SOURCE: “The Riddle of the Sphinx: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Story of Avis,” in LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, Vol. 9, No. 1, September 1998, pp. 31-64.

In the following essay, Barker argues that The Story of Avis is Phelps's feminist revision of Nathaniel Hawthorne's representation of the woman artist in his The Marble Faun.

In the late nineteenth century the woman artist was in the ambiguous position of serving both as a sign of the decline of cultural standards and as an emblem of cultural redemption through proper education. Nowhere is this dual potential better exemplified than in Nathaniel Hawthorne's representation of the woman painter in The Marble Faun (1860). Hawthorne depicts the woman painter as having the ability either to aid in or to reverse the process of cultural evolution. If, as an original artist, she attempts to promote her own work, she lowers the standards of art, creating an audience...