SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen):

A fictionalized autobiography and reform novel, Mary Lyndon offers an account of Mary Nichols' first 45 years, focusing mostly on her first, unhappy marriage and separation that resulted in her social ostracism. The eponymous protagonist reminisces about her childhood in New England, which were marked by poor health, her acquaintances and friendship with the Transcendentalists, her efforts to sustain herself and her daughter, and her interest in and involvement with several reform movements, most notably the water-cure or hydropathy (hydrotherapy). “Health,” Mary asserts at one point, is but “another name for harmony and holiness” (360).

While the narrator remarks early in the narrative that “[p]eople are very much in the dark at this day respecting the laws of health” (14), the question of women's rights and the injustices of patriarchal marriage often take precedence over questions of health. These emerge intermittently, especially towards the end of the novel, when Mary settles in New York and slowly gains prominence as a water-cure practitioner. It is also in New York that she meets her second husband, Mr. Vincent (Thomas Low Nichols). While this later marriage is based on true love and companionship, she describes her first marriage as miserably stifling, “a struggle and a problem” (135), “bondage” (130), and a form of “slavery” (129). She condemns the legal and material conditions to which women are subjected: “Here is the key to the dungeon of woman – man owns the property” (151). Mrs. Brenton, an acquaintance, deems the plight of women to be worse than that of slaves: “'Did you ever hear of a certain class of people down South, who wish very much to go to Canada, and yet have merry dances and songs every night?' said she, laughing more lightly. 'There is no Canada for us; I know of no place that I could escape to in this world'” (152). Mary resorts to this analogy, when she writes of her first husband: “I was willing to work for him as a bond slave, and faithfully give up my earnings, as I had ever done, but the punishment of living with him was like Cain's, greater than I could bear” (156). She speaks of “marriage as annihilation of woman, as often the grave of her heart and the destruction of her health and usefulness” (166). Mary explicitly advocates for women's right to divorce, implicitly continuing the slavery analogy when she asserts that the “liberty of protest against a bill of sale, called a marriage certificate, was the beginning of a great germination of individual liberty for woman” (163). She concludes that “no true freedom can be assured to woman in any sect that makes marriage indissoluble” (163). The narrator, considering herself “sepultured alive, because a man owned me by law” (210) and vehemently insisting on the “self-ownership of woman” (214), recants some of her rhetoric later, when she concedes that “[c]hattel bondage is the lowest of all – but those who are oppressed by marriage, and find no escape but by loss of name and fame, food and children, may well be excused for seeing a parallel to the institution of marriage in that of slavery” (269). Mary condemns the social ostracism she confronts, particularly in liberal and radical circles, after leaving her husband. She “became so unpopular,” she writes, “that the most liberal newspaper in the town, for which I had furnished unpaid tales and poems for a considerable time, refused to receive my contributions. The majority of the people hated and feared a poor, pale, shadowy woman, who was breathing prayers, and making efforts, for a true life for herself and all others, even under the very blight of death” (167).

Women's rights and questions of health intersect in the issue of dress reform, and the narrator laments “our pale, shadowy, fastidious wives in long clothes, who shrink with equal pain from a run up hill, a Bloomer dress, and the suspicion of masculinity” (16). She describes her sister Emma's practice of “tight lacing” and her neglect of proper winter clothing, which results in treatment for her “cold,” including bloodletting and the administration of opium and “spermaceti and iron in a blue powder” (35), but to no avail: “The minister came, and asked if she repented of her sins. He did not ask her if she repented having committed suicide by the torture of corsets, and cold, and other cruelties against her frail life. His decalogue contained no command against compressing the lungs” (36). Young Mary herself undergoes a similar treatment, after the family moves from fictional Greenwood, Massachusetts, to Graydon, Vermont: “How weak, and entirely good-for-nothing I felt, as I emerged from that learned doctor's care, I leave for those to imagine who can reason from analogy. Most people have made similar escapes, and a great many have not escaped, or have been caught again” (53). Another physician is much more successful when, at the suggestion of Mary's father, he prescribes what would become known as a "water-cure" treatment: “[T]he doctor approved of my father's remedy, with the modification that my mother was to pour a pail of cold water over me in the early morning, and then wrap me in a blanket, and put me in the warm bed. I slept always after it, an hour of the sweetest sleep I had at any time” (57-58). But even this physician cannot shake what the narrator perceives to be the intrinsic deficiencies of his profession: “My physician knew that close dressing was an evil, but he did not know that green tea was a poison, and he did not imagine that my little remaining strength was warring against the medicines that he had given, in the futile endeavor to poison me into health” (66). In addition, the food he prescribes “was composed of the most unhealthy compounds that people make for invalids, to coax them to eat. Highly-seasoned meats, mince pies, stuffings, jams, jellies, and other preserves, increased daily my bad digestion, and my spiritual temptations and disasters” (66). Towards the end of the novel, it is Mary's expertise in the water cure and her vegan diet that prompt one of her acquaintances to suggest that Mary should live with his physically weak sister: “'Your simple mode of living on vegetables, fruits, and grains, your cold bathing, and the magnetism of your affection, will restore my sister's health'” (303). The rented house soon becomes a kind of water-cure center, where Mary offers lectures, lessons, and medical advice while establishing “a pure diet” regime of “grains and fruits, some varieties of vegetables, and milk and eggs, with water for drink” (310).

