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The Voices of the Night

—

by

Milan Terlunen
in

Popular categories: Digital Storytelling, Short Story

Edition created by Kaylee Barrera and Skipper Lynch

Table of contents

Interactive Fiction

Before reading on, you’re encouraged to experience the interactive fiction adaptation of this story.

Introduction (by Kaylee Barrera)

Preface: the 19th-century American short story and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

Short stories were undeniably one of the most popular types of fiction in 19th-century America. The introduction to “Periodical Literature in Nineteenth-century America” notes that with the growth of magazines and newspapers, these periodicals lent themselves as a platform for authors to efficiently publish their work and sustain their careers.1 With the consistent supply of short stories, they shaped much of 19th-century American literature; as the Editor’s Study of issue 441 of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine states, “Americans have […] brought the short story nearer perfection in the all-round […] it was a literary form peculiarly adapted to the American temperament…”2

Of course, while male writers like Edgar Allen Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne were the most popular short story writers, women of the 19th century also found their own success in short stories. As scholar Susan Coultrap-McQuin writes “… women authors were very popular and prominent in the nineteenth century […] Best-seller lists reveal that by the 1850s women were authors of almost half of the popular literary works.” However, Coultrap-McQuin also notes that despite their contributions to the literary world, women were often cast aside due to misogyny and the idea that writing as a career was unacceptable for women.3 Much of the short stories produced by women during this time period inevitably reflected their experiences and injustices as delegates to their homes and families. Scholar Valerie Sanders notes that “Literature, above all, was a place where women could explore the intimate details of their emotions and social interactions, imagining new relationships and life choices, while also protesting against the injustices they saw around them.”4

Such examples of these feminist works were written by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward (1844-1911), who centered topics about “women’s economic and emotional independence […] the ‘true woman’ stereotype, and the problems of women in traditional marriages”5 in a collection of her writing, as stated in American Women Writers. While some of her works were explicitly feminist, like The Story of Avis (1877) and Doctor Zay (1882) as noted in Encyclopaedia Britannica,6 others were more subtle. This subtly can be found in some of Phelps’s short stories like “The Voices in the Night,” originally published in May 1866 in Issue 192 of the New Harper’s Monthly Magazine. (For Phelps, a woman writer who was discouraged by society to have her own career, publishing in Harper’s, America’s most popular periodical,7 is a feat in itself.) “The Voices in the Night” follows a woman named Keturah and her surreal experience through two wild sleepless nights, offering lots of bizarre twists to Keturah’s seemingly mundane life. Through this farcical piece of work, Phelps also explores the confinements of marriage and Keturah’s dreams for excitement in her dull domestic life. When an opportunity for excitement and adventure arises at the end of the story with robbers approaching Keturah’s home, her hopes are quelled by her husband.

We have chosen to republish this story to offer a further glimpse into Phelp’s feminist work during a time when women writers were neglected and an insight into the budding ideas of 19th-century feminism. In today’s world, where women’s rights and freedoms are consistently challenged, taking a step back to look into our past highlights that the feminist fight is far from over.

Editorial Notes

As the story was originally published in 1866 in New Harper’s Monthly Magazine, it is in the public domain. I have transcribed the story from a scan of the original 1866 text sourced from The Internet Archive.8 In transcribing into a digital platform, I have attempted to preserve as much of the original story as possible, making no correctional edits and keeping in stylistic choices such as italics or dashes. I did, however, change the paragraph formatting from the original two-column text block used in New Harper’s Monthly Magazine into a one-column text block, along with extra paragraph spacing, to increase the readability for our audience. Along with the transcription, I have included a glossary for unfamiliar words or phrases and extra notes on some cultural, historical, or biblical references Phelps uses in her work that I deemed important to understanding the story.

Glossary of Unfamiliar Words or Phrases

  1. tempestuous – “resembling a tempest: turbulent”
  2. be-ribboned – “adorned with ribbon”
  3. be-spangled – “to adorn with spangles […] brillantly sparkling or glittering objects”
  4. be-rouged – “obviously or thickly rouged”
  5. soirée – “a party or reception held in the evening”
  6. sma’ – small (shortened, assumed from context clues)
  7. ayont – (in Scottish English) “beyond”
  8. twal – (in Scottish English) “twelve”
  9. penitently – “feeling or expressing humble or regretful pain or sorrow for sins or offenses”
  10. requisition – “the state of being in demand or use”
  11. efficacious – “having the power to produce a desired effect”
  12. panacea – “a remedy for all ills or difficulties”
  13. ignis fatuus – “a deceptive goal or hope” (literally “foolish fire” in Latin)
  14. forlorn – “nearly hopeless”
  15. MSS – manuscripts (abbreviation)
  16. crockery – “cups, plates, bowls, etc., used to serve food and drink, especially made of china”
  17. apostrophized – “to address what you are saying, or a poem, a speech in a play, etc. to a particular person or thing”
  18. perambulations – “a slow walk or journey around a place, especially one made for pleasure”
  19. modicum – “a small portion”
  20. Puritanic – “strict in moral or religious outlook”
  21. sibyl – “a female prophet or witch”
  22. sang froid – “coolness of mind; calmness; composure:” (literally “cold blood” in French)
  23. menagerie – “a place where animals are kept and trained especially for exhibition”
  24. stupor – “a condition of greatly dulled or completely suspended sense or sensibility”
  25. flotant – “flying in air”
  26. harpies – “a foul malign creature in Greek mythology that is part woman and part bird”
  27. heraldic device – “a coat of arms; armorial bearings”
  28. stentorian – “extremely loud”
  29. philology – “the study of literature and of disciplines relevant to literature or to language as used in literature”
  30. infallible – “incapable of error”
  31. rout – “a state of wild confusion or disorderly retreat”
  32. empressement – ” demonstrative warmth or cordiality”
  33. boughs – “a branch of a tree”
  34. peal – “a loud sound or succession of sounds”
  35. scar’t – scared (as assumed by context clues)
  36. reconnoitre – “to examine or survey (a region, area, etc.) for engineering, geological, or other purposes”
  37. unbanditti-like – unlike the characteristics of a robber or thief (derived from banditti, a group of “outlaw[s] who live by plunder” )
  38. incredulous – “unwilling to admit or accept what is offered as true”
  39. Paterfamilias – “the male head of a household”
  40. especial – “specific, particular”
  41. anodyne – “something that soothes, calms, or comforts”
  42. haec fabula docet – “this fable teaches us” (in Latin)

Cultural, Historical, and Biblical Notes

  1. A list of recognizable political figures. The first two are ancient politicians, Cicero from the Roman Empire and Demosthenes from ancient Athens, while the latter two are 19th-century American political figures, Henry Ward Beecher and Charles Sumner, both of whom were notable abolitionists during Phelps’s time.
  2. Jeff Davis is assumedly short for Jefferson Davis, an American political figure who served as the first and only president of the Confederate States (1861-1865) during the American Civil War.
  3. Mendelssohn Quintette could refer to either one of two things: one of several string quintet pieces composed by Felix Mendelssohn, a 19th-century German composer, or the Mendelssohn Quintette Club, a chamber music ensemble popular in the United States in the latter half of the 1800s.
  4. Gilmore’s Brassiest references American composer Patrick Gilmore, a renowned composer and bandleader, known for his marches.
  5. “Cruden’s Concordance” is an alphabetical index of the Bible written by Alexander Cruden, first published in 1737.
  6. Edwards on the Will refers to “The Freedom of Will” written by Jonathan Edwards in 1754, a lengthy theological work examining the idea of free will.
  7. Martin F. Tupper was a 19th-century English writer and poet.
  8. President Edwards refers to Jonathan Edward’s brief appointment as the president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University).
  9. A list of infamous exiled people. Marius, or Gaius Marius, was a fallen Roman general who fled to Africa, possibly Carthage. Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of the French, was exiled to the island of St. Helena in 1815 after being deposed from his rule. M’Clellan, fully George B. McClellan (as assumed from context clues), was a disgraced American general of the Union Army during the American Civil War, who fled to Europe after an unsuccessful presidential election in 1864.
  10. A mythical fruit that would dissipate into smoke and ash when plucked; Supposedly found on a mythical tree near Sodom, a biblical city destroyed by God in the biblical book of Genesis.
  11. Absalom was the biblical son of King David, who was killed when he was trapped in the branches of an oak tree while retreating after a battle during his revolt against his father.
  12. Job is a biblical figure from the Book of Job who experiences continuous horrible disasters as a way to test his true faith in God.
  13. King David was a legendary king of Israel. First known for defeating the giant Goliath, he was eventually anointed king of a united Israel and bridged together religious unity.

