Barbara Southard is the author of the new novel Unruly Human Hearts. Her other books include the story collection The Pinch of the Crab. A historian, she has taught at the University of Puerto Rico.
Q: What inspired you to write Unruly Human Hearts?
A: I began to explore the Beecher-Tilton scandal while teaching a graduate seminar on US history. During a classroom discussion of the 1875 trial of Reverend Henry Ward Beecher for adultery with Elizabeth Tilton, one student remarked that the reverend survived the trial and went on with his career. Yeah, said a young woman, but what happened to Elizabeth?
I suspected that my student’s concern that the woman involved had faced more severe consequences was well-founded. I began extensive research into history books about the scandal as well as trial records and other primary sources, analyzing how the strict Victorian code of conduct put Elizabeth in a more perilous position than her lover, but I was not entirely satisfied with the article I wrote for a history journal.
During my research, I came to realize that Elizabeth was involved in a love triangle that involved both emotional and ideological ties. Henry, her pastor, and Theodore, her husband, were longtime friends and collaborators in the abolitionist movement and other progressive causes.
Elizabeth was deeply drawn to the gospel of love preached by Henry in his challenge to Calvinist emphasis on punishment, and she supported her husband’s activism in the women’s suffrage movement.
Public gossip reduced the famous scandal to one more instance of a preacher taking advantage of a woman in his congregation, but the emotions and motivations involved were much more complex.
I then decided that the best way to view the scandal from the perspective of the woman involved would be to write a historical novel telling her story.
Q: How did you research the book, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?
A: The research process began with secondary historical studies. Richard Wightman Fox, Trials of Intimacy: Love and Loss in the Beecher-Tilton Scandal and Altina Laura Waller, Reverend Beecher and Elizabeth Tilton: Sex and Class in Victorian America were particularly helpful.
When I moved to primary sources, I found the thoughts and perspectives of Beecher and Theodore easier to ascertain than the point of view of Elizabeth. Both her husband and her lover had public platforms (one was a famous preacher, and the other was a journalist) and they also testified at length at the public trial in 1875.
Elizabeth’s perspective was more difficult to unearth, because she was a very private person who was not called to the stand at the trial. However, there are important primary sources that reveal her point of view, including her personal letters, which her husband published in the press without her permission, and her testimony at the church investigation.
While writing an academic article I looked primarily at the social issues involving the position of women. Once I decided to write a novel, I had to immerse myself once again in primary historical sources. This second time I was not concentrating on social issues but rereading to submerge myself in the feelings and thoughts of Elizabeth and her two lovers.
I was surprised that my decision to write Unruly Human Hearts from Elizabeth’s perspective not only helped me understand the difficulties she faced because of the strict code for women’s conduct in the Victorian Age but also enabled me to sympathize with her husband and her lover, who both had to wrestle with the ethos of male honor.
Henry can be dismissed as a minister seducing a loyal parishioner. Theodore can be labeled a hypocrite who championed women’s rights and free love in public but upheld the double standard in private.
Elizabeth had a more nuanced view of the character of each of her two lovers and her forgiving nature perceived both noble and selfish motives. Her point of view provided the perfect building block upon which to construct the edifice of a historical novel about love and loyalty as well as betrayal.
Q: The writer Jacqueline Friedland called the book a “story that will inspire readers to think about similar challenges today...” What do you think of that assessment, and what do you hope readers take away from the novel?
A: I think Jacqueline Friedland’s assessment is remarkably prescient given the recent challenges to women’s rights. I was a schoolgirl when the conservative culture of the 1950s promoted the ideal of women as homebodies as did the culture of the Reconstruction era. The women’s liberation movement of the 1960s profoundly affected my journey to adulthood.
In the same epoch, there emerged a movement for sexual liberation, which included many positive gains for women who suffered more than men from the stigma against premarital and extramarital sex, but I also remember discussions in which my young women friends questioned whether concepts like open marriage could work in a society in which the sexist double standard still prevailed and most women were financially dependent on their male partners.
Beginning in the ‘60s, women have made tremendous strides in terms of career advancement and financial independence, but at the present time we are experiencing a backlash that threatens to erase some of the progress made toward more female autonomy.
The successful practice of open marriage or polyamory (modern variations on free love) requires that the women involved should have sufficient autonomy to make their own decisions about who to love and how to love, and to command respect for those decisions. Otherwise, these women risk undergoing the same heartbreak that Elizabeth experienced.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m writing a historical novel with the provisional title This Side of Purgatory. It examines the life of a young woman with bipolar disorder in the 1920s, an epoch in which women attained new freedoms. The protagonist, a talented poet, launches herself enthusiastically into the new lifestyle and soon finds that the limits of acceptable female behavior are much narrower than she imagined.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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