Eyeing her sister Cassandra, Veronica Morgeson asks for Georges de Buffon's multivolume encyclopedia, proclaiming, “I want to classify Cass.” Veronica's indication of how difficult it may be to categorize even one person points to the preoccupation many characters in Elizabeth Stoddard's The Morgesons (1862) have with explanatory labels. This preoccupation is understandable, for the world in which these characters live is so fluid and bewildering that what the novel's protagonist, Cassandra Morgeson, calls “comprehension of self” and “comprehension of life” (9) is never fully available to even the most observant of them. Much of the power of The Morgesons, I will suggest, lies in its complication of assumptions about “life” and “self” which prevailed in the 1860s. Its characters - and its readers - are challenged to recognize that neither life nor self is actually commensurate with existing concepts and that making sense of both entails ceaseless intellectual and emotional work, work which reliance on conventional classification impedes.

These challenges distinguish The Morgesons from most contemporary American novels, including the popular domestic fiction of the era such as Susan Warner’s best-selling novel The Wide,Wide World (1850).Women like Warner and Harriet Beecher Stowe embraced both Christian doctrine and the ideology of domesticity. Viewing their fiction as a combination of didacticism and entertainment, they told readers what to think and feel, soliciting readers’ identification with their narratives by featuring accessible characters and familiar situations.