Biographical and Historical Introduction (by Skipper Lynch)

What led American author Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward to marry a man seventeen years her younger, publish dozens of works criticizing traditional marriage roles, and urge women to light a raging bonfire fueled by corsets?

To answer this question, I began by researching Phelps’s childhood and relationship to her mother. Lynn Abrams explains that in mid-19th century America, when Phelps was born, society expected mothers to devote all their efforts to domestic life. Abrams adds that the pressures of caring for children and managing the house left women little time to pursue literature or other academic disciplines. Fortunately, despite the male-dominated nature of 19th century literature, Deidre Johnson notes that Phelps grew up surrounded by women writers. Johnson explains that as one of the first known authors to pen and publish fiction for young girls9, Phelps’s mother represented the possibility for women to succeed in literature despite the strict societal norms surrounding women in the workforce. I speculate that Phelps’s early exposure to female authors influenced her decision to center women creatives in so many of her works. Perhaps Phelps took inspiration from her mother when writing Keturah – the protagonist in “The Voices of the Night” – as a woman who dreams of publishing her own works.

Unfortunately, despite her early success as an author, Phelps’s mother eventually fell victim to the repressive nature of 19th century marriages. As Nina Baym describes, it was difficult for her mother to maintain a career as an author, “cultivate her own mind and heart”, and manage all the domestic responsibilities of a “housewife.” Later in life, Bayam notes that Phelps’s mother looked back on her adulthood and wrote extensively about the burdens marriage imposed on her artistic ambitions10. Phelps’s exploration of Keturah’s failure to publish, partially due to the way she was trapped in the mundane routines of managing a household, reflects her mother’s struggles to balance her personal ambitions and domestic expectations.

Perhaps resulting from the burdens of domestic life, “[Phelps’s] mother… suffered from intermittent health issues for much of her adult life” (Johnson). She eventually died of brain fever when Phelps was eight years old (Johnson). In “Chapters from a Life”, Phelps speculated that “the relentless drudgery of domestic toil” contributed to many of her mothers ailments and was ultimately responsible for her early death. Similarly, “The Voices of the Night” explores the health issues married women faced in the Victorian era. Although never explicitly declared a health condition, Keturah experiences severe insomnia that prevents her from sleeping for many consecutive nights. Her condition seems to stem from her dissatisfaction with married life: she’s so bored when awake that she can think of nothing interesting enough to put her to sleep. I conjecture that Phelps took inspiration from her mother’s strained marriage and untimely death when writing about Keturah’s dangerous experience with insomnia.

Many of Phelps’s writings, including “The Voices of the Night” explore the dichotomy between domestic responsibilities and self-realization. Like her mother and many other women of the mid-19th century, Phelps precariously balanced her personal ambitions and passion for writing with what was expected of her as an upper class woman, mother, and wife. According to Lynn Abrams, “motherhood [in the Victorian-era] was confirmation that [a woman] had entered the world of womanly virtue and female fulfillment”. Marriage and motherhood wasn’t only be a social responsibility, but also the ultimate goal of a woman and the only path to personal satisfaction. For women like Phelps, marriage and the social expectations that came with it were a prison: wives were expected to run the home, cook, clean, and care for the children, leaving them little time for other pursuits.

Phelps’s work “The Story of Avis”11 explores the restrictions marriage imposed on personal pursuits by focusing on Avis Dobell’s struggles to reconcile her desire for a career as a painter with the societal expectations of women. Throughout the novel, Phelps critiques the patriarchal society of Victorian England and the way it restricted women’s opportunities for education, career advancement, and personal autonomy. “The Voices of the Night” also explores the need for feminist reform in the institution of marriage. I’ll explore this more in my interpretive essay, but due to marital confinement, Keturah can’t pursue her dreams of writing and instead lives in endless days of drudgery.

After understanding a bit about Phelps’s childhood and body of work, I decided to look into her adult life. Before diving in, it’s important to understand that Victorian-era social capital depended on wealth and fertility. Lydia Shoup explains that “A man was desirable once he’d acquired wealth, a woman for her ability to bear children”. Because men typically accumulated wealth later in life and women gave birth earlier, younger women would marry older men for the promise of financial stability. These age gaps likely exacerbated the power dynamics that already existed between spouses due to other patriarchal norms of that time. Phelps resisted these pressures: in 1888, she married Herbert Dickinson Ward, a journalist and writer 17 years her younger (Johnson). Beyond their ages, their marriage was unconventional. Johnson explains that they both worked as writers and often collaborated on projects. Phelps’s insistence on marriage being a union of equals bleeds into “The Voices of the Night”. This short story criticizes the “husbands are the protectors of their wives” trope by writing Keturah’s husband to be useless in warding off the burglars and writing Keturah as the one who manages to take action.

Beyond her personal life, the wider social atmosphere of the 19th century influenced Phelps’s works. Literary historian Nsaidzedze explains that 19th century society stereotyped women as demure and submissive; to act outside such stereotypes was to expose oneself to judgment and retribution. He states, “one stereotype image of women [in the Victorian era] was that they were pure and pious”. During this time, women were often depicted as angelic, marking “a shift from the image of the woman portrayed in the medieval period… which… represented a woman as an agent of the devil” (Nsaidzedze). Despite this shift being somewhat positive, expectations surrounding femininity still trapped women in unsustainable and unhealthy roles.

The perfect Victorian woman was thought to be obedient and subdued; anybody who deviated from these expectations was in danger of being labeled hysterical. Maria Cohut explains that physicians and academics of the 19th century considered hysteria a “disease of the consciousness”. Depression, infertility, and even a love for writing all fell under its symptoms (Cohut). Although both men and women could be diagnosed with hysteria, it was much more prevalent among women, something physicians attributed to their “lazy and irritable nature” (Cohut). In a similar way to men calling women “overreactive” today, Victorian-era men used “women’s hysteria” as an excuse to explain away behaviors that didn’t uphold the status quo and remove non-conformists from the public eye.

“The Voices of the Night” highlights the repercussions of the “women’s hysteria” epidemic. Keturah thinks it’s necessary that people perceive her as calm and goes to great lengths to convince readers that she’s not delusional or aggressive. This depiction of Keturah reflects how many women – and perhaps Phelps herself – prioritized keeping up appearances and fitting into the status-quo, even to their own detriment.

Victorian-era feminist ideologies also inspired the themes of Phelps’s writing. Herb Hallas explains that just six years before Phelps published “The Voices of the Night”, married women were not permitted legal financial independence in most states, rendering them as “wage slaves”. Their husbands controlled all of their assets, wages, and savings, leaving women with little agency or autonomy. Hallas notes that these laws remained in place in parts of the country until 1867, a year after the publication “The Voices of the Night”. Similarly, the same year that “The Voices of the Night” was published, the 1866 Women’s Suffrage Petition was presented to parliament.