The question of proper nutrition and diet, like health in general, is broached intermittently. Mary first mentions her veganism only in passing, well into the novel, when she remarks that she “had for years abstained from all animal food, and had even a Jewish and Braminical horror of pork, and as Swedenborg had been especially recommended to me, because for thirty years of his life he had lived as simply as Plato and Pythagoras, and had said that the eating of flesh was profane” (152). Later, she recounts that her parents used to allow her “the privilege of absenting myself from their table, which was furnished in the usual manner, with flesh, fish, and fowl, and was a more grievous offense to me than I chose to express to them” (206). In this connection, she mentions that she “had heard Sylvester Graham (Doctor, by courtesy) lecture on Hygiene” (276). Veganism is also one of the topics discussed during a picnic and subsequent symposium with several Transcendentalist luminaries, Mr. Mooney and Mr. Lang (A. Bronson Alcott and Charles Lane, respectively) among them.

Mr. Lang is described as “a tall, hard, Scotch-looking man, who might be a communist, as he had the credit of being, but of whom, I was sure, I could never ask my own, either as a right or as a charity. He was keenly taking a survey of the scene. He looked as though he was appraising the oaks for shipping, measuring the sap in the maple trees, and calculating the number of pounds of sugar it would make. Such a commercial countenance hardly fitted the idea of communism” (179). Mr. Mooney, too, is described as “another bland” but - in contrast to Mr. Lang - “kindly communist” (188) and even “a veritable harbinger of the millennium” (201). Lang is portrayed as dogmatic, inflexible, narrow-minded, “very hard and tyrannical” (208), and utterly unlikable (206-212), preaching universal love but not acting upon his words. Further, Mary is displeased with the food at the picnic: “There were stuffed hams boiled, roast chickens, sausages, and mince pies, and other horrors compounded of the corpses of animals, with a great quantity of cakes, fruits, and other delicacies” (180). But there are other vegans present, most notably Mr. Lynde (Henry Gardiner Wright), who explains:

“It is not beautiful to slay and eat animals. Death may not be an evil to the ox, or the lamb, or any of our mute friends, the brutes, but it is an evil to us. We love to think of the earth as the garden of God. The idea of an Eden life can not include the thought of slaughter. In a paradise of fruits and flowers would any man dip his hands in blood? Would any mother bind her son apprentice to a butcher? Would any one make himself a mausoleum for the dead, and carry on his countenance boils and blotches, as epitaphs of diseased animals, slain and buried there? I can not find liberty in my spirit to eat flesh. To me, bread is the food of mental and muscular strength, and fruit is the food of love and beauty” (184).

“As it was,” the narrator continues, “a pure diet, and the sanitary virtues of water, were the topics on which Mr. Lynde gave me much desirable information. For twelve years he had excluded animal food from his bill of fare, being, at the commencement of his abstinence, given up to die of a scrofulous disease. A distinguished physician told him that his only chance for life, in any degree of health and comfort, was in living on a grain and fruit diet. Subsequently he became a patient and pupil of Priessnitz, and added the good of Water-Cure to his pure and simple diet” (197). She later credits Mr. Lynde as one of the major influences on her understanding and practice of the water-cure in addition to Priessnitz and Swedenborg (317).

Of the subsequent symposium, Mary critically remarks: “The meeting was peculiar. It was a party of well-dressed ladies and gentlemen, most of whom were considered 'thinkers.' Many of them were styled 'reformers,' and every body knows something of these world-menders, who have made a division of labor (or hobbies, as some say); and one has chosen 'abolition,' which means denunciation of negro slavery; another 'peace,' which means the abolition of war; another 'non-resistance,' which means that no physical force or violence is to be used” (201). She also gives an account of Mr. Mooney's presentation of a planned, self-sustained community (Alcott introducing Fruitlands), emphasizing “that no law, and no government but self-government, was to be recognized; that no violence was to be used toward man or beast,” and that “no flesh could be eaten, and no woolen garments could be worn” (202). Mary remarks that while Mooney “rested on Providence,” his “ultimate providence … was an excellent wife, who clothed and fed him as a baby, and reverenced him as a divinity” (203). She also provides a short, fairly unsympathetic account of the failed experiment at Fruitlands and Lang's subsequent stay with the Shakers and ultimate return to England, concluding that “[s]ome truthful utterance of principles, and many clear and cutting criticisms come ever and anon across the Atlantic from this man. Whether he has yet learned that no one can be free while controlling another's will or act, I have no knowledge” (223).