Given its sentimental trappings, readers have failed to appreciate the gynocentric plot of Harriet Beecher Stowe's The Pearl of Orr's Island. Here, empowered as agents, two women exchange a man between them-a loving, sentimental gifting that upends the “traffic in women” that underwrites traditional, patriarchal constructions of marriage.

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© 2014 by The New England Quarterly
2014
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