Although the petition didn’t succeed in securing women the right to vote, Dr Gillian Murphy states that it’s often regarded as the formal beginning of the Suffrage Movement. After the petition failed, women began to intentionally organize and unite their efforts surrounding suffrage and women’s rights in the US (Murphy). As I mentioned before, during this time Phelps used her writing to advocate for social reform. It’s likely that Phelps was inspired to write about legal and social constraints that prevented women from achieving self-determination because of the wider political atmosphere surrounding such topics. Additionally, Phelps saw the abolition of corsetry as a social standard as a prerequisite for women’s full participation in general society. Given her history with confining ideas and expectations, her strong stance on corsetry12 – another object used to confine women – isn’t a surprise.

Given everything we know about Phelps’s history, the importance of looking at “The Voices of the Night” through a feminist lens is abundantly clear. In “Narratology in the Archive of Literature,” Cohen illustrates the importance of the way we interpret the archives by describing the role that twentieth century feminists played in reclaiming the narratives of de Stael and Sand (page 53). This applies to Phelps as well: when resurrecting her stories, we must consider the nature of female authorship, marriages, and career prospects in the Victorian era. Her writing shouldn’t be isolated and picked apart, it should be analyzed through both a feminist and historical lens. Hopefully, through reading and deconstructing “The Voices of the Night” with me, you too can appreciate the feminist and historical underpinnings of Phelps’s works.

“The Voices of the Night” by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

Keturah wishes to state primarily that she is good-natured. She thinks it necessary to make this statement, lest, after having heard her story, you should, however polite you might be about it, in your heart of hearts suspect her capable not only of allowing her angry passions to rise, but of permitting them to boil over “in tempestuous fury wild and unrestrained.” If it were an orthodox remark, she would also add, from like motives of self-defense, that she is not in the habit of swearing.

Are you accustomed, O tender-hearted reader, to spend your nights as a habit, with your eyes open or shut? On the answer to this question depends her sole hope of appreciation and sympathy.

She begs you will understand that she does not mean you, the be-ribboned and be-spangled and be-rouged frequenter of the ball and soirée, with your faint, floating perfumes, flutter of fans, and sweep of many-hued drapery; your well-taught drooping lashes, or wide girl’s eyes, untamed and wondering, your flushing color, and your pulse up to a hundred. You are very pretty for your pains – as she hopes you know, to take the comfort of God’s great gift as women can; as true and royal women can – oh, to be sure, you are very pretty! She has not the heart to scold you, though you are dancing and singing and flirting away your golden nights, your restful, young nights, that never come but once – though you are dancing and singing and flirting yourselves merrily into your grave. She would like to put in a plea before the eloquence of which Cicero and Demosthenes, Beecher and Sumner, should pale like wax-lights before the sun, for the new fashion said to be obtaining in New York, that the soirée shall give place to the matinee, at which the guests shall assemble at four o’clock in the afternoon, and are expected to go home at seven or eight. That would be not only civilized; it would be millennial.

But Keturah is perfectly aware that you will do as you will. If the excitement of the “wee sma’ hours ayont the twal” prove preferable to a quiet evening at home, and a good, Christian, healthy sleep after it, why the “sma’ hours” it will be. If you will do it, it is “none of her funerals,” as the small boy remarked. Only she particularly requests you not to insult her by offering her your sympathy. Wait till you know what forty-eight mortal, wide-awake, staring, whirring, unutterable hours mean.

Listen to her mournful tale; and, while you listen, let your head become fountains of water, and your eyes rivers of tears for her, and for all who are doomed to reside in her immediate vicinity.

“Tired nature’s sweet restorer,” as the newspapers in a sudden and severe poetical attack remarked of Jeff Davis, “refuses to bless” Keturah, except as her own sweet will inclines her. They have a continuous lover’s quarrel, exceedingly bitter while it rages, exceedingly sweet when it is made up. Keturah attends a perfectly grave and unimpeachable lecture – the Restorer pouts and goes off in a huff for twenty-four hours. Keturah undertakes at seven o’clock a concert – announced as Mendelssohn Quintette, proving to be Gilmore’s Brassiest – and nothing hears she of My Lady till two o’clock A.M. Keturah spends an hour at a prayer-meeting, on a pine bench that may have heard of cushions, but certainly has never seen one face to face; and comes home at eight o’clock to the pleasing discovering that the fair enslaver has taken some doctrinal offense, and vanished utterly.

Though lost to sight she’s still to memory dear, and Keturah penitently betakes herself to the seeking of her in those ingenious ways which she has learned at the school of a melancholy experience. A table and kerosene lamp are brought into requisition, also a book. If it isn’t the Dictionary, it is Cruden’s Concordance. If these prove too exciting, it is Edwards on the Will. Light reading is strictly forbidden. Congressional Reports are sometimes efficacious, as well as Martin F. Tupper, and somebody’s “Sphere of Woman.”

There is one single possibility out of ten that this treatment will produce drowsiness. There are nine probabilities to the contrary. The possibility is worth trying for, and trying hard for: but if it results into the sudden flight of President Edwards across the room, a severe banging of the “Sphere of Woman” against the wall, and the total disappearance of Cruden’s Concordance beneath the bed, Keturah is not in the least surprised. It is although too familiar a result to elicit remark. It simply occasions a fresh growth to a horrible resolution that she has been slowly forming for years.

Some day she will write a book. The publishers shall nap over it, and accept it with pleasure. The drowsy printers shall set up its type with their usual unerring exactness. The proofreaders shall correct it in their dreams. Customers in the book-stores shall nod at the sight of its binding. Its readers shall dose at the first page. Sleepless old age, sharp and unrelieved pain, youth sorrowful before the time, shall seek it out, shall flock unto the counter of its fortunate publishers (she has three firms in her mind’s eye; one in Boston, one in New York, and one in Philadelphia; but who the happy men are to be is not yet definitely decided), who shall waste their inheritance in distributing it throughout the length and breadth of a grateful continent. Physicians from every where under the sun, who have proved the fickleness of hyoscyamus, of hops, of Dover’s powders, of opium, of morphine, of laudanum, of hidden virtues of herbs in the field, and minerals from the rock, and gases from the air; who know the secrets of all the pitying earth, and, behold, it is vanity of vanities, shall line their hospitals, cram their offices, stuff their bottles, with the new universal panacea and blessing to suffering humanity.

And Keturah can keep a resolution.

Her literary occupation disposed of, in the summary manner referred to, she runs through the roll of her reserve force, and their name is Legion. She composes herself, in an attitude of rest, with a handkerchief tied over her eyes to keep them shut, blows her lamp out instead of screwing it out, strangles a while in the gas, and begins to repeat her alphabet, which, owning to like stern necessity, she has fortunately never forgotten. She says it forward; she says it backward; she begins at the middle and goes up; she begins at the middle and goes down; she rattles it through in French, she groans it through German, she falters it through Greek. She attempts the numeration table, flounders somewhere in the quadrillions, and forgets where she left off. She watched an interminable flock of sheep jump over a wall till her head spins. There always seem to be so many more where the last one came from. She listens to oar-beats, and drum-beats, and heart-beats. She improvises sonatas and gallopades, oratorios and mazourkas. She perpetrates the title and first line of an epic poem, goes through the alphabet for a rhyme, and none appearing, she repeats the first line by way of encouragement. But all in vain. She is as likely to fly as to sleep.

