Century America,” addresses the resulting controversy and the amorphous state of society, unhinging at the time Ruth Hall was published. While Grasso refrains from interjecting much of her own voice, her article does a good job of informing the reader on why the novel was such a catalyst for the public’s hyper-opinionated concern, by introducing the desperate premises of activists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Caroline Dall. Most importantly, the article speaks on “abolitionist agitation” and how “woman’s rights activists were able to adapt and apply to their own purposes.” (Grasso, 254). ). For suffrage activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Ruth Hall provides a divine lesson on woman’s divinely inspired brain and muscle power (Grasso, 252). Women were finally, “vehemently rejecting a Jesus-like, feminine-styled doctrine of ‘Love your enemies’’ (Grasso, 255).The backlash resulting from the novel was only logical, for society feared the unknown horizon of change, as it was shifting away from a “harsh Calvinism” (Grasso, 258). 

However, Dall did not “regard woman’s public expression of anger as a socially acceptable political tool” for it was “inappropriate and crass” (Grasso, 257). In this way, Dall adhered to the norm of anger being a masculine attribute. And although, the autobiographical tale of Ruth Hall was seen as an angry prose-lashing by the public, Fern’s novel depicts a woman whom deals with her adverse circumstances of patriarchal injustice with grace and strength. And because it is a work of non-fiction it serves as a novel should in that it is a point for identification for Fern’s readership. The novel is authentic even more so by the utilization of the character of Halls’ mother-in-law. While Ruth is docile and abused by her family members, including her mother-in-law, Mis Hall is snarky and often combats in a passive-aggressive manner. This utilization of her character’s interaction with her husband only increases the novels revolutionary aesthetic; Mis Hall’s age give her actions more authenticity (Fern 66).