The Hidden Hand or, Capitola the Madcap by E.D.E.N. Southworth

Feb 1, 2012
Stetson Thacker

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This article details the plot of the infrequently studied yet excellent novel, The Hidden Hand. Southworth has many interesting points about gender roles.

The Hidden Hand or, Capitola the Madcap (1859) by E. D. E. N. Southworth was an extremely popular novel during its time, resulting in multiple editions, but the book is also a great satiric piece that distinguishes Southworth as “a brilliantly comedic popular analyst of cultural stereotypes and expectations.” Southworth felt “a deep personal sense of outrage at the oppressions and deprivations of her own life and the lives of the women she saw around her,” provoking her to construct a narrative in which she has a female protagonist, Capitola Le Noir, who has been “countersocialized” under male expectations, which rescues her from a “conventional woman’s life” and being “taught obedience.”

However, Southworth also saw value in and appreciated many conventional female duties and characteristics, which results in the conformity of Capitola to several feminine ideals. Consequently, Southworth employs her novel to argue for the creation of a new social role for women, which is termed “home-free”— allowing women’s potential to be released from the “burdens of domesticity and its attendant personal obligation” and “to live freely and self-reliantly.”

Capitola Le Noir

Capitola Le Noir is evidently a unique combination of stereotypically masculine and feminine traits; she is a heroic adventurer yet also a sensual and ideal woman. It is important to pay attention to her masculine socialization— she was kidnapped by her uncle and then essentially sold into abject poverty, where she dressed as a boy to make money and feel safe on the streets at night. Cap says that “if [she] were a boy, [she] might carry packages and shovel in coal, and do lots of jobs by day, and sleep without terror by night” and goes on to say that she is “bitter against fate for not making [her] a boy;” this strong language reveals Southworth deep anger over the financial inequalities and sexual harassment inherent to the lives of women.

Southworth’s main character simply puts on boy’s clothes, cuts her hair, and puts on a cap, and her problems disappear overnight; the simplicity of this solution intensifies the iniquity of guarding certain opportunities from women but not men. Moreover, Cap’s treatment as a male during this time gives her the tools she needs to evade the oppression and trivialization of men later on in the novel such as Black Donald.

Thwarting Black Donald

Cap’s masculine qualities are used to distinguish her from the submissiveness and obedience of her sex, but again Cap is not a radicalized by this depiction because “she conforms to the conventional pattern for female protagonists of the era” in several important ways: she is very virtuous and once she attains a happy marriage her story in concluded. For instance, at one point in the novel Black Donald hides in her room in order to rape her and steal her virtuosity. Cap knows that in this situation that she is “entirely in the power of Black Donald” because of his domineering physique and she is also tempted by her genuine attraction to him, but she employs her feminine and sensual charm and persuades Black Donald into a false sense of comfort, then traps him in a pit beneath her room.

Southworth uses this scene to illustrate that virtuosity, religious and moral, are deeply important to her and that a woman can easily possess virtue while denying submissiveness, which Cap has done by incapacitating her captor. Cap also marries and enjoys a good “amount of human felicity” in her marriage to Herbert Greyson and seems to be accepting of a domestic role.

Gender Roles

Southworth’s novel depends deeply on the portrayal and rearrangement of gender roles and expectations, specifically those of her protagonist, Cap. The masculine traits given to Cap allow her and would allow other women to have financial and sexual freedom and safety and protection from manipulation and oppression, which is accomplished by avoiding submissiveness and dependency.

The feminine traits given to Cap allow her and would allow other women to still accept a role in the domestic sphere, be happy in marriage, and continue to be virtuous, pious members of their religion. The balance between masculine and feminine identities in Cap allow Southworth to assert “home-free” as a position that women should be able to access in nineteenth century America.