With a silence that speaks unutterable things she rises solemnly, and seeks the pantry in darkness that may be felt. At the bottom of the stairs she steps with her whole weight flat upon something that squirms, and is warm, and turns over, and utters a cry that makes the night hideous. Oh, nothing but the cat, that is all! The pantry proved to be well stocked with bread, but not another mortal thing. Now, if there is anything Keturah particularly dislikes, it is dry bread. Accordingly, with a remark which is intended for Love’s ear alone, she gropes her way to the cellar door, which is unexpectedly open, pitches head first into the cavity, and makes the descent of half the stairs in an easy and graceful manner, chiefly with her elbows. She reaches ground after an interval, steps splash into a pool of water, knocks over a mop, and embraces a tall cider barrel with her groping arms. After a little wandering about among ash-bins and apple-bins, reservoirs and coal-heaps, and cobwebs, she discovers the hanging-shelf which has been the ignis fatuus of her search. Something extremely cold crossing her shoeless feet at this crisis suggests pleasant fancies of a rat. Keturah is ashamed to confess that she has never in all the days of the years of her pilgrimage set eyes upon a rat. Depending solely upon her imagination, her conception of that animal is a cross between an alligator and a jaguar. She stands her ground manfully, however, and is happy to state that she did not faint.

In the agitation consequent upon this incident she butters her bread with the lard, and takes an enormous bite on the way up the stairs. She seeks no more refreshment that night.

One resort alone is left. With a despairing sigh she turns the great faucet of the bath-tub and holds her head under it till she is upon the verge of a watery grave. This experiment is her forlorn hope. Perhaps about three or four o’clock she falls into a series of jerky naps, and dreams that she is editor of a popular Hebrew Magazine, wandering frantically through a warehouse full of aspirant MSS (chiefly from the junior classes of theological seminaries) of which she can not translate a letter.

Of the tenth of Keturah’s unearthly experiences – of the number of times she has been taken for a robber, and chased by the entire roused and bewildered family, with loaded guns; of the pans of milk she has upset, the crockery whose hopes has untimely shattered, the skulls she has cracked against open doors, the rocking-chairs she has stumbled over and apostrophized in her own meek way; of the neighbors she has frightened out of town by her perambulations; of the alarms of fire she has raised, pacing the wood-shed with a lantern for exercise stormy nights; of all the possible and impossible corners and crevices in which she has sought repose – she has slept on every sofa in every room in the house, and once she spent a whole night on a closet shelf; of the amiable condition of her morning, and the terror she is fast becoming to family, Church, and State, the time would fail her to tell. Were she to “let slip the dogs of war” and relate a modicum of the agonies she undergoes – how the stamping of a neighbor’s horse on a barn floor will drive every solitary wink of sleep from her eyes and slumber from her eyelids; the nibbling of a mouse in some un-get-at-able place in the wall, prove torture; the rattling of a pane of glass; ticking of a clock, or pattering of rain-drops, as effective as a cannon; a guest in the “spare room” with a musical “love of a baby,” something far different from a blessing, and a tolerably windy night, one lengthened virgil long drown out – the liberal editor would cry “Forbear!” It becomes really an interesting science to learn how slight a thing will utterly deprive an unfortunate creature of the great necessity of life; but this article not being a scientific treatise, that must be left to the sympathizing imagination.

Keturah feels compelled, however, to relate the story of two memorable nights, of which the only wonder is that she has lived to tell the tale.

Every incident is stamped indelibly upon her brain. It is wrought in letters of fire. “While memory holds a seat on this distracted globe,” it shall not – can not be forgotten.

It was a night in June – sultry, gasping, fearful. Keturah went to her own room, as is her custom, at the Puritanic hour of nine. Sleep for a couple of hours being out of the question she throw wide her doors and windows, and betook herself to her writing-desk. A story for a Magazine, which it was imperative should be finished to-morrow, appealed to her already partially-stupefied brain. She forced her unwilling pen into the service, whisked the table round into the draft, and began. In about five minutes the sibyl caught the inspiration of her god, and heat and sleeplessness were alike forgotten. This sounds very poetic, but it wasn’t at all. Keturah regrets to say that she had on a very unbecoming green wrapper, and several ink-spots on her fingers.

It was a very thrilling and original story, and it came, as all thrilling and original stories must come, to a crisis. Seraphina found Theodore kissing the hand of Celeste in the woods. Keturah became excited.

“Oh, Theodore!” whispered the unhappy maiden to the moaning trees. “Oh, Theodore, my –”

Whirr! buzz! swoosh! came something through the window into the lamp, and down squirming into the ink-bottle. Keturah jumped. If you have half the horror of those great June beetles that she has you will know how she jumped. She emptied the entire contents of the ink-bottle out of the window in great disgust, closed her blinds, and began again.

“Theodore,” said Seraphina.

“Seraphina,” said Theodore – jump the second. It was – it really was – the same identical creature, whirring round the lamp, and buzzing down into her lap. Hadn’t he been burned in the light, drowned in the ink, speared with the pen and crushed by falling from the window? Yet there he was, or the ghost of him, fluttering his inky wings into her very eyes, and walking leisurely across the smooth, fair page that waited to be inscribed with Seraphina’s woe. Nerved by despair, Keturah did a horrible thing. Never before or since has she been known to accomplish it. She put him down on the floor and stepped on him. She repented of the act in dust and ashes. Before she could get across the room to close the window ten more had come to his funeral. To describe the horror of the ensuing hour she had no words. She put them out of the window – they came directly back. She drowned them in the wash-bowl – they fluttered, and sputtered, and buzzed up into the air. She killed them in the corner – they came to life under her very eyes. She caught them in her handkerchief and tied up them tight – they crawled out before she could get them in. She shut the cover of the wash-stand down on them – she looked in a while after and there was not one to be seen. All ten of the great blundering creatures were knocking their brains out against the ceiling. After the endurance of terrors that came very near turning her hair gray she had pushed the last one out on the balcony, shut the window, and was gasping away in the airless room, her first momentary sense of security, when there struck upon her agonized ear a fiendish buzzing, and three of them came whirling back through a crack about as large as a knitting-needle. No mortal beetle could have gotten through it. Keturah turned pale and let them alone.

The clock was striking eleven when quiet was at last restored, and the exhausted sufferer began to think of sleep. At this moment she heard a sound before which her heart sank like lead. You must know that Keturah has a very near neighbor, Miss Humdrum by name. Miss Humdrum is a – well, a very excellent and pious old lady, who keeps a one-eyed servant and three cats. And the sound which Keturah heard was Miss Humdrum’s cats.

Keturah descended to the wood-shed, armed herself with a huge oaken log, and sallied out into the garden, with a horrible sang froid that only long familiarity with her errand could have engendered. It was Egyptian darkness; but her practiced eye discerned, or thought it discerned, a white cat upon the top of the high wooden fence. Keturah smiled a ghastly smile, and fired. Now she never yet in her life threw anything any where, under any circumstances, that did not go exactly in the opposite direction from what she wanted to have it. This occasion proved no exception. The cat jumped, and sprang over, and disappeared. The stick went exactly into the middle of the fence. Keturah can not suppose that the last trump will be capable of making a louder noise. She stood transfixed. One cry alone broke the hideous silence.

“O Lord!” in an unmistakably Irish, half-wakened howl, from the open window of the one-eyed servant’s room. “Only that, and nothing more.”

Keturah returned to her apartment, a sadder if not wiser woman. Marius among the ruins of Carthage, Napoleon at St. Helena, M’Clellan in Europe, have henceforth and forever her sympathy.

She thinks it was precisely five minutes after her return, during which the happy stillness that seemed to rest upon nature without and nature within had whispered faint promises of coming rest – that there suddenly broke upon it a hoarse, deep, unearthly breathing, So hoarse, so deep, so unearthly, and so directly underneath her window, that for about ten seconds, Keturah sat paralyzed. There was but one thing it could be. A traveling menagerie in town had lost its Polish wolf that very day. This was the Polish wolf. 

The horrible panting, like the panting of a famished creature, came nearer, grew louder, grew hoarser. The animal had found a bone in the grass, and was crunching it in his ghastly way. Then she could hear him sniffing at the door.

And Amram’s door was on the lower story! Perhaps wolves climbed in windows!

