SOURCE: “Competing Narratives in Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Story of Avis,” in American Literary Realism, Vol. 26, No. 1, Fall 1993, pp. 60-75.

In the following essay, Wilson explores the ways in which The Story of Avis is a multi-textual early feminist story.

Over the last two decades Elizabeth Stuart Phelps' The Story of Avis has received deserved attention as a pioneering feminist text. Writing from her observations and experiences, Phelps produced a text which argues that marriage can have a devastating effect upon the aspirations of women. The narrative that traverses the text is one of entrapment in marriage and its consequences. At the end, after many critical comments on men and marriage, Avis knows where the fix the blame for her artistic failure: “her feeling for that one man … had eaten into and eaten out the core of her life.”¹ Many critics agree. Carol Farley Kessler attributes Avis' failure...