Woman's work in America

by Unknown

In “Temple House,” “Two Men,” and “The Morgesons,” the peculiarly powerful works of Mrs. Stoddard, the central figures do not seem necessarily of any particular time or country. Their local habitation, however, is impressively painted; with a few swift vigorous strokes, the old coast towns spring up before us; the very savor of the air is imparted. Minor characters strongly smack of the soil; old Cuth, in “Two Men,” dying “silently and firmly, like a wolf”; Elsa, in the same book. There are scenes of a superb, fierce power,—that of the wreck in “Temple House,” for instance. The curt and repressed style, the ironic humor of Mrs. Stoddard, serve to grapple her work to the memory as with hooks of steel; it is as remote as possible from the conventional notion of woman’s writing.

The old conflict between the reformer’s passion and the art-instinct is renewed in the novels and stories of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps; who possesses the artist’s responsiveness in a high degree, with but little of the artist’s restraint. Exquisitely sensitive to the significant beauty of the world, she is no less sensitive to the appeal of human pain. In “Hedged In” and “The Silent Partner,” in her stories of the squalid tenement and the storm-beaten coast, her literary work reflects, point for point, her personal work for the fallen, the toiling and the tempted. Her passionate sympathy gives her a power of thrilling, of commanding the tribute of tears, which is all her own. An enthusiast for womanhood, she has given us in “The Story of Avis,” and “Dr. Zay” striking studies of complementary themes; “Avis,” despite certain flaws of style to which objection is trite, remaining the greater, as it is the sadder, book. All Miss Phelps’s stories strike root into New England, though it is not precisely Mrs. Cooke’s New England of iron farmers and stony farms; and none strikes deeper root than “Avis,” a natural product of the intellectual region whence “Woman in the Nineteenth Century” sprang thirty years before. No other woman, among writers who have arisen since the war, has received in such fullness the spiritual inheritance of New England’s past.

The changes brought about by the influx of foreigners into the factory towns of the East, are reflected in the pages of Miss Phelps, particularly in “The Silent Partner.” A recent worker of the same vein is Lillie Chace Wyman, whose short stories, collected under the symbolic title “Poverty Grass,” are marked by sincerity and simple power. Sarah Orne Jewett roams the old pastures, gathering many pungent handfuls of the familiar flowers and herbs that retain for us their homely preciousness. She is attracted also by the life of the coast. Without vigorous movement, her sketches and stories have always an individual, delicate picturesqueness, the quality of a small, clear water-color. “A Country Doctor” is to be noted for its very quiet and true presentation of a symmetrical womanhood, naturally drawn toward the large helpfulness of professional life.

A novel which has lately aroused much discussion, the “John Ward, Preacher,” of Margaret Deland, is, although its scene is laid in Pennsylvania, a legitimate growth of New England in its problem and its central character. The orthodox idea of eternal future punishment receives a treatment somewhat similar to that applied by Miss Phelps, in “The Gates Ajar,” to the conventional heaven. The hero seems a revisitant Thomas Shepard, or other stern yet tender Puritan of the past, miraculously set down in a modern environment. The incisiveness of portions of “John Ward,” as well as the grace of its side scenes, gives promise of even more valuable coming contributions to American fiction, by the poet of the charming “Old Garden.” A still more recent New England production is the book of stories by Mary E. Wilkins, “A Humble Romance”; vigorous work, brimful of human nature.

We need not now enter into the circumstances, tending to the misdirection of intellectual effort, which so affected the work of Southern women in literature that for some time they produced little of enduring value. These causes have been of late fully set forth by a writer of the New South, Thomas Nelson Page; who, in naming the women of Southern birth or residence most prominent as novelists before the Civil War, places Mrs. Terhune in a class by herself. “Like the others, she has used the Southern life as material, but has exhibited a literary sense of far higher order, and an artistic touch.” Mrs. Rebecca Harding Davis, a native of West Virginia, has chosen a Pennsylvanian background for some of her best work; producing, perhaps, nothing stronger than “Life in the Iron Mills,” published long since in the Atlantic; a story distantly akin to those of Miss Phelps and the author of “Poverty Grass.” The hopeless heart-hunger of the poor has seldom been so passionately pictured. A distinguishing characteristic of the work of Mrs. Davis is her Browning-like insistence on the rare test-moments of life. If, as in the complicated wartime novel “Waiting for the Verdict,”—a work of high intention,—the characters come out startlingly well in the sudden lights flashed upon them, the writer’s idealism is tonic and uplifting.