The awful thought roused Keturah from the stupor of her terror. She was no coward. She would face the fearful sight. She would call and warn him at any risk. She faltered out upon the balcony. She leaned over the railing. She gazed breathlessly down into the darkness.

A cow.

Another cow.

Three cows.

Keturah sat down on the window-sill in the calm of despair.

It was succeeded by a storm. She concludes that she was about five seconds on the passage from her room to the garden. With “hair flotant, and arms disclosed,” like harpies of heraldic device, she rushed up to the invaders – and stopped. Exactly what was to be done? Three great stupid, browsing, contented cows versus one lone, lorn woman. For about one minute Katurah would not have wagered her fortune on the woman. But it is not her custom to “say die,” and after some reflection she ventured on a manful command:

“Go away! Go! go!” The stentorian remark caused a result for which she was, to say the least, unprepared. The creatures coolly turned about and walked directly up to her. To be sure. Why not? Is it not a part of our outrageous Yankee nomenclature to teach cows to come to you when you tell them to go away? How Keturah, country-born and bred, could have even momentarily forgotten so clear and simple a principle of philology remains a mystery to this day. A little reflection convinced her of the only logical way of ridding herself of her guests. Accordingly, she walked a little way behind them and tried again.

“Come here, Sir! Come, good fellow! Wh-e-e! come here!”

Three great wooden heads lifted themselves slowly, and three pair of soft, sleepy eyes looked at her, and the beasts returned to their clover and stood stock-still.

What was to be done? You could go behind and push them. Or you could go in front and pull them by the horns.

Neither of these methods exactly striking Keturah’s fancy, she took up a little chip and threw at them; also a piece of coal and a handful of pebbles. These gigantic efforts proving to be fruitless she sat down on the grass and looked at them. The heartless creatures resisted even that appeal.

At this crisis of her woes one of Keturah’s many brilliant thoughts came to her relief. She hastened upon the wings of the wind to her infallible resort, the wood-shed, and filled her arms up to the chin with pine knots. Thus equipped she started afresh to the conflict. It is recorded that out of twenty of those sticks, thrown with savage and direful intent, only one hit. It is, however, recorded that the enemy dispersed, after being valiantly pursued around the house, out of the front gate (where one stuck, and got through with the greatest difficulty), and for a quarter of a mile down the street. In the course of the rout Keturah tripped on her dress only six times, and fell flat but four. One pleasing little incident gave delightful variety to the scene. A particularly frisky and clover-loving white cow, whose heart yearned after the apples of Sodom, turned about in the road without any warning whatever and showed fight. Keturah adopted a sudden resolution to return home “across lots,” and climbed the nearest stone-wall with considerable empressement. Exactly half-way over she was surprised to find herself gasping among the low-hanging boughs of a butternut-tree, where she hung like Absalom of old, between heaven and earth. She would like to state in this connection that she always had too much vanity to wear a waterfall; so she still retains a portion of her original hair.

However, she returned victorious over the silent dew-laden fields and down into the garden path, where she paced for two hours back and forth among the aromatic perfumes of the great yellow June lilies. There might have been a bit of poetry in it under other circumstances, but Keturah was not poetically inclined on that occasion. The events of the night had so roused her soul within her that exercise unto exhaustion was her sole remaining hope of sleep.

At about two o’clock she crawled faintly up stairs again, and had just fallen asleep with her head on the window-sill, when a wandering dog had come directly under the window, and sit there and bark for half an hour at a rake-handle.

Keturah made no other effort to fight her destiny. Determined to meet it heroically, she put a chair precisely into the middle of the room, and sat up straight in it, till she heard the birds sing. Somewhere about that epoch she fell into a doze with one eye open, when a terrific peal of thunder started at her feet. It was Patsy knocking at the door to announce that her breakfast was cold.

In the ghastly condition of the following day the story was finished and sent off. It was on this occasion that the patient and long-enduring Editor ventured mildly to suggest, that when, by a thrilling and horrible mischance, Seraphina’s lovely hand came between a log of wood and a full force of Theodore’s hatchet the result might have been more disastrous than the loss of a finger-nail. Alas! even his editorial omniscience did not know – how could it? – the story of that night. Keturah forgave him.

It is perhaps worthy of mention that Miss Humdrum appeared promptly at eight o’clock the next morning, with her handkerchief at her eyes.

“My Star-spangled Banner, my nearest and dearest, has met with her decease, Ketury.”

“Indeed! How very sad!”

“Yes, She has met with her decease. Under very peculiar circumstances, Ketury.” “Oh!” said Keturah, hunting for her own handkerchief; finding three in her pocket, she brought them all into requisition.

“And I feel it my duty to inquire,” says Miss Humdrum, “whether it may happen that you know any thing about the event, Ketury.”

“I?” said Keturah, weeping, “I didn’t know she was dead even! Dear Miss Humdrum, you are indeed afflicted.”

“But I feel compelled to say,” pursued Miss Humdrum eying this wretched hypocrite severely, “that my girl Jeminy did hear somebody fire a gun or a cannon or something, out in your garden last night, and she scar’t out of her wits, and my poor cat found cold under the hogshead this morning, Ketury.”

“Miss Humdrum,” said Keturah, “I can not in justice to myself answer such insinuations, further than to say that Amram never allows the gun to go out of his own room. The cannon we keep in the cellar.”

“Oh!” said Miss Humdrum, with horrible suspicion in her eyes. “Well, I hope you haven’t it on your conscience, I’m sure. Good-morning.”

It had been the ambition of Keturah’s life to see a burglar. The second of the memorable nights referred to crowned this ambition by not only one burglar but two. She it was who discovered them, she who frightened them away, and nobody but she ever saw them. She confessed to a natural and unconquerable pride in them. It came about on this wise:

It was one of Keturah’s wide-awake nights, and she had been wandering off into the fields at the foot of the garden, where it was safe and still. There is, by-the-way, a peculiar awe in the utter hush of the earliest morning hours, of which no one can know who has not familiarized himself with it in all its moods. A solitary walk in a solitary place, which the great world sleeping about you, and the great skies throbbing above you, and the long unrest of the panting summer night, fading into the cool of dews, and pure gray dawns, has in it something of what Mr. Robertson calls “God’s silence.”

Once, on one of these lonely rambles, Keturah found away in the fields, under the shadow of an old stone-wall, a baby’s grave. It had no head-stone to tell its story, and the weeds and brambles of many years have overgrown it. Keturah is not of a romantic disposition, especially on her midnight tramps, but she sat down by the little nameless thing, and looked from it to the arch of eternal stars that summer and winter, seed-time and harvest, kept steadfast watch over it, and was very still. It is one of the standing grievances of her life that Amram, while never taking the trouble to go and look, insists upon it was nothing but somebody’s pet dog. She knows better.

On this particular night, Keturah, in coming up from the garden to return to the house, had a dim impression that something crossed the walk in front of her, and disappeared among the rustling trees. The impression was sufficiently strong to keep her sitting up for half an hour at her window, under the feeling that an ounce of prevention was worth a pound of cure. She has indeed been asked why she did not reconnoitre the rustling trees upon the spot. She considers that would have been an exceedingly poor stroke of policy, and of an impolitic thing Keturah is not capable. She sees far and plans deep. Supposing she had gone and been shot through the head, where would have been the fun of her burglars? To yield a life-long aspiration at the very moment that is within grasp was too much to ask, even of Keturah.

Words can not describe the sensations of the moment, when that half-hour was rewarded by the sight of two stealthy, cat-like figures, creeping out from among the trees. A tall man and a little man, and both with very unbanditti-like straw-hats on.

