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“With Badinage and Repartee”: Freeing Women's Talk Through Capitola in Southworth's The Hidden Hand, Or Capitola the Madcap

E.D.E.N Southworth’s novel The Hidden Hand, or Capitola the Madcap, was one of the most popular novels of nineteenth-century America. The enthusiastic public response to the first serialized version in 1868 led to a second serialization in 1883 and finally publication in book form in 1888. The mock-heroic tone and fantastical plot give the novel a playful inflection and contribute to the novel’s popularity with contemporary readers and its disapproval among contemporary critics. Critics generally aimed their condemnation of Southworth at her excessive style and subject matter, criticism only amplified by her popularity that reviewers found “in general frightening” (Naranjo-Huebl 124). The negative tone of reviews reveals the largely held opinion, famously expressed by Hawthorne as the “mob of scribbling women,” that “literature written by women should adhere to a more restricted code of propriety than other fiction” (Naranjo-Huebl 124).1 Much of the recent scholarly work on The Hidden Hand reads the subversive undertones of the novel as derived from precisely what reviewers seemed to fear, even if implicitly: Southworth’s novels