It was a woman of the North who pictured, in a series of brief tales and sketches full of insight, the desolate South at the close of the Civil War: Constance Fenimore Woolson, the most broadly national of our women novelists. Her feeling for local color is quick and true; and though she has especially identified herself with the Lake country and with Florida, one is left with the impression that her assimilative powers would enable her to reproduce as successfully the traits of any other quarter of the Union. Few American writers of fiction have given evidence of such breadth, so full a sense of the possibilities of the varied and complex life of our wide land. Robust, capable, mature,—these seem fitting words to apply to the author of “Anne,” of “East Angels,” of the excellent short stories in “Rodman the Keeper.” Women have reason for pride in a representative novelist whose genius is trained and controlled, without being tamed or dispirited.

Similar surefootedness and mastery of means are displayed by Mary Hallock Foote in her picturesque western stories, such as “The Led Horse Claim: A Romance of the Silver Mines,” and “John Bodewin’s Testimony”; in which a certain gracefulness takes the place of the fuller warmth of Miss Woolson. One is apt to name the two writers together, since they represent the most supple and practiced talent just now exercised by women in the department of fiction. Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett, English by birth and education, and influenced by the Dickens tradition, though reflecting the tone of her environment wherever fate may lead her, touches American literature chiefly on the Southern side, through “Louisiana” and “Esmeralda.” Despite the ambitious character of her novel of Washington society, “Through One Administration,” her most durable work is either thoroughly English, or belongs to the international school. This particular branch of fiction we cannot now pause to note, though conscious that such books as the beautiful “Guenn” of Blanche Willis Howard have their own distinct value.

A truly native flower, though gathered in a field so unfamiliar as to wear a seemingly foreign charm, is Mrs. Jackson’s poetic “Ramona.” A book instinct with passionate purpose, intensely alive, and involving the reader in its movement, it yet contains an idyl of singular loveliness, the perfection of which lends the force of contrast to the pathetic close. A novel of reform, into which a great and generous soul poured its gathered strength, it none the less possesses artistic distinction. Something is, of course, due to the charm of atmosphere, the beauty of the background against which the plot naturally placed itself; more, to the trained hand, the pen pliant with long and free exercise; most, to the poet-heart. “Ramona” stands as the most finished, though not the most striking example, that what American women have done notably in literature they have done nobly.

The magazine-reading world has hardly recovered yet from its shock of surprise, on discovering the author of “In the Tennessee Mountains,” a book of short stories, projecting the lines on which the writer has since advanced in “The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountain” and “The Despot of Broomsedge Cove.” Why did Miss Murfree prefer to begin her literary career under the masculine name of “Charles Egbert Craddock”? Probably for the same reason as George Sand, George Eliot, Currer Bell; a reason stated by a stanch advocate of woman, in words that form a convenient answer to the common sneer. “Not because they wished to be men, but because they wished for an unbiassed judgment as artists.” The world has grown so much more enlightened on this point, that the biassed critic is now the exception, and the biassed editor is a myth. The precaution of disguise cannot much longer remain a necessity, if, indeed, it was necessary in the case of Miss Murfree.

From whatever cause adopted, the mask was a completely deceptive one. Mr. Craddock’s vivid portrayal of life among the Tennessee Mountains was fairly discussed, and welcomed as a valuable and characteristic contribution from the South; and nobody hinted then that the subtle poetic element, and the tendency to subordinate human interest to scenery, were indications of the writer’s sex. The few cherishers of the fading superstition that women are without humor, laughed heartily and unsuspiciously over the droll situations, the quaint sayings of the mountaineers. Once more the reductio ad absurdum has been applied to the notion of ordained, invariable, and discernible difference between the literary work of men and that of women. The method certainly defers to dullness; but it also affords food for amusement to the ironically inclined.