Now if Keturah has a horror in this world, it is that delicate play of the emotions commonly known as “women’s nonsense.” And therefore did she sit still for three mortal minutes, with her burglars making tracks for the kitchen window under her very eyes, in order to prove to herself and an incredulous public, beyond all shadow of doubt or suspicion, that they were robbers and not dreams; actual flesh and blood, not nightmares; unmistakable hats and coats, in a place where hats and coats ought not to be, not clothes-lines and pumps. She tried hard to make Amram and the Paterfamilias out of them. Who knew but they also, by some unheard-of revolution in all the laws of nature, were on an exploring expedition after truant sleep? She struggled manfully after the conviction that they were innocent and unimpeachable neighbors, cutting the short way home across the fields from some remarkably late prayer-meeting. She agonized after the belief that they were two of Patsy’s sweet-hearts, come for the commendable purpose of serenading her.

In fact, they were almost in the house before this remarkable female was prepared to trust the evidence of her own senses.

But when suspense gloomed into certainty, Keturah is happy to say that she was grandly equal to the occasion. She slammed open her blinds with an emphasis, and lightened her lamp with a burnt match.

The men jumped, and dodged, and ran, and hid behind the trees, in the approved manner of burglars, who flee when no woman pursueth; and Keturah, being of far too generous a disposition to enjoy the pleasure of their capture unshared, lost no time in hammering at Amram’s door.

“Amram!”

No answer

“Amram!”

Silence.

“Am-ram!“

“Oh! Ugh! Who-”

Silence again.

“Amram, wake up! Come out here – quick!”

“O-o-oh yes. Who’s there?”

“I”

“I?”

“Keturah.”

“Keturah?”

“Amram, be quick, or we shall all have our throats cut! There are some men in the garden.”

“Hey?”

“Men in the garden!”

“Men?”

“In the garden!“

“Garden?”

Keturah can bear a great deal, but there comes a limit even to her proverbial patience. She burst open the door without ceremony, and is under the impression that Amram received a shaking such as even his tender youth was a stranger to. It effectually woke him up to consciousness, as well as to the gasping and particularly senseless remark, “What on earth was she wringing his neck for?” As if he mightn’t have known! She has the satisfaction of remembering that he was asked in return “Did he expect a solitary unprotected female to keep all his murderers away from him, as well as those wolves she drove off the other night?”

However, there was no time to be wasted in tender words, and before a woman could have winked Amram made his appearance dressed and armed and sarcastically incredulous. Keturah grasped the pistol, and followed him at a respectful distance. Stay in the house and hold the light? Catch her! She would take the light with her, and the house too, if necessary, but she would be in at the death.

She wishes Mr. Darley were on hand, to immortalize the picture they made, scouring the premises after those exceedingly disobliging burglars – especially Keturah, in the green wrapper, with her hair rolled all up in a huge knob on top of her head, to keep it out of the way, and her pistol held out at arm’s-length, pointed, faltering, directly at the stars. She will inform the reader confidentially – tell it not in Gath – of a humiliating discovery she made exactly four weeks afterward, and which she has never before imparted to a human creature – it wasn’t loaded.

Well; they peered behind every door, they glared into every shadow, they squeezed into every crack, they dashed into every corner, they listened at every cranny and crevice, step and turn. But not a burglar! Of course not. A regiment might have run away while Amram was waking up.

Keturah thinks it will hardly be credited that this hopeful person dared to suggest and dares to maintain that it was cats! The insult is rendered more glaring by the fact that Amram is nothing but a Sophomore in Yale College.

But she must draw the story of her afflictions to a close. And lest her “solid” reader’s eyes reject the rambling recital as utterly unworthy the honor of their notice, she is tempted to whittle it down to a moral before saying farewell. For you must know that Keturah has learned several things from her mournful experience.

  1. That every individual of her acquaintance, male and female, aged and youthful, orthodox and heretical, who sleeps regularly nine hours out of the twenty-four, has his or her own especial specimen recipe of a “perfectly harmless anodyne” to offer, with advice thrown in.
  2. That nothing ever yet put her to sleep but a merciful Providence.
  3. A great respect for Job.
  4. That the notion commonly and conscientiously received by very excellent people, that wakeful nights can and should be spent in prayer, religious meditation, and general spiritual growth, is all they know about it. Hours of the extremest bodily and mental exhaustion, when every nerve is quivering as if laid bare, and the surface of the brain burning and whirling to agony, with the reins of control let loose on every evil and every senseless thought, are not the times most likely to be chosen for the purest communion with God. To be sure, King David “remembered Him upon his bed, and meditated upon Him into the night-watches.” Keturah does not undertake to contradict Scripture, but she has come to the conclusion that David was either a very good man, or he didn’t lie awake very often.
  5. That people who can sleep when they want to should keep Thanksgiving every day in the year.

Interpretive Essay (by Skipper Lynch)

Imagine beetles the size of your fist flying at you from all directions, cats dropping off fences, the night filling with whispers of Persian wolves, and strange men in black creeping through your backyard. Now, imagine that your day-to-day married life is so restrictive that these events provide a respite from the mundanity. Perhaps you now have a sense of how Keturah, the protagonist of Elizabeth Stuard Phelps Ward’s “The Voices of the Night”, felt.

But, before we start analyzing the events of the titular night, let’s start with my search through the archives. While looking for a short story to resurrect, I narrowed my search down to works by 19th-century feminist authors. When I initially came across “The Voices of the Night,” I was confused. Instead of criticizing the role of the patriarchy in Keturah’s fate, Phelps blamed Keturah’s troubles on insomnia. However, after careful re-reading, I discovered that this story goes deeper than just insomnia. As Auyoung argues in “What We Mean by Reading,” collecting and applying background knowledge while interpreting a text is fundamental to understanding it fully (Auyoung 95). She advises that readers look for patterns between the texts of an author, so that’s what I did.

After digging through the archive more, I realized that a significant portion of Phelps’s works focused on the impossibility of managing both the harsh expectations of domestic life and one’s personal ambitions13. As Tim Dolin affirms in “Mistress of the House:Women, Property, and Victorian Fiction”, the wider movement for marriage reform in the 19th century led to an upsurge in books centering the struggles of married women. Dolin explains that discontent with the lack of progress in liberating women from marital confines pushed authors to explore “legal and social pressures which continuously press upon and constrict the propertied heroine in her struggle for autonomy” (4). Many novels during Phelps’s time used marriage as a plot point to bring attention to its issues and create tension to drive their plots forward.

With this knowledge in mind, I reread “The Voices of the Night” and considered how marriage was presented. Through this rereading, I discovered a secondary truth hidden behind the facade of insomnia; in this short story, Phelps explores the effects of patriarchal constructs on the livelihoods and autonomy of women in the 19th century.

I first noticed the restrictions that marriage put on Keturah’s ability to entertain herself. The first paragraphs of the story emphasize the passage of time. This builds a feeling of mundanity that reflects how Keturah experiences her own life. During the day chronicled in these paragraphs, the Restorer “goes off in a huff for twenty-four hours”, Keturah listens to a concert at “seven o’clock”, is gone until “two o’clock”, spends “an hour” at Church, and finally returns home at “eight o’clock” (Phelps 1-2). It quickly becomes tedious for the reader to hear about the timetable of her day in such excruciating detail, which gives the reader a peek into how Keturah feels as she lives it every day.

Keturah’s life as a married woman stagnates: she dreams of being a published writer but is instead confined to days of sad bread and gray baths. While describing Keturah’s nightly routine, Phelps writes, “With a despairing sigh she turns the great faucet of the bathtub and holds her head under it till she is upon the verge of a watery grave. This experiment is her forlorn hope” (Phelps 3). The use of the phrases “despairing sigh” and “forlorn hope” elicit feelings of hopelessness, which is then exacerbated by the imagery of a watery grave. Additionally, stating that the faucet is “great” implies that Keturah is small, making her seem vulnerable and piteous. Phelps also describes Keturah’s dinners: “The pantry proved to be well stocked with bread, but not another mortal thing. Now, if there is anything Keturah particularly dislikes, it is dry bread” (Phelps, 3). Even the food she eats is plain and unsatisfying.

