色片软件免费

When Seaver College English professor Maire Mullins received a letter indicating her book had been rejected from yet another publishing house, she refused to despair. She continued to send out the manuscript until she received a yes鈥�not because she was desperate to tell her own story, but because she was determined to share someone else鈥檚. 

Mullins was fighting to uncover the true story of Hannah Whitman Heyde, a 19th-century woman who had suffered intimate partner violence at the hands of her husband, notable Vermont landscape artist Charles Louis Heyde. To accommodate his career, the couple moved from one scenic outpost to the next, which moved Whitman Heyde away from her family and prevented her from making friends. Isolated from her loved ones, she wrote countless letters to her mother and her siblings recounting her experiences of domestic abuse in great detail. These letters, which were carefully preserved by her older brother, poet Walt Whitman, shared a victim鈥檚 perspective, which, as experienced by many others in that time period, had to become highly publicized before it was deemed worthy of attention. 

鈥淪he was alone,鈥� says Mullins. 鈥淪he didn鈥檛 have community, and she didn鈥檛 have rootedness, but she did have one thing. She had her letters.鈥� 

Whitman biographers have historically mischaracterized his sister as a neurotic and hypochondriac and for years failed to capture the complexity of the emotional, psychological, and physical abuse she experienced at home. As her depictions of her ongoing traumatic experiences painted a sobering picture, Mullins wanted the world to see the contents of Whitman Heyde鈥檚 letters in order to finally shed light on her actual lived experience. 

In December 2021, Bucknell University Press published Hannah Whitman Heyde: The Complete Correspondence, the first complete collection of Whitman Heyde鈥檚 letters. Edited by Mullins and grounded on her years of research, the book provides a vital counternarrative to existing portrayals of Whitman Heyde鈥檚 character. 

Mullins, a Walt Whitman scholar and the Blanche E. Seaver Chair of English Literature, became interested in Hannah鈥檚 story when she first felt the disconnect between what Whitman biographers wrote about her and the contents of her letters. 

鈥淲hitman biographies maintained that she was hysterical and kept a messy house,鈥� Mullins says. 鈥淭here were these two stories out there鈥攖he story that the biographers told and the story that Hannah told. And 迟丑补迟鈥檚 where my research began.鈥� 

Publishing the letters was a labor of love for Mullins. Through the support of the Seaver Undergraduate Research Program and the Academic Year Undergraduate Research Initiative, Mullins and several students learned how to code from senior application analyst Jason Eggleston in order to digitize Whitman Heyde鈥檚 words. The project first began as an online collection of letters, but Mullins quickly realized that the entirety of Whitman Heyde鈥檚 correspondence was worthy of being published, a fact that editors at various scholarly presses did not initially accept. 

鈥淭his is a project that goes beyond Whitman studies,鈥� Mullins says. 鈥淗er correspondence gives us a deeper understanding of what would happen to women in the 19th century who were experiencing intimate partner violence. I can鈥檛 tell you how elated I was when Bucknell University Press wrote to me and said they were interested. I wasn鈥檛 happy for myself. I was happy for Hannah. Her story was finally going to be told.鈥� 

Despite her consistent communication with her brother and her detailed descriptions of the abuse she suffered, Whitman biographers have historically referred to another source when painting the picture of her life: her husband鈥檚 letters. In fact, Charles鈥� letters, each one presenting a counternarrative for each of his wife鈥檚, were intentionally crafted to undermine his wife鈥檚 reality鈥攐ne that he consistently challenged and denied. In his letters, he painted his wife as messy, a terrible housekeeper, and a hypochondriac. He described her as friendless, neurotic, and a burden. His story was the one biographers read, a phenomenon Mullins describes as common throughout history. 

鈥淰ery often, biographers looking at correspondence will believe one correspondent more than the other,鈥� Mullins shares. 鈥淲hat I know to be true is how the Whitman family responded to Charles. There鈥檚 a word you never see in Walt Whitman鈥檚 correspondence, except when referring to Charles: 鈥榮nake.鈥欌�� 

Yet, biographers took particular phrases out of Charles鈥� letters to characterize Hannah. 

鈥淭his is a revisionist story of a woman who not only was abused by her husband but who had her history linked to the abusive narrative that he put forward about her,鈥� Mullins says. 

Hannah Whitman Heyde was an educated woman when education and literacy were becoming increasingly commonplace for women. In fact, a mutual appreciation for education is likely what brought Charles Louis Heyde and Hannah Whitman Heyde together. In an ironic twist, her education and her literacy are what ultimately empowered her to tell of his abuse. More than a century after her death, another woman of letters devoted years of her life to lifting the narrative veil Hannah Whitman Heyde鈥檚 husband had crafted. And now, Hannah's story is at last being told.  

Hannah Whitman Heyde image: courtesy, Walt Whitman House, Camden, NJ