Phelps’s naming decisions also reflect the exhausting nature of her relationship. In “What We Mean By Reading”, Auyoung explains that specialized background knowledge can be applied to deconstruct the meaning of stories (Auyoung 100). I do this here with Keturah’s name. Although it’s impossible to confirm Phelps’s intentions when naming the protagonist Keturah, one can speculate that her name is an allusion to the way that marriage binds her. The name Keturah originates from Abraham’s wife in the Hebrew Bible. Rabbi Dr. Analia Bortz believes her name to be associated with the Aramaic term “ketur” which means “knot”, referring to the way that Keturah’s sexual relations were restricted (or tied) to Abraham. Similarly to the biblical Keturah, the Keturah from “The Voices of the Night” is bound to her husband. This makes it difficult for her to pursue any of her ambitions outside of marriage.

The only chances that she has to pursue these ambitions occur during horrible, borderline-supernatural events. Near the end of the second night, Keturah encounters a group of burglars in her backyard. Rather than seeing them as a threat or inconvenience, Keturah embraces the intruders as an opportunity for a novel experience. Phelps writes, “It had been the ambition of Keturah’s life to see a burglar” (Phelps 5). Her life is rather uneventful – she’s confined to the menial tasks of a housewife – so she treasures such a diversion from the mundanity of domestic life. The juxtaposition between a burglary and a chance for excitement emphasizes how terrible Keturah’s day-to-day life is and shows us how much she craves escape.

Keturah isn’t just trapped by marriage, she’s also trapped by 19th century social expectations for women. Phelps explores the confining nature of Victorian-era norms for married women from the opening line. Phelps writes, “Keturah wishes to state primarily that she is good natured” (Phelps 1). The fact that we learn about Keturah’s calm temperament before anything else is intentional: Phelps wants us to know that Keturah prioritizes being viewed as “good natured” over everything. Without this prelude, Keturah fears that readers will “suspect her capable not only of allowing her angry passions to rise, but of permitting them to boil over ‘in tempestuous fury wild and unrestrained’” (Phelps 1). For Keturah, being perceived as hostile is the worst outcome.

Furthering the idea that strict social norms forced married Victorian-era women to prioritize social appearances, Phelps concludes the introductory paragraph with “[Keturah] would also add, from… motives of self-defense, that she is not in the habit of swearing” (Phelps 1). Once again, Keturah is mainly concerned with preserving her image as a docile, pure woman – in this case, one who does not swear.

In this opening section, Phelps employs free indirect style to let Keturah’s voice come through more naturally in the writing. As H. Porter Abbott explains, this literary tool allows writers to embed the internal thoughts of their characters in narration. Here, Phelps uses free indirect style to capture Keturah’s own perceptions of what femininity should look like. Phelps describes the reader as “the be-ribboned and be-spangled and be-rouged frequenter of the ball and soirée… oh, to be sure, you are very pretty!” (Phelps 1). Although it’s the narrator who is talking, the typical objectivity of third person narration dissolves into the subjectivity of the first person and we see how much Keturah values prettiness and beauty as a form of social status. General Victorian society has ingrained the idea that beauty is directly correlated with respect into Keturah’s perception of the world, and in turn, us (the readers).

The restrictive nature of these social norms manifests in the myth of “women’s hysteria”. Women who act outside of the status quo are at risk of being labeled hysterical, forcing women to be cautious of the claims they make – even when it puts them in danger. At first, when Keturah spots the burglars in the garden, she doubts her own perception: “They were almost in the house before this remarkable female was prepared to trust the evidence of her own senses” (Phelps 6). Given the tendency for men to write off women’s concerns as “hysterics” during this time, it’s no surprise that Keturah struggles to trust her senses. She’s unconsciously accepted the idea that she’s prone to imagining things, costing her valuable minutes and endangering her life. The exploration of internalized sexism in the form of women’s hysteria portrays the dangers of patriarchal social norms.

Keturah’s husband also buys into the idea of “women’s hysteria”, claiming that she’s imagining things. After searching through the house, he “dared to suggest and dares to maintain that [what Keturah saw in the garden] was cats!” (Phelps 6). Instead of trusting his wife and taking the burglary seriously, Amram writes her off as overdramatic and too reactive. Once again, the tendency for men to dismiss the emotions of women as hysteria prevents them from taking women’s concerns seriously.

In a world which so tragically mirrors Phelps’s, it’s important for modern feminists to grapple with the call for domestic reform in “The Voices of the Night”. Patriarchal institutions still strip women of their personal autonomy, prevent them from realizing their ambitions, and tell them they’re hysterical. With the fall of Roe V. Wade and the subsequent criminalization of abortions across the country, bodily autonomy and agency in motherhood is under threat. Beyond the horrors of modern legislation, women remain confined to subservient positions through marriages. CNBC reporter Stacy Francis explains that “A large number of American women stay in marriages that are unhealthy and even border on dysfunctional due to financial insecurity and stress, and the ongoing gender pay gap.” Inequitable wage practices still confine modern-day women to the domestic sphere. Additionally, “women’s hysteria” still pervades interpersonal relationships. Even today, men claim that women are “overreacting” or “crazy” as a way to dismiss the problems that they bring up. Perhaps by understanding the frustrations and struggles of Victorian era women through stories like “The Voices of the Night”, we can better understand how to move forward in a world that’s scarily similar.

Interactive Fiction: Creator’s Note (by Kaylee Barrera)

Coming into this project, both Skip and I were drawn to making interactive fiction; We had both found interactive fiction for our Short Assignment 3 and came to appreciate them as a compelling form of storytelling. During our search for potential contenders for our final project, we searched for stories specifically to create interactive fiction. As I noted in my Short Assignment 3, I believed interactive fiction worked best with stories that had good re-readability or re-playability, which were stories with compelling enough plots to draw readers or players back in. We initially thought stories with horror or mystery themes could work best, but our final choice, “The Voices in the Night” by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, falls into neither category. However, “The Voices in the Night” tells a story of two surreal nights with the main character, Keturah, making unexpected decisions. For example, Keturah’s choice to kill the first beetle was a surprising decision even for her as it is stated that “[n]ever before or since has she been known to accomplish it.”14 The whole plot of Phelps’s work is based around a woman who experiences some of the most wildest nights of her mundane life, which we believed could be a good basis to create an interactive fiction as the players navigate these bizarre nights.

Taking an old 19th-century short story and transforming it into a more modern interactive fiction requires a change of modes. As Linda Hutcheon defines in her excerpt “Beginning to Theorize Adaptation” from her book “A Theory of Adaptation,”15 the short story would be a “telling” mode while the interactive fiction would be an “interacting” mode. As a telling mode, our experiences as readers of the original “The Voices of the Night” is mostly based on our imagination as we must interpret the text. On the other hand, our interactive fiction, as an “interactive” mode, allows us to physically enter the world of the short story and act within it. This change of mode forced me to re-evaluate different parts of the story to see how we can adapt it to offer a new perspective of the original work. As a narrative text, the original story is a static piece of work: the story cannot be changed and we know the plot will play out as we re-read. However, interactive fiction allows the players to have an influence over the story.

With this in mind, I thought of ways to adapt a static piece of work into a more dynamic one. The most straightforward choice was creating a “choose-your-own-adventure” type of interactive fiction where the player could relive Keturah’s surreal night adventures and decide which routes to take based on important plot choices. Since “The Voices in the Night” is a short story, there is not a great amount of content to work with. As a result, I planned on expanding the story to have two different endings. Each choice would accumulate a certain amount of points that would lead to the story’s “True Ending” or an “Alternate Ending.” The “True Ending” would be achieved if the player chooses the same choices Keturah makes in the original story, while the “Alternate Ending” would be achieved if the player deviates from the original plot.

In brainstorming for these new endings, I decided to use this interactive fiction to further highlight Phelps’s underlying feminist message in “The Voices in the Night.” Around Phelps’s time, the idea of “True Womanhood” was a prevalent ideology. As defined by Barbara Welter in “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860,”16 women were expected to remain pious, pure, domestic, and submissive. Welter writes, “[t]he true woman’s place was unquestionably by her own fireside – as daughter, sister, but most of all as wife and mother. Therefore domesticity was among the virtues most prized…” Domesticity, referring to the idea that women should be in charge of the home and family life, is a pressing idea in “The Voices in the Night.” In the beginning pages, the readers can see Keturah live her mundane and dull experiences as a wife at home, with her struggle to sleep indicating how boring and repetitive her life is. Thus, the two surreal adventures Keturah experiences juxtapose her monotonous life, offering a new thrill. This is evident near the end of the story where it is stated that “[i]t had been the ambition of Keturah’s life to see a burglar,” and her dream had come true when she spotted two robbers sneaking around her house at night; she is desperately wishing for some excitement in her life. However, this fantasy is cut short when her husband, too slow and ignorant to get out of bed, allows the robbers time to escape.

Mixing in these feminist themes, I planned for the “True Ending” to be the end where the player, after making the similar bizarre decisions Keturah makes in the original, will be empowered enough to seek a more extraordinary adventure, and goes to chase the robbers herself without her husband. If the player received the “Alternate Ending,” in which the player chooses different choices than Keturah, the player would not feel empowered enough to take on the robbers and must rely on her husband for safety. These two endings also drew inspiration from Frances Watkins Harper’s short story, “The Two Offers.”17 “The Two Offers” follows a pair of cousins, Laura and Jannete, where the former enters a loveless marriage and the latter remains single. Laura ends up dying a heartbreaking death from loneliness at the end of the story, while Jannete, a single woman, is able to experience more freedom without the chains of marriage. Harper uses her short story to warn women not to rely on their marriage and instead seek to fulfill their lives in their own ways. Ultimately, the player as Keturah in our interactive fiction is offered their own two choices, like Harper’s characters, one where the player is able to attain a sense of freedom and enjoyment and the other where the player remains trapped in their marriage.

Ultimately, due to a time constraint, I was only able to implement a small fraction of the story as a prototype. I started the interactive fiction during the beginning of the first surreal night, where the player goes to write to deal with their insomnia. This was a few pages into the story. However, I felt that the beginning parts of “The Voices of the Night” were insignificant to the rest of the plot, so I decided to cut this introduction out of the interactive fiction. From a creator standpoint, I wanted the players to start the interactive fiction in a more eventful way rather than having them trudge through unimportant story details where they could easily lose interest.

I implemented two major choices in the prototype: whether or not the player kills the first beetle on their first try, and whether or not the player kills the neighbor’s cat. The first choice about the beetle is a mandatory decision, as the whole first night starts with this first beetle. If the player kills the beetle on their first try, they gain extra points towards their score. If not, the game enters a loop where the story doesn’t progress until the player kills the beetle or the story forces them to. With each loop, the points the player gains decrease.

Once the player kills the first beetle, they then have to deal with 10 more beetles that come to bother them. The player is then presented with four different choices: throw them out of the window, drown them, kill them, or trap them. The player must cycle through all four of these choices for the story to progress. The order does not affect the outcome of the story; However, this cycle is meant to simulate the hopelessness Keturah experiences when trying to get rid of the beetles. Ultimately, the player, like Keturah, must give up and just leave them alone.

The last major choice I implemented into the prototype was about the neighbor’s cat. In the original “The Voices in the Night,” Keturah makes a surprising decision to throw a log at her neighbor’s cat. If the player also chooses to kill the cat, the player receives extra points and also unlocks a (theoretical) extra cutscene later in the game where the player will be interrogated by their neighbor. In this theoretical cutscene, the player can either cover up their actions (the canon choice) or admit to killing the cat. If the player leaves the cat alone, they lose out on this integral part of the story.

While I wasn’t able to spend more time on the game, I had some more ideas in mind about more major choices the player could make. This includes how the player decides to deal with the cows on their lawn and how they decide to deal with the bandits. The last choice leads into the player’s ending, and whether or not the player has garnered enough points to reach the “True Ending.” Also due to a lack of time, I was unable to add any compelling audio or visuals to my interactive fiction. I used Twine, an engine to create interactive fiction, and was able to add transitions and timed responses; I specifically wrote these in my code in order to eventually add some sound effects (like an insect buzz when the first beetle comes in). The visual and audio components of an interactive mode are one of its major advantages, as these details can enrich the players into the story beyond what a telling mode can do. Thus, I wanted to be able to utilize them well if given the time.

I have compiled the prototype along with Skip and I’s project materials that can be accessed after the first playthrough of the interactive fiction. If players are interested in the original work or our interpretations, they can easily access it through our website. Having digitalized Phelps’s work and creating an interactive fiction has given “The Voices of the Night” a new life; In a digital world where the Internet is easily accessible and storytelling has evolved into fun new forms like interactive fiction, republishing and adapting Phelps’s work allows for it to thrive beyond the 19th-century.

Link to the interactive fiction.

License

The text of “The Voices of the Night” is in the public domain.

All editorial material by Kaylee Barrera and Skipper Lynch is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0

  1. Periodical Literature in Nineteenth-century America. United Kingdom, University Press of Virginia, 1995.↩︎
  2. “Editor’s Study,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (1887), p.484. Internet Archive.↩︎
  3. Coultrap-McQuin, Susan. Doing Literary Business: American Women Writers in the Nineteenth Century. United States, University of North Carolina Press, 2000.↩︎
  4. Sanders, Valerie. Feminism and Literature in the Long Nineteenth Century. 2016, https://www.routledgehistoricalresources.com/feminism/essays/feminism-and-literature-in-the-long-nineteenth-century. Routledge Historical Resources.↩︎
  5. “Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward,” American Women Writers: A Critical Reference Guide from Colonial Times to the Present, vol. 4, ed. Lina Mainero (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1981), 326.↩︎
  6. Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward”. Encyclopedia Britannica, 24 Jan. 2023, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Elizabeth-Stuart-Phelps-Ward. Accessed 10 May 2023.↩︎
  7. “About.” Harper’s Magazine , 21 July 2020, harpers.org/about/.↩︎
  8. Phelps Ward, Elizabeth Stuart. “The Voices of the Night.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (1866). Internet Archive.↩︎
  9. a four-volume religious series entitled the Kitty Brown books↩︎
  10. She discusses this in her semi-autobiographical short story, “The Angel Over the Right Shoulder”↩︎
  11. I found this story through an article by Ruth Nestvold after searching for works Phelps wrote pertaining to marriage↩︎
  12. Phelps encouraged women to burn their corsets↩︎
  13. stories featuring this trope include “The Story of Avis” and “Doctor Zay”↩︎
  14. “The Voices of the Night,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (1866), p.789. Internet Archive.↩︎
  15. O’Flynn, Siobhan, and Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. United Kingdom, Routledge, 2013.↩︎
  16. Welter, Barbara. “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860.” American Quarterly, vol. 18, no. 2, 1966, pp. 151–74. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2711179. Accessed 15 May 2023.↩︎
  17. Jasmine, Taylor. “‘the Two Offers’ by Frances Watkins Harper – Full Text.” Literary Ladies Guide, 16 June 2020, www.literaryladiesguide.com/full-texts-of-classic-works/the-two-offers-by-frances-watkins-harper/.↩︎